[This article first appeared in the Autumn 2007 issue of The American Interest with the title “Over There, Then: John Gunther’s Inside Europe”]

The War had started and Churchill had lots on his mind. But even in September 1939 he still had time for John Gunther. The much-travelled American journalist was one of the few outsiders who had been in Moscow on August 24th, the very day the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, and Churchill wanted to hear how this stunning maneuver was received on Moscow’s streets.

What exactly Gunther told Churchill is unrecorded, but the words of the British leader were something Gunther remembered for years. “Russia,” Churchill murmured, brooding aloud about the Soviet Union, and rehearsing lines that would become famous in a more polished form, “was a mystery in a mystery in a mystery.”

* * *

The wartime meeting with Churchill was no fluke. During the 1930s and 1940s John Gunther’s Inside Europe had made him the most famous American newsman of them all. A friend of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, Gunther threw parties at his home in New York for the likes of John Steinbeck, Salvador Dali, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—Inside Russia was dedicated to his good friend Greta Garbo.

He spent perhaps more time than was sensible with Walter Winchell and Elsa Maxwell in places like the Stork Club and Toots Shor’s and 21. But his books anatomising different continents—Inside Latin America, Inside Asia, Inside Africa, Inside Russia—were translated into ninety languages and sold millions of copies around the world.

Yet nothing else was as successful as his 1936 Inside Europe. It foreshadowed what the Nazis had in store. Much as Robert D. Kaplan today has been a Cassandra warning of the descent of entire Third World regions into anarchy, Gunther warned of the European forces leading inexorably to World War II.

Inside Europe

Inside Europe wasn’t a paperback. At the cheaper end of the British market in the 1930s books were selling for sixpence, but this was a whopping 500-page hardback retailing at 30 shillings, or sixty times that price.

That didn’t slow sales one bit. In its first year, 1936, Inside Europe sold 65,000 copies at about 1,000 copies a week, and continued to sell through 1937 at the same rate. By 1939 it had sold nearly 120,000 copies and continued to turn over through the Second World War. John Gunther was later told he was the best-selling American author of non-fiction in Britain since Mark Twain.

There were three reasons for this success, and the first was timing. Appearing first in January 1936 in London published by Hamish Hamilton, and later by Harper’s in the USA, Inside Europe provided a close literary echo, scene by scene and act by fateful act, of the international drama of the times. Running steadily through numerous updated impressions and editions, it climaxed in the “Peace Edition” of October 1938—the month when German troops marched into Czechoslovakia.

In the words of historian John Lukacs “1938 was Hitler’s year”. It saw the annexation of Austria, Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich, and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Readers of Inside Europe’s October 1938 edition were able to follow these developments almost as they happened.

Not only were they given brilliant thumb-nail sketches of the Nazis in Germany (and a matchless photograph of Goering at a reception, an enormous bull draped with braid and medals confronting a frail and exquisite lady from Japan) but there were also incisive studies of the whole tragi-comic gallery in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the Balkans, in East Europe. Gunther also dealt ably with the United Kingdom itself, where, through May 1940, the struggle between Churchill and his domestic opponents had yet to play out.

As a portrait gallery the photographs are outstanding—with one striking exception. The shot of Stalin is a typical blurry Soviet retouch job, where the crude hand of some studio helot can be seen brushing the hair, brightening the eyes, and putting a smile on the despot’s face. All too lamentably, this pictorial failing also extends to the text in the last chapters about Stalin and the USSR—something we shall come to in due course.

The second reason for the book’s success was depth. Though Gunther’s later work was often based on visits of only days or weeks, Inside Europe drew on twelve years’ research and reporting from every European capital; on personally investigating Hitler’s Austrian background and personally witnessing events like the Reichstag fire trial; on continually sharing information with journalistic colleagues Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, H. R. Knickerbocker and William Shirer, and with literary acquaintances Sinclair Lewis and Rebecca West.

The high cost of Nazi hoodlums

The third reason for the book’s success was its style and tone. Gunther grew up in Chicago, cut his journalistic teeth at the Chicago Daily News before going to Europe, and enjoyed colorful muckraking journalism. During a trip back to the Chicago at the end of the 1920s he collaborated on a News article titled “The High Cost of Hoodlums” that appeared in the October 1929 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It told how you could have an enemy “bumped off” for as little as $50, though the rate for a newspaper man like himself might be as high a $1000. In Inside: the Biography of John Gunther (1992) Ken Cuthbertson wrote that:

Despite the fact that “The High Cost of Hoodlums” was written sixty years ago, it retains its vitality as a superb historical snapshot of the Chicago of 1929… It provided a highly readable behind-the-scenes look at how 600 hoodlums had succeeded in terrorizing Chicago’s three million citizens.

One way of looking at Inside Europe is to see it as “a highly readable behind-the-scenes look” about the even larger number of hoodlums who were already terrorizing Germany and would soon menace the continent. BBC producer Brian Miller described in 2001 how the “racy mixture of politics and Capitol Hill gossip” put together by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen in 1931, Washington Merry Go Round, successfully pioneered muckraking book journalism in the US.

Cass Canfield, president of Harper & Brothers in New York, thought the same approach might be tried on Europe’s dictators. He chose Gunther to write the book, and Gunther’s powerful style ensured that Inside Europe broke through the suffocating climate of active censorship and intimidation (“this fog of untruth, or else of censorship, which was really a kind of self-censorship”) that was depriving British readers of the facts about Hitler and the drift to war.

In Vienna since 1930, Gunther had several things going for him. First, he was fast and could meet deadlines. Second, according to Brian Miller, “he was not subject to conservative proprietorial censorship because both his publishers were liberally minded and inclined to let him write whatever he liked, provided it ‘took the lid off’ something.” Third, “he was not subject to censorship and intimidation by dictators themselves because he made quick raids into their territories and only wrote when safely back in England or the USA.”

Inside Europe was a huge commercial success that sold half a million copies and gave him political entrée everywhere. Not only Churchill welcomed him. Two years later in 1941 in Washington, after returning from Latin America, Sumner Welles called Gunther in to brief Roosevelt on the region. Welles had provided letters of introduction to a dozen national leaders, and now Gunther was supposed to report what he’d found: Hitler had boasted of building “a new Germany” in Brazil, and Nazi sympathizers were everywhere.

But Roosevelt appeared less receptive than Churchill, and Gunther hardly got a word in. Instead he was treated to a rambling 45-minute lecture on foreign affairs during which, Gunther later wrote, “I kept thinking that FDR looked like a caricature of himself, with the long jaw tilting upward, the V-shaped opening of the mouth when he laughed, the two long deep parentheses that closed the ends of his lips.”

With Walter Duranty in Moscow

When John Gunther headed for Europe in 1924 it was after a two-year spell with the Chicago Daily News working alongside Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg. In London he met Dorothy Thompson, a strong influence and life-long friend, and had an affair with Rebecca West, nine years his senior, who opened doors for him in British literary circles. In London he also married his first wife Frances—the beginning of a stressful relationship that ended in 1944.

During those years he reported from Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople, and Moscow. It was in Moscow in 1928 that Gunther first met the New York Times representative Walter Duranty—in those days it seems everybody who went to Moscow did. Visiting Duranty’s apartment he reported,

When one dines with him in Moscow, an extremely pretty girl, smart in semi-evening frock, opens the door, shaking hands. She then disappears again, and late in the evening, asks Walter if he wants to get to work, she has finished the Izvestia proofs. Then they go to bed together. In the morning, she shines the shoes. Mistress, secretary, servant. An unholy trinity for you! Of course, by Moscow law, since they share the same residence, she’s his wife, too…

The pretty girl’s name was Katya, by whom Duranty later had a son. But the mild irregularity of the arrangement Gunther witnessed in Moscow was merely the tip of an iceberg. In Paris in the years before 1914, Duranty was a close friend of Aleister Crowley, a genuine madman fascinated by excretory functions, sexually aroused by blood and torture, and a “master” of the occult.

Duranty and Crowley shared the same woman, Jane Cheron, and all three of them were heavily into opium, sex, and black magic. Even when Duranty was escorting Gunther around Moscow in 1928 he remained in some sort of marital relation with Cheron, who was still in France. Did Gunther know any of this?

Perhaps he did and perhaps he didn’t care. Duranty, who had lost a foot in a railway accident and had a limp (the picture shows him not long after this event) was a famous raconteur and the pleasure of his company seems to have swept all doubts aside. In Stalin’s Apologist (1990) Sally J. Taylor tells how forty years later he and his wife visited Duranty where he was living in Orlando, Florida. Duranty came over to the motel where the Gunthers were staying, and according to Jane Gunther he was “enchanting, in his very best form.” They all stayed up until 4.00am, with Walter being “terribly funny, and very very wicked.” After Duranty left their motel, John turned to his wife and said, “Walter is just a scamp!”

But Duranty was not, alas, just a scamp. He was also a man many regarded then and now as a scoundrel. Not for nothing did Malcolm Muggeridge call him “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism,” or Joseph Alsop describe him as a “fashionable prostitute”, or Robert Conquest, later, call for every word he ever wrote about the Soviets and collectivization to be challenged again and again.

It’s possible that Duranty was in the pay of the Soviets, though another long-term New York Times correspondent, Harrison Salisbury, who looked into things during his own stay in Moscow, denied that Duranty was ever in the pay of anyone except the New York Times.”

Perhaps. Yet it’s inescapable that his immediate reward for doggedly covering up mass murder in the Ukraine was the indulgence of the regime, the tumultuous applause he received in the Waldorf-Astoria in 1933 for assisting America’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, and a call from Stalin four weeks after Duranty’s return to Moscow offering the unprecedented privilege of a second interview. Stalin’s words at the time, however accurately or inaccurately rendered by Duranty afterwards, were something he quoted with pride for the rest of his life:

You have done a good job in your reporting the USSR, though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and to explain it to your readers. I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.

The literary culture of the time

All of this raises questions about the journalistic and literary culture of the time. How could someone from the world of Aleister Crowley and the Paris bohemian demi-monde be hired by the New York Times as its resident commentator in Moscow on Russia under Bolshevik rule? How did he become the best-read authority in the US on Stalin’s famous planned economy? Why was such a man invited to Washington in July 1932 to advise Roosevelt about Soviet gold production?

Whatever the answers to those question, it’s plain that Walter Duranty rubbed off on John Gunther. The reason seems to have had something to do with the fact that both Gunther and Duranty were the sort of men who would rather write anything than not write at all. More I suspect than is the case today, many journalists of Gunther’s time were novelists manqué. Only fiction was considered truly prestigious, and readable fiction was not about economic trends, voting patterns, or industrial production. Duranty periodically tried to write both novels and short stories, and in Hollywood, in the years of his decline in the 1940s, he teamed up with Mary Loos, a niece of the screenwriter Anita Loos, to crank out stories and scripts.

The same literary interests drove Gunther. He never stopped writing novels—The Red Pavilion, The Golden Fleece, The Lost City. Most of them sank without trace. Through Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson he knew dozens of novelists and yearned for literary recognition.

When success came, however, it was not for fiction but for his reportorial colossus Inside Europe (though he must have enjoyed a Popular Front gathering of the League of American Writers in 1938 when he was invited on stage, and dined with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

When in 1935 Cass Canfield of Harper & Brothers approached him to write Inside Europe, Gunther turned him down—not once but twice. “In those days I was more interested in fiction than in journalism and my dreams were tied up in a long novel about Vienna that I hoped to write.” Only when offered the huge sum of $5000 did Gunther reluctantly accept. What’s interesting is that when he finally sat down to write, the approach was personal and novelistic almost as much as analytic and interpretive. Events in Europe were being shaped by a cast of extraordinary characters, Gunther believed, and Inside Europe would be about their beliefs, motives, and charisma.

To get under way he agreed to produce three articles, and “The three articles”, wrote Gunther, “turned out to be the three chief personality chapters in the book—Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.” What drove him was the need to show the force of their personalities and how they wielded power over other men. In a letter to Canfield he said that this approach “derives from something deeper in me than political conviction; it comes from the fact, for good or ill, I instinctively think of myself as a novelist.”

* * *

Inside Europe is still riveting. No-one who reads Gunther’s description of Hitler and his friends will easily forget it, whatever they may have read since World War II:

He reads almost nothing. He dislikes intellectuals. He has never been outside Germany since his youth in Austria and speaks no foreign language, except a few words of French. He is nearly oblivious of ordinary personal contacts. A colleague of mine travelled with him, in the same aeroplane, day after day, for two months during the 1932 electoral campaigns. Hitler never talked to a soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never stirred; never smiled.

Gunther had also spent time in Bucharest and knew the ominous mixture of Ruritanian farce and fascist menace to be found in Rumania. Only two streets away from King Carol’s palace one could see well-dressed members of the Iron Guard lounging in a café, sipping Turkish coffee, and talking about revolution. Founded in 1927 the program of the Iron Guard, he wrote, “was a fanatic, obstreperous sub-Fascism on a strong nationalist and anti-Semitic basis. Its members trooped through the countryside, wore white costumes, carried burning crosses, impressed the ignorant peasantry, aroused the students in the towns.”

The portrayal of Stalin

So far so good. And it’s reasonably good for hundreds of pages. But then one comes to Stalin—and it’s pure undiluted Walter Duranty. Stalin has, we are told

“Guts. Durability. Physique. Patience. Tenacity. Concentration. If he has nerves, they are veins in rock. His perseverance, as Walter Duranty says, is ‘inhuman’. When candour suits his purpose, no man can be more candid. He has the courage to admit his errors, something few other dictators dare do. In his article ‘Dizzy from Success’ he was quite frank to admit that the collectivisation of the peasants had progressed too quickly.”

This is truly a gem. Stalin’s magnanimity is shown by his “frankness” in “admitting” that collectivisation had “progressed too quickly.” Gunther sums up the desperate suicidal resistance of the peasants in the following four sentences: “The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.”

Yes. John Gunther actually wrote that it wasn’t Stalin, or the Communist Party, or the NKVD, or the Red Army troops who seized their grain and herded them without food or water onto railway wagons and shot them if they resisted; they “killed themselves.”

Even so, Inside Europe was a major achievement. It brought to public notice the Empire of Evil that was about to expand and take over the whole of central Europe. It powerfully confirmed the Nazi menace Churchill had toiled for years to publicise. And Gunther’s Inside Europe played no small part in bringing US elite opinion out of the dangerous miasma of isolationism that prevailed.

That such a perceptive journalistic observer could be drawn into Duranty’s deceptions about the Soviets had no simple explanation. It may however be because one of Gunther’s strongest personal virtues, loyalty, here became also a vice. He could never bring himself to believe (or to even imagine) that however entertaining Duranty may have been down through the years, and however firmly he had stood by his side during the painfully protracted death of Gunther’s son, his old friend from the 1920s was also a thorough scoundrel whose writings about Stalin were full of lies.

Baden-Baden, 9 May 1863

Dear Countess,

I arrived here a week ago and have only just managed to settle in, find myself a flat, etc. I was just about to write to you—although not fourteen pages but my normal four—when your long letter suddenly appeared, and naturally, despite your pitiless severity on me, I hastened to carry out my intention. I will say a few words, not in justification, but by way of explanation.

You censure me both as a man (in the sense of a political animal, citizen) and as a writer. I think that with the first you are quite correct, but not with the second. You are right in saying that I am not a political animal and in affirming that the government has nothing to fear from me; my convictions haven’t changed since my youth.

But I have never engaged in political activity, nor shall I ever do so. Such matters are alien to me and uninteresting and I concern myself with them only insofar as I need to as a writer who deals with contemporary life. But you are wrong to demand of me literature which I cannot produce, fruits which, as it were, do not grow on my tree. I have never written for the ordinary people. I write for that class to which I belong, from A Sportsman’s Sketches to Fathers and Sons.

I do not know whether I’ve been of any use, but I do know that I have been unwavering in my aims and in this respect do not deserve your reproach. You suggest that it is merely out of laziness that I do not write, as you say, simple and moral stories for the people, but how do you know that I haven’t tried twenty times to do something along these lines and have not done so because I am convinced that it is not in my province, that I do not know how to?

This is precisely where you can see the weak side of the most intelligent people who are not artists: having grown accustomed to arrange their lives according to their own free will, they just cannot understand that a writer often has no control over his own offspring and are ready to accuse him of laziness, epicureanism, etc. Believe me when I say that every person does only what is given him to do, and to coerce him is both useless and fruitless. That is why I shall never write stories for the ordinary people. For that one needs a quite different cast of mind and character.

I can place my hand on my heart and say that I don’t think I live abroad simply to enjoy staying in hotels and so on. Circumstances have up until now determined that I spend only five months a year in Russia, and it’s now even less. I trust you will believe me when I say that I would particularly like to be in Russia now and to see at first hand what is happening there, for it is something I really feel for.

I still haven’t found a husband for my daughter; she’ll be writing to you herself. I am sorry that I didn’t thank you for the marvellous album which you sent for her, which arrived safe and sound and now graces her table. I would be very pleased if you were advised to go abroad; I would then have une chance to see you.

Look after your health and write me albeit indignant letters. You know that I love you sincerely and value your friendship. I firmly press your husband’s hand.

Yours, Iv. Turgenev.

Perhaps a footnote is appropriate here. Turgenev asserts an aversion to politics, defending himself on the grounds that it is futile for men who are not political animals to pretend they are. Yet his 1862 Fathers and Sons prophetically points towards Russia’s grim future down to the present day. The character of Bazarov notoriously prefigures cold revolutionary passion. He represents a nihilist prototype of the Bolshevik “New Man”—stripped of religion, blind to ordinary human failings, contemptuous of the arts, dedicated to science and materialism, obsessively hostile to Czarism, and determined to “make a clean sweep”.

It might be going too far to see in Bazarov the fearful lineaments of Comrade Pavlik, the Soviet boy hero who denounced his own father to the NKVD. But the heartlessness of this “son” to his own conventionally sentimental parents eerily prefigures a world in which only political values count—apart from survival. (See the recent book by Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: the Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero.) How then can Fathers and Sons be described as unpolitical? Turgenev also said rather alarmingly that aside from his attitude toward the arts, Bazarov’s character stood for much that he himself believed.

Nonetheless, as he claims, Turgenev is unpolitical. He belongs to no party. Despite his apparent sympathies he is not arguing for a cause. While he severely criticises the idle and directionless gentry to which he himself belongs, he has a detached and unsentimental view of the peasantry; and while agreeing that the abolition of serfdom was necessary (it took place in 1861; Fathers and Sons appeared in 1862) he was not optimistic about the future rise of millions of gross and brutish Furtsevas and Khrushchevs to supreme power. Turgenev is unpolitical also in his detachment. His aesthetic stance is strictly sub specie aeternitatis— it fatalistically embraces nature’s eternal indifference to man. In René Wellek’s words:

As early as A Sportsman’s Sketches he had said: “From the depths of the age-old forests, from the everlasting bosom of waters the same voice is heard: ‘You are no concern of mine’ says nature to man.” In the remarkable scene with Arkady on the haystack—the two friends almost come to blows—Bazarov had pronounced his disgust with “man’s pettiness and insignificance beside the eternity where he has not been and will not be.” There is no personal immortality, no God who cares for man; nature is indifferent, fate is blind and cruel, love is an affliction, even a disease beyond reason—this seems the message Turgenev wants to convey.

Quadrant, January-February 2007

Where are the sheiks of yesteryear, riding romantically over the dunes? Not in Australia. Here a burly Egyptian with an ugly turn of phrase recently set new records for ungallantry. Scantily clad Australian women, complained Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, go around like “exposed meat” inviting rape.

Of course we all made a huge uproar. Unbelievable! Who asked his opinion anyway? The sheik calls himself a Mufti and thinks he represents Islam Down Under. But the man’s a brute who plainly hates western culture, who may have channelled funds to Hezbollah, and on top this he’s a security risk too. Go home sheik, go home!

To be honest, it seems to me that what the sheik was complaining about is a process that has gone on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from most normal human cultures in the past, where once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires, along with grossly exhibitionistic behaviour, are now increasingly treated as routine.

What has happened? Has a moral tsunami left our middle classes in ruins? What has been the corrupting role we ourselves have played in this state of affairs—every one of us that is, from the trash merchants at the bottom, to our most celebrated writers and artists at the top? Last December Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal how when “Britney Spears jauntily revealed her waxed nether-regions to waiting photographers as she exited her limo,” this made her “the Internet smash of the season.” Hymowitz then underlined the naivete of the exhibitionism involved—the taken-for-granted security of the celebrity world where Britney Spears and Paris Hilton live:

They underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information and violate the logic of privacy that should be all the more compelling in a media-driven age.”

The sheik and his followers live within that force field—as do we all. Recently too the papers have been filled with scandalised reports of paedophilia in a surprising variety of milieus, sometimes at high political levels. A cultural complaisance regarding men who like boys is not uncommon in the Middle East, particularly among the Bedouin, a fact that is doubtless well known to the sheik. But our subject today is not the comparatively innocent behavior of desert tribesmen; it is the more knowing depravity of modern decadence. What has made us this way?

Art and innocence

A hundred years ago the German author Thomas Mann made an interesting comment. Thinking about morality and its relation to the world of art, he wrote in his novella Tonio Kröger that “as the kingdom of art increases, that of health and innocence declines.” Many artists are estranged from life, he said, pursue goals hostile to life, and work continually to destroy the bourgeois world.

Destroying the bourgeoisie was on many people’s minds at the time. Thoughts of bloody revolution were in the air. Mann however suggested that this would be wasted effort. Given time, and left to itself, capitalism would be more easily debauched than overthrown—destroyed by the values of the artistic bohemia it admired.

Artists were exciting. Artists were sexually free. Above all art redeemed the bourgeoisie from the greedy sin of acquisitiveness. As Jacques Barzun has argued, it wasn’t long before art became a new religion, writers were revered as prophets, and as part of this understanding the bourgeoisie came to believe that the creators of fine literature and beautiful music also had beautiful souls.

This was nonsense. The so-called artist’s ‘gift’, wrote Thomas Mann in 1903, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. “It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.” The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen are reliable friends. But artists are not. And because he understood this so clearly, the eponymous Tonio Kröger (the character of a writer in the book who speaks for Mann himself) was embarrassed to find complete strangers sending him letters of praise:

…I positively blush at the thought of how these good people would freeze up if they were to get a look behind the scenes. What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes…”

Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate!

The rise of the paederaesthetic

If art increases as innocence declines, is it a matter of cause and effect? In that case Mann would seem to be supporting Rousseau’s view in the First Discourse that literature and the arts are actually making the world worse. It certainly sounds like that. In Mann’s view the writer stands in permanent moral opposition, sceptical and ironic and relentlessly gnawing away. Worse still: having found a role in Art he may have lost a useful role in Life. The sense of being set apart in an alien moral universe is overwhelming:

You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attaché or a lieutenant; you hardly need to give a glance or speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something else: something queer, different, inimical.

Sexually inimical too—or sexually perhaps most of all. “Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those unsexed papal singers. We sing like angels; but…” Here Kröger/Mann breaks off. Perhaps from weariness or boredom. Perhaps also because the angelic songs of yearning can hardly be named for what they are. Readers of Death in Venice will however take his meaning. In that story the ageing writer Aschenbach lusts after the youth Tadzio, and the ironic sensibility so ably described, the scepticism, the irony, the extreme narcissism, is combined with the mysterious obsessions of the paedophile—such obsessions being those of the author himself.

Planck had requested a personal interview with Hitler regarding anti-Semitic dismissals of professors. He was subjected to a three-quarter-hour harangue, after which he returned home completely crushed.

He said it was like listening to an old peasant woman gabbling on about mathematics, the man’s low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas; more hopeless than anything the illustrious scientist and thinker had ever heard in his entire life.

Two worlds coming together as the result of the one’s rise to power: a man from the world of knowledge, erudition, and disciplined thought is forced to listen to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettante, after which he can only bow and take his leave.

Stephen Spender wrote of the diaries that “Thomas Mann is a monumental figure of our time. Reading these journals one feels that this monument is made of very hard, resistant, almost cruel material: but under the surface there is a human being who, together with Freud, was the greatest human being this century.”

Under the surface, too, unmentioned by Spender, was a pederastic interest that pervades his work and accurately reflects his inclinations. There is far more to his stories than that, and we should also note that he appears to have spent most of his life in chaste frustration. But with their adored ‘Hermes’ (and their slighted and ridiculous women) the tales he spun probably helped to disinhibit, to condone, and to legitimise predatory behaviour that mothers with children can only regard with dread.

Still, there it is, an unbudgeable fact of literary history: two of the most distinguished writers of the 20^th century, the most relentlessly cerebral and self-conscious writers, and the most academically admired and studied writers with whole shelves of earnest research devoted to their books, gave what I shall call “paederaesthetics”—the world of belief and feeling embodied in erotically idealised juveniles frankly treated as sexual prey—an important place. A widely used Simon & Schuster reader’s guide for college students from 1995 tells us that

Lolita, with its murder, paedophilia, sadism, masochism, and even hint of incest, clearly struck a nerve in our society by violating a number of its strongest taboos.

I’d have thought that any healthy society very reasonably should have taboos against murder, paedophilia, sadism, and incest. I am neither a prude nor a killjoy, yet rules against these things seem sensible to me. But the author of this student guide to Lolita apparently feels otherwise, suggesting, in accord with his antinomian principles, that the proper function of literature is to overcome such taboos. And perhaps in the case of paedophilia it has succeeded.

Yet to know this literary fact was not enough. After every extenuating aesthetic argument had been considered, it remained the case that Lolita “makes a prolonged assault on one of our unquestioned and unquestionably sexual prohibitions, the sexual inviolability of girls of a certain age (and compounds the impiousness with what amounts to incest).” It might be true, he writes, that Juliet was fourteen when she gave herself to Romeo, and that we all now regard ourselves as sensibly clear-eyed about sex after the enlightenment of Coming of Age in Samoa.

But let an adult male seriously think about the girl as a sexual object and all our sensibility is revolted. The response is not reasoned but visceral. Within the range of possible heterosexual conduct, this is one of the few prohibitions which still seem to us to be confirmed by nature itself.

The sexualizing of everyday life

Not any more—or not in certain circles. Trilling’s is plainly a voice from the past. Today the debate is more likely to concern the acceptability of public copulation or pubic display. If it’s okay for Paris Hilton to make a video of herself having sex and to share it about in cyberspace, why shouldn’t Susie and Jim make one too? A glance at any newspaper shows how each libertine advance ratchets up another without anyone knowing where to stop.

A mass-market color supplement to Sydney’s Sun-Herald for October 29 2006 has the Hilton sisters on the cover, while inch-high yellow lettering shouts “Hedonism is Back, How to Party Celebrity Style”. The following 30 pages promote celebtrashery as a way of life.

Spectrum, a literary supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald edited and written largely by women, moves up a cultural notch and features a story about the female author “of a best-selling erotic novel”. This cites “a man who wishes women would make more noise in bed, and a divorcee in her 50s finding sex on the internet.” Reviews follow, a scene from the film Suburban Mayhem showing a chesty chick in thigh-high leather who, we are told, is “mistress of the SMS, and the local boys are her Praetorian Guard.” Reviewer Sandra Hall reports that “Wanna Fuck? is their call to arms” and that the young woman in question “usually obliges.”

Some relief from this brazen brutishness is provided by the writer Elizabeth Farrelly. Her essay “In search of a cure for paradise syndrome” questions the concept of illimitable human desires, and quotes Raymond Tallis’s thoughts on this subject. But only pages later there’s a full-color cartoon of a pole dancer getting her rocks off—if that’s the expression I need.

Not wanting to unfairly target a single Sydney newspaper I looked at The Weekend Australian Magazine for November 11-12. The cover is a bold come-on for an article asking if it is right or wrong for women teachers to seduce male pupils. No particular moral stance is adopted, and a number of court cases are examined. Yet by only the second paragraph we are treated to a vivid description of a 37-year-old woman who “wound up in the front seat of her car giving one of her boys oral sex… His friends thought he was ‘a bit of a legend’. He let them in on juicier details, like her glasses fogging up.”

Civility and common sense

Now then. Let us stop for a moment and consider. Put yourself in the position of conventionally respectable immigrants from some traditional culture—Sri Lankan Buddhists, Colombian Catholics, Eastern Orthodox from the Ukraine—who are used to certain standards of dress and appearance, who go to buy a weekend newspaper, and who are confronted with this sort of thing. We might also mention the good Rabbi and the pious Lubavitchers over my back fence, whose views of female decorum are in all important respects indistinguishable from the sheik’s.

What conclusion can they possibly draw from the daughters of billionaires fornicating on the web, cries for more noise in bed, shouts of “Wanna Fuck?” from movie stars, a female pole dancer engaged in public masturbation, and Australian women teachers who seduce their pupils and provide them with oral sex? Sheik al-Hilaly is a boor and a pest. He undeniably has a wider political agenda. But if these are not examples of white western women calling for action, what exactly are they?

Thomas Mann’s premonitions have come about. With the expansion of media mimesis in every direction the numbers of those who write and film and act and transform reality in a thousand more-or-less artistic ways has steadily expanded, the boundary between life and theatre has blurred, and what were once the values of a picturesque social fringe have taken over. Many of the people in our Theatrical Industrial Complex are very sick people indeed.

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused…

For Europe’s educated classes the situation in the 18^th century may have been as near as we are likely to come to a secular world where mind and body, thought and passion, were in some kind of balance—the various worlds of Hume and Rousseau, of Gibbon and Voltaire, of the Baronne de Warens and Madame du Chatelet—a world where both the conventional Johnson and the promiscuous Boswell could separately thrive and flourish.

That’s where we seem to have gone wrong. An abandonment of the common sense rules to be found in hundreds of traditional cultures, and a foolish refusal to confine the sexual world to where it belongs, has led to its being indiscriminately mingled with everything else, 24/7. A burly Middle Eastern peasant in a nightshirt may seem an improbable source of moral guidance, yet in a way that’s what the outspoken sheik is—and he’s calling the shots as he sees them. But shooting the messenger is hardly the answer. Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly and his followers are what they are. We are what we have fatefully become.

The American Interest , November-December 2006

They called him the most distinguished public intellectual of his time. Malcolm Cowley said he was “the last of the great humanists”, while Leo Marx claimed “it’s hard to think of another 20th-century American, in or out of the academy, who has written as many books regarded by academic experts as signal contributions to as many scholarly fields. Except for Edmund Wilson . . . not one comes to mind.”

Though his works were often repetitive they were good enough to win the National Book Award in 1961, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, the National Medal for Literature in 1972, the Smithsonian’s Hodgkins Gold Medal and the National Medal of the Arts in 1986. In 1975 the Queen made him an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire; he got the Prix Mondial del Duca in Paris in 1976 for lifetime contributions to letters; in Italy, after calling on Bernard Berenson, he was taken up by the Olivetti family and given a lavish reception at a handsome Roman villa, where 200 of Italy ’s most famous writers, architects and painters were gathered.

For fifty years Lewis Mumford inveighed against capitalism, militarism, technology, our ungovernable appetite for energy and our deplorable weakness for highways and cars, predicting environmental disaster if Western economic growth and America ’s thirst for petroleum were not brought under control. Middle Eastern wars and global warming seem to fulfil his darkest prophecies.

Yet who reads Mumford now? His incoherent politics might be one reason—endorsing Emerson’s radical individualism in one place and Henry Bellamy’s “basic communism” in another. But here I’m concerned with something else: the role of aesthetes in public affairs. Does American democracy have no place for cultural mandarins any more?

Concord and Walden Pond

Born in 1895 in New York , Lewis Mumford was the illegitimate issue of a brief liaison between his 30-year-old Protestant German-American mother and a young man in the Jewish household where she worked. His surname had been acquired by his mother a dozen years before during a short marriage to a man twice her age, Jack Mumford. About six months after their wedding, Elvina Conrida Mumford’s first and only husband seems to have got into some sort of “book-keeping trouble” and fled to Canada . The marriage was then annulled.

Lewis Mumford never met either the man from whom he took his second name—and whose only other legacy was a cheap edition of Dickens—or his much younger biological father, Lewis Mack. An Irish nurse provided whatever stability the household had. Mumford was kept in the dark about the whole parental story for many years, and though he vaguely understood that he was both illegitimate and half-Jewish, his mother raised a barrier against further inquiry. Only in 1942, when he was 47 years old, did she finally tell him the facts. According to his biographer, Mumford smilingly embraced her and said she shouldn’t worry, since both Leonardo da Vinci and Erasmus were also illegitimate.

As a student at New York ’s Stuyvesant High School , young Lewis boyishly played around with science, and at 15 had an article accepted by Modern Electrics . But when he flunked basic algebra and found English was his best subject the matter was settled: He would be a writer—specifically a playwright and man of letters. It might be a bit much to see failing algebra as a crucial turning point, but his lifelong hostility to mathematics and quantification did start early.

Growing up on Manhattan during the years of the First World War Mumford tried on different American identities. Nearest to hand was Walt Whitman, a poet who had already sung the city of New York . But there was an exuberance about Whitman that wasn’t quite what he wanted. Thoreau was better: withdrawn, self-contained and defiant, better with trees than people, the kind of man an unprepossessing acne-scarred youth could warm to. But it was Emerson who most appealed—austere, towering, exemplary. “Emerson was a sort of living essence”, Mumford wrote in his 1926 survey of American literature, The Golden Day : “The preacher, the farmer, the scholar, the sturdy New England freeholder, yes, and the shrewd Yankee peddler or mechanic, were all encompassed by him; but what they meant in actual life had fallen away from him: he represented what they stood for in eternity.”

Emerson became Mumford’s lifelong idol: Mumford’s wife recalled having to listen to regular readings from the Journals: “I used to live with Emerson”, she said. “It was Emerson, Lewis, and me.”

Walking, talking

Emerson liked walking and so did Mumford. In 1916 he strode all over Manhattan —“East Side, West Side , north and south.” Biographer Donald L. Miller tells us how the New York neighborhoods he visited were observed, sketched, rated, while any that didn’t measure up got marked down for potential demolition. In New York ’s Jewish quarter “he encountered foul-smelling, clotted tenements he would later compare to those of Juvenal’s Rome .” All along the East Side, Mumford noted, “there was not a block after leaving Madison Avenue that was not dingy, grimy, dull and hopeless.”

Funny thing was, the inhabitants of these dull and hopeless blocks were enjoying a bright and hopeful existence. When he stopped to think about it, it was plain to Mumford that such a vital culture should be preserved, though to do this in accord with the latest principles he’d acquired at City College everything would have to be scrubbed and relocated first. A kind of Jewish Garden City formed in his mind—a Greek agora with a temple at one end, “an adjacent refreshment place, and many protected stalls” nearby, with “plenty of elbow room for gesticulation.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with a Jewish Garden City—quite the opposite. But did Mumford ask these lively gesticulating people if they wanted one? Did he talk to them at all? Like a Victorian traveller in Africa, the peripatetic visitor from the Upper West Side found the natives useful for stimulating moral reflections, pictorial fancies, and expansive civilizing plans, but conversation wasn’t part of the deal.

The contrast between his zeal for fixing New York City and his ignorance of its citizens exposed a persisting mental tendency. It was as noticeable in 1916, applied to life on the Lower East Side, as it was in the case of the International Garden City he proposed for the United Nations thirty years later, when he advised that 3,000 acres of Manhattan be forcefully requisitioned, screened by belts of grass and trees from the corruptions of commerce, and made into a leafy home for the benign world government to come.

Town planning as aesthetics

Lewis Mumford’s first book was his 1922 The Story of Utopias, a journalistic survey ranging from Plato to William Morris. Sympathetic judges say it showed commendable detachment and neither endorsed nor dismissed the utopian project as a whole. Yet the message Mumford distilled from Plato’s Republic went further than this. Here was a utopia that “pictured a community living a sane, continent, athletic, clear-eyed life; a community that would be always, so to say, within bounds”—and would be implicitly autarkic, too. It was a model he thought should be widely followed.

Mumford knew by the age of twenty that he really belonged in another time and place, writing that 6th-century B.C. Athens “would have been more to my liking than New York in the twentieth century after Christ.” And if ancient Greece would suit him better, why shouldn’t it suit the rest of New York ? Why not Athens on Hudson ? Parnassus on Palisades ?

To remake and reconstitute the garment district as a Garden City would be a good start—but in town planning one thing leads to another. New York was only a small part of the Hudson Valley . If the city were to be set to rights, there had to be a unified plan from the Adirondacks to the sea. In an essay on the “regional vision” John L. Thomas tells us that soon after discussing Plato’s polis, Mumford made the following comparison:

It is a mountainous region, this Greece , and within a short distance from mountain top to sea there was compressed as many different kinds of agricultural life as one could single out in going down the Hudson Valley from the Adirondack Mountains to New York Harbor . As the basis of his ideal city, whether Plato knew it or not, he had an ‘ideal’ section of land in his mind—what the geographer calls the ‘valley section.’

* * *

“The geographer” was a Scot named Patrick Geddes whose writings Mumford discovered at City College . Mumford swallowed whole Geddes’ ideas on regional and city planning. What exactly Geddes meant by a “valley section” need not concern us, except to note that it implied having a place for everything and putting everything in its place over hundreds of square miles and millions of acres.

Only a humorless Scot—or perhaps a drunken Russian—could have come up such a dirigiste fantasy, the political and economic ramifications of which hardly bear serious reflection. But each of these men—Mumford, Geddes and Mumford’s close friend, the Appalachian-trailing conservationist Benton MacKaye—had overriding moral and aesthetic concerns. If you got the right colors and shapes in the right places, according to a socialist scale that set firm bounds and limits, then politics (and funding) would look after themselves. What was needed was a high lookout from which a city could be seen with every building and district displayed. After that a planner could decide who and what went where.

Geddes got his view of Edinburgh from the Outlook Tower , a still-visited pseudo-medieval structure built on a high point near Edinburgh Castle , with a camera obscura at the top. For those unacquainted with this device, it projects a 360-degree synoptic image of one’s surroundings onto a table in a darkened room. Suddenly a confusion of human dwellings and workplaces forms a picture to delight the artist’s eye: not homes, just patches of color; not factories, just rectangular forms to be more suitably disposed.

MacKaye’s equivalent of the Outlook Tower in New England was a 542-foot rocky outcrop called Hunting Hill just west of Boston . From here he could see the tributaries of the Nashua River running through country familiar to Thoreau, while to the north “lay the Whitman River , along its banks the railroad bringing lumber and staples east to Boston and carrying manufactures back to the Berkshires and beyond.” Describing his own education, MacKaye said: “I graduated from Longley’s barnyard in 1893 and from Harvard in 1900”—Melvin Longley being the dairyman next door.

Mumford’s own version of the Outlook Tower was on the Palisades on the west side of the Hudson . One of the sketches collected in the Lewis Mumford Papers in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania bears the title in his own hand, “ Manhattan from top of Palisades .” Made during a walking tour in the area, the city in the sketch consists of an irregular horizon of forms and makes up only about 10 percent of the total composition, the rest consisting of river, trees and grass. There are, of course, no people to be seen.

Romantic transfigurations: the rural scene

Mumford followed The Story of Utopias in 1924 with a historical study of American architecture, Sticks and Stones . Many titles of swelling portentousness would follow: Technics and Civilization , The Culture of Cities , The Condition of Man and The Conduct of Life , to name but four. Along with Oswald Spengler’s 1926 The Decline of the West , they prophesied the technological nemesis of Western Man. All of them turgidly elaborated a handful of simple ideas, the first of which was that small is beautiful, and big must therefore justify itself.

The second held that rural arcadia is man’s natural environment: although cities bring forth man’s highest powers, metropolis is often inimical to the human spirit. The third idea was that whatever is “organic” is always and everywhere superior to “the machine”—the latter being a metaphor for all technology since time immemorial. The conclusions he drew were that science is out of control; growth must be stopped; unregulated development must be banned; the reckless consumption of finite resources must end; the ideal state is a stationary state; and planning must be imposed as widely as possible.

To justify this critique Mumford looked back into history. If utopias were to serve as a measure and a guide, they should be combined with what he called a “usable past.” But how could one tell the usable past from the unusable? Despite Mumford’s seemingly encyclopaedic reading and his deep immersion in Thoreau, when he rhapsodised about medievalism or about 17th-century New England towns and farms, what practical understanding of rural life did he actually have?

True, for 36 years Mumford divided his time between Manhattan and the slow-moving upstate hamlet of Leedsville, where he occupied what is called a farmhouse. This was not a working farm where a working farmer and his family made a living off the land. It was a congenial rural retreat for an urban intellectual—the sort of house that comes onto the market when working farmers go broke or die. True, too, his biographer Miller tells us,

As a young boy, from the time he was eight years old to when he was thirteen, he would spend part of the summer on a farm near Bethel , Vermont . . . . It was a world such as Henry David Thoreau had known, rustic but not wilderness, with farms and fields and streams and woods . . . a world Mumford would reference in his book on the art and life of Thoreau’s time, The Golden Day . There young Lewis learnt how to hunt woodchucks and squirrels, and “gained his first glimpse of a simpler, more deeply satisfying life than he found in the world of his New York relatives.

Perhaps so. But did he actually see any work being done? “When he wasn’t reading, hunting, fishing, or walking around the farm”, writes Miller, “Lewis would spend hours lying in a hammock, suspended between two maples in front of the house, listening to the rustling of the leaves above him.” There was also, as it happened, a 300-book library in the house. What I myself remember of life on the farm (and I spent rather more of my boyhood in the country than Mumford did) is the screaming of pigs being slaughtered and a farmhand falling off a haystack and breaking his neck. What Mumford remembered was lying in a hammock cradling Ruskin’s Modern Painters in his arms.

Romantic transfigurations: medievalism

The contrast between dream and reality is just as striking in Mumford’s enthusiasm for the medieval world. This enthusiasm makes an early appearance in his survey of American architecture, Sticks and Stones , where the reader learns that the noblest American residential building was the “medieval” tradition found in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the 17th century. By no means coincidentally, communalism is seen as inseparable from the aesthetic effect: “The charm of an old New England house”—a charm reflected also in the uniform styles of farmhouse, mill and meeting house—“was the outcome of a common spirit, nourished by men who had divided the land fairly and who shared adversity and good fortune together.” He added: “Would it be an exaggeration to say that there has never been a more complete and intelligent partnership between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the old New England village?”

Apparently not—the only thing to compare with the old New England village was the even older medieval European town where, according to The Culture of Cities , the entire social order was an enormous collective source of well-being. One didn’t have to sit at a desk or bully customers or sordidly wheel and deal: “Economic life was devoted to the glorification of God . . . and to the construction of cathedrals, churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools.” And the key to well-being was this: “Business and religion were in an organic relationship.” So there was no conflict between values and work. Organic relationships are best—and we are told there was also a healthy “organic” relationship between religion and the life of the mind. This flourished in the cloister, where medieval life was (somehow) constantly in blissful retreat: “One withdrew at night: one withdrew on Sundays and on fast days: so long as the medieval complex was intact, a constant stream of disillusioned worldly men turned from the market place and the battlefield to seek the quiet contemplative round of the monastery.”

Organic relations are good, but the overriding value is really aesthetic—in other words, how everything looks . In Sticks and Stones Mumford praised the John Ward House in Salem for purely external visual qualities. Every step one takes nearer the house “alters the relation of the planes formed by the gable ends . . . so the building seems in motion, as well as the spectator; and this quality delights the eye quite as much as formal decoration.” Writing in The Culture of Cities about the medieval German town of Dinkelsbühl , he finds the same thing:

Blocked vista and irregular, upward pointing silhouette: gabled roof, tower, and spire worked in aesthetic harmony. The tracery of ironwork in the standard and shield of the foreground was a fine feature of civic art, especially notable in South Germany .

