Nice Change Background Image photos

A few nice change background image images I found:

Pioneer Club

Image by wbeem
In 1947 Las Vegas chamber of Commerce hired a West-Marquis firm which invented the Fremont Street Cowboy Vegas Vic and his friendly "Howdy Podner" greeting.

The Young Electric Sign Company was commissioned to build the neon version of the sign by the owners of the Pioneer Club. They then commissioned Pat Denner who modeled it after the image used by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce in 1947 consisting of a cowboy in blue jeans with a yellow-checked shirt and red bandanna. Vegas Vic was then erected on the exterior of the building in 1951 changing the exterior of The Pioneer club forever.

Nice Change Background Image photos

Check out these change background image images:

In Honor of Memorial Day 2009, the American Bald Eagle and the Red, White, and Blue of our Old Glory Flag. Land of the Free and Home of the Brave

Image by Beverly & Pack
This picture is available on numerous products, from business cards, canvas, and posters, to cards, postcards, postage stamps and stickers, etc. For more products and information visit Zazzle or Redbubble.

I have made this image available under a Creative Commons licence, but NOT for commerical use. There is one exception, and that is if it is used by a veteran's non-profit group for any reason to include to help raise funds. I only ask for a link so I can view it, please, if possible.

The Bald Eagle is the national bird of the United States of America. It is one of the country's most recognizable symbols, and appears on most of its official seals, including the Seal of the President of the United States.

The Continental Congress adopted the current design for the Great Seal of the United States including a Bald Eagle grasping thirteen arrows and a thirteen-leaf olive branch with its talons on June 20, 1782.

After the end of the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin wrote a famous letter from Paris in 1784, to his daughter, criticizing the choice and suggesting the Wild Turkey as a better representative of American qualities. He described the Bald Eagle as "a Bird of bad moral character," who, "too lazy to fish for himself" survived by robbing the Osprey. He called the Bald Eagle "a rank Coward" easily driven from a perch by the much smaller kingbird. In the letter, Franklin wrote the Turkey is, "a much more respectable Bird," which he described as "a little vain & silly [but] a Bird of Courage."

The Bald Eagle remained the emblem of the United States. It can be found on both national seals and on the back of several coins (including the quarter dollar coin until 1999), with its head oriented towards the olive branch. Between 1916 and 1945, the Presidential Flag showed an eagle facing to its left (the viewer's right), which gave rise to the urban legend that the seal is changed to have the eagle face towards the olive branch in peace, and towards the arrows in wartime.

Nutrition know-how for mums and mums-to-be saves lives

Image by DFID - UK Department for International Development
Being born too small is one of the main reasons babies end up in the survival unit and can die.

With more than 40,000 newborn babies dying in their first month, getting the right nutrition before and after babies are born is crucial.

Mums can find out the latest advice including what best to feed their babies and young children from the health information wall in the heart of the village called 'Swasthya Kantha' and from their community health workers.

Background

Britain is working with the Government of Odisha, one of India's poorest states, and UNICEF to save the lives of thousands of mums and babies.

Find out more at www.dfid.gov.uk/changinglives

Picture: Pippa Ranger/Department for International Development

Terms of use

This image is posted under a Creative Commons - Attribution Licence, in accordance with the Open Government Licence. You are free to embed, download or otherwise re-use it, as long as you credit the source as 'Pippa Ranger/Department for International Development'.

Cool Change Background Image images

A few nice change background image images I found:

odard, Miéville & Lynne Sachs: Movie-making and the Stubborn, Unruly Galaxy of Childhood

Image by uniondocs
Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Marie Miéville to figure out how to use television to reveal the latent brilliance of a child. Created for French television during the radical days of the late 1970s , “France/tour/detour/deux enfant” (1978) is an intimate, provocative and quotidian video essay that uses avant-garde cinema’s techniques in a visual experiment that will change anyone’s perception of the developing mind of a human being.
Tonight Lynne Sachs will discuss the way that “France/tour…” influenced her own work as she reflects on the presence of childhood in her twenty-year film career. Beginning in her early twenties when the ambiguity of femininity seemed daunting and problematic to more recent years when motherhood has given her quick access to the conundrums of youth, Sachs, like Godard and Melville, ponders her relationship as an artist to this unavoidable eighteen year odyssey. Sachs will screen Photograph of Wind (3 min., 2001), Atalanta: 32 Years Later (5 min. 2006), and The Last Happy Day (38 min.) in their entirety along with brief scenes from The House of Science (1991) and Wind in Our Hair (2010).
Program:
France/Tour/Detour/Deux Enfants by Jean Luc Godard and Ann Marie Miéville
(excerpt from 12 part TV series, 1977, France)

Godard and Miéville take a detour through the everyday lives of two children in contemporary France. Sachs will present excerpts from the series.

Photograph of Wind by Lynne Sachs
(4 min.,16mm, b&w and color, 2001)

“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” (Lynne Sachs)
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

Atalanta: 32 Years Later by Lynne Sachs
(5 min. color sound, 16mm to video, 2006)
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.
“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.” George Kuchar
The Last Happy Day by Lynne Sachs
( 38 min. 2009)

The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week
Excerpts from:
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
(30 min., 16mm,1991)

“Throughout The House of Science an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title –house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space — without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.’” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive)

Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo
(16mm, Super 8 and digital on video, English and Spanish, 2010)

“Inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, whose work not only influenced a generation of Latin American writers but film directors such as Antonioni and Godard, Lynne Sachs’ Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo is an experimental narrative that explores the interior and exterior worlds of four early-teens, and how through play they come to discover themselves and their world. “Freedom takes us by the hand–it seizes the whole of our bodies,” a young narrator describes as they head towards the tracks. This is their kingdom, a place where–dawning fanciful masks, feather boas, and colorful scarves — the girls pose as statues and perform for each other and for passengers speeding by.”
- Carolyn Tennant, Media Arts Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York
“Wind in Our Hair moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces, into the skittering beyond of adolescence, exploding with anticipation and possibility.” Todd Lillethun, Artistic Director, Chicago Filmmakers
Program Run Time: 119 minutes
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque will present a full retrospective of her work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.


Josetxo Cerdán Los Arcos is an assistant professor at the URV and the artistic director of Punto de Vista. He has edited the books ‘Mirada, Memoria y Fascinación’ (2001); ‘Documental y Vanguardia’ (2005); ‘Al Otro Lado de la Ficción’ (2007); and ‘Suevia Films-Caesáreo González’ (2005); ‘Signal Fires: The Cinema of Jem Cohen’ (2010). He is author of ‘Ricardo Urgoiti. Los trabajos y los días’ (2007). He has coordinated an M. A. in from 1998 to 2008. Principal interest areas are non-fiction film, Spanish cinema, and television.
Kelly Anderson is an award-winning independent producer and director of documentary and narrative films. Her most recent production is NEVER ENOUGH, a documentary about American’s relationship with their material possessions, which is premiering at the 2010 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Other recent directing work includes SOMEPLACE LIKE HOME, a documentary about the redevelopment of Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, which she made for FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality). In 2004 Kelly produced and directed (with Tami Gold) and edited EVERY MOTHER’S SON, a documentary for ITVS about mothers whose children have been killed by police officers and who have become national spokespeople on the issue of police brutality. EVERY MOTHER’S SON premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and had its broadcast premiere on PBS’s P.O.V. series. Kelly produced, directed and edited OVERCOMING THE ODDS, a short documentary that was distributed to more than 2,500 people internationally as part of a successful campaign to pass the groundbreaking Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which set global standards on the promotion and marketing of tobacco. This film was a follow-up to MAKING A KILLING, a half-hour documentary Kelly produced and directed (with Tami Gold) and edited that addresses the marketing practices of the tobacco industry in the developing world. MAKING A KILLING premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival, was screened for delegates at the World Health Organization and aired on television in Nigeria, Serbia, Lagos and Vietnam. In 2000 Kelly completed SHIFT, a one-hour drama for ITVS about the volatile relationship between a North Carolina waitress and a telemarketing prison inmate, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and aired on many PBS stations. Kelly’s other documentaries include OUT AT WORK (with Tami Gold), which was screened at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and was shown on HBO. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College in New York City.

odard, Miéville & Lynne Sachs: Movie-making and the Stubborn, Unruly Galaxy of Childhood

Image by uniondocs
Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Marie Miéville to figure out how to use television to reveal the latent brilliance of a child. Created for French television during the radical days of the late 1970s , “France/tour/detour/deux enfant” (1978) is an intimate, provocative and quotidian video essay that uses avant-garde cinema’s techniques in a visual experiment that will change anyone’s perception of the developing mind of a human being.
Tonight Lynne Sachs will discuss the way that “France/tour…” influenced her own work as she reflects on the presence of childhood in her twenty-year film career. Beginning in her early twenties when the ambiguity of femininity seemed daunting and problematic to more recent years when motherhood has given her quick access to the conundrums of youth, Sachs, like Godard and Melville, ponders her relationship as an artist to this unavoidable eighteen year odyssey. Sachs will screen Photograph of Wind (3 min., 2001), Atalanta: 32 Years Later (5 min. 2006), and The Last Happy Day (38 min.) in their entirety along with brief scenes from The House of Science (1991) and Wind in Our Hair (2010).
Program:
France/Tour/Detour/Deux Enfants by Jean Luc Godard and Ann Marie Miéville
(excerpt from 12 part TV series, 1977, France)

Godard and Miéville take a detour through the everyday lives of two children in contemporary France. Sachs will present excerpts from the series.

