Plaque commemorating three Levellers shot by Oliver Cromwell in Burford
(Kaihsu Tai, 17 May 2008)

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Profit motive and the whispering wind
(John Gianvito, 2007)

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Toute révolution est un coup de dés
(Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub, 1977)

Grievances / Social Systems (Part 1)

Just published: The Daily Notebook's 3rd Writers' Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2010

My contribution:

NEW: The Social Network (David Fincher, USA)
OLD: The Night Cleaners (Part 1) (Marc Karlin & James Scott, 1975)

WHY: Two films that use the act of giving depositions as a means to explore the interactions of individual emotions and history: David Fincher's The Social Network (2010) uses deposition-based set pieces to showcase the personal grievances that help drive the creation of a new form of social interaction, a sort of computer-powered social efficiency engine. In The Nightcleaners (Part 1) (1975), the Berwick Street Film Collective uses interviews to show the human cost of daily underpaid drudgery and unfairness—the personal grievances that result from participation in an engine of grand economic efficiency.

techne does what it must

Below I've included 2 linguistic and historical digressions that I cut from my piece on Philippe Garrel at The Auteurs. They likely need more fleshing out to stand on their own, but for now:

Our difficulty in separating the 'true story' for the 'true' story has its roots in the earliest Western traditions of abstracted thought (themselves products of the historical moment at which leisure combines with urban life). Take the mythoi of the ancient Greeks: in Homeric Greek, mythos (μῦθος) refers to a thing said, a story being told, without reference to its truth value. The word gains a sense of unbelievability that we can trace along with the rise of "logos"-centic rationalism in the Greek world from the physiologoi of the Ionian school through Herodotus' approach to historia.



and, speaking of the myths propagated by the Romantic artists vis-à-vis artistic creation and inspiration:

* myths propagated, but also revealed: the position of the artist, "freed" from systems of patronage, is reduced to an independent contractor, a speculator in the value of their own work. In this system of proto-neoliberal liberation, one needs a certain degree of madness to undertake art as a career. One can also see in this the decline of the craft of art -- the end of techne -- as art (that is, "art," the mythical process of its creation) moves from the realm of work to the realm of 'inspiration.' The disappearance of artists' schools might be said to be the beginning of the end of the idea of art as a process independent from a metaphysical spirit. [Interesting that we can so easily parallel the rise of individualism in the political and philosophical spheres with the rise of similar myths in the arts, in all cases replacing collectivity and higher virtues to which one answers...]

To those who might source this Romantic myth in some classical ideal of inspiration, the relationship between metaphor and reality in ancient Greece leaves the Muses as more a rhetorical flourish than an actual conception of inspiration's roots (mythos makes no claims to facticity). See also the secular mythmaking by Romantic wits like Edward Bulwer-Lytton: "Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."

The defiance of the whispering wind

The defiance of the whispering wind

According to Shakespeare, men are involved in history in three ways

According to Shakespeare, men are involved in history in three ways: Some create history and are its victims. Others think they create history, and are its victims also. Others yet do not create history, but they too are its victims. The first are the Kings, the second are their assistants who carry out their orders, the third are the simple citizens of the kingdom.
- Un Film Comme Les Autres

'Non', ou A Vã Glória de Mandar

Trailer for Manoel de Oliveira's 1990 film 'Non', ou A Vã Glória de Mandar / No, or the Vain Glory of Command:



2 IMDB user comments makes this seem like Oliveira's anti-colonialist masterpiece:

"Episodes from entire military history of Portugal are told through flashbacks as a professorish soldier recounts them while marching through a Portuguese African colony in 1973. He easily draws his comrades into philosophical musings, and the little contingent suffers badly at the hands of the local military opposition."

