O slavnosti a hostech [1966)

This is one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen.

Rarely have I seen such uneasiness conveyed through cinema.

The really terrifying part is.

How mundane all of the symbols are.

Is/are.

Insane.

For a moment.

Like the Czech version of Deliverance.

We see “party” in English (in the context of Czechoslovakia), and we think.

Communist Party.

But the slavnosti in question translates to “feast”.

Google tells us.

And Google is never wrong.

Right?

Which is to say.

Hell is a party.

A party from which you wish to flee.

Beggar’s banquet.

There is no leaving communist Romania.

And Czechoslovakia?

I can’t tell you, dear friend.

But we know of the boy who swam the Danube.

Symbolic.

To nonaligned Yugoslavia.

And from there to Italy and Toblerone.

That’s Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii.

But what we have here is A Report on the Party and the Guests.

Report.

Also sounds very bureaucratic. Quintessentially communist.

Let’s take the popular notion that Kafka sums up bureaucracy.

In which work?

The Trial? With Josef K.?

Yes. This is most applicable to O slavnosti a hostech.

We must learn to speak every language.

Like Pope John Paul II (slight exaggeration).

Because Kafka wrote in German.

Der Process.

It’s a process of ablaut-ish metamorphosis.

Prozess –> Proceß –> Prozeß

swimswamswum

Kafka died in 1924. Age 40. My age in six months.

1948/1949 Czechoslovakia becomes part of Soviet bloc.

Comecon.

Not to be confused with Comic-Con.

And never any Poto and Cabengo in San Diego.

Though they be in their own backyard.

Grace and Virginia were superheroes without costumes.

And they had their own language, by golly.

Brings tears to my eyes.

To see them playing potato.

“What are they saying?”

This is the absurdity of blogging about the absurdity of a film inspired by the absurdity of Kafka.

But likely unconscious.

This genius (director Jan Němec) died only a few months ago.

But he gave the world a belly laugh.

And an unnerving masterpiece.

It is not as obviously magnificent as Closely Watched Trains.

But it is supremely subversive.

In a totalitarian state (like Amerika)…which is completely ruled by commodity relations.

This is our last recourse.

England swings.

Like a pendulum.

From the gallows.

Frexit (France leaves NATO…again).

Hexit (Hungary curses continental Europe from Buddhapesht to Bookarrest)

Crexit (Croatia invents new correction fluid for computer screens)

Spexit (Spain certifies that said correction fluid meets ISO standards)

Esexit (Estonia doubles GDP overnight with racy dating service app)

Slexit (a dual rush for the doors by Slovakia and Slovenia)

Rexit (Holy Roman Emperor reestablished in Romania, confined to Bookarrest)

Fexit (Finland engages in creative destruction)

Pexit (Poland and Portugal [in that order] gobble seed with bobbing avian head motion)

Irexit (being both hungry and anorexic [morbidly hangry], Ireland joins the Brits in bolting)

Everyone else stays.

Until the Czexit. [ooh la la]

Serbia accedes and secedes in same day simply to give the world the thrill of Sexit.

[I know I know]

This is the rearrangement of guests.

So many not at the world table.

In such times.

Only art can explain.

-PD

3 Comments

Иван Грозный Часть I [1944)

[IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART I (1944)]

Have you ever used Russian Wikipedia?

Because you can’t just type Ivan the Terrible.

You can’t even type Ivan Grozny.

Not least, you cannot type NBaH rpo3HbIN yactb I.

No, certainly not.

But by that point, you are close.

Funny thing about the Cold War was that it was cold.

No shooting.

At least the big guns.

Boom boom.

It was an economic war.

It would really be unfair to capitalism to claim that it didn’t win.

Ah, good old capitalism.

Capitalism is bad in a lot of ways, but it is an economic beast.

Communism is good in a lot of ways, but it got its butt kicked by capitalism.

But our story predates Marx and Lenin by centuries (even though it was commissioned by Stalin).

What we have here is a masterpiece of Soviet film: Ivan the Terrible (Part I).

It’s important. Part I. Часть I.

Because Часть II wouldn’t appear for another 14 years (Stalin was a fickle patron).

And Часть III would never appear. [It was destroyed after the director’s death.]

And what a director!

Sergei Eisenstein was a true auteur in every sense of the word.

When he died in 1948, Часть III more or less went with him.

Considering that, it’s amazing that Часть II itself even survived.

It was only the “Khrushchev thaw” which occasioned its eventual release in 1958.

But the year is 1944.

And the year is also 1547.

16 January 1547.

And Ivan (though he doesn’t look it in the film) is 16 years old.

It’s not Reims.

But it rhymes with…Bosco?

If it had a rhyme, Bob Dylan would have smacked it right down in the middle of The Freewheelin‘ or Another Side…

Good old Moscow! Москва́

Something like that…

And so we see a truly riveting coronation (this is not really a spoiler…1547).

We must remember what “the Terrible” meant.

Or means.

As I understand it…it’s neither good nor bad.

Terrible as in terror…but also as in “fear God”.

Perhaps I have botched it.

grozny (miniscule). As opposed to the capital of Chechnya.

Let me just say this:

Nikolay Cherkasov (in this film) is the spitting image of Nick Cave.

[God forbid an iconoclast get ahold of a spitting image!]

Some might need a further clarification.

I mean the Nick Cave from Warracknabeal, Australia.

Not the one from Fulton, Missouri.

Clear?

“2000 years of Christian history baby/and you ain’t learned to love me yet”

Something like that.

Ivan the Terrible “read that book from back to front”.

“It made a deep impression” (on his forehead).

But they didn’t have BBC Radio 4 in Russia in 1547.

So not even a gift of a chess set could cause Queen Elizabeth to beam a broadcast of Gardeners’ Question Time over to Ivan.

