Film: The Most Secret Place on Earth

ArtRage

March 2013

The Most Secret Place on Earth is a 2008 film by German director Marc Eberle.

After 30 years of conspiracy theories and myth making, this film uncovers the story of the CIA’s most extensive clandestine operation in the history of modern warfare: The Secret War in Laos, which was conducted alongside the Vietnam War from 1964 -1973. While the world’s attention was caught by the conflict in Vietnam, the CIA built the busiest military airport in the world in neighboring and neutral Laos and recruited humanitarian aid personnel, Special Forces agents and civilian pilots to undertake what would become the most effective operation of counterinsurgency warfare.

As the conflict in Vietnam grew, the objective in Laos changed from a cost effective low-key involvement to save the country from becoming communist into an all-out air war to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and bomb Laos back into the Stone Age that it had never really left in the first place. Conventional bombs equivalent to the destructive power of 20 Hiroshima-type weapons fell on Laos each year – 2 million tons of bombs, more than on Europe and the Pacific theatre combined during World War II. Until today much of the countryside is poisoned by Agent Orange and littered with unexploded ordnance.

In “The most secret place on earth” key players of the secret war – CIA agents, pilots, Laotian and Thai fighters -take us on a journey into the physical heart of the conflict: Top secret Long Tieng. Long Tieng was often described as “The Most Secret Place on Earth”. It was located in a valley at 3,100 feet elevation, high enough to have chilly nights and cold fogs. It was surrounded by mountains and on the northwest side of the runway were karst outcrops several hundred feet high. In the shadow of the Karst outcrops was “Sky” the CIA headquarters in Long Tieng. Jerry Daniels, a CIA officer codenamed “Hog,” is said to have named Sky after his home state of Montana, known as “Big Sky Country.” Long Tieng was protected on three sides by limestone mountains.

The story is told with archival images, interviews and contemporary shots of both Laos and the US. Some of the archive footage is previously unpublished and comes from private collections of former US personnel stationed in Laos, and from the Lao Film Archives – these had never before been screened. The interviews are conducted in a way to characterize the interviewees in their respective roles within the film. A voice over narration is sparsely applied where necessary. The investigative story telling is rendered by declassified documents, maps and newspaper clippings. Contemporary shots of both US government bodies (Congress, CIA Headquarters, the White House) and Laotian sceneries drive at a metaphoric visual rendering and connect the aftermath of the secret war in Laos to the machinations in the jungles of Washington 30 years ago. Americas Secret war in Laos tells of the absurd brutality of a conflict, that has barely been documented in it’s full extent and yet cost up to hundreds of thousand lives.

Full film below.

The Spirit of '45 Trailer - In cinemas 15th March

Academy Awards: When 'No' gets a 'Yes!' in Chile

Chile's film industry is excited about its first Oscar nomination for the controversial Pinochet-era film, 'No.'

By Steven Bodzin

Christian Science Monitor

February 23, 2013

When you click on the website of CinemaChile, the promoter of Chilean films around the world, you see a close-up of Mexican actor Gael García Bernal looking over his shoulder, a huge rainbow blurred out in the background. No one familiar with Chilean film needs the tiny caption. It’s from the movie “No,” released in 2012, now representing Chile at the Academy Awards as the country’s first-ever Oscar nomination.

With the Oscar ceremony set for Sunday evening,Santiago’s small but thriving film world is preparing for a late night — the broadcast will start at 9 p.m. local time. And the habitual local pessimism is yielding to a spot of hope.

Thinking about Prairie Capitalism: Interview with Larry Pratt

Interview by Jeremy Mouat
Aurora

Aurora: Recently I was reading Prairie Capitalism, a book that you wrote in 1979 with John Richards, and I found myself wondering what you might think now. The book came out of a particular debate and a particular context, notably, the debate around the NDP Waffle and left nationalism. Yet the book also attempted something that hadn't been done before in Western Canadian historiography, it seemed to me. Before Prairie Capitalism, the literature had been almost exclusively narrative. Did you have this sense at the time, that you were writing a different account of Western history?

