Kitchen Stories

Can a film about a sociologist's efforts to observe the movements of an aging farmer in his kitchen be described as a love story? Yet, by the end of the 2003 Norwegian film Kitchen Stories, that is just about the only explanation that makes sense of what we have watched for an hour and thirty-five minutes.

Beginning in 1944, a study was conducted by a group of Swedish sociologists that sought to track the movements of housewives in their kitchens so that future homes could be designed in such a way that their movements, puttering around the kitchen, could be minimized. (And if such a study sounds ridiculous, try to imagine what Google and Facebook are doing with all the data they're collecting about your online likes and dislikes, dear reader.)

Through an agreement with Norway (according to Bent Hamer's fictional screenplay), the sociologists proposed to extend their study to the kitchen traffic of ordinary Norwegian men. The film opens by informing us that there are subtle but significant differences between Norway and Sweden, as we watch a small convoy of identical cars with identical tiny trailers hitched to them advance toward us on the left side of the road. A sign in three languages (one of them is English) tells them that upon crossing the frontier they must drive on the right.

One of the field researchers, Folke, follows a tractor driven by a farmer named Grant to the house of Isak, who has agreed to take part in the study. But Isak won't answer the door. Folke waits. Hours pass. Folke's boss Malmberg climbs a ladder to reach an upper window and knocks. The next day they bring the local doctor to reason with him. Another day elapses with no sign of Isak. Folke climbs the ladder alone to the upstairs window. Isak opens the blind and is confronted with Folke's face outside. Isak draws the blind and Folke climbs down. He relaxes inside his trailer, listening to music on the radio. I should mention that it's the dead of winter and everything is covered in snow. In the morning Folke notices Isak emerge from the barn (how did he get there?) and he leaves the door of the house open for Folke. These scenes of inaction introduce us to what will be the pace for the rest of the film, a pace like one might expect the life of a bachelor farmer to be --- slow. It isn't often that a film asks us (and so soon after it has begun) not to expect any of the things that most films promise (but so rarely deliver): thrills, sex, and violence. The late E. L. Doctorow, who regarded film as "the enemy" of writing, once said that films are usually about faces or explosions. Kitchen Stories is about faces.

Folke erects a tall chair, like the ones used by tennis judges, in a corner of Isak's spartan kitchen, and takes up his post. We've not heard them speak a word to each other. Days pass with Folke watching and tracing Isak's kitchen putterings on a diagram of his kitchen. Whenever Isak leaves the kitchen he turns off the light. Days go by. Overnight, Isak has cut a hole in the kitchen ceiling above Folke's chair and he quietly spies on him. Folke presents his initial "findings" to his boss and asks for a different "host." His request is denied.

Because it's a scientific study, Folke is not supposed to interfere with his subject. Until one morning when he gives Isak some tobacco to fill his pipe. Isak follows by pouring Folke a cup of coffee, and Folke climbs down to drink it. He speaks his first word, "thanks," to Isak. The ice broken, they begin to have conversations in the kitchen. Late one evening, Isak finds Folke asleep in his chair and he covers him with a coat. Folke gives Isak some of the provisions he gets in the mail from his aunt, like canned herring (Isak eats nothing but porridge). Folke's boss arrives to inform him that one of the researchers and his host have become drinking buddies.

There is nowhere a suggestion of sexual interest between the men, even when Folke watches Isak bathe, and, in a beautiful moment, Isak claims that the fillings in his teeth allow him to receive distant radio signals and puts his open mouth next to Folke's wondering ear. But the closeness they develop is something more than merely friendly. It's a fondness, an affection, brought on by their unacknowledged loneliness (no surprise - Folke is also a bachelor) and their need for companionship. (It should be noted that, except for a woman accompanying the eccentric head of the firm, there are no other women in the film.)

But when Folke throws (if that is the word) Isak a birthday party and they get drunk together, Grant, an old friend of Isak, who has been spying on them and is, perhaps, jealous of their closeness, reports Folke to his boss for such brazen fraternization. In a jealous rage, Grant takes his tractor and tows Folke's trailer, with Folke asleep inside, to a railroad crossing and leaves it on the tracks. Isak sees him and gets out his ancient horse to quietly return the trailer. Throughout the scene, Folke never wakes.

But Isak's horse is dying. And Malmberg, Folke's boss, orders that everyone pack up their equipment - the project is cancelled. When Folke tells him he resigns, that he's staying, Malmberg reminds him of his "contractural obligations." And so we see the little convoy of cars and trailers returning to the border - except this time, Folke pulls off the road right before the checkpoint and unhitches his trailer and tells Malmberg he quits. Malmberg is left struggling to hitch the trailer behind his own car as the border guard watches him.

But Folke returns to Isak's house at night in time to see his horse being loaded into a truck and an ambulance in front of the house. Grant approaches Folke with news he can't bring himself to speak. Despite this apparent end to the story, the film gives us one last scene that leaves us with an airy and sweet ambiguity. We see Isak's house, but everything around it is green. Inside, Folke is alone but the telephone rings three times - just as it had when Grant let Isak know he was coming over for a haircut - and he smiles broadly. On the table is a pipe and tobacco and two coffee cups.

Is the film a sendup of the so-called detachment of sociologists? It certainly gives Swedes a gentle ribbing. By the end we've been introduced to a group of human beings who discover a little of their own humanity. Very gently and without much of a fuss, Bent Hamer evokes the loneliness of life in a tiny community where winter lasts half the year.

