So what is this “gender” everybody is talking about nowadays?
Gender is a grammatical category characterised by two main properties: 1. it divides all the nominal and some verbal forms into a limited number of categories, so that each word belongs to one of the categories; and 2. it connects words belonging to the same aforementioned category in a sentence or text. With two caveats: 1. There are words in several languages that seemingly can belong to more than one gender. In French you have aide that can be both ‘male assistant’ (un aide) and ‘female assistant’ (une aide). In BCMS you have bol, which can be masculine ‘physical pain’ and feminine ‘mental pain’. A caveat for the caveat: these are not the same word, these are different words. Belonging to a gender is also a part of the definition of a given word, so belonging to different genders makes them two different words. The same is valid for declension, words belonging to different declension patterns are in fact two different words: masculine bol has the genitive singular form bola, while feminine bol has the genitive singular form boli[1]. 2. It is a characteristic of declension as well. Words in the same case are generally connected to each other in a sentence or text.
Another characteristic of gender is that it is a closed category. It is virtually impossible to add a new gender.[2] On the other hand, losing a gender is more common. The late Proto-Indo-European three genders are retained in (among others) Slavic and some Germanic languages, but the Romance languages have in general lost the neuter one, while Armenian has lost gender differences.
So where does a problem with gender arise?
There is also another concept unfortunately also named ‘gender’ that is not related to the grammatical one in any way. It is a social construct that includes the social, psychological, cultural and behavioural aspects of being a man, woman, or other gender identity, where “gender identity” means the personal sense of one’s own social “gender”. This social “gender” was invented in the second half of the 20th century, and is often referred to as only “gender”, without emphasising its non-grammatical connotation.
The problem surfaces when people start mixing and confusing those two different terms.
How could that happen at all? This confusion began in a de facto genderless language ‒ English. I know, I know that many will raise their voices claiming that English is not genderless, that it has genders, three of them. OK, so tell me, please: 1. what is the feminine (singular) form of the adjective “beautiful”? 2. what is the neuter form of the number “2”? 3. what is the feminine form of “has been”? Suddenly, those forms happen not to exist. The only remnant of a gender system left in English is present exclusively in one pronoun ‒ that of the third person singular: he, she, it. If that suffices for you to continue your claim that English has genders, answer me another question: 1. does English have cases? If your answer is no, I simply must remind you that every pronoun has different forms depending on the case they represent: I, mine, me; you, yours, you; he, his, him; she, hers, her; it, its, it; we, ours, us; they, theirs, them. So there are more cases of declension in English than those of gender. If you deny English its cases, you have to do the same, if not even more, with its genders.
So, what exactly does English have? Something usually called natural gender, everything male is masculine, everything female is feminine, and the rest is neuter. Thus, in English it is inconvenient to label someone who does not want to identify as a he or as a she as an it. They say it is insulting, offending.[3]
Luckily, other languages with gender have no such inhibition.
‘Words have sex in foreign parts,’ said Nanny, hopefully.
Terry Pratchett Witches Abroad
Just for starters, not all languages have the same structure of gender or even the same number of genders. Various languages have from two[4] to a dozen or so genders. In some languages the contrast is between animate and inanimate, or common and neuter, or round and oblong, without any mention of masculine and feminine.
Let us see two examples of gender systems different from those to which we are accustomed:
Dyirbal is an Australian language spoken in northeast Queensland by the Dyirbal people, a member of the small Dyirbalic sub-branch of Eastern branch of the Pama–Nyungan language family. The language has four genders[5]:
Bantu languages are a language family of about 600 languages that are spoken by the Bantu peoples of Central, Southern, Eastern and Southeast Africa, forming the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages, belonging to the Niger-Congo language family. Bantu languages as a whole have 19 different genders, although some of them present just the singular and plural form of the same one. The Bantu language with the greatest number of speakers is Swahili:
So, as you see, there is enough room for everyone who wants to identify as something else than masculine or feminine.
One must remember that in languages gender is not the same as sex. The most notorious example is German Mädchen ‘young woman’, whose gender is neuter, although the denotate’s sex is most obviously female. The same goes for number in languages, which does not have anything to do with quantity. The best examples is the multitude of English nouns referring to a group of animals of the same kind: a pride (a group of lions), but also luggage and baggage, all treated grammatically as singular nouns.
And yes, languages do have a default gender that is used when the gender of the topic is not known. And yes, in many languages it is the masculine gender. And yes, live with it!
Today everybody is talking about gender-neutral pronouns. OK, you are free to make up new pronouns as much as you wish, like ze, xe, or hir, but you must also be aware that those do not belong to the language until acquired by all, or at least the vast majority of the language’s native speakers. Until then they are just a novelty item. And it is hard to expect other speakers (than yourself) would use them, because it is rather unlikely that they even know that those exist (or even what are they supposed to mean).
Moreover, not all the languages distinguish gender only in the third person singular. Many do it in the plural too. Some languages (Semitic ones, for instance) make a gender distinction in the second persons (singular and plural) as well.[6]
And why just gender-neutral pronouns? Gender-neutral pronouns can function pretty well in genderless languages as English, but are quite inapplicable in languages with a proper gender system. Because in those languages, those gender-neutral pronouns must match other parts of speech possessing gender in some gender-neutrality. So, there should be a whole new category made up out of thin air of nouns (those that can be considered to apply to some “gender”), adjectives, both in singular, plural and any other number forms that the language possesses, numbers (at least those that distinguish the gender), and even verbal forms. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, Semitic languages differentiate gender in second persons both singular and plural. They do it not only in the pronouns (Hebrew: אַתָּה ‘you (m. sg.)’, אַתְּ ‘you (f. sg.)’, אַתֶּם ‘you (m. pl.)’, אַתֶּן ‘you (f. pl.)’), but also in the verbal forms (Hebrew: כָּתַ֫בְתָּ ‘you (m. sg.) wrote’, כָּתַבְתְּ ‘you (f. sg.) wrote’, כְּתַבְתֶּם ‘you (m. pl.) wrote’, כְּתַבְתֶּן ‘you (f. pl.) wrote’).
So gender-neutrality means much, much more than mere gender-neutral pronouns. It means concocting some new grammatical categories, as I said: out of thin air, virtually inventing a brand new language.
Unfortunately (not for us), languages do not function in that manner.
[1] It happens even when the words are of the same gender, but have different declension patterns. In BCMS sat can mean both ‘clock’ and ‘hour’, but the singular plural of ‘clock’ is satovi and the singular plural of ‘hour’ is sati.
[2] In certain more extreme situations and contexts it can happen, though.
[3] That may be the reason why it is not easy to translate the title of Stephen King’s novel “It” into some languages. You can hit the right gender and still miss the correct meaning.
[4] Languages with “one gender” are in fact genderless.
[5] The balan gender has inspired the title of the 1987 book “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind” by the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, putting forward a model of cognition argued on the basis of semantics.
[6] I am not sure if there is any language that distinguishes the gender within the first person pronouns, but I would not be surprised if there were.
Is there such a thing as SF music? I would say that there is.
However, the candidates for that classification could be roughly divided into two categories: music with a SF contents or narrating a SF story, and “space” music, music evoking SF travels through space.
The former group is best represented by concept albums telling some story that could be defined as SF.
Paul Kantner & Jefferson Starship ‒ Blows against the Empire
Have you ever heard of Joe Meek? If you have not, you should, because he was one of the most influential sound engineers of all time. Have you ever heard of “the recording studio as an instrument”? Well, Meek was among the first to develop this idea, years before the Beatles discovered it when finally giving up live performances. He was also one of the first producers to be recognised for his individual identity as an artist. To say nothing about him being one of those who assisted in the development of recording practices like overdubbing, sampling and reverberation. Probably his most popular recording is the Tornados’ 1960 Telstar, gaining additional fame as being the first record by a British rock group to reach number one in the USA Hot 100.
Joe Meek ‒ I Hear a New World
In 1960 he wrote and produced the concept album I Hear a New World, subtitled “an outer space music fantasy by Joe Meek”, with an innovative use of electronic sounds. Alas, the album was not fully released in Meek’s lifetime, because of Triumph label’s financial problems, but only 24 years after his death, in 1991. The music was performed by a six-piece called the Blue Men, originally the skiffle group West Five from Ealing, London, who recorded for Meek under the alias Rodd, Ken and the Cavaliers. Meek was fascinated by the space programme, and believed that life existed elsewhere in the Solar System. He himself expressed his intention to create a picture in music of what could be up there in outer space: “At first I was going to record it with music that was completely out of this world but realized that it would have very little entertainment value so I kept the construction of the music down to earth.” Therefore he blended the Blue Men’s skiffle/rock and roll style with a range of sound effects created by purely kitchen-sink methods as blowing bubbles in water with a straw, draining water out of a sink, shorting out an electrical circuit and banging partly filled milk bottles with spoons. It is hard to recognise these sounds on the recording, though, after they underwent his production. This record also represents the early use of stereophonic sound.
Mr. Spaceman was a half-profound contemplation on the possible existence of extraterrestrial life enveloped in some early form of country-rock. McGuinn’s idea of a possibility to communicate with aliens through radio broadcast was smashed by his later realisation that AM radio waves disperse too rapidly in space. He hoped that if the song was played on radio there was a possibility that aliens might intercept the broadcasts and make contact. However, as Polish SF author Stanisław Lem has pointed out in several of his works, the main problem with extraterrestrial intelligent life might not be communication, but simply recognising it as such.
The Byrds ‒ Younger than Yesterday
C.T.A.-102 was written by McGuinn and his science-fiction-minded friend Robert J. “Bob” Hippard. It was named after the blazar-type quasarCTA-102. Thematically similar to “Mr. Spaceman”, it was another song that was both whimsical and serious speculation on the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, although at the same time a somewhat more serious attempt at tackling the subject matter. The space atmosphere has been reached by the extensive use of studio sound effects, simulated alien voices, and the sound of an electronic oscillator. As McGuinn explained the inspiration for the song in a 1973 interview with ZigZag magazine: “At the time we wrote it I thought it might be possible to make contact with quasars, but later I found out that they were stars which are imploding at a tremendous velocity. They’re condensing and spinning at the same time, and the nucleus is sending out tremendous amounts of radiation, some of which is audible as an electronic impulse on a computerized radio telescope. It comes out in a rhythmic pattern… and originally, the radio astronomers who received these impulses thought they were from a life-form in space.”
The Byrds ‒ The Notorious Byrd Brothers
Space Odyssey has also been co-written by McGuinn and Hippard. It represents a musical retelling of English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel”. The Moog modular synthesiser is extensively used and the song’s droning, dirge-like melody brings to mind a sea shanty, transporting us from a maritime travel to a space one. As the song predated Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, inspired by the same story, the mysterious object remained pyramidal in shape instead of the better-known monolith from the film and accompanying book.
Pink Floyd ‒ Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, Syd Barrett
We should also not forget Pink Floyd, at least before Roger Waters has taken the rains of the band’s recording output in his rigid hands[3].
Pink Floyd ‒ The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
On their first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, two songs, each introducing one side of the record, deal with space topics, both standing out a bit from the other more fanciful, almost childish lyrics and music.
Astronomy Dominé, written by initial guitarist and leader Syd Barrett, is a great representative of Underground, which was the name often used for UK Psychedelia. It was the band’s first foray in space rock, and it begins with Peter Jenner, one of their managers at the time, reading the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone. Barrett’s lyrics also mention the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune as well as Uranian moons Oberon, Miranda and Titania, and Saturn’s moon Titan. A perfect little gem of the age, with Waters’s pumping bass, Nick Mason’s relentless drumming, and Barrett’s guitar and Richard Wright’s organ leading the instrumental accompaniment to Barrett and Wright’s vocals.
Interstellar Overdrive is an instrumental written by the whole band, one of the first psychedelic instrumental improvisations recorded by a rock band. It begins and ends with a riff derived from their early manager Peter Jenner humming a song he could not remember the name of[4]. In the middle the song is deconstructed into four parallel solos still keeping (or trying to keep) the same rhythm. Although it sounded like the song burst in four different directions, never to meet again, the band consolidates at the end and finishes the song with the same riff it began with. A fragment of the bass score became the basis for Waters’s song Let There Be More Light, the opening track on the band’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets.
The latter category of SF music, music that bring to mind space travel or some other notion connected with SF, is usually instrumental.
His next recording was the 1976 The Tomita Planets, an electronic adaptation of English composer, arranger and teacher Gustav Holst’s seven-movement orchestral suite The Planets, Op. 32, with each movement of the suite named after a planet of the Solar System and its supposed astrological character. 冨田 (Tomita) transformed Holst’s astrology into his own astronautics, beginning the recording with synthesised sounds of the launching of a spaceship that visited the planets as the suite unwinds. Holst’s estate was not happy with the publication of the album, because冨田 (Tomita) did not obtain the permission for the electronic and spacey reinterpretation of the suite by Holst’s daughter, Imogen. She worked hard to prevent the recording being distributed in the UK. Nevertheless, this recording might have been the gateway to Holst’s work, popularising it outside of the usual classical music fans pool.
Bebe and Louis Barron
The couple Bebe (née Charlotte May Wind) and Louis Barron are considered pioneers in the field of electronic music. In 1950, they composed and performed Heavenly Menagerie, the first USA electronic music composed for magnetic tape. In those days composition and production of electronic music were the same thing. The process was time-consuming and arduous. To bring all the sounds needed together, they had to cut the tape physically and paste the cuttings together.
Bebe and Louis Barron ‒ Forbidden Planet
Their claim for fame is the first completely electronic music score for a film, for a SF film, for the legendary 1956 Forbidden Planet, directed by Fred M. Wilcox from a script by Cyril Hume based on an original film story by Allen Adler and Irving Block inspired by William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, with Altair IV, a planet in space, instead of an island, with Professor Morbius and his daughter Altaira instead of Prospero and Miranda, with both Prospero and Morbius having harnessed the mighty forces that inhabit their new homes, with Robby the Robot instead of Ariel, with the powerful race of the Krell instead of Sycorax, with the dangerous and invisible monster from the id, a projection of Morbius’s psyche born from the Krell technology instead of Caliban, a projection of Sycorax’s womb. The film was a pioneering effort within the genre of science fiction cinema: the first science fiction film to depict humans travelling in a faster-than-light starship of their own creation, the first science fiction film to be set entirely on another planet in interstellar space, far away from Earth, presenting Robby the Robot as one of the first film robots that was more than just a mechanical tin can on legs. And last but not least, the special effects were groundbreaking.
For such a groundbreaking SF film, preceding the key oeuvre in the genre, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for 12 years, a similarly groundbreaking score was needed. And that is exactly what the Barrons delivered: such a creepy and ominous soundtrack was never heard before by any film-going audience. Initially, it was composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments Harry Partch who was chosen to write the score, with the Barrons simply commissioned to do only about twenty minutes of sound effects. These twenty minutes were sufficient to convince the producers to transfer the complete score duties to the couple.
As Bebe and Louis explicate on the soundtrack album sleeve: “We design and construct electronic circuits [that] function electronically in a manner remarkably similar to the way that lower life-forms function psychologically. […]. In scoring Forbidden Planet – as in all of our work – we created individual cybernetics circuits for particular themes and leitmotifs, rather than using standard sound generators. Actually, each circuit has a characteristic activity pattern as well as a ‘voice’. […]. We were delighted to hear people tell us that the tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them of what their dreams sound like.”
Writing about SF music and not mention English musician and composer of electronic music Delia Derbyshire would not be a sin, but a serious crime. During the 1960s she was a notable member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Referred to as “the unsung heroine of British electronic music”, she has influenced musicians like Irish-born British musician, composer and DJ Aphex Twin, the English electronic music duo Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of the English electronic music duo Orbital. However, during her career, especially at its beginning, she was discriminated against for being a woman. When she applied for a job at Decca Records, they infamously answered that they refuse to hire women for work in their recording studios. After stints with United Nations in Geneva and the London music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, she became a trainee studio manager at the BBC in 1960, leading to her involvement with its then-young Radiophonic Workshop, that was primarily intended to supply incidental music and sound effects for Radio Drama productions. Even there she did not find a supportive environment, as much of her work was rejected for being either too lascivious for youngsters or too sophisticated for many adults. Therefore, with fellow composers, including Brian Hodgson, David Vorhaus, and Peter Zinovieff, she set up a number of studios (Electrophon, Kaleidophon, and Unit Delta Plus), where she could develop freely in avant-garde circles and delve further into work for film and theatre. She was one third of White Noise, an English experimental electronic music band (the orther two thirds were Vorhaus and Hodgson), that published its debut album An Electric Storm in 1969, now considered important and influential in the development of electronic music. Frustrated with the state of music and the prospect of where it was headed, Derbyshire left the Radiophonic Workshop in 1972.
Doctor Who
Her call to fame was the original opening tune of the British SF series Doctor Who, one of the firstelectronic music signature tunes for television. It has not lost its popularity even after more than half a century from its first appearance and it is still regarded as a significant and innovative piece of electronic music. Mind you, this piece was constructed well before the availability of commercial synthesisers or multitrack mixers. This means that each note was created individually by cutting, splicing, speeding up and slowing down segments of analogue tape containing recordings of a single plucked string, white noise, and the simple harmonic waveforms of test-tone oscillators, that were never intended for creating music, but for calibrating equipment and rooms. Before the era of multitrack tape machines, new techniques had to be invented to allow mixing of the music.
Many mistakenly believe that she was also its composer. Well, she was not. It was composed by Australian composer Ron Grainer, author of theme music for some other UK television series, The Prisoner,Steptoe and Son and Tales of the Unexpected. Delia only arranged it and realised it aurally, with assistance from British sound engineer Dick Mills. The theme was released as a single on Decca F 11837 in 1964. Her arrangement served, with minor edits, as the theme melody for 17 years, to the end of season 17 (1979–1980).
When Grainer heard the finished track, he allegedly asked, “Jeez, Delia, did I write that?” She answered laconically, “Most of it.” Grainer was willing to give Derbyshire the co-composer credit, but that would come into conflict with the then BBC policy.
Derbyshire would receive her first on-screen credit for the music only in 2013, at the 50th-anniversary story The Day of the Doctor with three Doctors present, the Tenth, the Eleventh and the War one.
[2] The co-writers were ex-Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin, Gary Blackman, Covington, Crosby, Garcia, Hart, Nash, Phill Sawyer, and Jefferson Airplane’s and future Jefferson Starship’s and Starship’s Grace Slick.
[3] Mind you, on their first album, he wrote just one song and co-wrote two with the rest of the band.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career, between 1591 and 1595, about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. Many think of it as the ultimate love story, but this is most definitely what it is not. It is a one-night stand between two horny teenagers that six individuals had to pay for with their lives.
Anyway, in the tragedy Romeo is given the age of 16 years and Juliet is given the age of 13 years. However, when staged, seldom if ever did the age of the actors match (or at least approximate) those of the characters.
Wikipedia lists 47 direct film adaptations of the tragedy, the oldest one being J. Stuart Blackton’s “Romeo and Juliet, A Romantic Story of the Ancient Feud Between the Italian Houses of Montague and Capulet” from 1908, and the newest (so far) Anthony Tresca’s “The Comedy of Romeo and Juliet” from 2021.
As we can see, all of the actors were older than the characters, the absolute champions being Norma Shearer playing a 34-year old Juliet and Leslie Howard playing a 43-year old Romeo[1]. Still, some of the actors do come close to the characters’ ages, like 15-year old Rebecca Saire and 17-year old Claire Danes and Hailee Steinfeld.
The most famous and best film adaptation of the tragedy surely is Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 “Romeo and Juliet” with a couple of young actors, 15-year old Olivia Hussey playing Juliet and 16-year old Leonard Whiting playing Romeo. Both Hussey and Whiting won the Golden Plate Award at the David di Donatello Awards, and the Most Promising Newcomer Award at the Golden Globe Awards for starring in this film[2].
On 30 December 2022, both Hussey and Whiting filed a $500 million lawsuit against Paramount Pictures[3] for sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, and fraud, 54 years after the fact! So it took them both 54 years to become aware that they have suffered emotional damage and mental anguish!
Supporting the lawsuit Hussey declared to Fox News in 2018 (4 years before the lawsuit itself though!) that she had felt at ease on the set when filming the nude scene: “We shot it at the end of the film. So by that time … we’ve become one big family. It wasn’t that big of a deal. And Leonard wasn’t shy at all! In the middle of shooting I just completely forgot I didn’t have clothes on.”[4]
The same year she corroborated a similar accusation to Variety, adding that Zeffirelli shot the nude scene tastefully: “Nobody my age had done that before. It was needed for the film. Everyone thinks they were so young they didn’t realize what they were doing. But we were very aware. We both came from drama schools and when you work you take your work very seriously.”[5]
I am not so sure about Withing, but Olivia Hussey did not shun nude scenes in her acting career, namely as Chris Walters in Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1982 Australian dystopian action film “Turkey Shoot”, as Norma Bates in Mick Garris’s 1990 USA made-for-television slasher film “Psycho IV: The Beginning”, or as Petra in Judy Hecht Dumontet’s 2005 independent comedy film “Tortilla Heaven”[6]. So she could hardly be characterised as prudish.
The question remains: why it took them both 54 years to realise that they were “sexually exploited”, “sexually harassed”, and “frauded”? Did they really need 54 years to grow up enough mentally to be aware of all that? Or were they waiting for the right oppressive political climate spreading like a fungal disease from the USA to emerge to conclude all that? Or were they finally convinced and forced by narrow-minded bigoted backwater liewyers (ombusmut being the worst of them all), Feminazis and Social Justice Wankers to sue? Has the fact that neither Hussey nor Withing did any proper acting job worth noticing in the last seven years, since they played Julia’s parents in Bruce Webb’s 2015 film “Social Suicide”, also inspired by William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, played the role in the decision to sue, to seize the opportunity to remind the public of their existence[7]?
I have no doubt that in this case and in this repressive dark ages’ atmosphere there would be no fair trial!
[1] This is as if, let us say, a 24-year old John Travolta and 30-year old Olivia Newton-John would play high-school students… Ooops!
[2] As far as I know, the only awards they have ever received throughout their acting careers.
[3] Three years after director Zeffirelli’s death.
[7] They would not be the first to claim some sexual misconduct years after it allegedly “happened”, but in a period when the accuser’s fame and glory has burnt out a long time ago.
I have encountered Led Zeppelin relatively late in my life. A bloke from my class at the beginning of my secondary education[1] was a great fan, so I gave them a chance and subsequently started collecting their albums. I probably did not purchase them chronologically as they were published, so in the beginning I could not follow the band’s musical evolution.
What I did know is that they had two classic songs that faithfully depicted the two faces of Led Zeppelin. The first was “Whole Lotta Love”, a lyrical reworking of Willie Dixon’s 1962 blues “You Need Love”, recorded by Muddy Waters in 1962, representing the hard/heavy rocking side of the band[2], with the classical structure of guitar riff ‒ verse ‒ chorus. The other song was “Stairway to Heaven”, its acoustic guitar intro pinched from Spirit’s 1968 instrumental “Taurus”, as a representative of the band’s more folk leanings and with a more complex structure: acoustic intro ‒ electric middle section including a guitar solo ‒ hard rocking section ‒ finale a cappella.
Well, they were both good songs, but insisting on them maybe even turned them a little bit tedious[3].
When it comes to choosing one song that for me symbolises Led Zeppelin I had to wait until I bought 1975’s “Physical Graffiti”. Although the “Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia” singled out the funky “Trampled under Foot”, with the lyrics pinched again from another song, Robert Johnson’s 1936 “Terraplane Blues”, it was not that song that won me over.
Rather, it was a song for which no accusations could be made of plagiarism (or “inspiration”), the most original song in the complete Led Zeppelin opus. It was “Kashmir” [4].
Neither of the band-members ever visited Kashmir at that time. What the lyrics were narrating was a drive through a desolate desert area of southern Morocco.
Led Zeppelin is usually identified with guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant. The two continued to somehow represent the band even after 25 September 1980, the date the group ceased to exist as such. Call me a heretic, but I always revered Jimmy Page more for his production work than for his guitar pyrotechnics. He never made it into my Top Whatever-Number-It-Is Guitarists list. As far as Robert Plant is concerned, I was never partial to the shrilly vocalists of his type (or Geddy Lee’s), always liked more singers with a full, warmer voice of the Ian Gillan kind. I repeat, call me a heretic if you want.
However, this song is focused on the other two members of the group, keyboardist and bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham.
The two main features of the song are its rich orchestration and its relentless rhythm. There probably is some guitar in there, but it is buried deep beneath the keyboards and orchestra. The vocal is not the leading voice of the song, just another layer added to the overall sound. The lush, rich harmonic and melodic wall of sound (not in the Phil Spector sense) that fills the sky is produced not only by John Paul Jones playing keyboards while at the same time playing bass pedals with his feet, but by adding actual strings and horns to the recording[5]. On the other hand, John Bonham’s powerful (evil tongues would say: loud) drumming anchors the whole song firmly to the ground, which earned him a well-deserved co-writing credit. Two rhythmic meters run concurrently, 4/4 in the drums and 6/8 in the orchestration. They catch each other every 3 drum measures and every 4 orchestra measures.
The structure of the song is not built around a typical verse‒chorus‒bridge or AABA type. There are four distinct segments of “Kashmir”: a) main orchestral riff (theme A) with added vocals (Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face…) exhibiting a steady chromatic rise of a semitone through its 4 measures, b) instrumental chorus or codetta, c) sparse bridge based on drums with added vocals (Oh, baby, I been flying…), d) orchestral theme B with added vocals (Oh, all I see turns to brown…) that serves as the outro too.
However, the strings and horns proved not to be a compulsory component of the song, as is nicely demonstrated at Led Zeppelin’s 1979 Knebworth appearance, where the complete orchestral sound was kept by John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page.
A nice analysis of the song is provided by Amy Shafer, LRSM[6], FRSM[7], RYC, a classical harpist, pianist, and music teacher, Director of Piano Studies and Assistant Director of Harp Studies for The Harp School, Inc., who holds multiple degrees in harp and piano performance and teaching, and is active as a solo and collaborative performer.
There are several cover versions of the song worth listening to. My favourite is, of course, that[8] by the Louisville Leopard Percussionists, a nationally acclaimed music group for children regardless of skill level originating from Louisville, Kentucky, USA, a performing ensemble directed by Diane Downs of over 60 musicians aged 7‒14, who attend different schools in and around Louisville.[9]
Another interesting version is that played by the Johannesburg Youth Orchestra (JYO), a youth full size symphony orchestra founded in 1976 based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and made up entirely of children and youth who have achieved a musical level of Grade 6 or higher.
I told you already how Page & Plant like to figure as some Zeppelin-ersatz and I believe that you have sensed my dislike for that situation. However, I must admit that the version of “Kashmir” that they have performed with a Moroccan string band and a ten piece Egyptian orchestra lead by percussionist and composer Hossam Ramzy is rather a remarkable one[10].
So this is the story of my favourite Led Zeppelin song…
[1] In a very seedy hoodlums’ school that I have soon replaced with a much better one.
[2]Led Zeppelin is usually classified together with Black Sabbath and Deep Purple as one of the progenitors of heavy metal.
[3] Unfortunately, the same happened with the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony when it was abducted as the anthem of a highly compromised oligarchic-political organisation.
[7] Fellow of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, the highest diploma level granted by the ABRSM.
[8] “Kashmir” ends at the 2:20 mark approximately, followed by “The Ocean” and “Immigrant Song”.
[9] Another video of the Louisville Leopard Percussionists worth seeing is their version of “Sing Sing Sing”. The boy playing the drums is simply fantastic, a worthy heir of Gene Krupa (after all, “Sing Sing Sing” was Krupa’s showcase within the Benny Goodman Orchestra)!
Whenever some state joins the so-called “EU”, state propaganda proclaims it as “joining Europe” although every single one of them lies on a territory that has been part of Europe for millions of years. Whenever the so-called “EU” is mentioned, again the platitude of “united Europe” arises, the idea that the so-called “EU” is the same as Europe. The truth is that the area of the so-called “EU” is just 41.58% of the area of Europe, and that the population of the so-called “EU” is just 59.59% of the population of Europe.
On the other hand, even if it encompassed the whole of Europe, it still would not represent a proper united Europe. Why? Because its members are states, haphazard political and military organisations that rule a certain territory, instead of logical socio-natural units defined by its people(s) and geography.
The major proof of that are regions that at the moment are occupied by two or more states, regions butchered by arbitrary borders that do not take into consideration the natural, ethnological and sociological unity of such regions. There is a multitude of them in Europe, I will mention just some.
Sápmi
At the very north of Europe Sápmi is divided between four states: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Its traditional dwellers, the Sámi, are neither Norwegian, nor Swedish, nor Finnish, nor Russian. They speak Sami, a language belonging to the same Uralic family as the Baltic Finnic ones south of them (Finnish, Estonian, Karelian and others) as well as the more distant (geographically speaking) Ugric languages (Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi) and the Samoyed ones. Their ancestors moved into their present homeland some time after the beginning of the Common Era. Living under different regimes, attending different schools, being subject to different laws, being denied rights to their beliefs, language, land and to the practice of traditional livelihoods, it is no miracle that they suffered (and still do) the cultural consequences of language and culture loss. Add to all this cultural and environmental threats, including: oil exploration, mining, dam building, logging, climate change, military bombing ranges, tourism and commercial development and you have the entire picture what living under foreign states means.
Ulaidh
Ireland was traditionally divided in five provinces, four of them existing to this day, Connachta in the West, an Mhumhain in the South, Laighin in the East and Ulaidh in the North, while the central province Mide is today Mí, one of the counties of Laighin. Every province is then divided in traditional counties, a total of 32 of them. After the liberation of the country from British rule in 1922, six counties of Ulaidh, Aontroim, Ard Mhacha, Doire, an Dúin, Fear Manach and Tír Eoghain, have seceded and voted to remain part of the UK, while three of them, an Cabháin, Dún na nGall and Mhuineacháin, remained in Ireland. We all know how many problems this partition engendered. However, partitioning a former colony was a favourite modus operandi of the UK ensuring troubles in the vein of “you see how much better you were under our rule”[1].
Slesvig/Slaswik/Sleswig
Back to the mainland, between Denmark and Germany there is a region with several names in several languages, reflecting the peoples that live there, in Danish it is Slesvig, in North Frisian Slaswik, in Low German Sleswig, and in German Schleswig. Historically speaking, the region, then a duchy, was never part of the German Confederation, an association of 39 predominantly German-speaking sovereign states in Central Europe, created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a replacement for the former Holy Roman Empire, dissolved in 1806, but a fief of Denmark. In the nationalistically charged 19th century, when many nations were invented out of thin air with appropriate national states and national languages, both Danish and German liberals wanted the region to be part of their national state. This struggle caused two wars, the First Schleswig War, caused by the uprising of German speakers in March 1848, and ending in 1852 with a victorious Denmark diplomatically supported by the great powers, and the Second Schleswig War, began in 1864 when the heir to the Danish throne turned out to be unacceptable to the German Confederation, and ending the same year, after which three duchies, Schleswig, Holstein and Saxe-Lauenburg, were governed jointly by Austria and Prussia to become part of Prussia in 1866. After two referendums in 1920, the region was divided between the two states.
Euskal Herria
Following the coastline to the South-West, we arrive to the Bay of Biscay. There in the angle between France and Spain, another region lies divided, Euskal Herria, homeland of the Euskaldunak speaking the Euskara language. The language is an isolate, it is not related to any known language, present or past. Most hypotheses of its affinity with other languages either lie in the domain of pseudoscience or are controversial. The same can be said for the origin of the people. Some genetic analyses prove them to be cognate with the rest of the population of the area, while others trace their ancestry in Neolithic farmers. Anyway, the land has remained somewhat isolated from the political turmoils surrounding it and the people preserved their language and customs. The fight for their independence has a long history, but has become extremely militant under Franco’s fascist dictatorship, when the region has been subjected to repression, havoc and unrest. This resulted in the founding of Euskadi ta askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom), better known by its initials ETA, who turned to the systematic use of arms as a form of protest in 1968.
Catalunya
Moving around the Iberian peninsula we arrive to Catalunya, another victim of Franco’s persecution. Although today it is one of the provinces of Spain, historically and linguistically it extends over the border into France. Although France is notorious for its treatment of ethnic and linguistic minorities, it is the Spanish Catalonians who dream of a free state of their own. The reaction of the present Spanish government to this aspirations demonstrated that not much has changed since the bloody days of Franco’s dictatorship, fascist ideas still thrive: tyranny, terror, violence, repression, arrests, nothing has changed.
Istria/Istra
Still in the Mediterranean, in the North-West angle of the Adriatic Sea lays its largest peninsula, Istra/Istria. During its history it was part of various states, beginning with the Roman Empire occupying the land of the Histri, and followed by the Republic of Venice, the Habsburg Empire, the Napoleonic Illyrian Provinces, the Austrian Empire, Italy and Yugoslavia. A land of several languages, Istro-Romance, Istro-Romanian, Istro-Venetian, Chakavian, Slovene,… It represents a mix of cultures not only in an ethnic sense, but also as a land that is both sea- and soil-oriented, a feature not so frequent on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. The present borders were drawn after WWII. In 1945, to avoid a possible conflict between the Yugoslav and Western Allies troops in a region claimed by both Italy and Yugoslavia. A demarcation line was set between them, called the Morgan line, named after Lieutenant General Sir William Duthie Morgan, chief of staff to Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean. The line divided the territory into two zones, Zone A in the North-West and Zone B in the East and South, which contained the major part of Istria. In 1947 the border between Italy and Yugoslavia was established while a part of the territory remained independent as the Free Territory of Trieste, it too divided into two zones, separated by the Morgan line. In the end the Venesia Julia/Vignesie Julie/Julijska krajina and the part of the Free Territory of Trieste west of the Morgan line became part of Italy, while the rest of it remained in Yugoslavia. Today, most of Istria is under the Republic of Croatia, a smaller part under Slovenia, and just a tiny bit (Muja and its surroundings) belong to Italy.[2]
Tirol
Not far from it there lies Tirol. Today the discontinued North and East Tirol are a Land of Austria, while South Tirol, called Trentino‒Alto Adige, belongs to Italy. After the decline of the Western Roman Empire, Tirol became part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in 476. After that kingdom collapsed in 553, the Lombards established the Duchy of Tridentum in south Tirol, while Slavic peoples, who had recently taken Carinthia, settled in east Tirol. It was not until the Holy Roman Empire that Tirol was more or less united in 1027 under the rule of the Duchy of Bavaria to be later established as the County of Tirol as a state within the Holy Roman Empire. Finally it came under the Habsburg rule in 1369. Tirol was of great strategic importance to the Habsburgs because it controlled several important Alpine passes and provided a connection to their western landholdings. After WWI, South Tirol and Welschtirol were bestowed to the Kingdom of Italy according to the 1915 secret London Pact and the Treaty of Saint Germain, While Osttirol and Nordtirol remained an unconnected Land of Austria.
