A few book reviews

For my first ever blog entry, some milestone you might say, I've decided to resurrect three book reviews I wrote a few years ago. These are what you might call oldies but, in my ever so humble opinion, also hopefully goodies. Here goes, as they say in downtown Tikrit...

Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy by Colin MacCabe

This dexterous and diligent biography of the greatest filmmaker of the twentieth century is to be treasured for its wide conceptualising scope, analytical depth and engaging tone. MacCabe is clearly a great admirer of Godard and makes this plainly clear throughout a tome which has a main textual body more than 350 pages in length. Sometimes MacCabe is too starry eyed and glides over some unflattering peccadilloes that, while brave of him to refer to in the first place, could have been delved into with more scalpel like precision or, perhaps, even merciless excoriation. However, as an almost devotionally deep admirer of the filmmaker these unflattering revelations, regardless of their truth, would probably have sat far too uneasily with me.

Jean-Luc Godard has always been a kind of seer and in latter years, if not from his breathtaking outset, the curmudgeonly conscience of world cinema. Along with his Nouvelle Vague cohorts, always the loosest of collectives, he transformed the production and distribution of motion pictures and rode the large crest of a wave carrying sublimely superb international cinema. The sixties were heady and experimental times, or so at least the historical cliché assures us, but the reality, as embodied particularly in European cinema of the time, leaves little doubt to the veracity of this now obdurately overused, though admittedly inescapable, claim. Things have turned sour since, but Godard presses on into his dotage and possibly even towards greater obscurity, although, in a heartening reversal of the trend towards mindless memory loss and vapid spectacle, Godard’s last two films have been internationally released and in England there have been a spate of new box sets of his older films and releases of work, such as La Chinoise, long previously unavailable.

To Godardophiles much of the story is known, but to have one book string the saga together in chronological order, with detailed information on his early life as well as turning a methodical eye to the peripheral figures who either influenced Godard or were instrumental in the realisation of his oeuvre, is to be blessed with a work of singular significance hitherto never even attempted in English. MacCabe has clearly done his homework and rarely delivers the sort of blandly cursory overview of films, many of them (the 70s work in particular) unavailable to anything resembling a wide public, that many critics display towards the perceived minor works of an artist’s legacy and, ironically, are often even more inclined to show towards those that are well known. He never descends to the level of press release shallowness and when he says next to nothing about a film, such as Helas Pour Moi (1993) or Forever Mozart (1996), one can only assume he hasn’t seen them, or, far less likely, found little of value in them.

The book provides a thorough picture of Godard as a literature-loving young man, nonchalant rebel, incessant re-inventor of himself and his medium (he consistently stresses the point that they are inseparable) and as prophetic poet who moves with isolated gravity through the increasingly exiguous wasteland of global cinema, or what is left of it in the wake of the cupidinous colossus that is Hollywood. Godard has always been a man on a mission, but ruefully reflects in the book that the mistake of the New Wave filmmakers was to think that what they “were doing was a beginning”. American cinema was then dominant, and in a very selective way the young tendentious Turks writing for Cahiers du Cinema championed the more exciting cinema originating from across the large Atlantic pond. Godard borrowed generic tropes for many of his early films and experimentally glorified in the playful self reflective fusion of American B-movies and his more personalised analytical, polemical and densely textual proclivities. For the last quarter of a century he has dropped the joie de vivre of genre allusions and somewhat settled down, if that is ever an appropriate description of Godard, as the sagacious elder statesman of sadly marginalised and resolutely art house cinema in a guise manifesting itself in intricate and often inscrutably fragmented essay-like discourses between the past and present, image and sound, narrative and discourse, literature and cinema, and, possibly more important than all the rest, between the director and society. The heady confluence of elements is still there as it was from the beginning, but the restless zest of younger days seems depleted, though never lost, in the tender reification of an art that Godard uniquely mastered in a way others could not even dream of, let alone emulate.

One of the most melancholic sections in a book filled with them is the final pages when MacCabe reflects on his inability to place Godard in a Pantheon of immortal artists in a self-devouring capitalist world ever more certain of its morbid mortality. Cinema has lost far more than it has gained since the joyous heyday of the New Wave, except on the level of technology and baleful corporate profits, and Godard, despite his proudly contrarian presence, embodies that loss more than anyone else. The hope is also still there, however, and for a new generation who may still want to give “ninety percent to ten percent of the audience”, as Godard once proclaimed his unofficial intention, the Swiss born filmmaker provides one of the most noble examples of elevating art, not cold commerce, to the highest evaluation of achievement. The world audience may be an American audience, but Godard keeps alive the barely perceived belief that “cinema is truth twenty four times a second” and that “to make a movie all you need is a gun and a girl”.

MacCabe has done an expertly accomplished job on documenting the times and life of a man so remarkable that twenty books, twice as long as this one, hardly does full justice to him. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy is both a pellucid primer for an amateur Godard enthusiast as well as providing the almost unthinkable, at this juncture nearly half a century since Godard’s feature debut, namely a number of fresh critical perspectives on one of the most written about filmmakers of all time. The world may not prevail, as it almost certainly won’t, but in the time that remains both this book, and the artist so assiduously and enthusiastically at its centre, should remain entrenched on the very highest rung of the ideal hierarchy of cinematic greats.

The Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky

While this might not be the best book to read if you’ve never before met this astounding intellect in print, it still serves to succinctly elucidate the most salient hallmarks of Chomsky’s approach to world affairs and, more specifically, his country’s foreign policy. These hallmarks include an incisive dissection of the subservience of intellectuals to state power, the flagrant hypocrisy of the US government, in this case the Reagan administration, as their public pronouncements project an image of inviolable nobility while their actions tell quite a different story, and the concentration of private power in a few hands which underpin, thus making possible, these disturbing aspects of American intellectual and political culture.

The book began life as a “postscript” to a number of foreign editions of Chomsky’s Turning the Tide, which dealt with many of the same points raised in this book, though The Culture of Terrorism deals with the Iran-Contra scandals at some length which the earlier text did not. Although the actual facts detailed in often exhausting rigorousness are well out of date, one is thoroughly exposed to the brazen dereliction of basic journalistic duty by those that Chomsky derisorily refers to throughout as representatives of the Free Press. They fall so effortlessly in line with state doctrine that the achievements, again noted by Chomsky, would make a totalitarian regime proud. That this happens in one of the freest countries in the world is nothing short of sickeningly scandalous. In case there are those that think Chomsky is a conspiracy nut or a devotee to the school of hyperbole he provides ample evidence which shows that even the so-called liberal press, namely the New York Times and the New Republic, are guilty of obscene apologetics for, and often advocates of, aggressive state terror.

The Culture of Terrorism deals predominantly with the campaign of subversion and harsh repression conducted by the Contras in Nicaragua who were armed, trained, and constantly supplied throughout this terrible period by the US government. There were flights over the countryside on an almost daily basis and the examples of their weaponry cited in the book would put most armies in other third world countries to shame, let alone the guerrilla forces who were fighting in nearby El Salvador, a country Chomsky also sketches in much socio-political detail. In 1979 the Nicaraguans overthrew the brutal dictator Somoza, a member of a dynasty stretching back to the middle of the 1920s, whose reign ended with a “paroxysm of violence claiming the lives of 40-50000 people”. This tiny Central American nation elected the leftist Sandinistas regime which immediately caused the big neighbour to the North considerable consternation. The Reagan Administration proceeded to destabilise this government by employing the Contras, many of them previously employed as members of Somoza’s abysmally vicious National Guard, to raid innocent villages, destroy houses, steal livestock, and even kill Americans who had come to aid this miserably poor country that was improving dramatically under the Sandinista regime. These leaps ahead in terms of health care, education and reduction of poverty were documented by such aid agencies as Oxfam at the time who compared the situation in this country with that of Guatemala and El Salvador. The picture created in the US media was quite different, however, as that charnel house Guatemala, along with El Salvador where political violence, including rapes, mutilation, tortures, and ‘disappearances’, were endemic, were described as “fledgling democracies”.

Conversely, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas was portrayed by the Free Press as a totalitarian state who was one of the tentacles of the Soviet Union. How interesting that by ordering an economic embargo of Nicaragua, and forcing allies to do the same, the Sandinistas are forced to turn to Russia for help which provides a retrospectively convenient basis for the Reagan Administration to scream from the roof tops that the Evil Empire is upon them. Also very intriguing, illuminated by copious quotations from leading journals and newspapers, that a country such as Guatemala, where it is estimated that around 150000 people may have been killed during the Reagan era, and El Salvador, the site of 50000 politically motivated murders during the same period, raise no impassioned denunciations of their odious socio-political conditions, or even an acknowledgement of these figures cited by human rights organizations and specialists of the region. Ignorance is indeed strength, as Chomsky notes in a very apposite evocation of Orwell, whom he often refers to throughout the book as the noted linguist creates for the reader a truly terrifying Orwellian world, all the more horrifying because it actually exists and is not only an acutely perspicacious exercise in allegory, where “democracy” implies regimes friendly to US business interests and “moderates” are people such as El Salvadoran president José Duarte who just happens to preside over a regime that assassinates Archbishops, union leaders, students, journalists of opposition newspapers, and just about anyone who dares to question the economically polarising policies of this staunch proponent of the US “development model”, another term Orwell would be proud of as the development in question applies to rich folk while the poor become demonstrably poorer, as is still much the case today in our world of ever “freer” markets.

The picture, as usual with Chomsky, is bleak, though when you have this much factual knowledge at your command, and have none of the necessary illusions required of the mendacious elites, then it is a tall task to be sanguine about world affairs, particularly those directed by the biggest terrorist state. The problem with reading a book published almost two decades ago about events that were then much publicized, is that much of the currency is unavoidably lost. At the very least the book provides an abundantly extensive historical overview of a time not all that different from our own, the primary deviation being the names of the victims and perpetrators, and at its most elevated altitudes of significant scholarship The Culture of Terrorism cogently demystifies the key characteristics, established by the voluminous historical and documentary record, of the most influential institutions in US society. This has always been Chomsky’s greatest gift and this book amply, though not definitively, showcases his remarkable ability to not only render events in breathtakingly astounding detail, but always ensures that they are related to a wider context of previous incidents and current practices.

This is not a book for those individuals who still foster illusions that the United States is the most benevolent super power the world has ever known. For those willing to look beyond the purposely constrained bounds of the mainstream media, as well as the limits of their own often self-willed ignorance, the book provides ample insights into past practices and their very grave implications for future conduct by the globe’s sole remaining hegemonic force. Chomsky may be less a voice in the wilderness than he was when the book was published, but still not enough people are hearing his extremely vital message.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Since his first publication, The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins has injected his works with subtle and often overt jabs at religion. His latest book blazes forth with blatant, yet it must also be said rather effortless, controversy to make the case that religion is not merely illogical and wrong, but supremely dangerous for the world at large.

The God Delusion is good on demolishing traditional arguments for the existence of God, but less effective in grappling with sophisticated theology. Dakwins displays mesmerising contempt for ‘faith heads’, even the moderate ones, and is trenchantly incisive in dissecting the speciousness and hypocrisy of all religious faith while cogently making it clear that our moral sense derives from our evolutionary heritage and not some supernatural deity revealed to us in a holy book. The author spares no punches in exposing the horrors committed in the name of religion while he occasionally allows himself to be swept up in the awe engendered by science’s grand mission to render all great mysteries wondrously comprehensible. This book will rattle many cozy cages, as well it should considering that so much of what passes as ‘faith’ is simply lazy adherence to the religion of our parents or immediate cultural surroundings. Dawkins contends, not altogether successfully, that the ‘how’ questions science so assiduously sets out to answer will always trump the ‘why’ questions that, by their woolly metaphysical nature, will ever remain unanswerable.

The ideas presented are communicated in a lucid and consistently logical style that, for all the book’s faults, are never anything less than insightful and, if you’ll excuse the expression, devilishly entertaining.