The archetypal creature of the city is the movie gangster, whom Robert Warshow described over sixty years ago as a tragic hero. “Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only … ambiguous skills,” Warshow wrote, “the gangster is required to make his own way, to make his life and impose it on others.” Frustrated by the facelessness of the individual in the big city, he sees crime as the rational way to establish his identity. Yet there is a tragic flaw in this ambition to rise above the crowd, for the successful racketeer increasingly becomes the target of both the police and his fellow criminals. The greater his success, the more precipitous his fall; in the end, “there is only one possibility – failure.” The final meaning of the city for the gangster, according to Warshow, thus can only be “anonymity and death.”

But Warshow understood that, like Greek tragedies, gangster films were not realistic works of art – they were mythological ones. And this means that, from an artistic point of view, the city, like the ancient Greek stage, is a metaphorical space and not a real one, even when gangster films are shot on location in actual cities like New York. So, for Warshow, the gangster inhabits the

The Coppolas, Francis Ford and his daughter, Sophia, both have the same artistic problem: neither is a thinker. The father has always been short on thought; indeed, he stumbles when he thinks, when he thinks he's thinking. The Godfather (1972, 1974, 1990) was strongest in its execution – also its executions – not in its adolescent implications of analogy between the Mafia and corporate capitalism (an analogy that ignores, among other things, the origins of the Mafia and its blood bonds of loyalty, which have nothing to do with capitalism). The Conversation (1974) faltered in its Orwellian ideological structure. And in Apocalypse Now (1979), the attempts to dramatize private moral agony and general moral abyss during the Vietnam War were disjointed, assumptive, weak, for all of Vittorio Storaro's aptly hallucinogenic color cinematography.

Even Coppola's scripts for others have suffered from woolly thinking: his screenplay for Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby (1974), for example, turned Fitzgerald's supple suggestiveness into mindless blatancy; and his scenario for Franklin Schaffner's Patton (1970) presented the glaringly contradictory nature of this famous general as praiseworthy, even fathomless, complexity. That's the top of the heap. From there, we head down to Coppola's blotchy script for René Clément's Is Paris Burning? (1966), a rambling, pseudo-documentary recreation of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation.

In recent years, determined and rigorous historical scholarship has begun to undermine the aura of exceptionality that surrounded the image of Mikhail Bakhtin. Where this figure was once held to be the initiator of an improbably wide range of intellectual trends, it has now been clearly established that Bakhtin was particularly influenced by German language philosophers, whose work he adapted to the cause of the theory and history of the novel. Research has often revealed that rather than being a remarkable innovator, Bakhtin adopted ideas that were current at the time but have now receded from the view of scholars, suggesting a reassessment of various aspects of intellectual history is needed. With certain notable exceptions, however, the Soviet context has been less thoroughly examined, and this is nowhere clearer than in the lack of attention paid to Bakhtin's debt to early Soviet sociolinguistics. In Russia in particular, Bakhtin has frequently been seen as an ‘unofficial’ thinker who opposed, and developed his views on language, culture and literature in isolation from the contemporary, ‘official’ Soviet scholarship. Consequently, the nature of the interaction between the thinkers who comprised what is now generally referred to as the ‘Bakhtin Circle’ and contemporary Soviet linguistics and philosophy of language has generally been neglected and even treated as a non-issue. One reason for this may be that it is generally assumed the ideas follow on from those delineated in Valentin Voloshinov's 1929 book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which has often been ascribed to Bakhtin himself.

I would like to begin by saying something about the adaptation of drama to film, mainly because so little is understood about the process of adaptation by even the educated filmgoer. Many people still cling to the naïve belief that drama and film, for example, are two aspects of the same art, except that drama is “live” while movies are “recorded.” Certainly there are undeniable similarities between the two forms. Most obviously, both employ action as a principal means of communication: that is, what people do is a major source of meaning. Live theater and movies are also collaborative enterprises, involving the coordination of writers, directors, actors, designers, and technicians. Drama and film are both social arts in that they are exhibited before groups of people and are therefore experienced publicly as well as individually. But films are not mere recordings of plays. The language systems of these two art forms are fundamentally different, and movies have a far broader range of techniques at their disposal.

Actually, as many commentators have noted, film is closer in form to fiction than to theater. Like fiction, film can move easily through time and space, and, like fiction, film employs narration – sometimes in the first person, through subjective camera and voice-over; rarely in the third person, through the anonymous commentaries that accompany certain documentaries; and most often and most naturally in the omniscient mode, which enables a filmmaker to cut from a subjective point-of-view shot to a variety of objective shots, from a single reaction in close-up to the simultaneous reactions of several characters in medium or full shot.

After neorealism, Ermanno Olmi is perhaps the best exemplar of the neorealist style, with its disdain for dramatic contrivance and fictive invention. His films offer slices of life, with indefinite or inconclusive endings; they simulate documentary methods in staging and photography; and they aspire not to proposition or evocation but only toward accurate representation. Olmi's later works depart from the neorealist style of Il posto (1961) and I fidanzati (1963), but even they are characterized by a kind of non-discursiveness.

As befits a master filmmaker, Ermanno Olmi is reluctant to give interviews. He lets his films speak for themselves. A shy, self-effacing man, it's always been that way with Olmi. He was especially sparse on words when awarded the Golden Lion at the 1988 Venice festival for The Legend of the Holy Drinker and the Golden Palm at the 1978 Cannes festival for The Tree of Wooden Clogs. And there hasn't been a published interview with Olmi for quite some time.

One reason for the reticence is his embarrassment at having to answer those all too frequent, nagging “how are you?” and “what have you been doing?” questions. For between the Cannes premieres of The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and Cammina Cammina (1983) lay five years of inactivity, then another four years until Long Live the Lady (Lunga vita à la signora, 1987) won the Silver Lion at Venice (to be followed a year later by the Golden Lion).

Developing Countries and Barriers to Trade

Prior to the adoption of a rules-oriented system, there were barriers or trade restrictive measures which were identified under the GATT as ‘obstacles to international flows’ of goods and services. Such barriers made it impossible for producers and exporters to make meaningful gains from their economic endeavours, and for consumers to have a reasonable choice of goods and services. Davey et al analysed these obstacles on four levels. Generally, these were:

• 1. Governmental explicit obstacle to imported goods e.g. quantitative restrictions, subsidies, government procurement practices.

• 2. Governmental internal practice or regulations which have protective effects e.g. regulations requiring a higher standard of safety for imports, requirement that importers be licensed. The authors point out here that there is often a valid domestic governmental purpose such as consumer health or protection addressed by the regulation and that the problem is balancing the application of governmental measures for a legitimate purpose against the requirements of the international trading system to minimise obstacles to imports.

• 3. Problems which arise due to the importing structure of the importing country e.g. government ‘industrial policy’, the structure of industry.

• 4. Business practice (non-governmental) e.g. governmentally-induced practices such as directing a private firm to refuse to purchase foreign goods, restrictive business practices of private enterprises such as exclusive dealing arrangements, business practice and structure such as habits and preferences of businesses, cultural barriers including a dislike of certain brand names, or a willingness to pay a premium for certain quality or specialty goods. Here, Davey et al note that these preferences may require marketing expertise on the part of particular companies in order to allow them penetrate the market.

These barriers are related to both developing and developed country alike. Given the efforts of the multilateral trading system in eliminating these restrictions by the provision of a uniform set of rules for the trading environment, why is it still difficult for developing countries to integrate fully into the world trading system?

In his seminal work on the integration of developing countries at the GATT, Hudec was of the view that the main factor limiting further improvements in market access for developing countries ‘is the relative lack of economic power of developing countries’.

Popular Images and Medical Concepts

Present-day images of the mad and their treatment in previous centuries are frequently stereotypical generalizations. On the one hand there is the gloomy picture of friendless lunatics, exposed to squalor, punishment and neglect. On the other there is the vision of the mad as endowed with supernatural capacities. Both images may contain a grain of truth. Augustan society for example tended to envisage, and frequently treated, the mad as bestial and subhuman, and the abominable conditions under which a James Norris was incarcerated for years in Bethlem Hospital were not examples of the humanitarianism said to have characterized the Georgian age. Similarly, although the fabulous ‘ship of fools’ may owe its existence to poetic licence, the ‘idiot colony’ at Gheel was certainly no chimera.

Neither the gloomy nor the sublime image accurately reflects the heterogeneity of social responses towards the ‘abnormal’. Furthermore, these stereotypical representations tend to project the false idea of simple uni-linear development. The history of the mad is construed as a development either from ‘better’ to ‘worse’, ‘noble’ to ‘abominable’ on the one hand, or from ‘scandalous’ to ‘enlightened’, ‘dark’ to ‘light’ on the other. The Victorian reformers’ picture of Georgian attitudes, for example, reflects the conviction that the eighteenth century's dungeons had been replaced by clean and airy establishments and that the insane had been liberated from abuse, cruelty and neglect.

When viewers had their first exposure to film one hundred years ago, it is unlikely that they interpreted silence as loss. Then, motion pictures represented a striking novelty: the ability to convey photographic detail in motion-produced images that on initial viewing must have seemed quite dramatic in themselves. Oddly enough, it was filmmakers' earliest efforts to convey a story that may have called attention to the unremitting silence of actors on the screen. Almost immediately, dramatic episodes adapted or drawn directly from the legitimate stage began to contend with more strictly documentary forms such as travelogues and newsreels. And the simple sight of people's mouths moving – an alien one, given the stiffness of nineteenth-century photography – must have prompted audiences to wish for the same range of expression on the screen that they had grown accustomed to in live performances.

When stage actors first came to film, they moved and spoke as they had been used to doing before live audiences.

A recurrent motif in the history of avant-garde film is the idea that the medium need not have become a narrative, representational form at all, but could instead have modeled itself on other art forms, especially painting and music. A history of avant-garde cinema can in fact be constructed in just such terms, counterpoising the origins of orthodox or mainstream narrative film in literature and theater with the painterly, poetic, and musical origins of the first avant-garde experiments on celluloid. In doing so, one would be elaborating a gesture made much earlier by, among others, Fernand Léger, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and the art historian Élie Faure, who said that “there will some day be an end of the cinema considered as an offshoot of the theater, an end of the sentimental monkey tricks and gesticulations of gentlemen with blue chins and rickety legs.”

The most extreme statement of this “anti-narrative” sentiment may be found in the work of the “structuralist-materialist” filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s such as Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, and Paul Sharits (themselves preceded by the “absolute film” of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger). They emptied their motion pictures of apparent content in order to draw attention to the functioning of a particular aspect of cinematic technique, or to emphasize film as concrete material rather than as a medium for imitating actions and conveying emotions.

The importance of trade to countries is two-fold: one, it provides a country with income; and two, it directly provides a country's citizens with income as well. In a sense, facilitating access to markets is the best form of direct investment a country can undertake towards its socio-economic development.

Throughout this work, we have emphasised that trade is instrumental to a people's socio-economic development. We started first with a review of trade and development at the WTO. The emphasis was on understanding the exact nature of the Organisation in order to provide a preliminary foundation for future consideration of what the WTO can and cannot do for its developing country Members. When we examined the classifications by international organisations on development status, it was clear that the international community through these various organisations understands that the principal element of ‘developing country’ status is the level of poverty and the limited capacity for individual growth and opportunity. These are elements which motivated the world trading system even from the time of the GATT, to lay out provisions in the international trade rules to address the challenges of developing country participation in organised global trade.

Developing country integration however has faced and still continues to face teething problems.

In the most impressive phase of his career (from Variety Lights [1950] through 8½ [1963]), Federico Fellini (1920–1993) was, above all, an observer, constructing his films through juxtaposition: that is, through setting details of reconstructed reality side-by-side to point up a common denominator, or (more often) to expose the ironic relationship between unlike things. This method of reconstruction is the one associated with Italian neorealism, which Fellini himself defined in a 1971 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels as “the opposite of manufactured effects, of the laws of dramaturgy, spectacle, even of cinematography” – in other words, the presentation of the world in as natural a manner as possible, without arranging things in order to create plots or entertainments.

What distinguishes Fellini from the neorealists, however, is an insistence on the primary force of human imagination. His characters aren't solely motivated by externals – the theft of a bicycle, social indifference, child and elderly abandonment or neglect – as Vittorio De Sica's were. Nor, like Ermanno Olmi, does Fellini invert neorealism by studying only the human accommodation to such external circumstances. Instead, he denies the pure externality of events, choosing instead to show that reality and imagination interpenetrate. Hence Fellini's characters never face a fact without dressing it up: if, as in I vitelloni (1953), they are in an empty piazza during the small hours of the night, they actively deny the implication that all human activities must pause; if, as in The Nights of Cabiria (1957), they are stepping in place on what amounts to a treadmill, they are nonetheless always on parade, decked out and boisterous.