Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Caleb, it looks like you've read Belich's Reforging Paradise - I really liked his reference to NZ playing the Shire to the wider world's Middle Earth.
Yeah. And Patrick Evans's Long Forgetting, too, who also has some good take-downs of PJ from a poco perspective. Maybe Danyl would have preferred if I'd, like, footnoted it.
Hang on a sec.
OK, that probably is an overreading. But the scene in that really disturbed me was the one showing orcs being born -- literally -- out of mud. Pseudo-autochthones, if you will. That did seem like a nasty parody of indigeneity.
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He elided my paragraph break! The most meaningful thing in the whole diatribe! I've been misquoted! Help!
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I was just getting my hate on, Danielle, because ... well, it was 4pm on a Sunday in Milton Keynes, and frankly there's not that much else to do here. :)
But anyway, it speaks to Jackson's powers as a filmmaker that years later I'm still angry about LOTR: FOTR and KK. So I'll give him that.
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To be fair, rodgerd, Prebble may have been discussing that alternate reality where we had a bunch of [ageing, poorly specced, ex-Taiwanese] trophy-F16s on hand to protect us from unorthodox flour delivery mechanisms.
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Yeah, there's a lot that could be said about landscape in the LOTR films as epitomizing the colonial project. New Zealand in the 19th and 20th centuries was consciously reshaped according to a vision of pastoral Britain -- a "better Britain," if you will. The movement was utopian, nostalgic, and conservative, and it involved obliterating the existing landscape, or reforming it into a manufactured sublime, like exotics planted in a ring-fenced garden.
The LOTR films use the transformed New Zealand landscape in the same way -- substituting it for the ideal, wished-for past Britain of Tolkien's intensely nostalgic and conservative artistic vision. It's not a benign process -- it involves forgetting, obliterating, and covering over what was already here.
I find Jackson deeply suspect as a filmmaker. It's not just that he's a sentimentalist and a schlockmeister; there's something else going on as well, and you can see it operating in his handling of race. Who are the Orcs in the Fellowship of the Ring if they're not a nightmare, gothicized vision of indigeneity? And isn't it interesting that Jackson and his team chose to cast Maori and Pasifika actors in those roles, almost the only place in the films where a non-Anglo-Saxon face could be found? Let's not even get into his more-Rider-Haggard-than-Rider-Haggard take on the Skull Islanders in King Kong -- a racialized slur on indigeneity seemingly lifted straight out of the 1890s. For Jackson, brown -- indigenous -- is a synecdoche for evil.
That people now want to subject Wellington -- my home town -- to Jackson's malign, intensely alienated and Northern-Hemisphere imaginary with the Wellywood moniker is hard to stomach.
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Thanks, Islander! I've tracked down your paper and will read it this afternoon. Blundering innocently into contentious subject areas due to a lack of knowledge of underlying terrain: I'm good at that. But the whole subject is utterly fascinating.
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This looks like an interesting read:
New Zealand is a group of islands that sits astride the boundary between two major tectonic plates. It is therefore highly vulnerable to earthquakes, volcanism, landslips, and tsunamis. While the consequences of earth processes on human communities in modern times are beginning to be well understood, that understanding has not yet been applied to Maori communities in pre-European times .... it is now apparent that Maori were living in a very unstable landscape, one periodically rocked by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. This geological activity set off chains of events that had hugely detrimental impacts on the communities caught up in them.
As does this: Cosmogenic mega-tsunami in the Australia Region: Are They Supported by Aboriginal and Maori Legends?.
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The tithe has gone out.
Well played, Sir.
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It's a Brian Tamaki photo extravaganza! Overall, I have to say that there's a disappointing lack of sleekness on display. Corpulence, on the other hand ...
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If the Tea Party ever get swept to power I expect they'll name a library after him.
Or perhaps a flamethrower.