Nora Ephron—Julie & Julia

I never thought it would come to this—that I would actually be holding up legendary French TV-chef Julia Child as a model of strong-willed womanhood. Yet that’s the only conclusion I can come to after seeing Julie & Julia, a film that traces the quasi-parallel lives of Julia Child and Julie Powell, a thirty-year-old New Yorker who decides to cook every one of the 524 recipes in Child’s iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And to do so within a year’s time. And to blog about it.

The film is in many ways a meditation on what it means to be an epigone. A middle-aged American wife in Paris in the late fifties, Child brazenly takes on the task of learning French cooking despite the myriad slights and obstructions put in her way by various French people. Brushing them aside, she learns to cook and, in writing about it, makes French cuisine her own.

Julie’s talent, on the other hand, lies mostly in following Child's recipes, and so she’s devastated when she hears that the actual Julia Child might have a certain disdain for her cooking-and-blogging adventure. If Child can be said to translate French cooking into Americanese, then Julie is more like a calligrapher—faithfully reproducing the art of the master without changing a word.

Another way of putting it would be to say that the two women’s lives are not so much parallel as inverted. Child takes on French cooking because she is looking for something to do (“What am I to doooooo? What am I to dooooo?” she trills to her husband sonorously), and in the process invents a new identity for herself. Powell, on the other hand, is primarily looking for a new identity (“I’m not a writer, I’m not a writer,” she insistently whines to her husband), and the cooking project is something she invents for herself to do in the process. The directions of the two women’s lives couldn’t be more different.

Eric Ambler—A Coffin for Dimitrios

I lifted this from the shelves at a bed and breakfast I was staying at, thinking that there’s nothing quite like a mindless murder mystery to entertain you at the beach.

In fact, it’s quite a mindful one, from its erudite protagonist to its oddly inverted plotline, in which a British professor turned crime novelist happens into a murder while vacationing in Istanbul. One expects he will set out to solve the crime, but rather than trying to unravel the circumstances of the death, he becomes obsessed with reconstructing the trajectory of the life, much like assembling an existential jigsaw puzzle when you have only a few pieces.

Since the victim was a career criminal who profited off the misfortune of others, the trail leads through various stress points of early-twentieth-century Europe: the uneasy ethnic mishmash of the late Ottoman Empire, the holocaust of Smyrna, the refugee camps of Athens, the political intrigues and coups of Bulgaria, and the trade in drugs and kidnapped women in Paris. Lurking behind it all, the giant, shadowy international banks who profit off all of it, just as surely as Dimitrios did. In the narrator’s words:

It was useless to try and explain Dimitrios in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than Baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. The logic of Michael Angelo’s David, Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

There's a lovely linkage set up here between the petty criminals who threaten civilized society, the criminal masterminds who destroy it, and the economic masterminds who arrange it for their own benefit, making use of (it is suggested) the other two groups as needed. Published in 1939, before the invasion of Poland, the book ends with the premonition of World War II. If Brecht had written crime novels instead of just reading them, he probably would have come up with something like this.

Michael Cacoyannis—Zorba the Greek

Back in the days before Nia Vardalos’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding became the standard Hellenic reference point for American audiences, there was Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek. Filmed in black and white, set in a poor village in southern Crete, featuring a number of grim scenes and culminating in catastrophe, it would seem to be an unlikely candidate for the international film sensation of 1964. And yet, it took the world by storm, becoming both a critical and a commercial success—among other tributes, it was nominated for eleven Oscars, won three, and was even credited with helping the late-sixties tourist boom in Greece.

This is to a large extent a tribute to Anthony Quinn’s hyperkinetic turn as Zorba, a recklessly charismatic adventurer who moves through life so quickly that the disasters he creates can never quite catch up with him. As with the scene in the film where he emerges unscathed from a mine collapse, he has an astonishing ability to get out just in the nick of time, and while he certainly carries the scars of what he’s lived through, they haven’t so thickened his skin that he can’t feel the pulse of new experiences. He lives with such vitality that everyone around him—his cautious, bookish boss, the black-shrouded men and women of the village, even the flamboyant French prostitute—seem like shadows. Zorba is a force of nature, a hurricane of existence that we can’t help but envy and be carried away by, exactly because he resists our better judgments.

It’s a role that defined Quinn ever afterwards, and it defined “Greek” for several generations of movie-goers as well, with a strong assist from the innumerable Greek restaurants and diners that cashed in by sticking the name “Zorba” in their titles—a google search turns up literally hundreds of them. It’s no coincidence that Vardalos, in her own portrayal of what it means to be Greek, pays ironic homage to her predecessor by naming the family restaurant where she’s been confined her entire life “Dancing Zorba’s.” Though one has the impression that she’s never danced a day in her life, and certainly not there.

There’s another irony to Zorba’s success, though, which has to do with Cacoyannis himself. From his earliest films, Cacoyannis displayed a sensitivity to women’s position in a male-dominated society that would be rare in any director, but is simply astonishing in a male director of his generation. Zorba is, in fact, one of his few films to even feature a male protagonist. Of his fifteen feature-length works, over ten place women in the starring roles, including his three adaptations of Greek tragedies—Elektra, Iphigenia, and the powerhouse Trojan Woman, which actually stars four women: Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Pappas, and Geneviève Bujold. In the early Stella, Melina Mercouri plays a woman who would rather die than give up her freedom by marrying the man she admittedly loves. It was made in 1955.

And then there’s Zorba, a movie that is so male-focused that it could qualify as an early example of the “buddy film”—a seventies-era genre defined by The Journal of Popular Film and Television as “replacing the traditional central romantic relationship between a man and a woman with a buddy relationship between two men. By making both protagonists men, the central issue of the films becomes the growth and development of their friendship. Women as potential love interests are thus either eliminated from the narrative ... or pushed into the background as side characters.” An apt enough description of Zorba.

And yet, with the women being portrayed by Irene Pappas and Lila Kedrova—who won an Oscar for her performance—one can hardly call them side characters. I would argue that Cacoyannis has done something extraordinary here—he’s made a buddy film that clearly honors the central place of the men’s friendship, and honors as well novelist Kazantzakis’s tribute to a life lived with courage and a refusal to bow down to the quotidian demands of bourgeois existence.

At the same time, Cacoyannis pays homage to the unintentionally destructive effect that such men have on the women around them. Zorba is indeed admirable for the freedom he asserts as his natural right, but Cacoyannis can’t help but also notice what happens to the women who try to grasp even a small piece of that freedom. Watch Pappas’s face as she welcomes Alan Bates into her house—she knows what she is risking, and she risks it anyway. She is, in this one moment, perhaps more courageous than Zorba ever is.

Michael Cacoyannis—Attila 1974: The Rape of Cyprus

Journalism is, in the words of Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post, “the first, rough draft of history.”

This quote has several interesting implications—the first is that the journalist isn’t merely a transcriber of events or an information monger who gathers dry bits of fact and assembles them for a readership. He or she is already involved in the interpretation of events, in the making-sense-of-things that we usually imagine is only the historian’s job.

At the start of Michael Cacoyannis’s documentary about the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, the director seems to understand and acknowledge this by making known his own position. “I am Greek,” he announces, “and my name is Michael Cacoyannis.” There’s no pretense to objective journalism here—this is from the start an interpretive documentary.

The other implication of Graham’s quote is that, since journalism is only the “first, rough draft,” the journalist should be given some leeway if he or she gets a few things wrong.

What’s remarkable about Cacoyannis’s film, made at the exact, impassioned moment of the Turkish invasion of his homeland in 1974, is how much he gets right.

The invasion and division of Cyprus was not a simple event—it was a disaster that was provoked by some, carried out by others, and allowed to happen by still others . . . and the island’s continuing division is the responsibility of yet others still. There’s plenty of blame to be spread around, and Cacoyannis is committed to calling out all the guilty parties. It would be easy enough for him to point a finger simply at the Turkish invaders, but he doesn’t settle for that—the British, the Americans, the Greeks, and even many Cypriots come under fire as he teases out the interlocking causes of the invasion.

