Thursday, January 16, 2020

IF YOU LOVE B GRADE FILMS THEN ROGER CORMAN IS THE MASTER 

At 93, Roger Corman Has No Intention of Retiring


Roger Corman is alive and well and up to his old tricks.

At 93, the prodigiously prolific director, producer and mini-major mogul has been in the business long enough to receive scores of lifetime achievement awards — he’ll be getting another one this week in Houston, courtesy of the Houston Film Critics Society — and solidify his status as equal parts living legend and eminence grise.

He has more than 400 films to his credit, including the no-budget B-movies (“Attack of the Crab Monsters,” “The Creature from the Haunted Sea”), darkly comical cult-faves (“Little Shop of Horrors,” “A Bucket of Blood”) and stylishly gothic Edgar Allen Poe adaptations (“House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum”) he made in the 1950s and ‘60s, and the dozens of films he produced for American-International and his own companies, New World and Concorde Pictures, that provided major career boosts for such up-and-comers as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Gale Anne Hurd and on and on and on.
In 2009, the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors voted to give Corman an honorary Oscar “for his unparalleled ability to nurture aspiring filmmakers by providing an environment that no film school could match.”



But Corman isn’t ready to rest on his laurels as creator and mentor. In fact, he’s too busy to do much resting at all. During the past year, he served as executive producer for the Chinese-Vietnamese co-production “Abduction,” a sci-fi action-adventure starring Scott Adkins and Andy On, and co-hosted — along with his wife, producer Julie Corman — “Cult-Tastic: Tales from the Trenches with Roger and Julie Corman,” a hugely entertaining and frankly revealing documentary series for Shout! Factory TV. More recently, he began pre-production for “Crime City,” a thriller that Corman cheerfully describes as a return to his B-movie roots, and will incorporate footage of devastation caused this year by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas. (What’s it all about? That’s hard to say — he’s still working on just how to make best use of that great footage.)
Speaking of the Bahamas: A few weeks ago, Corman attended the Bahamas International Film Festival to conduct mentoring sessions for novice screenwriters, and to introduce a special screening of “Abduction.” That’s where I was able to speak with him about his past, present and future in the word of indie filmmaking.

Would you advise every enterprising young filmmaker to be on the lookout for footage of disasters, natural or otherwise, to take advantage of?

It depends upon the filmmaker and what he wants to do. If he’s interested in doing that kind of film, by all means. And it doesn’t have to be a natural disaster or something like that. It can be anything that comes up in the headlines. I remember when the first Sputnik went up, I heard about it that night. At nine o’clock the next morning, I was in Steve Broidy’s office at Allied Artists. And I said, “Steve, if you can give me $80,000, I will have a picture about satellites ready to go into the theaters in 90 days.” And then he said, “What’s the story?” And I said, “I have no idea, but I will have the picture ready.” And he said, “Done.” And he gave me the money. And so we went off and made “War of the Satellites.”
Well, as you’ve often pointed out, the term “exploitation picture” originally was used to describe movies that “exploited” current events, timely issues. Like “The Trip” and “The Wild Angels,” two very successful films you directed in the 1960s. But there really aren’t many of those “ripped from the headlines” movies anymore, right?

That’s true. They were more common when medium- and low-budget pictures had full theatrical releases. So if you were aligned with a distribution company, you knew you would be in the theaters at a certain day and it would still be timely. Today there’s so much time spent in pre-production discussions, talking with the lawyers, one thing and another, and it slows you down. And if you’re not going into theaters, it goes on television, and it loses a little bit. Or streaming, whatever. To me, it loses a little bit of that impact you had by being in the theaters with the big ads on Friday.

Much has been written about your dollar-stretching and penny-pinching approach to indie filmmaking. Your ability to recycle sets, footage and even musical scores from movie to movie truly is the stuff of legend. How much do you think being a child of the Depression has shaped, not only your life, but your career?

I think it has shaped me and everyone else who grew up at that time. With the exception of, well, let’s say the top one percent, or something like that, everybody was affected by it. Now, my father had a job all the way through the Depression so we were not stuck for food, or anything like that. But nevertheless, my brother and I were vaguely aware that he might have moved up more, had it not been for the Depression. And we were aware of people around us. So it didn’t have an immediate effect upon us, but we were aware of everything that was happening around us at the time. And I think that affected our entire outlook towards life.

