From: blakes7-d-request@lysator.liu.se
Subject: blakes7-d Digest V99 #341
X-Loop: blakes7-d@lysator.liu.se
X-Mailing-List: <blakes7-d@lysator.liu.se> archive/volume99/341
Precedence: list
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/digest; boundary="----------------------------"
To: blakes7-d@lysator.liu.se
Reply-To: blakes7@lysator.liu.se

------------------------------

Content-Type: text/plain

blakes7-d Digest				Volume 99 : Issue 341

Today's Topics:
	 [B7L] re: the TRUE realities of combat
	 [B7L] Re: Tarrant's Uniform
	 Re: [B7L] Realities of combat  
	 Re: [B7L] Realities of combat 
	 [B7L] Re: Sarcophagus
	 [B7L] Re:ferrets, etc.
	 Re: [B7L] Realities of combat  
	 Re: [B7L] Re: Sarcophagus
	 Re: [B7L] Realities of combat 
	 [B7L] Weekly B7/Fannish Auction Reminder
	 [B7L] Soldiers of Love 4

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 21:29:13 -0700
From: "Ellynne G." <rilliara@juno.com>
To: blakes7@lysator.liu.se
Subject: [B7L] re: the TRUE realities of combat
Message-ID: <19991208.082328.9006.1.Rilliara@juno.com>

Excerpts from Federation Military Applications (with apologies to a
friend who said she read these on a Gargoyles list--but they still apply)

1. Oh, believe us, you don't need to worry about the _retirement_
package.

2. Yes! Being attacked by 1,000 year dead corpses, succumbing to alien
plagues and being melted into goo are all covered under our health care
plan!

3. Not to worry! Marksmanship is NOT a requirement for the job!

Ellynne

___________________________________________________________________
Why pay more to get Web access?
Try Juno for FREE -- then it's just $9.95/month if you act NOW!
Get your free software today: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 21:20:08 -0700
From: "Ellynne G." <rilliara@juno.com>
To: blakes7@lysator.liu.se
Subject: [B7L] Re: Tarrant's Uniform
Message-ID: <19991208.082328.9006.0.Rilliara@juno.com>

On Mon, 6 Dec 1999 08:27:40 +1100 Kathryn Andersen
<kat@welkin.apana.org.au> writes:
>On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 09:18:01PM -0700, Helen Krummenacker wrote:
>> >  Unless of course he ended up in the company of the Black Friday
>> > Afternoon Kill All Fed Scum Popular Peoples Mad-Eyed Revolutionary 
>Front,
>> > but that's just one of the risks he'd have to take.
>> > 
>> > Neil
>> Well, you do sort of wonder about him wearing it to board the 
>Liberator.
>> But my guess is he noticed the lifepods go or something. After all,
>> going there he was going into the Mad-eyed Revolutionary Front, 
>unless
>> he knew they'd bailed.
>
>(with apologies and thanks to Ellynne G.)
>
No apologies needed. I loved it.

Ellynne

___________________________________________________________________
Why pay more to get Web access?
Try Juno for FREE -- then it's just $9.95/month if you act NOW!
Get your free software today: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 15:56:30 +0000 (GMT)
From: Iain Coleman <ijc@bsfiles.nerc-bas.ac.uk>
To: b7 <blakes7@lysator.liu.se>
Subject: Re: [B7L] Realities of combat  
Message-Id: <Pine.OSF.3.96.991208150539.32650B-100000@bsauasc>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Neil Faulkner wrote:

> Iain wrote:
> >Interestingly, though, B7 quite consciously attacks or subverts many of
> >the tropes of heroic fiction. There are even cases of troopers being
> >presented as likable human beings, then shot by rebels and dying slowly,
> >painfully and bloodily. These are exceptional, mind you. B7 does do far
> >more than other examples of its genre as far as _psychological_ realism is
> >concerned, particularly with Blake: it does still lack _physical_ realism.
> 
> It occurs to me that we might be entering into a confusion of realisms
> (largely engendered by my previous post - sorry).  There is tactical realism
> (the way fights are fought) and then there is the realism of weapon effects
> (blood and gore, though how much of this SF weaponry would generate is open
> to debate).  Although the two are not unconnected, it is possible to have
> one without the other.  Compare, for example, a film like 'Platoon' with the
> Vietnam TV series (forget what it was called - it had Paint It Black for its
> title theme) - the latter cut back heavily on the blood and bad language,
> but could still depict the tactical (and psychological) side reasonably well
> (or so I'm told, since I never saw a complete episode).

"Tour of Duty" it was called. I used to watch it simply to mock the
sanitised treatment of the conflict, but later episodes did get rather
more realistic, and were sometimes quite good.

> No, probably not.  But there's no need to enter the realm of being graphic
> for graphic's sake.  A lot can be merely suggested, though even suggesting
> the brutality of realism is likely to get Outraged of Tunbridge Wells on the
> phone.  The parental angle is more problematic, since the B7 I would like to
> have seen would probably not have been suitable for very young children, yet
> the series does go down well with the kids.  OTOH, I'm not at all happy with
> the way impressionable young minds are force-fed the bilge that passes for
> family entertainment.

I'm with you there. Even non-graphic brutality would not go down terribly
well on a family show, though. Consider the torture scene in "Reservoir
Dogs": this is generally regarded as violent, shocking and definitely
unsuitable for small children and maiden aunts, yet the gory bits happen
off-screen.

> 
> >Another is the inheritance of dramatic conventions. <snip Gunfight at the
> OK Shuttle Park> Why do they go like this? Because they always have. That's
> what people are used to staging, so that's what gets done. You might as well
> ask why
> futuristic indoor scenes are always insanely overlit.
> 
> What, like Blake's base on GP, you mean?  The power of convention is only as
> great as people's willingness to subscribe to it.  The fault lies with
> hidebound writers, directors and producers for not daring to break the
> mould.
> 

There is a lot of inertia to overcome in doing things differently.
Breaking that mold requires someone with the Will to Power (sorry, veering
off into Nietzscheland), er, the will to force and see through the new
way. Chris Boucher certainly had the will to push his scripts in the
direction of psychological realism and moral ambiguity, and some actors
were willing to help things go in that direction. Realistic depictions of
combat, though, would really depend on the producer: there are serious
issues of budget, time and public reaction. While I'm sure David Maloney
was keen to do his best to deliver solid sci-fi drama on a shoestring, I
don't imagine he was terribly interested in pushing the envelope of
on-screen violence at the same time. For things to go the way we would
both have liked, he would have to have been prepared to really push for
it.

It's even harder to see Vere "silver frocks, darling" Lorrimer doing this,
although I think the open-air ambush scen in "Traitor" actually comes the
closest to real combat in B7. 

> >Finally, there's budget.
> 
> Ah, -that- again!
> 
> I can't really argue with any of those three points, since they were
> obviously all in force when the series was being made.  B7 was constrained
> by financial practicality, audience expectation and standardised modes of
> production (though the interrelationship between the latter two is
> interesting - 'We make it this way because you expect us to.  You expect us
> to because this is the way we make it...')
> 

There is a definite feedback going on there. It's a bit like language:
dramatic conventions set up a vocabulary which the audience comes to
understand easily, and it's always easiest to talk to people in a language
they understand. Going against dramatic convention will always put off
some section of the audience. It will also really grip another section, of
course, but the former group is invariably bigger than the latter group. I
do experimental theatre, darling, I know this all too well.

You or I may well say "Artistic integrity first, last and always! Give the
masses what they need, not what they want! Art _should_ be uncomfortable!"
As a BBC producer trying to attract a mass audience, whose career depends
on the ratings, one probably has to settle for pushing the envelope just a
tiny bit.

> >That's possible. I'm pretty sure the conventional gunfight I outlined
> >above has its roots in cowboy movies, at any rate. The more general "clean
> 
> >killing" thing may have older roots, though, in chivalrous romances. These
> >present heroic fictional combat to an audience without first-hand
> >experience. By contrast, Homer and the Greek tragedians have lots of blood
> >and brutality.
> 
> I know next to nothing about chivalrous romance. 

Same here. I must admit I'm bullshitting wildly on this point.

 You mean stuff like Le
> Morte d'Arthur or Amadis of Gaul?  Plenty of violence in those, but they're
> restricted by their form (words only, in verse format).  Contemporary battle
> paintings depict plenty of death and mayhem.  Theatre, likewise, was
> constrained in its depiction of realism, even though it was a visual medium.

I don't think this is quite true - perhaps another case of "different
kinds of realism". If you look at, say, the scene in "King Lear" where
Gloucester has his eyes put out, it's pretty intensely brutal and
realistic. Or a production of "Macbeth" I saw in Glasgow, which was
profoundly shocking and moving in its violence: Lady Macduff's murder had
audience members sobbing.

You can't do the blood-and-guts stuff very well in the theatre, but if
everything else is convincing enough, you really don't need to.

> It was not until the advent of first cinema and then television that the
> full reality of violence could be given to an audience unacquainted with
> that reality - who have more or less consistently rejected it, preferring a
> vicarious adrenaline rush whilst closing all eyes firmly against its deeper
> implications.
> 
> Further to my original supposition on the need for violence to be depicted
> as 'clean', I think it's also necessary for it to be shown to be under
> control.  This too renders it 'safe' and acceptable as entertainment.

I think it's if anything wider than that. The idea of the clean kill, the
surgical strike, the battle where only the truly evil die, where there are
no consequences to anyone else, is important in the popular modern view of
military operations.

> The most ludicrous example of such controlled violence that I can think of
> is the scene in Terminator II when Big Arnie lets rip with a minigun at a
> carpark and kills precisely no one.  Okay, so it's a joke, but it's a joke
> whose ironies are buried too deep within its medium to expose its own
> fallacious suppositions.  This would seem to be a recurrent problem with the
> Hollywood action movie - it doesn't know how seriously to take itself,
> caught between the hammer and anvil of verisimilitude and notions of
> 'entertainment'. 

I remember the most ludicrous part of that scene was the blinking text in
the terminator's POV: "Casualties 0.0" I mean, what's 0.1 casualties?
Never mind how you could estimate such a thing in the fog of war.

In that movie, young John Connor tells the Terminator "Don't kill anyone,"
and for the rest of the movie, no matter how much mayhem is caused, no
matter how many thousands of rounds are fired, the Terminator doesn't kill
a single person. This is analogous to the comforting thought that, if we
tell our soldiers to avoid civilian casualties, no civilians will suffer.
It would have been more appropriate for the Terminator's display to read
"Collateral damage: 75.3 civilians"

There's a pervasive cultural idea, which I think emanates from the USA
(though I'd welcome correction), that as long as your intentions are good,
you won't be responsible for anything really bad.

> I must stop reading media studies texts
> I must stop reading media studies texts
> I must stop reading media studies texts
> I must stop reading media studies texts

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Iain

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 23:05:56 +0000
From: Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
To: blakes7@lysator.liu.se
Subject: Re: [B7L] Realities of combat 
Message-Id: <199912072305.XAA08892@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Neil Faulkner wrote:
> > The physical cleanliness
> > of combat in shows like B7 (and many others) reflects the moral cleanliness
> > that the proponents of combat seek to advocate - the legitimacy of killing
> > requires that it be turned into a bloodless process, and also an absolute
> > one, with no interim state between dead and alive (save the occasional flesh
> > wound inflicted on one of the heroes).

Yep, although there's also the dramatic aspects - you want the heroes
to have _some_ trouble while accomplishing their main goal, but it's
not to overshadow the main goal itself (or, if it does, it's because
the "real" goal is just the premise for the conflict).

But I suspect this is minor compared with the reasons Iain cites.

> Another is the inheritance of dramatic conventions. Gun battles go like
> this:
[...]
> Why do they go like this? Because they always have.

It's the same thing, in microcosm:
- Goal: get past trooper B.
- Problem: Trooper A is shooting
- Solution: kill Trooper A, leaving Avon to deal with the real goal.

but it's got to be simple, because each trooper shot costs money.

> Finally, there's budget.

And ability. Scripting a realistic combat costs time and effort,
and requires the scripter to know what's a reasonable demand of the
actors in question. Gary's "Martial Arts in..." series of panels
highlight the difference between Actor/Stuntman and Actor/Actor
combats. Jackie Chan tried making films in the US a long time ago,
and gave up for a while because "they gave me a week to film the
fight sequences. I could take a week filming a single punch".

> The more general "clean
> killing" thing may have older roots, though, in chivalrous romances. These
> present heroic fictional combat to an audience without first-hand
> experience. By contrast, Homer and the Greek tragedians have lots of blood
> and brutality.

It's interesting. How much was the depiction of violence affected by
having a generation that had been involved in a World War? Or had
parents involved? Does the first-hand knowledge mean things are more
real, or does it mean that others get shielded from the horrors?
Does the greater realism of Reservoir Dogs (stomach wounds) or something
like The Rock ("You've been around dead bodies - is that normal?") reflect
a more liberal media, or just a mass audience that's more used to
urban warfare?

Me, I've got no idea.

steve

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 19:23:37 GMT
From: Murray Smith <mjsmith@tcd.ie>
To: Lysator <Blakes7@lysator.liu.se>
Subject: [B7L] Re: Sarcophagus
Message-Id: <l03110700b4745e46ad77@[134.226.96.44]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

I've been reading the various opinions of fellow list members about
'Sarcophagus', in particular the row between Avon and Tarrant while Cally
activated the alien artifact. My own opinion is that while the row was
instigated by the alien, in order to distract the attention of the crew
from Cally's activation, it did not succeed. Avon noticed the activation,
and continued the row to ensure that Tarrant and Dayna didn't notice
anything.

If we look at where Cally, Tarrant, Avon and Dayna are on the flight deck
at the time, Cally, when she is pushing the buttons on the artifact, is
within Avon's line of sight; so it is quite possible that he saw her do
this. At this time, Tarrant is going on about succeeding not just at games,
but at life. Avon than takes the opportunity to throw some more fuel on the
fire, making the comment that 'You [Tarrant] also talk too much', which
leads to a continuation of the row until Dayna's intervention.

Why did Avon do all this? My guess is that he already suspected that an
alien presence, in some way telepathic, was using Cally to take over the
_Liberator_. Being confident of Cally's loyalty, he concluded that the
alien was trying to subvert the former's will in stages, until she would be
too weak to resist. The only way to deal with the alien would be to 'flush'
it out into the open, to make it show itself, then giving Cally a chance to
deal with it. If he or any of the others stopped Cally activating the
artifact, then the alien might have used a more subtle strategy, one that
they might not have detected until it was too late.

What do people think?


Murray

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 21:05:42 -0700
From: Helen Krummenacker <avona@jps.net>
To: blakes7@lysator.liu.se
Subject: [B7L] Re:ferrets, etc.
Message-ID: <384F2A96.507D@jps.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

> 
> I think Alison suggested that Avon was the stoat, and Pat Patera then 
> suggested the skunk.  Personally, I think the skunk is appropriate, at least 
> for the first two seasons. ;-)  
> 
Fits his clothing choices by and large, too.

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 08:31:23 -0000
From: "Neil Faulkner" <N.Faulkner@tesco.net>
To: "b7" <blakes7@lysator.liu.se>
Subject: Re: [B7L] Realities of combat  
Message-ID: <001501bf4220$05103c40$6014ac3e@default>
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Iain wrote:
>"Tour of Duty" it was called. I used to watch it simply to mock the
>sanitised treatment of the conflict, but later episodes did get rather
>more realistic, and were sometimes quite good.

Ah, so that was its name!  I knew it was 'thing' of 'thingy', but I got duty
confused with glory and couldn't get closer than what I knew to be an old
Kubrick film.  (Which could lead us to ponder further, through another of
his works, on the difference between realistic depictions of violence and
artistic representations of it.  Next year, apparently, us Brits finally get
the chance to find out.)

Funny thing is, you could see the sanitised TV show and the unsanitised
movie (eg; Platoon) on the same channel, in the same time slot (ITV
broadcast ToD close to midnight, IIRC), potentially netting the same
audience.  So how come the TV show is sanitised so much more than the film?
Is it really the budget per se, when minute for minute TV is cheaper than
film (or at least so I guess)?  What role do the different funding
mechanisms play in determining the parameters available to different media?
Personally I suspect there is a public expectation at work that TV is not
permitted to go as far as cinematic works in depicting certain content
(namely the Big Three of violence, sex and 'bad' language - an unfortunate
lumping together of three very different things that have no good cause to
be associated with each other).

>Even non-graphic brutality would not go down terribly
>well on a family show, though. Consider the torture scene in "Reservoir
>Dogs": this is generally regarded as violent, shocking and definitely
>unsuitable for small children and maiden aunts, yet the gory bits happen
>off-screen.

The issue of violence is further complicated, since it is not only what is
done that matters but the way in which it is perpetrated.  The RD torture
scene carries so much impact through, amongst other things, the
near-inevitably of a viewer identifying with the victim rather than the
torturer, the victim's utter helplessness, and - Tarantino's masterstroke -
the presentation of the scene as primarily comic in form, confounding
cinematic convention and audience expectation which throws the viewer into a
state of confusion (if not outright repulsion).  There is probably more
actual violence (insofar as violence can be quantified at all) in the
free-for-all punch-ups that concluded every episode of Batman (Adam West
version), and although this also takes a comic form, it is within the
framework of a comic form (not to mention comic strip) that asserts the
unreality not only of the fight scenes, but of the entire programme.

Hey, this is fun!


>> >Another is the inheritance of dramatic conventions. <snip Gunfight at
the
>> OK Shuttle Park> Why do they go like this? Because they always have.
That's
>> what people are used to staging, so that's what gets done. You might as
well
>> ask why
>> futuristic indoor scenes are always insanely overlit.


Good question - -why- are they insanely overlit.  And why do gunfights go
the way they do?  Not because they always have, because there was a time
(and not so long ago) when there was no cinema to portray them in that way
(or indeed any other way).  Once upon a time, there weren't even any guns.
Dramatic conventions don't just happen, they evolve, and it's the
evolutionary process, and the forces that direct it towards one particular
mode or another, that interests me.  And probably only me:(

>While I'm sure David Maloney
>was keen to do his best to deliver solid sci-fi drama on a shoestring, I
>don't imagine he was terribly interested in pushing the envelope of
>on-screen violence at the same time. For things to go the way we would
>both have liked, he would have to have been prepared to really push for
>it.


I think we've gone a bit off-track here.  There are, of course, very sound
reasons for B7 being made the way it was.  We can cite, as you have quite
rightly cited, budget, dramatic convention (a confluence of the conventions
of television drama and notions of what consitutes 'science fiction'), and
audience expectation.  The question of budget can be dealt with fairly
summarily - there is only so much money to go round - though we could make a
side excursion into the internal politics of BBC funding (why should SF in
particular be so under-funded, etc?).  The other two factors are culturally
and historically rooted, however, and extend beyond the limits of B7 itself.

I don't think there's anything to be gained from discussing this issue
(assuming anyone really wants to discuss it anyway) within a rhetoric of
complaint (ie; railing against the failure of B7 to be made in the way we
might think it should have been made).  The series is immutably over and
done with - we can't go back and threaten David Maloney's hamster with
hideous death if he doesn't make the series 'properly'.  Nor do I see much
point in daydreaming over how things might have been.  We can only take what
was (and still is) and seek an explanation for it being the way it is.

>You can't do the blood-and-guts stuff very well in the theatre, but if
>everything else is convincing enough, you really don't need to.


No arguments there.  See my comments on Reservoir Dogs.

>> Further to my original supposition on the need for violence to be
depicted
>> as 'clean', I think it's also necessary for it to be shown to be under
>> control.  This too renders it 'safe' and acceptable as entertainment.
>
>I think it's if anything wider than that. The idea of the clean kill, the
>surgical strike, the battle where only the truly evil die, where there are
>no consequences to anyone else, is important in the popular modern view of
>military operations.

I think we might be venturing into chicken-and-egg territory here!

>There's a pervasive cultural idea, which I think emanates from the USA
>(though I'd welcome correction), that as long as your intentions are good,
>you won't be responsible for anything really bad.

I think (I -hope-!) that Hollywood consistently underestimates the
intelligence and awareness of its home audience.  OTOH, that was the
audience that largely rejected Starship Troopers and Mars Attacks!, two
films which undermine prevailing cinematic convention and which both fared
much better at the box office in Europe than they did at home.


>> I must stop reading media studies texts
>> I must stop reading media studies texts
>> I must stop reading media studies texts
>> I must stop reading media studies texts
>
>All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Now there's a great idea.  I could really enjoy a Christmas marooned in a
snowbound hotel.  Not sure I'd want Shelley Duval for company though.  Jan
Chappell, on the other hand...

Neil, who has so far managed to restrain from deploying the word 'bourgeois'

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 19:33:30 +1100
From: Kathryn Andersen <kat@welkin.apana.org.au>
To: "Blake's 7 list" <blakes7@lysator.liu.se>
Subject: Re: [B7L] Re: Sarcophagus
Message-ID: <19991209193330.A27306@welkin.apana.org.au>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Wed, Dec 08, 1999 at 07:23:37PM +0000, Murray Smith wrote:
> Why did Avon do all this? My guess is that he already suspected that an
> alien presence, in some way telepathic, was using Cally to take over the
> _Liberator_. Being confident of Cally's loyalty, he concluded that the
> alien was trying to subvert the former's will in stages, until she would be
> too weak to resist. The only way to deal with the alien would be to 'flush'
> it out into the open, to make it show itself, then giving Cally a chance to
> deal with it. If he or any of the others stopped Cally activating the
> artifact, then the alien might have used a more subtle strategy, one that
> they might not have detected until it was too late.
> 
> What do people think?

Much as I love the black-and-silver one, I think that is attributing
near-omniscence to someone who is only human, however clever he is.
Telling Tarrant he talks too much is not really something that is
designed to *continue* an argument; considering that what Avon is
saying is that he thinks the whole argument is silly, I don't really
see how that fits.  Avon is only suspicious at this point.  If he
*knew* what was wrong, then the obvious thing to do would have been to
destroy the artifact, before Cally could activate it.
Any second attempt by an alien influence would be *less* likely to
succeed than the first, because forewarned is forearmed; Cally would
be more likely to *resist* if she knew what was happening.
"More subtle" could well be "too subtle to actually achieve anything"
-- particularly if the alien technology was destroyed.

So I don't think your theory washes.

-- 
 _--_|\	    | Kathryn Andersen		<kat@welkin.apana.org.au>
/      \    | 		http://home.connexus.net.au/~kat
\_.--.*/    | #include "standard/disclaimer.h"
      v	    |
------------| Melbourne -> Victoria -> Australia -> Southern Hemisphere
Maranatha!  |	-> Earth -> Sol -> Milky Way Galaxy -> Universe

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 11:20:00 -0000 
From: Alison Page <alison_page@becta.org.uk>
To: "'blakes7@lysator.liu.se'" <blakes7@lysator.liu.se>
Subject: Re: [B7L] Realities of combat 
Message-ID: <21B0197931E1D211A26E0008C79F6C4A60C017@BRAMLEY>
Content-Type: text/plain

Neil said -
> Dramatic conventions don't just happen, they evolve, and it's the
evolutionary process, and the forces that direct it towards one particular
mode or another, 
> that interests me. And probably only me:( 
Are you kidding? This is fascinating stuff.
Here's my take on it. After TV attained a mass market in the late 50s
(earlier in the US I suppose), film came under a kind of Darwinian pressure
to evolve or die. The censorial attention that had been directed at film
(Hayes code etc.) was redirected at the more intimate medium of TV, so that
film now had two advantages it could exploit in comparison to TV:
- longer, bigger budget 'epic' quality
- looser regulation in terms of sex, violence and language
This impetus pushed directors like Polanski or Sergio Leone to work hard on
evolving new ways of depicting violence - while lesser directors just copped
out with buckets of blood, and zero thought. 
TV makers didn't have these pressures, or freedoms. As a result the
depiction of violence on TV in the seventies was at a similar position to
its depiction in movies in the 1930s and 40s. 
And now - I think - the work that was done to push forward artistic
conventions has increased the expectations of the TV audience (who after all
are the same as the film audience) and so we now expect 'better' depiction
of violence than we get in B7. I mean better in terms of more realistic
about consequences and more visually explicit. I think B7 was ahead of its
time in terms of the emotional and moral consequences of violence: well, to
some extent.
Alison
___________________________________________________________________

Alison Page 
Chief Executive's Policy Unit, Becta, 
alison_page@becta.org.uk

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 07:42:55 EST
From: Bizarro7@aol.com
To: blakes7@lysator.liu.se, freedom-city@blakes-7.org
Subject: [B7L] Weekly B7/Fannish Auction Reminder
Message-ID: <0.ce80f6ff.2580fdcf@aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Just a heads-up that the Holiday edition of our ongoing ebay auction of items 
from our collection of BLAKES 7 and other fannish photos and memorabilia can 
be viewed at: http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/ashton7/

For those who can do a direct hyperlink:  <A 
HREF="http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/ashton7/">eBay View About Me for ashton7
</A> 

We've currently got a batch of nifty out-take and production photos from 
various seasons on display to round out your collection, including Blake, 
Avon, Vila, Soolin, Gan, Jenna, Dayna, Tarrant and more. Take a look and 
remember...registering on ebay to bid is completely free.

Leah & Annie

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 15:59:17 +0000 (GMT)
From: Judith Proctor <Judith@blakes-7.demon.co.uk>
To: Lysator List <Blakes7@lysator.liu.se>
cc: Freedom City <freedom-city@blakes-7.org>
Subject: [B7L] Soldiers of Love 4
Message-ID: <Marcel-1.46-1209155917-313Rr9i@blakes-7.demon.co.uk>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII

Soldiers of Love 4 is now available.  It's camp, it's smutty, it's funny!  And
that's just the back cover!

It's also got Gareth Thomas (Blake), Jan Chappel (Cally), Michael Keating (Vila)
and Nicholas Courtney (the Brigader).

What does Jan sound like as a giant alien frog with evil intentions?

Is it true that the camp Welsh producer is back?

Did Mydas Mydasson really host 'finger that flange' the game show for visually
impaired plumbers?

Yours for a mere 10 quid including UK postage to Judith Proctor, 28 Diprose rd,
Corfe Mullen, Wimborne, Dorset, BH21 3QY.

Go on, treat yourself for Xmas - just don't let your Auntie Mabel hear it!

These CDs have great replay value - they're not things you just listen to once
(uness you have a different sense of humour, in which case you'll hate them)

CDs 1,2,3 are all available from me.  Same price, full details of the earlier
ones are on http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7

They can also be ordered via Linda Knights, and Horizon probably have copies
(check their web site).

Contact me if you're interested in signed photos, scripts etc.  Availability is
limited on those.

Judith
-- 
http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7 -  Fanzines for Blake's 7, B7 Filk songs,
pictures, news, Conventions past and present, Blake's 7 fan clubs, Gareth
Thomas, etc.  (also non-Blake's 7 zines at http://www.nas.com/~lknight )
Redemption '01  23-25 Feb 2001 http://www.smof.com/redemption/

--------------------------------
End of blakes7-d Digest V99 Issue #341
**************************************