Alas, he was on his own…

Boyars be boyin’ [if you know what I mean].

I must admit, I’m rather proud of myself for figuring this out.

To wit, Михаил Названов looks like Gene Wilder as Jesus.

Tsk tsk, English Wikipedia.

Which is to say, Andrey Kurbsky is played by Mikhail Nazvanov.

Every epic needs a great beauty 🙂

And Lyudmila Tselikovskaya is no exception.

She is chaste (and chased).

English Wikipedia gives no hypertext love.

But there is an article.

She was from Astrakhan.

And here she portrays Ivan’s bride Anastasia.

Such a lovely word…tsarina.

And by Astrakhan we certainly don’t mean Canadian military fur wedge cap.

Clear?

Ivan the Terrible is basically Donald Trump (for anyone needing a reference).

Which is why Stalin identified with Ivan.

Putin is another good reference point.

For that matter, Pavel Kadochnikov’s effeminate, moronic character is a good symbol for the past 16 years of American presidency. Imagine W. as a metrosexual in 16th-century Russia. You’ve got it! 16 & 16.

Marriage is the end of friendship (in more ways than two).

And so Philip II, Metropolitan of Moscow heads off to the monastery.

But at this time he was just Feodor Kolychev.

Family Glinski mentioned. Family Zakharin mentioned.

But the House of Romanov takes an extra effort.

Anastasia’s side.

Do you remember Kazan from Quantum of Solace?

I never properly expressed my admiration for that film.

Tosca in Bregenz. Exquisite!

Back to Kazan… Poor saps vs. rich saps.

And military strategy comes to the fore. That of Ivan.

Their strength was sapped. One letter from tapped.

That would be Operation Gold!

There’s a Tartar sauce of brutality (?) reminiscent of ¡Que viva México! (remember the horses and the buried guys???).

Same camera angles.

En plein air version of coronation. The doubters. Maybe Eisenstein took a thing or two from Welles?

Because Citizen Kane was 1941.

The Soviet Union joined the Allies in June 1941.

Citizen Kane premiered the previous month and would open in theaters across the U.S. the coming September.

So we wonder whether one of the first “chess sets” of understanding was a copy of Welles’ film.

Back to these Tartars. That’s just the Western version of Tatar.

An extra R (gratis).

You may need some tarragon as well.

It certainly wasn’t “Palisades Park” for these poor Tartars.

No Freddy Cannon sound effects to distract them before being picked off by (demonym-for-people-from-Kazan) arrows.

It’s almost a Thelonious goatee. Pharaonic. Sun Ra-nese.

Over and over we hear of Livonia.

Reval (which is today Tallinn, Estonia).

An iron curtain required iron men.

Oprichnina. A policy.

Oprichnik. Of the Oprichniki. Political police.

Oath of allegiance (starting to sound like Dale Cooper).

But lets not get caught up in bikeshedding.

This film is a masterpiece throughout.

-PD

4 Comments

Perličky na dně [1966)

I’ve never been much a fan of the omnibus film (or anthology film) genre.

Several directors.

One product.

But this one serves a very interesting purpose.

So far, we have only considered the work of Jiří Menzel (among Czech directors).

So now we will get to branch out a bit.

A sampler of sorts.

Funny enough, Menzel leads this whole thing off.

Start with your best speaker, they say.

Menzel’s contribution is fairly good.

It is closer in spirit to Capricious Summer than it is to the masterpiece Closely Watched Trains

Which is to say, it is largely “meh”.

But a true auteur is still engaging even when he or she is meh, and Menzel is interesting…even when he’s boring (as in Rozmarné léto).

If we want to know where the Belgian juggernaut Aaltra comes from, then we should look no further than Menzel’s short contribution on motorcycle racing.

As with all the stories in this omnibus, the author (in the literary sense) is Bohumil Hrabal.

We get our first bit of the “aging” theme in this installment.

The old man with his stories of Smetana and Dvořák.

The weird harpsichord music courtesy of Jan Klusák (or perhaps Jiří Šust).

It’s baroque, but just slightly off. Anachronistic. Neobaroque. Like Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (and just as rococonutty).

But the “aging” theme really comes to the fore in the next section which is directed by Jan Němec. Němec sadly passed away but four months ago.

In this scene we meet two old men in a hospital. It is a very touching piece of cinema.

They try to keep each other’s spirits up.

We also start to sense another theme in Hrabal’s writing: lies.

Lies notwithstanding, Němec’s segment is perhaps the most poignant thing about this film.

In the middle we get a splash of color (the rest of the film being in black and white) courtesy of the radical Evald Schorm.

What makes Schorm’s segment so beautifully jarring is the music (extremely reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen): organ dissonance ostensibly courtesy of the aforementioned Klusák and/or Šust.

We are presented with outsider art in its purest form. A painter who paints every wall in his house. It is certainly reminiscent of the one-of-a-kind Henry Darger.

Incidentally, the scene is deliciously dark humor directed at not only the bureaucracy of the Czechoslovak state but also at the legitimacy of the insurance industry.

Věra Chytilová contributes a dark-yet-dreamy vignette suffused with desperation throughout. Her use of slow-motion photography captures some very special emotions and is reminiscent of Jean Vigo’s use of the same in Zéro de conduite.

Finally, we encounter gypsies for the first time thanks to the loving depiction of Jaromil Jireš.

A Czech boy does his best Jean-Paul Belmondo before the cracked mirror near the lobby cards.

Dana Valtová might be the most convincing actress in this entire feature. Her role of the dark-skinned gypsy (who remains nameless) is quite astonishing.

And so we learn a bit more about the Czech people thanks to this defining mosaic from the Czech New Wave: Pearls of the Deep.

