Chapel Hill

Overheard at Coles, in the Kenmore Shopping Village:  A packet of cigarettes please.  The ones with the smoking baby on them.  Sorry, I've changed my mind.  Could I have the one showing the drooping fag symbolising erectile dysfunction.

Cultural Overdrive

Can culture effect our reason?  Ruminate on these two examples of cultural contamination.

Example 1.   If a couple of an aboriginal and white union have a child and their relationship breaks down, you then have a parent with aboriginal ancestry getting on cultural grounds a swag of advantages about rights to that child, and that child must be raised in that culture, etc. 

Example 2.   Recently, AFL Richmond defender, Bachar Houli, was suspended for two weeks ("a relatively light suspension"), for intentionally striking Carlton's Jed Lamb, in an off-ball incident.  "During the ninety minute [match review panel] hearing, Houli, a devout Muslim gave evidence that he had never - and would never - intentionally hit another person as he was a peaceful religious man."  I saw the "incident" on television.  Houli deliberately struck down Lamb with a swinging arm.  There was no contested play for the ball.  Thankfully and quickly, in social media, past AFL players complained about the leniency of the penalty.  In a quick response, the AFL appealed the decision and the more appropriate penalty of four weeks was imposed, for this unprovoked assault.

Change one word in this story - Muslim to Catholic.  Would there have been a need for an appeal?  Cardinal George Pell will need divine intervention, to save him from the cultural mind-set of a Victorian jury. 

Connie Bensley's poem - Coming To

                                                    Coming To
                                  
                                           The seconds between waking
                                and opening your eyes
                                may be revelatory. 
                                The adventurous traveller
                                tries to remember
                                where he is. 

                                            The philanderer                         
                                extends a cautious, investigating
                                foot. Is he alone?
                                Either answer has its pleasures.

                                
                                            The hungover poet wants
                                to hold on to the knock-out phrase
                                that just occurred to him. No chance.

   
                                            The patient feels his pain, but,
                                in his morphine-muddled way,
                                makes up his mind to live another day.

                              
                                                          

by Connie Bensley

published in 'The Spectator' (Australia) - 10 June 2017

Knowing, precise and often cheerfully acerbic, Connie Bensley’s poems revel in poking gentle fun at the self-deceptions and delusions of middle-class suburban life.  Connie Bensley was born in 1929, in south-west London, where she still lives. 

 

Gold - by Valerie Murray

                                        Gold


                         No knees-up, post staph,
                         Will this grey thread see me out,
                         or this blue one, or the red reel?
                         Will I see eye to eye with the needle?
                         Will I ever do more than mend,
                         fix, patch, meet a need?

                         Gone the days of designed, crafted clothes
                         for me and the family.

                         Gone the days of elaborate roasts,
                         layered torten with chocolate ganache,
                         even the goulash and tweaked salads
                         with crisp bacon pieces and dainty capers.
                         Healthy, sure, a balance of veg,
                         but half are prepared meals
                         easy to bake or nuke.

                        A handful of vitamins and supps daily,
                        in desperation to cling and maintain.                      
                        As the actress said,
                        "Old age ain't for sissies!"


                                                   Valerie Murray

     

                        

School

'Between Security and Insecurity' by Ivan Klíma (translated by Gerry Turner)

"I was once amazed to discover that the word school, which has the same root in most European languages, comes from the Greek skhole meaning 'time of leisure'.  In Ancient Greece that denoted the period that followed physical exercises and was devoted to the study of the arts.

It is hard to speak of any uniform style of schooling at the current time.  Only one thing can be said for certain: there aren't any schools that are places of leisure, and only rarely does one come across a school where children are given basic instruction in how to live, how to distinguish between values and pseudo-values, between the essential and the superfluous, where they can learn to understand themselves and other people and are given a grounding in the culture and civilization into which they were born."

Ivan Klíma was born in 1931 in Prague.  He spent over 3 years in a Nazi concentration camp as a child.  From 1970 he was blacklisted by the Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, and could only publish abroad.  He was deeply involved in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 with other dissident writers such as Václav Havel.  His books and plays have been translated into 30 languages.

Les Murray - history, lies and denial

                            Accused of history
                            many decide
                            not to know any

                            Les Murray

Connections are obvious, yet denied 3 & 4

The ABC  - terrorism and refrigerators


Last Week US academic Lawrence Krauss told his fellow ABC - Q&A panellists Islamic terrorism isn't as dangerous as a refrigerator:  "You're more likely to be killed by a refrigerator, in the United States, falling on you."  The next morning (Aus. Eastern Time), in Manchester England, twenty-two people, mostly female and children were killed in an explosion detonated by an Islamic suicide bomber, Salmand Abedi.   This name is not a brand name for refrigerators.



Doctors and politically correct diagnostics


On Friday 5.  -  The Public Health Association of Australia's  submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs   -  The PHAA urges the committee to include the recommendations in its report  which disavows the notion that there is any inherent link between Islam and terror.

On Friday, 26 May, in Egypt, Islamists attacked buses carrying Coptic Christians., killing 29 people, including children.  The Islamist group ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre.

PHAA is a national organisation comprising about 1900 individual members and representing over 40 professional groups concerned with the promotion of health...
Presumably some of the 1900 members are doctors.  It's to be hoped that their medical diagnoses are more accurate than their political diagnoses.

The infallible Word of God as revealed to Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel, the Koran
The 'Imrans 3;148

"We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.  They serve other deities besides God for Whom He has revealed no sanction.  The Fire shall be their home: dismal indeed is the dwelling of the evil-doers."

Primo Levi - his dream - his nemesis

Richard Ford, a Pulitzer prize winning author latest book is titled: Between Them: Remembering My Parents.  In a telephone interview with Stephen Romei, an Australian author and book reviewer, Ford described Romei's interpretation of how he, Ford, saw his parents, as "psychological bullshit".  He asks Romei: "Why can't you just read my book?" (Weekend Australian Review, Books May 20-21, 2017).  I had just finished reading Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner in two parts: This Is A Man and The Truce, when I read Romei's review of Ford's memoir about his parents.  How apposite, indeed, is this question, in the context of criticism of Levi, during his life, and the extraordinarily insensitive criticism of him, for having ended his own life. 

In October 1985, an attack on Primo Levi, made by Fernanda Eberstadt, appeared in the Jewish magazine Commentary, published in New York.  Levi was charged with an inability to respond to the pious Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews, whom he met in the camp, with having a tin ear for religion, and with a gentlemanly aloofness; and she was at pains to convey that his later books are inferior to the ones he began with.  Well, I  would be amazed, if Levi has written anything else, to equal his account of his time in the Lager (camp), and his life-long attempt to escape from it.

His voice in If This Is A Man is soft and modest, despite that its meaning, circumstance and sound threaten his own being.  

"Then one of them took my arm and looked at my number and then both laughed still more strongly.  Everyone knows that the 174000s are the Italian Jews, the well-known Italian Jews who arrived two months ago, all lawyers, all with degrees, who were more than a hundred and are now only forty; the ones who do not know how to work and let their bread be stolen, and are slapped from the morning to the evening.  The Germans call them "zwei linke Hande" (two left hands), and even the Polish Jews despise them as they do not speak Yiddish.

The nurse points to my ribs to show the other, as if I was a corpse in an anatomy class; he alludes to my eyelids and my swollen cheeks and my thin neck, he stoops to press on my tibia with his thumb, and shows the other the deep impression that his finger leaves in the pale flesh, as if it were wax.

I wish I had never spoken to the Pole: I feel as if I had never in all my life undergone an affront worse than this.  The nurse, meanwhile, seems to have finished his demonstration in this language which I do not understand and which sounds terrible.  He turns to me, and in near-German, charitably, tells me the conclusion: "Du Jude, kaput.  Du schnell Krematorium fertig."  (You Jew, finished. You soon ready for crematorium.)"  

Levi mastered German during his imprisonment and this linguistic feat helped him and others to survive.  He was known in Auschwitz as "debrouillard et demerdard" - smart and good at getting out of trouble.  He could speak Italian, French, German, and gathered together, as best he could, bits of Polish and Russian.  He had no need of English, because England and its colonies, and its former colony, the United States of America did not deport their Jews.  Languages and his professional knowledge of chemistry were for him, life saving tools.  There's a wonderful incident in TheTruce, when he and a priest are forced, because of incompatible languages, to talk to each other in Latin!  Yiddish, he admits, was beyond him - no Latin prefixes or endings, or familial sounds, to build on - impenetrable.  But some of the Yiddish Jews, Levi writes, were multi- lingual, and Levi engaged with them.  Eberstadt's article tries to convince the reader that Levi was less a Jew or imperfectly Jewish because he was an agnostic.  But that is nonsense.  Levi was there, in the Lager, because he was a Jew.  He was not a criminal, a political prisoner, or in the Lager because of a bureaucratic accident.  He was a Jew, destined, just like the more religious Jews, to leave the Lager, par la cheminee. 

As to his alleged gentlemanly aloofness, some of his comrades may have perceived him to be so, because his humanity, intellect, and European middle class manners would have been clearly evident on first meeting him. Without these qualities, he could not have written the books.  Chapter 3 of The Truce is titled The Greek.  Mordo Nahum, the Greek Jew, was a man whose activities in trade, fraud, smuggling and prostitution were foreign to the scientific and literary pursuits of Levi.  These two very different men were thrown together by chance, in threatening circumstances, and they collaborated successfully.  Levi, in humorous self-deprecation concedes, he was very much the junior partner; 'he [The Greek] said to me in a thoughtful tone: "Je n'ai pas encore compris si  tu es idiot ou fainéant." '.  Another thing evident on reading Levi, is his love of anecdotes and their retelling.  These personal gems cannot be mined, without  the warm engagement of others.  So much for the alleged hauteur of this man, Levi.  Levi was hurt by, and replied to, the Commentary piece, which was followed in February 1987 by another piece by Eberstadt, this time praising a "deeply religious", gulag memoir by Gustav Herling.  

