Virginia Woolf's death:

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Virginia Woolf

The Hours is a 2002 American/British drama film directed by Stephen Daldry. The screenplay by David Hare is based on the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title by Michael Cunningham.
The plot focuses on three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.


From the movie: Virginia Woolf and her husband at the train station. She would rather die in the violent jolt of London than stay in the quiet Richmond.

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A Brief HIstory of Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was birthed from the conflict that started between the French and Vietnamese in 1950. France colonized the Indochina region in the mid 1800s and had ruled there up until 1954, when they lost the first Indochina War. During this time
communist China recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a government body proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh and defender against the French. Vietnam was then split into to "nations" through the Geneva Convention of 1954. North Vietnam was backed by the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, while South Vietnam was backed by more democratic states namely the United States.Dwight Eisenhower, president of the United States at the time, used South Vietnam as a counter revolutionary body against the communist party. Mainly through American funding, pseudo country received around a billion dollars in military aid and Ngo Dinh Diem, elected leader of the newly created country, put it to use by oppressing anyone who opposed him. Buddhist monks, suspected communists, college students, among others were among the victims of Diem's counter tactics against communism. Diem also set his sights on North Vietnam claiming they had been forcefully trying to take over its southern counterpart. Fighting escalated as the two sides fought for control. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Vietnam took a slightly different approach. Their goal was to fight until the opposition no longer wanted to. The strategy relied on the war weariness of the United State's and South Vietnam's citizens to succeed. In 1960, the Kennedy administration took over the White House bringing with them a different policy toward Vietnam. They brought guerrilla tactics to the struggling country while increasing U.S. troop counts and introducing helicopters into the mix. In 1963, Diem was overthrown and killed, leading to chaos in South Vietnam. Three weeks later president Kennedy was assassinated.
The war, of course, continued to escalate from here. Lyndon Johnson, president of the United States after Kennedy, sent in an additional 200,000 troops and continued bombing raids. Communist backed North Vietnam also continued to fight. Ho Chi Minh declared that if the U.S. "want to make war for twenty years then we shall make war for twenty years. If they want to make peace, we shall make peace and invite them to afternoon tea." This all led to the Tet Offensive, which has gone down in history as a critical military failure for the United States, further splitting the country into pro- and anti-war movements and signaling a swing in momentum to the communist front.In 1968, negotiation began between the two warring sides, however, Nixon, now U.S. president, continued to aggressively fight using air raids. North Vietnam didn't quit, however. They continued to battle until 1975, when Saigon, capital of South Vietnam, was captured reunifying the Vietnam under communist control. The United States pulled their troops in 1973 but continued to aid the South until the fall of Saigon. On April 30, 1975, the war was officially declared over after two and a half decades of death and blood shed..As it is common in many wars at the end neither side won; US paid the war with 58.000 lifes and 350.000 casualities; the intensive use of napalm caused the death of a number between 1 million and 2 millions Vietnamese deaths and destructed great part of Vietnam’s forests. The use of “defolianti” as the famous “Orange agent” based on diossina caused great damage to the agriculture. This war will have heavy consequences on the image of the US during the cold war with Russia.

Lorenzo Ballati

Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now

Here you can find an interesting analysis of the novella and the movie version compared.

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Apocalypse Now

« My film is not on Vietnam... my film is Vietnam. » (Francis Ford Coppola)

LIGHTS AND SHADES OF THE SOUL: APOCALYPSE NOW


Apocalypse Now is a 1979 drama movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

It tells a fictional (made-up) story that takes place during the Vietnam War. It tells the story of an Army Captain who is sent on a boat deep into the jungle to capture a Special Forces colonel who has gone insane.

It was partly based on Joseph Conrad's novel about colonialism, Heart of Darkness.

Plot
U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard has returned to Saigon; a seasoned veteran, he is deeply troubled and apparently no longer fit for civilian life. A group of intelligence officers approach him with a special mission: go up-river into the remote Cambodian jungle to find Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a former member of the United States Army Special Forces.
They state that Kurtz, once considered a model officer and future general, has allegedly gone insane and is commanding a legion of his own Montagnard troops deep inside the forest in neutral Cambodia.
Their claims are supported by very disturbing radio broadcasts and/or recordings made by Kurtz himself. Willard is ordered to undertake a mission to find Kurtz and "terminate... with extreme prejudice."
Willard studies the intelligence files during the boat ride to the river entrance and learns that Kurtz, isolated in his compound, has assumed the role of a warlord and is worshipped by the natives and his own loyal men.

After arriving at Kurtz' outpost, Willard leaves Chef behind with orders to call in an air strike on the village if he does not return. They are met by a borderline-psychotic freelance photographer (Hopper) who explains Kurtz's greatness and philosophical skills to provoke his people into following him.

Kurtz wishes to die at Willard's hands, and Willard, having subsequently granted Kurtz his wish, is offered the chance to succeed him in his warlord-demigod role. Juxtaposed with a ceremonial slaughtering of a water buffalo, Willard enters Kurtz's chamber during one of his message recordings, and kills him with a machete.

Lying bloody and dying on the ground, Kurtz whispers "The horror... the horror," a line taken directly from Conrad's novella.


Cast:



• Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard

• Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz

• Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore

• Harrison Ford as Colonel Lucas

• Dennis Hopper as American Photojournalist

HoD (?)

It stands for "Heart of Darkness"

Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness in particular, provide a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals of modernism. It stands on the dividing line between the TRADITIONAL and the MODERN NOVEL containing elements of both. His adventurous life took him to exotic places but he did not write adventurous stories , rather the settings where were complex mental state could be presented. GEOGRAPHICAL ISOLATION WAS A SYMBOL FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL ISOLATION.

Like their Victorian predecessors, these novels rely on traditional ideas of heroism, which are nevertheless under constant attack in a changing world and in places far from England.

Women occupy traditional roles as arbiters of domesticity and morality, yet they are almost never present in the narrative; instead, the concepts of “home” and “civilization” exist merely as hypocritical ideals, meaningless to men for whom survival is in constant doubt.

While the threats that Conrad’s characters face are concrete ones—illness, violence, conspiracy—they nevertheless acquire a philosophical character. Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the early decades of the twentieth century, Heart of Darkness is as much about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt as it is about imperialism.

Imperialism is nevertheless at the center of Heart of Darkness. By the 1890s, most of the world’s “dark places” had been placed at least nominally under European control, and the major European powers were stretched thin, trying to administer and protect massive, far-flung empires. Cracks were beginning to appear in the system: riots, wars, and the wholesale abandonment of commercial enterprises all threatened the white men living in the distant corners of empires. Things were clearly falling apart. Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially power over other human beings, inevitably corrupts. At the same time, this begs the question of whether it is possible to call an individual insane or wrong when he is part of a system that is so thoroughly corrupted and corrupting. Heart of Darkness, thus, at its most abstract level, is a narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self, about the ability of one man to judge another.

Although Heart of Darkness was one of the first literary texts to provide a critical view of European imperial activities, it was initially read by critics as anything but controversial. While the book was generally admired, it was typically read either as a condemnation of a certain type of adventurer who could easily take advantage of imperialism’s opportunities, or else as a sentimental novel reinforcing domestic values: Kurtz’s Intended, who appears at the novella’s conclusion, was roundly praised by turn-of-the-century reviewers for her maturity and sentimental appeal. Conrad’s decision to set the book in a Belgian colony and to have Marlow work for a Belgian trading concern made it even easier for British readers to avoid seeing themselves reflected in Heart of Darkness. Although these early reactions seem ludicrous to a modern reader, they reinforce the novella’s central themes of hypocrisy and absurdity.

At the time Heart of Darkness was written, the British Empire was at its peak, and Britain controlled colonies and dependencies all over the planet. The popular saying that “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was literally true. The main topic of Heart of Darkness is imperialism, a nation’s policy of exerting influence over other areas through military, political, and economic coercion. The narrator expresses the mainstream belief that imperialism is a glorious and worthy enterprise. Indeed, in Conrad’s time, “empire” was one of the central values of British subjects, the fundamental term through which Britain defined its identity and sense of purpose.

Linkers

Here you can view a short list of the most common linkers:

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