Virtue and Virtuosity

Of all the "gentlemanly" sports (cricket, polo, tennis), the one that is the most objectionably snobbish must certainly be golf. It costs more for an individual to play a round of golf than probably any other sporting activity short of car racing. It lays waste enormous stretches of land that are made useless for any other purpose. Until very recently, the sport was the private preserve of white upper class males who have since reluctantly permitted non-Whites and women to play. It is a spectator sport for fellow golfers. Otherwise it is about as spectacular as watching grass die.

The supposedly unwanted (not to mention unwarranted) attention that Tiger Woods is getting over his erratic* behavior off the green, which his entrepreneurial girlfriends have made public, is the best thing to happen to golf since rain, and will only make Woods even richer than Croesus.

I dislike sports for the very same reason why most people seem to love it so much: its facility. It is all right there on the surface. It has no depths. It cannot seem - it merely is. It does not tell a story. It has nothing to say. And it is exactly such mindlessness that the mass audience desires most. "Make me forget myself," they cry out, "and I will reward you so far beyond your merit that it will make a mockery of all reward and of all merit.

Occasionally people need to be reminded that Tiger Woods is extravagantly wealthy because he can knock a little white ball over great distances with a crooked metal or wooden rod into a little hole in fewer knocks than anyone else in the world. That is his sole contribution to humanity. It is, in fact, too easy to dislike golf. But just because it is too easy to do, like saying that George W. Bush is stupid, it does not make it inaccurate or even unnecessary.


*Woods was behaving erratically, for a superstar, not when he fooled around but when he committed himself to one woman.

The Swimmer part three

There is about the swimmer a sentimentality, or self-pity, which disgusts him even as he finds himself thinking that surely he ought to have earned a reprieve. All that close attentiveness to the sea over the years, to this ever-yielding, stony-hearted medium which has him in it embrace - it cannot have been wasted. there must be something he has learned from it, some subliminal message from his ancestral home, instructions for survival. The idea is fatuous but persistent.

He is beginning to tire. Not of staying afloat, since this is effortless, but of trudging the water to stand higher, of spinning to keep every horizon constantly in view. More and more he allows his face to hang in the water. Through the glass panel of his mask his vision lengthens past the rope's end twenty feet below his ankle. He no longer sees the prismatic chips of phytoplankton, the blazing motes and jellies as they drift past his face. Now he believes he glimpses shapes far beneath, not predators but bulks of deeper purple as though . . .Why not? This archipelago is full of hidden reefs, its contorted seabed thrusts up unexpected pinnacles to within feet of the surface in the middle of nowhere. There could easily be a coralline peak, a ledge, even a plateau over in that direction away from the sun where the water does seem to deepen its color as if a little farther down there lay a solidity. . . .

Away from the sun? The swimmer jerks his head up, gasping and squinting painfully at the blazing disc overhead Is it not past its zenith now? Has it not begun to sink? May this illusion of a darker bulk be nothing but his own shadow, cast as he has so often seen it in late afternoon? No; ridiculous. It is not late afternoon, merely maybe a few minutes past midday. He looks downward again and in a while his eyes adjust from the dazzle and once more he thinks he can pick out an area of deeper tone. So convinced is he that he begins swimming toward it, slowly, so as not to give the impression of having finally picked a direction or of expecting very much. Now and again he glances around to tell his invisible boat where he is going. It seems to him that all will be well if it turns out to be a lonely reef he is heading for. However small, it will convert the ocean at that point into a shallow sea. He would then, as if by magic, be in his depth in twenty feet of water. Or at least, hovering as if in air above the unknown but familiar city, he would be close enough to feel its dwellers might intercede for him, present his case for survival as some court of marine jurisprudence. . . . As an idea it is better than nothing; even a glimpse of a reef would sustain him. Besides, reefs were mysterious and deceptive places whose greater being remained hidden. If one kept one's eyes on a reef under water and followed its avenues, it had a habit of turning into a shore. The swimmer had experienced it a thousand times. Might not this one, despite an apparently yawning horizon, somehow work the same friendly trick?


