La Guerre n'est pas finie

"When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war - and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings - there is always the temptation to say: 'One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral.' In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps and what not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface." George Orwell (1)


In the first feature films of Alain Resnais, the past and the present seem to occupy the same space. The characters in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel, and La Guerre est Finie cannot forget the past - they are as much defined as they are impeded by it. They move through the present as if by inertia, in a direction and at a pace determined by the past.

Diego, the hero of La Guerre est Finie, is a soldier fighting in a war in 1966 - despite the fact that the war was offically over in 1939. The Spanish Civil War, in which half a million Spaniards died, ended with the usurpation of the democratically-elected Republican government by the forces of Fascism led by Francisco Franco. The many thousands of Spaniards who fled across the border into France before Franco could seal it, either resigned themselves to living in exile or organized into resistance groups. For many of them, whether they engaged directly in the resistance or not, the war never ended.

Resnais relied on the integrity of his scripts, which were written by leading writers of the period: Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Cayrol (who had also written the script for Resnais's short film Night and Fog). For his fourth film, Resnais commissioned a script from Jorge Semprún, who had recently been expelled from the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). Born in 1923, Semprún was the son of Spanish exiles living in France since the fall of the Spanish Republic, and, after the German invasion, joined the French Resistance to the German Occupation.

Captured by the Germans and tortured, at the age of 19, Semprún was sent to Buchenwald where he spent eighteen months. On his return to France, he joined the Spanish Communist Party in exile, while using his work as a translator for UNESCO as a convenient front. Between 1957 and 1962, using the nom de guerre Federico Sanchez, Semprún began crossing into Spain clandestinely, dividing his life between Madrid and Paris. (If one didn't know how perilous his work was, his replacement, Julian Grimau, was arrested in 1962, tortured and executed.)

In 1964, Semprún was expelled from the communist party for his open criticism of Stalin. He had already published his first novel, Le Grand Voyage, which tells the story of his five-day journey to Buchenwald, mixed up with his memories and with incidents that took place during his imprisonment. His narrative style mixed autobiography with fictional elements, which made some critics (like Claude Lanzmann, creator of the landmark documentary Shoah) cry foul. In 1988, a Socialist government in Spain asked him to be the country's Minister of Culture. I wonder if he recalled the moment near the end of La Guerre est Finie in which a French police inspector who is looking for Diego tells Nadine, "Anyway, politics are always a tricky affair. Some of the underground characters turn up one day as cabinet ministers."

The hero of the film is Diego (Yves Montand, looking his hangdog best), a beloved veteran of the endless war. His life is constituted almost entirely of subterfuge. He is either arriving or departing, never in one place for more than a day or a night. Most of what we see in the film is his comings and goings, a few rushed encounters with fellow communists or those who are in sympathy with their cause. Even the love scenes that Semprún gives him, artfully staged and shot - as always - by Resnais, are fugitive, surreptitious. Diego acts throughout them like there is somewhere else that he needs to be, always somewhere else. The two women, the loving mistress Marianne (a radiant Ingrid Thulin) and the young partisan Nadine (a fiery Genevieve Bujold), seem alluring reminders of the private life he had long ago forsaken. In their lovemaking scenes, time and space seem suspended.

If you are going to make a film on such a subject, Resnais's approach is by far the most sound. His distillation of all action into its fleeting elements, with the more violent moments consigned to brief, soundless shots shuffled throughout the passing narrative like tiny shocks, is fascinating, if somewhat antiseptic. Nothing is sensationalized by Resnais, nothing is given undue emphasis. La Guerre est Finie is not a thriller - nothing like the two films Semprún later wrote for Costa-Gavras, Z and The Confession, despite the reappearance of Yves Montand in both of them. Resnais isn't out to thrill us. He wants only to show us. The film reminded me of Antonioni's The Passenger, in which a reporter on a sleeveless assignment in North Africa finds the man in the hotel's next room dead, and switches identities (for no apparent reason). He discovers that the identity he's assumed is much more interesting. On the way to the film's murky conclusion, Antonioni is diverted by the beauty of the physical world through which his hero moves (the North African desert, a baroque German church, Gaudi's Barcelona). To his credit, Resnais's imagery is more functional.

But I think La Guerre est Finie is impaired by its obvious love for Diego. The love scene between Diego and Marianne is staged like it's the centerpiece of the film, a lovely idyll toward which all of the action of the first half of the film seems to push us, and away from which the second half drags us. It's certainly worth it to see Ingrid Thulin in the altogether, especially since Resnais deprives us of Genevieve Bujold's nude beauty by his strategically-framed shots during the earlier love scene.

Diego meets with the Spanish underground in Paris, who are hungry for news of events in Spain. He is introduced to a group of young fighters who are plotting a terror attack. But when he tries to talk them out of it, that, based on his experience, it will probably end in their capture, they dismiss him as a has-been. Diego is ordered back to Spain, but the French police already know his identity. The film's last moments gently suspend the fate of Diego, on his way in a speeding sports car to the border, toward a trap that the agents of Franco have already set for him. We see his face through the windscreen, superimposed with Marianne's face as she runs to catch a train bound for Madrid to warn him. Semprún was clearly telling his own story - else why did he choose to speak the first-person narration himself? At last freed from the life of fear and suspicion, of loyalties and betrayals, of always being on his guard, it was perhaps his way of saying goodbye to a war that could never, and perhaps will never, end.

