Insiders

I see that Sergio Wolf has been appointed as the new director of the BAFICI. Good for him. I have no idea what he’s like as an administrator but he’s a very good film critic and I used to love his film slot on Pepe Eliaschev’s ‘Esto Que Pasa’ radio program back in the days when it was on Radio Del Plata.

He’ll have his work cut out for him. On the one hand he’ll have the gilded gobshites who ran everything cultural in the city under Ibarra and Telerman dying for him to fail in order to justify their prophecies of doom and bleatings to foreign embassies. I did a little piss take on this here. On the other, he’ll have to deal with a ruthless, rich bastard of a mayor and there isn’t a cuter hoor in politics than the city’s culture minister.

My suggestion for the incoming director would be the following; try to focus on making things easy for ordinary film goers and not just for film people, film students, culture workers and insiders in general. Most of us don’t give a damn about the parties or the foreign invitees and don’t have liveried servants who we can send to buy tickets for us. We’d like there to be lots of interesting films, that it be easy to find out when and where they are on and that it not be necessary to waste huge amounts of time blue arsing it around the city and standing for ages in queues to get tickets for them.

Good luck Sergio, you´ll need it.

Rosas: escena para una película

Tanto él como su esposa, su hija y su cuñada concurrieron en ocasiones a los bailes que organizaban la sociedades [africanas que había en Buenos Aires], gesto muy importante que les valió una gran influencia, puesto que no era nada común que los miembros de la elite hicieran eso. La colectividad negra porteña en esos años lo llamaba “Nuestro padre Rosas”

Gabriel Di Meglio. ¡Mueran Los Salvajes Unitarios! La Mazorca y la política en tiempos de Rosas p. 137

Contradictions

Diego Battle gives space on his website here to an exchange between two prominent cine folks about the state of INCAA and what should be done to improve it. No problem there. Right at the end however, he sticks in a note in which he  says that anonymous accusations are going around of corruption concerning INCAA, that it is not the policy of the website to publish such accusations and also gives the names of those accused.  I pointed out the obvious contradictions involved in a comment his reply to which suggests he didn’t understand. So, I will spell it out here.

I have no objection whatsoever to the names  of the accused being published but it seems the height of sanctimony to do so with hints that the accusations are credible and also say that it is the policy of the website not to publish anonymous accusations. Either one thing or the other, you either do it or you don’t. If you do that’s fine but you can’t say in the same breath it’s not your policy to do so.

Allegory

Referring to the Iranian director Mohsen Majmalbaf and his films in Pagina/12 today Luciano Monteagudo says,

.. he has always had a marked predilection for allegory, a mode of expression common in Iranian cinema and one that seems to form a basic part of the country’s culture.

Well, who knows? Maybe he is right. But there is another glaringly obvious possibility; the frequent resort to visual lyricism and allegory in Iranian cinema may have something to do with need to get permission from a committee of bearded bastards in turbans in order to shoot your film and get it shown. The hirsute loons believe that one book in particular contains all that anyone needs to know about cinema or anything else and without their thumbs up, it’s no dice. So, as your characters definitely aren’t going to be allowed to say anything interesting you’d better learn how to hint at what you actually want to say with endless shots of waves lapping onto the shore and the like.

Or to put it another way, in societies where the work of artists is subject to strict  censorship aimed at upholding a particular religion and  a theocratic regime we ought not to be surprised if a lot of the cultural products that come our way rely heavily on oh-so-subtle allegory.

Wars Of Independence

I saw The Battle of Algiers for the first time in many years today and it remains a very impressive film. Though his sympathies plainly lay with the FLN Pontecorvo’s gaze spares no one, neither the French who torture nor the FLN who have no hesitation in slaughtering innocent people with bombs in bars. I can’t think of anything comparable in cinema to the scene where the camera pans around the Milk Bar that is about to be ripped apart by a bomb, taking in and personalizing for the viewer the faces of many of those who are about to be exterminated. Perhaps someone should tell Eoghan Harris that this is the sort of thing that many countries, not just Ireland and Algeria, had to stoop to in their fight for independence.

All that said though, judged by the standards of contemporary cinema and even those of TV, the effects of violence on bodies are soft-pedaled quite a bit, we see bloodied bodies but not dismembered ones, those shot at close range fall theatrically without any spray of blood or matter and the focus is more on the moral effects of torture on the victim - his becoming less than a person, a plaything of his captors – rather than the horror of the means necessary to achieve this. It’s interesting that the film doesn’t even hint at the torturers themselves suffering psychological damage as a result of their activities.

Looking at it now, the ending seems like the film’s weakest point. Algeria didn’t become independent until five years after the defeat of the FLN in the Algiers Casbah and the viewer innocent of history – apart from some scenes of subsequent street demonstrations – isn’t really given much of a clue how this occurred and is somewhat left hanging. Anyone who wants to know more about this or any other aspect of the Algerian War of Independence could do themselves a big favour by reading Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace.