Unit 12: Men With Guns

Blog Prompt: Write a brief biography of Conejo, the young boy in the film, who would now be in his early/mid 20s. How - if at all - did hid chance meeting with the elderly doctor change his life? What has become of him in the last 10-15 years?

Conejo managed to survive.

He does remember the old doctor that came to his village and the long journey that ended high up in the mountains. There was nothing there. No village. Just a group of people that moved from place to place. They had to keep moving.

People came and went from the group. Conejo figures that the silent woman who had journeyed into the mountains with him had joined with some of these.

When the old doctor died, Conejo stayed and helped the medic who had deserted from the army. The man's arm never did heal properly.

After a while, Conejo left the group in the mountains and joined with the guerrillas. But he didn't stay with them for very long. And, if anyone asked if he had ever heard of Cerca del Cielo, he could tell them honestly that there was no such place. But he never mentioned the people that lived in the mountains. He wasn't sure why. Maybe he just wanted a place where he knew he could take shelter.

Conejo is now a businessman. He takes tourists around to visit archeological sites. He still embellishes his stories with grim and bloody details.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination.

Unit 11: Missing

Blog prompt 2: Imagine that you're an attorney for the US, attempting to disprove any complicity on the part of the US government in the 1973 death of Charles Horman during the coup in Chile.

1. Charles Horman was pursuing his inquiries independently and of his own choosing.

2. Charles Horman was in a dangerous place and had made his own choice to be in the region.

3. The US government is not responsible for any misadventure that a private individual encounters under these circumstances.

4. The US government was not involved in any direct or indirect way in the circumstances that surrounded the death of Charles Horman. (Clearly, this argument would have been made prior to the release of relevant declassified documents in October. 1999.)

Have To Skip This Altogether

I was unable to locate a copy of the novel A Dry White Season within the time alotted for the completion of this course and so will be unable to respond to the blog prompt for this unit.

I understand that the movie director departedly significantly from the original text so I look forward to having a chance to read the book in the future.

A Little Out Of Order: Hotel Rwanda

I had not planned on doing a blog post on Hotel Rwanda but I decided that I really did want to give it a mention.

(Note that I am not using the blog prompt for this Unit.)

I was reading some of the reviews for the movie and I came upon this one by James Berardinelli in which the reviewer concluded that a film as important as Hotel Rwanda would probably disappear and that almost no one would ever see it.

During the course of this Summer Sessions, I have had quite a time trying to locate movies but that has hardly been the case with Hotel Rwanda. In fact, every single Harris Teeter grocery store that I've been in has had a copy in the DVD rack at the checkout, right alongside the magazines, tabloids and beef jerky.

It's an odd choice for an impulse purchase, to be sure.

Still, I don't think that the placement of the movie, in any way, trivializes either it or the historical events behind it.

Rather, I believe that it is something that people don't just need to see but that they want to see.

Clearly, Berardinelli worried unnecessarily.

A Little Housekeeping

My blog keeps falling off the class's blogroll!

I will list it again but it might be a good idea for readers to bookmark this blog, in case that happens again.

I also apologise for the infrequency of my posting. It means that I end up posting an awful lot, all at once and I know that this is a royal pain for the reader.

The reason for the infrequency is that my laptop is the only one in the world that is incapable of getting online at coffeebars.

(I know that it's five years old but I am loathe to replace it - sentimental value, I suppose.)

Unit 9: Lumumba

The prompt for this blog was: If Lumumba had been able to overcome the challenges to his rule and stay in power, would he have been able to keep the former Belgian Congo from falling apart? Would he have established the country as a democracy or become a dictator?

I doubt that he could have kept the country from falling apart. I believe that regionalism was too great an obstacle to overcome. Over all, I think his only hope for maintaining power - under the circumstances - would have been to consolidate power.

He wanted a strong and unified country and not division. A parliamentary government with the opportunity for different regions and factions to build coalitions might have succeeded. But, major deciding factor would have been just who was in control of the military. I just don't see Lumumba being successful in keeping all of the former Belgian Congo intact as a democracy. If the separatists had been able to break away and create independent states, he might have succeeded in maintaining a democracy in what regions remained. Or, he might have been forced to consider working toward a confederation of independent states. But, in order to keep the former Belgian Congo intact as a single state, I think some sort of dictatorship would have been necessary.

Chronicle Of A Disappearance

A brief synopsis:

The movie is non-narrative and structured like a video diary. It starts out in the Palestinian filmmaker's hometown of Nazareth then moves to Jerusalem before concluding back in Nazareth.

Prompts for this blog:

Analyze at least three specific scenes that you found particularly significant or revealing and why.

The scenes I found the most revealing were the scenes of family and the rather mundane scenes of goings-on about town.

The family scenes are just average family scenes: gossiping, talking trash about the neighbors, fishing with the guys.

The town scenes are also pretty routine: bored shopkeepers, guys hanging out, chain-smoking, breaking up fights outside a cafe.

Here and there, mixed in with the other ambient noise are snippets of news reports and other broadcasts.

Eerie.


