King of Kong: For a Fistful of Quarters

King of Kong: For a Fistful of Quarters is the kind of film that makes me slightly queasy. It protrays the professional world of Donkey Kong playing, where various people compete to score records in the game. In particular it highlights two men- Billy Mitchell, a sauce manufacturer, and Steve Weibe a failed engineer and later science teacher- and their rivalry over the world record. Billy set it in 1982 and according to the film struggled by fair means, or foul, to make sure that his rival was unable to get a better score and that he would remain the King of Kong. In doing this he was assisted by Walter Day, the Head of the association which keeps the scores and by other friends and acquaintances. This account has been queried by Mitchell but it is the narrative of the film and whether true or not, it provides the architecture around which the film is judged. Not being familiar with Donkey Kong circles, I can't really comment on its truth- though I do think that the film's copious interview footage in particular does not portray those who it vilifies in a good light.

But lets move away from those questions for a moment, because in reality this isn't so much a film about the contest though that provides its dramatic coherence, as a film about obsession. We all have our obsessions in life- some of them like music and art are respectable, some are more geeky. Mastery of Donkey Kong is not normally combined with social adeptness and definitely this film provides you with evidence to go along with that thesis. Nobody in this film finds interraction with other people easy- you get the sense that the crowds of overweight, hairy and pale men don't interract well with the outside world. What you also get is a strong sense that they care too much about what they do- they beleive that for some reason it might just change the world- much like some bloggers do, they think that their every insignificant action matters, when actually its as important as a group of people going to a pub and enjoying a pint.

That's what intrigued me about this film- in reality it provides two explanations for a marginal activity and what's quite interesting is that it provides one positive model of how a minor activity can help someone, and another model of how it can harm someone. Lets take Steve Wiebe for a start. Steve according to the film was made unemployed, has had no real success in life- despite that he seems to have acquired two kids and a wife- but he has no real attainments and no self confidence. Being good at Donkey Kong became for him a way to rebuild his life- to reconstruct his identity and gave him confidence to move in his actual life to becoming a science teacher and therefore to a better respect for himself and for others. I know people who have used blogs in that way- as a ladder out of depression and uncertainty. For Steve Donkey Kong is his ladder.

Turn to Billy Mitchell, or the film's Billy Mitchell, and we find a different creature. Because so many of the gamers, like Billy, use the games to hide from the world and set up their egos against it. Billy is a self important loser in this film- there is no other way to describe him- constantly talking as though Donkey Kong were not irritating blobs moving on a screen but a life and death matter. In truth he has lost touch with reality. And in that sense he is similar to dozens of other guys that we see interviewed throughout the film- they have lost touch with reality. They believe that success in Donkey Kong is worth more than anything else- they construct castles built on the air of illusion and seem inable to see quite how comic and stupid they seem to anyone outside their universe. In a sense the Steve Weibes are the other side of the Billy Mitchells- in that both sets of people are constructing their identity through using the insiginificant game- but though you might think that you would be wrong. To construct something out of insignificance and then to go out into the world and actually do something is very different from retreating into insignificance and spending your life as a champion Donkey Kong player.

King of Kong is an immensely funny film- the joke is in the subtitle- but its a joke with a serious point. Let trivia- whether it be stamp collecting or games- turn from a support into a purpose and you have lost your way in life. If it aids you to construct a real life, so be it- but if it becomes more important than a real life- than real relationships- and starts to make you self important in illusion, then beware- there lies the path to Billy Mitchell and human disaster.

I loved every frame of this film- but as I said felt queasy- the reason is that I fear how far I am myself Billy Mitchell!

A glory of Miles Davis

Radio 3 is one of the great institutions of England- this evening I was listening to a great program on Miles Davis. They were discussing Davis's Carnegie Hall concerts in 1962. One anecdote though interested me in a more than musical sense- amongst my many failings is that I do not understand music as much as I should- and that was that it was often incredibly difficult to get Davis to record anything. The point was not that Davis abjured publicity- if your profession is playing instruments in front of people, you can't be shy! But that his concentration was on the music and not on the crowd around him, or notionally around him at their gramophones and in their houses.

Its an interesting thing- and I suppose constitutes a really important question that we often lose sight of. There are a hierarchy of pleasures. Davis felt them in the right way- music first and then publicity. Others today seem to feel them in another way round- with publicity and fame overtaking the pleasure of making music- the far end from Davis is populated by someone like Paris Hilton whose interest in music is purely notional. The question that we have to think about is whether its worth assigning a value to what someone feels as the keener pleasure: is a civil servant's joy in his job as praiseworthy if he enjoys analytical argument, working for the public or the money and security. Its probable that he will enjoy all three- but the hierarchy that he sets between them tells you a lot about his priorities in life.

And that really is the point here- the reason why we can condemn Hilton and exalt Davis is not merely their respective musical skills but also their sense of what is important in life. Fame is ultimately something that whilst attractive is meaningless and fuels competition and a desire for further acquisition. It is in that sense very similar to money- it is a good which is emulative- I know I am famous if I am more known than x, I know I am rich if I am richer than my friends (the great example of that principle recently was Alex on the apprentice who said he was successful because he was more successful than those he knew!) The point is that emulation is a natural and productive desire- but it is hard to think of it as a morally good desire. Contrast that to a passion for something- when I am passionate about something I seek out those who are also passionate and, though partly I wish to be known as 'the' expert, partly also I want to have someone to share my love. As love is a good, and it drives the passion- for history, cars, wine, football, dresses or jazz- and makes the passion an instrument to the creation of friendship so is the pursuit of the passion a good. That is why ultimately the musician who cares more for the music or as much for the music as s/he cares for the fame, is preferable to the musician who cares more for the fame than for the tunes.

The Challenge of filming the past

Filming history is something that directors increasingly do- it is something that they increasingly do badly. There are two equally bad mistakes to make when placing a person into the past: you can either put the person into the past as though they were an artefact of the 20th Century- the kind of creation of Jane Austen heroines as though they were Carrie Bradshaw is something that I perpetually have contempt for. But there is an equal mistake to make- which is to imagine the past so differently as to begin to condescend to those that lived in it. Great directors, as well as lesser ones, are guilty of this kind of thing- for instance its worth taking an instance of this attitude and working out why a director made the decisions he made, and also why the choices he made created an imperfection in a very great film. The instance that I want to discuss here is Ingmar Bergman's film The Magician and Bibi Andersson's character Sara, pictured above.

The Magician is set in 1846, it is about the visit of a Magician to the house of a leading townsman's house and it explores the role of magic and fantasy, art and science, God and death in a kind of philosophical horror film. The Magician himself is surrounded by cynics- upper class scientists and lower class sceptics- who challenge and confront him. But Bergman also wanted to create another group of people those who believed- we have the wife of the townsman's house- but we also have a chorus of servant girls (two of them including Sara) who give us the access to the crowd that believe the magician. Sara thus fulfils a role within the film, Bergman presents us with an uneducated, sexual, naive young maid. An end of the pier girl, sexy, sweet and fundementally stupid. There is a kind of comedy here- but its a coarse comedy and to modern ears fairly sexist.

The reason I call this sexist is because Sara's character is not really a character- it is a caricature. The actress in the role Bibi Andersson would do great work later on for Bergman- performing in Persona exquisitely six years later. But this part is not really a character- there is no depth here- nothing to get a handle on- rather this is an idea. The problem is that Bergman has tried to imagine a nineteenth century maid- and yes he has not tried to create a twentieth century woman and put her in a dress- but what he has done is just as problematic, because he has used the caricature of a 19th Century maid from bawdy comedy and placed that caricature inside the film. The thing is that you cannot imagine that just because someone existed in the past- and so for example might be naive (I wouldn't expect Swedish maids to be well educated) doesn't mean that they might not have characters. This caricature is all squeeling over love potions- I'm sure that there were people who did but they had more content to them than that. This is an unsubtle portrait- and so its a postcard of a past that never existed, and a sexist portrait that appeals to various male stereotypes as well.

Bergman was a great director- and created great roles for women- there is one in the Magician itself (the Magician's wife) but there are others scattered liberally through his films where his great actresses from Ingrid Thulin to Liv Ullman created women who will endure down the ages. But this single character is a failure: and I think it is a failure because Bergman allowed a caricature into his work. He basically forgot that a young uneducated girl was still a person- and not just a caricature: to an extent Sara is a sexist fantasy maid, to that extent Bergman fails to convey what he wants to in this film and it collapses. The irony is that Sara is created in order that the audience takes the magician's illusions more seriously: but of course Sara herself is an illusion and it is precisely because that character is a caricature, that we see the illusion and like a magic trick, when you realise its a magic trick, ceases to have an impact- so a film when you realise it is being directed- loses some of its dramatic power. Ingmar Bergman was one of the great illusionists (to borrow Scorsese's image), with Sara though the illusion is incomplete and therefore unbelievable.

Deir el-Bahari

Deir el-Bahari was an important ancient Egyptian religious site. It held the female pharoah, Hatshepsut's, mortuary temple. But it also was the site of another temple- more venerated in the ptolemaic age ( 305 BC-30BC) where two particular gods Amenhotep and Imhotep were worshipped. Recently the site has been excavated by Adam Lajtar- and a report on his reports of his excavations is here. What I find interesting about it, and I'm just reading at the moment an analysis of Roman religion which I will inflict on you later, is a number of points about the way that religious observance functioned differently in the polytheistic ancient world to the way it functions in today's modern world. What Lajtar has found is fascinating: he has found a great deal of Greek inscriptions from believers who came to this shrine to worship. Egypt at this point in history was dominated by a Greek dynasty- the Ptolemies were one of the more important successor dynasties to Alexander's empire in the Eastern Meditereanean- culminating with the spectacular figure of Cleopatra and sustaining the Alexandrian Library amongst other culturally important activities.

Perhaps more surprising than that historical detail is a couple of things- which are characteristic of Ancient Polytheism. One of which is that the temple commemorated two individuals- one of whom at least was an identifiable historical personality: Amenhotep, son of Hotep, a court official, priest and medic at the court of Amenhotep IV of the 14th Dynasty. Imhotep was also a minister- he served the 3rd Dynasty (in the 27th century BC). These two ministers therefore became venerated as important figures, intercessionary figures with the higher Gods and later turned into Gods themselves. The line between human and divine which in the austere monotheisms is so solid, in ancient polytheism was much more fluid. That has implications for the way for instance the Christian doctrine of the saints worked- but it also suggests to me a very different idea about religion itself. Noone going to these shrines would have gone under any illusion that these men had originally been men, noone would have doubted that they were now Gods.

There is a second point that I think is very interesting and seems very strange to a modern eye though. And this is this: just because you went to worship Amenhotep in Deir el-Bahari, does not mean you wanted to worship Imhotep. Furthermore many Greeks went to worship neither God, but to worship Asclepius, the divine physician, who they assumed Imhotep to be an Egyptian form of. What is interesting about this: and it is a point I will build on in my later article: is that ancient religion unlike modern religion was far less concerned with doctrinal difference. Polytheism could embrace a fluidity between religious custom that modern religion finds difficult to sustain. (I am not arguing that Polytheism was in any way better than modern monotheism- but that it was very different in character, it could fuse with less tension Greek and Egyptian religious practise than say one can fuse Jewish and Muslim and Christian religious practice). It is an interesting distinction- and we will come back to what that reveals at a later point but as a prologue to a later article, Deir el-Bahari is a useful pointer- it demonstrates some of the differences between a polytheistic ancient outlook and our own understanding of religion as a doctrine to which you adhere, excluding all other doctrines.

Le Plaisir

Watching Le Plaisir, you realise imediately the crassness of much romantic comedy. Guy de Maupassant's stories and Max Ophuls's direction point us though in a different, more realistic and still amusing direction when we consider relationships between the sexes and the way that we obtain pleasure in society. Ophuls chose to direct three of Maupassant's stories: Le Masque, about an old man trying to recover the womanising dancing youth he had been, La Maison Tellier, about prostitutes and a madam on a trip to the country and lastly La Modele, about the relationship between a model and her boyfriend, an artist. The three short films are introduced by a narrator, Maupassant himself, and the last by a journalist. They are not equal in length nor similar in temprament: the first gives is sad and short, the second long and more buoyant and the third returns to a darker mood in its short span.

Three stories, and three narrations between them, beggining fantastically as Maupassant tells us that we are in the dark, and he is sitting next to us, illustrating with a wave of his hand the contours of the stories. But like any narrator Maupassant is unreliable: this film is a great example of literary criticism, Ophuls takes apart Maupassant's narration and his stories do not always fit with the narrators confident judgements. Sexual desire is at the centre of these stories. Sexual desire leads the old man up to the dance hall to frolic with the young, under a mask, but he cannot cope and collapses- having to be taken home. Sexual desire provides the trade for the brothel- but the women of the brothel in the countryside cannot escape that sexual desire- they are still desired and they find being desired a less disturbing place than the pieties of the church or the loneliness of a single, quiet bed. They want to be loved. Sexual desire though can never last long- the last story illustrates for us that fact: 'Familiarity breeds contempt' afterall.

What we discuss though here is the male observer: the observations made by the narrator are always from the male point of view. One of the ways that Ophuls subverts that narrator is by demonstrating that his judgements are prejudiced. Perhaps this is most evident in the last story- Le Modele- where the narrator tells us that women are fickle, but the model proves anything but- ruefully the narrator has to admit, perhaps I was wrong. There is more to this than that: for Ophuls shows us that in a world without women, men are reduced to dispute. When the brothel closes for an evening: the men of the town start to fight, without desire, we are left with competition. Desire is not what creates competition, but it is what satiates competition. In this world, violence is the result of the absense or the denial of what you desire. A woman attempts suicide when her lover says no, men feud when the brothel is closed.

If Ophuls is interested in the mechanism of desire, he is also interested in the way that we are temporarily diverted from it. Ophuls's camera for instance shows us a church which the prostitutes visit at the girl's communion: whereas in Maupassant the scene is a farce, in Ophuls he gets us closer to the view of the prostitutes. We recognise the incongruity of these sinners acquiring a spiritual side: but then as their tears, the tears in particular of the hardened Rosa, affect the entire congregation, we recognise a central Christian truth- the incongruity of any sinner approaching the church and also the majesty of human freedom, that no matter who you are, you are free to be inspired by the good. Throughout the film's city scenes we see the prostitutes behind the bars of the brothel, we never intrude into it and we perceive them as the commodities they are, once out in the countryside they gain a respectability and an anonymity which means they are no longer prostitutes but people.

The central theme to these films is that Ophuls replaces Maupassant's sarcastic look at human kind with a gentler examination of human folly. Ophuls does not beleive that desire is stupid and what is desired worthless. Rather he suggests that beauty can become part of an almost mystical experience- in Le Modele that is the attitude of the artist at first to his model. He has a sense that often love decays, often people are in situations which are unhappy, and that beauty and strength wither with age: but Ophuls does not mock human folly, he invites us to observe, to gently smile at his characters but ultimately to sympathise. His camera has an attitude and it is gentle and amused: tragedy strikes and terrifies, age withers and money corrupts and yet humans are still loveable in the world of Max Ophuls.

The Effect of War

Vino suggests that we should be cautious about automatically assuming that the fact that America did not fight in the first world war leads to the point that America is more militaristic than Europe. He is entirely right. It struck me when reading Vino's post that the experience of war has some very complicated effects on societies. For a start, it is worth remembering that American history no less than European history has been governed by war- whereas we remember Churchill and the trenches, America has a folk memory of Roosevelt and Lincoln. The Civil War is a crucial moment within American history and in a sense you cannot understand America in the late 19th and early 20th century without understanding the civil war. Afterall the vice President in 1932 was born barely after the war had ended and lived right up until 1968.

America's past may be as war torn as Europe's but its also worth remembering that wars can have odd effects. The First World War has been a great force for pacifism in European history since 1918: the change effected on the generation that went to fight and the generation that sent them was profound. Just consider Rudyard Kipling whose life was shattered after his son died at the front, or JRR Tolkein whose Lord of the Rings trilogy is obviously scarred by the implications of total war- the marshes of the dead by Mordor are one of the more terrifying descriptions of the trenches ever to have been written in literature. But Tolkein's example should indicate something else- that war can transform lives but not neccessarily in a pacifist direction. Tolkein was no pacifist, rather war reinforced his Catholicism- which is so memorably expressed in the structure of his fable. If that variety is true of the First World War and of the American Civil War then it is equally true of earlier wars.