Again:

Rothenburg-an-der-Tauber: another typical profile, irregular but harmonious, following the contour of the land, with the more significant buildings thrusting against the sky. Organic planning and building, not for show but for defense, civic association, the expression of common values.

Were the residents of ancient Dinkelsbühl happy in their blocked vista with its irregular, upward-pointing silhouette? Were the citizens of Rothenburg-an-der-Tauber content with their buildings “thrusting against the sky?” Never mind blocked vistas—what about blocked drains? Throughout his life Mumford was extraordinarily reluctant to see the obvious connection between the continual expansion of science and technology that he feared and routinely denounced, and the practical interests and needs that drove this expansion all the way from the privations of the 11 th century to the amenities we enjoy today.

* * *

Despite occasional throwaway lines about the Black Death—“which sometimes killed off half the population of a town, but caused only a temporary recession”—Mumford’s feudal Europe was a world without lice, rats, plague, lepers, violence and insecurity, without crippling superstitions and hideous punishments, without crop failures and starvation, without arrogant abbots, brutal lords and brutish serfs. There are no packs of savage dogs (hard to deal with before firearms, and a serious problem around St. Paul’s Cathedral in London at one time), and no fiery conflagrations that might suddenly destroy 600 houses—as happened in London in 1091—because, alas, however pleasingly irregular their gables and silhouettes, they were mere structures of mud and straw.

As book followed book, Mumford’s wishful thinking about the medieval era got increasingly out of control, and the imagined glories of monastic life became an infatuation. By the age of 75 he seemed to have forgotten that at least nine-tenths of humanity—all normal families of men, women and children—were excluded from this celibate world: In one of his last works, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development , the single-sex monastic community is enthusiastically hailed as “an early model of the ‘welfare state’.”

The UN on Manhattan

Mumford’s comments on architecture were widely read and highly regarded. As recently as 1998 the Princeton Architectural Press published Sidewalk Critic , a collection of his New Yorker pieces from the 1930s, in which the anthologist describes him as “the most important architectural critic produced by the United States in the twentieth century.” Turning its pages we find him writing approvingly in 1932 of Frank Lloyd Wright, saying his “organic architecture” was “a matter of relating air, sunlight, space, gardens, outlook, social intercourse, economic activity, in such a fashion as to form a concrete whole.” In 1936 he likes the cork tiles on the kitchen floor of a Corbusier house, though he finds the bathroom window disappointingly small.

It has to be said that Mumford’s New Yorker columns contain much plain common sense, yet his architectural criticism overall left him spread-eagled between principles not easily reconciled—the “organic”; the modern view that “form should follow function”; something he finds in William Morris called “living form”; and along with all of this, the “usable past.” The result is that it’s never clear quite what he likes or why. He damns most historical styles as entirely unusable. Commenting on Corbusier in 1935 he condemns some barrel-vaulted ceilings as “stylistic atavisms” that remind him oddly of “Maine carriage houses of the eighteen-forties”, while in Sticks and Stones any attempt to revive colonial tradition is severely chastised: “What we call a revival is really a second burial.”

Yet elsewhere he finds revivalism legitimate. Because Mumford heartily approves of the English socialist and artist William Morris, The Culture of Cities introduces him as a man “who realized that society itself was the main source of architectural form, and that only in terms of living functions could living form be created.” In Morris’ “Red House” of 1852 “an attempt was made to discard ornamental tags and go back to essentials: honest materials, well-wrought: plain brick walls: a roof of heavy slates: every detail as straightforward and sensible as in a 17th-century English farmhouse.” So for Americans to revive 18th-century colonial architecture is wrong and foolish, but for a British socialist to revive a 17th-century English farmhouse is right and wise.

Archaism was hardly an issue when he came to consider the United Nations buildings—though form and function were. Mumford had been holding forth on this subject for years, in Sticks and Stones , for example, invoking Aristotle: “In the Aristotelian sense, every purpose contains an inherent form; and it is only natural that a factory or lunchroom or grain elevator, intelligently conceived, should become a structure quite different” from rectangular buildings traditionally conceived.

* * *

The doctrine that “form follows function” obviously applies to surfboards; why it should be expected to distinguish the premises of the butcher, the baker or the candlestick-maker is less clear. What architectural form would be appropriate for each? The plain fact is that for most functions, most of the time, 99 percent of humanity needs only four walls and a roof. For more abstract human purposes the doctrine that form follows function is a shaky guide. If, as Mumford assumed, the function of the United Nations complex in New York was to symbolize the “physical renewal of the whole city and the spiritual renewal of the whole world”, at the same time serving as a home for “the preservation of peace and a symbol of enduring harmony”, what form could it possibly take? An amiably sunlit stratospheric cloud?

His own proposals were grandiose, and in hindsight look as if he was already losing touch with reality. To be fair, other proposals were also very ambitious. The responsible UN committee was considering sites as large as forty square miles with the possibility of a “complete community” of 50,000 to be located in either Westchester or Fairfield counties. (Objections from local residents quickly put a stop to that.) But Mumford’s urban proposals were scarcely more modest. “This is no time for small plans or grudging half-measures”, he announced to the Royal Institute of British Architects in July 1946. He argued that an appropriate headquarters should occupy “between 1,000 and 3,000 acres within an existing world metropolis [ultimately New York] created by a large-scale process of slum clearance and replacement”; that the UN “should be a legally independent municipality”; and that it should comprise “a balanced urban community . . . capable of growing up to the point where it would hold a population between twenty-five and fifty thousand people in permanent residence.”

The gross area to be appropriated for this autonomous enclave comprised roughly all of Manhattan from east to west between about 34th Street and Canal. Mumford took pains to underline its essential anti-business ethos: “The city must be cut to the measure of a different kind of man from the powerful, domineering, semi-neurotic types who have left their marks so unmistakably on the great capitals of the past.”

* * *

The eventual site and building, designed by Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer , were of course a bitter disappointment to Mumford. He had argued that in a properly planned arrangement the new “world city” should be set off from “the visual clutter of New York”, and that it should be an inspiring symbol of world government and international cooperation, separated by a cordon sanitaire of trees and grass from midtown and Wall Street, standing in the sharpest possible contrast to the sordid money-grubbing world of capitalist enterprise overall. Lawrence Vale’s sardonic remark put it best: “How it is that a new mini city which turns its collective back upon New York may be construed as an example of world cooperation, Mumford did not say.”

Ethereal hot-air balloons

As he aged, the etherealizing trajectory of Mumford’s writing, moving always from the particular to the abstract, the visible to the invisible, exhortation to cosmic prophecy, grew more pronounced. This can be seen at the level of sentences as well as books. In The City in History he wrote “We must conceive of the city not primarily as a place of business or government but as an essential organ for expressing and actualizing a new personality.” Note the logical structure: Starting from an asserted but unargued imperative, he moves from the bricks and mortar of buildings, through the mystification of “expression” and “actualization”, to the goal of a new collective personality—the idealized psyche of reformed and reconstituted urban man.

Most of his books do the same. The first half of The Culture of Cities is a mine of miscellaneous information. Whether writing about Versailles , St. Petersburg , Bath , Carlsbad or Saratoga Springs , he usually has something interesting to say. But after the inevitable romanticizing of the medieval town, things slip ever more out of focus, and his claims become ever more extravagant. In the last chapter we learn that architecture is symbolic; that it has a peculiar part to play in the modern world—and we are also told rather alarmingly that it is not only “the essential commanding art” but that “the very notion of planning owes more to this art than to any other.”

Much of the rest, however, consists of banality. Between Mumford’s prefaces and his endings, vast regions of time and space are surveyed; a thousand names are dropped; and the mighty Zeppelin comes in to its mooring at last. But his closing peroration always resembles the expiring wheeze of a punctured hot-air balloon. Thus the conclusion to The Condition of Man (1944):

The inner crisis of our civilization must be resolved if the outer crisis is to be effectively met. Our first duty is to revamp our ideas and values and to reorganize the human personality around its highest and most central needs. . . . There is no wealth, as Ruskin said, but life; and there is no consummation of life except in the perpetual growth and renewal of the human person.

Utopia and paranoia

Charlatan or seer? Sage or simpleton? Hayek thought him pretty simple-minded, holding him up as an example of the “synoptic delusion.” Mumford had written in 1937 that we still have to develop “the art of simultaneous thinking: the ability to deal with a multitude of related phenomena at the same time, and of composing, in a single picture, both the qualitative and the quantitative attributes of these phenomena.” This, wrote Hayek in Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973), showed “a touching naïveté.” The synoptic delusion is “the fiction that all the relevant economic facts are known to some one mind”—and it enabled the enthusiasts for a deliberately planned society, of which Mumford was one of the more conspicuous, to “disregard all the facts he does not know.” The notion that if enough men practiced “the art of simultaneous thinking”, the problem of economic knowledge could be solved, Hayek thought downright hilarious.

But the direction in which Mumford was moving after World War II was no laughing matter. Utopian thinking suffers from the inevitable abyss between ends and means—in his case between the dream of perfect “organic relationships” and the crooked timber of humanity. Added to this was an economic delusion: For years following the Great Depression, Mumford anticipated a new collapse. As late as 1971 a bibliographic note of his accompanying Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation tells us to expect “the end of the market economy” within a generation.

A man who believed that could believe anything. And if one’s idées fixes include a still wider range of unattainable goals—about universal peace and world government and organic wholeness in human affairs—one is virtually bound to end up cross. Not only will you grow angry, your writing will sound increasingly paranoid as year after year, in book after book, grimly repeated warnings about “the machine” taking over the world, are, to all appearances, totally ignored. How can this be? Is there a conspiracy uniting business, industry, all political parties, the academy, the media, advertising interests, Hollywood, everything from Playboy to the Wall Street Journal —the lot?

* * *

Discussing these matters in The Paranoid Style in American Politics Richard Hofstadter noted that the paranoiac “traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.” Hofstadter added:

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of a working politician.

Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. The demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.

Much of Hofstadter’s insight fits the mind revealed in Mumford’s two last major books, Technics and Human Development (1967) and The Pentagon of Power (1970), both of them appearing under the joint title of The Myth of the Machine . In the first place, Mumford’s attitudes certainly had little to do with those of a working politician. A “holistic” thinker, he felt deeply that the whole world needed to be changed, but that it was not his business to consider how this might actually be done.

There was something very Germanic about his Spenglerian contempt for parliamentary process, and an interesting aside on this question is supplied by his biographer. Miller says that in his youth Mumford was influenced by the “aristocratic ideal” of his German uncle, James Schleicher, who held that public life should be the preserve “of a right-thinking and knowing minority.” We are told that both Uncle James and his wife hoped their nephew would become a writer, though not one seeking “the approbation of the masses and majorities.” Mumford was faithful to this Nietzschean pair in his own way: Although he found it convenient to speak on behalf of “the people”, he never consulted them, sought their approval, or showed the least interest in their views.

The paranoid style makes much play with invisible processes that have been going on secretly for years and are far more serious than anyone could have imagined. It also points to deliberately concealed motives that the author—lucky for us—has successfully exposed. Mumford steadily insinuates that the “cult” of technology was one such hidden process. Even in the long-ago days of the Sumerians, oracles were revealing “the might of an invisible machine” (Technics and Human Development). By the end of the medieval period, he claims, “a new religion had in fact secretly come into existence: so secretly that its most devout worshippers still do not recognize that it is in fact a religion” (The Pentagon of Power).

Technics and Human Development also includes an illustration of an 18th-century automaton. This enchanting doll-like figure, with velvet jacket, lace cuffs, and knee-length satin trousers, looks exactly like Mozart at a writing desk. But Mumford is not deceived: “Behind this playful automaton was a deeper motive, only now visible: the desire to create life by purely mechanical means—or at least to place every living function under mechanical direction and control.”

Bureaucracy and the megamachine

Mumford’s theory of the “megamachine” combines two ideas. The first concerns social structure. He regards state organization in pharaonic times as a “power system” organized along mechanically hierarchical lines, with each human unit, from slaves to overseers to divine kings, having a specific place and function. The second idea notes that colossal state engineering projects were born in pharaonic times too. Images of pyramidal structures dominate his closing polemics against modernity: The political pyramid, crowned by the divine god-king, and the architectural pyramid, serving as his tomb, become fused in a single metaphor for all that is least desirable and most woefully persistent in our collective life—the “megamachine.”

Thus it is that the political structure of the bureaucratic state and monumental, prestige-generating governmental projects—whether pyramids of stone or voyages to Mars—are historically coeval. In sociological terms, this twin birth was the moral equivalent of the Fall of Man. From the days of the pharaohs all the way to the now-defunct Soviet system on the one hand and American society on the other, it has been downhill all the way.

To see the evolution of large-scale social organization in this light may not be wholly absurd. We speak without embarrassment of “military machines”, although we know perfectly well that this is a metaphoric extension from the world of the metallic, the determined and the unconscious to the organic world of conscious human agency. The blind spot in Mumford’s use of the metaphor is that he invariably combines a remorseless critique of large-scale “power systems” with the enthusiastic conviction that everything will be for the best if only it is planned.

Totalitarian bureaucracy, however, with its deformation of means and ends and its highly disagreeable consequences, was the proven outcome of his view that societies can be deliberately designed, of his indifference to individual liberty, and of his insistence on taking decision-making out of the hands of the people and on doing things for them. He never faced up to this truth in his writings, and there is little evidence he ever understood it, even though serious thinkers had been discussing it from the very moment Mumford first put pen to paper.

Even as he was writing The Story of Utopias , Ludwig von Mises published an essay entitled “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth ” that, as Raymond Cubeddu put it, “set the scene for the scientific discussion of the problem of socialization. . . . Just when the hopes of socialism seemed to be about to come true Mises voiced the thoughts uppermost in the minds of many who lacked courage to speak out.” On the one hand, Mises argued that “socialism could not work or keep its promises . . . because under such a system economic calculations in terms of value were rendered impossible.” On the other, he asserted that the centralized organization of the economy inevitably “becomes transformed into a totalitarian regime.”

Mumford seems to have known nothing of this. Nor did he know, apparently, about the arguments regarding scientific research and freedom of inquiry set out by Michael Polanyi in the 1930s and 1940s. Nor did he ever understand what Hayek was on about. To be sure, The Road to Serfdom (1944) appeared in the bibliography of Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power , as did Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952), but they were conceitedly taken to illustrate Mumford’s own views on “scientism”, while their economic and political implications were either misunderstood or ignored.

* * *

Yearnings for the Arcadian world of Walden Pond have grown ever stronger over the past fifty years, and romantic utopianism is alive and well. So why has Mumford’s message had so little effect? Two things stand out. The first is the powerful influence of Oswald Spengler—a German authoritarian hard to combine with his early commitment to Emerson and Thoreau. Biographer Donald Miller describes Mumford as what we might call an “optimistic Spengler”, but trying to Americanise the Great Doomsayer with a positive utopian spin is downright impossible. All you get are moralistic demands to reverse direction, frantic admonition, increasingly unreadable jeremiads directed at a citizenry that declines to listen.

This combined with a fundamentally aesthetic view of the world. Aesthetics justified power and promised control. It vanquished ambiguities and the messiness of political debate. It joined the repose of a cloistered life with the insistence that others be ruled from the cloister. Architecture was the queen of the arts—the “commanding art” he said—one that required order and control, and that inevitably meant pushing people around until things looked the way they should. It is not entirely coincidental that a well-known Austrian was a frustrated fine-arts student who developed an abiding passion for architecture as a form of politico-mythic demonstration, or that in their youthful discontent both he and Mumford walked incessantly (the one in Linz, the other in New York), redesigning cities as they went.

“If there is anything that can be called a specific German ideology, it consists in playing off romanticism against the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages against the modern world, culture against civilization, and Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft”, writes Wolf Lepenies in his recent The Seduction of Culture in German History . Under Spengler’s influence Lewis Mumford bought this whole package. A few pages later Lepenies quotes Thomas Mann to the effect that the democratic spirit “was totally alien to the Germans, who were morally, but not politically, inclined.”

Again the description fits. It is curious that a man who was so quintessentially American in many ways was so Germanic in others. Not speeches and moralistic harangues, just plain conversation with ordinary citizens was needed if he was to get his message across. Nitty gritty political talk. But as an exhibitionistic cultural mandarin he found this too hard. Writing 500-page books was easier.

Hidden is the work of a gifted film director, Michael Haneke. The plot is deliberately shifty, with false trails and loose ends that never get tidied up, but basically it’s a variation of Rosebud and Citizen Kane. Boy is deprived of parental love. Boy never forgets. Boy seeks vengeance many years later—Spengler getting into the story because of all the colonial connections, a revenge theme involving Algeria, and the peculiar form of incendiary barbarism now common in metropolitan France. Being a view from the Left, it also features the usual mordant portrayal of French middle-class life as cold, alienating, and pointless.

But it’s very well done. As a youngster, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) was the villain who long ago did the wicked childhood deed, cruelly expelling an Algerian boy from his adopted home into an orphanage. Maybe that’s enough to severely twist one’s mind: anyway director Michael Haneke seems to think so, and thirty years later it’s payback time for the Algerian, a poor and rumpled banlieu inhabitant named Majid. He has videotapes of Georges’ house delivered anonymously to Georges, to his wife (Juliette Binoche), to his son at school, tapes accompanied by ugly drawings of a face vomiting blood, the whole thing menacing and ambiguous in the extreme. And before long the lives of TV chat-show host Georges, his cool wife (Juliette Binoche), and his son, begin to unravel.

But maybe Majid didn’t make the anonymous tapes or draw their gory accompanying pictures. Maybe his son did. Maybe nobody did—it’s that sort of plot, and though the nervous inquiry into what is actually going on keeps you on the edge of your seat, some would say it’s too clever by half. When Georges tracks down Majid to a squalid and untidy flat, and accuses him of attempted extortion, Majid cuts his own throat in Georges’ presence—it makes a bloody mess all over the wall—an act incomprehensible as anything other than desperate, suicidal, spite.

Though of course the intended political implications are all about France’s colonial sins. According to the story told by director Haneke there was a demonstration of Algerians in Paris in October 1961 when Majid’s parents died, allegedly thrown into in the Seine. The drowned mother and father had been immigrant farmhands on Georges’ parents’ estate: that’s why the latter felt obliged to adopt Majid. But the trail of guilt goes on and on and on. Much earlier there’d been the occupation of Algeria by the French in the 19^th century. So step by historical step, invisible but implied, is a moral tale of colonial oppression, of Algerian innocence, and of unmistakable French culpability, leading all the way from General Clausel’s bombardment of Algiers in 1830 to the riots in the banlieux today.

The French-language paper El Moudjahid, published in Tunis at the time by the Algerian Provisional Government, reports October demonstrations three times however, once on November 1^st, and twice on November 22^nd. The November 1st report is in an article “The October Days”. This describes 80,000 demonstrators being attacked by police and gendarmes, unprovoked police firing at 20.45 hours, and dead bodies on sidewalks. It makes no mention of drownings or the number of casualties.

On November 22 the first report criticizes “The Silence of the Left” and while it describes police violence, again makes no reference to either drownings or the number of casualties. The second November 22 report in El Moudjahid is by a participant in the demonstration and has the title “Escaped from Drowning”. A 20-year-old Algerian tells how he was arrested; how he saw a fellow-demonstrator beaten up and thrown into a river; and how he escaped the same fate.

My highly reliable source for this information informs me that “El Moudjahid, a monthly, was full of reports both of Algerian demos and of French repression. From Tunis they were in constant telephonic contact with France. Had there been a mass drowning, or massacre on October 17, this would have been given enormous prominence.” Instead what we find in its pages is mention of one man thrown into a river, and someone else escaping. In other words the “200 drowned demonstrators” would seem to be a largely hearsay episode serving the propagandist purposes of director Haneke.

But that the French, for all their artistic gifts, should now be governed by a directionless élite incapable of dealing with the marching armies of exotic enragés they and their ancestors blindly conjured into being; that their leaders should find themselves taking refuge in the gilded Parisian redoubts of the Gallic state… Well, the impending decline and fall of Jacques Chirac and Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin does seem fitting enough.

Schadenfreude however is not an attractive sentiment. And I’d be sorry if Haneke (an Austrian by the way) got his own throat cut one day. If Juliette Binoche got hers cut it would be downright sad. We need them around making films—however politically misconceived.

Hitler was an artist. Stalin took a close interest in what Soviet film directors and composers did. Mao lived with an actress, and her ruthlessness is a byword for the cruel power of despotic courts. All artists have to have things their way—or else. And if you think the fact that Hitler was only an indifferent watercolorist weakens the argument, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is much more likely that it was the gap between his ideals and his achievement—so painfully symbolising the gap between aesthetic ideals and reality on a cosmic scale—which produced the homicidal madness that drove him on. Peoples or cultures or things that didn’t look right had to be destroyed. Nazism was an aesthetic philosophy through and through.

* * *

But aren’t artists usually liberals? Don’t they value freedom of expression? Isn’t liberty the very center of an artist’s being? Not at all. An artist’s primary commitment is egoistic: he is committed  to his own freedom to do what he likes. All too seldom is this combined with a democratic vision of the myriad compromises that enable millions of people to live and let live and rub along together—people whose taste is often deplorable, and whose aesthetic sense artists regard with contempt.

“I never pay any heed. I do what I like and not what others like” says Oscar Niemeyer, designer of many of Brasilia’s buildings, and the most famous Brazilian in the world. Now 97, and interviewed by LA Times staff writer Henry Chu a month ago, he went on to add that “Architecture is invention. If you go to Brasilia, you may not like the buildings, but you won’t be able to say you’ve never seen anything like it.”

