Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

June 15, 2013

Three films of note

Filed under: art,Film,Russia — louisproyect @ 8:51 pm

Opening yesterday at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story” combines the strands found in two other excellent documentaries about artists. Like Gerhard Richter who was born one year after him in Germany, the 82-year-old Ungerer knew World War Two horrors firsthand from growing up in Alsace. In Strasbourg, the capital, French citizens were forced to speak German or go to jail. Once France was liberated, there was a drive to destroy German-language books in retaliation. Needless to say, a sensitive young man with a passion for free expression, especially in the arts, would be drawn to the USA, which after the end of WWII had the reputation for being the freest place on earth.

Not long after resettling in New York, Ungerer launched a career as a commercial artist using his particular off-kilter sensibility to make advertisements that belonged in the Museum of Modern Art. His main influence starting out was the legendary New Yorker magazine cartoonist Saul Steinberg whose minimalist style could convey in a few lines what it would take a thousand words to express.

His next step was to begin writing children’s books with the same kind of offbeat sensibility that endeared him to children everywhere. His books were filled with menace and darkness; all reminiscent of his youth in Alsace and calculated as he put it to help them discover the light. His work was a major influence on Maurice Sendak, who is interviewed throughout the film.

In a trip to Texas during the Jim Crow era, Ungerer was shocked to discover separate accommodations for Blacks and whites. That impelled him to begin making art with a message. By the time the Vietnam War started, he was primed and ready to become one of the most original and most trenchant poster artists against American intervention. He held nothing back. Ironically, he attributes his straight for the jugular style to the Nazi propaganda posters he was exposed to as a youth.

Susceptible to all the social upheavals of the 1960s, Ungerer discovered the sexual revolution and wasted no time launching a new career as a master pornographer. His sexually explicit and often sadomasochistic drawings were an acquired taste but nobody could question the power of his art.

Except perhaps for the censors who decided that his children books should be removed from the public libraries and the unofficial black listers who made him as unemployable in the 1960s as a CP’er was in the 1950s. This led him and his family to look elsewhere to make a living. Like Ai Weiwei, the artist profiled in another documentary, Ungerer was persecuted for his un-American values. In some circles, fucking is obviously as subversive as socialism.

Ungerer is altogether captivating subject. The film consists of him reminiscing about his past and brilliant examples of his work, much of it rendered as animation. This is a film that will remind people like me how powerful the transformative movements of the 1960s were and encourage younger people to keep their ammunition dry for the upheavals that are bound to occur down the road, especially those who believe in the revolutionary potential of art.

Also opening yesterday at the Village East Theater in New York is “In the Fog”, a Russian film that is a happy reminder that the Russian film industry continues to rebound nicely from the devastating impact of the Yeltsin years when Hollywood became part of the battering ram of privatization.

Like “White Tiger”, another excellent Russian film I reviewed recently, “In the Fog” is set during WWII but unlike “White Tiger” it does not exactly follow the Great Patriotic War narrative. Instead it is an existential saga that poses the dilemmas faced by men and women forced to make difficult choices under the gun.

Around the time I joined the Trotskyist movement in 1967, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism”, an essay that mapped to my own transitional state of mind. I still retained some of the French existential ideas that I had absorbed at Bard College as an undergraduate and others at the New School when I found myself embarking on a new course of revolutionary politics. Sartre’s essay was meant to highlight the difficult choices that people faced that did not lend themselves to a pat Marxist analysis:

As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandonment, I will refer to the case of a pupil of mine, who sought me out in the following circumstances. His father was quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a “collaborator”; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live. He fully realised that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance – or perhaps his death – would plunge her into despair. He also realised that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose.

“In the Fog” is the aptly named story of a Byelorussian partisan who comes to the house of a railroad worker who is believed to have betrayed three other workers who derailed a German train. Since they were hung and he was released, the partisans concluded that he was a collaborator. Part of the human drama involves the survivor arguing with the three fellow workers in a flashback about the drawbacks to sabotage. The Nazis will undoubtedly kill many villagers in retaliation. Do they want to be responsible for their deaths?

This is essentially a two-character film with Sushenya the railroad worker (Vladislav Abashin) trying to convince Burov the partisan (Vladislav Abashin) of his innocence. There is always a sense of impending doom as the Nazi army and the local cops acting on their behalf close in on the men. However, this is not an “action” film but much more about the tensions that exist during a state of war between revolutionary justice and the need for both fairness and mercy. The fine line between the two is often so thin as to be invisible.

“In the Fog” is based on a novel by Vasil’ Bykaw, Byelorussia’s most important author who was a WWII veteran who died in 2003. Like all great movies, I am always motivated to read the novel that they may be based on. Although Bykaw was not that ideological, there is one scene that suggests his judgments about the Stalin era. The bureaucrat who is in charge of the local railroad station is a Nazi flunky who beats the men as the mood hits him. One of the three railroad workers who ends up hung tells the others, “He was the same way under Stalin”.

Just before he died, Bykaw became part of the movement against Alexander Lukashenko, the vile autocrat who ran Byelorussia like the railway boss. Based on the evidence of the moral and philosophical foundations of “In the Fog”, it is not difficult to understand why Lukashenko would have felt the need to suppress the mass movement. As is the case with Tomi Ungerer, the artist is often part of the true vanguard of a revolutionary movement.

Unfortunately I was not able to see “Student” until after it closed at Anthology Film Archive. For those with a taste for politically hard-hitting and artistically daring fare, you can watch “Student” at mubi.com, a fee-based streaming service that might be described as the not-Netflix.