-Seven-Tenths: Sea and Its Thresholds, James Hamilton-Paterson

The Once and Future Queen

A report on Imelda Marcos was aired on the BBC on March 26 which honestly assessed her continuing role, at the age of 80, in the politics of her husband Ferdinand's far northern Philippine province of Ilocos Norte. Though she showed plenty of public contrition at the death of Ferdinand's nemesis, Cory Aquino, from cancer last year, she has since returned to her old unapologetic self.

She is running, if that is the word, for a seat in the lower Philippine Congress, vacated by her son, Ferdinand Jr., who is running for an upper house Senate seat. Typical of such provincial politics, one family has been in power for forty years. Imelda's daughter is running for governor of the province only because Imelda was not as prodigious a baby-maker as her poor Filipina sisters.

When they filmed the body of Ferdinand, now lying, like Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chih Minh, in an air-tight, climate-controlled glass case, Imelda could not restrain herself from planting a gooey kiss on the glass next to the dead man's face. It was the closest she will get, this side of perdition, to her martyred spouse. She then muttered, "this is one of our major injustices," leaving it to the observer to guess exactly what the "injustice" was. The glass case? Marcos himself? His death from multiple organ failure in Hawaii?

But Imelda's presence on the political scene proves how power is passed around by the ruling elite like a private toy, and how a powerful family may endure public disgrace for a short time* but are never very far from a position of power.

In the BBC report, a Filipino trike driver was asked for his thoughts on the Marcos's chances in the May election. With a scarcely concealed smirk, he said that it might be "good for the people" if all of them won. Of course, he did not say whom he was for, even if he knows too well the election is practically an unnecessary formality. Like everything else in his life, everything seems to have been decided upon before he was born, and long before he even heard of such things as elections or having a vote or more arcane conceptions like freedom or free will.

Some things never change, and more than twenty-three years after the People Power genie was let out of his bottle, and just as quickly put back in, some Filipinos might have been surprised by the prevailing tone of the piece, which was derisive - the view that most foreign observers take of a system that only serves a tiny minority. Before coming to the Philippines, nearly everyone would respond to the question: who committed plunder? with pirates. After coming here, they would have to include former president Joseph Estrada, who was convicted of that very charge, which is a capital offense, and summarily pardoned by the sitting president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Apparently unperturbed by his conviction, Joseph Estrada is running for president again, and is currently running third in the polls.

*Andal Ampatuan, the patriarch and governor of Maguindanao province, was recently cleared of charges of "rebellion" brought by the Philippine government for his involvement in the November massacre of 57 men, women, and journalists.

Effortlessly Green

It was amusing to see earth-friendly Filipino celebs on national TV encouraging residents of Manila, who suffered weeks of rolling blackouts earlier in March, to voluntarily turn off their lights for one hour in observance of Earth Hour on March 27.

I think they could have sold the idea better by suggesting that, if Filipinos were to go without power anyway, they might just as well do it for a worthy cause. It was an act of faith for them to expect the power to be there when they switched their lights on again.

Not surprisingly, then, the Philippines became the world nation with the most cities, towns, and municipalities participating in the event, for the second year running. But it would have been far braver of Filipinos to simply tell the organizers of the event, "led by WWF, the Department of Energy, Green Army Network Foundation and SWITCH Movement," to mind their own business.

Marrakech 1938

After a tubercular hemorrhage put him in hospital for much of the Spring and Summer of 1938, George Orwell travelled to Morocco to convalesce. The following year, he wrote the beautiful essay, "Marrakech," which was first published in the Christmas issue of New Writing. He was no stranger to strange places and cultures, and in his characteristic fashion he wrote about what he saw in Morocco - the dirt, poverty, and the injustice of a people whose country was being run by someone else.

One of the most interesting things that he saw was the living conditions of Sephardic Jews who were subject to cultural restrictions imposed on them for centuries in North Africa by Muslim rule. I wonder how a Palestinian living in Israel would react to Orwell's description. In the last sentence of the following passage from "Marrakech," Orwell seems to foretell the fate that European Jews were to meet only a few years later.



When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters--whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn't here. Perhaps he is on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

"Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They're the real rulers of this country, you know. They've got all the money. They control the banks, finance--everything."

"But," I said, "isn't it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny an hour?"

"Ah, that's only for show! They're all money-lenders really. They're cunning, the Jews."

In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square meal.

Remastering the Film: Ingmar Bergman

Some filmmakers, like Tavernier or Fellini, seem to arrive fully formed, their art at its zenith from the very beginning. Others, however, take several years, through trial and error, to arrive at their mature style. Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) had to make twelve films over seven years before finding his true voice in his first great film, Sawdust and Tinsel in 1953. That voice was developed as much in his work in Swedish theater during the long winter seasons when the light is not favorable to filmmaking as in his films. Bergman's writing was heavily influenced by Sweden's great dramaturg, August Strindberg. His films reflect several influences, not least of which were the great Swedish directors who came before him - Alf Sjöberg, who gave Bergman his first big break as a scriptwriter in 1944's Torment, and the man who is regarded as the father of Swedish film,Victor Sjöström, whom Bergman had a chance to direct in Wild Strawberries (1957).

Once he established himself as a formidable creative force in 1953, Bergman embarked on a string of films that were unprecedented both in their brilliance and versatility: the comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), the medieval morality tale, The Seventh Seal (1957), the dark and deceptively comic The Magician (1958), and the stark retelling of a Nordic legend, The Virgin Spring (1960).

Then, at the height of his fame, for reasons that are still obscure, Bergman fled to a small island called Fårö (1) and only emerged to make rigidly narrow, self-styled "chamber films," the first of which, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), set the tone of several of his subsequent films. These films deserve serious reevaluation, since they were nearly all hailed as "masterpieces," a term that guarantees an end to discussion. Winter Light followed, which I regard as Bergman's last great film. The rest of his films of the '60s were called "postmodern" (always without the hyphen): The Silence, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, The Shame, The Passion of Anna. The critics who hailed them believed, essentially, that Bergman had emerged from the chilly isolation of the "trilogy" purged of things like linearity (not to mention clarity) and was a more advanced and cerebral artist, suddenly expert at a looser, abstract style.

I, for one, do not believe in Bergman's metamorphosis any more than I believed that most of what passed for abstract expressionism was art. Woody Allen called Bergman "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera." John Simon called him "cinema's Shakespeare" and compared his sudden plunge into obscurity in the '60s with the comparable shifts in style of Picasso and Stravinsky. I find Simon's comparisons far-fetched. There are film artists who made more fatal errors than Bergman (2), but too often his attempts at versatility were misfires. When Simon attacked Fellini for his supposedly discovering a nonexistent intellect, he should have been equally critical of Bergman. (3)

In the '70s, Bergman's work fell into a marked decline. Among other mistakes, he made what I consider his worst film, which was actually a TV mini-series, Scenes from a Marriage, which not only presents one of the most nightmarish views of matrimony ever conceived (3), but in the last episode, "In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World," (4) Bergman places his central couple, Johann and Marianne, divorced and re-married to other people, blissfully in bed together - therewith sowing the seeds of two more failed marriages. Bergman had five wives and several mistresses, so there is no need to speculate about his views about marriage, let alone fidelity. (5) The series was so widely praised, however, that it was shown in its entirety, in six episodes, on America's Public Broadcasting Service.

While I am quite prepared to call Bergman one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of the medium, I do so critically, accepting his failures (which are numerous) as well as his triumphs. His long career proved how very difficult it is, even under the best conditions, to produce a great or even a good film. That he made as many as he did - as stingy as I am, I give him credit for six great films and at least as many good ones (6) - is a testament to his importance.

(1) Bergman's home on the island was recently sold. It was valued at €3-4m.
(2) Like Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni, et al.
(3) Vernon Young called it "two blood-stained towels marked HIS and HERS."
(4) The title of Lina Wertmüller's only film in English was The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain.

(5) He defined relationships in a line from one of his early films, Prison: "Hell together is better than hell alone."

