2008 on Heidegger and Technology – also ADF, river obsessions, Battle of Algiers, meditative thinking.
2008. “Martin Heidegger Goes to the Movies.” In, Cultural Politics in a Global Age (112–119). Oxford: One World.
Was never really satisfied that I had understood Heidegger in 1996 when I wrote about him in The Rumour of Calcutta (1996, reissued 2023) and now that’s 30 years ago, I looked back to see. Well, better than some I think, and, really pertinent to where we are now in the face of informational thinking, calculative tinkering, assemblage of AI, PDF aggregator, deep search, algorithmic accumulation – as if accumulation was not ongoing all through, and Heidegger got it, reading Marx in a hut (also see his Letter on Humanism, mixed messaging but something there).
So it still is an unfinished question whether questioning technology can be tuned to combat the relentless digital stupification of thinking now: where readers read but we do not; friends are many, but none are friendly; people go to meet, but do not meet; profiles that are fake; faces that are two-faced; messages have no message; delete delight; a book that is anti-book; always asking ‘whats on your mind’ but really only interested in ‘whats in your wallet’.
Recommendation: take time out to watch Battle of Algiers again.
2008. “Martin Heidegger Goes to the Movies.” In, Cultural Politics in a Global Age (112–119). Oxford: One World.
Alexander Kluge Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike – Marx/Eisenstein/Das Kapital [News from Ideological Antiquity – Marx/Eisenstein/The Capital]
I do not have all of it in a nice neat single package – there should be 9 hours of love (what I do have is 9 hours with English subs, with about an hour long section which refuses to be loaded to WordPress. I do have a link to that part, its the interview with Sloterdijk and should come at the start of part 2 [its possibly this] – so I have inserted the link below as well, or, not ideal, you can skip PS, and go straight on as the next bit overlaps [Those who are better informed or who have a full version with subs, please say so and I will adjust])
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The start of part 2 would come next, and I think its here on this link, which includes an interview with Soterdijk, so click this, as it won’t load to wordpress for some reason.
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Cast:
Public Culture
From Volume 2, number 1 – 1989.
We have never been Modern Lodge
The Modern has seen better days. Astronomical sums would buy it. Raju is caretaking, but, well, unlike most of Kolkata which has a certain sheen of relevance and commerce, this old and maybe now totally forgotten former glory has not done as well.
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This was the location of almost three years of ‘fieldwork’ (faffing about, mostly reading political pamphlets from the M-Ls in my ‘tent’) for the research that became “The Rumour of Calcutta” book (1996, rereleased 2023). It was 8 rupees a night back then, 1987-91, and did not move much with the times, killed by airbnb and the likes. And yet. It had its afterlives…. (see old pic in the repost at the bottom)
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The chapter:
Chapter 2 of The rumour of Calcutta tourism, charity and the poverty of representation (John Hutnyk) (Z-Library)Download
Here is the chapter on the modern from the Rumour book. It was chapter 2. Yes, I had Bruno Latour’s title in mind – we have never been modern – but I was not a fan of his writing, so alluded/stole shamelessly. There are lots of things I appropriated, with due acknowledgement, that still seem on topic. Just one, for example:
“In an expensive large-format hard-cover two-volume publication called Calcutta: the Living City)’ coinciding with the 300th anniversary celebrations of Calcutta, Sukanta Chaudhuri writes: ‘Few modern cities have bred so many myths as Calcutta. By “myths” I do not mean falsehoods, but myths in the social or anthropological sense’ (Chaudhuri 199p: .xv).”
and some things became even more meaningful later – i.e., when Viktor Alneng made me a red t-shirt with this quote fro the chatpter as the caption under a big torso-covering hammer&sickle:
“‘So, you’re a communist then?’ (Nigel)
‘Aren’t you?’ (John)”
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I still have the shirt – thanks Viktor. Its admittedly in an old box alongside other trinkets that need to be sorted, its not like I wear such things every day, though its been out a bit of late. But for time, the many other relics that belong to Rumour – the off register postcards of Vic Memorial, pics of vols, the residue of old notebooks, a box of letters, and one of artefacts, fireworks boxes, racing timetables, Tolly golf card – I had carried unopened for decades (Australia-England-Vietnam) – all await the time of a more leisurely accounting.
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Alas, the modern does not have time for that leisure.