This is a very free adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” with an utterly impassive and mostly taciturn Kazakh student living in poverty while attending a local university. He has a part-time job as a gopher on a movie set that features director Darezhan Omirbayev playing the director of a cheesy b-movie starring the girlfriend of a business/gangster who drives around in an oversized SUV surrounded by hulking bodyguards. When “the student” (Nurlan Bajtasov, his character is never named) accidentally spills tea on her lap, a bodyguard spirits him into a room on the set, locks the door, and beats the living crap out of him.

The next day he attends a college class in which the instructor lectures the students about the need for a society divided into classes with the rich on top of the poor. How else will anything get done without social stratification, she asks. You need to learn how to survive just like animals in the jungle. The strong kill the weak. That is how society advances.

Taking this lesson to heart, the student buys a gun and robs a Khazak version of a convenience store. Unlike Dostoyevsky’s novel, the act has no underlying philosophical meaning. It is just the act of someone trying to survive in the post-Soviet jungle.

Darezhan Omirbayev, who also wrote the screenplay, is obviously angry about what is happening in Kazakhstan. His camera lingers on the sight of the ultramodern high-rises that are home to the country’s petro-millionaires.

In an interview with the director at mubi.com, he was asked:

Dostoevsky’s novel was called “an encyclopaedia of Russian society of the 60s of 19th century”. Did you make it to create something similar about the modern Kazakh society?

His reply:

This is to be judged by the viewers, not by me. I based my film on this novel not accidentally. Marcel Proust said once: “Dostoevsky’s style is a bit clumsy, but the power of his novels is in their compositional harmony and beauty”. And this beautiful composition came thanks to those problems and ideas that troubled Fyodor Mikhailovich. And plus, some prose is very keen to be filmed – and “Crime&Punishment” is among of such. I was impressed much by the sequence where Raskolnikov, having murdered the old X, forgets to shut the door and an accidental person steps in. Also, this novel has a social undertone which is very actual nowadays. The 60s of 19th century were the period of launching capitalism that bred the conflict in a Russian society. The reaction of young minds was quite harsh, and Dostoevsky made it to catch that zeitgeist. The same process is currently going on in modern Kazakhstan: there’s too big financial gap between people and that troubles the youth of Kazakhstan very much.

Indeed.

June 2, 2013

A Great Day in Harlem

Filed under: Film,music,obituary — louisproyect @ 12:14 am

NY Times May 28, 2013

Jean Bach, Jazz Documentarian and Fan, Dies at 94

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Jean Bach, a lifelong jazz zealot whose fascination with a photograph of the titans of jazz gathered in front of a Harlem brownstone in 1958 led her to make a prizewinning movie about that moment, “A Great Day in Harlem,” 36 years later, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

The photographer Carol Friedman, a friend, announced the death.

A print of that black-and-white photograph — one of the most famous in jazz history — had for years hung in the office of Ms. Bach’s husband, Bob, a television executive. Art Kane, a fashion and music photographer on assignment for Esquire magazine, had taken it on Aug. 12, 1958, in front of 17 East 126th Street, off Fifth Avenue, having assembled 57 jazz musicians for the group portrait at the ungodly hour — for most of them — of 10 a.m.

On the stoop or standing in front of it were Count Basie, Lester Young, Gene Krupa, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, Sonny Rollins, Marian McPartland, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Mary Lou Williams and 44 other musicians (along with children from the neighborhood). Esquire published the photo in 1959.

After her husband died in 1985, Ms. Bach, a radio producer, learned that Milt Hinton, the bassist and jazz photographer, had a home movie of the original 1958 shoot. Though she had no experience making movies, Ms. Bach acquired it and decided to use it as the basis of an hourlong film, complementing the footage with interviews with musicians who were in the photo, clips of their performances, and narration by Quincy Jones.

Released in 1994, “A Great Day in Harlem” won the top award at the Chicago International Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

The jazz critic Whitney Balliett, writing in The New Yorker, called the film “a brilliant, funny, moving, altogether miraculous documentary.”

Ms. Bach had not originally intended it to be a movie. She had envisioned it as a series of recorded conversations that she would ultimately donate to the Smithsonian Institution. “I even planned on what I was going to wear to the ceremony,” she told The Chicago Tribune, “which pearls I would select, and how I was going to be very gracious about it all.”

Photo

Jean Bach with her friend Bobby Short.

For years, Ms. Bach was a fixture in the New York jazz world, with encyclopedic knowledge of the music, virtually unmatched connections and a reputation for giving great parties at her home in Greenwich Village. A gossip columnist once wrote that Frank Sinatra’s first question on coming to town was, “What’s happening down at Jean’s?”

After Ms. Bach and the pianist and singer Bobby Short had a party in 1981 to celebrate their 40 years of friendship, Mr. Short described what drew him to her when they met in 1942 at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago.

“I was a baby just out of high school,” he told The New Yorker in 1983, “and what drew me to Jean was not only her love for Duke Ellington but the fact that she could sing note for note Ben Webster solos and Cootie Williams solos and Johnny Hodges solos. And — she knew my idol, Ivie Anderson,” who sang with Ellington’s band.

Ms. Bach, he said, was “by far the most elegant and beautiful and sharply intelligent person I had ever met.”

Jean Enzinger was born on Sept. 27, 1918, in Chicago and grew up there and in Milwaukee. Her father worked in advertising, and her childhood household was full of music and parties. As a teenager she knocked on Duke Ellington’s door and established a lasting friendship.

Moving east to attend Vassar College, a short train ride from Harlem, she practically majored in trips to the Apollo Theater. In 1941, back in Chicago, she was at the Three Deuces when she met the trumpeter Shorty Sherock, then with Gene Krupa’s band. They married three weeks later.

Mr. Sherock later had his own band, which she managed. After they divorced in 1947, Ms. Bach worked as a radio scriptwriter and then as a press agent.

