the argo oscar story . Iran as the new enemy

There is  a lot more to the Argo story than just what is shown and seen.  The Iranian reaction to Michelle Obama's  Oscar award dress , the  'lambasting' that the Iranians are supposed to have given the  film and the  talk down of the conference the Iranians organised on "Hollywoodism" " are just a side story to  the deeper hidden side of  the  Argo's Oscar  story.  

The Guardian article I link to gives one a hint to  the greater game being played out in the new demonisation of Iran in the public mind.  What one needs to look at and understand is  the creation of a Lesser , dangerous Other that needs to be taken out in the interests of  Empire and Israel. 

The carefully posed military uniforms  behind Michelle Obama as she announced the Oscar for Argo  say a lot about the  not so hidden message that is being sent out  to the American Public.  

The CIA link and leak to the other Oscar contender, Zero Dark 30 , directed by an American Leni Riefenstahl just proves the point one is trying to make 

Iran gives Michelle Obama's Oscars dress sleeves

Michelle Obama's brief video appearance at the Oscars proved too racy for Iran's state news agency, which took it on itself to PhotoShop the First Lady's shoulderless dress into a more modest outfit.

BY RAF SANCHEZ | 26 FEBRUARY 2013

Michelle Obama as she announces that Argo had won the Academy Award for best picture, left, and the Iranian altered version Photo: Getty Images/FARS

Mrs Obama appeared via video link at the Los Angeles award ceremony, wearing a shimmering silver dress by Naeem Khan as she announced that Argo had won the Academy Award for best picture.

The President's wife sometimes jokes about her right to "bare arms" and her dress left her shoulders and upper chest exposed.

OSCARS RED CARPET: Hits and misses

But a report by Fars, an Iranian news agency that acts as a semi-official mouthpiece for the regime, told a different story. Its account of the Oscars ceremony was accompanied by a crudely-altered image of Mrs Obama in a less-revealing dress.

The alteration is believed to have been made so the photograph would comply with the strict rules enforced by Iranian media censors.

Iran has a history of digitally rescuing female modesty, and in 2011 a photograph of Baroness Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, was altered to raise the hemline of a relatively low-cut top.

IN PICTURES: Oscars Fashion No-nos

Mrs Obama's dress was not the only cause for objection from Sunday night's ceremony: Fars decried Argo's win and denounced it as an "anti-Iranian movie" brought out by "Zionists" in Hollywood.

The film, which tells the story of a small group of Americans escaping from Tehran after the 1979 revolution, has previously been lambasted by the Iranian media and government officials.

http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG9894285/Iran-gives-Michelle-Obamas-Oscars-dress-sleeves.html

An offer they couldn't refuse

The CIA is often credited with 'advice' on Hollywood films, but no one is truly sure about the extent of its shadowy involvement. Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham investigate

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• • Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham
  • The Guardian, Friday 14 November 2008

Spies like us ... Body of Lies

Everyone who watches films knows about Hollywood's fascination with spies. From Hitchcock's postwar espionage thrillers, through cold war tales such as Torn Curtain, into the paranoid 1970s when the CIA came to be seen as an agency out of control in films such as Three Days of the Condor, and right to the present, with the Bourne trilogy and Ridley Scott's forthcoming Body of Lies, film-makers have always wanted to get in bed with spies. What's less widely known is how much the spies have wanted to get in bed with the film-makers. In fact, the story of the CIA's involvement in Hollywood is a tale of deception and subversion that would seem improbable if it were put on screen.

No matter how seemingly craven Hollywood's behaviour towards the US armed forces has seemed, it has at least happened within the public domain. That cannot be said for the CIA's dealings with the movie business. Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley-scott