Italian political cinema

When Italian cinema deals with political issues, it always seems much more interesting to me than in, say, a French film. French cinema always seems much more didactic when it deals with these issues. The most egregious case might be Godard's La Chinoise which basically consists of a bunch of '68 fiery youths discussing Maoism. Even so, more contemporary French cinema always seems like it's driving home a point, even in the guise of a narrative.

I find Italian films more interesting than French ones when they deal with political issues. What you get, usually, are Machiavellian dealings and a dramatic arc. Woven into that, you also get commentary on the state of government corruption, social issues and the nature of ideology.

Salvatore Guilano (1962) by Franscesco Rosi is not usually considered part of the neo-realist movement. It is not usually presented on a par with films by De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni and co. However, it employs all of the neo-realists' aesthetics - hand-held cameras, filming on location, grainy resolution, etc. - and is more interesting than a lot of those films. A director like Visconti always falls back to soppy melodrama. Rosi confronts political issues head-on.

Presented in a non-linear style, the film is ingenious in the way it presents its material. The eponymous character never appears. Well, we do see him once or twice - as a corpse. The film comes back again and again to the moment where he was murdered by the Italian police. The film is shown from the perspectives of the insurgency fighting for Sicilian independence.

The film aptly captures the kind of revolutionary ardour which characterises leftist Italian politics. It also amply demonstrates the inevitable fissiparity and in-fighting of these movements. The post-war call for Sicilian independence, however noble its founding intentions, swiftly degenerates into acts of collusion and betrayal.

Salvatore Guilano

Bernardo Bertolluci's The Conformist (1971) is a fascinating political thriller. A conscript for Mussolini's secret police service is ordered to murder a Marxist professor, who once taught him during his years as an undergraduate student. Without a trace of compunction, he and his partner ingratiate themselves with the professor and his wife before the inevitable murder takes place.

The film takes place in fascist Italy. When one sees criticisms of fascism, one admission the critic makes is its potential for political and economic collectivisation as well as the happiness and optimism it brings to the side of the supporters. What this film demonstrates is that all that is palpably false. Modish fads pervade. Politics seems a mere afterthought. The lead character seems oddly apathetic about state propaganda. When he kills the professor, it is not because he finds Marxist ideology repellent. It is merely because he has being ordered to. When he commits the deed, it is of no moral consequence that the victim was once his vetted professor not that they struck a friendship. Collectivisation is not in the air, even during war time. The protagonists' lover is extremely individualistic, coquettish and materialistic. Strikingly, for a country as ardently Catholic as Italy, religion is rooted out. State fascism replaces clericalism and, as a result, religious belief is merely replaced by the pomp and circumstance of the church. The lover, before going to church, says 'no-one believes in this stuff anymore.'

Stylistically, the editing of the film is fluid, employing a lot of jump-cuts. As such, it is enthralling to watch. The lighting creates a lot of contrasts and plays into the film's overriding symbolism. As evidenced by the photograph below, there a lot of chiaroscuro. The films has scenes with copious use of colour as well as others which employ heavy saturation.

The Conformist

Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo (2008), meanwhile, is more overtly playful. It is closer to the cinema of Fellini. (Though it much more enthralling to watch - you are never bored out of your mind.) 

Sorrentino has been accused of indulgence. He has also been accused of being all style no substance. His scenes are beautifully shot. He employs a lot of tracking shots as well as panoramic shots. The scenes of the house of parliament, as a result, are made to seem ornate, as if they were Catholic churches. This is made all the more ironic given that its main character is a dull politician. (Played in a wonderfully soporific and dead-pan way by Tony Servillo.) The title translates as 'the divine.' The character is the lead politician of the Christian Democrats. The framing of the shots, and the significance of the political party, make it abundantly clear that the film ironically plays with the lofty religious overtones This is despite dealing with dull, duplicitous and morally shady characters. 

