CRIME FICTION: The Redeemer -- Jo Nesbø and the consequences of history

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø

This guy is one of the best writers page by page in crime fiction. His plotting is convoluted but always engaging and leads to so much mystery you keep wondering who dunnit. His sense of place -- Oslo -- is revetting. Despite  Harry Hole's alcoholism, it is a nice change to accompany a sleuth who is not over ruled by angst or depression. He may be handicapped by his demons but not so that that is the over bearing storyline.

Nesbø also has a moral compas -- so very non judgemental -- that I strongly relate to as he does not take the easy peasy 'evil' route out as though that supposedly explains 'crime' and the rest of what ails us. Everyone lives in a Nesbø novel in the real tangible world of everyday life experience.  Some grow up to be coppers/others become crims -- seemingly for very good personal reasons.

He also has a handy knack of making the best use of the characters he introduces us to as they come and go. Their roles are always serviceable and coincidentally --as you learn as you read on -- relevant to what may later unfold despite the author's penchant to assemble his novel as montage.

Nesbø also has a great feel for contemporary realpolitick especially the present day politics of Europe. So his stories are open to a lot of input from the rest of the world's penchant for struggle and tragedy. The plots aren't enclosed or inward looking despite the small size of  their placement patch in  Oslo.

Here there are multiple tragedies and personalities who come together to feed off one another in a multi layered plot about a determined hit man who takes a lot of pride in his work. Determination and pride such that you have to respect it.

But as with other works by Jo Nesbø there is a respect for the dead hand of history which bears down on the present. Both story and characters are placed in this chronological continuum where the individual story -- and a much broader human tragedy -- merges. 

In his Redbreast Norway's occupation by Fascism during the Second World War is called to account and played out through a story of retribution.

In The Redeemer a parallel balance sheet is being addressed such that you feel when reading Nesbø you need to go back and check the actual history -- in this case,  the slaughter of Croats in Vukovar in 1991.

Nesbø respects the consequences of history -- a sentence we cannot escape.

A short Film Noir observation: neo liberalism with low lighting

Marie Windsor:“I didn’t know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting! "

One of the very best things about film noir is that after you've seen one movie there is sure to be another before you reach the 1958 cut off. So you get at least 20 good years of cinema excitement, cynicism, and the souring of the post war dream. 

My problem is the conundrum: do I watch one I haven't seen, or watch one I've already seen? 

Decisions. Decisions. 

The complication is that I find them exhausting to watch in the sense that they are rich fare in the way so many contemporary films are not. In the way that so many contemporary films are predictable. The interesting irony is that the film noir revival -- watching them -- has, I suspect, a lot to do with the consequences of decades of Neo Liberalism . These films make sense again as the veneer of the post war consumerism fades under the increasingly stark glare of ebbing promises.  All the violence and thrills that have been served up in Hollywood movies are, in effect, titillation which has obscured an underlying shallowness and disdain for confronting the living experience of most of us. 

That these films were made when I was being born or before or soon after that august date, gives me a great sense of the world of my parents THEN which was not the one they passed onto me. There was a bargain made with a pay off: a glorified domestication fostered by a rising income and security so that no one wanted to relive the Depression or the war years --  and all  noir films did was remind you of that darkness. 

There's also a parallel in crime fiction I suspect where the preference for relentless 'serial killer' mode today -- which bores me --   ensures that the evils that beset us are forged as the activity of a perverse criminality embedded in an insane underground spring that dogs our preferred social mores. It's almost seems paranormal,  like an alien infestation, foreign  to the world we seek to inhabit.

It's bogeyman stuff -- and a distraction -- when the noirs were glass darkly reflections of ourselves.

In their way, the noirs were a metaphorical precursor to the realist films that began to be made in the sixties. 

Ironic is it not?

Peter Watkins on the Media Crisis -- from Culloden to America's Pravda

Culloden (1964)

For people of my generation you still may require a long memory to draw into its awareness Peter Watkins.

Inasmuch as Watkins registers in a broader consciousness it is because of his video docudramas made in the 1960s  especially    Culloden  which was shown by the BBC in 1964 - and The War Game (1965) which wasn't. In fact the BBC pulled it from showing on British tubes.

The film nonetheless went on  to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Watkins has been in exile from Britain since The War Game was banned but has continued to make his own style of film often in Scandinavia.

 I saw The War Game and Culloden decades ago and can vouch that,  as was the film maker's intention, they infest your mind well after the end titles have run.

Having just watched Culloden again I am a bit taken aback by the fact I have neglected this great film for so very long. But since copies are rare, I suspect I am not alone.

Culloden was Watkins' first full-length film. It was also his first use of his docudrama style in which actors portray historical characters being interviewed by filmmakers on the scene, "as though it was happening in front of news cameras".Watkins also "wanted to break through the conventional use of professional actors in historical melodramas, with the comfortable avoidance of reality that these provide, and to use amateurs - ordinary people - in a reconstruction of their own history." He accordingly used an all-amateur cast from London and the Scottish Lowlands for the royalist forces, and people from Inverness for the clan army. This later became a central technique of Watkins' filmmaking.
According to an estimate by the cinematographer for the film, Dick Bush, about 85% of all camerawork in Culloden was hand-held. This newsreel style shooting gave an already gritty reality a sense of present action. Culloden looked like a documentary of an event which occurred before the camera was invented. From this the film illustrates the recognizable documentary style of ‘cinema verite’. (reference)

I am in no position to rule on Watkins style -- much as it impresses , indeed, overwhelms me. I am also yet to catch up with The War Game  and his more recent films like La Commune (Paris, 1871)  -- made in 2000 -- and  Edvard Munch (1976). 

I guess over the decades I have seen  many documentary films. To be honest I don't always take to the form as they can be a very mixed bag of good intention and moralism seeded with factoring. To be honest I often enough prefer my documentation in audio format rather than being lulled into a manufactured belief by film. Outrage can come easily to film making. That may seem to make me out as a bit of a Luddite...  but -- to be honest -- I don't always trust film.

Here's an exercise: go edit a video and than try and say you did not manipulate the message to your personal preference/your POV spin doctoring. It's easy. Video is so plastic.

We could get into a McLuhanist discussion -- and I've spent a lot of time there -- mulling over media form and media message -- but in my followup on Watkins I came upon a essay of his -- The Media Crisis -- that is standout fascinating and very much to the point.

I suggest  you go read Watkin's essay which challenges the existing rigid and hierarchical processes of the mass audiovisual media (MAVM) , because it may make you engage in a rethink about what you watch...or, at least, how you watch it.

I'm thinking this through while I study the essay and work my way through whatever Watkins films I can access. But this segment from the revised introduction  to the essay captures substantial part of his argument:

Is documentary filmmaking being compromised as a result of the media crisis? Of course it is! Most documentary films - especially those made for TV - are now so uniformly formatted that it's difficult to tell them apart. One of the most striking aspects of the Monoform - along with the sheer mass of audiovisual material flooding out from cinema, TV, computer and mobile phone screens - is its ability to blur a/v messages, to meld individual subjects and concerns into one amorphous mass. It is this effect that undermines our sense of priority and personal involvement with global issues, and our ability to place events within a meaningful and holistic context. The fact that the greatest potential disaster of our lifetime has developed under our very noses, as we've sat on our couches being ‘served’ by the MAVM, is a indication of the efficacy of this system. We sat there losing the ability to tell the difference...

In an attempt to differentiate their work, a number of filmmakers are even elevating their own assault on the audience. A study of recent documentaries (The Corporation, Supersize Me, Michael Moore's films, others critical of George Bush and the Iraq War, etc.) reveals a style and pattern wherein the personality of the filmmaker is often as important as the subject of the film itself. And once again, the audience encounters a tornado of rapid editing; fragmented talking heads; twisting and cork-screwing camera work; clever digitized animation; and a theatrical in-your-face disrespect for the nearest corporate figures. All of which is heralded as cutting edge, radical and relevant - but which in fact barely masks a disingenuous and authoritarian relationship to the audience. Some of these films even claim to be critical of the media - but not only is their own language form centralised and hierarchical (a double-irony in the case of Manufacturing Consent, which features Naom Chomsky), they also never actually critique the form and process of the MAVM (including in their own films).

Oops! This seems like heresy does it not? Our beloved docoes

A little later, no doubt in frustration, Watkins asks, "Why does alternative journalism think that simply changing the agenda and the media-makers - leaving form, process, and relationship to the audience untouched - will solve the media crisis? "

This makes for radical reading delivered with  urgency...

But for all its intensity, I think Watkins drives home a salient point.  We may seemingly be delivered night after night exposés a'plenty in video form but all  that is expected of us is a heartfelt tut tut as though the world on screen  is foreign to the one we inhabit and could actively do something about.

Peter Watkin's Statement

• 1. Media Crisis - Use and Personal Prologue
• 2. Revised Introduction to Media Crisis
• 3. Role of American MAVM, Hollywood Monoform
• 4. European, Canadian, Scandinavian (etc.) MAVM
• 5. Media Education, Popular culture, Violence
• 6. Filmmakers, Festivals and the Repression
• 7. Role of the Global Justice Movement
• 8. Public-alternative Processes and Practices
• 9. Conclusion
• 10. Appendices
• 11. CNN - America's Pravda

VIDEO: Fracking -- “Don’t smoke in your shower.”

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Hydraulic fracturing is a controversial drilling technique which injects millions of tons of highly toxic chemical fluids into the ground to break apart shale and release natural gas. Even while scientists believe these chemicals may already be poisoning America's drinking water, the natural gas industry has unleashed a massive 34-state drilling campaign.

The delights of film noir

I fell under the spell of film noir by accident.

A touch of insomnia helps because you'll get noirish films on the TV very late at night if you are conscious and housebound.

But I guess the penny dropped for me when I did my homework and realized that the films I like -- I mean really like  to an obsessive level -- are coincidentally classified as noir.

Then when I saw The Big Combo (1955) for the first time I was aware that I was being hooked on what I now saw as "a genre" (and I knew straightaway why I had been  so long enamored with High Sierra (1941).

I'm not going to go down the anal retentive route and try to define "film noir" such that it ticks a classification box that will rule me. Indeed, after notching up so many movies I still cannot draw together all the themes and styles that aggregate under anyone's customized heading.

But I will say this: film noir feeds you with unexpected delights.

For instance I've been watching a couple of noirs starring Vince Edwards  --  Murder by Contract (1958) and City of Fear (1959) -- and despite everything that is wrong with these films  --  very B grade, low budget with obviously limited rehearsal input -- there is some snippets of delight. 

At least in my eyes....

That even  the most B-gradable noir --and Edwards did C grade -- has some merit is a conundrum. What's the deal, the hook -- that despite  film making like this on the cheap, why do these films work? 

I think the answer lies in part with the freedom with which they were often made which fostered a keen experimentation and ready indulgence in the graphic quirks of  (particularly German) Expressionism . It's all neurotic angst, threat and violence often packaged with an intense sensuality. 

Even if the story sucks, the camera work is gonna be worth the viewing.

Here's an off hand list of classic film noirs in no particular order:

• The Third Man (1949)
• Rififi (1955)
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
• The Big Combo (1955) 
• The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

...and you'd be hard put to draw them all together by strict ruling. While some are more melodramatic than others,  I guess I respond to the drama and the characters, often especially in the case of Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Combo -- to the woman characters. Two of these films    Kiss Me Deadly  and  The Sweet Smell of Success  have political themes, and one -- Kiss Me Deadly -- verges on science fiction. The Third Man and Rififi are probably my two favorite films of all time because...

...because they are almost perfect. They don't drop the cinematic ball once in all their 100 minutes plus.

Nonetheless, aside from my aesthetic penchant, what really gets me about noirness is that these films were engaged in the world from which they sprung -- the forties and fifties in the post war epoch -- and suggest a very different environment than the standard cultural narrative. They are as much Gothic  Beat Generation  and Bebop as they are pulp crime fiction.

In many of these films, such as the three metropolis classics of Jules Dassin  -- The Naked City (New York), Night and the City (London), and Rififi (Paris)  -- the city and its inhabitants rule by documentary as the star of the movie. It's the deity. The host. 

The Naked City ending titles says it all : " There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them. "

Unlike the standard reading of noir -- that it has to be in a sort of Los Angeles mode, hard boiled and very machismo with fags hanging from bottom lips -- what takes off in many noirs, like Dassin's -- is a fascination with the environments we live and work  in --and within which we are sentenced to irk out an existence by crime or other means. In noir, it seems to me, more often than not, actions make sense as they flow  from real need and motivation. 

They are survival exercises -- especially, I should add, for women.

So they are often Shakespearean tragic and fueled by overwhelming passion and yearning. If anything they are a protest against the decades in which they were made despite their seeming complicity with the status quo. 

To that end, noirs will often risk not having a happy ending. It's Hamlet and MacBeth for the 20th century but this time around the tragedians aren't playing aristocrats.

