The World: World Book podcast has an interview with the artist for the graphic novel version of Waltz With Bashir. Quite interesting, especially the question if the book is just trying to cash in on the movie.
Month: February 2009
Alias Nick Beal – A Review
Alias Nick Beal (1949) is a rare film noir that until recently was thought lost. Universal, though, has found the negative and a new print of this Faustian noir was show at Siff’s recent film noir festival. It is an excellent film that mixes mysterious cinematography, great acting and a good story to produce an atmospheric morality play with plenty of dark edges.
The film features Ray Milland as Nick Beal, the devil, who upon hearing a crusading DA say he’d give his soul to convict a big time criminal begins to tempt the DA. The DA is a good man only concerned with eradicating crime and helping kids with his foundation, but little by little Nick ingratiates himself in the DA’s life. First, he gives the DA the evidence he needs to convict the man even though he has to steal it. The theft is only the first step to loosing is soul. Along the way Nick arranges it so that the DA becomes Governor and has an affair with Audrey Totter. Totter’s character is a good woman who is seduced by the glamor Nick showers her with and the threat that Nick will tell the cops her where abouts, which scares her because she is wanted for something she didn’t do. Eventually, the DA, now the Governor, signs away his soul—not that he knows it. He only thinks he will go to the Isla de Almas Perdidas if he doesn’t keep Nick in the role of the Keeper of the State Seal. When Nick tries to collect on the bargin, the DA’s friend, a minister, accidently drops his bible on the contract. Nick, of course, can’t pick up the contract and so he cannot collect. The DA just barely escapes.
Ray Milland makes the movie work. His Nick is a malevelant man, always ready with an answer or money, cold, short tempered, and demanding. He doesn’t take no for an answer and seems to know everything. He almost seems to have the power to make one change their mind and what is worse, knows exactly what one is going to say. There is a particullarly brilliant scene where Nick tells Trotter how to convince the DA he should leave his wife. She is unconvinced it will work, but later he says exactly what Nick said he would. What makes the scene brilliant is the elment of commentary, as if the film makers were saying, this what they do in every film, of course it is going to work. Milland also gives Nick an unblinking stare and an expression that says he is ready to kill at a moment’s notice.When ever he enters a scene it becomes dark.
In true noir form, the DA battles between good and evil. His battle through most of the movie is one of little steps to damination. It isn’t so much the devil that makes him do it, but little compromises with his ideals. The DA, unfortunately, is a little too good, and his slide into darkness is a little too much. What makes it worse, though, is his sudden reversal. It is not his action, but divine intervention: the bible falls on the contract. Does this mean that to redemtion is a heavinly lottery that saves people from time to time? If the slide from good to bad was a little heavy handed, the sudden reversal undoes any responsibility one has to take. The DA had recanted the mistakes he had made, but he should have had to do more. The film, though, is more concernd with spiritual redemption and defeating the devil can only be done with the God’s help.
Despite the heavy handed morality play the film is solid. Every scene Milland is in is excellent and when he comes out of the havy fog that seems to permiate half the scenes he is the embodiment of evil. The cinemotography alone is worth watching. It is too bad the film isn’t available on DVD.
Night Editor – A Review
The more obscure the noir film, the more it adheres to the genre’s conventions and Night Editor is as obscure and as B as they get. As film noir it has the classic femme fatal and the good man gone wrong who must choose between keeping a secret that will ruin him and doing the right thing. A cop (William Gargan) and his married socialite lover (blond Janis Carter) witness a brutal murder while making out by the ocean. He tries to apprehend the murderer but is afraid he will ruin his marriage and career both of which he has been putting in jeopardy to have the affair. She doesn’t want him to tell the truth because it will ruin her too. Naturally, such inaction is never rewarded and the cops soon arrest another man and accuse him with the murder, eventually sentencing him to the chair. Gargan’s character is wracked with guilt and tries to figure out how to do the right thing while keeping out of trouble. Of course that is impossible because the basic premise of a noir is the conflict between doing the right thing and saving yourself. What makes his problem worse is his lover, now ex-lover, doesn’t want to go to the police. Instead, she has taken up with the killer and is now protecting him, partly as revenge because he left her and partly because she is intoxicated by the murder, and partly because she thinks the victim deserved it. Although she turns fatal quite quickly, she is the true fatal: cold, ruthless, selfish, and sexy. The cop gets more and more irritable until his partner, a wise and kindly German, gets him to tell him the truth. The cop realizes he has evidence that will corroborate his story so they go to his ex-lover’s home to confront her. He finds her alone in the kitchen and after he has told her she has no way out she stabs him with an ice pick.
Night Editor, though, is not an existential fable of the best noir, but a morality play and though Carter’s character gives the movie a trashy joy, it suffers from its earnestness. First, the cop’s family is in such stark opposition to the jaded and glamorous world his lover comes from, it is obvious that the cop has made a mistake. How could one leave such an ideal world? Moreover, the film is more concerned with the rightness or wrongness of the affair, not what led to it, which would make room for moral ambiguity.
However, what makes the film completely awkward is the frame story that surrounds the movie. The film takes the name Night Editor because the framing device is a news room where editors talk about old stories. As the film opens a young reporter walks into the news room and passes out at his desk. The wise old editor decides to tell the story of a cop who had a good family and went astray. At the end of the movie when the editor has told the story, the young report sees the light and renounces the parting he has been doing. He goes to the restroom to buy cigarettes and there he meets the cop who now works as a mens room attendant. The reporter is so overcome by this example of where a bad decision can lead he heads right home to apologize.
Night Editor is one of those noir films that show just how common place the conventions of noir were and just how the basic elements were used as a template for the most B films. In many ways, its as if a certain number of films need love scenes and a certain number needed to have vicious blonds. What does it say about an era that needed to use women as mirrors for men’s consciouses.
Review of Modern Arabic Fiction in Al-Ahram
There is a good review of the Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology
Likewise, in her anthologies, she argues that only poets can render poetry and only fiction writers can render fiction from another language. Thus she is adamant about having two translators for each work: a scholar and a native speaker from the original to English, revised by a writer in the target language, with her editing the final version to make sure that no stylistic or semantic errors have crept in.
Jayyusi acquainted herself with the literary scene in the US and UK and got to know personally many English-speaking creative writers and convinced them to partake in her many projects of translation.
The article also comments on the selection of the authors and the quality of the translations. Since Gamal Al-Ghitani has just won the Zayed prize the reviewer’s descrption sounds even more intriguing.
Jayyusi’s approach to Arabic fiction is marked by an analysis of its content and technique. In content, she sees fiction as a reflection of the turbulent history of modern Arabs, with hopes and dreams followed by disappointments and breakdowns — what she calls a sense of the apocalyptic. She points to a few names that stand out as models of certain trends in Arabic fiction: the Saudi ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif for his petrofiction depicting how oil has changed the ecology and the culture of the Gulf; the Egyptian Gamal al-Ghitani for his sophisticated use of time — mythical time in Kitab al-Tajalliyat (Book of Revelations) and historical time in Zayni Barakat ; the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani for his sense of space and loss of place; the Egyptian Edward al-Kharrat as a modernist and an experimentalist; the Palestinian Ibrahim Nasralla as venturing into postmodernism; and the Iraqis Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman and Fu’ad al-Takarli for depicting the individual struggling against prevailing moeurs. As for the short story, Jayyusi concentrates in her introduction on two figures, the Egyptian Yusuf Idris and the Syrian Zakaria Tamir. Needless to say dozens of others are mentioned, including Ibrahim al-Koni and Radwa Ashour.
Sudan Novelist Tayeb Salih Dies
Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih died. The BBC has an article about him. The Leonard Lopate Show has an appreciation last summer of his work Season of Migration to the North
Best Sellers in Chile February 5 to 11
It wouldn’t be any worse than the best seller lists in the States except they had to import the nonsense that fills their charts. It is too bad globalization means even your local hack has to worry about being outsourced.
The Best of Spanish Language Literature to Be Digitized
El País had an article a few weeks ago noting that some of the greats of Spanish literature will be available on the web, including Camilo José Cela, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Delibes, Julio Cortázar, Juan Marsé y Juan Goytisol. All of these will be available through the website Leer-e.
I’m not sure what I think of electronic books, but it is nice to see this isn’t part of the Amazon monopoly.
Gamal al-Ghitani Wins Zayed Book Award in Literature
Gamal al-Ghitani won the Zayed Book Award for Literature recently. I don’t know how important the award is (are any awards important?) but there is a nice list of his works. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know what the Arabic names are, not that I can speak Arabic, but it makes it a little easier to compare different lists of his books. It also makes it easier for to figure out which books of his I have read. I only see three listed that I have read: Zayni Barakat; Pyramid texts; Naguib Mahfooz Remembers. I have also read the collection of stories A Distress Call and the novel Incidents in Zanfrani Alley, or as it is known in German, Der safranische Fluch oder Wie Impotenz die Welt verbessert, which, if you can believe Google, means Saffron curse or how the world improves impotence, certainly a more fun sounding title and one that gives you a better sense of the book. As far as I know there is also one story in the collection Sardines and Oranges and one in the Columbia Modern Arabic Fiction, both of which I’ll be reading this year. A Distress Call and Incidents in Zanfrani Alley are almost impossible to find. I’ve never found them on the Internet. Fortunately, there is a large university near by if I were to want to read them again.
For someone who is one has been called one of the great Arabic fiction writers, it is too bad more isn’t translated. But then again since so little is translated it is a wonder this many of his works have been translated. I have posted a review of Naguib Mahfooz Remembers (published as The Mahfouz Dialogs).
Fiction:
- Chronicles of a Young Man Who Lived a Thousand Years Ago
- Al Zayni Barakat
- Pyramid texts
- Siege from Three Directions
- Stranger’s Tales
- Book of Revelations (3 vols.)
- Midnight of Exile
- Jungles of the Town
Studies:
- Watchmen of Eastern Gate
- Naguib Mahfooz Remembers
- Mustafa Ameen Remembers
- Views of Cairo a Thousand Years Ago
- Endowments in Cairo
- Pigeon Fever
Lobo Antunes to Write Only One More Novel
EL PAÍS notes that António Lobo Antunes is going to stop writing after his next novel.
António Lobo Antunes announced yesterday that he will write a novel to “round out his works” and that after he will not publish anything more. In the declaration published yesterday by Diário de Notícias, the Portuguese writer confirmed that after Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar?, the book he is finishing now and will publish in October, he will begin another novel that he thinks he will finish after two you years of work and then after “that will be the end of novels, articles, everything; I will not publish anything more. My voice, spoken or written, will not be heard again. “
António Lobo Antunes anunció ayer que escribirá una novela para “redondear su obra” y que después no publicará más. En unas declaraciones publicadas ayer por Diário de Notícias, el escritor luso afirma que tras Que Cavalos São Aqueles Que Fazem Sombra no Mar?, el libro que está terminando y publicará en octubre, empezará una novela que calcula que le llevará dos años de trabajo y que luego “se acabaron las novelas, las crónicas, todo, no publico nada más. Mi voz, hablada o escrita, no se volverá a escuchar”.
Sad if it is true, but I wonder how can one know they only have one more novel left in them.
Larry Wilmore at Elliott Bay Books
Larry Wilmore from the Daily Show was at Elliott Bay Books yesterday evening. He is on a book tour for his new book I’d Rather We Got Casinos, and Other Black Thoughts. The book is a collection of fake interviews, essays, radio shows that he wrote over the last year. He was inspired to write by Woody Allen’s early books, which Wilmore thinks are funny. It is an interesting influence and one I might not have guessed, I suppose because Allen is so unfunny now, but Take the Money and Run and Love and Death are quite funny.
Since Wilmore is a comedian the evening was very funny. You never know how an author who doesn’t primarily work through books will address a crowd in a bookstore. The last writer I saw like that was Johan Bruneel, the author of a book on bike racing, but usually I see novelists. Wilmore gave a short run down of his history as a writer and comedian, which most people probably don’t know, but is extensive and makes for some good stories. He then talked about his book and read through the table of contents finding titles he liked and explaining what the bit was about. I’ve never seen an author do that and if he wasn’t funny it would have painful. Eventually he read (and like a good reader, used voices for each character) and answered questions.
It was refreshing to see someone break the conventions of the reading a bit and do something a little different, even if it wouldn’t work for anyone else.
Tomás Eloy Martínez Interview in El País
There is an excellent interview with Tomás Eloy Martínez in El País Sunday. The interview covers his thoughts on journalism, especially new journalism, and how the Internet is changing journalism, mostly for the bad. It also covers how he got his start at a journalist—it paid more than an academic career and had better prospects. He also talks about his approach to writing La Novela de Peron and Santa Evita. For the former he wanted to use the tools of fiction to tell a true story, and in the later he wanted to use the tools of journalism to tell a completely fake story.
He says he thinks that literature should be disobedience:
If literature is not disobedient it is not literature. Literature, like journalism, at root are acts of transgression, ways of looking a little bit past your limits, past your nose. Everything I have written in my life are acts in a search for freedom. Nothing gave me more pleasure when I was publishing my first articles en La Gaceta de Tucumán than my mother would say to my sisters: “We have to go to mass to pray for the soul of Tomás who is completely lost.
