I really enjoyed this film. Having been recently ruminating once more on the sociological pathology of Honour Killings and the necessity to control the chastity of young females in most patriarchical societies, this film made me wonder whether it was indeed the birth of the Austrian-’Jewish’ school of psychoanalysis which led to the advent of the liberation of female sexuality in Western society. This may be obvious to some, but I find the potential of this quite intriguing. Especially in light of my introduction to Otto Gross from this movie. He actually deserves a separate post on his own (soon). I think psychoanalysis may be owed a great debt by the Western Society generally, a society which today is quite distinct from its Victorian Era incarnation, having had so many taboos and inter-related psychic truths brought out of closets into the public to be acknowledged and dealt with.The writing in this film is quite erudite, making one almost want to take notes at times. Such as the questioning of WHY humans, while such sexual animals, have this overwhelming need to repress this sexuality at the same time. This of course, is what the foundation of psychoanalysis was all about–the search for an understanding of this unfortunate duality…which inevitably leads to emotional baggage in a great number of humanoids.This film is recommended for neurotic uber-ruminators. Perhaps as a elementary introduction to the history of psychoanalysis. Also do readThe Interpretation of Murder.
-rudhro
Keira Knightley in ‘A Dangerous Method’ — Oscar-Worthy or Laughable?
By Sharon Knolle
Sep 2nd 2011
Keira Knightley’s bold performance in David Cronenberg’s ‘A Dangerous Method’ is splitting critics at the Venice Film Festival, who are finding her role as an uninhibited mental patient “fabulous” or laughable. Either way, those who’ve seen the film agree that her approach is extreme. (more…)
Despite decades of opposition from the right, and recent personal setbacks, Gloria Steinem remains one of the most outspoken and visible symbols of the women’s movement today. Produced and directed by Emmy®-winning documentary filmmaker Peter Kunhardt (HBO’s “JFK: In His Own Words” and “Teddy: In His Own Words”), GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS blends interviews of Steinem in her Manhattan apartment, archival footage, photographs from throughout her life and clips from press interviews over the years. Among those interviewing Steinem in the film are Barbara Walters, Helen Gurley Brown, Phil Donahue and Larry King. The documentary also features archival footage of such prominent women’s movement figures as National Organization for Women (NOW) co-founder Betty Friedan, congresswoman Bella Abzug and civil rights advocate Flo Kennedy.
GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS chronicles Steinem’s emergence as a driving force in the modern women’s liberation movement. She recalls beginning her career as a journalist in New York City in the early 1960s and making headlines with an expose on the working conditions of Playboy Bunnies, noting, “I learned what’s it’s like to be hung on a meat hook.”
Having had an abortion at age 22 (which she kept secret at the time), Steinem’s political awakening accelerated when she covered an abortion hearing for New York Magazine in 1969 and learned of the horrifying and humiliating experiences women endured attempting to exercise their right to reproductive freedom. She began to seek out everything she could find on the burgeoning women’s movement and helped lead the nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality march on Aug. 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of the enactment of women’s suffrage. It was, Steinem notes, “the first time in my life, and I think for many other women too, that we marched for ourselves.”
Since then, Steinem has been ever-present on the front lines of social activism, co-founding Ms. Magazine, where she continues to serve as a consulting editor, in 1972, despite media speculation about the publication’s viability. She recalls that at the time “there was nothing for women to read that was controlled by women.” Steinem became the public face of the women’s rights movement, participating in marches, making media appearances and also weathering the inevitable backlash, feeling she had to work twice as hard to not be judged by her looks. Indeed, Steinem would become almost as well-known for her distinct style as for her political activism, remembering that her streaked blonde locks were inspired by the character Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Her signature aviator glasses were about concealment, she reveals, saying, “The bigger they were, the more I felt I could hide behind them.” GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS also explores Steinem’s early days. Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, she studied tap dance as a child and watched her mother give up a career as a journalist to have children. Her parents had a rocky marriage and ultimately divorced. Steinem, who attended Smith College, wonders whether devoting so much of her time and energy to the women’s movement was a way to avoid the kind of suffering her mother experienced.
The film also looks at the challenges Steinem has faced in later years. Diagnosed with breast cancer soon after turning 50, she underwent surgery and radiation.“The cancer served a real purpose, making me a little bit more conscious of time,” she observes. Taking a break from public life after decades of traveling nonstop, Steinem “hit bottom” and began to look internally, writing the self-esteem book “Revolution from Within” in the early ‘90s. Interviewed at the time, she noted, “Being a social activist can be a drug that keeps you from going back and looking at yourself.”
And after decades of remaining single, she married entrepreneur David Bale – father of actor Christian Bale – in 2000, but he died after they had been married just over three years. GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS is produced by Peter Kunhardt and Sheila Nevins; directed by Peter Kunhardt; editing and graphic design by Phillip Schopper; original music by Michael Bacon. For Kunhardt McGee Productions: executive producer, Dyllan McGee. For HBO: supervising producer, Jacqueline Glover.
This was one of the best BBC documentaries I’ve ever seen, reminiscent of PLANET EARTH and just as in depth and in vivid colour, but rather than the natural world, it focuses on the civilizations that occupied the subcontinent since the time of the first humans to leave Africa. Superb–and I’m not merely saying that due to a DNA connection, I would have enjoyed this were it from any corner of the world. This is an intense study of the history of mankind, and the journey we’ve all taken thus far.
–rudhro
The Story of India is a BBC TV documentary series, written and presented by historian Michael Wood, about the 10,000-year history of the Indian subcontinent in six episodes.
An accompanying text was published by BBC Books.
As in most of his documentaries, Wood explains historical events by travelling to the places where they took place, examining archeological and historical evidence at first hand and interviewing historians and archaeologists, as well as chatting with local people. (more…)
Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Parisentreats us to live in the present. To obsessively, sentimentally or romantically look to times past is fraught with biases in perspection, the film shows. If one considers the 1920s in Paris as the greatest time to have been alive, the people living in that present may have thought it the 1890s which were even better…and those of the 1890s may have leaned more toward the French Revolution.
In short, none of us may perceive the present as exhibiting the ‘magic’ they may read into earlier times, prior to their birth.
I think I realized something similar regarding the Sixties–the most recent ‘magic’ time we are recounted of. Greenwich Village, the poets, the rockers, the thinkers, and the protests. Was it really, though, any different then as it is today? Were contemporaneous people AWARE of the ‘magic’? Potentially not. They themselves may have in turn longed for earlier, ‘simpler’, more romantic times.
As I watched this film something occurred to me about the Norway massacre of a few days past. What Anders Behring Breivik was perhaps seeking was a return to his conceptualized ‘romanticized past’–before colonialization, before globalization, before immigration, before the world became so small, and before tribal identities were potentially perceived as ‘endangered’ due to one’s fear of dilution, segmentization and diminishment of what it meant to identify with one’s clansmen. (more…)
This guy experienced more global intrigue than James Bond.
Sunday , June 5 , 2011
Excerpted with the permission of Penguin Books India from His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire by Sugata Bose
To Emilie, with love
That Subhas Chandra Bose met and fell in love with Austrian Emilie Schenkl in Vienna in the 1930s is well documented. But in a new book on his granduncle, historian Sugata Bose explains why they chose to keep their relationship and marriage a closely guarded secret. Despite the ‘enormous, intense’ love that Bose felt for Schenkl, his ‘first love’ was his country. An extract
WIFE AND DAUGHTER: Emilie and Anita, November 1948. Courtesy: Netaji Research Bureau
From the second week of June 1934, [Subhas Chandra] Bose settled down in Vienna, since he had a contract from the publishing company Wishart to write a book on the Indian struggle since 1920. In the course of looking for clerical help with preparing the manuscript Subhas met a woman who would bring about a dramatic change in his personal life…
It was June 24, 1934. A petite and pretty young woman named Emilie Schenkl arrived to be interviewed for the clerical job. Born on December 26, 1910, to an Austrian Catholic family, she knew English, could take dictation in shorthand and had competent typing skills. Jobs were scarce during the Depression. Her father, a veterinarian, was initially somewhat reluctant to let his daughter work for a strange Indian man, but in time her whole family — father, mother and sister — developed a warm relationship with Subhas. Emilie had a gentle, cheerful, straightforward and unselfish nature, which Su-bhas found appealing. He came to respect her strength of will and affectionately called her “Baghini” meaning “Tigress” in Bengali. “He started it,” Emilie states categorically about the romantic turn in their relationship. Their intimacy grew as they spent time together in Austria and Czechoslovakia from mid-1934 to March 1936…
Subhas Chandra Bose, according to his close friend and political associate A.C.N. Nambiar, was a “one-idea man: singly for the independence of India.” “I think the only departure,” he adds, “if one might use the word ‘departure’, was his love for Miss Schenkl; otherwise he was completely absorbed. He was deeply in love with her, you see. In fact, it was an enormous, intense love.” … (more…)
A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse… (more…)
This is the most current (2010) trailer for Hooked on Growth, a documentary examining the superstitions and addictions we need to leave behind in order to become a sustainable civilization. Join the global grass roots network helping to fund, produce, distribute and spread the word about this non-profit project athttp://www.growthbusters.org
As pretty much everyone knows by now, Inception‘s titular concept is the placement of an idea into a character’s subconscious — a notion that the film presents as being more or less unprecedented. And the plot mostly concerns the efforts of our heroes, led by master dream extractor Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to somehow convince Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir to a major energy titan, to split up his father’s empire, without realizing that the idea came from them. But since this is a Christopher Nolan movie, we’re not convinced it’s all that simple; the director’s films almost always turn in on themselves. We think there might be another inception going on in Inception. Needless to say, there are spoilers here, so you should probably not read this if you haven’t seen the film. (Though if you haven’t seen the film, you probably won’t know what the hell we’re talking about anyway.) (more…)
Uttam Kumar(3 September 1926 – 24 July 1980) born as Arun Kumar Chatterjee; was the greatest legendary actor of Indian Bengalicinema. He is fondly called the iconic Mahanayak or the “Great Hero” of Bengali cinema. He was born Arun Kumar Chatterjee on 3 September 1926 in Kolkata.
He had been an actor, director and producer. Apart from acting in a good number of Bengali films such as Saptapadi, Harano Sur, Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (The Hero) and Chiriyakhana (The Zoo, a thriller written by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, in which he played the famous Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi), he has acted in some Hindi films like “Chhoti si Mulaqat” (with Vyjayantimala Bali), Amanush (with Sharmila Tagore), Ananda Ashram(with Sharmila Tagore), Kitaab and Dooriyaan.
There is a theatre(Uttam Mancha)in his name in Kolkata.A life-size statue has been erected near Tollygunj metro station which has recently been renamed after the iconic actor by the central railway ministry.Besides,Shilpi Sansad,the actor’s pet project of safegurading the artises especially the poor and the old, has still been active.There is a grapevine that the state government is planning to build a museum to preserve the memorabilia of the legend. He is no doubt one of the best Indian Actors ever born who literally carved out the golden period of Bengali cinemas.
Quotes
” I prefer following my own ways of acting, like the ways we talk, get angry,that kind of natural spontaneous acting. More of portraying a character.”
” Sometimes I got scared. So much of accolade — would they last for long?And that is why I was not ready to get carried away in the waves of admiration. I desire for more work.”
” I never fear work. Rather I derive pleasure out of work.”
” Films,Shilpi Sansad,then there was the world of my own,my privacy:I was confused.As if my every moment has ben sold…”
” Whenever I set to work,one after the other death news hit me.Again I eased myself by realizing that death is the only truth.”
José Pedro Infante Cruz(November 18, 1917 [1][2] – April 15, 1957), better known as Pedro Infante, is perhaps the most famous actor and singer of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and was the idol of the Mexican people, together with Jorge Negrete and Javier Solís, who were styled the Tres Gallos Mexicanos (the Three Mexican Roosters). He was born in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico. He was raised in Guamúchil. He died on April 15, 1957, in Mérida, Yucatán, in a plane crash during a flight that he was piloting himself en route to Mexico City.
His film career began in 1939 with him appearing in more than 60 films, and starting in 1943, he recorded about 350 songs. For his performance in the movie Tizoc, he was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 7th Berlin International Film Festival.
A new collection of unpublished stories betrays the two faces of Shirley Jackson,the writer who created “The Lottery.
January 6, 1997Written By JONATHAN LETHEM There’s "The Lottery," of course, the story everyone knows even if they don't remember Shirley Jackson's name. A small New England town, blandly familiar in every way, sleepwalking its way through ritual murder. Likely the most controversial piece of fiction ever published in the New Yorker, resulting in hundreds of canceled subscriptions, later adapted for television, radio and ballet, it now resides in the popular imagination as an archetype. It can be as difficult to persuade readers that the story is just one sheaf in the portfolio of one of this century's most luminous and strange American writers as it is to explain that the town portrayed in "The Lottery" is a real one.I know it is, because I lived there. North Bennington is a tiny village less than a mile from the otherwise isolated Bennington campus in Vermont. Shirley Jackson was married to Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic who taught at the college. And she spent her life in the town, raising four children, presiding over a chaotic household that was host to Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud and Howard Nemerov, and at times going quietly crazy — and writing, always, with the rigor of one who has found her born task. Six novels, two bestselling volumes of deceptively sunny family memoirs and countless stories before her death at 48, in 1965.
