We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Contrary to what people might sometimes suppose “ought” to be the case at a blog like this, I have never felt that I have been under some sort of pressure, imposed either by myself or the editors, to write solely about politics or Big World Affairs. Yes, of course, we bash the various statist intrusions, the general crapness of David Cameron, Green reactionaries, islamofascists, privacy-trashing New Labour politicians, etc, etc, but of course we also write regularly about science, spacefaring and so on. And as regulars will know, I often mention fillms or films that have become part of the public conversation. My last comment about so-called “art house” films drew from one, perfectly polite commenter the remark that “why cannot I write about something important?”.
I think films are important, because they are part of culture, and, whether we like or not, the contents of a film, just like a painting, piece of sculpture, novel, ballad or poetry can sometimes – not always – say something interesting about the sort of values that permeate a society. To borrow from Ayn Rand for a moment, art can reveal the philosophy, world view, or “sense of life”, of the person who made that book, film or picture. (A person who prefers to listen to atonal music may have a different psychology or outlook to someone who likes rock n’ roll, for example). The artist may not himself be aware of that philosophy or be able to articulate it clearly, but it exists. In the case of arthouse films, for example, particularly of the sort that were produced by the Europeans like Bergman, Traffaut and Godard, they they certainly did tell us something about the state of the culture at the time: anti-bourgoios, anti-heroic, not very interested sometimes in actual drama, sharply defined characters or plots; the tone was often ironic (sometimes very funny), amused, but also very dark at times. The films fitted into the intellectual world of the time, to a world still recovering from the long-dominant strains of socialism and collectivism in vogue for much of the 20th Century. There are exceptions and oddities to this sweeping statement of mine, of course, but as a generalisation, I think it holds a fair amount of water.
On one level, arthouse films can and are enjoyed for being quite entertaining, even brilliant (I might rent out Bergman’s the Seventh Seal to see if it as good as the commenters say) but the reason why I chose to write what I did was because I agree with the likes of Toby Young and even Jeremy “The Rottweiler” Paxman that a lot of what passes for great art from such film directors is pretty thin gruel indeed. Art is important, because it says something about the civilisation in which we happen to live, often far more so than any number of books in a library.
Stephen Pollard, the UK writer and BBC Newsnight anchorman Jeremy Paxman may not agree about everything, but these two are certainly on the same page when it comes to a dismissive view of so-called “arthouse” movies. In particular, Paxman appears to have triggered a mini-storm when he said recently less than complimentary things – Paxman is not exactly what I would call a diplomat – about the late director, Ingmar Bergman. Quite right too. On Tuesday evening’s show, Paxman, journalist Toby Young and some film reviewer fellow from the Financial Times were having a right old argument about whether art house films are worth the effort. I tend to side with Toby Young: long after people have forgotten about the likes of Bergman, they will be watching the films made by Hitchcock, John Ford, Coppolla and the rest.
I think the problem are the words “art house”. It conveys the idea that the benighted viewer is not just watching a film, but is having some wonderfully clever experience which is likely to be lost on the plebs. There is a lot of anti-bourgeois posturing in such films. Worse, they are self-indulgent. I find most of them unwatchable. I’d rather watch Bruce Willis in Die Hard any day of the week than this stuff. And the point that the FT writer – I forgot his name – seemed to overlook is that films that lack plots, strongly defined characters, a sense of life and drama, do not achieve the lofty goal of somehow making us “think about the big lessons of life”. (He probably regards films with a beginning, middle and an end as “popcorn movies.”) Arguably, you are more likely to learn a bit about humanity if you watch The Simpsons or The Incredibles rather than some dreary French art flick.
Talking of witch, Die Hard 4.0 is on. I must get some tickets.
There have been quite a few films made in recent years about singers and musicians’ lives. We have had films about the late Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, to name just two. The latest of this type is the biopic of the French singer, Edith Piaf. Even if the film exaggerates a bit for effect, she led an extraordinary and in certain ways very sad life. Edith Piaf, was probably the most famous French person in the middle of the 20th Century apart from Charles de Gaulle or Maurice Chevalier.