The acting from a cast heretofore unknown to me (except for the splendid Sverre Anker Ousdal as the head of the firm sponsoring the study) is flawless. Joachim Calmeyer plays - inhabits - Isak, a man who finds himself rather defenseless against advancing age. And Tomas Norstrom gives us Folke, a dedicated scientist at first who gently bends the rules set for him with interjections of gentleness. How he goes about winning the trust and friendship of Isak - seemingly without even trying - is quietly beautiful. But it is the time and especially the place that are brought to breathing life by Hamer and his cameraman, Philip Ogaard. The film's luminous imagery matches the beauty of its illuminated lives.

The film suggests immeasurably more than it shows us. For instance, Isak's life through the years, alone in his farmhouse, reminded me of Frost's "An Old Man's Winter Night":

A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man - one man - can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

The Lovely Woods

In 1943, fifty thousand copies of a poem were printed and sent by the Council on Books in Wartime to U.S. troops fighting overseas - as a "morale-builder." Here is the poem:

COME IN

I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music - hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went -
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.


Try to imagine a soldier on the move with his unit in Italy or North Africa, or a marine on some Pacific island he never heard of, opening the envelope containing this poem by Robert Frost, and reading it during some pause in the fighting, sitting against the blown-out wall of a house or against a palm tree in the sun. What would they have made of Frost's poem? Would they have found it "optimistic," as the people who chose it believed Frost intended? "What's this?" I can hear them querelously asking. "A bird telling some guy to come in?" I can see my father, an Army MP in Bizerte, Tunisia in 1943, wondering why the hell somebody thought to send him a poem in the middle of a war.

Or would my father, or some of the other soldiers and marines who got the poem, have noticed that Frost is walking alone at dusk, the gathering shadows at end of the day, and would he have known what that unseen thrush was doing in the seductive dark of the woods? Wouldn't he have heard that thrush - or something like it - himself sometimes? And how many of the men who stuffed the envelope containing the poem into their pockets were found dead, having once said yes to the call?

There is something within the woods - something other than a thrush - that calls out to Frost walking at the edge. The thrush's song was a last thrilling tribute to the light, before the night falls. The man knows this, but acknowledges the invitation to come in from the dusk to the dark. "But no," he demurs, "I would not come in." And he shrugs the moment off, saying that he wasn't really asked to come in, but wouldn't have done it even if he had been.

Frost never tried to correct the popular image that most readers had of him as "the poet of the countryside, of rural settings - as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition."(1) So, when the people at the Council on Books in Wartime in 1943 chose "Come In," because they saw it as an "optimistic" poem, optimistic because the poet said "no" to the invitation, Frost didn't try to disabuse them of the what the thrush's invitation implies.

The poem is directly reminiscent, although he wrote it much earlier, of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", from his fourth collection New Hampshire:


Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


Along with the darkness of the wood in "Come In," there is the cold that gives the void an extra dimension. It's probably Frost's most famous poem. It is famous for being delicately simple. Only the strange repetition of the rhyme (DDDD) in the last stanza, and the ultimate line repeating the penultimate, makes ripples in its delicate surface. And yet, like some of Frost's better-known poems, as well as many of his lesser-known poems, it is deceptively simple. It's simplicity is actually a surface effect. When examined closely, it betrays depths that are both ambiguous and, to use Lionel Trilling's characterization of Frost, "terrifying."

It may come as a surprise to all those who admire the poem for its "picture postcard" prettiness that what Frost is alluding to in his imagery, if one looks just a little bit closer, is death. In his close examination of "Come In," the Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky certainly knew what Frost was talking about in the poem. "The twenty lines of the poem constitute the title's translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression 'come in' means 'die.'"

"Stopping by Woods" was John F. Kennedy's favorite poem, by his favorite poet. I wonder if he, too, was beguiled by the seductive loveliness of the dark and deep woods. The many miles he had to go before he slept didn't let him forget that moment by the woods.


(1) Joseph Brodsky, "On Grief and Reason," The New Yorker, 26 September 1994.

In Shoah's Shadow

"Writing history is an imaginative act. Few people would deny this, but not everyone agrees on what it means. It doesn’t mean, obviously,  that historians may alter or suppress the facts, because that is not being imaginative; it’s being dishonest. The role of imagination in writing history isn’t  to make up things that aren’t there; it’s to make sensible the things that are there." (Louis Menand, Introduction to To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson)


It does not happen - thankfully - very often, but every time a filmmaker attempts to deal with the Holocaust he comes up against two imposing, yet contradictory, obstacles. The first is the objection that any film, especially a fiction film, should touch the subject. This is not just because it is considered sacred by some - by survivors, by Jews, but also (and perhaps more stridently) by artists.

This is an argument that originates in disorganized remarks made by Theodor Adorno in the early 1950s: "After Auschwitz," he insisted, "to write a poem is barbaric," if writing it is intended "to squeeze aesthetic pleasure out of artistic representation of the naked bodily pain of those who have been knocked down by rifle butts. ... Through aesthetic principles or stylization ... the unimaginable ordeal still appears as if it had some ulterior purpose. It is transfigured and stripped of some of its horror, and with this, injustice is already done to the victims."

In his essay, "Writing and the Holocaust," Irving Howe examined Adorno's prohibition:

"... The representation of a horrible event, especially if in drawing upon literary skills it achieves a certain graphic power, could serve to domesticate it, rendering it familiar and in some sense even tolerable, and thereby shearing away part of the horror. The comeliness of even the loosest literary forms is likely to soften the impact of what is being rendered, and in most renderings of imaginary situations we tacitly expect and welcome this. But with an historical event such as the Holocaust - an event regarding which the phrase 'such as' cannot really be employed - the chastening aspects of literary mimesis can be felt to be misleading, a questionable way of reconciling us with the irreconcilable or of projecting a symbolic 'transcendence' that in actuality is no more than a reflex of our baffled will."

There have been great literary works by Holocaust survivors like Paul Celan, Primo Levi, and Istvan Kertesz. There have also been great works by filmmakers whose visits to the camps were purely imaginative. And there have been great documentary films as aesthetically distinct as Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (with narration written by survivor Jean Cayrol) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

Now that the last generation of Holocaust survivors is dying out, the importance of recording every one of their individual testimonies is - for history and humanity - especially urgent. As if in response to this sense of urgency has come the work of Lanzmann and something of a direct offshoot of the monumental film Shoah, Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. While they appear to be engaged in the same pursuit, somewhat curiously (if not inexplicably), both Lanzmann and Istvan Kertesz, Holocaust survivor and author of Fateless (also made into an excellent film) have taken extreme exception to Spielberg and his foundation.

The impact and importance of Shoah is indisputable. Watching it - experiencing it - is unforgettable. It challenges us, like all great art does, to take account for our own lives. In the 70s, Lanzmann had what was probably the last chance to record the eyewitness accounts of so many survivors, and he had the good judgement - and artistic sense - to limit his film exclusively to what his own cameras recorded, avoiding the use of newsreel footage that Marcel Ophuls had done - brilliantly - in The Sorrow and the Pity, The Memory of Justice, and Hotel Terminus.

I use the words "artistic sense" purposely because, on top of all the other things Shoah achieves, it is great art as well. Lanzmann would probably deny this, but if documentary were simply a matter of turning on the camera and the tape recorder (two instruments that Bresson believed had almost incantatory power), every one of the moral choices that a filmmaker makes - like where to point the camera and why - would be eliminated and documentaries would have nothing to tell us.

No one would dream of questioning the enormity of Lanzmann's contribution to the conversation about the treatment of the Holocaust on film. He never intended to, but he set the bar for every subsequent treatment of the Holocaust, documentary or fictional. His insistence, however, that there is no other justifiable way to represent the Holocaust except his way, is not simply disingenuous, but it would lead inevitably to silence. Perhaps silence is the most respectful reaction to the Holocaust,(1) but it doesn't increase our understanding of it, which every new generation greatly needs. That understanding may only ever be incomplete and unsatisfying, but this doesn't make it any less necessary.

Now comes a new film from Hungary, Son of Saul, by a fledgling (38-year-old) director, Laszlo Nemes. And as if in direct response to Lanzmann's challenge to fiction films about the Holocaust, Richard Brody of The New Yorker, while seeming to praise the film because it dramatizes specific events mentioned in Shoah - the use by the Germans of Jewish Sonderkommandos ("special units") who assisted them, under threat of death of course - practically dismisses the film as being "virtually superfluous."

Part of the importance of Shoah is its sheer scope, its encirclement of the inner and outer workings of the Nazi Final Solution, based entirely on the testimonies of people directly involved. But as broad and detailed as Shoah is, it does not - cannot - encompass the entirety of the Holocaust. As similar as all of the stories of Holocaust survivors are, every one of them is a story unto itself, an ineluctable perspective on the unfolding of the event.

Contrary to Western practices, filmmakers in Eastern Europe did not avoid the subject of the Holocaust in the decades immediately after the war. Approaching the subject in explicitly political terms, it was considered as just another chapter in the struggle between communism and fascism. As soon as film production returned in Poland, Wanda Jakubowska, a survivor of Auschwitz, made The Last Stage (Estatni Etap), her attempt to create a film record of her own experiences. Made in a matter of months after the liberation of the death camp, the film is remarkable for its directness and its demands, above all, for authenticity. It makes one wonder what Jakubowska would have made of Lanzmann's somewhat puritanical prohibition of any fictional portrayals of the Holocaust.

Richard Brody mentions how, in Son of Saul, "[Laszlo] Nemes renounces the act of total and transparent representation - he films Saul's experiences and observations as if he can't fully represent them dramatically by actors on sets." Such reticence to show the audience an unprecedented horror is both an old trick of the trade (think of how, in the original The Mummy [1931], Karl Freund creates a heightened atmosphere of terror by never showing us the risen Imhotep - Boris Karloff - but only the actors' terrified reactions to seeing him) as well as a quite telling admission of the limits that filmmakers set for themselves when they touch so sensitive a subject.  

Anyone familiar with former Sonderkommando Filip Muller's powerful testimony in Shoah knows that it is one of the most riveting scenes ever recorded of a man sitting in what appears to be his living room describing things that are all the more incomprehensible for having actually occurred. But are filmmakers who choose to re-create such scenes in danger of making such horrors as Filip Muller witnessed too familiar, almost commonplace?  

In the past twenty years we have been subjected in films to every imaginable horror in every horrible realistic detail. The very existence of a line that some people insist should never be crossed is an invitation to filmmakers to cross it. In the newly released film The Revenant, all every critic can talk about, it seems, is the moment when Leo DiCaprio is mauled by a bear in such graphic detail that some critics found themselves at a loss for words.