"The movie starts in the beginning of the end the of Portuguese Colonial Empire, illustrating the discontent of Portugueses Arm Forces concerning the development of the war in the Portuguese Colonies. At the same time, it demonstrates, in the words of a young Portuguese soldier (as a way of explaining why they are there,in the war), the evolution of the existence of Portuguese State (as a concept or an idea of building independent State). Which shows from Viriato (considered the "first Portuguese" to fight for the independence of the Roman province of Lusitania which now constitutes currently part of Porugal) passing by D. Sebastião (that was a Portuguese king that had a dream of building a Christian empire in northern Africa; from there reconquer the holy land, and after that crowned himself Pope of all Christianity and then overthrown the Pope in Rome)... It's a very profund film, and I consider it a one of the greatest achievements of the Portuguese moderno cinema."

Manoel de Oliveira's O Quinto Império - Ontem Como Hoje

"This historical and utopian obsession with the Fifth Empire seems to have become a reality again. One that has already been tried out by the U.N. and is now being carried out with deep conviction by the European Union. In the meantime, the world is today submitted to a sort of return to the Middle Ages, subjected to an implacable terrorism that victimizes the innocent and which disturbs the U.S.A. as much as Europe, attempting to destroy western civilization. This is a sort of return to an atavistic and incoherent struggle, which is also a return to the mythical Fifth Empire, to the desired one and the hidden one... These are the reasons leading me to give this film the title: THE FIFTH EMPIRE – YESTERDAY AS TODAY." – Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel de Oliveira's O Quinto Império - Ontem Como Hoje (The Fifth Empire - Yesterday As Today)

What is the Fifth Empire?

What does Camões have to do with it?
Luís de Camões, the singular Portuguese literary figure, wrote Os Lusíadas, the great Portuguese national epic. Os Lusíadas chronicles Portugal's voyages of discovery during the 15th and 16th centuries, and shares the sense of a people's great (divinely foreordained) destiny with Virgil's Aeneid. Camões printed the work in 1572, for which he received a stipend from Sebastião. Os Lusíadas, like The Aeneid, is a myth of the past that informs a near-messianic vision of the future of the nation. The poetry of Camões shows up sporadically in O Quinto Império.

"This film to which I am giving the title THE FIFTH EMPIRE - YESTERDAY AS TODAY is based on the theatre play EL-REI SEBASTIÃO, by José Régio. José Régio (1900 to 1968) was a critic, poet, playwright, novelist and essayist; he was a major figure of his time and of today, and the play, as he stated, intended to analyse the King, the Man and the mythical character of the Portuguese King Sebastião.
Sebastião, after the overwhelming defeat at the Battle of Alcácer-Kibir (1578), better known as the Battle of the Three Kings, after which his body was never identified, became the myth of the hidden one, having previously been the desired one and the one destined to receive the myth. A myth which is indeed sung and exalted in the sermons of Father António Vieira (XVII Century), by the philosopher Sampaio Bruno (XIX Century) and in the XX Century by the poet Fernando Pessoa and by the philosopher José Marinho, among other Portuguese writers and psychologists, as well as by some foreign researchers.
Curiously, this myth is also part of the Muslim mythology with the same nomenclature of the hidden one and, just like King Sebastião, the same is supposed to take place with the Muslim Imam (that of the twelfth generation) whose common belief is that he will come on a white horse on a misty morning in order to finally defeat the evil of the world and establish harmony among people." - Manoel de Oliveira

This Oliveira quote gets at why Sebastião is such an interesting figure from a Portuguese perspective, but sidesteps the actual plot of the movie. The film is the process of Sebastião deciding to embark on the crusade that leads to the Battle of Alcácer-Kibir. A bit of background:
In the 16th century, Christian Europe was in the midst of a centuries-long existential conflict with the Muslim world. In 1529 the Ottomans lay siege to Vienna (as would happen again in 1683). The Iberian peninsula had only been retaken from the Moors in 1492. In 1571, the Turkish Sultan had been defeated at Lepanto by Christian forces commanded by Don John of Austria, King Sebastião's grandfather. This film chronicles the leadup to Sebastião's 1578 campaign into Morocco (to choose sides in a civil war). Sebastião ignored the wisdom of his advisers and invaded, leading to the ruin of the Portuguese nation -- it disappeared as an independent nation from 1580 to 1640 (or, arguably, until the end of the Portuguese Restoration War in 1668).

Let's review: in the midst of a long, existential conflict with the Muslim world, a ruler tries to replicate the success of his father - sorry, grandfather - and embarks on an ill-advised mission against the advice of experienced leaders in the country, leading to the ruin of his nation. Oh, and he believes that God put him on the throne to begin with, and hears voices encouraging his actions? Perhaps now is a good time to remind you of the subtitle of the film...

It's clear, though that Oliveira is doing more than critiquing the Bush administration. His first quote tips us off that his critique is of the entire neoliberal order, and the quest to extend global capitalism. Oliveira's implication is that this extension of the values of the West - including capitalism, and even democracy and individual rights - shares essential characteristics with the religious and political aspirations of the Age of Empires. I'd argue that Oliveira doesn't oppose those values so much as recognize that the exertion of power taints both victor and victim, and thus calls into question the exercise of power in "defense" of (or rather, for the extension of) Western values -- rather than questioning the values themselves. Or perhaps I'm projecting...


Stylistically, this is very much a Manoel de Oliveira film. Oliveira uses long static shots of people seated and talking, often while not facing each other. In spite of this, the pace of the film is made (relatively) fast due to how much is being said; for Oliveira, content frequently lies in what we hear. This theatricality and staginess is important to Oliveira because he fully believes that sound is a more important storytelling mechanism than the camera.

And yet, the cinematography is stunning; the pictures I've posted do poor justice to a chiaroscuro brilliance that calls to mind the best of Rembrandt, or the most dramatic lighting of John Alcott's/Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Cinematographer Sabine Lancelin has shot 6 films with Oliveira (most of his recent output), 2 of Chantal Akerman's, and shot Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre. This film is like 3,000 frames of glorious renaissance art, full of vanishing points and shadow and candlelight.
The pace of the film and its artful use of light allow the embrace of architectural beauty; lancet arches and other Gothic forms become focal points in the frame, further historicising the film but also creating a pure formal beauty.


Portrait of Jan Six, 1654. Oil on canvas.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn


still from Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)


The Fifth Empire - Yesterday As Today [Official Site]




Further reading:
Against the Grain: On the Cinematic Vision of Manoel de Oliveira
by Randal Johnson (from 2003)

Youth on the March: The Politics of Colossal Youth

"The past is fraternal, utopian, romantic... The present is resigned, unfortunate, mediocre." - Pedro Costa


Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth / Juventude em Marcha has been rightly praised by English-language cinephiles as a work of uncommon poetic spirit. Costa's mix of documentary and fiction storytelling - going back at least as far as 1997's Ossos - places people in the actual settings of their (marginalized, poverty-stricken) lives, performing a fictional version of their lives. His static camera creates a near-oppressive frame; his actors/nonactors are at once more naturalistic and less expressive than those of Bresson. Costa elides action in favor of repercussion, and uses duration to focus attention; what could be boring forces one to look closer, asking the viewer's eyes to do the work of Bresson's montage and the viewer's thoughts to decode what's been left unsaid.

"[S]ometimes in the cinema, it's just as important not to see, to hide, as it is to show. The cinema is perhaps more a question of concentrating our gaze, our vision of things."¹

Most of what I've read on Costa in English focuses on these formal aspects. Some writers have alluded to Colossal Youth as a political film, but they see it as a politics of stasis and of social oppression, a social-realist portrait of the Portuguese immigrant underclass. This is certainly one aspect of Costa's work, but there is a much deeper level of politics to this film.

BACKGROUND:
Portugal's Estado Novo was an authoritarian regime based on Italian fascism and the heir to the Ditadura Nacional, the product of a conservative military coup in 1926. Beginning in the early 1960's, Portugal's African colonies began their battles for independence. The Portuguese Colonial War began in 1961 with the struggle for Angola, and within 3 years included Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Mozambique - all of Portugal's colonies in Africa. "War," singular, because these national liberation movements were fought by Marxist political parties who linked their struggle (see: Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies). The Cape Verdean revolutionary group, PAIGC, was founded by Amílcar Cabral.²

By the late 60's the Estado Novo faced resistance at home as well as abroad. As the war continued, student unrest provided the ideological underpinning for acts of sabotage: Armed Revolutionary Action (a branch of the Portuguese Communist Party) and the Revolutionary Brigades bombed and sabotaged military targets. Discontent within the army surged as they found themselves attacked by guerrillas in a desperate, unwinnable war. On April 25, 1974, a leftist military coup led by the Movimento das Forças Armadas brought down the Estado Novo. Thousands joined the insurgent soldiers in the streets of Lisbon offering them flowers to place in their guns - this was the Carnation Revolution. The MFA promised 3 D's: Democratisation, Decolonisation and Development.³

Two songs were used to code orders for revolutionary action at the launch of the coup. The first, "E depois do adeus" by Paulo de Carvalho, alerted the rebel captains and soldiers to begin the coup. The second was Zeca Afonso's "Grândola, Vila Morena," a song forbidden on Portuguese radio at the time, which signalled the start of the MFA's takeover and announced the start of the revolution.

FORGOTTEN HISTORIES:
At first glance, Colossal Youth gives the appearance of being almost atemporal, with no clearly delineated narrative, a series of scenes that take place in ambiguously defined present. Though there is some blurring of memory and past/present, the setting of the film is both specific and specifically political. As Costa himself said, "there are two parts to this film, a past and a present of the Fontaínhas, that coincide also with the before and the afterwards of the 25 of April."⁴ The "before" scenes are those of Ventura and Lento in the work shed. They fearfully shut themselves in the shed during the April 25th Revolution. Why would they be afraid of a coup that ends the military dictatorship? Costa:

"I realized that the 25 of April, which for me was an enthusiasm, had been for Ventura a nightmare. He arrives to Portugal in 1972, finds well-paid work, gets a contract. Thinks that he is going to escape. Afterwards comes the Revolution and he tells me the secret history of the Cape Verdean immigrants in Lisbon after April 25th, the history that nobody has yet told. They had a lot fear of being expelled or of ending up in prison. They barricaded themselves. At that time I was in the street, I was an adolescent. During shooting, we found an album of pictures of the demonstrations of the 1st of May with thousands of people celebrating, and it’s incredible: you don’t see one black person. Where were they? Ventura told me that they were all together, paralyzed by fear, hidden in the Jardim da Estrela, afraid for the future. He told me that the military police, in full euphoria, went off at night to the shantytowns to "hunt blacks". It seems that they tied them to the trees to amuse themselves."⁵

The present-day scenes - during and after the destruction of Fontainhas - make up the bulk of the film. The neighborhood's destruction leads Ventura to a new apartment, with room for his children (in spite of the fact that there's no mention of children in his file). Does he ever find them? The "children" of Ventura's never seem to materialize, though some accept their role as surrogate children. Costa has said that Ventura's (missing) children are the "children" of April 25th:

Juventude em marcha is also a film about the failure of the 25 of April, because if the Revolution had succeeded, neither Ventura nor the others would have continued in the same abandonment and in the same unhappiness for the last 30 years. I am not going to bring up the irony of the film’s title, but neither is it possible for me to forget that all the "children" of Ventura are children of April 25th. Filming these things the way I did does not put much faith in democracy. People like Ventura built the museums, the theaters, the condominiums of the middle-class. The banks and the schools. As still happens today. And that which they helped to build was what defeated them. There are two parts to this film, a past and a present of the Fontaínhas, that coincide also with the before and the afterwards of the 25 of April. The past is fraternal, utopian, romantic. In this time is the story of the love-letter that Ventura repeats. The present is resigned, unfortunate, mediocre."⁶

