November 11, 2010
November 10, 2010
Red Star Over Russia
About a month ago an old friend from my Trotskyist youth sent me the beautiful and inspiring “Red Star Over Russia”, a massive, coffee table type book with text and images geared to the sensibility of my blog readers and Marxmail subscribers. It is a vast collection of photos and images of posters, artwork, etc. from the Russian Revolution until the USSR’s demise.
The author is David King who was the art editor of the Sunday London Times Colour Magazine from 1965 to 1975 and who amassed one of the world’s greatest collections of Russian posters, photographs, and graphics.
He collected this material out of an obvious sympathy for socialism. In the introduction, he refers to a brutal fistfight that took place on a Russian subway car in the post-Soviet era. He says that the look on the faces of the workers in the car evoked these words: “Things have changed. This should not happen in our Metro. This is what happens under capitalism This is capitalism. It would have not happened in the Soviet Union.”
David Walsh of wsws.org interviewed King when he was working on the book. Here’s an excerpt:
I asked King about the origins of his interest in Trotsky and the October Revolution. “How did I start? I worked for the Sunday Times, and I traveled widely. I was taking photos, collecting photos. I was always interested in left ideas, in socialism. I wanted to get the ideas of socialism across visually to a much wider audience, a much wider audience than there seemed to be at the time. And it’s continued.
“I began 40 years ago collecting material out of an overwhelming interest in discovering the truth about what happened to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. I wanted to uncover, through visual means, what happened, to collect visual evidence.
“Suddenly in the late 1960s here, everybody was interested in Trotsky and one or two other figures, as major alternatives to Stalinism. There was a crisis, and people were looking for alternatives. I determined to find out what really happened to Trotsky, who he was.”
King speaks passionately about these matters. “When I was growing up, everything to do with the USSR was cloudy, mysterious. I was intrigued. By the time I started on the first book, in 1970, with Francis Wyndham, it was like opening up Pandora’s box. In the USSR, I’d ask ‘What do you have on Trotsky?’ Trotsky didn’t exist. ‘Trotsky was a fascist,’ etc. It was crazy.
“I hunted around the world, while working for the Sunday Times, searching every second-hand bookshop, library, tracking down friends, relatives of Trotsky. I was trying to piece together the real history.
The book was too big for me to fit into my scanner but I wanted to share some photos with you that send shivers down my spine every time I see them. I took pictures of them with my trusty Panasonic camcorder that are obviously no competition for what you will see in the book. But they should motivate you to buy this essential book for the left.
Also, the last picture is of my great-uncle who was in the Czar’s army. I know nothing about him other than that fact. He looks a lot like the men in King’s photos and he also looks a lot like me, especially the vaguely Asiatic eyes. I always wondered when looking at him or myself in the mirror whether our eyes are inherited from some Cossack who raped a long-lost female ancestor.
The captions are from King’s book.
The vanguard of the Revolution. Fully armed Bolshevik sailors from the cruiser Aurora at the time of the October insurrection. During the storming of the Winter Palace blank shells were fired from the ship to frighten off Kerensky and those still supporting the Provisional Government.
Leon Trotsky addresses the latest recruits to the newly-formed Red Cavalry, 1918.
Women newly recruited into the Red Army for the defense of Petrograd in the Civil War, 1918
My great-uncle
Jack Levine, dies at 95
(I especially appreciate the NY Times characterizing him as “unrepentant” in the first sentence.)
NY Times, November 10 2010
Jack Levine, a Painter Who Twinned Realism And Satire, Dies at 95
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: November 9, 2010
Jack Levine, an unrepentant and much-admired realist artist whose crowded history paintings skewered plutocrats, crooked politicians and human folly, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.
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His death was announced by the DC Moore Gallery in Manhattan, which represents Mr. Levine.
Mr. Levine despised abstract art and bucked the art world’s movement toward it, drawing inspiration instead from old masters like Titian and Velázquez. He specialized in satiric tableaus and sharp social commentary directed at big business, political corruption, militarism and racism, with something left over for the comic spectacle of the human race on parade.
“I felt from my early days that good and bad weren’t simply aesthetic questions,” he told American Artist magazine in 1985. “You have to defend the innocent and flay the guilty.”
Mr. Levine burst onto the American art scene in 1937 with a scathing triple portrait remarkable for its bravura brushwork and gleeful vitriol. Titled “The Feast of Pure Reason,” it depicted a police officer, a capitalist and a politician seated at a table, their bloated faces oozing malice. Hanging conspicuously in the background was an American flag.
“It is my privilege as an artist to put these gentlemen on trial, to give them every ingratiating characteristic they might normally have, and then present them, smiles, benevolence and all, leaving it up to the spectator to judge the merits of the case,” Mr. Levine once said by way of explanation.
The painting was a hot potato. After it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, the trustees debated fiercely about whether to exhibit it, lest it offend principal donors.
Similar arguments surrounded Mr. Levine’s later work, notably “Welcome Home” (1946). It shows an armchair general being honored at an expensive restaurant, a wad of food in one cheek. On his right sits a bored socialite. Two decrepit businessmen in tuxedos make up the rest of the party. The central figure, Mr. Levine said, was “the big slob who is vice president of the Second National Bank and the president of the Chamber of Commerce, only now he’s been in the Army.”
When “Welcome Home” was included in an exhibition of American culture in Moscow in 1959, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities mounted a campaign to have it removed. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “It looks more like a lampoon than art, as far as I am concerned,” but refused to intervene.
The uproar made Mr. Levine a star. He later told an interviewer, “You get denounced by the president of the United States, you’ve hit the top.”
Jack Levine was born on Jan. 3, 1915, and spent his early childhood in the South End of Boston, the youngest of eight children of immigrant parents from Lithuania. His father was a shoemaker. When he was 8, the family moved to the Roxbury neighborhood, and he began taking children’s art classes at the Boston Museum of Art with his friend Hyman Bloom, who also became a well-known painter. The two friends later studied with Harold Zimmerman, a young painter from the museum’s art school, at a settlement house in Roxbury.
By a stroke of good fortune, Denman Ross, a patrician professor in Harvard’s art department, took Mr. Zimmerman and his two students under his wing. He took Mr. Levine to his home to look at the art treasures on the walls, organized a showing of his drawings at the Fogg Museum while he was still in high school and provided him with a stipend and a studio.
With the Depression raging, Mr. Levine signed on with the Works Progress Administration as an artist and, in 1936, two of his paintings — “Card Game” (1933) and “Brain Trust” (1935) — were included in “New Horizons in American Art,” an exhibition of W.P.A. art at the Museum of Modern Art. After completing “The Feast of Pure Reason,” he received his first one-man show at the Downtown Gallery in New York in 1939.
Inspired by old masters like Titian, Velázquez and Goya, and German expressionists like George Grosz and Oskar Kokoschka, Mr. Levine took a lofty view of art and the artist’s mission. “I took my place in the late 1930s as part of the general uprising of social consciousness in art and literature,” he said later. “We were all making a point. We had a feeling of confidence in our ability to do something about the world.”
After the death of his father in 1939, Mr. Levine, a nonobservant Jew, experimented with several formal, Rembrandtesque portraits of Jewish sages and kings. “I think these are the flip side of the satirical work,” said Norman Kleeblatt, the chief curator of the Jewish Museum. “They are internal and highly personal.”
Mr. Levine later explored his Jewish heritage in a number of paintings on biblical themes, notably “Cain and Abel” (1961) and “David and Saul” (1989).
Mr. Levine was drafted into the Army in 1942 and, after doing camouflage painting, spent the war as a clerk on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. In 1946 he married Ruth Gikow, a painter, who died in 1982. Their daughter, Susanna Levine Fisher, survives him, as do two grandchildren.
He returned from the war to an art world in the throes of transformation, as Abstract Expressionism became the dominant painting style, displacing realists like Mr. Levine. He did not go quietly. He referred to abstract painters as “space cadets.” Later styles likewise failed to impress him.
“I am alienated from all of these movements,” Mr. Levine said. “They offer me nothing. I think of myself as a dramatist. I look for a dramatic situation, which may or may not reflect some current political social response.”
Despite retrospective exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1952 and the Jewish Museum in New York in 1978, the onward march of abstraction and avant-gardism relegated him to the margins.
“I made quite a splash in the art world in the 1930s, and it seems to me that every year since I have become less and less well known,” he told David Sutherland, the director and producer of the 1985 documentary “Jack Levine: Feast of Pure Reason.”
True to his first artistic impulses, Mr. Levine continued to produce work in a caustic vein. Some works were overtly political, like “Election Night” (1954), a squalid political tableau, and “Birmingham ’63,” a savage depiction of guard dogs attacking a group of black men. Others were bustling social panoramas in the spirit of Daumier.
“Gangster Funeral,” painted in the early 1950s, depicted a crew of thugs in formal attire gathered at the coffin of a slain mob boss. In the grandly conceived diptych “Panethnikon” (1978), Mr. Levine — depicting a semifictionalized gathering of the United Nations Security Council — presented an exuberant portrait of the human race, whose identifiable members included Leonid Brezhnev, Idi Amin and Ibn Saud.
“He never gave up,” said Patricia Hills, a professor of art history at Boston University. “He kept the faith. He continued a great tradition of painting, of showing the foibles of people, the human drama and especially the foibles of powerful people.”
He spoke of what underlies his art in a speech in 1976. “I am primarily concerned with the condition of man,” Mr. Levine said. “The satirical direction I have chosen is an indication of my disappointment in man, which is the opposite way of saying that I have high expectations for the human race.”
November 9, 2010
Aftershock
Now showing at the AMC Loew’s Village 7 in New York, Aftershock is China’s official submission as best foreign film for the 2010 Academy Awards. Unlike most Chinese movies that play in New York, this is not targeted at Western audiences like Yimou Zhang’s costume dramas, for example. Since director Feng Xiaogang was unabashedly appealing to his countrymen’s tastes, it is essential fare for anybody looking for an unfiltered take on what matters to a Chinese audience. Since Feng is regarded as China’s Stephen Spielberg, this is especially true. Like the American, he knows how to get to peoples’ hearts, even if exploiting melodramatic gimmicks of one sort or another.
In early August 2010, Aftershock became the highest grossing film ever made in China, surpassing The Founding of a Republic, government-backed hagiography on the Chinese Communist Party. Interestingly enough, the top-grossing film remains Avatar.
Aftershock is a very old-fashioned story about the impact of two powerful earthquakes on a fairly typical cross-section of Chinese society. In the opening scene, we see a young husband Daiqiang and wife Yuan Ni and their young son Deng and his twin sister Da in the cab of a truck that belongs to his employer, a local factory.
Driving home on the night of July 28, 1976 on the crowded streets of Tangshan, they are puzzled by a vast swarm of dragonflies streaming toward them in ominous anticipation of the earthquake that would strike later that night. The Tangshan earthquake killed more people than any other in the 20th century. Around 250,000 people died while another 164,000 were severely injured. As might be expected, the buildings were hardly resistant to earthquakes. To some extent, the Chinese government cannot be held totally at fault since the region was not considered susceptible to earthquakes.
Later when the husband and wife are out enjoying the night air in front of their apartment building, they succumb to a randy mood and jump in the back of the truck for lovemaking. Afterward, when they are sleeping, a powerful earthquake ensues. They rush toward their building, which begins to collapse just like all the others on the street.
Daiqiang runs toward the building to rescue their children but falling debris kills him immediately. As Yuan Ni approaches the collapsed building, she can hear her children crying out to her from beneath the rubble. Rescue workers can see them pinned beneath an enormous slab of concrete but can only rescue one of the children. By lifting the slab in one direction to rescue one twin, it will kill the other. They insist that she choose immediately or both will die. Following the male-dominated culture that surrounds her, she chooses that Deng should live.
He survives but loses a hand in the process. Meanwhile, Da, who has been placed next to her dead father in a truck, has only been unconscious. She is brought to an orphanage and adopted by a husband and wife who are in the People’s Liberation Army. For their part, Yuan Ni and Deng remain in Tangshan where they struggle to survive and mourn for the lost father and the presumably dead sister.
The movie follows each child as they suffer from different forms of adjustment. Da goes to medical school but drops out after becoming pregnant. Deng, an indifferent high school student, does not apply to college but becomes one of China’s new entrepreneurs through dint of his personal charm and perseverance.
I don’t think that I am giving away too much of the plot to say that this becomes a story about a family becoming reunited. Although I am as flinty as they come, I was nearly reduced to tears by the end. Oddly enough, the film that this reminds me of more than any is Sansho the Bailiff, a 1954 Japanese masterpiece about the reunion of a mother and her two children, who had been abducted by bandits. In a very real sense, the earthquake serves as the same kind of villain even though it is a natural disaster rather than a human agency. Just minutes after the Tangshan earthquake has taken her husband’s life Yuan Ni yells out “God, you bastard!”
