Tag Archives: film

Daoist ritual in north Taiwan: an ethnography

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Chu Chien-ch'eng
Taipei: Daoist priests working for the Hsien-miao altar 顯妙壇,
led by master Chu K’un-ts’an 朱堃燦, “open the eyes” of a god statue damaged in a temple fire.
All images courtesy of Yves Menheere. [1]

Pursuing a major theme that I broached in my superficial survey of music-ritual cultures in Taiwan, I learn much from

  • Yves Menheere, The Way and its powers: an ethnographic account of Taoist practice and religious authority in northern Taiwan (2020),

a lucid study which helps further my education on a topic that I previously found somewhat indigestible.

Menheere cover

The Introduction sets the tone for Menheere’s enquiry:

Why do people put their faith in religious specialists? Why are some people considered to be more adept at communicating with deities, explaining scriptures, blessing objects, or solving problems with ghosts and other malevolent forces?

Contrasting rituals that are “supposed to work” with those that are meant to be carried out “in the correct way”, Menheere finds that “neither efficacy nor proper performance can explain why people put more faith in one particular priest and not another”. In exploring authority and charisma he considers the work of Max Weber, Stephan Feuchtwang and Wang Mingming, Vincent Goossaert, and Pierre Bourdieu. 

His useful summary of previous research starts with J.J.M. De Groot in late-19th-century Xiamen (in mainland Fujian); and for Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945), studies by Japanese scholars and colonial administrators, notably a 1919 report under the supervision of Marui Keijirō. After World War Two, the pioneering work of Kristofer Schipper (on south Taiwan) and Michael Saso (for Hsinchu in the north) was continued by John Lagerwey for both north and south. Taiwanese scholars have also been industrious, from Liu Chi-wan and Lee Fong-mao to Lü Ch’ui-k’uan, followed by Lin Chen-yuan and others. As Menheere notes, the main focus of such studies has been the description of rituals and the search for the origins of particular practices and traditions; however, scholars adopting more anthropological approaches include Stephan Feuchtwang, David Jordan, John McCreery, Robert Weller, and Chang Hsun.

ji waifang
Offering and Sending Away (che-sang 祭送) ritual segment.
Left: 1930s (from Kajiwara Michiyoshi 梶原通好, Taiwan nōmin seikatsu kō
台灣農民生活考, 1939).
Right: Lim Ch’ing-chih 林清智 (b.1952), 2015. 

For ritual studies, I’ve outlined how by the early 1980s, as the PRC opened up after three decades of Maoist repression, the scope of fieldwork at last expanded to mainland China—fanning out from south Fujian (ancestral home of the Taiwanese Daoist altars) in a succession of major projects, mostly led by scholars with experience of the religious scene in Taiwan. So whereas previously the island was almost the only accessible site where scholars could study the riches of Daoist ritual, a wealth of local traditions now beckoned all over the vast expanses of the PRC, “if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective”, as I wrote (cf. The resilience of tradition).

However, it’s always worth paying attention to the ritual life of Taiwan, subject to fewer disruptions than in the PRC—with research now enriched by access to traditions shared with the southeastern mainland. And since scholarship on both sides of the strait, though based on fieldwork, has stressed the early origins of rituals rather than social ethnography (cf. Debunking “living fossils”—combining these approaches for Fujian, though, is Ken Dean), Menheere offers a fresh perspective.

* * *

The distinction between Redhead (ang-thau 紅頭) and Blackhead (o-͘thau 烏頭) ritual specialists is particular to Taiwan and Fujian; while much discussed, it remains complex. In north Taiwan, Blackhead priests specialise in performing mortuary rituals, and are either Sek-kau 釋教 Buddhists, or Daoists sometimes described by the name Numinous Treasure (Leng-po / Lingbao 靈寶). Redhead Daoists—Menheere’s focus, whom he describes as “the Northern Priests”—refrain from performing funerals. While belonging to the Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一 branch (like Daoists further south in Taiwan), they

carried out rites in ways that were broadly similar, and they were able to work together in ritual performances, which frequently occurred. Their way of working set them apart from priests from central or southern Taiwan, who performed rituals in different ways and were generally unable to work in concert with priests from northern Taiwan. These priests agreed that they belong to the same phai 派 or “branch” of Taoism and that priests from central and southern Taiwan belonged to a different branch. [2]

As Menheere observes, authority is relational: “it depends on the position of the individual priest in a wider network of priests, and it is always socially constructed and cannot be reduced to a particular priest’s personality or individual qualities”.

Between the Introduction and Conclusion, the book is arranged in six unnumbered chapters, to which I will award numbers here.

Chapter 1 (“Gods, ghosts and ancestors”) opens with a description of an exorcistic ritual intended to deter malignant forces of the road (lo-͘soah 路煞) from causing traffic accidents and other misfortunes besetting the community. Menheere goes on to give an overview of the religious environment in which the Northern Priests operate. Apart from large-scale temple ceremonies like the Chio / Jiao 醮 Offering, brief “minor rites” (sio-hoat 小法, or “little things” sio-su-a 小事) are also a regular part of the priests’ duties, often requiring only a single officiant. (I was glad to learn that priests in Taiwan describe the performance of ceremonies as “doing things” (cho-su 做事), cf. banshi 办事 in north China).

Always favouring practical grassroots perspectives above historical theory, Menheere unpacks the meaning of Cheng-it (Zhengyi)—”a term used by priests who shared their particular way of working, which presumed knowledge of two particular sets of rites; and did not perform funerary rites”.

By contrast with Schipper’s account for south Taiwan (e.g. his influential 1985 article), where “classical” and “vernacular” rites are carried out by different specialists, the Northern Priests practise a hybrid tradition, with two categories of rites, the “Way” (Tō / Dao 道) and “Methods” (Hoat / Fa 法): “two separate systems of rites, different in their performance, but referred to by the priests as complementary and sometimes even overlapping”. So Menheere ponders Schipper’s classical / vernacular dichotomy in the northern context, under the headings of language, pantheon, transmission, and the “mental states” of meditation and trance. Again working from the practical standpoint of the priests themselves, he confounds any simple distinction between the two types. Valuably, he notes contingency and modern change:

When we consider the meaning of Tō and Hoat and their associated ritual traditions, we must account for how the terms take shape in local practice and acquire different meanings, rather than ascribe them meaning devoid of social and historical context.

Still, “whether a rite was Tō or Hoat did not, for the priests at least, depend on its historical origins, but on the type of ceremony with which it was associated and on the way it was performed”. Noting that priests freely made use of the two categories during both exorcisms and offerings, Menheere illustrates this with Tō and Hoat versions of the “Worshipping the Lord of Heaven” ritual segment (pai Thin-kong 拜天公).

Chapter 2, a history of the Northern Priests from the Qing dynasty through the Japanese era to modern times, is full of detail on modern developments in their practice, showing that it is not immune to change. For the period since the 1980s, Menheere notes a shift away from healing rituals towards large-scale Offerings—which was attributed to perceived modernisation, notably in medical care. Thus “knowledge of the Tō rites for multiple-day Chio […] was slowly acquired by priests who initially performed mostly Hoat rites”. Moreover,

The expanding ritual market of the 1980s enabled several altars that at the time had only recently been established to rise to prominence. Indeed, some of the most successful and notable altars I observed doing fieldwork only began conducting offerings on a regular basis in the 1980s.

He also suggests a rather recent shift in the way the priests referred to themselves, with the autonym Cheng-it becoming more common.

Chapter 3, “Work and training”, looks at how ceremonies are performed and how the required knowledge to do so is transmitted. Menheere provides a good discussion of the role of “altars” (toan / tan 壇, an important term in south China that is seldom applied to household Daoists in the north), the physical and conceptual locus of a Daoist family tradition; and he gives a useful account of hierarchy and roles within the ritual group. As to personnel,

composition of groups varied from altar to altar and depended on the position of the priest in the field. Priests with more successful altars usually limited hires to their apprentices and a small group of priests that worked almost exclusively for them. Priests with fewer apprentices or fewer opportunities to organise ceremonies, however, had to look outside their immediate ties.

Menheere notes that “family was the principal source of knowledge for a small majority of the priests I observed”, but “recognising a master” from an unrelated family was also rather common. As to training in practice, he again finds variety, followed by a section on how priests assess competency:

A priest’s skills were described with the word kang-hu [gongfu] 功夫, and priests who lacked the physical attributes of the ideal priests—priests that were too short, for instance—could compensate for such perceived shortcomings with their kang-hu.

He continues with a most salient reminder:

It is perhaps worth noting that being familiar with the intricacies of Taoist doctrine as found in its classical texts did not play a role in the training of the priests or judgment of their competency.

The following two sections discuss the major ceremonies associated with the two ritual traditions. Chapter 4 explores the links between authority and the correct performance of rituals through a discussion of changes in the programme of the Chio Offering over the past century (with rich material in Appendix A listing sequences for ten such rituals).

After introducing the old “orthopraxy” trope and considering factors inhibiting change, Menheere argues “that despite the importance attached to correct performance, priests did occasionally—at least to a certain degree—have the ability to change the contents of rites and ceremonies and that such changes would not necessarily affect a priest’s authority”.

While the structure of three-day Chio seems quite constant over the century for which we have evidence, five-day Chio (an expanded version of the three-day programme) have also become increasingly common. The main addition here was the fast chanting of various [nationally standard] jing 經 scriptures—which household Daoists in north China have tended to omit in modern times, even though they comprise a major part of their ritual manuals (e.g. Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.211–13, 375–8).

Menheere continues with a detailed account of versions of the recently-elaborated ritual segment Ascending the Platform (teng-tai pai-pio 登台拜表) as interpreted by three different priests (cf. my account of Li Qing’s Pardon ritual):

All priests who performed the versions of the rite had access to Zhang Enpu’s text, yet none chose to follow his text to the letter. Even Master Tiong, who adhered to it most strictly, chose to add elements, attempting to, as he indicated in our discussions, make the rite more “correct”. It is possible that the priests in the other two cases chose to perform a much shorter rite because it was more convenient, not only for themselves, but also for all lay participants, who had to stand and watch the rite throughout.

He concludes the chapter thus:

The example of “Ascending the Platform” demonstrates that priests did have flexibility in revising rites in ways that did not transform them altogether. They were the experts, and as long as the performance of particular rites fulfilled expectations, the patrons neither grasped minor changes nor challenged a priest’s authority.

exorcismScene from the Great Improvement of Luck ritual:
the patron blows out a flame to send away the im 陰 fire.

Chapter 5 focuses on the links between authority and efficacy in the exorcistic Toa-po-͘un 大補運 Great Improvement of Luck, the major healing ceremony of the Northern Priests, when the patron often suffers from a serious medical condition. While careful not to add further layers of anthropological abstraction to the complexities of the ritual system itself, Menheere again begins with theoretical perspectives; [3] then, setting forth from the research of Hsu Li-ling, he moves on to elements in the adaptable programme for the Great Improvement of Luck ritual, and five vivid case studies from his own fieldwork (note the lists of ritual segments in Appendix C).

If patrons were not familiar with the logic of the Toa-po-͘un, they were generally free to interpret the ceremonies in ways not directly derived from the meanings enacted in the rites. For patrons, the “effective meaning” was found, not so much in the symbolism of the rite, but in the fact that a priest, possessing a body of specialised knowledge to which they had no access, was involved and employed his knowledge to interact with and implore deities to intercede. Such an attitude, combined with the spectacle of the ceremony and the impressions it left on the spectators, predisposed observers to connect the performance to any event during or after the ritual proceedings.

Menheere ends the chapter by considering efficacy (ling 靈)—the core of Chinese popular religion, according to Valerie Hansen and Adam Yuet Chau:

Patrons did not hire priests to conduct Toa-po-͘un because they knew the rituals would work. They hired priests because they believed in the potential of the ritual and that it was the right course of action. These beliefs were bolstered by, not so much prior successes in Toa-po-un performances, but by a priest’s connections with institutions and trusted individuals.

He argues that

efficacy was the product of authority, rather than the other way around. A priest did not become a great priest because he cured his patients, he came in the position to cure his patients—or not—because he had become a great priest.

Lin Changtong groupThe Wei Yuan Altar 威遠壇 in suburban Taipei,
with Lin Ch’ang-tung 林昌桐 (1947–2019) presiding.

