If you follow my writings on film, you are probably aware that I tend to review documentaries and foreign-language films with a focus on politics. As a member of New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO), I try to catch up with commercial films starting in late November through the DVD’s and press screenings the studio’s publicity machine churns out. Most years I go to NYFCO meetings and abstain on many categories for the simple reason that something like “Zero Dark Thirty” was beyond the pale for me.
This year I was pleasantly surprised by the number of quality films that came my way, including an animated feature titled “Inside Out” that was in some ways the best film of 2015. Over the next few weeks I am going to be posting reviews of some of the best starting today with a couple that are by no means political but speak to me on both on an artistic and existential basis since they deal with the question of aging, a preoccupation of many baby boomers. Just about all of the films that I will be writing about are still playing in local theaters, including the two considered below.
Although it is an English-language film featuring American and British actors, the ironically titled “Youth” is really an Italian film. Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, it is basically a two-character drama featuring Michael Caine as a composer named Fred Ballinger and Harvey Keitel as film director Mick Boyle. They sit around the hotel restaurant or swimming pool in a combination luxury hotel and health spa in the Swiss Alps discussing their various health problems, including enlarged prostate glands. They have been friends for decades and are acutely aware of having entered what Tom Brokaw called the “mortality zone”.
Ballinger has pretty much given up on new projects and spends much of the film fending off a representative of Queen Elizabeth who wants him to conduct one of his most famous compositions, “Simple Songs”. Boyle hasn’t given up yet and is working with a crew that has gathered at the hotel on a film intended to be his swan song. As grim as this sounds, it is mostly played as wistful comedy with Michael Caine at the top of his game.
Much of the film was shot on the premises of the Hotel Schatzalp, the same place that is featured as a TB sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain”. Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Cancer Ward”, such frameworks lend themselves to philosophical/political dialogues between the main characters. “Youth” has this aspect but it is blended with Felliniesque touches that are far sunnier than the gloom of Mann and Solzhenitsyn. For example, a monstrously obese actor plays Argentine soccer player Maradona whose daily waddle into the hotel swimming pool prompts catty commentary by the two old friends.
Ultimately “Youth” is as much about the cinematography and film score as it is about plot or dialogue. If you want to spend a couple of hours immersed in a stream of jaw-dropping tableaus assembled by a director/screenwriter with a mastery of his art form second to none, I recommend “Youth” highly.
Like the two main characters in “Youth”, the British film “45 Years” features a couple of old friends who have known each other for about the same amount of time. It also so happens that they are married. As I know from first-hand experience, a solid marriage is based on friendship more than anything else.
Tom Courtenay plays the husband Geoff Mercer and Charlotte Rampling is his wife Kate. Another main character is their German Shepherd Max that Kate walks each morning. Well into their seventies, their day is spent listening to music, eating meals with each other and puttering about their small but attractive house on the outskirts of a bright and prosperous looking town in the British countryside. As a retiree, I am familiar with the drill.
Their placidly quotidian existence is interrupted by a letter that Geoff receives one morning a week before their 45th anniversary informing him that the body of his companion prior to meeting Kate has been discovered at the bottom of a precipice in the Swiss alps. As next of kin (he and his lover identified themselves as husband and wife in more straight-laced times), he was expected to get the news.
Her memory acts to put the anniversary on the back burner to the point of backing out of a big celebration his friends have organized. Not only is Kate disturbed by his decision, she is even more upset to discover that Geoff might be making plans to travel to Switzerland to see her body. When Geoff begins spending time in the attic pouring through the boxes that contain photos of he and the woman, she confronts him: if she had lived, would they eventually wed. His answer: yes.
Andrew Haigh, a gay man who produced and wrote for “Looking”, the HBO series about gay men, wrote and directed “45 Years”. It is as sign of his brilliance that despite his sexual orientation he was able to make a film about heterosexual marriage that is about as realistic as any I have seen in my life. He has the daily rhythms of married life nailed down perfectly, from the minor quarrels to the major dramas that naturally occur over the course of a life together.
The screenplay was adapted from a short story by David Constantine titled “In Another Country”. Constantine lectured on German literature at Oxford University for twenty years and was the editor of the journal Modern Poetry in Translation so we are dealing with source material that is obviously a cut above the junk that most commercial films are based on. It would be well worth your time to read the story at https://books.google.com/books?id=5WRwCgAAQBAJ. It would be an even better use of your time to see this amazing film that probes the depths and heights of human experience.
Is there a place for films starring septuagenarian characters? I would hope so since everybody will find himself or herself there at one point or another—if you are lucky. With so much crap coming out about geezers, from the stereotypical crotchety “get off my lawn” performance of Clint Eastwood in “Gran Torino” to Alan Arkin’s performance of an out-of-control grandfather in “Little Miss Sunshine”, there is a need for films that depict people in their seventies and eighties as essentially the same people they were in their youth. As I told a good friend yesterday who I have known since 1961, there’s not much difference between the man I am today and back then—of course excluding the enlarged prostate.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, one must conclude that Russell Brand is one of Michael Moore’s biggest fans. Opening today at the IFC Center in New York, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is one of the many documentaries that have be made in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Like a British remake of Moore’s “Capitalism: a love story”, Brand is featured in just about every minute of the film calling attention to bankster criminality and the suffering of the poor, especially the council housing denizens who are to him as the people of Flint were to Moore.
Director Michael Winterbottom also made “The Shock Doctrine”, a 2009 documentary based on Naomi Klein’s book. As was the case with the Klein collaboration, Winterbottom’s goal was clearly to allow his subject to set the dramatic and political agenda. In essence, it was Brand’s movie as much as his.
For those who have been on another planet over the past five years or so, comedian Russell Brand became famous for taking on the rich and the powerful in a series of articles, interviews and Youtube videos in a style reminiscent of Jon Stewart. The emphasis was less on analysis and more on jeremiad. Since Brand can be even funnier than Stewart, the jeremiads had high entertainment value.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” covers well-trodden themes as Brand points out in the opening moments, admitting that you will not be hearing anything new about economic inequality. The difference is that this time you will be learning about how to change things.
This boils down to following the example of council housing activists who were fighting eviction orders by Westbrook Partners, an American company determined to build luxury condos. Eventually Westbrook mass action forced them to abandon their plans despite the British government’s support for its privatization agenda. Throughout the film, David Cameron is seen as the archfiend directing Britain’s implementation of Milton Friedman type economics. For Brand, the enemy is not so much capitalism as what he calls free market fundamentalism. Toward the end of the film, he acknowledges that his goals are relatively modest: making the billionaires pay their taxes, enforcing a living wage, and imposing a Tobin tax to fund new investments in housing, health and job creation. In light of the powerful economic forces driving the attack on working people, it is open to question that much can be done without a frontal attack on capitalism itself.