In 1948 she married Bob Bach, who was production coordinator for the television show “What’s My Line?” One member of the show’s celebrity panel was Arlene Francis, whose daily radio show on WOR she produced from 1960 to 1984.

Ms. Francis’s show, originally broadcast from Sardi’s, the theater district restaurant, became known for the wide range of guests Ms. Bach booked, including Ellington, Leopold Stokowski and Carl Sandburg.

In 1997 Ms. Bach directed a second movie, using outtakes from “A Great Day in Harlem.” In 20 minutes it solved one of the stranger riddles in jazz history: Did Dizzy Gillespie, in 1941, actually shoot spitballs onstage at his boss, the bandleader Cab Calloway, who promptly fired him?

No, Ms. Bach found. Interviewed for the film, “The Spitball Story,” the trumpeter Jonah Jones confessed to having done the deed. The short won awards at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Newport International Film Festival and the USA Film Festival.

In her later years, Ms. Bach, who left no immediate survivors, worked on a documentary about the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, which is unfinished. It was all part of her mission of finding and preserving a world that seemed to be fading away in front of her.

Until six months ago, she was out on the town listening to jazz.

 

May 21, 2013

Hannah Arendt

Filed under: bard college,Fascism,Film,philosophy — louisproyect @ 5:53 pm

Arguably Hannah Arendt was the first target of an organized campaign by the Israeli lobby. As was the case with the late Tony Judt, it did not matter that she was pro-Israel. By stepping outside the bounds of the ideological consensus, she became guilty of Orwellian thoughtcrimes. If for no other reason, this conflict is reason enough to see Margerethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” that opens on May 29th at the Film Forum in New York. As a film that takes politics and morality seriously, it is like nothing I have seen in a very long time and that makes Spielberg’s film on Lincoln look shallow by comparison. Essentially von Trotta’s film consists of people in their sixties and seventies arguing about Nazism and the right of the Jews to mount a show trial. But what people they were.

As Hannah Arendt, Barbara Sukowa is phenomenal. (It should be stated that her attempt to affect a Hollywood version of a German accent despite being German was a directorial miscue by von Trotta. It was a bit like Marlon Brando’s German accent in “The Young Lions”. Once you get used to it, however, it hardly matters.) This is the kind of role that Sukowa has long experience with. She played Rosa Luxemburg in another von Trotta biopic as well as Mieze in Fassbinder’s masterpiece “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, based on the novel by the leftist Alfred Döblin who also wrote “Karl and Rosa”, about Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

The film begins with Arendt finding out about the Eichmann trial from an article in the NY Times. She then approaches William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker magazine, with a proposal. She would go to Jerusalem and cover the trial.

A salon at her Riverside Drive apartment just before her trip leads to a quarrel between her and her husband Heinrich Blücher on one side and New School philosophy professor Hans Jonas on the other. The Blüchers worry that the Israelis are using the trial for propaganda purposes while Jonas is loath to find fault with Israel on any score. Of course, his decades long Zionist past would explain this.

This salon would have taken place in 1961, at exactly the same time I was enrolled in Hans Blücher’s Common Course at Bard College. This was a required “great books” survey that allowed Blücher—a high school dropout and former member of the German Communist Party—to philosophize about politics and morality. His defense of Socrates galvanized me in a way as nothing had ever before. From the minute I heard his defense of the need to put truth above the exigencies of citizenship, it made it a lot easier for me to become a socialist six years later at the very moment I was a student of Hans Jonas at the New School. Oddly enough, despite Blücher’s anti-Communism, he paved the way for me to become a communist.

When taking a seminar on Kant with Jonas in 1967, I came up with the idea of writing a term paper on Kant’s categorical imperative as an extension of his subject driven epistemology. After getting an A in the course, I was approached by Jonas at a gathering at his home in New Rochelle on a Sunday afternoon and encouraged to continue with my PhD studies. But a few months later I would drop out of the New School in order to focus on my activism in the Trotskyist movement after the spirit of Blücher in the 1920s—an avid reader of Leon Trotsky. I saw my categorical imperative as one of making the socialist revolution. Anything else was an escape from duty.

The film takes up Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger who comes across more as an absent-minded professor than a mouth-breathing Nazi ideologue. In one of the film’s more dramatic moments, you see her and Heidegger strolling through a German forest after WWII where she urges him to beg forgiveness from the world for his evil past.

Although it would be impossible for the film to deal with all of the tangled philosophical connections between the principals, it should be mentioned that Hans Jonas was a student of Heidegger’s as well. Furthermore his critique of technology owes much to Heidegger. With respect to Heidegger’s reputation as an anti-Semite and avid National Socialist, Hans Jonas paints an entirely different picture in his memoir and one that is consistent with the somewhat bumbling and pathetic characterization in von Trotta’s film.

Still, I was the only Zionist among his students. At least to my knowledge no one else among the Jewish Heidegger disciples was a supporter of Zionism—on the contrary. I did run into some of them later in Palestine, but they didn’t choose to go at a time when you still had a choice. Probably Heidegger thought there just happened to be such dreamers among the Jews, and his student Hans, on whose dissertation he’d conferred the highest praise teacher could give a student, namely summa cum laude, was one of those dreamers and would eventually go off to Palestine. So a Heidegger student would establish himself in Palestine and perhaps spread his teachings there, The thought that his standing in Germany might suffer as a result of many Jews leaving or being forced to leave apparently didn’t occur to him, Heidegger was in no way prepared for such a thing. I should mention, too, that here and there he even helped Jewish students of his. For instance, Paul Oskar Kristellar later said in New York that he had nothing against Heidegger because when he emigrated to Italy, Heidegger sent letters of recommendation that helped him find a position there.’ No — Heidegger wasn’t personal antisemite. Presumably it felt a little uncanny to him that so many of his students were Jewish, but more in the sense that it was somewhat one sided, that there weren’t enough others who were more like him. The only discussion of antisemitism in his immediate surroundings came up when word got out that his wife had belonged to the nationalist youth movement. Perhaps she nagged him occasionally, saying, “Martin, why do you act deaf and dumb? Why are you constantly surrounded by young Jews?”

After her articles begin appearing in the New Yorker, Arendt becomes a lightning rod. A neighbor in her Riverside Drive high-rise sticks a letter under her door accusing her of being a Nazi. The administration at the New School demands that she stop giving her courses. In defiance she goes ahead with the class. She goes to a meeting about her book where a young Norman Podhoretz denounces her. Her best friend Mary McCarthy makes her entrance just as Podhoretz is at his most venomous and twists him into a knot. Although the characterization of McCarthy veers too far in the direction of comic relief and paints her too much as a gum-chewing, wisecracking Eve Arden type (my younger readers will have to google this for more information), her presence is essential since it is a reminder that there were some intellectuals who had the guts to stand up to the Israel lobby at the time.

Back in 1961 I had no idea that Hans Blücher was married to Hannah Arendt and even less of an idea that she was covering the Eichmann trial. I can’t remember if I was reading the N.Y. Times back then but even if I had I would be far more interested in reviews of jazz musicians or movies than current events.

A few years later as the “sixties” began to erupt, young radicals embraced Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil” even if they may have not been fully engaged with her wariness over the project of revolution. This excerpt from Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography gives you a flavor for the mood at the time.

The young Jew who sent Arendt a report on this meeting [about her book] commented that Eichmann in Jerusalem seemed to have stirred up a generational conflict within the Jewish community. This conflict was made public when Norman Fruchter published a piece called “Arendt’s Eichmann and Jewish Identity” in Studies on the Left. Fruchter’s was the voice of the young Jewish radicals who found in Arendt’s work both a rebellion against “the myth of the victim which Jews tend to substitute for their history” and an analysis of what “citizen responsibility [is] necessary in every modern state to prevent the reemergence of the totalitarian movement which ravaged Germany.” He wrote at the moment when comparisons between Germany of the 1930s and America of the 1960s were becoming common among the New Left—to the consternation of the Old Left. A year earlier, James Weinstein had published a piece called “Nach Goldwasser Uns?” [After Goldwaer, us?] in which the comparison was made explicit: “There are, indeed, many similarities between American society today and that of Germany in the years before and during Nazi rule.” Eichmann became a symbol: “Like so many American bureaucrats and military men, Eichmann emerges from Miss Arendt’s account as a man of very limited ideological commitment.” Over such speeches as the one Carl Oglesby delivered at the 1965 SANE march on Washington, the New and the Old Left parted company: “Think of all the men who now engineer that war [in Vietnam],” said Oglesby, “those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals. “

Finally, the film should encourage those with a critical bent to look deeper into the arrest of Eichmann itself, something that would be beyond the scope of von Trotta’s film. The Mossad’s abrogation of international law through its kidnapping of Eichmann is certainly a precedent for actions that have become synonymous with the “war on terror”, including Obama’s kill-list.

What is of particular interest was the behind-the-scenes arrangement between Israel and West Germany that made David Ben-Gurion’s moral posturing look as hypocritical as any of the words coming out of LBJ’s mouth.

In 2011 secret documents revealed that the German government and the CIA knew the whereabouts of many former Nazis including Hans Globke, who was the Chancellery Chief of Staff and a close advisor to Chancellor Adenauer at the time of the trial. In a quid pro quo deal, the West Germans promised weapons if Globke’s name was not brought up in the Eichmann trial.

Der Spiegel reported:

But Israel needed the financial aid, the submarines and the tanks, and German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, who had also negotiated the arms shipments directly with Ben-Gurion, left no doubt that the Israelis were to protect Bonn’s reputation if they wanted weapons: “I have told my contacts that it is a matter of course that if the Federal Republic supports the security of Israel, it will not be held collectively liable, morally, politically or journalistically, for the crimes of a past generation in connection with the Eichmann trial.”

The Israelis had shown “understanding and responsiveness” for this position, Strauss reported. And so it happened that the question of how the Nazis had managed to involve significant portions of German society in the Holocaust was largely ignored.

“We only introduced information into the trial that was relevant for Eichmann,” says Gabriel Bach, the last remaining member of prosecution team still alive today. The Globke issue, he adds, simply wasn’t relevant.

May 10, 2013

Wang Bing: cinematic bard of the Chinese working-class and peasantry

Filed under: China,Film — louisproyect @ 6:32 pm

In trying to explain to my wife the importance of Wang Bing’s tripartite, 9 hour documentary “West of the Tracks”, I described it as the equivalent of a time machine transporting a video camera back to 18th century Britain and into the hands of someone like Thomas Gray or William Blake—poets appalled by the rise of capitalism. In 1999 the 32-year-old film school graduate, went to Shenyang, a heavily industrialized city, with a small rented DV camera in order to capture a moment in time when the “iron rice bowl” would become a thing of the past. While the film itself is about as unadorned as the videos that I tend to make, their impact is overwhelming as Chinese workers confront their imminent demise as benefactors of one of the 20th century’s most powerful revolutions. Now they were becoming the equivalent of British self-sustaining small farmers dispossessed by the enclosure acts.

“West of the Tracks” is not easy to come by. I was able to borrow a copy from Columbia University’s well-stocked film library, but it is worth tracking down. But for those fortunate enough to be in close proximity to Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives, I strongly recommend Wang Bing’s latest—“Three Sisters”—that opens today. It follows his long-form, cinema vérité approach but it is much more polished, even to the point of being described as an object of beauty, even as it depicts an ugly scenario, namely the bitter fortunes of impoverished peasants left out of China’s “economic miracle”.