Photograph of Wind by Lynne Sachs
(4 min.,16mm, b&w and color, 2001)

“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” (Lynne Sachs)
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

Atalanta: 32 Years Later by Lynne Sachs
(5 min. color sound, 16mm to video, 2006)
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.
“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.” George Kuchar
The Last Happy Day by Lynne Sachs
( 38 min. 2009)

The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week
Excerpts from:
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
(30 min., 16mm,1991)

“Throughout The House of Science an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title –house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space — without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.’” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive)

Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo
(16mm, Super 8 and digital on video, English and Spanish, 2010)

“Inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, whose work not only influenced a generation of Latin American writers but film directors such as Antonioni and Godard, Lynne Sachs’ Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo is an experimental narrative that explores the interior and exterior worlds of four early-teens, and how through play they come to discover themselves and their world. “Freedom takes us by the hand–it seizes the whole of our bodies,” a young narrator describes as they head towards the tracks. This is their kingdom, a place where–dawning fanciful masks, feather boas, and colorful scarves — the girls pose as statues and perform for each other and for passengers speeding by.”
- Carolyn Tennant, Media Arts Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York
“Wind in Our Hair moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces, into the skittering beyond of adolescence, exploding with anticipation and possibility.” Todd Lillethun, Artistic Director, Chicago Filmmakers
Program Run Time: 119 minutes
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque will present a full retrospective of her work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.


Josetxo Cerdán Los Arcos is an assistant professor at the URV and the artistic director of Punto de Vista. He has edited the books ‘Mirada, Memoria y Fascinación’ (2001); ‘Documental y Vanguardia’ (2005); ‘Al Otro Lado de la Ficción’ (2007); and ‘Suevia Films-Caesáreo González’ (2005); ‘Signal Fires: The Cinema of Jem Cohen’ (2010). He is author of ‘Ricardo Urgoiti. Los trabajos y los días’ (2007). He has coordinated an M. A. in from 1998 to 2008. Principal interest areas are non-fiction film, Spanish cinema, and television.
Kelly Anderson is an award-winning independent producer and director of documentary and narrative films. Her most recent production is NEVER ENOUGH, a documentary about American’s relationship with their material possessions, which is premiering at the 2010 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Other recent directing work includes SOMEPLACE LIKE HOME, a documentary about the redevelopment of Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, which she made for FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality). In 2004 Kelly produced and directed (with Tami Gold) and edited EVERY MOTHER’S SON, a documentary for ITVS about mothers whose children have been killed by police officers and who have become national spokespeople on the issue of police brutality. EVERY MOTHER’S SON premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and had its broadcast premiere on PBS’s P.O.V. series. Kelly produced, directed and edited OVERCOMING THE ODDS, a short documentary that was distributed to more than 2,500 people internationally as part of a successful campaign to pass the groundbreaking Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which set global standards on the promotion and marketing of tobacco. This film was a follow-up to MAKING A KILLING, a half-hour documentary Kelly produced and directed (with Tami Gold) and edited that addresses the marketing practices of the tobacco industry in the developing world. MAKING A KILLING premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival, was screened for delegates at the World Health Organization and aired on television in Nigeria, Serbia, Lagos and Vietnam. In 2000 Kelly completed SHIFT, a one-hour drama for ITVS about the volatile relationship between a North Carolina waitress and a telemarketing prison inmate, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and aired on many PBS stations. Kelly’s other documentaries include OUT AT WORK (with Tami Gold), which was screened at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and was shown on HBO. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College in New York City.

odard, Miéville & Lynne Sachs: Movie-making and the Stubborn, Unruly Galaxy of Childhood

Image by uniondocs
Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Marie Miéville to figure out how to use television to reveal the latent brilliance of a child. Created for French television during the radical days of the late 1970s , “France/tour/detour/deux enfant” (1978) is an intimate, provocative and quotidian video essay that uses avant-garde cinema’s techniques in a visual experiment that will change anyone’s perception of the developing mind of a human being.
Tonight Lynne Sachs will discuss the way that “France/tour…” influenced her own work as she reflects on the presence of childhood in her twenty-year film career. Beginning in her early twenties when the ambiguity of femininity seemed daunting and problematic to more recent years when motherhood has given her quick access to the conundrums of youth, Sachs, like Godard and Melville, ponders her relationship as an artist to this unavoidable eighteen year odyssey. Sachs will screen Photograph of Wind (3 min., 2001), Atalanta: 32 Years Later (5 min. 2006), and The Last Happy Day (38 min.) in their entirety along with brief scenes from The House of Science (1991) and Wind in Our Hair (2010).
Program:
France/Tour/Detour/Deux Enfants by Jean Luc Godard and Ann Marie Miéville
(excerpt from 12 part TV series, 1977, France)

Godard and Miéville take a detour through the everyday lives of two children in contemporary France. Sachs will present excerpts from the series.

Photograph of Wind by Lynne Sachs
(4 min.,16mm, b&w and color, 2001)

“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” (Lynne Sachs)
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

Atalanta: 32 Years Later by Lynne Sachs
(5 min. color sound, 16mm to video, 2006)
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.
“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.” George Kuchar
The Last Happy Day by Lynne Sachs
( 38 min. 2009)

The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week
Excerpts from:
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
(30 min., 16mm,1991)

“Throughout The House of Science an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title –house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space — without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.’” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive)

Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo
(16mm, Super 8 and digital on video, English and Spanish, 2010)

“Inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, whose work not only influenced a generation of Latin American writers but film directors such as Antonioni and Godard, Lynne Sachs’ Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo is an experimental narrative that explores the interior and exterior worlds of four early-teens, and how through play they come to discover themselves and their world. “Freedom takes us by the hand–it seizes the whole of our bodies,” a young narrator describes as they head towards the tracks. This is their kingdom, a place where–dawning fanciful masks, feather boas, and colorful scarves — the girls pose as statues and perform for each other and for passengers speeding by.”
- Carolyn Tennant, Media Arts Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York
“Wind in Our Hair moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces, into the skittering beyond of adolescence, exploding with anticipation and possibility.” Todd Lillethun, Artistic Director, Chicago Filmmakers
Program Run Time: 119 minutes
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque will present a full retrospective of her work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.


Josetxo Cerdán Los Arcos is an assistant professor at the URV and the artistic director of Punto de Vista. He has edited the books ‘Mirada, Memoria y Fascinación’ (2001); ‘Documental y Vanguardia’ (2005); ‘Al Otro Lado de la Ficción’ (2007); and ‘Suevia Films-Caesáreo González’ (2005); ‘Signal Fires: The Cinema of Jem Cohen’ (2010). He is author of ‘Ricardo Urgoiti. Los trabajos y los días’ (2007). He has coordinated an M. A. in from 1998 to 2008. Principal interest areas are non-fiction film, Spanish cinema, and television.
Kelly Anderson is an award-winning independent producer and director of documentary and narrative films. Her most recent production is NEVER ENOUGH, a documentary about American’s relationship with their material possessions, which is premiering at the 2010 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Other recent directing work includes SOMEPLACE LIKE HOME, a documentary about the redevelopment of Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, which she made for FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality). In 2004 Kelly produced and directed (with Tami Gold) and edited EVERY MOTHER’S SON, a documentary for ITVS about mothers whose children have been killed by police officers and who have become national spokespeople on the issue of police brutality. EVERY MOTHER’S SON premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and had its broadcast premiere on PBS’s P.O.V. series. Kelly produced, directed and edited OVERCOMING THE ODDS, a short documentary that was distributed to more than 2,500 people internationally as part of a successful campaign to pass the groundbreaking Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which set global standards on the promotion and marketing of tobacco. This film was a follow-up to MAKING A KILLING, a half-hour documentary Kelly produced and directed (with Tami Gold) and edited that addresses the marketing practices of the tobacco industry in the developing world. MAKING A KILLING premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival, was screened for delegates at the World Health Organization and aired on television in Nigeria, Serbia, Lagos and Vietnam. In 2000 Kelly completed SHIFT, a one-hour drama for ITVS about the volatile relationship between a North Carolina waitress and a telemarketing prison inmate, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and aired on many PBS stations. Kelly’s other documentaries include OUT AT WORK (with Tami Gold), which was screened at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and was shown on HBO. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College in New York City.