As a sign of his goodhearted but perhaps naïve understanding of class politics, Brand comes to New York to drop in on Mayor Bill de Blasio to get his advice on fending off Westbrook. While it was commendable that Brand was able to convince De Blasio to offer his support to those facing eviction in Britain, maybe he could have reminded the mayor that housing activists in New York have been bitterly disappointed in his affordable housing program that fails to address the seriousness of a housing crisis that makes many working people barely able to make ends meet. Jonathan Westin of the group Real Affordability for All has complained that the mayor has not made much of a commitment despite his lofty rhetoric. Maybe the fact that de Blasio’s point man on real estate matters is none other than James Patchett, a Goldman-Sachs alum, would explain this.
In one of the more amusing moments of the film, Brand rides around in a truck draped with signs calling for the arrest of top British bankers who were involved in what Woody Guthrie described as robbing with a fountain pen. As he makes the rounds of The City–the London version of Wall Street–in the truck, he uses a bullhorn to urge passers by to track down the guilty bankers and make a citizen’s arrest of just the sort of people who worked for Goldman-Sachs. Indeed, he makes a stop at Goldman offices in London to demand to speak to the head of the firm about why he is paid as much in a single year as one of his window washers would make in three hundred, a move patented by Michael Moore.The fact that Russell Brand seems innocent of Bill de Blasio’s shortcomings does not detract from the delight of this confrontation and many others in a well-constructed documentary that is best suited for people who have not read David Harvey or Doug Henwood.
While we are on the topic of austerity and bourgeois criminality, I would recommend a look at the Intercept website for a series of four videos on the election of Syriza and its failure to make any headway in the ongoing rape of a proud nation. It is a joint production of Laurie Poitras and Paul Mason and rather good as reporting. Unfortunately, as is the case with the Brand documentary, it does not penetrate beneath the surface. To this day much of the left looks at Alex Tsipras as the culprit but it is doubtful that anybody in the left faction of his party could have made much of a difference if they had been in power. With Venezuela’s new neoliberal government about to assail most of the social gains of the Chavistas, it might begin to make sense to stop looking for traitors and more at blind economic forces that keep working people in chains. Greece’s economic problems go back for decades and have much to do with its weak industrial base just as Venezuela’s woes grow out of the falling price of oil on world markets. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels always thought in terms of world revolution. Maybe it is time to return to their original vision.
Finally, I want to recommend a documentary titled “The Winding Stream: The Carters, The Cashes & The Course Of Country Music” that also opens at the IFC Center today. I reviewed it in August 2014 and found it one of the finest documentaries about musicians I have ever seen. (http://louisproyect.org/2014/08/04/three-documentaries-of-note-4/)
“The Girl King” is now the third film I have seen this year dealing with transgender issues (the others were Tangerine and The Danish Girl) and by far the most interesting even though it is by no means perfect. Available now on Vimeo for a modest fee, it tells the story of Queen Christina of Sweden who ruled from 1632 until 1654.
Christina, played by Malin Buska, is the daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus who was allied with other Protestant monarchs in a thirty-year war against the Catholics that like Syria today was a combination of geopolitics and class struggle. The Protestants tended to reflect the class aspirations of an emerging bourgeoisie while the Catholics stood for feudalism. Neil Faulkner, the author of “A Marxist History of the World” and a member of John Rees’s CounterFire tendency, describes it:
A religious war therefore turned into a geopolitical conflict. The transformative potential of the Reformation was deflected by princely leadership and dissolved into a conventional military struggle between rival states.
Without a son, King Gustavus decided that Christina would be entitled to all the rights and privileges of a man and even stipulated that she would be called the King after assuming the throne. Whether this explains her sexual orientation is an open question.
As is the case today, it would be a mistake to see the principals in this struggle in a simplistic manner. If Sweden was a state committed to Lutheran values, Queen Christina seemed like the last person on earth willing to carry them out. She was not only willing to defy sexual norms; she was also seduced by the writings of Rene Descartes whose radical subjectivism represented a threat to the established order. Ironically, it was the Catholic powers that tolerated his philosophy much more than the Protestants who ostensibly represented the challenge to feudal orthodoxy—particularly the dominance of religion over science.
After encountering his writings, Queen Christina began corresponding with the French philosopher as a fan, much like a grad student writing to Zizek. Of course, given her sexual orientation, it is obvious that it was his brains rather than his private parts that interested her.
Played by Patrick Bauchau, a veteran Belgian actor and the son of philosopher Henry Bauchau who fought in the French Resistance, Rene Descartes moves to Sweden to become Christina’s tutor. Arguably, it is the most important partnership between a monarch and a philosopher since Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great.
In one of the most riveting scenes in the film, Christina invites the newly arrived philosopher to demonstrate to her retinue his most important discovery—the site of emotions in the human anatomy. Descartes then removes a sheet from a corpse that is displayed before them, takes a scalpel and saw to remove the top of the skull, and reveals the secret source of emotions: the pineal gland. One of the dour Lutherans in attendance can take no more and storms out yelling “sacrilege”.
This offense could not compare to what would soon follow. Christina has invited her lady-in-waiting and bedmate, the Countess Ebba Sparre (Sarah Gadon), into the library she has assembled from the greatest books of Europe. She is proudest of an immense manuscript of black magic written by a monk who supposedly wrote it in one evening under Satan’s direction. Christina opens the book, strips to her waist, presses Erika’s back against the book’s open pages and begins to kiss her. When the doors swing open and a member of the court spots the two women in flagrante delicto, Christina makes no effort to explain what is going on. She is the King after all—or Queen?
The film shows Descartes being poisoned by a Lutheran priest but there is no proof that this happened. Some historians believe that the real cause was living in a cold climate and contracting pneumonia. There is no doubt, however, about the hostility that Christina’s court felt toward him.
Eventually they decided that she had to go as well. Pressures mounted to the point when abdication was the best move for her. She converted to Catholicism and relocated to Rome where she continued as a patron of the arts, the sciences and Enlightenment values. Her contribution to Catholic institutions was considered so important that she is one of only three women buried in the Vatican.
My recommendation is to have a bit of patience with “The Girl King” since there are some artistic choices made by Mika Kaurismaki, the brother of the far better known Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, that are somewhat off-putting. The film is in English and the actors are directed to appear like our contemporaries rather than as archaic players in a costume drama. That might make sense but more questionable was screenwriter Michel Bouchard’s decision to use outright anachronisms in the dialog. For example, characters say things like “you must be kidding”. It takes a while to get used to that style.
Despite the pleasure I got from Kaurismaki’s film and the incentive it gives me to follow up on a research project about Queen Christina and 17th century history, I could not help but wonder what Sally Potter would have done with this material. If you’ve seen her adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando”, a novel about an androgynous member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, you’ll know that it was made to order for director Sally Potter. Even if Kaurismaki was much too literal in his handling of the story, you will appreciate his effort. Given the fear and hatred that so many powerful men today have today about sexual identity, it is salutary to see how the right of a woman to act like a man was uncontested in Lutheran-dominated Sweden. Of course, it helps to be the most powerful person in that society. It might also help if class rule was a thing of the past, so that everybody can enjoy what Huey Long once said:
Every man a king, so there would be no such thing as a man or woman who did not have the necessities of life, who would not be dependent upon the whims and caprices and ipsi dixit of the financial martyrs for a living.
Opening at Lincoln Plaza in NY and the Laemmle in Los Angeles on January 22nd, “Aferim!” is Romania’s official entry for the 2016 Academy Awards. Directed by Radu Jude, it is a commentary on contemporary Romania even though it is set in 1835 Wallachia, a state that would eventually be part of the modern state that is still going through post-Soviet agonies. Indeed, just about all of Romania’s very talented filmmakers are consumed with the question of how they lived under Ceausescu and how his overthrow has failed to bring them the economic well-being and freedom they had hoped for. As director Radu Jude put it in an interview with CineEurope: “I truly believe what Johan Huizinga said: ‘We analyse every age for the sake of the promises it contains for the next age.’”
“Aferim” is a vernacular term meaning something like “Bravo” that is heard from its characters throughout the film. It is obviously related to the Turkish word “aferin” that is part of the term “aferin sana” that means “good for you” and that my wife often says to me after I tell her I have been published in some high-toned journal.
It is used with irony in Jude’s film since everything is marked by degradation of the most appalling nature. It is the story of a father and son who are seen riding across a desolate plain on horseback in their search for a runaway slave. The father, named Constandin (Teodor Corban), is a constable and his son Ionita (Mihai Comanoiu) an unpaid assistant. The story evokes a John Ford western except in this instance the posse is wicked and the runaway slave, a Roma named Carfin Pandolean (Toma Cuzin), is their better. In fact, the higher up you are on the social ladder in feudal Wallachia, the closer you are to savagery.
As Constandin and Ionita wend their way through one Roma village after another, they make sure to bully and threaten those they regard as less than human. They always refer to the Roma as “crows” and make sure to call the boyar—a feudal landowner—as “bright master”. In case Ionita slips up on the hierarchy, his father is sure to remind him that this is the way things are in their world and not likely to change.
The film has a grim sense of humor as Constandin hurls colorful invective at everyone who gets in his way, either beneath him socially or on his own level. In a memorable scene, father and son run into a carriage driven by a Turk somewhat higher up than them on the totem pole. When Constandin sees him coming, he says under his breath “Curse them Turks”. When the Turk asks him for directions to a Wallachian town, Constandin sends him off in the opposite direction. But before the Turk leaves, he gives the men a gift in gratitude for the wrong directions, some halvah. After the carriage departs, Constandin confides to his son: “I sent the fool the other way”. Ionita’s response: “Aferim, father!” Constandin’s final words as the carriage heads off:
I hate the Ottomans. The filthiest nation on earth. And he talked to me like I was shit. Said he was afraid of our haiduks [brigands who operated in Ottoman controlled territories in Eastern Europe]. I hope our Romanian boys catch him and tan his skin. You can tell from their talk that they’s nothin’ but beasts. We work like morons for them and the boyars.
That little speech does more to explain feudal Romania than any ten scholarly articles.
The stunning conclusion of this powerful film is set in the manor of boyar Iordache Cîndescu (Alexandru Dabija) who is intent on punishing the runaway slave for having cuckolded him. Suffice it to say that the punishment is gruesome and only made possible in the same way that it was in the Deep South in the pre-Civil War era. And in the same way that modern-day racism and capitalist dysfunctionality are related to life in that period, it would be fair to conclude that director Radu Jude sees Romania today in the same terms.
I urge you to see this very important film and to at least consult the press notes whether or not you are not in NY or LA to see it as it contains such interesting insights. Historian Constanta Vintila-Ghitulescu states:
The Romanian society is so concerned with women’s honor and reputation, that it allows husbands who are cheated on to punish the poor lover caught in the act with their wife. Revenge included tarring and feathering, exposing the naked man in public places, whipping or even castration, especially when the lover belonged to an inferior social category. And gypsies belonged in the lowest social class. Attached to their masters by slavery, gypsies seem no different from the animals on the noblemen’s or church domain. At the time, “gypsy” is synonymous with “slavery,” and the word “roma” does not even exist yet, it will only be introduced in the 20th century.
Abolishing slavery is a very new idea and only timidly advocated for, because slave owners have important functions in the political life. Preaching freedom for these poor beings, in the name of humanity, starts from the Church, through the voice of a few enlightened ecclesiastics at the beginning of the 19th century, but the time for freedom has not come yet. It is only with the active implication of young intellectuals around the 1848 movement that the public opinion will be shaped in favor of freeing the gypsy slaves. It took more than a decade to translate this process into legal form: in 1856, “The Law for the Emancipation of All Gypsies in Wallachia” is passed.
New York Film Critics Online members held their annual awards meeting on December 6, 2015, at the Furman Gallery inside Lincoln Center.
The following awards for films that opened in 2015 were voted:
PICTURE: Spotlight (Open Road)
DIRECTOR: Tom McCarthy, Spotlight (Open Road)
SCREENPLAY: Tom McCarthy, Josh Singer, Spotlight (Open Road)
ACTRESS: Brie Larson, Room (A24)
ACTOR: Paul Dano, Love & Mercy (Roadside Attractions)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Rooney Mara, Carol (The Weinstein Company)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies (DreamWorks)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: John Seale, Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner Bros.)
FOREIGN LANGUAGE PICTURE: Son of Saul (Sony Pictures Classics)
DOCUMENTARY: Amy (A24)
ANIMATED FEATURE: Inside Out (Disney/Pixar)
ENSEMBLE CAST: Spotlight (Open Road)
DEBUT AS DIRECTOR: Alex Garland, Ex Machina (A24)
USE OF MUSIC: Love & Mercy (Roadside Attractions); Atticus Ross, Composer; Featuring the Music of Brian Wilson
BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE: Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina (A24), The Danish Girl (Focus Features)
TOP TEN PICTURES OF 2015 (Alphabetical) 45 Years (IFC Films)
The Big Short (Paramount)
Bridge of Spies (DreamWorks)
Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight)
Carol (The Weinstein Company)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner Bros.)
Sicario (Lionsgate)
Spotlight (Open Road)
Steve Jobs (Universal)
Trumbo (Bleecker Street)
* * * *
My ballot (members pick their top three choices for each category that are weighed based on their position). I will be posting more about some of the films under consideration:
New York Film Critics Online 2015 Awards Nomination Ballot
Opening at the Cinema Village in New York today, “Stink” is a documentary that examines the health hazards of chemical additives to a wide range of consumer goods and particularly those that are intended to make something smell good. Unlike food products that are now required to disclose their ingredients such as the percentage of saturated fats or cigarettes that carry a warning about the possible risks of cancer, you can sell kids’ pajamas laced with chemicals to such an extent that they positively reek when taken out of their package.
That was the discovery made by Jon Whelan after buying pairs for his two young daughters from Justice, a clothing store geared to the kid’s market. When they complained to him that they had a chemical odor, he decided to track down the cause. He was particularly worried about chemicals since his wife died from breast cancer at a very young age. His first step was to contact people at Justice to find out exactly what was causing the odor and was shocked to learn that they were not obligated to disclose the source.
