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’s ambitious follow-up to Toback’s more intimate character study, expands The Gambler ’s mutual corruption between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ milieux to the broader historical and psychological trauma of the Vietnam War and its counter-cultural corollary, the CIA-controlled South-East Asian heroin trade, which flooded American inner cities with addictive drugs throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Based on the
cinema since the early 1990s, such as new realism, the so-called jeune cinéma , as well as the emergence of what we might term a ‘post-look’ spectacular genre cinema – a popular French cinema that looks to Besson and Beineix, Hollywood genres and South-East Asian cinema for its inspiration and modes of production, rather than the more traditional reference points of French realism, the auteur
hundreds of thousands of first- and second-generation migrants. Instead, these films reject the notion propagated in earlier French films of the flow of peoples, ideas and languages as being solely unilateral: as only flowing from North Africa, South-East Asia, sub-Saharan West Africa, etc. towards France. Eurocentrism has no place in these films, for according to Shohat and Stam, Eurocentrism ‘envisions the world from a single privileged point’ (1994: 2) whereas multilingual cinema acknowledges and incorporates a multitude of sociocultural and linguistic perspectives
Indian indentured labourers (and descendants in Singapore and Malaya as well as Fiji), were influenced by anti-colonial movements in erstwhile homelands, and South East Asia was far from peaceful. 22 The Dutch withdrawal from Indonesia in 1949 (after recolonising attempts were rebuffed by nationalist forces) had left unresolved the status of West Papua, which for the first part of the 1950s remained as
draw on his military experience, but given that his experience of active service had been in Cyprus it seems curious that he chose to set the novel in South East Asia. It does, however, demonstrate his interest in world politics at the time, as well as giving an indication of his literary influences: ‘One was showing interest in that [the situation in Indo-China] and what was happening in Russia and so on. I was reading everything and having ideas I guess. Also I think I was very influenced by Graham Greene and Hemingway.’ According to Kennedy Martin, Graham Greene
opportunities for those with experience working in fishing, boat-building and other professions linked to the water. In the mid-twentieth century, boats would even arrive in Marseilles from as far as Vietnam, bringing a sizeable South-East Asian diaspora to the region. Today, such boats are far more likely to carry refugees from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, in far from secure circumstances, as films like Eden à l’ouest relate. And as Human Zoo shows, the region is also a point of passage for those moving between France and Eastern Europe. In these contact zones
impression that he is in central East Asia . . . [T]hese plant associations form an alien high altitude zone that is otherwise found only in much more restricted range on the highest peaks of the upland’ (1988: 243). In describing Paektusan’s flora and human habitation patterns, Lautensach identified its mixed pine, fir, larch, birch, spruce and maple, giving way to pine, fir and larch only in the
adventure; but his experience, not just of combat but also of his return to a country that was already openly divided about the war, altered his perspective and the direction of his life. Enrolment at film school under the GI Bill seemed to offer a way of expressing his anger and disillusionment, and the same determination that had kept him alive in South-East Asia now drove him on to try and tell something of that experience on film. Even as he took his place in the Hollywood firmament, the subject did not need to be Th e ci nem a of Ol iver S to ne 232 Vietnam to
master and certainly not as a metropolitan French citizen who is his equal. Furthermore, the lazy association between zouaves and souks suggests that while Gibert sees Daniel as being at his service – militarily and commercially – Daniel’s supposed ‘sly civility’ (Bhabha 1994) as Maghrebi Other means he is not to be trusted; hence Gibert’s warning to Bertineau and reassurance that he will maintain a watchful eye over the ‘lascar’. The latter word itself also has colonial overtones: today used to mean ‘rascal’ (and also ‘hacker’), it originally designated an East Asian
, Romero thus illustrates how foundational dreams of cooperative social endeavour, as the guarantor of the perfectibility of the nation, meet their end both in the rice fields of South East Asia and in the bankrupt cities of the American 1970s. Romero’s America thus emerges as a nation governed by a President whose very name would become a watchword for corruption of the body politic: a fact no binding-up of the nation’s wounds by the revisionist Gerald Ford and others would heal. As I will subsequently argue, the sociocultural and political legacy of this would manifest