COLOSSAL YOUTH vs JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA:
"Colossal Youth" comments on the passage of time and the weight of memory. "Juventude em marcha" carries this meaning as well, but also implies the failure of past radicalism. "Juventude em marcha," literally "Youth on the march," is a revolutionary slogan implying the change of the old order. Ventura is an old man, though, long since left behind by this march. This is a story of the aftermath of revolution as well as the aftermath of youth, and the way we are haunted by ghosts of our past. Ventura spends much of the film looking for his children, but cannot find them. He also asks after Vanda's mother. She responds: "Ventura, my mother's buried in Amadora Cemetery." Ventura's memory is misdirected, his memories shuffled; his head bandage implies as much. To explain his head wound, he says "I slipped and fell off the scaffold." As we learn later, it was not Ventura that slipped and fell, but Lento - and the fall was fatal. Seeing Lento in the 'present' of the film, Ventura himself is literally haunted by the loss of his younger self's hopes for the future. Also in the film's present, Vanda (a recovering drug addict, supplied with methadone by the state) speaks to Ventura about the problems of drugs and poverty: "When they give us white rooms, we'll stop seeing these things." Whether this is genuinely hopeful or fatalistically resigned because it is so plainly untrue, we can recognize this as a call for revolution.
Ventura's hopes as a young man certainly involved such a revolution. In the film's past, he plays a record for Lento, Labanta Braço by Os Tubarões:

Labanta Braço - Os Tubarões

The lyrics are as follows:

Labanta braço se bô grita bô liberdade (x4)

Grita povo independanti
Grita povo liberdado

Cinco di Julho sinonimo di liberdadi
Cinco di Julho caminho aberta pa flicidadi

Grita "viva Cabral"
Honra combatentes di nos terra

[my English translation:]
Raise your arms up to shout for freedom (x4)

Cry out independent people
Cry out liberated people

The 5th of July, synonym for liberation
The 5th of July, open path to happiness

Cry out "Long live Cabral”
Honor the fighters of our land

As Rui Gardnier pointed out, this is a liberation song, but again the political context is more specific; it is a Cape Verdean liberation song, celebrating newfound independence (the 'Cabral' mentioned is Amílcar Cabral; Cape Verde earned its independence from Portugal on July 5, 1975). That is to say, it's an anti-colonial anthem, being listened to by immigrants from the colonies living in the capital of the (former) Empire. Ventura's unreliable memory adds an even more poignant political dimension to this song at the film's end, when he sings "Grita, grita Cabral." Instead of a celebration of a successful revolution, he cries for change, replacing the 'long live' with another cry. For Ventura as well as for Costa, the film chronicles the need for change, and itself cries out for a revolution that lives up to its ideals. The revolution misremembered itself and left Ventura - and all his children - forgotten.


NOTES ON THE PIECE ABOVE:
Special thanks to André Dias at Ainda não começámos a pensar for excerpting that invaluable interview with Pedro Costa, that I wouldn't have otherwise discovered (anyone know where I can get it in full?).
All translations are my own; anyone with a better knowledge of Portuguese than mine is encouraged to offer suggested corrections (especially for the song lyrics, which are in a Cape Verdean criole). I would love to expand this into an article for publication, if there's a venue for it, so any feedback is appreciated. [I'd also like to do an in-depth analysis of the way memory works in the film, but that's a project for another day.]
If you've made it this far, you should watch this trailer for the film:





¹ from Pedro Costa's lectures on film at the Tokyo Film School in March of 2004, collected and published in Rouge as A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing.
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² Amilcar Cabral's political thought and role in the liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde is discussed at some length in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil.
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³ For more, see Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal (Robert Kramer and Philip Spinelli, 1977).
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^{4, 5, 6} My translation of 2 sections of an interview excerpted at Ainda não começámos a pensar, from an original interview with Pedro Costa entitled "Guarda a minha fala para sempre." Interview conducted by Francisco Ferreira, published in the Nov 25, 2006 edition of Expresso-Actual.
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