Wow, so much here, thanks everyone. Alice, yes, good point to bear in mind -- the kneeling scene on the beach is tightly choreographed, who directed it anyway, Busby Berkeley? Things like that have to be rehearsed. "Guy walks into a room" has to be rehearsed, but a ballet with 42 people has to be
rehearsed.
AlicetheKurious wrote:Some people have speculated that the 21 were so oddly calm because they'd rehearsed several times. In fact, when I saw the video, I thought a likely scenario was that the men, after being captured by religious fanatics, or so they thought, found themselves face-to-face with their real captors, who didn't fit at all their image of Islamist nuts. Don't forget that all 21 were from villages in Minya, in Upper Egypt, which for decades was a hotbed of Islamist thugs, including the Jama'a Islameya and the Salafeya Jihadeya, who freely terrorized and bullied the residents, especially under the Morsi regime, where they openly swaggered around wielding machine guns and other weapons. (As I wrote this, I flashed to an image of Zionist settlers armed with machine guns, walking through a Palestinian town). In other words, they are very, very familiar with the type.
Instead, and here I'm speculating, they found themselves brought before a well-dressed, polite khawaga, a foreign gentleman, who assured them that they would be safe, but that they should just play along for a film, after which they would be paid and released. All 21 are desperately poor. They were willing to risk their lives, to smuggle themselves to Libya despite the travel ban and the knowledge that Egyptians, and especially Egyptian Christians, are being targeted by ISIS there. One of them, when a family member begged him not to go, answered: "I'm dead anyway." They didn't seem drugged to me. They seemed to be playing along, not totally comfortable with it, but game. Intimidated rather than terrified.
A well-known professional cinematographer was interviewed yesterday on tv, and he analyzed the video practically frame by frame (except for the gory final scene). He pointed out that recording voices at the beach, with the wind and sound of the waves, is technically very challenging, and that the soundtrack had been filtered and edited professionally. Similarly, several cameras had been used, yet the color was precisely calibrated to be identical in the film taken by all three. The cameras used were extremely high end. The overall technical quality was very meticulous and professional. He pointed out that Libya, of all the Arab countries, is the least advanced technically when it comes to film, photography and cinema production.
The cinematographer said that he'd also examined the video of the Jordanian pilot, and that although it was also clearly done by professionals, this one was of even higher quality, and that there was no doubt whatsoever that it was made by experienced and professional movie-makers. He also said that this guy, from the Sotloff video in Syria,
Image
is the same as this guy, from this latest video from Libya:
Image
And yes, he is wearing eyebrow makeup.
Your speculative scenario with the
khawaga is certainly plausible. And the cinematographer's analysis tells a lot. Keeping in mind everything Alice, our resident Egyptian who also happens to be one of our best writers, and Nordic, our very own Hollywood film/video professional who can explain technical issues, and others have pointed out, I'm drawn back to the meetings between Karl Rove and entertainment industry people:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/us/nation-challenged-entertainment-industry-hollywood-discusses-role-war-effort.html
Bush To Ask Hollywood To Make War Propaganda FilmsBy Nicholas Wapshott in New York
11-11-1
HOLLYWOOD is getting its call-up papers. The recruiting sergeant, in the person of President Bush's special adviser Karl Rove, arrives in Los Angeles tomorrow to meet the film industry's most important studio chiefs.
The agenda is simple: how can Hollywood help to swing the American people and the world's public behind the war on terrorism? Films are the most popular American export and the President is keen to ensure that Hollywood plays its part in purging the world of terrorists. Those who have the final say over films will agree tomorrow to bolster patriotism on the screen and to encourage actors and actresses to go on the road to entertain troops.
Mr Rove asked Sherry Lansing, the Paramount Pictures studio chief and one of the most influential women in Hollywood, to round up other film and television studio heads for this weekend's meeting. Forty senior Hollywood executives, the men and women who decide which films the studios make, will get together with White House representatives over brunch at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.
Jack Valenti, of the Motion Picture Association, who with Jonathan Dolgen, the head of Viacom, and Ms Lansing is helping to organise the event, described those invited as "a high-powered crowd, top people from the top companies". Among those who have accepted are Sumner Redstone of Viacom and Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of The News Corporation, parent company of The Times.
