The Nation Of Iran
Two for Tuesday
1
Saturday Matinee: Network
By Roger Ebert
Source: RogerEbert.com
Strange, how Howard Beale, “the mad prophet of the airwaves,” dominates our memories of “Network.” We remember him in his soaking-wet raincoat, hair plastered to his forehead, shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The phrase has entered into the language.
But Beale (Peter Finch) is the movie’s sideshow. The story centers on Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway), the ratings-hungry programming executive who is prepared to do anything for better numbers. The mirror to which she plays is Max Schumacher (William Holden), the middle-age news executive who becomes Diana’s victim and lover, in that order.
The movie has been described as “outrageous satire” (Leonard Maltin) and “messianic farce” (Pauline Kael), and it is both, and more. What is fascinating about Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay is how smoothly it shifts its gears. The scenes involving Beale and the revolutionary “liberation army” are cheerfully over the top. The scenes involving Diana and Max are quiet, tense, convincing drama. The action at the network executive level aims for behind-the-scenes realism; we may doubt that a Howard Beale could get on the air, but we have no doubt the idea would be discussed as the movie suggests. And then Chayefsky and the director, Sidney Lumet, edge the backstage network material over into satire, too–but subtly, so that in the final late-night meeting where the executives decide what to do about Howard Beale, we have entered the madhouse without noticing.
The movie caused a sensation in 1976. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, won four (Finch, Dunaway, supporting actress Beatrice Straight, Chayefsky), and stirred up much debate about the decaying values of television. Seen a quarter-century later, it is like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation?
Parts of the movie have dated–most noticeably Howard Beale’s first news set, a knotty-pine booth that makes it look like he’s broadcasting from a sauna. Other parts, including the network strategy meetings, remain timeless. And the set that Beale graduates to, featuring soothsayers and gossip columnists on revolving pedestals, nicely captures the feeling of some of the news/entertainment shows, where it’s easier to get air time if you’re a “psychic” than if you have useful information to convey.
Most people remember that Howard Beale got fed up, couldn’t take it anymore and had a meltdown on the air. It wasn’t quite like that. Beale is portrayed as an alcoholic doing such a bad job that he’s fired by his boss (Holden). Then they get drunk together and joke about him committing suicide on the air. The next day, in a farewell broadcast, Beale announces that he will indeed kill himself because of falling ratings. He’s yanked from the air but begs for a chance to say farewell, and that’s when he says, the next day, “Well, I’ll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bull- – – -.” His frankness is great for the ratings, Diana convinces her bosses to overturn Max’s decision to fire him, Howard goes back on the air, and he is apparently deep into madness when he utters his famous line.
Lumet and Chayefsky know just when to pull out all the stops. After Beale orders his viewers to “repeat after me,” they cut to exterior shots of people leaning out of their windows and screaming that they’re mad as hell, too. Unlikely, but great drama, and electrifying in theaters at the time. Beale’s ratings skyrocket (he is fourth after “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “All in the Family” and “Phyllis”), and a new set is constructed on which he rants and raves after his announcer literally introduces him as a “mad prophet.”
Counter to this extravagant satire is the affair between Max and Diana. Dunaway gives a seductive performance as the obsessed programming executive; her eyes sparkle and she moistens her lips when she thinks of higher ratings, and in one sequence she kisses Max while telling him how cheaply she can buy some James Bond reruns. Later, in bed, discussing ratings during sex, she climaxes while gasping about the “Mao Tse Tung Hour.”
That’s her idea for a prime-time show based on the exploits of a group obviously inspired by the Symbionese Liberation Army. In a secluded safe house, she negotiates with its armed leader, has a run-in with a Patty Hearst type, and uses an Angela Davis type as her go-between. This material is less convincing, except as an illustration of the lengths to which she will go.
Much more persuasive is Holden’s performance as a newsman who was trained by Edward R. Murrow, and now sees his beloved news division destroyed by Diana. At the same time, Max is fascinated by her, and deliberately begins an affair. For him, it is intoxication with the devil, and maybe love. For her–it is hard to say what it is, because, as he accurately tells her at the end, “There’s nothing left in you I can live with.”