In Chapter 6 Menheere further ponders the way the organisation of ceremonies is distributed and how this relates to the idea of a field of priests. Recurring occasions include

ceremonies organised in honour of a deity’s anniversary; Worshipping the Dipper ceremonies, which many temples organised once or twice a year; ceremonies conducted for the construction of a new temple, the restoration of an old one, or the consecration of a new statue; and ceremonies held to feed the hungry ghosts during the seventh lunar month. Priests also commonly performed exorcisms […] as well as temple ceremonies held for the benefit of the ancestors of the faithful. On some of these occasions, temples could also choose to organise a Chio, but this was less common.

While he notes some exceptions,

more common, recurring ceremonies were typically conducted by the same priest; that is, the priest responsible for a ceremony on one occasion returned to perform the ritual again.[…] In some cases, relationships between temples and altars spanned multiple generations.

He finds that “patrons unconnected to either a priest or a temple resorted to other ways to find a priest”, mainly through local or personal networks.

Priests occasionally recounted how territorial claims were violently enforced in the past, but during my fieldwork, I was not aware of any violent incidents. Still, priests could be visibly displeased when they felt other priests were infringing on their perceived territory and would try to use their own local connections to displace the infringing priests if they felt that this was indeed happening.

Menheere details various procedures in organising the Chio Offering—“the most elaborate and important ceremonies in the Northern Priests’ repertoire”, which (nonetheless) few of them had a chance to organise during their career. There was considerable competition between priests for the task of presiding over this ritual. Temples might appoint a chief priest directly, solicit bids, or appoint through divination.

Knowledge of particular forms of ritual was a prerequisite to conduct ceremonies, but knowledge in itself did not guarantee success. The most knowledgeable priests were not necessarily those conducting the most ceremonies.

Still, “priests who inherited a successful altar had the best chances at claiming a dominant position in the field”. He ends the chapter thoughtfully by suggesting further factors that may need including:

It would probably be easier to develop new contacts and lead a flourishing altar in areas where fewer priests operated than in an area with many active priests. We must also consider historical conditions and change. The situation was quite different in the 1980s, when the market for religious services, including the ceremonies of the priests, was quickly expanding and a priest’s method of entering the field may have been less important.

In his Conclusion, Menheere reminds us that

terms like Tō, Hoat, Chio, and Cheng-it (and their Mandarin equivalents) have specific meanings that are locally and historically embedded, can change over time, and should not be taken for granted. […] Ritual practices can change, even if they are part of a tradition that highly values correct practices and sees immutability as a defining feature of what actually constitutes correct practice. While such changes can be triggered by external factors, specialists themselves do play an important role in shaping changes.

* * *

Time for my inevitable spiel: after silent, immobile text, nothing can compare to experiencing the “heat and bustle” (cf. Chau, Religion in China, pp.67–8) of Daoist ritual for real—here, for instance, is a “Great Improvement of Luck” ritual in 2022, just one of many online videos uploaded by the Wei Yuan Altar:

And to sample the more “classical” Tō tradition, click here for a 1977 introduction to a temple inauguration, filmed by Patrice Fava (another scholar whose grounding in Taiwanese ritual bore fruit on the mainland)—see his Un taoïste n’a pas d’ombre: mémoires d’un ethnologue en Chine (2023), pp.30–31, 53.

* * *

While I’m in awe of their erudition, some scholars of Daoist ritual seem so committed to the Wisdom of the Ancient Sages that their accounts may seem more prescriptive than descriptive, almost evangelical; in both Chinese and English, they can speak only to a highly limited audience. Instead Menheere, with his clear style, refrains from unduly mystifying either the priests or their rituals.

The Way and its powers is valuable for incorporating ethnography, modern change, and ritual theory—all largely absent from the field as it took shape—into the established concerns of scholarship on Daoist ritual, which (first for Taiwan, later for the PRC) has come to be dominated by the salvage of medieval ritual structures and texts. The study of ritual traditions in mainland China might look quite different if the ethnographic approach had found more of a voice in Taiwan.

SJ, Easter 2024.

[1] Sadly, Menheere’s original PhD thesis (2017) contains a mere three images (the published version has none!), so I’m grateful to him for helping me illustrate this post with some of his splendid fieldwork photos. Images by Patrice Fava are found in John Lagerwey’s attractively-illustrated book Le continent des esprits (1991); though the captions don’t give locations, I’m told that they show rituals and priests from both north and south Taiwan.

For transliterations of terms and names I have followed Menheere’s practice, based (for Taiwanese) on the “Church” romanization and (for Mandarin) on Wade-Giles, with some pinyin equivalents added for terms with wider significance (such as Cheng-it / Zhengyi 正一).

[2] Menheere comments further: “Taoist Blackhead priests were active in different areas in northern Taiwan, but only in locations such as Hsinchu and Tamsui would they regularly carry out other ceremonies in addition to funerals. In both areas, however, they had to compete with the Northern Priests”. Michael Saso gave an early taxonomy of the ritual life of Hsinchu in “The Taoist tradition in Taiwan” (1970).

Similar distinctions are commonly found in mainland south China, e.g. in Hunan; in the north I don’t recall hearing of household Daoists who refrain from performing funerals—if there are any areas where they do so (also for regions such as south Jiangsu), then I’m keen to learn. In north Shanxi the Li family Daoists used to perform rituals for both the living and the dead, but mortuary rituals now comprise the great majority of their business (see Ritual change in north Shanxi, and my film). Note also my major rethink of the Zhengyi–Quanzhen dichotomy.

[3] Here, besides the sources that he cites, it’s worth consulting Catherine Bell’s surveys of the field of ritual studies.

Barbie

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Barbie

I’m always late to the party, but thanks to the splendid Turkish Airlines, after the spellbinding safety video I accompanied the delicious in-flight meal by watching

  • Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023).

With a cast led by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, it’s both hilarious and sobering. Foremost among the excellent articulations of the current human predicament is America Ferrara’s monologue:

The patriarchy, and mansplaining, are gleefully exposed. But how subversive is it? How feminist? Besides a thorough article on wiki (including sections on “Critical response”, “Feminism”, Masculinity”), and this further survey of reviews, Vogue observes:

While some are praising the film for its tongue-in-cheek approach to girlhood, womanhood and, erm, dollhood, many others have described it as white feminism wrapped up in a pink, Mattel-labelled bow. I’m here to argue that those two things can be true at the same time.

Guarded approval also here; some social-historical background, and reservations in global context. Among a wealth of discussions, feminists such as Natasha Walter are less than convinced (see also here, here, here), and the taint of “shameless product placement” lingers. I’d love to hear the insights of Janet Radcliffe Richards on the film.

Here’s the final song What was I made for? by Billie Eilish:

While the recent portrayal of women in movies is still not such a success story, it must be good that Barbie‘s huge success has spurred such a wealth of discussion. Cf. Green book, “an excessively smooth ride through bumpy subject matter” in the field of racism.

See also this roundup of posts on gender—rural and urban China, modern European history, language, music, humour, film, sport….

Drunken angel

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Drunken Angel pic 3

I’m most impressed by the early Japanese noir movie

It was the first of sixteen film collaborations between the director (1910–98) and Toshiro Mifune (1920–97)—after they parted ways, neither was quite the same again. The film finally opens my eyes to Mifune’s genius—much as I love Seven samurai (1954), for me the hero is the Zen swordsman Kyūzō; I find Mifune’s buffoon persona something of a parody.

Here’s Drunken Angel:

Made while Japan was still occupied by the Americans, the film had to comply with US government censorship rules, which forbade scenes critical of the occupation. As Ian Buruma notes in a fine review, the set

consisted of a filthy sump surrounded by ruined buildings, shabby wooden houses, and the facade of a sleazy nightclub. It was a setting that could have been found almost anywhere in Tokyo in 1948, or any other bombed-out Japanese city where postwar life revolved around the teeming black markets. One of the wonders of the early postwar Japanese cinema was the public appetite for realism, and the pestilential sump, filled with toxic garbage, stood as a symbol for all that was rotten about life in the wake of a catastrophic wartime defeat. The cheap hookers lurking in the shadows, the young thugs fighting over territory, loot, and “face”. To have “face” in a particular district meant that you had the run of the place, taking what you needed for nothing and making huge profits off the backs of Japanese citizens who struggled to survive. Many of these petty (and not so petty) gangsters had been soldiers in a holy war to expand the glory of the Japanese Empire. Kamikaze pilots whose sacred suicide missions were aborted when surrender intervened became criminals exploiting the people for whose honour they had just months before sworn to sacrifice their lives. But some, in a perverse way, transformed their military code of honor into a gangland code that was just as deadly.

Drunken Angel pic

Small-time yakuza playboy Matsunaga (Mifune) develops a complex, fractious relationship with the brusque alcoholic doctor Sanada (Takashi Shimura—as Brian Eggert notes, “the first of several Kurosawa pictures where he would play spiritual guide to Mifune’s apprentice”).

The English subtitles are impressive. Sanada shows feminist credentials, protecting his nurse, a former girlfriend of sinister yakuza boss Okada:

You’ve got it all wrong, mister. Times have changed since you went in the cooler. Your feudalistic ways don’t fly now. Want me to spell it out for you? It doesn’t matter what you call her. She’s got to want you. Ever heard of equality?

In the opening scene a lonesome drifter plays a blues before the pestilential cesspool; later his guitar is snatched by Okada, just out of prison (his more genteel number less suitable than Kurosawa’s first choice Mack the knife—the rights to which were too costly). In the nightclub dance scene (53.30), the garish Jungle boogie is an homage to Gilda—for the music, see Michael Harris, ”Jazzing in the Tokyo slum: music, influence, and censorship in Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel”, Cinema Journal 53.1 (2013).

Rob Kotecki makes a relevant analogy with Scorsese:

By starting with Shimura’s point of view, we see the gangsters’ moral rot in the context of the entire neighbourhood. Scorsese achieves his critiques of the gangster mentality from intimacy, living within that world exclusively, so we understand the appeal and eventually its hypocrisy, and with The Irishman, its banality as well. Kurosawa achieves the same, but with the distance from it that Shimura’s point of view provides.

My roundup of posts on Japanese culture includes the brilliant genre-bending movie Tampopo.

Maestro: Bernstein and Mahler

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Maestro

Infatuated as I am with Mahler (series here), my posts on his symphonies inevitably include performances by Leonard Bernstein (see under The art of conducting). So I just had to watch Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023: in cinemas and on Netflix).

Movies about musicians are notoriously prone to faux pas (for some TV clichés, see e.g. Philharmonia, and Endeavour). Bernstein’s passion as a communicator brought an unprecedented popularity to WAM that it could never again achieve; Maestro is admirable for bringing him (if not his musical genius) to a wide modern audience.

Norman Lebrecht shrewdly observes Bernstein’s place in the roster of Great Conductors (The maestro myth pp.180–87, 192–5, and, confounding the myth that he rescued Mahler’s music from obscurity in Vienna, 198–205). Heart on sleeve, OTT, Lenny was an archetype for his era—by contrast with the austere Maestros of Yore, or indeed the benign, banal middle-managers and Early Music semi-conductors of later years.

As to Maestro, Alex Ross comments in the New Yorker:

Because Bernstein’s career unfolds in the background of his marriage, the film is relieved of the dreary trudge of the conventional bio-pic, which checks off famous moments, positions them against historical landmarks (the Cold War, the Beatles, the Kennedy assassinations). […]
By and large, Maestro benefits from what it leaves out. Some viewers have complained that such major achievements as On the Town, West Side Story, and the Young People’s Concerts are mentioned only in passing. But Bernstein’s life was so stuffed with incident that nodding to each one would have drained the movie of momentum. One omission, though, left me perplexed: the studious avoidance of Bernstein’s radical-tending politics.

The roles of Lenny (Bradley Cooper himself) and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan) are brilliantly played, with all the tortuous public/private psychologies of their relationship. But indeed, the film omits their considerable social activism through a period of change; Cooper had intended to include the notorious “radical chic” 1970 party, but (as he explains in this podcast) he found it would have detracted from his main theme. So the screenplay invariably chooses the personal over the political. And I agree with other reviews that lament the wider avoidance of social history (e.g. another New Yorker article; myscena.org; The critic)—a tasteful script wouldn’t have to make such scenes into a “dreary trudge” at all.