The invitation reads: "The anticipated outcome of the meeting would be an initial plan encompassing several substantive ways we can lend support to our nation's cause. We assure you that this will be a private, confidential, working meeting of the most senior administration officials and entertainment industry principals only.
No press or elected officials will be present."
The gathering spans the political divide. Ms Lansing and Mr Dolgen are prominent liberals but another main organiser is Gerald Parsky, who ran President Bush's presidential campaign in California.
Tomorrow's meeting will build on the sentiments expressed in a similar forum in Hollywood last month, which concluded that the film industry needed guidance from Washington about how to help.
Last month's meeting was attended by actors and writers as well as Hollywood executives. Tomorrow's goes right to the top, bringing together a group of movie moguls who can ensure that what is agreed will reach the screens.
The film-makers are careful not to use the word propaganda when talking about what may be expected of them, although the wording on the invitation amounts to the same thing. It praises Hollywood's ability "to communicate, educate and inspire" and asks how these talents can best be used to combat terrorism.
[more at link]
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/us/na ... ffort.html
Bear with me, it goes further; has this been raised here before?:
http://lubbockonline.com/stories/110901/upd_075-4804.shtml
As Hollywood casts about for a war role, virtual reality is star
Published: Friday, November 09, 2001
JOHN LIPPMAN
The Wall Street Journal
LOS ANGELES (The Wall Street Journal) — In Bosnia, cable-news correspondent Jackie Banberry has just completed an interview in which Balkan warlord Dragon Vatroslav issued threats against American troops. As she prepares to tape a lead-in, machine-gun fire is heard off camera.
"What is that?" a panicked Ms. Banberry shouts, seconds before her satellite link cuts abruptly to a test pattern.
This isn't a new international crisis. It's part of an interactive training exercise created for the Pentagon that had its origins in a project developed at Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures. Ms. Banberry and Mr. Vatroslav are fictional characters, the machine gun is a sound-effect, and the whole exercise is an effort by Hollywood to give the military a hand.
This weekend in Los Angeles, about 40 top Hollywood executives will meet with President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, to discuss what roles Hollywood might play in the war on terrorism. The meeting probably will focus on public-service announcements, movie-theater shorts and other bits of entertainment that Hollywood can produce to support the war. Among the expected attendees are Walt Disney Co. President Robert Iger and DreamWorks SKG partner Jeffrey Katzenberg.
As the Paramount project demonstrates, some pockets of Hollywood are already doing something for the military. A few weeks ago, more than a dozen screenwriters, including John Milius, co-writer of "Apocalypse Now," and Steven De Souza, who wrote two "Die Hard" movies, got together to brainstorm about military scenarios under the auspices of the Institute for Creative Technologies. The institute, based in Marina Del Rey, Calif., was launched in 1999 with a $45 million contract from the Army to enlist the help of the entertainment industry and computer scientists in developing "immersive simulation" technologies.
The Paramount training exercise, written and produced by veterans of shows including "Star Trek" and "Columbo," tries to simulate the sights, sounds and pressures of an intelligence command post during an international crisis. It has been used at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington to test the strategic-thinking skills of students there — mainly midcareer military officers and some government civilians headed for senior positions.
The exercise was the brainchild of Richard Lindheim, a Paramount TV executive who got interested in exploring ways the military and entertainment industries might work together in the field of information technology. In 1997, Mr. Lindheim and director Alex Singer developed what they termed a StoryDrive Engine, which would combine scripts, computer graphics and audio-visual material. Studios don't normally bid for government contracts, but Mr. Lindheim hoped that developing such a tool for the military could lead to applications in the then-nascent area of interactive entertainment.
Mr. Singer, a director of "Star Trek" episodes, pitched Paramount's idea to the Pentagon by arguing that simulation exercises involving three-dimensional characters with complex histories and personalities could prepare trainees for an actual crisis. Paramount would write and produce fake versions of the flood of information — classified intelligence reports, State Department cables, military analysis and live cable-news coverage — that comes at real national-security teams.
