After the Fall: American Painting in the Thirties

After the Fall:  American Painting in the Thirties is a nicely proportioned exhibition of iconic paintings on canvas made by American artists during the Great Depression.  The show, curated by the Chicago Art Institute, features 93 paintings, about the ideal size for an exhibition -- you can look at each work with some degree of attention without succumbing to exhaustion.  Furthermore, the show's tight focus allows a maximum of comparing and contrasting, one of the pleasures of attending any gallery exhibition.  The level of the art works in the exhibition is very high -- you will recognize about half of the paintings in the show.  These art works are so highly characteristic of American painting in the Depression that many of them have come to stand as symbols for that period of American history.

With a few notable exceptions, these works are not "painterly" -- that is, there are very few bravura displays of paint application:  these works are nothing like art by Van Gogh, for instance, or Max Beckmann or, for that matter, Velasquez or Goya.  To the contrary, the artists are mostly interested in clear draftsmanship and the works feature figures carefully drawn and, then, it seems, colored-in.  Generally, the color schemes are intended to be realistic and even conservative in their appearance -- some of the works, in fact, seem tentatively colored, as if the artist used a medium like colored pencils or watery pastels to tint the images.  In effect, much of the work could be graphic, that is, an engraving or woodcut, that has been laboriously colored.  For this reason, many of the paintings really don't gain that much by being seen in person -- a reasonable reproduction generally suffices to convey the information in these pictures.  And, it is the information, that is paramount to these artists.  In fact, a number of paintings, particularly those by the precisionist Charles Sheeler, look like textbook illustrations for a particularly stolid and obtuse 9th-grade science primer -- for instance, a startling image of a huge hydro-turbine being lowered into place in a power-plant, as reproduced in the catalog, looks almost exactly like an image in a school textbook.  Viewed in the museum, the painting is quite large -- four by six feet, perhaps, and this gives it a certain authority, but the image is, in effect, a glossy technical illustration, something you might expect to see in an old issue of the Saturday Evening Post or Life.  In general, almost all the paintings in the show are primarily illustrative:  this describes many of Grant Wood's canvases, all of them witty but his landscapes, at least, afflicted with the pulpy brown tint of Iowa's soil. (Wood's painting of the "Daughters of the Revolution" and his "American Gothic" by contrast are carefully made portraits, similar to the northern European work of Memling, Holbein, or Cranach -- the catalog touts these paintings as ironic or satirical, in the vein of Sinclair Lewis:  I don't see the images in that light and think that they are, in fact, rather earnest and, even, perhaps, tending toward sentimentality.  There is a large self-loathing painting by Paul Cadmus, "The Fleet's In!" showing floozies with big asses, carousing sailors, and, even, pinch-faced homosexual in a pink tie flirting with a beefy seaman -- the picture is pleasantly lurid, painted in colors that are intentionally vulgar.  Georgia O'Keefe is represented by several iconic images of cow skulls, paintings devoid of any interest other than as a kind banner or pictorial equivalent of a commercial logo -- in my view, O'Keefe is consistently overrated, although she is a fine decorative painting and an ingenious inventor of "trademarks."  A couple of paintings by Reginald Marsh of garish metropolitan scenes features strangely restrained and dim color palettes -- the big paintings of urban chaos, nonetheless, are effective and eye-catching.  Ben Shahn's "Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" gains nothing really by being seen in person other than the fact that it is a big painting, the size of one wing of a Gothic altarpiece, apparently, the reference that the artist intends.  There is an extraordinarily luminous painting by Edward Hopper in which the artist has staged a combat between the twilight and electric light bulbs illumining a rural gas station -- the picture creates a fascinating sense of peace riven through, however, with disquieting notes.  For me, the highlight of the show is a painting by Marsden Hartley, a savage-looking landscape called "Mount Katahdin, Maine, Autumn No. 2 " -- this is one of the few works in the exhibition that has painterly qualities, that is, thick application of paint, wildly different types of brushstroke and intensely expressionistic colors:  Mt. Katahdin appears as a pitch-black spike poking up above an autumnal forest that is a solid field of dense red, all of this poised above evergreen green and the acid blues of a lake distressed by the wind.  It's a remarkable landscape.  Also remarkable, and possessing some painterly qualities, is a canvas by John Steuart Curry showing feral boars ripping serpents apart -- it's some sort of all-purpose allegory, but the sheer ugliness of the composition and the painting is worthy of admiration.  This image seems similar to Grant Wood's "Death on the Ridge Road", a wildly canted picture that shows two vehicles, literally flying (wheels off the road) into a fatal collision -- again, the intent seems to be generally allegorical, but not specific to any particular calamity.  By contrast, there are a half-dozen paintings by forgotten artists, among them O. Louis Gugliemi and Peter Blume, that apply the techniques of European surrealism to political commentary -- these images are startling, particularly Gugliemi's "The Eternal City" with a profile of Mussolini, luridly colored, popping up out of a jack-in-the-box.  Probably allied to this work is a very early round-shaped canvas by Philip Guston showing a bombing raid on a city, a very effective piece of agit-prop and painted in the manner of the Italian Mannerists -- the colors look like those in Pontormo's works.  Semi-abstract works in the show, a painting by Stewart Davis and another by Charles Demuth are negligible -- the image by Davis in particular is clearly inferior to other works by this artist, including some nice paintings in the American wing of the same museum.

This exhibit remains in Chicago until September.  The show travels to the Musee d' Orsay in Paris thereafter and will be presented in London as well.

Film essay -- Wajda's "Kanal"

Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal

　

　

At age 90, Andrzej Wajda represents Polish cinema and its history in a unique way: not only have his film’s explored the history of his native land, but they have also made history. Wajda’s voice is so influential in his homeland that his 1981 film Man of Iron, featuring Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement, is widely considered to have been instrumental in freeing Poland from the Soviet bloc. Wajda has made more than 40 feature-length films, directed for TV, and adapted many of his movies into theatrical works that he has also directed. He has been a one-man film industry and his long life and career have been decisive in Polish cinema. (In 2000, Wajda represented Poland literally: for several years, he was an elected representative to the national congress.)

Wajda’s career is so complex and involves projects so remarkably varied that commentary must be either brief and cursory or book-length. From a cursory perspective, Wajda grew up in cavalry garrison, the son of a Polish military officer. Wajda describes his childhood as idyllic, a matter of exciting mock cavalry charges and parades – he says that his boyhood was reminiscent of John Ford’s cavalry movies. (The idyll ended tragically in 1940 when Wajda’s much-beloved father was interned by the Soviets and, then, slaughtered in Katyn Wood massacre – Wajda didn’t learn the truth about his father’s death until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that is, until the mid-nineties.)

At 16, in 1942, Wajda joined the underground Armie Krajowa and fought against the Germans. (He was captured and sent to a concentration camp, a bit of bad fortune that may have inadvertently saved his life.) At the end of the war, the Soviets required that the Armie Krajowa be disbanded – Wajda’s unit laid down its weapons. However, other elements of the Armie Krajowa continued an insurgency against the Communists. Fighting continued for several years, a period during which the Communists hunted down members of the former resistance "Home Army" and either massacred them outright or sent captured guerillas to concentration camps.

In light of these dire circumstances, Wajda notes that for Poles of his generation, there was really only one subject: World War Two and its aftermath. Wajda said that Polish actors, as late as the eighties, could be divided into those who had somehow survived the war and, therefore, felt that life was a gift and a miracle (his perspective) or those, of a slightly later generation, who suffered survivor’s guilt, remorse at having missed the most important event in modern Polish history, that is, the Second World War.

After attending film school in Lodz, Wajda apprenticed with Aleksander Ford. Ford had begun his film in silent pictures, but was a prestige director and darling of the regime in the mid-fifties. (Ford went on to make the historical epic, The Knights of the Teutonic Order, the most expensive film ever made in Poland and an enormous success at the box-office. Ford controlled the Polish film industry – people that he denounced were arrested by the secret police and tortured. However, he ran afoul of the government himself while making a co-production with Israeli and German film makers about Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician who was also a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ford defected, lived for a time in Denmark, and the United States, and, ultimately committed suicide in a motel in Florida in 1980.)

Wajda became famous with his first films, the so-called war trilogy comprised of A Generation (1954), Kanal (1956), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958). In the early sixties, Wajda was heavily involved in directing theater – he was at the helm of famous productions of two American plays, A Hatful of Rain (about morphine addiction) and Two for the Seesaw, a dark Romantic comedy. Throughout this period of time, Wajda directed about one film a year – these included A Siberian Lady Macbeth, Ashes, a historical epic about the Napoleonic wars, and Landscape after a Battle (1970), another picture about Polish concentration camps. He made a partial version of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, entitled Pilate and Others (1967), and, later, adapted Conrad’s The Shadow Line into a film.

In 1974, Wajda directed another historical epic, The Promised Land, about industrial development in Eastern Europe – a film that we screened a few years ago. The first of Wajda’s films about the Solidarity movement was Man of Marble (1977). This was followed by the immensely consequential Man of Iron in 1981, a film in which the leader of the movement, Lech Walesa, actually appeared. (Wajda’s last film, made in 2012, completes his Solidarity trilogy – it is called Lech Walesa: Man of Hope and is a biopic about the Solidarity leader.) Danton, a French-Polish co-production released in 1983, was also seen as an allegory about the Solidarity movement, Depardieu’s Danton represented Lech Walesa poised in conflict against Robespierre, a figure analogous to the politicians opposed to Solidarity.

In 1990, Wajda made his own film about Janusz Korczak. He adapted the last part of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot into a film called Nastasja (the movie features a Japanese Onnugata actor – that is, male to female transvestite trained in Kabuki theater.) He directed a large-scale adaptation of a Polish national epic, Pan Tadeusz released in 1999 and another enormous box-office success in Wajda’s native land. (Pan Tadeusz was the second film by Wajda drawing upon the Nationalist romantic literature of the 19^th century – the first was The Wedding, released in 1973, based on an important theatrical work penned just before 1900 by Stanislaus Wispianski.) Wajda’s 2002 The Revenge is similarly based on a 19^th century farce that is regarded as a classic theater work in Poland. In 2007, Wajda was accorded international acclaim for his film about the Katyn Woods massacre and its nightmarish aftermath. The name of the film, not surprisingly, is Katyn.

How many massacres, atrocities, executions, and battles has Wajda staged in his films? How many revolutions has he depicted? How many protests and violent confrontations with authorities? How many heaps of corpses has he filmed?

Wajda is seven years older than Roman Polanski – in Poland’s tumultuous history, this is the equivalent of a generation. Film makers like Polanski largely defected from Poland and preferred to work abroad – notable examples are Krzsystof Kielowski, whose last four films were made in France, Jerzy Skolimowski who has worked extensively in England, and Andrzej Zulawski, who has made films in England and Hollywood. Wajda remained in Poland at the cost of certain compromises – he has been accused, from time to time, with collaborating with the same regime that his films helped to bring down.

　


The Warsaw Uprising
In some ways, it is astounding that Wajda was able to make Kanal. To understand political obstacles to the production of the film, we must know some basic facts about the Warsaw Uprising, the event the film documents.

Poland was overrun by the German Wehrmacht in 1939. The legitimate Polish government formed an government in exile and organized a resistance movement, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa). This resistance movement harassed German occupation forces in Poland and participated in some large, if doomed, uprisings, most notably one at Lvov in 1942.

In 1943, the Germans lost the battle of Stalingrad and the Red Army began to push the Wehrmacht out of Russia. By 1944, German armies had retreated into Poland. The Polish Home Army, then, began a series of coordinated uprisings called Operation Tempest. The purpose of these uprisings was to force the Germans to fight on two fronts – against the Russians advancing from the East and against the Poles rising up to attack their garrisons and convoys at the rear. Most of the Polish uprisings were crushed by the Germans with great loss of life.

Before July 31, 1944, the Red Army had reached a point about 10 km from the center of Warsaw. The Soviet positions were to the east of the Praga district of Warsaw, the suburb on the eastern bank of the Vistula, the river that bisects Warsaw. The Polish Home Army planned a concerted uprising and attack on the German forces occupying Warsaw – the notion was that the Home Army would begin killing German soldiers, seize the bridges crossing the Vistula, and, therefore, open the path for the Red Army to cross the river and seize the center of Warsaw. The plan was sound and, although historians debate the issue, probably would have been successful if implemented as proposed.

The Uprising began at "W-hour" – that is, five a.m. on August 1, 1944. ("W" stands for wybuch – explosion, wolnosc - freedeom, and walka - fight.) About 40,000 Home Army partisans attacked the German forces and, after several days of intense fighting, captured the city center, large portions of the suburbs, and had a command position in the Prudential Tower, an 18 story building that was the second tallest skyscraper in Europe at that time. Home Army attacks in Praga had dislodged the German units from the bridges on the Vistula. Initially, the uprising seemed to be successful and had achieved its preliminary objectives.

But the Red Army did not advance. Not only did the Red Army not send its columns across the Vistula, some units withdrew from the outskirts of Warsaw and began an armored thrust toward Romania. The Polish government-in-exile pleaded with the Allies to come to the support of the beleagured Home Army. Both American and British air forces engaged in several hundred sorties dropping munitions and food to the Home Army forces, but Western allied armies were nowhere near this theater of operations and could not provide any assistance on the ground. Until declassification of Soviet documents, it was unclear why the Red Army didn’t advance into Warsaw to seize the city, particularly when the bridges were seized by Home Army forces. (Officially, the Soviet’s claimed that the Uprising began too early, before the Red Army was properly positioned to support the rebels, and that the Home Army was a proto-fascist group, possibly allied with the Nazis.) We now know definitively what was strongly believed at that time – Josef Stalin himself ordered the Red Army to stand fast and not assist the Polish resistance. Stalin understood that the Germans had lost the war at Stalingrad and that it was only a matter of time before the Reich would be defeated. Accordingly, Stalin’s objective was to clear Eastern Europe of anti-communist forces that might oppose the installation of pro-Soviet regimes in the countries formerly occupied by the Nazis – and it was known the Polish army was highly nationalistic, pro-Catholic, and anti-Communist. Stalin made the decision to allow the Germans to exterminate the Home Army in Warsaw so that the Poles would not have a force able to resist a Soviet communist regime to be installed post-war in Poland. (This mirrors the Red Army’s massacre of Polish cavalry officers, including Wajda’s father, in the Katyn Wood in 1940 – the Soviet objective was to destroy Poland’s political and military elites to assure that the Communists could seize power after the war.)

Of course, the failure of the Red Army to come to the rescue of the Polish resistance fighters was regarded as "an act of infamy" at the time. And the motives of Stalin and his Red Army were largely understood – although historical confirmation wasn’t available until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both Churchill and FDR pleaded with Stalin to support the Warsaw Uprising, but to no avail. Without the support of Red Army tanks and heavily mechanized units, the Home Army was doomed.

Beginning on August 4, Heinrich Himmler sent special brigades of SS troops into Warsaw to commenced massacres in the Ochotu and Wolu districts of the town. The SS soldiers went building to building, dragging civilians onto the streets, raping the women and girls, and, then, shooting everyone in sight. After clearing a building, it was set on fire. Somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 civilians died in these massacres. The surviving population of suburban Warsaw took to the sewers and fled underground to the Old City or to the western suburbs.

Over a million people lived in Warsaw at the time of the Uprising. Combat in a urban terrain, fought house-to-house is asymmetrical. Although the Germans had air-cover, could use Stukas to dive-bomb Polish positions, and had tanks with heavy artillery, they were largely unable to dislodge the Home Army forces from the parts of the city that they had seized. The much more lightly armed and outnumbered Home Army was able to stalemate German forces in intense fighting that lasted for weeks. Throughout the battle, the Poles expected that, at some point, the Red Army would come to their rescue.

Beginning in September, Polish commanders began to negotiate with their German counterparts for the Home Army’s surrender. Each time a negotiated settlement was in sight, rumors occurred that the Red Army was advancing and so talks were suspended. But the Red Army never actually advanced and on October 5, 1944, the Home Army surrendered. About 15,000 men were disarmed and sent to POW camps. Between five and six-thousand troops melted into the civilian population. The remaining Home Army partisans had been killed – probably about 19,000 fighters. About 150,000 civilians were dead. The Germans lost about 10,000 men killed in the fighting.

The remaining civilian population of Warsaw was deported to a large concentration camp and sorted into different groups – about 60,000 people were exterminated in death camps. The Germans were told to treat Warsaw like "another Carthage" – accordingly, the city was systematically destroyed, each building looted, and, then, either dynamited or set afire. When the Soviet Army entered Warsaw in January 1945, the city was almost entirely leveled. Less than 10% of the buildings were standing.

After the War, the Polish Home Army was denounced for "collaborating with the Fascists." The Polish Communist party announced that the Home Army was to be exterminated. Although most Home Army troops were disarmed in January 1945, some number retained their weapons and began a partisan war against the Communists. The new Polish communist regime proposed an amnesty and told the remaining belligerent elements of the Home Army that they would be pardoned for their attacks on Soviet forces and the Russian backed Polish First Army. On the basis of these promises, about 60,000 members of the Polish Army surrendered. The NKVD, Soviet secret police, in charge of these operation, promptly arrested 50,000 of these fighters, tortured and executed their leaders, and sent the captured men to Siberia where many of them died in the Gulag.

No monument was erected to the Warsaw Uprising until 1989. Indeed, the Warsaw Uprising was a subject that could not be publicly discussed for most of the Communist era in Poland – Wajda made his film in the brief interlude of political "thaw" following the death of Stalin in March 1953. By 1958, a film like Kanal could not have been made and, indeed, would have been suppressed. The only reason the film was not suppressed in Poland was that the picture won the Silver Palm at the Cannes film festival in 1957 and, therefore, was a point of national pride that could not be ignored.

On the 50^th anniversary of the uprising, many international dignitaries, including the American vice-president Al Gore, traveled to Warsaw. No one from Russia or the former Soviet Union attended the remembrance ceremonies.

　

　


A poem
On his website, Wajda cites a poem about the Warsaw Uprising:


We are waiting...

We are waiting for you, red plague,

To deliver us from black death,

To be our land once torn and quartered

Salvation met with horror....

You can not harm us! The choice is yours,

You can help us, you can deliver us

Or still delay and leave us to die...

Death is not terrible; we know how to die.

But know this: from our tombstones

A victorious new Poland will be born

And you will not walk this land

You red ruler of bestial forces.
This poem was written by Jozef Szcapanksi, an officer cadet with nom de guerre "Ziutek", a soldier of the "Parasol" battalion. Wajda declares that the poem "speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

Notwithstanding the international fame of Kanal, official Polish critics derided the film as a whitewash of the Home Army. Wajda says that no one in Poland wanted to see the film. He writes on his website: "This film could not satisfy (the uprising participants and those who had lost their loved ones in Warsaw). They had licked their wounds, mourned their dead, and now they wanted to see their moral and spiritual victory and not death in the sewers."

　

　

　


A Criticism
There are obvious flaws in Kanal. First, the three zooms to close-up of the bugged-out eyes and haunted face of the composer are three too many. The composer’s madness in the sewers is a rare case of Wajda succumbing to over-explicit explanation of images that are sufficiently clear in themselves – we don’t need to be told that the sewers are a hellish inferno; that much is obvious from what we have seen. (Contrast with the heartbreaking scene of the 12 year old child soldier trying to clean out some boots as the Tiger tanks approach the barricade where he is hiding – it’s obvious, but never stated, that the boy will not live to wear these boots and that, indeed, he will surely be killed within the next five minutes.)

The romantic or love story aspects of the film seem a bit unnecessary and have a dark undertone. The blonde "good time" girl, apparently a prostitute, is an example of the kind of person who joined the resistance. In France, as shown in The Sorrow and the Pity, as well as in Poland as well, many members of the Resistance were small-time criminals, malcontents, crazies, marginal people who seized an opportunity to rebel because it was their nature to fight against all authority, no matter how constituted. The good citizens generally collaborate with occupying regimes because, of course, they have the most to lose. Wajda defines the blonde girl as sexually experienced and promiscuous. We initially are told that she smells bad – her shoes are covered with shit. And she is experienced in moving through the sewers. In fact, Wajda suggests that she is kind of sewer-dweller, the sewer is her natural habitat. This element of the film feels unduly judgmental and, even, half-crazed – because of woman is sexually promiscuous is it fair to also portray her as an experienced guide through a literal sewer?

(Some critics protest that the characters look too handsome and well-fed; the people in the movie are all obviously movie-stars – they have movie star good looks. This bothers some critics and not others.)

The principal criticism of the film is that it is profoundly depressing. Life is already tragic. Do we need further representations as to the absurdity of existence. At the outset, the narrator tells us that we seeing a "tragedy" – we are advised that none of the characters on-screen will survive the next 24 hours. Before the battle, someone says that they will fight to the last man and all be killed because "it is the Polish way." (Recall that the Poles are famous for supposedly mounting the last cavalry charge in military history, a futile and massive attack on German tanks at the beginning of World War Two, an episode that Wajda made into a film much later in his life, Lotna. Recent scholarship has shown that this cavalry charge did not occur – a group of Polish cavalry ran afoul of German infantry, many horses were killed, and, later, when German panzers moved into the area, the carcasses of the dead horses were misintepreted.) Within the first two minutes, we know how the film will play out – there is no suspense of any kind. Tragedy is supposed to inspire in us "pity and terror" – but what if we only feel "disgust and shame?" After all, the Warsaw Uprising was an abject defeat and, in some ways, the film drags the memory of the Home Army literally through excrement – in fact, as I argue below, the sewers represent the psychic landscape of defeat and humiliation. Is this, in a way, too much to ask an audience to bear?

Marcel Martin in March 1958 wrote in Cinema:

"...the illusory symbol of freedom...nonetheless involves the immediate presence of death. Having said this – and words do not suffice to express the full intensity of the drama – one must ask: can the viewer really participate in a film in which the horror reaches such unimaginable heights? And the horror and pity aroused by the misfortunes of the characters, are they ends in themselves, since no relief, no hope is offered in the conclusion?"

In other words, should a film induce despair in its viewers?

　

　


Character names
In Kanal, as in the actual Warsaw Uprising, Home Army members were not known to one another by their real names. This was to avoid family members being killed or tortured in reprisal for attacks committed by Home Army members who might be captured by the enemy. The following characters are among the 43 troops that we see fighting in Kanal:

Zadra – treason (or, more likely, something like "curmudgeon")

Kula – bullet

Mady – wise

Smukly – slim

Korab – caravel (a kind of boat)

Stokrotha – daisy

　

　


Production Notes
Jerzy Stawinski was a member of KADR, the Polish writer’s union. Stawinski wrote a novella called Kanal about the last gasps of the Warsaw Uprising. (Stawinski had been a commander of a Home Army unit in the Warsaw Uprising.) With the Polish novelist, Tadeusz Konwicki (the writer of A Minor Apocalypse, a book that we read in the group), Stawinski adapted the story into a screenplay. Andrezj Munk, a well-known director, expressed an interest in the screenplay. Munk was a documentary film maker, used to shooting with natural light on location. With a couple technicians, he crawled down into the Warsaw sewers, emerged in a few minutes, and said: "It’s pitch-dark down there and very cramped – there’s no way to shoot a movie in a sewer." He abandoned the project. At that time, Wajda was working as Munk’s assistant. He decided he would try his hand at making the movie. The film was his second, after A Generation, also a picture about the last days of World War II.

Wajda, who was often willing to pay lip-service to the party-line, pitched the film as a movie critical of the Home Army. He told the State film production censors that the movie would show the errors made by the Home Army. At the time, the official stance was that the Home Army’s uprising had resulted in nothing other than the destruction of Warsaw, the murder of its civilian population, and the slaughter of Poland’s intellectual elite – the Poles should have been patient and waited for Marxist-Leninist destiny, in the form of the Red Army, to roll in to liberate Poland. With this understanding of the production, the project was green-lighted. Wajda began shooting the exterior war scenes in ruins that remained in the suburbs of Warsaw. The rather baroque, bourgeois house that shelters the Home Army rebels in the film’s first half-hour was built from scratch on the site. The night scene in which tracers fill the dark sky was shot with live ammunition on a couple hectares of set roped off from the public – everyone recalls the sequence as being very frightening to film.

While the exteriors were being filmed, Wajda had an elaborate studio set built to simulate the sewers. The set was brilliantly lit. In his comments on the film, Wajda observes that there is nothing naturalistic about the lighting in the sewers – the wet brick and sludge scintillate with indirect light. Far from shooting in darkness, Wajda simply filmed wet black surfaces with bright light. The sewer set is, in fact, an expressionistic triumph of design and carefully placed lighting.

The final scene, in which Zadra, descends into the sewer again, he pistol defiantly (if hopelessly) pointed at the sky, was shot in Warsaw’s Old City. In 1955 and 1956, the Old City had not yet been rebuilt and remained in ruins.

Polish audiences were uninterested in revisiting the calamity of the Warsaw Uprising. The film’s nihilism was heavily criticized. At the Cannes Film Festival, the movie was highly regarded and awarded a prize. (The other important film shown at the 1957 Cannes film festival was Bergman’s The Seventh Seal). Kanal’s fame at Cannes won the film some grudging admiration and emboldened Wajda to make the politically controversial Ashes and Diamonds (1958) about the last day of the war and the conflict between the Communists and the Home Army. At Cannes, several Hollywood film executives approached Jerzy Stawinski, lavishly praising him for his imaginative concept – "we love the metaphor of the sewers," the Hollywood executives said. Stawinski was bemused. Of course, to him, the sewers had not been a metaphor at all.

　


PTSD

In the opening exterior scenes, the influence of Roberto Rossellini in films like Rome Open City and Paisan, is clear – indeed, several sequences in Kanal seem to be modeled on similar sequences in Paisan, particularly the uncompromising final narrative in that film showing the slaughter of the Po River partisans. The style of film making is fluid – one of the opening scenes features a four-minute track through rubble as the Home Army troops scuttle through ruins to the smashed mansion. Wajda shows us that the partisans are trapped by a simple device: we see the soldiers ducking behind walls thereby establishing the position of enemy snipers hidden in the wreckage somewhere beyond those walls; but when the first fusillade of fire occurs, the shots are fired from behind the camera – this surprises us and shows that the enemy surrounds the protagonists.

Poland has been a great showcase and theater for the baroque both in architecture and literature. The mansion is a baroque labyrinth, a kind of mini-cosmos that contains all remnants of the civilization destroyed in the war. Tracking or moving shots in the mansion tend to be subtended between half-shattered mirrors – the environment is tricky with spaces within spaces, odd niches, reflections, a coat of armor, and elaborate, ancient-looking furniture. The mansion suggests an intricate stage-set, a kind of bonfire of the vanities. Of course, there is an ill-tuned piano and a folio of reproductions from Botticelli. The grounds of the mansion, its destroyed garden, are covered with fallen and ravaged books. (Later, at the very end of the film, a ream of startling white paper, like the wings of a dove, will blow across the courtyard where Zadra guns down the sole survivor of his platoon.) War, of course, is the enemy of art and truth – war destroys books, burns records, and leaves archives strewn across shattered landscapes. With this motif, Wajda shows us that the Uprising is not only being crushed by the Germans, but, also, that its existence is being erased forever.

The battle around the house is shot entirely from the perspective of the Polish defenders. At no point in the film do we see anything from the perspective of the Germans. The attacking Germans, quite sensibly have no desire to be killed and so they keep their distance from Home Army position. They prefer to shell the place, dive-bomb at it, and, then, send in the Goliath tracked (self-propelled) mines. The Goliath is a kind of motorized bomb, sent into positions held by entrenched enemies to blow them up. (As we see, the bomb runs off an extension cord.) It is well to observe how Wajda denies the audience the conventional pleasures of a war movie. War movies usually involve large-scale scenes of armies moving into action – there is the panoply of battle spectacular with explosions, flags, and vast movements of men and equipment, the pleasure of seeing a cast of thousands deployed on the screen. Wajda provides us with nothing of this kind. Clearly, he is capable of, and has the resources to stage a huge and spectacular crowd scene – this is established by the very complex and densely choreographed sequence in the courtyard crowded with panicked civilians and soldiers under attack by advancing German "Tiger" tanks. But Wajda is not interested in providing us with any kind of spectacle that we can enjoy – the scenes of combat involve small units of men creeping like rats through wreckage. The only big and spectacular war scene in the film involves helpless civilians and retreating soldiers under fire by an implacable enemy.

Similarly, Wajda denies us the pleasure of seeing the brutal enemy suffer for his cruelty. We learn that the Germans are burning Polish families alive. One of the Polish soldiers says: "We’ll make them bleed" in anticipation of a frontal assault. But there is no frontal assault – instead of storming the barricades the Germans use mechanized equipment in the attack and, so far, as we can see no German soldier is killed or injured. In the last half of the film, there are very few Germans even on display. As far as I can determine, Wajda’s film does not show a single German casualty – the only people "bleeding" are Poles. (Compare this to Spielberg’s nasty Saving Private Ryan in which the last forty minutes of the film is devoted to a John Wayne-style slaughter of German troops – the Germans are like Apaches in old Westerns: they seem to want to die and are mowed down in the hundreds by our plucky American soldiers.)

