Starting Place / The People's War / SayKomSa ( Point de départ / The People's War / SayKomSa )

Starting Place / The People's War / SayKomSa (DVD) (*)

$33.99

Original Title: Point de départ / The People's War / SayKomSa
Language Selections:
English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 )
English ( Mono )
English ( Subtitles )
French ( Subtitles )

Product Origin/Format:
France ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
139 min

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.78:1)

Special Features:
Interactive Menu
Scene Access
Black & White
Booklet

Movie filmed in 1970-1998 and produced in:
France ( France, Benelux )

Directed By:
Robert Kramer

Written By:
Robert Kramer

Actors:
Clothilde Piven ..... Self - Reader

Synopsis:

Starting Place: In this film from late in his career, Kramer returns to Hanoi after nearly 25 years to re-envision the city's struggle through an uncertain and daunting past, present, and future. The Vietnamese characters in the film are diverse: Kramer's former guide from an earlier visit in 1969; a tight-rope walker in the national circus; a man who took photos of B-52s and another who lost his fingers shooting them down. The People's War: Shot in Vietnam in the summer of 1969, this documentary creates a vivid portrait of the countryside and ways of life during the war. SayKomSa: […] 'History has made Vietnam one of my favourite places… The links that you establish with people and places very often seem totally unexpected. But it is not a question of chance. It is, among other things, a question of history, of a sequence of events, 'that's how it is'. Once that is admitted, you can spend a lot of time trying to understand why that is how it is.' (Robert Kramer)

Like many Americans of his generation, the Vietnam War was a pivotal event in Robert Kramer's intellectual journey. In the mid-1960s, he published two articles of political analysis and wrote an unproduced screenplay about the conflict, before going there in 1969 with other members of Newsreel to shoot People's War, a medium-length film about the North Vietnamese struggle. Almost thirty years later, in 1998, he returned to the pacified country in the grip of globalization, where he filmed a short video chronicle, Say Kom Sa. Between the two, Point de départ, a documentary masterpiece in the style of floating framing and fragmented editing that Kramer has been developing since Our Nazi, bridges a national past that does not pass and a present without a future.

This product was added to our catalog on Saturday 02 November, 2024.