Ten Films - Part 1

This post originally started as a feature I planned to write for my college magazine. As I’ve graduated now, I imagine this will be the last time I regurgitate and reform a piece of writing that was intended for the pages of Fusion magazine first.

There was no specific reason that this wasn’t published – I asked my editor if it would be possible for me to write a brief article that broached the ‘films to see before you die’ subject. I decided to settle for ten, because it’s a round number that could fit into the space available. Any more and it would have just been a list with a sentence each for description. Right from the very start I planned it to reflect my own personal tastes, and to be open about that – the same rule applies here.

I part wrote it, but never finished it in time for my second-to-last issue (I’d been given two pages, spread over two editions) and I forgot about it in time for my final issue, due to exams and such.

Ten films is, actually, far too insignificant to cover the history of cinema. It couldn’t cover a decade, and, in a lot of cases, couldn’t cover a full year.  

But any more and it’s a mammoth task that I don’t have the energy or interest to properly devote myself to. If you do want this kind of list, you can’t do any worse than the annual ‘1001 Films To See Before You Die’ tome, which introduced me to countless great films I likely would never have heard of otherwise. Similarly, Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film is similarly expansive and, if you wish, can be treated as a reading list.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

A classic example of the minimalist, religious power that Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film channelled, The Passion of Joan of Arc is simply a beautiful film. It was Dreyer’s last silent film, one which was adapted straight from actual records of Joan of Arc’s trial. There would likely have been a temptation to make a film on this subject a huge, D.W. Griffiths-style melodrama, but Dreyer went in the complete opposite direction – much of the film is shot in extreme close-up, the screen framing Renee Falconetti’s face as she is interrogated by demonic court – who are also shot close up to emphasis their inhumanity and leering cruelty. Mark Cousins recognises these shots as what began to differentiate cinema from theatre – cinema allowed actors to move closer to the audience, or further away. Like the films of Sergei Eisenstein, The Passion of Joan of Arc helped to define cinema as a unique, special entity.

Falconetti, at the instruction of Dreyer, wore no make-up – it is as if it was removed to let the full emotion of her terrific performance get to the camera, and to further his quest for complete minimalism. The walls of the sets were painted pink to remove any glare that could be caught by the camera. Dreyer, recognising the one-off performance of Falconetti, was content to allow her to loom over the film, instantly becoming its defining characteristic. Even though it is shot in such a refined way, Dreyer still finds space for small acts of symbolism. Falconetti is frequently shown with pale light around her head, like a halo. The religious Dreyer would reprise this lighting in his later films, such as the austere Ordet.

In many ways, The Passion... is a ‘difficult’ film. Watching silent films from the 21^st century, when we are so used to dialogue, means that it can often be difficult to follow the exact nature of the plot in silent films. The Passion... is no exception – the title cards, which do carry text, are sparse compared to the amount of talking that the actors actually do on screen, leading to a sense that something is missing.* And the intensity of the close-ups can be wearing. But the austere beauty of Dreyer's vision always shines through.

 

L'Atalante - 1934

I'm a huge fan of Jean Vigo. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 29, leaving less than three hours worth of films - three shorts and L'Atalante, his only feature. But all are injected with his anarchic style, all attempting a mixture of social realism and surrealism (a trait picked up by Lindsay Anderson, hugely inspired by Vigo's work). I struggled to pick between L'Atalante, and the film that Vigo made just before it, Zero for Conduct (of which Anderson's classic If..., which nearly made it on to this list itself, is largely derived from) but in the end went for L'Atalante.

Jean and Juliette are that old cinema stapled - young lovers chasing excitement, with life bound to come between them. While Jean is a sea-faring adventurer, Juliette dreams of living a Parisian life of glamour. They get married, and inhabit Jean's barge L'Atalante with Pere Jules, a drunken madman who lives in a nest of nick-nacks he's collected from his years at sea.

 

Vigo was able to draw on the irrevent style of his earlier short A propos de Nice, as well as mixing it, in a fantastic scene near the end of the film, with Eisenstein's montage methods. But whereas Eisenstein used this method to convey the horror of the Odessa steps, Vigo uses it to express the longing of the separated lovers. L'Atalante sees Vigo channelling a romantic tale which was being told before the Lumiere brothers ever thought of stringing photographs together, and subverting it with the various styles and ideologies that cinema had offered up ever since. Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou played as big a influence as any of the romantic dramas which served it plot-wise.

Vigo's tragically young death, which left a cinematography shorter than any one Transformers film, does not, as you may expect, hang over L'Atalante, even though he had died just a few months before it had finished shooting. It almost seems to run on the energy of the love of Jean and Juliette, bounding with enthusiaism, not just for idealistic young love, but for what cinema can do, and what it can achieve, and what, most importantly, it can make people feel.

 

A bout de souffle (Breathless) (1959)

It was two Frenchmen who invented cinema, and it was two Frenchmen who, in the late fifties, helped to revolutionise it once again. Jean-Luc Godard and Raoul Coutard dragged cinema, kicking and screaming, from the studios and onto the Champs Elysees.

Coutard, a photographer like the Lumiere brothers before him, filmed scenes on a handheld camera, allowing them to effectively shoot while on the run. Jean-Paul Belmondo's chain-smoking, unbelieveably cool car thief Michel Poiccard, is himself on the run from police after shooting dead an officer. As he races about the streets of Paris, the film races after him. The film, like Poiccard, stands still for barely a second (barely, meaning that it does allow time for a Godard Standard - a long, bedroom set conversion between the leading man and woman). The film was shot without permission giving the cast a feeling of tension and excitement, which transfers onto the screen.

What A bout be souffle is most remembered for is breaking the 'rules' of cinema. Before, films were shot as if there was a line behind the camera, where the film stopped and the audience began. Shots didn't cross this line. Godard decided against this rule, and many others. Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane (arguably the last Western-made film before Breathless which had the same revoltionary impact on film), Godard was accused of being a hack who had no idea what he was doing (he still gets that, actually). But, like many of his French New Wave contemporaries, he was a writer for Cahiers du Cinema, and knew exactly what he was doing (Welles, in a bid to prove that he had indeed learnt the rules of the trade before ignoring them, made The Stranger, his most 'Hollywood' film, and his only financially successful one).  

It is fitting that Godard won the Prix Jean Vigo award for A bout de souffle, (an award given in homage to Vigo to reward a French director who displays an independent spirit in their film making) because it simiarly uses a standard plotline, revolutionising around it. Godard borrowed a lot from old Film Noirs (Humphery Bogart gets a number of references throughout), while Vigo, as we have seen, made a romantic film. Both managed to use the basics of classic cinema to change it further - both fit perfectly into the ever-changing, ever-evolving styles of film.

 

The Red Desert (1965)

Earlier this year The Guardian, and no doubt a decent number of film blogs and magazine, ran articles focussing on the fact that Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died on the same day, and that Bergman was incorrectly sitting on the throne of European Art-House Film King. It should have been Antonioni, they argued. It should be. Bergman called Antonioni 'boring', and he sometimes was - but so, sometimes, was Bergman. Bergman's films sometimes feel as if they have become stereotypical European Art-House works (probably due to their ubiqitous nature in parodies), and Antonioni offers more to explore in his films.

Like Carl Theydor Dreyer, Bergman was heavily interested in religion, and the human spirit in these conditions. His films were dark, but overall humanity came out more positive than negative, even if we struggled at times. Antonioni's attitude to the human race is largely negative - he rarely, if ever, portrayed his protaganists as likeable, or even tolerable. Often they had a disinterest in life - they suffered from ennui, and they couldn't even care about that.

Like L'Avventura before it, and Blow-Up after it, The Red Desert fails to really find a plot, despite presenting the audience with a mystery. In L'Avventura it's a disapperance, in Blow-Up, a murder, and in The Red Desert it is the nature of Monica Vitti's depression. She wanders around an industrialised landscape somewhere in Italy - it is bleak, and the bleakness is emphsised by Antonioni's use of colour - or, more specifically, his lack of it.

 

Much of the landscapes which Vittis haunts - and haunt her, as the film goes on - are filled with flat greys, greens, blacks and blues, with an occasional burst of technicolour in the background. It is reminiscent of Fritz Lang's M, which, despite being at the forefront of the sound revolution, showed restraint in it's use of dialogue and natural noises, where others overloaded. This was Antonioni's first colour film, and the effects are the same - the restraint places more emphasis on what the colours/sounds actually are, rather than just that fact that they are there. 

The Red Desert is not only a key work in Antonioni's filmography, but perhaps the best use of colour in film history (for me, the only thing that comes close to beating it is Bertolucci's The Conformist.  

 

La Haine (1994)

La Haine works better under it's English translation title - Hate. La Haine is a neo-realism drama without the humanity. It follows three 'banlieue' kids the day after a riot in a Parisian suburb. A friend of theirs - although it's suggested they barely knew him - his been hospitalised by the police, leading, as it does regularly, to the tension between poverty-aflicted youths and the police force finally giving out to violence. Vinz, the most unhinged, cop-hating of the three, has stolen a police gun, and is threatening to use it. Hubert and Said follow him around the city, picking through the chaos that lies in a run down housing estate both after a riot and in general.

 

It may be hugely stylised, by La Haine is a hugely powerful film - it doesn't lose any of the social impact that a film would if Quentin Tarintino would, for example. The three boys come from three distinct social background - Vinz is Jewish, Hubert Afro-French, and Said Maghrebian (it's never revealed his specific country of origin, but this does leave it open to suggestions that he's part of an Algerian immigrant family, which further expands the dynamic between the three, and their role in society). At one point they meet with a group of Le Pen supporting Neo-Nazis; at another they argue with a camera crew looking for a story about the violence the night before; in between, they clash with the police at various points. Throughout, director Mathieu Kassovitz's attempts to explore contemporary France could not be clearer.

La Haine succeeds because it articulates the anger - the hate - which rules the everyday life of thousands of people like Vinz, Hubert and Said. It does so with fantastic flair - one stand-out scene, from a film full of them, features a DJ playing a remix of 'Fuck Da Police' and Edith Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien'. It has to be seen to be believed.

  

Part two will be out at some point during the week, I hope. Let me know how much you disagree with these choices below.

*Earlier this year I volunteered a silent film festival in Bo’ness, where, among films like Safety First and I Was Born But..., I was lucky enough to catch 'The Lost Art of The Film Explainer'. It was once of the best experiences I have ever had at the cinema. Accompanied by a two-person, multi-instrumental backing band, ‘The Film Explainer’ Andy Cannon showcased a forgotten art-form – during the silent film era, many of the people who attended the cinema couldn't read, or films were shabbily put together so that, even if you could read the title cards, they were difficult to follow. So film theaters began to hire people who would read out the intertitles of the film, as well as just generally narrate it. 

          Often they were just the manager of the cinema who lazily read off the screen, but many other people made a living from it. They were especially popular in Japan, where cinemas would advertise films based on what Film Explainer was going to be narrating. They did it in all manner of styles - political, comedic, serious. They were so popular that when 'talkies' were introduced in Japan many cinemas turned down the sound so that they could keep their Film Explainers.    

          Andy Cannon's style was lovely - the films he choose were forgotten, and largely crap, and he made fun of them, but in an affectionate way, in a way that you can tell he genuninely loves film, silent film especially. There's more information here: http://www.reelscotland.com/the-lost-art-of-the-film-explainer-19-august-filmhouse-edinburgh/ and I cannot urge you enough to go see it if you get a chance.

Football is hyper-capitalism

Soccer is hyper-capitalism. It is the space that a free market would ultimately expand in to. The money that moves between clubs, and between owners, is nothing short of ridiculous, mind-bending, even.

PSG, currently feeling the effects of a Middle-Eastern sugar daddy, spent nearly $200 million over the summer on player transfers alone. They bought three players.

A few weeks ago, berk (and former footballer), Robbie Savage stated that be believed Lionel Messi alone was worth £100 million for his services.

Until the recent attempts of Michael Platini to implement his financial fair play (FFP) rules, football did not have the monitory constraints that many other international markets have. The FFP rules are intended to reign in the spending of clubs, ensuring that they do not spend more than their means, and that they give due concern to their existing debts. It also limits the number of years which a club can record a financial loss. The richest teams have continued undeterred, as you might have guessed would happen. The record debts and record fees continue to spiral upwards, one propping the other up.

It’s within this context that I read Rudi Batzell’s shortanalysis for the NFL referee strike, and a plea to nationalise football. Until I read the article, I had no idea of this strike, and, as someone who doesn’t follow American football, I have no idea of the surrounding context.

But the basic facts are that, for an entire season, NFL referees have been out on strike. The unionised referees were locked out by the owners over a dispute concerning pensions and secure working conditions. In American sporting lingo, they are on ‘lockout’ – the combined might of the owners of the NFL teams have barred them, and hired scabs in their place. The problem with scabbing in this context is that, to be a referee, you need years of training and practise, and the ability to make decisions based on obscure, garbled evidence. The scab referees do not have this, and since the start of the season there have been wrongly-given penalties, confusion and inconsistency. Batzell points out that his team, the Green Bay Packers, lost a game to Seattle because of the inability of the scab referees to police the game.

Batzell goes on to argue for a non-profit NFL, one without owners, played for the good of the game. The community-owned Green Bay Packers follow this example, but they are the only team to do so.

“Imagine the NFL as a factory. The production line workers are the players. It is a beautiful game, but playing football is brutal and violent work—most players have short careers and sacrifice their bodies for their vocation. The coaches, scouts, and trainers are the engineers, production planners, and shopfloor managers in the factory. Their schemes, strategies, and training prepare and coordinate the production process. Combined with the skills of the athletes, they engineer schemes and tactics that keep the game evolving and competitive.

The refs could easily be overlooked, but they play a crucial part in the valuation process. They are the quality control specialists, ensuring that working conditions are uniform and safe, and that a quality product is turned out, play-by-play and week-by-week. But the scabs can’t tell a touchdown from an interception, and the quality of the product—play-by-play and week-by-week—has deteriorated. If we want to keep this factory running, change has to start at the top.

What do owners do? They sit in luxury boxes, monocles, cigars, and brandy in hand, sucking their bloody profits from the bodies and minds of the players, coaches and refs. Much like the super-wealthy in other sectors, at their best they provide story lines for the tabloids. But now the football capitalists are destroying their own industry.”

 

In comparing the mechanisms of football – both in the American and European contexts – as a whole to a traditional production-line factory, Batzell raises the important question of whether football can be seen to function like the rest of capitalism. The workers may be vastly overpaid, but they still sell their labour to the capitalist owners, who proceed to make vast profits from them. Work is still unpaid labour, no matter what the scale. The reliance on scabs, brought in to replace skilled workers, has had a similarly detrimental effect that it would have if you brought in random members of the public and asked them to start buying cars for you.*

 

The capitalist mechanisms of football are the same as the workings of the wider economy, but this particular industry has bloated to a scale which is uncontrollable. Like the banking industry, football exists on a cloud of speculation and money which flows unstoppably between a select few capitalists. The idea of football as a working class sport is dead, or dying, pricing people out at the bottom, and alienating them at the top.

But is the nationalisation and community ownership model truly the way forward? Or, a more accurate question – is it viable? Like the example of the Green Bay Packers, community-owned clubs do exist, but in isolation. The most famous example is Barcelona, which benefits from being one of the most iconic clubs in the world to draw in money. Yet it is mired in hundreds of millions of debt, and is another club using Qatar oil as a leaning post. On the other end of the financial scale, Stirling Albion, a Scottish third division club bought by the local community after a conflict with the previous owner. They reached the first division, before falling apart financially and falling to the very bottom league position of Scottish football.

