Journal articles on the topic 'Commerce international – Vietnam'

This paper investigates the critical determinants for the adoption of mobile commerce (m-commerce) in Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from the perspective of managers. A perception-based conceptual model is developed with respect to the technology-organization-environment framework. The conceptual model is then tested and validated using structural equation modelling on the data collected from 513 SMEs in Vietnam. The study shows that perceived benefits, perceived compatibility, perceived security, perceived organizational readiness, and perceived customer pressures are critical for the adoption of m-commerce. As the first study on the critical determinants for m-commerce adoption in Vietnam, these findings are useful for SME managers as well as policymakers in designing policies as strategies to promote the wide development and diffusion of m-commerce in SMEs in Vietnam and other developing countries.

The objective of the study is to determine the factors affecting logistics performance in e-commerce in Vietnam. Vietnam's logistics industry with an estimated total value of USD 50-60 billion is currently growing rapidly (20-25%/year) and is forecast to maintain double-digit growth for at least the next 5-10 years, due to the breakthrough of the retail industry with the high penetration of the internet and the trend of online shopping. Research has shown 6 factors that have an impact on logistics performance: customer perception, technology and security, customer protection, electronic payment system, human resources, organization and administration. Analysis of factors affecting logistics performance to propose solutions to improve supply chain quality in e-commerce.

Loyalty is an important key performance indicator to assess a business's success, especially in an online business environment with fierce competition. The explosion of social networking sites has created a new form of business: social commerce. Simultaneously, the scale of loyalty in online transactions has some limitations; hence, this research aims to develop and validate an electronic loyalty scale in the context of social commerce. The study used a mixed research method with two phases of a sequential exploratory strategy. Qualitative research generated the scale and was used in the initial filtering to develop an e-loyalty scale for social commerce. This study conducted two quantitative studies with 715 social commerce shoppers in five developed areas in Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City, Ha Noi City, Hai Phong City, Da Nang City, and Binh Duong Province. Based on our research survey and literature review, the research results showed that electronic loyalty in social commerce is expressed in three dimensions: preference, interaction, and personal information’s disclosure. Then, the research proposed several relevant implications for other researchers and administrators of online businesses.

Despite promising growth, mobile commerce (m-commerce) still represents only a small proportion of the world's total e-commerce market. The research behind this article moves away from the predominantly single-country (typically developed) and utilitarian-focused market scope of past research to examine and provide a more nuanced understanding of customers’ motivations, whether utilitarian or hedonic, for using m-commerce across six countries. The six-country context, with data collected from 1,183 m-commerce users, offers a unique opportunity to advance mobile-retailing literature by comparing customers’ value perceptions, trust, and m-commerce use across disparate national markets. By treating motivations as conditions activated by individuals’ chronic regulatory orientations, our results show that hedonic motivation plays a more significant role in influencing customers’ value perceptions and trust for those who are promotion oriented (Australia and the United States), whereas utilitarian motivation plays a more important role for those who are prevention oriented (Bangladesh and Vietnam). Finally, both hedonic and utilitarian motivations play an important role in influencing customers’ value perceptions and trust for those who are moderately promotion and prevention oriented (India and Pakistan). These results offer insights to mobile retailers operating internationally in their decisions to standardize or adapt the mobile-shopping environment to deliver the most valuable, trustworthy, and engaging solutions to customers.

Abstract Nishimura Masanari argued that the construction of enclosed-type levees caused the water level of the Red River to rise in seventeenth-century northern Vietnam, and he suggested that this phenomenon triggered social changes that brought about the establishment of Vietnamese “traditional society,” represented by the autonomous villages of the Red River Delta. Nishimura’s archaeological discussion of the transition from horseshoe-shaped levees to enclosed-type levees suggests new ways of studying socioeconomic change in early modern Vietnam. This article examines the utilization of the dry riverbed area of the Red River near Hanoi and tracks changes in the position of the levee near the neighboring villages of Bát Tràng and Kim Lan from the seventeenth century onward. The article shows that Nishimura’s argument concerning the levee network makes it possible to locate the establishment of early modern Vietnamese society in the “Age of Commerce.”

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is report on findings from a survey of Vietnamese employers in 2008 highlighting key tends in training and future labour needs. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses data collected from a survey of Vietnamese employers during 2008. The survey was design by the authors and the fieldwork undertaken by representatives of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) with support from the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Findings – The survey shows that Vietnamese organisations understand the importance of training for their young workers but require more support from government and the VCCI to ensure effective training. Practical implications – The paper contains a number of practical implications for Vietnamese employers and the VCCI. Originality/value – Despite some opening of trade between Vietnam and the west, relatively little is still known about work, employment and training in Vietnam and there a few opportunities to undertake research of this nature. The main contribution of this paper is to report on current training practices and labour needs in Vietnam.

Even though the letter of credit was invented from a long time ago, however, its legal personalities are very new to the Vietnam Legal Framework. The International Chamber of Commerce (``ICC'') has issued principles for the documentary credit which is the Uniform of Customs and Practice (``UCP'') since 1933 and kept updating it until now, the latest version of UCP is UCP 600 which is presented in 2007. However, the UCP has not systematized many aspects of documentary credit yet and ICC considered those problems as subjects of domestic regulations. The diversification in different national laws leads to confusion thus causing many problems to merchants in international trade. Some countries do not have specified codifications to regulate the letter of credit so these countries treat UCP as ``quasi-law'' while other countries have their own legal framework for letter of credit law and even have fraud rules included. It is quite interesting that the United States which is a common law country is the first country to embody the operation of letter of credit in the Uniform of Commercial Code (``UCC'') and regulates the fraud rule within the same Code. This paper will try to explain and compare the principle of independence in the UCP and UCC, clarify the definition and regulations of fraud rule in UCC and evaluate the legal regulations of Vietnam law for the independence principle in a letter of credit.

