NOIR'S SUBVERSIVE WRITERS AND FILM DIRECTORS

NO JOBS

THE KILLING

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/magazine/what-they-say-about-stanley-kubrick.html

The Killing (film) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search For the fourth book in the CHERUB series, see The Killing (novel). For the Hatesphere album, see The Killing (EP). The Killing Theatrical release poster Directed by Stanley Kubrick Produced by James B. Harris Written by Stanley KubrickJim Thompson Based on Clean Break byLionel White Narrated by Art Gilmore (uncredited)[1] Starring Sterling HaydenColeen GrayVince EdwardsJay C. FlippenElisha Cook Jr.Marie Windsor Music by Gerald Fried Cinematography Lucien Ballard Editing by Betty Steinberg Distributed by United Artists Release date(s) May 20, 1956 (1956-05-20) (United States) Running time 83 minutes Country United States Language English Budget $320,000[2] The Killing is a 1956 film noir produced by James B. Harris and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It was written by Kubrick and Jim Thompson and based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White. The drama features Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards and Elisha Cook Jr.[3] Contents[hide] 1 Plot 2 Cast 3 Pre-production 4 Reception 4.1 Critical response 4.2 Awards 5 References 6 External links [edit] Plot Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is a veteran criminal planning one last heist before settling down and marrying Fay (Coleen Gray). He plans to rob two million dollars from the money counting room of a racetrack during a featured race. He assembles a team consisting of a corrupt cop (Ted de Corsia), a betting window teller (Elisha Cook Jr.) to give access to the backroom, a sharpshooter (Timothy Carey) to shoot the favorite horse during the race to distract the crowd, a wrestler (Kola Kwariani) to provide another distraction by provoking a fight at the track bar, and a track bartender (Joe Sawyer). However, the betting window teller, George Peatty, tells his wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor), about the impending robbery. Sherry is bitter at George for not delivering on the promises of wealth he made her at the time of their marriage, and George hopes that telling her about the robbery will placate and impress her. Sherry does not believe him at first; but, after learning that the robbery is real, she enlists her lover, Val Cannon (Vince Edwards), to steal the money from George and his associates. The heist is successful, although the sharpshooter, Nikki, is shot and killed by the police. The conspirators rendezvous at the apartment where they are to meet Johnny and divide up the money. Before Johnny arrives, however, Val appears and holds them up. A shootout ensues, and a badly wounded George is the sole survivor. He goes home and shoots Sherry before dying himself. Johnny, while on his way to the apartment, sees George staggering in the street, and knows that something is wrong. He puts the cash in an old, used suitcase, and he and Fay go to the airport. While boarding their plane, however, the suitcase falls off a cart, breaks open, and the money is swept away by the wind. Fay urges Johnny to flee, but he refuses, stating that there is no use trying to escape. The film ends with two officers coming to arrest him. [edit] Cast Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay Coleen Gray as Fay Vince Edwards as Val Cannon Jay C. Flippen as Marvin Unger Elisha Cook Jr. as George Peatty Marie Windsor as Sherry Peatty Ted de Corsia as Policeman Randy Kennan Joe Sawyer as Mike O'Reilly James Edwards as Track Parking Attendant Timothy Carey as Nikki Arane Joe Turkel as Tiny Jay Adler as Leo the Loanshark Kola Kwariani as Maurice Oboukhoff Tito Vuolo as Joe Piano - motel manager Dorothy Adams as Mrs. Ruthie O'Reilly Three members of the cast, Hayden, de Corsia, and Carey, had appeared together the previous year in the low budget noir film, Crime Wave. “ I give Stanley a free hand to create, and he leaves the money problems to me. ” —James Harris[2] [edit] Pre-production “ We want to make good movies, and make them cheap. The two are not incompatible. ” —Stanley Kubrick[2] Harris, a "prosperous young television distributor" and Kubrick's "Maecenas,"[2] set up Harris-Kubrick Films with the writer/director; the two convinced United Artists to put up $200,000 for the film, with Harris adding $120,000.[2] The film was the first of three on which Harris and Kubrick collaborated as producer and director in a span of less than ten years; Harris got the rights to the novel after Frank Sinatra, who had approached the author before Harris, hesitated during negotiations.[1] Working titles for the film were Clean Break and Bed of Fear.[1] The art director, Ruth Sobotka, was Kubrick's wife at the time.[1] [edit] Reception [edit] Critical response The film performed poorly at the box office and was in general, not critically acclaimed,[1] in spite of Time magazine's prediction that it would "make a killing at the cash booths" and its assertion that Kubrick "has shown more audacity with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town on an exhibitors' poll."[2] A.H. Weiler, film critic for The New York Times, wrote, "Though The Killing is composed of familiar ingredients and it calls for fuller explanations, it evolves as a fairly diverting melodrama. ... Aficionados of the sport of kings will discover that Mr. Kubrick's cameras have captured some colorful shots of the ponies at Bay Meadows track. Other observers should find The Killing an engrossing little adventure."[4] Variety magazine liked the acting and wrote, "This story of a $2 million race track holdup and steps leading up to the robbery, occasionally told in a documentary style which at first tends to be somewhat confusing, soon settles into a tense and suspenseful vein which carries through to an unexpected and ironic windup...Hayden socks over a restrained characterization, and Cook is a particular standout. Windsor is particularly good, as she digs the plan out of her husband and reveals it to her boyfriend."[5] Years later, The Killing gained a "cult" following.[1] For example, Eddie Muller placed the film at 15th among his top 25 favorite noir films, saying "If you believe that a good script is a succession of great scenes, you can't do better than this. Hey, that scene was so good, let's do it again from somebody else's perspective.".[6] In his 1999 book Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, Muller wrote, "With The Killing, Stanley Kubrick offered a monument to the classic caper film, and a fresh gust of filmmaking in one package. Who knew when he wrapped it, that it would be the last amusing movie he'd ever make?"[7] In 1999, film critic Mike Emery wrote, "Kubrick's camerawork was well on the way to finding the fluid style of his later work, and the sparse, low-budget circumstances give the film a raw, urgent sort of look. As good as the story and direction are, though, the true strength of The Killing lies in the characters and characterizations."[8] The same year, director Peter Bogdanovich, writing for The New York Times, noted that while The Killing did not make money, it, along with Harris-Kubrick's second film Paths of Glory, established "Kubrick's reputation as a budding genius among critics and studio executives."[9] [edit] Awards Nominations BAFTA Film Award, Best Film from any Source, USA; 1957. [edit] References ^ a b c d e f "Notes for The Killing (1956)". Turner Classic Movies. http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=17624&category=Notes. Retrieved 2010-07-21. ^ a b c d e f "Cinema: The New Pictures". Time. June 4, 1956. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,867001,00.html. Retrieved 2010-07-21. ^ The Killing at the Internet Movie Database. ^ Weiler, A.H. (May 21, 1956). "The Killing: New Film at the Mayfair Concerns a Robbery". The New York Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E03E3D9123BE333A05752C2A9639C946792D6CF. Retrieved February 7, 2008. ^ "The Killing". Variety. 1956. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117792301.html. Retrieved February 7, 2008. ^ Muller, Eddie. "Endless Night: 25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time". Muller's official website. http://www.eddiemuller.com/top25noir.html. Retrieved 2010-07-21. ^ Muller, Eddie (May 1998). Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. p. ?[page needed]. ISBN 0312180764. ^ Emery, Mike. The Austin Chronicle, film review, March 15, 1999. Last accessed: February 7, 2008. ^ Bogdanovich, Peter (July 4, 1999). "What They Say About Stanley Kubrick". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/magazine/what-they-say-about-stanley-kubrick.html. Retrieved 2010-07-21. [edit] External links The Killing at the Internet Movie Database The Killing at the TCM Movie Database The Killing film trailer at YouTube

STANLEY KUBRICK Single-Page After Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep of a heart attack on March 7, even the New York tabloids reported the news with an auteur slant, headlining the director's generally bleak view of life. Words like ''secretive,'' ''reclusive,'' ''strange,'' ''mysterious'' and ''cold'' were repeatedly used to describe him. It's true that the 13 feature-length films he made over 40 years present a disenchanted, sardonic and generally pessimistic view of humanity, but the lifelong friends, intimate associates and family members I spoke to conjure a far more complicated picture of a man who could be deeply reserved but also outgoing, meticulous and laid back, loving and self-absorbed. The precocious son of a Bronx doctor, Kubrick became a staff photographer for Look magazine at 17, but from the start he was captivated by the movies. He began as a kind of one-man band, financing, directing, producing, writing, shooting and editing three short documentaries -- Day of the Fight'' (1950), ''Flying Padre'' (1951) and ''The Seafarers'' (1953) -- and then doing virtually the same thing for his first two extremely low-budget features, ''Fear and Desire'' (1953), backed entirely by an uncle, and ''Killer's Kiss'' (1955).

In 1954, having already run through two marriages, Kubrick moved to Los Angeles and formed a production company with his friend James B. Harris, through which he made his first two professional pictures, the film noir ''The Killing'' (1956), with Sterling Hayden, and the powerful antiwar drama ''Paths of Glory'' (1957), starring Kirk Douglas. While shooting ''Paths of Glory'' Kubrick fell in love with and wed the German painter and actress Christiane Harlan, with whom he would rear two daughters along with Christiane's young daughter from an earlier marriage. ''The Killing'' and ''Paths of Glory'' did not make money, but they did make Kurbick's reputation as a budding genius among critics and studio executives. In 1960, Kirk Douglas hired Kubrick to replace another director on ''Spartacus,'' the only all-Hollywood production Kubrick would ever make, and his first box-office success. He hated the experience. Disenchanted with the industry and having developed a phobia about flying, the director soon afterward moved with his family to England, never again to travel far from home.

http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/still-cause-for-alarm.html

ANTI FASCISM AND THE WaRNINGS -JOURNEY INTO FEAR ERIC AMBLER

Noir is subversive. Noir lifts the veil of normality to reveal the chaos below. The underbelly of reality. The insanity of sanity. The furtive destructiveness of obsession. The truth behind the lies. The disaster of success. The ‘ghost in the machine’. Many of the artists of the classic noir cycle, from the writers of the hard-boiled fiction of the 20s, 30s, and 40s to those involved in the making of the films noir of the 40s and 50s, were ‘subversives’. Artists whose art was a politic statement, a social critique, a thesis on the nature of freedom and social responsibility. Novelists like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ira Wolfert, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler. Screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo, John Paxton, A. I. Bezzeridis, and Carl Foreman. Film-makers and actors like Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, Orson Welles, Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott, Joan Scott, John Garfield, and Marsha Hunt. A number of these artists were vilified and their careers destroyed during the ‘red menace’ years of HUAC and the blacklist. What was ignored then and largely forgotten now is that these men and women were united and largely animated by a common cause: anti-fascism. These liberals and leftists were warning of the dangers of fascism well before the outbreak of WW2, when many of the rightists that later prosecuted the anti-communist hysteria of the immediate cold-war period were apologists of fascism. Eric Ambler was a thriller writer whose best work was written during the late 30s and early 40s. His novels Journey into Fear (1943) and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) were made into films noir during the war. In 1938 Ambler published ‘Cause for Alarm’ – not related to any movie with the same title – a story about a British munitions engineer, Marlow, haplessly caught up in espionage in Fascist Italy. The protagonist is aided in his escape from fascist death squads by a mysterious American, Zaleshoff, who may be a Soviet spy but is definitely a socialist. Caught in a snow storm just before crossing into Yugoslavia to freedom, the pair is given shelter for the night by an artist and her elderly father. It transpires that the father is a mathematician, a Professor Beronelli, whose career was destroyed after he refused to pledge a loyalty oath to fascism. The trauma has plunged the man into insanity. The two fugitives discover this after a reviewing the professor’s notes on a perpetual motion machine, and after they realize the daughter is helping them even though she is aware of their fugitive status. After the old man goes to bed, Zaleshoff says to Marlow: ‘Sure! That’s right. What a tragedy! We’re horrified. Hell! Beronelli went crazy because he had to, because it hurt him too much to stay sane in a crazy world. He had to find a way of escape, to make his own world, a world in which he counted, a world in which a man could work according to his rights and know that there was nobody to stop him. His mind created the lie for him and now he’s happy. He’s escaped from everybody’s insanity into his own private one. But you and me, Marlow, we’re still in with the other nuts. The only difference between our obsessions and Beronelli’s is that we share ours with the other citizens of Europe. We’re still listening sympathetically to guys telling us that you can only secure peace and justice with war and injustice, that the patch of earth on which one nation lives is mystically superior to the patch their neighbours live on, that a man who uses a different set of noises to praise God is your natural born enemy. We escape into lies. We don’t even bother to make them good lies. If you say a thing often enough, if you like to believe it, it must be true. That’s the way it works. No need for thinking. Let’s follow our bellies. Down with intelligence. You can’t change human nature, buddy. Bunk! Human nature is part of the social system it works in. Change your system and you change your man. When honesty really is good business, you’ll be honest. When rooting for the next guy means that you’re rooting for yourself too, the brotherhood of man becomes a fact. But you and I don’t think that, do we, Marlow? We still have our pipe dreams. You’re British. You believe in England, in muddling through, in business, and in the dole to keep quiet the starving suckers who have no business to mind. If you were an American you’d believe in America and making good, in breadlines and in baton charges. Beronelli’s crazy. Poor devil. A shocking tragedy. He believes that the laws of thermodynamics are all wrong. Crazy? Sure he is. But we’re crazier. We believe that the laws of the jungle are allright!’Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/still-cause-for-alarm.html#ixzz1ILMYAt9Q Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

What They Say About Stanley Kubrick
By Peter BogdanovichPublished: July 04, 1999
Correction Appended
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After Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep of a heart attack on March 7, even the New York tabloids reported the news with an auteur slant, headlining the director's generally bleak view of life. Words like ''secretive,'' ''reclusive,'' ''strange,'' ''mysterious'' and ''cold'' were repeatedly used to describe him. It's true that the 13 feature-length films he made over 40 years present a disenchanted, sardonic and generally pessimistic view of humanity, but the lifelong friends, intimate associates and family members I spoke to conjure a far more complicated picture of a man who could be deeply reserved but also outgoing, meticulous and laid back, loving and self-absorbed.
The precocious son of a Bronx doctor, Kubrick became a staff photographer for Look magazine at 17, but from the start he was captivated by the movies. He began as a kind of one-man band, financing, directing, producing, writing, shooting and editing three short documentaries -- Day of the Fight'' (1950), ''Flying Padre'' (1951) and ''The Seafarers'' (1953) -- and then doing virtually the same thing for his first two extremely low-budget features, ''Fear and Desire'' (1953), backed entirely by an uncle, and ''Killer's Kiss'' (1955).

THE ORAL LAW IN MAN'S HANDS AND THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE SAGES

Torah is greater than priesthood and kingship, for kingship is acquired with 30 qualities, priesthood is acquired with 24, whereas the Torah is acquired with 48 ways. These are: ... (22) trust in the Sages..." We're now up to Part III of a topic which many find one of the most difficult to accept about traditional Judaism -- trust in the Sages. The Torah seems to insist that we accept the words and decisions of the Sages to be on par with Scripture itself. We are told to "trust" them -- even beyond what we understand or agree with, even if "they tell you your right is your left and your left is your right" (see again Deuteronomy 17:8-13). The question we have been dealing is: Were the scholars of the Mishna and Talmud perfect? As great as they were, were they infallible? And theoretically if they did err, why should I (who somehow knows better) be bound by their decisions? Is what they wrote "Torah" per se -- or is it merely their own imperfect attempt to make sense of the same Scripture and tradition we can understand ourselves? Let us briefly review the discussion up until now before we arrive at the final hurdle. As we explained, most of our tradition was given to us orally rather than in written form. Originally, only Scripture itself was recorded in writing. Most of the explanation -- the Oral Law -- was memorized and passed from teacher to student until the period of the Mishna and Talmud many centuries later. We explained that the Torah had to be in an oral state. The world is an ever-changing and developing place. New societies and situations arise; new technologies develop. There is no way a written work could tell man how every person should act in every possible situation from the Revelation till the End of Days. Rather, G-d gave us a *dynamic* Torah -- in a state we would have to explain and interpret ourselves. Man would have the task of understanding the Torah's eternal truths and applying them to myriads of people and situations. The Oral Law, as a living document, would bridge this gap. It would be the tool through which man would take G-d's infinite and absolute knowledge and apply it to the relativity of the physical world. SETTLING DISPUTE BY THE MAJORITY OPINION The key to this arrangement is that G-d placed the Torah in man's hands. Since we were entrusted with the mission of understanding the Torah and applying it to mankind, G-d would have to *give* us the Torah as well. Could G-d have us interpret and live by the Torah, yet fault us if we make mistakes? G-d gave us the tools for understanding the Torah, the various methods of interpretation, but at that point the Torah was no longer in the hands of Heaven. It was ours to understand and apply. And if we would err -- after -- and only after -- our greatest efforts -- that is the only Torah G-d gave us, and it is the one we would have to live with. (In addition, the Torah provides guidelines for settling debates among the Sages -- primarily by following the majority opinion. It also provides criteria for defining who is a true and authentic scholar -- although that has not gone uncontested over the ages.) We then introduced the final issue. We quoted the passage in the Talmud (Bava Metziah 59) in which during a debate a Heavenly voice spoke up in favor of R. Eliezer's opinion, yet the remaining scholars (who were in the majority) rejected it, stating that the Torah was no longer in Heaven's hands to decide. To this we asked that we might accept the Sages could make an occasional mistake and it would be binding upon us. But here the scholars *knew* they were wrong -- their understanding of the Torah was not in accordance with G-d's original intent. If so, how in the world could they have persisted? We now arrive at an even deeper issue. The task of the sages of each generation is not merely to "figure out" what G-d meant in the Torah. And if they err, it is not just simply a matter that their mistakes can be forgiven. Rather, the task of the sages is infinitely more profound: to bring down the Torah from the heavens to the world of man and to fathom how their particular generation relates to the Torah. What does the Torah -- in its many possible interpretations -- mean to *us*, not what did it mean to G-d in heaven? As we explained above, it is the task of man to bring G-d's Torah down to this world, applying its timeless principles to the relativity of man and the physical world. This is the charge of the greatest scholars of each generation. They must take the Torah from the level of the abstract to the down-to-earth. They must ascertain what the Torah means to *them*, and what particular messages and applications are most relevant to their times. This is because the Torah does not and cannot on its own reside in the world of man. The Torah is eternal and infinite; the world physical, finite and relativistic. It is the task of the sages to bridge this gap, to understand the Torah as they are best able, and to fathom what particular messages are most relevant to their day and age. Thus, amazingly, when the sages rejected R. Eliezer's opinion, they were not interested in how G-d understood the Torah. The Torah was truly no longer in heaven. It was theirs. They realized they were the leading scholars of the age. They were entrusted with the task of bringing the Torah down to their generation. They were not studying the abstract law of heaven, but the practical law of man. And so, as great as R. Eliezer no doubt was, the sages decided to -- in fact they had to -- reject his opinion. If anything, he was *too* right. His arguments were perhaps too sharp and profound for them to grasp, and he touched upon a level of truth they simply could not comprehend. And they recognized that his opinion was just not one their generation was worthy of. (Based in part in thoughts heard from my teacher R. Moshe Eisemann.) WE CAN NEVER BE TOO SURE OF OURSELVES It should also be borne in mind that the Sages tell us there are many valid interpretations to the Torah. The Midrash writes that there are 70 "faces" (facets) to the Torah (Bamidbar Rabbah 13:15). There are many valid ways of understanding each part of the Torah -- some more literal and some more profound -- but all valid according to the legitimate methods of Torah study handed to us. Thus, the Sages who contested R. Eliezer did not consider themselves "wrong". Perhaps their opinion was not the most profound in an absolute sense. But they correctly recognized that it was the only explanation their generation could fathom. I'd like to illustrate this principle with yet another fascinating episode from the Talmud (Shabbos 12b). I recognize this topic is one of our most profound and to be honest, most difficult to explain. Hopefully another illustration will shed a little more light -- and then we'll call it a day. The Sages of the Mishna forbade reading from the light of an oil lamp on the Sabbath for fear the reader will tilt the lamp to adjust the light (causing the fire to burn better on the Sabbath). R. Yishmael son of Elisha responded: "I will read and I will not tilt." He felt, no doubt rightly, that he was so cognizant of the Sabbath that it could never possibly slip his mind. He went ahead and ignored the decree and the inevitable occurred: he found himself tilting the lamp. a peron cannot dissociate himself from his generation My teacher, R. Yochanan Zweig (www.talmudicu.edu), however, saw a much deeper lesson. One person cannot disassociate himself from his generation. Just as the sages of a generation bring down the Torah according to their ability, they also recognize precisely how it applies to their generation. This is a part of their mission of applying the Torah. They define the reality of Torah for their day -- what precisely is the Torah their generation is privy to. If the Sages correctly see that their generation requires an extra safeguard for Torah observance, they are defining how their generation (and future generations) relate to Judaism -- in this case, to the Sabbath. The Sages of the Mishna saw that as a whole, their generation did not have the same awe of Sabbath that previous generations did. There was the need for an additional fence or decree. They had therefore defined their generation's relationship to the Sabbath. And that was now the Sabbath that existed for them. And so, no individual, no matter how great, could relate any differently. We now have an inkling of the magnitude of the Sages' mission -- then and today. They see Torah, they define it, and they bring it to man and the world. Over the generations, our greatest leaders have seen the need for new concepts and new stresses within Judaism -- for Chassidus, the mussar (ethics) movement, better education for boys and girls, more emphasis on family harmony, etc. (Not, of course, that they introduced something foreign to Judaism, but the Sages saw need for new stresses or safeguards.) Each generation would then have its own unique approach to the Torah, and each would make its own contribution. And so, the Torah in all its wonder and eternity, would assume greater freshness, relevance and vitality in each and every generation

Crime begins with God.