Once the action descends into the inferno of the sewers, the film becomes highly stylized and, indeed, intensely baroque: in a perverse way, the Hollywood executives were right – what occurs in the last half of the film seems unavoidably metaphoric. The sewers are a literal labyrinth. They seem more a state of mind than a real place. In the sewers, everyone is obscurely panicked – people run back and forth shouting that the Germans have filled the sewers with gas. Clearly, this is untrue – and, although there may, in fact, be bad fumes in the sewers, it’s not clear that these have the capability to kill anyone. Sounds are weirdly amplified in the sewers and, when we encounter the first checkpoint barricade, the men surrounding it seem to be already dead – they stand motionlessly by the debris blocking the sewer, like specters. The dying lieutenant half-drowned in the sewage and howling like an animal is like something glimpsed in a nightmare. Immediately, the platoon collapses into three groups that never rejoin one another. Once you have entered the sewer, it seems that you are doomed to remain there forever. The motions and gestures of the troops caught in the sewer become increasingly expressionistic – people are shown groping in the darkness, crawling, dragging one another forward as if moving against hurricane-force winds, groups of soldiers appear as statuesque friezes of the damned in Hell.

This imagery can be understood in several ways. First, it is a truism that the experience and historical meaning of World War Two is very different in a place like Poland or Estonia than it is in America (or even England). In America, we imagine World War Two as a great crusade in which virtue triumphed over absolute evil. This has been the propaganda disseminated in our movies and, even, history books. Politicians still refer to the Second World War as the "good war." But, of course, no war is good on any level. And, if you are Pole or an Estonian, it is not at all certain that "the Good Guys" won the war. The defeat of the Germans in Poland was followed by 45 years of savage repression, concentration camps, arbitrary arrest and torture, and economic malaise. One vicious totalitarian regime was succeeded by another. In this light, it is very difficult to argue that the heroism and sacrifice of the soldiers and civilians who died in the Warsaw Uprising had any value at all – in fact, the slaughter was an exercise in futility.

On this basis, we can interpret the sewer as an image for post-war Poland. After the fighting in the sunlight, a damaged and terrified group of people, some of them wounded, descend into a nightmarish labyrinth. The atmosphere is literally choking. The darkness is all-encompassing and there is no way out. No one comes to your rescue. You die in the darkness, the "darkness at noon" of the police state. It is no accident that the most clearly visualized killing in the film is one Pole shooting another. We never see any Pole successfully kill a German, but the last act of violence in the movie, a murder that presages the savage darkness of Ashes and Diamonds is Zadra pointlessly killing the last survivor of his battalion. The image of one Pole killing another Pole in the ruins of a city is an apt metaphor for post-War communist Poland.

There is another interpretation that may be more relevant to us. We now recognize that, in the wake of war, there is enormous psychic disturbance. We may interpret the sewers as an objective correlative for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the sewers, the Germans aren’t killing the Poles. The rather the Polish fighters are trapped in a blackness that leads them literally to suicide – for instance, the Polish girl who shoots herself when the man with whom she was sleeping declares that he must survive the ordeal so he can return to his wife and child. The warrior who has returned from battle finds himself in an uncomprehending society, cut off, and cast into darkness – there seems to be no way out and depression gnaws relentlessly at the sense of self. Topographically, the sewer is an interior, an inside, in which the characters are entrapped – there is an eerie sense in Kanal that the last half of the movie is a dream, a nightmare occurring within someone’s disturbed sleep. Years later, Wajda made a film called Landscape after a Battle – in my view, we can productively view Kanal’s second half as a psychic "landscape after battle," the spiritual darkness, confusion, and alienation that descends upon soldiers after the killing and dying has ended.

　


And Yet
As if in recognition that the story of the Warsaw Uprising is too terrible to be esthetically enjoyed, Criterion includes on its disc a long interview conducted in 2004 between Wajda and another old man, Jan Nowak Jezioranski. The interview primarily involves historical issues and ends with a kind of defense of the Warsaw Uprising. Jezioranski was a courier during the Warsaw Uprising and later an official in the Polish delegation to the United States.

Jezioranski makes the point that the Warsaw Uprising was historically consequential in three ways. First, the Red Army paused for 63 days during its inexorable advance into Germany. This allowed the Allies to advance through Europe thrusting deep into Germany from the West. As a result, the Red Army was not able to claim all of Berlin. In fact, Berlin had to be divided between the allied occupying forces. In Jezioranski’s view, the Warsaw Uprising, paradoxically, saved Germany. If all of Germany had fallen to the Soviet army, West Germany would not have existed and the entire German nation would have been a satellite to Moscow.

Second, Jezioranski says that the horrific memories of the Warsaw Uprising prevented the Poles from joining the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956. If the Poles had risen with the Hungarians, they would have been similarly crushed and would have suffered another calamitous defeat.

Finally, Jezioranski says that the Poles learned from the Warsaw Uprising that violence only begets more violence and that revolution is best accomplished by civil disobedience and not armed force. This understanding led to the Poles adopting non-violent means during the Solidarity period and, ultimately, liberating themselves from Moscow without an enormous loss of life.

Chicago Theater: The Grapes of Wrath and A Midsummer Night's Dream

With grim determination, on July 14, 2016, the members of the Gift Theater performed a stage adaptation of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath at their storefront venue in Jefferson Park, on the northwest edge of Chicago near Des Plaines.  The theater occupies an improbable space, an old shoe store, in one of those Chicago neighborhoods almost inaccessible because of torrents of traffic at 6:00 pm and, thereafter, eerily still and deserted.  North Milwaukee Avenue in this area is tending toward Polish-Guatamalan or, possibly, Lithuania - Balinese, but there is a Chicago eating institution near the intersection -- the Gale House Inn -- and artist Ed Paschke maintains a studio in the neighborhood.  The Gift seats 50 patrons, arranged in three low bleachers against one wall of the long, narrow, and stifling space -- to see the show, you are perpetually turning your head sharply in one direction or the other since the action is stretched our Cinerama-style across one-half of the freight-car shaped room.  I've been to this theater twice and intimacy doesn't begin to describe the experience -- in the front row, you are within two-feet of the actors and, frequently, have to shift your legs to keep from tripping them as they pass back and forth.  The Grapes of Wrath features a large cast, almost Shakespearean in size:  there are 19 speaking parts and, when everyone is on-stage, the audience is confronted with a frieze of Okies, shabbily dressed and half-maddened by heat and despair, arrayed across two levels -- on the level of the audience, the actors move alongside and behind a big ruinous truck, the vehicle that transports twelve or thirteen of them from the dust bowl to the promised land of California; above the floor, there is a kind of catwalk big and solid enough to support half the cast; the walls are painted with images of badlands, blazing sun, and stunted crops.   One of the dirty tires of the truck was about 18 inches from my toes and created a bottleneck through which the actors had to squeeze when moved from one side of the set to the other.

The story, as everyone knows, concerns Tom Joad, recently paroled from prison where he has done three years for a homicide committed in barroom brawl.  Joad encounters a half-crazed preacher, a character that serves as a vehicle for Steinbeck's weird transcendentally-inflected Communism -- every man, the preacher maintains, is a little scrap of the whole, a fragment of the divine, and, therefore, all action is necessarily collective since each of us acts for, and on behalf of, all others.  The preacher describes hard times in the country and Joad finds that his family's farm has been foreclosed and the entire tribe gathered for an exodus to California.  Aspects of the show run the risk of being unintentionally comical -- the Joads are numerous and all of them have to cram into (or onto the top of) the rattletrap truck imparting a vague clown-car feeling to some of the action.  After debating the merits of leaving Oklahoma, the Joads depart on their desperate journey, a trip that kills the two elder members of the family -- grandpa is buried roadside and grandma, who dies in the Mojave desert, is smuggled into California since the Okies are too poor and harried to stop to inter her.  One of the Joad boys goes mad and wanders off into the Colorado river.  All of this action is accompanied by music sung by a balladeer perched high above the action -- mournful tunes about poverty and hard times sung in the high and lonesome style.  In the second half of the show, the Joads encounter vicious agricultural contractors who lure them into migrant camps and, then, exploit their labor -- Hoovervilles are set afire and people get beaten with ax and pick-handles.  In one affray, a thug is killed and the preacher agrees to take the rap so that Tom Joad who has knocked the man down can stay with his family.  The preacher later appears as a Red, a labor organizer, working rather ineffectually with a Hispanic guy -- there are more speeches about how everyone is a just a part of the whole, a spectacular hoe-down in which the miserable and ragged peasants entertain one another with booze and skirt-chasing, and, then, Tom Joad, on the run, delivers his famous speech, the business about always being there when  children are hungry or a labor organizer is being beaten or when men are fighting for a better life, a great specimen of eloquence that on close inspection doesn't mean much of anything -- you'll always be there, but doing what?  This is the speech (memorably delivered by Henry Fonda) that closes John Ford's famous film.  The play, unfortunately, has another 15 minutes and in these scenes the trials and tribulations of the miserable Joads reach such a level of calamity that the whole thing risks becoming risible -- Rose of Sharon has her baby, but the child is still-born; this occurs during a horrific thunderstorm that floods the camp and forces the men into collective action (they apparently dig a diversionary ditch or build an embankment); in the aftermath of the storm, the semi-catatonic Rose of Sharon offers her breast to a dying hobo, an example of so-called "Roman  Charity" and the cast comes out to sing a commentary about all this misery, a forceful hymn-like song that concludes with this question about political change: "If not now, when?"  All of this wretchedness is gripping enough and the huge multi-racial cast generally performed very effectively -- there are so many people on-stage, however, that a lot of the time, the actors have nothing to do but scowl and look put-upon while others declaim their lines.  The preacher was excitingly wild-eyed and manic and the dance scene had an infectious liveliness.  The adaptation updates and makes topical several aspects of the old show -- for instance, one of the characters is gay and we get a nice male-on-male smooch at one point, although bizarrely enough, the script isn't changed and the he-she genders in the original are retained, a confusing touch.  There is no question that the show is remarkably current to the sorrows of today -- the Joads are the archetypal migrants, the same ragged families fleeing Syria and North Africa leaving their corpses scattered all over the beaches of the Mediterranean and they encounter the same mindless and xenophobic fury in the places where they seek refuge.  Steinbeck and his adaptor casts the whole thing in elevated, hyper-poetic language and this aspect of the play has dated -- it's Hollywood demotic, the lingo you find in antiquated stuff by William Saroyan and Clifford Odets and a little annoying.  About half-way through the enterprise, I longed for a little bit of Brecht -- the show is too naively dire and grim without an admixture of alienation effects:  we need more analysis, more song and dance, more humor.  Brecht, it seems, has made a whole genre of sincere and well-meaning plays of this sort seem unduly overcast and unnecessarily graphic -- do we really need to see Rose of Sharon shrieking in child-birth or giving her breast to the dying hobo?  I understand that Brecht's cynicism is not really in the American vein, but you long for a little bit of distance between you and the characters suffering two feet away.  The temperature in the theater became close to unbearable before the show was over, the seats are uncomfortable and the strain of watching the Ping-Pong of actors across the narrow, stretched space takes its toll -- the toilets are inadequate and, after a couple of hours of this, you feel your age and wonder whether it is worth it to suffer in this way to see a show that is undeniably moving, beautifully acted, and, ultimately, simply designed to make you feel bad. 

