Widower's Tango

To the Max

2012-01-30T12:50:00.011+08:00

"There's an enigmatic relationship between Max and myself. He has meant a tremendous amount to me....As an actor, Max is sound through and through. Robust. Technically durable. If I'd had a psychopath to present these deeply psychopathic roles, it would have been unbearable. It's a question of acting the part of a broken man, not of being him. The sort of exhibitionism in this respect which is all the rage just now will pass over, I think. By and by people will regain their feeling for the subtle detachment which often exists between Max and my madmen." - Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (1968)

The man I consider to be the greatest living actor, Max von Sydow, is now 82. His film performances - many, but not most, of which I am privileged to have seen - are rivalled in greatness by his stage performances, of which I have heard great things. The names of the characters he has played in the 144 films in which he has appeared provide us with a guide to the diversity of his brilliance. He is famous for his great kings, his devout priests, and his compassionate doctors: Antonius Blok, Albert Emanuel Vogler, Töre, Jesus, Andreas Winkelman, Smålands-Pelle, Johan Borg, Jan Rosenberg, Karl Oskar, Andreas Vergerus, Father Merrin, The Emperor Ming, King Osric, Salomon August Andrée, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, The Devil, Fridtjof Nansen, The Apostle Peter, August Strindberg, Lassefar, Pope Clement VII, Johan Åkerblom. Eugene O'Neill, Knut Hamsun, Cardinal Von Waldberg, Sir Walter Loxley.

Besides the thirteen films he has made with Ingmar Bergman, he made five films with Jan Troell, who remains one of the greatest living filmmakers. He was nominated last week for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, the second time he's been nominated (the first was for Pelle the Conqueror, 1987). I first saw him playing Jesus in George Stevens' beautiful but silly The Greatest Story Ever Told (1964). I was six years old, and by the time I saw him in Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), his was a familiar face.

Obviously, Hollywood never knew what to do with him, even if he knew what to do with Hollywood. Of the many films he appeared in, speaking English with a noticeable but not a heavy accent, only a handful are worthy of him. He was so well-known to Americans as Jesus, and as the exorcist Father Merrin, that the makers of Needful Things had fun casting him as Satan. I'm sure he relished the small roles he was offered in Hollywood, and never expected much except a good living. Although now a citizen of France, he still has an address in California.

But if the quality of the films (in a foreign language) were the first consideration, only Marcello Mastroianni appeared in as many equally impressive films. Max will be remembered because so many of the films he acted in were indelible: The Seventh Seal, The Magician, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, A Stopover in the Marshlands, The Emigrants, The New Land, The Flight of the Eagle, Pelle the Conqueror, Hamsun.

Writing is Wonderful

2012-01-27T10:20:00.005+08:00

Reading again the Paris Review interview with John Cheever, first published in the Fall 1976 issue, what a relief to find oneself in his company again, saying so much about writing - and, by extension, living - that is so replenishing. For instance, he quickly dispels the notion, popularized by mostly bad writers, that writing is a torment.

"When I write a story that I really like, it's ... why, wonderful. That's what I can do, and I love it while I'm doing it. I can feel that it's good ... The sense is of one's total usefulness. We all have a power of control, it's part of our lives: we have it in love, in work that we love doing. It's a sense of ecstasy, as simple as that. The sense is that 'this is my usefulness, and I can do it all the way through.' It always leaves you feeling great. In short, you've made sense of your life."

His advice to his readers, and to other writers, is as free from cant as anyone could want. He calls writing "our most intimate and acute means of communication." When asked his feelings about "truth" and "reality", he replies that

"For one thing the words “truth” and “reality” have no meaning at all unless they are fixed in a comprehensible frame of reference. There are no stubborn truths ... What I’ve always wanted of verisimilitude is probability, which is very much the way I live.

When he finishes writing a book, he says, "there is some dislodgment of the imagination. I wouldn’t say derangement. But finishing a novel, assuming it’s something you want to do and that you take very seriously, is invariably something of a psychological shock."

Pursuing this admission, the interviewer asks "How long does it take the psychological shock to wear off? Is there any treatment?"

"I don’t quite know what you mean by treatment. To diminish shock I throw high dice, get sauced, go to Egypt, scythe a field, screw. Dive into a cold pool."

He mentions how important memory is for a writer a few times: "... any estimable exercise of the imagination draws upon such a complex richness of memory that it truly enjoys the expansiveness—the surprising turns, the response to light and darkness—of any living thing."

So many of the interviewers questions seem like the standard questions asked of any writer, like "Do you feel drawn to experiment in fiction." But Cheever takes them in his stride:

"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. One never puts down a sentence without the feeling that it has never been put down before in such a way, and that perhaps even the substance of the sentence has never been felt. Every sentence is an innovation."

Cheever spoke about his affection for Scott Fitzgerald, "it is such a sad story." But he could as easily have been speaking of himself ("Everyone keeps saying that about my stories, 'Oh, they're so sad.'"):

"All the estimates of him bring in his descriptions of the '29 crash, the excessive prosperity, the clothes, the music, and by doing so, his work is described as being heavily dated . . . sort of period pieces. This all greatly diminishes Fitzgerald at his best. One always knows reading Fitzgerald what time it is, precisely where you are, the kind of country. No writer has ever been so true in placing the scene. But I feel that this isn't pseudohistory, but his sense of being alive. All great men are scrupulously true to their times."

Then, in response to a silly quote about novelists by William Golding, Cheever expands on his belief that writing is a more mysteriously psychic experience than we may think:

"Cocteau said that writing is a force of memory that is not understood. I agree with this. Raymond Chandler described it as a direct line to the subconscious. The books that you really love give the sense, when you first open them, of having been there. It is a creation, almost like a chamber in the memory. Places that one has never been to, things that one has never seen or heard, but their fitness is so sound that you’ve been there somehow."

Writing is "a question of making sense of ones experience ... Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh ... Acuteness of feeling and velocity have always seemed to me terribly important ... The proper function of writing is to enlarge people. To give them their risk, if possible to give them their divinity."

In his 1991 review of Cheever's Journals, John Updike wrote of his "memories of the sprightly, debonair, gracious man, often seen on the arm of his pretty, witty wife."

I saw his interview with Dick Cavett in 1981, just a few months before his death. Cavett wrote in a recent New York Times Opinionater column of his last meeting with Cheever, outside a "40-room mansion on Gramercy Park" where the National Arts Club had invited them to speak:

"Out front afterwards, on the dark sidewalk as people were leaving, I thanked and said goodbye to John for the last time. He started away and then came back, reached inside his jacket, and handed me his typed copy of the wonderful and witty remarks he had just made about me. As I recall, I tucked them inside my blazer pocket, making a mental note to take good care of that sheet of paper. A cleaner may have been the last to see it."

Contagion

2012-01-24T13:17:00.001+08:00

Two men, John Sayles and Steven Soderbergh, represent the two main problems with American "independent" film. (If on they could somehow be merged in one filmmaker, the resulting films would be something like Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers.) Sayles has never been short of things to say about (Matewan, Eight Men Out, Lone Star, Men With Guns, Casa de los Babys). He's the closest we have to an American Ken Loach. What Sayles lacks is an original or compelling way of saying it. Soderbergh, on the other hand, has acquired a superb technique that is too often confused with art and is lavished on trivial material or on movie star vehicles.

Every few years, it seems, some new strain of encephalitis appears out of nowhere (like Asia) that threatens to go pandemic and kill millions of us. Each new viral scare is a product of a shrinking planet and a vindication of it. The film "medical thriller disaster film Contagion illustrates these strengths and vulnerabilities.

Contagion has almost everything that a film dealing with such a subject requires: intelligence, truthfulness, and a plot driven by a genuinely frightening eventuality. What it doesn't have, strangely, is what Sayles would've given it at the expense of suspense: a point of view. Soderbergh takes a dim view of humanity when he shows us a handful of experts who know what to do and who get to it, a bureaucracy that does pretty much whatever the experts tell them, and the rest of humanity that does nothing but wait on enough luck to survive. The everyday sort of selfless heroism that was evident in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami is omitted. Western observers spoke often of the apparent stoicism with which the Japanese public endured their daily hardships. But some of them also speculated that Americans might not be so stoical if and when they are faced with such a national calamity. Soderbergh shows them on their worst behavior as the disease spreads, stampeding pharmacies, looting grocery stores, and vandalizing everything else. The only cool heads in the movie are, of course, played by the stars.

Probably the most despicable character in the movie is played by Jude Law - a blogger who contributes to and exploits the hysteria. At one point, he tells a scientist (played by Elliott Gould) that he's a writer and has his own blog. "Blogging is not writing," Gould tells him. "It's graffiti with punctuation." Law is dubious of everything that established institutions do to fight the virus. Even when they develop a vaccine, he says "This thing's side effects will be like the credits at the end of a movie."

Contagion, which is immeasurably better than the last film on the subject, Outbreak, has a current of fear that is, er, infectious. When we first see Gwyneth Paltrow, she coughs, and we follow her home from Chicago, after a business trip to Macao. Our clinical interest in her fate is softened by the helplessness in which her illness leaves her, and by Matt Damon's stunned reaction to the new of her sudden death.

I suppose that such a film, which must cover vast distances (Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Dubai, Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Russia, Malaysia, and Hong Kong) couldn't avoid the many ellipses and musical segues to which Soderbergh so often resorts. A throbbing, monotonous music score underpins these scenes, that manage to be dramatically effect rive while basically saying very little.

The star-studded cast is headed by an excellent Laurence Fishburne as the director of the CDC - for which Contagion is an extended endorsement. Kate Winslet manages to turn her small role as CDC field investigator into a memorable vignette. And Matt Damon is once again convincing as a regular Joe - in this case a hapless man who is immune to the virus that kills his wife and young son.

What the film tells us about human beings isn't very surprising or edifying. Camus' great novel, The Plague, is something of a model for all such stories, even if it is about much more than just the progression and containment of a bubonic plague outbreak in a 1940s Algerian city. The last paragraph of the novel (in Stuart Gilbert's translation) reads:

"...as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crows did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests, that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

Needless to say, Camus' chronicle is incalculably more moving as a human drama, and a towering work of art. Soderbergh has announced his upcoming retirement from directing. I can't think of too many others who could've made Contagion run its 106 minutes as smoothly as Soderbergh. Smoothness may not count for much, but in American film, perhaps it's the most we have a right to expect.

Language Barrier

2012-01-21T13:51:00.011+08:00

Last November, when an unscrupulous landlady of mine decided to raise my rent 60%, I did a little research into Philippine rent laws and discovered one - conveniently published in English - that prohibited landlords from raising their tenants' rent more that 7% per year. Known as the "Rent Control Act of 2009", the law included, in section 14, a provision for "a continuing information drive" that called for it to be "translated and be made available in major regional dialects and ... posted in conspicuous public places, including barangay halls."

I printed a copy of the Act and handed it to my landlady the next time she showed up to collect my rent. Since I had heard she was college educated, I made the honest mistake of expecting her to be able to read the English in which the Act had been written. The look on her face when she looked at the first page and then looked up at me made me realize my mistake. She would probably need a lawyer, I thought, to make sense of it for her.

Filipinos are taught English from grade one through their fourth year of high school. This is actually typical of many countries, including Japan, where I had lived for three years in the 1990s. But, like everything else in a person's education that has no practical application in their lives (like algebra) , even the best students have few opportunities in their lives to use the English that they spent ten years learning. One of the reasons why the Filipino Department of Education makes the instruction of English mandatory in public schools is because of the many dialects spoken throughout the Philippine archipelago - Ilocano, Pampangan, Waray, Visayan, Cebuano. For the same reason, DepEd has directed the schools to teach Tagalog, which is the official language of the country, a common dialect that can be used and understood all over the country. National television broadcasts and all Filipino movies use Tagalog. This guarantees that the greatest number of people who watch TV and movies can follow what is being spoken.

English is reserved - inexplicably - as the language of national government and of higher education. When I visited my local barangay hall and asked, in Tagalog of course, if a copy of the Rent Control Act had been posted there, translated into the local dialect, I was told that they had heard of neither the Act nor the information drive for its dissemination.

This week I watched on national TV the Senate impeachment trial of the standing Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, conducted exclusively in English, and I wondered how many Filipinos could follow what was going on. And then it occurred to me that, perhaps, this was the whole point. The exclusive use of English in government proceedings meant that a majority of Filipinos would understand nothing of what was going on. Just as it didn't matter that the Philippine government had passed the Rent Control Act, when few Filipinos would know of its existence or it meaning as long as it was drafted in English. As long as the Philippines is ruled in this way, with a majority of the people having no knowledge of the substance of laws enacted, a government could rule with impunity.

Recently, when a question regarding the "constitutionality" of a particular measure under debate in the Philippine Senate was raised, a certain senator noted for her outrageous remarks announced that no one who was not a law school graduate like her was qualified to interpret the Philippine constitution. When I heard this, I was flummoxed. If an American senator had made such a remark, he would've been pilloried. If what she said were true, I thought, then such a constitution should immediately be burned. (Incidentally, this same Philippine senator - Miriam Defensor-Santiago - has been elected as a judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.)

Tough Mercies

2012-01-18T11:59:00.003+08:00

Once again a poor contemporary film - Crazy Heart (2009) - propels me back to the film that ostensibly inspired it - Bruce Beresford's Tender Mercies (1983). Crazy Heart is so lamely executed, made by people who have as little feeling for life as they have for film, that the characters emerge as pathetic rather than sympathetic. In fact, Crazy Heart, which some critics called "Tender Mercies Lite", is a practical demonstration of how to escape from life, how to misrepresent the truth, and how to avoid art.

Jeff Bridges won an Oscar for his performance as Bad Blake, a country singer on what he seems determined will be his last legs. As played by Bridges, he is a messy human being, with failed marriages and responsibilities left behind. He spends at least half the film drunk, with his pants hanging open, travelling from town to town at his manager's direction. The film commits a quite glaring mistake when Bridges steps onstage, whether in a small town lodge or an arena, and he and his band play brilliantly - until Blake falls over and has to run backstage to throw up.

T-Bone Burnett supervised the songs Bridges sings throughout the film. So instead of a broken down old country singer no one wants to hear any more, Crazy Heart gives us an award-winning soundtrack album. Bridges has even taken a year off (which must be nice) to take his new-found guitar-playing and singing talents on the road.

The biggest mistake Crazy Heart makes is that Jeff Bridges' performing sounds far too polished. He's supposed to be playing with pick-up bands in saloons and bowling alleys. Anthony Quinn liked to tell a story of his days of shooting with Fellini for La Strada. Fellini arranged for Quinn to arrive in a small Italian town and perform his Zampano strongman act in front of whatever crowd showed up, shooting the scene with discreetly-placed cameras. On Fellini's signal, Quinn rode up in his wagon and prepared for his act. A crowd gathered and Quinn launched into his performance. He was brilliant and a huge crowd showed their appreciation for this apparently unknown performer with a hatful of cash. Quinn packed up his motorcycle and rode out of the town square. Later at night, Fellini phoned Quinn and told him they would have to re-shoot the whole scene. "But why?" asked Quinn. "I thought it was perfect?" "Because," Fellini replied, "you played the scene just like Anthony Quinn, the great actor. And of course the crowd loved it. But you're not Anthony Quinn. You're Zampano. You're supposed to be lousy."

Before Tender Mercies began shooting, Robert Duvall drove all over West Texas, listening to the people's speech and singing with local bands in preparation for his performance as Mac Sledge, a former country singer who finds himself one morning broke in a motel four miles from the nearest town. He asks the motel owner, Rosa Lee (played beautifully by Tess Harper) if he can work off what he owes her. She eventually gives him a steady job, pumping gas and doing odd jobs around the property.

Twelve minutes into the film, there is a scene between Mac and Rosa Lee in the backyard garden. Mac comes straight out with "I guess it's no secret how I feel about you. A blind man could see that. Would you think about marrying me?" This is precisely the point at which Pauline Kael, an occasionally sensitive critic, decided that the film had failed her. "I kept waiting for Tender Mercies to get started - to get into something. I was still waiting when it was over and I was back out on the street...[It is] proof that a movie doesn't have to be long to be ponderous." (1)

I can only guess that Kael was disappointed that the film, in her estimate, hadn't earned the sudden access of emotion between Mac and Rosa Lee. I think the point that Horton Foote, who wrote the script, and Beresford were making was how little their characters are capable of expressing their feelings. Mac has to do it through the platitudes of a country song. Duvall himself wrote the song that he sings at the film's climax, "If You'll Hold the Ladder (I'll Climb to the Top)". The song's clumsy poetry is typical of country songs, which give people, who are, evidently, in their millions, an outlet for their deepest feelings.

Duvall is so perfect as Mac Sledge that he sounds (to my ears) dreadful when we finally hear him sing, his voice (intentionally) a collection of vocal mannerisms learned from a lifetime of singing in honkytonks - just the sort of twangy cowboy music I've tried to avoid all my life. He isn't catapulted, as in Crazy Heart, back into fame after his recovery from drink. He is simply redeemed by love and by a profound faith, but sadly mystified by the workings of God. After a reunion with his daughter Sue Ann, she is killed in a road accident that leaves Mac at a loss:

"I was almost killed once in a car accident. I was drunk and I ran off the side of the road and I turned over four times. And they took me out of that car for dead. But I lived. And I prayed last night to know why I lived and she died. But I got no answer to my prayers. I still don't know why she died and I lived. I don't know the answer to nothin'. Not a blessed thing."

Bad Blake gets into a remarkably similar accident and survives with a broken leg. In fact, the similarities between Crazy Heart and Tender Mercies are many - too many to avoid comparing the two films. Blake has a son he hasn't seen in years. Instead of an ex-wife country singer, he has Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), who has managed to remain successful and not lose everything. Instead of Rosa Lee, Blake gets AA. In fact, Robert Duvall appears in Crazy Heart as an old friend of Blake's who helps him recover from alcohol. Bridges' film couldn't done without Duvall's imprimatur, but I suppose they believed that genuflecting at Tender Mercies wouldn't hurt. Boy were they wrong.

(1) Pauline Kael, Taking It All In.

When Nature Calls

2012-01-15T10:06:00.003+08:00

Is there a Geneva Convention statute giving instructions for the disposition of the dead in war? At a bare minimum, there must certainly be one that requires for a proper burial. And it probably condemns the sort of treatment that a group of U.S. marines gave to the dead bodies of Taliban in a video recently "leaked" on YouTube. It gives us a rather lurid glimpse into the mentality of these men, and should give us pause about what war can do to perfectly civilized people.

Nobody seems to want to any more, but the only way we are ever going to understand why American fighting men do such things is by thinking about why one of them decided to record it and share it with others. They knew that it was wrong, but they had to have believed that they would get away with it and that there would be support for their actions among fellow marines. They believed, I think, that they were demonstrating to one another their absolute mastery over their enemy. Their act of desecration proved that their Taliban adversaries, although dead, could be useful.

A few people, who also expressed disgust for the incident, hinted at some understanding for its context. Evidently, there had been a firefight, and the enemy dead had been placed in a pile. No one who hasn't been under fire and fought off the assault to live another day can possibly imagine what the experience is like. There is no other experience even remotely like it. It can be explained in physiological terms, when the adrenaline those marines were affected by, the exhilaration of coming close to death and surviving, was probably extraordinary. It's at precisely such moments that ideas like "professionalism" and "decorum" become especially meaningless. While combat is the single event for which all of a marine's or a soldier's training has prepared him, nothing can prepare him for the gamut of emotions or the velocity of their arrival and departure. It is in all the minutes, hours, and days after the event that the marine or soldier shows his true mettle. And the majority of those fighting men, the junior enlisted men, are 19 or 20 years old. Their high school buddies back home are getting high, partying, and doing all the things that 19 and 20 year olds normally do.

While on deployment in Afghanistan, each deployment lasting for 365 days, these young men earn what's known as "certain places pay" (i.e., combat pay) and their base pay isn't taxed. If their units weren't tightly knit prior to its deployment, the ever-present fear of being on patrol and the constant tension and relaxation of being in or out of garrison, produces a fellowship among them that is unprecedented and irreplaceable. For many of them, the thought of separating from the service, when their unit faces the likelihood of further deployments, is unthinkable. Ask any of those young men what they are fighting for and they will tell you, unequivocally, that it is for one another. Their mission may include everything from "peace-keeping" to "nation-building", but such concepts have meaning only for the people who have the time to think about them. These young men have a clear and direct understanding of brotherhood, of being more than an individual, of being a part of something bigger than themselves.

In order to overcome their basic reluctance to kill another human being, these young men have to be de-sensitized - i.e., brutalized - to the point at which the human beings whom they are called on to kill are deprived of their humanity. It happens in all wars. But it is especially prevalent when there are racial or cultural differences separating them from their enemies.

Sending these young men to do our dirty work and then criticizing the manner in which they do it is exceptionally hypocritical. What those marines did wasn't a disgrace to the U.S. Marine Corps. It was an embarrassment to the military mission in Afghanistan, which is trying to convince ordinary Afghans that they are there to help them achieve a pluralistic, secular state. Doubtless, the marines will have to be provided with further instruction in the proper handling of all those who oppose such a state, once they have been properly killed, that is.

Our notions of "limited war", of a "low-intensity conflict" have been severely tested by the estimates of somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 civilian dead in ten years. 95% of the world's supply of opium comes from Afghan poppy farmers. If the Taliban want to terrorize the world, they could do worse than to simply rely on the heroin that supplies the estimated 15 to 16 million addicts worldwide, tens of thousands of whom die early deaths every year.

Calamity Prone

2012-01-14T11:35:00.007+08:00

Philippine president Benigno Aquino III declared a state of "national calamity" after heavy rains from tropical storm "Sendong" left more than a thousand people dead and at least as many missing just a few days before Christmas. He declared that the state of calamity was to last for sixty days, but if he wanted to tell the truth about his beleaguered country (1), he should've extended it "in perpetuity".

Experts try to explain such disasters by pointing out that the Philippines endures an average of ten big tropical storms and cyclones every year. But that doesn't account for the routinely catastrophic scale of the damage the storms inflict on the Philippines, since the U.S. east coast sees several large storms as well, but the cost of lives and property damage is comparably minimal.

In the days after the flash floods in Mindanao, I heard pundits on Filipino TV talking about the "disaster-prone" areas in the country, suggesting that there are actually specific areas, such as river basins, that are prone to disasters like floods and landslides. But there are places like that everywhere in the world. Many major cities are situated on river basins. The Thai capitol, Bangkok, recently experienced its worst flooding in more than fifty years. The floods weren't restricted to one region, nor were they, despite extremely heavy rainfall, what caused the calamity in Mindanao.

When a major flood hits the U.S. or Europe, there is much property loss but comparably little loss of life. The huge flash floods in Mindanao took place in the middle of the night when people were asleep in their beds. The Philippine agency responsible for alerting citizens of impending disasters insisted that they provided sufficient warning to the residents of the region. What they didn't point out was what the warning consisted of and what form it took. Living in a remote province myself, in which there is only one radio station and where the two national TV networks are off the air at night, I wonder what, if any, warning would arrive here in time to save people's lives in a disaster.

Communications is just one part of a country's infrastructure. After the disaster, local officials were blaming "illegal logging" for the severity of the floods. But these disasters are practically self-inflicted, since infrastructure development in the poorer provinces of the Philippines is notoriously neglected. Where there is highway or bridge construction, corruption ensures that the money initially provided for the construction gets siphoned off: contractors pass the job on to sub-contractors, and the resulting roads and bridges are washed away every few years. Nothing gets fixed here until it breaks.

As I wrote in May 2010, Filipinos seem to have a special relationship with their surroundings. A road sign can be found everywhere, at particular places along a highway, that reads "Accident Prone Area". At first glance, one's first reaction to the sign is that it isn't areas that are accident prone - it's people. But Filipinos evidently don't see it that way. If accidents occur in certain places more often than elsewhere, the places themselves are partly responsible. The sign is a warning to everyone who drives into the area to be careful, lest they fall prey to whatever is causing all the accidents. It reminds me of an insurance law in Japan that states when your car is rear-ended, you are partially responsible (I think 15% was the percentage), since the accident wouldn't have occurred if your car hadn't been there.

I wouldn't be surprised if soon there will be signs posted in special areas in these islands that read Disaster Prone Area. They won't save lives, but they will give the local governments an excuse not to spend another peso on infrastructure.

(1) One example of the lack of truth-telling is the official unemployment rate of 6.4% (as of October 2011). Forgetting that 11 million Filipinos are working overseas, and that most of the women are too busy caring for their children to even consider getting a job, no one who has visited this country for a few days could possibly estimate unemployment at anything less than 30%.

Bond and Free

2012-01-11T11:50:00.005+08:00

Space is, like our world's oceans, an inhospitable environment for human beings, which is why we've had to construct special capsules and suits in which we can explore it, that supply us with air and the right atmospheric pressure. For more than a century, scientists have speculated that man will eventually have to leave the earth altogether in a few centuries - either because of some ecological disaster or a nuclear catastrophe - and colonize space.

I have always thought that the scientists seemed comfortable - if not delighted - by the prospect of visiting other planets, asserting that humanity will be able to adapt to a new and potentially hostile environment. While I admire the men and women - many of whom perished - who have volunteered to explore space, I have never envied them. Aside from simple curiosity, I have never been unduly interested in exploring the universe. (For the same reason, I suppose, I've never been interested in exploring the oceans.) My task has always been to find a way to live in the world that I currently live on.

The only valuable thing that the view of the earth from space has taught us is what a fragile place it is, upon which we have all been cast adrift in the universe. Such knowledge should also have imparted to us the importance of sharing our provisions equally with one another. Instead, man steals, hoards, and withholds what he has as never before. He will likely carry much of his ignorance with him when he embarks for other worlds. The last great age of discovery was motivated not by curiosity or courage but by greed and commercial competition. Will the next be provoked simply by self-preservation?

I won't be faced with the choice of leaving the earth or staying, assuming there will be such a choice. But when the last rocket ships are taking on evacuees before the earth expires or becomes uninhabitable, I am confident that I would decline the offer. Robert Frost's poem "Bond and Free" confronts just such a prospect. It was published in the collection Mountain Interval (1920), which also contains the Frost masterpieces "Meeting and Passing" and "The Road not Taken". In another poem from the collection, "Birches", Frost wrote:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Bond and Free

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about -
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turn, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world's embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius' disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

I think Frost would also choose to stay. But he would probably also half-regret the choice, as he did in "The Road Not Taken". Many readers continue to think Frost was saying something about taking "the road less traveled by", going his own wayward way in the world, and finding some victory in the choice But what he was actually addressing was the terrible necessity of having to choose at all. He would rather have not had to choose, or go both ways just to see where each ends up. Only then would he really know if he went the right way.

Waiting for a Streetcar in the Rain: Thoughts on Re-seeing Le Jour se lève

2012-01-08T13:45:00.002+08:00

Un homme a tué ... Enfermé, assiégé dans une chambre, il évoque les circonstances qui ont fait de lui un meurtrier. (A man has committed murder ... bedeviled, besieged in a room, he recalls the circumstances that made him a murderer.)

Le Jour se lève, called Daybreak in English, was released in France in July 1939. The year before, Hitler's Germany had reoccupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria and met no resistance invading and occupying Czechoslovakia. The month following the film's release, the blitzkrieg attacked Poland and the Second World War commenced. When France fell the following year, Le Jour se lève, along with Renoir's La Regle du jeu, was banned by the Vicky government, anxious to blame everything but its cowardice for France's demoralising defeat, because its "defeatism" had demoralized the French. After the war, its re-release was hampered when RKO, who sought to remake the film with Henry Fonda (The Long Night-1947), acquired the distribution rights, tried to acquire every existing copy of the film and destroy them. This prompted fears that the film was lost, until it was re-discovered in the 1950s.

In a provincial city, a blind man walks up flights of stairs when we hear an argument from inside a flat on the top floor. A gun goes off and a man, Valentin (Jules Berry) comes out onto the landing, grabs his abdomen and tumbles down the stairs.(1) The police arrive and learn that François (Jean Gabin) lives in the room and that he refuses to come out. The police besiege François' small room, in which he paces, smokes, and remembers the events that led up to his predicament.

He turns on the light, stops to examine a newspaper on the table. He reads aloud, "Ship schedules. Boulogne. the Veendam arrives from New York on the 6th...." Walking past the mirror, shot full of holes by the police, he hears a squeak and notices he's trodden on the teddy bear that Françoise had given him because she said it looked like him. He holds it up in front of him and looks into the mirror, covering his ear because the bear is missing one of his own. He lies down. Looking at the ceiling, he repeats the words "ship schedules". On the stairs outside his door, the police order him to open up. Ignoring them, he talks to himself. "How would they understand? You just do it and that's it." It's as if he knows the only way out for him.

François remembers how he met a young girl, Françoise, whose innocence charms him. But he soon learns that Valentin, a trained-dog performer, has a hold on her that he neither likes nor understands. He meets Valentin's assistant, Clara (Arletty), with whom he quickly develops an affair.

So many moments in the film are unforgettable. Jules Berry's clumsy fall down the stairs (the fall certainly wasn't what killed him). Gabin and Jacqueline Laurent's words during their first night together.

She: "It's funny, the two of us here, and everyone else asleep."
He: "Yeah. As if the whole world had died."

The talk between Arletty and Gabin, who seem to know each other without ever having met. Gabin's beautiful confession to Françoise of his lonely life before he met her.

"I took the train one day wearing my new cap and BAM - out the window. And all the rest of it. Work, no work. Is there a job I haven't done? All different, all the same. I was never really happy before, but I was alone and it didn't matter. I had nothing but problems big and small. When I couldn't fight it any more, I just gave in. Things went from bad to worse. But I got used to it. You know, like waiting for a streetcar in the rain. You try to get on, Ding! It's full. Second car, third car - ding ding! You're left standing in the rain, like a sucker."

François' angry words to Valentin just before he shoots him: "I was about to go to bed. I slaved all day and I'm tired. It's simple: I set the alarm, I sleep, the alarm rings and it all starts over again." (2)

The long dissolve of Arletty's face at the end of François' reflections.

For all the meaningless analysis of French "poetic realism", Le Jour se lève is entirely studio-bound. The city square, the factory, the houses backing onto train tracks - they were all a mock up on the Paris Billancourt sound stages.

Carné, Prévert, Berry, and Arletty stayed in France during the Occupation. Gabin left for Hollywood which, of course, didn't know what to do with him. Poor Arletty, whose Wehrmacht boyfriend got her in some hot water after the war, said in her defense, "My heart is French but my ass is international."

Gabin left for Hollywood, which, of course, didn't know what to do with him. I recall listening to the BBC World Service in 1976 when Gabin's death was announced. No other French actor of his generation so e,bodied the soul of 1930s France, its populism and tragic romanticism, in Pépé le moko, La Grande Illusion, Le Quai des brumes, La Bete Humanine, and Le Jour se lève. In only one of those films is Gabin's character alive in the final scene, and he kills himself in three of them.

(1) Berry's beautifully theatrical death is staged almost exactly like Gabin described shooting someone in Le Quai des brumes (1938): "You shoot, and then some guy . . . holds his stomach and makes a face like a kid with a bellyache."
(2) When the alarm goes off in François' room at the end of the film, the time is 6:20.

Remastering the Film: Jean Renoir

2012-01-05T10:21:00.001+08:00

Of the master filmmakers I singled out two years ago on this blog, Jean Renoir is the most remote in time. Though he made a film as late as 1969, appropriately titled The Little Theater of Jean Renoir, and he died in, of all places, Beverly Hills in 1979, his last great film was The Rules of the Game, made in 1939.

Of the millions killed in the Second World War and the millions more who were displaced and found themselves at war's end far from home or with no home to return to, it seems almost futile to mention the artists who were exiled by the war, who lost their way and couldn't find it again. Though Renoir managed to escape to the free world before the Germans attacked France in May 1940, and despite France's capitulation before the wholesale destruction of Paris, the destruction of Renoir's world - the Third Republic, Léon Blum, and the Front populaire - was, by the time he returned in 1945, complete. Because he was the creator of La Grande Illusion (1), which had the effrontery to suggest in 1937 that all men (French, German, British, and Russian) are brothers, Renoir would certainly have been arrested by the Gestapo. There was no way he could have strayed and continue working like Carné, Delannoy, and Christian-Jaque.

Reflections of that lost world informed all of his films of the 'thirties. The greatest of these, the short Une partie de campagne, the half-forgotten Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Grange Illusion, and La Règle du jeu, are exquisite expressions of Renoir's love for the people of the age.

But Renoir's career was effectively derailed in 1940. He made films in Hollywood (Swamp Water, This Land Is Mine, The Southerner) that were earnest but meagre, and his return to France induced in him a nostalgia that did not serve him well (Le Carrosse d'or (2), French Cancan, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe).

Renoir developed from free literary adaptations like Boudu Saved from Drowning (3) and The Lower Depths to original scripts written by Charles Spaak or Jacques Prévert. His best films are redolent of the political climate in France that set it apart from the Fascist movements in Germany, Italy, and Spain. Their politics may have left the French ill-prepared to defend themselves, but a great deal of the political convictions that fuelled the Resistance came from the people who were part of the Front Populaire.

(1) Stanley Kauffmann corrected the common English translation of the title, Grand Illusion, as The Big Illusion.
(2) François Truffaut evidently loved Le Carrosse d'or enough to name his production company "Les Films du Carrosse".
(3) There was irony (which nobody noticed) in Paul Mazursky's mirthless remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986). Mazursky returned to the original ending of the play - and completely blew the wistful anarchism of Renoir's substitute ending - by making his hobo reform.

Meet John Doe Revisited

2012-01-02T13:58:00.004+08:00

I haven't quite let go of my Christmas mood, nor have I quite finished with Meet John Doe.

The traditional run of Christmas movies is quite awful. One is required to grant one's consent to miracles of the holy or the commercial variety - of a baby in a Judean "manger" (the word in Greek means "food trough") or of a bizarre old man in red who is supposed to sneak into people's homes while they are sleeping. Since I do not believe in either, I am left with the few holiday films that are celebrations of the pagan aspects of Christmas - a feast in the depths of winter, a celebration of life and light when both are at their nadir.

The various versions of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the latest of which is in 3-D, have never quite done Dickens the justice he deserves. This is probably because Scrooge's change of heart, while beautifully told, is ultimately unconvincing. But because Christmas is meaningless without traditions to uphold or, for want of traditions, a lovely memory of them, many otherwise erstwhile filmmakers have resorted to making a Christmas movie, or just a movie that touches on some aspect of the holiday, like Meet John Doe.

It is not a perennial favorite. It was, in fact, a failure on its initial release, but it is a fascinating failure. Frank Capra, the film's director, had graduated from being a successful gag man for Hal Roach to making several films in the Great Depression 1930s that had a strong social message, like The Miracle Woman, American Madness, and Lady for a Day. He made what is probably the best "screwball comedy", It Happened One Night, before making a kind of New Deal trilogy of social-conscience films, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe.

The plot of John Doe is tantalizing. A woman is fired from her job as a columnist for a city newspaper, and told to submit her last column. She submits a letter she made up, from a man calling himself John Doe. In the letter he complains about the state of the world and says that in protest he is going to jump off the city hall roof at midnight on Christmas Eve. The letter provokes countless responses of sympathy and support for the man who wrote it. The newspaper brings the woman in to get the original letter. When she tells them she made it all up, they realize that they can simply find someone and pay him to say he wrote the letter.

Judging from the arguments that his films put forward, one could make the mistake of thinking that Capra was a New Deal Democrat, a believer in Roosevelt's radical social reforms that were aimed at rescuing America from the Great Depression. But Capra's politics were actually quite reactionary. The liberal heroes of his films were the creation of Capra's scriptwriters, the best of whom was Robert Riskin.

This disparity between Capra's films and his own political convictions perhaps explains why he was so good at creating convincing villains. The enemies of Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith, and John Doe are ruthless and powerful men, wealthy and corrupt, as well as almost totally cynical. Pitted against such adversaries, the liberal pieties of Deeds, Smith, and Doe seem naïve and weak. Despite their passion and their popularity, Capra was enough of a realist to allow his villains to pose a serious threat to his heroes. So serious, in fact, that Capra had a difficult time resolving the resulting conflicts. Mr. Deeds is sewn up too neatly, with the hero keeping his inherited fortune, but Mr. Smith is resolved with a quite unbelievable change of heart by the powerful Senator Paine having what looks like a nervous breakdown.

With John Doe, Capra shot the film without an ending, believing that a satisfactory one would materialize by the time his shooting schedule got around to it. When he realized that an ending was not forthcoming, he had to test alternate endings with preview audiences. Capra must have known that having established the John Doe/Christ analogy, there should be only one conclusion to his drama - the suicide of John Doe. He actually shot such an ending, with Gary Cooper jumping from a balcony at city hall at midnight on Christmas Eve, his lifeless body in the snow, and Walter Brennan taking him in his arms in a kind of impious Pietà.

The ending that Capra settled on feels tacked on - which it was. Audiences wouldn't accept John Willoughby simply killing himself, however logical it would've been as a conclusion to the drama, and certainly consistent with the Christian parallels. So Capra got Barbara Stanwyck out of her sickbed and a handful of John Doe diehard followers to show up at the nick of time to stop him from jumping. Why didn't many more John Doe supporters show up at city hall on Christmas Eve - for the spirit of the cause if not for John Willoughby? It makes sense that D.B. Norton would be there, just in case, to dispose of all traces of the body, seeing to it that John Doe couldn't be resurrected.

Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?

2011-12-31T12:39:00.002+08:00

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

When I watched the crowds of mourners screaming at Kim Jong Il's grotesque funeral, I thought of a scene from the Vincent Price horror flick Cry of the Banshee in which a group of women are loudly mourning some dead royalty and Price asks a servant, "How much did you pay the keeners?" When the servant tells him the amount, Price says, "Make sure they mourn until dawn."

On 19 December I noted the coincidence of the deaths of two world leaders who couldn't have been more different, the "glorious leader" of North Korea and Václav Havel, poet, playwright, dissident, and the first president of the Czech Republic. If their deaths had their different meanings, their funerals, while on a comparable scale and having some superficial resemblances, were utterly different.

I heard one North Korea expert on the BBC comment that the hysterics of the mourners in Pyongyang (a singularly sad city) were probably genuine. But the official video footage of the event shown around the world gave away the game: one cameraman on the street approached the crowd and the front row surged towards him. The following shot, from the cameraman's vantage point, showed the crowd up close, with every one of them wailing on cue in perfect unison. Their faces bore a striking resemblance to those of the damned in medieval illustrations of hell.

I no longer try to imagine what those people must be thinking. They have been told all their lives that they are in heaven, which is in fact much closer to being hell. At the time of Kim Il-Sung's death, I recall listening to a U.S. Navy admiral say that the people of North Korea were going to be very angry when they found out how they've been lied to all this time. But are they really, living in their self-generated twilight zone, unaware of the extent of the lies?

A genuinely solemn occasion was the funeral for Havel in Prague. Watching the cortège as it advanced slowly past the thousands of ordinary people who had come voluntarily to pay their last respects to a genuinely great and sincerely beloved leader brought tears to my eyes, rather than the horrible compulsory grief on parade in Pyongyang. In a typically bizarre twist, the North Korean news agency released video of people shedding tears for Havel. Perhaps they needed warming up for the funeral of their dear (feared) leader?

At least Havel's funeral made me recall the beautiful (if overexposed) words from the Auden poem the first of "Two Songs for Hedli Anderson". The photo above, of an old Czech man playing his violin on a Prague street, speaks volumes more of genuine grief than the tens of thousands of North Koreans keening in chorus.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

The Road Not Taken

2011-12-28T17:01:00.002+08:00

"London had an aspect of a proletarian Byron: illegitimate, handsome, wildly romantic, casting himself as the rebel and revolutionary, admired by Leon Trotsky for his anti-capitalist polemics. He was the archetypal early burn-out, dead at 40 from the excesses that he lived and wrote about....How he could write!... [London's] perfervid rhetoric matches the great narrative force of his stories, long and short. He is fascinating to read, about beast and man, in fact or fiction."
—The Wall Street Journal

"As a boy, the first heroes that I put into my Pantheon were Napoleon and Alexander the Great. Later on I destroyed this Pantheon and built a new Pantheon in which I began inscribing names such as David Starr Jordan, as Herbert Spencer, as Huxley, as Darwin, as Tyndall." - Jack London in a letter of 1915

I wonder how many readers familiar with White Fang and Call of the Wild are aware that Jack London was a committed socialist, or that he was convinced - at the turn of the 20th century - of an impending world revolution.

About six years ago, when I was living in Des Moines, I went to the public library downtown when it occupied an elegant old classical-style building by the river. The library has since been moved to a ridiculously expensive, ultra-modern monstrosity that snakes through downtown Des Moines. I located a volume of the Library of America edition of the collected writings of London, the Novels and Social Writings, that included The People of the Abyss (his reportage of the slums of East London), The Road, and a prophetic novel, The Iron Heel.

I suppose that I should've examined the book before I checked it out, because when I got it home and sat down to read it, I opened it to the section that, according to the table of contents, contained London's socialist journalism, I found that the entire section, a few hundred pages' worth, was missing. The pages must have been removed during the binding stage, since the book was otherwise intact. So it hadn't been a disgruntled reader who had found London's socialist writings objectionable but someone involved in the manufacture of the book itself.

I was a little astonished that no one had noticed the missing pages or hadn't brought them to someone's attention at the library. Evidently, someone was made uncomfortable with the idea that Jack London, outdoorsman, adventurer, and all-American, has been a committed and passionate enemy of capitalism I had to wonder if there were any more books in the Library of America's edition of London's writings in a similar condition.

To understand London's attraction to socialism, you have to know the bare facts, which were especially bare, of his early life. The circumstances surrounding his birth in 1876 read like one of his stories. His father and mother were unmarried, and when his mother became pregnant, his father demanded she get an abortion. When she refused, he abandoned her and she attempted suicide.

At the age of 13, London began working in a cannery, his first of many grueling jobs. After the labor unrest known as the "Panic of '93" in Oakland, he joined "Kelly's Army" of tramps that made a march, along with "Coxey's Army" of Ohio, all the way to Washington to protest unemployment. 6,000 of them made it to Washington, only to see the leaders of the protest arrested for walking on the grass. London only got as far as the Ohio River, where he was arrested for vagrancy and jailed 30 days in Buffalo at the Erie County Penitentiary.

On his release, he turned hobo, was a sailor for a short time, and eventually returned to Oakland to attend Oakland High School. It was his experiences on the road as a bum that he immortalized in his extraordinary book The Road, published in 1907.

John Law was up and out after the early worm. I was a worm. Had I been richer by the experiences that were to be fall me in the next several months, I should have turned and run like the very devil. He might have shot at me, but he'd have had to hit me to get me. He'd have never run after me, for two hoboes in the hand are worth more than one on the get-away. But like a dummy I stood still when he halted me. Our conversation was brief.

"What hotel are you stopping at?" he queried.

He had me. I wasn't stopping at any hotel, and, since I did not know the name of a hotel in the place, I could not claim residence in any of them. Also, I was up too early in the morning. Everything was against me.

"I just arrived," I said.

"Well, you turn around and walk in front of me, and not too far in front. There's somebody wants to see you."

Arrested, London was taken, with a group of other hoboes, before a judge, who listened just long enough for the charges against each one ("Vagrancy, your honor")before delivering the invariable verdict "Thirty days". London saw how each hobo was given exactly fifteen seconds, from charge to sentence. He waited his turn, thinking of the words for his defense,

. . . my American blood was up. Behind me were the many generations of my American ancestry. One of the kinds of liberty those ancestors of mine had fought and died for was the right of trial by jury. This was my heritage, stained sacred by their blood, and it devolved upon me to stand up for it. All right, I threatened to myself; just wait till he gets to me.

He got to me. My name, whatever it was, was called, and I stood up. The bailiff said, "Vagrancy, your Honor," and I began to talk. But the judge began talking at the same time, and he said, "Thirty days." I started to protest, but at that moment his Honor was calling the name of the next hobo on the list. His Honor paused long enough to say to me, "Shut up!" The bailiff forced me to sit down. And the next moment that next hobo had received thirty days and the succeeding hobo was just in process of getting his.

London was an erratic writer who wrote far too much. His 1,000 words a day is half of Trollope's daily output but twice that of Graham Greene. But he possesses a powerful, if simplistic, view of life that he managed to convey in his best writing, like the stories "Love of Life," "Make Westing," "The Francis Spaight", and "A Piece of Steak," and the books The People of the Abyss and The Road.

London led an interesting life that, after he had made himself rich from writing on an industrial model, had about it a rather driven zeal for adventure and physical risk-taking. London placed his characters in situations that provoked the response he was trying to illustrate, like the starving man and wolf in "Love of Life," or the crew of the sinking ship "The Francis Spaight". London's prose is blunt and does not suggest depths. There probably weren't any depths that he wished to explore. But his political convictions, while they may have stood in contrast to his brutal understanding of life, were genuine and determined by his life experience.

Meet John Doe

2011-12-24T11:15:00.006+08:00

"Below is a letter which reached my desk this morning. It's a commentary on what we laughingly call a civilized world. 'Dear Miss Mitchell: Four years ago I was fired out of my job. Since then I haven't been able to get another one. At first I was sore at the state administration because it's on account of the slimy politics here we have all this unemployment. But in looking around, it seems the whole world's going to pot, so in protest I'm going to commit suicide by jumping off the City Hall roof!' Signed, A disgusted American citizen, John Doe.'
Editor's note: If you ask this column, the wrong people are jumping off roofs."

It was 1941. Europe was locked in the second year of the most terrible war in history, while most Americans were thinking that they might just sit this one out. FDR was serving his third term as president. And Frank Capra, son of Sicilian immigrants, set out to make a movie that had no suitable ending.

A seventy year old movie that flopped when it was first released, that tried to warn Americans of a hidden menace: a group of powerful businessmen clandestinely manipulate a grassroots populist movement whose expanding membership has the potential to sweep a candidate of their choosing into the White House.

If this story sounds familiar, it might have something to do with a perceptible change in the moral atmosphere of America that resembles the one in 1941. Fascism was a reality in American politics, and popular figures like Charles Lindbergh argued for isolationism. Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America directly examines the consequences for America of Lindbergh becoming president in 1940. Lindbergh persuades Americans to stay out of a war in Europe, and the consequences - for Europe and for the world - are dire.

Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which I wrote about at length a few years ago, is probably the most recognizable Christmas movie in America, even if it only touches on Christmas in its final scene. What still strikes me about that fulsome movie is how Frank Capra could've gone through the Second World War just so he could retreat into a fantasy America when the war was over. His nightmare vision of Pottersville, with its disillusion, its bars, strip clubs, and prostitution, was much closer to the real America than hokey old Grovers Corners.

The final scene of Meet John Doe takes place on Christmas Eve. It was one of several scenes that Capra shot and tested with preview audiences. In one of the discarded scenes, the hero actually jumps to his death, and the Colonel (Walter Brennan) is last scene holding the dead man in his arms in a kind of impious Pietà. That ending worked, dramatically at least, but audiences weren't at all ready in 1941 for Gary Cooper committing suicide.

Earlier in film, Cooper gave a speech that is riddled with hokey sentiments, but is still powerful in its simple appeal to human decency.

Meet John Doe, despite its unevenness, is my favorite Christmas movie because it reminds us of what the holiday is supposed to be about. It is also, at the end of a year of populist movements, of peaceful and belligerent protests, a movie molotov cocktail aimed at Wall Street and all the D.B. Norton's of the world who want to take control of a democracy out of the hands of its people.

Here is the best contemporary review of the film by Otis Ferguson. I wonder what Ferguson would make of the fact that there is now a musical of Capra's movie?

Democracy at the Box Office
Otis Ferguson
The New Republic, March 24, 1941

Though Frank Capra is still right in the formula he has been holding to for five years now, Meet John Doe is at least a promise that he may be coming back to pictures. It is almost a point-for-point replica of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but some of the old felicity is there again and there are actually comedy sequences in it. I am not holding out too much hope, for today there is nothing Americans so like to be told from the screen as that they are Americans. So why should anybody with a formula and a credit line like skywriting bother with making a swell simple movie as his "production for 1941"?

The John Doe of the story is Capra's familiar and favorite American type, the easy shambling young man, shrewd and confused, rugged, a lovable innocent but don't tread on him - the uncommon common man, in short, with a heart of gold and a limestone fist, and integrity in long fibers. Eyewash, of course, but there is something in it, for a national hero is some sort of national index after all, and it is not so much how miserably short we fall of being an ideal as what ideal we choose to dream of. Anyhow, this young man, a bush-league baseball player with a glass arm, is caught up in a freak stunt for tabloid circulation-building which turns out to be dynamite both ways. As J. Doe, he is supposed to be a social reformer with a deadline for a suicide of protest; as a national news personality, he becomes so arresting and eloquent in his plea for love and understanding - the Sermon on the Mount with a drawl - that miracles are passed and John Doe clubs are formed, and it is presently worth someone's while to own him as political property. It started as fraud but eventually led to the young man's believing his own spiel and wrecking the sinister plans when he found out their antidemocratic aim. Love was a part of it, of course, and there are various clever wrinkles; but the outline is enough.

The fascination of gossip and the awe of prestige make it impossible that the question of what makes a picture should ever have a chance against the question of who. But while the names of Robert Riskin and Frank Capra are behind the production and writing and direction of John Doe, I think we can see even behind the names to what is under our noses. The message is that since it is all the little men who truly make the big world, they should live together and hang together, doing away with hate and suspicion and bad-neighborliness. Fine. Ringing. Of course there are present among us oppression and injustice and scorn for all unsung heroes whose names are Moe Million. Too bad; an outrage; something should be done. So the lift of the story comes in the doing, in the rallying to a new simple faith, as people and as Americans, through homely things but as a mighty army under the flag. In this story the powers of darkness are able to check the advance, but the victory in defeat is that there will be advance again.

I have no doubt the authors of such theses believe in them, just as it is easy for a songwriter to believe that God should bless America after he has glanced over the recent sheet-music sales. But sifted in with any such half-thought-out hoorah must be the true motivating conviction that the box office is out there and will be terrific. And that is where the thing begins to crack like Parson Weems's Liberty Bell, for in art there is a certain terrible exaction upon those who would carry their show by arousing people to believe, and it is that any such show must be made out of belief, in good faith and pure earnest, in the whole of belief itself. This rhetoric and mortising of sure-fire device of a success today is its sure betrayal by tomorrow - the flag in a game of charades, the mock prayer at a picnic.

As a picture, it does well the things which have proved highlights before: the tender concern over the little fellers with great faith; the underdog finally getting on his hind legs to tell them off; the regeneration of even a hard-boiled newspaper gal; the final blow-off scene with the nation as audience. But it talks too much to no purpose and in the same spot. The musical score is both arch and heavy (the most undeveloped department in all Hollywood anyway). And one of the saddest things is to find Capra so preoccupied with getting over a message of holy-hokum that he lets in half a dozen of the worst montage transitions - mumming faces, headlines, wheels and whorls - that have been seen in a major effort since the trick first turned stale.

Whether this much of hollowness and prefabrication will spoil the picture for you, I wouldn't know. There are things in it to see. The business of promoting a thesis has distracted Frank Capra's attention from much that he was superb at doing, and he still skips over many of the little fitted pieces which make a story inevitable. But now and then he lingers and you can see the hand of the loving workman bringing out the fine grain - as in the direction of the little crowd around the local mayor when Joe Doe is apprehended, with its naturalness and light spontaneous humor; as in the edge of satire in the management of the radio broadcast; as in the bringing out of homely humorous quirks in John Doe himself; and as always in the timing of a line, its cause and effect, so that it comes out with just force and clarity among the shifting images. But Capra and Riskin now seem content to let good actors fill out a stock part and stop at that, so Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, Gene Lockhart, J. Farrell McDonald, and several others have nothing more incisive to do than they would in any B picture. Barbara Stanwyck has always needed managing, and apparently got it here, though her idea of a passion is still that it is something to tear to firecrackers. But one man the director did give a chance to and smooth the way for, and that is James Gleason, who made more of this chance than there was in the lines and their meaning. The one scene which came through all these stream- lined Fourth of July exercises with true sincerity and eloquence was Gleason's drunken talk in the bar, the one that starts, "I like you, you're gentle. Take me, I've always been hard. Hard. Don't like hard people, you hear?" It was just talk, with business, but he made it his, and it will remain one of the magnificent scenes in pictures.

That leaves only the star, who is so much an American John Doe type you could never say whether he was cast in a part or vice versa - Gary Cooper. It is he who has the human dignity which this two hours of talk is talking about, and talking about; and it seems impossible for him to be quite foolish even in the midst of foolishness. His is the kind of stage presence which needs no special lighting or camera magic; he makes an entrance by opening a door, and immediately you know that someone is in the room. Meet John Doe has its humor, inspiration, and interest in uneven degrees; but whether you find it good, fair, or merely endurable depends more on Cooper than on what we know as sound moviemaking.

Gunpowder and Atom Bombs

2011-12-21T13:23:00.003+08:00

While reading the Essays of George Orwell, which is an obligatory activity for me, I found what I think is the most carefully reasoned argument against the Second Amendment that I know. Of course, Orwell wasn't addressing it directly, and the essay is deceptively topical. It was published just two months after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic explosions, so the subject foremost on everyone's minds was who's next?

One of the most cherished myths of the NRA is that a populace that is in possession of firearms, as Americans are, thanks to the Second Amendment, is unlikely to become victims of a police state, that the threat of armed resistance would dissuade any government from trying to violate civil liberties. The lesson of Libya is obvious: the revolt was successful only because of outside intervention on behalf of the rebels. This has nothing to do with what is right and whose side is in possession of it. It has to do with who has the bigger guns, the tanks, the fighter planes, etc. I remember hearing supporters of the Second Amendment, when martial law was declared in Poland, saying that such a thing could never happen in America because Americans have the right to bear arms. The image of a Russian tank bearing down on a crowd of civilians with handguns and hunting rifles sprang to mind. Paragraphs three, four, and five of Orwell's essay make mincemeat of this argument.

You and the Atom Bomb
Tribune, 19 October 1945

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb ‘ought to be put under international control.’ But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: ‘How difficult are these things to manufacture?’

Such information as we — that is, the big public — possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman’s decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman’s remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, thanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans — even Tibetans — could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three — ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon — or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting — not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose — and really this the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once UNCONQUERABLE and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.

Winter in Prague

2011-12-19T11:49:00.011+08:00

"The original and most important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all the others, is simply an attempt to create and support the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth. In other words, serving truth consistently, purposefully, and articulately, and organizing this service. This is only natural, after all: if living within the truth is an elementary starting point for every attempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of the system, if it is the only meaningful basis of any independent act of political import, and if, ultimately, it is also the most intrinsic existential source of the "dissident" attitude, then it is difficult to imagine that even manifest "dissent" could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life."

Václav Havel, "Power of the Powerless"

The coincidence of the death of Václav Havel and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il could not have been more pleasing, despite his being dead, to Havel, who resisted totalitarianism for two-thirds of his life.

Before the so-called Arab Spring there was the Prague Spring in 1968. I remember watching on television as Russian tanks rolled into Prague on 21 August 1968. I was unaware, at the age of ten, of its wider implications, but I was very aware of its terrible aspect, which Walter Cronkite, or whomever it was I was watching that day, reinforced. On 8 December I wrote that the world during the Cold War "was a world in which the sun never shone, a spiritual ice age, a low intensity nightmare". Of course, it wasn't anything like that for me, living safely in the West.

For the people of Eastern Europe, however, it was that and much worse. For the people who resisted, like Václav Havel, it was either a time of imprisonment or the threat of imprisonment, since he refused to cooperate and play his part in the charade of a "people's republic". He was a celebrated playwright, for five years, before the tanks squashed the Prague Spring and the subsequent regime became, because of Czechoslovakia's brief flirtation with "communism with a human face" one of the most repressive in Eastern Europe. He practiced non-violence, which got him comparisons to Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

But it also got him imprisoned until, in 1989, with the reforms in the Soviet Union loosening its hold on the Warsaw Pact nations, a non-violent, Velvet, revolution swept Havel into power. He eventually became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia. Three years later, when his country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, he became the first president of the Czech Republic.

He was embarrassed by all the ceremony of office. He wasn't even comfortable wearing a suit. He was the son of privilege, who saw the injustice of that privilege and revolted against it. But he never forgot the feeling he first encountered as a child that he was an outsider. "I longed for equality with others," he wrote, "not because I was some kind of infant social revolutionary, but because I felt separate and excluded ... alone, inferior, ridiculed."

In 1990, he was invited to address the United States Congress. The speech (mostly in Czech) betrayed his genius with the written - and spoken - word:

"We playwrights, who have to cram a whole human life or an entire historical era in a two-hour play, can scarcely understand this rapidity ourselves. And if it gives us trouble, think of the trouble it must give to political scientists who spend their whole life studying the realm of the probable and have less experience with the realm of the improbable than us, the playwrights.

"Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed –be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization –will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively won. We are, in fact, far from the final victory.

"We are still a long way from that "family of man." In fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than growing closer to it. Interests of all kinds–personal, selfish, state, nation, group, and, if you like, company interests–still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation and not just a part of it and that therefore everything is permitted.

"There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time, we say that the anonymous mega-machinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.

"In other words, we still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility.

"Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success–responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where and only where they will be properly judged.

"The interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred to as human conscience.

[speaking English]: "When Thomas Jefferson wrote that 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,' it was a simple and important act of the human spirit. What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words; it was his deeds as well."

It still amazes me that Czechs thought so highly of this great writer that they elected him president of their nation. But he was, as everything he said and did attests, a great man of conscience.

Chic Radical

2011-12-17T11:55:00.007+08:00

There are very few political writers worth taking seriously who have been able to put their faces in front of their words. That was one of Christopher Hitchens' achievements. I can't think of one American political thinker who was capable of going toe to toe with him without looking ridiculous. He was used sparingly, almost charitably, on American TV. And since debates over here are far more polite than they are in Britain, he was regarded as much too brutal and unfair, especially when he won.

He was a radical leftist for a long time and claimed to remain one in his last interviews. He was outspoken in his support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he was "unapologetic" when it became clear that the justification for the invasion had been at worst a concoction and at best a terrible mistake. In this, there was rueful irony in the coincidence of the American military presence in Iraq officially coming to an end the day before Hitchens died, at 62, in a Houston hospital. (I wonder if he pronounced it "Hooston" to the last?)

Somehow, the quaint word dashing summed up his looks - until chemotherapy deprived him of his bountiful hair - and fearless summed up his writing, especially when it came to standing up for a cause, the more unpopular, the better. Despite his mellifluous British accent, which he seemed to cultivate after his move to the U.S. in the '80s and which greatly intimidated his stupider American opponents, he grew to love America. He was passionate about what matters: truth, justice, life.

One of his lifelong heroes was George Orwell. In fact, Hitchens was born nine months before Orwell died of his own terminal illness. Perhaps it would be unfair to compare them, but Eric Blair was by no mean s a saint. They both wrote voluminously, obsessively. "I am a writer. It's what I am, not what I do." Though written by Hitchens, Orwell could as well have said so. Hitchens admired Orwell because he was the most engaged with his own age.

I think that Hitchens' move to America and his eventual backing of Bush and the Iraq War were due to his fear of becoming marginal or irrelevant. Perhaps he saw socialism as Orwell saw it near the end of his own life at the age of 46 - as a Utopian ideal with, at best, remote prospects of ever being realized anywhere in the world.

