version

Well-known member

What we’re seeing has been hidden from view for almost 50 years.

A film that captured striking images of IRA members making bombs and carrying out gun attacks, often unmasked.

These are the opening images of a film that got closer to the Irish Republican Army than any other documentary made across decades of conflict in Northern Ireland.

[...]

“The film is propaganda, but it’s also a remarkable film,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin.

“The intimacy of the footage is really striking. There’s nothing else like that, that I’m aware of and to see what is being depicted in that film in 1972 in particular is quite remarkable, because of the level of access that’s there when it comes to senior IRA figures, but also the personal testimony of women in particular, which again is highly unusual in the context of republican paramilitarism and the history of the IRA.”

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version

Well-known member
All sorts of craziness around that film. Footage of a young Martin McGuinness planting a car bomb. Both filmmakers potentially having intelligence links and secretly working for the CIA and Mossad. It's on iPlayer, or at least some film about the film is on there.

 

dilbert1

Well-known member
Watched Bastards of the Party the other night, details the history of gangs in Los Angeles and the origins of the Crips and Bloods out of the demise of the LA chapter of the Black Panther Party. Produced by HBO in 2005, really good

 

version

Well-known member
Watched Bastards of the Party the other night, details the history of gangs in Los Angeles and the origins of the Crips and Bloods out of the demise of the LA chapter of the Black Panther Party. Produced by HBO in 2005, really good


Apparently this came about because the guy who made it was a Blood who read Mike Davis' City of Quartz in jail and it prompted him to look into the history of LA gang culture.
 

dilbert1

Well-known member
Yeah the main guy is really cool, you can see him in news footage in ‘92 during Rodney King trying to explain his perspective. And the film does get a lot of mileage out of Davis providing the long historical timeline
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen

What we’re seeing has been hidden from view for almost 50 years.

A film that captured striking images of IRA members making bombs and carrying out gun attacks, often unmasked.

These are the opening images of a film that got closer to the Irish Republican Army than any other documentary made across decades of conflict in Northern Ireland.

[...]

“The film is propaganda, but it’s also a remarkable film,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin.

“The intimacy of the footage is really striking. There’s nothing else like that, that I’m aware of and to see what is being depicted in that film in 1972 in particular is quite remarkable, because of the level of access that’s there when it comes to senior IRA figures, but also the personal testimony of women in particular, which again is highly unusual in the context of republican paramilitarism and the history of the IRA.”

mcguinness2_newinset-976x549.jpg


car_prep-976x549.jpg


derry_shoot-976x549.jpg

staged and real blended "get the rifles out Sean, documentary makers have arrived in Derry", yet bombers clearly get drunk on fame too

production team is a cat's cradle of possible assets, surprised the bbc put it up now - Stormont must be getting haggled again

Dispatches did a reasonable job with Loyalists and King Rat, the irony being the main man was known throughout Loyalist and MI5 co-mingling circles what with cache after cache of death being transported straight from Boer orangemen and Sammy the spiv Wilson moving to mayor of Belfast next. Cunt is all over parliament, core-DUP Brexit tit, yet no-one ever digs around fairly open links to both Wright and Adair as 'community' men and wide open to all of it
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
staged and real blended "get the rifles out Sean, documentary makers have arrived in Derry", yet bombers clearly get drunk on fame too

production team is a cat's cradle of possible assets, surprised the bbc put it up now - Stormont must be getting haggled again

Dispatches did a reasonable job with Loyalists and King Rat, the irony being the main man was known throughout Loyalist and MI5 co-mingling circles what with cache after cache of death being transported straight from Boer orangemen and Sammy the spiv Wilson moving to mayor of Belfast next. Cunt is all over parliament, core-DUP Brexit tit, yet no-one ever digs around fairly open links to both Wright and Adair as 'community' men and wide open to all of it

the Inner Force, ie The Committee, King Rat et al, was uploaded previously then deleted a number of times but up for now

 

version

Well-known member
Interesting little story here about a Japanese photographer who ended up in Ireland during The Troubles:

guardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/07/akihiko-okamura-photographs-troubles-northern-ireland-memories-of-others-exhibition

2411.jpg


Like other aspects of his restless life, Okamura’s initial reasons for visiting Ireland are mysterious, but they included a deep fascination with the assassinated US president, John F Kennedy, whose ancestral roots were there, as well as his abiding interest in, and identification with, anti-colonialist struggles. Okamura first arrived in Dublin in 1968, aged 38, and immediately noted down his initial and less than favourable impressions: “Stormy weather. The sky was dark, almost black. A swirling wind whipped the freezing rain against my cheeks… To my eyes, accustomed as they were to the scorching sun, and the endless green jungles of south-east Asia, the winter landscape of Ireland when I saw it for the first time looked like nothing but a large cold black lump of soil."

[...]

In all of this, Okamura himself remains an elusive presence. The new photobook of his Irish work includes an essay by his daughter Kusi pointedly entitled How to Find a Ghost. She begins by recalling his absence from her childhood (he died when she was just nine), before alluding to his “invisible” presence as a photographer of the Troubles – “never seen, never spoken to, never heard”. As if to confirm her fleeting impressions of him, Photo Museum Ireland has been unable to find one person in Derry or Belfast who remembers him from that time, which is odd when you consider he may well have been the first Japanese person that anyone in a then monocultural Northern Ireland would have encountered in the flesh. Yet he moved among them with his camera, leaving no trace other than his photographs.

There exists a single photograph of Okamura from that time. In it, he is standing amid a small crowd of people next to the activist and MP Bernadette Devlin during a lull in the sustained street battles between rioters and police during the Battle of the Bogside in Derry in August 1969. He looks at ease, but engaged, as if taking in her every word. He looks like he belongs there.
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
you need an outsider to illustrate just how insane domestic monstrosities are occasionally, a curious roaming eye bypassing many of the usual tropes

my brother met Okamura outside an infamous watering hole once, such bios can appear almost mythical at times, people taking exception to being photographed in key areas can get messy rapid too but he was gone in minutes and, as you quote above, hardly anyone even knew he was there
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
another slice of madness in the aftermath of a wake, incongruous enough to raise eyebrows and stealthy enough to document

for a decade he seemed like another Sniper, operating peacefully out of sight, one/legion, until both sides tallied he was no threat

ta for the reference
 
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