Rev. Danny Fisher

Visit http://myspace.com/smallplacestour.

Via Precious Metal: In the wake of yet another useless U.N. special envoy visit to Burma, Frida Ghitis writes for the Miami Herald that “helping the Burmese people’s nonviolent struggle requires outspoken, vigorous and relentless diplomacy.” She’s yet another voice saying that Burma’s close ally China needs to take a greater role in ending human rights abuses in the country. “Beijing must hear that its post-Olympic international standing requires that it, too, pressure the junta to negotiate a transition of power,” she says.

Visit http://www.amnesty.org.

Reuters is reporting that His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been admitted to a hospital in India with “abdominal discomfort.” Doctors say there is no cause for concern. That said, this news comes on the heels of yesterday’s announcement that His Holiness had been diagnosed as “exhausted” and was planning to spend the next three weeks resting and recovering. Please keep him in your thoughts, prayers, and/or practice.

[This post was updated at 9:30 p.m. EST on 8.28.08.]

Some of you might have heard about the controversy surrounding the title of Warner Independent Pictures’ soon-to-be-released Towelhead, which is based on Alicia Erain’s novel of the same name about a thirteen-year-old Arab-American girl coming of age in Texas. This past week, the LA branch of the Council on American-Islam Relations (CAIR) asked Warner Bros. to change the name of the film back to Nothing is Private–the title the then-skittish studio premiered the movie under at the Sundance Film Festival before deciding to revert to the original title for wide release. Warner Bros. is standing by the film and its title, though, and today issued a formal statement of support. Also issued were statements by Erain and the film’s Emmy and Academy Award-winning screenwriter/director Alan Ball (of “Six Feet Under” and American Beauty fame), as well as one signed by a group of six scholars who study religion and film…including yours truly. You can read all of the statements at a special section on the official Towelhead website entitled “What’s In a Name?” (and elsewhere on the web). Here is the full text of the statement I co-signed:

The concept of cinema can be described as ‘the cultural transmission of symbolic forms’ which include actions, utterances, images and texts and are embedded in structured social contexts which involve relations of power. These forms are produced by subjects and are recognized as meaningful constructs. As a form of entertainment, it also plays ‘a leading role in shaping attitudes and ideas, including political ideas’. In-depth studies of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films over the past eighty years have found that out of the nine hundred films examined, only five percent of all the movies (approximately fifty movies) debunked the barbaric image of Islam.

There are very few films that show Islam in a positive light. Dr. Rubina Ramji, Film Editor for the Journal of Religion and Film, is one the scholars who has researched the images of Islam in Hollywood films. Dr. Ramji screened Towelhead at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and found that this film is indeed one of those few that promote different faiths and the challenges faced by these groups in America, while offering a much more balanced representation. Using the derogatory term “towelhead” as the film’s title, in the context of this film, provides a different meaning to the term, one that encourages viewers to observe these challenges first-hand and to better understand how Muslim characters have been stereotypically displayed in previous films.

By bringing forth the racist attitudes which have arisen about Muslims living in America, Towelhead openly reveals projected fears about difference and offers a constructive, yet difficult, approach to bring forth understanding. We, the undersigned scholars, have spent years researching and understanding the impact that cinema has had and continues to have on various religious groups in American culture. We hope that the true intentions of the semi-autobiographical novel, written by Alicia Erian, who has encountered such racism as an Arab-American, will continue to be accurately reflected in the film Towelhead, by leaving the title as is – a thought-provoking and difficult term that needs to be deconstructed.

Dr. William Blizek, Founding Editor, Journal of Religion and Film; Professor of Philosophy and Religion, University of Nebraska at Omaha

Dr. Amir Hussain, Associate Professor of Theological Studies, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles; Author of Oil and Water: Two Faiths, One God (2006)

Dr. John Lyden, Professor and Chair of Religion, Dana College; Chair of the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group of the American Academy of Religion; Author of Film as Religion: Myth, Morals, Rituals (2003)

Dr. Rubina Ramji, Film Editor, Journal of Religion and Film; Professor of Religious Studies (Islam and media), Cape Breton University

Rev. Danny Fisher, Doctoral Candidate, University of the West

Tony S. L. Michael, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies/Biblical Studies, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, Toronto

I’m pleased to be able to contribute in my small way to this conversation. Good art should be challenging, and we have to be careful not to confuse the use of certain words, images, and so on with a tacit endorsement of them by filmmakers or the studios distributing their films. A lot of arts controversies (like this one) start with a peculiar sort of literalism. Context is everything. If the term were used in a demeaning way, like to get a laugh at someone or some group’s expense, I’d be the first to say, “That’s a problem.” In this case, though, the filmmakers seem to want to communicate something about racism and the way terms like “towelhead” cruelly reduce complex human beings. As the letter I signed says, the term needs to be deconstructed, and works like Towelhead contribute greatly to that effort.

For more about the film, visit its official website at http://wip.warnerbros.com/towelhead/. The trailer is below.