By contrast, on a breezy and cool summer night, First Folio's venue, far west of downtown in the suburb of Oak Brook, is just about as pleasant can be imagined.  First Folio presents its shows on a stage at the foot of a grassy slope on the Peabody Mays Lake Estate -- a wooded area with a forest and swamp full of very loquacious bullfrogs and a big Tudor-style mansion looming somewhere over your shoulder.  For two dollars you can rent a chair and perch it on the slope --you have to brake yourself with your feet -- to watch the show presented in the open-air on a huge wooden stage erected on the edge of the marsh.  There is a chapel painted with a religious fresco up the hill a little and a sixty yards to the side a 'tiring house, as  Shakespeare would have it, to which the cast retreats at intermission.  The venue is served by five porta-potties, an adequate number of toilets, and you can buy a box-lunch to eat picnic style before the show.  When we arrived for an 8:15 curtain time almost ninety minutes early, the hillside was already thronged with people, all of them white, well-to-do and casually, if elegantly, dressed -- the same kind of folk you see sprawled out on the grass at Ravinia listening to a Mendelssohn concert or symphonies by Mozart.  (I noticed some competitive picnicking, people vying it seems to have the most elaborate 'spreads' -- I saw champagne, many bottles of wine, with picnickers setting up tables on the hillside groaning with fried chicken, grapes, and pastries.)

The First Folio company presented A Midsummer Night's Dream, emerging from the attiring shed and walking in a procession, their swords and lutes and lyres slung over their shoulders, to the rear of the stage, a two story construction.  At first, as is often the case with Shakespeare, the actors seemed close to inaudible -- it's a combination of unfamiliar language, tentative pronunciation on the part of the thespians, and, in this case, the open-air setting -- cicadas roaring like chainsaws in the trees, those amorous frogs, and planes descending to O'Hare periodically outroaring the actors.  In the darkness, the setting is romantic-looking, with the orange glow of the vast city permanently arrayed across the wooded horizon -- this is the Garden District of Chicago --like an immense, unending sunset.  As you settle into the show, the actors do better, they speak more loudly it seems, and you understand more and, after fifteen minutes of what was mostly complicated exposition in any event, the action slips into place and you can generally hear the speeches and appreciate them.  The cast was uneven and, I thought, the actor playing the role of Theseus seemed particularly outgunned and overwhelmed by the elaborate Shakespearian diction that he was required to pronounce -- some of the female characters, particularly Hermia, were a bit screechy, spoke too quickly and were unintelligible.  (Although the tall woman playing Helena was particularly good.)  The "rude mechanicals" were very funny and the broad-faced and merry comedian playing Nick Bottom was particularly brilliant.  Indeed, I thought that this actor's rendering of the beautiful prose soliloquy  in which Bottom recounts the events of his night as a dream could not be bettered -- in this performance, Bottom pauses significantly as he recalls his encounter with Titania, the Queen of the fairies and, then, shows a tinge of plaintive melancholy when he says:  "Methought I was and methought I had -- but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had."  Unspoken, of course, is Bottom's memory that he had, and held in his arms, the Queen of fairyland and that he was, perhaps, the most fortunate all mortals during her embrace.  (Shakespeare insists on the idea that the fairies are  immortal unlike the mere humans with whom they interact.) The idea of something rare and extraordinary, some paramount gift of the imagination vouchsafed to the "rude mechanical" Bottom is extraordinarily moving and, in this performance, all the pathos of this revelation to him is made wonderful clear and emotionally powerful. 

Directors of A Midsummer Night's Dream, generally, regard the fairies as an opportunity to impress their interpretative stamp on the play.  It isn't exactly obvious what the fairies represent and how we are to view their hijinks and so these figures always offer the director an opportunity to improvise on the material provided by the text.  In the Folio One production, the fairies are sexually ambiguous hipsters, casually decadent, for whom existence is a continuous round of lovemaking, drinking, and dancing.  Oberon wears shades and dresses like Hugh Hefner and Puck is played by a transgender person so queer that in the program this actor requires that "they" be addressed by the pronouns "they," "them," and "theirs."  The fairies dart around at high speed, appear from cisterns in the middle of the stage, and, led by a DJ with a boom box, dance conga lines around the mortals or cakewalk to Prince's song "Kiss."  It's all very effective and amusing and these rather depraved and louche fairies are a highlight of the production.

Of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a very familiar play to theater-goers, perhaps over-familiar.  And I think it beneficial to step back a few paces from antics that we have come to regard, perhaps, as commonplace.  In fact, the play is extremely strange and contains many elements that are impossible to reconcile.  Why, for instance, does Theseus interrupt the action with a lengthy discourse on the merits of his hunting dogs?  This section in Act IV, scene 1 contains some of the play's most distinguished poetic effects, but it is, in effect, an essay on the respective merits of different types of hounds.  The bizarre custody battle that motivates the dispute between Theseus and Hippolyta is very hard to understand -- Theseus wants a half-mortal changeling boy as his "henchman" while Hippolyta clings to the infant with almost desperate fury.  What is this about?  Is this a trope for the unhappiness in the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta that seems to rage just beneath the surface of play?  Once again, Shakespeare's account of the boy's origin involves some of the most ravishing poetry in the text, but it's very unclear just exactly what is at stake in the controversy.  Furthermore, we don't understand how the dispute is settled -- in a couple of lines, Theseus cursorily informs us that the quarrel no longer exists and that he has the boy.  But how does this happen in light of Hippolyta's previous adamant denial of Theseus' demand for the child?  Of course, Theseus says that he will torment Hippolyta with her love for the ass-headed Bottom until she relents but, in fact, Hippolyta seems to relinquish her claim on the boy before there is any real negotiation on the subject.  (Perhaps, her love for Bottom has distracted her from her proprietary and, seemingly, maternal claim on the child.)  Something mysterious and very strange is embodied in this quarrel but whatever it is remains an enigma.  Finally, the double action of the play requires some consideration:  why does Shakespeare couple a play about the misadventures of lovers with a very probing, and profound, analysis of the nature of theater, the subject of the plot involving Peter Quince and his players?  This deserves close consideration.  In the most moving lines of the play, inexplicably omitted from the First Folio production, Theseus excuses the errors of the "rude mechanicals" by saying:  "The best of this kind (actors) are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them."  (See Act V, scene 1, 224-225).  This statement, together with the comment that the lover, the poet and the madman are of one imagination compact, seems to me to be absolutely central to the play.  Love represents to Shakespeare the addition of the imagination to what is otherwise a shadowy world of mere facts.  Theater and love, accordingly, represent the world as amended and revised by the addition of the imagination -- this, I think, explains the basis for the parallels implicit between the love stories and the work presented by Peter Quince and his "mechanicals."      

The Man from Laramie

Anthony Mann's 1955 Western, The Man from Laramie, reminds us that films of this sort were once A-list entertainments with complicated and highly literate scripts.  Agon was important in the masculine, hyper-competitive fifties and The Man from Laramie teams with conflict of various kinds -- it has more characters clashing violently with one another than Antigone.  Indeed, just about everyone on-screen clashes with everyone else and the film is crammed with fistfights, shoot-outs, and violent declarations of anger or love or despair -- these speeches inflected with some of the passion of Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams.  Jimmy Stewart is a teamster plotting murderous revenge on the man who sold Winchester repeater rifles to the local Apaches -- this weapon's deal has resulted in the death of his brother.  A loyal ranch hand clashes violently with the son of his employer, both men vying for the love of the patriarch of a ranch so large that "you can ride for three days in any direction without leaving" the property.  A matronly female rancher contends with the ranch patriarch -- ostensibly the quarrel is over rustled steers and ranch boundaries, but, actually, arises from thwarted love.  When Jimmy Stewart shoots the big ranch owner's son in the hand in one of the film's many gunfights, he is captured and his own hand shot off at point-blank range -- Jimmy Stewart, who suffers as beautifully and perpetually as Christ, howls with pain and his beautiful eyes roll like those of a martyr as he swoons during his torture.  Accused of killing the ranch-owner's son, Jimmy Stewart stands his ground with his long gun as the old man charges him on horseback, firing his revolver wildly because he has gone blind.  An ineffectual sheriff challenges everyone ineffectually and, lurking around the edges of the action, but unseen until the final five minutes, are the ultimate antagonists, the angry and ferocious Apache warriors who threaten the whole community with destruction.  (The main plot in the film involves the sale of repeater rifles to the Apaches, a story-line that seems related to the Rosenberg trial -- Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for providing atomic secrets to the Communists; the characters in The Man from Laramie are defined in relationship to their willingness to supply the frontier equivalent of the atom bomb, the Winchester rifles, to the savage and implacable foe.)  We tend to forget how morally complex Westerns became in the 1950's -- The Man from Laramie is startling in that the villain killed at the end of the film was not a bad guy at the outset and was gradually backed into his evil deeds; accordingly, the death of this villain can't be interpreted as a kind of triumph -- the viewer is forced to recall that the bad guy killed at the climax was originally a good man, indeed, a hero in the narrative secondary in virtue only to the saint-like Jimmy Stewart.  Accordingly, the film plays as a sort of highly understated tragedy.  Furthermore, the director doesn't install any explicit speeches in the film to remind us that the character killed in the end was originally virtuous, courageous, and, even, noble -- we are expected to have attended with sufficient care to the plot to grasp that the outcome is tragic and can't be construed as a happy ending.  When the movie ends, the viewer is left with a number of troubling questions that can't be simply resolved. 