<p>The dramatic impact of E-commerce being the trend insofar as modern governance and management operations of most service agencies and entitites in most countries which in effect hastens the delivery of services for local and international clientele-customers. This study focuses on the service delivery in VietNam with the launching of its electronic tax payments both for its exporters and importers taking place in Ho Chi Minh City VietNam.<br />This study analyzes the factors affecting the satisfaction of importers and exporters on the quality of electronic tax payment services at the HCM city Customs Department, through the survey of 347 enterprises participating in electronic tax payment services. Research results show that there are 6 factors that affect the satisfaction of enterprises on the quality of electronic tax payment service: Trust; Sympathy; Service capabilities; Tangible Media; Transparency and Coordinate Implementation. In particular, Trust has the strongest impact and Transparency has the lowest impact. Key recommendations suggest thatv actions and plans for improvement should be undertaken taking into consideration the above-mentioned six factors in delivering its E-Tax Payment system to stakeholders.</p>

In his review of Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1860: Expansion and Crisis, Victor Lieberman plied the margins of Anthony Reid's (1995) portrayal of early modern Southeast Asia and objected with purpose: “critical cultural and political transformations on the mainland without close archipelagic analogy receive little or no attention” (Lieberman 1995, 799). Where connections and crossings characterize historic social formation in insular Southeast Asia, Lieberman focused on a different shore – territorial consolidation of kingdoms in mainland Southeast Asia, from over 20 in the pre-modern era to only three major empires, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, by the end of the seventeenth century. Yet Reid's two-volume work was exquisitely timed with the theoretical pulses of globalization and their keywords of crossings – diasporas, flows, linkages, mobilities, networks, routes and travels. Closely related to the poststructural theoretical shift, these themes have guided new area studies and are likely to prevail in international scholarship for some time to come.

English abstract: The European Union (EU) is often understood as a normative power. However, based on a case study of European policy networks in Vietnam, this article shows that despite the EU’s commitment to norms and transformative development, norms are not a priority in the implementation of development policies. Rather, norm promotion is delegated to political and diplomatic representatives, whereas development and trade representatives are responsible for technical work. Consequently, policy networks created around these four sectors tend to operate separately from each other, undermining the spillover of norms from diplomatic and political networks to development and trade networks. As a result, this article shows that the structural–institutional separation of sectoral policy networks is one of the EU’s systemic characteristics that restrict normative policy coherence for development.Spanish abstract: La Unión Europea (UE) es considerada un poder normativo, comprometida con las normas y el desarrollo transformativo. En cambio, usando un caso de estudio de redes europeas políticas en Vietnam, este artículo demuestra que las normas no son prioridad en la implementación de políticas de desarrollo. Al contrario, la promoción de normas se delega a representantes políticos y diplomáticos, mientras que los representantes del desarrollo y comercio se hacen cargo del trabajo técnico. Consecuentemente las redes políticas de estos cuatro sectores tienden a aislarse, dificultando la transferencia de las normas de redes políticas y diplomáticas a redes de desarrollo y comercio. El resultado demuestra que la separación estructuro–institucional de las redes políticas sectoriales es una de las características sistémicas de la UE que restringen la coherencia normativa de políticas para el desarrollo.French abstract: L’Union européenne est souvent considérée comme une puissance normative. Cependant, sur la base d’une étude de cas de réseaux de politiques publiques au Vietnam, cet article montre que, malgré son engagement normatif et de développement réformateur, les normes ne sont pas une priorité dans la mise en oeuvre des politiques de développement. Au contraire, leur promotion est déléguée aux représentants politiques et diplomatiques, tandis que les représentants du développement et du commerce sont responsables des travaux techniques. Par conséquent, les réseaux politiques créés autour de ces quatre secteurs ont tendance à fonctionner séparément les uns des autres, ce qui compromet le transfert des normes des réseaux diplomatiques et politiques aux réseaux de développement et du commerce. Ainsi, cet article montre que la séparation structuro-institutionnelle des réseaux sectoriels de politiques publiques est l’une des caractéristiques systémiques de l’UE qui restreint leur cohérence normative en matière de développement.

Covid-19 spreads around the world with adverse health, economic and financial impacts. This affects the economic and social practices of the countries in general and businesses in particular. The legal e-commerce system and its fate during and after the pandemic are one area that we lawyers have to consider. To assess the condition in and after this health emergency, we are trying to incorporate e-commerce. E-commerce is an amazing and unparalleled phenomenon. We are looking for proof to be persuaded of this. More specifically, we seek to illustrate the processes by which, in our case, the idea of emerging diseases is imposed. We also consider modern e-commerce, legislative and regulatory systems configurations. Our scientific research aims at focusing on issues related to consumer protection in the e-commerce law, including corporate information, uneven business practices, online payment security, data protection and confidentiality, settlement and solutions for disputes, as well as international and national electronic transactions.

Résumé: Année après année, il y a de nouvelles accessions à la Convention de Vienne. Du fait que les arbitres n’ont pas de for étatique, il est intéressant de comprendre ce que font les arbitres dans les nouveaux pays adhérents lorsqu’ils sont saisis d’une vente internationale de marchandises. Apportant un intérêt non négligeable pour les acteurs du commerce international qui ont les contrats de vente avec ces pays, pour l’effectivité de la Convention et pour les États nouveaux membres de la Convention, la présente étude aborde l’applicabilité, la mise en œuvre et le traitement des lacunes de la Convention devant les arbitrages dont le lieu se trouve dans un nouvel État adhérent, à savoir le Vietnam.

The important year of 1995 marked Vietnam’s first integration as a member of ASEAN. By 2016, Vietnam had negotiated, signed, and implemented sixteen free trade agreements. They include both multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements such as the China-ASEAN, Vietnam-Chile, and Vietnam-Japan agreements. By signing free trade agreements Vietnam can increase trade flows in bilateral and multilateral developed-country FTA scenarios. Trade creation and diversion can be found in multilateral developing-country FTA scenarios and the author finds the impacts of each free trade agreement is different if analyzed for each 2-digit commodity. Keywords Free trade agreement, trade, import, export.t commodity References [1] Baier, S.L., Bergstrand, J.H., “Do free trade agreements actually increase members’ international trade?”, Journal of International Economics, 71 (2007), 72-95.[2] Chong, Soo Yuen & Hur, Jung, “Small Hubs, Large Spokes and Overlapping Free Trade Agreements”, The World Economy, 10.1111/j (2008), 1467-9701.[3] Hur, J., Alba, J. D., & Park, D., “Effects of hub-and-spoke free trade agreements on trade: A panel data analysis”, World Development, 38 (2010) 8, 1105-111.[4] McDonald, S. & Walmsley, Terrie, “Bilateral Free Trade Agreements and Customs Unions: The Impact of the EU Republic of South Africa Free Trade Agreement on Botswana”, The World Economy, 10.1111/j (2008),1467-9701.[5] Pan, S., Welch, M., Mohanty, S., Fadiga, M., & Ethridge, D., “Welfare analysis of the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States free trade agreement: The cotton textile and apparel industries”, The International Trade Journal, Vol. XXII (2008) 2, 1521-0545.[6] Benedictis, L., Santis, R., Vicarelli, C., “Hub-and-Spoke or else? Free trade agreements in the “enlarged” European Union”, The European Journal of Comparative Economics, 2 (2005) 2, 245-260.[7] Nguyen, Q.H., & Nguyen, T.H., “The impact of free trade agreement on trade flow of goods in Vietnam”, Vietnam Economist Annual Meeting, 2015[8] Das, R.U., Rishi, M., Dubey, J.D., “Asean plus six and successful FTAS: Can India propel intra-industry trade flows?”, The Journal of Developing Areas, 50 (2016) 2.[9] Hayakawa, K., “Impact of diagonal accumulation rule on FTA utilization: Evidence from bilateral and multilateral FTAs between Japan and Thailand”, J. Japanese Int. Economies, 32 (2014), 1-16.[10] Jennifer Y. Leung, “Bilateral vertical specialization between the U.S. and its trade partners - before and after the free trade agreements”, International Review of Economics and Finance, 45 (2016), 177-196.[11] Jongwanich, J., & Kohpaiboon, A., “Exporter responses to FTA tariff preferences: evidence from Thailand”, Asian Pacific Economic Literature (2017).[12] Lakatos, C., & Walmsley, T., “Investment creation and diversion effects of the ASEAN-China free trade agreement”, Economic Modelling, 29 (2012), 766-779.[13] Vanhnalat, B. at el., “Assessment the Effect of Free Trade Agreements on Exports of Lao PDR”, International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, 5 (2015) 2, 365-376.[14] Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), “Freedom of international trade in Vietnam”, Research report, Vietnam, 2015.

Abstract: Nowadays, Vietnamese women are participating actively in parts of the economy that were previously deemed male domain. Women are involved in business activities at all levels in Vietnam, making significant contributions to the economic development of the country. By December 2011, there were 81,226 small and medium enterprises headed by women, accounting for 25% of the total number of enterprises in the country (GSO, 2013). In Vietnam, despite recent economic development, socio-cultural and legal barriers are still very difficult for women since the general perception in society is that a woman’s main duty is to be a good housewife and mother and they are also often perceived as weak, passive and irrational (VWEC, 2007). Even though the studies related to women entrepreneurship development are quite extensive, amongst them only a limited number of researches on the role of legal and socio - cultural barriers on women entrepreneurs in the context of Vietnam have been investigated. Thus, supported by the World Trade Institute (WTI) in Bern, Switzerland, the researchers have chosen this as the subject of this study. Based on a quantitative survey of 110 companies in Hanoi and adjacent areas, the research has taken legal and socio - cultural barriers and explored their effect on the development of women entrepreneurship in the context of Vietnam in order to indicate how women entrepreneurs perceive the impact of socio-cultural factors, economic impacts, and policy reforms on their entrepreneurial situations and initiatives, and to then provide policy implications for promoting women’s entrepreneurship and gender equality in Vietnam. Keywords Entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurs, gender equality, Vietnam References Acs, Z. & Varga, A. (2005) ‘Entrepreneurship, agglomeration and technological change’, Small Business Economics, 24, 323---334. Avin, R.M & Kinney, L.P (2014). Trends in Female Entrepreneurship in Vietnam Preliminary paper presented at the 23th Annual Conference on Feminist Economics sponsored by IAFFE, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana, June 27-29, 2014.Avin, R.-M., & Kinney, L. P. (2014) ‘Trends in Women entrepreneurship in Vietnam’, 23rd Annual Conference on Feminist Economics, Ghana: 27 – 29 June.Bruton, G. D., Ahlstrom, D., & Obloj, K. (2008). Entrepreneurship in emerging economies: where are we today and where should the research go in the future. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 32(1), 1–14.Bunck, J. M. 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What are the driving factors for foreign direct investment liberalization in formerly communist countries? Previous research explains foreign direct investment liberalization as a function of the intensification of international commerce and democratization; however, the likes of China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam hardly fit into this narrative. The following contribution makes a theoretical argument about the causes of foreign direct investment liberalization in communist authoritarian regimes with highly centralized and closed economies. We argue that foreign direct investment liberalization is caused by external shocks materializing in policy adaptations. The degree of foreign direct investment liberalization depends on the balance of power between actors who favor liberalization and actors who stand to profit from rent-seeking economies. The relative power of both factions determines the magnitude and type of foreign direct investment liberalization. We test this theoretical argument using case studies, which include China and Vietnam as representatives of gradual transitions and Cuba and North Korea as representatives of traditional rent-seeking economies.

Key Performance Indicators in performance management system was attracted by researchers and practitioners. In order to effective implemented KPIs in SMEs, managers must deeply understand about the KPIs, role of KPIs, implemented KPIs. Based on the quantitative method by doing survey with 162 SEMs, author indicated the current situation of the perception of SMEs manager about the fundamental of KPI, roles of KPIs and difficulty implemented KPIs in performance management system. Based on the consistent theory about KPIs , author proposed some solution for manager to enhance their knowledge of KPIs. Keywords SMEs, KPIs , Performance appraisal References Ahmad, M. M., & Dhafr, N. (2002). Establishing and improving manufacturing performance measures. Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 18(3), 171-176. Aylin Ates, Patrizia Garengo, Paola Cocca, Umit Bititci (2013), The development of SME managerial practice for effective performance management, Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 20(1), 28-54Ayoup, H., Omar, N. H., & Rahman, I. K. A. (2012). Implementation of Balance Scorecard (BSC) in a Malaysian GLC: Perceptions of Middle Managers. Asia-Pacific Management Accounting Journal, 7(2), 99-126.Barney, J. (1991), ‘Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage’ Journal of Management, 17(1), 99-120Cagliano, R., Blackmon, K. and Voss, C. (2001).Small firms under microscope: international differences in production/operations management practices and performance. Integrated Manufacturing Systems, 12, 469– 482.Corbett, L. M. (1998). Benchmarking manufacturing performance in Australia and New Zealand. Benchmarking for Quality Management & Technology, 5(4), 271-282. De Waal, A. A. (2003). Behavioral factors important for the successful implementation and use of performance management systems. Management Decision, 41(8), 688-697.Garengo, P., Biazzo, S., & Bititci, U. S. (2005). Performance measurement systems in SMEs: A review for a research agenda. International journal of management reviews, 7(1), 25-47.Epstein, M. J., & Roy, M.-J. (2001). Sustainability in action: Identifying and measuring the key performance drivers. Long range planning, 34(5), 585-604. Evans, N. (2005). Assessing the Balanced Scorecard as a Management Tool for Hotels, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality, Management Accounting, 17, 5 : 376-390.Jakelski, D., & Lebrasseur, R. (1997). Implementing continuous improvement in the North American mining industry. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 55(2), 165-177. Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., Anderson, R. E., & Tatham, R. L. (1998). Multivariate data analysis (Vol. 5): Prentice hall Upper Saddle River, NJ.Lado, A. A., & Wilson, M. C. (1994), ‘Human resource systems and sustained competitive advantage: A competency-based perspective’, Academy of management review, 19(4), 699-727.Mai Thanh Lan (2016), Xây dựng các năng lực cho nhà quản trị cấp trung nhằm nâng cao năng lực cạnh tranh của doanh nghiệp, Tạp chí Kinh tế & phát triển, 225, 90-99.Lê Quân (2015), Lãnh đạo doanh nghiệp Việt Nam: Hội đồng quản trị; Ban điều hành; Khung năng lực; Thẻ điểm cân bằng; Chỉ số hoàn thành, NXB Đại học Quốc Gia Hà Nội, Hà Nội.Martins, R.A. and Salerno, M.S. (1999). Use of new performance measurement system, some empirical findings. In Managing Operations Networks – VI International EurOMA Conference, Venice, Italy, 7–8 JuneParmenter, D. (2010). Key performance indicators (KPI): developing, implementing, and using winning KPIs: John Wiley & Sons.Rodriguez, R. R., Saiz, J. J. A., & Bas, A. O. (2009). Quantitative relationships between key performance indicators for supporting decision-making processes. Computers in Industry, 60(2), 104-113. Shahin, A., & Mahbod, M. A. (2007). Prioritization of key performance indicators: An integration of analytical hierarchy process and goal setting. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 56(3), 226-240.Nguyễn Đình Thọ (2012). Phương pháp nghiên cứu khoa học trong kinh doanh. Thiết kế và thực hiện. Hà Nội: Nhà xuất bản Lao động xã hộiTsai, Y.-C., & Cheng, Y.-T. (2012). Analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) for E-commerce and Internet marketing of elderly products: A review. Archives of gerontology and geriatrics, 55(1), 126-132. Yeung, J. F., Chan, A. P., & Chan, D. W. (2009). A computerized model for measuring and benchmarking the partnering performance of construction projects. Automation in Construction, 18(8), 1099-1113.

In recent years, electric two-wheeled vehicles (E2Ws) including electric bicycles and electric motorcycles have been used widely in Vietnam. Currently, the total number of E2Ws used is 3 million and with an average growth rate of 13.33% an estimated 6 million E2Ws will be used in 2024. E2Ws have been used widely among Vietnam’s youth. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) of Ajzen (2005, 2016) [1, 2], the main purpose of this research is to identify factors affecting the attitude to and intention of high school students in Hanoi city towards E2W usage and their affected level. The analytical results show that the attitude towards E2W usage is influenced respectively in descending order by (i) perceptions of economic benefit, (ii) usage convenience, (iii) friendly environmental awareness, (iv) stylish design. Usage intention towards E2Ws is determined respectively in descending order by (i) subjective norm, (ii) attitude toward E2W usage, (iii) the attraction of motorcycles. Based on the research results, some proposals for producers, authorities and policy-makers have been recommended. Keywords Electric two-wheeled vehicle, intention, attitude toward E2W usage, perception, emission, battery References [1] I. Ajzen, Attitude, personality and behavior, 2nd Edition, England: Berkshire, 2005.[2] I. Ajzen, The Theory of Planned Behavior. https://people.umass.edu/ aizen/pdf.html/, 2016..[3] R.C. Christopher, Electric Two-Wheelers in China: Analysis of Environmental, Safety, and Mobility Impacts, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2007.[4] Chu Tien Dat, “Consumer behavior and marketing - mix strategy of mobile communication businesses in Vietnam”, Doctorate Dissertation, National Economic University, 2014.[5] Dang Thi Ngoc Dung, “Factors Affect Intention Usage Toward Metro System in Ho Chi Minh City” Master Thesis, Ho Chi Minh Economics University, 2012.[6] Government website, http://vanban.chinhphu.vn/portal/page/portal/chinhphu/hethongvanban. [7] Hanoi Department of Transport, “Scheme on strengthening management of road transport means to reduce traffic congestion and environmental pollution in Hanoi city, period 2017-2020, a vision to 2030”, General report, Hanoi People’s Committee, 2017. [8] Hoang Trong, Chu Nguyen Mong Ngoc, Data Analysis with SPSS, Hong Duc Publishing House, Ho Chi Minh City, 2008.[9] Ho Chi Minh Department of Transport, General Report: “Scheme on strengthening management of road transport means to reduce traffic congestion and environmental pollution in Hanoi city, period 2017-2020, a vision to 2030”, General report, Hochiminh People’s Committee, Department of Transportation, 2017.[10] D.W. Hoyer et al., Consumer Behaviour, 6th Edition, South Western Cengage Learning, 2013.[11] D. Jennifer, R. Geoffrey, “Electric Bikes and Transportation Policy: Insights from Early Adopters”, Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2314, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2012, pp. 1-6. [12] Jica, Data Collection Survey on Railway in Main Urbans of Vietnam, final report, Part 2, Hanoi area, November, 2015.[13] X.W. Jonathan, The Rise of Electric Two-wheelers in China: Factors for their Success and Implications for the Future, Doctor of Philosophy In Transportation Technology and Policy, University of California, 2007.[14] P. Kotler, G. Amstrong, Principles of Marketing, 15th Edition, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2014.[15] Le Quan Hoang, Toshiyuki Okamura, “Influences of Motorcycle Use on Travel Intentions in Developing Countries: A case of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam”, Journal of Eastern Asia Society of Transportation Studies. 11 (2015) Số trang.[16] R. Luke et al, “The effect of incentives and technology on the adoption of electric motorcycles: A stated choice experiment in Vietnam”, Transportation Research Part A 57, 2013.[17] National Traffic Safety Committee, “The study on the traffic safety of highschool students in Hanoi and some proposed solutions”, Final Report, Vietnam Association of Motorcycle Manufacturers VAMM, 2017. [18] Nguyen Minh Tam, “Planning Orientation of Hanoi’s Urban Railway System to 2030 and Vision to 2050”, International workshop report, Hanoi Planning and Architecture Department, 2017.[19] Nguyen Ngoc Quang, “Qualitative Methods in Research on Consumer’s Behavior Toward Motorcycle in Vietnam”, Doctorate Dissertation, Hanoi National Economic University, 2008.[20] W. Ning, L. Yafei, “Key factors influencing consumers’ willingness to purchase electric vehicles in China”, School of Automotive Studies, Tongji University. Volume II, November (2015) 911-955.[21] R. Pranav, B. Yuvraj, S. Razia, “Assessment of consumer buying behavior toward electric scooters in Punjab”, International Journal of Research in Commerce and Management. 4 (2013) 7-15.[22] K. Rattanaporn, S. Wichuda, J. Sittha, S. Thaned, “Psychological factors influencing intentions to use Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Khon Kaen, Thailand”, Proceedings of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies. 10 (2015) số trang đầu và cuối.[23] M. Ronald, T. Debasis, “A Study on consumer buying behavior toward two wheeler bikes in context to Indian market”, International Journal of Advanced Research in Management (IJARM). 4 (2013) 65-số trang cuối. [24] S. Sheetal, S. Abhishek, “Consumer Behavior towards Two-Wheeler Bikes - A Comparative Study of Rural and Urban Consumers of Jodhpur District of Rajasthan, India”, Research Paper, Global Research Analysis. 1 (2012) 91-92.[25] M.R. Solomon, Behaviour - Buying, Having, Being, 10th Edition, Pearson Education, Inc., 2013.[26] Statistic Office of Hanoi. http://thongkehanoi.gov.vn/, 2018.[27] Tran Thuy, “Located fuel motorcycles, remote controls, and accident notices: a mother buys to supervise her child”. https://vietnamnet.vn/vn/kinh-doanh/dau-tu/xe-may-dien-ban-ra-nua-trieu-chiec-dai-gia-them-muon-475551.html/, 2018.[28] Trinh Thu Thuy, “Factors affects consumer’s behavior towards two-wheeled vehicles in Hanoi city”, Doctorate Dissertation, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, 2018.[29] S. William et al., “The influence of financial incentives and other socio-economic factors on electric vehicle adoption”, Journal of Energy Policy. 68 (2014) 183-194. Ch. Yi-Chang, T. Gwo-Hshiung, “The market acceptance of electric motorcycles in Taiwan experience through a stated preference analysis”, Transportation Research, Pergamon, Part D 4, January 9, 1999, pp. 127-146 (Published by Elsevier Science Ltd).

The aim of this research is to calculate and measure the level of trade facilitation of ASEAN countries. The research selected 5 indicators of trade facilitation including infrastructure, customs environment, e-commerce, policies environment and financial environment to measure the degree of trade facilitation of ASEAN countries and use the Gravity model to empirically analyze the effect of trade facilitation ASEAN countries to trade between Vietnam - ASEAN. The study shows that trade facilitation profoundly affects Vietnam's export and import flow. Based on the analysis results, the paper has suggested some recommendations to boost Vietnam’s trade facilitation. Keywords Trade facilitation, trade, gravity model of trade, ASEAN References [1] Wilson J. S., Mann C. L., and Otsuki T., Trade Facilitation and Economic Development: A New Approach to Measuring the Impact [J]. World Bank Economic Review 2003, 17(3): 367-389. [2] T. Hertel, T. Mirza. 2009. "The Role of Trade Facilitation in South Asian Economic Integration.". Study on Intraregional Trade and Investment in South Asia. ADB. [3] Tạp chí kinh tế đối ngoại – Đại học ngoại thương. Thuận lợi hóa thương mại và hài hòa chính sách logistics tại các quốc gia Asean, tạp chí kinh tế đối ngoại -Đại học ngoại thương), Số 63 (03/2014).[4] Trịnh Thị Thu Hương, Phan Thị Thu Hiền. Hiệp định thuận lợi hóa thương mại WTO cơ hội và thách thức đối với Việt Nam, Tạp chí kinh tế đối ngoại - Đại học ngoại thương, Số 71 (03/2015).[5] H. Nordås, R. Piermartini. “Infrastructure and trade”. WTO Staff Working Paper ERSD, 2004.[6] J. Felipe, U. Kumar, “The Role of Trade Facilitation in Central Asia: A Gravity Model”. The Levy Institute Working Paper, No. 628, 2010. [7] C.N.Kumar. “Prospects of Regional Economic Cooperation in South Asia”. Woodhead Publishing Limited, 2012, 101-115. [8] APEC’s Trade Facilitation Action Plan: AMid-TermAssessment[R]. 2004[9] TINBERGEN J. Shaping the world economy: A suggestions for an international economic policy [M]. New Pork: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1962.[10] POYHONEN P.A., tentative model for the volume of trade between countries [J]. Weltwirtschatlliches Archiv, 1963, 90(1): 93100.[11] APEC. Assessing APEC Trade Liberalization and Facilitation: 1999 update[R], Economic Committee, Sigapore, 1999, 11.[12] Shepherd B, Wilson JS, Trade Facilitation in ASEAN Member Countries: Measuring progress and assessing priorities [J]. Social ScienceE lectronic Publishing, 2009, 20 (4) : 367-383.[13] Itakura, K. (2014). Impact of liberalization and improved connectivity and facilitation in ASEAN, Journal of Asian Economics, 35, 2-11.[14] APEC’s Trade Facilitation Action Plan: AMid-TermAssessment [R]. 2004.[15] Zhang Ya Bin. Thuận lợi hóa thương mại các nước thuộc vành đai con đường tơ lụa và tiềm năng thương mại của Trung Quốc. Tạp chí kinh tế Trung Quốc, 2016(5):112-122.[16] Ran Qi Zhao,Yang Dan Ping. Nghiên cứu thực chứng ảnh hưởng của thuận lợi hóa thương mại các nước EU đến thương mại Trung Quốc.Tạp chí kỹ thuật và quản lý, 2018(2): 33-40.[17] Gao Zhi Gang, Song Ya Dong. Ảnh hưởng của thuận lợi hóa thương mại các nước thuộc vành đai con đường đến thương mại Trung Quốc.Tạp chí khoa học xã hội Quý Châu, 2018 (7): 100-108.

This study explores the factors influencing the quality of telecommunication services in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. By conducting an online survey of 413 office workers, the results indicate that among the five components of the perceived quality of telecommunications services, reliability, assurance, and empathy are Key factors affecting consumer satisfaction in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The findings of this research help mobile service providers to understand how consumers perceive the quality of mobile services. Thus, mobile service providers would effectively design marketing strategy to improve customer loyalty as well as enter new markets. Keywords: Mobile service, service quality, online survey, empirical study, Vietnam. References [1] Boohene, R., & Agyapong, G., “Analysis of the antecedents of customer loyalty of telecommunication industry in Ghana: The case of Vodafone (Ghana)”, International Business Research, 4 (2011) 1, 229-240.[2] Leelakulthanit, O., & Hongcharu, B., “Factors that impact customers satisfaction: Evidence from the Thailand mobile cellular network industry”, International Journal of Management and Marketing Research, 4 (2011) 2, 67-76.[3] Eugenia Y. Huang, Sheng-Wei Lin, Ya-Chu Fan, “M-S-Qual: Mobile service quality measurement”, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 14 (2015), 126-142, http://dx.doi.org/10.2016/j.elerap.2015.01.003[4] Omotayo, O., & Abiodun, A., “Service quality, value offer, satisfaction, and loyalty: An empirical relationship in the Nigerian telecom industry”, Contemporary Management Research, 5 (2011) 2, 14-23.[5] Lee, Roy Chun, “Telecommunications in Vietnam”, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER). Chinese Taipei WTO Center, C.20 (2011), p.1.[6] Agarwal, S., M. Erramilli, et al., “Market orientation and performance in service firms: role of innovation”, Journal of Services Marketing 17 (2003) 1, 68-82.[7] Agyapong, G., “The effect of service quality on customer satisfaction in the utility industry: A case of Vodafone (Ghana)”, International Journal of Business and Management, 6 (2011) 5, 203-210. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijbm.v6n5p203[8] Yee, R. W. Y., Yeung, A. C. L. & Cheng, T. C. E., “An empirical study of employee loyalty, service quality and firm performance in the service industry”, International Journal of Production Economics, 124 (2010) 1, 109-120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2009.10.015[9] Le The Gioi and Nguyen Minh Duan, “Improving the competitiveness of VMS-MOBIFONE on mobile communication market”, Journal of Science and Technology, University of Da Nang, 2 (2007) 19, 68-72.[10] Dinh Thi Hong Thuy, “Research the factors affecting on the decision for mobile telecommunications of students in Ho Chi Minh City”, Master Thesis, (2008).[11] Le Thi Tuyet Trinh, “Research the customer satisfaction in using Vinaphone mobile service in Binh Dinh province”, Master Thesis, 2012.[12] Bui Van Trinh and Luu Ngoc Mai Anh, “Research the customer satisfaction in using Viettel mobile service in Hai Giang province”, Master Thesis, 2013.[13] Pizam, A., Ellis, T., “Customer satisfaction and its measurement in hospitality enterprises”, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 11 (1999) 7, p. 326-339, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09596119910293231[14] A. Parasuraman, Valarie A. Zeithaml, Leonard L. Berry, “A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research”, The Journal of Marketing, Vol. 49, No. 4 (1985), pp. 41-50[15] Cronin Jr, J. J., & Taylor, S. A. “SERVPERF versus SERVQUAL: reconciling performance-based and perceptions-minus-expectations measurement of service quality”. The Journal of Marketing, 58 (1994). 125-131.[16] Aydin, S. and G. Ozer, “National Customer Satisfaction Indices: An Implementation in the Turkish Mobile Telephone Market”, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, 23 (2005) 5, 486-504.[17] Mishra, R.C and Sandilya, A., Reliability and Quality Management, New Age International Publishers, 2009.[18] Torsten J. Gerpott, Ilknur Bicak, “Telecommunication service choice and use among migrants: The case of German-Turkish consumers”, Computers in Human Behavior, 6 (2016), 584-596, http://dx.doi.org/10.2016/j.chb.2016.03.018[19] Uddin, M. B., Akhter, B., “Customer satisfaction in mobile phone services in Bangladesh: A survey research”, Management & Marketing X (1) (2012), 20-36.

Value theory is one of the fundamental problems of economics which is applied in many different disciplines. However, the application of this economic theory in recognizing the valuation of intellectual capital of enterprises is a complex issue, especially knowledge is considered as an important form of resource and exchanged on the market. According to modern accounting theories, the accounting of intellectual capital is associated with the use of a measure of value to recognize, measure, and report on intangible assets of enterprises. However, current accounting practices do not meet the information demand of enterprise knowledge resources. This article focuses on clarifying the theoretical issues of knowledge resources in enterprises and the current state of accounting of intellectual resources in particular and intangible assets accounting in general in Vietnam in the integration period. Based on the research on content, requirements for managing knowledge resources and accounting methods, this article provides the guiding principles for the development of the accounting of intangible assets to exploit the enterprise's knowledge resources. Keywords Intellectual capital, value theory, intangible assets, enterprises References [1]. Abeysekera, I., (2003), “Intellectual accounting scorecard - Measuring and reporting Intellectual Captital”,http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1590&context=commpapers [Accessed 5 June 2017] [2]. Brennan, N. và Connell, B. (2000), “Intellectual capital: current isues and policy applications”, Intellectual Capital, 1 (3), 206-240.[3]. Đặng, Đ. S., Mariott, D. N. và Mariott, P. (2006) “Qualitative insights into the provision of financial information by small and medium companies in the transitional economy of Viet nam”. The International Conference on Accounting and Finance in Trasition, April 10-12, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia.[4]. Guthrie, J. và Petty, R. (2000), “Intellectual capital review: measurement, reporting and management”, Journal of Intellectual Capital, 1 (1), 155-176. [5]. Ismail, T.H., (2008), “Intellectual Capital Reporting in Knowledge Economy: Evidence from Egypt [pdf]”, Available at: <http://www.cba.edu.kw/wtou/download/conf3/tariq.PDF> [Accessed 12 June 2017][6]. Johanson, U. (1999), “Mobilising change: characteristics of intangibles proposed by 11 Swedish firms”, the International Symposium Measuring and Reporting Intellectual Capital: Experiences, Issues, and Prospects, OECD, Amsterdam, June.[7]. Moolman, S., (2010), “Intellectual Capital : Measurement, recognition and reporting, Masters of commerce in the subject Accounting, University of South Africa [pdf]”, Available at: <http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/4847/dissertation_moolman_s.pdf?sequence=1> [Accessed 12 June 2017][8]. OECD (1999), “Measuring and reporting intellectual capital”, OECD Research Papers, Amsterdam.[9]. Roos, J. Roos, G. Draggonetti, N.C. và Edvinsson, I. (1997), Intellectual Capital, Macmillan Business, London.[10]. Sujan, A. and Abeysekera, I., (2007), “Intellectual capital reporting practices of the top Australian firms”, <http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1437&context=commpapers [Accessed 12 June 2017].

Internet banking (IB) is believed to bring a lot of banefits to customers and is provided by most of the banks in Vietnam, but the number of users is still limited. The purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons and consumption-decision structure why not many people in Vietnam is willing to use the service. The study is based on Mean Means-End Chain theory (MEC) and uses laddering interview to collect data. Data from a sample of 71 respondents are analysed by employing Association Pattern Technique (APT) and then are demonstrated on Hierarchical Value Map (HVM). The research findings show that there are 06 attributes, leading to 05 consequences, driving to Unsafety and Inconvenience as 02 crucial values which prevent customers from using IB. Some recommendations are proposed accordingly to improve IS usage. Keywords Internet banking, Means-end chain theory, soft/hard laddering interview References [1] Phương, M. (2017, December 01). Việt Nam có tiềm năng lớn về phát triển ngân hàng số. Bnews. Retrieved from: http://bnews.vn/viet-nam-co-tiem-nang-lon-ve-phat-trien-ngan-hang-so/29815.html[2] Internet Users, Facebook Subscribers & Population Statistics for 35 countries and regions in Asia. (2017, December 31). Internet World Stats. Retrieved from: https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm[3] Đăng, H. (2017, May 17). Tỷ lệ người dùng Internet Banking tại Việt Nam ít một cách bất ngờ. Báo Mới. Retrieved from: https://baomoi.com/ty-le-nguoi-dung-internet-banking-tai-viet-nam-it-mot-cach-bat-ngo/c/22384122.epi[4] Mbrokoh, A. S. (2015). Factors that influence internet banking adoption in Ghana. University thesis, University of Ghana.[5] Gerrard, P.& Cunningham J.,B. (2003). The diffusion of Internet banking among Singapore consumers, International Journal of Bank Marketing, 21 (1), pp.16-28, https://doi.org/10.1108/02652320310457776[6] Hanafizadeh, P., Keating, B, W., & Khedmatgozar, H, R. (2013). A systematic review of Internet banking adoption. Telematics and Informatics, 31(3), 492-510, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2013.04.003[7] Laura, B., & Kate, S. (2002). A Delphi study of the drivers and inhibitors of Internet banking. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 20(6), 250-260, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/02652320210446715[8] Lee, E., Kwon. K., & Schumann, D. W. (2005). Segmenting the non-adopter category in the diffusion of Internet banking. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 23(5), 414 – 437, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/02652320510612483[9] Kuisma, T., Laukkanen, T., & Hiltunen, M. (2007). Mapping the reasons for resistance to Internet banking: A means-end approach. Information Management, 27(2), 77-85, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2006.08.006[10] Costa, A. I. A., Dekkerb, M., & Jongen,W.M.F. (2004). An overview of means-end theory: potential application in consumer-oriented food product design. Trends in Food Science & Technology, 15(7-8), 403-415, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2004.02.005[11] Gutman, J. (1982). A means-end chain model based on consumer categorization processes. Journal of Marketing, 46(2), 60-72, doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3203341[12] Hofstede, F., Audenaert, A., Steenkamp, J-B. E. M., & Wedel, M. (1998). An investigation into the association pattern technique as a quantitative approach to measuring means-end chains. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 15(1), 37-50, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-8116(97)00029-3[13] Reynolds, J. T., James, P.J., & John, W. L. (1988). Application of the Means-End Theoretic for Understanding the Cognitive Bases of Performance Appraisal. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 41(2), 153-179, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(88)90024-6[14] Olson, J. C., Renolds, T. J., & Partners, R. (2001). The means-end approach to understanding consumer decision-making. in T. J. Reynolds & J. C. Olson (eds.), Understanding consumer decision-making: The Means-end approach to marketing and advertising strategy (pp. 3-20) Mahwah, N.J.: Psychology Press. 2000.[15] Russell, C. G., Busson, A., Flight, I., Bryan, J., van Lawick van Pabst, J. A., & Cox, D. N. (2004). A comparison of three laddering techniques applied to an example of a complex food choice. Food Quality and Preference, 15(6), 569-583. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2003.11.007[16] Reynolds, T. J., & Gutman, J. (1988). Laddering theory, method, analysis, and interpretation. Journal of Advertising Research, 28(1), 11-31.[17] Grunert, K. G., & Grunert, S. C. (1995). Measuring subjective meaning structures by the laddering method: Theoretical considerations and methodological problems. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 12(3), 209-225. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0167-8116(95)00022-T[18] Hyunsoo, K., Mincheol, K., Sora, Y., & Kang, D. (2013). A consumer value analysis of mobile internet protocol television based on a means-end chain theory. Emprical Article, 8(4), 587-613, doi: 10.1007/s11628-013-0208-8[19] Yassaman, M. (2009). Reasons Barring Customers from using Internet Banking in Iran: An Integrated Approach Based on Means-End Chains and Segmentation. Master’s thesis. Lulea University of Technology[20] Lee, M-C. (2009). Factors influencing the adoption of internet banking: An integration of TAM and TPB with perceived risk and perceived benefit. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 8(3), 130 – 141, doi: 10.1016/j.elerap.2008.11.006[21] Martin, C., Oliveira, T., Popovic, A. (2014). Understanding the Internet banking adoption: A unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and perceived risk application, International Journal of Information Management, 34 (1), 1-13.[22] Hoang, H. M. (2015). The Adoption of Personal Internet Banking in Vietnam. Silpakorn University Journal of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, 15(2), 173-201.[23] Alalwan, A., Dwivedi, Y., Rana, N. et al. (2015) Consumer adoption of Internet banking in Jordan: Examining the role of hedonic motivation, habit, self-efficacy and trust, Journal of Financial and Service Marketing, 20(2), 145-157. https://doi.org/10.1057/fsm.2015.5[24] Hoàng, P. T (2016). Báo cáo Tổng quan tình hình an ninh mạng Việt Nam 2016. Retrieved from: http://security.org.vn/Docs/2017/K1%20Mr.%20Hoang%20Phuoc%20 Thuan_CANM.pdf[25] Thúc đẩy phát triển Internet Banking. (2015, July 1). Ngân hàng Nhà nước Việt Nam Retrieved from: https://www.sbv.gov.vn/webcenter/portal/vi/menu/trangchu/hdk/cntt/udptcntt/udptcntt[26] Ram, S., & Sheth, J.N. (1989). Cosumer resistance to innovations: The marketing proplem and its solutions. The Journal of Cosumer Marketing, 6(2), 5-13, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000002542[27] Marr, E.N., & Prendergast, P.J. (1993). Consumer Adoption of Self‐service Technologies in Retail Banking: Is Expert Opinion Supported by Consumer Research?. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 11(1), 3-10, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/02652329310023381[28] Thornton, J., & White, L. (2001). Customer orientations and usage of financial distribution channels. Journal of Services Marketing, 15(3), 168-185, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/08876040110392461

20th VESOUL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF ASIAN CINEMA (11-18 February 2014) Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian Cinema is a rare event not only in its program dedicated solely to the cinemas of Asia, but also in the manner it is run, which is an important factor in drawing film-lovers from all over the world every year to a rather ordinary town in the middle of winter. A family affair, with Martine and Jean-Marc Thérouanne at the helm, the opening night commenced with a cocktail in their house, followed by a ceremony at the largest theatre in town. For the 20th anniversary, the concert from Vietnam, the traditional dance show from the Philippines and a Jô-do martial art performance from Japan were followed by an inspiring film on the twenty years of the festival that started with one small theatre for projection and an adjacent tent for meetings, with Mr...

AUSTRALIA — Prototype Test for Predicting Clinical Outcome for Melanoma Patients AUSTRALIA — New Model Predicts Long-term Survival of Critically Ill Patients AUSTRALIA — World's First Computerized System to Predict Premature Births CHINA — Biomagnetics (BMGP) Enters Chinese Biotech Market CHINA — More Than 12 000 Babies Hospitalized for Taking Tainted Milk CHINA — New Test Could Prevent Cervical Cancer INDONESIA — Indonesia's Pharmaceutical Companies Get Boost in Competitive Advantage from Launch of Newport Horizon Premium and IDRAC Solutions INDIA — India's Government Nods to Set up 10 Testing Units for Ayurvedic Drugs INDIA — DuPont India Opens First Research Facility in Hyderabad INDIA — CSIR and Godavari Sugar to Set up India's First Sugarcane Biorefinery INDIA — FRLHT Develops Herbal Drug for Diabetes Mellitus INDIA — Chhattisgarh Government to Set Up Herbal Medicinal Park to Promote Industry INDIA — Escorts Heart to Launch 3D Trans Esophageal Echocardiography INDIA — India Develops Hybrid Mustard Seed, Better Yield Expected INDIA — Hindustan Latex to Develop MediPark NEW ZEALAND — NZ Bird Flu “Could Mutate into More Serious Form” NEW ZEALAND — HRC Invests Over $1.07 million to Help Build International Health Research Partnerships SINGAPORE — Singapore Researchers Find Key Gatekeeper Gene that Plays Key Role in Colon Cancer SINGAPORE — Singapore Research Produces Plastic Micro Needles that can be Mass-Produced More Easily and Cheaply for Painless Injections and Extraction of Bodily Fluids SINGAPORE — Singapore Researchers Develop New Stem Cell Therapy for Heart Disease SINGAPORE — Singapore's First Commercial Developer of Molecular Diagnostic Assays Commences Operation SINGAPORE — Singapore to Host Medical Equipment Manufacturing Show VIETNAM — Local Scientists Create Sperm from Stem Cells VIETNAM — Vietnam to Reinforce Crackdown on Fake Medicine

Purpose Drawing from institutional theory and organizational learning perspectives, the purpose of this paper is to examine how social norms of corruption in home countries and those in host localities influence firm bribery behavior. It also investigates factors that moderate the influence of these norms. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on survey data of foreign invested firms (FIFs) in Vietnam, conducted by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry between 2010 and 2018 along with Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. The authors run ordinary least squares regressions to test the hypotheses. Findings The study provides evidence that social norms of corruption in both home countries and host localities influence firms’ bribery behavior, but their effects are moderated by different sets of factors. Specifically, the use of local leadership augments the impact of the host province’s corruption norms on the firm’s bribe payments. By contrast, the relationship between the home country’s corruption norms and a FIF’s bribe payment is weaker if local leadership is used, and stronger if the FIF’s home country belongs to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Research limitations/implications Repeated cross-sectional data do not allow us to genuinely keep track of the changing roles of home country and host province corruption norms over time.[AQ2] In addition, the use of perception measures for corruption norms is subject to potential biases. Practical implications As the hiring of local executives weakens the impact of the home country’s norms which are embedded in the MNCs’ general practices, a stronger learning measure and regular review of the headquarters’ policies and practices is needed to ensure the overseas branch’s compliance. For policymakers, it is critical to recognize that local corruption plays a role in shaping FIFs’ bribery behavior. Originality/value While the effect of social norms of corruption on firm bribery behavior has been recognized, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examines the learning processes FIFs may take to make sense of and cope with these norms, and also the first one to specify factors that moderate the influence of these norms.

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circumstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circumstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. 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Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. 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Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.