Movie mayhem has been a fact of filmgoing life at least since Bonnie and Clyde. But no one, as far as I know, has attempted to exploit cinematic tricks, including CGI, in the detailed representation of the gas chambers. It would be regarded as "going too far." If the representation of a man being shot to death is somehow acceptable realism - even if everyone accepts that no such act has actually occurred - why would an attempt at representing the moment, inside one of Auschwitz's gas chambers, when the Zyklon cyanide pellets are dropped through the air vent and the naked people inside are shown perishing in unimaginable ways, be unacceptable? When Muller, in Shoah, describes how, removing the bodies from a gas chamber, he saw blood and excrement and vomit everywhere, that he saw how the bodies of some of the women showed signs of menstrual bleeding - why are such terrible details acceptable when they are spoken, but would be considered an outrageous violation of propriety, not to mention taste (in his opening paragraph Brody calls Son of Saul "daring but tasteless") if a filmmaker tried to show them to us?

Irving Howe went further in his examination of Adorno's remarks on representing the Holocaust:

"Adorno might have had in mind the possibility of an insidious relation between the represented (or even the merely evoked) Holocaust and the spectator enthralled precisely as, or perhaps even because, he is appalled - a relation carrying a good share of voyeuristic sadomasochism. Can we really say that in reading a memoir or novel about the Holocaust, or in seeing a film such as Shoah, we gain the pleasure, or catharsis, that is customarily associated with the aesthetic transaction? More disquieting, can we be sure that we do not gain a sort of illicit pleasure from our pained submission to such works?"

There is, of course, an enormous difference between the spoken testimonies of Holocaust survivors in Shoah and a fiction film's dramatic representation of such events. The difference is not just a simple matter of form. In his 2003 review of Susan Sontag's book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Tzvetan Todorov wrote:

"One of the great platitudes of our epoch is that images, in particular photographic or filmed images, transmit messages that are much clearer and stronger than words, which disguise the truth more than they reveal it. But in truth nothing could be less certain: a photograph can stun us, but taken out of context it may not convey any significant meaning. You see a mutilated corpse, you are moved and overcome by shock or pity; but you do not yet know who this corpse is, nor why this person has been killed, nor by whom; nor whether this is a case that warrants an appeal to vengeance, or on the contrary an appeal for peace, or whether it is only an incitement to meditate on the fragility of human existence. Sentences have a subject and a predicate, a part that delimits what is being discussed and another part that says something about it. But images are subjects without predicates: they evoke the world intensely, but they do not tell us, of themselves, what we should think about it." (Tzvetan Todorov, "Exposures," The New Republic, April 21, 2003)

When the sexual revolution was upon us in the 1970s, Charles Thomas Samuels called for a retreat, arguing that "sex needs words in order to be creative." The presentation of sex in a film is virtually invariable. Like a childbirth scene, it is made up of the same props, sounds and gestures. Any creator of images has to work hard to avoid visual cliches; and yet the particularization of human experience is limited by a finite number of repetitious gestures.

Richard Brody argues that, in Son of Saul, Nemes is referring us to the words spoken by survivors in Shoah by choosing to avoid representing events chronicled in his film directly: "The enormity of the events defies dramatization without utterly eluding it. Yet the muffling of the image suggests another mode of transmission - the word, in the future tense. The events that Saul sees and the actions that he takes will survive, if they survive at all, through Saul's eventual verbal testimony. The fullest access to what Nemes doesn't and won't show clearly will be through the culled word - will be when Saul, or other members of a Sonderkommando, speaks with Lanzmann, and when Lanzmann composes a film on the basis of that word."

As I mentioned earlier, there are two obstacles that every film about the holocaust must overcome. The second is how to avoid being - or seeming to be - crassly exploitative. Of course, there are obvious examples of how a filmmaker should not approach the Holocaust. Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, while it was quite popular and it got Benigni some awards (and an excuse to be his insufferble self in accepting them), was a misguided and dishonest attempt to inject humor, however emotional, into the least funny subject imaginable. And there is some speculation over a film Jerry Lewis made more than forty years ago that he called The Day The Clown Cried that no one has seen because Lewis himself knew that people would have found it too objectionable.

So, too, when Hollywood took a rather good East German film called Jakob the Liar, made in 1975 by Frank Beyer, and remade it into a star vehicle for Robin Williams in the lead role of a compulsive liar who momentarily relieves the suffering of his fellow inmates in a Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Poland with false (or fantastical) reports about the progress of the war and the imminence of their liberation - in every way except commercially the remake was a mistake. In "Writing and the Holocaust, Irving Howe delivers a funny aside:

"(I think here of a story that I have on the highest authority. The producers of the television serial called Holocaust first approached Leo Tolstoy with a tempting offer to write the script, for they had heard he was the author of some good books. After listening to them politely, the Russian writer turned pale and mumbled, 'No, no, there are some things that even I cannot do. For what you want, you should turn to Gerald Green.')"

The very real danger that the Holocaust can be used as a by-word for a traumatic experience that misguided filmmakers might use to prop up a character was borne out by the spectacularly stupid X-Men films, in which one character, named Magneto, is shown to have discovered his powers when he was a boy in a Nazi death camp. When he is separated from his parents and they are herded, in the usual driving rain, towards an ominously smoke-belching chimney (the imagery is reduced to mere emotional cues) he cries out and the barbed-wire gates that separate them are pulled apart by invisible forces. I find it difficult to believe that all those people - actors and technicians - who made the film were put through the motions of re-creating in minute detail a moment in history's biggest human catastrophe to add some depth to a comic book movie without one of them questioning its propriety. But it illustrates the extent to which the Holocaust has become, to some of the more crass producers in Hollywood, a kind of thematic punch line.

When the film Schindler's List was released in late 1993, it was attacked in some quarters because it was made by Hollywood's P.T. Barnum, Steven Spielberg. Viewed as another "Hollywoodization" of the Holocaust, Stanley Kauffmann was one of the first to come to its defense. While he wondered if there was a need for "another film about the Holocaust . . . especially after Shoah," he argued that "presumably there are at least some people who have never seen a Holocaust film and may see this one because it's by Spielberg and will have mainstream promotion. Let's hope there are many such." (The New Republic, December 13, 1993)

In a piece written for the New York Review of Books, John Gross agreed:

"As a contribution to popular culture, it [Schindler's List] can only do good. Holocaust denial may or may not be a major problem in future, but Holocaust ignorance, Holocaust forgetfulness, and Holocaust indifference are bound to be and Schindler's List is likely to do as much as any single work can to dispel them." (John Gross, "Hollywood and the Holocaust," New York Review of Books, February 3, 1994)

Richard Brody claims that the spoken testimonies in Shoah make the dramatized events in Son of Saul - and virtually every other film depicting the Holocaust - "superfluous." According to Kauffmann, "Claude Lanzmann, who made Shoah, believes that re-creating the Holocaust is impermissible, 'is tantamount to fabricating archives.'" But if it is a duty, and I think it is, to revisit, if only occasionally, the Holocaust in memorials, in novels and films, and even in silence, I think it is also a duty to look at it anew, with new eyes and from new angles. As Primo Levi said in 1979, "If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again."



(1) In the words of the Yiddish poet Aaron Tsaytlin: "Were Jeremiah to sit by the ashes of Israel today, he would not cry out a lamentation. ... The Almighty Himself would be powerless to open His well of tears. He would maintain a deep silence. For even an outcry is now a lie, even tears are mere literature, even prayers are false."

Two Cheers for Equality

Just when I was about to sink my teeth into the BBC's "100 Greatest British novels," I came across another, far more dubious list - "A Year With Women: 103 Essential Films By Female Filmmakers" published last August. In principle, I am all for women directing films. If they can manage to make films that are at least as good as the vast majority of films directed by men, that would certainly not be saying very much at all for "female filmmakers." Judging by the 103 films on this list compiled by the eponymous "cinemafanatic," a self-styled "cinephile to the max," women are more than capable of making films at least as bad as men.

While I will admit to seeing roughly half of the 103 films on the list, the admission doesn't give me much satisfaction. Wading through this field of weeds, I found a few actual flowers amongst them, like The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola), Vagabond (Agnes Varda), Away from Her (Sarah Polley), Frida (Julie Taymor), and The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko). As for the rest, does it matter that films as bad as Ishtar, The Night Porter, The Piano, You've Got Mail, and Wayne's World were directed by a man, a woman, or a moviola?

Last December 7, BBC Culture contributor Jane Ciabattari presented the results of a poll of 82 book critics that listed the 100 greatest British novels ever written. Here is the Top 25:

1. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
2. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
3. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
4. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
5. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
6. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
8. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
9. Frankenstein (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
10. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
11. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
12. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
13. The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)
14. Clarissa (Charlotte Bronte))
15. Atonement (Ian McEwan)
16. The Waves (Virginia Woolf)
17. Howards End (E. M. Forster)
18. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
19. Emma (Jane Austen)
20. Persuasion (Jane Austen)
21. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
22. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Henry Fielding)
23. Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
24. The Golden Notebooks (Doris Lessing)
25. White Teeth (Zadie Smith)


The first noticeable problem with the BBC list is the insistence on ranking, which is an utterly philistine practice. The second problem is that three people were responsible for nine out of the twenty-five novels. Last summer I commented on another literature poll, the 100 Best Novels Written in English, sponsored by theguardian.com, that was conducted by one person, Robert McCrum, instead of a consortium. I expressed enough distaste for McCrum's list, and the general stupidity of such lists, but compared to the BBC's list, McCrum's now looks far more impressive and authoritative. McCrum refused to rank his 100 choices, presenting them - beginning with Pilgrim's Progress - in chronological order, and he limited each author to a single book, which now seems remarkably fair. If Jane Ciabattari had employed the rule, six of the titles on the list - Mrs. Dalloway, Bleak House, David Copperfield, The Waves, Emma, and Persuasion - would have to be replaced by others. The results would have been more challenging and less objectionable.

One more obvious problem is the definition of "British," which is not as narrow as the poll's guidelines pretend. If Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, and The Remains of the Day, novels written by men born - respectively - in Poland, Germany, and Japan, are British, what is Ulysses, especially since Ireland was British until 1946?

I won't bother you with the first 25 of the 103 Essential Films By Female Filmmakers, since you and me and everyone we know have never seen many of them. I've only seen half of them and, according to some websites, I am what is known as a "film scholar." Prominent among the 103 are the names of the better-known women directors like Elaine May, Agnes Varda, and Sofia Coppola. Just about every one of Coppola's films is on the list, which is a good indication of the sad dearth of women directors.

On the occasion of Kathryn Bigelow's win as Best Director at the Academy Awards a few years ago, I wrote a post for this blog devoted to the woman whom I still regard as the finest woman director to date - Lina Wertmuller. Even if they hated Wertmuller, it would be impossible for film critics to disregard the accomplishments of Wertmuller. After all, they included Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which is, however skillfully made, a loathsome film. While Wertmuller's politics are far to the Left of Riefenstahl's, I think that the reason she is now ignored has alot more to do with her treatment of women, which orthodox feminists long ago dismissed as reinforcing stereotypes.

In the "comments" section of the 103 Essential Films, someone pinted out Wertmuller's conspicuous absence from the list: "This is a great list, but really, no Lina Wertmueller? I realize it is hard for Americans to get a foreign vibe, but this woman is a genius and worth taking a look."

The comment moved "cinemafanatic" to respond - lamely: "I think the availability (aka lack thereof) of her work in the US on DVD/Blu has really lessened her impact on younger generations. It's a shame her films are [not] more accessible." Baloney. What about Chantal Akerman, Maya Deren, and Celine Sciamma, whose films are at least as hard to find as Wertmuller's?

I think Wertmuller is neglected because her films concentrate on often unsympathetic male characters and the women who are drawn to them. And because of Wertmuller's refusal to approve of their actions. The hero of Seven Beauties is a former pimp who survives a German concentration camp by summoning the strength to copulate (there is no better word for it) with the obese female camp commandant. The hero of Swept Away is a stupid Neapolitan deck hand whose superior strength and skill allows him to dominate a particularly useless rich woman with whom he is stranded alone on an island. The hero of Love and Anarchy is a foolish, spotty-faced provincial whose sole chance at being an anarchist hero is through an absurd and hare-brained plot to assassinate Mussolini. Because Wertmuller has a jaundiced view of human beings, men and women, her complex, powerful films are difficult for critics to pigeonhole. Her star rose and set in a painfully short arc in the mid-70s. No sooner had we been surprised by the appearance of The Seduction of Mimi in 1976 than we were disappointed by the big-budget, all-star Blood Feud in 1980. Until the invention of video, films were permitted very brief shelf-lives. If no one recalls Lina Wertmuller's films, it's the fault of film critics, not audiences.  

Date Due

I do not know, and I have never claimed to know, anything about being an editor of creative or scholarly writing, but I think that uttering the word "plagiarism" in the precincts of a book or magazine (or ezine) publishing office must be like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.

Bored last week (the week between Christmas and New Year's, the quietest week of the year), I went on a Google search for my favorite plagiarist, Bert Cardullo. On page 2 I found something about a newly published book of his whose title made me nearly choke on my leftover eggnog. The link led me to the website of a small literary press - whose name I withhold out of what is probably misplaced fairness - where I found the book, Persistence of Vision: The 21st-Century Film Criticism of Stanley Kauffmann, edited by Cardullo, published last January. Accompanying a description of the book's contents was a blurb from Gary Bettison from a review of the book published at Senses of Cinema.

The article was like a perfect storm for me - a combination of benign climatic conditions that produce a destructive gale. The article combined the work of Stanley Kauffmann, the man who was for decades the doyen of American film criticism, with Cardullo, who is becoming a by-word for literary thievery, with Senses of Cinema, the very website at which I published in 2007 the first public notice of Cardullo's plagiarism.  

In the interests of the truth, that most elusive of chimeras, I contacted the director publishing house, expressing my outrage that Cardullo should bestow on himself the honor of editing the work of a man from whom he stole on repeated occasions. The director (who shall remain shameless) responded by saying that she doesn't plan on publishing a new book with Cardullo, but that I shouldn't make such formal accusations of plagiarism to a publisher "without solid proof." We went back and forth more than a dozen times about my proof before I realized that I was whipping a dead horse.

Her replies to my insistence that she had published the work of a well-known plagiarist were disingenuous, I think, of even a "small press" (her words) publisher. Evidently bothered by my use of the words "make money," the publisher defended herself by informing me that the pittance that such "academic books" earn is scant justification for plagiarism. Then she asked me if I had contacted Yale University Press and all the other publishers Cardullo has taken advantage of.

I explained that publications prior to the exposure of Cardullo's plagiarism were outside my reach, but that I regard it as open season for publications of books made since his exposure. I told her that "there is little I can do about the publishers over whose eyes Cardullo has already pulled the wool, so to speak."

Then she told me a little about her job as an editor and that there has to be "solid proof" of plagiarism "in the specific book" already published before they can withdraw the book from print. So even if someone proves that an author has committed plagiarism before, it doesn't disqualify all of his books from consideration for publication. I asked her, if she owned a gallery and someone had informed her that a painting on her wall was the work of a known forger, would she leave it hanging there? To this she wrote, "If I spent an enormous amount of time designing the frame and room etc. for a work by somebody that might have forged other works of art and after I hanged them up somebody said he might have forged stuff before and I hadn't made money for all my work - I'd do what I'm doing now and that's not get any more works from the artist but also not throw away all my work. My design etc. isn't a forgery and you should have some respect for a publisher's work."

So, to paraphrase, I shouldn't interfere with her work with such trivial information about the questionable integrity of an author's work that she has published and I should mind my own business. And to top everything off, she told me that only an author who is a victim of Cardullo's plagiarism has a legitimate grievance. If I spend $700 for an Apple i-phone, only to discover that it isn't a genuine i-phone but a cheap Chinese knock-off, it's only Apple that has a reason to complain?

My business, she then brought to my attention, was akin to an "obsession" with Bert Cardullo, that I was "on a mission" to destroy the man's career and that I might consider seeking therapy. In my last (I promise) email to her, I told her that, given the negligible results of my efforts to inform both publishers and the public of Cardullo's crimes, I wished I had left the Cardullo book I found so many years ago on the shelf at the Anchorage Public Library where I found it. Without realizing it, I was echoing that marvelous thown-away line spoken by Claude Rains near the end of Lawrence of Arabia. Playing the role of Mr. Dryden, he is asked what he thinks about the end of the war in the desert in which Lawrence had played such an important but thankless part. With classic airy resignation, Rains says, "Well, on the whole, I wish I'd stayed in Tunbridge Wells."

The Penalty Box

"I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out."
(Rodney Dangerfield)

It is easily the most thankless task for an expatriate to have to explain to uncomprehending foreigners the behavior of some of his more exceptional countrymen. Not to come across as disloyal, yet doing his best not to misrepresent or excuse them, it too often becomes necessary for him to be dismissive or to downplay what is clearly objectionable or, in the eyes of a foreigner, intolerable.

I watched President Obama's "Town Hall Meeting," which aired on CNN on January 7 - except I watched in on Friday morning here in the East Asia. It reminded me, as all such cozying up to Americans in their living rooms by sitting presidents does, of FDR's "Fireside Chats," broadcast on American radio in the 1930s. Quite skilfully, Roosevelt tried to explain to Americans some of the extraordinary reforms that were being implemented that were intended to alleviate the hardships of the Great Depression.

Similarly, Barack Obama was attempting to calm some of the fears of Second Amendment proponents, who regard his executive actions on incremental gun control as direct assaults on their Constitutional right. I found the program impossible to watch, since I am extremely skeptical of the president's ability to change anyone's mind that he isn't trying to take away their guns or that he is not in favor of further tyrannical encroachments on their liberties.

I am in the habit of drinking my morning coffee(s) while catching up on whatever news events transpired overnight, and for the past few years I have watched events unfold in the States from what has become an increasingly uncomfortable distance. My Filipino housemates have by now grown inured to my exclamations of outrage at the announcement of sometimes heartbreaking "breaking news." They have routinely heard me, just moments after turning the television on, saying "holy shit!" or "Jesus Christ!" at yet another mass shooting, and have learned to gauge the extremity of the event when they hear the words, usually uttered gravely, "oh my god!"

Now that the shootings have become a terrible routine in America, attempts by my foreign friends to get some sastisfactory explanation for them out of me have waned as they saw how incapable I was of ever being able to do so. Nevertheless, I've tried to frame for them the kind of explanation that is somehow analogous to other comparable outrages.

I remember when, in 1990, I watched Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait and, as armies of a coalition opposing that invasion readied themselves to push him out of Kuwait, he threatened to use the foreigners stranded in Baghdad - mostly diplomats and reporters - as "human shields" when the imminent "Desert Storm" was unleashed. There was a terrible moment when, in front of television cameras, Saddam brought out an American family and tried as gently as he was capable to embrace a boy who was perhaps ten. The boy was obviously terrified of Saddam. When I first saw the video, it was on NBC's Today Show. Fred Rogers, of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, was on the show and he was asked how he would explain that video to children. He surprised me, and took my breath away, when Rogers said simply, "I would tell the child that we do things differently here."

We do things differently in America. That's how I try to explain to my foreign friends why some Americans cling so tenaciously - and childishly - to a completely outdated amendment to their constitution. But when I'm in a generous mood I try to explain the actions of my countrymen like this -

In 1998-99 when the NBA Player's Association failed to reach an agreement with the team owners, there was a lock-out that drove many fans to despair and some others away from the sport in disgust. With no basketball games to be aired during prime time, the TV networks and cable sports channels looked around for a suitable alternative to basketball. The only other professional league sport that was available during that time of year (October to May) that was relatively familiar to American sports fans was the National Hockey League.

So the networks and sports channels aired professional hockey games for a few weeks, hoping that basketball fans would take to them. Hockey is the national sport in Canada, and there have been teams in American cities like Boston, New York, Detroit, and Pittsburgh for decades. The popularity that hockey has enjoyed in the States, however, never presented the NBA or the NFL with serious competition.

When the initial reactions of fans to the introduction of hockey to prime time telecasts came in, it became clear that professional hockey simply wasn't ready for prime time. So television producers approached NHL owners and coaches and presented them with a suggestion: if they could somehow try to control or eliminate what they called the "Gonzo element" of pro hockey - i.e., the violence - they could attract (at least as long as the NBA lock-out lasted) a much broader audience.

The NHL owners and coaches politely considered the suggestion. Then they politely informed the TV producers that if they did anything to control the violence in hockey, they would drive away their diehard fans, the ones for whom the Gonzo element is what is most distinctive and vital about the sport.

America, I tell my foreign friends, wouldn't be the same country, for the better or the worse, without its Gonzo element.

Mutatis Mutandis

For my first post of the new year, I wanted to do more than make a fresh start. Going through some old emails recently that I'd saved to a gmail account back in 2005, I came across the following email that I sent to a friend nineteen years ago. I had been in touch with a mutual friend who gave my email address to him. He asked in his subject line, "Are you the Dan I used to know?" 



Subj: The Dan you used to know?
Date: 96-12-09 19:01:14 EST 
From: Asiahand 
To: J*********@iri.org


John,
I read your message the very day, in fact just two hours after, you sent it. This long it's taken me to frame a reply. What follows is everything I am prepared to divulge for now regarding your friend Dan Harper, who sometimes mentioned your name to me during my brief acquaintance with him. I last saw Dan Harper on May 31st 1995. My first meeting with him occurred just two months prior when I happened to attend his wedding in Balibago in the Philippines. He had arrived in the Philippines earlier in March after his detachment from the Navy in Okinawa. He had managed to separate overseas rather than return to the States, which he frequently assured me was unthinkable. I was one of only two other Americans at the wedding, which is probably why we wound up getting acquainted.

I had been living in Balibago with a girlfriend for more than a year, overstaying my visa by several months. This would eventually have resulted in an expensive fine and maybe a stay in jail if I ever decided to leave the country. I was totally broke, living off the generosity of my girlfriend,her family, and a handful of fellow expatriates - Australians - for whom I performed occasional business transactions which I won't specify here.

My prospects of ever leaving the country were remote, until I met Dan. He was "disaffected," to use his own word, with the States, and wished to remain in the Philippines for as long as he possibly could. He had some cash, but it was dwindling rather quickly what with the expense of his wedding and reception (food and drink for 100+, his wife's gown, etc.) and his wife's extravagances. He felt quite swept away by the whole experience.

We became drinking buddies as the weeks went by and his 90-day visa slowly elapsed. His wife wanted him to return to the States and apply for her own immigrant visa (every Filipinos' dream). Dan tried repeatedly to persuade her to let him stay and support himself on the GI Bill benefits he could draw by attending the local university in Angeles City. I knew many ex-servicemen who were doing this - $400 a month is a king's ransom in parts of the Philippines. But she stonewalled.

After another month of this, we came up with a plan to save both our skins. Dan and I were sitting in a bar called Margaritaville on Fields Avenue (sorry, but the details are significant) along what used to be the perimeter of Clark Air Force Base, abandoned since the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in '91. We had played a little pool and were just wasting the rest of the afternoon in the shade of the bar, sipping San Miguels and watching the traffic on Fields pick up as evening fell. This was a full-time activity for alot of expats.

Dan was staring at the barmaid when he started telling me how there was nothing more in the world he wanted right then than to climb aboard a banana boat and head south somewhere, to "disappear." He looked at me and I knew he wasn't joking. He pulled a scrap of paper out of his wallet and handed it to me. I unfolded it and found a handwriiten poem - "The Voyage to Secrecy" it was called. It had something to do with wanting to go to a place where you could never be found again. I asked Dan if he'd written it, but he said he only wished he had.

We spent the evening coming up with a plan: he and I would switch identities - he assuming my dead-end life in the Philippines, and I going back to the States. Though we were far from look-alikes, there was never any question of taking over each other's lives. Once the switch was made, he would cut all ties with whomever he and I knew in Balibago and "head south," just as he said. I would simply use his passport to get home on the cheapest flight available.

His wife wasn't to know, but I was to proceed with her immigrant visa anyway and get her to the States. She arrived here in Colorado last June 20th. She was surprised to see me and thought it was all a joke for the first few weeks. Now she doesn't seem to mind, and we've grown rather close. Filipinas are nothing if not practical.

The last time I saw Dan was the night of May 31st, as I said before. He had arranged a bus ticket to Manila for me and enough cash to get me to the airport, that's all. I made arrangements for my sister to collect me once I arrived Stateside. All he had was a rucksack with clothes and a few books - everything he figured he needed in his new life. He asked me if I wanted his dress blue Navy uniform, but I declined. I'll never forget his last words just before I boarded the Philippine Rabbit bus: just a simple "goodbye and good luck."

He smiled and walked off toward MacArthur Highway. I never saw or heard from him him again - unless it was a postcard I got on what was his 38th birthday last May. On the card was a typical tourist photo of a pretty young Filipina in native dress. The postmark was from Jolo on the island of Sulu way down where the Philippines meets Borneo. The message was a line from the Old testament: "And the Pharoah said unto Joseph: forasmuch as God hath showed thee all this..." Nothing else. It wasn't signed.

I know this must sound more than a little daft. I figure Dan would've wanted you to know the whole story. I still don't know if you're quite prepared to believe it. I'm alive and I'm here in the States thanks to Dan and I'm telling you now: Believe it!


"Dan"


What my friend couldn't have known was exactly how much I wanted this fantasy to be true. I was out of the Navy, living with my sister in Aurora, Colorado, and my wife, who had arrived from the Philippines in June, was living with me. From the day of my departure from the Philippines after I married her until her arrival in the States with a visa it had taken 385 days, due to two government shut-downs and my wife's indecision about abandoning everything she had known to come and live with a man she barely knew. Then there was the strain of three people living under the same roof of a small two bedroom apartment. I was working a dead-end job, facing the realization that I had committed to myself to a life I didn't want.

Four months after I sent this email I joined the Army. Clearly, I was looking for a way to regain what I had lost in the Navy, which was, believe it or not, a sense of freedom and a position of strength from which I could get a better look at my life. After six months of training, the Army sent me to Korea, unaccompanied. It was this second separation that broke what was left of my marriage.

I got out of the Army in 2000 and got out of my marriage in '01. Not knowing exactly what to do with my life, I drifted for the next five years until I hit on the idea of going back to the Philippines. After everything that had happened to me, there was still, it seemed to me, this parallel life of mine going on somewhere in the Philippines. I had found happiness there and expected (foolishly) to find it again. I went back in November 2007. In early 2008, I boarded a bus instead of a banana boat and went south. I didn't go as far as Sulu, "way down where the Philippines meets Borneo," but I came far enough to find myself, still there - here - after almost eight years, effectively lost.  The poem I used to carry in my wallet, written by Norman Cameron, asked the question, "How many days the voyage to secrecy?" The speaker of the poem wanted nothing more than to get lost. I accomplished it. But now I want to be found again.

I have led a hazardous life these eight years. I have lost nearly everything, and, in so doing, I have discovered precisely how much I possessed in my life in the States. What seemed directionless then seems amazingly purposeful to me now. And now I want it back. Before I can make a fresh start, I have to stop.