Hasan Arbakesh

I started this series on East European film of the 1960s and this film from Tajikistan will be the second installment. I know it's a bit of a stretch, a 10,000 kilometre stretch to count Tajikistan, which borders on Afghanistan and China, as part of Eastern Europe, but Hasan Arbakesh (Hasan the cart driver) is so wonderful, so under-appreciated and still so contemporary, I feel its inclusion is justified. Besides there are large swaths of Eastern Europe - Romania, Bulgaria and surprisingly East Germany that don't seem to have produced any cinema of note during the same period.

Hasan Arbakesh was made on location in Tajikistan, the poorest of the Soviet republics, in 1965 by the director Boris Kimyagarov, a Jewish native of Tajikistan, celebrated today as the father of Tajik cinema. 1965 was a time known as the "Thaw," a narrow window of tie when censorship was relaxed and heretofore forbidden topics and themes were explored. Alexander Solzhenitsyn first came to notice during this period.

It's not a technically or artistically innovative film, but well made in every respect. The director obviously has love for his homeland, its scenery and a good many of its folkways. The star, Bimbolat Vatayev, in his first leading role, is full of charisma, singing, dancing, loving, and fighting as well as any hero can be expected to. Hasan Arbakesh is structured as an epic, echoing the Herculean exploits of the Persian bard Ferdowsi's masterwork, Shahnameh. Hasan's horse is named Rakhsh, after Ferdowsi's hero's horse, although the cart he pulls is a disconcertingly crude contraption. The plot culminates in Hasan successfully discharging his tasks but he is left with only the very dubious rewards on offer by the new Soviet regime.

The film is set some time in the 1920s when the dust of the revolution and the civil war is settling but the Soviet ways are not quite accepted. We see the collectivisation, industrialisation and emancipation the Soviets have brought along them them, and while not explicitly condemned, to our characters, the new era brings bitterness, sacrifice and loneliness. All the qualities that made Hasan a hero count for nothing.

Recently I listened to a lecture on how Stalin incorporated Kazakhstan in the USSR, making the rather perverse effort to shape a clan-based nomadic society into a nation. Somehow, having had a national identity retrofitted, so to speak, for them the Kazakh people could more easily pass on to the higher stage of socialism. Now in Hasan Arbakesh, the only nation building I saw going on was of the Soviet variety, but it's worth noting that Kimyagarov drew on precisely the same sort of epic source material that Soviet historians used for their work in Kazakhstan. It seems that whatever the success the Soviets had in instilling a national consciousness in the people of Kazakhstan, their efforts in Tajikistan were a failure. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, Tajikistan was plunged into a vicious clan-based civil war and the non-Tajik inhabitants, predominantly Russians and Jews, fled to Russia.

Perhaps Hasan Arbakesh represents a golden era of Tajikistan, a time of peace, prosperity and artistic license, if not freedom. It also recalls the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, at least as far as the women of Kabul are concerned. In one scene we see the outraged women tearing off their veils and throwing them into a fire! In an era when religious fundamentalism is rising from the Soviet grave, the film has renewed relevance. It´s available via bittorrent by itself which I will try to maintain, or with a group of other central Asian films which I won´t.

Nuclear Test in North Korea Tests Commitment to Peace

US President has called North Korea´s latest detonation of an atomic weapon a ¨provocative act¨ and a threat.

What Obama seems to be missing is that for a nuclear deterrent to work, the weapons have to be functioning and seen to be functioning, and the owners of the weapons have to be seen to have every intention to use them, should the occasion arise. Without these deterrence won´t work. This is true of every nation that possesses nuclear weapons, and I see no reason to expect anything different from North Korea. North Korea, in acquiring nuclear weaponry, has simply put itself on a par with the other nuclear nations. The threats and provocations from North Korea are no different from those of any of the nuclear nations that wish to maintain a credible deterrence.

We see much speculation in the press on how China is finally going to be forced to reign in North Korea. This has been going on for almost a decade now, and North Korea has in this time developed nuclear weapons and gained the ability to launch satellites into space. With the recent election in Japan of the most bellicose government in decades, a government that is directly provoking China herself over the issue of the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands, Korea seems destined for the back burner, at least as far as China is concerned. Nevertheless, after the test, China released a statement calling for peace and stability and a denuclearized Korean peninsula. I think these sentiments might be closer to the hearts of North Korea than the USA and allies.

We might not have noticed, but the week before this test the USA and South Korea were engaged in military exercises in the waters of the peninsula´s east coast. These exercises are routinely held and essentially they are preparing to attack North Korea. Imagine a bunch of guys parked on the street outside your home and going through a dry run on burning down your house and killing you. Most of us would react, and the North Koreans are no different. Last week they condemned the exercises and said they were open to peace talks. No response. This week nuclear tests.

I have to agree with both the Chinese and the North Koreans here. There should, at long last, be peace talks on the Korean peninsula. The Korean war has gone on long enough, and continuing it serves no purpose I can see. It´s a shame that Obama and the USA can´t endorse this idea.

East European Film of the 1960s - Sedmikrasky (Daisies)

I´m thinking that over the next little while, I´ll write about films. Specifically films made in the 1960s in Eastern Europe. I can give three reasons for this.

1) They are not widely known or celebrated.
2) They are available for download over the internet and as far as I know, not subject to copyright (being produced in social countries.)
3) They are noteworthy for being made at a time of world-wide cinematic innovation and exploration in police states undergoing political liberalization.

In short they are unknown treasures that with only the slightest effort are there for the taking.

I´d like to start by introducing a Czech film made in 1966 by the director Vera Chylitova and her husband. It´s titled ¨Sedmikrasky¨ or Daisies in English. It´s available at the Pirate Bay here, so long as you have a bittorrent client. I use this one available here.

Sedmikrasky (I´ll refer to it as Daisies henceforth) is a film about two lively young women who, thinking about what a degenerate and destructive place the world is,  decide to become degenerate themselves. They do this mostly by inveigling older men into taking them out to dinner where they shamelessly over-indulge themselves in food and drink. It is bold, visually compelling, humourous, though without a solid narrative. It´s a Dadaist work that uses anarchic absurdity to attack bourgeois morality.

         Maria 1 and Maria 2 playing with scissors

Daisies was banned on completion and the director had a great deal of difficulty in making other films for a decade. The authorities cited the wastage of food depicted in the film as the reason for the ban. They saw the Dadaist attack on morality for what it was and they were not amused. Most of the commentary on the film I´ve seen on the internet makes the film out to be an attack on communism (mostly because it was made in socialist Czechoslovakia) or a feminist statement (mostly because the two protagonists, Maria 1 and Maria 2 are female.)

I prefer viewing Daisies as a Dadaist Potlatch. Like any Dadaist work, its target is the bourgeois tout court, and not restricted only to the socialist bourgeois of Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Potlatch refers to the gratuitous destruction of property practiced by the natives of the west coast of North America. The practice so offended the morality of the Canadian government of the time, that it was banned. In Daisies, the Dadaist sensibility is obvious in almost every frame, just like ritualistic destruction of the potlatch.

Daisies begins and ends with a credit sequence over scenes of actual footage of war time devastation. Finally there is a postscript which reads:

¨This film is dedicated to all the people indignant only when their salads are trampled¨

The English subtitles supplied with the file are less than perfect but the print of the film is excellent. Daisies has all the innovation and experimentation of European film of the 1960s with an absurd irreverence. I hope you enjoy.

Thackeray´s Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

I recently finished reading ¨Orientalism¨ by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. This book is an examination of European attitudes toward the East, from Arabia to China, but mostly centring on the Arab world. To summarize the work in a phrase is difficult but ¨Michel Foucault goes East¨ might be close enough to give an idea. Regardless of what you might think of Foucault´s ideas or Said´s wisdom in using them, Said knows his business. He seems to have read just about every book on the subject in existence. He treats many in detail and I´d like to focus here on one in particular, a travelogue that he mentions in passing along with more famous authors such as Mark Twain whose ¨Innocents Abroad¨ is often cited these days for a passage that mentions (pre-zionist) Palestine as an empty wasteland, and Richard Burton, the ¨1001 Nights¨ translator and adventurer who, disguised as a Pashtun, smuggled himself into Mecca. What struck my interest in Said´s list of titles however, was a travelogue by William Makepeace Thackeray. Said said it was ¨moderately amusing,¨ which is moderately high praise, coming from him.

The book in question is called ¨Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo¨ and was published in 1845 after Thackeray´s two month journey which touched off in several ports on the Iberian peninsula, some islands in the Mediterranean, Greece, Turkey, Palestine, finally ending at the summit of the great pyramid of Giza. It appeared not long after Thackeray´s novel about the rascally Barry Lyndon, and just a few years before his most famous work, ¨Vanity Fair,¨ about the even rascalier Becky Sharp.