Eventually he sent the pajamas to a laboratory and the results confirmed his worst suspicions. Made in China (no big surprise there), they were laced with a flame-retardant that was supposedly intended to protect children but without any understanding of the collateral damage a carcinogen can do. The story of how clothing, furniture, rugs, drapes, bedclothes, etc. became drenched with flame-retardants is an interesting one. Some years ago researchers discovered that people falling asleep with a lit cigarette caused most house or apartment fires. When a new cigarette was developed with chemicals that could prevent such an accident, it was rejected because of their somewhat unpleasant taste. So instead the tobacco and chemical companies came up with a new game plan. They persuaded manufacturers to add flame-retardants to a wide range of products, including the pajamas that Jon Whelan’s children would not wear.
As he began his investigation into unregulated chemical additives, the first thing he learned is that a pleasant fragrance trumps health under capitalism. If you opened the cabinet beneath your sink, you’ll learn that just about everything there is laced with crap that is bad for your health. For example, I use Dawn dishwashing detergent made by Proctor and Gamble. On the label it says “original scent” but I’ll be damned if P&G will tell me where that scent comes from. In one confrontation with a chemical industry lobbyist, Whelan asks if arsenic were responsible for a product’s scent, would he favor disclosing the ingredient. The lobbyist evades his question by saying that is up to the FDA or EPA to check on such matters. Since P&G is not obligated to tell these agencies—weak as they are—what they put in Dawn, you are shit out of luck.
Dawn, by the way, hypes their “environmental” credentials on their website as is customary nowadays. They have tips on recycling but not a word on the health risks involved with using it every day.
“Stink” is done in the Michael Moore style with Jon Whelan and his camera crew stalking one industry scumbag or another. While he lacks Moore’s patented shambling, neo-Will Rogers style, he more than makes up for that with his single-minded passion. When you lose a mate at such an early age (Heather Whelan appeared to be in her late 30s when she died), you obviously come to a project like this with a sense of somber dedication.
As might be expected, the film benefits from a wide range of experts like Arlene Blum who could be the subject of a documentary in her own right. Born in 1945, she led an all-woman’s ascent of Annapurna that was the first successful American attempt. In 1960, she requested to join her first mountain climbing expedition but was told that she was welcome to not come past the base camp where she would “help with the cooking.” (Wikipedia)
After earning a Ph.D. in biophysical chemistry at UC Berkeley in 1971, she began the research that would result in the regulation of two cancer-causing chemicals used as flame-retardants on children’s sleepwear. In 2007 she co-founded the Green Science Policy Institute in order to deploy scientific research on behalf of human health and the environment.
As you might expect, all the people who are on the other side of the divide from the CEO of the Justice clothing stores to a Democrat in California named Cal Dooley who served in the House of Representatives from 1993 to 2005. Three years later he became the CEO of the American Chemistry Council (ACC) that is primarily responsible for lobbying against legislation that would curb toxic chemical additives even though they claimed that they never did. In 2012, the Chicago Tribune did a series of investigative reports on how big chemical got its way:
Citizens for Fire Safety is the latest in a string of industry groups that have sprung up on different continents in the last 15 years — casting doubt on health concerns, shooting down restrictions and working to expand the market for flame retardants in furniture and electronics.
For example, the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, based in Brussels, may sound like a neutral scientific body. But it was founded and funded by four chemical manufacturers, including Albemarle, to influence the debate about flame retardants made with bromine.
Albemarle’s global director of product advocacy, Raymond Dawson, said in blunt testimony before Washington state lawmakers in 2007 that the forum is “a group dedicated to generating science in support of brominated flame retardants.”
An official from Burson-Marsteller, the global public relations firm that helps run the organization, said the bromine group is not misleading anyone because regulators, scientists and other stakeholders are well-aware it represents industry.
Does the name Burson-Marsteller ring a bell? It should. They have been behind some of the biggest cover-ups for the past 50 years. I am no fan of Rachel Maddow but she nailed them pretty good in August of 2012 (Wikipedia):
Who’s Burson-Marsteller? Well, let me put it this way — when Blackwater killed those 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, they called Burson-Marsteller. When there was a nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, Bobcock & Wilcox, who built that plant, called Burson-Marsteller.
[After the] Bhopal chemical disaster that killed thousands of people in India, Union Carbide called Burson-Marsteller. Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu — Burson-Marsteller. The government of Saudi Arabia, three days after 9/11 — Burson-Marsteller.
The military junta that overthrew the government of Argentina in 1976, the generals dialed Burson-Marsteller. The government of Indonesia, accused of genocide in East Timor, Burson-Marsteller.
“Frame by Frame”, which opened at the IFC Center in New York today, is a portrait of Afghanistan’s photojournalists who take their life into their hands every time they go out into the streets to take pictures, especially when they show the human toll of suicide bombings since showing the consequences of Taliban terror might be a death sentence.
It was not just that the Taliban was opposed to showing their brutality. When they took power in 1996, all photography was banned including family portraits, wedding portraits, and art photography as well. When they were ousted in 2001, a media revolution broke out that created a real demand for those with photojournalistic skills, including the four subjects in the film:
Farzana Wahidi: a woman who despite being allowed to go to school when the Taliban ruled, managed to get one in Canada. A lot of her advocacy is involved with women’s rights. In one of the key scenes in “Frame by Frame”, we see her in the burn unit of a hospital in Heart, a city that has the highest incidence of self-immolation in the country much of it having to do with the despair of living in a country with such a grim outlook. After cajoling with a doctor to get permission to film, he remains resistant since the publication of photos from the ward would likely lead to the Taliban or its allies showing up to kill him.
Massoud Hossaini: Hossaini won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for the image of a girl crying in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing of an Ashura ritual in which Shi’ite men flagellate themselves to mourn the killing of Mohammad’s grandson in 680AD. It is a reminder of how insane the divisions are in the Muslim world when such a ritual can generate a massacre. Hossaini is seen photographing another self-flagellation a year later, a sign of progress in Afghanistan where few can be seen.
Najibullah Musafar: Trained as a painter, he took up photography to document Taliban atrocities. Becoming a partisan of the anti-Taliban resistance, he embedded with the Northern Alliance in 2000 to document what he saw as war of liberation. Perhaps the only flaw in this very revealing documentary is its failure to identify the factors that led to the Taliban reconstituting a new threat today.
Wakil Kohsar: Kohsar’s focus is on Afghanistan’s lower depths. He goes out each day to photograph drug addicts, beggars, and anybody else whose life has been destroyed by a war that has been going on for the better part of 35 years.
Co-directed by two young women Alexandria Bombach and Mo Scarpelli, it is a testimony to the vitality of documentary filmmaking as an instrument of social change in the modern epoch. After looking at some raw footage of street life in Afghanistan in 2012, Bombach became “insatiably curious” about the country and resolved to make a film there. She sold her car and emptied her bank account to get the initial funding.
