MetaFilter posts tagged with vietnam and film

He’s documenting history, one Asian movie theater at a time

blueberry — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 10:59:02 -0800

Three years ago, Phil Jablon (aka The Projectionist) started a concerted effort to start documenting the rapidly-vanishing stand-alone movie theaters and former theaters in Southeast Asia. Today his website, The Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project is a historian and movie-theater lover's dream. Jablon has captured the fad ed, the lost, the torched, the almost lost, the repur posed, the reborn, and the unbounded. The photos that Jablon has taken outside_. and in_. document the various_. styles_. and structures_.; the colors_. and feelings_. projected_. back in the theaters salad days_.. But more interesting is the life that is breathed into the photos by the answers, stories and photos (both old_. and new_.) that he collects when talking with current_. wor_.kers_., for mer wor kers_., neighbors_., and people who were kids at the time of the theater's heyday. The site brings images of buildings_. to life_. by bringing old stories (from those who loved them) to light. "This is Mr. Phayungsak …as a child, his father ran an older theater in town made of bamboo and mud... " (Suwan Rama theater) "The staircase led to balcony-level seating, the projection booth and the sound room, where live dubbers, sent by the film distribution company, would perform the voices for foreign movies." (Sri Pathana theater) "Dawei was memorable for its colorful tag-alongs, like this guy, who prided himself in resembling Mr. Bean." (Mingala Thiri cinema)
To date Mr. Jablon has visited and written about scores of theaters in Thailand, Laos, and Burma. Below, as on his site, are links to all of his posts broken down by geographic region:

Cambodia (1)
Korea (1)
Laos, Central (7)
Laos, North (10)
Laos, South (9)
Myanmar (Burma), Bago Division (5)
Myanmar (Burma), Mandalay Division (11)
Myanmar (Burma), Shan State (5)
Myanmar (Burma), Thanintharyi Division (4)
Myanmar (Burma), Yangon Division (18)
Myanmar (Burma), Magwe Division (5)
Thailand, Central (11)
Thailand, Central, Bangkok (59)
Thailand, Isan (44)
Thailand, North (44)
Thailand, South (6)
Vietnam, South (4)

Broadsword calling Danny Boy

nthdegx — Tue, 17 May 2005 06:53:25 -0800

Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films as voted for by their (generally more clued-up than average) viewership has plenty for you to disagree with, but much to recommend. Filmsite.org has a history of war films (as does Berkeley) for the completists among you. There are more war films from and about Vietnam and Indochina than you can shake a bayonet at (see also the 1999 NYT article, Apocalypse Then: Vietnam Marketing War Films to learn a little about the Vietnamese government's 1960s and 70s archive of war film). The [British] national archives have archived film from pre-WWI to the Cold War.

"When you see your own photo, do you say you're a fiction?"

matteo — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 11:13:58 -0800

“The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.”
In "Tout Va Bien", just released on Criterion DVD, four years after May '68 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin examine the wreckage: fading workers' empowerment (page with sound), media fatuity, capitalist sprawl, global imperialist mayhem, interpersonal disconnections. "Tout Va Bien" is the story of a strike at a factory as witnessed by an American reporter (Jane Fonda) and her has-been New Wave film director husband (Yves Montand). Included on the DVD is also Letter to Jane (1972), a short film in which Godard and Gorin spend an hour examining the semiotics of a single, hypnotizing photograph of Fonda as she shares feelings with a Vietnamese villager. More inside.

The ghosts

matteo — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 10:40:57 -0800

"We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why." In The Fog of War, a revelatory new documentary about his life and times, a disquieted Robert McNamara implores us to understand why he did the things he did as an Air Force lieutenant colonel who helped plan the firebombing of Japanese cities in World War II, and, later, as a secretary of defense and pivotal decision-maker during Vietnam, which some Americans came to call "McNamara's War." One of the movie's most powerful passages covers McNamara's little-known service in World War II, when he was attached to Gen. Curtis LeMay's 21st Bomber Command stationed on the Pacific island of Guam. LeMay's B-29s showered 67 Japanese cities with incendiary bombs in 1945, softening up the country for the two atomic blasts to come. McNamara was a senior planning officer. Story by "Killing Fields"' Sydney Schanberg in the American Prospect (more inside)

Do anti-war films glorify conflict?

spotmeter — Mon, 03 Mar 2003 12:49:26 -0800

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. Platoon. Full Metal Jacket. The opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. It's surprising that anyone volunteers for the armed forces after a steady diet of Hollywood depictions of the horrors of war. In "Jarhead" Gulf War sniper Anthony Swafford contends that these"...Vietnam War films are all pro-war, regardless of what... Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man." Does the terrible beauty of Apocalypse Now actually help military recruitment?