Mind you, Niemeyer himself lives in a penthouse in busy Rio gazing down on Copacabana Beach. He does not live in Brasilia. And with good reason. For this uncompromising artist Brasilia is where there’s a place for everyone, and everyone has been put in their place by Niemeyer himself—usually around the margins of vast sterile spaces as empty as the moon. His “you’ve never seen anything like it” buildings are the towering symbols of a towering ego. An extrapolation from a drawing-board, Latin monumentalism at its worst, Brasilia’s buildings have wildernesses between them so enormous that prudent pedestrians are well advised to carry food and water in case they get lost on their journeys from one edifice to the next. Marginalised workers of the kind the Brazilian government would like to keep out of sight, ill-dressed, barefoot, and poor, are banished to the outskirts of this utopian city. Indeed, wits have called it “the Final Solution”.

This is unfair. For Niemeyer is very far from being a Nazi or right-winger of any kind, and has always had the interests of the proletariat at heart. According to Mr Chu, he “remains an unreconstructed Marxist, quotes Lenin, laments the fall of the Soviet Union, likes Fidel Castro and detests George W. Bush.” And if membership of the Communist Party is not enough to demonstrate a lively concern for the world’s oppressed, the walls of his Rio office are adorned with rousing slogans: “When misery multiplies and hope flies from the hearts of men, there is only revolution”; “The screwed don’t have a chance.”

At the age of 97 his eyesight is failing, and what Henry Chu calls “his cherished books” are now only available to him on tape. This must be a great privation. For he has always emphasized that architects should read and keep in touch with the world around them. He himself has kept abreast of events for many years, his shelves being “jammed with books on philosophy (Sartre) and politics (Stalin, in French).”

* * *

Brasilia married the architectural arrogance of Oscar Niemeyer to the nationalist zeal and developmental ambitions of President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira. The president was determined that Brazil should have a new capital and “leap 50 years in five”; the architect was determined to “do what I like and not what others like” and be remembered for it. For those who would have to live in this nightmarish product of political and artistic fantasy, a true folie à deux, here was a marriage made in hell. The location—the geographical center of Brazil—could not have been worse chosen by throwing a dart at a map on the wall. Probably a dart would have done better.

It will stand as perhaps the greatest white elephant in the long and mysterious history of building symbolic cities in strange places to satisfy the egos of artists and the longing of political leaders to be memorialised. There is only one other that seems even whiter, more elephantine, more wasteful, and more contemptuous of the citizenry at large: Yamoussoukro, the capital of the Ivory Coast. In this one-time jungle village stands a full-size replica of St Peters’ basilica built by the dictator of the day, Félix Houphouët-Boigny.

I made no resistance. In retrospect it was smart to be wearing the badge, since as an apparent norteamericano I had an ambiguous status in this assembly. Sure, I didn’t have a US passport, which is why I could travel to Cuba in 1960, but you wouldn’t want to rely too heavily on that if things turned nasty. And I was only there out of curiosity on my way back from Mexico. I dislike to the point of loathing all mobs and mob behavior, and a cool and distancing Anglo reserve might have been rather provocative when the cheering began.

But nothing happened. Castro never appeared. Hiring a cab I visited huge mansions commandeered as orphanages, with workman making alterations inside, noticed the big ESSO signs torn down at gas stations, and when the stopover ended I went out to the airport and boarded my Cubana Airlines flight for New York. Popular euphoria was still palpably in the air after Batista’s overthrow. It was something inescapable, unique. It was also something I was lucky to experience, and which those who have not personally felt it at a time of revolution, but have only read about it, will never quite understand. But the Cuban plane was something else. The US had embargoed maintenance for the airline; one engine failed over Miami; then the air-conditioning stopped and the cabin temperature soared. We were exhausted by the time we got to La Guardia.

* * *

Then I pretty much forgot about Cuba. I left the US, made some films, and it was only some years later that I ran into a cinematographer in Paris who brought me up to date. He had seen one of my documentaries at a festival and wanted to talk. Born and raised in Barcelona, he himself had worked as a documentary director in Cuba from 1959 to 1961, but propaganda was not his forte, and only those prepared to push the party line were wanted.

He knew he would have to get out. So he left Havana, moved to Paris, and made a distinguished name for himself working for Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut: My Night at Maude’s, Claire’s Knee, The Wild Child, and many other notable French features were all his work. Yet the grim reports that kept coming out of Cuba about political prisoners haunted him—reports of state executions and unending terms in jail—and in the early 1980s he helped produce two short films about Cuba’s dismal record on civil rights. It seemed like something a filmmaker who knew Cuba should do.

* * *

Which brings us to Oliver Stone. Stone of course is a filmmaker too, though hardly a man of honor, and he got very snakey when HBO pulled the broadcast of his admiring portrayal of Castro, Comandante, in April 2003. In a notably thoughtless gesture Castro had just shot three men for hijacking, and had had another 75 dissidents thrown into jail for long periods, all this at the very moment Stone was trying to polish up the dictator’s image on TV. Later he went back to Cuba and made another supposedly more objective documentary, Looking for Fidel. Slate’s Ann Louise Bardach interviewed him in April 2004 about his Cuban publicity efforts and here are some of the things Stone said:

OS: You know, the advantage I have is to be a filmmaker. Castro seemed to love my movies. Apparently he liked my presence, and he trusted that I wouldn’t edit him in a way that would be negative from the outset…

[One scene has Castro in front of eight men charged with hi-jacking. The dictator says to them, “I want you to speak frankly and freely.” They look well-scrubbed and their shirts are well ironed, and Stone thinks this is all fine and dandy.]

ALB: But Cuba’s leader for life is sitting in front of these guys who are facing life in prison, and you’re asking them, “Are you well-treated in prison?” Did you think they could honestly answer that?

[Stone makes no clear answer in the Slate transcript, or none that makes any sense, so the interviewer tries again.]

ALB: So you think they thought this was their best shot to air grievances? Rather than that if they did speak candidly, there’d be hell to pay when they got back to prison?

OS: I must say you’re picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn’t feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.

ALB: Did you go to the prisons in Cuba?

OS: No, I didn’t.

* * *

Picture this. Stone is not allowed to talk to the accused in the absence of Castro. And they are not allowed to speak without Castro or his agents being present. So our radical filmmaker accepts a controlled governmental set-up in which men over whom the dictator has powers of life or death, three of whom he has already shot, are lined up before Stone, before Castro, and before the camera, while being grilled. Back in the days of Stalin this was common. Scenes like this were presented as “evidence” in Stalinist trials.

The same thought must have occurred to Ann Louise Bardach, because she then suggests to Stone that the prisoners had no choice but to appear when ordered, “and that in some ways it was a bit of a mini-show-trial…”

OS: It does have that aura, absolutely. But I do maintain that if it were a Stalinist state… they certainly do a great job of concealing it.

ALB: To me, one of the most interesting exchanges in the film is when you ask “Why did you decide to shoot these three hijackers on the eighth day?” And he (Castro) bristles and says, “I didn’t shoot anyone, personally.” You then respond, “Well, OK, the state shot these three guys on the eighth day.” And he then says, “Of course, I take my share of responsibility.”

So el lider máximo takes responsibility for the murders. Or rather, he takes his ‘share’ of responsibility. Which is nice to know, and must be a great comfort to the families of the dead.

Reality graphics in the Modern World

“Americans jolted by gruesome TV pictures” reads the morning paper in a report from Somalia. The battered face of US helicopter pilot Mike Durant looks fearfully out of a front-page picture made from a CNN videotape. And once again—only a year after the Rodney King episode of 1992 and the burning of central Los Angeles—the graphic evidence of film and video records seems likely to play a prominent part in our lives.

Looking back a bit further there were the audio tapes which precipitated President Richard Nixon’s downfall. And before them, providing irrefutable evidence of acts so far outside the range of normal human behavior that a sceptical later generation finds them increasingly difficult to believe, there were the film records made by the cameramen who entered Belsen and Auschwitz.

Each of these cases involves graphic facsimiles provided by mechanical record-keeping devices in which the role of human subjectivity is either negligible or irrelevant. All of them involve situations which are either difficult (Mike Durant’s) or impossible (Rodney King’s, the Nixon tapes, the death camp footage) to rehearse, repeat, direct or in any way control.

And all of them represent, in varying forms, the vital modern role of “reality graphics” in providing reliable information about states of affairs and matters of fact. Instead of reality graphics several synonyms would serve as well: objective graphics, video documents, electronic transcripts, biofacsimiles, and so on. What is denoted is the entire class of alinguistic mimetic facsimiles used for scientific research and public information—from the cloud chambers of nuclear physics, to satellite imaging, to medical endoscopy, to the scenes on the evening news. All of them indispensably assist both enquiry and observation today. Without them we would be handicapped in many ways.

The popular opposing view

This is not a popular view in social science. Anthropologists in particular urge us to regard the world not as the totality of facts or of things but of meanings. These are felt to have nothing to do with empirical observations, instrumental technology, or truth. “Thought lives on meanings, meanings are culture-bound. Ergo, life is subjectivity,” notes Ernest Gellner, summarizing the prevailing outlook. “Objective truth is to be replaced by hermeneutic truth” in a closed universe of self-admiring subjectivities (Gellner 1992: 24, 33, 35).

Besides, it’s argued, all the world’s a stage, Goffman rules, and today only simpletons could possibly be unaware that social life is full of deceit and dissimulation, of tricks and masks, or that wherever cameras are employed we find information and misinformation and disinformation inextricably combined.

There is of course something to this point of view. But to my mind it encourages a much too limited view of a large subject. I take it that even Hermann Eutic himself wouldn’t actually claim that we would know more, or would know it more reliably, if there had been no video evidence from Somalia showing Mike Durant; no endlessly reviewable tape of the beating of Rodney King; no recording of Richard Nixon’s voice; no cine-camera record of Belsen and Auschwitz.

I also assume that even the most besotted post-modernized devotee of interpretation would hardly have the gall to maintain that the unmediated subjectivity of Richard Nixon or David Irving (the latter being a man who maintains that the Holocaust never happened) would actually be preferable to the electromagnetic and photographic evidence we possess.

It is cases like these which make one realise that the account of culture as universal subjectivity and more-or-less motivated deception goes altogether too far. More than this, it demonstrates an ivory-towering blindness to life today. The entire fact-seeking and reality-testing side of modern culture is left out—that large part of it concerned with accuracy of description and adequacy of formal argument, and which has as its distinctive legacy the achievements of modern natural science.

Furthermore, the spill-over of its techniques into the public domain has had wide ramifications. In the last thirty years there have been huge advances in the ways citizens monitor their own activities and learn what is going on abroad. The images from Somalia and Moscow in 1993 were part of this. Real-time transmissions around the world never stop, from skirmishes in the Balkans to football matches in Paraguay, and each of these events may be taped, enlarged, reviewed in slow motion, or speeded up, all in the cause of seeing more clearly details of action and performance.

Yet to read theorists of ethnographic film you would hardly know this was happening. Intent on blurring the boundary between words and things, fiction and fact, the linguistic representations of narrative and the nonlinguistic (or a-linguistic) mechanized graphic records of events, they seem unaware of the deeper cognitive reasons for the continual expansion of facsimilizing in modern life. They still write as if what are called “documentaries” (those highly artificial artifacts) were the primary unit for analysis. In small groups at conventions they still gather in darkened rooms like Plato’s cave, admiring the shadows on the wall, seemingly unaware of the world outside.

From perception to transcription

Can we love the cinema and Plato too? asks Bill Nichols (1991: 187), before reluctantly answering “No.” But perhaps he’s been looking in the wrong part of the Agora. It was Aristotle, not Plato, who gave his mind to the question of likeness or “mimesis”. Just as it was Aristotle who first considered the need for mimetic accuracy in representation. And he went straight to the point. “A work of art is a likeness or reproduction of an original,” he wrote 2,300 years ago, “and not a symbolic representation of it” (Butcher 1951: 124).

This contains an important distinction, and it is a thousand pities that Daguerre and Fox Talbot and photography itself were not around at the time to help Aristotle develop his thoughts. They could have taken a photograph of his pupil Alexander, and its significance would have struck the sage at once. Almost certainly he would have felt impelled to revise the above passage as follows: “A photograph is a likeness or reproduction of an original, and not a symbolic representation of it.” For as S.H. Butcher noted in his 1894 commentary, Aristotle is saying that

A sign or symbol has no essential resemblance, no natural connection, with the thing signified. Thus spoken words are symbols of mental states, written words are symbols of spoken words; the connexion between them is conventional. On the other hand mental impressions are not signs or symbols, but copies of external reality, likenesses of the things themselves” (Butcher 1951: 125).

Just why Aristotle should have thought this distinction important I’m not sure, but it is entirely in keeping with his interest in the accurate observation of living things.

And it shows that the difference between verbalizing and mental picturing had been noticed at quite an early stage. Anyone who tries to give a detailed verbal description of what he sees—the cat on the mat, the flowers on the table, the computer on the desk, with their colors and positions and size—will quickly find how hard it is to translate the one into the other. In the first place, because so many bits and pieces of verbal code are required. In the second place, because you also need to know about sentence construction and narrative form. And lastly, because of the sheer instability of things. The cat rises and slowly walks away, and even with the help of tense it is hard to bend language round the curve of time.

The limitations of words

Adequate verbal description always presents cognitive difficulties. But it is not merely difficult, it is next to impossible in the case of action which is quick, fleeting, unique, and uncontrolled. Then there’s the additional problem of how to communicate this sort of thing accurately to others.

In order to accurately record and communicate the sort of ever-changing pictorial imagery in the mind something very much better than language had to be devised, and eventually in the nineteenth century it was. Daguerre and Fox Talbot, and later Thomas Edison, met both the technological challenge and the cognitive need.

But in science the large class of facsimiles I am calling reality graphics were not developed and refined in order to provide us with “symbolic representations”—least of all the representations of literature. Homer had done that well enough, and the works of the Greek dramatists are both timeless and exemplary. There is no useful sense in which language, literature or symbolism have developmentally “progressed” since classical times, nor are they likely to in the future. And the reason is plain.

Language stands at a fixed and irreducible distance from whatever it describes, and this distance or gap has always been a problem. The true significance of all the facsimilizing going on around us lies in the historic effort of modern instrumentation to try and close that gap, to supersede the fuzziness and uncertainty of linguistic codes, to provide better, more accurate and permanent “likenesses of the original”, in Aristotle’s phrase. Photography, along with the whole range of ingenious imaging techniques we use today, is a cultural response to our cognitive need for better descriptions of states of affairs and matters of fact.

But doesn’t this ignore the obvious communicative use of such images? Weren’t the photographs from Somalia of the downed helicopter pilot Mike Durant sent by the Somalis as conscious messages of triumph, of popular defiance, of ethnic pride? Weren’t they deliberately intended to humiliate and embarrass President Clinton? And weren’t they correctly received and interpreted in America as such?

They were indeed. Any photograph may be used for any purpose. And for the purpose of argument reality graphics of this kind function very powerfully. Yet it is precisely because of their independent and superior reliability as objective a-linguistic records that they so powerfully influence our opinions and beliefs. A second-hand verbal report by Somalis about a captured US soldier admitting that “killing innocent people is wrong” belongs simply and exclusively to the error-prone domain of journalistic communication, and at its worst may be only hearsay. A video of that pilot uttering those words is both a communication and a quite different thing.

Confusion has arisen because of a tendency to treat all communicative phenomena as embodying a universal semeiosis. But the enjoyment of reducing everything to the lowest common denominator—all the world’s a text, etc.—is merely a hindrance here. It is unhistorical, it precludes an evolutionary view of the matter, and it fails to discriminate between the generalized linguistic use of pictures as expressive signs and symbols, and the specific role of facsimilizing as an emergent nonlinguistic level of description.

Karl Popper on language

Karl Popper’s comments on language may be helpful here. In his essay “Epistemology without a knowing subject,” he writes that the lower and universal linguistic functions of self-expression and signalling (to be found in all animal languages and all linguistic phenomena) need to be distinguished from the higher functions of description and argument (in Homo sapiens). There is a connection here with my suggestion that the universal communicative functions of pictures (of all sorts) need to be distinguished from the unique descriptive function of reality graphics (a specific sort).

And what Popper says next about the reason for all the confusion is also revealing. “The two lower functions are always present.” he writes. “when the higher ones are present, so that it is always possible to ‘explain’ every linguistic phenomenon, in terms of the lower function, as an ‘expression’ or a ‘communication’” (Popper 1973: 120). In his following statement too Popper’s thought can be read as illuminating the cultural role of “reality transcriptions” as an extension of “linguistic description”—a role which sees them helping to clarify issues of truth or falsity in the cases of Durant, Nixon, David Irving, and Rodney King:

With the descriptive function of human language, the regulative idea of truth emerges, that is, of a description which fits the facts … The argumentative function of human language presupposes the descriptive function: arguments are, fundamentally, about descriptions: they criticise descriptions from the point of view of the regulative ideas of truth; content; and verisimilitude” (Popper 1973: 120).

Although it is an important consequence of this line of thought. we need not go into the emphasis Popper places on the higher functions of language as indispensable to cultural rationality. But one last sentence is worth quoting: “Without the exosomatic descriptive language—a language which, like a tool, develops outside the body—there can be no object for our critical discussion,” no objective foundation, that is, for determining matters of fact (Popper 1973: 120).

Today a whole range of modern devices for recording, imaging, storing and reproducing data augment the “exosomatic descriptive language” on which analysis and argument finally rest. In the past, verbal description and argument provided the sole basis for truth claims. It was all we had, and its overall cognitive role has always been confused by the fact that any use of language contains a rhetorical and expressive element. It remains of the greatest importance. But today it is everywhere reinforced with mechanically produced facsimiles which in many cases provide evidence of a more accurate kind. Because such evidence often “fits the facts” more exactly, it is important in establishing matters of fact.

The structural integrity of events

Our starting point, then, is that the basic materials for analysis are alinguistic. Next one sees that this material comes in isolable units—units we shall call events. These may be as short as a wink or as long as a marathon. They may be as trivial as a talk-show or as grave as a survivor’s report of a death camp. They may be as simple as a pitcher’s toss or as complicated in their framing as a play within a play within a play.

Whatever and wherever, when matters of fact matter, the reality graphics recording such events are bound by some concept of completeness and coherence. Bound, that is, by the structural integrity of events.

It might be noticed that the last 30 years have seen huge changes. At a New York film school towards the end of the 1950s a favorite class exercise was to give the student a scratched and valueless 16mm. print of an old documentary and tell him to reconstruct it. The challenge was to show one’s cleverness by treating each scene as an independent semantic unit, constructing new sentences and new meanings, writing a new commentary and fabricating a whole new interpretation which stood the old film on its head.

It demonstrated that where there’s wilfulness there’s a way, and was generally in accord with John Grierson’s definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality”. The original people in the original scenes and the intention of the original work didn’t matter: these were grist for the mill. “Give it the treatment,” was the instructor’s advice—the creative treatment of actuality. And we did.

But cinema verité put an end to all that. And soon cameramen filming speech and music discovered the joys and frustrations of dealing with complicated internal structures of both sound and sense. Editorial fragmentation went out; unity and continuity came in. A manipulative eagerness to impose the merely extrinsic meanings of filmmakers became less and less acceptable, and a respect for intrinsic meanings took its place.

Above all, an indifference to the true dimensions of behavioral forms was no longer permissible. Replacing it came a respect for the natural topography of events, along with the assumption that for facsimiles of such events to be fully intelligible that shape had to be preserved.

This requirement applies to the minor as well as the momentous. It is as important to parents who record scenes of bathing the baby as it is to historians of the Holocaust watching the long unbroken record of Abraham Bomba, in Shoah, talking to Claude Lanzmann about Treblinka. And in the field of mass communications exactly the same considerations apply wherever matters of fact most matter—in international politics and their modem sublimation, sports.

When the helicopter pilot Durant replies to his Somali interrogators that “innocent people being killed is not good,” we know that any sign of a cut or deletion between the “is” and the “not good”—any flip-overs or image break-up or loss of lip-synch—would be grounds for suspicion; grounds for suspecting that a news editor was making Durant say something other than what he in fact said. Grounds, that is, for questioning the descriptive adequacy of the transcript of the event.

Sports fans are particularly demanding. In Formula One racing, lenses are attached to the cockpits of cars, and one gets immediate objective verification of whether or not Ayrton Senna was the culpable party in a “shunt”—whatever the subjectively volunteered extenuating circumstances of worn tires or driver fatigue. In football, vast sweeping views of the field bring audiences a whole range of complicated plays, and if signal drop-out occurs and a continuous and coherent presentation is disrupted, fragmented, and made unintelligible, viewers get very upset.

Their irritation reflects an intuitive understanding of the connection between cognition, continuity, and the phenomenal nature of the world. And this can be seen in both symbolic and non-symbolic representational forms. Where tense bends language round the curve of time (what was becomes what is and then what may be), the sinuously agile facsimilizing of cameras and lenses follows the temporal shape of events.

Where do photographic “stills” fit into all this? Mostly they don’t; for the reliable depiction of either identity or behavior time frames of 1/250th sec. are not enough. Casting directors might once upon a time have made do with portfolios of glossy still shots arriving in the mail from aspiring actors. Now they require videos of performance. In India matrimonial arrangements negotiated at a distance depended on carefully posed stills of prospective brides and bridegrooms, but as the MacDougalls’ recent film Photo wallahs shows, painful revelations often ensued (MacDougall 1992). Will videos soon displace stills as more reliable evidence of the wares on offer? Will there be a demand for more fully portrayed identities and events? It’s inevitable. In life, marriage is one of those times when matters of fact matter most.

Aristotelian unities

The need to pay attention to natural forms of life and action has a long history. In The poetics Aristotle’s conscious concern was with artistic mimesis. He wanted to define criteria for literary representation. But a naturally empirical turn of mind inclined him toward rules for storytelling which were essentially rules of intelligibility—rules designed in cognitive terms—and this in turn led to his famous declaration that “episodic plots are the worst”, and that the best narratives portray “one action and the whole of it” (Butcher 1951: 35, 37).

He warned that “if any part is displaced or deleted” the whole meaning will be “disturbed and dislocated” (ibid: 35). A meaning which is dislocated has been changed, perhaps irremediably. All of which indicates that from the very start of critical thinking about narrative, when cognitive matters mattered, displacement, deletion, disturbance and dislocation were seen as injurious.

Critics and dramaturgical theorists have always had trouble with this; and rightly so. When taken too seriously the principle of “the unity of action” amounts to a disabling restriction on the imaginative creativity we expect in all great drama. Where Aristotle’s rules more naturally belong is in empirical science, not art. And for documentary filmmakers they usefully set out general conditions of intelligibility for both the recording and understanding of social events.

The criteria of naturalistic coherence in time and space derive from our cognitive need somehow to seize phenomena in flux, making them available for contemplation. Respecting these criteria in the realm of reality graphics—respecting the structural integrity of events and employing lenses and framing procedures which retain bounded and isolable features of scenes intact—became defining criteria for the descriptive adequacy of the results.

Karl Heider included this understanding in his recommendation that ethnographic films should portray “whole persons in whole acts” (Helder 1976: 107-109), and the cognitive rationale is not hard to see. Happenings are related as cause and effect, and to ask for the preservation of natural sequences is to ask for rules of facsimilizing in which “the logic of the situation” and “the logic of understanding” correspond.

Yet descriptive adequacy is only a first step. The objective record is only a foundation. Beyond it lie the perplexities of Goffmania, and upon entering this country one must ask the people whose images appear in these records who they are, and what they are doing, and why? Actors must explain their roles. When they do, will they confirm or deny their appearances?

Once filmmakers and editors have taken the original film documents and cut them about—using the shots of the cameraman as semantic units endlessly rearranged—will the intrinsic and heterogeneous meanings of the “footage” correspond to or contradict the extrinsic homogeneous meanings imposed by filmmakers in “films”? Once assimilated to this or that communicative form, will the men and women whose biofacsimiles appear in these films still recognize and confirm their identities and their acts?

Objective graphics, subjective confirmation

Trees are one thing; the rafters of a house are something else. And in most cases it would be difficult to draw any secure conclusions about the nature and form of the former from the latter. Of course, if one were able to interrogate individual pieces of lumber they might confirm their original identity despite all the cutting and sawing and industrious human use. But one should never lose sight of the fact that pieces of lumber begin as trees.

In much the same way it is a mistake to define the nature of reality graphics in terms of the artefacts called “documentary films”. For here once again we are dealing with constructions, in this case constructions in which the alinguistic products of facsimilizing are put to quasi-literary use. And the questions to be asked are much the same as the imaginary questions we might ask the planks and rafters: How much do the extrinsic purposes of the filmmaker allow the grain of original identities to be preserved? How much of the intrinsic meaning of the original event survives? What guarantee do we have that things really and truly are what they seem?

Suppose that helicopter pilot Mike Durant were to say in reponse to being shown his picture back in the U.S.A.—”That is not me”: suppose that he were to deny that he was the man in the truncated video clip. This plainly involves rather more than the repudiation by an annoyed and humiliated sitter of an artist’s unsatisfactory likeness in pen and ink. It is to deny the look of my eye while talking, the curve of my mouth as it speaks, the sound of my uneasy voice.

Such a repudiation has about it something of ontological suicide, and indicates the importance of the evidence of human actors themselves. As it happened, pilot Durant never did any such thing. And this example is only used to emphasise that if the built constructions of “ethnographic films” are to be persuasive, participants must confirm that even when the shots representing them have (so to speak) been cut, and sawn, and stained, what appears on the screen truly is what it purports to be. Here subjectivity plays an important role. It authenticates (or repudiates, as the case may be) the graphic reality portrayed.

I am not arguing here the general point that the self-understanding of agents is the only understanding relevant in social analysis: it is not. But in facsimiles of cultural phenomena the minds of agents are certainly the first things we should consult. A widespread feeling that this is so has deeply influenced ethnographic filmmaking in recent years. Underlying it is the tacit assumption that if asked, if given an opportunity to comment, the agents portrayed would themselves confirm and corroborate the meanings, the understandings and the interpretations which the communicative forms and formats of film convey.

One might indeed arrange ethnographic films along a continuum from those in which the intrinsic meanings of agents are central (the MacDougalls’ African work; Ian Dunlop’s later work in Australia) to those in which such meanings are largely irrelevant to the filmmaker’s extrinsic artistic considerations (Robert Gardner’s Forest of bliss, for instance). In this film about death and dying in Benares (a “silent” film in the sense that though dialogue is heard it is untranslated), a variety of implied or insinuated meanings were noted by Alexander Moore and Jonathan Parry (Moore 1988; Parry 1988).

But those meanings are all very ambiguous. One suspects that if some of the participants in Forest of bliss were shown the scenes in which they appear and asked “What are you doing?” the result would make a most diverting companion to the film itself. Surely in no other work claiming anthropological consideration is the disjunction between intrinsic meaning (the participant’s) and extrinsic insinuation (the filmmaker’s) so radical or so complete.

There is of course an infinite variety of intermediate types of ethnographic film, and an examination of selected cases throws light on what happens to reality graphics when they are used in various ways—anthropological, educational, or political. In each of the cases to be discussed the foundation of the work consists of reality transcripts having a greater or lesser degree of descriptive adequacy: in films about matters of fact that is the sine qua non. After that come the various ways in which subjectivity authenticates the record, witnesses speak, lawyers argue, and the wider processes by which reports become known as reliable begin.

Coniston Muster (1972) is a 30-minute film 1 made about Aboriginal stockmen (cowboys) on a central Australian cattle station (ranch). Its shooting ratio was about 20: 1. Much editorial work went into scene selection and sequence construction, and a variety of grammatical devices are employed. Action sequences are cut for kinetic effect. Extrinsic spoken narration is spare and only used at the beginning to set the scene. Silent episode intertitles are employed to punctuate and separate, to raise introductory questions, to point and comment.

All of which should make clear that the final result is very much a designed and packaged artefact for the marketplace. Yet the credibility of the result, if it is credible, depends largely on the descriptive adequacy of the original reality transcripts, the unedited footage, reinforced by the spontaneous commentary of an Aboriginal participant, Coniston Johnny, recorded as he watched the uncut film.

It is Johnny who identifies people and who personally answers the ever-present question, “What’s going on here?” In a scene which at one point includes himself he catches sight of an old friend struggling to lift some harness onto a truck. At this point he says, “There’s Paddy! Poor old bugger! [laughs] Loading them up. Helping Maurice load the truck.” Like most of his other comments these simple words go only a little beyond the self-explanatory nature of the event, so why are they appreciated by audiences?

Because that little is a crucial part of subjective authentication. Only a participant’s mild humor (“Poor old bugger!”) is either appropriate, understandable. or justified. It grows naturally out of the intersubjective experience of the world presented on the screen and is the expression of present consciousness reliving past events. At one level the image before him on the screen is merely the shadow of a shadow. At another it is closer to the Ding an sich than his own memory could ever hope to attain.

Johnny’s utterance is in part a communication with the world beyond the shadow, in part the murmured rumination of memory talking to itself. In either case his voice is self-evidently unrehearsed, undirected, and uncontrolled. During scenes in which a wild bull is released from a stockade in the early morning he begins to re-enact the desperate ride of the man who brings the animal back, and as he cries out in warning to the rider, past and present, objective graphic and subjective authentication, the viewer and the viewed, become for the moment phenomenologically fused.

Objective record, subjective disconfirmation

By way of contrast one might consider a particular sequence in Maasai women. This popular introduction to Maasai culture has been widely seen, and combines a certain amount of undirected observational material with interviews conducted by the anthropologist Melissa Llewelyn-Davies examining the situation of women. It is a useful film which I have often shown to classes in Sydney. But much of the information conveyed by the narration is both generalizing and normative—a feature hard to combine with the specificities of actual events.

Worse than that: because of a visible incongruence between the descriptive footage, on the one hand, and the information supplied by participants on the other, serious implausibilities arise. This is spectacularly so in the case of a sequence treating the subject of clitoridectomy.

It would be absurd to suggest that either the filming or the subsequent presentation on broadcast television of such an event was either practicable or desirable: it was not. But equally plainly it was open to the filmmakers to recognise this fact and not to pretend otherwise. As it is, the sequence treating this matter provides a clinical example of what happens when none of the criteria here being considered is satisfied—neither completeness and descriptive adequacy, nor subjective authentication.

The relevant scenes show a young girl being prepared for the operation, a few close-ups of her head being shaved, an interpolated interview from another time and place with an older woman, and then a number of post-operative scenes from which the patient is entirely excluded showing general collective celebration. Nothing of the surgical actuality is shown, and virtually nothing which even suggests the patient’s anxiety and tension before the event. As a result, a large burden of responsibility rests upon Llewelyn-Davies’ spoken commentary. This is perversely unequal to the task. It consists of a sustained attempt to abstract, romanticise, etherealise, and generally gloss over the painful bleeding centerpiece of the occasion.

The language of the narration is itself revealing. After all, what exactly is “female circumcision”? To most people it suggests an anatomical improbability, not the cutting off of the clitoral hood or the labia minora. Appealing figures of speech are employed poetically to distance and transfigure the occasion. The circumcision ceremony is described as “a girl’s farewell to childhood”, something “expected to transform a giggly girl into a mature and thoughtful woman” which is all in all “a bit like a white wedding”.

That the scenes dealing with the occasion are noticeably fragmentary and interrupted only increases one’s suspicions. In an abruptly inserted interview Llewelyn-Davies asks her principal female informant (and this interview fragment is used directly after the distressed face of the patient has been glimpsed), “Is the girl happy?” To which the Maasai woman appears to reply, “Very happy. Part of the ritual is to brew mead from nectar and honey … Her mother and father wear charms and they are happy because their daughter isn’t pregnant and they are drinking mead.”

Yet all too obviously the “happiness” referred to has nothing directly to do with the patient’s state of mind as she faces the knife—and from the look of the editing, nothing to do with her state of mind at all. It is a normative statement referring to how her father and mother regard such a ceremony overall, and its use at this point is decidedly misleading. Next we are told that “after the ceremony has taken place, the branches of a special tree are brought to mark the house where the girl is recovering” (one of the rare implicit references to the surgical nature of the event); and a procession of singing girls appears, adding both a musical and visual distraction from the matters of fact at hand.

Of course we know what Llewelyn-Davies means by her remark that “It’s a bit like a white wedding”. But with respect, analogies made on the lofty level of what all rites de passage have in common scarcely enable us to share, or even to glimpse, the experiential level of genital mutilation performed in a hut without benefit of antiseptic or anaesthesia. What would the participant herself have had to say about the event? Would the patient have endorsed the interpretative overlay? Would she have agreed with the older woman’s enthusiastically “functional” assertions? Or was she a victim of cultural circumstances that she would dearly like to see changed?

More to the point, perhaps, how complete were the original records of the event?—what uncut reality transcripts were made and available? Loizos tells us that the screams of the patient had been recorded, and that “a lively debate [took place] in the cutting room about how the issue should be handled”, one view being that “perhaps the girl’s screams should be heard, thus giving ’symbolic’ expression to what was visually too horrific” (Loizos 1993: 123). In the event, however, nothing is shown, the screams are silenced, and the narrator pours a syrup of generalizing sociological interpretation over a whole episode. ¹

But the relevant points are these: the original camera record is entirely inadequate. On top of this the natural shape of the event is broken up in a deliberately misleading way, being interrupted with highly tendentious “happiness” comments from an interview conducted at another time and place, followed by scenes of communal jubilation. Finally, no attempt is made to obtain the participant’s view of the event by exploring the intrinsic meanings available from the actor; indeed, quite the reverse. The “meaning” of the event is pretty much what you will find in Arnold Van Gennep. How extrinsic can you get?

A lot more than this, to be sure. Instead of even the pretence of observational spontaneity one might for example have tried to organize the local community into acting out the whole episode, thus ensuring that nothing untoward occurred—no screams, no blood, no pain. In this ideal/typical functionalist version of the circumcision ceremony the desired social consequences toward which Llewelyn-Davies’ account is skewed—solidarity, unity, collective cohesion, happiness would then be even more systematically brought out, the numerous details of Maasai dress and decorum and speech and behavior being pointed toward this overriding goal. Real people would go through the motions of somewhat unreal acts. Real places would provide the backgrounds or “sets” for unreal scenarios.

There is of course a well-known tradition of political documentary which has always been made in this way (and Man of Aran was too). In this kind of work actuality is to be moulded as public opinion is moulded, and is always subordinated to overriding political goals. And if the set is a set-up, the men and women merely actors, the presentation of both self and setting a version of the Goffrnanian world where nothing is what it seems—what relevance have the criteria here set out? What can be done when the action is all too clearly rehearsable, directed, and controlled?

A witness testifies to events

Marina Goldovskaya’s remarkable recent film, The Solovki power: evidence and documents, suggests one possible approach. “Those who control the past control the future” was for seventy years the ruling principle of Soviet historiography. In accordance with this goal huge quantities of documents and evidence were either destroyed, or hidden, or suppressed, and systematic falsification was institutionalized.

But with Gorbachev the control of the past was relaxed, and among the things which escaped from the archives in 1986 was a film made about an early Soviet labor camp (the model for numberless others) built on the Solovetski Islands in the White Sea. This camp had been established in 1925 in an abandoned monastery. The treatment of prisoners was typically brutal. Escapees’ reports published in the West became an embarrassment. And so it was that in 1927 the GPU (later the KGB) commissioned a film to show the benevolent and uplifting nature of their prison regime.

“With an iron hand we shall drive mankind to happiness,” a Bolshevik poster had announced in 1918; and among those caught by the iron hand was 15-year-old Yefim Ligutin. Driven by a romantic yearning for faraway places and the sea he had run away from home. Unfortunately for him this was construed as the attempt of a would-be spy to enter foreign countries. He was sentenced to death, and when the sentence was commuted to imprisonment at Solovki he began the first of seventeen years in prison. Like a surprising number of other former inmates—scientists, engineers, writers, academics—this man was still available to be interviewed when Gorbachev freed Russia to inquire into its past, and in 1988 Marina Goldovskaya talked to them, showing the old propaganda film and inviting their comments on the mysterious world it both did and did not show.

This process can be seen as another variation on the theme of “objective record, subjective authentication”—except that the reality of the 1927 film was that of a “Potemkin Village”, and the role of living witnesses was one of retrieval: as each man and woman speaks it is less to confirm and authenticate than to disconfirm and repudiate the “creative treatment of actuality” the GPU had engineered. ²

“How nice and clean—and there’s linen too!” a former inmate says ironically about the scene. “A white tablecloth and even flowers. It must be a wrong close-up.” The remark is as spontaneous as it is revealing. The deception of the close-up derives from its role in information control. Beyond the frame of the close-up is the scene as a whole; beyond the scene, the play; and beyond that the play which contains a play. Yet within the tradition of situational encompassment this is something special. For to pull back and reveal the frame outside the frame is to reveal the high barbed-wire camp boundary within which this entire tragicomedy of political deceit is set.

In reality graphics treating matters of fact it is often tacitly assumed that what is contained within the narrower view typifies what is present in the wider field as welt, that the phenomenon pictured is continuous in space. In the kind of self-authenticating work of the MacDougalls in East Africa, we know that to pull back from the group of men gathered under the men’s tree—casually conversing, idling, working on strips of hide we will find across the wide plain beyond other men under other trees. Numerous clues lead us to trust the image.

By way of contrast, in the kind of work represented by the GPU’s propaganda piece we know that if we could pull back from the table with the white cloth and the flowers we would find only bare boards, dirt, and misery. Numerous clues lead us to distrust the image: the cramped view, the short takes, the posed people, the relentless voiceless smiles. We can be confident that tomorrow the cloth and the flowers will be gone forever—for what is presented is a space-time discontinuity so extreme that if one had been able to search the whole wide universe in the year this film was made, nowhere else could a camera crew be found in a concentration camp getting up to such theatrical tricks.

And one by one the former inmates confirm that this is so. “For God’s sake, what nonsense!” cries Yefim Ligutin, now 78, “My God, what rubbish! This never took place in Solovki. It’s just for show. Is that how they served food in the prisons? It’s a fake!” The scene shows a neatly dressed camp guard solicitously tasting the stew to be served to prisoners, followed by a title which claims that “Prisoners may request dry rations if they prefer them.” Throughout the Gulag dry rations were nauseatingly strong-smelling dried cod and a little bread and were universally detested. When Ligutin was offered this salted fish for the first time he was sickened, and struggled to get near an open window. Two guards knocked him down and kicked him in the kidneys.

“What I noticed then,” he says, “I have never forgotten: the shiny black boots of my tormentors.” And he laughs at the memory. Such scenes in Goldovskaya’s film draw on the intrinsic and unique experience of participants, those who have truly been there and had that sort of thing done to them. For this there is no substitute.

But the most remarkable fusion of reality transcript and subjective recollection occurs at a later point. It is when the eyes of the 78-year-old camp survivor stare into the eyes of the 16-year-old he then was. He remembers when the film was being made. The crew had begun working in the camp and he recalls as a boy sitting and looking toward the camera. Now, after sixty years, he meets that boy again. As he does so he sees the facsimile of an enduring identity whose experiences, accumulated over 17 years in prison, would at last bear witness against those who could no longer control the past.

The orthodoxy of cinema theory

With monotonous repetition it is asserted that the objectivity of reality graphics is merely naive nonsense. Questioning the underlying assumptions of research films Luc de Heusch once wrote that the camera’s objectivity is “a myth” which is based “on a belief in its magic powers” (de Heusch 1962: 23).

What this means I’m not sure, but in the cases of Durant, of King, and of Nixon, it seems less than self-evident that magic gives these transcripts their persuasiveness. An even more sweeping claim was made years ago by Asen Balikci and Quentin Brown to the effect that “any subject that the camera photographs has been discovered already by the eye of the man behind the camera and hence the record acquires only the quality of illustration” (Balikci and Brown 1966: 27).

To which one can only respond that the cameramen Balikci and Brown are referring to differ radically from any I have known. On the evening news tonight there was a report about the Goroka festival in highland Papua New Guinea, one scene alone showing a quantity of uninterpreted data which it would take a well-informed anthropologist six months’ work to unpack.

Recent reports from Moscow presented wide-angle views from a high building showing crowds, military vehicles, trees and flowers in a park, and a line of distinctive edifices on the far horizon. If you were to give a highly magnified still of that scene to a dozen specialists in Russian affairs with a request for the interpretation of all identifiable military, botanical, demographic and architectural contents, six months might not be enough.

It is of course correct that in the normal course of events 99.9 percent of those data (add additional digits to taste) will never be interpreted. This is both true and irrelevant. After all, 99.9 percent of all sensory data in biological systems are uninterpreted, but so what? Sensory inputs of sight and sound last at their very best for the life of the organism—at worst they are erased within the hour. The cognitive difference between these two procedures (and the advantage of the mechanical over the biological) is that the cultural invention of facsimilizing makes data permanently available for review—whether or not this ever happens.

What then is the status of transcript data which are forever uninterpreted? Of “research footage” which is never seen? Of the ten miles of audio tape from Papua-New Guinea the linguist never gets around to analyzing? Of the video record from the monitor in the local bank before it is wiped out each month? It exists in a condition of latency—rather as latent photographic images exist before they are developed. Human consciousness is the chemical reagent which realises whatever potential is there, making it available for the next step in the construction of our knowledge of events.

A personal example comes to mind. Around 1971 the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies made a film, Larwari and Walkara, about Aboriginal ceremonies in the vicinity of Hooker Creek (now Lajamanu). As the cameraman on the project I worked with the anthropologist and liaison man Stephen Wild. Wild knew both the people and the language, whereas 1 knew neither, and knew even less about the rituals to take place. That they took place at all was largely due to our providing the food, transport, and encouragement needed to precipitate the events involved.

We also urged those responsible to do whatever they were going to do in as traditional a manner as possible. Beyond this we simply filmed what people chose to do, and my own role was little more than that of an uncomprehending observer of a three-day rite which both anthropologist and Aborigines believed to be important.

A complete and unedited copy of the original photographic transcript was subsequently given to the community, and a shorter edited film was also made. Then we all went off to do other things. Some years later however the data the footage contained were found to be relevant to an Aboriginal land claim, and statements made by individuals appearing in the film were mentioned in court. In this way the latent information of the original footage (an objective account of the event) was used as evidence on the basis of which legal argument determined certain matters of fact.

All in the cameraman’s head?

As to the remarkable claim that “it’s all in the cameraman’s head,” or that this or that subjective factor caused this or that subject to be filmed and the rest to be ignored, all I can say is that in this particular case the material used in evidence was wholly uninfluenced by the subjective interests of either the cameraman, the soundman, or the Chief Cook and Bottle-Washer who was also along on the trip.

Our very ignorance of the specific sentences on which argument would later rest ensured that all we did was to frame them, hoping that the result would satisfy minimal standards of descriptive adequacy. All such utterances were entirely unrehearsed, undirected, and uncontrolled—how could it be otherwise? In brief, the objective record we so blindly produced was the adventitious consequence of the disinterested documentation of events.

This film was indeed made by subjective persons with subjective purposes. Another tirelessly repeated absurdity claims that because photographic and video records are made for a purpose, the undeniable subjectivity of the intentional act subjectivizes all the consequences. In other words, that because my subjective purpose directed me to take a shot of a marketplace, all the data such a shot contains are equally the product and consequence of the initial subjective state.

But this is a non sequitur. The plenitude of data in reality graphics is an unintended consequence of purposive action—and like innumerable other unintended consequences it is absurd to pretend to “explain” them in terms of initial subjective conditions. The inventor of the automobile did not have Los Angeles “in mind”. Yet Los Angeles was certainly one of the objective consequences of his invention.

In the same way the superabundant data which register without any thought whatever on the part of numberless photographers in numberless shots every day are an unintended objective consequence of purposive action. Since in this case the specific product is not Los Angeles, but mere data in graphic form, it is appropriate to describe the result as an objective graphic. In the new world of facsimilizing such products are among the cognitive matrices of our lives.

Truth and consequences

Two images are relevant at this point—the gallows and the ivory tower. The first defines a situation of utmost seriousness, the kind which Dr. Johnson had in mind when he said that nothing so concentrates a man’s mind as the knowledge that he will soon be hanged. The second indicates a situation of legendary inconsequentiality, the sort of privileged unseriousness found only in the groves of academe.

Serious situations of life or death not only concentrate the mind, they put it under the kind of cognitive pressure which makes people rather more interested in distinguishing between truth and falsehood than they might otherwise be. Ivory towers, in contrast, are synonymous with the absence of any cognitive pressure at all. Matters of fact are always conjectural. Anything may be said; anything may be believed; beneath the “dreaming spires” the dreamers dream.

The appointment of cameramen to university posts in the last twenty years saw the academicization of a formerly honest trade. When this happened, putting a frame round the action gave way to framing arguments for other university folk. It became important to publish, and even more important to keep up with the latest fashions in anthropological thought. Each of these steps meant a move away from dealing with the non-semantic dimensions of culture, a retreat from fact-finding activities and exposure to serious cognitive pressure, and an increasing interest in the traditional preoccupations of arts faculties in ivory towers: that is, with words and meanings.

This has involved a more and more tenuous connection with the world in which reality graphics belong, and in which the only distinctive tradition of ethnographic filmmaking originated: the empirical tradition of direct behavioral observation. Where once an ethnographic filmmaker produced a film, and attached to it an appendix of published notes, today’s film may be merely an appendix to an essay. Sometimes an agonising selfconsciousness supervenes.

All of which closely resembles the situation in anthropology as a whole. Where fieldwork is more and more a thing of the past, where the study of culture has turned into the study of the “writing” of culture, where commentaries on commentaries proliferate and Sir Edmund Leach recommends that ethnographies should be read as novels, anthropology has become in some places little more than the onanistic subliterary chatter of people with nothing better to do.

Outside the universities, however, the cognitive needs of our culture still make themselves felt. There it is noticeable that where the stakes are high and when the consequences of getting things wrong are serious—when matters of fact matter—reality graphics are called on again and again. Hence the importance of the scenes of Mike Durant and Rodney King. Hence the significance attaching to the Nixon tapes and the footage from Auschwitz.

Where the consequences of error are momentous, the role of documentary footage in providing the evidential foundations for our knowledge of the world is most unlikely to diminish. Indeed, quite the reverse. Off campus, driven by our need for reliable information and broadly governed by the rules of intelligibility which Aristotle so presciently set out so long ago, reality facsimilizing shows every sign of continuing to expand.

1 For years Marxists berated functionalism for offering rosy interpretations of conflict and domination. There is a certain irony in the fact that someone like Llewelyn-Davies should make a film in which functionalistic talk about happiness and community well-being obliterates a young girl’s screams.

2 Named for one of Catherine the Great’s ministers, Potemkin, who inaugurated systematic theatrical deceptions for state visitors on their tours of the Russian countryside the chief object of such deception being Catherine herself. This tradition of political disinformation involved the building., painting, and populating of whole ersatz villages of happy peasants. Although fakery of this kind went on for over two hundred years in Russia, under Stalin it was carried to extremes never known before.

BALIKCI, ASEN, QUENTIN BROWN 1966 Ethnographic filming and the Netsilik Eskimos. Educational Services Incorporated Quarterly Report (Spring‑ Summer): 19‑33.

BUTCHER, S.H. 1951 [1907] Aristotle’s theory of poetry and fine art. New York: Dover Books.

GELLNER, ERNEST 1992 Postmodernism, reason and religion. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

HEIDER, KARL 1976 Ethnographic film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

HEUSCH, LUC DE 1962 The cinema and social science. Paris: UNESCO.

LOIZOS, PETER 1993 Innovation in ethnographic film. Manchester: Manchester University Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

MACDOUGALL, DAVID 1992 Photo Hierarchicus: signs and mirrors in Indian photography. Visual Anthropology 5: 103‑129.

MOORE, ALEXANDER 1988 The limitations of imagist documentary. Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4(2): 1‑3.

NICHOLS, BILL (WILLIAM JAMES) Representing reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

PARRY, JONATHAN P. 1988 Comment on Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss. Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4(2): 4‑7.

POPPER, KARL 1973 Objective knowledge. London: Oxford University Press.

CURLING, CHRIS, MELISSA LLEWELYN‑DAVIES 1974 Maasai women Color, 53 minutes.

GARDNER, ROBERT 1986 Forest of bliss. Color, 90 minutes.

GOLDOVSKAYA, MARINA 1988 The Solovki power. B & W, 90 minutes.

LANZMANN, CLAUDE 1985 Shoah. Color, 9 hours, 30 minutes.

MACDOUGALL, DAVID, JUDITH MACDOUGALL 1972? Under the men’s tree. B & W, 20 minutes.

SANDALL, ROGER
1972 Coniston muster. Color, 25 minutes.
1974 Larwari and Walkara. Color, 45 minutes.

“I have seen the future—and it is yellow.” This enigmatic statement by Professor Duncan McPhee, shortly before he was shot, has had the force of prophecy. McPhee was one of the characters in Tom Stoppard’s 1972 play Jumpers, and he thought the future was going to be yellow because of the kind of intellectuals visibly taking over the universities. Twenty years ago Stoppard needed eye-catching track suits to help identify them—hence the colour—but no assistance is needed nowadays to recognise the type. Bounding onto the stage with arguments as supple as their limbs, the eponymous jumpers of the title are a collection of bendy relativists for whom all traditional moral judgment has been cast in doubt—has indeed become indistinguishable from aesthetic judgment, simply a matter of taste.

A phrase of Mozart’s must not be said to be superior to a donkey’s bray—in donkey culture brays are considered melodious. And what do donkeys think of the matter? Shouldn’t we ask? In the same way good and bad aren’t actually good or bad, but “just categories of our own making, social and psychological conventions like the rules of tennis. Telling lies is not sinful but simply anti-social.” A lie in one place might be a necessary truth in another, and unforgivable murder in one place becomes a necessary murder somewhere else. Pragmatism rules. Meaning and context is all. And trust is destroyed.

As Stoppard saw matters, it was the plain duty of anyone who understood what was happening to try and prevent it, and in Jumpers a professor of ethics, George Moore, is assigned this thankless task. A rather indeterminate deist who is not afraid to enlist God on his side, Moore is provided with a variety of theatrical props to dramatise his argument. He has a bow and arrow for shooting at the target of Zeno’s paradox, and a hare and a tortoise as well.

But the hare dies by misadventure, the tortoise is crushed underfoot, and his arguments from First Causes fall on deaf ears. The embodiment of embattled decency, Stoppard’s stage George Moore has quite a lot in common with the historical George Moore of 1903. Bertrand Russell remembers how when the latter tried to light his pipe, he would strike a match, and then begin to argue, and continue until the match burnt his fingers, interminably striking matches and arguing and burning his fingers until the box was finished—the pipe  remaining unlit. Stoppard’s George Moore II has also a somewhat preoccupied manner, having burnt his fingers even more severely on the old flame he married and who occupies the bedroom next door.

Down-to-earth women are common in Stoppard’s plays. It’s their male adversaries who are dreamy fantasists. An amnesiac musical-comedy queen who once sang about Juney Moons, and whose clothing waywardly comes and goes, Dotty Moore might seem a rather striking exception to this rule, but like her husband George she can tell a moral limbo when she sees one. And what she has just seen on television is downright shocking. It seems that two astronauts on the moon named Scott and Oates didn’t take enough fuel with them—enough, that is, for both to return to earth. So who shall live and who shall die? Violently wrestling Oates off the boarding ladder, Captain Scott secures his own survival before announcing: “I’m going up now. I may be away for some time.”

This little bit of lunar unpleasantness is a mini drama about relativism, Darwinian naturalism, and the kind of “survival ethics” which in fact supersede ethics of any kind. And Dotty’s poignant response answers the yellow-clad academic jumpers better than George’s arguments:

Not only are we no longer the still centre of God’s universe, we’re not even uniquely graced by his footprint in man’s image … Man is on the moon, his feet on solid ground, and he has seen us whole, all in one go, little-local… and all our absolutes, the thou-shalts and the thou-shalt-nots that seemed to be the very condition of our existence, how did they look to two moon-men with a single neck to save between them? Like the local customs of another place. When that thought drips through to the bottom, people won’t just carry on. There is going to be such … breakage, such gnashing of unclean meats, such coveting of neighbours’ oxen and knowing of neighbours’ wives, such dishonorings of mothers and fathers, and bowings and scrapings to images graven and incarnate … Because the truths that have been taken on trust, they’ve never had edges before, there was no vantage point to stand on and see where they stopped.

Jumpers is concerned more explicitly than any other of Stoppard’s plays with the moral fabric of social life. It presents a world in which a strong and unified character like George is pitted against men too shifty to be fully understood. If Dotty’s world is falling apart because the truths that have been taken on trust can no longer be trusted, and if George’s arguments on behalf of God and against relativism fall on deaf ears, it is significant that the architect of moral disintegration in the play is the mysterious vice-chancellor of the university to which the track-suited yellow academics belong—Sir Archibald Jumper, MD, DPhil, DLitt, LD, DPM, DPT (Gym), “a first rate gymnast though an indifferent philosopher”.

In his role as a doctor Sir Archibald spends an inordinate amount of time in Dotty’s bedroom examining her, and his additional sins include at least one murder. According to the vice-chancellor, Captain Scott only did what was “natural” when he abandoned Oates to die on the moon; and as for the murder itself, he is not above trying to buy the silence of a police inspector with the offer of a Chair of Divinity. The inspector is shocked—and so, understandably, are those of Stoppard’s critics who have trouble with the character of Sir Archibald. They claim that real vice-chancellors don’t behave like this at all, and they may have a point. But Archie’s antics are important as an example of a deracinated mind—of an intellectuality which has freed itself from all moral constraint, simply by thinking. And the mysterious, corrupted, unidentified university of which he is High Priest stands equally for the institutional pathologies which a rootless, tradition-less, deconstructed intellectualism breeds. All this, mind you, years before numerous arts departments had been clobbered senseless by Foucault, and Derrida, and Lyotard.

John Henry Newman once memorably described the idea of a university as “the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery” which defends the territory of the intellect against its enemies. But today even a cursory investigation will reveal almost as many enemies of the intellect within the walls of the university as without. In this situation the life of the mind is too important a matter to be left to academics. They need help. They may even need therapy.

Stoppard was himself offering therapy of a kind in his vivid dramatic caricatures of intellectual trends—the trend toward relativistic yellowness being one. But his message wasn’t always getting through. His stated dramatic ideal was “the perfect marriage of farce and the play of ideas”, and to those clever enough to follow what he was saying this had been triumphantly realised: Jumpers and Travesties not only pushed sheer theatricality to its limits, they raised inventive intellectual digression into a new form of dramatic art. But in a way Stoppard was too successful—too dazzling, too witty, too much fun. Those blinded by all the pyrotechnics decided that the final result was “seriousness compromised by frivolity”. Tom Stoppard, they said, wasn’t for real.

The frustrations of this judgment led him to try and set the record straight in the columns of the TLS. If the world wanted an uncompromisingly unfrivolous Tom Stoppard then here it was. Invited in 1977 to review Paul Johnson’s Enemies of Society, he picked from the book the key aspects of Johnson’s argument he endorsed, and wrote:

The fundamental assertions are these. Truth is objective. Civilization is the pursuit of truth in freedom. Freedom is the necessary condition of that pursuit. Political freedom and economic freedom are dependent on each other. Material and cultural progress (growth) is dependent on both together. The loss of freedom leads to civilization’s decline.

This is a usefully compressed Manifesto. The statement it makes about truth, freedom, material welfare and civilization is a good guide to Stoppard’s more persisting beliefs. He did not agree with all that Johnson said. He was less pessimistic than Johnson about the blighting effect of Cambridge philosophy. He was more optimistic than Johnson about modern art—for art was as much a child of temperament as of intellect, and it was a mistake to judge its meanings too narrowly as refutable truth-statements about this or that.

But regardless of these and other differences, he said, “in one of his themes—the defence of objective truth from the attacks of Marxist relativists—Johnson has got hold of the right end of the right stick at the right time”. In the thinking of a typical representative of this already large and busy school, Stoppard noted, “the idea of objectivity and truth in science, in nature and in logic is termed ‘this colossal confidence trick”‘, the author of this phrase going on to conclude: “The advancing edge of objectivity must be replaced by a revival of radical consciousness which is developed concomitantly with the growth of radical will and action.”

By 1977 radical wilfulness was everywhere. In certain circles it had already ensured that there were no such things as facts independent of theories, that only fools believed in objective truth, and that once you knew that everything from art to medical practice to foreign policy was merely an ideological refraction of social class, you knew it all. “These,” wrote Stoppard,

“are now the quite familiar teachings of well-educated men and women holding responsible positions in respectable universities, and the thing to say about such teaching is not that it is ‘radical’ but that it is not true. What it is, is false. To claim the contrary is not ‘interesting’. It is silly. Daft. Not very bright. Moreover, it is wicked.”

But how could these silly and daft (and well-educated) men and women holding responsible positions in respectable universities be persuaded to change their minds? Or even to open them? One way might be to arrange a bruising collision with the world in which not so well-educated people live. Something like this took place in his television play Professional Foul, broadcast in September 1977, four months after his piece in the TLS. Stoppard had been reading up on the Russian dissidents. In 1976 he had met Victor Fainberg, recently released after five years in the Soviet prison-hospital system as “insane”, and now devoting himself to the campaign to free the similarly incarcerated Vladimir Bukovsky. A thirty-four-year-old biologist who had boldly suggested that inherited factors in human development are also important, Bukovsky had been rewarded for his outspokenness with twelve years in prisons, camps and psychiatric hospitals. Then in January 1977 a number of arrests were made in Prague, and a plot began to form in Stoppard’s mind.

Professional Foul takes place during a visit to Prague by Anderson, “the J.S. Mill Professor of Ethics at the University of Cambridge”. Anderson’s main but unstated goal—though that may not be quite the word we want—is to see England play Czechoslovakia in a World Cup qualifier. A secondary but not negligible interest is his attendance at Colloquium Philosophicum Prague 77, where he is to deliver a paper on “Ethical Fictions as Ethical Foundations”. In the minds of the younger participants at the colloquium another motive for flying east seems to be sex, though the furtive fingering of girly magazines is about as far as anyone gets. A warning that copies of Playboy and Penthouse are likely to be confiscated by the Czech police is only the beginning of Professor Anderson’s enlightenment.

While registering in his hotel he is approached by rather nondescript Czech citizen. Pavel Hollar works as a cleaner, but it turns out that he was once a student of Anderson’s in London, and is now the author of a dissertation he wants smuggled out of the country. Anderson demurs—it would be bad manners to behave in this way, and surely Hollar must realise that as a guest of the Czech government it wouldn’t be right to deceive his host! Hollar argues that the human being rather than the citizen is the repository of rights, and that there is a human responsibility to fight against the state’s definition of good manners. But the J.S. Mill Professor of Ethics at Cambridge argues that individual rights are only derivative, that they flow from the collective rules of the state—and if those rules require you to do such and such, then such and such is what you should plainly do.

Up to this point the implications of Cambridge philosophy for the welfare of ordinary people seem every bit as unfavourable as Paul Johnson claimed. But after an encounter with the Czech security police there’s a happy ending. Although Anderson misses the football match, the harsh experience of losing all his rights and being held for some hours incommunicado in Hollar’s apartment brings the Cambridge visitor belatedly to his senses. Hollar himself has been torn from his family and is under arrest. Hollar’s wife and child have been humiliated and abused. Borrowing a typewriter, Anderson revises his paper on “Ethical Fictions”. Rights, he now tells the Colloquium, are more than rules. Rules belong to communities; what civilized societies call rights reside with individuals.

“I will further propose that although these rights are fictions there is an obligation to treat them as if they were truths; and further, that although this obligation can be shown to be based on values which are based on fictions, there is an obligation to treat that obligation as though it were based on truth; and so on ad infinitum.”

Here we seem to be back with Dotty’s claim that in civilized society certain truths must be taken on trust. And Anderson has been led to this less by ratiocination than by the painful spectacle of the suffering of Hollar’s family. A small child who cries “that’s not fair” is appealing, he says, to an idea of natural justice. To be sure, a philosopher talking about right and wrong is ill-advised to make too much of the argument that “a child would know the difference”. Nevertheless,

It is well to be reminded that you can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever. There is a sense of right and wrong which precedes utterance. It is individually experienced and it concerns one person’s dealings with another person. From this experience we have built a system of ethics which is the sum of individual acts of recognition of individual right.

Stoppard must have hugely enjoyed writing the sports journalists’ reports from Prague of the dismal failure of the English football team: “Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers, stop. Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers, stop … Only Crisp looked as if he had a future outside Madame Tussaud’s …” The dons, ever-eager to impart their expertise, lecture the footballers on tactics, and the usual Stoppardian double-entendres occur when McKendrick mistakes a soccer player for another colloquialist: “You’re Crisp. (He takes Crisp’s hand and shakes it) Bill McKendrick. I hear you’re doing some very interesting work in Newcastle. Great stuff. I still like to think of myself as a bit of a left-winger at Stoke …”

But the main point of the play is ethical, concerning (as Stoppard made plain in an interview in 1981) “a moral philosopher preoccupied with the true nature of absolute morality … coming from England to a totalitarian society, brushing up against it, and getting a little soiled and a little wiser. I can honestly say that I have held Anderson’s final view on the subject for years and years, and for years before Anderson ever existed …”

Along with other work from the period, Professional Foul was gleefully hailed by the critics as a sign that “art for art’s sake” Tom had at last been politicised. As some saw it this would now entitle him to be taken seriously by the theatre-going public – almost as seriously, perhaps, as the Edward Bonds, the John Ardens, the David Hares. The critical glee was doubly enjoyable in that Stoppard had earlier shown lofty disdain for the “theatre of commitment”, once going so far as to declare with Wildean mockery: “I think that in future I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness. I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.”

This was a jokey way of warning off the herd of independent minds on the left, the phrase about his “lack of convictions” being an ironic code for his reluctance to endorse the certified list of progressive causes. Art’s relation to society, he said, was rather more complicated than they imagined: “The plain truth is that if you are angered or disgusted by a particular injustice or immorality, and you want to do something about it, now, at once, then you can hardly do worse than write a play about it. That’s what art is bad at.” But at the same time, he went on, “the less plain truth is that without that play and plays like it, without artists, the injustice will never be eradicated”.

The social role of the artist is at the intellectual centre of Travesties the play in which James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin are assembled in a Zurich library in 1917. It contains some plain truths about art of another kind, not so much from the Big Names mentioned above, as from Henry Carr, a rather overdressed representative of the Common Man. It appears that when the rest of the boys at Carr’s school were required to weed, or sweep, or saw logs for the boiler-room, a privileged few were let off with a chit from matron and allowed to mess about in the art room. With mounting irritation he tells Tristan Tzara, the posturing exhibitionist who founded Dadaism, that he seems to have somehow obtained a chit for life. Where exactly did Tzara get it?

In a piece of social analysis which might usefully be framed and hung above every Arts Council bureaucrat n the land, Carr explodes: “What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.” This isn’t the end of the argument (Joyce’s noble defence of Homer is effectively the conclusion) in a play which offers champagne comedy of the rarest kind, an intellectual and theatrical tour de force—with one egregious exception, the episodes involving Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov sticks out like the sore Bolshevik he was, and as his grim shadow looms above the stage, the fireworks go out and the comedy is eclipsed.

The odd thing is that Lenin is treated with a sentimental solemnity which the other main figures on the stage—Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Henry Carr—are deliberately denied. And now more than ever we want to know why. It is true that Lenin is not wholly attractive, and that he says unsympathetic things about writing:

“Today, literature must become party literature. Down with non-partisan literature! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become a part of the common cause of the proletariat” and so on. But the tone throughout is grave and considered, the argument is not unreasonable, and since Lenin’s character is far more naturalistically developed than anyone else’s even his anger is easily forgiven. It isn’t the rage of an instinctively murderous despot. It merely expresses the understandable frustration of a Man of Destiny whose plans have been obstructed by Lesser Men.

A more puzzling aspect of Stoppard’s treatment of Lenin is that material central to his theme is ignored. If there is a single line which contains the main idea in Travesties it is Carr’s dictum that “the easiest way of knowing whether good has triumphed over evil is to examine the freedom of the artist”—certainly that is the line which is meant to bounce off Lenin. But although the revolutionary ruminations of Act Two bring in a wide range of material, the kind of phrase which illuminates this issue, and on which Stoppard might well have played brilliant variations, is somehow missed. What I have in mind is Lenin’s declaration (the italics characteristically being his own): “Our task, the task of social-democracy, is to combat spontaneity.”

Those three words echo and re-echo through every subsequent historic development in Soviet history. They reach down to the foundations of the state; they define the tasks of the entire police and ideological apparatus; and in their direct bearing on artistic freedom they explain the cultural desolation of Soviet life.

If saving the life of the mind from academics has been one of Stoppard’s missions, saving the English language has been another. The two are closely related. In Jumpers Archie’s deracinated intelligence can make words mean anything at all, with ethically fateful consequences. In Professional Foul the linguistic philosopher Andersen comes to realise that “the essen­tials of a given situation speak for themselves, and language is as capable of obscuring the truth as of revealing it”. Words are not all — and in Prague he finds that even the most ingenious sophistries in defence of the “rights” of the state cannot shield him from the wrongs done to a mother and child. As a reviewer in the Times put it, “everything hinged on the impact of wordless human suffering on articulate spiritual atrophy”.⁴ But the linguistic disorders of the over-educated are only part of the problem. Language is also being steadily destroyed by journalistic hacks and under-educated zealots who think that provided you have an issue, and can manage the approved moral tone, then how you express yourself hardly matters.

This appears in The Real Thing when a jailed anti-missiles protestor named Brodie is persuaded to write a play. His supporters are confident that when the remorseful authorities find they have jailed an artis—no mere criminal—this will win his release. But in the eyes of Henry, a writer who is Stoppard’s alter ego, Brodie’s art is rather thin on ideas: “War is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft… It’s all here … You can’t fool Brodie: patriotism is propaganda, religion is a con trick, royalty is an anachronism … Pages and pages of it.” Worse even than the rag-bag of radical cliches is the fact that Brodie

“is a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable state­ment is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech … Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey … I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect.”

What The Real Thing tells us about writing, however, is better than what it tells us about love. While it’s a bitterly funny portrayal of how theatre people live and love and tear their lives apart, and not without poignancy, the author was plainly aiming at more than this. ]umpers had been about the morality of academic gymnasts, and The Real Thing supposedly illumined the morality of boudoir gymnastics among theatre folk both on and off the stage. The play is spiked with self-revelation since it contains a writer plainly modelled on Stoppard himself, and despite Roger Scruton’s strictures in a review the characterisation is convincing enough.

Indeed, the characters are vividly real. That’s not the problem. The difficulty is that they’re a generally unwholesome crew, and there’s a callous flippancy to everyone except Henry which leaves a rather sour taste. Charlotte managed to “get off with” nine other men while being married to Henry—which simply as a matter of logistic scheduling surprises him. Henry’s daughter is an unendearingly coarse-mouthed and promiscuous teenager who ridicules his ideals and whose head is full of “persuasive nonsense” about sex. The woman Henry falls in love with and marries, Annie, is simultaneously bedding an actor with whom she has been performing in John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore—short excerpts from which are used—and this ugly variation on incest and murder from the Elizabethan repertory is not a help.

It all looks as if Dotty’s prophecy in Jumpers has come true with a vengeance: “such breakage, such gnashing of unclean meats, such coveting of neighbours’ oxen and knowing of neighbours’ wives, such dishonorings of mothers and fathers …”

The notion that one can derive an instructive fable about personal relations from the philandery land of the actor is misconceived. After all, didn’t The Player himself tell us in Rosencrantz and Guildenstem are Dead that “We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!” But that such a project should even be entertained shows how far Stoppard had moved since the manifesto of 1977. The values of theatrical people are largely bohemian; and from its inception in the nineteenth cen­tury artistic bohemia has been the most consistent enemy of the middle classes, of commercial prosperity, and even of civilization itself. To consult even the wisest of its inhabitants on how to live your life is like looking in the pages of Penthouse for advice on how to raise a family.

“I know not seems”, says Hamlet—for seeming is acting, and actors only seem to be true. In agreement with Hamlet and with the canons of modem authenticity we are inclined to feel that the social masks of seeming should be stripped away. Masks are worn by people compelled by society to play roles; compulsion is wrong; and it is one of romanticism’s more tiresome dogmas that only by radical self-disclosure will we get back to the real selves which are really true. In Stoppard’s The Real Thing this takes the unusual form of a theory of love as pure coition: “Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other; not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face …” But to idealise romantic unmasking is risky. Its consequences are far more often cruel than kind. That many critics discovered in The Real Thing a more “human” side to Stoppard seems rather blind.

They were right, however, to detect a turning point. There had always been a certain tension between the different elements to be found in the playwright’s review of Paul Johnson. On the one hand it saw a connection between the morale of a healthy middle class, and freedom and material growth. On the other hand it linked Western liberal democracy to the persistence of an intellectual and cultural elite. The limit of his agreement with Johnson was reached when the latter attacked modern art for being anti-representational. A kind of irritable puritanism hostile to Stoppard’s luxuriantly eclectic style seemed to be lurking in the wings. And Stoppard plainly felt a temperamental impatience with some of the moral and aesthetic canons of middle-class life. It seemed more than possible that the playwright’s real affinity was not for all those useful wealth-producing burghers, but for the world of a traditional, literate, devil-may-care aristocracy. And this of course is the world of Sidley Park in 1810, in his new play Arcadia.

Byronic jesting requires a social setting of broad acres and broader morals, one in which adultery is merely the more hazardous of various blood sports on offer. At Sidley Park the echo of gunshots at dawn may signal only the death of a hare. But it’s just as likely to announce the fiery finale of some nocturnal escapade—with pistols at twenty paces. In such a milieu the aristocratic code that one should do what one likes and to hell with the peasants blurs indistinguishably with the bohemian code that one should do what one likes and to hell with bourgeois morality—Byron embodying the best and worst of both worlds.

In matters Byronic misbehaviour must be handled with style. Charlotte’s conduct in The Real Thing probably differs little from Lady Groom’s in Arcadia, but whereas the naturalistic treatment of infidelity among the faithless seems beside the point, the same thing transmutes into high comedy in the language of another time and place. Jealously accused by Lady Croom of embracing her rival Mrs Chater, the ingenious Septimus says in his defence:

My lady, I was alone with my thoughts in the gazebo, when Mrs Chater ran me to ground, and I being in such a passion, in an agony of unrelieved desire … thought in my madness that the Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the happiness to which I dared not put a face. (Pause.)

To which Lady Croom responds: “I do not know when I have received a more unusual compliment, Mr Hodge. I hope I am more than a match for Mrs Chater with her head in a bucket. Does she wear drawers?” Lady Croom’s interest in underwear is keen, but not exclusive. She has large ideas and ambitions, the chief of them being to preserve the classical estate of Sidley Park from the destructive romanticism of a landscape architect who would replace “the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden with an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks” where there wasn’t even a spring. When reminded by the architect that his forests and crags are inspired by “the picturesque style” she retorts that “Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage.” All in all, she concludes, “It is nature as God intended, and I can say with the painter, Et in Arcadia ego”.

Lady Croom’s classicism speaks for Tom Stoppard redivivus. Following the self-exposures in 1982 of The Real Thing he entered a period of disorientation from which he now seems to have emerged renewed. During the 1980s the ethical questions with which his characters struggled seemed to have been displaced by psychological questions: not “What should I do?”, but “Who am I really—one person or two?”

In Hapgood, for example, this became a fully-fledged exploration of the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the self. Now, however, Stoppard seems to have decided that both life and art benefit when the emotional violence and intellectual confusion of romanticism are kept at bay. Instead of stripped-down nakedness, the classical setting of the nineteenth-century country house gives us masks, conventions, traditions, and elaborate and obligatory styles of speech—guarantors of civility even amidst the mayhem of weekend intrigues.

Arcadia also reminds us that naturalism unnaturally constrains Tom Stoppard. Modem demotic is not his normal voice. To show off his talents at their best he needs a period and style where speech is vivid, where men and women have larger-than-life characters, and where you can find the sort of freely speculative intelligence he admires. At Sidley Park the life of the mind is sustained by gifted amateurs pursuing this or that field of enquiry for no better reason than love of the subject and natural curiosity. It is the sort of place where a gifted child might not unreasonably be invited to consider Fermat’s theorem. Such is the mathematically precocious Thomasina in Arcadia. And such was the person on whom she seems partly modelled, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, Byron’s legitimate daughter by Annabella Millbanke, whose mathematical gifts flourished briefly in association with Charles Babbage—Babbage being the man whose invention of a mechanical calculating machine heralded the computer age.

An interest in science and mathematics has marked Stoppard’s work from the beginning: probability features in the first scene of Rosencrantz and Guildenstem are Dead, Cantor gets into Jumpers, catastrophe theory is touched on in Professional Foul; quantum indeterminacy is made rather too much of in his espionage drama Hapgood, and chaos theory takes over almost a whole scene of Arcadia. All of which tends to give the phrase “a play of ideas” new meaning. But while one is glad to be intelligently addressed in the theatre by someone for whom an idea is something other than a poilitical idée fixe, the result is not always successful. Despite the enormous inventiveness of stories which try very hard to tie the ideas to the action, and of characters for whom rattling on about particle physics seems almost natural, one sometimes has the impression, watching the immensely entertaining Mr Stoppard, that what we are watching is a clever man amusing himself.

Yet the growing prominence of science in Stoppard’s plays may have a deeper significance. Perhaps it means that today the only serious ideas are going to be the ideas which science offers—not those to be found in faculties of arts.

In the twenty years since Jumpers the yellowing of the academic landscape has proceeded apace, and many departments have now fallen terminally “into the sere”. Bendy relativists and hopelessly bent postmodernists have multiplied beyond imagining, and donkey culture is now reverently interpreted bray by bray. With the rise of a cohort of academics whose English prose reads like a foreign language, and who treat the latest symptoms of Gallic logorrhea as a huge leap in articulate thought, is it surprising to find that one of our most gifted writers for the stage has gone looking for more serious things?

(Visual Anthropology, Vol 6, pages 367—379)

“You must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice done to us.”

[Last words of a woman about to die, spoken in the gas chamber to the Czech Jew Filip Muller, a man who lived to survive the Auschwitz 'special detail'. Muller is interviewed in Part Two of Shoah.]

Riga is not usually associated with the origins of anthropology. Yet perhaps the historic contribution of the capital of Latvia and the Latvians deserves to be better recognized. It was while staying there in the years 1764-1769 that Johann Gottfried Herder began to develop some of those ideas about culture which have since become so widely adopted—culture as both autonomous and unified, as incommensurable experience, as an intrinsically valuable source of identity—and it was the stimulating ethnographic environment of Riga that put these ideas in his head.

The more he saw and heard of life in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire the more Herder became convinced that if a choice had to be made between the French Enlightenment (which saw civilization spreading out imperially from Paris) and the virtues of not-so-civilized independent cultures, then there was a lot to be said for the latter. He and his teacher, the student of languages Johann Georg Hamann, were particularly impressed by the million or more Latvian folk songs, a lively tradition little known in Paris, Berlin and Weimar. ¹

“He watched the Latvians’ love of singing and poetry”, a contemporary author wrote of Herder, “their ability to improvise, the extraordinary emotion of their love songs, into which they pour all the possible tenderness of a lover’s melancholy and describe the whole endurance of a sensitive heart in such an artistic way that we cannot but be deeply moved by their songs”.

The little tinkling Latvian bells also caught his attention; and it is therefore highly appropriate that both songs and bells, musically united in great gatherings of choirs at traditional singing festivals, are at the center of the resistance to Soviet hegemony presented in the late Yuris Podniek’s Homeland. A distinguished and original work honoring Baltic independence, his film celebrates the choral rising which took place in 1990, a form of cultural politics which contributed more than a little to securing the new-won freedom of the Baltic States. ²

Delicately tinkling bells and radiant women’s faces alternate with guns and gunfire. Human voices sing in solemn concert against images of planes and tanks. Meanwhile the accumulated force of memory and moral wrath is directed against a terrible history. Cutting to and fro between past and present, using black-and-white footage from the twenty independent years between the wars, the meaning of this history is examined—especially the consequences of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. On 23 August 1939 Stalin said to Hitler: “You take Poland”; while Hitler said to Stalin: “You take the Baltic States”. David Low’s well-known cartoon, “Rendezvous”, summed up this unholy alliance as nothing else could.

The immediate result was the wholesale Sovietization of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, beginning in June 1940. At a time when few in the West were looking, and nobody could have done anything anyway, communist governments controlled by Moscow were set up, this being at once followed by the state seizure of all newspapers and radio stations, banks, land, urban real estate, factories and transport—without compensation of course. Meanwhile long lists of men, women, and children, all of them candidates for “‘liquidation”, were being prepared. And on June 13-14, 1941, in a single night, those listed were seized and shipped off to Siberia. In one year of Soviet occupation, June 1940-June 1941, the total Baltic population executed, deported, or conscripted by force into the Russian army has been estimated at 124,467 (this being those for whom there are definite names).

But this was only the start. Soon Germany declared war on Russia and Hitler’s war machine rolled in. The deportation and massacre of the Baltic Jews began, along with the destruction of thousands of non-Jewish Baltic people. The Nazi occupation lasted until 1944. Then, after these three grim years, the victorious Russians came back to stay. Just as the Nazis destroyed anyone they thought might have been sympathetic to the Soviets, the returning Russians set about the persecution and deportation of anyone they thought might have cooperated with the retreating Germans. At the end of it all some 800,000 people had been shipped like cattle, in hideous conditions from which large numbers died before ever reaching their destination, to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other places in the east and north. ³

This is the tale of suffering, leading up to the 1990 Latvian Song Festival, its 358 choirs of 24,000 people, and its heart-felt singing of national songs banned for 50 years, which provides the moral dynamic for Yuris Podniek’s film. It has six main ingredients. First, a huge choral festival attended by thousands of brilliantly costumed and strikingly handsome women singers. Second, scenes of Soviet military forces on manoeuvres (large areas of the Baltic States have for decades been used for Soviet bases and army manoeuvres, the farmers having long since been turned off the land or deported).

Thirdly, footage from the past showing glimpses of the earliest days of the song festivals, and more than glimpses of the arrogant steel-clad might of this or that imperial power rolling through Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn. Fourthly, interview material with young and old survivors. Fifthly, scenes from settlements of Baltic exiles in Siberia, showing the exhumation of the dead and the transportation home of their remains. And sixthly—and intimately continuous with the preceding—scenes of Lithuania’s Hill of Crosses, a religious shrine twice bulldozed flat by the communist regime, which in its phoenix-like capacity for renewal symbolized, like nothing else, resistance to both Marxism and the Party.

What welds this material together is the poignant use of traditional choral singing, along with a low-keyed jaggedly nervy score by Martin Braun composed for invading weaponry and troops. The different elements work to produce a film which is simultaneously political in purpose, cultural in content, and has an almost musical form. But what is the deep reason for all the choirs and singing? It is because this was the only form of nationalistic expression allowed under the Soviet regime. Free nations normally display their independence and unity by putting their armed forces on parade, but of course nothing like this was possible for the subject Balts. In its generosity, however, Moscow did allow them to parade their choirs. The contrast reveals a lot—especially about the “‘gender effects” of military domination. For what sort of a Baltic culture do these choirs portray? What is emphasized, and what seems strangely missing?

The strong immediate impression this film conveys comes from scenes of Latvian and Estonian women, either in powerful close-ups showing intense but contained emotion, or in smaller groups, or in the great massed choirs in the arena singing the national songs which provide Homeland’s irresistibly emotional “score”. Their white costumes with hand-woven red headbands and waist-sashes provide a matching visual unity for the theme of national solidarity and shared tradition.

In Homeland they and their voices represent Baltic “culture” par excellence, and they are repeatedly contrasted with Russian officers and their exaggeratedly peaked caps (the dominant male presence) or with assorted weaponry. As a result Latvian culture is strikingly feminized. There would be nothing wrong with that if the characterization was true. But in this case one feels that it is neither a Baltic tradition, nor a Latvian trait, but a profound sociological consequence of the kind of military domination which systematically removes men from effective power.

Virtually the only male characters of any significance in Homeland are (1) old, (2) broken, (3) corrupted, (4) dead. Or various combinations thereof. The presence in the film of a man who—incredibly—first conducted massed choirs before the Tsar, and who still manages to look creakily debonair, is a huge bonus: what a symbol of cultural indestructibility stands there!

But all too clearly he and other men associated with the song festival represent the tolerated and innocuous domain of Art, not the contested domain of Power. Effective male political leadership has for 50 years been co-opted, removed, or repressed. In the eyes of the regime, however, musical activities were harmless enough. One remembers the derision heaped by Moscow on the first president of newly independent Lithuania, Vytautas Landsbergis. The “music-teacher,” they called him dismissively.

Beneath the ruined rafters of what must once have been a family farm (destroyed during the collectivization of the 1950s) a man who suffered 47 years of exile sits meditating, and as he tells his story another source of Baltic male attrition becomes clear. This man had been drafted into no less than four armies: first, the Latvian force formed to defend his homeland in 1939; second, the “Popular Army”, this being the name under which the Russians took it over; thirdly, The Red Army itself; and fourthly, the German army which drove out the Russians in 1941. In each case he was conscripted against his will. We learn that during the Second World War the Nazis and the Soviets forced fully ten percent of the male population to serve in their armed forces.

This figure from the past is followed by a more shocking contemporary statistic. In a title superimposed on a funeral cortege we read that “One murdered conscript is returned to the Baltic States every third day”. No explanation for these killings is offered, but the implication is that in the Imperial Soviet Army at the end of the 1980s, with discipline deteriorating, and national tensions violently erupting within the ranks, the victimization of helpless and isolated “colonials” had reached such a point that murder was commonplace. One wonders what the complementary figure might have been for the deaths of Georgian conscripts, or those of Islamic background from Azerbaijan or Tadzhikistan.

There were also more dishonorable duties associated with Soviet occupation. Baltic men who were not yoked for service in the Army were suborned into dirtier jobs. When a political candidate in the forthcoming elections is interviewed we find that he had worked in a minor capacity for the KGB. His duties required him to open and read letters sent to and from Baltic exiles overseas. He doesn’t seem to regard this as a serious electoral disadvantage however—”everybody had to do something like this”—a fact which footnotes the pervasive moral debilitation which accompanied Moscow’s emasculation of its subject states.

An aspect of the film which assumes a growing importance with repeated viewings is the strongly Christian message, towards the end, implicit in the handling of the Lithuanian material. Here the director shifts from the “Baltic” cultural emphasis of the song festivals to a religious theme. It is a theme which is neither new nor surprising: namely, that the eschatological doctrines of Christianity have since its beginnings appealed to the oppressed and the enslaved. Solzhenitsyn and others observed the superior ability of both the “Old Believers” and the members of various Russian sects to withstand even the worst that Soviet labor camps could offer.

Presumably this is because Christians who are crucified politically, culturally, and sometimes personally, spontaneously identify with Christ. There is no small irony in the fact that the most triumphant millenarianism of our time (the Marxist Church Militant) should have been defeated on a philosophical level by the much older, purer soteriology which for seventy years it struggled aggressively to displace.

At all events, one feels that in Lithuania the symbol of the cross became, for many, a symbol of their own condition. They too had suffered innocently and they too had stoically endured. The persistently rebuilt Hill of Crosses is a symbolic memorial to both the living and the dead, and the image of it at the end of the film mist-shrouded and floating in space, is fittingly ethereal.

At an elementary level, no doubt, carving and constructing crosses to replace those destroyed by the bulldozers provided both men and women with something emotionally and physically satisfying to do. Though of different sizes, many crosses are elaborate quasi-sculptures which obviously require both muscular energy and creative imagination. At another level, however, they seem to be a concentrated moral expression of the underlying religious philosophy which enabled Lithuanian nationalism to endure.

It is noticeable that aside from the stills to be found in certain exile publications, there seems to be little extant photographic evidence of the atrocities associated with both Nazi and Soviet occupation, expropriation, and deportation, (though no doubt hidden archives are now everywhere coming to light).

Although the events described above provide an ever-present moral background there appears to be comparatively little directly picturing them which can be seen. Such events are of course shameful— sufficiently shameful for those responsible, both Nazi and Soviet, to have done their utmost to conceal their actions from public view. This is in accordance with one of the Laws of Totalitarian Information Control: the more shameful the episode, the fewer the photographs— indeed, the less the documentary evidence of any kind.

This was true of the Holocaust until, at the end of World War 11, an appalled and nauseated team of reporters and cameramen were allowed through the gates of Belsen and Auschwitz. What they filmed in the space of the next few hours and days remains etched in the memory of mankind. But suppose the photo-record they made didn’t exist? Suppose the Germans had had time both to wipe out the European Jews and erase all evidence of the crime? Suppose that not just years but whole decades had been allowed to pass before circumstances permitted open enquiry? Wouldn’t the repulsive perversities of those like David Irving (who claims the Holocaust never took place) be that much more plausible?

Such questions arise when one turns to films about the “Soviet Holocaust” of enforced collectivization fifty years ago. These are gradually appearing in the course of a post-glasnost outpouring of news and journal reports about Stalin’s terror and the lives it cost. For example, in June 1988 Russian readers learned of the 100,000 corpses found at Kuropaty, near Minsk, all shot during the period 1937-41. In March 1989 between 200,000 and 300,000 bodies in a grave near Bykovnia in the Ukraine were officially acknowledged as “victims of Stalinism”. And these examples seem to be merely the corners of a continental boneyard.

Recent assessments of the totality of human life lost under the Soviet regime are staggering: In September 1987 Yu. Poliakov, a leading Soviet demographer, estimated that during the Civil War, 1918-1922, the country’s population decreased by thirteen million. In March 1989, Roy Medvedev, a former dissident and notable historian, estimated the total number of Stalin’s victims (from 1927 to 1953) at forty million. V Pereverzev, writing in the Russite magazine Molodaia gvardiia, put the losses for the 1918-1939 period at 20.1 million..” Others have argued that these figures are too low. In June 1989 an article by 0. Marinicheva in Komsomol.’skaia pravda “estimated the total losses due to the brutality of the Soviet regime since 1917 at ninety million people’.’ [Krasnov 1991: 129-1301. ⁴

All such figures are estimates. But they suggest that the Soviet Holocaust was of a range and magnitude (and was directed by the Soviet government against its own citizens it should be remembered) well in excess of anything the Nazis achieved. Only a part of this colossal tragedy concerns us here—that dealt with by two films on collectivization and deportation to the labor camps, an episode in which "only" 14.5 million perished.

Since those unaware of these figures may be surprised, and will inevitably ask why it is that they are not as widely known as Hitler's infamies (one still meets academics who seem to believe they are all invented), it is perhaps necessary to make a brief comment on this before we start. The reasons why Hitler's murders have been so well-advertised, and Stalin's, by comparison, so well-concealed, are quite straightforward.

First, when Hitler attacked the European Jews he attacked a literate and influential European population whose leaders were to be found in some of the most prominent positions of cultural, scientific, and commercial life. Until the outbreak of war they were able to emigrate and those who did so were able to make the Jewish predicament known outside Germany. Only in the period 1942-45 was international communication extremely difficult, and a reliable account of what was happening in the death camps all but impossible to obtain.

In contrast, when Stalin attacked Russia's peasants he attacked a largely illiterate, powerless, rural population behind closed frontiers. They were unable to emigrate, were sent to their deaths into the vast and inaccessible silences of the north and east, and were wholly incapable of mobilising international opinion.

Secondly, Stalin's quasi-military assault on the countryside, with its grain seizures, deportations, and genocidal man-made famine of 1932-33, was largely overshadowed by the rise of Hitler in Germany—a political drama which was at once more visible, more portentous, and of much greater immediate concern to Western opinion. Reports to the effect that a few million peasants were suffering under Stalin were easily shrugged off. After all, a weary West complained, Russia's peasants were born to suffer. What else was new?

Thirdly, Western intellectuals were (rightly) as well-informed and alarmed about the prospect of fascism in Germany as they were (wrongly) ignorant and complacent about the murderous despotism which had evolved in post-Revolutionary Russia. Scores of communist-sympathising fellow-travellers, from George Bernard Shaw to Romain Rolland to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, kept up a chorus of praise for the Soviet regime even in the midst of its atrocities.

Anyone brave or independent enough to report what was actually happening was reviled as a crypto-fascist or worse. Large numbers of academics in the West had convinced themselves that collectivization was a good thing—whatever the cost. It was not a good thing—it was a terrible thing. Yet never have so many well-meaning intellectuals been so ready and so willing to shoot the unwelcome bearers of bad news.

Fourthly, and finally, the contrast between our knowledge of Nazi horrors and our ignorance of their Soviet equivalents is explained simply by the defeat of Germany. A victorious army marched into the Nazi death camps and exposed them to the eyes of the world. No such merciless exposure was ever visited on the numberless camps in the Gulag Archipelago (which, after all, belonged to our World War II ally) and for this reason the 'peculiar institutions' of the Soviet penal system have always had a more nebulous existence in the Western mind.

So it was that the entire historical episode of collectivization, deportation, and the "gulagization" of millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants in the early 1930s passed almost without notice in the West, and whole populations went to their doom. In the Kuban, for example, a region in southern Russia which features in the film Leningradskaya Village, we are told that no less than half the total rural population either died of famine or was deported. And the question once again is this: in attempting to produce a film about something so shameful that the entire apparatus of state security was mobilized to prevent any record of it surviving, what can you do?

One answer to this question is that you can interview survivors. Memory bears spoken witness to events. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah is the paradigm and exemplary case, and it must have been prominently in the minds of those who made the film in the Kuban. Those familiar with Shoah will remember the deceptively idyllic opening scenes of field and stream, of willows along the banks of the Narew, and of the return of Simon Srebnik to the dark pine forests of Chelmno. Srebnik is one of only two survivors out of 400,000 murdered there.

The controlled artistry with which this man is introduced to us and his history is self-revealed through prolonged silences during which the viewer is compelled to bring a more than usually serious level of attention and concern to the task of watching a TV or movie screen; through the close involvement of the audience in the painful process of recollection; and through the perfect complementarity of interviewers, interpreters, witnesses, and theme.

Even within the first ten minutes of its entire nine and a half hours it is clear why Simone de Beauvoir should have written: "1 would never have imagined such a combination of beauty and horror. True, the one does not help to conceal the other. It is not a question of aestheticism: rather, it highlights the horror with such inventiveness and austerity that we know we are watching a great oeuvre. A sheer masterpiece." [Lanzmann 1985: x]

Leningradskaya Village is firmly in this tradition, and though its makers were plainly not aiming at anything as ambitious as Shoah, and were constrained by the one-hour program format of television, it combines with two other episodes in “The Hand of Stalin” series to present both an honorable and distinguished portrayal of aspects of the Soviet Holocaust (the other two one-hour episodes being Kolyma, about the labor camp complex in Siberia, and Leningrad, about the terror and arrests of 1937-38 in that City). ⁵ Comparison with Shoah is useful-it reveals the much more difficult circumstances in which “the cinema of witness” has to operate in today’s Russia than in Poland when Lanzmann made his film.

To interview a man in Poland in the early 1980s about the 1940s was to ask him to recollect events which, however vivid in memory, had long outlived the Nazi state. The Gestapo was no longer just down the street; a midnight knock on the door was no longer possible. By way of contrast, in 1989 in a Cossack village in southern Russia the claustrophobic atmosphere of state thought-control is still present, free speech is an unfamiliar novelty, and some degree of fear and suspicion regarding anyone enquiring into the fraught subject of collectivization is unavoidable.

It is therefore not surprising that the filmmakers feel obliged to explain at the outset the inhibiting context in which their interviews took place. In the Soviet Union, we are told, “by the spring of 1933 seven million had died of famine, and thirteen million had been deported. Only now, after 50 years of fear and silence, are the survivors beginning to speak.” Their diffidence is understandable. Time and again there had seemed to be a “thaw”—a relaxation of controls and a spirit of greater freedom encouraged by the regime. Time and again those who spoke out during such intervals of liberty were seized and imprisoned. Why should the Gorbachev dispensation be any different? Why should these filmmakers be trusted?

A wrinkled Party activist begins his tale by defending collectivization as “‘imperative. Collective farms were a great achievement”, he says. “How were we to feed the workers? Workers had to be fed”. True enough, but since modern analyses suggest that there is no reason whatever to think that traditional arrangements could not have fed them (see the article by Kseniia Mialo, p. 375), this is largely irrelevant. The question is: supposing that collectivization was desirable as a political goal, was it necessary to force it through at the cost of millions of lives?

For those running the USSR in 1930 the only possible answer to this question was a resounding “Yes!”. In their eyes rapid industrialization was essential, and capital to finance industrialization had to be extracted forcibly from the peasants. This was coldly and deliberately done by seizing their grain, selling it at a profit abroad, and using the income to buy Western machinery and to fund huge capital works. Meanwhile the peasants starved. For a variety of reasons this overall plan and purpose is only allusively treated in the interviews with surviving villagers (whereas it is central to the film Harvest of Despair discussed below).

Yet much can be learned from the style of the allusion itself. There is a studied reluctance on the part of all informants to ever identify those responsible—or even to name Stalin, 50 years after his death, as principal villain of the piece. Instead people say of the disasters that befell them that “they” wanted it, or “they” or­dered it, or “they” did it. It sounds like an inversion of the “we” of Zamyatin’s novel—the declamatory “we” that represents the voice of power at the Center is here seen from the submissive periphery as an anonymous “they” from whom all orders come.

No doubt there is something here of the eternal rural suspicion of distant cities and legislatures. Yet not only the peasants in Leningradskaya Village adopt this usage. Urban Party “activists” and ex-army men who came to the village in 1930 to direct the grain seizures and to round up victims for deportation also habitually refer to an anonymous “they” and their purposes. Perhaps we need some deep-thinking post-modernist to guide us here: plainly “they” is a key term in a discourse of generalized subjection and fear.

As for why it was necessary for the army men and the Party activists to do “their” bidding, starving millions, and sending more millions to their doom in the freezing wastes, we are told that both soldiers and party men were just “carrying out orders.”. And as he says this the merciless Red enforcer of yesteryear squirms, fidgets, and wrings his hands.

“We communists would meet and say ‘This is wrong’. But what could we do about it? You had to carry it out. If you’re a communist, then do it. So we followed instructions … How did I feel? I felt it was wrong. But I couldn’t do anything. I had to act wrongly, I had to. And I did so.”

It would be exaggerating to describe this cadre-leader, who ransacked the homes of starving peasants, and personally deported some 3000 of them to death and destruction, as conscience-stricken. But he does show some remorse. And the subtle difference between the taking of life for reasons of sheer racial annihilation (Nazi racism) and the taking of life in pursuit of some messianic social goal (Soviet communism) tends to soften one’s moral response.

As in Shoah the timeless beauties of field and stream, of spreading meadows and shivering poplar leaves, of flights of crows at sundown, provide a poetic counterpoint to horrific recollections which seem, against such scenes and in the light of recent events, to show the vanity of revolutionary ambitions. As in Shoah, the symbolic engines of destruction are lines of dark and faceless freight-cars, (the “ships of the Gulag” in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase), remorseless, inhuman, all iron inevitability and dismal clangs, rolling on steel rails slowly toward the east:

“It was morning” a craggy woman survivor tells us, standing in the railway yard where she had seen it happen. “They came to me and said people were being deported. Wagons were there and people were being loaded into them.” Then one of those who was being loaded takes up the tale. “We were young, and all we had were a lot of children. We were poor and barefoot. They loaded us into a wagon and off to Saratov.

The doors were locked and never opened. There were guards. The doors weren’t opened until we reached the destination in southern Kazakhstan or somewhere. There they unloaded us out onto the frozen ground. It was the start of January. We stayed to weed sugar-beet. Everyone was dying of hunger—the young, the old, everyone.”

“That’s where my four children died. ‘Look, said a doctor, ‘the children are dead, yet they walk as if they were alive. They are dead, yet still they move.’ A day or two later they too died. Every one.” The interviewer then asks whether she had any more children. “No. I didn’t want another family. I felt sorry for the children. I didn’t want any more,” she says, as her ancient face trembles with emotion and she is unable to go on. Another survivor, a man, says bluntly: “It was genocide. I had six uncles. They, with families of sometimes seven, were all deported. After a month none of them were alive. Not one.” He finds the memories too bitter to be borne, and asks that the interview be ended.

As more than one informant reports, this village was “on the blacklist”. Why? “Because there were Cossacks and kulaks, who had to be disposed of. Basically, the Cossacks had to be disposed of.” “Dekulakization”—a word almost as ugly as the brutalities it describes—we shall assume to be understood. But why were the Cossacks targeted? Both the Kuban and the Don Cossacks had strongly resisted collectivization, and reports exist of a full-scale peasant revolt which was put down by the Soviet government with heavy loss of life.

A sociological reason for this resistance is worth noting. The distinctive arrangements of the mir (or commune), involving the rotating use of strips of collectively owned land, do not appear to have been found among the Cossacks. Out on the edges of the Tsarist Empire—in Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and in the southern Cossack regions—peasants tilled their land individually by households. In these non-Russian areas “each household held, either in ownership or under lease, a parcel of land which it cultivated as it pleased” [Pipes 1991: 98]. As successful independent farmers the Kuban Cossacks had no desire whatever to be collectivized. It was for this contrariness that the village was on the blacklist. This was why thousands of villagers had to be “disposed of”.

What do Russian anthropologists say today about this grim episode, now they are free to speak? Some idea can be had from the article by Kseniia Mialo, “The Thread That Was Torn: Peasant Culture and the Cultural Revolution”, which appeared in Novyi mir in August 1988. According to the summary provided by Krasnov, “the destruction of the Russian peasant way of life was a ‘cultural catastrophe’ which she likens to the Spanish destruction of the Inca and Aztec civilizations, the annihilation of the Albigensians and the Huguenots in France, and the decimation of the Indians in North Arnerica.”

In place of the blindness of Western colonizers, she sees the blind destructiveness of “Soviet ‘leftists’ who had no respect for the ‘primitive’ culture of the Russian peasantry on whom they forced both collectivization and ‘cultural revolution’, with disastrous results, not just for the peasants, but for the rest of the country.” [Krasnov 1991: 115]

Mialo “charges Soviet historians and sociologists with either ignoring the tragedy of the Russian peasantry or ‘creating a myth according to which the victim was just about the sole perpetrator of the crime’.” Nor does she find any economic justification for destroying the `primitive’ Russian peasantry: “Far from being an obstacle to modernization and industrialization” they could well have advanced Soviet agriculture on the basis of their own traditions [Krasnov 1991: 116].

Is one to assume that Leningradskaya Village is the first documentary of any significance to treat this subject? Not so. Although reports based on comprehensive interviews with the people affected, in their own villages, have been impossible until the collapse of the Soviet regime, there have certainly been other attempts to deal with the same events. One which has been made available to me is the early 1980s Harvest of Despair.

Produced by the Ukraine Famine Research Committee of Toronto, Canada, this documentary was made outside Russia, well before Gorbachev and perestroika, at a time when the very idea of conducting open on-site field research critical of Soviet policies was absurd. It also, however, makes wide use of interviews, though the men and women who speak are of a different kind to those in Leningradskaya Village: German diplomatic personnel who were present in Moscow and Kiev in 1932-33; Malcolm Muggeridge, then working as a young journalist in Russia; Lev Kopelev, whose account of his life as a zealous enforcer of collectivization in those days, The Education of a True Believer, appeared in 1981; and Petro Grigorenko, a former Soviet General.

Also heard from are a number of ordinary men and women, then living in Ukrainian villages, who have both survived and made their way to the West. What they say about the Ukraine wholly confirms and corroborates all that one can now hear said by the Cossacks of the Kuban.

The presentation is however very much more complicated and confused, since Harvest of Despair is first and foremost an impassioned pre-Gorbachev defense of Ukrainian nationalism, and a plea for cultural and political autonomy. As such it places collectivization and the famine of 1932-33 in the historical context both of Soviet nationalities policy and international relations, and it can be said that this wider frame of reference is ably handled by a writer, Peter Blow, with both a grasp of the facts and a persuasive interpretation to offer.

The narration brings out well the connection between the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in November 1933 (when 25,000 per day were dying of hunger in the Ukraine), and the reliance of the U.S. State Department on the systematic mendacities of the New York Times reporter Walter Duranty (according to Muggeridge, “not only the greatest liar among the journalists of Moscow—the greatest liar I ever met in fifty years of journalism”); the complicity of Germany in ignoring the famine since exports of machinery to the Soviet Union, paid for by grain, were helping to keep Germans employed; and the sinister role of a deluded collection of Western leftists, conspicuous among whom was George Bernard Shaw, in assisting the Soviets to achieve a monumental cover-up of what was happening. The thirties were a terrible time. In Harvest of Despair this especially terrible chapter is well told.

More important for our purposes however are two other aspects of the film: first, the indications it contains of a wealth of original photographic material documenting collectivization and the famine, and secondly (and regretfully) the sadly counterproductive form in which this is presented. Rarely can material of such gravity have been so compromised. Parts of this film are virtually a clinical exhibit of what not to do if the very important information you possess, and the argument you wish to present, are to be taken seriously.

It is as if the director had unresistingly succumbed to the style of the 1930s and 40s newsreels he was required to review. Everything is taken at a headlong rush. Never is there time to reflect. If an army parade is shown, a busy fragment of band music is heard; if children are starving, misery music assails the ear; and if the bodies of the dead are being taken away a burst of choral mourning tells us how to react. Scenes and moods follow one another without the viewer ever having time to digest what they contain, let alone to express an appropriate emotional response. The result, at times, is to turn a real tragedy into a comedy of unintended effects.

Others might not be as jolted as I was by the disharmony of style and subject. But just as one was grateful, years ago, that Night and Fog had brought another moral and artistic dimension to the newsreel view of Belsen and Auschwitz, one can only hope that the material on collectivization will one day find a modern Alain Resnais. What do the archives actually hold? How might it be assembled? Is there in fact anything more than is shown in such a fragmentary manner here? What do the old Soviet archives contain—or was it all destroyed? ⁶ Perhaps it might be a suitable subject for Marina Goldovskaya, whose remarkable The Solovki Power documents the origins of the Soviet forced labor camps.

The trivializing complained about above is the effect of a certain narrative style. It assimilates material of profound documentary importance to the story-telling conventions of old-time propaganda pieces or to the declamatory rhetoric of “Time Marches On!” But there is of course a more serious form of trivialization now popular in the universities—one which seeks to divorce the photographic image from whatever it objectively represents, and to diminish its claim as primary data for our knowledge of events, all this in the course of a general subjectivizing of epistemic issues.

As I have suggested above, it seems to me that this does little to help stiffen our resistance to the David Irvings in our midst. It is Mr. Irving’s view, regularly stated, that the Holocaust never happened and that the death camps were built as postwar tourist attractions. He continues to claim that no Jews were gassed by the Nazis during the Second World War. Speaking to the London newspaper The Independent in 1992 he said: “It’s going to be a hot twelve months, but at the end of it the gas chamber legend will have vanished once and for all”.

How does one deal with this sort of thing? There are various approaches, no doubt, but surely the best proof of the falsity of Irving’s views is provided by the stills and cine-camera footage taken during the first hours and days after the allies entered the death camps. Such photographs, used in books, films, and educational displays about the Holocaust, are widely and correctly seen as irrefutable evidence of the crime.

There will always be David Irvings, on the Left as well as the Right, just as there will always be a sizeable constituency of wishful-thinking fanatics of one persuasion or another eager to accept the frauds they offer. It is salutary to remember that innumerable apologists for the Soviet regime are still convinced that the Soviet Holocaust “never happened—or that if it did it was a minor demographic blip which certainly didn’t involve 14.5 million dead.

I even have a colleague who thinks the widespread reports of cannibalism during the famine (such behavior is matter-of-factly described by several eye-witnesses in both the films under discussion) are “just propaganda”. Keeping our heads clear on the factual nature of the photographic record, and our minds open to the extraordinary experiences related in such examples of “the cinema of witness” as Leningradskaya Village, is one way of keeping the Irvings of both Left and Right under control.

1. See Isaiah Berlin’s Vico and Herder. Herder’s stay in Riga is mentioned by Arnolds Spekke in his History of Latvia.

2. Homeland. 1991. Produced and directed by Yuris Podnieks. Executive producer, Roger James. Associate producer, Chizuko Kobayashi. Made in association with NHK, the Baltic Branch of the Soviet‑British Creative Association, and Central Independent Television. Cameramen, Andres Slapins, Gvido Zvaigzne, Yuris Podnieks. Editor, Antra Tsilinska. Music, Martin Braun. Also involved were the Riga Documentary Studio, the Latvian and Estonian Film Archives, and Panavision USSR.

Yuris Podnieks made a subsequent film, Homeland Postscript, about the attack by Soviet Black Berets on the Latvian Interior Ministry on January 20th, 1991. In the course of their work his two cameramen, Andres Slapins and Gvido Zvaigzne, were shot and killed. Yuris Podnieks himself died in what is called “”a diving accident”, in a lake not far from Riga, some time later. A useful journalistic account which complements Homeland is Clare Thomson’s [19921 The Singing Revolution: a Political Journey through the Baltic States. See also the new book by Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence [1993].

3. See Arnolds Spekke, History of Latvia: an Outline, chapter 18, “‘Ten Years of Foreign Occupation”. For Lithuania, see the relevant chapters of Albertas Gerutis, Lithuania: 700 Years.

4. Conquest 1976 is a good study of the whole subject of collectivization. Kopelev 1981 and Kravchenko 1989 contain the experiences and eye-witness reports of participants.

5. Leningradskaya Village. 1990. (Part 1 of “The Hand of Stalin” series). An October Films/PTV Co-Production for BBC Television. Director and cameraman, John Walker. Editors, Steve Stevenson, Kevin Ahern. Research, Liana Pornerantsev (USSR), Rebecca Penrose, Soviet Coordination in the Kuban, Pavel Tsavalanov, Boris Vergun, Sergei Grigoriev. Series producer, Tom Roberts. Series consultant, Michael Ignatieff. “With special thanks to Memorial-USSR; Dasha Chudoba, Ethnographic Museum Krasnodar.”

6. Harvest of Despair. (1984) Produced by the Ukraine Famine Research Committee, Toronto Canada. Directed by Slavko Nowytsky, Writer/Story consultant, Peter Blow. Filmmakers researching this episode of 20th Century history may find useful the list of institutional sources of still and film materials on which the editors of this film have drawn: Thorn EMI Elstree Studios, London; Cinémathèque Gaumont, Paris; Visnews Ltd., London; National Archives and Records Service, Washington; Library of Congress Motion Picture Archives, Washington; Sherman Grinberg Film Libraries, New York; The New York Times, New York; Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Toronto; Lypinsky East European Research Institute, Philadelphia; Ukrainian Orthodox Museum, South Bound Brook; Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre, Winnipeg; Foundation to Commemorate the 1933 Famine, Montreal.

7. The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Monty and Rita Rutkovskis, who drew his attention to the Latvian materials discussed above.

Berlin, Isaiah 1976 Vico and Herder. London: Hogarth Press.

Bullock, Alan 1991 Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. London: HarperCollins Publishers.

Conquest, Robert 1976 The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. London: Hutchinson.

Gerutis, Albertas (ed.) 1969 Lithuania: 700 Years. Baltimore, Md.: Maryland (Recovery Communication, Inc.)

Kopeley Lev 1981 The Education of a True Believer. Aldershot: Wildwood House.

Krasnov, Vladislav Russia beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth. New Brunswick, N.J. Transaction Publications.

Lanzmann, Claude Shoah, an Oral History of the Holocaust. The complete text of the film. New York: Pantheon Books.

Lieven, Anatol The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Pipes, Richard 1990 The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919. London: Collins-Harvill.

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. 1974-1978 The Gulag Archipelago. (3 vols.) London: Collins-Harvill. Thornson, Clare

1992 The Singing Revolution: A Political Journey through the Baltic States. London: Michael Joseph.