Every time I talk about top 10 lists,  I always start with the  disclaimer that I know  how pointless they are.

And then I ask myself:  OK, if they are  so pointless, why do I have so much fun reading them and doing  them and sharing them?

No good answer, In fact, making lists is far from the only pointless thing I do.

Today, I am adding some new films and slightly changing the order.   It is not a 10 best list.  It is a list of my ten favorites. A  list of 10 best films  would be beyond nervy given how many films have a legitimate claim to inclusion.

But it seems perfectly fair to make a list of ten favorites since they are, in fact,  only my favorites.

My favorites have stayed the same for over a year.  But for the last few months I have been mulling over “No Country for Old Men”  and “The Lives of Others.” (Now I can really hear you saying: This guy need a life! Who has time to mull anything over?)

Seriously, I want to make some changes to my list.  But according to ground rules that some friends of mine and I set up many years ago in a UCLA dorm room, I have to remove one film for each one I add.  I posted my last 10 favorite about a year ago. Here is my new one along with a list of contenders.

Comments welcome. Lists welcome. Ridicule welcome.

My Ten Favorite Films as of November 15, 2009

1. Dekalog

2. Godfather 1/Godfather 2

3.  Salesman

4. The Lives of Others

5. Amarcord

6.  Goodfellas

7  No Country for Old Men

8  Fargo

9. Rear Window

10 Night and Fog

__________________________________

Other Contenders (not in order)

Midnight Cowboy

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Au Revoir les Enfants

Shop on Main Street  (1965)

It’s a Wonderful Life

Jeux interdits

Come and See

Smile

Atlantic City

Three Kings

Das Boot

The General

Paris, Texas

Shoah

Invaders from Mars

Strangers on a Train

The Graduate

The French Connection

Double Indemnity

Les Enfants du Paradis

Les Diaboliques

Psycho

Le Salaire de la peur

Sunset Boulevard

The Exiles

The Last Laugh

Hotel Terminus

Happiness

The Third Man

M

The Marriage of Maria Braun

The week goes by so fast – surviving Wednesday, the crux a steep ascent. The sudden incline, rapid succession of classes – film: Triumph of Will and Night and Fog. Stunned horror translating later into a dull roaring anger. Anger directed in all directions, at every object and subject, but focused more intensely on me – my every act and thought cause for contempt. Faded after dinner but echoes now as I write – anger at my writing.

To A: Have you seen Betty Blue? Perhaps Zorg is my inevitable fate. But if you haven’t seen that film perhaps you shouldn’t, maybe you should. Perhaps each moment is a rehearsal for that final act – perhaps I should and shouldn’t see the film again, re-read, re-live – no, this is not possible. Where then is my great work? I have started it here, in these pages a superimposed alligator snapping at the buttocks of my vision. But my vision, she is unattainable, the never tasted Eurydice, but when she is kissed on film I am kissing her. When the camera strips her bare for all to see I am her sole worshiper. Fuck the whore. Who needs her anyway. she who prostitutes the essence of all my hopes and dreams. She whose smile slays me, slaps me, killing prose, dead fish and bloated, molting eyelashes strung from hot wires. A descent. Away! Away! While I am cursing I might as well tell a lie.

To A: well, today I talked to that one girl and finally had enough nerve to ask her to coffee. She said that she didn’t really go for coffee.

“You don’t like coffee?”

“Not really.”

“What do you like then?”

“Well, since you asked, I like to have my cunt stretched by big, massively muscled, well-hung black men, so I really don’t have any use for a skinny white geek like you.”

Racist? No question. Sexist? See above. What else? No comment. Why? End of a nightmare.

I dreamt recently that I had AIDS.

I’ve managed to stay up until two am again. I wish to build a monument. One greater than the sour crevices between my toes. One better than André Breton’s bowler hat. Better, further, higher than an historical exegesis. Heavier than a dictionary but useful for taking trips in.

Fate’s poker face. E’s bluff. Trying to stare down the future, just like Davy Crockett taming a bear. Playing chicken with an oncoming train, riding a bicycle made from human teeth. Hear the wheels clatter across the railroad ties while your swollen, itching eye scratches on the screen door and begs for a crust of sex. Spare change spare change spare change. I’ve been anticipating – waiting, but on a train bound for nowhere I met up with a gambler, and in his final words I found an Ace that I could keep.

I fold.

Deal me in for another round.

The Centaur-Seeker himself penned a nice little essay at Criterion, well worth your time, a snippet herewith:

The rap against most Holocaust films is that they exploit the audience’s feelings of outrage and sorrow for commercial ends; and, by pretending to put us vicariously through such a staggeringly incomprehensible experience, they trivialize, reducing it to sentimental melodrama. Alain Resnais has done nothing of the kind. Making this film in 1955, only ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps, with the wounds so fresh, he did not presume, first of all, to speak for the victims and survivors of the camps: he chose as his screenwriter the novelist Jean Cayrol, a man who had actually been imprisoned in one. Second, neither he nor Cayrol presumed to offer a comprehensive guide to the concentration camp universe. Quite the contrary: the voiceover is filled with skepticism and doubt, and a sympathetic awareness of the viewer’s resistance, conscious or unconscious, to grasping the unthinkable. “Useless to describe what went on in these cells,” and “Words are insufficient,” we are told again and again in the voiceover narration. “No description, no picture can reveal their true dimension.” And: “Is it in vain that we try to remember?” Meanwhile, the viewer is calmly given information about the Nazis’ extermination procedures. Thus the dialectic is set up between the necessity of remembering, and the impossibility of doing so.

Night and Fog is, in effect, an antidocumentary: we cannot “document” this particular reality, it is too heinous, we would be defeated in advance. What can we do, then? Resnais’ and Cayrol’s answer is: we can reflect, ask questions, examine the record, and interrogate our own responses. In short, offer up an essay. Moreover, by choosing to compress such enormous subject matter into only a half-hour (think, by contrast, of Claude Lanzmann’s over-nine-hour Shoah, [1985]), the filmmakers force themselves into the epigrammatic concision and synthesis of essayistic reflection.

This effort at analysis and reflection is one of the ways the filmmakers work to evade pious sentimentality: indeed, the voiceover narration (masterfully spoken by Michel Bouquet) is delivered in a harsh, dry, astringent tone, filled with ironic shadings (though, according to the filmmaker himself, he asked Bouquet to deliver his lines in a “neutral tone”). The magnificent score by Hanns Eisler is also employed ironically: the lovely, lyrical flute passages collide with harrowing images, the Schoenbergian pizzicato strings signal the revving up of the Nazi machine. (Just as Cayrol’s text is unusually elegant, dense, and poetic for a film voiceover, so the Eisler score is not your typical movie background music, but a modern composition that has since been performed in concert halls.)

I finally got the chance to watch Ann Hui’s follow up film to last year’s The Way We Are and it got to me so bad, I now have insomnia. The cinematic skills of Ann Hui is fully on display here as she creates a harrowing, unpredictable film out of a true story in which the ending is already tragically all too clear. The film is based on an actual 2004 murder-suicide that wiped out a family of four in Tin Shui Wai, the same setting of The Way We Are. A temperamental father with ego problems subjects his family to domestic violence until it culminated into the systematic butchering of his wife and twin girls before killing himself. There were just a couple of missteps that marred an otherwise realistically drawn film. Having Lee Sum (Simon Yam as the abusive husband and father) break down the fourth wall by leering right at the camera was weird. Also, in the effort to heightened the film’s climax, Ann Hui makes the uncharacteristic error of descending into melodrama to accomplish her objective when she juxtaposes the actual murder scene with the over-the-top-that-it’s-unnecessary emotional breakdown of the neighbor who was being questioned by the police investigating the case after the fact.

The acting more than makes up for the film’s flaws. You see Simon Yam as you’ve never seen him before…well, maybe a few times before when he was doing B-level horror flicks in the early Nineties. His portrayal is truly terrifying even as he goes back and forth between his character’s good moods and bad ones, and yet, he also elicits pity. Now, that’s hard to do. My respect for this actor just increased ten-fold. Ditto for Zhang Jingchu, who fully inhabits her character from her long journey as a carefree, filial, if only a bit wild party girl when she first meets Lee Sum to the clearly beaten, both physically and emotionally, mother of twin girls trying to survive against her husband’s brutal temper. Props also to Jacqueline Law for the moving, if sometimes transparent, performance as the well-intentioned bystander powerless to stop the tragedy.

Just one question about the way Ann Hui portrays the public servants in Hong Kong: Are the cops and social workers there really that inept and callous? If I were in either of these professions and I saw this film, I would be incredibly offended, or ashamed if it’s true, with the way I was portrayed. Either they downplayed the severity of Ah Ling’s situation or they were altogether completely careless. The most egregious example was when Ah Ling was beaten so badly that the cops had to whisk her away back to the battered women shelter, but they FORGOT THE CHILDREN!!!! How could they even think of letting the girls stay with the father when the mother had just been hurt so severely, she needed to be hospitalized *shakes head in disbelief*. But then again, I think this was just yet another poetic license that Ann Hui took just for the sake of advancing the plot and that unfortunately diminished the quality of her work.

Aside from that, Night and Fog is a powerful film that sears into the memory, a lasting reminder of the bottomless abyss that is human darkness.

totally optional prompts: death and shoes
photo: shoes, Sirkullay, flickr

a million souls stacked
no longer bound by shoestrings
barefoot heaven waits

In the decade following the Holocaust, conversation on the subject was largely mute. Some people had problems finding a way to conceptualize the evil of Hitler’s Nazi regime, while others simply did not want to think about it. Within this context, French director Alain Resnais decided that the cinema might be a good place to begin the process of breaking through this sense of public amnesia. The result of his inclination was Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) — one of the most important documentary films ever made.

As Fog only runs about 30 minutes, a comprehensive account of the Holocaust is not Resnais’ intention. Instead, with a mixture of black and white still photos and similarly colored archival footage, he briefly explains the forces behind the creation of the Nazi concentration camps and the many horrid aspects of camp life. Throughout the film, Michel Bouquet’s skillfully understated and often ironic narration accompanies images of packed cattle cars, gruesome medical experiments, and scratches on the gas chamber ceiling.

These old photos and bits of footage are juxtaposed with color shots of an abandoned and disintegrating Auschwitz, taken by Resnais in the mid 1950’s. During such segments, the Frenchman cleverly captures the public reluctance to engage the Holocaust with decidedly timid camerawork; as it pans left and right Resnais’ lens often changes speed generating a feeling of shaky unease.

Today, it seems that this feeling has been, for the most part, extinguished from the public mind; there are now scores of films available on the Holocaust. And while the removal of this taboo does make the experience of viewing Fog slightly less meaningful, it shouldn’t prevent people from setting aside half an hour and watching the film. Those who do will be treated to excellent directing on the part of Renais, and exposed to the Nazis’ atrocities with a poignant force that is matched by few, if any, other visual interpretations of the event.

Nathan Walker
nwalker02@hamline.edu

Shoah (1985)
Claude Lanzmann
English/German/Hebrew/Polish/Yiddish/French

“So you want to die. But that’s senseless. Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive. You must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us.”

Let’s make a few things clear first. Shoah (1985) is an essential film. Essential not for us to see it, but for it to exist. Even if the world fails to take notice of it, even if audiences don’t see it, it will remain as glorious and as vital as any historical monument or religious document. It’s not a film that you merely watch, but one which you visit. Running for over nine hours, Shoah opens up at its own pace, never bothering about its destination or about its function as a film. Aided by a couple of cinematographers and a translator, Claude Lanzmann, a protégé of Jean-Paul Sartre and the director of the film, meets the survivors of the Holocaust, – of Auschwitz-Birkenau, of Treblinka, of Chelmno and of the Warsaw ghetto – neutral witnesses in rural Poland and even ex-Nazi officials and workers who were in some way related to the events at the camps, striking up conversations that seem utterly banal but which eventually develop the atmosphere of the film. Apparently, it took Lanzmann over a decade to complete the film and this determination shows. If you are looking for something close to courtroom transcripts or architectural details, look elsewhere. Lanzmann does not pretend to give a fair chance to the SS officers, nor does he try to tell us what actually happened out there. He takes a stand, for sure. Once you take its premise for granted, you realize that Shoah is more than a film. It’s a project – of preservation and of education.

One can’t clearly assign a purpose to the film, for Shoah’s scope of research is far from limited. One moment you have a survivor passionately recalling those years whereas in the other, you see Lanzmann taking a tour of the idyllic Polish countryside. The film does not even raise questions, leave alone answering them. Lanzmann gives us ample time to reflect upon the film, to go beyond its written perimeters, to pose our own questions and to review our own political, moral and social stances. However, one thing that is certain is that Lanzmann, here, is attempting to tell the world once and for all that the Holocaust did take place. Every question, every conversation and every development seems like a reply to the claims of the Holocaust Revisionists. He seems more interested in establishing the verity of the notorious event than illustrating its horrors. And this is perhaps the reason why Revisionists are thoroughly critical of Lanzmann and his movie (Here is an elaborate Revisionist review of the film questioning it using its own testimonies).

The greatest problem that Shoah poses to its deniers is the fact that it deals with the Holocaust and not a holocaust. It is said that Lanzmann has fabricated and misrepresented certain details that would be oblivious to foreign eyes. That, I feel, is really an irrelevant issue over here. Shoah is essentially like a Werner Herzog film, only that the subject that the director is handling is too sensitive and researched upon to impose an artist’s vision. Surely, Shoah would not lose even an iota of its sheen even if it were to be declared as purely fictional. If what Lanzmann is trying is to arrive at a greater truth, unbound by the flow of time, by betraying reality to a minor extent, then I don’t see any reason why this film should be berated.  It is not as much important to know what exactly happened as it is to understand what is claimed to have happened should not happen. That is to say, it is not a question of our response to a historical truth as it is of our action to an eternal (and now imminent) possibility.

The more I learn about the Holocaust, the more I tend to admire Salo (1975). I never could really digest Pasolini’s vision when I first watched the film, but especially after Shoah, I think I am able to see what Pasolini was arriving at. The conversations with the SS officers in Shoah indicate the sheer industrial nature of the whole operation. Prisoners are called “pieces”, gassing them is known as “processing” and the camp itself, dubbed as the “production line of death”. Everything here is commodified and reduced to dispassionate scientific terms. The extravagance of the entire process effaces any trace of individuality that the victims may have had. As the conversations regularly show us, the bigger problem for the SS was not the threat of a rebellion, but the logistics of the project that they had undertaken. Why Shoah (and also the work of the Shoah Foundation, with its 120,000 hours of footage) is special is partly because that it reviews a large-scale political issue in terms of personal tragedies. Its testimonies replace homogenized statistics and body count, which only serve to alienate us more from the event and hence be complacent about it, with intimate accounts that remind us of the value of each life.

Shoah arises out of a series of critical choices that Lanzmann has taken. There is not one shot of historical footage or one real photograph of the camp form the World War years in the film. Instead, he builds his non-linear narrative purely out of first hand accounts and interrogations. For most time, Lanzmann is content with either showing us the faces of the witnesses in extreme close up as they talk or dwell on the now-serene landscape of Treblinka, Auschwitz and Birkenau. Those who have seen Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), which is ironically, but without doubt, a big inspiration for this film, will see Lanzmann’s move as being cynical.  If Lanzmann’s suggesting anything at all in these dead times, it must be that this fascism is not a phantom that is dead and buried but one that lives and breathes among us in some form or the other. Lanzmann’s reinforces this idea through his small talks with the townsfolk in Poland, where (like in so many other countries) religion seems to be a clear standard of judgment. One resident sees Poles and Jews as mutually exclusive sects while some don’t seem to regret much about what transpired.

Having watched Shoah, one is only skeptical about the effectiveness of the work of the Shoah Visual History Foundation that Spielberg founded after the making of Schindler’s List (1993, which sometimes looks merely like the visual illustration of these testimonies despite the overall excellence of the film). You see, the camera has strange effects on the consciousness of the people in front of it. While Lanzmann captures these people while they are disarmed and engaged in their daily lives, hence tapping honest and unforced emotions (of the witnesses and ours), the Foundation’s work relies on consciously filmed interviews amidst a studio-like officious atmosphere.  As a result, there is bound to be considerable difference in these testimonies and emotional impacts that they will have. But having said that, one must also acknowledge the nobility of both the missions, despite their outcomes, keeping in mind the immense sociological impact that these documents will have in the decades to come, years after the death of the last survivor. As one of the witnesses in the Foundation’s video says: “It’s not a question of forgiving or forgetting, it is a question of education”.

I don’t think there is not much that one could write about Shoah, for it is a film that is more experiential than cerebral. One would only end up talking about Holocaust if he were to talk about the film and miss the whole point of the film. It attempts to recreate the same atmosphere that persisted then, without resorting to meaningless photos and records, in order to make us feel the event rather than philosophize in hindsight. However, unlike many a movie made about the Holocaust, this one does not sell misery. Nor does it overload us with information as in history books. Instead, it tries to take us back to the dreadful period, ripping off our smug and comfortable perception of it acquired through scratchy B&W videos. There is much magic in Shoah that is as precious only when seen. This is manifest when you feel the air of uneasiness as Simon Srebnik, the miraculous survivor of Chelmno stands among Christians, who go on to subtly glorify themselves. Or when you notice the irony that the prison guards of the camps are now in a state of self-imposed exile. Or in the fact that Abraham Bomba, the barber who had to shave off the women’s hair at Treblinka, is still a barber, but by free will.

Over at The Search, Brett McCracken lists five Holocaust-themed movies he considers (along with at least 10 other non-Holocaust-themed movies from last year) to be better than The Reader, which was recently nominated for a best picture Oscar:

Schindler’s List: The granddaddy of all Holocaust films. Steven Spielberg’s passionate, timeless epic is not easy to watch, but it is a master class of classic narrative filmmaking.

The Pianist: Adrien Brody’s performance as pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman won him the Academy Award, and rightfully so. It’s a phenomenal performance, and a stunning film. The music scenes—especially near the end—are exactly what catharsis should be in cinema.

Life is Beautiful: This film’s mix of joy, tragedy, laughter, and tears—featuring perhaps cinema’s only madcap comedic performance in a Holocaust film—makes for a truly compelling viewing experience.

The Counterfeiters: If you haven’t seen this 2007 film yet, rent it! The true story of a band of Jewish counterfeiters who stayed alive by lending their services to the Nazis (which, ironically, kept them operational and able to kill more Jews) is way more provocative than The Reader could ever try to be.

Night and Fog: This 1955 French documentary from director Alain Resnais (before he became a leader of the French New Wave) is supremely evocative and features some of the most devastating early documentary footage (e.g. bulldozed piles of bodies) of the horrors of the concentration camps.

I thought The Reader was pretty good, and Kate Winslet was certainly terrific in it, but a best picture nominee??? I could think of at least ten movies from last year that are more deserving (see any listed here). Alas, the fact that it is at least partially about the Holocaust lends The Reader the sort of gravitas that Academy voters love. But there are much better Holocaust-themed films out there than The Reader, and just in case you hadn’t seen any of them, here are five of the best:

Schindler’s List: The granddaddy of all Holocaust films. Steven Spielberg’s passionate, timeless epic is not easy to watch, but it is a master class of classic narrative filmmaking.

The Pianist: Adrien Brody’s performance as pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman won him the Academy Award, and rightfully so. It’s a phenomenal performance, and a stunning film. The music scenes—especially near the end—are exactly what catharsis should be in cinema.

Life is Beautiful: This film’s mix of joy, tragedy, laughter, and tears—featuring perhaps cinema’s only madcap comedic performance in a Holocaust film—makes for a truly compelling viewing experience.

The Counterfeiters: If you haven’t seen this 2007 film yet, rent it! The true story of a band of Jewish counterfeiters who stayed alive by lending their services to the Nazis (which, ironically, kept them operational and able to kill more Jews) is way more provocative than The Reader could ever try to be.

Night and Fog: This 1955 French documentary from director Alain Resnais (before he became a leader of the French New Wave) is supremely evocative and features some of the most devastating early documentary footage (e.g. bulldozed piles of bodies) of the horrors of the concentration camps.

In early August 1945, the USA dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively ending the Second World War. A little more than a decade later, fresh off his acclaimed Concentration Camp documentary short Night And Fog (original title Nuit Et Brouillard), French filmmaker Alain Resnais (Last Year At/In Marienbad) was asked to direct another short documentary, about the atomic bomb. Unconvinced, Resnais ended making not only his first feature-length film, but his first work of fiction as well, Hiroshima Mon Amour (literal translation Hiroshima My Love).

Written by celebrated author Marguerite Duras (The Lover), the film tells of the love story between a French actress shooting a film in Hiroshima and a Japanese man she spent the night with, during her last day in town before returning to Paris. The unexpected emotions stir up some old painful feelings from the actress’ past, and serve as a metaphor to Hiroshima’s tragedy. It stars Emmanuelle Riva (Three Colors: Blue) in her first film role, Eiji Okada (Woman In The Dunes) who had to learn his dialogue phonetically, and Bernard Fresson (Brotherhood Of The Wolf) among others. Trailer and first five minutes of the film’s infamous fourteen minute long opening sequence after the jump.

First of all this is not a movie you want to watch if you’re in the least bit tired. But this is definitely a movie you want to watch if you’re the least bit interested in cinema. Hiroshima Mon Amour is slow, extremely so. And it is also a very quiet film, not that there is no dialog, on the contrary, just that said dialogs are isolated from surrounding sounds and are actually more long monologues spoken by the French actress with short interruptions by the Japanese businessman.

The melodic line delivery, que to Duras’ patrticular style of writing, coupled with Resnais’ beautiful filming and the haunting music by composers Georges Delerue (Platoon) and Giovanni Fusco (L’Avventura) give the film a poetic, dream-like, timeless atmosphere, a consequence of which is that though Hiroshima Mon Amour lasts only 90 minutes, it easily feels an hour longer, thus stressing the importance of not watching the movie when looking for some light entertainment.

Though it may not become your movie of choice for multiple repeat viewings (then again?), the French-Japanese co-production remains an significant film in the history of cinema, due for example to its innovative use of brief flashbacks, and the fact that it’s regarded as one of the first movies of the French New Wave. But more importantly it’s an expertly-made, beautiful piece of cinematic art. You may not enjoy the film itself, but you’d be lying if you weren’ impressed by it in a way or another. Hiroshima Mon Amour remains Alain Resnais’ best-known film and garnered much critical praise, earning a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival and a nomination at the Oscars.

Verdict: Definitely watch it, but not when you’re even a little bit sleepy. Hiroshima Mon Amour currently holds an 8/10 on IMDB and a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

More “Movies Of The Day”

It’s no use pretending that director Claude Miller’s latest film doesn’t contain a few trappings of tedious melodrama. The most basic ingredients of A Secret are a self-torturing personal history of the Holocaust, a troubled family with skeletons in its closet, and a mildly sudsy love triangle, all packaged together with a sprawling, flashback-intensive storytelling style. It helps that Miller knows what he’s working with, and that he works it well.

The year is 1985. There is voice-over narration and the aura of remembrance. The range of focus is shallow, the imagery a dull washout of black-and-white. Ah, this must be a flashback, we figure. But how come the scenes in color are from 30-plus years before? And how is it that the details in those scenes seem somehow more palpable, more exact? Whatever “now” means, it will have to be a product of memory and muddled perspective. Can we trust it?

In Paris in 1955, young François (Valentin Vigourt) is the meek and sickly son of a champion swimmer, Tania (Cécile De France), and an ardent gymnast (Patrick Bruel), Maxime, whose parental affections for him seem mysteriously provisional. François gets the idea that mom and dad consider him a disappointment, yet his habit of fantasizing that he has an older, more robust and outgoing brother seems disproportionately disturbing to them–sort of in the same way his own reaction to a classroom screening of Night and Fog, Alain Resnais’ unsparing 1955 documentary about Nazi concentration camps, is to him: Something about those fleeting scenes of sunken bodies being bulldozed into mass graves, combined with harassment from an obliviously anti-Semitic classmate, taps right into a rage François didn’t know–or remember–that he had. And when he flips out and beats the other kid up, dad’s surprise registers as an unfamiliar kind of pride. On the other hand, a few years later, when a sullen teenaged François (Quentin Dubuis) catches the eye of a Jewish girl at the public pool, the look his parents pass between them registers as an unfamiliar kind of shame.

OK, obviously somebody here has some unpacking to do, psyche-wise. That task falls to a family friend (Julie Depardieu) with a protective fondness of François, who reveals to him some presumed-unmentionable details about what went down during the Nazi occupation, and accordingly topples his romanticized understanding of his parents’ early life together. It turns out that Maxime and Tania first discovered their mutual attraction on the day he married her husband’s sister, Helen (Ludivine Sagnier). What’s more, Maxime and Helen had a robust and outgoing son, Simon (Orlando Nicoletti), who died, along with his mother, during the war. Does what bloomed between Maxime and Tania thereafter constitute an unconscionable tragedy of betrayal, or an affirming triumph of love? Or both?

In any case, François’ life will be the answer. Yeah: No pressure or anything.

The source material for A Secret is Memory, a lauded 2004 autobiographical novel by the French psychoanalyst Philippe Grimbert, whose parents did indeed have an affair while the Nazis murdered their spouses, and later committed suicide together when their son still was young. Co-scripting with Natalie Carter, Miller has adapted Grimbert’s book with empathy and precision, and his actors perform gracefully. Bruel, De France, Sagnier and Depardieu each provide an essential-seeming piece of the film’s complex comment on assimilation and survivor’s guilt. As the older François, whose present-tense narration is the movie’s framework, Mathieu Amalric proves once again how graciously he consents to being underused. In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, all Amalric really had to work with, most of the time, was a single blinking eyelid; in Quantum of Solace, he could at least move around more, if only to wade through a lukewarm stew of Bond-villain clichés. Here, he’s just not present very much, but of course neither is the present tense.

All told, it’s an elegant production: Cinematographer Gérard de Battista and production designer Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko seem to understand each other, and the director, exceptionally well; and composer Zbigniew Preisner, always alert to the cinematic register of poignant profundity, scores such moments with typical beauty and restraint. These are the difference-making details.

To take the movie’s own point, what really matters about A Secret isn’t conventionality but integrity. 

Ten best lists of films are dumb. They force dumb choices and add almost nothing to serious discussion and criticism.

Big deal.

I love them. I love reading them. I love making them. And here is how I go about it.

At any given time I always have a list of contenders. If a film has any claim whatsoever on ever making it into my top ten, it goes on the list. Then, one by one, I cross out films until there are only ten left. These are the films that I most enjoyed watching, not those that I would necessarily rank as the highest expressions of the craft. Having said that, it is almost certainly the case that my contenders are overwhelmingly well crafted. But to make my top 10, I have to viscerally and emotionally love the experience of watching the film.

Important: “Love” does not mean that I found the experience pleasant, just that I reveled in the pleasure of watching a story told with narrative skill and total command of the formal elements of film.

The best example of a film that embodies all these confusing criteria is my favorite of them all, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Dekalog.”  I suppose you could say I enjoyed watching it, but if you have seen it you will understand why “enjoy” is perhaps not quite the most apt word for the experience. What, after all, do you say about a film in which one of the very best of the  sections (#1  I Am the Lord Your God) was so emotionally shattering that I have only watched it once and almost certainly will never be able to watch it again?

So here is the list as of today. If a film has a number, it made the top ten. The reasons why a film didn’t make the top ten are varied and, most often, beyond rational explanation. My choices are infinitely more visceral than cerebral.

By the way, I have a separate documentary list, which I will post soon. Salesman, although a documentary,  is a work of such poignancy and genius that it would make any list I create. 

I very much hope you might post your ten best lists and describe your agreements and your quarrels with mine. Perhaps you think that either an omission or inclusion of mine is unforgivable.

Let me know.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

1. Dekalog (1989) 

Au Revoir les Enfants

Shop on Main Street  (1965)

10. Midnight Cowboy

It’s a Wonderful Life

3. Jeux interdits

Smile

Atlantic City

Fargo

Das Boot

The General

The Swimmer  

7. Goodfellas

Paris, Texas

8. Rear Window

Shoah

Invaders from Mars

4. Salesman

Strangers on a Train

The Graduate

French Connection

2. Godfather 1/Godfather 2

9. Double Indemnity

Les Enfants du Paradis

Les Diaboliques

Psycho

Le Salaire de la peur

Hotel Terminus

5. Amarcord

6. Night and Fog

Happiness

The Third Man

M

The Marriage of Maria Braun

*Follow-up on the screening and lecture itself: very well-attended, with about 40 people, and occaasional passers-by, including small kids with basketballs, peering in from the street, Chung King Road. No one can resist a boarded-up room showing movies, it seems. What I didn’t do justice to in the original post was Nao’s installations. One was taken down for the screening, but two remained up. There was one in the basement, the one with footage from Saipan, that was very absorbing, and the basement was a good place for the kind of immersive voiceover, atop images that navigated through water. The textures were quite lush, the voice soothing, and very descriptive, so it took me a while to realize that it was describing various munitions that lurked underwater off the coast of Saipan. Buried war treasures. I ended up going to dinner with the very generous gallery owner and other attendees, which was a blast. Lots of good stories about artist forms of transit, specialised forms of tea-pouring (e.g. the British rail pour, and the lush life of Altadena).

The gallery is currently holding an exposition by film-maker/sculptor Naotaka Hiro. Screening of short Japanese experimental films, in The Box, in Chinatown, tomorrow, from 7-9. Images are from: Matsumoto Toshio, Shiki soku ze ku (1975); Itoh Takashi, Spacy (1981); and Iimura Takahiko, In the River (1969-70).

Actually–there’s some Saipan content, too, with the collaborative piece with Sid Dueñas. The wonderful and entertaining Jonathan Hall (of UCI) will give a talk interspersed with the screenings. Yes, it’s free!

May 10 – June 7, 2008

The Box gallery is pleased to present an exhibition which will include two new video pieces by Naotaka Hiro and a new collaboration with Sid M. Duenas. The first new video is the third in a series of pieces that involve a human skull. In this particular piece the video is a documentation of a performance Hiro did in which the skull hung from the ceiling with a wire and Hiro built onto the skull using sticky rice, attempting to make a sphere. The video shows the quick movements of a disjointed male nude, with the frame of the video disconnecting the body from the feet and his own head.

The second video piece also dissects the body; placing plastic toy body parts into a non-descript landscape. In this case the body parts in the video are objects, not attached to a human figure. The body parts that remain are disturbing and the viewers contemplates their own bodies’ relationship to landscape. This piece will include two video projections running side by side.

The third piece, To and From, that is collaboration with Sid M. Duenas, is a video in which these two artists explore the relationship of their personal and political cultures. With Hiro being of Japanese decent and Duenas being of Saipanese decent, decided to travel to Saipan and explore the very location of conflicts between these two countries.

 Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now, the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history, and you are part of it. Six hundred years ago, when elsewhere they were putting the blame for the Black Death, Casmir the Great—so-called—told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came, they trundled their belongings into the city, they settled, they took hold, they prospered, in business, in science, education, the arts. They came with nothing. Nothing. And they flourished. For six centuries, there has been a Jewish Krakow. Think about that. By this evening, six centuries are a rumour. They never happened. Today is history.

-Amon Goeth’s (Ralph Fiennes) speech upon liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The reality is hard to uncover […] No image, no description […] Words fail.

-Jean Cayrol, Nuit et Bruillard/Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1953)

Out of History: Holocaust and the Crisis of Representation

What, if anything, separates history from rumour, fact from fiction? There are those who would deny the Jewish Holocaust ever happened, who would say that the history books are wrong, that the mass murder of six million Jews is a fabrication, a misrepresentation. There are those who would subscribe to a different version of history, either ignorant or indifferent to the evidence—personal, physical, pictorial or filmic—that stands as proof. And they would rewrite the course of history, excising what we know to be facts and evidence, and inserting what we see to be rumors, lies, and biased opinions.

            But thankfully we know—because our history allows us to know—that on 20 January, 1942, the systematic murder of Jews known as the “Final Solution” became Nazi policy in Germany.[1] Whereas the Nazis had previously documented their (almost) every move out of an obsessive tendency towards self-historicization and mythologizing, there were to be no witnesses to the Final Solution—and particularly no photography or filming[2]—for without proof of death, little proof of the life of Jews would remain. Thus they would be gradually elided from history and finally erased altogether, whereupon Nazi re-historicization would fill the void they had left.

            Again thankfully, a third of the pre-Holocaust Jewish population in Europe survived, and to the Allied victors have gone the spoils of history and historicization. Thus it has become a collective responsibility to ensure that the history of those two-thirds of the population who persished be not erased, and that we bear witness to their existence in order to combat the Final Solution project. [3] But how, with what narrative form, to respectfully, appropriately, effectively witness such an event? For as Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel admits, to some degree the Final Solution must be seen as successfully compromising Jewish historical integrity and specificity after all. He writes,

As ontological phenomenon, ‘The Final Solution’ is located beyond understanding. Let’s be honest: In this sense, the enemy can boast of his triumph. Through the scope of his deadly enterprise, he deprives us of words to describe it.[4]

So to say, the Holocaust event has been seen to be—in that it has been both witnessed and understood as—inconceivable and too horrific to be written about or understood fully, realistically, empathetically, believably. The Holocaust, that which must be written into history in order to reaffirm the vanquishment of Nazism, and to provide a record with which to warn or guide the collective in the future, defies and denies its own historicization. It will not write itself as historical narrative (as we know it), but we must somehow find a respectful and respectable means by which to express the Holocaust’s full historical significance, without trivializing the deaths of more than six million Jews as little more than a statistic, and without desensitizing ourselves to its most horrific aspects.[5]

            In this essay, I will be looking at two such representations on film, the documentary Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1953) and the biographical Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), as successful representations of the inherent unrepresentability of the Holocaust through classical or realist narrative and form. I would suggest that the filmic form, in and of itself, of each representation is uniquely suited to convey the complexity and problematics of artful representation as the mediation of historical meaning. Both films defamiliarize us intentionally (or not, sometimes, in the case of Schindler’s List) with filmic form and narrative in order to achieve the reconceptualization of the Holocaust as significant historical event. And in particular I will be looking at the ways in which Night and Fog exists always as a self-consciously and necessarily experimental representation of history, whereas Schindler’s List unconsciously presents us with an example of a film narrative always already self-problematizing, by virtue of the very subject it represents.

