This week Alfredo Guevara, the father of revolutionary Cuba’s film industry, died of a heart attack at the age of 87. The N.Y. Times obituary was refreshingly honest about the role he played:
A committed Fidelista, Mr. Guevara nevertheless insisted that art should not be subservient to politics.
“Propaganda may serve as art, and it should,” he was quoted as saying. “Art may serve as revolutionary propaganda, and it should. But art is not propaganda.”
Filmmakers credit Mr. Guevara with fending off censors and overseeing films that criticized Mr. Castro’s Cuba. He was at the center of fierce debates between artists and communist ideologues, clashing with Blas Roca, a powerful member of the Communist Party leadership, in the early 1960s in a public row over the role of culture in politics.
“He had to confront a lot of polemic,” Mr. Pineda Barnet said. “And if a polemic didn’t find him, he went looking for it.”
Despite such films as “Lucia”, “Memories of Underdevelopment”, and “Strawberry and Chocolate” that defied characterizations of Cuban cinema as propaganda machines, there is still a tendency to lump Castro’s Cuba with Stalin’s USSR, as if the typical Cuban movie was about a sugar mill meeting its quota. While one would naturally expect this from the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, it is disconcerting to see the same sort of reductionism at play in the writings of one Samuel Farber, a Cuban-American professor emeritus at Brooklyn College and a self-described socialist.
The HBO series Girls misfires again in this week’s episode that has viewers pulling their hair out wishing the characters would just stop their whining, grow a spine and grow up. In the wake of the recent backlash, it’s curtains for the series for this viewer (and many others) as the backlash grows.
{Note: I admire all who create. Creating is not easy. Still, when you put something you create into the world you open yourself up to criticism. Girls has been getting a fair share of it as of late, some of it deserved. The following is my opinion, take it for what it’s worth. I believe that Lena Dunham can do better.}
The problem with the HBO series Girls (by creator & star Lena Dunham) isn’t so much the backlash and controversy against the show, although that was on an epic scale. (In case you missed it, one of the show’s writers tweeted insensitive comments that were deemed “racist” which lead to a critique that for a show set in Brooklyn, a very diverse borough, it lacked diversity.) The problem in addition to that is — the show isn’t as funny as it thinks it is. The characters are so pathetic while being so arrogant at the same time that it’s hard not to feel they deserve every horrible thing that happens to them. In short: They act like idiots.
And not the endearing kind.
“Hannah’s Diary” doesn’t show them changing anytime soon. They’re still clueless girls who want us to revel in their cluelessness. They are the kind of moronic idiot that is hired as a nanny, goes to the park to talk down their nose at actual (multi-cultural) nannies, and then loses your kids. Then said nanny goes home to flirt with your husband who tells said nanny that losing children in public “happens to all of us.”
God bless and god help us all but um, cough, no — it does not.
In late 2010 I watched a screener for an animated film titled “The Illusionist”, an homage to Jacques Tati being submitted to NYFCO for our yearly award ceremony. Not only did the film leave me cold, it also left me with a nagging thought: who was Jacques Tati and why was he so admired? “The Illusionist” certainly did not offer any kind of hint, despite its best intentions.
All I knew about Tati when I was first developing a passion for art movies in the early 60s was that he was some kind of clown beloved by the French, just as Cantinflas was beloved by the Mexicans. Also, like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, he played a character named Mr. Hulot who kept getting in trouble because he either ignored or flouted social convention. Somehow, I managed to go through life without having seen a single Tati film, despite the fact that Andre Bazin ranked him with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as an all-time comic genius.
A couple of months ago, TCM was airing “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” and I decided to give it a shot to see what all the hoopla was about. I am glad I did since it was an eye-opening experience in more ways than one. For one thing, the limpid cinematography was as beautiful as anything I have ever seen in a black-and-white film, from Ingmar Bergman to Akira Kurosawa. Beyond that, the comedy had much more in common with Buster Keaton than Chaplin. While I am a fan of both masters, it was Keaton’s absurdist, surreal vision that stuck with me even though I was more partial to Chaplin’s politics.
I am not exactly sure why but the Netflix DVD version that I extracted this clip from abbreviated the speech of the pipe-smoking Marxist to his girl friend on top of the rocks. When I watched it on TCM, I am quite sure he went on at some length spouting a bunch of rhetoric. The character makes another appearance in the film along the same lines and it is just as funny. Tati has as much fun with a Colonel Blimp type character that is always going on at length to anybody who will listen about his exploits during WWI. I don’t think there is much going on here ideologically but works on the level of one of your more sophisticated New Yorker Magazine cartoons.
Tati was from an aristocratic Russian family named Tatischeff that settled in France. Born in 1907, Tati developed into a promising athlete in his teens, eventually becoming a semiprofessional rugby player. After launching a modest career as a film actor in the 1930s, his career was interrupted when drafted into the French army. After the war ended, he formed a film company that produced his first three films, all of which incorporated a theme that preoccupied him throughout his artistic career, namely the empty promises of “modernization”.
In “Jour de fête” (The Big Day), his first major motion picture that debuted in 1949, Tati played Francois, the postman in a tiny French farming village that is hosting a yearly fair. As part of the festival, there is a newsreel shown to villagers that demonstrates the prowess of the American postal service. Rising to the challenge, Francois tries to beat the Americans at their own game traveling about the village at a breakneck speed on his bicycle, all the while declaring “rapidité” to all the bemused bystanders. (This clip is from an Italian-dubbed version of the film that I was able to extract, unlike the French version that can be seen here.
Four years later “Mr. Hulot’s Holidary” appeared, introducing the signature character. Some of you might be aware that British comedian Rowan Atkinson appeared in something called “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” that if meant as homage to Tati scarcely does him justice. As Steve Rose put it in the Guardian:
They’re saying this is Mr Bean’s last appearance, but if Rowan Atkinson hasn’t got the heart to kill off the character, I’ll gladly throttle him by his necktie myself. In a post-Borat world, surely there’s no place for Bean’s antiquated fusion of Jacques Tati, Pee-Wee Herman and John Major? Perhaps he’s a version of British masculinity the rest of the world can relate to.
Unlike Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean, Mr. Hulot is not a “wild and crazy” character that is meant to be the butt of the joke. Instead, he is an eminently reasonable and civil character always anxious to please who manages to reveal through unintended consequences the comic idiocy of middle-class life. As Andre Bazin, the legendary editor of Cahiers du Cinema, once put it:
The warmth of Hulot’s characterization, plus the radiant inventiveness of the sight gags, made Les Vacances an international success, yet the film already suggests Tati’s dissatisfaction with the traditional idea of the comic star. Hulot is not a comedian in the sense of being the source and focus of the humor; he is, rather, an attitude, a signpost, a perspective that reveals the humor in the world around him.
I think it is reasonable to state that “Mon Oncle” is Jacques Tati’s crowning achievement. Appearing 5 years after “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday”, it is a comic assault on French society’s infatuation with modernism in all its appalling varieties, from glass houses to the latest kitchen gadgets. It is probably safe to say that Tati’s heart was always with the simple values of the French farming village that served as a location for “Jour de fête” even though—ironically—he was always pushing the envelope of film technology. (“Jour de fête” was, for example, the first French film shot in color, using Thomson-color, an early and untried color film process.)
Mr. Hulot is the brother-in-law of a French industrialist who lives in the glass house and whose wife is devoted to the latest electronic kitchen gadgets, most of which fail to work to great comic effects. Mr. Hulot gets a job at the plastic-pipe making factory, only to find that he and the assembly line were not meant for each other. While I have no way of knowing what Tati’s intentions were, this scene appears to be a perfect blend of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”:
Nearly a full decade will pass before Tati’s next film “Play Time” debuted in 1967. This is his most ambitious film, costing millions of dollars to erect a soulless city very much in the spirit of Brasilia and other “modern” monstrosities that were found in the Soviet bloc. Without any connections to the past and in utter defiance of the organic ties that make urban life pleasurable, such cities become oppressive to the human spirit. Even though Tati’s intention was to generate laughs, his deeper goal was to decry the sterility of modern society. In this clip, you see Mr. Hulot wandering about a Kafkaesque super-modern workplace, using what appear to be the first cubicles ever seen in a motion picture, even if they are grotesque caricatures:
Tati’s last film was “Trafic”, made in 1971 as a TV movie to be aired in the Netherlands. It featured the Mr. Hulot character in the unlikely role of a car designer and much of the action takes place on the road. I have to admit that I found it kind of tiresome but it does have its moments such as this (the traffic cop is not Tati) Does the VW at the end of the clip remind you of anything? It should—it is very similar to the boat shark in “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday”:
In one of the more unlikely pop culture partnerships that ever existed, Jacques Tati explored the possibility of making a film called “Confusion” with the rock twosome Sparks just before his death in 1982. Like “Play Time”, it was about a sterile super-modern city. While the film was never made, the band did record the theme song for the film:
What makes this remarkable is how at odds it is with the theme of “The Illusionist”, one in which a vaudeville style magician—a Mr. Hulot character—is being forced into involuntary retirement because of the rise of rock-and-roll. The rock musicians in the film are depicted as complete jerks, projecting as it were a cultural predisposition onto Jacques Tati that did not really exist.
Coming back to “The Illusionist”, I can say that whatever it was, it was not in the spirit of Tati’s body of work even though it was based on a script he wrote. Rather than try to unravel the connections or disconnections between the men behind “The Illusionist” and Tati, I would refer you to a letter that his grandson wrote to Roger Ebert that ends:
If the integrity of my grandfather’s work means anything to you then please take into account the wishes of his only three grandchildren who united stand loyally by their adored mother, the daughter he had heartlessly abandoned as a child and later addressed l’Illusionniste to. Together we ask that you please show moral compassion and chose in the future not to participate in the misrepresentation of our family history to suit the parasitic benefit of others. That Sylvain Chomet, Pathe Pictures, Sony Picture Classics and Les Films de Mon Oncle dare to rub my grandfather’s remorse on our doorstep without respectfully acknowledging the facts is intolerable. The truth deserves a voice so that at the very least we do not forget the sacrifices made by others for our liberty.
Looking at Tati’s body of work, it is hard not to feel that the “good old days”, at least when it comes to film, were really better.
In early December, I watched another award screener for our NYFCO meeting that my colleagues voted best picture of the year: “The Artist”. Like “The Illusionist”, it is an homage to an older genre, the silent film. From the torrent of awards this film has garnered, including one likely from the Academy for best picture as well, you would think that it was what the world was waiting for—the first artistically realized silent film since the days of Keaton and Chaplin. Nothing can be further from the truth. It is a tolerably amusing novelty, but nothing else.
The greatest silent films in the modern era were Tati’s. Despite a plentitude of sounds (like birds chirping, or people making small talk), they were about visual interaction between people, or between people and nature, and especially about the miscues between people and machines.
Tati’s greatest films (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, Play Time) are available from Netflix. My suggestion is not to waste your time or money with the “The Artist” but to go to the real thing. Films become classic because they incorporate a superior form of expression, the gift always of an uncommon mind.
In May 1958, Jacques Tati did an interview with André Bazin and François Truffaut for Cahiers du Cinema. At some point, the question of art versus commerce came up. Tati told the two:
I am extremely worried when I see so many good filmmakers who are obliged to submit to all kinds of constraints. Today, all you have are constraints, everywhere. But I was able to make my film where I wanted, in Saint-Maur and I was able to build the house I wanted for Hulot. I think this is important in the end. There aren’t that many countries today where a guy in the movie business can say. ‘”Not only did I make a film, but 1 also made the film that I wanted to make.” Bresson is just such a director, and I love what he does. I find it a shame that he doesn’t make more films.
What is really a shame is that only one door is open to young filmmakers: that of commercial cinema. And this is very dangerous. After Jour de fete, and more so after Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, I had some offers to go and make a Franco-Italian co-production. It was to be called Toto and Tati. You get the idea! I said to myself: “No! Hulot does not have the obligation to be in Toto and Tati” It’s not that Toto is bad: in fact be is a very good actor; but the simple fact that the picture was going lo be called Toto and Tati already tells you more than you want to know. I believe that one’s artistic independence is a must, and it is up to the individual to defend it in all cases.
And yet, it is difficult to resist commerce when you realize that by making one such film or by accepting one such role, you will earn a sum of money that will enable you to change your life a bit, have more pleasures, have your house repainted, even change houses, in this modern world, people are after all, and no matter what, extremely driven by their material needs: money impresses them and in the end they will make quite a lot of concessions—not only artistic ones, alas—to achieve a more luxurious lifestyle. As for me, it is not courage that makes me resist; commercial considerations simply leave me cold.
Hari Kondabolu discusses an incredible thing he heard a nanny say to a child she was caring for in Brooklyn. Filmed at NYU’s Skirball Center on January 22, 2011 while opening for Wyatt Cenac’s TV special “Comedy Person.”
On July 29, an article titled “Curb Your Racism” appeared on the widely read Mondoweiss, a blog devoted to “the war of ideas in the Middle East”. Written by Eleanor Kilroy, it expressed dismay at the most recent Curb Your Enthusiasm episode on HBO:
Larry David’s right to exist in his homeland, America, seems ‘pretty, pretty’ secure. Slandering all Palestinians as anti-Semitic on an irreverent and popular TV show like this is a new low, and is an example of cultural and ethnic arrogance; it is no joke to imply that the Palestinian people’s ongoing struggle for justice poses an existential threat to privileged, Jewish men. Antony Loewenstein’s comment on the clip: “Is it possible for even liberal Jews on mainstream American TV to not frame Arabs and Palestinians as all anti-Semites? Apparently not”. Meanwhile, Haaretz is grinning like a fool at Larry’s joke that this is best place for Jews to cheat on their wives – since they would never be seen. If you side with the oppressor, you won’t be seen dead in the company of the oppressed.
This led to a heated discussion on the article with many comments claiming that Kilroy did not “get” the show:
You guys are misinterpreting this completely. It’s ironically pointing out how absurd those fears are in the context of Larry’s life.
When the guy looks at the posters and says they’re anti-semitic, that’s clearly the writers saying that claim is overblown. When Larry worries about women not recognising his right to exist, that’s clearly Larry getting over-wrought within a Jewish victim-complex.
It’s actually a smart comment on the Jewish mentality. Irony, people!
On August 1, there was a follow-up article titled “The Larry David Peace Plan“ that concurred with the comment above. Written by Jesse Benjamin, it recommended a more subtle reading of the show that required a deeper sense of irony:
My argument is that beyond the serious cultural limitations we sadly have come to expect on US television, there is also something else in this episode, something subversive, which is not common at all, and which casts light on the significant cultural moment we are living through. In this sense, I think too many critical thinkers with good politics have moved too quickly to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one. Amidst the gross but predictable equalizing of two profoundly asymmetrical “sides” in this very real conflict, David and crew actually showcase Jewish racism in both its extreme and its liberal forms, and this is something truly rare on television. They also give us brief flashes of otherwise censored concepts like “occupation,” “settlements,” or even just the real-life restaurant posters which show an Israeli tank facing down children, or declare: “Right –vs- Might,” and “Visit Palestine” – things we never see on tv.
HBO has a synopsis of the episode here. As should be obvious, the inspiration for the show was the NYC mosque controversy in which rightwing protesters challenged the right of Muslims to build a Islamic cultural center a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
What commentators on the show seem to miss is that–leaving aside the politics–it was not very good satire. While nobody would ever expect good satire to be “obvious”, the show was so unmoored from current events and from social reality, that it failed to register as social commentary—other than making religious Jews look foolish, a rather commonplace occurrence on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. Rabbis have gotten sent up on the show more times than I can count and much more effectively than the vastly overrated Coen brother’s movie “A Serious Man”.
