Reading Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes, Violence

For many years, I took a break from reading theory, mainly literary theory. What bothered me about theory as it applied to literature and culture was that it lost (or never cared to find) a focus on the intrinsic merits, principally, aesthetic, as well as explore intertextual and literary biographical aspects of literary texts. Instead, the text all too often became a means to end, a stepping stone to demonstrate the workings of power (Foucault), logocentrism (Derrida), capitalism (Jameson). I felt I was in the presence of secular priest-academics, hell-bent on finding social truths, trampling rough-shod otherwise on literary history and value and aesthetics. But they weren't out in the field fighting and struggling and taking risks for social justice.

If I want to be informed about politics, why not just read a newspaper or the work of political scientist or journalist or sociologist? Why a literary theorist? Reading theory was heady, inspiring for me at times, but something that indulged in for too long, too much of it began to seem arid and empty to me. Thus, I would liken reading too much theory to taking cocaine: it was a drug that took you into an abstract world divorced from the material, everyday world by virtue of the scintillating play of ideas, deft application of theory, apt choice of words, virtuouso handling of syntax, head-spinning organization of ideas. And it all seemed so meaningful, but at the same time it was so, so far divorced from reality.

The paradigmatic figure in the world of Anglo-literary theory had become the prolific, neo-Marxist Frederic Jameson with whom I became most familiar. He is most notable for his paragraph long sentences and amazing facility at handling ideas and concepts like silly-putty, maneuvering them with formidable erudition and dexterity, much like Sartre. Exploitation, alienation, destruction wrought by capitalism--these are some of Jameson's underlying targets. At times, I was engaged to be sure by what I read,. But where did reading Jameson get me?! If political injustice is something I want to read about, I'd rather read the account of a historian, a political activist, or about an educator, who is on the front lines fighting for social justice. Rather than read a recondite literary theorist, I'd settle for reading a muckracking writer or journalist.

I was wary of reading Zizek who was a self-proclaimed follower of Jacques Lacan, a follower of Freud. Lacan takes Freudian ideas and puts them into neat semiotic formulas. He writes in an opaque, gnomic, elliptical style in which the meaning isn't readily evident. And he shares Freud's heavy handed moralism and sexism, and is all to ready find perversion and deviance in any sexual expression that doesn't conform to some middle class norm from the Victorian era. But Zizek uses Lacan in quite interesting ways that to me actually seem to make sense.

Zizek is a theorist like Jameson, but with a few twists, like, a morbid, zany sense of humor, a gadfly's proclivity for provocative overstatement and trenchant wit, a liking for and frequent allusion to popular film and fiction, and on occasion, he speaks bluntly, forcibly, and quite effectively, eschewing qualifications and provisos. All these qualities have made him a popular academic, and if you watch him on youtube, you can see just how engaging and entertaining he is compared to most other academics.

My main difficulty with In Defense of Lost Causes were the sections and chapters that Zizek devoted to trying to salvage some meaning and value from mostly recent social revolutions (the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese). I found myself grimacing at times as he wrote about Stalin's violent experiments in collective farming and industrialization, and the purges of the party leadership itself. Just how much instructive material can be gleaned from these disasters for the sake of future revolutions? Just how much a failure, just what cost of human lives is needed to realize that it need not be repeated yet again? Even if I was given pause to reconsider just how, according to Zizek, the road to utopia or rather hell is paved with good intentions, from which we can indeed learn when the attempt or rather revolutionary fervor explodes, unexpectedly, again on the world stage, the tone in which he does so, treating human casulties as just seeming numbers cannot but seem callous. Perhaps this is calculated provocation: we are too accustomed to dismiss out of hand the brutal, inhumane excesses of communism. While we do indeed tend to overlook the excesses of capitalism, as Zizek correctly, avers, as a matter of course, regarding them as the objective, inevitable consequence of history, that is no reason to adopt such an attitude to the excesses of communism.

The cover of Zizek's book features a rendering, a color drawing of a guillotine blade, but one that has been conceptually pulled out of its context from the larger wooden structure of which it is a part, as well as the scene in which it was deployed--a bloody spectacle of public execution. So, too, isn't Zizek's writing in his book about revolutionary violence largely taking place in a scene apart and distant from its agents and victims? Or is the focus not so much on the human agents involved--after all they are ultimately instruments of historical forces they embody and deploy, but which they cannot quite control according to their plans--but rather on the mechanisms, the inner laws that seem to determine the course that violent change and upheaval tends to take? That does seem like a worthwhile topic to investigate, not adopt a dismissive formula, as Zizek observes, of the revolution turns against itself, consumes itself. What else may we learn from the socio-psychological factors that determine this self-destructive turn. That seems a worthwhile investigation, but the tone in which Zizek conducts it, tossing in a devil-may-care humor seems to me, on more than a few occasions, excessive and inappropriate. For my sensibility there is too much mordant, black humor in the aftermath of social revolutions gone wrong with millions of casualties.

One wonders just how many readers take Zizek for his word, and even if they do, what access do they have to power? This talk of revolutionary embrace and reconsideration seems to me quixotic and misplaced. In the absence of relevance and reverberation in the larger world, in the relatively quiet halls of academia and bookstores, what other way is there to create a stir, then to provoke your audience, to make outrageous claims? Terry Eagleton in his review of Zizek's Drense in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) aptly likened Zizek's book as more interesting for its naves, than its halls.

When ZIzek is not making politically provocative overstatements, I read him with interest, for, informed as he is by philosophy, theory, psychology, linguistics, he has original, compelling things to say about political developments. Moreover, he applies abstruse theory to phenomenon unfolding today in a persuasive, readily understood manner.

to be continued

Yella (2007) by director Christian Petzold

The German director, Christian Petzold's film "Yella" (2007) is a psychological drama about the plight of a woman from East Germany trying to escape her world of limited opportunity to West Germany. In the process, she loses her sense of humanity, as she becomes drawn into the world of flimsy and shady businesses and businessmen. The rapidly changing landscape of East Germany is ripe for speculation and schemes to make a quick Euro.

Yella, or rather her husband, was apparently tempted to try his hand in the computer business and lost badly, not only money and in his plan to make money by reselling computer equipment, but also his wife. The film opens with Yella walking away from him, trying to ignore his pleas for her to return to him. To what degree Yella was involved in his schemes, we never learn. But it seems he is the more to blame for this scheme, if we are to judge by his short temper, overbearing manner, and refusal to start his life anew without his wife. Even worse, upset that Yella has actually found work in West Germany and will be soon be leaving, this husband plans to do away with them both. He cannot bear the thought that his wife will pursue her own life without him.

So, the husband, unexpectedly, shows up, before the cab does to take Yella to the train station to West Germany. Predictably, he refuses to drive to the station. At this point it's best not to divulge just how the narrative plays out, but only say that for a time Yella does seem to escape, though her husband continues to pursue and stalk her.

Yella's job offer turns out to be at a company which has just been dissolved, or bankrupted, or suddenly taken over by another company. Her boss seems to take it all as business as usual, but she is crestfallen. Yet not for long, for she meets a shady businessman, who she unexpectedly helps to realize his business scheme to outfox another business. They continue their relation, he, intent on pursuit of the big Euro, amassing money for a scheme to acquire a business, and, Yella, whose motivations are simpler--to help her poor father and to strike back at the businesses who she have ruined her former husband.

There is a sombre atmosphere to the film, a minimal focus on characters, in particular, Yella, often isolated, alone. The world is simply one of roads, cars, clean and modern and sterile office and hotel interiors. It seems that other people, the world itself is left out of the film, that is, it is not a matter of concern to the main characters of the film who are preoccupied with their schemes to make money.

This is quite a subtle, powerfully moving film, quite critical of the reconstruction of East Germany by West. The film reminded me of Slawomir Fabicki's "The Retrieval" in which a young man in Poland, who is dismayed with his work prospects, whether its shoveling manure at the family farm or working at a cement factory where he witnesses a coworker fall down a shaft to his death. This young man gets drawn into the criminal underworld, working as an enforcer for a loan shark.

Tonight I watched the compelling personal story of James Carroll that is very much a public and historical narrative that centers on Carroll's preoccupation with the nature of good and evil, in particular, how one institution, the Catholic Church, which he served for a brief time as an ordained Catholic priest (1969-1974) had and has become associated with violence, power, and persecuting Jews. The film is based on a long book that Carroll published in 2001, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews.

To make the film more current, Carroll adds two strands to his history: first, the campaign of the Christian evangelical church to recruit members at the U.S. Air Force school and base, in Colorado Springs; second, the link between political and religious, President Bush's characterization of the war on terror as a crusade. This latter point in the film is not developed, since there is simply not enough time for it, and it moves past the framework of the film (as well as the original theme of Carroll's, the relation of Christians and Jews). Carroll sees proselytizing of evangelicals in the U.S. Air Force Academy and Bush's use of biblical allusions to describe the war on terror as signs and symptoms of the fact that the bloody past of Christianity, it's use as a state religion to be used to fight wars and to persecute non-Christians, Jews and Muslims, remains unknown to most Christians. Though some efforts have been made by the pope and Catholic Church to acknowledge evils committed by the church in the name of good, they have not been quite inadequate.

The starting point for Carroll's film is the symbol of the cross. As a boy, Carroll liked the cross, but then, as an adult, he began to see the shadow its cast. The good he associated with the Catholic Church also came to be associated with evil. Where did the symbol come from? It came from Constantine, a Roman general, in the 3rd century; he claimed to have had a vision of a cross during battle, and he believed it was sign that helped him win the battle. Later, the cross was adopted as a symbol in battle. When Constantine became a Roman emperor he made the cross a key Christian symbol. Thus, a symbol of grisly Roman style execution was chosen as a symbol of a religion that became a state religion, and one used as battle standard. The cross, Christian faith, would be enforced on pagans and non-Christians by the sword. The cross was quite different from other Christian symbols at the time--the fish, the lamb.

Carroll asks, what sort of man was Constantine? We learn Constantine was a ruthless and violent man, who even went so far as to have his son and one of his wives murdered. One account from Constantine's time, ironically observes that Constantine was a man with so many sins that only the Christian religion was willing to accept him. Thus, when one asks whether Constantine accepted Christianity out of personal conviction, or as a means to an end, to consolidate state power and use religion, the symbol of the cross, as a means to inspire soldiers in battle, the answer seems clear.

For Carroll, the cross, which is brought to others by sword, military force and violence--this is the starting point for Christian crusades against the infidel, its anti-Semitism and its use as a battle standard against pagans and Muslims. Since Constantine made Christianity a state religion in the twilight years of the Roman Empire--it frayed apart and collapsed in the next hundred years--there was no much time to put this militant religion into practice. However, eventually, when the medieval states that espoused Christianity became stronger in the 10th century, the crusades were launched--the imposition of the cross with the sword on non-Christians. The first to suffer were the Jews who lived along the Rhine River; they were attacked and killed by crusaders on their way to "liberate" Jerusalem and attack Muslims. Carroll goes to visit the archives, which hold books from the time, which have accounts of these atrocities. He visits Trier, for instance, and the archivist there finds a book with a description of a murder. Carroll also goes to visit the grave sites that still remain of victims.

Carroll asks, why didn't he learn about this dark past of the Catholic Church? He had even been a resident of Germany as a boy, since his father was an air force general stationed in Germany during the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, as Carroll observes in retrospect, he lived in an artificial world of moral purity and goodness. His father served the forces of good--first, the FBI, then the armed services of U.S. His parents were devout Catholics. Carroll himself harbored two dreams: either become an air force pilot or a priest, and he chose the latter. In his studies in the seminary and then in his years working as an ordained priest who was committed to the peace movement to end U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Carroll began to investigate how state power and Catholicism were involved and implicated in evil. This investigation led him to quit the priesthood and to become a writer and journalist. In time, the result of Carroll's personal odyssey led to the publication of long, 751-page book published in 2001, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews; the movie based on the book, was released this year.

The Strangerer by Mickey Maher, Theatre Oobleck

Now playing at the Chopin Theatre (1543 W. Division, Chicago), and in its third run, is Mickey Maher's play "The Strangerer," an absurd, satiric, dark comedy featuring George Bush, John Kerry, and Jim Lehrer, a news anchor man, who serves as the moderator. The play is based on the debate between Bush and Kerry in 2004, but only in a very loose manner, that is, it is replete with euphemisms for brutality and violence, circumlocution, posing, empty rhetoric, and pursuit of tangents, so much so that nothing really does get said about the Iraq invasion. The actors playing Bush, Kerry, and Lehrer act like bufoons, and I was reminded of Eugene Ionescu's absurdist rewriting of Shakespeare, MacBeth, called MacBett, which I saw when it was staged a few years ago at the Chopin Theatre. In Ionescu's play leaders are presented as possessing all too human failings.

I will not comment on the play itself, but rather make some remarks about the issues raised in the play. For viewers who haven't seen the play, I would give too much away about it, if I discussed it, so I will refrain from doing so.

The playwright, Mickey Maher, who plays Kerry, gives his play an absurd turn by likening Bush to the antihero of Albert Camus's novella, The Stranger, Meursault, who commits a murder on a whim in a nihilistic fashion. Of course, neither Bush nor Kerry nor Lehrer ever get their hands "dirty" and "bloody" as such. The president ordered others, the U.S. armed forces to invade Iraq. In the name of security, in the name of democracy, in the name of stability--you name it--but there were various ideological justifications and explanations for the unilateral invasion of Iraq by Bush, which was supported by U.S. House and Senate. The mainstream media and press, including Lehrer's news hour, can be regarded as complicit in their support of the U.S. militarism, since they would often give the government, especially its representatives and spokes persons a free pass, a forum to drone on and on in their official rhetoric that would justify their militarism as anything--an effort to develop and support democracy, offering political stability, and so on--but what it it really and primarily was--an exercise in unilateral imposition of American economic and military power abroad.

Of course, Bush is quite different than Camus' Mearsault, who is a nihilist, who murders for no reason and who is detached from any feeling of connection to fellow human beings. Likely, Bush and others, in their own minds believe, deeply and passionately, that their militaristic policies are indeed justified, just as leaders of powerful countries have often believed they had some sort of religious and political right to impose control, occupation, democracy beyond the borders of their nation. Thus, the parallel suggested between Mearsault's nihilistic murder and the state sponsored militarist policies of President Bush is an absurd one. A more apt comparison between the two is based on their lack of coherence, which Maher's Bush in the play readily admits to, though quickly adds that that fact is not important. One memorable such and recorded incoherent response of Bush in the second debate with Kerry is still available on video online. When asked by an audience member that opinion abroad has become critical of Bush's invasion and how he responds to it, Bush rambles about the need to take decisive action that may be unpopular. The camera that pans the audience on occasion records looks of incomprehension and amusement and impatience at Bush's response. In Maher's play most of Bush's responses are like this.

But Maher does not write a play with an eye for satirizing the delusions of American imperial power politics that justifies its policies. His real target is the verbal game of double-speak, obfuscation, and misinformation, which is practiced by Bush himself, at times, ineptly. Bush makes many malapropisms in the play. Maher's other targets are the lackluster opposition epitomized by Kerry who cannot or for the sake of not appearing unpatriotic cannot bring himself to call the president and his administration to task for their militaristic policies that are packaged in lies and half-truths. And the mainstream American media which plays along with the government, rather than questioning it, is also a target for Maher's satire.

Maher presents Bush absurdly as someone who wants to call attention to death and murder. Of course, it's well known that the Bush administration has undertaken extraordinary measures to avoid calling attention to the deaths its Iraq invasion has caused. For instance, photographs of coffins of dead U. S. armed service men and women are not permitted to be made. Thus, in Maher's absurd debate Bush wants to stage a death during the debate itself! I will not elaborate on this development, since it would reveal an element of surprise and suspense from the play to those who have not seen it.

The debate constantly veers away from the questions posed by the moderator. The main diversion of debate becomes an argument on the nature of theatre, the theatre of politics and the theatre of death. How does one present political policy, and how does one present the death that it can cause? Bush and Kerry argue about a play they had gone to see together the night before the debate, and this serves as a meta-commentary on how their own politics, the posing, the rhetoric, the appeals to voters, is itself a staged performance. In the case of pursuing an invasion of another country, the question becomes for the administration how to stage the event, package and present it to the public. Kerry, in turn, plays along with the administration; he does not so much as protest or oppose it, as simply offer suggestions on how to modify it. In effect, this is a toothless opposition, one which in making itself "moderate," palatable to the entire game of staging politics, is not a viable alternative.

Another issue the play raises is that the lack of substantive debate and discussion in the 2004 presidential debates suggests that much of the American public is either tuned out or already has its mind made up. At one point, Maher's Bush observes that no one is really listening to him, for his supporters already agree with him, and his detractors only focus on his malapropisms. Kerry in contrast at one juncture asserts that the best theatre is the theatre that will put its audience to sleep, which is a commentary on his own inability to differentiate himself and his policies from those of Bush.

Short Films by Asliuk, Strembitsky, Loznitsa, Pakalnina, Buraja

Falling Out of Time
Gene Siskel Film Center
Curators, Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby
Thursday, April 3, 2008

"Once the home of state-sponsored social realism, the former Soviet Europe has given rise to a new breed of documentary featuring the observational ambiguities and formal rigor more familiar to experimental cinema."

The Mine, Victor Asliuk, Belarus (2004) 16 min

Wayfarers, Igor Strembitsky, Ukraine (2005), 10 min

Halt, Sergei Loznitsa, Russia (2000), 25 min

Papa Gena, Laila Pakalnina, Latvia (2001) 10 min

Mother, Oksana Buraja, Lithuania (2001) 10 min

Five short experimental, documentary films from the former Soviet Union were shown. None of the films had narration or extended dialogue; some had background music. Before the films were shown, the curators gave some background information about them. Though the union came to an end in 1991, seventeen years ago, directors from nations that were a part of it, were strongly influenced in the 1990s by the film schools and documentary film studios that had been formed in the 1920s in the Soviet Union. Each province or oblast in the former Russian Soviet Union had a film school and studio, as well as the centers of Russia, Leningrad and Moscow. Each of the Soviet republics also had its film schools and centers in their capitol cities.

"The Mine" was shot in color and follows a crew of miners to their work site. There is no narrative commentary, no dialogue and some background movie only towards the very end of the film. The sound of the film is strictly on the machinery. The camera shows the workers trudging down a tunnel to the elevator, which then follows them as the elevator takes them further underground. A sensation of claustrophobia, feeling confined, is likely to develop in the viewer as the camera pans the faces of the miners in the elevator. The elevator reaches its destination and the workers leave one confined space to enter yet into another such space--the system of tunnels. The camera follows a few of the individual miners as they split up in order to attend to their particular tasks.

There is an implicit commentary being made by the director: the life of a miner is grim and grimy and harsh. We get closeups of miners attentive at some task; they are stoic, reserved, suggesting not the laborer as hero--as the 1920s propaganda films suggested--but rather a detached and dutiful attention to the task at hand. A triumphant sounding classical music score begins at the end of the film as workers depart from the mine; this is clearly an ironic comment, a suggestion that departure from confined and dusty underworld is the one source of solace for the miners from their difficult work.

The "Wayfarers" also offers us a grim view of life, in this instance, life at a home for mentally ill men, but there are occasional cuts in this narrative focus to shots of women sitting alone, a child, and a woman with a child. All these shots are presumably references to the social world outside the nursing home, a world that its inhabitants have left behind (in childhood) or dream about (meeting a woman to share life with). The film opens with the nursing home's director making his morning rounds with a forced cheerfulness and sarcastic comment (Here is our hero) to a former veteran confined to his bed. In one scene an elderly man reads aloud a nostalgic love poem near a tv that is playing, but is not tuned to any station, but simply showing static. There is no need for commentary or narration for this poignant scene, which shows us an older man's loneliness and estrangement from the world. In another similar scene, as the men mingle and sit outside the building, one man is prompted to sing, and he obliges. In several shots, individuals are seated and face the camera, but none of them talk nor seem to be quite sure how to respond to being put on the spot or interviewed. The film ends with a woman singing a lullaby in the background. Again, an ironic comment on the subject of the film--the tragic separation and isolation of mentally ill men confined to a nursing home.

Halt by Sergei Loznitsa is a black and white series of images that focuses on people sleeping at train station, which is full of them. The camera lingers on one or two or several people. Usually the edges of the screen are slightly out of focus, and often the angle of the camera is from the floor. The distance of the camera from the sleepers is uniform throughout: they fill the screen. Each sleeper or sleepers seem to get a minute or two of time on which the camera lingers on them, and usually there is some subtle and slight movement to observe

Each individual has fallen asleep in a different position--seated, slumped, stretched out, curled up, and so on. The only sounds we hear are the people breathing, stirring slightly, the occasional train whistle and the train rumbling nearby. The absence of action, the repetition of poses with slight variations leaves the viewer free to begin to form his or her own reflections; in effect, I see this as an open ended occasion for the viewer to reflect on whatever topic is on his or her mind. In this regard, a parallel experience would be looking at and reflecting on an abstract painting. In this film the burden of finding and making sense of the film is placed almost completely on the viewer.