So when you got into making movies, the idea of “waste not, want not” obviously stuck with you. I mean there have been jokes about it — even you have joked about it — but there really were times when you simply said, “Well, if you’re going to have the sets up for another few days, why not make another movie?”
[Laughs] Yeah, exactly. Now, it might’ve been in my character anyway, but it was amplified by the Depression.

You were one of the first producers to fully grasp the profit potential of the home-video market — not only for theatrical releases, but made-for-video product. More recently, you have produced made-for-cable movies, and movies that are released simultaneously as streaming and theatrical fare. If a young Roger Corman were just starting out today, what platform do you think you’d concentrate on?

First, I would say it’s much more difficult today. When I started, any picture that had at least some reasonable merit to it got a full theatrical release. Today for medium- and low-budget pictures, it’s the exception for a picture to get a full theatrical release. Generally, the only ones that seem to be able to make that jump are what I might refer to as auteur-driven films. But for the majority of straight action films of one kind or another, it’s very difficult to get a theatrical release. And the home video market has slipped. That market is still there to a certain extent, so you shouldn’t discount it. But it can’t be counted on for a big payoff. Which leaves pretty much streaming. Netflix and the others, they’re looking for the home-run pictures. They do take an occasional lower-budget picture. But it’s difficult to find the right slot for that. So that end of the business has become much more difficult.

At the same time, wouldn’t you agree that, thanks to technological advances, it’s much easier to actually make movies cheaply than it was when you were starting out in the 1950s?

It’s easier to make a picture today than it ever was. We had big, heavy, bulky equipment. Big Mitchell cameras, big lights. I remember there was one light that was called the Brute. It was so big, it took two men to move this light around. Today you’ve got lightweight digital cameras. Sound is very lightweight. The lights, particularly with LED and everything, you can move faster, more efficiently and less expensively. You don’t have to pay a lab to develop your film and go through the answer print, the trial print and all of that. It’s done digitally. So, yes, the making of the film is easier and more efficient today as it ever was. But the distribution is more difficult, in my opinion, than it ever was. Because, as I say, with the occasional exception, you’re probably not going to get a theatrical release.
Of all the many films you’ve produced, it seems to me that “Death Race 2000” is the one that has best claim to being the gift that’s kept on giving. You made the original film back in 1975 for New World Pictures, then served as executive producer for the 2008 remake, “Death Race.” And then you were involved with three direct-to-video spinoffs that were prequels or sequels to the remake.

Right. Universal had the right to do the remake and the follow-up films. And two years ago, they wanted to make a final one. And I was talking to them, and I said, “You know, I think you missed some things that I thought were good in the original that you didn’t have.” They said, “Well, why don’t you make the fifth one?” So I made the fifth one — “Death Race 2050.” The budget was a little bit under $2 million, and it was clear from the start what was going to happen: It was going to go out on Universal DVD, and had been pre-sold to Netflix. But here’s the thing: I was out on one of those little publicity junkets that they generally put you on. There was a very nice young woman from the Universal publicity department. And some interviewer somewhere asked me, “What is the distribution plan on this?” And I said, “Well, this for me is a big-budget picture, but for Universal it’s a low-budget picture. So it’s not going out theatrically, it’s going out on DVD. And then after that it will be on Netflix.” And that’s when the publicist took me aside and said, “Roger, it’s going out on Netflix the same day it’s going out on DVD.” And I thought, this clearly diminishes the sales on DVD. Why would Universal do this? And the answer is, the power of Netflix. Because, in a rational world, you would at least give a DVD a month or something like that before going to streaming. But it’s clear streaming was the goal. The DVD was just a little icing on the cake because some people still like to have a hard copy of films.

Back when you were operating New World and Concorde, you produced a lot of saucy movies about oversexed strippers, nurses, and women in prison. At the same time, though, you were giving women opportunities to direct films a lot more often than the majors were.
Oh, yes. We had many women directors, producers and so forth. It wasn’t that I was favoring women, it was that I was finding the best person for the job. And it made no difference to me whether they were men or women. So, therefore assuming — which I think is correct — the qualities are roughly equal in both sexes, forget about the morality of it. In a more efficient world, women should be holding down about the same level of jobs on different areas as men. [Laughs] Of course, at the time you’re talking about, women weren’t being hired as much. So therefore, the pool of qualified women was greater than it would have been if hiring was equitable.

