El espíritu de la colmena - Víctor Erice

Es muy difícil que una película con mensajes velados a una generación envejezca bien. Es mucho más difícil aún que una película que haga referencia a eventos de la generación anterior sea apreciada al pasar el tiempo. Y es casi imposible si esos mensajes velados permanecen en la memoria colectiva.

Por eso no me gustó El espíritu de la colmena, una película que muchos consideran una obra maestra del cine español. Filmada en 1973, en las postimetrías del franquismo, El espíritu de la colmena es la historia de dos hermanas en un pueblo perdido en medio de España al finalizar la Guerra Civil Española. Debido a la censura todavía prevalente en la época Erice tuvo que valerse de varias alegorías y mensajes escondidos para dar un mensaje que, en realidad, nadie sabie bien a bien qué es, y quizá por eso fue tan exitosa en su momento. La película me pareció lenta, cansina, repetitiva, y sin trama aparente. La cinematografía, por otro lado, es preciosa y vale mucho la pena para los interesados en estudiar y hacer cine. 

Pocos países han cambiado tanto como España en los últimos 40 años; para muestra basta la canción "Poco antes de que den las 10" de Joan Manuel Serrat, grabada en 1971, y cuya letra es totalmente anacrónica: hoy las madres le piden a sus hijas que lleguen antes de las 10 de la mañana del día siguiente y sin drogas en el torrente sanguíneo. A la luz de los cambios sociales y económicos que han acontecido en España (una misma generación fue pobre, rica, y otra vez pobre), lo lógico sería que los matices y los códigos de El espíritu de la colmena se pierdan y que las nuevas generaciones dejen de apreciarla. 

Y, sin embargo, ese no ha sido el caso. En su 40 aniversario, varios medios, incluido El País, dedicaron mucha tinta y bytes a explicar por qué El espíritu de la colmena es una gran película que vale la pena ser vista. Supongo que eso se debe a que una opinión repetida muchas veces termina por ser verdad. A muchas películas de cine les pasará algo parecido que al Quijote, La Biblia, Mozart, la ópera, y otros elementos de arte clásico que nadie conoce pero todos se aprestan a citar y alabar. Con el cine, lo que pasará (está pasando) es que las audiencias verán las películas viejas sin entenderlas pero repitiendo que son grandes obras para no descuadrar.

La masificación de la cultura no nos está haciendo más inteligentes o más refinados; al contrario...

Conquest (Marie Walewska) - Clarence Brown

Conquest depicts the affair of Napoleon Bonaparte and her "Polish wife", Marie Walewska. According to Wikipedia and other sources online, including Walewska's own memories, the movie has a lot of resemblance to historical facts.

Like most movies of the 1930s, Conquest is a collection of theater-like dialogues between the two main characters interrupted by the appearance of some secondary characters. Events outside the love story are nothing but encores linking two scenes where the two main characters just talk and kiss. Over-explotation of Napoleon and Marie leaves outside important pieces to understand the main story: Movies were different from what they are today: they were understood as an extension of theater and hence and opportunity to see actors interpreting characters. Back in the day, a convincing love scene was more important than the plot. Today, the plot is as important as acting, if not more. Also, movies were directed to audiences with some cultural background: in the case of Conquest, Napoleon's evolution from a liberator to a would-be dictator is mentioned en passant, even if it's arguably one of the most important reasons why his love story with Marie falls apart. Audiences were supposed to know these things.

Shortly, Conquest is a movie worth watching for people interested in the history of film-making. The love story is too cheesy for today's fast-love standards, and Napoleonic history is mostly forgotten outside of France. Perhaps the only thing that may interest today's audiences is the characterization of Napoleon by Charles Boyer: at a time when we are all surprised by Charlize Theron's physical transformation in Monster, or Christian Bale's permanent and amazing look changes, it is worth seeing Boyer, considered a sex-symbol at the time, characterizing a despicable and ugly man wearing tight pants with a big  belly.

Kant: Political Writings - H. S. Reiss

When the first edition of this book was published (1970), Kant's political thinking was mostly overlooked by the experts. Twenty-one years later, and after the Rawlsian revolution of political science, Kant: Political Writings became a reference text for undergraduate and experts alike.

As H. S. Reiss, the editor of this volume summarizes in the postscript (p. 272), "Kant's political principles (...) express basic human aspirations". Do you want to know how George W. Bush perverted the idea of democratic peace? You only need to know Kant's Perpetual Peace. Do you know that Ghandi's idea of civil disobedience is partly based on Kant's ideas?

As great and influential as Kant's thoughts are today, I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, and as a matter of principle, I am against the idea of "selected works" volumes. If you want to know about an author's ideas, you should really read everything that person wrote. There is no escape around that. However, academics can do a pretty decent job summarizing and picking up pieces of an author's work for general and mid-level expert consumption. And they are partly paid for that. In other words, if you want to get an idea about an author's view of the World, go for this kind of books.

Experts on Kant's ideas may also want to read the introduction and the postscript of this book, which are basically Reiss' interpretation of Kant's works. I found particularly interesting his opinions about Kant and the right to rebellion, a topic Reiss wrote about and about which I would like to talk about for the remainder of this blog.

Democratic transitions were one of the most important subjects of study in political science in the second half of the 20th century. Samuel Huntington, Barrington Moore, Francis Fukuyama, Juan Linz, and more recently Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, just to mention a few, devoted at least part of their to study how one country goes from autocracy to democracy. All the democracy theoricians were, whether they admit it or not, influenced by Immanuel Kant, whose biggest contribution to political science was the idea that democracy (he called it republicanism) would bring perpetual peace and that democracy was inevitable. Kant, however, opposed the idea that democracy could be brought from abroad -and that's why Bush's Iraq War is a travesty of Kant's original theory- and he also opposed rebellion against government.

The reason why this is important is because, in practice, democracy has always been copied or implanted by some external power; the only country that was born fully democratic was the United States. Also, democracy has never been brought about peacefully by a benevolent dictator, as Kant wished. Democracy theoricians and practicioners like Freedom House, the Open Society, and NGOs like HRW or Amnesty International before they were coopted by communists, base their action plans on a theory that works magnificently on paper but has barely worked as expected in reality. Does this hinder Kant's contribution to political science?

The answer is complex. On the one hand, Kant could never foresee things like a dictator gazing his own people, or the degree of surveillance and repression exercised by modern totalitarian regimes. Kant lived before the Industrial Revolution; Hitler, Lenin, Saddam Hussein, and all the dictators of the 20th century were a direct product of industrialization and modernization. On the other hand, one could argue with some legitimacy and a high degree of speculation that the logical modern corollary of Kant's politica thought would be a rejection of totalitarianism and even some vindication of the right of rebellion.

Kant's political ideas became obsolete with the passing of time. That's the fate of most ideas, when you think about it. However, if we want to understand why we are where we are today, we need some minimal understanding of the ideas that brought us here. Two hundred years after Kantt, Rawls vindicated republicanism and the categorical imperative, and Michael Walzer tried to square the Kantian circle of democratic transition by force. Civilization is nothing else but a set of building bricks...

Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford Coppola

Few movies have generated an opinion as unanimous as Apocalypse Now: everybody loves this movies, but few people really know why. Anti-war people like Apocalypse Now because they think it has an anti-war message, while other people think its plot is basically a glorification of violence. In fact, Apocalypse Now is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is unclear what is Coppola's intended message with this movie, but I'd like to think that he's only trying to portray war "as it is": soldiers executing orders and just trying to go back home. Remarkably, international politics is mostly absent in the original movie (the 2001 Redux does include discussions on politics and colonialism).

Another remarkable thing of Apocalypse Now is its music: The Doors, the Rolling Stones and Wagner are the main stars.

I recommend Apocalypse Now because it's become a cultural icon, but I have to acknowledge that I still haven't digested it; I will probably have to watch it 2 or 3 times before I get the entire message. The "first act" is great, mixing Catch-22 like scenes with dark humor and (at the time) extremely violent scenes, all of which result in an excellent portrait of the ridiculousness of war. The "second act" is, I think, a failed psychological thriller: we still see an photographer (thoday, he'd be an NGO-kind-of guy) gone mad worshipping a serial killer, but there are some redundant silences and scenes.

Antonio López de Santa Anna ese espléndido bribón y la Guerra de Estados Unidos contra México, esa infame bribonada - Armando Fuentes Aguirre, Catón

En mi post sobre El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano analicé la proliferación de novelas históricas en México. En realidad, en los últimos años, México ha sido testigo de una gran oferta de libros de Historia dedicados al gran público: desde biografías hasta análisis de episodios históricos en específico como el Telegrama Zimmerman, pasando por volúmenes que pretenden revelar la "verdadera" Historia de México, la oferta de libros de divulgación es muy amplia.

Las cosas no siempre fueron así. Hasta hace poco, las publicaciones sobre Historia en México eran de dos tipos: loas pagadas por el gobierno a los héroes y miembros panteón nacional, o monografías microhistóricas sobre temas tan apasionantes como la vida en los claustros de monjas en la ciudad de Puebla en el siglo XVII; estas últimas publicaciones, obviamente pagadas con dinero oficial (¿qué empresario en su sano juicio va a publicar un libro sobre monjas en el siglo XVII¿) servían para sobornar y cooptar a un sector de la academia (humanidades, historia, sociología) que podía ser crítico con el gobierno.

Dos factores hicieron que los historiadores comenzaran a salir, poco a poco y a reculones, de sus laberintos y su torre de marfil y se dedicaran a la divulgación: en primer lugar está la llegada del PAN al poder y la democratización del poder, que significó que los historiadores no oficiales (los que no estaban en la nómina del gobierno) tenían carta blanca para ajustar cuentas con el panteón oficial -y de paso engrosar las nómina de los organismos culturales del gobierno. Todos oíamos de niños que el PRI ocultaba la "verdadera" Historia de México; con el PAN muchos estuvieron dispuestos a contarla y otros tantos a comprarla. En segundo lugar, cuando llegaron a México, las editoriales españolas como Alfaguara y Planeta, creyeron, pendejamente y sin razón desde mi perspectiva, que México era un país de lectores. Se dejaron deslumbrar por la FIL de Guadalajara. Cuando llegaron a México, las editoriales españolas empezaron a publicar un montón de libros de Historia "verdadera" y no oficial. Durante unos años operaron con pérdidas, hasta que eventualmente el nicho de mercado se desarrolló y se consolidó.

Como todo mercado, la oferta es multivariada: hay libros muy buenos y otros que se colaron quién sabe por qué. El libro de Catón sobre Antonio López de Santa Anna pertenece al segundo grupo, aunque en este caso sí sabemos por qué Diana decidió publicarlo: la razón es que Catón es uno de los columnistas más leídos del país y, por lo tanto, es un éxito de ventas seguro. Si no lo agarraba Diana, otra editorial lo habría hecho.

No tengo nada en contra de las novelas históricas. Y me parece que la biografía es una rama de la Historia que ha sido injustamente menospreciada por la intelligentsia mexicana en general. Lo que me molesta del libro de Catón es que, haciéndose pasar por biografía, en realidad sea un panfleto con un solo mensaje: que la culpa de todas las desgracias nacionales es de los liberales radicales, y en específico de Valentín Gómez Farías, acaso el personaje más anticlerical del siglo XIX mexicano. Metodológicamente, el libro de Catón es un insulto. En algún momento dice que la situación de la deuda externa en México está peor hoy que en el siglo XIX, sin importar que en el siglo XIX México fue invadido militarmente precisamente por problemas de deuda, escenario que está lejos de materializarse hoy. Para decir que Gómez Farías era un traidor a la Patria que tenía contacto con las logias masónicas de Estados Unidos (sic), Catón recurre al libro Historia de la Iglesia de México del "padre Cuevas" (resic). En 650 páginas, no hay ni pies de página ni referencias a fuentes primarias o secundarias que hagan sentir al lector que no estamos ante el dicterio amargo de un viejito reaccionario educado en una escuela de curas. 

Pero el problema es que el libro es, nada más y nada menos, que el dicterio amargo de un viejito reaccionario educado en una escuela de curas. A título de ejemplo comento al lector que estoy leyendo en paralelo la biografía de Dean Acheson, Secretario de Estado de Estados Unidos en los 1940s y 1950s. De las 832 páginas que lo componen, alrededor del 40% son referencias a archivos, documentos de época, otros libros, o a conversaciones públicas o privadas. Para no ir más lejos: la monumental biografía de Santa Anna que está haciendo Enrique González Pedrero (reseñada aquí) se toma la molestia de hacer un trabajo de investigación serio sin perder atributos comerciales como la "frescura" o la "familiaridad con el lector." 

El libro de Catón no representa más que la salida de clóset de la derecha clerical de provincia de los años 1930s, que pretende que la Iglesia juegue un papel activo en la política y la educación del pueblo. Esa corriente política está condenada a desaparecer: México es cada vez un país más urbano y con la urbanizacíón viene la secularización de la sociedad en automático, al menos en los países occidentales. No obstante, cuando veo a la nueva derecha, su poco sentido común y su incultura, casi me dan deseos de que Catón y los abuelos se queden con nosotros para siempre...

Throne of Blood - Akira Kurosawa

People from the West tend to see Kurosawa's Throne of Blood as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth (see, for instance, Wikipedia , IMDb, and The Guardian, just to mention Google's top 3). This is obviously an oversimplification. Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth but it goes beyond that: it incorporates elements of Noh theatre and is not based on the Western ethos of making good triumph over evil. Instead, the plot of Throne of Blood is circular, with the cycle of violence repeating again and again, without making clear references to morality. The World of Throne of Blood is one where power seeking is the motive of all the characters and moral issues are left outside. These fusions of Buddhist, Japanese, and Western elements were common in Kurosawa's career and gained him criticisms in Japan (where he was seen as a sold-off) and praised in the West (where he was seen as the only understandable Japanese filmmaker)

I don't know if I should recommend Throne of Blood. The movie is obviously a masterpiece, like most of the material produced by Kurosawa. The camera work is simply fantastic, and so are the make up and the attire of the actors. However, modern audiences have lost the sensibility to appreciate silences in movies, which is a constant in this movie. If there is one reason why I would still recommend Throne of Blood to a movie viewer of the 21st century the scene where Taketoki Washizu is killed: much more dramatic and sadist than anything you've seen so far and with far less blood.

Throne of Blood has been re-issued to the market recently by The Criterion Collection.

And youtube auto generated a channel for the movie, available here (I'm obviously no responsible for the content of the channel or any copyrights infringement, etc).

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: