December 10, 2010
White Material
French director Claire Denis would appear tailor made for the film studies departments of the most prestigious universities, starting from the fact that she herself is a Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her particular specialty is postcolonialism, a perfect expression of which is “White Material” now showing at Lincoln Plaza and IFC theaters in New York, two premier locales for art films.
My first encounter with a Claire Denis film was the 1999 Beau Travail, an adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” using French Legionnaire characters stationed in Africa. As a Lacanian strongly influenced by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who was influenced in turn by Derrida and Bataille among others, Melville’s homoerotic tale was made to order for someone preoccupied with what they call The Body in postmodernist studies. I have to give credit where credit is due. Although I much preferred Melville’s original, her adaptation was compelling in its own art-house manner as the trailer would indicate:
Denis’s interest in African “problems” has a lot to do with growing up as the daughter of a French civil servant who was stationed in Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal and Cameroon. Her decision to make “White Material” was obviously influenced by current events, namely the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as Mugabe’s crackdown on white farmers. Since she has essentially made an amalgam of two very different processes, a criticism might be raised that she is not very interested in African reality. In all likelihood, this film maker might accept this criticism but deem it beside the point because she is—after all—striving for Deeper Truths.
The movie’s main character is Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), a coffee plantation owner in an unnamed African country (perhaps it might have been called Zimberia since it is an amalgam of Zimbabwe and Liberia) that is being ravaged by civil war. The insurgents, mostly children or teenagers in makeshift uniforms, are streaming toward the plantation in order to hook up with “The Boxer”, the wounded leader of the rebellion (played by the renowned Ivory Coast actor Isaach De Bankolé). The Boxer is the nephew of one of Maria Vial’s hired hands and she does not seem bothered by the fact that he is a rebel leader and wounded.
Indeed, nothing seems to bother her. Despite the fact that the army has warned her to leave her property and despite the fact that “survival packs” are being dropped all over her land from helicopters, all she seems concerned about is harvesting her coffee beans. When her pickers depart in order to save their necks, she scolds them about being nervous nellies and goes to the nearby town in order to recruit a new crew.
As all this transpires, we hear from a disk jockey in a nearby micro-radio station who rants against white settlers and the government while reggae is playing. If most of the movie evokes Zimbabwe and Liberia, these segments evoke Rwanda where disk jockeys incited mass murder.
Her ailing father is more in touch with reality than her but refuses to leave the plantation because he is practically on his death bed and sees no need to flee. Her ex-husband, who lives on the property, has taken steps to sell the property to the mayor of the nearby town who refuses to pay him anything. In a time of social collapse, the property is worthless.
Finally, there is her son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the most compelling figure in the cast. In his early 20s, Manuel is a total lout covered in tattoos who sleeps to noon each day and generally refuses to take part in plantation chores.
At one point he is set upon by two armed child rebels—one bearing a home-made spear, the other a machete—who cut off a piece of his blond hair in a kind of postcolonial symbolic action. Later on, apparently driven mad by this act, he shaves off the rest of his hair and stuffs a big clump of it into the mouth of the family’s Black housekeeper who storms off, only after urging her mixed-race son to become part of the rebel movement.
And to top it all off, Manuel goes off on his motorcycle, hunting rifle strapped to his back, in search of the rebels. Once he finds them, he invites them back to the plantation where they will merrily sack and torch the place together in the spirit of “Zero For Conduct”. Why this turn of heart for the tattooed settler? Who knows? At this point, Claire Denis is far more interested in striking imagery rather than narrative logic and she is quite good at it, I must say.
So, what drives this rather over-the-top movie forward is the conflict between a batty group of white settlers and a band of feral youth who function in this movie in pretty much the same fashion as the zombies in AMC’s excellent series “The Walking Dead”. When will the teenaged rebels finally knock down the doors of the plantation villa and eat the inhabitants? Oooh. Scary, Lacanian stuff.
As one might expect, not a single African has more than a line or two of dialog in the entire movie, except for the mayor who is a kind of mediator between the scary Blacks and the plantation owning family. It is really shocking to consider that not a single word comes out of the mouth of The Boxer, played by one of Africa’s finest actors. One has to wonder whether Claire Denis’s failure to make such an important character speak for himself is a function of her own post-postcolonial attitudes. If she had seen the excellent documentary War Don Don, about a Sierra Leone militia leader railroaded by an imperialist court, she might have gotten some ideas about how to develop such a character. My guess is that her film tastes run to Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, not such material.
Having said all this, I can recommend this film despite its questionable politics. Claire Denis is an excellent story-teller and cinematographer who is capable of spellbinding work. It is too bad that she is not one-one hundredth the talent of a Gillo Pontecorvo who certainly would have known how to bring a character like The Boxer to life. But then again, Pontecorvo’s brand of Marxist agitprop is not very fashionable in film school nowadays…
An open letter to the left establishment
From http://protestobama.org/
A call to Michael Moore, Norman Solomon, Katrina van den Heuvel, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher Jr., Jesse Jackson Jr., and other high profile progressive supporters of the Obama electoral campaign to actively support protests against the Obama administration.
With the Obama administration beginning its third year, it is by now painfully obvious that the predictions of even the most sober Obama supporters were overly optimistic. Rather than an ally, the administration has shown itself to be an implacable enemy of reform.
It has advanced repeated assaults on the New Deal safety net (including the previously sacrosanct Social Security trust fund), jettisoned any hope for substantive health care reform, attacked civil rights and environmental protections, and expanded a massive bailout further enriching an already bloated financial services and insurance industry. It has continued the occupation of Iraq and expanded the war in Afghanistan as well as our government’s covert and overt wars in South Asia and around the globe.
Along the way, the Obama administration, which referred to its left detractors as “f***ing retarded” individuals that required “drug testing,” stepped up the prosecution of federal war crime whistleblowers, and unleashed the FBI on those protesting the escalation of an insane war.
Obama’s recent announcement of a federal worker pay freeze is cynical, mean-spirited “deficit-reduction theater”. Slashing Bush’s plutocratic tax cuts would have made a much more significant contribution to deficit reduction but all signs are that the “progressive” president will cave to Republican demands for the preservation of George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy Few. Instead Obama’s tax cut plan would raise taxes for the poorest people in our country.
The election of Obama has not galvanized protest movements. To the contrary, it has depressed and undermined them, with the White House playing an active role in the discouragement and suppression of dissent – with disastrous consequences. The almost complete absence of protest from the left has emboldened the most right-wing elements inside and outside of the Obama administration to pursue and act on an ever more extreme agenda.
We are writing to you because you are well-known writers, bloggers and filmmakers with access to a range of old and new media, and you have in your power the capacity to help reignite the movement which brought millions onto the streets in February of 2003 but which has withered ever since. There are many thousands of progressives who follow your work closely and are waiting for a cue from you and others to act. We are asking you to commit yourself to actively supporting the protests of Obama administration policies which are now beginning to materialize.
In this connection we would like to mention a specific protest: the civil disobedience action being planned by Veterans for Peace involving Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Joel Kovel, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, several armed service veterans and others to take place in front of the White House on Dec. 16th.
Should you commit yourselves to backing this action and others sure to materialize in weeks and months ahead, what would otherwise be regarded as an emotional outburst of the “fringe left” will have a better chance of being seen as expressing the will of a substantial majority not only of the left, but of the American public at large. We believe that your support will help create the climate for larger and increasingly disruptive expressions of dissent – a development that is sorely needed and long overdue.
We hope that we can count on you to exercise the leadership that is required of all of us in these desperate times.
Best Regards,
Sen. James Abourezk
Michael Albert
Rocky Anderson
Jared Ball
Russel Banks
Thomas Bias
Noam Chomsky
Bruce Dixon
Frank Dorrel
Gidon Eshel
Jamilla El-Shafei
Okla Elliott
Norman Finkelstein
Glen Ford
Joshua Frank
Margaret Flowers M.D.
John Gerassi
Henry Giroux
Matt Gonzalez
Kevin Alexander Gray
Judd Greenstein
DeeDee Halleck
John Halle
Chris Hedges
Doug Henwood
Edward S. Herman
Dahr Jamail
Louis Kampf
Allison Kilkenny
Jamie Kilstein
Joel Kovel
Mark Kurlansky
Peter Linebaugh
Scott McLarty
Cynthia McKinney
Dede Miller
Russell Mokhiber
Bobby Muller
Christian Parenti
Michael Perelman
Peter Phillips
Louis Proyect
Ted Rall
Michael Ratner
Cindy Sheehan
Chris Spannos
Paul Street
Sunil Sharma
Jeffrey St. Clair
Len Weinglass
Cornel West
Sherry Wolf
Michael Yates
Mickey Z
Kevin Zeese
Please sign the Open Letter to the Left Establishment.
James Moody passes on
James Moody, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 85
By PETER KEEPNEWS
James Moody, a jazz saxophonist and flutist celebrated for his virtuosity, his versatility and his onstage ebullience, died on Thursday in San Diego. He was 85 and lived in San Diego.
His death, at a hospice in San Diego, was confirmed by his wife, Linda.
In November 2010, Mr. Moody revealed that he had pancreatic cancer and had decided against receiving chemotherapy or radiation treatment. He underwent surgery in February to have his gall bladder and blockage in his digestive system removed.
Mr. Moody, who began his career with the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie shortly after World War II and maintained it well into the 21st century, developed distinctive and equally fluent styles on both tenor and alto saxophone, a relatively rare accomplishment in jazz. He also played soprano saxophone, and in the mid-1950s he became one of the first significant jazz flutists, impressing the critics if not himself.
“I’m not a flute player,” he told one interviewer. “I’m a flute holder.”
