July 27, 2015 – RI Future

Sister Ann Keefe “was not a saint, she was better than that. She was human,” said her sister Kathy Keefe to an impressive crowd of 200 people at the newly christened Sister Ann Keefe Post Office at 820 Elmwood in Providence. Sister Ann, a community activist who started or helped to start nearly two dozen organizations in the service of social justice, including the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, ¡City Arts! for Youth and AIDS Care Ocean State died earlier this year from brain cancer. She was 62. The post office, located in South Providence, a community that Sister Ann served so passionately during her lifetime, was named in her honor.

US Representative David Cicilline introduced the legislation that began the process of renaming the building in Sister Ann’s honor in February. In the present political climate, said Cicilline, even getting a bill like this passed presented difficulties. Representative James Langevin cosponsored the bill, and Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed pursued the legislation in the Senate. Ultimately, President Barrack Obama signed H.R. 651 into law in May. Thus, the Sister Ann Keefe Post Office became the first US Post Office named for a nun.

Senators Whitehouse and Reed were not at the dedication ceremony, having been called back to Washington to vote on a transportation/infrastructure bill, but Cicilline and Langevin, along with other many elected officials, were eager to put in an appearance at the event, a tribute to Sister Ann’s influence.

The best parts of the dedication ceremony were the tributes from Sister Ann’s family and the community she served. Her biological sister, Mary Blanchet, read a letter to Sister Ann, recalling memories from their lives. Another sister, Kathy Keefe, read a poem from A.A. Milne.

Elijah Matthews read an award winning poem written by his sister, Victoria Matthews about Sister Ann. Elijah was introduced by his mother, Pamela Matthews. Victoria Matthews was at a sorority event out of town. Elijah’s reading of the poem earned a well deserved standing ovation.

The ¡City Arts! Bucket Drummers and the Saint Michael’s Community Choir provided the music.

We are now through July and, to that extent, the almost done with entire summer movie season. With releases like ‘Mad Max’ and ‘Jurassic World,’ we have seen a plethora of by-the-numbers blockbusters that all seem strangely familiar. This is not an accident; rather, there is a basic grammar and vocabulary that defines the programming of any and all action films. As early as the works of Abel Gance, it was understood that editorial tricks could be used to manipulate viewers and generate reactions on a psychological level. This was later codified by the Soviet film makers Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, whose work remains extremely tenable despite the collapse of the USSR. Kuleshov’s experiments demonstrated the way audiences react and insinuate their own interpretations into viewing materials when they have no real reason to do so, whereas Eisenstein formulated his theory of the montage using the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic to describe film in the context of historical materialism.

The first true American blockbuster was without any doubt the DW Griffith film ‘Birth of a Nation.’ Released in May 1915, it was the first multi-reel epic film that broke every previous convention, going beyond the usual length and breadth of the 15-minute short films and tackling one of the greatest blood baths in American history, the Civil War. But Griffith also created a picture that would do great harm to our society for decades. The second half of the picture retells the story of Reconstruction as a debacle, featuring black men as imbeciles, mixed-ethnicity ‘mulattoes’ as sexual beasts, and the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of Southern female virtue. As a result of the film’s release, the Klan saw its ranks explode and the civil rights movement’s gains were set back decades.

Several months ago, I had the opportunity to sit down with MIT linguist Dr. Noam Chomsky. Based off the work of Warren Buckland, Michel Colin, and others, there is now a veritable sub-branch of cinema studies that has taken prior work dealing with the semiotics of cinema and re-written the genre using the Chomskyan theories of transformative generative grammar. The resulting conversation is quite instructive to our own dialogue about race and racism in America as well as our thought process regarding what we would now call the summer blockbuster.

Day: July 27, 2015

Post Office dedicated to Sister Ann Keefe

‘Birth Of A Grammar With Noam Chomsky’ and summer blockbuster culture