The first part of “West of the Tracks” is aptly titled “Rust” and takes place almost entirely in the massive zinc and copper smelting plants in Shenyang as workers go about their jobs. Much of the action takes place in break rooms where they play cards or Mahjong and speculate about the pending bankruptcy of the state-owned factories that have provided them with health care, lunch, free housing, pensions and other benefits. Like their counterparts in places like Detroit or Cleveland, these are workers who are rapidly becoming redundant. The strain on their psyches is palpable as the opening scene depicts. A pointless argument in the break room leads a drunken worker to fisticuffs with those he has been annoying. As the fight winds down, he confesses that it is entirely his fault. He should not have gotten drunk.

Wang Bing’s use of cinema vérité functions both as a way of capturing lives in their messy, quotidian essence as well as a way of avoiding censorship. Just about every Chinese documentary filmmaker avoids making Michael Moore type agitprop since that would risk leading to the same fate as artist Ai Weiwei. As a gimmick that reminds me a bit of Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearance in most of his films, Wang Bing tips off his audience that it is still a movie and not reality. In part three of “West of the Tracks”, he shows a junk collector at his home near the rail yards picking up his pet dog Maomao, holding him up to the camera, and announcing: “Look at the camera, Maomao. Let them take your picture.” In “Three Sisters”, we see the father of the three young girls, who are the subjects of the documentary, get on a bus that will take him to a nearby city in search of a factory job. The bus driver then asks him for a ticket. He replies that he has already given him one. “Not yours”, the bus driver says, “one for the guy with the camera.”

Part two is titled “Remnants” and depicts the forced relocation of Shenyang’s workers who are losing their company housing to demolition. In every case, they are not only getting smaller flats that will force at least one family member to be left out; they are also required to pay a hefty price for being given that privilege. With most of the workers already a victim of layoffs, much of the film shows them passing time in their old neighborhood as they reflect on the raw deal they have gotten. There is no organized resistance shown in Wang Bing’s film since that would risk censorship or worse but the film gives you a good idea why 180,000 reported incidents of organized protests took place in 2010.

“Rails”, the final part, is about railroad workers whose trains operate in and about Shenyang’s industrial yards. As is the case in part one, most of the action takes place on the job and in break rooms but unlike part one the workers are less stressed out since they will likely not be impacted by plant closings. Although they refer to each other as “comrade”, there is little evidence of the workers thinking in broad political terms. As long as they have a job and the money to spend on prostitutes or Karaoke bars, they will accept the new system that is unfolding. The most moving part of “Rails” involves the aforementioned junk dealer who makes his rounds in the rail yards looking for discarded metal to sell in local marketplaces. One night some cops arrest him for an unauthorized collection, leaving his young son to suffer what amounts to a nervous breakdown. It is a graphic reminder of the cruelty of those with the power to enforce capitalist law and order in the new China.

As my regular readers probably know by now, my emphasis is on politics rather than style. That being said, it is worth noting what “Jump Cut”, a magazine geared to the byways of America’s film schools, had to say:

The four shots are taken from a camera mounted on the front of a small goods train as it traverses and penetrates Tiexi District’s factories and residential areas.  Snowflakes stick to the lens as if to one’s eyelashes, and this snow sticking, along with the occasional small jerk given to the camera by the old railroad tracks, serves to make the cinematography tangible, vulnerable, almost human.  Thus the camera does not just observe or record; it stares, it braves, it searches, and it salvages.

If much of the film’s stylistic power is arguably unintentional, there is little doubt that Wang Bing’s latest is a finely wrought work of art.

“Three Sisters” is shot in a remote and mountainous farming village where three young girls are fending for themselves in what amounts to a hut. Their mother abandoned the family long ago and the father has been forced to look for work in the nearest city.

Yingying is 10 and amounts to the head of the household that consists of her, her 6-year-old sister Zhenzhen, and Fenfen, the youngest who is 4. Like “West of the Tracks”, the 153-minute film is made up of the quotidian existence of humble people, in this instance not only humble but also highly vulnerable. Yingying is always picking lice out of her sibling’s hair while all three have coughs that alarmingly never go away.

Their grandfather lives nearby and tries to look after them as best he can but he has his own meager existence to look after. The children have little to look forward to outside of a visit from their father who brings them new clothes from the city or to festivals in the village that provide a good meal for the hungry.

Notwithstanding the obvious suffering, there is also much inspiration in watching three children trying to shore up each other against all odds. Yingying has almost unbelievable fortitude for a 10-year-old.

The village is perpetually cloaked in a fog that lends it the aura of a Bronte novel. When Yingying goes to a nearby mountaintop to look after her grandfather’s flock of sheep, you hear a constant rumbling as if in an approaching storm. It takes a while to figure out that the sound is that of the unrelenting wind rather than thunder. Wang Bing had the bright idea to remove the windscreen from his microphone to achieve this dramatic effect.

According to a 2008 World Bank report, 948 million people live on less than $5 per day in China. One imagines that if the three children had $4.99 per day to survive on, they would feel as if they won the lottery.

Recently it was reported that Mao Zedong’s granddaughter Kong Dongmei is worth about $815 million, placing her 242nd on Chinese magazine New Fortune’s 500 Rich List for 2013. Those in China, who share director Wang Bing’s values, call these Forbes type lists “sha zhu bang” or “kill pig list.

In March 1927 Mao Zedong wrote a “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” that stated:

In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.

Surely as the conditions described in Wang Bing’s documentaries continue, there will be another “mighty storm” that will eventually sweep away the likes of Mao’s granddaughter. Ironically, despite the lack of a revolutionary party, it is a good sign that documentary filmmakers are serving as a kind of cultural vanguard exposing the rot at the heart of this vicious system. Sooner or later, the workers and peasants will mobilize as well to make another revolution to sweep “corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves” once again.

May 3, 2013

Desperate Acts of Magic

Filed under: Film,magic — louisproyect @ 9:37 pm

“Desperate Acts of Magic” can be described as a film that does for the world of professional magicians what “The Wrestler” did for another spectator pastime based on illusion. Despite its lighter tone, it probes the depths of a subculture that clearly rests on the foundations of insecure egos just as wrestling depends on beefed up bodies.

We meet the main character Jason Kant at a meeting of coworkers at the I.T. company where he works as a database administrator, a position I held for over a decade while I pursued my own kinds of illusions after working hours. Jason’s head and heart is not really in databases. It is in magic. While the meeting is going over technical matters, Jason minds start to drift toward the coin trick he has been perfecting. While manipulating it between two fingers, he accidentally propels it across the conference table and into the blouse of a co-worker and between her breasts.

The next day he is fired and forced to follow his true passion. Watching this scene made me wonder if I had been better off being fired myself long ago. While leaving the office with his belongings, he runs into a beautiful woman working as a shill for a three-card monte dealer who picks his wallet.

That night she calls him up to let him know that she went to magic camp with him long ago and would like to have dinner with him to get a handle on the magic scene in L.A. He only figures out later in the restaurant that she is the person who picked his wallet. When the bill comes for the meal, she picks the wallet of the guy at the next table to pay for it.

While wary of her criminal side, Jason finds her irresistibly beautiful. He explains to her that he is turning pro and needs someone to work as his assistant. She bristles at the suggestion, telling him that there is nothing more sexist than women serving as a male magician’s assistant in a Playboy Bunny outfit. A day later he meets up with her and says that he wants her to be his partner and not just his assistant. Furthermore, the magic act will be a satire on sexism in the business that features a climactic trick that drives the point home. Despite her initial interest in working with him, tensions mar the professional relationship—not to speak of his jealousy over what he perceives as her preference for a more successful magician who is his best friend.

Jason is played and directed by Joe Gold who knows this world inside out from his experience as a professional magician performing at over 500 kids’ birthday parties, and entering numerous magic competitions. He bears a striking resemblance to Steve Carell who is cast (overcast actually) as nerdy losers. I can’t imagine Carell doing a better job of playing Jason Kant, a nerdy loser in just about all aspects of life besides magic.

While not as ambitious as “The Prestige”, “Desperate Acts of Magic” is much more realistic about the lives of professional magicians. I can’t say that I am an expert on this world but I probably know a bit more about it since my wife’s nephew, who is now studying film in the U.S., was one of Turkey’s most successful teen magicians. Mostly out of my connections to him, I have tried to see any film that comes my way about magicians, just to send him the screener when I am done. If you have ever dabbled in magic yourself or if you simply want to see a well-written and well-directed character-driven romantic comedy, check out “Desperate Acts of Magic” that opens today at the Quad Cinema in N.Y. and at the Laemmle in Los Angeles on May 10th.

Voices of the Mizrahim

Filed under: Film,Jewish question,zionism — louisproyect @ 8:35 pm

In doing background research for an article on the Jews of the Maghreb (North Africa), I learned of the existence of a 2002 documentary on Iraqi Jews titled “Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection”. Among Jews, the term Mizrahim (Hebrew for Oriental) is applied to those from North Africa and the Middle East, in contrast to the European Ashkenazis who constitute the ruling elite of Israel.

In some ways the term that makes the most sense is Arab Jews, one that is embraced by Ella Shohat, an Iraqi Jew who is featured in “Forget Baghdad”. Her story, and the story of four elderly Jewish ex-members of the Iraqi Communist Party, is a reminder of the destructive character of Israel’s creation. Not only did it represent a nakba (disaster) for the Palestinian people, it also forced a people deeply rooted in their respective Arab countries to become assimilated into a culture that regarded them as inferiors.

While by no means an attack on the Zionist entity, the 1964 Israeli film “Sallah Shabati” does a fairly decent job of dramatizing the plight of new Mizrahim immigrants. You can rent the DVD “Forget Baghdad” from Netflix while “Sallah Shabati” is a bit harder to get your hands on (I took a copy out from Columbia University’s film library, but Amazon.com has new copies for sale at $15.64). After seeing them side-by-side, you can only conclude that the Mizrahim would have been better off where they came from, a claim that obviously applies to the Ashkenazim as well.

full:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/voices-of-the-mizrahim/

April 30, 2013

New York Indian Film Festival 2013

Filed under: Film,india — louisproyect @ 11:32 pm

This is an all points bulletin for New Yorkers who care deeply about film and about politics. Based on the press screenings of three films that are scheduled for the 2013 New York Indian Film Festival that opens today, you have the chance to see some amazing work. The two narrative films being discussed here are meant primarily for the Indian market. Unlike the typical Indian film that ends up at an art house in Greenwich Village, the directors behind these films came up through the ranks of the indigenous television and film industry rather than the UCLA Film School. This means that the sensibility is distinctly Indian as opposed to the sort of “globalized” film that exhibits more of West Hollywood than West Bengal. What you “lose” in terms of dramatic complexity and psychological depth is more than made up for by authenticity. The other film under discussion is a documentary that will probably not end up in a New York theater, all the more reason to take it in. After all, it is not every day that you get a chance to find out about war-torn Manipur’s main passion: baseball.