Larry Pratt: When John came to see me around 1975 – he was a Saskatchewan MLA about to lose his seat - we compared notes and we were struck by the similarities between the Blakeney NDP in Saskatchewan and the Lougheed Conservatives in Alberta. That was the first thing. The second was that we were both disenchanted nationalists. We came to feel that Lougheed couldn't be simply written off as an instrument of the working people, which is what a lot of people in the East were saying. I wrote a piece for Leo Panitch’s book, The Canadian State and in it I described a development strategy that was emerging in Alberta around petrochemicals.[1] It seemed to me that if a province was simply content to take the money and run, that that province wouldn't go through these tremendous difficulties trying to build a world class petrochemical industry. And there were a lot of other things - the Blakeney government in Saskatchewan was nationalizing potash. John and I thought that we would try to do something different. We would take the history of the two provinces right from their conception, through the populist period, to the first development period, then up to the present. John would write about Saskatchewan and I would write about Alberta, and then I would go over his work and he would go over mine. But John was a better economist than I was, and so he wrote the book’s last chapter, which I think is a really great chapter, on rent. The book probably arose out of the tremendous period of change that occurred after the price of oil went up so high in 1973-74. We had to account for the fact that these two provinces were behaving in very entrepreneurial sorts of ways. And some private factors were following.

Clint Eastwood was right. Hollywood can be quietly, yet profoundly, conservative

By Tim Stanley 

The Telegraph

September 1, 2012

Dirty Harry captured the conservative mood of the early 1970s

Clint Eastwood got one thing right during his senior moment at the Republican convention: Hollywood isn’t all liberal. The first time Clint gained serious press attention in national politics was 1972, when he was invited by President Richard Nixon to attend his nominating convention in Miami. Nixon was a movie buff who understood the power of Hollywood. In 72, he wanted to use specific celebrity endorsements to shape the way that the public understood him. He wanted Democrats like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr to show that he was a centrist and he wanted Old Hollywood to evoke nostalgia for a happier, more traditional age. When Nixon held a meet-and-greet for actors at his West coast mansion, one guest called it “a cocktail party at the Hollywood wax museum.”

Commentators at the time were sniffy about Nixon’s Hollywood strategy precisely because its choice of symbols seemed so passé. The 1970s are remembered for experimental liberal film making – Apocalypse Now, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, All The President’s Men etc. The hot talent of the time was Left-leaning, even hippie – Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Warren Beatty. But Nixon understood that movie politics is just as diverse as its many genres. Individual movies can be interpreted in multiple ways. The Godfather was meant as an attack on hyper-masculinity and even a parody of Nixon, but it became part of a revival of white ethnic nostalgia. It could be argued that the Corleone family’s patriarchy offers a seductive alternative to bureaucratic welfarism.

The Long-view of the Nuclear Industry in Saskatchewan, Part 2

By Jim Harding

No Nukes
August 29, 2012

CCF, Liberal, NDP, Conservative and Sask Party governments all played a role in the nuclear industry getting a foothold in this province. Whether more left or right, all parties held to a post-war development view which could be called “pre-environmental technocracy”. All equated “nuclear” with industrial progress.

One of the first things done by the CCF’s Adult Education division in 1944 was to issue a pro-“atomic power” study guide. Nuclear power was going to be “too cheap to meter”, and, in those early years, there was complete amnesia about nuclear wastes. No wonder it’s been so hard to wean ourselves from the fantasy that nuclear energy is a vehicle of progress for working people. No wonder it’s been so hard for the non-nuclear view to get traction here.

Nevertheless, there’s been a steady evolution of solid opposition to the spread of the nuclear industry. In the late 1950s there was a strong “Ban the Bomb” peace movement here, but in retrospect, in that era of state secrecy, we still had our heads in the sand about Saskatchewan and Canada’s complicity in the nuclear arms race.

Saskatchewan Environmental Film Festival

Leo Panitch: The Challenge is to Move Beyond Protests

NewsClick.in
March 15, 2012

Professor Leo Panitch, Editor of Socialist Register and a well-known Marxist thinker discusses the need to go beyond resistance and opening out political space for change. This is the challenge before the movements today, ranging from the Occupy Movements to the Indignados. He is interviewed by Aijaz Ahmad - video in two parts. 

Canada's Siberia Expedition trailer

Canada’s Siberian Expedition

The 2012 Academy Awards

By David Walsh 

WSWS

28 February 2012

At the 84th Academy Awards ceremony Sunday in Los Angeles, the nearly silent French film, The Artist, and Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of a children’s book, each won five awards. The Iron Lady, the misguidedly sympathetic biography of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was the only other film to earn multiple awards.

The Separation

The Artist won as best picture, and its director (Michel Hazanivicius) and leading actor (Jean Dujardin) took home major prizes for their efforts. Meryl Streep won her third best actress award for her performance as Thatcher, and Octavia Spencer (The Help) and 82-year-old Christopher Plummer (Beginners) received the awards for best supporting actress and actor, respectively.