The point is that it is the mindset with which people approach war that governs their reactions to it. Ultimately war is a terrifying and upsetting experience- especially a war like that in 1914 or in 1860 which kills a large proportion of those who go out to fight. It changes lives. But it changes lives from within. The soldiers of the English civil war for example went to war with a profound monotheistic conviction and came back convinced that providence had saved them for a purpose. Wilfrid Owen and Seigfried Sassoon's generation often went to war with a more secular conviction and came back with a hatred for the 'old gang' who had manipulated the country into war. The effects of destruction in Iraq have ressembled the model of the 1640s more than that of the 1914 war but the general truth remains there. Vino is right to be cautious that war explains differences in militarism between the two parts of the western alliance: it is the attitude you go to war with that largely governs how you interpret the experience of war and how you come out of it. War can therefore do different things to different societies- depending on the way that soldiers approach and experience its tragedies.

War as a general phenomenon produces stress and fear, sorrow and hate. Those emotions cause change in individuals. But it is the base from which they start often, as much as the experience they go through, that explains the place they end up in. Searching for differences based on shared experiences within societies but not between them might help us, but we need to understand whether the societies were in the same place beforehand before we can state that the absense of a variable contributed to the different attitude.

The many deaths of Martha Ray

'Now madam can you beleive such a tale? How could poor Miss Wray have offended a divine? She was no enemy to the Church militant or naval, to the Church of England or the Church of Paphos. I do not doubt that the assasin is a dissenter and instigated by the Americans to give such a blow to the state' Horace Walpole to the Countess of Ossory (8 April 1779)

Horace Walpole was an inveterate gossip. But what he was gossiping about when he wrote to the Countess of Ossory was the subject of London gossip throughout the ensuing months: on 7 April 1779, Martha Ray, the mistress to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, got into a carriage after the performance of a play. A former soldier and present clergyman, James Hackman stepped out of the crowd and shot into her face, killing her instantly, he then attempted to kill himself but failed. He was hung ten days later after a brief trial before Sir John Fielding. The trial left much unresolved: why afterall did Hackman murder Ray, what were Ray's relations with her keeper, Sandwich, and how did the murder reflect the way that men and women related in the eighteenth century. Unsurprisingly these were issues that immediatly contemporaries began to speculate about as have biographers until this day. We may not be able to say much about the murder itself- we know little of Hackman before 1779 (save that he had probably met Ray in 1776 and that he professed to be in love with her- we have no definite account of them meeting between 1776 and 1779 at all)- but we can definitely as John Brewer has describe the reactions to the murder and demonstrate through them how a private tragedy became an indicator for centuries to follow of truths about the public realm.

Brewer wants to take us into the mindset of those that covered the events, not those that participate in them. He wants you to see how an event was understood at a particular time. This event for example became part of a cult of sensibility in 18th Century London. All the protagonists were seen as sensitive human beings. Ray was seen as a gracious mistress, Sandwich's grief for his mistress's death was observed and Hackman was understood as a fervant lover. Where Hackman failed though was in his strength of feeling- feelings overwhelmed him in the moment and confronted by his lover being handed into a carriage by another man, he unloaded lead into her face and killed her. Of course though that was not the only route that one might take to understand the case. Partisans of Sandwich were able to influence the newspapers- the eighteenth century journals relied on voluntary correspondents, many of whom were in the employ of those participating in the stories that they covered- and Sandwich had a network of journalists out to disseminate a truth about the events of April 1779. But that was not the only version and soon competing ones arose.

One competing version was that Ray was a conniving woman- a woman of easy pleasure who had manipulated both men to her evil ends and caused her own downfall. Sandwich himself was a well known libertine. Politically he had offended John Wilkes, the radical, and consequently was attacked almost constantly. But it was Ray and Hackman who attracted particular attention with different publications taking opposite sides- arguing the case either for Ray as the leader on, the false woman or for Hackman as the vile seducer. Some saw Ray's death as punishment justified for her sins: others saw Hackman as the true protagonist and suggested that he must have suffered from some kind of madness. In the midst of all this a forgery was published- one of the most impressive forgeries of the eighteenth century by Herbert Croft. Croft presented to the public the letters between Hackman and Ray- actually he himself wrote those letters. What he presented though was the idea of madness- that Hackman had murdered Ray in a spasm of madness, a creative kind of instability- for Croft bought the idea of artistic instability and indeed compared Hackman to Thomas Chatterton explicitly. The point of Croft's work was not lost on contemporaries- Erasmus Darwin for example used Hackman as an example of erotomania- though it fitted oddly with their perceived ideas about the world, erotomania was supposed to the be a disease of women and not men.

From Croft the nineteenth century largely derived its view of the incident- from Croft and one other source. The other source was Martha Ray's son, Basil Montague. His son also named Basil ended up being babysat by William and Dorothory Wordsworth and indeed in a poem, written at about the time that Basil jr. was with them, William Wordsworth refers to Martha Ray. The Thorn refers to Martha Ray less as a historical person than as an exempla of human suffering. For Wordsworth her name was a word which denoted an association in the readers' mind of suffering but did not refer to a particular historical case. By the time that lyrical ballads came out at the turn of the century, the world had largely moved on from the days of Martha Ray and what we find is that increasingly her life is used as an illustration- as in Wordsworth's poem. In other places it becomes an illustration of the corruption of the 18th Century compared to the virtuous 19th Century. The point is the same though, Ray's tale gradually faded.

It was revived when Croft's letters, reedited and ammended, were republished at the turn of the twentieth century. Most people, including scholars, presumed that there was a kernel of truth to what Croft had prepared. This is despite the fact that Croft himself told the world that the letters were entirely fictional- but the convention that in the eighteenth century meant that a fiction and fact were closer together- that Daniel Defoe for example might draw out the truths in Alexander Selkirk's life and present them as Robinson Crusoe- had died by the late 19th. The new edition inspired a great amount of thought surrounding Ray in particular: some authors took the line that Ray was caught herself tremulously between two masterful men (the account of Constance Hagberg Wright is almost schoolgirlish in turning every man into Mr Darcy). Here the murder is less important than the situation. That is the same as Elizabeth Jenkins's approach who likewise views the murder as revealing of a situation- in this case the social one- how should Ray leave her 'keeper' without risking the collapse of her fortunes.

We do not know much about Ray and Hackman- were they lovers or was the love a dream of Hackman's imagining? What was Ray's real attitude to Sandwich? We will probably never know- but the way that the story has changed in its telling demonstrates a lot about the way in which the centuries have affected the way that stories are presented and thought about. Brewer's telling of this is interesting- and there is more than I can hope to capture here- but particularly in the way he presents attitudes to news changing across the generations he has captured something really interesting. There is something fascinating about the way that a story first came to pass in the newspapers of the 18th Century, with anonymous letter writers providing unchecked copy and the fantasies of Herbert Croft and then the way that those fantasies and letters became the source material for supposedly 'scholarly' editions in the 19th Century and then for fictionalised treatments in the 20th Century. Such are the vagueries of fashion- not merely in what each generation writes as history, but in how each generation views the history that it writes.

Jack the Ripper Exhibition

Jack the Ripper is a name that comes with associations- dark East End alleys filled with the lonely cries of drunks stumbling through the night air, the bodies of murdered prostitutes, the glimmers of street lamps above torn carcasses, the silent murderer like a ghost walking the ways around Whitechapel. There is at the moment a fantastic exhibition about the Ripper and his times over at the Docklands museum in London: I went there last week. The pictures of East enders bring home the poverty of the time: women and men without shoes, families living in single rooms if they were lucky, dirt and grime covering the streets and glum faces looking out of them. There are some wonderful pictures here: of match girls working from home, with the matches covering the desks or of cases that came into the London Hospital: prostitutes with their faces marked hideously by siphillis, terrible injuries from manual hard labour and there are maps of London made at the time showing the poorest areas- many of which surround the narrow streets in which the Ripper preyed.

Perhaps though the most powerful moment for me was coming round a corner in the museum and hearing people, interviewed much later, discussing how they had lived when kids in the time that the Ripper was alive and hunting. The interviews must have been done in the sixties or the fifties, but there are the peculiar flat London Eastend voices, the dropped vowels and you get that sense of intimacy with the past that is so important if you are to understand it. The thing about the Victorian era is that it is so easy for us to assume that they were like us- afterall this is the generation of our great grandparents- but it is very false. The poverty was what struck me throughout the exhibition: the prostitutes that the Ripper preyed on were known as four penny touches- four pence was the price of a room in the East End for the night and they would take that for sex and spend it on the bed where they completed the purchase. Photos of the suspects- particularly the Eastern Europeans who inhabited the East end bring home the nature of the area- it was a squabbling hive of poverty and immigration. An area not unlike the favellas of Brazil or the slums of Mumbai today- an area where visitors feared to tread.

All this makes the expert witnesses, whose videoed interviews disrupt the last hall, so disappointing. One even asserts that life as a prostitute in Whitechapel today is similar in some ways to life then: whereas one would think that though no prostitute deserves our envy, few are sleeping with men just for the cost of a bed and fewer are taking such a lottery with primitive methods of contraception. Equally facile are the observations of a criminal profiler that Jack was probably a bit weird- as though most men think 'ah today I'll go out and dismember a prostitute', it would have been more interesting to see some historians discuss the eras or even better see more interviews about the time with those who had lived in the East End in similar days. Attempting to suggest that the Ripper's society is like today's society is facile: horrible crimes happen today (of course) but the Ripper's case gives us the opportunity because of the contemporary public fascination to understand a type of life that isn't often exposed to us, to get into the slums of Victorian London- breaking that for the facile assumption that it ressembles our own lives seems to lose the point of the exhibition.

Overall though this is fascinating, criminal cases often are. They are fascinating because the criminal like a knife cuts not merely at the victim, but into his society. What you have exposed by that flesh wound is often the things that otherwise would be silent, would be kept under lock and key in some safe and never heard of again. Because of the media interest and the police files, we get to see the life of a prostitute in late Victorian London, something that we would not otherwise ever hear about. In that sense the morbid fascination contributes to our understanding of the way that the world was then: and it cannot be anything but a good thing that this exhibition has chosen to try and make this a display of the Ripper and also his times. The closer we get to understanding the differences between our times and theirs, the closer we get to understanding what Victorian London was like through Victorian eyes, the closer we get to discovering something of value.

It is, despite some annoying commentary, a good exhibition to see- the photos and reminscences in particular are worth hearing and it reveals once again how historical crime and scandal can reveal to us the patterns of the past.

Cronaca di un amore

When it was first made, Cronaca di un amore was criticised by the neo-realist critics of the day. They thought it an exaltation of the frivolous lives of the aristocracy and the bourgeoise, a cinematic surrender to the delights of the flesh promised by Capitalism to the Italian middle class. Worse still they read it correctly as a homage to Hollywood, a homage to film noir in all its facets and a homage therefore to American film making. How wrong they were in their assessment. For Cronaca is really a cutting attack: it is an icy stare upon western society and in particular upon western wealth and the marinettes dancing upon the top of the wedding cake of capitalism. The film is about a girl- played by the impossibly beautiful Lucia Bose- who is caught between her husband and her lover. Years ago she turned away from her lover because his girlfriend and her friend died when they were both standing by subliminally wishing her out of the way. Her husband's investigation of this accident brings together Guido and Paola again after seven years and leads onto a similar terrible event.

Antonioni wants us though to reflect a little deeper here than we might about the meanings of things. The love that Paola and Guido enjoy is a little thing which inspires terrible consequences: it stops them acting to save the lives of others around them. They could have saved the life of their mutual friend by telling her there was no lift in the shaft, but they didn't out of love. Their love is never shown as something that satisfies either of them though. It is no grand passion. Increasingly throughout the film Paola acts the part of the femme fatale. Increasingly both of them seem utterly bored, consumed by their lustrous surroundings and drained by them. Paola in particular seems to pass through the film listlessly, she wears stunning clothes, drives amazing cars and is amazingly beautiful (such that her husband jokes he could sell her for hundreds of thousands of lire) but she doesn't really appreciate any of it: it doesn't make her happy. That isn't to say she could ever leave it: she tells Guido quite emphatically that she cannot leave her husband because she cannot leave his wealth: but it does mean that she derives almost no pleasure from life.

He is equally aimless. He doesn't appear to have a job. He expresses no enjoyment in anything during the film bar her. All the other characters are similar. The detective who trails the lovers is also a man without much in the way of pleasure- save for seeing Milan play. The husband is not a particularly violent man. All the characters seem insipid. Rendered as such by their lives which are devoid of any real meaning. I don't beleive that Antonioni thinks that there is any meaning- just that in this incredibly bleak film he finds nothing of meaning. He finds that the world for these characters is boundless and bare: this is the truly antisceptic modern world, clean and brilliant, yet utterly pointless. It is a Chronicle of Love but a chronicle of modern love: a love in a world that is merely boring. Despite the gowns and the glory that is the message of this film- and its a deeply pessimistic one- go home, don't bother, give up, there is nothing to see, all the stories we tell about ourselves are lies, all the loves we have do not last and we are as guilty of crimes we fail to prevent as of those we commit. Ultimately love and crime are similar so long as we part, we can forget, the problems come when we remember- when we seek to reawake the past, to find our stories. All we do then is send ourselves strolling round to repeat old mistakes with old lovers, reawakening passions that don't exist. All we do is stay within our Chronicles of Love- our Cronaca di un amore- without any possibility of escape.

The Lady of Musashino

The history of the twentieth century is the history of the impact of the two World Wars. Wherever you are in the world, your family was directly impacted by those wars and their massive consequences- revolution, depression, decolonisation, post war prosperity, casualties and social change. Social change followed on from war inexorably. In the UK for example, the real decade of sexual liberation was the forties not the sixties, the fifties were an attempt to repress the anarchy of the war years. If in the allied countries life was smashed and changed forever by the experience of war, then in the defeated nations, in Japan and Germany and Italy, that was even more true. Luckily for us as historians, we have copious amounts of evidence with which to understand that process. Amongst that evidence is the reaction of film makers: the Italian neo-realist tradition for example stemmed from the condition of Italian society after the war and sought to analyse and explain what had happened. If that was true of European filmmakers then it was also true of Japanese filmmakers, who sought to explain their defeat and the reconstruction of the post war era with all the tools they could lay their hands on.

Of all the explanations of the social change happening in Japan from 1945 onwards, the Lady from Musashino, a film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, has a unique vantage point. Mizoguchi was an accomplished director by the point he made this film and you can see it in the way that he forms his frames and directs his actors. You can also observe it in the economy with which he conveys the story- he uses only 88 minutes to tell a story whose characters are complete and which spans several years. He uses voice over occasionally but more often relies upon subtle visual techniques to supplement an excellent, if minamalist, script. The story is easily told: it is a story of an unhappy marriage, between Michiko and her husband Akiyama. Michiko falls in love with her cousin returning from the war, Tsutsomo and Akiyama is secretly in love with Michiko's other cousin Ono's wife Tomiko. The love pentagon is at the beggining of the film presided over by Michiko's father and mother, but they die as Japan falls to the allies and thus the stage is set for the tragedy to come.

I do not wish to get any further into the story, but rather to explore some thematic points. Because this is a film that makes you think. Michiko's father begins the film by berrating the Meijj Restoration, and restating his own martial samurai ethic. Akiyama does not come from that background and is a university Professor from a peasant family. He is totally contaminated by Western influence- in particular by Stendhal. Michiko and him live very different kinds of lives. Michiko's love affair with Tsutsomo reminds me of nothing more than the relationship in Brief Encounter, its got the same muted restraint. Michiko though explores the reasons for staying respectable in a different way than either character manages to in Brief Encounter: she argues that there is a moral code and that we have to stick by it whether it is evil or good. Our moral code is what we will, it is created out of our volition (God is scarcely mentioned in this) but once uttered it must be performed. In that sense Michiko sees the real value in life being in oaths- she takes two oaths during the film, one to her father on his death and the second to her lover and she believes in her own terms that she has kept those oaths and consequently throughout the movie is convinced of her own rectitude.

The world of the movie is more complicated than this: for whereas Michiko represents absolute conservatism, there is a sense in which she also acknowledges the need for change. She tells Tsutsomo that believing in the persistance of the Samurai ideal (symbolised by the estate of Musashino) is believing in an illusion- the future is the industrial and Americanised city of Tokyo. She has sworn her oath of fidelity to the old tradition: but she has no problem in seeing that that tradition must change. (Interestingly it is technical and economic change that forces moral change here, not the redundancy of the ethic that had led to the Nanking massacre and other like horrors.) The artificial moral code she lives by is a constricting one which restricts her own happiness and propels her to damage others. But she holds to her oaths, because they give her life a moral framework which the lives of Akiyama and Tomiko lack. Deprived of any moral framework those two are blown hither and thither by their lusts: Michiko says at one point that morality not love is the only power, and by that she means that morality can give a life structure and meaning, whereas love can only give it excitement and content. In that sense, Tsutsomo is perhaps the most interesting character- because within him we can perceive the conflict between the two principles. Tsutsomo lives a life of abandon in Tokyo but swiftly realises that it does not satisfy him, he then comes to the countryside and finds that a woman whom he can at last love, but she denies him because of her morality which is in part what he loves, because she is embedded in marriage with a husband who hates and abuses her.