Cool Change Background Image images

Some cool change background image images:

IMG_4044Arsenalshorts

Image by uniondocs
The program collects films that are asking the same questions: What was here before? And how can you show it if it’s not there anymore? When and how did absence turn into presence? Does it always do that?
It also connects places in East and West, New York, Berlin and Warsaw. Shanghai and Venice. Not only through images, but also through the people who made the films (and are in them): For them, 1984 had been fiction and 1989 a reality. They are from a generation that has been producing images and sounds before and after the Berlin Wall, in East and West, until today.
Program runtime is 62 minutes.
a-b-city by Dieter Hormel and Brigitte Bühler
BRD 1985, 8 minutes, digital projection

Accompanied by a score using music of Pere Ubu and Einstürzende Neubauten, a-b-city revolves around West-Berlin’s psychodelic atmosphere. Brigitte Bühler and Dieter Hormel, who were renown for their fast paced and skillfully edited Super-8 clips, mix TV images and time-lapse shots of nightly streets, drifting clouds, and a men continuously jumping in front of the Berlin Wall, bringing about an impression of the enclosed city that constantly shifts between ecstasis and depression. (Text: Florian Wüst)
Haunt No. 1-3 by Niklas Goldbach
2007, 2 minutes, digital projection

Haunt No. 1, Video Loop, 35 sec., Stereo
Assistance: Daniel Reuter
Haunt No. 2, Video Loop, 28 sec., Stereo
Assistance: Viktor Neumann
Haunt No. 3, Video Loop, 36 sec., Stereo
Assistance: Viktor Neumann
The video triptych focuses on the historical background and the future of up to now abandoned places in Berlin’s former working-class district Prenzlauer Berg where the gentrification process is almost accomplished.
5 lessons and 9 questions about Chinatown by Shelly Silver
USA, 2009, 10 minutes, digital projection

You live somewhere, walk down the same street 50, 100, 10,000 times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE. Years, decades go by and you continue,unseeing, possibly unseen. A building comes down, and before the next one is up you ask yourself ‘what used to be there?’ You are only vaguely aware of the district’s shifting patterns and the sense that, since the 19th century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops.
10 square blocks, past, present, future, time, light, movement, immigration, exclusion, gentrification, racism, history, China, America, 3 languages, 13 voices, 152 years, 17,820 frames, 9 minutes, 54 seconds, 9 questions, 5 lessons, Chinatown.
View Excerpt
Former East/Former West by Shelly Silver
USA, 1994, excerpt 10-15 minutes digital projection

Made up of hundreds of street interviews done in Berlin two years after the Reunification, FORMER EAST/FORMER WEST is a vital, surprisingly open, and at times disturbing documentary. Silver questions the very notion of a shared language, focusing on changing definitions of words for political and economic systems – democracy, freedom, capitalism, socialism, nationality and history.
Magnetic [eye] Berlin by Gunter Krüger
Germany, 2007 / 08, excerpt 10 minutes, digital projection

Since 1997, Gunter Krüger has been archiving media fragments which he finds on the street – broken audiotapes, scraps of VHS and discarded compact discs. At the location he records additional filmic notes.
In the second part of the “Magnetic [eye]” series, “Magnetic [eye] Berlin”, a selection of media fragments forms a portrait of his living space. The film is designed as a generative structure, i.e. there is no final version.
In 2007 and 2008, three different playlists were made, each varying in both the selection of the media fragments as well as their compilation. By integrating new modules, new playlists with predefined running times can be created for each screening.
Nullpanorama by Martin Ebner
Germany, 2003, 1 minute, digital projection

The ascent and decent of an advertiser’s captive balloon over the roofs of the capital.
Proprio Aperto by Judith Hopf, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Florian Zeyfang
Germany / USA, 2005, 6 minutes, digital projection

The single channel video and installation work PROPRIO APERTO, which was first presented in February 2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in the exhibition, “Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist’s Eye,” shows a walk taken through the giardini, the grounds of the Venice Biennale, in winter.
The conversations that took place there among Judith Hopf, Natascha Sadr-Hadhighian and Florian Zeyfang result in a text that circles around landscapes of ruin, ghosts and the Dasein in cultural hegemony. The images — actually photographs — are presented in slow pans, and the various levels of destruction of the pavilion come more and more into the center.
The tone of voice and language congenially conveys the suitably contemplative mood during the walk, which carries over to the spectator.
The Rooms (excerpt) by Tim Blue and Paul Rowley
USA 2010, 5 minutes, digital projection

With rich sound design and diverse formats, THE ROOMS is an experimental study of an abandoned world that somehow continues to operate. This excerpt feautures the HAU 1 / Hebbel am Ufer, a historical theater in Berlin, that turned into a cultural space for contemporary experimental and innovative theater and performance art (HAU 1).
We will be strong in our weakness. Notes from the first congress of the Jewish Renaissance in Poland.Performance by Yael Bartana with Susanne Sachsse and Slawomir Sierakowski
Israel/Netherlands/Poland, 2010, 15 minutes, digital video projection
Jewish Renaissance movement in Poland, Tel-Aviv/Amsterdam/Warsaw

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is a film and video curator who lives and works in Berlin. She is Co-Director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (with Milena Gregor and Birgit Kohler) and Member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum and founding director of Forum Expanded, a new section of the Berlin International Film Festival which negotiates the boundaries of cinema. Her curatorial work comprises numerous film programs, retrospectives and exhibitions, among them Michael Snow, Guy Maddin, Heinz Emigholz, Birgit Hein, Ulrike Ottinger, Stephen Dwoskin and many others. She recently co-curated (with Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel) LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in A Rented World (October 2009).
Her texts have been published in Frauen und Film, The Moving Image, Texte zur Kunst, Ästhetik & Kommunikation, Schriftenreihe Kinemathek as well as in various festival and exhibition catalogues. She is the editor of: Kinemathekheft Nr. 93: Germaine Dulac (with Sabine Nessel and Heide Schlüpmann), Berlin 2002; “The Memo Book. Films, Videos and Installations by Matthias Müller”, Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005; “The Primal Scene: Christine Noll Brinckmann. Films and Texts”, Berlin: arsenal edition, 2008; “Who says concrete doesn’t burn, have you tried? West Berlin Film in the ’80s” (with Florian Wüst), Berlin: arsenal edition, 2008. www.arsenal-berlin.de

Paul Rowley was born 1971 in Dublin. He has worked for more than ten years as a filmmaker and visual artist.
His critically acclaimed feature documentary Seaview, which he co-directed with Nicky Gogan, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and has toured festivals internationally since.
Together with David Phillips, Paul completed a collection of films to accompany a live performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, premiered at The Stone in New York in collaboration with pianist Emily Manzo. They recently completed a 60 screen permanent video installation in the international terminal at LAX airport.
Paul was artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida with Gillian Wearing, and has received many awards from the Irish Arts Council for his work since 1997. He was a fellow at the Macdowell Artist Colony in New Hampshire, and the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy. He was awarded a residency at the Experimental Television Center in New York, which led to a grant from NYCSA, the New York State Council for the Arts. He lives in Dublin and Brooklyn.
See also www.condensate.net and www.stillfilms.org

Shelly Silver is a New York based artist utilizing video, film and photography. Her work, which spans a wide range of subject matter and genres, explores the personal and societal relations that connect and restrict us; the indirect routes of pleasure and desire; the stories that are told about us and the stories we construct about ourselves.
Silver’s work has been exhibited and broadcast widely throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Screenings and installations have been mounted by venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum, the Pompidou Center, the Kyoto Museum, the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Museo Reina Sofia, and the London, Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin film festivals. Her work has been broadcast on BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte, Planete/Europe, RTE/Ireland, SWR/Germany, and Atenor/Spain. Silver’s numerous fellowships and grants include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the DAAD, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman. She is based in New York where she is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts in the School of the Arts, Columbia University.

IMG_4013Arsenalshorts

Image by uniondocs
The program collects films that are asking the same questions: What was here before? And how can you show it if it’s not there anymore? When and how did absence turn into presence? Does it always do that?
It also connects places in East and West, New York, Berlin and Warsaw. Shanghai and Venice. Not only through images, but also through the people who made the films (and are in them): For them, 1984 had been fiction and 1989 a reality. They are from a generation that has been producing images and sounds before and after the Berlin Wall, in East and West, until today.
Program runtime is 62 minutes.
a-b-city by Dieter Hormel and Brigitte Bühler
BRD 1985, 8 minutes, digital projection

Accompanied by a score using music of Pere Ubu and Einstürzende Neubauten, a-b-city revolves around West-Berlin’s psychodelic atmosphere. Brigitte Bühler and Dieter Hormel, who were renown for their fast paced and skillfully edited Super-8 clips, mix TV images and time-lapse shots of nightly streets, drifting clouds, and a men continuously jumping in front of the Berlin Wall, bringing about an impression of the enclosed city that constantly shifts between ecstasis and depression. (Text: Florian Wüst)
Haunt No. 1-3 by Niklas Goldbach
2007, 2 minutes, digital projection

Haunt No. 1, Video Loop, 35 sec., Stereo
Assistance: Daniel Reuter
Haunt No. 2, Video Loop, 28 sec., Stereo
Assistance: Viktor Neumann
Haunt No. 3, Video Loop, 36 sec., Stereo
Assistance: Viktor Neumann
The video triptych focuses on the historical background and the future of up to now abandoned places in Berlin’s former working-class district Prenzlauer Berg where the gentrification process is almost accomplished.
5 lessons and 9 questions about Chinatown by Shelly Silver
USA, 2009, 10 minutes, digital projection

You live somewhere, walk down the same street 50, 100, 10,000 times, each time taking in fragments, but never fully registering THE PLACE. Years, decades go by and you continue,unseeing, possibly unseen. A building comes down, and before the next one is up you ask yourself ‘what used to be there?’ You are only vaguely aware of the district’s shifting patterns and the sense that, since the 19th century, wave after wave of inhabitants have moved through and transformed these alleyways, tenements, stoops and shops.
10 square blocks, past, present, future, time, light, movement, immigration, exclusion, gentrification, racism, history, China, America, 3 languages, 13 voices, 152 years, 17,820 frames, 9 minutes, 54 seconds, 9 questions, 5 lessons, Chinatown.
View Excerpt
Former East/Former West by Shelly Silver
USA, 1994, excerpt 10-15 minutes digital projection

Made up of hundreds of street interviews done in Berlin two years after the Reunification, FORMER EAST/FORMER WEST is a vital, surprisingly open, and at times disturbing documentary. Silver questions the very notion of a shared language, focusing on changing definitions of words for political and economic systems – democracy, freedom, capitalism, socialism, nationality and history.
Magnetic [eye] Berlin by Gunter Krüger
Germany, 2007 / 08, excerpt 10 minutes, digital projection

Since 1997, Gunter Krüger has been archiving media fragments which he finds on the street – broken audiotapes, scraps of VHS and discarded compact discs. At the location he records additional filmic notes.
In the second part of the “Magnetic [eye]” series, “Magnetic [eye] Berlin”, a selection of media fragments forms a portrait of his living space. The film is designed as a generative structure, i.e. there is no final version.
In 2007 and 2008, three different playlists were made, each varying in both the selection of the media fragments as well as their compilation. By integrating new modules, new playlists with predefined running times can be created for each screening.
Nullpanorama by Martin Ebner
Germany, 2003, 1 minute, digital projection

The ascent and decent of an advertiser’s captive balloon over the roofs of the capital.
Proprio Aperto by Judith Hopf, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Florian Zeyfang
Germany / USA, 2005, 6 minutes, digital projection

The single channel video and installation work PROPRIO APERTO, which was first presented in February 2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in the exhibition, “Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist’s Eye,” shows a walk taken through the giardini, the grounds of the Venice Biennale, in winter.
The conversations that took place there among Judith Hopf, Natascha Sadr-Hadhighian and Florian Zeyfang result in a text that circles around landscapes of ruin, ghosts and the Dasein in cultural hegemony. The images — actually photographs — are presented in slow pans, and the various levels of destruction of the pavilion come more and more into the center.
The tone of voice and language congenially conveys the suitably contemplative mood during the walk, which carries over to the spectator.
The Rooms (excerpt) by Tim Blue and Paul Rowley
USA 2010, 5 minutes, digital projection

With rich sound design and diverse formats, THE ROOMS is an experimental study of an abandoned world that somehow continues to operate. This excerpt feautures the HAU 1 / Hebbel am Ufer, a historical theater in Berlin, that turned into a cultural space for contemporary experimental and innovative theater and performance art (HAU 1).
We will be strong in our weakness. Notes from the first congress of the Jewish Renaissance in Poland.Performance by Yael Bartana with Susanne Sachsse and Slawomir Sierakowski
Israel/Netherlands/Poland, 2010, 15 minutes, digital video projection
Jewish Renaissance movement in Poland, Tel-Aviv/Amsterdam/Warsaw

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is a film and video curator who lives and works in Berlin. She is Co-Director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (with Milena Gregor and Birgit Kohler) and Member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum and founding director of Forum Expanded, a new section of the Berlin International Film Festival which negotiates the boundaries of cinema. Her curatorial work comprises numerous film programs, retrospectives and exhibitions, among them Michael Snow, Guy Maddin, Heinz Emigholz, Birgit Hein, Ulrike Ottinger, Stephen Dwoskin and many others. She recently co-curated (with Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel) LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in A Rented World (October 2009).
Her texts have been published in Frauen und Film, The Moving Image, Texte zur Kunst, Ästhetik & Kommunikation, Schriftenreihe Kinemathek as well as in various festival and exhibition catalogues. She is the editor of: Kinemathekheft Nr. 93: Germaine Dulac (with Sabine Nessel and Heide Schlüpmann), Berlin 2002; “The Memo Book. Films, Videos and Installations by Matthias Müller”, Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2005; “The Primal Scene: Christine Noll Brinckmann. Films and Texts”, Berlin: arsenal edition, 2008; “Who says concrete doesn’t burn, have you tried? West Berlin Film in the ’80s” (with Florian Wüst), Berlin: arsenal edition, 2008. www.arsenal-berlin.de

Paul Rowley was born 1971 in Dublin. He has worked for more than ten years as a filmmaker and visual artist.
His critically acclaimed feature documentary Seaview, which he co-directed with Nicky Gogan, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and has toured festivals internationally since.
Together with David Phillips, Paul completed a collection of films to accompany a live performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, premiered at The Stone in New York in collaboration with pianist Emily Manzo. They recently completed a 60 screen permanent video installation in the international terminal at LAX airport.
Paul was artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida with Gillian Wearing, and has received many awards from the Irish Arts Council for his work since 1997. He was a fellow at the Macdowell Artist Colony in New Hampshire, and the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy. He was awarded a residency at the Experimental Television Center in New York, which led to a grant from NYCSA, the New York State Council for the Arts. He lives in Dublin and Brooklyn.
See also www.condensate.net and www.stillfilms.org

Shelly Silver is a New York based artist utilizing video, film and photography. Her work, which spans a wide range of subject matter and genres, explores the personal and societal relations that connect and restrict us; the indirect routes of pleasure and desire; the stories that are told about us and the stories we construct about ourselves.
Silver’s work has been exhibited and broadcast widely throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Screenings and installations have been mounted by venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Center of Photography in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum, the Pompidou Center, the Kyoto Museum, the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Museo Reina Sofia, and the London, Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin film festivals. Her work has been broadcast on BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte, Planete/Europe, RTE/Ireland, SWR/Germany, and Atenor/Spain. Silver’s numerous fellowships and grants include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the DAAD, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman. She is based in New York where she is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts in the School of the Arts, Columbia University.

Portrait of Elizabeth I (1533 - 1603) The Armada Portrait 1600c.

