Avuncular American

Wild Blood - Sanguepazzo: Familiar Fascists

Marco Tullio Giordana, director of what we saw in France as "Une Histoire Italienne," can do no wrong.  Maybe I'm too easy to please, but I found his six and a half hour (it was shown on European TV as a mini-series) La Meglio Gioventu (The Best of Youth, 2003) addictive.  Now that he has so accurately portrayed Italian youth in the Sixties and beyond, he has trained his eye for period detail on the 30s and 40s, the heyday and then precipitous fall of Mussolini's Fascist state.

The settings are properly sumptuous when depicting the film world of Cinecitta, and appropriately squalid when showing the depths of fascist depravity as their world collapses during the Allied liberation of Italy.  Casting Monica Bellucci as Luisa Ferida and Luca Zingaretti as Osvaldo Valenti is inspired - I have no idea whether they resemble the real actors murdered (executed?) in the confused bloodletting at war's end, but Bellucci is credible as a no-nonsense actress, and Zingaretti looks like current Italian prime minister Berlusconi, who looks like il Duce Mussolini...

Director Giordana plays with such historical flashbacks both on screen and off.  In a two page interview in France's Liberation when "Sanguepazzo" was released, he draws parallels between the fascism of Italy's inter war period and the "fascism" of Berlusconi's "control of the Italian imagination" through his omnipresence in both politics and the TV industry, much of which he owns.  Giordana spends much time disparaging Italian TV (if our two weeks there recently can serve as corroboration, we would agree: almost no documentaries, almost exclusively 50s style variety shows with a maximum of buxom dancing girls).  Awful as it is, Giordano asserts that most Italians spend hours glued to it every evening.  Bread and circuses... it all started in Rome.

I guess "Wild Blood" will not be for everyone.  Jay Weissberg, writing in Variety after Wild Blood was screened at Cannes, says that "Giordana's surprisingly wet treatment adds nothing incisive or complex to the debates" about the behavior of Italian partisans during the war, or the current rise of the far right in Italian politics.  Too bad that Weissberg's is one of the few mainstream reviews in English currently available, so we'll have to await release in the English speaking world to get divergent opinions.

In the meantime, Wild Blood offers, in my opinion, a credible, nuanced, and dramatic picture of an era that is not all that far away.  Giordana knows his fellow citizens' foibles, and his depiction of Italians is probably timeless, though set in the 1940s.  And fascism, while it may no longer wear black or brown shirts, is still with us.  Here the fascists are not all monolithic monsters, and those who collaborate with them sometimes do so for less than ideological motivations.  Anyway, go see it, if for no other reason than to see Monica la Bellissima.

(Photo credit: Ocean Films, distributor in France)

Two Shores, One Dream: Idir & El Gusto Bridge the Mediterranean

I’m still catching up after weeks in the mountains and on the road, so I’m only now writing about a concert we attended in Lyon on July 6, on our way back from Italy.  Our son treated us to tickets to “Nuit de l’Algérie,” a double bill concert at the city’s open air Roman theater.  And what a treat it was: legendary (it’s overused, but a term that suits) Kabyle (Berber) musician Idir (check out his website - he looks like an Avuncular Algerian), followed by the 40-member chaabi orchestra El Gusto.

The world has just finished paying brief attention to the Mediterranean and its peoples thanks to President Sarkozy’s weekend summit meeting in Paris, but the multicultural crowd in Lyon a week earlier personified a Mediterranean unified with a passion that politicians can only dream of.  On stage and in the audience, Muslim, Jew, Christian, whether Algerian, French, or a stray American – the atmosphere was joyous (El Gusto = “joy,” reflecting the Spanish/Sephardic element in Algeria’s melting pot).

Idir set the stage, and his following is intensely loyal.  Several showed up wrapped in Kabyle and Algerian flags, and it didn’t take long until they were dancing (mostly solo, in the demure folk style of North Africa that has vulgar belly dancing beat by a mile) in the Roman stone aisles.  Idir, who has been a Kabyle Algerian institution for more than thirty years, is a voice for moderation, for inter-religious fraternity, and respect for women.  Indeed, it appeared to us that of the largely Maghrebi-origin audience, women accounted for a hefty majority of Idir’s fans - though very few head scarves were in evidence.