The Paramount proposal received a friendly reception from the Department of Defense. Paramount officials got a tour of military simulation facilities around the country. Defense officials made several trips to Paramount's studios in 1997 to immerse themselves in how movies and TV shows are created.
The Pentagon agreed to fund the StoryDrive Engine project at Paramount for about $800,000, and now owns the system. Writers and producers were hired. Working alongside people designing the "Star Trek" Web site in an office on the Paramount lot, Mr. Singer's team spent 18 months in 1998 and 1999 writing and producing.
The chief story writer was Larry Tuch, who has written episodes of "Columbo" and was a "clue writer" on the video game "Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego?" He sketched out various regional crisis scenarios that would take place in 2008: a drought in Mexico that triggers a huge influx of Mexicans into the U.S. Southwest; a Persian Gulf crisis involving the Sixth Fleet; car bombings at U.S. embassies in Tokyo and Russia; and rising tensions between Russia and NATO.
Mr. Tuch crafted the roles played by a dozen characters, ranging from United States senators to fictional heads of state such as "Sham Kani," the president of Iran, and Mexican president "Jose Cantu." Balkan characters like Dragon Vatroslav — described as a former paramilitary commander connected to ethnic-cleansing incidents — are being added to a successor version of the project. Mr. Tuch's phony intelligence reports detailed the fictional histories of the various characters; his "sitreps" — situational reports — outlined the unfolding crisis.
For the all-news channel, Paramount produced video footage of a fictional network called ZNN and hired actors to play correspondents and anchors.
Among those cast was David Brancaccio, host of the public-radio business show "Marketplace," who says he signed a nondisclosure agreement about his work for the project. The ZNN correspondents were then filmed by Mr. Singer in front of a "blue screen" — a blank background that allows producers to later place correspondents digitally in other locales, such as the White House lawn or a war zone. In total, Mr. Tuch says, they produced a novel-length scenario and shot video equivalent to a two-hour movie.
The materials were shipped off on laser discs to the National Defense University, where they became part of the "final flurry," the strategic-thinking exercise given to graduating students. For the weeklong exercise, students are set up in a room that resembles an NSC situation room with banks of monitors and computer screens and overhead TV sets showing the ZNN news footage. As the scripted information about the crisis flows in, the students access the background materials on their laptops, confer with each other, and then write up a strategic response for the president. An instructor in another room can alter the scenarios in the StoryDrive Engine, tailoring the situation presented to the students depending on their answers.
Some of the scenarios have turned out to be prescient. "We had a scenario that involves a homeland biological attack two years ago," says Alan Whittaker, a professor of political science at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, also part of the National Defense University. Prof. Whittaker, who advised Mr. Tuch, administers the exercise to his students.
More than 3,000 students have passed through the final flurry exercise produced by Paramount, many of them in top intelligence and military roles today. Since last year, the university has been producing more of the SDE material itself, using its own staff to write the scenarios and act in the mock video segments. A spokesman for Paramount said the studio wouldn't talk about its involvement in the StoryDrive Engine project.
People associated with the project have found new careers working on its next generation and on other simulation technology at the Institute for Creative Technologies, now headed by Mr. Lindheim. With about 100 employees, the ICT is trying to develop artificial-intelligence and virtual-reality technology. In one project, soldiers would interact in "virtual" situations with computer-generated characters and events on a screen.
These are just the publicly-known efforts to "swing the American people and the world's public," nothing new, of course. I'll add this piece, it's surface stuff, but I didn't know they hired a fucking
magician:
Le Monde diplomatique
English edition
Scheherazade in the White House
How George Bush’s wartime administration used a magician, Hollywood designers and Karl Rove telling 1,001 stories to sell the invasion of Iraq.
by Christian Salmon
A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’ ” (1).
[...snip]
The remarks, which were probably made by Karl Rove a few months before the Iraq war, are not just cynical and Machiavellian. They sound like they come from the theatre rather than from an office in the White House. Not content with renewing the ancient problems discussed in cabinet offices, pitting idealists against pragmatists, moralists against realists, pacifists against warmongers or, in 2002, defenders of international law against supporters of the use of force, they display a new concept of the relationship between politics and reality. The leaders of the world’s superpower were not just moving away from realpolitik but also from realism to become creators of their own reality, the masters of appearance, demanding a realpolitik of fiction.
