{"id":596,"date":"2008-07-15T20:04:07","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T00:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=596"},"modified":"2008-07-15T20:04:07","modified_gmt":"2008-07-16T00:04:07","slug":"echoes-from-a-somber-empire-1990-werner-herzog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/596","title":{"rendered":"Echoes from a Somber Empire (1990, Werner Herzog)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Not very Herzogian &#8211; the great man doesn&#8217;t interject any commentary of his own, letting his narrator (journalist Michael Goldsmith) do all the leading and interviewing, and not cutting away when Goldsmith follows up interview subjects&#8217; stories of being imprisoned and tortured for years by order of Central African Republic dictator Jean-B\u00e9del Bokassa with Goldsmith&#8217;s own oft-repeated story (&#8220;you know, I was imprisoned for a month myself&#8221;).  Gives the feeling that it is the journalist&#8217;s film and Herzog is a director-for-hire, which is probably not true.  The movie does, after all, end with a caged monkey smoking a cigarette, which isn&#8217;t a typical way to end a journalistic interview-doc.  And it opens with Herzog himself reading a letter from Goldsmith over beautiful, otherworldly shots of migrating crabs.  It&#8217;s just the bulk of the film in between those animal bookends that seems kind of typical.<\/p>\n<p><em>Bokassa, fallen dictator:<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/echoessomber1.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p>Bokassa himself seems sadly typical &#8211; a military leader of an African country who took over the government, becoming more corrupt, horrible and bizarre as his rule progressed.  We talk with a couple of his (many) wives and some kids, including one who was involved in a fraud\/mistaken-identity comedy which led to her having a sister with the same name who got married on the same day as her.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/echoessomber2.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p>Goldsmith survived torture and imprisonment in Central Africa, and returned safely from Liberia (where he had gone missing at the time of this film&#8217;s completion), only to die of a hemorrhage in late &#8217;90, shortly before the film premiered.<\/p>\n<p>Fascinating movie.  I think Katy liked it too, though we were both a bit upset after she vetoed my triple-feature short-doc selection at the last damned minute.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image08\/echoessomber3.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not very Herzogian &#8211; the great man doesn&#8217;t interject any commentary of his own, letting his narrator (journalist Michael Goldsmith) do all the leading and interviewing, and not cutting away when Goldsmith follows up interview subjects&#8217; stories of being imprisoned and tortured for years by order of Central African Republic dictator Jean-B\u00e9del Bokassa with Goldsmith&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[42,468,31,247,458,469,201],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-africa","tag-central-african-republic","tag-politics","tag-prison","tag-repression","tag-torture","tag-werner-herzog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}