Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved was like watching a documentary that focused on the origins of a major phenomenon in the world around me. Never a slave and not even of true Southern white lineage, I trace my first awareness that something was very wrong with the way some people were viewed and treated to my own experience looking out a school bus window at the consequences of mischief taking place inside. I must have been in third or fourth grade at the time when a boy on the bus one or two years older opened the bus window and threw a rock at a small group of black schoolgirls as we waited at a stop light in New Orleans. He hit one on the side of the head and she wailed and put her hand to the side of her face. The boys on the bus, perpetrator and friends, just laughed. So her novel was kind of an answer to me as a little girl as I sat there and wondered: how can anyone act that way toward another person for no reason?
But of course I knew then that most white people in New Orleans looked down on “colored” people, and until I was some way on in grade school, there were separate restrooms, water fountains, and theatre sections, even a separate waiting room in the train station, for black and white people. And by the time I went to college in Massachusetts I knew I wanted to get away from the world of racism and segregation and the anti-intellectual environment in which it thrived. New England was a Mecca for me as a place of enlightenment and liberalism. And I was prone to equate every area north of a line drawn at the Mason Dixon. I was not sufficiently aware at that time of racism outside the south.
Beloved tells part of that story and the story of the horrific effects of slavery and how it degrades and changes a society. The injustice, cruelty, loss, poverty and frustration of Sethe and her family as well as their rich love of life and ability to cope somehow- the characters are touching, fun, and realized so that they feel like family to most readers, I should think.
After reading the psychologically complex and sophisticated story of mother love and regret, one is changed and enriched, even if saddened, by another layer of decay in the infrastructure of the American soul. I see it every day now in DC and experience frustration over the health care debate and the plight of the poor. I’m optimistic that there can be change, and the election of Barack Obama proved that. But the sense of threat, and the superhuman standard to which he will be held in dealing with the aftermath of an incompetent previous administration – one which in my view damaged our commitment to the rule of law- are palpable.
Sethe and the former slaves lived with a much more serious and physical threat, the constant threat of violence. Morrison shows in the glowing and poetic rhythm of language in the community of general terror how the semiotics of terror can be fraught with strange beauty in the words of the hunkered down and in the random acts of their tormentors. Law is a sign or order for me more than a form of narrative- it contains stories but much more: categories and abstractions as well, and so can be abstract as well as concrete and relates to both. Narrative and story has a sequence or pattern of events at its core and resists abstraction, consigning categories to allegory and systematic philosophy. Or to library catalogues.
Beloved, both the character and the novel- is a sleepy afternoon in which one remembers something terrible, and then it comes to stay with you for awhile as your houseguest,. But horrifically, as if in a dream, you know the terror of your own mistake is not a stranger; it’s family. You gave it being, and it lives here. Help us to love it back into innocence despite our primitive ways.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980): the legal film as history and art
A docu-drama such as Breaker Morant, like most works of art, can be viewed through the lens of the time it portrays, the time it was made, and the time in which any viewer views it. This film contains additional layers of cultural, political, and legal perspectives that reflect upon a cloudy historical record, a strained British Empire and its restive colonial outposts, and the legal/philosophical issues surrounding the essentially transnational character of the laws of war their intersection with national military justice systems. I would like to begin with some brief and necessarily superficial background concerning the legal systems portrayed, and move on to consider how some of the factual vagueness, both in the film and surrounding the continuing investigation of the historical events, find reflection in how the film is put together. In the end, the stage play or the film can serve only to underscore the inherent state of dehumanization that constitutes guerilla warfare, suggesting that law cannot fix it and art cannot control its interpretation or impact. That the film somewhat subverts itself continues to fascinate audiences and critics living in various states of war.
South Africa, Australia, Great Britain and its colonies; comparative military justice and war
The colonization of the southern tip of Africa by the British was via the Cape Colony. The Dutch and their colonies of the East India Company carried a form of civil law, so-called Roman-Dutch law, to their colonies such as the Transvaal, established in 1858 but annexation was attempted by the British in 1877. The British would have allowed the private law to be kept under this system. The Boers resistant in an earlier war well enough to retain a kind of independence under a British protectorate. The last Dutch territory, the Orange Free State, is the entity depicted in the film and undergoing a messy and horrific defeat in this “ Boer War” of 1898–1900. The Australians, like other colonies, were given a form of parliamentary representative government in the 1850’s and became the Commonwealth of Australia in on January 1, 1901. In the film, Harry Morant refers in his court-martial to having joined the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC) on April Fool’s Day, 1901 and conveys his sense, perhaps sincere, of irony. But a sense of separate Australian identity was becoming possible. As James J. Kirschke of Villanova University points out in a recent essay in the journal Film & History, “Say Who Made Her So: Breaker Morant and British Empire” (38:2, 2008), there was concern in the 1970’s about Australian identity, and perhaps in the run-up to the 1986 Australia Act, which terminated almost all of the constitutional connections with Great Britain, this was a way to get the George Witton story and the many other accounts of the Morant group’s court-martial into a different framework:
The characterization, then, of the Australian soldiers is as important as the historical presentation of the court martial. There is little doubt in the film that they shot the prisoners, and the film remains vague on the existence of orders from superiors to do so. Beresford is neither damning nor absolving the soldiers. His target, rather, is the way the event has been used to delineate a civilized Britain from a barbarous Australia. The B.V.C. soldiers are shown to be loyal and determined. Even at their execution, they comply with each military protocol, neither running nor ranting. Their conduct is as British as the empire could expect. (Kirschke, 48).
However, the legal and constitutional changes within the Empire, and the necessity of fighting a brutal war against small farmers using guerilla tactics to create a formidable insurgency, are perhaps the issues of most lasting relevance today, and with an imperial Germany lurking in the background of this story (they had a foothold north of the Orange River), we start to see a familiar pattern of civilian combatants, spies, and secret orders. The emergence of gold and other precious resources set the stage for maximum barbarity on all sides. By the late 1970's, regardless of the accuracy of the film, Australians and Americans would also remember Vietnam and the My Lai massacre.
Laws of War- late Nineteenth Century
Despite several rounds of conferences and codifications, such as the earlier Lieber Code (1863), and the Hague Conferences (1899-1907) that were contemporaneous with the events of the film, there was nothing like the idea in the treaty establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that would have rejected superior orders as a defense. The international instruments did consider the situation of civilians and “rebels” and the ambiguity of civil wars and civilian combatants in some respects, but reciprocity was required to be mutual and could be negatively interpreted for retaliation. (Watts, S. Reciprocity and the Law of War, 50 Harv. J. Intl L. 365, 397-398(2009).
In Prof. Kirschke’s article, cited above, there are several interesting notes citing several works on the event and comparing Kitchener’s take on the Boer insurgents with the aim of the court martial to begin to repair relations with the Boer’s and Germany for the limited purpose of peace (and territorial) negotiations.
The film and Perceptions of War and Law
An academic and philosophical debate took place in the journal Critical Arts (Johannesburg, South Africa: Critical Arts Study Group], 1980- ) from its first volume with a monographic essay and into vol. 2 no. 3 (1981-1982) and vol. 3 no. 3 (1985) about the themes of imperialism, racism and the role of cinema and whether the social character of art is subverted in such a successful film, and so forth. These debates were part of a debate about the role of art in cultural struggle, and at that time South Africa’s struggle in particular was still going on in an earlier post-colonial phase. The critique of the subversion of art and law through myths, and debates over how much this film really condemns imperialism, do not seem nearly as relevant to a current viewing of a film with several sub-texts that appear now after the American adventure in Iraq.
One subtext is that of the need to situate blame, and post-Nuremberg, the entire chain of command is seen as morally culpable, and the legal defense now pulled out from under the accused (we were just obeying orders). But the nature of the BVC as an “irregular” counter-insurgency group with no real orders has already undermined its legitimacy as a kind of vigilante group with inchoate state approval, not unlike the police juries and nightriders of the American south in the century after the civil war. The rapid cuts from past to present and toned down to faded memory enliven the court-martial visually but do not add much to the now rather obvious hypocrisy.
Another anchor for the film is the role of poetry and rhetoric: Morant is a conventional cynical poet on the make, using language to capture that obvious hypocrisy, but it establishes him mainly as having a persona that he has built through war and daring deeds. The zeal of Major Thomas, his lawyer, has somehow more honesty and a more faithful allegiance to the power of accurate language and eloquent but logical reasoning. He is less a sophist and more honest with language than those eager to have a bit of adventure, promote a newly emerging country (“Australia forever”), and in the end show what a good soldier one can be. Thomas does not “defend” so much as represent the rule of law, and the incredible audacity of applying that rule to situations where the descriptive language is crucial: is it a crime, a war, or terror? Beresford’s camera cannot hide the human toll taken by the words.
************
Cited or reviewed in law reviews:
Graber, Doris Appel .The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation 1863-1914 (1949).
Neff, Stephen C., War and the law of Nations: A General History. Cambridge, 2005.
Wiener, Frederick Bernays , Civilians Under Military Justice: The British Practice Since 1689 Especially in North America (1967.
The Popular and historical accounts are listed at the Widipedia article, Court-Martial of Breaker Morant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_martial_of_Breaker_Morant and pasted below:
Bleszynski, Nick (2002), 'Shoot Straight, You Bastards': The True Story Behind The Killing of 'Breaker' Morant. Random House Australia. ISBN 1-74051-081-X.
Davey, Arthur; "Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers" (Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town 1987) ISBN 0620124857 and 9780620124850
Denton, K. (1973). The Breaker. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-12691-7. But see Denton, Kit, Closed File: the True Story Behind the Execution of Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock. Adelaide: Rigby, 1983.
Pakenham, Thomas (1979). The Boer War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-77395-X.
Pollock, John (1998). Kitchener. Constable. ISBN 0-09-480340-4.
Ross, K.G., Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts, Edward Arnold, (Melbourne), 1979. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Ross, Kenneth G. (1990). Breaker Morant, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Wallace, J.W. (1976). The Australians At The Boer War. Australian War Memorial/Australian Government Publishing Service.
Witton, George (1982). Scapegoats of the Empire. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-14666-7.
Woolmore, William (Bill) The Bushveldt Carbineers and the Pietersburg Light Horse (2002, Slouch Hat Publications Australia) ISBN 0-9579752-0-1
South Africa, Australia, Great Britain and its colonies; comparative military justice and war
The colonization of the southern tip of Africa by the British was via the Cape Colony. The Dutch and their colonies of the East India Company carried a form of civil law, so-called Roman-Dutch law, to their colonies such as the Transvaal, established in 1858 but annexation was attempted by the British in 1877. The British would have allowed the private law to be kept under this system. The Boers resistant in an earlier war well enough to retain a kind of independence under a British protectorate. The last Dutch territory, the Orange Free State, is the entity depicted in the film and undergoing a messy and horrific defeat in this “ Boer War” of 1898–1900. The Australians, like other colonies, were given a form of parliamentary representative government in the 1850’s and became the Commonwealth of Australia in on January 1, 1901. In the film, Harry Morant refers in his court-martial to having joined the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC) on April Fool’s Day, 1901 and conveys his sense, perhaps sincere, of irony. But a sense of separate Australian identity was becoming possible. As James J. Kirschke of Villanova University points out in a recent essay in the journal Film & History, “Say Who Made Her So: Breaker Morant and British Empire” (38:2, 2008), there was concern in the 1970’s about Australian identity, and perhaps in the run-up to the 1986 Australia Act, which terminated almost all of the constitutional connections with Great Britain, this was a way to get the George Witton story and the many other accounts of the Morant group’s court-martial into a different framework:
The characterization, then, of the Australian soldiers is as important as the historical presentation of the court martial. There is little doubt in the film that they shot the prisoners, and the film remains vague on the existence of orders from superiors to do so. Beresford is neither damning nor absolving the soldiers. His target, rather, is the way the event has been used to delineate a civilized Britain from a barbarous Australia. The B.V.C. soldiers are shown to be loyal and determined. Even at their execution, they comply with each military protocol, neither running nor ranting. Their conduct is as British as the empire could expect. (Kirschke, 48).
However, the legal and constitutional changes within the Empire, and the necessity of fighting a brutal war against small farmers using guerilla tactics to create a formidable insurgency, are perhaps the issues of most lasting relevance today, and with an imperial Germany lurking in the background of this story (they had a foothold north of the Orange River), we start to see a familiar pattern of civilian combatants, spies, and secret orders. The emergence of gold and other precious resources set the stage for maximum barbarity on all sides. By the late 1970's, regardless of the accuracy of the film, Australians and Americans would also remember Vietnam and the My Lai massacre.
Laws of War- late Nineteenth Century
Despite several rounds of conferences and codifications, such as the earlier Lieber Code (1863), and the Hague Conferences (1899-1907) that were contemporaneous with the events of the film, there was nothing like the idea in the treaty establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that would have rejected superior orders as a defense. The international instruments did consider the situation of civilians and “rebels” and the ambiguity of civil wars and civilian combatants in some respects, but reciprocity was required to be mutual and could be negatively interpreted for retaliation. (Watts, S. Reciprocity and the Law of War, 50 Harv. J. Intl L. 365, 397-398(2009).
In Prof. Kirschke’s article, cited above, there are several interesting notes citing several works on the event and comparing Kitchener’s take on the Boer insurgents with the aim of the court martial to begin to repair relations with the Boer’s and Germany for the limited purpose of peace (and territorial) negotiations.
The film and Perceptions of War and Law
An academic and philosophical debate took place in the journal Critical Arts (Johannesburg, South Africa: Critical Arts Study Group], 1980- ) from its first volume with a monographic essay and into vol. 2 no. 3 (1981-1982) and vol. 3 no. 3 (1985) about the themes of imperialism, racism and the role of cinema and whether the social character of art is subverted in such a successful film, and so forth. These debates were part of a debate about the role of art in cultural struggle, and at that time South Africa’s struggle in particular was still going on in an earlier post-colonial phase. The critique of the subversion of art and law through myths, and debates over how much this film really condemns imperialism, do not seem nearly as relevant to a current viewing of a film with several sub-texts that appear now after the American adventure in Iraq.
One subtext is that of the need to situate blame, and post-Nuremberg, the entire chain of command is seen as morally culpable, and the legal defense now pulled out from under the accused (we were just obeying orders). But the nature of the BVC as an “irregular” counter-insurgency group with no real orders has already undermined its legitimacy as a kind of vigilante group with inchoate state approval, not unlike the police juries and nightriders of the American south in the century after the civil war. The rapid cuts from past to present and toned down to faded memory enliven the court-martial visually but do not add much to the now rather obvious hypocrisy.
Another anchor for the film is the role of poetry and rhetoric: Morant is a conventional cynical poet on the make, using language to capture that obvious hypocrisy, but it establishes him mainly as having a persona that he has built through war and daring deeds. The zeal of Major Thomas, his lawyer, has somehow more honesty and a more faithful allegiance to the power of accurate language and eloquent but logical reasoning. He is less a sophist and more honest with language than those eager to have a bit of adventure, promote a newly emerging country (“Australia forever”), and in the end show what a good soldier one can be. Thomas does not “defend” so much as represent the rule of law, and the incredible audacity of applying that rule to situations where the descriptive language is crucial: is it a crime, a war, or terror? Beresford’s camera cannot hide the human toll taken by the words.
************
Cited or reviewed in law reviews:
Graber, Doris Appel .The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation 1863-1914 (1949).
Neff, Stephen C., War and the law of Nations: A General History. Cambridge, 2005.
Wiener, Frederick Bernays , Civilians Under Military Justice: The British Practice Since 1689 Especially in North America (1967.
The Popular and historical accounts are listed at the Widipedia article, Court-Martial of Breaker Morant, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_martial_of_Breaker_Morant and pasted below:
Bleszynski, Nick (2002), 'Shoot Straight, You Bastards': The True Story Behind The Killing of 'Breaker' Morant. Random House Australia. ISBN 1-74051-081-X.
Davey, Arthur; "Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers" (Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town 1987) ISBN 0620124857 and 9780620124850
Denton, K. (1973). The Breaker. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-12691-7. But see Denton, Kit, Closed File: the True Story Behind the Execution of Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock. Adelaide: Rigby, 1983.
Pakenham, Thomas (1979). The Boer War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-77395-X.
Pollock, John (1998). Kitchener. Constable. ISBN 0-09-480340-4.
Ross, K.G., Breaker Morant: A Play in Two Acts, Edward Arnold, (Melbourne), 1979. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Ross, Kenneth G. (1990). Breaker Morant, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-7267-0997-2
Wallace, J.W. (1976). The Australians At The Boer War. Australian War Memorial/Australian Government Publishing Service.
Witton, George (1982). Scapegoats of the Empire. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-14666-7.
Woolmore, William (Bill) The Bushveldt Carbineers and the Pietersburg Light Horse (2002, Slouch Hat Publications Australia) ISBN 0-9579752-0-1
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Summer reading II: Noise
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
The end of the 19th century and its fin de siѐcle foreboding set the stage for all of the scandalous performances and “rioting audiences” with which the history of 20th century music unfolds. I had heard before in my own music history studies of the performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprѐs-midi d’un faune as each roused a tonally lazy and satisfied bourgeoisie out of its collective conformity. Ross builds the story slowly and concentrates on the artistic and personal biographies of the major composers, inserting where necessary the descriptions and music theory to make the story comprehensible.
The main theme of the book is one of the rise of diverse conceptions of tonality, including atonality and its several versions, as part of serious music in a legacy of “art for art’s sake” that he implies has served the cause of serious music poorly over the century (I prefer the term “serious” to “classical” since I reserve the latter term for Mozart and Haydn and their contemporaries). To other versions of tonality that were explored, one would add those derived from Far Eastern and indigenous cultural traditions, and these emerged as western musicians discovered other musical systems.
I enjoyed reading about Berg, Schoenberg, and the arrival of so many later on in California and Los Angeles. The rise of minimalism and Philip Glass, one of my favorites, could have been more thoroughly explored. Finally, the end of the book ,with its rather superficial coverage of those “serious -music- or jazz-influenced “ musicians in the pop, rock, and folk categories, made me wish that at the outset he had covered only the fate of serious music rather strictly. However, he was right to include the evolution of jazz improvisation into its cool phase, and the ordered noise of John Cage. The impassioned narrative of how each successive set of composers try to take the musical trends to the next level, and the readable character of the book, both served, I’m sure, to win it the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2007.
What does twentieth century music say to us about that century and its violent upheavals, wars, and ideological shifts? It would be easy to speak of fragmentation and globalization; those are heard in the rise of percussion and the Babel of new instruments and tonalities as well as new amplification. But so much hatred is covered by the false sweet sounds; now in the twenty-first century we can hear sweet hymns of Christian fundamentalism and detect nothing of the insecurity and racial fears of a new right wing. Perhaps I am just an aging 1960’s person as I long for music that is not just angry and eager to shock; we need the music of peace at a deeper level. This may be where Philip Glass and his zen minimalism as well as the themes of Kundun and Satyagraha come in.
Postscript: A real benefit to the book is its web site audio files, and while some are very short (owing to permissions and the length of the book), for students it would be essential to listen to the excerpts; music survey courses of course include CDs and databases which provide more extensive coverage, but –this is, after all, free.
The end of the 19th century and its fin de siѐcle foreboding set the stage for all of the scandalous performances and “rioting audiences” with which the history of 20th century music unfolds. I had heard before in my own music history studies of the performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprѐs-midi d’un faune as each roused a tonally lazy and satisfied bourgeoisie out of its collective conformity. Ross builds the story slowly and concentrates on the artistic and personal biographies of the major composers, inserting where necessary the descriptions and music theory to make the story comprehensible.
The main theme of the book is one of the rise of diverse conceptions of tonality, including atonality and its several versions, as part of serious music in a legacy of “art for art’s sake” that he implies has served the cause of serious music poorly over the century (I prefer the term “serious” to “classical” since I reserve the latter term for Mozart and Haydn and their contemporaries). To other versions of tonality that were explored, one would add those derived from Far Eastern and indigenous cultural traditions, and these emerged as western musicians discovered other musical systems.
I enjoyed reading about Berg, Schoenberg, and the arrival of so many later on in California and Los Angeles. The rise of minimalism and Philip Glass, one of my favorites, could have been more thoroughly explored. Finally, the end of the book ,with its rather superficial coverage of those “serious -music- or jazz-influenced “ musicians in the pop, rock, and folk categories, made me wish that at the outset he had covered only the fate of serious music rather strictly. However, he was right to include the evolution of jazz improvisation into its cool phase, and the ordered noise of John Cage. The impassioned narrative of how each successive set of composers try to take the musical trends to the next level, and the readable character of the book, both served, I’m sure, to win it the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2007.
What does twentieth century music say to us about that century and its violent upheavals, wars, and ideological shifts? It would be easy to speak of fragmentation and globalization; those are heard in the rise of percussion and the Babel of new instruments and tonalities as well as new amplification. But so much hatred is covered by the false sweet sounds; now in the twenty-first century we can hear sweet hymns of Christian fundamentalism and detect nothing of the insecurity and racial fears of a new right wing. Perhaps I am just an aging 1960’s person as I long for music that is not just angry and eager to shock; we need the music of peace at a deeper level. This may be where Philip Glass and his zen minimalism as well as the themes of Kundun and Satyagraha come in.
Postscript: A real benefit to the book is its web site audio files, and while some are very short (owing to permissions and the length of the book), for students it would be essential to listen to the excerpts; music survey courses of course include CDs and databases which provide more extensive coverage, but –this is, after all, free.
Summer reading I: Weimar
Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Having thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate encounter with a course entitled “Central Europe Since 1815, “ I entertained the possibility of moving on to this professor’s other excellent course, “The Culture of Europe between the Two World Wars. “ I read a good deal of the literature from the period out of interest and upon the recommendations of students who did take the course. This kind of cultural history, exploring all aspects of a period (however brief, in this case) in politics, arts, and technological innovation invites a real participation in its spirit and sometimes real concern that certain attitudes and dangerous tendencies may be surfacing in one’s own contemporary situation. Reading Weitz’s very readable and compelling history of what has long been regarded as a pivotal moment, one that could have been a golden moment in German history after a devastating war, does rekindle in one’s mind all the debates about the Allies’ treatment of Germany and of course, whether Nazism and the rise of Hitler could have been avoided.
Weitz covers the political situation in detail, and this was useful to me because this was my area of least knowledge; I know more about literary developments and about the art history of the period. He also emphasizes architecture and again, speaking selfishly, this helped me fill in some gaps about early modernism, one of my strong interests.