And little by little we learn a new culture.

-PD

3 Comments

Rozmarné léto [1968)

I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass.

This one starts out slowly.

Too long at the first location.

The river bathhouse.

The dread of boredom begins to creep in.

No girl. No gun.

Until Jana Preissová makes her first appearance.

It was unbearable.

A rainy summer.

Every day the same as the last.

In a small town.

A closed circle.

But like Fellini, the circus comes to town.

Thank God for the circus.

Cotton candy. شعر البنات

Is it girl’s hair? Pink. A one-piece pajama.

Or a pig.

It is like the sweet words of the beautiful Haneen Elhaj in Bethlehem.

Girl’s hair.

Running on the electricity of a car battery.

Spinning sugary magic.

Sandy stone (when the mirror of translate is turned upon itself).

We want to know literally what ~~Heidegger~~ Derrida was talking about.

And so it only took director Jiří Menzel two years to lose his voice.

It was perfection in ’66.

Ostře sledované vlaky.

That is the cynical view.

But we must realize that Menzel was literally walking a tightrope.

It’s not funny.

It’s not engaging.

It’s slow.

It’s effective.

By the end you see that Fellini is the right reference.

Capricious Summer (our film) bridges the gap between the antics of La Strada and the lovable freak show of local color that would be Amarcord (1973).

But this was 1968.

A very serious year.

The Czech and Slovak (respectively) socialist republics came into being the following year.

We know the legend.

Mai ’68.

All hell broke luce.

Even Cannes was cancelled.

[Cannescelled]

But what is a film festival compared to an invasion?

Before our Capricious Summer was the Prague Spring of 1968.

Lasting well into the summer.

And blooming well before winter had ended.

January 5 – August 21.

Then the invasion. The Warsaw Pact countries.

Operation Danube.

Romania (and Albania), to their credit, refused to participate.

108 Czechoslovak civilians killed.

Liberalization. Decentralization. Democratization.

Like the beautiful Anna. Fleeting.

Because the circus always has to pack up and leave town.

Our film.

Released May 24. During the Prague Spring.

Pražské jaro (or jar).

Czech. Slovak.

The only difference between my bank balance and Bill Gates’.

More zeros at the end.

Infinitely more.

Later these “Springs” would become manufactured (if they weren’t already).

Libya…

We all know about color revolutions…but the Czechs would have a textured revolution in 1989.

From velvet…we could have had the corduroy revolution (ribbed, for her pleasure), silk revolution, cotton (the revolution of our lives)…etc.

The “nonviolent” Prague Spring resulted in the deaths of 96 Soviet soldiers.

84 of them by “accident” (friendly fire?)

and the accidental/”suicide” deaths of 10 Poles.

Apparently none of the Poles died conventionally.

At least the two Bulgar soldiers killed perished from intent.

The four Hungarians all slipped on banana peels in front of Škodas.

This is the tone.

Lola Montès.

Plucking the feathers from chickens.

The chubby wife returns.

Drench the nubile.

Menzel, then, was many months ahead.

Knowing that summer would really begin when autumn usually fell.

Another 20 years before the circus returned.

-PD

9/11: Ten Years of Deception, Part 1 [2015)

I must praise the brave soul or souls at Hulu who made this documentary available through their video streaming service.

If there is a global conspiracy of greed at the most elite level of society, then those conspirators have yet to impress upon Hulu the lesson of what is arguably Juvenal’s most famous bit of thought.

America is becoming less and less restrained.

Continet. Contains. Contents itself with. Restrains itself.

Who? Se. They.

Those who have shed their cares. Effudit curas. Shed cares.

Who? Qui. Those who.

Who what?

Dabat olim. Once gave.

Once gave what? A shit.

Idem populus. The same people.

Ah! People. The people.

It is from Satura X. The 10th Satire of Juvenal. You might see it as Satvra.

Full. Satur.

Lanx satura. Full scale.

A full scale. Full-scale.

It was the Toronto Hearings. The International Hearings on the Events of September 11, 2001.

You’ll get a lot of stuff.

For instance, David Ray Griffin.

I have long appreciated his scholarship in the field of 9/11 research.

His books are part of my library.

You’ll also get the excellent Kevin Ryan (who lost his job at Underwriters Laboratories for questioning the fraudulent “science” of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology]). UL worked with NIST on their reports regarding the cause of collapse of the World Trade Center buildings (all three of them). Ryan seems to have found any involvement in this unconscionable and thus spoke up. Just like Dr. James Tracy (for his Sandy Hook research), Ryan’s job employment with UL was terminated.

You’ll meet hearing panelist Ferdinando Imposimato (honorary President of the Supreme Court of Italy).

Imposimato was one of those who got to the bottom of Operation Gladio.

And so staged bombings have been with us awhile.

Mr. Imposimato uncovered the secrets of the “years of lead” in Italy.

The “strategy of tension”.

He uncovered that it was NATO intelligence (with a leading role played by the CIA).

Anything to keep the communists from coming to power.

So much so that the weapons caches of “stay behind networks” were put into service. Italy bombed and terrorized its own people. And blamed it on the Red Brigades.

To sway popular sentiment.

“Don’t vote for the communists!”

What a murderous, cynical solution to a phantom problem.

People cynically sacrificed to prevent some greater perceived threat.

And that’s exactly what 9/11 was.

That was the mechanism.

You will meet Richard Gage. Founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

No quack.

A very articulate, serious person.

Same goes for Kevin Ryan.

Check their science.

Follow their logic.

Observe the duplicity of NIST and their politically-motivated fudging of numbers.

It is astounding!

You’ll meet Peter Dale Scott.

What an astute personality! Former English teacher at UC-Berkeley.

Famous for research on “the deep state”.

