The Global Crime Novel: Worldwide Corruption and Chiseling

In a 1931 Warner Brothers made the film Blonde Crazy, in the pre-Code period where expression was raunchier and more truthful, before the era of middle-class censorship. As the Depression reaches its peak, conniving bellhop James Cagney is trying to convince new hotel hire Joan Blondel to go on the road with him and work a hustle together. Leaning into the ingenue and laying his cards on the table, he makes his pitch, explaining that “The age of chivalry is over. This is the age of chiselry.”

Cagney and Blondel in Blonde Crazy 

In the evidence of this year’s Quais du Polar in Lyon France one of the largest conventions in the world of global crime writers, the “age of chiselry” is, as the current recession/inflation/austerity continues, back with us, bigger and badder than ever.  And that age is not only perpetrated from below but also from on top as the very rich, with the global pie shrinking, take whatever steps are necessary, lawful or not, to hold onto what they’ve got, whether it was acquired lawfully or not.

Perhaps the star of the conference was India’s Deepti Kapoor whose Age of Vice is now being adapted for series TV by Disney+ and FX. Age of Vice takes place in the early 2000s, a time, the author explained, when India was making a transition from socialism to capitalism. It was also, as she describes it in the novel, a time when gangsters and organized crime entered the government, melding with regional authorities in a level of corruption that exceeded even Russia in the 1990s under its alcoholic “czar” Boris Yeltsin.  In that period, as Nick Harkaway, a crime author himself and John Le Carré’s son who was in Russia at the time, pointed out gangsters profited from the government, but stayed out of it.

Age of Vice is also about developers profiting in this new, “modern” India as whole settlements of the poorest are removed from the Yamuna riverbank in Delhi with everyone’s conscience eased because they are offered resettlement housing. However, the gangster-developer quickly sends his representatives into this area to buy back the resettlement land and to tear down the cheap housing and build on that.

The gangster’s son, who gallivants across the globe with his father’s money, has the vision of making the riverbank look like the Thames, with museums and upscale developments replacing encampments inhabited by the poor, but his father cuts that vision short and opts instead for the pure profit of high rises for the rich.

As Kapoor pointed out, India, with now the largest population in the world, has reached new levels of inequality, in the wake of the corruption she describes in the first decade of this century. According to the latest Oxfam survey, the top 1 percent own 40 percent of the wealth while the bottom 50 percent own 3 percent.

In an opposite way, in a panel that included Kapoor, Jake Adelstein, the author of Tokyo Vice, which Michael Mann has adapted into a series now renewed for a second season, described the overreach of the Japanese Yakuza gangsters, whose power has recently been curtailed in Japan because they attempted to aggressively challenge the police and the government, disrupting a truce that saw each existing side by side with the other. Adelstein, who was a reporter working on the crime beat in Tokyo, also explained that like Roberto Saviano, whose investigative work on the Camorra has entailed him living in constant police protection, now needs police protection when he visits Japan because of his extensive inside reporting on the Yakuza.

Volker Kutscher, author of ten books on which the German series Babylon Berlin is based, with the first five translated into English, described the schlumpy hero of the series Gereon Rath as a “mensch.” Rath is the sometimes less-than-decisive protagonist of the series. He is, though, a staunch defender of the Weimar Republic as we watch as the series, which starts in 1928, progresses or regresses through the years of Hitler’s coming to power.

In The Fatherland Files, set in 1932, Rath is sent to a remote corner of Germany near the Polish/German border as he tracks a wily killer who operates in Berlin. The still unresolved tensions in the border region, which a plebiscite had claimed for Germany, and the nationalist fervor of the Germans in the region, now further deepened by the ominous presence of the brown-shirted SA as well as the supposed patriotic fervor of a prosperous brewer are the seeds from which this violence in Berlin has erupted.

Elsewhere, Dennis Lehane, author of among others Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, addressed the conference remotely from the U.S. and explained how his latest novel Small Mercies, set in Boston in 1974 at the time of forced bussing to desegregate the public school system, dealt with a racial hatred, not so dissimilar to Kutcher’s borderland Germans, that resulted in the tragedy of the death of a little girl.

Melivina Mestre took the audience on a journey of both time and space as she described her latest novel Twilight in Casablanca, set in the early 1950s where the city was abuzz with spies, including a huge presence of American intelligence, trying to influence the continent. Jurica Pavičić, whose novel Red Water won the European prize for Best Crime Novel two years ago, returned to the conference with the soon-to-be-translated The Woman on the Second Floor.

Red Water described with a sprawling depth the break-up of Yugoslavia, the years of war after that break-up and how the modern Dalmatian coast has now turned into a high-end Western investment haven and tourist paradise – changes that have left the populace gasping as they tried to keep up.

Woman on the Second Floor covers similar territory but this time in microcosm, as a wife looks back on the events and rapid-fire transformations that led her to murder her mother-in-law. As such the novel in its intricate description of the consciousness of a single character and its explanation of what led her to violence, has something in common with David E. Kelley’s masterful Love and Death with Elizabeth Olson in a true crime recounting of how repression in a Texas suburb led her, as she made a valiant effort to escape that repression, to commit a violent act.

Also in attendance at the conference was Thomas Mullen whose trilogy titled “Darktown,” which takes the name of the lead novel, follows the first African American cops on the Atlanta police force in 1948 as they deal with violence, corruption, and racial prejudice in the pre-Civil Rights South. The final novel, Midnight Atlanta, set in 1950 stands on the cusp of that movement and features a cameo by Martin Luther King. The trilogy describes the extent of the discrimination in this earlier era where, as Cornell West described it, “Race is the way class is spoken in America.” It also calls into question how far supposedly progressive communities have come because today racial barriers are maintained through income disparity and high property values such that, in a way that allows for pristine discrimination without having to deal with ethnicity, in a reversal of West’s dictum, “Class is the way race is spoken in America.”

Finally, from Marseilles came the winner of the French prize for Crime Novel of the Year, Gérard Lecas’ Blood of Our Enemies, a “policier,” as the French call it set in that city in 1962, on the eve of the ending of the war for Algerian independence, in a novel that may well soon become a television series.

Two cops of different political persuasions, one communist, one conservative, must investigate the death of an Arab man whose body is drained of blood. The city is filled with representatives of the right-wing terrorist group the OAS, the Algerian independentist movement the FLN, “pied noir,” refugees from Algeria who supported and gained from colonial rule and Harkis, Algerians who served on the side of the French in the war. The two contrary officers must navigate these various groups as they search for the killer in a novel that has intonations of Dominique Manotti’s Marseille 73 where 11 years later the same tensions still erupt in a far-right plan to retake Algeria.

Thus, across the globe and through history, writers of crime fiction, as seen in this year’s Quais du Polar, are tracing an increasingly more malevolent turn toward violence as global conditions break down in the face of worsening poverty and inequality.

***

Dennis Broe is the author of “Calamitous Corruption,” The Harry Palmer LA Trilogy that consists of Left of Eden, A Hello To Arms and his latest, The Precinct With The Golden Arm.

What is the state of TV streaming TV Serial Series, in the wake of last year’s Netflix devaluation and this year’s bank crisis in the U.S? That was a question that was not mentioned much at Lille in Northern France at this year’s Series Mania. It’s perhaps the world’s largest television festival, boasting 55 series from 24 countries, including for the first time series from Iran (The Actor) and a Pakistani/Indian co-production (Limboland).

The question of how to survive in an industry in retreat however did surface in disguised form repeatedly. This seeming global cornucopia and abundance of series TV is belied by the fact that financing is shrinking in the wake of another bank collapse. This time it’s Silicon Valley Bank, which made loans to digital companies of which streaming is now a part including bankrolling the streaming service Roku, as well as the collapse on the international level of Credit Suisse.

Not to mention another U.S. mid-level bank failure, that of First Republic, equally crucial to the digital economy on both coasts, which lost 102 billion in deposits in the first quarter of 2023 and needed a 30 billion bailout just to stay alive. The net effect of a run on mid-level banks in the U.S. was that money fled to the supposedly safer, larger banks, in particular J.P. Morgan (whose profits jumped 52% for the first quarter of 2023) and Citibank. J.P. Morgan also has now absorbed First Republic.

These banks will be much more conservative financiers of a largely debt-ridden industry which has yet to turn a profit. Warner Bros., operator of HBO Max, which recently became just Max, is 50 billion in debt, having lost 217 million in the first quarter, claiming that loss is actually a victory since it was far less than the previous quarter, while Disney+ is hoping to be profitable by 2024.

First Republic Bank, now wholly owned by J.P. Morgan

So there will be less money to go around, and the money that is available will be coming from more conservative sources which will want more guarantees that the money invested will be profitable. All this in the wake of last year’s market devaluation of Netflix, based on subscribers declining for one quarter and a new emphasis on overall company profitability rather than on number of new subscribers, as the market becomes more suspicious of the streaming ‘house of cards’.

The retrenchment was an unacknowledged topic at the conference, with everyone realizing that budgets will be leaner and fewer series will be commissioned. There is also in the industry a new conservatism in programming, which likely dates from Reed Hastings’ comment in 2019, at that time as the head of the most influential streamer Netflix, about not opposing Saudi cuts in his company’s documentary because “We’re not in the news business. We’re not trying to do truth to power. We’re trying to entertain.”

This purposeful abnegation of any larger social role for the streaming industry was like the statement attributed to Jack Warner in 1947 in the wake of a strike against his studio, that “I will never again make a film about the common man.”

The renouncement of social content was touched upon by Series Mania director Laurence Herszberg, who candidly declared before the festival that “Today Netflix is more conservative than TF1” (TF1 is a commercial French on-air station, the equivalent in the U.S. perhaps to CBS).

The result of this retrenchment, which is already apparent, is a cutting back not only on the number of series and/or on the budgets of commissioned series, but also the failure of some of the streaming services. If they survive, it will be by making cheaper series, usually meaning unscripted or reality series which means a general diminution in quality.

Last year the French streamer Salto collapsed, while the merger of Warner Bros. and the documentary service Discovery meant that the resulting streamer, now simply titled Max, having shed the name of HBO, is now about saturation – but with cheaper reality series from the Discovery label, with the emphasis on more bottom feeder series such as Gold Rush, Deadliest Catch, and Moonshiners.

The End of Peak TV

This new state of affairs was described by the online service Slate as no longer “Peak TV” but rather “Trough” or bottom-of-the barrel TV. Two years ago, 2021, was probably the height of series abundance with 559 series produced in the U.S. By contrast, in the current climate, Sky, one of the leaders in European series, has invested in 200 series but only about 10 percent of them are scripted.

All over the world consumers, led by the U.S. and now labelled ‘cord cutters’, are cancelling expensive cable services for cheaper streamers. The problem for the streamers is that inflation and an austerity-driven global attack on working class income such as the French raising of the pension age from 62 to 64, and global central banks’ raising of interest rates which makes borrowing prohibitive, means that cord cutters are subscribing to fewer streaming services.

Meanwhile, as Herszberg says, streaming services across the globe are growing and have now reached by her count 700, which means the competition for viewers is increasing.

Nordland '99

All this new penny pinching has prompted a return by the streaming industry to many of the practices of the older era of network TV, practices which for a decade or so the streamers had claimed had been surpassed in a frenzy of creative activity. Series are being cancelled sooner with some now cancelled in production before they reach the air.

This practice is more in line with the usual mid-season casualty list of network TV which used to announce after Christmas a fresh second season, having replaced fall series that were duds and ratings failures with spring series, many of which, a few months later, shared the same fate.

Budgets for series are being reduced and canny showrunners are already adapting to the new austerity. One of the best series in the festival was Nordland ’99 from Danish public television, in a shortened but tight half-hour rather than the usual hour format. The showrunner, Kasper Møller Rask, has fashioned a low-budget, rural series with a cast of mostly newcomers, filmed cheaply in the Danish countryside whose dark forests are alive with the eerie intonations of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks while also echoing the themes of Lynch’s series. Here, three teens search for their missing friend and discover the evil of an adult world which itself has been left for dead by the systemic brutality of what in the West can now be labelled authoritarian neoliberalism.

Freedom to choose bland TV

Another accommodation to the network TV era is the adoption of the dreaded strategy of advertising, which Netflix previously was famous for shunning, instead claiming it was viewer-sponsored with its revenue coming exclusively from subscriptions. All streamers now though have instituted “two-tiered” pricing, with a lower price that includes advertising and a higher price that excludes it. Advertising of course also opens the door to sponsors having a say in content and particularly in the atmosphere that the program surrounding their product sets up – yet another infringement on creativity that means blander content. This new austerity, control, and limiting of the range of content is presented as “freedom of choice” for the consumer.

To appeal to lenders wanting to be assured their money will prosper, the buzzword in streaming is now “IP,” Intellectual Property, which does not mean more thoughtful challenging work but rather the opposite. IP denotes utilization of a previously successful property. In the Hollywood studio sense this could mean that the series already has an audience in another medium, thus the recent television remakes of the novels Great Expectations and Tom Jones and Drops of God, an international co-production from a popular Japanese manga about competition between wine growers in France and Japan.

More often though IP means the extension of one hit series into a franchise, the business term, or “universe,” its creative equivalent.  With the success of the very conservative Yellowstone, a kind of modern-day cross between Bonanza and Dynasty, about a rancher and his family holding onto their land, aided by the fading star quality of Kevin Costner, Paramount+ has now gone back in time and created two copycat series about the origin of the dynasty titled 1883 and 1923.

This trend is further magnified by the ratings success of the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, which despite a lacklustre final season for the origin series has proven to be an enormous hit and which has prompted the development of six more GOT series. You can never have too much of a good thing even if that good thing ended by exhausting itself.

A mountainous abundance of ****

The general quality of the streamers’ stables is declining. Once upon a time television was referred to as “the vast wasteland” with that phrase then superseded by the labelling of the streaming era as a new “Golden Age,” harkening back to socially inflected anthology dramas of television’s early years. Today’s budget-conscious streamers, in an era of increasing competition, each stressed at the conference their desire to be all things to all audiences, a one-stop shop for entertainment, given that much of the audience can now only afford one stop.

This Noah’s Ark approach – comedy, drama, family, quality entertainment all in the same bundle – stressed the element of abundance, but the truth is there is now mostly an abundance of shows without much merit, so that, to find quality series it is now necessary to scour all the streamers to find the one or two relevant series on each.

Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa, part of the Paramount+ “Mountain of Entertainment”

Paramount+, for example, a newcomer to European markets, in line with its old studio logo featuring a snow-capped peak, described its offerings as “a mountain of entertainment,” a “popular array of content” that presented a range of series with each being “best in class.” The streamer’s “sizzle reel,” a montage of its various offerings, with the tagline “The Stars Are Streaming,” belied these claims, featuring the almost comatose Costner in Yellowstone, Sylvester Stallone in his beyond-cliched gangster series Tulsa, a coming extension of Dexter about a vengeful serial killer and NCIS Sydney, the overseas expansion of that tired franchise. This is surely a mountain of something, but I’m not sure the correct name for it is entertainment.

There are three ways that both globally and locally the power of the streamers is being challenged. The first, in Europe, is still the possibility of government intervention to level the playing field, though as in many forms of the digital economy, with the EU already currently behind in the race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) as exemplified in ChatGPT, this intervention often comes in the ‘too little, too late’ variety.

There is a European mandate that the American streamers’ content must be at least 30 percent local. Despite or perhaps to surmount this mandate, the streamers are pilfering the best European series talent, with Netflix, for example, recently having hired Eleonora Andreatta, formerly the head of the drama department of the Italian public television network RAI and with the producers of the French espionage series Bureau of Legends, which has now become a global franchise, currently working for Disney+.  

In France, though, following the Chinese model, each co-pro with an American streamer now must have a delegated French producer. The idea here is that the producer then absorbs the American model and can instill it into French production, the way the Chinese allowed foreign companies to set up in China but then absorbed their know-how.

The writers are striking!

The most impactful challenge though at the moment is located in the belly of the beast. As this article goes to press, the biggest story in series and film production is the looming writers’ strike, which is now almost a certainty and will commence in May.

Since 2007, with a contract won in the wake of the last strike, the writers have been watching those gains steadily erode as their salaries declined by on average 4 percent while profits in the entertainment industry as a whole, despite the debt, have soared. The streaming companies on the other hand, now more budget-conscious, have not budged in negotiations, trying to extract as much profit as possible from writers who have a crucial role in the establishment of series TV and whose hiring is now more precarious since series have shorter time spans, 8 to 12 episodes as opposed to the former network model of 22.

Those 8 to 12 episodes now also take longer to produce in the era of “quality TV” but writers are being paid the same amount per show and thus are forced, as are workers everywhere, to work longer hours for less pay.

One of the points of contention in the writer’s contract is the use of AI, with producers threatening to employ this latest technological breakthrough to author scripts and the writers campaigning to keep AI out of the writing process. The problem here is that because of the declining quality which this article has mapped, and the whole history of Hollywood film and television production as rolling off an assembly line, some of the recent series look like they have already been written by programs like ChatGPT.

However, this assembly line production can never replace well-written series. One need only look at two recent series, released within a day of each other, to observe this. Amazon’s bloated, utterly unoriginal John Wick/True Lies/Jason Bourne paint-by-numbers Citadel, which will become a global franchise with new entries in India and Italy, sounds like it has been spun off a machine. To use the language of AI, the script, lacking an ounce of originality, is simply recombinatory.

On the other hand, David E. Kelley’s Love and Death, an extraordinary, minute examination of how unmet desires in a suburb of Texas at the dawn of the repressive Reagan “Revolution” erupt into violence, is not a machine-like spitting out of past cliches but a highly original work.

The third challenge to the power of the streamers is in the global content of showrunners willing to buck the trend of “pure entertainment” and create socially relevant series, which admittedly are in the vast minority.

The anti-capitalist alternative to wealth porn like Succession

An India/Pakistani production Limboland, although much more Pakistani centered, being shot amid the breathtaking peaks and lowlands of the Hunza Valley in Karachi, is a Succession themed series but unlike that series – which is simply wealth porn – has an anti-capitalist point.

Limboland centers on the decisions an old man, now a wealthy hotel owner, made in his life, shutting out the woman he loved in favor of the pursuit of money with a non-Western pace that equally belies the frantic pursuit of profit evidenced even in the editing of its American cousin.

Equally, Black Santiago Club, from Benin, describes the fellow-feeling around a jazz club that is being threatened by a developer who wants to gut the club and turn it into condo apartments. The film is crystal clear on both the communal sprit engendered by the club and the attempt to destroy that spirit by privatizing for profit what is a neighborhood treasure.

Little Bird

Finally, two other series highlighted racial inequality. The first was Canada’s Little Bird, voted the audience favourite at the festival, which situated itself first in the present as it follows the path of a Native American ripped away from her family and inserted into a Jewish professional milieu in which she has thrived. Then it flashes back to her painful abduction by the Canadian state and highlights the attitude of superiority that allowed that state to break up families in the name of “progress.”

Netflix’s Thicker Than Water, currently streaming on the network, a tour-de-force by showrunner, writer and series lead Nawell Madani, highlights the racism of the French professional classes. An Algerian female reporter must claw her way onto the set of French TV as an anchor woman, all the while dealing with her brother who is connected to a gang, while cooperating with her sisters as their family is caught up in trying to rescue the brother. As a reporter Fara is allowed her own curly black hair, a physical mark of her Arab heritage, but as an anchor, to come into the living rooms of a white French public, she must straighten her hair and dye it blonde. After the changeover, she climbs into an elevator filled with nothing but dyed blonde French women, ascending to the top of the station hierarchy symbolically and physically.

Thicker Than Water

As Western economies everywhere decline, the streamers also find themselves in a precarious position with Peacock, Comcast’s streamer made up of content from NBC/Universal, now rumored to possibly lose its identity in a merger with Warner Bros.’s Discovery, and thus in danger of becoming the first of the major streamers to throw in the towel.

Opposing the corporate juggernauts

The struggle continues of writers, other creative workers in the creative industries, public stations, alternative streamers as well as audiences to oppose the corporate juggernauts. In the latest manifestation of this struggle, writers, never more important in the industry, attempt, through the time-honoured tool of a strike, to fight off these latest efforts to reduce their value both by a regressive movement back to “non-scripted” reality television and a coming attempt to supplant their work in general through the onslaught of AI and ChatGPT’s replacing of a writer’s sensibility with a machinic recombination of genres. Unfortunately, the decline in series quality, supposedly motivated by decreasing budgets, is playing its part by readying audiences to accept this degraded mode of production.

Dennis Broe’s articles are television are available on Substack at Cultural Politics For Those Who Care and on his website Bro On The Global Television Beat. His latest book on television is Diary Of A Digital Plague Year: Corona Culture, Serial TV and The Rise of The Streaming Services.

The Invaders: Alien Beings From a Dying Planet. Their Destination: The Earth. Their Mission: To Make It Their World. It began with a landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow, he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.