“La literatura si no es desobediencia no es. La literatura, como el periodismo, son centralmente actos de transgresión, maneras de mirar un poco más allá de tus límites, de tus narices. Todo lo que he escrito en la vida son actos de búsqueda de libertad. Nada me daba más placer -cuando publicaba mis primeros artículos en La Gaceta de Tucumán- que mi madre le dijera a mis hermanas: “Tenemos que ir a misa a rezar por el alma de Tomás, que está totalmente perdida”.
About the Internet and journalism he isn’t the most hopefull.
Q. But there already has been yellow journalism.
A. It existed and it exists. What happened is that this potential multiplied the poser of the yellow journalists. Every day we see signs of this type of journalism that manifests itself en the form of an accusation. I wrote a column about the carnage that got hold of Ingrid Betancourt and Clara Rojas when they were liberated from the FARC. Serious journalists with a long career added fuel to the fire of gossip about the intimacy of the exhostages.
Q. How would the limits be established?
A. This is the basic work of editors. […]
P. Pero ya había periodismo amarillo.
R. Lo había y lo hay. Lo que pasa es que esto potencia, multiplica, la fuerza del periodista amarillo. Todos los días vemos señales de este tipo de periodismo que se manifiesta en forma de acusación. Escribí una columna sobre la carnicería que se hizo con Ingrid Betancourt y con Clara Rojas cuando fueron liberadas por las FARC. Periodistas muy serios, con una larga trayectoria, añadieron leña al fuego de los chismes sobre la intimidad de las ex rehenes.
P. ¿Cómo tendrían que establecerse los límites?
R. Este es un trabajo básico de los editores. […]
Vilnius Poker – A Brief Review
I just finished reading Vilnius Poker
I will have a full review at the Quarterly Conversation in April.
Mexico Going Bilingual?
La Plaza reports that Tamaulipas has declared itself bilingual and will teach English to 300,000 students in the state. Interesting idea and makes one wonder if the US could ever do such a thing.
Waltz With Bashir in the Nation
Turkish Noir on Leonard Lopate
The authors of Istanbul Noir (Akashic Noir)
Scenes from Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s From A Drifting Life
Words Without Borders has a short section from the Manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s new book From A Drifting Life, which is forthcoming from Drawn and Quarterly. As usual, Tatsumi mixes a bit of manga history with everyday life in Japan after the war. Even if you don’t read graphic novels, it is interesting.
Waltz With Bashir at Words Without Borders
Words Without borders is featuring graphic novels this month and included in collection are several pages from the graphic novel of Waltz With Bashir. The pages capture the same fearfulness as the film and are a good taste if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
They also include an interview with David Polonsky, the artist behind the film. Of particular interest to me were so of his stylisic choices.
“The script said there were flares over the camp,” said Polonsky. “I remembered the flares from Haifa, where I grew up. The navy would always hold maneuvers, and they would shoot up these flares into the sky that painted the whole town dark orange. So this was my starting point, this memory. I later developed it into a motif, with the same orange flame appearing in the eyes of the mad dogs and in the sky. Then, in the end, when the flares burst out and take over everything in Sabra and Shatila, it’s like a repressed memory of violence erupting and burning everything underneath the sky.”
A Sad Telegram
Speaking of the darker sides of life, the LA Time’s Daily Mirror blog had this short and sad piece. It reminds me of the Hemingway’s 6 word short story: For sale, baby shoes. Never used.
Tribute to El Caso – Spain’s Crime Paper
El País has an interesting article about El Caso, a trashy crime tabloid from the Franco period. It is not the material they covered that is so unique, but how popular it was within Spain and how it carved out a space for the salacious in the Catholic Dictatorship.
The film director Pere Costa, one of the editors of El Caso, explained how at the hands of Eugenio Suárez its inclusion as a section of the daily Marid came to an end, and became a weekly “with the condition to no publish more than one Spanish assassination a week.” The 12,000 issues of its first run grew to 100’s of thousands, and its readership was even greater because it was normal for it to be read out loud to a group.
El director de cine Pere Costa, uno de los redactores de El Caso, explicó como de sección fija del diario Madrid pasó, de la mano de Eugenio Suárez, a semanario “con la condición de no publicar más de un asesinato español por semana”. Los 12.000 ejemplares semanales del primer número fueron creciendo a cientos de miles, aunque su audiencia fue mucho mayor, pues era normal que se leyera en voz alta y en grupo.
It is worth a read if you are interested in crime fiction.
Waltz With Bashir – A Review
To use the word beautiful is obscene, and powerful is the over used cousin of interesting, and so the best word to describe Waltz With Bahir, the brilliant film from Ari Folman that captures the alienation and denial that comes with the savagery of war, is unsettling. From its blend of haunting images and music to its searing yet dispassionate exploration of one man’s participation in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Waltz With Bashir is not just a simple war film, but a pained conscience from one of the more ugly episodes between Israel and Beirut.