"Sometime after 10.am, Saturday, April 11, 1987, on the third floor of a  late - nineteenth - century building in Turin, a concierge rang the doorbell of Primo Levi's apartment.  Levi- research chemist, retired factory manager, author of our humanly compelling accounts of the Holocaust - had been born in that apartment 67 years earlier.  He opened the door and collected his mail fro the concierge like every other day.  He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt.  He smiled, thanked her as usual, and closed the door.  The concierge descended on foot the ample spiral staircase occupied in the middle by a caged elevator.  She had barely reached her cubicle on the ground floor, she later told the police, when she heard Levi's body hit the bottom of the stairs by the elevator.  It was 10:20.  A dentist who lived in the building heard her screams.  He immediately saw, he subsequently reported, that Levi was dead.  The autopsy established that he died instantaneously of a "crushed skull".  No signs of violence unrelated to the fall were found on his body."  Boston Review: Primo Levi's Last Moments - June 01, 1999.)   

It didn't take long before friends and commentators expressed dissatisfaction with his choice of ending.  How could he be so selfish to forget us?

"the efficacy of all his words had somehow been cancelled by his death - that his hope, or faith was no longer usable by us."

"He spoke for the bet that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover.  When he smashed his body, he smashed his bet." 

Others, more sympathetic, sought excuses - depression - the after effects of recent prostate surgery - an accident - the tendentious criticism of his role in the Lager.  "Did anyone see him jump over the bannister?"  And how could a writer of Levi's stature depart with leaving a note of explanation?  "Did anyone find a piece of paper announcing his intention to end his life?"

I did.  I read of the recurring dream, in his books.  You don't need any Freudian insight to understand its meaning.  In the dream. Livi's sister gets up and leave the family table; like the others, she is unaware of Levi's presence.  Levi is only twenty-four years old, when he first begins to have this dream.

 "This is my sister here, with some unidentifiable friend and many other people.  They are all listening to me and it is this very story that I am telling: the whistle of three notes, the hard bed, my neighbour whom I would like to move, but whom I am afraid to wake as he is stronger than me.  I also speak diffusely of our hunger and of the lice-control, and of the Kapo, who hit me on the nose and then sent me to wash myself as I was bleeding.  It is an intense pleasure, physical, inexpressible, to be at home, among friendly people and to have so many things to recount: but I cannot help noticing my listeners do not follow me.  In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I were no there.  My sister gets up without a word.

A desolating grief is now born in me, like certain barely remembered pains of one's early infancy.  It is pain in its pure state, not tempered by a sense of reality and by the intrusion of extraneous circumstances, a pain like that which makes children cry: and it is better for me to swim once again up to the surface, but this time I deliberately open my eyes to have a guarantee in front of me of being effectively awake.

My dream stands in front of me, still warm, and although awake I am still full of its anguish: and that it is not a haphazard dream, but that I have dreamed it not once but many times since I arrived here, with hardly any variations of environment or details.  I am now quite awake and I remember that I have recounted it to Alberto and that he confided to me, to my amazement, that it is also his dream and the dream of many others, perhaps of everyone.  Why does it happen?  Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated sense of the unlistened-to story?"

The last publication of this dream occurs in the very last two pages of The Truce, written in Turin, December 1961-November 1962.

'....a dream of horrors has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.

It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance.  I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside: in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat.  And in fact, as the dream proceeds slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise.  Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it: I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager.  All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream: this dream of peace is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued.  It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word and expected: get up, "Wstavac".'

Levi's son, Renzo doesn't indulge in denial:  "Now everyone wants to understand, to grasp to probe.  I think my father has already written the last act of his existence.  Read the conclusion of The Truce and you will understand."  Levi wrote his suicide note, twenty-five years before his death. 

Levi, claims rightly, that his purpose in life was to bear witness to, and to record the horrors of German Nazism and its attempt to exterminate Judaism.  But this role eviscerated his psyche, gutted his very being.  In the Lager, he trod precariously close to oblivion, alone in his agnosticism.  A non-believer, no divine transcendence or revelation could save his being.  There was no god to guide him - no Virgil, Dante's guide and protector in the Inferno.  His survival depended on the single strength of his inner core, the spirit of his own unique self.  He walked out of the Lager free or was he?  That dream!  He kept it and reality separate, away from his self, for as long as he could.  The writing of the books probably helped him do that - a depository - separate from himself - for a horrific past.  However, once reality and the dream finally merged, he began living inside the dream. The armour of his self was fatally penetrated. How could he escape the Lager?  Seek the reality of eternal refuge in the void?

If This Is A Man

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
     Consider if this is a man
     Who works in the mud
     Who does not know peace
     Who fights for a scrap of bread
     Who dies because of a yes or a no.
     Consider if this is a woman,
     Without hair and without name
     With no more strength to remember,
     Her eyes empty and her womb cold
     Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
     Or may your house fall apart,
     May illness impede you,
     May your children turn their faces from you.