The town hasn’t changed, or at least it hadn’t by the mid- eighties, when I was a student at the school. A handful of the townspeople portrayed in thin disguise in Jackson’s novels and stories were still around. I knew the square where “The Lottery” takes place. It was Jackson’s fate, as a faculty wife and an eccentric newcomer in a staid, insular village, to absorb the reflexive antisemitism and anti-intellectualism felt by the townspeople toward the college. She and her children were accessible in a way that her husband and his colleagues and students, who spent their days on the campus, were not.Jackson was in many senses already two people when she arrived in Vermont. One was a turgid, fearful ugly-duckling, permanently cowed by the severity of her upbringing by a suburban mother obsessed with appearances. This half of Jackson was a character she brought brilliantly to life in her stories and novels from the beginning: the shy girl, whose identity slips all too easily from its foundations. The other half of Jackson was the expulsive iconoclast, brought out of her shell by marriage to Hyman — himself a garrulous egoist very much in the tradition of Jewish ’50′s New York intellectuals — and by the visceral shock of mothering a quartet of noisy, demanding babies. This second Shirley Jackson dedicated herself to rejecting her mother’s sense of propriety, drank and smoked and fed to buttery excess — directly to blame for her and her husband’s early deaths — dabbled in magic and voodoo, and interfered loudly when she thought the provincial Vermont schools were doing an injustice to her talented children. This was the Shirley Jackson that the town feared, resented and, depending on whose version you believe, occasionally persecuted.The hostility of the villagers further shaped her psyche, and her art; the process eventually redoubled so the latter fed the former. After the enormous success of “The Lottery,” a legend arose in town, almost certainly false, that Jackson had been pelted with stones by schoolchildren one day, then gone home and written the story. The real crisis came near the end of her life, resulting in a period of agoraphobia and psychosis; she wrote her way through it in “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” In that novel, Jackson brilliantly isolates the two aspects in her psyche into two odd, damaged sisters: one hypersensitive and afraid, unable to leave the house, the other a sort of squalid demon prankster who may or may not have murdered the rest of her family for her fragile sister’s sake. For me, it is that unique and dreamlike book, rather than “The Lottery,” that stands as her masterpiece.
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play. and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix– the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”–eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the boys. and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.
Soon the men began to gather. surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin ducked under his mother’s grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest brother.
The lottery was conducted–as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program–by Mr. Summers. who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him. because he had no children and his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the square, carrying the black wooden box, there was a murmur of conversation among the villagers, and he waved and called. “Little late today, folks.” The postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him, carrying a three- legged stool, and the stool was put in the center of the square and Mr. Summers set the black box down on it. The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool. and when Mr. Summers said, “Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?” there was a hesitation before two men. Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter. came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.
The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything’s being done. The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.
Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool until Mr. Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued. had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into he black box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips of paper and put them in the box, and it was then taken to the safe of Mr. Summers’ coal company and locked up until Mr. Summers was ready to take it to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was put way, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves’s barn and another year underfoot in the post office. and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there.
There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open. There were the lists to make up–of heads of families. heads of households in each family. members of each household in each family. There was the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory. tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the people, but years and years ago this p3rt of the ritual had been allowed to lapse. There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to each person approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all this; in his clean white shirt and blue jeans. with one hand resting carelessly on the black box. he seemed very proper and important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins.
Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the assembled villagers, Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulders, and slid into place in the back of the crowd. “Clean forgot what day it was,” she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. “Thought my old man was out back stacking wood,” Mrs. Hutchinson went on. “and then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running.” She dried her hands on her apron, and Mrs. Delacroix said, “You’re in time, though. They’re still talking away up there.”
Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and found her husband and children standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm as a farewell and began to make her way through the crowd. The people separated good-humoredly to let her through: two or three people said. in voices just loud enough to be heard across the crowd, “Here comes your, Missus, Hutchinson,” and “Bill, she made it after all.” Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers, who had been waiting, said cheerfully. “Thought we were going to have to get on without you, Tessie.” Mrs. Hutchinson said. grinning, “Wouldn’t have me leave m’dishes in the sink, now, would you. Joe?,” and soft laughter ran through the crowd as the people stirred back into position after Mrs. Hutchinson’s arrival.
“Well, now.” Mr. Summers said soberly, “guess we better get started, get this over with, so’s we can go back to work. Anybody ain’t here?”
“Dunbar.” several people said. “Dunbar. Dunbar.”
Mr. Summers consulted his list. “Clyde Dunbar.” he said. “That’s right. He’s broke his leg, hasn’t he? Who’s drawing for him?”
“Me. I guess,” a woman said. and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. “Wife draws for her husband.” Mr. Summers said. “Don’t you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?” Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally. Mr. Summers waited with an expression of polite interest while Mrs. Dunbar answered.
“Horace’s not but sixteen vet.” Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully. “Guess I gotta fill in for the old man this year.”
“Right.” Sr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was holding. Then he asked, “Watson boy drawing this year?”
A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. “Here,” he said. “I m drawing for my mother and me.” He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said thin#s like “Good fellow, lack.” and “Glad to see your mother’s got a man to do it.”
“Well,” Mr. Summers said, “guess that’s everyone. Old Man Warner make it?”
“Here,” a voice said. and Mr. Summers nodded.
A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at the list. “All ready?” he called. “Now, I’ll read the names–heads of families first–and the men come up and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?”
The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions: most of them were quiet. wetting their lips. not looking around. Then Mr. Summers raised one hand high and said, “Adams.” A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came forward. “Hi. Steve.” Mr. Summers said. and Mr. Adams said. “Hi. Joe.” They grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd. where he stood a little apart from his family. not looking down at his hand.
“Allen.” Mr. Summers said. “Anderson…. Bentham.”
“Seems like there’s no time at all between lotteries any more.” Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs. Graves in the back row.
“Seems like we got through with the last one only last week.”
“Time sure goes fast.– Mrs. Graves said.
“Clark…. Delacroix”
“There goes my old man.” Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her husband went forward.
“Dunbar,” Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to the box while one of the women said. “Go on. Janey,” and another said, “There she goes.”
“We’re next.” Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves came around from the side of the box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely and selected a slip of paper from the box. By now, all through the crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hand. turning them over and over nervously Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood together, Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip of paper.
“Harburt…. Hutchinson.”
“Get up there, Bill,” Mrs. Hutchinson said. and the people near her laughed.
“Jones.”
“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery.”
Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery,” he added petulantly. “Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody.”
“Some places have already quit lotteries.” Mrs. Adams said.
“Nothing but trouble in that,” Old Man Warner said stoutly. “Pack of young fools.”
“Martin.” And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. “Overdyke…. Percy.”
“I wish they’d hurry,” Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. “I wish they’d hurry.”
“They’re almost through,” her son said.
“You get ready to run tell Dad,” Mrs. Dunbar said.
Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward precisely and selected a slip from the box. Then he called, “Warner.”
“Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery,” Old Man Warner said as he went through the crowd. “Seventy-seventh time.”
“Watson” The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd. Someone said, “Don’t be nervous, Jack,” and Mr. Summers said, “Take your time, son.”
“Zanini.”
After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr. Summers. holding his slip of paper in the air, said, “All right, fellows.” For a minute, no one moved, and then all the slips of paper were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saving. “Who is it?,” “Who’s got it?,” “Is it the Dunbars?,” “Is it the Watsons?” Then the voices began to say, “It’s Hutchinson. It’s Bill,” “Bill Hutchinson’s got it.”
“Go tell your father,” Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.
People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet, staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly. Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers. “You didn’t give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn’t fair!”
“Be a good sport, Tessie.” Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, “All of us took the same chance.”
“Shut up, Tessie,” Bill Hutchinson said.
“Well, everyone,” Mr. Summers said, “that was done pretty fast, and now we’ve got to be hurrying a little more to get done in time.” He consulted his next list. “Bill,” he said, “you draw for the Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the Hutchinsons?”
“There’s Don and Eva,” Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. “Make them take their chance!”
“Daughters draw with their husbands’ families, Tessie,” Mr. Summers said gently. “You know that as well as anyone else.”
“It wasn’t fair,” Tessie said.
“I guess not, Joe.” Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. “My daughter draws with her husband’s family; that’s only fair. And I’ve got no other family except the kids.”
“Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it’s you,” Mr. Summers said in explanation, “and as far as drawing for households is concerned, that’s you, too. Right?”
“Right,” Bill Hutchinson said.
“How many kids, Bill?” Mr. Summers asked formally.
“Three,” Bill Hutchinson said.
“There’s Bill, Jr., and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and me.”
“All right, then,” Mr. Summers said. “Harry, you got their tickets back?”
Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. “Put them in the box, then,” Mr. Summers directed. “Take Bill’s and put it in.”
“I think we ought to start over,” Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. “I tell you it wasn’t fair. You didn’t give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw that.”
Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box. and he dropped all the papers but those onto the ground. where the breeze caught them and lifted them off.
“Listen, everybody,” Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people around her.
“Ready, Bill?” Mr. Summers asked. and Bill Hutchinson, with one quick glance around at his wife and children. nodded.
“Remember,” Mr. Summers said. “take the slips and keep them folded until each person has taken one. Harry, you help little Dave.” Mr. Graves took the hand of the little boy, who came willingly with him up to the box. “Take a paper out of the box, Davy.” Mr. Summers said. Davy put his hand into the box and laughed. “Take just one paper.” Mr. Summers said. “Harry, you hold it for him.” Mr. Graves took the child’s hand and removed the folded paper from the tight fist and held it while little Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly.
“Nancy next,” Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily as she went forward switching her skirt, and took a slip daintily from the box “Bill, Jr.,” Mr. Summers said, and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge, near knocked the box over as he got a paper out. “Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly. and then set her lips and went up to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.
“Bill,” Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt around, bringing his hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.
The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, “I hope it’s not Nancy,” and the sound of the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.
“It’s not the way it used to be.” Old Man Warner said clearly. “People ain’t the way they used to be.”
“All right,” Mr. Summers said. “Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave’s.”
Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill. Jr.. opened theirs at the same time. and both beamed and laughed. turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.
“Tessie,” Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.
“It’s Tessie,” Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. “Show us her paper. Bill.”
Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.
“All right, folks.” Mr. Summers said. “Let’s finish quickly.”
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”
Mr. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said. gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.”
The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Nigel Kneale and Richard Matheson.She is best known for the short story “The Lottery” (1948), which suggests a secret, sinister underside to bucolic small-town America. In her critical biography of Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when “The Lottery” was published in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that “no New Yorkerstory had ever received.” Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, “bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse.” [2]In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions:Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.Jackson’s husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that “she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.” Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson’s works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of “personal, even neurotic, fantasies,” but that Jackson intended, as “a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb,” to mirror humanity’s Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as evidenced by Hyman’s statement that she “was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned ‘The Lottery,’ and she felt that they at least understood the story”.
Sook-Yin Lee: Her movie found its roots in her adolescence, when she found a community of fellow artists.
Guy Dixon
Tuesday, Jun. 22, 2010
There’s a secret to understanding Sook-Yin Lee.
She actually cares what other people think of her. A lot.
This might come as a surprise to anyone who saw her masturbate in the film Shortbus. Or appear naked in the short film she directed and starred in for Toronto Stories. Or those who listen to her unconventional CBC Radio show Definitely Not the Opera. Or follow her presence on the highly uncommercial fringe of indie rock. Her new film Year of the Carnivore, however, is the first feature film she’s directed, and that makes it personal.
The film was inspired by Lee’s teenage years in and around Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona neighbourhoods, when she was a socially awkward young woman trying to impress a young guitarist by becoming more sexually experienced. “There are people who are going to embrace this movie, and there are people who are going to deride this film. And it profoundly affects me!” Lee says, sitting on the grass outside the CBC building in Toronto on a warm afternoon.
“It profoundly affects me,” she repeats, “and I wish it did not. I wish I could just go, ‘That is just their interpretation,’ and not feel hemmed in by any definition stated by anyone else. And also let [my own definition] of myself move. Do you know what I mean?”
Some artists pretend they don’t care about labels attached to their public personae, or about turning themselves into a brand. Lee cringes at the idea.
“It sucks to be Ronald McDonald! I’d hate to be, like, this walking brand, ‘Hey, I’m Sook-Yin Lee!,” she says, holding up her arms like a marionette and shouting in a mock-obnoxious voice.
Lee began fighting limitations and being pigeonholed at 15, when she left home and the confines of suburban life in North Vancouver’s Lynn Valley.
“It was a very exciting time. I broke out of a very, in some ways, traditional family. I hung out at the mall. I watched a lot of television. And suddenly in the middle of my parents’ really messy break-up, I jettisoned out and found freedom,” she recalls. “And it was so exciting. It coincided with my discovery of punk rock and existential writing. The only punk guy in my entire suburb: We became friends, and he introduced me to all these great bands and stuff.
“Then I found myself an orphan with a lot of freedom. I was a very socially awkward teenager, unable to speak verbally and very shy. I found myself always expressing myself through painting and art. These were very meaningful and cathartic expressions for me. And suddenly I found myself in the company of a number of other artists.”
It’s that period which was the genesis for her film Year of the Carnivore. When preparing the actors for their roles in Shortbus, director John Cameron Mitchell asked the cast to make personal videos about love. Lee wanted to explore the story she told in her video about her cluelessness back then about love and her body – which she tried to address by having sex with strangers in a number of befuddled ways.
Lee embellished the script with many fictional details, often for comedic effect, but the essence of the young woman’s confusion resembles what Lee went through. “I think with [the film’s lead character], it was more like looking at a relationship with a fella, and being in a quandary about what it is to be a woman. I still feel that. I don’t quite comfortably fit into what seems like the culturally prescribed gender roles. And sometimes when I’m faced by a majority of people who fit [in] better, I feel, like, ‘What’s wrong with me?’”
She’s currently working on other scripts about relationships and identity. “I am challenging this notion of what makes me,” she says. “This attempt to define self seems so slippery.”
The irrepressible Robert Adams presents an enthralling review of Khaled Hosseini’s, The Kite Runner. The Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul.Robert Adams, one of North America’s leading literary thinkers, is an impressive and animated speaker who displays a vast knowledge of history and literature. He always manages to deliver hard facts and humorous anecdotes with equal charm. In this series, Adams speaks at length about six authors and their works. In each program, he presents a fascinating, in-depth review of a contemporary novel. Produced by TVO. Every year, Robert Adams prepares a series of five reviews of contemporary novels, to be delivered alone on a theatre stage to sold-out audiences in Toronto and Montreal. In A Love of Reading Adams has now gathered 18 of his most brilliant reviews, from Jack Maggs by Peter Carey and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, to A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler. In them he skillfully interweaves a nimble and entertaining discussion of plot, theme, and characterization with fascinating historical, biographical, and literary context. He is repeatedly drawn to the spectacle of less-than-perfect humans making their way in a hostile world, and as a result a review by Robert Adams is almost always a hugely satisfying mix of rich pathos and abundant humour. Famously, Adams reads a book a day, from which he selects only those novels that are truly extraordinary, that have made him see some part of the world or some aspect of the human condition in a new light – because for Adams, the best books always take the reader on a journey, with a destination very distant from the point of departure. It should be not only a journey of discovery – an exploration of the author’s vision – but also of risk. By matching one’s own vision to that of the author, says Adams, the reader enters an exciting negotiation to produce a new vision of his own. This joint enterprise between reader and writer, the shared risk and the wonder of discovery, is the foundation of A Love of Reading. • For the last six years, Robert Adams has presented an annual series of book reviews to sold out audiences. Eighty per cent of Adams’ 3,000 subscribers in Toronto and Montreal renew for the following season • This book is a selection of modern classics from a discriminating and entertaining guide • Perfect for reading groups • Quill & Quire, noting the jump in sales of any book reviewed by Adams, has called the phenomenon “The Adams Effect” Robert Adams is a Welsh-born teacher, writer, and critic. For 11 years in Montreal and 8 years in Toronto, he presented an annual series of book reviews to sold out audiences in both cities. He has often been profiled on television, including PBS, and his lectures were shown on TV Ontario for 5 years. They are still shown on Book TV. His biography of the artist alexander Bercovitch was shortlisted for the 1988 QSPELL Award and A Love of Reading, the first of 2 collections of his lectures, was a national bestseller in 2001. He now lectures all over the world on the 6-Star Crystal Cruise Line. ~~~~~~~~~~ “rave reviews for reviewer….absolutely outstanding” – Montreal Gazette “a real tour de force performance” – Toronto Star “Robert Adams has invented a new art form” – NOW Magazine “a prodigiously well-read and highly articulate speaker” – Quill & QuireThe Kite Runner is a novel by the author Khaled Hosseini. Published in 2003 by Riverhead Books, it is Hosseini’s first novel, and was adapted into a film of the same name in 2007. The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a young boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, who befriended Hassan, the son of his father’s Hazara servant. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime.
Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 breakthrough, “Breathless.”
By A. O. SCOTT
May 23, 2010
A TIME-HONORED tradition: Stand outside a movie theater with a camera and microphone and poll the audience members for their reactions. What did you think of the film? A grandmotherly woman makes a face and waves her hand in disgust: Revolting! Idiotic! A middle-aged gentleman, stout and respectable, takes a more tolerant view: This is a movie about how young people live today, he says, a movie made by young people, and he is generally in favor of young people. But a sober-looking, well-dressed younger fellow demurs. “I don’t think it’s very serious,” he says dismissively.
This little scene of impromptu amateur film criticism — or market research, if you prefer — occurs in Emmanuel Laurent’s new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” about the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose friendship was a driving force and a central fact (as well as, eventually, a casualty) of the French New Wave. Those people outside that Parisian cinema in 1960 have just seen “Breathless,” Mr. Godard’s debut feature, starring Jean Seberg as an American exchange student who teases, loves, protects and betrays a French hoodlum played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who smokes and runs his thumb pensively over his lips. Some of the patrons are baffled, some enthusiastic, some noncommittal, a mixed bag of responses that seems a bit deflating. Aren’t they aware of the historical significance of what they have just witnessed?
Is it possible now, 50 years later, even to imagine seeing “Breathless” for the first time? Mr. Godard’s film quickly took its place among those touchstones of modern art that signified a decisive break with what came before — paintings and books and pieces of music that have held onto their reputation for radicalism long after being accepted as masterpieces, venerated in museums and taught in schools.
Somehow, the galvanic, iconoclastic force of their arrival is preserved as they age into institutional respectability. So even if you were not around to hear, let’s say, the catcalls greeting Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or to unwrap a copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” smuggled over from Paris in defiance of the postmaster general, or to examine Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans when they were first exhibited, the works themselves allow you to place yourself among the brave vanguard who did. And even if you did not see “Breathless” during its first run at the dawn of the ’60s, surely every frame carries an afterimage of that heady time, just as every jazz note and blast of ambient street noise on the soundtrack brings echoes of an almost mythic moment.
At the same time, though, such legendary status can also be a burden, weighing down what was once fresh and shocking with a heavy freight of expectation and received opinion. There is perhaps no episode in all of film history quite as encrusted with contradictory significance as the cresting, in 1959 and 1960, of the Nouvelle Vague. It was a burst of youthful, irreverent energy that was also a decisive engagement in the continuing battle to establish cinema as a serious art form. The partisans of the new — Truffaut and Mr. Godard, along with comrades like Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer — were steeped in film history. Before taking up their cameras they had been critics, polemicists and self-taught scholars, and yet, like other aesthetic insurgents before them, they attacked a reigning style they believed was characterized by unthinking and sclerotic traditionalism. And their drive to reassert the glory of French cinema was grounded in an almost fanatical love of American movies.
Mr. Godard, who had made a handful of shorts before turning to a true-crime scenario that Mr. Truffaut had been working on, was perhaps the most extreme and paradoxical figure in this movement, and would go on to become a prolific and polarizing filmmaker. He would pass through a period of intense, if not always intelligible, political militancy in the late ’60s and early ’70s before settling into his current status somewhere between grand old man and crazy uncle of world cinema. His most recent feature, “Film Socialism,” showed up at the Cannes Film Festival last week, though the director himself did not, offering as explanation for his absence a cryptic reference to the Greek financial crisis. He has, for as long as some of us can remember, walked the fine line between prophet and crank, turning out films that are essayistic, abstract, enraging and intermittently beautiful and issuing variously grandiose and gnomic statements about his own work, the state of the world and the future of cinema.
But that is now. Back then it was surely different. An immaculate and glowing new print of “Breathless” will be shown, starting Friday, at Film Forum in Manhattan, and while no restoration can scrub away the accumulated layers of history, its anniversary can be taken as an invitation to take a fresh look. What if, instead of seeking out an artifact of the past, you could experience the film in its own present tense? Not, in other words, as a flashback to 1960, enticing as that may be, but as 90 minutes of right now.
That kind of time travel is part of the special allure of movies, and “Breathless,” precisely because it so effortlessly, so breathlessly, captures the rhythms of its time and place, erases the distance between the now and then. And yet even as Mr. Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, record the sights and sounds of Paris with documentary immediacy, the images are infused with an unmistakable nostalgia. This is not something a latter-day viewer — perhaps besotted by secondhand memories of vintage cars circling the Place de la Concorde or pretty young women selling The New York Herald Tribune in front of cafes — brings to “Breathless.” Rather, the film’s evident and self-conscious desire to tap into a reservoir of existing references and associations is a sign of its director’s obsession with other movies.
You don’t have to recognize this film’s overt cinematic allusions to be aware of its indebtedness. When Michel (Mr. Belmondo) pauses in front of a movie theater to admire an image of Humphrey Bogart, he is confirming what we already know about him, which is that he is a cinematic construct, a man who has perhaps seen too many movies invented by another man who has spent his adult life doing almost nothing else. As a satellite orbiting the twin suns of the Paris Cinémathèque and the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, Mr. Godard was an ardent champion of the Hollywood directors whose reputation as artists is one of France’s great gifts to America and the world. Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang — and perhaps above all Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchock: these were not just influences on “Breathless,” but axioms in its universe of meaning.
The phenomenon of movie-mad moviemakers is a familiar one by now. The young American directors of the 1970s — including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich and George Lucas — used to be identified as members of “the film generation” because they had grown up compulsively watching movies, assimilating genre conventions and shot selections that would become the raw material of their own work. Twenty years later, Quentin Tarantino, whose production company is named after Mr. Godard’s 1964 film “Bande à Part,” would refresh and extend this tradition of film-geek filmmaking. Mr. Tarantino’s career consists of a series of genre pastiches and homages that manage to feel startlingly novel, esoteric formal exercises that are nonetheless accessible pieces of popular entertainment.
“Breathless” was there first. Which is to say that it was already late. Seen from its most unflattering angle, it is a thin and derivative film noir. A generic tough guy steals a car, shoots a policeman, sweet-talks a series of women, hobnobs with his underworld pals and tries to stay a step ahead of the dogged detectives on his trail. His poses and attitudes seem borrowed, arising less from any social or psychological condition or biographical facts than from a desire to be as cool as the guys in the movies.
The wonder is that he surpasses them, and that “Breathless,” quoting from so many other movies (and shuffling together cultural references that include Faulkner, Jean Renoir, Mozart and Bach as well as Hollywood movies), still feels entirely original. It still, that is, has the power to defy conventional expectations about what a movie should be while providing an utterly captivating moviegoing experience. A coherent plot, strong and credible emotions and motivations, convincing performances, visual continuity — all of these things are missing from “Breathless,” disregarded with a cavalier insouciance that feels like liberation. It turns out that a movie — this movie, anyway — doesn’t need any of those things, and that they might get in the way of other, more immediate pleasures. You are free, in other words, to revel in the beauty of Paris and Jean Seberg, the exquisite sangfroid of Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the restless velocity of Mr. Godard’s shooting style. And style, for those 90 minutes, is — to phrase it in the absolute, hyperbolic terms Mr. Godard has always favored — everything.
In a way, that skeptical young man was right: “Breathless” is not serious. It is a lark, a joke, a travesty of everything earnest and responsible that the cinema can (and perhaps should) provide. Is it a love story? A crime story? A cautionary tale or an act of brazen seduction? All of these things and none of them. It proceeds entirely by its own rules and on the momentum of its director’s audacity. That music! Those tracking shots that seem to snake through the streets of Paris in a single sprint! That long scene — almost a third of the movie’s running time — in which the two main characters laze around in a long postcoital seminar, talking about love, death, literature and music while the camera floats around them.
“Breathless” is a pop artifact and a daring work of art, made at a time when the two possibilities existed in a state of almost perfect convergence. That is the source of its uniqueness. Much as it may have influenced what was to come later, there is still nothing else quite like it. Its sexual candor is still surprising, and even now, at 50, it is still cool, still new, still — after all this time! — a bulletin from the future of movies.
Stieg Larsson’s brother, Joakim, left, and their father, Erland, in their office in Umea, Sweden.
The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: May 17, 2010
THE THIRD VOLUME in Stieg Larsson’s immensely successful Millennium trilogy, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” finally goes on sale here this month. Except for “Harry Potter,” Americans haven’t been so eager for a book since the early 1840s, when they thronged the docks in New York, hailing incoming ships for news of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s “Old Curiosity Shop.” That was before Amazon. This time, particularly impatient readers simply paid a premium and ordered the new book from England, where it came out months ago (though with the apostrophe in a different place, making the “Hornet” plural).
Knopf, Larsson’s American publisher, has already printed 750,000 copies of “Hornet’s Nest.” It will almost certainly soar to the top of the best-seller lists, where the previous volumes, best sellers in hardback, recently occupied the top two paperback slots. What’s unusual is that unlike some other recent publishing juggernauts — the Dan Brownbooks, say, or Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner” — the Millennium novels are not American in origin and were huge best sellers in Europe before most Americans got wind of them. Sonny Mehta, the publisher and editor in chief of Knopf, who bought the books for what he says now seems like a “very modest sum,” even worried that they might not catch on here. “I had nightmares that we would be the only country where the books didn’t work,” he says.
The novels come from Sweden, of all places, where the first one was published in 2005 and the next two over the following couple of years. They’re crime thrillers about a journalist named Mikael Blomkvist, who works for the magazine Millennium, and his sometime partner Lisbeth Salander, a startling and strangely appealing character who is a tattooed and pierced, bisexual computer hacker. Together this improbable pair solve mysteries involving spectacularly corrupt businessmen and politicians, sex traffickers, bent cops, spineless journalists, biker gangs and meth heads. In fact, not the least of the attractions of the books for American readers is that they introduce us to a Sweden that is vastly different from the bleak, repressed, guilt-ridden images we see in Ingmar Bergman movies and from the design-loving Socialist paradise we imagine whenever we visit Ikea. It’s a country that turns out to be a lot like our own.
The plot of “Hornet’s Nest,” which involves a rogue, top-secret organization within the Swedish government, has elements of a John le Carré spy thriller. Like the other two Millennium books, it also has an outspoken feminist subtext, hardly a typical feature of crime novels. (In Swedish, the first volume, the one we know as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” has the grim, nonfiction-sounding title “Man Som Hatar Kvinnor,” or “Men Who Hate Women.” In France, for some reason, it’s “Les Hommes Qui n’Aimaient pas les Femmes,” or “Men Who Didn’t Love Women,” which sounds like a very different book altogether.) But in Sweden the books and their author — who died in an untimely fashion that some conspiracy theorists persist in calling an assassination — have lately become the center of another sort of story, the kind of thingAugust Strindberg might have written, full of intense, opinionated Swedish characters entwined in a saga involving envy, resentment, a contested legacy and a mysterious manuscript. At least one skeptic has even questioned how Larsson, a middle-aged man with no history of writing crime fiction, and seemingly no flair for it, could have written the Millennium books in the first place.
Larsson died in November 2004 — at age 50 — before any of the novels were published and with little clue to just how successful they would be. Like Blomkvist, he was a journalist, well known in certain circles for his campaign against right-wing extremism in Sweden, but hardly a household name. “To introduce a brand-new crime novelist like this, someone who is unknown, our goal was to sell 20,000 copies, but we thought 10,000 would be marvelous,” Eva Gedin, Larsson’s editor at the Swedish publishing house Norstedts, told me recently. “You could never imagine that the books would do so well.”
Larsson began “Dragon Tattoo” while on vacation in the summer of 2002, thinking of it as a kind of pension fund for himself and Eva Gabrielsson, the woman he lived with. He actually had a series of 10 books in mind, she says. The money from the first three would go to them, they figured, and the rest they would give to charity. Remarkably, he displayed none of the anxiety and impatience typical of first-time novelists and finished two entire books and most of a third before he submitted any of them to a publisher. He considered all three novels a single text and at one point wanted to number the chapters of the second and third volumes consecutively. Gedin says that Larsson never seemed in any doubt about their worth.
His was not a view widely shared. Mikael Ekman, a friend and protégé of Larsson’s who collaborated with him on a nonfiction book, recalls sitting with Larsson one night in 2001. “We were drinking a little too much whiskey,” he told me, “and Stieg started talking about what he’d do when he was too old to work anymore. He said, ‘I will write a couple of books and become a millionaire.’ I laughed at him. I thought he was crazy.”
Kurdo Baksi, another friend, had pretty much the same reaction a year later when Larsson told him he had written a thriller and offered to show him the manuscript. Baksi declined, saying: “Stieg, I don’t think you’re so good at literature. It’s not your business.” Baksi told me: “I thought he was joking. His talent was for writing about Stalin, Lenin, Bush — not for thrillers.”
