The Film Sufi

“Japanese Girls at the Harbor” - Hiroshi Shimizu (1933)

2011-08-22T03:23:00.023+12:00

Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Minato no nihon musume, 1933) is a striking and atmospheric silent movie from director Hiroshi Shimizu, who had a long and successful career in Japan, but is relatively unknown in the West. Based on a story by Itsuma Kitabayashi, the film may at first appear to be a rather conventional romantic tale, but it manages to evoke nuanced considerations of love, jealousy, the challenges of modernism to traditional values, and also what I might call, “truth and revelation”.

The story of this film revolves around three girls in the port city of Yokohama who are all romantically attracted to a handsome young man in the area. The focus is on two best friends, Dora and Sunako, who are students at a Catholic girls school. The plot passes through three basic stages.

Sunako and Henry. After opening with some atmospheric but impersonal and distancing shots of Yokohama harbor, the scene shifts to Dora and Sunako, who walk home together across a hilltop every day. On this occasion the courtly young man Henry drives up to the hilltop on his motorcycle, to the evident delight of both girls. Henry is charming and chivalrous towards each of them, but Sunako is more assertive and succeeds in winning his attentions. Dora is crushed but swears fealty to her eternal friendship with Sunako. Soon, however, we learn that Henry likes to hang around the company of punk gangsters and is also seeing an older, more worldly girl, Yoko Sheridan, who seems to be experienced in the affairs of seducing and manipulating men. Dora reports this situation to Sunako, who is overcome with jealousy and, in a dramatic scene, confronts Yoko in the school chapel and shoots her with a gun.
Sunako’s Fall. The scene now shifts to new circumstances after some time has passed. Through a process of slow disclosure, the viewer gradually learns that in the smoky world of prostitutes and gin joints, one of these girls, now wearing the striking garments of a geisha, is Sunako. She has become a different person from the respectable schoolgirl seen in the first act. Meanwhile Henry and Dora are now married, revealing that Dora’s shy, conservative manner was ultimately successful in the game of love. By chance, Henry runs into Sunako in the city and is shocked by what has happened to her. Dora, still loyal to her old friend, seeks to help Sunako and urges her to come to their dwelling for visits. Both Henry and Dora feel called upon to get Sunako to return to a more respectable and virtuous life, but Sunako, presumably aware of the likely unforgiving nature of traditional Japanese society, feels trapped in her situation.
Sunako’s Redemption. Henry, trying to turn Sunako around, goes to visit her, but he also finds himself tempted by old feelings and is attracted to her again. Perhaps due to his conflicting emotions, Henry turns to drink and starts hanging out in bars until late at night. Although Sunako is also still attracted to Henry, she reawakens to her authentic self and insists on Henry returning to his wife, Dora. At the end of the film, Sunako departs from Yokohama on a ship, having done the right thing but unsure of what life has further in store for her.

There are several interesting aspects of the story of Japanese Girls at the Harbor that make it more interesting than might first appear, The focus of attention here is on women, not men. What we see is a sensitive portrayal of women and how they see and act from their particular perspective, and this portrayal is enhanced by generally subtle acting (despite the sometimes stylized gestures mentioned below) that reveals their depth. As with many of Kenji Mizoguchi’s films, the men in this story are generally shallow and weak. Henry is nice, but seems to have little spine or character. In addition, another personage in the story, the painter Miura, who is Sunako’s later companion in her fallen state, is a friendly but servile camp follower who follows Sunako around like a puppy dog. So the men here are relatively useless, and it is the women who drive the story. Of course, Sunako is an assertive women who takes actions throughout. But even Dora and Yoko Sheridan (who reappears as a chastened and doomed character in Act 3) are attention-drawing and rather complex characters who undergo change in the story. Sunako is the most interesting character and the action-taker. In Act 1 she asserts herself by claiming Henry. Later when Yoko comes to take Henry away from her, Sunako shoots her. In Act 2, Sunako has descended into prostitution, but she is still very much her own woman, making her own living and energetically dominating her hangdog companion, Miura. Finally in Act 3, Sunako is still the decisive character – she reunites Henry with Dora and then chooses to leave Yokohama for new territory. She is the agent that makes things happen in this story.

Getting back to that theme of truth and revelation that I mentioned earlier, there is this curious compulsion on the part of characters in the film to intervene by telling the “truth” as they know it. In Act 1 Dora goes to Sonako and tells her what she knows about Henry and Yoko. Yoko also reveals to Henry that she knows about his dallying with Sunako. In Act 2 both Dora and Henry attempt to intervene in Sonako’s life and get her back to a virtuous life. In Act 3 Miura intervenes and reveals what he knows to Henry. Also in Act 3 Yoko Sheridan, having reappeared as a quite different person, also attempts to straighten out Sunako. The sense of respect for the privacy of the individual was evidently less significant in this realm. All of these characters felt the need to establish a common objective knowledge in the society around them, even though new modernist tendencies were making such commonality even less achievable and also revealing that the depth of individual feelings were richer than can be known in the public space and that increased considerations for privacy were more desirable for individuals and public alike.

What makes Japanese Girls at the Harbor such a special experience and a must-see film, however, is not the basic story, but the telling. The moody, black-and-white compositions and long tracking shots are consistently evocative of the general feelings of longing and loneliness. In addition there is considerable visual symbolism throughout, often in terms of images that represent the challenges of modernism. A further visual attribute, and one that strikes me as more unique to this film, is the sometimes dramatically stylized gestures of the actors – I am not sure whether these derive from silent movie or perhaps Japanese dramatic traditions. Incidentally, although sound movies came early to Japan, with the first one appearing in 1926, it took some time for talking pictures to take hold – even in the year of this film, 1933, more than 80% of the Japanese productions were silent films. One curious aspect to the visual presentation was the many intertitles in the film. These numerous textual interruptions might be thought to interfere with the visual presentation – I was always taught that the best silent films were those that didn’t need any intertitles. And yet the brief intertitles in this film don’t seem to get in the way, and seem almost to provide a form of visual punctuation.

Overall, Japanese Girls at the Harbor is worth tracking down. In many ways I had the feeling as I watched it that I was seeing a Japanese version of a Josef von Sternberg film, where a simple narrative arc is graced by a leisurely, expressionistic cinematography that entrances the viewer.

“The Social Network” - David Fincher (2010)

2011-07-24T04:10:00.014+12:00

The Social Network (2010) is about one of the hot cultural topics of the moment, the massive move to computer social networking and the extraordinary rise of its primary platform, Facebook. So even a poorly crafted film would have attracted considerable interest from many quarters. But the public and the critics generally judged The Social Network to be top-notch entertainment, giving it thumbs up all round: it earned eight US Academy Award Oscar nominations and has grossed well over $200 million. Based on Ben Mezrich's book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the founding of Facebook, it is notable that this mainstream Hollywood production is not a product of the youth culture it examines, but is instead something of an examination from the outside of that sphere – it was directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, 1999) and scripted by Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, 1999-2006). In fact the clinical examination metaphor is made explicit in the production, since all the events depicted are seen from the framing device of two concurrent court depositions associated with lawsuits that were filed about the events depicted in the film: the law courts are trying to get at the truth of what exactly took place in 2003-2004 concerning the rise of Facebook

In fact the film’s viewers, too, are probably looking for some kind of truth, or perhaps many truths when they go to see this film. After all, in just a couple of years, Facebook has amassed 750 million users and is considered to be worth more than $70 billion. How did this thing that was started by a single 19-year-old programmer get so big, so fast? Depending on what part of society they are coming from, viewers probably wanted to know the real story, the truth, that could provide answers to the following questions:

What made Facebook different from its other social networking competitors (Myspace, Friendster, Bebo, Orkut, . . .) and how did it come to dominate the market? Does it have special technical features, algorithms, or user affordances that make it so much better?
How does the youth-dominated high-tech computer industry work and what is it like to be a computer hacker?
Who is Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, and what lies behind his success?
Did Mark Zuckerberg actually steal the idea of Facebook from some of his fellow students and cash in all by himself?

Amazingly (for a film that has satisfied so many viewers presumably looking for these answers), the film doesn’t provide definitive information for any of these questions. Although The Social Network is grounded in actual court testimony (much of the testimony in the hearings is taken directly from the court transcripts), some knowledgeable critics have even complained that the depiction of the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, has serious inaccuracies [1,2,3]. In particular they argue that the film shows Zuckerberg to be

insecure – but they say he is not;
being obsessed with gaining an invitation to one of the prestigious, upper-class Harvard Final Clubs – but Zuckerberg denies having had an interest in that;
being a social outcast who could not find a girlfriend or relate to girls – but apparently he has had a steady girlfriend since 2003.

Besides the issue of whether the characterization of Zuckerberg is authentic or not, the film doesn’t even say much of anything about the experience of computer social networking or how the software that drives it was constructed.

Despite these criticisms concerning the film’s failure to reveal authentic and realistic information about its main subjects, though, I would say that the film does have its virtues. We just have to realize that this film is not about gritty reality, but is actually more of an expressionistic fable about characters that exist partly in our collective imagination. And on these terms, the film does convey something of an interest. So for the moment, let’s consider the fictionalized characters as shown, who may differ considerably from the real personages after whom they were fashioned.

First let’s consider the surface reality of the film. From the outset we are plunged into something of a dreamworld, or at least the dreamworld of TV dramas. What we see is not how real people really act, look, or talk. The pacing is too fast, filled with snappy and smart verbal comebacks to any remark. The girls, most of them Asian, are all slender, glamorous, and enticing. This is more the stuff of male fantasies than of the literal truth. At a social mixer party that takes place at a Harvard Jewish fraternity in the film, a male friend of Eduardo, one of the film’s main characters, remarks that he wants to develop an algorithm to explain the connection between Jewish guys and Asian girls. Eduardo responds,

“I don’t think it’s that complicated. They’re hot, they’re smart, they’re not Jewish, and they can’t dance.”

I guess that just about sums it up.

But it is exactly this dreamworld that makes the film compelling. The story is not about social networks, but about a particularly bizarre social network, in fact the social network (as the title reminds us). In this case the social network concerns the principal characters, an odd pairing that fate and circumstance has thrown together:

Mark Zuckerberg, the gifted and nerdy computer whiz who starts Facebook.
Eduardo Saverin, a Brazilian math major at Harvard and Mark’s roommate. Eduardo works as Mark’s early financial advisor.
The Winklevoss twins, two studly and patrician Harvard upperclassmen who want to recruit Mark to work for their own fledgling computer company.
Sean Parker, a West Coast entrepreneur who was part of the founding of two well-known computer startups, Napster and Plaxo. Sean entices Mark to move Facebook out to the West Coast.

The plot is crafted as a variant on the classical “hero’s journey” [4], an oft-told story of a dangerous and lonely passage into a mysterious realm in quest of a hidden treasure – but fraught with multiple temptations and dire jeopardy. An iconic example of the hero’s journey is The Wizard of Oz (1939), and in fact I was reminded of David Lynch’s expressionistic turn on that very tale, Wild at Heart (1990), while watching this story unfold.

The film narrative is divided into three acts, and each one features alliances, betrayals, and the confrontation of threats. In each case the protagonist Zuckerberg is faced with a test that he manages to pass through by means of a shaky and not altogether trustworthy alliance. All three acts are framed, as I mentioned earlier, in the context of the later lawsuit deposition hearings, so they represent selected flashbacks of key events during the period under examination.

1. The Harvard Startup.
In the first act we meet the Aspergerish Zuckerberg talking to his girlfriend, Erica, and manically maintaining two conversation threads with the same person at the same time. She eventually zones out of his narcissistic and insensitive ramblings and announces that she is dumping him. Bewildered, Mark goes back to his room and vengefully calls Erica a bitch on his Friendster blog page before turning away from the too-complicated human world and spending all night hacking up a computer mashup, called “FaceMash”, that enables Harvard students to rate and compare how “hot” the coeds are on campus. Although this computer application is immediately popular, it gets Mark in trouble and leads to his suspension. But the bravura exploit draws the attention of the Winklevoss twins, who, together with their classmate Divya Narendra, have decided to start a local blogging and social networking platform at Harvard called “Harvard Connect”. They offer Mark the job of programming their service platform, and Mark agrees to join them. But it’s clear that these guys are just out to use Mark and exploit his programming genius. He’s just a tool for these sophisticates, who dominate Mark by virtue of their being upperclassmen, their immense wealth, and their social status. Meanwhile Mark secretly decides to go off and develop his own social networking platform, and this activity delays his work for the Winklevosses. These are the key events associated with the subsequent Winklevoss lawsuit against Zuckerberg, which claimed that Mark had stolen their idea (their “intellectual property”) for Facebook. We never do get much of a feeling whether Mark meant to screw the Winklevoss twins from the outset and how much of his own venture, initially known as “thefacebook.com”, was his original idea. Actually, it turns out that even his original FaceMash application was not such an original idea, since something very similar had appeared at MIT a year earlier [5].

But somehow the issue of Mark’s originality doesn’t seem to matter in this story told on screen. We are basically on the side of this innocent, naive kid struggling against the super-confident giants that are always expected to win, because the deck is inevitably stacked in their favor. Although on the surface Zuckerberg appears completely outmatched by the Winklevoss twins, in the end it is Mark, like the mouse topping the cat in the Tom and Jerry cartoon, who dumps the Winklevoss twins and plows ahead with his own company.

2. TheFaceBook.Com
Zuckerberg and his roommate and pal, Eduardo Saverin, set out to build thefacebook.com (which will eventually become Facebook.com). Saverin is no slouch, by the way – we are told early on that one summer he made $300,000 investing in oil futures, and he becomes the Chief Financial Officer for the startup company. Throughout The Social Network, much of the action is seen from Eduardo’s perspective, and he is something of a narrator for this tale. This feeling of him being the narrator arises naturally from the fact that Saverin was Mezrich’s principal source for The Accidental Billionaires (Zuckerberg did not cooperate on the book or the film). So we are just getting Saverin’s side of the story all the way along. It is not surprising then that Saverin is the most sympathetic and human of the principal characters in the film. In fact only his role (played well by Andrew Garfield) and that of Erica (Rooney Mara) who come across as real, believable people. The rest of the roles, though well-acted, are heavily dramatized caricatures.

Anyway, in the context of this tale as its cinematically told to us, it is evident that Saverin’s sensitivity and humanity are necessary counterbalances to Zuckerberg’s disconnected and obsessive focusing on his own narrow goals. After some successes both with Facebook and with meeting girls, the two close friends meet up with the next turning point, the encounter with Sean Parker.

3. The Journey Out West
In a way, Parker (in an enthusiastic performance by Justin Timberlake) turns out to be the key pivotal figure to the narrative. He is a dazzling and seductive Mephistopheles, as he completely awes Zuckerberg with his glitzy familiarity with California showbiz-style entrepreneurship. The innocent and genuine Saverin is no match for this smooth operator, and he is easily sidelined by Parker’s almost demonic presence. In fact there is a scene in a San Francisco nightclub that summons up the images of the devil, himself, in the form of Parker seductively leading the ensnared Zuckerberg into a netherworld of forbidden rituals. It is certainly the “innermost cave” [4] of danger for the naive Zuckerberg. Parker represents a different kind of threat than the Winklevoss twins. While the Winklevoss twins were imposing and formidable antagonists, they were external threats – like powerful beasts of the forest. But Parker is even more dangerous – he appears to be attacking Zuckerberg from within and threatening to capture his very soul. And the horrified Eduardo is powerless to stop him. Parker soon engineers a semi-takeover of Facebook by landing some big-time investors to invest heavily in Facebook, thereby establishing Parker as president of the company and forcing Eduardo out of the picture (he would later Zuckerberg over this).

In the end, though, fate plays its hand and saves Zuckerberg from being completely taken over by Parker, as Parker’s fast-paced social life leads to a cocaine bust that removes him from the scene. In the film’s closing sequences, Zuckerberg is seen as having triumphed over everyone. He cam pay off the lawsuits and still be the world’s youngest and perhaps most powerful billionaire.

Many people have criticized the real Zuckerberg for being an ego-obsessed monomaniac, using his calm demeanor to mask a heartless arrogance that is willing to exploit anyone (and everyone, when it comes to people’s privacy) who stands in his way. Yet in this film, anyway, his character comes across as essentially innocent. He is the lone hero who pursues his dream to do it his own way. He spurns easy money and never lets distraction get in the way of his efforts to make Facebook into the what he had originally envisioned: a mechanism to connect people together. So as a drama, The Social Network works. Even though Zuckerberg’s relentless drive led him to move on from his friendship with Saverin, he does get what he wanted: the Facebook that can change the world.

But this victory comes at a price, and at the end of the film, Zuckerberg is still thinking about Erica and wishing that he could get her back. He has created the social networking behemoth, but his own social network is defunct.

This brings us to the larger issue, beyond the hero’s journey depicted in the film, concerning what Facebook really offers to us. Zuckerberg said that it was all about people making connections. When you can do that effectively online with Facebook, you can presumably find out what your friends are doing, eating, drinking, and watching. But the way Facebook works, subtlety and context are lost, and so, too, is privacy

In my view Facebook does not have a magic formula for social interaction. It was simply slightly better and slightly less bothersome than its competitors, and in the power-law economics of global electronic commerce, the leader, no matter how small its initial lead, will dominate overwhelmingly in the marketplace, whether it's in search engines (Google), operating systems (Microsoft), or social platforms (Facebook). And since Facebook is now so pervasive, the information that it has collected about everyone is enormously valuable to commercial enterprises, who will pay high fees to get at that information and make Facebook even more wealthy – a wealth that has been amassed by its acquiring and aggregating personal information from you and me. But we should not be seduced by mere size. As a social tool, Facebook is no more innovative than mass-market TV.

Facebook in fact is based on a reductionist, Objectivist view of reality – an impoverished perspective founded on a simplified and uniform ontology (mental model of the world). In terms of world modelling, it has always been the goal of the natural sciences to develop a universal model of reality, and we all know about the great advances in physics, chemistry, and biology towards this direction. But the complexity of human social interactions is well beyond the explanatory powers of the natural sciences. It is admittedly true that it is possible to employ simplified, quasi-universal ontologies that cover simple products and processes that we use for common and straightforward actions. But the human social world is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of complexity, and it is precisely that sphere of activity that will not succumb to such simplicity. In the social domain, everyone develops their own mental model of reality based on what they can learn from others and from their local contexts. To interact effectively in society, one has to have empathy: one’s mental model of reality must include the notion of other people who have their own, different mental models of the world – and they in turn have mental models that include guesses concerning what our own mental models may be like to them. We do this all the time, almost unconsciously, when we try to navigate in the social world, but in fact it is an extraordinarily complex mesh of multiple models within multiple models.

There are people, however, who have difficulty empathizing, the more extreme examples of whom may exhibit autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, and ADHD. Since they don’t empathize and imagine the mental models of others, they don’t see a social world out there of multiple models. For them, the external world, including it social aspects, has only a single, universal model. It would be natural for such a person to come to the idea that the way to extend our understanding of that single, social model is to connect as many people as possible together so that they can all share what they know. This is apparently how Mark Zuckerberg, and people like him, thinks. That’s why the mere act of social connection was so fundamental to him and became his mantra. In this way of thinking, when a person connects with a “friend”, he is connecting with someone who is on the path to being mentally identical to him. They are just at various stages along that path towards comprehending the universal ontology.

But we should not let such empathy-challenged people wire us into a social system that diminishes the rich potential of our interactions. Deep down, we know, of course, that the idea of a “friend” is far more subtle than the way it has been defined in Facebook. In fact the real meaning of friend, just as the meaning of love, is actually so deep and context dependent, that it has forever challenged the world’s poets and artists. And each beautiful poem and work of art that has been produced on these subjects has been understood individually by each listener/observer in terms of his or her own meaningful local context. In contrast, Facebook, as it stands today as the product of Objectivist computer geeks, lumps every connection with another user as simply an unqualified and undistinguished “friend”. You may be electronically connected by this process, but these are often meaningless connections. As Zadie Smith reminded us [3], we need computer systems that empower us to be even more human, not reductionist-driven systems that only provide us with a fast, but barren, landscape of meaningless connections. Those better systems that we need will certainly come eventually, I am sure, and when they do, they will be produced by technically skilled teams that can go beyond reductionism and incorporate the poetry and empathic compassion of complex social interactions.

Notes:

David Kirkpactrick, “What’s True in the Facebook Movie”, The Daily Beast, September 30, 2010, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/09/30/the-facebook-and-zuckerberg-in-the-social-network-arent-real.html.
Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook”, The New Yorker, September 20, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all.
Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?”, The New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why/?pagination=false
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, (1992).
Facemash was preceded at MIT by “Hot or Not” in 2002. See http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N69/69hotornot.69n.html.

Ashgar Farhadi

2011-07-18T03:47:00.003+12:00

About Ashgar Farhadi:

"Iranian Director Performs Difficult Balancing Act" (2011 article in Der Spiegel)

Films of Ashgar Farhadi:

Fireworks Wednesday (Chaharshanbe Suri) - Asghar Farhadi (2006)

“Casablanca” - Michael Curtiz (1942)

2011-06-30T21:06:00.008+12:00

When one has the chance to take another look at Casablanca (1942), it brings to mind a sense of anticipation beyond the usual one of reviewing a film classic. It is that of looking straight into the face of an American myth. It is perhaps the contemporary nature of this particular myth that makes the film – a “Hollywood” melodrama – one of the real enigmas of American pop culture.

Even today there is considerable lack of unanimity from critics as to the film’s ultimate importance. It’s overall popularity with its audiences is undeniable, however. Made in 1942 and starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains, Casablanca has been one of the most popular and widely seen films ever made – achieving almost cult-like proportions with college students. Besides making Ingrid Bergman an American star and winning three US Academy Awards, including Best Picture, the film provided the ultimate vehicle for the Bogart legend. Indeed, one measure of the film’s success is that some of its lines, like “Here’s looking at you, kid” and “Play it, Sam” are still part of the American scene.

The behaviour of the critics then is interesting. Although most of them admit liking the film, they seldom pin-point the reason, (e.g. Richard Shickel, of Time, called it “delicious”). For one thing, Casablanca stubbornly resists analysis on the basis of film aesthetics’ meager categories, in particular, the auteur theory. The auteur theory asserts, to put it loosely, that a work of cinematic art is achieved as a result of a personal statement by the film’s creator – the director. Casablanca’s director, Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz, was more famous for his mauling of the English language than for his acts of creativity (e.g. “This scene will make your blood curl”). Curtiz, once a circus strong man, directed three films in 1942, and usually turned out gross blockbusters rather than personal statements. Curtiz did, however, have an excellent sense of camera rhythm and lighting, both essential ingredients to the film’s success.

However, the nature of the film’s greatness is more closely identified with the portrayal of Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, the classic movie example of the alienated antihero redeemed by love. Romanticism in the American film frequently takes its form in the cynical tough guy’s independence. Sentimentality lies traditionally in the finish, when the antihero turns hero. Casablanca is no exception. Rather, it is a near perfect representation of this genre.

Since sentimentality exists more in the imagination than in the real world, an expressionistic, subjective environment is crucial to the theme. Hence Casablanca itself, a city of intrigue and mystery, where chaos rules and only the toughest survive, plays a role. The atmospheric settings and the super-real performances of Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, and Sidney Greenstreet are thus crucial to the effect; more “realistic” acting would fail to achieve the emotional power. Furthermore, Bogart’s acting style is perfectly geared to the role. His restraint and cool always suggest an inner turmoil that internalizes the action for the audience.

The viewer always understands that Rick knows the score and that his mind is always churning, despite the forcedly calm exterior. (Imagine the film with Rick played by Ronald Reagan, the man Bogart beat out for the role!)

All of these expressionistic effects (some of which may have been partly indigenous to films of the forties) combine for an emotional impact which is still as powerful today as it was seven decades ago and which, except for scattered exceptions such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or occasional works by the Coen brothers, were not the usual fare of modern American cinema. The outrageously melodramatic plot, lack of special effects, and standard studio shooting notwithstanding, Casablanca is still a brilliant example of how stirring good movies can be.

“Inception” - Christopher Nolan (2010)

2011-06-28T21:46:00.016+12:00

Inception (2010) currently has a user rating of 8.9 on the IMDB Web site, making it one of the highest-rated films in their comprehensive world database. By that reckoning one could argue that Inception is one of the best (or at least most popular) films of all time. Writer-director Christopher Nolan was already known for his reality-warping screen thrillers Memento (2000), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Night (2008), but Inception was hailed by his fans as his greatest achievement.

The sci-fi story of the film involves a high-tech “intellectual property” burglar, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is skilled at stealing highly profitable ideas from people by invading their minds while they sleep. Early on we are shown situations where he can invade the dreams of other people and manipulate the dream so that he can grab what he wants; he can also go into a dream within a dream. This dream-within-a-dream scenario becomes the fundamental metaphor of the film.

After a failed intellectual heist, though, Cobb is offered a job by his most recent intended corporate victim to do something different: not to steal an idea, but to implant an idea into a rival’s brain which will lead to big financial returns for the sponsor of that intellectual “inception”. This idea-insertion operation is thought to be impossible, according to the conventional wisdom of dream burglars, but Cobb thinks he can do it and agrees to the contract. He then goes about assembling a high-tech team to carry out the intended implantation maneuver. In order to accomplish the desired operation, he claims, they will need to go down three levels – to a dream within a dream within a dream.

This may seem to be mentally mind-boggling, but actually the task of following the various dream penetrations in the rest of the film is relatively straightforward. The machinations of the dreamworks, however, are not straightforward, at all, although Nolan’s script blithely (and mindlessly) employs basically magical explanations whenever the script demands it. The vehicle for delivering these explanations to the viewer is for Cobb to recruit a young, innocent college girl, Ariadne, to serve as the dream “architect” for the team and for Cobb to explain things to her. She is told that since people can invade each other’s dreams, it means that dreams are essentially shared vehicles with multiple drivers. Whenever Ariadne sees something totally weird going on with the world, she is told, oh, that must be so-and-so’s dream “projection”. Each level of dreaming that one “descends” to (i.e. further descent into the dream-within-a-dream scenario) involves relative time distention by at least an order of magnitude – that is, what seems to take hours in the lower level only occupies minutes in the dream level immediately above it. Then we are told that the entire high-tech idea implantation team assembled by Cobb and wandering around in the lower depths of dreamdom can magically ascend back to reality by synchronizing on some music that is collectively heard. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

Things get more complicated, though, because of Cobb’s own hangups – he is haunted by his own nightmares of his deceased wife, Mal, who occasionally enters into the shared dreamscape and wreaks havoc. This is apparently due to Cobb’s personal feelings of guilt concerning her death and not due to any inherent malevolence on Mal’s part, since Mal is generally presented as a sympathetic character. Anyway, because of various unforseen events, Cobb and some members of his team must descend further into even lower dream levels than originally planned (ultimately to the fifth level), and, of course, that means that they are plunging into unknown and even more dangerous territory. At the end of the film, in fact, there is a suggestion that the entire film, including the final shots, may still have been taking place at some unspecified dream level. That is, perhaps Cobb’s world of professional idea thievery is just another dream, and there are actually (at least) six dream levels covered in the film.

While I recognize that suspension of disbelief is crucial to science fiction films (a number of which I do enjoy), the ad hoc and superficial, essentially magical, explanations in Inception don’t hold up. Claims that this film appeals to the imaginative intellect need to be buttressed by more than repeated references to ‘catharsis’ and having a character named “Ariadne”. I have remarked elsewhere about the folly of believing in "intellectual property" – that ideas are objective, material objects that can be stolen [1]. But I would be willing to set that objection aside for a fantasy film like this if there were something else in the story that tantalized the imagination.

One potential topic that could have been taken up with some payoff is the issue of Mal’s (Cobb’s wife’s) autonomy. Is she an autonomous spiritual being who has returned from some external spiritual domain to enter into Cobb’s own dreams? Or is she just a figment of Cobb’s guilt-ridden imagination? It would have been interesting to highlight the contrast between (a) a materialistic interpretation of Mal’s presence (which could be held by Cobb, the professional and mechanical idea thief) as a figment of Cobb’s imagination and (b) the alternate idea that Mal’s presence actually does represent an encounter with the still-living spirit of the deceased Mal. But this potentially interesting issue, one that does come into play in Solaris (1972, 2002), was not pursued or examined here. Inception has many of the external earmarks of an Expressionist film, but I wouldn't classify it as such, because it doesn't convey the expressionistic aesthetic impression.

There are other problems with Inception as well.

Throughout the film there are repeated violent encounters involving chase scenes with armed gunmen. These are all going on concurrently at several dream levels, with many people getting shot and killed, but there is little motivation for these scenes. Nolan is unable to build up any narrative motivation for these events, so they just seem to be pointless violence. It’s not even like playing an endless first-person shooter game (FPSG); instead, it’s like watching somebody else play an endless FPSG – the viewer feels little involvement in the action. The relentlessly pounding and one-dimensional background music by Hans Zimmer only makes things worse.
The presentation and acting is confused by a mixture of dramatic genres. It is as if the actors and actresses are not on the same page as to what kind of movie they are in. The relationship between Mal and Cobb is presented as a serious and emotional dramatic encounter. But this theme, as I suggested above, is only left hanging. On the other hand, Cobb’s “mission impossible” team of dream-manipulation technicians plays it very tongue-in-cheek. – it all seems like a joke. And then Ariadne, Cobb’s dream landscape architect, is very much the innocent young college girl.

So we have a confused dramatic mishmash of shootem-up violence, a dramatic love relationship, a cheeky heist movie, and a teenage coming-of-age story – and all going on at the same time. No wonder the actors seem confused (although DiCaprio, as Cobb, and Marion Cotillard, as Mal, do pretty well under the circumstances).

Admittedly there are some dazzling graphical effects, such as a downtown city environment rolling up over itself like a carpet, entire cities gradually crumbling to pieces, locomotives roaring down the middle of city streets, and fistfights in zero-gravity (or sometimes gravity is present, but the gravitational axis is shifting). But these effects need an effective story to make them interesting. As it is, the effects (apart from the gravity-shifting environment) seem to be “out there” – just part of some weird landscape and not part of the immediate, interactive environment. The viewer’s attention is distracted, and by means of that distraction perhaps somewhat engaged, throughout the film by the task of having to keep track of exactly which dream level the film is operating on at the moment; and so one keeps on watching intently for the almost three hours of action. But that distraction is not enough to make it all worthwhile (even if video game addicts seem to find that kind of distraction sufficient for their needs). Although Inception is promoted as a mind-bending intellectual feast for the college crowd, it seems to be only sophomoric.

Notes:

See http://filmsufi.blogspot.com/2009/08/rip-remix-manifesto-brett-gaylor-2009.html. For some further commentary on this topic, see http://filmsufi.blogspot.com/2010/02/sicko-michael-moore-2007.html.

Roberto Rossellini

2011-06-28T21:02:00.002+12:00

About Roberto Rossellini:

Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: Open City and Paisan

Films of Roberto Rossellini:

The Flowers of Saint Francis (Francesco Guillare di Dio) - Roberto Rossellini (1950)

Bogart and Brando (“The Maltese Falcon” & “The Wild Ones”)

2011-06-26T22:46:00.008+12:00

The Maltese Falcon (directed by John Huston in 1941) and The Wild Ones (directed by Laslo Benedek in 1954) offer an interesting cinematic and social comparison. Although made only thirteen years apart, the two films seem to be indicative of distinctive generations. The comparison comes down ultimately to the contrast between Humphrey Bogart, the charismatic star of the forties, and Marlon Brando, the corresponding figure of the fifties. Each one displays the characteristically brutal personality that won them such large followings.

The Maltese Falcon was a break for Humphrey Bogart. The role of Sam Spade, the detective, was first offered to George Raft, who declined it because he wouldn’t take a chance on rookie director John Huston. Huston, in his first feature, went on to fashion the Dashiell Hammett thriller into a film so good, it gave a new dimension to the film noir genre.

Hammett knew the score with detectives (he was once one, himself) – they were basically antisocial cops, but smarter, more mercenary and sinister. Huston did nothing to soften Sam Spade’s character, and the supporting cast (Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Mary Astor) was near perfection. The only alteration from the original story was the omission of Hammett’s final scene, when Effie realizes what a bastard Spade is. Whether Huston is responsible for this cut or not, it actually improves the story by omitting petty moralizing as well as leaving Spade to the viewer’s ultimate judgement. Bogart’s portrayal is one of his best. His voice and demeanor are perfectly suited for the delivery of such lines as, “Sorry, angel, I have a pressing date with a fat man.”

The Wild One’s, starring Brando and Lee Marvin, was Laslo Benedek’s only decent film. Like many films of its day, it tried to understand the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency in terms of cheesy psychology. Hollywood’s explanation of the alienated antihero of the 30's is poverty. In turn, the antihero of the 40's was supposed to be that way as a result of corruption and war. The preposterous explanation of the 50's was that boys went bade because they weren’t loved enough. These concluding explanations, however, didn’t snow the youth of the time, who perfectly understood the characters of Brando and James Dean and then jeered at the cop-out answer to the problem. Brando’s performances were so good during this time that they carried the entire movies along with them.

I’m sure Benedek didn’t even understand what Brando was doing, but young people all over the country were almost fanatical in their appreciation and empathy. Brando’s inarticulate frustration was a rejection of the entire society – but an individual, not a socially oriented rejection. The war was over, and the plastic American dream was here. Brando’s nihilism was emblematic of the “no” that came from the guts, ignorant of the relatively well-developed and sophisticated youth culture that made antiestablishmentarianism so fashionable later on.

The Bogart and Brando characters are not essentially tied to their decades, however. Brando is raw – the total drop out. Bogart, on the other hand, has not gone so far – or maybe he’s come back part way. He’s out to use everyone and everything for his own cynical purposes. Richard Shickel, commenting on the Bogart character, said of him,

"His special knowledge was of the jungle of the city at night – which clubs the syndicate ran, which one-arm restaurants served good coffee, which hotels a whore could use, which streets were safe to walk upon after midnight.

It was this detailed knowledge that set Bogart apart from the ordinary lonely male; it was the rightness of the setting, mood, and dialogue that established empathy with him.”

Richard Brooks, the gifted writer-director, had particularly revealing comments to make –

“Somehow you identify with this fellow. I think that’s what kids today see in him. He’s a man and not a raw kid, and willing to put his life on the line. He’s not, interestingly enough, like James Dean and other characters they identify with. He is not a lost soul in any of his films.

He knew what he stood for and is masculine and, of course, he could say so much in so few words. . . . For one thing, he was not a sentimentalist. That is important to people today. It’s not a sentimental world we’re living in as far as the youth is concerned today.”

Federico Fellini

2011-06-24T18:33:00.001+12:00

Films of Federico Fellini:

La Strada - Federico Fellini (1954)

“La Strada” (1) - Federico Fellini (1954)

2011-06-24T18:21:00.006+12:00

Fellini. If a poll were taken to name the greatest filmmaker ever, the ultimate iconic auteur, his name would probably be at the top. The name is known to people who haven’t even seen any of his films. Despite the fame, Fellini’s determinedly independent course of filmmaking enabled him to evade facile categorization from critics, aside from their frequent use of the phrase, “The P. T. Barnum of the Cinema.” Thus no one ever knew quite what to expect from a new Fellini film, other than greatness. The director of such highly praised films as La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963), and Fellini Satyricon (1969), Fellini first achieved world-wide fame with the appearance of his third film, La Strada (1954), which in my opinion is his finest work and one of the greatest films ever made.

Fellini was initially associated with the Italian neorealist movement in the cinema just after World War Two. He was a script writer and assistant director for two of Roberto Rosellini’s important films of this time, Open City (Roma, Città Aperta, 1945), and Paisa (1946) [1]. The neorealist movement, a semi-documentary form which tried to depict the most common activities of a society, had its own aesthetic limitations, and Fellini was one of the first Italian directors to move in a new direction. After his only mildly successful first film, The White Sheik (Lo Sceicco Bianco, 1952), Fellini first began to receive attention for his I Vitelloni , a sensitive study of small town aimless youths, the Italian analogues at that time of the Beat Generation. Only after this success was he able to convince skeptical producers to finance the making of his old project, La Strada.

Producers were dubious of his desire to use his wife, Giulietta Masina, as the star. As soon as shooting started, she fell and dislocated her ankle, and the film had to be held up for three months. Anthony Quinn, committed to making another film at the time, Atilla (1954), was frequently absent from the set, and often shooting had to begin at daybreak so that Quinn could rush off to the other set. This proved to be a fortunate circumstance, providing the film with its eerily grayish light and making the actors even more desolate and isolated.

The initial reviews in the Italian press were mixed – primarily a result of the demands of Catholic and Communist dogma, which unnecessarily complicated Italian criticism. But in France, England, and the United States, truly fanatical praise was showered on the film, which was to win over fifty awards in nine countries, including a US Oscar as best foreign film. The film played in New York for over three years, Giulietta Masina was placed alongside the greatest actresses of all time, and the them, “Giulietta’s Song”, by Nino Rota (who later did the music for Zefferelli’s 1968 film, Romeo and Juliet) became an international hit and sold over two million copies in France alone. So much interpretive material has been written about the film that it would be impossible for me even to mention all of the themes (although I will return to this film later with another, longer article). It is the story of an itinerant Italian strongman who wanders about the Italian countryside performing in small towns with his servant. The episodic plot is wound up and given meaning by one of the most intensely beautiful cinematic endings. Critics often hail the film as a brilliant example of neorealism; other insist it is a symbolic spiritual fable.

Both positions are supportable, but neither seems satisfactory. The poetic quality, which makes the film so unforgettable, seems unapproachable by the intellect. And, like much great poetry, the film speaks of man’s existential loneliness in a language all its own.

Notes:

see my Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: "Open City" and "Paisan" for further discussion.

"The Hurt Locker" - Kathryn Bigelow (2008)

2011-06-23T00:17:00.016+12:00

The Hurt Locker (2008) is a feature film about the experiences of a US Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team stationed in Iraq after the US invasion there. Based on the experiences of scriptwriter, Mark Boal, who was an embedded journalist with the US military forces in Iraq in 2004, the film has been widely praised as a gritty, no-holds-barred war film and won six US Academy Award in 2009s, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay (for Boal), and Best Director.

The film begins in Baghdad, where the Bravo Company is in the final weeks of their tour of duty (“rotation”). We are immediately introduced to the three-man EOD team of young soldiers that must undertake the extremely dangerous tasks of disarming and removing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that have been set up by insurgents. The team comprises an expert IED deactivator, who must wear a heavy, cumbersome bombsuit that provides partial protection, plus two backup soldiers who guard the back of the explosives expert. Almost immediately the leader of the team is killed by a radio-controlled IED, and he is replaced by another expert who continues to work with the other two men. The rest of the film follows events in the remaining, harrowing six weeks of this group’s rotation. I have mixed feelings about the The Hurt Locker, because it has significant strengths and weaknesses, and depending on your tastes, your enjoyment of the film may vary.

First consider the film’s strengths, which are the basis of the film’s great popularity. By the way, the film does not take a position about the justification for the Iraq War, the American involvement in the Middle East, terrorism, or other issues that are constantly discussed in this connection. The film is solely about the American soldiers, and everything is seen from their point of view. In fact when it comes down to it in my view, The Hurt Locker is not a war film at all, but is a horror film. It doesn’t really show ordinary military combat, and there don’t seem to be military objectives to be gained or lost. Instead, the EOD team seems to be entirely isolated from a battle front and placed in some kind of special hell. Despite the expanse of the city, there is a feeling of confinement, even one of claustrophobia throughout the film. Truly this EOD team is, psychologically at least, perpetually locked in the “hurt locker”. Cinematically, the film is reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s classic horror film, Alien (1979), where the protagonists are threatened by an amorphous enemy force of unknown powers that is always just out of sight and is difficult even to identify. The powers possessed by the EOD team seem incredibly flimsy in comparison with the powers of the threats they face.

Their flaky little robot vehicle loses a wheel and becomes dysfunctional when it merely runs over a small rock in the streets. How pathetic their supposedly advanced technology appears to be in this threatening theater of action!
Their heavy, cumbersome bombsuit makes the bomb deactivators swelter in the heat, prevents them from moving well, and, as we see in the opening sequence when the first bomb expert is killed, doesn’t even seem to provide much protection.
The other two backup solders in the unit seem to be isolated from any other support and so are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the crowd of onlookers which could harbor any number of potentially lethally equipped enemies.

The cinematography and editing are geared to accentuate this incessant feeling of paranoia. Handheld, point-of-view camera shots constantly give one the feeling that one is part of the OED team, peering around corners and looking through window openings to catch sight of the next danger. Director Kathryn Bigelow often used four simultaneous camera setups to shoot a scene and wound up giving her editing team (who did a great job with both the visuals and the sound) 200 hours of footage to work with in order to achieve this sustained nightmare of anxiety.

Further contributing to the feeling of impending doom is the abrupt manner in which some sympathetic characters are annihilated. On two occasions we are introduced to characters in the story performed by well-known actors who are customarily placed in protagonist roles (Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes) . We naturally and unconsciously expect these characters to provide some heroic leadership for our benighted EDO team, since a film production wouldn’t normally be expected to waste such a performer on a minor role. Yet our hopes are quashed; both characters are easily obliterated in short order by the unseen evil. This, again, brings to mind certain events in Alien.

There were other past films that came to mind as I watched The Hurt Locker, and perhaps Bigelow, an MFA graduate in film criticism from Columbia University, had them in mind, too. The incessant, chaotic “fog of war” in the film reminded me of the classic The Red and the White (1968) by Miklos Jancso. The depressing return at the end of the to the hell from which the main character had managed to escape was reminiscent of the final scene of Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal (1957). And Bigelow won accolades for her efforts that put her in the rank of those directors: the US Academy Award for Best Director, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, and the Critics' Choice Award for Best Director.

But despite the admitted strengths of the atmospheric cinematography, there are some significant weakness that prevent it from being an outstanding film.

The film narrative is episodic and fails to progress towards any kind of goal. This is where it dims in comparison to Scott’s Alien [1], which had a relentless progression of enclosure – the continual closing off of avenues of escape and the successive elimination of hoped-for support for the endangered protagonist, Ripley.
The handheld camera shots do offer subjectivity, but often the camera is much too shaky. This is a common mistake of inexperienced cinematographers, who apparently want to suggest agitation and also provide a “newsreel” sense of reality. In fact, this only calls attention to the camera work as camera work and tends to distsance the viewer from the action depicted, thereby subverting the very sense of immediacy that was desired.
The character development in the film is weak. Although the acting is good, the characters have strange, unmotivated swings in fortitude and attitude. In particular, Sergeant William James, who emerges as the principal character, seems to be utterly fearless, but he remains opaque throughout. What really motivates him? As a consequence, it is difficult to empathize with his situation. For example, at one point in the film when the EOD team comes across a bomb factory, James is highly disturbed to discover the dead body of an Arab boy, who earlier used to hawk DVDs and was known to all the soldiers as “Beckham”. We are led to believe that James had some sort of personal relationship Bechkam and some feeling for the brutal sacrifice of this boy. But later on, James encounters Beckham on the street (evidently his earlier identification of the dead boy as Beckham was erroneous) and shows no reaction. Why? You would at least expect that James would have been surprised by the site of the living boy whose presumed death had so agitated him earlier.
The film opens with a quotation from Chris Hedges’s book, War is a Force that Gives Meaning: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug”, with an emphasis on the idea that war is a drug. At the end of the film, James returns to the United States to rejoin his wife and child, but is evidently bored. So he returns to Iraq to serve another tour of duty to satisfy his apparent craving for another rush. This is a very weak conclusion, and it undermines, enervates, and trivializes everything that has come before. (This is also has quite different meaning from the fatalistic return to the underground “hell” in Kanal.) The idea in The Hurt Locker that the civilian “real world” is just too complicated for some soldiers, who prefer simple, black-and-white tasks that have clear outcomes has been asserted many times before, but it is a weak assertion and it doesn’t apply well to the murky, paranoid conditions of this EOD unit. Anyway, the proper metaphor in this respect is not so much drugs as it is sports. Sports and games are what offer the rush that comes from a dramatic victory in connection with a contest with a straightforward goal. So after all that horror, are we to emerge from the cinema with the conclusion that the whole thing we have watched is, for many soldiers, just a game, just a thrill, just a drug rush? I don’t know, but I doubt many soldiers feel that way.

So what we have is a film with a brilliant atmosphere but with a seriously flawed narrative. The Hurt Locker is at times gripping, but it does not carry through with a compelling narrative and so is not what it could have been.

Notes:

This is just one reason why Scott's Alien is vastly superior to its sequel, Aliens (1986), directed by Bigelow's ex-husband, James Cameron.

The Treatment of Love in Soren Kierkegaard’s "Either/Or"

2011-06-18T17:33:00.008+12:00

In S. Kierkegaard’s Either/Or [1] the reader is presented with two presumably mutually exclusive alternatives for conducting one’s life. In particular, the judge, B, who presents the ethical position, attempts to resolve the aesthete’s (A’s) misgivings about marriage by presenting its aesthetic validity. This argument of B’s, I submit, offers no real advancement from the aesthete’s quandary.

B sees the life of A as inadequate for attaining satisfaction, and B goes on to insist that there is a better method available for conducting one’s affairs. But A, of course, is a complex individual, and it is important for us to see B’s view of A’s life and what assumptions he has made about it. First of all, B senses that A is not satisfied. Here we like to say of satisfaction that it means one’s being at one with oneself. But this doesn’t tell us much; what do we mean by “being at one with oneself”? So for the moment, anyway, let us assume that there is a common understanding of the existence of the state of satisfaction (albeit intuitive), although we don’t have a full understanding of the term, because we don’t understand how this state comes to be. This is just the subject of the present inquiry. Thus we’ll have to settle for the idea that one knows when he himself is satisfied, but knows little of the nature of this satisfaction qua satisfaction. Thus we might say that A is not satisfied and spends a great deal of his time in quest of this satisfaction.

We are also given the information that A finds some things interesting but most things boring. In fact A speculates that boredom is the root of all evil. But what is the nature of the interesting or the lack thereof (boringness)? This again is not defined for us, but it seems somewhat linked to A’s satisfaction – when A is bored, he isn’t satisfied. These intuitively-based polarities are significant. It is not that S. K. has done an inadequate job of clarifying the concepts he uses, but that he begins with certain concepts that cannot be explained in terms of other concepts, but which instead relate directly to experience.

Thus B recognizes that A is bored and wants to be interested in something. A sees his own search for satisfaction in terms of the interesting. If he is ever caught up on some situation in its immediacy, then for the moment A loses sight of his dissatisfaction with existence. However, upon repetition of such events, boredom sets in. Although A is an interested student of the interesting, he seems to have little knowledge of it other than in rather concrete situations. It appears that A has not solved the problem of attaining the interesting in his life (and thus, for him, satisfaction), and because no thing or activity can remain interesting for long (upon repeated encounters, it becomes boring), there is nothing of positive value – everything is ultimately meaningless. Because A is interested in learning the art of acquiring the interesting, B sees it as an attempt to endow his life with meaning. But here B sees a contradiction:

“You told me that this prompted you to reflect whether the entirely fortuitous fulfilment of a wish fortuitously expressed might not bring a person actually to desperation, because thereby the reality of life was negated in its deepest root. So what you wanted was to play the part of fate.” [2]

Now for a man to be his own fate is clearly a contradiction in terms. For a man to determine his own fate, he must reflect on the manifold of his potential activity. When he so reflects, he becomes somehow disengaged from the manifold – he no longer experiences it in its immediacy. This disengagement destroys the interesting nature of it and all emotional attachment; meaningfulness is lost. A is aware that some elements in the manifold are destined to be interesting to him, but he does not know which ones. Nor can he determine this by direct reflection, since the accompanying disengagement prevents him from feeling any meaning. B seems to indicate that A is unaware of this contradiction and of the impossibility of his task.

The judge wants to present the ethical as highly aesthetic to A – in particular, marriage is to be justified aesthetically. B’s plan is for a human being to choose himself, that is, will that which has already been assigned to him. The necessity of choosing among many equally meaningless elements of a manifold is now obviated. The choice has already been made for the subject as to who he is, and one must only affirm this determination. The important thing for B is that one must will himself, and by so doing, one actively engages himself with the manifold again. By this exercise of the self, life again takes on meaning for the ethical man, since he has chosen something from the manifold of possibility (himself) and has restricted himself from participating in the other possible choices (those which are not himself). Thus the ethical man takes on a commitment and a sense of meaning.

How is this program applied to love? B says that here again the choice has already been made; one need only affirm it. One must, in this case, choose his first love, i.e. he must commit himself to his first love. B willingly admits that the term first love is difficult to pin down, but he apparently has a sufficient understanding of the term to apply it to himself – “although I have been for several years a married man, I still have the honor of fighting under the victorious banner of first love.” [3] Here by committing oneself to one’s love, one establishes a dialectical subject-subject relationship that has dynamical characteristics. For such lovers, “‘the first’ is simply the present, but the present is for them the constantly unfolding and rejuvenating ‘first’” [4]. In other words, one must live every moment in its total uniqueness and thereby obtain the eternal in the temporal (implying, among other things, satisfaction).

B says of A, “your life is wholly given over to preliminary runs” [5]. Thus B insists that A is presented with occasions, some of which he finds interesting. The repetition of the situation is often boring to A, so he is constantly looking for new areas of stimulation. His life becomes a series of discontinuous moments over which he tries to assert control but cannot. B himself, on the other hand, by actively willing the first love, feels that he continually lives in the moment of first love. We could say then that the judge present to us a method for aesthetic fulfilment, which in this discussion, of course, stands or falls solely on its aesthetic merit. Now to what extent are the assumptions of B superior to those of A?

B states at the end of his letter that he has “shown . . . that conjugal love has it conflict in time, its victory in time, its blessing in time.” [5] The dialectical, inner historicity of conjugal love allegedly provides a continuity across time, an eternal present, that is lacking in A’s life. The lack of continuity of A is that to which B is most sensitive, but this is more of an outward manifestation of A’s problem rather than the cause of it.

A and B recognize a number of the same things. They both realize that occasions present themselves to their experience, some of which are significant, e.g. they both would agree that the moment of “first love” is significant). They both intuitively feel that man has the freedom to so structure his life that he can find some aesthetic satisfaction. By aesthetic satisfaction I mean activity that has its own justification. The two advocates both agree that there is a substantial element provided, in this particular case, love, from the outside; they have no control over it. The judge attempts to fashion marriage from this raw material, while the aesthete shrinks from the idea. A, however, is now without a program. He is sensitively aware that he has no control over the occasion which supplies content to his life. He can, nevertheless, increase the probability that an occasion will present itself, and his genius lies in this direction. For one thing he is aware that somewhere in his manifold of experience an interesting occasion might lie. When part of this potential is kept from him, the aesthete is painfully aware that he might be foregoing the opportunity for an interesting moment. Thus A avoids the possibility of an interesting moment being eliminated due to a restriction of his manifold.

"You understand how to keep your soul as still and apathetic as a bird of prey is still before it plunges down; you know that the instant is not in any man’s power and that, nevertheless, the most beautiful experience is comprised in the instant." [6]

By refusing to restrict his manifold, A refuses to commit himself and remains detached from all things. Since his moments are always infinitesimal durations of time, A is almost always dissatisfied and bored. Thus marriage would be a drastic restriction of A’s opportunity for love and would violate his freedom. A has other means of increasing the probability of his being interested, though. He devises the “rotation method”, by means of which A varies his moods so as to be in the most receptive condition for an interesting occasion. As was stated above, A’s disengagement from the world prevents him from experiencing any meaning or significance, i.e. his very concern that he keep open all possibilities for the interesting prevent him from apprehending the interesting. Thus A has conceived of the idea of the art of remembering – when an interesting occasion presents itself, A attempts to reflect upon it right at the moment of its occurrence. Then later on, he can remember this reflection and thus approach as closely as possible the moment of the interesting (since reflection cannot apprehend the interesting itself). This indicates that A is quite aware of his own inability to reflect on the immediate, he can only evoke indirectly, perhaps, the mood he felt at the prior moment. The one problem with this is that the repeated reflection on the same thing become boring. This points us to a fundamental difficulty with A’s method – his reflections lack the substantial quality that experience has. To fend off the boring, A has the freedom to make his reflection appear before him in different perspectives each time. But this very freedom to manipulate his reflections is in the end self-defeating, because both reflections of the existent (memories) and of the unreal (fantasies) lack the substantial character of immediate experience. Ultimately, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the two reflective modes (i.e. memories and fantasies).

B’s point of view is similarly lacking a mechanism to account for the substantial quality of experience. For example he is totally unable to explain the emergence of first love, yet he is quite willing to build his life on this unexplained phenomenon. To do this he must assume that first love is the only true love.

"On the other hand, the more significant that thing is which for the first time announces itself, the less is the probability of its being repeated. If there is something so important as to be even eternal, all probability that it may be repeated vanishes. Hence when one has talked with a certain sad seriousness of the first love as something which could never be repeated, this is no disparagement of love but a lofty eulogy of it as the eternal power." [7]

He take this position on little more than an act of faith. From this he goes on to inform us that we are able only to sustain a single instance of what he might call a “I-Thou” relationship (in its purest form) and this relationship contains an historical element, its own law of motion. He notes that,

"Conjugal love shows itself to be historical by the fact that it represents a process of assimilation which deals with the experience and refers back the experience to itself. Thus, it is not a disinterested witness of what occurs but is essentially a sympathetic participant, in short, it experiences its own development." [8]

B is aware of freedom in the sense that one is free to choose that which has been present to him (first love). By this B means that one must commit oneself to one’s love, but at the same time be free from the need of one’s love (free from encountering the loved one categorically as an object that can be manipulated). Thus B not only chooses one element (the beloved) out of the manifold, but does so in a different manner (subject-subject encounter, rather than subject-object). He then asserts that a dialectical inner history will result that perpetually maintains the first love. This implies that B knows something about the occasion, yet we know he doesn’t. His assertion that first love (which comes from outside him) is maintained perpetually by conjugal love must be pure guess, since he knows nothing of the nature of the emergence of first love. This naiveté was even articulated when B admitted that first love must precede conjugal love.

What is really behind the judge’s arguments concerning the nature of love? The occasion presents love to a person from outside himself. Hence his failure to understand the reason for his love. The judge says that a man is free to commit himself to his love or not to commit himself. But this act of will implies a subject that is alienated from the task. To will something is to see oneself up against an obstacle which must be overcome – a task is set before one. Thus when one wills, one is alone; he is in a state of alienation (a subject-object situation) from that on which he operates. But this is not the nature of love. It would destroy love’s immediacy. One does not operate on one’s love, but instead receives the love. The establishment of a love relationship is not willed, but rather the subject opens oneself to the possibility of this being established from without. Indeed, freedom is incompatible with love, for love provides the subject with meaning. Love endows a man’s life with meaning; he cannot endow his own life with meaning. That is not to say that one has no freedom in dealing with one’s love, but that one cannot affect the nature of love by any willed activity.

Thus the failure of both A and B is due to their inability to posit a mechanism for the establishment of content. If they do not understand the nature of love (how it comes to be), then their methods of dealing with it in experience are arbitrary and without meaning. Thus in some sense A’s position is more viable than B’s, because it recognizes its own inadequacy. His position recognizes its ignorance of the nature of the occasion and thus wants to provide itself with maximum flexibility to experiment. B, on the other hand, provides no treatment of the possibility of departure of the love content from marriage. Since love’s coming to be is unexplained, its departure is also unapproached. He might try to get around it by saying the “first love” lasts forever, but then he is only providing his own definition of the term “first love”, which may have no real significance beyond this.

A demands freedom from the boring (lack of content), and marriage is very boring without love. Since noone understands how love comes to be or passes away, A refuses to bind himself to some situation which is based on the naive belief that the content will always remain in it, that first love lasts eternally. Thus B’s claim that A, by reflecting on experience is unable to relate himself to the content of experience, misses the point, since both A and B are equally alienated from love – B being equally alienated because by committing himself to his love, he thereby objectifies her.

Finally, B’s claim that he has solved the problem of temporality is untrue. The dialectical process does not extend the quality of the moment across time. An analogy can be made to the field of music, where B’s program is analogous to rhythm. Although rhythm does extend itself across time and is a function of time, it is only a structure for the music. Rhythm cannot create music or ensure that music will continue. It is nothing without the music, and therefore A would rather go where the music is, rather than attempt to stay in one place and structure it rhythmically, when it might at any moment depart.

The fact that A and B are unable to provide a mechanism for the coming to be and passing away of love may point to a fundamental impossibility for human understanding of the essential immediacy of love. It seems that the real difficulty is man’s freedom. A and B presuppose that some kind of freedom exists for man. This very freedom seemingly enables man to endow his existence with content, but this is deceiving, because at the same time it removes the essential meaning or value from a choice. A choice implies that other acts could also have been willed and thus a certain arbitrariness enters. The meaning and power of love precludes a choice with regard to its meaning qua love; one can only choose to do things that are at best indirectly related to love. Thus it may be impossible for a human being, existing in a state of freedom, ever to understand love and how it comes to be. If this is the case, then B’s program represents a retrogression from that of A.

Notes:

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or; a Fragment of Life, translated by D. F. Swenson and L. M. Swenson.
Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or; a Fragment of Life, translated by D. F. Swenson and L. M. Swenson, vol. II, p. 13.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 40.
Ibid., p. 144.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid,, p. 40, 41.
Ibid., p. 99.

Dr. Strangelove - Stanley Kubrick (1964)

2011-06-14T21:21:00.009+12:00

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) still has to be identified as America’s finest anti-cold-war film, clearly exposing as it does the madness of Mutual-Assured Destruction. Far from being the typical anti-war film that bombards us with senseless human brutality and naive pacifistic propaganda, Dr. Strangelove, in its representation of the ultimate depravity and hopelessness of man and his systems, is not so much anti-war as it is anti human being.

That such a film could, at the same time, be a tense melodrama and a ridiculous comedy is a tribute to the directorial execution of Stanley Kubrick (Lolita, 1962, 2001; A Space Odyssey, 1968). Kubrick’s bold use of a wide range of camera and editing techniques is aided by a tight scenario involving three simultaneous theaters of action – a US Air Force Base, the Pentagon War Room, and a bomber on a mission threatening to destroy the world. Continuous interplay between dramatic tension and comic release heightens the effect of both and makes the resulting fever pitch almost unbearable.

The most important element is, however, the self-conscious nature of the acting performances which provides immediate commentary on the roles and sends the entire film careening back and both between absurd tomfoolery and frightening reality. The characters, equipped with campus sex humor names like Merkin Muffly and Buck Turgidson would appear too absurd were it not for our own national leaders (I refer you to the Pentagon Papers, the Bush-Cheney era, etc.). In doing what he thinks is right, each player behaves heroically, yet in a fashion so parochially self-righteous that one realizes the screen writers have condemned the entire species to self-extinction.

Indeed couldn’t it be said that it is rather sick to produce a nihilistic farce about our grave world situation? The poet and critic Lewis Mumford commented on such a question in the New York Times [1]

“What the wacky characters in Dr. Strangelove are saying is precisely what needs to be said: this nightmare eventuality that we have concocted for our children is nothing but a crazy fantasy, by nature as horribly crippled and dehumanized as Dr. Strangelove himself. It is not this film that is sick: what is sick is our supposedly moral democratic country which allowed this policy to be formulated and implemented without even the pretense of open public debate.”

What is needed to cure this sickness is a common commitment to the propositions that all people are our brothers and sisters and that adversary annihilation (no matter how "evil" an adversary may seem) is always insupportable.

Notes:

Lewis Mumford, (letter to the editor), New York Times, March 1, 1964.

"Bab’Aziz" - Nacer Khemir (2005)

2011-06-12T17:06:00.011+12:00

In Nacer Khemir’s Bab’Aziz (2005), the red-headed and seemingly half-mad dervish observes:

“The people of this world are like the three butterflies in front of a candle’s flame.

The first one went closer and said, ‘I know about love’.

The second one touched the flame lightly with his wings and said, ‘I know how love’s fire can burn.’

The third one threw himself into the heart of the flame and was consumed.”

This is the kind of Sufi wisdom that Khemir tries to convey in his tale of an aged and blind Sufi dervish (different from the red-headed one), who travels across the desert sands with his young granddaughter in search of an epic gathering of Sufi practitioners said to take place once every thirty years. One might assume that such a journey through a picturesque landscape would provide a compelling narrative backbone of the tale we are watching. But this is not the case, and it points to the narrative shortcomings of the film. In fact that blind man’s journey is only a vehicle to relate four other stories that are told piecemeal and concurrently by various participants in the pilgrimage. Each of these stories is apparently supposed to reveal another side of the inscrutable Sufi way.

Khemir, a Tunisian-born artist, writer, and filmmaker residing in Paris, fashioned this film (the full title of which is Bab’Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul) in an attempt to present to world audiences the mystical Sufi side of Islam – something markedly distinct from the image of fanatic dogmatism often appearing in the popular media. In Khemir’s words [1]:

“Sufism stands against all forms of fanaticism. Sufism is the Islam of the mystics; it is the tenderness of Islam. But in order to give a better definition, let me use this Sufi saying: ‘There are as many ways to God as the number of human beings on earth.’ This quote alone is a representation of the vision of Sufism. One could also say that Sufism is the pulsating heart of Islam.”

In pursuit of his expressed goal of presenting the mystery of Sufism, Khemir injected into the film’s dialogue poems and phrases drawn from ancient Sufi masters Rumi, Attar, Ibn Arabi, and Ibn Farid. Khemir also seems to have recruited a remarkably broad international team of Middle Eastern and European production and post-production collaborators, including contributions from Michelangelo Antonioni’s longtime screenplay collaborator, Tonino Guerra (L'Avventura, La Notte, L'Eclisse, Red Desert, Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point).

The story begins with the aged dervish, Bab’Aziz, and his 10-year-old granddaughter, Ishtar, managing to survive a fierce desert sandstorm and then resuming their trek across a vast, horizon-to-horizon desert of sand – the kind of desert image from your childhood dreams or from illustrations of the tales of the “Arabian Nights”. Such an evocative landscape signals to us that we are in for a tale of mystery and magic, parables and fables. In fact the setting seems so primitive and eternal that we feel that events must be taking place somewhere back in medieval times, although later on in the film there are occasional appearances of motorcycles, buses, and jet planes to remind us that the film’s actual setting is the present day.

As Bab’Aziz and Ishtar continue their trek, Ishtar asks her grandfather to continue to relate his apparently interrupted tale about a handsome young prince. But not long after Bab’Aziz resumes telling this tale and before he can finish it, the twosome encounter other travellers in the desert, and they have their stories to tell, too. As a consequence, most of the film is devoted to the telling of the four stories, which are:

Bab’Aziz’s tale: “The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul”.
Osman’s tale about his visions when he fell into a well.
Zaid’s tale about the psalmody contest.
Hassan’s tale about his twin brother.

Although each tale is beautifully photographed, and the viewer is enticed to follow along and piece the story fragments together, none of them really lives up to its promise as the visually poetic allegory that seems to have been suggested and that one hopes for.

Bab’Aziz’s tale.
The story that Bab’Aziz tells to Ishtar occupies a fair amount of screen time to tell, but there is not really much to the story. The handsome young prince is distracted from watching a performance of a dancing girl at his desert camp by the sight of a gazelle in the distance. Fascinated, the prince wanders out in search of the gazelle and does not return. After a lengthy search the prince is discovered sitting by a small pool and gazing as if in a trance at his reflection in the water. We are told that he is not admiring his image, but is in a meditative state, contemplating his own soul. At the end of this tale, the prince eventually wakes up from his revery and decides to abandon his royal estate and become a wandering dervish (leading some to speculate that this tale is really about Bab’Aziz’s own past).

Osman’s tale.
Osman, who is said to work as a “sand carrier”, is first encountered when he is rescued from having fallen into a public well. Afterwards, he tells how he came to fall into the well (he was fleeing a jealous husband) and what he saw at the bottom of the well (a palace full of beautiful women, including his beloved). His story if the oft-told tale of the man cannot regain his lost paradise.

Zaid’s tale.
Zaid is an educated young man wearing a baseball cap whom Bab’Aziz and Ishtar encounter along the way, too. He tells his story about his participation in a master psalmody, or poetry-singing, competition. Zaid and the other contestants take turns singing out beautiful poetic phrases, and they are judged by a mysterious young woman, Nour (played by the mesmerisingly beautiful Golshifteh Farahani, who later appeared in Half Moon (Niwemang, 2006) and Ali Santori (Santoori, 2007)). Zaid’s poetic rendering wins both the competition and the heart of Nour. But after a passionate encounter, she ultimately steals his clothing and disappears so she can go out in disguise and search for her lost father. This story seems like Osman’s tale of loss, but it has a happier conclusion.

Hassan’s tale.
Hassan’s story is the most mysterious and is even more fragmented than the others. He is first seen searching for a red dervish who, he says, murdered his twin brother, Hussein. Hassan is also seen briefly in Osman’s tale, where he is revealed to be a drunken libertine, the very opposite of his authentic and serious-minded brother. After some misadventures, Hassan eventually does happen onto the red dervish, and we even get a brief glimpse of the red dervish’s role in Hussein’s mysterious entry into the nether world of death. There is much (actually too much) left unsaid here, and Hassan’s own conversion into the dervish way of life is equally unmotivated

Overall, I might say that Bab’Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul is a film marked by pronounced strengths and weaknesses. On the positive side, one must acknowledge that the cinematography and some of the production values of the film are extraordinarily good. Veteran cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari, who has worked with many top Iranian filmmakers, presents a string of fantastic (and phantasmagoric) images of a dreamlike desert setting. It is my understanding that the filming in the desert was extremely difficult and that most of those desert camera setups could only be used once because of the unerasable tracks made by the actors in the pristine desert sand [1]. (This difficulty probably accounts for some of the awkward editing sequences, where visual continuity and orientation are sometimes not maintained.) Another visual treat, near the of the film, is the view of the appointed place for the Sufi gathering, which was shot in the historic Iranian city of Bam. Bam has a 2,000-year-old history dating back to the Parthian Empire, but many of its historic monuments were damaged by an earthquake in 2003, which occurred shortly after the Bab’Aziz filming was undertaken there.

Unfortunately, the virtues of the cinematography cannot make up for the serious narrative deficiencies in Bab’Aziz. None of the four told tales has a narrative aim or motivation. One could, I suppose, make the counterargument that these stories are supposed to be somewhat mysterious, but the fundamental problem is they are not sufficiently engaging. As a consequence, the viewer’s mind might wander, even in the midst of all that visual splendour.

There is one further positive aspect, though, that it worth mentioning. Although the film is mostly of men and about men, the women who appear in the film (very modestly attired) are memorably graceful and sonorous (yes, there is some singing). Of particular note are the enchanting Golshifteh Farahani, as Nour, and the namaki Maryam Hamid, as Ishtar.

Notes:

Chale Nafus, “Bab’aziz – the Prince Who Contemplated His Soul”, Austin Film Society, Austin, TX, USA, 2009, http://www.austinfilm.org/Page.aspx?pid=929.

The Method of History in the Present Age

2011-06-09T00:38:00.003+12:00

Karl Löwith’s introduction to From Hegel to Nietzsche reads, “a study of the age from Hegel to Nietzsche ultimately will have to yield the question: is the essence and “meaning” of history determined absolutely from within history itself; and, if not, then how?” [1] Mr. Löwith sets the tone of the present age by stating that a study of the age yields the question – that is, he doesn’t venture to say whether we might come up with some answers from a study of the age. Well, now that the question has been raised, we might attempt to examine the thought of the two most prominent thinkers on history of the nineteenth century, Hegel and Marx. For these two infused a new life and importance into the study of history and in fact changed the nature of historical study – “ever since Hegel, world history, in contrast to historia [the etymological root of history], seems to be precisely what one has not seen and experienced, inquired after, and investigated for himself.” [2]

One might first ask the question what does Löwith mean when he says, “essence and ‘meaning’ of history”? This is a crucial question, but let us, for the time being, say that it amounts to asking whether in Hegel’s or Marx’s philosophies history is self-contained and self-caused. We then can proceed, rather uncritically, to Hegel.

Hegel sees history as the advancing self-manifestation of the Absolute Idea in time. It is not the collective unity of all the ideas or consciousnesses of men in the progress of history, but rather the manifestation of the Idea as history itself – in the historical model. The self-manifestation proceeds in distinct historical states. The Absolute Idea as treated by Hegel in his Phenomenology [3] is also seen to advance by means of the Hegelian dialectic to a self-comprehending complete unity. As it progresses from subjective spirit (whose content is the human mind viewed subjectively as the mind of the individual subject) through objective spirit (whose content is objective spiritual institutions) to absolute spirit (the Absolute Idea as spirit in and for itself), the spirit progresses towards its ultimate freedom and self-expression and liberates itself from subjection to nature. Here it is the spirit that is the determining factor, the cause of change. History itself as manifested in historical facts and concrete details is a mere reflection of history qua Hegel’s concept of history – the abstract progress of the spirit. Thus everyday life is not truly significant (historically) to Hegel unless some minor everyday event can rise to the level of a truly historical event. No individual person is important to history unless he rises to become the expression of some abstract historical concept. Marx’s critique of Hegel is that he has presented an abstracted movement of mind – not true history (as Marx sees it). Thus he says, “the whole history of the alienation process and the whole process of the retraction of the alienation is therefore nothing but the history of the production of abstract (i.e. absolute) thought – of logical, speculative thought.” [4] Thus the principle of movement in Hegelian history applies to abstract thought entities which are in turn manifested in everyday experience. (This criticism of Hegel is directed at the Phenomenology as an historical presentation, nevertheless the criticism here referred to applies to Hegel’s position on history).

For Hegel, the Spirit (the Spirit of the Age) exists not over and above time, not objectively outside of time manipulating historical events, but in time, that is, in the eternal present. The Spirit has within itself all of past time (it is the historical consequence of such) and the prospects of the future. It doesn’t externally create history, its progress in the historical mode is history. It is important, however, to distinguish between the Idea as the process of the Absolute Spirit (that which is the subject of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit) and the Spirit as world history. Thus returning to the original question taken from Karl Löwith, we can see that the spirit within history is not the true essence and meaning of history, for the Idea as expressed in the Phenomenology as it attains its dialectical development is not in history as such; history is only its expression in the historical model. Thus the Phenomenology of the Spirit is the essence and meaning of history (to Hegel) but it is not itself within history.

It is on this count that Marx attempt to break off from the Hegelian dialectic in favor of what he calls “naturalism”.

"Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, establishes his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalization, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in his process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective. An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He creates or establishes only objects, because he is established by objects – because at bottom he is nature. In the act of establishing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, establishing his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.’" [5]

By taking this position Marx sacrifices some of the beautiful completeness in Hegelian doctrine for his humanistic naturalism. Marx defines history as the true natural history of man. His theory of history is somewhere in between the materialism of Feuerbach and the idealism of Hegel. Marx sees true history as the history of living, concrete, suffering man, but he does retain some level of abstraction in his dealing with sociological and economic forces as abstract historical concept.

Thus we have the positions of the two philosophers of history with regard to what history is. To understand, however, the essence and meaning of Hegel’s and Marx’s conceptions of history, we would do well to consider how they treat history as a dynamic process.

Hegel is relatively obscure on this point (more than his usually obscure self), because he presents his Phenomenology of the Mind in an historical context. This seems to be inherent in his method of presentation – the Spirit proceeds from subjective spirit to objective spirit out of a dialectical necessity; the time lapse involved is only incidental to the real relationship. That is, we tend to personify Hegel’s abstract notions and picture them in an historical setting, but, in truth, the Phenomenology is not a direct explanation of history. The dynamics of Hegel’s historical theory involve the dialectic of negativity. Spirit, as it attains the expression of the unity of the Idea in itself (as expressed in the Logic) and nature (as expressed in the philosophy of Nature) proceeds through other stages, always positing its opposite, and then, by comprehending the two conflicting concepts, transcending the opposition to achieve a higher unity. Marx criticizes Hegel for often using this method to abstractly move back to the originally posited concept. Thus he views Hegel’s process as a negation of negation and instead of a true transcendence, is one-sidedly resolving the opposition in favor of one particular side. Marx cites Hegel’s return to religion as an example. The criticism touches on an important aspect of Hegel’s system – the realization of Hegel’s principles in the real world (the manifestation of the Idea in art, history, etc.) is often extremely difficult to accomplish. Just what constitutes the Spirit of the Age is more than just a procedural question; it points to a fundamental weakness in Hegel’s method – namely that of establishing the Spirt after the fact. When one looks back in history, one can always cite events that are turning points and see many events, viewed collectively, as a logical pattern. But there may have been other logical patterns in the making which didn’t quite achieve culmination and are thus overlooked by historians. This results in an arbitrary selection of pattern-forming events (those which actually reached their logical fruition) as historically significant (when looking back into history). When the historian examines the threads leading up through his present existence and attempts to predict the future, he no longer has the great advantage of knowing the result. Thus two historians using the dialectical method may attempt to classify historical events on the basis of some abstract formalism, and, because they don’t have the outcome of history in front of them, these two historians may reach opposite conclusions. This indicates that the selection of historical events as significant (and hence as representing the Spirit of the Age) may be arbitrary classifications which predict, as it were, the pasts, and – lo and behold – they are correct!

Marx indicates an understanding of this fundamental weakness, but refuses to reject the method; he only modifies it. Marx brings history in close contact with real events. He criticizes Hegel as dealing only in abstractions, yet he himself deals in only relatively less abstract abstractions. Rather than Hegel’s extremely abstract notion of man bing self-consciousness, Marx views man as natural, yet he is still speaking of man as laborer, man qua capitalist, i.e. a lower level of abstraction. For Marx’s period this was the most particular and individuated body of knowledge with regard to man – economic, but it was not any ultimate reduction to natural man.

Thus for these two men and for subsequent historians, the study of history entailed dealing with abstractions. In attempting to organize historical data and explain history, a systematic approach was necessary. Some historical facts are thereby rendered significant and fundamental to the march of history, while others are merely incidental effects of these first, as all data are placed somewhere in the systematic framework. To speak of a world-spirit that is the manifestation in the historical mode of the Absolute Idea is one way of systematic explanation. Because its dynamical principle, its reason for change, is not within history itself, Hegel’s system would seemingly have great significance compared to more descriptive bodies of thought. A purely descriptive body of thought attempts to explain phenomena on the basis of cause and effect. That is, if condition A is present, then B will follow. The concept of B is not in A (since B is different from A, otherwise we would just have A followed by A). We merely form a systematic body of thought based on this causal situation. There may be intermediate stages between A and B (found by a more thoroughgoing analysis) which are causally related, but not one of these causal relationships ever provides us with a reason as to why condition A is suddenly followed by different condition B. This is not what descriptive science is concerned with. Therefore descriptive knowledge tells us nothing with regard to the ultimate cause. Since, as above, cause-and-effect is not ultimately explanation, but merely description (elaborate though it may be), it is useless to attempt to explain (find the reason behind) natural phenomena by retreating to the ultimate cause. There is either an infinite regression of causes back into infinity, or there is a first cause – neither of these leads to anything but mystery with regard to ultimate meaning. By the use of the principle of causation, descriptive sciences set up fundamental laws that enable one to predict the future. From the present condition A we can prediction condition B with our causal principle. The ultimate test for a scientific law is whether it is successful at prediction; if it isn’t, then a new relationship must be found.

A descriptive science can exist for any level of abstraction, as long as it successfully organizes its abstract conditions into causal relationships for valid prediction. Thus it is possible to treat historical phenomena as bases of a descriptive science by obtaining causal relationships among historical entities. Economics is another example of a descriptive science on another level of abstraction. When economic theory (i.e. Say’s Law) failed to successfully predict economic behaviour during the 1930s, a new body of descriptive thought was necessary (Keynesian analysis). Neither of these two methods of describing economic behaviour was any more fundamental, true, or reasonable, in any absolute sense; it just happened that one method correctly established causal relationships, and the other didn’t.

Thus if one looks for the “ultimate meaning and essence” of a descriptive science, one must find it within that science. That is, for economics, it was found that Say’s Law was no longer a valid causal organization of economic abstractions from real life. Economics has no inherent comment on why Say’s Law failed. (It may have actually been due to a fundamental psychological, that is, non-economic, change in consumer attitudes. In other words, it may have been a result of a change outside of economics. But for economics as a body of thought, it is purely descriptive and not concerned with any reasons outside of predicting observable phenomena.) Thus also in physics, there is no ultimate essence or meaning outside of it as a descriptive body of thought. Physics from 1890 to 1930 underwent a complete overhauling in order to yield successful prediction. It was found (in 1890) that under the system of causal relationships then regarded as accurate, new physical phenomena could not be successfully predicted; causality was denied. Even though “classical” physics successfully described a great realm of observation, it was completely overhauled and new definitions of physical states (the conditions A & B of physics) were found that restored the principle of causality to the physical states. (Although it yielded a fundamental uncertainty for individual events, these single events were no longer states, no longer in the causal framework. Causality in physics today is related to the new definition of state which relates to statistical averages of events.) Thus physics resolved its conflict in favor of increased causality – it had to in order to advance as a descriptive science.

Thus a descriptive method of thought can apply to any sphere of knowledge, in particular, history. And its essence is determined within its nature (its moving principle). But a descriptive science carries with it no real meaning, no reason behind its network of causal relationships. If, rather than describe a field by presenting a first cause, of which the world is an effect, one presented a first reason of which the world is the consequence, then would there be meaning. Reason exists outside of a descriptive body of phenomena. That 1 + 1 = 2 is a fundamental product of reason can be seen as well as the fact that it is not dependent on any real observable data for verification. Thus in the realm of reason we have logical necessity which is not verified. If we could see condition B as a logical necessity to condition A, if we could see the reason for it; then we could reach an understanding of the meaning of the relationship.

Now we can see what Hegel’s position was in light of the above. For Hegel, reason, in the abstract, was the first principle. Reason as a universal is the meaning (the Idea), and the world it its logical consequent. By taking all of reason (reason in and for itself) as his ultimate principle, Hegel did not have to go beyond the Idea for a reason of this reason (no infinite progression). Hence the Absolute Idea is its own logical consequent, unlike a first cause. Hegel, as mentioned above, presented history as the manifestation of the Absolute Idea in the historical mode. This relationship seems rather obscure (it have seems so to Marx) with regard to the real phenomena of history. Certainly the connection as “manifestation” seems indefinite. We can see Marx then as attempting to relate history more closely with real events (though still on a rather high level of abstraction) by attempting to treat it as a descriptive science. He takes the historical entities of the day (abstractions of the more everyday, less significant events) and attempts to apply the principles of a descriptive science to history. Regarding Marx from this point of view, we may simplistically view Hegel as the true speculative philosopher, while Marx was really a would-be scientist.

Marx viewed philosophy of his day as lacking content, that is, lacking relation to direct phenomena. Thus he observes,

“The Abstract idea, which without mediation becomes intuiting, is indeed nothing else but abstract thinking that gives itself up and resolves on intuition. . . The mystical feeling which drives the philosopher forward from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom – the longing for contents.” [6]

He speaks of communism and atheism as “no loss of the objective world created by man – of man’s essential powers born to the realm of objectivity, . . . on the contrary, they are but the first real emergence, the actual realization for man of man’s essence and of his essence [7]. Thus Marx is speaking of abstractions in the historical framework of the world. Marx’s attempts to provide a descriptive basis for history rely on economics, which was actually a scientifically-based economic history. Marx is rather vague with regard to the relation of economics and history. Wherever economics seems to lose control of a situation, wherever causal relationships seem to lie just outside the realm of economics, Marx calls it history. This is not particularly sound, because the assumptions of economics (the definitions of its abstractions) are not the same as those of that which he speaks when he mentions history. Thus in Marx’s Pre-capitalist Economic Formations [8] he attempts to give us a systematic, descriptive idea of the boundary between history and economics, appealing now to history then to economics –

“all the forms in which the community imputes to the subjects a specific objective unity with the condition of their production . . . necessarily correspond only to a development of the forces of production [economic basis] . . . (these forms are of course more or less naturally evolved, but at the same time also the results of a historic process)” [9].

Thus Marx’s naturalism attempts to deal with history within history as a descriptive science.

In view of Marx’s criticism of Hegel, let us return to Hegel and see how he related his abstractions to the realm of historical thought. Hegel saw the Idea as not only a universal in and for itself (its own reason for existence), but also reason was fundamentally related to epistemological categories of knowledge. That is, after Kant, Hegel conceived of perception of the real world as inherently categorical (and hence inherently related to reason). Logic and nature were manifestations of the Absolute Idea in their particular modes of existence, and so were the categories of human knowledge a manifestation of the Idea. Thus the Hegelian process of history has an a priori connected rationality – it is not arbitrary abstraction from the real world, but an inherent abstraction. Was this justified? Marx’s move away from this idealism is explained when he observes,

“In Hegel, therefore, the negation of the negation is not the confirmation of the true essence, effected precisely through negation of the pseudo-essence. With him the negation of the negation is the confirmation of the pseudo-essence, or of the self-estranged essence in its denial; or it is the denial of this pseudo-essence as an objective being dwelling outside man and independent of him, and its transformation into the subject.” [10]

Thus Marx tells us that Hegel can’t really transcend his own consciousness. How, unless Hegel himself is a divine being, can Hegel be certain of his own philosophy. That is, how can he be certain unless he has actually comprehended the Absolute Idea. What he has actually done is secularize Christian doctrine. To accept Hegel’s reason-in-history position (that is, to have anything in history beyond a descriptive science) one must have an implicit faith. One can’t really know this as truth. That is to say, Hegel’s position may indeed be correct, but it rests on condition of faith in reason, and the meaning of history. As Löwith comments,

“Historicism is the religion of the ‘educated’, whose skepticism is not vigorous enough to live entirely without faith; it is the cheapest sort of substitute. For what is cheaper than the faith that over the long course of history everything that has ever happened, with all its consequences, must have a meaning and a purpose!” [11]

It is this faith that all history has a purpose that has induced many historians to rationalize past history according to their own prejudices. They arbitrarily select data to be significant that fit their own personal opinions concerning reason in history. These historians reject the idea of history as a descriptive science.

Considering history as a descriptive science is very difficult due to the lack of uniformity with regard to historical entities and concepts. Historical study which is along the lines of descriptive science corresponds to fields like political science, sociology, economics, etc. The difficulties, which we won’t bother to discuss here, that these fields of study run into lead many historians, perhaps justifiably, to reject these fields as valid alternatives for prediction. Hence history has come to stand for the side of history that attempts to find reason in history (social sciences becoming the attempt to achieve a descriptive body of knowledge).

Historians, nonetheless, are very often unfaithful to the original Hegelian principles. Hegel conceived of history as the manifestation of the Spirit in time. Reason, itself, achieved its own self-comprehending unity not in the historical mode; thus, as above, the essence and meaning of history are not in history itself (only a manifestation of the Spirit). Historians, on the other hand, often fail to achieve this level of abstraction and attempt to see reason in history. Either that or they even less responsibly attempt to apply their own preconceived notions to the study and organizing of history.

Such an historian was Marx, himself. Although he had scientific notions, he never completely attained a descriptive method. Instead, his naturalism was only a decline in the level of abstraction to an attempt to impute reason in history. Marx would probably assert that the meaning and essence of history is within history. (Had he been a purely descriptive scientist, he would say that history is self-contained but that it has no real meaning.) Marx, however, had his own prejudices which he put into history, and thus, rather than achieve an improvement of Hegel (his analysis of Hegel’s weaknesses above appear to be profound), he represents a retrogression from the completeness of Hegelian thought.

Mr. Löwith, who recognized Hegel’s philosophy as requiring a faith in reason and purpose, is, unfortunately, also a historian of this latter class – influenced by Hegel in his efforts to obtain order in historical phenomena, but not sufficiently abstract to see the arbitrarinesses that this can lead to if one doesn’t fully accept Hegel’s position. Thus Professor Lawrence Stepelevich comments on Löwith’s book:

“A thin line divides the historian of philosophy from the philosopher of history – a line that is too easily crossed when the historian approaches under the guidance of a philosopher. Hegel’s hand rests too heavily upon Löwith, and other philosophers lose their original substance and are absorbed by Hegel.” [12}

To return to Mr. Löwith’s original question, it now becomes a matter of seeing the essence and meaning as ultimately outside of history. History in our age is a partial appropriation of the Hegelian method without the acceptance of the rest of Hegel’s philosophy which validates it.

Notes:

Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, the Revolution in Nineteenth-century Thought, Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1964, p. vi.
Ibid., p. 212, 213.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Hegel, ed., by Carl J. Friedrich, Random House, 1954.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Wilder Publications, 2011, p. 175.
Ibid., p. 181.
Ibid., p. 190.
Ibid.,. p. 187.
Karl Marx, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations, International Publishers, 1965.
Ibid., p. 96-97.
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Wilder Publications, 2011, p. 185.
Löwith, op. cit., p. 217.
Lawrence S. Stepelevich, “Reflections on Hegel”, The Intercollegiate Review, 2:3, November-December, 1965, p. 214.

"God’s Country" - Louis Malle (1986)

2011-05-27T15:10:00.008+12:00

In 1975 successful French filmmaker Louis Malle moved to the United States and began the second phase of his career, which soon resulted in the production of the feature, Pretty Baby (1978). But although Malle was mostly known to the public for his feature films, he was also an outstanding documentary filmmaker, with some magnificent credits during his French period that included Phantom India (1969) and Calcutta (1969). So when he arrived in the US, he brought his personal, cinéma-vérité-style documentary approach to the American scene. His first documentary film in the US was commissioned by PBS in 1979, and he was given freedom to choose any subject in America that captured his fancy. He eventually settled his focus on the life in a small town in Minnesota, which became the subject of his God’s Country (1986).

