Tokyo Gore Police…

Occasionally you see a movie that is so bizarre, so far beyond anything that you have ever experienced that you just go damn, and know it will be years before you ever see something to top it.  I think it was about 2002 that I saw The Story of Riki-O and had that feeling.  But then I saw Tokyo Gore Police.

I heard it mentioned on the Crankcast when Chris Taber was on.  He said it was bizarre.  He was right.  The basic plot:  in the future the Japanese police have been privatized and are now this crazy looking army of samurai warriors with all kinds of bent and S and M aspects to them.  They are battling something called “engineers”, which are genetically modified super beings that kill people for no real reason.  The main character is a female whose father was a policeman and was killed in the line of duty.  She grows to become a cop.  A mean one, and a slayer of the engineers.

There is a background story of the political movement that moved the police into being privatized, how that fits in with our female protagonist (who was raised by the police) and the generally messed up world that these characters live in.  There are also some intercutting of some crazy commercials that are reminiscent of Starship Troopers.  My favorite was for these blades for “cutters” that were being sold to Japanese school girls.  Suicide is a big part of this movie, and there is also a very funny PSA telling people to “stop the hara-kiri”.  What else do you get?  An S and M club where there is something that has been modified into a chair that urinates on people.  A subway pervert who gets his hands severed.

This movie looks shot on video, but it was shot well – with a good camera and good lighting.  There is a strong Cronenberg element also with all the biotechnology and body horror.  It is not as fancy as Cronenberg’s stuff, but it is pretty awesome.  At times the effects can be campy, but the attempts towards gore are pretty intense and maybe it is a good thing it is campy.  It is what seperates this movie from something like Hostel.

Global Metal – The Best Documentary Available In Every Country But The US Evidently…

Sam Dunn is a filmmaker/anthropologist who made an excellent documentary called A Headbanger’s Journey. You might not have known that he followed it up with a documentary about how metal has spread across the globe as part of globalization. He traveled to Brazil, Indonesia, China, Israel, Dubai, Japan, India. The reason you have not seen this movie is that it seems to be available in every country but the United States. If you are close to Canada you can pick up a DVD there. Why is not available in the US? I am guessing it has something to do with the cost of the rights for the music used in the films. So what has been the result of this? The whole movie is available (at low quality) on youtube.

Here is a link to the video channel on youtube it is available on.

Here is a trailer:

Here is a pretty good interview with the filmmakers.

Electric Apricot…

My inlaws saw this movie and recommended it.  It is a mockumentary about a jam band that is full of the cliques that are attached to jam band musicians.  The main character, in my opinion, is lapdog…who is played by Les Claypool.  He is the drummer and singer of this band Electric Apricot, a jam band that is getting picked up by a manager to record its first album.  He is a glassblower by trade and makes pipes, bongs and dildos.  It takes him hours to set up his drums for the recording session and is always talking about how “you only record your first album once” and “you only play your first festival once.”

There is also Aiwass, the bass player with a Yoko Ono style girl friend and a penchant for english folk and prog rock.  He changed his name to the spirit that was conjured by Alister Crowley, and makes the whole band call him this.  The band thinks this is silly but they do it to humor him.  He also lives in a tree fort on his parents property.  The guitar player is a Jerry Garcia worshipper who actually punches a guy for saying that he was glad that Garcia died.  He has a religious experience after making an ass of himself talking to Warren Haynes, goes off to get wasted and has a religious experience where Garcia speaks to him.  He even plays a Garcia guitar.  Then there is the keyboard player.  He is obsessed with eastern philosophy and meditation but is kinda an angry asshole most of the time.

The movie is an interesting satire about the jam band scene and the people that are involved in them.  It is fairly accurate in the sense that the hippie jam band scene is like this.  Les Claypool is also very hilarious for not being a commedian (the other actors are commedians).  The music is real too, and they do a pretty funny song called “Hey Are You Going To Burnin’ Man.”  It is a great little movie.

Flight of the Living Dead – Con Air meets Snakes on a Plane with Zombies

Okay.  The title of this movie screams clique mash-up.  That is true in this case.  It is not a bad movie.

Here’s what you get:  a secret biomedical experiment is being shipped on a passenger flight.  Add to that a prisoner (who looks a bit like John Malkovich and acts like his character on Con-Air) and a guard who is transferring him that is hot for a stewardess.  Then there are 2 couples, the women hate each other and the men are friends.  Turns out one of the women is cheating on her boyfriend.  That dynamic is just set up to screwed up.  You also have a US Marshal on board.  They divert their flight plan, end up in a storm.  Then you have the turbulence cause the zombie cases to get jostled in the cargo-hold.  Like any zombie movie it turns out they didn’t make the zombie containers good enough.  They never do.  Then the zombies get loose.

When you put all this together you can tell that things are going to go terribly wrong, especially after the prisoner escapes to the cargo hold, where the zombie has gotten loose.  You know how it is with zombies, you cannot have just one in a movie.  Well, hilarity and casualities ensue.  There are a few really interesting shots, it is a well made movie considering the subject and possibility of failure that “Snakes on a Plane meets Zombies” can have.  But you get some great zombie killing as well, so it is forgiven that the movie just sounds so derivative.  The effects were good and there were some interesting zombie attacks to be had, like when they start coming through the floor.  Also there is some nifty unrestrained use of firearms on a plane.

3 stars.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2 – The Metal Years

After wanting to see this movie for almost 17 years I have finally gotten ahold of a copy of it.  I sat down, very excited, and watched it all just now.  Well, I would have probably enjoyed it more 17 years ago.  After the death and resurrection of hair metal (as nostalgia) – or glam metal, whatever – it is a little light to see.

This was a documentary about the late 1980s metal, that dealt mainly with the glam rock scene.  It was directed by Penelope Spheeris, who later went on to direct the first Wayne’s World movie.  It centers around the Los Angeles music scene, but is by no means exclusive to that type of metal.  Lemmy from Motorhead shows up, as does Megadeth and some other acts of non-glam note.

I have read about the interview of Chris Holmes from WASP before.  But nothing prepares you for the uncomfortableness of actually seeing him dead drunk, in a swimming pool talking about groupies and then switching to self-hatred while swilling vodka.  What makes it difficult is that his mother is there sitting in a poolside chair during the interview.  Maybe this is a form of documentary intervention.  Maybe no one was expecting this.  It does make for a very powerful scene, especially since they keep cutting back to his mother.

Ozzy Osbourne is interviewed, mainly about his sobriety and rehab.  This is early Ozzy, jumbled but much more coherent than he would be in later years.  There is an insert shot where it looks like he is spilling orange juice when he is pouring it that seems both prophetic of his later condition and a little mean on Spheeris’ part.

There is also a heavy metal “deprogrammer” interviewed.  She really spouts off some insane things about the devil horns hand gesture and some other nonsense about metal.

A very young Ricky Rockman (Headbanger’s Ball) also talks about his Cathouse Club, and we get some performances by Faster Pussycat.  There is a definite sexist streak running through this film.  I don’t think it is a planned theme, but arises naturally from the interviews (reinforced with the rock and roll strip show part, long story).  But is it arising from a reality of the situation?  Yes, in the sense that the 1980s brought out alot of musicians that were very interested in sex.  In the interviews many of the male musicians (high percentage male for musician interviews, no big surprise in something about metal) giggle as they talk about sex, seemingly obsessed with it and making a big deal of their exploits with groupies.  That would probably not fly so well today, but times were different back then.  HIV creeps into the interviews at the margins, but not a great deal.

As a documentary it really captures the time of its creation.  Metal is not that way anymore, and it is had to explain to someone under 25 why all of this music was terribly important at the time.  It is also funny because many of the bands and musicians who claim to have no use for drugs turned out to be real big addicts (Dave Mustaine I’m lookin’ at you).  When they finally do get it onto DVD I think it is going to really miss the point.  The wikipedia page points to some manipulations and criticisms that participants made about Spheeris’ portrayal of them in the movie, but no one is ever happy about how they end up in a movie.

Millicent Marcus – Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism

An unpublished book review I had lying around. This is as good a place as any for it.

Princeton University Press, 1986. 443pp.

The prospect of understanding another culture by means of a media such as film is a difficult task for many ethnographers. Can we attempt to draw inferences about the anthropological lifeways of a specific group from their cultural productions of films? While this book is written from the perspective of a academic film critic: that rare creature which often draws out interpretative statements about the director and source material’s view of the culture in ways which often parallel Clifford Geertz’s well known “onion layer” approach to social events. As anthropologist Robert Lawless is always ready to admit, “When Geertz’s writing is good he is terrific, when he is bad he is terrible.” This statement is all too true when it comes to academic film criticism.

When the book was written in 1986 foreign film in the English speaking countries amounted to a very limited availability. To subtitle a film produced in Europe and put out on VHS (different kind of video cassette than the PAL format used in most European nations) was an expensive prospect. For those who later invested in laser disc players a few Criterion Collection transfers of the better known auteur directors such as Fellini and Kurosawa were available. The introduction of DVD technology provides a format that is at once universal and utilizes low cost production. Add to that the internet’s ability to make a large selection of film available in ways that were previously unknown, be it the mail based distribution of Netflix or the more recent additions of video on demand and bit torrent downloads.

A book like this would have been more use to the specialist with access to costly film prints as well as places to project them. This and other thoughtful books about foreign films that are centered on interpretations of films as cultural texts have much greater relevance when the films that are discussed are far easier to view.

Italian Neorealism is an interesting, if difficult to describe cohesively, movement of film making that had considerable popularity in Italy from the end of World War II up through the 1950s. Much of the country was in ruins following the death of Mussolini and the film studios were mostly unusable since the massive sound stages were being used to house refuges. The movement itself was based on the influence of realism from the French as well as the economic restraints which resulted in using streets as settings, keeping post-production visual effects to a minimum and the necessity of using low paid non-professional actors in supporting roles as well as random people off the street in lieu of extras to fill out crowds. The subject matters of the films were usually centered on the nation’s poor and working class. From this cluster of conditions arose what is usually considered and artistic movement in both aesthetic and narrative qualities.

Marcus does a good job of exploring the Italian Neorealist Movement by utilizing an interpretive framework based on a selection of 17 films, each of which is treated as a chapter, arranged into four 4 sections. There is a wealth of information in the introduction, where the author deals with the difficult task of presenting the various arguments about what Neorealism should be considered: association, school, historically based movement, catch phrase, guild, etc. The author wisely makes no statement that allies him with any of these academic diatribes about labels and approaches the project by defining within his individual film examples the relative qualities of the Neorealist descriptor.

The first section of the book, Neorealism Proper, deals with the historically significant period right after the war and into 1950. It uses primarily canonical works (such as Rossellini’s Open City, De Sica’s Bicycle Thief and Umberto D) to bring the reader into an understanding of the groundbreaking aspect of Neorealism as a force in film-making. Much of the critical analysis is based on how these films are the “text book” examples of Neorealist theories and the roles that their directors had in promoting the Neorealist aesthetic.

Part II deals with transition in Italian film, as Neorealism was an influence on the work of others but not in an all consuming allegiance to the method of the concrete Neorealism that find’s it purest expression in the films of Part I. Fellini’s La Strada is examined in this section, easily the Fellini film that is closest to any concept of realism. This section also features a discussion of the Visconti film Senso and the political injection that the film maker made into this retelling of the eponymous 19^th century novella by Camillo Boito. The analysis of this film is an examination of how the political realities of postwar Italy have a considerable impact in the presentation of source materials that predate the war, particularly with respect to socialist/communist ideologies of class.

This issue is developed in the next section, Return to Social Commentary, by looking into Petri’s psychological thriller about police corruption Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion. The corrupting influence of power is a central theme to the analysis presented in this chapter. This film is often considered giallo (and Italian genre of crime-based films that are often considered violent and sadistic, somewhat like the American Silence of the Lambs) and the inclusion in this collection may seem at odds to some film historians. This section also attempts to deal with Pasolini’s often considered self-indulgent works by looking at the disintegrated familial relationships in Teorema as an allegory of failed political movements in Italian society.