Ślōnsk/Śląsk/Schlesien/Slezsko/Schläsing
Here we come to another region with a plethora of names by virtue of the ethnic populations that live there, Ślōnsk in Silesian, Śląsk in Polish, Schlesien in German, Slezsko in Czech and Schläsing in Lower Silesian. The first states that are known to have occupied the region were the Slavic ones of Greater Moravia and Bohemia. The region has become part of the Polish state in the 10th century. During the fragmentation of Poland in the 12th century, the land was divided into many smaller duchies ruled by various dukes. Immigration from the Holy Roman Empire increased the German cultural and ethnic influence in the region. After the Mongols have raided it (and the rest of Eastern and Central Europe) in the 13th century, the province became part of the Bohemian Kingdom, itself a part of the Holy Roman Empire, but some duchies remained under the rule of the Polish dukes. In 1526 both the Bohemian Crown and Silesia were passed to the Habsburgs. After that, parts of it were pinched by this or that neighbour, until it came under Prussia in the War of Austrian Succession and subsequently part of the German Empire. After WWI, parts of Upper Silesia were awarded to Poland, the Prussian province was divided in two, and the Austrian Silesia was awarded to Czechoslovakia. The establishment of the Oder-Neiße line as the new border between Germany and Poland fixed the present state, where the majority of the region belongs to Poland, while two smaller portions are parts of Czechia and Germany.[3]
Kärnten/Koroška
After a series inter-Germanic squabbles in the region following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Slavs moved into these lands in 600 and founded the Principality of Carantania, assimilating the remaining Celto-Roman population. In 743, prince Borut asked the Bavarian duke Odlio for help against the Avars. The price was Bavarians taking over the region. The territory was incorporated into the Carolingian Empire and later became part of the Kingdom of East Francia. In 976 Carinthia was the first newly created duchy of the Holy Roman Empire. It became part of the Habsburg lands in 1335. After WWI, representatives of the German-speaking territories of Austria in the Reichsrat met in Vienna and agreed that German-Austria should not include “Yugoslav areas of settlement”, as they called them, Lower Styria and two Slovene-speaking Carinthian valleys south of the Karawanken range, Jezersko and Meža valley.[4]
Steiermark/Štajerska
The history of Styria follows that of Carinthia until 1180, when it became a duchy of its own. After WWI, representatives of the German-speaking territories of Austria in the Reichsrat met in Vienna and agreed that German-Austria should not include “Yugoslav areas of settlement”, as they called them, Lower Styria and two Slovene-speaking Carinthian valleys south of the Karawanken range, Jezersko and Meža valley.
Baranya/Baranja
After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, many regions became divided between newly-formed states. Baranya/Baranja was one of those. Baranya was one of the first counties of the Kingdom of Hungary, created in the 11th century. King Stephen I of Hungary founded an Episcopal seat there. In the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire conquered Baranya, and included it into the Sanjak of Mohács, an Ottoman administrative unit with the seat in the eponymous city. After the Battle of Mohács in 1687, Baranya was captured by the Habsburg monarchy, and was included in the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary. In 1918, the entire Baranya was occupied by the Serbian army and administered as the Baranya-Baja Republic by the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. By the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, the territory of the county was divided: the south-east of the county was assigned to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and the rest to Hungary. In WWII Hungary occupied and annexed the whole region, but after the war, the 1920 borders were established again. Today, the south-eastern part is ruled by the Republic of Croatia.
Bácska/Бачка
Báscka/Bačka is another of those regions that became divided between newly-formed states after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is that part of the Pannonian Plain that is bordered by the river Danube/Dunav to the west and south, and by the river Tisza/Tisa to the east. Inhabited from the Neolithic period, it was ruled by many peoples and states, including the Dacians, the Kingdom of the Iazyges, the Hun Empire, the Gepid Kingdom and the Avar Khanate. In the 8th century it has become part of the First Bulgarian Empire. In the 10th century the Bulgarians were defeated by the Hungarians and the territory came under their rule. In the days of King Stephen I of Hungary, two counties were formed in this land: Bács County in the south, its administrative centre being Bács, and Bodrog County in the west and centre, its capital being Bodrogvár. The two countries were later united to form Bács-Bodrog County. In the 16th century the region was ravaged by the Ottomans who defeated the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohács. After the Battle of Zenta and the Ottoman defeat, the Hungarians have re-established the Bács-Bodrog County. After WWI, the Treaty of Trianon defined the new borders between Hungary and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia) thus dividing the region into two: the major part belonged to the newly-formed South Slav state and the smaller one in the North-West to Hungary. The south-eastern part now lies within Vojvodina, under the Republic of Serbia.
Banat/Банат
Banat shares a similar early history with Báscka/Bačka. Banat was administered by the First Bulgarian Empire from the 9th to the 11th century, but that control gradually migrated to the Kingdom of Hungary which administered it from the 11th century up until 1552, when the region of Temesvár, of which Banat was part, was captured by the Ottoman Empire and was subsequently organised as the Eyalet of Temeşvar. After the Austro-Turkish War (1683–1699), and under the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, northern parts of the Eyalet of Temeşvar were incorporated into the Habsburg monarchy, but the territory of Banat remained under Turkish rule. In the next Austro-Turkish War (1716–1718), the Banat region was taken from the Ottomans and after the Treaty of Passarowitz of 1718, it became a province of the Habsburg Monarchy, but not incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary. Special provincial administration was established, centered in Temesvár. It remained a separate province under military administration until 1751, when Empress Maria Theresa of Austria divided it between military and civil administration. The Banat of Temesvár province was abolished in 1778, when civilian part of the region was incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary and divided into counties. The southern part of the Banat region remained within the Military Frontier until the Frontier was abolished in 1871. In 1848, western Banat became part of the Serbian Vojvodina, a Serbian autonomous region within the Habsburg Monarchy. After the Revolution of 1848–1849, Banat was designated as part of a separate Austrian crown-land known as the Voivodeship of Serbia and Temes Banat. In 1860 this province was abolished and most of its territory was incorporated into the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary. After WWI, the majority of the region belonged to Romania, a minor part to Hungary, and the rest to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia). The latter is today part of Vojvodina, under the Republic of Serbia
Srem/Срем
It all began with Syrmia, the centre of Indo-European Vučedol culture between 3000 BCE and 2400 BCE. The Roman conquered Sirmium in the 1st century BCE, the city became the economic and political capital of the Province of Pannonia. Ten Roman Emperors were born in Sirmium or nearby. From the 6th century Syrmia was part of the Byzantine Province of Pannonia. However, in the same century Avars and Slavs conquered the territory, which fell under the Frankish Empire around the year 800. A quarter of a century later Bulgars invaded the region and after that it became a battleground between Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Serbs. In 1071, Hungarians took over the region of Syrmia from the Byzantine Empire, but the latter re-conquered the province after the victory over the Hungarians in 1167. The Byzantine rule ended in 1180, when Syrmia was taken again by the Hungarians. Later, the region was ruled by Serbian sovereigns, either independently or as Hungarian vassals. The Ottomans occupied the region in 1538, but under the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699 they had to cede its western part to the Habsburgs. In 1745, the County of Syrmia was established as part of the Habsburgs’ Kingdom of Slavonia. In 1848, the temporary Serb autonomous region Serbian Voivodship within the Austrian Empire was established. A year later, Emperor Franz Joseph decreed the creation of the Voivodship of Serbia and Tamiš Banat comprising Northern Syrmia. After 1860, the County of Syrmia was re-established and returned to the Kingdom of Slavonia, which in 1868, became part of Croatia-Slavonia in the Kingdom of Hungary. After WWI, the whole region became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia). After WWII, eastern Syrmia became part of the People’s Republic of Serbia, while western Syrmia became part of the People’s Republic of Croatia, both Republics of the new Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the border between the two republics became a state border.[5]
Тракия/Θράκη/Trakya
This region is bordered by the Old Mountain[6] to the North, the Black Sea to the East and the Aegean Sea to the South. The Thracians were an Indo-European people inhabiting this part of Europe in the antiquity. Their first permanent state was the Odrysian kingdom in the 5th century BCE, but they were soon subjugated by the Persian Achaemenid Empire. After the Greek victories in the Persian Wars, the Kingdom was free again, but lost its independence to Macedonia in the late 4th century BCE. Rome conquered the region in the 2nd century BCE and turned it into it province of Thrace. Two famous names are connected to the Thracians of old. Spartacus was a Thracian gladiator, one of the slave leaders in the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. Mavrud, on the other hand, is a red wine grape and wine made of it[7], a tradition that dates back to Roman times, if not even before that. The Province of Thrace belonged to the Western Roman Empire, but when that began do fall apart, it came under the jurisdiction of the Eastern Roman Empire. However, with the arrival of (then still Turkic) Bulgarians, the region started to change hands between the Romans (Byzantines) and Bulgarians for the next seven centuries. Thrace was conquered by the Ottomans in 1352 and ruled over it for the next five centuries. The Congress of Berlin of 1878 had Northern Thrace incorporated into the semi-autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, which united with Bulgaria in 1885. Following the Balkan Wars, WWI and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, the rest of Thrace was divided among Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. This division is still present, the largest part of Thrace, Northern Thrace being part of Bulgaria, East Thrace belonging to Turkey and the smallest part, West Thrace being under Greek rule.[8]
Галичина/Galicja/גאַליציע
There are two regions of the same name in Europe. On is located in the North-Western corner of Spain. This is the other one. Galicia is that region “somewhere in Eastern Europe” where WWI was fought on the Eastern front. The region was named after a medieval city with a plethora of names, Галич in Ukrainian and Russian, Halici in Romanian, Halicz in Polish, Галич in Russian, Halytsch, Halitsch or Galitsch in German and העליטש in Yiddish, so it comes as no surprise that the region itself has names galore: Галичина in Rusyn and Ukrainian, Galicja in Polish, Галиция in Russian, Halič in Czech and Slovak, Galizien in German, Galícia, Gácsország or Halics in Hungarian, Galiția or Halicia in Romanian and גאַליציע in Yiddish. It was first mentioned in 1206 Hungarian historical chronicles as Galiciæ. Its eastern part was controlled by the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and Volhynia. In 1253, Prince Daniel of Galicia was crowned the King of Rus. In 1352, the Kingdom of Galicia and Volhynia was annexed by the Kingdom of Poland as the Ruthenian Voivodeship. During the partitions of Poland, it was incorporated into a crown land of the Austrian Empire as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. Today the western part of the region belongs to Poland while its eastern half lies in Ukraine.
Besarabiya/Basarabia/Бессарабія
Bessarabia is another region in Eastern Europe between the Dniester River in the east and the Prut River in the west. In the late 14th century, the future Bessarabia was part of the newly established Principality of Moldavia. In the 15th century Moldavia came under the Ottoman rule. After Russia prevailed in the Russo-Turkish War (1806–1812), the ensuing Peace of Bucharest bestowed the eastern parts of the Principality of Moldavia, an Ottoman vassal, along with some areas formerly under direct Ottoman rule, to Imperial Russia, one of the Empire’s last territorial acquisitions in Europe, as the Bessarabia Governorate. After the Crimean War, in 1856, the southern areas of Bessarabia were returned to Moldavia, but Russian rule was restored over the whole of the region in 1878, when the freshly unified Romania was pressured to exchange those territories for the Dobruja region. After the October Revolution in Russia, Bessarabia remained part of the Moldavian Democratic (later: Soviet) Republic. Today, after the dissolution of USSR, two thirds of Bessarabia lies within modern-day Moldova, while the southern coastal region and a small part on its north belong to Ukraine.
There must be many more such regions, not only in Europe, but worldwide (especially where the colonising powers drew borderlines with a ruler!). However, these were the first to come to my mind when addressing the problem of political divisions vs. peoples’ unity, of irrationality vs. logic.
[1] The most blatant example of such politics is the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan, India, and later Bangladesh!
[2] This is a somewhat longer paragraph since the maternal part of my family comes from there. This is the one speaking a Romance language and bestowing me with some Romance genes and my mother tongue.
[3] This is of special interest to me since the part of my family bearing our family name comes from Silesia. In search of our roots, my father established that his greatgreatgrandfather (so my greatgreatgreatgrandfather) was born in what is now the Czech part of the region in 1819. His son, my greatgreatgrandfather, moved over here in the 19th century. The funny thing is that, thanks to the mix of ethnicities up there we do not know to which one they might belong.
[4] My father’s mother was born there, at the extreme West of the region, near the border with Tirol. Her mother came from there to work over here, but when she had to bear her first child, she travelled back to her mother, who knew what should be done. This is the Germanic part of my family. Alas, they never taught me any Germanic language.
[5] Do not let the Croatian prescriptivists fool you. They want the region to be called Srijem, but the native population always called it Srem.
[6] Turkish: Balkan. And it is the only meaningful use of the name. Everything else is either non-existing (the “peninsula” ‒ ask any geographer; the “region”, etc.).
[7] If you visit the region, do not miss to taste it! According to a legend, during the reign of Khan Krum of Bulgaria in the 9th century, he ordered that all vineyards be destroyed. Later, a lion escaped from its cage and terrorised the city. Then a fearless young man named Mavrud confronted and slew the lion. The king summoned Mavrud’s mother to learn the secret of such courage and strength. She answered that she had secretly saved a vine, made wine, and that this was the source of Mavrud’s bravery. When he heard that, Khan Krum ordered the vineyards to be replanted and both the vine and the wine were names after the young man.
[8] There is a valid reason why I lingered so much on this region. And that has nothing to do with my ancestors, but with a very special person in my life.
During the life of a TV series many characters come and go. They use different manners to leave. Some are promoted to a different duty and location like Gavin Troy, Brenda Leigh Johnson or Fidel Best.
Some simply move away like Libby Chessler or Valerie Birkhead.
Some retire like DI Tom Barnaby.
Some, however, disappear without a trace, like Judy Winslow, Mr. Eugene Pool, Jenny Kelley and Drell, never to be mentioned again.
Here are some of the characters killed by the series screenwriters that should have never been killed in the first place. Characters whose death cast a damning shadow over the rest of the series, if any.
This generally happens in police and detective TV series, because dealing with crime is the best way to be killed.
DS George Toolan, played by John Lyons, was a long-time friend and right hand of DI Jack Frost. He was Frost’s confidant and Frost often entrusted him with tasks that should be done while he himself followed other leads with one of his (temporary) DCs and DSs. And these (DCs and DSs, not tasks) were many, among them Maureen Lawson, the beautiful Ronnie Lonnegan, Robert Presley, chain-smoker Terry Reid, Billy Sharpe, Jasper Tranter, and Hazel Wallace. Toolan wore the most conspicuous moustache this side of Hércule Poirot’s[1]. He has been in a critical health condition after falling from a flight of external stairs in the episode Near Death Experience, but he survived and returned to work. However, at the end of the two-part episode If Dogs Run Free he was killed by a jealous ex-husband of Frost’s fiancée, aiming to kill Frost. Toolan’s death only strengthened Frost’s decision to retire, as he no longer saw the office as a safe haven to escape his outside troubles without George there, but at the same time estranged many fans who found his death unnecessary and damaging to the image of the whole series. Toolan was one of the mainstays during the whole duration of the series, from 1992 until 2010.
Kitty, played by an unknown feline actress, was inherited by Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson, head of the LAPD Priority Murder Squad > Priority Homicide > Major Crimes Division, with the house she moved in in the first episode of The Closer in 2005[2]. Kitty was a he until she gave birth to kittens, but Brenda Leigh continued to refer to her as “he” while her boyfriend > husband Fritz Howard equally persistently corrected her with a “she”. Kitty got very sick and in the 2009 episode Blood Money she is put to sleep, much to Brenda Leigh’s grief. This could hardly ever happen in a UK series!
Willie Rae Johnson, played by Frances Sternhagen, is another exception. Although appearing in a police TV series, The Closer, she is not part of the force, but the principal character’s mother, and she is not killed, but dies of natural causes. Although Brenda Leigh Johnson’s father is an imposing figure, it is her mother who governs the family and balances his and her daughter’s strong wills. After appearing for the first time somewhere in season one (2005) she dies in the antepenultimate episode of the series, the 2012 Last Rites. Her death probably facilitates Brenda Leigh’s decision to leave Priority Homicide Division and accepts the job of Chief of the Los Angeles County District Attorney Bureau of Investigation (decision helped by the constant persecution and oppression from both repulsive captain Sharon Raydor and her Internal Affairs as well as lawyers).
Lance Sweets, Ph.D., Psy.D., played by John Francis Daley, first appeared thrice in 2007 as a guest psychological profiler in Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan’s lab at the Jeffersonian Institute in Washington, D.C., first appearing in the episode The Secret in the Soil. He joined the regular crew in the 2007 episode The Santa in the Slush. Sweets’s youthful looks (in accordance with his family name) and non-intruding manner made his interaction with the rest of the team somehow difficult at the beginning. A group of scientist and police officers looked him down their collective nose. However, they eventually accepted him (although Dr. Brennan was always distrustful of stuff of the mind) and he became a regular squad member. Unfortunately, he was killed off in 2014 in The Conspiracy in the Corpse, the first episode of the show’s tenth season. However, he was not the first character of the series to die. This doubtful honour belongs to Vincent Nigel-Murray, played by Ryan Cartwright, one of several Dr. Brennan’s rotating interns. Still, his killing did not resonate as grievously as Sweets’s. Sweets was allegedly killed because Daley wanted time off to direct a movie, and producer Stephen Nathan was concerned that Daley’s absence would be too long, especially if the directing job led to other jobs.
Here we come to the most unwanted death of them all! DI Richard Poole, masterfully played by Ben Miller, arrived from Croydon to the Caribbean island Saint Marie in 2011 to investigate the previous DI’s murder. To his chagrin, he was so successful that the local commissioner Selwyn Patterson agreed with Poole’s UK bosses for him to stay as the island’s new DI. He is paired with DS Camille Bordey, played by Sara Martins, and two PCs, the unambitious but streetwise Dwayne Myers and the more by-the-book Fidel Best. Despite his dislike for the island, its tropical weather and the French in general[3], and despite the DI and DS starting as adversaries, him and DS Bordey gradually built a great relationship as well as an incredible chemistry. It was obvious that the two of them felt love to each other, and although Camille’s often teasing him[4], he seemed to stay unable to express his feelings to her openly. He won her over, among other, with his psychological genius, making decisions based on minimal information and random events. DI Poole was murdered in the 2014 episode Death of a Detective. He was replaced by a less charismatic British DI, who came to investigate his murder just as he came to investigate his predecessor’s murder, and the series started its steady decline. Ben Miller decided to leave the series because long shootings in Guadeloupe meant months of separation from his family which was too much for him.
DS Annie Cabbot, played by Andrea Lowe, met DCI Alan Banks while investigating for Professional Standards the apparently extreme assault on Marcus Payne, who has died from his injuries in the first two-part episode[5]Aftermath of the series in 2010. She became not only the principal character’s closest collaborator, but an on-again off-again love relationship was evolving between them too. The relationship never developed to its fullest because in the penultimate episode, the 2016 A Little Bit of Heart, she is stabbed and died from the injuries. The final episode of the series deals with finding who killed her. It killed the series as well.
On the other hand, some deaths of characters were motivated by external reasons. The actors portraying them died, so the character could not survive. Sometimes they are replaced by other characters like in the case of Granddad Trotter, whose replacement was uncle Albert Trotter.
Paul Hennessy, played masterfully by John Ritter, was the main reason of the series 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter. A protective father who can hardly cope with the fact that his baby girls are grown up teenagers now and that this status of theirs brings with it different not-childhood-anymore problems. As a newspaper columnist he works from home, which enables him to be involved into different teenage problems like popularity, boyfriends, dating, kissing and the like. Too involved indeed. The series was one of the rare USA sitcoms that managed to be funny while at the same time based on a very mundane everyday situation. Alas, during the filming of season three, Ritter suddenly fell ill and died misdiagnosed. Consequently, Paul died in the series as well and was grieved by his family. However, as the show MUST go on, the producers brought in two new characters, his wife’s father and nephew (the latter played by serial sitcom killer David Spade), shortened the title to the now utterly meaningless 8 Simple Rules and drove the show into a completely different direction. Total wreck, that is.
Another great performance… The legal medic Dr. Pasquano, played flawlessly by Marcello Perracchio, was famous for two things, his acerbic personality and his gluttony for sweets, especially traditional Sicilian cannoli, cassata siciliana and buccellato (among others). His relation with commissioner Montalbano was a complex one. Although constantly accusing him of «scassamento di cabasisi», somewhere deep inside the doctor respected him as a good copper. Nonetheless, he allowed himself to be corrupted by Montalbano’s gifts of aforementioned cakes. The actor died before the shooting of series 12, but they kept the character (unseen, unheard) alive in the following episodes. However, with him the series’s charm died as well. The character was allowed to die off-screen only in the next series. After the funeral, the most beautiful wordless eulogy to the character (and to the actor that played it for so long) was held in the police station. Montalbano called all his closest collaborators to his office, opened a pack of cannoli, offered one to each member of the team and they all ate them in silence. No words were necessary. We all knew what exactly does it mean.
[1] Have you noticed how Poirot’s moustache changed over the series? As if it were constantly shrinking.
[2] That house previously belonged to a murder victim whose case she solved.
[3] Some typical exchanges: Comm. Selwyn Patterson: Sainte-Marie was colonized by the French, who lost it to the British, who lost it to the Dutch. The Dutch lost it back to the French. The French then handed it back to the British in the mid 70’s. So, about 30 percent of the population is still French. DI Richard Poole: French. Great. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse. or: Camille Bordey: Voodoo has been part of this island for hundreds of years. DI Richard Poole: So have cholera and TB – and the French – and we managed to get rid of them in the end! Camille Bordey: I am half French! DI Richard Poole: There’s no such thing as half French!
[4] DI Poole sleeps in full pyjamas. DS Bordey: Don’t you get hot at night wearing all that? DI Poole: Yes. DS Bordey: Then you should sleep naked. DS Bordey: I do.
Some time ago I published a post about the anniversary of the finding of Roberto Calvi’s body hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge.
MZ&Co. punished me for publishing it. So far, the banker’s death has been attributed to the Vatican Bank, the Mafia, and the clandestine Masonic lodge Propaganda Due. What are MZ&CO.’s vested interest in this case so that they ban the mere mention of it?
Anyway, there is not a drop of logic (or even intelligence) in MZ&Co.’s punishment politics. I publish a Monty Python quote in a Monty Python group and I get punished for it. I publish a Terry Pratchett quote in a Terry Pratchett group and I get punished for it. I publish a Father Ted quote in a Father Ted group and I get punished for it. I publish a Fawlty Towers quote in a Fawlty Towers group and I get punished for it. I publish a Death in Paradise quote in a Death in Paradise group and I get punished for it. I publish a Achmed the Dead Terrorist quote in a Jeff Dunham group and I get punished for it. I sincerely answer a (non-punished!) question about how authorities deal with immigrants in the state under which I live and I get punished for denouncing their violence.
On the other hand, when I report posts and pages that overtly promote violence (most often Arab and Muslim ones who call for the annihilation of Israel and the Jews), it turns out that such content does not violate MZ&Co.’s so-called community excrement!
Thus, it is evident that it does not matter what is written but who has written it![1]
Living where I live, I am too well personally acquainted with the notions of linguistic, ethnic, political and personal discrimination not to be able to recognise them at first glance.
So yes, I do accuse MZ&Co. for discrimination, bigotry, hate, harassment and abuse!
GET! OFF! OF! MY! BACK! BLOODY PERVERTS!
It is time for the whole Europe to scream in unison once again!
[1] The only solution seems to be not to write in English, because these illiterate uneducated yokels are prevented from understanding foreign languages.
The title is a sentence written to me by one very best friend of mine[1].
When we first heard about the new virus, it was something happening in a galaxy far, far away. Not a long, long time ago, though. Everybody was kind of oblivious to the fact that we do not live in the ages in which it took Central Asian hordes centuries to cross the Eurasian supercontinent anymore. The whole world is right here, at our doorstep in a couple of hours or a day or two.
So, when the virus first appeared in Europe, or to be more precise: when the news first confirmed that the virus appeared in Europe, it seemed to be a shock for everyone. Moreover, nobody seemed to know anything about the virus, news were contradictory, more false ones then actual well-researched ones.
The state went into closure. Only the necessary grocery shops remained open. We were sealed in our homes. Opening the window at night to let a bit of fresh air into the apartment? No way! The virus might creep in through it. Do not touch your face, they said. How was I supposed to administer eye drops, something I do twice a day? The virus can be washed down from your mouth with hot water, they said. It would end in your stomach where the acids would consume it, they said. Drinking hot water may sound funny in the comic strip « Astérix chez le bretons », but not so much in real life.
… de l’eau chaude.
When I had to go out, I was equipped with a face-mask and plastic gloves. And it was strictly limited to the nearest grocery shop, where I bought food that can last for some time: rice, pasta, tinned food,… I did not hoard. I had a special cardboard box in which the bought groceries would be quarantined for a couple of days before storing them properly or using them. After each outing I would immerse in a hot bath to wash away what could be there to have to be washed away. I was careful not to touch my outside clothes when back home.
The funny thing was that I, who had been using hand disinfectant since my baby-sitting days[2] (You cannot baby-sit without an arsenal of cleaning stuff in your bag!), could not find any in pharmacies. At least at the beginning.
In short, outside was dangerous, inside was safe.
Until…
One spring morning, I was still in bed, the earthquake stroke. The strongest one I have ever experienced. It lasted indefinitely long. At the moment it seemed that it will never stop until it toppled everything. Being woken up by such an experience is one that you can never forget, no matter how much you try.
What to do? Go out, where the virus reigns? Stay inside and wait for the next shock? I packed a couple of things and went to the near-by park, where I felt two more aftershocks, both weaker than the initial one. The park was full of people, bewildered, confused and distraught as I was. And then (on 22 March!) it started to snow.
One friend wrote on Facebook: “Snow following an earthquake in the middle of a pandemic ‒ sounds like a bad Hollywood movie.”
There was nothing else to do than to go back home and hope for the best. Of course, every creaking, crackling, murmur had me alert immediately, even the quietest one. And then there is me, so susceptible to vibrations in normal circumstances. Luckily, I still had some tranquiliser and sleeping pills given to me by my doctor some weeks ago for the insomnia that was tormenting me.
Going to the toilet or taking a shower was out of the question! What if…? Closing the doors between rooms? No way!
Nights were the worst. At night everything could happen. At night every little sound sounded like destruction. (And it still does.)
But an even worster problem was an overwhelming paranoia: both outside is not safe and inside is not safe anymore.
The main shock affected more the eastern part of the city centre and, of course, the epicentre in its north-eastern suburbs.
The life was returning back to some semi-normal at a snail’s pace. After a while, the city re-opened, but going out was still a challenge. Mask and gloves on. I had to force myself to go out at first, but with time it became a normal activity.
My hands suffered a lot from the gloves and the constant washing. The skin was dry and there were little cracks from time to time. It took me quite a while to compel myself to exit my home without them. Eventually, I did, and my hand skin condition improved rather quickly.
With the mask it was not so easy. It has been only a couple of months since I roam outside freely without a mask on my face. I still do put it on when I enter an establishment where it is requested for me to do so.
When we started to treat the earthquake as something from our past (and when I finally cleaned all the mortar debris from all the rooms), another one stroke[3]. And this was an even worse one. It annihilated a couple of towns to the south of my city. It was felt in Friuli, Austria, Hungary,… The sight of my apartment during it was a sight that I would never forget. The wardrobes rocking so much that I still cannot understand how they managed to stay upright after all. Through the window I could see parts of the façade tumbling down. And that sound! (For months after that I was unable to listen to any intense music.) I thought that this was the end, that this was it.
It lasted and it lasted and it lasted.
The strongest that hit the city in the last 140 years[4]!
When it was over, I packed a few necessities, ran out, called a cab and went to my father’s. It was not quite of fear, but more of some necessity to be together. And stayed there for a month.
It was not the happiest of arrangements. They (my father and his wife) were stuck in their way, I in mine. I was torn between my desire to return home and the terror of the vision of my apartment trembling that still besieged my mind vividly. I would go home to pick something (and turn on and off some lights so that it did not look like it was abandoned) every week, but always entered with fear. Every time when I saw the level of damage in there, I could not imagine how to bring the place to some kind of normal again.
While living with my father I did all the shopping for them, but whenever going out or returning back in, I avoided the elevator. I was frightened of being stuck in it.
Eventually, my father helped my by engaging a very diligent and hard-working woman to help me clean up my apartment. So I came back home. But I could not force myself to sleep in my bed at night, the same bed from which the first earthquake so wildly driven me out of. I was sleeping on the couch. The clean-up woman came to work for seven days at least (I did not count) before everything was top notch again. Except the walls, of course.
Months have passed before I was able to return to my bed.
Even more months have passed before I was able to sleep with my bedroom door closed.
I sometimes dream of an earthquake.
I simply become resigned: if there were another one, we would all be killed and the city would not exist anymore anyway.
Yes, I did not come out of this crisis without emotional damages.
The local cinémathèque-cum-art-cinema prepared a retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s films. The only omitted one was his directorial debut, Fear and Desire (hence the title of this blog entry)[1].
Kubrick was not a prolific director, he made only 13 feature films in 46 years. That means 0.28 films per year, that is 3.54 years per film[2]. Some of his unrealised projects are even more famous than some he actually managed to bring to fruition, Napoleon being the most well-known of them.
Unfortunately, as was the case with 小津 安二郎 (Ozu Yasujirō) and אפרים קישון (Ephraim Kishon), the cinema stuck to its policy of showing two films back to back on the same day if they last less than 2 hours each. Viewing two films by a great director in the same night means not being able to absorb each of them satisfactorily.
Luckily most of Kubrick’s (screened) films are longer, only Full Metal Jacket (1987), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Paths of Glory (1957), The Killing (1956) and Killer’s Kiss (1955) do not reach the 120 minutes mark.
There is a thing about Kubrick. Or, more precisely, there is not. With Jacques Tati you know that you will watch a minutely choreographed visual comedy. With 小津 安二郎 (Ozu Yasujirō) you know that you will watch a comedy-ish story of interpersonal relationships within a contemporary Japanese family. With Kubrick you do not know. Kubrick is known for never returning to an already explored genre. The only exception to this rule might be the pair Paths of Glory ‒ Full Metal Jacket under provision that both are labelled as anti-war films[3].
Of course that the programme began with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the most celebrated of his works. It also best represents some of Kubrick’s stylistic features, the famous tracking shots (not so much the Kubrick look), but also the choice of music. In some movies that choice was dictated by the story itself (e.g. A Clockwork Orange), but here it is somehow the other way round. Kubrick popularised some classical music by incorporating it perfectly in appropriate sequences. Just to remind you, the music used is ԱրամԽաչատրյան’s (Aram Khachaturian) Adagio from his ballet Գայանե (Gayane) (introducing Bowman and Poole aboard the Discovery), three pieces by Ligeti György, Kyrie from Requiem for soprano, mezzo-soprano, two mixed choirs and orchestra (the monolith’s encounter with apes, the monolith’s discovery on the Moon and Bowman’s approach to it around Jupiter just before he enters the Star Gate), Lux Aeterna and Atmosphères (Bowman actually enters the Star Gate), Johann Strauss II’s An der schönen blauen Donau and Richard Strauss’s introduction to Also sprach Zarathustra as the main leitmotiv.
The interesting aspect of this film, not present in his other “big” films, is rather unknown actors being cast[4], Keir Dullea as Dr. David Bowman, Gary Lockwood as Dr. Frank Poole, William Sylvester as Dr. Heywood Floyd and Douglas Rain as the voice of HAL 9000. I do not say that they did no big (and small) screen acting before 2001, just that neither of them ever became a big star before 1968. Kubrick probably did not want this film to be burdened with stars (got it?) and even less with excessive dialogue, most of it is told though images and music. A friend of mine, who was a great fan of the film when it first appeared, smuggled a cassette recorder into the cinema and recorded the sound of the whole film. By listening that recording I became aware how little is said during its 142 minutes! Fun fact: If you remember Bowman’s last words “Oh my God ‒ it’s full of stars!” they never appear in the film. It is just a Mandela effect[5]. The first time they are actually heard is in the film’s inferior sequel, Peter Hyams’s 1984 film 2010: The Year We Make Contact[6]. Another quote that actually is in the movie is Frank Poole’s (talking about HAL 9000) “I’ve got a bad feeling about him,” nine years before Han Solo & Co. made “I have a bad feeling about this” a worldwide-known catchphrase. Another line of dialogue, HAL’s “Dave, I’m afraid” reminded my (do not ask why and how) of Holly’s “Everybody’s dead, Dave” from Red Dwarf.
One Robert B. Frederick, who allegedly earns for a living by acting as a “film critic” for Variety, wrote in 1968: “… a group of apes (the makeup is amateurish compared to that in Planet of the Apes).” Did he actually think that those obvious humans in Halloween ape suits are more convincing than our distant ancestors as depicted in 2001? Or was he just sight impaired?
Anyway, 2001 aged well, much better than Planet of the Apes or any SF from those days. Its technology looks top-notch (or what will be top-notch in the future) today as it did then. Maybe it would be more correct to say that it did not age at all at all.
One thing that only Kubrick seemed to get correct in space movies is the silence in space. There are no wooooshes, pew-pews, booms and other sounds out there. No sound in vacuum. Kubrick knew it. Other space opera directors did and do not.
Just one question: did tapirs live in Africa at the times of our distant ancestors? There is no evidence indicating that they ever existed in Africa, so it is likely they were probably added simply for their “prehistoric” appearance. In the novel, they are replaced by warthogs.
And to conclude, if you have not read it yet, I warmly recommend Arthur C. Clarke’s half-fiction book The Lost Worlds of 2001 in which he chronicles the naissance of 2001. I believe that it is in there that it is said that the screenplay should be credited to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke after the novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, and that the novel should be credited to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick after the screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.
I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita a long time ago, when I borrowed the book from my then girlfriend. I liked it a lot, it was both funny and tragic. I am still wondering how normal those times were before some very uncouth and uneducated and uncivilised individuals started imposing their Iron Age morality on the civilised world. I saw Kubrick’s film version (1962) much later. This is a more typical case in Kubrick’s filmography than 2001. Of all his films only Fear and Desire, Killer’s Kiss and 2001 are not based on previously published material.
However, even in 1962, owing to restrictions imposed by the outdated thirty-two-year ancient Motion Picture Production Code as well as the Catholic Legion of Decency[7], the film was forced to tone down the most provocative aspects of the novel, sometimes leaving (too?) much to the audience’s imagination. So, what did happen between Humbert and Lolita? Kissing? Petting? Intercourse? Even then, and even more today, prohibitions of that kind cannot be regarded upon otherwise but as as primitive, backwards and stupid as the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC)[8] or as any SJWankers of today.
The problem of false moralists treating any children in art as pure paedophilia is denounced by a brave internet site that proclaims that such views can only be held by closeted paedophiles.
So Lolita herself has been adulted a little, from twelve (as in the book) to fourteen (in the film), the age of Sue Lyon while playing the title role[9].
The casting is superb, James Mason is a convincing extrovertly emotionally repressed, but internally boiling Humbert Humbert. Shelley Winters, one of the great USA so-called “character” actors[10], who alas! never conformed to Hollywood’s narrow concept of what a film star should look like[11], is the perfect love and sex hungry Charlotte Haze, never crossing the line to become a mere caricature. Sue Lyon is perfect in the title role of self-conscious minor sexual extorter. And Peter Sellers shines in the role of Clare Quilty that enables him to demonstrate some of his chameleonic abilities[12].
An important part of the film is that there is not a single positive “good guy” character among the leading quartet. Not even Lolita, who is a shrewd manipulator of all the men around her. She is well aware of what she possesses that makes men jump to her command. And she uses it relentlessly and profoundly. The film leaves no doubt that she pays favours with her looks, and her body too. She is far from being an innocent adolescent. More a scheming gold-digger.
Fun fact: the recurring dance number first heard on the radio when Humbert meets Lolita in the garden later became a hit single under the name Lolita Ya Ya with Sue Lyon credited with the singing on the single version.
Thirty-five years after Kubrick, Adrian Lyne adapted Lolita for the big screen once more. However, the casting was not as strong as Kubrick’s. Another British actor, Jeremy Irons, subscribed to roles of wretched intellectual losers, replaced Mason. Seventeen-year old Dominique Swain playing a fourteen-year old replaced Lyon. Melanie Griffith replaced Winters. And finally, Frank Langella replaced Sellers. If we can talk of proper replacements here. Neither Griffith nor Langella can match Winters’s and Sellers’s acting talents and performances, so overwhelmingly important in the whole of Kubrick’s Lolita.
The next couple of films were the first to be screened the same evening. Which is very interesting, because they represent two aspects of war. One is about war of machines against people, dealt much more realistically with than in the Terminator franchise. The other is about war of people against people, not of enemies against enemies, but of soldiers against their own soldiers[13].
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” and Peter Sellers in his triple role of group captain Lionel Mandrake, president Merkin Muffley and former Nazi nuclear war expert Dr. Strangelove. OK, now that we have dealt with the essentials, we can continue to the film.
The film’s full title is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), which is much longer that the title of the book that inspired it: Peter George’s Red Alert (1958), originally published under the title Two Hours to Doom and under the nom de plume Peter Bryant. The key word here is “inspired”, because it depicts precisely what Kubrick did with his written sources. He did not adapt them so much to the big screen as adapt them primarily to himself. He turned every one of those sources into pure Kubrick. And this film is the best example. Red Alert is a thriller, Kubrick’s film is a black political satire.
The firm satirises the typical USA claustrophobic paranoia, inaugurated by General Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, when he ascended to the Oval Office. (Which is a practical demonstration why generals, a paranoid brood in itself, should never be allowed to occupy positions with great responsibility.) The tragedy of the present time is that that same chronic paranoia is now being disseminated by USA to its overseas colonies, protectorates and other dependent territories, along with its outdated iron-age wannabe-morality.
Besides Sellers, three other actors have presented memorable over-the-top roles in this film. Among the most memorable ones of their careers.
The role of B-52 pilot Major T. J. “King” Kong was initially intended for Sellers as well. However he had an injury that prevented him from doing it, but some say that he was not quite comfortable with a cowboy role. Anyway, I can only imagine Slim Pickens, a rodeo rider and minor western actor, coming to the audition in his cowboy boots, ten gallon hat and Texas drawl. It must have been love at first sight. It is notorious that Kubrick never let the actor read the whole script, but only the B-52 pages of it, leaving him convinced that he is acting in a serious war film. And Pickens did it. And created one of the greatest comedy roles in film history. As film critic Roger Ebert put it: “People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing. … A man wearing a funny hat is not funny. But a man who doesn’t know he’s wearing a funny hat… ah, now you’ve got something.” Alas, many contemporary comedians and “comedians” do not understand this. But let us go back to Pickens. He credited Dr. Strangelove as a turning point in his career. Previously he had been “Hey you” on sets, and afterward he was addressed as “Mr. Pickens”. He once said, “After Dr. Strangelove, the roles, the dressing rooms, and the checks all started gettin’ bigger.”
The second great role is that of General Buck Turgidson played majestically by the great George C. Scott, making it one of two memorable roles of his career (the other is of course 1970’s Patton). Kubrick used a diametrically different tactics with Scott. He urged him to act the scenes over-the-top just for practice before the real ones were filmed, and then used the former in the film. What we got is a rich ballet of his face muscles and body postures. He makes funny faces but not for funny faces sake, like say Jim Carey or Rik Mayal, but to convincingly portray a general proud of his boys who are so able to evade all Soviet anti-aircraft defence and bring an end to humanity and civilisation.
The third memorable role is that of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper played maniacally by Sterling Hayden. I do not know what Kubrick did to him to obtain the scary deranged paranoid lunatic Hayden so faithfully portrayed in the film.
So Peter Sellers famously played three different roles in the film, yes? However, this still does not beat his Ladykillers colleague Alec Guinness, who in Robert Hammer’s 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets played nine members of the D’Ascoyne family: the late 7th Duke of Chalfont in brief flashback sequences, his children, Ethelred, 8th Duke of Chalfont, the Reverend Lord Henry, General Lord Rufus, Admiral Lord Horatio, the banker Lord Ascoyne and Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne, as well as his two grandsons, Young Ascoyne and Young Henry.
Should I mention the hilarious names given to the characters? Like Bat Guano, Buck Turgidson, de Sadeski, Jack D. Ripper, “King” Kong, Kissoff, Lothar Zogg, Mandrake, Merkin Muffley?
The film is so drenched in sex that I am surprised that it was not banned forever in USA. It starts with two airplanes copulating in mid-air (look how that fuelling rod wobbles in and out!), General Ripper is obsessed with his bodily fluids and constantly munches a penis-like cigar, and General Turgidson is very interested in the 10 to 1 ratio of women vs. men in the nuclear shelter.
In his 1982 autobiography Mon Dernier soupir, Luis Buñuel mentioned Paths of Glory (1957) as one of his favourite films. And that means something!
Kubrick set Dr. Strangelove in three locations, the Burpelson air base (interior and exterior), the B-52 and the War Room. In this film he used three different locations to illustrate the difference of living conditions of ordinary soldiers and their immediate superior on one side and the generals on the other.
The trenches are bleak, muddy, dirty, cold, wet. And the officers’ quarters are just slightly better. On the other hand there is the château, where the generals reside. The interiors of the château, played by the Bavarian Schloß Schleißheim, the summer residence of the Bavarian rulers of the House of Wittelsbach, are so bright and clean that they look like overexposed shots. The stretching of the trenches gave Kubrick the opportunity to engage in his signature tracking shots. In the château, where there are no such restrictions, the camera plays a waltz with the actors, moving around them and the furniture and the columns in vast rooms.
The other contrast between Colonel Dax, the commander of the troops in trenches, and the generals well hidden in the château is that he is the leader of his men, he is the first to leave the trenches and goes in front of his men during the ill-fated attack, while the latter are cowardly hiding far behind the front to watch what is going on through powerful binoculars.
Dax is artfully played by Kirk Douglas, the first great Hollywood star to star in a Kubrick film, and the man who made the adaptation of Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel possible through his own production company. He asserted that Kubrick was a difficult director to work with, demanding innumerable retakes, but in a 1969 interview he said about the film: “There’s a picture that will always be good, years from now. I don’t have to wait 50 years to know that; I know it now.”
The whole court-marshal scene depicts it at it is: a farce. The men were condemned the moment they were accused. The proceedings have a lot in common not only with medieval and post-medieval witch-hunts, including those by the disreputable Joseph McCarthy, but also of many proceedings of today[14].
The film ends with one of the strongest and most memorable sequences in film history. A frightened captured German girl is brought before French soldiers to entertain them. By singing a simple folk song, Der treue Husar, she manages to calm a pack of howling Tex Avery wolves into snivelling little boys overwhelmed with nostalgia and homesickness.
That single scene demonstrates how much understanding there is between ordinary people on both sides of the barbed wire and how great is the divide between the ones on the top and the ones in the bottom on the same side of the barbed wire. Jean Renoir’s 1937 masterpiece La Grande Illusion tells of the same divide. German and captured French officers socialise, but ordinary French soldiers, fugitives from the POW camp come to understanding with a German woman whose language they do not speak.
Paths of Glory is based loosely on the true story of the Souain corporals affair, when four French soldiers, clockmaker Louis Victor François Girard, married with one child, waiter Lucien Auguste Pierre Raphaël Lechat, single, railway worker Louis Albert Lefoulon, living with a partner with one child, and town hall employee Théophile Maupas, married with two children, were being murdered in 1915, during World War I by orders of General Géraud Réveilhac[15] for failure to follow orders. The soldiers were exonerated posthumously, in 1934. Needless to say that the soldiers themselves did not give a damn for the exoneration.
The morale of the film is pretty clear. The greatest enemy of a soldier in a war is not the enemy, it is his superiors. Or, as film critic Mike Lorefice puts it: “One way or another, we all realize that the greatest military leaders are also the greatest murderers of their time”.
There are two types of Stephen King film adaptations: the ones he did not make and is deeply unsatisfied with them and the bad ones. There are also two types of horror films: the ones in which someone for no reason kills other people and the ones in which the horror sensation comes from inside[16].
The Shining (1980) belongs to the first ones among the former and the last ones among the latter.
The film is set in a typical horror environment, an isolated spot to which no help can come and from which it is not easy to escape to security. But this is the only concession made to the stereotypes of the genre. Film critic Lee Lescaze called it “a thinking-man’s horror film”, while film critic Bruce McCabe summarised it: “It’s a horror story even for people who don’t like horror stories ‒ maybe especially for them[17].”
So, if you are a fan of predictable horror stuff, this is most definitely not a film for you. There are no Freddies Krugers, Michaels Myerses, Jasons Voorheeses or Xenomorphs. There are just daddy Jack, a questionably recovered alcoholic and family bully, his powerless wife Wendy and their (psychic?) son Danny with his invisible friend Tony.
Is it the cabin fever that drove them crazy? And who exactly of them is going crazy? Only Jack? What about Danny and his visions? And what about Wendy? And what is it exactly that drives him/her/them crazy? In fact, the uncertainty remains: what of it all is true and what is not?
Luckily, Kubrick does not bother to give rational explanations. And that is a good thing. Allegedly, there was an explanatory scene but it was fortuitously cut off from the film’s end. Good riddance!
It is often noted that whenever Jack sees ghosts there is a mirror present (behind the bar, in the toilet,…), suggesting that whom he sees and with whom se talks is his reflection. Again, if that explanation satisfies you, it is OK. I rather leave the ending open to myself and everybody else who is able to accept it like that.
Shelley Duvall’s revelation of her difficult experience with Kubrick and this film has also become notorious. Was Kubrick the only ghost that turned them all crazy during the shooting?
Here is another film that uses classical music to enhance the visuals. Wendy Carlos (who vowed never to work with Kubrick again) and Rachel Elkind preformed Hector Berlioz’s Dies Irae from Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d’un artiste … en cinq parties, op. 14. There are also pieces by notable 20th century composers, Bartók Béla’sZene húros hangszerekre, ütőkre és cselesztára (Sz. 106, BB 114) (Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta), Ligeti György’s Lontano and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Ewangelia and Kanon Paschy from Utrenja, Przebudzenie Jakuba, De natura sonoris no. 1 and 2, Canon and Polymorphia. As well as some pop recordings during the ballroom scenes.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is not only the last but also one of the longest films Kubrick ever made. Bad news for weak bladders! The cinema was a veritable promenade to and from the toilets.
Another adaptation, or should I say Kubrickisation, this time of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle set in early-20th-century Vienna during Fasching. Eyes Wide Shut is set in New York City in 1999 during the Christmas season.
The film examines sex in society. To be more precise, its dehumanisation. Dehumanisation is a constant theme in Kubrick’s filmography (Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket), but here it pierces into the most personal and private zone of human beings. Sex, as depicted in the film, is impersonal. As film critic MaryAnn Johanson put it: “Kubrick isn’t just divorcing sex from love ‒ he’s divorcing sex from lust.” The mathematic is easy: no intimacy = neither love nor lust.
The married life of the Halfords seems to be all foreplay, no copulation. Not even some heavy petting. They seem to avoid it. Alice is having strong imagined and dreamt sex with multitude of men. And Bill is interrupted every time that some sex is overtly or covertly proposed to him. Even if he were not so rudely interrupted, I doubt that he would engage in it, I am pretty sure that he would avoid it all the same.
At Ziegler’s Christmas party, two models try desperately to drag him to bed, but Ziegler’s emergency call interrupts them.
Marion, his deceased patient’s daughter, hits heavily on him in the room where her father’s body lies, he resists (for how long could he?), but the arrival of her fiancée interrupts them.
Domino, a prostitute, invites him to her place to have some fun, he goes, but he avoids it.
Milich, the costume shop owner, pimps his underage daughter to him, he avoids it.
The clerk at his friend’s hotel, an obvious homosexual, hits on him, he avoids it.
Sally, Domino’s flatmate, also hits on him, he avoids it.
Bill turns out to be not so much an agens[18] as a patiens[19] in all these more or less open flirtations. The question remains why. Why it never comes to carnal consumption? Because he is faithful to his wife, marriage, daughter et al.? (It is interesting to note here that it is the male of the couple that wants commitment, while the woman fantasises about non-committing casual sex!)
Hardly so, he is constantly persecuted by the black-and-white image of his wife being sexually satisfied by an anonymous soldier whom she saw when they were vacationing at Cape Cod and felt an instant desire to surrender her body and her life to him. Considering marriage as a property relation (his wife! mother of his daughter!), just as prescribed by the Bible, he obviously wants some kind of retaliation for a misdeed that was never done, except in her mind, but seems unable to do it himself. Her adultery never actually happened, it was just wished for and imagined by her. This is a clear representation of the caricatured system in which thoughtcrime is not just a word coined by George Orwell anymore. If people would be actually judged for their thoughts, a great part of humanity would be incarcerated as murderers, robbers, sex maniacs, rapists, child molesters or ombudsmen.
The dehumanisation of sex conquers its peak in the orgy scene. Everybody is wearing masks. The masks dispose no intimacy at all. The masks impede sex partners to watch each other, to enjoy the sight of a face not hiding bodily satisfaction, the masks prevent sex partners from kissing, that most intimate touch during sex. Masks become a necessity in a society where some “incorrect” sex, sex not condoned by the social order, is a greater crime than mass murder.
Unfortunately, the orgy scene was molested by the production company in its yearning for a rating that would provide a more profitable sale of pop-corn, allegedly with Kubrick’s consent. As film critic Roger Ebert, comparing the result with Austin Powers, wrote: “With or without those digital effects, it is inappropriate for younger viewers. It’s symbolic of the moral hypocrisy of the rating system that it would force a great director to compromise his vision, while by the same process making his adult film more accessible to young viewers.”
