I would like to begin by saying something about the adaptation of drama to film, mainly because so little is understood about the process of adaptation by even the educated filmgoer. Many people still cling to the naïve belief that drama and film, for example, are two aspects of the same art, except that drama is “live” while movies are “recorded.” Certainly there are undeniable similarities between the two forms. Most obviously, both employ action as a principal means of communication: that is, what people do is a major source of meaning. Live theater and movies are also collaborative enterprises, involving the coordination of writers, directors, actors, designers, and technicians. Drama and film are both social arts in that they are exhibited before groups of people and are therefore experienced publicly as well as individually. But films are not mere recordings of plays. The language systems of these two art forms are fundamentally different, and movies have a far broader range of techniques at their disposal.

Actually, as many commentators have noted, film is closer in form to fiction than to theater. Like fiction, film can move easily through time and space, and, like fiction, film employs narration – sometimes in the first person, through subjective camera and voice-over; rarely in the third person, through the anonymous commentaries that accompany certain documentaries; and most often and most naturally in the omniscient mode, which enables a filmmaker to cut from a subjective point-of-view shot to a variety of objective shots, from a single reaction in close-up to the simultaneous reactions of several characters in medium or full shot.

After neorealism, Ermanno Olmi is perhaps the best exemplar of the neorealist style, with its disdain for dramatic contrivance and fictive invention. His films offer slices of life, with indefinite or inconclusive endings; they simulate documentary methods in staging and photography; and they aspire not to proposition or evocation but only toward accurate representation. Olmi's later works depart from the neorealist style of Il posto (1961) and I fidanzati (1963), but even they are characterized by a kind of non-discursiveness.

As befits a master filmmaker, Ermanno Olmi is reluctant to give interviews. He lets his films speak for themselves. A shy, self-effacing man, it's always been that way with Olmi. He was especially sparse on words when awarded the Golden Lion at the 1988 Venice festival for The Legend of the Holy Drinker and the Golden Palm at the 1978 Cannes festival for The Tree of Wooden Clogs. And there hasn't been a published interview with Olmi for quite some time.

One reason for the reticence is his embarrassment at having to answer those all too frequent, nagging “how are you?” and “what have you been doing?” questions. For between the Cannes premieres of The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and Cammina Cammina (1983) lay five years of inactivity, then another four years until Long Live the Lady (Lunga vita à la signora, 1987) won the Silver Lion at Venice (to be followed a year later by the Golden Lion).

Developing Countries and Barriers to Trade

Prior to the adoption of a rules-oriented system, there were barriers or trade restrictive measures which were identified under the GATT as ‘obstacles to international flows’ of goods and services. Such barriers made it impossible for producers and exporters to make meaningful gains from their economic endeavours, and for consumers to have a reasonable choice of goods and services. Davey et al analysed these obstacles on four levels. Generally, these were:

• 1. Governmental explicit obstacle to imported goods e.g. quantitative restrictions, subsidies, government procurement practices.

• 2. Governmental internal practice or regulations which have protective effects e.g. regulations requiring a higher standard of safety for imports, requirement that importers be licensed. The authors point out here that there is often a valid domestic governmental purpose such as consumer health or protection addressed by the regulation and that the problem is balancing the application of governmental measures for a legitimate purpose against the requirements of the international trading system to minimise obstacles to imports.

• 3. Problems which arise due to the importing structure of the importing country e.g. government ‘industrial policy’, the structure of industry.

• 4. Business practice (non-governmental) e.g. governmentally-induced practices such as directing a private firm to refuse to purchase foreign goods, restrictive business practices of private enterprises such as exclusive dealing arrangements, business practice and structure such as habits and preferences of businesses, cultural barriers including a dislike of certain brand names, or a willingness to pay a premium for certain quality or specialty goods. Here, Davey et al note that these preferences may require marketing expertise on the part of particular companies in order to allow them penetrate the market.

These barriers are related to both developing and developed country alike. Given the efforts of the multilateral trading system in eliminating these restrictions by the provision of a uniform set of rules for the trading environment, why is it still difficult for developing countries to integrate fully into the world trading system?

In his seminal work on the integration of developing countries at the GATT, Hudec was of the view that the main factor limiting further improvements in market access for developing countries ‘is the relative lack of economic power of developing countries’.

Popular Images and Medical Concepts

Present-day images of the mad and their treatment in previous centuries are frequently stereotypical generalizations. On the one hand there is the gloomy picture of friendless lunatics, exposed to squalor, punishment and neglect. On the other there is the vision of the mad as endowed with supernatural capacities. Both images may contain a grain of truth. Augustan society for example tended to envisage, and frequently treated, the mad as bestial and subhuman, and the abominable conditions under which a James Norris was incarcerated for years in Bethlem Hospital were not examples of the humanitarianism said to have characterized the Georgian age. Similarly, although the fabulous ‘ship of fools’ may owe its existence to poetic licence, the ‘idiot colony’ at Gheel was certainly no chimera.

Neither the gloomy nor the sublime image accurately reflects the heterogeneity of social responses towards the ‘abnormal’. Furthermore, these stereotypical representations tend to project the false idea of simple uni-linear development. The history of the mad is construed as a development either from ‘better’ to ‘worse’, ‘noble’ to ‘abominable’ on the one hand, or from ‘scandalous’ to ‘enlightened’, ‘dark’ to ‘light’ on the other. The Victorian reformers’ picture of Georgian attitudes, for example, reflects the conviction that the eighteenth century's dungeons had been replaced by clean and airy establishments and that the insane had been liberated from abuse, cruelty and neglect.

When viewers had their first exposure to film one hundred years ago, it is unlikely that they interpreted silence as loss. Then, motion pictures represented a striking novelty: the ability to convey photographic detail in motion-produced images that on initial viewing must have seemed quite dramatic in themselves. Oddly enough, it was filmmakers' earliest efforts to convey a story that may have called attention to the unremitting silence of actors on the screen. Almost immediately, dramatic episodes adapted or drawn directly from the legitimate stage began to contend with more strictly documentary forms such as travelogues and newsreels. And the simple sight of people's mouths moving – an alien one, given the stiffness of nineteenth-century photography – must have prompted audiences to wish for the same range of expression on the screen that they had grown accustomed to in live performances.

When stage actors first came to film, they moved and spoke as they had been used to doing before live audiences.

A recurrent motif in the history of avant-garde film is the idea that the medium need not have become a narrative, representational form at all, but could instead have modeled itself on other art forms, especially painting and music. A history of avant-garde cinema can in fact be constructed in just such terms, counterpoising the origins of orthodox or mainstream narrative film in literature and theater with the painterly, poetic, and musical origins of the first avant-garde experiments on celluloid. In doing so, one would be elaborating a gesture made much earlier by, among others, Fernand Léger, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and the art historian Élie Faure, who said that “there will some day be an end of the cinema considered as an offshoot of the theater, an end of the sentimental monkey tricks and gesticulations of gentlemen with blue chins and rickety legs.”

The most extreme statement of this “anti-narrative” sentiment may be found in the work of the “structuralist-materialist” filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s such as Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, and Paul Sharits (themselves preceded by the “absolute film” of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger). They emptied their motion pictures of apparent content in order to draw attention to the functioning of a particular aspect of cinematic technique, or to emphasize film as concrete material rather than as a medium for imitating actions and conveying emotions.

The importance of trade to countries is two-fold: one, it provides a country with income; and two, it directly provides a country's citizens with income as well. In a sense, facilitating access to markets is the best form of direct investment a country can undertake towards its socio-economic development.

Throughout this work, we have emphasised that trade is instrumental to a people's socio-economic development. We started first with a review of trade and development at the WTO. The emphasis was on understanding the exact nature of the Organisation in order to provide a preliminary foundation for future consideration of what the WTO can and cannot do for its developing country Members. When we examined the classifications by international organisations on development status, it was clear that the international community through these various organisations understands that the principal element of ‘developing country’ status is the level of poverty and the limited capacity for individual growth and opportunity. These are elements which motivated the world trading system even from the time of the GATT, to lay out provisions in the international trade rules to address the challenges of developing country participation in organised global trade.

Developing country integration however has faced and still continues to face teething problems.

In the most impressive phase of his career (from Variety Lights [1950] through 8½ [1963]), Federico Fellini (1920–1993) was, above all, an observer, constructing his films through juxtaposition: that is, through setting details of reconstructed reality side-by-side to point up a common denominator, or (more often) to expose the ironic relationship between unlike things. This method of reconstruction is the one associated with Italian neorealism, which Fellini himself defined in a 1971 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels as “the opposite of manufactured effects, of the laws of dramaturgy, spectacle, even of cinematography” – in other words, the presentation of the world in as natural a manner as possible, without arranging things in order to create plots or entertainments.

What distinguishes Fellini from the neorealists, however, is an insistence on the primary force of human imagination. His characters aren't solely motivated by externals – the theft of a bicycle, social indifference, child and elderly abandonment or neglect – as Vittorio De Sica's were. Nor, like Ermanno Olmi, does Fellini invert neorealism by studying only the human accommodation to such external circumstances. Instead, he denies the pure externality of events, choosing instead to show that reality and imagination interpenetrate. Hence Fellini's characters never face a fact without dressing it up: if, as in I vitelloni (1953), they are in an empty piazza during the small hours of the night, they actively deny the implication that all human activities must pause; if, as in The Nights of Cabiria (1957), they are stepping in place on what amounts to a treadmill, they are nonetheless always on parade, decked out and boisterous.

Introduction

This chapter examines the collective security issue-area in the Western Hemisphere from 1991 to 2005. Its purpose is to clarify the role played by the US and the OAS respectively in the hemispheric security agenda setting process. The key question is whether the US sets the regional security agenda unilaterally, cooperatively, or via a combination of these two modalities. The Realist expectation would be that the US as the hegemonic power would set the hemispheric agenda unilaterally, and that the subordinate states would have no real choice but to acquiesce to US interests. The expectation of Neo-liberal institutionalism would be that, especially when its interests are perceived to be at risk, the US would choose to set the hemispheric security agenda cooperatively. The US then would allow the hemispheric security agenda to be set by means of regimes and institutions to garner greater legitimacy, and to obtain better results at lower costs in the long run. The analysis presented in this chapter focuses specifically on the extent to which the OAS participates in the regional security agenda setting process by looking at two examples of OAS involvement in two general cases: 1) illegal drugs; and 2) military cooperation.

The Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM) Case

The first general case consists of an analysis of the multilateral decisions of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD), established in 1986 and achieved by means of the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM).

I say nothing new when I assert that realism has been central to the last hundred and fifty years or so in the history of art. Realism, of course, is not only an approach to representing people and things but also a view of the world. And I think it fair to say that in no medium has this view been so cheapened as in film. In film you can excuse anything, explain anything, fake anything – you can get away with anything, no matter how extreme, repulsive, or degrading – simply by calling it realistic.

A case in point is Die Hard II, a movie popular with many different audiences, or so I heard at the time of its release in 1990. It takes place within about five hours in and around an airport. The hero, played by Bruce Willis, goes through a whole series of beatings and fights: he is shot at, he jumps from great heights, he experiences things that would hospitalize the young Arnold Schwarzenegger within five minutes. Still, our hero persists, and all of the fantasy – it's the sheerest fantasy – is passed off as realism, simply because the setting seems to be a real airport and the actors are real human beings. Bolts and nuts, bodies and heads, are discernible. Yet the whole affair is more fantastic than The Arabian Nights; indeed, it's hard to take any film seriously when virtually all of its characters are involved in the violence, when all but the hero are shot and killed.

Film editing, or the instantaneous replacement of one moving visual field with another, was once not part of our daily experience. So nothing in 400 million years of vertebrate evolution prepared us for the visual assault of cinema. But amazingly enough, the process succeeded and we became accommodated to the idea of motion pictures. Even more, a mysterious extra meaning was gained from the juxtaposition of two images that was not present in either of the shots themselves. In short, we discovered that the human mind was predisposed to cinematic grammar as if it were an entirely natural, inborn language. Perhaps it is inborn, because we spend one-third of our lives in the nightly world of dreams. There, images are fragmented and different realities collide abruptly with what seems to have great meaning. In this way we can see film editing as, probably unwittingly, employing the power and means of dream.

For many millions of years, then, human beings were apparently carrying within them the ability to respond to film and were unconsciously awaiting its arrival in order to employ their dreamfaculty more fully. Some of us have long believed that, through more recent centuries, theater artists and audiences themselves had also been longing for the film to be invented even without a clue that there could be such a medium. Many tricks of stagecraft in those centuries (particularly the nineteenth) were, without knowing it, attempting to be cross-cuts and superimpositions, or double exposures.

The Role of Institutionalization

When, in 1858, the Crown took over the political administration of British India, it was also to take charge of public institutions previously established by the East India Company. The Company's legacy of jails, penitentiaries, hospitals and dispensaries (and to a lesser extent of orphanages, workhouses and schools) was impressive. There existed also several lunatic asylums. The provinces of Bengal, Bombay and Madras each boasted an asylum for the reception of Europeans, whilst nearly every district had its own ‘native lunatic asylum’. Further institutions for the mentally ill had been established in more recently annexed areas, such as Burma, the Punjab and Sind, as well as in the coastal centre of Sri Lanka and in such remote territorial acquisitions as Penang and Singapore. In addition to these specialized receptacles, lunatics ‘up-country’ in inaccessible and desolate areas could be locked up for shorter periods in the more ubiquitous local jails and in cells adjoining dispensaries and regimental hospitals. The British Empire of the nineteenth century was thus, it would appear, well provided with institutions for the confinement of deranged Europeans and Asians.

The Company's provision for European lunatics extended back into the colonial motherland itself. In England, Pembroke House, a privately managed madhouse, specialized in the treatment of insane Europeans sent home from India by the East India Company. This was not the only institution in England for returned lunatics.