Glencoe, Minnesota, the subject of God’s Country, is a farming community about 100 kilometres west of Minneapolis, and its population today of around 5,000 is still about what it was when Malle paid his visits. The film comprises three main sections and becomes increasingly personal (that is, reflecting Malle’s personal fascinations with what he has found) as it progresses to each successive stage:

Overview of the Town (about 30 minutes)
Specific Subjects of Interest (about 40 minutes)
Revisiting the Town Six Years Later (about 20 minutes)

1. Overview of the Town
In the opening scenes I wondered if this film was going to be another European cosmopolite’s dismissal of provincial American hicks. Was this going to just another freak show depicting how humorously weird American Midwesterners are? The film opens with Malle entering Glencoe by road and encountering an elderly lady wearing an odd-looking cap and weeding an overgrown garden near the street. Although she looked a little odd, she turned out to be amiable and wiling to engage. And so it turns out with most of the Glencoe people we encounter in the rest of the film. This first part of the film is general survey of life in the town as seen by the interested French newcomer. After the old lady, we observe some typical small-town Americana:

The American Legion and its concern for honouring Vietnam war veterans
Bingo games
The local Church and its pastor
The American fixation with mowing and maintaining a well-groomed lawn
A girl’s softball team
A cordial local policeman who attends to a town with virtually no crime

Malle also shows an interest in something that might not occur to the locals: the Caucasian ethnic uniformity of the town. Are there many native Indians and Black people around? He speaks with one old man who discusses what he knows about the disappearance of the Indians from the area after the outbreak in 1862 known as the “Sioux Uprising”. Malle also surveys the local farming industry and chats with the owner of the largest farm and another man who is both a farmer and the local banker. The farming business in this area appears to be a balance between dairy and agricultural farming. The overall picture is that of a relatively prosperous and contented town that is shielded from the world’s problems.

2. Specific Subjects
In the next section Malle zeros in on a few people who open up their homes and give him a more intimate view of life in the town.

We spend about ten minutes visiting the home and farm of a 28-year-old farmer and his wife.
Then Malle visits a lawyer, Arnold, and his wife, Millie, an aspiring local playwright . Though they, like the great majority of the local populace, have been long-time supporters of the conservative and pro-military Republican Party, their son was a Vietnam war protestor during that war. Although they approach the subject of that protest cautiously, they gradually open up to Malle and reveal how they came to support their son’s conscience-driven opposition to the war, which led to his arrest (he had been arrested in connection with an attempt to burn local military draft records).
We meet Steve, who, besides being a performer in the town’s local theatre group (which performs Millie’s satirical plays), works in the local farming industry as the man who inseminates cows. This rather gruesome procedure he performs several times an hour on cows, who put up with this intrusive action without too much protest. Steve is in his thirties and a committed free-loving bachelor. He approvingly remarks on the attitude of the local citizenry of this laid-back farming community to avoid condemning alternative points of view (such as that exemplified by his own lifestyle).
Glencoe’s young women is the next topic of interest, and Malle is briefly fascinated with one young woman pumping gas at a local petrol station (perhaps not so common then in France?). He moves on to focus on a remarkable young woman, Jean, whose conversations with Malle were the highlight of the film for me. Jean has an ordinary job as a social security employee at the local court and also has a second job as a bartender on weekends. But Jean is not so ordinary – she is thoughtful, sensitive, well-read, and a free spirit. She has renounced her Roman Catholic faith (over the subject of abortion), and she openly shares her thoughts about life and the world around her in a series of candid film clips.
The care of the elderly is then considered for about five minutes. Even though Glencoe is not a large town, it seems to have a well-equipped nursing home for its elderly. Although the health of these people is looked after, Malle has some grim shots of extremely frail and probably senile people in this facility living without hope or interest in life.
The final part of this section is devoted to a wedding of a young local couple. There is a traditional ceremony featuring a soulful singing of “We’ve Only Just Begun”, followed by a dance/reception. But then for the rest of the afternoon the entire wedding party engages in a lengthy bar-hopping trek. Traditional habits apparently persist in this town, even on what would seem to be the most important day of one’s life.

This entire section serves to accentuate the first section, but in greater depth and intimacy.

3. Revisiting the Town Six Year Later
Although Malle’s original visit to Glencoe was in 1979, there were some work interruptions and funding delays that delayed completion of the film for six years. Finally in 1985 Malle returned to Glencoe with his crew to see what had changed. This section then serves as something of sobering reflection on what time has wrought.

The old woman gardener on the road entering the town is still there and still, now at the age of 91, cheerful and industrious. The fixation of lawn-mowing is unchanged. Steve is still a bachelor and still inseminating cows round the clock. But there have been some changes, too. The banker/farmer has died of a heart attack, and the liberated Jean has moved to Florida. But perhaps more significantly for the population at large, the town is now suffering from a severe downturn in agricultural food prices. Farmers are struggling to make ends meet, and some of them are going under. The big farmer, shown as prosperous and contended in the first section of the film, now has heavy losses and is intensely frustrated reveals – he ominously reveals his growing sympathies for the fascistic Posse Comitatus group that fantasizes in Jewish-led conspiracies behind every discontent, and he predicts impending violence in the area.

To close the film, though, Malle turns away from these frustrations and signs of gloom and visits again with Arnold and Millie (the parents of the student antiwar protester). Millie is still writing and producing plays at the local theater. Over dinner, Arnold reflects philosophically on the growing darkness that he sees coming over modern society – its increasing obsession with material greed and the decline of traditional values and fellowship.

In earlier documentary films like Phantom India and Calcutta, Malle displayed two contrasting, concerns: an interest in the spiritual dimension of the people and an identification with the French progressive, leftist focus on social justice, particularly for the working class. One concern was directed towards personal fulfilment, and the other towards the collective good. Accordingly, one can detect in those earlier films Malle’s sympathies shifting back and forth, as he observes local religious practices, on the one hand, evidently holding back the material progress of the Indian people and at the same time offering them something uplifting and wholly lacking in Western societies. This tension is never really resolved in those films, but that two-sidedness is part of what makes those films enduringly interesting – they evoke the depths of unresolved conflicts that remain in today’s world.

Since throughout God’s Country Malle has let the people of Glencoe speak for themselves, the film may appear at first glance to be entirely removed from those concerns present in Malle’s earlier documentaries, and many viewers may be tempted to see the film as merely a snapshot of a small town – a banal cataloguing of a remote and not very exciting village. But though the talk is largely about the mundane aspects of the townspeople’s daily lives, Malle finds Glencoe fascinating, and so do I (even though I am from a town very much like Glencoe, myself). In truth the film offers more than just local-color Americana, and it does carry implicit allusions to those earlier Malle concerns. What evidently fascinated Malle, and what comes through gradually as one watches the film, is the general innocence and cordiality of these people. The ethos behind this social behaviour was epitomized by lawyer Arnold’s remarks at the close of the film. His basic concern for the preservation of common piety and decency was the message that Malle wanted to convey. The people observed in this film are ordinary commonfolk, but on the world stage, they are extraordinary – they mostly seem to treat everyone they encounter as their equals, and they are honest, genuine, and modest (the effect of their interpersonal directness is accentuated by having them speak directly into the camera.) This is not only where Malle’s interests in personal fulfilment and social harmony converge, it also points to the kind of society that we want to have – and if we already have it, as in Glencoe, we want to preserve it. This is God’s country.

The Being of Entities in the World

2011-05-10T11:52:00.007+12:00

An important section of Heidegger’s Being and Time is his treatment of the “Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment”, for the point of view taken here greatly affects the tenor of the entire work. Heidegger sees as fundamental to Dasein’s being-in-the-world what is called concern. In our everyday dealings in the world, that which is not characteristic is dealing which grasps and manipulates entities in the environment rather than merely perceives their existence. Thus the analysis is that of these entities so encountered, rather than any abstractly postulated entities of nature. This analysis is in keeping with the phenomenological approach, but it fundamentally affects our eventual attitudes. The central theme is the concern of Dasein – it is that which constitutes the encounter with entities. Thus Heidegger says:

“The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter, consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretative tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us, and which conceal not only the phenomenon of such ‘concern’, but even more those entities themselves as encountered of their own in our concern with them. “ [1]

Entities that Dasein encounters in its concern are called equipment, but Dasein is not thematically aware of this “equipmentality”. Rather, the nature of the encounter is termed readiness-to-hand.

“The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme”. [2]

The important thing here is that the entities encountered are not simply brute-existent (present-at-hand) which are injected with the quality of readiness-to-hand by Dasein. This would imply that the entities are first encountered as present-at-hand and are later provided with the characteristics of readiness-to-hand. But Heidegger insists on maintaining the priority of readiness-to-hand. Heidegger introduces phenomenologically the concept of present-at-hand entities with the idea of unusability. When an entity presents itself as unusable (e.g. when it is damaged), its unreadiness-to-hand presents itself. Likewise when a utensil is missing for some project or when one obstructs the completion of a project, the unreadiness-to-hand is manifest. The unready-to-hand utensil, which is normally used to bring about the completion of a project, is suddenly unable to function in this way. When a hammer is broken, it immediately presents itself as incapable of hammering. Now, before the particular reason for the malfunction is observed, that is, at the moment when only its incapability for being used to further the project is noticed, then it is apparent that presence-at-hand lies behind the readiness-to-hand. This does not mean that presence-at-hand is more fundamental.

“This presence-at-hand of something that cannot be used is still not devoid of all readiness-to-hand whatsoever; equipment which is present-at-hand in this way is still just a thing which occurs somewhere.” [3]

It seems that readiness-to-hand maintains its priority. The damage to the equipment is still not a mere alteration of a thing – not a change of properties which just occurs in something present-at-hand” [4] Thus we are not observing pure presence-at-hand. The development seems to suggest that presence-at-hand is related phenomenally to thematic awareness of readiness-to-hand. Heidegger observes on this point that

“the presence-at-hand of entities is thrust to the fore by the possible breaks in that referential totality in which circumspection ‘operates’; how are we to get a closer understanding of this totality?” [5]

A footnote to this sentence in the text explains that in the earlier editions of the book, the word for readiness-to-hand was used instead of that for presence-at-hand. Thus Heidegger, himself, must have thought that the thematic awareness of readiness-to-hand brings about the concept of presence-at-hand.

Thus we are given two kinds of being of entities in the world, which are to a certain extent cofundamental (to Heidegger):

The Being of those entities within-the-world which we proximally encounter – readiness-to-hand;
The Being of those entities which we can comes across and whose nature we can determine if we discover them in their own right by going through the entities proximally encountered – presence-at-hand. [6]

If we again examine these concepts on the ontic level, we can more fully see the argument. All entities encountered in our concern are ready-to-hand instruments. Thus a pencil is seen as a writing implement – that which will serve to complete the project of writing. It can also be seen as a piece of wood that will burn, or a light object that can be thrown. No matter how it is encountered, it is seen as a utensil of some sort. One might argue that the idea that the pencil is the same thing in all of these situations is lost. But that is the point: the entity is a utensil, not a thing-in-itself. If an unreadiness-to-hand doesn’t appear (a broken pencil), then there is no awareness of the pencil as a thing other than its function in the given project. Of course we can reflect upon the single pencil as something to be used for many different projects, but it is still always in terms of some readiness-to-hand. When a pencil is perceived as broken, it is still perceived in a ready-to-hand way. It must be discarded, repaired, or ignored, but it always seen in terms of its readiness-to-hand.

The question now arises, where does presence-at-hand come in? When we look at a rock, we see it as ready-to-hand. As soon as we see it as a “rock”, it is assigned to the referential totality of ready-to-hand entities. Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel, La Nausée, depicts Antoine Roquentin as overpowered with a feeling of nausea when he reflectively observes a root in a park. Roquentin becomes aware that there is something beyond the root as it is perceived in all of its referential connotations.

“‘This is a root’ – it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was . . . below all explanation.” [7]

However, I do not think that Roquentin is nauseated because he perceives the presence-at-hand of the root. Rather he is nauseated precisely because he can’t. No matter how he looks at the root, he is overwhelmed with the mental abyss staring at him when he tries to penetrate to the presence-at-hand of the root – the existence of which can be postulated but never perceived. Everything that is perceived, every situation, is perceived in terms of antecedents and consequences. This suggests Heidegger’s concernful Being of Dasein and the category of cause-and-effect for Kant. This quality of antecedents and consequences is characteristic of all human knowledge, because it is rooted in human perception. If the ready-to-hand entity is perceived in terms of antecedents and consequence, then this is the being constitutive of it. The pencil is seen in terms of making a blank piece of paper full of writing. The future situation of a paper full of writing dominates here.

If ready-to-hand entities (all entities perceived) are in terms of antecedents and consequences, then the essential element of these entities is time. Time is the succession of events. When an environmental situation changes to another situation, time has elapsed. Thus an entity which is thought of in terms of antecedents and consequences has time as its constitutive element. Heidegger, himself, suggests this in his analysis of care and temporality:

“Coming back to itself futurally, resoluteness brings itself into the situation by making present. The character of ‘having been’ arises from the future, and in such a way that the future which ‘has been’ (or better, which ‘is in the process of having been’) releases from itself the present. This phenomenon has the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been; we designate it as ‘temporality’. Only in so far as Dasein has the definite character of temporality, is the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole of anticipatory resoluteness, as we have described it, made possible for Dasein itself. Temporality reveals itself as the meaning of authentic care.” [8]

Here, however, I believe that temporality arises from the idea of the ready-to-hand. The thesis of temporality being constitutive of readiness-to-hand is entirely consistent with Heidegger’s conception of time (above). That is, the present is the past projecting into the future.

As we noted earlier, presence-at-hand is not immediately encounterable for Dasein. Yet Heidegger suggests that pure science is handled in terms of presence-at-hand. He points out that the concern attendant upon any encounter with a ready-to-hand entity precludes the possibility of mathematical functionalizaton. Thus he says,

“By reason of their Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more, these latter entities can have their ‘properties’ defined mathematically in ‘functional concepts.’ Ontologically, such concepts are possible only in relation to entities whose Being has the character of pure substantiality. Functional concepts are never possible except as formalized substantial concepts.” [9]

This, however, is not consistent with our concepts of entities. Presence-at-hand is pure substantiality without the ascription of any properties, no matter now formal. All functional concepts are eventually relatable back to some sensory perception, whether it is the reading of a meter, hearing a buzzer, or seeing an image. This must be so in order to have experimental verification of scientific theories. As areas of knowledge become more sophisticated, they may seem to be more fundamental, but they all eventually go back to some empirical observation – this observation being exclusively of ready-to-hand entities. The physical theory is then a complex organizational framework of ready-to-hand things, and it, too, is ready-to-hand. As the quest for fundamental particles in physics becomes more and more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly evident that the theories are mere mathematical tools which seem to eliminate the need for the idea of a present-at-hand entity. That is, there are no longer discrete entities in modern theory, but just a vast space-time continuum with wave-like peaks and valleys which appear to be entities to our senses in the macroscopic world. This only indicates that present-at-hand entities are in no way necessary for physical speculation, even for "fundamental particles” of nature. Even physicists no longer believe that they are dealing with present-at-hand entities – that is what the “revolution in physics” is al about. Physical theories are seen only as mathematical interrelations of sets of data that are valid only in so far as their empirical predictability is successful. Thus physics and all other realms of knowledge are exclusively thought of in terms of the ready-to-hand.

What, then, is presence-at-hand? It is a kind of dimension characteristic of utensils. Since it can only be phenomenologically approached by the observance of an unreadiness-to-hand, this idea seems justified. If all the readiness-to-hand were to be removed from an entity, we would have its presence-hand. This can only be thought of logically, since when a certain readiness-to-hand is seen absent from an entity (an unreadiness-to-hand appears), then a new and different readiness-to-hand will show itself to Dasein’s consciousness. If we were to reflect on the utensil, we could approach presence-at-hand as a logical limit by contemplating the removal of all readiness-to-hand. In precisely the same way the concept of infinity is a logical limit, that is, it’s sum can never really be conceived, but by successive addition of units, we can approach infinity as a limit.

It seems quite possible that presence-at-hand is not unlike pure aesthetic speculation. This would suggest, if the foregoing is accepted, that pure aesthetic speculation, i.e. a purely aesthetic encounter of anything, is completely impossible, but that the idea may be approached as a limit.
Thus he who pursues the aesthetic way of life can never really achieve a fully aesthetic experience, and thus full aesthetic satisfaction is impossible – only nausea is the result.

The world seen as strictly utensils can lead to many ethical implications in view of the fact that the future dominates the outlook of the individual (“The Primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future.” [10]) The duty of man is then centered around projects that are continually set before him. Many of these implications are carried out in great detail by the Utilitarian philosophers, such as Dewey.

The important point is that central to Heidegger’s thesis is the idea that entities of the world are all encountered as utensils, and this fact can override other less fundamental tenets when implications of his philosophy are being considered.

Notes:

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962), Harper & Row, p. 96.
Ibid., p. 99.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 103.
Ibid., p. 107.
Ibid., p. 121.
Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (1938), translated by Lloyd Alexander (1959), p. 174.
Heidegger, op. cit., p. 374.
Ibid., p. 122.
Ibid., p. 378.

Soul and Society

2011-05-10T11:03:00.019+12:00

Soul and Society

The Being of Entities in the World
The Method of History in the Present Age
The Treatment of Love in Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or
Earthlings - Shaun Monson (2005)
The Ister - David Barison and Daniel Ross (2004)
Nuclear Tipping Point - Ben Goddard (2010)
RiP: A Remix Manifesto - Brett Gaylor (2009)
The Secret - Rhonda Byrne (2006)
SiCKO - Michael Moore (2007)

"Women Without Men" - Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari (2009)

2011-03-27T19:03:00.011+13:00

Women Without Men (Zanane Bedune Mardan, 2009) is an Iranian film based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s 1990 novella of the same name. Parsipur’s work tells the stories of five different women and how they come together in a rural estate south of Tehran both to seek refuge from the various forms of male harassment that they have experienced and perhaps also to find their own way in life. The appearance of the film attracted attention among Iranians for several reasons:

Parsipur is a well-known Iranian writer who has spent several years in prison merely for expressing her views. Not long after Zanane Bedune Mardan was published, the book was banned by the Iranian government.
This was the debut directorial outing of well-known New York-based Iranian multimedia artist, Shirin Neshat (but note that Shoja Azarin is also credited as “collaborating director”).
The film is set during a critical, and to Iranians eternally fascinating, period in Iranian political history when Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a American/British-assisted coup d’etat.
The story was known to cover adult themes about the sexual activities of some of its characters, which is a taboo subject in the Iranian public space.
In addition, the Iranian government unwittingly undertook measures guaranteeing an even larger audience for the film by attempting to coerce the Canadian authorities into barring the film from public exhibition.

Parsipur’s novella has a “magical realism” style, with bizarre, surreal events occasionally embedded in the historical setting of the early 1950s. I am not sure how that kind of thing works out in the book, since I have only read summaries of it, but some reviewers have criticised the odd admixture of disconnected plot elements. Whatever narrative deficiencies the book may have had, though, they may well have been worsened by the film-script adaptation made by Neshat and Azari. Their script deletes one of the five main characters in the book and passes on some of her characteristics and narrative activities to the remaining four women. In any case these changes may well have been approved by Parsipur, since she participated in the film by playing one of the supporting roles (a madame of a brothel).

For a film likely to be banned at home and cater mostly to an Iranian audience abroad, Women Without Men has surprisingly high production values. It also has a suitably Iranian look to it, but given the explosive subject matter, it was necessarily shot abroad in Morocco and features Iranian expatriate actors and actresses.

The four main characters in Women Without Men are

Munis is an intelligent and relatively liberal young woman who is approaching the age of thirty and still single. Her domineering and abusive brother, Amir Khan, feels that it is a disgrace to his pride for her to remain single and wants to make arrangements for her to marry an older man. But Munis resists these efforts and wants to live her own, independent life.
Faezeh is younger and a good friend of Munis, but she is much more conservative and routinely wears the chador (veil) everywhere (in the period of this film, wearing the chador on the streets was not required, but it was practised by women from conservative families). Despite her demure nature, though, Faezeh has romantic longings for Munis’s brother, Amir. Later she has the misfortune of getting raped by some men in the city and subsequently has fantasies about having sex with men.
Zarin is a young prostitute who works in a big-city brothel and who seeks some sort of release from the travails of life.
Fakhri is a wealthy, fifty-year-old woman unhappily married to a general in the Shah’s army.

As the plot unfolds, the narrative threads of the four women are separated, and the women, except for Faezeh and Munis, do not know each other. The transitions between these threads are often confusing and temporarily disorienting – the viewer is often suddenly cast into a different thread of the story, but there is not enough motivation or background contrast to cue the viewer that one is now following a different character.

After awhile, Munis, apparently in despair of her brother’s bullying, commits suicide by jumping off the roof of her apartment building. Later Faezeh revives her friend’s dead body from her backyard grave and sees it magically rise up and jump into a household pond, plunging down to the bottom and presumably to further oblivion. But later in the film we see Munis walking around the city and seeking to get involved in the political crisis that was brewing on the streets of Tehran at that time. There is no explanation given concerning how or why she came back to life, and she seems to be unfazed and unmindful of her recent death and apparent resurrection.

The political events of this time are only alluded to in the film by showing street protests. But this was the period when the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, nationalized the Iranian oil facilities and defied the reigning Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. With the sovereignty of the monarchy challenged by the government and the people, the Shah fled the country, but he soon returned after the military staged a coup d’etat with the help of the U.S. CIA. Munis becomes fascinated with the activities of the local Russian-supported Communist party, the Toudehs, and befriends a young Toudeh activist who is trying to drum up support on the streets. The Toudeh party, inherently aligned as it was against Western imperialism, opposed the Shah and supported Mosaddegh at this time.

Faezeh, meanwhile, hopes to marry Munis’s brother, but she is dismayed to learn that he has gone ahead and married someone else. Nevertheless, later he proposes to her to be his second wife, a rather diminished status that was not at all what she had wanted.

Zarin, the prostitute, is perpetually glum and unresponsive, as she almost mindlessly languishes in her brothel chamber while her clients use her body. Eventually, she looks up on one occasion from her bed and is horrified to see one of her clients without a face. The sight is so shocking that she flees her establishment and takes to the road.

Fakhri lives the life of a wealthy socialite, but she is unhappy with her married life (this is never explained), and she leaves her husband to go live in a villa with a large garden to the south of Tehran.

Eventually Munis, Faezeh, and Zarin show up in the villa, too, and for the first time all the women are together in a sort of women’s refuge centre that frees them from the abusive men in their lives. This bucolic community provides them with some tranquillity, but it doesn’t evidently lead them to immediate salvation. And just to complicate things a bit further, a senior military detachment then shows up at Fakhri’s villa estate and challenges her possession of it. They are eventually appeased, but not before they can display more imperialistic and male-chauvinistic behaviour in front of all the women.

The film ends enigmatically, with some of the women dying and others facing uncertain futures and their problems unresolved. But so much is left unexplained. This, unfortunately, is not a poetic virtue, but a severe fault of exposition. In fact there are a number of significant problems with this tale:

Narrative elements from the novella’s missing fifth character, Mahdokht, have apparently been included in the film without explanation. For example in the novella, the Mahdokht character turned herself into a tree, and indeed a huge tree does at one time mysteriously intrude into the villa’s vestibule. There is no reason for inserting this event into the film (or perhaps leaving it in the film), other than its possible association with a character who was subsequently excised from the story.
Although the four women finally get together in the villa garden, there is no narrative connection ever made between them. It is still a tale of four separate women.
As mentioned above, Munis’s suicide is never motivated or explained or reflected upon. In the novella, she is accidentally killed by her brother, and it is not evident why Neshat and Azari chose to alter the cause of her death and make it into a suicide. It is also not clear why Munis later knows about the existence of or how to get to Fakhri’s villa.
There are several unmotivated long shots of some of the women walking down a long road into the distance. These shots presumably signify the journey to the rural villa and could conceivably have metaphorical significance, but they seem meaningless.
The political theme concerning Mosaddegh’s fall, which the novella only barely touched on, is expanded in the film, but to no purpose. There is no connection between these events and the stories of the four women, leaving the viewer set up to expect something of significance that never appears.

Despite all these narrative shortcomings, Women Without Men has a certain visual charm that lingers in the mind. Neshat seems to have a talent for composing haunting, static shots that have a life apart from their narrative context. There are many such dreamlike images in the film, and together they conjure up an evocative mood in their own right that carries the viewer along. As a result, all of the characters in Women Without Men seem innately interesting. In particular, the performance of Orsolya Tóth, as Zarin, is especially compelling. Perhaps because she is Hungarian and probably unfamiliar with the Farsi language, she has very little to say in the entire film. This absence of speech leaves her role to be artfully conveyed by her brooding face and angular, lissome body language (there is a considerable amount of nudity in her sequences). At the end, we want to know more about her and the other characters, too, but we are only left with just those enigmatic hauntingly-composed images to remember long afterwards.

"Calcutta" - Louis Malle (1969)

2011-02-25T17:54:00.008+13:00

In 1968 French director Louise Malle took a two-month furlough from the stresses of his life and professional work to visit India. He was only 35, but his brilliant early career (he shared a Cannes Palme D’Or at the age of 23) seemed to be on a dangerous downhill slope, and he was coming off a marital breakup. What he saw in India was a profoundly different way of life and attitude towards reality, which undoubtedly commingled in his mind on his return to France with the student rebellion going on at the time in Paris. He immediately decided to return to India with a cameraman and sound recordist to make a documentary film, and he travelled widely about the country, shooting footage opportunistically and without a preset plan over the ensuing five months.

When Malle returned to India, he had to edit the thirty hours of footage he had accumulated into meaningful documentary material. Much of the footage went into creating the seven-part TV series, Phantom India (1969), which is a uniquely brilliant and reflective examination of the soul of India. But he felt that the material he had for Calcutta (Kolkata) was too much to fit into the Phantom India series, and he made a separate 99-minute documentary film, Calcutta (1969) from that material for theatre release.

One of the interesting things about Calcutta is just how different it is from Phantom India. As I remarked in connection with Phantom India:

“Phantom India was very much in the cinéma vérité tradition that first flourished in the 1960s when the appearance of lightweight film cameras made possible the capturing of “real life” activities in the practical affairs of society. But cinéma vérité in its early European manifestation was distinguished from its counterpart in North America, known as “direct cinema”, which tried to capture “objective” reality by attempting to make the cinematographers invisible. Cinéma vérité filmmakers, in contrast to that, tended to acknowledge explicitly the presence of the filmmaker and his or her involvement in the processes under study. This, in my, view is the more realistic approach and is likely to lead to a more accurately captured “reality” on film. Whatever is captured on film is inevitably altered by the presence of the watcher, and in addition the choice of camera angle and the flow of edited images inevitably reflect the ontological context of the watcher. It is best to recognize this state of affairs and work within that context. This is exactly what Malle did in Phantom India. Indeed, Malle’s film is an extended examination of the issue of cinematic objectivity. He is less concerned with the camera’s putative “invisibility” (there are many occasions when his subjects look straight into the camera) than with the inescapable fact that the director, as well as each viewer, brings to the film his or her own intellectual categories by means of which the perceived reality is to be constructed.”

Calcutta is much less personal than Phantom India and strives for a more objective depiction. The contrast is particularly evident in connection with the presentations of Indian religious practices in the two works. In Phantom India, Malle reveals a personal fascination and amazed appreciation at the depths of Indian religiosity. There is almost a sense of envy at the dedication of Indian religious practitioners and the degree to which their beliefs may bring a profound sense of contentment, even under impoverished material conditions. But in Calcutta the bizarre religious practices seemed to be viewed from a remote and uncomprehending distance. There is no attempt to get inside what may motivate these practices. This remoteness carries over to the rest of Calcutta. Everything in the city seems strange, cluttered, exotic, and sometimes grotesque. There is less empathy and sympathy and more critical condemnation of the dysfunctional “system” in place. Nevertheless, this critical remoteness does not mean that Calcutta provides an objective topographic overview of the city. The film is still basically a randomly impressionistic presentation, but with a more dispassionate eye.

Another significant distinction between the two works is the overall narrative flow. In each of the seven hour-long segments of Phantom India, there is a sort of narrative theme that oversees the images. In those films Malle seems to be relating part of his personal journey and encounter with the soul of India. But in Calcutta we see a repeating sequence of critical segments without that sense of personal narrative flow. In fact the segments in Calcutta seem to move almost cyclically through three thematic subjects:

People/Religion. I put people and religion in the same thematic category here, because in this film, both the customs of the people and their religious practices are viewed from the outside as things that are interesting, but somehow odd and unfathomable. The religious practices in this film are just one more strange aspect about the Indian people and do not represent something fundamentally different from other customs (which contrasts with Phantom India, where religion and spirituality was fundamental to the whole work).
Politics. There are some segments that take a critical look at politics in India – from the perspective of Malle’s European leftist/Marxist sympathies. These segments are the most “distant” and represent depicgtions from a critical, Western viewpoint.
The Poor. Calcutta at this time was the epitome of impoverished human suffering, and its horrors were also brought to Western eyes at about the same time by Ved Mehta’s 1970 article in The New Yorker, “City of Dreadful Night” [1], which later appeared as a chapter in his Portrait of India (1970) [2]. Malle dwells here on the wretched conditions of the many people who have come to Calcutta, some of whom were fleeing perhaps worse conditions of starvation in the countryside.

The segments circling though these subjects that are described below do not show much progression, and it almost seems as though they could have been placed in a different order.

People/Religion 1. The first fifteen minutes of the film show the sights and sounds of Calcuttans without any voiceover commentary. The segment starts of with people, mostly men, bathing in ritualistic fashion in the river (presumably the Hooghly). Then there are images of various people observed moving about the city in dense crowds, with a particular attention to interesting faces.
The Poor 1. This segment presents brief coverage of the “Dying Rooms” of Mother Teresa, who was not well-known to the West at that time (she was highlighted in Ved Mehta’s article soon thereafter). Here the “poorest of the poor” are picked up off the street by Mother Teresa’s charitable volunteers and given some care to alleviate their suffering prior to (for most of them) their deaths.
Politics 1. Some local politics are discussed. The 1967 election led to a centre-left/communist government in West Bengal, but it was overthrown by a parliamentary manoeuver, and to restrain dissent the new government declared martial law and forbad people assembling in groups greater than five (an absurd decree for the crowded city of Calcutta). Malle explains that both the two communist factions in India, the left-wing communists (who followed the Soviet line) and the right-wing communists (who didn’t follow the Soviets) refused allegiance to Mao. Only the fledgling Naxalites started in Naxalbari in 1967 followed the Maoist line, which was where Malle’s sympathies lay.
People/Religion 2. There is a coverage of the joyous Festival of Saraswati, the Hindu consort of Brahman and the goddess of knowledge and the arts. Calcuttans spend considerable effort to build and decorate numerous life-size statues of Saraswati, only to throw them all into the river on the final day. One can’t help but reflect on what seems to be the obvious waste of material resources and labour that all this entails.
Politics 2. There is a brief depiction here of the Westernized rich, who are cut off from Indian traditions and ape Western practices and lifestyles. Malle repeats the widely-held view of many Indians concerning the British plunder of India:
“The British East India Company systematically exploited and exhausted the riches of Bengal, taking considerable capital back to England. This influx of money allowed the Industrial Revolution and English capitalism to get underway.”
The Poor 2. Before independence, Calcutta was the processing centre for jute fields that were later partitioned off into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). To replace the jute fields, the Indian government used land in West Bengal normally used for food production, leading to severe food shortages in the region and semi-starvation.
People/Religion 3. Calcutta was home to some 50,000 Chinese immigrants, and this section shows some of them celebrating the Chinese New Year. Today, though, the ethnic Chinese population is probably only around 2,000. This is followed by discussion of the Sadhus (these were also discussed in Phantom India), who have renounced all material amenities to practice their lone, individual spiritual paths. Despite the poverty in India, the Sadhus are respected and offered alms by even the poor people. Finally, this section shows a Hindu burial.
“For the Hindu, death is not a dramatic event. It is neither an end not a deliverance . . . . life is only a stage, a passage, a brief moment in a cosmic cycle.”
The Poor 3. There is further coverage of the massive, abject hutments of Calcutta where squatters live on privately-held land. This is followed by shots of unskilled labourers and emaciated pedicab drivers struggling to pedal about their heavy loads. As always, Malle is fascinated by the seemingly pointless, menial tasks of labourers who often appear to be doing nothing more than moving usseless objects or paper around. But after all, are most of us not the same? Only we are just better paid for out seemingly nonsensical tasks.
People/Religion 4. This section covers a middle-class wedding, whose ceremonies appear ornately weird and laborious to the participants. But the large feast provided the groom’s parents is welcomed by the guests. This section also depicts a musical conservatory for sarod-playing that is run by Aashish Khan (son of master Ali Akbar Khan). Many of the students studied the sarod there for years without plans for professional play, just for their personal satisfaction.
Politics 3. Students rebel when the University is closed by the state governor. Many of the students evidently advocate the idea of an armed peasant revolt in the style of the Vietnamese and Maoists. The ensuing student riot, however, is forcefully broken up by police.
The Poor 4. Here there is a coverage of the awful conditions of the lepers in Calcutta, which at that time numbered around 75,000. Since that time, however, the treatment of leprosy has been one of India's relative success stories, and the number of lepers has been greatly reduced in the country: there are now less than 5% as many cases as there were then.
People/Religion 5. Another Sadhus is shown. This one took up a vow seven years earlier never again to sit or lie down. He is shown surrounded by his disciples who attempt to tend to and alleviate his physical pains. This is followed by a series of shots covering street mountebanks, musicians, and further opaque religious ceremonies.
The Poor 5. Here there is extensive coverage of the slums of Howrah, a southern industrial sector of the Calcutta conurbation. Forty percent of Calcuttans were said by Malle to be living in “subhuman conditions”, and this section depicts the squalor and filth of their habitations. There is also coverage of Tamil immigrants from southern India, who don’t speak the local Bengali and are forced to live in squatter settlements outside the city in equally “inhuman” conditions.

At the end of this cyclical coverage of Calcutta, one is left with a feeling of the crowded, cacophonous, almost lurid conditions of life in Calcutta. Since Calcutta was not an ancient Indian city, but was created as a service centre for British imperial interests, Malle is evidently castigating the West for creating these monstrous, inhuman conditions and not rectifying the faults that linger on. This is a fairly grim viewpoint, seen by an outsider, and it is one that might not be shared by Indians aware of the rich Bengali traditions and culture. Still, the film is a fascinating record, because Malle was one of the first people to get out on the streets and make movies about life as it existed there. He had amazing access to a wide spectrum of city life in Calcutta, and the images are not staged or faked. Malle’s interesting kaleidoscopic perspective is still available on film, as it was forty years ago, for anyone to see and make of it what he or she will. For Malle, and for Mehta and Kipling, too, Calcutta may have been “the city of dreadful night”. Whatever perspective one takes, though, we are still trying to understand and learn, as Malle was, from what seems to be an alluring phantom.

Notes:

Mehta, Ved, "Profiles: City of Dreadful Night." The New Yorker, 21 March 1970.
Mehta, Ved, Portrait of India, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.

"The King’s Speech" - Tom Hooper (2010)

2011-02-19T16:35:00.013+13:00

The King’s Speech (2010) tells the story of Prince Albert, the Duke of York and the future King George VI of England, and how he struggled to overcome his lifelong speech impediment during the period leading up to and just after his assumption of the crown. The film, directed by Tom Hooper, has been one of the most lauded productions of the year, having been nominated for fourteen BAFTA awards, twelve Academy Awards (Oscars), and having received widespread acclaim from the critics and the public. In the face of such overwhelming approval, I could perhaps remain silent, but there may be some people out there who are sympathetic to some of the misgivings I have about the film.

The story concentrates on Albert’s continuing distress concerning his pronounced stammer and the lengthy working relationship he had with an eccentric speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who was engaged to help him with his disorder. The film concludes in a triumphant, feel-good manner in 1939 when Albert, now King George VI, manages successfully to deliver a radio speech to the country when war was declared with Germany. Although the film begins in 1925 with Albert delivering a brief, but disturbingly stuttering, address at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium, most of the film’s action concentrates on the five-year period between 1934 and 1939.

What makes the film interesting as a narrative are the three parallel and interwoven narrative threads that run through the film.

The Speech Therapy. The main thread is the Albert’s personal struggle to overcome his stammer and the mortification that it induced. In a sense this thread is a metaphor for Albert’s development into a person fit to rule an empire.
Historical Developments. There were interesting developments during this five-year period, including the death of Albert’s father (King George V), the ascension to the throne and then abdication of Albert’s older brother (King Edward VIII and after abdication, the Duke of Windsor), and the threatening rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.
Relationship with Logue. A third narrative thread is the developing relationship between Albert and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue. Logue was a commoner from Australia, and the evident contrast between the down-to-earth Aussie bloke and his royal patron and their ensuing gradual rapport elevates the Logue character to a lead role.

This adds up to interesting material, and the three narrative threads have considerable potential to reflect upon and amplify each other. But the film falls short of greatness due to a number of drawbacks. I will briefly list them by category.

1. Film Narrative. Outstanding films are those that tell a compelling story using the visual dynamics of cinema. There is considerable potential with this material, but the realization here comes up short. As the narrative threads #2 (Historical Developments) and #3 (Relationship with Logue) meander along, they don’t have the dramatic arcs or developments that make them interesting stories on their own. Of course the Historical Developments thread culminates in a declaration of War, but Albert’s role in those events is on the sideline, and the film counts on the viewer’s external knowledge to carry that thread along. The Relationship with Logue thread is vague throughout. We never really get a feeling for what each thinks of the other, or how that thinking evolves – although they eventually come to some sort of unspoken accommodation. This leaves only thread #1, the Speech Therapy thread, as the driving narrative. This one also doesn’t work well, because whenever the film returns to it, there is a session in which significant progress concerning Albert’s stuttering appears to have been made. Yet on each successive return to this thread, we are back to square one, with Albert stammering worse than ever. Although the dramatists may have felt compelled to evince some progress with each session, these repetitive sequences are delusive and ultimately frustrating. In addition, this thread carries the suggestion that the cause of Albert’s problems was due to psychological traumas he experienced as a child, but this idea is neither developed nor resolved. At the end the film winds up with its triumphant radio speech, which presumptively concludes and resolves all three threads in some sort of victorious mood, but the narrative buildup to that finale has been ineffective.

2. Character Development.
The characterisations of most of the people around Albert are all wooden stereotypes of upperclass manners. Although this may appeal to some audiences fascinated with the Upstairs, Downstairs contrasts in British society, the exaggerated postures in this film, particularly that of Derek Jacobi as the Archbishop of Canterbury, are severe. One might argue that, in real life, members of the British upperclass are playing stereotypical roles, so such dramas are only reflecting reality. But the characterisations here are not even that true to life. In addition the Aussie-English contrast between Logue and Albert appears to be forced to the point that the film is sometimes described as a comedy. Lionel Logue’s son, for example, has stated that his father never swore in front of Albert and never called him , “Bertie”.
The role of Lionel Logue, though, is an important one with considerable screen time devoted to it, but it is never really developed into a meaningful character. It is difficult to develop a mental picture of what is going on in his mind.
The portrayal of Wallis Simpson (later, the Duchess of Windsor), whose affair with Edward VIII led to his abdication, is that of a manipulative, poisonous viper. In fact there are two conflicting narratives about Ms. Simpson’s affair in popular culture: either it is a story of romantic love that sacrifices all, or it is a story of a Jezebel-like she-devil who threatened the British crown. American portrayals of her often follow the former narrative outline, while British portrayals usually choose the latter, as did The King’s Speech.
3. Historical Accuracy. Taking liberties with some historical details is often necessitated to simplify and condense a story into a coherent two-hour vehicle. But such liberties need to be around the edges. In this case, it seems, c ompromises with historical veracity may have been made in connection with core issues of the story.
The film celebrates the British war effort and resolute British opposition to the Nazis, with the presumption that George VI (Albert) embodied this attitude. But commentators have argued that Albert was pro-appeasement.
Albert apparently hired Logue in 1926 and demonstrated progress in his speech within months, whereas the film depicts Logue being hired around 1934, with speaking progress taking a much longer period. In addition, some people have argued that Albert’s stammer is greatly exaggerated in the film and that Albert’s stuttering in real life was much milder.
The film suggests that Winston Churchill was in favour of Edward’s abdication, but commentators have maintained that Churchill urged Edward not to abdicate.
4. Cinematography.
The extreme wide-angle, almost fish-eye lens, photography used in connection with Albert’s sessions is disconcerting and renders these scenes unrealistic. This was probably done to make the figures around Albert imposing and threatening (suggesting the psychological cause of Albert’s problem, which is never really developed), but instead the technique merely makes the scenes more like slapstick comedy.
The many full-face, backward-moving tracking shots are laborious and not visually motivated – and only contribute to further claustrophobia.
5. Music.
The musical background score is far too intrusive for this sort of story. In particular, the use of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony during the final radio speech is ponderous and heavy-handed. Its use is also a bit curious for a speech aimed at marshalling British resolve to fight Germany.

On the positive side, I would have to say that Colin Firth does a good job under the circumstances in his role as Albert. I find it hard to believe that Albert was such a conflicted, anguished personality, but Firth does appear convincing. In addition, Helena Bonham Carter, as Albert’s wife, Elizabeth, has little to do in the story, but she adds a convincing and sympathetic element to the domestic surroundings. Her mere presence makes Albert a more sympathetic character.

Overall and from my perspective, though, The King’s Speech is a misleading, confused, and disappointing work. It has a few good moments, but not enough of them.

“Earthlings” - Shaun Monson (2005)

2011-02-14T00:32:00.008+13:00

Earthlings (2005) is a documentary film by Shaun Monson that asks us to think authentically about who we really are. It forcefully, sometimes disturbingly, reminds us of an essential character of our consciousness, something about ourselves that our culture often dismisses: compassion and empathy. Along the way it shows and tells some inconvenient truths that most of us (including Al Gore) would probably prefer to avoid. Though we sometimes feel compassion and empathy towards other human beings, we try to run away from the natural empathy we should feel towards other beings on the planet, other earthlings. This is essentially a mass hypocrisy that we mindlessly accept. Earthlings shows us what is right there to see, if we would only look directly and honestly.

As a production, Monson’s Earthlings is a meticulously crafted work, featuring narration by Joaquin Phoenix, a moodily effective musical score by Moby, and rare footage from inside the animal factory farming industry that must have been difficult to acquire. But due to some of the film’s unsettling images and the fact that the film is partially an exposé of barbarous practices across various sectors of society (particularly the meat and dairy industry), Monson has faced difficulties gaining mainstream distribution for the film. But movies should be more than just escapist entertainment. This film has a thought-provoking social significance, and I urge readers to seek it out (you can get it here) and watch it.

To a certain extent Earthlings can be considered to be a visual companion of Will Tuttle’s The World Peace Diet (2005). Although the two works make no reference to each other, they share the common vision that we must regain our feelings of empathy towards other earthlings if our human civilization is to survive. They both make the point that, generally, no matter how different people may seem to be, they all share some basic feelings:

a desire for companionship,
a chance to live a normal life,
freedom from pain and violent death

And all people recognize these feelings in other members in their immediate social group and feel empathy for them. In addition we all know that there are “uncivilized” people (in our modern sense) who fail to extend that empathy towards members of other societies, other races, or the opposite gender, and we appropriately condemn them as racists or sexists. Such narrow-minded people view others towards whom they are prejudiced as mere objects, unworthy of consideration as bona fide human beings.

But there is another mode of prejudicial narrow-mindedness, called “speciesi sm” that is less commonly recognized. Speciesists are people who fail to extend empathy towards animals, even though animals, too, are clearly sentient, sensitive creatures who have the same basic desires for companionship, a chance to live a normal life, and freedom from pain. Although we typically condemn those who are racists and sexists, the overwhelming majority of us are guilty of speciesism.

Early on, Earthlings presents striking images of Nazi genocidal atrocities towards Jews, which elicit a curious cognitive dissonance in the viewer’s mind – certainly the Jews were cruelly “treated like animals”, but on this occasion we are moved to ask a different question: should even animals be treated this way? Or did Nazi the treatment of Jews stem, in fact, from the socially accepted reduction of animals to mere objects? The rest of Earthlings goes on to discuss the extent of modern society’s pervasive speciesism successively covering five successive areas:

Pets
Food
Clothes
Entertainment
Science

The ordering of this sequence is cunning and effective, and it helps Monson make his case about the endemic nature of speciesism in our society.

1. Pets
Certainly the subject of pets should be at least one category where animals are well-treated and given love and affection, no? Yet even in this most benign category, people often prove to be careless and unfeeling towards the animals they claim to love. Although people enjoy the companionship of dogs and cats, they often treat them as toys or playthings and fail to look after them. Every year there are about 25 million of them are left as strays on the streets, and 9 million eventually die there. Another 16 million are euthanized per year by civic authorities and animal shelters. Interestingly, the film claims that 50% of animals that are brought to shelters have been taken there by their caretakers.

2. Food
The next topic is at the opposite end of the spectrum. These creatures who, like all animals, want to live and be free from pain are slaughtered and eaten by us on a massive scale. Although most of us eat animals for food, we studiously avoid thinking about what that means – that a sentient being has been slaughtered for our pleasure. The meat that we find on our plates has been abstracted away from the living being that it once embodied, and there seems to be a collective conspiracy to keep that thought out of mind: “don’t spoil my dinner by talking about it,” people typically say. But if you watch the images in this section of the film, you cannot ignore seeing the obvious fact that these fellow earthlings share a basic commonality with us: they do feel pain and they struggle to stay alive. Nevertheless, we have created a massive and mechanized food industry whose operations are generally shielded from the public eye. The mass slaughter of animals is relentless – 10 billion per year in the US (~19,000 per minute). Earthlings shows how the often terrorized animals are ruthlessly transported and then some of the operations of branding, dehorning, and slaughter, all of which is done without anesthetics. The slaughter may involve the hurried and often haphazard use of the “humane” bolt guns, but they all end up with live animals having their throats slit so that their still-beating hearts can pump out much of their blood to make their meat more palatable for human consumption.

The cruel excesses of the meat industry are gruesomely detailed; and although the viewer may already have a dim inkling of what generally goes on inside the slaughterhouses, the specifics shown here must be brought to the attention of everyone. There are some people, however, who will concede the excesses of the slaughterhouse, but who hold onto the belief that at least the dairy industry is less cruel to the animals. However, as Tuttle points out, in some ways dairy farming is even more cruel than meat farming, because the animals “are severely abused for longer periods and inevitably slaughtered when their productivity declines.” Consider the grim fate of newborn calf when a dairy cow gives birth. There are four horrific paths it could take:

If female, it might be raised as another dairy cow. Then, like its mother, it will be dehorned and then impregnated within its first year (normal, natural calves would not be ready to mother until 3-5 years of age), fed hormones and milked by machines incessantly, producing 4-6 times as much milk as normal cows would. It will from then on be kept in the unnatural state of both lactating and newly pregnant for several years until it finally collapses from exhaustion at the age of about 4 (a cow’s natural life expectancy is about 20-25 years). Then it will be taken to the slaughterhouse.
Or the calf might be killed immediately after birth. The rennet in its stomach will be used for cheese production. Its tender skin can be used for expensive leather, and its body will be ground up for animal feed.
Or it might be used for veal. In this case it is forced to live in a tiny veal crate so that it cannot move and develop muscles. This makes the veal meat more tender. The calves are fed an iron-deficient diet (to give the meat a lighter, more appealing look) and denied bedding, water, and light during their miserable four-month existence prior to the slaughterhouse.
Or, if male, the calf might be lucky enough to be raised for beef meat. Then it will be quickly castrated (without anesthetics), branded, and dehorned. After 1-1½ years of grazing, it will be sent to a feedlot to be unnaturally fattened with steroids and other chemicals for a few months prior to the trip to the slaughterhouse.

It seems likely that the conditions of almost all factory-farmed animals face are so excruciating that the animals must inevitably be driven mad. This is clearly documented with the next segment depicting what happens in the pig farming industry. The pigs are subjected to tail docking, ear clipping, and teeth removal in order to lessen the damage the occurs when the driven-mad animals turn to cannibalism in their crowded pens. The assembly-line nature of pig slaughtering, by the way, is so hasty that a certain fraction of the pigs are not even dead yet when they are next boiled for hair removal.

The situation is no different for the poultry industry, which has become an increasingly significant proportion of the Western diet – Americans consume as many chickens per day now as they did in one year back in 1930. In order to reduce the effects of cannibalism that inevitably arises from their dreadful living conditions, the chickens are routinely debeaked, a painful procedure that sometimes kills them.

Seafood is covered next, and again, the viewer is reminded that fish, like other earthlings, have sophisticated nervous systems that indicate they are sensitive creatures who feel pain and struggle to survive. Dolphins and whales are known to be particularly intelligent, social creatures, and the story of their harvesting and slaughter, which is the focus of the recent excellent feature The Cove (2009), is also covered.

3. Clothing
The value of placing the subject of food relatively early in Monson’s account is that the disturbing images of the slaughterhouse cast a dark shadow over the rest of the tale. The coverage now turns to clothing, and the reminder that leather is “dead flesh” is all we need to remember some of the earlier sequences. Much of the world’s demand for leather comes from the US, the UK, and Germany; and much of the leather for these markets come from a different source than the cows we eat – India. In that country cows are venerated by Hindus and protected by law. But in sectors of the economy rife with corruption, the cows are apparently sold to leather merchants by poor Indian farmers who have been wrongly assured that their cattle will be able to live out their natural lives. Coverage in this section also includes the appalling conditions of fur farms, as well as the information that over 100 million wild animals are yearly murdered for their pelts (25 million in the US).

4. Entertainment
The next topic is revealing, because it reminds us that our culture has so accustomed us to animal mistreatment that we don’t see that animal entertainment is – just the grotesque manipulation of innocent animals as objects for our amusement. It was Mark Twain who said that man “ is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.” The topics depicted move from rodeos, roping, racing (mostly dog and horse), state fairs, circuses, zoos, bull fighting, and, of course, fishing and hunting for “sport”. In the section on circuses, we are reminded that the animals forced to perform actions unnatural to their nature (but amusing to humans) do so only because dominance, fear, and pain are integral parts of the training process. When we visit zoos, it is to see a freak show; it is impossible to get any understanding of the nature of those other living beings animals or how they would live in the surroundings in which they naturally evolved.

As for the pleasure of hunting, there could be much said, and the film offers a few telling images. But to add even more perspective, I ask you to consider just what happens in one relatively benign state of the US, Wisconsin: during that state’s brief gun-hunting season their hunters kill (“harvest”) over 200,000 deer per year. Even more despicable is the state’s “Youth Deer Hunt” for 10-15-year-olds. I hope you agree that we need to raise our youths to have an entirely different view of wildlife and the world we live in.

5. Science
Finally, the discussion turns to vivisection, or “animal experimentation”, an attempt of reductionist science to learn more about potential health effects on humans by torturing and maiming animals. There are various estimates as to how many animals are subjected to these procedures, but the numbers could be as high as 100 million per year. There is no evidence that these procedures have led to significant scientific discoveries.

In the end it comes down to what I said at the beginning: it is a matter of who we really are, who we want to be. Are we authentically able to recognize our inborn feelings of empathy? We actually recognize pain in all other beings, but we pretend that we don’t see it. The word “speciesism” may sound somewhat artificial, but perhaps we should let Richard Ryder, who coined the term, expand upon it:

“[Speciesism is] like racism or sexism - a prejudice based upon morally irrelevant physical differences. Since Darwin we have known we are human animals related to all the other animals through evolution; how, then, can we justify our almost total oppression of all the other species? All animal species can suffer pain and distress. Animals scream and writhe like us; their nervous systems are similar and contain the same biochemicals that we know are associated with the experience of pain in ourselves.”

In many ways the film Earthlings complements another film that counsels us to avoid the consumption of animal flesh, Mike Anderson’s excellent, Eating (2009). For its part, Eating speaks to our selfish concerns about our own welfare, including both our personal health and the sustainability of our environment. The argument makes sense from a purely utilitarian perspective, where empathy plays no part. Earthlings, on the other hand, speaks to our innate sense of compassion. Something that is there inside all of use, but needs a reawakening.

Early on in the film, there is quotation from Henry Beston’s The Outermost House:

“Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

We must make the connection.

“Nuclear Tipping Point” - Ben Goddard (2010)

2011-01-19T15:34:00.012+13:00

On January 4th, 2007, the Wall Street Journal featured a brief article by four formerly senior US military strategists that called for a global commitment to eradicate nuclear weapons. What made the article, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons”, significant above and beyond the usual appeals for nuclear disarmament was the prominence of its four authors, who for decades had been at the very top of the US military strategy decision-making hierarchy:

George Schultz (US Secretary of State, 1982-89)
William Perry (US Secretary of Defense, 1993-97)
Henry Kissinger (US National Security Advisor, 1969-74, US Secretary of State, 1973-77)
Sam Nunn (US Senator, 1972-1997, Chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, 1987-95)

Nuclear Tipping Point (2010) is a documentary film written and directed by Ben Goddard that elaborates on the issues raised in that WSJ article and discusses the specific proposals to eliminate nuclear weapons put forth by the four principals. Although I have some reservations about the film as it is presented, let me affirm at the outset that the overall issues raised here are so important that they demand immediate action and should be brought to everyone’s attention. While the common currency these days may be gloom about the effects of global warming, people seem to have lost sight of an even more grim vision that permeated the Cold War of the past few decades: the near-expectation of impending nuclear annihilation. Nuclear Tipping Point reminds us of that horrific possibility by bringing to attention a few dismaying facts about nuclear weapons that persist to this day.

Nuclear Warheads. There are still tens of thousands (~22,000) of nuclear warheads today that are held by the nine current nuclear states (Russia, United States, France, China, United Kingdom, Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea). While this is perhaps less than a third of the number of nuclear weapons, worldwide, at their peak in the 1980s, it is still enough to eradicate m0st of life on this planet.
Launch on Warning and MAD. Because a nuclear-armed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) would take at most 30 minutes to reach its target, the US and Russia have implemented “launch on warning” tactics. This is based on the idea that a country under the threat of a nuclear strike has only minutes to launch its own nuclear counterattack before its own strike capabilities might be wiped out. The launch-on-warning strategy thus entails launching a massive retaliatory nuclear strike immediately on the warning of an enemy strike. Given such severe time constraints, there have always been unanswered questions concerning who in the command chain could authorize a massive nuclear counterstrike. Such consideration have led to the strategy of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD), which posits that the only defense against a nuclear threat to is to guarantee mutual annihilation of the two adversaries. This would supposedly make a nuclear strike “unthinkable”. Frighteningly, the MAD nuclear strategy (in its various forms) has been the received doctrine and has presumably been operational over much of the Cold War.
Mistakes Happen. The precarious standoff of MAD is dependent on mistakes not happening, but mistakes have happened in the past. Some of the principals in the film point out that false nuclear attacks were reported and that US B-52 bombers were sometimes mistakenly flown across the US with armed nuclear weapons. We don’t know how many of these potentially catastrophic mistakes have occurred, but Henry Kissinger reports that he knows of perhaps five, even under stringent US military fail-safe operations. There is no reason to assume that Russia and the other nuclear powers have not had similar close-calls.
Terrorism and a Nuclear Black Market. Of course for MAD to function, the two adversaries must act in their rational, material self-interests. This can not be presumed in the case of terrorists willing to carry out suicidal missions. Furthermore the existence of routine, open shipping of enriched, reprocessed nuclear materials has led naturally to a nuclear black market. It has been difficult to police and throttle this nuclear underworld (think of A. Q. Khan’s clandestine network), which means that nuclear materials are increasingly available to terrorist organizations and rogue governments bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.

In the face of this threatening landscape, Schultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn presented in their 2007 article an outline for what steps to take:

Changing the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon.
Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.
Eliminating short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward-deployed.
Initiating a bipartisan process with the Senate, including understandings to increase confidence and provide for periodic review, to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances and working to secure ratification by other key states.
Providing the highest possible standards of security for all stocks of weapons, weapons-usable plutonium, and highly enriched uranium everywhere in the world.
Getting control of the uranium enrichment process, combined with the guarantee that uranium for nuclear power reactors could be obtained at a reasonable price, first from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and then from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or other controlled international reserves. It will also be necessary to deal with proliferation issues presented by spent fuel from reactors producing electricity.
Halting the production of fissile material for weapons globally, phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce, and removing weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world and rendering the materials safe.
Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers. Achieving the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons will also require effective measures to impede or counter any nuclear-related conduct that is potentially threatening to the security of any state or peoples.

The last bullet item has since been edited and expanded as follows:

Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers.
Ensuring that we have effective means to verify compliance with nuclear commitments and to counter nuclear-related conduct that is potentially threatening to the security for any state or peoples.
Intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons to turn the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise.

Further discussion of these goals, as well as associated activities in their pursuit, is provided at the group’s Web site, The Nuclear Security Project, and a free DVD of the film can be ordered from the film’s Web site.

Despite its worthy objectives, however, the Nuclear Tipping Point suffers from some limitations. One problem is the production, itself. Goddard’s film is mostly a sequence of talking heads – primarily Schultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn, but also with some other figures, including an introduction from former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. None of these are riveting speakers (three of them are octogenarians), and weaving their testimony together falls short of a compelling narrative. This interview material is interspersed with largely meaningless stock footage of weapons systems, or the smiling faces of cherubic foreign children, that appear to have little semantic import. Moreover the invocation of “tipping point” in the title may be trendy, but it is off target. Nowhere over the course of the film does the theme of a tipping point emerge. In fact the world has not just suddenly arrived at a critical tipping point that could tilt towards a nuclear disaster – on the contrary, we have been on the edge of disaster for more than fifty years. Also, the narration voiceover provided by Michael Douglas has an nervous, edgy, and insistent tone that wears on the viewer after awhile. It would have been better to have a more calm, authoritative narrative voice appropriate for the gravity of the situation. Thus on purely cinematic terms, the presentation Nuclear Tipping Point is pedestrian, and the documentary thesis is repititious and lacks any real narrative development.

Another area of concern is the collective perspective of the four principals. Although they ostensibly represent a politically bipartisan group (since Kissinger and Schultz were officials in Republican administrations, while Perry was an official in a Democratic administration and Nunn was a Democratic senator), they were all Cold War Warriors and on the hawkish side of the political spectrum. Both Schultz and Perry, for example, are Fellows of the Hoover Institution, a conservative thinktank associated with the Republican Party. All of them, as far as I can see, believed in the supposed effectiveness of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), even though that policy was a reckless and dangerous strategy that we have been lucky, so far, to survive. MAD was a theoretical game-theory notion that could not realistically be expected to operate flawlessly in the real world, where mistakes and irrational decision-making appear from time to time. Admittedly, the four principals agree that the current climate of suicidal terrorism renders MAD ineffective, but if these people at one time believed in MAD, can we trust them to make wise decisions now? After all, suicidal and apocalypse-inducing behaviour is not a recent invention, and taking account for it was necessary during the Cold War, too.

Furthermore, George Schultz repeats the old mantra that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs effectively ended the War in the Pacific and ultimately saved lives. This I consider to be a falsehood, and I invite readers to consult Ward Wilson’s Rethinking Nuclear Weapons to read an emphatic debunking of that myth. Schultz (and presumably the others, too) is a man who still retains some belief in the efficacy of nuclear weapons. But in fact the possession of nuclear weapons is not an asset, but only a detriment to national safety, because such a condition only makes that country a target for a nuclear attack from other powers. And as a military instrument, the indiscriminate destructiveness of nuclear weapons is only effective for mass annihilation of human life and not for the dismantling of military targets. In my view the present nuclear arsenals around the world do not serve any useful purpose, other than for hopefully attracting some sort of misguided political prestige (again, consult Ward Wilson’s writings on this score).

An additional consideration is that Nuclear Tipping Point also seems to reflect general approval for the expansion of nuclear utility power generation, which is something that I believe is also problematical. The continued growth and deployment of nuclear power generation only worsens the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation and has four other associated difficulties:

Requires High Security. Nuclear power installations require significant security mechanisms and procedures in order to insulate them from sabotage. These procedures are not conducive to an open and free society.
Contributes to Industry Concentration. Nuclear power is based on a few, high technology installations generating power in a handful of locations, which reinforces industry concentration into the hands of a few players. It is better, other things being equal, to invest in technologies that are widely distributed and localized, an inherently more fail-safe approach that avoids the single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities of concentrated industries. Moreover such centralized foci of control are difficult to manage politically and generally contribute to highly uneven wealth distribution. In addition the deployment of nuclear energy installations entails dependency on remote control institutions for fuel reprocessing which may be subject to political vicissitudes outside local influence.
Not Economical. Nuclear power has never been shown to be economically competitive compared to other energy-producing technologies when all costs (such as indemnity and waste processing, which are often covered by governments) are considered. There is reason to believe that alternative technologies, such as coal conversion, sea current turbines, wind turbines, solar power, etc., will always remain economically preferable.
Safety.

Nuclear power plants are complex and can suffer from catastrophic breakdowns. Should an accident occur, then the local population near a plant must suffer a disproportionately high level of damage and injury compared to the overall population.
There are also still-disputed claims that low-level background radiation from nuclear power plants has adverse long-term health consequences. Once a heavy investment is made in nuclear technology, the pressure from existing economic stakeholders tends to dismiss negative reports on nuclear power safety.
The problem of what to do with spent fuel has never been adequately addressed and has largely been underwritten by military programs that already must deal with this problem as an unavoidable necessity.

Thus my reservations about the fundamental message of Nuclear Tipping Point are not concerned with the basic opposition of the four principals to nuclear weapons, but whether they are opposed enough! It is a worry that the four principals accept that it may take at least a generation before we can achieve the goal of a world free from nuclear weapons. Is this time frame acceptable? Can we afford such a leisurely approach? I think not. In fact a better, more thoughtful proposal for the elimination of nuclear weapons is expressed in Toward True Security, published by the Union of Concerned Scientists (2008).

On the other hand, it is necessary to appreciate what has been accomplished by the initiative documented in Nuclear Tipping Point. The four principals – Schultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn – even from their military-tactics-dominated perspective, have indeed issued a call for a world free of nuclear weapons. That in itself is a significant step, because it is so superior to the proposals from other right-wing commentators who have called for nuclear “damage limitation” – a dangerous proposition that attempts to maintain nuclear weapons as a military instrument (c.f. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ document, “Debunking the Damage Limitation Strategy”, 2008). Schultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn hopefully have the stature and prestige to sway the thinking of the military elite away from such errancy and make a real difference. Thus their voices, and this film, could ultimately make a powerful contribution towards a safer world, free from the threat of nuclear devastation. So go ahead; order a free copy of this film and discuss it with others.

Roberto Rossellini

2010-11-14T18:14:00.002+13:00

About Roberto Rossellini:

Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: Open City and Paisan

Films of Roberto Rossellini:

The Flowers of Saint Francis (Francesco Guillare di Dio) - Roberto Rossellini (1950)

"The Flowers of Saint Francis - Roberto Rossellini (1950)

2010-11-14T17:55:00.012+13:00

Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis (Francesco Guillare di Dio, translation: “Francesco, God’s Fool”, 1950) bewildered critics when it came out, since it appeared to be a strange amalgam of spirituality and realism. As a consequence the film was a critical and commercial failure, even though Rossellini later remarked that it remained his personal favourite. Rossellini had become an international star director when he effectively launched the Italian Neorealist movement with his postwar trilogy, Rome, Open City (Roma Città Aperta, 1945), Paisan (Paisà, 1946), and Germany Year Zero (Germania Anno Zero, 1948). But thereafter he was charged with having strayed from the Neorealist aesthetic, and The Flowers of Saint Francis was dismissed as an intellectually and aesthetically confused offering. Was slapstick the appropriate genre for such an enlightened spirit as Saint Francis? Of course, there were others, including eminent film directors, who embraced the film as a work of genius. For them, Rossellini’s film was not an exalted evocation of the other world, but instead uniquely grounded Saint Francis’s humanity in everyday human existence.

As usual with Rossellini, the acting was performed by nonprofessionals drawn from the social milieu of the story. In this case monks from the Nocere Inferiore Monastery played the roles of Francis and his friars. The script, co-written by Rossellini and Federico Fellini, was episodic in structure, which for Rossellini was a return to the narrative format of his greatest successes, Rome, Open City and Paisà. It covers nine episodes that have been drawn from the 14th century works, Little Flowers of St. Francis (I Fioretti Di San Francesco) and The Life of Brother Juniper (La Vita di Frate Ginepro) that compiled tales about Saint Francis and his followers that had been passed around in the years following his death. Although the nine episodes, or “chapters”, are all supposed to take place in the two years following the endorsement of his order in 1210 by Pope Innocent III, there are some anachronisms here. Since Francis had only taken up his spiritual vocation in 1209, the film begins at an early stage of the Franciscan movement, when Francis had only eleven followers.

Francis and his followers return in the rain to a humble hut they had just constructed, only to learn that the small shelter is now claimed by a peasant and his donkey. Rather than contest this usurpation, Francis urges his follows to relent and to rejoice that they have finally done something useful in God’s world. The friars then go on to construct a small chapel, Saint Mary of the Angels. Also in this episode, one of the friars, Brother Juniper, returns to the chapel half-naked, because he had given away his tunic to a beggar. Francis gently admonishes him for his naive generosity and instructs him to remain behind at their chapel thereafter to prepare meals for the other friars to eat when they return from preaching.
A simple-minded old peasant, Giovanni, comes to Francis and joins the brotherhood.
A nun from a nearby monastery and an ardent follower of Francis’s mission, Clare (Chiara Offreduccio, who would later founded a monastic order for women and is now known as Saint Clare of Assisi), comes to visit Francis and joins the friars in a dinner.
Seeking to provide an ailing brother with his favourite pig’s foot stew, Brother Juniper goes out in the woods and thoughtlessly cuts off the foot of a wandering pig that he finds.
While praying one evening in the woods, Francis encounters a leper and is overcome with compassion. Despite the leper’s efforts to keep his distance, Francis embraces him.
Brother Juniper, seeking to free up time from his cooking duties so that he can join in the preaching, cooks the entire two-weeks worth of food that the group has in store. Again the tolerant Francis only smiles and grants Juniper the desired permission to preach.
Now preaching in the world, Brother Juniper runs across rowdy warlord gang, whose leader suspects him of being an assassin and orders him to be executed. But Juniper’s meekness and humility dumbfounds his captor and moves the “tyrant” to release him and abandon his current military siege.
Francis and Brother Leon discuss what is perfect happiness, with Francis dismissing a number of suggested scenarios as not achieving the desired perfection. Then they seek alms in the name of Jesus at a residence and are rewarded with a sound beating by the owner, at which point Francis proclaims that this kind of suffering for God is exactly what constitutes perfect happiness.
Before sending the brothers separately out into the world to teach, Francis has them spin around until they are dizzy and fall to the ground. The individual directions they now face will be where God wants them to head out to preach.

There is little narrative progression in The Flowers of Saint Francis, and the nine episodes can collectively be considered to paint a psychological portrait of Francis and his nascent group. Each of the episodes seem to highlight the almost absurd gaiety of the Franciscans in the context of their miserable poverty. They are all presented as holy fools wallowing joyously in the mud. This sharply contrasts with typical films about religious figures, who are typically presented as (eventually) exalted souls that soar far above us ordinary sorts. Here in this film, Francis and the brothers are so ordinary, and their circumstances are so confined and squalid, that we find it hard to believe that this represents the origins of a holy order. And yet Rossellini’s neorealist aesthetics makes these figures come alive as real, believable people.

I have remarked on Rossellini’s neorealist aesthetics before, in “Aesthetics of Two Neorealist Films: Open City and Paisan”. There is an emphasis on direct, sometimes melodramatic action and, at the same time, the maintenance of a somewhat detached perspective on the part of the camera (the narrative’s “silent witness”) that generates a sense of newsreel immediacy. This is enhanced by the naturalness of his nonprofessional actors that evokes a realistic social milieu. It is an evocation of realism in our subjective consciousness, rather than a true representation of what actually happened. As an example criticism of the film illustrates the distinctions concerning what is true “realism”: some critics complained that the friars in Rossellini’s film looked too comfortable and well-fed for what must have been emaciated 13th century religious mendicants living in extreme poverty. They complained that Rosellini’s friars were not realistic, despite the fact that Rossellini had engaged real Franciscan monks to play the roles. Rossellini, the humanist, was seeking realism in a different dimension than the purely physical and external.

Moreover, true realism of any sort seems to have been entirely abandoned in episode 7, which features the one professional actor in the film, Aldo Fabrizi, whose music-hall hamming as the “tyrant”, Nicolaio, features bug-eyed histrionics that belong more in slapstick comedy. These comedic effects not only reduce our feelings about the authenticity of the scene, they also threaten to make the band of brothers appear ludicrous and undermine our overall appreciation of Saint Francis, himself. In particular, those parts of the film featuring Juniper (Ginepro) and Giovanni (episodes 2, 4, 6, & 7) focus on two disciples who seem not to have fully embraced a life of “Sufic” compassion towards others. Giovanni is innocent, but seems to be more of an imitator of outward behaviour, than someone who had fully digested the message of compassion. Juniper is both innocent and selfless, but his literal-minded adherence to Francis’s rules lacks real comprehension and is ultimately destructive. His hacking off of the pig’s foot (which some people apparently regard as funny) is a repugnant example of how mindless rule-following, without any deeper understanding, can be ruinous to one’s fellow beings. All we can say is that his actions remind us that there is no inherent virtue in innocence.

Nevertheless, the spiritual limitations of Juniper and Giovanni do not necessarily detract from our appreciation of Francis, but only remind us of the typical kinds of people who are often attracted to the spiritual path and which one is likely to encounter along the way. And this returns us to the key quality of this film – the ordinariness of the characters, their simple humanity that underlies many of Rossellini’s films.

There are a number of moments and images from this film that linger in the mind afterwards.

Francis’s vivid and emphatic references to “Brother Fire” and “Sister Death”, which suggest his inner connection with all of reality, all experience.
The picture of Brother Juniper’s sense of satisfaction as he holds up the pig’s foot that he has just amputated.
The images of Francis and his brothers almost celebrating their physical wretchedness in the rain and mud, suggesting that their self-realization of their inner sturdiness brings them greater joy.
Francis’s late-night encounter with the leper.
Francis talks to a little bird that comes to his hand.
The tentativeness associated with the meeting with Saint Clare.

It is an odd potpourri from Rossellini, but it is unique and definitely worthwhile seeing.

"The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" - Werner Herzog (1974)

2010-11-03T17:21:00.010+13:00

Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder Für Sich und Gott Gegen Alle, translation: "Every Man for Himself and God Against All”, 1974) chronicles the bizarre, but real, story of a teenage German boy whose brief life in the early part of the 19th century remains a subject of speculation to this day. Those familiar with writer-director Herzog’s often grim, expressionistic oeuvre are likely to assume that the weird circumstances presented in the film could only be the product of Herzog’s febrile imagination. But in fact the film follows the documented facts of a historical figure very closely. Nevertheless and despite the film’s conformity to the known account, it still falls very much within the scope of Herzog’s unique expressionistic vision.

First it is best to reprise what is known about the real Kaspar Hauser. According to Hauser’s own account, he spent the first sixteen years of his life chained up in a tiny dungeon with only a toy horse to play with and cut off from all human contact except for a man in a black overcoat who gave him food and taught him a few rudimentary things. Then in 1828 this man took Hauser out of his confinement, taught him to stand upright and walk, and then left him in a square in Nuremberg with a letter for him to hold in his hand. The letter stated that the boy had been born in 1812 and had been given by the “Court” into the care of the letter’s author, an impoverished father of ten children of his own, as an infant and that this man had kept the child in his quarters for the past sixteen years. It further stated that the boy would like to become a cavalryman. The boy was then taken into the care of the local jailer and began receiving some basic instruction. Later Hauser was given into the care of a schoolmaster, Friedrich Daumer, who spent time tutoring the boy and found that despite the boy’s extreme innocence and ignorance concerning things in the world, he had an aptitude for learning. In late 1829, however, Hauser was mysteriously attacked and wounded by an intruder in Daumer’s house. Hauser identified the assailant as the man who had brought him to Nuremberg. Nevertheless, Hauser’s education proceeded, and this ultimately attracted the attention of a British nobleman, Lord Stanhope, who took a philanthropic interest in furthering Hauser’s education. In 1833 Hauser received a fatal stab wound in his chest. When the police searched his quarters, they found a note in mirror writing that read [1]:

“Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come _ _ . I come from _ _ _ the Bavarian border _ _ On the river _ _ _ _ _ I even want to tell you the name: M. L. Ö.”

Nothing more was ever known about Hauser’s true origins or the identity of his assailant. Because of the strange circumstances surrounding Kaspar Hauser’s appearance and death, he attracted considerable public interest and has always been the subject of controversy. Some commentators speculated that he was somehow connected with a succession struggle in the House of Baden, a German noble family. Many others have accused Hauser of being a self-publicising fraud and habitual liar. These latter critics of Hauser claim that Hauser’s story of his entire upbringing taking place chained in a prison cell is not remotely credible and that noone could have survived very long under such conditions. These detractors even claim that Hauser even inflicted the publicized wounds on himself (the latter one, obviously, overdone) in order to further his notoriety.

Now a filmmaker interested in the “enigma” of Kaspar Hauser might explore the true origins and background of Hauser, or he might question and investigate the authenticity of Hauser’s curious account. Herzog does neither of these things. For him the enigma of Kaspar Hauser lies in an altogether different direction. For one thing, Herzog’s film shows none of the doubts about Hauser’s credibility and presents an image of complete sympathy for a man who struggles to understand the world and his place it. As such, the film metaphorically explores our own existential and unaccountable “thrownness” into a world beyond our understanding. A common theme in Herzog’s films is the profound alienation of the principle character from the world. This sense of alienation, indeed extreme isolation, reveals itself as a separation from the “humane”, rational world that perhaps only exists in our fantasies. This is what Hauser feels in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, when he emerges from his simple “cocoon” – he finds a world of astonishing complexity, filled with beings who seem distant, often savage (“they are like wolves”), and forever beyond his comprehension.

The film’s narrative structure has four basic sections that relate the course of Kaspar’s early background in the cellar dungeon, his initial assimilation into the community, his further educational development, and ultimately his downfall.

1. Kaspar’s Background
The first half hour of the film shows the extreme restrictions of Kaspar Hauser’s confinement in the cellar. He is chained to the floor, eats bread, and only has a small toy horse to manipulate. The man in the black cape arrives one day, and, while largely shielding himself from Kaspar’s gaze, rudely teaches Hauser to write his name and to walk upright. This man then deposits Hauser in a Nuremberg town square and tells him to wait there.

2 Kaspar’s Initial Assimilation into Nuremberg
The profoundly ignorant and almost mute Hauser is taken to the police for examination where he is adjudged to be relatively harmless. Hauser’s innocence is dramatized by an incident when his curiosity compels him to touch a candle flame; the resulting burn shocks him and brings tears to his eyes. In fact Hauser proves to be so gentle that the local jailer takes him into his home, and his children begin giving Hauser instruction about elementary things in the world. The jailer’s wife even lets Kaspar hold her newborn baby, which again brings the tender Kaspar to tears, as he bemoans the deeply felt separation that he feels from everyone and everything. There is also a scene in which some local hooligans antagonise Kaspar by first tormenting a rooster and then thrusting it upon Hauser in his cell. As I mentioned in my review of Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970),

“Herzog is known to despise and fear chickens, and they must represent something overwhelmingly repulsive to him. Their relentlessly spasmodic movements and their often fierce, mindless savagery conjure up a sense of meaningless animal brutality.”

So it is emblematic of Herzog’s attitude towards these quizzical creatures that he depicts the gentle Hauser, who is shown to relate easily and intimately to other animals, immediately shrinking back in horror when confronted with the rooster.

3 With the Schoolmaster, Mr. Daumer
In order to reduce the upkeep of Hauser in the city jail, the town officials have him earn some money by putting him on exhibition at a local freak show. There he is espied by the schoolmaster, Daumer, who decides to take Hauser home and supervise his further education for. After two years Daumer observes that Hauser is a naive but surprisingly apt student who intuitively asks questions that are not easily answered by his more experienced guardians, accustomed as they are to accept things as they are without question.

“Why can’t I play the piano like I can breathe?,” Hauser asks at one point.
On another occasion he asks Daumer’s housekeeper, “What are women good for? Why are women only allowed to knit and cook?”
When he is cross-examined by a logician, his intuitive logical reasoning is more pragmatically grounded than that of the academic.
When he is given religious instruction by the local pastors, Hauser questions some of their basic tenets. He says he can’t understand how God could have created everything out of nothing.
And during a lesson, Daumer tells Hauser that the movement of external, inanimate objects, such as apples, are subject to his own will. But when Hauser observes the chaotic motion of the thrown apple, he theorizes that the apple must move according to its own will. Thus rather than submitting to doctrinaire principles, Hauser is positing his own models based on the empirical evidence.

Most intriguingly, Hauser has a discussion with Daumer about the nature of space that crucially reveals how vast and terrifying is the new world to which he has been exposed. On this particular occasion Daumer shows him the large Nuremberg prison tower in which he was initially confined. This spurs Hauser to insist that his cell inside that vast tower was much bigger than the tower, itself:

“Wherever I look to the room – to the right, to the left, frontwards, backwards – there is only room. But when I look at the tower and turn around, the tower is gone! So the room is bigger than the tower!”

This reminds us that while we viewers would envision his early confinement as terribly constrained and claustrophobic, to Hauser that small room was existentially the entire universe – nothing was beyond that cell. So the cell was vast, a complete world all by itself. Now, out of his confinement the world of the same "size", but different -- it is now infinitely more complicated and animated with hostile forces.

4 Hauser’s Visions and Demise
While the film up to this point has depicted Hauser’s progressively successful accommodation to our rationalized world, the final act suggests the deep mysteries that still remain, perhaps not only to Hauser but to all of us, as well. The effete Lord Stanhope comes and offers his patronage to Hauser, but the stylized manners of him and his entourage are overwhelming to Hauser. Ultimately the count concludes that Hauser is uncivilized and departs without him. Then Hauser experiences the first attack by the man in the black cape. While recovering from this injury, Hauser recounts a mysterious dream he has had of a mass of people all trying to climb a steep mountain in murky fog. At the top of the mountain, awaiting them, in this dream was Death. Later Hauser is attacked again, this time fatally. On his deathbed he relates a story fragment this is also dreamlike – it tells of a wandering tribe lost in the Sahara Desert who are guided by a blind Berber to a “city the North”.

The overall strength of Herzog’s film narrative is significantly enhanced by the performance of “Bruno S.” (Bruno Schleinstein) in the role of Kasper Hauser. It was an ingenious move of Herzog to insert Schleinstein, a street musician with no previous acting experience and who had spent much of his early life in and out of mental institutions. Indeed, Schleinstein’s every encounter in the film seems intuitively authentic and entirely original. Though Schleinstein was forty-one years old at the time and thus far older than the teenage Hauser he was supposed to depict, that age difference is not fatal to the telling, and his performance is magnetic. It was the success of his performance here that inspired Herzog to craft the screenplay for Stroszek (1977) expressly for Schleinstein. Commenting on Schleinstein recently at the time of his death, Herzog remarked that “. . .with all the great actors with whom I have worked, he was the best.” [2].

Hauser’s two “dream” stories towards the end of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser convey the suggestion that all mankind is lost in a wilderness and is wandering towards an indeterminate destination and fate. We seem to be searching for something, but for what? The mysteries behind this search were what Hauser sought to understand, but he received little assistance or support from his supposedly more enlightened contemporaries. The routine explanations, procedures, and “reports filed” in our conventional society (as epitomized by the town secretary in the film) fail to address these ultimate questions in any meaningful way. In the end Hauser was destroyed without provocation by an unfathomable foe. Why? Why are we all created with the capacity to ask these existential questions and then doomed to die without answers? That is the real enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

Notes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enigma_of_Kaspar_Hauser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_S.

“The Constant Gardener” - Fernando Meirelles (2005)

2010-10-22T17:50:00.020+13:00

The Constant Gardener (2005), one of the best films of the past decade, has had numerous admirers, but because of its many themes, it has been viewed, and criticized, from a number of different angles. Based on John Le Carre’s 2001 novel of the same name, the film can be variously experienced as primarily a mystery/thriller, an expose of the pharmaceutical industry, an expose of Western statecraft’s subservience to globalized capitalism, or a love story, depending on one’s predilections. In fact the task of taking Le Carre’s typically intricate novel of 550-plus pages and somehow fashioning an entertaining, not to mention comprehensible, two-hour movie out of the material must have been daunting. But I would say Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was definitely up to the task, and he made superb choices to create something special – a gripping cinematic story that has a reflective philosophical motif at its core. Meirelles had already attracted international intention with his spectacular previous outing, The City of God (2002), which was a startling, visceral drama about crime in the Rio de Janeiro suburban slums. With The Constant Gardener, his first English language film, he displayed further mastery and an impressive new expressive dimension.

Yes, The Constant Gardener could be said to be about corruption, intrigue, capitalism, and love, but this is not just a random collection of themes – there is something in this film that ties all these seemingly disparate things together in terms of a larger theme. I will try to explain.

The protagonist, Justin Quayle, is a mid-level British diplomat stationed in Kenya, whose modest, civilized character is symbolized by his avocation of gardening. He is a gentleman in every way, and he lives well within the boundaries of his (and our) culture, as it has been defined to all of us in our upbringing. This is a society governed by the rule of law, human rights, freedom of expression, and equal opportunity. But, curiously, our culture predominantly characterizes these things in selfish terms. It is said, especially by libertarians, that it is in our enlightened self-interests to obey the laws and to support freedom-of-action and human rights as much as possible. This general credo of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is promoted, because there is a payoff promised to us if we follow it. We, individually, will all be happier, we are assured, if everyone conforms to these norms. Society sets up various punishments if we don’t follow the norms, and to ensure even more faithful adherence, our religions promise us that God is watching us at all times and will reward us in the afterlife if we live virtuously. Of course, selfish pleasure-seekers might not see the big picture, so the need to be constrained, but we educated ones (who are presumably enlightened and see the bit picture) will follow the rules, because they are in our long-term selfish interests.

This ethos of enlightened self interest is extended into our capitalistic economic sphere to the notion of a corporation. Corporations are legally identified as “individuals” that are expected to operate according to their enlightened self interests (i.e. the interests of their share-holders). According to this scheme, we humans have evolved from the savage beasts, which our forebears once were, by learning that cooperation gives us a competitive advantage: cooperation and rule-following is in our selfish interests, because it gives us a competitive advantage. This selfish-competitive mantra barely needs repeating today and has become second nature to us. Nevertheless, despite this conventional notion of (hopefully enlightened) self-interested behavior, we intuitive know that there is something missing from this cultural picture: empathy. And it is empathy that is ultimately the overriding theme of The Constant Gardener.

The concept of empathy, though, has often been dismissed by the academic community. Logical positivists, behaviorists, and other scientific reductionists dismiss conventional notions of the mind, such as beliefs and desires, as merely examples of “folk psychology”. To them these ideas are part o f loose talk that may be satisfactory fir casual conversation, but they are held to be unscientific and must ultimately be superceded by a more neurophysiological-based scientific characterization, just as the notion of magnetic poles was superceded by Maxwell’s more accurate model of electromagnetism. And even most of those other scholars who do regard “folk psychology” as a useful descriptive framework don’t have much use for the notion of empathy – they are satisfied that all human decision-making can be understood on the basis of the mental notions of beliefs and desires.

Nevertheless, empathy is a real and primordial mental faculty, even if we don’t yet fully understand it. Whenever we exchange eye-to-eye contact with another person, or even another mammal, there is a mutual awareness of another sentient being that is being observed. This evokes the glimmerings of empathy. Neurophysiological evidence from brain imaging reveals that mostly the same areas of the brain are activated both when we feel pain and when we observe another animal subjected to pain. That similar response of sharing pain with the other is empathy. As a consequence of these studies and also the re-emergence of phenomenology, the notion of empathy has attracted renewed attention from philosophers [1,2] and biologists [3,4,5] as a fundamental category of human interaction. De Walls even points to an innate “inequity aversion” in animals:

“A dog will repeatedly perform a trick without rewards, but refuse as soon as another dog gets pieces of sausage for the same trick. Recently, Sarah reported an unexpected twist to the inequity issue, however. While testing pairs of chimps, she found that also the one who gets the better deal occasionally refuses. It is as if they are satisfied only if both get the same. We seem to be getting close to a sense of fairness.” [3]

But despite these studies and our own intuitive convictions that empathy is real, there is still a problem – empathy is not really wired into our conventional social culture. That culture is still based almost exclusively on self-interests. Corporations and government organizations are instructed to evaluate the world on the basis of their own selfish interests, and moral behaviour is assumed to only arise on the basis of those long-term interests.

In The Constant Gardener, the protagonist, Justin Quayle meets and falls in love with a beautiful young woman who is very much attuned to her own empathic feelings towards her fellow beings. The principal narrative theme concerns how Justin eventually understands and shares that empathic passion with her.

The plot of the film can be divided into roughly four sections or acts, each of which represents a successive stage in Justin’s journey towards enlightenment and commitment. The focalization of the film is almost entirely limited to Justin, but there are a few scenes just outside Justin’s scope and which are mostly centered around Justin’s boss in Kenya, Sandy Woodrow.

1. Justin and Tessa.
The opening scene shows Justin kissing his wife, Tessa, good-bye at the Nairobi airport, just prior to her departure with a companion, Dr. Arnold Bluhm, to the northern Kenyan city of Lokichogio. The next shots reveal that she has been murdered somewhere on the road, and Justin must go to the morgue to identify her body. The rest of this act is devoted to flashbacks about how Justin came to meet and fall in love with Tessa. She was a political science student and liberal activist who attended a guest lecture given by Justin. Their romance was rapid, as the self-confident Tessa readily welcomed Justin’s shy advances. Soon it was she who proposed that he marry her and take her back with him to his diplomatic assignment in Africa. Once there she soon partners with a black African doctor, Arnold Bluhm, in connection with her passion to improve the health and welfare of poverty-stricken natives. The close association of Bluhm with the liberal Tessa makes Justin feel uneasy, and he fears that the two may be intimate. In connection with Tessa’s work with Bluhm, she learned that a large, international drug corporation, KVH, was compelling poor natives seeking AIDS treatment to undergo testing of Dypraxa, an unproven tuberculosis (TB) drug with known, sometimes fatal, side effects. KVH and their local heatlhcare partners administering the tests, ThreeBees Corp., were covering up the deaths caused by the Dypraxa tests.

2. The Conspiracy Revealed.
We return the “present”, with Justin and his boss, British High Commissioner (i.e. Ambassador) Sandy Woodrow in the morgue. Because Arnold Bluhm is missing, it is assumed by the government that he was Tessa’s lover and brutal murderer. The grief-stricken Justin wants to know more about these murky circumstances and why their home was ransacked after her death, so he begins to investigate. Justin learns that Tessa had sent a report, via Sandy Woodrow, to Sir Bernard Pelligrin, head of the Africa desk of the British Foreign Service, revealing the conspiracy of KVH and ThreeBees and accusing them of blatant illegalities and wrongful deaths. Tessa had subsequently learned that her letter was suppressed by Pelligrin, and she had then conspired to get hold of Pelligrin’s abusive and self-incriminating letter dismissing her revelations. Justin now knows that the British government was in on the conspiracy in order to assist its corporate allies.

3. Justin on the Trail.
Justin is now determined to follow up on Tessa’s investigation. He returns to England, where his passport is confiscated, and he realizes that he is now seen as an enemy of the British Foreign Service. He acquires a fake passport so that he can continue his clandestine consultations with some of Tessa’s fellow social activists in Europe. And despite beatings and death threats from paid thugs, the mild-mannered diplomat’s resolve is firm. He learns about Tessa’s acquisition of Pelligrin’s self-damning letter, and also he learns both that Bluhm was not really Tessa’s secret lover, but only an innocent victim, and that Tessa’s ill-fated trip to Lokichogio was connected with her efforts to meet a developer of Dypraxa, Dr. Lorbeer. His sights are now set on finding Lorbeer back in Africa.

4. The End of the Road.
Returning to Africa, Justin accumulates more crucial evidence about the conspiracy, but learns from the cynical but sympathetic head of MI5 in Kenya, Tim Donohue, that the British government has taken a contract out on his life, just as it had done with Bluhm and Tessa. Justin doggedly goes ahead manages to track down the eccentric Lorbeer in Sudan, acquire from him the damning letter from Pelligrin, and get it dispatched back to allies in England where it can be revealed to the public. But he knows he cannot escape his tragic fate.

Throughout The Constant Gardener Justin’s sense of empathy expands towards the wider circles encompassed by Tessa’s. In Act 1, he is a sensitive, caring man in love, but his concern is primarily with Tessa. Right after her miscarriage in Kenya, Tessa beseeches Justin to give ride in their car to a poor African boy who must walk back to his village forty kilometers away. Justin denies her request, saying that they cannot attend to all the poor people in Africa and that her health must come first. But she protests, to no avail, that this is one person who needs help and that they can help. This exemplified her existential engagement of sympathy, something that could take precedence over more practical considerations in some situations. Towards the end, in Act 4, Justin has adopted Tessa’s perspective. While trying to escape a murderous attack by brigands on the Sudanese village he is visiting, Justin asks the pilot to take onboard a poor black girl who had been working with Lorbeer. This time the roles are reversed, and the pilot repeats Justin’s earlier practical, rule-based argument, denying Justin’s empathic appeal. In response to “we can’t save everybody”, Justin (echoing Tessa) says, “yes, bu we can save this person!". In both situations the empathy-denying responses seemed reasonable, but they reflect the fact that our organizations seem to have no place for empathy.

There are four significant characters in the film who show a certain degree of sympathy for Justin’ situation, but they all fall short of true empathy.

Sir Bernard Pelligrin expresses sympathy in Act 2 to Justin for the death of Tessa, but, of course, he is lying and was a direct cause of her death. His utter hypocrisy puts him at the lowest level.
Sir Kenneth Curtiss, the CEO of ThreeBees, helps Justin in Act 4 by supplying him evidence of ThreeBees own culpability. But this is merely an act of revenge, since he knows that he is about to get dumped in the corporate world, and he wants to take others down with him. His vengeful action is not the empathy we seek.
Sandy Woodrow weeps at the death of Tessa and appears to show sympathy. But we later learn that he is a weak and self-seeking individual and that his feelings for Tessa were entirely selfish.
The spymaster Tim Donohue sympathizes with Justin, because he, too, is doomed, in his case with a terminal illness. But his empathic action does not extend to all his fellow creatures, as it does with Tessa, and later Justin, but is merely directed to a similarly powerless individual.

All of the men above were operating inside systems and organizations for which empathy has no reward and no place. And perhaps it says something about our culture that the two worst scoundrels in the story had been bestowed with the honor of knighthood. Although some of these men were dimly aware of these shortcomings, they were all submissive to the status quo of selfishness. Only Tessa heroically rebelled against that situation, and so, too, in the end, did Justin.

The mise-en-scene of Meirelles in The Constant Gardener is fascinating in the way it skillfully maintains a feeling of anxiety via its impressionistic renderings. We, the viewers, are like Justin and stand outside of the major, critical happenings. The murders of Tessa and Arnold Bluhm are not even shown; we are only given the information after the fact. Similarly, Tessa’s miscarriage in the hospital and her visit to Dr. Lorbeer are not shown directly. Everything is seen from the narrative perspective of Justin, who is trying to catch up with a series of machinations that are outside of his control. There is considerable camera movement, along with a stream of perspectival compositions, that sustain this anxious, impressionistic mood, all the while maintaining a smooth visual continuity and dynamic flow. At the same time Meirelles also gives the viewer impressionistic shots of winsome, joyful black children in the villages that evoke unconscious empathy on the part of the viewer. One can't help but recognize that they are our brothers and sisters who deserve a better deal.

The acting is uniformly good, especially, that of Ralph Fiennes, whose introspective portrayal of Justin is reminiscent of his performance in The English Patient (1996). Rachel Weisz (Tessa) and Danny Huston (Sandy) also stand out.

As for the subject matter, what could be a more appropriate industry on which to focus this issue of empathy than the healthcare industry? Healthcare should be founded on empathy, but the corporate practices are everywhere governed by selfish profit. In a review of Le Carre’s novel that is sympathetic to the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry, the author remarks [6]

“The author also touches on real-life social concerns, such as the possible coercion of needy patients, the solicitation of favorable reports and testimonials by opinion leaders, and the ghostwriting of such testimonials by sponsoring pharmaceuticals firms themselves. The reader is also exposed to some of the realities of biomedical publishing, such as the difficulty of communicating negative data in premier medical journals, the potential for censorship of unpopular data by biased peer reviewers, and the use of confidentiality agreements that can prevent company employees and their associates from communicating research findings.”
. . .
“However, the practices attributed to KVH do not appear to be out of line with real-life pharmaceutical R&D activities. KVH met or exceeded the regulatory requirements for clinical safety and efficacy necessary to achieve market approval in three countries. It is not uncommon to adjust clinical protocols, as the fictional company appears to do, when adverse events are observed, in order to ensure safety. Similarly, pharma companies often seek the endorsement of key opinion leaders, as does KVH, as a way of encouraging the medical community to use a new drug. Finally, confidentiality agreements are standard practice in the pharmaceutical industry; they are designed to protect the huge financial investment that underlies drug development and to control disclosure of data about drugs that are still under development.”

So the practices described in the film (presumably accurately following Le Carre’s text) are apparently standard with the pharmaceutical industry, and these are exclusively driven by the selfish interests of profit. Maybe we need something a little different for the healthcare field. In fact, maybe we need to consider how corporations, in general, could be restructured for the better, in order to go beyond their present selfish orthodoxy. This is the subject of the recent book by Dev Patnaik, Wired to Care, which argues that the corporations today lack empathy and that for them to be more effectively service-oriented, they will need to establish a more widely held sense of empathy for their customers.

At the end of the film while awaiting his grim fate, Justin soliloquizes aloud to his departed Tessa, "I know your secret now". That secret was Tessa's feeling of engaged compassion towards the entire world. Justin had moved in the film from the withdrawn world of the gardener, to the passionate embrace of his beloved, and on to that level of comprehensive compassionate engagement. We need to do that in a more inclusive fashion and think about empathy in a wider, social context. Perhaps The Constant Gardener may be a little bit helpful in getting us to think and feel along these lines.

Notes:

Karsten Stueber, "Empathy", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/.
Karsten R. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the HumanSciences, The MIT Press, 2005.
Frans de Waal , The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, Three Rivers P:ress, 2010.
Frans de Waal, “Morals without God”, New York Times, 17 October 2010, (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/?ref=afternoonupdate&nl=afternoonupdate&emc=auab1).
Frans de Waal, “Fair Play: Monkeys Share Our Sense of Injustice”, New Scientist, 11 November 2009.(http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/empathy/Reviewfiles/fairplay_NS.html).
Rebecca Anderson, “The Drug that Came in From the Cold”, Molecular Interventions, American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, 2004, (http://molinterv.aspetjournals.org/content/4/1/60.full).

“Happy Times” - Zhang Yimou (2000)

2010-10-04T18:07:00.022+13:00

Zhang Yimou rose to international prominence in the early 1990s with a series of films depicting a woman (always starring his partner, Gong Li) struggling to make her way in an indifferent society. But Zhang’s thematic and stylistic range has always been relatively broad, and over the years he has demonstrated his skills across a wide spectrum of film genres. In fact after the Gong Li films, he ventured into films noir (Shanghai Triad, 1995), black comedies (Keep Cool, 1997), and Hong-Kong-style martial arts features (Hero, 2002). It almost seemed as if with each new outing he had set out to demonstrate his prowess with a new genre. But Zhang is more than a professional artisan adapting his style in accordance with his latest assignment: with each new film he seems to be exploring the boundaries of whatever genre engaged. So it was with his fascinating and wistful Happy Times (Xìngfú Shíguõāng, 2000).

In the case of this film, it has divided critics, because it in fact contains a mixture of three different genres:

Lowbrow Comedy featuring oafish rascals – the kind of farcical fare seen on television sitcoms and appearing to a wide audience eager to laugh at fools who get themselves into trouble. (The film starred some well-known Chinese comedy actors.)
Social Commentary – a theme that, of necessity, can only be implicit in Chinese-made films. With respect to this thread of the film, there is a subtle interplay and contrast throughout between literal honesty and sincerity.
Existential Struggle – the artistic theme that has characterized and distinguished Zhang’s greatest work.

Reviewers have frequently seized upon one of those stylistic themes above, to the critical neglect of the other two, which helps account for the wide variation of opinions on the film.

The story goes through four phases, although the third section could be divided in two to make five overall phases. As it progresses, it moves gradually from mostly lowbrow-comedy (LC) mode more to one of social commentary (SC) and existential struggle (ES).

1. The Happy Times Hut (22 minutes).
The film opens in lowbrow-comedy mode with Zhao, a fiftyish bachelor, trying for the 19th time to find a woman who will marry him. The object of his ardent pursuits on this occasion is an obese, twice-divorced lady whom he has found through a matchmaker. This woman (who is nameless and only referenced occasionally by Zhao’s mates as the “Chunky Momma”) has two children: a super-spoiled and equally obese teenage son, who is a repellent icon of China’s one-child policy, and a blind, eighteen-year-old step-daughter, Wu Ying, whom she treats abusively. It soon becomes evident that Zhao is a schemer who “talks out of both sides of his mouth” and is perpetually short of cash. One of the reasons for his financial straits is that he and his mates are all “retired”, i.e. part of China’s vast body of elderly workers who have been laid-off from uncompetitive state-own companies. Throughout the film the theme of misrepresentation to keep up appearances is presented on many levels. But underlying this theme is a distinction between literal truth and authenticity of feeling.

Although broke, Zhao promises his intended wife that he will fund a relatively posh 50,000-yuan wedding for her. This big-shot posturing presents his first (of many) problems: how is he going to come up with the cash for such a wedding? His friend and former workmate, Fu, helps out by coming up with a scheme to refurbish an abandoned bus in back of their old, shutdown factory and charge lovers searching for a private tryst location. The two schemers label their rendezvous site, the “Happy Times Hut”, and soon Zhao is boasting to Chunky Momma that he is a big-time hotel manager. Zhao’s problem looks like it may be solved.

2. Wu Ying’s 1st job. (22 minutes)
The Chunky Momma, eager to get her blind step-daughter, Wu Ying, out of her flat, insists that Zhao get her a job at his hotel and have her quartered there. This presents another problem for Zhao, and the narrative now shifts from primarily lowbrow comedy (LC) to incorporate Wu Ying’s existential plight (ES). Zhao agrees to the demand to give the girl some kind of make-work, and conducts a fake job interview, during which Wu Ying reveals her sad history of how she lost her sight and then her father. But when Zhao leads the girl to his “Happy Times Hut” bus for her first day on the job, he finds that the old abandoned bus has been removed as an eyesore by the landowner. His “business” is kaput. So now Zhao’s new, immediate problem, besides that of making money for the wedding, is how to find shelter for Wu Ying so that she doesn’t give away the truth about his phoney background.

3. Wu Ying’s 2nd job. (37 minutes)
Having learned that Wu Ying knows how to give massages, Zhao and Fu get permission to temporarily refashion their shutdown factory workshop with the tools that remain there. With the help of their other “retired” workmates, they erect a fake hotel massage parlor for Wu Ying to be the masseuse. The workmates then pretend to be hotel customers, and Wu Ying happily gives them all expert massages. By this point Zhao and his mates are so concerned about Wu Ying’s happiness that they seem to have forgotten about the original problem: the needed 50,000 yuan. With no money coming in, Zhao even hocks his old TV in order to buy Wu Ying a new dress for her “job”, and the “customers” have to use fake money even to give the customary tips to their masseuse.

But for the moment, the fantasy is intoxicating, and they all reinforce themselves with giddy optimism. While celebrating their supposedly booming massage business at a noodle shop, Wu Ying takes out a letter from her absent, beloved father that was written to the Chunky Momma and asks Zhao to read it to her. As Zhao reads it aloud and realizes that the letter only talks about the rascal father’s monetary failures, making no mention of Wu Ying, Zhao pauses and fibs that there is a hard-to-read postscript of the letter about Wu Ying that he will read to her later, when he has his glasses.

4. Parting ways (14 minutes)
On his next visit to the Chunky Momma, Zhao learns that he has been summarily dumped. The woman berates him for all his lies and admonishes him to “be honest and speak the truth”. He can only respond that though he did lie, his overall feelings for her were sincere. But she boots him from her premises, and the dejected Zhao is out on the street, consoling himself with alcohol. He borrows a pen at a canteen and adds some promised fake words about Wu Ying to her father’s letter, but a short while later he is run over by a truck.

At the end of the film, Fu and the other workmates go to the hospital and find Zhao in a coma, and then, when they return to Zhao’s apartment, they learn that Wu Ying has run away. So at the conclusion of the story both Wu Ying and Zhao face uncertain and dubious futures – we don’t know if Zhao will regain consciousness, and we don’t know how Wu Ying can survive wandering sightlessly in the streets. Yet despite these dire circumstances for the two protagonists, the film ends on a curiously uplifting note. Both Zhao and Wu Ying have left messages to each other which cannot be delivered to their intended recipients and are known only to Zhao’s workmates. Zhao’s message is the fake letter to Wu Ying, and Wu Ying’s message is a tape recording to Zhao that she left in Zhao’s apartment just before departing. Each message urges its recipient to believe in her or himself and always to have faith in a positive outcome, no matter what difficulties life may present to them.

Each of the two final messages basically asserts the same thing: that life can be beautiful if you don’t give up – and that authentic, sincere, and meaningful interactions with other people are ultimately possible and worth striving for, no matter that some of them may turn out sour. At the end of the film, what started out as a colloquial comedy has turned into a soulful and inspirational message of hope.

Looking back over the course of the narrative, we could say that by engaging in sincere, authentic interactions with each other, Zhao and Wu Ying gave each other something priceless. And yet during their all interactions, each of them was participating in an extended deception, a pack of lies. But underneath those lies was an authentic concern for the other. Wu Ying’s recording recognizes Zhao’s ultimate sincerity by acknowledging that “even though the money was fake, your intentions were genuine”.

Although we can take this message on a purely individual scale, there are societal (i.e. the social commentary part, SC) implications, as well. Wu Ying and Zhao’s two messages are not just calls for self-reliance – relying on one’s own capabilities can only carry you so far. Their messages, in fact, are more directed towards believing in the potential goodness of others – to have faith that fruitful, meaningful interactions are always possible with our fellows in the community if we approach them with an open heart. This piece of wisdom is what Zhao and Wu Ying, who have been discarded as useless in today's go-go economy, have come to realize. Have faith in a happy life together with others. Then you will realize that every life, every moment together, can be precious. To be sure, literal honesty has its value, but it is only a mechanical virtue and subservient to the higher value of love. This is Zhang’s ultimate message. Wu Ying’s tape recording refers to the shared deception of their sham massage business and says, “those were our happy times together.”

“Eating, 3rd Edition” - Mike Anderson (2009)

2010-09-19T23:59:00.028+12:00

Eating, a documentary film written, produced, and narrated by Mike Anderson and shown on PBS (US Public Broadcasting Service), has a blunt and straightforward thesis: America’s principal health problem is the eating habits of its people. Our eating is killing us. In fact the film cites a US Surgeon General’s assertion that every year “eating kills 2 of 3 Americans”. Why? Because Americans (and those of other wealthy Western societies) are stuffing themselves with animal protein and cholesterol, instead of eating properly: a plant-based diet devoid of any animal products.

The basic thesis of the film is centered around that fact that, despite improvements in wealth and medical care over the past half century, Americans have more than doubled their consumption of meat during this period, which has had very negative consequences on overall health. The cause for this negative health impact is based on the following argument:

Animal-based foods supply high levels of cholesterol to the diet – much more than is required for human consumption.
The high cholesterol leads to the thickening of artery walls (atherosclerosis, or “hardening of the arteries”).
Hardening of the arteries impedes blood circulation throughout the body, thereby diminishing the body’s ability to respond to and repair degenerative and/or invasive tissue problems, such cancer cells, bacterial and viral infections, or general cell damage.

Thus the #1 agent for good health, which is the body’s own ability to repair itself, has been damaged. If one follows a strictly plant-based diet (and by this I mean not only vegetarian, but a diet without dairy products or anything derived from animals, i.e. a vegan diet), so the argument goes, then the body’s self-repair mechanism will be unimpaired, and many serious health problems can be avoided.

The film’s primary thesis concerning the advantages of plant-based diets echoes the work of T. Colin Campbell, a nutritionist professor from Cornell University who documented his work in the The China Study. Dr. Campbell and his team were given access to detailed, longitudinal nutrition information from a large region of China and concluded that people who consumed less animal protein had reduced incidences of a broad ranges of illnesses and health conditions. The study was said by Jane Brody, nutrition editor of the New York Times, to be “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” A summary of some of the findings of “The China Study” can be found here.

Eating provides direct testimony from several people who, having been stricken with serious heart ailments and cancer, chose to ignore the conventional therapeutic programs recommended by their doctors and instead switched to strict plant-based diets. In each case, the plant-based diets let to dramatic reductions in the patients’ serum cholesterol. The results, for these people at least, were remission and reversal of their life-threatening conditions.

After outlining the case against cholesterol ingestion due to an animal-based diet, Anderson moves on to consider why meat, milk, and dairy products are so heavily promoted and subsidized in the US. It comes down to the political influence of powerful lobbies run by meat/dairy industry. They have brainwashed the American public into believing that all children should have three glasses of milk a day, which, as both Anderson and T. Colin Campbell point out, is actually harmful to childrens’ health.

Then the film briefly considers the deleterious effect of animal-based foods on global warming and the environment, in general. After rapidly covering information about the dramatic impact that the animal-based-food industry has on the environment, Anderson concludes that the single most effective thing you can do to reduce global warming is to change your diet.

In terms of documentary exposition, Anderson’s narrative style in Eating is deceptively simple, but I found it highly effective and worthy of general consideration by teachers and college lecturers for articulating any argument. Unlike many documentary narrators, Anderson makes no effort to entertain or communicate in a casual, ingratiating style – instead his measured, simple, and deliberate disposition is straight to the point and relentless in the pursuit of his overall thesis. The visuals include frequent superimposed large-text titles that provide summary statements and emphatic redundancy, thereby reinforcing the main message. The cumulative effect of all the information he presents is overwhelming. A DVD of Eating can be obtained from Anderson’s Web site, "Rave Diet & Lifestyle" (http://ravediet.com), as well as from Amazon.com, for US$ 9.95. The only quibble I have is that the many factual assertions made in the film, such as

“85% of adults suffer from hardening of the arteries; half will die prematurely due to heart disease”, and
“. . .it has been estimated that excess cholesterol has contributed to more deaths than all the wars of the 20th century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents, combined!”,

need to be properly sourced. Of course there’s no place in the film for reference citations, but it would be good for the ravediet.com Web site to have a reference page that lists the sources for all the factual assertions made in the film.

From my own perspective there are four principal domains with respect to which following a vegan or vegetarian diet makes a crucial contribution:

Environment. Animal farming consumes many times more hectares of land than plant-based agriculture to produce an equivalent amount of food calories for human consumption. In addition, animal farming wastes consumes valuable fresh water resources. We are currently facing a worldwide food crisis due to the use of land and water resources devoted to animal farming. If humans consumed a plant-based diet, there would be no such crisis. In addition, animal farming contributes significantly to global-warming gas production, particularly methane, which has more than twenty times more impact on global warming than does CO2.
Ethics. Every year there are roughly 50 billion animals slaughtered for human consumption (c. f. http://www.rattvismat.nu/utlandet/animals_world.htm). Yet animals are sentient beings like us that feel pain. They are existentially our brothers and sisters and do not deserve to be killed for our pleasure.
Health. As outlined in this film and in The China Study, a diet with more than a tiny amount of animal-based food is very harmful to human health.
Soul. Most small children are instinctively alarmed when they first learn that they are eating flesh from dead animals, but adults persuade them to accept it. That initial alarm that you felt was the voice of your inner soul – the essential core being that you really are. When you resolve to give up eating animal-based food, you are responding to that inner voice and following the path of your true, compassionate nature. You are becoming the complete person that you have always wanted to be.

Each of the four domains above supplies a compelling reason on its own for one's being a vegan/vegetarian, but in this film, the emphasis is primarily on health, the 3rd domain listed. Although supplementary material covering environmental effects (1st domain) and animal mistreatment (ethics, 2nd domain) was apparently added for the present edition, the main impact of the film and comes from the principal cholesterol-based thesis associated with the health-oriented material, much of which was compiled for the original 2002 edition. That emphasis on the health side of things is fine; more than 70% of vegetarians initially choose that diet just for health reasons, but they later expand their thinking to encompass some of the other reasons. Thus the move to a vegetarian lifestyle has helped them become more compassionate and responsible souls.

Everyone should see this film and think these things over.

Phenomenology and “Red Desert”

2010-09-11T12:31:00.017+12:00

Film critic Stanley Kauffman relates the following conversation that took place over dinner with Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti during his visit to Rome in 1964, prior to the release of Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964):

“After an hour or so of chat as animated as my Italian will permit, I ask, ‘Well, what about Red Desert? Antonioni smiles broadly, makes a sweeping gesture, and announces with the self-satire of the confident, ‘Un film stupendo!’” [1]

This was another instance of Antonioni’s spare but remarkably revealing comments concerning his own work, for critical reaction in this country has generally been one of stupefaction. There can be no doubt that behind the film is a great degree of cinematic control and seriousness of purpose, but there appears to be confusion as to what Antonioni is actually getting at. His three previous films had been thin in terms of the narrative content but rich in terms of the depth of the interpersonal relationships. Red Desert on the other hand, lacks even the substance of human relationships. John Simon was thus moved to write that

“the color is so eloquent and thought-provoking that it emphasizes the vacuousness of what it envelops: plot, character, dialogue.” [2]

Similarly Dwight MacDonald observed that

“the thinness of the subject matter . . . contrasts with the brilliance with which it is expressed to the eye. . . And the farther he goes in that direction [towards abstraction] without giving up the conventional kind of plot, as in his last two films, the more obtrusive is the discrepancy between the feebleness of what he has to say and the cinematic power with which he says it.” [3]

When one embarks upon the expedition of exegesis, all sorts of objections are immediately raised – particularly in connection with a visual artist like Antonioni. One is warned that the work of art is just there – take it or leave it. The feeling is that the expository analysis is ultimately reductionist and that to intellectualize a work of art is to rob it of its aesthetic mode of communication. To this feeling I am sympathetic, inasmuch as I agree that Antonioni’s film is not overtly symbolic; it does not stand for something else. Yet for one to integrate one’s experience of viewing Red Desert with his other experiences, a certain amount of analysis and systematization is necessary. Therefore my comments concerning Red Desert are to be directed not so much in terms of an explanation (or, at least, in the commonly understood sense of that word) but more in terms of an aid to relating the experience of watching Red Desert to other modes of experience.

There have been typically two ways of interpreting Red Desert. The first, and one that was seized upon by those with a generally Marxist critical disposition, was to view the film as an attack on modern society and as a condemnation of the ravages wreaked upon man by modern technology. This critical approach was refuted by Antonioni just after the film's release when he was interviewed by Jean Luc Godard:

“It simplifies things too much (as many have done) to say that I accuse this inhuman, industrialized world in which the individual is crushed and led to neurosis. My intention, on the contrary, . . . was to translate the beauty of this world, in which even the factories can be beautiful.” [4]

The second manner in which this film has been considered is as a psychological case study of a neurotic girl. While this is ostensibly true, it is not particularly fruitful to think of the film in terms of psychology as it is conventionally practiced. Neither of these approaches is without some validity, but they fail to recognize the extent to which Red Desert probes the fundamental nature of experience. I suggest, instead, that Red Desert be looked upon as a cinematic exploration of the phenomenology of perception. In particular, certain ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger can be perceived within the cinematic structure of Antonioni’s film, and these ideas lie outside the realm of traditional film-critical categories.

The breakthrough associated with Kierkegaard was the understanding of the opposition between what is called “essence” and “existence”. That is, a thing’s essence is that which determines it and distinguishes it from others; existence is that which distinguishes the thing from nothing. Existence is that which brings the thing to realization; essences are interrelations, a thing’s essence relates it to other things. In this way a system of essences can be contemplated by the mind entirely separate from existence – an abstract, universal, timeless systems of inactive essences. Modern philosophy from Descartes onward has had a strong bias towards essentialism, and this was culminated in the Hegelian system. It was Kierkegaard who recognized that philosophy concentrated exclusively on essentialism was incapable of accounting for individuation, contingency, time, and will –

“What confuses the whole doctrine about being in logic is that people do not notice that they are always operating with the ‘concept’ existence. But the concept existence is an ideality and the difficulty is, of course, whether existence can be reduced to a concept. . .

But Existence corresponds to the individual things, the individual, which even Aristotle teaches lies outside or least cannot be reduced to a concept. . . an individual man has not, after all, a conceptual existence.” [5]

Thus it was that by considering the concrete nature of existence, which he felt Hegelianism overlooked, Kierkegaard introduced the related idea of nothingness. This attack on Hegelianism was and is of considerable consequence simply because most of the established thought patterns of the present age are founded upon Hegel’s thought. In particular all the social sciences are rooted in Hegelian essentialism, and this is especially significant for an existential critic of essentialism like Kierkegaard, who would charge that it is precisely in the social sphere that the scientific method of essentialism is inadequate. In other words the scientific method applied to objects in the world may have its uses, but it does not render an accurate accounting of our experiences of objects nor of our experience of each other – each of which can only be adequately dealt with by a philosophy that considers existence as well as essence. The breakdown of classical philosophy has, say the existential critics, brought about a mass neurosis, causing people to be regarded as dehumanized conceptual quantities and leaving the individual with a feeling of homelessness and boredom. It is this malaise that Antonioni has dealt with in Red Desert, and the psychotic condition of Giuliana is an externalization of that which is implicitly present in a great number of troubled souls.

It is now evident why the above-mentioned conventional critical approaches to Red Desert are inadequate. A Marxist attack on modern capitalistic technology is founded on Hegelian principles and thus is still essentialist. Similarly a psychological case study is a social scientific treatment that also remains within the confines of pure essentialism. Antonioni’s film, however, is existentialist, and thus of a different nature altogether. [6]

Now to express the idea of existence opposed to essence verbally is difficult, since it is the nature of language to deal with essences. For example the word “tree” does not do justice to this tree, and, in fact, no matter how detailed I become in my description of this tree I can never adequately convey the this-ness, as it were, of the tree. Nevertheless post-Kierkegaardians, like Sartre and Heidegger, have invested great effort to express their philosophies, which involve important ontological distinctions, in terms of written language. [7] Consider the following passages from Sartre’s novel, Nausea:

I lean my hand on the seat, but pull it back hurriedly: it exists. This thing I’m sitting on, leaning my hand on, is called a seat. They made it purposely for people to sit on, they took leather, springs, and cloth, and they went to work with the idea of making a seat, and when they finished, that was what they had made. The had carried it here, into this car, and the car is now rolling and jolting with its rattling windows, carrying this red thing in its bosom. I murmur: “It’s a seat,” a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated – bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey’s belly, my feet dangling in the clear water. Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenseless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me. . . . .

[later] I’m in the park. I drop into a bench between great black tree-trunks, between the black, knotty hands reaching towards the sky. A tree scrapes at the earth under my feet with a black nail. I would so like to let myself go, forget myself, sleep. But I can’t, I’m suffocating: existence penetrates me everywhere, through the eyes, the nose, the mouth . .
And suddenly, suddenly, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.
So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, lone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision.
It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of “existence.” . . when I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word, “to be”. Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belongs to the class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. . . . And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder – naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.
I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn’t need to move in order to see, behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamp-posts of the bankstand and the Velleda in the midst of a mountain of laurel. All these objects . . . How can I explain? They inconvenience me: I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve. The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather . . .

In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relationship to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, and overflowed. Of these relations (which I insisted on maintaining in order to delay the crumbling of the human world, measures, quantities, and directions) – I felt myself to be the arbitrator; they no longer had their teeth into things. . . .

In vain to repeat: “this is a root” – it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was . . . below all explanation. . .

Suspicious: that’s what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. When they ran quickly under your nose like startled hares and you didn’t pay too much attention, you might believe them to be simple and reassuring, you might believe that there was real blue in the world, real read, a real perfume of almonds or violets. But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves. The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart. . . . But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything beings to float. . . .
I was no longer in Bouville, I was nowhere, I was floating. I was not surprised, I new it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being. . . I shouted, “filth! what rotten filth!”, and shook myself to get ride of this sticky filth, but it held fast, and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless: I stifled at the depths of this immense weariness. [8]

Sartre is striving to describe a particular manner of perceiving entities, a particular awareness with which essentialism cannot cope. The character Roquentin’s feeling of nausea in Sartre’s novel is almost exactly mirrored by Giuliana’s anxiety in Red Desert. The threatening forces are not those of “technology”, but just things-in-themselves. The refuse in front of which Giuliana eats her sandwich in an early scene is not to be viewed as industrial waste, but as undefined, unexplained matter, analogous to the black root of Roquentin’s chestnut tree. And, in fact, Antonioni’s effort to bring us to Giuliana’s perceptual state by the use of cinematography is more directly successful than Sartre’s, since Sartre can only appeal to our recollections of possibly similar experiences when he expresses himself in words.

One of the techniques Antonioni used was to shoot much of the film in which Giuliana's perspective is in focus with very long (in focal length) lenses. This created a very short depth of field that results in several psychological effects. For one thing it is closer to our actual visual perception, since only a small part of what we take in in a glance is in focus. Moreover the objects that are seen out of focus tend to lose the specific functionality that we usually associate with them. When objects are seen out of focus, their outlines fuzzy and their colors blending in with color of neighboring objects, they begin to lose their conventional identities and become abstract entities. In the previously mentioned interview with Godard, Antonioni commented on the relation of Red Desert to his previous films,

“It is a less realistic film, from a figurative point of view. That is to say, it is realistic in a different way. For example, I used the telescopic lens a great deal in order not to have a deep focus, which is for good reason an indispensable element of realism. What interests me now is to place the character in contact with things, for it is things, objects, and materials that have weight today.” [9]

Thus it is not surprising that Red Desert lacks depth in its presentation of interpersonal relationships. What are significant are Giuliana’s relationship with and awareness of things – even the faces of actors like Richard Harris are deliberately muted and de -emphasized in relation to the surroundings.

Another technique Antonioni used to represent the altered consciousness was his manipulation of color. This is the most celebrated aspect of the film, but critics err when they assume that Antonioni was trying to create dynamic colorist painting. As he himself says:

“There is, in this film, no pictorial research at all; we are far from painting, it seems to me. . . . Moreover, I had never thought about color in itself. The film was born in colors, but I always thought, first of all, of the thing to be said – this is natural – and thus aided the expression by means of the color. I never thought: I’m going to put a blue next to a maroon.” [10]

The use of color was specifically intended to enhance the perceptual awareness of things. The bright, pure colors serve to detach things from their conventional environment and create new, abstract relationships with other unrelated colored objects.

Perhaps the most significant of Antonioni’s techniques was his treatment of screen kinetics. This effect necessitates on the part of the viewer a continuous struggle to orient himself with respect to the depicted environment. Elliptical action and oblique camera angles are employed not to emphasize dramatic moments but as a continuous condition of perceptual reality. An illustrative scene is the visit of Corrado and Giuliana to the radar installation. A long row of skeletal radio telescope towers is the primary background material, and the viewer is continuously forced to orient the camera position and the characters with respect to his knowledge of the tower geometry. During the visit several important changes of position by the characters are omitted by Antonioni. Thus the struggle with orientation with respect to these huge, abstract edifices is forced upon the viewer, bringing him in greater sympathy with Giuliana’s struggling awareness of things. In addition Antonioni frequently uses slow disclosure by beginning a scene with a detail of an object. In almost every case the object is not seen for what it normally is, but as a quasi-abstract form. When asked by Godard about this practice, Antonioni explained that

“It’s a way of approaching the character in terms of things rather than by means of her life. Her life, basically interests me only relatively.” [11]

This is an extremely revealing statement, for it emphasizes the difference between Antonioni’s approach and the typically essentialist approach of a psychoanalyst. A psychoanalyst would be interested in nothing but her life – except that it would be considered in terms of conceptual events. The uniqueness of her perceptual awareness would be overlooked, and it is precisely this with which Antonioni is concerned.

I have so far only mentioned the visual stylistics with which Antonioni expressed himself, but of course the characters reveal themselves b y what they say as well. Ugo, Giuliana’s husband, is a kindly person, but is also the ultimate technician. As such he can be thought of as purely essentialist. A characteristic moment for him is when he shows his son the spinning yellow toy. As an explanation of the toy’s behaviour, Ugo explains that it has a gyroscope in it, the same kind things used to steer ships. This is an utterly reductionist statement, reducing things to concepts. Though the statement is correct, one feels annoyed, given the context within the film, with the complacent disregard for existence implicit in the statement. Immediately afterwards, there is a cut to a large ship, and the visual impact of it seems to bring out the poverty of Ugo’s description. Giuliana, as already stated, is extremely sensitive to and feels threatened by the existence of the concrete other, just as Roquentin did in Nausea. She tells a Turkish sailor, “if you prick me, you don’t suffer,” thereby trying to convey her feeling of separateness and isolation. At another point she says to Corrado,

“The sea is never still. I can’t look at the sea for long and not lose interest in what happens on land.”

The sea is for her not a symbol or metaphor but an ever-changing, impossible to pin down “thing”. For her it is analogous to the chestnut tree root that brings on the “nausea”, since its uncategorizable nature thrusts its existence upon Giuliana’s consciousness.

Giuliana’s story that she tells her son is further elaboration of her psyche. The entire scene is shot in bright Hollywood style ‘technicolor”, the depth of field is increased to that of typical films, and the screen kinetics are completely straightforward. The viewer has to do none of the struggling with reality that is necessary in the other scenes; one feels very comfortable with the environment depicted. This scene acts to convey Giuliana’s romantic yearnings for her formerly naive, untroubled consciousness that was at home in the world. All the colors belong to nature, they seem to belong, as opposed to Giuliana’s real life where colors seem to force themselves on one’s awareness. Rocks are seen not as brute existences, but in terms of human forms. The world has an existence for her – it even sings to her. But this feeling of oneness with the world is only fable; it is not possible in her real existence.

The character of Corrado is somewhat problematical, He appears discontented with his existence and feels a sympathy for Giuliana’s problems. At one point he says to her,

“You wonder what to look at, and I wonder where to live. It’s the same thing.”

In fact it’s not the same thing at all. Giuliana’s sensitivity is more developed than his. Corrado is primarily an essentialist who feels that by sufficient manipulation of the external world of objects he can eventually find fulfillment. He wishes to have adventures, like his expedition to Patagonia, hoping that change of his external environment will bring about satisfaction. Giuliana contrasts her own feelings with his when she tells him, “If I were to leave, I’d take everything.” That is to say, the few things with which she has managed to feel somewhat comfortable (as opposed to the great mass of objects by which she feels threatened) are indispensable. She must cling to them as a means of protection. Corrado, the essentialist, living in a world devoid of content is constantly looking for the external stimulus. Giuliana, on the other hand lives in a world too full of existence. She would like somehow to demystify and humanize her surroundings.

In the final scene Giuliana tells her son that birds survive by learning not to go near the poison waste gas of the plant. In other words she is resolving to be like everybody else. While this may be the advisable course for someone who is on the brink of insanity, the larger questions concerning the inadequacy of our conventional thought patterns to deal with existence are left unanswered. Is the lesson we are to learn from Roquentin and Giuliana that to see beyond the veil leads to madness? Perhaps so, as long as madness is defined in terms of the conventional thought patterns. At any rate the extraordinary thing about Red Desert is that it deals with profound aspects of existence in an immediate fashion. It concerns the phenomenology of perception and expresses itself by means of perception. The gestalt psychologist Rudolph Arnheim has made studies to show that all thinking is structurally similar to visual perception, and “truly productive thinking in whatever area of cognition takes place in the realm of imagery” [12]. If this is true, then Red Desert may be a more direct and unadulterated presentation of existential ideas of Sartre than that philosopher’s own writing was.

Notes:

Kauffman, S., A World on Film, Dell (1966), p. 407.
Simon, J., Private Screenings, Berkeley (1967), p. 177.
Macdonald, D., On Movies, Berkeley (19600, PP. 375-376.
Sarris, A., (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors, Avon (1967), p. 23.
Kierkegaard, S., The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, Oxford (1938), p. 147.
I have taken the pains to specify what I mean by “existentialist”, since causal usage has undermined its meaning.
In fact Heidegger came to despair of the possibility of conventional language to express the ultimate nature of existence and turned his attention to poetry as a possible avenue. Perhaps he might have profitably considered the film medium.
Sartre, J.-P., Nausea, New Directions (1964), pp. 168-181.
Sarris, A., op. cit., pp. 28-29.
Ibid., p. 30.
Ibid., p. 28.
Arnheim, R., Visual Thinking, U. of California (1969), p. v.

“Wait for the Birth of the Husband” - Zheng Hua (2008)

2010-09-09T13:34:00.009+12:00

The Hakka people (aka Hakka Han), a Han Chinese ethnic group primarily in southern China, have long had a peculiar tradition of marrying young girls into families who do not yet have a suitable bridegroom for the girl. The Hakka “bride” must await the future birth of her “groom”, and then further await the maturation of the boy, before the couple can finally have a truly connubial relationship. When the boy is finally of age, the girl is no longer young. Zheng Hua’s Wait for the Birth of the Husband, tells the fictional story of one such girl who went through this experience. At moments during the film, a folk song is heard on the soundtrack with the following sad lament:

An 18-year-old bride has a 3-year-old bridegroom
Thinking of this, she can’t help feeling distressed at midnight
She would be old when he is grown up,
Like a flower in blossom when the leaves turn yellow.

Wait for the Birth of the Husband has not yet been widely seen in the West, but it did secure an award for the veteran director Zheng Hua at the 2008 Monte-Carlo Television Festival and may perhaps receive the wider exposure that it deserves in the future. The film features excellent color cinematography, with the adroit use of short focal-length compositions. In addition, the acting performances are first-rate, particularly those of Yuan Zhibo (as the mature Runyue) and Dong Ping (as the well-meaning, but conservative, Taohua). The film is partly shot inside the confines of a traditional Hakka walled vi llage, whose interesting architecture supplies a picturesque backdrop for the drama that unfolds. Although Wait for the Birth of the Husband could be viewed as simply a dramatic depiction of colorful, but curious, customs of the past, we also expect, given the Chinese restrictions concerning artistic commentary on society, that there may be metaphorical overtones in the film concerning larger themes of present-day concern.

The story begins during the 1920s, with ten-year-old Runyue traveling with her peasant father to another village where her future in-laws reside. It is evident that Runyue has no idea what is going on, since she promises her brother upon departing that she will play with him later that day. Upon arrival at the destined Hakka walled village, Runyue learns that she now belongs to another family, almost as a chattel, and must serve as a housemaid to her future mother-in-law, Taohua, who is currently pregnant. Runyue soon meets another, similarly-aged “waiting-for-the-birth-of-the-husband” (this phrase in Chinese is presumably more economically expressed and not quite so awkward) girl, A Ju, who becomes her best friend.

It soon becomes quite evident to the Western viewer that women in this society are very much undervalued and underprivileged. The principal value and virtue of a woman is to produce male offspring, and that is the obsession of the pregnant Taohua, who is a recent widow and concerned that her family line will die out without a male heir. She sees her unborn child is the last chance for salvation.. If, on the other hand, the child Taohua delivers turns out to be a girl, Runyue’s fate is quite uncertain. Fortunately for Runyue, Taohua does deliver a boy, named Sihuan, and the first crisis of the story is overcome. As it turns out, however, Runyue’s friend, A Ju, is not so lucky and must wait many years before her “betrothed” enters the world.

Time passes, and as Sihuan grows, Runyue looks after him almost like a mother, giving the boy baths and tending to his needs. The action now shifts ahead to when Sihuan is fifteen-years-old – he has reached a mature height, but he is still a child and not yet a man. Even so, Runyue is now twenty-six and impatiently starting to look at her “fiancé” as something more than a boy or a little brother.

But without having a real man around to help with the plowing, daily life is hard for Taohua and Runyue, so they are persuaded to hire an almost-deaf war veteran, Chunsheng, to assist with the farming and daily chores. While Sihuan is just a scrawny teenager, Chunsheng is a geneial, strapping, and capable young man more Runyue’s age. Thus the stage is set for the next crisis: the growing attraction between Chunsheng and Runyue. Though both Chunsheng and Runyue are shy and obedient, Taohua fears something might happen and rushes to schedule an early marriage ceremony for Runyue and Sihuan so that the traditional customs can be fulfilled before a scandal arises.

The traditional marriage ceremony is performed, but Sihuan, having lived with his “sister” all his life, has difficulty seeing Runyue as an alluring bedmate and is unable to consummate the marriage. Runyue is disappointed, but advised by Taohua to be patient. However, since the Japanese War is now raging, Sihuan abruptly decides to run away to Nanjing in order to escape being impressed into the army. Not long afterewards the news arrives that Sihuan has apparently passed away due to a fever, which renders Runyue a widow. Taohua is crushed to learn that her last chance for a male heir to her family line is gone, but after awhile she regains herself and comes up with an idea that could bring contentment all around. She goes to a village elder and inquires whether it would be possible for Runyue to wed Chunsheng, and for them to have their first male child designated with her own family name, Wang. This would provide Taohua with the sought-for continuation of her family line, and it would bring happiness to Chunsheng and Runyue. Amazingly, the village elder readily agrees to this arrangement! It seems that though the social rules and customs may be absolutely rigid for women, they can easily be bent by the male village elders whenever they see fit.

At this point things look very promising for the long-suffering Runyue and Chunsheng, but there will be a final twist of fate that dashes all their dreams. The ironic closing shots of the film bring us full circle and tie this tale of the past to the present day.

Throughout Wait for the Birth of the Husband, there are no malevolent characters. Runyue, A Ju, Taohua, Sihuan, and Chunsheng are all essentially well-meaning and innocent. They don’t complain; they struggle to play by the rules; and they learn to love and care for one another. But they live in a social prison, from which there is no escape. This prison is not material poverty, but the rules and customs imposed upon them by other people. The rules are rigid, unreasonable, and severely prejudicial against women. It is this human institution that is malevolent. In a suffocating society that denies individuality and privacy, Taohua, Runyue, and A Ju are unable to appeal to higher values or to see outside these repressive confines. Chunsheng, however, is different; he is the outlier, the symbol of authentic good will. His deafness is a metaphor for a person who is partly outside the scope of this restrictive, gossip-driven society. He is less affected by the “inauthentic otherness of the ‘they’”, as a Heideggerian might put it. His responses are not dictated by the rules, but arise from and follow the heart. Unfortunately, neither he nor Runyue is able to overcome the man-made restrictions imposed upon them. And so it is in today’s world, as well.

The Visit to the Radar Installation in “Red Desert”

2010-09-03T22:30:00.013+12:00

The scene in Red Desert [1, 2] in which Corrado and Giuliana visit the radio telescope installation is an excellent example of the unique manner in which Michelangelo Antonioni laid out the geography in this film. By the use of oblique camera angles and elliptical action, Antonioni achieves a disorienting effect that causes the viewer to struggle constantly with the reality presented. In this way the radar structures become determining factors throughout the scene, since the viewer must constantly orient himself with respect to them. As the scene progresses, these structures, along with a striking black house in the background, take on the character of active participants. The overall effect of the kinetics is thus to establish viewer empathy towards Giuliana’s psychological dislocation.

Just prior to this scene, Corrado and Giuliana have visited the apartment of a man that Corrado is interested in interviewing as a possible employee. They go on in the present scene to seek him out at his place of work – the radar installation.

Shot 1 (355 frames)
Corrado and Giuliana enter the frame from the right in extreme long shot. A sign post about human height occupies a balanced position on the left side of the screen. The camera pans to the left so that the sign and the two characters remain in balance as they walk towards the center of the frame. Before the characters pass the sign, a man appears from the left of the frame and walks to the right, having just passed in front of a black house in the distance. The camera accelerates its panning rate at this point to reestablish a balanced frame. The sign post is now in the middle of the frame, with Corrado and Giuliana still on the right and the house along with the man who has come to greet them on the left. With the house balancing the composition on the left, the camera ends its pan as the couple reach the sign and stop. The man walking from the left finally reaches the two characters, where they apparently converse. Giuliana then walks to the left of the screen, away from the two men talking, until she passes in front of the black house in the distance.

Shot 2 (279 frames)
Cut to a closer shot of Giuliana (in long shot now) in front of the black house, which now dominates the background. As she begins to pass the house, moving screen left, Corrado enters from the right of the frame. They both continue their movement to the left, until first Giuliana walks out of frame, and then Corrado. The house remains alone for several seconds.

Shot 3 (145 frames)
Cut to a reestablishing view of Shot 1 (extreme long shot again). The house is now on the right, and a row of metal towers dominate the left of the screen. We are to learn in Shot 14 that these towers are radar telescope antennae – until that point, and thus for most of this scene, these towers remain unexplained, abstract structures. These structures, it should

be pointed out, are asymmetrical, that is, they arc somewhat to the right, and the row that we

see stretches far into the distance. Corrado and Giuliana continue their movement to the left and toward the row of towers.

Shot 4 (223 frames)
Cut to a low-angle shot of the upper part of one of the radar towers. Because of its curvature to the left of the screen, it indicates that the camera position is now on the other side of the radar installation from that of Shot 3 (refer to Topographical Chart A -- see the end of this article for an overview of the topographical charts). The camera then tilts downward to show the black house seen before in the distance on the left side of the frame. Giuliana enters the frame on the right in medium shot in front of the tower. Once again the frame is in perfect balance: the base of the structure is in center midground, Giuliana is in the right foreground, and the house is at frame left in the background.

Shot 5 (355 frames)
Cut to Giuliana seen from a new angle (see Topographical Chart A) though she is still on the extreme right side of the frame. This is a high-angle shot with most of the frame occupied by the lattice-like structure of the tower support, which is in the foreground and in blurred focus. The angle of view plus the visual clash between the red tower structure and the green grass behind it make Giuliana look small and insignificant. On the extreme right of the frame, Corrado is partially visible (and it is possible that he may have been entirely visible in the original 35 mm print version).

Shot 6 (175 frames)
Cut to a medium long shot of Corrado and Giuliana walking along parallel to the radar towers, Giuliana on the left and Corrado on the right. The camera tracks backward slowly following their movement. The radar towers in the background again serve as the orientational reference. As the couple walk, moving somewhat to the left, Corrado pears ahead and says:

“There he is.”

Shot 7 (139 frames)
A man is seen walking from right to left in medium long shot, the camera panning with his movement. The radar towers in the background serve as the only reference in which to locate this man. In other words, by using our knowledge of where Corrado and Giuliana are and the direction in which Corrado is looking in combination with our knowledge of the structure of the individual radar towers seen in previous shots, plus our assumption that they are all identical, we are intuitively able to figure out where this man is located. Thus, like Shot 4, the choice of camera angle forces the viewer to relate to the radar tower structures and causes the tower structures to be almost active participants in the scene. It is to be inferred that the man seen in this shot is the man whose house Giuliana and Corrado had visited in the scene immediately preceding the present one and that he is the one in whom Corrado is interested as a possible employee.

Shot 8 (495 frames)
The towers are now on the extreme right side of the screen, as the man who was seen in Shot 7 (who shall be referred to as “the worker”) comes directly towards the camera. Corrado is in the foreground on the left side of the screen, with the worker walking down a path filling the space on the right. Corrado glances briefly over his shoulder, and the camera dollies backward to take in Giuliana, such that she appears in the frame in medium close-up on the right. The worker, who has been walking forward from long shot, continues forward until he passes out of frame on the right. However, Giuliana’s presence on the right maintains a compositional balance with Corrado, i.e. Giuliana appears on the right of the frame at about the time that the worker passes out of the frame, so that, in effect, Giuliana replaces the worker as the right-side compositional element. When the worker passes out of the frame, both Corrado and Giuliana turn and stare forward and to the right of the screen to where the worker is apparently positioned. The couple briefly exchange glances, then continue to look out of frame until the worker reenters the screen from the right. At this point, Giuliana asks the worker:

“How are you? All right?”

The final composition of this shot has Corrado in the left background, Giuliana at midground center- right, and the worker on the right foreground.

Shot 9 (117 frames)
Cut to a reverse-angle shot. Corrado, however, has been moved considerably to his right from the preceding shot to enable the familiar black house to be included in the background of this shot. Thus Corrado is in the foreground in medium shot on the right; Giuliana and the worker are in long shot in the center; and the black house is in the distance on the left. These three elements form a straight line from right foreground to left background. Since the worker and Giuliana are in a conversation that continues from Shot 8, they form the principal axis for these two shots, and the angle of Shot 9 does not constitute a crossing of the axis. During this shot the worker says to Giuliana:

“I’m all right, and you?”

Shot 10 (216 frames)
Cut to a frontal medium closeup of Giuliana. She answers:

“I’m fine, too.”

She nods to her right (referring to Corrado) and says:

“He came to see you.”

Giuliana has been turned in this shot to enable the camera to include the radar tower structures in the background. Had she not been moved, the background would have been the same as in Shot 8 – looking down the pathway that runs parallel to the radar towers.

Shot 11 (198 frames)
Cut back to the same view as Shot 9. Giuliana moves to the right, down the pathway, and the worker comes forward towards Corrado. Giuliana is now walking in the opposite direction along the path from that which she and Corrado had taken in Shot 6. The worker’s movement restores the straight line formation that had existed in Shot 9, running from Corrado to the black house. The worker turns his head backward, looking in Giuliana’s direction (Giuliana is still in the frame before the cut to Shot 12).

Shot 12 (259 frames)
Giuliana is in a frontal long shot seen

through the radar tower support structure and is partially obscured by it. Due to the short depth of field, the tower girders form fuzzy red lines crisscrossing the frame. This is high-angle shot similar to Shot 5 (see Topographical Chart B). Giuliana looks straight upward and says:

“Tell me, please, . . .”

Shot 13 (642 frames)
Cut to a low-angle shot of a radar structure not hitherto seen. A man working on the structure and somewhat encaged in its girders is seen moving slightly to the left, and the camera pans to the left following the architecture of the structure. Then the camera tilts downward to reveal Giuliana in extreme long shot looking up at the man. In the background Corrado and other worker are seen conversing. The initial view and the subsequent pan are a slow disclosure and the viewer might well struggle to determine where he is in reference to the main characters before Giuliana comes into view. In particular, Giuliana’s question and glance upward in Shot 12 might possibly prepare the viewer for a low-angle shot of what she is looking at from roughly her position for Shot 13. The initial low-angle view of Shot 13 partially fulfils this expectation, but the curvature of the radar towers indicates that the camera is on the opposite side from Giuliana of the structure first seen in this shot and that the camera is in fact in the position indicated on the Topographical Chart B. Thus the viewer again orients himself with respect to the asymmetrical geometry of the radar antennae.

When the camera tilts downward to take in Giuliana, she is heard to say:

“Who owns these things?”

The man she is addressing is now no longer in view, but he answers:

“The University of Bologna.”

Giuliana asks:

“Aren’t you scared?”

The man says:

“I’m used to it.”

Giuliana asks again:

“What’s it for?”

Shot 14 (216 frames)
Cut to the man in the radar structure seen in a low-angle long shot. This time the view is from Giuliana’s side of the arching structure. The asymmetry of this arching structure enables one to locate himself here, too. The conversation between the man and Giuliana is still in progress with the man answering:

“To listen to the stars.”

Giuliana, who is not present in the shot, is then heard to ask:

“May I listen?”

The man answers:

“You’d have to climb up.”

Shot 15 (384 frames)
Cut to Giuliana seen from the rear in medium shot, with the radar structure (which she is facing) behind her. In the distant background is seen the familiar black house. Corrado enters the screen from the left side in medium closeup, again forming a diagonal composition. Giuliana turns around to face Corrado. They have the following exchange:

Corrado: “You knew him?”

Giuliana: “I just met him.”

Corrado: “No, the other one.”

Giuliana: “He was a neighbor. Did he accept?"

“Corrado: “Nothing doing.”

Corrado then walks rightward in front of Giuliana.

Shot 16 (202 frames)
Just as Corrado passes in front of Giuliana in Shot 15, the action cuts to a medium closeup on the same camera axis as Shot 15. Corrado, continuing his last remarks, says,

“. . . unless I dazzle him with money.”

He passes out of the frame on the right, leaving Giuliana smiling after him in the center. The black house is behind her on the right, and some radar metalwork is visible on the left behind her. She turns around, waves to the man she had been talking to, and departs screen right. This is a telephoto shot, and it causes the black house to loom massively in the background, having an effect not unlike that of the ocean-going ships seen at other times in the film. After Giuliana departs the frame on the right, the camera lingers on the black house for a moment.

Topographical Charts
The Topographical charts presented here are a schematic representation of all the camera positions for this scene. Chart A depicts the positions for the first six shots, and Chart B for the subsequent ten shots. We have attempted here not to produce a scale drawing, but merely to construct the geometry of the entire scene and locate the relative positions of the camera with respect to the basic elements within that geometry. The camera position for each shot is depicted by an encircled number, and the arrows indicate in what direction the camera was pointed. For simplicity of presentation, we have given the positions as if a single focal-length lens was used for the scene, which was not the case. Thus Shots 2 and 16 were almost certainly telephoto shots taken from the same positions as the respective preceding shots, but the camera position has been advanced forward on the chart to indicate that the image was enlarged. The movement of Giuliana, Corrado, and the interviewed worker is depicted by the lines with arrows in the charts – the dashed line portions of which represent movement that is not presented in the scene, but which must have taken place for purposes of continuity. It should be noted that the dashed line movement that Antonioni chose not to relate in this scene is precisely that which would enable the viewer, were that material present in the film, to simply locate all the action. Instead, the viewer must continually reorient himself with respect to the geometry of the radar towers and the black house. Thus the continuity of physical existence is broken down and fragmented here in much the same way as that which presumably exists in Giuliana’s mind.

Notes:

Red Desert, http://filmsufi.blogspot.com/2010/09/red-desert-michelangelo-antonioni-1964.html.
Phenomenology and Red Desert, http://filmsufi.blogspot.com/2010/09/phenomenology-and-red-desert.html.
Mike Ceraso contributed to this article.