The lead character becomes involved with the Mafia and orders the killings of political opponents to advance his political career. As he becomes embroiled in a court case which will lead to his incarceration, he faces it with equanimity and never displays a guilty conscience. It is clear that the film was made during Berlusconi's reign. This is not only does it deal with the court case of a politician. Politics is made out to be a frivolous game and as nothing more than an ecstatic party. Although addressing a figure from the seventies, Sorrentino is clearly commenting on the present day. This is a riveting film which clearly shows why Sorrentino is one of the best directors working today.

Il Divo

Eclective affinities

In the last week of March I went to London three times. My wallet has been ever so light recently. The three events I attended were: The Sun Ra Arkestra on the 25th of March, a John Gray lecture on the 27th and football match between Chile and Brazil on the 29th.



The Sun Ra Arkestra

I introduced a school friend into Sun Ra's music and he let me know about this concert in London. It exceeded both of our expectations. This is quite likely the best concert I have ever attended.




The dour thing about most rock and pop is that is largely a dour process when it comes to live performance. The performers play the repertoire largely as it is on record. They insincerely thank the audience. They plan an encore. They leave. The great thing about jazz performances - especially with an ensemble as colourful as the Arkestra - is that each performance is different.





Sun Ra played nearly every variety of jazz throughout his career. He is written off by many as a crazy shaman who just made atonal cacophony. Yet the great thing about this music - and the Arkestra have kept at it for more than twenty years since his death - is that it is firmly poised between more traditional and more avant-garde stylings of jazz. In this concert, there was a lot of swing alongside brilliant atonal effusions.






It beggars belief that most of the group are in their eighties. Marshall Allan, who leads the group, is approaching ninety-one. They played with so much energy and passion that, if you heard a recording of the music, you'd assume they were all in their twenties. One of their saxophonists started dancing and doing incredible acrobatics - in his late seventies! Sun Ra has a despotic reputation. But, unlike other 'despotic' avant-garde-musicians - Mark E. Smith, Beefheart, Zappa, Miles Davis etc. - none of his musicians seem to harbour the slightest resentment against him. They still want to preserve his legacy, celebrate his cosmic philosophy and they still want to play each gig with the utmost energy and passion.




There is such a communal feeling to an Arkestra concert. They want the audience to get involved. I giddily danced and clapped throughout the concert. Towards the end, the wind and brass and players - barring Allan - descended onto the crowd and danced and soloed around us. I've been hearing Sun Ra's music for ten years now, so it is rather emotional to witness this. Also, strangely for a concert of avant-garde music there were a lot of pretty single girls floating around! (One of them started dancing with us but promptly left before the end of the concert!)




When you read about Sun Ra's music, he is always written about in past tense. It is easy to forget that his legacy lives on. To think that he was at his peak during the 60s and 70s when you can still attend a concert as mind-blowing as this.




John Gray

I've been reading John Gray's books and his magazine articles an awful lot lately. He has influenced a lot of my thinking and was the person largely responsible to get me into reading Schopenhauer (Borges played a part in that, too). I went with Michael Brooks, author of the 'Doves Will Rust' blog and a novel I review for this blog, Digital.




Gray is, by and large, the main voice of pessimism and unreason in this country. He has been a strident criticism of Enlightenment thinking and utopianism. The main charge leveled against him is that he offers nothing positive to lead to any tangible change and improvement. To Gray's credit, I think that there is far too much optimistic thinking. In my view, it is healthy to have his commentary and analysis in public discourse. He has been advocating a similar position for a long time. (This is despite seismic shifts from being a socialist labourite, to being a Thatcherite, a brief excursion into Blarism and now finally has arrived at a red herring where he does not really espouse any political label.) Gray critiqued free market globalism in False Dawn, where he argued that is an 'unstable Enlightenment project' on the verge of collapsing. He was an early critic of the Iraq war, viewing the idea of importing western liberal democracy as hubristic and utopian. As he was saying all this stuff about fifteen years ago, after Fukuyama had pronounced 'the end of history,' he was viewed as something of a crank. Yet after the financial crash of 2007, the unraveling of the Iraq war, the failure of the Arab Spring and many other developments have largely vindicated his position. The optimism of the 90s has largely lapsed into a collective scepticism.




The main target of Gray's polemics has been the notion of 'progress.' He argues that the Enlightenment/Liberal/Marxist idea of progress was inherited from the Christian notion. Gray argues that there is progress in science, in the sense that knowledge and information accumulates. Gray argues that that such a view is a 'human myth' (like religion), one of the many beliefs which humans have. (Another argument he uses against Enlightenemnt humanism is that humans are no different from other animals.) Gray sees politics as temporary remedial expedients - hence the 'seismic shifts' I mentioned above. There is no progress in politics or ethics. This was the view of ancient antiquity, which was a circular conception of history. In the Greek/Roman/pagan etc. conception, history was viewed as being sequential. There were wars and there was strife followed by periods of enlightenment and harmony. Whilst Gray does concede that living standards have improved and that we are more liberal and tolerant about civil liberties, these values and economic conditions can vanish overnight and be replaced by barbarism. (He cites the USA, the world's foremost liberal democracy, employing torture during the Iraq war.)




Gray covered some familiar ground in this lecture. He covered some of the stuff he has written about in recent articles as well as his most popular book, Straw Dogs. But the talk was at its most stimulating when he ventured into the subject of his latest book, free will. I disagreed with some of the things he had to say. Gray believes that our minds are deterministic and that we are not always conscious about our actions. In his book Straw Dogs, he argues that a pre-engineered cognitive system is essentially no different from that of humans. But, beyond that, can said cognitive system actually understand concepts like free will, morality, love beyond merely replicating them? (This has been brought up by John Searle in his 'Chinese Room' argument.)




Gray draws from examples from ancient antiquity against secular humanists who think they are more enlightened and scientific. He talked about the Gnostics and contemporary 'transhumanism.' Gnostics thought that the material world was illusory and that the afterlife was the real world (a view which has shades of Plato). By adhering to their creed and by practicing asceticism, they would enter a 'perfect' spiritual plane. Gray argues that is essentially no different from a current scientific fad that wants to load the data from our brains and to bring it back once we've passed away. We thus become 'eternal' and 'perfect.' Scientists are essentially being ascetic and austere by living so healthily that they will live until 2040 until technology has caught up with us.




Whilst I disagree with some of his arguments about free will, Gray ended his lecture on a stimulating note. He talked about the need for humans 'to live in mystery and ignorance.' Gray is less influenced by philosophers than he is by poets. There is a Romantic streak to his world-view (which I am sure he would deny). I get terribly bored by thinkers like Dawkins, Pinker and Grayling (all of whom Gray attacks on a regular basis) who preach about the need for science and 'reason.' Gray is sympathetic to religion. He wants us to preserve myths, one of the things which differentiates us from other animals. We are so sedated by consumerism and by the progress of science that Romantic concepts like transcendence and the sublime seem to have little currency. Though as Michael said once we left the lecture, we still feel the need to intellectualise these things. And we are often smug about 'ignorant' people.




Chile vs, Brazil at the Emirates stadium

I went to this game with bunch of Latin American PHD economics students whom I've developed very close friendships with. Two of them are Brazilian. They had been taunting me about what a crap Chile team before the world cup but largely retracted those statements after they saw them play in the world cup! (We were close - ever so close - of knocking them out.)


This the fourth time I have seen Chile play. (The previous time was the 2-0 win against England at Wembley.) This is the first time, though, that I saw them lose. The game ended 1-0 to Brazil.


The main reason for the disappointment was down to Dunga's negative tactics. Chile are a fast, fluid, passing side and Brazil constantly fouled them and stopped them. (They accrued a lot of cards.) Chile, despite being the better side, mustered one shot on target.


Though I did encounter something very, very suprising. A fan from my third division teach, Fernandez Vial, invaded the pithch. I am in an important European stadium, watching an international friendly and I see a Vial fan storm into the pitch. Only word could express my incredulity: SU-RRE-AL.


Vial are in danger of being disbanded. They were just promoted from the third tier and the ANFP (the football federation) has charged them a large sum they can't afford to pay. Vial are the team with most support in the region and with longest and most interesting history. They deserve a lot more. The fan went up to Bravo, who plays for Barcelona, and pleaded for his help... yep, the situation really is that desperate.


So, all in all, I had fun bantering with my Brazilian friend and witnessing that surreal incident. And I'm a passionate fan of La Roja, so it's a always a pleasure to see them play. So it was worth it.

The virtues of idiosyncrasy

Most of the fiction around is very much the same - it is anodyne, bland and has very little to say. The honed crisp writing style which is fostered by creative writing courses is celebrated. Stylistically and thematically, this writing is published because of its formulaic nature. An idiosyncratic style is perceived as being counter to the cause. As a result, the literary market place is cluttered with tepid works with no recognizable authorial voice and no interesting commentary.


I think that one's idiosyncrasies should be celebrated as a virtue. I would say that it's better to have an idiosyncratic take on literature, philosophy, history etc. than a standardised educated take. An 'educated' person amasses facts, but doesn't reproduce these facts in a new and unheralded way. He accepts common truisms and dogmas, but doesn't use his own individuality to synthesise them and reproduce a new alternative take on the state of events.


An idiosyncratic approach takes on its material and looks at it afresh from a new perspective. What once appeared idiosyncratic is often mimicked by legions of admirers and a new 'school' of writing emerges. As a result, these styles are prescribed by creative writing courses and preached as gospel.


A society should foster idiosyncrasies. It should let them come out into the open. We often suppress off-the-cuff remarks in the event that we may appear eccentric or awkward. British society is especially rigid and bound to social codes. People take on roles. They play-act. It is often difficult to loosen up and allow one's own idiosyncrasies to come out into the open. Culture is especially bereft without them. 

500th post

Guess what? This is my 500th post!

Have you been reading this blog since 2007? Stuck by me all these years? Happy to have done so? Despondent?

I will stubbornly write on. And on. And on. Whether you like it or not. If you do enjoy dropping by, I will write for your delectation.

Many ideas bubbling in my head. I know what my next 5 books will be (3 novels, 1 memoir, 1 essay collection). In the past I would have these wild fantasies - 'oh boy, I'm going to write all these books - I'll get them published, too.' I have a pretty good idea of where I am going with these, though. I won't get too down if they don't get them published, either. (I have to be realistic - they probably won't.)

Most of these posts are lapidary in character, granted. Usually toss them off quickly. The idea for the essay collection is: revisit all the topics I've covered here, flesh them out and give them the kind of effort/attention I would to one of the essays I write for uni.

Stick around, my friend. Now, let's clink glasses, down the champagne and celebrate!

Crumb

Crumb (1994) is a documentary about the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. A highly eccentric character, he is open and candid as the director here, Terry Zwigoff, was a close friend. Like his highly revealing autobiographical comics, Crumb really bears his soul. His comics are openly misogynistic, racist and twisted - as such, it is easy to hold a grudge against him for any of these things. Crumb caught onto the hippie zeitgeist - with characters involving mystic charlatans, drug-addled weirdos and sex-starved bimbos - and he became a renowned countercultural figure. Yet his work is at its most compelling when he is his own subject. The reason why this film is so great - and so moving - is that it follows the same prerogative: an unflinchingly honest portrayal of its subject, warts and all.

What becomes clear is that Robert Crumb suffers a great deal. He says 'If I don't draw, I feel suicidal. But, then, I sometimes feel suicidal when I draw too.' It is clear that his comics have therapeutic function - to exorcise demons. (This can be taken literally. Many of his comics involve sexual fantasies about strange Goya-like bird creatures.) In this process, he does not censor himself in the slightest. He has a predilection for robust women with long legs. These are legion in his comics and more often than not they are submissive to fragile, neurotic men.

All this was borne out of years of frustration and alienation. Rejected by women throughout his teens, he withdrew into his sexual fantasies. One of his comics chronicling this is detailed in the film: how a girl he was infatuated with went off with some stud. Robert's misogyny is borne out of a deep-rooted rejection and alienation from other women.  Alongside fervent admirers, a few critics of Crumb's work appear in the film. They contend that, whatever the therapeutic value of the comics, that is dangerous to put them out in the public domain.

Crumb came from a broken family. His father beat all three of his sons on a regular basis. We meet his two brothers, who are even stranger (and more disturbed) than Robert. His brother Charles, who introduced Robert to comic books when they were both young children, is so sedated by his medication that he drawls and has several teeth missing. He still lives with his mother. His brother Maxon, also an artist, lives in a ramshackle hotel. He begs for money on the streets whilst sitting on a bed of nails.

The reason why the film is so moving is that the abuse inflicted by their father clearly disturbed Charles and Maxon to such an extent that they became maladjusted. Like Robert, they have unusual sexual fetishes, except that they are stranger. Maxon gropes women in the streets. Charles, we learn, has homosexual pedophilic tendencies. He managed to suppressed them and he remained a virgin. Yet he was tormented his entire life and was terrified that his mother might find out. Following the film's completion, we learn, he committed suicide. Despite the way both Maxon and Charles turned out, Robert became a success.



In many ways, this film is an image of an inverted American dream. Their father was a marine in the Second World War. He wanted his sons to follow in his footsteps - become a marine, be virile, manly, responsible and punctilious. He wrote a book entitled 'Training People Effectively.' The family grew in 50s suburbia and in the ferment of sexual repression and rigid social mores. Following the horrors of the Second World War, youngsters were subjected to a tawdry image of American suburban happiness and conformity. This partly led to the rebellion of the sixties and the psychosis of Robert's art. And Crumb's father was horrified when he saw how his children turned out: shy, nerdy, maladjusted and strange.




Another issue raised about the films is: is Robert's work art or porn? Several talking heads are featured and they take divergent views. The most notorious is the art critic Robert Hughes, who bombastically compares Crumb to Brughel and Goya. Other voices reject the racism, the nastiness and the misogyny. One dissenter mentions an overwhelmingly disturbing cartoon involving incest. It features a 1950s nuclear family. It has all the qualities of satire but, the critic argues, Crumb is getting off on his material and ended up producing porn. What they all agree on is that he is very technically gifted.

They interview Crumb's wife, who says 'he draws his id.' We should take Crumb as a portal to the dark side of its subject and accept that what we encounter isn't always savoury. It is a masterful study of a broken home, a tormented artist, the vagaries of sex and porn and the therapeutic function of art.

Causal narratives

The outlook of a classicist aesthete is that all events in a work of literature must be causally determined. They would also argue further by saying that literature must also follow the same spatial and temporal laws as the real world. Any divagation from these spatial, temporal and causal laws is a divagation from literature itself. You have not produced a novel or a story in the true sense of the word - you have produced a Frankenstein monster.

Should this really be the case? First of all, we don't even perceive reality in a logical way. We are, in the Kantian sense, limited by our 'possible experience.' We have to limit ourselves to what we know. If a writer were to depict 'the thing in itself' - i.e. direct experience - he is actually being disingenuous. All exercises in naturalism are failures. You cannot methodically recreate the entire of reality. As thinking subjects, we experience bits and pieces of reality. Our impression (or 'phenomenon') of reality is coloured by our idiosyncrasies and our own personality. When I perceive reality, I don't see all causal changes in space taking place. Literature should therefore focus on the subjective perception of reality - the individual perceiving space in time. Even efforts at naturalism end up producing the same thing as it is impossible to recreate a total impression of reality or even society.

Literature, then, should not follow this classical assumption. It can assiduously break these assumptions. Works of literature can even follow different spatial, temporal and casual laws of the real world. Objects can move randomly across different points in space; there can be temporal ellipses; events can occur without being causally determined.

Dreams aren't narratives. They are just random images which we later later construe as narratives once we are awake and lucid. Can't novels replicate the kind of irrational processes experienced in dreams? In dreams, all of these classicist laws are broken. Dreams have always appealed to writers since antiquity. Whilst in texts from antiquity dreams appear to be divine interventions, in modernist literature they heighten the sense of subjective consciousness and 'apperception' ('individual experience').

There can be other frameworks. For instance, in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, all the characters in the novel are dead. As a result, a universal clock which determines time is lost. All we have are vestiges of memory which appear. These aren't causally determined - events from different epochs appear at different points of the narrative. The novel is like wandering through the ghost town of the book - as you roam about, different ghosts seize you and divulge their past experiences.

The novel I have started (and which I really hope to dig my teeth into once term is over), Planet Zhelanie, also has a different framework. All spatial and temporal laws are determined by the consciousness and memories of the individual. Moments which appear evanescent in fact last for millennia. Events are either sequential or circular. They are rooted in time rather than space. It is a vindication of Berkelian idealism.

Causal narratives, then, should be rejected. The most stimulating thing about literature - especially novels - is that anything is possible and that anything can happen.

Business fundamentalists

Business is the bed-rock of any economy. I grant that, by all means. However, what we find now is a certain type of what I call business fundamentalist who goes further. A business fundamentalist would say that business dictates the economy. The role of the state should be minimised to its most basic core - to restore law/order, policing and to protect the country from foreign attack. States do not determine anything. On the contrary, markets control the economy.

What we are increasingly finding with this creed is that they want to apply business strategies to all practices and discourses. Now, I understand that if you have a company you might want to use strategies to sell clocks, furniture, food, etc. etc. What I think should not happen is what currently takes place - the marketisation of public services. In addition to this, many public services (the railways, the postal services) get privatised and become another competitor in the market.

Although the NHS is a public institution, it does very much feel like a private enterprise. If I want to book an appointment (I seldom do because I have a chronic fear of doctors, but that's beside the point), I have to ring up before 9am in the morning and no later. A public service like the NHS should be open at all times to take on all inquiries. Although it is a public service, it very much feel like it works under free market lines. Although it is free, the way appointments are scheduled and the way rotas work, it is organised like a business.

The same applies to education. Students are taught to pass exams so as to boost the rankings of the school. Teachers are encouraged to follow the curriculum and to divagate as little as possible from it. Higher education is in an even sorrier state. Universities are effectively shopping centres. They charge astronomical fees - the current fee is £9,000 - and is now effectively private. Despite these fees, they often deliver courses that are substandard. They seem to have clubs and dance halls than libraries stocking books. (To be honest, I find it mind-boggling why a university needs a club or a dance hall - try to telling that to the next guy you see here.) Universities should be imparting wisdom and knowledge. Instead in their little course descriptions, they write about all these 'skills' you will acquire for the workplace. A presentation in a seminar is less about the creative inquiry and discussion than a grooming for your next pep talk at your first business. There are more and more business courses at universities - I would insist that they have no place on a university campus. Instead of teaching classics and grounding you in critical thinking, universities principally drill you with all these business strategies and 'skills'.

The 'business fundamentalist' is getting away with a lot and he knows it. I am not an admirer of Miliband, but I think he has every right to take on vested interests. It's mind-boggling when Miliband castigates corporations for dodging tax that the Labour is branded as 'anti-business.' Since when have the Labour party taken such a stand? It is not acceptable for business conglomerates to base their premises in Luxemborg and not to pay tax. It is even less acceptable for Conservative politicians like Lord Fink, and other protegees surrounding Cameron, to keep bank accounts in Switzerland and avoid tax. Miliband has every right to take on these vested interests. By doing so, he is not being 'anti-business.' He is only  labelled as such because papers like The Times and The Daily Telegraph support the Conservatives. It sounds like its heresy when he is pointing out the obvious. It is mind-boggling how everyone bears the brunt of austerity whilst major corporations and major politicians open up these Swiss bank accounts to avoid tax.

As I said before, a thriving business is the bed-rock of any economy. It should stop there. Business surreptitiously poisons anything else. I find that the marketisation of the arts is also having a malign effect. (Compare this with publicly funded art and see where the difference lies.) A businessman knows nothing about engineering, so why should he pontificate to an engineer about the design of something. It is almost as the businessman thinks that everything is within his means. Everything is being debased for the contemptible need to amass more and more capital.