The obvious conclusion is the promotion of a new standard of morality and a new kind of Japan: the age of the samurai is over and the age of the automobile has begun. Samurai morality propelled Japan into a bloody war, there is no question that flowing through this is the resentment of the soldiers that went against those that stayed behind to sleep with girls and party all day. The resentment though is something that is a double edged sword because of course traditional Japan went to war in the first place. Michiko advises Tsutsomo that ultimately the traditional way of doing things must die and industrial Japan replace it: but her example informs him of the fact that with that new industrial Japan the norms, the principles of morality must be adopted. Morality is a matter of volition and though the content of the oaths must change, the fact of the oath must not change. Morality will still exist because without it life becomes meaningless- it becomes the life that Tomiko lives- but morality has to change with the new times. Tsutsomo walks out of the film without giving us a clue as to whether Michiko's dream of a new modern yet still moral Japan has become a success: like the impact of the French Revolution, it may be too early to discuss that question, all we can do is wait and see.

Felicia's Journey

"Memory Lane" is a constant presence in this fine novel by William Trevor. Memory governs both of his characters- Felicia, a young pregnant Irish girl come to England to find her lover, and Mr Hilditch, a catering manager who she finds instead. Felicia of course is possessed by her memories as the story begins- she searches the streets of Birmingham for a face, for a whisper of news about her lover. Mr Hilditch though is also gripped by the memories of other girls in other places who he met and had tea with, counselled and eventually who parted from him. Felicia finds in Mr Hilditch a temporary resource, she does not care for him particularly and does not really think about him, the trajectory of her mind is set by her memories into a particular form and in her story, Mr Hilditch, is nothing more than an aberration on the way to find her Johnny. Whereas for Mr Hilditch she represents another itteration of a story that he retells himself again and again, about the girls he has met and about his time with them, and the times afterwards.

There is no getting away from it, this is a sinister novel, with the shade of Fred West for instance instantly present at every moment. But it is far more interesting than a mere thriller, though those aspects are there as well. It is about the way that we think about each other- and the way that our habits of explanation collide. Felicia unwittingly stimulates Mr Hilditch through her panic: when she runs down to find out how he is doing at finding Johnny in her nightgown, her urgency is interpreted by him as sexuality. There are plenty of other moments in the story where a character's actions are misunderstood- particularly there is the obtuse missionary who meets both Felicia and Hilditch and fails to comprehend either of them, then there is Felicia's family whose instant condemnation fails to appreciate Felicia's guilt and lastly there is Felicia herself who assumes that such condemnation is perpetual and therefore runs away. Most notable and tragic is Mr Hilditch, almost everything he thinks about other characters, almost every way he classifies people is an error and a mistake. It drives him onwards towards an unpleasant ending.

The novel does not offer any satisfying resolution to these issues- what I found interesting was that in the end the resolution is almost an abandonment of hope. Trevor's characters can only find peace by neglecting to remember, by forgetting the ability to write stories but just observing life as seamless and meaningless incident they find a kind of truth. By dying, they live. In a sense that Christian motif runs right through the novel- from the first hints of an Irish mass, to the last calls of an Evangelical old woman- but in a deeper sense this is a novel whose roots are incredibly Christian. What could be more theologically apt than the power of a pregnant woman, carrying a child into a strange country, what could be more theologically accurate than the conception of the anger of conscience, the torture of wronging an innocent destroying the lives of the guilty? Trevor's portrait of individual Christians is very bleak- but his conception of the world rests upon a Christian moral sensibility- and in particular an Irish Catholic sensibility.

If this has one last meaning, it is to do with the position of Ireland and England in their never ending dance (which hopefully is entering a newer and brighter phase). Written in the early 1990s though, this book reflects that world in which the IRA ceasefire was but a myth and the Celtic tiger had only begun to roar. Felicia's lover, Johnny, is feared by her father because of his possible links to the British Army. In a deeper sense his fear of his daughter's violation by this representative of Britain is an emblem of the crossing of the two societies. Felicia's remembered Ireland is the land of conservatism and rural community, Britain in contrast is scary, urban and liberal. In Ireland, a man may easily be beaten up, his face kicked to ribbons and left to die without a word passing, in Britain Mr Hilditch with all his problems fades into the anonymity of modern life. These portraits are not nice- but Trevor balances throughout the novel between the two and between the two narrators- inevitably what he portrays is the journey of Felicia psychologically from Ireland to Britain, a journey which only begins when she arrives in the UK. And lastly a journey which is deeply ironic, for everyone she meets in Britain is attempting to help her not become the person, that she eventually, under their pressure becomes. Felicia is naive: but so are the small c conservatives she meets- for they think that it is possible to be Irish in Britain. As the story proves it isn't.

There are lots of journeys in Felicia's journey, but the essential ones are internal journeys. Styllistically Trevor manages to convey this through a peculiar narrative style- most of the book comes in third person narration, from the position of one of the two main characters' minds. The key though is that the internal journey is the real event described in the title- I hope I haven't given away its ending but suffice it to say that the journey winds and twists and its ending is not what you might expect.

Industrial Britain (1931)

Part of the recent 'Land of Promise' collection of 30s and 40s documentaries put out by the BFI and made by Robert Flaherty at the start of the British documentary movement of the 1930s and 1940s, Industrial Britain is a wonder to behold. Flaherty believed in a romantic ideal of work- an ideal that we have almost lost today- that work was the culmination of life. His craftsmen- and in this film every single worker is a craftsman- are the epitomy of what it is to be a real person. In a sense what Flaherty captures is not so much industrial Britain, as pre industrial Britain- in that he seeks to find amidst the industrial the remnants of the craftsman who can be happy with his skill, the man who is more than machine, who is an expert in his own craft. It is no surprise for example that he turns to look at men who make glass and pots as his exemplas of the way that industrial Britain is or rather the way it should be. What he captures though is important and it is a precious insight- his documentary is about the value of work, work should not be about going to an office for a day and coming back in the evening to earn a wage in what is ultimately boring, futile and soul destroying, such as the ancients or the early moderns would have described it is slavery. Provender, as Mark Anthony comments, is fitting reward for a horse but it is an insult to regard any person as a horse! Rather work in Flaherty's conception was noble, it was an endeavour that transcended its dull monotony- one might not know it but the work of a steel mill or a coal mine produced a ship, a speed record, a lighthouse, a railway track or the girder that held up a hotel roof.


Flaherty was a wonderful film maker as well as someone who had an insight into the way that what we might call the industrial aristocracy of England thought about their jobs. What I think he also conveyed was something that England as a country rather lacks today- the responsibility I hasten to add of a series of complicated social changes- which is an esteem for engineering and craftsmanship. What he manages to communicate in this film is why engineering is so wonderful: it is creation at its purest. He has a wonderful sequence in which he films the construction of a glass light for a railway- the workers puffing away- the fine tweezers which manipulate the glass and the fascinated and intent look of the craftsmen at their job. Another example is where he shows a potter moulding the clay- here the eyes of the young man are intent, his hands in sinc with each other as they caress the lines of the clay and move up and down, changing subtly its shape until it becomes something recognisable as a pot. His filming is impecable- it is hard to fault any part of it- the shots are well chosen- in a steel mill for example he captures the urgency with which the men shape the course of the steel into a mould- he focuses always inwards on the expressions of those working, on their faces, intent and concentrated staring at their product.