(6) The "good ones" include Waiting Women (1952), Summer with Monica (1953), A Lesson in Love (1954), Women's Dreams (1955).

Tutto a Posto e Niente in Ordine (Everything in Place, Nothing in Order)

Seeing Kathryn Bigelow become the first woman to be voted Best Director by AMPAS last weekend led some critics to bring up the sad subject of the dearth of women directors, past and present. Whatever Bigelow's claim to the title of last year's best director, if I had to give my vote for the best woman director ever, my choice would be Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich-Job, or Lina Wertmüller for short. (1)

Her name, like the titles of her films, is like a treatise. She first gained notice as assistant to Fellini on 8 1/2, and enjoyed a brief but extraordinary creative burst in the '70s that resulted in four films that are superb by any but the most obtuse standards: Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (The Seduction of Mimi-1972), Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero 'stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza...' (Love and Anarchy-1973), Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (Swept Away-1974)), and Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties-1975). The title of this post is from her 1974 film, released in the U.S. (stupidly) as All Screwed Up.

These four films are bristling with ideas - about men and women, about history, about politics - that are idiosyncratic as well as manifestly serious. Some critics, political naïfs, claimed her politics were "schematic" and her films like pamphlets. Wertmüller is, in fact, a far more interesting politically committed filmmaker than Ken Loach because her politics is a long way from being doctrinaire. Her best film, Seven Beauties, remains controversial, and was attacked for its appropriation of an otherwise untouchable subject, Nazi labor camps, in a serious and inventive examination of the lengths to which one not very likable or admirable man will go to survive. In his attack on the film, Bruno Bettelheim, eminent child psychologist and camp survivor, took offense at Wertmüller's supposed suggestion that surviving the camps required a betrayal of one's humanity.(2) Wertmüller's point, I think, was that her film is only about one man's betrayal of his own humanity. The burlesque manner of that betrayal - scraping together his last bits of libido to make love to a grotesquely obese and sadistic woman,(3) betrays Wertmüller's design and exposes her very impure protagonist as the monster that he knows he is.

But because her films were more interested in people than just women, Wertmüller was of no use to feminist critics, who accused her of reinforcing stereotypes. And because she so swiftly went into decline after answering the dreaded call of Hollywood, it was all the easier to downplay her importance. Her work lost much of its vitality and urgency in the '80s and she only regained commercial attention once with the uncharacteristically sentimental Ciao, Professore! (Io speriamo che me la cavo-1992). If nothing else, the pointless remake of Swept Away (2002), with an utterly unalluring Madonna and Adriano Giannini, son of Giancarlo (4) made the original seem all the more like a masterpiece.

(1) Wertmüller was actually the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Director, for Seven Beauties in 1976. Other women directors nominated since are Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, and Bigelow.

(2) "If ["Seven Beauties"] is to be taken for mere entertainment, I must state my disgust that the abomination of genocide and the tortures and degradations of the concentration camp are used as a special, uniquely macabre titillation to enhance its effectiveness. . . . I also believe that "Seven Beauties" is a somewhat uneasy, indirect, camouflaged—and therefore more dangerous, because more easily accepted and hence more effective—justification for accepting the world that produced concentration camps; it is a self-justification for those who readily accepted that world under these conditions and profited from it." Bettelheim, "Wertmüller, Lina 1928–" Bettelheim took his own life in a nursing home in 1990 by pulling a plastic bag over his head.
(3) I have to admit that Wertmüller goes a little over the top by making the commandant of Pasqualino's camp a woman (Shirley Stoler).

(4) Matt Damon and Paul Greenglass were on Charlie Rose last week and it was mentioned that their film partnership is comparable to "Leo and Marty." Never mind that since Martin Scorsese started working with Leo DiCaprio his work embarked on a commercial detour from which it may never return. But the comparison to "Matt and Paul," while ludicrous in itself, shows what an incredibly narrow frame of reference most contemporary critics are subject to, for whom any film older than their own measly lifetimes is considered prehistoric. What about Monica and Michelangelo? Or Liv and Ingmar? Or Giancarlo and Lina?