From the outset as a pack of wild dogs run down an Israeli street, knocking over chairs and tables in outdoor cafés only to stop and look stare up at a haunted veteran, you know the film is going to mix the horrific and disturbed flash backs to not only explain the war itself, but its power to still haunt the survivors. At first images—the pack of dogs, men bathing under flare light—are shown without any explanation and they seem otherworldly, figments of an unsettled mind. All you have are the uncontextualized images as if to simulate the fragmentary nature of memory. Folman, though, can’t can’t remember what happened during the war. All he can remember is swimming on the Beirut sea shore at night while flares light sky. It is one of those hauntingly beautiful moments of cinematographic war that maybe shouldn’t exist, but gives one the impression of complete senselessness—why should one even have the chance to bathe as if it were your private beach, while bombs are falling else where? Yet like a similar scene in Apocolapse Now that makes beauty out of the perverse it shows the soldiers as they truly are: isolated in a world where beauty can become flares over a destroyed city.
To find recover his memory, Folman begins to interview his comrades. The men often talk for some time and through the interviews the film regains its documentary quality. The interviews give the story more than just one voice and let the soldiers have a chance to speak for themselves. They also help to illustrate Folman’s point that memory of war, especially the most traumatic incidents, are seldom remember accurately, if at all. Between the interviews Folman recreates the scenes the men describe. The scenes are typical of so many soldiers sent into modern, urban warfare—young men who are scared, who shoot at anything, and are more interested in drinking and going to clubs, and whose frustrated ambivalence only makes the lives of the populace worse. There are the heroic moments when a soldier swims to safety after all his comrades are killed, and the horrific when the men shoot up a family in a car.
Folman continues to weave scenes together, some adding more details, others countering what came before, but each succeeding scene showing the war in darker and darker terms, until he finally gets to the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It is here that the full weight of the move comes and it is clear that for Folman this was the worst part of the war for him and even though he didn’t remember the camps, he could remember an image that he shows over and over and only at the camps do we understand it. We understand that the movie, like the war itself, has been moving relentlessly towards the massacre and each of the interviewees, soldiers like himself, tell what little part they had, but how they knew or sensed that something was wrong or are just haunted by it now. And when the killing is done and the soldiers move back into the camps they describe what they see and at first it is drawn, an animation like the rest of the movie, but then Folman switches to actual fotage. Perhaps the animation is no longer subtule; perhaps it places too many layers between the actual and the viewer. It is strong stuff and he wisely ends the movie there with little comment.
For Folman the war was a senseless in so many ways and Israel deserves a great deal of blame for the massacre. The movie portrays the whole incursion into Beruit as a mistake that didn’t lead to anything positive. It lead to senseless deaths of Israelis and Beruitis and in Israel no one even seemed to care. In one of the more disillusioning moments, Folman returns home to Israel for a 48 hour leave and finds that life has gone on as if there wasn’t a war going on. He notes that in the 1973 war everyone stayed at home, but in this war they are at clubs. Folman, if he was not already uncertain about the war, now feels farther from its purpose and farther from the civilian world that doesn’t even care what is going on in its name. It is in these contrasts, between home and the front, massacres and soldiers on drinking bouts, that Folamn questions the war and suggests if it was so easy to ignore, so easy to get carried away, so easy to feel purposeless, then why did we fight it, and maybe this is why he had forgotten it.
Stylistically, Waltz With Bashir is impressive, blending what seems at times completely realistic with the unreal that only animation can provide. Although documentary suggests hard edged reality, the use of animation brings a greater realism to the story because it illustrates the perceptions and memories more than the flat realism that stock footage could provide. Moreover, animation lets the movie movie past pure documentary into the interpretive where the viewer sees the film maker’s interpretation of the scenes, even though the viewer is also hearing the narration from the participant. It creates a dual layer of story telling and one that checks the veracity of the other. The use of music, too, is more than just documentary filler, but a the subtle rejoinder to the hopelessness. The score itself is sparse, and in between are Enola Gay from OMD and This Is Not A Love Song from PIL that add a dark and disjointed feel to the film. The scene in the club when Folman is on leave uses PIL’s sarcastic sensability to underscore the futility of Folman’s experience.
All of these elements, the animation, the score, the interviews, make Waltz With Bashir a brilliant and troubling film that will stick with one for quite some time.
By The Firelight 