There are, however, examples where community ownership, and therefore community benefit, works. The German Bundesliga dictates that fans must own at least 51% of every club. The Bundesliga is regarded as the most fan-friendly league in Europe, as well as one of the more competitive ones. Similar rules exist in Turkey and Sweden.

Most countries have smattering of fan-owned clubs, but in England community clubs have emerged as a form of protest, as much as a community activity. F.C. United of Manchester were started as a protest again the Glazer ownership of Manchester United, A.F.C. Liverpool give fans who have been priced out of Premier League matches a chance to watch league football, and AFC Wimbledon were started by fans of the old Wimbledon team after it was bought over and forcibly moved to Milton Keynes (to become MK Dons). All play in the lower leagues, on tiny budgets compared to their professional rivals, but all operate on a community-first basis, attempting to wrestle control of football away from money.

This is ultimately a more viable option. Fans have the necessary passion to drive these projects forward. They can take back control of clubs and give them back to the community. Some clubs won't be as successful, but it would stop the death-spiral of increasing debt and output. Of course, this is a significant upheaval - a revolution in the way that football is run. It would have to happen globally. But these smaller clubs give hope to the bigger ones. Change can start from the ground up.

 

*Scottish football was hit by a similar referee strike in the 2010/2011 season, when referees withdrew their labour, forcing the SFA to bring in scabs from around Europe, and anywhere else they could find them. These scabs were in fact professionals, which differs to the NFL story above, and, as far as I know, there were no major controversies over decisions. The referees went on strike over a number of reasons, but it was mainly the way they had been treated by the media, the fans, and members of the football clubs. I imagine pay comes into it as well - referees are paid £800 per game, which sounds like a lot, but this only comes to a maximum of £10,000 per year. Most will probably make less.

 

A rant about Gerald Warner

Sunday is Funday, especially if you are Gerald Warner, professional misery-guts and right-wing writer. He is Richard Littlejohn, if Littlejohn were a Will Self-level thesaurus botherer, and wrote a column for the Scotland on Sunday.

Warner's work can be boiled down to two main strands - he hates socialism, and he hates political correctness. He also sees them as being intertwined somehow, so essentially his work follows that one strand.

His column this week, "The whole myth of the Spanish civil war is sustained by lies" starts by accessing the BBC's obituary of Spanish communist leader Santiago Carrillo. He fought to defend Madrid from fascist forces during the civil war, and, after years of exile, helped Spain in it's transition to democracy. Sounds like a decent person, but several historians, and Warner, have tied him to the massacre of civilians and fascist soldiers, something which was carried out by both sides during the war.

What Warner objected to most was the overly-positive tone that the BBC took when reeling through Carrillo's life - to Warner, he is a murderer, and worse: a communist.

Criticising Carrillo for his earlier war crimes in Madrid (which he always denied) is fair enough - using it as a reason to ignore his role in the transitional period (when Carrillo moved towards social democracy) is stretching it. But Warner uses the example of Carrillo to springboard into strange critique of the Republican forces of the civil war, and their historical representation. Why this is a big deal I have no idea, by Warner perseveres playing down the bombing of Guernica, without any hint of a reference. He points to faked war photos, ignoring the fact that, in all likelihood, the majority of famous war photos are probably faked to some extent. The famous picture of American troops hoisting a flag pole on Iwo Jima is faked, and it may be the most recognisable war photograph ever.

With such a strong-headed assault on the Republican forces, Warner almost seems to come out on the side of the fascists - for all the faults he lists on one side, Franco's army - which committed massacres and disseminated propaganda just as much, if not more than, the democratically elected government they were overthrowing. Not to mention - I doubt there is a single army in history that has fought a war without using propaganda and massacres as a weapon.

To further the point of him defending the fascist forces - he never actually uses the word 'fascist' to describe Franco's troops. Using that would remove any audience sympathy which he is trying to garner. Imagine the opening scene of a film where a character is being badly beaten in an alleyway. As his assailants runs off, he is revealed to have a swastika armband - would this not drastically change the audience perception of him immediately? Maybe you wouldn't feel the beating was justified (it depends on the extent to which you believe 'an eye for an eye', I suppose) but it would certainly remove a great deal of empathy which you had felt originally.

Interestingly, he does, once, use the word 'falangists', a more obscure term than fascists, but one which is associated mainly with Franco's strain of politics. It's like using the term autonomism to refer to marxism. Both are more niche terms, and much less emotive.

This tight control of words, the shying away from openly calling what he is partically defending 'fascism', jarrs with one of his recurring themes - the cultural control he believes marxism is gaining in British society.

As a writer, Orwell’s stock in trade was words. He therefore recognised earlier than most people the bastardisation of language that was a principal instrument of leftist subversion of objective reality. Marxists have always been obsessed with linguistics, for a very good reason: if the means of communication can be manipulated, if words can be made to take on a new meaning supportive of the programme of those in power, it will become impossible to articulate views hostile to the regime.

 - from 'Statue of George at the BBC would be truly Orwellian'

He is obsessed with what he terms 'Frankfurt Marxism', persumeable a reference to the Frankfurt School, which pioneered marxist cultural studies and revisionism in the early twentieth century.

You see, Warner is one of those anti-PC people who believe their right to say racist terms trumps the right of people not to be abused. He sees political correctness as a form of 'Newspeak', rather than as an attempt to sideline offensive language in our culture. In the above article on George Orwell, he has a final paragraph meltdown, listing the various 'invented' words which, to him, signify nothing but an attempt at mind control - 'sexist' 'homophobic' and 'multicultural'.