The biggest problem is the utter failure to make the Palestinians seem even slightly plausible. To start with, the notion that there is such a thing as a Palestinian chicken restaurant festooned with political posters in Los Angeles is absurd. First of all, when Arabs—whatever their nationality—open a restaurant in a major American city, the last thing they are interested in is making a political statement. The posters on the wall of the restaurant opposing the occupation, etc. were a gimmick dreamed up by the Curb Your Enthusiasm writers in order to create a context for the conflict between the feckless Jews who came to protest the restaurant and the equally feckless Palestinians, symbolized by the young and attractive Palestinian woman who decides to become Larry David’s lover (I am afraid that he is succumbing to the Woody Allen syndrome) after he plucks the yarmulke from his friend’s head.
After the people in the restaurant watch the confrontation between Larry David and his newly observant friend in the parking lot as seen in the Youtube clip above, they decide to hail him as some kind of anti-Zionist exemplar. Who in their right mind could possibly connect this to a real-life situation? While I don’t think that the show could ever be interpreted as Zionist propaganda, it is unsettling to think that Arabs could ever act so foolishly. Why in the world would Muslims care about an observant Jew eating in a Palestinian-owned restaurant? The net effect of this scene is to portray them as anti-Semitic, and as equally intolerant as Larry’s friend who sought to “provoke” them. This is classic Hollywood liberalism but turned on its head. Instead of Paul Haggis “let’s all try to get along” pieties, Larry David aims at an “Arabs and Jews are equally stupid” message.
When Seinfeld’s Executive Producer Larry David launched a new TV show on HBO playing himself, it might have been anticipated that “Curb Your Enthusiasm” would retain some of the characteristics of the Seinfeld show. This it does. Not only is the character Larry David just as self-centered and obnoxious as the Seinfeld regulars, he has the same whining Queens inflection as Jerry Seinfeld himself.
Unlike most Americans, I could not stand the Seinfeld show. I thought the show relied too heavily on shtick, a Yiddish word meaning gimmick–especially in the comic sense. For example, Jack Benny’s cheapness was shtick, as was Chevy Chase’s pratfalls on SNL. It also had the mandatory laugh-track, which has the same effect on me as the sound of a garden rake being scraped across a blackboard.
“Curb Your Enthusiasm” does incorporate the same kinds of convoluted plots as Seinfeld, usually putting one of the main characters into an excruciatingly embarrassing situation. Since they are not constrained by network requirements to keep Bible belt figures like Donald Wildmon happy, these plots tend to be a lot rawer and a lot funnier. For example, in one show, Larry David performs oral sex on his wife only to get a pubic hair stuck in his throat. For most of the episode, he is seen gagging and choking in polite company trying to dislodge the troublesome hair.
Now in its eighth season, the show has exhibited a kind of exhaustion that you tend to expect from those that are long in the tooth—the Saturday Night Live problem, so to speak. You get the sense that “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episodes are cooked up in writer’s sessions that put a premium on being “outrageous” rather than witty. Watching a thirty-minute episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” nowadays is a frequently exhausting experience as you try to find dialog and situations that are even distantly related to the experience of real-life human beings. (Please don’t ask me about my own experiences with oral sex.)
In utter contrast to what “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has become, I strongly recommend “Louie”, the show produced, directed, written by and starring Louis C.K. (The comedian’s last name is an approximation of his Hungarian surname Szekely.)
Louis C.K. is a standup comedian who has also written for David Letterman and other big name entertainers. His style is an admixture of Bill Cosby and Sam Kinison. From the former, he derives home-spun subject matter, like interacting with his kids. From the latter, he derives a savage misanthropic view of the world, reserving the greatest loathing for himself. So in a typical bit, he might make some cute reference to his daughter and in the next breath saying something like he wishes she had never been born.