Image by lisby1
Phillip Mould:

Elizabeth I understood the power of portraiture better than almost any other English monarch. Like all the Tudors, she knew well the value of making her subjects aware of her identity. Her grandfather, Henry VII, was the first monarch to put his own accurate portrait on the English coinage, while her father, Henry VIII, seized on Holbein’s ability to present himself as a strong and majestic ruler in numerous official portraits. So Elizabeth too mobilised her own image, emboldened and reinforced with expensive costumes and sumptuous jewels, as a symbol of royal authority. Above all, such portraits were a demonstration that, despite being a woman, Elizabeth was the natural and legitimate ruler of England.


The flamboyant image of Elizabeth seen here has become one of the most successful sovereign statements in English history. The contrast with Elizabeth’s earlier portraiture is striking. In the first portrait of her as Queen, the ‘Clopton’ portrait of 1558 [Private Collection, formerly Philip Mould Ltd], Elizabeth is shown with conspicuous piety. She wears a relatively simple black dress, and holds a religious book in her hand. This portrayal accords well with what we know to be Elizabeth’s virtuous, even frugal youthful character.

But as her reign progressed Elizabeth’s portraiture became increasingly outré. Each portrait outdid the last with ever more elaborate changes in costume, pose, composition and jewelry, a progression matched by Elizabeth’s increasing addiction to expensive jewels. The process culminates in the over-indulgent, oversized, almost absurd example of the ‘Ditchley’ portrait [National Portrait Gallery], in which Elizabeth is shown full length, bestriding the earth, as bolts of lighting strike dramatically through the sky behind her. Her face is small, aged, even ugly, and overwhelmed by the rest of the painting. Elizabeth the person is subsumed by Elizabeth the icon.

And this was precisely the intention. They key to understanding Elizabeth’s portraiture lies in a recognition of her political vulnerability. Female monarchs in the sixteenth century were rare enough. Unmarried female monarchs were unheard of. Her image, therefore, could not stress traditional female charms; beauty, grace, fertility. In fact, it had to stress the opposite. From the late 1570s onwards, when it became clear that she would not marry, Elizabeth was effectively de-sexed. She was portrayed as a virtuous emblem of state, the Virgin Queen forsaking marriage for the good of the kingdom. It was therefore not enough for Elizabeth to rely on likeness alone in her portraiture. She certainly could not be portrayed in the demur, usually seated, manner of her sister Mary, supported as she was by her marriage to Philip of Spain. And, of course, Elizabeth was unable to rely on sheer physical presence in her portraits, as her father done. Thus her portraits came to rely on bejewelled and bulky costumes – ‘Gloriana’ – for the projection of majesty.

This portrait is one of the best known images of the Queen. Commonly called the ‘Armada’ type, it is one of four versions, most likely painted in the late 1580s and early 1590s. The three related pictures are at; Woburn Abbey, the National Portrait Gallery, and in the possession of the descendants of Sir Francis Drake. They celebrate the apogaic defeat of the Spanish fleet in 1588 by the inclusion of a naval battle in the background.

What is considered the ‘prime’ Armada type, that at Woburn, has been attributed to George Gower. Gower produced a large number of portraits of Elizabeth in his capacity as the Queen’s Serjeant painter, and thus would have had an extensive workshop to help meet the high demand. This portrait was most probably painted by an artist familiar with his practices.

The production of Elizabeth’s portraits followed well established practices. A standardized face ‘mask’ was used, as has been the case in this example. Face masks not only saved time, but made up for the impossibility of painting the Queen from life for each new commission. Masks were also used to adhere to the fairly stringent, if unofficial, rules surrounding the production of the Queen’s image. She preferred, for example, to have no shadows across her face, and hence the stark, bright appearance of her features. The pose and costume would then have been painted with greater artistic freedom. Subtle changes would have been introduced in each portrait, usually in the accessories such as the fan in this example, so that the dependence on standard facial types did not give rise to identical portraits of the Queen. It appears to have been accepted that no two portraits of the Queen should be identical.

There has been some debate about the precise date of this portrait. When recently sold at Christies, London, it was dated to between1600 and1620, principally due to the use of canvas. However, it is possible that the portrait can be dated to within Elizabeth’s lifetime. An imposition of a terminus post quem of 1600 on the present portrait, simply because canvas was most commonly a seventeenth century medium, is unjustified.

Although canvas is thought to have been introduced mainly at the turn of the seventeenth century, there are many examples of canvas portraits in the sixteenth century, particularly for larger works where the use of oak might have been prohibitively expensive. In Europe canvas was used throughout the sixteenth century, while in England it can be found in early Tudor royal portraits, such as the group of Henry VIII and his family [Royal Collection] and a portrait of Edward VI [Lord Egremont]. There are also examples of contemporary portraits of Elizabeth on canvas, such as; Quentin Metsys the Younger’s ‘Sieve’ portrait of 1583, Marcus Gheeraerdts’ ‘Ditchley’ portrait of c.1592 [NPG]; John Bettes the Younger’s portrait of c.1590 [on loan to Pollok House, Glasgow]; and the anonymous ‘Elizabeth I with a Crescent-moon Jewel’ [Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury]. Significantly, two portraits that use the same face-mask as the Armada present portrait are also on canvas, one dated c.1590 at Toledo Museum of Art, and another, a full-length, also c.1590, at Trinity College Cambridge [check]. The present work is painted on a particularly coarse weave, as seen in very early English canvas paintings.

If the present work was painted after Elizabeth’s death, then it must have been a copied from an earlier work, namely, one of the other three Armada versions. What is evident from even the cursory comparison of the facial features however, is that the sensitive modelling and cadaverous characterisation are both manifestly early in handling and of notable high quality, particularly when set aside other versions. It would seem untenable that this could have been completed by any artist who did not have experience of contemporaneous workshop practices. Paint analysis has confirmed a possible date from the late sixteenth century, and reveals the use of azurite, a pigment regularly used in the sixteenth century. And, finally, and indicatively there are numerous differences between the present painting and the other three Armada types.

The most obvious difference is the lack of an Armada scene. It would make little sense for a posthumous copy of an Armada portrait not to include any reference to the greatest event of her reign, particularly when such a copy must have been commissioned with a degree of retrospective gloire. For all its later acclaim, the Armada portrait type was in fact a relatively short lived phenomenon. It seems improbable that an artist charged with making a copy in James I’s reign would chose a work of relative rarity, and which cannot by then have been easily accessible.

There are also significant differences in the jewelry between the present painting and the three other versions. In the present work the Queen wears a double chain of pearls across her bodice. A similar arrangement can be seen in Gower type portraits of the 1580s, the ‘Darnley’ portrait c.1575, Marcus Gheerearts the Elder’s c.1585 full length, and most strikingly in Quentin Metys the Younger’s ‘Sieve’ portrait of 1583. However, in the other three Armada portraits the Queen is shown wearing a far larger arrangement of pearls. These were almost certainly those bequeathed by the Earl of Leicester to Elizabeth, his “most dear and gracious Sovereign whose creature under God I have been”, in 1588. Elizabeth, who locked herself in her room on hearing Leicester’s demise, is shown wearing this gift in most of her later portraits. It would be extremely unusual for an artist to copy an Armada portrait, and then, in addition to making numerous changes in the pose and costume, revert to a formula of jewelry used before 1588.

Similarly, in the present portrait Elizabeth is shown holding a distinctive jewel of a large diamond, flanked by two figures, with a large pendant pearl. This same jewel can be seen clearly in the Metsys’ sieve portrait. It makes further appearances, in a more generalized form, in only a handful of portraits dated to the 1580s, such as that attributed by Roy Strong to John Bettes the Younger [Private Collection, Gloriana p.118, and in the little-known portrait of Elizabeth seated on a throne [Lord Tollemache]. It does not appear in portraits of the Queen post 1590. Its presence in the present portrait could be explained by an artist conversant in Elizabethan iconography and fashion – and that means a contemporary workshop.

We must also consider the likely circumstances in which the portrait would have been commissioned. Royal portraits of this size and scale were usually commissioned as a means of displaying loyalty to the regime, perhaps by a leading courtier, nobleman, or gentry family. In this context a late copy of Elizabeth on the scale and quality seen here would have had no political value in the reign of the new Stuart king, James I. Posthumous copies of Elizabeth tend to be confined to smaller corridor portraits, or include obvious references to her age and death, such as the example at Corsham Court, in which a weary Queen is overshadowed by the figure of Death.

Nice Change Background Image photos

A few nice change background image images I found:

odard, Miéville & Lynne Sachs: Movie-making and the Stubborn, Unruly Galaxy of Childhood

Image by uniondocs
Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Marie Miéville to figure out how to use television to reveal the latent brilliance of a child. Created for French television during the radical days of the late 1970s , “France/tour/detour/deux enfant” (1978) is an intimate, provocative and quotidian video essay that uses avant-garde cinema’s techniques in a visual experiment that will change anyone’s perception of the developing mind of a human being.
Tonight Lynne Sachs will discuss the way that “France/tour…” influenced her own work as she reflects on the presence of childhood in her twenty-year film career. Beginning in her early twenties when the ambiguity of femininity seemed daunting and problematic to more recent years when motherhood has given her quick access to the conundrums of youth, Sachs, like Godard and Melville, ponders her relationship as an artist to this unavoidable eighteen year odyssey. Sachs will screen Photograph of Wind (3 min., 2001), Atalanta: 32 Years Later (5 min. 2006), and The Last Happy Day (38 min.) in their entirety along with brief scenes from The House of Science (1991) and Wind in Our Hair (2010).
Program:
France/Tour/Detour/Deux Enfants by Jean Luc Godard and Ann Marie Miéville
(excerpt from 12 part TV series, 1977, France)

Godard and Miéville take a detour through the everyday lives of two children in contemporary France. Sachs will present excerpts from the series.

Photograph of Wind by Lynne Sachs
(4 min.,16mm, b&w and color, 2001)

“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” (Lynne Sachs)
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

Atalanta: 32 Years Later by Lynne Sachs
(5 min. color sound, 16mm to video, 2006)
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.
“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.” George Kuchar
The Last Happy Day by Lynne Sachs
( 38 min. 2009)

The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week
Excerpts from:
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
(30 min., 16mm,1991)

“Throughout The House of Science an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title –house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space — without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.’” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive)

Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo
(16mm, Super 8 and digital on video, English and Spanish, 2010)

“Inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, whose work not only influenced a generation of Latin American writers but film directors such as Antonioni and Godard, Lynne Sachs’ Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo is an experimental narrative that explores the interior and exterior worlds of four early-teens, and how through play they come to discover themselves and their world. “Freedom takes us by the hand–it seizes the whole of our bodies,” a young narrator describes as they head towards the tracks. This is their kingdom, a place where–dawning fanciful masks, feather boas, and colorful scarves — the girls pose as statues and perform for each other and for passengers speeding by.”
- Carolyn Tennant, Media Arts Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York
“Wind in Our Hair moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces, into the skittering beyond of adolescence, exploding with anticipation and possibility.” Todd Lillethun, Artistic Director, Chicago Filmmakers
Program Run Time: 119 minutes
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque will present a full retrospective of her work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.


Josetxo Cerdán Los Arcos is an assistant professor at the URV and the artistic director of Punto de Vista. He has edited the books ‘Mirada, Memoria y Fascinación’ (2001); ‘Documental y Vanguardia’ (2005); ‘Al Otro Lado de la Ficción’ (2007); and ‘Suevia Films-Caesáreo González’ (2005); ‘Signal Fires: The Cinema of Jem Cohen’ (2010). He is author of ‘Ricardo Urgoiti. Los trabajos y los días’ (2007). He has coordinated an M. A. in from 1998 to 2008. Principal interest areas are non-fiction film, Spanish cinema, and television.
Kelly Anderson is an award-winning independent producer and director of documentary and narrative films. Her most recent production is NEVER ENOUGH, a documentary about American’s relationship with their material possessions, which is premiering at the 2010 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Other recent directing work includes SOMEPLACE LIKE HOME, a documentary about the redevelopment of Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, which she made for FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality). In 2004 Kelly produced and directed (with Tami Gold) and edited EVERY MOTHER’S SON, a documentary for ITVS about mothers whose children have been killed by police officers and who have become national spokespeople on the issue of police brutality. EVERY MOTHER’S SON premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and had its broadcast premiere on PBS’s P.O.V. series. Kelly produced, directed and edited OVERCOMING THE ODDS, a short documentary that was distributed to more than 2,500 people internationally as part of a successful campaign to pass the groundbreaking Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which set global standards on the promotion and marketing of tobacco. This film was a follow-up to MAKING A KILLING, a half-hour documentary Kelly produced and directed (with Tami Gold) and edited that addresses the marketing practices of the tobacco industry in the developing world. MAKING A KILLING premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival, was screened for delegates at the World Health Organization and aired on television in Nigeria, Serbia, Lagos and Vietnam. In 2000 Kelly completed SHIFT, a one-hour drama for ITVS about the volatile relationship between a North Carolina waitress and a telemarketing prison inmate, which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and aired on many PBS stations. Kelly’s other documentaries include OUT AT WORK (with Tami Gold), which was screened at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and was shown on HBO. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College in New York City.

Nice Change Background Image photos

Some cool change background image images:

Image by jonmartin ()
Large, black background | Full size, full screen
 
(Moab, Utah) The pride of Arches National Park; Delicate Arch, stretches towards the Milky Way.

It was shooting a night sky in Arches after a crash course in star photography by a kind stranger, that I knew I loved photography. Thuus, returning to Arches had been high on my list. This was my first time at Delicate Arch, and I had set high expectations for myself, wanting to get a shot that required the top of my skills to pull off. Having just started with light painting, I am still awed by how easy it is to totally and utterly ruin a shot by just the slightest wrong move of the torch.

Carefully planned (finally a cloudless night, let's go now now now!) and researched (as in happy coincidence) to make sure the moon was under the horizon and the milky way in the right position. I was really eager to finally try my skills out at this wonder of nature.

So, I got a bit cocky and jogged ahead as Tor was still getting his gear act together. Naturally, I ended up losing my bearing around half way there--some parts of the route is over slickrock with only small cairns to guide the way. Now, there are not many lights in the middle of nowhere, and some of the places it gets pretty steep if you wander off just a little. My nifty iPad USGS map app with detailed trails came in handy as I finally decided to let my night vision get destroyed by looking at the light screen, and before long I had backtracked and met up with Tor again, who deciseively led the way... in the direction I had just returned from.

It might have been a good idea to visit the Arch during daytime for a little scouting, before setting out in the middle of the night. But, in the end we found our way and we promptly forgot this learning point.

Delicate Arch is imposing where it stands in front of a deep chasm and with a large bowl-like depression in front; I was impressed at the steepness of the slope leadning up to it, as well as parts of the trail which was a mere half-meter hacked into bare rock with a serious drop on the side–this is not your boardwalk-laid path for blue haired grannies–a refreshing change from many of the popular National Park sights around the US.

Canon 15mm Fisheye on camera, to get the most sky possible and to allow for 30 seconds exposures with minimal star movement (which I still cant bring myself to do. I want my sky full of round dots, not trails). The wider field of view makes each star smaller and thus allows you to expose longer. It takes a little experimenting, but when you get to know your lens it is simple to get shots where you can view the photo full size and see round dots of light from millions and billions of years ago, traveling across the universe just to end up on your CCD chip:

- shoot at your favorite focal length at max (or auto) ISO starting at say 10 seconds (Tv mode - it is so dark that your aperture will max out anyway), inspect the photo on your screen looking at the form of the stars only and adjust the shutter speed as necessary. As you get to know the threshold for when they start to smear (this photo is just on the edge, and the fisheye distorts the corners), step down ISO if you can and you should get a decent exposure. If you have some ISO steps to go before your noise sensitivity itches, try to decrease the aperture a little as lenses might be sharper at say f/4. Forget about a sharp foreground (f/8 or higher) until cameras shoot at ISO 1.6 million or thereabouts; which should take something like five years?

The Arch is painted with a faint red LED flashlight. It is amazing how little light is needed to get results--more often than not it is a challenge to not get excited and over-do it ("just one more swipe of light..."), the results being patches of washed-out, over-saturated, glaring, nauseous color.

I used a wired Canon remote and shot series of 5 30 second exposures with a little break between each to vary my position and technique, then checked the results and tried five more, repeating ad nauseam. Many of the shots have ghosts of yours truly waving a light around, even this image reveals my position...

Post-processing in Photoshop and Lightroom. Blend of two exposures that had varying lighting on the arch, desaturated the red a bit and upped the contrast.

Learning points: Being two and shooting long exposures painted with flashlights is painful for at least one person as just one stray light ruins the other shooters photo, and due to the fact that while social, sharing a scene is more similar to territorial war than teamwork. Bringing beer and shooting in turns alleviates the problem somewhat. Just make sure to stay on your feet for the return trek.

Now click the full-size and count the stars.
 
30,0 sec at f/2,8 | 3200 ISO | Manual mode | 0 EV | EF15mm f/2.8 Fisheye at 15mm

Time Magazine (September 13, 2010) ...item 2.. The New Anti-Semitism - What it is and how to deal with it (July 12, 2011) ...

Image by marsmet541
While this sounds like an episode in Germany leading up to the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, it occurred more recently and much closer to home, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Social Work.

Now, more details are emerging under the exceptional circumstance of two U of T professors publicly criticizing a colleague for facilitating classroom anti-Semitism and the university administration’s inadequate response.
.

........***** All images are copyrighted by their respective authors ........
.
............................................................................................................................................................................................
.
.....item 1).... aish.com ... www.aish.com/jw/s ... HOME ISRAEL JEWISH WORLD ...

Anti-Semitism at University of Toronto

Jew-counting, racism and intimidation in U of T's Social Work program
.
.......................................

img code photo ... Anti-Semitism at University of Toronto

media.aish.com/images/AntiSemUniversToronto230x15.jpg

.......................................
.

July 12, 2011 / 10 Tammuz 5771
by Richard Klagsbrun

www.aish.com/jw/s/Anti-Semitism_at_University_of_Toronto....

Picture the following: A discussion in a post-graduate university class on the topic of Jews turns ugly. The professor is uncritical when one student says he doesn’t want to be around Jews. Another student complains about “rich Jews,” implying their excessive power. In a subsequent class, the same professor, as if to validate those points, says half her department faculty are Jews and with her approbation, students conduct a ‘Jew count’.

While this sounds like an episode in Germany leading up to the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, it occurred more recently and much closer to home, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Social Work. Now, more details are emerging under the exceptional circumstance of two U of T professors publicly criticizing a colleague for facilitating classroom anti-Semitism and the university administration’s inadequate response.

The controversy began when some visible minority students in a Social Work Master’s program at the University of Toronto expressed discomfort about being around “rich Jews,” in Professor Rupaleem Bhuyan’s class, regarding a proposed outing in 2009 to the Baycrest Centre, an internationally renowned Jewish geriatric and research facility. They were undoubtedly confident of a sympathetic ear from her. The previous year, Bhuyan denounced Israel as a satellite of the United States, unworthy of distinction as a separate country.

The few Jewish students in Bhuyan’s Master's Program class were intimidated into silence for much of the discussion by a classroom culture slanted against them. Finally, one young woman spoke up, protesting her grandparents had come to Canada with virtually nothing and she was proud her family could now afford the fees for them to reside at Baycrest.

That must have rung an alarm bell for Professor Bhuyan, because startlingly, she then admonished her students not to divulge what transpired in class to outsiders.

But her classroom was not Las Vegas and what happened there did not stay there. Some outraged Jewish students approached Professor Paula David, who in turn consulted senior professors Ernie Lightman and Adrienne Chambon.

“Students are in a vulnerable position and dread officially attaching their name to complaints against a professor in a program like Social Work,” said Lightman. “Aside from determining grades, they fear one bad word from a professor to a social agency can eliminate their employment prospects.”

In the face of such circumstances, Lightman assumed the voice of the Jewish students who endured the vitriol in Bhuyan’s class. He, with Chambon spoke to Faye Mishna, the Dean of Social Work about the incidents. A letter Lightman wrote to U of T President David Naylor about the matter also became public.

By way of response, Mishna, without specific reference to the incident or Bhuyan, sent out a pair of letters to the Social Work department generically condemning anti-Semitism.


Related Article: The New Anti-Semitism

www.aish.com/jw/s/48930417.html


Lightman believes the university’s response was absurd. “The department’s approach seemed to imply a widespread problem with anti-Semitism – which there wasn’t – and that everyone is potentially a racist when one professor promoted anti-Semitism and was never held publicly accountable.”

The Canadian Jewish Congress declined to participate in resulting seminars on anti-Semitism held for the Social Work Department. According to the CJC’s Bernie Farber, “We were not satisfied in the end with the entire process.”

Chambon, a Jewish professor who is Director of PhD programs in the Social Work department, was particularly pained by these events. Originally from France, she relates that “I am from Europe and of a generation with bad memories of the sinister results of Jew counts.” After hearing about the incident, Chambon arranged to meet with Bhuyan.

We have a responsibility to students to ensure faculty do not abuse the power inherent in their positions.

“I was flabbergasted” Chambon disclosed. “She told me ‘racialized’ students come from underprivileged backgrounds and were justified in not wanting to be around old Jews because they are rich and would make them uneasy. I couldn’t believe my ears. I took some paper and wrote down what she said in front of her. Bhuyan then said the donor plaques at the university were all from rich Jews, which she felt proved her point. Aside from being factually wrong, it reflects an attitude that polarizes groups and reinforces stereotypes that do not belong in the teaching of Social Work.”

Professor Bhuyan did not reply to a request to comment for this article and the University refused to add to Social Work Department Dean Mishna’s response that, “the Faculty took all steps to address the matter appropriately at the time of the incident and thereafter.”

Nothing could be more false in the opinion of Lightman, Chambon and others. While patiently waiting for the wheels of justice to grind slowly, they instead saw them go off the rails.

Bhuyan, an untenured Assistant Professor, who never offered a public apology for her behavior, was rewarded by the University with a contract renewal .

That development has frustrated a number of professors in a dysfunctional Social Work Department that remains divided in opposing camps. Lightman insists this matter must be exposed and wrote a recent article about it for The Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.

Lightman asserts, “It’s ironic that a department purporting to teach anti-racism is incapable of dealing with racism in its own house. We have a responsibility to students to ensure faculty do not abuse the power inherent in their positions, and to the community-at-large to ensure all the Social Workers it graduates reflect and promote the values of the field. That hasn’t happened here."

Ontario's Minister for Colleges and Universities is John Miloy. The Progressive Conservative Critic for that portfolio is Jim Wilson. Why not let them know what you think?

This article originally appeared on the blog: Eye on a Crazy Planet
eyecrazy.blogspot.com/
.
.
.............................................................................................................................................................................................
.
.....item 2).... aish.com ... www.aish.com/jw/s ... HOME ISRAEL JEWISH WORLD ...

The New Anti-Semitism ...

What it is and how to deal with it.
.
....................................

img code photo ... "The New Anti-Semitism"

media.aish.com/images/The_New_Anti-Semitism_(medium)_(english).jpg

....................................
.

July 12, 2011
by Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks

www.aish.com/jw/s/48930417.html

In January 2000, heads of state or senior representatives of 44 governments met in Stockholm to commit themselves to a continuing program of Holocaust remembrance and the fight against anti-Semitism. Barely two years later, synagogues and Jewish schools in France and Belgium were being firebombed, and Jews were being attacked in the streets.

The distinguished Chief Rabbi of France, Rabbi Joseph Sitruk, advised Jews not to wear yarmulkas in the street. The French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut wrote, 'The hearts of the Jews are heavy. For the first time since the war, they are afraid.' Shmuel Trigano, professor of sociology at the University of Paris, openly questioned whether there was a future for Jews in France. Never again had become ever again.

Basing Jewish identity on memories of persecution is a mistake.

On 28 February 2002 I gave my first speech on the new anti-Semitism. Never before had I spoken on the subject. I had grown up without a single experience of anti-Semitism. I believed, and still do, that the whole enterprise of basing Jewish identity on memories of persecution was a mistake. The distinguished Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz reached the same conclusion at the end of her life. She warned of the danger of a whole generation of children growing up knowing about the Greeks and how they lived, the Romans and how they lived, the Jews and how they died. I wrote Radical then, Radical now, specifically to focus Jewish identity away from death to life, suffering to celebration, grief to joy.

The return of anti-Semitism, after 60 years of Holocaust education, interfaith dialogue and antiracist legislation is a major event in the history of the world. Far-sighted historians like Bernard Lewis and Robert Wistrich had been sounding the warning since the 1980s. Already in the 1990s, Harvard literary scholar Ruth Wisse argued that antisemitism was the most successful ideology of the twentieth century. German fascism, she said, came and went. Soviet communism came and went. Anti-Semitism came and stayed.

It is wrong to exaggerate. We are not now where Jews were in the 1930s. Nor are Jews today what our ancestors were: defenseless, powerless and without a collective home. The State of Israel has transformed the situation for Jews everywhere. What is necessary now is simply to understand the situation and sound a warning. That is what Moses Hess did in 1862, Judah Leib Pinsker in 1882 and Theodor Herzl in 1896: 71, 51 and 37 years respectively before Hitler's rise to power. To understand is to begin to know how to respond, with open eyes and without fear.

