Paul Sweezys 1. lov om udenlandske investeringer

Hver gang jeg ser Christoffer Guldbrandsens film Tyveriet af Afrika synger for min erindring fra for virkelig lang tid siden denne bemærkning: ”… indtægterne fra udenlandske investeringer over en hvilken som helst signifikant periode vil overstige kapitaludgifterne med 70 procent.” Udsagnet er økonomen Paul Sweezys (1910-2004). Det stammer fra en forelæsning, han gav i juli 1967 på Round House i Chalk Farm, London under en 14 dages tværvidenskabelig konference arrangeret af Institute of Phenomenological Studies, London med titlen Dialectis of Liberation. Det lille afsnit af forelæsningen, hvori bemærkningen faldt, ser sådan ud:

”… Blomstringsperioden for den britiske imperialisme og dens udenlandske investeringer var naturligvis det halve århundrede før Første Verdenskrig. I perioden 1870-1913 investerede England ifølge de almindeligt accepterede tal et nettobeløb på 2,4 milliarder pund. Det vil sige, at de engelske investeringer i udlandet overgik de udenlandske investeringer i England med 2,4 milliarder pund. Ved første blik ser det ud som om England af sine ressourcer gjorde meget betragtelige summer tilgængelige for resten af verden. Der var faktisk tale om en ret betragtelig sum, på den tid svarende til 12 milliarder dollars, hvor dollarens købekraft mindst var det dobbelte af hvad den er i dag (altså i 1967). Således svarede de engelske nettoinvesteringer i det halve århundrede før Første Verdenskrig til omkring 25 milliarder dollars, efter deres nugældende værdi (1967). Det er temmelig  store investeringer efter en hvilken som helst målestok, dengang som nu. Men udbyttet er selvfølgelig den anden side af denne mønt – indtjeningen på investeringerne. Og i den samme periode, 1873-1913, beløb den engelske nettofortjeneste på udenlandske investeringer sig til 4,1 milliard pund. Så når man sammenligher, ser man at beløbene på indtægtssiden oversteg udgifterne til investeringer med rundt regnet 70 procent. Det var denne periodes virkelige strøm af rigdom. Der blev givet ud med denhøjre hånd og taget tilbage med den venstre, og den venstre hånd tog 70 procent mere tilbage end den højre gav ud. Hvem hjalp hvem? Det er åbenbart, at resten af verden, udviklet eller underudviklet ydede sit til Storbritannien gennem denne investeringsmekanisme.

Eller tag de amerikanske erfaringer efter Anden Verdenskrig. Jeg tager kun de amerikanske koncerners direkte investeringer i udlandet i betragtning, de er langt  den vigtigste type af udenlandske investeringer i vore dage (1967). Tallene, der kan sammenlignes med dem, jeg netop har anført for Englands vekommende, er for perioden 1950-63 følgende: nettooverførsel af kapital fra USA 17,4 milliarder dollars; overførsel af kapital til USA – 29,4 milliarder dollars. Atter viser det sig, at der kom næsten nøjagtigt 70 procent mere tilbage end der blev givet ud.

Jeg føler mig fristet til at ophøje dette til Sweezys første lov for udenlandske investeringer: at indtægterne fra udenlandske investeringer over en hvilken som helst signifikant periode vil overstige kapitaludgifterne med 70 procent. Og dette baserer jeg på en god videnskabelig metode; jeg har mindst to tilfælde! Jeg venter nu på mine efterfølgere, som kan afprøve og sandsynliggøre denne lov ved hver nyt tilfælde, der dukker op. Vi må atter spørge hvem der har brugt hvis rigdom? Og svaret er ikke til at tage fejl af.” 

Nu her sent på året 2012 har Christoffer Guldbrandsen med Tyveriet af Afrika vist nok foretaget en afprøvning, og måske vil loven vise sig at fungere stadigvæk. I hvert fald er svaret på hvem, der har brugt hvis rigdom heller ikke denne gang til at tage fejl af.

Litt.: Paul Sweezy: Kapitalismens fremtid i David Cooper, ed.: Dialectics of Liberation, Penguin Books Ltd., 1968. Dansk oversættelse: Frigørelsens dialektik, Rhodos 1969.

South African Apartheid Documentary Exhibition

The Treason Trial 1956-61 (photo), The Sharpville Massacre 1960, the Soweto Uprising 1976… it is all in its immense brutality very well documented in ICP (International Center of Photography) in New York – runs until January 6 2013 – there are photos from the lives of the white oppressors and the black oppressed in Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, the title of the exhibition that “includes nearly 500 photographs, films, books, magazines, newspapers, and assorted archival documents and covers more than 60 years of powerful photographic and visual production that forms part of the historical record of South Africa.”