You may not want to believe it, but sticking your head in the sand won’t make it go away.

You’ll meet Graeme MacQueen. A Harvard Ph.D.

Serious voices.

Matthew Witt. Professor at the University of La Verne.

People putting their reputations on the line.

Smart, studied people who have sensed (and proven to their own satisfaction through the scientific method) that 9/11 was something far different from that which was presented.

How does news become history?

Once something is reported as news, is it then history?

There are very serious questions surrounding 9/11.

I cannot name all of the figures in this documentary, but ponder these:

-Cynthia McKinney (one of the only trustworthy politicians to have emerged in recent memory)

-Lance deHaven-Smith (a Florida State professor whose contribution to this documentary is priceless)

-Jonathan Cole (whose questions get at the heart of the mythical 9/11 “state crime against democracy” [a term coined by deHaven-Smith])

-David Chandler (whose beard is as impressive as his mathematics qualifications)

I highly recommend this documentary to all who value what remains of liberty. As the filmmakers make clear, many scourges of humanity can be traced back to the false narrative which followed quickly on the heels of the 9/11 events.

Judge for yourself whether the evidence presented supports the hypotheses of these researchers. As is no doubt evident, I concur with most of their conclusions regarding this sad event.

-PD

Salvatore Giuliano [1962)

When we dig into history we must wade through many boring reams of paper.

If, for instance, your FOIA request is granted, you might be inundated with a fecundity of information which makes comprehension initially prohibitive.

But we dig anyway…because we are human.

Once in awhile, a decent man or woman will tell us we have the right to know the truth.

If we find their ethics convincing, we might respect them for such a statement.

And so such is the milieu surrounding the story conveyed in Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano.

I was tired.

And so I watched and watched and watched…and things became slower.

Nothing seemed to be happening.

It was like a particularly painful silent film.

But the sound eventually makes itself indispensable.

It is the sound of strange relationships.

Like the Mafia and the CIA.

Like the Cubans and the CIA.

Like the Mafia and the Vatican.

Like the P2 Masonic lodge and Operation Gladio.

These strange relationships.

What can we prove?

Should we cower forever beneath the hulking torts of libel and slander?

What balance of justice is there between the free speech of the impoverished and defamation?

I have nothing worth taking.

There’s a reason Palsgraf sued the Long Island Railroad Co. and not the man with the newspaper-wrapped box of fireworks.

Money.

Seeking a remedy at law (as opposed to a remedy in equity).

Such a strange language.

We don’t speak this way other than in legal circumstances.

Today, when Scalia strangely bites the dust…we remember his own supposed connection to the Propaganda Due lodge.

Strange bedfellows.

Blowback.

And Salvatore Giuliano. A real personage.

It all seems so reminiscent of the “strategy of tension”…Operation Gladio…the “anni di piombo” (Years of Lead)…

And I’m sorry to say that Wikipedia seems pruned and poised to mislead on these subjects. While the contributors have made certain that Daniele Ganser is profusely maligned, I find Mr. Ganser’s research and writing on the above subjects far superior to the damage-control tone of Wikipedia.

It is the same sort of failure (this damage-control tone) which pervades the potentially groundbreaking Wikipedia page on “9/11 conspiracy theories”. Some very important (rich) people have much at stake in keeping the (false) narrative constrained to a very tight frame.

Compare, for instance, the Wikipedia articles on “9/11 conspiracy theories” (don’t even bother reading the whitewashed main article on 9/11) and “flat earth”. There is no urgency to conceal in the flat earth article. The same, sadly, cannot be said for the “9/11 conspiracy theories” travesty.

And what does all of this have to do with Salvatore Giuliano?

Well, my friends, sometimes our enemies have very colorful histories.

Consider, for instance, Osama bin Laden.

The U.S. Republican presidential candidates (particularly the deplorably daft Marco Rubio) are (while no worse than their opposing party) willfully ignorant concerning 9/11.

Rubio and company (the six remaining Republican presidential candidates) have bought hook-line-and-sinker every bit of repugnant narrative which has emanated from the U.S. federal government since day one: 9/11/01.

How closely did we work with Osama during Operation Cyclone?

Charlie Wilson’s War doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

And what was the nature of the relationship between the CIA and the Pakistani ISI?

The much-maligned Michael Ruppert seems to have been right on the money in describing a confluence of oil, drugs (opium), and geopolitical chess when tracing the cui bono of 9/11 to the bonanza of Afghanistan. Of course, Iraq would soon follow.

And so what of Thierry Meyssan’s claims regarding the translation of the words al-Qaeda from the Arabic to the English as “the base” or “the database”? Such a translation seems entirely plausible when considering Osama’s coursework of business administration at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. It is, therefore, a strange mesh of false jihad (for show) and organizational acumen. It seems that the billions (before adjusting for inflation) which flowed from the CIA to the mujahideen were, at least to some significant extent, used to fund Osama’s organization in Afghanistan during the Soviet war (1979-1989).

This is usually the place at which the spin doctors attempt to interpolate the concept of blowback. The idea that we “abandoned” Osama after we were done with him. But I don’t buy that for a second. He was too valuable. He was, literally, an investment.

Michael Ruppert said in his excellent tome Crossing the Rubicon that (to paraphrase) “the CIA is Wall Street”.

Ah, but I keep leaving Salvatore Giuliano in the dust.

Mostly because I don’t want to spoil it.

This is an essential film, but it is a lot of work for the piece of meat.

I can’t say on first viewing that it is little.

To truly appreciate this film one would need a significant knowledge of Italian history in the 20th century. I barely caught the Garibaldi reference (and he died in 1882).

Strange alliances. Corruption. Italy. Sicily.

And the Communists who peacefully organized on May Day to petition the government for assistance with running water and electricity (in 1947). (!)

