Ha! Look! There!

You there!

Look, there he is!

This one, that one, that

Give me (us) . . .! Bring me (us), let me (us) have . . .!

Inner voice

This theory is rather weak

Composed(ly), with one’s mind at ease

Calm, composed, confident

Calm(ly), confident(ly)

Here, take it! There you have . . .

There he is . . .

To let one’s eyes wonder

To wander aimlessly about

He was no longer himself, he was floating in higher regions, he was

beside himself, he was out of his senses

He was no longer himself, he was out of his senses

To attach no importance to the fact that . . .

You there!

I (emphatic form)

To burst into laughter

To blow (wind), to rage (storm), to break out (fire)

To take up arms, to enter the war

To rise in arms, to take up arms in opposition

To stand, to plant o.s., station o.s.

To get on one’s feet

Suppose that, assuming that . . .

Atoms scattered in all directions

He is in luck’s way, he has a lucky hand in everything

Suppose I had done it

Battle cry, war cry

To cheer s.o.

To call to s.o.

A voice called out to him, an invisible force told him, made him (do s.th.)

To give (s.o.)

To jeer, boo

Disclosure, uncovering of s.th. hidden

To disgrace s.o.

To soothe the nerves

To become composed, calm down

A goal which remains unattainable (lit. a goal on the way to which throats are slit)

To calm down! Take it easy! Don’t worry! Don’t be afraid!

My own insignificant self, I (as an expression of modesty)

Besides, moreover, furthermore, what’s more

That costs, amounts to (e.g. fifty dinars)

Now we are even, we are quits

You owe this to me

That’s tough look!

That’s what you need, what you deserve

That is sheer fantasy!

Here is a man to fill any man’s shoes

That’s his affair

He is always that way

This and that are two entirely different things (or matters)

This equals that

That’s pretty strong! That’s laying it on thick

That won’t help you, that will be no use (to you)

This does not concern me, this is none of my business

This is not to my taste

That is very kind of you, that is proof of your goodness

There is currently something of a groundswell in favour of ‘low-budget/ no-budget’ filmmaking in Scotland. Simultaneously, but without prior consultation, several individuals have set in train initiatives which, in diverse ways, have addressed the question. The present writer published a piece in Sight and Sound magazine; the former Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), Jim Hickey, announced his move into film production with a series of low-budget ‘exploitation’ movies based on the 1960s practice of Roger Corman in the United States; and EIFF's present Director, Penny Thomson (1950–2007), included in the Festival's 1993 programme two events which broached different aspects of the question: Visionary Tactics, which explored both the common ground and contradictions between low-budget orthodox cinema and video art, and a series of viewings and discussions under the thematic heading, Just Do It. The latter was mainly concerned with the experience of contemporary American independents and particularly with that of Robert Rodriguez, whose debut feature, El Mariachi (1992), was reputedly made for $7,000. The processes of discussion at Edinburgh revealed that even venerable British film institutions like British Screen, up until now mainly associated with orthodox, quasi-European art cinema aesthetics and financial structures, have been attempting to devise mechanisms which would lower British feature production budgets drastically.

All of these initiatives may represent a challenge to those institutions charged with the public funding of filmmaking in Scotland, the Scottish Film Council (1934–97) and the Scottish Film Production Fund (1982–97), both of which are widely suspected of favouring relatively high-budget, orthodox narrative films intended to compete for attention on the European, if not the world stage. One says ‘suspected’ because both bodies operate with a certain degree of sleekitness, to use an evocative Scots word. This evasiveness is expressed in their claims to be all things to all people while demonstrably making an attempt to create an orthodox narrative cinema in Scotland their main financial commitment. Each body would proclaim its autonomy from the other, but both are chaired by the same man – under the name Allan Shiach, the Chairman of the Macallan Glenlivet whisky firm, and under the name Allan Scott, a successful screenwriter, most notably in his collaborations with Nicolas Roeg (1928–2018).

The standard works of film history and criticism in English (that is, those books whereby the cinema has been most usually represented on British and American library shelves) all, in one way or another, put Hollywood down. They do so from one or other of two premises: that Hollywood is a factory and you don't get art out of factories; or that Hollywood movies are escapist and fail to confront real situations. But, so a closely associated overarching argument runs, Hollywood from time to time redeems itself by producing the odd work which, like a European art movie, is formally perfect (such as Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941]), or which, more importantly in the Anglo-American critical tradition, is socially conscious. One movie is cited so often in this latter context that it becomes the touchstone of the socially conscious Hollywood film. That movie is Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947). Thus, Paul Rotha (1907–84) argues,

and he concludes that, ‘Despite all the opportunities of post-war human experience, Britain has yet to make a film that will measure up to the contemporary significance of a Crossfire’, a film ‘which dealt with the dynamite theme of antisemitism with more honesty and fearlessness than any other Hollywood film’. Similarly, Arthur Knight (1916–91) proposes that:

What is striking about the way the Anglo-American critical tradition describes Crossfire is, firstly, that the film's meaning is assumed to be unproblematic and transparent (that is, the film is unambiguously about a social problem, antisemitism); and, secondly, that the film's otherness, its difference from the normal run of Hollywood movies of the period, is insisted upon. This essay challenges both these assertions.

There is a commonplace that people became bored of the moon after Apollo 11 landed on its surface. Matthew Tribbe points to ‘the fact that Americans were never as keen on the moon program as current public memory and myth suggest’ and an anecdote from a 1973 essay in the New York Times Book Review by Hugh Kenner, a conversation between himself and the owner of a science fiction bookstore:

As it is posed here, the borders of reality began to shift for fiction writers in the late 1960s and 1970s. With expert and complex technology entering popular culture in the form of a media barrage promoting the moon shot, the basic function of representation went into question. This is one of the explanations for the drift in literary fiction from modernism to postmodernism, so posed by Brian McHale's argument that there was a shift from epistemological to ontological concerns in the mid-twentieth century, an ‘ontological shock […] of recognizing that there are other worlds besides this one’. No longer was progress headed toward opening up new ways of thinking and conceptualising the expanding world (as its space had been exhausted) it was opening up actual new worlds – spaces such as the moon. Joseph Tabbi calls the literary techniques used to express this new form of the unfamiliar the ‘postmodern sublime’.

Two images that exemplify the tensions between reality and representation during this period are the Earthrise and Blue Marble photographs, two of the few unplanned artefacts of the tightly planned NASA engineering spectacle. As Richard Lewis points out in a 1974 book about the Apollo program: ‘the story of each mission was known in advance.

Are vampires good at mathematics? Perhaps those who were once accountants and bankers. Perhaps those who failed algebra courses not so much. In fairness, even for vampires who own calculators, it might be hard to keep track of how many victims they have bled over the decades, over the centuries.

In some folkloric traditions, vampires who encounter spilled grain or seeds must count them, apparently due to a type of supernatural arithmomania. Woe to the less-educated vampire who could not count as high as the number of seeds on the ground. Or to the vampire who kept losing count and had to start anew repeatedly until it dawned on him or her that it was dawn. Perhaps there are times when it's preferable to be the Count von Count of Sesame Street.

Such mathematics may or may not be important, but to the vampire hunter, the vampire enthusiast, and the vampire scholar, one number is as dramatic as it is baffling: the global vampire population. According to much folklore and literature, vampires give rise to more vampires. Biting one creates another, the process repeats, and then repeats, and so it goes. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Van Helsing refers to the title character as the “King Vampire.” At the end of the nineteenth century, there were fewer than two billion people in the world. But how many supernatural vampires were there, if not in the real world, then in the world of fiction? Over how many undead did Dracula reign?

Put another way, the problem is that, by a given point in time, every person would either die or transform into a vampire. As more vampires are spawned, more blood is necessary, and so the scarcer it gets. Eventually there would probably be, as the title of Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow's 1964 film warned us, The Last Man on Earth. Then he too would become either dead or undead. Thus, earth could accurately be called, to borrow the title of Mario Bava's 1965 film, Planet of the Vampires.

The previous chapter began with the story of a dubiously Jewish, Christian and/or Muslim man's attempted theft of the Maqām Ibrāhīm. As we saw, the Maqām Ibrāhīm represented Islamic claims to both continuity with and difference from earlier Near Eastern religious communities. This chapter begins with another relic story, but one which largely inverts the scheme of George stealing the Maqām Ibrāhīm. Instead of an (ambiguously) non-Muslim man failing to abduct an Islamic relic, this story narrates a group of Muslims successfully moving a relic of the Jewish and Christian past: the corpse of the prophet Daniel. But rather than displaying this prophetic relic as a symbol of victory or monotheistic supremacy, the conquering Muslim army hides Daniel's corpse, seemingly to get rid of it forever.

The story of Daniel's corpse is set in the 640s ce during the siege of al-Sūs, a city in the Persian province of Khūzistān, amid the Muslim conquest of the Sassanian Empire. An early account appears in an anonymous East Syrian (i.e. Nestorian) record – now conventionally called the Khūzistān Chronicle – of late Sasanian and early Islamic history:

According to this Syriac Christian text, the Muslim army took as spoil a biblical prophet's body, allegedly preserved since the days of the ancient Persian kings. In this very early account of the conquest of Khūzistān, we see Muslims quite interested in a prophet's body. Taking the corpse away as a prize alongside other treasure, the Muslims here arguably participate in a form of relic translation: just the sort of activity that led to George's beheading when he tried to steal the Maqām Ibrāhīm from Mecca.

Altogether, all in a medley

Urgent need

It is urgently needed

Insurmountable barrier

To be confused, baffled, bewildered

To be careful, be on one’s guard

Sense of touch

Bare-headed, hatless

Far be it that you did it

Far be it from you that you . . .

God forbid!

Far be it that I do it

Briefly, in short

The present, at present, now

Quick-witted

quick-witted

Incentive, stimulus, motive

Full of, replete with, abundant, rich in content (history), much frequented (by visitors, etc.)

To make s.th. inaccessible to s.o, impossible for s.o., to obstruct s.o.’s way to s.th.

To deny o.s. any sympathy, to resist compassion

To withdraw from a contract

Presently, right way, now, at present

State of emergency

Living standard

Whereas

State of mind, mood

At present, actually

He was suspected, suspicion fell on him

Standard bearer, flagman

The right time has come, now is the time

The time has come for him to . . .

I happened to turn around to, it just happened that my eyes fell on

Weary of life, dispirited, dejected

Misogynist

Confused, baffled

Curiosity, inquisitiveness

Self-love

Ostentatiousness, love of pomp

Patriotism

In the desire to

Out of curiosity

Out of love for

For your sake and in your honour

Jets of water

It would be nice, or he would do well, if he did it

How nice it would be if . . .

Mere ink on paper, of no effect (e.g. an agreement, a treaty)

To make s.o. catch his breath, take s.o.’s breath away

Supernatural vampires are criminals. Their dark deeds range from sexual harassment to rape and murder. And they are imposters, not just of other people, as when Dracula pretends to be Count de Ville in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, but they also imposters of people, impersonating the living as they wine and dine with and on victims, whether in Transylvania or London or anywhere the undead might journey, which they also do illegally, travelling in crates of dirt without passport or stamped visa. Though they may not feel guilt, vampires are guilty, and guilty of so very many sins. Here are crimes against the law, as well as crimes against humanity.

Robbing, looting, purloining: how very often vampires participate in those felonies, their misconduct transgressing social norms and expectations. As Charles A. Kinkaid's The Vampire's Treasure (1922) explains, “Even a vampire would give up its riches, if it were given human blood to drink.” But as the title character in Stoker's Dracula proves, a vampire need not deplete its wealth to obtain blood. Stealing blood is a relatively easy task, even if it unlawful and immoral. Horrid abomination or minor infraction, the vampire is nothing if not a scofflaw.

Staged in London in 1823, The Three Vampires; or, Maids Beware of Moonshine depicted a trio of shady humans thought to be vampires. One is a “Practitioner of Medicine,” the second a “Pork Butcher,” and the third an “Undertaker,” their combined professions potentially helpful to so many malefactions. The maids guzzling their illicit homebrew are members of the same family, aptly named “Swallow-all.” A playbill described the play as a “New Operatic, Melo-Dramatic, Terrific Vampiric, Monstrous, Frankensteinish, Horrific Romantic Burletta, comprising much Moonshine, and more Mirth, written under the Lunar influence, but not by a lunatic… .” One did not necessarily need to be crazy to perceive the value of vampirism as a dynamic and compelling metaphor for criminality.

Introduction

The relationships of paramilitary formations to one another and to state institutions is best understood at the local level. Focusing on paramilitarism in a small area, makes the relations between the influential political, military and bureaucratic actors more visible and concrete, on the one hand, while illuminating the micro-dynamics of tribes, families and individuals loyal to the state, on the other. As the workspace or perspective narrows, relationships and actions become crystallised. At the same time, gaining an understanding of the nature of paramilitarism through local examples also provides an entry point to an appreciation of the similarities and differences between paramilitary policies in different regions. Therefore, in the last two chapters of the book, I offer a comparative discussion of two different areas.

Batman (province) and Cizre (city-district) provide good examples to understand the paramilitaries as operative at the local level in northern Kurdistan during the 1990s. Batman and Şırnak were both previously districts in Siirt province and were made provinces on 16 May 1990, mainly for military reasons in combating the PKK. Administratively restructuring (‘upgrading’) a place from district to province meant that more troops could be deployed there. In that same month, May 1990, a state of emergency was declared in both provinces. These territories were administratively restructured upon the proposal of the MGK. The reasons for the change were not the socio-economic conditions of the locals there, but military and political factors. Batman also had a unique paramilitary force, which was created by the administrative bureaucracy, while Cizre was one of the clearest local examples of paramilitarisation of the state.

Additionally, the following two chapters focus on Batman and Cizre based on (1) the embeddedness in the local administrative bureaucracy, (2) the structure of the paramilitary formations, and (3) the level of violence. Considering these in turn, first, in terms of the conduct of government institutions in the region with regard to paramilitary forces, the role of the governor of Batman and the mayor of Cizre in relation to the paramilitary forces was quite strong and unambiguous. Both the bureaucrat and the politician (the governor was appointed from Ankara, the mayor was elected locally) had important roles in directing the paramilitary forces.

While women undoubtedly are part of the cinematic depiction of the official historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide, they nevertheless mostly feature in the background, behind prominent male political actors such as Roméo Dallaire, Paul Kagame, and Carl Wilkens. This is especially true for Rwandan women, who are almost solely featured as victims, while Rwandan men are featured as both victims and perpetrators. Exceptions to this are found in the three feature films, A Sunday in Kigali, ‘94 Terror, and Trees of Peace, which prominently focus on rape, women victims, and survivors respectively. However, films and television documentaries which retell the official history of the Rwandan genocide create a collective memory that is dominant in relation to these alterative versions of the same memory.

Historically, wartime sexual violence has foremost been aimed at women, with rape frequently used as a means of psychological warfare in order to humiliate the enemy. However, sexual violence does not just constitute rape, it also includes sexual mutilation with the genocidal intent of destroying women's reproductive capabilities, and sexual slavery, something that occurred on a regular basis during the genocide and is exposed, for example, in ‘94 Terror.

One story which is surprisingly absent in the official historical media memory is precisely the one about all the rapes committed as part of the genocide. Another somewhat ironic absence—seen in relation to the story in A Sunday in Kigali where the white protagonist makes a documentary about AIDS, while being ignorant about the imminent genocide—is the story of HIV/AIDS as one of the dire consequences of genocidal rape. A third is the story about all “war babies” that were a result of the endless rapes. All these stories are typically not part of the male-oriented official historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide, and this is in spite of the fact that it is estimated that somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 girls and women were raped—that is, nearly all surviving Tutsi women—and that the Rwandan genocide was the first genocide in which rape was officially declared to be a war crime by an international court.