More charitable Christians probably prayed that he be converted in his last moments. Of course they would. But Hitchens, I am confident, came to the same conclusion that Primo Levi came to when he was in Auschwitz. Hitchens said that, in a Christian universe, "we are born sick but must make ourselves well." Levi describes a crucial moment in the Lager:

I too entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated
and have lived to this day; actually, the experience of the Lager with its
frightful iniquity has confirmed me in my laity. It has prevented me, and still
prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice .
. . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the
temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in the October of
1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death.
Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. (The Drowned and the Saved)

Always seeming to look the part, not even a makeover for Vanity Fair could diminish his stature as one of his generation's best debaters and polemical writers. What a beautiful expression "He passed away" is, even if it is only a euphemism.

One Below

2011-12-15T11:22:00.004+08:00

On the centenary - 14 December - of Roald Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole, I recommend a brilliant book by an unconventional historian, Scott and Amundsen by Roland Huntford. The book first came to my attention by way of the 1985 television series The Last Place on Earth, which was itself a remarkable achievement.

Huntford was highly critical of Amundsen's competitor in the race for the pole, Robert Scott, who reached the pole on 17 January 1912. On finding that Amundsen had already been there more than a month before, Scott and his four companions died on their way back. The discovery of their bodies eight months later confirmed Scott, at least in the minds of Britons, as the real hero of the race for the pole. In a "Message to the Public" found with his remains, Scott wrote:

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.

Amundsen, a true hero and certainly the more able explorer, never lived it down. In that strange age of exploration, in which people were more important for their courage than for their abilities, Scott was indeed a hero. Huntford's book, by presenting the facts of his expedition, revealed how egoistic and foolhardy Scott was. In an interview with The Guardian, Huntford asserted that

"In as much as I had an agenda, it wasn't to run down Scott; rather, it was to rehabilitate Amundsen, who I felt had never been given the credit he deserved outside Norway. No previous English-language biographer had even worked from the original Norwegian sources. It was only when I started reading both Scott and Amundsen's diaries that I became aware of the discrepancies. I found Scott almost incomprehensible, while Amundsen spoke a language to which I could relate. But then I've long felt an affinity with the Scandinavian psyche."

Yesterday, the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, whose country has had a very tough year, said in a ceremony you can watch here, "We are here today to honour these five brave men. We are here today to celebrate one of the most outstanding achievements of mankind and we are here to highlight the importance of this cold continent for the warming of the globe."

Fly Me to the Moon

2011-12-13T11:11:00.004+08:00

Just yesterday I was given a reminder of how far from everything I am now. I heard a commotion outside my house in the late afternoon and I stepped outside to see what was going on. A bunch of children were screaming in their dialect, "look there!" and "hello!" at something in the sky. I expected to see a rainbow or some other natural wonder, but when I looked up toward what they were pointing and waving at, I saw a tiny silver object - a jet plane - heading away toward the northwest. The setting sun glinted off its metal body and there was no vapor trail, indicating that it wasn't flying at a high altitude.

It occurred to me that, in all the time I've been living on this island, it was only the third time I had seen a plane in the sky. The last time had been during the election campaign last year when a presidential candidate (Joseph Estrada) paid the island a visit in his private helicopter. The helicopter caused near-pandemonium among the barangay kids, who had likely never seen a one before in their lives except on TV.

Yesterday, the children caused a commotion over something that no longer even registers in people's minds everywhere else. In cities, air traffic is boringly and even annoyingly familiar. Strangely, even the total lunar eclipse the night before, visible in the Philippines, got little or no attention here. Lunar eclipses are more frequent occurrences than jet planes.

But the sight of a plane to the children, and perhaps to many of the adults, who live out their lives here is more than just an infrequent event. To them, it is probably an enticement to leaving. Like the poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that I remember reading - and totally understanding - when I was a boy:

Travel

The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.

Creation

2011-12-11T09:17:00.001+08:00

I had a chance to see the film Creation (2009) last week and I found it a surprisingly beautiful dramatization of the central conflict in the life of Charles Darwin: the devout religious faith of his beloved wife, Emma, to which the scientific discoveries that he wrote about in his great book, On the Origin of Species, was a direct challenge. Darwin's book, which is as much a masterpiece of imaginative thinking as of scientific discovery, was a bomb dropped on Christianity from which it hasn't recovered since.

The film is based on Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution, a novel by Darwin's great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes. He wrote it after discovering in 2000 a box in which Charles and Emma Darwin had collected mementos of Annie, their eldest daughter. It concentrates on the close relationship between Darwin and Annie, whose death at the age of ten haunted him and his wife for the rest of their lives. At the time of her death, Darwin wrote: "We have lost the joy of the household, and the solace of our old age.... Oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still & and shall ever love her dear joyous face." (1) Annie's health had been seriously weakened by scarlet fever, but some believe it was tuberculosis that eventually killed her.

Darwin himself submitted Annie to some horrific treatments such as "Gully's Water Cure", which included excruciating cold water hoseings and "spine-scrubbings" that, if anything, deprived the poor girl of what strength she had left to resist the disease that killed her. Her death drove Charles and Emma apart - he, repulsed by the prospect of his daughter's salvation or damnation by an implacable God in an utterly cruel cosmology (2), she into deeper and deeper religious neurosis.

Yet on behalf of Emma's religious convictions, Charles delayed the submission of his manuscript nearly twenty years, fearing it would drive Emma away entirely. As the film shows us, however, it was she who, after reading his manuscript, at last allowed him to publish it. Worriedly waiting for her verdict, she hands him a parcel wrapped in brown paper, addressed to the publisher John Murray.

Paul Bettany plays Darwin as he appeared in 1859, the year of On the Origin of Species' publication. I have seen him in several films, most of them, of course, dreadful. In Creation, however, he is graceful and sensitively intelligent, which is precisely how the filmmakers wanted us to see Darwin. Jennifer Connolly, as Emma, makes Charles devotion to her quite believable. I've been infatuated with her since her days as a child star. She, too, has had to endure a careerful of awful scripts. It is good to see her talent matched with a substantive script. The girl who plays Annie, Martha West, is quite moving, as she endures the hardships of health with which nature saddled Annie.

Some critics fussed over the film's title, thinking it was a sop to placate the stupid "creationists". I think it had more to do with Darwin's act of creating his magnificent book, which is a work of splendid prose as much as it is of scientific research. The "creation" of that book occupied him for fifteen years after his return from his voyages on HMS Beagle. The film reminds us that scientists are also human beings.

Not surprising me in the least were the claims of the film's producer, Jeremy Thomas, that he had trouble finding an American distributor. The effects of Charles Darwin's book are still troubling to a majority of Americans.

(1) Quoted by Janet Browne in her book, Charles Darwin: A Biography, Volume 1, Voyaging (New York: Alfred A Knopf).
(2) In a now-famous passage from his autobiography, Charles stated: "I hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine."

Global Thawing

2011-12-08T10:22:00.006+08:00

"Communism. Capitalism. It's the innocents who get slaughtered."*

If a poll were conducted asking people to name the most important historical event in their lifetimes, I don't think the event that took place twenty years ago today would even be among the top five. History pushes the past out of our consciousness much more quickly than we think. Significant events also seem to shrink in importance as they move away from us in time. Natural disasters, wars, or terror attacks superimpose on one another, and the past ten years has certainly seen enough of all three.

I was in the Navy when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved on December 8, 1991. We didn't know it at the time, but the event, which appeared to be extraordinarily good news for just about everyone in the world, was a catastrophe for us.

When I joined the Navy in 1988, Ronald Reagan's hubristic 600 ship fleet was close to being realized. The end of Desert Storm and of the Soviet Union three years later were back-to-back shocks from which the Pentagon has yet to really recover. By the time I left the Navy in 1995, the word "downsizing" was on everyone's mind. While the Army was simply handing out pink slips, the Navy was forcing people out with stricter retention standards. George W. Bush's dubious "War on Terror" has merely emphasized the perception that the U.S. military is spoiling for a fight that is simply no longer out there.

I recall seeing a political cartoon at the time Gorbachev was initiating the last great thaw of the Soviet era. It depicted Gorbachev shaking hands with Fidel Castro, saying "Glasnost!" To which Castro replies, "Gesundheit!" Clearly, Gorbachev believed that he could keep the Soviet Union intact, but he, like everyone else, was overtaken by events. He resigned on Christmas Day, 1991, and communist rule came to an ignominious close.

You would have to be at least as old as I am to really remember what the world was like during the Cold War. It wasn't simply the threat of nuclear annihilation that made the period so gloomy. It was a world in which the sun never shone, a spiritual ice age, a low intensity nightmare from which we suddenly awoke twenty years ago. Many people in the West began to crow "victory", including some historians who committed the historic error of believing that it was the end of history as we know it, that our way of life had vanquished theirs, that our values had prevailed. In actuality, economies had fallen, not ideologies. The arms race had bankrupted the Great Enemy, not their Five Year Plans.

Nothing captures the Cold War era more powerfully than one of the most probing and sad reflections on the East/West stand-off than the grimly beautiful film adaptation of John le Carré's espionage classic, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, directed by Martin Ritt in 1965 and starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom. The world it explores seems to be under an interminable blackout, as if a Third World War were actually being waged somewhere. It's almost the same atmosphere as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - betrayal, deceit, suspicion are all around the protagonist, Alec Leamas. He is instructed by his superiors to behave like he's had it with being a spy, like he's lost faith in the righteousness of his side, so that agents for the other side will try to contact him and he can infiltrate their ranks and discredit one of their most powerful agents. But they get their hands on Liz, his girlfriend, who is a professed communist but entirely innocent, and when they kill her as they are escaping over the Berlin Wall, Leamas decides to die with her rather than descend the wall to safety on the other side.

Surely, no one had more mixed emotions about the end of the Cold War than John le Carré. It had been his bread and butter, the catalyst for nearly all of his novels. Though he has managed, in the twenty years since, to write successful novels, and even incurred a little controversy (he was charged with anti-semitism for his Jewish protagonist in The Tailor of Panama), Le Carré has clearly lost his métier. But then, so has the Pentagon.

* Leamas's line to Liz in the film The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

A Crowded Loneliness

2011-12-07T10:05:00.001+08:00

I was sitting in the living room of my rented trailer 22 years ago, watching MTV, when the band Mötley Crüe appeared on the screen. After I proudly named all four members of the band, a charming young woman, who was sitting there with a few other friends, looked at me and asked, "Why do you know that?"

It was the tone of her voice that suggested to me what she meant by the question: why had I bothered to learn the names of the members of a useless rock band when I knew the names of the principal conductors of every major symphonic and philharmonic orchestra in the world?

I just laughed and said, under the cacophony that the band was producing on the TV, "I don't know." It was sweet of her to ask, though. She knew something of the distance I had come since I joined the Navy. I made a conscious decision to neglect the things that I loved in favor of what everyone else loved. My tastes were lonely ones, exclusive. If, after I joined the Navy, I was to keep listening to Mahler and Debussy, watching Antonioni and Bergman, reading Camus and Bellow, I wouldn't have had any friends. I felt that I needed to change my life, and assure others, my fellow sailors, that I was one of them, no better and no worse. For the next eleven years I avoided the music and films and literature that I loved and followed the crowd.

I believe it was a better, richer experience because of it. I noticed that my journals grew thinner, that the things I chose to set down in them were spreading further apart in time. Entire years were chronicled in only a few pages. It wasn't that I had nothing to apostrophize - it's that I was being borne aloft on the crest of a wave and I didn't have a moment's spare time to stop to analyze my thoughts or my feelings. I was alive.

But now, these many years since returning to my private life, I find that I no longer have the time or a proper occasion to listen to Das Lied von der Erde or to Pelléas and Mélisande. The music I now hear all around me hardly qualifies as music in my estimation. A part of me is screaming. I am almost never alone, either, here in my house among the coconut trees. But I miss those lonely places I once knew but never visit any more, where I was accompanied by Meursault and Augie March, Albert Vogler and Umberto D., and Claudio Abbado and Neville Mariner.

An Anniversary

2011-12-04T09:18:00.002+08:00

Today is an anniversary. Four years ago, a particularly awful woman - a methamphetamine addict, freelance hooker, and part-time police informer (I learned all this only later) - introduced the woman in the picture to me. I was technically still a tourist in a Philippine city that has catered to male tourists ever since the closure of a large American air force base in 1991. I was staying in a cheap hotel owned by a New Zealander and I had been drinking steadily for a few days when I asked the dreadful girl who was with me (she was endowed with beautiful brown skin and breasts that defied gravity) to go and find me a masseuse. I can't speak too badly of that girl because the masseuse she brought back with her has been my constant companion ever since.

It was she who suggested that I leave the resort town and come to the provinces, where my meagre pension would go quite a lot further. She has saved my skin several times, saved me incalculable amounts of money. She is my translator and my protector. Through her this place has become somehow less incomprehensible. Through her I am somehow made somewhat more human to the Filipinos we encounter.

Wherever we have chosen to live, the neighbors are struck by so many things about us. I always stick close to home, close to her, and they marvel at my uncharacteristic faithfulness. What little they know of foreigners here is contradicted by my abstemiousness and my lack of a string of other girlfriends. Why haven't I taken up with another, younger and more nubile girl? They are puzzled by the fact that she has not been jettisoning one baby after another, since that's what every other woman does and we foreigners are alleged to be so oversexed. If you saw her standing in the sunlight with the other neighbor women, you could identify her by the absence of a baby stapled to her breast.

She has also given me her family - or, rather, given me to her family. They have shown such acceptance, even when I was reluctant to be anyone's "daddy". (Freud would've noticed that the boys are more aloof, since in their minds I am a feeble replacement for the man they know as their "tatay".) Despite occasional frustrations, I thank her for the daughter, who turns 10 next month, who says "good night daddy" to me every night. I am a failure as a father, I know. But only because I am so dubious of fatherhood in the first place.

I cannot marry her here, since I married here once before, and the marriage is registered. (The Philippines is now the only country in the world with no divorce law.) Only some amount of cash and a lawyer could make it possible to marry her here. Yet she has been immeasurably more a wife to me than either of my former wives put together. I tell her this, but she wants to be married to me. I make promises that are of their nature feeble, since I have no way of knowing how or when I can get myself home. Only there can I hope to make an "honest" woman of her. But who will make me an honest man?

Happy Anniversary, my angel.

Juvenile Offenders

2011-12-01T15:14:00.003+08:00

The Yukio Mishima novel translated as The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1) concerns a group of boys in Yokohama who carry out the murder of a merchant mariner because he has forsaken his life at sea - a life the boys see as elemental and beautiful - for the mother of one of the group. They also commit the crime knowing that, as minors, they will not be charged with murder by the Japanese justice system.

Mishima's use of the legal status of minors in the novel was certainly political, even if such a status is not unique to Japan. In law, the "age of majority" separates children from adults and is usually (and arbitrarily) the age of 18 (in Japan it's 20). But under criminal law, such a standard is not consistently observed or enforced. In the U.S., individual states can decide, depending on the severity of the crime committed, whether an offender can be tried as a "juvenile" under the Juvenile Justice System, or as an "adult".

How can one be considered a child at every moment of one's life until the age of 18 (or 17 or 16, depending on the U.S. state) except at the moment one commits a crime? The Juvenile Justice System in the U.S. exists simply because a juvenile boy or girl is not (I wouldn't insist cannot) be considered responsible for his or her actions. This explains the existence of legal concepts like "age of consent", which prevents, for example, addictive products like tobacco and alcohol from being sold to minors. Strangely enough, the age was increased twenty or so years ago from 18 to 21, which suggests that, at least when it comes to cigarettes and booze, it is taking longer to arrive at maturity.

When prosecutors are the ones who decide when a crime committed by a child or a juvenile is "heinous" (a word popular with prosecutors) enough to justify putting an offender on trial as an adult, who or what gives them the authority to apply such a blatantly arbitrary standard? There seems to be some foolish notion at work in the American justice system that contends that someone, no matter what their age or degree of mental competence, must pay for a crime, especially the most serious ones. But when a prosecutor decides to selectively disregard the legal status of minors by reclassifying them as adults when it suits his political purpose, he is compromising not just the juvenile justice system but the whole system of justice.

In England, a particularly unspeakable crime was committed in 1993 by two boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both aged 10. They abducted, tortured, and murdered a two-year-old boy named James Bulger. They were the youngest convicted murderers in English legal history. But, despite the severity of their crime, they were not tried as adults. They were sentenced to custody until they reached the age of 18, and then they were "returned to society". Their names were changed and they were relocated to other places in England to protect their identities.

A film, called Boy A was released in 2007 that was based on a novel by Jonathan Trigell, fictitiously telling a story similar to the Bulger case. The film perceptively and sensitively explores the life of one of the boys who is returned to society at the age of 18. My initial reaction to seeing the film, after my surprise that it was made at all, was that such an uninsistent, scrupulously neutral film could never have been made in the U.S. - for one thing, since Americans are not nearly as convinced of the rock-bottom decency of human beings, they would never assume that anyone who committed a crime such as the one committed by the two boys in the film, could be redeemable in a million years. Or that a minor should be protected by certain rights that make him immune to prosecution as an adult no matter what the crime was. Revenge is never very far from an American's understanding of justice. So when a heinous crime is committed, someone, no matter if they're children or mentally incompetent, has to pay.

(1) The Japanese title, Gogo no Eikō, translates literally as The Afternoon Towing.

Remastering the Film: François Truffaut

2011-11-28T13:36:00.006+08:00

"What is your greatest ambition in life?"
"To become immortal, and then die."
(Jean Seberg and Jean-Pierre Melville in Breathless.)

As David Thomson correctly suggested last year when Godard's Breathless turned 50, if you want to locate the heart of the French Nouvelle Vague, you would have found it beating in the breast of François Truffaut:

"There is a temptation to see Breathless (or A Bout de Souffle) as the epitome of the New Wave. In this reading, it was the emblematic film for a group of young critics and cineastes who had longed to make films themselves and who suddenly found the chance. But if you want the right emblem, you’d be better off going to Truffaut (with Les 400 Coups or Tirez sur la Pianiste)."(1)

Truffaut was the embodiment of the cinephile, so in love with film that it shaped his personality. More than his love of books, which often led him very far astray, (2) his judgement of films was a guiding and abiding passion. But because they gave him such a consistent and gratifying escape from the circumstances of his adolescence, he developed an irrational love for American films that clouded his judgement. The auteur notion that Truffaut introduced has been so abused that it is almost meaningless by now. Just because Edgar Wallace was an author did not make him the equal of Kipling, any more than it makes John Ford the equal of Ozu.

Those first three films, Les 400 Coups (1959), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), and Jules and Jim (1962), are for the ages. But it is impossible to properly examine Truffaut's work without at some point facing up to the fact of its precipitous decline. One can actually watch it happen in his fourth feature film, The Soft Skin, about which I wrote at length for .

One theory is that he was not content to be the avant-garde creator of small budget art films and wanted to live a more comfortable life. Godard, who revelled in being the struggling artist, took a dim view of Truffaut's transformation and made this abundantly clear. To him, Truffaut was turning into the same kind of director he had attacked in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema.

The New Wave was long over by the time Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984. By the mid-1960s, Chabrol was making a string of oh-so-stylish thrillers, and Truffaut was deep into his own noir period, having, I suppose, forgotten that he once made the greatest send-up of film noir, Shoot the Piano Player. Godard just went on twiddling, drifting from Marxist-Leninism to Stalinism to Maoism - to no avail. While occasionally trying to stay in touch with his sources, with further Antoine Doinel films (3) and a retelling of Jules and Jim with the sexes reversed (Two English Girls), Truffaut had lost alot of his passion, and the ecstatic reason for being that his first three feature films exuded was missing. He "squandered his talents", as they say. But, as George Orwell wrote about H.G. Wells, "But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander." (4)

(1) The full article can be found here.
(2) His love of fiction that can only be called trash was pronounced, but the French have generally overestimated the value of American pulp fiction.
(3) As often happens to child actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud grew into a surprisingly bad actor.
(4) Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and the World State", Horizon, August 1941.

Mourning with Marilyn

2011-11-25T12:05:00.002+08:00

By now, nearly fifty years after her self-inflicted death, Marilyn Monroe is beginning to resemble Jesus Christ. As the people who knew the actual woman underneath the image, who saw her "in the flesh", are dying off, the real Marilyn is becoming more insubstantial.

As the new movie, My Week with Marilyn suggests, Marilyn was an invention of Norma Jean herself. This is not quite a revelation. Others who knew her much better than Colin Clark, upon whose diaries the script of My Week with Marilyn is based, always insisted that Marilyn was just a mask that Norma Jean could put on or take off as the spirit moved her. Billy Wilder, who evidently hated her (because of her notorious antics on and off his movie sets), claimed that she hadn't a thought in her pretty head and had no inkling of the effect she had upon men. That effect was powerful, as her many marriages, affairs, and flirtations attest. Like Rita Hayworth, however, who was another pin-up girl, the various men in her life took Marilyn to bed, but woke up beside Norma Jean, leading to confusion and frustration for all concerned.

Thanks to Andy Warhol and a ravenous and revolting popular culture, Marilyn has become a quite monstrous icon. Even serious and pseudo-serious people like Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer were captivated by her persona. However close they may have got - or indeed however much they were interested in knowing - the real woman beneath, is, by now, as unknowable as she was.

The trouble with this kind of movie is that it isn't in the least interested in who she was, either. Marilyn was perfect for film, which is in love with the surfaces of things. Marilyn was all surface. Nobody is really interested in her depths, assuming she had any. Her devoted fans across the generations, who have seen every photograph and film of her, are fascinated by potentially new angles, new perspectives of her - but only her epidermis. Images are all that survives, really, thanks to her death at the age of 36. Had she not taken a fatal dose of sleeping pills (the official cause of her death), she would've been 85 today. And I think she would be as little remembered as Jane Russell, who co-starred with her in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

The story, which claimed to be "true" (a word, like "reality", that makes no sense any more outside inverted commas), suggests that Marilyn had an affair with a 24-year-old assistant director from the set of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) in the middle of her honeymoon with Arthur Miller. I don't suppose that this less than flattering imputation surprises anyone, and one of the preconditions for being a sex goddess is that you should have an inexhaustible libido. Whether it's true or not, Clark is just another fantasist who slept with Marilyn. But taking an interest in such things is just another example of the tawdriness of our celebrity-slobbering, grave-robbing culture, that wants to resurrect some people just so they can screw them all over again.

When Alma Mahler left the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka in the lurch, he created a life-sized doll that resembled his lost love, which he took with him to the theater, dined with and - ostensibly - slept with. When I saw film clips of Michelle Williams made up to look like Marilyn for this movie, I thought of that beautiful but lifeless doll - except that Williams is a living, breathing woman and Marilyn is the beautiful simulacrum.

Putting Things Straight

2011-11-23T13:17:00.002+08:00

Needless to say, but what Tolstoy wrote about families at the beginning of Anna Karenina is true. "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This Thanksgiving Day, I thought it might be timely to write about a film that takes family as its subject.

No other subject, except perhaps "America", makes Americans reach for a tissue more quickly than family. Part of the reason must surely be because no other subject touches such a sore spot.

Based on real people and events, the 1999 film The Straight Story is about family - a typically fractured American family. Alvin Straight is retired and living in Laurens, Iowa when he learns that his only brother Lyle, who lives in Wisconsin, has suffered a stroke. The two haven't spoken to each other in ten years because of some unexplained argument. But Alvin determines to go and see Lyle, despite his lack of a driver's license, a car, and even the ability to walk without two canes. He does have a riding mower, for which a driver's license isn't needed. So he sets out on the mower, at slightly greater than a walking pace, with a small trailer hitched behind it.

When Alvin embarks on his journey, the film subtly adapts its pace to the riding mower's. As it putters away from us down the highway, the camera uses a crane shot to pan up to the sky. But instead of giving us the usual segue to the next scene, the camera pans back down to the highway, showing Alvin and the mower only a few yards farther on its way. I burst out laughing when I first watched it, because it tells the audience to settle in their seats. It's going to be a long ride.

If I were to call The Straight Story a great American film, I'd be selling it short. It features the final performance of Richard Farnsworth, playing Alvin with tangible integrity. Freddie Francis did the cinematography. A few weeks ago I watched Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961) and when I saw Francis' name in the credits, I made the surprised connection with The Straight Story. He makes Iowa look a great deal more beautiful than I remember it, but who can complain about beauty?

But David Lynch's film is not without it's flaws. He overindulges in aerial shots of the golden Iowa landscape at harvest time, with giant tractors cutting swathes through the corn fields. (Talk about product placement - the film is a huge commercial for John Deere.) It breaks up the monotony - which is precisely what Lynch needn't have done. Enduring every mile of Alvin's long journey was the point of the film.

And Lynch uses Alvin as a font of wisdom a few times too many. He tells a runaway teen aged girl a story: "When my kids were real little, I used to play a game with 'em. I'd give each one of 'em a stick and - one for each one of 'em. Then I'd say, 'You break that.' Course they could, real easy. Then I'd say, 'Tie them sticks in a bundle and try to break that.' Course they couldn't. Then I'd say 'that bundle - that's family.'"

When a young biker asks him, "What's the worst thing about getting old?" he replies, "Rememberin' when you was young."

But the clincher is something he says to the twin mechanics (played by Chris Farley's brothers, Kevin and John): "There's no one knows your life better than a brother that's near your age. He knows who you are and what you are better than anyone on earth. . . . A brother's a brother."

Alvin completed his journey, and David Lynch allowed us to complete it with him in his marvelous film. It was shot in the actual places, and along the actual route that Alvin took from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin to be with his brother again, to sit on the porch and look up at the stars with him, just as they did when they were boys.

This Thanksgiving Day, I won't have a chance to do as I habitually did when I lived in the States. I won't watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV. I won't be watching the football games. And I won't be eating turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie or pecan pie and feeling stuffed by evening. I could ask the people I live with to celebrate this old American holiday with me, but I'm too broke to afford any of those things - even if I could find a turkey or a cranberry or a pumpkin or a pecan.

What I will be doing is thinking of home, and what's left of my own family - my brother and my sister, and wishing I could see them both again if only for the duration of a hug. Happy Thanksgiving.

Up All Night: La Notte

2011-11-20T13:08:00.000+08:00

Antonioni's films form organic wholes rather arbitrarily. The three films that have been lumped together into a "trilogy" - L'Avventura, The Night (La Notte) and L'Eclisse - are formally similar but individually unique. My favorite Antonioni film is not his best, which is certainly L'Avventura, but the one he made after it, which he called, perhaps a little too apocalyptically, The Night. Some critics even remarked that, while agreeing that The Night was not as good as L'Avventura, it would've been called a masterpiece had anyone but Antonioni made it.

L'Avventura got off to a fast start with a wild goose chase - the search for a missing woman. The search itself is never resolved, but it invests the film with a kind of aimless impetus, since the lead characters know what they are looking for but haven't the slightest idea of where to start looking. By the end of the film they have found something else, which sort of explains why the woman went missing in the first place. (1)

When I watched the beautiful film Marcello Mastroinanni: I Remember, I was a little puzzled that Mastroianni made no mention of his working with Antonioni on the film The Night (1961). Having seen the film again, I can now understand why. Some critics blamed Jeanne Moreau for The Night's being something of a let-down after L'Avventura. But the real problem was Mastroianni. Antonioni's men are invariably uninteresting, two-dimensional, and weak. What they do is more important than who they are: Claudio in L'Avventura is an architect, Giovanni in The Night is an acclaimed novelist, Piero in Eclipse is a stock broker, Thomas in Blow-Up is a photographer. Antonioni was too absorbed with his women to spend enough time giving his male characters much depth.

When Antonioni got him to do The Night, Mastroianni was in the middle of an unbelievable streak of great roles in some of the greatest Italian films of the era: Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), Bolognini's Bell'Antonio (1960), Germi's Divorce, Italian Style (1961), and Zurlini's Family Diary (1962). Antonioni was not what is known as an "actor's director". I think it was because of the way he wanted to make films, by eliminating plot from his stories. Causality wasn't one of his considerations. Since actors need motivation - some explanation for their actions - and because Antonioni had none to give them, they found his direction aloof and unhelpful. Mastroianni's character was diffident, proud of his accomplishments but incapable of accepting praise.

The Night goes much further toward total plotlessness, except that virtually everyone is dissatisfied with life, despite their being extravagantly wealthy. The women in particular have nothing to do, apparently, but wander through the ugly fringes of modern (i.e., 1961) Milan, always with a car and driver waiting somewhere, use beautiful parqueted floors to play hockey with their compacts or otherwise adorn the more directed and purposeful lives of their men. Valentina, an affected, dilettantish young woman, says "My hobbies are golf, tennis, cars and parties." Giovanni tells her, "I know what to write, but not how to write it. It's called a crisis; very common among writers today. But in my case it's affecting my whole life."

Giovanni is indifferent to money and his would-be patrons are contemptuous of him. When he and Lidia arrive at the sumptuous house of Gherardini, he finds a book someone had left near a side door. "Who here would read The Sleepwalkers?" he asks Lidia. (2) They join a party already in full swing that goes on all night. I suppose there is always a party just like the one in The Night going on all the time somewhere. The rich are always with us. They say fantastic things like "I'm going to Sweden - on my boat, of course." Gherardini offers Giovanni a job writing a history of the firm. He tells him, drawing a line of zeros on a page, that he will make enough money to become "independent". Independent of writing, of course. Another rich man uses Hemingway as an example of a "real artist". Except that Hemingway hadn't written a worthy novel since 1945.

How refreshing to watch a film in which every single shot is carefully planned, set up, and flawlessly executed. Antonioni wanted us to look at the world, not just at actors passing in front of an arbitrary backdrop. His images are powerful because they are composed. When Lidia takes off in the rain with Roberto, there is a wonderful moment when he slows his sports car down and we see them talking and smiling inside but hear nothing but the sound of the rain and the windshield wipers.

The party over, Giovanni and Lidia walk out of the palatial house, past a jazz band still playing in them dawn light. "Do they think the music will improve the day?" Lidia asks. They walk onto a golf course and sit at the edge of a sand-trap. Lidia takes a typewritten letter from her purse and reads it to Giovanni, a long and emotional love letter. When she's done, Giovanni asks her who wrote it. "You did," she tells him. One critic complained that a real writer wouldn't not recognize his own writing. I disagree. Estranged from his feelings for her, Giovanni no longer knows what to say. Guilt-stricken, he kisses her hand and then passionately embraces her, pushing her down into the sand. "No. I don't love you any more. You don't love me, either."