Directed by Devashish Makhija, “Oonga” is the first film I have seen out of India that takes up the cause of the Adivasi, the so-called forest-dwelling tribals who provide the base of support for the Naxalite guerrillas whose case novelist Arundhati Roy argued. Oonga is the name of a young boy who has become obsessed with the story of Rama, the seventh avatar of the Vishnu deity in Hinduism, so much so that he makes a pilgrimage to a distant city where the village teacher has brought classes in the past to see a reenactment of Rama’s combat with the evil monarch Ravana staged at an amusement park.

Because the teacher has brought Adivasi children to the city, she has come under suspicion from the local military detachment that is trying to wipe out the Naxalites. They are convinced that she has brought the children there to be indoctrinated. They take her into custody and begin torturing her into making a false confession of being a Naxalite spy.

Meanwhile the Naxalites have brought the teacher to their camp in the forest to get her to persuade the villagers to join the struggle. Made up mostly of women, the guerrillas have taken up arms because there is no alternative. Their husbands have already been killed or imprisoned and their land confiscated to be used for mining bauxite. While the teacher and the villagers she leads are depicted as a kind of football being contested by two opposing sides, the brunt of the film is to show the military as utterly depraved and at the service of the mining companies.

Oonga manages to make his way to the city despite knowing very few words in Hindi and relying totally on the mercy of strangers willing to give an Adivasi youth a ride in their truck or on a motorcycle. Once he is in the amusement park, he sneaks into the tent where the Rama legend is being reenacted as a kind of set piece reminiscent of the ballet in “An American in Paris”. It is one of the more astonishingly beautiful “song and dance” scenes I have ever seen in an Indian movie, more Balanchine than Bollywood.

Directed by Ratnakar Matkari, “Investment” is a scathing portrayal of the grubby, materialistic, and Western-oriented upwardly mobile classes in India. When we first meet husband Ashish and wife Prachi in their high-rise, they seem normal enough. They are enjoying the benefits of a rising standard of living and sharing the abundance they enjoy with their 12-year-old son Sohel who at first blush appears like a typical spoiled brat.

When his dad asks him to turn down the volume on the television set so he can talk to someone in a position of helping him land a job at Barclay’s, the son tells him to go to another room since he is watching one of his favorite shows on MTV, one that features American rappers celebrating their wealth and fame. When he is not watching TV, Sohel is zoned out on video games based on killing “enemies”. (Are there any other kind?)

But as the plot develops, we learn that Sohel is not just spoiled. He is a psychopathic killer in the vein of Patty McCormack in the 1954 film “The Bad Seed”, a lying and murderous 12-year-old girl who became the inspiration for a host of other less inspired horror movies of the 1970s through today.

But the real horror is India’s class society. Sohel has a sick sexual interest in a schoolmate with a mother and father beneath his own parents socially, like characters in a Dreiser novel. When she resists his advances, he strangles her in a wooded area nearby his school where Adivasi peoples have been protesting the takeover of their land by a real estate company. The film makes no attempt to provide a “balanced” view. It is an old-fashioned diatribe against a monstrous family who are obviously symbols of an India that 74-year-old director Ratnakar Matkari has no use for.

This, his first movie, is a clear expression of his values previously reflected through a Marathi translation of Arundhati Roy‘s English essay titled Greater Common Good. After earning a degree in economics from Mumbai University in 1958, he worked at the Bank of India for the next twenty years. Despite his ability to enjoy the life of his evil characters, he is much more interested in challenging the values that are currently encouraging their development.

Directed by Mirra Bank, “The Only Real Game” is a documentary about the baseball craze in Manipur, a state bordering on Burma that has had 30 guerrilla groups operating at its height (or depth, as you look at it.) Ethnically, the people look more Burmese than Indian. This and just about every other aspect of Manipur culture and politics make me realize how dense and challenging the study of India can be. Even if the film was about nothing except Manipur cuisine, it would be worth watching simply for an insight into a nationality that we know so little about.

Apparently the Manipur people are the most athletic in India and took to baseball like a duck takes to water when they first discovered it during WWII. American airman created a base in their state that was a link the supply chain to the soldiers fighting against the Japanese. Not long after creating their field of dreams, they began teaching the natives how to hold a bat and throw a ball—American hegemony’s more beneficent side.

The film shows standout talents from Manipur as well as an American delegation of professionals who raised money for supplies and to support a clinic on the finer points of baseball. Among those on the delegation is former minor league standout Jeff Brueggemann who was never quite good enough or healthy enough to make it in the majors. He is an immensely appealing character and shows what America is capable of once it puts away its guns and its capital.

 

April 26, 2013

Juan of the Dead

Filed under: comedy,cuba,Film — louisproyect @ 8:46 pm

Counterpunch Weekend Edition April 26-28, 2013

Cinema in the Service of Revolution

Confronting Polemics With Alfredo Guevara

by LOUIS PROYECT

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.

full:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/26/confronting-polemics-with-alfredo-guevara/

April 25, 2013

Mud

Filed under: Film — louisproyect @ 5:45 pm

Young “indie” filmmakers tend to follow trends. One of the more popular is “mumblecore”, the genre that tends to embody “slacker” values and esthetics even as it aspires to commercial success. Think Lena Dunham. The other is at the other spectrum and can be described as the Terrence Malick School of filmmaking. It is known for having much more interest in landscape photography than character development.

And then there are those like Jeff Nichols, who march to the tune of a different drummer. My last Jeff Nichols film was the 2011 “Take Shelter” that I picked for the best of the year. I described it:

“Take Shelter” has a premise much like “Close Encounters of the Close Kind” but turned upside down in a malignant fashion. While the object of awe and wonder in Spielberg’s great movie was Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, the future landing site of flying saucers piloted by benign creatures, Nichols’s main character is haunted by nightmares of an apocalyptic future as well as by hallucinations when he is awake. Birds fall out a blue sky while terrible thunderstorms produce raindrops with the consistency of motor oil and a brackish smell.