As in some other films by Kubrick, we are transported into a different reality. To quote film critic James Berardinelli: “In Dr. Strangelove, it was a world where the Cold War had gone mad. In 2001, it was HAL’s domain. In A Clockwork Orange, it was an Orwellian future. In Full Metal Jacket, it was Vietnam. Here, it’s an underground realm of sex parties and orgies.”
The post-orgy part of the film follows Bill looking for answers. Eventually, he gets them from Ziegler. But did the events unfold the way Ziegler narrates them to Bill? Ziegler is one of the in-crowd, after all. The truth? We will never know it. But that is not the problem. We exit the cinema and do not have to live with it. Bill stays inside and has to.
The principal roles are played by the then dream team couple of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. The whole film lies on Bill as the main character. And here is the problem. Regardless of his later image of the action hero who does his own stunts, Tom Cruise is seldom something more than a pretty face. Yes, he did star in some good (or at least popular) movies, like Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), Barry Levinson’s Rain Man (1988), Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992), Sydney Pollack’s The Firm (1993), Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996), but I never got the impression that he ever advanced from his pretty face status[20]. The burden is too much for him to carry the whole film on his weak shoulders. Some scenes, and he is in almost all of them, work and some do not.
Nicole Kidman, on the contrary, is at her best. She already proved in several films what a good actress she is. Whenever she is on screen, things work out. She was pretty nervous about doing nude scenes, and Kubrick encouraged her to bring some music to the scenes to help her. Later he incorporated that music of her choice into the film. Maybe this is just in the eyes of the observer, but I would say that that uncomfortableness is exactly what makes her so sexy in the whole film.
The final dialogue perfectly summarises the whole idea of the film, the one stated above in the text: “The married life of the Halfords seems to be all foreplay, no copulation.” Alice informs Bill that there is one thing they simply must do before anything else. To his question what that should be, her answer is succinct: “Fuck.”
At this point it is needless to mention Kubrick’s masterful use of music. Not only the usual classical pieces, like Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович’s (Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich) Waltz N. 2 from Cюита для эстрадного оркестра в восьми частях (Suite for Variety Orchestra), Ligeti György’s second movement of the piano cycle Musica ricercata, Franz Liszt’s solo piano piece Nuages Gris, S.199, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Rex tremendae from Requiem.
But even more intriguing was the music assembled by the film’s composer Jocelyn Pook for the orgy ritual. The whole scene is deeply immersed in a dark mysticism and Pook came with the perfect solution to incorporate some mystic and sacred music in it. She took a Romanian Orthodox Divine Liturgy recorded in a church in Baia Mare and played it backwards. In another music for the orgy she included a Tamil song sung by மாணிக்கம்யோகேஸ்வரன் (Maanikkam Yogeswaran), a Carnatic singer, that replaced the originally intended scriptural recitation from the श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता (Śrīmadbhagavadgītā), after the South African Hindu Mahasabha group protested against the scripture being used.
The next two films were screened the same evening.
A Clockwork Orange (1971) has probably the best-known musical score of all Kubrick films with the possible exception of 2001. As Alex[21], the protagonist of the story, is a Ludwig van (as he himself puts it) buff, it is expected that Beethoven’s music must occupy a significant part of it. And it does. Two movements of his Ninth Symphony in D minor, Op. 125,[22] appear in generous portions, the second, Molto vivace, and the fourth, the choral Finale, now so sadly misused and abused as the “anthem” of the so-called “EU”. They appear in two versions each: orchestral and electronic, the latter bestowed by the then still Walter (her albums were signed by Wendy from 1980 onwards) Carlos[23]. Five more classical compositions accompany some scenes, two of them overtures by Gioachino Rossini, La gazza ladra and Guillaume Tell. You may remember the latter from chase scenes in classic golden-era cartoons. Two other are two of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance Military Marches, Op. 39, Nos. 1 in D and 4 in G. The last classical piece is the oldest of them all, Henry Purcell’s March from Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, Z. 860. It also appears in an orchestral and an electronic version and is now widely known as Title Music from A Clockwork Orange.
I read the book (translated) years before the film was shown in my city. And even then it was not in cinemas, but on TV. So I watched it for the first time knowing what it is all about.
What we see in that film is a not distant, if distant at all, future. A corrupt state, lead by a fascistoid and adequately corrupt government unable to furnish the population with normal living conditions because of being too occupied with incarcerating political prisoners. As we all know, in such a dictatorship a political prisoner is more dangerous than a criminal one. The reason for this is simple: you can corrupt a criminal to work for you, to do the same job as while being an outlaw, but paid for it[24]. The problem arises when the adversaries of such a government, candidates for the political prisoner status, are not fundamentally different from the ones in power. And those in power will make a full turn of their politics to both avoid criticism and gain more positive points. It is the classical “anti-corruption” politics in many institutions: they use corruption to their advantage and this is wrong. Elect us so that we can stop them and start using it to our advantage!
The government acts as the omniscient deity who does not give humans free will but takes it from them by the use of drugs and other suspicious methods. Interestingly enough, the prison chaplain is the only one protesting the Ludovico method, to which Alex would soon be subjected.
What we see in that film is more of a kitsch than a pop-art future. Alex’s mother is wearing some hilarious plastic clothing and footwear. The family’s living room’s wall is adorned by some inverted bowl ornaments. It seems that purple hair from UFO’s Moon Base has become all the rage, both Alex’s mother and the psychologist wear it. The architecture, on the other hand, is brutalistic. Concrete slabs scattered around, deserted as a Giorgio de Chirico painting. Not a future (or present, for all that matters) in which I would like to live.
All those who objected to Eyes Wide Shut for showing exclusively female full frontal nudity now have a chance to inspect Malcolm McDowell’s penis a while. I am not an expert when it comes to penises (I hope that some of you can help me with your evaluation in the comments), but it seemed rather alright to me.
The funniest scene occurs in the hospital when moans of a nurse having sex with a doctor and moans of Alex waking up from his coma echo each other. The image of the nurse and doctor rushing into the room, she with her tits loose and he with his trousers around his ankles is unforgettably hilarious.
This film represents one of the top triad of Kubrick’s opus, together with Dr. Strangelove, seven years its senior, and 2001, made three years before this film. What comes as a kind of surprise is the economic storytelling. Unlike some of his other films, this one does not assume some epic proportions but forwards the narrative in a swift and logical fashion from one sequence to the next.
The thing that is really worth seeing in A Clockwork Orange is Darth Vader in some sexy skin-tight short shorts!
Killer’s Kiss (1955) is the second feature film made by Stanley Kubrick. Written, directed, cinematographed and edited by Stanley Kubrick.
It is a film noir made after the genre’s heyday. The visual style of those films owes a lot to German expressionism and even more to the fact that many German filmmakers (including cameramen) have fled Hitler’s Nazis and moved to USA. It is a rather pessimistic genre, its stories usually being about losers, not with a happy ending.
Kubrick’s film follows faithfully the premises of the genre, except for the happy ending that was forced upon him by the producers. The claustrophobic feeling is evoked by the small enclosed boxes through which the characters have barely the space to move, the apartments, the office, the boxing hall, even the boxing ring. Contrasted to them are the big, open spaces through which the final chase is presented. Those shots make us lament Kubrick’s decision to leave the camerawork to someone else in his future films. His eye of an ex-professional photographer is visible in every cadre of that part of the film. The marvellous play of black and white brings to mind the best graphic pages drawn by comic strip masters like Will Eisner (Spirit, 1940‒1952) and Roy Crane (Buz Sawyer, 1943‒1979). The film includes a dream, more of a nightmare negative-image sequence of the camera racing through an endless, straight New York street that anticipates Bowman’s voyage through the Star Gate in 2001. Another stunning visual is seeing the boxing match from the point of view of one of the fighters. How much did Kubrick’s experience from his 1951 documentary short Day of the Fight (that I have never seen) affected and influenced the fight scene in Killer’s Kiss?
The story is told in layers, in a flashback that contains flashbacks. A surrealist scene of a dancing ballerina on a black background accompanies Gloria’s story of her (sister’s) life. Its mere disconnection with the scenes that precede and follow it stress the importance of Gloria’s explanation why and how did she end as a dance girl for hire within the main frame of the overall story.
And here we come to the main problem of the film. There is too much diegesis[25] in it, and not enough mimesis[26]. Too many things going on are described verbally instead of shown happening. This is something that Kubrick was going to jettison soon in his future career, which will make his films longer and visually attractive.
The sequence of the final fight between Davey, the good guy, and Rapallo, the bad guy, the former armed with a pike, the latter with an axe, in a mannequin storeroom is the second visual culmination of the film (the first was the chase scene that preceded it, remember?). Camera cutting from the fight itself to decapitated heads and hanging arms as well as the fighters hitting each other with body parts makes this sequence even more surrealistic than the ballerina one. It is one of the great fight scenes ever filmed and I cannot believe that it was not carefully choreographed[27].
The derelict New York streets, apartments, offices,… evoke Italian neorealism, the camerawork and lighting (even in this early film Kubrick showed his penchant for using lights available in the set) German expressionism and the ballerina and fight scenes French surrealism. Kubrick has managed to offer a nice visual mixture of genres incorporating it in a visual unity of his own camera.
I wrote before that there is a happy ending forced upon the film. There is still a shadow of a doubt: when Gloria was badmouthing Davey in front of Rapallo and his henchmen, was she lying to save Davey’s life of was she sincere? Davey no doubt heard it. Can he be sure that her feelings for him are real, or is she just using the winner of the battle that two men fought for her as a mere means to get the hell out of there?
I must admit that Irene Kane is very cute and I am sorry that there are virtually no other films in which I can watch her[28].
Is Spartacus (1960) a Stanley Kubrick film? Well, he did direct it. However, this is his only film over which he had not complete control.
The one who had control was Kirk Douglas, the star playing the titular role.
It is notorious that Kubrick used some actors for minor roles in several of his movies repeatedly, but he rarely engaged the same actor for some of the big ones. There are three exceptions. Sterling Hayden played the leading role in The Killing and the maniacal cigar-munching General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. Peter Sellers played Clare Quilty in Lolita and the three famous roles in Dr. Strangelove. Finally, Kirk Douglas played the leading role in both Paths of Glory and Spartacus.
The story of how the film came to be is well-known. Disappointed that the leading part in William Wyler’s 1959 Ben-Hur was given to whining, whimpering and puling Charlton Heston instead of him, he searched for some other similar project in which he could star. He found it in Howard Fast’s historical novel Spartacus. It is a matter of speculation how much Douglas’s Jewish heritage[29] influenced the fact that he made the first ever Hollywood pseudo-historical[30] epic set in antiquity that had nothing to do with both Jesus and/or Christianity. Hollywood, of course, cannot wean from Christianity so they had to stuff it into the off-voice introduction, sounding utterly ironical today, beginning with “In the last century before the birth of the new faith called Christianity, which was destined to overthrow the pagan tyranny of Rome and bring about a new society, the Roman Republic stood at the very centre of the civilized world.” and ends with “There, under whip and chain and sun, he lived out his youth and his young manhood, dreaming the death of slavery 2,000 years before it finally would die”, thus assuming that during 1,900 years Christianity had nothing against slavery, on the contrary, that it supported it wholeheartedly. Of course, Christians would find a prefiguration of Jesus in Spartacus, but Christians are eventually able to find Jesus even on a piece of toast!
The film had a political connotation that is now mostly lost. Not because the political climate has changed, but because it was suppressed in the minds of the people (through the Ludovico treatment?). Spartacus was a giant figure revered in the socialist world and repressed in the capitalist one, because he was the leader of the exploited against the exploiters. With this film Douglas was denouncing the fascistoid blacklisting of Hollywood workers introduced by paranoically deranged USA senator Joseph McCarthy. The cry “I’m Spartacus!” was the cry of solidarity with the persecuted, shunned and haunted. Douglas openly put blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s name in the credits, openly defying the Nazi-like House Committee on Un-American Activities. The then USA President John Kennedy, in one of his rare positive moves, crossed a picket line set up by pro-fascist organisers to attend the film.
The slave rebellion is set against the background of the fight for power over Senate and Rome between the republicans, represented by the fictional Gracchus, marvellously played by Charles Laughton, and the pro-dictatorship real-life Marcus Licinius Crassus, played more seriously by Laurence Olivier. However both of those British master thespians are overplayed by another, younger one, Peter Ustinov as Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia, called Lentulus Batiatus by Plutarch, the Roman owner of a gladiatorial school in ancient Capua in which Spartacus’s revolt began. Unlike ironical Laughton and stern Olivier, Ustinov plays his role playfully, like a child included in a game that it adores. It is notable that the three leading roles in Rome are all played by British actors.
There is just one hole in the storytelling: the slave Antoninus’s flight from Crassus to join the rebels. He just seems to disappear from Crassus home, as if there are no guards or servants watching over such an important figure in Rome and his household, only to suddenly appear before Spartacus.
Although Douglas was well aware of Kubrick as a difficult director to work with, he invited him to the recently emptied director chair probably because of the satisfaction with the film the two of them made three years before.
Barry Lyndon (1975) is a picaresque period biography famous for its three period components: period music, period tableaux and period lighting.
Kubrick used music by composers covering the whole of the 18th century, in which the story takes place, from baroque to the classical era, Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friederich Händel, Friedrich II der Große (who, apart from being a King was also a very literate and cultural monarch as well as a good musician, flutist), Giovanni Paisiello, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as well as borrowing Franz Schubert from the next century. The other kind of used period music is the one that has no era of its own, traditional folk music. This was mainly performed by the legendary Irish group the Chieftains, whose leader Pádraig Ó Maoldomhnaigh (Paddy Moloney) has passed away recently. Also included is military marching music of the era.
The exterior and interior shots were arranged and cinematographed as tableaux inspired by 18th century paintings. The most obvious influence seemed to be William Hogarth, author of some comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”, of which the best adapted to Barry’s life story are A Rake’s Progress and Marriage a-la-Mode. But the works of other portraitists and landscape painters were mirrored as well, those of Jean-Antoine Watteau, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable.
Since his very early films, Kubrick was experimenting with not using other lights but those available at the set. This tendency of his reached its peak in this film, where a lot of scenes unfold in candlelight. By using adequate lenses and film he was able to film them using no other light source and the results are impressive. When combined with the previous two points it gives the film a tone of a faithful documentary on the century in question.
Kubrick engaged another pretty face for his leading role, USA actor[31]Ryan O’Neal. He did a much better job than Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, simply because his character lived in times when external presentation of emotions, feelings and thoughts was considered not well-mannered.
The source for the film was William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Kubrick divided the life story of the titular character in two parts, Part I: By What Means Redmond Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon, and Part II: Containing an Account of the Misfortunes and Disasters Which Befell Barry Lyndon, thus telling two different stories of Barry, his ascent from poor country boy to married into money, and his descent into debauchery, indignation and exile. Kubrick was criticised for making A Clockwork Orange’s despicable Alex a character for whom we do care. In this film he had his revenge over the criticisms. In the first part of the film we root for Barry to get out of his misery and become a free man. However, in part two we start rooting against him, we root for all those who try to stop him, we cannot wait for his end to come and it surely does not come too soon. My hatred for him rose to the point that after the final duel I was not sure whether I am disappointed that he should live on or satisfied that he would be punished for life while still alive.
And I know what I am talking about because unfortunately, it was my misfortune not only to know one such verminous worthless piece of shit, but also to have it too close to my family and my home.
The last evening of the retrospective also included two films:
Full Metal Jacket (1987) always reminded my of Robert Aldrich’s 1967 film The Dirty Dozen. Not that the two films have much in common story-wise, except that both are set during wars, separated by a quarter of a century apart. What is shared by the two films are their structures. Both consist of two parts, the training and the action. In both films the training part is better than the action one.
The central characters of the training part of this film are Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and Private Leonard Lawrence, nicknamed Gomer Pyle. Hartman is played with gusto, violently and ardently by real-life ex-Marine drill instructor R. Lee Ermey. He was originally engaged as technical advisor, but when he showed Kubrick what he is capable of doing, he was not only cast for the role, but also allowed to write himself his howling lines of abuse, insults and offenses toward the hapless boys-cum-marines. When I first saw the film, I was unable to recognise actor Vincent D’Onofrio inside the body and mind of Gomer Pyle, although I knew the actor well at the time, such was his metamorphosis into Gomer Pyle. He is a chubby, not quite bright boy, who finds out to be a fine marksman. Gomer Pyle’s inability to perform the most ordinary chores causes eruption of anger from Hartman who pushes him hard, harder than anyone else and who turns the whole company against him by punishing the whole platoon when Pyle makes a mistake. No other role and/or actor in the film comes even close to these two. And when they are both eliminated from the film (you see what I did here?) the whole thing deteriorates.
The action part of the film occurs during the Sự kiện Tết Mậu Thân 1968 (Tết Offensive), a major escalation and one of the largest military campaigns of the Kháng chiến chống Mỹ (Resistance War against USA) launched during Tết Nguyên Đán, the Lunar New Year festival, with the date chosen when most Lục quân Việt Nam Cộng hòa (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) personnel were on leave. It was not a military victory for the North, but it was a strong psychological one. One of the major military engagements in the Tết Offensive was the Battle of Huế. After initially most of Huế and its surroundings were liberated, the combined South Vietnamese and USA forces gradually reoccupied the city over one month of intense fighting. The battle was one of the longest and bloodiest of the war, and it had far-reaching consequences due to its effect on the views of the war by the USA public, whose support for the war declined as a result of the offensive casualties and the ramping up of draft calls, and by the world in general.
It is in that mess that Private/Sergeant J. T. Davis, nicknamed Joker, Gomer Pyle’s comrade and personal instructor (by Hartman’s orders), a military journalist, is thrown. Although I have seen the film before and I remember well the training part, the action was as if I saw it for the first time. Not a single memory of it I had except for the hooker scene at its mere beginning. The war scenes were done well and shot perfectly and the key scene has the intended effect, but it all pales when compared to the first half of the film.
Kubrick was worried that the audience might misread the title of Gustav Hasford 1979 semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers that he adapted into this film as a reference to people who did only did half a day’s work and decided to change the title of his film into Full Metal Jacket after coming across the phrase in a gun catalogue[32].
Some topics already dealt with in previous films find their place in this one too. Not only the obvious anti-war and antimilitaristic message. There is also dehumanisation, present in Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, but also the situation in which craziness and madness take over, like they did with General Jack D. Ripper, HAL or Jack Torrance. Even some characters look similar to some past ones, Animal Mother, the platoon’s combat-hungry machine gunner who mindlessly takes pride in killing enemy soldiers, is not so distant from A Clockwork Orange’s Dim.
Kubricksaid in an interview for the New York Times: “Man isn’t a noble savage, he’s an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved ‒ that about sums it up. I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it’s a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.”
The ending of the film shows those marines for what they really are: just little boys, nothing more than brainwashed and well-armed children[33].
Joker is happy because he is still alive and he is going home. But what is he bringing back home with him?
The Killing (1956) is a heist film and usually evaluated as Kubrick’s first great film.
This is the first of three films film co-produced by Kubrick and screenwriter, producer, and director James B. Harris. It was Harris who purchased the rights for journalist and crime novelist Lionel White’s book Clean Break and it was Kubrick’s idea to hire hardboiled crime fiction author Jim Thompson to write the script. For some reason or another, the cinematographer’s union in Hollywood forbade Kubrick to be both the director and the cinematographer, so he never again shot himself a film of his own.
The narrative innovation was connected with the fact that several men had to do their own part at exact times and in exact order for the robbery to succeed. Film critic Roger Ebert compared it to a game of chess (of which Kubrick was an aficionado). Instead of following all the included in a single parallel montage of sequences, Kubrick chose to tell the story of each participant separately. We follow each of the men during the day until the moment their part of the plan enters into action. When we finish following one of them, we go to the next. In this, some scenes are seen multiple times which only enforces the intertwining of the roles each one of them plays in the heist. Quentin Tarantino quoted this film as an influence for his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, but I would say that the narration style influenced more his 1997 film Jackie Brown (in my eyes still his best one) in which the key sequence is repeated three times, each time following one of the characters involved.
In the film it is only Johnny, played by Sterling Hayden, who knows the overall plot, all the participants, and each involved man’s role. Keeping the whole from others brings to mind Kubrick’s treatment of Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.
Of course that in the end everything goes wrong. Really, why do heist films always end as failures? Why can honest thieves never be rewarded for their efforts?
The influence of French heist films is pretty obvious, and if I am supposed to call names, I would call that of Jean-Pierre Melville, the French independent filmmaker, mostly of crime films, even elevated by some to the title of being the spiritual father of the French New Wave cinema.
Why do I have the impression of having already seen this film?
Well, that is all, folks!
And how much attending the whole retrospective cost me? Approximately 10% of the average monthly income in this state.
A very good book for Kubrick fans and researchers:
I found it in a second-hand bookshop. As a fan, I bought it immediately. Its only deficiency is that it stops at A Clockwork Orange[34], and it incorporates analyses of only four films: Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. The other films are mentioned and partly analysed in the two preceding texts, Kubrick: Man and Outlook. From Fear and Desire to A Clockwork Orange (including an interview with the director) and Kubrick: Style and Content.
[6] The only good thing about this film is hotter than hell Наташа Шнайдер (Natasha Shneider) playing Irina Yakunina, the girl who kittenly snuggled with Floyd during a rough passage of the starship through some atmosphere or other.
[7] Talk about decency among the Catholic( priest)s!
[8] To illustrate the stupidity of PMRC’s record labelling, let us just give a single example. Frank Zappa’s 1986 (and final) album Jazz from Hell got the notorious and ominous label “Parental advisory explicit lyrics”. So what is so stupid about it, you may ask yourself. The mere fact that it was an album of strictly instrumental music!
[9]Sue Lyon was not allowed to see the film she starred in in cinemas until she was eighteen!
[10] Probably connoting that there are also actors without character.
[11] Not everybody is lucky like Frances McDormand or John Goodman to have a Coen brothers to promote them to top acting stars!
[12] Do you not find that in his first dialogue with HumbertQuilty sounds like a typical Woody Allen, who would not make any film for the next four (if you count What’s Up, Tiger Lily?) or seven (if you count Take the Money and Run) years?
[13]Kubrick has demonstrated his anti-war sentiments in other films too, Fear and Desire, Spartacus, Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket.
[14] Is there any way one can defend herself from untrue accusations of sexual harassment, or prove that they are false?
[15] He has probably already risen to his level of respective incompetence, according to Laurence J. Peter, just like Brigadier General Paul Mireau in the film.
[16] A good example is Roman Polanski’s 1976 film Le locataire. In literature, the master of this craft is H. P. Lovecraft.
[18] The active participant in a syntax structure.
[19] The passive participant in a syntax structure.
[20] Unlike Leonardo DiCaprio, who also started more or less like a pretty face himself to later prove himself as an actor as well.
[21] I am not sure that his alleged family name ever appears in the novel. But I read it some time ago and maybe should go through it again.
[22] By the way, do you know how many symphonies did Beethoven compose? Four: Eroica, the Fifth, Pastoral and the Ninth.
[23] She published her score for the film, only parts of which were accepted by Kubrick for the final film, in 1972 under the title Walter Carlos’ Clockwork Orange.
[24] Similarly, the Catholic Church in my city used all the neighbourhood hooligans, bullies and roughnecks as chief altar boys to keep other altar boys in line.
[25] Diegesis < Greek διήγησις < διηγεῖσθαι ‘to narrate’ is a style of fiction storytelling in which the narrator tells the story, presents the actions (and sometimes thoughts) of the characters to the readers or audience.
[26] Mimesis < Greek: μίμησις < μιμεῖσθαι ‘to imitate’ is a style of fiction storytelling which shows, rather than tells, by means of directly represented action that is enacted.
[27] I bet that Buñuel would enjoy this sequence if he ever had a chance to see it!
[28] Actually, there are, from 1962 to 1965 she played in the TV soap opera Love of Life, she appeared twice in the police procedural series Naked City in 1958 and 1963, she played a film critic in Bob Fosse’s 1979 musical drama film All That Jazz, and could be seen and heard in Jan Harlan’s 2001 documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures.
[32] A full metal jacket (FMJ) bullet is a small-arms projectile consisting of a soft core encased in an outer shell of harder metal called the jacket.
[33] The song they sing probably means virtually nothing to someone who is not from USA.
Hoffmann Ferenc was born in Budapest in the days when Austro-Hungarian admiral Horthy Miklós ruled as the Regent of the re-established, but kingless Kingdom of Hungary. After surviving Nazi concentration camps in World War two he re-appeared in Budapest as Kishont Ferenc. Eventually, when he immigrated into Israel, an immigration officer finally made him who we all know now very well ‒ אפרים קישון! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Ephraim Kishon.
Ephraim Kishon
קישון (Kishon) is primarily known as a writer, a satirist. During his half a century long career he published dozens of books collecting his short stories and some novels. But he was more than that. He was also a dramatist, a theatrical person and ‒ what is more important in this context ‒ a screenwriter and film director.
In his thirteen-year long film career he wrote and directed five satirical feature films.
Three of those were recently shown in a retrospective in the local art cinema/cinemathèque, his first, third and fourth.
The film סאלח שבתי (Sallah Shabati) was made by Kishon (קישון) in 1964 as his big screen debut, and it shows. It is still a little bit rough around the edges. It tells the story of the eponymous Mizrahi Jew, that is a Jew from somewhere in the Middle East, immigrating into the new Israeli nation with his pregnant wife, six or seven children (has not counted them lately) and an old woman whom nobody knows who she actually is but has been with the family forever. They are assigned a ramshackle one-room hut in a מעברה (ma’abara) or transit camp within a קיבוץ (kibbutz). Temporary, of course. However, this temporariness might last for a serious length of time, as proven by the family’s neighbour גולדנשטיין (Goldstein), with whom סאלח (Sallah) kills time by playing שש בש (shesh besh, the Middle Eastern variant of backgammon). For money, of course. And סאלח (Sallah) wins every time, of course. But he does not want to live in a shack. He wants to live in an apartment, like the ones built nearby. However, for the apartment, he needs money, and lot of it. Working for it is out of the question. A daughter sold as bride seems like an easy solution…
Chaim Topol, Geula Nuni and Ephraim Kishon
The film promoted חיים טופול (Chaim Topol) in the title role as a talented actor (he convincingly played a person twice his age)[1] to worldwide audiences[2] as the film achieved international success, being the first one from a fledgling Israeli cinematography to do so. A young kibbutznik, the love interest of the main character’s eldest daughter חבובה (Habuba) is played by אריק איינשטיין (Arik Einstein) who is going to become a famous Israeli singer, songwriter, actor, comedian and screenwriter. איינשטיין (Einstein) is the author of the first Israeli rock album, the 1969 פוזי[3].
As קישון (Kishon) manages to insert at least one Israeli beauty in his films, in this one, as far as I am concerned, this role is taken over by the קיבוץ (kibbutz) social worker בת שבע (Bat Sheva) played byגילה אלמגור (Gila Almagor).
Gila Almagor and Chaim Topol
קישון (Kishon) was heavily criticised for him, an Ashkenazi Jew, poking fun of Mizrahi Jews. However, it is also true that the pompous heads of the קיבוץ (kibbutz), the קיבוץ (kibbutz) secretary נוימן (Neuman; note the Ashkenazi family name!), played by שרגא פרידמן (Shraga Fridman), and the קיבוץ (kibbutz) supervisor פרידה (Frida; note the Germanic first name), played by זהרירה חריפאי (Zaharira Harifai), are no less caricatured than סאלח (Sallah) himself. It is actually a typical culture clash comedy, depicting the reality of Israel as melting pot of different Jewish traditions. As is the custom in comic situations where people from rural areas move to urbanized ones, סאלח (Sallah) has no intention of adapting to the new environment. On the contrary, the new environment must be the one to adapt to his ancient ways. In this way, he shares a lot with the title character of Dušan Kovačević’s comedy Radovan Treći (Radovan the Third), a man who left his zavičaj[4], but who cannot make his zavičaj leave him.
When immersing oneself in Israeli culture, one should be well-informed about the relationships within the Israeli reality. Israel was founded by Ashkenazim who fled Europe after the horrors of WWII and השואה (The Shoah). Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews immigrated mostly after being expelled from predominantly Muslim states by their Muslim governments. The imbalance of power between the former and the latter is either the main topic or the background of many Israeli narratives. In סאלח שבתי (Sallah Shabati) this inequity of power is ridiculed not only between the Ashkenazi קיבוץ (kibbutz) leaders and the Mizrahi Jew but also among the קיבוץ (kibbutz) leaders themselves, as פרידה (Frida) turns out to be the real controlling power in the קיבוץ (kibbutz). The caricature of קיבוץ (kibbutz) functionaries is especially obvious when the secretary shows the planting of trees to a benefactor whose name the future forest will bear only to show it to another benefactor shortly afterwards as a future forest bearing his name.
It is a black and white film and, as I said, the first one made by קישון (Kishon), so it should be taken at that value.
The film was nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1965. The winner was Vittorio de Sica’s Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow) and the other nominees were Bo Widerberg’s Kvarteret Korpen (The Korpen Neighborhood), Jacques Demy’s Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and 砂の女 (Sand Woman) by 勅使河原宏 (Teshigahara Hiroshi).
By the way, most of films that קישון (Kishon) made were not based on original screenplays, but adapted from some other media. Just like Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk, סאלח (Sallah) lead a pre-life in several stage sketches and short stories. Of the film’s motivation and success the author writes in his book Almost the Whole Truth, dealing with the inspiration behind his short stories, novels, plays and films:
It is a common misconception that Hollywood filmmakers are heartless people. In fact, they are all like that all over the world.
In Hollywood there sit a few fat gentlemen with cigars between their teeth buying anyone they like. They just buy him.
My films have been among the top five Oscar-nominated foreign films twice. I never got it. Both times I was very sad. The great director William Wyler gave me a good advice: “Do you want to save yourself from such disappointment in the future? Make bad movies!”
I have experienced the above-mentioned procedure [of Hollywood buying anyone they like] myself several times. The greatest ordeal followed my film Sallah about the Arab-Jewish immigrant Sallah Shabati. The film won the Hollywood Film Critics Award and was nominated for an Oscar. Then the producer of the most successful American TV series, a shy man of German descent, ordered from me a series of 24 one-hour sequels in which the protagonist would be a somewhat Americanized Sallah… I began to calculate aloud: “24 hours, that means three years.” The producer replied: “No, my friend, that means a million dollars.” It took me a few minutes to make a decision. (I couldn’t help but to silently ask forgiveness from my grandchildren, who will have to work somewhat more because of it…) “Rest assured,” I told the Hollywood mogul, “that I have a burning desire to work in your grand studios. I would love to settle in Hollywood and become one of your men. But my weak character stands in the way of my great desire ‒ I long for home, Israel. That’s where the big money is.” I bet that the producer is still sitting there with his mouth ajar. And I returned to Israel, a land of limited possibilities where Sallah is no TV hero, but a very living nudnik.
It’s hard to emigrate. It’s even harder to immigrate.
I met Sallah in my pioneer days, a few weeks after arriving in the Jewish state founded only a few months earlier. A million more refugees came with me, so there was quite a crowd, they put us in the settlements of barracks knocked together quickly, fifteen souls in one room. Of course, only temporarily, for a maximum of five or six years. I found myself in a huge camp near Haifa, in a shack made of red-hot corrugated iron. In one corner of the barn my wife and I were lying on straw, and in the other corner laid an unshaven Moroccan with a round wife and countless offspring. There was also an old woman who was doing laundry all the time.
Sallah was an Arab Jew. His grandchildren will be Jewish Arabs.
At first, there was tension and mistrust between Sallah and me, but as we got to know each other a little better, our relationship became extremely hostile. Sallah was a fat man who hid his years under a carefully ungroomed beard. In addition to Arabic, he spoke fluent French, but he was one of the most primitive blokes I have ever met. And one of the most intelligent ones as well. The few conversations we had in the hot hut gave me material for a stage character who, in the interpretation of the outstanding actor Topol (also known as Tevye from the film Fiddler on the Roof), not only won countless film awards, but one can no longer imagine Israeli folklore without him. Sallah was a conman, a liar and a charmer in one person, all of a very special kind. When I asked him, for example, how many children he had, he started counting them. He didn’t know it by heart. When I asked him about his occupation, he replied that he was a train driver. “Which line are you driving on?” I asked him. “I haven’t driven yet. I didn’t have the time to learn it.” As I said, he was a bit of a peculiar guy. He could not give any reliable information about the grandmother who permanently did some laundry or other. He said he didn’t know who she was. Yes, she has always been with them, that is true. Was she related to him? Maybe, how would he know?
Women in the Middle East are only allowed to speak when their husbands allow it. No such case has been reported so far.
Sallah’s plump wife squatted day and night against the red-hot tin wall and was silent as a grave. No one would have heard her in the middle of that children’s roar anyway. When I invited Sallah to discuss some basic principles of hygiene, Mrs. Sallah came to the door of the shack and shouted to her husband: “Sallah! The powers that be want to talk to you!” The misery of the camp residents was indescribable. In those heroic and terrible times, there was bread on consumer cards only, if there was any. Everything was bustling with hungry beggars. Only one of us figured out in two weeks how to cash in on his poverty.
“Mr. Sallah Shabati?” “That’s me. Do you speak French or Arabic? Yes? Then come in, sir, and sit down. Yes, there in the corner. On that broken box.” “Thank you very much.” “If the kids bother you, I can strangle them.” “It won’t be necessary.” “Okay, then I’ll lock them in the bathroom. Shoo, shoo! So. Are you a reporter for a daily newspaper or magazine?” “Daily newspaper.” “With a weekend supplement?” “Yes, Mr. Shabati. I read your ad in our paper: ‘Poor fam. with 13 ch. on disp. for the mass media’. Do you have time for me now?” “An hour and 15 minutes. I already gave an interview to the radio this morning, and after you some kind of investigative committee will come, but we can talk now.” “Thank you, Mr. Shabati. My first question…” “Don’t be in such a hurry, wait a minute. How much do you pay?” “Say what?” “I’d like to know what my fee will be. I guess you don’t think that I’m squatting in this dilapidated shack out of pleasure, or that I might be living on state support with my family?” “I didn’t even think about that.” “But I did. The catastrophic situation of primitive oriental settlers has a fairly high market value today. The ones in this position should also benefit from it. Let’s say you write a nice report with an air of the poor, unhygienic conditions and so on, it will attract attention, it will help sell your newspaper and affect your salary. In addition, you’ll gain the status of a socially engaged journalist. And I will help you as much as I can, sir. From me you’ll receive a touching depiction of my woes, my disappointment, my indignation, my…” “How much are you looking for?” “My usual rate is £ 300 an hour, plus VAT. With photos 30 percent more. Payment in cash. I don’t accept checks. I do not sign any receipts.” “£ 300 an hour?” “I still have to pay my manager from that sum. Such are the tariffs today, sir. In the Yemeni neighbourhood, you may find some desperate man for 150 pounds, but what a desperation that is! Eleven children at most, all well fed, and decent monthly welfare allowance. And with me you have a family of nineteen members on 55 square meters of living space, with three grandmothers and with this unhappy married couple in the corner.” “And where is your wife?” “She’s just being photographed up on the roof. Hanging laundry on our antenna. She is also pregnant.” “Then you should receive a supplement to the state aid?” “I gave up both. That could hurt my position in the market of misery. Interviews bring more. These days we will be moving to an even smaller, more dilapidated hut. With probably another goat. And where is your photographer?” “He’ll be here any minute.” “As for the design of the text, I would like it to go on two adjacent pages. And the title across both pages.” “Don’t worry, Mr. Shabati! We will take care of your wishes.” “Good. And now, sir, we can begin.” “My first question: do you think, Mr. Shabati, that you are being treated badly in Israel?” “Why? I am sincerely grateful to my compatriots. They have a heart of gold. However, they do not work hard to fight poverty and no one cares about the slums in their city. On the other hand, the public shows lively compassion for us and is always unusually touched when they see photo-documentation of our misery in illustrated magazines. This is by no means without consequences. If you could only hear all those professors and sociologists when they begin to cluck! Their words are really soothing. And the need of the mass media for reports of misery is still growing, so that the standard of living of us socially disadvantaged is constantly improving. It could be argued that Israel is the first country in the world to solve its social problems through interviews.
The conflict between European and Oriental Jews was programmed from the very beginning. The solution is called – mixed marriages. The quarrel would not stop though, but at least it will remain in the family.
This sarcasm at the end is mine, but the patent is Sallah’s. The laziest Moroccan fox was a born living artist. In the winter, when all the inhabitants of the camp had been shaking since November, Sallah went to work at the nearest market and returned in two hours with a brand new oil stove that he had stolen somewhere. He placed it as far away from us as possible so that the precious heat would not be wasted on two low-income Europeans. Only our winter coats protected my wife and me from the cold. When I caught a cold one day, a devout camp doctor gave me a hot water bottle. (He thought I was a good believer because he once happened to see me buying candles.) It was an oversized hot water bottle, made in Sudan, pink with green dots. Soon I couldn’t do without it anymore, I dragged it everywhere with me. (Retranslated by me.)
The third film made by קישון (Kishon) was תעלת בלאומילך (The Blaumilch Canal) from 1969, that for some unfathomable reason was rechristened The Big Dig in the Anglophone world.
I can say that this one was my favourite of the whole programme, mostly because of its absurd and at time surrealist setting.
The story is quite simple: קאזימיר בלאומילך (Kazimir Blaumilch), a lunatic known as החפרפרת (the Mole) because of his digging mania, digs his way out of an asylum, steals a pneumatic drill and an air compressor, drags them to the junction of רחוב אלנבי (Allenby Street), רחוב בן יהודה (Ben Yehuda Street) and רחוב פינסקר (Pinsker Street) and starts digging. The inhabitants of the neighbouring buildings are the first to protest for the noise. The location being one of the busiest traffic hubs in תל־אביב (Tel-Aviv), drivers are the next to kick up a row. Soon an incompetent policeman, played by שייקה אופיר (Shaike Ophir) tries to bring some order, only to embiggen the chaos. The city officials in charge of road maintenance have no idea who ordered the works but have no intention whatsoever to admit that something might go on in their department without their knowledge so they join their own machinery and workforce to speed up the construction (or destruction). Eventually, the digging reaches the Mediterranean Sea, רחוב אלנבי (Allenby Street) is flooded, then transformed by the politicians into a canal, with the mayor inaugurating it proclaiming תל־אביב (Tel-Aviv) “the Venice of Middle East”[5]. In short, politicians turn their own incompetence and ignorance into a triumph!
Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt, Hauptmann von Köpenick
The situation brings to mind the famous Hauptmann von Köpenick, the shoemaker Friedrich Wilhelm Voigt who, in 1906, masqueraded as a Prussian military officer, rounded up a number of soldiers under his “command”, and “confiscated” more than 4,000 marks from a municipal treasury. No one dared oppose him because everybody was trained to obey a military officer without questioning. In the film, nobody questions the acts of a lunatic.
I mentioned surrealist humour. One of the best such sequences is when two heads of the Municipal Road Department, אביגדור קויבישבסקי (Avigdor Kuybishevsky) and זליג שולטהייס (Zelig Schultheiss) have a heated argument about responsibilities, hiding facts from each other and undermining each other that was in real danger to turn into a fistfight, interrupted by the secretary announcing a tea break. What ensues is an idyllic scene in which best friends ‒ what am I saying? loving brothers and sisters enjoy their tea with almost an erotic intimacy. Then the tea break ends, the participants move to the places they occupied before the break and continue with the quarrel exactly where they were so unrudely interrupted.
When I mention the secretary, she is the nameless secretary of קויבישבסקי (Kuybishevsky). She is totally unable to type, which is effectively demonstrated in a short gag, but has other qualities (competing with Candy del Mar in making bubblegum balloons, for instance). Among those are a skimpy mini dress and azure satin knickers, which she loses somewhere in the middle of the film. We do not actually see her without them on ‒ קישון (Kishon) is not that kind of director! ‒ but their story is told marvellously in three short frames. Blink thrice and you will miss it. First we see them on her thanks to the enormous shortness of the dress and her own way of sitting on a chair. Next they are found in a cigarette case, grabbed by קויבישבסקי (Kuybishevsky) tucking them into the inside pocket of his jacket. Finally we see him pulling them out again to wipe the sweat from his forehead. A sweet erotic joke perfectly told in film language.
This secretary, played so provocative and yet not pornographically or vulgarly by Aviva Paz (אביבה פז), is the sexy Israeli beauty in this film.
Shraga Fridman and Aviva Paz
Watching the movie one cannot help asking oneself how the גיהנום did קישון (Kishon) manage to do it. I mean, you cannot destroy a city centre just to make a film. Or can you? Eventually it turns out you cannot. קישון (Kishon) had the whole thing (the whole street and the 30 m canal!) reconstructed on the beach behind the film studios in הרצליה (Herzliya).
The film was nominated for Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Foreign Film in 1969. The winner was Costa-Gavras’s Z and the other nominees were Bo Widerberg’s Ådalen 31, Κορίτσια στον Ήλιο (Girls under the sun) by Βασίλης Γεωργιάδης (Vasilis Georgiadis) and Federico Fellini’s Fellini Satyricon.
The penultimate film that קישון (Kishon) made was the 1971 השוטר אזולאי (Constable Azulay), which was also rechristened in English as The Policeman for reasons unknown.
Inspired by how capably שייקה אופיר (Shaike Ophir) played an incapable police officer in his previous film, קישון (Kishon) decided to dedicate a whole film to such a character. The policeman got a name, אברהם אזולאי (Avraham Azulay), and a third dimension. אזולאי (Azulay) is a bad copper, but not for the same reasons the character played by Harvey Keitel in Abel Ferrara’s 1992 film Bad Lieutenant is. Au contraire. אזולאי (Azulay) is a bad copper because he is a good person. This could be a morale of the whole story: A good man is a bad copper. He sees people for what they are and not what they represent. Unlike his colleagues, he believes in human goodness and dislikes solving problems with violence. That is the main reason why he never ever advanced in position in twenty years in the force. Instead of attacking a group of orthodox Jews who stone cars that are driven on Saturday, he enters with them in a friendly religious debate and calms them down[6]. When the delegation of the French police force visits his police station, as the only one who speaks French, he mellows down the occasional harsh remark and is adopted by the French as their buddy and guide.
However, there is a Damocles’s sword hanging over the head of אזולאי (Azulay) the whole time: his superiors want to get rid of him, and he himself is not sure whether he would like to have his contract extended or not, and what about that long-awaited promotion? His superiors, פקד לפקוביץ׳ (Captain Levkovich) and סמל בז׳רנו (Sergeant Bezherano), another pair of pompous functionaries, eventually decide to finally dismiss him. This alarms the underworld in the area patrolled by אזולאי (Azulay) because his presence there helps them a lot with their businesses, whereas a more diligent copper in the neighbourhood could bring them harm. What אזולאי (Azulay) needs is solving a major crime. And they will make it happen, like it or not.
This solution brings to mind another classic comedy, Steno’s and Mario Monicelli’s 1951 film Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers[7]). Ferdinando Esposito played by Totò is a small crook who tries to support his family by conning people. His arch-enemy is Sergeant Lorenzo Buttoni played by Aldo Fabrizi, who is too fat to be able to catch him. However, Buttoni’s superiors give him an ultimatum: either he will finally arrest Esposito or he will be fired. Esposito is too kind-hearted to allow his (after all) friend to become unemployed because of him and agrees to go to prison to save Buttoni.
So, the motive of the crook(s) to help a police officer is different, in Italy it is empathy, in Israel business reasons.
אזולאי (Azulay) is not too happily married but still married. Consequently when a young, cute, pretty hooker (with the indispensable heart of gold) enters his life (he took pity on her and let her escape during a raid), their relationship cannot trespass the platonic stage, although she invites him to visit her whenever he wants. For free, of course! This prostitute, מימי (Mimi), played sweetly by ניצה שאול (Nitza Shaul) is the third in the line of sexy Israeli beauties featuring more or less prominently in films by קישון (Kishon).
קישון (Kishon) directed his penultimate film as the classical “invisible” director, without any modernist escapades, but he gave the actors a chance to show what they were able to do in front of the camera. A small shift in the muscles of a face can mean a lot. שייקה אופיר (Shaike Ophir), the leading actor, shows us a whole spectrum of emotional nuances in close-ups, but neither physical comedy is alien to him. No wonder he was an Israeli film star[8]!
Nitza Shaul and Shaike Ophir
Generally speaking, the films made by קישון (Kishon) are not of the kind where the whole room bursts into a never-ending ROFLMAOs. His humour is too subtle for that. Too warm. And this film is the warmest of them all. There is a lot of empathy in the telling of the story of this honest and naïve man. The best Israeli films all the way to the present day nurture this combination of tragedy with comedy that makes them so full of real life.
This is the only film made by קישון (Kishon) with an original screenplay, not as an adaptation of previous writings or characters.
The main objections to this film were again that קישון (Kishon), an Ashkenazi, mocks the Sephardim through the title character, but the actual truth is a little bit different. His pompous, but not more capable superior (probably already reached his level of incompetence), פקד לפקוביץ׳ (Captain Levkovich), is an Ashkenazi. However, as said above, in everyday situations (pacifying the orthodox Jews, interpreting for the French), אזולאי (Azulay) copes better than him.
Shaike Ophir and Ephraim Kishon
The film was nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1965. The winner was Vittorio de Sica’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Contini), and the other nominees were どですかでん (Clickety-Clack) by 黒澤明 (Kurosawa Akira), Jan Troell’s Utvandrarna (The Emigrants) and Чайковский (Tchaikovsky) by Игорь Васильевич Таланкин (Igor Vasilyevich Talankin).
The film won the 1972 Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Foreign Film. The other nominees were Éric Rohmer’s Le genou de Claire (Claire’s Knee), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Il conformista (The Conformist), Чайковский (Tchaikovsky) by Игорь Васильевич Таланкин (Igor Vasilyevich Talankin) and André Cayatte’s Mourir d’aimer / Morire d’amore (To Die of Love).
The film won several other awards, such as best foreign film in the Barcelona film festival and best director in the Monte Carlo festival. In Israel it is considered a cinematic classic.
So two more unseen movies remain to be mentioned.
The second film made by קישון (Kishon) is the 1967 ארבינקא (Ervinka[9]). The titular character, a small con man played by חיים טופול (Chaim Topol), falls in love with רותי (Ruti), a police officer who does love him back[10], but is appalled by his way of life and concerned that he is on a slippery slope to a life of crime. ארבינקא (Ervinka) first appeared in short stories as a kind of the author’s alter ego. This is the first film by קישון (Kishon) in which שייקה אופיר (Shaike Ophir) plays a confused policeman, a role that will be expanded in the director’s next two films.
Gila Almagor
Of course, רותי (Ruti) played by גילה אלמגור (Gila Almagor) is the obligatory Israeli beauty in this film (again!).
The last film in the director’s opus was the 1978 השועל בלול התרנגולות (The Fox in the Chicken Coop), based on the author’s satirical book by the same name. אמיץ דולניקר (Amitz Dulniker), an aging member of Knesset, played by שייקה אופיר (Shaike Ophir)[11], is sent out of town for a holiday after he collapses during one of his endless, tiresome and meaningless tirades and ends up in a bucolic and carefree קיבוץ (kibbutz) in the middle of nowhere. Such an atmosphere is totally alien to him and he decides to bring some order in the villagers’ lives by organising a government. Do I have to stress that it eventually ends in a catastrophe? The film was unsuccessful both with the public and with the critics and, as the first significant failure of אפרים קישון (Ephraim Kishon) in Israel since he first appeared in public in 1952, dissuaded the director from continuing his film career. The main problem with the film might have been that the book was adapted 23 years after it was written with the political climate in Israel having changed a lot in the meantime.
So these are the films by אפרים קישון (Ephraim Kishon) that I have both seen and not seen.
[1] Was I imagining things, or was he really lisping… or more accurately, lishping while speaking? You know, [ʃ] instead of [s], [ʒ] instead of [z]…
[2]טופול (Topol) will become an international star with his role of Tevye the milkman in Norman Jewison’s 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof.
[3]איינשטיין (Einstein) invited הצ׳רצ׳ילים (The Churchills), a leading force in the early Israeli beat scene, to be his backing band on that LP. They played on half of the tracks on it. After that they gigged and recorded three more albums together.
[4] Its basic meaning is ‘homeland’, but in fact it is much much more than that, a feeling, a belonging, a seal of origin.
[5] In His book Almost the Whole Truth, about the inspiration behind his short stories, novels, plays and films, קישון (Kishon) mentions תעלת בלאומילך (The Blaumilch Canal) in passing: The secret is called “Almost the whole… Journalists write about what is interesting, writers write the truth and humorists write an almost the whole truth. What matters is that “almost the whole”. When a slightly tipsy backup worker from the road construction sector pierces the sidewalk in front of our house with a pneumatic drill it is unbearable. But when he digs up the whole city and makes a Blaumilch canal in it, then it suddenly becomes ridiculous. “Eureka!” exclaim serious humour researchers at this point. “Now we have a solution: we just need to start from reality and push things to the absurd.” Eh, if it were that simple… Last year, when I showed my passport to a police officer at the Belgrade airport, he kindly said: “Yeah, Mr. Kishon from Israel!” Suddenly a nice Yugoslav behind me got excited: “Excusez,” he said, “have I heard that the gentleman is from Israel and that his name is Kishon?” I answered in a sonorous voice: “You heard right, sir.” The gentleman was even more excited: “Wouldn’t you perhaps be a relative of the writer Kishon?” I retorted as Lohengrin did when declaring his divine origins in the third act: “No, sir, I’m the writer Kishon in person.” “Too bad,” said the nice gentleman, turning away disappointed and leaving. Funny, isn’t it? At least I like it very much. Unfortunately, that scene didn’t turn out that way. Namely, after his “Too bad” the gentleman continued “Please do not misunderstand me. I have read somewhere in the newspaper that one of your cousins is an Egyptologist like me…” And that’s it. With Egypt, that scene isn’t even half as funny. The story only became comical when I left out the point. Here, therefore, it was not necessary to “push things to the absurd” but the exact opposite. (Retranslated by me.)
[6] He is somehow rather learned in the subjects of תורה (Torah) and תלמוד (Talmud) as well as Yiddish, which is funny since he is obviously a Sephardi Jew!
[7] However, the phrase is also the Italian name of the children game tag.
[8] Alas, as a heavy smoker, שייקה אופיר (Shaike Ophir) died from lung cancer in 1987 at the age of 59.
[9] A hypocoristic of Ervin, in the film it is actually pronounced Arbinka.”
[10] Does this setting not remind your of the love story between convenience store robber H.I. “Hi” McDunnough and police officer Edwina “Ed” in the Coen brothers’ 1987 film Raising Arizona?
Linguist's eye on things 