A good example is Pickup on South Street (1953) -- which is, of all things, a crash piece of anti communist  McCarthyism.  The bogeymen are Reds -- devious, murderous, well funded and insidious. But the irony is that  for those who ain't commie prone -- all they really have going for themselves is their patriotism -- their chapter and verse dedication to the mantra My Country 'Tis of Thee ... and little else.

And that's their tragedy -- that the characters can only redeem themselves through "the last refuge of the scoundrel".

Similarly the very working class noirs like the trucker tales, They Drive By Night (1940)and Thieves Highway (1949) -- make you want to scream: "what you guys need is not more melodrama in your lives but a darn good trade union!"

The Horatio Alger American Dream sucks -- it did not matter if you try it on in the garb of film noir or social realism the times were not a'changing much for the better.

• Useful and thoughtful essay on film noir: What is film noir?

Carbon Commodity Song -- Don't ask me what Carbon is. Don't ask me my advice. I've no idea what Carbon is: All I have learned is its price.

Die Massnahme (The Measures Taken or The Decision) was the first of Bertolt Brecht's "learning" plays. It is a heavily didactic perhaps -- even  a tres propagandistic (egads!) and shocking -- but is nonetheless beautifully conceived and written with music by Hans Eisler.

It premièred at the Berlin Schauspielhaus in 1930.

I've been long time interested in these learning plays which Brecht called lehrustucke .  I am familiar with them in a way that many other humans would not be. I got myself a niche perhaps -- a   lehrustucke familiarity.

The Lehrstücke (plural form; singular: Lehrstück) are a radical and experimental form of modernist theatre developed by Bertolt Brecht and his collaborators from the 1920s to the late 1930s. The Lehrstücke stem from Brecht's Epic Theatre techniques but as a core principle explore the possibilities of learning through acting, playing roles, adopting postures and attitudes etc. and hence no longer divide between actors and audience. Brecht himself translated the term as learning-play^[1], emphasizing the aspect of learning through participation, whereas the German term could also be understood as teaching-play. 

That said there is a song in The Measures Taken that captures, what I think is, the essence  of the Carbon Trading or Carbon Taxing schemata.

It could be rewritten as:

Don't ask me what Carbon is.

Don't ask me my advice.

I've no idea what  Carbon is:

All I have learned is its price.

The point being, as Marx noted, that capitalism fetishizes commodities 

In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things (commodities and money).

Now as sure as  the pope is catholic and a bear shits in the woods (or vice versa),  the Carbon trading scheme is capitalist mystification in over drive.   It preserves this obscurantism so that the physical properties of the commodities -- such as their  congealed carbon emissions content -- are obscured by their price which is arbitrarily set.  It is not the price of a commodity that should be the rule but how, by whom and why it is produced.

"There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them." - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, chapter 1 section 4 

The complication is that we are not allowed to decide  how, by whom and why a commodity is  produced because our 'democracy' doesn't extend that far. We are sentenced in the face of a major emergency for humanity to passivity before the fickleness of market driven  supply and demand.

As Brecht noted in The Measures Taken -- to a catchy tune by Eisler (which I cannot share with  you online but I can hum it if pressed) -- the capitalist doesn't give a damn about any carbon thing just so long as it is trade-able for a profit.

Thanks to David Henry for the tip to this vid 

(Archer is a world renowned Australian Brecht interpreter. As is, ironically Nick Cave.

 Song of Commodity/Supply and Demand

Rice can be had down the river.
People in the remoter provinces need their rice.
If we can keep that rice off the market
Rice is bound to get dearer.
Then the men who pull the barges must go short of rice
And I shall get my rice for even less.

By the way, what is rice?

Don't ask me what rice is.
Don't ask me my advice.
I've no idea what rice is:
All I have learned is its price.

In winter time the coolies need warm clothing.
Then you must buy cotton so that
You can keep cotton off the market.
When a cold spell comes, then clothes get more expensive.
Our cotton spinning mills pay too high wages.
And cotton's too plentiful in any case.

By the way, what is cotton?

Don't ask me what cotton is.
Don't ask me my advice.
I've no idea what cotton is:
All I have learned is its price.

Working men need too much feeding
And this makes a man's work dearer.
To provide for his feeding you need women.
Our cooks can make a meal cheaper but look at
Those eaters making it dearer.
And we could use more men here in any case.

By the way, what is a man?

Don't ask me what a man is.
Don't ask me my advice.
I've no idea what a man is:
All I have learned is his price.

The translation I prefer:

Performed by Maria Tegzes, vocals, and Geoffrey Burleson, piano and arrangement.