Friday, March 8, 2024

The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest: Three Terrific New Films


 The Peasants is the single most beautiful film I've ever seen. The Zone of Interest is a Holocaust film. Both were shot, at least in part, in Poland. The Boys in the Boat tells a World War II story. 


The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest:
Three great films best seen in a theater

 

Friend, I beg of you. Go to a theater and see three great movies sometime soon: The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest.  

 

Leopold Staff, a Polish poet who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, said that "Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all." Movies are democratic. They are accessible and they are communal. It's fashionable to declare one's superiority by sneering at popular culture. It's harder to sneer when you remember that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fearless counter-jihadi, was inspired by Nancy Drew novels, and that Top Gun and Saving Private Ryan drove military recruitment. Politics is downstream from culture. The culture we support with our ticket-buying dollars is as important as the candidates we support with our votes.

 

We get something from publicly watching a movie together with our fellow citizens. The Major and the Minor is a 1942 screwball comedy. I'd watched it a couple of times at home, alone, on a small TV screen before seeing it for the first time in a jam-packed, Greenwich Village art house theater. In that crowd of rollicking laughter, I suddenly realized what a very naughty movie The Major and the Minor is. Its double entendres had flown right over my head. While watching Gone with the Wind, a loud and spontaneous sigh erupted when the camera zoomed in on Rhett Butler's handsome face (see here). Gathering in the ladies room after a movie like that is a genre of psychotherapy. While washing your hands you ask complete strangers, "Do you think Scarlett and Rhett ever got back together?" You comfort and enlighten each other and the world is warmer, more connected, less lonely and tense. Mel Gibson's The Passion depicts Christ's torture, crucifixion, and death in grisly detail. Three Muslim guys took seats directly behind me. They were joking sarcastically. Clearly, they were in the theater to mock. After the film ended, I turned around to check on them. One was doubled over, distraught. His companions were rubbing his back and speaking softly to him.

 

The loss of public movie-going erodes not just community, but also art. Ali's well is a famous, eight-minute scene in Lawrence of Arabia. Most of what we see is a completely flat, lifeless, tan desert landscape against a blue sky unbroken by any cloud. Two men draw water from a desert well. A tiny dot appears on the horizon. Slowly we realize that that dot is a man approaching on a camel. He shoots one of the men to death. As we wait, and wait, and wait for the approaching man  to arrive, we experience a fraction of the desert: the emptiness, the boredom, the terror, the sudden and irrational violence, the value system so very different from our own. That scene could never move us in the same way on a small screen. And, when we are watching alone on a small screen, we can fast forward through the parts we don't like, like, say, the grim depictions of the Holocaust in Schindler's List.

 

My students, trained on media that rushes and delivers jolts of violence and sex aimed at the lizard brain's reward-squirting mechanisms, lack the ability to sit through a scene like Ali's well. They also have trouble sitting through a complex lecture on current events, or a long story of personal struggle told by a friend. Movies, like all art, have the potential to train us to be our best selves.

 

The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest are three very different films, but they are all innovative, in different ways. Peasants is so innovative another movie like it may never be made again. Zone rewrote how the Holocaust will be treated in film, and how it will be understood. Boys is rebellious, counter-cultural filmmaking in ways I'll detail below. All three films have much to say about our current politico-cultural landscape. Each addresses community. Each, given their visual and auditory artistry and impact, should be seen in a theater.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

The Zone of Interest: Movie Review


 

The Zone of Interest 2023
A Masterpiece from a TV Commercial Director

 

Friend, please do something for me. Put this article aside and find the nearest theater showing The Zone of Interest. Walk into the theater knowing as little as possible about it. Then return to this article so we can exchange notes. I need to talk about this movie with others.

 

The Zone of Interest is going to generate a great deal of talk. There will be debates and podcasts. There will be university courses and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. There will be a backlash industry pooh-poohing every accolade the film receives. If you wait too long, your chance to have your own experience of the film may slip out of your hands. You may feel, "The Zone of Interest is its own industry. Seeing it would be too much like homework. I'd prefer the latest superhero movie."

 

You may be thinking, "Another Holocaust film. They're just are fishing for an Academy Award! Why can't we have movies about other atrocities? And I don't like watching people being tortured."

 

First, there is no torture, and almost no violence, in this movie. I cry at movies and I didn't cry while watching Zone. Days later, while merely thinking about it, I cried. I had nightmares. Even in my nightmares, there was no blood. There were merely well-groomed, clean people behaving in accord with their value system, their character, and their mental defenses. And we need Holocaust movies because the Holocaust was a big deal. And we can have movies about other atrocities, too, like Twelve Years a Slave and Killers of the Flower Moon.

 

Zone is universal and timeless, like W. H. Auden's poem "Shield of Achilles," which uses Jesus' crucifixion and Achilles' shield to discuss twentieth-century atrocity. Both Auden's poem and Zone say as much about slavery or the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Gulag as films directly addressing those topics.

 

I recommend Zone to every thinking adult. I say "thinking" because a subset of viewers are not getting this movie. There are some negative fan reviews online. These say that the film is "boring." "Nothing happens," they complain. "There is no plot." Bless their hearts.

 

Thinking adults are capable of observing. "To observe" implies an increase in cognitive activity from "to watch." If you know how to observe, you will get Zone.

 

Filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, winner of four Academy Awards, said, that Zone is "probably the most important film of this century, both from the standpoint of his cinematic approach and the complexity of its theme." And if you are thinking, "Oh, this movie sounds too artsy-fartsy. I like more direct fare," don't let that stop you. Glazer got his start in that most democratic of forms, the TV commercial, where he depicted drinking a Guiness beer as tantamount to being a white stallion emerging from ocean surf. Glazer knows how to create images that penetrate to your lizard brain. He wields that magic here, not to sell beer, but to bring you closer to yourself, your own lowest fears and highest prayers.

 

In the article, below, I will summarize the plot, and then discuss the filmmaker, his approach, and the history he addresses. 

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

The Never Again Association Releases a Report on Grzegorz Braun


 The Never Again Association describes itself thus,

"The 'NEVER AGAIN' Association is an independent civil society organization founded in Warsaw in 1996. It has campaigned against racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, for peace, intercultural dialogue and human rights across the world … The major objectives of the 'NEVER AGAIN' Association include:

 

 breaking the silence and raising awareness of the problem of racism and xenophobia;

 

building a broad and inclusive movement against racism and discrimination, for respect, inclusivity and diversity;

 

eliminating or marginalizing racist, xenophobic and antisemitic tendencies in various spheres of life."

 

The Never Again Association webpage is here.

 

In December, 2023, the Never Again Association released "Braun's Hate," a report addressing Grzegorz Braun's activities. The full, 29-page report can be read here.

 

The report begins,

 

"The 'NEVER AGAIN' Association has prepared a special report that documents several dozen examples of hateful actions and statements of Grzegorz Braun, Member of Polish Parliament from the far right Konfederacja (Confederation) party. The hatred expressed by Braun did not start with the infamous 12 December 2023 attack on the hannukiah in the Parliament, using a fire extinguisher. In fact, the Konfederacja MP has for years promoted conspiracy theories about Jews taking over Poland, mocked the victims of Nazi camps, called for violence against LGBT people, and boasted about tearing down Ukrainian flags."

 

Here are just a few examples from the report:

 

"On 2 April 2019, in an interview published on the YouTube channel of wRealu24, online TV, Grzegorz Braun demanded penalties for homosexuality. He said, 'Let's negotiate not the boundaries of tolerance, but of penalisation. … If someone comes up with a liberal bill introducing whipping of homosexuals, then we can discuss how to implement it whether through European Parliament or Warsaw's Parliament.'

 

On 9 April 2020, in an interview for the Panta Rhei channel on YouTube, Braun presented xenophobic conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID--19, 'Might it be simply an act of biological warfare? …Who might benefit from it? The Chinese, Americans, Muscovites, Jews, or all of them at once?'

 

Braun referred to modern Poland as 'a Russian German condominium under Jewish fiduciary government', adding that 'the Jewish fiduciary government has, of course, its guarantor and protector in the American empire'. He continued: 'Germans, Jews and sodomites must not re write our history and instruct us how to behave in our own home'"

 

 

Thursday, December 21, 2023

A Polish Politician Extinguishes a Hanukkah Menorah. What do you do when the worst stereotypes seem to be true?


 

A Polish Politician Extinguishes a Hanukkah Menorah
What do you do when the worst stereotypes seem to be true?

 

Grzegorz Michal Braun is a 56-year-old Polish parliamentarian. On Tuesday, December 12, 2023, Braun used a fire extinguisher to snuff out the candles on a Hanukkah menorah erected in the Polish Parliament, the Sejm (pronounced "Same"). Warsaw Rabbi Shalom Stambler and Deputy Speaker of Parliament Piotr Zgorzelski had lighted the candles. The rabbi was accompanied by two of his children, ages 7 and 11. Chabad Rabbi Stambler has been lighting Hanukkah candles in the Sejm for the past seventeen years.

 

A Jewish woman, Dr. Magdalena Gudzinska-Adamczyk, physically confronted Braun and attempted to stop him. He sprayed her in her face and she required medical attention. She displayed courage in spite of being a petite woman, smaller than Braun (photo here). She later said, "I have stopped feeling safe in this country." Dr. Gudzinska-Adamczyk also said, "This is my religious symbol, I have the right to defend it, because we live in a free, democratic country. And no one has the right to direct a powder extinguisher in my face because I am defending my religious symbol."

 

Attempting to justify his crime immediately afterward, Braun said, "Those who take part in acts of satanic worship should be ashamed … There can be no place for the acts of this racist, tribal, wild Talmudic cult on the premises of the Sejm … You are not aware of the message of this act innocently called Hanukkah … I am restoring a state of normality by putting an end to acts of satanic, racist triumphalism because that is the message of these holidays." His statement was booed by other parliamentarians.

 

Braun's antisemitic vandalism was immediately and widely condemned, including by members of his own party.

 

"All decent people think exactly the same thing, this is an unacceptable thing, this must never happen again. This is a disgrace," said Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who assumed office on December 13, 2023.

 

Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told Reuters by telephone that Braun's actions were not representative of Poland and that he was "embarrassed" by them.

 

"I declare that I am ashamed and apologize to the entire Jewish community in Poland," said Cardinal Grzegorz Rys.

 

Mariusz Blaszczak is chairman of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, or Law and Justice Party Parliamentary club. Law and Justice is a right-wing party; it recently lost its parliamentary majority. Blaszczak said that "Braun should be expelled from Confederation," that is, Braun's own party should expel him. "If he is not expelled, it will mean Krzysztof Bosak [the head of Braun's party] stands by him, and he [Bosak] should step down as deputy speaker of the Sejm … There is no justification for the attack because it was an attack on Poland … It is an attack conducted by a man who is either completely irresponsible or someone who acts to the detriment of our country."

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