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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2 Things to Watch out for on Irish Television

September 30, 2022 by Leave a Comment
An Buachaill Gael Gáireach, The Laugh­ing Boy

There was a new doc­u­men­tary fea­ture screened recent­ly on TG4, and a 3 part doc­u­men­tary series on RTE, and both were excellent. 

An Buachaill Gael Gáireach, or The Laugh­ing Boy tells the unlike­ly if entire­ly true sto­ry behind Bren­dan Behan’s most famous song. After hear­ing about how help­ful Michael Collins had been to his moth­er when she had been preg­nant with him, the teenage Behan penned the Laugh­ing Boy, in Irish, in his honour.

Twen­ty years lat­er, he trans­lat­ed it into Eng­lish and used it as the cen­tre piece for his play, The Hostage. And when that play was then per­formed in Paris, a cou­ple of Greek ex-patri­ots saw it and were deter­mined to stage it in Athens. And they com­mis­sioned Mikis Theodor­akis, the most cel­e­brat­ed Greek com­pos­er of the 20th cen­tu­ry, to pro­vide the music for their production.

Theo Dor­gan, right, on his own per­son­al Greek odyssey.

And, improb­a­bly to say the least, that adap­ta­tion of Behan’s song then became the unof­fi­cial nation­al anthem for Greece, after being tak­en up as the song Greeks sang to protest the mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship that ruled there between 1967–74. So, lit­er­al­ly, every sin­gle Greek boy and girl grew up singing it in the 1970s and 80s as a sym­bol of their resistance. 

Direct­ed by Alan Gilse­nan and pre­sent­ed by the poet Theo Dor­gan, it’s one of the few films to actu­al­ly ben­e­fit by not being too rigid in its struc­ture or focus. Instead, the film is left free to wan­der and gen­tly mean­der, as it embraces its sprawl­ing themes. Fus­ing music with poet­ry, film and the­atre, to explore his­to­ry, pol­i­tics and cul­ture, exam­ined and expressed in Irish, Eng­lish and Greek.

Impec­ca­bly realised, it’s a film that, for once, lives up to its lofty ambitions.

The Island is a 3 part doc­u­men­tary series on RTE and the BBC, and it too deliv­ers on its com­mend­able ambi­tions. So many of these sorts of things reveal them­selves to be lit­tle more than thin­ly veiled com­mer­cials for the tourist indus­try. The Island was, impres­sive­ly, very much a sci­ence-led series. 

Liz Bon­nin, on The Island.

This, you feel sure, is down to it being pre­sent­ed by Liz Bon­nin, who is chalk­ing up an impres­sive record in pop­u­lar sci­ence pro­grammes for the BBC. It promised and then duly gave us a 1.8 bil­lion year his­to­ry of the island of Ire­land, with an array of wide-rang­ing  aca­d­e­mics and instruc­tive graph­ics, which were used to clar­i­fy and illu­mi­nate with­out ever over-simplifying.

It still looks rav­ish­ing of course. But for once, the images are giv­en a pur­pose and a context. 

What a joy to be treat­ed like an adult for a few stray hours.

You can see The Laugh­ing Boy on the TG4 play­er here:

https://www.tg4.ie/en/player/play/?pid=6311320763112&title=An%20Buachaill%20Gealgháireach&series=An%20Buachaill%20Gealgháireach&genre=Faisneis&pcode=622980

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Apple TV’s ‘Severance’ is the real deal

September 2, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Apple TV’s “Sev­er­ance”

Things have been qui­et of late, in this the much her­ald­ed gold­en age of tele­vi­sion. There has been plen­ty of per­fect­ly watch­able, emi­nent­ly ade­quate fod­der on offer from the var­i­ous stream­ing ser­vices and their ter­res­tri­al brethren. But very lit­tle to write home about. 

So it was with a slight sense of wari­ness that I sat down to watch Sev­er­ance, notwith­stand­ing all the noise it’s gen­er­at­ed. But for once, that hype was entire­ly jus­ti­fied. Hap­pi­ly, it’s the real deal.

It’s a high con­cept, Big Idea series. A nefar­i­ous and implic­it­ly evil tech cor­po­ra­tion has invent­ed a chip that allows you to sep­a­rate, sev­er, your work-you from your home-you. So as you work through the mind­less chores at the face­less office where you work, you’ve no idea what you do or who you are for the rest of the day when you’re at home. 

The same neck of the woods.

As you descend in the ele­va­tor at the end of the day, the chip kicks in, and you step out on to the ground floor as your home-you, or what they call your ‘out­ie’. And after you get back into the ele­va­tor as your out­ie the fol­low­ing morn­ing, you emerge on the ‘sev­er­ance’ floor as your ‘innie’. Com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous as what you might have got up to in between. 

Why would any­body want that? Well, Mark has recent­ly lost his wife in a car crash. And, he fig­ures, at least for 8 hours a day he’ll be spared the bot­tom­less grief he’s floored by dur­ing the oth­er 16.

It’s avowed­ly left of field and off kil­ter, and veers from the sur­re­al­ly mun­dane to men­ac­ing and back, often in the same scene. Think Char­lie Kauf­man meets David Lynch, where both have had their wings clipped to rein their flights of fan­cy in. Which is, respec­tive­ly, both good and bad. 

Every­thing about Sev­er­ance is impec­ca­bly craft­ed. The art direc­tion is pris­tine, the direct­ing, by Ben Stiller, is foot per­fect and the act­ing is excep­tion­al across the board. 

All the gang on the Sev­er­ance floor.

Adam Scott takes the lead as Mark, and is impres­sive­ly abet­ted by Britt Low­er, Zach Cher­ry, John Tur­tur­ro and, improb­a­bly, Christo­pher Walken, all of whom are out­stand­ing as his increas­ing­ly rebel­lious co-work­ers. But Patri­cia Arquette man­ages to some­how steal the show, as the near­est thing to a plau­si­ble and gen­uine­ly ter­ri­fy­ing real­i­sa­tion of the wicked witch of the West. 

And, rather than address­ing them head on, it sen­si­bly flirts around the philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions that it rais­es about the self, pur­pose, mean­ing, work-life bal­ance and agency. Most impres­sive­ly of all, it builds momen­tum and rais­es the stakes con­tin­u­al­ly, thanks to the per­fect­ly met­ed out parcels of sto­ry. And the increas­ing­ly com­pelling cliff-hang­ers that each episode con­cludes with.

It might not quite be up there with series 1 of Twin Peaks, and I hope it does a bet­ter job than that show did of main­tain­ing its momen­tum into series 2. But it’s com­fort­ably the best show to grace our screens since Bojack pur­sued and fed his demons (reviewed ear­li­er by me here).

You can see the trail­er for Sev­er­ance here:

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