TV programs worth watching:
Sun February 1 — Sat February 7

One of my passions is fine photography: I have numerous books 
of the work of some of the great photographers — Eisenstaedt, 
Steichen, Karsh, Ylla, Schulthess, Cazneaux, Dupain, and many 
more.

So I am particularly pleased that the various documentaries 
(mainly American) which the ABC has grouped together over the 
next five weeks under the heading Season of Photography 
are of such high quality.

First up is the three-part American Photography: A Century Of 
Images (ABC 2.00pm Sundays). The first episode deals with the 
development of photography from Kodak's Box Brownie in 1900 to 
Dorthea Lange's photographic record of the Depression in 1934.

It is followed by a documentary by Ric Burns on the curious life 
and exquisite work of Ansel Adams (ABC 3.00pm Sunday), 
wizard of the darkroom and wilderness photographer without peer.

There is perhaps too little of Adams' own photos and too much 
modern movie footage of his beloved Yosemite national park, but 
it does give you some idea of the awesome beauty of the place and 
how it affected him so powerfully.

Adams and his contemporary Weston were criticised for 
photographing trees and mountains when the country was suffering 
through the Great Depression; other photographers (like Lange) 
put their talents at the service of the struggle for a New Deal, 
but Adams would have been an inferior photographer of poverty and 
actuality.

His forte was revealing the beauty of the natural world through 
the play of light and shadow, and his work led to the 
conservation of vast tracts of wilderness as national parks.

Fifty million years ago evolution produced a very effective 
design: the rhino. Strong, fast, capable of rapid acceleration, 
with extraordinarily sensitive hearing and an acute sense of 
smell, it has few natural predators.

But, as Rhinos: Built To Last? (ABC 7.30pm Sunday) shows, 
human greed and the willingness of profit-makers to exploit and 
perpetuate human ignorance means that in less than a quarter of a 
century 97 percent of all rhinos have been lost.

While rhino horn continues to be marketed as an aphrodisiac the 
animal is in danger of extinction. Nevertheless the program shows 
the efforts being made to try to save this prehistoric giant for 
the future.

The documentary series Seven Up followed a group of seven 
year old children, interviewing them every seven years 
thereafter. It proved popular and spawned a few imitations, 
including here in Australia.

Now the director Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist, 
Coal Miner's Daughter) has taken the idea and applied it 
to the institution of marriage in the USA, in Married in 
America (SBS 8.30pm Sunday).

Beginning with nine soon-to-be-wed couples representing a variety 
of cultures, ethnicities, religions and economic backgrounds, 
Apted will return to them every two years for a decade to see how 
their relationships and views on marriage change.

With half of all US marriages ending in divorce, a lot of Apted's 
follow-ups are expected to explore what it means to be an "ex".

Nevertheless, if you can last the distance, it should be 
interesting.

Animated cartoons are not merely comic strips that move. Disney 
understood this, maintaining completely separate production units 
to write and design his cartoons and his comic books.

Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, who make the Charley 
Brown Specials, based on the Peanuts comic strips by 
Charles M Schulz, including this week's Lucy Must Be Traded 
(ABC 4.35pm Monday), have never understood it. They 
meticulously animate the strips, using the words in the former 
speech balloons as dialogue, and the result is, well, dull.

The possibilities inherent in the animated film are not persued 
while the surreal logic of the four-panel comic strip is 
dissipated on TV. Neither fish nor fowl, they are a great 
disappointment considering the delight of the original strips.

In the 1960s, helping the anti-colonialist Sukarno Government of 
Indonesia to wrest West Papua, at that time the colony of 
Netherlands New Guinea, from the Dutch seemed the progressive 
thing to do. But, as the excellent Film Australia production Land 
Of The Morning Star (ABC 8.30pm Monday) shows, it actually 
scuttled West Papua's progress towards independence.

Determined to prevent Indonesia, now the world's fourth most 
populous country, from "falling to Communism", US imperialism co-
operated with Indonesian capitalism's own imperialist ambitions 
to ensure their permanent control over West Papua.

The Dutch had a timetable for Papuan independence within a 
decade. Indonesia made Flying the West Papuan Morning Star flag 
or advocating independence into crimes, harshly suppressed by the 
Indonesian military.

Today, if transmigration (a more subtle form of ethnic cleansing) 
continues, the indigenous people of West Papua will soon be a 
minority in their own country. 

Meanwhile, inevitable inter-imperialist rivalry means that, as 
armed resistance continues and Indonesia jails student activists 
for 20-year stretches, Indonesia and the USA now struggle with 
each other for control of the giant Freeport gold and copper mine 
and the undoubted mineral wealth of the rest of the country.

Written and directed by PNG-born Mark Worth, Land Of The 
Morning Star is that rare thing: a documentary that can make 
you angry at the injustice it shows. It exposes the Australian 
Government's less than noble involvement in the sorry story, but 
lack of a class perspective means that the program over 
emphasises nationalism while economic reasons are too often 
ignored.

But its eyewitness accounts and extraordinary archival footage 
are very interesting, and the program provides a first rate 
introduction to a colonialist crime and incipient — and largely 
neglected — national liberation struggle that is taking place on 
our very doorstep.

Consider this: every five minutes, somewhere in the world, a 
woman dies as the result of an illegal and unsafe abortion.

Abortion Ship, on Cutting Edge (SBS 8.30pm 
Tuesday), recounts the battle between a shipload of Dutch 
feminists trying to provide Polish women with access to an 
abortion clinic, and fundamentalist Polish Catholics supported by 
skinheads and young fascists determined to stop them.

In the end, a few Polish women get to the seagoing clinic, but 
the quixotic expedition is largely a bust, in the face of the 
reactionary, clerical-dominated regime that rules Poland today.

If you despair of the bed-hopping by drug-addicted police in The 
Bill and hanker for a straightforward "police procedural", 
you should catch this week's episode of the Scottish cop show 
Taggart (ABC 8.30pm Friday).

The ABC is advertising this episode, A Fistful Of Chips, 
as a "new episode" but it was made in 1999, and is new only to 
the ABC, having previously been seen on Channel Seven.

Running them out of sequence has the unfortunate result that the 
head of the team, who was killed several episodes ago, is back 
alive and well and heading the investigation, which takes a 
little getting used to.

Nevertheless, this is a good cop show, tightly shot and 
energetically edited with a good script. And the seriously 
compromising situation one of the detectives carelessly gets 
himself into wouldn't even raise an eyebrow at Sun Hill.