"It's not true."
"Say it!"
"No, I won't say it."

The camera tracks away from them, lying in the sand-trap among some trees. Antonioni had a knack for beautifying everything merely by looking at it.

(1) John Simon correctly pointed out that the wrong woman disappeared in L'Avventura. Lea Massari is a much better actress than Monica Vitti.
(2) 1931 novel by Hermann Broch.

Undue Credit

2011-11-17T13:13:00.008+08:00

Until the 1950s, credits at the end of a movie were usually limited to the words The End or some other foreign language equivalent. Occasionally the credits would repeat the cast.

Nowadays, when the convention of ending a movie with the superfluous words The End has been abandoned and when even opening credit sequences can go on for several minutes, end credit sequences typically crawl on for an unconscionable time, giving credit to everyone involved in the smallest capacity in the production, as well as numerous people who have nothing at all to do with the movie, except as a provider of some service to the cast or crew.

End credits also contain disclaimers that read things like "any resemblance between the people and situations you have just witnessed and actuality is completely unintentional" or "no animals were mistreated during the making of this movie merely to increase its entertainment potential." Information like the actual locations where the movie were shot are helpful, even when they sometimes put me in mind of Gene Shalit's comment that "The Blue Bird was shot in Russia, and it should've been buried there." Since filmgoers rarely stick around to watch end credits, filmmakers sometimes indulge in additional scenes and outtakes to get them to sit through them.

For no particular reason I watched the end credits for the 50 Cent movie Setup (2011) and noticed a credit for the "Honeywagon".* I realize that a credit like this could have been included out of respect or gratitude for the people who kept the location port-o-potties clean. Or it could have been put there because of some kind of union requirement. Since too many films treat end credits as a joke, it's probably a mistake to take them seriously. But including people like personal assistants, caterers, drivers, and honeywagon operators in a movie's end credits is a discredit to the movie and to all the people who are directly involved in its making.

But why is it that many classic films, particularly from abroad, eschew end credits altogether? Breathless, for example, has only three titles at the beginning: "Visa de contrôle cinématographique Nr 22275", "Ce film est dédié a la Monogram Pictures", and A bout de souffle; and the word "FIN" at the end. And yet we know it was directed by Jean-Luc Godard, written by him from a story by François Truffaut, photographed by the great Raoul Coutard, and has delightful acting by Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Even if we didn't know all this from the dozens of reference books published since 1960, anyone can find it at imdb.com. Setup, which was instantly forgettable, has 28 producers and (coincidentally?) 28 stunt people, lists 42 actors in its credits, 35 camera and electrical technicians, 14 drivers, and 39 "other crew", which includes a set medic, animal trainer, payroll accountant, chef, and various interns. Maybe this is nothing more than a side-effect of democracy?

*Chris Musick drove the honeywagon.

Eponymous

2011-11-14T13:17:00.004+08:00

"I have felt with even greater force, the same feelings - this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits - thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding - is a great evil, as is every untruth." Leo Tolstoy, "Shakespeare and the Drama", 1906

"Was Shakespeare a fraud?" [Tagline for the film Anonymous]

Ever since the man who wrote "Hamlet", "King Lear", and "The Tempest" was recognized as perhaps the greatest writer of English, some people have been trying to prove that he was not William Shakespeare. This is probably due to the adulation that began to be heaped on him by scholars in the 19th century, attributing qualities to him that he did not possess, like a well-developed philosophy. Over the years, various theories have been put forward about who else might have written the plays, like Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, and Edward de Vere. Now comes a film, Anonymous, directed by the German Roland Emmerich, that dramatizes one such theory.

It seems to me there are two kinds of Shakespeare dissenters: people with an educated, informed hunch, brilliant laymen not attached to conventional scholarship who have a unique perspective on a wide variety of subjects; and literary outsiders who latch on to such theories because they somehow resent Shakespeare's overinflated reputation.

Leo Tolstoy evidently hated Shakespeare, so much so that he wrote a notorious pamphlet about it. George Orwell wrote a fascinating review of Tolstoy's essay, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool", which pretty much demolishes Tolstoy's argument. But there have been plenty of dissenters over the years who haven't changed anyone's mind about Shakespeare's importance. Even some of his admirers had reservations. As Jacques Barzun wrote, "From Shakespeare’s time to ours — that is, from Ben Jonson to John Crowe Ransom—competent judges of literature have not ceased to point out Shakespeare’s singular combination of mastery and ineptitude. He is said to be transcendent and also crude, careless, vulgar, incoherent, rhetorical, exaggerated, naive, cheap, obscure, unphilosophical, and addicted to bad puns and revolting horrors. Dryden, who admired Shakespeare just as Wagner admired Berlioz, found his master’s phrases 'scarcely intelligible; and of those which we understand some are ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure.'"

The movie Anonymous doesn't attack the common perception of the greatness of the plays, but it attacks the man we're used to thinking of as the writer of the plays, which is only a roundabout way of attacking the plays. It's no accident that for Roland Emmerich English is, at best, a second language. Many native English speakers find Shakespeare "difficult", for the same reason they find the King James Bible rough going.

Emmerich is the maker of hypertrophied trash like 2012 which wants us to believe, if only for the sake of the movie, in a Mayan myth that the world will come to end in December 2012. Anonymous is rich in its own mythology, but it's about as worth taking seriously as Mayan astrology. Shakespeare scholar Stephen Goldblatt goes further:

"The idea that William Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays and poems is a matter of conjecture and the idea that the “authorship controversy” be taught in the classroom are the exact equivalent of current arguments that “intelligent design” be taught alongside evolution. In both cases an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on a serious assessment of hard evidence, is challenged by passionately held fantasies whose adherents demand equal time. The demand seems harmless enough until one reflects on its implications. Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?"

Emmerich should stick to destroying the world.

Ce n'est pas la guerre

2011-11-11T13:06:00.007+08:00

Gamblers the world over are placing their bets today, 11/11/11. Here in the Philippines there are low-odds lotto games of only two and three digits. The bet is ten pesos and can win you up to 4,500 pesos ($100). By yesterday, all bets for 11-11 and 1-1-1 were sold out. They're sold out to make sure that if too many people bet on the same number and it wins, the national lotto doesn't go broke.

If you were a soldier in the British, American, French or German armies on this day in 1918 - and you were alive - you would have considered yourself extremely lucky, since an estimated ten million soldiers died in the First World War. This day used to be known as Armistice Day in the States, but they changed it to Veterans Day in 1954.

On this Veterans Day, I want to simply say hello to all my former buddies, shipmates, and comrades-in-arms with whom I served from 1988 to 2000. And to all those with whom, mysteriously, I continue to serve nightly in my dreams. In a very real and very satisfying sense, I never really left the service. But I'm too old and out of shape to keep up with the men who haven't aged a day since I last saw them. The ones who are dead are ageless.

And the dreams are progressive, adding one onto the other. So instead of enlisting again with twelve years under my belt, as the years have passed it's fifteen years and seventeen years, until I'm just one more enlistment away from my twenty year retirement. Perhaps when I'm on my deathbed I can be honorably discharged, the way they let my father go at the age of fifty-five. They told him he'd had a heart attack, and showed him the scar tissue on his x-ray. But he was unaware of any heart attack, and after thirty-one years in the army, was totally unfit for civilian life.

He lived another twenty years not knowing what to do with himself. I wonder if his dreams were like mine, still in the service to his last gasp. (Or was it a yawn?)

Memory

When I was young my heart and head were light,
And I was gay and feckless as a colt
Out in the fields, with morning in the may,
Wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom.
O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free
And all the paths led on from hawthorn-time
Across the carolling meadows into June.

But now my heart is heavy-laden. I sit
Burning my dreams away beside the fire:
For death has made me wise and bitter and strong;
And I am rich in all that I have lost.
O starshine on the fields of long-ago,
Bring me the darkness and the nightingale;
Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,
and silence; and the faces of my friends.

Siegfried Sassoon, Limerick, 1 February 1918

Andy Rooney

2011-11-09T14:42:00.001+08:00

"If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it."

Fifty years ago, it seemed that America and other Western democracies were moving toward a society with greater equality and justice. By now, however, it's obvious that we've been going in the opposite direction for quite some time, toward extreme inequality and injustice. We the people have taken a backseat in our own country.

For the last forty years, Andy Rooney was a rare commodity in American broadcast news. By the time the Ronald Reagan era, which included the term of his vice president, was over, the word "liberal" had become so dirty that few Democrats would dare to call themselves one. Bill Clinton, we are told, was a "moderate", a "centrist", which is the only reason why he managed to serve two terms. After eight years of George W. Bush's bungling, Americans expressed their exasperation by electing the first black president. Despite cretinous suggestions the he is a socialist, Obama's liberal credentials are impeccable.

So were Andy Rooney's, even when, for a terribly long time, it was unpopular to insist on pushing liberal values in his newspaper columns and his 60 Minutes segments. He was a curmudgeon whose heart was always in the right place. He was an American. In an age of equivocation, we always knew what he stood for - and why. When his friends try to flatter his late father's memory, Hamlet silenced them by speaking the most moving words I can think of at the moment: "He was a man. Take him for all and all, I shall not look upon his like again."

No Smokin'

2011-11-09T13:22:00.001+08:00

I recently had a chance to watch the documentaries, Thriller in Manila (2008) and Facing Ali (2009), both of which showed Joe Frazier as he looked in his prime against Muhammad Ali and as he looked only a few years before he succumbed to liver cancer on November 7. He was living in the building that houses the old gym where he trained in Philadelphia, still very much himself - quiet, proud, but embittered over what Ali said about him before their three fights, calling him an "Uncle Tom"* and a "gorilla".

It would be hard to name two great boxers who were less alike than Ali and Frazier. When they fought for the first time, in March 1971, I was twelve and I didn't like Ali because he was a braggart. I thought it was too much to be so successful at what one does and to brag about it. Of course, Ali's "trash talk" was as much for Ali's benefit as for his opponents'. Frazier was so hurt by Ali's remarks that, late in his life, he derived some satisfaction at Ali's being stricken with Parkinson's Disease. Ali's words to Frazier were clearly absurd, since they were both victims of racism. The film Facing Ali recounts how, when Frazier visited his mother in South Carolina in 1970, he went to a local bank to cash a check. The bank wouldn't cash it, despite Frazier being the heavyweight champion of the world.

When they fought for the first time, the fight was billed as "The Fight of the Century". My mother and big brother were routing for Ali. I bet them both $5 that Frazier would win. Thank you, Joe, for making me the winner that time.

*In Facing Ali, a Frazier friend comments that Joe didn't know what an "Uncle Tom" was. He thought Ali was saying he peeped in people's windows.

It's Nice to Go Trav'ling

2011-11-08T10:23:00.004+08:00

Four years ago today, I arrived in the Philippines for an indefinite stay. The indefiniteness has deepened to the point that, even though I've had more than enough of this place, it evidently hasn't had enough of me. Four years of living like an ordinary Filipino, even if my per capita income is more than twice the national average of $2,000, and I could live a lot better if I weren't supporting three other castaways who happened to wind up in my lifeboat.

I alluded some time ago in this blog to the misadventure that landed me here in the Sticks - a small island tied by a bridge to a bigger island. Someone once said that freedom is like air conditioning - once you've experienced it you find that you can't live without it. It's a funny line, but I've learned that freedom isn't at all like air conditioning, since I've lived comfortably without the latter all this time. For half of that time I have somehow lived without cable TV. So I missed the entire 2008 presidential primaries, all the debates, the conventions and the most remarkable election of my lifetime. I feel a deep sense of regret that I wasn't home participating in my country taking those enormous steps.

I was preoccupied with the daily challenges of maintaining my composure while I was afflicted with typhoons, swarming tropical insects, power failures, screaming roosters, full-volume karaoke, and the alarming day by day spectacle of poor people struggle against a full-fledged oligarchy for the last ounce of liberty they can cajole out of them. Compared with all this, the economic crisis in America is like distant thunder or watching the track of a super typhoon as it veers to the north toward Taiwan or Okinawa. Not a disaster averted but one diverted. I tell myself that I'll deal with the scarcity of jobs, the reluctance of banks to provide credit to small businesses or ordinary people, or the prospect of a Republican winning the 2012 election when I get home.

There are moments when a cold wind will swoop down from somewhere high in the atmosphere and slip through my window, making me wonder from what compass point or what altitude it came and remind me of fairer climes and better times. Like the lyricist who wrote the song "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling",* I've learned that the best part of a journey may well be its end.

It's very nice to go trav'ling
To Paris, London and Rome
It's oh, so nice to go trav'ling
But it's so much nicer
Yes, it's so much nicer to come home

It's very nice to just wander
The camel route to Iraq
It's oh, so nice to just wander
But it's so much nicer
Yes, it's oh so nice to wander back

The mam'selles and frauleins and the senoritas are sweet
But they can't compete 'cause they just don't have
What the models have on Madison Ave

It's very nice to be footloose
With just a toothbrush and comb
It's oh so nice to be footloose
But your heart starts singin'
When you're homeward wingin' across the foam

And you know your fate is
Where the Empire State is
All you contemplate is
The view from Miss Liberty's dome
It's very nice to go trav'ling
But it's oh so nice to come home

You will find the madchen and the gay muchachas are rare
But they can't compare with that sexy line
That parades each day at Sunset and Vine

It's quite the life to play gypsy
And roam as gypsies will roam
It's quite the life to play gypsy
But your heart starts singin'
When you're homeward wingin' across the foam

And the Hudson River
Makes you start to quiver
Like the latest flivver
That's simply drippin' with chrome
It's very nice to go trav'ling
But it's oh so nice to come home

No more customs
Burn the passport
No more packing and unpacking
Light the home fires
Get my slippers
Make a pizza

(Frank Sinatra sings the song here.)

*The lyricist was Sammy Cahn.

Good Climates are Worst

2011-11-05T10:07:00.004+08:00

Just before Halloween, what was identified as an "unseasonable" snow storm hit the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Watching the BBC's video shot in New Jersey of the heavy snow coming down, a Filipino friend who has never experienced snow in his life asked me if it was cold this time of year in the States. "Yes," I told him. It's mid-autumn." Then I had to explain to him what autumn was, since he had no notion of it.

George Orwell wrote the following essay for the 2 February 1946 edition of the Evening Standard. What he meant by a "bad" climate is one that causes discomfort when exposed to it, in the cold, the rain, or even in a gale. He suggests that the "good" climates - like the one I'm living in - are actually worse than bad because they are so unvarying. The heat is unending, it even rains more than in England, and there are typhoons instead of gales. There are really only two seasons here - the wet and the dry. Some years they are exactly divisible as such, but in others, thanks to the El Niño/La Niña effect, there are long dry spells in the rainy season and plenty of rain in the middle of the dry.

Orwell may have been unfair toward tropical fruits and flowers (rambutans are delicious) and flowers (I see daffodils every day here), but he knew that happiness can only be based on variety, not on sameness; that hot weather is not just the price to be paid for the cold, the two are faces of the same coin.

Bad Climates are Best

The time was when I used to say that what the English climate needed was a minor operation, comparable to the removal of tonsils in a human being.

Just cut out January and February, and we should have nothing to complain about.

Now, however, I feel that I would not remove even those two months, supposing that I had the power.

This is not entirely an academic question, for, if our popular scientific writers are to be believed, we are within sight of being able to control the climate. By the use of atomic energy, it seems, we could melt the polar ice caps, irrigate the Sahara, divert the Gulf Stream, move chains of mountains from one place to another, and, in short, alter the planet out of recognition.

And if the day ever comes when Britain has to decide what kind of climate it is to have (it will be done by plebiscite, I suppose, or on the basis of a Gallup Poll), I hope we opt for what is called a "bad" climate and not what is miscalled a "perfect" one.

The great thing about the English climate is its variation. It is not merely that you never know what the weather is going to do to-morrow, but that each season of the year, and indeed each month, has its own clear-cut personality, like an old friend - or, in the case of two or three months, an old enemy.

In very many parts of the world this is not so. In most Eastern lands there are only three seasons, the hot weather, the cold weather and the rains, and in each of those three periods one day is just like another day.

In very hot climates there is not even anything corresponding to spring or autumn; there are always flowers in bloom, the trees are evergreen, the birds are nesting all the year round. Down near the Equator even the length of the day barely alters, so that you never have the pleasure of a long summer evening or of breakfasting by artificial light.

I am going to try the experiment of running through the months of the year and seeing what associations they automatically call up.

They will not all be pleasant ones, but I think it will be found that they are sharply differentiated from one another. I will start off with March.

March. - Wallflowers (especially the old-fashioned brown ones). Icy winds sweeping round the corners and blowing grit into your eyes. Hares having boxing matches in the young corn.

April. - The smell of the earth after a shower. The pleasure of hearing the cuckoo punctually on the fourteenth; also of seeing the first swallow - which, in fact, is usually a sand-martin.

May. - Stewed rhubarb. The pleasure of not wearing underclothes.

June. - Cloud-bursts. The smell of hay, Going for walks after supper. The back-breaking labour of earthing up potatoes.

July. - Going to the office in shirt sleeves. The endless pop=pop-pop of cherry stones as one treads the London pavements.

August. - Midges. Plums. Sea bathing. Beds of geraniums, painful to look at. The dusty smell of water-carts.

September. - Blackberries. The first leaves turning. Heavy dew in the early mornings. The pleasure of seeing a fire in the grate again.

October. - Utterly windless days. Yellow elm trees looming up out of the mist, with all their leaves dead and none fallen.

November. - Raging gales. The smell of rubbish fires.

December. - Owls hooting. Cat ice on the piddles. Roast chestnuts. The sun hanging over the roof-tops like a crimson ball which one can study with the naked eye.

Those are merely my own associations. Anyone else's, I suppose, would be different, but they would probably be just as varied.

I cannot believe that in, say, California or New Zealand, or in the pleasure resorts of the Riviera, the months have so individual a flavour.

But how about January and February? February, I admit, is a particularly detestable month, with no virtue except its shortness. But in fairness to our climate one ought to remember that if we did not have this period of damp and cold, the rest of the year would be quite different.

The flavour of our fruits and vegetables depends on the rain-sodden soil and the slow coming of spring. With the doubtful exception of the banana and the pineapple, no fruit worth eating grows in a hot country. Even the orange and the lemon come from fairly temperate lands like Spain or Palestine, and the characteristic tropical fruits - mangoes, paw-paws, custard apples - are watery, tasteless things.

Fruits like apples and strawberries all need a period of frost and heavy rain, and never attain their best flavour in countries where the summer is really hot. The most attractive flowers also need a cold winter. In the plains of India, for instance, it is easy enough to grow zinnias or petunias, but the most skilful gardener alive could not grow a primrose or a wallflower or a daffodil.

If we want to make January and February less unpleasant than they are, we might start by building our houses more intelligently.

For instance, it would not be a bad idea to arrange the water pipes so that they do not burst every time there is a hard frost.

But that is a different question. What we shall have to decide, if this notion of changing the climate ever becomes practicable, is whether we want a dead level of continuous sunshine, or a few exquisite days paid for with fog, mud and sleet. When Shakespeare, describing this time of year, wrote:

When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian's nose looks red and raw

he was describing rather disagreeable phenomena, and yet there is a kind of affection in the lines, a perception that everything has its place.

There is a time to sit in the garden in a deck chair, and there is a time to have chilblains and a dripping nose. Perhaps five days out of seven our climate gives us cause to curse it, but there are also days, especially in spring and autumn, when even the streets of London take on a beauty that is not found in sunnier lands.

Wake Up John Doe

2011-11-02T13:18:00.005+08:00

When the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began, I watched how the major American news networks scratched their heads trying to figure it out and take it seriously. They saw its potential as a news item but couldn't decide what to do with it. Unlike the demonstrations of the Arab Spring, which the networks were anxious to own and, in some cases, to physically take part in, there is no single, clear agenda in the Wall Street protests (aside from the obvious one - it isn't called Occupy 42nd Street).

Consequently, the American media have tried to portray the protesters to fit their own unofficial ideological agenda. Fox News, for instance, has denounced them as nothing but anarchist hippies. Other media networks are being more cautious, just in case the movement amounts to something. Politicians are taking sides as well, with the 2012 presidential race looming. Republicans are calling Occupy Wall Street - at best - a pointless distraction, while Democrats are tentatively supportive or noncommittal.

I, for one, think it is encouraging that there doesn't seem to be a unified, monolithic message towering above these messy and shambling demonstrations. Some observers have tried to make the various conservative movements that seemed to spring up spontaneously in 2009 - that eventually coalesced into the Koch Brothers' Tea Party - analogous to the multifarious origins of the protests on Wall Street.

One thing is clear: Occupy Wall Street is a movement of the left. So often with such movements, there is a tendency for unaffiliated leftist groups to be hijacked by extremists like the anarchists who always seem to appear on the fringes to scare away liberal or libertarian elements. Certainly the enemies of the movement must be hoping that it turns violent. It is a maddening habit of leftist groups to refuse to compromise and cooperate with one another for a common cause.

Conservatives argue that Wall Street isn't responsible for the worldwide economic crisis. Barack Obama, who took office four months after the Crash of '08 and three months after the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 that saved the American banking system, is responsible. The banks, conservative reasoning suggests, should've been left alone to fail.

However much I somewhat agree with that disaster scenario, the bailout of the banks was not a Get Out of Jail Free card, inviting them to continue the same practices that brought about the crash. However much the banks do not seem to have learned their lesson, it was eminently necessary that their misdeeds didn't completely shatter the world economy. The cries of outrage at the evident money madness infecting the 1% of the American population that controls 40% of the American Pie may sound shrill but they are genuine. It has shaken alot of people's faith in capitalism - a system that relies on that 1% to behave themselves. Too many Americans know that they cannot rely on them any more.

I think the moment someone comes forward to give Occupy Wall Street one face and one voice and one message, it is finished.

Assassination

2011-10-31T09:24:00.003+08:00

[An edited version of the following essay was published in Issue 59 of Senses of Cinema last summer. Adrian Danks, the editor of the pieces published for the Melbourne Cinémathèque Annotations on Film has always been a cooperative guy. But when I submitted the essay below he removed some things, a sentence here, a paragraph there, and rearranged other things, that lessened the essay's impact as a piece of writing. Danks even quibbled at my use of the Vernon Young quote which, coming from Young, was meant as high praise. Perhaps despair was too strong for a Japan still recovering from the earthquake and tsunami. Indulging my own vanity, here is the unedited version I submitted.]

“I would like to be able to take hold of the past and make it stand still so that I can examine it from different angles.” Masahiro Shinoda (1)

In the long history of Japan, few eras were as volatile and violent as the Meiji restoration in 1868. Two hundred and fifty years of peace under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) had resulted in cultural and economic stagnation. After the American Commodore Perry’s arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853 with his “four black ships”, a power struggle erupted between the forces loyal to the Shogunate and those wanting to restore the emperor as the head of state.

In the midst of this turmoil, powerful individuals emerged whose allegiances changed direction with the prevailing winds. One of them, Hachiro Kiyokawa, rose from a lowly position as the son of farmers to become one of the most respected and feared samurai of his age. He is at the center of Masahiro Shinoda’s extraordinary historical film Assassination. Donald Richie, the doyen of critics of Japanese film, called it Shinoda’s best film, as did fellow director Kon Ichikawa.

The historical context of the film is extremely complex, and Shinoda further complicates matters by recounting events in Kiyokawa’s life from the perspective of several different characters and shuttles us backwards and forwards in time. The result is a little confusing but makes it that much harder to take one’s eyes off the screen.

After two minutes of expository history, the film opens on a map of Edo (old Tokyo) with the Chrysanthemum seal, representing the emperor, at its center. We first see Kiyokawa crouched before a Shogunate official, the same seal on the wall behind him, who reads out his official pardon of the murder of a policeman. Next we see two prominent Shogunate players who figure prominently throughout the film, commenting on Kiyokawa’s exploits. One of them smokes a cigar, a sign of his corruption by Western customs and ideas.

Kiyokawa’s antagonist in the film is the samurai Tadasaburo Sasaki. Early in the film we are shown the grounds for Sasaki’s enmity toward Kiyokawa. Priding himself on his own fencing prowess, he faces off against Kiyokawa in a kendo match and is roundly beaten. Sasaki was also the name of Musashi Miyamoto’s nemesis, Kojiro Sasaki, dramatized in legend, literature, and film, the most popular being Hiroshi Inagaki’s trilogy of films starring Toshiro Mifune as Musashi.

Kiyokawa is presented by the film as a powerful, larger-than-life character. Shinoda is so evidently enamored of him that he is willing to forgive him his sometimes unsettling brutality. One of the best scenes in the film shows us Kiyokawa’s savage murder of a Shogunate policeman in broad daylight on a crowded street. After beheading the man in the blink of an eye (Shinoda freezes the shot of the man’s head launching into the air), Kiyokawa is chased by the angry mob of witnesses. As Kiyokawa flees from the stone-throwing mob, his sword still drawn, Shinoda eliminates all sound except for Takemitsu’s percussive score. The image of a lone samurai being chased down the road, as onlookers scurry out of his way, is unforgettable.

Of all the angles from which we are shown insights into the life of Kiyokawa, the most complex is from the perspective of his mistress, Oren, elegantly played by Shinoda’s wife Shima Iwashita. She recounts in her diary - which Sasaki grudgingly reads - her first night with Kiyokawa (he is her first customer) and their intimacy when she becomes the mistress of his house. When a warrant for his arrest is issued after his murder of the policeman, Oren is tortured by Shogunate officials, but does not divulge his whereabouts. In tribute to her, Kiyokawa tells his parents to pray for her.

By the end of the film, Kiyokawa remains an enigma. Oren’s death and, perhaps, the death of his idealism, have driven him to a dissolute life of sake and prostitutes. The final sequence of the film is shown entirely from the perspective of Sasaki, who stalks Kiyokawa, even spying on his intimacy with a prostitute whom he calls “Oren”. Sasaki is waiting for his chance to attack, and he sees his opportunity in a chance meeting he witnesses from a safe distance. Shinoda freezes the frame as Kiyokawa, in greeting an acquaintance in the street, stops to remove his straw hat, his hands clear of his white-handled sword.

Our efforts to understand Kiyokawa are driven by Sasaki’s efforts to find a point of weakness in his character, a chink in his samurai armor. A problem arises when we realize that a lot of Kiyokawa’s behavior isn’t exactly explicable. For instance, he organizes his own army to defend the Shogunate but interrupts its march on Kyoto with the sudden announcement that he is waiting on orders from the emperor. Or at one point he is obviously shaken by his impulsive beheading of a policeman but later unhesitatingly steps up to behead a group of captured “traitors”.

As Kiyokawa, Tetsuro Tanba is riveting. He exudes an intelligence and strength that makes the other characters fascination with him understandable. There are two actors in the cast whose faces are probably familiar to filmgoers. Eiji Okada, who plays Lord Matsudaira, played opposite Emmanuelle Riva in Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and was the captive of Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964). And Isao Kimura plays Sasaki, Kiyokawa’s sworn enemy. Japanese cinephiles might not recognize him as the actor who played the novice samurai, Katsushiro, in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). In that film, he was a devoted admirer of a master swordsman. In Assassination, Katsushiro has grown up, admiring Kiyokawa’s swordsmanship while hating the man and his reputation, determined to beat him when he finds the chance.

The music of Toru Takemitsu is so closely integrated with the action that it becomes a protagonist. A superb modernist composer, Takemitsu actually preferred to compose film music, and he did so for Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri, Kwaidan), Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes, Rikyu), Kurosawa (Ran) and particularly for thirteen of Shinoda’s films. For Assassination, he composed a spare but powerful score, making liberal use of traditional Japanese instruments, particularly the biwa.

A companion piece of sorts to Shinoda’s film is Kazuo Kuroki’s The Assassination of Ryoma (1974), which follows the last days of Ryoma Sakamoto, who figures prominently in Kiyokawa’s story. Kuroki’s film is markedly different in style from Shinoda’s, much looser and avant garde. (It was made for the independent Art Theater Guild.) Its anarchic imprecision reveals the extent to which Shinoda was still working within a filmmaking tradition in 1964. Assassination is a late but brilliant example of that tradition.

Assassination comes close to being a paradigm of Japanese esthetics, which Vernon Young described as "despair, reconciled by formal beauty - the Japanese answer to life resembles that of the ancient Greeks, or of Nietzsche." (2)

(1) Told to Audie Bock, Japanese Film Directors, Kodansha, 1978.
(2) Vernon Young, On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art, Quadrangle Books, 1972.

Captain Murderer

2011-10-28T12:13:00.001+08:00

In 1983, Welsh writer and actor Emlyn Williams appeared in a made-for-tv movie called Emlyn Williams as Charles Dickens, which was nothing more (or less) than a recording of a one-man show that he'd been performing onstage for thirty years. It was itself a re-creation of public appearances made by Dickens himself, standing at a lectern and reciting passages from his best-known works.

The film closed with a bedtime story that Dickens claimed was told him by a nurse when he was a boy. I include it here in gruesome observance of Halloween.

CAPTAIN MURDERER

If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase), I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.

The first diabolical character who intruded himself on my peaceful youth was a certain Captain Murderer. This wretch must have been an offshoot of the Blue Beard family, but I had no suspicion of the consanguinity in those times. His warning name would seem to have awakened no general prejudice against him, for he was admitted into the best society and possessed immense wealth. Captain Murderer's mission was matrimony, and the gratification of a cannibal appetite with tender brides. On his marriage morning, he always caused both sides of the way to church to be planted with curious flowers; and when his bride said, "Dear Captain Murderer, I never saw flowers like these before: what are they called?" he answered, "They are called Garnish for house-lamb," and laughed at his ferocious practical joke in a horrid manner, disquieting the minds of the noble bridal company, with a very sharp show of teeth, then displayed for the first time. He made love in a coach and six, and married in a coach and twelve, and all his horses were milk-white horses with one red spot on the back which he caused to be hidden by the harness. For, the spot would come there, though every horse was milk-white when Captain Murderer bought him. And the spot was young bride's blood. (To this terrific point I am indebted for my personal experience of a shudder and cold beads on the forehead.) When Captain Murderer had made an end of feasting and revelry, and had dismissed the noble guests, and was alone with his wife on the day month after their marriage, it was his whimsical custom to produce a golden rolling-pin and a silver pie-board. Now, there was this special feature in the Captain's courtships, that he always asked if the young lady could make pie-crust; and if she couldn't by nature or education, she was taught. Well. When the bride saw Captain Murderer produce the golden rolling-pin and silver pie-board, she remembered this, and turned up her laced-silk sleeves to make a pie. The Captain brought out a silver pie-dish of immense capacity, and the Captain brought out flour and butter and eggs and all things needful, except the inside of the pie; of materials for the staple of the pie itself, the Captain brought out none. Then said the lovely bride, "Dear Captain Murderer, what pie is this to be?" He replied, "A meat pie." Then said the lovely bride, "Dear Captain Murderer, I see no meat." The Captain humorously retorted, "Look in the glass." She looked in the glass, but still she saw no meat, and then the Captain roared with laughter, and suddenly frowning and drawing his sword, bade her roll out the crust. So she rolled out the crust, dropping large tears upon it all the time because he was so cross, and when she had lined the dish with crust and had cut the crust all ready to fit the top, the Captain called out, "I see the meat in the glass!" And the bride looked up at the glass, just in time to see the Captain cutting her head off; and he chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones.

Captain Murderer went on in this way, prospering exceedingly, until he came to choose a bride from two twin sisters, and at first didn't know which to choose. For, though one was fair and the other dark, they were both equally beautiful. But the fair twin loved him, and the dark twin hated him, so he chose the fair one. The dark twin would have prevented the marriage if she could, but she couldn't; however, on the night before it, much suspecting Captain Murderer, she stole out and climbed his garden wall, and looked in at his window through a chink in the shutter, and saw him having his teeth filed sharp. Next day she listened all day, and heard him make his joke about the house-lamb. And that day month, he had the paste rolled out, and cut the fair twin's head off, and chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones.

Now, the dark twin had had her suspicions much increased by the filing of the Captain's teeth, and again by the house-lamb joke. Putting all things together when he gave out that her sister was dead, she divined the truth, and determined to be revenged. So, she went up to Captain Murderer's house, and knocked at the knocker and pulled at the bell, and when the Captain came to the door, said: "Dear Captain Murderer, marry me next for I always loved you and was jealous of my sister." The Captain took it as a compliment, and made a polite answer, and the marriage was quickly arranged. On the night before it, the bride again climbed to his window, and again saw him having his teeth filed sharp. At this sight she laughed such a terrible laugh at the chink in the shutter, that the Captain's blood curdled, and he said: "I hope nothing has disagreed with me!" At that, she laughed again, a still more terrible laugh, and the shutter was opened and search made, but she was nimbly gone, and there was no one. Next day they went to church in a coach and twelve, and were married. And that day month, she rolled the pie-crust out, and Captain Murderer cut her head off, and chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones.

But before she began to roll out the paste she had taken a deadly poison of a most awful character, distilled from toads' eyes and spiders' knees; and Captain Murderer had hardly picked her last bone, when he began to swell, and to turn blue, and to be all over spots, and to scream. And he went on swelling and turning bluer, and being more all over spots and screaming, until he reached from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall; and then, at one o'clock in the morning, he blew up with a loud explosion. At the sound of it, all the milk-white horses in the stables broke their halters and went mad, and then they galloped over everybody in Captain Murderer's house (beginning with the family blacksmith who had filed his teeth) until the whole were dead, and then they galloped away.

Goodnight, child.

Reprinted from All the Year Round, September 8, 1860.

Brutalized

2011-10-25T13:14:00.003+08:00

Watching the awful cellphone videos of Gaddafi's last moments as a mob of rebel fighters pressed in on him to get a good look or throw a sucker punch, or after five days of his body lying in a meat locker while men bring their families inside to show them that the monster is dead, some people have been bothered at the brutality of killing a 69-year-old man and not burying his body expeditiously.

I was surprised that they didn't tear him limb from limb. His dead body is certainly quite a bit more decorous-looking than Mussolini's was, or Ceauşescu's, or, reportedly, Bin Laden's. Of course, they had to take care that no one damaged his face too severely that he would be unrecognizable. But DNA could take care of a positive ID, even if there had been nothing left of him but a scrap of tissue.

What the hell did anyone expect Gaddafi's death would be like after all these months? The men who caught him hiding in a culvert had been fighting from house to house, watching their friends and brothers get wounded or killed. And before the revolution, they had all been convinced, all their lives, that they weren't worth the dirt that they stood on, when any day the police could arrive and, for no reason, take one of them away to be tortured and murdered in some dungeon, or to simply disappear - buried in a mass grave somewhere in the desert. One of the reasons that some people wanted Gaddafi taken alive was so he could tell Libyans exactly where their loved ones had disappeared.

There was some concern when the revolution started about the fighting mettle of ordinary Libyan men, with no military training, in the daily prosecution of a guerrilla war. But they were probably the most well-prepared populace imaginable for such a war. Life and death were meaningless already, thanks to nearly forty-two years
of Gaddafi.

The brutalization that is unavoidable in the training of special warfare recruits has had to be made more extreme as prosperous societies have grown accustomed to peace and stability. Human beings have a natural compunction against taking a life. To overcome this compunction, the training of fighting men must involve teaching them to kill almost as a matter of reflex, with rifle or knife or whatever weapon is at hand. And this is a price that every society has to pay for its security. Libyans have had no need of such training, since brutalization was a part of their daily lives.

According to international law, every prisoner of war is entitled to be treated humanely, and it is the duty of his captors to protect him from further harm. But such a law is only binding on exceptional days, when the sun shines gently, when a cool breeze blows softly, when no storm is threatening and when the rains have all passed. Such a law wasn't made for a day like last Thursday. It wasn't a great day for humanity or for justice. But nobody can argue that it wasn't a great day for Libyans.

America's Most Wanted

2011-10-22T13:36:00.004+08:00

"I learned I had to stand for something so I could stand to be me."

Some Americans seem to have an unshakable belief that a degree of resistance to authority is OK, but vocal, active resistance is not OK. In the 1960s, the historic protest movements against race segregation and the war in Vietnam seemed to divide America along strong political lines. The protesters saw something that was seriously wrong with their country and their government and wanted to do something to change it, taking part in marches, sit-ins, and civil disobedience, even if it resulted in their arrest and a momentary loss of their liberty.

But other Americans saw the protesters as traitors, criminals, anarchists, or communists who threatened the American way of life. They mistook the outcries against injustice as cries of anti-American hate. They came up with the slogan, addressed to the protesters, "America - love it or leave it." This slogan was based on the assumption that anyone who thinks something is wrong with America - and says so - must hate America as well, and wants America to be more like Canada or France or maybe even communist China. All they really want, I think, is for America to be what it so often only seems, to live up to its lofty ideals, and to stop saying one thing and doing another.

For most Americans there is probably nothing worse than having a police record, than being arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted and photographed and placed inside a jail cell. But to some Americans, it is almost an occupational hazard for citizenship. For one American, named Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez by his parents but known to everyone else as Martin Sheen, being arrested would seem to be a habit. With sixty-six arrests on his rap sheet, in forty-six years of social activism, Sheen is a tireless advocate for many causes, including peace, immigrant rights, and the environment. He claims that he never tries to get arrested, but that it just seems to happen very often. "I don't look forward to being arrested and I don't go anywhere to get arrested," he told Robert Lipton. "I really don't. I never know what's gonna happen at the time and sometimes . . . you have to do it because you cannot not do it and be honest with yourself."

He is often overshadowed these days by the antics of his bad boy son, Charlie. But Martin Sheen takes his nationality seriously, despite the fact that his Irish mother qualifies him to be president of the Irish Republic. He is a devout Catholic, and an advocate against abortion, since he regards taking a stand against the death penalty and for abortion to be "inconsistent". He has played the president on TV, which has given some people the idea that he would make a good president, and have asked him to run. His response was typically forthright and self-effacing: "I'm just not qualified. You're mistaking celebrity for credibility." Unlike them, Sheen is able to distinguish between appearances and reality.

Sheen can't be accused of using his celebrity as a shield in his activism, to protect him from doing serious time for his minor offenses. His first taste of activism was in 1965, long before he became a successful screen actor, taking part in Cesar Chavez's migrant workers' protests.

In 2003, at that horrible moment in American history when odious men questioned the loyalty of Americans who opposed the invasion Iraq, Sheen was resolute in his opposition. He even wrote a poem for the occasion.

There Can Be No Victory

In order to prepare for war,
You must not be sensitive or poetic or humorous.
You must not be self effacing,
Or reflective, or forgiving.

You must not be sentimental or compassionate or lighthearted.
On the contrary, to prepare for war,
You must be clear, uncompromising, and confident.

You must look life square in the eye...

And choose death.

Sheen aggressively opposed the war - so much so that large numbers of people were calling for him to be fired from his NBC show The West Wing in which he played the president. Sheen's pacifism was, for once, perfectly timed in 2003. The war was nothing but a horrific boondoggle, an historic blunder. The intellectuals who were suckered into it, like John Keegan and Christopher Hitchens, should've known better, but they still refuse to eat crow. Sheen's arguments against the war may have sounded simplistic and unsophisticated beside theirs. But that, I think, is the point: finding an argument for an unprovoked war led too many bright people to mistake power for righteousness. Having the power to do some things is never a proper justification for doing them.

One of my first encounters of Sheen in a movie role was in The Execution of Private Slovik (1974) that I saw on television. It was the story of Eddie Slovik, a soldier in the Second World War who was the only American soldier sentenced to death and executed for desertion since the American Civil War.(1) I will never forget Sheen's performance, nominated for an Emmy, as the hapless victim of circumstance. His actions, which were confused with cowardice, were presented in the film with utmost simplicity and honesty. His execution in the snow was graphic - the soldiers in the firing squad were so unnerved by their thankless job that none of their bullets pierced Slovik's heart. His death was therefore neither painless nor quick. The film was a perfect illustration of the ultimate ugliness of war, and one that perfectly suited Sheen's convictions.

(1) Dwight Eisenhower, who authorized the execution, tried to stop the publication of the nonfiction account of the execution, written by William Bradford Huie, in 1954 when he was president. The rights to the book were bought by Frank Sinatra, who tried to get backing for a film adaptation in 1960. He was accused of being a communist sympathizer and had to cancel the project because of his ties to the campaign of JFK.

Stillborn

2011-10-19T11:37:00.004+08:00

I watched a new Thai film, The Unborn Child (Sop Dek 2002)(1) last weekend, knowing nothing more about it than that it was a horror film. Asian cinema abounds in these kinds of films, ever since the surprising worldwide success of the Japanese film The Ring in 1998. Since Asians are mostly non-Christian, their concepts of death, good and evil are refreshingly different. For a Western audience, an audience whose own ideas about those subjects have been shaken up in the last few generations, it seems that the old phrase "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know" has been turned on its head.

The films are all ultimately silly, and many talented Asian filmmakers have turned to them only because they are more likely to have a chance of making them than a film about ordinary people living their ordinary lives. But some of the films are interesting for their imaginative, low-budget solutions to technical problems.

Unborn Child, directed by Poj Arnon, resembles other Asian horror films in its predictably slow pacing and its fetishistic emphasis on specific body parts. The emphasis in Unborn is on vaginas and fetuses. The story is about a young couple whose little daughter befriends an invisible playmate that the father eventually realizes is the ghost of a child he paid to have aborted. Subplots involve young women who become pregnant and seek abortions, which are carried out under the most ludicrous conditions. (The subtitles further complicate matters by referring to "illegal" abortions, which suggests there are also "legal" ones in Thailand. Abortion is illegal in Thailand except in special circumstances.(2)) The woman who carries out the abortions is continually taking drags from a cigarette during the procedure, getting what is presumably placental blood all over her cigarette. The film indulges in this imagery to deliver a political message against abortion. It even tacks on a title at the end that reads (in the English subtitles): "This film is dedicated to all baby souls in the world and hope [sic] there will be no more losses."

The Unborn Child is so disgusting that, even though I watched it in my living room, I wanted to walk out on it. It spends seemingly half of its running time showing us characters who walk around looking for someone who isn't there. But even if it were a masterpiece, the film is a piece of propaganda representing abortion as a terrible, gruesome crime against the fetus. It suggests, with thudding stupidity, that women who have abortions, and men who make them necessary, will be visited by the ghosts of the unborn babies.

The woman abortionist in the film actually presents an argument that is informed by Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation. She says that she is doing a service for unwanted children whose souls will be able to find another life in another body, with parents who genuinely want them. But the action of the film - with the ghosts of the aborted fetuses attacking the abortionist en masse and forcing her to mutilate herself with the same instrument she uses to kill them - shows how little the director takes the Buddhist explanation seriously. The real villain in the film, the one who's responsible for all the trouble, is an incompetent undertaker who, instead of cremating them and releasing their souls, has to stockpile the bodies of aborted fetuses in his (un-refrigerated) morgue. After a few hundred end up being stuffed into the storage locker, the stench alone would've been enough to raise the dead.

(1) The number in the Thai title refers to the number of fetuses discovered buried near a temple crematorium in Bangkok. A trailer for the film can be seen here.
(2) An excellent article on the subject can be found on the Manchester Guardian website.

The Legacy of the Shoes

2011-10-16T13:13:00.003+08:00

"I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty."
Imelda Marcos (The number was officially placed at 2,700.)

History is, or used to be, based on something called objective truth - an implicit belief that what is written down is a fairly accurate account of what actually happened. But it's been said that if you tell a lie enough times, it becomes the truth. This would appear to be the case with Imelda Marcos and her children, Ferdinand Jr. (nicknamed "Bongbong") and Imee. The fact that they have been living, despite attempts to divest them of some of their wealth, in palaces for the last forty-odd years may have had the effect of reinforcing their own delusions. Bongbong was elected a senator and Imelda elected a representative to the Philippine Congress. Imee is now governor of Ilocos Norte.

These uncommonly wealthy but quite mediocre people no longer have any reason to lie. Ferdinand's children could have simply said "I am not my father" and let themselves off the hook. Instead they go on repeating the same scabrous song and dance that Imelda has performed for twenty years - that Ferdinand Marcos left the Philippines a safer, richer, and prouder nation than he found it. What they can't seem to grasp is the simple fact that it doesn't even matter if a man acts like a saint 364 days out of a year if he acts like a demon on the last. Ferdinand Marcos didn't have to be a saint or a demon. He simply needed to be a good president.

Current Philippine president Benigno Aquino III was asked in a recent conference with the foreign press if he would consider granting a request from the Marcos family that he be given a state funeral. Aquino, whose father was assassinated either by direct order of Marcos or by Marcos supporters in 1983, and whose mother beat Marcos in a now-famous "snap election" and subsequent People Power Revolution, replied unequivocally "not on my watch".

That means the Marcos family will have to wait until 2016 when Aquino leaves office and another president, perhaps more sympathetic, may give them a hearing. Or they will have to bury the body of their patriarch, dead since 1989 and lying in a state of perfect preservation in a glass case, in his native province of Ilocos Norte.

Henry Sy, the wealthiest man in the Philippines, had a dream when he opened his first shoe mart in 1948, that one day every Filipino would own a pair of shoes. Sixty-three years and 41 SM Malls later, I can say from experience that Mr. Sy's dream hasn't yet been realized. When I got married in Balibago, Pampanga in 1995, I had to buy my bride's father a pair of shoes so he could attend the wedding.

When the Marcos family was whisked away by the U.S. military in February 1986,* when it looked like the presidential Malacañang Palace would be overrun. President Reagan himself offered the Marcoses asylum in the U.S. Witnesses claimed they saw diaper bags filled with gold objects and pallets of freshly printed Philippine Pesos loaded onto the C-141. But most of the money that Marcos stole from the Philippine treasury and in various scams was already safely hidden in overseas banks accounts and in real estate investments. The city of New York seized the Marcos properties. According to one account, Imelda considered buying the Empire State Building, but thought it would be too ostentatious even for her.

When Malacañang was finally searched, the stashes of artworks, nick-nacks and doodads that were found there included 2,700 pairs of shoes belonging to Imelda. A month after the Marcoses fled the Philippines, Lance Morrow wrote an essay, "The Shoes of Imelda Marcos" for Time.

"The parable of Imelda's shoes has something to teach. She could never wear them all. Nor could the Marcos family, one suspects, manage to spend the billions of dollars they plundered from the Philippines. . . . The Marcos plundering seems ultimately a cheerless affair, covert though sometimes ostentatious, avaricious though often prodigal. Christ said, 'If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.' Marcos did not wish to wait. He turned Christianity upside down. He took nourishment from the mouths of the poor and transformed it into his treasure on earth. Such venality is not a matter of either Freud or metaphysics. It is just a brutal habit, the crocodile reflex of a man too long in power. It is a subdivision of the banality of evil."

What makes the image of those 5,400 shoes especially obscene for Filipinos is that owning one pair is a status symbol when so many will either never own them or will never have a life in which shoes would be practical. Instead, the majority of Filipinos wear flip-flops, or "tsinelas" (a word, like so many others in Tagalog, borrowed from the Spanish).

But in a world that rewards excessive greed, that allows a tiny handful of people to own almost everything and that can impoverish everyone else in the world by impetuously trying to increase their wealth, Imelda is perfectly at home. If those shoes could walk, they'd be marching over the bodies of the protesters who are trying to "occupy" Wall Street.

*Ferdinand was carried aboard a C-9 on a stretcher, while his family and their belongings, along with some 49 "supporters" were loaded aboard a C-141.

Remastering the Film: Yasujiro Ozu

2011-10-13T10:37:00.001+08:00

"For me, never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose: to present an image of man in our century, a usable, true, and valid image in which he not only recognizes himself, but from which, above all, he may learn about himself."
Wim Wenders, Tokyo-Ga (1985)

The general admiration of the films of Yasujiro Ozu in the West is a direct refutation of the idea, astonishing to us but common among many Asian scholars and artists, that there is a distinct sensibility that only members of a certain race or culture are able to perceive. The titles of some of his films are certainly addressed to viewers with a distinctive palate, like The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) or The Taste of Mackerel (1962). The latter title was changed to An Autumn Afternoon for Western audiences.

Because of this cultural prejudice, Ozu was probably the most inaccessible genius of international film for more than two decades. Treasured in Japan, for the length of his career and for nearly a decade after his death in 1963, one day before his 60th birthday, Ozu's films were regarded as too idiosyncratically Japanese for Western audiences to fully apprehend. The moment New Yorker Films decided to ignore this prohibition and show a selection of Ozu's films in New York in 1972, the response of audiences and critics was unanimously positive.

Ozu's films lack the exoticism that fans of the Japanese film had come to expect in the 1950s from films like Rashomon, Ugetsu, and Gate of Hell. Like Naruse, whose work had been neglected in the West for much longer, Ozu sought out dramas that took place in ordinary contemporary settings, among people whose ordinariness was irreproachable. Rather than the larger-than-life stories found in the films of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, Ozu's uncommon artistry looked into the commonest of places - a middle class home, an office, a provincial town, a suburban street.

Ozu's most overt statement on his favorite subject - the decline of the family - can be found in what is regarded by many as his greatest film, Tokyo Story (1953). An elderly couple set out on a trip to Tokyo to visit their grown children. They are shocked to find they have become selfish, disrespectful, and greedy. Only the former wife of their dead son, who hasn't remarried, is everything their own children are not: kind, loving, and considerate. Without warning, on the way home, the old woman breaks down and dies. After the funeral, the children leave their widower father alone in his house. Ozu closes the film with the image of the old man (Chishu Ryu, who was 49 when the film was made) smoke from the mosquito coil floating around him like incense, gazing forlornly at the view.

Ozu represented families before and after Tokyo Story, but never so purposefully. In fact, it makes Ozu's message come across much more explicitly and, for me, forcedly. Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoonare far more moving because they don't elicit emotions so easily. Their trajectory is similar to Tokyo Story's but they are more complex because they allow their stories to unfold without Setsuko Hara delivering the line "Isn't life disappointing?"

Occasionally Ozu concentrated on subjects other than the family, most interestingly in one of my favorites of his films, Floating Weeds (1959), which follows a troupe of itinerant actors to a small seaside town. The leader of the troupe, played by the great Ganjiro Nakamura, has a young mistress who is the troupe's leading lady. But the small town is home to another woman, who has borne him a son. The old man thinks about quitting his vagabond life, but he returns to his mistress when he learns that there is really no place for him in his grown son's and former girlfriend's world. (The plot of this film is virtually identical to Ingmar Bergman's masterful film Sawdust and Tinsel [1953].)

And Ozu's camera. It's the most noticeable part of his filmmaking, and it is the most profound element of his art. Antonioni once remarked that camera placement is a moral decision. He meant that where the director places his camera determines how he wants the audience to feel about his subject. By the same token, it tells the audience what the director thinks about himself. While many filmmakers have lately decided to abandon the fixed perspective required by traditional camera placement, if only because cameras have gotten smaller and lighter, Ozu takes advantage of the fact that the viewer has to be seated in order to watch his films by sitting down his camera in the room with his actors, on the floor where, in Japan, they sit, eat, and sleep.

Wim Wenders visited Tokyo wanting to get closer to the places that Ozu depicted in his films. The result was Tokyo-Ga, which is invaluable for its interviews with Chishu Ryu, the actor who played the father in so many of his films, and with Yuharu Atsuta, Ozu's cameraman, who showed Wenders the famous squatting camera position. The rest of the film inadvertently shows the extent to which Ozu's world has disappeared almost completely from 1985 Tokyo. The only surviving setting is the labyrinthine bar district, with innumerable cozy, inviting bars. (In one such bar, called La Jetée, Wenders finds Chris Marker!)

Dog Gone

2011-10-10T12:10:00.004+08:00

When I recently moved farther from the port town on my island into another house, a feral dog who liked to take shelter on my porch had just had puppies. I didn't see them at first but I could hear them sheltering under my back stoop, whining from the cold when it rained at night. These dogs eat only what they can scrounge from people's trash and the leftovers from their meals. (There is no waste disposal that I know of anywhere in this province.) This diet somehow manages to keep a surprising number of dogs alive, but there is constant fighting among them and they all carry the scars of survival.

The dog that had the puppies started bringing them, one at a time, onto my porch as soon as she and I became friends. Having a dog around your door is always a good idea when you're a stranger and people are convinced that you have stacks of cash inside your house. Given the fact that the dogs' survival depends on whatever they can scavenge, the puppies' survival was especially precarious. In fact, within a week or so, I never saw the puppies again.

Life went on for the mother, and about six wees ago, without my knowing she was carrying one, she had another litter, amounting to four this time. As the weeks have gone by since then, I watched as they survived or, one by one, did not. One of them felt safe enough on my porch to lie down next to one of my tsinelas (flip-flops) and die. Half-starving, it had eaten something it shouldn't have, spent the morning throwing up and only when I began to smell that unmistakable stench waft into my sala sis IO look outside and find it lying there, with flies around its eyes and mouth. I put my hand inside a plastic bag, picked up its cold little body (none of the puppies had noticeably grown for weeks) and pulled the bag inside out around it. My neighbor, a retired cop, buried it somewhere for me.

The one puppy that is left is still nursing - when the mother lets him. When I can, I make sure that she gets the first go at my leftovers, even when the alpha male makes threatening noises as he watches her wolf down the fatback and fish bones. When she looks at me now, I see a calm, contended look in her brown eyes. Just how many more times her well-worn body can stand the strain of a litter I shall have to see.

Appreciation

2011-10-07T10:06:00.001+08:00

One of the most telling details that has emerged from what people are calling the Michael Jackson Death Trial is how many people depended on Jackson as a source of income and to what extent he was an idol as well as a cash cow.

The accused Dr Conrad Murray's witnessed behavior during the moments when he found that Jackson had expired betrayed the near-frantic reactions of a man who was trying to resuscitate a corpse, not because he cared about the vital human being who had given up the ghost quite unexpectedly under his care, but because of what he was figuring that he had to gain by keeping Michael's heart beating and what he stood to lose if he did not. The image of Murray whipping a dead horse sprang to mind as accounts from EMS crews and emergency room doctors were certain that Jackson was clinically dead while Murray was insisting that they keep trying to resuscitate him.

Viewers of the concert movie This Is It (an ironically crass title) were spared, through careful editing, the recorded moments when Jackson betrayed how actually fragile his health was while he put himself through rehearsals for a concert tour he himself announced would be his last.

Another inadvertent revelation of Murray's trial is that his obvious incompetence and unscrupulousness were the conditions of his employment as Michael Jackson's personal physician. A more competent and scrupulous doctor simply wouldn't have prescribed all the drugs that Jackson insisted on having, no matter how much Jackson offered to pay him.

I watched an incredible interview the other day with one of Jackson's business advisers who, while claiming to have been a close friend of his, spoke with unconcealed and unrestrained pride about the dead man's ongoing Net Worth. Despite the expiration of the mortal Michael Jackson, the Estate of Michael Jackson lives on, and even grows, continuing to enrich all the people named in his will but also the many employed in the management of his legacy.

In his final days, Jackson wasn't much different from Elvis - a drug-addicted wreck. At least Jackson wasn't found dead on the toilet. When the Arthur Penn film Bonnie and Clyde became an unexpected hit in 1967, cartoon appeared in a popular magazine that depicted two prison inmates, one of whom says to the other "Bonnie and Clyde! Bonnie and Clyde! All I hear is Bonnie and Clyde. The saying is true, you're never appreciated until after you're dead!" In Jackson's case, he has appreciated in more than one sense.

Stuffed Animals

2011-10-05T10:44:00.002+08:00

The news last week that a remake of Sam Peckinpah's powerful film Straw Dogs (1971) was in release infuriated me so much that I decided to revisit the original, if only in memory. "Why not rewrite The Sun Also Rises while you're at it?" I thought. The same people who say they revere certain classic films, while engaged in remaking them, are showing a funny kind of reverence. It shows just how little they take film seriously. Remake a piece of skilled trash like Psycho, as Gus Van Sant did, by all means. Or simply admit that you're only doing it for the money and because you can't come up with an original idea of your own. The truly sad part is that a majority of people aren't likely to seek out the original, simply because the remake just isn't compelling enough. Score one for the philistines.

I noticed from the preview that the remake is set in good old Hicksville, USA rather than the English village in the original. This perhaps gives the story an unfortunate Deliverance-like bias against red state rednecks ("Squeal like a pig!"), small towns and farmers. It would certainly give the new film an unintended political slant. But Peckinpah was trying to tell us what he thought about men and women. He wasn't giving us a travel advisory. I never had the feeling that he was making a general statement about English people, even if the censors may have taken it that way.

In Peckinpah's film, the hero, played by Dustin Hoffman, is a pacifist university mathematician who has come to a small English village (called Wakely, but the film was shot in St Buryan, Cornwall) for some peace and quiet while he works on a new theorem. With him is his newlywed wife (Susan George) who is a native of the village. Hoffman hires some local men to help renovate parts of his old farmhouse. Unbeknownst to Hoffman, his wife and one of the men are former lovers. The film becomes a contest of wills, with Peckinpah imposing a quite primitive view of men and women. (Peckinpah had been reading books by Robert Ardrey on human behavior when he wrote the script.)

The hired hands devise a scheme in which they take Hoffman out hunting while his wife's former boyfriend reclaims her in the film's most objectionable scene. Peckinpah depicts how the wife shows pleasure as she is being raped. The scene caused an uproar precisely because it was presented so powerfully. Pauline Kael called the film a "fascist work of art" - supposedly because it tries to impose its own lurid views of human sexuality on the viewer.

I remember the telling moment when a clash of cultures takes place in a single image: Hoffman kills a bird but comes close to tears when he sees it lying dead before him. The symbolism was made all the more moving by Hoffman's unexpected access of emotion, while cross-cutting shows us his wife being brutalized back at his farm.

The trailer for the remake shows how much of the original was retained: the bear trap, the pots of hot oil, Hoffman beating one of the men with a poker like he's teeing off at St Andrews while mad bagpipe music blares from his stereo.

Dustin Hoffman was excellent as the timid hero, whom Peckinpah helps discover the animal within. Susan George, like many another daughter of Albion, had imperfect teeth that made her seem all the sexier. But one of the best elements of Peckinpah's film was the extraordinary music of Jerry Fielding (he won an Oscar for it - but big deal). He had worked with Peckinpah since his days on the television show The Rifleman and wrote excellent scores for many of his films, including The Wild Bunch, Junior Bonner, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. John Simon noted that his music for Straw Dogs was influenced by Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto". I found it worthy of Stravinsky himself.

The Great Divide

2011-10-02T09:18:00.001+08:00

Since the 2000 presidential election, in which Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote, but Republican candidate George W. Bush won the most electoral college votes (and won the election), the fact that there are two Americas has become obvious.

Several issues make the divide between the two Americas seem particularly unbridgeable, and, appropriately I suppose, have to do with matters of life and death. Abortion, with supporters calling themselves "Pro-Choice" and opponents calling themselves "Pro-Life", has inspired its more extreme opponents to murdering abortion doctors and blowing up abortion clinics.

Currently, abortion is legal in every state of the U.S. since the Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade in 1973. Whatever its legal status, abortion is carried out everywhere and all the time by women who, for whatever reason, do not wish that their lives should be changed permanently by an unplanned pregnancy. I suppose that if it were to be banned in the U.S., its opponents would have the strange satisfaction of knowing that they will have succeeded in making abortion so risky that it could potentially cause the deaths of the mothers as well as the fetuses.

In a bizarre twist, many of the people who are against abortion are also enthusiastically for capital punishment. They continue to believe that it is a deterrent, despite proof to the contrary. People simply don't commit crimes in the belief that they will be caught and punished.

Capital punishment has its supporters in tyrannies like China and North Korea, but also in the United States, which is alone in the Western Hemisphere in its observance of the practice. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976, but 16 states have abolished the practice.

Last week, it seemed that the whole world was watching as Troy Davis became the latest victim of the moral turpitude of some Americans. Our sudden knowledge of the existence of this man was quickly upset by the state of Georgia's determination to expedite his nonexistence. If the cruelty of the event wasn't already obvious, it was delayed for three hours while a last minute appeal to the Supreme Court was being considered. Since the execution was by lethal injection, Troy Davis likely laid there on the table with the i.v. in his arm the whole time. That's like if he'd been hanged, he'd have had the noose around his neck and been standing on the trap door for 3 hours.

I have made my feelings on this subject abundantly clear before now. People who despair of their countrymen ever coming around to their thinking on the subject have to persevere. I recall when some avowed liberals moved to Canada when George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 because they found the political and moral atmosphere in America to be poisonous. Certainly their departure gratified those on the other side of the divide. But America is my country. And my side is winning.

Remastering the Film: Louis Malle

2011-09-29T13:20:00.001+08:00

Having for various reasons conspicuously passed over some of the big names of the nouvelle vague on my list of Masters of Film, I hope that it doesn't appear spiteful of me to put Louis Malle in place of them. He was too often associated in people's minds with the movement, despite having nothing to do with Cahiers du Cinéma. He learned from them, as everyone did, but he would eventually surpass their accomplishments - even though he made the Big Mistake (answering the call of Hollywood) that Truffaut and Chabrol were smart enough to resist.

Malle began in documentary film, co-directing Le Monde du Silence, with Jacques Cousteau in 1956. It won a Palm d'or at Cannes. His first fiction film was Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (1958), known as Lift to the Scaffold in Britain and Elevator to the Gallows in the States. Fantastically cool (Malle persuaded Miles Davis to do the music), Vernon Young called it an improvement on Hitchcock. I call it "definitive".

Elevator starred Jeanne Moreau. Malle cast her again in his next film, The Lovers (1958), a huge hit in France and abroad, due to its Gallic honesty about sex. Moreau was never more alluring. Feeling the tide of the New Wave, Malle next tried his hand at a Marienbad-like experimental film, Zazie in the Metro (1960), based on the Raymond Queneau novel. It was spirited but ultimately unsatisfying. Malle tried to recoup some of the commercial success and notoriety (in the States) of The Lovers with A Very Private Affair (1962) (simply Vie privée in French), starring Brigitte Bardot.

Just when he seemed to have gone commercial, out of nowhere Malle made his masterpiece, Le Feu Follet (1963)(1). Though its subject was forbidding, the film's beauty is indisputable. Maurice Ronet's performance as a man who's run out of time was unsurpassed. For the next five years, Malle seemed to enjoy being a successful professional director (evidently something that Truffaut enjoyed tremendously - the the detriment of his art) without having much to say. In 1968 he took off for India with a small crew and returned with more than thirty hours of film. He managed to reduce it to a feature film released the following year, Calcutta. If the film seems rather lost, it certainly reflected Malle's reaction to the phantasmagoria he found in India. More footage was put together and shown on British TV in seven episodes as Phantom India (1969). The Indian government objected to Malle's completely open-eyed look at their country, and banned the BBC from filming there for several years.

Malle's next feature film was a return to his stride. Le Souffle au Coeur (1971) was known - slightly inaccurately - as Murmur of the Heart in the States. Set in Dijon in 1954, the film has everything going for it, including the return of Lea Massari, the girl who disappeared in Antonioni's L'Avventura. The film gets more than a little flippant, however, when it suggests that a boy's sex with his mother is no big deal ("It'll be our secret. I'll remember it without remorse, tenderly. Promise you'll do the same."). And the actor at the center of the film, Benoît Ferreux, is not very good. The soundtrack, however, is all Charlie Parker and Sidney Bechet.

Malle had helped produced the Marcel Ophuls documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1968), and his fiction film, Lacombe Lucien is a beautiful counterpart to it. It examines some of the confusion and collusion of the French during the occupation. Pauline Kael used Hannah Arendt's line about the "banality of evil" to describe the film's titular character. Malle later wondered at his choice for the lead, Pierre Blaise, who became a star but was killed in a car accident a the following year. The film is an beautiful tribute to him and it was Malle's last great film.

After a few documentaries (Human, Too Human, 1974, stands out in my memory, suggesting that industrial robotics are extensions of our bodies), and a forgettable foray into surrealism, Black Moon (1975), Malle departed France for Hollywood in 1975. The move was not unlike those of many other artists, and the results were the same. Some of his American films were successful, but none of them are the equal of Le Feu Follet or Lacombe Lucien. In fact, it is often hard to believe that the puerile Pretty Baby or Atlantic City were the product of the same intelligence that gave us Elevator to the Gallows or Calcutta. Not even a return to France in the late '80s (Au Revoir les Enfants and Milou en Mai) could resuscitate Malle's deceased muse. Malle told interviewers that he left France because he didn't want to end up like Truffaut, who made Day for Night in 1973, a film about the making of a film. What Malle failed to notice was that his last film, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) is a film about the rehearsal of a play.

(1) Based on the novel by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, the title is an idiomatic term that corresponds to the English "will-o-the-wisp".

Sensitivity Training

2011-09-26T13:24:00.009+08:00

I watched Morgan Freeman on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight last Friday (Saturday morning here). I think Freeman is a fine actor when the part calls on him to be, as in Glory, Driving Miss Daisy, and Seven. At one point in the interview he said that the Tea Party were being racist when they claim they will do whatever it takes to ensure that Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

"[The Tea Party's] stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What’s, what does that, what underlines that? Screw the country. We’re going to do whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here."

While I might be satisfied with the interpretation of the Tea Party's avowed goal that it is nothing but the usual election rhetoric, and that perhaps Freeman, like other black Americans of his generation, might be seeing and hearing racism where none was intended, I am inclined this time to agree with him, with one distinction.

I have examined this subject before, and I believe that, while some white Americans are often surprised when a black American makes the charge of racism against speech and behavior that appears to them to be quite innocent and innocuous, it is due to the fact that white Americans are oblivious to racism simply because it is never directed at them and because they have never lived under the cloud of racism all their lives.

When I lived in Des Moines several years ago, I worked for awhile for a private security company that was contracted by the city to patrol the downtown skywalks. My uniform made me look more like a cop than those worn by the city cops, since my shirt and pants were navy blue rather than dark blue, and the patch on my arm was a shield, while theirs was a circle. My job was to walk the skywalk, all five miles of it, and make sure that no one was there between the hours of midnight and 4 AM. If I found anyone there, I had to help them along to the nearest exit or call for police backup if they refused.

One night I was walking through a bank building when it was about five minutes 'til midnight and a black man was walking toward me. As soon as he was within about ten yards from me, I asked "Do you have somewhere to go, sir?" That was my line. When the answer was "yes", my next question was "Well you had better get there before midnight because the skywalk is closing."

But the black man didn't answer me. He didn't even look at me. When I asked him the question a second time as he passed by me, he didn't respond then either. Finally I turned around and raised my voice, asking the question for a third time. The black man spun around and hissed the word "yes", and gave me a look, a look that said, "I am holding you personally responsible for 350 years of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation." Then he went on his way.

How did I know that look? Where had I seen it before? Or was I simply reading all that into the black man's expression because I have a guilty conscience about all those things? I could've just attributed it, like white people always do, to the racial chip that some black people have placed precariously on their shoulders, quick to respond whenever the slightest contact makes it fall. My co-workers, all white people like me (1), certainly assured me that it was the black man's problem, not mine.

I was only doing my pinchey job, even if the uniform I was wearing, the badge and the duty belt, stood for something the black man instinctively hated. Since it was me in that uniform, standing behind that badge, all his contempt was directed straight at me. And I wanted nothing more at that moment, as I turned and, suddenly exhausted, walked away, was to tear that uniform off and never put it on again.

Wasn't the Tea Party created some time in 2009? And wasn't Barack Obama sworn in as the first black American president in January of that year? Is there some connection between an extremely conservative political group declaring its existence a few months after the inauguration of Barack Obama? If it is merely a coincidence, it is one of the most unfortunate coincidences in history. While I often get the feeling that some of the Tea Party's loudest voices, who have been calling Obama a socialist, a fascist, and questioning the validity of his nationality ever since he took office, are simply using all those words and tactics because they can't bring themselves to use another word, a word that is also a slur (and to them, calling someone a socialist is one of the worst insults they can imagine) but which is no longer acceptable for use by white people, I think Morgan Freeman may be confusing the words "racial" and "racist". Is alot of the Tea Party's rhetoric racially motivated? Probably. Does that also make it racist?

(1) Latest statistics show that Des Moines is 82.3% white. The Tea Party is estimated to be 79% white.

Taking Sides

2011-09-24T15:38:00.004+08:00

Given that the former Palestinian Liberation Organization is closer, politically, to the militant Irish Republican Army (indeed, the PLO and IRA once trained together in Syrian and Libyan terrorist training camps), I feel somewhat qualified to comment on the imminent bid for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.

Until quite recently, the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland seemed at least as intractable as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As long ago as the 16th century, when Henry VIII reformed the Church of England, Protestants have been settling in Northern Ireland. When the Republic of Ireland was created in 1949 (Israel was established only a year before), six counties in the north were retained as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Radical Irish Republicans, who wanted the island united under the Republic, saw the protestant loyalists in the north as invaders and eventually formed the Provisional IRA in 1969 (the Arab-Israeli War was in 1967), which conducted acts of sabotage at first, which increased in frequency and savagery when the "Troubles" began in Northern Ireland after the Battle of the Bogside in 1969, provoking the British government to deploy its army two days later to prevent rioting from escalating into outright civil war.

For many years some Irish-Americans supported the IRA either openly or covertly, believing that the cause of the Troubles was a war of occupation being carried out by the British Army, and that the only solution was to convince the British government to withdraw their troops. More astute observers, however, understood that if the British Army were to suddenly withdraw, a brief but bloody civil war would take place, causing thousands of refugees to flee the violence into the Irish Republic or to nearby Scotland.

I came of age during the Troubles and was dimly aware of their implications. I had a copy of the 1916 Irish Rebellion Declaration tacked to the back of my bedroom door, and I listened to Irish rebel songs, foremost of which was Paul McCartney's stridently obtuse anthem "Give Ireland Back to the Irish". After several years of watching the ups and - mostly - the downs of the Troubles from the safety of America, I had to simply quit and accept that nothing was as simple as I once thought. I endured too many Irish-Americans who talk about the "old country" as if there were any such place, drinking their black-and-tans on St. Patrick's Day. I once believed there was enough hatred between the Protestants and Catholics to fuel the conflict for another five hundred years. I began to be thankful that my maternal great-grandfather got on that boat and left Ireland behind for good. When he arrived, he told the immigration official his name, which sounded to the man like "Cassiday". He had the good sense to drop the "O" as well.

But sometimes even revolutionaries want nothing more than to live a normal life. A new generation in Northern Ireland, fed up with the violence, has decided that they are ready to accept some form of coexistence, even if some of the old inequalities persist. In a move that would've been thought inconceivable even in the mid-1990s, the IRA announced they were renouncing violence altogether, and the "Good Friday" Agreement was approved in a referendum in 1998. That agreement still stands as of today. The Irish are united in their rejection of violence and their commitment to coexistence. For me, it has been an almost incredible blast of fresh air from a country whose history has been a litany of doom and gloom for too long.

Coexistence in Israel is by now an impossible dream. A separate state for Palestinians is the only conceivable solution at the moment. Along with disappointment, this state of affairs leaves me feeling quite a bit resentful toward both sides in the conflict, since successive American governments have made such a big deal out of it for so long. I am sick and tired of the same news year-in and year-out from Israel. The U.S. has invested so much in Israel (not to mention Mubarak's Egypt, Assad's Syria, and Gaddafi's Libya) that it's a shame they cannot occasionally do what we ask them to do. I also feel that, if the Irish in Ulster can get over everything they've been through in the last forty years and get along with one another, so can the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis seem to be saying, with some justification, "since you couldn't coexist with us for two thousand years, we will not coexist with anyone either!" But, try as they will, they can't make the Palestinians go away.

Recently, Israeli citizens took part in a mass (nude) demonstration on the shores of the Dead Sea to make a point about the environmental problems facing the body of water. A few weeks ago, they protested in much greater numbers, fully clothed, against the rise in the cost of living in Israel. If that many Israelis were protesting the existence of the biggest open air prison in the world - Gaza - perhaps their leaders would be more willing to negotiate with the Palestinians.

Up All Night: American Graffiti

2011-09-21T14:18:00.002+08:00

First films made by some fledgling American directors have been about the pain but also the necessity of leaving home. Think of Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), and George Lucas' American Graffiti (1973). The origin of all these films is usually overlooked. It was Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953).

After successfully transposing his student short, THX-1138, to a more sizable budget feature film in 1971, George Lucas turned away from the future to the past. While some may think that it can't have been all that hard in 1973 to recreate one summer night in 1962, it must've seemed like ancient history to Lucas. While redolent of the period, American Graffiti also contains sad hints of the obsequious time in which it was made. The rueful end titles announce that Terry ("Toad") Fields was reported MIA in Vietnam, and "Curt Henderson is now a writer living in Canada".(1) During the Vietnam years, ROTC meant "Run Off to Canada".

American Graffiti (2) dramatizes twelve hours in the life of a California town (Modesto) at the end of summer, 1962. The tagline was "Where were you in '62?" I was four years old in Albany, Georgia. The film is not just another plunge into treacly nostalgia. It brings the time and the place to life with subtlety and imagination. For me, it remains George Lucas' best film.

"Cruising" is the activity in which every young person in the film engages. And nearly all the film's action, after the "sock hop" at the high school is over, takes place on the nocturnal streets of the town. The beauty of the passing old Chevys, Buicks and Lincolns, as they seem to revolve around a center like a record on a spindle, is a fascinating and enduring image.

But the genuine stroke of genius for the film was hiring Walter Murch, who created, with Lucas, a soundscape as rich and detailed as the imagery. In interviews, Murch spoke of "worldizing" the soundtrack:

The acoustic treatment of worldizing it, so that it seemed to be something that existed in real space. The idea was that every teenage car in this town was turned to the same station, and, therefore, anywhere you went in the town, you heard this sound echoing off the buildings and passing by in cars.(3)

Lucas' fascination with Wolfman Jack and his large collection of vintage records gave him an opportunity to create with Murch a radio show that was typical of the ones he heard at the time. They hired Wolfman Jack and recorded a two hour show, and interspersed the music, along with the dialogue scenes and incidental sounds. Purchasing the rights to all the songs was a large portion of the film's $775,000 budget.

As the night deepens, the action slows and the songs on the soundtrack become ballads. Just as the dawn is breaking, John Milner wins the long-anticipated race, Carl talks with his blonde dream girl on a pay phone for the first and last time, and Steve and Laurie are reunited as Steve resolves never to leave her and go off to college. The end titles tell us that John was killed by a drunk driver the following years and Steve became an insurance salesman in Modesto.

The hero of Fellini's film, Moraldo, spends the film coming to the difficult decision, and awaiting the right opportunity, to leave his friends and family behind in his small town. When he finally does so, he gazes from a window of the train at the passing town and images of his friends, asleep and oblivious of his leaving, pass before him. American Graffiti ends with Curt boarding a plane and leaving Modesto for college. He listens to a radio as Wolfman Jack signs off, and notices far below on a deserted highway the white Thunderbird.

(1) Because he didn't want to prolong the titles, Lucas left out the names and fates of his female characters, prompting Pauling Kael to accuse him of "chauvinism".
(2) Among the titles that the studio (Universal) flirted with in post-production was Another Slow Night in Modesto.
(3) The entire Murch interview can be found here.

Up All Night

2011-09-20T11:34:00.003+08:00

"Until you've faced the dawn with sleepless eyes, you don't know what love is." (1)

Just about everyone I know, on hearing the words spoken by Falstaff to his drinking buddy Prince Hal, "we have heard the chimes at midnight", would say, "Big deal!"

Midnight in Shakespeare's day was, with a total absence of public lighting, when going out of doors was ill-advised and travel had to be conducted by the light of torches, a much bigger deal than it is today. Hearing the chimes at 3 or 4 in the morning is not even such a big deal any more. But few people have the stamina, unless their work requires it, to stay up until dawn. It's disturbing to watch the night expire and the new day begin when one has been awake for 24 hours straight. It's one thing to awake to watch the dawn, busying oneself for the labors of the coming day. It's a quite different thing to watch the sun come up after being up all night.

I defined the magic hour last week as the period that lasts only about twenty minutes when the sun sets and the earth is illuminated by light coming from the sky but not from a direct source, eliminating shadows and giving everything a glowing, magic quality.

But there is another magic hour in the day, just before the sun rises and the day, as it were, commences. The light at that hour may be identical to the light after dusk, but because it arrives at the end of the night, bringing warmth rather than removing it, a harbinger of what is to come rather than what is past, its qualities are altogether different.

A number of great films have taken us from dusk til dawn, using the sun's arrival as a climax, or anti-climax, a moment of truth or reckoning, when the dramas that have unfolded achieve some resolution. La Notte, Hiroshima Mon Amour, American Graffiti, Le Jour se lève, La Dolce Vita, Smiles of a Summer Night, Melvin and Howard, Elevator to the Gallows. I will be writing about these films, and others, in the coming weeks.

Vernon Young wrote that "the film is in nothing more wonderful than this: it brings us not simply a world we never made but worlds we would not otherwise glimpse. It compensates us for all those lovely dawns we slept away, the sycamore trees under which we never awakened, the rivers we never crossed, the fugitive friendships that never ripened, the Southwest canyons or Bavarian churches we never reached."(2)

(1) Jazz standard "You Don't Know What Love Is", words and music by Gene De Paul and Don Raye.
(2) Vernon Young, "Our Local Idioms", On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art.

Remastering the Film: Hirokazu Koreeda

2011-09-17T14:53:00.006+08:00

Hirokazu Koreeda (his patronym is also transliterated as Kore-eda) is, at 49, the youngest filmmaker on my list of Masters of Film. Starting out as a director of documentaries, his first fiction film, Maborosi (1995), is predictably straightforward. But it is constructed around a mystery: was the death of the charming young man we observe in the early scenes an accident or a suicide?

Koreeda is so keen on finding the truth that he leaves the question unanswered, even when the young man's wife learns of the sometimes jealous spirit - "maborosi" - that presides over the perilous lives of fishermen. And she has to live with the mystery. The film has an almost uncanny feel for the quotidian, ordinariness of life that it's as if we are seeing it in this film for the first time. Koreeda's camera explores the quiet corners of the backstreets of a Japanese city (Osaka), as well as the natural splendors around a remote fishing village, with an eye for the strangeness and wonder of the world that we shape to accommodate us but that shapes us in return.

For his next film, Wadafuru Raifu (1998) - known as After Life in the States - Koreeda resorted to the documentary device of interviewing the principal subjects of the film, who have arrived at an unexceptional-looking old building where they are calmly informed that they have died and that they have until the end of one week to choose from among a lifetime's memories the one in which they will spend eternity.

This fanciful premise, which is one of the most attractive notions of the afterlife that I've ever encountered, is brought down to earth by Koreeda's observations of his characters as they try to decide what was most important about their lives. The memories that they choose, with the help of case workers whose status is undetermined, are entirely personal and show us their secret lives. At just the moment when their choices seem most predictable, some detail that they overlooked makes them change their minds. There is even one subject, a young man, who refuses to choose - precisely because he is told that he must. He joins the staff of caseworkers after one of them finally makes his own choice and vanishes on the last day into a memory he hadn't known was the one most cherished by a woman who secretly loved him.

Koreeda makes the old building and its surroundings, in late winter weather, substantially real. Drafty, with a leaking roof and wheezing radiators, it is the most lovely limbo ever conceived.

His next film, Distance (2001), explores a controversial subject: an apocalyptic religious cult similar to the "Aum Shinrikyo" which used Sarin poison gas to kill thirteen people in a Tokyo subway in 1995. In Koreeda's film, some members of the cult carry out the poisoning of a city's water supply and then commit mass suicide. Three years after the event, family members of the dead cult members gather at the lake's shore to observe the anniversary. They meet a survivor of the cult, who disappeared the night before the attack, and together they spend a night in a cabin the cult had used, sharing their memories of the dead. Because of its proximity to the September 11 terrorist attack in New York, and perhaps because of its honest exploration of the reasons for such attacks, Distance was never given theatrical release in the U.S.

Nobody Knows (2004) uses a news report that astonished the Japanese: a group of children were found living on their own in the most shocking conditions. Koreeda constructed a fictional story from the news item. The film is not an indictment of Japanese society. The hardships that the children endure in the film are quite avoidable. The only thing that keeps the oldest child, Akira, from contacting child services is the knowledge that he and his siblings would be separated from one another. Even Yuki's death wasn't exactly preventable, even if she had been taken to a hospital. Being abandoned by their mother is terrible, and her infrequent messages containing cash (but never enough) are feeble attempts to assuage her own guilt.

I suppose if anyone is to blame for the events in the film it is a world that doesn't realize that it could happen, even in the most prosperous country. Enough people get to know Akira and his situation. Yet they can't even make the one phone call that could save the children, or at least lessen their hardships. As soon as Akira makes up his mind that his mother will never return, he is responsible, at the age of 12, for whatever happens next.

Hana (2006) was a complete change of pace and direction for Koreeda. It is a period film, set in 1702 (the same year as the loyal 47 ronin's rebellion), and it is a comedy about a samurai with unaccountable scruples about killing.

Still Walking (2008) is a return to contemporary Japan, and is so masterly it gained Koreeda comparisons to Ozu. Comparing Koreeda to any of the old masters of Japanese film raises difficulties since his films have none of the plot-driven structure one finds in Ozu, Naruse, and Mizoguchi. Nor does Koreeda, like Kurosawa and Imamura, try to impose a vision or an overriding attitude toward people and society in his choice of subjects or characterization. He isn't interested in manipulating life to illustrate a point. He doesn't even seem to be much interested in telling a story.

Koreeda's style might be called "incidentalism" because of its reliance on the subtle accumulation of detail to elicit meaning. His films are closer to life than any other Japanese filmmaker since Susumu Hani. The strongest element of his art is his attachment to actuality. In fact, his films exude the same feeling for life as it is lived that is found in the great films of Ermanno Olmi - The Fiancés (1963) and One Fine Day (1969).

The Magic Hour

2011-09-14T10:54:00.004+08:00

For the purposes of a post I am working on, I looked up the definition of the "magic hour", which is also known as the "golden hour" and wound up scratching my head. There is some confusion about the meaning of the term.

Wikipedia defines it thus: "In photography, the golden hour (sometimes known as magic hour, especially in cinematography) is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day, when a specific photographic effect is achieved due to the quality of the light."

At the website magichour.com, the definition is more exact: "In photography the Magic Hour is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day."

At another website, photo.net, some photographers give their responses to the question "When is the magic hour?" One of them states:

"The term refers to the time when the sun is low in the sky. The exact time depends on geography, time of year, and weather conditions. It may only be a couple of minutes long, or the good lighting conditions may stretch for several hours (in the far northern summer, for example). There's a magic hour in the morning, too, but not as many people are awake and out taking pictures during that one."

Another response states:

"In a nutshell, when the term 'Magic Hour' is used, it is generally referring to the 1st hour of daylight and the last hour of daylight."

As I always understood it, the magic hour is actually the short period after the sun has already set, when the sky illuminates the earth. But since the light doesn't come from a single source, it is diffuse and creates no shadows. Everything seems lit as if from within.

In my DVD collection, I unearthed (almost literally, since the case has been mouldering in a corner for years) the disc of a documentary called Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography. Made in 1992 for NHK, the Japanese PBS, it is a splendid exploration of the history and art of cinematography. It contains numerous invaluable interviews with great cinematographers from all over the world, including one with Néstor Almendros, the Spanish-born Cuban genius who photographed some of Truffaut's and many of Eric Rohmer's best films.

The story goes that after seeing Truffaut's The Wild Child (1970), Terrence Malick wanted Almendros to be his cameraman for Days of Heaven (1978).* Many of the outdoor scenes in the film were shot during the "magic hour", which was defined by Almendros himself in the film Visions of Light:

Magic hour is a euphemism because it's not an hour. It's about 20 or 25 minutes at most. It's the moment when the sun sets, and after the sun sets. Before it is night. The skies have light, but there's no actual sun. And the light is very, very soft. And there's something, as you say, magic. It limited us to 20 useful minutes a day. But it paid on the screen.

All this is tempered by the knowledge that, while making Days of Heaven, Almendros was going blind.

*The still at the top is from Days of Heaven.

The Day America Stopped

2011-09-11T13:56:00.005+08:00

Clearly, 9/11 was an atrocity waiting to happen. On that day, America was wide open. When Osama Bin Laden was killed, I commented on the day of the attacks and the aftermath. In observance of the 10th anniversary of those attacks, here are a few more thoughts.

In my military career, whenever the "defcon" level was low, I couldn't begin to count the number of times when I drove through the main gate of a military facility completely unimpeded. Often, there was no one there in the guard shack to check my identification or inspect my vehicle. I felt then that a determined terrorist would've had every opportunity to carry out an attack on that or any other military base.

Since 9/11, I have sometimes wondered about the security screeners at Logan Int'l Airport in Boston who saw all those box cutters in the carry on luggage of the men who hijacked the planes, and how they must still feel about that day. They did their job exactly as described in their training. Box cutters were not on their list of impermissible items. They weren't considered weapons. Who could have imagined to what use those murderers would put them?

Looking back at the United States of America of ten years ago leads inevitably, I think, to compiling a list of all the things it has lost. For one thing, the War on Terror has realized one of George Orwell's most grim predictions - that war would some day become permanent.

We have lost a good deal of whatever privacy we had left, what with Homeland Security's authority to listen in on our phone conversations and to read our emails. A year or so after 9/11, I watched a TV program about some of the people who lost family members in the attacks that concentrated on the loss or degradation of their religious faith. But how seriously can we take someone's faith when it was willing to accept the Holocaust but unwilling to accept 9/11?

Airport security has, of course, "improved" - by making air travel an even greater pain in the arse than it was. It is no longer possible to see our loved ones off at the gate or to greet them as they emerge from it. Flight attendants have become more rude and aggressive because they're under so much more pressure. We get x-rayed and scanned and patted down just so there can be a semblance of safety. But all this security won't stop a determined terrorist when we already know some of the lengths to which they will go to kill us.

Then there was our response to the attacks. I say "our" only because the government acted on my behalf, even if I was never consulted, nor were, evidently, any others who had an ounce of objectivity. So the voices that were heard were not only the loudest but the most shrill. President Bush started a war that we can't seem to finish, and two years later invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. I had the inescapable feeling that an opportunity was missed. Aside from doing nothing with the outpouring of goodwill for America from everyone in the world for what happened in Manhattan, the president did nothing with the American people's resolve to follow him anywhere he wished to take them. Instead he told us to go to Disney World.

And then came the decision from very high up to use those despicable "rendition" tactics of which we're only just beginning to learn the details. "Enemy combatants," were stripped of their universally accepted Geneva Convention rights as prisoners of war, flown around on secret CIA flights to secret locations and secretly tortured, before being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, where they still wait to be told what they're charged with. Senator John McCain, who endured torture in North Vietnamese prisons, has insisted that the use of torture is not only ineffective, but something that, when used by a nation that stands as a shining symbol for human rights, compromises our moral authority.

I was in Des Moines ten years ago. At the time I took some comfort in the conviction that the city was probably the unlikeliest target of a terrorist attack. Des Moines has no symbolic value, like New York City or Washington, D.C. But I felt the same chilling effect, which was as much spiritual as economic, that every other American felt in the ensuing days and weeks.

Ten years later, I am amazed at the willingness of Americans to relinquish their privacy and their rights every time another attack is foiled. The notion that we are safer is completely cancelled out by the common perception that we are actually under siege. It will probably take a few more decades to get back to the sense of security we had before 9/11, even if it was false. As Orwell noted about Fascism in 1941: "Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them."*

*George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and The World State", Horizon, August 1941.

Playing With Fire

2011-09-08T12:41:00.007+08:00

Captain America is out. Last month it was The Green Lantern, and Thor the month before. Marvel Entertainment is rolling out its second-string properties, with their built-in potential for a franchise of computer games, toys, collectibles, and possible sequelae. The producers of the films have attracted real talent: Kenneth Branagh directed Thor and, awhile ago, Ang Lee made Hulk. But instead of using all their art and imagination creating three-dimensional, believably human characters, such talented filmmakers commit all their energies to making inhuman characters believable in 3-D. The essential silliness of these characters can be measured by the color and cut of their outfits. The Hulk's magic shorts are particularly silly, since, no matter how gigantic he becomes (along with, presumably, gigantic naughty bits), his shorts remain discreetly in place.

After seeing some of these films, I was forced to conclude that I could not disqualify myself, however much I tried, from criticizing them. The best that could be said against my presuming to have an opinion about them came from Chris Rock who once told white people who criticized rap music for its aggressive ugliness to keep their mouths shut because, as he put it, "it ain't for you!" Whom, then, is rap for?

I recently watched the first few scenes from the new X-Men: First Class and I saw how they once again exploited the Nazi death camps to lend something - what? depth? credibility? - to the comic book character Magneto's discovery of his mutant powers. If you haven't seen the film, perhaps you will recall the opening scene from the very first X-Men (2000), in which, in a few shots, the terrible reality of a Nazi death camp is evoked: "Poland 1944", in a driving rain prisoners are being herded by soldiers. One of the prisoners, a boy, notices other prisoners toiling behind the fence, with numbers tattooed on their forearms. The boy is separated from what we can assume are his parents, amid angry shouting and screams, underscored by prodding music. As the guards restrain the boy and his parents are marched away, the boy reaches out and the barbed-wire fence separating him from his parents is pried open by an unseen force. This force, which also pulls the boy, restrained by guards, toward the metal fence, suddenly ceases the moment thatone of the guards knocks the boy unconscious with the butt of his rifle.