Timepass
Timepass: having sat four days under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya and watched in procession:
– an ant struggling to go the wrong way as hundreds of devotees perambulate around the tree/shrine – it was eventually crushed flat
– literally thousands of feet passed as I watched – people’s feet are so varied in India, rings on toes, twisted toenails, variety of socks (its winter)
– a red carpet was laid out, before some dignitary came an was shown the shrine
– Tibetan, Thai, Sri Lankan, Indian, and occasionally European monks
– groups of 30 spiritual tourists and tour guide sitting and chanting in 15 minute blocks (there must be a schedule)
– a scramble for a fallen Bodhi leaf (one had fell on me while sitting with the meditators in 1989 – I did not realise its meaning, but could see the devotees looking at me and wondering why someone who had come for just 15 minutes was lucky enough to get a leaf – I gave it to one of them
– a glossy-bearded well-groomed clean/wealthy US american 35 year old explaining everything about the temple, from the Lonely Planet web guide, to a younger female, loudly, during the monks chanting, and quite annoying (sent to test my patience I think).
– the Tibetan, Thai, Sri Lankan, Indian monks accepting gifts of money and gold jewellery from 30-something Korean, Japanese women visitors dressed in elegant salwar kameez
– older white women doing full exotica
– crazed Indian sadhu types that speak fluent English hippy
– eastern European women and Indian men about 25 doing full length body prayer, pranam crouch, sit up, yoga type perambulations round the shrine (there is a name for this that I’ve not looked up in google brain).
– 65 year old Australian guy watching all this with his Vietnamese friend who sneaks snacks from her bag (strictly buddhist!). This guy takes occasional notes in a notebook
– a spider web spun among the Bodhi tree leaves
– bodhi tree leaf sellers, a jewell embedded in the leaf, vacuum sealed in a plastic cover
– armed police, male and female, and a ruckus started nearby, they join with enthusiasm and lathi sticks
– different nationalities with organised meditation spots – the Vietnam one usually vacant after the first saturday
– non-la (vietnamese conical bamboo hat) is more evident here than in HCMC.
– Indian female army troop in a fabulous blue and white camouflage pattern uniform – you would not be able to find them in… an aquarium.
– 50 year old californian walking super slow, mindful of each step, in everyone’s way nevertheless
– stray dogs
– monk feeding female stray (so ‘not’ stray) metres from the holiest of holies
– crows, apparently dying but because rubbish is cleared too quickly now and they are starving, evident here also (as in Kolkata)
– all mosquitoes matter
– cleaning staff work 5 hour shifts, while devotees offer a few minutes cleaning as votive penance, murmuring gatha or parithas.
– other parts of the bodhisattva’s journey not emphasised in Bodhgaya, as if he landed for those 7 weeks from outer space – sci fi buddha
– still peace, much heavily robed, cloth selling, fashion-conscious, peace (tailor stores doing well near the main market)
Much more of this…World keeps on being interesting I guess. I am not ready to renounce…
Contested Glories of Selective Renovation in West Bengal
This article, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, is about heritage restoration according to old colonial protocols and myopias. Contesting entrepreneur-developers facing funder imperatives, the article works through meanings, assumptions and differences of interest and purpose for variously invested groups (remember this time, that time, this heritage, that heritage). The article assesses an ‘initiative’ of the National Museum of Denmark, completed some years ago for Serampore, West Bengal. With an eye on the police, it does this within the lived context of coloniser apologetics, enthusiasms, time-restricted memorialisms (this heritage that heritage) to evaluate selective historical recall. Memory, subjective at best, manifests in different ways when …
Zukunfstmusik: Wagner and Marx
On Adorno and Wagner for the journal Kaabigan:
With Michael Roland F. Hernandez’s intro:
“John Hutnyk’s meditation on Zukunftsmusik—Richard Wagner’s “music of the future”—provides a powerful point of departure. Wagner imagined an art that would anticipate and shape a transformed society. Yet, as Hutnyk reminds us through Adorno and Marx, the future promised by cultural production is often already compromised by the conditions of its manufacture. The immense accumulation of commentary around Wagner exemplifies what Adorno famously called the culture industry: a system in which art, critique, and even dissent are absorbed into circuits of commodification”.
