quotes, Uncategorized

454

spacetime coordinates: 18th – 19th century Easter Island

Language at the End of the World

“According to one early commentator, Rapanui songs expressed ‘the surprise of being alive and also the sadness of life.’”

movies

0445 – The Promise (2016)

spacetime coordinates:  1915  small Armenian village of Sirun in the southeast part of the Ottoman Empire >  ConstantinopleIstanbul,  Taurus mountains

the-promise-2016-01

The Promise is a 2016 American historical drama film directed by Terry George and starring Oscar IsaacCharlotte Le Bon and Christian Bale, set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. The entire budget  for the film was donated by American businessman of Armenian origin Kirk Kerkorian.

Ara Sarafian, director of the Gomidas Institute in London and a leading historian of the Armenian Genocide, praised the film for its historical accuracy. “The key themes were historically accurate,” he said. “The producers did not take license to go beyond the historical material at hand yet they managed to capture much of the enormity of the Armenian genocide.” Sarafian also commended director Terry George for his “well balanced and creditworthy” sense of history.

IMDb pre-release voting controversy

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4776998/

movies

0409 – First They Killed My Father (2017)

spacetime coordinates: 1975 – 1979  Cambodia

firt-killed-poster-large

First They Killed My Father (Khmer: មុនដំបូងខ្មែរក្រហមសម្លាប់ប៉ារបស់ខ្ញុំ Moun dambaung Khmer Krahm samleab ba robsa khnhom) is a 2017 biographical historical thriller film directed by Angelina Jolie and written by Jolie and Loung Ung, based on Ung’s memoir of the same name. Set in 1975, the film depicts 7-year-old Ung who is forced to be trained as a child soldier while her siblings are sent to labor camps during the Socialist Khmer Rouge regime.

Cambodian genocide   //   Khmer Rouge Killing Fields

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4882376/

documentary

357 – German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (2014)

spacetime coordinates:  1945 Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, Germany // Buchenwald, Weimar, Thuringia, Germany // Dachau, Bavaria, Germany // Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, Oswiecim, Malopolskie, Poland // Majdanek, Lublin, Lubelskie, Poland

(DISTURBING CONTENT)

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is the official British documentary film on the Nazi concentration camps, based on footage shot by the Allied forces in 1945.

The film was produced by Sidney Bernstein, then with the British Ministry of Information,  with Alfred Hitchcock acting as a “treatment advisor”. The script was written by Richard Crossman and Colin Wills. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Nolbandov was production supervisor.

The project was abandoned in September 1945, and the film was left unfinished for nearly seventy years. The film’s restoration was completed by film scholars at the Imperial War Museum. The finished film had its world premiere early in 2014 at the Berlin Film Festival, and was shown in a limited number of venues in 2015. It was released in North America in 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Concentration_Camps_Factual_Survey

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3455796/

A 70-minute documentary on the making of the 1945 film, entitled Night Will Fall, was assembled from the partially finished material and new original footage by director Andre Singer and producers Sally Angel and Brett RatnerThe New York Times, in its review of the documentary, said that “what the new film accomplishes, more than anything else, is to make you wish you could see the original.”

series

343 – The Handmaid’s Tale (TV Series 2017– )

spacetime coordinates:  near future. Gilead (former United States)

(DISTURBING CONTENT)

The Handmaid’s Tale is an American television series created by Bruce Miller based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834204/

movies

315 – Hannah Arendt (2012)

spacetime coordinates: 1961 New York // Israel

Hannah Arendt is a 2012 German-Luxembourgish-French biographical drama film directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Barbara Sukowa. The film centers in the life of German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. The film centers on Arendt’s response to the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which she covered for The New Yorker. Her writing on the trial became controversial for its depiction of both Eichmann and the Jewish councils, and for its introduction of Arendt’s now-famous concept of “the banality of evil“.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1674773/