I only got an idea about the contents of the book after I went to my computer and searched around a bit. There was no information on the book beyond a mention of its title, author and year of publication. I was a little surprised as Said´s book is well known, and with his reference to the book in a positive light, slight as it was, I would have thought it would have attracted more attention to itself. There was nothing in Wikipedia, an oversight I might try to correct, but fairly quickly my search led me to a remarkable page which allowed me with the click of a mouse to download the book in its entirety. In several different formats. The internet has such a marvelous potential to make so much available with such ease at so little cost. I was only the 80^th person to avail myself of this work. The quality of the scan is not perfect. Little mistakes abound and there are one or two places where the thread of meaning is lost. Here´s an example of what must be the worst:

The terrace Wiore tlie palace was similarly en-dtvacheil U{H»n by these wi^tched habitations. A fii^w luilUons. Judiciously e:!cpended

I should stress this was the exception. Still, I wonder whether these errors spring from a rushed job at scanning, old and crusty source material, or perhaps modern rendering algorithms aren´t suited to archaic fonts and type faces. In any case, the book is there for the taking, and with a few exceptions, easy to read.

Is it worth the read? Yes and no. Thackeray is no expert on the areas he visits; he is a tourist, has more interest in the journey itself and praising the steam ship, the captain and crew, and above all the company which, and hats off to Thackeray´s frankness here, provided him with a free passage. The actual destinations are of secondary importance to him. He frames all that comes before him with the expectations of one who never leaves home, nor has any desire to. This is not to fault Thackeray. He plays the part of the tourist with honesty and wit. He gives us as good an illustration of the tourist´s mind as any. For example, he tells the story of his early morning visit to St. Roch cathedral in Lisbon to see the famous mosaics. (They still draw tourists today.) He arrives only to find the curator still in bed. Instead of waiting, he leaves, doubly pleased with himself. Pleased with his making the effort, and pleased that he is spared trouble of actually seeing and taking in the mosaics.

Thackeray reflects much of the prejudices of his times: the cheapness of the Jews, the horrid sensuality of the Arabs, the obsessing over the different shades of skin in each port, the happy black people, the immanent decline of Islam, and the low value placed on life in general. If Thackeray didn´t see anything directly to back these sorts of assertions, he has plenty of lurid second-hand stories to tell us. All this conforms to Said´s thesis in ¨Orientalism,¨ that the West thinks of the East as the embodiment of the ¨other,¨ derived from some kind of platonic counterpart to the West. It´s not at all difficult to see this same conception of the East in popular culture today. Thackeray still manages to surprise us. The difference between how he views Greece and Turkey couldn´t be more stark. Of Greece, he says ¨the shabbiness of this place actually beats Ireland, and that is a strong word.¨ With Turkey, despite his reservations over the despotic Pasha, he raves over the architecture, the food, the women, the navy, and what may bear the most significance, a detailed account of his visit to a Turkish bath.

Bathing and the importance of hygiene in the 1840s were not what they are today. In the previous century baths were taken maybe once a year, and the hygienic practices that were followed were dubious. Settlers from Europe amused native Americans by their habit of pulling a clean handkerchief from their pocket, blowing their nose into it and carefully refolding the hankie and replacing it as though it contained something precious. Bathing in Thackeray´s time was something relatively new, good not just for hygiene, but cure for illnesses, mental and physical, and even as a punishment for the wrong doer. It was Thackeray, by the way, who coined the term ´the great unwashed´ to refer to the common people. Wikipedia tell us that it was David Urquhart who introduced the Turkish bath to England in 1850, but Thackeray beat him by 5 years, at least on paper. The mystery and indulgence of the Turkish bath is clearly the highlight of his travels.

Perhaps another contribution Thackeray makes, this time to the world of literature, is a proto-type for the stock figure of the exert expat Englishman gone native. In this case, he appears late in the book, in Cairo. His name is ¨J,¨ an old school friend of Thackeray´s, and expert on all things Cairene. Though English to the core, he has adopted local dress, customs and mannerisms. He even enjoys the attentions of his own concubine whom Thackeray is delicate enough to refer to as an attractive and seemingly available ¨cook.¨ Such characters are with us today and can be found in exotically-localed works like the James Bond films. They tend to be dispensable and can be forgotten once they´ve made themselves useful by giving the hero some bit of information. The character Henderson in the Bond film, ¨You Only Live Twice¨ is a prefect example. He provides us with a little comic relief, a show case for comfortable exoticism, and to Bond he provides a name, enabling the plot to keep rolling along, and, this accomplished, he is promptly murdered by a gang of ninjas. Thackeray´s ¨J¨ is spared the fate of a murder at the hands of marauding ninjas but is nevertheless forgotten once he leaves Cairo.

Thackeray deserves praise for the laudable religious tolerance he shows. In his time, religious tolerance was not an Englishman´s strong suit. For example, the conversion novel was a popular genre of English fiction. A young spiritually starved Jewish girl escapes from the clutches of the grasping materialistic men who surround her. She meets a fine young Christian man, she converts, they marry and live happily ever after. Thackeray himself contributed to the genre, and as might be expected, he has not much good to say of non-Christian faiths or those who follow them. To be fair though, not much bad is said of them either, and Thackeray bears them no special animosity. He also has the ability to admire female beauty wherever and however it presents itself. His harshest words are reserved for the Christians who congregate in the holy land around Bethlehem. There´s the meddling religious crackpot of an American consul, the Armenians, the Catholics and the Greek Orthodox, all up to their necks in sectarian squabbles. Thackeray leaves the holy land in a disappointed and bitter mood. The trip between the port town of Jaffa (that´s Tel Aviv today) and Bethlehem is noteworthy. It´s the wildest part of the journey and because of the risk of attack from brigands, the party is obliged to travel on horseback in a convoy, escorted by an Arab bodyguard, armed to the teeth and dressed to the nines in flowing robes, whom Thackeray romanticizes shamelessly.

The book ends in Cairo with a remarkable scene on a Nile river boat where, he tells of his first sighting of the pyramids:

¨The distances, which had been grey, were now clothed in purple; and the broad stream was illuminated. As the sun rose higher, the morning blush faded away; the sky was cloudless and pale, and the river and the surrounding landscape were dazzlingly clear. Looking ahead in an hour or two, we saw the Pyramids. Fancy my sensations, dear M – two big ones and a little one!!! There they lay, rosy and solemn in the distance, - those old, majestical, mystical, familiar edifices. Several of us tried to be impressed; but breakfast supervening, a rush was made at the coffee and cold pies, and the sentiment of awe was lost in the scramble for victuals.¨

Thackeray notices his companions are similarly unimpressed and goes on to wonder how ´our organs of veneration have become so withered.´ It´s an odd note to end on, because surely, if the tourist ponders the health of these organs, then he should realize that it´s the traveller on a religious pilgrimage whose veneration is strongest. The only pilgrims he comes across in the journey, however, are some Jews bound for Jerusalem and nobody else in the book is treated to such a verbal drubbing as these fellow passengers. Perhaps there´s a happy medium between the coffee scrambler approaching the pyramids and the single minded pilgrim but Thackeray doesn´t pursue these questions.

Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo has its points of interest, especially for the Thackeray compleatist, the Orientalist, the historian, the traveller or the tourist. Thackeray makes an amusing and observant travel companion but thankfully, he leaves us at Cairo, not insisting we accompany him all the way back to Cornhill.

Guns and Gun Ownership

I´d like to make a comment or two about the aftermath of the school shooting last month. I don´t think that guns or mental illness or video games are to blame. If I were to pin point something as a cause for these incidents, I would go with social fragmentation, alienation, dispossession and powerlessness. Maybe some time in the future I will elaborate on these causes, but for the moment, I´d like to explore the possibility of gun control.

Specifically, I´d like to counter those who claim that in the United States, with millions of gun owners determined to keep their guns no matter what, strict gun control is an impossibility. I don´t think it´s a likelihood, but if the government really wanted to institute a ban on guns, they could do so. It´s a hypothetical I´m dealing with here, but please indulge me. My argument hinges on a tasty paradox.

First off, there are no shortage of people in society who are willing to obey someone wearing a uniform. If guns are to be eliminated, they will be salami sliced away through legislation, bit by bit. Americans have shown time and time that they are willing to trade freedom for some illusory security.

What about these millions who swear that the only way they´ll be disarmed is when their rifle is pried out of their cold, dead hands? I imagine the number of people who´d rather die than surrender their weapons to be vanishingly small, internet bluster notwithstanding. Still it´s conceivable that these gun owners could club together, form a militia, and mount an effective resistance to any government programme to eliminate guns. But here is where my paradox makes its entry. Clubbing together and surrendering autonomy to a collective is simply not part of the gun owner´s ¨cultural DNA.¨ The gun owner buys guns out of feelings of anxiety, suspicion and distrust, especially of their neighbours. It's a catch 22. The forces that motivate people to seek the protection afforded by gun ownership - social fragmentation, feelings of insecurity and distrust of neighbours - are going to militate against them uniting and forming an effective force to resist gun confiscation.

This brings us full circle. The powerlessness of the gun owner is caused by the same malaise that causes the shooting incidents: it is this lack of cohesion and solidarity that I referred to in the first paragraph. If anything, gun owners, despite the illusory security that their weapons give them, are just as much the victims of this social affliction as the rest of us. Well, at least those of us who manage to avoid getting themselves victimized in these shooting sprees.

Where are the Christians?

This is probably as good a time as any to comment on what appears to be a new Christmas tradition in the making. I'm referring to the renewed fighting in the 'war on Christmas' that I've noticed in recent years flaring up around this time. Someone notices a public display of a Christmas message, complains, and controversy ensues. This year, I saw it erupt in the news story of complaints over a Christmas message on the Saskatoon bus service in Saskatchewan, Canada.

The following is not an untypical reaction: "Buddy, I am about as atheist as they come. There is not even a hint in my mind that a god may exist. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!"

Atheists, and just about everyone else embracing Christmas. Conspicuous by their absence, however are the Christians who don't appear to have anything to say about the matter. I'm surprised to see nobody identifying themselves as Christian denouncing the public Christmas displays or defending the complainants.

I see no Christians complaining about the public displays of febrile consumerism. No complaints over public displays of elves, flying reindeer or gifts under trees. I suggest these are doing more harm to the Christian spirit of Christmas than these Saskatoon complainants ever could. I can't understand how Christians who take their faith seriously are happy with state sponsored celebrations of Christmas that muddy the message of universal love in the gospels and pollute the sanctity of their holidays with pagan symbols.

The liberal values of our society separate the church and state. It's to prevent clerical power from gaining undue influence over our lives. I think though it works both ways; the separation also protects religion from encroachment by the state. Consequently, these days we see that the more true Christian meaning is drained of Christmas, the more non Christians will speak up in defense against the (almost always) heretical public displays. When atheists defend Christmas, Christians should begin to worry.

Movie of the Year: Clint, a Chair and Petition

The most gripping drama I saw this year was Clint Eastwood's performance of an actor addressing the audience of a political convention in the late summer of this year. Eastwood's role is as an old actor who takes to the television airwaves for an embarrassing eleven minutes as he remonstrates with an empty chair, where supposedly sits the president of the United States. The actor Eastwood plays hasn't prepared his lines, and is distracted and unfocused. When he does say something, it's inappropriately belligerent and at odds with the setting. As the seconds tick by, the tension mounts as all who watch know that this moment - the climax of the convention - has cost millions and was planned month in advance, suddenly lurches into a crazy off script turn that could spoil the career of a presidential hopeful.

Well, that's not really a movie, and the next one, I only managed to watch this year. But it's real, very real. It was made over a period of 12 years and completed in 2009, and released in the United States in 2011. The movie's name is Petition and the director Zhao Liang shot the movie on digital video, much of it from hidden cameras. It is a documentary about a group of petitioners, Chinese people who have been subject to some injustice and after being thwarted at the local level, have come to Beijing where they mingle with other similar cases from all across the country.

The petitioners are fearless and determined, but lead utterly marginal lives, subsisting on found food and sleeping in improvised shelters. They show us how much people are willing to endure when they believe their (admittedly hopeless) cause is just. There's a teacher who was fired for exposing corruption in his school's administration. Another, a young man who was arbitrarily beaten and hospitalized by thuggish policeman. And a woman who's husband died mysteriously while being given a workplace medical exam and then summarily cremated. They don't sound like much, but if it's inspiration you seek, set aside your Amazing Spiderman comics and DVD and watch Petition. These are real heroes. Such people will be the kernel of any movement that arises in China to challenge the current regime. Most reviews I've seen speak only of the Kafkaesque justice system in China. They are missing the remarkable dignity of those who are fighting it.

I've uploaded this movie in a file just under one gigabyte to The Pirate Bay. It's in Mandarin with English and French subtitles. I will be seeding this over the next little while as long as interest holds. Click here to get the torrent file.