One-legged Civil War veteran Dan Evans (Christian Bale) volunteers to help escort artsy outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to justice so that he can earn $200 and save his farm-and-family from rich landowners. Wade's gang and Evans' son ride close behind.
Twenty minutes longer and about the same amount more illogical than Delmer Daves' well-remembered original, James Mangold's mangled 3:10 to Yuma survives on one factor alone: its posse of hard-nosed, gun-slinging actors. Without the cover of these guns, Mangold wouldn't survive a quarter hour in Apache country; with them, he survives twice that—before getting plugged in the gut and left to dry to death in the desert. No one comes to the funeral. As for the film's style: it's a compliment to even use the word. Utterly graceless, Mangold manages to strip the Western of its mythology without substituting anything in its place. It ain't opera, it ain't realistic, it ain't anything but plain stupid. Oh, and the changes Mangold and friends made to the actual story don't make a whiff of sense. It's all just rotten.
A post with some images from David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Although I'm not usually a fan of Cronenberg's works (a notable exception being Videodrome), this one's truly great—so cleanly and precisely made, from one frame to the next until the last:
Blood is to be expected in a Cronenberg film, but it's rarely blood in any one context. In just the first three scenes of Eastern Promises, for example, we see already three different contexts: murder, illness, birth.
I wasn't sure where to put this still, but I wanted to include it for two reasons. First, the character is played by Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski. He does a passable job—and I doubt you'd find too many Poles willing to pass up the chance to play a Russian stereotype—but how strange to see him in an American film!
Second, what an international and culturally-perceptive film this is. There's a scene near the beginning in which a Russian teenager staggers into a London pharmacy where the pharmacist, an Indian, is speaking to an Indian woman in Hindi. The girl, who you might imagine is British if only because she is white, suddenly asks for help in heavily-accented English. She's Russian. The pharmacist answers in his differently-accented English. And the girl collapses in a pool of blood. English: the international language...
Kirill and Nikolai, two Russian mobsters in London. Both excellently played by, respectively, Vincent Cassel and Viggo Mortensen.
Another neat shot.
And, what they're looking at:
As Kirill says, he's just an ice cream now.
Nikolai ready to conduct some business.
And ready to conduct another type of business.
And ready to conduct yet another type of business.
However, this sexual politics aspect of the film is probably its greatest weakness. But that's down to Steven Knight's story, which is quite soapy and overwrought. What makes Eastern Promises a good film is Cronenberg's vision and direction—his ability to make myth out of soap.
Nikolai especially gets the iconic treatment. Some of the compositions and poses are quite stunning.
This one, for example, comes during a graceful slow pan across a seated Nikolai as he reads from a dead girl's journal. I like the way the three lamps—foreground, middleground, background—shift their relative on screen positions and, at one point, arrange in a diagonal. It gives a fantastic depth to the image.
From here, Cronenberg cuts to:
A close-up on Nikolai's face, rendered through dramatic lighting.
Another creative shot comes at the end of that scene: Nikolai through a flame. The moving image looks much better, but there's something sinister about the way, in this frame, the flame appears to engulf his face.
A shot that isn't so dark as the others! But it makes an interesting point: the whole film is very posed and conscious of where actors appear on the screen. Also, is it just my eyes, or is there a clear vertical separation of light from dark here?
Another lighter tough: Nikolai places a wayward cherry on a plate of fruit. Notice how the white boxes complete the composition.
A rare shot without any people! Although that'll change soon enough...
Another unconventional one. Looks like it fell into the film by accident, from a passing science fiction flick!
Returning to Nikolai, however, yields another dramatic shot. Off-center, off-kilter, and very fitting. But I dare not say too much.
Other than that there will be blood...
A scene to be seen. One of Cronenberg's best. If the film seems to slow down afterwards, how could it not? Incidentally, to criticize the film for its ending—as many critics have done—is, I think, to miss the point.
I want to finish with this one not because it's the most important, but, simply, because I want to ask a question:
Jean Gabin in Port of Shadows?
Two years ago, when Cronenberg's A History of Violence came out, I didn't "get" it. Although I'm still not as convinced about Cronenberg as some, Eastern Promises is one of the best of 2007.
Vignettes from the life of St. Francis of Assisi (Brother Nazario Gerardi): 12th-century Italian mendicant monk, humble speaker to animals, and self-proclaimed fool of God. Small-of-staure, big-of-spirit Franciscan follower Ginapro (Fra' Severino Pisacane) shares main character duties.
Nestled between Rossellini's war films and his existential Bergman phase, the too-seldom seen Francis, God's Jester (known in the US by the sapless title The Flowers of St. Francis) is a near-masterwork of religious simplicity. Containing almost no narrative flow, a poorly dubbed soundtrack, and a cast of mostly amateurs (monks and a beggar), the film succeeds because of its humble evocation of Franciscan spiritual values—due, appropriately enough, much to these very "flaws". What makes the film truly reverential, however, is its functional austerity. Rossellini doesn't stick to his spare style in arrogant showmanship: when the camera should move, it moves; when the angle should change, it changes. Perhaps, in film historical context, we could call this post-realism, or spiritual realism? Or, perhaps we could simply say that it's influential, both in its religious themes and depiction of medieval Europe. Unfortunately, for every moment and vignette that's brilliant (a near-silent scene in which Francis meets a wandering leper is especially striking), there's one which seem merely good. But, if God made fools to confound the wise, and the weak to confuse the strong, perhaps there is still greatness to be found in the whole. A quiet, beautiful film.
The diary of a dead pregnant Russian teenager spells danger for an English nurse (Naomi Watts) after she delivers the dying girl's baby to a London hospital and her diary to a dangerous Russian mob boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Enter two Russian mobsters, the frozen Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) and overheated Kirill (Vincent Cassel), a Chechen corpse, and a former KGB officer turned nurse's Uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), and you've got yourself a sudsy crime story. David Cronenberg makes it legendary.
Cronenberg is a cinematic surgeon: cold, clean, perversely fond of blood, and deadly precise. And what he creates with Eastern Promises is only a few minutes short of a two-hour long series of the year's most well-crafted frames set on a story that could have so easily gone so badly wrong. While, in essence, there's little here we haven't already seen elsewhere—and critics have exaggerated the film's thematic depth—damn, if it isn't visually spectacular and incredibly compact. Which is to say nothing about the climactic bathhouse two-versus-one knife fight! That, you've never seen before. Idea, visuals, sound: riveting. Acting is great all-around, too, with Mortensen often iconic. Although not quite a masterpiece, as solid as films get. A perfect exercise in technique.
Nerdy American salesman reared on TV's The Office (Josh Hamilton) gets sent to backwater India to train his Indian replacement. The catch: he can't return to America until his bumbling Indian employees become good at their jobs. This, incidentally, leaves him just enough time to fall in love with India, an Indian (Ayesha Dharker), and go through the motions they teach in one-night screenwriting classes.
It's amazing how clean and full of neurotic, Americanized—though suspiciously brown—Indians India is in Outsourced. Bland white guy hero fits right in. As does Jeffcoat's camera, which frames up and moves along in proud sitcom-like glory, capturing the whole film in the style they'd use if they ever made a half-hour weekly comedy about Tupperware: beat by beat, but without rhythm. Story isn't much better, matching ball-less comedy with ball-less romance, ending on a shiny message, and reducing Indian culture to a novelty item so that it can sell it to us over the phone. And why the hell is it all so joyless? Parting thoughts: political correctness has neutered the cross-cultural film.
Based on a true story. Gangster and heroin kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) rises in Vietnam-era New York, then meets righteous cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) and falls—in that obligatory gangster meets good cop kind of way. Corruption, family troubles, and well-executed familiarity watch from a nearby car.
Any "epic" crime film that climaxes in a Church is trying a bit hard to be obvious. But, when it's competently done, do we really care? After all, Ridley Scott certainly doesn't have a problem with it, lending his cream to a crop that fulfills even as it fails to delight. Which is not to say that American Gangster is at all tasteless—if anything, it seems oddly subdued—but it does lack its own taste. In fact, I often wonder if Scott even knows what his own cream tastes like anymore. Probably like money. Lots and lots of money. Incidentally, is the film's first scene a visual pun on one of his brother's Denzel Washington flicks? Oh, and I wish Scott would stop-already with those "oh, look, this shows the irony of America" parallelling intercuts. His film's strength is not any kind of intellectual or emotional weight; it's its professional polish.