Disney to the rescue
The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 provided a spectacular illustration of the White House’s desire to create its own reality. Pentagon departments, keen not to repeat the mistakes of the first Gulf war in 1991, paid particular attention to their communications strategy. As well as 500 embedded journalists integrated into sections of the armed services, great attention was paid to the design of the press room at US forces headquarters in Qatar: for a million dollars, a storage hangar was transformed into an ultramodern television studio with stage, plasma screens and all the electronic equipment needed to produce videos, geographic maps and diagrams for real time combat.
A scene in which the US army spokesman, General Tommy Franks, addressed journalists cost $200,000 and was produced by a designer who had worked for Disney, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the television programme Good Morning America. In 2001 the White House had put him in charge of creating background designs for presidential speeches – unsurprising to those aware of the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood.
More surprising was the Pentagon decision to recruit David Blaine for interior design; he is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and for conjuring tricks such as levitating or being shut in a cage without food. Blaine claimed in a book in 2002 that he was the successor to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century magician who agreed to go to Algeria at the French government’s request to help it quell an uprising by showing that his magic was better than that of the rebels (3). It is not known whether that is what the Pentagon expected from Blaine but it seems that use was made of his illusionist talents for special effects.
Scott Sforza, a former ABC TV producer who worked within the Republican propaganda machine, created many backgrounds against which Bush made important statements during his terms of office. On 1 May 2003 he stage-managed the presidential speech on the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier before a sign reading “Mission accomplished: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
The show didn’t end there. Bush landed aboard the carrier in a fighter plane renamed Navy One; on it was written “George Bush, Commander-in-Chief”. He was seen leaving the cockpit dressed in a flight suit, his helmet under his arm as if he were returning from war in a remake of Top Gun (the film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is a familiar face in Hollywood-Pentagon operations; he made a reality TV show, Profiles from the Front Line, on the war in Afghanistan).
The former New York Times theatre critic, Frank Rich, described the television coverage of this event and said it was fantastic – like theatre. David Broder of The Washington Post was captivated by what he called Bush’s physical posture (4). Sforza had to stage the scene carefully so that the city of San Diego, about 60km away, was not seen on the horizon when the carrier was supposed to be out in open sea in the combat zone.
But the staging was never as explicit as on 15 August 2002 when Bush solemnly spoke of national security in front of Mount Rushmore with its sculptures of the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. During his speech the cameras were placed at an angle that allowed Bush to be filmed in profile, his face superimposed on to those of his predecessors.
The image becomes the story
For Bush’s speech on the first anniversary of 9/11, in which he prepared US public opinion for the Iraq invasion by glorifying the “great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve”, Sforza rented three barges to take the team to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he had lit from below. He chose the camera angles so that the statue appeared in the background during the speech. Frank Rich, commenting on this, quoted Michael Deaver, who stage-managed Ronald Reagan’s declaration of candidacy speech in 1980 with the Statue of Liberty in the background. According to Deaver, people understood that what was around the speaker’s head was as important as the head itself (5).
What is around the head turns an image into a legend: “Mission accomplished”, the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty – over time the image becomes the story. But the event must resonate with the viewer, must make two moments interact: what is represented in the image and the actual moment it is seen. This resonance produces the desired emotion. For Americans in 2002 nothing could have had a greater emotional impact than a speech on war on the first anniversary of 9/11. The country had just come back from summer holidays and was ready to concentrate on important matters.
According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control” (6). Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’ attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.
As Chernus explains, Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier – at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.” Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on out there in the world. Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement” (7). This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.”
All of this make me pretty certain that all of these techniques are secretly being exploited, and that a sufficient pool exists of technicians willing to do the work.
But you know what now makes me
completely certain that ISIS is BSBS?
Seriously? Those are ISIS dudes? No...c'mon...yer shittin' me. That's gotta be from a TV comedy show, that's
comedy gold.