Anders Hellberg, who was Larsson’s colleague in the late 1970s and early ’80s, goes even further and claims that someone else must be behind the Millennium books: Larsson himself was simply not good enough a writer. Larsson worked then as a graphic designer for Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, or T.T., a Stockholm news agency that is the Swedish equivalent of The Associated Press. He occasionally wrote longer pieces for T.T., as well as captions, and would ask for advice about his writing. “It was not good; it was impossible,” Hellberg, now a journalist at Dagens Nyheter, the largest and best of Sweden’s several morning papers, told me. “Every professional writer knows these things: you look at a text, and you can see this is terrible. Some texts are a little messy, but you can work them out; but here nothing was good — not the syntax, the way of putting things, nothing.”
But Hellberg left T.T. decades ago, I pointed out. Couldn’t Larsson have improved in the years since? Besides, it’s not as if the Millennium books are masterpieces of literary style. The prose is not the point.
“I don’t know, of course,” Hellberg said, shaking his head. “I don’t know. But I believe that to write is a talent. You don’t just pick up a guy from the bus station and expect him to be able to do it.”
Eva Gedin, the Norstedts editor, says she has no doubts whatsoever that Larsson wrote the books. “When you’re an editor, you get a feel for these things,” she told me. “It wasn’t one of those cases where a book is sort of half-written and you have to finish every other sentence. Stieg’s prose is really quite efficient. He was a tremendous storyteller.” The editing of the books went smoothly, she went on to say, and consisted mostly of cutting some of Larsson’s encyclopedic detail. The only thing Larsson wouldn’t budge on was the unsexy title, “Men Who Hate Women.”
A question that keeps coming up, though, is the role of Gabrielsson, an architect who is said to be a good writer and who, to make extra money years ago, translated Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle” into Swedish. Gabrielsson herself has been evasive, in at least one interview hinting at something like co-authorship and in another backing away from that position. She now says that she has been misquoted so often that she will no longer discuss the issue and that the whole story will come out in her own book, to be published in France this fall. Nevertheless, I tried to press her a little. Is it fair to say, I asked, that while Larsson may have shown the books to her or discussed them with her, he was the author?
“I’m not sure you could say that,” she said and paused. “He did certainly write them himself — I think that’s fair.”
“But if he wrote them, then isn’t he the author?” I asked, a little baffled. “Or is that too simplistic?”
She smiled and said, “Yes.”
SPECULATING ABOUT Stieg Larsson and what he was like has practically become a journalistic subindustry in Sweden. “It’s like the fun-house mirrors in the Tivoli,” Gedin says. “Everything gets very complicated when you don’t have the author himself here to tell us.”
One clue, of course, is the books themselves, especially the Blomkvist character, who is clearly an alter ego of sorts. By the standards of Scandinavian crime fiction, peopled by brooding, depressed and friendless detectives who drink and smoke too much and eat appalling food, Blomkvist is remarkably cheerful and well adjusted, which is how friends remember Larsson. In the books, Blomkvist’s only flaw, if you can call it that, is a sex life that is the stuff of male fantasy. He is so attractive to women that they are always hopping into bed with him. Eva Gabrielsson says that’s merely a fictional device. “It’s just a way of opening up the character,” she told me. “He had to be interesting in some way. Without that he would have been a shadow next to Lisbeth Salander, which he was anyway.”
Salander is certainly the compelling figure in this partnership and the real source of the books’ fascination. In his cover letter to Norstedts, Larsson wrote that she was an “oddball” and something brand-new in crime fiction, and he was right on both counts. Salander is 24 when we first meet her but looks like a teenager. She’s elfin, barely 90 pounds, and has dyed black hair “short as a fuse.” Abused as a child and wrongfully institutionalized, Salander engages in dysfunctional, even autistic, behavior that might just reflect an understandable skepticism about human goodness and potential. She exists off the grid, really — having as little to do with people and institutions as possible and following an avenging ethical code of her own devising — and in the first novel makes a living of sorts as a researcher for a security firm, where she benefits from two spectacular assets: a photographic memory and wizardly computer skills. She can hack into anything.
Salander obviously owes something to Pippi Longstocking, the strong-willed character of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books. But there is also something of Larsson himself in the character — more even than in Blomkvist, perhaps. They shared a diet consisting almost entirely of coffee and fast food, fanatical research habits and a single-minded, steadfast sense of justice and fairness. What keeps coming up when Larsson’s friends recall him is his idealism. Larsson’s friend Mikael Ekman, now a television producer and journalist, told me: “Stieg was a true idealist, a feminist, a believer in freedom. He dedicated his whole life to fighting the right-wing extremists. The biggest thing Stieg did was not the books. It was the work he did for democracy.”
John-Henri Holmberg, a Swedish editor, translator and critic who was a mentor to Larsson, wrote in an e-mail message: “He was very soft-spoken but held uncompromising views. He was a steadfast friend who would drop you entirely if you in some way proved not to be worthy of his friendship. . . . Among other things . . . he would not tolerate derogatory opinions of others based on their secondary characteristics, such as ethnicity or gender. Politically, in his youth, Stieg was a libertarian Socialist, active in a Trotskyite group; later on, I believe that he became more of a libertarian anarchist, but regardless of that the important part was his continual passion for liberty. And he would not suffer even previously close friends once he had reason to believe that in fact they harbored racist, sexist or prejudicial views.”
STIEG LARSSON WAS born in 1954 in Skelleftehamn, in what is known as Norrland, the northernmost part of Sweden. He mostly grew up in Umea, a town that is about 400 miles north of Stockholm but might as well be a world away. People in Stockholm, who pride themselves on their worldliness and sophistication, like to say that the people in the north are different; the people in the north, who are by and large less prosperous and cosmopolitan, don’t entirely disagree.
Larsson’s father, Erland, worked as a window dresser for years before getting a job as a graphic designer at the Umea newspaper. His mother, Vivianne, worked in a dress shop. When Larsson was 1, his parents moved to Stockholm in search of more opportunity and, unable to afford an apartment suitable for a child, sent Stieg to live with his maternal grandparents in Norrland. The arrangement was not unusual at the time, Erland told me, explaining, “Everyone our age was living under the same circumstances.” Eventually the grandparents moved to Norsjo, even farther away, but the families exchanged visits at Christmas and Easter, and Stieg came home for the summer. “He knew who his parents were,” Erland insisted.
He didn’t join them, however, until 1962, when his grandfather died, and by then he had a 5-year-old brother, Joakim. Stieg was artistic as a child and particularly interested in astronomy, Erland said, showing me a little notebook Stieg kept about the constellations. In another notebook he even wrote a novel as a 12-year-old, an Enid Blyton-like tale set in America. When Stieg was 14, his father bought him a typewriter on the installment plan, and he became such a nuisance, clattering away in the family’s two-room apartment, that Erland had to rent a room for him in the basement next door. “After that we never saw him,” he said, laughing. “He would come up just to eat and talk politics.”
By Larsson’s late teens, politics were his main interest, and he became an ardent supporter of the local Socialists. But he wanted to see the rest of the world. At 17, he hitchhiked to Algeria, and after 14 months of national service in the army, then still mandatory in Sweden, he went to Ethiopia, where he aided Eritrean rebels. Back home, at a rally against the Vietnam War in 1972, he met the like-minded Eva Gabrielsson, the 18-year-old daughter of a local journalist, and two years later they began living together. While working for the post office, he edited a Trotskyite magazine and together with Gabrielsson published several science-fiction fanzines.
Larsson was turned down by the Stockholm School of Journalism, where many of Sweden’s better-known journalists get their start, and became a graphic designer instead. Anders Hellberg, his former colleague at T.T., remembers him as a small, shy man who apparently lived on hamburgers and carried his belongings around in a plastic bag. Larsson worked nights, which left his days free for what was in many ways the great project of his life, writing and doing research for Searchlight, a British antifascist, antiracist magazine. Larsson so valued Searchlight that in 1995 he helped create Expo, a Swedish equivalent, for which the mission statement was “to study and survey antidemocratic, right-wing extremist and racist tendencies.” Expo, on which Millennium is loosely based, is now a handsome, well-designed, full-color quarterly that, while not awash with revenue, has attracted some powerful backers. In the beginning it was more like a black-and-white pamphlet and lost so much money that it almost went under.
The magazine nevertheless succeeded in upsetting the people Larsson was writing about. Right-wing extremism, a legacy in part from World War II, when some Swedes secretly supported the Nazis, was especially virulent in Sweden in the ’90s. Even before Expo, Larsson was the object of death threats from this quarter. In the early ’90s, a magazine put out by the White Aryan Resistance published his photograph and address and suggested that as an “enemy of the white race” he ought to be eliminated. And in 1999, when Bjorn Sodereberg, an antifascist trade-union leader, was assassinated by neo-Nazis, information about Larsson and Gabrielsson was found in the apartment of one of the murderers.
Inevitably this history has fueled speculation among the conspiracy-minded in Sweden, of whom there are many (including Larsson himself, to judge from his books), that Larsson’s death was planned. Three years ago, a man named Bosse Schon, who is a sort of professional Nazi hunter (and who might not have been averse to drumming up a little publicity for a TV documentary he had coming out), told Aftonbladet, Sweden’s leading afternoon daily, that he knew of a plot to kill Larsson, hatched in a pub years ago by a Swede who had served in the SS. But the evidence is close to overwhelming that Larsson died of a massive heart attack. Everyone agrees that he took terrible care of himself. He didn’t exercise, he smoked a lot and if he ever ate a green vegetable, no one has reported it. On the afternoon of Nov. 9, 2004 — the anniversary of Kristallnacht, if you’re looking for an eerie coincidence — the elevator at Expo wasn’t working, and Larsson climbed the seven flights to his office, where he collapsed. According to Kurdo Baksi, his last words were, “I’m 50, for Christ’s sake!”
Larsson died without leaving a will. Like a great many Swedish couples, he and Gabrielsson never married — she was his sambo, as the Swedes say, his live-in companion — and they had no children. Oddly, Sweden, that model of social liberalism, has no provision for common-law marriage, the way many American states do, and so Larsson’s father and younger brother, who are not particularly literary, got everything: the rights to his books, the money, even half of the apartment that Larsson and Gabrielsson shared. This has made Gabrielsson, a complicated and fascinating character in her own right, an object of intense sympathy in Sweden, where seemingly everyone has an opinion about how Larsson’s estate should have been divided.
Legally Gabrielsson has no claim, but she has asserted a kind of moral entitlement. She also has a crucial piece of the Larsson legacy: a laptop computer containing roughly three-quarters of a fourth novel. According to Gabrielsson, in 2005 the Larssons offered to give her Stieg’s half of the apartment in return for the laptop. She refused, calling the offer extortion, and they eventually relented, very likely under the weight of public opinion, and let her have the whole apartment for nothing. Last November, they told a journalist that they were willing to settle the dispute for 20 million kronor, or roughly $2.6 million. Gabrielsson didn’t respond.
The Larssons and Eva Gabrielsson are barely speaking to each other anymore, but both sides have talked to the press, and a great many hurtful things have been said. Gabrielsson claims that Larsson was estranged from his father and brother and hardly ever saw them. The Larssons have suggested that Gabrielsson is mentally unstable. And in a television interview, Joakim pointed out, unhelpfully, that they had testicles and she didn’t.
The money, meanwhile, keeps pouring in. So far, there are some 27 million copies of the Millennium novels in print, and the books have been made into three very successful Swedish films. (The first, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” was released here, with subtitles, in March.) Sales will doubtless get an additional boost in December 2011, when the first American film version, written by Steven Zaillian and directed by David Fincher, is scheduled to come out, followed in short order by films of the second and third books, which will be shot together. Scott Rudin, the producer, said recently that the deal was immensely complicated to put together, not only because there were so many parties involved but also because of the ongoing popularity of the series. “The books were still growing even as we were negotiating,” he explained, “so the price tag kept moving.”
BY HER OWN account, Gabrielsson was so shattered after Larsson’s death that it took her months to recover. When I met her in March she still seemed a little worn and grief-stricken. She is a smallish blond woman with a habit of rubbing at her mouth and gnawing at her fingertips. We had coffee one afternoon at Kvarnen, an old-fashioned, high-ceilinged restaurant that she and Larsson liked and that turns up frequently in the books. She was charming and animated one minute and, seemingly weary and wary of the press, quiet and withdrawn the next.
“A lot of people would have liked to get rid of Stieg,” she said, sadly. “I always thought I would hear one day that he had been killed.” She added that her sister told her something that helped her come to terms with his death: “At least it didn’t happen the way you thought it would, and so now you don’t have to hate someone for the rest of your life.”
Speaking of Larsson’s father and brother, she was occasionally sarcastic but more often resigned. “Stieg never was close to them,” she said. “That’s a history I cannot change. He was brought up by his mother’s father and mother for nine years, brought up far from his biological parents. What do you expect? You can talk to people who knew him when he was 12, when he was 18, when he was 35 — there was never any closeness. He is more like his mother, who died in 1991. The other two, they are completely different. Stieg moved to places, he traveled, he was street-smart. They are the opposite. It’s not just the childhood history. He really was different.”
Gabrielsson says she doesn’t care about money. She told me that all she wanted was her share of the apartment and control over Larsson’s literary estate, which she would administer in return for a small percentage of the royalties. The father and brother were in no position to know what he would have wished, she added, and already serious mistakes have been made. Gabrielsson says, for example, that Christopher MacLehose, a legendary editor and publisher who acquired the books in England and gave them their catchy titles, needlessly prettified the translation. The translator, Steven T. Murray, says that he feels the same way; he was so upset by MacLehose’s tinkering that he asked that his name be removed and a pseudonym be used instead. MacLehose pointed out to me that the translations were commissioned by the Swedish film company and were originally intended not for publication but to aid an English-speaking screenwriter whom the producers were hoping to hire, and for that reason they were done with unusual speed. All he did, he said, was polish and tighten them up a bit, the way he might with any translation.
Gabrielsson is also furious that Norstedts changed the name of one of the characters — the doctor who treats Salander in the third volume — from Anders Jakobsson to Anders Jonasson. Larsson frequently used the names of real people, and Jakobsson, a surgeon in Gothenburg, was a friend of his. But after Jakobsson and Erland got into an argument over how Gabrielsson was being treated, Erland demanded that Jakobsson’s name be removed.