So check out the entire issue (and indeed, contribute to their next – a welcome initiative):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w_TgzOUCbsckwbNeYtRAMezGUfObxqgW/view
Marston Mats in Apocalypse Now Redux
A best yet marston mat helicopter landing pad from the stranded bunnies section of Apocalypse Now Redux (2001 edition). Not in any of the other editions, for reasons you can guess if you’ve seen it, but this is the classic example:
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For the Redux premiere in London, I got the last returned comp ticket and was sat next to Tim Page, one of the models for Dennis Hopper’s unhinged photojournalist.* On the next seat over a woman attending to page woke the sleeping celebrity just for the Hopper sequence. He had slept soundly through the rest of the film (*Hopper says he was also channelling Sean Flynn, son of Errol, lost in Cambodia).
And of course, there is a corpse in the room in the sequence with camouflage–make–up–enthusiast and surfer–boy Lance, as he and the strung out playmate get down to it. Mr Clean comes to the window to perfectly fit Coppola’s stereotype – that director got issues.
Follow the Marston Mats – they will lead, well, everywhere:
Watching Snuff Films at Mar a Largo
On January 3 2026, after the strike on Venezuela, Trump called up what I assume is now his second most favourite programme Fox and Freinds to say: “I watched it literally like I was watching a television show”.
Well well. Did you also watch the Cubans being killed? Snuff film fan you. Not that there are no precedents for this sort of thing, to be fair. But at Jeffrey’s old club? sheesh. Are we gonna see a photo of you watching this tv? Anyways, here is a little of the history of US snuff film fandom below:
First of all, buy the signed picture (search it, who knows if its legit – they did release it as a publicity shot). Apparently all proceeds of the site I found this on go to veterans (which ones?)… Later on Prez Obama wrote that the strike was “the first and only time as president that I’d watch a military operation unfold”, and he called the day of the strike “the most important single day of my presidency.”
%%%
And here is a narration of all that snuff, for, erm, context – its an excerpt from Global South Asia on Screen, Bloomsbury 2019:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/global-south-asia-on-screen-9781501324956/
Bardot with Marston Mats
Just to add to the frenzy; RIP (take MLP with you).
see original at (h/t Neil D): https://youtu.be/ai2As4XFZDY?si=g3zLRAGS_yumwvyl
See also:
Edgard Verèse
If you have any interest in electronic music, classical, experimental, or just music, or humanity, in general, today is the day to listen again to the works of the great Edgard Varèse. Theremin fans will know his work, but there is more intensity and to him than that. A number of excellent collections of his works exist, and exhibition books of aphorisms, performance notes, and biography all worth the time — I dunno with what end, I mean, beyond expansion of your world, the possibilities of sound, the knowledge that such experiments exist, that there were dedicated and relentless explorers of the outer reaches of creativity, as if interplanetary, sonicity, plurality — listening again as I type this and it is so clear how so many of the conventions of composition in rock, pop, jazz, incidental music, drums, sirens, space opera, piccolo elfenreich, even advertising jingles, are in absolute debt to his innovations. Edgard V folks, the real deal, with diacritical notes that will bug some people, but without which, not much else would have advanced (incidentally, Frank Zappa’s favourite composer, if that works as a recommendation for you, all is not lost). Happy 142nd birth anniversary, a sonic colossus. This is volume one of the complete works:
Of course not without criticism, from 2006: “Edgard Varese describes an alleged difference between Western and Eastern music – citing one of his Indian students who thought Western music jerky and edgy he writes ‘To them, apparently, our Western music seems to sound much as it sounds to us when a record is played backwards’ and Varèse then conducts his own quaintly charming experiment: ‘playing a Hindu record of a melodic vocalization backward, I found that I had the same smooth flow as when played normally, scarcely altered at all’ (Varèse 1936 P 20 of “Audio Culture”)”
Malinowski is not a god
In a perhaps misguided effort to preserve love of writing, enthuse about independent critical mental facility, to “exercise the metaphoric muscle”, as Mick Taussig would say, and just out of sheer Sarah Connerism—this year I set my anthropology classes tasks to include in their final reports that would make their essays also be poetic, creative, and not mere information. Holding Celeste Olalquiaga’s beautiful book “The Artificial Kingdom” aloft, I waxed enthusiastic about describing things in the wondrous power of your own word hoard (and horde). Unleash the thesaurus of expressive thunderous swift and deadly wit, do not be afraid of turns of fun, or pruning praised sentences of their cliche seriousness by detourning routines of chaotic inspiration and, yes, the desire to persuade with arabesques invented by poets… maybe too far,, for one of the clever youths saw through my intimidating dare for them to write with questions and made a fair and legitimate query: since you ask us to read monographs by anthropologists carefully, does the object have to be one that their anthropologist had also mentioned/
I cannot lie, I had suggested that objects too could be matters of interpretation. Consider, for example, a commodity… [no, wait, wrong talk…]
Here is my actual answer, itself flighted with fantasy:
You can choose any object. I think I also said in one class that it could be an imaginary object – the point is that it should help you tell the story/make the argument you are making, and perhaps indeed help you explain something core to your chosen anthropologist(s) from the course. [I had something in mind when I said imaginary objects as I had once wanted to point out to my anthropology class – circa 1998, that worship of Malinoswki as some sort of infallible culture hero was cult of personality stuff, so I brought in a piece of canvas cloth that I had cut from an old shirt, framed it in a little red frame, and handed it around the class for them to admire as a piece of one of Malinowki’s three actual tents used in the Trobriands fieldwork. Of course it was not, which I revealed at the end of the class by taking it up and wiping my nose (I am now embarrassed to say). The point though is that we cannot make Malinoski into a god, he was just a man, who nicked the idea of fieldwork from Gillen an Spencer and made it sound like science. The power of interpretation is all.
