Final Exam Questions

1. In what ways does French occupation interfere in the daily lives of the Algerians in "Naema--Whereabouts Unknown"?

2. Accoding to Robert Stam's and Louise Spence's essay on The Battle of Algiers, what are two film techniques that the film uses to make its audience identify with the FLN?

3. Write about any two themes Yukio Mishima addresses in his short story "Patriotism"?

4. In the short film Patriotism, how does the photography, costume, setting, and composition (write about two) contribute to the lyricism of the story?

5. In Kobo Abe's one-act play, "The Man Who Turned into a Stick," what are the causes of the man-stick's" unhappiness?

6. In "The Man Who Turned into a Stick," what are two symbols that a stick stands for?

7. According to the "Introduction" to magical realism, what might be the explanation to why magical realism prevailed in Latin America?

8. What is one characteristic of magical realism and how might it fit into one of the stories?

9. In Federico Garcia Lorca's play, "Blood Wedding," what is he criticizing by giving only one of his characters a real name?

10. How is suspense built in the film adaptation of Blood Wedding?

11. According to the essay "Ghosts of Comala," how does the novel criticize the Mexican Revolution and rapid urbanization?

12. Point out two changes in the film Pedro Paramo.

Pedro Paramo Film Response

Let's try something out of the ordinary here. Instead of writing and handing in a traditional essay, let's post our responses and get a conversation going. For 5 points credit, write a 100 word response to the topic, or to someone else's response. Write another 100 words in the form of a response to another comment to receive the other 5 points. If you've done all your film responses, you can do this for extra credit, too. Okay, so here we go...

There are some parts to Juan Rulfo's novel that is definitely cinematic, other parts not so much. Was this adaptation satisfying to you, or did it not do the novel justice? What did you or did you not like about the film?

Yosimar Reyes and For Colored Boys Who Speak Softly

For those of you who attend Yosimar's reading on Thursday, I'm wondering what your reactions were? Post your thoughts!

Patriotism

It was my first time teaching Yukio Mishima's "Patriotism" in class so I didn't know how that was going to turn out considering the intense subject of seppeku. You all took it with maturity, especially your reaction to the graphic nature of Mishima's short film. So is the story and film worth bringing in again in a future class?

Also, if you'd like further reading about the film and its production history, click here.

Themes and Meanings in "Patriotism"
Yukio Mishima was a writer who became obsessed by what he saw as the loss of Japanese traditional values, although he led a cosmopolitan and bizarre life. He used his writing success to fund a small private army, the Shield Society, to fight against Communism and support a prewar vision of the emperor as the soul of the Japanese nation. However, he was also an exhibitionist inspired by violence and homosexuality. Sexuality and violence are combined in “Patriotism,” in retrospect perhaps the most revealing of Mishima's works, because the author, like his protagonist Takeyama, committed seppuku.


On November 25, 1970, Mishima led a band of his private army to the headquarters of the Japanese Self Defense Forces, where he told the troops to show the “samurai spirit” to protect the “Imperial Way.” These prewar sentiments were derided by the soldiers, who saw Mishima as a crackpot. Mishima then showed his sincerity by withdrawing from the balcony on which he was speaking and disemboweling himself. The nation was shocked at this spectacular and strange death of one of Japan's most popular writers. It is difficult to consider his writing without reference to his suicide.


In “Patriotism,” written more than a decade earlier, one can see an early sign of Mishima's linking sex and death, or ecstasy and agony, in his version of the Takeyama suicide. The theme of this very tight story—the focus is on the suicide—is the honor and dedication of the lieutenant and his young and beautiful wife. They transcend the life-preserving spirit of most people to find peace in death. Their dedication to the nation and to the emperor is unsullied by selfishness: “The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep.”


Mishima wanted to restore what in his personal vision were the traditional values of Japan, values that were deeper than the materialism of the 1960's. Many contemporary Japanese intellectuals worry that Japan's rush to economic success has left behind any real values other than an increasing gross national product and electronic gadgets. Like Mishima, some seek answers in Japan's military past, while others look to religion to restore a sense of values that transcend materialism.


Suicide is a sin in the Christian view, and the Western reader is likely to be repelled by the act if not by the motives of Takeyama and his wife. In Japan, however, there is a long tradition of the “failed hero,” to quote Ivan Morris, in which admiration is given to the loser in a failed but just cause. In the feudal period, the losing hero could redeem himself by committing deliberately painful seppuku to show, quite literally, that he had guts. In Takeyama's case, he was ready to die rather than attack his comrades in revolt, who were supposedly acting in the name of the emperor, the nation, and the army.


Another theme is doing things in the proper way, even suicide. This becomes very clear as the couple prepare their bodies, home, clothes, and suicide notes in a ritualistic manner. The only new element that Mishima introduces into this tradition is the strong eroticism that describes the bodies and passion of Takeyama and his beautiful wife. Beauty and truth are seen as one, and pleasure and pain are integrated in this disturbing story.

Richard Rice. "Patriotism." Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. Salem Press, 2004. eNotes.com. 2006. 1 Mar, 2009

Rock the Casbah!