And above all, Louis C.K.—like Kinison—is deeply misogynistic. Much of his material dwells on what is like being divorced and how hard it is to find love. Mostly he blames himself for being overweight, a creep, a liar, etc. But more than enough blame is assigned to women who seem to get their greatest joy in humiliating him.
Some of the episodes of the thirty-minute FX show “Louie” can be seen at http://www.hulu.com/louie. I particularly recommend “Bummer/Blueberries” that follows the same format as Seinfeld, another about a comedian that blends on-stage performances at the beginning of each episode, followed by a “situation”.
Unlike Seinfeld, these situations are much darker and much more realistic, cutting close to the bone. In the aforementioned episode, the blueberries are a reference to a shopping expedition that Louie is sent on by a woman who has invited him to have sex—and virtually nothing else. She runs into him at his daughter’s school and after a precursory conversation about school affairs suggests that he might come over to her place sometime for some casual intercourse.
After he drops by, she asks him what kind of condoms he brought with him. When they turn out to be lubricated, she frowns and tells him that they will not do. They irritate her vagina. She instructs him to go to a pharmacy down the block and pick up unlubricated condoms, some lotion for her vagina just in case, and some blueberries. The blueberries, it turns out, have nothing to do with sex games but just something she wants to eat later. Throughout the entire experience—first meeting her, finding out about the shopping trip, and a truly alienating sexual encounter—Louie is held back by a hair’s width from aborting the mission. He wants the sex, but everything else leaves him depressed.
While all of this is completely amusing, at least to me, it is also very painful and very truthful. If this sounds like it is worth your while, I suggest tuning in to “Louie” on FX Thursdays at 10:30pm.
You also might want to check out “Wilfred”, the show that comes on just before “Louie” at 10pm, even though once might be more than enough.
Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins in the Ring movies) plays Ryan, a depressed lawyer who after trying to commit suicide relies on the companionship of a dog named Wilfred to raise his spirits. After seeing Wilfred in action, you wonder why Ryan doesn’t rush out and buy a gun to blow his brains out. I guess this is the comic conceit that is supposed to sustain your interest.
Wilfred is a dog in name only. Dressed in a Halloween-type costume, Australian actor Jason Gann, who created the original “Wilfred” on Australian TV, is an obnoxious pot-smoking creep who is constantly getting his master in trouble by doing all sorts of anti-social things like pissing on one of Ryan’s friend’s living room floors, etc. His “uplifting” message, repeated to the point of tedium to Ryan, is to “let it all hang out”.
I can’t vouch for the original Australian show, but I am afraid that it is probably much more inspired by “The Family Guy”, an American show that was created by David Zuckerman, the producer of “Wilfred”. Like “Wilfred”, “The Family Guy” features a talking dog and situations carefully calculated to make you squirm.
Like “Louie”, you can watch some episodes of “Wilfred” on Hulu. (http://www.hulu.com/wilfred) I more or less decided to put the kibosh on the show after watching the episode “Respect” the other week.
Set in a hospice, where Ryan has begun volunteering in order to impress a woman who has a thing about men with a social conscience, Wilfred—who has tagged along—demonstrates a talent for detecting when someone is about to die, a supposedly “spiritual” gift.
The show derives most of its guffaws from showing people near death looking and acting like human refuse. All I can say that having spent a couple of years visiting my mother in exactly such a place, I found it callow and tasteless. Just the sort of thing that television comedy is mostly about nowadays, I’m afraid.
One of the best things I ever did is called “Huntington, West Virginia on the Fly” which is sort of biographies of friends of
mine, but they’re told from my point of view. That was supposed to come out in September, but now, for all intents and purposes, it’s just gotten indefinitely postponed. I have another one that I wrote for Random House called “The Unrepentant Marxist” which is a biography of a guy I met in New York who was a member of a Trotskyist organization for a really long time, and he put up with a whole lot of bullshit until he finally got to where he couldn’t take it anymore. I’m really interested in that stuff. It was apparently accepted but I don’t know when that’s supposed to come out. I don’t know if I’ll live that long.
http://www.tmz.com/2012/03/16/jason-russell-video-naked-meltdown-kony/