What can you tell us about “Crime City,” the film you’ll be producing here in the Bahamas?

I’m going to be using footage of the devastation caused by Hurricane Dorian. I found a cameraman who had flown a drone over the areas that were hit hardest. I looked at his footage and I thought, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I mean, the devastation goes on and on and on. So I licensed the footage he shot from the drone, and then I hired him to go back and get me ground shots. So I’ve got the devastation covered from the air, from moving aerial shots, and from set shots on the ground. And I found out the schedule for when the Bahamian government is going to clear out the devastation. So we may be starting in March.

Do you have your script ready yet?

No. My problem is, I’ve started with just footage, and I wrote an outline in an afternoon. But you know what? It’s a little bit like fun again. I know I’ve got a deadline. I know all of this is there. But to be honest, I started it deliberately, because I’ve got a couple of projects that are going to take some time — they’re bigger-budget pictures to put together. Nothing I’m doing is on the ground right now. And I thought about this and I figured, “This is the way I started. It would be fun to go back and see if I can do at my age what I did when I was in my twenties.” So I’m doing “Crime City” partially to make a picture that will look very big in relationship to the budget, but also just to see if I can recreate the fun that we used to have. And, actually, the people I’m talking to who would be working with me — to them they’re all taking it the same way.
You’re 93 years old now, but you show little sign of slowing down. Do you have a secret formula for remaining spry and active?

Not really. It’s a combination of watching what you eat, and exercise. Also, it’s been shown that if your brain is working, solving problems and such, it actually enables your brain to stay functioning more than if you’re sitting at home watching television all day long. Jon Davison, who used to be my assistant, went on to produce “RoboCop” and “Airplane!” and other films. We were having lunch a little while ago in California, and he said, “I’ve decided to retire.” And I said, “Jon, I always saw you as a kid in the office. Now you’re telling me you’re retiring? If you’re retiring, maybe it’s time for me to retire.” And he said, “Roger, you’re too old to retire.” Maybe he’s right.
The “Unhealthy” in “The Fall of the House of Usher”: Poe’s Aesthetics of Contamination
David Roche


In L’Imagination malsaine (L’Harmattan, 2008), I tried to follow Freud’s example in “The Uncanny” by starting with a study of the adjective “malsain,”feeling that some of the ambiguities raised by the morphology of the French Word were lost in the English word, “unhealthy.”

Historically, the adjective was mainly used to describe physical and mental ailments; the non-literal or“moral” sense of the word (which is predominant in contemporary French and has come to mean “immoral,” “perverse” or “disturbing”) was employed later in the nineteenth century when it was notably used to describe literary works.If the adjective initially suggested the idea of contamination or contagion (whichmedical usage distinguishes insomuch as the first is propagated by the non-human, the second by the human), the non-literal sense would tend to be metaphorical. Gérard Genette’s study, “Métonymie chez Proust,” when the critic speaks of “metonymic contagion” 
and argues that a “metaphor-effect”is often rooted in a “metonymy-cause,” enabled me to articulate the notion of “unhealthy” around these two figures. Examples from David Cronenberg’s Films also suggested that, if a symptom becomes the visible metaphor of the disease, the symptom is nevertheless linked to an invisible metonymical chain of spatial or causal contiguity.
L’Imagination malsaine, I did not, however,refer to Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking Illness as Metaphor , since she deals with the metaphoric uses of specific diseases, namely TB and cancer, but my thesis does confirm her demonstration that the disease’s reality and gratuitousness, or what I would call the disease’s corporeality, is, in a sense,repressed by “metaphoric thinking.”

My study of metaphors also backs up Sontag’s demonstration that individual diseases such as TB and cancer are feared as if they were “morally, if not literally, contagious,” so that the metaphoric seems to become metonymical. With the “unhealthy,” I argue, the metaphor is, in effect, rooted in the metonymy. Moreover, if the foreign body and the contagious subject are deemed “unhealthy” to a healthy subject by a subject or the (medical, moral, etc.) law, it is, in fact, the relation between the two that is “unhealthy”. This implies a certain degree of subjectivity in the attribution of the value “unhealthy” and raises the question of the relationship between the subject and the law.Few studies of “The Fall of the House of Usher” deal, even in passing, with illness and disease, much less contamination. 