I hope you enjoyed The Battle of Algiers as dark of a subject it may be. If you'd like to read an essay on it production history, click here. As I mentioned in class, some of you may be familiar with this track from The Clash: "Rock the Casbah." Check out this Wiki entry that tries to dissect how this song was inspired by the Casbah of Algiers. The song's not wholly political, but it's still interesting subject matter for being a hit single.

Peter Weir's The Last Wave

"The Last Wave" by Diane Jacobs

A sense of foreboding pervades an opening scene of Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, though the sun shines and young children play cricket as usual during recess at school. Then, suddenly, the wind picks up, dust rolls in like waves from the distance, and the children and their teacher race indoors, where bricks of hail pierce the windows and gouge their fragile skin. It is a classic horror image—only here the victims are not so much shocked as creepily fascinated. Destruction, seemingly unexpected, has answered their intimations of cataclysm and bliss.

From Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), where schoolgirls float off during an outing at Australian aboriginal sacred grounds, to The Truman Show (1998), where the hero braves death to escape the clichés of American television, all of Peter Weir’s films defy simple definitions of reality. But The Last Wave, Weir’s first film to be released in America, goes further—insisting on the tangible power of spiritual life.

The Last Wave involves a Chinese box of mysteries—from the sudden death of a healthy Australian aboriginal to the conundrum of a white Australian’s dreams. The plot line follows a Sydney corporate tax lawyer, David, who takes on a legal aid case involving a group of aboriginals accused of murdering a man outside their tribe. While the black men assure David that they are innocent, they refuse to divulge evidence that could save their lives. They fear something more terrifying than death, David figures, and he commits himself to discover what and why.

Peter Weir said he got the idea for The Last Wave when he asked himself, “What if someone with a very pragmatic approach to life experienced a premonition?” Fittingly, David’s preoccupation with the aboriginal murder is triggered by his own bad dreams. To understand his clients, he steeps himself in aboriginal history, then gets drawn to their tribal mysteries as well. Chris (Gulpilil), one of the defendants, becomes David’s spiritual guide, and the lawyer’s nightmares increasingly invade his waking hours as bathwater gushes off the landing of David’s staircase, and the skies shower soot on the windshield of his car.

Visually stunning from start to finish, The Last Wave exudes the excitement of the so-called “new Australian cinema,” which in the 1970s burst onto the international scene. Where the French New Wave auteurs had reacted against their predecessors, the films of Australia were practically suis generis—for a quarter century, Australian movie screens had been completely dominated by imported Hollywood (and sometimes British) product. Australians’ screen idols were John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor; their movie landscapes were the streets of London and the American West. Then, in 1970, John Gorton’s government legislated an Australian film industry into existence: opening a state-financed film school and underwriting the early works of Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career), Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith), Bruce Beresford (The Getting of Wisdom), and Phillip Noyce (Newsfront) as well as Peter Weir.

Along with these other gifted filmmakers, Weir set out to explore the nature of Australian identity. The Last Wave, like Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, grapples specifically with the dilemma of a native black race ruled by immigrant whites. City aboriginals are “no different culturally than depressed whites,” a colleague flippantly informs David, but the thrust of the film suggests the opposite—that aboriginals possess a powerful separate and more spiritual identity that whites ignore at their own risk.

Many of the great pleasures of The Last Wave derive from its acting. Richard Chamberlain brings a febrile intensity to the emotionally confused David, while the gifted Gulpilil, playing Chris, David’s alter-ego, manages to convey fierce tribal loyalty while flirting with the logic of the white man’s world. Chris’s tribe leader, Charlie, is far more intractable. Played with disconcerting calm by the arresting Nandjiwarra Amagula (who was a tribe leader in real life), Charlie represents the spiritual leader as both a dignified artist and a merciless god.

In the film’s seductive conclusion, David follows Chris through a cavern filled with talismanic paintings, then confronts apocalypse in the form of a swelling sea. But the ending is admirably ambiguous. For while Weir’s hypnotic images inspire the predictable awe and terror, The Last Wave refuses to resolve either the political or the spiritual issues it so eloquently pursues.

Midterm Questions

Here are the midterm questions in advance. I suggest getting together in groups or partners in order to find the best possible answers. This is really a test against time contraints (20 minutes or 2 minutes per question) so I suggest that you practice jotting your answers under similar time retraints.

1. What are the characteristics of postcolonial literature?

2. Why isn't the literature of The United States considered post-colonial?

3. What are the two stages of development in postcolonial literature?

4. Use an example from any of the stories we covered in class that supports postcolonial theorist Elleke Boehmer's idea that "text, a vehicle of imperial authority...performed the act of taking possession" (14).

5. How is the theme of colonial encounter and its consequences played out in any one of the stories?

6. How is indigenous (mis)perceptions a theme in any of the stories we've read in class?

7. According to the documentary film Guns, Germs, and Steel, how is inequality accounted for in its various way among nations?

8. Why is social-realist sensibility a strong feature in 20th century Australian writing?

9. How is Red Ochre in "Clothes Make the Man" representative of the environmental harshness to the Australian settler?

10. What thematic conflicts arise between the Aboriginal world and white society in The Last Wave?