And, in case you hadn't worked it out, a week before his 'daring'/factually-inaccurate critique he revealled himself to be homophobic by not only standing against gay marriage, but declaring the arrival of totalitarianism if same-sex marriage were to become legal. He backs this up, apparently, by saying that it represents as attack on religious freedoms (specifically Judaeo-Christian, obviously). The logic in this falls apart in seconds - no one is being stopped from practising their religion by this new law. If anything, it will bring gay men and women back into the faith - the number might not be very big after the way the church has attacked them, but I assume there will be some same-sex couples who want to get married in a church. And denying people the right to marriage because of their lifestyle - is that not itself totalitarian?

Warner is vainly expanding on the argument I pointed out above - that his right to say whatever he wants, to whoever he wants (it would be something offensive, as I have no doubt that Gerry is very much a bigot, a word I would use to describe him mainly because he hates it so much) trumps the right of people not to be abused because of their race, gender, sex or otherwise. He claims to rebel against cultural totalitarianism, but he himself practises it, in his desperate attempts to promote WASP values at the expense of genuine freedom.

Old man to internet: 'Get off my lawn!' (or, why it's pointless to control the internet, and the generation gap that stops people understanding this)

Back in the unspecifically-dated olden days, censoring the media was easy. There wasn't much media, for starters. The only books published were either the King James Bible, or books about the King James Bible. Any radical newspapers being distributed could be burned, and their editors hung, or just priced out the market by raising the tax people had to pay to print them. Easy.

Today, though - not so easy. You haven't got some uppity peasant running off copies of his Leveller pamphlets in his hut - now it's the internet. Trying to subdue the internet is like playing one of those whack-a-mole games, but when you knock one down it just stays there, while ten more spring up purely out of spite. You've no chance.

And yet people still try. Just this week, the lawyers of the British Royal family moved to stop the publication of nude photos of Kate Middleton, which were already seen in France after magazine Closer published them there. Already an Italian newspaper has stated it's intention to do so, as did the Irish Daily Star. Several American magazines have followed suit.

The Queen herself could burn the printing presses of these magazines to the ground, it doesn't matter - they're on the internet. They've been scanned on to blogs and Twitter accounts. If you want to see blurry pictures of what might be Kate Middleton's possible boobs, just Google it. Moving to stop the publication just generates a bit of publicity for the magazine that has the injunction against it.*

And today Pakistan's prime minister Raja Pervez ordered access to YouTube in his country to be blocked, to stop people seeing 'Innocence of Muslims', the film connected to the rioting and attacking of embassies across the Middle East and North Africa. Sure, it's possible to block YouTube, but the information would get out anyway. For one thing, YouTube isn't the only video-hosting site. Secondly, if someone has downloaded a copy, they can disperse it at will. Plus, it is out there - that the video exists is inflammatory enough.**

People believe, erroneously, that the internet can be tamed - for better or worse, it cannot. British right-wing paper The Daily Express, I believe, is running a campaign to purge the internet of porn. It's like purging a sandwich of bread. They might just be trying to protect children from hardcore porn, but this is equally a task without an end. Presumably the campaign has the support of its readers - a newspaper only ever runs campaigns it knows it will get the support the readership - who are 99% ageing Christian Tory/Ukip-voters, who are likely to have never used the internet, and don't understand quite how the it works.

Similarly, when the super-injunction of footballer Ryan Giggs was made pointless by the details being revealed on Twitter, he tried to sue everyone on Twitter who had tweeted it. Everyone. Presumably his lawyers said 'Yeah, we can do that. Just make sure you keep paying us, and we'll look into it' and high-fived each other when he left the room.

What I find most interesting about this is that there exists a generation gap between those who 'get' the internet and those who don't. My generation (I'm twenty) grew up with the internet - we, and those younger than us, are the ones that get it. I'm generalising, but it is the older age groups that don't understand. 'They' don't use it as much as 'we' do. This excellent article by now-defunct communist-propaganda-machine Deterritorial Support Group notes the use of Goatse as a modern-day industrial sabotage. The argument is thus: Goatse, and shock-memes like it, have been reappropriated as in-jokes by those who understand them (like a group of friends watching the same obscure TV show and using it's jokes as their own makeshift language). They then skip this into designs and popular culture, effectively subverting logos from the inside. DSG argue this is a form of post-Fordism industrial sabotage simply because it is now the only way to rebel within the workplace while still being able to remain employed there. When a production factory was the de-facto destination of the working classes, sabotage could take on a different, physical form. What if you 'accidently' left a screw out of every tenth car you worked on? There are numerous stories of workers in Eastern European bomb factories who, while being made to work by the occupying Nazi army, purposely forgot to put explosives in some of the bombs so that they would do less harm when eventually dropped on Britain.

Now that the working landscape has changed (from a production to a consumption society, as Baudrillard argued), the nature of industrial sabotage has changed with it. People now subvert mainstream logos with anti-mainstream sources.

 Above: the logo for Hungry House. What makes me think of Goatse, and the DSG article - the forks look like hands, and why would you have two forks? A knife and fork would look better.

Whether this subversion is intended or not is debatable - what is most noticeable is the change cultural differences that make the internet a source of confusion to one group and so easy to use to another. People who try to control the internet - the naked celebrity pictures, the extremist material, the child pornography, the free media content - are like that old man shouting at kids to 'get off my lawn!'. The kids will continue to run over his garden - mainly because it annoys him. He doesn't understand the sheer pointless joy that the kids get, the thrill of defying authority in some. And to them, he just looks foolish.



*A side note here: I can't be the first person to point out the hypocrisy of British newspapers in the way they have treated this incident. They claim it to be an invasion of privacy - it is, but they exist in a culture where privacy is something to be swept aside in the pursuit of a story. They hack phones, send paparazzi to hound drunk celebrities, relentlessly press rape victims for information if they think it will get them an extra reader or two. The Daily Mail covered the story by stretching a single word, 'grotesque', over it's front page, but it could equally have been a label for the contents of the paper itself.

 **Another side note: This doesn't even cover the myriad reasons behind the rioting - the idea that people in Middle Eastern countries have only just found something to hate America for is laughable. And the violence is more prominent in countries which do not have a higher Muslim population, but were more heavily involved in the Arab Spring. Certainly, the violence seems to have been provoked by the video, but, like how lat summer's rioting in England was sparked by the shooting of Mark Duggan by police, the anger that drove it, and the reasons that lead it to continue, were various. The view of the media that the 'Innocence of Muslims' is the sole reason behind the violence is a continuation of the highly-flawed and dangerous discourse that all Middle Eastern countries are roughly the same, and that each has problems that can be dealt with in much the same way.

On the fallacy of 'post-ideology'

Frank Turner caused a minor furore recently, when Michael Hann uncovered some anti-left comments Turner made a few years in an interview with Moon and Back Music. A lot of people had mistaken his ‘don’t tread on the little guy, but don’t try to help him either, everything will sort itself out’ as socialist rhetoric, for some reason. This has helped mould Turner into the Billy Bragg of his generation (my generation, sadly), a moniker which apparently applies to anyone with an acoustic guitar and a vague knowledge of current affairs.

Bragg and Turner are friends, you know. Bragg tells us this in a Guardian article, where he shares tales of him and Turner enjoying a few matey beers backstage before a gig at Wembley Arena, and, more to the point, blames Turner’s libertarian views on this post-ideological age.

As you might expect from a ‘socialist’ who owns a huge house in a part of the country dominated by Tory politics, Bragg’s arguments don’t quite hold up.

This ‘post-ideological’ age is a fallacy. The argument that society and politics have moved beyond the need for vastly differing points of view originates in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book 'The End of History and The Last Man'. By disintegrating, the Soviet Union had dragged communism into irrelevance. Given the perceived influence of the USSR in far-left movements worldwide, they too were expected to fall apart at the feet of all-powerful Western capitalism.

 

The votes for communist and socialist parties around the world, especially in Europe, went into an even steeper decline than they already had (a decline which began after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was quelled by Russian tanks and machine guns), and, as Bragg notes, British Labour removed Clause Four from its party legislation. Neo-liberalism had the upper hand, thanks to Thatcher, and Blair followed suit, shifting a once left-wing party into a different brand of Tory.

The idea of capitalism and democracy as intrinsically linked, and the latter not being able to exist without the former, also grew, as a reaction to the horror of Soviet autocracy. It mattered little that Marx never wrote a word that could be seen in being in favour of the persecution of the working class that Stalinism practised – as far as most people were concerned, Stalin could have went through the selected essays of Marx and Engels with Tippex and a biro, whiting out large passages and writing ‘all for me’ over the top.

So then – the twentieth century was battle between communist dictatorship and capitalist democracy, and capitalist democracy had won in the end. Fascism, of course, died in a bunker with Hitler, after a mortal wound sustained hanging off of a Milan petrol station.

This is a strikingly Atlantacist view to take, of course. In many parts of the world, communism still lives on. Whether China operates a communist country is debatable, but it still calls itself that. Cuba, resting under the nose of the Unites States, continues to follow the guidance of Castro, despite a growing flirtation with consumer capitalism. Elsewhere in South America, the ‘Pink Wave’ continues to gather speed – a series of democratic socialist governments have improved the lives of countless millions of people, from Brazil to Venezuela. The media in Europe and America is largely at a loss to explain why this has happened – as the countries modernised over the past decade, they no doubt expected them to follow the path set out by Europe in achieving short term prosperity.

Ideology did not end – it was stagnant, and the crisis of capitalism has reawakened it. Specifically, the austerity measures which have affected huge areas of Europe. Nowhere has felt the grip of austerity like Greece, and nowhere has seen such a resurgence in anti-capitalist politics either.

The Greek situation is a desperate one – as it drowns in the Mediterranean, the ECB stands on the shore with a fraying rope shouting ‘Swim harder! I’ll throw you the rope if you just swim harder!’ The centre-left party in power at the time, PASOK, has atrophied in the face of public anger, surviving only as a junior power in a rickety pro-austerity campaign headed by centre-right former rivals New Democracy. What was most surprising in the Greek election was not the collapse of the PASOK vote (any left-leaning party who commits itself to such austerity should expect their supporters to baulk) but who replaced them. The Eurocommunist/green activist coalition SYRIZA moved from a tiny share of the vote, pre-austerity, to becoming the official opposition. It flew past the PKK, the parliamentarian communist party who had retained a significant level of support in Greek elections over the past couple of decades.

                                                          SYRIZA election poster

More worryingly, the far-right also experienced a rise in support, as fascist movement Golden Dawn entered parliament for the first time. Its supporters act like the SA and are referred to by the party leadership as ‘stormtroopers’. It is no surprise that some people predict civil war in Greece, perhaps the natural progression from the breakdown that social order has already felt.  Anarchist squatters, who attend protests in black bloc mode, fight with Golden Dawn, who fight with immigrants, while the police attempt, and fail, to keep order.

The Greek situation signals the fallacy of the post-ideological belief in several ways. First, Greek politics sheltered a communist party which still achieved a good level of support in elections. The PKK’s role in Greek politics has added dimensions which are not present in other countries – the party’s role in the Greek revolution of the seventies, for example – but, in any case, there was clearly still an appetite in Greece for radical politics.  

Secondly, the rise of both SYRIZA and Golden Dawn has shown that a strong belief in centrist politics has evaporated. Elsewhere in Europe, both the far-right and the far-left have made gains over the past few years. Ultra-nationalist parties, claiming to counter what they termed a ‘worldwide Jihad’, operated on an Islamaphobic message to make electoral gains – in France, Marine Le Pen’s Front National finished third in the latest French elections. Also at these elections, the UMP of Sarkozy (who styled himself as the French Thatcher, dedicated to union breaking and individualistic pursuits of wealth, and failed) were replaced for the first time in years by the Socialist Party, while forth place was taken by a resurgent Left Front, led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, who planned to introduce a minimum wage. In the Netherlands, where the far-right’s European figurehead Geert Wilders was enjoying support, the formerly-Maoist Socialist Party has taken back votes.

Even in Britain, where the rise of neo-liberal anti-politics was, arguably, first heralded by the three election victories of Thatcher and the demise of working-class unionism, both radical sides of the political spectrum have began to grow in influence. The BNP, while enjoying success in the last decade, have collapsed in on themselves, suffocating under the weight of voter apathy and lack of funds, but clearing the ground for the EDL and various splinter factions to fight it out. And whatever you think of the man, the Respect Party has got someone who at least claims to be a socialist into Westminster.

The final argument against Fukuyama's optimistic but naive comment is not taken from votes polled or party membership, but from political philosophy:

"They do not know it, but they are doing it"
 

said Marx, originally in relation to false consciousness. Marxism concerns itself greatly with the way in which capitalist ideology worms its way into the mind of the people without them knowing (Gramsci's hegemony, for example). The End of History is not possible because the end of ideology is not possible. Ideology is inescapable, no matter what one you subscribe to - communism, capitalism, fascism etc. It is the way politics is structured, on every level, and, therefore, seeps into everyday life.

Random thoughts on: The Newsroom

Misogyny

Perhaps one of the most damaging early criticisms of The Newsroom was that it veered, in its portrayal of the female characters, towards sexism. Certainly, the female characters tend to follow female stereotypes. Slone, for example, is an intelligent woman, able to get ahead in her chosen career which she is passionate about – but still caves into requests from producers when a wardrobe of complimentary clothes is dangled in front of her.

The accusations of Sorkin’s misogyny remind me of similar claims which were aimed Jonathon Franzen. Both seem to struggle to portray their female characters in a positive light, but this comes not from a dislike of women, but from having to stray from their comfort zone. Both Franzen and Sorkin are white, male, middle-class intellectuals – the blueprint for all their good characters, and the type of characters which they feel confident, and are able to, write about. They write from experience, in the same way that someone who did not live in the Amazon for six years could not write about that situation in the same way as someone who did.

I don’t think Franzen is sexist (snobbish, yes, but not sexist), and nor do I think Sorkin is sexist.

Technology

Where would news media be without the internet? In a more financially stable place, for one thing. The Newsroom’s two main characters, Will and MacKenzie, both reject the new way in which news is gathered and dispersed, and it can be assumed, given his romantic and idealistic view of the way real-life newsrooms are run, Sorkin does as well. Early on in the series MacKenzie fails to understand how to use e-mail, and inadvertently sends information about her and Will to everyone at ACN. Will, it is remarked, ‘can’t even find Will’s blog’. And so on.

The lack of realism constantly jars – would two people, still in their forties (roughly) really not know how to use online technology? Especially considering their industry is effectively run by it? The only person who really seems to embrace the online world is Neil – he is therefore portrayed as a nerd for much of the series, and is relegated in one episode to the role of a prop for a dreadful running joke about Bigfoot.

Humour

The Newsroom is not a funny programme. What is unfortunate is that it tries to be. Like the Bigfoot joke mentioned above, Sorkin’s attempts to inject a bit of comedy almost all fall flat on their face. Two other examples stick out, both from the second part of the blackout episode.

First, Jim and ... attempt to lure Sarah onto Newnight because she went to college with Casey Anthony, and they are desperate to find a different angle. They head to her work in a high-fashion store, where Jim’s awkwardness is played up to new heights, attempting to both talk a customer into buying a dress and invite Sarah on a date. Jim has regularly been portrayed as awkward (when it suits the script) but at one point he asks ... if he thinks Sarah and the customer are making out in the changing room. ... is shocked, and so are we – Jim is merely an awkward journalist, not a sex-crazed social disaster.

In the same episode, Sorkin attempts to wring some humour, for some reason, from Will putting on trousers. First we see him complaining to his tailor that something is wrong with his trousers – a few scenes later he is bouncing into the newsroom with his trousers around his ankles, because he cannot get his other leg into them. He falls flat on his face, in a scene which juts out as a failed attempt at pointless slapstick.

Politics

It came as something of a surprise when Will was revealed to be a registered Republican, and a Tea Party supporter at that. Going into the show, everyone was expecting Sorkin’s liberal background to influence the politics of the show. It certainly did. Will is not a Republican in the Fox News sense – his Republican party is that of Abraham Lincoln, not Mitt Romney.

What Will ultimately believes in is truth. This is what he hopes to attain through his broadcasts. His search for the truth, and the relentless assault on the lies of the Republican party, mean that, to those outside ACN, he is a liberal. What Sorkin has done here, interestingly, is show that, in his attempts to find the truth, Will is perceived to have liberal values – therefore, liberal values are the truth. Sorkin says here that by simply looking at the facts and figures which you have easy access to, you will find that the Republicans are indeed wrong.

Will’s Republicanism also serves another purpose – he is the sensible Republican. He is not the one who believes that Obama hates white people, is a Muslim, wants to take away your guns etc. His relative saneness in comparison with the rest of the party shows them up to be the ridiculous fantasists they are.

Simulacrum

Earlier I used the words idealistic and romantic – no other pairing could better describe The Newsroom. It’s regular name-checking of legendary American news anchors – Walter Kronkite, for one – shows the view that Sorkin has of news broadcasting. It is a noble, vital format. This he tries to capture with The Newsroom. The team consistently go against the orders from bosses, who are concerned only with advertising revenue. In ACN’s Newsnight, Sorkin has laid out his utopian vision of Habermass’ Public Sphere. He wants to reclaim journalism from profit and partisan politics.

The main problem is whether this type of journalism ever really existed. Mainstream press, radio, broadcasting – unless it is government owned, it has its eyes on profit. Outside the mainstream, the issue of one-sided politics is likely to be evermore present.

I have no doubt that broadcast journalism – journalism as whole, in fact – has seen better days, both financially and ethically. But the dream chased by Sorkin – it seems to be more a view of the past preserved in amber, with the dirt and sleaze wiped away.

 

Alex Salmond's threat to the relevance of the Scottish independence referendum

As the Scottish parliament resumes after its summer break, Alex Salmond and his SNP party are setting out their legislative timetable for the next year. There are a number of big ideas, but, predictably, the one that generated the most discussion is the independence referendum.

 

The autumn of 2014, where the vote is estimated to take place, is the final life or death decision for Scottish independence. Defeats in referendums mean defeat for the policy in that generation at least. Nick Clegg attempted electoral reform two years ago and crashed out, signalling the end of any public debate on the issue, AV or not. If the SNP lose the debate, and Scotland remains part of Britain, then Scotland will remain part of Britain for the considerable future, irrespective of any future successes of the nationalist party.

[Just a side note here: I believe that the SNP could survive the failure of its independence referendum. For one, the party has moved beyond the confines of being a single issue party devoted only to the idea of independence. It now inhabits the centre-left position once dominated by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Labour are the archaic party associated with Westminster, and, like in England, the Lib Dems have lost any reputation they once had a ‘protest vote’. The SNP’s success is not rooted in a desire for an independent Scotland– look at any poll and you can see that SNP support far outstrips that of independence. They may need time to heal their wounds, perhaps even replace Alex Salmond, but the SNP would remain a major component of Scottish politics.]  

The future of Scotland will be written in 2014. The debate on the place of the country in the UK will come to an end, which makes it all the worse that Salmond has declared his support for Independence-Lite. He wants to retain the Queen as a head of state, keeping Britain within the commonwealth. He wants Britain to remain part of NATO, the boy’s club designed to combat the threat of communism in Europe. And recently the SNP have started playing about with the idea that you can still be British even if you are not technically part of Britain.

So if the Scottish people decide to stick with the UK, the debate will end, but equally, if they choose independence, the debate will die off as well, leaving Scotland in its post-referendum situation for the foreseeable future.  The tame independence option (the rejection of the SNP of offering people a choice of a non-nuclear republic) would leave Scotland stuck in a purgatory – no desire to stay with Britain but no will to pull away. It is a frankly pointless situation to be in – independence in name only.

The Queen represents Britain and British power. A few square miles in London holds all the influence over the rest of the country. The devices for financial, political, social power, all constrained within the mechanism of the British state, all constrained within the hands of the few. This situation is so ingrained into the Britain that reform will not budge it - only a violent revolution in England could shift the balance of power. Yet, it is with this referendum that Scotland has a chance to remove itself from this influence, without having to undergo a hugely destabilising revolution or civil war. The British parliament is hundreds of years old, as are the other governmental forces. In Scotland, which constructed its parliament in the last decade, this deep-seated concentration of power does not exist.

Independence Lite, however, will allow it to continue to exist, and the end of the discourse will allow the state of purgatory will be colonized by the ruling classes.

The drive towards a Scottish republic has already begun, but the most important part comes, not in 2014, but this year. Alex Salmond can choose to pursue the current option he has been trialing, and ensure Scotland never truely becomes independent in his lifetime. Or he can choose to offer people a real change, a real break away.