That was the opening of a piece of ’50s paranoia that ran on TV in the mid-60s. These creatures from another planet are just like us but some of them have a deformity, a pinkie finger that sticks straight up. Each week architect Vincent tried to tell people that the planet was in danger, launched by a deadly foe that did not mind wiping out all life on earth to make way for this alien life form from a planet whose inhabitants assumed human shape but showed no emotion.

Unfortunately, the Invaders still walk among us. They resemble ordinary politicians except their rhetoric is much more bellicose. They threaten the rest of the planet and at every moment attempt to push war and halt peace. They have ordinary names like Nuland, Sullivan, Blinken and Biden, and you can tell them, not by their extended pinkies, but by their use of the word “democracy” as an excuse for their desire for planetary dominance.

They disrupt the flow of goods and the peaceful development of the resources of that part of earth called The Global South in order to maintain their dominance. They are especially active in what they see as the menace of Eurasia. When they saw the possibilities for shared resources with Russia and Western Europe they immediately went into disruptive mode, in order to further promote their own oil and gas and maintain their dominance over their Caucasian vassals.

Make no mistake about it, they are invaders. They themselves recently revealed they have launched 251 military interventions since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 469 since the Invaders arrived in the U.S. in 1798. The greater contemporary danger though for these creatures for whom peace is an alien concept, is the coming together to share resources and aid that is the mutual development of the entire land mass of Eurasia. This danger is led by China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which despite its problems, aims to be a bridge between the developing countries and Europe, with the trade on this New Silk Road raising living standards all along the way.

The aliens in the U.S. – already reeling from their failure to decimate Russia in their Ukraine proxy war as 87 percent of the world’s population refuses to commit to the war – have now set their sights on destroying the Belt and Road Initiative which they see as a challenge to their mission to control the earth, to keep it exclusively their world. What they pose as the alternative to the Chinese rising tide which lifts all boats is endless destruction in a kind of mafia protection racket. Either you are with us or against us and if you are against us, we are coming for you and you will be destroyed.

This is the Biden-Blinken-Sullivan-Nuland logic and, as they clamor for a rules based order, behind the braying, lies the power of their alien weapons now spread out in 800 military bases in over 80 countries while China, the country they present as a major military threat, has one foreign base in one country.

The way of life of this alien race is crumbling, as their leader, who they call The Biden, walks the streets of Ukraine with a fake air raid siren to make it seem he is in danger, while they ignore their own people who are dying in a chemical spill and then a purposeful explosion that may have decimated the drinking water and livelihoods of one-third of their own world, making it far more dangerous for The Biden to walk the streets of Palestine Ohio, where he does not dare to go, than those of Kiev.

David Vincent had to go person to person in the late ’60s to warn about these alien invaders, as people refused to wake up to the danger they posed. It is far more difficult for the David, Diane, Dinitia and Damon Vincents of today because the aliens have captured all means of communication in their world, and emit an endless stream of blather utterly out of touch with the geopolitical realities of the world around them.

Behind the wall patrolled by their alien devices which censor all global perspective, they reward their lying media as just recently a daily newspaper now taken over completely by these creatures, which they call The New York Times, was awarded the prestigious Polk Award for its coverage of the war in Ukraine. This was a completely one-sided and often inaccurate view of the war, with almost no reporting on how and why the war started and only one paragraph written about the revelations that their alien masters blew up the Russian Nord Stream pipeline.

Can the drive toward death and destruction by these alien creatures and their mad lust for power be stopped before they destroy the earth in their attempt to make it “their world” and to keep the rest of the world from rising? The architect David Vincent tried to spread the word but it will take all of us to build a peaceful world and rid this one of this ever more dangerous alien menace.

This is a preview of an upcoming episode of I Fought the Law featuring prolific author and historian Gerald Horne and titled “Me Tarzan, You, Are Either With Us Or Against Us: Joe Biden in Africa” 

It’s hardly the ruined, devastated postwar rubble that was the backdrop of the most famous film shot in Vienna, The Third Man (see image above), but in more subtle ways Europe in general and Austria’s capital city in particular is showing signs of deterioration. After two years of a COVID lockdown and with the price cap on Russian oil and natural gas – prompting in return a cutoff of that supply from Russia – there is a general air of belt-tightening and despondency as well as an unleashing of right-wing sentiments in the wake of these twin catastrophes.

The belt-tightening is everywhere apparent. The museums cut back on Christmas blockbusters and instead tried to make up in ingenuity what they lack in budget. The Leopold Museum’s feature “Vienna 1900” displayed works by Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka in an exhibition that simply looks like a regurgitation of past exhibits using the fin-de-siecle 1900 label to group them under a new heading of the turn to modernism.

The Kunst Historisches (Art History) museum which in the past has featured blockbusters highlighting Titian, Caravaggio and Bruegel this year tried, in avoiding the high price of borrowing and insuring works, to trace the history of competition in art in its “Idols and Rivals” exhibit which featured an array of replicas and reproductions. It’s a topic that might have dealt more strongly with the pressures on artists to produce saleable commodities in a capitalist art market, but which instead focused on individual rivalries. Best moment was an etching of the art historian Georgio Vasari and Michelangelo visiting Titian’s studio at which time Michelangelo, peering over the master’s shoulder, is said to have remarked that the Venetians, famous as colorists, still had not learned how to draw.

The New Year’s celebration was also muted as the city, pre-COVID, had sponsored nine stages with various kinds of music ranging from Viennese waltzes in the city square to hip-hop to rock, but this year cut the display down to five. A highlight of past New Year’s events was a broadcasting outside the world-famous Staatsoper, the national opera house, of the New Year’s Eve perennial Der Fledermaus and the next day on the same screen the world-famous Vienna Philharmonic Concert. This year the events took place but were not broadcast outside, and thus remained only the province of the elite, though the concert in truncated form is broadcast on public television stations across the world.

Surrealism and Psychoanalysis at The Freud Museum 

The most interesting exhibition was one of the smallest, a collection of 50 Surrealist pieces – sculpture, paintings and sketches – at the Sigmund Freud Museum, which recounted the sometimes troubled relationship between Freud and the Surrealist capo Andre Breton. Freud remained skeptical about the Surrealist project, which he claimed dealt only with the manifest, or overt, content of the dream, whereas he was interested in the latent, or hidden, content. But it’s easy to see that in fact the two benefited each other, with Surrealism helping to popularize Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis, and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious which enlivened and invigorated the art world with a plethora of startling images. 

Also on hand at a revamped version of the museum was Freud’s correspondence with Einstein on the subject of the uselessness and destruction of war in the era between the two world wars. Their warning went unheeded, neither in their time nor today as we draw ever closer to global nuclear war.

The other most interesting exhibit was at the Welt or World Museum on the subject of “Oceans. Collections. Reflections.” The museum featured the work of New Zealand Maori artist George Nuku. The work, in exquisite paintings and sculptures, detailed the interdependence of the Maori on the ocean with each construction of a boat or a whale bounded by plastic bottles, indicating the way waste and the petroleum industry are devastating the livelihood and sustainability of the Maori.

Elsewhere, the exhibition described how in the 18^th century New Zealand tribesmen had visited Vienna as the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire and asked for aid as they were about to be invaded by the British. The emperor granted them a printing press which they used to print leaflets and testimonies warning of the impending invasion. Helpful, yes, but also a way of exonerating the empire from its colonial role in the conquest and colonization of the peoples of eastern Europe.

The Volksoper's Threepenny Opera 

The Volksoper, or People’s Opera, which performs light opera or operetta and musicals, featured a strikingly modern version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera with the beggars dressed in the gaudy costumes of internet influencers and the thieves arrayed in the equally outrageous apparel of digital entrepreneurs. This element of the production emphasized the continuity between scammers of different centuries. What did not work was the overwrought Don Juan in Hell final death of the lead thief and cutthroat Mack the Knife which attempted to replace with smokescreens and stagecraft Brecht’s more radical ending. Brecht resolved the injustice of the play through a royal decree, which was designed to call attention to the falseness of Dickensian and other deus ex machina endings of  artworks which undercut the social critique in those works. The trope persists today, not only in fiction but also in the belief that billionaire philanthropy will in the end save the world, even as it adds to their own wealth.   

The city is dotted with metros, buses and trolleys, and is often voted the most livable on the planet. It continues to have extraordinary public transportation and affordable housing with the average price of 767 euros for a roomy one-bedroom flat just outside the central ring. Sixty percent of its population live in subsidised housing, a tribute to the post World War I affordable housing boom led by first socialist and then social democratic administrations. But as everywhere on the planet there are ominous sightings of the ever-present monstrous cranes, harbingers of the coming of large condos that will force the prices up everywhere in the city.

Renaissance of the right wing

There is also a disturbing right-wing renaissance even in this most cosmopolitan of cities. It’s perhaps the result of the support for the fascist elements in the Ukrainian government, soon to be aided by the flow of NATO arms that are making their way across Western Europe, where a right-wing planned coup was recently thwarted in Germany. Those arms have surfaced as far away as Africa, with Nigeria’s president announcing they have already reached terrorist groups in that country.

The Austrian History Museum, opened in 2019 and recounting Austrian events from after World War I to the present, featured an exhibit titled “Disposing of Hitler: Out of the Cellar, Into the Museum.” The Austrian criminal code bans any material that could be used to “perpetuate the aspirations” of any Nazi organization, but National Socialist paraphernalia – books, swords, photos, postcards – exist everywhere and can be bought on eBay. The exhibit consists of illustrations of this memorabilia and asks visitors whether it should be preserved, sold, or destroyed. Overwhelmingly the response, aided by the museum itself which presented an argument for a museum being a repository of historical memory, was “Preserve,” with no “Destroy” and an occasional “Sell.”

The exhibit thus functioned as a part of the path on the way to normalising this hateful junk, with the argument that “it’s part of our history” – the same argument propounded almost always by right-wing pundits and used to attack the pulling down of slave owners’ statues in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Elsewhere, the Staatoper’s version of Wagner’s The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, at over four-and-a-half hours the longest opera in the repertory, missed a chance to address the anti-semitism and championing of the Aryan virtues which made it not only a hit but the only opera performed at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival in Hitler’s darkest days of 1943 and 1944.

In the work, the proud German blond clean-shaven novice has to outsing the hard-hearted bearded technical master for the hand of a German maiden. The Staatsoper chose to simply recreate the work, putting its effort into painstaking reconstruction of the 17^th century milieu in which the work is set, seemingly oblivious to its historical uses and its ethnic stereotyping. The opera is a fascinating meta-mediation by Wagner on the art of composing and singing, but it cries out for a modern retelling which ironizes and criticizes its original bigotry and the uses to which it’s been put. Recreating the period does not negate that history but simply suppresses it in an era in Europe where it is more alive than ever.