So, while I am not saying you should make anything up, if you have a point to make that is worthwhile (I mean about anthropology) then that object could be almost anything. {I will post a picture of the old cloth later]
I should add that some time afterwards I read that Michael Young, the famed and admirable Malinowski expert from Australian National University, had set up an auction of one of Malinowski’s tents to raise money for that department, faced with cuts of some kind or another. I never heard it was untrue, but I suspect its “one of those stories”.
Prison School
Abstract: This paper considers a course on critical thinking in Vietnam with a case study focus on historical prisons as they are represented in museums. Reflections on prison narratives in history and literature, texts, film excerpts and museum visits were used in classes for students of anthropology and sociology. In Ho Chi Minh City (hereafter HCMC), a series of museums tell versions of the wider colonial and military story, and in part turn that story into one of pedagogical resistance that students today study as history. That is, the colonial prison is remembered and presented—to Vietnamese and international visitors, with quite different levels of preparedness—as a space where anti-colonial struggle was organised, and a determined revolutionary Party ethos built up a ‘revolutionary school’ (rường học cách mạng) within the prisons. Our class made use of concepts from Discipline and Punish—the panopticon, the tableau, the diagram and the calligraphic—to evaluate and critique a global cinematic version of the story of war, contrasting representations of prison in the museums of HCMC to expand accepted understandings and challenge the curriculum and history of national liberation.
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Sidenote/afterthought: And while I’ve much to lament about publishers (and how some of the biggest profiteers are raking it in through fees for articles which is obscene when reviewers get owt, editors next to owt, and copyeditors scrimp on below – below whatever. Below is shit, and below what anyway, since even the average is the pits now, skewed as it is by a bloated managerialism… STILl, I say), as far as I understand it – its a good move that Wiley has this ‘share your content’ thing. Of course that always existed for those who asked, and thank you, but now its tracked.. 
. And yet, good I guess. If it works – now I’ve posted it I am not sure it does:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/4C3TESRPRVSEVSXAETSN?target=10.1111/apv.12445
Keith Hart on Fieldwork advice
I interviewed the much missed Keith Hart about a half dozen times across the last 30 or so years, each time planning to do something with it but never able to really tie down the project – one on Don Quixote in the mid 1990s; an interview in Manchester, so 1997 perhaps, about his time as advisor for the ill-fated Bouganvile–Riotinto—PNG love triangle; another time in London on Kant/Marx; and then via email some years later on Fieldwork stories. Here is the bit on fieldwork circa 2016:
Keith Hart: “I have already started on the book after the one I just published. It is an intellectual and political biography of Marcel Mauss. After organizing the revival of Annee Sociologique, including the gift essay, his socialist government failed and his lover died, so he dedicated the rest of his life to teaching the first two generations of French ethnographers in the Institut d’ Ethnologie. He did two weeks of fieldwork in Morocco himself. He was fed up with top down politics and education and his experience in writing the Gift persuaded him that the writing and reading of ethnography was the answer to his political questions. No-one would fight for beliefs passed on by the politburo and professors. He wanted an economic revolution from below against capitalism: unions, coops, mutual insurance a la Keir Hardie and the Webbs. But he knew, as Gandhi did, that people needed their own versions of why to fight for radical change. Ethnography is the opposite of instructions for above, of ‘theory’. I tried to teach world history for decades and failed. I blamed the students. But if given an ethnography to read, they found their own meaningful version of it, every time. I don’t care about fieldwork. Life is fieldwork or auto-ethnography. I read a lot and I draw on my personal experience, as I have in this book. It ends with this: “Magritte soaks up what the place has to tell him, imagines a Paris he can’t see and takes in a universe of stars, altogether. I spent two years in a West African slum. I thought I became a better fieldworker with time. But when I wrote it up, I only used my notes from the first year. These read like a detective story – I was asking big questions then, but later I drowned in the trivia of parish pump politics.”
Once for his birthday less than a decade ago I gave him a bottle of Blue Label Johnny Walker, that I would have liked to share with him, but I did not drink by that time. Sadly, I’ve no idea how far along the Mauss book was, but I’d guess a significant chunk of it exists and I hope its the first of many posthumous tracts.
Red Salute Keith, go well.
Circumlocution advice.
Learning peace and acceptance in the toleration-negotiation-circulation saga. I bought a book online from an organisation in the Czech Republic and it arrived at my house a week later – free of postage. Emboldened by this, I ordered a book on the 17th Century travels of William Dampier from a bookstore in Adelaide and they sent it via Australia Post, for an extortionate 600k postage for a 200k book. So the book ordered early September arrived in Vietnam Sept 23. No tracking support from Australia Post, they said after I queried this that I had to contact VietPost. The link AustPost offered was dead but VietPost said they would explore and email me. No email arrived and after three weeks I consigned the matter to the ether, albeit after making myself a bit annoying at work. Then, pretty much out of the blue in late October I was informed by the helpful Mai of VietPost that I had to go to Q10 to receive the book. I have been there before and while it was a long visit, after some pikachu-coffee stuff, turned out ok. This time my visit to Q10 was much less smooth and they say because of changed rules I now need to go to the Ministry of Culture in Q1. Mini Cult says fill this form and come back in 2 weeks. I come back in two weeks, pay 20k and are told to come back again in the afternoon. Then get a ‘license’. This is taken then to the Q10 post office and they now helpfully say they will find the package (its a big warehouse-like place that would put the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit to shame) and courier it to my house in two weeks. Result. This is the new process to buy books from abroad. I include this narrative in case there researchers are seeking key texts from foreign.
(also because I have a talk deadline soon, so am clearly procrastinating)
Studying Tourism means going to have a look for yourself. Tourism Recreation Research article into book…
Anyone who wants this should DM me for a copy of the journal version.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02508281.2023.2201755
lost note on peninsulas and islands
This is from the summer of 2025—attendance at two conferences, one Inter Asia Cultural Studies at Walailak/Nakhon Si Thammarat, the other on Islands at Jeju National University/Jeju City. A squib of commentary, but well organised events, notable for much more than I could scribble down at the time.
Continental thinking of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies conference was followed by the archipelagic and oceanic thinking of Critical Island Studies. Was there a contrast between a thinking of shared work between nations, cities or regions and thinking that foregrounds peripheries and isolation, even persecution of minorities? Stress on a shared relation to hegemonic China contrasts with shared minority thinking; questions of method were comparable to some extent, though not all obviously indebted to Kuan Hsing Chen in IACS, whereas methodological hesitation, doubt, refusal and reversal (rhythm, dialectic, disconnection) were favoured at CIS where Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was an ever–present reminder. Cinema auteurs were a feature of IACS: Ghatak – and the historical materialism team day—while features of CIS were the range of papers on Jeju Island (the venue) and on songs and poetry that were notable and unique. Bordering found commentators at both conferences, perhaps more urgently at CIS, but solidarity with Gaza was more forcefully articulated at IACS, for whatever that is practically worth (thanks Ash Sharma). Food, organisation, venue and keynotes were excellent at both, though Spivak as star turn was the highlight of summer in Asia. The rejection of the term the Global South in favour of Banding was a somewhat discordant feature of IACS while indigeneity and subalternity were distorted at CIS.
Is it plausible that a journal, association, or its manifestation in a conference, have a cohered agenda around some elaborated keywords and conceptual challenge—an understanding of the need to think archipelagic post continental Bandung, non aligned, inter and cross or post–geographical formation? Not every participant at a conference will get it, but more may have a more engaged, complicated, enthused response—and responsibility—from these two conferences. [Even if someone missed the meaning of the tile Global South Asia, taking the term Global South more prominently than the South Asia of its content]. Perhaps a Chinese prejudice?
