Shoah: the Most Important Documentary of the 20th Century

May 5, 2023 by Leave a Comment

I spent an entire day ensconced in the IFI cin­e­ma in Dublin in the 1990s to watch all 7 ½ hours of Syberberg’s extra­or­di­nary epic “Hitler, a Film from Ger­many”, from 1977. Susan Son­tag had famous­ly said of it that it was “one of the 20th century’s great­est works of art.”

Which had struck me at the time as sound­ing unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly wool­ly. But once you watch it you appre­ci­ate her choice of words. It’s not a film, or a doc­u­men­tary, a dra­mat­ic re-enact­ment, essay, opera, mime or the­atri­cal pro­duc­tion, and yet it draws on all those forms as a means of approach­ing its ungod­ly subject. 

But it’s only now that I’ve final­ly sum­moned up the courage to sit down and watch all 9 ½ hours of Claude Lanzmann’s mon­u­men­tal “Shoah”, from 1985, doc­u­ment­ing the holocaust. 

It is, as it needs to be, con­stant­ly har­row­ing and as such is a much-need­ed anti­dote to some­thing like Schindler’s List. 

Filmed over 11 years, Lanz­mann makes some remark­able choic­es. There’s no use of archive footage. Instead, he inter­views absolute­ly every­one he can find and talks to them, calm­ly, in a per­func­to­ry way, about what they can remember. 

And one of the first things that strikes you is how young every­one is. This is the mid 1970s, bare­ly 30 years after the IIWW, so many of the peo­ple he inter­views are in their 40s, 50s and 60s. 

He talks to some of the very few sur­vivors of the holo­caust, most of whom speak to him from their homes in Israel. To some of the casu­al wit­ness­es who’d been liv­ing and work­ing there in Poland, as the camps in Tre­blin­ka and Auschwitz came into being. And to a num­ber of SS offi­cers, whom he secret­ly films and records. 

And because he under­stands how fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant it is to doc­u­ment all of this, and to not allow his emo­tions inter­fere in that process. And because he’s pre­pared to spend 11 years doing it, and will only release the result in its entire 9 ½ hour form, the result is a film that’s qui­et­ly mes­meris­ing. And cumu­la­tive­ly dis­turb­ing in its insis­tence of unhur­ried­ly por­ing over all the details, one by one. 

And the phrase that, inevitably, keeps return­ing is Han­nah Arendt’s famous “the banal­i­ty of evil”.

But one of the things that has changed over the past cou­ple of decades is our view­ing habits. Few of us would ever have actu­al­ly got around to spend an entire week­end in the cin­e­ma watch­ing all 9 ½ hours of a doc­u­men­tary on the holo­caust, how­ev­er much we might have intend­ed to.

But watch­ing a less than 10 hour doc­u­men­tary on one of the most impor­tant events in mod­ern his­to­ry is far less improb­a­ble today, giv­en our cur­rent appetite for binge-watch­ing all sorts of unde­serv­ing dross, which we’re more than hap­py to waste hours and hours doing.

Every­body should put aside 10 hours to watch Shoah. It’s appalling. And mes­mer­iz­ing. And is one of, if not the most impor­tant doc­u­ments of the 20th century. 

Watch the trail­er for Shoah here.

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Russia on the BBC, Part 2: Adam Curtis’ TraumaZone

April 7, 2023 by Leave a Comment

Adam Cur­tis first emerged from the con­fines of con­ven­tion­al BBC pro­gramme mak­ing in 1992 with Pandora’s Box, in 6 parts, and he’s been plough­ing his glo­ri­ous­ly idio­syn­crat­ic fur­row there ever since. 

Rather than con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­taries, what Cur­tis pro­duces are filmic essays, in which he explores the con­tra­dic­tions that have result­ed from the rise of tech­nol­o­gy, the malaise of con­sumerism and the cat­a­stroph­ic mis­takes made by the var­i­ous empires that have risen and sunk over the course of the last one hun­dred and fifty years. 

His most famous films to date are prob­a­bly All Watched Over By Machines of Lov­ing Grace, in 3 parts, from 2011 (reviewed ear­li­er by me here), which casts a cold eye over evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, glob­al cap­i­tal­ism and the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment. And Bit­ter Lake, from 2015, a bril­liant autop­sy on how the West end­ed up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And his lat­est, Rus­sia 1985–1999: Trau­ma­Zone, What It Felt Like to Live Through The Col­lapse of Com­mu­nism and Democ­ra­cy, to give it its full title, is his best to date. Notwith­stand­ing the fact that two of his trade­mark stamps are absent. Gone are both his silky if point­ed voice over, and his care­ful choice of music, which usu­al­ly acts as coun­ter­point and com­men­tary to the images they accompany.

That’s because, he says, these images speak for them­selves. Which they do, and don’t. And that’s an entire­ly good thing. 

What’s he done is to gath­er up all the out­takes, all the reams and reams of footage left over, after the var­i­ous BBC cor­re­spon­dents have filed their report on what­ev­er was going on then in Rus­sia, and used them all to pro­duce a por­trait of Rus­sia as it sinks into anarchy. 

The result is a 7 hour jour­ney, in 7 one hour parts, chart­ing the dis­in­te­gra­tion of what had been the Russ­ian empire. It’s at times charm­ing, qui­et­ly mov­ing and con­sis­tent­ly cap­ti­vat­ing. There is a con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive, but that’s cov­ered in about one of its sev­en hours. 

There’s Afghanistan, and Cher­nobyl and Gor­bachev, open­ing up Sovi­et mid­dle man­age­ment to prof­it shar­ing and con­sumerism. And those man­agers team­ing up with orga­nized crime, to rob and pil­lage the state-run busi­ness­es they were sup­posed to be nur­tur­ing. And the ram­pant crime, cor­rup­tion and vio­lence that follows. 

There’s Yeltsin, out­ma­noeu­vring Gor­bachev, embrac­ing untram­melled cap­i­tal­ism, and the cat­a­stroph­ic eco­nom­ic col­lapse that that caused. And the rise of the oli­garchs that fol­lowed, as Russ­ian indus­try was raped and stripped clean. And the nation­al­ism that emerged in response. And Chech­nya, and the fright­en­ing sense of an aston­ish­ing­ly rapid descent into unimag­in­able vio­lence, cor­rup­tion and soci­etal disintegration.

But dur­ing the oth­er six hours, we see; grad­u­ates get­ting their degrees in soon to be inde­pen­dent Ukraine, as a mass grave dat­ing back to the Sovi­et peri­od is dis­cov­ered right next to where the cer­e­mo­ny is tak­ing place.

An old woman trav­els hun­dreds of kilo­me­tres, from the mid­dle of nowhere, to some­where else in the mid­dle of nowhere, in the freez­ing cold, to gath­er and take back pota­toes, so she has some­thing to live off.

One of the many out­takes so won­der­ful­ly made use of in Bit­ter Lake.

Teenage girls are schooled in how to com­port them­selves in beau­ty con­tests. The Moscow police force prac­tice shoot­ing guns, aid­ed by the record­ed sounds of gun fire, as they can’t afford to use actu­al bul­lets. Pro­to punk rock bands per­form in under­ground clubs. Thou­sands of the des­ti­tute and home­less sleep in sleep­ing bags on the floors of vast train stations. 

And row after row after row of emp­ty shelves are silent­ly gazed at by the hun­dreds and hun­dreds of peo­ple, who queue every day for hours in super­mar­kets, in the hope of find­ing some­thing, any­thing, to eat.

You get an extra­or­di­nary and vis­cer­al sense of the sheer size and vast scale of the coun­try, strad­dling as it does 6 time zones, and the abject pover­ty that the vast major­i­ty of them had to live in, in unspeak­able con­di­tions. As a tiny, minis­cule minor­i­ty enjoyed a pas­tiche of cap­i­tal­ist excess in a hand­ful of gar­ish, city cen­tre clubs and sub­urbs in parts of St Peters­burg and Moscow. 

And in amongst all which, there’s Gor­bachev, get­ting side­lined. And Yeltsin, get­ting drunk. And a coun­try, being picked apart, and left to rot and fester.

Until final­ly, a qui­et, unas­sum­ing bureau­crat promis­es to restore order. The oli­garchs shrug, and think, why not. It’ll still be us call­ing the shots. And so a func­tionary from the for­mer KGB is hand­ed the reins of pow­er. And sure enough, order is indeed soon restored.

What’s so com­pelling about Cur­tis’ film, is that it man­ages to both tell that sto­ry, with­out being bound to mere­ly tell that sto­ry. It’s that, and so much more.

You can see the trail­er for Trau­ma­Zone here:

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Russia on the BBC, Part 1: Putin Vs The West

March 3, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Putin Vs The West, 2023.

Nor­ma Per­cy makes the sorts of doc­u­men­tary series which shouldn’t work but some­how do. And, after the equal­ly reveal­ing Iran and the West, from 2009, and The Iraq War, from 2013, she this month presents us with Putin Vs The West, screened recent­ly on the BBC. And which is yet anoth­er extra­or­di­nary win­dow on to today’s geopo­lit­i­cal landscape.

What she does is to per­suade many, and often most, of the prin­ci­pal play­ers to sit down and talk to her about some of world’s most con­tentious trou­ble spots. And the remark­able fact is, that as soon as senior diplo­mats, civ­il ser­vants and even for­mer world lead­ers vacate their posi­tions of pow­er, they’re more than hap­py to spill the beans about the con­fi­den­tial and high lev­el con­ver­sa­tions they were only recent­ly privy to. 

Iran and the West, 2009.

Far from being bound by any sense of omer­ta, they’re all too ready to tell tales out of school. They are, it turns out, no bet­ter than the rest of us. And it makes for riv­et­ing viewing. 

The most reveal­ing of Putin Vs The West’s three remark­able episodes was the sec­ond, detail­ing the plight of Syr­ia in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. One of the first to react to the chaos that then erupt­ed was Gaddafi, who turned on the peo­ple of Libya with a vicious­ness that even they were unac­cus­tomed to. 

So the West went to Rus­sia hop­ing to per­suade them not to veto the sanc­tions they want­ed to impose on him, assum­ing that their request would be denied. But at that time, in March 2011, Medvedev was pres­i­dent and, to their sur­prise, he enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sup­port­ed the idea of sanc­tions. So long, of course, as there were no talk of regime change. Absolute­ly not, the West assured him.

So Rus­sia abstained in the UN vote, but with­out impos­ing its veto. And the sanc­tions were passed. 

The Iraq War, 2013

But Putin, who then held the junior post of prime min­ster, pub­licly chas­tised Medvedev for hav­ing fool­ish­ly tak­en the West at its word, and for not recog­nis­ing the ‘cru­sade’ the West was on to destroy them. And sure enough, two months lat­er the West declared that actu­al­ly, the only thing that would save Libya was in fact regime change. 

Medvedev was furi­ous, and Putin used the West’s betray­al of him as the cen­tral plat­form in his bid for re-elec­tion, which, the fol­low­ing year, he won in a landslide.

A year lat­er, in 2013, John Ker­ry trav­elled to Moscow in the hope of repair­ing rela­tions between East and West, so that they could join forces to do some­thing about Assad and the hell he’d been unleash­ing on the peo­ple of Syria. 

Haven’t you learnt any­thing about your ruinous efforts at regime change, they replied. Look at what hap­pened after your dis­as­trous inter­ven­tions in Libya, and in Afghanistan and Iraq before that. 

But when evi­dence sur­faced that sum­mer that Assad had begun using chem­i­cal weapons, Obama’s famous red line had been defin­i­tive­ly crossed. And Oba­ma joined forces with Hol­lande and Cameron, the French pre­mier and British PM, deter­mined to inter­vene in Syr­ia with air strikes. 

But when Cameron put mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion to the vote in Par­lia­ment, he lost. And sim­i­lar­ly, Oba­ma learnt that he would very like­ly lose a sim­i­lar vote in con­gress. So when Putin, very much to everyone’s sur­prise, offered his word that he would under­take to force Assad to sur­ren­der his chem­i­cal weapons, if the West promised to refrain from tak­ing mil­i­tary action, Oba­ma, to everyone’s amaze­ment, agreed. 

Which, obvi­ous­ly, was an extreme­ly good thing and was absolute­ly the right deci­sion. But the way it was reached was, to put it mild­ly, murky. And, polit­i­cal­ly speak­ing, it was a dis­as­ter. The West had blinked. Red lines were, clear­ly, mean­ing­less, and the West was mired in dis­uni­ty – Hol­lande felt par­tic­u­lar­ly left out in the cold. 

The Black Sea.

A year lat­er, in 2014, Isis took over swathes of Syr­ia. And the fol­low­ing year, two days after address­ing the UN assem­bly, and to everyone’s com­plete aston­ish­ment, Putin sent his air force in to bomb Syr­ia, under the guise of attack­ing Isis – which of course was exact­ly the same excuse that the West was using for doing the same thing else­where. And for the first time in decades, Russ­ian troops were deployed on for­eign soil. 

The West’s response? It decid­ed to do noth­ing. Which, again, was absolute­ly the right response. But the mes­sage that it sent out to Putin couldn’t have been clear­er. The West was weak, divid­ed and spent, and Rus­sia was back on the world stage. And in a part of the world that was vital to its strate­gic interests. 

To the north, it had gone into east­ern Ukraine in 2014, with the cru­cial access that gives it to the warm water ports in the Black Sea – and in response to which, again, the West had done noth­ing. And to the south, it now had a pres­ence in the Mediterranean.

None of which, to be absolute­ly clear, in any way excus­es what Putin has so unfor­giv­ably inflict­ed on the peo­ple of Ukraine. But it does help explain his actions, and put them in context. 

We’ve very quick to mar­vel at how blind­ly peo­ple in places like Rus­sia accept the pro­pa­gan­da they’re fed. But we rarely stop to ques­tion the pic­ture we’re being giv­en. Putin is not the insane, unpre­dictable, car­toon vil­lain we’re con­tin­u­al­ly pre­sent­ed with. He’s pur­su­ing a clear polit­i­cal strat­e­gy that has its roots in the re-uni­fi­ca­tion of Germany. 

Thir­ty years ago, the West promised Rus­sia that that re-uni­fi­ca­tion would cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly not result in any expan­sion of NATO into the east of Europe. Since when, 14 of the 15 coun­tries to the east of Ger­many have all joined NATO. All but one; Ukraine.

What this film demon­strates so well is that Russia’s attempt­ed inva­sion of Ukraine is every bit as com­pli­cat­ed as the rea­sons behind the sec­ond world war, which so many peo­ple like to com­pare it to. And is no more black and white than that was. 

Paint­ing Putin as an irra­tional lunatic is lazy and lets us off the hook. Because it fails to acknowl­edge the arro­gance that we’ve dis­played towards Rus­sia since the breakup of the Sovi­et Union. And it con­ve­nient­ly ignores the chaos we’ve inflict­ed on numer­ous oth­er coun­tries over that same time.

None of which, final­ly, should in any way be read as any kind of sup­port for those two insuf­fer­able clowns that we Irish have sent over to the Euro­pean parliament. 

And none of which will do any­thing to ease the suf­fer­ing of the poor peo­ple of Ukraine.

Watch the trail­er for Putin Vs The West here:

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Tár: a Good Film that Could Have Been So Much More

February 3, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Tar.

Tár is a metic­u­lous­ly craft­ed film, boasts a tow­er­ing per­for­mance from Cate Blanchett, and tack­les a seri­ous sub­ject in a care­ful­ly con­sid­ered and mea­sured way. So why does it leave the view­er qui­et­ly deflated?

Todd Field made his direc­to­r­i­al debut in 2001 with In the Bed­room, and fol­lowed that up with his adap­ta­tion of Tom Perrotta’s Lit­tle Chil­dren, in 2006, both of which are superb. 

All his films are clear­ly a con­scious riposte and anti­dote to a cul­ture that seems to have trad­ed seri­ous­ness and depth for ephemer­al triv­ia and emp­ty if imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion. And in each film, the lives of com­fort­able but sym­pa­thet­ic mid­dle class pro­tag­o­nists are sud­den­ly uproot­ed by exter­nal threats they’re inca­pable of comprehending.

Lydia Tár, played by Blanchett, is that rare thing, a respect­ed and suc­cess­ful con­duc­tor in the world of clas­si­cal music, who hap­pens to be gay. Though hap­pi­ly ensconced with her part­ner and their 7 year old daugh­ter, she clear­ly is or was roman­ti­cal­ly engaged with her assis­tant, Francesca, and had ear­li­er had some sort of a tryst and or rela­tion­ship with a musi­cal pro­tégée called Krista. 

Enter Olga, the new­ly arrived and much younger cel­list in the orches­tra, who Blanchett instant­ly devel­ops a crush on. Indeed, the only rea­son Olga secures her posi­tion is pre­cise­ly because of said infatuation. 

In the Bed­room, 2001

But when, and with­out giv­ing any­thing away, it’s dis­cov­ered that Krista has com­mit­ted sui­cide and has some­how impli­cat­ed Blanchett, her com­fort­able exis­tence begins to unravel. 

The prob­lem is, the film spends far too much time estab­lish­ing its clas­si­cal music cre­den­tials, and not near­ly enough explor­ing the dra­mat­ic ques­tions it rais­es. What exact­ly is Blanchett accused of doing, what does she think she did, what actu­al­ly hap­pened, and how big is the gap between the pub­lic per­cep­tion of what she’s accused of and what she actu­al­ly did?

If the film had failed to ful­ly address any of its dra­mat­ic ques­tions, and had insist­ed instead on remain­ing stead­fast­ly enig­mat­ic over the course of, say, a 90 minute film, then that might have been one thing. But Tár goes on for the guts of 2 and ¾ hours. 

And what you get instead are extend­ed dis­cus­sions of Mahler’s 5th, and the mild­ly con­tentious ques­tion around the tem­po of its adagi­et­to, and reams and reams of her jog­ging, rehears­ing and com­pos­ing. The open­ing scene in par­tic­u­lar, in which she’s inter­viewed by the New York­er’s Adam Gop­nik, goes on for ev er.

Lit­tle Chil­dren, 2006.

You’d love to have sent them away for a month with their script and a rig­or­ous script edi­tor. Or alter­na­tive­ly, to have been left alone with the fin­ished film and a pair of scis­sors in an edit­ing suite.

When it does focus on the dra­ma, as for instance with the scenes between Blanchett and Olga, or between Blanchett and her wife and daugh­ter, the film siz­zles and sparks fly. It just fails entire­ly to pro­duce any kind of sat­is­fy­ing third act.

Tár is impec­ca­bly made and impres­sive­ly seri­ous, and it’s com­fort­ably one of the best films to come out of Hol­ly­wood in years. But, dis­ap­point­ing­ly, that’s all it is. When it could and should have been so much more substantial. 

You can see the trail­er for Tár here:

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“Bones and All”, “Aftersun”; teenagers times two

December 30, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Bones and All.

As I came out the cin­e­ma after watch­ing Bones and All, I won­dered briefly whether that was per­haps the most instant­ly for­get­table film since what­sit­called with what­shis­name, you know, that one that was nom­i­nat­ed for all those Acad­e­my awards. And I pre­sumed that that would be the very last time that it ever crossed my mind. 

But over the few weeks that fol­lowed, to my baf­fled bewil­der­ment, a slew of star­ry-eyed review­ers lined up to loud­ly sing its prais­es. The Guardian, the Sun­day Times, the Irish Times, the Lon­don Inde­pen­dent and even, if you don’t mind, the New York­er’s august Antho­ny Lane all man­aged to momen­tar­i­ly divest them­selves of their crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties to be born forth on its agri­cul­tur­al rhythms. 

raio Argen­to’s Sus­piria.

It’s like watch­ing some­body sit­ting on an inflat­able pool toy as it rests stub­born­ly motion­less on your liv­ing room floor. While they flash you an excit­ed smile, bob­bing game­ly this way and that, telling you that the water is amaz­ing, and won­der­ing why you’re not jump­ing in to join them. 

Let’s get one thing straight. Bones and All is absolute­ly not a bad film. It’s very com­pe­tent­ly made and is as inof­fen­sive as you could pos­si­bly wish for. And if you’re famil­iar with Guadagni­no’s films, you’ll not be sur­prised by what you’re being pre­sent­ed with.

As with his point­less remake of Dario Argen­to’s tow­er­ing Sus­piria (reviewed ear­li­er here), where he neutered any sense of beau­ty to focus instead on pro­duc­ing an accu­rate­ly researched repro­duc­tion of drea­ry, drab, dull, grey 1970s Ger­many, here he con­cen­trates care­ful­ly on recre­at­ing grim, grimey rust-belt, mid­dle Amer­i­ca, cir­ca 1989. 

It’s com­mend­ably con­vinc­ing, but utter­ly devoid of any­thing approx­i­mat­ing dra­ma, and is entire­ly free of tension. 

Obvi­ous­ly, if you’re a teenag­er, con­fi­dent in the cer­tain­ty that you have all the time in the world, then the prospect of watch­ing two attrac­tive would-be teenagers gaze lov­ing­ly into one another’s eyes, as they amble aim­less­ly across the plains of Amer­i­ca from one trail­er trash dive to the next, will quite pos­si­bly strike you as time well spent. 

But for any chick­en for whom spring is, alas, a now dis­tant mem­o­ry, you’ll be left qui­et­ly seething at hav­ing fruit­less­ly wast­ed more than two gold­en hours on glo­ri­fied Wallpaper.

After­sun.

After­sun is about a teenag­er, but is very much a film for grown-ups. And is in fact one of the films of the year, and com­fort­ably so. As such, it’s the ide­al palette-cleanser for Bones and All.

I’ll say very lit­tle about the plot. Indeed, there’s lit­tle to say about it. It’s slow, mea­sured, appar­ent­ly lan­guid, and yet there’s a ten­sion that qui­et­ly and then omi­nous­ly builds. 

Paul Mescal is the bare­ly thir­ty some­thing year old father of an 11 year old daugh­ter, played by the daz­zling new­com­er Frankie Corio. And he’s tak­en her to a resort in Turkey to spend some qual­i­ty time togeth­er, now that he and her moth­er have separated. 

Metic­u­lous­ly paced, pre­cise­ly shot and care­ful­ly con­sid­ered, its shoe­string bud­get is vis­i­bly but fleet­ing­ly. Oth­er than which, it’s con­scious­ly cin­e­mat­ic in a way that few films any more both­er to be. Writ­ten and direct­ed by first time Scot­tish film mak­er Char­lotte Wells, it’s the most con­fi­dent and impres­sive fea­ture debut for many a moon.

You can see the trail­er for After­sun here:

And the trail­er for Bones and All here.

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