Saturday, January 28, 2012

Un chien andalou - Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí

Resultaría ocioso hacer un análisis de Un chien andalou, en primer lugar porque, según el propio Buñuel, la pelicula carece de significado y, en segundo, porque está disponible gratis en internet. Al final del post se puede ver el cortometraje (17 minutos) completo. Se podría agregar, en tercer lugar, el hecho de que existe toda una comentocracia alrededor de esta película, como sucede con todas las obras creadas con el objetivo de impactar al espectador. Google da 774,000 resultados al escribir "Un chien andalou" Si alguien quiere encontrar el significado y descubrir la importancia de esta película en la cultura occidental moderna, que se sumerga en las 774,000 páginas y después use la sección de comentarios para que nos diga qué encontró.

Lo más a lo que aspira este blog es a lanzar al aire una serie de reflexiones que son casi preguntas. Se utilizará el formato "bullet points", propio de las presentaciones de Power Point, esperando que el lector informado cache la ironía de utilizar una herramienta neoliberal y tecnocrática (el Power Point) para comentar una pelicula con la que los autores buscaron cimbrar los valores estéticos de la sociedad (Un chien andalou).


  • Salvo la célebre escena del ojo, Un chien andalou ya no choca al espectador. Algunos, incluído el hijo de Buñuel, dicen que eso es testimonio del éxito de la revolución surrealista. Yo más bien creo que es una prueba del éxito del sistema capitalista, que fue capaz de adaptar la estética surrealista a metas comerciales: la mayoría de los videos musicales no son más que una interminable superposición de escenas sin mucho sentido; algunos comerciales de televisión buscan apelar a los sueños del espectador combinando situaciones que no se pueden dar en la vida real. 
  • Desde un punto de vista puramente estético, el heredero de Un chien andalou no es el cine experimental sino The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, célebre comercial de Old Spice.
  • Al empujar los límites de la sorpresa, la revolución surrealista se niega a sí misma. Eventualmente un director de cine hará una película en la que torturen a conejos, luego lo hará otro, y otro, y así, nos habituaremos a ello, y el surrealismo habrá perdido una batalla aunque la haya ganado.  El surrealismo lleva la penitencia en el pecado.
  •  El surrealismo padece lo que en jerga Leninista se conoce como tacticismo: anteponer una táctica (chocar al espectador) a la estrategia (dudo que el surrealismo tenga alguna) y a la teoría (lo cual es lógico, dado que el surrealismo aborrece de toda teoría estética).
  • Volviendo a Un Chien andalou, y aceptando la premisa de carece de sentido, lo importante de la película es lo que dice de los seres humanos como entes susceptibles de adquirir conocimiento. Nuestra mente está diseñada (¿o entrenada¿) para pensar en términos de historias: hoy pasa esto, ayer aquello, y mañana pasará esto otro. Uno puede pasarse la vida entera intentando encontrar una secuencia lógica a esta película, cuando la realidad es que no la tiene.
  • Todo mundo dice que esta es una película indispensable, y hay un librito que se llama 1001 películas que hay que ver antes de morir, o algo así, que también la recomienda, señalando además que es el único cortometraje incluido en la lista. Sí, desde un punto de vista técnico, y más cuando se es un realizador sin dinero, esta película es una cátedra. 
  • Pero desde el punto de vista estético, esta película aporta ya muy poco, con excepción, lo vuelvo a repetir, de la escena del ojo. Pero hacer demasiado hincapié en lo del ojo muestra lo bajo que hemos caído.
  • En fin, buenas reflexiones (en formato "bullet points") para ir a la cama un sábado por la noche.