It also reminds me of some I have seen from North Korea, a country that makes some very fine movies despite the iron hand of the dictatorship. If there is one thing you can say about the mixture of Confucianism and state socialism (obviously highly distorted in North Korea’s case, and only a memory in the case of China), there is an obvious commitment to family values, to use the words in their proper meaning rather than in the disgusting way bigots in the U.S use them.
For a very old fashioned but genuinely stirring film, Aftershock is strongly recommended.
November 8, 2010
Paul Lodico, dead at 70
(I met this guy back in 1967 shortly after joining the SWP. He really impressed me. Like so many others, he went on to bigger and better things.)
Paul Lodico first crossed paths with the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee in 1980, when the steel firms that built this city started shipping jobs overseas.
He was leading a march through Downtown as an organizer with the United Electrical Workers laid off from the American Standard plants in Edgewood.
As the marchers passed Mr. Lodico, he started counting the people — all 3,000 of them.
“He knew you’ve got to be quick about your numbers and your capacity,” said his future colleague, Barney Oursler. “Because that was a real show of power.”
That combination of passion and planning marked Mr. Lodico’s lifetime in union organizing. As co-coordinator of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, he spent 30 years in the region finding people at their most vulnerable and showing — or shouting — their concerns to lawmakers in Harrisburg and Washington.
Mr. Lodico called himself a “professional rabble-rouser.” He was just that until he died Oct. 29 of cancer in Greenfield. He was 70.
The Wyandotte, Mich., native had been in Pittsburgh since 1978, when he moved here to organize for the United Electrical Workers. When he met Mr. Oursler at that rally two years later, he shelved an oral history he’d begun so he could start work at the Homestead outfit.
“Recording the history of another strike may be helpful in the future, but when he saw the chance to make real change in peoples’ lives, he jumped right in,” said Mr. Oursler.
At the committee, Mr. Lodico helped the local unemployed navigate health insurance bureaucracy, fight bus cuts that made commutes harder and protest budgets that shaved unemployment benefits.
His son, Antonio, said his father empowered people to form their own opinions and never pontificated from a soapbox.
“He wanted them to know that they weren’t alone,” said his son, who works as an organizer in Pittsburgh voting rights campaigns.
As a child, “every now and then my dad would take me away from Sunday morning cartoons to go to the office and lick envelopes,” he said.
Mr. Ludico’s ex-wife, Norma Dupire, said Mr. Lodico’s unwavering sense of justice formed during his time at Wayne State University, where he graduated in 1968.
She first spotted her future husband at a college party where he was playing speed chess. He only stopped to take a drink. He won the game.
“That impressed me,” she said.
They married in 1960 and begin making stops in cities — and jails — across the country.
They ran for local office in Detroit on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. They were arrested for vagrancy in Cheyenne, Wyo.
“We were hitchhiking students on break; we weren’t vagrants,” said Ms. Dupire. Regardless, they had to spend the weekend in jail.
“In separate cells, of course,” she said.
Mr. Lodico favored uniforms, she said, often finding an outfit and wearing the look for days.
When Ms. Dupire spotted him at that chess board, he wore a white dress shirt with Levi’s and a leather jacket. In grad school at American University, it was a collarless shirt and vest.
And for the past 20 years, it was a black-and-gold T-shirt and hat bearing the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee logo.
He even sported the outfit on a trip to Italy with his son a few years ago.
“We’re in Venice and I said, ‘Dad, why are you wearing the shirt and hat? Nobody here knows what it means,’ ” said Antonio Lodico.
Mr. Lodico turned to his son and smiled. “I know what it means,” he said.
In addition to his ex-wife and son, Mr. Lodico is survived by his partner, Sandy Kolenda of Munhall.
The family will host a memorial event on Saturday at noon at the Homestead Order of the Owls.
Erich Schwartzel: eschwartzel@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1455.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10306/1099893-122.stm#ixzz14i3HXdIx
November 7, 2010
Clifford Krauss: propagandist par excellence
Clifford Krauss
After having seen the powerful documentary Gasland that shows the impact of “fracking” on households across the United States, including flammable tap water and cancer clusters that are the inevitable outcome of natural gas drilling byproducts, I have begun to pay closer attention to news coverage, including my hometown papers in Upstate NY where energy companies are attempting to buy support from impoverished land owners.
So with that in mind, I read the article “When a Rig Moves In Next Door” by Clifford Krauss and Tom Zeller Jr. in the Business section of today’s NY Times with keen interest. As is so often the case with the newspaper of record, it has to maintain the illusion of objectivity, so necessary for its market niche: college-educated professionals who vote Democrat, watch PBS, listen to NPR, drive a Lexus, and donate money to the ACLU or mainstream environmentalist organizations. It simply would not suffice for Krauss and Zeller Jr. to write the sort of thing that you would hear from Rupert Murdoch hirelings, even if it amounts to the same thing more or less.
The article reports on the riches gas drilling has bestowed on Louisiana:
By the 2000s, De Soto, with a population of about 28,000, was one of the poorest parishes in the state.
Then came the shale.
“People went to bed one night poor and woke up the next day rich, enabled to buy a Cadillac and pay cash,” said Mayor Curtis McCoy of Mansfield, the parish seat. “It’s kind of like the show ‘The Beverly Hillbillies.’ ”
Farmers who once lived check to check are now extremely comfortable, if not downright wealthy. New cars, recreational vehicles and trailers are parked in nearly every driveway. Vinyl siding has been applied to weather-beaten cottages and clapboard houses.
But to make sure that he maintains the aura of objectivity, Krauss reports on the negative consequences as well:
The Haynesville area has not been spared from drilling accidents, experiencing several over the last two years that might make residents howl in some other parts of the country.
Nearly 150 homes had to be evacuated in the neighboring Caddo Parish in April, when drillers of an Exco Resources well struck a shallow pocket of gas, causing a blowout. Exco says methane was already in the drinking water, and suggests that further study is needed to determine whether some gas came from the well.
Careful readers will note, I’m sure, that he is sure to turn a negative into a positive: “further study is needed to determine whether some gas came from the well.” You almost need to study Hegel to master all the contradictions contained in the article.
I especially enjoyed his reporting on how some environmentalists are for gas drilling despite the inflammatory water faucets and cancer clusters:
Some environmentalists support fracking and other means of extracting natural gas because gas emits a fraction of the carbon of either oil or coal. They also prefer it because it could replace coal as the nation’s principal source of electricity and provide a lower-carbon bridge before renewable energy sources can be developed on a larger scale.
You don’t have to be working at FAIR to ask the question which environmentalists. Back in junior high school, our social studies teacher explained what good reporting is all about. It has to address the questions of who, what, when, where and why. The NY Times is fully capable of answering these questions when it is in the interests of the class it speaks for, just as it is capable of fudging them when it is not. I was not surprised to discover that a google search on “environmentalists support fracking” only turned up links to Krauss and Zeller’s article. Maybe they are the environmentalists they are talking about, since both contribute to Green, a Blog about Energy and the Environment at the NYT.
In the course of finding out more about Clifford Krauss, I discovered that he is someone who has been responsible for shoddy reporting in an entirely different arena. Along with Simon Forero, Krauss was writing articles about Hugo Chavez that were compliant with American foreign policy imperatives. In an article “High Stakes: Chávez Plays the Oil Card” from April 10, 2007, Krauss informed his readers:
We are on a collision course with Chávez over oil,” said Michael J. Economides, an oil consultant in Houston who wrote an influential essay comparing Mr. Chávez’s populist appeal in Latin America with the pan-Arabism of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya two decades ago. “Chávez poses a much bigger threat to America’s energy security than Saddam Hussein ever did.”
Needless to say, Krauss did not bother to cite anybody like Mark Weisbrot or Eva Gollinger.
Along with Forero, he has also been presenting Chevron’s case in Ecuador most assiduously: Chevron Offers Evidence of Bribery Scheme in Ecuador Lawsuit.
So one can only surmise that as a watchdog of American energy corporations’ vital interests in Latin America, it was only natural for him to adopt the same fighting stance in places like Louisiana or Pennsylvania.