ROGER CORMAN'S FALL OF THE House of Usher(1960)
Drama | Horror
Upon entering his fiancée's family mansion, a man discovers a savage family curse and fears that his future brother-in-law has entombed his bride-to-be prematurely.
Director: Roger Corman Stars: Vincent Price, Mark Damon



A LATER VERSION STARRING OLIVER REED AND DONALD PLEASANCE






AN EARLIER VERSION OF THE FALL BW MOVIE ENGLAND 
First shown 06/01/1950. A traveler arrives at the Usher mansion to visit his old friend, Roderick Usher. Upon arriving, however, he discovers that Roderick and his sister, Madeline, have been afflicted with a mysterious malady: Roderick's senses have become painfully acute, while Madeline has become nearly catatonic. That evening, Roderick tells his guest of an old Usher family curse: any time there has been more than one Usher child, all of the siblings have gone insane and died horrible deaths. As the days wear on, the effects of the curse reach their terrifying climax (IMDB).

Tomb Or Womb: The Freudian Approach to Live Burial in Edgar Allan Poe's" The Fall of the House of Usher" and" The Premature Burial"
THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF THE GOTHIC ELEMENTS IN EDGAR ALAN POE THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER Using : interpretation of dreams Freudian theory and others
Graduation thesis, 2013
Dali  Amel





THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH IS ANOTHER POE WORK THAT FITS THIS DESCRIPTION OF ILLNESS, CONTAGION, CONTAMINATION BOTH IN POE'S SHORT STORY AND IN ROGER CORMAN'S FILM ADAPTATION, ONE OF THE FEW THAT IS EVEN CLOSE TO POE'S ORIGINAL STORY.

"The Masque of the Red Death", originally published as "The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy", is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1842. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death, by hiding in his abbey.
Genre: Short story
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death - Wikipedia


THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.

But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."

READ ON

IMPERIAL OIL, CANADA’S EXXON SUBSIDIARY, IGNORED ITS OWN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH FOR DECADES, ARCHIVE SHOWS

Murtaza Hussain January 8 2020

LONG READ FEATURE ARTICLE 

The Syncrude Project in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, on March 6, 2006. 
The Syncrude Project is a joint venture operated by Syncrude Canada Ltd. 
and owned by Imperial Oil Resources and other oil and gas companies. 
Photo: Norm Betts/Bloomberg via Getty Images


RECORD DROUGHTS, RAGING forest fires, crop failures, and disappearing glaciers: It has become undeniable that the planet is in the early stages of a climate crisis with dire implications. As terrifying as it is, this unfolding disaster has not come as a surprise to everyone — especially not the people who have been profiting off fomenting the climate emergency.

It has come to light in recent years that major fossil fuel companies knew well in advance that their activities were gravely distorting the climate, even as they waged a relentless campaign to confuse public opinion and prevent regulatory action. A flood of cases are now making their way through the courts against Exxon Mobil and other companies accused of concealing the truth of a calamity now slowly enveloping the world.

Imperial Oil, Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, is a household name in Canada thanks to its ubiquitous Esso gas stations. Exxon owns 70 percent of the company, which is a major holder of reserves in the controversial Alberta oil sands. Like its parent company, Imperial has been accused of climate denialism and efforts to stall meaningful regulation needed to prevent today’s crisis. In a 1998 article published in Imperial’s in-house magazine, former Imperial CEO Robert Peterson wrote that there is “absolutely no agreement among climatologists on whether or not the planet is getting warmer or, if it is, on whether the warming is the result of man-made factors or natural variations in the climate.” He added that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but an essential ingredient of life on this planet.”

Peterson’s paeans to the benefits of carbon dioxide notwithstanding, experts at his company knew with confidence not only that climate change was real, but also that Imperial’s activities were causing crippling harm to the environment. That knowledge was recorded in company documents that were recently revealed to the public and reviewed by The Intercept.


A portion of a report titled, “Canadian pressure groups, Part I, by Public Affairs Dept. Toronto, Imperial Oil Limited, May 1976.”

THE CACHE OF documents shows that as far back as the 1960s, Imperial had begun hiring consultants to help them manage a future public backlash over its environmental record, as well as conducting surveillance on its public critics. The documents also show that, as the company began to accept the implications of a warming planet, instead of acting decisively to change its business model, it began considering how a melting Arctic might open up new business opportunities.