Film Medium, Mediator of Holocaust Trauma

Resnais’s camera tracks slowly over the crematorium ovens of Auschwitz; we get a glimpse into the dark pits wherein thousands upon thousands of Jews’ bodies were burned. We cut to black and white images of massive piles of women’s hair, and the rolls of cloth into which it was spun. There is a shot of human bones. Then bodies, followed by strips of human skin. They have been drawn on as sketch paper: “Words fail”.

Words fail to convey the intangible horror these images represent and transmit in their very presentation. Thus ‘narrates’ Jean Cayrol (voiced by actor Michel Bouquet) over Night and Fog. And thus he provides a succinct reason why film is arguably the most effective mode of expression/representation for the Holocaust and its traumatic effect on the European Jewish population, more so even than the written text. Holocaust trauma, that which resists mediation or understanding, may be conveyed (and then only partially, most likely) through a medium that in and of itself is conscious of its mediation and complexity, and is therefore predisposed to narrative self-problematization—and this film is: balanced and balancing (or having the potential to be so) between visual, aural, and verbal modes of expression, film is, out of all the media, arguably the most naturally inclined towards ‘mediation’. It has the greatest potential for fragmentation into mediating parts.

            Film is also popularly accessible, and so it should be no surprise that it is a film, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) that has, for better or for worse, come to signify the definitive Holocaust text in the modern era.[6] A major Hollywood blockbuster, Schindler’s List grossed $95 million in the States, and more than $200 million abroad,[7] and it won seven Academy Awards, including for Best Picture and Best Director, for the year of its release.[8] Nevertheless, or perhaps because of its popularity and success, Spielberg’s film has drawn heavy criticism from all sides. Miriam Hansen, placing Schindler’s List in the context of Hollywood industrial filmmaking, notes that it must necessarily be

circumscribed by the economic and ideological tenets of the culture industry, with its unquestioned and supreme values of entertainment and spectacle; its fetishism of style and glamour; its penchant for superlatives and historicist grasp at any and all experience (“the greatest Holocaust film ever made”) and its reifying, levelling, and trivializing effect on everything it touches.’[9]

We must understand that Schindler’s List, an historical film by content, is also an historical film in context—that is, being cultural product, it is necessarily formed by and in discourse with the time and environment in which it was made—and it is likely partly for this reason, its being a product of the early nineties,[10] that the film implies a certain capitalist ideology and a perceptible tendency towards the reification and trivialization of its subject matter. From a postmodern perspective, Schindler’s List attracts suspicion because, as seemingly everything in the postmodern era must be reviewed with a skeptical eye, it does not appear to review its own self as text with skepticism, sufficiently or at all. It is perhaps too earnest in its attempt to signify meaning for the Holocaust, and so it may be seen as trivializing of a subject matter deserving of complex treatment. Schindler’s List does not escape its own postmodern historicization; as we shall see, it rather problematizes its own narrative integrity in reluctance to fully commit to formal experiementation—it brings the crisis of representation and the mediation of trauma upon itself.

Modern and Postmodern Reels

Night and Fog, though, for many critics including Andrew Sarris, is the “the only film on the Nazis’ era to have truly transcended its subject without betraying it.”[11] That is, the film may be seen as going beyond those limitations of narrative and narration that would fit it neatly into a particular historical or historicizable context—yet it remains at all points concerned with the representation of the tragedy at hand. Bearing in mind Elie Wiesel’s theory on the inherent limits to representation of the Holocaust, its being in fact unrepresentable within a normative or realist system of signification,[12] Alain Resnais concerns his film with the representation of representation, the problematic repetition of what has already been repeated:[13] Night and Fog is self-reflexive narrative, self-consciously narrated and formally constructed to look at itself—and draw attention to the fact of its looking at itself—as history, historical, and history-making, all at the same time. Thus, Night and Fog avoids the postmodern pitfall of repetition without revision.

Accepting that traditionally the “implicit claim of the documentary is that it gives us direct access to history,”[14] Night and Fog challenges its own authority to speak on and for those Holocaust victims whose abused bodies are presented as significant proof of the historical event of Holocaust. Joshua Hirsch posits this innovative tendency towards narrational self-problematization as proof of Night and Fog’s being modernist text: it responds to the failure of narration in light of the trauma of Holocaust; Night and Fog therefore formally mimics and re-enacts that trauma.[15] Resnais has rejected typical documentary realism, which tends towards linearity and cohesion, in favor of a fragmented narrative, jumping from time to time, space to space, dissociating objective, historical/historicizing perspective from the subjective experience of, and reaction to, horrific, abject images of the dead and the dying—the real that defies reality and realist representation.

            In the Jamesonian tradition of postmodern criticism, Schindler’s List has, on the other hand, often been faulted for being “reactionary postmodern work”, repudiating modernist critical energies and celebratory of the status quo.[16] The charge, then, is that Spielberg refuses to address the fact that Holocaust representation is potentially problematic and self-negative, thus trivializing the event’s historical specificity and the unique difficulty of its comprehension. Compared to the self-reflexive and challenging modernist sensibility of Night and Fog, indeed Spielberg’s blockbuster goes down relatively easily in terms of its narrative progression and temporal shifts. It appears to be at first glance just one more film, a copy of other copies, in the classical narrative mould, a filmic simulacrum. As Joshua Hirsch has noted, where Night and Fog self-consciously interrupts its own narrative flow, successfully representing its own failure at coherent representation, Schindler’s List fails, blending even its pastiched quotation of other films[17] and its feebly non-linear narrative “seamlessly into […] the unself-consciousness of realism.”[18]

            The crux of the matter seems to be that Spielberg shies from grappling with the problematic of time and temporality with which each and every purportedly historical film must be in dialogue. I would argue against this, however: though Schindler’s List does respect, for the most part, linear chronology, with the narrative and the space in/on which it is acted out exerting control over time (as opposed to the other way around in Night and Fog), there are a few crucial moments in the film in which time, space, and narrative progression come together in conflict, subverting the film’s overall realist, temporal integrity. This is not original to the film, of course: Schindler’s List quotes—incriminating evidence of postmodern pastiche—the time-jumping-within-the-same-space technique Resnais uses to defamiliarizing effect in Night and Fog.

To explain by example briefly, the experimental documentary begins with a tracking shot meditation on the view from Auschwitz as seen ‘today’ (that is, half a century ago to us), before the camera speeds up, and suddenly we find ourselves transported back in black-and-white to “1933” and the rise of the Nazi “machine”. Time past thus insinuates itself into place and presence, and several times over in the narrative, we will again be forced back to see increasingly disturbing images as evidence of the setting’s historical significance—it is as if the narrative is trapped in time and cannot progress beyond reliving these dead images.[19]

Schindler’s List’s interruption of diegetic place and time, on the other hand, serves not to confuse or paralyze narrative progression, but appears rather more as a postmodern wink of sorts at the older film, and as a formal conceit effecting unity between the film’s beginning, middle, and end—that is, the story as a whole. The film opens with a colour scene of a Jewish family lighting candles, and after a series of shots that dissolve away into each other, the candles’ smoke in turn dissolves softly into the black-and-white image of smoke billowing from a train. The subtitle appears,

September 1939, the Germans defeated the Polish Army in two weeks.

