Moral education to shape the personality
Published May 4, 2012 | 
Internet has penetrated every sector of life. We have a lot of benefit from this internet presence. But the effects of the internet are not only positive but also negative things that we need to beware. We can access a variety of things from the internet. All parties can feel it, young and old, great and small, men and women. Various sites on the internet ahave made every enlightened individual. We can access things that are related to health, parenting, education, entertainment, social, cultural, or get the best free porn site. World at your fingertips, it’s very appropriate phrase to describe the internet discourse in our society. There are many things that we can absorb information from the internet in relation to information from around the world. Internet access is so easy to have made the distance becomes meaningless. Any information or news that occurs from anywhere in the world will quickly be presented before us.
When the positive things we have been able to achieve from the internet then the negatives of the internet we must be cautious and we have to prepare something to deflect it, especially when it is the negative aspects of our children. We need to equip our children with a variety of science in which if can be a deterrent to possible negative smells from the internet. The character of every individual is different, then how do we explain to the child should also be adapted to their character. Which clearly do not let them get the wrong information from the outside and we missed. Early sex education is appropriate to anticipate the danger of free sex which has now been implicated in some of our communities.
Society, especially among teenagers need to equip a clear moral foundation that they can choose where positive things that should be achieved and where the negative things that need to be digested first. The role of parents is crucial in children’s personality pattern which then determines the formation of a good personality. Our children are like blank notebooks that are free in any content by creations, whether to fill in graffiti, bad writing, or penmanship. Patterns of moral education to the child’s parents will determine the personality of the child in the future. Our children do not have a significant oversight in surfing the internet when they have the character of an intelligent and responsible. We do not have to worry about their activities on the internet if we have to equip them with a good moral education. They will be able to respect themselves.
Tracing The Footprints Of Documentary Film Making
Published April 12, 2012 |
“In feature films director is God; in documentary films God is the director”.
An art form which has over a hundred years depicted the serendipitous romanticism, surrealism and activism of the journey of life. Extreme naturalism is the key; transcending the quandaries of human existence, documentary films go beyond the archetypal perception, unraveling the psychedelic mysteries of life, always giving a “voice to the voiceless”.
The art of documentary film-making traces its roots to pre-1900s when the French coined the term to depict any non-fictional film with an informational purpose. Often referred to as “actuality films”, these would include very short stretches of filming often a minute or less in length. There was no form of conceptualization of a real-life event or depiction of consciousness in these creations, primarily due to the technological limitations of the days. Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar (Save Dada) who in 1899 shot a wrestling match was probably the earliest traces of “topical” films in the Indian film industry. He is also accredited to have made the first Indian newsreel in 1901 filming the public reception of Raghjunath P. Paranjpye who had won a special distinction in Maths at Cambridge. Chitrapat Kaysa Taya Kartat (How films are made) (1917) directed by Dadasaheb Phalke, the “Father of Indian fiction film”, is another significant milestone in the genre of Indian “actuality” films.
The Czech filmmaker and theoretician Vit Janecek was one of the first few individuals who improvised the term “documentary film” to replace a “documental film”, to dramatize the camera shot on the spot, to depict discursive interests of a cultural-social domain. The first few such attempts were by the Lumiere Brothers which showed short clippings of a train entering a station, factory workers leaving a plant, etc. Romanticism found its way into the first official documentary film, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), a contemporary look at the life of Canadian Inuit Eskimos living in the Arctic. However, the term “documentary” was first used in a review of Flaherty’s (also referred to as the “Father of the Documentary Film”) Moana in 1926. Over the years with the availability of cheaper 16mm film stock and the rising political movements in Russia and UK, documentary films gradually became an avenue to reach out to the masses. Films were projected on to factory walls and screens set up in church halls trying to raise awareness about unemployment, poverty and fascism. Thus we see the birth of the “alternative newsreels” in the 1930s, a generation of left-wing film makers motivated to guide the people from apathy to activism. The genre of “newsreels” was also sometimes staged, re-enacting some of the actual events which occurred. Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (literally translated as “film truth”) newsreel series depicted the everyday lives of bourgeois, trying to send a deeper message through a metaphorical montage of real-life recordings – often even using hidden cameras. This creation inspired the birth of cinema verite as another form of documentary, which utilized Vertov’s technique of juxtaposing scenes and non-intrusive filming techniques. This form of documentary film stressed on retaining the pristine form and authenticity of naturalism. John Grierson was the first documentary film maker and critic who coined the term “documentary” in writing a review for Flaherty’s Moana. He also extended the idea portrayed by Vertov, defining the art form as a “creative treatment of actuality”. This decade also saw the birth of documentary film-making in India with the creative acumen of Dr. P.V. Pathy, K.S. Hirlekar and D.G. Tendulkar.
