Film Notes: The Lives of Others

Tonight I saw "The Lives of Others" a German film (original release date March 2006) that shows how the secret police, the Stasi, of the former East German Democratic Republic spied on its citizens, compromising, if not ruining their sense of purpose and moral integrity, especially if they were writers and artists. The basic rule to follow is either play along with the secret police, or if not, then face the prospect to not play at all--face silence, neglect, imprisonment, relegation to the margins of the society, and for some artistic death is tantamount to spiritual death, and they commit suicide.

This film won 7 Deutscher Filmpreis awards and the American Academy Award for best foreign film. This is quite a dark film, relieved with some humorous scenes on occasion, but dark in showing how everyone becomes morally compromised in the net of a society founded on mistrust. A lighter look at the East German past is available in the film, Good Bye Lenin (2003).

There are two heroes to the film, not heroes in a monumental, but on a mundane level, who both act when their sense of conscience prompts them to act in a humane way. First, there is the playwright and writer Georg Dreyman, a darling of the state, who writes plays made to order for the socialist government, and in the opening scenes of the film, we see scenes of what looks like a play that focuses on the heroism of a woman laborer in the factory. But a Stasi officer in the audience, Gerd Wiesler, senses something is amiss in the play, even though it seems on the surface to adhere to all the conventions expected of it. And actually it turns out that Wiesler indeed has an acute sense for ferreting out subversion however subtle its hints: he senses it's not the play itself that is the problem, but what it reveals about the director--that he would dare allow a friend, a director who had been punished, jailed for subversion, direct it. This is evidence enough that Dreyman is himself drifting in the direction of subversion.

Ironically, Dreyman regards this act as a simply a gesture of kindness to a friend in need, and not as a political act in any sense. But Gerd's hunch that something is amiss with the reliable writer of state is shared by the chief of the intelligence, who is also in the audience, and Dreyman's apartment is promptly wiretapped. All his conversations are recorded by Wiesler and his associate in the attic above it. Ironically, however, Gerd finds nothing suspicious to report: Dreyman remains a loyal servant for the state; at a party with friends, he dismisses an accusation by his director friend that someone at the party is a secret police informer.

What pushes Dreyman over the edge to question his allegiance to the state and dissent against it is the mistreatment of his friends at the hands of the secret police. His girlfriend, Christa Marie Sieland happens to catch the eye of the chief of the secret police, and the chief cannot resist the temptation to force himself on her sexually, a fact which shakes up Dreyman when he learns about it. This abuse of power, and then the suicide of his former mentor and director who has been silenced by the state pushes him over the edge. He decides to write an article about suicide in East Germany and how the government doesn't publish any statistics on it.

Gerd, who has been listening in on Dreyman, also begins to doubt the state and its ideals he has served selflessly and loyally. The fact that the chief of the secret police has sexually forced himself on Dreyman's girlfriend causes him to question his own institution, the more so because he must leave out his chief's vile practice out of the official transcripts of what Dreyman and all his friends and associates said or did. Gerd realizes that the secret police is corrupt and morally bankrupt. To provide some context, we are told it's 1984, and in only another five years the Berlin Wall will fall, and in the intervening years the hold of the corrupt regimes in Eastern Bloc states like East Germany will begins to unravel.

To say more about the film's plot would give it away. The theme of the film is how loyal servants of the corrupt regimes in the police and arts begin to sense the moral bankruptcy of their government and state are moved to act against it. The quality of the film itself is made with intentionally grainy film in many shots, as if it were made using the available film technology of the 1980s. (If you don't know what year a film is made, you can usually discern if it was made some time in the mid-90s or later by the higher quality of its resolution and color range, thanks to digital production.) Also, the film is generally sombre in its use of color: often the action takes place in night, or in dimly lit rooms, interrogation rooms and eavesdropping rooms. Gerd's apartment room looks like an ascetic cell of a monk with its bare furnishings and absence of any art on the walls. There is not much sunlight in this world, and the weather outside is overcast and a perpetually barren and cold late fall or early spring.

The chief actors--Dreyman, Gerd, Sieland--are first rate. I can't recall the last film that moved me so much but in such a subtle manner with its powerful message. Personally, the film reverberated very strongly, prompting me to ask myself whether I haven't allowed myself to stray too far from engaging in more work that I find meaningful to me. It also made me think about the fact that other former Communist satellite states and Soviet republics have not reckoned with the past as in East Germany; that is, as the epilogue scenes in The Lives of Others shows, the secret service files were not opened to citizens and historians and researchers.

Brecht's The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui

At the suggestion of a friend, I went with him to see Bertold Brecht's play written in 1941, "The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui," which is about a Chicago mobster's rise to power, and which is also an allegory of Hitler's or any dictator's ruthless rise to power. It was performed with a spare set with few props or stage furniture at the Steep Theatre on a second preview evening; and it's ensemble work with fourteen actors and four or five prominent roles. http://www.steeptheatre.com/current.html

This theatre company features ensemble productions; the other and last play I saw here was Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy". The actor who played the chief criminal, Arturo Ui, was convincingly and energetically played with animation and sulkiness. The air of someone who observes no rules and limits was conveyed well, though at times I felt as if slouching and sulkiness was overdone; I imagine a mobster, a strong man would keep up appearances of strength and a stoic front, at least in front of his subordinates. Another actor whose performance and roles were powerful was man who played the publisher and the actor, who teaches Ui how to walk, sit, talk in order to impress people.

A few scenes, especially in the second part of the play after intermission were especially powerful and moving. For instance, the court scene in which justice is bent to favor the criminals; the scene in which the newspaper publisher is pressured to remain silent, and then confronts his wife.

I must admit that not being familiar with the details of Hitler's own rise to power made me miss allusions and parallels that Brecht worked into his allegory. In the play, Brecht has a narrator comment on the turning points in Hitler's rise to power after some scenes; in the play itself, we hear an announcer speak over the intercom. Having been regularly reading about the machinations of the current government in Russia, like poisoning a critic in London with radioactive polonium, hacking into and shutting down the internet of Estonian government institutions, I found the play chilling with examples of the close connection between criminality and government that is becoming more apparent in Russia.

Brecht pokes fun at the mobster's rise to power through gaining influence in the grocery, in particular, cauliflower business. I could not quite follow just how one grocer was convinced and pressured to ally himself with the mob in exchange for money in the play's first part, and the allusions this may have had to Hitler's alliance with business in Weimar Germany. In any event, the play picked up momentum in the second part, and I would recommend seeing it.

Art Chicago & The Intuit Show of Folk & Outsider Art 2007

Along with Art Chicago, there was another art show, The Intuit Show of Folk & Outside Art, which occupied about a quarter of the floor below the Art Chicago show. I spent some time looking through this show before proceeding to upstairs, and would just like to mention one gallery, Ridge Gallery, from Oak Park, Illinois, in passing. The paintings of Evarist Chikawe, a folk artist, from Tanzania, caught my eye. The work reminds me of Chagall and Picasso, the latter who freely borrowed from African figurative sculpture and masks in his early paintings.

http://ridgeart.com/paintings2.html
http://www.artshost.org/rafiki/rafiki/artists/evarist.htm

Looking Beyond Borat: A society and architecture of the future, or more state propaganda in Kazakhstan?

I found Sasha Cohen's film "Borat" entertaining, but I was upset and uncomfortable with just how far and for how long the device of ignorant, crude ethnic yahoo was taken by Cohen. For this is the very image of benighted country bumpkin that comes up in and is used to justify an empire's occupation or forceful re-education of its subjects.

For example, it comes up often in the image of the crude and ignorant Ukrainian peasant that was created from an imperial Russian cultural perspective, as evident in many literary works. If the backward Ukrainian peasant, as depicted in fiction, would only learn Russian and renounce his Ukrainian, peasant culture, he would become civilized, and, of course, a proud Russian, as well. Ukrainian writers were quick to jump to the peasant's defense, in particular Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, a recorder and admirer of the peasant's fertile and creative linguistic resources.

After all, peasants possess a rich folk culture with rituals, myths, stories, an extensive knowledge of their surrounding natural world. Modern composers have turned to folk music for their melodies; scientific researchers, to peasants' knowledge of herbs to develop new medications. That said, we can note that the prototype for Cohen's ethnic yahoo is not a peasant as such, but rather a Soviet Man, that is, a descendant of an ex-peasant, one who was forcibly removed from his farm during the process of collectivization and industrialization during the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union. As part of an intensive and harmful industrialization process imposed from above by Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, the age-old agricultural communities in Kazakhstan, Russia, Belorus, and especially in Ukraine, were destroyed, individual farms made into collectives. Up to seven or eight million peasants starved to death in an artificial famine that resulted. The descendants of these survivors became Soviet people stripped of their folk and rural culture, religion and customs; conceivably, some could even have become similar to the sort of declasse troglodyte that Cohen creates in his film. But one outcome of destroying the indigenous peasant culture was desirable to the nascent Soviet Union--to create a population that was dependent on the state for work and more likely to buy into its state propaganda.

In any event, Kazakhstan the land, and Kazakhs, the people, are by no means the backward land and people that Cohen's satire makes it out be, as demonstrated by some of its cutting edge architectural projects, like the currently under construction enormous enclosed city space, the Khan Shatyry. What is really backward about Kazakhstan is the deplorably bad situation of democratic rights to free speech and assembly--such speech is censored and banned--as well as the lack of transparency in a corrupt government--with no press and media to fear, the rulers of this Central Asian nation pocket much of its wealth with impunity for themselves. Kazakhstan has in fact had only one ruler, Nursaltan Nazarbayev, and his government, since 1991.

Thus, a really more harmful and cruel joke is being played on Kazakhs by their own president than by the comedian Cohen in his film. The sad truth is that it is likely easier to make and market a film about an imaginary ethnic yahoo than about a corrupt politician in a Central Asian nation, a megalomaniac like Nazarbayev.

While some improvement in the economy is clearly evident, as a result of oil revenues, which has provided the funds for spectacular architectural projects such as the tent city, this land has remained in many ways frozen in the Soviet past circa 1991. The snatches of official Kazakhstan state propaganda, which Cohen includes at the beginning of Borat, and which are in themselves unintentionally amusing because of the heavy handed praise of labor that contributes to state power--this propaganda may well have been updated in Kazakhstan, but it has yet to be satirized by the Kazakhs themselves.

Clearly, Nazarbayev's new and spectacular architectural projects of the future also serve as propaganda for his regime and state, more effective propaganda than that of the Soviet era. At this juncture, this architecture also can serve as a symbol of hope, a utopian dream that one future day Kazakhstan's citizens could enjoy the benefits of a democratically more open democratic and progressive society. But for now this tent city functions like a Potemkin-like distraction and stage-prop on the world stage.
http://www.registan.net/index.php/2006/12/10/the-excesses-of-kazakh-architecture/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Shatyry
http://www.fosterandpartners.com/Projects/1438/Default.aspx
http://newsite.irinnews.org/country.aspx?CountryCode=KZ&RegionCode=ASI

Museum Notes: Art Institute Vollard

Before it ended, I made it to the Art Institute exhibit, Ambrose Vollard: Patron of the Avant-Garde. This art gallery owner and dealer and patron of nineteenth turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century artists, and later a publisher of illustrated books, had an impressive collection of works by Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gaugin, and others. What impressed me most were several paintings that I had not seen before, like Picasso's blue period, "The Old Guitarist", Gaugin's massive, mural sized "Where Do We Come From...", and a Van Gogh Starry Night. The book published about the exhibit by the Art Institute, a collection of essays, seems a worthwhile investment to learn more about Vollard's relations to the artists he knew.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/picasso/works.html

Gallery Notes: Morpho and Los Manos

Tired from a busy week and pressed for time, I didn't venture far tonight from where I live to visit a few opening night gallery night exhibits. First, I stopped at Morpho Gallery, which is a relatively isolated and small gallery, but I learned soon to be expanded with another room. There were works by several artists on display, and I've included a photo here of Steven Hazard's color etching, the moose with butterfly wings in place of antlers, as well as Dave Gista's painting, "Yellow Urban Professional, an inventive imposition of the cityscape outline onto figures dressed in suits. The staff of two was solicitous to gallery visitors, and I had a chance to ask them questions about some of the artists.

http://www.morphogallery.com/

My next gallery stop was at the Los Manos Gallery where there were four artists being shown, two of whom worked in larger scale. Striking and original were Tim Hurley's large oil paintings, and the one I included a photo of here was one in a series shown at the gallery tonight. Clearly, these iconic like paintings with brilliant colors and intricate designs have some private symbolic meaning for the artist, but the viewer can read his or her own interpretation into the painting. Fletcher Hayes paintings impressed me as well; he works on a large scale and had several large scale paintings of landscapes.

http://www.lasmanosgallery.org/artists/26/

Note on Readings & Music: The Partly Dave Show at Neofuturarium

Tonight, I went to the Partly Dave Show, which features readings and music, showcasing local talent in Chicago. I especially enjoyed Dave Awl's satire on celebrity relationships as seen from the perspective of the distant future, amused and puzzled about the bizarre lives of movie stars, Kurt Heinz's moving account of a search for love in a bar one evening, and Christopher Piatt's poetic account of his narrator's attempt to find love with someone from the neocon camp. The music of the band Even in Blackouts with acoustic guitars had thoughtful, well written lyrics. John Pierce, the lead guitar and founder of this band, was in a commercially successful punk band, Screeching Weasel. Tonight's show reminds me that there is writing and performing talent aplenty which is on par or better than what can be found in more popular and well funded and publicized work.

I should add a word that Dave Awl's hilarious and zany satire on celebrity relationships took an idea from tabloids and ran with it, that is, introducing an incredible and bizarre rumor about a celebrity. His starting point were two Star Wars erasers of aliens who were mistakenly identified in the distant future as representations of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston.

A podcast of the entire evening should be up soon on Dave Awl's website, Ocelapatomus, so any reader will be able to listen to this and the other parts of the show.

http://ocelopotamus.com/ http://eveninblackouts.com/

Art Project Chicago: 300 Portraits

If anyone has interest in portrait paintings, you can take a look at a link that offers more than 300 of them rendered in distinctive styles by Chicago artists Lisa Parenteau-DePinto and Daniela Ortiz. Lisa takes some inspiration from Alice Neel, a renowned painter of portraits and figures, and her work uses a darker palette than Daniela's. Over a 15-month period, 300 individuals were asked to model for usually one or sometimes two sessions of one to several hours. About half this number may be found on the web page of the project. I was among the subjects selected to pose, since I had met Lisa in a figure drawing workshop. The project culminated with an exhibit opening with performances at a large exhibit space in Chicago named Galaxie earlier this year. http://www.galaxiechicago.com/galaxiesite/home.htm

http://www.300heads.com/heads.asp?p=all

Russia: World Chess Champion Versus KGB Judo Practicing President

I've been reading news stories about disturbing political developments that Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer who has worked for Russian clients, has been posting about Russia on his blog. Not that this is really startling news, but the recent incidents in what's turning out to be a heavy handed and rigged government election to put President Putin's successor in place, a reversion to standard Soviet practice, only reinforces the sense that the Putin government is digging the country into a deeper hole, reverting Russia into a new post-Soviet version of the repressive pre-1985 authoritarian state.

The efforts of retired world chess champion Garry Kasparov, now a Russian politician protesting the charade of an election in Russia, and trying to run for the position of president of the Russian Federation, are courageous, but ineffectual. For the Putin-led government controls all the news sources, so simply doesn't allow dissent or protest to be broadcast, nor for that matter public protests and rallies.

Though it's claimed Putin's government enjoys support of the majority of the population, one can certainly assume that it would decrease--just how much is an open question--with an open press and investigative journalism. Perhaps sensing that a mere spark of protest could eventually start a fire, as it had in Ukraine in late 2005, the Putin government has brutally put down protests, with police beating protesters and arresting them. For now Kasparov has taken to the internet to broadcast his candidacy for president, and more importantly provide much needed criticism of the current president's disregard for adhering to democratic process.

One wonders how the government will choose to handle him, because he is well-known throughout the world. Will one of Putin's henchmen venture to slip some poison in his soup, as was done to current president of Ukraine, Yushchenko, as he was running for office against a Ukrainian pro-Putin candidate? It remains to be seen just how low Putin's government will stoop.

For now thanks to genuine democrats, like Kasparov, the undemocratic transfer of the presidency in Russia will be put in a brighter spotlight, exposing the true thuggish, authoritarian face of the current Russian government, which makes itself out to be a benevolent, paternal government that must rule with force and a strong hand.

Recent attempts to silence Kasparov have shown that it's likely that the transfer of power won't be anywhere as smooth as Putin anticipated. Government justifications for cracking down on legitimate and legal protests and rallies will ring quite hollow. And, Putin won't easily perform a judo flip on a wily rival like Kasparov, at least as long as the world is watching. But it's high time for democratic nations to speak out more forcefully at the travesty of electoral politics in Russia where there are no debates even allowed. To begin with, censure Putin and insist that he and his government respect the rules of democracy. To stop overlooking the increasingly flagrant disregard for rule of law being practiced in Russia only encourages it to continue.

For a recent article by a Russian human rights activist published at Open Democracy see:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/russia_civil_society_4573.jsp#

http://www.robertamsterdam.com/