But it is in Sandinista Nicaragua where Clifford Krauss sharpened his propaganda skills working for the Wall Street Journal prior to landing a job at the Times. On May 18, 1987 Krauss wrote a piece for the WSJ with the unwieldy title Central Issue: If the Contras Collapse, U.S. Faces Bigger Task In Containing Marxism — Officials Fear an Adventurism By Nicaragua Sandinistas Similar to That of Castro — The Likely Refugee Problem. It pretty much dispenses with any pretensions toward impartiality that would be necessary for the NY Times readers and presents an analysis that might have been written by a State Department flack:
No one knows the future of Nicaragua. The image of a triumphant, militaristic, Marxist-Leninist Nicaragua torments antiCommunists. Others think the Sandinistas will broaden civil and economic liberties once the Contra pressure is released. Some observers speculate that Managua will face serious internal political pressures from the Nicaraguan public and from within the Sandinista party itself once the war fades and domestic crackdowns are no longer justifiable. The Sandinistas’ future may be profoundly affected by whatever commitment the Soviet Union makes in Nicaragua, and by the moves Washington makes.
“We don’t have a wall to stop Sandinista ideology or subversives,” complains William Hall Rivera, the Honduran president’s chief of staff. “It won’t be a fight over land, but over minds.” He adds: “We’ll need a Marshall Plan.”
In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced an arguably comparable situation. Fidel Castro quickly consolidated his revolution in Cuba, defeated a U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary force and attempted to export his ideology to the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia. His adventurism failed, partly because Washington pushed Alliance for Progress social programs and military training in Latin America, but mostly because of indigenous anti-communism in the hemisphere.
Krauss is an Edward J. Murrow Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), a policy review body filled to the rafters with inside-the-beltway pundits and NY Times reporters. Whatever qualms I might have about Murrow’s own connections to power, he had the guts to take on McCarthy at a time when Krauss would have likely been raising a ruckus over atom spies.
In an interview he gave to the CFR, Krauss answered the question about the most important story he covered in his career:
No question, the most impactful story I ever covered were the wars in Central America during the late 1970s and 1980s. The fall of Somoza, the Sandinista revolution and Contra counter-revolution, and the revolutions and U.S. policy in El Salvador and Guatemala were dramatic events that brought an otherwise remote part of the world into focus for Americans and the world. It was a challenging story for many of us young reporters because we carried lessons and baggage from the Vietnam era. Some were pertinent to this story, while others were not, and we had to sort it out. The Cold War loomed large, of course, with Cuban and even Soviet bloc involvement. But there were also crying human needs and suffering that needed to be addressed, and revolutionaries not particularly sympathetic to American interests (to put it mildly) sometimes appeared to be the only ones eager to address them. In the end, good reporting was needed to break through the simplistic perceptions of both left and right. I was attracted to Central America at first because of my own Vietnam experience as a high school and college student, and I left with a much more nuanced view of the world. As for Central America, it’s still a mess, but the foreign correspondents are essentially gone.
You’ll note his self-justification that “In the end, good reporting was needed to break through the simplistic perceptions of both left and right.” And the older but wiser bullshit about a “more nuanced view of the world”. Such formulations reflect the “sensible” way that American ideologists see themselves, from Krauss’s thumb-sucking apologetics for gas-drilling corporations to Jon Stewart’s idiotic rally. As a way of maintaining the status quo, there is no better tactic for persuading the affluent middle class that its interests are the same as the people who own the NYT or Comedy Central (Time-Warner actually). But when the status quo amounts to job loss, foreclosure, deteriorating water and air, pension uncertainties and ever-escalating health costs, that status quo will begin to appear more and more inadequate. That will most certainly begin to persuade the formerly complacent that radical change is not only desirable but necessary.
November 6, 2010
Outside the Law
Written and directed by Rachid Bouchareb, “Outside the Law” (Hors La Loi) is a revisionist take on the Algerian war of independence. In contrast to “The Battle of Algiers”, this is not anti-imperialist agit-prop. Instead it is a cautionary tale about the costs of fighting total war against the colonizers, in some ways echoing the pacifist laments of Albert Camus.
Unlike the Marxist Gillo Pontecorvo, who made “The Battle of Algiers” in 1965 just as the war in Vietnam was inspiring a new generation to struggle against imperialism, Bouchareb—an Algerian born and raised in France—had little interest in politics. A question was posed to the director: What’s your advice to aspiring young filmmakers who want to make provocative, political pictures? In effect, he advised them not to take the route of Pontecorvo:
First of all, do not approach things politically. You must have a story to tell. My film has a political background but, for me, it’s the story of three brothers, an emotional story about a family. Certainly, the characters in my story travel within a bigger story. But I didn’t start with that. Instead, I chose to tell the smaller story about people’s lives and then I traveled with them inside the larger story between France and Algeria and the Algerian War.
Bouchareb’s last film “Days of Glory” led me to believe—somewhat over-optimistically, I’m afraid—that this would be a political film since “Days of Glory” was a passionate critique of the racism African soldiers in the French army faced during WWII. One would have to assume that the general turn against radical politics in the film industry and more specifically the long-lost revolutionary fiber of Algeria itself made this impossible.
The movie begins on a farm on the outskirts of Setif, Algeria with the film’s three brothers then in childhood–Saïd, Messaoud and Abdelkader—witnessing its seizure by a local comprador official accompanied by French cops. When their parents are unable to produce a deed, the official tells them that they have to leave immediately even though they have been there for generations. A French colonist will now own the land and they will have nothing.
Saïd, Messaoud and Abdelkader are the names of the soldiers that Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila played in “Days of Glory” as well. Clearly, Bouchareb intended some kind of continuity between the two movies on this basis, even though his most recent is decidedly less confrontational politically. The main confrontation would appear to be between the combatants on one side—French and Algerian alike—and the civilized audience who would never stoop to such behavior. In one scene, Abdelkader—an FLN leader—is in a meeting with his French nemesis, a cop named Faivre who is running a death squad called The Red Hand. He tells Faivre that they are no different. Faivre fought with the Resistance against the Nazis, while he is carrying out the same kind of fight against the French. Somehow one is left with the conclusion, in light of their respective brutality, that both struggles were problematic. Indeed, Army of Crime, a 2009 film on the French Resistance, makes exactly that point.
Not long after the three young brothers move to the city of Setif, they find themselves in the middle of the massacre that led to the war of independence. On May 8, 1945 some 5000 Algerians were on a peaceful march demanding independence that was attacked by the colonists. In a series of pogroms that lasted for weeks, at least 6000 Algerians were killed, raped or mutilated. Abdelkader, who was on the demonstration that day, narrowly escaped with his life as did his brother Saïd, who had no interest in politics.
As fate would have it, the other brother Messaoud, who had enlisted in the French army, would find himself in another key chapter in the anti-colonial struggle, namely the battle of Dien Bien Phu. When he becomes a prisoner of war with other French soldiers, he listens to Vietnamese speeches over a loudspeaker about the need to fight for national independence from all countries ruled by imperialism.
Meanwhile, Saïd, Abdelkader and their mother have moved to France where they are living in a shantytown in extreme poverty. Unlike Abdelkader, Saïd has no political ambitions and only seeks a way out of poverty. When he spots a well-dressed Algerian sitting at leisure on a bench near their shack, he asks him how he can enjoy the same kind of life. The man recruits him as a fellow pimp, thus leading him into an existence similar to the man who was gunned down in the Casbah in “Battle of Algiers” by the hero Ali la Pointe. Despite their clashing political perspectives, Bouchareb clearly shares thematic elements with Pontecorvo.
When Messaoud returns to France to join his mother and brothers, he soon becomes an FLN member and serves as a kind of muscle man to his brother who has just been released from prison. His values and psychology are located in between his two brothers. While he is committed to the liberation struggle, he is still anxious to live a normal life even to the point of getting married and having a child.
Abdelkader, by contrast, eschews anything smacking of domesticity. Not only will he not get married, he will not even sleep with the French leftist woman whose assignment is to launder money for the FLN. When she tries to kiss him, he turns his face away. The only thing that motivates him is the struggle. As a study in fanatical asceticism, Abdelkader should be familiar to anybody who has read fiction or seen movies about the “hard men” who make revolutions, whether they are in the IRA or the guerrilla movements in Latin America. This would not be such a bad thing, if Bouchareb had a flair for putting interesting words in his mouth. Mostly, Abdelkader says things like “The FLN must be victorious”, “I will die for my country” or “Traitors to the cause must be punished”.
One scene encapsulates the alienation that separates Bouchareb from his revolutionary character. When Abdelkader and Messaoud learn that a fellow shantytown dweller has stolen money from the movement, they pay a visit. The man admits his guilt and shows them the refrigerator he bought with the funds. His wife intercedes to tell them that she pressured him to buy it for the sake of their children. Despite grave misgivings, Messaoud pins the man’s arms while Abdelkader strangles him with electrical cable.
One cannot escape the feeling that the two men differ little from Mafiosi embarked on their first hit, an initiation into gangster life. Their cause might be national independence rather than personal gain, but they come across as ruthless criminals. Meanwhile, Saïd appears much more “normal” than them, even though his life is much more like a real Mafioso. He has graduated from running a prostitution ring to opening a nightclub and managing prizefighters on the side. The drama in this film is mostly about the conflicted relationships between the three brothers rather than the political struggle, something that the director would readily admit.
Unlike “Battle of Algiers”, the masses play no role in the struggle. Abdelkader is never seen once in a mass meeting where there is discussion about a protest demonstration or the need to carry out a revenge bombing. He only harangues them as the need arises.
Even with these caveats, I can recommend this movie as a gripping story about three brothers living on the edge. Compared to the garbage at your local Cineplex in New York, “Outside the Law” at least takes its characters and their motivations seriously. It is adult fiction for adult viewers, a disappearing commodity in today’s marketplace. “Outside the Law” is playing at The Paris Theater in New York on 4 West 58th Street and is worth your time, even though it is obviously no competition for “Battle of Algiers”.
November 3, 2010
AfroCubism
http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-11-03/music/afrocubism-emerges-at-last/
AfroCubism Emerges at Last
A Mali-Cuba connection, 14 years in the making, is finally forged
By Tad Hendrickson
Most Buena Vista Social Club fans remember the group’s backstory: elite Cuban musicians coaxed out of retirement in 1996 for sessions designed to mingle them with their Malian counterparts, except the African stars made the mistake of trying to handle their visa applications by mail. They never made it, the Cubans soldiered on alone, and the rest, as they say, is eight-times-platinum history.Fourteen years later, producer Nick Gold has finally revisited his original concept. The resulting record, AfroCubism, features BVSC guitarist Eliades Ochoa (the cowboy hat-wearing singer of the hit “Chan Chan”) and his band, Grupo Patria, alongside ngoni master Bassekou Kouyate, guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, and a few other Malian ringers, including kora titan Toumani Diabaté. Throw around the phrase “Afro-Cuban,” and usually a blustery Latin-jazz vortex with Mario Bauza and Machito at its center comes to mind, but this is a different animal altogether: The big brass riffing and conga drums are supplanted by an earthier, string-based tradition, the similar-sounding guitar, ngoni, and kora shimmering together with the same subtlety that made BVSC so alluring, inviting Yoruban spirits to the campfire rather than trying to chase them away with the blast of a horn.
The album opens with the self-explanatory instrumental “Mali Cuba,” the bouncy melody complemented by brief, introductory solos by several players, the result a prologue of sorts leading straight to the heart of the matter: “Al Vaiven De Mi Carretta,” which translates to “The Swaying of My Cart.” This Cuban classic, written by Ñico Saquito, is here driven by Ochoa’s robust guitar and vocals, yet the Africans immediately line up behind him: Vocalist Kasse Mady Diabaté sings alternating verses as the strings add subtle accents to each lyrical line about the plight of poor farmers. Something magical happens on one of the last choruses, with keening African voices perfectly rising up together with the incantatory Cubans.
And then, the reverse happens: The Malian classic “Karamo” (or “The Hunter”) shifts the focus to a griot performing in an African town square, the music dense as Kasse Mady Diabaté’s voice and Toumani Diabaté’s kora fly above the percolating polyrhythms. The vocals are in Swahili, but they have a Spanish exclamatory element to them, and Kouyate and Tounkara handle their instruments in an almost Cuban-like style, tightening up their exploratory lines to something more forceful and tuning their instruments to a Western musical scale.
Both tunes are about as perfect a blend of AfroCubism‘s two dominant cultures as you’ll ever find; the rest of the album sustains that high. As it turns out, Mali was Cuban-music crazy from the ’50s to the ’70s, as friendly governments oversaw globe-trotting cultural exchanges. Mali’s music scene, the crown jewel of Africa, is consequently deeply indebted to Cuban music, with popular bands like Orchestra Baobab, the Star Band, Djelimady’s Rail Band, and others bringing Cuban flair both to the radio and the clubs. This 14-track tribute alternates between the two countries, never leaning too far in either direction as it shifts from Cuban treasures to traditional griot numbers to original unions of the two. “Fusion” can be a dirty word, but not here: At long last, Gold and his cohorts have achieved something that lives up to its original promise, a direct link between the Old World and the new.
The AfroCubism band plays Town Hall November 9
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist 