#the killing fields

[vehiculartheyslaughter]

Sam Waterston memes for the soul

[kennethbrangh]

SAM WATERSTON as Sydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields (1984)

[theoscarsproject]

The Killing Fields (1984). A journalist is trapped in Cambodia during tyrant Pol Pot's bloody 'Year Zero' cleansing campaign, which claimed the lives of two million 'undesirable' civilians.

There's a lot to like in this harrowing film about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, from the friendship between Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran's to the sublime cinematography. I particularly appreciate the way the film used the American journalism angle as an entry point but stayed with Dith's journey in Cambodia afterwards. It felt almost like a way to trojan horse a broader audience into the story, and it's particularly compelling given that act is by far the strongest of the film. Pretty solid, albeit also pretty flawed. 7/10.

[theredandwhitequeen]

2, 8, 40 for the movie ask!

2. What movie do you wish you could unwatch? I don’t think I have any. If I think I won’t watch something then I just won’t watch it in the first place.

8. What’s your comfort film? Newsies, and Star Wars I feel are my comfort movies.

40. A film you think everyone should see at least once? Empire of the Sun and The Killing Fields. These are such good movies and very important to me. Christian Bale as a teen during wwii in a pow camp for white people in China struggling to survive without his parents. It’s amazing. The Killing Fields is hard to watch to the subject matter, but it is so good. The lead actor also survived the killing fields of Cambodia and was brilliant in the movie. I love these movies. Also Schindler’s List and the Piano. I could go on about movies.

Thanks for the ask.

[pampinoscaryt2]

The Killing Fields

Los gritos del silencio

[wisdomfish]

John Owen famously wrote, “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.”

[script-supervisor]

Penny Eyles

The Killing Fields, dir. Roland Joffé, 1984.

[wonderfulstills]

The Killing Fields

[ Roland Joffé • 1984 ]

[cemyafilmarsiv]

The Killing Fields directed by Roland Joffe

[denimbex1986]

'LONG before Cillian Murphy there was Sam Waterston, and long before Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer there was Peter Goodchild’s Oppenheimer (BBC4, Friday), which is being reshown for the first time in decades.

Goodchild, who was interviewed by Variety last month to coincide with the film’s release, started his BBC producing career in radio drama and later moved to television with the science documentary series Horizon.

When Horizon diversified into science docudramas in the 1970s, Goodchild, who holds a chemistry degree, got to combine his two interests in a successful series about Marie Curie.

It was his idea to make a seven-part miniseries about J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, played by Waterston. First shown on BBC2 in 1980, Oppenheimer was a big hit with viewers and critics, winning three Bafta awards. It also garnered Emmy and Golden Globe nominations after it was shown on PBS in the United States.

The budget of £1.5m (about €7.5m today) – 90pc of it coming from the BBC, the rest from WGBH Boston – might seem like a grain of New Mexico sand compared with the £100m price tag of Nolan’s Imax epic.

Back then, however, it was a huge spend for a British drama.

A huge physical production, too, with scrupulous attention to detail. For maximum authenticity, Goodchild, now 83, told Variety, the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory was recreated on a purpose-built set in Colorado Springs, complete with water tower and replica bomb.

The supporting cast was made up almost entirely of American actors based in Britain.

Two notable exceptions were future Poirot star David Suchet as the excitable, voluble Hungarian physicist Edward Teller and Edward Hardwicke (Dr Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes) as his Italian colleague Enrico Fermi.

Viewers who have grown used to watching even modestly budgeted dramas shot on HD video that mimics celluloid film may find the switch from Oppenheimer’s interior scenes, which were mostly shot on videotape in a studio in the UK, to the ones shot on film in America a little jarring at first.

But the story is so engrossing you cease to be aware of the contrast after a while.

What’s remarkable is how well Oppenheimer, which was written by Peter Prince and directed by Barry Davis, holds up 43 years later.

There’s none of the slowness or staginess you sometimes see in dramas from the period. Friday’s opening two episodes positively zipped by.

They spanned the years 1938, when Oppenheimer was at the University of Berkley, to 1942, when Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Manning Redwood), ignoring warnings about Oppenheimer’s long associations with active communists and championing of left-wing causes, put him in charge of the Manhattan Project, which was to be housed in a high-security facility in Los Alamos.

Waterston, just four years ahead of his best actor Oscar nomination for playing Siydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields, is fantastic as Oppenheimer.

You can see why the BBC was prepared to pay him well above the normal rate for appearing in one of its dramas and to put him up in a luxury hotel during filming.

He conveys Oppenheimer’s charisma, intelligence, brilliance and charm, especially to women.

But we also see his ruthlessness and arrogance.

When we meet him, he’s romantically involved with psychiatrist and communist Jean Tatlock (Kate Harper), who suffered from clinical depression (she died by suicide in 1944), yet thinks nothing of casting her aside when he sets eyes on his future wife Kitty Puening (Jana Shelden), who at that time is married to someone else.

They tumble into an affair. In one particularly cruel moment, he humiliates Jean by turning up at a dinner party at her home with Kitty on his arm.

Even at this stage, the seeds of Oppenheimer’s downfall are being sown. Naively unconcerned about the dangers of having communist friends, he doesn’t realise he’s already under FBI surveillance.

A terrific drama from a far more creative age of TV.'

[unfotograma]

The Killing Fields (1984)

[nonovyabuisness]

Just finished watching Killing Fields with my father and Cambodian step mother.

The original point of watching this movie was to see the Cambodian point of view for a ducking presentation.

I’m still crying and I can’t fucking stop.

[cinemaquiles]

CINCO VENCEDORES DO OSCAR DE MELHOR FOTOGRAFIA POUCO LEMBRADOS QUE VOCÊ PRECISA VER!

[negrolicity]

[longliverockback]

Mike Oldfield The Killing Fields 1984 Virgin ————————————————— Tracks: 01. Pran’s Theme 02. Requiem for a City 03. Evacuation 04. Pran’s Theme 2 05. Capture 06. Execution 07. Bad News 08. Pran’s Departure 09. Worksite 10. The Year Zero 11. Blood Sucking 12. The Year Zero 2 13. Pran’s Escape • The Killing Fields 14. The Trek 15. The Boy’s Burial • Pran Sees the Red Cross 16. Good News 17. Etude —————————————————

Mike Oldfield

* Long Live Rock Archive

[southeastasiadiary]

Day Twelve: The Killing Fields

Late this morning, I flew from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to Phnom Penh, “The Pearl of Asia,” AKA the capital of Cambodia. I met my guide, Thy, at the airport and headed immediately to Cheung Ek, one of the sites known collectively as “the Killing Fields.”

Incongruously and somewhat surreally, there’s a very nice cafe with free Wi-Fi just across from Cheung Ek. I was very hungry, so I sat and checked my email over a lovely lunch of spring rolls and red curry only about a hundred yards away from where hundreds of people had been murdered a few decades earlier.

Unfortunately, I don’t have that many photos to show of Cheung Ek for two reasons. First, visitors are asked to refrain from photographing many parts of the site out of respect for the victims. Second, this is the rainy season in Cambodia.

Now, let me try to give you some impression of what it means to be in Cambodia during the rainy season. Recall the worst storm you can remember. Thunderstorm. Tropical Storm. Hurricane. Whatever. Now multiply that by ten. Then multiply the result by a thousand. THAT'S how heavy the rains are. The water comes down, not in droplets, but in continual sheets that drench you and everything you own, leaving it looking as though you took it all for a nice swim. Wearing an anorak and carrying an umbrella? Ha! They serve only to make you FEEL as though you’re doing something. Compared to this utter monsoon, they don’t stand a chance.

Here’s the walkway into the site:

And here’s the entrance gate:

You have to realize that the water you’re looking at between the doors of that gate is six inches deep AT ITS MOST SHALLOW. At the end of our visit, Thy had to call our driver to come rescue us under a canopy, otherwise we couldn’t have made it across the parking lot to the car.

Yes, it was really that bad.

Needless to say, taking photos at an outdoors site like Cheung Ek in the midst of such a storm proved to be nearly impossible. But, since we had to run from one sheltered area to the next, armed with the beach-sized umbrellas that Thy provided, he had plenty of time to tell me the story of the Killing Fields.

He was sixteen when the Khmer Rouge came to power. At first, they were welcomed by the Cambodian people since it was widely believed that the Khmer Rouge would reinstate the king. But, immediately after taking power, the new government ordered Phnom Penh to be evacuated. The reason given was that the Americans were about to bomb the city. In reality, this was a ploy to get everyone into the countryside and force them to work in agriculture. Pol Pot claimed that, if everyone worked and there were no lazy people, the country could produce enough rice that it could buy whatever it needed, and everyone would prosper.

Things didn’t turn out that way.

The Khmer Rouge distrusted intellectuals, foreigners, those who had associated with foreigners, and anyone else who might be suspected as not fully on board with the new order. In prison, those arrested were tortured and forced to provide names of others who were “enemies of the regime.” And so, the list of those who were arrested continued to expand.

Once people had given names of their “co-conspirators,” they were told they’d been rehabilitated and soon would be taken back to their homes. In reality, they were taken to one of the Killing Fields.

There, they’d be blindfolded and their hands tied. One by one they’d be taken out to where a mass grave had already been dug. Each victim would be struck in the head with whatever implement was at hand and, dead or not, tossed into the grave.

At Cheung Ek alone, almost 9,000 bodies have been found, and it is known that many still lie buried there.

A memorial or stupa has been constructed at the site. Inside are seventeen tiers, filled with bones of the victims.