The self-effacing humor of that comment was characteristic of Mr. Moody, who took his music more seriously than he took himself. His fellow musicians admired him for his dexterity, his unbridled imagination and his devotion to his craft, as did critics; reviewing a performance in 1980, Gary Giddins of The Village Voice praised Mr. Moody’s “unqualified directness of expression” and said his improvisations at their best were “mini-epics in which impassioned oracles, comic relief, suspense and song vie for chorus time.” But audiences were equally taken by his ability to entertain.
Defying the stereotype of the modern jazz musician as austere and humorless (and following the example of Gillespie, whom he considered his musical mentor and with whom he worked on and off for almost half a century), Mr. Moody told silly jokes; peppered his repertory with unlikely numbers like “Beer Barrel Polka” and the theme from “The Flintstones”; and often sang. His singing voice was unpolished but enthusiastic, and his noticeable lisp, a result of having been born partly deaf, added to the comic effect.
The song he sang most often had a memorable name and an unusual history. Based on the harmonic structure of “I’m in the Mood for Love,” it began life as an instrumental when Mr. Moody recorded it in Stockholm in 1949, improvising an entirely new melody on a borrowed alto saxophone. Released as “I’m in the Mood for Love” (and credited to that song’s writers) even though his rendition bore only the faintest resemblance to the original tune, it was a modest hit for Mr. Moody in 1951. It became a much bigger hit shortly afterward when the singer Eddie Jefferson wrote lyrics to Mr. Moody’s improvisation and another singer, King Pleasure, recorded it as “Moody’s Mood for Love.”
“Moody’s Mood for Love” (which begins with the memorable lyric “There I go, there I go, there I go, there I go …”) became a jazz and pop standard, recorded by Aretha Franklin, George Benson and others, and a staple of Mr. Moody’s concert and nightclub performances as sung by Mr. Jefferson, who was a member of his band for many years. Mr. Jefferson was shot to death in 1979; when Mr. Moody, who was in the middle of a long hiatus from jazz at the time, resumed his career a few years later, he began singing the song himself. He never stopped.
James Moody — he was always Moody, never James, Jim or Jimmy, to his friends and colleagues — was born in Savannah, Ga., on March 26, 1925, and raised in Newark. Despite being hard of hearing, he gravitated toward music and began playing alto saxophone at 16, later switching to tenor. He played with an all-black Army Air Forces band during World War II. After being discharged in 1946, he auditioned for Gillespie, who led one of the first big bands to play the complex and challenging new form of jazz known as bebop. He failed that audition but passed a second one a few months later, and soon captured the attention of the jazz world with a brief but fiery solo on the band’s recording of the Gillespie composition “Emanon.”
Mr. Moody’s career was twice interrupted by alcoholism. The first time, in 1948, he moved to Paris to live with an uncle while he recovered. He returned to the United States in 1951 to capitalize on the success of “I’m in the Mood for Love,” forming a seven-piece band that mixed elements of modern jazz and rhythm and blues. After a fire at a Philadelphia nightclub destroyed the band’s equipment, uniforms and sheet music in 1958, he began drinking again and checked himself into Overbrook, a psychiatric hospital in Cedar Grove, N.J., for several months. He celebrated his recovery by writing and recording the up-tempo blues “Last Train From Overbrook,” which became one of his best-known compositions.
In 1963 he reunited with Gillespie, joining his popular quintet. He was extensively featured as both a soloist and the straight man for Gillespie’s between-songs banter, sharpening his musical and comedic skills at the same time. He left Gillespie in 1969 to again try his luck as a bandleader, but met with limited success; four years later he left jazz entirely to work in Las Vegas hotel orchestras, first at the Flamingo and later at the Hilton.
“The reason I went to Las Vegas,” he told Saxophone Journal in 1998, “was because I was married and had a daughter and I wanted to grow up with my kid. I was married before and I didn’t grow up with the kids. So I said, ‘I’m going to really be a father.’ I did much better with this one because at least I stayed until my daughter was 12 years old. And that’s why I worked Vegas, because I could stay in one spot.”
After seven years of pit-band anonymity, providing accompaniment for everyone from Milton Berle to Ike and Tina Turner to Liberace, Mr. Moody divorced his wife and returned to the East Coast to resume his jazz career. The final three decades of his life were active and productive, with frequent touring and recording (as the leader of his own small group and, on occasion, as a sideman with Gillespie, who died in 1993) and even a brief foray into acting, with a bit part in the 1997 Clint Eastwood film “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” set in Mr. Moody’s birthplace, Savannah.
The National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master in 1998. “Moody’s Mood for Love” was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001. His last album, “Moody 4B,” was recorded in 2008 and released in 2010 on the IPO label.
Mr. Moody, who was divorced twice, is survived by his wife of 21 years, Linda, and three sons, Patrick, Regan and Danny, all of California.