[Postscript: Richard Blair, the adopted son of George Orwell, recently voiced his support for a museum of the Spanish Civil War proposed for a location in Barcelona ahead of the 80th anniversary of the start of the war in July. On behalf of the Orwell Society, Blair said: "We are wholly in favour of this and wish the project every success. Many young people in Spain have not been taught in depth about the civil war and don't really have an understanding of what happened from 1936-39 or of the dictatorship that followed." The Guardian, "Campaign for Barcelona museum to tell at last full story of Spain's civil war," by Julian Coman, May 29, 2016.]
         

(1) George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War," [1942?].

Kind of Cool

Two jazz trumpet players, Miles Davis and Chet Baker, are back in the news due to the release of two biopics: Miles Ahead, about Davis, was written, directed and stars Don Cheadle; Born to Be Blue, about Baker, was written and directed by Robert Budreau and stars Ethan Hawke. Neither film inspired much enthusiasm from critics, except perhaps the dredging up of a tired argument in which the trumpeters themselves were not involved, a sort of East Coast-West Coast musical rivalry. While both musicians received high praise from their contemporaries, there was a great deal of rather silly controversy over which one was the more deserving of praise. Their careers had their ups and downs, and both films concentrate on the downs - the source of most of the interesting drama in these musicians' lives.

I have been a jazz lover for about as long as I can remember - before I even knew what it was. When I was ten, I was sitting in the back seat of a car and a pretty sixteen year old blonde in the front seat turned around and looked at me. I was a cute kid, but painfully shy. There was music playing on the radio, probably rock music, and she asked me, "What kind of music do you like?" Without stopping to think of an answer, I blurted out "Jazz!" The girl tilted her head in amazement, smiled a curious smile, and said, "Jazz?!?"

I didn't know it then, but jazz was the greatest musical idiom of the 20th century. Some of the greatest jazz musicians were playing then. It was 1966, and post-bop was the latest permutation of jazz. Listening to some of it now, it sounds as edgy and bold as it did then - more so, since jazz has slipped into ossification since then, like it had nowhere else to go. I think it has to do with the fact that jazz is more about musicians than it is about music. And when the mass audience, which had never really embraced jazz as its own, turned its back on jazz in the late 60s, turning instead to funk and psychedelic rock, those jazz musicians who had survived the 60s tried to stay alive by changing styles, modes, and mixing jazz with other forms. The results sound terrible today precisely because of its impurity - music that can't make up its mind what it wants to be.

A jazz musician isn't just an interpretive artist, like an actor who has to follow a script, or a classical musician a score. When a jazz musician takes the stage, he may begin with the familiar notes of a standard like "My Funny Valentine," but from the initial notes of the melody he can go wherever his mood or his frame of mind may take him, to a destination that he may not even have glimpsed when he started. He has the freedom and the power to be both interpreter and creator, making something out of thin air in front of his audience. On their best recordings, such musicians wrote their own songs, used a handful of notes they assembled in the morning as a jumping off point for their rapturous improvisations in the evening. One such jazz artist was Miles Davis, who originated a minimalist, clean - "cool" - musical style that attracted listeners because it lacked the overwhelming busyness of bop, the sometimes bewildering multiple layers of notes piled on notes that characterized the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. As much as Davis was famous for ushering in the cool era of jazz, there were many imitators, and none of the imitators was as successful - more successful even than Davis - as Chet Baker.

There had always been great jazz musicians who were white. Jazz is an idiom - not a form unto itself, but a kind of dialect. It was the opposite of parochial, as the success of jazz everywhere in the world proved; it was universal. White artists, however (especially in America), had an advantage over their black fellow musicians that was unfair. Because jazz was largely played by black musicians, the discriminatory laws in America that deliberately isolated black people from white society made it difficult for black jazz musicians to perform wherever they wished. The Swing Era was the closest that jazz came to being American Popular Music. But it did so because of predominantly white bandleaders like Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, and Artie Shaw.

The postwar era ushered in great changes. How could anything, least of all music, fail to reflect the enormous experience of a world war? There was a need and an appetite for something new, even revolutionary. But as much as musicians and listeners were ready for change, conservative forces in society wanted things to return to the way they were before the war, especially in the Deep South. Too often, black jazz musicians touring the South found themselves playing in clubs on one side of the tracks only to learn that they had to sleep and eat on the other.

Chet Baker was different, and not just because he was white. He and his fellow musicians, which included the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, were practitioners of the "West Coast Cool" bebop sound. Baker had earned chops of his own playing with Charlie Parker in some of Parker's west coast gigs. And Baker could sing, sort of. His vocals were actually alot like his trumpet style - spare, reedy, unforced, and rather bland. But he was popular, and his striking (white) looks landed him Downbeat's Trumpeter of the Year award in 1953 and 1954 when more talented (black) trumpeters were struggling. They knew - and deep down, so did Baker - that his popularity had little to do with his playing.

It's easy today to look back on the era and laugh. But it's also too easy to see Baker's dramatic decline as some kind of tragic fall. The truth is somewhere in between. Baker wasn't the equal of Miles Davis, but neither was he a total joke, as too many observers of late are suggesting. Jokes don't win Downbeat Awards, however racially biased they used to be. People still find something of value in Baker's early recordings, and in his recordings of the 1980s, after he got new dentures and regained his embouchure, even if they're aware of what Miles and Dizzy (and Clifford Brown and Roy Eldridge) were doing at the same moment. Holding all of his advantages against Baker is as unfair as the system that made him popular.

The two biopics Miles Ahead and Born to Be Blue concentrate on moments of crisis in the lives of and Davis and Baker. The critics I've read liked neither film, even if Miles Ahead, the film concentrating on Davis, was somewhat better received. The trouble starts when critics measured the success of the films against the worthiness of their subjects. However self-inflicted Baker's problems may have been (both he and Davis were heroin addicts), his life didn't follow the self-destructive curve that some critics would have us believe.

In 2002, a biography of Baker, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, by James Gavin, was published. Among the mostly favorable reviews was one written by David Thomson, a prolific and sometimes observant critic who is clearly more interested in famous subjects like Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. As I said of him in a review of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, he is more of a fan than a genuine critic.

The thesis of his review of the Baker biography is that Baker was a bad jazz musician because he was white and because he was strikingly good-looking (which seems to be the only reason why Thomson was attracted by the subject in the first place). He opened his review with the following warning: "If you treasure Chet Baker, if you have all his recordings of "My Funny Valentine" and "Let's Get Lost," and if you revere the desperate effort to hit flat notes, to stretch more paining pauses, to disappear into the ether, then buy this diligent book, but do not read what I have to say about its subject."(1)

I read his review of the book because I was interested in the story of jazz, not necessarily in the story of Chet Baker. Jazz musicians, like blues musicians, often die suddenly or accidentally, and often far too soon. The talent they possess seems to be purchased at the expense of their souls, and a jealous death is always shadowing them, ready to press them for payment.

Evidently, if Chet Baker could've pawned his soul for some heroin, as he often did with his trumpets at his lowest point (he started using in 1957, served time in jail in Europe for drug offenses, and, in 1966, got his teeth knocked out in a drug-related altercation), he would have without a moment's thought. What any of this has to do with his playing is a question worth asking because it doesn't have an easy answer - despite David Thomson's strenuous efforts to convince us of Baker's total unworthiness.

Baker died in a fall from a second storey balcony in 1988. Thomson comments: "Had the man fallen or jumped, or had someone even pushed him? I am inclined to confess that I think it may have been me - I don't want to be unkind, and in this case it was surely mercy if some angel gave the man's frail back a tender, guiding push."

For Thomson, Baker's life story after discovering heroin is so monotonously depressing that he feels sorry for his biographer:
"Baker was out to bring everyone down. It would not surprise me if - just to get through the labor--Gavin needed an hour or so every night listening to something as cleansing, explosive, and hopeful as Louis Armstrong, Lee Morgan, or Clifford Brown, or anyone who knew how to pick up a trumpet and blow, as opposed to using the instrument to enlarge an exquisite, maudlin, and grisly sigh. No, I do not like Chet Baker." I don't know that I like him either, but I can't condemn him simply for not being black or not being Louis Armstrong. Do I condemn Thomson for not being Vernon Young - a fellow Americanized Englishman, but much finer writer and critic?

"Truly I think that the Chet Baker story was, from start to finish, based on his appearance. He was pretty, he was handsome, he was cute." It's possible, all these years since, to separate Chet Baker's trumpet playing from his face - especially since, by the time he was 40, he had entirely lost his looks. And it was his later recordings in the 1980s that critics recognize as examples of his best playing, when he looked like death warmed over, as my father used to say.

As for his playing, Thomson quotes Art Pepper, a fellow white jazz musician, from his memoir Straight Life (1979):

"Billy Wilson [Pepper's veiled renaming of Baker] plays like he is. When I knew him, when he was young, he was a real warm, sweet, loving person. And he plays just that way. But if you listen to his tone, it never was very strong; it's pretty and kind of cracking. It's weak. And when he was faced with prison--because he got busted for using drugs--he couldn't stand it. He couldn't go because he was afraid, and when they offered him an out by turning over on somebody he couldn't help but do it. He's a weak person. That's the way he plays. That's the way he sounds."

At least Pepper was fair enough to credit Baker's playing with warmth and sweetness. Whether or not his death was suicide, whatever was responsible for Chet Baker's success, it's silly to blame him for it. Was John Coltrane responsible for his early death from cancer? If being a gifted jazz musician carried a curse, how was Baker to blame if his curse came ready-made, as it did for anyone who picked up an instrument and made something out of nothing for whomever was lucky enough to be listening?

(1) "My Unfunny Valentine" by David Thomson, The New Republic, June 17, 2002.

Far from Hardy

Perhaps it's too easy to find in Thomas Hardy's fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, a rebuke to Jane Austen's chronicles of courtship - splendid women absorbed in the puerilities of landing suitable husbands. Hardy's story begins with an independent and courageous young woman, with the usual fantastic Hardy name of Bathsheba Everdene, resisting the proposals of three stalwart men and ends with her eventually marrying all three. Hardy's story ends with one of the men dead (interestingly, the only one who has had sex with Bathsheba), and a second as good as dead - he will hang for the murder of the first. The man she ends up with, a rather stolid shepherd named Gabriel Oak (!), was the first to propose, but it's safe to suppose that she doesn't love him. If Bathsheba can be pinned down to loving any of them, it was the first, the one who seduced her.

After watching the latest of four film adaptations of Hardy's novel, it's tempting to think, comparing it to the expensive and expansive first adaptation, from 1967, "What a falling off was there." Recalling that film, directed by John Schlesinger and photographed by Nicolas Roeg, so many scenes stand out: the sheep dog driving Gabriel Oak's flock off a cliff, Sergeant Troy demonstrating his swordsmanship to Bathsheba, Troy breaking open the coffin of Fanny Robin, the gothic church's rain spout disinterring Fanny's grave, Boldwood's wedding party interrupted. But the simple fact that one recalls only scenes from Schlesinger's film exposes its essential weakness. It isn't a cohesive - or even a coherent - work. Top-heavy with three great actors, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp, perfectly cast, they appear to revolve in the memory around a beautiful nullity - Julie Christie, whose stardom was one of the most baffling flukes of the 1960s. Why she was never expected to act by David Lean and Schlesinger (who was her lover for awhile), is one of film history's greatest mysteries. But the technicolor imagery summoned up by Roeg, who would shortly embark on his own meandering career as director, caught fleeting glimpses of Hardy's fatalistic Wessex tale. Hardy belived so overwhelmingly in the inevitability of disappointment (especially in love) and grief that he could get away with devices like coincidence and foreshadowing, all of it to establish his sense of a powerful Fate ruling the lives of his characters.

In the new movie, there is a much airier feeling, a particularization of detail that has something other than the plot to justify it. The Danish director, Thomas Vinterberg, shows us how people lived in Victorian Dorsetshire, the English county that Hardy redubbed Wessex. The costumes are marvelously explicit. (When I reaquainted myself with the Schlesinger version twenty-five years ago when I was in the Navy, and Terence Stamp walked on in all his dragooned glory, I said, "Now that's a uniform!" A friend corrected me: "No. That's a costume.") The actors don't behave as if they're wearing costumes, but their everyday clothes, which is a subtle but marvelous touch.

Carey Mulligan heads the cast, as she should - since it's Bathsheba's story to tell. She provides this version with a much sturdier center, with her three male swains (Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Sheen, and Tom Sturridge) providing their parts with supporting substance. But how I missed Bates, Finch, and Stamp in those roles! There are no English actors around today who could properly replace them. Mulligan carries the film well, even if she isn't as superficially toothsome as Julie Christie was in 1967. Vernon Young was right, though, when he pointed out that Christie missed her true calling as a flight attendant (he used the quaint term "stewardess"). Mulligan breathes life, if not fire, into Bathsheba, the same life that Hardy gave her on the printed page.

One other dimension missing from Vinterberg's film is the music, an absence that would've been welcome since it's so overused in today's films. Craig Armstrong composed a somewhat murky score for the film, along with a quasi-English folk song sung by Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen. But Richard Rodney Bennett supplied the Schlesinger film with a score worthy of Ralph Vaughan Williams, even if the film wasn't quite worthy of it. Vinterberg's choice of the Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen replaced Nicolas Roeg's lugubrious atmospherics with sunny, sharp images in keeping, perhaps, with the Dogme dogma of avoiding photographic effects (filters, underexposure, artificial lighting, etc.). It's an improvement, I think, on the Turneresque look of too many Hardy adaptations.

In keeping with the latest literary adaptations, the new Far from the Madding Crowd is just shy of two hours, which is a serious short-shrifting of the novel's density. The Schlesinger version was a hefty 169 minutes, but few audiences today have the patience for such long-hauls. Which means, of course, that it isn't just their loss but ours, dear reader. Vinterberg's film only managed to scrape in $30.2M worldwide. This time the madding crowd stayed away.

From the Cockpit

As of right now Filipinos, around forty million of them this year, are standing in line outside voting centers all over the Philippine archipelago waiting for their turn to cast their vote for candidates running for president, vice president (an office elected separately from the president), senator, all the way down to municipal mayor. Even if most of the 7,107 islands that constitute the geographical area of the country are uninhabited, the Philippine Committee on Elections (COMELEC) has transported automated voting machines made by a company called Smartmatic to as many populated areas as possible. Starting with the 2010 elections, COMELEC decided to replace the time-consuming manual voting system - in which voters filled out a ballot, folded it and put it into a secured box, and which resulted in a lengthy waiting period while the voting boxes were gathered from far and wide, unlocked, and the ballots counted by an army of volunteers (a process that could take weeks) - with a machine that works like a fax, transmitting every voter form via secure connection to a central receiving station in Manila. Vote tallying is over in a matter of a few days. For some reason, people actually believed that this faster process would prevent, or at least discourage, cheating.

In the past week, Filipinos hung around their barangays waiting for representatives of the candidates who carried lists of registered voters and satchels filled with envelopes. The envelopes contained cash of various denominations, from twenty pesos (45 cents) to one hundred pesos ($2.10). In provincial gubernatorial elections, which can get heated, the money in the envelopes can be as high a one thousand pesos ($21). An average voter, if he was patient, came away with maybe five to ten bucks this past week. It's called vote buying - a quite simple quid pro quo between poor people and the unimaginably rich people who rule them. I have seen it with my own eyes - the bank notes even had the candidate's name on a piece of paper stapled to them.

For a majority of Filipinos, cock-fighting is more than just an unofficial national sport - it's a metaphor of the political process that Filipinos experience. When they vote, it's easy to see their votes as a bet for the cock that they believe will win the fight. What happens after the winning cock/candidate takes office isn't a factor Filipinos consider when they vote. Despite no one ever acting in their interests in the seventy year history of their republic, Filipinos take voting seriously - far more seriously, strangely enough, than Americans - but they don't expect anything in return. For example, the common rationale behind the election of President Benigno Aquino III in 2010 was that he was already rich enough not to feel the need to steal from the people, as every president before him did. Ferdinand Marcos managed to steal billions of dollars (not pesos) from his people before they'd had enough and drove him from power. To our shame, Marcos's personal friend, Ronald Reagan, requisitioned two C-130 transport aircraft to carry the Marcos family, a small retinue of cronies, diaper bags crammed with jewels and gold bars, along with pallets of millions of freshly-minted Philippine peso notes to Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii where he was given asylum (and where he died of cancer a few years later).

Among the candidates running for president this time is a former mayor of Davao, a sprawling city in the Philippine Wild West (or South) on the island of Mindinao, named Rodrigo Duterte. Since he announced his candidacy, he has become wildly popular among voters, mostly the poor and uneducated, for his tough talk about mass executions for drug dealers. One rumor going around is that he shot and killed his own son when he discovered he was doing drugs - crystal meth, known hereabouts as "shabu." He has been labelled the "Philippne Donald Trump" because of his routine outrageous statements, like wishing he had been the first to have a go at an attractive Australian woman who had been gang-raped and murdered in a Philippine prison. Duterte makes Donald Trump look like Gandhi. Like Trump, however, he is ahead in the polls, and looks like a winner in this cock fight.

Also running, but for Vice President, is Senator BongBong Marcos, the only son of former dictator Ferdinand. He goes by the nickname BongBong, I suppose, because his real name is Ferdinand Jr. He was last polled to be in a dead heat with another candidate. He has been trying to paint a far different picture of his father's presidency since he arrived on the public stage, claiming that Ferdinand was interrupted in his project to transform the Philippines into another Singapore, and that he intends to continue that legacy if he makes it to president. Since Duterte has dictator written all over him, provoking current president Aquino (whose father, by the way, was murdered by Ferdinand - a fact that has never been legally established) to warn Filipinos that Duterte may actually do what he says he will do and throw out the Philippine constitution, Marcos may have to wait his turn to plunder his country.

Philippine politics has always resembled a two-ring circus, with the forces of corruption and the status quo in one ring amassing as much stolen wealth as they can before they get caught, and the forces of reform and fair governance in the other going about the piecemeal and arduous task of holding a window - if not a mirror - up to the antics being carried out in Ring #1 so that everyone can see. The Philippines is just about to conclude a six-year period of economic increase, brought about by Benigno Aquino III, son of the rich and powerful - and long-standing Hacendero - Cojuanco family. Like American president Barack Obama, his term (only one 6-year term) has been spent down in the weeds of governance unknown to ordinary Filipinos. It was uneventful, lacking in drama, boring in Circus Ring #2. Perhaps that was exactly what voters wanted in 2010, after twelve years of corrupt presidents, plunder, impeachments, and stolen elections. But now, evidently, once again they want to see what the first ring will give them - or what they will spectacularly steal.

Look at Me

Nothing demonstrates a society's faith in the rock-bottom decency of human beings than the manner with which it treats its criminals. Of course, the faith of some people in human decency appears to be far greater than that of others.

On April 20, a verdict was returned by the Oslo district court in Norway regarding a case brought against the state by Anders Behring Breivik. As everyone should know by now, Breivik is a Norwegian man who, on July 22, 2011, set off a bomb near a government building in Oslo, killing eight people. After lighting the bomb's fuse inside a parked van, Breivik then proceeded directly to a tiny island called Utøya where the country's ruling Labor Party was sponsoring a youth summer camp. With two guns, a Ruger carbine and a 9mm Glock, and a bag full of ammunition, Breivik strolled around the island for more than an hour, shooting everyone he encountered, often at point blank range, killing sixty-nine. When police finally arrived, he quietly surrendered to them, as if it, too, was a part of his plan. Before leaving his mother's flat on that horrific morning, where he had been living and where he had manufactured the bomb, he emailed a 1,500-word manifesto to a thousand online recipients in which he stated that he wanted his actions to provoke a revolution in Norway, and in every other European country, against immigrants, especially against what he called a "Muslim invasion." He also uploaded a 12-minute video to YouTube declaring the same message.(1)

Almost immediately after being taken into police custody, Breivik began to complain about the most trivial things. Asne Seierstad, in her article in The New Yorker, wrote:

"When his bloodied shoes were put in a plastic bag and he was given slippers, he refused to wear them. 'I don't want to be seen in these; they are riduculous,' he said." (2)

Then Breivik discovered that, during the shootings, he had somehow cut his finger and was bleeding. He remembered that, during the shootings on Utøya, he had been hit in the hand by something - probably a piece of the skull of one of his victims whom he had shot in the head. He continued until his interrogation, when he demanded a bandage. One of the policemen present muttered that he would get "no fucking bandage" from him. So Breivik refused to any more questions until he got a bandaid. Someone got it for him.

At the end of his ten-week trial in 2012, in which there was conflicting psychiatric opinion about his mental state (the court concluded he was not psychotic, although his total lack of remorse clearly showed that he was a sociopath), he was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, the longest penalty under Norwegian law, but the sentence can be extended indefinitely.

In prison, Brievik was subjected to daily strip-searches, found himself separated from visitors by a glass partition, was prevented from communicating with his followers, and was restricted to solitary confinement for lengthy periods. Breivik complained to prison officials, as well as directly to the press about other things as well, such as having to use a Playstation 2 rather than a Playstation 3, having to drink cold coffee or not having enough butter for his bread, and about the total absence of artworks in the prison. He claimed that the resulting psychological damage made him a fan of a reality television dating show.  

Last year, Breivik filed suit against the state because some of the conditions under which he is obliged to live are, he claimed, a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting "inhumane and degrading treatment". Having to see him again every night on Norwegian television as his case was presented to the court, made the wounds of the families who lost a son or a daughter, a sibling or a friend in the massacre, bleed again. Seeing Breivik obviously relishing the publicity, his taking the stage once again, enraged everyone. Yet the law required that the court hear Breivik's complaints. And last month the court ruled in his favor, agreeing that there was deliberately inhumane and degrading treatment of him, but that some of the terms of his confinement, like his being prevented from communicating with his followers, should continue. And now the state has appealed the court's decision, Breivik will be provided with still more attention from the press, and Norwegians subjected to further outrage.

Some of the most acute minds in Norway have spent the years since the Utøya massacre trying to figure out how Breivik could have brought himself to the point of committing mass murder, and then to have carried it out without the slightest comprehension of wrong-doing. In another New Yorker article, published a year ago, Karl Ove Knausgaard tried to comprehend Breivik. "The most logical approach is to view his actions as a variation on the numerous school massacres that have occurred in the past decades in the United States, Finland, and Germany: a young man, a misfit, who is either partly or completely excluded from the group, takes as many people with him into death as he can, in order to 'show' us. . . He wanted to be seen; that is what drove him, nothing else. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me."(3)

If Breivik had committed his massacre in the U.S., it's fairly certain that by now he would be dead. Like Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (an act that Breivik tried to repeat with his Oslo bomb) and who was put to death by lethal injection in 2001, Breivik would have been expeditiously tried by a federal court, convicted, and sentenced to death - all out of consideration to the victims and in the interests of "justice." In Europe, however, capital punishment has long since been abolished. Brevik must spend the rest of his life in prison. The survivors of the massacre and the families of the victims never expected justice, since no matter what they did to Breivik, the seventy-seven dead will never be brought back. The responsibility of the state, therefore, is to keep him in one sort of confinement or other until he, too, is dead.

What is the purpose of incarcerating convicted criminals? My father, after his retirement from the Army, got a job as a guard at a prison in South Carolina, and it gave me a lesson in the confusion Americans evidently had towards prison inmates. Because of his experience with weapons, my father worked in one of the prison towers with a high-powered rifle and instructions to shoot anyone who tried to climb over one of the high fences near the main gate. Since he worked the graveyard shift, I remember he drank alot of coffee and slept all day.

The prison where he worked, down by the Congaree River in Columbia, was officially known as the South Carolina State Penetentiary. Penetentiary is an old word, betraying an old conception of imprisonment that has little meaning any more. It's where "penitents" - confessed sinners - go. The state department was called the Department of Corrections. That prisons "correct" prisoners is a liberal 20th-century idea that is the expression of a different understanding of what happens when someone breaks the law and what society needs to do about them.

Anders Breivik seems determined not to go quietly into the living oblivion that Norwegian law has sought to place him. "Every time his name appears in public," Knausgaard wrote, "he gets what he wants, and becomes who he wants, while those whom he murdered, at whose expense he asserted himself, lost not onky their lives but also their names - we remember his name, but they have become numbers."


(1) Charles Manson believed that the Tate-Labianca murders carried out by members of his "family" would spark a race war.
(2) "Mercy for a Terroist in Norway," The New Yorker, April 25, 2016.
(3) "The Inexplicable: Inside the mind of a mass killer," The New Yorker, May 25, 2015.

An Auteur's Revenge

I had the pleasure to see a brief documentary produced by Criterion for the 2014 release of their DVD of Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybele (Cybele, ou Les Dimanches de Ville-d'Avray, 1963). Bourguignon, speaking English throughout the short film, recalls the making of the his first feature film, the preparation of the script, the casting of the two leads, Hardy Kruger and Patricia Gozzi, the discoveries and difficulties during shooting, and the release of the film and its phenomenal success. But the critical reaction to the film, as Bourguignon recalls, wasn't unanimously positive. One specific group of critics that might have been relied on by a young French filmmaker making his first film as a source of support, the critics writing for Cahiers du Cinema that included Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, and Truffaut, attacked the film and, according to Bourguignon, their disapproval cast a shadow over the rest of his career.

Having been an admirer of Bourguignon's film since I first saw it forty years ago, I always wondered why he didn't have as full and rewarding a career as some other French directors. In his Dictionary of Film Makers, Georges Sadoul encapsulated Bourguignon's career:

"BOURGUIGNON, Serge Dir. France/USA. (Maignelay Sept 3,1928- ) Studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC). He is passionately devoted to the cinema, delighting in beautiful images and the exotic, but he is sometimes a little mannered. His Sundays and Cybele won an Academy Award."

That last sentence. How final. In the Criterion documentary Bourguignon tells how Cybele was released in France and abroad in the same year as Truffaut's Jules and Jim, one of the great films of the Nouvelle Vague, and, it turned out, Truffaut's last great film. Cybele was entered in competition for the Cannes Palm d'Or against Jules and Jim, and Cybele won. And since France could enter only one film in competition for the American Academy's Best Foreign Language Film, Cybele was entered instead of Jules and Jim. So, what could have been Truffaut's Big Break, a break that might have changed the direction of his whole career, became Bourguignon's.

A common mistake made by critics is to call every French filmmaker whose first film was made between 1958 and 1965 a member of the Nouvelle Vague. Alain Resnais, for example, who saw his first feature film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, released in 1959, is often - incorrectly - labelled a member of the New Wave. The Nouvelle Vague belongs to the group of former critics writing for Cahier du Cinema, the film magazine founded by Andre Bazin. Unlike Bourguignon, who was a graduate of IDHEC, the world famous French film school, the Cahiers critics who created the New Wave made their first films with no prior technical knowledge of how films are made. Bourguignon knew all about lenses and focal lengths and about all the established rules of filmmaking like line-of-sight and reverse angles. The Cahiers critics went to the film school of the Cinematheque Francaise, and their professor was Henri Langlois, who advised them all to consume films at a profligate pace.

For their first efforts, Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and Rohmer had to rely on the technical knowledge of their collaborators, most notably cinematographers like Raoul Coutard and Henri Decae. One of the reasons why they became filmmakers was so they could express more directly their hatred of the Old School of French filmmaking, represented by directors like Rene Clement and Marcel Carne. Their condemnation of this generation was both deeply political and psychological. The Cahiers critics had all grown up during the German Occupation of France (1940-1944), and had inherited the guilt of the generation of Frenchmen that preceded them. But they also had to kill the old in order to establish the new - kill the old kings of French cinema so that they could supplant them.

The irony was that the two most successful directors of the New Wave, Chabrol and Truffaut, to a large extent became what they had once hated. It was almost inevitable. Entering the industry against the mainstream, they forced the stream to change course, and their films became the mainstream; their work was the new status quo. Godard could see it happening to his old brothers in arms, and he tried to point this out to them. His famous falling out with Truffaut was a direct result of Truffaut becoming a commercially successful film director, of growing comfortable in his position and of his wanting to remain there. Chabrol's work, which had started out with two or three honest and personal films, was, by the mid-60s, almost entirely given over to potboilers redeemed only by their elegant style. Truffaut tried to return to his lost innocence with more Antoine Doinel films and with a more direct retelling of the story of Jules and Jim, in which the two men become Two English Girls. But he never recovered the nerve that had made his first three films so challenging and original.

In the Criterion documentary, Bourguignon lamented that his career subsequent to Cybele was made up of promising projects that never got off the ground, films that he never had an opportunity to make. He suggested that the negative appraisal of Cybele by the Cahiers critics had a negative influence on film producers. But he hoped, in the charming last moments of the documentary, that - who knows - his career might yet get off the ground again. (Bourguignon was 86 when the interview was conducted.)

The fact is, Bourguignon's career wasn't the first that was sabotaged by the Cahiers critics. When Bertrand Tavernier wanted a collaborator to help him writer the scripts for his first films, he located an old French script writer, Jean Aurenche, whose impressive career as a successful script-writer in the 1940s and 50s was brought to an abrupt end by an attack in the pages of Carhiers du Cinema on a script he had written in collaboration with Pierre Bost. They had been hired to write an adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel, The Diary of Country Priest. The filmmaker who was directing the film was Robert Bresson, who rejected the Aurenche-Bost script and eventually wrote one of his own. Since Bresson was not in any sense a mainstream French director, making only thirteen films in a forty year career, his work was held in highest esteem by the Cahiers critics. Bresson's reasons for rejecting the Aurenche-Bost script were due to their approaching the novel as just another work of literature, instead of some sort of spiritual masterpiece by a devoutly Roman Catholic novelist.

But Bresson's rejection of the Aurenche-Bost script was used as an example to illustrate how ossified French film had become, of how even important works of literature had been adapted in the same dull manner year after boring year, mostly by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. The result of the Cahiers dismissal of their work effectively ended their careers. Tavernier saw this as an injustice, and worked with Aurenche on the scripts for his first three, highly celebrated films, The Clockmaker, The Judge and the Murderer, and Let Joy Reign Supreme. He would later adapt a novel by Pierre Bost for the film A Sunday in the Country.

Sundays and Cybele remains an effective, off-beat tale of innocence destroyed. It is a remarkable achievemnt for a first-time filmmaker. But compared to Jules and Jim, it looks awfully tepid. Of course, if compared with Jules and Jim, just about every film would look second-rate. The savants on the Cannes jury made a mistake. (The Oscars probably didn't.) Maybe if Truffaut had won, he would've felt comfortable enough to avoid being compromised, and his friendship with Godard might never have ended.

By now, all this is nothing but an anecdote in the history of film. After Cybele, Bourguignon would make only four more films, the only one of which I've seen was The Picasso Summer, a fascinating portrait of a young architect's efforts to meet an elusive Pablo Picasso in the south of France, using brilliant animation sequences of Picasso's paintings coming to life. (There was a dispute between Bourguignon and his producer during filming that precipitated his quitting the location.) I was always curious to know why Bourguignon seemed to vanish after that. But this is too often the fate of filmmakers who choose to go their own way. The fact that Bourguignon momentarily answered the call of Hollywood (something that Truffaut managed to resist) might also explain how Bourguignon somehow lost his way. I can name several talented filmmakers who suffered the same fate.

Will I Was

A man died four hundred years ago today. The man was an English playwright named William Shakespeare. His plays wouldn't become works of literature until two of his friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, went to considerable expense to publish his plays seven years after his death. On the day he died, according to Shakepeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, there was no great outpouring of public grief. In fact, no one paid more than passing attention to Shakespeare's passing.

Two days ago, Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday was observed with general congratulatorial appeal. And the R&B singer Prince was pronounced dead of, as yet, unexplained causes to general outpourings of shock, grief, and praise. There will be no such displays of emotion today, despite Shakespeare's towering reputation as the greatest writer in English.

Some people, however, don't even think Shakespeare wrote any of the plays attributed to him. Stephen Greenblatt has called them "Shakespeare deniers," and has even remarked that their skepticism is in some way comparable to Holocaust denial. In a recent essay for The New York Review, however, Greenblatt insists that Shakespeare can't be found in his plays, that, unlike Marlowe or Jonson, he is one of those writers whose biography is of no importance to the plays. "It is not really necessary to know the details of Shakespeare's life in order to love or understand his plays."(1) This may be a problem for some people, for whom the artist must always supercede the art. The history of art, as an astute observer once described, started with works whose creators were anonymous, deliberately or otherwise, and ends with the works being supplanted by the reputation of the artist. An unsigned painting, sculpture, or cathedral replaced by a monumental signature. This is how a heretofore nondescript canvas in an storage room whose value has always been considered low has recently been discovered to be a Caravaggio, valued in hundreds of millions. Why did the painting's value AS A WORK OF ART suddenly shoot up merely because its creator is now believed to be Caravaggio instead of some unknown master? I admit that this is a silly question since money, which spoils everything, has long since despoiled the world of art.

Greenblatt now insists that Shakespeare's passing four hundred years ago passed unnoticed by the public because the plays are what matters, and the plays have only increased in vitality in four hundreds years. To an ultimately unimportant majority of people, Shakespeare's plays are inaccessible, what with all of those THEEs and THOUs. As everyone who has seen one of his plays performed knows all too well, Shakespeare's language is strikingly and magnificently clear. How else could he have been so popular in his day?

Greenblatt argues that "the real 'life' of the characters and their plays lay not in the texts but in the performances of those texts. The words on the page were dead letters until they were 'revived' by the gifted actor. This belief should hardly surprise us, since it is the way most audiences currently respond to plays and, still more, to film."

In his classic study Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster wondered how the dramatist's art could survive the onslaught of actors who "appear to side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the play as a whole, and more often to be the mortal enemies of both."

"Is it not extraordinary," Forster asks, "that plays on the stage are often better than they are in the study, and that the introduction of a bunch of rather ambitious and nervous men and women should add anything to our understanding of SHakespeare and Chekov?"(2)

But Greenblatt insists the opposite: "We speak of Shakespeare's works as if they were stable reflections of his original intentions but they continue to circulate precisely because they are so amenable to metamorphosis." It is a commonplace of Shakespeare productions for the past fifty years to set Timon of Athens not in ancient Greece but in the Havana, Cuba of 1959 or to set Richard III not in 15th century England where there was an actual king named Richard III but in Nazi Germany. Whenever I read the play, I read of an old Saxon king named Lear roaming, half-crazed, across an all-too-genuine English heath or a Roman general named Marc Anthony, familiar from Hollywood films, throwing off his armor to embrace Cleopatra in the Alexandria, Egypt. Certainly the context in which we find his plays allows for plenty of imaginative exercise. But the insistence that it is better to set Macbeth in Brooklyn because audiences will somehow comprehend what is happening is a disservice both to Shakespeare and to the audience.

So, so what if we know so little about William Shakespeare's life except the barest of essentials, registered dates and signatures on titles and deeds? Why should it lead some people to suppose that his obscurity was deliberate instead of a natural condition? Anthony Burgess once claimed that if he had to choose between the discovery of a lost play by Shakespeare or Shakespeare's laundry list, he'd go for the dirty laundry every time. But why? Obviously (to me anyway), the play's the thing. Shakespeare is dead. His bones - sans his skull, as recent ground-penetrating radar revealed - are buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-on-Avon. His plays can be found everywhere in the world.


(1) The New York Review, April 21, 2016.
(2) Aspects of the Novel, Harcourt Inc., 1927.