Not a genuine American Gangster. But better than a Chinese American Gangster knock-off. Hence, a bit lighter on the lead than you might expect, too.
Based on a true story. German-born, American naval pilot Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) gets shot down over Laos in 1966, is captured by the communist Pathet Lao, and ends up in a POW camp with other Americans (Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies) and fellow-travellers. Together, they plot their escape.
Making narrative out of a story he already shot as a documentary (1997's Little Dieter Needs to Fly), Herzog loses himself somewhere on the borderland of Herzog and Hollywood. Neither here nor there, with a man-against-nature story that's comfortably the former yet packaged as something completely the latter, a weirdly campy performance by Bale, and a sectional parody of Green Berets-era Vietnam flicks, the film follows the conventions of the prisoner bust-out genre within the slightly-askew visual style of the man who domesticated Klaus Kinski. For fans of the German director's work, however, some greatest hits moments—crazed men on a raft!—as well as some strange omissions: Dieter Dengler met a bear, and little Werner didn't care? Other failings: eerie lack of historical period that lends itself to perhaps-unwanted politicizing, and plain weird diaogue—a strength of Herzog, but bad in Hollywood. Still, great moments exist; and your cinematic year of 2006 will never be complete until you experience the simply sweeping, majestic camera movement across a bamboo wall with which Herzog grants his characters freedom.
Little Dieter gets a pilot's license. Still listening to Tom Petty.
Robert Dziekanski, a 40-year old construction worker from the small town of Pieszyce, Poland, died on October 14, 2007 after four Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers used a taser on him in British Columbia's Vancouver International Airport.
Cold
The purpose of Dziekanski's flight from Poland to Canada was the ever-present immigrant dream: to start a new life. His mother, Zofia Cisowska, who was also his sponsor for permanent resident status, had—in a twist perhaps too cruel for even Hollywood—"worked two jobs for seven years to save enough money for her only child to join her in Canada." (source)
It was Robert Dziekanski's first flight.
But, much like Viktor Navorski, the character played by Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg's film The Terminal who finds himself trapped in New York's JFK airport after arriving in the United States, once on the ground in Canada, Dziekanski quickly became lost and disoriented in a place where no one spoke his language and hardly anyone paid attention to him.
After clearing his passport, he sat down and waited in the baggage area where his mother had agreed to meet him.
More than six hours went by.
The problem, it turned out, was that the baggage area was "secure"; Dziekanski's mother was not allowed inside. So, as Dziekanski sat and waited—no doubt growing thirstier, hungrier, and more confounded as time slowly went by—Zofia Cisowska, mere yards away, tried to alert the airport to her situation. It's an image as cinematic as it is powerful and tragic: a long shot whose close ups will never come together.
Three times, Zofia Cisowska told airport staff about her son and asked for their help. Three times, they did nothing. Finally, after several hours, she was informed that her son had simply not arrived in Canada—and she made the 350km drive back to her home in Kamloops.
At 12:30am, eight and a half hours after landing in Vancouver, Dziekanski cleared the second phase of customs and arrived at one of the airport's public areas as an official immigrant.
By 1:00am, there are reports by witnesses in the aiport that Dziekanski is growing visibly frustrated and angry.
By 1:26am, it's reported that Dziekanski has thrown a chair through a window and looks to be drunk.
By 1:28am, four RCMP officers arrive to deal with the problem.
By 1:30am, Dziekanski has been hit by a taser and subdued by the RCMP. He loses consciousness. No CPR is attempted. Paramedics are called, and arrive fourteen minutes later.
Some time after, the phone rings in a home in Kamloops and Zofia Cisowska picks up. Her son—the one she had been told had never arrived in Canada—is dead.
Spark
At this point, the situation seems mostly clear. The police make a few statements to explain everything. An immigrant arrives in Canada. He's an Eastern European. He's probably drunk or intoxicated in some way. He becomes enraged and starts causing havoc in the airport by throwing chairs and computers, and endangering other people's lives. The airport staff try but can't calm him down. Neither can security. They seal him down. He won't talk to anyone, and is becoming more and more violent. Eventually, the RCMP arrive, and try various ways to calm him down. Nothing works. As a last resort, they taser him. Tragically, something goes wrong—probably a medical condition, possibly the intoxicants in his body—and he reacts adversely to the shock. He loses consciousness, no one can revive him, he dies.