Most of the films that won top prizes are slight, or worse. The Artist is a clever but simplistic reworking of a theme, the dilemma produced by the transition from silent to talking pictures, that has been much better developed in other films. Hugo is another confused and disappointing effort from Scorsese. The Help reduces the drama of the civil rights era in the South to very small change.

Naomi Klein on the Greek Crisis

Συνέντευξη: Η Naomi Klein για την κυβέρνηση Παπαδήμου from ThePressProject on Vimeo.

Global Justice and the Future of Hope

By Rajesh Makwana
Dissident Voice
February 11th, 2012

Would it be easier to create a sustainable global economy if the world more closely resembled the demographics and geography of Iceland — a volcanic island with a manageably small population and a unique abundance of renewable energy? This was among the many questions raised during a panel discussion at Tipping Point Film Fund’s UK premier of Future of Hope, often referred to as the Iceland documentary.

Since the Nordic country experienced the systemic failure of its entire banking sector in 2008, a number of Iceland’s senior banking executives have been arrested, sacked or sued. Grass roots organisations, including the Ministry of Ideas that was featured in the film, have since hosted a National Assembly of unprecedented scale. The government-backed Assembly was designed to focus specifically on the nation’s next steps; to agree on a set of collective values and to establish a clear vision for how to rebuild their economy from the ashes of the old. While the film did not focus on the Assembly itself, progressives would not be surprised by its outcome: participants emphasised the importance of robust public services, establishing an environmentally responsible and sustainable economy, and ensuring equality and transparency in the country’s future renaissance.

Christopher's Movie Matinée: haphazard adventures in Flower Power cinema

National Film Board of Canada

In 1968, in Yorkville (Toronto), the NFB provided a group of hippies with cameras, film and a few NFB film crew members so they could make a film illustrating their lives and their world. The result is a frustrating yet strikingly beautiful testimony to a protest era not unlike our own.

Read more HERE.

Revenge of the Pawns

By Jamie
New Left Project
09 January 2012

Wonderful little film by Erik Olin Wright, made in 1968, about the dilemmas of revolution.

He explains:

"The key idea in this animated film was this: the pawns revolt against the 'ruling class' pieces, sweep them from the board and then dance an American square dance on the board. In the end, however, they start a new chess game, but this time the pawns are on the back row moving like Kings and bishops and the like, while the old aristocratic pieces occupy the pawn row and move like pawns. The message of the film was that the pawns failed to make a revolution because they thought it was sufficient to depose the old elite. They neglected to remove the board itself. The chessboard, then, was a metaphor for underlying social structure that generates 'the rules of the game'. A revolution, to be sustainable, has to transform that.

Now, this idea is not a uniquely Marxist idea. In a sense it is the foundational idea of much structurally oriented sociology: people fill “locations” in social structures — sometimes called roles — which impose constraints and opportunities on what they can chose to do. This doesn’t mean that human practices or activities are rigidly determined by roles. Intentions and choices still really matter. Agency matters. But such choice occurs in a setting of systematic (rather than haphazard) constraints.

The Marxist form of this general idea is to make a claim — a pretty bold one when you think about it — that the key to understanding this structural level of constraint is the nature of the economic structure in which people live, or even more precisely, the nature of the “mode of production”. In my little film there was no production, no economy. The chessboard was a completely open-ended metaphor for social structure. So it is in that sense that the film was not specifically based on a Marxist framework.

As for its inspiration, I think the film grew out of the concerns for radical, egalitarian social change that were part of the intellectual culture of the student movement, the American civil rights movement and Vietnam War era anti-war movement. I participated in various ways in these social movements of the 1960s and was very much caught up in the utopian aspirations of the times, but I also felt that the task of constructing emancipatory alternatives was more arduous than many people thought. It is not enough to attack the establishment and remove its players. Constructing an alternative is a task in its own right. And that is what the film tried to convey."

In the Year of the Pig (full movie, 1968)

Yahoo movies

Celebrated and controversial documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio made IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG, criticizing American involvement in the Vietnam War, during the height of its intensification in 1968.

Like his other constructed documentaries, de Antonio takes newsreel and archival footage, along with existing interviews, and uses them to explore the history of Vietnam between the Second World War and the civil war that America would become involved with. Using the very words of those who escalated the conflict against them, de Antonio's film condemns the American involvement in the war by providing disturbing footage of its terrible consequences.

IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG is the forerunner to the political documentaries of the George W. Bush period.

A Multimedia Introduction to the Communist Manifesto

Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

Girl re-booted

Does the world need a second The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film? Yes, says John Rees.

By John Rees
CounterFire
28 December 2011
Also see How Stieg Larsson trained Marxist guerrillas in Eritrea

You might think the world is already saturated with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Sales of the original novel stand at over 30 million copies. It’s the first novel to sell over a million Kindle copies alone. When the first Swedish screen adaption, released in cinemas less than 2 years ago, came out as a DVD it became the fastest selling disc in UK history.

And there is another reason for scepticism: the plot of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not exactly new. For those who have been on a long-term mining expedition on one of Saturn’s less accessible moons it involves the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, a young member of an industrialist’s family, on an island in northern Sweden in the summer of 1966. There is only one way off the island over a road bridge and that was blocked by an accident when Harriet disappeared. Was Harriet killed? And if so which member of the Vanger family is responsible? In short this is a country house mystery of the kind made famous by, variously, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Cluedo. Larsson himself makes the point in the book ‘It's actually a fascinating case. What I believe is known as locked room mystery’.

Grierson

National Film Board of  Canada
1973

This feature film is a portrait of John Grierson, the first Canadian Government Film Commissioner and founder the National Film Board in 1939. Interweaving archival footage, interviews with people who knew him and footage of Grierson himself, this film is a sensitive and informative portrait of a dynamic man of vision.

Grierson believed strongly that the filmmaker had a social responsibility, and that film could help a society realize democratic ideals. His absolute faith in the value of capturing the drama of everyday life was to influence generations of filmmakers all over the world. In fact, he coined the term "documentary film."

Alfred Hitchcock Presents "Class Struggle"

By Mervyn Nicholson
Monthly Review
December 2011

Class struggle is the last thing most people would associate with Alfred Hitchcock, probably the most famous director of them all. But there is a connection, nevertheless. No one would call Hitchcock a socialist; he emphasized that all he wanted was to entertain people—not instruct them. He was proud of his commercial success (and so were the studios that employed him). He made cynical-sounding remarks about manipulating audiences, and he never bothered with deep-level interpretation of his films.

It is true that his movies of the war period (1939–45) are conspicuously antifascist, Lifeboat most of all, but the common view is that Hitchcock is essentially apolitical. “You generally avoid any politics in your films,” the French director François Truffaut said to him, and Hitchcock’s reply sums up his attitude: “It’s just that the public doesn’t care for films on politics.” He has nothing against it, but it is not what the public wants. It is significant that even Lifeboat was accused by some critics of supporting the Nazis.

Academics typically discuss everything about Hitchcock, except class—class not in a quasi-cultural sense, but in the technical and Marxist sense of class, with related themes of surplus extraction, alienation, immiseration, and revolution, implied in the term. As John Grant puts it, “the notion of ‘class’ is a dirty word in today’s America.” Critics notice the “dark side” of American society, plainly depicted in Hitchcock’s Hollywood movies; they discuss the alienation and cynicism, the satire, even nihilism, in his films.

Read more HERE.

Cosmonaut (Cosmonauta)

Portobello Pictures
2009

"A crowd pleasing coming-of-ager”
Variety

“I’m a Communist!” declares Luciana at age 9.

It’s now 1963 and 15 year old Luciana has been obsessed with Russian space missions since she was a little girl, a passion passed on by her older, oddball brother Arturo. She is now a committed member of the local Italian Federation of Young Communists and is nursing a hopeless crush on the handsome leader of the group, also her friend’s boyfriend. Susanna Nicchiarelli’s first feature follows feisty Luciana trying to get the boys in her group to take her ideas seriously as she suffers through the initial blast off and return to Earth of first love.

A teenage girl growing up in the Sixties finds an unusual way to impress a boy and show up her older brother in this bittersweet coming-of-age debut feature from director Susanna Nicchiarelli, which was selected for the "New Trends in Italian Cinema" section at the 2009 Venice Film Festival.

Luciana (Miriana Raschilla) was just a baby when her father died, but stories of his devotion to the Italian Communist party have had a strong impact on her and her older brother Arturo (Pietro del Giudice). They follow the progress of the space program together, urging on the Soviet cosmonauts. When Arturo declares his ambition to someday become a cosmonaut, Luciana starts her own personal space race, announcing that she intends to beat her brother into outer space and become the first woman in orbit. But it's hard to say how much of this is a genuine ambition, and how much is intended to impress Vittorio (Michelangelo Ciminale), the handsome leader of the Young Communists.

Sergio Rubini is terrific as Luciana's stern stepfather and Nicchiarelli, who co-stars as a party woman who inspires Luciana, skilfully evokes the period, contrasting historical events with the trials of adolescence, interspersing fascinating footage of the early Soviet space missions with newly recorded contemporary versions of pop songs from the period.