Word: java
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some Victorian scientists viewed the discoveries as evidence of a primordial flood, possibly Noah's. A few linked extinctions to the fury of volcanoes; their conjecture was based on the extraordinary explosion in 1883 of Krakatoa, a volcano between Java and Sumatra, which darkened the skies and triggered a giant tidal wave that drowned 36,000 people...
...group that was directly ancestral to man and is known to have used fire and lived in caves as well as on the plains of Africa. Members of the species migrated as far as Asia, where the cranium of the so-called Java Man was discovered in 1891 and the Peking...
...culturally trapped in the Stone Age. But recent studies of skeletons reveal the aborigines as a far more ancient people. There appears to be evidence from bone structure of two distinct migrations of modern man's predecessor, Homo erectus, to Australia some 40,000 years ago, one from Java and the other from China...
...Java, 1942. A P.O.W. camp, where men are men-except for the Japanese guards, who are wily beasts. Through the sweltering days and ominous nights, three British prisoners run variations on the national character. Hicksley-Ellis (Jack Thompson) conducts his impotent belligerence by the book; ragged, resilient Jack Celliers (David Bowie) has the clear eyes and defiant smirk of a Kipling hero; Lawrence (Tom Conti), the camp translator, is an Oxbridgian humanist seeking a tunnel into the Oriental mind. Men are strong; men are shot; men fight on for their peculiar codes of honor. This is an art-house Bridge...
...Cannes Film Festival went to a Japanese film: Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, an elemental and unsentimentahzed portrait of Japan's mountain people in the 1880s. The same festival also showcased Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a P.O.W. melodrama set in Java in 1942 starring David Bowie and two popular Japanese performers, Singer-Songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto and the TV comic Takeshi. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is scheduled to open this fall in New York as the spearhead of an Oshima retrospective...