Uprising Film Quotes

mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters. When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack. Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!” Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst. “Hands

Sarah,’ Hugo smirked, ‘we’re only making movies here, not inciting a Marxist uprising. I mean, there’s only room in history for one film-maker like Tarkovsky, right?

Early on, LAPD commander Daryl Gates had said no to Cops filming in his city. Then, in 1991, George Holliday recorded the beating of Rodney King, graphic evidence of police brutality that led to a mass uprising a year later, after the jury delivered a not-guilty verdict. In 1994, the new LAPD police chief, Willie Williams, agreed to let Cops film his officers. “At this juncture, it makes certain sense for the department to receive some positive coverage,” said Gary Greenebaum, the president of the police commission, in the Los Angeles Times.

In the absence of any changes on the ground or concrete political gains apart from the faltering PLO dialogue with the Americans, the uprising had itself become routine. International media coverage had been extremely important in drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians but its intensity lessened over time, not least because of the higher and more novel drama of the revolutions that were transforming the landscape of Eastern Europe throughout 1989. But the media could mislead as well as inform. The TV cameras captured repeated clashes, but rarely filmed the Palestinians who continued to work inside Israel, or the Israelis, especially in the Tel Aviv area, who were carrying on with their lives undisturbed by or oblivious to the sporadic unrest across the green line. ‘The situation in the territories was shunted – or repressed – to a marginal place in terms of public interest’, noted B’Tselem, the newly founded Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. ‘The types of stories that led … the news in the electronic media or made headlines in the written press in the past, are today noted laconically or relegated to inside pages of the newspaper.’16 There was an economic cost to be sure, but for the Israelis this was mitigated by the import of foreign workers and a fall in unemployment among Jews who replaced absent Palestinians. In June 1989 about 90 per cent of Palestinians from Gaza were still working, though the figure was only 56 per cent from the West Bank.17 Life

But not all gays were pleased about the eruption at Stonewall. Those satisfied by, or at least habituated to, the status quo preferred to minimize or dismiss what was happening. Many wealthier gays, sunning at Fire Island or in the Hamptons for the weekend, either heard about the rioting and ignored it (as one of them later put it: “No one [at Fire Island Pines] mentioned Stonewall”), or caught up with the news belatedly. When they did, they tended to characterize the events at Stonewall as “regrettable,” as the demented carryings-on of “stoned, tacky queens”—precisely those elements in the gay world from whom they had long since dissociated themselves. Coming back into the city on Sunday night, the beach set might have hastened off to see the nude stage show Oh, Calcutta! or the film Midnight Cowboy (in which Jon Voight played a Forty-second Street hustler)—titillated by such mainstream daring, while oblivious or scornful of the real-life counterparts being acted out before their averted eyes.59