Following the rousing folk-rock-fusion Idir group intro, it was a little odd to shift to the suited and decidedly graying “El Gusto,” which some European writers have nicknamed “the Algerian Buena Vista Social Club.”  Last year Robin Denselow of The Guardian attended an El Gusto concert in Marseille:

Behind the rabbi and the imam was a 42-piece orchestra, composed of Algerian Muslim and Jewish musicians. Some of them had lived together in the country before 1962 - the year of Algerian independence - when some 130,000 Algerian Jews, the vast majority of the community, fled for France, fearing for their future in what was now a Muslim state. It was the end of an era in which Muslim, Jewish, and European musicians had lived and played together in the narrow streets of the Casbah in Algiers, developing a rousing, wildly varied hybrid style - chaabi [literally, "popular"] - that the El Gusto project set out to rediscover.

No rabbi or imam on stage in Lyon, but otherwise an excellent resume of the band’s origins.  Just how "popular" is chaabi?  The concert flyer and website has a picture of three of the musicians practicing in what looks like an Algiers barber shop.

As in “Buena Vista” the Ry Cooder of El Gusto, responsible for bringing these respectable gents together, is a young Irish-Algerian film-maker, Safinez Bousbia.  According to Denselow, Bousbia

was determined to track down surviving musicians from the heyday of chaabi, the 1940s and 50s. Chaabi is a mix of Arabic and north African berber styles, blended with modern French chanson, American boogie and Latin American styles, brought by the American troops stationed in Algeria during the second world war. It's a lively, versatile music suitable for weddings, bars and concert halls alike, and played exclusively by men.

American boogie... that explains the banjos.  I can testify to the influence of American GIs, who landed in Vichy-held Algeria in November 1942: our plumber in Oran, an impressionable boy at the time, years later still remembered chewing bubble gum and repeating '40s pickup lines like “What’s cookin’ chicken?” for the soldiers’ amusement.  For francophone readers, it’s worth watching the video excerpt of Bousbia explaining her first contacts with the elderly musicians, whom she feared tiring out with the first hour and a half long session.  Not to worry: the music went on for close to four hours!  For anglophones, Quidam Productions has a wonderful series of clips from Bousbia's documentary film "El Gusto: The Good Mood."

Actually, we pooped out before the end of the Lyon concert, since the next day was a working day for our son and his girlfriend.  As we climbed down and left the amphitheater, the music followed us as we walked towards the car.  That night in Lyon was a gift, for us of course, but mainly for the young “beur” (French slang for the sons and daughters of Algerian, and also Moroccan and Tunisian, immigrants) fans celebrating these ambassadors of normality from the oft troubled country of their parents or grandparents.  I suspect that the audience, like some of the chaabi old timers, included a certain number of pieds noirs and their descendants, from the community of Europeans who left Algeria in 1962.  Algeria has a way of going to your head, and staying there, as Alistair Horne noted in his everlasting work on the Algerian war of independence, A Savage War of Peace - "l’Algérie, ça monte à la tête."

“Deux Rives, Un Rêve” (Two Shores, One Dream) is the title of Idir’s album that we picked up before the concert.  That’s exactly what was happening last week in Lyon.

Living Like Europeans

Last week Paul Krugman wrote "Stranded in Suburbia" in the New York Times.  His dateline was Berlin, and he marveled at the sheer livability of many urban neighborhoods:

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

Krugman laments that "many Americans [are] stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas."

(images: STIB Brussels Transport)

As expats familiar with both suburban American and urban European lifestyles, we can relate to Krugman's depiction of the dilemma.  We live in a leafy part of Brussels, in the kind of apartment building and neighborhood described by Krugman.  We have a car, and it is parked in the building's underground garage.  Unless we take a ride in the country (and even then, we can reach greenery by public transport), we only use the car to do major food shopping about once a week.  Everything else is by tram.  We can use the same ticket for Brussels' metro or bus systems, and for those train lines that cross the city.

This is not to gloat - far from it, since we do all this on a declining dollar - but to illustrate Krugman's point about the oil-induced reasons for Americans to change, the "strong incentives to start living like Europeans."  My fellow Americans... it's not that hard, "living like Europeans."  Once freed from the tyranny of the internal combustion engine, possibilities open up.

Last week a delegation of Brussels regional officials traveled to Malmo, Sweden, just across the water from Copenhagen, Denmark.  They saw Scandinavian examples that some would like to emulate, like urban planning that incorporates energy efficiency in building design, something which is now catching on in Brussels and elsewhere in Belgium and in Europe.  Though Brussels has a long way to go before it can resemble Malmo or Freiburg in Germany, it at least has a massive head start in its integrated public transport network.  And it didn't make the monumental mistake made by Los Angeles and other cities in ripping up their "quaint" tramway/trolley lines for "modern" freeways, like LA did in the fifties ("At its peak, the Pacific Electric Railway was huge: 1,150 miles of track covering four counties and 900 cars. 1944 marked the highest ridership: over 109 million passengers)."  Imagine the cost of recreating that.

No, living like Europeans doesn't mean abandoning the car, but it does mean embracing what's best in urban life, recognizing that it requires public investment, and is sustained by improvements to the infrastructure.  It is the opposite of the throwaway car culture.

Culture Wars, European Style - May '68

I would be remiss in my duty as an observer of the European scene if I let the month of May pass without a comment on May 1968.  Since I was a pimply teenager in Pennsylvania at the time, I cannot speak from personal experience.  But you cannot be alive in Europe in the spring of 2008 without being bombarded with documentaries, books, commemorations - nostalgia of the most maudlin to the intelligently reflective.  At most recent count, 100 books (!) have been published in French alone.

One of the most thoughtful TV programs (now out on DVD), one of the few to put the street protests in France into their international context, is Patrick Rotman's "68."  Francophone readers can listen to an RTL radio interview with Rotman here.  Rotman, as a 19 year old student at the Sorbonne, was a participant and witness.  It was definitely a turbulent year, worldwide.

Anniversaries, especially those ending in round numbers like 40, are fair game for reflection.  Especially when many "soixante-huitards" (in the States, we would say baby boomers) are themselves in their sixties.  In France, there is a particularly contemporary - political - slant to these recollections: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an anti-68, conservative politician, in a country where the dominant intellectual strain grew up in the shadow of the May '68 protests.  Shadows of the US, where "what did you do during the Vietnam War?" continues to fuel political debate, and where the Republican Party would like to program the national DVD player to skip the tracks between Eisenhower and Reagan.

But just like America's boomer hippies have morphed into Wall Street lawyers and Washington politicians, so too have many soixante-huitards joined the establishment.  Probably the best example of a student leader keeping his youthful ideals while succeeding in the political world is "Danny The Red" Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament for Germany's Green Party, though he has as much of a profile in France (born there while his parents fled Nazi persecution, he's perfectly bilingual and bi cultural).  Cohn-Bendit was recently shown chatting with the long-retired chief of the Paris police, who he credits with saving lives (and perhaps French democracy) by holding his fire during the student/labor protests.

"'68" is perhaps most resonant now because of the current existential crisis in the world economic system, with financial, food supply, environmental, and societal (immigration, aging, unemployment) pressures causing many to question the way the Western world organizes itself.  It's another nostalgia "industry," for sure.  But without necessarily offering answers, this season's European retrospectives serve a purpose in forcing introspection of the most useful type.  For the US too, this will be most evident once the Democratic Party finally sorts out its candidate to face John McCain.  Will it be '60s vs. '70s? (age, not decades).  Or will it be McCain national-security-means-guns vs. Obama's more inclusive definition of security through diplomacy, economic strength, and inclusiveness?  The Culture Wars in the United States are not over yet.

Lemon Trees On the Green Line

Once, when we lived in Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, we visited a village perched in the rocky hills of the interior.  We were there to see a falaj, one of the ancient irrigation canals cut into the stony hillsides, carrying precious water to small gardens and orchards.  An Omani farmer took a liking to our small children, and offered us lemons plucked from one of his dozen or so trees.  In hot, arid climates, these bright beautiful yellow fruit, standing out against the dark green leaves, are things of beauty.

And so it is in the West Bank – or more precisely, on the “Green Line” that on paper separates Israel from the Occupied Territories – where Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree is filmed.  Never has a glass of fresh lemonade looked so inviting.  That’s what visitors to the home of lead character Salma are offered, from her father’s orchard that she has inherited.  From trees that she must protect when politics intrude into her simple life.

Riklis has visited this human terrain before, notably in his 2004 masterpiece, The Syrian Bride.  Watching Lemon Tree, you have to remind yourself that this is an Israeli film, or rather, a film made by an Israeli director.  But, as Riklis said in a Tikkun interview apropos of The Syrian Bride, when asked if it was a “political film”

First and foremost, this is a humane film. It deals with people who are caught inside politics, inside a political world. It’s a pro-people film. On the other hand, of course it contains political elements. In the Middle East in particular, almost everything that you do and refer to is political. Everything has consequences.

The same could be said of Lemon Tree, though it is “political” to a much greater degree.  When you have the “Separation Barrier,” the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, and an Israeli cabinet minister as backdrops or characters in a film, it is political.  Everything is political in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Just as Riklis is sensitive to the nuances of the complex relationship between occupier and occupied, he is a particularly talented observer of the relationships between men and women, in both Israeli and Arab cultures.  Nazareth-born Hiam Abbass, who has already appeared in Riklis’ films, plays Salma with innate grace and intelligence.  Not only does she have to confront Israeli neighbors bent on separating her from her lemon trees, but also has to navigate a male-dominated Palestinian society.  Palestinian officialdom is shown as more troubled over matters of propriety than demonstrating any concern for this defiant widow’s attempts to protect her property.

On the Israeli side of the fence (literally), there is tension in the Minister’s household, where wife Mira (played by revelation Rona Lipaz-Michael) begins to see for herself the human costs of occupation.  Eventually they must face the question: is it better to look out onto a luscious orchard (owned, admittedly by Palestinians of unknown security credentials) or to “enjoy” the security offered by watchtowers and the Separation Barrier?

Today’s “sneak preview” of Lemon Tree was sponsored by the women of Brussels film club “Cinefemme” (whose website has an insightful interview with Riklis), and whose members have been invited by the film’s distributor to provide commentary for a DVD “bonus” segment.  They will have much to discuss.

3MA - Three Sons of Africa

(photo source: Contre Jour)

As I write this, my newly-acquired "3MA" CD is playing in the background.  Last night we went to their concert in Brussels, and it was pure joy.  This marriage of oud (by Moroccan Driss El Maloumi), kora (Ballake Sissoko, from Mali), and valiha (Rajery, playing the bamboo zither of Madagascar) is "world music" of a natural classicism.  Played at the Flagey auditorium - the acoustically updated and wonderfully art deco original home of RTBF, francophone Belgium's broadcaster - "3MA" was a surefire crowd-pleaser.  And we have some particularly bright cultural diplomats to thank for introducing them outside of Africa.

Each of the three musicians is a "star" in his own right.   Rajery, the wiry Malgache with a golden voice to boot, is a self-taught musician who was trained as an accountant.  Too bad for the green-eye-shade crowd, but lucky for music lovers, Rajery has devoted himself to the valiha.  He started a 23-member orchestra for the instrument, a national festival in its honor, and has founded a music school for street children.  He's made four albums.  Oh yes - and he has only one hand.

Driss El Maloumi, the oud player, has a following of his own, and has collaborated with Catalan ancient music virtuoso Jordi Saval and Hesperion XXI, as well as other international artists from Francoise Atlan to Iran's Keyvan Chemirani.  Driss is the anchor of the trio, and something of a wit and a poet.  He leads an amusing scat piece the group calls "African Political Speeches," which is equally effective as political satire: "plenty of dissonance, and lots of false notes."

Mali's Ballake Sissoko hails from a musical griot family, and his father co-founded the Ensemble Instrumental du Mali.  Sissoko's evocation of his daughter, Kadiatou, is a perfect vehicle for the versatile kora, essentially a massive gourd with 21 strings.

This joyous amalgam of music from three corners of Africa is the fruit of a somewhat chance encounter at the Timitar Festival in Agadir Morocco in 2006.  Three French cultural center directors - in the respective capitals of the three musicians - helped nurture what would come to be called 3MA: Mali, Madagascar, Maroc.  Belgian producer Michel De Bock, of the label Contre-Jour, worries a little about the MA of Maroc not fitting into "the anglo saxon, where it's Morocco...  But once they hear the album or see a concert, they'll be sure to fall for them."

I certainly hope so, though a quick look at 3MA's tour schedule doesn't show any anglophone countries (though they have already played at several venues in anglophone Africa) in the near future.  And as a former diplomat who sometimes dabbled in cultural diplomacy, hats off to the French Cultural Centers of Bamako, Agadir, and Antananarivo for introducing us to this fusion of African music (the Ford Foundation has assisted through "Art Moves Africa").