There are lots of good things in the film, starting with the performance of Marion Cotillard, who is uncannily good in the lead role and it has plenty of strong supporting performances including a short but strong set of scenes with Gerard Depardieu, who plays the nightclub owner who discovers young Edith singing for cash in the streets of Paris. The scenery is nicely handled; we are given an idea of what early 20th Century France was like for people born on the wrong side of the tracks (at one stage, young Edith was raised in a brothel). She was born during the First World War and lived in Paris during the Second, and according to this Wikipedia entry, helped with the French Resistance. What is interesting, however, is that almost no reference whatever is made to WW2 and occupied France in the film, as if the subject matter is either too sensitive for the supposed audience – the movie is made in French, with subtitles – or some other reason. And yet the way in which such artists managed to survive and even forge some sort of a career during wartime is surely an interesting subject.
To say that she was unlucky in love was an understatement; she was also a serious addict of painkiller drugs and other substances and died of liver cancer in her mid-40s, but the film does not make her into some sort of whining, pathetic victim although it does at times slip into a tragic sense of life – to use Ayn Rand’s expression – which becomes a little oppressive at times. On the whole, however, it is quite clear that she made certain choices in her life and benefited and suffered accordingly. I certainly left the cinema with a greater understanding of why this little, charismatic woman from the streets of Paris rose to become one of the greatest singers of all time. Here’s to her memory.
Nice piece in the Spectator about the contrast between shows like Sex in the City and older, “screwball” movies made in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the peerless His Girl Friday (starring Cary Grant). I found SITC quite funny at times – well, at least in the first series – but the joke wore thin. On the other hand, however many times I watch it, His Girl Friday will never pall. And as a sendup of the journalist world at its time, there’s been nothing better, arguably, than Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop (the old British TV sitcom, Drop the Dead Donkey, was great, but set in a later era).
Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.
Steve Martin. (My favourite Martin film is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with Michael Caine.)
I was switching from television station to television station when I came upon a show (on “Sky 3”) called Riverdance In China.
OK, I thought, a group of athletic Irish people dancing in China – I will see what the show is like.
And then an Irish women’s voice said something close to the following:
“The Chinese Emperors tyrannically isolated the country from the outside world, but in the first years of the 20th century the Communists under Chairman Mao overthrow the Emperors and the lives of hundreds of millions of people gradually improved…”
Perhaps it got better after this, but I do not know because I turned it off.
Well once the Emperors of China may indeed have isolated China from the outside world, but that certainly was not true in the “early years of the 20th century”, when one could, for example, buy Chinese railway bonds on all the major exchanges of the world.
The Chinese Communists did not overthrow the Emperors – the Chinese Communist Party did not even exist in 1911 when Sun Yat-Sen (and his protégé, Chiang Kai Shek) overthrew the Qing Dynasty.
And as for the life of the Chinese people gradually improving under the Communists, in reality tens of millions of them starved to death during the collectivist ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the rest of it. About 60 million people were murdered under Mao, so perhaps ‘gradually improved’ might not have been the most appropriate choice of words.
Also even the most statist Emperor never demanded that people make steel in their back yards (you can guess what this steel was like) or launched a campaign to exterminate birds in the demented hope that it would improve the harvest (surprise, surprise, there was a plague of insects).
Perhaps the show introduction was, unintentionally, amusing for people who have read books like Mao: The Untold Story, but remember – a lot of young people (and not so young people) get what knowledge of the world they have from sources like the introduction to this show, which is a great pity.
On Sunday evening, I returned a rental car at Los Angeles International Airport prior to boarding a flight to London. LAX is one of those airports where the car rental station is some distance from the terminals, and having returned your car, you board a shuttle bus that takes you to your terminal. There were only a small number of people on this particular bus, and the driver asked each of us which airline we were travelling on and hence which terminal we needed to be taken to. One of the other passengers was a young woman – perhaps 30 years old. She told the driver that she was flying on United, hesitated and said “…but it is an international flight. Is that the same?”. As is the case with many Americans, she gave the impression that she did not fly internationally very often, so I assured her that she was going to the correct terminal.
I asked her where she was going. She answered “Johannesburg”, and told me that she was going via London to get there. I expressed surprise that she had to take such a long route, and she told me that she could have flown to Washington and got a direct flight from there, but that the 15 hours non-stop from Washington to Johannesburg was a longer flight than she wanted to take. Personally, I have done more than a few 15 hour flights in my time, and I would not have made the same choice she did (for me, getting the total journey time down to as small a time is key, but other people’s mileage does vary, somewhat literally in this case). I mentioned that I had friends and family in Johannesburg and that I had visited that city earlier this year, and she asked me what it was like. I told her that the rich parts of northern Johannesburg (where she was going) are like southern California but with more fortifications, which may or may not have reassured her.