RAW DEAL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_Deal_(1948_film)

Raw Deal (1948 film) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search For the 1986 film, see Raw Deal (1986 film). Raw Deal Theatrical release poster Directed by Anthony Mann Produced by Edward Small Written by Story:Arnold B. ArmstrongAudrey AshleyScreenplay:Leopold AtlasJohn C. Higgins Starring Dennis O'KeefeClaire TrevorMarsha HuntJohn Ireland Music by Paul Sawtell Cinematography John Alton Editing by Alfred DeGaetano Distributed by Eagle-Lion Films Release date(s) May 26, 1948 Running time 79 minutes Country United States Language English Raw Deal is a 1948 film noir directed by Anthony Mann and shot by cinematographer John Alton.[1] Contents[hide] 1 Plot 2 Cast 3 Critical reception 4 See also 5 References 6 External links [edit] Plot Prisoner Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe), who has "taken the fall" for an unspecified crime, breaks jail with the help of his girl, Pat (Claire Trevor). Neither Joe nor Pat is aware that the escape has been facilitated as a set-up by mobster Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr), a sadistic pyromaniac, who has arranged for Joe to be killed during the break-out in order to avoid confronting him and paying Joe his agree-upon share of $50,000 for the crime. When the break-out scheme succeeds, contrary to Rick's expectations, Rick decides that he must have Joe done in some other way, by somebody else. In the course of their run, Pat and Joe kidnap a social worker, Ann (Marsha Hunt) who has been visiting Joe in prison, trying to reform him. This begins a doomed film noir love triangle. A fight with a vicious thug ends when Ann shoots Joe's attacker in the back. After this act of murder, Ann realizes she is in love with Joe. Relenting, he sends her away and prepares to flee the country with Pat. In their hotel room, Pat receives a phone call from Rick's associate warning them that Ann has been seized by Rick, and will be harmed if Joe and Pat do not come out from hiding. Pat does not disclose the nature of the phone call, but instead tells Joe that it was a call from the hotel desk clerk about their check-out time, since she is anxious to avoid telling him anything about Ann that would lead him to hesitate beginning a new life with Pat. After boarding a ship to flee the country, Joe attempts to convince Pat that they can start over a new life together, however Pat finally realizes that Joe will always be thinking of Ann. Pat realizes she must tell Joe that Ann is in danger and does so. Before the ship sets sail, Joe races to save Ann and kill her captor Rick. Under the cover of a thick fog, Joe manages to get past Rick's thugs who are positioned to ambush Joe, and sneaks into Rick's room. Surprised by Joe’s sudden intrusion, a sudden gunfight erupts with Rick and Joe shooting each other and inadvertently starting a fire. Joe and Rick, both wounded, fight hand to hand with Joe finally pushing Rick through an upper story window to his death. Mortally wounded, Ann comforts the dying Joe in her arms as Pat looks on. [edit] Cast Dennis O'Keefe as Joseph Emmett (Joe) Sullivan Claire Trevor as Pat Cameron Marsha Hunt as Ann Martin John Ireland as Fantail Raymond Burr as Rick Coyle Curt Conway as Spider Chili Williams as Marcy Regis Toomey as Police Capt. Fields Whit Bissell as Murderer Cliff Clark as Gates [edit] Critical reception When the film was released, The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, panned the film, "But this, of course, is a movie—and a pretty low-grade one, at that—in which sensations of fright and excitement are more diligently pursued than common sense...Except for the usual moral—to wit, that crime does not pay—the only thing proved by this picture is that you shouldn't switch sweethearts in mid-lam.[2] In Girl and a Gun: The Complete Guide to Film Noir, David N. Meyer wrote "It's the richest cinematography in noir outside of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane."[3] [edit] See also List of American films of 1948 [edit] References ^ Raw Deal at the Internet Movie Database. ^ Crowther, Bosley (July 9, 1948 accessdate=August 31, 2008). "Raw Deal (1948)". The New York Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9904EFD8123EE03BBC4153DFB1668383659EDE. ^ Meyer, David N. (1998). A Girl and A Gun: The Complete Guide to Film Noir. ISBN 0-380-79067-X. [edit] External links Raw Deal at the Internet Movie Database Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_Deal_(1948_film)"

Crime begins with God. It will end with man, when he finds God again. Crime is everywhere, in all the fibres and roots of our being. Every minute of the day adds fresh crimes to the calendar, both those which are detected and punished, and those which are not. The criminal hunts down the criminal. The judge condemns the judger. The innocent torture the innocent… Can you hold the mirror to iniquity when it is close at hand? Have you looked into the labyrinth of your own despicable heart? Have you sometimes envied the thug for his forthrightness? The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you. The source of it is God whom you place outside, above and beyond. Crime is identification, first with God, then with your own image. Crime is all that lies outside the pack and which is envied, coveted, lusted after. Crime flashes a million brilliant knife blades every minute of the day, and in the night too when waking gives way to dream. Crime is such a tough, such an immense tar­paulin, stretching from infinity to infinity. Where are the monsters who know not crime? What realms do they inhabit? What prevents them from snuffing out the universe? - Henry Miller, ‘The Air-Conditioned Nightmare’ (New Directions, NY, 1945) pp 86-87Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/noir-poets-henry-miller.html#ixzz1IFFOx3yD Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Sam Juliano December 1, 2010 at 2:48 am(Edit) Here’s another from Miller: “The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.” Miller’s language is vivid and textured, and his philosophy uncompromising. He is unquestionably a gven for this distinguished series, but your own passage here is a lucid examination of the connection between crime, God and the universe. It’s absolutely stunning.Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/noir-poets-henry-miller.html#ixzz1IFH4QdHH Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Henry Miller’s “On the Road” The Air-Conditioned Nightmare Henry Miller Review By Dan Geddes Henry Miller is famous for leaving New York for Paris in 1930, and writing sexually-explicitly literary novels that were banned in the United States for over thirty years. His notoriety spread, however, when American servicemen discovered Miller’s novels during the liberation of Europe in 1944-45, and smuggled copies entered the U.S. Miller lived abroad for ten years, leaving France only three months before the outbreak of the Second World War. After a brief time in Greece (which produced his classic travelogue The Colossus of Marousi), Miller returned to America, and set out on a cross-country journey to re-discover his homeland. The result was The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). After an introduction about Miller’s ex-patriate status at the time of his cross-country trip, each chapter addresses a particular American locale, and an emblematic person from each stop on his journey. Miller’s usual remarks about non-artistic people or places as dead is manifested throughout the book. While Miller’s prose vibrates with colorful insights and unusual words, he also issues summary judgments constantly. In that way, Miller is something of a moralist, a moralist in favor of the artistic-hedonistic lifestyle. Miller is a great champion for the bohemian life in both his life and work, but he often betrays his impatience with the lives of simpler folk. True, in the course of issuing so many judgments, he will arbitrarily single out certain simple folk for praise, but Miller’s work is so full of judgment, even as he protests, mock-modestly, about how little he knows. So The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is a collection of sketches, all infused by Miller’s endless judgments and generalizations, variously insightful, humorous, poetic, elitist. Consider: “Walt Disney…is the master of the nightmare…Disney works fast—like greased lightning. That’s how we’ll all operate soon. What we dream we become. We’ll get the knack of it soon. We’ll learn how to annihilate the whole planet in the wink of an eye—just wait and see” (40-41). “The most difficult adjustment an expatriate has to make, on returning to his native land, is in this realm of conversation. The impression one has, at first, is that there is no conversation. We do not talk—we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines, and digests.” (109). Since he eschews any importance at all to political movements, Miller feels free to say nearly anything in the way of criticizing the system. Many of his comments appear irresponsible. When he meets an ex-con on a train, Miller and his traveling companion later track him down to see if they can be of help to him. Miller fulminates that we are all as guilty as the ex-con, who has a heart after all, and that prisons only develop the criminal skills of his inhabitants. This is typical Miller: he does point out some of the worst aspects of the criminal justice system (as he does in other books), but of course cannot offer any practical alternative. He has only the idealists’ wish that war and crime would go away, and he apportions blame to society for causing these evils, and using naked force to maintain a corrupt society. Miller does his job as a travel writer, providing the local color, the sights and the sounds and the personalities of each place. Miller’s main charm is his enthusiasm. Even while denouncing American cities as godforsaken holes, Miller prides himself on being able to find the good in it, the few eccentric characters that perhaps justify a place’s existence. Much of Miller’s fulminating against the soullessness of America will be familiar to readers of other Miller books, such as Tropic of Capricorn. Americans are awash in consumer commodities, which they mistake for tokens of happiness. Miller’s critique of the American system is far from a Marxist one, though it may appear that way to some readers. Miller repeatedly avows that he is uninterested in political reform, and we don’t hear him calling for unionization of the workers. Miller’s critiques from the artist’s perspective, especially a supposedly spiritually motivated writer’s perspective. People must free themselves from their own slavery. Miller repeatedly invokes the character of the 19th century Indian mystic Vivekananda as the greatest sage of our age. Vivekananda visited America, and attempted to spread his message; Miller tells us that one evening Vivekananda looked at the faces in the audience and found them so utilitarian minded that he was filled with despair, and refused to give his speech. Miller also enjoys European or Eastern sages to critique America’s spiritual bankruptcy. Miller’s critiques appear all the more prescient, considering he was writing The Air-Conditioned Nightmare in 1940-1. He sees the mass media as bankrupt, and singles out newspapers, movies, radio and Disney for particular contempt. He doubts that radio’s world-wide reach will do anything to make humanity—especially Americans—feel more connected. “We get about as much information about the other peoples of this globe, through the movies and the radio, as the Martians get about us.” (44). The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is an especially important Miller work, as it was not banned in the U.S., as were Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Miller’s influence on the Beats is obvious. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare reads like the Ur-text for Kerouac’s On the Road. Miller’s songs of praise for sex, art, food, freedom from normal bourgeois life are all repeated by the Beat writers.

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HENRY MILLER BIO AND CRITICISM

Henry Miller Encyclopedia of World Biography 2004 COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. (Hide copyright information) Copyright /**/ Henry Miller American author Henry Miller (1891-1980) was a major literary force in the late 1950s largely because his two most important novels, prohibited from publication and sale in the United States for many years, tested Federal laws concerning art and pornography. Born December 26, 1891 in Brooklyn, New York City, Henry Miller grew up in Brooklyn and briefly attended the City College of New York. From 1909 to 1924 he worked at various jobs, including employment with a cement company, assisting his father at a tailor shop, and sorting mail for the Post Office. While in the messenger department of Western Union, he started a novel. Throughout this period he had a troubled personal life and had two unsuccessful marriages (throughout his life he married five women and divorced all of them). Determined to become a writer, Miller went to Paris, where, impoverished, he remained for nearly a decade. In 1934 he composed Tropic of Cancer (United States ed., 1961), a loosely constructed autobiographical novel concerning the emotional desolation of his first years in Paris. Notable for its graphic realism and Rabelaisian gusto, it won praise from T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Many were outraged by the sexual passages, however, and the author had to go to court to lift a ban on his work. The controversy caused it to become a best-seller, although critics continued to debate its literary merits. Black Spring (1936; United States ed., 1963) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939; United States ed., 1962) are similar in style and feeling, drawing from the experiences of Miller's boyhood in Brooklyn and formative years as an expatriate. In 1939 Miller visited his friend the British novelist Lawrence Durrell in Greece. The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), depicting his adventures with the natives of the Greek islands, and one of the finest modern travel books, resulted. Returning to the United States in 1940, Miller settled permanently on the Big Sur coast of California. His acute and often hilarious criticisms of America are recorded in The Air-conditioned Nightmare (1945) and Remember to Remember (1947). The Time of the Assassins (1956), a provocative study of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, states eloquently Miller's artistic and philosophic credo. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1958) deals with Miller's California friends. Miller's major fiction of this period was the massive trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, including Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1960). These retell his earlier erotic daydreams but lack the earlier violence of language. Miller's correspondence with Durrell was published in 1962 and his letters to Anaïs Nin in 1965. His The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation (1980) is about the life and career of his literary compatriot, D. H. Lawrence. Opus Pistorum (1984) is a novel reputedly written by Miller in the early 1940s when he needed money; most critics consider the work to be pure pornography and some question whether Miller was the actual author. In his later years Miller was admired mainly for his role as prophet and visionary. Denouncing the empty materialism of modern existence, he called for a new religion of body and spirit based upon the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, and D. H. Lawrence. Miller's novels, despite sordid material and obscene language, at their best are intensely lyrical and spiritually affirmative. With his freedom of language and subject he paved the way for such Beat Generation writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Miller lived his final years in seclusion pursuing his lifelong interest of watercolor painting. He died on June 7, 1980 in Pacific Palisades, California. Further Reading For more on Miller's life and work, see J.D. Brown's Henry Miller (1986). Book-length critical studies are Edwin Corle, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948), and Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (1967). For equally valuable insights and biographical information see Alfred Perles, My Friend Henry Miller (1955); Lawrence Durrell and Alfred Perles, Art and Outrage: A Correspondence about Henry Miller (1959); Annette K. Baxter, Henry Miller, Expatriate (1961); Kingsley Widmer, Henry Miller (1963); and William A. Gordon, The Mind and Art of Henry Miller (1967). The largest collection of critical essays is George Wickes, ed., Henry Miller and the Critics (1963). □

IKAROS AS HEALING ACCOMPANYING AYAHUASCA

IKAROS AS HEALING ACCOMPANYING AYAHUASCA

Note additional sources in this blog on Ikaros and its function as music for healing

The new album, Versos Maestros: Ayahuasca Ikaros features three generations of master ayahuasqueros and curanderos: the late legendary Don Solon Tello, Don Guillermo Ojanama and Don Evangelino Murayay (Jose Campos). These healing songs for ayahuasca journeys were recorded over several years of ceremonial work by Mamancuna's Jackie Bobrowsky. The different singing styles that the listener can quickly notice are only but a few examples of the spectrum of complexity of personal interpretation of ayahuasca shamans, ayahuasqueros and curanderos. These conscientious interpretations have been the result of life-long endeavors to master the art of healing through sound while under the effect of the medicine. This new work builds on the "El Canto del Tiempo" CD, which featured live recordings of Jose Campo's (Don Evangelino) beautiful and healing Ikaros. Alexandre Tannous, ethnomusicologistExcerpts from Versos Maestros, together with animated visionary plant experiences, are available at http://www.blacktartan.com/ and www.youtube.com/blacktartantube. The tracks and full album are available for download on CDBaby, Amazon and iTunes. Jose Campos will be performing live on May 7th at the Manifestation Celebration in Dallas, Texas. 3-30-11 Alexandre Tannous's blog Login or register to post comments ShareThis Printer-friendly version Tags: Music Ayahausca

Each time a shaman dies, a body of knowledge dies with them. In our current world climate it has never been more vital that we bring awareness to the teachings of the Amazonian and Andean cultures into our every day lives. It is our collective responsibility as stewards of the earth to conserve these fast disappearing cultures, their knowledge and wisdom that has only been transmitted orally for thousands of years.Drawing from his twenty years of experience as a music producer, Jackie Bobrowsky started an independent initiative to record and preserve the sacred healing music of the foremost curanderos (shamans) of the Amazon and the Andes. Versos Maestros 0:00 / 0:00Right-click and save as to download. Versos Maestros / Ayahuasca Ikaros Out of the heart of the Amazon, we bring you the sounds of three generations of medicine men: paleros, ayahuasqueros, vegetalistas, curanderos. Don Solon Tello, Don Guillermo Ojanama and Jose Campos (aka Don Evangelino Murayay) are *mestizo curanderos and they represent a lineage of traditional healing that spans hundreds of years. Each has his own style of curing and follows the same tradition, the healing tradition, the selfless job of a curandero. They are all related as they have known each other in this and many other lifetimes, they have worked together, learned together, sang together and healed together. They have all drunk together from the same cup, the plant teacher cup, the mariri cup, the vine of the soul cup. *mes·ti·zo (mĕs-tē’zō)Any person of mixed blood. In Spanish America the term denotes a person of combined Indian and European extraction. Ikaro de la Ayahuasca 6:50 / 6:50Right-click and save as to download.(free download – right-click to save) Ikaro de la Proteccion 0:34 / 0:34Right-click and save as to download. Ikaro del Floripondio 0:30 / 0:34Right-click and save as to download. Canto a los Pajaros 0:34 / 0:34Right-click and save as to download. Don Evangelino Murayay has honoured us with a live recording of his beautiful, powerful and healing Ikaros. The music was captured live during a traditional Ayahuasca ceremony. This limited edition CD is packaged with all recycled paper, and includes a fantastic booklet complete with English translations. Born in Cajamarca in the northern Peruvian Andes to a peasant family, the then young Evangelino inherited the vocation to become a curandero (healer) from his grandfather. But as a growing child between family and farm, his interest had not yet been awakened towards the teachings and practices of his healer grandfather and his plants. In his adolescence, he left the Andean highlands to enter into the jungle, the Peruvian Amazon, in search of work and new frontiers. He became passionate about archaeology and participated in expeditions searching for clues to the puzzles of Peru’s many ancient cultures. While in the jungle he met a woman healer, and this curandera tried to make him understand that underneath his passion there was a hidden power. After some time, she initiated him in the way of the San Pedro, opening the doorway to a path of intense exploration of inner worlds and spaces. It was in this road that he met a physician who worked with the Ayahuasca plant and the Dieta. He received this new initiation, which led him to master healers Don Wilfredo Tuamana, Don Aquilino Chujandama, Don Solon Tello and Don Guillermo Ojanama. He spent many years of apprenticeship with these great masters, receiving their wisdom and experience, until he found his own path, his own teacher. For more than twenty years he has traveled this path of effort, search and toil, helping and instructing people from all walks of life in the art of self knowledge through the Dieta and responsible use of the Plants of Wisdom. Don Evangelino’s work has taken him beyond the frontiers of his native Peru, awakening and guiding numerous spiritual beings to consciously locate themselves in the currents of existence here on earth. website by conscious images® LLC WordPress Sandbox Autofocus -->

THE NOOSPHERE

http://www.realitysandwich.com/noosphere_next_stage_evolution

To mark the recent passing of José Argüelles, we offer an excerpt from his upcoming book Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness, available from Evolver Editions/North Atlantic Books in October 2011. We must enlarge our approach to encompass the formation taking place before our eyes ... of a particular biological entity such as has never existed on earth-the growth, outside and above the biosphere, of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance, to which, for the sake of convenience and symmetry, I have given the name of the Noosphere. --Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man Manifesto for the Noosphere is the result of forty years of study, contemplation, investigation, and synthesis. While the noosphere may be beyond the grasp of conventional science, it is a deep and pervasive intuition that has gripped the minds of scientists, philosophers, poets, and artists since the concept first emerged in 1926. It is an evolutionary concept posited by studies in both biogeochemistry and paleontology. It is a whole-systems paradigm that melds prophecy and analysis of current world trends. It is a perception that the transformation of the biosphere is inevitably leading to a new geological epoch and evolutionary cycle, and it is due to the impact of human thought on the environment that this new era -- the Noosphere -- is dawning. The term "noosphere," referring to the mental sheath or envelope of thought that encompasses the Earth, is derived from nous, the Greek word for "mind." The presentiment of the noosphere fully awakened in me in 1969 upon seeing the whole Earth from space on the television. Soon after, I organized the First Whole Earth Festival, and together with my students at the University of California, Davis, we transformed the central quadrangle of the campus into the "global village" -- all in anticipation of the first Earth Day set to occur a month later, on April 22, 1970. Around the same time I had a fruitful correspondence with R. Buckminster Fuller, who first suggested to me the presence of an information storage and retrieval system existing as some kind of psychic field or thought belt around the planet. It was by this means, Bucky wrote me, that he could converse with the pre-Socratic philosophers as he strolled down the beach. The First Whole Earth Festival roused the interest of planetary philosopher and astrologer Dane Rudhyar, whose book The Planetarization of Consciousness (1970) had just been published. A warm friendship immediately ensued, and among other things, Rudhyar exposed me to the work of University of Pittsburgh physicist Oliver Reiser. In his monumental volume, Cosmic Humanism (1966), Reiser proposes a vision of the noosphere as consisting of a psi field between and in resonance with the two radiation belts defining Earth's electromagnetic field. The psi field, a DNA-informed "World Sensorium," Reiser further hypothesizes, consists of two halves -- an Eastern (intuitive) and a Western (analytical) -- which function holonomically like the two hemispheres of the human brain. I amplified Reiser's notion in my book The Transformative Vision (1975), where I link the two principles governing the history of human consciousness -- psyche and techne -- to the two sides of the human and planetary brain. While acknowledging the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, among many others, this book was also influenced in its perspective by Hopi, Hindu, Mexican, and Mayan prophetic traditions. But it is with the notion of the Earth and its hemispheres -- Eastern and Western as well as Northern and Southern -- that The Transformative Vision builds on the idea of a higher unifying principle of planetary consciousness governing the progression of history and the world ages in general. In Earth Ascending (1984), elaborating greatly on Teilhard de Chardin's notion of "planets with noosphere," I put forward the existence of a psi bank -- the noosphere's coded information storage and retrieval system and DNA timing program, located between and in resonance with (as Reiser had proposed) the two radiation belts of Earth's electromagnetic field. The psi bank has been key to my later work, including The Mayan Factor (1987), The Call of Pacal Votan: Time Is the Fourth Dimension (1996), and Time and the Technosphere (2002).

My studies of the mathematics of the Mayan calendar and subsequent discovery of the Law of Time as the universal principle of synchronization, as well as exposure to the work of Vladimir I. Vernadsky, further deepened my comprehension of the noosphere. Through a number of visits to Russia and my dialogue with leading-edge Russian scientists, I saw how widespread the concept of the noosphere is in Russian intellectual life. By 2003 I had become an acting member of the Moscow-based Noosphere Spiritual Ecological World Assembly. Having already convened the First and Second Planetary Congresses of Biospheric Rights in Brasilia (1996, 2006), I proposed the First Noosphere World Congress to occur in Bali, 2009. This event evolved into a number of synchronized bioregional Noosphere Congresses convened on July 22, 2009. From this experience came my website. All this would not have been if a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, had not coined the concept and word in a burst of inspiration while serving as a stretcher-bearer in the front-line trenches of the First World War. As a noted paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin went on to write extensively of the noosphere in books like The Future of Man (1959) and Man's Place in Nature (1956). In 1926 he and his Jesuit colleague and fellow philosopher Edouard Le Roy met with a Soviet geochemist, Vladimir I. Vernadsky, to jointly agree on the meaning of the concept noosphere. This meaning is spelled out very simply and clearly by Vernadsky, who wrote at the end of World War II:

The historic process is changing dramatically before our eyes ... Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a powerful geological force. Humanity's mind and work face the problem of reconstructing the biosphere in the interests of freely thinking mankind as a single entity. This new state of the world we are approaching without noticing it is the "Noosphere." Just as the biosphere is the unified field of life and its support systems -- the region for the transformation of cosmic energy on Earth, to use Vernadsky's phrase -- so the noosphere is the unified field of the mind, the psychic reflection of the biosphere. Because we as a species, the aggregate of consciousness-bearing cells of the evolving Earth, are not yet awake to our role as a planetary organism, so too the noosphere is not yet fully conscious. When humanity becomes conscious of itself as a single organism and unites to activate the noosphere, we will find the collective resolve and will to reconstruct the biosphere and divert the energy of the human race from a path of destruction based on a mechanized abstraction from nature to a new harmonic order of super-organic reality based on an entirely different state of consciousness than has yet existed on Earth.

Such is the fundamental premise that underlies Manifesto for the Noosphere. My feelings about the Noosphere run deep. While I believe it is inevitable, I also believe that its activation requires a collective conscious effort on the part of at least a critical portion of humanity. I further believe that its advent as a conscious planetary phenomenon approximates the prophetic date 2012, and provides the deeper evolutionary significance for the mass-mind focus on that date. In studying all the data of the present world trends, it becomes evident that the year 2012 marks the crux of the biosphere-noosphere transition, a theoretical term that points toward resolution of the present planetary crisis in a new state of being. This, for instance, is the basis of Ervin Laszlo's WorldShift 2012 (2009): this author sees the date as the point to shift our human goals and objectives. As the next stage in the evolution of consciousness and life on Earth, the Noosphere is the only solution conceivable if we are to survive the effects of five thousand years of increasingly terrible war and five hundred years of all-pervasive materialism. By understanding and supporting all efforts to make the noosphere conscious, we assist our evolution from the current state of chaos and disorder into a "freely thinking mankind as a single entity" (Vernadsky). This is what will solve the crisis: the advent of a new state of consciousness that elevates and benefits all human beings without exception, and the planet as a whole, ultimately evolving our terrestrial sphere into a work of art.

A major theme of this book revolves around the notion of envisioning Earth as a work of art, for the transition into the noosphere indicates a profound shift in human values and priorities -- from materialism and consumerism to a normalized paranormal spirituality and the practice and elevation of art to the peak of human values and activities. A plethora of archetypal structures, repressed until now, will find release through the channeled means of hitherto unrealized artistic possibilities giving form to a symbiosis of the human imagination and the natural order.

DREAMTIME BECOMING REALITY

Like the "dreamtime" known to our aboriginal ancestors, the noosphere is the collective unconscious impelled into conscious awareness by the crucible of history. The super-subtle telepathic medium in which we live -- whether knowingly or not -- and which orchestrates the whole of our reality is the noosphere. Throughout our history, human beings acted as agents of the noosphere, bringing about this epochal transition but without awareness of this process or the consciousness that our tribal and individual actions would eventually lead to a new state of collective planetary wholeness. Humanity is now going through its final preparation to enter, as a harmonized collective, into this new conscious dreamtime.

WE WILL PERCEIVE AND KNOW RADIALLY

In speaking of it as an entry into a new dreamtime, we are casting the Noosphere into the psycho-mythic framework of a planetary emergence myth. In such myths of the Hopi, the people are warned and given signs to take action in preparation for the wiping away of the old world and emergence into the new creation of the next world. This concept is applicable to the Noosphere as a planetary rite of passage. From the Hopi perspective, such a change is the emergence from the fourth into the fifth world, and in the Aztec-Mexican mythos, from the fifth sun of change into the sixth sun of consciousness

As the medium through which a galactic order of evolutionary intelligence interacts with and ultimately transforms the material processes and organic expressions of the Earth, the noosphere is not restricted to a limited rationality or a linear either/or meaning. Instead, once we align with the noosphere, we will perceive and know radially. We will experience everything as multiple sets of correspondences that link everything to everything else in a synchronically harmonized multidimensional universe.

Opening to the noosphere, we avail ourselves of the thinking layers of cosmic civilization. The highly advanced telepathic intelligence communicated through the noosphere resonates different dimensions of meaning according to daily codes of synchronicity; the most fundamental of these is encoded as the 13-moon/28-day calendar. Synchronized being and simultaneous knowing are the chief qualities and characteristics of the shift into the noospheric phase of evolution. This new system of knowing and consciousness channeled through the noosphere will provide the basis of an advanced knowledge and a psycho-technology making use of our psychic capabilities. This knowledge will displace all the separatist fictions that now bind us to an ongoing conflict of self and nature. In 2012, we initiate the new paradigm of synchronization; in 2013 and beyond, we access the Noosphere to implement a transformation of the Earth. This phase of implementation begins the epoch of the Noosphere, the long-awaited "mind shift."

The shift into a noospheric state of being represents a collective focusing and unification of human consciousness hitherto undreamed. Synchronizing ourselves in ever-greater circles of harmony, we will become a new species -- Homo noosphericus. Creative peace will be inherent in our new self-perception and developing awareness of the universe in which we find ourselves. The problems we face today will dissolve in the light of a consciousness operating according to a unified planetary program. Spiritually interconnected and acting with a truly planetary and galactic perspective, we will dance to the greater rhythms of the cosmic Supermind. Art will become our way of life.

Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship-THE SHAME OF THE BRACERO PROGRAM

the braceros

http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/dark-borders-film-noir-and-american-citizenship.html

I have never thought of the immigrant experience of the 40's as the stuff of noir material and as fit for the existential and horrible paradigm that it really was and is, but I can readily imagine(and that is what I can conceive of at this present) ,as short as that comes to be , of the noir experience. The"Red Scare " hearings assume an aura of unreality and noir archetypal atmosphere, to be sure, and the Bracero program (I am unfamiliar with but presently am researching) assumes a kindred atmosphere of nihilism and void as painted by Noir film and worldview. The Cinema Journal article posted below does present an anomaly of disenfranchisement and the oxymoron of noir citizenship in this reality of a dark noir world.

Jonathan Auerbach, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and regular presenter at film noir screenings, has just published his much anticipated book on film noir, Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship, a study which connects the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir in the 40s and 50s with the anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in mid-20th century America, by providing in-depth interpretations of more than a dozen noir movies. Professor Auerbach shows how politics and aesthetics merge in these noirs, where the fear of subversive “un-American” foes is reflected in noirs such as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Border Incident, Pickup on South Street, Stranger on the Third Floor, The Chase, and Ride the Pink Horse. These anxieties surfaced during a series of wartime and post war emergency measures, beginning with the anti-sedition Smith Act (1940), the Mexican migrant worker Bracero Program (1942), the domestic internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry (1942), and the HUAC hearings in 1947. Professor Auerbach, in 2008 in an issue of the scholarly Cinema Journal (47, No. 4, Summer 2008) in an article anticipating his book and titled ‘Noir Citizenship: Anthony Mann’s Border Incident’, posits an ambitious thesis about national borders and the borders of film genres: “Looking closely at how images subvert words in Anthony Mann’s generic hybrid Border Incident (1949), this article develops the concept of noir citizenship, exploring how Mexican migrant workers smuggled into the United States experience dislocation and disenfranchisement in ways that help us appreciate film noir’s relation to questions of national belonging.” The article offered a rich analysis of Border Incident, and developed a fascinating study of the sometimes antagonistic dynamic between the police procedural plot imperatives of the screenplay, and the subversive visual imagery fashioned by cinematographer John Alton. The scene in Border Incident where the undercover agent Jack, is murdered by the furrowing blades of a tractor is one of the most horrific in film noir, and Professor Auerbach rightly observes that the agent “gets ground into American soil by the monstrous machinery of US agribusiness… [this is] a purely noir moment of recognition that reveals the terrifying underbelly of the American farm industry itself in its dependence on and ruthless exploitation of Mexican labor”. The paperback is available for only US$20.48 from Amazon. A great price for a book offering an original perspective that demands the attention of anyone interested in the origins of film noir.Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/dark-borders-film-noir-and-american-citizenship.html#ixzz1HuxMQWXU Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

The Set-Up 1949US Robert Ryan is great as washed-up boxer in Robert Wise’ sharp expose of the fight game. Brooding and intense noir classic.Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/the-greatest-film-noir.html#ixzz1HvE6cTAP Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

63 greats of all time

The greatest films noir of all time. Ambitious and perhaps presumptuous. But without apology or regrets. I have an aversion to rankings, so my list comprises 63 films noir that I rate 5-stars listed by year of production. That’s all folks. La Nuit de Carrefour 1931France Aka ‘Night at the Crossroads’. Early Jean Renoir poetics. Magically delicious femme-noir and a brilliant car chase at night. Moody and bizarrre! You Only Live Once 1937US Fritz Lang and Hollywood kick-start poetic realism! Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney are the doomed lovers on the run. Hotel du Nord 1938France Poetic realist melodrama of lives at provincial French hotel. As moody as noir with a darkly absurd resolution. Port of Shadows 1938France Aka Le Quai des brumes. Fate a dank existential fog ensnares doomed lovers Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan after one night of happiness. I Wake Up Screaming 1941US Early crooked cop psycho-noir. Redolent noir motifs, dark shadows, off-kilter framing and expressionist imagery. The Maltese Falcon 1941US Bogart as Sam Spade the quintessential noir protagonist. A loner on the edge of polite society, sorely tempted to transgress but declines and is neither saved nor redeemed. Journey Into Fear 1943US Moody Orson Welles’ noir. Exotic locales, sexy dames, weird villains, politics, wisdom, philosophy, and a wry humor. The Seventh Victim 1943US “Despair behind, and death before doth cast”. The terror of an empty existence. Brilliant Lewton gothic melodrama. Double Indemnity 1944US All the elements of the archetypal film noir are distilled into a gothic LA tale of greed, sex, and betrayal. Laura 1944US Gene Tierney is an exquisite iridescent angel and Dana Andrews a stolid cop who nails the killer after falling for a dead dame. Murder My Sweet 1944US Most noir fun you will ever have. Raymond Chandler’s prose crackles with moody noir direction from Edward Dmytryk. Mildred Pierce 1945US Joan Crawford in classy melodrama by Michael Curtiz lensed by Ernest Haller. Self-made woman escapes morass of greed. The Lost Weekend 1945US ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can’t take quiet desperation.’ Ray Milland against type on a bender. Ride the Pink Horse 1946US Disillusioned WW2 vet arrives in a New Mexico town to blackmail a war racketeer. Imbued with a rare humanity. Scarlet Street 1946US Classic noir from Fritz Lang. Unremitting in its pessimism. A dark mood and pervading doom of devastating intensity. The Big Sleep 1946US Love’s Vengeance Lost. Darker than Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet. Bogart is tougher, more driven, and morally suspect. The Killers 1946US Siodmak’s classic noir. Burt Lancaster’s masterful debut performance in a tragedy of a decent man destroyed by fate. The Postman Always Rings Twice 1946US Fate ensures adulterous lovers who murder the woman’s husband, suffer definite and final retribution. Body and Soul 1947US A masterwork. Melodramatic expose of the fight game and a savage indictment of money capitalism. Garfield’s picture. Brighton Rock 1947UK Greatest British noir is dark and chilling. A cinematic tour-de-force: from the direction and cinematography to top cast and editing. Nightmare Alley 1947US Predatory femme-fatale uses greed not sex to trap her prey in a hell of hangmen at the bottom of an empty gin bottle. Nora Prentiss 1947US Doctor is plunged into a dark pool of noir angst in a turbo-charged melodrama of tortured loyalty and thwarted passion. Out of the Past 1947US Quintessential film noir. Inspired direction, exquisite expressionist cinematography, and legendary Mitchum and Greer. The Gangster 1947US Hell of a b-movie. Very dark noir ‘opera’ brutally critiques the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. Bravado Dalton Trumbo script. The Lady From Shanghai 1947US Orson Welles’ brilliant jigsaw noir with a femme-fatale to die for and a script so sharp you relish every scene. T-Men 1947US Mann and Alton offer a visionary descent into a noir realm of dark tenements, nightclubs, mobsters, and hellish steam baths. Act of Violence 1948US Long-shot and deep focus climax filmed night-for-night on a railway platform: the stuff noirs are made of. Drunken Angel 1948Japan Aka ‘Yoidore tenshi’. Kurosawa noir. A loser doctor with soul takes on the fetid moral swamp of Yakuza degradation. Force of Evil 1948US Polonsky transcends noir in a tragic allegory on greed and family. Garfield adds signature honesty and gritty complexity . Hollow Triumph 1948US Baroque journey to perdition traversing a noir topography redolent with noir archetypes. Audacious and enthralling. Raw Deal 1948US Sublime noir from Anthony Mann and John Alton. Knockout cast in a strong story stunningly rendered as expressionist art. They Live by Night 1948US Nicholas Ray’s first feature. A tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions which transcends film noir. Too Late For Tears 1948US Preposterous chance event launches wild descent into dark avarice and eroticised violence as relentless as fate. Border Incident 1949US Subversive expressionist noir from Dir Anthony Mann DP John Alton and writer John C Higgin indicts US agribusiness. NOTE BOOK REVIEW ABOVE Criss-Cross 1949US Accomplished noir. Siodmak’s aerial opening shot into parking lot onto a passing car exposing the doomed lovers to the spotlight. Stray Dog 1949Japan Aka ‘Nora inu’. Kurosawa’s ying and yang take on reality informs this 5-star noir: the pursuer could as easily have been the pursued. The Reckless Moment 1949US Max Ophuls takes a blackmail story and infuses it with a complexity and subtlety rarely matched in film noir. The Set-Up 1949US Robert Ryan is great as washed-up boxer in Robert Wise’ sharp expose of the fight game. Brooding and intense noir classic. The Third Man 1949UK Sublime. An engaging cavalcade of characters in a human comedy of love, friendship, and the imperatives of conscience. Thieves’ Highway 1949US Moody Richard Conte hauling fruit to Frisco. Rich socio-realist melodrama from Jules Dassin and A.I. Bezzerides. AAA. Une Si Jolie Petite Plage 1949France Aka ‘Riptide’. Iron in the soul: savage irony, withering subversion, and desolation mark the rain-sodden angst of a young man’s end. White Heat 1949US Fission Noir. Taut electric thriller straps you in an emotional strait-jacket released only in the final explosive frames. Breaking Point 1950US Great John Garfield vehicle with strong social subtext. Much stronger than from the same source To Have and Have Not. Caged 1950US Eleanor Parker leads a great female cast in a dark women’s prison picture with a savage climax and a gutsy downbeat ending D.O.A. 1950US Gritty on-the-street in-your-face melodrama of innocent act a decent man’s un-doing. Edmund O’Brien is intense. The goons rock! In A Lonely Place 1950US Nick Ray deftly explores effect of isolation, frustration, and anxiety on the creative psyche as noir entrapment. Night And the City 1950US/UK Dassin’s stark existential journey played out in the dark dives of post-war London as a quintessential noir city. QUINTESSENTIAL NOIR CITY-NOTED Sunset Boulevard 1950US Wilder’s sympathetic story of four decent people each sadly complicit in the inevitable doom that will engulf them. The Asphalt Jungle 1950US Quintessential heist movie transcends melodrama and noir. A police siren wails: “Sounds like a soul in hell.” The Sound of Fury 1950US Great noir! Outdoes Lang’s Fury and brilliantly prefigures Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Climactic mob scenes mesmerise. On Dangerous Ground 1951US City cop battling inner demons is sent to ‘Siberia’. A film of dark beauty and haunting characterisations. The Prowler 1951US Van Heflin is homme-fatale in Tumbo thriller. Director Losey is unforgiving. Each squalid act is suffocatingly framed. Ace in the Hole 1952US A savage critique of a corrupted and corrupting modern mass media. Billy Wilder’s best movie. Kirk Douglas owns it. saw it and love it as truthful Clash By Night 1952US Cheating wife Stanwyck faces the music. Fritz Lang puts sexual license and existential entitlement on trial and wins. The Big Heat 1953US Gloria Grahame as existential hero in Fritz Lang’s brooding socio-realist noir critique. Crime Wave 1954US Andre de Toth noir masterwork set on the streets of LA is so authentic it plays for real with each character deeply drawn. Kiss Me Deadly 1955US Anti-fascist Hollywood Dada. Aldrich’s surreal noir a totally weird yet compelling exploration of urban paranoia. Rififi 1955France Dassin’s classic heist thriller culminating in the terrific final scenes of a car desperately careening through Paris streets. HAVE SEEN THIS THRILLER AND IT IS AN EXCELLENT MICROCOSM OF THE AMORAL WORLD OF THE 50'S UNDERWORLD The Big Combo 1955US “I live in a maze… a strange blind backward maze’. Obsessed cop hunts down a psychotic crime boss in the best noir of 50s. Sweet Smell of Success 1957US DP James Wong Howe’s sharpest picture. As bracing as vinegar and cold as ice. Ambition stripped of all pretense. Touch of Evil 1958US Welles’ masterwork is a disconnected emotionally remote study of moral dissipation. Crisp b&w lensing by Russell Metty. Underworld USA 1961US Fast and furious pulp from Sam Fuller. Revenge finds redemption in death up a back alley the genesis of dark vengeance. A Colt is My Passport 1967Japan Aka ‘Koruto wa ore no pasupoto’. Hip acid Nikkatsu noir with surreal spaghetti-western score.Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/the-greatest-film-noir.html#ixzz1HvEYoS6d Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

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http://www.unco.edu/cohmlp/pdfs/Bracero_Program_PowerPoint.pdf WHERE ARE THE FUNDS SAVED FOR THE BRACEROS Original Bracero Agreement Mexico and U.S. August 1943 The Bracero program was an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments that permitted Mexican citizens to take temporary agricultural work in the United States. Scope of Program The managed migration, an unprecedented and radical solution to America’s labor needs, was prompted by the enormous manpower shortage created by World War II. Over the program's 22-year lifespan, more than 4.5 million Mexican citizens were legally hired for work in the United States, primarily in Texas and California. Mexico Declares War On June 1, 1942, Mexico declared war on the Axis powers and immediately after the U.S. Department of State was asked to approach Mexico officially on the question of the importation of foreign labor. In providing the necessary laborers to the U.S., Mexico believed they could contribute to the Allied war effort and could benefit economically as a country. Bracero Agreement On July 1942 the Bracero Program was established by executive order. It was enacted into Public Law 78 in 1951. The agreement was expected to be a temporary effort, lasting presumably for the duration of the war. The Bracero program was not terminated until December 1, 1964-more than nineteen years after the end of World War II. Braceros worked on farms and on railroads, making it possible for the U.S. economy to meet the challenges imposed by the war effort. Mexico’s Concerns Mexico doubted that a legitimate labor scarcity existed and viewed the Bracero program as a way for the U.S. to obtain cheap labor. Mexican officials were concerned about the deportation and repatriation of Mexicans which occurred in the 1930’s and were anxious to prevent another such episode. Mexico did not want to permit their workers to be sent to discrimination prone states in the U.S. Mexico felt that there might be a danger to Mexico's economic development if many thousands of their workers left for the U.S. The Official Bracero Agreement The final version of the agreement was released on April 26, 1943. The original agreement was signed by representatives from both countries. From Mexico, Ernesto Hidalgo, representative of Foreign Affairs Ministry and Abraham J. Navas, representative of the Ministry of Labor. From the United States, Joseph F. McGurk, Counsel of the American Embassy in Mexico, John Walker, Deputy Administrator of Farm Security Administration, United States Department of Agriculture, And David Mecker, Deputy Director of War Farming Operations General Provisions (in short) Mexicans contracting in the U.S. shall not be engaged in any military service. Mexican workers shall not suffer discriminatory acts of any kind. Transportation and living expenses from the place of origin to destination, and return, as well as expenses incurred in the fulfillment of any requirements of a migratory nature shall be met by the employer. Mexican workers will be furnished without cost to them with hygienic lodgings and the medical and sanitary services enjoyed without cost to them will be identical with those furnished to the other agricultural workers in regions where they may lend their services.

General Provisions Continued The worker shall be paid in full the salary agreed upon, from which no deduction shall be made. Mexicans entering the U.S. shall not be employed to displace other workers, or for the purpose of reducing rates of pay previously established. Contracts must be written in Spanish. Wages paid to the worker shall be the same as those paid for similar work to other agricultural laborers under the same conditions within the same area. The worker shall be exclusively employed as an agricultural laborer. Work of minors under 14 years shall be strictly prohibit. General Provisions Continued For such time as they are unemployed under a period equal to 75% of the period for which the workers have been contracted they shall receive a subsistence allowance at the rate of $3.00 per day. The respective agencies of the Government of the U.S. shall be responsible of the safekeeping of the sums contributed by the Mexican workers toward the formation of their Rural Savings Fund. The Mexican government will take care of the security of the savings of the workers.

Guarantees for Mexicans Under the Agreement The agreement between the Mexican and U.S. governments guaranteed certain benefits and protections for Mexican workers, including free sanitary housing, medical treatment, bathing facilities, transportation, wages equal to those of American farm workers, and a contract written in Spanish.

Recruitment Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, across from El Paso, Texas, became historic recruitment sites. The recruitment centers themselves became crowded with thousands of Mexicans who were unemployed and who wanted to go to the U.S. Because of the overwhelming numbers of applicants, it became very difficult to obtain permits to enter the program. In many instances a bribery system was set up. Often those who learned the ropes and who could bribe the officials were selected as braceros.

Illegal Workers Many Mexican workers who were not able to obtain permits chose to enter the U.S. illegally. The number of illegal's who entered the U.S. during the tenure of the Bracero program was equal to or surpassed the number of braceros.

Mexican Migration to the United StatesYear:Braceros:1942 4,203 1947 19,632 1952 197,100 1956 445,197 1961 291,420 1967 7,703

DEFINITION OF A BRACERO What is a Bracero? "Generally speaking, the Latin-American migratory worker going into west Texas is regarded as a necessary evil, nothing more nor less than an unavoidable adjunct to the harvest season. Judging by the treatment that has been accorded him in that section of the state, one might assume that he is not a human being at all, but a species of farm implement that comes mysteriously and spontaneously into being coincident with the maturing of cotton, that requires no upkeep or special consideration during the period of its usefulness, needs no protection from the elements, and when the crop has been harvested, vanishes into the limbo of forgotten things-until the next harvest season rolls around. He has no past, no future, only a brief and anonymous present." From Latin Americans in Texas, by Pauline R. Kibbe, The University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1948. Who were the Braceros? The majority of the braceros were experienced farm laborers. They stopped working their land and growing food for their families with the illusion that they would be able to earn a vast amount of money on the other side of the border. The braceros converted the agricultural fields of America into the most productive in the planet Push/Pull Factors for Braceros􀂆Push:􀂄Two million peasants lost their lives in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. By the late 1930’s, when the crops in Mexico began yielding insufficient harvest and employment became scarce, Mexican workers were forced to look for other means of survival.􀂄The occurrence of this grave situation in Mexico coincided with the emergence of a demand in manual labor in U.S. brought about by WW II. A PICTURE THAT I CANNOT SAVE IS IN THE FOREGROUND OF THIS SLIDE "This is one of the two rooms for a family of nine people living in San Mateo-about 20 miles south of Mexico City. The other room serves as a kitchen, work room, and storeroom. When work is available in the village, a Mexican laborer may earn about 10 pesos per day. Because of this, the wage earner of the family here wants to go to the US as a farm laborer where he may earn much more anywhere from 4 weeks to 6 months." Push/Pull Factors􀂆Pull:􀂄The Mexican government hoped the braceros would learn new agricultural skills which would benefit the development of Mexico’s own agricultural programs.􀂄The Mexican government foresaw the possibility that the braceros would earn good wages in the U.S., bring the money back to Mexico and stimulate the Mexican economy. Benefits for U.S. of Employing Mexican Nationals American workers often worked as families. This meant growers had to supply housing for the family. Mexican workers were all men and came in groups. For growers, it was easier to provide transportation and supply barracks or rooms for single men. It was also easier to transport Mexican nationals from farm to farm without any difficulty. Wages for Mexican nationals were set by growers, not in a supply and demand situation and not in collective bargaining. A PICTURE THAT I CANNOT SAVE IS IN THE FOREGROUND OF THIS SLIDE This is housing provided by a Texan farmer for 200 braceros in this long building, with the beds made out of stretched canvas, upper and lower. Such close living conditions make for high incidences of respiratory illnesses among the braceros. Short Handle Hoe During the Bracero program the short handle hoe was widely used. A regular long-handled hoe could have been used, but it was considered harmful to the plants. The short handle hoe required the user to work in a bent over position and crawl along the dusty rows of plants for ten to twelve hours a day. At the end of the shift, it was nearly impossible to stand up straight. The use of this tool in now illegal in most states, although you will still find farm workers using it specially in South Texas and in New Mexico. Discrimination in Texas Although the Bracero agreement contained stipulations with regard to health, housing, food, wages, and working hours, most were disregarded by both U.S. government and the growers. The requirement that Mexican nationals not be discriminated against was also disregarded. In the state of Texas alone, Mexicans were discriminated against to such an extent that the Mexican government forbade the use of its nationals in the fields in Texas. Racism Against the Braceros The braceros suffered all types of abuses not only from racist extremists but by the average American. Some restaurants had signs to prohibit the entrance of Mexicans. If restaurants did allow the entrance of Mexicans, they were forced to eat in the back of the kitchen. Segregation was noticeable in the theaters where Mexicans were only allowed in the upper sections designated for African Americans. American Resentment When American farm workers walked off a job to protest poor wages or working conditions, farm owners would import braceros to harvest crops, destroying the bargaining power of the American farm workers (although this use of braceros was expressly prohibited in the Bracero Program) "Wetbacks" The Mexican illegal alien has been popularly called a "wetback." The term originated from the fact that the Rio Grande forms much of the long border between the U.S. and Mexico, and many Mexican illegal aliens have crossed into the U.S. by swimming of wading the river. Many growers hired "wetbacks" rather than braceros because wetbacks were more manageable and because as illegal aliens they had absolutely no rights. The photograph shows braceros working the fields, where they would stay from sunrise to sunset. Thousands of braceros were brought in to perform stoop labor, a task that causes back injuries resulting from the constant strain of bending over all day. Medical clinics reported backache as the most common ailment among the braceros. Since no machine has been able to replace stoop labor, it continues today. End of the Program By the 60’s, an excess of "illegal" agricultural workers along with the introduction of the mechanical cotton harvester, destroyed the practicality and attractiveness of the bracero program. The braceros returned home. Unable to survive in their communities in Mexico, many continued to cross the border to work farms and ranches in the U.S. Today you will still find braceros. They continue to be one of the most exploited labor groups in the U.S. Abuses of the Program As part of their contract, braceros agreed to have ten percent of their wages withheld and placed in a fund controlled by the Mexican government. An overwhelming majority of the workers never received compensation and the whereabouts of the funds remain unknown. Many former braceros now live in dire poverty, abandoned by both governments. Effects of Program Today The Bracero program has had lasting effects on both the United States and Mexico. It helped establish in what has become a common migration pattern: Mexican citizens entering the U.S. for work, going home to Mexico for some time, and returning again to the U.S. to earn more money. Bracero Project: Recovering the History of Migrant Farm Workers The history of the braceros has long been ignored by both Mexico and the United States. Once they were no longer needed in the U.S., the Mexicans who participated in the Bracero Program had to return to their homelands without ever receiving, to this day, recognition for their valuable contributions to the U.S Bracero Project: Recovering the History of Migrant Farm Workers Once the history is recovered, then we can contribute to the recognition of the efforts made by the Mexican farm laborers in the United States. If this recognition is achieved, then the old braceros (and the future braceros) will receive dignity and maybe, compensation for their efforts. REFERENCES Works Cited: http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/calheritage/latinos/braceros.html http://www.jsri.msu.edu/museum/pubs/MexAmHist/chapter15.html http://www.farmworkers.org/benglish.html http://www.counterpunch.org/bracero.html http://www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/5.16/990804-bracero.html . Insult to Injury-- Abuses of the Bracero Program Continue 35 Years Later By Jesus Martinez Date: 08-04-99 Between 1942 and 1965, the U.S. government issued some 4.5 million contracts to Mexican workers ("braceros") willing to come to the U.S. for brief periods. The program, widely criticized for failing to protect workers from abuse, seems to have added insult to injury by "losing" money that rightfully belongs to the workers. PNS commentator Jesus Martinez is an immigrant researcher and activist who was formerly a member of the Political Science Department at Santa Clara University. A new immigrant-based social movement has emerged on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border that seeks redress from both governments. The roots of the grievance stretch back more than 50 years, to 1942, when the U.S. government began the "bracero" program to fill labor shortages caused by World War II. Under this program, the government issued contracts to Mexicans willing to cross the border for temporary employment. Braceros, working on farms and on railroads, made it possible for the U.S. economy to meet the challenges imposed by the war effort. Government and employers found the program so appealing that it was extended, through various acts, until 1965, when it was terminated unilaterally, after much pressure from unions and activists concerned with the systematic exploitation of the workers. During its existence, some four and a half million contracts were issued. As part of their contract, braceros agreed to have ten percent of their wages withheld and placed in a fund controlled by the Mexican government. When they returned to Mexico, individual migrants could request that the money be returned to them. According to Ventura Gutierrez, who heads the bracero redress movement in southern California, the overwhelming majority of the workers never received compensation. Moreover, the whereabouts of the funds remain unknown. To resolve the matter, Gutierrez and other activists based in the United States and Mexico have initiated a campaign to have the Mexican government make payments to the braceros or surviving family members. Despite their contributions to the U.S. and Mexican economies, claims Gutierrez, many former braceros now live in dire poverty, abandoned by the both governments, and without even the means to claim Social Security, which was supposed to be a benefit of the program. The campaign, which started only a few months ago in Michoacan, Guanajuato, and other major bracero sending regions, has rapidly gained momentum. It has identified and enrolled tens of thousands of braceros, who have initiated individual claims for benefits promised by both governments. The movement has emerged just as the Mexican government has established a temporary labor program with the Canadian government which, like the Bracero program, does not permit the workers the right to unionize to improve wages and conditions. The movement has also arrived at a time when many in the United States are engaged in an intense campaign to create a new Bracero program. As in the past, they argue that there is a need for foreign, particularly Mexican, labor. Also as in the past, the proponents seek to create conditions of employment that will make the migrants exploitable and easy to control. Securing justice for the braceros, their children and widows, is a necessary step in the process of reconciling the histories of these two countries. It will affect many people on both sides of the border, as most contemporary Mexican immigrants are direct descendants of the braceros. Several of my uncles, my paternal grandfather, dozens of other relatives, and scores of neighbors from my hometown in Michoacan contributed with their labor to the U.S. World War II efforts. During the life of the Bracero Program, the workers were exploited by employers and often the targets of political attacks -- as we have seen in recent years. Resentment against Mexican immigration is deep, and all too often this social sector becomes the scapegoat for the structural problems caused by government and the private sector. At the very least, the Mexican government should investigate the whereabouts of the bracero fund and initiate payment to the migrants and their surviving relatives. One Mexican senator, Hector Sanchez of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), has agreed to introduce the issue as a bill to the Mexican Congress. In turn, the very least the U.S. government can do is to honor the promises made to the braceros. In addition to economic benefits due to the braceros or their widows, it would be appropriate for the U.S. government to recognize and celebrate the braceros' contributions. After 57 years, it is time to acknowledge the role of all social sectors in making this nation great.

http://http//www1.cuny.edu/portal_ur/content/immigrants_curriculum/7_8_pdfs/unit3_lesson2.pdf

A TEACHING UNIT ON THE BRACEROS AND THE SHAME THE UNITED STATES HAS TO BEAR

testimonial

_____________________________________________________________ My name is Jose Guadalupe Murguia. I came north to this country from my village in Zapotitlan, Jalisco in 1952. I came as a bracero after learning from my uncle, tio Raymundo, there were opportunities for earning money working in the fields. I signed my first contract as a bracero after being promised an hourly wage of 60 cents an hour and housing. My cousin also came with me on this first contract. We worked in Arizona and soon learned that the money we expected to earn disappeared in charges for food and housing. We were told we had to buy what we needed from a store at the bracero camp. Because there were times, all the money we earned went to pay for these things, I, along with others began to talk and our discontent led to a labor stoppage that involved all the braceros in the camp. The Mexican bracero representatives, Humberto Bernal, and Maria Maldonado met with us and we were able to negotiate on these issues. It resulted in the growers providing transportation for us to the local town to purchase things we needed, and our employment checks being based on what we actually earned from work. This was the only time in my life as a bracero that a labor action was taken that resulted in an improvement in our working conditions. After completing my contract, I returned to Mexico, using the money I had earned to build a small home for my mother in Zapotitlan and another on our ranch where my brother Ramon lived. I returned as a bracero to California in 1954. The first year I worked in the Salinas Valley for a lettuce company. In 1955 I worked in the lemon and orange groves in Ventura County and in the tomatoes in Yolo County. In the tomatoes we were averaging a dollar a day and when the braceros complained it was always the same. We were humiliated and told to go back to Mexico like “perros con la lengua de corvata”. I decided I could earn more money if I “jumped” my contract and worked on my own. In 1957, I did so and began working in the fields as an illegal. I went to the Mendota/Firebaugh area and began working in the cotton driving a tractor. I was being paid 85 cents an hour. http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/914/responses/details/10095.html

http://www.bighousefilm.com/reviews/border_incident.htm

The epitomizing of a noir era in this film Roger Westcombe's review

BORDER INCIDENT (1949) Starring Ricardo Montalban, Howard da Silva, George Murphy; dir; Anthony Mann An extremely tough, powerful thriller, Border Incident is also an interesting milepost in the careers of its makers. Director Anthony Mann came of age in the late 1940s with a series of grimly violent, embattled urban crime thrillers, the best of which – Raw Deal and T-Men – cemented a timeless filmmaking partnership with cinematographer John Alton, who also shot this film. When MGM bought Border Incident mid-production, Alton followed Mann across to finish it and then stayed with the studio, going on to become Vincente Minnelli’s Director of Photography for whom he won an Oscar in 1951 with An American In Paris. Border Incident was also Mann’s last film noir before the series of Westerns he made for MGM, mostly starring Jimmy Stewart. Interestingly, the opening action scenes and Border Incident’s climactic sequence are pure Western (and bring the narrative full circle as they use the same dramatic location – the Valley of the Vultures) – with hapless individuals, dwarfed by an imposing, ancient landscape, being led into a life or death confrontation of elemental purity – good and evil, knuckles and brawn, shotguns and cunning. These framing scenes’ particular qualities are clearly delineated by the ensuing shifts of setting and action: from hand to hand, Western-style in the Valley of the Vultures, to a more coordinated, cogs-in-a-complex-machine (multi-national law enforcement) arrangement in the film's central contemporary thriller-style scenes, where modern industrial society forms the backdrop. Yet far from a typical Western’s sense of freedom, Border Incident shares with T-Men that film’s inky, submerged visual quality. These are ‘wide’ but not ‘open’ spaces, as Alton’s beautifully registered grey-toned but grim visuals make the distant horizons as closed as the American border. The constant presence of vulnerable, innocent peasants adds a piquancy to Border Incident, raising the stakes from the destiny of a mere two police agents to that of an entire underclass. The linkage to T-Men is further reinforced by some characteristic Mann/Alton camera set-ups (an over-the-shoulder, day-for-night shot looking down over a broad empty space in Border Incident is echoed in T-Men; Mrs Amboy foregrounded in half profile late in Border Incident recalls similar framing of Claire Trevor in Raw Deal). As in T-Men, likewise topped and tailed by a Federal Government, 1950s-style voice-of-authority narration (evidently shot on the same boardroom set!), long stretches of Border Incident take place indoors in incongruously luxurious settings; in T-Men these were used to portray gangland as a corporate battlefield. But Border Incident is no Tijuana T-Men. Its central scenes around the lavish ranch house conform more to standard Hollywood visions of ‘Mexico – land of extremes’ than any likely reality; certainly they are consistent with no indigenous Mexican filmmaking I’ve ever seen. (However documentary value does come through in Border Incident in unintended ways; through how little has changed [economic disparity fueling the desperation of minimum-wage workers] - and how much [unguarded chicken-wire fencing representing the 1940s U.S.-Mexico border]; by 1980’s The Border, starring Jack Nicholson, this barrier had morphed tragically into awesome concrete emplacements more reminiscent of France’s Maginot Line – and just as militaristic.) According to Alberto Dominguez’s 2000 documentary on Latin Americans’ portrayal by Hollywood, The Bronze Screen, the production of Border Incident expressed ‘subversive’ leanings by adopting a non-racist, even-handed approach to its portrayal of the two nationalities. This reflected the status of much of its crew being, so the story goes, victims of the McCarthyist black list. Yet there is an evident symbolic distinction in Border Incident between day (good/white) and night (illicit/Mex), a dualism reinforced by the prominence of New World (American) technology contrasted with the stone-age primitivism of the Old World. We see the U.S. police fleet, guided by radio, roar out in formation in bright sunshine, while south of the border swarthy peasants huddle clandestinely at night exchanging secret codes via their lapel buttons; Mexican cops arrive (ineffectually) in the dead of night in the back of a truck, etc. Driving this home, there’s no shortage of eyeball-popping ‘stupido’ Mexican caricatures among the villains. Reconciling these conflicting views of the allied nationalities is the camera. Its tendency to adopt a subjective point of view has the audience looking down ‘over’ the peasants – the Uncle Sam paternalistic viewpoint towards the needy which fit the liberalism of the time just as snugly as its anti-McCarthyism. It all makes an interesting comparison with Touch of Evil (1958): the action in both similarly hovering around the border ‘aperture’, that porous, fluid, grey area where identities blur, inhibitions (if you’re white) melt away in tantalizing marketplaces of forbidden sin, while unattainable opportunities for prosperity (if you’re Latino) seem just a step away. While Border Incident, particularly through its framing Federal government propaganda messages, ostensibly toes the line of postwar conservative prosperity, Touch of Evil, through its overt cynicism revisits these contrasts with a polar opposite agenda, underlining perhaps how much attitudes had changed in the intervening decade. There’s even a mimicking structure of bilateral ‘cooperation’ that falls short, suggesting neither era believed in Pax Americana (Welles’ American police honcho futilely sets up elite Mexican crimefighter Heston for a fall, while Montalban’s Mexican Fed watches inertly as George Murphy’s G-Man goes down quite savagely.) This latter event, a scene of immense violence – physical and psychological – is the most memorable thing about Border Incident and seers its image into viewers’ memories for decades. In his noir films Mann repeatedly staged scenes of barbaric cruelty (thankfully shot in somewhat oblique fashion), most notably Raw Deal’s flaming liquid to the face and T-Men’s suffocating steamroom murder. But numerous postwar ‘B’ films noir (Max Nosseck’s Dillinger [1945] with Lawrence Tierney's broken glass to the face; Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat [1953] in which Lee Marvin’s boiling coffee scarred Gloria Grahame’s face for life; Joseph H.Lewis’s The Big Combo [1955] where a hearing aid became an aural drill) took sadism in ‘imaginative’ new directions. What’s striking about the grouping of such scenes is their quotidian quality (echoing their precursor, Cagney’s assault-by-grapefruit in 1931’s Public Enemy). This ability to transform mundane objects into cruel torture devices suggests profound unease with everyday life; the timing of these scenes’ emergence and disappearance suggests the possible after-effects of wartime desensitization. Honorable mention must go to the highly effective music in Border Incident by Andr� Previn and the villainous turn of Howard da Silva, who is very believable as the ruthlessly exploitative ranch owner. Also excellent is the adaptable Ricardo Montalban – ‘dashing’ is not too strong a description for the young star (seen to equally sharp effect as a detective in the Detour-like Mystery Street [1950 – also shot by Alton]), who, like Dick Powell, transformed himself from a smooth dancer to an urban tough guy – notwithstanding his soft hands! *