The Man from Laramie is handsomely shot in New Mexico.  One of the primary sets seems to be the pueblo at Taos.  The Indians and the landscapes are all authentic-looking and the interiors are beautifully designed.  The film reminds us that Hollywood's racism, particularly as it relates to Native Americans, was never monolithic or simple-minded -- the Apaches are portrayed as sympathetic, a curmudgeonly but loyal old man says proudly that he had an Apache mother, and the ranch-owner asserts that he has no problem with the Indians because he has treated them fairly, lets them hunt on his land, and has paid them for the property that he took from their tribe. (The film also takes great care to distinguish the Pueblo Indians, seen attending church in a handsome adobe chapel for the marauding Apaches.)  When the Apaches finally appear at the very end of the movie, of course, they are visualized as terrifying, the Other with guns and arrows -- when they surround and cut down the heroic cowboy who has become a villain, they blast him off his horse with a half-dozen shots from a Winchester, but, then, administer the coup de grace with an arrow thumping into the dying man's spine.  The acting is stylized and theatrical but uniformly excellent -- Donald Crisp, who played battling Burroughs in Broken Blossoms for D.W. Griffith in 1919, acts the part of the ranch owner with great and dignified authority:  he seems to embody not only the history of West, but the history of American cinema in his appearance in this film.  The landscapes are beautiful but appropriately stark -- we see vast badlands where a single rider, with obvious difficulty, picks his way across the stony waste; the scenes shot at the ranch houses luxuriate with the light and immense steppe-like distances of the open range -- we see cattle grazing, scattered across a half-dozen miles.  And there is a jagged mountain, with extraordinarily steep sides, that becomes as much a character in the film as any of the players -- at the end of the movie, you half-expect to see the mountain given credit since it is so prominent in the film's last hour.  The mountain has yellow crumbling cliffs and has to be approached on horseback via serpentine 45 degree uphill switchbacks and at the top of the peak, in a cool forest of pinon pine that you can almost smell -- I sensed the distinctive odor of the west:  warm pine sap oozing from trees in the high sierra in the cool shade -- there is a splendid view of what looks like all of the world. 

Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom is a glossy TV series available on TNT, an amoral spectacle that traffics in the excesses it pretends to denounce.  The show is based on a similarly titled Australian movie about a family of criminals ruled by a fierce, viciously manipulative matriarch.  In the American series, Ellen Barkin plays the matriarch, called "Smurf" by her adoring sons.  Barkin's asymmetrical smirk and black expressionless pinpoint eyes give her a vaguely reptilian appearance -- although she professes love for all, calls her grown boys "sweetie," and, often, smooches with them, her affection seems cold, strategic, the caress of a cobra.  Barkin has aged and her features seem taut, possibly immobilized by plastic surgery, and she shows a lot of her Betty Boop figure in the series -- the characters live in some surfside California suburb (possibly Long Beach or Venice) and they spend a lot of time at the beach or poolside in skimpy bathing suits.  Smurf is a grotesque caricature of a kind of mother that everyone has encountered:  she purchases the affection of her children with lavish gifts and controls her boys with in a way that is clearly incestuous -- each of Smurf's four sons seems to think that he is her special lover and that she is romantically inclined toward him:  this is her mechanism of control.  Smurf is also an "enabler" par excellence -- she smokes dope with her boys, one of whom is severely addicted to various drugs, provides a constant supply of booze, purchases extravagant and dangerous entertainment for the boys (they go surfing all the time, ride their skateboards with dangerous abandon, skydive and engage in paint-gun duels), and vets their girlfriends for sexual inventiveness.  When the boys misbehave, she withholds her favors.  Although all four of her sons have their own picturesque seaside pads, they spend the majority of their time hanging out in Smurf's luxurious compound, lounging around her pool with half-naked hussies, and getting loaded.  Needless to say, none of the boy's girlfriends can hold a candle to Smurf for seductiveness and, when one of the women defies her, she casually terrorizes her rival by kidnapping the woman's baby.  At the heart of all this depravity is the family enterprise:  the four boys comprise a criminal gang, apparently specializing in high-end burglary.   The engine that runs the show's plot are the various crimes that the Smurf plans and that her boys commit -- in the first episode, an assault on a expensive jewelry store leads to one of the boys being shot and a security guard dying.  This crime is too impressive to go without notice and the merchandise (mostly watches) is too hot to be fenced -- Smurf orders the watches melted down, although her grandson gives one of the stolen items to his girlfriend, probably a dire mistake.  The injured son's wound festers and he has to be taken to Tijuana for surgery -- a plot turn that reveals that the oldest boy, Bas, who is married, has a Mexican girlfriend with whom he engages in photogenic sex.  One of the boys, a handsome surfer dude, is gay, although he conceals this fact from his mother.  When a member of the family stumbles into a public toilet where that son is getting a blow-job from his boyfriend, the surfer turns on his lover and beats him to a pulp to preserve the fiction that he is straight.  The fourth son, who may not be Smurf's biological progeny, is nicknamed Pope.  Pope has just been released from a three-year term in prison and is obviously damaged goods -- he scowls at everyone, sits motionlessly for hours, and takes out his aggressions by smashing things up in the backyard with a sledge hammer.  Pope is a very scary and volatile character, the most remarkable in the ensemble, and he provides a sinister edge to proceedings that might otherwise be a little too rich and generously endowed in pandering to wish fulfillment fantasies of the viewers.  This carousing all looks like a lot of fun but Pope is lurking at the edges of the action and you have the sense that he is a ticking time bomb about to blow-up. 

The audience enters the subculture of this family through the eyes of a naïf. Smurf's grandson, Jay, literally provides us with access to the narrative -- we first see him expressionless, sitting on a couch, next to his heroin-addicted mother who happens to be dead from an overdose.  After his mother's death, he wanders over to Smurf's compound where everyone is half-naked, drinking bloody Mary's and smoking dope, a crowd of bikini-clad girls in the swimming pool.  Needless to say, he is seduced by Smurf's charm and the generosity of his uncles and becomes involved in the criminal activities of the family.  As the plot develops, Jay proves to be a weak spot in the family's unity -- he is not as fanatically devoted to Smurf as his hapless uncles and there is a kindly teacher at his high school who has taken an interest in him, indeed, apparently to an inordinate degree since the young woman invites him to encounters that only be called dates and lets him kiss her.  (In an ugly, but realistic plot turn, we learn that Jay's teacher is herself a drug addict who has been turned into a snitch by a relentless female detective and that she is, in fact, using the boy to provide information to the cops.)  Jay has a girlfriend and the scene in which Smurf puts on her pearls and entertains the girlfriend's ultra-straight family at her compound is both hilarious and frightening -- Smurf's charm approaches the level of the monstrous:  the girl has been sleeping over at the house with Jay and the dinner party's objective is to persuade her parents that this has been innocent, is okay, and should be allowed to continue.  Smurf succeeds with this project, in fact, too well -- her oldest son decides that he will use this opportunity to convert the girl's father, a blustery miles glorioso army officer, to the family's criminal enterprises.  The main plot line is supported by dozen of so subplots, all of them reasonably compelling, and it is clear that the writers and makers of this series intend to continue into future seasons -- each episode plants the seed for another couple of subplots to be developed in the future:  the family's back story, in particular, is unclear and we don't know why Smurf's boys, with the exception of the two furry surfer dudes, all look so different.  Of course, they have different fathers and my suspicion is that one or two of them may be adopted.  (I have known families of this general kind and they always have people living in their household without blood affiliation, but being "fostered" to use a term from old Norse and Icelandic sagas -- that is living with the family on the basis of some alliance or in recompense for some obscure indebtedness.)  I suspect that these elements of the narrative will be developed in future episodes -- as it is, there are a number of mystifying elements in the plot that await clarification.  With its proliferating subplots and expanding inventory of characters, the show resembles The Sopranos -- in fact, a comparison can be made between Tony Soprano's ghastly charm and Smurf's apparently endless capacity to manipulate people.  I suspect that the film tends toward the same central irony:  a group of people proclaim family to be the ultimate value, but, in the end, must act together to murder a member of the very family that they assert to be so important.

Upon watching Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, Marlene Dietrich is reported to have mourned the transformation of the beast into the handsome, if conventional-looking, prince with the words "Bring me back my beautiful beast."  Animal Kingdom contains hints that it will provide a backstory, probably something maudlin about child abuse, to explain Smurf's motivations and psychology.  (There is scene in which Smurf, ever the shapeshifter, sexually seduces a female photographer, apparently, to secure information about a surfer shown in one of her pictures -- it seems that Smurf is prosecuting some kind of enigmatic revenge, but this is unclear in the first six episodes of the show that I have seen.)  Providing a backstory for Smurf is wholly unnecessary and will be destructive to the series.  Smurf is a sacred monster, a powerful, charismatic and frightening being -- the power of the show is that we all recognize the character as an alarming, archetype of a one sort of maternal love.  To provide her with a childhood and sentimental reasons for her smothering and feral attachment to her sons is an exercise in puerile psychologizing that will, I'm afraid, seriously weaken the show.  No one tells us about Lady Macbeth's childhood and we don't need to be privy to secrets of Smurf's soul -- it's enough for us to watch her machinations. 

Film Essay -- Manuel Gomes' Tabu

Notes on Miguel Gomes’ Tabu


　

　
Miguel Gomes is a Portuguese film maker, born in Lisbon in 1972. He is a product of the Lisbon film school. Apparently, Gomes worked as a film critic, began making short movies, and progressed to feature-length films in the first decade of the new millennium. I don’t know anything about his personal life, although I gather he has a daughter, eight years old, from a dedication at the end of Arabian Nights (2015).

Gomes first feature film was The Face you Deserve (2007). The movie concerns a schoolteacher’s 30^th birthday on which he fantasizes interactions with seven children, all of them alter-egos. The movie is identified as a comedy and was, apparently, reasonably successful in Portugal but was not exported.

In 2008, Gomes directed Our Beloved Month of August. This film is a mixture of documentary and fiction. The picture concerns a director who travels to a provincial city to make a slasher/horror film. Funding evaporates and the director abandons the fiction film for a documentary about a music festival underway in the town. From the documentary, however, there gradually emerges a narrative involving two young girls, their families, and boyfriends – ultimately, the film becomes a kind of domestic melodrama, complete with a crowd-pleasing climax involving a forest fire. Widely successful in Europe, the film was shown in international film festivals and is highly regarded.

IMDB shows that Gomes appeared in, or directed, several short pictures, including a made-for-TV movie. I have seen some of them. One called Redemption purports to consist of private memoirs from several European leaders including Nikolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. This 26 minute film is very powerful and suggests that Gomes’ true metier may be short, highly poetic films of this sort.

Tabu was released in 2012. At its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the movie was widely acclaimed. It was exported to the world – in the Twin Cities, the picture was shown three or four times at the Walker Art Center but had no broader release except for some New York and California art-houses. Tabu was presented at both the Toronto and New York International Film Festivals and there are interesting interviews with Gomes made at those venues and available on You-Tube.

Gomes followed Tabu with the wildly ambitious, six hour film Arabian Nights (2015). The film is nothing less than an attempt to capture the essence of Portuguese society in the throes of economic recession through a series of documentary, parable, and fiction sequences all knit together as tales told by Schezerahad over a thousand-and-one nights. Most critics regard this film as an extraordinary, if, sometimes, baffling accomplishment. I am less sanguine about the picture. Despite some remarkable passages, the trilogy of films can not be made to cohere and, in fact, seems to slip off topic to the extent that, at the end of the last picture, the viewer has no idea what the film is about or why it was made – the 6 and ½ hour movie ends with a ninety minute documentary about songbirds, a chaffinch competition held in a poor part of Lisbon; although some critics have heroically tried to develop a theory that unifies the trilogies disparate elements, their efforts, in my view, are completely futile and unconvincing. At heart, Gomes is a surrealist – this is, at once, his strength and weakness: his imagination is fantastically fertile and he invents incredible images and situations, but these inventions seem to exist, in large part, to outrage or bewilder the audience.

Gomes’ pictures are generally constructed as individual narrative sequences that stand apart from one another. The task for the viewer is to discover how the individual narratives fit together and what they mean collectively. For instance, The Face you Deserve begins with sober journalism – a documentary-like study of a teacher and his associates, students and friends. The second-half of the film is more freely constructed and seems to be a daydream experienced by the protagonist. In Our Beloved Month of August, half the film involves the ill-fated effort to shoot the slasher picture and the collapse of that project; the film’s second part is a joyous, semi-documentary account of a music festival in the town where the film crew is stranded that slowly evolves into a melodram. Tabu and Arabian Nights follows this pattern.

Little is published concerning Gomes personal life or background. Interviews show a swarthy handsome man (he often acts in his own films) with an intense demeanor. Gomes speaks in a soft voice in excellent English. He appears impatient with interviews and swings his right foot, draped over his left leg, nervously while speaking. There is are two very funny shots of him in Arabian Nights – in one shot, he is buried up to his neck in sand as punishment for fleeing the film set; someone puts a cigarette in his mouth that he morosely smokes. In the other shot, Gomes is standing under a ferris wheel dressed as a seedy Baghdad sultan – he has a ratty looking turban, seems unshaved, and is smoking in that image as well.

1. Saudade is a term for a state of mind said to characterize the Portuguese. Saudade is an untranslatable word – it means something like melancholy combined with nostalgia for a lost, half-imaginary happiness. Saudade is the mood associated with many Portuguese fados or folk songs. In political terms, Saudade is associated the Portuguese nostaglia for the lost paradise of that nation’s empire – that is, the lost colonies in Cape Verde and Mozambique.
2. While making Our Beloved Month of August, Gomes encountered some older musicians who had been famous for their performances in Mozambique. In Africa, these musicians performed their own music and covers of Beatles and Phil Spector tunes. The men performed wearing white suits and their records were famous in the Portuguese colonies. This band was part of the inspiration for Tabu.
3. Another inspiration for Tabu was story that Gomes was told about a strange relationship between an older woman and her housekeeper, a woman from Cape Verde. Gomes heard this story from a family member who attributed the events told to some neighbors. The story involved mysterious events attributed to the witchcraft or voodoo of the African maid, a person thought to be a powerful witch.
4. The original title of the film was Aurora, that is, the picture was named after the old woman whose story is recounted in the second half of the film. The Romanian film maker, Cristii Puliuu, had just released a movie named Aurora and, so, Gomes changed the movie’s name to Tabu.
5. One of the financiers for the film is ZDF (Zum Deutschen Fernsehen – German TV). The money-men at ZDF demanded that Gomes shoot the African sequences in color 35 millimeter. "Africa is beautiful," the Germans said, "and you need to capture that beauty in your film." Gomes said no. He told the Germans he wanted the film to look like the old Tarzan productions with Johnny Weismueller – "those films are beautiful, are they not?" Gomes asked. The Germans reluctantly agreed with this argument.
6. The first half of the film is shot on black 35 millimeter stock in the pillar-box ratio used in silent films like Tabu by Murnau and Metropolis. The second half of the film preserves the silent aspect pillar box ratio, but is shot on 16 millimeter stock – this is intended to give the second half of the movie a "dreamy," slightly "out of focus" look.
7. The second part of the film was shot on location on a tea plantation in Mozambique. Typically, Gomes does not use professional actors or actresses. He just had crew members play roles in the narrative. "I made it look like a period film," Gomes says, referring to the fact that the film is set in the sixties, "by having the men grow moustaches."
8. Gomes says that the film is about those things that are fading away, becoming lost, dying and extinct. Thus, the film involves Aurora’s death, the lost Portuguese colony in Mozambique (with a nod to the lost colony in Cape Verde), as well as black and white film stock. Gomes has commented on the difficulty of acquiring black and white film stock on which to shoot the movie – "everything is made digitally today," Gomes says, "without film at all." The other obvious aspect of the film is that it celebrates a "kind of film that has been extinguished," Gomes says – that is, silent film. The kind of film that no longer exists, Gomes characterizes as "the youth of cinema – the film that does not exist any more". In that context, he refers to John Ford movies like Mogambo (another picture set in the jungle), Howard Hawks, and, of course, F. W. Murnau’s movies.
9. Murnau’s Tabu is a "greatly underestimated film," Gomes proclaims. It is "at once the most controlled and most open of all films." Murnau was a director who obsessively controlled his films down to the slightest detail. And, yet, on Tabu (1930), Murnau worked with the documentary film director Robert Flaherty and used native people in Tahiti for his actors. Accordingly, Gomes sees Tabu as a paradigm of a film that is both tightly controlled and disciplined, but also improvisatory – it is part documentary, part fiction, and, like Gomes, pictures uses amateur actors. Gomes indicates that he values films that are, at once, tightly designed and structured but, also, open to improvisation and that use non-professional actors.
10. About ten years ago, I noticed something unusual. In the Lutheran hymnal, new songs appeared identified as originating the Taize Community. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is swift to adopt ecumenical stances and anxious to broaden its lily-white constituency into other colors and ethnicities. For that reason, there are a number of hymns from Mexico, South America and Africa now printed beside the tunes written by Bach, Luther and Isaac Watts. I assumed that the Taize Community was some peculiar group of Protestant Africans or Lutheran Hondurans. In fact, the Taize Community is an ecumenical monastic order headquartered in south France at Taize. The order was founded by Roger Schuetz, a Swiss Lutheran, in 1940 and, now, has adherents around the world. Schuetz was the son of a Swiss pastor, born in 1915. He was inspired by stories about his maternal grandmother opening her home to war refugees during the Great War. When World War II erupted, Schuetz, with his sister, opened a "safe house" for people displaced by the war a few kilometers beyond the "zone of demarcation" – that is, the border between Vichy and Free France. Schuetz used the house for smuggling Jews out of Vichy France, an activity that was discovered by the Gestapo with the result that Brother Roger, as he was now known, had to flee back into neutral Switzerland – he spent the balance of the war at Geneva, returning to Taize, France in 1944 in the wake of the Allied advance into that country. After the war, Brother Roger continued to gather disciples at Taize, where he founded an ecumenical and celibate monastic order combining Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. The Taize Community grew, particularly as a result of its youth programs and has become one of the largest religious movements in Europe. In 2005, there were 100 monks at Taize and the village was an important pilgrimage site. Brother Roger was stabbed to death in 2005 by a mentally ill Roumanian woman – he was ninety years old.
11. The Taize Community European meeting, held annually, took place in Lisbon between 28 December 2004 and 1 January 2005 – according to its website, Taize annual meetings always straddle the end of the year. The subject of the meeting was "The Urgency of Peace" and it was attended by 120 youth leaders, including many from Poland (there is a large Taize community in Poznan) and Eastern Europe. Near the beginning of the film, we see the protagonist of the first part of the picture, the kind and gentle Pilar, waiting at the airport for the Polish girl who is supposed to stay at her house. At Taize meetings, the participants live with families in the host country.
12. An important tradition in European literature is the novella, a literary form longer than a short story but more compact than a novel. Many famous European novellas employ the narrative device of a frame story. In the frame story, a character, often speaking in the first person, encounters an unusual person. This person seems afflicted in some way and has been marked by great passion or suffering. The protagonist of the frame story is usually a gentle and kind person, a representative of the ideal reader. The protagonist asks the person encountered what has happened to them and the balance of the novella consists of the story recounted by that person. Innumerable novellas in the German tradition take this form; two of the greatest practitioners of this kind of narrative are the Swiss writer, Adalbert Stifter, and the north German, Theodor Storm. Sometimes, the novella narrative is a document, or a series of documents – for instance, a diary or a group of letters discovered by the protagonist. I mention this tradition because the outstanding exemplar of this kind of writing in the last quarter century is another German, albeit an expatriate, W. G. Sebald. (We read Sebald’s book The Emigrants in our group). Sebald, in turn, seems to have been an enormous influence on Gomes. The shape of Tabu seems derived from Sebald’s narrative techniques – in Sebald’s books, a first-person protagonist goes somewhere, entering a eerie depopulated and devastated landscape. In that landscape, the narrator encounters a person characterized by a terrible melancholy, disabling depression that sometimes leads to suicide. The narrator gradually learns the person’s story and discovers the causes for the melancholy, the vast sadness embodied both in the wounded individual encountered but, also, in the abandoned and ruinous landscape. One of the pleasures of reading Sebald’s texts, sprinkled as they are with black and white photographs that supposedly document the events described (but that could be really about anything), is piecing together the thematic and historical relationships between the frame-story and the narrative. A novella constructed in this way is literally resonant – that is, the themes and events in the frame story resonate with, and give meaning to, the narrative enclosed by the frame and, of course, vice-versa, the frame deepens and complicates the narrative embedded within it. In Tabu, current history frames the colonial past and there are numerous cross-references between Lisbon’s present and the events narrated by Gian Luca Ventura. In the movie theater, Pilar and her gentleman admirer hear Ronnie Spector’s "Be My Baby", a song played by the rock and roll combo in Mozambique forty years earlier; Gian Luca Ventura tells his story in an atrium decorated with tropical plants, a place something like the Rainforest Café; in a deserted mall, we see a child’s ride shaped like a crocodile, referring us to the baby crocodile whose escape triggers the fatal love affair. (Novellas in German are said to feature a turning point called a "Falcon" after a famous story by Goethe – the "Falcon" is the unerhoerte Begebenheit ("unheard-of event") that generates the story. Following this pattern, the escape of the baby crocodile, an unusual event, gives occasion to the forbidden romance that is the subject of the second half of the film.) Pilar’s rejection of her gentleman admirer’s romantic pleas resonates against the romantic diction of Ventura’s narration and Aurora’s submission to her handsome lover. Gomes insures that the viewer enjoy a complex and intriguing set of cross-references between the frame and African romance – even small details contribute to this cross-indexed system: for instance, recall that Aurora’s father lost a fortune gambling, an addiction that seems to afflict Aurora as well, at least in her dotage. Ultimately, Gomes’ point is simple but profound – Faulkner said it best in Requiem for a Nun: "the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past." Present-day Lisbon bears the traces of Portugal’s colonial past – the colonial past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. Thus, Tabu insists upon establishing an extensive set of connections that weave together Lisbon’s present-day mystery and melancholy with the savage and intensely romantic past of Portugal’s lost colonial empire.
12. An interesting aspect of Tabu is the fact that, in many ways, modern day Lisbon is more exotic, enigmatic, and inexplicable than Africa. The tea-plantation in Mozambique presents a coherent space, organized around the steep, brooding thumb of Mount Tabu. Locations are efficiently depicted by establishing shots that show us where the characters are located – indeed, the adjacency of locations is central: the escape of the baby crocodile onto the property occupied by Ventura and his band-mates is a crucial element of the narrative. Africa is bright and sunny. By contrast, Lisbon is murky with rain and mist. Locations are uncertain, even, baffling. During the old Aurora’s first long monologue, a speech in which we detect the onset of her dementia, both actresses seems to be on some kind of turntable rotating in a circle in the casino – this curious effect is never naturalized, never explained. Transitions in Lisbon are made without warning – the most remarkable effect of this sort is the scene in which we are suddenly in some sort of subterranean tunnel: Pilar and her suitor wear miner’s helmets with carbide lamps. The tour-guide makes a suggestion that is hard to interpret, something about burying a large number of corpses that engenders an inexplicable outburst from Pilar’s gentleman admirer. Where does this scene occur? What is it about? Why are the protagonists suddenly deep underground? This episode is completely disorienting, but implies that Lisbon is a city of dreadful night, perhaps, even a kind of Hades, a realm of the dead and dying. Voodoo is thought to be at work in modern-day Lisbon. Santa, the black housekeeper from Cape Verde, is possibly a witch. In one shot, we see caricatured silhouette figures of black women, a kind of decorative wall-hanging in Aurora’s apartment and, of course, a reference to the colonial past. Later, Santa is shot in silhouette, a similarly pitch-black form hovering over the pale and vulnerable Aurora. Lisbon seems strangely deserted, a city of empty parks and vacant cemeteries. Pilar, a kindly liberal, supports all kinds of good causes – despite her Catholic piety, she is also probably a Taize community member. But the good causes that Pilar supports are incomprehensible – in one scene, Pilar protests genocide and chants the completely enigmatic phrase in English "Shame ONU" – does this mean, something called ONU should be ashamed or is she saying "shame on you"? In another scene, Pilar is lectured by a cigarette-smoking female professor – the woman speaks in dense jargon and her side-kick berates Pilar for handing her a marker that is the wrong color. What is this all about? In Gomes’ vision, the colonial past is more luminous, vivid, and explicable than the rain-sodden foggy present.
13. Gomes’ Tabu asserts a puzzling relationship between the personal and the political. Aurora kills a man who is attempting to intervene in her adulterous relationship with Gian-Luce Ventura – the dead man is one of Ventura’s band-mates. Aurora’s husband removes the body and blames the killing on native rebels – indeed, Tabu suggests that the Portuguese Colonial War (1964 to 1975) began as a result of an obscure love-affair on a tea plantation in Mozambique. Aurora’s adultery, accordingly, has consequences far beyond those that are personal to her – in fact, her affair seems to trigger a destructive 11 year conflict with a dire effect on Portugal. I am uncertain as to whether this cause-and-effect relationship is rooted in some kind of reality or intended to be allegorical or, merely, a surrealist joke.
14. Portugal was ruled by a weak and moribund king until the 1908. At that time, King Carlos I and his young son, the heir to the throne, were killed by assassins in Lisbon in a spectacular regicide – the Queen fought the assailants with a bouquet of roses that she was holding. A short-lived republic was instituted. The late 20's there was civil unrest and, ultimately, a military junta seized power ending Portugal’s so-called First Republic. The Second Republic, also called the Nova Estado was led by a dictator, Antonio Salazar, a conservative "para-fascist." Salazar steered a third course between Communism and Fascism – his government was, more or less, neutral in World War II (although he gave covert support to the Allies by allowing the International Red Cross to operate out of Portugal). Salazar’s regime mirrors Franco’s Spain – Salazar was pro-Catholic and highly conservative. The motto of his State as Deus, Patrie, Familie, an obvious rebuke to the French Revolution’s slogan: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. "We are against all forms of internationalism," Salazar declared. Salazar’s emphasis internationally was on retaining Portugal’s colonies. Indeed, Portugal was one of the last countries in the world to relinquish its once mighty colonial empire. Beginning in 1964, the Portuguese military fought doomed campaigns against guerilla insurgencies in Angola, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea. These wars were so unpopular that over a million of Portugal’s young people fled the country to work in Europe or the Americas in order to avoid conscription in these nightmarish Guerra de Ultramar. Salazar had a stroke in 1968 and was without a successor. Chaos ensued and, in 1974, the Portuguese military again seized power in the so-called Carnation Revolution. The army promptly abandoned its wars in Africa and the independence of Portugal’s remaining colonies rapidly followed – for instance, Angola and Mozambique were declared independent in 1975.
14. In classical surrealism, effects are achieved by the creation of chimera – that is, combinations of images, words, or ideas that do not seem to belong together. The most famous statement of this doctrine derives from the proto-surrealist Comte de Lautreamont’s statement that his poetic practice was akin "to the chance meeting on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing machine." Andre Breton wrote that surrealism should liberate the subconscious by dream analysis in which "one could combine, inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects." The French surrealist poet, Pierre Reverdy called for the "juxtaposition of two, more or less distant realities... that achieve emotional power" by being combined. According to this dicta, Gomes seems to me to be primarily a surrealist. Whereas a surrealist poet might create his effects by linking incongruous words together, or surrealist film makers might yoke together in one frame a dead donkey and piano (Bunuel and Dali in Un Chien Andalou), Gomes operates by juxtaposing narratives and entire sequences of film that are rooted in wholly different realities. His objective, I think, is to create a surrealistic chimera, an uncanny effect that destabilizes our assessment of the two narrative realities presented. In Tabu, Gomes creates occasional surrealistic effects in the style of Bunuel and Dali – for instance, the image of the ghost in long gown with the alligator in the opening scenes of the film. In general, however, Gomes relies upon the vivid contrast between the scenes in present-day Lisbon and colonial Mozambique to create surrealist effects – he exploits the contrast between frame-story and colonial narrative to destabilize both aspects of the film. Lisbon seems vacant, ghost-like, empty, uncanny in light of Portugal’s colonial and imperialist past; similarly, Mozambique seems unreal when compared with modern-day Portugal.

14. The inhabitants of the apartment tower in Lisbon appear once more in Gomes’ Arabian Nights. Indeed, the best episode in the loose and baggy Arabian Nights involves the reincarnation of a dog and a suicide pact in the apartment complex.