“Mud”, his latest, opens tomorrow at theaters everywhere. While it is not quite up to the standard set by “Take Shelter”, it is about as good a narrative film as I have seen this year. It stars Matthew McConaughey as a mysterious, gun-toting figure who is hiding out on an island nearby a Southern river (possibly the Mississippi), looking for the first opportunity he can find to link up with Juniper, the treacherous siren he loves and has killed for.

He is discovered by two teenagers who have spotted a boat wedged in the branches of a tree—the result of a recent hurricane—and are anxious to lay claim to it without realizing that it is Mud’s hideout. When they first run into McConaughey, he announces: “Call me Mud”.

One of the teens is Ellis, the son of a man who cobbles out a living as a trapper and a fisherman on the river. The other is Neckbone, who is being raised by his affable, good old boy uncle (played by Michael Shannon, the star of “Take Shelter”, and cast against his usual malevolent type.)

For the most part, the film focuses on the ambivalent relationship between Mud and Ellis who admires the resourceful loner who shows him much more attention and affection than his cold and remote father. As might be expected, a fugitive like Mud has other things to worry about than satisfying a boy’s hero worship.

Some critics have likened “Mud” to “Huckleberry Finn” since it is set on the Mississippi and shows a young man bonding with a fugitive. (Nichols told an interviewer that Mark Twain was a major influence but mostly through “Tom Sawyer”.) I thought it evoked “Great Expectations” as well since Dickens’s novel also depicts a young boy coming to the aid of an escaped prisoner.

There are a couple of problems with the film. The most serious of which is the failure to establish the stormy past of Mud and Juniper’s relationship. The film would have benefited from flashbacks that grounded their country-and-western inspired love story. There is also a somewhat conventionally plotted shoot-out between Mud and a gang assembled by the father of the man he killed that almost felt thrown in by Nichols to meet audience expectations.

The most dramatically interesting scenes involve the complex interactions between Mud and the boys as they both challenge and defer to him in a way that they never could with their own fathers. They strike a bargain with Mud. In exchange for them rounding up spare parts to get the salvaged boat navigable, he will give them his pistol. Once the boat has been launched, he completes his end of the bargain but only after removing the bullets. He says, “I promised you a gun, not the bullets”. As is nearly always the case with Mud, his charm assuages them.

In a casting coup as brilliant as Tarantino using the nearly washed up John Travolta to play a hit man, Nichols picked just the perfect actor to play Mud. Now 43, McConaughey has exactly the weathered look that suits his character. Early in his career, he played in forgettable romantic comedies. Now middle-aged, he is doing the best work of his career.

If Nichols is determined to make films that express his own aesthetic rather than what is fashionable in the industry, it does not follow that he is without influences. In a January interview with MovieMezzanine.com, Nichols cited his influences:

Yeah, you know, whenever I get asked that question I often think less about specific directors and more about films. But, I’m a big fan of John Ford. I’m a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock is actually the one major influence because in a way because he picked a genre, he picked fear, which isn’t actually a genre, but an emotion, to work in. But people know him as “oh, he’s that guy that made scary movies” … but it’s because fear (which is why enjoy I love Take Shelter so much) is such a tangible thing to do through filmmaking.

John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. What’s not to like?

April 23, 2013

Follow-up on the Tribeca Film Festival incident

Filed under: Film — louisproyect @ 7:35 pm

Today, I heard from Brandon Rohwer, the Tribeca Publicity Director, who told me that he was sorry that I was banned from the screening of the herring documentary but that they had certain rules to follow otherwise the gates of hell would open and Satan’s minions would rise from the depths and lay siege to mankind.

Specifically, for someone like me who does not have press credentials, the publicist has to contact them in advance so my name will show up on a list. I got the feeling after reading his email that the Boston Marathon bombing would not have taken place if the Tribeca Festival officials had been in charge.

There were a “lot of moving parts” that involved security, etc. Like I might have sneaked in to see a movie at that theater other than the one sponsored by Tribeca. Or stolen a box of Good and Plenty’s when nobody was looking. Or peed on a toilet seat. Or took a crap and neglected to flush. That is why they needed a cop who looked like Eric Campbell to keep an eye on potential wrong-doers.

Being told that I had to leave the Tribeca screening

I wrote back to him:

A day after the incident I was told by the publicist that I had rsvp’d to the April 22nd rather than the April 19th screening. So even though I accidentally came to the wrong screening, I see no reason on earth why I would have been prevented from sitting down to watch a documentary on herring fishermen after she told your people that I was a New York Film Critics Online member and not an Al Qaeda operative.

I can understand why you would stipulate that publicists furnish you the name of the critics they invite ahead of time but in this particular instance a decision to make me turn around and go home really fucking burned me up.

I have written 650 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, most of them about documentaries like the one I wanted to see. I am not just a film reviewer. I have also written for scholarly journals on the environment, including “Capitalism, Nature and Socialism” and “Organization and Environment”. My review would have exposed the film to a much broader audience than the one that usually attends a Tribeca movie.

Finally, you know and I know that there is a two-tiered approach to critics. For people like David Edelstein or A.O. Scott, there is a red carpet. For nobodies like me, there has never been an incentive to get press credentials because the application process is like something out of a Kafka novel.

This year publicists approached me to view about 6 different Tribeca screenings, either in person or through DVD/Vimeo. I was looking forward to promoting the festival because I think it does a good job of presenting exactly the kind of films my readers look for.

But right now I would never bother writing a single word on behalf of Tribeca. You made someone who writes about film out of love rather than money feel like I was crashing a party. I deserved better.

Postscript:

No wonder he is paid to keep people from seeing movies rather than making them.

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