Papa Gena by Laila Pakalnina is a black and white, gritty film that contrasts mundane life in a flat, urban, industrial landscape with Figaro singing Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. There is a strong contrast between the lively music that people are listening to on headphones and the gray setting they inhabit. The music, Mozart, often brings the dead scene to life, and on occasion puts a smile on the listeners face, usually on older listeners. The children and young adults don't seem to take as much pleasure and joy in the music as the adults. The film is made up of a series of scenes in which the listeners to the music are standing still and waiting, it seems, for the music to begin. At that point they listen to it for a time, and then walk away off camera which doesn't follow them. From one perspective, listening to the music is an indicator of the interviewees mood--are they amenable, open to the joy of the music, or are they indifferent to it? Will it make a change in their mood? If not, why?

The last film shown "Mother" by Oksana Buraja is shot in color and ironically, we never do get to see the mother of the boy in the film. As the film opens, we see a boy staring at a tv, and then a room full of smoke and people sitting around a table drinking. Presumably, the boy's mother is at the head of the table. All we see is her her back facing the film as she sits at the table full of bottles and glasses offering guests more to drink. A nonstop party seems to be in session, and the only people not partaking are the boy, who is about age six, and his friend who appears later in the film. Most of the film follows the boy around; the adults don't seem to pay much attention to him, except when he plays with the stove and is asked to get some water for a drunk man (his father?). The man talks about the struggle for good and evil in the soul; clearly, he has lost his battle, and is in the grip of alcoholism.

The residents of this apartment speak in Russian, and they are part of the Russian minority in Lithuania; such a Russian minority remains in all the new nations that formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This particular group illustrates not only the prevalence of alcoholism among Russians, whether it is in former Soviet republics that have been independent nations, or in Russia itself, but a widespread health and social problem throughout Eastern Europe and in particular the former Soviet Union.

From the naive perspective of the child, his life is boring, and he lacks structure and direction which his parents and family are supposed to be providing him. From the viewers perspective, we can only cringe and wonder what will be the long term consequences of this parental neglect on his development.

Perspeolis: a free spirit finding herself

Persepolis is a a moving coming of age story of Marjane Satrapi who grew up during the Iranian Revolution and the takeover of the country by its religious right during the 1980s. Her personal story is political: just as her nation undergoes turmoil and upheaval politically, she too leads a turbulent life trying to find herself. For a time her parents send her abroad for a few years to Vienna because they fear her outspokenness and independence at school would inevitably get both her and them in trouble with the authorities. The theme of the narrative is Satrapi's own search for stability and meaning in a life, whether under repressive religious rule in Iran that forbids free thought and expression, or living in Western Europe, which allows for such thought and expression, but such freedom is over-indulged by young outsiders that Satrapi meets.

From the first scene of the film, Satrapi as a child at a family party, one sees that she is someone who is eager to explore and test boundaries. Imitating her hero Bruce Lee, she practices martial arts moves, more zealously than called for. Perhaps, her rebellious streak is one inherited or similar to her uncle, a man who became a Marxist revolutionary, studied in the Soviet Union, and was eventually jailed in Iran after his return. He becomes one of Satrapi's heroes. The other more moderating source of guidance for Satrapi is her grandmother, who is less confrontational than her uncle--she doesn't politicize her rebellion--perhaps sensing the futility of that course of action, but is quite outspoken and independent minded.

Initially, Satrapi is an adolescent who takes a liking to the West, but in time she experiences culture shock and isolation, so she returns home at the age of 18. She tries to find her place in post-revolutionary Iran, going to far as to marry an Iranian man at the age of twenty-one, but again has difficulties--with him, the school--so she eventually leaves after several years.

Visually, the mostly black and white animated film was a pleasure to watch. The animated nature of the film serves as an effective vehicle to convey the plight of Satrapi and the Iranian people. The background is sketched in generally with spare and simple urban or nature scenery. Tehran at times appears as a dismal ghost town, its streets empty and dark, suggesting the set of German expressionist film.

This is not only a story of Satrapi, but also of her family, and other middle class families like hers in Iran, who never do fit in the theocratic government of Iran in the 1980s, nor the 1990s. There is a constant reference to events in Iranian history, and brief suggestive scenes of these historical developments, like the 8-year long war with Iran. The educated and middle class residents of Tehran hold illicit parties with alcohol, music, and dancing; after all, there is no great harm in having a bit of fun, is there?! These people enjoy Western popular culture, which is available in the underground market on the street. Satrapi's use of an increasingly popular Western art form, the graphic novel, adapted into a film, allows to both enjoy and understand her story.

The Rape of Europa, a documentary film 2007

Tonight I saw the film The Rape of Europa, a documentary about the the plunder, theft, and destruction of valuable art during and after WW II. The film begins with Hitler's own relation to art. He was a watercolor painter, who applied to art school at 18 in Vienna, but was rejected, a rejection that in retrospect gave him opportunity to become more involved in politics than art. Another young man, Oskar Kokoshko, who had applied at the same time as Hitler was accepted to the school; he later quipped, he would have made quite a different leader had he been rejected and Hitler accepted to the school.

Though Hitler set aside his artistic ambitions, as he acquired political power in the 1930s, he made his own conservative artistic sensibility a matter of state and public policy. He took much more and close personal interest in art and culture than other state leaders. His conservative taste that recoiled at the avant garde changes and developments in painting and art made condemnation, censorship and destruction of such art, which was labeled as degenerate, a matter of state and public policy. Such art was removed from museums, sold off, or destroyed.

But much of pre-twentieth century art was appreciated by Hitler, who became a collector of masterpieces from the past, whether by purchase or simply theft. In fact, even in the late 1930s, he had already set his eyes on acquiring more past masterpieces from countries that he would eventually invade. Other Nazi leaders, notably, Goering also collected art.

As a matter of policy, art in nations that German invaded and occupied was to be plundered and become a part of Nazi collections or stored for eventual housing in a museum that Hitler planned to build in Linz, Austria, his home town. The focus of the film is on Poland, France, individual collections and galleries of Jews throughout Europe, and Soviet Russia. The film has a chronological narrative thread. The art theft and appropriation commences in Austria in 1938 when it becomes united to Germany. Collections and galleries of prominent Jews in Vienna are identified and their art along with their property is simply taken away from them. Recently, and after legal wrangling, some paintings of Gustav Klimt are returned to the daughter of their owner.

The next country on Hitler's list is Poland, which Germany invades in September 1939. Here a policy of destroying Polish art and culture, most visibly, buildings is pursued. Destruction and desecration of art in Poland and Soviet Russia was a matter of policy: art deemed Polish in Poland was destroyed; what's more its culture itself was to be destroyed as well. Unless art was made by a German artist, as the case of many works in Cracow, which was to be appropriated and taken to Germany, it was not deemed valuable. In Russia, though the German army was held off at the outskirts of Leningrad, the nearby summer palaces, which had become state museums under Soviet rule, were plundered and then ruined when the Germany army retreated. The film goes back and forth between past and present, adding interviews with Polish and Russian curators.

The film then moves to France and then to Italy where some American artists and curators join the army to help in the effort to save art from the destruction of retreating German armies. There are even more stories to this film--the immediate post-war years, following the efforts of a conscientious German Christian who returns Jewish religious items to their family if he can find them; the remaining impasse of Russians holding onto to German art, which they stole from Germany; the continuing efforts, now more than sixty years after the war to restore artwork in Italy.

If there is any fault to this film, it's that there is so much territory covered in it, and so many fascinating stories to tell. Still, it's worthwhile to just see the entire story compressed into one narrative, and to see the images collected together in a film. Some of my visceral reactions to the film were to wince and flinch at the wanton greed and brutality of Hitler, the Nazis, the German army as they steal and destroy art and culture. Ironically, the ugliest and most inhumane and brutal actions are undertaken in the name of claiming art that is regarded as beautiful and the epitome of Western civilization. At times, I felt uneasy as world of wealth and art as a precious commodity comes up--what's the auction price for what's deemed a masterpiece? The film does show the war from quite a unique perspective of the art, and a few themes emerge, which pose interesting questions--to what extent is defending art as valuable as defending human life? To what degree do people identify with the art?

The website for the film has more information and links. http://www.therapeofeuropa.com/