Today's anti-Semitism is a new phenomenon, continuous with, yet significantly different from the past. To fathom the transformation, we must first define what anti-Semitism is. In the past Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor; because they were capitalists (Marx) and because they were communists (Hitler); because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they held tenaciously to a superstitious faith (Voltaire) and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing (Stalin).

Anti-Semitism mutates, and in so doing, defeats the immune systems set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred.

Anti-Semitism is not an ideology, a coherent set of beliefs. It is, in fact, an endless stream of contradictions. The best way of understanding it is to see it as a virus. Viruses attack the human body, but the body itself has an immensely sophisticated defense, the human immune system. How then do viruses survive and flourish? By mutating. Anti-Semitism mutates, and in so doing, defeats the immune systems set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred. There have been three such mutations in the past two thousand years, and we are living through the fourth.

The first took place with the birth of Christianity. Before then there had been many Hellenistic writers who were hostile to Jews. But they were also dismissive of other non-Hellenistic peoples. The Greeks called them barbarians. There was nothing personal in their attacks on Jews. This was not anti-Semitism. It was xenophobia.

This changed with Christianity. As was later to happen with Islam, the founders of the new faith, largely based on Judaism itself, believed that Jews would join the new dispensation and were scandalized when they did not. Jews were held guilty of not recognizing -- worst still, of being complicit in the death of – the messiah. A strand of Judeophobia entered Christianity in some of its earliest texts, and became a fully-fledged genre, the 'Adversos Judaeos' literature, in the days of the Church Fathers. From here on, Jews – not non-Christians in general -- became the target of what Jules Isaac called the 'teaching of contempt'.

The second mutation began in 1096 when the Crusaders, on their way to conquer Jerusalem, stopped to massacre Jewish communities in Worms, Speyer and Mainz, the first major European pogrom. In 1144 in Norwich there was the first Blood Libel, a myth that still exists today in parts of the Middle East. Religious Judeophobia became demonic. Jews were no longer just the people who rejected Christianity. They began to be seen as a malevolent force, killing children, desecrating the host, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. There were forced conversions, inquisitions, burnings at the stake, staged public disputations, book burnings and expulsions. Europe had become a 'persecuting society'.

We can date the third mutation to 1879 when the German journalist Wilhelm Marr coined a new word: anti-Semitism. The fact that he needed to do so tells us that this was a new phenomenon. It emerged in an age of Enlightenment, the secular nation state, liberalism and emancipation. Religious prejudice was deemed to be a thing of the past. The new hatred had therefore to justify itself on quite different grounds, namely race. This was a fateful development, because you can change your religion. You cannot change your race. Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews. Racists could only work for the extermination of the Jews. So the Holocaust was born. Sixty years after the word came the deed.

Unlike its predecessors, the new anti-Semitism focuses not on Judaism as a religion, nor on Jews as a race, but on Jews as a nation.

Today we are living through the fourth mutation. Unlike its predecessors, the new anti-Semitism focuses not on Judaism as a religion, nor on Jews as a race, but on Jews as a nation. It consists of three propositions. First, alone of the 192 nations making up the United Nations, Jews are not entitled to a state of their own. As Amos Oz noted: in the 1930s, anti-Semites declared, 'Jews to Palestine'. Today they shout, 'Jews out of Palestine'. He said: they don't want us to be there; they don't want us to be here; they don't want us to be.

The second is that Jews or the State of Israel (the terms are often used interchangeably) are responsible for the evils of the world, from AIDS to global warming. All the old anti-Semitic myths have been recycled, from the Blood Libel to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still a best-seller in many parts of the world. The third is that all Jews are Zionists and therefore legitimate objects of attack. The bomb attacks on synagogues in Istanbul and Djerba, the arson attacks on Jewish schools in Europe, and the almost fatal stabbing of a young yeshiva student on a bus in North London in October 2000, were on Jewish targets, not Israeli ones. The new anti-Semitism is an attack on Jews as a nation seeking to exist as a nation like every other on the face of the earth, with rights of self-governance and self-defense.

How did it penetrate the most sophisticated immune system ever constructed -- the entire panoply of international measures designed to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust would ever happen again, from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) to the Stockholm declaration of 2000? The answer lies in the mode of self-justification. Most people at most times feel a residual guilt at hating the innocent. Therefore anti-Semitism has always had to find legitimation in the most prestigious source of authority at any given time.

In the first centuries of the Common Era, and again in the Middle Ages, this was religion. That is why Judeophobia took the form of religious doctrine. In the nineteenth century, religion had lost prestige, and the supreme authority was now science. Racial anti-Semitism was duly based on two pseudo-sciences, social Darwinism (the idea that in society, as in nature, the strong survive by eliminating the weak) and the so-called scientific study of race. By the late twentieth century, science had lost its prestige, having given us the power to destroy life on earth. Today the supreme source of legitimacy is human rights. That is why Jews (or the Jewish state) are accused of the five primal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide and crimes against humanity.

That is where we are. How then shall we respond? There are three key messages, the first to Jews, the second to anti-Semites, and the third to our fellow human beings in this tense and troubled age. As Jews we must understand that we cannot fight anti-Semitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate. Jews cannot defeat anti-Semitism. Only the cultures that give rise to it can do so.

European Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth century made one of the most tragic mistakes in history. They said: Jews cause anti-Semitism, therefore they can cure it. They did everything possible. They said, 'People hate us because we are different. So we will stop being different.' They gave up item after item of Judaism. They integrated, they assimilated, they married out, they hid their identity. This failed to diminish anti-Semitism by one iota. All it did was to debilitate and demoralize Jews.

We need allies. Jews have enemies but we also have friends and we must cultivate more. I have helped lead the fight against Islamophobia; I ask Muslims to fight Judeophobia. I will fight for the right of Christians throughout the world to live their faith without fear; but we need Christians to fight for the right of Jews to live their faith without fear.

The most important thing Jews can do to fight anti-Semitism is never, ever to internalize it.

The most important thing Jews can do to fight anti-Semitism is never, ever to internalize it. That is what is wrong in making the history of persecution the basis of Jewish identity. For three thousand years Jews defined themselves as a people loved by God. Only in the nineteenth century did they begin to define themselves as the people hated by gentiles. There is no sane future along that road. The best psychological defense against anti-Semitism is the saying of Rav Nachman of Bratslav: 'The whole world is a very narrow bridge; the main thing is never to be afraid.'

To anti-Semites and their fellow travelers we must be candid. Hate destroys the hated, but it also destroys the hater. It is no accident that anti-Semitism is the weapon of choice of tyrants and totalitarian regimes. It deflects internal criticism away by projecting it onto an external scapegoat. It is deployed in country after country to direct attention away from real internal problems of poverty, unemployment and underachievement. Anti-Semitism is used to sustain regimes without human rights, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free press, liberty of association or accountable government. One truth resounds through the pages of history: To be free you have to let go of hate. Those driven by hate are enemies of freedom. There is no exception.

Finally to all of us together, we must say: Jews have been hated throughout history because they were different. To be sure, everyone is different; but Jews more than most fought for the right to be different. Under a succession of empires, and centuries of dispersion, Jews were the only people who for more than two thousand years refused to convert to the dominant religion or assimilate into the dominant culture. That is why anti-Semitism is a threat not just to Jews but to humanity.

God, said the rabbis, makes everyone in His image, yet He makes everyone different to teach us to respect difference. And since difference is constitutive of humanity, a world that has no space for difference has no space for humanity. That is why a resurgence of anti-Semitism has always been an early warning of an assault on freedom itself. It is so today.

We must find allies in the fight against hate. For though it begins with Jews, ultimately it threatens us all.

This article first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle. Visit the Chief Rabbi's website at www.chiefrabbi.com.
.
.
.............................................................................................................................................................................................
.
.

Male Crimson Banded Wrasse

Image by PacificKlaus
Notolabrus gymnogenis. Scroll back a few images to see the completely differently colored female. Many species of wrasses change sex at one point in their lifes (female to male), I am not sure if this species also does that. Very active, curious fish.

I did some minor cleaning up of the background in post-production of this image.

Take underwater pictures with me at the Evolution Photoganza in the Philippines in September 2013, and enjoy more of my photography & tales of the underwater world in "Sex, Drugs and Scuba Diving".