jan's blog

2010-04-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

Dogged Democracy: Manderlay and The Redeemer’s Dilemma

As usual, Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (DK/SE/NL/FR/DE/UK, 2005), the second film of his American trilogy which opened with Dogville (DK/SE/NO/FI/UK/FR/DE/NL, 2003) and is announced to close with Wasington^[i], has given cause to much anger, disappointment, confusion and controversy. Von Trier’s presumed anti-Americanism plays a great part in the annoyance about these films. According to one critic, Manderlay is “simply another subversive spectacle” made with no other intention than “to siphon off the glamour and excitement of American culture,” while another called the film “a crude Soviet view of American history.”^[ii] The New York Times did not appreciate the ‘derision and moral arrogance of a snide European intellectual thumbing his nose at American barbarism” with a “deeply misanthropic, anti-American film [that] insists that the United States is ruled by crooks and gangsters and cursed by the legacy of slavery whose poison has seeped to its very core.”^[iii] Grace’s attempts to open up the hearts and minds of the slaves in Manderlay for freedom and democracy have been interpreted as an allegory of the US invasion of Iraq, whereas her incapacity to deal efficiently with a natural disaster like a dust storm has been seen as an allusion to the US government’s handling of hurricane Katrina. For those offended by Von Trier’s alleged anti-Americanism, it may come as a small comfort that he didn’t picture a very uplifting image of the Old Continent either in the three films that became known as his Europe trilogy consisting of Forbrydelsenselement/The Element of Crime (DK, 1984), Epidemic (DK, 1987), and Europa (DK/SE/FR/DE/CH, 1991)..

Probably because Von Trier’s predilection for organizing his films into trilogies made him set Dogville, Manderlay, and the projected Wasington apart as an “American trilogy,” and also because both Dogville and Manderlay evolve around the do-good gangster daughter Grace and both films are shot on similar stages with the plans of the sites and the names of streets and buildings chalked on the floor, this combination of Brechtian distanciation techniques and the choice of American places as settings for these film’s stories has blinded critics for the similarities and continuities with Von Trier’s earlier films.

His film Dancer in the Dark (DK/DE/NL/IT/US/UK/FR/SE/FI/IS/NO, 2000), together with Breaking the Waves (DK/SE/NO/IS/FR/NL, 1996) and Idioterne/The Idiots (DK/SE/FR/NL/IT, 1998) part of the “Golden Heart” trilogy, is also set in the United States and has as its protagonist a rather naive do-good immigrant woman, Selma (played by Björk). As a musical it is no less unrealistic as the staged dramas of Dogville and Manderlay, and in spite of being adorned with song and dance, its story is no less grim than the narratives of the latter films. It could just as well have beeen part of the America series. The other two films of the Golden Heart trilogy, though both set in Europe, deal with female protagonists who face a fate that is very similar to that of Grace in Dogvile and those of the male protagonists of the Europe trilogy. Von Trier’s eight feature films can easily be grouped along other lines.^[iv]

This is not to deny that there Dogville and Manderlay are closely connected. The narrator’s voice-over introduces the latter explicitly as a sequel of the former, both films share the same protagonist, both films are staged in a similar theatrical fashion, and, of course, both films are set in the United States in the era of the Great Depression. But instead of following Von Trier’s own rather arbitrary grouping of his films it might be prove worthwhile to discuss Dogville and Manderlay in the context of Von Trier’s other films. After all, the America of Dogville and Manderlay is no less fictional and no more ‘historical’ than postwar Europe in The Element of Crime and Europa. More generally, Von Trier’s films need to be discussed in the framework of his approach to film laid down in the Dogma 95 Manifesto. In this manifesto, Von Trier (his co-writers all confirm that the Manifesto was Von Trier’s idea) defines film making as a rule bound practice, that is, for Von Trier the practice of film making is like a game. His films are best understood accordingly. Game theory - of the mathematical and economic sort, that is - might have more to say about his films than classical film theory and naratology.^[v]

Von Trier’s Game Cinema

The Dogme 95 Manifesto, which Von Trier launched in 1995 in Paris at the conference “Cinema in its Second Century,” came with a “Vow of Chastity” which contained ten rules for the aspiring Dogma filmmaker that circumscribe practices the filmmaker is allowed or forbidden to employ during shooting and post-production. Among other things, they forbid the filmmaker to bring props or costumes to the set, to use special lighting, or to record sound separately from the images, to add special effects during post-production, and prescribe the use of a handheld camera.^[vi]

These rules are not motivated by content or subject matter, as, for instance, André Bazin’s recommendation of the use of in-depth photography was motivated by the desire to preserve the spatiotemporal continuity of a filmed event.^[vii] The rules are impediments because they prohibit the filmmaker to use the most habitual and efficient skills and techniques of the profession. Rather, they force the filmmaker to develop new skills and techniques to work around the prohibitions imposed by the rules, just like a soccer player must develop special skills to cope with the rule that forbids to touch a ball with the hands. And just as the special skills of a soccer player are rather useless outside the pitch, the rules laid down in the Dogma 95 Manifesto are only meaningful in the game of Dogma 95 filmmaking. Von Trier and the other founders of Dogma 95 each made only one film according to the rules of the Manifesto only to change them for other rules for their next films. As game rules, the rules themselves are arbitrary and interchangeable: if one gets tired or bored of the game, one can simply start to play another game, as Von Trier himself did after (and before) The Idiots.

However, the rules of the Dogma 95 Manifesto are arbitrary but not meaningless, although their meaning is quite different from their usual interpretation as an injunction to documentary realism and the treatment of contemporary subjects. But as the Dogma films of the founders of the movement convincingly demonstrate, it is very well possible to enact historical dramas and fictional characters with objects found at the location of shooting. In Dogme#3 - Mifunes Sidste Sang/Mifunes Last Song (Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, DK/SE, 1999) Kersten enacts for his younger brother Rud the Japanese warrior Mifune with an armor improvised out of pans and utensils he had found in a kitchen, and in Dogme#4-The King Is Alive (Kristian Levring, Se/DK/US, 2000) a group of tourists stranded in the desert decide to stage Shakespeare’s King Lear with props they find at the site and in the light of the blazing sun.

The purpose of the ban on props, sets, and costumes is not some notion of intensified realism, but to replace the prevailing notion of representation with ideas that are more current in games and new media: simulation and model building. In film, a scene is usually conceived of as a verisimilar re-enactment of a unique event as it supposedly occurred in a historical or fictional reality. A scene must “look” like the event it represents, and must be “directed”, that is, planned and choreographed, in such a way that the position of the camera offers the dramaturgically most effective view on it. A simulation, on the other hand, is not aimed at a meticulous reconstruction of already past events, but at soliciting the behaviors of a system under various actual, possible, and even impossible conditions. For a simulation a visual resemblance with the system it models is not necessary and often even disturbing because it distracts from its relevant properties.^[viii] The behaviors of the simulation model are not known in advance and cannot be “directed”: the experimenter just “feeds” the model with variable parameters and then sees what happens. The purpose of a simulation is, moreover, not the reconstruction of a singular event, but rather the charting of a system’s “state space,” i.e. the space of all possible configurations it can attain.^[ix]

The rules of the Dogma 95 Manifesto envision this sort of simulation. The ban on props, sets and costumes is aimed at “shearing away detail”, “the very essence of model building.”^[x] The rejection of “predictable dramaturgy” and the renouncement of “taste” and the status of “artist” point in the same direction: the filmmaker is not an “author” but an experimenter who observes the behaviors of models. The camera must “follow” the action, instead of the action being organized and directed towards the camera. In the editing shots from various takes of various executions of an action under varied parameters (e.g., mood), are “sampled” to the effect that instead of creating a seeming continuity, the flagrant discontinuity of the shots reveals that each execution is only one possible “state” out of the infinitely many “states” the same event could have attained. The “whole” that emerges from this editing is not a singular actualized state, but rather the infinite virtual state space of the possible configurations open the event could have settled into.^[xi] Dogma’s “realism” aims at opening up a virtual and mental space rather than a physical and palpable reality.

Von Trier deploys other strategies to open up virtual worlds in his films as well. It is not difficult to recognize a strategy of “shearing away detail” in the scarce settings of Dogville and Manderlay. Although the theatrical staging in both these films has often been associated with Brechtian alienation techniques, they do not serve the pedagogical purpose of making the spectator aware of the artificiality of cinema. A good indication for that is that critics often mention these techniques in passing but do not seem to experience them as intrusive upon their engagement with the worlds and characters of these films. The sparse sets rather solicit the spectators to fill in the gaps with projections of images from their memories of the vast number of films, photographs, records, stories, news paper reports, advertisements, tv programs, magazines that constitute a collective cultural image of America. The photographic sequences that conclude these films are there to confirm the virtual worlds the spectator conjured up in the preceding projection time.

Von Trier deployed this strategy less conspicuously in Dancer in the Dark, which is set in a bland and almost nondescript town which could be situated anywhere in the Midwest and anytime in the fifties or sixties. The spectator is invited to follow the example of the nearly blind Selma who imagines the dance scenes from the musicals she goes to see in the local cinema on the basis of the verbal and tactile descriptions by her friend Kathy (Katherine Deneuve) together with her memories of movies she saw in her youth in Czechoslovakia. In these “American” films Von Trier makes his spectators perform the work he executed himself in his European trilogy where he constructed an entirely virtual Europe literally “written with light” and built out of physically impossible spatiotemporal relationships that could only be brought into existence with cinematographic means. Especially in Europa, “Europe” was rendered with images taken from a comprehensive catalogue of European films, styles, genres, movements, themes and motives. Von Trier called this method the “Kafka method”, since Kafka wrote his novels about America on the basis of information from his uncle. Von Trier too constructed the worlds of both his European and American films by using the “indirect evidence” stored in the audience’s collective cultural memories.^[xii] These virtual and literally “imaginary” worlds are as loosely related to the real historical continents as the worlds of games like Close Combat (Atomic Games, 1996-2005) are to the actual battles of World War II.

If these virtual worlds are only remotely related to their historical referents, it might make more sense to see if they can be treated in the same way as game worlds. For a game designer, the particular visual appearances of characters, objects, and environments of a game are just a matter of dressing up or “coloring” of the rules and algorithms that specify the game.^[xiii] What if one were to perform a sort of reverse engineering on the Von Trier’s films to see what models might underly their “colorings?”

Dad’s Law: TIT-FOR-TAT

If one looks beyond the great diversity of settings, perods, styles, and characters one discovers that Von Trier tells the same story over and over again: a stranger enters an unknown territory where he (the protagonists of the Europe trilogy) or she (all others) has to find out the rules and intentions that govern the behavior of its inhabitants. They all put trust and faith in their new companions, but all wind up abandoned, abused, maltreated, exploited, and even dead. The only exception is Grace, who takes a terrible revenge on the “good and honest” people of Dogville and manages to escape from Manderlay.^[xiv] Von Trier’s heroes and heroines seem to have only one choice: perish or punish.

The problem Von Trier’s protagonists face is what has become the staple of game theory, “The Prisoner’s Dilemma”: is cooperation possible in an environment where everybody else pursues their own interests?^[xv] In the Prisoner’s Dilemma - itself a story invented to “color” an abstract logical problem^[xvi] - two men arrested by the police on suspicion of a serious crime, e.g. a bank robbery, are interrogated separately without means to communicate with one another. They are offered the following choices: if both confess, they will be sentenced to five years in prison; if neither confesses, they will both be sent to jail for one year for a lesser offense, e.g. illegal possession of arms; if one of them confesses while the other does not, the former will be granted immunity and the latter will be sentenced to ten years in prison. The best choice each player can make individually is to confess (defection), because this guarantees that the player will not end up with the severest penalty while it keeps open the possibility of the highest reward, immunity. Cooperation (not confessing), on the other hand, makes it tempting for the other player to defect and to leave the loyal player with the “sucker’s payoff.” Although mutual cooperation yields a higher payoff than mutual defection, defection is each player’s best response to whatever choice the other player makes.^[xvii]

The predicament of Von Trier’s protagonists is sad proofs this game theoretical insight: by choosing a strategy of cooperation they expose themselves to ruthless exploitation by the other players in their new surroundings and - again except for Grace - wind up with the “suckers payoff” and perish.^[xviii] But if cooperation is not very wise, then why do Von Trier’s protagonists persist in choosing a nice strategy? In order to answer this question, one should look at Von Trier’s as iterations in an infinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. In such a game, the payoff for mutual cooperation is in the long run much higher than the reward for mutual defection. But in the short run the temptation of defection remains, and since one never knows whether one is dealing with a “nice” or a “mean” player, the problem for a cooperative player is how to avoid exploitation by the other player. In a computer tournament organized by Robert Axelrod economists, social scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists were invited to submit strategies for an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which each strategy played each other strategy. The winner turned out to be a remarkably simple strategy that started with offering cooperation and in every next turn did what the other player did when it was his turn to move. The success of this strategy, known as TIT-FOR-TAT, shows that in a population of unknown players it is wise to start with offering cooperation, since there is always a possibility that the other player is a nice player (or follows a TIT-FOR-TAT strategy, too) and nice players thrive much better in the long run.

This is what Von Trier’s protagonists do but unfortunately they only encounter grim players. Bess in Breaking The Waves introduces another nice player, Jan, in the community of grim players on her isle, but an accident makes him involuntarily defect and leave her unprotected in the community of mean players. Grace in Dogville accepts the “quid-pro-quo” deal with the people of Dogville proposed to her by wanna-be writer Tom, offering to do chores in exchange for a safe heaven, only to find herself exploited and abused. Eventually her father comes to her rescue and instructs her about the necessity of a TIT-FOR-TAT rule of behavior in a world of selfish players. Only then she retaliates defection with defection thus conforming to what may be called “Dad’s Law.”

Von Trier’s films arrive at the same conclusion as Axelrod’s computer tournament. From a game theoretical perspective, the different settings and episodes of Von Trier’s films are just as many different “colorings” of the same “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game. In this series of iterations, Grace is the first of Von Trier’s protagonists to learn that TIT-FOR-TAT is the only viable strategy in a world populated with mean players. Selma in Dancer in the Dark is the only other character to come close to that realization. After her neighbor, landlord, and local sheriff Bill has robbed her of the money she had saved for the eye operation of her sun, Bill makes her kill him and thus forces her to retaliate his defection. Selma is then sentenced to death and executed, as prescribed by Dad’s Law, but since she managed to hand her savings to the doctor who will operate her sun’s eyes, she doesn’t end up with the “sucker’s payoff” but gets “the reward for mutual defection.” From Bess in Breaking the Waves via Selma to Grace in Dogville Von Trier’s protagonists go through a learning process in which they gradually learn to come to terms with the harsh but only viable rule of TIT-FOR-TAT.

How does Manderlay fit in this game? At first sight Manderlay is a repetition of the previous iterations of the game: as in Dogville, Grace leaves her father and enters against his advise the unknown world of Manderlay, where she starts a search for other nice players to help her overthrow the regime of Mam’s Law. She fails and eventually flees from Manderlay, abandoned by her father and chased by the inhabitants of Manderlay. Hasn’t Grace learned anything after all?

Mam’s Law: A Dogged Social Contract

There are striking differences between Manderlay and Dogville (and Von Trier’s other films) as well. To begin with, contrary to Von Trier’s other protagonists, including Grace in Dogville, Grace is invited, if not urged, to enter Manderlay by one of its inhabitants. Moreover, Grace is not forced into a humble and humiliating position of dependency on the inhabitants of her new environment, but she puts herself in charge of the plantation after Mam’s death. From this position, she tries to redeem the inhabitants of Manderlay from slavery by introducing freedom and democracy. Her attempts fail because the former slaves stubbornly stick to Mam’s Law and even vote for Grace’s installment as Mam’s successor. Grace nearly falls victim to the democratic rules she tried to introduce when she almost sees herself forced to occupy the very position she tried to abolish. In the end she meets out the whipping to Timothy she intervened to prevent in the beginning of the film. In the final shot she is seen in a bird’s eye view fleeing over the map of the USA away from Manderlay, chased by the inhabitants of the plantation and abandoned by her father. It looks as if she winds up like Karen in The Idiots, betrayed by the members of the community she had become part of and abandoned by her family.

Grace’s self-imposed mission to redeem the slaves of Manderlay seems to have failed because she didn’t find another player who shared her ideals: her campaign for free and democratic cooperation falters on a similar sort of narrow-minded defection she had encountered among the “good and honest people” of Dogville.^[xix] But maybe the specific “coloring” of this iteration of the game, cast in an opposition of slavery and freedom, distracts from what actually is at stake. It might be wise to follow the rules of Dogma 95 and “shear away details.” Let’s take the purpose of the Brechtian alienation techniques seriously and take our distances from the the represented world in order to uncover the model underlying it.

To start with, the film presents a clear spatial division: there is the vast space of America, represented from a bird’s eye view by a white map with only the borders and the names of the States printed on it, and a drawing of the Statue of Liberty at New York’s place on the map (and the meaning of liberty is the central theme of the movie). The only moving objects visible in this space are four dots that appear to be the motorcade of Grace’s father, his gangsters and Grace herself who travel from the Rocky Mountains to Alabama where they will happen on Manderlay. Grace’s father and his gang are the only persons in this film to occupy this vast and undifferentiated space, which makes it safe to say that in this film this space is dominated by Grace’s father, who represents Dad’s Law, i.e., TIT-FOR-TAT as the only viable strategy in a world populated with “mean players.” (Grace’s father is not exempt from this law, since his business has been taken over by his competitors while he was in Dogville). That this “America” is the space of Dad’s law is confirmed by the few other representatives of this space like the entertainer Doctor Hector whose profession as a card cheater makes him literally a “mean player.” It is also the space where Timothy, in Manderlay known as a “proud” African from Munsi descent who doesn’t drink or gamble, turns out not to be the “proud” African from Munsi descent who refrains from drinking and gambling as he is known in Manderlay, but an “eye pleasing” Mansi who (ab)uses alcohol and gambles with money stolen from the Manderlay community.

Opposite the space of Dad’s law is the space of Manderlay ruled by Mam’s Law. As the owner of the Manderlay plantation Mam has kept her workers in slavery for seventy years after its abolishment. She apparently rules by fencing off her workers from the outside world and by arbitrarily meeting out corporeal punishment, as Grace learns when she is asked to intervene in the whipping of Timothy. His wife Victoria tells Grace that Timothy is unjustly accused of possessing a bottle of whine which was “just put in his cabin to have something to punish him for” (exactly what Grace will arrange at the end of the film). But Mam’s law turns out to be a bit more complicated. Mam herself is an old, sick and dying woman, whose power does not reside in her whip and weapons (“a shotgun and an old pistol”) or the fences and gates around Manderlay (“we could easily climb over them with a ladder”, as Wilhelm will explain), but in a book in which “Mam’s Law” is laid down. Apart from some “bizarre and vicious regulations” this book contains a “psychological” classification of the workers of Manderlay into categories like “a clowning nigger,” “a hitting nigger,” “losing niggers,” “a talking nigger,” “a weeping nigger,” “pleasing niggers,” “crazy niggers,” “proudy niggers,” that is, a system of “bondage, even through psychology” as the voice-over narrator puts it.

As Wilhelm will later explain to Grace,these categories are based on the observation of these individuals’ “patterns of behavior”: the inhabitants of Manderlay are subjected to a system that is designed to fit them. And Mam’s Law is also protective and beneficiary: it makes sure that each worker does the work that suits his or her skills, talents, and character and that each worker gets rewarded accordingly. Mam’s Law, as Wilhelm explains to Grace, “is for the good of everyone.” Mam’s law does not need to be enforced with violence nor does its existence need to “brought into the open” as Grace initially intends to, since the inhabitants of Manderlay all know about the existence the book and have voluntarily accepted the rule of Mam’s law.

To Grace’s great surprise Mam’s law was not written by Mam but by Wilhelm, the community’s elder. Mam’s power is like that of a constitutional monarch: it is entirely symbolic and rests literally on the book she keeps under her mattress and that was written by a representative of the community she presides over. Even if Grace would have burned this book, as Mam requests on her death bed, the system would have remained in place since it is no less than a social contract, eventually even democratically voted for by the community which thinks it is, as Wilhelm says, “as relevant as it ever was.” Instead of enforcing her law on the inhabitants of Manderlay, Mam’s authority itself was derived from the social contract codified by Wilhelm’s book.^[xx]

Freedom or Fairness?

A social contract is “the set of common understandings that allow the citizens of a society to coordinate their efforts” and in this it can only succeed if behavior is coordinated on an equilibrium that should meet the requirements of stability, efficiency, and fairness.^[xxi] TIT-FOR-TAT, Dad’s law, assures a stable social contract, because if all other members of society stick to this rule, nobody can do better by deviating from it. It is, however, not necessarily efficient because it favors mutual defection although mutual cooperation is a more rewarding strategy. Since nice players only stay nice as long as they know that defection will immediately be retaliated, mutual cooperation is not a stable equilibrium. As all protagonists of Von Trier’s movies, including Grace in Dogville, learned, in a population of mean players a single nice player is doomed to perish. Dad’s law, then, is a social contract which creates stability, but it is not efficient (most of the time, players only receive the award for mutual defection) and not fair either (nice players get ruthlessly exploited and end up with the “sucker’s payoff”). It is, however, as the prominent presence of the Statue of Liberty on the map of the USA already suggested, libertarian, because it leaves the players free in their strategic choices assuming that the players’ interactions will eventually settle on an equilibrium state. In more contemporary political terms, this social contract represents the unfettered reign of “free” market forces neo-conservatives dreams of. In game theoretical terms, this is called an egalitarian social contract.^[xxii]

Mam’s law, on the other hand, exemplifies a so-called utilitarian social contract. It is based on “psychological” classification system - an almost Foucaultian formalization of knowledge embodied by and extracted from this social body - which serves to divide labor and food, duties and rewards to each member of the community according to his or her abilities. The system ascribes “utilities” to each member of the community, and divides responsibilities and rewards, rights and obligations accordingly. This system is efficient and fair, because it makes sure everybody contributes to the “common good” according to his or her abilities and everybody gets their proportional share of the common good. It is, however, not stable because the members of the community will always be tempted to put their own self-interests above those of the community and cheat on the fairness norms laid down in the social contract. In Manderlay this weakness is demonstrated by Wilma, who steals the mule meat the community had put aside for sick little Claire, or when most of Manderlay’s workers start spending more time at mending of their own dwellings and neglect their work on the “common” land.

This utilitarian social contract therefore needs an external power to enforce and police it, which is why the community of Manderlay needs the authority of Mam and later votes for Grace as her successor. The utilitarian social contract is “not free” - as Grace rebukes Wilhelm’s explanation of Mam’s law - because it requires the power of a “nurturing” authority who knows what is best for its subjects. ^[xxiii] Mam’s law, for instance, prohibits alcohol and forbids the possession of cash money to keep Manderlay’s workers away from the vices of drinking and gambling. The utilitarian social contract, then, is not free, but it is protective and “caring.” This “matronizing” social contract underlies regimes from corporatism and fascist dictatorships to the communist ideal state, and is nowadays probably best exemplified by the European welfare state. Is not the latter not often criticized for “enslaving” its citizens by making them dependent on social security, national health care systems, minimum wages, and other forms of state supplied support or legally enforced social provisions?^[xxiv]

Dad’s law and Mam’s law, then, are two models of social contracts similar to ones one finds in textbooks on game theory or in the thought experiments of moral philosophers like John Rawls and John Harsanyi.^[xxv] Like these models, both models Manderlay are idealized and abstract sich all detail has been “sheared away.” Neither of these models is to be found in the pure and brutal, and hence caricatural form as they are presented in Manderlay (or in scientific and philosophical textbooks) in the real world, not in the United States nor in the former Soviet Union or anywhere in Europe. To visualize these models, Von Trier “colors” them with tropes, taken from the stock of contemporary cultural memory and imagination, “gangsterdom” as the incarnation of the free market economy and “slavery” as the icon for dependency on a nurturing state. Manderlay is not about America, nor is it about America’s legacy of slavery: Manderlay is a model simulation of two opposite forms of a social contract, for which images of gangsters and slaves serve as vivid personifications. The models themselves are not tied to any country or continent in particular. The opposition between the American Democrats and Republicans has, for instance, been described as an opposition between the model of the “nurturing parent” and that of the “strict father,” after the collapse of communism the economy of the former Soviet Union was ruled by the Russian mafia, whereas the nurturing state is most typically exemplified by the European welfare state, often criticized for “enslaving” its citizens by addicting them to, and in some Eastern European former communist parties were democratically re-elected in government by a population who feared the effects of globalization, deregulation, privatization and in general the free market forces.

Ironically, once one understands that Manderlay presents a model simulation, it immediately becomes clear that the film, though not referring to real, historical phenomena, is nevertheless not that far removed from real world developments either (as is usually case the with simulations). The only thing that is really amazing is that after half a century of Cold War and its aftermath, these models were not recognized in Von Trier’s film.

Daughter’s Law?

How do the politics of Grace fit into all this? Initially Grace seems to take distance from her father. According to the narrator Grace and her father had taken up “their legendary discord” and Grace had become “somewhat weary of her unbearably overweening daddy.” Grace tells her father twice that “he wouldn’t have dared to speak like that if mother still would have been alive,” suggesting that she leans more towards “mam’s site” than to “dad’s.” However, in Dogville she accepted Dad’s instruction about the necessity of TIT-FOR-TAT, she enters Manderlay determined to overthrow Mam’s law, and she takes five of her father’s gangsters with her to assist her with her operation. For Grace there is apparently no contradiction between her father’s methods and the freedom and democracy she wants to introduce into Manderlay.

Rather, the freedom and democracy Grace promotes are the political and institutional side of Dad’s law. Not coincidentally, the topic of the first session of the democracy course Grace obliges the workers of Manderlay to attend is how to settle a dispute over private property. After the death of little Claire the community members unanimously vote for the execution of Wilma who they hold responsible: apparently, democracy fosters the application of the logic of TIT-FOR-TAT and Grace obliges by killing Wilma personally. Grace’s attempts to introduce freedom and democracy destabilize the community rather than liberate it. Her decision to let the workers take down the trees of the Old Lady’s Garden to use the wood for the mending of their houses deprives the plantation of its protection against the annual dust storms. The Old Lady’s Garden wasn’t there for the private pleasures of Mam after all, and Grace’s choice to let the private interests of the inhabitants prevail over Mam’s rules and prohibitions turns out to be detrimental for the common good. For lack of food, everybody is forced to eat “dirt” which was strictly forbidden under Mam’s law.^[xxvi] This episode shows in a nutshell how Grace’s overruling of Mam’s law leaves Manderlay’s inhabitants unprotected against the unleashed forces in the outside world. Grace thus destabilizes the social contract of Mam’s law, and introduces the inefficiency (loss of the harvest, the eating of “dirt,”) and unfairness (Wilma’s capital punishment) of Dad’s law into Manderlay.

Grace, then, acts like the “liberating forces of capitalism” as described by Marx and Engels in “The Communist Manifesto” that “burst asunder” the “feudal relations of property” that became “fetters” to “the already developed productive forces.”^[xxvii] Capital, after all, needs “free labor”, that is, a labor force that is not tied to land, property, ownership or other obligations but is “freely” disposable and dispensable. This explains the reluctance of the inhabitants of Manderlay to give up Mam’s law for Dad’s law. Confronted with the choice between an egalitarian social contract and a utilitarian one, they prefer the latter, because under Dad’s law they will have nothing to offer but cooperation: under Dad’s law they will be “free” from possessions, obligations, and rights, as assured under Mam’s law, and they will be forced to accept any “quid-pro-quo” deal offered to them, just as Grace herself was forced to in Dogville. Under Dad’s law this means that they too, like Grace and all other protagonists of Von Trier’s previous films, will be exposed to the most despicable and ruthless forms of abuse, maltreatment and murder, as demonstrated by the fate of Burt who left his wife on the plantation for a white girl and is at the end of the film seen hanging from a tree, killed by the company of the woman he put his trust in, and the sequence of photographs with which Manderlay ends. Under Dad’s law, freedom as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty means “freely disposable” for exploitation and abuse.

There seems to be as little room between the evil of Dad’s law and the lesser evil of Mam’s law for a Daughter’s Law as in Von Trier’s imaginary “Europe” and “America.”

Conclusions

To discuss Manderlay in terms of democracy versus slavery or to interpret it as a belated Danish “J’accuse,” an indictment of the maltreatment of the Afro-Americans in the nine-teen-thirties or to see it as proof of Von Trier’s incorrigible anti-Americanism is to miss the point of this film (and the other films by Von Trier). The film itself already contains a number of indications that it should not be taken literally: it’s style is another example of the model-building Von Trier has practiced since the launch of the Dogma 95 Manifesto; the Brechtian alienation techniques invite the spectator to take a critical distance from the film’s referential illusion; and Wilhelm suggests that Grace, who can only read “the prolongation of slavery” and “a recipe for oppression and humiliation” in Mam’s law that she has “been reading it with the wrong spectacles.”

For those familiar with Von Trier’s earlier films about the immediate post-war Europe it must be clear that “reading” Manderlay as a film about slavery or even about America is indeed “reading it with the wrong spectacles.” His films do not refer to historical periods and geographically identifiable countries, but rather to the images, myths, and narratives “Europe” and “America” have come to stand for in contemporary - mainly cinematographic - culture. Von Trier uses these cultural icons and symbols to “color” the models he builds with his films. As I have argued elsewhere, these films up to Manderlay are all iterations of a single game: together they form an infinitely repeated game of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.”^[xxviii] Apparently it takes Von Trier’s protagonists eight iterations to find out that a consistently and ruthlessly followed strategy of TIT-FOR-TAT is the only viable strategy in a world populated by mean players.

In Manderlay Von Trier raises the stakes: this film does not pit one nice player against a population of mean players, but two social contracts, one based on a strategy of voluntary defection, and the other based on forced cooperation. The egalitarian social contract - Dad’s law - is the model of the free market and free enterprise, for which the United States of America have become the paramount symbol, whereas the utilitarian social contract - Mam’s law - underpins the “mothering” state nowadays (still) best exemplified by the European welfare state .

But this drives home the point that a historical or referential reading of Manderlay is besides the point. Manderlay obviously does not stage a conflict between “America” and “Europe”, but rather between two models of social contracts colored by mythical, or if you prefer, caricatural images that circulate in contemporary, predominantly cinematographic visual culture: gangsterdom for a (neo - conservative) free market economy and slavery for a (liberal) welfare state. The models that are pitted against each other, however, are as abstract and idealized as you will find them in a text book on game theory or in the thought experiments of moral philosophers like John Rawls and John Harsanyi. And who would take them to task for historical accuracy?

^[i] According to the Internet Movie Data Base, Wasington is “still on the back burner of Lars von Trier,” and not scheduled for release before 2009. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0461425/, accessed on Oct. 15, 2007.

^[ii] Peter Bradshaw, “Manderlay,” in The Guardian, March 3, 2006, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,1721653,00.html, accessed on Oct. 15, 2007; Philip French, “Manderlay,” in The Observer, March 5, 2006, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_review/0,,1723665,00.html, accessed on Oct. 15, 2007.

^[iii] Stephen Holden, “Manderlay: An America Where Gangsters Free Slaves Not Keen for Liberation,” in The New York Times, January 27, 2006, http://movies.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/movies/27mand.html, accessed ok Oct. 15, 2007.

^[iv] His latest feature film, Direktøren for det hele/The Boss Of It All (DK/SE/IS/IT/NO/FI/DE, 2006) is not included in this number, because Von Trier himself did not take this project all too seriously.

^[v] Jan Simons, Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).

^[vi] The “Dogma 95 Manifesto” is published on the official Dogma 95 website, http://www.dogme95.dk (accessed on Oct. 17, 2007).

^[vii] André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004).

^[viii] See Gonzalo Frasca, “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology,” in Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader, New York and London: Routledge, 2003, 223.

^[ix] See John Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Cambridge, Ma: Perseus Books, 1998), 34.

^[x] Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, 24.

^[xi] For a more elaborate discussion of the aesthetics of virtual realism, see Simons, Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema; Jan Simons, “Von Trier’s Cinematic Games,” Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Spring 2008). See also Jack Stevenson, Lars von Trier (London: BFI Publishing, 2002).

^[xii] This “Kafka”-method is explicitly demonstrated in Epidemic, in which filmmaker Lars (Lars von Trier) and scriptwriter Niels (Niels Vørsel) write a story about a plague epidemic on the basis of archival material, but Niels also confesses that he maintains a correspondence with a girl in Atlantic City because seeing Bob Rafelson’s King of Marvin Gardens (US, 1972) made him want to know more about that town but he is too lazy to travel there by himself. As is well known, Von Trier doesn’t like to travel himself, and he has never been in the USA. See Simons, 115.

^[xiii] Greg Costikyan, “I Have No Words & I Must Design,” in Interactive Fantasy#2, 1994, http://www.costik.com/nowords.html, accessed on Oct. 18, 2007.

^[xiv] The only other exception is Doctor Mesmer in the embedded story in Epidemic. In almost all respects this story mirrors symmetrically all other stories: instead of entering a strange environment Mesmers leaves his familiar city, and instead of being abused by the inhabitants of his new environment he goes out to cure the plague-infested population of the country side. Mesmer’s salvation is consistent with these structural mutations. The other exceptional figure is Bess in Manderlay, since she is an inhabitant of the isle as well. She has, however, a history of mental illness and is regarded by the other inhabitants as the village’s fool. She is thus a stranger in her own community.

^[xv] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984, 9.

^[xvi] Only after this story’s invention by Albert W. Tucker the problem underlying it rose to fame. See Brian Skyrms, Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48-49.

^[xvii] Mutual defection corresponds to what is called a Nash equilibrium. This equilibrium is reached when each player’s move is the best response to the other player’s move and no player can improve his or her payoff by choosing an alternative strategy.

^[xviii] For a more elaborate analysis see Simons, 188-196.

^[xix] See Wim Staat, “Dogville Characterized by The Grapes of Wrath: European Identity Construction Through American Genre Convention,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 48.1 (Spring 2007): 79-96.

^[xx] As mathematician and economist Ken Binmore writes, “Nor are popes, presidents, kings, judges, or the police exempt from the social contract of the society in which they officiate Far from enforcing the social contract, they derive what they have from a social convention which says that ordinary citizens should accept their direction.” Binmore, Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.

^[xxi] Binmore, Natural Justice, 3-5. An equilibrium that is not stable would not hold for long; an equilibrium that is not sufficiently efficient cannot compete with more efficient equilibria, and an equilibrium that would be experienced as unfair encourages defection and cheating.

^[xxii] Binmore, 188.

^[xxiii] See George Lakoff, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 108.

^[xxiv] See for instance Theodore Dalrymple, Life At The Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2001).

^[xxv] John Harsanyi, Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univerity Press, 1977); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1972).

^[xxvi] This is a variation of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the overgrazing of common land because each farmer individually tries to get a maximal benefit by grazing as many animals as possible. This is a classical example of an inefficient equilibrium (under an egalitarian social contract). See Binmore, 7.

^[xxvii] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” (Paris, 1848), http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html, accessed on Oct. 25, 2007.

^[xxviii] Simons, Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Cinematic Games, 188-196.

There is no budget like low budget Deel 2

2009-01-20T03:53:00.001-08:00

The good old days....

Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

2008-12-29T02:36:00.000-08:00

Although WALTZ WITH BASHIR (Ari Folman, Il/De/Fr, 2008) has been almost unanimously acclaimed for its innovative character, this animation movie, also almost unanimously categorized as a "documentary," actually is a very classical piece of what Sigmund Freud once called Trauerarbeit ("mourning work"). The film is an attempt to recuperate its maker's lost memories of his role as an Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war which ended in the massacres of Palestinian refugees carried out by the Christian Phalangist militiamen who were allowed by the Israeli Defense Forces to enter the camps Sabra and Shatila. In the film Folman visits former fellow soldiers, a war correspondent who witnessed the invasion of Beirut and the massacres in Sabra and Shatila, a befriended shrink and the unavoidable psychologist and trauma expert to find out where he was himself during this episode and what he had done.

Folman's friend Ori Sivan, who acts as his personal shrink, makes the obvious and alsmost inevitable reference to the WWII Nazi camps, when he explains to Folman that his awoken interest in the tragedy of the Palestinian refugee camps goes back to the history of the sufferings inflicted on his parents by the Nazis in Auschwitz, of which he must have heard as a child. And, of course, the Israeli policies towards the Palestinians have often been compared to those of the Nazis towards the Jews. However, the ground for this comparison is not a role change from former victim into hangman, but rather in what Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in their groundbreaking 1967 book called Germany's postwar Unfähigkeit zu trauern ("inability to mourn"). And more significant than the suggested comparison and its concomitant role switch between the tragic events in both the Nazi and the Palestinian refugee camps is this "displacement" which by pointing to one traumatic event continues the repression of another. And here WALTZ WITH BASHIR enters grounds that are familiar from "the New German Cinema" (Fassbinder, Wenders, Schlöndorff, Von Trotta a.o.) and American Vietnam war movies like APOCALYPS NOW (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1979), THE DEER HUNTER (Michael Cimino, USA, 1978) , HAMBURGER HILL, (John Irvin, USA, 1987) PLATOON (Oliver Stone, USA, 1986), the RAMBO sequels (USA, 1982, 1985, 1986). As WALTZ WITH BASHIR, these films too are phantasmatic rather than historical or biographical journeys into the German and American unconsciousness that serve to build up a screen against rather than to reveal and face some painful historical facts (such as the humiliating American defeat by an adversary that was by all accounts deemed inferior to the American military).

This is exactly the film's strategem: if it seems to lift a tip of the veal in the final live-action video images of desperately crying and screaming Palestinian women who have been eventually allowed to re-enter the camps only to find the mutilated corpses of their husbands and children scattered over the ruins of what were their homes only a few hours ago, it is only to conceal that this film is definitely not about the Palestinians and their suffering or about what really occurred in the camps under the very eyes of and probably with the consent of the Israeli Defense Forces. This film is all about the "mourning work" itself, which is also a way to avoid the confrontation with the events that caused the trauma in the first place.

The film states this quite openly. Folman's personal shrink Ori Sivan tells him about a psychological experiment in which subjects were presented with pictures from their own family album plus one concocted montage picture which showed them as kids in a kind of a theme park. No less than 80% of the respondents recognized the picture and told the experimenters that they remembered that happy day, whereas a significant number of the 20% who didn't recognize the picture later reported that they did recollect that particular outing. The psychologist and trauma expert explains the phenomenon of "dissociative personality" which means that in stressful or traumatizing moments a person may "dissociate" herself from his or her personality and experience the event as a neutral, impassible observer. As if these lessons in the capacity of the human mind to dissociate itself from traumatizing events and to fill gaps in memory creatively with images and stories appropriated from whatever available source are not enough, Folman's former fellow soldier and friend Carmi Cna'an, who now lives a wealthy life in the Netherlands, is only seen smoking joints, and booz, porn and rock music pop up constantly during the film. And when Folman asks him if it is allright for him to make drawings in the snow with his sun, Cna'an says that drawing is okay, as long as Folman doesn't film. Drawing, the basic technique on which animation is based, assumes the function of protecting a childish and pure ("snow white") innocence against the harsh and more earthly realities of history, that can be revealed in their raw appearances only by film, as indeed happens in the last part of the film.

The animation, then, is the screen set up in this film between the consciousness of filmmaker Folman - and the spectator - on the one hand and his experiences during the Lebanon war. It is also a screen between the memories of the interviewees and their emotions that become dissociated from their stories, since the interviewees are literally turned into cartoonesque figures whose blank faces and rather flat voices become screens offered to the spectators for projecting their feelings and emotions onto.

And of course, the animation film is a perfect medium for blending myth and reality, fiction and truth, figments of imagination and authentic memories. And as human memory is capable of adopting images and stories from others to fill gaps in memory or to reconstruct past episodes, WALTZ WITH BASHIR freely borrows its imagery from all kinds of cultural clichés (e.g., the pot smoking friend from Holland, porn as a German specialty) and war movies. During the scene in which the Israeli soldiers are chilling out on the Lebanon beach while waiting for orders to move to Beirut, one cannot help but expecting Robert Duvall to show up and bark: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," as he did in APOCALYPS NOW, just as the image of Folman's friend who raises in the midst of snipers' fire and starts to dance franticly while emptying his machine gun reminds one of similar images of frenzied GI's dancing and shooting on the rhytms and sounds of Jimi Hendrix in films like PLATOON (Oliver Stone, USA, 1986). Apart from being an animation, there is actually very little in this movie that had not already figured in one way or another in numerous other movies about the aftermath of WWII, the Vietnam War, or the Middle East conflict (e.g. Volker Schlöndorff's DIE FÄLSCHUNG (Fr/BRD, 1981)). Which makes one wonder what makes this film more a documentary than, say, APOCALYPS NOW or PLATOON?

WALTZ WITH BASHIR has more in common with the American Vietnam movies than the theme of (not) coming to terms with a traumatic past. The most remarkable correspondence is the almost complete absence of images of the enemy the American and Israeli armies are fighting against respectively. In the American Vietnam movies all one gets to see from the Vietcong warriors are shades and silhouettes (and in RAMBO - FIRST BLOOD (Ted Kotcheff, USA, 1982), the Vietcong were even replaced by Russian officers, the Soviets being a more worthy and fearsome opponent than the humble Vietnamese). In WALTZ WITH BASHIR, the only Lebanese and Palestians that get an appearance in the film, are (old) women and children, but hardly any able-bodied adult. In the American war movies, this absence constituted the cover that made it possible to depict the war and the American defeat as the result of a mythical internal, inner-American conflict between a bellicose and ruthless soul (say, John Wayne and the GREEN BERETS (John Wayne & Ray Kellog, USA, 1968)) and its compassionate and honorable counterpart that both live in America's "breast," as enacted in PLATOON in the conflict between the "mean" Sgt. Bob Barnes (Tom Berenger) and the "good" Sgt. Elias Grodin (William Dafoe). In these American Vietnam movies the war theater gets transformed into a stage for soul searching into the American mind at war with itself. In WALTZ WITH BASHIR, too, the absence of the historical adversary functions as a screen that must allow the filmmaker to do a bit of personal soul searching while avoiding the more painful issues of why and how and for whom he was fighting against whom.

The film literally keeps the burning question of what happened in the Palestinian refugee camps and what the responsibility of the Israeli army - and of Folman himself - was in the massacre safely at bay. The events are being told from the perspective of the Israeli military who had taken position just outside the camps from where they could not see what happened inside after the Phalangist militiamen had entered. Moreover, the images of the massacre's episode are almost all "taken" from a long distance during the night while the camps are lit only by alarm lights fired by the Israeli army (to make things easier for the Phalangists?).

At the very end of the animated part of the film, there is a sudden change of perspective, though. In one long shot the camera follows the Palestinian women who were allowed to re-enter the camp after the massacre, and tracking those women while they discover the bodies of their beloved ones, the camera moves on to end on a close-up of Folman, who no longer stands behind the camera or outside the camp as an impassible or powerless observer, but instead faces the camera, in full military gear, and in the middle of the camp, as if caught in the act. And as if to stress this touché par le réel, the film immediately switches to the live action images of the desperate women crying over the mutilated corpses of their husbands and children.

But is this really a resolution to the problem that launched Folman's quest? The end seems to suggest that one cannot for ever go on with soul searching and protracting the process of "mourning work" and that at some point one has to face the "real." However, the Folman who seems to realize that he is fully implicated in the horror of the massacre is also still fully part of the animation film, which raises questions about the status of this "memory": isn't it rather a kind of a guilt-ridden fantasmatic identification with the perpetrators of the massacre?

It is worth remembering that Forman's strongest feelings when he went to war were pain and anger with his girlfriend who had dumped him the week before, and that Cna'an went into the war to prove his still unconsumed virility: could it not be that the massacre of the Palestinian men and children is a sort of imaginary revenge on the women who had forsaken these two Israeli warriors? After all, didn't Folman's friend the shrink suggest that there was "another story" behind his anger about the Lebanese war? And do not Folman and Cna'an repeatedly emerge naked from the sea on the beach of Beirut to put on their Israeli military gear and go to war in the nightmare that started to haunt Folman after his encounter with his former fellow soldier Boaz.

According to Folman's psychiater friend Sivan the sea symbolizes "emotions," but these emotions are heavily eroticized by another dream image in the film, when Cna'an rests on the naked belly of a giant woman who carries him swimming through the sea, away from the war theater in Beirut, back into the safe "waters" of the motherly womb? After all, in Freudian psychoanalysis, the sea is a classical symbol of the womb. The images of the naked young men emerging from the sea and walking onto the beach where they put on their very virile uniforms and pick up their fallic rifles, represent a rather classical image of a kind of a rite of passage: innocent kids who are forced to leave the safe waters of childish innocence and now have to prepare themselves to face the harsh world of adults. Indeed, as earlier in the film the snow served as the screen that at the same time covers the frozen and unwelcoming soil and as the screen onto which to "draw", the animated images of the Lebanese war seem to serve as a "screen" memory that cover up another traumatic experience that in itself has not very much to do with the war. The film, that is, seems to "draw" what Freud called a "screen" memory.
Lost love, unconsumed virility, unfulfilled longing and love for the virgin/mother: the film is more about pueril and adolescent desires, anger and frustration than the war exploits of these young men. Or rather, the historical war theater is here transformed into a stage for the acting out of these frustrations. And it looks as if the Palestinian women have become the imaginary targets of Folman's rage.

And finally, do the TV-images of the results of the massacre actually "match" Folman's gaze, or are they just new resources to tap on in order to fill the gaps of his memory? And if these images somehow represent the "real," what sense are we to make of them? Or isn't that possible (yet), and is Folman about to begin a new round in his infinite search for consoling memories? What is missing, is precisely the story that links the animation movie with the live action images, the register of the "symbolic" that makes it possible to establish a bearable relationship between the "imaginary" (the animation part) and the "real" (the live action part), and that allows the adolescent to enter adulthood.

All this makes this film utterly unsatisfying. The animation turns out to be nothing but a decoy that distracts from the very classical nature of this quest for (personal) comfort and reassurance, long after the American Vietnam movies had proved that one doesn't need animation to create a mixture of fantasy and history, of myth and melancholy, of mourning and self pity, of self-delusion and denial. Because that is, in the end, what this is probably all about: the animation is just a new package to wrap a content that is already close to, if not passed, its expiration date.

Animation is a mode that is usually preserved for children's films or adolescents' computer games. In this film it is the symptom of a profound immaturity and incapacity on the part of the filmmaker to come to terms with the tragedy of the Lebanese war as an adult should: not by using personal frustrations such as the loss of a love as a screen to cover up less flattering parts of his biography, but by trying to understand his historical and political responsibility as a conscript and a citizen of a state that is at war, with its neighbors but probably most of all with itself and its own past.

Gomorra (2008): Dogmatic indifference

2008-12-19T02:54:00.000-08:00

GOMORRA, the italian crime movie by Matteo Garrone that won the Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival 2008, is one of those very rare films today that leave a lasting impression. But impressive as the film is, it is hard to pin down exactly why it made such an impression. Sure, there is a lot of violence and killing in the film, but that is, after all, part and parcel of the gangster movie. It is no coincidence that GOMORRA makes a revering nod to SCARFACE (Brian de Palma, USA, 1983), one of the classics of this genre. Neither is it the brutality, ruthlessness and uncompromising manner in which the heads of the criminal clans impose and maintain their rule, because that's what they've always done in gangster movies, from Francis Ford Coppola's GODFATHER (USA, 1972; 1974; 1990) series, through, again, Brian De Palma's THE UNTOUCHABLES (USA, 1987) to the TV-series THE SOPRANOS (USA, 1999-2007). Nor is it the tragic fate of the two cocky adolescents who stumble on a arsenal of hidden weapons that belong to one of the clans and have to pay dearly for their refusal to return them and their attempt to start a two-men gang of their own. They share this fate with lots of other deluded young wanna-be-gangsters as in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (Italy/USA, 1984) or Martin Scorcese's GOODFELLAS (USA, 1990). If one were to go by these elements of the film, the best one could probably say is that GOMORRA is a neo-neo-realist version of THE SOPRANOS, since its structure of multiple independent but interspersed story lines makes it more similar to a typical TV series than a feature film and THE SOPRANOS is a series that takes the familiar themes, motives, characters and plot elements from the gangster movie and 'remixes' them to make them fit for the format of the TV-sitcom (although the multiple story line format is not completely strange to cinema either, of course, as many Robert Altman movies make abundantly clear).

This, however, seems to be exactly the point where it hurts. A key image in the film shows how the haute couture tailor Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo), who runs a work shop owned by a mobster sees a Hollywood actress on the TV screen wearing one the gowns he was forced to produce against extremely low fees. It is the movies and the TV that reap the results of the labour and life delivered under severe conditions of exploitation and oppression that border on slavery, and turn them into glamorous objects of spectacle. That is, of course, what movies and TV-series do with the lives and the labour of those who are entrapped in a life ruled by criminal clans, competing gangsters, and trigger happy youngsters: they take those as the "raw material" for slick, thrilling, spectacular, engaging entertainment pieces that alwas reassuringly end with the prevailing of the 'good' or the 'just'. The problem, then, is how to make a movie about life in the 'Gomorra' into which the mob has turned many a popular quarter in Napels without making it glamorous, entertaining, thrilling, spectacular and certainly not reassuring.

One answer to the problem is to revert to the lessons of the postwar Italian neo-realists: shoot on location, use non-professional actors and actresses, and show the living conditions of the subjects of your film as they really are. In an age that is oversaturated with images in which almost every imaginable and unimaginable topic has found one form of representation or another - and thus inevitably become glamourized in one way or another in the process - this is no small feat. Italian neo-realism, for its part, has largely contributed to what Walter Benjamin in another context once called "the aesthetization of misery."
Feature films, documentaries, TV-reports and drama, moreover, not only turn every reality, however gruesome, into if not beautiful then at least digestible images, but they also tend to mold them into narrative patterns that provide the images with a minimally explanatory framework as well as with the expectation of some redemptive closure. One could even argue that because narrative promisses a minimal degree of comprehensibility and the reassurance that the represented events will come to some sort of end, images are licensed to turn their subjects into an object of spectacle and aesthetic pleasure, if not straightforward entertainment.

Narrative, moreover, usually also offers the lure of psychological identification with one the characters (usually the protagonist) and thus invites spectators to temporarily "identify" with and "live" the lives of the characters and become, at least for the duration of the screening of the movie, part of their world. Through identification with, say, Umberto D., the homeless pensioner of Vittorio De Sica's movie with the same title (Italy, 1952), the spectator "sees" and "experiences" the vagaries of the protagonist as he does, and becomes "aware" of what it means to live as a pensioner in the ruins of postwar Italy. And again, narrative makes these vagaries if not bearable then at least understandable, as it reassures the spectator that Umberto D's and by implication the spectator's ordeal will come to an end. And although in Italian neo-realism closure hardly ever brough a happy ending, it always promissed some sort of often spiritual or moral salvation and redemption. In movies, whether fictional or documentary, and TV programs, whether actualities or drama, narrative and imagery work in tandem to contain and frame, to clarify and beautify, to order and visualize, to explain and to aesthetize, and eventually to offer molds and patterns, roles and plots, problems and solutions for whatever "raw material" is fed into them. And in this respect, contemporary filmmakers face a situation that is totally different from their postwar neo-realist predecessors.

In these circumstances, adopting a neo-realist style is not quite enough to avoid the traps of glamorizing, romanticizing, and, maybe worst of all, relativizing the sordid conditions of life in Gomorra. After all, Italian neo-realism not only showed the misery of the Italian lower classes, but it also tainted its stories with at least a shred of hope for redemption. And this hope was founded on the explanations of the fate of the protagonists suggested by the narrative format: greed, egotism, indifference or ignorance on the part of the well-to-do as causes for the miserery of the less well-off. Nowadays, that is, the evocation of an Italian neoralist approach would also bring with it the evocation of the narrative schemes that were as defining for this movement as was its style.
Moreover, as happened with the western, the tropes of the gangster movie have now become so familiar, that they have not only become the stuff of parody (as exemplified by THE SOPRANOS, for instance), but also that the shere evocation of such a trope is bound to immediately mobilize these well-known narrative schemes and concomitant expectations in the mind of the spectator. In the day and age of 'visual culture,' there seems to be no escape from "Hollywood."

One possible way out of this conundrum is to adopt a "Dogmatic" approach to the subject. The Dogma95 movement, launched by Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, explicitly aimed at providing an alternative for the "superficial" and "highly cosmetized", that is, technology and special-effect driven "action movie" of today, which they also condemned for its "predictability" because of its justification of the plot by "the characters' inner lives". To stress its adversity to preformatted narrative schemes, rule 8 of Dogma95's "Vow of Chastity" formally states: "Genre movies are not acceptable." Although the makers of GOMORRA do not refer to the Dogma95 Manifesto and its accompanying "Vow of Chastity" at all, the Dogma95 rules seem to provide the perfect prescription for filmmakers who wish to avoid making a genre movie from the very stuff one of the most popular film genres is made of.

Garrone and his scriptwriter and crew seem to have made exactly the kind of film the writers of the Dogma95 Manifesto had in mind. Obviously, the film has no digital special effects, and some of the film's inevitable special effects, such as the explosion of a car, have been produced "on the spot", in front of the camera, exactly as they would have occurred in the absence of a film crew. The film is entirely shot on location, and, more importantly, the sets and characters seem to not have been embellished by extra lighting, props, costumes, or any other material not found on the sets. The camera, moreover, is constantly hand-held, and driven by an interest to capture the action in front of it than by aesthetic concerns about frame, angle, focus or light. This "point-and-shoot"-like aesthetics, that sometimes borders on the DIY film style of the YouTube uploader, not only gives the film an unmistakenly documentary outlook, but it also turns the spectator into a participatory observer (not unlike what happened in the film Ç'EST ARRIVÉ PRÈS DE CHEZ VOUS (Rémy Belvaux & André Bonzel, Belgium, 1992) in which the film crew follows a serial killer on his exploits), a kind of a field anthropologist and sometimes war reporter.

As an effect of this style, the spectator gets "immersed" into the world of this Gomorra, but as a field anthropologist, tourist, or, for that matter, the protagonists of Lars von Trier's movies, he or she lacks the keys to the codes of behavior, the histories and traditions, the hierarchies and ranking orders, the interests and motives, the ambitions and desires, that govern the actions of the characters that inhabit this place to which the spectator remains an alien outsider. This effect of being too close to see the whole is reinforced by the film's structure. It consists of five (and are there really only five?) story lines in which the vagaries of several different characters are being followed, of which it remains undecidable if, how, or to what extent they are related. And since the film shifts abruptly and seemingly randomly from one story line to another, without, for instance, jumping from one 'cliff hanger' to the continuation of another story line, it is pretty hard to keep track of the developments of each story line separately as well, especially since the continuation of a story line only rarely picks it up where it had left it, and each scene is swamped with characters, names and references to stories that had not been introduced or mentioned before.

This strategy is very succesful in drowning the classical tropes of the gangster movie, that inevitably cropp up in a film like this (the apprentice mobster who refuses to become like his boss; the youngster who sells his surrogate mother for a carreer in the mob; the young rebels who challenge the established order of the maffia; the work shop manager who starts moonlighting for the competition; the conciliere who wants to change sides and offers his services to a rivaling clan, etc.) in a plethora of information and indeterminacy and to make the familiar narrative schemes of the gangster movie inoperative to comprehend each situation at hand. It also prevents any identification with one of the characters, because it never becomes really clear what they want, with whom they are dealing, where they are in their particular stories, and why they do what they are doing. In short, the film refrains from "justifying the plot" through the "inner lives" of the characters. To paraphrase a trope from narrative theory, then, this "Dogmatic" strategy makes many a scene from this film descriptive, rather than narrative.
As a result, the film offers an almost documentary view of the squalid backside of the glamorous images spread by movies and tv, literally as when the camera follows Pasquale on his itineraries through the sweatshop he runs for the maffia and those of their Chinese competitors who hired him to teach their seamstresses the art of sewing, or when the camera follows Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), the accountant/consiliere of one the clan leaders on his way through the living quarters of the families of emprisoned mobsters to pay them their benefits, or when it accompanies the two wanna-be-gangsters when they go to an industrial wasteland to try out their newly acquired guns.

This strategy does to the content of the movie what its cinematic presentation does to the geography of this part of Naples: it turns it into a labyrinth where the spectator never knows where he or she is, and it creates the permanent threat of uncertainty of where the danger might come from and when it will show up. And again, this is not the Naples as it has been made famous by tons of pictures of its historical center distributed by the tourist industry and the movies and TV, but rather the other, less romantic and less illustrous side of Naples where no tourist ever comes.

However, the probably most disturbing effect of this Dogmatic approach is that for the inhabitants of this ecological niche this always and permanently present danger apparently is a fact of life, like rain in the summer is for the Brittish and the Dutch. Here, death, murders, abuses, shootings, and bombings are not an exceptional but the normal state of affairs, however dreadful this may be to the inhabitants of this Gomorra as it is to us, spectators, and they - not us - know they have to live with it. And it is exactly this enforced indifference on the part of the perpetrators as well as the victims of this permanent violence that emerges as the most disturbing feature of this film. There is no Grand Narrative here to be told, no explanation that would hold water, no appeal to consciousness or commiseration that would make sense, no redemption to be promised. In short, the violence in Gomorrah, that lacks narrative motivation, logical explanation, moral justification, and often any purposeful meaning, and is often executed in the most casual way, is the least glamorous, heroic, or romantic violence one could imagine. It is as glamorous as a drizzle in London or Amsterdam. It is this unglamorous and banal, everyday dimension of the violence in this maffia controlled place, that GOMORRA has succeeded in capturing.

Eventually, the spectator reemerges from this Gomorra only more alienated from the characters he or she thought s/he would become acquainted with. This Gomorra turned out to be place where the norms, morality, conventions, codes, and values that supposedly govern most of the civilized world do not apply. Ironically, the spectator winds up in the same position as the protagonists from the movies of Lars von Trier: one either has to adopt the grim outlook on life of the inhabitants of this strange place, or one will be doomed to perish. In all respects, GOMORRA is a Dogmatic treatment of indifference as a survival tool. If one would object that GOMORRA could not possibly be a Dogma movie because the "Vow of Chastity" forbids the occurrence of murders and weapons one should keep in mind that Dogma banned these items because they often serve to spice up "superficial action." In GOMORRA it is the other way around: murders and weapons are turned into unglamorous, indifferent and superficial elements, the nasty components of everyday life in Gomorra. And in this way, this film has succeeded in re-appropriating the topic of the maffia from "Hollywood."

MLGK Finished!

2008-11-29T08:48:00.000-08:00

On Friday November 28th we had a meeting with the project directors and the 'steering board' of the Mobile Learning Game Kit project The Mobile Learning Game Kit project - which we always referred to more shortly as the MLGK project - was an project of the Department of Media Studies of the Universiteit van Amsterdam (the university insists on always being mentioned by its dutch name), the Media Lab of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and the new media foundation Waag Society, subsidized by SURF, the institution that provides the universities and polytechnics in The Netherlands with ict facilities.

After a swift start in September 2005, and some rough periods in the project's first year in 2006 we managed to complete the project by september 2008 and got the final approval of our end results from the board of SURF this november - the official letter just arrived this week. So time for a wrap up, appropriately accompanied with coffee, a bottle of champaign and chocolate pie (a combination that only goes well at 10 a.m.) but even more importantly, time for looking ahead and guarantee a future for our product.

The product is a platform for developing educational location-based games for mobile devices equiped with GPS software. As the subtitle "Learning through your city" already suggests, the idea is that especially the urban environment is an information rich environment that nowadays students can learn to explore and research with mobile devices combined with GPS, Internet, and mapping, tracing and tracking software.
The MLGK serves many educational goals at the same time. It learns students to 'read' the urban environment, to dig up and critically examine information at and information about sites and locations. Modern mobile devices allow students to take pictures, make videos, or interview people on location, and send their results immediately to other participants of the game, or to a home base where another team member can check the information, ask for complementary data, or tag the site with the acquired new information immediately. With modern communication tools students can also consult digitized archives through the Internet, and once they have processed their research results and edited those into, say, a multimedia presentation, they can upload their work on the Internet or tag the sites they have investigated and offer their research results to others for further elaboration, completion or correction (pretty much like a Wikipedia, for example).
Students do not only learn to 'read' the urban environment, but they also learn to collaborate as a team, to plan their activities strategically, to divide tasks in such a way that each student's skills, talents and knowledge is put to best use, and to do research and publish research results with new media (instead of only producing the traditional research paper).

Probably because the goals we defined before the start of the project were a bit too ambitious for the limited time and budget we had at our disposal, we didn't really deliver what we initially promised. That is, there is no real ready-for-use prototype available that third parties can already acquire and use. Thanks to the great understanding, sympathy and flexibility of SURF we were allowed to extend the proof-of-concept period over the whole period of the project. This means that we had at least succeeded in convincing SURF that our project was worth their while, and that it had enough of a potential to be further developed by either ourselves or by other parties after we had proven its feasability. This is what we've done so far, and this is what we were celebrating last friday.

But there is still quite a lot of work to be done. We need to find a publisher who wants to release the MLGK on the market, and at the same time we need to find teachers and researchers who'd like to use the MLGK in their own teaching and would be prepared to take the trouble to develop content for the MLGK. Of course, we need to provide those teachers with instructions and guidance - not because the MLGK is not user-friendely but rather because developing an educational game is quite a hard job, as we learned ourselves during the last three years. Especially since there still are hardly any teachers who have learned to teach and publish with new media, let alone locative media.
One suggestion was that we would organize a contest, and another one is that we will approach teachers more directly in order to get started as soon as possible.
Another task that needs to be completed is the creation of a website with instructions, examples, and a user guide for teachers who are interested in using the MLGK. Since all these activities must be paid for somehow, we will also have to go and look for funding.

Although the project is officially finished now, it is by no means over.

Greenaway's J'Accuse

2008-11-25T06:53:00.000-08:00

Almost to provocatively demonstrate that his films defy any usual classification, Peter Greenaway's latest film, REMBRANDT'S J'ACCUSE premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival 2008 in Amsterdam. Although Greenaway himself called his film a 'documentary' in his talk during the Q&A that followed the film's screening, the least one can say is that it is most certainly not a documentary in the familiar sense. In this film Greenaway analyzes Rembrandt's probably most famous painting - according to Greenaway the fourth most famous painting in the world, after Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sixtinian Chapelle in Rome - The Nightwatch, completed in 1642, as a piece of evidence in a murder case. Greenaway sets out to demonstrate that Rembrandt staged and composed the Amsterdam militia group that is the subject of the painting in such a way that every visually literate contemporary of his could not but read it as an indictment of the two central figures in the painting, captain Frans Banning Cocq and lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch who Rembrandt accuses of the murder of Banning Cocq's predecessor captain Frans.

At first sight the film is a curious mixture of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and an Agatha Christie thriller in which in the final scene inspector Hercule Poirot lays out his evidence and reveals the culprit. In this case, however, the evidence does not consist of a forlorn cigarette butt, a lost hair or the trace of a tiny mistake, but of the visual cues Rembrandt provided in his painting of the 32 members of Amsterdamse Cloveniersdoelen militia who were involved in the conspiracy to murder their previous captain. Unlike Christie, Brown, and, for that matter, Eco who rekindled the genre of the historical detective with his novel The Name of The Rose, Greenaway makes his case not by telling the story of a detective who discovers the story of the crime, but by building a compelling argument that consists of exactly 31 steps. Since this number coincides with the number of men portrayed in the painting minus Rembrandt himself, one may rightfully ask oneself whether this number is motivated by the internal logic of Greenaway's argument or whether the build-up of his argument is made to fit the number of suspects on trial (and it should maybe also been seen as a secretive nod to Alfred Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS (UK, 1935) in which a man gets wrongly accused of the killing of a counterespionage agent). The very arbitrariness of the number of his arguments - a motif well known from his other films - rises the question how reliable Greenaway himself is in his self appointed roles of detective, prosecutor, and judge at the same time.

However, wondering whether Greenaway investigates the presumed murder case as a historian or as a fictional fabulator seems to be missing the point. If the film is not quite a documentary, it isn't a piece of fiction in the vein of THE DA VINCI CODE (Ron Howard, USA 2006) or THE NAME OF THE ROSE (Jean-Jacques Annaud, Fr/It/BRD 1986) either. REMBRANDT"S J'ACCUSE is rather a pedagogical introduction into the art of reading and interpretating visual arts, which include not only painting, but also the art of the moving image, cinema. Greenaway, who during most of the time addresses the spectators of his film in an insert or otherwise explains and comments in voice-over what is to be seen on the screen, assumes the role of Rembrandt who is one of the only two characters in the painting who directly look at the spectator. As Rembrandt in The Nightwatch, Greenaway looks the spectator straight into the face, and since Greenaway repeatedly invokes Rembrandt's predilection for irony, pastiche, and mockery one must be prepared to take Greenaway's reconstruction of the murderous conspiracy as much as a joke as Rembrandt intended the whole staging of The Nightwatch to be (although, according to Greenaway, Rembrandt payed dearly for it). One may assume that Greenaway sees his film on Rembrandt's masterpiece as much as a pastiche and a radical innovation at the same time of the now popular genres of the historical thriller and contemporary forensic police investigation series such as the American CSI NY and English TV series like WAKING THE DEAD - the latter specialized in 'cool cases' as is the case at hand in Greenaway's film - as Rembrandt's The Nightwatch was a pastiche and radical innovation of the military portrait.

Greenaway accepts and encourages his film spectators to accept the outreaching (left) hand of captain Banning Cocq as an invitation to enter the scene of this mid-seventeenth century company. However, Greenaway does not offer his spectators an immersive experience in a cinematographically reconstituted Amsterdam of its Golden Age. REMBRANDT'S J'ACCUSE is more akin to what since Al Gore's AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (USA 2006) has become known as 'PowerPoint Cinema' than to 3D VR simulations. Greenaway favours the flatness of the painting canvas and the cinema screen over the depth of the perspectival illusionism, and - as Rembrandt who stressed the shallowness of the stage on which Banning Cocq's company was arranged and the theatricality of the whole set-up by placing the group in front of a very non-Dutch arch and dressing his characters in quite exotic costumes - Greenaway emphasizes the stagedness of the few live action scenes by placing his actors in almost bare settings, having them address the camera, (and having them speak English, which is a particularly alienating experience for Dutch viewers like myself), and staging his scenes flatly in front of the camera rather than staging 'in depth' on the axis perpendicular to the camera's lens. The only exterior scene in the film is shot in a typically non-Dutch - rather English - landscape as well, as if Greenaway sought to avoid any suggestion of 'realism', just like many a seventeenth century Dutch painter incorporated rocks, mountains and vegetation in their landscapes that were borrowed from Italian landscape paintings.

Like Rembrandt, then, Greenaway places himself 'behind the scene' not to 'reveal' the artificiality of the artefact - a rather futile endeavour in this extremely media aware day and age - but to make sure that the spectator 'gets the message' that is encoded in the painting. However, whereas Rembrandt anxiously looks at the spectator to see if he or she takes the trouble to decypher the painting, Greenaway fully exploits the soundtrack Rembrandt didn't have at his disposal in order to instruct his audience. The film is a Greenway's j'accuse rather than a Rembrandt's, and if Greenaway seems to act as an investigator, prosecutor and judge on behalf of Rembrandt, he does so not so much in order to 'reopen' the cool case of the alleged conspiracy and murder by Banning Cocq and his company but rather to indict the 'visual illiteracy' that impedes contemporary audiences to see the painting otherwise than as a more or less faithful visual representation of a scene staged in front of the painter's eyes and to 'read' the painting instead as a text full with symbolisms, allegories, references and visual puns. As a kind of a belated McLuhanite, Greenaway bemoans the culture of the printed word and the concomitant predominance of abstract rationality and linear logic that replaced the image as the prevailing conveyor of spiritual or political messages. Cinema and television, rather than restoring visual literacy, reinforced the prevailing incapacity to 'read images' by adhering to visual realism and narrative logic, the rare exceptions being filmmakers and theoreticians like Eisenstein and Godard who stressed 'montage' and the symbolic potential of film rather than its capacity to photographically reproduce reality.

Greenaway, then, turns the cinema screen into a kind of a classroom blackboard on which he proceeds to dissect the 'text' of Rembrandt's painting. In this lesson in visual literacy, Greenaway does not follow a narrative pattern, but instead he breaks up the seemingly organic whole of the painting's visual representation into the aforementioned 31 fragments that he in a way organizes into 31 PowerPoint sheets on which these fragments are analyzed and discussed separately and in no compelling order - the separate parts of the painting could easily have been dealt with in any other sequence. Greenaway proceeds not unlike a puzzler who breaks up the seeming wholeness of the drawings that make up a rebus - a rebus is, after all, nothing but a 'text' encoded in pictures, or the psychoanalyst who breaks up the narration of a dream into separate, and isolated pieces and translates these literally into words. The for contemporary spectators perhaps surprising, but nevertheless very rewarding result is the emergence of a story that is much more fascinating, mysterious, suggestive and compelling than any attempt to reduce the painting's scene to a likeliness with a pre-existing scene.

Greenaway achieves this result by dissecting the painting into a relatively large amount of smaller units - the 31 fragments that he divides over his 31 'PowerPoint sheets' on the one hand, and by reconnecting these smaller units to a larger and almost indefinitely extendable context of seventeenth century commerce, politics, art history, weaponry, architecture, diplomacy and social history (e.g., the Amsterdam orphanages in the seventeenth century). That is, Greenaway turns Rembrandt's The Night Watch into a kind of a hypertext that consists of smaller 'lexia' as well as connections to other files and documents. In that sense, REMBRANDT'S J'ACCUSE is more 'new media' than 'film', or rather, in as far as Greenaway uses cinematographic means in order to create this hypertextual document, he 'accuses' cinema of not having explored and exploited its new media potential that was acknowledged by only very few filmmakers such as Eisenstein, Vertov, and Godard.

The hypertextual nature of this film provides an answer to the question whether the allegation of conspiracy and murder by Banner Cocq and Willem Ruytenburgh rests on any historical evidence. The sheer correspondence of the number of 'lexia' and the number of members of the depicted company already indicates the arbitrariness of this particular dissection of the text. Moreover, the basic idea of hypertext literature is - or rather, was since text based hypertext literature has been largely replaced by graphical computer games - that the readers/users create their own trajectories and discover or construe their own stories, that do not necessarily resemble any of the other readers' stories. Again, Greenaway takes Rembrandt's stance, who, as Greenaway explains, literally stands 'behind his story' in the painting without therefore guaranteeing its truth - Greenaway repeatedly stresses the poetic and painterly licence artists take. Greenaway similarly stands behind his 'dissection' and his 'itinerary' through the hypertext into which he has transformed Rembrandt's painting. But however authoritarian his presentation of the alleged crime may be, he exercises his authority to transmit a skill rather than a knowledge, a capacity rather than a truth: his 'j'accuse' is aimed at the murder of visual literacy by the culture of the printed word and cinema's complicity in this cultural crime.

If he concludes the film concludes an appeal to 'reopen the case', then this is an invitation to the spectators to apply themselves the skills Greenaway attempted to demonstrate and transmit again to Rembrandt's The Night Watch and to go and search for other clues and connections and maybe to come up with other surprising stories, and if not in Rembrandt's painting, then maybe in other visual artefacts.

The question is, however, how convincing Greenaway's case really is? For all its ingenuity, the film rests on the very classic narrative structure of the detective story which starts with the discovery of a dead body and the detective's suspicion that the deceased did not die of a natural cause. The reason Greenaway gives for his suspicion that Banning Cocq's predecessor was murdered is motivated by the narrative logic that Umberto Eco and others identified in Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes as 'abduction' ("there must be a causal connection between the two events of the death of one person and the promotion of another person as his replacement"), and the rather arbitrary - "non-linear" - sequence in which Greenaway then presents his 31 arguments follows the convention of the detective story in which the detective discovers the evidence of the crime in an order that does not correspond with the sequence of events that led up to the crime. This non-correspondence of 'story' and 'plot' of the crime is a major source of suspense. Moreover, it takes Greenaway about the full length of the film to get Rembrandt's visual cues across - verbally: Greenaway speaks for about a hundred minutes almost uninterruptedly. His 'j'accuse', the indictment of contemporary word dominated culture as well as his condamnation of the narrative fiction film seems to follow a self-refuting procedure, or is this part of a typical Greenaway play of irony? Or is it just another indication that this 'J'Accuse' should not be taken too seriously? And isn't Greenaway exactly doing what was according to the classic writer and philopher Horatius, rediscovered and much appreciated in the Renaissance, the greatest task of the poet and artist, prodesse et delectare, 'to instruct and to amuse'?

Playing The Waves

2007-07-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

And now for a bit of self-promotion: here is my latest book and it is about the director who is staring you in the face.

The approach taken in this book is a game theoretical and game studies perspective. In the book I argue that Dogme95 is first and for all a game, and that the Dogme95 Manifesto should be read as an attempt to redefine the practice of filmmaking as a playful, game in which the filmmaker sets himself a number or largely arbitrary rules.

Von Trier has done so in all of his productions. Moreover, the narrational patterns and the remarkably consistent, if not repetitious structures of his stories can be very well explained by an (in)famous case from game theory.

Moreover, the book draws attention to the particular use of a much overlooked device in Von Trier's films: the editing. Through a particular kind of discontinous editing, Von Trier breaks away from classical and modern notions of 'representations' and brings cinema into the realm of simulation and the virtual. His style might be more aptly called 'virtual realism'.

Order at Amsterdam University Press or at Amazon

The PR Princess

2007-07-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

Immediately after her death Tony Blair called Diana 'the people's princess'. As tremendously sholcked the Brittish people seemed to be by her unexpected, but spectacular lethal accident, allegedly caused by paparazi trying to hunt her down, just as soon the memory of Diana seemed to have waned. Already in the first summer after her death the expected droves of visitors - needed to pay for the construction and maintenance of the tomb massively stayed away. The Diana industry never really took off.
Luckily Diana's children have a genetically inherited sense of publicity as well. Well aware that today almost any cause is a good excuse for a globally broadcasted pop concert, they organized an huge concert in Wembley Stadium, for the benefit of charity, of course, but doubtedlessly also aimed at rekindling the love and memory of Diana and the reanimation of the almost defunct Diana industry. So, on your way to one of the many festivals, don't forget to visit Diana's grave, and please buy some mugs, t-shirts, posters, photographs and other parafernalia.

2007-06-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

Old Media are Dead: Long Live the Old Media!

2006-12-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

Intrigued by the Time Magazine election of 'You!' as the personality of the year, I took a little holidays excursion to YouTube hoping that I would catch a glimpse of this so highly praized personality . On my admittedly rather small explorative journey into YouTube I came across video postings of a fellow country man, who calls himself 'JP'. He had only recently started his vlogs, and I caught his second one. Well, if this young man is only remotely representative of the 2006 personality, this personality had rather be called 'non personality'.
Though visually very present in close up, he remains a completely blank person. The most revealing information he discloses about himself is that he lives in the Netherlands - of which he shows a map - and that he is willing to answer questions about his country. He then plays three fragments of Christmas songs (by Bing Crosby, Wham!, and Elvis respectively) and then confesses that he's not sure whether to decorate his house for Christmas and asks his viewer for suggestions. He ends his video with a little tour through his scarsely furnitured appartment and then says goodbye.
Since JP is representative for what is called blogging, vblogging and socializing on the Internet nowadays, I will not reveal his name or URL (you can probably find his vlogs pretty easily yourself or you will recognize the sort of video I'm talking about). For me JP is the paradigm example of what the so called digital revolution has brought about. The main result of that revolution is a desire to manifest oneself on the Internet, to be seen and heard, and to get in touch with other likeminded 'internauts'. However, equiped with a 'real camera' (JP makes a point of not having recorded his film with a webcam), a YouTube account, a computer and an Internet connection, JP finds out that he really has got nothing to say. The musical instruments he proudly shows - a guitar and an electronic keyboard - are probably just like his computer objects that symbolize his desire as much as his uncapacity of personal expression. The central piece of his room is a couch, in which JP, as he says, usually watches television.

That's the whole point of this story, I'm affraid. In spite of all the promisses that new media would release the hidden or repressed creative potential of ordinary people, this 'democratization' only taught those common people and us, new media gurus, that they really had not that much to say. Many videos on YouTube are either straightforward forms of viral advertising, spoofs or pastiches, emulations of mainstream media, or re-enactments of longstanding quarrels such as the one between the Mac and PC fanbases, or digital editions of long time honored home movies such as the little girl singing Christmas carols. Just as JP tries to move around his couch and tv set, sites as YouTube, MySpace, or Hyves (in the Netherlands) cannot really get around the fact that these sites are alle a big cry for professionally made entertainment to fill the daily empty lives of the common people who are at loss in the vast ocean of high tech interactive communication systems where they really don't know what to say, what to show, and what to communicate. Sites as YouTube do not pose a real threat to the old broadcast media, but are rather a reason for relief because they beg for more tv.

You!

2006-12-18T01:13:00.000-08:00

Time Magazine has elected the Internet user as the 'personality of the year 2006'. There's a bit of irony here, because 'the Internet user' doesn't exist as a personality, and the websites that are heralded as examples of the 'Internet democracy' should rather be defined as 'distributed personalities', shared and created by a multitude of users who do not necessarily share psychological traits, ideological convictions, political goals, personal ambitions or what have you. In that sense, however, this election is not without importance, since it points towards a major paradigmatic shift in our notion of personality and individuality. The 'I' was the individual subject of the liberal and neo-liberal eara, but 'You', always already defined relative to someone else, will be the 'dividual' subject of a truely 'postmodern' epoch of the 'network society'. Even mainstream media can no longer deny this.

The other irony is, of course, that Time detects the democratic potential of Web 2.0, 'social software', p2p networks, etc, at the very moment that these have also been discovered by corporations like Google and other media giants. As is well known Google furthers democratization of information and knowledge only as far as it furthers its own commercial interests. This company wants to make all information accessible except its own codes and algorithms, and is prepared to keep loads of 'free information' stored away behind a 'Chinese Wall' for millions, if not billions of people. Youtube is expected to face law suits on copyright issues, and is, given the huge amount of money Google was prepared to invest in it, bound to be commercialized in no time. In that sense history seems to repeat itself: after the 'activist' optimism about the future of cyberspace, virtual communities, democratization and freedom of information in the eighties and nineties, the dot.com crash soon elucidated the bounaries of these utopian prospects. It is more than ironic that these old illusions are now being re-animated by the 'old media'.

Googled back again..

2006-12-06T07:56:00.000-08:00

We're finally back again. But to my great surprise I was forced to take a Google account before I could access my own blog again. Is the blogosphere being digested by Google? After having bought YouTube, now they appear to own Blogger as well. A remarkable dialectic between the democratization of the possibilities of publishing your thoughts, ideas and hunches on the one hand, and the centralization of ownership of those very means at the same time on the other.

What about copyrights? Who will at the end of the day own my musings? We'll see....

How low can you go?

2005-11-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

Had to spend so much time to get logged in that I almost forgot the topic I wanted to post a blog about. I remember.... Since a couple of weeks there is a tv commercial featuring Jules Deelder, the self proclaimed 'Night mayor' of the city of Rotterdam. Deelder is well known as a popular poet, a very regular in the Rotterdam club scene, always dressed in black and always sporting a pair of black sun glasses, and probably dying his hair black and wearing it in a fiftieslike fashion. He's also a fanatic supporter of the Rotterdam soccer club Sparta, playing in the bottom part of the Dutch premier league. Deelder himself used to be in the same league as the late rock musician and painter Herman Brood, though he didn't really share his preferences for drugs abuse and booze. The only article Brood ever used to promote was himself, and - in his last spectacular act - the Amsterdam Hilton hotel, from which he made his suicidal jump.
In this tv commercial Jules Deelder, formerly known for his anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist attitudes, now promotes a detergent called 'Robijn', which has a little toy bear as its brand image. One can imagine how the 'creative designers' of this commercial conceived of the reputedly rough and rough Deelder as the antithesis of the sweet and dearing toy pet. But what about Deelder himself? Is he in such a desparate need for money? Has he taken a sniff of coke too many? How low can you go? Jules Robijn Deelder, the national pet poet, the darling of all house wives, the substitute hugging pet. It is like seeing Johny Rotten advertising health food, or Alice Cooper promoting cat food. Jules Deelder, figure head of a lost generation, indeed.

jan's blog

2005-10-25T02:26:00.000-07:00

Retorica

De moeder – of misschien wel de grootmoeder – aller politieke dooddoeners is wel de frase: ‘We moeten eerst met zijn allen beslissen wat we aan willen met ......’, waarna het onderwerp of thema van keuze kan worden ingevuld. Deze frase heeft een eerdere dooddoener vervangen die elk kritisch geluid smoorde met de wijsheid 'Dat hebben we nu eenmaal met zijn allen met elkaar zo afgesproken'. Alsof parlementaire democratie een vorm van democratisch centralisme is, en alsof parlementaire besluitvorming op basis van 'volksraadpleging' plaatsvindt. Van ophokplicht voor hobbykippen tot de invoering van een nieuw zorgverzekeringsstelsel is mij nooit om mijn mening gevraagd, laat staan dat ik hierover iets heb afgesproken. Wet- en regelgeving vindt namens mij en voor mij, maar ook zonder mij plaats. De discussies over de invoering van een referendum laten ten overvloede zien dat volksraadpleging juist het laatste is was de gevestigde politieke orde wil. Het motto werd vooral gebruikt om de burger te verplichten zich aan afspraken te houden die hij of zij nu juist zelf NIET had gemaakt.
De nieuwe dooddoener wordt door politici in drie gevallen gebruikt. Als zij bepaalde ontwikkelingen willen vertragen zoals bijvoorbeeld Tony Blair: ‘Eerst moeten we in Europa consensus zien te bereiken over wat we met de EU aan willen’. In de tweede plaats wanneer politici zelf niet weten wat ze met een onderwerp aan moeten, en dan gaan oproepen tot een Brede Maatschappelijke Discussie, zoals de Nederlandse regering deed onmiddellijk na de verwerping van de Europese Grondwet door een overtuigende meerderheid van de kiezers. Tenslotte halen politici de dooddoener van stal als ze niet willen toegeven dat beleid op een mislukking is uitgelopen. De grenzen tussen deze categoriën zijn natuurlijk uiterst dun: de Nederlandse regering probeert met de overigens alweer afgeblazen BMD over Europa niet alleen de eigen radeloosheid, maar ook het démasqué van haar eigen Europabeleid toe te dekken. Blair beseft maar al te goed dat de door hem bepleite modernisering van Europa binnenlands op de tradtionele Britse Euroscepsis en in Europees verband op de onwil of het onvermogen tot modernisering van met name Frankrijk en Duitsland zal stranden.
Het PvdA-kamerlid Brugman gaf een staaltje van het gebruik van de dooddoener ten beste in het programma Buitenhof van zondag 23 oktober. Zij beantwoordde de forse kritiek op het studiehuis waarover een vernietigend rapport was verschenen, met de oproep om het eerst maar eens met elkaar eens te worden over wat in de hedendaagse kennismaatschappij van onderwijs verwacht mag worden.
Men mag toch rederlijkerwijs verwachten dat een dergelijke discussie vóór de invoering van het studiehuis gevoerd zou zijn. Dat werd immers een jaar of zeven geleden geïntroduceerd toen Manuel Castells driedelige verhandeling over economie, politiek en cultuur in 'the information age' hoog op de internationale bestsellerslijsten scoorde en in Nederland Paul Frissen's boek De Virtuele Staat het bureau van menig (onderwijs) bestuurder opsierde. Afgaande op de oproep van Brugman is één en ander indertijd volledig aan de politiek in het algemeen en de voor onderwijs verantwoordelijke bewindspersonen in het bijzonder voorbij gegaan. Maar afgezien van de vraag hoe de klok stilgezet of zelfs teruggedraaid zou kunnen worden om deze discussie alsnog te voeren, staat één uitkomst daarvan wel vast. Tot welke eisen aan het onderwijs in de 'kenniseconomie' dit debat ook zou leiden, het studiehuis zal daaraan niet voldoen. Zou dat wel het geval zijn was de hele discussie immers overbodig.
Impliciet gaf het Kamerlid dus het failliet van het studiehuis toe. Wellicht durfde ze dat niet hardop te zeggen uit piëteit voor haar twee dagen eerder overleden collega-Tweede-Kamerlid en partijgenote Adelmund die als staatssecretaris verantwoordelijk was voor de invoering van het studiehuis. De naam van de aanstichtster van al dit onheil viel niet één maal, zoals ook zeker niet werd gememoreerd dat haar grootste verdienste als staatssecretaris van OC&W bestond uit de uitbreiding van het politieke jargon met de term 'zwabberen'.
Met het aanhalen van de grootmoeder aller dooddoeners maskeerde Brugman ook haar eigen gebrek aan visie op wat van onderwijs in de 'kenniseconomie' verwacht mag worden. Door te doen alsof de kennseconomie een fenomeen van vandaag of gisteren is, demonstreerde ze het schrijnend gebrek aan kennis en intellect dat sinds het afleggen van de ideologische veren door Kok in de PvdA en sinds de revolutie van 'Professor Pim' in de Nederlandse politiek in het algemeen de norm is geworden. Onderzoek en onderwijs zijn aan dit kamerlid in elk geval niet besteed geweest. Eén ding is wel duidelijk: onderwijs is te belangrijk om aan politici over te laten. Daar kunnen we het met zijn allen wel over eens zijn.

They took a leak...

2005-06-03T05:12:00.000-07:00

The Netherlands have confirmed their autonomy: 62% out of 62% of the electorat who showed up at the poll stations last wednesday said 'neen' to the European Constitution (which is actually a treaty and not what is normally understood by 'constitution'). The Dutch are not alone in this: the French also refuted the constitutional treaty by 55%, and chances are that the Danish and maybe the British - if they get a chance - will also reject the proposal of a new European administrative order.

Personally I think that renewal of the European administration is an inevitabel necessity, if Europe is to compete with China and other Asian sleeping giants in the not too far away future. It is also quite naive to expect the US to protect Europe militarily and economically: that country has a huge deficit, its military power is waning - it can't even control Irak, and soon will be facing many problems inside its own boundaries. Moreover, remaining militarily dependent on the US almost unavoidably means getting involuntarily involved in its imperial adventurisme. In order to cope with these rapidly changing conditions, Europe shouuld invigorate itself and brace itself with an efficient and powerful administration.

Having said that, it is obvious that not only Europe needs to be refashioned, but that the Dutch political system needs to be thoroughly renovated as well. If 62% of the votership resoundingly rejects a proposal that has been supported by 80% of the members of parliament, including the major oppositional parties of Labour and the Green, and that has been actively campaigned for by government ministers and party leaders from allmost all established factions, then there is a problem. The problem is only aggravated by the insistent and persistent denial of the problem by those very same politicians: 'the vote was about Europe, and not about us' was about the most heard sound byte. Political leaders who had passionately campaigned for the Constitutional Treaty suddenly decried the speed, the scope, the costs and the notorious intransparency of 'Europe'. The prime minister, who had signed the Treaty and sent it to Parliament for ratification, promissed 'the day after the night before' that he would firmly represent the 'people's view' on Europe in Brussels. Nobody felt the urge to ask the prime minister to step down after this rather humiliating defeat. The parlementarian debate about the referendum can best be summarized by a popular Dutch phrase: 'ze deden een plas, en alles bleef zoals het was' ('they took a leak, and all remained the same..').

Major questions remain unanswered, and major problems remain unsolved. First of all, nobody seems to take any responsibility for Dutch European policy. All politicians agree that the vote was not 'about them'. But who else but them championed the European integration? One of the few issues on which there is a broad consensus among Dutch political parties of (almost) all denominations, 'Europe', was confronted with an even broader opposite consensus among the Dutch population. Instead of adopting the 'voice of the people', as practically all politicians who defended the European Constitution only two days ago, they should now go back to their voters and say: 'We've done our best, and we thought we did what was best for the future of the country, but you think otherwise. Let us know what it is that you want, and choose a new parliament'. That is, the most logical conclusion of thie unprecedented defeat would be new elections.

The most collateral damage of this referendum has been done to the credibility and legitimacy of the established political parties and their leaders, including Labour and GroenLinks. They, as well as the parties in power, should go back to the voters and ask for a new mandate. In new elections they could also advance their views on the future of Europe, so the voters would not only have the choice of either accepting a proposed constitution of rejecting it wholesalesly. On the basis of the outcome of new elections, parliament could even reconsider the ratification of the Treaty.
It is foreseeable that the political establishement, having choosen not to act upon the voters' massacre, will have to face doubts and questions from the far-right as well as from the far-left opposition about who they represent and with what authority they speak. It comes as no surprise that neither left or right wing oppositional party demanded new elections (apart from Wilders), because they know very well that in the coming two years the authority and legitimacy of the established parties will simply erode. In the near and foreseeable future, some major issue will occur in which the Titanic of the political establishement will meet its iceberg. The tide of populisme can only be contained if political leaders now have the courage to confront their voters.

Apart from the future of Europe, the future of the Dutch political system should also be an issue in upcoming elections. The referendum has made it clear once more, that the so-called 'representative democracy' no longer functions. The majority of the population no longer feels represented by the political parties, and the dismay and discontent of the voters is easily exploited by the negative rhetorics of radical parties at either side of the political spectrum. The leaders of the political establishment know nothing better to do than to embrace the newly discovered tool of the referendum: for every controversial of sensitive issue you call a plesbisciterian vote, and by respecting its outcome nobody will be able to accuse you of elitisme, arrogance, and paternalisme. If the outcome goes against your policy, you're even better off: you can show that you take the vox populi seriously! Responsability, leadership and long term policies are thus all thrown overboard into the vast but unpredictable sea of popular sentiments, grunges and fears, and in the end nobody will be accountable for the wreckage when the Titanic eventually hits its iceberg.

And how is our prime minister together with his minister of foreign affairs supposed to represent the Netherlands in European platforms in a remotely credible way? How can he be taken seriously by other heads of state and government if he proves to so flexible as to first defend the treaty (not eschewing references to WWII and Auschwitz) only to return at the conference tables to reject it as vehemently in the name of his people? Other leaders will certainly ask themselves on behalf of whom PJB is talking, and whether he will still say the same things tomorrow or next week? And how is he going to represent which part of the Dutch nation: can he still rely on a discredited majority in parliament, or should he consult with the winners of the referendum, the Socialist Party, the fundamentalist Christians, and - even worse - the self proclaimed populist hero Geert Wilders? Just to save our PM these embarrassing questions the leaders of the political establishment should have the decency to call for new elections.

canons or firecrackers?

2005-02-12T07:53:00.000-08:00

A not so interesting debate is raging in the Netherlands. It evolves around the question 'who are we?', 'what is our position in the world?', and it seems to be inspired by the fear that most citizens of this small country don't really care about where they came from, who they are, what language they speak, and what customs, traditions, and history keeps them together. Plea's are made to reintroduce canons of (national, dutch) literature and national history into the curricula of primary and high schools, to oblige students of universities and polytechnics to take courses in history, art, literature and culture at large in order to create a sense of communality, a common source, a common frame of reference, etc.

Most often educational reformers from the sixties and seventies are blamed for the loss of historical, cultural, linguistic and national consciousness that the champions of canons observe and mourne. Question is, however, whether this entirely true.

Most remarkable feature of these debates is that big words like 'tradition', 'culture', 'national identity', 'national values' and their likes cast their shadows over the debates like the threatening clouds on a stormy day in fall, but that the shapes and substance of these clouds are never ever defined. One of the culture critics - who tend to be culture pessimists in the tradition of Spengler and Ortegy y Gasset - ridiculed some representatives of the contemporary cultural elite who were not capable of answering the challenge to come up with features that define dutch national identity with other things than some trivialities like tulips, cheese and herring. The critic who had challenged these public figures, Michael Zeeman, countered their ignorance - or worse, indifference - with an example of how an Itialian waiter in Rome responded to a similar challenge: when Zeeman deliberately misquoted Dante's Inferno when he ordered his meal, he stood corrected by this waiter. Who is here to ridicule? The 'culture critic' who goes about like a quizz master to 'test' the 'national consciousness' of his victims, the waiter whose knowledge of his country's literary national treasures had not brought him a better position in life than being the waiter of this quizzmaster-on-a-mission? Or maybe it shows how ineffective and inefficient the Italian educational system is, where pupils get imbued the 'great texts' of the itialian canon, but receive no training in skills that make them fit for life in the postindustrial society?

Remarkably absent from the contributions of the culture pessimists are the 'new' dutch citizens, whose knowledge of the heroic deeds of our ancestors, the great literary works of the dutch past is less than familiar: the so called 'allochthones'.It is of course the rapid increase of the number of citizens who do not necessarily share knowledge and awareness of Holland's history, culture and traditions that makes these critics aware that a national cultural and historical consciousness can no longer be taken for granted (if it ever could). But instead of honestly admitting this and revealing the cause of their fears, they indulge in lamentations about the educational system, the indifference of the government and politicians in general, and, of course, the 'media'.

Another remarkable thing is that 'culture' or 'values' of 'national identity' always are defined in a sort of 19th century-like way. The critics are not looking forward, and not even looking around them, but they are looking backwards and try to reconstruct a sort of national identity out of a canon, and this process shows the whole circular way of reasoning: we need to go back to the canon in order to rediscover our 'national identity' and common cultural values, but on the other hand the canon can only be reconstructed if we know what national identity and which cultural values it expresses. Unfortunately, the cultural critics refuse to share their knowledge of these values, although they claim to know them.

Remarkably enough they never refer to contemporary culture, modern 'new media', the effects of globalisation, the demise of the nation state, the internationalization of (mass) culture, etc. It is quite revealing that Scheffer in his article in today's NRC only mentions new media once in a negative fashion; they 'divide' and 'individualize', and therefore they can not very well function as vehicles of a common culture. The same goes for other critics like Zeeman and Maarten Doorman (who shares his family name with one of the last dutch maritim heros, Karel Doorman).

However, as Bas Heijne pointed out in today's NRC (02-12-05), this is the kind of nostalgia that can only produce some kind of surrogate version of a past. The 'national awareness' of a 'dutch identity' can only be a surrogate because the 'real thing' never existed in the first place. Canons or firecrackers?

Aftermath or post mortem

2004-12-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

Dust seems to settle. Time for reflexion, looking back, commenting upon and analyzing the flood of images that almost drowned us over the last six weeks. Unfortunately, reflexion reaches no further than commmon sense talk on tv. A special edition of the once slightly notorious tv program 'The Blue Light', hosted by Anil Randas, was broadcasted in which Randas looked back on a selection of images of the assassination of Theo van Gogh and its political and social impact.

However, a critical analysis of the images themselves and the discourses in which they functioned was a bit too much asked to the small assembly of intellectuals who sat around a table with each having a tv monitor in front of him or her (yes, there was one woman, a maroccan-dutch journalist of the Volkskrant). The analyses were mostly mere descriptions of what everybody could see with their own eyes, and the commments prolonged the discussions these images had provoked earlier instead of taking some distance and trying to reflect upon their cultural and political significance as images.

The by now notorious image of an elderly imam refusing to shake hands with minister of Integration Verdonk, because his religion forbade him to shake hands with a women, made the members of the panel align with positions others had taken earlier ('did she act right?'). The only critical question was whether this scene had been staged, since the minister must have been aware of the attention the media would pay to her visit to this conference, but any doubt about the integrity of the minister was shiftly dismissed. But 'intentionality' is no longer an issue in a world of 'real virtualilty' (Castells) in which images create rather than reflect a reality and tend to live a life of their own which is no longer governed by any intention of whoever.

The same goes for the discussion of the way talk show host Andries Knevel goaded a dutch young man who was converted into a muslim into admitting that he wouldn't mind if MP Wilders would die of cancer. The 'historian' Boekhorst, who tended to reduce every event to the realm of his personal experiences ('when I was a student I used to live above a Maroccan family and the wife was a prisoner of her husband...'), and so certainly succeeded in keeping the discussion at the level of 'you're perfectly right, neighbour', called this scene 'news' because it conveyed something to him he didn't yet know. First of all, it is quite incredible that an academic historian, who doesn't miss an opportunity to have himself exposed as an 'expert' on islam, Irak, and the threat Islam poses to the west, would never have heard of muslims who don't feel much sympathy for politicians, writers and artists who want to curb what they perceive as the 'islamization' of the West. Second, and more importantly, as a historian he should first of all critically question the documents and evidence he is being confronted with. Who is this young convert, and why is he in this program? What makes him so 'news worthy'? Who does he represent? Has he anything whatsoever to do with the murder of Theo van Gogh, is he connected to the 'Hofstadter group', etc. The mere fact that a document or a tv program tells you something you didn't know doesn't turn that information into a 'news worthy' fact: in fact, it doesn't necessarily turn that fact into a fact at all, as any serious historian knows and Boekhorst should know too.

Well, it turned out that this self appointed imam had been interviewed by a regional newspaper, that was interested in the reasons why a young dutch man, who was brought up as a catholic, would convert to islam. The journalist, however, soon intuited that this young man was psychologically disturbed, and reported that in his article. Knevel should have known this: this act of journalism was remarkably similar to practices of the American CBS channel, which were revealed in a documentary broadcasted by VPRO tv only a couple of months ago. Iconically, this young muslim was also choosen because of his resemblance to the description of Mohammed B, the killer of Van Gogh: short shaven skull, bearded, and dressed in a muslimm skirt. Van Ven, as the young man is called, exactly fitted the description eye wittnesses had given of Mohammed B. Although actually and factually Van Ven had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Van Gogh, the connection was made entirely through visual and verbal analogies. This is what a historian who takes his profession seriously should have noticed, instead of acting like the naive, surprised citizen who is surprised to learn that some right wing politicians are not very popular among the people they prefer to attack. Boekhorst disqualified himmself in this program in more than one way. Unfortunately the other members of the panel were no better.

The problem probably is, that people who (would like to) work for television are not the best qualified to reflect critically on tv. Vanity, vanity... and a missed chance.

It has been a while

2004-12-07T04:20:00.000-08:00

'Cause nothing much seems to have happened over here. His Royal Highness Bernhard, Prince of the Netherlands, passed away last Thursday. The anouncement of his death was made in the middle of a soccer broadcast. Luckily the country was not shut down until the funeral will be over, like it was at the times of death of Juliana and Claus.

It is a sign of the speed of our times, though, that journalists and news papers didn't wait for the funeral to publish major and minor incriminating information about the Prince. Two days after he died, it was reported on television that the weekly newspaper De Groene Amsterdammer would publish an interview their former chief editor, the late Martin van Amerongen, had had with the Prince, in which the latter admitted to have received a million dollars (or guilders?) worth of bribes from Lockheed. The current editor-in-chief of the Magazine endorsed this premature revelation by making an appearance himself in a tv news show in which he summarized and assessed the meaning of the Prince's statements. This has become a familiar ritual by now: tv programmes tell you what you will be able to read in print press publications, so you don't have to bother to read those publications themselves anymore. Apparently the sales of De Groene are so low that the editor thinks that this pre-publication on tv might boost the sales of this edition of De Groene beyond their normal level. However, by the time De Groene will appear in the bookstands everybody will have forgotten about the Prince's bribes or consider it 'old news'. And old news is for wrapping herrings, as they say in the Netherlands.

The other thing that keeps people busy here - besides the ongoing debates about our muslim fellow country men and women - are the boops of Georgina Verbaan. Flesh or chips, carbon or silicon, that's the question. In order to provide evidence that her tits are what they look they are Georgie had X-ray pictures of her boobies - which she tenderly calls 'Harries' - published on the front page of the biggest national news paper, De Telegraaf.
There is obviously quite a lot of irony in this gesture. To prove she has 'natural' breasts, Georgina produces highly technologically mediated images of the inside of her Harries: to show that her breasts are 'real' and not supported by prosthetic aides, she deploys advances technological extensions of the human eye that allow us to look under her skin. But whereas the pictures of her skin on the cover and inside of Playboy could be apprehended in the blink of an eye by anyone, the X-ray pictures displayed on the front page of the Telegraph could only be grasped by a few trained professionals who have the skills required to 'read' X-ray photographs. I for sure could not tell the difference between an X-ray picture of juicy fleshy breasts and a picture of dry silicon cones.

In a way, this titties-test shows what has become of the infamous Turing test in our days and age. People have become anxious to scrutinze the appearances of other human beings in order to try to establish whether they are 'real' or some technological contraption. Georgina is either very naive or (unbelievably) clever to bounce the scrutinizing gaze back to the beholder with scientific evidence that really proves nothing. It actually re-enacts the only really important question the Turing test raised: what difference does a difference make?

The jury is still out on that one, but the question only seems to become more imporant in the culture of the information society in which bodies are being increasingly seen as expressions of information patterns. If one succeeds in finding the key that unlocks the 'source codes' of our bodily being, such as the genome, one may start thinking of generating and engineering bodies or body parts one self, as has been prefigured in films like the Star Trek series ('beam me up, Scotty'), Terminator2 (Terminator Arnie),The Matrix (agent Smith), Lord of the Rings (Gollum), or Steven Spielberg's AI (little David), and is already being practiced in the cloning of animals (Dolly, and in the Netherland the bull Herman). Who can tell the difference between a 'natural' sheep and her clone Dolly? And again: what difference would that make? In Georgina's titty-Turing-test the human body is played out as a 'site' of naturalness, which only shows that it has already become a site of nostalgia in our contemporary posthuman culture.

jan's blog

2004-11-27T11:43:00.000-08:00

'Wish you were dead....'

2004-11-26T02:55:00.000-08:00

Media not only represent the world, but they increasingly shape it. Much of the panic and hysteria that has haunted the Netherlands for the last couple of weeks is due to hyperbolic reporting, scoop hunting, and the fear of missing out on something 'really important' on the part of the media. Of course, the assassination of Theo van Gogh was a major event, and the killer (probably) was part of a group of muslim extremists who had planned other murders on prominent dutch politicians as well. On the other hand one might doubt the professionality of these youngsters, who apparently killed Van Gogh as a substitute of their real target, who was out of their reach. Real professional terrorists would not have settled for a substitute and thus warned their real targets for what they were up, would they? The arsening of a musim school in a small provincial town was done by two 14 and 15 year old kids, and not, as media and government suggested, by right wing extremist groups.

Extremism is partly a creation of the media themselves. A good example of how it is created was given by Andries Knevel, talkshow host of the in its own right extremist religious broadcasting company Evangelische Omroep. For reasons that are still unfathomable to me he had invited a young former Christian who had converted to the islam. As most converts, he was more of a muslim than ordinary musims, but he was also a religious man who believes in sincerity. Knevel really goaded him into saying that he wouldn't mind the death of a right wing dutch member of parliament, but that he'd rather see him die from cancer than being murdered by a muslim. Here we wittnessed the live creation of a devil by an overzealous christian tv personality.

Of course other journalists started to dig out death wishes by Theo van Gogh and other champions of free speech, who have wished horrible deaths to many a politician or public figure with whom he had a quarrel (and almost every public figure in the Netherlands was on his hitlist).

Luckily the European soccer competitions have startd again, so the media can spend their attention and time to less harmful matters. Though racism is climbing the agenda of the sports programs rather quickly.

Shake hands!

2004-11-22T13:45:00.000-08:00

Be sure never to refuse to shake hands with a Dutch cabinet minister. You might cause a national row. Now an extremely conservative imam did this, and this was, of course, a very inappropriate behaviour. After all, western women who go to arab countries are supposed to veal themselves, and to wear decent clothes. Men should also comply to certain forms of behaviour, so why shouldn't we demand a similar form of respect in return? And though in our democracies cabinet ministers are considered 'primes inter pares' rather than highly placed authorities, a minimum of politeness and decorum is required with regard to 'those who are placed above us', as Theo van Gogh used to call these persons. So it is indeed a very rude, inpolite and disrespectfull behaviour of this imam to refuse to shake hands of the minister, however much we may dislike her policies.

Still, these are confusing times. To hear a rap band singing 'We are against senseless violence' and thus up the very 'dissing' which made rap so popular is strange, if not quite incredible, indeed. But that's maybe only me, old grumpy man who expects representatives of cultural movements or subcultures to stick to some of their principles instead of paying lip service to common wisdom.

Catastrophe

2004-11-18T13:27:00.000-08:00

Just reading a conversation between Paul Virillio and Derrick de Kerckhove, 'Conflilcts: the threat of the first global civil war'. It is striking how much of it relates to the current situation in the Netherlands. DdK remarks how Bush jr did after 9/11 exactly the opposite of what Clinton did after the first attack on one of the Twin Towers in 1993: Cllinton let the thing go, because he knew that, as McLuhan had said, 'if you don't want a catastrophe, pull the plug', i.e., don't let the media dwell on the event too much.

That's exactly what prime-minister Balkenende did in the first instance: he stayed in Bruxelles where he presided over a meeting of some European Union council and only showed himself one week after the murder of Theo van Gogh. Unfortunately, it has become impossible nowadays to pull the plug: the media cannot be stopped anymore, and since the prime minister had left leadership and initiative to other members of his cabinet, the government almost fell apart, and the media were gradually building up an image of a country on the verge of a civil war. In this, they were certainly helped by the Justice Department that sent what looked like an army into a neighborhood in The Hague to arrest a couple of presumed terrorists. These images helped to underscore the ongoing confusion between 'war on terrorism' and 'civil war', and one may fear that media and politicians are together exactly creating the catastrophe they pretend to prevent. Here we have moved beyond Baudrillardian simulacra: the hyperreal strikes back with a vengeance.

Hi world

2004-11-18T05:51:00.000-08:00

Here I am, entering the blogosphere and fulfilling my cybercivilian duties by contributing to the emerging global e-(d)emocracy. Have to admit, though, that I'm not quite sure how and if this will work out.

Anyhow, this world seems in dire need of some dose of sober thinking and clear arguing. Mendacious and belligerent presidents get re-elected, and in my own country a right wing maverick who was assassinated two years ago has been bestowed with the title of 'Greatest dutch person ever' (sorry Rembrandt, Hugo Grotius, William of Orange, Antony Leeuwenhoeck, Spinoza, Van Gogh, Mondrian, Jan Tinbergen, Sicco Mansholt, and other artists, scientists, philosophers and politicians). Old media like broadcast & push television, desperately trying to keep attracting the waning attention of popular audiences must have a lot to do with this. The blue light of the tv screen has definitely obscured the last shinings of what was left of the Enlightment in the Netherlands, where once Descartes sought refuge from the French catholic king. He would surely be pretty surprised to learn that in the year 2004 ministers and members of parliament know nothing better to do than to discuss a obsolete piece of law which forbids to ridicule God. This two weeks after the brute assassination of an outspoken anti-muslim and xenophobic filmmaker Theo van Gogh (yes, relative of ...) who was killed by a muslim extremist who needed an organic stamp for a letter addressed to member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We seem to be heading for another period of crusading.

Well, the blogosphere might offer some relieve from all this real world madness, although colleagues of mine have already pointed out that Van Gogh's assassinaton had been amply discussed on extremist websites....