In the last scene, the filmmaker's parents have fallen asleep in font of the television. As the broadcast day concludes, the Israeli national anthem plays behind an image of Israeli flags waving in a breeze.

Were there any aspects of those scenes or the film as a whole that you found confusing or unclear?

Actually, most of the film is unclear but the intention of the absurdist "political" segment - the Palestinian woman and the walkie-talkie...the fireworks...the mannequin...everyone piling into the car....all pretty confusing.

If you had to rewrite the ending, how would you change it?

Hmm....showing the filmmaker's parents asleep in front of the TV actually worked quite well. The entire section after the filmmaker returns to Nazareth from Jerusalem is much more subdued than the earlier Nazareth segments so it seems appropriate.

The Colour of Paradise

First, a brief synopsis (Warning: spoiler ahead!):

Mohammad is a boy attending a school for the blind in Tehran. He is a very open and curious child who seems quite attuned to nature. It's the end of term and all of the other children are picked up by their parents but Mohammad's father is very late in coming for him. The father tries to persuade the school to keep the boy over school break, saying that there is no one to take care of the child at home. This is not true because the boy's grandmother adores him, as do his two young sisters.

Actually, the father has mixed feelings about his son because of the boy's blindness. It seems like another one in a string of rotten things that have afflicted the father and left him fearful and anxious.
Trying to turn his life around, the widowed father is courting a young woman but, while she and her family know about the two daughters, he has not told them about the blind son.

The father makes arrangements to apprentice the boy with a blind carpenter. He's convinced himself that it is for the boy's own good and takes the boy away. Brokenhearted, the grandmother packs her things and leaves her son's house but soon collapses and is taken back to the house to recover. She gives her son her jewelry for the wedding but not her blessing and spends her remaining days in prayer and when she dies her face is illuminated with a golden light.

Meanwhile, Mohammad is also nursing a broken heart. He feels unloved and unwanted.

After the grandmother's funeral, the father learns that his fiancee and her family have called off the wedding because the circumstances were too ominous. Grieving yet another loss, the father goes to the carpenter's and fetches his son. Tragically, a bridge they are crossing collapses and the boy is swept away in a raging river. The father follows after and eventually washes up on a shore near his son. As the father weeps and holds his son, the boy's hands are bathed in a golden light and the fingers begin to move.


Prompts for this blog:

Analyze at least three different specific scenes that you found particularly important or revealing and why.
1. While Mohammad waits for his father outside the school, he rescues a baby bird from a cat and climbs a tree to put the bird back in its nest. He doesn't hesitate to act in the world. This contrasts with the father who hesitates and seems afraid of nature and the calls of birds.

2. When the grandmother packs up and leaves, the father is worried about what people will think. The grandmother, however, is worried about him.

3. There are many scenes of Mohammad "reading". He doesn't just read Braille; he also "reads" pebbles in a stream and grains of wheat. He has been told by his teacher that the blind are favoured by God because, although invisible, God can be felt. Mohammad knows that God is everywhere and is eager to "see" God.

Were there any aspects of these scenes or the film as a whole that you found confusing or unclear?

The unclear part was the ending and I am not sure whether or not the ending is meant to be as ambiguous as it seems.

If you had to rewrite the ending, how might you change it?

If the boy is dead then the golden light on his fingers as he "sees" God makes perfect sense but I'm not sure why the child didn't die until his father found him. Futhermore, it makes the boy's death just another tragedy in the father's unfortunate life. So.....I don't really see that the father has really learned anything.

If the boy is not dead at the end then I don't know why the golden light would appear as it does but it would explain why his fingers are moving.

I think that the father finds the boy is at the moment of his death. Maybe feeling his father's love helps the boy to "see" God. But I think I'd make the final scene a little clearer, one way or another.

Unit 5: The Scent of Green Papaya

The prompt for this unit: Blog (2): Based on your viewing of the film and the Unit 5 online lecture material, how would you compare or contrast the French and American experiences in Vietnam?

The French colonial period lasted over a century and was cultural as well as economic. French settlers had a personal stake in the region and had a large influence on the culture in the southern part of Vietnam.

The U.S. had only strategic interests in mind. They started out by giving the France financial support for its war effort, which was followed by intelligence and military "advisors". Military involvement grew after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964.

Unit 4: Xiu-Xiu

If I were a girl of the next generation from Xiu-Xiu's village and had grown up hearing her story from my mother and her friends would I have joined in the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square?

What exactly was the story that I heard from my mother and her generation? If little news reached Xiu-Xiu's home town, did they know what happened to her after she was sent to herd horses?

Did I hear that the girl was a heroic young woman who simply disappeared? Are there speculations about her destiny? Do the women of my village know - or guess - that she was sexually exploited? Do they know because the same thing happened to them? Do they blame Xiu-Xiu? Do they know she died or imagine her living on, far away from home and family? Do they see themselves as heroes and heroines of the Revolution? Do they see themselves as victims of the regime or of bureaucratic blunderers? How have they come to terms with their own loss?

More questions than answers with this one.