Mozart in 3D 

Finally, Vienna also has, as is popular everywhere in Europe, a new immersive experience in the centre of the city titled “Mythos Mozart”. These are 3D recreations of Mozart’s death, his city Vienna in 1791 at the time of his writing of The Magic Flute, and the creation of his most famous musical number “A Little Night Music.”

In general, these “immersive” exhibitions flood the viewer with images – but afterwards one knows little more about Mozart and his world at the end than at the beginning. The last room is a kaleidoscope of random images assaulting the viewer on all four walls, the ceiling, and the floor. In response to this stultifying collage a little girl got on all fours, and raised one foot up against the wall as though she was a dog out for a walk doing its business. That little girl is going to make an excellent critic.

The beating heart of the city though, despite the rightward tilt and the wartime austerity, is still its cafes. Café Central, a haven for writers and once the home of Freud, the novelist and journalist Joseph Roth – the subject of an exemplary new biography titled Endless Flight – the anti-war critic Karl Krauss, and Arthur Schnitzler, the playwright and lampooner of the bourgeois. Café Museum was the home of the “1900” artists Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka and Café Mozart was the meeting place of composers and opera singers, and perhaps of Arnold Schoenberg and Albert Berg as they created the “new” atonal music.

These are now all packed with tourists but still contain the memories of a time that may hopefully be revived and prevail over the war clouds that now hang so heavily over Europe.

Corporate streaming TV seems to be engulfed in a never-ending chasing of its own tail. Its programming attempts to frantically flee any form of social reality, even as that reality becomes more desperate for those working-class and middle-class viewers living it.

Digital companies use the programming to simply present the virtual world as an ever-expanding source of the abundance so sorely lacking in the actual lives of workers. Take Amazon’s The Peripheral, part working-class Southern rural woman’s struggle, like Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, but the larger part, and the inducement for the series, is that same woman roaming freely through time and space in her online gaming life, like Westworld or the much better – because also critical of that dichotomy – Ready Player One.

The Peripheral is by the creators of Westworld, and much like the unwieldy attempts of characters to navigate the “multiverse” in Phase 4 of the Marvel Universe, amounts to a big budget inane leaping from world to world, in a failed attempt to leave this one behind. Facebook/Meta’s own attempt to foster this interior flight from reality – whose exterior equivalent is Elan Musk’s Space X which asserts that a lucky few will start over on Mars when earth is destroyed – is failing. Meta’s projected membership of 500,000 is instead less than 200,000 with company stock falling 62% as for many the $1500 headgear is too high a price for a trip to fantasy land.

This Autumn has witnessed huge investments in streaming production values as the competition between these megacorporations accelerates. The largest among them are using their financial heft to not only beat their close competitors but also to drive other streamers, unable to match the expensive “look” of these productions, out of the business. Thus, HBO’s Throne of the Dragon costs $20 million per episode and $200 million for the season, doubling the cost of its predecessor Game of Thrones. Amazon’s Rings of Power goes one better, at $715 million for Season 1 and $90 million per episode.

Forced to represent reality

The silver lining in this race to oblivion is that both private and public channels around the world, although they cannot match the budgets of these series, are forced to produce series which deal with the actual breakdown of the global system as it affects the lives of the working and middle classes. The best of the current crop of these series are Irish public television’s North Sea Connection, available on Viaplay, and from Australia, which is the current leader in Social Realist TV, Australian public television’s Savage River and Significant Others on Paramount+, Australian Commercial TV’s After the Verdict on Apple TV+, and the Australian Indigenous Network’s True Colours, streaming on the Sundance Channel.

The average cost of a single episode on Australian TV is $760,000. So in a sense, outflanked in the ability to create alternative fantasy worlds and unable to match Amazon’s $90 million and HBO Max’s $20 million, these smaller entities are “forced” to take into account the actual problems facing their lead characters. This is similar to what happened in the Hollywood studio era of the 1940s to RKO, the least wealthy of the Big 5 monopoly studios at that time. RKO embraced film noir eg in Crossfire, whose subject was anti-Semitism, with the “value added” being the social content of the screenplays, rather than lavish production numbers.

North Sea Connection centers on a family fishing business, with the oldest daughter Kiera following in her dead father’s footsteps as the captain of a small fishing trawler. Her brother Aiden who tells her she cannot any longer make a living as an honest fisher – “Those days are gone and you know it” – instead, in language and flashy appearance that mark him as a representative of the “anything goes” neoliberal order, strikes a bargain with a methamphetamine dealer to begin bringing that drug into an Ireland that before, as the local cop says, “doesn’t have a meth problem.” Aiden sucks Kiera into his scheme, explaining his using his fishing processing plant as a dumping ground for drugs as “a business transaction that benefits both of the parties.” He later excuses the death of one of the dealer’s henchmen on Kiera’s boat as a “work accident.” Aiden’s moneymaking frenzy also involves another type of addiction as he gambles on the horses and is late to meet his wife for an adoption interview.

Elsewhere, Kiera’s mother (Sinéad Cusack), married to a Swede, discovers a criminal past that enabled them to buy their house and indicates that, for those living off the land to survive, the only path, in a globalized world organized against them, is the illegal one, a similar theme as that raised in last year’s Irish production A Clean Break. A viewer’s post accompanying the show accuses it of wasting national acting treasure Cusack’s talent in a middling production. The post itself is perhaps the result of the mega-streamer’s creation of the expectation of financial onscreen bombast replacing a more human scale, in a series that centres its critique of the inhuman values that emanate from these outsized productions.

Katherine Langford in Savage River 

The trope of the convicted criminal completing their sentence and returning to an unforgiving town has already produced two remarkable series in Sundance’s Rectify and Daisy Haggard’s Back to Life – and here in the Australian Broadcasting Company’s Savage River it produces a third. Miki (13 Reasons Why’s Katherine Langford which this series will turn into a megastar) has supposedly killed her best friend and returns after a five-year jail sentence to a small town where all activity is centred around a sheep slaughterhouse and meat packing plant.

Miki quickly finds herself in the midst of another murder she is blamed for and in the later part of the series (episodes 5 and 6 of 6) she transforms from victim to active detective hunting the actual murderer. The slimy owner of the meat works wants to sell the plant to a global enterprise which he knows will mean job cuts, but when the town reacts the corporation pulls out because although they will clearly hollow out the enterprise, “our brand is community engagement not community warfare.”

The female mayoral candidate is opposed by the longstanding mayor who drips corruption from every pore and is in league with the meat works owner in putting across the sale. The female candidate proposes instead that the workers buy the plant, which the owner scoffs at, claiming he could get “4 million” from the corporate buyers and “these idiots don’t have 50 between them.”

On the personal level, Miki is courted by both the local high school teacher, the mayor’s son, who abandoned her when she went to jail and now comes back around and an Indigenous fellow worker who offers her affection and friendship and who, as part of her challenging the power structure, she warms to. Savage River is one of the year’s best series and extremely attuned to the challenges and potential opportunities for collective organization facing the town’s workers.

Ordinary people in After The Verdict  

After the Verdict, as attuned to the fraying middle class as Savage River is to workers, uses a gimmick to introduce a murder mystery that is fairly apparent from the start. Four ordinary jurors, all beset in various ways with their own problems, free Laura, a wealthy female suspect, who they then suspect may have used her class position and ease with power as tools to convince them she is innocent. The jurors then meet “after the verdict” to investigate whether or not they have made the wrong decision and perhaps been bamboozled by the woman’s wealth and position.

Clara, a Chinese-Australian and mother of two who is negotiating a divorce with a husband who centred the marriage around him, is also underpaid and overworked at her clerical job. Daniel, eminently bribable, is a high school teacher, as in Breaking Bad, who can’t make ends meet as he attempts to provide some kind of life for his teenage daughter. Ollie is a sleazy and seductive real estate agent who has problems with abandonment which have kept him alone and isolated. Finally, Margie, a butcher, is in a relationship with an on-call overnight nurse Trish who distrusts Margie’s ability to be honest.

Budding class co-operation

Flawed characters all, but the flaws of each also have everything to do with a middle class under constant pressure to pretend that all is well as the weight of work pressures, debt and their own family history impinge on them. The relationships each form – two unlikely romantic couples, but also a male friendship of Ollie with Daniel and a female one with Margie that Ollie claims is a first in his life – are the heart of this series. The hopeful interactions of the group, as well as the fact that each is menaced by the wealthy figure of Laura, turn this from a despairing Breaking Bad'  into a show about how fellow-feeling enables budding class cooperation to bloom in a series about the enduring and endearing relationships among these set-upon characters.The mystery thus takes a back seat to the enduring and endearing relationships between these set-upon characters. Less slick on the same subject as Ozark and in the end vastly more hopeful.

Toni and her mother in True Colours 

The trope of the cop coming home which fuels most Scandinavian Crime Series, or Scandi Noir, is employed in National Indigenous Television’s True Colours to follow an overweight, and we later find out, pregnant cop sent further into Australia’s Northern Territories, the center of Aboriginal life, to discover what has happened to a young girl thrown from a car in mysterious circumstances. The casting is akin to that of the Australian series Significant Others where various flawed and physically mundane family members come together in a rundown home. Likewise, the characters peopling True Colours are anything but Hollywood glamorous. Instead, the series opts for a gritty portrayal of various Indigenous retaining their lifestyle and customs as a way of confronting poverty.

The True Colours of the series are of two varieties. The first is the open racism of the society, as in the opening urban sequence Toni, the plain clothes detective, is confronted by a convenience store clerk who calls her “a f***ing black” and who she then follows and tickets. The other meaning of true colours is the constant array of splendid Indigenous art as Toni, back home, visits a group of elderly female artists painting a mural that will be displayed in Paris – reminiscent of a recent exhibition in that city by Indigenous artist Sally Gabori –though their white broker, a sister in the tribe, will earn 60 percent of the profits.

Each of these series in their own way counter both the big budget “metaverses” of the corporate streamers and the flashy and insincere casting of series such as ABC’s Big Sky, supposedly a slice of life in Montana but is actually an array of beautiful, toned Hollywood types masquerading as ordinary. There is a huge gap between Ireland and Australia’s accurate representations of the working and middle classes, and of Indigenous peoples, and Hollywood’s ‘Montana Hunks’.

In the second article on Documenta 15, Dennis Broe outlines the criticism of the festival, and reviews the Berlin Biennale. Image above: Group Sharing at the Main Hall 

Documenta 15, the lumbung Documenta, curated by an Indonesian collective and the first major art festival in the West to be given over entirely to a developing world group, has been unceasingly attacked by Western critics as being anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli.