I asked her why I was going. She said it was “Business”, and that she was “involved in the Live Earth concerts”. I probably should have asked her how she was involved, or what she did, or something, but connections between LA and the music industry are not exactly surprising. I was tempted to make some snide remark about how the Johannesburg concerts had just been relocated to a smaller venue due to lack of interest, but in truth the discovery as to why this woman was travelling rather caused me to lose interest.
I suppose the real question might have been just exactly how she thought that flying lots of people like her from LA to London to Johannesburg was going to help global warming exactly, but I could not be bothered asking. And in truth it would have been rude to ask, because I was just making friendly conversation with a perfectly pleasant woman before catching a flight.
I fear though, that we are back to “essential” travel for “important” people like politicians, rock stars, and people who work in the music industry somehow not counting. Making sacrifices to save the world is something for the plebs to do.
Is no-one interested in saving the planet?
The Johannesburg leg of the Live Earth concerts has shifted venues due to lack of ticket sales at original venue…
The Istanbul leg of the event was cancelled last week, due to lack of sponsorship interest.
Wah-haah!
Of course, you do realise that in 20 years or so, everybody will be smoking again:
WHEN the musical Grease opens in London’s West End this summer, and the teenage sweetheart Sandy draws on a symbolic cigarette, warning notices will be in place around the theatre alerting the audience to the danger she poses.
And that’s for a symbolic cigarette! Imagine the danger she would pose if she blazed up a real one?
The West End theatres fought successfully to win an exemption for actors from the ban on smoking in public places, which becomes law on July 1. But some are now concerned that onstage smoking may draw complaints from the audience.
They should put up a warning sign which says:”Anyone who complains about smoking on stage will have the snot beaten out of them”.
But whatever signs are erected will be temporary. When things get this deliriously insane, it means that the war on smoking is quite obviously and hopelessly lost.
OK, I am biassed. NO2ID gets a credit on this film. But having been to a contributors’ screening last night, I think you could do worse than drag any friends or relations who are complacent about Britain being ‘a free country’ along to Taking Liberties (since 1997) when it opens on June 8th. If you have a black sense of humour, you will laugh.
Not much in the film will come as news to Samizdata readers, and to get anything like a coherent story out of so much material it has had to simplify, rather. But I was very pleasantly surprised that in doing so it avoids falling into the usual human-rightist traps of equating liberty with leftism. Teeters on the edge occasionally, perhaps. The sequence on Guantanamo is a little too long, and I think unbalances the section on the Blair regime’s complicity in torture. But there are few tendentious statements, and in most ways it is a conservative polemic. If there are heroes on screen they are mild-mannered middle-class pacifists. The off-screen heroes are Winston Churchill and the common law courts.
The points are made gently and methodically, ticking off, one by one, the broad civil liberties supposedly assured by the Human Rights Act, but actually removed by the same government that made such a fanfare of its respect for “our way of life”. Boiling the story down from a vast mass of information they could have included makes it very solidly founded. This is polemic, but the antithesis of Michael-Moore-style, concocted illustration of an artificial thesis. I spotted only very few factual errors, and I am an awful nitpicking wonk, as you all know.
What will stay with me, however, is what I had not seen before. Footage of lots of officious political policing and show of official force. Those who think we are softies whining about nothing will no doubt say that actually this just illustrates we are in no danger, Britain is still a healthy democracy (whatever that means). But is it really better to be smothered with a feather pillow than publicly garotted?
PS – Like a lot of small films this starts out in a few screens and hopes for a rolling release, so it is desperately sensitive to opening receipts. If you do go to see it when it opens, you increase the chance that others will get a chance do so too.
Writers who hate a lot are often more compelling to read than pleasant, nice folk. We want some, if not all, of our newspaper columns to have a fair measure of sulphur, a bit of bile and a pinch of basic malice. Rod Liddle of The Spectator comes to mind. Christopher Hitchens, when he is on form and slaying some religious nonsense or attacking George Gallway, fairly curls the edges of a newspaper. But the supreme purveyor of sustained, gratuitous nastiness is AA Gill. He sometimes hits the target with great accuracy, but there is this level of personal animus that he directs to certain targets that makes me wonder what exactly is eating this man, or whether he is ever so slightly off his trolley (“Nurse!”). Many of his targets seem to come from the same background, in terms of income, culture and education, as himself. There seems to a lot of score-settling between that small, suffocating clique of London media types going on, if you read between the lines of Gill’s writings, which must leave a lot of ordinary folk bemused.