The subtitle “promise and tragedy” certainly employs the right key words to bring up the relevant ethos of the time. Glimmers of our current financial dilemma and our silence as an American people in the face of a war that went forward in violation of international law flash across the scene and make me feel uncomfortable. While the equation of Jews with internationalism etc. is born of an anti-Semitism that we left behind, one hopes, with Richard Nixon (who appropriated internationalism to himself, nonetheless, with better than expected results) , other aspects of nationalism, “nativism” and such ghosts of the Twenties of the Twentieth Century have ghostly cousins at present in the form of Sarah Palin’s McCarthyism of lies and distortions regarding modest attempts to reform and humanize our health care market. There is anger, and it is dangerous.
Where is the serious art to hold its image up to our collective face that we might see it for what it is? (see review of The Rest Is Noise for more reflection on this question).
Having thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate encounter with a course entitled “Central Europe Since 1815, “ I entertained the possibility of moving on to this professor’s other excellent course, “The Culture of Europe between the Two World Wars. “ I read a good deal of the literature from the period out of interest and upon the recommendations of students who did take the course. This kind of cultural history, exploring all aspects of a period (however brief, in this case) in politics, arts, and technological innovation invites a real participation in its spirit and sometimes real concern that certain attitudes and dangerous tendencies may be surfacing in one’s own contemporary situation. Reading Weitz’s very readable and compelling history of what has long been regarded as a pivotal moment, one that could have been a golden moment in German history after a devastating war, does rekindle in one’s mind all the debates about the Allies’ treatment of Germany and of course, whether Nazism and the rise of Hitler could have been avoided.
Weitz covers the political situation in detail, and this was useful to me because this was my area of least knowledge; I know more about literary developments and about the art history of the period. He also emphasizes architecture and again, speaking selfishly, this helped me fill in some gaps about early modernism, one of my strong interests.
The subtitle “promise and tragedy” certainly employs the right key words to bring up the relevant ethos of the time. Glimmers of our current financial dilemma and our silence as an American people in the face of a war that went forward in violation of international law flash across the scene and make me feel uncomfortable. While the equation of Jews with internationalism etc. is born of an anti-Semitism that we left behind, one hopes, with Richard Nixon (who appropriated internationalism to himself, nonetheless, with better than expected results) , other aspects of nationalism, “nativism” and such ghosts of the Twenties of the Twentieth Century have ghostly cousins at present in the form of Sarah Palin’s McCarthyism of lies and distortions regarding modest attempts to reform and humanize our health care market. There is anger, and it is dangerous.
Where is the serious art to hold its image up to our collective face that we might see it for what it is? (see review of The Rest Is Noise for more reflection on this question).
Summer reading; back to August post, the follow-up
As I begin my fall list of "outside" reading (that is, not related to anything I'm writing at the moment)I realize that I need to enter my selection of top books I read this summer. These were my favorites or the more unusual offerings which made me think about issues or literary theory in a new way. So here come several posts under this heading!
Friday, October 02, 2009
The Free and the Brave under a director's lens
Last night at Georgetown Law the the library sponsored the first in a series of screenings of films under the series heading "Law at the Movies." The series has been organized by my colleague Kumar Jayasuriya and sponsored by the Friends of the Law Library. Last night's inaugural film was introduced by two of the faculty who have joined an informal group interested in providing law students with some encounters between law and the film medium. Our first offering was John Ford's Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
I recalled almost nothing of the film after seeing it on television at some point in my much earlier life. Television negates any real experience of many films, but even more so back in the days when cropped versions were built around commercial advertising. So this was a treat for me, and I reflect upon it in connection with my continuing media studies (and a new project I'll announce soon via this blog).
Naomi Mezey of our faculty pointed out many features of the largest, zoomed out facets of the film: the juxtaposition of "talk and force" as well as the feminizing of the Jimmy Stewart character, the young lawyer Ransom Stoddard during his rocky start in the dusty town of Shinbone, rendered more/less "wide open" as a territory settlement by having a comic non-entity for a federal marshal. The John Wayne character, Tom Doniphon, was the kind of ambivalent hero that she described well: we watch as he and Ransom compete, in the minds of the audience, for first and second chair in this orchestration of philosophical tunes. Randy Barnett agreed generally with her remarks, which included some mention of how the coming of law, government, and civilization to this partly Hobbesian world had "costs" that are alluded to in the name of the horrific outlaw Liberty Valance and in the world of the ranchers, of which Tom is one (though he is interestingly neutral on issues that they represent in the film).
I agree partly with these remarks and offer just a few observations of my own. A student in the audience before the show stated that the film was shown in a European philosophy class, and indeed John Ford has inspired many European filmmakers artistically and in the themes of some of his many historic and great films. True, there is much here to spark further discussion of Plato and Hobbes, to name only two.
But for me a film is often foremost about the time in which it was made, in this case, 1962. Tom Doniphon represents in so many ways the plain integrity of the American myth of the West, the anti-intellectual American who still controls most of our culture, but who has a point about knowing when to back up words with action. And a handgun, of course. But who knew, in the continuing struggle of a post-war world living in an almost continuous post-colonial state of perceived emergency, that the path to be steered carefully between tribalism and the rule of law leads to suburbia? (Yes, Tom's life and plans are centered on that first house, no mortgage!) That must have been most comforting to audiences in 1962; but three cheers for Ford when the sole black resident of the town (albeit a servant) is encouraged to step up to the lunch counter- in this case, the saloon bar.
So while the town is busy becoming consumers, and the ranchers are busy becoming producers who resent regulation (don't fence me in), the deeper issue of the bully/victim is explored in the encounter between Ransom and Liberty Valance. Long before our recent school shootings, it may have become clear to some that every victim is a bully and every bully, a victim- well, perhaps. Psychopaths are an exception, as in this case. The sheer brutality of Valance and the disturbing mix of distant outrage but near tolerance of his torture techniques on the part of the townfolk, even if we consider it a tolerance engendered by fear, is done wonderfully by Ford and at time when the myth of the West was always one of sanitized violence. The silver-tipped whip hints at what most of Hollywood then would not show: that terrorism was a very real part of living in and settling the American West, even leaving aside native peoples. (The Mexicans in the film are left to be picturesque and benign, not yet a threat).
Fear of the Other and also the need to build a state solution to random, private violence indeed has a trade-off in the film as Ransom learns that government is also a tool of the tribes. He also learns that he was paradoxically both brave and a coward. So was Tom: mostly selfless in his love for Hallie, he still got his best, safest shot while Valance was distracted by Ransom in his momentary role as decoy.
Let's face it: none of us is perfectly brave or perfectly free. We are only as free as the least free person in our community, local or global.
As a final footnote it is interesting to look at the names of the characters and the principals of the film. Director John Martin Feeney (John Ford) and actor John Wayne (Marion Morrison) left the traces of Irish tribe in their birth names aside for the commodification of Hollywood, though Ford may have recanted somewhat later on. And that odd Doniphon, which sounds like Donovan: even the massive Wikipedia reveals only one other of note: Alexander William Doniphan, a soldier in the Mexican-American war who was lawyer and author of a legal code (the Kearny code) that was to have been used in an annexed Mexico and New Mexico, a kind of hybrid code, "an amalgam of Mexican, Texan and Coahuilan statutes" [with some Livingston Code of Louisiana, Missouri law mixed in](Roger D. Launius, Alexander William Doniphon, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate, 1997)at 115. But I digress- fulfilling here the codex theme of the blog as well as asking, in the end, whether we can leave the little house and garden of our minds and embrace the Other, at least by the study of comparative law? (Okay, like Ransom, I am forever the nerd).
So here is a paradoxically joyful "ouch" as we embrace John Ford's violent, beautiful film, a real "cactus rose."
I recalled almost nothing of the film after seeing it on television at some point in my much earlier life. Television negates any real experience of many films, but even more so back in the days when cropped versions were built around commercial advertising. So this was a treat for me, and I reflect upon it in connection with my continuing media studies (and a new project I'll announce soon via this blog).
Naomi Mezey of our faculty pointed out many features of the largest, zoomed out facets of the film: the juxtaposition of "talk and force" as well as the feminizing of the Jimmy Stewart character, the young lawyer Ransom Stoddard during his rocky start in the dusty town of Shinbone, rendered more/less "wide open" as a territory settlement by having a comic non-entity for a federal marshal. The John Wayne character, Tom Doniphon, was the kind of ambivalent hero that she described well: we watch as he and Ransom compete, in the minds of the audience, for first and second chair in this orchestration of philosophical tunes. Randy Barnett agreed generally with her remarks, which included some mention of how the coming of law, government, and civilization to this partly Hobbesian world had "costs" that are alluded to in the name of the horrific outlaw Liberty Valance and in the world of the ranchers, of which Tom is one (though he is interestingly neutral on issues that they represent in the film).
I agree partly with these remarks and offer just a few observations of my own. A student in the audience before the show stated that the film was shown in a European philosophy class, and indeed John Ford has inspired many European filmmakers artistically and in the themes of some of his many historic and great films. True, there is much here to spark further discussion of Plato and Hobbes, to name only two.
But for me a film is often foremost about the time in which it was made, in this case, 1962. Tom Doniphon represents in so many ways the plain integrity of the American myth of the West, the anti-intellectual American who still controls most of our culture, but who has a point about knowing when to back up words with action. And a handgun, of course. But who knew, in the continuing struggle of a post-war world living in an almost continuous post-colonial state of perceived emergency, that the path to be steered carefully between tribalism and the rule of law leads to suburbia? (Yes, Tom's life and plans are centered on that first house, no mortgage!) That must have been most comforting to audiences in 1962; but three cheers for Ford when the sole black resident of the town (albeit a servant) is encouraged to step up to the lunch counter- in this case, the saloon bar.
So while the town is busy becoming consumers, and the ranchers are busy becoming producers who resent regulation (don't fence me in), the deeper issue of the bully/victim is explored in the encounter between Ransom and Liberty Valance. Long before our recent school shootings, it may have become clear to some that every victim is a bully and every bully, a victim- well, perhaps. Psychopaths are an exception, as in this case. The sheer brutality of Valance and the disturbing mix of distant outrage but near tolerance of his torture techniques on the part of the townfolk, even if we consider it a tolerance engendered by fear, is done wonderfully by Ford and at time when the myth of the West was always one of sanitized violence. The silver-tipped whip hints at what most of Hollywood then would not show: that terrorism was a very real part of living in and settling the American West, even leaving aside native peoples. (The Mexicans in the film are left to be picturesque and benign, not yet a threat).
Fear of the Other and also the need to build a state solution to random, private violence indeed has a trade-off in the film as Ransom learns that government is also a tool of the tribes. He also learns that he was paradoxically both brave and a coward. So was Tom: mostly selfless in his love for Hallie, he still got his best, safest shot while Valance was distracted by Ransom in his momentary role as decoy.
Let's face it: none of us is perfectly brave or perfectly free. We are only as free as the least free person in our community, local or global.
As a final footnote it is interesting to look at the names of the characters and the principals of the film. Director John Martin Feeney (John Ford) and actor John Wayne (Marion Morrison) left the traces of Irish tribe in their birth names aside for the commodification of Hollywood, though Ford may have recanted somewhat later on. And that odd Doniphon, which sounds like Donovan: even the massive Wikipedia reveals only one other of note: Alexander William Doniphan, a soldier in the Mexican-American war who was lawyer and author of a legal code (the Kearny code) that was to have been used in an annexed Mexico and New Mexico, a kind of hybrid code, "an amalgam of Mexican, Texan and Coahuilan statutes" [with some Livingston Code of Louisiana, Missouri law mixed in](Roger D. Launius, Alexander William Doniphon, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate, 1997)at 115. But I digress- fulfilling here the codex theme of the blog as well as asking, in the end, whether we can leave the little house and garden of our minds and embrace the Other, at least by the study of comparative law? (Okay, like Ransom, I am forever the nerd).
So here is a paradoxically joyful "ouch" as we embrace John Ford's violent, beautiful film, a real "cactus rose."
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Summer reading; first, in summary
Reading for pleasure does not for me mean "non-serious" reading. Since I enjoy serious topics, philosophy and such, and since I am usually writing some sort of publication for which I have research-driven reading, my leisure reading covers a wide range of materials I am reading for no particular reason other than intellectual curiosity. My list of books I am lining up to read are on LibraryThing.
This summer, in addition to working on a book chapter for an edited collection of essays about the core sources for international legal research, I went through a few titles of which the following are just highlights. I like to wander back to fiction, as well as cultural history and philosophy. I am giving each a brief review in my next blog post.
Jose Saramago, Death With Interruptions (2008)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (2009)
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913)
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
"..the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve.."
To revive the blog and my own reflections on texts of all kinds, I can think of no better way to do it than to respond to President Obama's Inaugural speech. I was inspired by the intelligent, adult tone of the speech as well as the musical variations on "'Tis the Gift to Be Simple." But most of all, as I've been reflecting myself on the ongoing nature of bully becoming victim becoming bully becoming victim in our human history and even now in Gaza, Barack said after St. Paul, "...the time has come to set aside childish things..." and there can be greater indictment of the petty crimes as well as the human rights violations of the warmongering of the outgoing administration. Hope does seem to be springing forward for all of us.
As Cheney was wheeled away in a bizarre appearance, in a wheelchair and reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove, the sorrow of waste and damage, human and ecological and now economic, was the only low tone in an otherwise inspiring beginning for our country. I feel personally inspired and ready to continue with teaching, writing, and promoting a conscious examination of communication theory to law, comparative and religious.
As Cheney was wheeled away in a bizarre appearance, in a wheelchair and reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove, the sorrow of waste and damage, human and ecological and now economic, was the only low tone in an otherwise inspiring beginning for our country. I feel personally inspired and ready to continue with teaching, writing, and promoting a conscious examination of communication theory to law, comparative and religious.
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