Their “crew” in Afghanistan consisted of the two women and a driver they hired to take them about. Considering the obstacles that the four subjects of the film have to face on a daily basis, it is a miracle that the film ever got made.
Highly recommended.
Also opening today is “Kingdom of Shadows”, another film made in a war zone, in this instance the drug war in Mexico with a focus on Monterrey, the capital city of Nuevo León that has become the site of more “disappearances” than either Pinochet’s Chile or Videla’s Argentina.
Ironically, the Zetas, one of the drug gangs running amok in Nuevo León, has a number of members who were former cops or soldiers trained in the Schools of the Americas alongside Pinochet and Videla’s goons.
Like “Frame by Frame”, “Kingdom of Shadows” benefits from the “casting” of three subjects who illustrate different aspects of the drug wars and the disappearances epidemic. All three make for compelling story telling.
We meet a Texas rancher named Don Henry Ford Jr. who appears to be about my age and blogs as the Unrepentant Cowboy of all things. Facing unbearable economic pressures in the 1970s, including an $800,000 debt that he had no possibility of repaying, he began smuggling marijuana into Texas from Nuevo León. In those days, he says, nobody carried a weapon and everybody trusted each other, including a man who became a close friend. The friend, like many who became drug barons, had no way of making a living except by wholesaling drugs just as Ford had no way out of economic catastrophe except as a retailer. With an amiable manner reminiscent of Willie Nelson and a shrewd assessment of the insanity of imprisoning people for selling drugs (half the prisoners in the USA are guilty of nonviolent drug offenses), Ford draws you deeper and deeper into the film’s overall message every time he appears.
When you first see Oscar Hagelsieb, he is tooling down a highway on a Harley “hawg” with ape-hangers. Despite his heavily tattooed, outlaw appearance, he is an officer in the drug interdiction unit of the Homeland Security office in El Paso, Texas where he grew up as the son of undocumented immigrants. As is the case in Mexico, selling drugs was the best way of moving up the economic ladder. For Hagelsieb, becoming an undercover cop was an alternative to crime. It would seem that making drugs illegal has generated a boom industry in both crime and crime prevention. If there is anything that symbolizes the irrationality of capitalism, it would be hard to find anything that tops this exercise in futility.
Finally, there is Consuelo Morales, a Catholic nun based in Monterrey who organizes mothers to press for the return of their disappeared children, even if it is only their bones.
The film, which is playing at Cinema Village and also available on VOD, was directed by Bernardo Ruiz who is committed to making films about the dysfunctional relationship between Mexico, the birthplace of his father, and the USA, where his mother was born. He describes his goal in the press notes:
My perspective is that the people of Mexico can’t fix this problem entirely on their own. Like Oscar says in the film, we in the United States need to think about our responsibility in this conflict as consumers of narcotics. Don would say that the violence stems from the fact that narcotics are illegal. Either way, what we find in Mexico is a perfect storm where corruption, intimidation and this huge appetite for drugs in the United States come together. It’s really all those things, and it’s not as if all of this is happening thousands of miles away from the United States. It’s happening just south of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Also highly recommended.
Finally, and also highly recommended, is “Drone” that opened as well today at the AMC Empire 25 in New York.
As the title implies, this is about the new technology that is being used for a very old purpose, to kill the natives in distant lands with impunity. Directed by Tonje Hessen Schei, a young Norwegian woman, it combines interviews with a wide range of authorities including the Pakistani and British lawyers fighting to ban their use and to compensate the victims in North Waziristan who have been “collateral damage” of the war on terror. In one striking statistic cited in the film, there have been only 49 Al Qaeda “operatives” killed out of the more than 2,300 victims. Part of the problem is the unaccountability of the CIA program that does not require the spooks to name the men they have targeted–basically extrajudicial killings. As one expert points out, Obama was anxious to stop arresting terrorist suspects; instead he would use drones to kill them without the need for inconvenient trials. Basically we are dealing with what Clarence Thomas called hi-tech lynchings but in fact rather than his rightwing fiction.
The star of the film is Brandon Bryant, who operated behind the console of a drone targeting computer monitor at an air force base in Nevada and who was thoroughly traumatized by the experienced, even to the point of suffering PTSD. Bryant’s problem is that he had a shred of humanity something his commanding officer utterly lacked. Just as he was watching a missile blasting the “enemy” for the first time, the officer yelled “Kaboom” at the top of his lungs just for fun. What a depraved world we live in when advanced technology goes hand in hand with frat boy pranks and mass murder
Another compelling testimony comes from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson who during a 31-year career in the US army served as chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell. In an Al Jazeera article dated May 6, 2013 Wilkerson began by referring to a book that I regard as essential for understanding the “war on terror” especially in a period when the air forces of four different nations are bombing in Iraq and Syria against “terrorists” with collateral damage to hospitals, schools, apartment buildings and god knows what else:
Akbar Ahmed’s The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam, should be required reading for American soldiers, citizens and, above all, every member of the Obama administration.
Written from the perspective of both an academic (Professor Ahmed is a leading anthropologist) and a government official (he was political agent to South Waziristan, in Pakistan’s Federally-Administered Tribal Area, and Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland), as well as with the inestimable passion of a poet (in both written and visual verse), this book provides critical insights into how US Cold War tactics opposing communism have transmogrified into tactics opposing terrorists.
I quite agree with Wilkerson as should be obvious for my review of the book that appeared in Critical Muslim:
We live in a period of such mounting Islamophobia that it became possible for Rush Limbaugh, one of the most venomous rightwingers in the U.S., to make common cause with Global Research, a website that describes itself as a “major news source on the New World Order and Washington’s ‘war on terrorism’”. Not long after the Sarin gas attack on the people of East Ghouta, Global Research became a hub of pro-Baathist propaganda blaming “jihadists” for a “false flag” operation. Limbaugh, who claims that there is no such thing as a “moderate Muslim”, touted a Global Research “false flag” article on his radio show demonstrating that when it comes to Islamophobia the left and right can easily join hands.
Therefore the arrival of Akbar Ahmed’s “The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam” is most auspicious. It puts a human face on the most vilified segment of the world’s population, the “extremist” with his sharia courts, his “backwardness”, his violence, and his resistance to modernization. The central goal of Ahmed’s study is to subject the accepted wisdom of the punditry on both the left and right, which often descends into Limbaugh-style stereotyping, to a critique based on his long experience as an administrator in Waziristan, a hotbed of Islamic tribal “extremism”, and as a trained anthropologist. Reading “The Thistle and the Drone” can only be described as opening a window and letting fresh air and sunlight into a dank and fetid sickroom.
Opening at the IFC Center on November 20th, “Mediterranea” is a timely narrative film about immigration, an issue that has been dominating the media for the past year or two. In this instance, the characters are not political refugees but a couple of brothers from Burkina Faso who are trying to make to Europe in hope of a better life.
While most people who have been following the immigration story are aware that the voyage across the Mediterranean Ocean on rickety boats has cost the lives of more than 2000 people this year, the film dramatizes the hazards that must be faced even before they reach the boat. The two brothers, Ayiva and Abas, join a group of about twenty people who must reach their point of departure in Algeria by first traveling through the Libyan desert. Relying on a guide who they are told to trust implicitly, they are ambushed by Libyan bandits who obviously got tipped off by the guide. They are ordered to surrender their hard-earned cash and other valuables. When one man begins complaining loudly even as he has complied with their demands, he gets a bullet in the head.
Eventually the two brothers make it to Italy—just barely—where they make their way to a small town in the countryside where they hope to hook up with other Burkina Faso immigrants. After being warmly greeted in town by their brethren, they are escorted to their new home—a room in a shantytown hovel. Between the two brothers, there are conflicts over their situation with Ayiva seeing the glass half-full and Abas seeing it as ninety percent empty.
Like most of the other male immigrants, they end up as farmworkers picking oranges for an Italian family that looks upon them kindly but patronizingly. The grandmother insists on being called Mother Africa while the teenaged granddaughter turns over a carton of oranges because she is feeling bitchy. Her father is fair to his workers but only so far as it goes. When Ayiva practically begs him to help secure the papers necessary for permanent residence, the man lectures him about his grandfather who relied on nobody except his family when he came to the USA.
The film is remarkable by staying close to the realities of immigrant life without resorting to the melodrama that many of these types of films deem necessary. It is about the daily struggle to make a living in difficult circumstances and the small pleasures that come with the gatherings of fellow Burkina Faso men and women at night as they share drinks, listen to Western music, and shore each other up for the next day’s travails.
The press notes indicate how the director came to make such a film:
It would be pretentious on my part to claim that I have experienced anything remotely close to what the immigrants are experiencing —I can only be an outside observer here. However, because of my own background, I could approach the story of African immigrants in Italy with some personal connections. My mother is African-American and my father is Italian. And I’ve always been very interested in race relations, with a particular interest in the role of black people in Italian society. So when the first race riot took place in Rosarno in 2010, I immediately went down to Calabria to learn more about the circumstances that lead to the revolt. It was an event of historical proportions because it opened up for the first time the question of race relations in an Italian context. So I started talking to people and collecting stories about their lives. I settled there permanently and began to think about a script.
Although it should not be a factor in either reviewing or seeing this exceptionally well-made and politically powerful film, a few words about Burkina Faso would help you understand why such people would take the arduous trip across the Mediterranean to an uncertain future.
In 1983 Captain Thomas Sankara, who was to Burkina Faso as Hugo Chavez was to Venezuela, led a popular revolution in Upper Volta, a former French colony. Once in power, he changed the name of the country to Burkina Faso, which meant “Land of Upright Men”, and embarked on a bold series of social and economic reforms targeting the country’s poor, especially the women. Called the “Che Guevara of Africa”, he consciously modeled his development program on the Cuban revolution.
Unlike in Venezuela where Hugo Chavez was saved from a coup attempt by the power of the people, the Burkina Faso experiment had a tragic outcome. Blaise Compaoré, acting on behalf of Burkina Faso’s tiny but powerful bourgeoisie and their patrons in France, overthrew Sankara in 1987.
For the next twenty-seven years Blaise Compaoré created the conditions that forced people like Ayiva and Abas to risk everything on a voyage that could cost them lives at worst and at best to end up picking oranges for minimum wages. In 2006 the UN rated Burkina Faso as 174th in human development indicators, just three places from the bottom. With cotton plantations dominating the rural economy, the country is locked into the traditional neocolonial, agro-export dependency.
Last year when Compaoré proposed a change to the constitution that would allow him to run for office once again after the fashion of Robert Mugabe, the country erupted in protests and he fled the country. In the aftermath, there have been various attempts by military figures to run the country temporarily until elections were held next year. Suffice it to say that none of them measures up to Thomas Sankara. One hopes that the same kind of courage and determination that led the characters in “Mediterranea” to make the arduous trip to Italy will serve to make Burkina Faso the “Land of Upright Men” once again.
Following in the footsteps of this year’s “A Second Mother”, a Brazilian film about class divisions between master and servant in a wealthy household, “Casa Grande” incorporates much of the same tensions and even a central character—a teenage son who is uncomfortable with privilege.
In “Casa Grande”, which opened yesterday at the Cinema Village in New York, we meet Jean the teenage son early on as he sneaks into the bedroom of Rita, one of the family’s two maids. Overloaded with raging hormones, he can barely restrain himself as Rita—a beautiful young woman—tells him about a tryst she had with a motorcyclist whose name she did not even know. He took her to an alley, lifted up her skirt, and began kissing her bottom. As Jean begins to make a move on Rita, she holds him off and sends him back to his room—the only power that she can exercise in a house where class privilege is on display every minute of the day.
Hugo, Jean’s father, is impatient with Jean who has a slacker temperament. It is not just that the youth is unmotivated, although that is a problem, it is more that he is not very smart—the same flaw that existed in the young man in “A Second Mother”. That does not stand in the way of the close relationship he has built with the hired help and in fact makes it more possible. For someone barely capable of passing Brazil’s onerous entrance exams for college, there is little point in pretending that he is something other than a kid who likes music and women. When Severino the chauffeur drives him to school in the morning, the main topic of conversation is how to “score”. It is clear that Jean has much more of a rapport with the driver than his martinet of a father who expects him to join Brazil’s bourgeoisie.
This is a bourgeoisie that Hugo is barely clinging to having lost his job as an investment adviser and who is now deeply in debt, so much so that every penny must be accounted for in Casa Grande. Before the family gathers for dinner in the evening, he reminds them to shut out the lights in their room before they sit down at the table. We eventually learn that Hugo, despite all his displays of privilege, has not paid the servants for the past three months and that he will be forced to sell their mansion in a gated community designed to keep out people from the lower classes.
When Jean develops a relationship with Luiza, a young woman of mixed ancestry, race joins class in forcing Jean to decide where his loyalties lie. The main topic of conversation at dinner gatherings is Brazil’s new affirmative action law that will allot 40 percent of the posts in many public institutions to Black or brown people, including Luiza. When she insists to Hugo that she deserves a spot in college because of the new law’s commitment to compensating for slavery, he spits out that he earned his place in society. Nobody ever gave him anything.
His place in society is exactly what is in jeopardy now. Although the information will be familiar to Brazilian audiences, I had to research the nature of Hugo’s immanent downfall on the net. It seems that he owned thousands of shares in OGX, the second largest oil and gas company in Brazil after Petrobras. This is a company that would go broke eventually because of the mismanagement of its CEO Eike Batista, who was an even bigger screw-up than Hugo.
In 2008 Forbes listed Batista as the 8th richest man in the world. Five years later he would be ruined because OGX was pumping only 15,000 gallons of oil out of the ground rather than the 750,000 it predicted. This year Brazilian cops seized seven cars from Batista, including a white Lamborghini Aventador, and all the cash he had left.
If you want to understand the turmoil in Brazil today, there’s no better place to go than the Cinema Village to see this brilliant dissection of a society falling apart at the seams.