Later into the 1930s and 1940s, documentary films became more propagandistic in nature stressing the marginalized and laboring majority of the Years of Depression and War Years. This form of media took up an activist role in its efforts to comprehend the reality and an ethical responsibility. Triumph of the Will (1934) was a masterpiece from Leni Riefenstahl, very much controversial and propagandistic in its horrifying depiction of the Nazi Part Congress rally in Nuremberg. In spite of the controversy surrounding the creation, in the realm of cinematography, this creation has earned laurels beyond par from critiques. The year 1940 is a significant milestone in Indian Documentary film making, wherein the British Government created the Film Advisory Board (FAB) to provide the infrastructure to boost the war propaganda effort. In 1943, the Information Films of India (IFI) and the Indian News Parade (INP) were formed to expand and consolidate film production and distribution units. Between 1940 and 1946, the FAB and the IFI produced more than 170 films apart from the INP newsreels. Unfortunately in the year 1946, government grants to these institutions were drastically reduced and there was no official film unit to record Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ speech on the auspicious first Indian Independence Day. The efforts were revived in 1948, through the formation of Films Division, the official vehicle of the Government of India to promote production and distribution of information films and newsreels. The Documentaries were to be released under the banner of ‘Documentary Films of India.’
The 1960s and 70s perceived a theme of protest against neocolonialism. La Hora de los homos (1968), The Hour of the Furnaces, directed by Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanos, is a four-hour long manifesto inciting a sense of revolution against imperialism and the disasters it brought in Argentina. In addition to portrayal of social and political issues, biographical, rock concert/music-related and nature-related documentaries were also finding their way into the mainstream during these years. Filmic stylization and informational reportage in documentary films has reached newer echelons of success with the advent of hi-tech digital photographic equipments. Director/Cinematographer Ron Ficke’s, Baraka (1992), depicts the “the essence of life”, transcending the limits of nature and time. Without a single word narrated in the film, it is often referred to as have delivered a “message without words” with its scintillating visuals accompanied with pristine musical scores.
Documentary film-making started off for informational purposes but graduated over the years through to reflect the persuasive creative ambition of the film-makers. Along with the aesthetic hues of romanticism and surrealism, the films have become more diaristic, self-reflective and experimental. The infant “actuality” art form of the yesteryears soon became the energetic activist threatening to topple the hegemonic powers of oppression. The film genre has extended much beyond the etymological sense of the term and had been visualized as doing so in a more than seventy-year old futuristic article by one of its founding auteurs and theoreticians, John Grierson as “Documentary is a clumsy description, but let it stand”.
Doc Makes a Life Story Video Documentary in Retirement
Published April 11, 2012 |
Doc Wylde had a wild time growing up. Like most kids of his generation, the only time he spent inside was to eat and sleep.
Impassioned naturalist
Doc started out as an impassioned naturalist. Not the airy-fairy tree-hugging kind, but someone who camped out, fished and hunted all his life. Now 83 and living in Southern California, he traveled as a child along the Ortega Highway in the family’s Model A Ford for vacations on the San Juan Creek. As a young boy, he scooped fish out of the creek’s shallows by hand, trying to save them from the summer heat by moving them to deeper pools.
Doc knew that he had lived a kind of privileged life. Not a lot of the luxuries, mind you. But he was a boy at a time when being a boy meant being outside from dawn till well after dark. When being a boy allowed you to carry a rifle and get up to all kinds of things well beyond the prying eyes of the grown-ups. It was this thinking that, much later in his retirement, began to make Doc think that he should make a life story video and tell the whole story.
Wild honey
As Doc recalls in his life story video, vacations were almost always at the family cabin on San Juan Creek. He used to collect wild honey from the hills, being extremely careful to avoid the cougars. Later, he would give Elynor his Sigma Chi Fraternity pin during a USC pledge party at the cabin (properly chaperoned of course.)
Doc is also part of a growing number of seniors who are preserving their life stories with private, personal history video documentaries – known in the industry as “video biographies” or “life story videos”. Doc created his life story video so that future generations would know his story. “I want them to know something about me and our family history. This life story video is something that I can leave them.”
Doc pretty much made a success of everything he tried in life. His persistence is legendary, as Elynor attests to in his life story video. But in retirement, he found his mind increasingly turning to his early days.
Thermal pools
Like the time when he and his friends (and their girls) used to sneak into the thermal pools along the Ortega Highway. The thermal pools were part of an old spa, which had been boarded up a long time ago.
Another story Doc recounts in his life story video is the time he went out shooting quail. Not hitting any birds, he volunteered to use his posterior as a test target for his suspect shotgun. (“I was wearing jeans,” he say, to avoid being considered too idiotic.) It turned out that the problem was not the shotgun, and Doc had some difficulty in sitting down for weeks after.
Biggest regret
Perhaps the most unpleasant memory Doc recalls in his life story video documentary comes from the Second World War. Doc was too young to serve by just a few years. But he was big enough to get into trouble. So he let his friends talk him into breaking into cabins along the San Juan Creek. They got in, got out, and Doc became very popular giving the booty away at school. Then the sheriff arrived and Doc spent two weeks in the OC lock-up. “It sure taught me a lesson,” he says in the life story video. “I never broke the law ever again.”
Life Story Historian
As well as being a naturalist, Doc is a historian. Not the pipe-smoking, tweed jacket wearing kind, but someone who has photographed, filmed, processed and preserved his own personal history and the history of his family. Over the course of decades, he has created an archive of more than 10,000 photographs and over 50 hours of film and video footage.
Doc has never been afraid of the new technology. He runs a sophisticated computer setup with multiple screens and more drives than you could poke a stick at. He flits from one program to another and pops disks into computer drawers with as much ease as some folks lob coins into slots.
So making his own documentary in his retirement – with a little pro help – was always a natural fit for Doc.