Levi wrote this poem, at the age of 25 years.  Was he ever a man thereafter?

In addition to being a penetrating personal autobiography, these books are testament to the depths of depravity reached, during the twentieth century, capturing the political essence of that century - ideology and the descent from the sacred into the mire of profanity.  Let's not kid ourselves; the twentieth century will be remembered not for humanism, but for barbarism.  Levi was an exceptional man, in an age of barbarism, and the mode of his death does not make him any less a man.  A fitting epitaph for the man, Levi: " Appel a tous.  Ceci est mon dernier cri avant silence eternal".

Film Review: Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993) - Spanish Film Festival Brisbane 2017

Directed and written by Carla Simón 
 
Initial Release - February 2017 
 
This is a film about a six year old orphan, Frida (Laia Artigas) - singularly pleasing in that there is no need of Kleenex.  Carla Simón, in her first feature film is deserving of high praise.  She uses two children to tell the story of Frida's displacement, despite their inability to express emotion verbally.  Their story is devoid of sentimentality.  Instead of inserting adult sentiment and speech into the mind and mouth of Frida, her character is permitted to express emotion through behaviour, both good and bad. Verbally, Frida and Anna (Paula Robles) are blanks.  Anna is a lovely little blonde pudding, full of innocence and charm - the three-to-four year old child of Frida's new parents.  Scenes of their play imitating adults in Frida's life, unconsciously betray the negligence of Frida's deceased mother.
 
How can Frida replace Anna or equal her, in the eyes of her new parents?  This issue cannot be resolved without patient and prudent responses from her new parents - her mother's brother, Esteve (David Verdaguer) and his partner, Marga (Bruna Cusi).  Both are compromised by the native love for their biological daughter and the elusive need to find an emotionally secure place for Frida, in their new family.   
 
Frida has to confront other issues: the frightening physical displacement, from city life to a mountainside pueblo, and the pain of separation from her previous family of indulgent grandparents and aunts.  Essential to her well being and the acceptance of her new family, is an explanation of her mother's death.  Can the joy of the moment between a father and his daughters, and the design of a mother for her daughters, overcome Frida's resistance? 
 
Foot Notes:
Carla Simón aged six, was sent to live with her uncle and aunt after her parents died.  The summer of 1993 was the first time she spent with her new family.  "...I have sweet memories of it and I wanted to translate them.  We shot in the area where I was raised."
 
The casting:  "It was quite long about five or six months.  The casting director, Mireia Juarez, saw almost 1,000 children for all the roles in the movie.  In fact Laia was the penultimate girl that we saw.  Because I could not find her.  And when we were almost done, Laia appeared." 
 
Rehearsals:  "We did a long process of rehearsals with Bruna, David and the children for the girls to believe the relationships.  We played for hours, for instance, four hours playing that the four of them were a family.  Doing this, they built memories that were used during the shoot.  The girls never read the script.  If I wanted the girls to say something, I told them before the take."
 
"Every sequence includes Frida."

Estiu 1993 director Carla Simón

 

Note: The above quotes of Carla Simón were taken from Kristina Zorita's interview with her for the European Women's Audiovisual Network http://www.ewawomen.com/en/events/interview-with-director-carla-simon.html

Film Review - The Exile (El Destierre)

Written and directed by Arturo Ruiz Serrano           

This film is not "commercial".  It is grim.  Notwithstanding that, I rate it highly.  I'm not alone in that opinion.  The entire audience was absorbed by the film.  

During the Spanish civil war, three individuals are unwillingly crammed together physically and emotionally in the tiny space of  a stone lookout, atop a ridge, in a snow covered mountain range.  It is winter and the snow is knee deep.  Horizons are absentees - vision blurred by snow and mist.

The two male individuals are members of the Nationalist army.  Just what these two sentinels of the sky are supposed to be guarding or watching over, is not clear.  The Nationalists built a line of outposts, together with machine gun bunkers,  tank camouflages and ammunition dumps, dug into hills and rocky outcrops, in the Pyrenees, during World War II, presumably to deter invasion from France by the Nazis or the Allies.  Stalin had urged Truman and Churchill to combine with Russian forces and invade fascist Spain.  But England and America were done with war and Stalin's desire for revenge on Franco went unfulfilled.  He had to settle for a trade embargo against Spain.  The photograph of the bunker below is typical of the fortifications built after the civil war.  I suspect the stone lookout used in the film is a remnant of this line.  There may be a simpler explanation - a shepherd's summer shelter.  Does anyone know?

Silverio (Eric Francis), a peasant? is a hard man, physically strong and direct in manner.  His companion, Teo (Joan Carles Sau) is fresh from a seminary.  The climate inside this bolt hole, like the weather outside, is bitterly cold and hostile. Silverio holds Teo in absolute contempt.  Teo, in contrast to Silverio, is a lean ascetic, bespectacled, inexperienced and timid.  He cringes, hard up against a wall, praying, while Silverio, from the other side curses him and labels him "the Priest".

The dualism of opposites is a constant theme.  Silverio is practical, physically threatening, cold and solitary, profane and uneducated, the opposite to Teo, who is spiritual, effete, educated and obviously middle class.  In  politics, they are also divorced.  Silverio has been drafted, unwillingly into the Nationalist army.  His sympathies lie with his family and the Republicans in Madrid.  Teo is a disciple of the Church and a supporter of Franco.  Tense monotony reigns, until Silverio returns from one of his regular hunting excursions, carrying the wounded Zoska (Monika Kowalska), a Polish national and member of the Republican international brigade.  After her recovery, she dominates the two male antagonists with her sexuality and femininity.  Zoska's warming influence coincides with the advent of summer.  The attitudes of Silverio and Teo soften and merge.  But the tension of the film is maintained, by the fear of Zoska's presence becoming known to the Nationalist command.  Discovery could result in death for each of the trio.  When Paulino, the supplier and courier of the outposts disappears, investigators become suspicious and Silverio and Zoska flee. Teo remains at the post, to deal with the aftermath.

Strained relationships arrested and transformed in a brief interlude of love and warmth, renewal of anxiety, and unresolved apprehension to the last second, all spent in a threatening and isolated landscape.

Film Review: A Dog's Purpose

 

Patience, loyalty, obedience, willingness, engaging fun, the sensitive reciprocal body language of a dog in canine or human company, grief in parting.

Directed by Lasse Hallestrom (is the pronunciation 'Lassie'?).  One of the human actors' first name is 'Pooch'.

Stars: in order of appearance - Bailey, a golden retriever; Ellie, a German shepherd police dog; Tino, a corgi; and Buddy, a Bernese mountain dog.

I confess I'm a dog-lover.  My parents bought me my first dog Tim, when I was still in the pram.  He was described without proper enquiry as to his origin, and generously, as a black and tan kelpie.  As soon as I could walk, we spent every day together.  On one occasion he led me, a toddler, into the shelter of a wheel-barrow leaning upright against a fence.  There, we sheltered from a Mallee dust-storm.  My mother was distraught when she realised I wasn't in the house.  After the storm moved on, Tim emerged, in response to the frantic calls of my mother and siblings.  I remained behind the wheel barrow - asleep!  We continued our relationship for about another seven years.  He walked with me to school, and when I came out of school; in the afternoon, he would be waiting for me.  One afternoon, he wasn't there.  I ran home, as fast as my short legs were capable.  Mum was inconsolable.  We stood in the drive way, embraced in grief.  Tim, chasing a horse and cart, had been run over and killed by a car.  Born and raised in a small hamlet near the Murray river in Victoria, Tim had no road sense.  This was my earliest experience of genuine grief.  I have never forgotten Tim and I'm now 72 years of age.

In the intervening years I have been involved with many dogs, pets, working dogs, giants and minnows.  Unfortunately, they all die before you do.  Grief upon grief.  I nursed two of these dogs when they were dying.  It was plain to me they knew they were dying.  More grief.

This film uses reincarnation, to side-step the problem of a dog's short life.  Bailey becomes Ellie, the police dog and dies a hero while on duty.  As she dies, her handler stays by her side, paralysed by grief.  With working dogs you must - like a good football coach - keep your distance from your charge, for the sake of performance.  Disciplined reservation of emotional space is required.  Yet I've seen hard men, eyes welled with tears and choked by grief, when their dog has been killed hunting in the field or working in the sale yards.

Tino, a corgi finds love for her young mistress and then leads her infant children in the joy and fun of play.  Dogs are the perfect fit for children, full of crazy capers and rapid action, underpinned with unconditional love and devotion.  There is a typical and funny scene of the owner being interrogated by a vet as to her feeding regime for Tino.  She is evasive in her answers, guilty, like most dog owners of overfeeding their pet dogs with "treats".

Bailey reincarnates as Buddy.  Old relationships are resumed and Buddy is set for a great life.

This is a film for dog lovers.  The director plays on the emotions apparent between owners and their dogs.  As a dog lover I did not resist her manipulation, experiencing only the slightest sense of guilt, for enjoying that base human failing - sentimentality.

Between the Wars: Film Review of 'Frantz'

Film Review: Frantz - Directed by Francois Ozon

In the First World War, France and Germany lost a generation of youth.  France - over 1,150,000, Germany about 1,800,000 to 2,000,000.

