Oliver Kamm

"The Summer of British Film"

The peerless Clive James, in the Times Literary Supplement, writes excellently about the BBC's recent "Summer of British Film". I particularly relished this passage:

Daisy Goodwin, whose memoir of her difficult upbringing has been well received (see the TLS, September 7), might also know something about poetry, a subject she had previously been deputed to make approachable for audiences who presumably knew nothing about poetry at all. But speaking about British film, she deployed an even less analytical vocabulary. About the famous scene in Tom Jones when Albert Finney and his next female target eat themselves into bed, Daisy had this to say: “It’s all very kind of, you know, phwoar!”. I don’t remember her speaking the same way about John Donne. To remind us that she was not just a hot number but a highbrow as well, Daisy managed to squeeze the word “quintessentially” into her lightning discussion of Far From the Madding Crowd. In the language of the higher journalism gone wrong, “quintessentially” is the only way to say “essentially”, just as “implode” is the only way to say “explode”. Ever more grandiose and less accurate, this detestable meta-language is always in the process of – to use one of its favourite words – “reinvention”, as in “reinvention very much the name of the game”.

Very much characteristic of a self-generating patois like this is its levelling effect, by which nobody can think but everybody can have an opinion. Speaking of The Long Good Friday, someone billed as a broadcaster said that “Thatcherism, the IRA and the Mafia” gave the film its edge. He might at least have considered that Thatcherism gave the film some of its finance.

A pack of lies

A critic called Stephen Dalton gives due warning in The Times of a film to be shown on BBC1 this evening (Sunday):

JFK (1991) BBC One, 10.55pm: Much more ambitious and controversial than his new film World Trade Center, Oliver Stone’s powerhouse essay on the mother of all conspiracy theories still feels like a bravura piece of film-making. It is packed with star names and the virtuoso editing blends newsreel footage, dramatic re-creation and wild speculation. Kevin Costner is excellent as the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only man to try legally to prove a Kennedy assassination plot. (189min)

JFK presents President Kennedy's assassination as the work of a conspiracy conducted at the highest levels of government, to prevent a withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. Readers who saw the film on its release 15 years ago may recall that its thesis was rubbished by political commentators of every shade of opinion from Alexander Cockburn in The Nation to George Will in the Washington Post. (The principal exceptions to this consensus of execration were the know-nothing fringe of the know-nothing fringe, such as Michael Parenti and John Pilger.) It provoked particular outrage among writers such as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr who had served in the Kennedy administration. But many of the same critics acknowledged despairingly that generations to come might gain their knowledge of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from this film.

I don't know the age of Stephen Dalton, who writes on films for a variety of publications, but it looks to me that he bears out that prediction. Aesthetic criteria are independent of politics (which is why we value the filmic standards of Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl despite the politics they served), but Oliver Stone explicitly presented JFK as expressing essential historical truths. He invites judgement on that point, and the judgement must be that his film is despicably dishonest.

There is zero evidence that Kennedy planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam. There is zero evidence that Kennedy was killed by anyone other than a lone misfit. By his slightly confusing remark that Garrison was "the only man to try legally to prove a Kennedy assassination plot", Dalton means that Garrison is the only legal figure to have issued an indictment for participation in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. This is true, but - presumably because Stone doesn't mention it, and Dalton gets his history from Stone - Dalton omits relevant information. Garrison's case, against a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw (played by Tommy Lee Jones in the film), was thrown out of court in less than an hour.

The real-life Garrison's principal witness, Charles Spiesel, doesn't appear in the film. This may have something to do with the fact that he was prone to take his daughter's fingerprints to check that supernatural forces hadn't replaced her with an imposter. A witness who does appear in the film, a rent-boy played by Kevin Bacon, is entirely fictitious. A third protagonist, known only as 'Colonel X' and who provides the film-version Garrison with confirmation that Kennedy's assassination was a government conspiracy, does (or did) have a real-life counterpart. He was a retired US Army Colonel called L. Fletcher Prouty, who worked as a researcher on Stone's film. He was also a regular speaker at conventions of the Liberty Lobby, a fiercely antisemitic organisation that fortunately expired in the same year as Prouty (2001). Prouty's ludicrous book The Secret Team was published in a 1990 edition by the Noontide Press. This is the imprint of the so-called Institute for Historical Review, rightly described by the Anti-Defamation League as "the world's single most important outlet for Holocaust-denial propaganda".

You might want to bear this in mind if you find yourself watching Stone's farrago of nonsense, now or at any time in the future.

Delusions of King George

This comment appears in The Times today.

CLIVE JAMES once wrote that hearing a few of his own liberal opinions coming from the mouth of Jane Fonda was enough to set him wondering if the John Birch Society was so bad after all. I have a similar reaction to George Clooney.

”We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood,” Clooney declared at the Academy Awards. “I think that’s probably a good thing. We are the ones who talked about Aids when it was only being whispered . . . We talked about civil rights . . . I’m proud to be part of this Academy.”

Only four black performers have won Oscars for Best Actor or Actress, and three of them were in this century. Only six black actors or actresses have won awards for supporting roles. Hollywood lags far behind the military as a force for the advancement of black Americans. The film industry is out of touch not in its achievements but in its historical certitudes. When the director Elia Kazan received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, much of the audience declined to applaud. Kazan’s crime had been to testify, 50 years earlier, to communist involvement in the entertainment industry.

Yet Kazan was more historically perceptive than is Clooney’s directorial debut, Good Night, and Good Luck (nominated for Best Picture). The film’s central character, the television anchorman Ed Murrow, was not, as Clooney portrays him, a lone figure standing against Senator McCarthy. Murrow was very late in countering the blustering demagogue. Clooney gives no indication that anti-communism and McCarthyism were distinct forces, or that communist infiltration of government and civil society was a genuine threat, though McCarthy grossly exaggerated it.

At least Good Night, and Good Luck is cinematically impressive. Syriana, for which Clooney won Best Supporting Actor, makes up for an incomprehensible plot with a stock of political caricatures so extravagant that the film might as well have been made as a cartoon. An enlightened Arab leader chooses to cross American interests; nefarious oilmen scheme; the CIA, with an unrealistic degree of competence, plots mayhem and assassination. Even the Islamist suicide bomber is a noble figure.

If Clooney wishes to be applauded for the power of his ideas, it would be wrong to withhold judgment. He is Michael Moore for the MTV generation.

More on Syriana

The film Syriana has now opened in London. Commenting on it on Radio 3 a couple of weeks ago I described it as Michael Moore for those who find the original article too learned and allusive. Charles Krauthammer writes about the film in the Washington Post today; excepting only the first sentence of his final paragraph, I agree with him entirely. What Syriana lacks in comprehensible narrative it more than makes up for in clueless caricature. What Krauthammer writes is all you need to know of this film:

In my naivete, I used to think that Hollywood had achieved its nadir with Oliver Stone's "JFK," a film that taught a generation of Americans that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the FBI in collaboration with Lyndon Johnson. But at least it was for domestic consumption, an internal affair of only marginal interest to other countries. "Syriana," however, is meant for export, carrying the most vicious and pernicious mendacities about America to a receptive world.

Political film-making

I went on Radio 3's Nightwaves programme this week, to discuss politics and film. If you've nothing better to do, you can listen to the programme here (it's the Tuesday edition).

I was on with Frances Stonor Saunders, former arts editor of The New Statesman and author of a study of the CIA's influence in the cultural Cold War, Who Paid the Piper? (a good and formidably well researched book, whose conclusions I think are too harsh). We were primarily there to talk about two new films that are shortly to be released in the UK, Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana. We also took part in a general discussion at the end of the programme about the notion of political films.