In a statement to the press, RCMP spokesman Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre reiterates, very clearly and specifically, that three RCMP officers tried to hold Dziekanski down after they approached him (source).
He also said that "the officers were using gestures saying, you know, relax, relax, put your hands on the desk there where the computer was taken; to no avail, [he was] still throwing things around" and that "the officers tried to speak to him, tried to calm him down, but he continued to throw things around and yell and scream." (source) The taser was a last resort. It was justified. Dziekanski could not be handled in any other way.
Very little seems contentious now. It was all the tragic end to an unfortunate situation that had been handled the best way possible. Sad, but unavoidable.
But, days, weeks later counter-details begin to emerge: eyewitnesses telling a slightly different story, toxicology results that reveal Dziekanski was neither drunk nor high at the time of his death.
And then, words collide head-on with images: there's footage. One of the bystanders has captured everything on video. The entire confrontation is suddenly visible.
This footage gets taken away, held, then, after some haggling, some threats of legal action, given back to the person who took it.
Strike the match, light the fuse.
Ignition
The video of Dziekanski's death hits the Canadian news channels. Then it hits the American news channels. Then it hits the Internet. It transcends the national, and becomes international (note: the video has already been used to ban taser use in New Zealand, for example). Within a day, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world are seeing the final minutes of Dziekanski's life: non-Poles watching the death of a Pole in Canada. Although the quality of the original image is high, most people see the video in low definition, on television, on YouTube. The impact is heightened, the images direct.
Both television and internet video—the only two ways the footage has ever been seen by the public—are what Marshall McLuhan calls "cool" media: low information, high participation. The low resolution of both means that the viewer has to fill in informationthat a "hot" medium would itself provide.
Dziekanski's death thus becomes personalized.
For those who don't speak Polish, a YouTube user from New Zealand has translated Dziekanski's last words. Seeing that he's being approached by police, he pleads:
"I want to get out, help me find the way... Police! Police! Can't you help me?"
Blowup
In Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blowup, a fashion photographer snaps off a roll of seemingly innocent photographs at a public park. When he takes the photos to his lab and starts to develop them, however, he's overwhelmed by a sudden sense of horror: the pictures he's taken—far from being innocent—may actually be proof of murder.
With that in mind, consider these statements made by Paul Pritchard, the man who caught Dziekanski's death on video (via Globe and Mail):
In a CBC radio interview yesterday, Mr. Pritchard confessed he had two completely different reactions to what happened. On video, much of the episode seems to unfold in an eerie calm. Yet, at the time, as an eyewitness, Mr. Pritchard felt the situation was anything but serene.
"In fact, the original interviews and my statements were the complete opposite," he recounted. "Our opinions of him [Mr. Dziekanski] were: Here's a man, he's distraught, he's throwing things and he's yelling in a foreign language."
"Believe me, I was 100 per cent on the police side up to this point. As far as I was concerned, the cops came in and they did their job. ... I remember the cops running in there, and I thought there was this aggressive behaviour."
[...]
"Not until I got the footage back and I took some time to go through it again [did I realize that the atmosphere] was so calm. Bone-chilling calm. ... I can see it live in front of me. There was no need to use the taser. They had time. ... It was a complete misuse of the taser. It didn't need to be done."
Here, though, the Antonioni comparison breaks down: whereas much of the point of Blowup is that the dark blur—which may or may not be a dead body—in one of the public park photographs will never be more than a blur, no matter how closely or in what context we look at it, the video of Robert Dziekanski's death is of Robert Dziekanski's death.
If anything, what Pritchard describes as the "serene" quality of the video is actually perception devoid of, not coloured by, emotion or emotional interpretation.
The Globe and Mail piece goes on:
Despite their clarity, videos do not record tension, emotions or accumulated anxiety. Nor do they provide context or background.
That is exactly what the RCMP will be focusing on as they try to justify to millions of appalled viewers why four of their officers decided in a matter of seconds that the only way to corral Mr. Dziekanski was to taser him, pin him roughly to the ground, and taser him again.
The Mounties have already downgraded the video from "evidence vital to the investigation" - their description when they initially refused Mr. Pritchard's demand to return it - to "only one piece of evidence," now that the footage is in the public domain.
The people attempting the "blowup", then, will be the RCMP. As their lawyers take Pritchard's video—which we can substitute for one of the Antontioni's single photographs—and attempt to simultaneously place it in the context of other photographs (testimony, memories, the narrative of the hours before the death) and zoom in ever closer on its details, trying to prove, with the help of ever-decreasing fidelity that, without a doubt, Dziekanski was a menace who needed to be tasered.
Already, police have started calling into question the exact usefulness of the video. It's only one camera's point of view, one spokesman told a news show recently. But what is it, exactly, that another camera's point of view would show? Would the same scene viewed in medium-close up reveal that Robert Dziekanski was pointing a gun at the RCMP officers, would a sudden shot-reverse-shot reveal that he had a bomb strapped to his chest and was threatening to detonate?
If there's one thing that Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon has taught us, it's that while multiple points of view may propose multiple murderers, they do not change the fact of the murder.
Meanwhile, on a radio program, a retired police chief defended the actions of the officers by giving that most politically-convenient of answers—that such a response is required in a "post-9/11 world". To which the radio host responded with an appropriately blunt question:
Do these four officers look like heroes to you?
Fallout Were the four RCMP officers following protocol? And, therefore, is the system at fault? Did the men overstep their boundaries and act on their own initiative? Is it their fault? How many times can you hit someone with 50,000 volts before endangering their lives? And what constitutes endangering someone's life: tipping over a computer, throwing a stool?
And what about the airport itself: why was a Polish interpreter never brought in, why was someone carrying a Polish passport—after ten hours—still identified as speaking Russian?
Spike Lee highlighted this exact situation in his 2006 film Inside Man, in which police officers lead a frantic search to first identity a "foreign" language, and then another to find an Albanian translator in New York City. Fortunately for the fictional inhabitants of that film's world, heroism was not defined by playing it by the book; "just following orders" was overcome by human conscience and individual initiative.
On the flip side: Welcome to Canada, home of the immigrant and holy temple of multiculturalism. Welcome to Vancouver, host of the 2010 Olympic Games.
And yet, if there's at least one thing in the least bit hopeful in the video of this man's death, it's what several bloggers have already pointed out:
As Dziekanski holds a stool, ready to toss it at a window, a woman approaches him and holds out her hand. She doesn't speak Polish, she doesn't know who he is. She just holds out her hand and and says "calm down".
He doesn't calm down. He doesn't understand her. He probably doesn't even hear her.
But, perhaps, this cuts to the heart of the whole matter. I'm reminded of another recent situation at an airport—this one involving detention and interrogation, and brought to my attention by Maya at The Evening Class.
On October 23, Tunisian actor Lotfi Abdelli was detained in a San Francisco airport and questioned for almost five hours because, in the words of airport authorities, "artist or not, you are Arabic, you are young, you have potential." In a subsequent interview, Abdelli added that, while detained, he was never provided a translator, and made the the point that, "sometimes they left me waiting for half an hour and they come back and they ask me again the same questions."
This raises an interesting parallel to the Dziekanski situation: a lack of listening highlighted by the constant need for repetition.
Obviously, communication was a major problem for Dziekanski, his mother, the Vancouver International Airport and the RCMP. But it's striking how much of what was said, hinges on saying the same things more than once.
The most obvious and startling example is also the most graphic. After having hit Dziekanski with the taser once—his scream bloodcurdling and his body writhing on the floor—one of the RCMP officers commands:
Hit him again.
Hit him again.
Ashes
"Aglaya rushed quickly up to him, and was just in time to receive him in her arms, and to hear with dread and horror that awful, wild cry as he fell writhing to the ground."
"Imagine what must have been going on in that man's mind at such a moment; what dreadful convulsions his whole spirit must have endured; it is an outrage on the soul that's what it is. Because it is said thou shalt not kill."
There's a chapter in Richard Pipes' Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime titled "The Assault on Religion". In this chapter, Pipes covers the oft-forgotten campaign against religion that Lenin and his Bolsheviks devised and carried out in the post-revolutionary years.
Although Russia's Orthodox Church bore the brunt of this campaign, the Catholics and Jews also suffered. In fact, of the four major religions in Russia, only Islam fared slightly better than the others—and, even then, only because Lenin had designs on the Middle East and didn't want to blacken relations with the Middle Eastern Muslims he hoped to use against the imperialist West.
The tactics employed in this struggle varied, but they can be divided into two groups. In the metaphor of Bolshevik Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharskii, there were those that hit the religious nail straight on the head—lynchings of clergy, ransacking of churches and synagogues—and those that grabbed the nail and tried to pull it out—leaving the Church hierarchy in place, but taking the religion out of the people. The latter are by far the more insidious and interesting.
One such tactic was to undermine the Orthodox Church by placing it in a lose-lose situation. And it was the Church itself that gave Lenin the idea.
After famine broke out in Russia, the Church offered to donate its non-holy artifacts (it had both holy and non-holy artifacts) to help relieve the situation. Lenin refused the offer—and, sensing a chance to strike, instead asked the Church to donate its holy artifacts. The Church now faced a choice: agree, and undermine the holiness of the artifacts; or disagree, and be seen as hoarding treasure while fellow Russians are starving? It disagreed, unwilling to give up its tradition and authority, but offered to raise money equivalent to the value of its holy artifacts through donation and the selling of other property. Lenin again refused. What followed was a campaign—inspired and headed by Trotsky—of confiscations that pitted Orthodox Russians against Orthodox Russians, as those protecting their local churches fought those attempting to break in and steal whatever they could find. As the campaign expanded, even the Vatican got involved: offering to pay the Bolsheviks money equal to the value of both Catholic and Orthodox property that was to be confiscated. Yet again, Lenin refused. The theft continued and violence escalated. Pipes describes as, in particularly gruesome and probably representative fashion, one bishop was taken from his church, "had his cheeks hollowed, his ears and nose cut off, and his eyes gouged: thus disfigured he was driven through the city and then thrown into a river to drown."
Though many details about this campaign are now lost, a few still remain: Soviet documents rveal, for example, that in 1922 around 8,000 people were killed "in the conflict over church valuables". Also, the actual final value of the confiscated property was, according to Moscow newspaper Izvestia, "ridiculously small" (not the officially announced "8 trillion rubles"), and, regardless, not used to help starving peasants anyway. Let them eat cake, I guess.
Another Bolshevik tactic, and the one that especially struck me, was the use of atheist counter-rituals to mock and ridicule Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish traditions. At Christmas-time, for example, the Bolsheviks organized a "Komsomol Christmas", which constituted staging parades in which people carried caricature-effigies of various religious symbols and images and sung anti-religious songs ("We need no rabbis, we need no priests / Beat the bourgeoisie, strangle the kulaks"). When it came to Russian children, the angels and saints that had been previously used to "enslave the child's mind" were replaced with more appropriate entertainment: "satires on the Lausanne Conference, the Kerensky regime, and the bourgeois life abroad".
The actual reason I'm shamelessly plagiarizing Pipes' book, however, is a very specific aspect of this atheist ritualism. As Pipes describes it:
"In Gomel, which had a mixed population, a 'trial' of Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish 'gods' represented by effigies took place in the theater. The judges, assisted by the audience, condemned them to an auto-da-fe, following which, on Christmas Day, they were ceremoniously burned in the city square."
And, Pipes quoting Zvi Getelman's A Century of Ambivalence:
"On Rosh Hashanah, in 1921, the Jewish religion was 'tried' in Kiev, ironically, in the same auditorium where the Beilis trial had been held. The 'judges' saw a strange array of 'witnesses': a 'rabbi' testified solemnly that he taught religion in order to keep the masses ignorant and subservient; an obese 'bourgeoisie' , bedecked in glittering jewelry, testified to the alliance between the exploiters and Judaism. The 'prosecutor'... demanded a 'sentence of death for the Jewish religion.' A Hebrew teacher who rose from the audience to defend Judaism was arrested on the spot. The 'judges' returned from their chambers and, to no one's surprise, announced a death verdict."
Because my trains of thought always arrive at cinema, I was struck by how similar these Bolshevik "trials" were to Abderrahmane Sissako's recent film Bamako, in which Malians stage a "trial" of—well, I'll let The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw explain:
"On trial is nothing less than the system of globalised capital, in the form of the World Bank and the [International Monetary Fund]. Prosecuting counsels and ferocious witnesses denounce African debt to these figures as a loan-sharking scam for which the lenders have sought out and cultivated a corrupt apparatchik-clientele [!] to wave through the arrangements, which turn the continent into an income-stream milch cow, and ensure that by having to spend nearly all its resources on servicing eternal debt, Africa will never be rich enough to develop indigenous industries, and so continue to be a captive market for the west's manufactured goods.
No opposite point of view is seriously advanced..."
Although I don't mean to compare Sissako to Lenin or equate their concerns—the Bolshevik show trials were conducted from a position of power, Bamako comes from a position of powerlessness, is but one important difference—but the form and function of both "trials" are similar. For example, the show part is emphasized in both: Judaism was on trial before an audience; Bamako is a film meant for an international audience. Tied to that, performance plays a key role in each: stage actors in Russia, film actors in Mali. In terms of bias, counter-arguments are twice silenced, as one side controls the entire "production": the Hebrew teacher is removed from the audience; Sissako controls what is filmed and what makes it into the film's final cut. Not to mention that both are, quite literally, scripted trials! And, finally, on trial are not people, but institutions, concepts: the various religions in Russia; and, as Cynthia Fuchs of PopMatters calls it, "the West’s diverse abuses of Africa" in Bamako.
On a related note, some interesting historical context (describing 1960s Mali; Sissako was born in 1962) to keep in mind when watching Bamako. From "The Impact of Communism on West Africa", an article by Walter Kolarz published in the journal International Affairs in 1962:
"Anyone travelling in French-speaking Africa and investigating the impact of Communism there will have to admit that the French Communist Party is 'discharging its duty' to the best of its ability. The party is doing its duty to world Communism not only by pumping Communist literature into Guinea and Mali but also, and even more, by putting trusted Communist Party members at the disposal of the African nationalist regimes. These French Communists do not occupy any high political posts, but they have been placed in positions where they can do a great deal to carry Marxist ideas into the decisive, literate sections of African society. French Communists are to be found, for instance, in the new African Workers' University in Conakry, in the State Research Organization of the Republic of Guinea, and in the editorial office of the only daily newspaper published in the Republic of Mali. French Communists have also been prominently associated with drawing up Mali's first long-term economic plan."
And, from John N. Hazard's "Marxian Socialism in Africa: The Case of Mali", in the October 1969 edition of Comparative Politics:
"Will the communists of Eastern Europe and Asia leave the new Malian regime free to develop as it wishes? This seems unlikely, for Mali has long been the brightest star in Africa for communists of the U.S.S.R. and China. When slogans were published annually on Soviet holidays, the greetings to Mali were placed immediately after the group of greetings to people within the inner group of fourteen members of the Marxian socialist commonwealth. Hope ran high that Mali would adhere to the group, although no such adherence was proclaimed.
[...]
Mali remains too important as a focal point in Africa for operations and for proof of the viability of the Marxian socialist system for the U.S.S.R. and China to leave it alone, unless all hope has to be abandoned. The Marxist East has done better in Mali than elsewhere in training large numbers of Malians, and this group cannot be expected to remain silent once the first flush of excitement abates. Social revolution takes time, and Marxists do not permit themselves to become discouraged by what they believe to be no more than temporary setbacks in the progress of the dialectic of history."
In his youth, after being born in Mauritania and brought up in Mali, Sissako travelled to Moscow, where he studied, mingled with communists from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, and, in 1982, enrolled in the Russian State Institute of Cinema. What he learned there, what his politics are, I don't know.
But he's sure filmed an interesting show trial. Lenin would be proud. Long lives the revolution.
Based on a story by Jerome Bixby. Six academics and a student walk into a retirement party. The retiree, young-looking John Oldman (David Lee Smith) turns to them and says: I'm 14,000 years old. That's the set-up. The punchline lasts for the next 80 minutes.
For a poorly acted, badly shot film with stilted dialogue and one indoor setting (that actually loses props as it goes on!), The Man from Earth is pretty good. See: unlike most low budget fare, which relies on cheap gore, big boobies and crotch-and-bong jokes, Man exploits ideas. Granted, there's nothing in the film that justifies an Internet's-worth of "mind blowing" and "belief challenging" superlatives—unless you really, really like Dan Brown, I guess—but it's not dumb by any means. Just think of those 1950s sci-fi yarns about the golden-haired space adventurer rescuing the space princess from the evil Drathkon on Octar8: the actual plot may be silliness itself, but there's something about that description of Octar8's fauna that betrays more than a simple glimpse of biology.