The century would go badly for socialists in Italy. And that was no accident. They have NATO to thank for many problems. But they also have their own security services to blame as well.

Such a fear of communism. Like today. Such a fear of Islam.

And sadly, covert operations done in the coldly-utilitarian spirit of “the ends justify the means”…

But pay particular attention to the effort needed by the police (or was it the carbinieri?) to place the body (habeas corpus) in a convincing sprawl for a chalk outline. Yeah…whoops! Once again, the “death” of bin Laden is instructive.

It takes great lengths to hold no one accountable for internal weaknesses in such massive crimes.

And so perhaps with Salvatore Giuliano, the more apt metaphor is Lee Harvey Oswald (or, closer still, Jack Ruby).

-PD

2 Comments

A King in New York [1957)

I once went to rather extraordinary lengths to see this film.

Doing such a thing often makes one appreciate the rarity of the moment.

But now I revisit this testament for the purpose of placing the film in my own history of the cinematic medium.

As you might know, I don’t often review new films.

For what is important to me is not the hackneyed novelty of Hollywood today, but rather the breadth of motion pictures down through time as an art form.

What is attractive about the movies is that they are barely 100 years old.

It is not much of a stretch to say that the seventh art (as Ricciotto Canudo eventually called it) was short of being a mature mode of creation in 1916.

For though Charlie Chaplin was already making important contributions, his first feature as a director and actor wouldn’t come till 1921’s The Kid.

In many ways A King in New York was Chaplin’s last film. Namely, it was the last in which he both starred and directed. [He would direct one final effort: 1967’s A Countess from Hong Kong starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren.]

And so it was that with A King in New York Chaplin returned in some ways to the themes of The Kid.

Michael Chaplin (his son) is brilliant as “the kid” Rupert here in the film under consideration.

And Charles (Charlie) is equally timeless as the foil to Rupert’s Marxism.

Yes.

This was a brave film to make.

It was a humane film to make.

And it is insightful even today.

We may no longer have the communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era, but we still have the same brain-dead stupidity (as exemplified by Fox News).

It is quite easy to draw that particular parallel when viewing the newscast which comes on King Shahdov’s hotel television periodically throughout this movie.

And while the hysteria of anti-communist “vigilance” has largely faded into history, another equally virulent strain of bigoted ignorance has taken its place.

Terrorism as religion.

That phrase may sound weird, but let me explain.

When you pick up The Wall Street Journal, you are viewing a religious newspaper.

And the religion?

Terrorism.

When you watch Fox News you are entering an alternate universe in thrall to terrorism.

Terrorism is the manna from heaven for the neoconservative global elites.

They are a one-trick pony (terrorism being their only trick).

But let me illuminate my point.

NONE of the other major American news outlets (print or televised) are any better.

CNN ABC CBS NBC…all worthless. And let’s not forget the woeful New York Times.

Which brings me to a very important point.

This past week, a PhD professor at Florida Atlantic University in the United States was dismissed from his tenured position for questioning the very suspicious “mass shooting” supposed to have occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.

I have not read every bit of critique which Dr. James Tracy (the unfortunate professor) has written concerning this “massacre”, but what I have read harmonizes with my own take on the event (namely, that it was a staged, false-flag type psychological operation).

And so Dr. Tracy has become a parallel to all of those poor souls who had to suffer the ignominy of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in May 1960.

Why do I focus on this particular hearing? Because it was released as an LP album in 1962 by the invaluable Folkways Records (today Smithsonian Folkways).

Find this record.

Listen particularly to Witness #5.

Spotify lists each track as being by the artist “Unspecified”.

This is the same type of recognition which would have accrued to topless mothers in the Sahara singing their babies to sleep (while the tape recorder preserved their performance for all time).

Americans had become nameless.

And so next time someone asks you about your favorite musical artists you can refer to the Folkways catalog and answer, “Well, I’m a big fan of ‘A young girl singing’, but I also like ‘A young woman’. But then, not much beats ‘Aboriginal Songman’. In fact, I met him once and I was quite nervous. I said, ‘Mr. Songman. Can I call you Aboriginal? Al??? I would really appreciate an autograph!'”

But I digress…

Dear friends, we can rescue the names from history. Witness #5 is actually still alive. He is and always will be William Mandel.

Mr. Mandel took the stand and railed against the bigots in San Francisco on that Folkways LP of the “Un-American” hearings.

In the estimable Mr. Mandel we have a parallel to Mr. Macabee (Rupert’s father) from A King in New York.

The trials which inspired Chaplin were to continue (1957 film, 1960 LP).

The trials continue today. Dr. James Tracy is now a “conspiracy theorist”. If the New York Times says it’s so, then it must be so.

No.

Until we drop like flies, we will continue to speak out like Rupert.

We will continue to combine art and politics like Charlie Chaplin.

No profession gives one a free pass to opt out of engagement. Disengagement is a decision.

Chaplin fought back. The world’s greatest funnyman felt compelled to speak up.

Perhaps Rupert is really 6079 Smith W.

Perhaps Room 101 is betraying oneself. Being eaten alive. By cowardice. Until death.

Occasionally pop art transcends. Witness Radiohead’s “2 + 2 = 5” from the perfect album Hail to the Thief. At the height of the Bush junta this British avant-pop band had the stones to dish out a God-save-the-Queen to the slimy bastards dragging the world down.

The late David Bowie made a valiant effort on his best album Diamond Dogs.

We speak, of course, about 1984 and the protagonist Winston Smith.

Orwell’s novel was a mere eight years old in 1957.

Perhaps little Rupert is an evocation of Winston Smith. And we know that Rupert’s fortitude lived on in the aforementioned William Mandel.

But now we come to a new era. A new era which is so old.