He does romanticise, this is not the kind of film produced later in the decade which highlighted the suffering of those that worked in industrial Britain. Flaherty's workers are undeniably physically tried, in one remarkable sequence he takes us down into a coal pit where the miners are hewing out the coal with picks. The work is hard, arduous and back breaking: far removed in a sense from the glass work of the craftsmen. But he doesn't dwell on it. Rather for Flaherty the miracle is that despite the modernity of what these industries produce, ultimately it is human agency which determines their production. Coal has to be bludgeoned out of the rock, steel supervised, glass and clay shaped in order to produce what seem to us at the other end as purely mechanical productions. What he stresses is the effort, the sweat and the attention that went into the creation of industry in the modern era- and in his context the pride that also went into it, professional pride in creation. It is a part of the story that we often lose- we forget that the industrial revolutions of this and other countries depended and still depend on people doing difficult and hard jobs, and doing them well. Sometimes the part of the story that we seem to have lost is not so much the awareness of class struggle, as the awareness of the acheivement of craftsmen, engineers and manual workers. That's what Flaherty at the end of the day gets to, it is a call for recognition and a call for people to feel proud of their acheivements- the call for the Industrial Revolution to turn all men into craftsmen- if leaves an idealised picture partly because it seeks to transform the world into an ideal.


Looking back on Flaherty's film from this point in time, we can admire the photography, admire the filming and recognise that what he does is utter a call to recognise those, whose back breaking labour formed our modern world. Alongside the great scientists, great businessmen, great politicians, we shouldn't forget the great miners, great glassworkers, steelworkers and potters- our world was shaped by their hands.

The Plague

The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus. What Camus intended to do was to dramatise the problems of the French Resistance, what he intended to do was dramatise the reasons that men decided they would die in the Resistance. Instead of taking the subject on directly, Camus presented the problem of the resistance by analogy. He took the subject of a plague hitting the small Algerian (at that point French) town of Oran. The plague is indescribable. It afflicts all with equal indiscriminate ease and seems to strike at the most random moment. Furthermore because of the plague the town of Oran is isolated, cut off from the rest of France and left alone to suffer. Its townspeople for instance are reduced to watching over and over again the same films, because no new ones arrive and Camus documents their attempts at escape, the riots which threaten to sweep away the armed encircling guard, the psychosis of a citadel in the midst of an epidemic. Perhaps most terrifyingly he dwells on the experience of those whose families have been divided by the iron law of quarentine and lovers whose love is stuck in the world outside. Camus manages to capture in his prose some wonderful ideas about the ways that humans feel: he captures something that I think no novelist has ever quite got for me, which is the feeling after you have left someone you love, of their face fading before your eyes. At another fantastic moment, he captures the way that two men planning an escape attempt, suddenly begin to trust each other as they debate the position of a centre half on the football field.

The novel is almost a documentary at points and demonstrates how a community feels under that kind of awful pressure. But it is also a deep and intense psychological drama focussing on a doctor, Dr Rieux and his friends who form part of a group committed to aiding the plague sufferers in their final death pangs. Rieux and the others become hated, despised because they bring diagnosis and the reality of isolation. They labour without quite knowing why, they labour in order to labour. Camus brings out the way that in the silence of God, God becomes irrelevant to human morality. Rieux and the others are not motivated nor moved by theological speculation but by the need to struggle to do what is decent. What he also gets about morality is that there are no costless decisions, staying in the town of Oran to care for the sick is for Rieux a moral imperative and yet it leaves him with a final personal tragedy. He cannot say, no more than we can, that those who escape to find their loved ones are evil or bad: he can only say, to borrow Michael Frayn's line, that after the fact we see what matters. Each choice, including the most altruistic one, contains the possibility of tragedy and the possibility that it is futile and that the other choice would have been better. But equally for Rieux there are real moral choices- they are just not clear and codified in some divine scripture- but revealed on earth through the dispositions of conscience- to paraphrase Kipling it is when the heart and sinew give up, when everything is against you and the only thing that keeps you on the road is the realisation that an action is right, that you act in a true moral sense. Its a Kantian emotional reaction and Camus gets it.

Perhaps the great moment of this whole book comes when Camus describes the perfect individual, the embodiment for him of what it is to be moral. For him that individual is a man called Grand- a civil servant who has never risen that far- whose life seems from the outside a failure, having lost the love of his life, Jean, for being unable to speak to her. Grand spends his whole life fining and refining a sentence to start a novel about a woman that rides down a street filled with flowers. He does not serve on the frontline but rather organises the relief of the plague and he is weak, almost collapsing with the strain and yet he is the hero. For he represents the fact that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. During the whole novel we see the traditional repositaries of moral instruction- priests, magistrates- fail: often as they see their role as being to rebuke and instruct others rather than serve their communities. The priest for example as the plague begins delivers a terrifying sermon to the townspeople about it being their fault that the plague has come down upon them: how that does anything to save people from death or how it manages to do anything save for make the priest feel better in his moral superiority. Religion gets a bad press in this novel, partly because it encourages people to resign from their moral commitments in this life to attain a future one- it produces a false ascetism.

But the novel really is not about condemning any sequence of ideas, as much as in providing an explanation for the ways that humans come to behave morally. What Camus shows is the way that the drive of conscience works: it operates as a kind of neccessity- a blind neccessity forcing people to do things that they are scarcely conscious of. Interestingly it has little to do with religion or other justifications for morality- interestingly it also makes little discrimination. One of Camus's characters is Cottard, who likes the plague because it saves him from possible arrest, Cottard though is not condemned by the book as much as he is examined. And here emerges something that I savour about Camus- the book compares Naziism to a plague, and explicitly at one point links the plague to human immorality- to capital punishment but at no point does it seek the easy condemnation. It is a moral work, infused with morality, but condemns sin without looking at the sinner. And it condemns sin for the right reasons- not because of an offence to any tabboo- but because of the ways that sin hurts and destroys human lives. Camus is a humanist in the real sense of that word- someone who places their ultimate value on the relief of human suffering.

This is a great book, and I have scarcely probed its surface- but there is something magical here in his perception of morality that gets to the bottom of a thought that I find half articulated in protestant theologians of the 17th century and German philosophers of the 19th, that morality is an inward commitment, a sense, a conscience and that understanding that impulse of duty is the first step towards understanding what it is to be moral.

Station Agent

I really like steak sandwiches, with onions, and accompanied by a nice bowl of chips, well cut potatoe chips. Strange way to begin a movie review perhaps, but its information that immediatly occured to me after watching Station Agent, not merely because there is a scene in which the three main character sit and eat steaks, just cooked, and rice and tomatoes fried with onions and garlic. Its a scene that made me feel incredibly hungry and that pang hasn't really left me yet, despite the fact that I ate dinner several hours ago and am not undernourished at all! The sight of frying steaks makes my mouth savour.

What has this to do with Station Agent, well nothing really- its a self indulgent complaint! But on the other hand, it has everything to do with a movie that at its best is about the simple pleasures of life. Station Agent is about a train spotting dwarf- the worst bit about this film is its synopsis which makes it sound like Garden State but without the subtlety. Station Agent is about the way that this dwarf, bequeathed a station hut out in New Jersey decides to go out there and live in solitude. Unfortunately for him, outside his door, is a Cuban-American coffee maker called Joe whose response to rejection is just to try and try and try again- conversation becomes inevitable. It becomes even more so when Fin, the dwarf, is run off the road twice by the same woman, called Olivia, a neurotic artist trying to cope with the loss of her son, Sam. It sounds trite and a film about personal renewal- but it isn't really, its a film in which nothing much happens- redeemed by the fact that noone has an epithany until towards the end, the director makes the mistaken decision to install some drama- but even that fits into the mellow movement of the overall film.

It wouldn't work so well unless it had good actors- and Peter Dinklage does a great job here. The character he sketches out is fascinating. Fin is a character who despite his professed normality is a all interior and no exterior. He finds it hard to cope with the rejection of ordinary people who laugh whenever they see him, 4 foot and five inches tall, he gets laughed at wherever he goes or abused. The truth is that the end of the film shows him still laughed at. But he has his fascination with trains- he walks along the railway lines because he can't drive and also because he is just interested. He spends hours reading about trains and watching them- its a great moment when he finally gets to chase a train in a car. Interests make the man interesting. There are some other fine performances- the two secondary leads do well- and Michelle Williams confirms, that despite lacking the fame of her Dawson's Creek costar Katie Holmes, she is by far the best thing to have come out of the irritating teen drama of the 90s.

This isn't a major piece of work- it reminds me a little of Karismaki but without the darkness that you get in a Karismaki piece- rather its a meandering meditation. There are some little points here- if you want happiness, you have to go out and get it rather than sitting at home waiting for it to turn up on your doorstep etc. But they aren't really the point- the point is that here is a man, not a dwarf, here are a set of characters and over the time you spend with them, you get to know them a bit and get to work out why they are friends. This is a film that is best when it isn't a normal film, without a story it functions better than with a story. It is an observation as much as a narrative: and as an observation, it is charming and very funny. The humour is very subtle but Dinklage in particular just has to raise an eyebrow to make you notice the absurdity of his situation as he gets run off the road for the second time or irritated for the umpteenth time. This is a good film- but it is definitely an acquired taste- if you like casual, funny and gentle looks at life, I'd give it a shot- if you want plot and drama then move on somewhere else.

The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

An Outpost of Progress

Joseph Conrad's modern reputation largely derives from his great masterpiece- the Heart of Darkness- remade into a great modern film, Apocalypse Now, whose themes have been explored and criticised by numerous thinkers, novelists and analysts. It is a wonderful book to which I will return, but perhaps as fascinating is Conrad's earlier colonial short story- An Outpost of Progress in which he reflected on the isolation of the colonial officials dispatched to some remote frontier and their 'civilization' not to mention the 'civilization' of those that came to fetch them back from the mouth of oblivion.

An Outpost of Progress is a work about the periphery. It features two characters, 'two imbeciles' according to the director of the Company who sends them up the Congo river (it is the Belgian Congo we are in here- something that numerous clues and Conrad's own correspondence gives away) to an isolated station in the middle of nowhere. These two men, Carlier and Kayerts, are joined by a third named character, the factotum of the station, Makola, who observes the white men come and go to their destruction with impassive and grim glee. All around them is a world that neither Carlier nor Kayerts understands- the only sounds that they ever hear are the drums from the nearest African village- they cannot read the language of the chieftan and rely on Makola to survey Africa for them and interpret Africans. When he sells their entire set of servants for precious ivory, neither of the two Europeans has the wit to do anything but be asleep.

In part that is their failure to understand Africa, this renders them lonely amidst a vast uncomprehending crowd. In this crowd of strangers, they are Conrad informs us in a state of nature:

They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their characters, their capabilities and their audacities, are only an expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence, the emotions and principles: every great and every insignificant thought belongs to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one's kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one's thoughts, of one's sensations- to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous: a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.

Conrad's language is brilliant and he conveys the sense that the European had of Africa, when he believed that the savage was truly savage. But more than that that passage is not so much about the encounter with the primitive savage, as with the primitive loneliness of being unable to communicate. The real focus of the tale is that the silence of the jungle enfolds the two Europeans, as it does we watch them regress to an uncivilized state (a state which is far below that of the African tribes around them!) They cannot see the Africans as their comrades, when the African servants are sold as slaves by Makola, Conrad comments that the two Europeans talked with indignation but felt nothing about the illusion of that suffering. For them it is an illusion because they experience it from a distance, the same distance they would be at were they reading about it in a club in Brussels and exclaim at 'how shocking' it was. They remain detached and isolated.

And as Conrad demonstrates they thus sink into madness. These two inadequates become criminals- they become villains- they become savages. Civilisation, Conrad leaves us in no doubt, is a fortunate condition we are born into- not something that is innate to us. In this sense, the darkness of his Africa, the heart of darkness, is that life, nasty, brutish and short, that the English Philosopher, Thomas Hobbes explored in his Leviathan. But Conrad's state of nature is a reality- the true dystopian reality of his vision is that man is regressing through colonization, blazing a trail for Orwell and others to come, Conrad argued that the terror of colonization lay as much in its effects on the colonizer as on the colonized. Carlier and Kayerts are incompetent buffoons, but being colonizers turns them into villains. Our actions ultimately affect us as much as they affect those we aim them at: of course as Chinua Achebe reminds us there is something racist about only seeing colonization through European eyes, but Conrad was a citizen of a racist age and to find him calling Africans savages is not surprising. What is stunning is his clear vision, a clear vision that sits alongside the great liberals of the 19th Century- John Bright and Richard Cobden (les plus Gladstonian que Gladstone), that colonization would destroy the European colonizer: it would brutalize the brutal and would render the greatest achievement of European civilization- the security and peace that states ensure- vulnerable to the loners on the veldt and the river.

Conrad in this sense anticipates the darkest films from the Western genre- which demonstrate the terrors of the man in a state of nature. If you want to understand this short story by seeing a film, go and see the Searchers by John Ford. For in the vision of John Wayne, willing to murder his neice because she has been captured by the Apache, irreconcilable in his hate, with death in his eyes, you see Carlier and Kayerts's shadows had they but been wise. As fools their destiny is no less dark but more comic- as one ends up on a Cross with his tongue open and his cheek purple- the perfect mockery of colonialism, violence, disrespect and death- in a very European and Christian form. Communication and lack of it is the center of the decay of life for Carlier and Kayerts- they fall because they are unable to communicate with the Africans- and that signal is the last failed sentence, because it demonstrates that now they cannot even communicate with the director who sent them- they have become grotesques, lonely on the cross of their own lack, isolated forever, fixed in disrespect and mockery- fixed in a posture that ridicules the high words they came to enforce. Colonization here ironically turns the colonizers words back on them and in his last posture, the colonist is like a sow eating its own vomit- turning his own high words into high mockery.

Where would you go?

James Higham has a rather amusing post up this evening about the battle he would love to reenact- for James its Culloden. It got me thinking though about I suppose a different question, which is if I could go back in time to see something happen, what would I go back to see- its not an easy question to answer. For a start I'd exclude seeing all battles- a battle is a disorientating and unpleasant experience- to see a battle like say Hastings or Naseby, you wouldn't see the historical events taking place, you would see a massive confusing carnage, bloody and uncertain, there would be nothing to admire or enjoy in that! To go back to the past to see something, you would want to see something that was staged for a purpose, that was presented in a sense to you. Personally that for me means two sets of events- the one is a debate, the other a play. If I could go back there are four things which I would love to actually see: the first would be the Putney Debates of 1647, debates about democracy and monarchy that stretched over three days, I studied them for my PhD, they are amazing filled with great rhetoric and stunning thought. They were heavily involved and incredibly tense- at one point a soldier present tells the rest that unless the debate is concluded by the morning, the King will come and get them and hang them all. They were important and about deep principles- the questions of religious obligation, the authority of the state and political promises, the authority of an assembly of the people, the degree to which we can justly destroy rights granted in law, the degree to which war destroys law- all of these things were discussed.

My other three things are perhaps more obvious and well known. Next in line comes the Norway debate of 1940, when every great orator of mid century British politics- Llyold George, Winston Churchill, Leo Amery, Neville Chamberlaine etc- all spoke. Forever in most people's minds it is linked with three great moments- when Amery leaned over to the Labour benches as Arthur Greenwood then acting Labour leader put the motion of no confidence in Chamberlaine and shouted "Speak for England, Arthur", when George called on Churchill to avoid making himself an airraid shelter for other ministers (particularly the Prime Minister, Chamberlaine) to hide under and when Amery again rose to his feet and said (repeating Cromwell's words to the Rump), 'I say now what has only once been said in this house before, Depart I say and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!'. The upshot of those moments was that Churchill became Prime Minister, and Britain decided, in the words of Lord Keynes, to throw away an empire in order to defeat Naziism.

Thirdly, well who could ask anyone to name a moment to go back and see and not appreciate this. The opening night of my favourite Shakespeare play, which happens to be the one I studied as an A-Level student, Othello. I would love to see how Shakespeare himself made those lines on that wooden O appear, love to see the way it was set up, love to appreciate the skill of those immortal words- lines that even Milton acknowledged were as perfect as pyramids (and praise from Milton for poetry is like praise from Einstein for physics!) . Imagine being in the audience as Iago, Othello, Desdamona and the like strode into the world's consciousness for the first ever time- imagine the wealth of theatrical experience available to the Englishman of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century- seeing Macbeth, Lear, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V and all the rest for the first time ever- not to mention the works of Jonson, Marlowe, Fletcher et al- not to mention the poetry of Sidney and Spencer- not to mention if one had lived long enough to see Milton's Comus and in an exceptionally long life to be there for the Restoration and the plays of Aphra Behn and others. If I could I would see them all- if you reduce me to one- its Shakespeare and its Othello.

The fourth moment I would see is a different kind of moment- a moment which in a sense gave birth to all the others. I would love to have been present when Socrates gathered around him his pupils and talked- and argued and questioned truth. I would love to have seen his trial, partly to know who out of Plato and Xenophon got it right, whose account was accurate. But more to have known the man- in many ways our modern pursuit of knowledge, our modern enterprise and consciousness is still a Greek dream and if it is the dream of any one man, is the dream of Socrates. Ancient Athens was an incredible place- this was a place where at a drinking party one could find, so Plato has us beleive, Aristophanes and Socrates might be joined by Alcibiades. The forefathers of history- Herodotus and Thucydides thrived and lived at the same time as the great playwright Euripides (imagine being in the theatre for Euripides and Aristophanes- there were Greeks who were). If one place holds my imagination and the imagination of the West, it is Athens and it is that era. If I could go back.... that's where I'd go....

but I'd be back here pretty quickly- all of those places would be pretty smelly. Nostalgia is a good thing until you remember that they all lacked anaesthetics!

and I didn't mention the sermon on the mount, or the Don Pacifico debate, or meeting Bede, or watching Feynman give a paper to Einstein, Pauli, Fermi et al or the Lincoln Douglas debates or the first performance of Pushkin's Boris Godunov or or or or or....- truth is I am a glutton for the past, I'd be always travelling back in time had I the chance, perhaps its better that I don't...

Oh and furthermore its a frivolous pipe dream!

Ok guys, I've done mine where would you go?

A small death

We all have our favourite haunts. One of mine was Unsworth's Bookshop, on the Euston Road just opposite the British Library. It was a bookshop which sold excellent academic books for cheap prices- I remember getting Kevin Sharpe's Personal Rule of Charles I for a fiver for example- and was one of my favourite places to go to in London when I felt my purse needed lightening: or rather it was one of the most dangerous places for me in London as when I visited I couldn't leave without spending at least twenty pounds that I didn't have! Well its closed or it has been replaced by a poorer bookseller whose range isn't as good.

Good second hand bookshops are not ten a penny- I am lucky enough to know another one in London (My Back Pages, just opposite Balham Tube, if you are ever in Balham it is a must visit, I know another one whose name I have forgotten in Clapham that always have interesting books on offer!) but they are being replaced by discount shops who specialise in remainders of Frank Lampard's biography for fifty pence. There are other good bookshops around- Foyles in central London is a great place- but if there is one cause I think we should all turn to its supporting our local bookshop. There is something special about a good bookshop- the experience of browsing in a shop is totally different to doing it online- and to be good a bookshop needs to have the ability to be browsable- to have a good selection. They need to provoke you to want to read something- I often spend time looking for things in bookshops that I don't know I will find, just scanning across the titles and picking out interesting ones- looking at the authors to check their credentials and the acknowledgements page and then considering whether to read it or not. I like places that are eccentric- where you can see a particular interest in the seller reflected in the books he or she sells. The kind of shop where you can do that is the kind of shop that needs protecting and preserving- unfortunately more and more bookshops are going down the best seller route (witness the Books Etc near Victoria whose selection of classic novels can only be described as looking like a flower wilting without water or attention!) but they needn't: we ought to vote with our feet. Time to support good bookshops- afterall we'd miss them if they all vanished.

Winston at work

Winston Churchill has as this essay from the New York Review of Books makes clear always divided opinion. Many in his own lifetime echoed the anecdote made by Asquith who said that a fairy had come down at Churchill's birth and showered him with all possible gifts, accept that is for judgement. Many like Asquith imagine that Churchill was an undisciplined rover, an inspired genius who did not have the ballast to achieve the highest office. What is interesting is that Churchill did have the ballast to take on the burdens of office- and an important mistake in the article above suggests exactly why he was. Geoffrey Wheatcroft suggests that

One day Churchill would win the Nobel Prize for literature (largely on the strength of The Second World War, much of which, as David Reynolds has shown in his splendid book In Command of History, was ghostwritten)

Actually Wheatcroft gives the wrong impression of what Reynolds argues that Churchill did. The book was researched and written largely by others: but Churchill altered the wording, or added the key document. Reynolds prints passages before and after Churchill with his pencil went through it: and he demonstrates that Churchill kept a real control over the text. He changed crucial words which changed the entire sense of the text. In reality what Churchill proved himself to be was a competent writer: he was of course a best selling journalist and his writing, somewhere in a no-man's land between Macaulay and Gibbon not to mention the occasional touch of sentimentality, is definitely reasonable. But even more than a competent writer, he proved himself a master of delegation. He was not a historian- so Maurice Ashley did the research, what he was was a master of drafting, and one of the most known politicians of his age. He was able to get official documents and help that noone else could have got, he managed to alter the text to make it reflect things that he thought had happened, and also to give the dry work of the researchers the lightness of touch of a journalist and political speaker. In reality, Churchill's accomplishment when writing his histories was his insight into himself and his audience: he knew what he was doing, delegated what he needed to and kept the final draft to himself- in that sense what Reynolds shows is that his history proved, not that he was a great writer, but that he was a good organiser and a good politician.

The Ideology of Gymnastics in Hungary

Ignazc Clair was the first person to introduce Gymnastics into Hungary as a sport in the early 19th Century when he founded the Gymnastics society. Gymnastics developed in Hungary to a huge extent over the 19th Century- but more interesting perhaps than the fact of its development and its popularity are the reasons why it developed at that particular point. As Miklos Hadas argues in a perceptive, but often dense, article, written for the Fall 07 issue of the Journal of Social History, the timing of the rise of Hungarian gymnastics was no accident and tells us something very interesting about the process that we call modernisation.

There are two separate processes that Hadas identifies: both of which deserve some attention from us. The first is that the rise of gymnastics represented a change in the class structure of society. As society became more urbanised and more bourgeois the kinds of physical exercise preferred by people changed radically. The old aristocratic exercises such as duelling and hunting became less relevant, as the world shifted. Hunting obviously was not as important within the city of Budapest as within a country estate outside. Duelling too harked back to an honour code and an ideal of chivalric masculinity that was passing out in Burke's 'age of oeconomists'. They were replaced by gymnastics and sport. If you turn to examine the memberships of the gymnastic and sporting societies of Hungary in the century, you find that the majority of their membership were not aristocratic but were middle class- were bourgeois. As the Hungarian middle class grew, so did the obsession with personal sporting excellence.

When the bourgeois moved to exalting sports, they moved to exalting a different model of society. A duel is very different from a fencing match- and even more different from an individual athletic exercise. If I duel, I do so in order to harm my opponent- there is at least a significant risk of doing so. Fencing and to an even greater extent, rowing, and most of all gymnastics are not really about the other, the competition, as they are about the improvement of one's own standard. A duel is an important signifier when your rivals are few and very important- in the bourgeois world of late 19th Century Budapest however, your rival on the gymnastic stage is not likely to be your rival in the boardroom. Rather you use gymnastics to develop yourself as an instrument of self advancement- you do it in order to train yourself.

It is no surprise- and Hadas adopts a fairly Marxian framework based on class analysis to argue this- a framework that has its limitations but also invites us to learn a lot- that this craze for gymnastics took place at the same time as a craze for education. Over the 18th Century, the educative works of modern Europe from the great philosophers of the age- Locke and Rousseau instantly come to mind- were translated and taken on by Hungarians in order to form a new Hungarian citizendry. Rousseau in particular had a great influence through his novel Emile on the way that Hungarians thought about education. Education in Rousseau's view was a way of forming a person to live in a corrupt society- he argued that a vigorous and natural education would lead to a true citizen, whose world would not include amour-propre, the destructive self love- but instead be filled with true feelings towards society and himself. Hungarians shared that aspiration- as did others around Europe- just think of Arnold's Rugby and its description in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Education for them was a training- and it was a mental training. You placed within the individual dispositions through their education- raised them to the higher pleasures. In the classical world of the 19th Century middle class- one of the obvious ways to do that was through training not merely the mind but the body- through gymnastics in particular, through an exercise that promoted self analysis and self criticism and attention to detail amidst monotonous activity.

I don't entirely buy Hadas's thesis- I think he overstates the structural element to this. But I do think that the core is right- we are looking at a change within society and an accompanying change in mindset- and the invention of competitive sport is a part of that. It is a useful part for us because it throws light on the way that the bourgeoise of the 19th Century beleived that education formed the perfect citizen- that it implanted beneficent dispositions within the child in order to the fulfilment of society's ideal. What we are seeing in the development of 19th Century sport is the consequences of the Emilisation of society: hence amongst the most notable offspring of Rousseau should be counted the Olympic Games and the proud history of Hungarian Gymnastics!