American Capitalism - John Kenneth Galbraith


Galbraith basically repeated the same ideas over and over through his academic career, and also as a novelist. American Capitalism is one of John Kenneth Galbraith's first books, and consequently, is not among the best ones. Galbraith would deploy his ideas fully in The New Industrial State, which is actually a very long volume. So, if you need to get a grasp of Galbraith's ideas, American Capitalism is a decent substitute. (actually, quite honestly, the best thing to get a grasp of anyone's ideas is Wikipedia; here is the entry on Galbraith)

The only interesting thing about American Capitalism is the concept of countervailing power, which basically refers to the idea of concentrating buyers or suppliers to counteract the market power of their counterparties (here is a more complete explanation by Christopher M. Snyder from Dartmouth). Countervailing power is an interesting concept from the point of view of competition policy. Galbraith argues that modern markets can never be perfectly competitive, so the solution to monopolies doesn't lie in anti-trust regulations, but in creating  and enforcing all kinds of monopolies so that they check and balance each other. This is a terrible idea. In the end, the people who would end up paying the costs of this scheme are the least organized ones: the customers.

I've reviewed some books by Galbraith over the last months, and I've had enough of him, at least for the medium term. I don't think that reading Galbraith has any value today other than for the economic historian. Galbraith's thoughts have become the creed of the Democratic Party, and his arguments are repeated by people like Krugman in ways that make more sense for the current generation. But The Nation thinks that reading Galbraith is one of the best things you can do with your time. Here's  their review of Galbraith's works.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Bird of Music - Au Revoir Simone

Depression and anger:



(British style):




After giving Ritalin to your daughter for her entire childhood:

Monday, January 23, 2012

Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

The World economy started falling apart the moment after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, but there was one industry that flourished despite everything: the publication of books written by former investment bankers saying how useless, boring, and exhausting is banking and why making millions of dollars a year is morally reprehensible. 


Some of these books are relatively well written, which is quite remarkable when you think that investment bankers only get to write whenever they have to sign a check or a voucher. While investment bankers turned into authors think that they make the World a service by publishing their memoirs, the reality is that their books are a testimony of their huge egos.


The first investment banker turned into rogue author was Michael Lewis, whose book Liar's Poker, published in 1989, depicts, in addition to a huge number of anecdotes, the fall of Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. This book can save you a lot of time if you are either a prospective investment banker trying to get information on how life inside a bank really is, or if you want to read something to increase your hatred towards investment bankers. This is because Wall Street has not changed at all in the last 30 years if not for the complexity of the financial instruments: 25 year-old with no experience on business or on anything at all still get paid ridiculous amounts of money for creating and selling instruments they don't understand; regulators are still captured by the banks; double accounting is customary, and the list continues.


In addition, the prose of Liar's Poker is so hilarious that it will make you forget that you're reading a description of events that cost billions of dollars of wealth.

Here's Lewis page in Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, and an article he wrote after the financial collapse of 2008 where he goes back to Liar's Poker.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Gran Casino - Luis Buñuel

Hay pocas cosas que hacen evidentes las diferencias generacionales en México. La denominada "Época de Oro del Cine Mexicano" es una de ellas. Para la generación de mis abuelos, Jorge Negrete y Pedro Infante eran lo que todo hombre que se preciara de serlo debía aspirar a ser: feo, fuerte, y formal; para la de mis padres, eran ejemplos de una época rural perdida irremediablemente aunque vista con respeto; para mi generación, son más bien caricaturas de rancheros o policías. Dudo que la generación de mis hijos lleguen a saber quiénes eran Negrete e Infante generalmente; evidentemente, habrá cineastas e historiadores que hablen de ellos, pero ya no serán una referencia en ningún aspecto.

La razón por la que Negrete, Infante, y las producciones de la Época de Oro han bajado del pedestal en que estuvieron durante casi cincuenta años tiene mucho que ver con Televisa, que saturó al público con esas películas hasta el hartazgo. Hasta hace poco, todos los sábados en la tarde, de 4 de la tarde a 12 de la noche, en el Canal de las Estrellas, pasaban maratones de películas de Libertad Lamarque, Sarita Montiel, y toda la "palomilla". Eventualmente, la gente se hartó. Muchos contrataron cable para dejar de ver a Pedro Infante cantar "Amorcito Corazón". Televisa respondió quitando la barra de películas y poniendo a Don Francisco y otros programas de concursos dirigidos por mujeres tetonas vestidas con minifalda. No estoy seguro de que la gente que no contrató cable haya salido ganando con el cambio.

Pero además, objetivamente, las películas de la Época de Oro son objetivamente malas. Nuestros abuelos y padres las ven con respeto, admiración y nostalgia porque lo que le siguió (las películas de ficheras y albures del Caballo Rojas y la Pelangocha subsidiadas por Echeverría y López Portillo) fue mil veces peor. Objetivamente, las películas de la Época de Oro son una desgracia: los actores recitan sus diálogos sin matices; todo se grababa en estudio y se nota que las escenografías son de cartón. No hay película en la que Jorge Negrete saque las manos del pantalón y diga una línea de forma natural. Arnold Schwarznegger es un actor acartonado incapaz de articular escenas complejas, pero Jorge Negrete inventó el concepto. Y Negrete es considerado, junto con Infante, el referente de la actuación mexicana.

Gran Casino, protagonizada por Negrete y Libertad Lamarque, no va a cambiar esa percepción. De hecho, si no tuviera el nombre de Luis Buñuel, la película estaría totalmente olvidada. Como toda película mexicana de la época, Gran Casino tiene interminables y larguísimos números musicales, que le quitan tiempo a la historia, presenta a la pobreza como folklor, tiene escenografías de cartón, y a Negrete con las manos en las bolsas del pantalón durante poco más de hora y media.

Buñuel odió Gran Casino. La historia le parecía aburrida y predecible, los egos de Negrete y Lamarque estaban fuera de control y no pudo lograr que se dieran un beso o al menos cantaran juntos, y tenía las exigencias de la industria cinematográfica mexicana, que pedía musicales con historias simples y finales felices. Lo único rescatable de la película son los últimos 10 minutos, en los que Buñuel puso su toque ideológico y artístico. (a continuación, voy a describir el final de la película; si el lector no la ha visto y no quiere que le arruine la experiencia, recomiendo dejar de leer)

Desde el momento en que Negrete golpea en la cabeza al hombre que lo iba a asesinar, y vemos durante unos segundos un cristal rompiéndose, que es una reminicencia de la época surrealista de Buñuel, hasta el final de la película, vemos un poco de la película que él hubiera querido grabar. El hecho de que "el malo" sea un alemán con ideología nazi y que su esbirro sea un español con bigote a la Franco es un guiño de ojo a su pasado; la desconfianza a las multinacionales, parte de su ideología; el hecho de que la historia gire alredodor del petróleo, cuya nacionalización fue el eje ideológico del PRI hasta recientemente  y es el caballo de batalla de la izquierda mexicana es, acaso, un agradecimiento a México, país que lo recibió.

Gran Casino no es una película que haya que ver forzosamente, aunque tampoco es una película que se deba menospreciar. Sin Gran Casino, Buñuel no hubiera podido hacerse de dinero y contactos en la industria para hacer Los Olvidados. Al llegar a México, Buñuel hizo el cine más comercial y banal del mundo para después poder hacer los proyectos que le interesaban y por los que tanto lo admiramos. Es un poco como Barack Obama, que después de terminar sus estudios de derecho hizo derecho corporativo para poder pagar sus préstamos estudiantiles y después se fue a hacer trabajo comunitario en los barrios marginales de Chicago. Algunos le venden el alma al diablo; los más inteligentes sólo se la rentan.

Aquí se puede ver Gran Casino completa:

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Novelle Vague - Nouvelle Vague

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" is the first track of the first album of Nouvelle Vague.
Thats the only song to hear to know if you will like the band or not.

Oracle Bones - Peter Hessler

Right after World War II, Kremlinology started being considered a discipline worth of financing. Likewise, a lot of books and movies about Japan or with Japanese motives were written in the 1980s, as Americans thought that Japan would replace them as the Worlds largest economy. Over the last 15 years, the same thing has happened with China: movies, books, music, trips, lectures, grants, and scholarships have been devoted to studying the second largest economy in the World.  American declinism is not only the United States national sport, but also an engine of the economy.

From a commercial perspective, Oracle Bones benefited greatly from the China Mania that has permeated the United States over the last couple of years. Oracle Bones was considered best book of the year by the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times (book review here), and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. This book was also one of the reasons Hessler received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011.

But Oracle Bones is also an extremely well written book. In 20 years, no matter if China becomes the World largest superpower, or the United States is paranoid about the industrial and military rise of Uganda, people will still think of this book as a reference on China's modernization. Oracle Bones deals with issues like China's  internal migration, migration to the United States and political assylum, political repression, generation gap, and archaeology, just to mention a few. As I said, a tremendous amount of information related to China is produced daily, you can google all these topics right now and get very high quality information on them. But as important as statistics and hard facts are, the beauty of books like Oracle Bones is that they put human faces to the news. Non-fiction and long format journalism are like stopping for a rest in the middle of a long trip. (there is obviously a limit: most American newspapers are filling their pages with individual stories on anything rather than report facts; this kind of texts used to appear only on Sundays, but as newspapers face financial constrains, they have to put all the meat on the grill, even if that means lowering their standards)

Hessler set the bar too high for people who want to write a similar book on China. The good news for readers is that he moved to Egypt (here is one of his articles for the New Yorker), where he will presumably produce high quality texts for us; the bad news for journalists and non-fiction writers specialized on the Middle East is that a young talented writer will take some of the market they expect to tap...

Here is Hessler talking about China in general for National Geographic.

And in the video below Hessler talks about Oracle Bones in the Google headquarters:



Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Bande à part - Nouvelle Vague

In their second album, Nouvelle Vague covered "In the name of love", originally performed by U2.



Your thoughts about this song will be an excellent proxy for your opinion about Nouvelle Vague in general, since all their songs are based on the same concept.

Rudo y cursi - Carlos Cuarón

  • Gael García y Diego Luna van que vuelan para ser la reencarnación de Viruta y Capulina}. Eso, o la adaptación mexicana de Brokeback Mountain. (momento: eso fue justo lo que hicieron en Y tu mamá también...)
  • Diego Luna no puede dejar de hablar con acento fresa del D. F. ni aunque le pongan bigote de ranchero. Simplemente es más fuerte que él.
  • Al final de la película, el argentino dice que el personaje de Diego Luna regresa a dirigir un equipo en Chilpancingo, lo cual hace creer que los protagonistas son de Guerrero. El hecho de que hablen como norteños demuestra no sólo la ignorancia de Cuarón y los productores, sino la idea, muy despectiva y muy extendida entre la burguesía de la Ciudad de México, de que fuera de ahí todo es Cuautitlán.
  • No hay diferencia entre los albures baratos del Compayito y las modelos de Televisa y TV Azteca y las mentadas de madre proferidas constantemente por García y Luna. La gente que critica unos y aplaude a los otros no tiene idea de nada.
  • Chespirito al menos pateaba el balón en las del Chanfle. Y no necesitaba gritar ni mentar madres para hacer reír a la gente.
  • El humor del mexicano es como su educación política: ambos confunden la crítica con la queja. Por eso uno es pesado y la otra es deficiente (e ineficaz al momento de tomar acciones concretas).

Monday, January 16, 2012

The Iron Lady - Phyllida Lloyd

The first half of The Iron Lady is a depiction of a senile Margaret Thatcher that understandably annoys her family and members of the British Conservative Party.

The second half is a collection of sketches showing several passages of Mrs. Thatcher political career, masterfully performed by Meryl Streep. You need some basic knowledge of British History and politics to get a good grasp of this part of the movie.

The Iron Lady is just one more average movie, but it is likely to get several Oscars given the well-known American fascination with British accents.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

The Young One - Luis Buñuel

A lot of things have been written about The Young One, the second and last movie filmed by Buñuel in English. Check, for instance this website (in Spanish), this one, this one, and obviously the reviews written by the users of IMDb. Most of the comments agree that this is a great movie for a number of reasons: it portrays racism in the United States as a social construction rather than a good vs. bad issue; it shows how religion is practically irrelevant whenever man is in the state of nature; it shows a sarcastic view of religion; from a plot perspective, The Young One offers the opportunity to all its characters to be the main actor and the most powerful person at least once; at the end of the movie, it is extremely hard to say who was the main character. Also, the fact that the movie has no music other than the sounds of nature increases dramatism exponentially.

What I haven't read so far is an appreciation of the extent to which Evie, the 13 year-old girl is used as a piece of exchange by the male characters of the movie. Traver uses her to get free; the priest buys her from Miller in order to have one more soul for God's cause, and Miller sells her (or more accurately, she rents her) to buy the silence of the priest for raping the girl.

The Young One is an extremely rich and complex movie, and you can watch it for free here:


Friday, January 13, 2012

3 - Nouvelle Vague

Nouvelle Vague is a concept designed by French musicians Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux consisting of having female singers (previously called "girls") performing new wave and rock songs with bossa nova arrangements. The experimental character of the project is enhanced by having singers performing songs they had never heard before. Yes, the entire thing is very French.

Their first two albums were very successful, at least in France. For 3, they were even able to recruit people like Martin Gore, who sings the back voice for "Master and Servant."

Overall, the entire concept of Nouvelle Vague is not that bad. Their music is OK for listening in an office and, quite honestly one gets to appreciate the music with a set of headphones. The arrangements are worth the price of the albums.

I guess that the problem with this band is that they take classic songs and rip them off their essence to make them palatable to all audiences -with the remarkable exception of the people who heard the original versions. But that's not the problem of Nouvelle Vague. During the first decade of the 21st century commercial art general was characterized by remakes. Hopefully that was just a trend and originality will eventually come back.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

The Cove - Louise Psihoyos

Stereotypes are a fact of life. Movies that break them are good.

When people think about Japan and the Japanese people, this is what they have in mind:

Source: Deviant Art

Or:
Source: flickriver

Or probably:

People who have traveled have this in mind when they think about Japan:
Source: Cure Byte

The Cove will take these stereotypes out of your mind. Instead, you will see Japanese as:
(the fishy things in the boat are dolphins, the boat is floating on a blood-tainted beach, and the people on the boat are Japanese dolphin hunters)

Dolphin hunting is an very important part of Japanese culture, and the Japanese government subsidizes it to annoy the West. 

It could be worst. They could be working on getting atomic bombs like Iran, building a mighty navy in the Pacific like China, or opposing Security Council resolutions against nasty Arab dictators like Brazil, India, South Africa, Russia, China (again) or Germany (Germany is not really Western; if they were, they wouldn't be sitting while the European project collapses).

The Cove is a great documentary. And the website is here.

Monday, January 2, 2012

The Fall of Baghdad - Jon Lee Anderson

An Iraqi youth walked up to me, showed me some kind of a military medal, and said, in English, "Saddam animal," then walked away. Groups of young Iraqi men would wander up, smil, give the thumbs-up, say, "Down Bush", or, "America good," before walking on. It was unclear o me whether they meant what they said or thought this was a ritual they should perform.

The Fall of Baghdad is not a book analyzing the arguments in favor or against the American invasion of Iraq, though the book argues that the two opportunities to invade Iraq on humanitarian causes were when Saddam Hussein bombed the Kurds with chemical weapons, and after the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam massacred the Shia population of the Southeast. This not a book about explaining what Americans should do (or should have done in 2004) to calm the mess Iraq quickly became, either. In fact, a tremendous amount of books and articles on these topics were written since 2002 but none of them became nearly as successful as this.

The Fall of Baghdad tries to tell how the life of about six Baghdadis changed between early 2003 and mid 2004. The aim of the book, modest only in appearance, is to do what the American intelligence community should have done but did not bother to: survey the hearts and feelings of some Iraqis on how an American intervention would be received (probably the American secret services did carry out some in-field intelligence, but it was not heard at all, so it counts as if it didn't do anything). Collecting the views of Iraqis at that time was no easy task.  There were few American journalists in Baghdad as the coalition troops entered the city, and the city fell into disorder quickly after. Talking to people, or even going back to the hotel, should not have been an easy task.

The Fall of Baghdad was issued right before the 2004 election, and it quickly was used by the Democratic Party as a testimony of George W. Bush's failure to provide stability to ordinary Iraqis, as well as to bring American troops back. The book became a bestseller, and Anderson joined the debate, siding with the Democrats, as this interview shows.

Eight years later, once that Americans left Iraq, and the country slides into sectarian chaos instead of chaos focused to make Americans go, I think this book is valuable for three reasons. The first one is that it tries to portray what Iraqis think, taking their opinions at face value. Anderson was criticized for this, but I think that this way of narrating inscribes in the tradition of historiography created by Thucydides and followed by chroniclers like Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Anderson could have editorialized his book, like many journalists do today, but then it would be a description of Anderson's thoughts on other people's thoughts.

The second reason is literary and is the reason why this book should be mandatory for students on journalism and literature. The Fall of Baghdad feels like a novel narrated from the first person rather than a journalist document. Anderson achieves this by not corroborating or denying the information that he received in real time. Anderson was in Iraq, getting sporadic information from the West and subject to the rumors in the street and the propaganda of Saddam's Ministry of Information. As he reviewed his notes and drafted the book, he could perfectly have narrowed all the opinions and ideas he heard by using formulas like "as we realized later, this proved to be false." Instead, Anderson lets facts follow their natural course, and information gets denied or confirmed, or left unaddressed, in their due moment. There are only two moments in the book where Anderson corroborates his real-time impressions  with information received later on: right after the attacks of the American army to the Palestine Hotel, which Anderson thought had been carried out by Iraqi terrorists, and when he confirms that a burned boy he saw at the hospital was in the U.S. receiving medical treatment.

The third reason, and this can't be stressed enough, is that it shows the failure of American intelligence. It took Anderson a couple of interviews in late 2002 to realize that American troops wouldn't be received "with sweets and flowers", as the Bush administration forced itself to believe. The fact that a semi-independent journalist did a better job than the CIA on surveying Iraqis' feelings about Americans is disconcerting and worrisome. The inability to assess the conditions of the invasion aftermath is the real failure of the U.S. intelligence and not, as some people argue, the obsession with Saddam's WMD. Saddam confessed in his interrogations to have bluffed about the WMD because he was afraid of showing weakness to the Iranians, so he brought disaster on himself -and on his people.

Here is a preview of The Fall of Baghdad via Google Books.

Here is Anderson's latest writing on Iraq, published by The New Yorker a couple of days after the last American soldier left Iraq.

And below is Anderson talking about the book, via NPR:

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Cape Fear - Martin Scorsese

It's amazing how things change in twenty years. Here's a list of things that you wouldn't find in a movie today but were common in a R-rated movie in 1991 such as Cape Fear:

  • An adult kissing an underage girl (the actress who plays the underage character was over 18, though).
  • The father of the underage GIRL having dirty thoughts about her.
  • Dysfunctional families, and common fellows in general as heroes. For some reason, Hollywood has had a long infatuation with rich and powerful characters. Movies about common people are becoming the exception rather than the norm.
  • Southern conservatism portrayed as a potential source of violence and conflicts; when Southern conservatism is portrayed today, if it is portrayed at all, it is as a motive for mockery.
  • The idea that provocative women deserve to be raped. (I actually think that the term "promiscuous women" has been kicked out of the U.S. media completely, in great part thanks to Sex and the City).
  • Derogatory comments about being raped by black men in jail.
  • Dirty, rough, and rude men. Actors like Robert de Niro have nothing to do in Hollywood today.