Even as the fossil fuel industry continued to fight against renewables in public and its CEO worked to confuse public opinion on this critical issue, in private Imperial’s experts recognized the urgency of switching to sustainable energy.

All of this took place decades ago, when the climate crisis was still largely avoidable and its deadly contours had yet to take shape.

The documents providing details on Imperial’s historical activities were retrieved from an archive in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum by U.S.-based climate advocacy groups Desmog and the Climate Investigations Center. Available since 2006, the depth of the archive has never been fully examined, though previous reporting on documents from the Glenbow Museum revealed that Imperial made detailed plans for exploiting Arctic ice melt and that the company knew high carbon taxes would be required to stave off the effects of climate change decades ago — even as it worked to ensure that they would not be put in place.

“Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Exxon, and by extension Imperial, were among the leading researchers in the world on climate change,” said Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada and a lecturer at the University of Toronto. “They understood the science and understood the implications. They had a choice to either change their business model or obfuscate the reality. They chose to obfuscate. Long after they had accepted that climate change was real, and even started building their installations differently to reflect that, the company continued to publicly deny the science that they knew to be true.”


John Armstrong, then-chair of Imperial Oil, photographed on April 20, 1977, surrounded by 49 barrels of crude oil, the average amount consumed by each Canadian that year.
Photo: Harold Barkley/Toronto Star via Getty Images

The documents provide a disturbing insight into how Imperial grappled with the obvious environmental impact of its operations over the past several decades.

“Air pollution is an area highly charged with emotion and one characterized by a lack of data and rational guidelines,” noted a 1967 report prepared by a consultant for Imperial and marked as “confidential.” The report added that public opinion in the United States on the subject was “out of control.”

“Air pollution is an area highly charged with emotion and one characterized by a lack of data and rational guidelines.”

That report, titled “Air/Water Pollution in Canada: a Public Relations Assessment,” outlined possible consequences for Imperial if the public continued to pressure the company over its environmental record. The threats included “difficult-to-change anti-oil industry attitudes” and demands to switch to renewable energy. “Due to continuing exposure to stories in the mass media, the general public could easily be persuaded to support increased pollution regulation and legislation,” the report warned. “It could be encouraged to support the electric car, nuclear energy and other technology favouring competitive fuels.”

The report did not say that Imperial should do nothing in response to the devastating environmental consequences of its business, which had become clear as early as the 1960s. As a “responsible corporate citizen,” Imperial would obviously aim to avoid harming Canada’s environment and the health of its people. A public relations campaign aimed at pushing back against pressure on the company might serve as a means of buying time before more substantive steps could be taken, the report suggested. Such a campaign could help “keep public and legislative opinion in control so that increased pollution control measures affecting all corporate functions can proceed on an orderly, economic and reasonable basis.”

DESPITE GOING ON the PR offensive, by the 1970s, Imperial was becoming yet more alarmed by the growing public criticism of its activities. Its response to this perceived threat was typical of many powerful yet paranoid institutions: surveillance.

As public pressure mounted, Imperial began putting together dossiers on organizations that it accused of “politicization” of the fossil fuel business. A 1976 report titled “Canadian Pressure Groups,” prepared by the company’s public affairs department, offered detailed profiles of six Canadian NGOs alleged to have targeted the company over environmental or social issues. Among the information they gathered was financial data about the operations of these organizations, along with physical addresses and information about their key spokespeople. 
Read Our Complete Coverage Climate Crimes

The document claimed to provide “identification of national, provincial, pressure groups that are either directly or indirectly involved in energy-related activities,” while indicating that a future study would look at “recommendations for development of strategies to prevent/respond or adapt to the major pressure groups.”

As the environmental toll of its operations continued to build and public anger rose along with the damage, Imperial gradually began developing its own environmental research capacities. By the early 1990s, the company’s in-house researchers had made some important findings: Not only was the Earth’s climate being dangerously heated up by the emission of greenhouse gases, but Imperial’s own operations were also playing a role in this potentially existential threat.

As the astonishing scale of the climate crisis slowly came into focus, the company began gaming out possible responses. Researchers at Imperial analyzed different ways of reducing the carbon footprint of energy production and gradually moving society as a whole toward renewables, including the possibility of underground capture and storage of carbon emissions, solar energy production, and electric vehicles.

Yet the company’s leadership remained fixated on ensuring that whatever was done shouldn’t be too much and, most important of all, that it shouldn’t result in government regulation of Imperial’s operations. A 1990 document, “Response to a Framework for Discussion on the Environment – The Green Plan: A National Challenge June 1990,” was published in the context of a high-level debate then taking place in Canada on developing a sustainable economy. In the document, Imperial warned that stakeholders in government and private industry should be careful to not “out-green each other.” Any discussion of environmental controls must be carefully balanced with concerns about how regulating the oil industry might harm the Canadian economy, the report emphasized, calling for approaches to climate change that “rely as much as possible on the market means to provide economically appropriate information and incentives.”

A rig at Norman Wells on Jan. 31, 1981. The oil field is located beneath the MacKenzie River and ownership is shared by Imperial Oil Ltd. and Canadian taxpayers.
Photo: Doug Griffin/Toronto Star via Getty Images

An assessment prepared by Imperial and published the following year conceded, “The simplest way to reduce CO2 emissions from energy is to substitute natural gas, nuclear and hydropower for coal.” The report recognized that “a carbon tax causes the most direct impact on CO2 since the tax is in proportion to the emissions.” Despite these admissions, Imperial continued low-balling estimates on what such a tax should look like, as reports by HuffPost and Bloomberg recently noted.

“The fate of sea ice in a warmed planet will largely determine how Imperial operates in the Arctic.”

As the planet warmed and the long decline of glaciers accelerated, the company was also evidently using its environmental research to scope out new business opportunities afforded by climate change. “The fate of sea ice in a warmed planet will largely determine how Imperial operates in the Arctic,” said one document from 1991, a report called “The Application of Imperial’s Research Capabilities to Global Warming Issues.” Exxon, Imperial’s parent company, has had no qualms about capitalizing on the short-term economic opportunities offered by climate change either: The oil giant partnered on a new deal this October to use ice-breaking ships to transport liquified natural gas across the warming Arctic.

IN THE TWO decades since Robert Peterson, Imperial’s former CEO, insisted that pumping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is actually good for the environment, Imperial Oil continued to ramp up its fossil fuel production. According to its latest operating results, the company increased its extraction of barrels per day from 375,000 to 383,000 between 2017 and 2018. Imperial’s current head, Rich Kruger, lauded the numbers, stating that Imperial has “achieved petroleum product sales levels not seen in decades.” Meanwhile, 2019 is projected to be the second-hottest year, following 2016, worldwide since records have been kept.

The documents on Imperial’s past activities suggest that the company long ago recognized the seriousness of the harm it was causing to the environment, including on the issue of climate change. Despite this knowledge, its leaders doubled down on the same damaging activities, rather than switching to a business model they knew would be necessary to avert catastrophe.


Richard Kruger, president and chief executive officer of Imperial Oil Ltd.,
 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on March 6, 2014.
Photo: Galit Rodan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment on the archive materials, a company spokesperson said the archive documents “reflect the conversations that were happening at the time regarding the evolving science of climate change and the public policy discussions to curb emissions.”

“At Imperial we have the same concerns as people everywhere – to provide the world with needed energy while reducing GHG emissions. As noted on our website, we support the Paris Agreement as an important framework for addressing the risks of climate change and we support an economy-wide price on carbon dioxide emissions,” the spokesperson added. “The company is committed to taking action on climate change by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions intensity and by supporting research that leads to technology breakthroughs.”

Experts who have followed Imperial’s activities over the years have noted how its rhetoric has tended to modify itself in response to public pressure.

“In the early 1990s, Imperial had to shift their behavior to accommodate high-level discussions then happening in Canada on environmental policy,” said Kert Davies, the founder and director of Climate Investigations Center. “But by 1998, when that political scrutiny had eased a bit, they started going the other way and claiming that CO2 is not even a pollutant — that it’s good. As environmental activism and the threat of regulation has increased in recent years, you can now see Imperial taking a stance closer to the early 1990s, where they’re saying that climate change is serious but also hedging by saying we should not do anything too extreme and also think about the economy.”

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Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Chelsea Manning Spent Most of the Last Decade in Prison. The U.N. Says Her Latest Stint Is Tantamount to Torture.
Natasha Lennard January 2 2020

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning addresses reporters before entering the Albert Bryan U.S. federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on May 16, 2019.
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

ON NEW YEAR’S Eve, as personal reflections on the last decade flooded in, Chelsea Manning’s account tweeted that she had spent 77.76 percent of her time since 2009 in jail. That same day, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer publicly released a letter from late last year accusing the United States of submitting Manning to treatment that is tantamount to torture.

“Such deprivation of liberty does not constitute a circumscribed sanction for a specific offense, but an open-ended progressively severe measure of coercion.”

It does not take a U.N. expert to recognize the current conditions of Manning’s incarceration as a form of torture. It is the very definition of torture to submit a person to physical and mental suffering in an effort to force an action from them. Since May, Manning has been held in a Virginia jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning has not been charged with or convicted of a crime. And her imprisonment on the grounds of “civil contempt” is explicitly coercive: If she agrees to testify, she can walk free. If she continues to remain silent, she can be held for the 18-month duration of the grand jury or, as the U.N. official noted, “indefinitely with the subsequent establishment of successive grand juries.”

Each day she is caged, Manning is also fined $1,000. If she is released at the end of the current grand jury, she will owe the state nearly $500,000 — an unprecedented punishment for grand jury resistance. And Manning has made clear, she would “rather starve to death” than comply with the repressive grand jury system, a judicial black box historically deployed against social justice movements.

“Such deprivation of liberty does not constitute a circumscribed sanction for a specific offense, but an open-ended progressively severe measure of coercion,” Melzer, the U.N. special rapporteur, wrote of Manning’s treatment. Melzer’s November letter, which was made public this week, stated that Manning’s coercive imprisonment fulfills “all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and “should be discontinued or abolished without delay.” The letter asks that the U.S. government provide factual and legal grounds for Manning’s ongoing imprisonment and fines, “especially after her categorical and persistent refusal to give testimony demonstrates the lack of their coercive effect.”

Manning’s supporters and legal team have long stressed that no such legal grounds exist. Manning has proven again and again that her grand jury resistance is unshakeable; the coercive grounds for imprisonment are thus undermined and her jailing is revealed to be purely punitive. Federal Judge Anthony Trenga, who ordered Manning’s torturous incarceration, should be compelled to release her as a point of law, regardless of U.N. censure. This is not to say, however, that coercive incarceration is defensible in cases where it works to compel testimony — it is not. Manning’s resistance has highlighted the brutality of the practice tout court.
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Letter on Chelsea Manning6 pages


MANNING’S ATTORNEY, CIVIL rights lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen, said that she hopes the U.N. official’s letter calls greater attention to the use of coercive detention generally, as well as the specific cruel treatment of her client. “While the United States has failed to live up to its human rights obligations, I remain hopeful that the government will reconsider its policies in light of the U.N.’s admonition,” Meltzer-Cohen said in a public statement. She also told me that the U.N. special rapporteur’s recognition of Manning’s refusal to be coerced can serve as further evidence to the judge.

In a statement from jail, Manning said, “I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is: incompatible with international human rights standards.” The grand jury resister is, however, under no illusions about the U.S. government’s willingness to flout its purported human rights obligations in the face of admonitions from the international community. As she put it, “even knowing I am very likely to stay in jail for an even longer time, I’m never backing down.”

“I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is: incompatible with international human rights standards.”

Indeed, as the U.N. special rapporteur noted, his predecessor wrote a number of appeals to the U.S. government from 2010 onwards regarding the cruel and torturous treatment to which Manning was subjected prior to and during her confinement in military prison. Yet her 35-year sentence was not commuted until 2017 by President Barack Obama. Manning noted in her New Year’s Eve tweet that she spent 11.05 percent of the last decade in solitary confinement and over half of her years behind bars “fighting for gender affirming care.” She attempted to take her own life twice during her time at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Suffice it to say, U.N. appeals have never secured Manning’s liberty or safety. And as, Meltzer-Cohen noted in her statement on the U.N. official’s letter, “In the two months since the letter was conveyed to the United States, Ms. Manning has remained confined, and the daily fines imposed upon her have continued to accrue.”

If the letter fails to sway the government, it should, at the very least, serve as a public reminder to support a political prisoner. Though the last decade of Manning’s life has been marked by torture, she has responded with fierce resistance and struggle for liberatory social justice at every turn. In the tweet tabulating her last 10 years, Manning ended by noting that she devoted “0.00%” of her time “backing down.” The U.N. special rapporteur’s recognition of her refusal to be coerced is welcome. Our solidarity is more than deserved.