Of course, Cacoyannis isn’t a journalist, but a filmmaker who was already well into his mid-career when this film was made. He had lived abroad in Greece and England for years, but returned immediately to make this documentary when he heard of the invasion. Therefore, not being a journalist, he doesn’t just give us the facts, or even the facts and an interpretation. Instead, like the filmmaker that he is, he creates a documentary that is as rich in atmosphere as it is in information. He gives us a chance to experience for ourselves what it feels like to be in his country at that moment.

He does this by alternating between information and emotion, by sequencing interviews and factual narration with long—almost embarrassingly long, sometimes—shots of individuals as they tell their stories, cry in sorrow, scream in despair, or simply sit in resigned humiliation. These shots, actually, have no purpose within the narrative of the film—they convey no information, and the flavor they impart could be edited down by a professional documentarian to just a few minutes. But that’s not Cacoyannis’s point. These shots are not just a little spice in the thick stew of important information. They are stories told by the people who experienced them, with no greater purpose than that the people have to tell them and Cacoyannis is there to listen.

Part of Cyprus’s problem is that its history is remembered only in pieces—the Greek Cypriots remember the 1974 invasion; the Turkish Cypriots the violence against them in 1963. Turkey remembers the 1974 coup by Greek nationalists; Greece remembers the 1955 expulsion of Greeks from Istanbul, made in response to the Greek Cypriot independence movement.

What Cacoyannis lets us see is another sort of memory in the making—not the collective memory of the Greek Cypriots as a group, but the deeply personal memories of Cypriots as individuals. These memories are almost entirely of loss—loss of sons, husbands, or fathers; loss of property or a good life; loss of a sense of belonging and of the pride of self-sufficiency. Among other things, this might be the best film made on the experience of refugees, whom we see in their pain, boredom, anger, and stunned emotionlessness.

Again, Cacoyannis shows this though extended, almost too-personal shots of his fellow Greek Cypriots as they communicate, each in their own way, what they’ve lost. It’s a process that continues to this day. As late as 2004, when I was in Cyprus, there were still old women standing by the border crossings, dressed all in black, holding pictures of the loved ones who had disappeared without a trace in 1974. Politics falls away in the face of these women.

Though Cacoyannis opened his film with a declaration of his own viewpoint going forward—I am Greek and my name is Michael Cacoyannis—he closes quite differently. In an epilogue added 25 years later, he is looking back and wants to know only about the dead. “I am Michael Cacoyannis,” he declares “and I want to know, where?” Where are the nameless dead buried?

Just a few years ago, more than three decades after the invasion, bi-communal teams of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot forensic scientists were assembled, to begin exhuming and identifying remains—from both sides—and returning them to their families. Until they are all identified, however, we have Cacoyannis’s film to help us remember—if not to remember them, then at least to remember their loss.

Martin Kippenberger—Zuerst die Füsse (First the Feet)

One thing I've noticed about blasphemic art—by which everyone usually means: art that blasphemes Christianity—is that nearly all of it has been created by Catholics. (I don't know Kippenberger's religion, but he comes from a Catholic region of Germany.) This has to be factored into the debate about artworks that offend non-Christian religions, most of which originate from outside the faith. I seldom see Jewish, Muslim, or even Protestant artists deliberately violating their religion for shock effect, though they may run afoul of it anyway, as Rushdie did. Catholics seem to be driven to great lengths to exorcise their religion.

Second, defenders of blasphemic art seem to assume that taking offense to an artwork leads inevitably to advocating censorship, and therefore we should never take offense to even the most provocative imagery. Personally, I don't want to live in a world where art is regarded with such rational detachment that it has lost its power to shock—that's one (though only one) of its possibilities. The artist has a right to offend people, and people have a right to be offended.

Third, a work like this one by Kippenberger has almost no aesthetic impact—its effect is entirely psychological. Because we grant the image of the crucifixion a certain power, Kippenberger can exploit that emotional reservoir of feeling, but he doesn't add anything to it, in the way that, say, Michelangelo's Pietà invests a tremendous power into the image of Mary and Christ, for example. In a world filled with blasphemic art, Kippenberger's image would have no effect at all, whereas the Pietà still would.

In this, it's of an entirely different order from Andres Serrano's once-controversial "Piss Christ," which remains in my opinion a visually stunning and philosophically troubling work of art. It's even been defended by art critic/nun Sister Wendy Beckett!

So many musicians, so little time

It's been ages since I posted here, which signifies partly a lack of inspiration and partly a lot of travel followed by a deluge of editorial work to pay for it. I finally managed to keep it all at bay for a few days so I could churn out some reviews of things I've been listening to recently—Cuong Vu, a Vietnamese-born, American-raised trumpeter whose work investigates sonic regions usually left unexplored by jazz musicians; Haale, a Bronx-born guitarist of Iranian immigrants who delves deeply into a mystical trance-rock that wavers between sixties intoxication and Sufi transcendence; Bulgarian pianist Plamen Karadonev whose take on jazz is a bit too mainstream for my tastes but who straddles an interesting line between virtuosic homage and playful experimentation; and Diamanda Galás, the magnificent singer of Greek parentage who manages to channel an archaic tragic sensibility into her covers of American blues, soul, and country. In addition, I'm reviewing three jazz concerts this year at the Albright Knox art museum—the serene Norwegian pianist Tord Gustafsen, the joyful Malian guitarist Lionel Loueke, and the thoughtful American-born Indian pianist Vijay Ayer.

In other words, I'm apparently not much interested in American music these days, though I did pick up an amazing Doc Watson collection today that represents the best of bluegrass—mournful picking accompanying Watson's slightly nasal twang as he narrates songs about the loss of love, of money, of hope, of virtually everything that sustains a life. And yet falls not into despair. The songs with banjo have an almost Asian resonance as the instrument maniacally percolates under his elongated vocals ("Country Blues" and "Shady Grove"). But Watson's guitar is just as virtuosic, playfully rambling alongside his tale of murder on "Little Sadie" or of hippophilia on "Tennessee Stud," a song so exuberantly praiseful of a good horse and the adventures that it can provide that the singer's return to his girlfriend seems almost anticlimactic. At least the Tennessee stud gets a Tennessee mare.

Anand Tucker—Hilary and Jackie

As soon as this ended, the question arose why bio-pics always manage to portray difficult men as troubled geniuses, while difficult women mostly come across as just annoying hysterics?

In this case, it's partly because Jackie du Pré—for all that she may have been a gifted cellist—was no genius, and we're not going to see a better breed of women’s bio-pic until we raise our sights a bit.

Mostly, though, it's the perverse approach of this film, which focuses on du Pré's personal life at the expense of her music. Even a film like Immortal Beloved, which is almost entirely about Beethoven's love affairs, has some transcendently beautiful musical passages—most notably when he flees as a boy from his drunken, abusive father into the solace of a starry night, accompanied by the full orchestration of the Ninth Symphony—and these allow us to understand in some allegorical way what music meant to him.

The filmic du Pré, on the other hand, seems to have no inner relation to music at all—as a child she practices only to keep up with her talented older sister, and as an adult she actually resents the cello's dominance over her life. In one scene, she even locks her instrument outside during a snowstorm, the way an abusive parent might punish a misbehaving child. She's reconciled to it only after it helps her meet her future husband, the pianist Daniel Barenboim.

In fact, the film’s only joyful musical moment comes when Barenboim strikes up the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" at the end of a dull rehearsal, and du Pré picks it up adoringly. It's a School of Rock touch ("This is the way Beethoven should always be played," Barenboim declaims), but it is, after all, the sixties, and at least the musicians are having fun. One senses, though, that for du Pré it’s still less about the music than it is her recognition that she’s made great catch in Barenboim. In other words, a very old cliché: Women—even women of great talent—are always more about their outer relationships than they are their inner gifts.