Consider this paragraph about a recent TV documentary by Ian Hislop. Hislop profiled the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the movement 100 years ago. Hislop was rather kind to the man, and although he mentioned the imperialistic overtones of the Edwardian times in which B-P operated, generally urged us to admire the old fella. For Gill, who clearly loathes so much about England and its history, Hislop’s sin is unforgivable:
Hislop is good at documentary TV. He has a bright, hobbity enthusiasm and is smarter than he looks, which, frankly, isn’t much of a stretch. He comes from a great tradition of English pamphleteers and iconoclasts who are very eccentric and partial about the bits of the Establishment they want to put on the tumbril and those they want to preserve in aspic. Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was, predictably, a good thing, though very few of today’s scouts were allowed to sully the halcyon, Hentyesque nostalgia for a simpler, stiffer, perter time.
He has half a decent point, of course. Hislop is editor of Private Eye, which unfailingly hammers away at all manner of targets, not all of them deserved. On the Have I Got News for You satire programme, Hislop and his opposite number, Paul Merton, send up the news stories of the week through a generally left-liberal lens (a lens that I suspect is shared more or less by AA Gill). But occasionally Hislop goes “off the reservation” and says nice things about people, which must clearly upset Gill. Hislop once, memorably attacked the European Union on the show, to the horror of his fellow panelists. Hislop is also a devout Anglican Christian and clearly has a lot of affection for many of the traditions of this country. He comes from the sort of upper-middle class background that formed much of the backbone of institutions like the old Indian Civil Service. Gill’s insult about his intelligence is a cheap shot and damaged what could have been an actually quite decent argument (Hislop may be selective in his choice of victims and heroes.) But Gill’s vileness gets the better of him and masks the point. A shame. If you read the link to the article and read his first point about another, awful TV programme, you can see why Gill remains the master of sustained and justified invective. But he needs to cut out the personal and thank his lucky stars that the practice of duelling is now outlawed.
Continuing in movie-talk vein, one force that has swept through the western film industry to greater and lesser degrees is the current hatred of tobacco and the tobacco industry. The Michael Mann film, The Insider, starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino – with a fine performance also by Christopher Plummer – is a good example. All the pieces are in place: a big, evil ciggie firm makes its products more addictive by dark scientific means; Crowe, who plays a scientist, leaves said evil organisation and blows the whistle on its practices. He is hounded, threatened, his marriage and career collapses. Pacino, as the hero-journalist, tries to expose all this, and in the process gets leant on by his big-bucks media empire bosses. The viewer comes away from the production in no doubt that cigarette companies are just a few inches short of being Nazis.
If you take a random look at any major Hollywood production these days, you seldom see stars light up a cigarette, except possibly some of the more dubious or “troubled” characters. When I watched Steve Martin’s hilarious spoof film of 1940s film noir, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, I was reminded of how in the movies of the time, everyone smoked. Even the pet dogs would have smoked, given half a chance. And the cinema audiences smoked like chimneys as well. This is now a distant memory. The modern James Bond in Casino Royale does not smoke his Morland Specials, whereas Connery smoked and of course 007’s creator, Ian Fleming, puffed away heroically. Bogart got through several packs of Luckies in a movie, and so did the various hot dames who acted with him. Spencer Tracy was unusual in that he did not smoke. Can you imagine Hugh Grant smoking, or George Clooney?
Of course, there is a bit of a backlash from time to time, creating wonderful satire. Thankyou for Smoking, the film based on the humorous novel by Christopher Buckley, is one such. And the great Denis Leary tries to keep the flag flying. But for real defiance of the health-obsessives, the French cannot be beaten. Last night I watched the French cop film 36, starring the usual roster of craggy-faced Jules and Jacques with their Galoises and Gitanes attached permanently to their lower lips. I counted, or tried to count, the number of cigarettes smoked in the film and gave up at about the 200 mark.
If Sarkozy is to be a great president of France, he needs to smoke.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