Good Night, And Good Luck is a dramatisation of the television anchorman Ed Murrow's confrontation with the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy in the mid-1950s. The director, co-scriptwriter and one of the lead actors is George Clooney. The film has some good points, and I enjoyed it. I said on the programme that the film was excellently shot in atmospheric black and white, has strong performances by the lead actors, and recreates vividly the atmosphere of the smoke-filled newsroom. Unfortunately it's not just the cinematography that's in black and white, but also the script and the ostentatious political message.

The film asks to be judged on the acuity of its political ideas, yet comprehensively misunderstands the politics of the 1950s. At no point does it manage to distinguish anti-Communism from McCarthyism. The liberal and social democratic anti-Communists that subscribed to the principles set out in Arthur Schlesinger's book The Vital Center had no trouble in simultaneously reviling McCarthy and recognising that American Communism was no mere harmless heterodoxy. We know from the decrypts of intercepted Soviet cables under the Venona programme that the accusations against Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were correct. We also know the extent of Soviet covert activity through the CPUSA, and the party's domination of a range of front organisations. These are no longer matters of dispute among serious historians. You won't find reference to this background in Clooney's film. The establishment of a Security Programme in the early Cold War was not a function of paranoia. It was a recognition that, given the nature of Soviet covert activity, and the CPUSA's aims and operations at that time, Communist affiliations were among the factors relevant to assessing someone's suitability for employment in government or defence-related industries. (Recall that in the crisis over Stalin's blockade of Berlin, the leadership of the CPUSA openly declared that in the event of war the Party would do everything in its power to secure a Soviet victory.)

Clooney's film gives no such context, and also misrepresents Murrow's own contribution to the downfall of McCarthy. Murrow was very late in coming to this cause. I point out in the radio discussion that his famous anti-McCarthy broadcast was in March 1954, whereas President Eisenhower had already taken personal charge of the political campaign to bring down McCarthy the previous month. You're not really risking your professional reputation in attacking a maverick right-wing Senator if the Republican President has got there before you.

Good Night, And Good Luck is worth seeing. I can give no such recommendation for Syriana, an enervating and largely incomprehensible "thriller" [sic] about oil, the Middle East, the CIA and nefarious American interventions - I think. The film has been nominated for a number of Academy awards, but its caricature of international politics is so extreme that it might as well have been made as a cartoon. When Michael Moore won his award for the mendacious Fahrenheit 9/11, someone termed it "Chomsky for Dummies". Syriana is Michael Moore for those who find the genuine article too learned and allusive.

UPDATE: A misleading ambiguity crept into the last paragraph. The award for Fahrenheit 9/11 that I was recalling was not an Academy award but the Palme D'Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Thanks to readers for pointing this out.

Spend Valentine's evening with me

There can be, and I hope are, few readers with nothing better to do next Tuesday evening than listen to me. But if you're at that loose an end, you could turn to BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves programme at 9.30pm, where I shall be among the guests debating two new films, Good Night, And Good Luck and Syriana. The first film, directed by George Clooney, "details the real-life confrontations between legendary television journalist Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy" (Murrow by the way is not legendary: he really did exist, and I've seen the tapes); the second, directed by Stephen Gaghan, is "a political thriller that unfolds against the intrigue of the global oil industry".

Both come from the stable of Participant Productions, which declares:

Participant believes in the power of media to create great social change. Our goal is to deliver compelling entertainment that will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all.

I reserve till then my judgement of this compelling entertainment, and the extent to which it will inspire me to get involved in the issues that affect us all.

UPDATE: The broadcast will also be available for download from the programme's web site for up to a week after the programme.

UPDATE II: I am informed by email that Nightwaves is available only for streamed listening, and is not "downloadable" in the normal sense. My thanks for the correction.

Political theorists of our time

I have never heard of an actress called Maggie Gyllenhall, but her political opinions, as reported by the BBC, are highly familiar to me:

Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal has prompted outcry after she remarked that the US was "responsible in some way" for the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. Gyllenhaal was speaking at an interview promoting her new film, The Great New Wonderful, about people living in New York in the aftermath of 9/11. In a subsequent statement issued by her publicist, she defended the comment.

"Not to have the courage to ask these questions of ourselves is to betray the victims of 9/11," the 27-year-old said.

In the statement, Gyllenhaal said 11 September was "an occasion to be brave enough to ask some serious questions about America's role in the world". She added: "It is always useful as individuals or nations to ask how we may have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to this conflict."

What can you say of a young lady for whom history has never happened, and who mistakes amorality and ignorance for personal bravery? The notion that we - the western democracies allied to the United States - might have knowingly provoked the murder of 3000 civilians is beyond everyday categories of stupidity. The amount we contributed to this 'conflict' unknowingly is moreover a matter on which it is unnecessary to speculate, for we already know the answer: it is zero. The theocratic totalitarians who attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did not leave a suicide note, but their leader has made no secret of his ambitions. As he explained to the BBC in an interview in 1998, he regarded "holy war against Jews and Christians" as a duty. We could adopt every single policy laid out in the 2004 election manifesto of Ralph Nader and still be the target of holy war by our declared Islamist enemies. There is no negotiated solution possible in such a conflict - only military victory for our side or theirs. And to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, this is just as well, because what their side objects to about us is everything - everything - that distinguishes our societies from the clerical barbarism that they represent: democracy, pluralism, liberal political rights, sexual equality, religious liberty, homosexual rights and so on.

Maggie Gyllenhaal managed to reserve a casual blasphemy for her coda:

She also expressed her grief for "everyone who suffered and everyone who died in the catastrophe".

With the phrase "everyone who died" she includes - if I may employ a Gyllenhaalism, "knowingly or unknowingly" - the bigots and fanatics who carried out these monstrous acts of terror. I trust that in conveying that judgement, she will find that the exercise of free speech that her country protects will nonetheless not be commercially costless to her. That is as it should be.

Culture spot

Director Michael Moore's controversial anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has won the prestigious Palme d'Or best film award at the Cannes festival.

'Anti-Bush film tops Cannes awards', BBC News, 23 May 2004

[S]peaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they‘ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

Christopher Hitchens, MSNBC transcript, 18 May 2004

Incidentally, as the BBC ought to know but doesn't, the noun from which 'prestigious' derives is 'prestidigitation', or the art of doing conjuring tricks. This strikes me as quite apt in the circumstances.

The Passion, the Churches and the Jews

Of course I can't seriously comment on Mel Gibson's new film without seeing it, and I'm not sure that I want to do that. It has seemed to me somewhat missing the point to accuse Gibson of not taking account of the position of the Second Vatican Council in his depiction of the Passion. Gibson is fairly clearly the type of traditionalist who would instinctively distrust Vatican II, and generally not be favourable to the pontificate of John XXIII (who showed his intentions earlier still by removing reference to 'perfidious Jews' from the Good Friday liturgy), and there's no artistic reason to criticise a director for not reflecting the position of his Church. I'm taken aback, however, by the force of Leon Wieseltier's scathing observations in The New Republic:

The only cinematic achievement of The Passion of the Christ is that it breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence. The notion that there is something spiritually exalting about the viewing of it is quite horrifying. The viewing of The Passion of the Christ is a profoundly brutalizing experience. Children must be protected from it. (If I were a Christian, I would not raise a Christian child on this.) Torture has been depicted in film many times before, but almost always in a spirit of protest. This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.

On the particular point of the film's alleged antisemitism, Wieseltier says this:

In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images. In this regard, Gibson is most certainly a traditionalist.

This does strike me as worrying, and worrying especially at this time, because the stock images of Jewry that have been passed in Christian tradition from at least St John Chrysostom's Orations Against the Jews are far from extinguished (as there was reason to hope they might have been in the decades after the Holocaust), and extend a good deal further than antediluvian traditionalist Catholicism. It's customary - and of course, as the statement stands, true - to distinguish criticism of the modern state of Israel from traditional antisemitism, but as Melanie Phillips remarked in The Spectator a couple of years ago:

Criticism of Israel’s behaviour is perfectly legitimate. But a number of prominent Christians agree that a line is being crossed into anti-Jewish hatred. This is manifested by ascribing to every Israeli action malevolent motives while dismissing Palestinian terrorism and anti-Jewish diatribes; the belief that Jews should be denied the right to self-determination and their state dismantled; the conflation of Zionism and a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ of vested interests; and the disproportionate venom of the attacks.

That she is right in this can be verified almost weekly by examining Church statements - and the most egregious generally come from liberal Protestantism. Here, for example, is a statement released by the World Council of Churches last week, condemning the construction of what it preposterously terms Israel's annexation of Palestinian territory:

The WCC Executive Committee, meeting in Geneva from 17-20 February, 2004 guided by the teachings and Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility and by his death and resurrection has promised one new humanity on the foundation of faithful witnesses for people of every race; having received an updated report on Israel’s construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and in and around East Jerusalem, since April 2002, which is in departure of the Armistice Line of 1949 ( Green Line) and is in contradiction to relevant provisions of international law is;

Gravely concerned about the fundamental violations of human rights of the Palestinian people, the confiscation and destruction of their land and resources, the disruption of the lives of thousands of protected civilians and the de facto annexation of large areas of territory and in particular its devastating humanitarian consequences on the life and dignity of innocent Palestinians....

You wouldn't think from this statement that Israel has any particular pressing need to construct a barrier (most of which is not a 'wall' but a barbed-wire fence) to shield its civilians from terrorist attack. The statement has the further indecency to draw an analogy between attacks on civilians and attempts by a sovereign and democratic state to prevent those attacks; the WCC:

Calls on the Israeli Government and its defence forces and as well as all Palestinian armed groups to give up their strategy of mutual killings and terror, in order to achieve lasting peace....

I suppose some sort of riposte to this inflammatory nonsense would be to note the WCC's own political predilections, in the form of the £43,000 grant it made, under the auspices of its 'Programme to Cambat Racism', in 1978 to the party of Robert Mugabe. But that might give the impression that the WCC is an extreme and unrepresentative body; I wish it were so, but in fact the WCC's premises are widespread, as will be obvious if you consider counterexamples.

One of the greatest Protestant theologians of the last century, Reinhold Niebuhr, saw the issue more clearly than most. He wrote an article in The New Republic, 4 February 1957 (reprinted in A Reinhold Niebuhr Reader edited by Charles Brown), entitled Our Stake in Israel. Niebuhr was no theological obscurantist - he stated bluntly that a biblical right to the territory of Palestine 'evaporated some thousands of years ago' - but founded his argument on straight grounds of Christian obligation:

The simple fact is that all schemes for political appeasement and economic cooperation must fail unless there is an unequivocal voice from us that we will not allow the state [of Israel] to be annihilated and that we will not judge its desperate efforts to gain some strategic security (by holding on to the Gaza Strip and demanding access to the Gulf of Aqaba, for instance) as an illegitimate use of force.

The location of the state of Israel may have been a mistake; though the confluence of historical forces made it unavoidable. The birth and growth of the nation is a glorious spiritual and political achievement. Its continued existence may require detailed economic strategies for the whole region and policies for the resettlement of the Arab refugees. But the primary condition of its existence is our word that we will not allow 'any nation so conceived and so dedicated to perish from the earth.'

Just ask yourself: disregarding the fact that there is no living figure in Christian social thought to compare with Niebuhr's moral and intellectual authority, can you imagine a liberal Protestant leader today speaking in terms like these about this moral cause? Neither can I.