The Deposition is a dark and emotional drama written and directed by Eddie Mensore. While the story is very basic at its core, centering around Adam Long (Charles Rashard) who inadvertently kills his lover in a brutal car accident, some stunning cinematography and an incredible score come into play which helps the flow of this very slow paced indie flick.

When I say some stunning cinematography, I really mean the best camera work I think I’ve ever seen in any independent film as long as I can remember.  Some shots are so visually stimulating it really helps with what this film lacks in dialog and action. Some of this gorgeous camera work could be deemed “filler” though I really felt it worked well with the score to simulate all the emotions surrounding Adam and his  phsycological recovery from the accident.

The story is simple, though written masterfully: after the car crash that kills Adam’s girlfriend the whole town vilifies him as a murderer.  Adam has no recollection of the accident and must battle his own inner demon along the way to try and remember the details of that fateful day. With some strong racism and hatred, Adam struggles his day to day life while listening to witness testomony during the deposition.

I can only recall 4-5 scenes in this entire film that didn’t have a soundtrack. The  score is  fantastic, again completely different to that we expect from the indie scene. This, along with the cinematography gives The Deposition a very high quality production value matching almost any of this years biggest blockbuster hits. The small things add up too, like the makeup and VFX of the crash scene were just incredibly well polished and looked like the belonged in a much higher budget movie.

While not giving too many details away, The Deposition is indie film making at it’s finest. It ticks all the right boxes minus one thing.  A slightly higher caliber of actors. While the cast do a great job I couldn’t help but think with such a quality editorial / sound / cinematography team, this movie deserved some better acting. Though it wasn’t bad, it just could have been better.

Having recently found out this is Eddie’s first attempt at film making, I’m truly excited as to what he will bring us in the future.

The Deposition: A solid 8/10

Check out www.thedepositionmovie.com for more information and upcoming screening information and go see this flick!

2. Easy Rider

3.  Planes, Trains and Automobiles

4.  Midnight Run

5.  Sideways

6.  Two Lane Blacktop

7.  National Lampoon’s Vacation

8. Vanishing Point

10.  Thelma and Louise

Best American Road Trip Videos

Don’t like road trip movies? then go check out Party Poker for some good ol’ fashion poker fun!

WHEELING, WV, November 08, 2011 | — ‘Memory Lane’ is a rare, truly independent thriller shot for only $300 about a war-veteran who travels between our world and the afterlife in search of his fiance’s killer… by stopping and starting his own heart. At midnight on 11/11/11 at www.553AM.com,Shawn Holmes, the youngest nominee in the history of the West Virginia Filmmaker of the Year Award will release ‘Memory Lane’ online for free for one weekend only.

Writer, director, and producer Shawn Holmes stated, “Innovation is paramount to our success. I’m giving it away because you just don’t do that.”

As film festival entries cost as much as his entire movie, he chose to skip the festival route early on in the film’s release and give it away for one weekend on his website www.553AM.com. “We may have a festival run, we may not. We’re living in this crazy time where traditional gatekeepers can be circumvented altogether. The VCR, DVD players, in-home 3D and internet; history has proven that movies aren’t limited to thriving on the silver screen and that with advances in technology come advances in how we watch them. Alfred Hitchcock said that television was like the invention of indoor plumbing. That it didn’t change people’s habits, it just kept them inside. Had the internet existed in his lifetime as it does in ours, he could have easily made the same realization that we have,” claims Shawn.

Writer/Director Alan Gorg

This movie PROPHECY&POLLUTION (80 minutes) was requested by Hopi elder activists a half-century ago, but writer/director/producer Alan Gorg took about fifty years to put together this mix of documentary, docudrama, and animation. Meanwhile, history caught up with the Hopi prophecy that digging out Mother Earth for fuel would bring humankind to disaster. Scenes of what oil and mining companies have done to indigenous peoples around the world preview what could be coming to all of us.

The first part of this trilogy presents the documentary AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A HOPI (9 minutes) to make the point that for a thousand peaceful years the Hopi had been doing all right by themselves out on the high desert in what in now Arizona and, like most indigenous peoples, neither needed nor sought modern industry and so-called civilization.

In the second part, a docudrama entitled EARTH SPIRIT (35 minutes), oil and mining companies come to exploit the land, provoking the kind of conflict and protest many indigenous peoples around the World have endured. Robert Tena brings spirit to the role of a pueblo teenager so corrupted by city life that his mother, played with emotional depth by Betty Matwick, carries him back to the reservation, where, like most indigenous people, she must choose between a simple life and modern convenience and comforts. The shocking death of Forrest Wood as her uncle convinces her to heed the prophecy.

The third part THIRD WORLD INVESTMENT SEMINAR (36 minutes) shows through animation and documentary clips the prophecy fulfilling for indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa with terrible scenes of suffering and mourning for the ill and dying. The human toll is wide and intense.

This footage does entertain as well as inform. Caricature animations of Milton Friedman and other business leaders who have promoted worldwide investment in energy development should provoke discussion and curiosity, but the tragedies shown here are not entertainment as we see what horrors have been fueling our cars and plans and nuclear reactors and atomic bombs for decades. These stories should be presented in every college classroom and on television for all to see the results of what we are doing here on Earth and what could be coming to us in our turn if we ignore what those Hopi elders have been trying to tell us.

The film has a website:

http://prophecyandpollution.wordpress.com

A trailer can be viewed here:

http://indieflix.com/film/prophecy-pollution-32759/

A dvd can be obtained here

By: Lee Leslie

The movie is about two brothers named Derek Vineyard (Edward Norton) and Danny Vineyard. Derek is a skinhead leader of a neo-Nazi group whose younger brother is deeply influenced by him. One night, two black kids attempt to steal Derek’s car when Derek realizes and kill both of them. He kills one of them so violently by kicking on his head while his mouth is on the groove. Shortly after his crime, he is arrested by cops and sentenced to jail for three years. He has stories in prison which have been depicted by director with hurry. Although Derek realizes the secret trades among his prisoner so-called racist friends and others like blacks and Hispanics, the viewer is hardly convinced how Derek, a violent racist, converted to a refreshed person. The story is centered on the concept “racism”. However, it is not all about racism. It is also about violence. The name of the movie is also interesting. As far as “X” refers to something unknown, American History as a whole is not something unknown. The lower layers of the movie describe a seemingly endless violence in an American society. Violence is not just beating, gangs’ street struggles, and murders. It may have other forms.

Religious and political ideologies have been the cause of interpersonal violence throughout history.[1] Ideologues often falsely accuse others of violence, such as the ancient blood libel against Jews, the medieval accusations of casting witchcraft spells against women, caricatures of black men as “violent brutes” that helped excuse the late 19th century Jim Crow laws in the United States,[2] and modern accusations of satanic ritual abuse against day care center owners and others.[3]

Both supporters and opponents of the 21st century War on Terrorism regard it largely as an ideological and religious war.[4]

Vittorio Bufacchi describes two different modern concepts of violence, one the “minimalist conception” of violence as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force, the other the “comprehensive conception” which includes violations of rights, including a long list of human needs.[5]

Anti-capitalists assert that capitalism is violent. They believe private property, trade, interest and profit survive only because police violence defends them and that capitalist economies need war to expand.[6] They may use the term “structural violence” to describe the systematic ways in which a given social structure or institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs, for example the deaths caused by diseases because of lack of medicine.[7] Free market supporters argue that it is violently enforced state laws intervening in markets – state capitalism – which cause many of the problems anti-capitalists attribute to structural violence.[8]

Frantz Fanon critiqued the violence of colonialism and wrote about the counter violence of the “colonized victims.”[9][10]

Throughout history, most religions and individuals like Mahatma Gandhi have preached that humans are capable of eliminating individual violence and organizing societies through purely nonviolent means. Gandhi himself once wrote: “A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy.”[11] Modern political ideologies which espouse similar views include pacifist varieties of voluntarism, mutualism, anarchism and libertarianism.

Beyond these efforts to explain the violence, it is worth stepping back and considering the relationship between violence and democracy. In Politics as a Vocation, Max Weber reminds us that the state is that entity that which successfully claims a ‘monopoly on the legitimate use of violence’. The key to his definition are the twin notions of monopoly and legitimacy [12].

This movie did not go through these details on violence. However, when it comes to American history, violence definition should be able to cover many aspects. Violence is like an essential requirement for a democratic state. A democratic society needs free economic and private sector. Consequently, competition is an undeniable fact in democratic societies. There is not a long distance between competition and violence. In a society whose main pillar is democracy, the people are forced to secure themselves economically. In such societies, the state is not a godfather bargaining freedom with economy. American history has come all the way from violent days, whose one of its aspects is racism, to democracy. As long as people and politicians try to establish an ideal society, the violence is an inevitable affair.

1. “Doctrinal War: Religion and Ideology in International Conflict,” in Bruce Kuklick (advisory ed.), The Monist: The Foundations of International Order, Vol. 89, No. 2 (April 2006), p. 46.

2. The Brute Caricature, Ferris State University Museum of Racist Memorabilia.

3. 42 M.V.M.O. Court Cases with Allegations of Multiple Sexual And Physical Abuse of Children.

4. John Edwards’ ‘Bumper Sticker’ Complaint Not So Off the Mark, New Memo Shows; Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Free Press; 2004; Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, Potomac Books Inc., June, 2004; Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East, Fourth Estate, London, October 2005; Leon Hadar, The Green Peril: Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat, August 27, 1992; Michelle Malkin, Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week kicks off, October 22, 2007; John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, Oxford University Press, USA, September 2003.

5. Vittoriio Bufacchi, Two Concepts of Violence, Political Studies Review, April 2005, Volume 3, Issue 2, Page 193-204.

6. Michael Albert Life After Capitalism – And Now Too. Zmag.org, December 10, 2004; Capitalism explained.

7. Bruce Bawer, The Peace Racket, September 7, 2007.

8. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, From the Economics of Laissez Faire to The Ethics of Libertarianism.

9.Charles E. Butterworth and Irene Gendzier. “Frantz Fanon and the Justice of Violence. ”Middle East Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 451-458

10.Adele Jinadu. “Fanon: The Revolutionary as Social Philosopher.” The Review of Politics, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Jul., 1972), pp. 433-436

11.Bharatan Kumarappa, Editor, “For Pacifists,” by M.K. Gandhi, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, India, 1949.

12.http://www.idcr.org.uk/violence-and-democracy-the-london-riots

By: Hossein Aghababa

Avatar an incredibly action packed film which stars Sam Worthington as Jake Sully who plays as an ex-marine. Jake is incubated into long cylinder tubes that look like MRI machines combined with tanning beds which transports his mind to the avatar that was created with his DNA. Jake is sent on a job to persuade the Na’vi to leave, or to find out enough about them so the army men can come and kill them. When Jake first explores the distant planet Pandora, he is hooked right away with the Planet’s exploding features. The planet is breath taking gorgeous. It consists of lots of different beautiful tribes including the string bean blue creatures called the Na’vi who live inside a gigantic sacred tree.

The first times Jake Sully and his new friend Parker Selfridge tags along with Grace, (a scientist who wants to build a stronger connection with the Na’vi) to the outskirts of the forests of Pandora, Jake comes head to head with a rhinoceros-like animal with a hammerhead snout. In this new world Jake also meets dog-like hyenas that drool out foam, a large black dog-like animal that seems to behave like the king of the jungle, and giant pterodactyl horses.

The movie is pure fantasy and it is amazing how completely real this new world feels. By now I’ve watched Avatar twice and the overall effectiveness just makes me want to be happy and also scares me. When Jake Sully said, “They destroyed their home and now they have come to destroy yours,” it scares me a lot, to think that the Earth can one day become dead.

How James Cameron pulled all this together is genius. To create a new world, within Earth like Harry Potter is already hard to imagine but to create a whole new planet with different animals, landscapes, languages and customs!? It must have taken him a lot of dedication. I like how Cameron chose a blue toned colour theme. The effect of it gave a sense of calm and patience. 3-D movies usually dull the colour of the visuals and I was surprised to see that the dark rain forest still had a quite a lot of light.

I like how James Cameron didn’t use 3-D footage simply because you could because lots of producers and directors tend to do that these days. I also like that he enhanced real humans into the film than just animation all the way through. I enjoyed watching Avatar and I’ll probably watch it again, just in hope of relishing the visual aspects more.

By: Shobi

The movie is about a debate team from Wiley College of Marshall, Texas trained by Professor Melvin Tolson (Denzel Washington). The little team of Negros College has been able to win local teams. The team was also invited by Harvard which is the national champion. One night when Tolson and his young team were on their way back to home they saw a group of whites who was lynching a black. This experience made them think of their society deeper. The movie is a mixture of debating exercises, secretive life of Professor Tolson, and making motivations for young black kids to demonstrate themselves. The movie is explicit enough on the issue of racial discrimination.

Racism is the belief that there are inherent different traits in human racial groups which justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term “racism” is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature (i.e. which harms particular groups of people), and which is often justified by recourse to racial stereotyping or pseudo-science.

Modern usage often equates “racism” and “racial discrimination” and defines the latter term only as applying to pernicious practices. Differential treatment of racial groups that is intended to ameliorate past discrimination, rather than to harm, goes by other names (e.g. affirmative action); the characterization of this practice as “racism”, “racial discrimination” or “reverse discrimination” is normally only done by its opponents, and typically implies a belief in the harmful nature of the practice with respect to the groups not receiving assistance.

Racism is popularly associated with various activities that are illegal or commonly considered harmful, such as extremism, hatred, xenophobia, (malignant or forced) exploitation, separatism, racial supremacy, mass murder (for the purpose of genocide), genocide denial, vigilantism (hate crimes, terrorism), etc. “Racism” and “racial discrimination” are often used to describe discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of their somatic (i.e. “racial”) differences. According to the United Nations conventions, there is no distinction between the term racial discrimination and ethnicity discrimination.

Some sociologists have defined racism as a system of group privilege. In Portraits of White Racism, David Wellman has defined racism as “culturally sanctioned beliefs, which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated position of racial minorities”[1]. Sociologists Noël A. Cazenave and Darlene Alvarez Maddern define racism as “…a highly organized system of ‘race’-based group privilege that operates at every level of society and is held together by a sophisticated ideology of color/’race’ supremacy. Sellers and Shelton (2003) found that a relationship between racial discrimination and emotional distress was moderated by racial ideology and public regard beliefs. That is, racial centrality appears to promote the degree of discrimination African American young adults perceive whereas racial ideology may buffer the detrimental emotional effects of that discrimination. Racist systems include, but cannot be reduced to, racial bigotry,”[2]. Sociologist and former American Sociological Association president Joe Feagin argues that the United States can be characterized as a “total racist society”[3]

- :”Police harassment and brutality directed at black men, women, and children are as old as American society, dating back to the days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Such police actions across the nation today reveal important aspects of . . . the commonplace discriminatory practices of individual whites . . . [and] white dominated institutions that allow or encourage such practices.”[4]

Some sociologists have also pointed out, with reference to the USA and elsewhere, that forms of racism have in many instances mutated from more blatant expressions hereof into more covert kinds (albeit that blatant forms of hatred and discrimination still endure). The “newer” (more hidden and less easily detectable) forms of racism – which can be considered as embedded in social processes and structures – are more difficult to explore as well as challenge.

The movie is a good picture of blacks’ efforts to get out of the limbo of racism. To this end, they have had to prove themselves in a positive way during the past decades. Although discrimination has a nasty view, the races should catch up the whole society in terms of the level of study, skillfulness, and social responsibility.

1. Wellman, David T. (1993). Portraits of White Racism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. x.

2. Cazenave, Noël A.; Darlene Alvarez (1999). “Defending the White Race:White Male Faculty Opposition to a White Racism Course” Race and Society 2. pp. 25–50.

3. Feagin, Joe R. (2000). Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New York, NY: Routledge. p. 26.

4.”Traditional” American Culture: Benign and Wholesome or Inherently Racist?”

By: Hossein Aghababa

There is not a movie produced so far to cover all the aspects of the Vietnam War. The movie “We Were Soldiers”, however, illustrates major aspects of that ruinous war. This movie is about the Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) and his men from American 7th Air Cavalry who were under siege by North Vietnamese soldiers in La Drang valley a.k.a valley of death. In this movie, Hal Moore is a man of family with religious beliefs. The wives of soldiers and their worries in home at time of war are pictured delicately. A postman with a letter is not a good sign. He may have brought a condolence letter. This movie does not tell the story of soldiers who were not welcome warmly like the movie “First Blood”. There have been some other movies like “The Deer Hunter” or “Rescue Dawn” which partially or fully concentrate on Vietnam War from their own angle of view.

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of South Vietnam, supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations [1]. The Viet Cong, a lightly armed South Vietnamese communist-controlled common front, largely fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The Vietnam People’s Army (North Vietnamese Army) engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units into battle. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery and airstrikes.

The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment. The North Vietnamese government viewed the war as a colonial war, fought initially against France, backed by the U.S., and later against South Vietnam, which it regarded as a U.S. puppet state [2]. U.S. military advisors arrived beginning in 1950. U.S. involvement escalated in the early 1960s, with U.S. troop levels tripling in 1961 and tripling again in 1962 [3]. U.S. combat units were deployed beginning in 1965. Operations spanned borders, with Laos and Cambodia heavily bombed. Involvement peaked in 1968 at the time of the Tet Offensive. After this, U.S. ground forces were withdrawn as part of a policy called Vietnamization. Despite the Paris Peace Accords, signed by all parties in January 1973, fighting continued.

U.S. military involvement ended on 15 August 1973 as a result of the Case–Church Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress [4]. The capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese army in April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War. North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities.

The movie is “Mel Gibson-ish” in that there is a battlefield with military tactics like his “Patriot” and “Braveheart”. He is a commander with adorable charisma when speaks to his men: “Look around you. In the 7th cavalry, we’ve got a captain from the Ukraine; another from Puerto Rico. We’ve got Japanese, Chinese, Blacks, Hispanics, and Cherokee Indians. Jews and Gentiles. All Americans. Now here in the states, some of you in this unit may have experienced discrimination because of race or creed. But for you and me now, all that is gone.” The morphology of an American war is precisely reflected in these statements. America is a land where all religions, creeds, and races live together and also arrive to the war together against enemy. This is like a motto. Another aspect of his personality is his central role in battlefield. He promised his men “I will be the first to set foot on the field, and I will be the last to step off, and I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come home together. So help me, God.” And he exactly did this.

1. “Vietnam War”. Encyclopædia Britannica.

2.“Learn about the Vietnam War”.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm.

3. Vietnam War Statistics and Facts 1, 25th Aviation Batallion website.

4. Kolko, Gabriel Anatomy of War, pp. 457, 461 ff., ISBN 1-898876-67-3.

By: Hossein Aghababa

The movie is a black comedy on Cold War tensions between United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In this movie, there is a general named Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) who intends to deploy a nuclear attack on USSR because he believes the fluoridation of American water supply is plotted by Russians. He is the only person having access to the code for recalling the bombers. He is going to do this job without informing the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Buck Turgidson (George Scott), and President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). The entire movie is thrilled by the possible occurrence of an explosion in the world as a result of simple mistake. Stanley Kubrick has made a movie which looks comic at first but the fact is something else. Kubrick is noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism, his reluctance to talk about his films, and his reclusiveness. Kubrick’s films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail. The movie “Dr.Strangelove” is an unforgettable Kubrick’s masterpiece. He depicted the stress of leaders with scrutiny. The name “Strangelove” is also another point attracting the attention.

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World – primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies – and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States and its allies. Although the chief military forces never engaged in a major battle with each other, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states deemed vulnerable, proxy wars, espionage, propaganda, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race.

After the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, the USSR and the US saw each other as profound enemies of their basic ways of life. The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing some and maintaining others as satellite states, some of which were later consolidated as the Warsaw Pact (1955–1991). The US financed the recovery of Western Europe and forged NATO, a military alliance using containment of communism as a main strategy (Truman Doctrine). Some countries aligned with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and others formed the Non-Aligned Movement.

The US funded the Marshall Plan to effectuate a more rapid post-War recovery of Europe, while the Soviet Union refused to allow participation by Eastern Bloc members. Elsewhere, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR assisted and helped foster communist revolutions, opposed by several Western countries and their regional allies; some they attempted to roll back, with mixed results. Moscow supported the pro-communist revolt in Cuba, led by Fidel Castro, and in 1962 sent in nuclear missiles. That was intolerable to the Americans, who forced their removal in the Cuban Missile Crisis, as full-scale nuclear war threatened.
The Cold War featured cycles of relative calm and of high tension. The most tense involved the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959–1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1989), and the Able Archer 83 NATO exercises in November 1983. Both sides sought détente to relieve political tensions and deter direct military attack, which would probably guarantee their mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, under the Reagan Doctrine, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the nation was already suffering economic stagnation. In the late 1980s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika (“reconstruction”, “reorganization”, 1987) and glasnost (“openness”, ca. 1985). The Cold War ended after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power. The Cold War and its events have had a significant impact on the world today, and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially films and novels about spies [1].

Now the question is whether the cold war has ended after the collapse of Soviet Union. As the matter of fact, it seems that there are still tensions among major powers of the world. Russia and China from one side and US and its allies from the other have still seismic relations. Although this shaky atmosphere is not militarily threatened, at least yet, however the current economic slump may turn into a dangerous competition whose aftermath is not clear.

[1] Wikipedia

By: Hossein Aghababa

The movie is an epic story of the life of William Wallace (Mel Gibson) who is a Scottish rebel uprising against Edward the Longshanks as the tyrant king of England. The atmosphere, characters, and music take the spectator to Scotland at the years around 1300. Wallace, who has lost many of his beloved ones including his fiancé, takes revenge from a local commander in their neighborhood. Gradually, he and his allies attack to other castles and conquer the English army in a few battlefields. The movie is a mixture of military tactics, bloody battles, emotions, politics, treachery, and slogan. To be fair, Mel Gibson is number one in war movies scenes especially where infantries of both sides are supposed to run towards each other and mercilessly kill each other. Benjamin Martin in “Patriot”, Lt. Col. Hal Moore in “We Were Soldiers”, and here William Wallace are good examples of this idea. Randall Wallace as the writer and Mel Gibson as the director had teamed up excellently in this movie. The idea of defeating English army by Scottish farmers is under serious question. However, as far as mythology is concerned, it can be neglected. The movie supports this historical theory that freedom is obtained at the cost of many lives. However, the political freedom which Wallace and his allies were fighting for is much different from the concept which has been developed during the past centuries.

Political freedom (also known as political autonomy or political agency) is a central concept in Western history and political thought, and one of the most important (real or ideal) features of democratic societies [1]. It has been described as a relationship free of oppression [2] or coercion; [3] the absence of disabling conditions for a particular group or individual and the fulfillment of enabling conditions; [4] or the absence of lived conditions of compulsion, e.g. economic compulsion, in a society [5]. Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as the freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action,[6] it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action, and the exercise of social or group rights [7]. The concept can also include freedom from “internal” constraints on political action or speech (e.g. social conformity, consistency, or “inauthentic” behaviour[8].) The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.

Hannah Arendt traces the origins of the concept of freedom to the practice of politics in ancient Greece. According to her study, the concept of freedom was historically inseparable from political action. Politics could only be practiced by those who had freed themselves from the necessities of life, so that they could attend to the realm of political affairs. According to Arendt, the concept of freedom became associated with the Christian notion of freedom of the will, or inner freedom, around the 5th century C.E. and since then, freedom as a form of political action has been neglected, even though, as she says, freedom is “the raison d’être of politics [9].”

Arendt says that political freedom is historically opposed to sovereignty or will-power, since in ancient Greece and Rome, the concept of freedom was inseparable from performance, and did not arise as a conflict between the “will” and the “self.” Similarly, the idea of freedom as freedom from politics is a notion that developed in modern times. This is opposed to the idea of freedom as the capacity to “begin anew,” which Arendt sees as a corollary to the innate human condition of natality, or our nature as “new beginnings and hence beginners.”

In Arendt’s view, political action is an interruption of automatic process, either natural or historical. The freedom to begin anew is thus an extension of “the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known.”

Anyways, as Wallace said, it’s all for nothing if you don’t have freedom. The finale is the shout of the hero:”Freedom”.
1. Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?”, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, (New York: Penguin, 1993).

2. Iris Marion Young, “Five Faces of Oppression”, Justice and the Politics of Difference” (Princeton University press, 1990), 39-65.

3. Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

4. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Anchor Books, 2000).

5. Karl Marx, “Alienated Labour” in Early Writings.

6. Isaiah Berlin, Liberty (Oxford 2004).

7. Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong With Negative Liberty?”, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, 1985), 211-29.

8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”; Nikolas Kompridis, “Struggling Over the Meaning of Recognition: A Matter of Identity, Justice or Freedom?” in European Journal of Political Theory July 2007 vol. 6 no. 3 277-289.

9. Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?”, Between Past and Future: Eight exercises in political thought (New York: Penguin, 1993).

By: Hossein Aghababa