Jews were ordered to register all family members and relocate to major cities. More than 10,000 Jews from the countryside arrive in Krakow daily.

The transition from ostensible ‘present’ into narrative ‘past’ is smooth, whereas in Night and Fog it is self-consciously jarring. Even the continuity ‘problem’  of colour disappearing into black-and-white images (which for Night and Fog succeeds in destroying the illusion that “this is reality and unconditional truth” implicit to the documentary/non-fiction form) is ‘solved’ when colour reemerges in a girl’s red coat, and later when candles which the Schindler Jews have lit in the factory gleam yellow. The final graveside scenes uniting the real Schindler Jews with the actors who play them coincides with the return to full colour. All in all, colour film appears to signify either the temporal present within the diegesis of the film, or significant moments of happening having present, extradiegetic import (that is, ‘things we should notice’). In other words, the use of colour film in Schindler’s List signifies signification itself, whereas in Night and Fog colour ‘simply’ signifies transition to footage from another time; it demarcates transition and juxtaposition, as opposed to continuity and perseverance through time.

            But I would look again, back to the first subtitle in Schindler’s List, to find where, perhaps unintentionally, the film may actually be seen as problematizing the very narrative authority it projects in the realist mastery of time (which is a unifying device, as opposed to fragmentary and disorientating). What I will be looking at is likely unintentionally destabilizing to the story, however I believe it is telling of Schindler’s List being rather more temporally complicated and self-reflexive in terms of temporality and narration than perhaps even Spielberg himself grasped or intended at the time of its post-production. In any case, I find it significant that in this first subtitle, which affirms that the story has in fact gone back in time to 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and began its pogroms against the Jews, the tense of the narrative ever-so-subtly shifts. The first sentences being in the past tense, the background image of a train station is thus seen as illustrative of, or supporting to, the text. However, the temporal context shifts slightly when “Jews from the countryside arrive in Krakow daily” is read directly after, and we realize that what we are looking at is just such an instance of Jews arriving in Krakow—the text is now describing an event taking place in the present. The hierarchy of narrative elements has switched from text/commentary above visuals back to the preeminence of the image with which the film originally started. Thus there exists a slightly unstable relationship between the progression of written versus imagistic narratives in Schindler’s List, a subtle complication compared to the obvious juxtaposition of word, image, and music in Night and Fog, [20] but there, nevertheless. Spielberg may be seen as attempting a unified, linear narrativization of a story that exists already necessarily disjointed in two worlds apart, the fictional and nonfictional, in ‘real’ time and reel time. He succeeds in uniting them thematically into the one filmic text, yet the fundamental impossibility of thus trying to re-historicize an event that resists coherent historization and verbal representation at every instance returns like a repressed traumatic memory: the limits of representation and narrativization inherent to the Holocaust event reemerge, subversive to narrative temporality and linear coherence, in seemingly innocuous instances of subtitled narration.

            We have seen that in both cases of attempted Holocaust representation, Schindler’s List and Night and Fog, organization of narrative into linear form, for ease of comprehension or realist effect, is an impossibility. Ironically, Resnais’s documentary, a narrative mode seemingly more disposed towards realism than a Spielberg movie might usually be, accepts this as part and parcel of the abject subject matter, whereas Schindler’s List tries to work around the problem of re-historicizing the Holocaust through narrative with thematic unity and subtle variations in narrative tense. However, at those points where narration becomes necessarily self-conscious—when historical context must be inserted and explained through subtitling—temporal slippage occurs, and the narrative landscape of Schindler’s List becomes, like Night and Fog’s setting in Auschwitz, the site for a displacing, detemporalizing reenactment of trauma on the spectator witness to Holocaust representation.

Works Cited

Baron, Lawrence. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changine Focus od Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005.

Brode, Douglas. The Films of Steven Spielberg. New York: Citadel Press, 1995.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: from Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List.” The Persistence of History: cinema, television, and the modern event. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

Haggith, Toby. “Filming the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.” Holocaust and the Moving Image: representations in film and television since 1933. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, Eds. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005.

– and Joanna Newman. “Introduction.” Holocaust and the Moving Image: representations in film and television since 1933. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, Eds. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005.

Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory.” Spielberg’s Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Hirsch, Joshua. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.

Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambirdge University press, 1989.

Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.

Wiesel, Elie. “Introduction.” Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Second Edition. Annette Insdorf.  Cambridge: Cambirdge University press, 1989.

Zelizer, Barbie. “Every Once in a While: Schindler’s List and the Shaping of History.” Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List. Yosefa Loshitsky, Ed. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Zuccotti, Susan. The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. New York: BasicBooks, 1993.

The final batch. The official schedule for the day is here. Final thoughts on EMP will have to wait until tomorrow — I’m definitely in relax and zone mode now before tomorrow’s flight back home! — but here’s one last batch of scattershot notes. There were only two panel rotations this morning as is the case with the Pop Conference in general; this time around there was no final group session.

Thanks to everyone for all their comments and corrections; I do welcome more of them at any point!

—

Andrea Bohlman, “Live from Beirut: Activist Sounds in the Blogosphere” — Kerblog by Mazen Kerbaj in Beirut started in 2006 — “bang? Blog!” Punctuation and alliteration as interpretation, activism in the wake of the Israeli invasion. Musicality of response studied, especially “Starry Night,” a widely circulated mp3. News related from scene of action, urges documentation of destruction, questioning silence. First visual representation of silences (“keep your sound!”) from personal to media level worldwide. “Starry Night” was a solo piece played and composed during a night bombing attack — track played, sounds of bombs and drones, trumpet serene then squalling amid the massive explosions, silences then shock. Keep listening when nothing is heard, the “fucking silence” is needed. Improvisation as activist parallel. Song is a snapshot, how do we experience it on the Internet? Performed within that medium, we can stop, start, pause and comment, all blurring author and readers. Users are authors and readers, a kind of mobilization. Another fragment played, breath sounds and cars and planes and bombs. Explores improv and deconstruction, a reconsideration of the instrument and the process. Music a medium that acts out, Kerbaj quoted as saying it needed to be live. Sounds of war have become everyday.

Leonard Pierce, “Wordless in Gaza: The Radical Electronica of Bryn Jones” — play some songs or not? Better to provide some context, at least. Has been obsessed with Muslimgauze for ten years but there’s a lot of music and almost nothing biographical. Basic overview provided. Life is a total cipher, worked in isolation, barely any live shows, few interviews. More prolific than Tupac after his death. Isn’t the work enough in this case? A true enigma. Made music in sympathy with Palestinians, was neither Arab nor Muslim, the Rootsman said he had no interest in Islam, never visited the area, did not use computers, “every track begins with a political fact,” but no understanding of Arabic. Invasions of Lebanon and Afghanistan were the turning points, eternally provocative to a fault, reveled in the image of violence. An anti-Semite? Signs are there — “Israel is everywhere.” Never donated to the PLO, refused to be involved further. A fraud? Pierce notes his own background and his own unsure feelings. Jones had no interest in an Arabic fanbase. Asked about living in a free Palestine, he laughed off questions about art in that context. Angry with questions about repetition. Records do cross all musical bounds, very widespread. No impact politically but a lot of musical connections. Didn’t think too far ahead, thought career wouldn’t end since peace wouldn’t arrive. Would have continued had he lived.