THE LARSSONS SEEM unlikely to give up any control of the literary rights — they kept insisting to me that these rights are not transferable — and in any event many of the important decisions have already been made. Some people have suggested that Joakim and Erland were taken advantage of and should have negotiated a better deal with Norstedts and the film company after it became clear just how much money the Millennium franchise was worth.
Gabrielsson considers herself a shrewd businessperson. But at the same time, she has an odd, moralistic view of the books, which she seems to regard not as entertainment so much as didactic tracts. Larsson was able to write the books so quickly, she told me, because he felt “deep frustration and rage that things were sliding ever more downward,” and she added that the worldwide success of the books was in some ways unfortunate, because it seemed to reflect that corruption and abuse of power was a problem everywhere, not just in Sweden.
As for the novel on the laptop, she said she hoped that it would never be published. “They have made enough money, which is their main objective,” she said, referring to the Larssons. But the manuscript is her only bargaining chip, and she may be in the best position to know what needs to be done to make the text publishable. John-Henri Holmberg has guessed that because of the way Larsson wrote, often working on more than one book at a time, there may be a fair amount of outline and even actual text for a fifth book and possibly a sixth. The computer files are an enormously valuable property, because of readers’ appetites for more Larsson and because, as Scott Rudin suggested to me, of the movie potential. At the moment, film producers have rights to only the three published novels. A new contract could conceivably liberate Blomkvist and Salander from books altogether and allow them, like James Bond, to go on having movie adventures indefinitely.
I met Larsson’s father and brother at a brand-new office suite they have rented in Umea. There were a couple of desks and computers, some Millennium movie posters waiting to be hung and a shelf of awards that the books won from various mystery writers’ groups. Joakim Larsson, who worked for 22 years as an accountant at Ernst & Young before quitting to look after Stieg’s estate, looks a little like his brother and has some of the same conciliatory personality that enabled Stieg to listen patiently on the phone when right-wingers called up to rant at him. Erland, who is now 74, is sharper-tongued and more forceful. Practically the first thing he said to me, in his direct, Norrlander fashion, was that he didn’t understand why it took Gabrielsson so long to pull herself together. Both he and Joakim lost spouses, he pointed out, and they had soldiered on. “Eva Gabrielsson is very peculiar,” he added. “People say she was that way even as a child. She isn’t like everyone else.” There is some family history, it turns out. Years ago, Erland says, he lent some money to Gabrielsson’s father so he could pay the taxes on some land he owned. In return, he was given lifetime use of a Gabrielsson summer cottage.
At this point Gabrielsson and the Larssons can’t even agree on things like whether she was told when the books were officially being published or whether she was properly invited to the movie premiere. But the Larssons’ position on the estate is straightforward: the law is the law, and they can’t change it; and it’s fitting, they say, that any money left over in the next generation should go to Joakim’s two children and not Eva’s sister’s. Joakim and Erland also insist that there is a will of sorts: a letter Stieg wrote before leaving for Africa in 1977 and sealed in an envelope marked: “Contains my will. Do not open before I die.” This document was never witnessed and has no legal validity, which is probably just as well, because it leaves everything to the Socialist Party in Umea. But the Larssons see the letter as a partial clue to Stieg’s intentions. “He had 25 years to change it,” Joakim said. He added that he advised Stieg to get married, saying it was the “common-sense thing to do,” and that his brother made fun of him. Later, when the book contract was signed, he said, he kept urging Stieg to make a will until his brother became irritated.
When I suggested that in view of how much money the books had made, their offer to Gabrielsson of 20 million kronor didn’t seem particularly generous, Joakim turned to me and demanded, “How much money do you make?”
I said that wasn’t the point, but he insisted, “No, how much do you make?” So I told him, more or less, and he looked at me with something like contempt. “I do not need that much money,” he said. “I make $30,000 a year after taxes. For me, a good day is to go out in the woods and make a fire, have something to eat. I don’t have a Ferrari. I don’t have that taste.”
Erland explained that the 20 million kronor was meant not as a division of the estate but as a kind of living allowance. “It’s 20 million for her to live,” he said. “She can live very well with that money, and then together we will decide what to do with the rest.”
The Larssons do not strike me as greedy people. They drive small, inexpensive cars and live in modest apartments, and if they wanted to change their lifestyle they would probably have to do it somewhere other than Umea, where conspicuous consumption is frowned upon. I got the impression, in fact, that Stieg’s estate was a burden, a weighty responsibility they weren’t prepared for, perhaps didn’t feel quite up to and are still trying to figure out. Joakim gave me a long explanation, which I couldn’t quite follow, of why the Swedish tax laws make it hard to give money away, and yet slowly they have begun to do so, recently donating five million kronor, or $660,000, to Expo, the magazine Stieg co-founded.
The Larssons say they wish Gabrielsson well, and yet it bothers them greatly when she says Stieg had no contact with them. “I talked to my brother all the time at his office or on the cellphone,” Joakim said. Erland mentioned visiting Stieg in Stockholm and, because Stieg didn’t have a license, picking him up and driving him to the family’s summer cottage, where he worked on the third book. Stieg even sent him the books in manuscript, he said, and they discussed them. “The first book, I told him there was too much sex. The second one, I said, ‘You can’t end that way — it’s not fair to end with a cliffhanger.’ ”
He paused and then added, sadly: “I’m sorry that my wife, Stieg’s mother, didn’t live. I think it might have been different — it wouldn’t have been two males against one woman.”
Joakim remarked that there had been two recent face-to-face meetings with Gabrielsson and her lawyer. The first went badly; the second — perhaps because Erland was ill and couldn’t attend — was better.
So, I asked, was there still a chance of a happy resolution?
Joakim paused and then said, “Yes.”
“Ha!” Erland barked, and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
MANY OF LARSSON’S friends have refrained from publicly taking sides in what they see as a tragic family quarrel. One who hasn’t refrained is Kurdo Baksi, whose memoir, “My Friend Stieg Larsson,” was recently published in Sweden and will come out here at the end of the year. He has openly sided with Joakim and Erland to the point where he now says that Gabrielsson has in effect stolen the fourth book and even that the relationship between her and Larsson wasn’t particularly fond. “Stieg liked women,” he said to me, insisting that on four occasions he saw Larsson being affectionate with women other than Eva. “I can’t lie for the history books,” he added. “I have the names, and Eva knows two of them very well.”
“Jesus Christ!” Gabrielsson said when I brought up Baksi’s name. “He’s making things up. He exaggerates his importance in everything he has ever done, or not done.”
As his name suggests, Baksi is not a Swede. He’s a Kurd from Turkish Kurdistan, and he came to Sweden as a teenager when his family had to flee for political reasons. As a young man he, too, founded a political magazine, Black and White, dedicated to opposing racism. He and Larsson met in 1992 when Baksi was organizing a one-day strike of immigrants in Sweden and Larsson, characteristically, called up and demanded to strike, too.
Baksi does not have the typical Swedish personality. He’s voluble, talkative, a bit of a self-aggrandizer. His book has offended a lot of people, because it violates the Swedish principle of jantelagen — of not sticking out or making too much of yourself. He has claimed, some of Larsson’s friends say, a much bigger part in Larsson’s life than he actually played. Baksi also says that Larsson was a better opinion journalist than a reporter.
Baksi prides himself on being a sort of ethical wheeler-dealer. “I don’t have money, but I can arrange money for good things,” he told me. And perhaps for that reason he said that the dispute between Gabrielsson and the Larssons is about money and nothing more and even called her the greedy party. Fredrik Quistbergh, a journalist who worked on a documentary about Gabrielsson, on the other hand, says that the real issue is not money but control — about who will get to shape Larsson’s literary legacy and decide about future adaptations. Eva Gedin sees the whole dispute partly in familial terms. It’s the kind of thing that happens in all families, she says: one side takes offense about something and stops talking to the other, and pretty soon the feud has a history and a life of its own.
But ultimately the dispute is really about Stieg Larsson himself, an exceptional young man, idealistic and artistic, who in classic fashion left the boondocks and made something of himself in the wider world. Who was he, really — a Norrlander or a Stockholmer? And who gets to claim him now? The emotional stakes on both sides are huge. No matter how close he was or wasn’t to his family, he was clearly a central figure to them — someone to be admired and cherished — as he was to Gabrielsson. The tragedy is that they can’t figure out a way to share him.
LIFE SELDOM IMITATES art, but sometimes they intersect. On Easter Saturday this year, the Stockholm City Museum sponsored a walking tour of landmarks that figure in the Millennium books. These tours have become a popular attraction, and there are hundreds every year, given in several languages. The group assembled at Bellmansgatan, a hilly street in Sodermalm, where in the novels Blomkvist has his apartment, and then paused on a path, still icy even in April, at the top of a bluff with a beautiful view of the Riddarfjarden, the bay separating Sodermalm from Gamla Stan, the Old City, and the rest of the Stockholm archipelago. Sodermalm, where much of the action in the books takes place, is Stockholm’s Brooklyn, more or less — formerly poor and working class but now rapidly being gentrified and home to the vinyl-record shops, the cool vintage-clothing boutiques, the edgy new restaurants. Larsson, who clearly loved the place, made a point in the books of using real addresses and real locations.
The guide explained that the books even employ a moral geography: the good characters all live in Soder, as it’s called, and the bad ones in Kungsholmen or Ostermalm, across the water. Wennerstrom, the corrupt billionaire in the first book, lives on Strandvagen, the guide said, a beautiful waterfront boulevard where the real Swedish billionaires live, and there Strandvagen was, gleaming in the distance.
Just then, two people came strolling down the path from the other direction: Eva Gabrielsson and Svante Branden, a friend of Larsson’s who is a character in the third book. They looked straight ahead, no one in the group recognized them and they were gone in an instant.
In an e-mail message later, Gabrielsson told me that she is used to such groups and that she thought it interesting that she and Branden happened by just as the guide was talking about corrupt businessmen in the novels. She added that she hoped he mentioned there were such people in the real world too.
Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The New York Times.
Even though she’s ‘so damn ancient,’ the director still defies Hollywood convention
Johanna Schneller
“You know,” I said in a phone interview this week with Nicole Holofcener, the writer and director of the new film Please Give, “from Hollywood’s perspective, you do everything wrong. You make small, smart films that are dialogue-heavy and character-driven. The emotions are subtle, not super-sized. You focus on female characters, usually well past the ingénue stage, who are prickly and discontented. You use –”
“ – the same actress [Catherine Keener] over and over,” Holofcener jumped in, way ahead of me. “I write ensemble films, so I can’t get a huge star because there isn’t one clear lead character. My movies are too dark, or the humour’s too weird. They’re hard to market, because they don’t have a hook – they can’t be reduced to one line.”
I tried to come up with a few. For Walking and Talking (1996), Holofcener’s debut feature: Amelia (Keener) can’t manage to be happy that her best friend (Anne Heche) is getting married. For Lovely and Amazing (2001): Despite their closeness, a mother (Brenda Blethyn) and her two daughters (Keener and Emily Mortimer) continually baffle one another. For Friends with Money (2006): Four women (Keener, Frances McDormand, Joan Cusack and Jennifer Aniston) feel empty in lives that appear full. And for Please Give, which opened in select cities yesterday: When married Manhattan furniture dealers (Keener and Oliver Platt) buy the apartment next door but allow its elderly occupant to live there until her death, strange and complicated relationships arise between the couple and the woman’s granddaughters (Amanda Peet and Rebecca Hall).
“You’re right, it’s pretty tortuous,” I said. “The movies are so much fuller and funnier than a tag line can convey.”
Holofcener sighed. “I have no idea why I can keep getting movies made,” she said. “I write a script on spec – which means nobody pays me – and then shop it around. Mostly I hear, ‘Great script,’ or even, ‘One of the best scripts I’ve ever read.’ And then I hear, ‘But we’re not going to make it.’ It’s always the same. Studios will say, ‘We want to make your next one, but notthis next one.’ It’s always the script I haven’t written that they want to make, not the one that’s in their hands. It’s really hypocritical and so full of shit. Or they want, I don’t know, some Nicole Kidman vehicle about a woman crossing the desert. It’s like, ‘What? That’s not what I do!’”
I thought I should tell her that she’s not supposed to be this honest, at least not to a journalist. But I didn’t, because I really wanted to hear what she’d say next.
“But somehow eventually I can convince the right people,” Holofcener continued. “For Please Give, Sony Classics first said, ‘This movie is so sad, I think I’d want to kill myself after seeing it. Why should we make it?’ So I went through it page by page and said, ‘This scene’s gonna be funny.’ They said, ‘You’re joking. It’s tragic!’ I said, “It’s tragic, but it’s also funny.’ That’s what the process of trying to get financing has always been like.”
In between features, Holofcener is in demand to rewrite other people’s scripts, or to direct episodes of smart-talky television shows, including Sex and the City, The Gilmore Girls, Six Feet Under and Bored to Death. She’s just adapted her first thriller, Every Secret Thing, for producer/star Frances McDormand, which they’ll soon be shopping around.
Almost every profile of Holofcener – who is 50, recently divorced, and the mother of twin 12-year-old sons – mentions that she grew up in New York and spent time on Woody Allen’s sets. (Her stepfather, Charles Joffe, was Allen’s long-time producer.) At Columbia Film School, her peers called her “the female Woody Allen.” But she says her connection to him was slight: “I was so young when I was on Woody’s sets. I worked as a production assistant on one when I was 19, but I was with the bagels and cream cheese. And Woody whispers to his actors, so the very few times I was allowed on the set, I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The only thing I picked up is what everybody picks up from being a huge fan of his early movies and watching them over and over: His long takes, and the dolly shots, and the natural performances. And his brilliance.”
What most profiles don’t mention is that Holofcener’s first professional gig was as a writer on the hit Canadian tweener TV series Ready or Not, for creator Alyse Rosenberg. “I have wonderful memories of us sitting on living-room floors bashing out ideas and memories from our own tween lives,” Rosenberg told me.
The intense female friendships, the long and winding conversations, the delicate calibrations of emotions – all the characteristics of Holofcener’s movies were nascent in Ready or Not. “It’s all the same, yeah; I think it’s all exactly the same,” Holofcener said. “You try to put your feet in someone else’s shoes and go. I tend to like things that, I don’t know, tell the truth.”