Nelson Mandela in a short interview with BBC in 1960, the last one before he was imprisoned for 27 years (1963-1990), we all know about it and have seen it before and yet it brings tears to the eyes to watch him walking hand in hand with Winnie after the release. There are many film and tv clips in this amazing exhibition, where – of course – the classic “Come Back Africa” by Lionel Rogosin (1959) is also to be seen, with wonderful Miriam Makeba. Martin Scorcese once said that it is “a film of terrible beauty”.

However, what the exhibition first of all does is what is stated on the site: (it..) proposes a complex understanding of photography and the aesthetic power of the documentary form and honors the exceptional achievement of South African photographers.

http://www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/apartheid

http://comebackafrica.com/

Picasso in New York

118 black and white works by Picasso at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition runs until January 23 and is highly recommended. As the curators put it on the site of Guggenheim: the first exhibition to explore the remarkable use of black and white throughout the Spanish artist’s prolific career. Claiming that color weakens, Pablo Picasso purged it from his work in order to highlight the formal structure and autonomy of form inherent in his art. His repeated minimal palette correlates to his obsessive interest in line and form, drawing, and monochromatic and tonal values, while developing a complex language of pictorial and sculptural signs…

In the basement cinema hall of the building of Frank Lloyd Wright the classic art documentary of Henri-Georges Clouzot, ”Le Mystère de Picasso”, is shown, filmed in the 1950’es with the energetic Picasso in shorts painting on glass. The American distributor Milestone Films describes the film precisely as such:

In 1955, Clouzot joined forces with his friend Picasso to make an entirely new kind of art film — a film that could capture the moment and the mystery of creativity. Together, they devised an innovative technique — the filmmaker placed his camera behind a semi-transparent surface on which the artist drew with special inks that bled through. Clouzot thus captured a perfect reverse image of Picasso’s brushstrokes and the motion picture screen itself becomes the artist’s canvas. Here, the master creates, and sometimes obliterates, 20 works (most of them, in fact, destroyed after the shoot), ranging from playful black-and-white sketches to Cinemascope color murals — artworks which evolve in minutes through the magic of stop-motion animation. Unavailable for more than a decade, The Mystery of Picasso is exhilarating, mesmerizing, enchanting and unforgettable. It is simply one of the greatest documentaries on art ever made. The French government agreed — in 1984 it declared the film a national treasure. Indeed a classic in the art documentary genre.

France, 1956, 78 mins.

http://www.guggenheim.org/

Link to: http://cdn.shopify.com

DFP 10 Years Celebration

DFP stands for Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and Fund and has existed for 10 years which is the reason that realscreen, the fine trade magazine that calls itself ”the best in non-fiction”, brings an interview with the director Cara Mertes (photo) in its daily newsletter.

There are far too few international funds for documentary support, there should be more as the importance of the public broadcasters in connection with creative documentaries is strongly decreasing, so it is important to know about the activitites and ambition of the Sundance DFP. Here is what Cara Mertes says:

“[We’ve] also developed a third area that I call international creative partnerships, and they’re really about increasing resources for documentary filmmakers around the world.” Those partnerships include the Skoll Foundation on Stories of Change, which brings social entrepreneurs and storytellers together at the Sundance Film Festival and the Skoll World Forum; the Channel 4/Britdoc Foundation partnership, which created the Good Pitch in North America, where NGOs, philanthropic, corporate and individual investors are brought together to support films; the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture to support Arab documentaries; and CNEX, a Beijing-based not-for-profit, to run labs and design funding protocols.”

… “DFP has supported films and filmmakers from around the world, through the Sundance Documentary Funds, which grant between US$1 million and $2 million per year in development, production and post-production categories; creative documentary labs; Sundance Creative Producers Summit, and more”. Titles include Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home, Mahmoud al Massad’s Recycle, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts and U.S. films The Island President, directed by Jon Shenk, and Detropia from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, along with Laura Poitras’s My Country, My Country and The Oath.

Read more: http://realscreen.com/2012/12/07/institutional-thinking-sundance-documentary-film-program-wraps-10th-year/#ixzz2EPxDkBxp

Jay Bulger: Beware of Mr. Baker

For one who was around 20 in the short lifetime of Cream – 1966-68 – with ”White Room”, ”where the shadows run for themselves”, as one of their songs that still gives you the chills when you hear it, and you do so in this film, with old man Ginger Baker in a chair smoking constantly talking about his incredible career as drummer and constant traveller in Life… Yes, this is pure shocking pleasure that stays untouched for the whole duration of a documentary that puts its focus on a man, who socially with other people was quite an asshole and according to colleagues and critics the best rock drummer ever.

Normally you say that you must have some kind of empathy for a main character in a film. It is difficult with Ginger Baker but his Life and his no bullshit attitude to a film about himself is second to none. Are you a tragic hero, the director asks him, the answer is ”go on with the interview, stop being an intellectual dickhead”. And he does, the director, and gets it (all?) into the film: the childhood, the early marriage and his first child, his wives, his inspiration from other drummers, mostly from the jazz scene (he was more a jazz drummer than a rock drummer, several colleagues say), his journey around the globe with constant controversies and break-ups.

The material is unique, archive from concerts, from previous televison reports, music videos before they were called that, so much has been recorded including his travel to Africa, the origin of drumming, where he set up a studio, performed with Fela Kuti, afrobeat musician, and started to have interest in horses and polo playing. It is a rich film, full of details, and where there is no archive and we need to leave the old man in his armchair down in South Africa on his ranch, fine animation sequences come in and do the job – like when Baker and Jack Bruce shout at each other with the third Cream member, Eric Clapton, in the background, suffering when the two were fighting. Sorry Eric, says Bruce, who looks like a poor forgotten bird in the film, referring to the times when Clapton had a breakdown because of the tension between the others. Clapton, by the way, is as always pleasant and precise in his characteristic of Baker, as he was with George Harrison in Scorcese’s film.

Baker is a man who needs oxygen to breathe, but in his 70’es still makes his gigs once in a while, and who needs morphine to ease the pain after a hard life as a junkie, and who at any time would prefer his drums to anything or anyone else and whose best friends were his drumming idols – among them Max Roach, who said ”Ginger plays like a Nigger”. Talking about this is the only time Baker shows any emphatic emotions in a film that is basically chronological, very much based on interviews, maybe too many, but with a fine sense of Time as Baker says of himself. 

USA, 92 mins., 2012

http://bewareofmrbaker.com/

Oscar Shortlisted Documentaries

… were announced three days ago. 15 films that later will be taken down to 5 nominations that are made by January 10. 126 films qualified to be considered. Have chosen to take text clips from Variety to mention the titles in question plus inform about the new selection process implemented by governor, as he is called, Michael Moore.

The films: Alison Klayman’S “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” Lee Hirsch’s “Bully,” Jeff Orlowski’s “Chasing Ice,” Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s “Detropia”, Rory Kennedy’s “Ethel”, Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s “5 Broken Cameras” (photo), Dror Moreh’s “The Gatekeepers,” Eugene Jarecki’s “The House I Live In,” David France’s “How To Survive a Plague”, Bart Layton’s “The Imposter”, Kirby Dick’s “The Invisible War,” Alex Gibney’s “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” Malik Bendjelloul’s “Searching for Sugar Man,” Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi’s “This Is Not a Film” and Peter Nicks’ “The Waiting Room”.

Variety: ”This year’s process, which involved narrowing a record 126 official submissions to the 15 semifinalists, came with controversy over rules changes that solved some problems while creating others.

Most notably, instead of using committees, each person in the 160-member documentary branch (of the Academy) weighed in on the selections, a method that was theoretically more fair and more likely to keep worthy selections from being ignored, but inevitably tested voters’ abilities to see every project in consideration.

Academy governor Michael Moore, who helped instigate the changes, later expressed public regret over the mountain of entries. The Academy later revealed that each branch member was assigned 10 movies that they were to guarantee watching, to make sure every film project had some audience.”

“On Twitter following the announcement, Moore called today’s shortlisted docs “a strong and incredible group of films”.”

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118063018/

Nikolaus Geyerhalter at DocAlliance

Pleased to recommend a new offer from the vod DocAlliance, this time related to Austrian documentarian Geyerhalter. Here is a slightly edited version of the promotion text from the vod site:

We offer a selection of the best films by Geyerhalter in the period December 7-9, for a small fee. Scenes from the life of animals in mass-production shown in Our Daily Bread (photo) represents one of the most powerful visual depictions of the food-processing industry. The director alternates between sequences of shots of machines in operation with images of workers during breaks captured alone and without words which would, in any case, be drowned in the never-ending humming of the machines. All is clean, hygienic and synchronized, including the slaughters of mass-produced animals.

An apparent similarity with the impersonal mass-production processes can be found in Abendland. An observation of the European continent at night shows crowds of people partying, protesting as well as impersonal crews of workers at conveyor belts, for example burning coffins in a crematorium. Besides, scenes of employees of a help line, nurses and medical staff are also observed through absolutely unbiased, cold and distant lens. The impartiality and detachment of the camera constantly merge in CCTV supervision or permanent police controls.

In 7915 km, Nikolaus Geyrhalter follows the route of the Dakar Rally race. He shows the ordinary world of ordinary people living along the route of the race at the moments when the track is free of vehicles. The substantially different characters portrayed in this documentary share their experience with the competitors who are passing through. Their experience is mainly reduced to the roar of motors and whirling clouds of dust. The film presents variations on the idea of the West speeding through countries which would prefer the world to slow down and pay attention to the problems their inhabitants have to cope with.

http://dafilms.com/

Nahed Awwad: Gaza Calling

Samer lives in Ramallah, his mother is Safa, who lives with his father and siblings in Gaza. Mustafa lives in Gaza, his mother, Hekmat, and his sisters live in Ramallah. The distance between Gaza and Ramallah is around one hour’s drive. Samer and Mustafa are separated from their families, they can not meet them. They communicate via cell phones and video clips shot here and there. They live in occupied territories and the occupier does everything to make their lives difficult. To say the least.

It is a very important film that Nahed Awwad has made. It is both informative and emotional. It visualises what we seldom hear about – how it is to live under these apartheid conditions. It goes, to use a stupid cliché, behind the scenes of thousands of news clips from Palestine and Israel. In that respect it unfolds a human perspective on the background of the humiliating living conditions, which are given to the Palestinians by the Israelis.

Awwad also uses the film medium to convey the buraucratic absurdity of communication between the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis, whenever the Palestinians apply for an id to travel or stay or… Accompanied by light bossanova music a brilliant montage takes us (and the letters/applications) from the offices of the Authority to the Israeli administration offices that happen to be placed in a settlement! Just around the corner. (The film originally carried the working title, ”The Mail”).

The film also touches upon the relationship between Palestinians from Gaza and from the West Bank. Hekmat, for me the most impressive character in the film, has a Gaza id, stays illegally in Ramallah, ”I’m a criminal”, she says, having no intention to go back to Gaza, wishing/hoping/trying to get permission to see her son Mustafa after years of separation. In the most moving scene in the film, Hekmat and her daughters watch clips with Mustafa on the beach in Gaza. The camera stays on their faces as the heartbreaking scene develops emotionally. Don’t talk about it, show it. This is what this film does so well.

Palestine, 2012, 64 mins. Will be shown at the upcoming Dubai International Film Festival (December 9 – 16)

http://dubaifilmfest.com/en/films/cast/id/11436

Louisiana Channel

The Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen is of course a must for all art lovers, who visit Denmark. A new web-initiative by the museum deserves to be promoted. Here is the text from the museum:

“Louisiana Channel delivers culture to the Net extending beyond the museum’s own events expanding upon the museum’s exhibitions and activities, as well as looking beyond Louisiana’s own context, meeting the artists in their environment for their stories. Louisiana Channel finds its material in Louisiana’s unique network of visual artists, writers, architects, designers and musicians, and angles the material with a background in Louisiana’s tradition for communication.

The Louisiana team produces videos on art and culture on a regular basis and new videos are posted to the site every week. We welcome you to sign up for our newsletter (go to the website) to be notified of new videos regularly.

At current you can meet David Hockney, Pipilotti Rist, Yayoi Kusama, Jonathan Safran Foer, Henning Mankell and many more…”

Including an acoustic version of “Banga” by Patti Smith.

Photo: Patti Smith performing in Helsinki 2007.

http://www.louisiana.dk/dk/Service+Menu+Right/English

Cinema Komunisto Success

It was one of those nights – the premiere of Mila Turajlic’s ”Cinema Komunisto” – that will be remembered. A totally packed Sava Centre in Belgrade were present for the closing film of Magnificent7 Festival 2011. Standing ovations. It was late January 2011 and now almost 2 years later, the film, first of all thanks to the incredible energy and skills of the director herself, the film is still travelling the world after lots of festival screenings and several awards.

”This exhaustively researched and elegantly edited documentary…”, writes the critic of The Times after the theatrical premiere in the UK a week ago. Other reviews, including one from celebrity critic Philip French in Guardian, are equally positive as you can see through the links below.

The film, that was also screened at idfa, comes out on dvd today in Serbia, is said to have a theatrical premiere in Paris… well, you can’t stop great films and talented directors.

http://www.cinemakomunisto.com/about/

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/home.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/nov/25/cinema-komunisto-review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/nov/22/cinema-komunisto-review

http://www.totalfilm.com/reviews/cinema/cinema-komunisto

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/film/reviews/article3608922.ece