Beatrice Straight’s role as Max’s wife is small but so powerful it won her the Oscar. It is a convincing portrait of a woman who has put up with an impossible man for so long that, although she feels angry and betrayed, she does not feel surprised. The meaning of Max’s decision to cheat is underlined by the art direction; he and his wife live in a tasteful apartment with book-lined walls, and then he moves into Dunaway’s tacky duplex. It is clear that although she cares how she dresses (costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge), she doesn’t care where she lives, because she is not a homebody; her home is in a boardroom, a corner office or a control booth.
The film is filled with vivid supporting roles. Ned Beatty has a sharp-edged cameo as a TV executive (he’s the one who says the famous line, “It’s because you’re on television, dummy”). Robert Duvall plays an executive who, when murder is suggested, insists he wants to “hear everybody’s thoughts on this.” Wesley Addy is the handsome, gray-haired executive in the network’s display window; he looks good at stockholder meetings. (If you look closely, you can spot a young Tim Robbins as a revolutionary assassin.)
One of Chayefsky’s key insights is that the bosses don’t much care what you say on TV, as long as you don’t threaten their profits. Howard Beale calls for outrage, he advises viewers to turn off their sets, his fans chant about how fed up they are–but he only gets in trouble when he reveals plans to sell the network’s parent company to Saudi Arabians. There’s a parallel here with “The Insider,” a 1999 film about CBS News, where “60 Minutes” can do just about anything it wants to, except materially threaten CBS profits.
Sidney Lumet, born 1924, a product of the golden age of live television, is one of the most consistently intelligent and productive directors of his time. His credits are an honor roll of good films, many of them with a conscience, including “12 Angry Men” (1957), “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962), “Fail-Safe” (1964), “Serpico” (1973), “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), “Prince of the City” (1981), “The Verdict” (1982), “Running on Empty” (1988) and “Q and A” (1990).
Because he works in many different genres and depends on story more than style, he is better known inside the business than out, but few directors are better at finding the right way to tell difficult stories; consider the development of Al Pacino’s famous telephone call in “Dog Day Afternoon.” His book Making Movies (Knopf, 1995) has more common sense in it about how movies are actually made than any other I have read.
In “Network,” which is rarely thought of as a “director’s picture,” it is his unobtrusive skill that allows all those different notes and energy levels to exist within the same film. In other hands, the film might have whirled to pieces. In his, it became a touchstone.
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
By Robert Daniels
Source: RogerEbert.com
To see the archival footage of Patrice Lumumba, which serves as the backbone to the forceful documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” is to witness a daring future that, due to the rot of colonialism, tragically never came to pass. The foil to the film’s incisive use of newsreels, excerpts from biographies and political speeches is the kinetic wielding of jazz music.
On October 28, 1960, for instance, Louis Armstrong jubilantly arrived in the Congolese capital of Leopoldville (renamed Kinshasa in 1966) to perform. He came to a country that has always mystified the Euro-centric imagination as part of a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Africa. Four months earlier, the Republic of the Congo’s bid for independence had become a living reality. Three months after Armstrong’s performance, with the murder of Lumumba, the dream had already died.
Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s dense, encyclopedic film “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” does more than tell viewers about the downfall of a revolution, one that conceived of a pan-African movement composed of a dozen countries that gained independence from their colonial overlords. It tells viewers how industrialist countries, primarily in the West, are still picking the bones of a broken promise decades later.
It’s difficult to watch Grimonprez’s intuitive telling of history without feeling the sinister truth of world history: the major powers of the world only see countries like the Congo as an exploitable resource, not as a sovereign state. To tell this reality, Grimonprez takes a similar path traversed by Raoul Peck, whose documentary “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet” is an incredible portrait of a defiant man. Grimonprez dives into the immense span of available footage and writing about Lumumba and that brief period when the idea of a United States of Africa, as coined by Marcus Garvey, to tell how the Congo gained its independence and lost Lumumba.