I’ll say. Holofcener boldly strides into conversations that others would consider minefields. She admits to “freaking out” prior to turning 50: “It just seems so damn ancient, and it’s the unsexiest number, in our culture anyway. We should be dead, right, because we’re useless to the population. But I would never lie about my age. I think women especially have to stop that.”
On money, the focus of her last two films, she says: “I feel it’s one of the last taboos, like race. It evokes such strong feelings of shame or greed or envy, whether you make too little or too much. My screenwriter friends might make $700,000 for a script, which of course is obscene – and not even the highest amount. When I ask, ‘How much?’ you should see the embarrassment on their faces. I feel ashamed of the amount of money I make, compared to normal people who have normal jobs.”
And on Please Give’s opening credits, which show a panoply of older breasts being squished in a mammogram machine, she says, “I’m aware of being shocking, and that a lot of people might not like it. But I think it’s funny. In French movies, women are topless, and they have these big hanging boobs. But in this country people say, ‘Oh, that’s disgusting.’ That’s sad.
“I guess I like to be shocking sometimes,” Holofcener sums up. “When I was younger, it came from a more immature place. At least now when I’m doing it I’m aware of it.” I’d say hyper-aware. And thrillingly so.
A stylized take on the casting process created with diegetic sound, shot at House Production & Casting and Milk Studios.
Director: Georgie Greville – georgieforever.com
Executive Producer / Casting: Adam Joseph – houseprod.com
Editor: Nathan Byrne – postmillennium.com
Sound: Geremy Jasper
Producer: Grayson Ross
DP: Joe Arcidiacono – joearcidiacono.com
Special Thanks to Iggy Pop & The Stooges
Diegetic sound
Sound whose source is visible on the screen or whose source is implied to be present by the action of the film:
voices of characters
sounds made by objects in the story
music represented as coming from instruments in the story space ( = source music)
Diegetic sound is any sound presented as originated from source within the film’s world
Digetic sound can be either on screen or off screen depending on whatever its source is within the frame or outside the frame.
Another term for diegetic sound isactual sound
Diegesis is a Greek word for “recounted story” The film’s diegesis is the total world of the story action
Non-diegetic sound
Sound whose source is neither visible on the screen nor has been implied to be present in the action:
narrator’s commentary
sound effects which is added for the dramatic effect
mood music
Non-diegeticsound is represented as coming from the a source outside story space.
The distinction between diegetic or non-diegetic sound depends on our understanding of the conventions of film viewing and listening. We know of that certain sounds are represented as coming from the story world, while others are represented as coming from outside the space of the story events. A play with diegetic and non-diegetic conventions can be used to create ambiguity (horror), or to surprise the audience (comedy).
Another term for non-diegetic sound iscommentary sound.
Diogenes of Sinope (Greek: Διογένης ὁ Σινωπεύς Diogenes ho Sinopeus), was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy. Also known as Diogenes the Cynic, he was born in Sinope (modern-day Sinop, Turkey) in 412 or 404 BCE [1] and died in 323 BCE,[2] at Corinth. Diogenes was the only man to publicly mock Alexander the Great and live. He intellectually humiliated Plato and was the only pupil ever accepted by Antisthenes, whom he saw as the true heir of Socrates. Diogenes taught his philosophy of cynicism to Crates who taught it to Zeno who fashioned it into the school of Stoicism, one of the most enduring branches of Greek philosophy.
Diogenes of Sinope was always controversial. Exiled from his native city for defacing the currency, he moved to Athens and declared himself a cosmopolitan (in flagrance of the prevailing city-state system). He became a disciple of Antisthenes, and made a virtue of extreme poverty, famously begging for a living and sleeping in a large tub in the marketplace. He became notorious for his provocative behaviour and philosophical stunts such as carrying a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He regularly tangled with Plato, disputing his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaging his lectures. After being captured by pirates and sold into slavery, Diogenes eventually settled in Corinth, where he was befriended by Alexander.
Diogenes was a staunch admirer of Hercules. He believed that virtue was better revealed in action and not theory. His life was a relentless campaign to debunk the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt society. None of his many writings have survived, but details of his life come in the form of anecdotes (chreia), especially from Diogenes Laërtius, in his book Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.
Diogenes was a self-appointed public scold whose mission was to demonstrate to the ancient Greeks that civilization is regressive. He taught by living example that wisdom and happiness belong to the man who is independent of society. Diogenes scorned not only family and political social organization, but property rights and reputation. The most shocking feature of his philosophy is his rejection of normal ideas about human decency. Exhibitionist and philosopher, Diogenes is said to have eaten in the marketplace,[40] urinated on some people who insulted him,[41] defecated in the theatre,[42], masturbated in public and pointed at people with his middle finger.[43] Sympathizers considered him a devotee of reason and an exemplar of honesty. Detractors have said he was an obnoxious beggar and an offensive grouch.
Diogenes the Dog
Many anecdotes of Diogenes refer to his dog-like behavior, and his praise of a dog’s virtues. It is not known whether Diogenes was insulted with the epithet “doggish” and made a virtue of it, or whether he first took up the dog theme himself. The modern terms cynic and cynical derive from the Greek word kynikos, the adjective form of kynon, meaning dog. Diogenes believed human beings live artificially and hypocritically and would do well to study the dog. Besides performing natural bodily functions in public without unease, a dog will eat anything, and make no fuss about where to sleep. Dogs live in the present without anxiety, and have no use for the pretensions of abstract philosophy. In addition to these virtues, dogs are thought to know instinctively who is friend and who is foe. Unlike human beings who either dupe others or are duped, dogs will give an honest bark at the truth. Diogenes stated that “other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my friends to save them.“
The term “Cynic” itself derives from the Greek word κυνικός, kynikos, “dog-like” and that from κύων, kyôn, “dog” (genitive: kynos).[46] One explanation offered in ancient times for why the Cynics were called dogs was because Antisthenes taught in the Cynosarges gymnasium at Athens.[47] The word Cynosarges means the place of the white dog. Later Cynics also sought to turn the word to their advantage, as a later commentator explained:
There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them.
As noted, Diogenes’ association with dogs was memorialized by the Corinthians, who erected to his memory a pillar on which rested a dog of Parian marble.
This very short film – produced by MoMA [The New York Museum of Modern Art] – should be required viewing for folks encountering abstract art for the first time. A simple and elegant explanation of how a 5 ft. tall tower of wood, cardboard, and crushed eggshells – made in 1913 – still speaks to us 100 years later.
David Bordwell, the film historian, author and blogger, in an editing room on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Andy Manis for The New York Times
By MANOHLA DARGIS
MADISON, Wis.
LAST Sunday the film historian David Bordwell watched movies from Spain, Denmark and Romania at the Wisconsin Film Festival here in Madison, where he has lived if rarely stayed still for four decades. He had just returned from the Hong Kong International Film Festival, after which he drove some 400 miles (and back) from Madison to Bloomington, Ind., to deliver a lecture. In between all this flying, driving and watching, he also posted some 14,000 words on his blog, davidbordwell.net. Then it was off to Ebertfest in Champaign, Ill., a film festival programmed by Roger Ebert, who has called Mr. Bordwell “our best writer on the cinema.”
He might be retired, and you might never have heard of him, but at 62 Mr. Bordwell remains extraordinarily prolific and perhaps more influential than ever. His blog is read by academics but also routinely featured on aggregate sites like moviecitynews.com next to industry dispatches from Variety. “Minding Movies,” an anthology of blog posts by him and Kristin Thompson, his wife and frequent collaborator, is due next spring. And new editions of their textbooks “Film Art” (ninth) and “Film History” (third) were issued last year. If an undergraduate takes a single film class, it’s a good bet that one of these books will be on the syllabus.
Outside of the academy (and sometimes in it too) film studies have long generated degrees of mirth, bafflement and hostility, which can happen when you mix polysyllabic words like intertextuality with high-concept producers like Jerry Bruckheimer. In 2003 The Los Angeles Times Magazine published a cover article, “Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology,” by David Weddle, who was aghast at what his daughter, a film-studies major, was studying in her department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was the kind of freak-out that film studies people were used to (then and now) — after all, it’s only a movie.
Back in the mid-1980s, when I was a graduate student in cinema studies, psychoanalytic and feminist film theory, with their emphasis on the male gaze and female bodies (never as sexy as it might seem), were the rage. I read a lot of work influenced by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and while it was intellectually stimulating, I later decided that this wasn’t a fruitful approach for me. At the time it felt as if everyone was writing variations on the same issues (visual pleasure blah blah blah) while using the same almost ritualistically recycled theories with the same types of films that conveniently fit those theories. (Mr. Bordwell would later take direct aim at theory with a capital T, making a lot of people unhappy.)
That’s one reason why the 1985 publication of “The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960” — by him, Ms. Thompson and Janet Staiger, who read chapters aloud to one another during the writing — was so welcome. Dedicated to the actor Ralph Bellamy, the writer Anita Loos “and their many co-workers in the Hollywood cinema,” this magisterial work uses 300 movies from 1915 to 1960 (and a bit beyond) to trace changes in Hollywood’s production practices and in its technologies through, for instance, a history of cameras. It also identifies the conventions that helped constitute the classical style through devices like continuity editing; explaining how these devices work to create systems of cinematic narrative, time and space; and examining how these systems work together.
This was history with a vengeance: detailed, rigorous, monumental. Though well received, the book had its detractors and continues to draw criticism for, among other things, its cut-off dates and insistence on the coherence of the Hollywood style. The book alone certainly didn’t reintroduce history back into film studies, but its insistence on the historical conditions that control and shape “textual processes,” along with the depth and breadth it brought to writing film history, has been profound. The discipline’s new emphasis on cinema’s past has been rewarding, but it also suggests that film studies has entered a nostalgic, even elegiac stage: many scholars have turned back the clock to write about early and silent cinema at the very moment that others are theorizing about the end of cinema in the digital age.
The boundlessly enthusiastic Mr. Bordwell doesn’t come off as nostalgic, either in his writing or in person. He grew up on a farm outside the upstate New York town of Penn Yan, where there was only one movie theater. So he fed his cinephilia through early film books like Arthur Knight’s “Liveliest Art” and late-night television. By the time he started teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he was committed to the serious study of film. (“No soft arguments,” as he puts it.) Madison was an ideal spot partly because it housed a trove of research material, including the United Artists collection of more than 5,000 films, and more than 2,000 boxes of paper material. And the school was hopping, with 22 film societies and the influential journal The Velvet Light Trap. He got to work.
During a recent visit to Wisconsin I found him indefatigably energetic, fast talking and walking, as he ricocheted from idea to idea, film to film. It’s no wonder he titled one recent blog post “The Omnivoyeur’s dilemma.” (The equally prolific Ms. Thompson was in Egypt studying Amarna-period sculpture.) Unlike some film academics, who sometimes seem less interested in actual movies than the peripheries, he remains an enthusiast who likes to sit in the first row center. He was toting the book “Why We Cooperate,” in which the psychologist Michael Tomasello looks at why children are naturally cooperative. A practitioner of cognitive film theory, Mr. Bordwell is interested in the process of knowing through perception as when, for instance, we watch actors blinking in movies.
Why should anyone care, other than a Visine executive? As it happens, actors are often taught not to blink, and filmmakers will cut away from a scene before an actor blinks because it’s distracting. Eyes are an important expressive tool, imparting valuable information (joy, sorrow) that we register perceptually: blinking, in other words, is part of how a movie makes meaning. In “Jerry Maguire,” Mr. Bordwell writes in his 2005 book “Figures Traced in Light,” there are “fewer than 30 blinks among three characters in a passage of nearly three minutes,” which exaggerates and amplifies the interpersonal cues. Some filmmakers guide our attention to faces; others direct our attention to postures and gestures or even away from faces toward other expressive elements.
Eye blinks are part of a film’s expressive style, and movies are about style, not just stories. “Why should we inquire into style at all?” he asks rhetorically in “Figures Traced in Light.” Because “without performance and framing, lens length and lighting, composition and cutting, dialogue and music, we could not grasp the world of the story.” But Mr. Bordwell doesn’t just count eye blinks, he also discusses human physiology, specifically the region of the eye that has critical focus. Our eyes scan our environment through “visual search” (“active, fast and indebted to our biological heritage”), something intuited by the English painter Hogarth and that scene-stealer Katharine Hepburn, who wore a scarlet cardigan in “On Golden Pond” because, as the cinematographer said, “your eye goes straight to it.”
Counting blinks is just one of Mr. Bordwell’s strategies for understanding movies, the fundamental goal of the critic. Rather than just gassing on about his interpretations (as reviewers can do) or starting with a theory and finding a set of movies that support that theory (as scholars will do), he looks to the movies first, analyzing what is happening at the level of sight and sound, then extrapolating meaning. In his books and on his blog he also generously employs images taken from the movies, so that you can follow his line of reasoning and trace along with him how German Expressionist cinema influenced William Cameron Menzies, the production designer for “Gone With the Wind.”
You can see for yourself on that blog, which he started after he retired from teaching in 2004. He isn’t the only high-profile academic with a Web site — Henry Jenkins (henryjenkins.org), Yuri Tsivian (cinemetrics.lv\) — but the accessibility of his writing as well as his output make him a noteworthy contributor to our brave new world of moving-image discourse. (Mind you, discourse has its limits: the blog is closed to comments to keep out the noise.) It has recently become axiomatic that film criticism is in crisis. The truth is that outside of the mainstream media world, where reviewers are increasingly disposable, film criticism is doing fine. Academic programs continue to churn out professors who continue to assign books by Bordwell and Thompson that open eyes, ears and minds, and sometimes rock worlds.
Written By David Weddle, Special to The Los Angeles Times
July 13, 2003
“How did you do on your final exam?” I asked my daughter.
Her shoulders slumped. “I got a C.”
Alexis was a film studies major completing her last undergraduate year at UC Santa Barbara. I had paid more than $73,000 for her college education, and the most she could muster on her film theory class final was a C?
“It’s not my fault,” she protested. “You should have seen the questions. I couldn’t understand them, and nobody else in the class could either. All of the kids around me got Cs and Ds.”
She insisted that she had studied hard, then offered: “Here, read the test yourself and tell me if it makes any sense.”
I took it from her, confidently. After all, I had graduated 25 years ago from USC with a bachelor’s degree in cinema. I’d written a biography of movie director Sam Peckinpah, articles for Variety, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, and written and produced episodic television.