The last section, titled Fascism and War Reconsidered, deals with films that present their story in the pre-war era of Mussolini. This section deals with films that attempt to portray the moral issues that come from the nation’s fascist past. These are always difficult issues to deal with in films where one is harkening back to their nation’s own dark times with the hindsight to comment on the events which took place. The shifting morality of youth under fascism is the core of the Marcus chapter about Bertolucci’s The Conformist, as the main character turns from idealist liberal to fascist conspirator.

This book was very insightful to those who attempt to understand Italian Neorealism. The best thing I can say about the book (and I mean this as a deeply sincere compliment) is that after I read it I knew what Italian Neorealism was and how it would later influence and inform American films such as Easy Rider. Often books that deal with film theory, particularly of the historical kind which this one is, fall apart under the weight of conflicting arguments and generally vacuous blanket terms such as Neorealism. Though I had only seen 5 of the 17 films which are analyzed in this book previous to reading it, I made the effort to watch most of them before reading the chapters which dealt with them. This is essential in understanding this book.

Malin Wahlberg – Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology

A book review that should be up on the Anthropology Review Database soon.

This book deals with a difficult and interesting topic. How does philosophy, namely existentialist phenomenology, intersect with film studies? How should time be thought of in terms of documentary film? How should we characterize the manipulation and distortion of time in documentary film, a form which promises non-fictional representation of realities yet manipulates that reality in order to reconstruct it?

The main instrument the author uses to investigate the problems of time and film is the philosophical theme of phenomenology. This distinctively European philosophical tradition of perceptional constructions of experienced sensation at an individual level brings the problems of indexicality to the discussion. For the construction of documentary film, the construction of meaning is a main concern when one is assembling content from the appropriation and transformation from archival footage, photos and sound.

Part I of the book attempts to separate how time is quantified in the experienced world and in various approaches to film. This requires not only an understanding of how time is experienced in the small sequences of watching a film, but the larger ways in which film can become an experience of history, much like a text. To this end the author invokes Gilles Deleuze and his theories of cinema as a movement of images (pp. 25-28). The movement of images constructs an experience, through time, in which the film is experienced by an individual nervous system. This is the core approach of the book in regards to how documentary film should be analyzed.

The author also looks to the realism of Andre Bazin and the weight that he puts on the necessity of a good editor to “capture something of the ambience at the site of recording” (pp. 34). Wahlberg recognizes this important argument by Bazin that film must be edited in order to convey something of the spectacle that is to be witnessed in the footage. To this end the author looks at the experience of death in documentary film and how images of death are translated beyond the image to blur the presence of the viewer with the presence of the witness.

Part II of the book continues the phenomenological method by examining experimental uses of film, photography and sound in the construction documentary description. To this end the author looks at the role of abstraction through early science films which use images of microscopic realities, chemical reactions and time-lapsed photography of organic processes in order to visualize natural phenomenon outside of the experience of the standard issue human perception system (pp. 64-80).

In this section Wahlberg also investigates the use of the montage in the presentation of space and time. The presentation of urban space is a major concern, with some attention to how it is juxtaposed with rural space. The use of real-time in the presentation of events is also given some attention through the experiments by Andy Warhol in presenting physical acts such as sleeping and sex in their whole and unedited experience (pp. 89-90).

The importance of physical sites and the reconstruction of their historical meaning concludes the second section of the book. The author examines a film about Ellis Island (pp. 103-109) and a website about Chernobyl (pp. 119-123) and how these media presentations of historic photographs, “found” footage from amateur sources and narration content create a setting wherein the viewer feels both the pasts of these places and the vacuum that is part of their functional disuse today. It is the “trace” that the sign once carried which often collides with the current images to be found in these places as they exist today.

The last section of Part II examines the collision of various media forms through the example of Harun Farocki, a film essayist whose video installations have been featured in many art museums in Europe (pp. 124-132, 139-143). Farocki uses everything from high tech remote imagery from the 1991 Gulf War to prison surveillance systems to produce his work, which often incorporates the decontextualization of the source material as it is remixed into a new creation which does not contain the messages for which it was originally intended. The new message is often a comment on the source material, as well as a comment on the medium which produced the source material.

The reference to specific films requires some background in experimental cinema. This will require both explorations of film libraries and the internet to fill out the authors descriptions. This is not a problem confined to this book, indeed this is a situation which faces any book on film theory since the examples used for expansion or explication do not usually accompany the text.

The author has presented a very interesting book on existentialist phenomenology as it is applied to film theory. The prose is able to navigate this somewhat specialized territory of continental European philosophy with a strong voice and competence of the individual theorists involved. However, it is this strength which also makes the book very difficult for many readers. Wahlberg presupposes the foundational knowledge in the audience, and this makes the book difficult for those without considerable background in the particular philosophies being described. For that reason I would not recommend this book for undergraduates and would be hesitant to recommend graduate students approach this book except in the course of a larger study of philosophical issues of time, visual historiography and film studies. The true audience of this book lies in film scholars and documentary filmmakers who specialize in experimental approaches to historiography.

The Happening: What Happened? His Movies Used To Suck Far Less.

I saw The Happening yesterday. This was highly promoted as the first M. Night movie that was rated R. Well, it may have been rated R but it was written for a junior high drama club. I did not like this movie. The wife did not like it also. I usually like M. Night’s work. Even a movie that is kinda silly, like Signs, has good parts to it. This movie really missed the boat as far as I am concerned.

Let me list my grievances. I hated the acting. I know Wahlberg is better than this, Boogie Nights and I ‘Heart’ Huckabees were both proof of that. I think the problem is that I cannot believe him as a high school science teacher. His acting was quite wooden, but not nearly as bad as his co-star Zooey Deschanel was very robotic. I liked her in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. But in this movie it seemed like she was trying to do most of her acting with her eyes. Unfortunately, it seemed like her eyes conveyed her confusion of acting with her eyes more than anything else. I know this movie was intended to offer more suspense then obvious action, but it still missed the point with the acting. These characters were not really believable except for rare moments where they did not have to really act but just fill up expressionless screen time.

The plot was also pretty silly. It is based on a rather poor understanding of biology and botany. Now you might wonder why I am being so critical. I mean it is just a movie. Well, the problem is that it attempts to be scientific. Wahlberg’s character is a high school science teacher and there is an attempt to make the scientific method part of the movie. The problem is the situation the movie is based on is more intelligent design than science. In fact, it is very anti-science to a high degree. Maybe M. Night would deny this, if he would have taken some college science instead of the warm and fuzzy Mr. Wizard stuff we get in our public schools (not to say that public schools don’t teach good science, just that they only teach enough to make someone think they can be a scientist and believe their own pet theories).

For this movie being rated R, which is a big thing I guess, there is surprisingly little to it that deserves the R rating. It is not a hard R rating. Only a handful of curse words, maybe one f-bomb, and while the film had some violence it was not too pronounced. There was a rather silly lion cage scene, totally not the way that lions really eat their prey. The famed lawn mower scene showed next to nothing and a lot of violence was off screen. Did it deserve an R rating? Just barely, and just because the current social climate couldn’t handle it. It would have got a PG13 if it was released in 1994. There was zero sexual content for them to worry about. Really it was tame.

I didn’t really describe the plot, because I think the reveal of the plot is the only thing this movie has going for it. That is the M. Night touch – you have a basic concept of what the movie’s subject is, but it is by the revealing of information that the plot takes form. The ending was as bad as Signs, there is no great breakthrough, the events just stop. Now some would say that this is where M. Night stands out, because he creates twists and not conclusions. Well, dammit, there is no twist here and there is no conclusion either. The movie lacked both. You get to a scene, you find out the happenings have stopped and then you get a couple of minutes “3 months later” and that is your conclusion. Really bad. I don’t know if M. Night planned for this as an ending or if he got bored and decided to stop there. The problem is that M. Night could easily say that he planned this ending, and because he is M. Night we will praise him for what would be called bad writing for another screenwriter.

So, over all, no need to spend money in the theater, unless you have those asshole friends that ruin everything. You might want to see it on video, if you are an M. Night fan. The completest urge might draw you there. I do not believe it is a good movie. I do not believe that the acting was in the place where it was. The only character who was believable was John Leguizamo, but he is far beyond any other actor in this movie (except he got a supporting role). He should have been the lead, but hey he’s Hispanic and they get an extra 30 percent at the box office if they put a white boy up there to identify with. Leguizamo would have been far more believable as a science teacher and might have really acted like it was the end of the world.

Final verdict: Make Leguizamo the lead, write a better plot with some real science in it, lose the stuff with the mood ring and have the other actors really act like it might be the end of the world and the movie would have been alright.

“I can’t see the twist for all the plot holes. Act more with your eyes Zooey! Try to look confused!”

King Corn: Corn Syrup Made 1970s Independent Horror Films Possible

Saw this movie last night. Quite a good film. It’s up on netflix’s instant viewing section. The documentary uses a process approach, similar to Supersize Me. The filmmakers follow a project of growing an acre of maize to maturity, harvesting it and taking it to market. There is a side story about their friendship and how both their families are traced back to the small town of Green, Iowa.

There were some things the film lacked. I think a five minute history of maize would have been interesting; its origins in southern Mexico, the use by the Native Americans, etc. The movie makes a bit of mention about that but the film deals more with the modern industrial agriculture picture beginning with the US’s changes to farming subsidies in the 1970s. Seems we changed the farming subsidy program to create greater productivity, but in that we switched to a breed of corn that is essentially not fit for human consumption. So we feed it to cattle, which is very unhealthy, and we turn it into high fructose corn syrup. The main use for this corn syrup, outside fake blood for the first two Evil Dead movies and for Gene Simmons from Kiss to spit out during his bass solos, is as a sweetener for soda and practically everything.

This makes a point that most of our bodies are made of carbon that comes from this corn, a corn breed that is nutritionally worthless but which can produce a lot of mass per acre. There is some interesting stop motion animation that is used to carry certain points. The film was pretty good, but it seem a bit shallow. The most interesting educational comments came from Michael Pollan, but most of the movie looks more at the process of corn farming in the greater picture of economics. That, by proxy, leads on to the mechanics of the cattle industry and the corn syrup industry.

The movie manages to avoid making the corn farmers look like rednecks. That was a concern I had, as the filmmakers come from Boston and could easily fall into such a frame of reference. The film also maintains a level that is not really that terrible in terms of how it portrays the farmer and cattle rancher. It is not instantly anti-corporate, though there is some commentary on the corporate role of economic consolidation of the agricultural base. The money from the corn cash crop also comes from subsidies, as the end result of their experiment is a loss of about 20 dollars, though the government subsidy payments are all that produces the profit.

The film was worthwhile, but it also approaches the topic with a certain level of shallowness. They could have been more informative and only scratched the surface of the historical and economic issues that are involved in the production of this corn. The agenda of the film seems to be a complaint about the use/abuse of corn as high fructose corn syrup. This is something that needed to be said, but much more could have been said. It was well edited and the footage has some interesting camera work involved.

A Response to A&E Don’t Know @%@# About Cannibalism

A comment to the post: “Your comments don’t provide a lot of evidence – just subjective rubbishing of a theory.

Is there any evidence of someone from a culture believing in cannibalism and talking to camera and explaining why?

There is evidence that Europeans were only allowed by the Catholic church to enslave those ‘found’ to be cannibals so the ‘evidence’ materialised. But all of it fiction.

These comments from a reviewer on the Amazon website of Arens book expresses it pretty succinctly:

“No group ever claims that THEY eat people. It’s always the hated enemy and/ or those slated for destruction. Arens notes how Columbus considered the natives of Hispanola to be the most docile and harmless people on Earth who could be enslaved easily. The Spanish Crown allowed the enslavement of the natives, but only those who ate human flesh. Of course like most peoples, the “Caribs” got rather insolent when Columbus started killing them and stealing their land and PRESTO! -the once peaceful, docile natives turned into vicious cannibals instantly! This gave Columbus and his successors a convenient excuse to rob, rape, murder, and enslave the natives, who became more uppity… This cycle was quite agreeable to those who stood to make money from genocide.

If man-eating was socially acceptable, one would think someone could have produced a photograph or videotape since the man-eaters would not have gone to any lengths to hide something they weren’t ashamed of. But no such evidence exists for the same reason there’s no hard evidence for fire-breathing dragons, one-eyed giants, giant three-headed dogs, unicorns or other creatures from ancient bestiaries. They only exist in overheated imaginations.

The reason this book caused such a ruckus when it was released, is not just the fact that it made anthropologists look as disreputable as phrenologists: charlatans, shysters and hucksters practicing a crank pseudo-science. Among the highly educated, it’s fashionable to ridicule the bumpkins and yokels for being gullible enough to buy into astrology, creationism and other forms of nonsense. But as W. Arens proved with “The Man-Eating Myth”, the intelligencia is just as easily fooled as what Mencken called “the booboise” and that in many cases, “PhD” means “piled high and deep”. “

If you could substantiate your critic of Arens with some evidence it might help.“

Thank you for your comments to the blog. I unfortunately have to disagree with your point. There are groups that admit to having eaten people: The Asmat, some people in Fiji, etc. They admit to it and it is culturally sanctioned (though not anymore due to national concerns). The problem with a film of the act is that any anthropologist who might film such an activity (recently considering the nature of the technology) would never release such a film if they ever made one. Filming and showing such an act would bring what amounts to a government invasion to the people. The influence of missionaries also result in the practice disappearing. My main complaints were about the way that culturally sanctioned cannibalism (which is oddly not really questioned) is portrayed as a form of deviancy. As for Arens, I could argue all day but it will not change your mind. I know of two pictures, but I cannot give you links from the top of my head: one was a photo by Martin and Osa Johnson that was taken in Africa of some human body parts hanging on a line. The other was a photo among the Asmat that was published in a National Geographic anthology.

Arens attack on anthropology is fine, that made him his name and career. Anthropologists should be critical when dealing with historical sources. My issue comes more from a matter that is embedded in Arens arguement. By proposing the Man-Eating Myth as an Othering/Colonializing impulse he is constructing cannibalism as a universal dysfunction. He does not want to recognize that culturally sanctioned cannibalism might be relative, he sees cannibalism as universally horrible and then claims that cannibalism doesn’t exist. The careful little shifting of the burden of proof onto Anthropologists to prove that people did perform socially accepted cannibalism takes all accounts as false, and then a photographic evidence is required. No anthropologist is going to record an act that will get people arrested if they can help it.

The amazon book review and Arens book don’t really provide evidence, except where it furthers his general argument. The blog was more of a critique about the A&E documentary. That being said I do believe that Arens is coming from a very important point of view. I do believe that alot of the early explorer and missionary accounts of cannibalism are false, and maybe some anthropologists are wrong too. The problem is that when there is evidence for cannibalism he will not accept it or will put forth an argument that will somehow remove it from any culturally sanctioned practice. His theory is a fairytale, it is like a creationist argument that doesn’t really address evolution but uses any weaknesses in the literature as representations of the subject. There is evidence, but there is no way to keep Arens and his following from rejecting it on philosophical grounds. As for the film footage, early film makers in the remote areas of Melanesia usually stayed with the missionaries, using their facilities to develop their film. There are not going to be too many cannibals around the missionaries. With all due respect, Arens will never admit that cannibalism is socially sanctioned even if he sees it first hand. One of the first thing governments or missionaries do is to try and suppress cannibalism, so any people under this colonialism would have denied their practice. Arens fails to recognize that it is possible that the colonializing influence might have been not only to see cannibalism in places where it didn’t exist, but to create such a total power that we will not even recognize it in the places where it did exist.