The lamentable treatment of Dr. James Tracy.

The enshrinement of Terrorism as the new state religion of the United States.

Even for a non-communist such as myself, it is apparent that capitalism must always expand.

When it comes to terrorism (both “foreign” and “domestic”), the Ministry of Truth has spoken.

Our only hope is the voice of opposition. It is therefore quite apt indeed that Dr. Tracy’s excellent blog (which incidentally led to his thoughtcrime conviction by FAU) should be named Memory Hole… (http://memoryholeblog.com/).

And it is hopeful that said blog has more hits than the Wikipedia page for “Memory hole”.

-PD

Čovek nije ptica [1965)

It makes sense that Man Is Not a Bird was Dušan Makavejev’s first film. It has that first-film “breadth” to it.

Where Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T. (Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator) struck with absolute precision, Čovek nije ptica meanders about a bit in search of the appropriate film language.

[N.B. Wikipedia spells “bird” in Serbo-Croat for this film as “tica”. I’m not sure why that is as “tica” seems to mean nothing (whereas “ptica” means “bird”).]

Though our film is set in a strange, backwards town, the narrative is considerably sprawled.

Eva Ras (the star of Love Affair…) is here as a more minor character. However, she is the one who most lives out the message of the title.

This film has a strange obsession with hypnosis. There is a hypnotist, but the film starts off with a scientific denunciation of superstition. Through hypnosis (we are told), a distressed person can be made to abandon the grip of superstition.

Back to our hypnotist in the middle of the film…he is more of an entertainer than anything. I am not entirely sure, but I believe the initial “legitimate” hypnotist (psychologist) and the later “entertainer” hypnotist are played by the same actor.

If that is the case, then Makavejev’s later metaphor (the circus) makes more sense. But what is really complex about this film is the layering of metaphors upon one another. It makes finding meaning very difficult.

One “reading” would be that life is a circus. Another reading would be that “cinema” is a circus which purports to present a more truthful version of life than what we know.

But what does that mean?

Every day we experience life is some respect. What could be “more truthful” than our daily experience? Is Makavejev implying that we lie to ourselves? Quite possibly.

As film viewers (spectators), we may become immersed in a particular movie and identify with characters and stories. In a way, WE are the fourth wall. The fourth wall is our temporary reality. We enter into the false reality of film.

But, film gives us a chance to observe “ourselves”. When we heavily identify with a particular character, we are having a sort of “out of body experience”.

And this brings us back to hypnosis.

Man Is Not a Bird is a very beautiful film (in a grimy, socialist, factory soot kind of way), but it is (perhaps not surprisingly) a dark film as well.

Shot, like Love Affair…, in black and white there is something more sinister about this film than the more gentle and humorous Love Affair… But who are we kidding? Love Affair… is inextricably wound up with death. What could be darker than that?

Answer: life without life.

It is what Eva Ras experiences as she is emotionally abused and disrespected by her husband. Her husband, as it turns out, is working a job which is so hazardous to his health that the position is being eliminated ASAP. And that’s in communist Yugoslavia! All through this film we see a sort of poverty which separates East from West. The poor Eastern Europeans. What the West would come to realize (like New York Times film critic Vincent Canby) was that the East had something of immense wealth. If pressed, I would call it soul.

Man is not a bird (even if, under hypnosis, he believes this to be the case). Man is also no angel. Janez Vrhovec plays a sort of martyr in this film. Another more light-hearted character prods him as to whether he can feel the tingling of his burgeoning angel wings (the prodding is actually quite sardonic).

Man is not a machine. But Jan Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec), the deft Slovenian machinist/engineer, has become a slave to his job. From Pakistan to Dar es Salaam: Rudinski makes his comrades proud with his exceptional efficiency.

But let us return to Eva Ras.

To turn Godard on his head, A Woman Is Not A Woman.

Why do I say that?

Because the French word for wife (femme) is the same as the French word for woman (femme).

And so a whole new world of wordplay opens up for us concerning TWO Godard films (namely):

Une Femme est une femme

and

Une Femme mariée.

In the first, we could potentially have the proto-syllogisms:

A woman is a wife.

Or, conversely:

A wife is a woman.

Furthermore, we could have:

A woman is a woman (the accepted translation in the English-speaking world).

Or, on the contrary:

A wife is a wife.

It gets to be such that we assume there is some sort of “boys will be boys” idiomatic phrase in operation. Not being a native French speaker, I cannot confirm or deny that. But I do know that Godard loves word play. And therefore, the simple answer may not be the intended answer.

To illustrate further we have,

Une Femme mariée.

The accepted English translation is A Married Woman, but could it not be the more perverse and thought-provoking A Married Wife?

One thing is certain:

Man Is Not a Bird will have you under its spell whether you understand it or not. At least, that’s the experience I had.

I would add one final bit of exegesis (extra Jesus).

It may very well be that Makavejev was making a disparaging statement about the communist Yugoslavian state with his first film. It would be like the secret messages which Shostakovich managed to work into his music (particularly the string quartets) while living in Soviet Russia.

In the hands of communist governments, art (and particularly film…after Lenin’s admiration of the medium for its uniqueness) had to represent the people. On one side (with communist eyes) this is admirable. From the other (with capitalist eyes) this is seen as propaganda.

Any astute capitalist would have realized that (particularly in times of war) there was not much difference from communist and capitalist propaganda. Both economic systems availed themselves of the practice of propagandizing.

But my guess, regarding the film in question, is that Makavejev recognized his own role as a propagandist (he had no choice in the matter…either please the censors or leave the profession) and likewise saw film as a double-edged sword of hypnosis.

And so his first film is really a realization…of that power in film…that power that can drive the masses to love…or to kill.

-PD

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M [1931)

Perhaps we pay too much attention to the story.

We all love a good story.

But the mark of the genius filmmaker may be found in their method of narrative. The art of how they tell their stories.

To be quite honest, I wasn’t thrilled to return to this Fritz Lang masterpiece, but I’m glad I did.

It is very much how I feel about Hitchcock’s Psycho. It is a wonderful film, but it’s not something I want to throw on once a week during the course of kicking back.

M, like Psycho, is a supremely tense film. Nowadays, when we think of Hitchcock, we might reflect on his tastefulness. Think about it (says Jerry Lee). In Hitchcock’s day (a long, productive “day”), things which are now shown with impunity were positively disallowed for a Hollywood filmmaker. Blood and guts…no. Hitchcock was forced to artfully suggest.

The strictures guiding Fritz Lang (29 years earlier) were even more conservative. But even so, M is a genuinely terrifying movie.

Terrifying films are rarely relaxing. They are not meant to be.

But as I had seen this one before, I was able to focus more on the method employed by Lang. The truth is, M is a masterpiece. It really is the treatment of a brute subject (murder) with incredible subtlety.

What is most radical about M is its counterintuitive take on crime.

Within this film, crime is divided into capital and noncapital offenses.

In M, a band of criminals exists which seeks to put a serial killer out of business. It may seem a strange turn of phrase, but this killer is bad for the business of other criminals (mainly thieves and such).

A town in terrorized. The police regularly raid establishments. You must have your “papers” with you at all times.

And so those who survive on crime are so desperate as to adopt (temporarily) the same goal as the police: catch the killer.

It is not giving much away to tell you that Peter Lorre is the killer. This is not a whodunit. It’s a “what’s gonna happen”. That I will leave to your viewing pleasure.

While I am on the subject of Lorre, let me just say that this is one of the finest, weirdest performances in cinema history. The final scene is one of absolutely raw nerves. Lorre is not the cute, vaguely-foreign character he would become in The Maltese Falcon or Casablanca. Lorre is stark-raving mad.

His attacks of psychosis are chilling to observe. But really, it is his final outburst which tops any bit of lunacy I’ve ever seen filmed.

Today there would likely be plenty of actors ready to play such a macabre role, but in 1931 this was a potential death wish.

That Lorre put his soul into it tells us something important about him. First, he was capable of being more than a “sidekick” (as he was in the previously-mentioned Bogart films). Second, he was dedicated to the art of acting. Lorre was not “mailing it in”. Playing such a role can’t be particularly healthy for one’s mental state.

But there’s a further thing. His final monologue is filled with such angst. Let us consider the year: 1931. In the midst of the Great Depression.

But also we must consider the country: Germany. These were the waning years of the Weimar Republic. Three important dates would end this democratic republic: Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor (Jan. 30, 1933), ~~9/11~~ the Reichstag fire (Feb. 27, 1933), and the Enabling Act (Mar. 23, 1933).

The era of M (1931) was the era of Heinrich Brüning’s “deflationary” monetary policy as German Chancellor. I put deflationary in quotation marks because Wikipedia’s current description might better be termed contractionary monetary policy.

As Wikipedia would tell it, Brüning was essentially instating fiscal austerity (that hot-button term of recent times) concomitantly with the aforementioned monetary approach. This was, of course, the failure which paved the way for Adolf Hitler to take control of Germany.

And so we find that the historian Webster Tarpley is right when he refers to certain modern-day policy makers as austerity “ghouls”. Either conservative/fascist leaders across the globe have no grasp of history, or they are looking forward with anticipation to the next Hitler or Mussolini.

It should be noted that Tarpley is coming from a socialist perspective rooted in the Democratic Party of FDR. His opposition, therefore, would likely brand him as liberal/communist and through slippery-slope logic see the policies he espouses as paving the way for the next Stalin or Mao.

And so goes the political circus…ad nauseam.

Returning to film, we must at least consider this situation in Germany. The country was still paying war reparations from WWI (though this was becoming impossible because of the internal economic woes).

What is perhaps most astonishing is how much Peter Lorre’s character prefigures the Hitler caricature which has come down to us from history.

War-based societies have a compulsion to kill. Germany found out the hard way that this is not a healthy default. Sadly, today’s Germany has not checked the most warmongering modern country on Earth (the United States) enough to make any difference.

The United States has, for a long time now, been breathing…seething for a war. The “masters of war” are all wearing suits. Only suits want to go to war. A true warrior does not want war. Only those who will go unscathed actively invite war.

But there is an insanity in suits. A compulsion. Don’t let the suit fool you. A suit is, for us grown-ups, the equivalent of a piece of candy…or an apple…or a balloon for a child. A suit advocating war is saying, “Keep your eyes on my suit. I know best. Trust in me. Look at my impressive degree.”

The suits like places such as Raven Rock Mountain. The suits won’t be on the battlefield. And don’t let the 10% who actually fought in a war fool you: they were in non-combat operations. Their daddies made sure of it.

So keep your eyes open for the M of American cinema. Who is the next fascist to take the stage? Hitler had a Charlie Chaplin moustache. How dangerous could he be? Trump has a ginger comb-over. Surely he’s harmless, right?

-PD

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Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T. [1967)

Something draws me to Eastern Europe. I blame Romania. Thank you Romania! Yes, there was something about the ambiance which director Cristian Mungiu conjured up in 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile) which has stayed with me for a long time.

Really, it’s a rather mundane part. Near the top of the film. The goddess Anamaria Marinca traipses down the hall to find some soap…and cigarettes. The scene is a college dormitory in communist Romania (pre-December 1989). Girls in one room chat about beauty products. There seems to be a good bit of bartering going on. Marinca is mainly uninterested. Looking for a certain kind of soap (if I remember correctly). On the way back to her room she stops off at the room of a foreign student (non-Romanian) who sells cigarettes and gum and stuff. The whole film she is searching for Kent cigarettes (a few mentions of this brand). Not surprisingly, there are no Kents to be had in the dorm. She settles for something else. Perhaps. I don’t know.

She stops and admires some kittens which someone has taken in.

It is astonishingly real. On par with Roberto Rossellini.

Indeed, it might be said that all New Waves (from the nouvelle vague to the Romanian New Wave) have their birth in the neorealist films of Rossellini.

But Mungiu added a new wrinkle.

Marinca. [The goddess of whom I spoke.]

Marinca is unglamorous. No one is glamorous in 4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile. We get the impression that it is the waning days of Ceaușescu’s reign.

Times are tough. The policies of the state haven’t worked out so well. It bears some resemblance to a prison. Material items take the place of money (reminiscent of cigarettes as currency in jails).

What I have yet to define in this article is “goddess”. What do I mean by that?

Well, I’m glad you asked! Marinca (particularly in this film) is a goddess to me because she represents the opposite of the typical American woman in the year 2015. Her beauty is her soul. Her beauty is her loyalty to her roommate and friend Găbița. Her beauty is her dedication to acting. She is completely immersed in her unglamorous role…and it is eye-watering.

I have mentioned a similar impression (which further solidified my admiration for Romanian films) I got from watching Dorotheea Petre in The Way I Spent the End of the World (Cum mi-am petrecut sfârşitul lumii). This masterpiece by director Cătălin Mitulescu preceded Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning film by about a year (2006). I was again struck by another goddess of film (Petre) who, with the help of her auteur, created a character also in direct opposition to the meretricious, vacuous ideal of American womanhood in the 21st century.

And so it is that we finally come to the film under consideration: Душан Макавејев‘s Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator. Dušan Makavejev is Serbian. Out of deference to his country I have listed his name in Cyrillic script. Likewise, the title of the film (at the top) is in Serbo-Croatian. It is a grey area about which I am not completely informed. Suffice it to say that Croatia seems to generally use Roman letters (as opposed to the Serbian usage of Cyrillic). It is a bit like the distinction (and writing differences) between Urdu and Hindi [which I have heard described as essentially the same language, but with two different writing systems].

I prefaced this article on Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T. with my own backstory concerning Eastern European cinema because it is relevant to my approach going forward.

Before coming to this, my first Yugoslav (1967) film, I opened up the can of worms which is Czech cinema by reviewing Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky). Jiří Menzel’s sexually-charged film poem from the previous year (1966) was a major revelation for me. And so it is that Dušan Makavejev’s bittersweet confection shares more than just a communist framing with Menzel’s aforementioned erotic portrait.

Yes, Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T. is about our old film-school standbys: sex and death. I can never combine those two words (in the context of film) without remembering the ridiculously funny scene of Jim Morrison at UCLA screening his student film in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991).

The fictional Morrison, then, would be trying to hop on a nonfictional bandwagon represented by the likes of Menzel and Makavejev. Morrison’s time at UCLA (1964-1965) not only coincided with the staggered births of “new waves” around the world (particularly in Europe), but also occurred while Morrison’s father (US Navy Rear Admiral [RADM] George Stephen Morrison) was the commanding officer of a carrier division involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Jim Morrison lived fast. Entered UCLA in 1964. Graduated with an undergraduate degree in film in 1965. Was dead by 1971. But those years in between… It’s no wonder Jim had an Oedipal complex (evident in the song “The End” [1966/1967]) when considering his father was involved in false-flagging the U.S. into a suicidal war against communism. What a disgrace…

No, the real hero in the family was not RADM Morrison, but rather Jim. He turned on the dream-switches of so many kids. To put it quite bluntly, he was part of the counterculture in America which caused kids to start giving a fuck about the world and politics and geopolitics and confirmed charades (frauds, shams, etc.) like the Gulf of Tonkin “incident”. Such a sanitary and slippery word: incident.

It fits perfectly, in that there was no incident.

But while Morrison the Younger had gone off into Brechtian pop-rock, Serbian director Makavejev was busy making Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator. It is equally stunning, for its medium, as “The End”.

Sex needs beauty. A really luscious film like this needed Ева Рас (Eva Ras). She is a bit like Jitka Zelenohorská’s character in Closely Watched Trains…mischievous, bewitching… But there is one great difference between Ras and Zelenohorska: Ras is a blond.

Though our film is in black and white, it is clear that Ras’ silky hair is rather fair (a detail which would not have escaped Hitchcock). It must be said, however, that Makavejev did not give in to the easy femme fatale portrayal when it came to filming Ras. Izabela (Ras) is a complex individual. The film tells us that she is Hungarian. She is different…other. She needs sex. She is passionate.

All the same, her portrayal by Ras is poetic and tender. Really, what we are seeing here is a tentative feminism expressed by Makavejev which would become a thundering symphony of women’s liberation in Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

And it is good. It is good for men to see these types of films. We men idolize and reify women in the West, but we don’t often enough stop to really observe the trials of womankind.

In the best spirit of socialism, this film has something for everyone…men, women…ok, maybe not children.

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is really an intense film. If you have seen (and made it through) Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (a film I, incidentally, once made the mistake of showing at a party), then you’ll be alright. For those faint of heart (I generally fall into that category), there are a couple of rough moments in this film (in the context of criminology).

In all, I am very proud and happy to have seen my first Serbian movie. As a resident of San Antonio (and fan of the San Antonio Spurs), I feel it gives me a better glimpse into the life of one of my favorite basketball players Бобан Марјановић (Boban Marjanović). I highly recommend this film…and Go Spurs Go 🙂

-PD

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paulydeathwish

musician and film critic

Tag Archives: communism