On the exam, I found the following, from an essay by film theorist Kristin Thompson:
“Neoformalism posits that viewers are active that they perform operations. Contrary to psychoanalytic criticism, I assume that film viewing is composed mostly of nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious activities. Indeed, we may define the viewer as a hypothetical entity who responds actively to cues within the film on the basis of automatic perceptual processes and on the basis of experience. Since historical contexts make the protocols of these responses inter-subjective, we may analyze films without resorting to subjectivity . . . According to Bordwell, ‘The organism constructs a perceptual judgment on the basis of nonconscious inferences.’ “
Then came the question itself:
“What kind of pressure would Metz’s description of ‘the imaginary signifier’ or Baudry’s account of the subject in the apparatus put on the ontology and epistemology of film implicit in the above two statements?”
I looked up at my daughter. She smiled triumphantly. “Welcome to film theory,” she chirped.
Alexis then plopped down two thick study guides. One was for the theory class, the other for her course in advanced film analysis. “Tell me where I went wrong,” she said.
The prose was denser than a Kevlar flak jacket, full of such words as ”diegetic,” “heterogeneity,” “narratology,” “narrativity,” “symptomology,” ”scopophilia,” “signifier,” “syntagmatic,” “synecdoche,” “temporality.” I picked out two of them “fabula” and “syuzhet” and asked Alexis if she knew what they meant. “They’re the Russian Formalist terms for ‘story’ and ’plot,’ ” she replied.
“Well then, why don’t they use ‘story’ and ‘plot?’ “
“We’re not allowed to. If we do, they take points off our paper. We have to use ‘fabula’ and ‘syuzhet.’ “
Forget for a moment that if Alexis were to use these terms on a Hollywood set, she’d be laughed off the lot. Alexis wants a career in film. She chose UC Santa Barbara because we couldn’t afford USC and her grades weren’t lustrous enough for UCLA. Film programs at those schools have hard-core theoreticians on their faculty, as do many other universities. Yet no other undergraduate film program in the country emphasizes film theory as much as UCSB, and the influence of those theoreticians is growing. We knew that much before Alexis enrolled. In hindsight, we had no idea what that truly meant for students.
I flipped through more pages and landed on this paragraph by Edward Branigan, the premier film theorist at UCSB: “Film theory deals with basic principles of film, not specific films. Thus it has a somewhat ‘abstract,’ intangible quality to it. It is like looking at a chair in a classroom and thinking about chairs in general: undoubtedly, there are many types and
shapes of ‘chairs’ made out of many kinds and colors of materials resulting in different sizes of chairs. What must a ‘chair’ be in order to be a ‘chair’? (Can it be anything? a pencil? a car? a sandwich? a nostalgic feeling? a ledge of a building that someone sits on? the ground one sits on and also walks on? Can a ‘chair’ be whatever you want, whatever you say it is?) Here’s another question: what must a chair be in order to be ‘comfortable’ (i.e., what is the ‘aesthetics’ of chairs?)?”
My daughter was required to take 14 units of film analysis and theory before she could graduate with her bachelor’s degree in film studies. That’s the equivalent of going to school full time for one quarter, which made it relatively easy to crunch the numbers. Including tuition, books, school supplies, food and rent, it cost about $6,100 for Alexis to learn how to distinguish between a chair and a nostalgic feeling. I don’t like to complain, but that just didn’t seem like a fair return on my investment.
Is there a hidden method to these film theorists’ apparent madness? Or is film theory, as movie critic Roger Ebert said as I interviewed him weeks later, “a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a New Age cult, in which a new language has been invented that only the adept can communicate in”?
At USC cinema school a quarter-century ago, one of the most popular teachers was Drew Casper, a young, untenured professor with an unbridled love for movies. Casper didn’t lecture, he performed: jumping on a chair to sing a song from the musical he was teaching, covering his blackboard with frenetic scrawls as he unleashed a torrent of background material on the filmmaker’s life, the studio that produced the movie, and the social forces that influenced it.
Casper, and most other film studies professors at USC, approached film from a humanist perspective. He taught students to focus on the characters in the movies, the people who made the films, and the stories the movies told and what they revealed about the human condition, our society and the moment in history they dramatized.
Yes, students read theoretical essays and books. But they were about the nuts and bolts of moviemaking. Aristotle’s “Poetics” laid out the basic principles of dramatic writing. Sergei Eisenstein explained the intricate mechanics of montage editing, which used quick cutting to provoke visceral emotions from audiences. And André Bazin described how directors Orson Welles and William Wyler used a “long-take” method of filming scenes that was the opposite of montage, the camera and actors moving poetically around one another in intricately choreographed shots.
Students also studied the first French cinematic doctrine to reach American shores, the auteur theory. It held that directors were the primary creators of films and that they, like novelists, created bodies of work with recurrent themes and consistent world views. At the time, the auteur theory seemed revolutionary, and in Hollywood‹particularly among members of the Writers Guild it remains controversial because many argue that movies are created not by a single auteur but by a complex collaboration of hundreds of craftspeople, beginning with the screenwriter.
Whatever its merits, the auteur theory remained solidly within the humanist tradition Casper once taught. Perhaps he knows what happened to film theory in recent decades.
He does. “Unfortunately, film studies has moved away from humanist concerns,” says Casper, who now holds the prestigious Hitchcock Chair at USC’s School of Cinema-Television. The change began in France in the late 1960s, he says, offering explanations echoed by other film and English professors interviewed for this article. French theorists of the New Left pushed their own liberal social agendas. They discredited the auteur theory as sentimental bourgeois claptrap. Auteurists, they believed, had constructed a pantheon of great directors, almost all them white males, whom they worshiped as demigods. Moviegoers passively allowed the genius to spoon-feed them his interpretation of their socio/political system, and they never dared question the validity of those perceptions.
New Left theorists decided film viewers should liberate themselves, bringing their own thoughts, interpretations and responses into the process. Moviegoers should look at films not as the product of a unique creative spirit, but as cultural “artifacts.” Films could be analyzed as a series of Rorschach inkblots, providing insights about the collective unconscious of the society that produced them. Thus it was no longer the artists’ views of the world that counted. They were merely channeling the zeitgeist. Theorists became the new high priests of culture, and they followed their own concrete, left-wing social agenda.
By the ’70s, film theory was spreading to the United States, and moving beyond simple politics. A kind of metaphysical inquiry into the nature of cinema was underway. Discussions about movie characters, plots and the human beings who created them were on the way to being replaced by theories such as semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalytics and neoformalism.
Film metaphysics, to use an Edward Branigan-style analogy, is like looking at a statue of a man and instead of asking what it expresses about the human psyche, wondering what it reveals about the nature of marble. Or studying a painting to find what it says about the meaning of the color red.
Hershel Parker, respected author of a two-volume biography of writer Herman Melville, says the transformation of film studies mirrored that in many college English departments. “There’s no room for anyone in English departments who wants to talk about author intention,” says Parker, who goes into Old Testament rage at the mention of the subject. When the New Left theories invaded American English departments, Parker believes it all but wiped out serious scholarship. “I was a freak for wanting to go into the library manuscript collections.”
Since authors no longer matter, Parker says, many researchers believe they no longer need to go back and read the author’s correspondence and working manuscripts, or study the events that shaped his or her sensibility. “It’s naïve New Criticism, where all you do is submit yourself to the text,” says Parker. “These people have no clue about going to do research. They don’t know you can find out about a person’s life or work. They have not, and their teachers have not done real research.”
Annette Insdorf, director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University, recruits film theorists for her faculty because she believes her students should be exposed to a discipline that has had a major impact on cinema scholarship. But she remains ambivalent.
Film theory caught on in the 1970s and 1980s, she points out, a time when many cinema professors were struggling to win the respect of their colleagues. “Don’t forget that film studies always labored under the handicap of being perceived as too easy and fun within many universities,” Insdorf says. “I sometimes suspected that professors were trying to ensure their own job security by utilizing an increasingly obfuscating language. The less understandable film theory became to faculty from other departments, the more respectable it seemed.”
As curriculum shifted, students moved further from the practical considerations that have always driven filmmaking‹and continue to drive Hollywood today. “You get people who are graduating with master’s degrees who know nothing about the history of movies,” Casper says. “They have never even heard of Ernst Lubitsch, have never even seen Hitchcock movies. They know the different film theories, they know their Marx, their Freud, their Althusser, Derrida.”
Constance Penley is a thin, plainly dressed woman in her late 50s, her short white hair combed forward in the manner of Gertrude Stein. She speaks in a soft Southern accent, her slender ivory hands shaking ever so slightly as they gesture to illustrate a point.
Penley is director of the UCSB Center for Film, Television and New Media. She also is one of the founders of Camera Obscura, a highly influential feminist film journal, and is one of the primary architects of film theory in the United States. As author or editor of nine books on film and media theory, she is constantly on the move, whisking off to speak in Rome, London, Warsaw, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and at UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Princeton and Harvard.
Like many theorists, she exudes an almost religious fervor for film theory and its power to transform. Penley vividly remembers the moment of her conversion. She arrived at the University of Florida in 1966 with the intention of becoming a high school or community college teacher. But the campus’ burgeoning counterculture quickly radicalized her. She marched in peace demonstrations, got tear-gassed, worked on the underground newspaper, attended feminist consciousness-raising groups and came to realize that becoming a mere teacher would be to surrender to the pressures of a patriarchal power structure.
One night she went to a screening of “Pierrot le Fou,” a labyrinthine, perplexing, yet mesmerizing film by the premier French New Wave director, Jean-Luc Godard. The plot was impossible to follow, but the spontaneity of the acting, the unconventional staging and elliptical editing seemed to Penley to burst beyond the screen. “I walked out into the steamy Florida night and I was baffled. I set out to try and figure out: ‘How is this a film?’ “
She went to see more European movies, hallucinatory concoctions by Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini that catapulted beyond all traditional notions of genre or narrative. Her excitement and questions multiplied, even if she still didn’t know how to define what she was seeing.
Then she took a film class from W. R. Robinson, who had edited a book titled “Man and the Movies.” “He was one of these crazy English professors who loved movies and wanted to legitimize them so he could show them in class,” Penley says.
At the time, only a handful of universities had film programs, most prominently USC, UCLA and New York University. At most colleges, the notion of seriously studying cinema was mocked or ignored. But gradually, instructors on some campuses persuaded the English, philosophy, or even the rhetoric departments to allow them to teach a film class or two.
At the University of Florida, Robinson taught a number of courses, including “Narrative Analysis.” One of the textbooks was “Structuralism,” by Jacques Ehrman. “It was one of the very, very first things on structuralism translated in this country,” Penley says. Derived from the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, structuralism is an investigation of the “deep structures” found in a society’s myths, artwork, literature and films‹structures through which the society defines itself.
In it, at last, Penley had a tool for picking apart works of literature and these new foreign films, a tool for bringing order to the chaos, understanding to her confusion.
After earning a master’s in English education in 1971, Penley wanted to go to the “the most radical place, the farthest away I could get” from Florida. ”That was Berkeley.” There she found a fantastic Day-Glo wonderland, a frothing kettle of New Left politics. She joined a Marxist study group, attended classes at the East Bay Socialist School, screenings at the Pacific Film Archive and film theory classes and seminars taught by professors in Berkeley’s French and rhetoric departments.
She abandoned the idea of getting a PhD in English. “I thought: If I go into English, I’ll have to be like everybody else. I’ll have to find one Shakespeare sonnet that hasn’t been done to death and spend the rest of my life doing it to death. Film seemed so wide open.” She decided to get a doctorate in rhetoric and write her dissertation on film theory.
Then the opportunity of a lifetime presented itself. Bertrand Augst, a French professor who taught courses in semiotics and structuralism at Berkeley, started the Paris Film Program. American college students could study in France with the great film theorists, including Christian Metz whose name I encountered on Alexis’ final exam.
Metz founded the theory of cinema semiotics. He presided over a think tank in Paris where scholars did not make movies or interview filmmakers or do archival research. Instead, they pondered the metaphysics of film, the manifold neoplastic mysteries that semiotics revealed.
Semiotics is the study of the myriad “signs,” verbal and nonverbal, that human beings use to communicate: body language, images, icons, social rituals, and, of course, written language and movies. A semiotician sees an ordinary advertising billboard as a complex “hierarchy” of signs: the slogan, the image of the product, the people consuming the product, the clothes they are wearing, the colors used in the graphics and so on. By closely analyzing each sign, or visual element, and their relationships to each other, the semiotician can glean a treasure trove of insights about the social system that both created and now consumes this pattern of images.
First developed at the end of the 19th century by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, semiotics was later picked up by French theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, who applied it to anthropology; Jacques Lacan, who applied it to Freudian analysis; and Metz, who turned its prism upon the cinema. “In his books ‘Film Language,’ and ‘ Language and Cinema,’ Metz was trying to look at the way film is structured like a language and if we could study its elements with the same precision with which structural linguists were studying language,” Penley says.
She spent two years in Paris with about 40 other scholars. “Metz was a beautiful, beautiful, gentle man in his 50s, trained in linguistics,” Penley says, with the I-can-hardly-believe-I-actually-got-to-hang-with-him glow of a teenager who’s met a rock ‘n’ roll idol. She also attended seminars and lectures by some of the great French researchers in the pantheon of semiotics: Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Raymond Bellour.
Penley returned from Paris after two years with the academic cachet to establish herself as one of the leading film theorists in North America. She earned her PhD at Berkeley and, in 1991, was hired at UCSB, where the film program was being methodically constructed by professor Charles Wolfe, who holds a doctorate in film studies from Columbia University.
“I wanted to build a strong core curriculum stressing film history, theory and analysis‹the way I was trained,” Wolfe says. The practical side of filmmaking‹how to write dramatically sound screenplays, elicit performances from actors, light a set, place a camera and edit film became secondary. ”Students who had strong interests in production could take classes” in addition to core curriculum.
Penley joined Branigan, who had been on the faculty since 1984 after earning a doctorate from a leading film theory school, the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Wolfe now had two major film theorists and the momentum to turn the film program into a full-fledged department in 1996.
Any way you slice it, UCSB’s small band of radical theorists has pulled off a remarkable feat. They now hobnob with the Hollywood elite and are building a complex that will put their film studies department on par with UCLA, USC and NYU. They have overthrown the old school humanists and broken free of the fascist thought control designs of the artistic genius auteurs.
How did they do it? “We were right, that’s how!” department chair Janet Walker says with a triumphant laugh.
The department has 11 full-time and three tenured part-time faculty members and 456 undergraduates, twice that of a decade ago. Wolfe has in many ways created a strong department. It offers courses in screenwriting, 16mm film production and animation, and a number of Hollywood professionals have come to teach classes, including director John Carpenter, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, and the late Paul Lazarus, a production executive who worked at Columbia, Universal and Warner Brothers. Guest lecturers have included Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jeff Bridges, Michael Douglas, Jodie Foster and screenwriter John Lee Hancock.
The cinema history classes are demanding. Students cannot get away with regurgitating passages from encyclopedias; they are required to pull original production files on movies from such archives as the Motion Picture Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library. But film theory remains at the core. Students are required to take 14 units of film theory and analysis, and just one four-unit production course that deals with the actual writing, shooting and editing of a film or video project.
Wolfe argues that the rigorous intellectual regimen produces better filmmakers, noting that for three consecutive years (1999-2001), UCSB alumnae were nominated for Academy Awards. The most prominent is Scott Frank, nominated for his screenplay for the thriller “Out of Sight” in 1999. Frank has since written the script for “The Minority Report.”
It’s worth noting that Frank graduated in 1982, before Branigan and Penley and the greater emphasis on theory. He credits Lazarus with helping him to hone his craft and says he learned a great deal from Wolfe’s film history classes.
Frank co-chairs the advisory board for UCSB’s Center for Film, Television and New Media. The board is peppered with other Hollywood heavyweights, including Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas, “Ghostbusters” director Ivan Reitman, TV producer Dick Wolf and Fox Entertainment President Gail Berman. The center is scheduled to break ground in 2005 and will include an editing room, production space and a theater.
When I show Frank examples of the film theory that mystified my daughter, he is bewildered. “This is the first I’ve ever heard of these terms. ’Narratology?’ ‘Symptomatic interpretation?’ ‘Syuzhet, fabula, analepses, prolepses’, my goodness! I’m really shocked that they even teach anything like this.”
Other Hollywood professionals and film experts offered harsher reactions. Some criticized the curriculum or the political agendas at work. Some simply couldn’t get beyond the turgid academic language.
I read from my daughter’s study guide to Gary A. Randall, who has served as president of Orion Television, Spelling Television, and as the executive producer of the TV series “Any Day Now.” “That’s what your daughter’s being taught?” he says. “That’s just elitist psychobabble. It sounds like it was written by a professor of malapropism. That has absolutely no bearing on the real world. It sounds like an awfully myopic perspective of what film is really supposed to be about: touching hearts and minds and providing provocative thoughts.”
From movie critic Ebert: “Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.”
From Kevin Brownlow, the world’s leading silent movie historian, author of ”The Parade’s Gone By . . .,” and co-producer, with David Gill, of acclaimed documentaries: “You would think, from this closed-circuit attitude to teaching, that such academics would be politically right wing. For it is a kind of fascism to force people practicing one discipline to learn the language of another, simply for the convenience of an intellectual elite. It’s like expecting Slavs to learn German in order to comprehend their own inferiority. But they are not right wing. They are, regrettably, usually left wing, quite aggressively Marxist, which makes the whole situation even more alarming.”
UCSB’s film studies faculty is upfront about its political agenda. The professors are, as in most other film programs, almost uniformly on the left end of the political spectrum. Penley’s generation forged their political beliefs in the 1960s counterculture, and they show a strong preference for hiring younger professors who share their liberal beliefs.
Lisa Parks, 35, joined the faculty in 1998 as a specialist in global media and broadcast history. While an undergraduate at the University of Montana in 1991, Parks and other students lay down on the basketball court at the start of a nationally televised game to protest the Gulf War. She passionately opposed the war in Iraq, and believes that film and media theory can win the hearts and minds of her students back from the mass media conglomerates that Parks says are controlled largely by conservatives.
“Many of our faculty are really concerned about the relationship between media images and social power outside of the screen,” Parks says. “Even though in our classes we’re often watching stuff and trying to segment, analyze and discuss it, we hope that by the time our students graduate, if they do go into the industry, it affects the way that they actually produce.”
In some respects, it’s not fair to single out UC Santa Barbara’s film theory and analysis curriculum simply because my daughter went there. On the other hand, UCSB does consider its film theory program to be its signature.
Faculty members are aware that many students are reluctant if not outright hostile to being force-fed so much theory, but they maintain that the curriculum is valuable even for production-oriented students. “We want them to be able to understand other ways of thinking and looking at these works of art that perhaps exceed their own reactions,” Wolfe says. “That may be people from different time periods, cultures, genders or social orientations.”
When I share the criticisms of film theory with UCSB staff, they look truly wounded, then quickly mount a vigorous defense.
“Film theory is philosophy, and people have made the same criticisms of philosophy for years,” Branigan says. “They say, ‘What relevance does philosophy have to the real world? It’s merely idle thought, personal feeling, pointless speculation.’ If we listened to them, we would do away with teaching and studying the works of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein and Sartre. Do we really want to do that? I think not.”
Anna Everett, an associate professor who specializes in new media, says, ”It’s galling for me to hear those kinds of charges when we expect our students to be able to grapple with complex ideas in math and science and a lot of them won’t go on to use them. Math and science are part of our everyday lives. So why is it then illegitimate for us to ask students to be just as rigorous with something that has a much greater impact on an everyday basis?
“Art, film and video games really do help to shape their ideas and experiences and their relationships. I think the critics are unfair. It’s a way of thinking that doesn’t really take into account what the university is about. We’re not a trade school. We’re trying to develop minds, to create a better world.”
Is it working? The voices of two students:
“I love film theory,” says Chris Scotten. “When I graduate, I want to write, direct and produce. I’m shooting for the moon. The great thing about UCSB is, I could have gone to USC and sat around holding a microphone boom pole, but then I wouldn’t understand the theory behind filmmaking, to understand how film exists in relation to our lives. We learn how film psychologically manipulates us, and the power inherent in the language of cinema. It can be two things, a useful propaganda tool in a communist revolution, or part of the capitalist superstructure, a way of lulling the working class into a haze to subdue them and give them an escape from the pressures of reality. The old communists writing about film theory in Russia and Germany really had something to say, and it’s still relevant today. You’ve got about six companies that own the biggest, most awesome propaganda machine in the history of the whole wretched world. What are the consequences of that?”
Yoshi Enoki Jr., who graduated in 1995, believes he has succeeded despite the film theory classes, not because of them. He has built a thriving career as a location scout and manager for such films as “American Beauty,” ”Terminator 3″ and the Coen brothers’ forthcoming remake of “The Ladykillers.”
Some of his fellow students were not so lucky, Enoki says. They took to heart the portrayals of Hollywood as the embodiment of corporate evil that inevitably corrupts authentic artists and crushes their spirit. “That world
view has given them a rationalization for failure,” he says. “So they don’t even try to break into the industry. These kids, I call them kids because they behave that way, have developed this cynicism, so much so that it eats them alive. Everything becomes negative. They don’t want to connect with people. One of my best friends said to me, ‘When I’m in Hollywood, I can’t be myself.’ But they don’t even know what Hollywood’s all about because they’ve never really been a part of it.”
During my interview with Janet Walker, she glances at the clock and gets a sudden inspiration. Branigan, the department’s premier cognitive film theorist, is teaching a class this very moment. “You’ve got to see Edward lecture,” she says, leading me to a lecture hall. “It’s a theatrical experience.”
Walker ushers me into a 147-seat theater that is about three-quarters full. Branigan stands before a blackboard covered with rectangles and hexagons heavily notated with abbreviations. They appear to be the complex equations of an astrophysicist, but are in fact illustrations of semiotic theories of “narratology.” Branigan has tangled brown-gray hair, a shaggy beard, large glasses coated with flecks of dandruff and fingerprints, and wears an oversized gray sweater and corduroy pants. As he speaks, his hands grasp at the air, shaping it as he shapes his thoughts. He punches certain words out with an odd, inflectionless emphasis. “The nature of the photography: Benjamin says the camera strips people who are in front of the camera lens‹like actors and alienaaaates them from their labor! Alienaaaation! False coooonsciousness!”
Branigan’s oratory mesmerizes many of the students. They lean back, deep into the seats’ red upholstery, eyes staring blankly into space. Some give up and close them altogether. A brunet with a Huck Finn cap pulled over the bridge of her nose shifts about for a more comfortable position and drifts off again. A fellow traces the stubble on his cheek and squints, trying to follow as he takes notes. A tall young man in a backward baseball cap doodles a series of spirals, and at the back of the hall another reads a paper. Two girls in the back whisper to each other.
Branigan takes no notice. He leaves them far behind as he ascends faster and faster along a spiral of rhetoric into the pure white ether of theory. ”Benjamin says the camera does not show the equipment that’s used to make the film. It obscures or hides or masks THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION! Now in Marxism if you hide the process of production, you are obscuring and further alienating the labor that goes into that, the BOOODILY labor that yoooou are contributing to that manufacture. OK? Which is a bad, bad fact. . . .”
David Weddle last wrote for the magazine about comedy.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A new film by Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney takes viewers from Cairo to London on a search for the cultural and historical roots of al Qaeda and some of its motives behind its attack on the United States.
“My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, follows U.S. journalist Lawrence Wright’s worldwide exploration of the historical context of what formed and radicalized al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.
“We know al Qaeda, we know the terror, we know the threat, but we really don’t know why, we don’t know how. And Larry’s personal journey made that understandable in a very low-key, compelling way,” Gibney told Reuters in an interview.
Adapted from Wright’s 2007 one-man play that was based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” it shifts between Wright’s storytelling on stage and real-life interviews with Wright’s sources.
“The search for al Qaeda isn’t so simple, as to just say, who are these individuals? It’s where they come from. What is the context in which the terror was made manifest?” Gibney said.
The film begins with Wright in Cairo detailing the radicalization of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who formed al Qaeda’s backbone. In 1984, al-Zawahiri left a Cairo jail after being tortured with electricity and wild dogs for three years, according to Wright. He was “hardened, resolute and bent on revenge,” the journalist said.
The film then shifts, explaining how bin Laden’s father, described as “a one-eyed illiterate Yemeni laborer,” rose to become Saudi Arabia’s biggest contractor.
But the younger bin Laden became disillusioned with Saudi Arabia, says Wright, who refers to a key moment when he was humiliated after being turned down by Saudi Arabia to protect its people when Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein in 1990.
Instead, the Saudis turned to the United States and bin Laden’s “pride was hurt,” Wright says. The incident helped form al Qaeda’s early agenda to get U.S. troops out of the Middle East, according to the author. Later, al Qaeda is shown using humiliation in martyrdom tapes with participants chanting “we will not accept humiliation.”
Bin Laden is fueled by the historic event that occurred on September 11, 1683. On that date, Polish, Austrian and German forces broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna, marking the moment when Islam began a long retreat and “the Christian West regained its footing,” Wright said.
Gibney said, “It is interesting to find out how Osama bin Laden redefines himself as this great hero who is going to lead the Middle East to some kind of victory over the West.”
Many of the September 11 hijackers were from repressive societies with high unemployment rates, the film says, including Hani Hanjour. Wright says Hanjour’s brother stated he became radicalized only when he could not find a pilot job in Saudi Arabia and became depressed.
“Their own culture offered them no way to be powerful in the world, but al Qaeda could offer them glory,” Wright says.
U.S. PLAYS INTO AL QAEDA’S HANDS?
Wright also details his personal journey and connections with al Qaeda.
A staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, he wrote the script for the 1998 Hollywood movie “The Siege” about a wave of terrorist bombings in New York. Wright said after the September 11 attacks, it became the most rented movie in the United States, making him “the first profiteer in the war on terror.”
He criticizes the United States’ own agenda and military reaction to the September 11 attacks and its scandals under the Bush administration on torture and illegal wiretapping.
Images of U.S. soldiers invading people’s homes in Baghdad and pictures of U.S. soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib in 2004 helped sway public perception in the Middle East.
“Torture by liberal democratic societies proves to jihadis that the West is hypocritical,” Gibney said. “It also gives terrorists a very powerful recruiting tool.”
Gibney also examined torture in his Oscar-winning film “Taxi to the Dark Side,” but he said he became enchanted with Wright’s own quest.
“I wanted to look at the other side. I wanted to look at how al Qaeda came to be,” he said.
Police said Rodney Ansell shot dead a police sergeant but a second officer had returned fire killing the former buffalo hunter.
Police had been looking for Mr Ansell, 44, following an attack on a family near Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, which left two people injured.
The gunfight brought a dramatic end to the life of a man whose survival instincts and rough wilderness manner had made him a symbol of Australian toughness.
He became a hero in 1977 after being stranded on an island for two months when a crocodile overturned his small boat. He survived by shooting sharks and buffalo.
His exploits were celebrated in his book and a documentary film, both called To Fight the Wild.
Mr Ansell wrote in the book that the loneliness of his ordeal had not bothered him – but he did miss the company of women.
The story sparked actor and writer Paul Hogan’s imagination and inspired him, Ken Shadie and John Cornell to write a film about an Outback superstar – Crocodile Dundee.
With Hogan in the title role, the film portrayed the hunter as a backwoodsman out of place in the big city.
She began to seek out everything she could find on the burgeoning women’s movement and helped lead the nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality march on Aug. 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of the enactment of women’s suffrage. It was, Steinem notes, “the first time in my life, and I think for many other women too, that we marched for ourselves.”
GLORIA: IN HER OWN WORDS also explores Steinem’s early days. Born in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, she studied tap dance as a child and watched her mother give up a career as a journalist to have children. Her parents had a rocky marriage and ultimately divorced. Steinem, who attended Smith College, wonders whether devoting so much of her time and energy to the women’s movement was a way to avoid the kind of suffering her mother experienced.
“The cancer served a real purpose, making me a little bit more conscious of time,” she observes. Taking a break from public life after decades of traveling nonstop, Steinem “hit bottom” and began to look internally, writing the self-esteem book “Revolution from Within” in the early ‘90s. Interviewed at the time, she noted, “Being a social activist can be a drug that keeps you from going back and looking at yourself.” 
The Story of India is a BBC TV documentary series, written and presented by historian Michael Wood, about the 10,000-year history of the Indian subcontinent in six episodes. 