Nevertheless, the use of music sets Grimonprez’s film apart from Peck’s survey. Similar to the improvisational spirit of jazz, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” isn’t a linear film. It hops and it bops from 1961 to contemporary ads for Tesla and Apple. The same could be said about the murderer’s row of Jazz legends: Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Armstrong—who take center stage. Grimonprez isn’t terribly interested in laying the biographical groundwork of these figures; they’re iconic enough to allow their aura to provide the documentary with an inherent mood and presence. That built-in tenor is necessary in a film that requires plenty of reading with excerpts from Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman, Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, and In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament (Bofane reads passages from his book that speak to world powers’ desire to command the country’s uranium supply).
It’s the latter angle that forms the film’s central thesis. True independence for former territories turned countries was always going to be a fraught proposition in the face of colonial powers afraid to part from the unchecked wealth they gained through ultra-violent oppression. Grimonprez, in fact, looks toward Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal from the British as a potential parallel for the kind of reclaiming of natural resources that other African countries like Congo would’ve sought. Nasser is just one of the many predictions Grimonprez bridges as he crafts a comprehensive view to demonstrate how world powers used Cold War fears to justify assassinations and coups.
The film examines the burgeoning rebellion by these newly independent countries from many angles. For instance, through the analysis of Malcolm X, we find that Asian and African countries possessed outsized power in the UN, whereby anytime they stuck together as a coalition, they could vote down countries like the United States, Belgium, or Britain. And even before she became Lumumba’s chief of protocol, Andrée Blouin, whose home movies and book My Country, Africa are referenced in the film, mobilized African women for political change. As the film informs us, this sense of collective mobilization further frightened world powers.
That anxiety, posits the film, is why music, specifically jazz, became a conduit for political purposes. Grimonprez can be winking, especially when he introduces the Cabinet of Jazz; he and editor Rik Chaubet can also be spontaneous, weaving in and out from any given performance into a narrativization of history that often recalls a late-night setlist. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Lullaby of the Leaves,” for instance, becomes a playful way to pose Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the U.S. to meet President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a meeting between two kindred spirits. On the other hand, Nina Simone visiting Nigeria in 1961 on behalf of the American Society of African Culture, a group whose connection to the CIA was unknown by Simone, demonstrates the underhanded ways these artists were pitted against regimes they supported by menacing imperialists.
Even when “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” which runs at a chunky 150 minutes, struggles to maintain a snappy rhythm, this documentary has an enthralling boldness. This film pushes its audience to absorb every note, clip, and quote that crams an entire study of information into an elegant, slick package. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” succeeds as an intense piece of reclamation and rejuvenation, giving breath to Lumumba’s spirit by sporting the same kind of defiance the political leader espoused.
Watch Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/14940555
Towards a Global Prison Break
Similar to how our soul or divine spark is imprisoned within a physical body, our bodies and minds are confined by overlapping social structures such as empire, criminal cabals, oligarchy, kleptocracy, technocracy, deep state, police/surveillance state, banking/monetary systems, and multinational corporations (including corporate media). These archonic forces have collectively manifested a dystopia the likes of which we’ve long been forewarned by visionaries such as William Blake, Mary Shelley, Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and Philip K. Dick among others.
Leaders of the more destructive social structures are invariably the most venal and sociopathic personalities who typically thrive and rise within such systems. Recent revelations from the Epstein files (as limited and heavily redacted as they’ve been) offer a glimpse of their depravity and rapaciousness. It’s no surprise the various institutions now corrupted, captured and controlled by the Epstein Class have strayed so far from their original functions, to the point of doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Conversely, those who typically do the worst within the systems and/or the most harmed by them tend to be the most law-abiding and economically disadvantaged.
Now, just over two years after my injury, my body has become more heavily locked-down. While still in the hospital the sensation of muscle tightness started with my hands feeling as if they were swollen and holding phantom objects. By year one it felt as if my forearms and abdomen were confined by tight metal shackles. Today the muscle tightness encompasses my body below the border of my paralysis near my shoulders. Having been still overnight and before a caregiver is able to stretch out my limbs, I often wake up feeling tightly mummified and squeezed by a giant hand.
As painful as my condition can be, it pales in comparison to the lives of countless innocent victims in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere, either targeted or collateral damage in geopolitical conflicts motivated in large part by racism, money and power. If anything positive can be imagined resulting from these multiple tragedies, it’s the growing realization of the true nature of the world and the people profiting most from the destruction of it’s life and natural habitat.
Despite feeling disconnected from the world, in a sense, the timing and consequences of my injury seem to reflect global events and trends in microcosm. For example, just as my injury forced me to leave my job, waves of workers have or will soon be leaving theirs due to obsolescence from AI automation and economic turbulence caused by war in the Middle East and resultant fuel and trade disruption. As I struggle with continuing health needs and accompanying insurance and social security issues, a large aging generation have or will soon face greater and lesser struggles.
Just as my mind has lost control of limbs and some internal functions, the body politic has lost control over government and associated institutions. Despite a plurality of citizens being against funding genocides, initiating wars, protecting pedophilic human traffickers, syphoning wealth to the Epstein Class, slashing infrastructure and human services budgets, etc., U.S. government continues to do so regardless of majority opinion.
The only way my life and health are sustained is with the help of systems (as dysfunctional as they can sometimes be) and a community of friends and family led primarily by my wife. As for national and global communities, it will take a mass domestic and global effort to implement substantial and permanent changes. For this to happen a global gnosis is needed; an awareness of the true nature of systems of control and the nature of ourselves, which are spiritual beings containing a divine spark (as suppressed or diminished as it may be within some). From these realizations, people will see with greater clarity and discernment the futility of efforts to reform thoroughly corrupted institutions. More immediately essential and effective are mass movements towards mutual aid and resilient human-scale systems to replace the institutions which no longer serve us.
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Double Take
Alfred Hitchcock Meets Jorge Luis Borges Borges in Cold War America: Watch Double Take (2009) Free Online
By Colin Marshall
Source: Open Culture
In 1962, while shooting The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock gets a phone call. Or rather, he’s informed of a phone call, but when he makes his way off set he finds not a call but a real live caller, and a thoroughly unexpected one at that: himself, eighteen years older. Beneath this encounter — in a room the London-born, Los Angeles-resident Hitchcock recognizes as a hybrid of Chasen’s and Claridge’s — runs a current of existential tension. This owes not just to the imaginable reasons, but also to the fact that both Hitchcocks have heard the same aphorism: “If you meet your double, you should kill him.”
So goes the plot of Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, or at least that of its fictional scenes. Though feature-length, Double Take would be more accurately considered an “essay film” in the tradition of Orson Welles’ truth-and-falsity-mixing F for Fake. As Every Frame a Painting’s Tony Zhou reveals, Welles’ pictureoffers a master class in its own form, illustrating the variety of ways cinematic cuts can connect not just events but thoughts, even as it expertly shifts between its parallel (and at first, seemingly unrelated) narratives. Double Take, too, has more than one story to tell: while Hitchcock and his doppelgänger drink tea and coffee, the Cold War reaches its zenith with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
We call Hitchcock “the master of suspense,” but revisiting his filmography exposes his command of a more basic emotion: fear. It was fear, in Double Take’s conception of history, that became commoditized on an enormous scale in Cold War America: fear of the Communist threat, of course, but also less overtly ideological varieties. Hollywood capitalized on all of them with the aid of talents like Hitchcock’s and technology like the television, whose rise coincided with the embittering of U.S.-Soviet relations. Even for a man of cinema forged in the silent era, the opportunity of a TV series could hardly be rejected — especially if it allowed him to poke fun at the commercial breaks forever quashing his signature suspense.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, its namesake announced upon its premiere, would commence “bringing murder into the American home, where it has always belonged.” But along with the murder, it smuggled in the work of writers like Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, and Rebecca West. Double Take also comes inspired by literature: “The Other” and “August 25th, 1983,” Jorge Luis Borges’ tales of meeting his own double from another time. Its script was written by Tom McCarthy, whose Remainder appears with Borges’ work on the flowchart of philosophical novels previously featured here on Open Culture. However many different Hitchcocks it shows us, we know there will never truly be another — just as well as we know that we still, in our undiminished desire to be entertained by our own fears, live in Hitchcock’s world.
After the Crash 