In this mainly black and white film, circa 1919, we are led by the camera through cobble-stone streets and into lamp lit interiors of stone buildings in a small German country town.  In the town cemetery, lies a memorial for Frantz.  The grave is empty.  For the parents of soldiers killed in the trenches there were two cruel twists - the burial of their sons in anonymous graves, far from home, and not knowing how they died - "killed in action, "cause of death unknown", "missing in action presumed dead", "died of wounds at .....".  The streets are not only free of rubbish and traffic, but also free of young men.  At a ball, attended by the two main characters of the story, Anna (Paula Beer) and Adrien (Pierre Niney), Adrien is swamped by girls, anxious to dance with a male of their own age, even though he is one of the hated French ("Every Frenchman is the murderer of my son").  The adult population is consumed by grief for their lost sons.  Frantz is the deceased son and only child of Hans Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner) and his wife Magda (Marie Gruber).  Anna, Frantz's fiancée lives with the Hoffmeisters - a surrogate for their only child, loved as though she is their natural daughter.  Anna's days are spent in grief and mourning, daily visits to the cemetery and abandonment of studies.  A suitor, probably twice Anna's age, favoured by the Hoffmeisters, waits for her grief to subside.  Then she finds a mysterious Frenchman (Adrien), standing and crying at Frantz's memorial.  This is were the story begins.  There are two parts, the one beginning in Germany and the one ending in France.  The story contains structured, complex lies, illusions, pacifism, flashbacks, hints of homosexuality, suicide, and train journeys.  Although there are two uncomfortable scenes of patriotic fervour, the film is certainly not another tiresome, superior-than-thou, moralising, anti-war film. Praise be to the Director.  

Audience reaction: Not enough patrons to judge.  Show-time: Easter Sunday after 6pm.  We witnessed the shuffling exit of patrons (many) from the afternoon showing - to get home before night fall and I presume, to be in bed, circa 7.30pm.  An intro. for students of demographics, who may be interested in Graceville.

Now showing at The Regal Twin - Boutique Arthouse Cinema at Graceville, Brisbane AUS

Hauteur to Empathy: Film Review: "The Innocents"

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
      
The Innocents (French:Les Innocentes) is a 2016 French film directed by Anne Fontaine.


"It is a grim irony that although it had been a member of the victorious alliance, Poland was the ultimate loser of the Second World War.  It lost its dependence and almost half of its territory - in defence of which the war had been declared.  According to the Bureau of War Reparations, it also lost 38 per cent of its national assets, a gigantic proportion when compared with the figures of France and Britain: 1.5 and 0.8 per cent respectively. These assets included the majority of its cultural heritage, as museums, libraries, palaces and churches had gone up in smoke.  But the real losses were far greater than that, and the consequences.

Nearly six million citizens had been killed, a proportion of one in five.  The proportion among the educated elites was far higher: nearly one in three for Catholic priests and doctors, and over one in two for lawyers.  A further half a million of Poland's citizens had been crippled for life and a million children had been orphaned.  The surviving population was suffering from severe malnutrition, while tuberculosis and other diseases raged on an epidemic scale.  Another half a million Polish citizens, including a high proportion of the intelligentsia, most of political and military leadership, and many of the best writers and artists, had been scattered around the world, never to return.  In all, post-war Poland had 30 per cent fewer inhabitants than the Poland of 1939.  But these figures give only a pale picture of the real harm done to Polish society: the Second World War destroyed not only people, buildings and works of art; it ripped apart a fragile yet functioning multi-racial and multi-cultural community still living out the consensual compact at the heart of the Commonwealth.

Both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were determined to destroy Polish society.  They therefore imported onto the multi-ethnic and socially diverse territory of Poland methods of racial, social and political manipulation they had developed in their own countries.  It was these that tipped the realities of war in occupied Poland into a circle of hell far below that reached in any other country.

In October 1939 The Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland came into effect.

The larger Soviet zone was incorporated into the Soviet Union and over the next months about 1,700,000 of its inhabitants were transported to labour camps in Siberia or the far north of Russia.

Hans Frank [the Governor-General of Nazi occupied Poland] announced that the concept of Poland would be erased from the human mind, and that those Poles who were not exterminated would survive only as slaves within the new German Empire.

The process began at once.  ....... priests, landowners, teachers, lawyers and other persons of education or influence were summarily shot or sent to a concentration camp at Oswiecim, renamed Auschwitz, in a process that aimed to decapitate Polish society and leave a leaderless and compliant workforce.

Poland's Jewish population was singled out for special treatment.  In small towns and villages, Jews were rounded up and shot by the Wehrmacht or special police units following in its wake, and in some cases burnt to death in their wooden synagogues.  In May 1940, the Jewish ghetto of Lodz was sealed, and the same happened in Warsaw and other cities.  From 1942, the people trapped in these ghettos were transported to camps set up at Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz and elsewhere, for extermination.  In all 2.7 million Polish citizens of Jewish origin were murdered. 
 
In Poland, anyone caught assisting or sheltering a Jew faced an automatic death penalty not just for himself, but for his entire family."

The same penalty applied to anyone failing to report that someone else living in the same apartment block was sheltering a Jew.

Adam Zamoyski   -   Poland a  History  -  first published by William Collins in 2009  -  paperback addition published 2015   -  ISBN 978-0-00-755621-2

Warsaw 1945

By comparison France suffered little in World War11.  After the capitulation of the French Army to the German Wehrmacht, a puppet French government set itself up in Vichy.  In so doing, France gained the dubious honour of being the only country defeated by Germany that established a new regime which collaborated with the Nazis.  Occupied Paris carried on, as though an invasion had not occurred.  Germans and French lived side by side and collaboration was the norm, in business and pleasure.  The Arts flourished. Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir continued to write and publish.  Camus published L'Etranger  and The Mythe de Sisphe in 1942.  Pablo Picasso was not able to show his work in public, yet he produced almost 400 paintings in addition to prints, drawings and sculptures during the Occupation, and his works were sold privately.  The painter of Guernica continued to live and work in Paris during the Nazi occupation!  Unlike Warsaw - which the Germans turned into a desert of rubble, during and after the Polish uprising in 1944 - as the vulture, in the shape of the Soviet Union's army, looked on - Paris was a peaceful paradise.  The maintenance of this peace was built on collaboration, including to France's everlasting shame, the internment and deportation of over 75,000 Jews - including 11,000 children - to the Nazi gas chambers in Poland.

Paris during German Occupation

In January 1945, Soviet Forces invaded East Prussia and began the mass rape of German women as the they sped towards Berlin.  "NKVD rifle regiments did not punish their own soldiers for rape, they punished them only if they caught venereal disease from victims who had usually caught it from a previous rapist.  Rape itself, in a typical Stalinist euphemism, was referred to as an 'immoral event'.  It is interesting that Russian historians today still produce evasive circumlocutions.  One writes:  'Negative phenomena in the army of liberation caused significant damage to the prestige of the Soviet Union and the armed forces and could have a negative influence in the future relations with the countries through which our troops were passing.'  This sentence also indirectly acknowledges that there were many cases of rape in Poland.  But far more shocking from a Russian point of view is the fact that Red Army officers and soldiers also raped Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian women and girls released from slave labour in Germany.  Many of the girls were as young as sixteen when taken to the Reich; some were just fourteen.  The widespread raping of women taken forcibly from the Soviet Union completely undermines any attempts at justifying Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union."

Anthony Beevor - Berlin The Downfall 1945

The Innocents is set in Polish countryside in 1945, after the events described above.  A guerrilla war is being fought, outside Warsaw, as Soviet forces and Polish communists quell nationalistic Polish resistance.  (Mathilde, the main player in this film narrowly escapes being raped in an encounter with a Soviet patrol controlling a road block.) 

Winter covers the landscape under a silent canopy of ice and snow.  Not only is the landscape depressed, but also the spirits of the medical staff working in a Red Cross hospital rehabilitating French soldiers and French Jews,  former inmates of work camps established by the Germans in Poland and Germany.  Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Laage), a young French doctor bearing a frosty demeanour, works in the hospital.  A nun emerges from the throng of beggar orphans outside the hospital entrance.  She finds her way into the hospital and begs Mathilde to help a sister who is seriously ill.  Mathilde turns her away.  Another begging Pole.  Later, resting beside a frosted window, she sees the same nun, in prayer, on her knees in deep snow.  Touched, Mathilde answers the nun's prayers and goes with her.  They arrive at the convent, isolated and defenceless, on the edge of a forest - black tree trunks, stretching upwards, still and silent, from a floor of white snow - beautiful to the eye, but in the mind foreboding, because of what it may conceal.  The cold, grey-stone interior of the convent, and a bare unlit altar do nothing, to allay the sense of foreboding.  Are there no priests left?  But the sister is not ill or suffering from disease.  She is about to give birth.  Mathilde assists her and the baby is delivered.
 
The following day, Mathilde revisits the convent and finds several more pregnant nuns.  Soviet soldiers had raped them.  Mathilde confers with Sister Maria (Agata Buzek) and the Mother Superior (Agata Kulesza) and it is agreed Mathilde will assist the remaining pregnant nuns.  The Mother Superior stipulates the pregnancies are to be kept secret, and the infants placed by her in outside communities - her motive - to preserve the reputation and continuity of the convent community.  Mathilde, an atheist, witnesses with secular indifference, the nuns struggling to retain their faith in God, given their rape, the irreversible loss of chastity, the baby and motherhood.  Mathilde remains aloof, impersonal and professional.  When she witnesses the nuns, singing, beautifully uplifting anthems of prayer, she begins to melt.  Then the nuns, despite their anguish, open up to her, with affection and gratitude. Mathilde is defrosted.  Hauteur to empathy.  She engages warmly with the remarkable Sister Marie, ( "..twenty four hours of doubt for one minute of hope"), - the go-between - who holds together the vital communication between Mathilde and the prickly Mother Superior - and who kindles trust between Mathilde and the expectant nuns.  When Mathilde realises she cannot cope on her own with multiple deliveries, she persuades her professional colleague and casual lover to help her deliver the babies.  He is Jewish, scarred permanently by the holocaust, in which his family disappeared, and openly hostile to the Catholic church.  If it was not for Mathilde he would not be in the convent.

The mother Superior, driven by her ardent desire to protect the convent and her charges, commits an unforgivable crime.  Agata Kulesza gives the best acting performance of the film.  She is brilliant, transforming the Mother Superior into a tragic Shakespearian character, who plunges irredeemably from grace to damnation.  Despite her iniquity, you cannot fail to grieve for her, as she lies in bed, her chastity, her gift to God, ruined by the defilement of rape, guilty of mortal sin, waiting the final audit. 

Sadly, the end of the film lapses into modern-day sentimentality.

Postscript: This story is based on the experience of a Red Cross doctor, Madeleine Pauliac in Poland, after World War11


Audience reaction:  Silent rapture from start to finish.


Literary sources for this review: 
Adam Zamoyski - Poland A History
Michael Curtis - Verdict On Vichy
Anthony Beevor - Berlin The Downfall 1945 
Primo Levi   - Is this a man

Bus Stop homicide - surgery efficiency - the wicked vicar

Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978

While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr Robert Clear.  "He demanded that I give him my wife's purse", said Mr Thirsty.  "Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it.  It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but, unhappily for us all, he died."



Stephan Westaby writes that on obtaining his first junior post as a surgeon at London's Royal Brompton Hospital, he commandeered the rubber boots that had once belonged to the eminent surgeon Lord Brock and later adapted them with a length of tubing and sticky tape to avoid having to take toilet breaks during lengthy operations.

Fragile Lives:  A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephan Westaby
 
Entries from the Parish Register of Seasalter, Kent:

1734  Edward Trice and Mary Acros married at the Cathedral of Seasalter.  A Bowl of Punch was made almost as big as the Caspian.

1734  John Powney Huntsman to that ancient Corporation of crucketsoles the City of Canterbury and Miss Eliz. Johnson, daughter to the Devil's own, commonly called a Bailiff, were married at the Cathedral of Seasalter.

1742  Buried John Ellis, a very strong young fellow and a great smuggler.

1744 John Housden, widower, a young gape-mouth, lazy fellow, and Hannah Matthews, an old toothless wriggling Hagg, both of Faversham, were trammel by Licence at the Cathedral of Seasalter.

1750  William Parnel and Mary Steed, a dolefull forbidding saturnine damsel, married.

These extracts were written by the Rev. Thomas Patten, who was appointed Vicar of Seasalter and Perpetual Curate of Whitstable in 1711, and held the two livings until his death in 1764 at the age of eighty.

A law unto himself, he not only kept a mistress, but drove to church in a butcher's cart, wore ragged, dirty clothes, signed himself "Bishop of Whitstable", refused to read the Athanasian Creed, and would suddenly break off a sermon if he thought that any of the congregation would join him in a visit to the nearby pub.

In Archbishop Secker's visitation of the parishes in 1759, Patten is described as 'half-mad impudent, poor".  When the archdeacon reproved him for not reading the Athanasian Creed, which the archbishop did, "That may be," answered Patten, "perhaps he may believe it; I don't.   He believes at the rate of $7,000.00 per annum: I at less than fifty.

He died in October 1764 and was buried in Old Seasalter Church on the south side of the altar, his grave marked by a stone slab set in the chancel floor.  Here it rested for over 160 years but in 1927 Seasalter received a new vicar, the Rev. Edward Thompson, a short, thick-set martinet with a stentorian voice, straight from the China Mission.  He had Patten's gravestone dug up and thrown out, saying he was not going to have so scandalous a man commemorated in his church.  It languished among the weeds until the 1960s, when in that more tolerant decade (one which might have suited Patten) it was brought back into the church, where it now rests on a window sill.

A Christmas Cracker  -  2008

BYSTANDERS TO GENOCIDE

Flicking on the remote, at home, I stopped suddenly, on seeing Samantha Power, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, berating some stony-faced males seated opposite her.  One was a Russian representative.  Her outburst was hot and scolding, sprayed at Syria, Russia and Iran.

"Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our consciences decades later.  Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, now, Aleppo.  Your barrel bombs and mortars and airstrikes have allowed the militia in Aleppo to encircle tens of thousands of civilians in your ever-tightening noose.  Are you truly incapable of shame?  Is there nothing that can shame you?  Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a little bit?  Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?"

Phew!  Great stuff!  But hang on.  Samantha Power was part of the Obama administration and this language is most unlike that used by Obama.  Note: these fiery words were spent on December, 2016, five weeks before the end of the Obama presidency, and three and half years into Power's tenure as America's UN ambassador.  

Consider those words, in the context of the past crimes of genocide she listed, Halabja, (A gas attack on Kurds in Iraq), occurred on the watch of George H.W. Bush.  Rwanda, Srebrenica and Aleppo occurred during the administrations of presidents Clinton and Obama.  Power was unsparing in her criticism of the Clinton
administration's handling of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.  In 2001, she published an article called, "Bystanders to Genocide". In it, she excoriated the administration for its indifference.  In Power's own time, as a servant of the Obama administration, she witnessed weak, ineffectual intervention by the U.S in the Syrian conflict, which allowed Assad, Russia and Iran to operate unhindered in the ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs by Shiite-Iranian militia.  Obama's administration to use Samantha Power's title looked like another "bystander to genocide".

So was Samantha Power, in fact, venting her frustration with Obama's inaction when she gave both barrels to the boys on the other side of the UN?  Could be.  We await with interest to see whether she supports the Trump administration's prompt military response against Assad's regime for its recent gas attacks on civilians including children.