|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
In Seven Samurai (1954) a whole society is on the verge of
irrevocable change. Akira Kurosawa's celebrated film, regarded by
many to be the major achievement of Japanese cinema, is an epic
that evokes the cultural upheaval brought on by the collapse of
Japanese militarism in the 16th century, but at the same time
echoes also the sweeping cultural changes occurring in the
aftermath of the American Occupation that followed Japan's defeat
in the Second World War. The plot is deceptively simple. A village
of farmers is beleaguered by a horde of bandits. In desperation,
the farmers decide to hire itinerant samurai to protect their crops
and people and defeat the bandits. There had never been a Japanese
film in which peasants hired samurai, or an evocation of the social
transformation that made such an idea credible. There are six
samurai and one who is accepted as such. Together they reflect the
ideals and values of a noble class near the point of extinction.
Seven Samurai may be the greatest action film, a technical
masterpiece unmatched in its depiction of movement and violence,
but running beneath the sound and fury is a lament for a lost
nobility, 'a dirge for the spirit of Japan,' writes Joan Mellen,
'which will never again be so strong.' Mellen's study
contextualises Seven Samurai, marking its place in Japanese cinema
and in Kurosawa's film-making career. She explores the film's roots
in medieval history and, above all, the astonishing visual language
in which Kurosawa created his elegiac epic.
Presents evidence suggesting collusion between US and Israeli
intelligence in the attack on a US naval surveillance vessel during
the Six-Day War and the more than fifty-year long cover-up. On June
8, 1967, the USS Liberty, an unarmed intelligence ship reporting to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the auspices of the National
Security Agency, was positioned in international waters off the
coast of Egypt when it was attacked with deadly violence by
unmarked jet planes firing rockets and machine guns and throwing
napalm onto its deck. This ambush was followed by a torpedo strike
that blew a forty-foot hole in the starboard side of the ship.
Lacking the capacity to defend themselves, thirty-four sailors were
killed and 174 wounded, many for life. By the end of the day,
Israel had confessed to having been the aggressor, simultaneously
arguing that the attack had been an "accident" and a "mistake." The
facts said otherwise. So intense and sustained was the attack - it
lasted for nearly an hour and a half - so specific was the aiming
for the antennae and satellite dish on deck, that it was scarcely
credible that Israel's aggression was not deliberate; such was the
view of Marshall Carter, the director of the National Security
Agency, his deputy director Louis Tordella, and Richard Helms, the
Director of Central Intelligence. Based on interviews with more
than forty survivors, knowledgeable political insiders, and Soviet
archives of the period, investigative writer Joan Mellen presents
evidence suggesting complicity between US and Israeli intelligence
in the attack on Liberty and the more than fifty-year long
cover-up. What were the underlying motives? Was this a false flag
operation conducted in the midst of the Six-Day War? Was it
conceivable that Israel would have initiated such an operation
without a green light from the United States? For the sake of
justice, truth and the murdered and surviving sailors, this is a
story demanding to be told.
Delving into the complex and intertwined world of the CIA, Lee
Harvey Oswald, and the assassination of President John F Kennedy,
this book takes on the angle of those who knew and associated with
Kennedy's alleged assassin. Profiling George de Mohrenschildt, a
petroleum geologist based in Dallas and Haiti, this examination
explores the relationship between Oswald, the CIA, and de
Mohrenschildt. This book also investigates the CIA's involvement in
the Haitian government during the 1960s, and seeks to connect each
entity to each other in the jigsaw puzzle that is the Kennedy
assassination.
Declared obscene in Japan, where it has never been shown in its
entirety, Oshima Nagisa's "In the Realm of the Senses," was shown
uncut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976: thirteen screenings were
required to satisfy audience demand. The unprecedented explicitness
with which the film presented sexual acts inevitably caused
widespread controversy. But this is not a film which sets out
simply to shock. Oshima's account of a couple whose sexual
obsession finds its ultimate expression in murder (based on a
notorious true-life incident in 1936 Tokyo) was animated by deep
political convictions. As Joan Mellen explains, Oshima wished to
break with social conventions as well as the film-making culture of
the past. He took a revolutionary position. Refusing to follow the
lead of the masters who had gone before him (Mizoguchi, Ozu,
Naruse, Kurosawa), disdaining costume drama and poignant family
portraits, Oshima attacked the sense of victimhood he saw
everywhere in his country's psychic make-up. "In the Realm of the
Senses" is the fullest expression of this political intent.
Oshima's lovers seek to combat social repression through sexual
transgression--but they fail.
Jim Garrison: His Life and Times, The Early Years, is a biography
of the former District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana from
his 1922 birth in Iowa and service in World War II - he was among
those assigned to Dachau Concentration Camp the day after its
liberation - to his years confronting the corrupt politics of
Louisiana. In 1997, Joan Mellen started to work on the story of
former Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison's life. That
biography turned into the story of Garrison's investigation of the
assassination of President John Kennedy, and then into a new
investigation of the assassination itself in her book, "A Farewell
to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That
Should Have Changed History," published in 2005.
Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and
drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses
speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the
investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the
only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in
President John F. Kennedy's murder.Garrison began by exposing the
contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee
Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in
killing Kennedy. "A Farewell to Justice" reveals that Oswald, no
Marxist, was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well
as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison's
investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the
assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee
David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who
at the very least was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset.
Garrison's suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune
enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an
anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators,
interviewed here for the first time by the author.Building upon
Garrison's effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and
clearly establishes the intelligence agencies' roles in both a
president's assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well
before the actual events of November 22, 1963.
Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and
drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses
speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the
investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the
only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in
President John F. Kennedy's murder.Garrison began by exposing the
contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee
Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in
killing Kennedy. "A Farewell to Justice" reveals that Oswald, no
Marxist, was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well
as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison's
investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the
assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee
David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who
at the very least was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset.
Garrison's suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune
enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an
anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators,
interviewed here for the first time by the author.Building upon
Garrison's effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and
clearly establishes the intelligence agencies' roles in both a
president's assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well
before the actual events of November 22, 1963.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|