Thought of the month: Do not imagine that structuralism and post structuralism are exempt from, however complex, a relation to the restructuring of global power after WWII. Just as today digital systems and Al are complicated by the struggle over knowledge in Asia
Writing against Occupation: Palestine and Beyond.
from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (free download):
本書收錄 2019-2025 年發表於「衝突、正義、解殖」(CJD) 的著作，主題涵蓋以色列-巴勒斯坦戰爭、加沙的種族滅絕、巴勒斯坦的殖民結構，以及阿拉伯世界中的社會政治鬥爭歷史。
出版單位：國立陽明交通大學文化研究國際中心
全書開放下載：https://reurl.cc/YkWaLD
We are delighted to announce the publication of Writing against Occupation: Palestine and Beyond.
This volume compiles a range of writings digitally published on Conflict, Justice, and Decolonization (CJD) between 2019 and 2025. It brings together the voices of those who refuse silence in the face of erasure and injustice—voices that continue to believe in the enduring power of words and intellectual work as acts of resistance.
Within these pages, readers will find analyses, testimonies, and theoretical reflections on the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian war, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the enduring colonial structures in Palestine, and the broader histories of social and political struggle across the Arab world.
We extend our deepest gratitude to all contributors—especially those writing from Gaza, Jerusalem, and Sana’a—who, even amid the devastations of war, have continued to think, write, and speak, offering insights that sustain the ethical and political urgency of this collective project. Our heartfelt thanks also go to Professor Joyce C.H. Liu for her passionate and insightful guidance throughout the making of this issue.
Edited with dedication and conviction by the CJD editorial team, this booklet is both a record of thought and an invitation: may it serve as a resource, an inspiration, and a spark to kindle further acts of engagement, reflection, and solidarity.
Download the booklet: https://reurl.cc/YkWaLD
Visit the CJD website: https://cjdproject.web.nycu.edu.tw/
Contact: iccs.cjdproject@gmail.com
F. Schlegel’s Philosophy of History
1852
From the untroduction to The Literary Life of FvS
Three brothers:
BOOK REVIEW: Ghassan Kanafani’s History Lessons
BOOK REVIEW: Ghassan Kanafani’s History Lessons
31 October 2025
by Jay Murphy
Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine, Background, Details, Analysis, translated by Hazem Jamjoum, with an introduction by Layan Sima Fuleihan and an afterword by Maher Charif (1804 Books, New York, 2023)
Ghassan Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, translated by Mahmoud Najib (Liberated Texts/Ebb Books, Oxford, 2022)
Proletarianisation – New Formations, 2012
There seems too little focus of how the loss of writing skills though the convenience of AI as writing flounders under the ever urgent need for results, the ability to learn from close slow reading versus demand to deliver any response at all, the wherewithal of critical acumen, destroyed by and at scale, all leading to vast limitations in what Bernard Stiegler called the battle for knowledge…
Ghosting Taiwan
First 50 downloads fpr free
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6AE3FPZEBGYXGSSMJVEW/full?target=10.1080/14649373.2025.2567139
Or dm
Prisoners of Love
this is the story of the earlier Boats to Gaza, 2010, published 2012.
See also
Sân khấu khủng bố: Âm nhạc và chủ nghĩa phân biệt chủng tộc – 21/09
Book Launch reading and discussion video (bilingual: English – Tieng Viet – nearly 2 hours).
Mưa đỏ: Still more Marston Mats
This film, as directed by Đặng Thái Huyền. a hard watch, educational rather than informational (that is a good thing) and powerful. Aggravated eye infection by some degree. Seemed to me to be more about the horror of war and the tragedy of the the love, people, comrades, and lives it smashes to bits, more than I had been led to believe by the reviews. Heavily discussed, with some not getting the allegory, but there is much in this film that deserves watching – not least for its subtle tributes, eg., to Saving Private Ryan (nuanced), the Longest Day (less so), 1917 (severally) – and because it is up there with The Dirty Dozen, All Quiet on the Western Front, anything by Frank Capra, and of course Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick – it adds some new things too. Only maybe the map shaped scarf after the epic battle o two guys that otherwise could be…
To get that ‘oh, there they are’ moment of recognition in the cinema by me at least (and no-one else) there are several Marston Mats in the bunker scenes, and then also the nice detail at the end with the reflection of the mats appearing/echoed in the choice of music stand for the orchestra bit in Paris. Nice touch:
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Other marston mats stuff here:
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and many more here:
