Facts Are Subversive by Timothy Garton Ash
Atlantic Books, £25
Reviewed by Joe Haines
Many years ago now, I committed the ultimate act of heresy for the ranting red-brick ideologues who give the left such a bad name. Fed up with its sanctimony, its holier-than-thou attitudes and a carelessness with facts, at least about me, that would have had CP Scott whirling in his grave, I gave up reading The Guardian. Scott’s mantra about comment being free but facts being sacred had long deteriorated in that paper into “comment is free but facts are mis-spelled.” I’d had enough.
So successful was this policy in time and money saved that I later extended it and stopped reading any article about politics as soon as I spotted the first mistake in it. It was a great success and lengthened my active day away from newspapers enormously.
Last year, I further extended my filtering of rubbish by turning off radio and TV news reports from the myriad political correspondents who are the BBC’s contribution to keeping the nation’s youth in well-paid work after hearing or seeing similar error-strewn items. No one with serious journalistic intentions should tell the Ten O’Clock News that Harold Wilson won the 1966 general election on the back of England’s victory in the World Cup. Why should licence fee payers have to fork out for a diet of ignorance? Maybe the head of news should send a memo to his media studies graduates and tell them all that that general election was in March and the final of the World Cup was not until July. But perhaps it would be news to him, too.
Of course, I wouldn’t suggest that I didn’t make mistakes in my career as a journalist (or even as a press secretary) but apart from when, as a columnist, I mis-attributed the composer of the wordiest of popular song titles, one which could double as a politician’s theme tune, Why Did You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life, they weren’t born of laziness.
I digress. Was it worth giving up The Guardian? Yes, it was, and more rewarding financially than the National Lottery, with the additional bonus of avoiding witnessing the needles of Madame Polly Defarge clicking the overture to the funeral music of the latest politician to earn her disfavour. But after reading Facts are Subversive, Timothy Garton Ash’s (pictured) collection of essays, grouped in this volume with his weekly columns for that paper, I felt the first tinge of regret. He is an outstanding writer, complex but clear, illuminating the obscure in a way that sets him apart from most of those who combine a weekly contemporary task with a historian’s need to be read and appreciated in the future. I can live without The Guardian provided he publishes his musings in volume form now and again.
I have always been suspicious of the “contemporary historian” as he is described on the dust jacket, largely because any meticulous author aspiring to or accepting that title can never perform that task to complete satisfaction. Contemporary history needs constant revision and correction as previously unknown facts come to light and change perceptions. “What do we want?” “History!” “When do we want it?” “Now!” has little appeal to me. But Garton Ash does it better than anyone else I know of writing today. He says that he practises “a mongrel craft” combining scholarship and journalism. But he comes near to confounding HL Mencken’s description of the relationship between politicians and the press as that between a dog and a lamp post, in his essays, in particular, which are superb. He is thoughtful, he is rational. A brief anecdote about Margaret Thatcher – her telling the Centre for Policy Studies in 1999 that “God separated Britain from mainland Europe, and it was for a purpose” (and you thought Tony Blair overdid the God angle?) – tells you more about her than 1,000 words from her defenders.
He shows how many simple black and white issues are not simple nor black and white. He is pro-European in the commonly used sense, but relentless in exposing its weaknesses and faults; he quotes, for example, an Oxfam index, new to me, that in the year 2000 the average EU subsidy to the average European cow was $913; what we gave in aid for each individual being in sub-Saharan Africa was $8 per head. If I were a politician I would be more ashamed of that than of fiddling my expenses.
When I joined Downing Street as Wilson’s press secretary many years ago, I thought I was a reasonably well-informed lobby correspondent. I then found out, among other things, what my role would be in the event of a nuclear war and realised how little I knew (I won’t bother to spell it out, you wouldn’t believe me, in any case). If I thought I knew perhaps 20 per cent, at best, of what was going on in the world of politics, even that may have been an exaggeration. In these days of openness, I doubt if the best reporters know much more. What Garton Ash brings, however, is something much more important than partial knowledge. He brings understanding.
Even those (which is almost everybody) who believe they always knew that Tony Blair had it wrong about Iraq from the beginning might put down their placards declaring he is a war criminal for a moment and think it possible, just possible, that there was a case – at the time, contemporaneously – for the actions he took. Read him on immigration and the murders of a Dutch politician and a film-maker and understand more; read him on Burma, on European anti-Americanism and American anti-Europeanism and understand more. It is a long time since I read a book telling me so much about what I already thought I knew.
Pity he writes for The Guardian.
Freeing Tibet: 50 Years of Struggle, Resilience and Hope by John & Elizabeth Roberts
Amacom, £14.95
Reviewed by Glyn Ford
President Dwight D Eisenhower, at the end of December 1955, signed the secret National Security Council directive 5412/2 that initiated a broader and more aggressive response to the threat of “international communism” and authorised the funding of guerrilla groups, economic warfare, sabotage and black propaganda. This was not a new programme, but one that built on earlier efforts to contain the red menace. In this book the two Roberts, in making the case for Tibetan independence, reveal what this directive meant for covert action in Tibet aimed at destabilizing China.
As early as 1951, President Harry S Truman had tried to persuade the Dalai Lama to flee into exile in Sri Lanka with Washington offering to fund him. By 1956 Gyalo Thondup, his second eldest brother, was a fully paid up CIA asset. Meanwhile the black propaganda machine ran non-stop. The Chinese and Tibetans both committed atrocities, but the CIA Tibet task force took real reports of human rights violations and, in a contemporary phrase, “sexed them up” by adding details of “Chinese forcing Buddhist monks to publicly rape nuns at gunpoint, of children made to shoot their parents, of villagers forced to watch as dozens of landowners were publicly burnt to death, of men being castrated publicly, parents being executed by having nails driven through their eyes for refusing to send their children to Chinese schools” etc, etc.
The CIA recruited and trained Tibetan “resistance fighters” first at Saipan and then at Camp Peary, Virginia, and Camp Hale, Colorado, before being parachuted or infiltrated back into Tibet. By 1959 the US had airdropped tons of weapons and ammunition leading to a major upsurge in fighting and this time they wanted the Dalai Lama out to serve as an anti-communist figurehead. In both 1951 and 1956 he had returned to Lhasa when he could have gone into exile but, as Cuba had just fallen to Castro, this time nothing was left to chance. The CIA prepared a contingency plan to bring the Dalai Lama safely across the Himalayas to India. When in March riots and demonstrations broke out in Lhasa he consulted his “living oracle”, a monk who put himself in a trance before responding. This time the Dalai Lama was conveniently instructed to leave immediately, with the “oracle” helpfully writing meticulous and explicit instructions for his departure which were identical to those in the CIA’s contingency plan.
With the Dalai Lama in India the covert war could be stepped up. Hundreds of fighters were trained. “The monasteries were often centres of political resistance and sometimes used to cache supplies and weapons, and this made them military targets”. But the Tibetans refused to obey instructions and limit themselves to guerrilla warfare and instead regularly ended up in set piece battles against superior Chinese forces.
On April 17 1961 the US launched its hapless invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. President John F Kennedy refused to authorise pre-emptive strikes against the Cuban air force as requested by Lieutenant Colonel Aderholt, brought back from his duties on the Tibetan airlift to provide temporary support for the Cuban invasion, and so the result was the famous fiasco. Tragedy became farce when, later the same year, a force of several thousand Tibetan guerrillas were lured by the Chinese into an engagement that turned out to be a trap. Their only hope of escape was for the CIA to parachute fresh supplies and ammunition into the battle-zone. Washington’s ambassador to India, JK Galbraith, who thought the whole Tibetan imbroglio was an “insane enterprise”, refused to authorise the airdrops and thousands – as compared to hundreds in Cuba – died on the battlefield. The Tibetan operation went into limbo.
Actually, the seeds of their own destruction had already been harvested by the Tibetans themselves in October when they ambushed a Chinese convoy and recovered more than 1,000 “blood-splattered” classified Chinese documents. The jewel in this crown was the Bulletin of Activities of the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army revealing all the problems of famine and unrest consequent on the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Sino-Soviet schism. The international communist threat was no longer monolithic, signposting Nixon’s opening up to China and the policy of divide and conquer and an end to state sponsored rebellion in Tibet.
The authors argue the case for a campaign to force China to degorge Tibet through a combination of the human rights lobby – and here there is a case to answer, if not that of the Roberts’ – and the imposition of non-tariff trade barriers supposedly to enhance consumer protection, and disinvestment campaigns driven by corporate interests. The Roberts say they want to unite consumers, unions and environmentalists to help Tibet although, interestingly, the measures proposed are congruent with the interests of sections of corporate capital in the US, which may explain the apparent incongruity of the publisher being the American Management Association.
The protests last March in Lhasa that turned into race riots against Han Chinese and Muslims and were then put down by Chinese troops indicate the continuing bitter legacy from the 1960s and 1970s when Washington’s weapons sowed the seeds that threaten to reap the whirlwind of tomorrow. Do the consequences of past actions in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq or Tibet never give pause for thought to the US policy makers of today?
Sympathy for a
devil
Have you noticed the correlation between high literature and unsavoury heroes? If the devil has the best tunes, literature certainly has the worst humans. Think of Proust’s wimpish, snobbish, petulant, prudish, coquettish and self-deceptive narrator. Or Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, who murders a defenceless old woman with an axe.
Leopold Bloom doesn’t achieve so high a category of criminality, but he’s not averse to masturbating while ogling under age girls at play. And Musil’s Ulrich is an incessantly intellectual Houyhnhnm with a fascination for the murderer and rapist Moosbrugger.
As a group, they hardly represent humanity in all its God-given glory, do they?
But the gift of great novelists is the ability to enhance our understanding of humanity in all its aspects. They possess the magical talent to take a deeply flawed character and reveal the circumstances that led him to be this way. This means the reader understands the motivation for the character’s actions and, from this understanding, flow sympathy and even empathy. We are touched by another being in another time.
Such a book is The Sorrow of Belgium by Hugo Claus. The central character, Louis Seynaeve, whose development from boy to man we witness, is no role model. The boy steals and bullies, the adolescent joins the Belgian Hitler Youth, the NSJV, and the older boy is strangely untouched by the horrors he has witnessed. Yet he earns our sympathy because Claus elucidates exactly what makes him blind and insensitive. The state of Belgium in the 1930s and 1940s has deprived him of any sense of accepted morality.
Louis, a Fleming with a French name, struggles through an inexplicable, irrational world that grips him in endless conflict. How can he think straight when he is trapped by the endless vice-like pressures of Catholicism and agnosticism, Flanders and France, Greater Netherlanders and Pan-Germanists, collaborators and resisters, Communists and Royalists? Because of their own confusion, every message he is sent by his priests, family, friends or mentors seems despatched in indecipherable code. Then the war raises the contradictions to a manic, anarchic level where morality and normality stand on their head and decency becomes alien.
The genius of this work is to explain the boy’s actions in such a way that detaches us from our own convictions. We understand how Louis resents the German occupiers less than the Allies whose bombs rain upon his land. In this novel, sadly hard to find now, we are touched by the sorrow of a generation – and left to marvel at the power that the acts of reading and writing can contain. What a magical talent to create a human link with an unsavoury fictional character across decades, thwarting even the barriers of language. l
Chris Proctor
American poet never knowingly undersold
Ballistics by Billy Collins
Picador, £8.99
Billy Collins is not very well known in Britain but no one can accuse Picador of underselling their American client. The blurb on the back of this book begins: “It is no understatement to say that Billy Collins has found poetry a whole new audience across the English-speaking world.” No, not an understatement. But a bit of an overstatement, perhaps? But wait, there’s more: “No poet writing today insists on such open, direct and courteous engagement with the reader and no poet has shown the common experience to be such an astonishing and singular one.” Like John Lewis, never knowingly undersold, then?
Collins was born in New York in 1941, studied English at the University of California, Riverside, and has taught at Lehman College in the Bronx since 1968. He was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, the year CBS described him as “the most popular American poet since Robert Frost. No poet draws bigger crowds, gets larger audiences or sells more books than Billy Collins.”
Picador published his selected poems here in Britain in 2000 under the title Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes. Two more volumes – Nine Horses and The Trouble with Poetry – have followed and now here is Ballistics, which was published in the US last year where it was his eleventh collection to hit the printer’s ink.
He starts as he means to go on in the opening lines of the opening poem August in Paris: “I have stopped here on the rue des Écoles / just off the boulevard St-Germain / to look over the shoulder of a man / in a flannel shirt and a straw hat / who has set up an easel and a canvas chair / on the sidewalk in order to paint from a droll angle /a side-view of the Church of Saint Thomas Aquinas.”
Now there is nothing wrong with this. It is, like much of his verse, easy, accessible and conversational and there will be many readers who are familiar with the scene. He wonders “where are you, reader” and then answers his own question: “But every time I turn around / you have fled through a crease in the air / to a quiet room where the shutters are closed / against the heat of the afternoon, / where there is only the sound of your breathing / and every so often, the turning of a page.”
It’s a nice enough image – and this volume is full of them – but it’s also superficial. The thoughts and observations, happily enough described as they are, rarely go anywhere or add up to very much. There are shades of Rod McKuen here – another American poet with a penchant for light, accessible verse and a popular touch – in the way the words wash over you without leaving any mark that lasts.
There are some good lines – “When it’s late at night and branches / are banging against the windows, / you might think that love is just a matter // of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself / into the fire of someone else, / but it’s a little more complicated than that” – and you can see why he is such a draw at poetry readings in the States.
Reading or listening to one of his poems is rather like eating a soufflé; enjoyable enough, but not very substantial. And that’s a shame because in a poem such as The Mortal Coil – “One minute you are playing the fool, / strumming a tennis racquet as if it were a guitar / for the amusement of a few ladies / and the next minute you are lying on your deathbed, / arms stiff under the covers, / the counterpane tucked right across your chest” – there is a hint of how he can write when he aproaches a subject with a degree of moral seriousness.
Keith Richmond
Film
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Director: Michael Bay
Transformers was one of my guilty pleasures of 2007, a loud, silly summer blockbuster about a bunch of metal giants that transform improbably into vehicles one quarter their size. The large transformations were paralleled by a smaller one, as nerdy teen Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) was going through the last stages of American puberty, buying a car to impress women but purchasing the wrong vehicle. This was one of the so-called Autobots, fortunately a good Transformer. Two years on, we have the inevitable sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, where the bunch of mostly likeable humans are overwhelmed by the frankly dull battle between Autobots and their evil nemesis, the Decepticons.
The purpose of the film is to shift a bunch of toys and, in its own small way, help the American economy. Sadly, its high carbon, low growth production values are a turn-off. You feel like you’re contributing to global warming just by watching the never-ending series of explosions, while the characters are barely developed.
It begins in Shanghai, with the Autobots helping the US military track down renegade Decepticons in Shanghai. “Hang on”, you think, “US intervention on the shores of its biggest economic rival – this is more improbable than a bunch of iron giants fighting each other.” The Decepticons are after the remains of the so-called All Spark and the location of a burial site where a Transformer power source is hidden. They get their iron clampers on both items and take out chief Autobot, Optimus Prime, in the process. Sam is dragged into the action after discovering he has a map imprinted on his brain and being tasked by Optimus to find a secret weapon that eventually brings the Autobot back to life for the final battle among the Egyptian pyramids.
Screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzmann attempt to reinvigorate the format of the first film by changing the rules. Now Transformers can assume human form and travel vast distances in seconds – which seems like a cheat.
The film is not all bad. Kevin Dunn and Julie White continue their comedy double act as Sam’s parents, Sam’s mother being particularly emotional over his baby booties and ingesting a cannabis brownie at one point. John Turturro invigorates his scenes as a former “Sector 7” agent now working at his mother’s delicatessen. Megan Fox (as Sam’s girlfriend, Michaela) has little to contribute beyond being eye candy. I lost count of the number of Baywatch-style slow-motion scenes in which she ran towards the camera showing off her cleavage.
This, of course, is a Michael Bay-watch, with the director’s customarily loud audio track designed to turn off the hearing impaired. Crucially, the tone wobbles between being a film for kids and one for teens, satisfying neither audience. Bay is adept at orchestrating spectacle, but this film as a blank a sequel as his Bad Boys 2. l
Patrick Mulcahy
North by Northwest
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest – back in cinemas via a new print from the BFI – exudes the kind of old-school wit, charm and style that makes most current Hollywood releases seem staid. And even though it’s been shown countless times on television over the years, this is a fine example of David Thomson’s dictum that the small screen is unfair to all films and cruel to great ones.
Ah, but is North By Northwest a “great” film? Such a portentous label would sit oddly on an enterprise which takes such pains not to take itself at all seriously (even the title, ostensibly a quotation from Hamlet, turns out to be a non-sequitur description of an aeroplane trip taken via Northwest Airlines.) The jocular opening scenes set the tone: victim of a fluke instance of mistaken identity, flippant, unflappable, middle-aged, twice-divorced, mother-dominated advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant, still fabulous at 54) suffers what he terms “a slight case of abduction”, sparking what the original posters referred to as “a 3,000 mile chase” cross-country.
Working from a script by Ernest Lehman, Hitchcock strings together a series of audacious, plausibility-defying set-pieces, several of which have found their place in movie history: most iconically the near-wordless sequence in which Thornhill is pursued by a crop-dusting aeroplane in the featureless expanses of Prairie Stop, Indiana. Then there’s the climax, in which Thornhill and sympathetic femme fatale Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) flee the henchman of suave villain Philip Vandamm (James Mason) across the sculpted faces on Mount Rushmore.
The Rushmore shenanigans lead in to a furiously breakneck wrap-up – all the convoluted story’s manifold threads are dealt with in less than 60 seconds – which is the droll pay-off of an elaborate structural gag, the preceding 130-odd minutes having proceeded at more of a casual, Cary-Grant-at-cocktail-hour saunter than anything approaching a full-tilt gallop. It’s typical of a picture which functions more as a sleek paranoid comedy than any kind of
nail-biting thriller – one of the lighter “entertainments” of the later Hitchcock and, if not quite up to the level of, say, Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho or Frenzy, right at the top of his career’s second XI. l
Neil Young
Visual arts
Summer Exhibition 2009
Royal Academy of Arts, London
“An artist’s collective” is how Charles Saumarez Smith, secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy, describes the illustrious institution he heads – an institution that was set up some 250 years ago and which is managed by a group of elected artists. While the variety and diversity of exhibitions shown at the gallery throughout the year reflect the tastes of the executive, the annual Summer Exhibition is still very much in the spirit of the first held in 1768.
Therein lie both the strength and the weakness of the exhibition. Each academician is entitled, by right, to submit up to six works, though only a few do. The work of some recently deceased academicians are also celebrated in the exhibition with special displays of their work. The memorial display this year celebrates the achievement of Jean Cooke. Artists from overseas are also included. The American-born artist Cy Twombly is represented by a large-scale painting, The Rose III, a sumptuous and abstracted image in which the rose seems to be melting.
The biggest attraction, however, is that, on payment of modest fee, the Summer Exhibition is open to anyone who wishes to submit work. And submit they do, with some 10,000 pieces of two- or three-dimensional work presented from which the jury of academicians select the 300 on show. With such large numbers, decisions are made quickly and first impressions count for much. The result is a mish-mash of the good, the great and the plain dull.
The selectors adopted the overall theme “Making Space”, which may have related to the individual works or, more likely, to the need to find room on the walls for so much art.
As in previous years, the solution is to stack images two or three deep on the walls, offering much to look at and decipher. The walls of one small gallery are, literally, filled with small-scale images, many of which capture the delight of the miniature. Of particular topical interest is a rather bleak oil painting of a deserted Woolworths store by Simon Turvey, a grim reminder of the times in which we live.
Each year, different variations are tried. In the section on architect’s models, for example, the pieces are shown at eye level enabling the viewer to have more of a visitor’s experience instead of the usual bird’s eye perspective in which the viewer looks down on the model. There is also a room devoted to photography, all a far cry from the long-held view that saw the medium as beyond the pale, as far as the Royal Academy was concerned.
Equally inventive is the addition of a gallery devoted to film and video selected by the sculptor Richard Wilson. With a varied programme, it is not only an opportunity to sit for an hour, but also to see some remarkable works. Vicky Hawkins’ Ethel and Mutant Babies, of animated dolls made from fabric, give birth, are violent and belie any concept of the soft cuddly toy. This is a useful antidote to an exhibition that at times seem to avoid the controversial and confrontational in favour of the polite and respectful. For the Royal Academy, the Summer Exhibition is also important in that the income from submissions, entrance fees and a proportion of the selling price of work sold all contribute to make a hefty profit that helps to fund the Royal Academy Art School, which does not charge fees but does awards grants to students. It’s an “artists’ democracy” in action. l
Emmanuel Cooper
The Summer Exhibition continues until August 16
Theatre
Orange alert for blood sacrifice among male bonding
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme
Hampstead Theatre, London
Why is Ulster such a bigoted place? News about the recent attacks on Romanian migrants in Northern Ireland is a depressing reminder of the seemingly intractable nature of backwater bigotry, a deep-seated antagonism between us and them. But, as Frank McGuinness triumphantly proves in his 1985 play, which had its London premiere at the Hampstead Theatre and is now revived there as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, it is possible to write sympathetically about loyalism.
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme tells the story of the 36th Ulster Division and the massive casualties it sustained. Some third of the total number of its men were killed, wounded or missing during one of the most notorious battles of the First World War. To make this point, McGuinness introduces us to eight volunteers, only one of whom will survive the conflict.
Inspired by the many memorials to those that died on that July day in 1916, the play opens with old Kenneth Pyper, the sole survivor who rages against a merciless God and the painful memories and voices that he can’t forget. Although slightly touched, he accepts responsibility for the disaster. “In the end, we were not led, we led ourselves.” This was a blood sacrifice made for Ulster.
As he calls up the dead men in his imagination, the play opens up and we watch as the volunteers gather. As well as the younger Pyper, an upper-class artist, the men are a good cross-section of society: a blacksmith’s son, two countrymen, a doubting preacher, two Belfast shipworkers and a football fan. Pyper, who is deliberately provocative, cynical and given to homoerotic come-ons, dominates the scene.
And then the tone changes. In the next scene, the men are home on leave and we learn more about their dreams, fears and characters. Two of them confront the effects of shellshock together and, by summoning up the spirit of loyalism, overcome them. Another pair act out the rituals of the Glorious Twelfth of July, while the preacher and the half-Catholic wrestle with faith. Pyper and the blacksmith’s son make love.
In the final scene, as the men wait in the trenches to go into battle, they perform both surreal routines – a humorous re-enactment of the Battle of the Boyne – and serious rituals, hymn singing and the exchange of orange sashes. In the end, it is the cynical Pyper who rallies their spirits with a eulogy to Ulster and the tradition of “No Surrender”.
Although he was born a Catholic and brought up a republican, McGuinness is alive to the psychology of the embattled loyalist culture and suggests that both sides of the sectarian divide have a suicidal yearning for blood sacrifice. What else was the Easter Rising? Although billed as an anti-war play, what strikes you most is that the work celebrates male bonding and the idea that soldiers fight for their comrades. To me, the play has nothing to do with recent British adventures in the Middle East. Whatever you think of them, these Ulstermen really were fighting for a way of life.
Director John Dove’s production is sturdy and well-paced. I preferred Richard Dormer as the younger Pyper to James Hayes as his older self, but the rest of the cast were equally impressive in what is essentially an ensemble piece. As a sympathetic account of sectarian loyalty and determined bigotry, however, the piece never really explores the truly ugly side of religious prejudice – from whichever dark corner it comes. l
Aleks Sierz
Rock
Mother and child in a bravura reunion
Melanie
Jazz Café, Camden, London
Woodstock original Melanie Safka has sold 80 million records. And not all of them were “Brand New Key”, her surprise 1970s’ smash that provided the Wurzels with the template for “The Combine Harvester”.
Before that, Melanie had carved out a successful career as a singer and prolific songwriter. Her songs have been covered by the likes of Cher and Dolly Parton – herself no slouch when it comes to penning a memorable tune. It was for her songbook, as much as her offbeat humour and tales of the good old days before artists were routinely enslaved to their record companies, that a defiant crowd flocked to north London’s premier live music venue. Certainly, it’s far cry from the Metropolitan Opera House or the United Nations General Assembly, where Melanie once received a standing ovation from delegates.
Accompanied by her son, Beau, who is fast becoming a major attraction in his own right, Melanie takes to the stage, guitar in hand, to perform songs from Candles in the Rain, her classic album. Clearly, a substantial portion of the audience, long-time inductees into the cult of Melanie, bought the album when it was first released in 1970. Tracks including “What Have They Done To My Song Ma?” and Melanie’s outstanding version of the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” are greeted rapturously, even by those members of the audience taking the kind of nervously prurient interest younger people have in the presence of someone who used to be very famous when their parents were young.
“I was called the female Bob Dylan”, says Melanie, before asking: “Why was Dylan never called the male Melanie?” It’s a good question.
There is disappointment when she refuses entreaties to sing “Brand New Key”, but this is quickly forgotten when opts for “Beautiful People” instead. If you close your eyes, you can imagine you are in the Greenwich Village club where Melanie premiered the song some 40 years ago.
Some might consider it inappropriate to drag one’s offspring along to perform a set largely written before they were even born. Thankfully, Melanie is single-minded enough to do just what she likes – hence the presence of Beau on guitar. From his instrument, he coaxes a sound that is at once deep, mysterious and like nothing you have ever heard before. He takes up a bowed electric guitar and makes it sound like a subterranean cello section. Strung and fretted like a regular guitar with a curved bridge to enable string crossing, this is essentially an electric Arpeggione – an instrument briefly fashionable in 19th century Vienna, but now long obsolete.
Beau extemporises accompaniments to his mother’s voice with an almost magical fantasy – sometimes on the top two strings together, melody spinning like the finest threads from his fingers and reminiscent of the great masters of the bass viol. With astonishing alacrity, sometimes declamatory and demonstrative, sometimes intensely intimate, this is truly virtuoso playing.
This mother and son reunion was not one to be missed.
Cary Gee
Film: Clui Gilm Festivval 2009 by Neil Young
“Every known superstition is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool.” So wrote Jonathan Harker in his shorthand journal, which forms the first chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Arriving in Transylvania en route to his fateful encounter with the bloodthirsty aristocrat, Harker’s first port of call was the city of “Klausenburgh” – the old German name for what is now officially known as Cluj-Napoca.
This mini-metropolis of 400,000 souls remains the capital of Transylvania – that multi-ethnic portion of western Romania, with a particularly prominent Hungarian minority. And since 2002 it’s played host to the Transilvania [sic] International Film Festival, TIFF for short, which introduces the latest cinematic treats to local audiences and, in turn, showcases new Romanian film-making for the benefit of its foreign visitors. Add in a warm, friendly atmosphere, cinemas full of character, nightly opportunities for socialising and a hilly, picturesque setting and the result is a more modern version of the “imaginative whirlpool” noted in Harker’s diary.
And it’s perhaps no coincidence that the seven years of TIFF’s existence – under the genial stewardship of its founder Tudor Giurgiu (himself active as a producer/director) – have seen the swelling of what’s become known as the “New Wave’” of Romanian cinema. Winner of the top prize – the Transilvania Trophy – at the inaugural TIFF was Cristian Mungiu for Occident, who went on to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes for 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Corneliu Porumboiu took home the Trophy in 2006 for 12:08 East of Bucharest, shortly after picking up the Camera d’Or (for the best debut) at Cannes, while major prizes on the Croisette also went to Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005) and California Dreamin’ (2007), the latter being the only feature completed by Cristian Nemescu before his tragically premature death in a car crash in 2006, aged just 27.
What’s really surprising about the “New Wave” is that, four years after Lazarescu’s Cannes triumph put the nation back on the cinematic map, it shows very few signs of dying down. While cinema-going in Romania itself has been in crisis for some time – the number of picture-houses is scandalously small – the “export” situation is diametrically different.
Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective was perhaps the best-reviewed film in Cannes last month. It won the top prize in the prestigious “Un Certain Regard” sidebar and many reckoned it could even have won the Palme d’Or if it had been allotted a slot in the main competition. Conspiracy theorists speculated that it was kept out because organisers were wary of Romania triumphing twice in three years. Joint winner of TIFF’s Transilvania Trophy – with Norway’s crowd-pleasing “road movie on snow-scooters” Nord – Police, Adjective is a cerebral patience-tester about a taciturn young cop who comes to realise that his personal morality doesn’t quite square with the laws he’s sworn to uphold.
Full of long takes in which very little happens – slowly – Police, Adjective is as much a “structural” affair as Porumboiu’s first (much more energetic) movie, but operates in a much more rarefied, austere mode of film-making. While solid in all departments and guaranteed to stimulate social and philosophical debate wherever it is shown, the snail-paced picture is a classic example of a movie seemingly made with international critics and festival-awards primarily in mind – as American box-office analyst Eric Lavallee put it, “this is an art house film for a very select crowd.” So, expect to see it play in “select” British venues later in the year.
If there was a Romanian production on show in Cluj this year that has a chance to appeal to local and international palates, it’s Tales from the Golden Age, a seven-part portmanteau project devised and written by Mungiu, who also directed two of the segments. The over- ambitious plan is that six of the seven parts will be shown at any one screening, the selection and order to be determined by an as-yet-unspecified randomisation process. All seven sections were shown in Cluj, presenting ironic, wry glances back at the grim 1980s when Romania suffered under the quasi-Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. Two of the segments (The Legend of the Official Visit and The Legend of the Air Sellers) stand out from the remainder in terms of impact and quality, but overall the standard is pretty strong and, taken together, the “tales” do cohere into an entertainingly effective whole.
Rather more conventional in form and tone, but, on balance, more satisfying and accomplished, is Constantin and Elena, a reflective documentary from talented,
25-year-old debutant Andrei Dascalescu. Showing real flair as editor and cinematographer as well as director, Dascalescu – who worked as an assistant to legendary sound/film editor Walter Murch on Francis Ford Coppola’s Romania-shot Youth Without Youth (2007) – painstakingly crafts an empathetic study of his own elderly grandparents as they go about their business in a sleepy rural village. Although shot on video, Dascalescu’s “eye” is such that the picture is consistently striking to look at, as over the course of a year we observe and adapt to the rhythms of a couple who’ve been married – not always in perfect bliss – for more than five decades.
Dascalescu wasn’t the only 20-something to serve notice of his promise – and ability – in Cluj this year. Providing further welcome evidence of the Romanian New Wave’s ongoing vitality were a couple of outstanding shorts: Oli’s Wedding by Tudor Cristian Jiurgiu (23) and For Him by Stanca Radu (26). Both, as it happens, deal with international communications via the wonder of Skype – the former a bittersweet tale of a proud dad in Romania “participating” in his son’s nuptials as they unfold across the Atlantic in the United States, the latter a darkly comic (and genuinely funny) vignette in which technology facilitates (and then indirectly imperils) a long-distance love-affair.
Of the two, Oli’s Wedding conforms more closely to the kind of established “art-cinema” tropes so masterfully explored by the likes of Mungiu and Porumboiu, while For Him is sparkier, wittier, displaying more of that elusive “commercial” sensibility in its directness, economy and visual flair. Radu’s accomplishment is especially gratifying given the disappointing dearth of females among the Romanian directorial ranks – pretty much the sole previous exception being Ruxandra Zenide, now resident in Switzerland, who shows no signs of following up her fine debut Ryna (2005).
Even better news: Radu isn’t alone. Keep an close eye out for California-educated
38-year-old Ioana Uricaru, whose hilariously acerbic, curtain-raising contribution to Tales of the Golden Age (The Legend of the Official Visit) isn’t merely the stand-out segment of that particular movie – it’s also, pound for pound, perhaps the best single work to be found in Cluj’s “imaginative whirlpool” this year.
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