Jose Anguiano Cortez, “Ay Morrissey!: Latino Morrissey Fanaticos and the Renewed Possibilities of Fandom, Race and Cultural Citizenship ” — entered in progress. Overview of Smiths/Moz impact among LA Mexican Americans. Diverse group but the most disenfranchised are the biggest followers, rebuilt fanbase in their own ways. Initial resistance turned to passion, “lonely” music built into communal melodrama and independent fanbases. Manchester memories of misery translate well to the grinding oppression in SoCal. Anti-Latino actions noted, trying to succeed hard. East LA to IE corridor provides a large fanbase. An “anti-essentialist” strategy, an embrace to mark their own American and Mexican identity. Moz addresses subject more openly — “Mexican Blood American Heart” T-shirts by fans, also banda reembrace to fight back against racist denigration. Both strategies against problem but in different aesthetic ways, claiming space. Complexity and diversity found all around, what can it teach us about Chicano music? Not simply essentialized.

Barry Salmon, “Trauma and Cine-Musical Image: Music, Moving Image and Moral Universality” — Jeffrey C. Alexander asks how the Holocaust become a generalized symbol of trauma, noting the evolution of the ‘trauma drama’ (link is via Sage and will not be open access to all users). Hegel and Durkheim noted. “An engorgement of evil.” Image forms archetype away from specifics. Aristotle and Jonathan Lear noted on tragedy, catharsis and mimesis. Aristotle holds music as crucial, cleaving to mimesis. How these stories are retold is important, sheer size of audience and depth of experience means movie and TV versions important. Anne Frank diary as key, figure and situation Americanized in movie version, music important. Hanns Eisler and Adorno to be cited. First clip played, from end of movie — slow violin and strings orchestration, vaguely Jewish violin, Anna leitmotif, very sentimental and somber during reading of diary in attic, then the triumphant conclusion, D major chord. Adorno noted saddened friend, talks of music in individuation. Schindler’s List as obvious trauma-drama, culture industry, imagine unimaginable, but what of John Williams‘ score? Does not suture film, not only cinematic glue. Clip shown of Itzhak Perlman praising the score and the idea that Williams felt the history. Clip shown stitching together a wide variety of YouTube performances — violin, guitar, piano, more. “Girl in red dress” sequence shown, children’s song as musical base, point of empathy and using children’s chorus is now standard in such films and situations. Director of Shoah says he would have destroyed a real gassing clip; Perlman cue for Schindler’s clip noted, film sequence itself heavily critiqued and cut for presentation. Solo violin as affective moment. Music governs cue in both cases. Resnais and Eisler in Night and Fog aim for something different, music in gas chamber clip suggests Mahler at start, covers bluntness of the gassing in almost playful ironic counterpoint at moments, pastoral versus fingernail marks. Cinema being montage and inevitable cliche, function of rationally planned irrationality (cf Adorno). Reveals machinery of representation in the film, dreary narration, intercuts, all undermine the obvious as such. If potential of Holocaust exceeds language, how we tell things are very important. Adorno on poetry after Auschwitz, both takes including the 1965 variation. Night and Fog as the best take on the evil of banality. (Tom Smucker notes a Jewish violinist stereotype.)

Mary Greitzer, “Sound After Silence: Solo Voice, Sexual Violence” — power of solo voice in autobio work. If responding to trauma, how inscribed? Sexual violence as seen in “Me and a Gun” by Tori Amos and “Daddy Dearest” by Lydia Lunch. Tori clip played first, second verse. What can we learn? Little physical details, instead mental portrait. Lyrics can speak to any victim, but palatable because the details are omitted. Why this successful construction of identity? Solo voice recreates status, isolation and nudity, voice breaks at many points, bring the rape near, a woundedness. Maintaining a detachment with control and resistance, lament and prayer providing healing and surviving. Formal structure is A to A around a middle C, comfortable and comforting like a lullaby, sung by a caring woman but still harrowing. Lunch’s piece a monologue, her musical qualities, especially in rhythm, is key. Progression of letter insidious, building into the horrible moments then pulling back suddenly. Control exhibited throughout as she tracks the moments and changing gears suddenly, building uneasy anticipation. Molesting first told in an out of context “sexy” voice, horrified to find ourselves aroused, thus guilty. A trace of the complicated reaction to molestation. He preys on her, she preys on us. Cyclic perpetuation, a terribly human origin. Meaning inaccessible through text alone, a symbolic induction. He taught her come, she was almost destroyed, climax builds into sobbing rage that is also a mindblowing orgasm through manipulation. Conclusion — basic feminist tenets incorporated in culture, thus Amos fits into this, speaking up and surviving, strength and inspiration. Lunch is the complicated response, addressing other truths, a deviant sexuality, a double-edged sword, excoriation and pleasure, a defense of perversions. Cause and reconciliation are critically different, confronting the erotic response. See also Bob Flanagan and his response to pain, transcendence through reconciliation. Celebrate Lunch’s reclaiming of self as feminist like Amos — “refuse to be victim of own self.”

Marianne Tatom Letts, “’You Forget So Easily’: Radiohead’s Amnesiac as a Failed ‘Directed Forgetting’ of Trauma” — Kid A as departure with more electronic/opaque approach. Amnesiac — “forced to forget where we have come from,” so Amnesiac blurs where Kid A’s painful birth came from but not entirely. Memory and trauma — wanting to forget but also manipulating. Amnesiac supposedly more conventional, Yorke caustic about expectations. All tracks recorded together, Amnesiac compiled after Kid A release, so erasing the first album was a false goal. Amnesiac treating Kid A as aberration. Amnesia as surviving commodity in industry. Warmer than Kid A (?) but we must read beyond. Subject repressing Kid A, redeeming lost subject. First song has disappointment in nothingess, comment on pop music world? Handout has songmapping chart between the albums, noting specific sonic and lyrical connections. Clips played for illustration. “Packt” as claustrophobic, near death experience. Reaction to near deaths in Kid A? Language as illogical syntax. Epiphany to do with subject, not listener. (Do not agree with Letts’s assumption of overall unitary lyrical subject unless it is a direct address to the audience from Yorke as public figure.) Subject in Amnesiac already dead, where in Kid A death is considered as solution. Singles as statements of intent. Insistence of truth in representation in recording while listener looks out for oneself, a violence in exploitation (thus “Knives Out” and the use of the body and devouring). Subject can be consumed, while consuming. Song played in full. Amnesiac is unsympathetic eulogy for subject. Concept is larger than the albums, Radiohead as not just band but brand, already dead and served.