Finally, there’s “Barge”, a 71-minute documentary showing tomorrow at the Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas on 260 W 23rd St, between 7th and 8th Avenues as part of the NY Documentary Film Festival that runs until the 19th (the schedule is here: http://www.docnyc.net/schedule/).
In this marvelous work by Ben Powell, we accompany a crew as they navigate the Mississippi River from Rosedale, Mississippi to points northward. The film alternates between gorgeous vistas of the river, the men at work on the boat, and interviews that you have to strain a bit to understand since the drawls are so thick you can cut them with a knife. (Will Patterson’s minimalist film score is a winner, the best Philip Glass-inspired work I have heard in decades.)
The interviews are what make this film stand out. If you have read Studs Terkel’s “Working”, you’ll get an idea of what inspired Ben Powell to make such a film. In a period when workers are undervalued, you’ll be impressed with how the crew see themselves—as men who help keep the country going. One nails it this way: most of everything you touch gets there on a barge, including the concrete of the sidewalks you walk on and the plastic your groceries are packaged in. With so much of American society consumed with “making it” on an individualist basis, it is great to see a collectivist ethos that goes back centuries at least.
Almost as if he were making amends for his last documentary that implicitly took the sides of the U. Cal Berkeley administration against students protesting a tuition hike, Frederick Wiseman’s “In Jackson Heights” is a throwback to the sort of film that made him special. It is a passionate embrace of the downtrodden and the persecuted in a Queens neighborhood that most Manhattanites will have ever stepped foot in. Indeed, even for myself—a devotee of New York neighborhoods where you’ll never find a CVS, a Banana Republic or an HSBC branch—Jackson Heights is almost as faraway and as exotic as Timbuktu. Perhaps the best thing you can say about “In Jackson Heights” is that after seeing the film you’ll want to get on the number 7 train and take the 20-minute trip out to Queens to see it for yourself.
Ironically that physical closeness to Manhattan is what is threatening to turn it into the next Williamsburg, Park Slope or Hoboken. Much of the film is devoted to strategy meetings with Latino small businessmen trying to figure out how to prevent the real estate developer steamroller from gentrifying their neighborhood and turning them into casualties of a process that is making most of greater New York unaffordable.
The villain in the documentary is the Business Improvement District Board, the unseen committee of rich bastards whose goal is to replace all the bodegas with a Whole Foods and every affordable apartment building with sterile-looking, glass-walled condominiums as the Daily News reported on July 23, 2014:
The protracted battle to create a business improvement district along a 20-block stretch of Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights has turned nastier still.
Merchants organizing against the BID have expressed fears that the BID would drive up their rents. More recently, they have argued that the lengthy ratification process has been undemocratic.
“They are pressuring us because they want us to vote yes,” said Sergio Ruiz, the owner of a bakery and grocery store on Roosevelt Ave., in a subtitled video recently posted on the Queens Neighborhood United Facebook page. “When I didn’t say yes, I couldn’t sign.”
Wiseman also provides a platform for Jackson Heights’s LGBT activists, including a charismatic transgender Latina (most of the principals in the film are Spanish-speaking) who leads a protest outside a Latin-owned restaurant that refused to serve her (obviously not everybody who is Latino is enlightened.)
Jackson Heights is probably the most ethnically and religiously diverse neighborhood in the entire city, with Latinos constituting the majority. But the film spotlights other groups including Muslims from various parts of the world who are content to live in exactly the same way they did before economic hardship forced them to come to the USA. You see children being drilled into reciting Arabic words just the way I was drilled into learning Hebrew about the same age. Let’s hope they’ll learn what the words mean. I never had a clue about what I was reciting, which is just as well I suppose.
Frederick Wiseman is 85 years old now and a testament to how making art can keep a person alert and productive late in life. I only hope that writing about the art that people like Frederick Wiseman and others are making will keep me half as fit as them.
“In Jackson Heights” opened at the Film Forum in New York on Wednesday. Highly recommended.
“Song of Lahore” is now the third documentary I have seen this year that deals with the state repression of artists. Considering the fact that “Trumbo” opened today as well, there must be something in the air. When filmmakers decide to put their hearts into such a cause, it must mean that they are carrying out the role of an informal vanguard—in many ways eclipsing the so-called ideological vanguard organized in tiny sects.
Lahore had long been a cultural center of South Asia, long before Pakistan was constituted as a nation. In the 1950s and 60s, musicians trained in a hybrid of classical and popular style made good livings providing the musical background to the film industry, the local version of Bollywood.
But when General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq seized power in a coup in 1977, one of the first things he did was institute Sharia law and cracked down on both film and music that were considered un-Islamic. Not surprisingly, a broad section of the Pakistani ruling class decided to foster the same tendencies in Afghanistan.
The film begins with interviews of a number of musicians in their 50s and 60s who are Pakistan’s version of Dalton Trumbo but without the possibility of using a “front”. When you are an actor or musician, it is impossible to hide your identity when you are on stage.
Eventually Izzat Majeed, a wealthy fan of Lahore’s musicians, decided to launch a new production company called Sachal Studios that would revive their musical legacy. While they were eager to make their music available again in an environment someone less repressive than under Zia-ul-Haq, they faced a problem. The years of malign neglect had eroded the fan base. Young people found themselves adapting to Western popular music, something that in itself is not necessarily bad. After all, cultural globalization helps to spawn new forms of art. When Cuban sailors brought their records to the Congo in the 1950s after all, it gave birth to Soukous, the Congolese rumba.
Indeed, the Sachal musicians calculated that their best bet was to synthesize the native style with American jazz, a move that was not that far-fetched since most of the practitioners were mesmerized by the performances of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong et al who were jazz ambassadors in years past. But the musician who inspired them most of all was Dave Brubeck, whose “Take Five” was the best-selling jazz single of all time. Wikipedia explained how Brubeck created the piece:
Brubeck drew inspiration for this style of music during a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Eurasia, where he observed a group of Turkish street musicians performing a traditional folk song with supposedly Bulgarian influences that was played in 9/8 time (traditionally called “Bulgarian meter”), rarely used in Western music. After learning about the form from native symphony musicians, Brubeck was inspired to create an album that deviated from the usual 4/4 time of jazz and experimented with the exotic styles he had experienced abroad.
As it turns out, Lahore flourished as a cultural center from the onset of Mughals rule. Who are the Mughals, you ask? Well, they were the Turkic-speaking clans of the Mongol Empire—that’s who. As Turks inspired Brubeck, so did his music inspire the Pakistanis.
The film concludes with a triumphant visit of the musicians to New York where they performed with Wynton Marsalis’s big band at Lincoln Center. The film opens at the Angelica Theater in New York on Friday the Thirteenth. Take it from me, this will be your lucky day to see this marvelous film.
Now 61 years old, Michael Moore has been making documentaries since 1989. All of them, including “Where to Invade Next” that opens everywhere in December, are very entertaining and politically on the left. However, the latest film makes me wonder if he is running on vapors.
Knowing nothing about the film except the title, I thought it would be in the same vein as “Fahrenheit 9/11”–war in far-off lands. As it turns out, it is much more like “Sicko” even to the point of being plausibly titled “Sicko Part Two”. If you’ve seen “Sicko”, you’ll recall that it is a tour of European countries where socialized medicine rules. And as he leaves France or England on the way to his destination, he asks why can’t the USA have the same system.
This is the same formula in the new film except it is devoted to a Grand Tour where the European nations are more civilized on a range of other issues. For example, French school kids have great lunches prepared by a skilled chef. When Moore shows them pictures of American cafeteria food, they blanch. Used to drinking water with lunch, he offers one student a can of Coke. She politely takes a sip and then puts it aside.
Portugal no longer jails people from taking drugs. Sitting down with a cop, Moore asks what he would do if he told him that he had a bag of cocaine in his pocket. The cop’s reply: nothing. Norwegian prisoners, except in maximum-security institutions, have the keys to their own cells. In Italy they seem to have five weeks of paid vacation at least.
What is missing from the film is any reference to counter-indications. For example, the words “austerity”, “immigrants” or “ultraright” are not mentioned once. A day after I went to a press screening, I saw a NY Times op-ed that put French beneficence into context:
WHEN I moved to France 12 years ago, it was like arriving in an unfriendly paradise. Sure, hardly anyone spoke to me. But there was national paid maternity leave and free preschool. Practically everyone seemed to agree on the need for strict gun laws, and access to birth control and abortion. Not only did the whole country have health insurance; most undocumented immigrants could get medical and dental care free. (Cruelly, their thermal bath cures weren’t covered.)
But what the headlines don’t say is that daily life in Paris, and in most French cities, is also full of pleasant multicultural experiences. My local cheese stand is owned by a Moroccan lady who’s married to a Serb. My children have public-school classmates who speak Chinese, Italian or Arabic at home. At my twins’ recent birthday, a table of kids descended from Greek, Lebanese, Portuguese and American immigrants insisted on singing “La Marseillaise.”
So when hundreds of thousands of migrants began arriving in Europe, I assumed that France would be welcoming.
It wasn’t. President François Hollande said in September that France would take in an additional 24,000 refugees over the next two years. In a national poll afterward, 70 percent of respondents said 24,000 was “sufficient” or “very sufficient,” and half said they would refuse to accept refugees in their own city.
In the very same edition, the NY Times reported on a French mayor who was once a member of “Reporters Without Borders”, a group that you would think that Michael Moore would strongly identify with. It turns out that the mayor has become a turncoat:
In a past life he was France’s leading advocate for journalists, fighting to spring them from dictators worldwide, a fearless defender of freedom of the press on four continents and a hero to free-speech advocates.
That was then. Now, Robert Ménard, the man who founded Reporters Sans Frontières — Reporters Without Borders — has become a symbol of right-wing extremism in France.
No longer a journalists’ advocate but the mayor of the largest city under far-right control in France, he says there are too many immigrants in his town, too many veils, too many Muslim children and too much culture that is not French.
Mr. Ménard has ordered the laundry off the window ledges, the satellite dishes off the roofs and Syrian refugees out of public housing. He has counted the Muslim children in schools here — a strict no-no in secular France — and increased police patrols on horseback in this whitewashed old Mediterranean city of 70,000 people, high unemployment, high poverty, narrow stone streets and medieval churches.
How can you make a film that ignores such a development? I guess you’ll have to ask Michael Moore himself, a guy who begged Ralph Nader not to run in 2004. You would think that after making a film titled “Capitalism: a Love Story” he would have come to the point of thinking in systemic terms. Unfortunately, Moore has shown very little ability to understand why austerity exists or why it is utopian to expect the USA to adopt socialized medicine or prisons where the inmates have keys to their own cells. It is much more likely that France and Norway will go the route of the USA in a race to the bottom unless the working class wakes up from its slumber and grabs the bosses by their throats and forces concessions from them. We need filmmakers who can throw cold water in their faces right now, not to foster illusions in a welfare state that will come into existence because rich people see it as “good for the country”.
When I ran into a fellow member of New York Film Critics Online last night following the press screening of Trumbo that opens everywhere on November 6th (unlike most films that I review, this one gets full-page ads in the NY Times), he asked me what I thought. My response: “If you can see only one film this year, it should be Trumbo. Furthermore, if you can see only film for the rest of your life, it might also be Trumbo, a desert island selection next to Citizen Kane orModern Times.”
This is a film that obviously matters a lot more to me than the average Hollywood film that has become not only distressingly escapist but poorly made as well, the quality of which tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of money it costs to make. Making a biopic in 2015 about the famous blacklisted screenwriter with a cast of notables including Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad in the lead role should get the attention of any CounterPunch reader but when such a film is so head and shoulders over every American film made this year in terms of direction, screenplay, acting, incidental music, and costume design, it becomes one for the ages.
I became a socialist in the 1960s largely on the belief that capitalism held back civilization by preventing a large majority of the world’s population from reaching its maximum potential. If the children of Asia, Africa and Latin America could enjoy the same benefits of those in rich countries, especially a top-notch education and the leisure time to develop innate talents, that could enhance the possibility of a great artist like Picasso or the scientist who could find a cure for cancer emerging out of formerly neglected regions.
Saul Bellow once asked tauntingly “who was the Zulu Tolstoy” in an obvious dismissal of African potential. Considering the career of filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, who is the subject of the great documentary “Sembène” that opens on November 6th at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, you would conclude that the potential is enormous, held back only by what Andre Gunder Frank once called the development of underdevelopment.
Although I have been following Sembène’s film career for decades, “Sembène” offered new insights into what a genius he was. Born in 1923, his father a fisherman, Sembène fell in love with movies at an early age after seeing scenes of Jesse Owens’ track victories in Leni Riefenstahl’s pro-Nazi Olympics documentary. “For the first time,” he told the LA Times in 1995, “a black honored us by beating whites. . . . It became the film for the young people of my generation.” We can be sure that this was not Riefenstahl’s intention.
Sembène quit high school after punching out a teacher who had hit him first. He then joined the Free French army during World War II. After the war he became a rail worker, participating in an epochal Dakar-Niger railroad strike in 1947-48. After stowing away in a ship to France, he became a longshoreman in Marseilles and a member of the French Communist Party.
In France he started writing fiction in order to depict the reality of modern African life that could best be represented by the African. As the documentary points out, he was to become a modern version of the griot, the travelling storyteller who was to Africa as Homer was to the Greeks. Indeed, the real question is “who was the African Homer”, not Tolstoy. The answer is that Ousmane Sembène comes pretty close.
His first novel “The Black Docker” was published in 1956. But in the early 1960s, Sembène decided to turn his attention to filmmaking (“the people’s night school”) because most Africans were illiterate and could only be reached with this medium. His films would follow the same road as his writing, to offer an alternative to Tarzan movies and garish epics like “Mandingo.” “We have had enough of feathers and tom-toms,” he said.