This scene is repeated in the new X-Men shot for shot. (I haven't looked closely enough to determine if they were the same scenes. I think it would've required a particularly crass producer to simply re-stage the whole thing and re-shoot it.) In the new film, it is followed by a scene in which the boy is standing in front of the desk of a Mengele-like doctor, played by Kevin Bacon. He rings abell and a woman prisoner is brought into the room by helmeted guards. Bacon puts a coin on the edge of his desk and tells the boy to move it with his "powers". Then Bacon points a pistol at the woman and begins counting down from ten. The boy holds out his hands toward the coin, but fails to move it before Bacon shoots the woman. The boy, enraged by the act, begins to scream and metal objects in the room react - the bell, the guards' helmets, the zinc tables in the examining room, etc.*

I mentioned that the first scene evoked the reality of the camps. But it was evoked in order to enhance the story of Magneto. I was so disgusted by these scenes, and by the filmmakers' insane belief that they could get away with using the Holocaust in such a distasteful and vulgarizing manner, that I stopped watching the film.

The first Iron Man (2008) includes a scene in which American soldiers escorting Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) in Afghanistan are killed in an ambush. Their deaths are used as a pretext for Stark to be captured by Taliban-like thugs, who force him to use his weapons expertise to create a new weapon for them. But that single scene of soldiers being killed, which was, I suppose, an attempt to add topicality to the movie as well as contribute to its schizophrenic anti-militarist message, came too close to home. I have served in the army. I wasn't deployed to Afghanistan, but I have friends who were in Iraq. I can't speak for them, but I found it outrageous that their experience could have been appropriated by a group of obviously cynical people as a plot device in a comic book movie.

In his essay, "Inside the Whale", George Orwell looked at the Auden poem "Spain 1937", which he singled out as "one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war." He took exception, however, to the lines that read:

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

Orwell noted that these lines "could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word." He went on to state that

Mr. Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

If Auden's liberal conscience moved him to write something about the Spanish Civil War at the time, a little more personal commitment to the event, such as Orwell experienced, would perhaps have only made the poem greater. But Auden would have to have been a different person. He was so stung, however, by Orwell's words that he changed the line in the poem and suppressed it in his collected poems.

The makers of these movies seem motivated by something other than conscience in their determination to graft historical fact onto their fantasies. They are playing with fire in the foolish belief that fantasy makes them fireproof.

*Postscript: I had a chance to double check the scenes from X-Men: First Class, and the initial scenes in the death camp do appear to be new. The woman prisoner whom Kevin Bacon summons, speaking German atrociously (to add a little authenticity, you see) is, in fact, the boy's mother. Bacon points his gun at her and counts to three ("ein, zwei, drei"). The men who make these crass movies (notice how women consistently absent themselves from the making of these male juvenile fantasies) believe that nothing is sacred.

Who Let the Dog Out?

2011-09-05T12:50:00.001+08:00

While some observers, including President Obama, are delighted at the new deal that football quarterback and convicted felon Michael Vick just signed with the Philadelphia Eagles for $100M, which includes a guarantee of $40M (not taking any chances this time), I for one am bemused.

Vick signed a remarkably similar deal in 2003 with the Atlanta Falcons (1), but it was nullified by his criminal conviction in 2007 for engaging in dog fighting.(2) He was released from his contract by Atlanta at the end of his two year sentence. The Philadelphia Eagles signed him in 2009. Last December, the president took time out of his Hawaiian vacation to telephone the Eagles's owner and personally thank him for giving Vick a "second chance".

The latest contract is further proof of Vick's worth, if not exactly his worthiness. But is it, as so many are calling it, really Michael Vick's second chance? Or should we be calling it his one thousand and second? Vick's athletic career followed a predictable pattern: as soon as it was ascertained that he had what is called "athletic ability", Vick was given a free pass through high school and college (even though he revoked his athletic scgholarship to Virginia Tech after his sophomore year).(3) Evidently, the only thing his talent couldn't get him was a get out of jail free card.

Our culture is so enamored of people who can routinely throw and hit baseballs hard, toss basketballs through hoops and throw and catch footballs that it is now prepared to pay them millions of dollars to do it. George Plimpton famously tried to explain our strange fixation on athletes by saying it's because they can accomplish certain tasks with apparent ease that are exceptionally difficult for the rest of us. The trouble with this explanation, like so many of Plimpton's remarks, is that it is insupportable. Anyone who can juggle four balls or balance spinning plates on sticks with their noses belongs in a circus. The talents of many athletes are not much different.

Now 31, with another year of probation to serve, Michael Vick had his many chances long before he squandered every one of them by taking part in the barbaric hobby that landed him in jail. But really, how else should he have behaved since our culture made it unnecessary for him to waste his time learning how to become a decent human being? If athletes sometimes misbehave, who can blame them? They have been mollycoddled all their lives because of their silly athletic skills and as professional players are being paid ridiculously disproportionate sums of money. How can they not be deluded enough to think they're above the law and common morality?

(I am amazed when Americans complain that our education suystem is a shambles when our culture pays a teacher an average salary of $55,693 and a football player $770,000 [4].)

Will Vick keep his nose clean this time? Or will the easy money he's once again getting and the forgiveness of the president continue to twist his underfed mind? If Vick deserved a second chance, he should've used it to get as far from football as possible.

(1) $62M for six years.
(2) His activities included betting on dogs fighting to the death and the destruction of dogs who wouldn't fight by strangulation, drowning, and electrocution.
(3) A warning on the "welcome" page of his official website reveals something of what Vick relinquished when he dropped out of college: "Any person who comes to this site and make abusive comments or statements to Mr.Vick and or his fans and supporters, the comments will be deleted and the person responsible for making such comments and statements will be immediately banned and all comments will be deleted. There will be no acceptions or reinstatements." (His name should be Michael [Sic].)
(4) 2009 statistics.

The Last Action Hero

2011-09-02T09:04:00.000+08:00

Everybody ought to have a maid,
Everybody ought to have a working girl,
Everybody ought to have a lurking girl
To putter around the house.

Everybody ought to have a maid,
Everybody ought to have a menial
Consistently congenial
And quieter than a mouse.

Oh, oh, wouldn't she be delicious,
Tidying up the dishes,
Neat as a pin.

Oh, oh, wouldn't she be delightful,
Sweeping out,
Sleeping in.

Everybody ought to have a maid,
Someone who you hire when you're short of help
To offer you the sort of help
You never get from a spouse:

Fluttering up the stairway,
Shuttering up the windows,
Cluttering up the bedroom,
Buttering up the master,
Puttering all around the house!

-Stephen Sondheim, A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum

Donald Trump delivered one of his most revealing statements during a phone conversation with Piers Morgan during a broadcast of Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN. When asked what he thought about the revelation of Arnold Schwarzenegger's having a son by his Hispanic housemaid, Trump said that he thought the worst thing about it was that Arnold had done it with a maid. It wasn't his infidelity to Maria Shriver or his having kept it a secret for so long, but the fact that the former Guvernator had stooped to having an affair - and a child - with the hired help.

If I hadn't already made up my mind about Trump as a rich clown with a clown's hair, that loathsome statement of his would have done it. All the statement actually did was confirm for me the strong suspicion that this ultimately silly person obviously has disdain for everyone who isn't wealthy or well-off. And it came from a man who briefly entertained intentions of running for president. Evidently, it would never have occurred to Trump, as it obviously occurred to Schwarzenegger, that even a house servant is a human being.

Quite honestly, the news of the affair made Arnold Schwarzenegger immeasurably more likable to me. Having attained at least one of his stated goals in life - marrying a Kennedy* - he at least showed that it wasn't beneath him to be attracted to a woman who wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and who had something to offer him besides money and prestige. Apparently, Donald Trump can buy any woman he wants. The circumstances of Arnold's affair are probably not the stuff of a Hollywood movie, but the suggestion that it was something to be ashamed of is funny coming from a clown like Trump.

*Shriver's mother was sister to JFK and RFK. Arnold's other ambition was to be president, which he can't as the rules now dictate.

The Boy Who Wasn't There

2011-08-31T13:45:00.002+08:00

On July 22, a birthday was quietly celebrated in my house for a boy who turned 16. He has been living in my house since he was 12. His mother has been my constant companion, translator, and protector since late 2007. And after three years of living under the same roof, we remain almost total strangers.

I am willing to take some of the blame for this, but the boy is no day at the beach, either. He was always, I am told, quiet and self-effacing. I would often fail to notice that he was there. Walking around the house on a cool afternoon, I would be convinced I was alone until I saw his feet sticking out from behind a door, sitting there reading his bible.

His older brother, then 14, lived with us at first, until some of his actions around my remote barangay - like stealing fish out of a nearby fish farm - persuaded his mother to send him to live with his older sister. He was a far more interesting boy, to say the least. Tall, and light-skinned, he possessed that unmistakable but mysterious something that makes the opposite sex do double-takes. Five of them would come to the window of his room every morning to whisper him awake. Sitting in a friend's sala one evening, I heard a commotion outside the door when a girl proclaimed her love for him and then burst into tears. He just sat on the floor in front of the TV, paying no attention to the poor girl outside.

After his older brother's departure, the boy settled into a routine of doing nothing. When he arrived in my house he was, at the age of 12, a second grade drop-out. He gave no indications of what he intended to do with the rest of his life until I had had enough of his sullenness, his sneaking comings and goings, and proposed to him that he return to school with an allowance of five hundred pesos (a little more than $10) every month. I only did it to get him out of my house during the day, five days a week.

This change of outlook apparently had such an immeasurable impact on his life that he somehow found Jesus - with a vengeance. In fact, he couldn't have devised a better revenge on the man who usurped his good for nothing father. I couldn't have been less pleased if he'd announced he was a Republican. And he couldn't have opted for the gentle Roman Catholic Jesus, whose worship is conducted once a week in church. No, he had to be "born again" - a boisterous, exclamatory worship of Jesus, conducted everywhere: in their hole in the wall church, at the dinner table, before bed, in fact just about every time it occurs to them to emit their passionate cries of devotion to their savior. The boy was made aware of my utter disdain for his new found faith when I told his mother to tell him to shut his trap one night when his bed time prayers were beginning to drown out the comforting drone of my electric fan.

Since I have a bible of my own, in the King James text, I found a passage in the Matthew gospel that might persuade him to hold it down. The passage seemed to be addressed directly to him and his born again crowd:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:5-6)

This strategy seemed to work. Or else it was his mother translating to him all the things I told her I would do to him if he didn't shut the hell up.

For awhile, I began to suspect that the boy was gay. It was only little clues, like when he got a cellphone and the only thing he photographed with the built-in camera was his own face, in painfully simpering, precious poses. Then there were the deeply homoerotic messages to Jesus that he left on the covers of his school notebooks - "Jesus Lover of My Soul" being the most obvious. Or when the neighbors' girls would parade past my verandah in their pink high school skirts, and he would duck inside until they were out of sight. It bothered me because it was one less thing - sexuality - that we had in common, one more possible obstruction to our ever communicating.

By the time he turned 15, cutting an odd figure in the third grade, he went to all the bother of taking a placement test, and waited six months to be informed that, while he had already achieved the level of Grade Three (with honors, I should add), his score had met the basic requirements for Grade Two. I took no satisfaction from the fact that he had scored highest in "communication arts" (English). The test was irrefutable proof, that could not have been encouraging to his teachers, that getting perfect grades the hard way, year in and year out, wasn't good enough for the Philippine Department of Education.

So, unless he is willing to take the test again this November and wait until next June to get the results, he will have to face graduating high school at the age of 22. Since a proposal is now being considered to lengthen the current K-10 school program to the American K-12 model, he will have another two years of his life to postpone. And because there are no dependable jobs here in the provinces even for a high school graduate, the boy will probably be living with his mother, who lives with me, long after he becomes a man.

If he doesn't advance to a higher grade soon and has to attend the fifth grade next year, and if he doesn't get discouraged by the prospect of his life passing him by while he hangs around a bunch of kids, (and if the proposal before DepEd passes) he will be ready for college when he is 24. I honestly can't see him wasting his time for much longer. Whatever choice he makes, his mother seems to believe - whether I do or not - that there will always be a place for him in my house.

But I suppose the real reason why I find this silent boy so insufferable is because he reminds me too much of me. I was just as much a loner when I was a boy, and rather more so. My father probably thought I was gay for awhile. I was a living exemplar of the Confucian saying, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." I learned from a very early age how to make myself invisible. This probably explains why I never found God, because I made it so impossible for Him to find me.

I am confident enough, and saddened, that he will perhaps never read these words or comprehend how much it pains me to know what a failure I have been as a step-father. If I had more influence over him, I would try to get him away from the people in his church, where he spends so much of his time. I should thank them, perhaps, for giving him the ego-gratification that he found nowhere else. But I have serious misgivings about a religion that makes it impossible for a 14 year old boy to act like any other normal boy, that instructs him to act like a lunatic at every opportunity and that makes living in the same world as everyone else harder than it already is. Never mind my doubts about its setting its flock apart, of turning them into suspicious-looking strangers who associate only with one another, who act as if they are special, set apart, exceptional, different. Occasionally, when his mother got drunk on tuba (coconut wine), he would scold her. I simply told him in untranslated English to get the hell out, taste life for ten years and then come back and judge his mother. This boy was different enough without Jesus making it easier for him to be weird. His faith may indeed bring some joy to him, but only at great cost. It's hard enough to figure out how to be a man without getting Jesus mixed up in the process.

A Felicidade

2011-08-28T09:02:00.006+08:00

Tristeza não tem fim
Felicidade sim

Though the samba has ended, I know in the sound
Of your voice, your piano, your flute, you are found,
And the music within you continues to flow
Sadly, lost Antonio.
-Michael Franks, "Abandoned Garden"

Nothing has more power to restore me to myself than music. Yet the origin of this power is a mystery. E.M. Cioran, whom one critic called the "last philosopher of Europe" (one can only hope) wondered if we will ever discover what music appeals to in each of us, since even the insane respond to it. It has even been suggested - somewhat unconvincingly - that music has an effect on fetuses in their mothers' wombs. The popular Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto has composed works exclusively for them, filling concert halls with pregnant women. Of course, Sakamoto may only be taking advantage of his listeners' inability to vote with their feet. So I suppose it is fortunate that there is enough music around to make one feel more sophisticated than a lunatic or a fetus. There is more than enough to make me wish sometimes that I were deaf as a post.

Twenty years ago a friend of mine, who didn't share my taste in music, labelled what I was listening to "lite" music. I listened to jazz, even though I also listened (because there was no escape from it) to what he liked. He listened to hard rock - Kiss, AC/DC, Guns & Roses. Brought up in a world in which "lite" music distinguished itself as music without singing, or what David Sanborn called "instrumental pop", he told me that the music I listened to gave him the feeling that he was riding in an elevator. When I asked him to define it for me, he said that music was "lite" if it didn't threaten the listener. I didn't bother him at the time with my own definition of rock and roll. But even if I had, it wouldn't have mattered.

Music always raises problems for anyone who wants to belong to his own age. There is always what is generally - and mistakenly - called "classical" music, but nearly all of it, glorious as it is, was created long before one's birth. There is the all-American idiom of jazz, which is sometimes splendid, and much of it created in one's lifetime. But, as I mentioned before, jazz is more about the musicians than the music. It is brilliant when the horn or piano player is inspired and his improvisations give new life to old standards. This has happened often enough, and luckily in front of a microphone. But since the 1980s, jazz has got itself stuck in a bop or post-bop rut.

Rock was originally called rhythm and blues, and since the 1950s has become - for better or worse - the music of rebellion. Part of the rebellion was against music and musicianship itself, against established norms of beauty and virtuosity. For listeners (teenagers) it was a rebellion against one's parents, against society and the status quo, against all the rules with which life is riddled. The disorder of rock is its greatest strength - its jagged edges and avoidance of structure and proportion. But it becomes a problem as soon as one is past the rebellious stage, what sociologists call the "age of maximum risk". One simply cannot go on rebelling indefinitely. It's like being decadent: "decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon."(1) Most of the people still living who helped to create rock in the 50s and 60s are old men. Unless one is simply expressing nostalgia for one's youth, watching these withered rockers perform provokes either laughter or sorrow, in equal portion. Once one has lived a little, the clumsy and forced emotions of rock music no longer satisfy. What is left then for someone who wants to hear the voice of a musical intelligence that responds to the same age in which he lives? Searching for such a voice can be a lonely pastime.

Visiting Brazil in 1949, Albert Camus attended a party at which a popular singer performed. Never far from the sensualism that pervaded his writings, Camus was moved to write in his journal of "Kaimi" and of the songs he heard that evening: "Of all songs, these are the most beautiful, songs of love and the sea."(2) The singer was Dorival Caymmi, and the music he performed was the samba, a Brazilian form based on both African and Native South American rhythms.(3) That same rhythm became the foundation of a popular musical form called bossa nova, whose greatest practitioner was the composer and performer Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994).

In 1959, Sacha Gordine produced the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), based on the play Orfeu da conceição by the poet Vinicius de Moraes. Shot in glorious Eastmancolor entirely in Rio de Janeiro during that city's legendary Carnaval, the film featured an all-black Brazilian cast and a soundtrack with original music and songs by Luiz Bonfa and Jobim. The film caused a sensation, but not because it was a good film. It is watchable today for the beautiful photography of the Rio locations and for the music that it introduced to the world. While there have been other songwriters in Brazil and quite a number of great singers and musicians, Jobim was the reason that bossa nova captured the world's imagination.

With Vinicius de Moraes, Jobim wrote some of his most famous songs, including "Girl from Ipanema", "Insensitive", "Chega de Saudade", and "A Felicidade". Innumerable American jazz performers wanted to perform and record these and other songs, "Agua de Beber", "One Note Samba", "Desafinado", "Dindi", "Corcovado", "Dreamer", etc. In 1962 guitarist Charlie Byrd released the album Jazz Samba, along with saxophonist Stan Getz. Getz enjoyed performing on the album so much that he invited Jobim himself and singer/guitarist João Gilberto to New York in 1963 to record Getz/Gilberto. On the recording of "Girl from Ipanema", Getz persuaded Gilberto's wife Astrud to sing the lyrics in English. The song was such a hit in America as a single that it sold over one million copies.

Jobim then recorded an album of his own in 1963 on the legendary Verve label, The Composer of Desafinado, Plays, with orchestrations by Claus Ogerman, of many of his songs. Jobim performed on guitar, piano, and flute on the album. He recorded with Frank Sinatra four times, and Ella Fitzgerald recorded the Jobim songbook, Ella Abraça Jobim, in 1981. If this is elevator music, the elevator is on its way to heaven.

Probably my favorite of all his songs is called "Fotografia", whose English lyrics were written by Ray Gilbert:

You and I, we two, alone here
In this terrace by the sea.
The sun is going down
And in your eyes
I see the changing colors of the sea.
It's time for you to go,
The day is done.
And shadows stretch their arms to bring the night.
The sun falls in the sea
And down below a window light we see,
Just you and me.
You and I, we two, alone
Here in this bar with dimming lights.
A full and rising moon comes from the sea,
And soon the bar will close for you and me.
But there will always be a song
To tell, a story you and I cannot dismiss,
The same old simple story of desire
And suddenly that kiss, that kiss.

Jobim loved the world and his place in it, and I am quite certain that the portion of it that he enjoyed was not enough. Some people say that too much of anything can kill you. Jobim's music asks how much is too much?

The circumstances of Jobim's death were shockingly sad. He was diagnosed in 1994 with a bladder tumor, but for several months sought spiritual healing. Finally requesting surgery in December 1994, he died four days later of a heart attack brought on by a pulmonary embolism. Three days later, his last album, Antonio Brasileiro, was released.(4) He was 67.

One of his first recorded songs, "A Felicidade", which was featured in Black Orpheus, begins with the words quoted above. In English, they mean, "Sadness has no end. Happiness please." Joy was Jobim's greatest legacy.

(1) George Orwell, "T.S. Eliot", October 1942.
(2) Albert Camus, American Journals, Hugh Levick, translator, New York: Spear Marlowe & Company, 1995.
(3) New York Times Obit of Dorival Caymmi.
(4) Jobim's full name is Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim.

Sink or Swim

2011-08-25T10:43:00.003+08:00

I have always believed that it is foolish to argue that there is any such thing as a distinct Japanese sensibility. Even when great Japanese artists, like the late composer Toru Takemitsu, make such a claim, I am just as incredulous. A Japanese mystique, maybe. It is far more likely that the Japanese are incapable of recognizing faculties in the rest of us that may only be latent but which make us perfectly capable of appreciating qualities in Japanese poetry, art, music, and film that are supposed to make them peculiarly Japanese.

On the subject of suicide, however, the Japanese would seem to be well ahead of the Western perception of it as the act of an unbalanced mind. The number of Japanese writers, for example, who have taken their own lives is a veritable Who's Who. Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, four of the most illustrious Japanese authors of the 20th century, all killed themselves. The Japanese filmmaker of wry comedies, Juzo Itami, threw himself off a tall building to protest a tabloid story alleging his affair with a woman other than his wife. Kurosawa attempted suicide. And Takeshi Kitano, popular Japanese television personality, called his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1994, an "unconscious suicide attempt."

It would be convenient if his filmmaking career were divisible into the two periods, before and after the accident. Except that there is no appreciable difference between the films he made in either period. He appears to enjoy alternating between films involving cops and yakuza and films about ordinary men and women. It is in the latter, needless to say, that I am interested.

Curiously, one of the connecting threads in Kitano's films is suicide. Whether he is personally preoccupied with it or it is just a dramatic device in unclear. But three of his first six films end with a protagonist committing suicide.

A Scene at the Sea (1991) is a badly Englished title for Kitano's third directorial effort. "That Summer, the Calmest Ocean" is closer to the title Kitano came up with, Ano Natsu, Ichiban Shizukana Umi. It is an idyllic film about a young man named Shigeru who works as a garbage man in a coastal city. One day he finds a broken surfboard in somebody's trash. (The words "Sink or Swim" are printed in English on the edge of the Blue Bunny surfboard.) He takes it home and repairs it with a chunk of styrofoam, chopsticks and some box tape. With his girlfriend - or simply a friend who happens to be a girl - he takes up surfing, with sometimes funny, often wry results. And incidentally, Shigeru is a deaf-mute, as is his friend.

Japanese filmmakers have always walked a fine line between pure sentiment and treacly sentimentality - a difference that Donald Richie characterized as earned and unearned emotion. Kitano's use of the silence of his principle characters doesn't exactly exonerate him from the charge of sentimentality, but it spares his film alot of the mawkishness that mars his later Kikujiro. You can tell it's a dramatic device simply because the two actors who play Shigeru and Takako - Claude Maki and Hiroko Oshima - are not deaf-mutes.

Pervading the film is a placidity that makes it, if nothing else, a rather pleasant viewing experience. The placidity is, however, ultimately impenetrable, like the dumbness of its hero and heroine. The necessarily unspoken feelings between Shigeru and Takako remain a mystery until Kitano sweetens their relationship with two scenes. Deciding to catch a bus after a day of surfing, the driver won't admit Shigeru, carrying is serfboard, because the bus is crowded. Takako boards the bus alone, gazing forlornly at Shigeru, abandoned on the sidewalk. As the bus drives away, Shigeru starts to run home, the surfboard under one arm, but gives up after a few blocks. Meanwhile Takako stands holding onto a pole, refusing to sit even when ample seats become available. When she gets off the bus, she runs back to meet Shigeru, as Joe Hisaishi's music rises to an emotional climax, most of which we must infer.

The other scene takes place after Takako has seen Shigeru on the beach with a strange girl (who isn't aware that he's deaf). When Takako fails to show up the next day, Shigeru has to go to her house and, to get her attention in her upstairs room, he tosses his shoe in front of her window. When this doesn't work, he throws stones until he breaks the window. He runs away, but she catches up with him and, a tear running down her cheek, hands him the stone that broke her window. I would be reaching, I think, if I were to call this symbolism, but there is really little else to go on.

Shigeru enters a surfing competition in Chikura and, after an initial blunder, places high enough in the judges' estimation to win a small trophy. He and Takako return home and one day Shigeru goes alone to the beach where he learned to surf. He takes off his street clothes, folds them neatly on the beach, and enters the surf. By the time Takako arrives and finds Shigeru's clothes, only his surfboard returns from the sea.

What if a device could be implanted in everyone's heart at birth. When each person reaches his peak in life, the moment until which his life presents to him only rising ground toward a high point he cannot foresee but which existence itself promises. At the exact moment of attaining that point, the device activates and stops his heart.

There are some gifted souls who have no need of such a device. When Shigeru ventures out on his surfboard for the last time and only his empty surfboard comes back, we are left to infer that, in discovering a degree of success and fulfillment in surfing, he decided that it was a good time to quit, so to speak, while he was ahead. In the film's closing coda, Takako takes Shigeru's surfboard all the way back to Chikura, the scene of his triumph, and releases it to the outgoing tide.

How very Japanese. But saying so doesn't make it any more explicable or satisfying.

Remastering the Film: Shohei Imamura

2011-08-22T13:48:00.006+08:00

In the process of choosing which Japanese filmmakers to place on my list of Masters of Film, it was difficult to limit myself to just four. Japan seems to have an abundance of filmmakers who have not only gone on working well into their seventies, eighties, and sometimes nineties, but have made viable, distinguished works long after most directors in the west have either retired or found their quietus.(1) Kon Ichikawa, who died in 2008 aged 92, made his last film in 2006. (Ashamedly, I had to omit Ichikawa only because I haven't seen enough of his films.) Yoji Yamada, now 79, still directs. Kaneto Shindo, who is 99, just released a new film. And Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), made his last film at 74.

Rather than a radical political agenda like other directors of his generation, who became known as the Japanese Nouvelle Vague (nuberu bagu), or a perfect technique, Imamura had a life-view and a highly un-Japanese disregard for formal beauty.

His first great film, The Insect Woman (1963), follows Tome, played by Sachiko Hidari, who survives the poverty and abuse of her childhood to become a factory worker, a housemaid, and, finally (it would seem) a prostitute. Imamura, who worked as assistant to Ozu, couldn't resist the irony of his portrayal of a fragmented Japanese family.

But what is most striking about Imamura is his apparent ambivalence toward his characters and his refusal to pronounce judgement on them, particularly when judgements come ready-made. Given his record, trying to imagine what Oshima would've made of Nosaka Akiyuki's satiric novel The Pornographers (1966) is illustrative of just how truthful Imamura was trying to be. When the hero of the film floats out to sea in a rowboat with his specially-designed sex doll, there is as little room for laughter as for tears.

Perhaps Imamura's masterpiece is Vengeance is Mine (1979), easily the most disturbing portrayal of a mass murderer on film, if only because Imamura shows us what an inexpert killer he is and how impossible it becomes for him to escape the consequences of his terrible crimes. Ken Ogata plays Enokizu, whose crime spree is based on the actual case of serial killer Akira Nishiguchi. The film is rivetingly told, while managing to avoid any of the cliches of a thriller.

Imamura's remake of The Ballad of Narayama (1983) is a far cry from Kinoshita's 1958 classic. Typically, Imamura emphasizes his characters' bestial traits, since they alone can guarantee survival in an imperiously severe environment. Japanese audiences took exception with certain moments - for instance when the villagers resolve to kill a family that hoards precious food by throwing them into a pit and burying them alive. Or when, near the end of the film, a young man carries his helpless old father, kicking and screaming, into the mountains to be left there to die. The young man finally has to push the old man, tied to a bamboo chair, off a cliff to his death. But these scenes are contrasted with those of Tatsuhei's mother breaking her own teeth to convince him to carry her into the mountains.

Shot in black-and-white, the story of Black Rain (1989) is all too familiar. That Imamura, following the Inoue novel, makes it once again engaging for its human content, the fates of individuals caught up in a genocidal experiment, is a tribute to his artistry and his engagement with his subject. The imaginative challenge of representing the scale as well as the human impact of the destruction of Hiroshima is remarkable in itself. The ordeal of returning to life, of recovering from the concerted insanity of war, that affected both sides, was never more movingly recounted. Black Rain is a film for the ages that documents one of our most unpardonable acts.

In his early seventies, Imamura made two brilliant films, The Eel (1997), a strangely beautiful story of a man who murders his wife but finds redemption through a young woman he saves from suicide and his unlikely relationship with a pet eel, and Dr. Akagi (1998), about an indomitable doctor in wartime Japan who seems to run everywhere he goes.

His last film was incorporated into the predictably uneven omnibus film 11'09"01 September 11 (2002). Like Black Rain, but far less effectively, it tells of the days immediately following the war in Japan and a soldier's descent into insanity. Imamura intended it as an answer to the folly of a "holy war" like that declared by Al Qaeda on America on September 11, and the undeclared one by George W. Bush on "terror".

(1) I write this mindful of the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira who is now 102 and persists in his usual mediocrity.

The Holy Virgin of the Assassins

2011-08-19T10:42:00.006+08:00

Medellín, according to Fernando, was named after a pigsty in Estremadura, Spain. Alexis, who was born there, calls Medellín Medallo or Metrallo, as in metralleta (machine gun). When they meet, Fernando tells Alexis that he has come back to Medellín to die: "Life is short and ends when you least expect it". In the course of the film La Virgen de los Sicarios (2000), based on Fernando Vallejo's 1994 novel, both men learn the truth of these words.

There are films that fail to reach a large audience because they take us to places to which most of us would rather not go. Violent places, unpleasant people, or offensive ideas can drive the faint of heart or the unadventurous mind away. Fernando Vallejo, who wrote the semi-autobiographical novel on which the film is based, knows this. But so does the film's director, Barbet Schroeder.

Schroeder's place in film history is assured by his long association with Eric Rohmer. He has also occasionally directed a few quite unusual films, the best of which is the documentary, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974), which is no less effective today thanks to The Last King of Scotland. His other films include More (1968), about heroin addicts, Maîtresse (1976), a documentary about a dominatrix, Barfly (1987), adapted from one of Charles Bukowski's typically revolting novels about the daily lives of alcoholics. He also made a few commercially successful films, like Reversal of Fortune (1990), which is excellent, Single White Female (1992), and the unrelievedly awful Kiss of Death (1995), which made one wonder which actor, Nicolas Cage or David Caruso, was the worse candidate for movie stardom. Schroeder even directed an episode of the popular television series Mad Men.

La Virgen de los Sicarios concerns Fernando, a gay man who has returned to Medellín after many years to find that what was once "a big farm with a bishop" has become a lawless city where sicarios, of whom Alexis is one, form gangs for lack of employment (Pablo Escobar is dead) and kill one another in broad daylight.

Fernando has inherited an apartment with a high terrace overlooking Medellín. When fireworks go off, he asks "What's that for? It's not a holiday."

"Means they got a shipment of coke into the U.S." Alexis explains. He asks Fernando "You said you came back to die?"

"It's true," he replies, "I don't want to live any more. I've lived more than enough. This is borrowed time." And later he says "What I had to do in life I already did. Like a gust of wind peeling lime off the walls." Fernando shows Alexis the Medellín he remembers, or what's left of it. They find a bar that's still standing, and there is a beautiful scene in which Fernando finds a song on the jukebox that he remembers and sits down. Overcome with memories, he lays his head on the table.

"You're crying," Alexis says. "What happened?"

"Time caught up with me," Fernando says. "In this same bar, when I was a kid, on a day like this, I heard this record. Then my parents, my brothers and sisters and grandparents were alive. They're all dead. How can I not cry?"

Like Malle's Le Feu Follet, we follow a man planning to kill himself, although the agent of Fernando's death (by his own hand) is only implied. But unlike Alain in Malle's film, Fernando's despair is full of contempt - for everything. God: "I told that old creep to fuck off a long time ago." Sex: "You can't live without sex. People go crazy without sex. Look how nutty the Pope's become. Spouting crap everywhere and kissing floors. Saying that homosexuals, and all that, is a sin. That's a sin? Having kids is a sin. There's no space left, the planet'll explode!" The Poor: "Put two wretches together in 15 minutes they'll breed. 10 more poor wretches. I hate poverty. The way to get rid of it is to get rid of those who spread it." Simón Bolívar: (looking at his statue) "Coward. The only time you had to fight, you fled! And jumped off a balcony three feet off the ground! The pigeons will shit on you. Hide under yours wife's skirts! Glory is a statue that gets shit on by birds." Fútbol: "When people sit on their asses watching 22 childish adults kicking a ball, we're screwed." Whistling: "Man has no business stealing the sacred language of birds!" (So much for Messiaen.)

In one scene, Schroeder indulges in what must be one of the worst clichés about gays by having Fernando introduce Alexis to the voice of Maria Callas: "That's the finest aria ever written [Rossini's "Una Voce Poco Fa" from The Barber of Seville]. Her incredible voice is piercing my heart." Callas was also used in the pushy Jonathan Demme movie, Philadelphia, when Tom Hanks's character insinuates that one had to be gay to fully enjoy Callas. (There may be some truth in this. I always thought she was overrated.)

Though he has given up hope for humanity, Fernando is nonetheless shocked at the mayhem he witnesses: a man shot down in front of him, Alexis killing a taxi driver and three others on a train. "All these killings are encouraging my own self-destructive urges", Fernando tells Alexis. "Think twice before you shoot. Count to ten. If we killed everyone we kill in our heads, life would be butchery! Can't you distinguish between thought and action? What separates the two is called 'civilization'."

The killings pile up, almost literally, until they become meaningless. Schroeder's film, shot on extremely immediate digital video, is not very cinematic, despite all the blazing guns and falling bodies. If the film fails it's because of how impossible it quickly becomes to care for people who shoot one another and die like dogs. I don't have the advantage of Fernando's sexual attraction to Alexis and the other sicarios. When they die, and Fernando goes home and closes the curtains for perhaps the last time, it wasn't so much sadness I felt as relief. At least the end of the film, for me at least, was an end to the mindless destruction.

Schroeder's film is nonetheless revelatory of the soft underbelly of a macho Latin American culture. It effectively exposes the impotence of a society in which murder is so commonplace that signs have to be posted to prohibit the dumping of bodies. The author of the novel revoked his Colombian citizenship and now calls Mexico his home. I wonder if Vallejo now sees the Mexican drug war, in which more than 40,000 people have died since 2006, as a familiar nightmare.

The Browning Versions

2011-08-16T10:50:00.004+08:00

I must have seen Anthony Asquith's (1) beautiful film of Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version (1951) when I was not much older than Taplow, the boy in the "lower fifth" whose school master is the formidable Andrew (the "Croc") Crocker-Harris. It reminded me then, as it reminded everyone, of Goodbye Mr. Chips, without Petula Clark or the London Blitz. It featured what I still regard as one of the finest film performances, Michael Redgrave's in the role he introduced to the London stage in 1948.

The rest of the film was somewhat limited by the respectability of the production, with Rattigan himself writing the film treatment, and by Rattigan's plotting. Crocker-Harris comes off as a trifle stodgy and dull, but hardly worthy of the nickname "Himmler of the Lower Fifth".

The most memorable scene was written expressly for the film (the play ends the night before when Crocker-Harris announces to his termagant wife Millie that they are separating). It is Crocker-Harris's valedictory address to the assembled students and school faculty.(2) I find the scene exquisitely moving every time I see it, even if it is a far too melodramatic finish to the film.

The Rattigan play was remade by Mike Figgis in 1994, with Albert Finney playing Crocker-Harris. Figgis is an idiosyncratic director, who was clearly infatuated with the model and actress Saffron Burrowes for awhile. He is an actor's director, but he is always better with his actresses, making Elizabeth Shue's performance in Leaving Las Vegas a splendid consolation for the dreadful Nicolas Cage (Cage won the Oscar, of course).

Figgis couldn't resist updating the old-fashioned play, mostly by peppering the student population with the sons of rich foreigners (Arabs), by giving the role of Frank Hunter to an American actor, Matthew Modine, and by greatly improving the role of Millie, played by the eternally toothsome Greta Scacchi.

Despite these "improvements" on the original, the film belongs to Finney. A fine actor himself, it was brave of him to attempt the role that Redgrave made famous. He is a bit too precious at times, and overdoes his mannerisms (he sometimes sounds like he's imitating Redgrave). His emotional outburst at Taplow giving him a copy of the Browning translation of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus is more emphatic, in keeping with Finney's more expansive performance. Though moving, it is far less dramatically effective than Redgrave's, which is so reticent that it barely registers to a modern audience. Figgis actually cheats a little by showing how Crocker-Harris warms to a reading from Aeschylus in front of his students (with obvious parallels to his own Clytemnestra). It makes his reputation as the "Hitler [not Himmler] of the Lower Fifth" inexplicable.

Figgis keeps the climactic scene of Crocker-Harris's final address, changing a word here and there. But the scene, even with an anxious Millie standing in the back, is not nearly as moving as the original.

In an interview on the DVD, Finney criticizes Redgrave's performance for its reliance on flimsy details, like distractedly dusting off his robes while delivering his lines. Unlike Redgrave's, Finney's performance lacks a center cohesion.

But the biggest liberty that Figgis takes with Rattigan's play is in making Millie far more human. In the play and the Asquith film, she is portrayed as monstrously cruel. For example, when Frank asks Crocker-Harris how long he has known about the affair with his wife, he tells him "from the beginning" and that his informant was none other than Millie. Figgis omits this terrible exchange.

In Rattigan's version, Crocker-Harris's marriage is almost unimaginably horrible, like an airless crypt. Figgis makes the marriage simply unhappy and Millie somewhat snide but still passionately human. Figgis casting of Greta Scacchi as Millie also helps rehabilitate the role. Scacchi has always been an unsung heroine of mine, ever since I saw her in a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" TV version of Camille in 1984. Aside from great beauty and a voluptuous body that she generously unveiled now and then (The Coca-Cola Kid springs to mind), she is a splendid actress.

Near the end of the film, after she is supposed to have gone and Albert Finney gives his parting speech, she returns to watch him from the back of the hall, and weeps with heartbroken happiness at his triumph. In the last shot, outdoors, they exchange gazes, each perhaps recalling what they once felt for the other. It is perhaps the most significant improvement on the original Browning Version.

(1) Asquith was an occasionally superb director: Pygmalion (1938), The Way to the Stars (1945), The Winslow Boy (1948), The Importance of Being Earnest (1952).
(2) The name of the school isn't mentioned, but Rattigan's own Harrow School was the model.

Faithbook

2011-08-13T09:08:00.001+08:00

Despite my not quite knowing what to do with them, I have a Facebook and a Twitter account. I gave up on the latter about a year ago, if only because I was unable to reduce what I wanted to say on any given occasion to a trite formula in the abbreviated telegraphese required by the "network". (I was taken by surprise once by a tweet from Martin Amis, whose criticism I read avidly.)

Facebook is better, but only slightly. I have found it to be a source of both wonder and frustration - wonder at its ability to reconnect me with people I'd lost touch with, frustration at my inability to find anything to say to them after all these years. It's strange, to put it mildly, to have them back with no other frame of reference than a brief shared history, however ancient.

Like attending a 20th high school reunion, we can see that the intervening years haven't been kind to any of us. Some of us are essentially the same. But others are utterly changed. Some remember what I remember with a sense of humor. Others have forgotten or would like to forget the past.

All these people are classified by Facebook as "friends". But are they? They may have been, once upon a time, fifteen or twenty years ago. Now they arouse somewhat embarrassed, awkward feelings, almost like looking at old photographs or video of oneself. It's really you in the picture, but there is no longer any way you can account for him. You have long since washed your hands of that person, of everything he may have said or done.

The big difference is that I am more than a decade older than most of my friends. That age difference grows less important as the years pass, but I can never escape it. So at the same time I was thirty-two or thirty-five, they were nineteen or twenty-one. What they might regard as the sins of their youth today was the time of my life.

Last June, sitting in an internet cafe here in a backwater of the Philippines while my Facebook friends were getting along in their lives somewhere in the contiguous United States, or somewhere a lot closer, I felt moved to write something that exceeded the maximum number of characters and had to be posted as a "note":

Streamers

I check up on friends and family here, which is one of the few ways left to me from the distance at which I find myself. And I wonder at how much my being an icon on their computer screens is an act of faith. It's just about the closest I come any more to prayer when I open my facebook page. How insubstantial it is. And yet it's as beautiful as those paper streamers that once stretched between passengers on a ship and their loved ones on the pier. Only mine is several thousand miles long.

I got no replies - no "comments" - and no one liked it enough to click on "Like". I wasn't surprised, but still disappointed. I'm sure what I wrote made them feel the same awkward embarrassment that they always feel when they look at my profile photo and think of all the distance that time and experience have stretched between us.

The Stranger

2011-08-10T11:37:00.005+08:00

Who better than Albert Camus has written of the instinctive stranger, l'étranger, who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral (because he doesn't feel much like crying), who takes up with an old girlfriend the very next day, who notices the black band of mourning still on his coat sleeve, who is noncommittal when she asks him, after they make love, if he loves her, or who tells a judge that that he shot an Arab on a beach "because of the sun"? Meursault, the protagonist of L'Étranger, is a man who refuses to lie.

Camus knew the bitterness of exile during the war years (1940-44) that he was forced to spend in France, far from his beloved Algeria. He wrote at length of what it was like for him in Nazi-occupied Paris, of the loss of liberty, of the suspicion, the intolerable checking of one's papers by police, of the rumors and lies, of the incremental little victories and sudden catastrophic defeats, of the Resistance. It was a darkness that lasted too long, and its lessons were bitter and unedifying.

In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Camus wrote about people trapped in the quarantined city of Oran during an outbreak of the plague. But the novel was also an allegory for living under the Nazis. At the onset of the quarantine, Camus described the perambulation of the people trapped in the city, the interminable walking around its outskirts, silent and alone.

"In the general exile they [the travelers] were the most exiled... These were the people whom one often saw wandering forlornly in the dusty town at all hours of the day, silently invoking nightfalls known to them alone and the daysprings of their happier land. And they fed their despondency with fleeting intimations, messages as disconcerting as a flight of swallows, a dew-fall at sundown, or those queer glints the sun sometimes dapples on empty streets. As for that outside world, which can always offer an escape from everything, they shut their eyes to it, bent as they were on cherishing the all-too-real phantoms of their imagination and conjuring up with all their might pictures of a land where a special play of light, two or three hills, a favorite tree, a woman's smile, composed for them a world that nothing could replace." (1)

I have written so much about exile only because my own has lasted too long. It is especially here, in the provinces of a backward Asian country, that a foreigner feels his foreignness most acutely. He cannot walk down the street without being gawked at, attracting looks of surprise, pleasure or hostility. Philip Larkin, home from his life in Belfast, missed being the stranger:

The Importance of Elsewhere

Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognised, we were in touch.

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker’s cry, dwindling, went
To prove me separate, not unworkable.

Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

13 June 1955

Perhaps that is the fate of the preternatural stranger, always wanting to be elsewhere. But what eventually overcomes the traveler is the desire to be a stranger no longer, to cease being gawked at by children, to hearing whispers when he walks by, to always standing out in a crowd, to being an obligatory fifth wheel or thirteenth man at table. After so many years abroad, what he longs for most is to be invisible again, to disappear in a crowd, to be a nobody. Even if in his heart he knows he doesn't belong anywhere.

(1) Albert Camus, The Plague, Stuart Gilbert translation. (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).
(2) Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber, 1964).

Remastering the Film: Federico Fellini

2011-08-07T08:31:00.001+08:00

Love is predicated on the belief in the integrity of another human being's existence. That is why love is the ruling principle of art. Going to all the trouble of painting a portrait or a landscape, of putting layer upon layer of detail in a novel so that a character "comes to life", of a filmmaker pursuing an actor with his camera, alone with him across a piece of the earth we have never seen until we are compelled to care what happens to him - these are all acts of love, and Federico Fellini's best films, The White Sheik (1952), I Vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), Il Bidone (1955), The Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), and 8 1/2 (1963) are shining examples of this.

The White Sheik is a beautiful and engaging satire of the provincial dreams of Wanda, a newlywed in Rome who secretly plans to meet her fotoromanza idol, "The White Sheik", while her husband scrambles to cover up his wife's misconduct. It was a flop in Italy, but Fellini's next film, I Vitelloni, is a dramatic account of his life in Rimini, his family and friends whom he left behind, just like Moraldo does, to pursue his dreams in Rome.

The international success of La Strada made Fellini famous, and it's a mixture of realism and fantasy (Gelsomina, played by Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina, is half-moron, half-angel), beautiful and compelling. Il Bidone, which is his most misunderstood film, is also my personal favorite. Like La Strada, it's oddness is mitigated by the presence of a Hollywood star, in this case Broderick Crawford, as the leader of a trio of con men.

Nights of Cabiria followed a character that Fellini introduced briefly in The White Sheik, an eternally optimistic prostitute, played by Masina. The film became the inspiration of the Broadway musical and Hollywood film Sweet Charity.

La Dolce Vita originated in a script that Fellini intended to be a follow-up to I Vitelloni, called Moraldo in the City. But Fellini expanded the script considerably (the uncut version is three hours) and the film ultimately became what Vernon Young called a "flawed epic" - but an epic all the same.

After La Dolce Vita, Fellini was arguably the most famous film director in the world. For the next thirty years he was certainly one of the most famous people in Italy. Even people who knew little or cared less about film recognized his genius. His next film, 8 1/2, is about a film director who has run out of ideas and who tries everything to rekindle his inspiration. It is filled with dreams of suffocation, of people - actors, producers, and women, women, and more women - who demand from him results instead of excuses. Dwight Macdonald, who got into a famous published argument with John Simon over the film's value, called it Fellini's "obvious masterpiece". I agree.

Perhaps because of his unprecedented rise, Fellini's decline was precipitous. After 8 1/2 his Midas touch suddenly became a minus touch. It's difficult to overestimate the magnitude of Fellini's wrong turn. I have already mentioned the chasm that divides his first seven feature films from the rest. Coming from the artist who made I Vitelloni and The Nights of Cabiria, self-parodic rubbish like Amarcord (1974) or labored nonsense like And the Ship Sails On (1983) were painful disappointments. Rather than diminish the importance of those first films, his subsequent work has enhanced it - for no other reason than that they were inimitable, no matter how many times Fellini tried.

Remastering the Film: Vittorio De Sica

2011-08-05T09:23:00.001+08:00

As sometimes happens at certain moments in history (the Bolzhevic Revolution, for example), politics and art can become enmeshed to produce works that are socially as well as artistically important. As the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Vertov were a direct and powerful reflection of the revolutionary fervor of Soviet society in the 1920s, so the films of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica were both inspired by (and inspiring to) an Italy that had finally got rid of fascism.

With films like Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D (1952), De Sica was the greatest practitioner of a mode that quickly became known as neo-realism. De Sica's art, of course, was far more sophisticated than it looked. He imposed a subtle design on his subjects, while maintaining a simplicity of means, like his preferred use of non-professional actors, that created the illusion of artlessness. His films are as structured, in fact, as some of the more rigid stylists, like Antonioni. As Vernon Young wrote, in his review of Umberto D,

"Sociological film criticism is forever mistaken because it is forever misled – on humanitarian principles or by self-righteousness or from color-blindness – into confusing ends with means. Asserting that importance lies in subject matter, it fails to recognize that no subject is important until awakened by art; assuming (to give its charity the benefit of the doubt) that love is greater than art, it fails to acknowledge that the art is the love... To praise the film for its human appeal is as needless and as miserly as to praise a beautiful woman for her conspicuous virtue." (1)

Despite the acclaim that De Sica's masterworks earned, they did not make enough money for him to continue working independently. Besides directing, he was a beloved film actor, appearing in 157 films. But he managed to create a few distinctive films after Umberto D, like Gold of Naples (1954), La Ciociara (Two Women-1960), Marriage Italian Style (1964), and the two late flourishes of his long career, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) and A Brief Vacation (1973), even if they were worlds apart from the struggles of the poor in his early films.

In the documentary, Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember, Mastroianni describes a confrontation with De Sica, whom he revered, over the script for the film, A Place for Lovers (1968). Mastroianni hated the script so much that he felt he had to tell De Sica, "Signor De Sica, the script is shit!" When he discovered that De Sica knew this, but had gambling debts he had to settle, he agreed to do the film.

De Sica was a lifelong gambler, and in what is perhaps a self-portrait, he played an inveterate gambler, Count Prospero B, in an episode, "I giocatori", from his beautiful omnibus film, The Gold of Naples. He is such a compulsive gambler that he resorts to forcing the little son of his concierge to play cards with him - and always loses. In his best films, De Sica gambled - and always won.

As Vernon Young concluded:

"De Sica’s films in the naturalist vein have been accusations of the fascist aftermath; they take their place with the most profound cinematic achievements by sounding vibrations in a dimension larger than the political. . . . When Umberto D. twirls down the path under the trees with the jumping dog, we recall not only the other De Sica “conclusions” – Pasquale, in Shoeshine, facing a lifetime of expiation; the frustrated “bicycle thief” and his son renewing the life-circuit by joining hands; the poor, of Miracle in Milan, flying away on their brooms to an unlikely heaven – but also perhaps Baptiste, in Les Enfants du Paradis, striving against the tide of revelers cutting him off from Truth, the woodchopper in Rashomon, undaunted by fearful disclosures of moral ambiguity, deciding to adopt the abandoned baby – and Chaplin disappearing into a California horizon (the first time!)."

(1) Vernon Young, "Umberto D.: Vittorio De Sica’s ‘Super’-naturalism", The Hudson Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4 [Winter, 1956].

Remastering the Film: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

2011-08-02T09:31:00.011+08:00

[At the beginning of last year, I announced a project that I called Remastering the Film, which (I hoped) would constitute a more critical continuation of a scholarly project left unfinished by Charles Thomas Samuels at his death in 1974. Using Samuels' criterion of including in the study only those filmmakers who have made at least three great films, I came up with my own list that both (humbly) corrects and updates Samuels' list. Without grouping them, as Samuels did, according to style, my list was, in alphabetical order:

Gianni Amelio
Michelangelo Antonioni
Bruce Beresford
Ingmar Bergman
Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne
Federico Fellini
Shohei Imamura
Hirokazu Koreeda
Akira Kurosawa
Louis Malle
Yasujiro Ozu
Jean Renoir
Vittorio De Sica
Bertrand Tavernier
Francois Truffaut
Jan Troell
Zhang Yimou

I then started to write, every few weeks, a brief overview of the contribution of each filmmaker. But I only got as far as Akira Kurosawa, jumping over several others on the list. Let's see if I can complete my project by the end of 2011!]

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

There are many people who would rather that film - and everything else for that matter - stayed clear of politics. That this is in itself a political attitude is by now abundantly clear. Of course, a political agenda can be found in the unlikeliest places. Bresson's art was medieval in more than just design. His films, inadvertently I am sure, come close to enunciating Marx's "sigh of the soul in a soulless world." And Joan Mellen cannot have been the first to point out how Ozu's sympathies were always with the traditional patriarchal Japanese family, eroded to the extent that only the father is left standing, with adoring daughters tearfully departing.

Vernon Young once observed that the French filmmaker André Cayatte had "domesticated the pièce à thèse." Cayatte was a former lawyer who made films with overtly political themes, like Justice Is Done (1950), We Are All Murderers (1952) (about capital punishment), and An Eye for an Eye (1957). Without being as blatant and possessing much greater artistry than Cayatte, the brothers Jean-Pierre (b. 21 April 1951) and Luc (b. 10 March 1954) Dardenne have gone much further in domesticating the political film.

Born in Seraing, an industrial sector of the medieval city of Liège, Belgium, the Dardennes are among the most highly acclaimed filmmakers in the world. All of their films have used Seraing as their setting. They draw their characters from the working classes, and in some cases from a classless, virtually homeless "demographic" group, which they themselves claim comprises 15% of consumer society.

Gaining their first international attention in 1996 with the film La Promesse, about a 15-year-old boy who must fulfill a promise to look out for a dead man's wife and child, despite a world that tells him not to, the Dardennes's next three films, Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002) and The Child (2005), are masterworks of their edgy, passionately involved approach to humanity.

The stories they tell are about people whom the rest of us have passed by, the exceptions to our ruling principles of gain and expend, of consume and discard, of throw away values and disposable gods. When I wrote a tribute to Vittorio De Sica several years ago, I mentioned how, in his best films, he always went looking for his heroes in the most overlooked places - among the homeless shoeshine boys of postwar Rome, the unemployed, who have to sell wedding gifts (bed linen) to get the money to buy a bicycle, an old man to whom people give charity more out of pity for his little dog than for him, whose pension puts him at the mercy of a grasping landlady.

The Dardennes' uniqueness has led some critics on a wide-ranging search for comparisons. Even the shadow of Bresson (Mouchette and Pickpocket) has fallen on the Dardennes. Strangely, as if the moral and political urgency of their films were not urgent enough, some critics claim to have found "spiritual" themes in them. Bresson is only interested in his characters' souls, not their skins. When your belly is empty, you will find there is not much time to bother about your soul. Rosetta, for example, is hedged in by so many insuperable problems, like the nightmare of unemployment, that she must hurry at everything that engages her. Trying to determine exactly when or why she could find the time to cultivate a spiritual life, or any inner life at all, is, to me, a fool's errand. If, as in The Child, the child's father eventually discovers enough humanity to regret his actions, he does so at the cost of his liberty.

What is remarkable about the Dardennes' films is their proof that these people are still with us, still the subjects of discussion, even of debate. One of the implicit messages of all these films - and of Bicycle Thieves, Il Posto, Vagabond and The Dreamlife of Angels - is that our ideas about progress are figments so long as people such as these live and breathe. "They are disregarded," Jean-Pierre Dardenne has said, "left to the side, left to rot. These are the people we are interested in, that we film."*

* Interview included in the bonus features of the L'Enfant DVD.

Dog Days

2011-07-30T13:41:00.001+08:00

I have sometimes thought about adopting a dog here on my Philippine island.(1) The thought only lasts for a few moments, and then I dismiss it as impossible. I have also thought about getting a cat, since I have always preferred the feline emotional diffidence to canine dumb devotion.

Dogs and cats serve a purpose in this poor country that is not immediately apparent to a stranger. At first I thought their function was the defense of property or pest control. I soon realized that Filipinos pay as little heed to a barking dog as Americans pay to a sounding car alarm. (And the rats here are bigger than the cats.)

They actually function as garbage disposals in a place where waste disposal is left to people's imaginations. Whatever food is left over is usually horsed down by the animal who gets to it first. Since there is never enough to go around, nearly all the local dogs and cats are the scrawniest domestic pets I have ever seen. Many of them are afflicted by what looks like mange - a skin disease that results in large patches of hair falling out. Their growth is horribly stunted by malnutrition (2), and dogs in particular often bear the wounds of the fights I hear in the night.

But the only way I would consider having a dog or cat would be if I could keep it clean and healthy - in other words it would have to be confined inside my house. It's the only way I could protect the animal, and myself, from the wide variety of maladies and parasites with which it would come in contact. But how could I possibly keep it in my house? A dog would have to go out to do its business, and a cat would quickly discover a way out.

Whenever I consider adopting a dog or cat I have to remind myself that it would never work out. But lately I have had to face similar second thoughts about having a child in this place, and mostly for the same reasons. I say this despite the fact that, since my arrival, I have - so to speak - come up in the world and I now live in a barangay that is better off than some others, like the last two I lived in.

Recently I met an American who had come to this province to fetch a three-year-old boy whose mother had provided him with satisfactory evidence that the boy was his. He was staying at a nearby tourist hotel that as charging $25 a night. That sounds cheap until you calculate that he stayed there for about a hundred days. He was what was once called an "old Asia hand" had knocked around the Philippines many times since the 1980s, when he was in the Marines. I never asked him directly, but I figured he was going to all the expense and trouble with Philippine customs to get the boy and his mother out of the Philippines as soon as possible because he found the idea of his boy spending a minute in the Philippines longer than he had to unacceptable.

I won't make the analogy that many pet owners make between cherished family pets and their children, but it would require much imagination to look at the filthy, starving pets in my barangay without wondering what the place must do to children. I have written about the children I see every day on my island, an estimated fifteen million of whom aren't in school, playing in the streets because there are no playgrounds. I asked a question more than two years ago that needs asking again: when the world is unfit for a dog to live in, how can it be fit for a child?

(1) I call it "my island" for the same reason that the mad Irishman in Braveheart said of Ireland "it's mine".
(2) I watched a neighbor's puppy over the course of a few months not grow at all. It was the same size at six months that it was at one.

The Singing Goat

2011-07-27T13:35:00.004+08:00

"The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means." -Tom Stoppard

There is a very popular TV show here in the Philippines called Face to Face. Airing Monday through Friday at 10:30 AM, it presents us with real people and their real problems, but the setup is adversarial, like the American Jerry Springer show. It pits bickering neighbors and family members against one another: cheating husbands are confronted by their wives, opposing sides of a soured money transaction face off, an old man and his unsupportive children present their sides of the story.

There is much shouting, much name-calling, and the plastic chairs on which the people sit are frequently thrown across the stage. In between them is the show's host, an attractive, fashionably dressed woman named Amy Perez who spends most of her time fleeing from the fray or shouting "sandalilang!" ("hold on!") as the day's guests attack one another.

A panel of "experts" - a lawyer, a psychologist, and a priest - give their advice to the parties. My companion watches the show every day, and at the climactic moment when all is forgiven and the estranged parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors embrace one another in reconciliation, she always cries.

I always laugh, and she asked me why. I told her that it wasn't true, that people's problems can't be fixed like that, in the course of an hour. It could happen like that, I suggested, only after alot of coaching takes place. Besides, such problems are often never resolved. Only in a bad movie, or a scripted TV show, is life ever so easy.

I sympathize with people who want life to be like a bad movie - with problems solved, everlasting love, and virtue being victorious. But that isn't the function of art. I want a movie, or a novel or a play, to be true to life by capturing what I have found to be the qualities of life, which are not always cheerful or edifying. They don't improve on life by giving everyone a happy ending. They make life - however we may find it - a form that gives it meaning, that makes its meaning apprehensible, that shows us a pattern, a symmetry that we didn't see before.

That's the trouble with life: not that it's always sad or disappointing but that it makes no sense. When someone dies in an accident (or when, over this past weekend, people are murdered by a madman or a soul singer dies young), people call it tragic. But it isn't tragic.(1) What they mean to call it is "senseless". But to declare that Amy Winehouse's death was "senseless", or that all those Norwegian teenagers died "senselessly" would arouse anger and indignation.

So we say it's tragic without realizing that the word is only a euphemism - a painless lie disguising a painful truth. No other word quite fits because they are too brutally specific. Meanwhile the perfectly useful word tragic has become, through overuse, the catch-all word for everything from natural disasters to freak accidents. It's as if the only thing that people remember about tragedies from their high school literature studies is that "everybody dies".

Tragic has the advantage of being vague as well as somewhat grand. By definition, an accident can't be tragic simply because in a universe ruled by Fate, there is no such thing as an accident. Everything is foreordained and everything happens for a reason. This is a simple and comforting philosophy, but one that few people take seriously any more. The majority of people in the West, who only admit to faith in God when pressed, and have given up believing in the immortality of the soul, understand that nothing happens for a reason, that life and death have no meaning, and that once richly meaningful words like tragic no longer carry much weight, except as synonyms for awful, terrible, horrendous, sad, pitiful, or pathetic.

In his essay, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool", George Orwell writes that

"It is doubtful whether the sense of tragedy is compatible with belief in God: at any rate, it is not compatible with disbelief in human dignity and with the kind of 'moral demand' which feels cheated when virtue fails to triumph. A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him."

The word tragic has degenerated from its original meaning because our faith in human dignity has declined. Only art is left to redeem our lives from the meaninglessness in which our decadent civilization has stranded it.

(1) The Oxford English Dictionary is, of course, neutral on the subject: "tragic, adv. 1. extremely distressing or sad; 2. suffering extreme distress or sadness; 3. relating to tragedy in a literary work."

[The word tragedy means "goat song" in Greek.]