The rationale of this festival is a concerted challenge by various developing world collectives on Western capitalist individual and productivist modes in art and in the world in general. The festival’s early statement about critics characterizing it as “non-art” is that “We refuse to be exploited by European institutional agendas that are not ours to begin with.”

Another art institution operating a concurrent festival, the Berlin Biennale, though at points stridently critical itself of these practices, also worked to some extent as a counter to the more unbridled spirit of the lumbung Documenta.

Education

A major part of Documenta is education, and the opening room of the Fridericianum, the main display area, is given over to an “educational playground for kids” where “children and artists can connect.”

This alternative attempt at education was answered by the West by appointing a panel to conduct a “scientific” investigation of the site. The panel then declared the festival was rife with anti-Semitism, a charge especially in Germany with its horrible history that is designed to be the main way most people hearing of the festival will remember it.

There are several points to make about this charge. The first is that no shred of anti-Semitism should ever be tolerated, especially in Germany which not only has its genocidal past to deal with but also a powerful far-right party, the AFD, where these sentiments may surface.

In the most radical of the groups at the festival, Taring Padi, the inquiry found a distorted representation of a hook-nosed figure in a mural which the group quickly removed. When asked, by the way, where the figure came from, their answer was that they did not know who had drawn it since they were a collective and could not recall, but that there was a strong possibility that the iconography had originated with the Dutch colonizers – i.e. the West.

Other instances are more problematic. The festival has been attacked for a cinematic exhibit by a Japanese group called Tokyo Reel whose found footage of several 1960s and ’70s Palestinian films, transmitted originally to the long-since disbanded Red Army, runs in an clever cinematic display where the footage is the centre of a painted film strip. The films themselves are seen as one of the opening salvos of what was to become a Third World Film Movement, a key part of the filmmaking of that period. They highlight, for example, the treatment of Palestinians in the camps in various parts of the Middle East and call Zionist practice and methods into question. The curators refused to remove the films.

An exhibit about the role of Algerian women in that country’s struggle for independence, an unearthing of a too-long-forgotten history undertaken by the Hirak people’s movement which has attempted reform in that country, consisted prominently of two blown-up silkscreens of women in the streets together rallying to overturn the 130-year history of French rule. There was also apparently a book with anti-Semitic photos in a table off to the side, which should simply have been removed. But, to find that book, a spectator would have to search mightily and would have to ignore the thrust of the exhibition. In many ways the criticism is designed to have spectators do just that – to ignore 99 percent of the content and focus on the 1 percent that should have been removed. But the critics claim the entire festival is replete with this imagery.

Anti-semitism, anti-Zionism and critiques of current Israeli state policies

This claim is the standard one of attempting to collapse three concepts, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and any critique of the policies of the current Israeli state. The first is loathsome, should be erased and has no place in any festival or in the world. The second, anti-Zionism, in some way depends on one’s perspective and is echoed by the statement by a Jewish commentator that the founding of the Jewish state is the greatest triumph and the worst tragedy of the 20th century – a triumph for the Jewish people but a tragedy in light of the endless war and destruction it has brought to the region.

On the question though of the current policies of the state of Israel, which continues to move further and further to the right, there is no doubt that, as Marx said, what is needed is “ruthless criticism of the existing order.” This is a colonial apartheid state, with its left mostly erased, that brooks no interference.

It is also now perhaps, besides the U.S., the most ruthlessly neoliberal capitalist state which in its digital defence industry supports spyware from companies like Pegasus, developed from surveillance of Palestinians and which recently finally admitted to killing a female Al Jazeera journalist, after first blaming the Palestinians. It said it was sorry and then closed the case with no investigation over whether or not this was a targeted assassination.

The attempt at Documenta, and elsewhere, is to silence any criticism of the Israeli state by conflating the three concepts. There were some errors made at Documenta, foremost among them being that there should have been more participation among Jewish progressive collectives and groups critical of the policies of Israel – for example, Jewish Voices for Peace which supports the BDS boycott. BDS, which essentially attempts to organize a ban on all products coming from the settler-colonial factories of the occupied West Bank, though it is now outlawed in Germany and in many states in the U.S., continues to gather momentum and constitutes a major global challenge to these practices.

The larger thrust of the critique though is that this is the West’s answer to the people in the developing world who critique its institutions. While the lumbung Documenta was in many ways about education, the “scientific” panel convened to “investigate” Documenta was in effect doing a little schooling of its own, that is, teaching this group of collectives that they had better think twice before again launching such a critique.

The Berlin Biennale

A softer, more restrained but in ways no less adamant critique of Western practices, though one solidly contained by the parameters of the contemporary art world, was the recently concluded Berlin Biennale.

Here, as in Documenta, abstraction was minimized as artists confronted the issues of the day with a sometimes obsessive, documentary intensity. Moses Marz’ mapmaking highlights the spirit of Bandung, the Asian and African newly independent states’ conference in 1955 that announced their non-aligned position of independence from the major powers in the Cold War. The work – a maze of arrows, text and circles – is in its intensity a kind of political Art Brut or Outsider Art, an unearthing and charting of colonial cruelty and its resistance with all the painstaking detail of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls, but here in a geopolitical rather than a psychosexual context.

India’s Prabhakar Kamble’s ragged feet of agricultural workers with a metal filament then leading to in one case a miniature of a blue cow, points to the fact that that beast is sacred in the country, while poor rural workers form the foundation, the feet of the economy but are ground under by this oppressive inequality.

Likewise, Birender Yadav’s actual worn sandals spread out below photographs of the almost numb feet of workers in a brick factory, their feet as hard as bricks, recall Van Gogh’s peasants’ feet in a global linking of oppressed workers. 

Juan Jacques Lebel’s life-size photos of the torture at the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib with U.S. soldiers looking on amused, interspersed with photos of the Shock and Awe annihilation of the Baghdad, was even more effectively rendered because it was laid out in a maze where it was difficult to keep from getting lost in the “fog of war.”

Dau Chau Hai’s “Ballad of the East Sea” was a sculpture of undulating waves with sharp blades, waves that could kill, as the sea – think of the current U.S. battleships in the South China Sea –becomes increasingly militarized.

Finally, Alex Prager’s “Crowd #4 New Haven” was a crowd scene shot from above where all the individuals in this collective space are exerting every inch of their will to accentuate their own personality – through hair style, dress, and makeup – and deny the existence of the collective. Ultimately, in a way that throws that consumer defined concept into question, they are imprisoned in the very “individuality” that is supposed to mark their freedom.

The Berlin Biennale, a safer art space operating within the more abstract and conceptual framework of the commercial art world, nevertheless like Documenta pointed to the fact that Western modes of production and conceptualizing are not only homogenizing but also destroying the planet. Documenta’s bolder presentation of this case drew fire from outside the art world – though it was strongly supported from within – but both events call attention to a moment of crisis that cannot be resolved by simply shooting the messenger.

In the first of two articles on Documenta 15, Dennis Broe outlines the thinking behind the festival and some of its artworks. Image above: Group Sharing at the Main Hall 

This article will consider the impact of a monumental event in the art world, the turning over of Documenta, Kassel's quinquennial art festival. Documenta has been developed and managed by a series of collectives under the organizational framework of the Indonesian group Ruangrupa, the first such direction of a major art festival in the West by an Asian and Muslim group from the developing world.

Ruangrupa and the 50 participants, mostly collectives, rethought and refashioned the foundational concepts of not only how the art object is presented, but also the place of art in the developing world and in the West. They also addressed the issue of how art is, rather than simply being “consumed,” capable of critiquing the productivist development of the West and of posing new ways of being, and new solutions.

The project has been roundly criticized for daring this wholesale reimagining, mostly under the rubrics of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and criticism of the policies of the Israeli state. This first article will present the critique Documenta poses, and the second will consider the attack on it as well as examining the Berlin Biennale – a more art world friendly, but still cantankerous and challenging simultaneous presentation. Documenta closes this weekend, the Biennale closed last weekend, but both have challenged and in ways tried to upend preconceived perceptions both in the art world and more widely.

Socialising the production of art

Let’s start with the radical slogan of this year’s art festival in Kassel: “We are not in Documenta fifteen, we are in lumbung one.” In Indonesia a lumbung is a rice barn where the surplus harvest is stored to benefit the community in time of need. So Ruangrupa extends the concept of lumbung to this festival and, more importantly, to the world at large, as sharing the fruits of the system of production for the benefit of all. The concept is a developing world answer and a socialist answer to the private and extractive capitalist schemes of the West which have exploited the rest of the world for so long.

In the art world, the application of lumbung means not only throwing the festival open to collective labour but also viewing the practice of art not primarily as a production of a commodity but rather a means of opening up group participation, education and creativity. Thus, art is not individually made and consumed but rather collectively produced and digested as an opening to changing the world. Ruangrupa thus challenges the old system of state funding and/or free market art systems, or even biennial circuits such as Documenta, which it defines as “highly competitive, globally expansive, greedy and capitalist—in short exploitative and extractive.”

Thus, for example, another Indonesian collective Taring Padi, uses cardboard cutouts in street demonstrations and murals to indict the killing behind the global foundation of Indonesia’s island paradise Bali, financed by Western capital and built on the graves of the dead.

These artworks then resist being torn from their function in their real life social-political context and point the way to an art that is “no longer pursuing mere individual expression, no longer needing to be exhibited in stand-alone objects or sold to individual collectors and hegemonic state-funded museums.” 

Passive spectating versus active participation

“Lumbung calling,” another slogan of the festival, this one adopted from The Clash’s apocalyptic song “London Calling,” is here converted into a plea for humanity to avert the apocalypse. In practice this has meant work that, unlike much of the objects in the Berlin Biennale, does not obscure the issue by hiding behind the patina of making vague statements through a highly conceptual veil of abstraction. For daring to confront these issues directly, for bloodying itself with a confrontation of the actual results of these centuries of Western colonialism, the first critique that this version of Documenta faced by Western critics was that this was “not art.”

The difference was striking between the Biennale, with its more traditional mode of spectators passively contemplating individual works and measuring their comprehension against the artist’s concealed intent, and Documenta, with its groups of students and mostly young people engaging with and working out ways in which the artworks spurred discussion and action. So spectators became participants, they changed from being commodified consumers into activists together groping for means of change.

As in the metaphor of lumbung, the rice collective, many of these means recalled earlier methods of being part of the earth, as in the elaborate Vietnamese garden constructed on the grounds of a well-known local nightclub by a Hanoi collective. But their works also necessarily bore the traces of formerly or still colonized peoples labouring under the burden of being “developing nations,” a sobriquet that conceals the fact not only that they have been vastly underdeveloped and exploited by the West, but also that their path should be itself productivist, always “developing.”

