Journal articles on the topic '\Kurdish films'

AbstractWithin the last few years, “Kurdish cinema” has emerged as a unique discursive subject in Turkey. Subsequent to and in line with efforts to unify Kurdish cultural production in diaspora, Kurdish intellectuals have endeavored to define and frame the substance of Kurdish cinema as an orienting framework for the production and reception of films by and about Kurds. In this article, my argument is threefold. First, Kurdish cinema has emerged as a national cinema in transnational space. Second, like all media texts, Kurdish films are nationalized in discourse. Third, the communicative strategies used to nationalize Kurdish cinema must be viewed both in the context of the historical forces of Turkish nationalism and against a backdrop of contemporary politics in Turkey, specifically the Turkish government's discourses and policies related to the Kurds. The empirical data for this article derive from ethnographic research in Turkey and Europe conducted between 2009 and 2012.

this essay explores the conceptualization of Kurdish identity in the works of Kurdish film makers, namely Bahmani Ghobadi and Yikmaz Guney, whose films established a unified Kurdish National Cinema beyond the borders and statelessness in a transnational space. This essay delineates the ways Kurdishness is expressed in the cinematic techniques of the two Kurdish film makers who used similar subtle techniques to incorporate their Kurdish identity into the films they made. The Kurds, as one of the largest stateless ethnic group in the Middle East have suffered violent oppression, state perpetuated discrimination, and exclusion. This essay draws on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Philip Rosen’s essay in Theorizing National Cinema to explore how Yalmiz Guney and Bahmani Ghobadi presented the national identity of the characters to mark the films with a sense of Kurdishness. This essay further explores the construction of national identity and personhood specifically in Guney’s Yol and Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly to show how stateless people can easily become a subject of dehumanization by different nation states.

AbstractTowards the end of the decade long Iran–Iraq war, Saddam Hussein launched a deadly attack against the Kurds, known as the Anfal Campaign, killing more than a hundred thousand. One of the largest acts of genocide occurred on 18 March 1988 in the Kurdish city of Halabja. On that day, sweet-smelling poison gas was poured over the city, killing at least five thousand. Since 2001 Kurdish moviemakers have memorialized the tragedy of the Halabja massacre by producing cinematic dramas and narrative documentaries. These films are part of a discourse of authenticity and a politics of culture that permeate the Kurdish independence movement. This essay proposes that Halabja films can be divided into three stages: the era of consolidation, 2000 to 2009; the golden era, 2009 to early 2014; and the fall which followed the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Each era reveals new attitudes towards politics, society, and the massacre.

In 2009, the Turkish government started the “Kurdish Initiative”, a comprehensive policymaking process, in an attempt to improve the democratic standards and civil rights of the Kurdish population. Even though the initiative ended in 2015, it made it possible for a significant number of independent films to emerge which deal with the Kurdish issue. Historically, mainstream cinema’s symbolic representation of Kurdish identity served to neutralise its Kurdish characters by portraying them as Turkish speaking and one-dimensional. Breaking this tradition, these independent films offer multi-layered, Kurdish speaking characters with progressive narratives. This article investigates three films produced on the eve of and during the “Kurdish Initiative”: My Marlon and Brando (Gitmek: Benim Marlon ve Brandom, Hüseyin Karabey, 2008), The Storm (Bahoz, Kazım Öz, 2008) and Future Lasts Forever (Gelecek Uzun Sürer, Özcan Alper, 2011). In addition to interrupting the traditional acceptance of stereotypes by the mainstream cinema, each film discusses the symbolic representations of Kurdish identity through different aspects: transnationality, the role of discriminative processes, and memory and trauma.

In this paper, I consider the potentials and theoretical interpretations of Kurdish Cinema produced in Turkey. I evaluate the dynamics of the emergence of a state-less Kurdish cinema, which produces films in spite of the existence of Turkish National cinema and an oppressive Turkish national identity. Using Hayden White’s formulations on narrative and history and Gilles Deleuze’s theories on minority filmmaking and the time-image, I argue that the conception of time in Kurdish Cinema exceeds the time of the narrative and carries an archival potential for the unrepresented history of Kurdish life in Turkey.

Yezidi studies in Russia and the USSR were connected, first of all, with the general development of Kurdish studies. Due to long-term social isolation and religious persecution, the Yezidis were a closed society, which, due to its low social “proletarian” status, was considered by the Bolsheviks as a society capable of assimilating a new revolutionary ideology. One of the most important elements of nation-building was the formation of a national identity among the ethnic groups of the eastern and southern regions of the USSR through the promotion of the ancient heritage of these peoples, as well as the interpretation of their religious traditions as part of their national identity. Unlike the European part of the country, here it was about pre-modern societies and was complicated by tribal and religious aspects. National minorities in the USSR were often assigned to one or another republic, within the framework of which they received the institutions of modern culture and elements of their own administration. In Armenia, home to the largest Yezidi community in the region, Kurdish identity has long been linked to Islam, which could potentially also mean opposition to modern Armenian identity, which emphasizes Christianity. The Armenian side made references to the common past during the First World War and looked for additional ethnic groups as potential allies. Armenia's monopoly on the Kurds and Yezidis is reflected in the cinema. There were few films dedicated to the Kurds during the entire existence of the SSR of Armenia. The main emphasis in the report is made on the films of the interwar period: “Zare” (1926) and “Yezidi Kurds” (1932). These paintings are interesting not only as one of the earliest depictions of Kurdish society, but also as an attempt to represent and interpret Yezidi rites and customs on film.

The current study investigates Kurdish students’ attitudes towards the use of films in teaching literary works at universities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The study also highlights whether using films in teaching literary works is beneficial or not and what challenges are faced by them. The data were collected by using questionnaires and interviews from 60 students aged between 18-24 years old from both private and public universities. Out of 60 students, 15 were randomly chosen to be interviewed. Results show that some students consider teaching literary works using films is beneficial, as it encourages students to study and read more literary works and it also makes them actively interact with the content which helps them remember the events more effectively. However, the study also reveals that some Kurdish students consider teaching literary works using films is a waste of time, and this discourages interaction between students and their teacher. In addition, ‘boredom’ and ‘language difficulty’ are the other two major challenges faced by Kurdish students.

The current study investigates Kurdish students’ attitudes towards the use of films in teaching literary works at universities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The study also highlights whether using films in teaching literary works is beneficial or not and what challenges are faced by them. The data were collected by using questionnaires and interviews from 60 students aged between 18-24 years old from both private and public universities. Out of 60 students, 15 were randomly chosen to be interviewed. Results show that some students consider teaching literary works using films is beneficial, as it encourages students to study and read more literary works and it also makes them actively interact with the content which helps them remember the events more effectively. However, the study also reveals that some Kurdish students consider teaching literary works using films is a waste of time, and this discourages interaction between students and their teacher. In addition, ‘boredom’ and ‘language difficulty’ are the other two major challenges faced by Kurdish students.

In my paper I intend to examine how the historical marginalization of Sami and Kurdish history and culture affects the cultural identity of these ethnic groups. I discuss how recent political discourses and state interventions have influenced the images of the past and identity politics in the Sami communities living in Finland and in the Kurdish society living in Turkey. Furthermore, I describe how these assimilated minorities have alienated from their own identity due to a damage of their collective memory caused by devastating historical events. The paper also focuses on the ways these two minorities give meaning to the past and strengthen their cultural identities through different forms of art. Both Samis and Kurds express their identities in several creative ways. Their historical realities, individual histories, memories of assimilation and common values are reflected in joiks, folk music and cinema. These are strong ways of remembering and expressions of identity in both cultures. Traditional songs, films, documentaries reveal histories, reproduce cultures and shape the memories of both Sami and Kurdish people. Therefore, I will discuss how the patterns of their cultural memory have an impact on the representation of their identities in the above art forms.

The meeting of film and history sits at a position where it becomes hard to distinguish their interdependent dynamics. Accordingly, how do film and history connect, work with or work against each other? What is the significance of film for constructing histories of the people whose past, identity and culture were denied for long years? Where does this bring or drive film towards becoming a medium through which precarious politics on diverse people are revealed, documented and archived? Leaning on these, in this article, I will interrogate the position of transnational Kurdish cinema produced in Turkey for transforming the precarious political realms into a creative force that exposes different Kurdish histories, memories and temporalities. To do this I will make use of the interviews I conducted with Kurdish filmmakers in Turkey between 2010 and 2016, including Hüseyin Karabey, Mizgin Müjde Arslan, and Zeynel Doğan, and their films which reveal the tensions they inherit from their ancestors.

From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, this paper analyses Kurdish television documentary film that produced by Kurdish television during the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ISIS period in Iraq, exploring the discourse of the film by examining the visual, verbal, soundtracks modes, also considering how those modes work together to create narrative structure in the extracted film. The investigation has been done through applying, Iedema (2001) Reading Images: Visual Grammar by Kress & Van Leeuwen (2006; 2020; 1996). To deconstruct the elements of documentary film A modern software named Multimodal Video analysis by Kay L. O’Halloran & E (2013), has been applied. Results show, the extracted film has been produced by shaping the footages into an artefact by putting recorded materials together to make narrative structure, the deployment of various modes in the dynamic discourse, make the documentary films more effective in order to achive its discourse, Kurdish Television attempted to confirm ISIS brutality, ISIS crimes against Kurdish people, and displacement of Innocent civilians including children.

The belated emergence and the visibility of the cinema by Kurdish filmmakers is widely interpreted as a reason to categorize it as part of transnational cinemas characterized by a lack of standardized language and national domestic industry. This contributes to a negation of the promise of a cinema that specifically caters to a Kurdish public in terms of enunciation and reception. Considering Kurdish cinema outside transnational conditions, this paper examines enunciation in cinema of (national) subject through an audiovisual analysis of three feature-length films equipped with acoustic means in Kurdish: Voice of My Father (Dengê Bavê Min, Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Doğan, 2012), Song of My Mother (Klama Dayîka Min, Erol Mintaş, 2014), and My Sweet Pepper Land (Hiner Saleem, 2013). I employ Mladen Dolar’s concept of voice in understanding enunciation of subject through body and language and Michel Chion’s concept of acousmatic voice in understanding the constitutive division of the subject by means of suture. Through this analysis, lost memories, absence of the father (read as nation-state), and fetishization of mother(land) emerge as icons of the past haunting the present on behalf of recognition. In this regard, I address Kurdish cinema as a force of subjectification that transcends and transforms the experience of trauma through an impure production of meaning. Accordingly, the paper concludes that a primary characteristic of Kurdish cinema is its potential as a self-reflexive means for recognition and identification.

In contemporary films like Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015) and Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009), effects of (post)colonialism, immigration and globalisation transform French spaces into multilingual ones, in which language use is impacted by a complex network of spheres of influence. This article offers a new approach to understanding the place of the language in French films about border-crossing in today’s Europe. It paraphrases terminology from Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet to examine the films Dheepan and Welcome, in which the French language is crucial to migrants’ survival, but in temporary and conditional ways. Finally, the article analyses how French co-exists alongside other languages such as Tamil, English, and Kurdish in such films, and proposes a new term for understanding the use of language by shifting and migrating subjects: the langue de passage.

The original score of Iranian, Turkish, Arab, and Kurdish music created for the 1992 Milestone Films re-release of Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, deserves more attention than scholars have given it. This essay aims to fill this gap in the critical literature by providing context for the Milestone soundtrack and analyzing its musical and cultural implications and its potential impact on viewers of the film. The essay sets the context for this study by speculating about the lost 1925 score by Hugo Riesenfeld, especially in relation to his reputation for scoring Westerns. It also builds on other scholars’ examination of Aryan race theory expressed in the film’s intertitles, placing this racist ideology within more recent critical theory. I go on to discuss how Amir Vahab, one of the composers, approached the score. I argue that the music is an example of locative cosmopolitanism. Within these contexts, the essay analyzes the score in detail by focusing on the regional elements of the music, its relationship to traditional dances depicted on screen, the choice of modes and instrumentation, and the use of sung Turkish and Persian poetry. The essay argues that the culturally and regionally relevant score challenges and even displaces the racializing ideology of the intertitles.

The end of empires and the rise of nation-states have transformed the way politics and societies operate and the modern sense of these changes, transformations, events, and situations. Language, culture, and memory are essential pillars of the nation-states’ projects of creating a new society. The modern form of government, the nation-state, use history not only as a means of transmission but also as a means of building identity and memory. This study examines the case files of three critical names in the Kurdish movement and the history-based debates in their trials. By applying discourse analysis, we have shown how the Turkish state and The Kurdish Workers’ Party used history as a tool to “prove” and “disprove” the existence of Kurds, the Kurdish language, and Kurdistan. While the judges imposed an evidence-based approach to history and denied the existence of Kurds, Kurdish and Kurdistan, the PKK members opposed the official thesis of the state and built their arguments more on the day-to-day realities of life. The study’s main argument is that the official ideology uses history to prove and convey a message to the rest of society, whereas the defendants used it as a means of protest depending on the historical reality rather than history as a science. This study discusses that by using science to make examples of these members, the judges used history to prove the Kurds’ non-existence, whereas the defendants implied history as a way of protesting the ruling authority.

Since the 1950s, historiographical trends in scholarship have re-considered the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent nation-state building of the Republic of Turkey. The social and political evolution of the imperial system into a nation-state has been alternatively explained through geopolitical pressures, domestic resistance, the expanding economy and modernism in Europe, and the inability of the Ottoman establishment to cope with the rapid changes of the nineteenth century. Constructing one holistic narrative of a vast time period of upheaval is a difficult endeavor for any scholar. In the case of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Republic of Turkey, ethno-religious networks, two world wars, geopolitical competition between the great powers, regional and pan-regional insurgencies, demographic displacement, nationalist fervor sweeping through the Balkan and Arab provinces and into Anatolia, and finally the Kurdish armed resistance renders succinct historical narratives all but impossible to achieve. Thus, while there are many stories of the end of the Ottoman Empire, an overview of the issues for students and general audiences is a much needed, but audacious, undertaking. Yet for understanding the Middle East and Southeastern Europe today, a critical narrative must be told in all its complexity.

The early 20thcentury works of Kurdish Islamic thinker Said Nursî explore how cinema can provide access to the divine. Yet, considering the periods of Nursî’s life that were spent in prison, or in exile in remote locations, it is likely that the cinema he was discussing was, very specifically, the early silent cinema of attractions. Thus the distinctive format of this cinema can be uncovered in, and seen to structure, Nursî’s formulation of ‘God's cinema’. With this proposition in mind, this article indicates something of the potential that an engagement with Nursî’s cinematic writing offers for reconsidering topics already much discussed in film-philosophy, such as that of time in the works of Gilles Deleuze.

In recent years, deep learning has had enormous success in speech recognition and natural language processing. In other languages, recent progress in speech recognition has been quite promising, but the Kurdish language has not seen comparable development. There are extremely few research papers on Kurdish speech recognition. In this paper, investigated Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) which is one of the popular RNN models to recognize individual Kurdish words, and propose a very simplified deep-learning architecture to get more efficient and high accuracy model. The proposed model consists of a combination of CNN and GRU layers. The Kurdish Sorani Speech KSS dataset was created for the speech recognition system, as its 18799 sound files for 500 formal Kurdish words. Finally, the model proposed was trained with collected data and yielded over %96 accuracy. The combination of CNN an RNN (GURs) for speech recognition achieved superior performance compared to the other feed-forward deep neural network models and other statistical methods.

Image files can hide text without their size being affected too much. This process called steganography which allows hiding text in images without any suspicions from intruders. This paper addresses an improved LSB substitution algorithm for hiding Kurdish text information written in text file into digital image as steganography technique. The algorithm consists of two main phases, the first phase holds the encryption of the Kurdish text message and the embedded technique while the second phase hold the message extraction followed by decryption to get the original code of each character. The algorithm contains many procedures to enhance this process. Least Significant Bit method is used to hide the Kurdish text, in order to keep the features and characteristics of the original image. Applying the proposed approach shows that it seems work in a best case by hiding and retrieving text from the digital image which is used as a carrier of this text. Delphi 2010 was used to simulate both encrypt-embedded phase and extract-decrypt phase, and the results were obtained with high and security which proved the efficiency of the algorithm, where the hidden Kurdish text didn’t make any distortion or change over the cover image.

The first archival collection from Saddam Hussein’s regime to receive the attention of researchers in the early 1990s was the large number of documents secured by Iraqi Kurdish rebels in the March 1991 uprising. The documents have been referred to variously as the Iraqi secret police files, the Anfal files, the North Iraq records, and are today known as the North Iraq Dataset (NIDS). In addition to being the first of several collections of Bath-era documents removed from Iraq by the US military as a result of the 1991 and 2003 wars, the NIDS was also the first collection returned to the country by the US government in 2005. This article discusses the history of the NIDS, the contents of the archive, efforts to digitize and study the documents, along with investigating the fate of the original records.

This study shows impoliteness as a form of face-threatening that can be intentionally caused by verbal threats in a particular setting. It investigates: what strategies and mitigators do Iraqi-Kurdish English as a foreign language (EFL) learners use in situations of threat responses? The present investigation paper aims to examine impoliteness strategies and mitigators by these learners when they respond to threatening situations in their context. Thus, it fills a gap in pragmatics literature by investigating the reactions to threats in an Iraqi-Kurdish EFL context. To this end, 50 participants have participated in this study. An open-ended questionnaire in the form of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) is used to elicit responses from the participants. Besides, a focus group interview is conducted to support the data analysis. The data are coded based on Limberg’s (2009) model of impoliteness and threat responses to figure out the strategies used by the learners. Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper’s (1989) taxonomy of mitigators is adapted to analyze the mitigators. Overall, the findings reveal that the preferred responses surpass those which indicate dispreference by the learners. They tend to use face-saving acts when they comply with the threatener’s demand and opt for face-threatening acts when they reject that demand indirectly. Moreover, these learners use mitigators to attenuate the illocutionary force of their responses. Finally, this study provides some recommendations and pedagogical implications.

The aim of this research is to identify the television programs that children watch in general during interviews with a group of (504) children. After analyzing the content of those programs that were widely viewed according to some categories such as (the tools used for aggression), (verbal violence), (Practical violence) and (symbolic violence). Then the programs were arranged according to the number of repeated the violence in them. For all this, a questionnaire was prepared to analyze the content of the programs. After doing face validity and Internal consistency to the measure, the researcher analyzed the content of (50) programs from the animated films and the total time was (830) minutes or (13) hour and (50) minutes.According to all categories of content analysis measure, the results showed that children's programs generaly includes violent scenes and (Spiderman, Tom and jerry and Ben 10) got the first rank in that they contain stylized scenes, and this makes them the most influential cartoon movie on children to learn from them violent behavior and to make social and psychological problems. At the end, the researcher has presented some suggestion and recommendations.

This article focuses on how Kurdish returnees experience the process of returning “home”, how they imagine and (re) negotiate their future, through the discussion of my documentary film, Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing, which tells the story of my parents’ return to Iraqi Kurdistan after living in the Netherlands for more than 20 years. While over the past decade, the Kurdistan Region has developed into a safe-haven situated within a conflict-laden area, the recent tension around the Islamic State’s (IS) expansion has changed the social and political landscape significantly in the Middle East, leading to new considerations for potential returnees. Based on the fieldwork I conducted through filming my own family during their return journey, I argue that using visual anthropological tools can open a window onto diasporic movements and illuminate social life in times of crisis by challenging the representation of Kurdish migrants and addressing the impact of uncertainty in their lives. Keywords: Kurdish diaspora; social navigation; visual Anthropology.Filmandina malbatê û behsa vegerê di çêkirina Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing de Babeta vê nivîsarê Kurdên vegerayî û serhatiya wan di pêvajoya vegera bo ‘malê’ da ye. Nivîsar bala xwe dide wê yekê ka vegerayî bi çi rengî paşeroja xwe xeyal û ji nû ve guftûgo dikin. Ev mijar bi rêka filma min a belgeyî ya bi navê Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing tê nîqaş kirin, ku çîroka vegera dê û bavên min bo Kurdistana Iraqê ya piştî pitir ji 20 salên jîna li Holendayê vedibêje. Di demekê de ku Herêma Kurdistanê di nav deh salên borî de bûye stargeheke ewle li devereke pir bi şer û pevçûn, kêşe û nerihetiyên vê dawiyê yên ji ber mezinbûna DAEŞê, dîmenê civakî û sîyasî yê li Rojhilata Navîn gelek guhartiye, ku bi vê yekê re hizr û fikarên nû xistine ber wan Kurdên ku niyeta wan a vegerê heye. Li ser bingehê xebata meydanî, ya ku min di qonaxa filmandina rêvingiya malbata xwe ya vegerê da encam da, ez îdia dikim ku bikaranîna amûrên antropolojîk ên dîtinî (vîzuel) dikare pencereyeke nû veke bi ser hereketên diyasporayê de û ronahiyê bixe ser jiyana civakî di demên qeyranê de, ku ji bo çespandina vê yekê ez li dijî temsîlên serdest ên koçberên kurd radibim û her wiha karîgeriya guman û nediyariyê ya li ser jiyana wan nîqaş dikim. فیلم گرتن له‌ بنە ماڵە و باس کردن لە گە ڕانەوە لە کاتی دە رهێنانی "حە‌رە کە بەرەکە:جووڵانەوە خێروبه‌ره‌كه‌ته"‌(Haraka Baraka: Movement is a Blessing) ئە م وتاره، بە یارمەتی باسكردن له بەڵگە فیلمەکەم، "حەرەکە بەرەکە: جووڵانەوە خێروبهرهكهته"، کە چیرۆکی گەڕانەوەی دایکوبابم بۆ کوردستانی ئێراق پاشی بیست ساڵ ژیان لە وڵاتی هۆڵەند دەگێڕێتەوە، تیشک دەخاتە سەر ئەو بابەتە کە ئهو کوردانهی دهگەڕێنهوه بۆ وڵات چۆن پڕۆسەی گەڕانەوە بۆ "ماڵەوە" ئەزموون دەکەن و، چۆنی داهاتووی خۆیان دەهێننە بەر چاو ودهیخهنه بهر لێوردبوونهوه و پێداچوونهوه. لە ماوەی دە ساڵی ڕابردوودا، هەرێمی کوردستان گەشەی سەندووە و بووە بە حەشارگەیەکی بێمەترسیی لە ناودڵی ناوچەیەکی لێوانلێو لە ململانێ و بەیەکداداندا، بهڵام، ئەو شڵەژانەی ئەم دواییانە، لە ئاکامی پەرە سەندنی دەوڵەتی ئیسلامیی(داعش)، بە شێوەیەکی گرینگ دیمەنی کۆمەڵایەتیی وسیاسیی ڕۆژهەڵاتی ناڤینی گۆڕیوە. هەربەم هۆیەوە، ئهوانهی كه تهمای گهڕانهوهیان ههیه دهستیان كردووه به لێوردبوونهوهیهكی نوێ له تهماكهیان.. لە سەر بنەمای ئەم کارە مەیدانییەی کە لە ڕێگەی فیلمگرتن لە بنەماڵەکەی خۆم، لە جەنگەی سەفەری گەڕانەوەیاندا، کردووە، وای بۆ دەچم کە بە کارهێنانی ئامرازگەلی مرۆڤناسانەی دیتنی (visual anthropological tools) دەتوانێت لە ڕێگەی بهرهوڕووبوونهوه له گهڵ شێوهی نواندنی کۆچبەرانی کورد وئاماژە پێدان بە بێتهكلیفی و سهرگهردانی له ژیانیان دا، پهنجهرهیهك بەرەوڕووی جووڵانهوهی تاراوگەنشینیی بکاتەوە و ژیانی کۆمەڵایەتیی لە کاتی قەیرانەکاندا ڕووناک بكاتهوه.

Pastaraisiais metais plėtojantis modernizmui ir modernizacijai pastebima pasaulinių nacionalinio tapatumo pokyčių, kurie skatina nacionalizmo ir tapatybės tyrimus. Komunikacinės technologijos ir globalizacijos procesas gali turėti įtakos nacionaliniam tapatumui. Pagrindinis šio pranešimo tikslas – aprašyti ir ištirti tautinį tapatumą ir esminius su juo susijusius veiksnius. Šiam tikslui atskleisti taikomas tiriamasis apžvalgos metodas, pasirinkta apklausti Islamabado ir Gilanegharbo 165 studentus bakalaurus. Tyrimo rezultatai parodė, kad nacionalinis tapatumas yra labai svarbus (jis vertinamas 3,92 skalėje nuo 0 iki 5), taip pat kaip svarbūs įvardijami ir kiti kintamieji, tokie kaip interneto aplinka, palydovinių ir palydoviniu būdu perduodamų programų žiūrėjimas, vaizdo filmų ir televizijos programų žiūrėjimas. Nustatyta, kad šie veiksniai turi neigiamą įtaką nacionaliniam tapatumui.Analizuojant kurdų pasisakymus matyti, kad nedidelė populiacija, etninės ypatybės, tradicijos kartais nulemia nacionalinio tapatumo silpnėjimą.National identity and globalization. A survey among undergraduate students in Islamabad and Gilanegharb cities (Iran)Alimohammad Javadi, Maryam Javadi SummaryIn the recent years, due to the expansion of modernism and modernization on a global scale, there have been developments at cultural and structural levels, resulting in a change in national identity and making the study of nationalism and identity become an important topic in social science. Communication technologies and globalization can affect national identity. The main goal of this article is to describe and analyse national identity and related major factors. For this purpose, a survey of a sample of 165 undergraduate students in the cities of Islamabad and Gilanegharb (Iran) in the education year 2007 was considered, (the population are Kurds in Islamabad and Gilanegharb, Kurds being an ethnicity in Iran). The results have indicated that the rate of national identity is high (mean = 3.92 of 0 to 5), and the variables at the use of sexual environment of the Internet, the rate of using satellite programs and their kinds, VCD and related programs have a negative effect on national identity, and the variables like satisfaction with work and facilities of welfare, intimacy with family, satisfaction with having facilities of welfare in the nation of Kurds have a positive effect on national identity. Ethnicity and the low size of population affect the decrease of national identity. In the multi-variable regression analysis, the effect of independent variables reached about 64%, and the variables that could be included as independent variables into the regression model are as follows: satisfaction with job in Iran, relationships with friends, ethnic intimacy with the family, the rate of the use of satellite, tradition and satisfaction with the facility of education.Key words: national identity, globalization, mass media, new media, ethnicitybsp;

Kurdish cinema provides a multitude of narrative contexts for social inquiry. This article focuses on the interlocking role of Kurdish cinema in constituting and bearing Kurdish cultural and collective memories. By focusing on three films, Bêdengî / Silence (2010), Future Lasts Forever (2011), and Dengê Bavê Min / My Father’s Voice (2012), I explore how state violence and resistance are depicted, represented, and reflected on in the Kurdish filmmaking scenes. I argue that Kurdish cinema makes ‘non-existing’ and ‘invisible’ Kurdish bodies visible and commits them into collective memories. Through a multi-layered analysis of these films, I showcase how the Kurdish experiences and memories of gendered state violence are visually recorded, preserved, and transmitted beyond spatial and temporal boundaries and how different subject positions and subjectivities are produced and represented. By highlighting the multidirectional and multilayered aspects of memory, I portray the entangled practices of state violence. Finally, this article shows that Kurdish cinema provides victims, survivors, and witnesses a space to vocalize their demands and needs by making storytelling possible. At the same time, it implicates the ‘silent audience’ and reminds of its ethical and political responsibilities in the historical continuity of state violence.

All critics declare not only their judgment of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (Pierre Bourdieu 36). As it becomes blindingly obvious that ‘cultural production’, including the cinema, now underpins an economy every bit as brutal in its nascent state as the Industrial Revolution was for its victims 200 years ago, both critique and cinephilia seem faded and useless to me. (Meaghan Morris 700). The music’s loud, the lights are low. I’m at a party and somebody’s shouting at me. “How many films do you see every week?” “Do you really get in for free?” “So what should I see next Saturday night?” These are the questions that shape the small talk of my life. After seven years of reviewing movies you’d think I’d have ready answers and sparkling rehearsed tip-offs to scatter at the slightest quiver of interest. And yet I feel anxious when I’m asked to predict some stranger’s enjoyment – their 15-odd bucks worth of dark velvet pleasure. Who am I to say what they’ll enjoy? Who am I to judge what’s worthwhile? As editor of the film pages of The Big Issue magazine (Australian edition), I make such value judgments every day, sifting through hundreds of press releases, invitations and interview offers. I choose just three films and three DVDs to be reviewed each fortnight, and one film to form the subject of a feature article or interview. The film pages are a very small part of an independent magazine that exists to provide an income for the homeless and long-term unemployed people who sell it on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And no, homeless people don’t go to the movies very often but our relatively educated and affluent city-dwelling readers do. The letters page of the magazine suggests that readers’ favourite pages are the Vendor Portraits – the extraordinary and sobering photographs and life stories of the people who are out there on the streets selling the magazine. Yet the editorial policy is to maintain a certain lightness of touch amidst the serious business. Thus, the entertainment pages (music, books, film, TV and humour) have no specific social justice agenda. But if there’s a new Australian film out there that deals with the topic of homelessness, it seems imperative to at least consider the story. Rather than offering in-depth analysis of particular films and the ways I go about judging them, the following diary excerpts instead offer a sketch of the practical process of editorial decision-making. Why review this film and not that one? Why interview this actor or that film director? And how do these choices fit within the broad goals of a social justice publication? Created randomly, from a quick scan of the last twelve months, the diary is a scribbled attempt to justify, or in Bourdieu’s terms, “legitimate” the critical role I play, and to try and explain how that role can never be fully defined by an aesthetic that is divorced from social and political realities. August 2004 My editor calls me and asks if I’ve seen Tom White, the new low-budget Australian film by Alkinos Tsilimidos. I have, and I hated it. Starring Colin Friels, the film follows the journey of a middle-aged middle-class man who walks out of his life and onto the streets. It’s a grimy, frustrating film, supported by only the barest bones of narrative. I was bored and infuriated by the central character, and I know it’s the kind of under-developed story that’s keeping Australian audiences away from our own films. And yet … it’s a local film that actually dares to tackle issues of homelessness and mental illness, and it’s a story that presents a truth about homelessness that’s borne out by many of our vendors: that any one of us could, except by the grace of God or luck, find ourselves sleeping rough. My editor wants me to interview Colin Friels, who will appear on the cover of the magazine. I don’t want to touch the film, and I prefer interviewing people whose work genuinely interests and excites me. But there are other factors to be considered. The film’s exhibitor, Palace Films, is offering to hold charity screenings for our benefit, and they are regular advertising supporters of The Big Issue. My editor, a passionate and informed film lover himself, understands the quandary. We are in no way beholden to Palace, he assures me, and we can tread the fine line with this film, using it to highlight the important issues at hand, without necessarily recommending the film to audiences. It’s tricky and uncomfortable; a simple example of the way in which political and aesthetic values do not always dance so gracefully together. Nevertheless, I find a way to write the story without dishonesty. September 2004 There’s no denying the pleasure of writing (or reading) a scathing film review that leaves you in stitches of laughter over the dismembered corpse of a bad movie. But when space is limited, I’d rather choose the best three films every fortnight for review and recommendation. In an ideal world I’d attend every preview and take my pick. They’d be an excitingly diverse mix. Say, one provocative documentary (maybe Mike Moore or Errol Morris), one big-budget event movie (from the likes of Scorsese or Tarantino), and one local or art-house gem. In the real world, it’s a scramble for deadlines. Time is short and some of the best films only screen in one or two states, making it impossible for us to cover them for our national audience. Nevertheless, we do our best to keep the mix as interesting and timely as possible. For our second edition this month I review the brilliant documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), while I send other reviewers to rate Spielberg’s The Terminal (only one and a half stars out of five), and Cate Shortland’s captivating debut Australian feature Somersault (four stars). For the DVD review page we look at a boxed set of The Adventures of Tintin, together with the strange sombre drama House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), and the gripping documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) about the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As editor, I try to match up films with the writers who’ll best appreciate them. With a 200-word limit we know that we’re humble ‘reviewers’ rather than lofty ‘critics’, and that we can only offer the briefest subjective response to a work. Yet the goal remains to be entertaining and fair, and to try and evaluate films on their own terms. Is this particular movie an original and effective example of the schlocky teen horror thriller? If so, let’s give it the thumbs up. Is this ‘worthy’ anti-globalisation documentary just a boring preachy sermon with bad hand-held camera work? Then we say so. For our film feature article this edition, I write up an interview with Italian director Luigi Falorni, whose simple little film The Weeping Camel has been reducing audiences to tears. It’s a strange quiet film, a ‘narrative documentary’ set in the Gobi desert, about a mother camel that refuses to give milk to her newborn baby. There’s nothing political or radical about it. It’s just beautiful and interesting and odd. And that’s enough to make it worthy of attention. November 2004 When we choose to do a ‘celebrity’ cover, we find pretty people with serious minds and interesting causes. This month two gorgeous film stars, Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal find their way onto our covers. Portman’s promoting the quirky coming of age film, Garden State (Zach Braff), but the story we run focuses mainly on her status as ambassador for the Foundation of International Community Assistance (FINCA), which offers loans to deprived women to help them start their own businesses. Gabriel Garcia Bernal, the Mexican star of Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Diaries appears on our cover and talks about his role as the young Che Guevara, the ultimate idealist and symbol of rebellion. We hope this appeals to those radicals who are prepared to stop in the street, speak to a homeless person, and shell out four dollars for an independent magazine – and also to all those shallow people who want to see more pictures of the hot-eyed Latin lad. April 2005 Three Dollars is Robert Connelly’s adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s best-selling novel about economic rationalism and its effect on an average Australian family. I loved the book, and the film isn’t bad either, despite some unevenness in the script and performances. I interview Frances O’Connor, who plays opposite David Wenham as his depressed underemployed wife. O’Connor makes a beautiful cover-girl, and talks about the seemingly universal experience of depression. We run the interview alongside one with Connelly, who knows just how to pitch his film to an audience interested in homelessness. He gives great quotes about John Howard’s heartless Australia, and the way we’ve become an economy rather than a society. It’s almost too easy. In the reviews section of the magazine we pan two other Australian films, Paul Cox’s Human Touch, and the Jimeoin comedy-vehicle The Extra. I’d rather ignore bad Australian films and focus on good films from elsewhere, or big-budget stinkers that need to be brought down a peg. But I’d lined up reviews for these local ones, expecting them to be good, and so we run with the negativity. Some films are practically critic-proof, but small niche films, like most Australian titles, aren’t among these Teflon giants. As Joel Pearlman, Managing Director of Roadshow Films has said, “There are certain types of films that are somewhat critic-proof. They’ve either got a built-in audience, are part of a successful franchise, like The Matrix or Bond films, or have a popular star. It’s films without the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and the big names where critics are far more influential” ( Pearlman in Bolles 19). Sometimes I’m glad that I’m just a small fish in the film critic pond, and that my bad reviews can’t really destroy someone’s livelihood. It’s well known that a caning from reviewers like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (ABC, At the Movies), or the Melbourne Age’s Jim Schembri can practically destroy the prospects of a small local film, and I’m not sure I have the bravery or conviction of the value of my own tastes to bear such responsibility. Admittedly, that’s just gutless tender-heartedness for, as reviewers, our responsibility is to the audience not to the filmmaker. But when you’ve met with cash-strapped filmmakers, and heard their stories and their struggles, it’s sometimes hard to put personal compassion aside and see the film as the punter will. But you must. August 2005 It’s a busy time with the Melbourne International Film Festival just finishing up. Hordes of film directors accompany their films to the festival, promoting them here ahead of a later national release schedule, and making themselves available for rare face-to face interviews. This year I find a bunch of goodies that seem like they were tailor-made for our readership. There are winning local films like Sarah Watt’s life-affirming debut Look Both Ways; and Rowan Woods’ gritty addiction-drama Little Fish. There’s my personal favourite, Bahman Ghobadi’s stunning and devastating Kurdish/Iranian feature Turtles Can Fly; and Avi Lewis’s inspiring documentary The Take, about Argentine factory workers who unite to revive their bankrupt workplaces. It’s when I see films like this, and get to talk to the people who bring them into existence, that I realize how much I value writing about films for a publication that doesn’t exist just to make a profit or fill space between advertisements. As the great American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has eloquently argued, most of the worldwide media coverage concerning film is merely a variation on the ‘corporate stories’ that film studios feed us as part of their advertising. To be able to provide some small resistance to that juggernaut is a wonderful privilege. I love to be lost in the dark, studying films frame by frame, and with reference only to some magical internal universe of ‘cinema’ and its endless references to itself. But as the real world outside falls apart, such airless cinephilia feels just plain wrong. As a writer whose subject is films, what I’m compelled to do is to come out of the cinema and try to use my words to convey the best of what I’ve seen to my friends and readers, pointing them towards small treasures they may have overlooked amidst the hype. So maybe I’m not a ‘pure’ critic, and maybe there’s no shame in that. The films I’ll gravitate towards share an almost indefinable quality – to use Jauss’s phrase, they reconstruct and expand my “horizon of expectation” (28). Sometimes these films are overtly committed to a cause, but often they’re just beautiful and strange and fresh. Always they expand me, open me, make me feel that there’s more to the world than expected, and make me want more too – more information, more freedom, more compassion, more equality, more beauty. And, after all these years in the dark, I still want more films like that. Endnotes As of August 2005, the role of DVD editor of The Big Issue has been filled by Anthony Morris. According the latest Morgan Poll, readers of The Big Issue are likely to be young (18-39), urban, educated, and affluent professionals. Current readership is estimated at 144,000 fortnightly and growing. References Bolles, Scott. “The Critics.” Sunday Life. The Age 10 Jul. 2005: 19. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Morris, Meaghan. “On Going to Bed Early: Once Upon a Time in America.” Meanjin 4 (1998): 700. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Junket Bonds.” Chicago Reader Movie Review (2000). 2 Sept. 2005 http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1000/00117.html>. The Big Issue Australia. http://www.bigissue.org.au/> 10 Oct. 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Siemienowicz, Rochelle. "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>. APA Style Siemienowicz, R. (Oct. 2005) "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>.

Significant new species that belong to diverse genera and families were recorded to exist in Lebanon during our continuous non-stop field survey all over the country. The authors gathered some exceptional taxa from distinctive locations and habitats of the country, which were not reported so far in the flora documentation with the exception of Quercus libani, that is regarded as a very atypical species (for Lebanon) discovered for the first time after Post in 1932. The current paper deals with the records Anchusa milleri Lam. ex Spreng, Bassia hyssopifolia (Pall.) Kuntze., Eminium heterophyllum (Blume) Schott., Euphorbia prostrata Aiton, Euphorbia serpens Kunth, Hypericum olivieri (Spach) Boiss., Kickxia cirrhosa (L.) Fritsch., Lamium macrodon Boiss. & A.Huet, Onosma fruticosum Sm.lder, Plantago crypsoides Boiss., Platanthera holmboei H.Lindb., Potamogeton perfoliatus L., Quercus libani G.Olivier, Rhamnus kurdica Boiss. & Hohen., Tulipa biflora Pall. and Xanthium strumarium subsp. sibiricum (Patrin ex Widder) Greuter. The plants were photographed, collected, dried and herbarium specimens were prepared and deposited in K. Addam's Herbarium AUL University (Lebanon). Their taxonomical and ecological characters as well as their geographical distributions were exhibited. New Taxa (representing 14 genera in 12 families of flowering plants) were recognized with the reference of different floras and recent literature for their authentication. The present study also files them with updated nomenclature, descriptions, and notes on phenology and images for their easy identity.

The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. 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