Thus, at the Fridericianum, the main site of the festival, there was a tent labelled “Indigenous Embassy” with the slogan “We want land not handouts” as everywhere on the earth the claims of the original tenders of the earth are gathering steam and being taken more seriously. Their practices are vying for attention against the harmfully extractive methods which are destroying the planet e.g. the battle in Canada for its place as leading mineral miner versus the claims of those on the land whose life will be upended; and Biden’s “Environmental Protection Bill” which opens Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico up to oil drilling. A continual ticker above the festival building like the one in Times Square, New York, kept pacing out the money the Australian government owes First Nations Groups from 1901 to the present day, with the figure reaching into the trillions and still mounting.

Instead of simply locating themselves in the two main halls, as other iterations of the festival have done, Documenta’s collectives have also expanded out into the city, in what Ruangrupa calls “the ekosistem.” The institution itself, begun in 1955, was designed as an antidote and a mea culpa for the place of its site Kassel as a primary manufacturer of the armaments which fueled the Nazi war machine. As such Documenta, the most political of all art festivals, has always taken as its mission to highlight this grievous moment in the city’s past.

This trend broadens in this latest iteration as the lumbung Documenta expands or ‘occupies’ not only various sites in the city but also expands its critique, to encompass the postwar development of what became known as “the city of the car,” with the automobile replacing weapons manufacturing in the 1950s “economic miracle,” a situation globally that has accounted for numerous deaths in densely populated urban areas because of diesel pollution.

Thus, the headquarters of the clothing company C&A, an unadorned and monotonous façade typical of postwar reconstruction, is illuminated with a Taring Padi banner ablaze with colour and featuring a steadfast Karl Marx in the upper corner looking askance at the company. It profited under the Nazi regime, seizing Jewish assets and employing forced labour but it has also been accused in the global neoliberal era of employing sweatshop labour from the developing world.

What could possibly go wrong?

A platz near the centre is covered underfoot with headlines from Romanian Dan Perjovschi’s Horizontal Newspaper, with one containing the slogan WAteR, proclaiming the water wars to come, another ominously announcing that “I am so grateful to be in the last Documenta” and a third picturing a word balloon from an ocean liner whose cheery passengers address those below being submerged in a raft with the comforting slogan “We are all in this together.” Perjovschi’s project, as does much of the work here, democratizes the staid art world convention of Conceptualism, where meanings are obscure and which led not to a critique of art world materiality but only to a new form of commodification, this time focusing on the word as saleable object.

What might have been a plaza, a public place for gathering at the corner of two streets in the centre of Kassel, because of the dominance of the automobile in ’50s city planning became simply a traffic circle, with pedestrians directed underground. So Ruangrupa turned the bleak underground space over to the Black Quantum Futurism collective from Philadelphia, whose lively photo montages with slogans over a slave ship read “Black People Navigate Western Timelines as Our Ancestors Did The Stars” and “Dissolve the Arrow of Progress,” as the collective called attention to the global devastation this “progress” caused.

It must be mentioned also that with the Ukraine war now being the occasion for Germany and Japan to rearm, Kassel is again becoming a site of not only the manufacture of cars but also of weapons building for a new German war machine. What could possibly go wrong?

The extension out into the city also featured multiple works in the manufacturing district of Bettenhausen, generally ignored in previous Documentas. The Hallenbad Ost, formerly a workers’ swimming facility, was taken over by Taring Padi, the most radical group in the festival. That Taring Padi should install itself in a workers’ facility is fitting since the group, from Yogyakarta, aligns itself with working-class concerns.

The collective traces its origins to its involvement in protests and street demonstrations at the moment when the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis brought down the longtime U.S. supported dictator Suharto. The name itself means “fangs of rice,” suggesting the grain can support a community but also that it can prick opponents.

The lawn of the Hallenbad Ost, part of an interior and exterior display of over 100 objects from the group’s 22 years of active protest, was filled with cardboard cutout puppets used in street demonstrations, called wayang kardus, which take the more elite form of Indonesian puppet theatre and make it available for expressing people’s political concerns. One cutout had a Suharto figure clutching money bags while hovering over a ballot box and swaying
elections.

There is a gorgeous multitude of murals, often visually citing the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. In one, a woman linking Indonesian and Mexican indigenous peoples bursts her chains. Another mural transposes Bosch’s vision of hell into a modern history of the diabolical world of Indonesia’s historical exploitation by the Dutch, the Japanese, Suharto and the global capital that backed him.

That vision was laid out in a series of murals about the murder of thousands on the island of Bali in 1965-66 and the subsequent decision, even as the killings of the island’s left and any who had an association with them continued, to build Bali into a global “pleasure dome” with money supplied by “the World Bank, The French Tourism Board and the UN Development Program.”

The construction was done, Taring Padi relates, with no input from those on the island and with hotels possibly built over the mass graves, concealing the largest massacre in the country’s history, worse than the Dutch or the Japanese massacres. One black and white mural accompanying this story features an army officer prominently leading and salivating over the killing below him.

Countering this is a stunning full-color mural of an Indonesian princess with a tiger striding majestically across a busy modern intersection. In the background are billboards proposing “Skin Care” and other Western capitalist beauty products which the commanding natural beauty of the princess negates. Her almost mystical presence also recalls Indonesian folklore and its use in sustaining the country against its history of incursions, outlined for example in Eka Kurniawan’s novel Beauty is a Wound.

Mark Zuckerburg as Pinocchio

Finally, there was a more traditional art world presentation in an exhibition about myth by Mexican artist Erick Beltrán in Kassel’s Sepulchral Museum, which contains medieval burial objects. A wall of various mythical representations is introduced with standard late postmodern art world gobbledygook claiming that myths only produce “vacant meaning,” are “unknowable and equal” (so thus why try to understand them).

The one saving grace in a juxtaposition of images which never exceed their place as pretentious collage is that of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with a slightly oversized nose as Pinocchio, calling attention to the lies he tells at every congressional hearing to outwit those who would regulate his enterprise.

Documenta 15, the lumbung Documenta, opens the way for a developing world conception of art that directly embraces the current world crisis and that challenges and will continue to challenge Western traditions and institutions. The attack by those institutions will be the subject of the second part of this series.

Dennis Broe reviews The Battle at Lake Changjin, the second highest grossing film of 2021. Image above: Jacky Wu as rough and ready commander of the Revolution’s 7^th Company

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi readies an announcement of a state visit to Taiwan that is most likely to stoke calls for Taiwanese independence, China continues to warn the U.S. about upping its level of aggression in a land that both the U.S. and China have affirmed for almost half a century is a part of China.

The U.S. media has been waging a non-stop ideological war against China, with the New York Times including an almost daily obligatory negative story on some aspect of Chinese policy. Likewise, The Financial Times, in a recent review of two books on Hong Kong with invective from both the books and the reviewer, described the Chinese leader Xi Jinping as “ruthless” and Chinese leaders in general as promoting “totalitarian vandalism,” as being living fossils of Leninism as well as “rich, mighty…cruel and corrupt.” The review ended with a final assessment of the leaders of the world’s second largest economy as “thugs.”

Meanwhile Margaret Thatcher, who almost singlehandedly defeated the British working class, is viewed as “refreshingly libertarian.”  The western capitalist corporate media cannot stop chiding China for its “draconian” Covid lockdown policy, which is partly a prod on the part of Western leaders to push China back to full production of the cheap goods needed in the West to assuage populations which, with both a recession and rising inflation, otherwise cannot afford them.

The Loud American: Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan? 

The media are also keen to keep Western audiences from making a comparison between the “authoritarian” Chinese system and the “democratic” system in its handling of the pandemic. In June 2022, the U.S. attained the horrendous peak of over 1 million deaths, the most in the world, or 3,042 deaths per million, with its allies in Europe not doing much better at 2,434 deaths per million. China meanwhile for the same period registered 5,226 total deaths or 3.7 deaths per million, sharply contesting the old Orientalist adage that “people in those countries don’t value human lives.” Had the U.S. followed China’s “draconian” methods, it would have had 1,307 deaths instead of over 1 million. China’s policy was also better for business because in the Covid lockdown the Chinese economy continued to grow but at a slower rate, while the U.S. economy contracted.

The Chinese though are asserting and defending themselves. Nowhere more prominently perhaps than in the cinema where last year’s box office bonanza The Battle at Lake Changjin, available on Apple TV and soon on Netflix, about Chinese entry into the Korean War for the purpose, according to the film, of defending the successful revolution from American aggression. Lake Changjin was not only the highest grossing film in Chinese history, with a sequel already released this year, but also was last year’s second highest grossing film in the world at $913 million, and that included Hollywood releases.

Chinese audiences flocked to see the film, which is one of the most expensive ever made with a budget of over $200 million. It was commissioned by the Chinese Communist Party and released on National Day, which celebrates the birth of the People’s Republic in 1949. A triumvirate of Chinese auteurs, Chen Kaige, Dante Lam and Tsui Hark whose Taking of Tiger Mountain was a momentous World War II epic, directed the film, which stars Jacky Wu, the lead in two previous action blockbusters, 2015’s Wolf Warrior and 2017’s Wolf Warrior 2.

The differences in the villains in Lake Changjin and Wolf Warrior are instructive in understanding the difference China has travelled in its response to the concerted bellicose intentions of Joe Biden’s neo-con foreign service. The Wolf Warrior battles and bests a rogue ex-NAVY Seal in the former, while the might of the Chinese army faces and routs the superior technology of the U.S. forces in Korea in the latter.

Wu Qianli (Jacky Wu) returns in 1950 from the Chinese Civil War as an honoured commander of the People’s Liberation Army’s rough and rowdy 7^th Company. He has been promised a piece of land which he intends to cultivate to take care of his parents. But he and the 7^th Company are quickly called back into battle as the Americans are threatening to cross the Yalu River, the border between Korea and China and bring the war to China. The American commander Douglas MacArthur, one of the villains of the piece, is shown at his most aggressive and bellicose, wanting to invade China and crush the revolution.

Wu Qianli and his rebellious younger brother who joins the unit face multiple challenges in battling the superior American air and armoured tank force. From the air, the American bombers, gleeful about raining death and destruction, strike and decimate the train transporting the company and they then have to wade through the mountains in snow and ice to reach the battlefield.

Industrious versus industrial

The film demonstrates on the battlefield what Giovanni Arrighi in Adam Smith in Beijing describes as the “industrious” quality of the overwhelming might of the Chinese population versus the “industrial” might of Western technology. The men of the 7^th Company play dead in order to avoid American strafing from the air. Later, in a battle against enemy tanks, one of the company stalwarts sacrifices himself to drive a jeep with a marker for the American bomber pilots behind an American retreating column so the pilots mistake the column for the enemy and bomb it.

The 7^th Company out in the cold

The relative poverty of the Chinese economy in 1950 is stressed as at Thanksgiving the Americans share turkey and stuffing while the Chinese in the mountains above them pass around potatoes, which they divide into quarters in order that they all may eat. Nevertheless, the film shows the Chinese victorious and features an extended scene with the American soldiers in retreat.

Lake Changjin, in its presentation of the colorful characters of the 7^th, utilizes many of the tropes of the American World War II Platoon Film (Battleground, Bataan), including stressing the democratic nature of the people’s army. Unlike subsequent American films, where the enemy is often either faceless or vicious, the American soldiers in several scenes are humanized, shown equally as nervous as the Chinese about preparing for battle. It is their leaders, pushing them to fight in a far-off war, who are the problem in the film and not them.

Battleground and the American World War II Platoon Film 

Nevertheless, the film does make several relevant points clear which ought to, but probably won’t, function as a caution to current U.S. policy makers.

Defending the revolution

The first is that the Chinese will fight to the last man and woman to defend their country and to defend the revolution. Wu Qianli and his cohorts' call to battle is that this is “The War to End Aggression and to Aid Korea.” The film sees the designs of the Americans in approaching the Yalu River as part of a plan to crush the Revolution and the men talk about fighting this war so that future generations won’t have to fight. Indeed, the Chinese intervention in Korea secured, at least for China, over 70 years of peace and the ability to develop its economy.

As such, the Korean intervention, as viewed by the film, may be seen as akin to the Civil War after the Russian Revolution where Lenin, his party and the Russian people had to battle the combined force of European and U.S. Western capitalist states, all bent on crushing their revolution – in Churchill’s famous phrase “strangling Bolshevism at its birth.”

The second point is that there is a new, renewed and more vigorous interest in China today in the origins of the People’s Republic. Mao, a creature of total disdain in the Western media, appears in the film as a reasonable figure who does not want to go to war after the years of the Civil War, but recognizes that it is necessary and allows his son to join the fighting. There is particularly a renewed interest by Chinese youth in Mao and Marxism that is similar to how for U.S. youth, who are watching their future and the future of the planet deteriorate under capitalist war and income disparity, the word “socialism” can now be spoken.

Meanwhile Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland and the rest of Biden’s neo-cons promote aggressive rhetoric which would make the two Bush administrations blush. American “democracy” descends into the leader of one party flirting with announcing his candidacy for President to avoid being arrested, and the might of the other party using the legislative apparatus to label their rival candidate criminal because they have fulfilled none of their promises and thus cannot beat him any other way. It thus does not appear to the world that American “democracy” is a shining beacon against Chinese “authoritarianism.”

The lesson of Lake Changjin, which enjoyed such widespread support within China that the film set the world record for domestic box office, is that a fading empire had better think twice about continuing on its hell-bent path to a war that may only result in another American retreat.   

Mr. Zelensky Goes To Washington

Vladimir Zelensky has been called many things, depending on which side of the now firmer divide, with the U.S. attempting to recreate the old Iron Curtain, an observer falls. To some he is a hero, valiant defender of a small nation against a mighty one, David to Putin’s Goliath, or a saviour, turning back an invasion by sheer willpower. To others he is a stooge, playing at diplomacy while not actually knowing what he is doing or, worse yet, a puppet, with the U.S., NATO and Ukrainian oligarchs pulling his strings. But, perhaps the more accurate characterization of Zelensky is to take seriously what he is in actuality, an actor, one who has been called upon to play at least four roles.

Servant of the People

Zelensky’s series, Servant of the People, now a global sensation running on Netflix and Arte in France, ran for three seasons, 51 episodes. It catapulted an Alberto Sordi-type everyman into the Ukrainian presidency, based on a diatribe against corruption that one of the students in his high-school history class recorded and posted and then went viral.

The show, which premiered in 2015, is a populist fable about how Vasily Petrovich Holoborodko, in his 30s, divorced and living with his parents, boasts that the country would change if he could just rule it for one week and then gets his wish. The villains on the show are Kiev oligarchs, shown in the opening from the back or in close-up with just their deceiving lips moving as high above the city they boast about the mockery of elections where each controls a different candidate supposedly opposing each other.

Holoborodko unifies the country, claiming that a small portion in the extreme East “The Separatists” and the West “The Nationalists,” both supported by the oligarchs, divide the nation by “country, language and birth.” Instead, Holoborodko preaches unity since “we are all human beings,” illustrated in the last episode by Ukrainian Russians from the “Far East” with their technical expertise assisting in saving miners trapped in the “Far West”. This recalls Georg Pabst’s Weimer film Kameradshaft (Comradeship) with its German and French working class coming together to heal the wounds of the trenches where they were exiled by their oligarchs. The show is a sort of Welcome Back Kotter meets House of Cards where the innocence of the high school teacher in the first rubs up against the cynical power structure of the second.    

One of the show’s funnier sequences has two parliamentarians having sex in an antechamber in one scene and in the next violently opposing each other on the legislative floor. The fake antipathy recalls the Clinton era marriage of Democratic consultant James Carville and Republican and George Bush consultant and Clinton opponent Mary Matlin whose tryst, instead of suggesting complicity by the nation’s rulers in a faux two-party system, as People suggests, instead was marvelled at by the media as a model of “civility.”

Another sequence has a temporary female president supposedly worried about the country but with her anxiety then revealed to be instead about the outfit she is wearing, a page torn from the narcissistic would-be president in Veep. There is a kind of zaniness to this political satire, most evident in the unrelenting music, mocking the always-on-the-go advisors putting a president through his vacuous paces. The show’s dourness contains more than a dollop of Russian fatalist humor and the series was very popular in Russia.  

Servant of the People – The Reality Series

Scarcely had the show finished its run in 2019, when Holoborodko/Zelensky was himself elected president, running on a platform copied right from his character on the show, promising peace, prosperity, and unity while portraying himself as a kind of homespun man of the people, ala Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, who would wage war against political corruption. He would also be a healer, a Jewish Russian speaker from the East who promised to “reboot” failed peace talks with the breakaway provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk and negotiate a “ceasefire” to end a war that had been destroying the country since 2014. Ukrainians, whose level of distrust of their government had reached a world low of 9 percent by the time of that election, ushered Zelensky/Holoborodko into office in a second-round landslide where he beat the standing president Petro Poroshenko, regarded by electors as a part of the oligarchy, by 73 to 24 percent.

Servant of the Oligarchs

Unfortunately, once in office, he himself behaved more like Kevin Spacey’s Machiavellian manipulator in House of Cards then Gabe Kaplan’s affable instructor in Welcome Back Kotter. His clean-up of corruption turned out to be primarily to make Ukraine safe for foreign capital, and so he set about attempting to please Western financial institutions above all else. His neoliberal reforms were in fact even too fast for, as he put it, “The Europeans, the IMF, the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and The World Bank, which were “very happy,” but, he reported, urged him to “slow down a little.”

A key demand of these institutions was “land reforms,” that is a privatizing and monopolizing of lands long held in common since the Soviet period, and the subject of Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko’s 1930 film Earth, as well as deregulation of the banking system. The land reform measure was widely opposed with 72 percent against this attempt to accustom the country to, in Zelensky’s words, “the normality of capitalism.” These neoliberal reforms, which Zelensky happily championed, led to industrial decline, salaries in arrears, rising unemployment and—and this is before the war with Russia—massive labor migration and depopulation, with experts predicting the country would lose one-fifth of its population by 2050, to the point where, by the time of the Russian invasion, Ukraine was the second poorest country in Europe, behind only its neighbour Moldavia.    

On top of this, there was a paucity of cases instituted to further Zelensky’s nominal mandate, to clean up corruption. A promised corruption task force, the Bureau for Economic Security, still not fully operational almost 3 years after the election. Finally, tensions in Ukraine did not decline but increased as the war in the Donbass dragged on with 14,000 citizens of the two now-breakaway republics killed before the Russian invasion as “unity” broke down with Zelensky, the great unifier, refusing to contest a law that mandated Ukrainian state workers only to speak Ukrainian, though 40 percent of the country speaks Russian. A few months after entering office he had an approval rating of 57%, but by August 2021, that number had dropped to 29, with 69 percent believing the county was going in the wrong direction. Perhaps Zelensky as this point was simply channeling the Peter Sellers character in Being There, Chance the gardener who as unassuming advisor to the White House is inflated to become Chauncey Gardiner.

A more sinister interpretation though accompanied this drop in popularity, as it was revealed that the owner of 1+1 Media the popular television channel that aired Servant, Igor Kolomoyskyi, lent his personal lawyer to Zelensky to be campaign advisor and contributed to and promoted his candidacy on 1+1 and various other media outlets he owned. Once in office, Zelensky removed the oligarch’s opponents, the Prosecutor General, the Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine and his own prime minister who tried to regulate the media oligarch’s control of a state-owned electricity company. At that point Zelensky appeared more like the oligarchs in the opening scene of Servant than the crusading teacher who had only the people’s interests in mind. All this suggests that the serendipity of Servant may instead have been a carefully calculated campaign hatched not in 2019 at the time of the election but in 2015, as the show debuted to widely popular audiences.  

Servant of the Empire

Zelensky’s world popularity, after reaching its absolute nadir in his own country, echoes that of George W. Bush in his before and after 9/11 transformation from academic ne’er do well to wartime leader. Perhaps the last role though is more ominous. With his popularity declining, Zelensky moved to institute more strict controls on freedom in the country. He has sanctioned political rivals and silenced television channels controlled by them, going so far in 2021 as to suggest that those in the Donbass sympathetic to Russia “immigrate there.” His party has also moved to pass a regressive labour law, curtailing rights on working hours and working conditions, as well as making it easier to dismiss workers without compensation, while even going so far as to cancel the rights of women to not be compelled to do strenuous labor. A previous iteration of the bill by the way was supported by the British Foreign Office, no stranger to neoliberal “reforms.”  It should be noted that almost the first act of the Nazi regime in Germany was to outlaw labour unions, and this bill is certainly trending in that direction.  

In addition, just before the war, France and Germany attempted to revive the Minsk accords, which would have allowed a ceasefire, and Zelensky refused to agree to restart the talks.

Zelensky then embarked on his world tour, this time as a kind of Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon who simply assumes the personality of whatever foreign leader he is near. Zelensky has become all things to all people, but especially serving those in the West who want to keep the war going in perpetuity, seeing a chance to achieve a 20-year U.S. goal of effecting regime change in Russia, no matter the cost.

Thus, in the UK his “We will fight on the shores” echoed Churchill’s World War II challenge to the nation in his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech. In Germany, he raised the spectre of the Cold War division of the country, urging the chancellor to tear down the new wall being constructed in Europe by the Russians between “freedom and bondage.”

In the U.S. he urged congress to “Remember Pearl Harbour when your skies were black with people attacking you,” and then called for a no-fly zone which would almost certainly expand the war and potentially lead to nuclear destruction which would “blacken the skies” in the most dangerous way. Those who think the war was engineered by the U.S. as a trap for Russia might also recall John Toland’s Infamy where he attempts to prove that Pearl Harbour was deliberately manufactured by U.S. policymakers as a way to move the U.S. population to accepting entry into the global conflagration of World War II.

Finally, in Israel, he invoked the Holocaust claiming, “Ukraine made the choice to save Jews 80 years ago,” but there he was quickly rebuked with a charge that parts of the Ukraine had participated in the mass extermination of Jews.

Which brings us to Zelensky’s last role, one where he moves from man of the people to perhaps now serving not only the U.S. empire but also, as aider and abettor of the Nazi Azov Brigade as it prepares for a last defence of Mariupol and of “Nationalist” parties such as The Right Sector, with that nomenclature often being a rebranding for a neo-Nazi formation aligned with the military. This new role is more akin to that of the actor in the 1980s film set in Nazi Germany who serves as a front for the government until he loses his effectiveness and is cast aside. Holoborodko, the Servant of the People, may be completing a long, arduous transformation into Mephisto.

Dennis Broe is unimpressed by the artwashing at this year's film festival at Cannes. Image above: Lou Reed et. al. in Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground 

It may be a bit cruel starting with Yeats’ criticism of his era in his epic poem The Second Coming but unfortunately it is an accurate summary of both the organization and the films in the 2021 edition of the world’s leading film festival.

This post-COVID confinement version of the festival featured maximum healthcare restrictions for the Cannes elite and minimum restrictions for everyone else. Thus to enter the Palais where the competition screenings are held amid the splendour of the red carpet, you are required to have either a QR bar code proving two-shot vaccination in France or a 48-hour COVID test. It is mandatory in France to wear a mask inside but for the opening ceremony, attended by the rich and powerful from the French Riviera and the global 1 percent, both Variety and Screen reported that as soon as the lights went out many of the elite removed their masks and were not reminded by ushers to put them back on.

Meanwhile, for the majority of screenings stocked with lower level press and students, many of which have now been moved out of Cannes and are a 45 minute bus ride away, there were no health restrictions.

This year the entire festival bureaucracy has moved online which caused much initial chaos. Although the streaming services and their digital monopolies are being kept at a distance and not allowed entry into the main competition, the virtual rules the festival. All tickets are online in a system that often crashes, contains no summary of the 135 films in the festival now that the festival book is eliminated, and shortcircuits the human contact of waiting with other dedicated filmgoers.

The online system has, like French organization as a whole, the appearance of elegance while being both inefficient and overly rule bound. What makes it work is that the French people staffing the festival are able to help as they can, humanizing this mechanization just as they have always done with earlier versions of French bureaucracy. But once the system is automated, those lacking technical expertise are practically useless.

What used to be the press room still exists but this year there are no computers, since the usual sponsor Hewlett Packard dropped out. The room is nothing but a series of electrical outlets and remains most often empty. It’s a perfect symbol of the fate of the press over the last decade as hedge funds buy up newsrooms, deplete the staff and sell off part of the real estate, gutting major papers.

In a rapidly deteriorating world, plagued by multiple pandemics involving climate change, COVID, drugs, inequality and racism, the usual blather about the sanctity of the auteur sounds simply like French industry speak, since the films they make seldom confront these problems. Instead, French film makers are using this year’s edition to relaunch their films now backlogged from COVID, with over 450 films vying for attention as they are poured onto the market after the lockdown and facing the American streaming services who used the lockdown to launch their films online.

Because of the restrictions there is also very little product or presence here from the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which together account for 40 percent of the world’s population. These countries have been effectively shunted aside what is supposed to be a global festival.

The best are well-intentioned but empty

The best do not lack all conviction but much conviction is shunted aside or squandered in NGO gobbledygook such as that used by Chadian director Hahamet-Saleh Haroun. He makes very good films like The Screaming Man about poverty in neo-colonial Africa, but told the Western press that he was not Chadian but rather he spoke ‘the global language of cinema’.

A special section called Cinema for The Climate is well-intentioned but somewhat empty. At this point if that cinema is not exposing the fossil fuel companies or industrialized fishing magnates which are destroying the land and the oceans it is really engaging in cultural greenwashing, which instead of combatting these companies usually proposes individual solutions to the global problem. An example is the film Bigger Than Us about a teenager from Bali whose Bye Bye Plastic campaign got the island to ban plastic bags, straws and Styrofoam cups. It’s helpful but hardly controversial, and we are beyond the point where planting trees and recycling will solve the problem.

The Gravedigger’s Wife 

The best film entry was a fourth level competition film The Gravedigger’s Wife, about a Somali villager who has only a shovel to earn his daily bread, by pursuing hearses and offering to bury the dead. His wife has kidney failure and will die if he does not come up with 5000 American dollars, a sum no one he knows possesses. The film is touching about his and her desperation and in the end, just as all seems lost because a doctor will not perform the operation to save her without the money, a contemporary miracle occurs.

The film, which seems to be about individual heroic acts and acts of kindness, actually calls attention to the need for a global system of healthcare, rather than relying on the kindness of strangers, though it stops at merely validating the miraculous individual act. The film originates in the West, and the Finnish-Somali actor Omar Abdi, whose tattered face fits in with the actual villagers, is excellent. His wife is played by a Canadian Somali model, and her bearing and looks are sometimes a jarring reminder of the presence of the Western gaze, even in a quasi-neorealist film.

Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground is about a band who had few convictions to begin with. Haynes tells the story of this proto-punk group of misfits, outsiders who railed against the musical establishment, which at that time was the industry’s embrace of the hippie era and the Velvet’s West Coast avant-garde rivals Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention.

Their story is told largely in their own words with the avant-garde composer John Cale, whose atonal drone was an essential part of the music, as a major source for the film. The band was supported by Andy Warhol and sometimes described as his marionettes, but the real genius was a drug-addled, bisexual Lou Reed. He channelled all his obsessions into a music that, in its cynical embrace of his truth, linked to the French poets Baudelaire, Verlaine and especially the tortured youth Rimbaud while anticipating the impending return-to-basics musical revolution that was to come, here symbolized by punk-folkie Jonathan Richman, who saw the band in Boston 75 times.

A fascinating recounting of a group of visionary artists, too many of whom, including Reed and the German vocal enchantress Nico who blazed the path for Debbie Harry and Blondie, died young, victims of a society which did not tolerate their alternative lifestyle.  

The worst are full of sound and fury

‘The worst are filled with passionate intensity’ might have been Yeats’ review of the festival opener Annette, which Le Monde, doing its part to restore French cinema, gave its highest rating, four stars. Leos Carax is a talented director who makes arthouse films that are, depending on your taste, highly provocative (The Lovers on the Bridge) or fairly pretentious (Holy Motors).

A devilish Adam Driver and a bedevilled Marion Cotillard in Annette  

His latest film stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as a disparate couple who combine American low art and entertainment – he is a stand-up insult comic whose stage routine is not funny – with Continental high art as she is an opera singer. The form of the film is operatic, mostly sung, with a soundtrack from the group Sparks. Carax updates the form – in one scene having Driver and Cotillard singing while he pleasures her, and begins both the film and the festival with the ditty “And so may we start,” the lyrics of which, like most of the songs, are simply a repeat ad nauseam of that line long after it has lost its referential meaning.

The film makes use of Driver’s talents and rehearses his past roles, as a robed boxer about to go onstage shot from behind and looking like his Vader character from Star Wars, as out of control lover from Girls in the sung sex scene, and as employing his gorgeously melodious voice which was the revelation of A Marriage Story. Onto a Hollywood tragedy – the boating death of Natalie Wood often attributed to her husband Robert Wagner – Carax grafts a criticism of the vacuousness of American entertainment in the form of the Driver character’s brutality in his treatment of the underused Cotillard.

However, the film exaggerates the brutality, defining it too often as coarseness rather than as violence, while at the same time not showing enough of it, as Scorsese does in the much better New York, New York. It offers Carax’s knowing genre play and thematic overloading as the answer instead of an actual critique of the way French and continental high art and Hollywood are now moving toward becoming a more seamless whole in which neither allows the real problems of the world an airing. Annette is full of sound and fury but signifies little.

Falling into the same category was The Hill Where Lionesses Roar, which features three teenagers discontented with their lives in a Kosovo, which has been almost entirely cleansed of all its meaning as brutal site of destruction – the only signifier of its history is a mosque in the background. Instead the film is mostly about the three teens frolicking – on a hill, in the water, in a hotel. And that’s about the beginning, the middle and the end of it.

Menacing Croatian patriarchy in Murina 

On a similar young girl coming-of-age theme was the more interesting Croatian film Murina which features a 17 year old caught in a death grip between a domineering father and his seductive former boss, a successful businessman. The father is trying to induce the businessman to invest in a hotel on the prosperous Dalmatian coast, now a dazzling global resort. The daughter is ultimately able to transcend both the physical violence of the father and the seductiveness of the boss, which since it is empty is a kind of emotional brutality. However, neither is linked to the history of the brutality of a country with a fascist and ethnic cleansing past. This past is being erased as it enters the global economy as tourist paradise.

Similarly interesting and similarly limited was the Argentinian film The Employer and The Employee, invoking Hegel’s master and slave dialectic as it plays out in the parallel relationship of the son of a wealthy landowner and the Indian boy he and his father treat as a servant. In the end the Indian gets his revenge expressed in a bitter smile, but the revenge also dooms him in a way that incorrectly suggests that the only way out of this relationship is mutual self-destruction.

The antidote was provided in a passage from a documentary essay Mariner of the Mountains about a Brazilian journalist Karim Ainouz who journeys to Algeria in search of his father’s village. He quotes Franz Fanon’s passage from his essay on violence that says that when the colonized realizes he or she is equal to the colonizer, it is the beginning of the end of that relationship. We then see Algerian youth chanting “Murderous regime” as they come to their own realization about a government that is selling them out. Here the passionate intensity is directed and purposeful and the conviction of the youth of this generation is sincere.