* * *

Moreover, as a Guardian review comments,

What there is very little of is music. We barely see him conduct, we hear only snatches of his own compositions, and there are frustratingly few glimpses of his passion for communicating—through performance and education—the wonders and riches of classical music.

Mahler 1907

Bernstein’s own music does play a considerable role, without quite engaging us. But the most regrettable casualty is Mahler. Despite a scene that I’ll discuss below, the movie never broaches Lenny’s deep passion for his fellow conductor-composer—he must have seen himself as a reincarnation. In Lebrecht’s words (The maestro myth, p.185; cf. Why Mahler?, pp.239–41 and passim), Mahler was

a visionary who fought against humanity’s rush to self-destruction. “Ours is a century of death and Mahler is its musical prophet” [see e.g. my fanciful programme for the 10th symphony], he proclaimed, seeking to find himself a similar role.

Apart from the moving evidence of his performances, Lenny missed no opportunity to promote Mahler’s vision, and irrespective of the movie, it’s well worth returning to his extraordinary lectures on the topic. * Without hijacking the film’s main theme, one longs for a mention of Mahler’s name, or an image—although I quite see the risks of composing a line like “Oh Felicia, what would I do without you and Mahler?”!

Lenny and Mahler

Lenny ElyWe get to hear some of the Adagietto, though it’s such a staple of movie soundtracks that for many viewers it may sound merely like generic film music rather than the work of Lenny’s alter ego. Then the long scene of the monumental ending of the 2nd symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973 is the perfect choice, and it should be overwhelming. But if the uninitiated don’t know what it represents (for Lenny and, well, for Western civilisation!), then again one might just think it’s some random piece of dramatic romantic music; or if you love Mahler as deeply as Lenny did, then you’ll be shocked at how the lack of context largely deprives it of impact—the scene’s main point seems to be his reunion with Felicia in a make-up kiss as he comes off stage.

Cooper, having learned assiduously to impersonate Lenny’s conducting for the Ely Cathedral scene under the guidance of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, looks admirably impressive on the podium—but it’s also a salient lesson in how impossible it is to mimic the art of an experienced conductor. The Guardian review cited above has details of how the scene was filmed, with comments from members of the LSO:

Every detail of the 1973 performance was painstakingly reproduced, from where each player sat (“more squashed than we generally are today!”), to the mocked-up programmes, even though these were never in shot.

Players who wore glasses were asked to provide prescriptions so they could be given new ones in old-style frames—and they were all asked to let their hair grow. “Most of the guys had been asked to grow beards,” says Duckworth, “and those with very short hair had been asked not to cut it.”

And (WTAF) despite going to such lengths to achieve historical authenticity, the film used the players of today’s LSO, 45% of whom are women—whereas the 1973 LSO had only two women (the harpists) among 102 players. Is this, finally, PC gone mad?!

Despite these cavils, I admire the way Bradley Cooper has brought Bernstein’s personality to a wider audience. Perhaps it’s too much to hope that Maestro might also turn on a new generation to Mahler.

* After his 1960 talk at the televised Young People’s Concerts (wiki; complete list on YouTube here—weekly audiences for his broadcasts estimated at ten million!), more illuminating is “The unanswered question” in his 1973 lectures at Harvard:

Late in “The 20th century crisis”, from 1.37.58:

And a 1985 essay:

DO go back to Humphrey Burton’s wonderful films of Bernstein’s performances of the symphonies… Burton also filmed him rehearsing—and commenting on—the 5th, the 9th (“Four ways to say Farewell”), and Das Lied von Der Erde with the Vienna Phil (1971–72):

Music–ritual cultures of Taiwan

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Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do

—Christopher Small, Musicking

Through the Maoist decades after the 1949 Communist takeover, while the society of mainland China was constantly beset by a succession of iconoclastic traumas, the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan was considered a bastion for the maintenance of traditional Chinese culture.

What I suspect hasn’t always been clarified is that Taiwan cannot embody that culture as a whole: naturally, its heritage largely reflects the traditions of the particular regions from which they were descended on the southeastern mainland—and it was that, until the 1980s, which was the only peep-hole through which we could view the enormity of Chinese culture. *

But then, as “reform and opening” swept the PRC, ritual and other folk performance activity—that outsiders could only assume to have been extinguished there after the Communist takeover of 1949—began reviving on a vast scale, along with an array of central and regional scholars keen to resume fieldwork and research. And at the forefront of discoveries was the region of south Fujian, just across the strait from Taiwan (see e.g. C.K. Wang, Kristofer Schipper, Ken Dean, John Lagerwey). As fieldwork expanded to other parts of the southeast (see Daoist ritual in south China), it soon became clear that there was a vast repository of local traditions of ritual and expressive culture to document all over China (see The resilience of tradition)—if not eclipsing the reputation of Taiwan’s heritage, then at least putting it into perspective. The research of Taiwanese scholars was now able to inspire fieldwork on the mainland.

Still, the main genres of Taiwan have rather little bearing on the kind of ritual traditions that were coming to light in the north Chinese countryside, or even in east-central China; indeed, they only represent a small selection from the diverse range of genres around Fujian, as becomes clear by consulting the volumes of the monumental Anthology (for now, see here, with a further post to follow).

I also think of the transformation of Tibetan studies. After 1950, exile communities (led by TIPA in Dharamsala—see e.g. Zlos-gar, 1986) had been considered as the sole heirs to the culture of Tibet; but by the 1990s scholars began shifting towards the mature ethnographic assessment of its vicissitudes under the Chinese yoke (under Recent posts on Tibet, see e.g. Labrang 1). In her wise article “Easier in exile?, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy ponders the different challenges of doing fieldwork among Tibetans in Lhasa and Dharamsala (see The enchanting world of Tibetan opera).

* * *

Taiwan
Besides the small minority of aboriginal groups (c2%), the main populations of Taiwan are Hoklo (Holo, c70%), Hokkien speakers originating from the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou regions of south Fujian; and Hakka (c15%), descended from the mainland regions of east Guangdong and west Fujian (click here and here for the expressive cultures of both groups). Refugees from elsewhere in China fleeing to Taiwan in the 1940s also brought some staged vocal genres with them.

With Taiwanese society subject to far fewer traumatic social upheavals than on the mainland, cultural forms were certainly better maintained there. But as in any modern society, there are no “living fossils”: besides the island’s complex colonial legacy, performers and patrons have to negotiate the incursions of modernity and popular media (see Society and soundscape, notably the work of Bruno Nettl).

Since the clampdown in the PRC under Xi Jinping, perspectives regarding the mainland and Taiwan are modifying (see The Queen Mother of the West); having myself been busy studying the maintenance of local ritual cultures in the PRC, it’s high time for me to re-assess my approach. So as sometimes happens on this blog (e.g. Precious scrolls, and even A jazz medley), this basic overview of music–ritual traditions is as much for my benefit as yours…

Surveys
In English, starting points include articles in The New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians, The Garland encyclopedia of world music (Wang Ying-fen pp.423–9, Hsu Tsang-houei pp.523–9), Wang Ying-fen in The Rough Guide to world music, Europe, Asia & Pacific (3rd edition, 2009), and even wiki.

At the forefront of studies of traditional music in Taiwan was Hsu Tsang-houei 許常惠 (1929–2001), who gravitated from WAM-style composition to fieldwork on folk traditions. ** Among his surveys are Taiwan yinyue shi chugao 台灣音樂史初稿 (1991, I think) and (with Cheng Shui-cheng) Musique de Taiwan (1992). See also Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬, Taiwan chuantong yinyue gailun 台灣傳統音樂概論 (2005, 2007), in two volumes on vocal and instrumental music.

Genres
Among the most popular topics are nanguan and Daoist ritual—both, since the 1980s, informed by fieldwork on either side of the strait. Amateur nanguan 南管 music societies, performing exquisite chamber ballads for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, have long been deeply embedded in community life (see this post). Nanguan is the subject of much research, both in Fujian and Taiwan. Wang Ying-fen has published extensively on the Taiwan scene in both Chinese and English—I particularly admire her articles on the risks inherent in state promotion of nanguan (such as this), worthy contributions to studies of the thorny issue of heritage.

Temple fairs, with vibrant processions, remain a major part of life in Taiwan. Regional traditions of Daoist ritual (for the north, click here) are the focus of generations of Taiwanese and foreign scholars. For the former, alongside many distinguished scholars, Lü Ch’ui-k’uan 呂錘寬 has paid notable attention to ritual soundscape (e.g. Daojiao yishi yu yinyue 道教儀式與音樂, 1994). Another major theme in ritual studies is the worship of the female deity Mazu, widespread both in Taiwan and around the southeastern coast of the mainland.

The composite genre of beiguan 北管 (good wiki page here, with links) is again performed mainly for calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies, largely by occupational groups; while closely related to vocal drama, it’s best known for its loud outdoor shawm-and-percussion bands. Here’s a short documentary about the master Qiu Huorong 邱火榮 (b.1937):

Most flexible of popular operatic forms is gua-a-hi (gezai xi 歌仔戲). And more popular in Taiwan than shadow puppets and marionettes, glove-puppetry (budai xi 布袋戲) has adapted to changing times; the former tradition was transmitted by masters such as Li Tianlu 李天祿 (1910–98), whose early life is evoked in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1993 film The puppetmaster.

Narrative-singing is best known through Chen Da 陳達 (1905–81) on the Hengchun peninsula. He was “discovered” in 1967 by Hsu Tsang-houei and Shih Wei-liang 史惟亮 as part of their fieldwork for the Folk-song Collection movement, forerunner of several state-sponsored organs in Taiwan. Here’s Shih Wei-liang’s recording from 1971:

In the north of the island, the blind female singer Yang Xiuqing 楊秀卿 (b.1934) is also renowned.

(As in the PRC, please excuse me if I fall into the old Songlines trap of giving undue attention to “star performers”—whereas in-depth ethnography soon uncovers the myriad unsung bearers of tradition, such as Vincent Goossaert’s “ordinary Daoists”, or rank-and-file members of festive groups.)

Like beiguan, the Hakka bayin 八音 ensemble is dominated by shawms and percussion. Here’s the CD Taiwan: mountain songs and bayin instrumental music (Inedit, 2006; as playlist):

As in mainland China, the vocal polyphony of minority peoples (notably Amis, Bunun, Tsou, Paiwan, Rukai—around 2% of Taiwan’s population) has attracted much attention, with many recordings issued of aboriginal singing, such as Polyphonies vocales des Aborigènes de Taiwan (Inedit, 1989):

and Taiwan: music of the Aboriginal tribes (Jecklin, 1991) (playlist):

As in mainland China, while such traditions struggle to remain relevant in a modernising society, national cultural bodies have adopted particular genres as symbols of identity. Expressive culture has made a major component in the rapprochement between the PRC and overseas Chinese communities. Wind Records in Taipei issued a succession of CDs of mainland genres in conjunction with the Music Research Institute in Beijing, notably an important series of archive recordings (folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, and instrumental music, as well as minority polyphony), and of the qin zither. The journal Minsu quyi, with its detailed studies (mostly in Chinese) on ritual, theatre, and folklore, also expanded its scope from Taiwan to the mainland.

* * *

Growing political tensions encourage us to pay renewed attention to Taiwan, and to support beleaguered democracy. While it’s fruitful to study the genres introduced above on both sides of the strait, the island remains a conducive environment for both performance and research. Now I’m keen to see someone with fieldwork experience in both societies, such as C.K. Wang, Wang Ying-fen, Ken Dean, or Adam Yuet Chau, expounding the different trajectories of the diverse traditions there, and the challenges that they face.

* Now, none of these comparisons quite work, but…
While it’d be far too parochial to imagine the Isle of Wight as a refuge from a radical government in mainland UK, perhaps we might visualise Cuba becoming a liberal sanctuary from a Gilead-style fundamentalist north America (see The handmaid’s tale)—or even Sicily as the sole isolated outpost for tradition while mainland Europe languishes in the grip of authoritarian regimes.

In chapter 10 of In search of the folk Daoists of north China I made a similarly rash comparison, seeking to incorporate north China into our overview of Daoist ritual (cf. this post, again):

It is rather as if our knowledge of Christianity in the whole of Europe were based almost entirely on Sicily and Puglia, with the odd footnote on the Vatican and Westminster Abbey. We may like what we find in those places, perhaps considering it more exalted, mystical, and ancient—but that is another issue.

Without at all playing into the greasy hands of PRC propaganda, one might consider Taiwan (culturally, not politically, since it is clearly an independent nation! Cf. China has always been part of…) as just one among over thirty provinces of China, all of whose forms of expressive culture are dominated by long-established local folk traditions while also featuring some “national” genres and styles from other regions.

** If Yang Yinliu wasn’t the Chinese Bartók, then Hsu Tsang-houei wasn’t the Taiwanese Yang Yinliu (whereas Bill Evans was the Bill Evans of jazz).

Restless

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My penchant for the spy novels of John le Carré, the crime fiction of Philip Kerr, and so on has been enhanced since I learned of the real and tragic story of Noor Inayat Khan, as well as the SOE and Ravensbrück.

Restless cover

A gripping fictional portrayal of espionage in World War Two Is

Here’s the opening:

When I was a child and was being fractious and contrary and generally behaving badly, my mother used to rebuke me by saying “One day someone will come and kill me and then you’ll be sorry”, or, “They’ll appear out of the blue and whisk me away—how would you like that?”, or, “You’ll wake up one morning and I’ll be gone. Disappeared. You wait and see.”

It’s curious, but you don’t think seriously about these remarks when you’re young. But now—as I look back on the events of that interminable hot summer of 1976, that summer when England reeled, gasped for breath, pole-axed by the unending heat—now I know what my mother was talking about. I understand that bitter dark current of fear that flowed beneath the placid surface of her ordinary life—how it had never left her even after years of peaceful, unexceptional living. I now realise that she was always frightened that someone was going to come and kill her. And she had good reason.

It was only in 1976, in the genteel setting of Oxford, that Sally Gilmartin finally felt compelled to make a series of revelations to her daughter Ruth, confiding her true identity as Eva Delectorskaya, who had worked as a spy for the British during the war.

Eva’s family had fled Russia upon the 1917 revolution, from St Petersburg and Vladivostok on to Tientsin, Shanghai, Tokyo, Berlin, and Paris. In 1939, while living in Paris, Eva was recruited for the British Secret Service, and trained at a secret mansion in Scotland, “an eccentric boarding school” for spies where she learned about codes, how to drive, shoot a gun, forge documents, tail suspects and evade those on her trail, and to speak like a young, middle-class, privately-educated English woman.

Warned by her suave mentor and boss Lucas Romer never to trust anybody, nonetheless, in wiki’s mot juste, Eva does indeed fall for him. After a mission in Belgium goes badly wrong, the plot thickens further in London. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, amidst the shifting, labyrinthine agendas of the German and Soviet secret services, Eva is part of a British mission concocting propaganda to persuade the USA to join the war—under cover of innocuous institutional fronts in New York and Washington, leading her to a gory betrayal in New Mexico.

Returning bereft to New York, finally trusting no-one, Eva makes an assignation in a cartoon theatre:

She waited two hours for Morris at the theatre, sitting in the back row of the near-empty cinema, watching a succession of Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry cartoons interspersed with newsreels that occasionally contained news of the war in Europe. “Germany’s war machine falters at the gates of Moscow”, the announcer intoned with massive, hectoring insistence, “General Winter takes command of. The battlefield”. She saw horses floundering up to their withers in mud as fluid and gluey as melted chocolate; she saw exhausted, gaunt German soldiers with sheets tied around them as camouflage, numbly running from house to house; frozen bodies in the snow taking on the properties of shattered trees or outcrops of rock: iron-hard, wind-lashed, unmovable; burning villages lighting the thousands of Russian soldiers scurrying forward across the icy fields in counter-attack. She tried to imagine what was happening there in the countryside around Moscow—Moscow, where she had been born, and which she couldn’t remember at all—and found that her brain refused to supply her with any answers. Donald Duck took over, to her relief. People began to laugh.

Moving on to Canada, after Pearl Harbor she makes her way back to England. Shocked by further sinister betrayals, she carefully constructs a new identity:

It took her a day or two to calculate how it might just be done. In bombed-out London, she logically supposed, people must be constantly losing everything they owned. What did you do if your block of flats collapsed and burned while you were cowering in your basement shelter in your underclothes? You stumble out, dressed in pyjamas and dressing-gown, into the dawn after the “all-clear”, to find that everything you possessed had been incinerated. People had to start again, almost as if they had been reborn: all your documentation, clothing, housing, proofs of identification had to be re-acquired. The Blitz and now these night raids had been going on since September 1940, over a year, now, with thousands and thousands of dead and missing. She knew black marketeers exploited the dead, kept them alive for a while to claim their rations and petrol coupons. Perhaps there was an opening for her, here. So she began to scan the newspapers looking for accounts of the worst attacks with the biggest number of casualties—forty, fifty, sixty people killed or missing. A day or two later names would be printed in the papers and sometimes photographs. She began looking for missing women about her age.

Sally/Eva’s new domestic mask seems to have ensured her safety, but in a tense dénouement she enlists her daughter to confront the threat.

As the novel alternates the voices of the two women, the period detail is evocative, both for the war years and for 1976 Oxford (hire-purchase, malls, buskers, Hare Krishna, glue-sniffing punks). Ruth, a single mum, teaches English to foreigners—including Hamid, whom she later spots at a demo against the Shah. A sub-plot involves Ruth’s own relationship with Germany, with a vignette on the Red Army Faction.

Here’s a trailer for the all-star BBC TV adaptation of Restless (2012):

For those of us who grew up churlishly dismissive of our parents’ drab lives, neither knowing nor caring much about their personal stories, with our mutual “don’t talk about the war” pact, it makes an intriguing fantasy. I still have to assume my mother’s backstory wasn’t as colourful as that of Eva.

For crime fiction, see e.g. novels set in China, North Korea, Germany, Tibet, Russia, Hungary, LA (The big sleep, Bosch), and among the Navajo.

Roundup for 2023!

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As I reflected in last year’s roundup,

like a suburban Sisyphus doing and undoing a jigsaw, having gone to great lengths to mix up the daily sequence of my diverse topics in a stimulating fashion, it’s that time of year when I try and reassemble them into some kind of thematic order.

In order for this exercise to be worthwhile, you’ll have to click on the links! Ideally, spread the word by reposting on one of those “Social Media” Thingies They Have Nowadays… Even if you only read a dozen of these posts, then my labours will not have been in vain!

I’m going to adopt Stella Gibbons’ drôle device in Cold Comfort Farm, drawing attention with *** to passages (mostly posts, in this case—indeed, the book’s protagonist is Flora Poste) Not To Be Missed. And this list isn’t even exhaustive—the committed masochist can consult the monthly archive in the sidebar, scrolling waaay down.

I’ll begin with Nicolas Robertson, who alas joined the Heavenly Choir in November (see my tribute). His extraordinary anagram tales (introduced and listed here***), a kind of fantasy Esperanto fiction, are among the highlights of this blog, and in further tribute to his brilliant mind I have recently added two more:

So here are listings under some main themes (many, of course, belong under several themes, which is the point of giving them categories and tags, listed in the sidebar):

China (culture and ritual, Maoism and politics):

East Asia, other:

This year’s additions to my education in Tibetan and Uyghur cultures:

Turkey and West/Central Asia (see roundup):

Modern Europe:

Ethnomusicology and world music:

Jazz (see roundup***):

Pop:

Western Art Music:

Sport (see roundup):

Film/TV:

Loft best new

Arising from the transformation of my home:

Other:

For roundups of previous years’ musings, see 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. And here’s a roundup of roundups! The homepage is always useful for navigation.

And it’s always worth reminding you to watch my portrait film***
on the Li family Daoists, raison-d-être of this whole blog!

Bosch

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Bosch TV

Fast-forwarding from Raymond Chandler and The big sleep, I’ve already praised the crime novels of Michael Connelly, starring the dogged LA detective Harry Bosch. They’ve always seemed to invite representations on the Silver Screen, and now, thanks to Amazon Prime (don’t ask…), I’ve been bing-watching all seven seasons of the film adaptation Bosch (wiki, with episode guide), the first season airing in 2014.

Whether TV and film versions of novels satisfy is a matter of taste. But I found Bosch entirely gripping, with the characters most convincing—Bosch (Titus Welliver in an iconic role) and his nuanced relationships with his daughter Maddie, partner J. Edgar, sympathetic boss Lieutenant Grace Billets, and Chief of Police Irvin Irving, as well as the whole labyrinthine rigmarole of station procedurals.

With Connelly’s active involvement, the TV adaptations are creative variations on the books, combining various plots from different novels. Amply reflected in the soundtrack is Bosch’s passion for jazz, which led me to several great finds (e.g. Tomasz Stańko, Frank Morgan, Art Pepper). * Against the backdrop of a dystopian LA landscape, the jargon, and the dark humour of their exchanges, is fascinating.

My immersion in the novels was never affected by not having a firm visual image in mind; when I return to them it’ll be interesting to see how much this new input colours my reading.

Note also Michael Connelly’s website.

Other posts introduce crime fiction set in China, North Korea, and Germany, Weimar Berlin—Stasi—Russia—Hungary, Tibet, Ottoman Istanbul, and among the Navajo. You might even try Robert van Gulik‘s Judge Dee mysteries, set in Tang China… And for crime drama on screen, see under Saga and Sofia, and French slang.

* Just one more track, somewhat off-piste: the bleak finale of Season 6 plays out with Chris Botti’s 2012 cover of What a wonderful world, with Mark Knopfler. I always felt bad about not quite warming to Louis Armstrong’s 1967 original—maybe it’s just over-exposure. But this is great, both (in Bosch) as a sad commentary on the cemetery scene, and here, enhanced by the Georgian artwork:

The big sleep

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Big sleep

In my youth I watched The big sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) More Times than I Had Hot Dinners—not so much in the cinema as on TV, where it was among a wealth of old movies shown in the dim and distant days before DVDs and streaming.

Chandler coverThe film does justice to Raymond Chandler’s brilliant prose style. Roger Ebert, always a perceptive reviewer, made some good points. He described it as

a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler’s ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares.

 However often we watched the film (or read the book), the plot remained elusive. Ebert cites Sperber and Lax’s Bogart:

Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking whether the Sternwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor, was murdered or a suicide. “Dammit I didn’t know either”, Chandler recalled.

But details yield to the atmosphere.

Bogart’s career was on the up with The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941; trailer here)—the novels of Dashiell Hammett rivalling those of Chandler—and the iconic Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). On the Bogart–Bacall relationship, a recent book by William Mann is reviewed by David Thompson in the LRB:

The span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the “greatest love affair” promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the mid-1940s. That’s the combined duration of To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946).

Their affair (she was 19, he 44), with its “thrilling ping-pong innuendo”, began while they were filming To have and have not, Bacall’s screen debut:

This led to Bogart divorcing his third wife and drinking still more heavily. Off screen he was regarded as surly and dull.

Moving on to The big sleep, here’s the opening (Chandler’s original here):

The horse-racing dialogue is “one of the most daring examples of double entendre in any movie up until that time”:

In the film, Marlowe is irresistible to a succession of women—something unfathomable to British men well into the 1970s. During wartime, women were admitted to professions from which they were otherwise barred:

Most astounding is the bookstore scene, with Dorothy Malone (and note Max Steiner’s portentous soundtrack):

And here’s the very ending:

OK, I can’t stave off old age for ever. Such films (whether 40s’ noir * from the States or modernist creations from France, Italy, or Japan) came as a kind of blessing to us on a cloistered, repressed island, and are indelibly etched into our collective memory; yet (more an observation than a lament) I doubt if they are quite so iconic to Young People Today. For other seminal influences on “my generation”, see under The conformist.

For a modern take on LA noir, see Bosch.

Irrespective of the Academy, popular culture is clearly, well, popular. Since the 60s, the Fusty Pundits of Yore have been disconcerted to find film, film music, and pop, becoming serious subjects for study; but they wield a profound influence on us all, even on those with more classical concerns… Cf. What is serious music?!, and Feminine endings: Madonna and McClary.

* I read that the term film noir was “coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1945 when a flood of dark Hollywood thrillers made during the war eventually arrived on Parisian screens after the four years of German occupation. Nearly 40 years passed before the term became current in the English-speaking world.”

Sparks

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Ian Johnson, Sparks: China’s underground historians and their battle for the future (2023).

Following The souls of China (2017), Ian’s valuable survey of the diverse manifestations of religious activity in the PRC, this is a most admirable study—thoughtful and eminently readable. Ian’s website lists the many rave reviews by people far more qualified than me, so I need hardly add to them; but I’d really like to spread the word still further. For his teaching notes, click here.

Sparks revolves around the control of history (“a battleground for the present”), and the role of memory in countering official propaganda. While “dissidents” are well documented for the Soviet bloc (for the USSR itself, Ian refers to Orlando Figes’ The whisperers; see also under Life behind the Iron Curtain), their Chinese counterparts have been less prominent in the public eye (see e.g. China: memory, music, society).

The book’s protagonists are “underground historians” (Sebastian Veg: “amateur or one might say guerrilla historians”), waging an “asymmetrical battle between a few, often beleaguered citizens opposing an overwhelmingly strong state”. While much of the material here is available in niches of academia (the work of the counter-historians has been highlighted by Western scholars such as Geremie Barmé, David Ownby, and Sebastian Veg), Ian portrays even activists who are already quite well-known with great clarity and perception. A major thread through all this is the personal missions of Ai Xiaoming and Jiang Xue.

Ai Xiaoming (left) and Jiang Xue—among the images by Sim Chi Yin that enrich the book.

As noted in a review by Han Zhang, Ian’s first book on China, Wild grass (2004), covered a not dissimilar group of activists during a relatively liberal period. Whereas after the authoritarian clampdown since 2016 his tone might seem less upbeat, nonetheless the work of those introduced in Sparks continues to inspire hope, even amidst the gruesome litany of atrocities, persecutions, and cover-ups that they document.

Ian meshes the successive eras of modern China: pre-Liberation, Maoism, the “reform and opening” of the 1980s and the early 21st century, back to the current retrenchment under Xi Jinping.

This conviction of history’s importance drives a movement of underground historians that has slowly gained momentum over the past twenty years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad group of some of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists, and journalists. Some are outsiders and might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property, and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures, and prison to publish samizdat journals, banned books, and independent documentary films. They seek to correct the Party’s misrepresentation of the past and change their country’s slide toward ever-stronger authoritarian control. And they do so by using new technologies to publicize the regime’s failings, often linking current problems to debacles of the past.

It’s long been clear that not all Chinese people gullibly accept Party propaganda. As the state reverts to more draconian policies, while the growth in new technology helps the security surveillance apparatus, righteous Chinese historians also use it to find ways to evade censorship. And their mission is important for our understanding of China:

If people grow up thinking that the Chinese Communist Party played a key role in fighting the Japanese, took power thanks to popular support, and is led by a group of meritocratic patriots, then they will have a hard time understanding why China is prone to purges, corruption, and political violence.

* * *

Sparks is in three parts, The Past, The Present, and The Future. The chapters are interspersed with vignettes on Memory.

Ai Jiabiangou

Part One opens with the labour camp of Jiabiangou in the poor northwestern province of Gansu, a series of determined investigations culminating in the long documentaries of Ai Xiaoming and Wang Bing. And this is no mere documenting a traumatic past, as Ai Xiaoming’s experience spells out:

The “hit, smash, loot” tactics of the Cultural Revolution that she and her family had experienced were not unique and are not dead; it is how the party regularly deals with people who have different views—especially when they dare touch on Communist Party history.

Still in the northwest, the memoirs of Gao Ertai (a Jiabiangou survivor) reveal the political turmoil at the Buddhist cave complex of Dunhuang in the 1960s.

Spark
Members of the Spark group, 1960:
Tan Chanxue, Sun Ziyun, Zhou Shanyou, Ding Hengwu.

A major theme is the work of Hu Jie and Jiang Xue on the short-lived magazine Spark, published by a group of students in Tianshui in 1960. At first they had the upright resolve to make the people’s desperate plight during the famine known to the central leadership, but soon, as it became clear that the latter had compelled the chain of regional and local cadres to report fictitious, exaggerated grain yields, they penned cogent critiques denouncing the people’s communes and the whole socialist edifice. Forty-three of those involved were soon arrested and sentenced to long prison terms; two of the leaders, Zhang Chunyuan and Du Yinghua, were executed in 1970.

Ian cites the solitary anti-Nazi propaganda of Otto and Elsie Hampel under Hitler, driven to tell the truth even if the attempt was futile—a story evoked in Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone / Alone in Berlin.

Xinghuo
Spark 1st edition, 1960: “Give up your fantasies and prepare to fight!”.

From 2008 Hu Jie filmed compelling interviews with many of the original Spark group, still passionate in their determination to speak the truth. He released a moving documentary online in 2013 (note the mournful shawms from 3.00 to commemorate Du Yinghua):

In “Memory: Snow’s visit”, Ian introduces Jiang Xue’s own work on Spark with a vignette on her extended, intimate interview with Xiang Chengjian in 2016—here’s the film, edited by Tiger Temple (see below) (slightly different edit here):

Just as moving is an earlier film by Hu Jie, Searching for Lin Zhao’s soul (2004), on the horrifying fate of a young Peking University student, unable to compromise her democratic ideals as society disintegrated in the wake of the Anti-Rightist campaign, who was imprisoned for six years before she was executed in 1968:

Ian looks back at the Party’s machinations, casualties, and pathological purges at Yan’an in the wartime Shaanbei Base Area, with the stories of Liu Zhidan and Liu Jiantong’s banned 1962 novel about him; of Gao Gang, Wang Ming, and Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun. Even after a palatable version of the Maoist era was being fabricated in the 1980s, and as “Red tourism” swept the country, Gao Hua embarked on a scathing indictment of the Yan’an period.

Ian gained experience of the Party’s control of archives in his study of the fate of the Maoshan temples since the 1930s (see Ritual life around Suzhou). Under Xi Jinping, with history ever more rigidly controlled, the National Museum of China has become a mere propaganda showcase.

In Part Two we meet the novelist Wang Xiaobo and his wife Li Yinhe, documenting subaltern lives; and the anthropologist Guo Yuhua, whose research on “the sufferers” in Yangjiagou village thoroughly demolished the Shaanbei myth. In Xi’an (setting for the cult novels of Jia Pingwa) Ian accompanies Jiang Xue to visit citizen journalist Zhang Shihe (“Tiger Temple”), with his bitter past as a child labourer in the Cultural Revolution. We eavesdrop on meetings of the editors of the Zhiwuzhi public forum.

Returning to Ai Xiaoming, Ian explains her background, and her support for rights-defender lawyers. Assessing the current retrenchment she comments,

The severe political pressure unleashed through governmental response has made it clear that it is unshakable, it does not need to listen, it has idolized itself. What happened in the past, the demonization of those critical of the government, is taking place once again.

The mass murders of the early Cultural Revolution in Daoxian county, Hunan, where—at the instigation of the Party—over 9,000 were murdered in August 1967, have been exhaustively researched by Tan Hecheng, and published in English as The killing wind: a Chinese county’s descent into madness during the Cultural Revolution. Ian provides a vignette on Yu Luoke’s exposé of the massacre in Daxing county in the Beijing suburbs at the same time. Yu was arrested and executed in 1970, but since 2016 his story has been circulating again.

A couple of instances of how such scars should impact on our fieldwork: in the 1990s I was impressed to find amateur Daoist and Buddhist ritual groups in Daxing, but I never learned of the 1967 massacre there. Ian comments further:

One survey of local gazetteers [Yang Su, Collective killings in rural China during the Cultural Revolution] shows that between four hundred thousand and 1.5 million people perished in similar incidents, meaning there were perhaps another one hundred Dao County massacres around this time.

And, from a distance, I’ve long been curious about the expressive culture of Gansu province—including its household Daoist traditions. The counties that scholars of religious and musical life should do fieldwork are among those where the most disturbing abuses under Maoism took place—so somehow we have to integrate society and culture into our studies.

Ian visits retired film historian Wu Di, co-founder of Remembrance (one of a whole series of samizdat journals), taking up the shocking topic of high-school girls in Beijing torturing and beating their vice-principal Bian Zhongyun to death in 1966—subject of another harrowing film by Hu Jie, Though I am gone, recounted by her bereaved husband:

This leads the Remembrance group to debate the career of Red Guard poster-girl Song Binbin, who witnessed (at least) the murder.

In Sichuan we meet Huang Zerong, who, undaunted by over two decades in labour camp as a “Rightist”, in his old age began publishing an unofficial history magazine, Small scars of the past—earning him another prison sentence, a fine, and close surveillance. In a reproach to the reluctance to “dwell on the past” (common among many traumatised peoples), he explains the importance of the 1958 Anti-Rightist Campaign:

Without the Anti-Rightist Campaign there would have been no Great Leap Forward; without the Great Leap Forward, people would not have starved to death. If people didn’t starve to death, there would not have been the Cultural Revolution. Without the Cultural Revolution, there would have not have been Tiananmen.

Fanning out from Beijing, Cui Yongyuan (Oral History Centre) and Wu Wenguang (Village Documentary Project and Folk Memory Project, focusing on the Great Famine) have done impressive work.

LWL
Li Wenliang.

Part Three, “The Future”, reveals shifting concerns. Ian documents the Coronavirus in Wuhan and whistle-blower Li Wenliang; while the Party was busy suppressing the truth, the awful realities of life under a draconian lockdown were again exposed by independent counter-historians, including Ai Xiaoming, along with front-line diarist-reporters like Zhang Zhan and the reputable novelist Fang Fang. Ian’s account is always nuanced:

The events in Wuhan show the potential anger, dissatisfaction, and critical thinking that lies beneath the surface. People like Ai Xiaoming, Jiang Xue, Tiger Temple, and Tan Hecheng represent a minority of Chinese. But their well-articulated critiques resonate when people are shaken from their lethargy.This is why one way to look at the Wuhan outbreak is as an example of government power. But a more convincing explanation is that it was a classic example of the repeated eruptions against unchecked government authority.

fig.68
Lhasa, 1966: from Woeser’s Forbidden memory.

The ever more vexed flashpoints of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong are another major area for underground historians. Ian introduces the work of Tsering Woeser on her father’s photos of the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa, and the Tibetan stories collected in Conflicting memories. We learn of the travails of Hong Kong and the elimination of the free publishing world there. Part Three ends, perhaps rather more tangentially, with another trip with Jiang Xue to visit the Zhongnanshan hermits (also outside society), alongside an account of the lockdown in Xi’an.

The excellent Conclusion confronts the underlying questions: are the odds too great, is resistance to the authoritarian state useless, are those few who resist doomed to failure? Ian ponders how we should engage with China, challenging conventional wisdom on how to view it—when

the dominant way of understanding China is that nothing happens there except a string of dystopian horrors: surveillance, cultural genocide, mindless nationalism.

But

Government propagandists can flood the media with their version of reality or slow down unwanted information. This sophisticated form of censoring means that most people will still agree with the government version of events. And yet enough people now have access to alternative interpretations of the past that questioning has become widespread and persistent, despite harsher and harsher crackdowns. […]

The fact that people still resist and do so in a more coordinated form than at any time in the past, seems more significant than the banal point that an authoritarian regime is authoritarian.The fact is that independent thought lives in China. It has not been crushed.

He goes on,

The Party does not always win. Despite overwhelming odds, people inside China today still publish works and make films that challenge authority. Their ideas continue to spread, and when problems in society reach a critical point, people look to them for ways of thinking about their country. This is why Xi Jinping has made control of history one of his signature policies—because he recognises counter-history as an existential threat.

Thus Ian queries whether amnesia has really triumphed:

Saying that “most people” don’t know or care is a truism applicable to almost every society in every era; what matters is that many Chinese do know and continue to battle, today, to change their society.

Moreover,

Prosperity is not inevitable. For any country, it requires constant self-reflection and an ability to think up new solutions to new problems. The Chinese Communist Party’s ability to do so is open to question, especially when we consider its decade-long aversion to meaningful economic reform and its failure to build a top-ranked education system for non-elites.

Before the extensive Bibliography comes a useful Appendix on Exploring China’s Underground History. Ian notes dGenerate Films, Icarus Films, and the Chinese Independent Film Archive, while on YouTube there are channels for Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming, and Tiger Temple—I’ve featured some of his recommendations above. He also offers a succinct list of recommended books. And an important new site, the China Unofficial Archives, has just gone live (see my introduction). Endnotes (a system that I much admire, cf. Eat the Buddha) provide detailed further references.

* * *

One naturally characterises such figures as “brave”. Guo Yuhua, herself long punished by the authorities and harassed by state security, told me she doesn’t feel particularly brave: rather she acts out of a sense of duty—part of a long tradition of righteous scholars throughout Chinese history, as Ian observes. One can only feel the deepest respect for the people who have stood up for truth, and for those who document their labours.

Still, these are people whom most of us wouldn’t normally encounter—or might not be aware of encountering. So where might The Masses stand on all this—those who swallow their scruples for the sake of a quiet life for themselves and their families? One finds plenty of resentment, of course, and even resistance—such as from organised religious groups; and individual cynicism is often heard, both from those clearly targeted, like “reactionaries”, and from the peasantry, who suffered just as grievously and in larger numbers. But just as distressing are the fates of the many who fervently believed in the Party, yet were assaulted in successive campaigns.

Foreign scholars may visit China for a variety of reasons. However much we may wish to eschew politics, and however much we like and esteem our friends in China, the gruesome history of the Party, trampling people’s lives, is the essential backdrop to all the topics that we study in modern (and indeed imperial) China—including history, culture (art, architecture, music, literature), and religion (see my post Cultural Revolutions). Mao was right about one thing: “There is no such thing as art that is detached from or independent of politics”. No walks of life have been untouched by all this, and Sparks should be essential reading for us all.

Twice a stranger: an update

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Smyrna

I’ve just added two short documentaries to my post on the 1922–23 Greek–Turkish population expulsions—complementing the excellent novel Birds without wings.

Both the immediate logistics and the consequences of the expulsions caused immense suffering. The relocations posed severe social and economic challenges in both countries. Yet both Bruce Clark and Louis de Bernières observe the disjunct between simplistic political ideology and a popular yearning to reconnect.

See also The Armenian genocide and other posts under West/Central Asia: a roundup.

It’s what it is

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what it is

In Istanbul over the summer, punctuated by the call to prayer, I watched not only my usual woke fare of black-and-white subtitled foreign-language films with amateur actors, but also a succession of classic mafia movies—three instalments of The Godfather, plus Goodfellas, perhaps the greatest of all. I still have to watch Casino.

I wasn’t previously aware of The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019; reviewed by Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode), but it’s just as compelling, with a star-studded cast. For me, among all the immortal dialogue, two scenes stand out with Robert De Niro, as he tries to relay the unwelcome news from Jo Pesci to Al Pacino, and as it becomes clear that his best friend is gonna have to get whacked:

and

We may be used to “It is what it is”, but here “It’s what it is” makes an even stronger line.

The female gaze is only fleeting in The Irishman, but the revulsion in the face of Frank’s daughter Peggy offers a rare glimpse of a moral core to the story. These movies are particularly topical amidst the current mafia state prosecutions in the USA.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers if I note that “It is what it is” makes a suitable bumper-sticker for the descriptive anthropologist of Daoist ritual, by contrast with the prescriptive agenda of scholars seeking clues in modern ritual to the religious doctrine of ancient times (see Debunking “living fossils”) [Oh FFS—Ed.].

On a more topical note, the astounding Coco Gauff used the expression in her wise reflections after her semi-final in the US Open was (briefly) disrupted. She is Good People.

The Black Wave

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In the same vein as my penchant for subtitled black-and-white movies with amateur actors [zzzzz—Ed.], you can’t beat 1960s’ Soviet-bloc satire, as Stewart Lee would say.

Hole in the soul
Source.

I dimly recall being bemused by W.R.: mysteries of the organism (Dušan Makavejev, 1971) at university, but now, thanks to a recent review by Peter Bradshaw, I’ve been relishing the same director’s 1967 Yugoslavian pulp classic

Makavejev (1932–­2019) was a “satirist, political subversive and eroto-evangelist, a performance artist of ex-Yugoslavia’s cinematic Black Wave”. In exile from 1973, his early films are inevitably compared with Godard.

Love affair poster

The doomed love affair is between switchboard operator Izabela and Muslim rodent sanitation inspector Ahmed (don’t you love it when you can type a sentence like that?). The film

is about politics, sex and death. Or mostly sex and death. Or mostly sex. Sex is the great rebellion in this film, and the great warning. Izabela is killed by a male figure who for all his own unorthodoxy and boozy indiscipline is a submissive follower of the party line. Sex can be an apolitical form of conflict; it does not explicitly exist in opposition to the government, but the erotic mode is revolutionary by its very nature. This film is a short, sharp shock of exhilaration and artistic dissent.

It’s full of incongruous, stimulating disjunctions. The drama is interlaced with patriotic songs. Izabela may be a “tease”, but Makavejev teases us too. While the seduction is going on, what starts as a scene-setting pan to a TV newsreel of the desecration of churches gets us involved, threatening to distract us from the bedroom action. The camera lingers on bodies, alive and dead.

Love affair scene

Roger Ebert’s original review is excellent too, with the fine sentence

He eventually does not exactly hurl her into a deep well.

Makavejev’s first movie Man is not a bird (1965) is on YouTube too:

And his 1994 self-portrait Hole in the soul, for the BBC (fine review here), is no less wacky:

* * *

Also part of the Black wave was I even met happy gypsies (Aleksandar Petrović, 1966; cf. this post, under “Roma”). This upload of the complete film, and these two excerpts, are alas without English subtitles:

Note also the Prague Spring (Closely observed trains, Kundera), Punk in Croatia, and other posts listed under Life behind the Iron Curtain.

Iran: Women, Life, Freedom in film

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Cinema is one of the great strengths of Iranian culture (wiki; playlist of films with English subtitles). I’ve admired works such as Samira Makhmalbaf’s The apple and Blackboards, as well as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (a graphic novel turned into an animated film), turning the spotlight on the plight of women under a repressive regime (see under Iranian lives).

Iran protest
Source.

The current “Women, Life, Freedom” movement is the latest and boldest in the decades-long struggles of Iranian women (and men) to overcome oppression (see e.g. here). The issue has receded from world headlines in recent months, but it mustn’t.

In these struggles, the world of cinema has long played an important role.

What makes this uprising so powerful is that women and cinema are at the heart of it. Both speak to the Iranian people across all social and ethnic divides and both target the heart of the regime’s anti-modern ideology.

By imprisoning the figureheads of Iranian cinema, the regime neither succeeded in silencing them, nor in intimidating the protesters. It even made them more vocal. Filmmakers both in and outside prison have made statements in support of the uprising and have amplified the voice of the protesters. Realising that the detainment of filmmakers had empowered them even more, the regime decided to grant them amnesty. Yet, this amnesty again put the global spotlight back on the filmmakers, who used this as another opportunity to garner worldwide support for the Iranian uprising.

Circle poster

Looking back, the kind of film I’ve been looking for is

The film was shot in 35 days over a 53-day period. As usual, Panahi used non-professional actors, * with the exceptions of Fatemeh Naghavi and Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy. He saw the lead actress, Nargess Mamizadeh, in a park one day and immediately offered her the role. The film opens with one long, handheld shot that lasts over three minutes and took thirteen attempts to achieve. Panahi adopted a different camera style to depict each of the four main protagonists’ lives. For the first, an idealistic woman he used a handheld camera. For the second woman, the camera is mounted on a constantly moving dolly. The third woman’s story is told at night in darker outside, and the camera is static with pans and tight close-ups. For the last, least optimistic, both the camera and the woman are completely immobile and very little sound is used.

Earlier film of Panahi include The white balloon (1995) and Offside (2006, in six parts starting here, without subtitles). He has been arrested several times, most recently in 2022.

* * *

Milani
Tahmineh Milani. Source.

Among woman directors (both in Iran and in exile), note Tahmineh Milani (b.1960). She was briefly imprisoned for her film The hidden half (2001) before pressure from international directors brought her release. Here’s a scene:

and a short feature:

I’m also keen to see her film The fifth reaction (2003), as well as Marzieh Meshkini‘s The day I became a woman—here’s a trailer:

Further leads welcome.

See also New musics in Iran and other posts under West/Central Asia: a roundup. Cf. the secular theocracy of China, where independent directors such as Ai Xiaoming and Wang Bin, Jiang Nengjie and Xu Tong manage to make challenging films.

* Predictably, as a fully paid-up member of the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati, I’m a sucker for foreign-language films with amateur actors. But seriously though folks, much as I admire Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, we just can’t help being aware that they’re Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep—which, you must admit, is a serious flaw. I dream of a global ban on actors ever appearing in more than one film, but I do realise it might not go down so well.

Resisting fakelore

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Kundera and Pawlikowski

Kundera

In memory of Milan Kundera (1929–2023; wiki, obituary), a favourite of mine is his first novel,

  • The joke (Žert, 1967).

Joke cover

Kundera worked on the book in the years following his expulsion from the Party in 1950. Published briefly before the Prague Spring was crushed, it shows personal and political to be enmeshed, as well as the degradation, nihilism, and duplicity of life under state socialism—through a brilliant exposé of the “fakelore” indignities to which the regime subjected traditional culture in Moravia.

For insights on the musical elements of The joke, I recommend

  • Michael Beckerman, “Kundera’s musical joke and ‘folk’ music in Czechoslovakia, 1948–?”, in Mark Slobin (ed.), Retuning culture: musical changes in central and eastern Europe (altogether a useful volume—see under Musical cultures of East Europe).

Joke film

With The Ride of the Kings pageant as the novel’s climax, Kundera saw through the propaganda:

… Tereza, when she met the chairman of the collective farm at the spa, conjured up an image of the countryside (a countryside she had never lived in or known) that she found enchanting. It was her way of looking back, back to Paradise. […]
The state supported folk music and festivals in an attempt to show, quite simply, that in this “people’s paradise” the folk, at least, were alive and well.

Cynical as Kundera’s alter ego Ludvik is, he has a genuine attachment to the folk culture that was now being distorted. But his revenge is hollow. Here’s an excerpt from the 1969 screen adaptation by Jaromil Jireš:

Just as fascinating is Jireš’ short film about the Ride of the Kings:

* * *

Cold War

All this, and more, is brilliantly evoked in the Polish movie

Ravishingly filmed in black-and-white, it’s a visual and musical tour de force. The early scenes, soon after the Communist takeover, are revealing in themselves. Fieldworkers Wiktor and Irena avidly record folk musicians in the countryside, then help develop the sanitised style of the “Mazurek” song-and-dance ensemble (based on the real-life  Mazowsze troupe), until the folk ethos is further compromised by numbers in service of the Party agenda.

My post on folk traditions of Poland opens with this brief period of energy in the collection of folk music after the Communist takeover. The soundtrack, masterminded by Marcin Masecki, illuminates the whole drama. Opening strikingly with a gutsy song accompanied by bagpipe and fiddle in a snowy village, the early scenes, with Irena and Wiktor inspired by the project, communicate the whole excitement of discovering folk culture through fieldwork (see also Musics lost and found).

As in The joke, prescriptive apparatchiks play a disturbing role. Their companion Kaczmarek, soon to become director of the new state troupe, doesn’t share their enthusiasm; this revealing exchange is horribly familiar to me from meetings with cultural cadres in China:

You’re not afraid it’s too crude, too primitive?
No, why?
Where I come from, every drunk sings like this.

Kaczmarek is also a believer in racial purity. Listening to a beautiful recording they’ve just made:

What language are they singing in?
Lemko.
Thought so. Shame.
Why?
That it’s not ours.
Mr Kaczmarek, whether it’s ours or not is none of your business.

They record a young girl singing an unadorned Dwa serduszka (Two hearts)—a song which punctuates the story in successive reincarnations:

Kaczmarek soon becomes director of the new state troupe, spouting sonorous platitudes. As Peter Bradshaw comments:

Of course, they are not “welcoming tomorrow”—they are welcoming the past, a hyperreal, state-sanctioned, quaintly fabricated time of “folk” tradition that will combine Soviet obedience and ethnic conformity. […]
This kind of genteel artistic display is vital for foreign diplomacy, for establishing relations with Russia and a prestigious display for the west. It is a world of privileged foreign travel, with fears of defection.

Auditioning for the troupe is young singer Zula. Though she looks the part, she’s “a bit of a con”— not from politically-correct peasant stock, on probation, and choosing to sing a song learned from a Russian movie. Himself resistant to ideology, Wiktor is charmed by her energy, spirit, and originality. As Zula goes “from victim to victor and back again”, their fatal attraction now unravels over fifteen years from Poland to East Berlin, Paris, and Yugoslavia.

Cold War 3

While many peasants were nonplussed by the state troupes’ misappropriation of their culture, the film does well to observe that this new sanitised style was welcome to some audiences who perhaps (like Kaczmarek) found folk music unpalatable in its raw form. After one glossy spectacle, an audience member comes up to Wiktor and Irena:

I never believed in all this folky stuff. But this—it moved me. You are a genius. To take something so… and make it so beautiful. Thank you both—this is the most beautiful day of my life!

At a tense meeting a stony-faced Party Boss dictates the direction the troupe is to take:

In your repertoire you access priceless treasures of our People’s culture. This is highly commendable. We want you to become a living calling-card for our Fatherland. But I think it’s time for you to add something new to our repertoire—about Land Reform, World Peace and the threats to it. A strong number about the Leader of the World Proletariat. And we, in turn, will do everything in our power to show our gratitude. […]

Irena politely protests:

I would like to express gratitude on behalf of the whole ensemble for your appreciation of our hard work. But when it comes to our repertoire, it’s based on authentic folk art. The rural population doesn’t sing about Land Reform, Peace and Leaders—simply doesn’t do it, so it would be difficult.

But the canny Kaczmarek hastily reassures the Boss:

Comrade Bielecka, I assure you that our nation is not so ignorant, including its rural elements. Quite the contrary. And it will sing about those issues—as long as it is encouraged, and given direction. This, I believe, is exactly what I believe the role of our ensemble should be.

The principled Irena soon quits, while Wiktor (a male archetype straight out of a Kundera novel) bides his time as musical director—and as Zula’s lover. Not to toe the new ideological line could destroy lives.

And all that’s just in the first half-hour—essential viewing for the impact of state socialism on expressive culture, more eloquent than volumes of worthy academic analysis.

While the ensemble is in East Berlin on tour in 1952, Wiktor defects, going on to eke a living at a jazz club in Paris. Over the following years the lovers’ brief encounters become ever more bleak as they come together and pull apart, until the degradation of their final meetings back in Poland, crossing paths again with Kaczmarek. Peter Bradshaw again:

A love affair thrashes and wilts in the freedom of a foreign country, and then begins to submit to the homeland’s doomy gravitational pull.

Cold war richly deserves all the praise it has gained. Now I’m also keen to watch Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida (trailer here), set in 1962.

Under Life behind the Iron Curtain, see also Czech stories, Madonna pilgrimage in Communist Poland, and Polish jazz, then and now.

* * *

The state’s manipulation of folk culture that Kundera and Pawlikowski evoked was a common element throughout the Soviet bloc, such as sharovarshchyna in Ukraine—and also a major theme in China.

sfg-50s

The great Yang Yinliu made wise comments as early as 1953 on the gulf between folk and conservatoire styles—ideological tensions that were replicated in countless county-towns (for a renowned peasant ensemble “blowing with the wind” during the 1958 Great Leap Forward, see Ritual groups of Xushui, under Qianminzhuang; cf. A Daoist serves a state troupe).

And the impasse has continued in the “Golden Age” myth, idealising the Glorious Past (see Debunking “living fossils”). Even in cases where local cultures have not been explicitly targeted by the state for remoulding, scholars may unwittingly impose their own agendas, notably in the flummery of “Intangible Cultural Heritage“. See also Different values, and The politics of ethno-trad.

Chloé Zhao

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The films of Chloé Zhao are subtly engaging.

Born in Beijing in 1982, she moved on—via boarding school in London—to LA and New York. Having felt drawn to the vast empty spaces of Inner Mongolia in childhood, once based in the USA she discovered an affinity with the landscapes of the mid-West, and an empathy with subaltern lives (cf. Xu Tong).

Zhao 2

Songs my brothers taught me (2015; reviewed e.g. here) evokes the conflicted lives of Native Americans on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. For the outsider the desolate beauty of the landscape may suggest freedom, but with their choices constrained by a cycle of alcohol, violence, and prison, all attendant on chronic poverty, young people’s only hope seems to rest in leaving. Trailer:

Less eventful, but just as moving, is Nomadland (2020).

Zhao 1
Chloé Zhao with the film’s protagonist Frances McDormand.
Photo: AP.

The freedom of the alternative American Dream, and the back-to-nature romance of the nomadic lifestyle, are tempered by tenuous living conditions, dependent on the van and on soulless temporary factory work. Several real-life nomads appear as themselves, as well as simple-living guru Bob Wells. Trailer:

As Adrian Horton writes in the Guardian,

Nomadland observes an America not so much forgotten as ignored, or never seen in the first place. The film redirects attention to where the cinematic gaze is usually fleeting, and often made by those inured to glazing over service work, alternative living situations, older people, women in general, and particularly older single women uninterested in stagnation, cordiality or disappearance. For Fern, there’s no trite redemptive arc or revelation, just as there’s no restoring her town and old memories. Instead she dances on a cliff, gallivants around postcard sunsets, keeps moving, saves herself. She’s dwarfed by the Arizona desert and the larger forces at play in her uprooting, but her single story, one among the many real ones glanced by Nomadland, looms large, if only we choose to listen.

See also Grassy narrows (under my roundup of posts on Native American cultures); and for a moving study of alienation, Five easy pieces.

Love, Deutschmarks, and death

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The Germans wanted workers, and they got human beings.

One of the main aims of ethnomusicology is to integrate musical and social insights, as in classics like Enemy Way, Sardinian chronicles, Thinking in jazz, and Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam. So I was fascinated to watch the documentary

  • Aşk, Mark ve Ölüm (Love, Deutschmarks, and death, Cem Kaya 2022) on Mubi. Here’s a trailer:

See this interview with the director Cem Kaya, and introductions e.g. here and here.

The film vividly evokes the lives of Turkish immigrants to Germany from their early days as Gastarbeiter struggling for jobs and rights as workers (music making a means of expression for those lacking a voice in society), right through to rap/hip-hop, as their descendants assert their rights as citizens.

Ismet TopcuThe Turkish music scene in Germany was far from homogeneous. Cem Kaya elicits some excellent comments from characterful musicians. The film opens and ends strikingly with İsmet Topçu, the Hendrix of the bağlama, putting the story in wacky extra-terrestrial context…

old movie

Among the first wave of Gastarbeiter was the protest singer Âşık Metin Türköz, who found a huge audience among the poor factory workers with his songs reflecting their harsh life:

He became the first Turkish star to sing in German:

Left, Yüksel Özkasap; right, Cavidan Ünal.

We meet the female singers Yüksel Özkasap (“the Nightingale of Cologne”) and Cavidan Ünal, as well as the brilliantly camp Hatay Engin (playlist). Such singers who made their name in Germany become popular in urban and rural Turkey too.

The film shows evocative archive footage of the first waves of Gastarbeiter from 1955. Turkish workers were always at a disadvantage besides their German colleagues, but by the 1970s, as the economy went into recession, they came out together on strike. Paradoxically, the 1980s were a heyday for gazinos (cf. The Club)—more footage of the Türkische Basar in Berlin—and the conspicuous consumption (flashing the cash) of ostentatious weddings, which required musicians to perform in regional styles from all over Turkey. Visiting Turkish stars like İbrahim Tatlıses, Zeki Müren, and Ferdi Tayfur drew huge audiences among their compatriots in Germany.

Like the Black Sea, Germany is a region of Turkey…

The theme of protest continues with the charismatic Türk-rock singer Cem Karaca and his band Die Kanaken. He left Turkey for Germany in 1979, but when the post-1980 coup government issued an arrest warrant for him and other intellectuals, he was unable to return home until 1987. This playlist has 62 tracks—here’s Mein Deutscher Freund:

and Es kamen Menschen an (1984):

Another critical singer was Ozan Ata Canani, here with a variation on the “German friend” theme:

Further listening on the Songs of Gastarbeiter compilations (here and here).

Also impressive are the folk-rock/disko-folk duo Derdiyoklar—here they are performing live for a wedding in 1984:

Perhaps their most successful song was Liebe Gabi—again protesting racism:

As the early Gastarbeiter settled, new German-born generations created their own styles, with arabesk leading to R’n’Besk. We find Derya Yıldırım accompanying her wistful song on bağlama, before she progressed to Anatolian psych-pop with her Grup Şimşek. The film’s third section covers recent years. As anti-immigrant sentiment grew in Germany from the 1980s, increasing after the Fall of the Wall, young hip-hop artists from a “lost generation” born of immigrant parents (multi-ethnic groups like King Size Terror and Microphone Mafia) confronted xenophobia and the rise of the far right. Cem Kaya draws astute comments from popular Turkish-German “oriental” rappers of the day such as the inspirational mentor Boe B. (1970–2000) of Islamic Force (musical wing of the 36 Boys gang):

Also contributing are Kabus Kerim and Erci E. of the short-lived but influential Cartel; Muhabbet, who also gained a wide following; Tachi of Fresh Familee and Volkan T error of Endzeit Industry. Such rappers creatively combined their mother tongues with German in Kiezdeutsch or Kanak sprak (cf. French slang).

To complement the archive footage and interviews, Cem Kaya has really gone to town on the psychedelic captions.

captions

Do also watch the documentary Jazz in Turkey, leading to several posts on the Istanbul jazz scene, as well as an introduction to Alevi ritual in Istanbul that ends with a note on its fortunes in Germany—all part of my extensive series on west and Central Asian cultures.

* * *

Another impressive recent exploration of Turkish-German identity is the stage drama Türkland, realised by Dilşad Budak Sarıoğlu, Ilgıt Uçum, and İrem Aydın.

turkland

Xu Tong: subaltern lives

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Filmed around the very regions where I’ve done my long-term fieldwork on ritual life in north China, the documentaries of Xu Tong 徐童 (b.1965) make deeply uncomfortable yet necessary watching. *

His work explores aspects of subaltern people’s lives of which I’ve only been peripherally aware. I’ve never wished to filter them out: unlike most portrayals of religious activity in China, my films show glimpses of itinerant performers, grave-diggers, beggars, pop music, smoking, joking… But my focus has made it hard for me to do these people justice.

As peasants migrate to urban areas in search of labour, choosing urban squalor over rural poverty, the depletion of the villages continues. In Xu Tong’s films, the scenery alone challenges our image of China’s rapid economic progress; the values of the pre-Liberation and Maoist eras (whether traditional, religious, or socialist) are almost entirely absent, yet one catches hints of a different kind of morality. As I observed in my post on Guo Yuhua, under Maoism the Chinese Masses were thoroughly exploited even while they received empty praise as salt-of-the-earth laobaixing, but since the 1980s’ reforms, state media have serially demonised them with the taints of  “low quality” and “low-end population”.

  • Cut out the eyes (Wa yanjing, 挖眼睛, 2014) is a most striking documentary (substantial review in Chinese here), in which Xu Tong follows round an itinerant blind errentai singer in rural Inner Mongolia—just north of my fieldsite in north Shanxi.

ZJYT beggars

Itinerant beggars at funeral, 2018. My photo; see Yet another village funeral.

Small groups performing errentai songs and skits appear regularly at weddings and funerals along the broad northern expanse of Hebei, Shanxi, and Shaanxi. I’ve often come across them—several scenes in Cut out the eyes remind me strongly of fieldwork, such as the funeral beggars (from 16.41), or Blindman the Fifth’s troupe (from 54.38). The shawm bands (known here as gujiang 鼓匠), very much part of this lowly milieu, include errentai in their repertoire (see vignettes in my DVDs Doing things and Notes from the Yellow Earth that come with my 2007 and 2009 books); even household Daoists incorporate such pieces in their popular sequences (see my film Li Manshan, from 42.52). Note also Yanggao personalities; A flawed funeral; Blind shawm players of Yanggao; Women of Yanggao 3; Hequ 1953; An unsung local hero; and Blind musicians in China and elsewhere.

However, the way I’ve delineated my topic has never afforded me time to immerse myself in this world—mercifully, one might say; so Xu Tong’s ethnography of their lives, “warts and all”, is most welcome. It all feels so familiar: gambling, dysfunctional families, pimps, dope-smoking, overturned lorries by the roadside…  And hearing the dialectal expression bulei (“great”) again, which would be bulai in putonghua, is music to my ears.

Here’s the blurb for Cut out the eyes from a recent festival:

At once piercingly observant and intimately complicit in his approach, director Xu Tong trains his mobile, intimacy-generating camera on unique real-life characters in order to explore the ongoing clash of rural traditions with China’s rush to modernity.

In Cut out the eyes, Xu follows Er Housheng, a blind musician who travels Inner Mongolia with his lover/partner Liu Lanlan performing the saucy, sensationally bawdy form of musical duet comedy called errentai. Er Housheng’s female audiences are particularly enthralled with his combination of sensuality, Rabelaisian earthiness, and socially subversive lyrics.

Er Housheng is a charismatic, mesmerising narrative-generating machine, singing of his own incredibly fascinating, violently tumultuous life, and of the (mostly) sex lives of the people who form his community, grass roots down-to-earth folk whose lives haven’t changed much in decades, in rural Chinese Inner Mongolia.

Live performance, in Er Housheng’s hands (and in his and Liu Lanlan’s voices) is something both enthrallingly surreal and earthily commonplace: his audiences hear him boast about his prowess, his courage, his creativity, his trouble with women, not unlike a 1930s American blues singer, or even a 21st-century Chinese rural Kanye West!

The commonplace becomes spectacle, reality shines like magical fables, but there is darkness, danger, and unspeakable violence in Er Housheng’s life, love, and lyrics.

While the film is on one level an enthralling ethnographic showpiece, at its core Cut Out the Eyes is a passionate, frenzied psychodrama of lust, violence, and genius.

At last in a long scene on a visit home, Er Housheng tells how his lover’s husband cut out his eyes when he was 29; later (1.02.13) his graphic retelling of the lurid true crime story in song (and even the sexist denouement) has a painful authenticity which, just as much as his bawdy lyrics, explains his popularity. His songs contrast with much of the music in Xu Tong’s films, where the brash propriety of revolutionary songs and the saccharine pop from recent times express the degradation of people’s lives in a different way. For more on his life (he died in 2021), click here.

Here’s the film, with subtitles in Chinese and English:

Guo Youshan, senior master of “east-road” (donglu) errentai, recalls the perils of singing “unhealthy songs” after Liberation (cf. Gansu: a sequel).

Wa yanjing 1976

He and cultural pundits may deplore the “unhealthy” downward spiral represented by performers like Er Housheng and Lanlan, but men and women, old and young, gobble it all up (and I suspect that’s a more subtle pun than you’ll find in the songs!).

Cut out the eyes gives an unflinching portrait of grass-roots errentai, utterly remote from the sanitised image of state troupes (cf. my vignette on attending a “concert” in Shaanbei) and the razzmatazz of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Unsettling as it is, this film should be compulsory viewing for anyone interested in Chinese society and its expressive culture.

* * *

Xu Tong trilogy

The sense of voyeurism in viewing such harrowing scenes is accentuated when watching the “Vagabonds trilogy” (Youmin sanbuqu 游民三部曲) with which Xu Tong made his name—films on subaltern lives around Beijing that are also most revealing:

  • Wheat harvest (Maishou 麦收, 2008).
    The protagonist Hongmiao is a sex worker at a brothel in Fengtai district of south Beijing. Her home village is in Dingxing county, where I found ritual groups through the 1990s (see under Local ritual, notably The Houshan Daoists), very near Gaoluo. This world of migrants drawn to Beijing—construction jobs, rudimentary health care, brothel workers and clients, seedy karaoke bars—is one that I only glimpsed. The benefits of modernization look most elusive; contrary to Partyspeak, there’s nothing noble about the plight of “the masses”. But the characters consider “culture”, “moral quality”, and “respect”.

You can watch the film complete in three parts, which should follow on from here; or, on YouTube, here’s the first 68’ (missing the last 31′) (this and the following videos with Chinese subtitles only):

  • Fortune teller (Suanming 算命, 2009; see here, wiki, and this critical review on the “Screening China” site).
    Caring for a mentally and physically handicapped partner, the disabled Li Baicheng moves round Hebei province offering his services as a fortune teller (his story far from those of the prestigious hereditary Daoist lineage of Li Manshan in Shanxi). The stories his clients tell him are distressing too—sexual violence, self-harm, prison, begging. Here it is, punctuated by Xu Tong’s instructive commentary:

One of Li Baichang’s clients in Fortune teller became the protagonist of

  • Shattered (Lao Tangtou 老唐头, 2011; see e.g. here and here), uploaded in three parts, which should follow on from here.
    After her release from prison, the tough brothel owner Tang Caifeng returns home to visit her family in rural Heilongjiang in northeast China. Her father Old Man Tang recalls how he joined the Party in 1948 but withdrew in 1958, disgusted by the farcical, and tragic, steel campaign; still, like many veterans, he deplores the decline since the 1980s’ reforms. Dysfunctional family dynamics are paraded on camera again. Caifeng is impressed by Brother Wu, owner of an illegal coal mine (cf. Platform); in the final scene, captions reveal that she has hired thugs to beat up the man who reported the mine to get it closed down.

Around this time she changed her name to Tang Xiaoyan, and began working with Xu Tong on his projects (Cut out the eyes was among the films on which she helped him—see e.g. here); in 2023 they married.

Again, the “Screening China” site has valid criticisms:

Xu must be aware how these scenes will look to his audience—who like him are mainly urban, educated and relatively well off compared to the people on screen. By constantly homing in on aspects of rural life that he knows will likely make this audience squirm, I feel like Xu is—perhaps unconsciously—pandering to the disparaging view of rural life commonly held by Chinese urbanites. […]

I always end up feeling uncomfortable with Xu’s films because I feel like he looks at his subjects with the detached ethnographic gaze of an educated, middle class urbanite fascinated with the “primitive” life of China’s poor—a perspective that can’t help but end up being condescending towards his subjects.

Even if the results may sometimes seem invasive rather than empathetic, with some scenes extended gratuitously, I still admire not just Xu Tong’s choice of subaltern subjects, but the way he masters the considerable challenge of filming them unobtrusively. And his attention to the accounts of older people recalling the Maoist era adds a valuable historical dimension.

All these films are seriously challenging to watch. My focus on ritual performance has to a large extent insulated me from confronting many of these issues; and it reminds me how equivocal my Chinese colleagues must have been when they realised my enthusiasm to get to grips with grass-roots life. Yet the desperation of people cast adrift, the utter inadequacy of the state’s response, and the clash of values, need to be revealed.

* * *

For Jiang Nengjie’s unflinching documentaries on rural Hunan, click here. For Chinese movies, see Chinese film classics of the early reform era (including Life on a string, more magical than realist); Platform, The street players, One Second, So long, my son, and Rock it, mom.

On the written page, I value exposés of subaltern China such as Liu Hongqing’s harrowing book on blind bards and their families, Kang Zhengguo’s Confessions, and Liao Yiwu’s vignettes (here and here). And for the “dark underbelly” of Lhasa society before the Chinese occupation, click here.

* Since I began working on this post, this and other links to yimovi.com have become temporarily unavailable, but do check back, as it’s a useful site!

So long, my son

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So long 1

Like Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅 (b.1966) is part of the “sixth generation” of Chinese film-makers, for whom a fraught relationship with the censors is par for the course.

His film So long, my son (Dijiu tianchang 地久天长, 2019) is deeply moving, “negotiating an ocean of sadness”, deflecting melodrama (reviews e.g. here and here, as well as this interview).

Destroyed by grief at the loss of their son Xingxing, Yaojun and Liyun (the brilliant Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei) relocate to coastal Fujian, their pain compounded when their relationship with the boy they have adopted breaks down. Common themes of the early reform years—falling foul of the 1983 Anti Spiritual Pollution campaign, and a degrading scene illustrating the one-child policy—follow on from the depiction of Maoist-era family dramas such as To live and The blue kite (a particular favourite of mine) (see Chinese film classics of the early reform era). But just as startling is the bewildering pace of more recent change since the reforms began to bite, with factory workers laid off and dramatic changes in the physical and moral landscape—alongside “the terrible burden of grief, rage and guilt, and the greater burden of forgiveness”. The final sequence makes a harrowing yet compassionate denouement.

So long 4

Here’s the film (also currently on BBC iPlayer):

Now I’m keen to see Wang’s earlier films such as Beijing bicycle (Shiqisuide danche 十七岁的单车, 2001), Drifters (Erdi 二弟, 2003), Shanghai dreams (Qinghong 青红, 2005), and Red amnesia (Chuangruzhe 闯入者, 2014).

For comments on other recent movies from China (my “entirely futile effort to keep my finger on the pulse of Chinese popular culture”), see One second, and Return to dust, as well as the TV series Rock it, Mom.

Sara Gómez films the revolution

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Gomez
Photo: ICAIC.

In her all-too-brief life, the film-maker Sara Gómez (1942–74) applied a critical ethnographic eye in documenting everyday lives in Cuba after the 1959 revolution.

One of only two black film-makers in ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos), and the institute’s first (in her lifetime, Cuba’s only) woman director, she was “concerned with representing the Afro-Cuban community, women’s issues, and the treatment of the marginalized sectors of society” (black people and women, the poor, religious, and young)—highlighting social injustice, as well as racial and gender discrimination. *

Cierta
From De cierta maniera.

Most of her oeuvre consists of short films, such as her debut Iré a Santiago (1964)—visually innovative despite some almost touristy images, its voiceover as yet unchallenging but eschewing the clichéd travelogue style later parodied by Monty Python—note the funeral from 4.07, and Carnival from 11.53:

The social agenda (both the regime’s and her own) develops in Una isla para Miguel (1968):

In her final, full-length, masterpiece De cierta maniera (One way or another, 1974) Gómez incorporates a fictional love story within a documentary style to shed light on tensions in the revolution, using real people playing themselves alongside professional actors. While the style of the criticism session that opens the film may recall China under Maoism, her message is far more probing than in Chinese films of that era. Here it is:

As Alonso Aguilar comments,

Melodramatic outbursts of emotion are followed by an erratic camera flowing freely inside crumbling edifices. Sociological musings fade in favour of heartfelt musical renditions.  Transitions are rarely seamless, clashing with every canon possible (even the revolutionary ones), but precisely because of such frontal disregard, Goméz’s cinema feels liberated. Only answering to the concerns of the souls framed on screen, every moment is used to challenge official narratives and position the urgency of the work still to be done.

Note also the vignette on the Abakuá religious fraternity (14.35–18.23)—here Gómez’s analysis concurs with socialist orthodoxy:

This cultural manifestation epitomises the social aspirations, norms, and values of male chauvinism in Cuban society. We believe that its traditional, secret, exclusive nature sets it against progress and prevents it from assimilating the values of modern life. Therefore, in the present stage it generates marginality, promoting a code of parallel social relations that is the antithesis of social integration.

Discuss—for a range of more nuanced approaches to ritual, refer to Catherine Bell…

With Gómez’s black middle-class background (see her 1966 short Guanabacoa: crónica de mi familia), her musical training was classical—but she was animated by the Afro-Cuban rhythms of the streets, lovingly documented in the fine Y… tenemos sabor (1967): **

The procession from 22.27 even features a shawm! ***

Here’s the illuminating documentary Sara Gomez, an Afro-Cuban filmmaker (Alessandra Müller, 2004):

* * *

More recently, note the films on Cuba in the Growing into music series. Akin to Goméz’s stress on marginalized groups, for the Maoist decades in China Guo Yuhua documents “the sufferers”—ironically, the peasant majority, again including women. For musicians’ “licence to deviate from behavioural norms”, click here. ****

Gomez 1
Sara Goméz dancing the cha-cha-chá, from Agnes Varda’s Salut les Cubains (1963).

* Making Gómez a fully-paid-up member of the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati—and quite right too.

** More piffling linguistic pedantry: the three dots should indeed follow the opening word Y, although many citations put them before it. No less pedantically, I note that the 2004 documentary seems to lack the accent on Gómez’s surname. Yes, I should get a life.

*** On YouTube the coda appears to be a promo for Nicolás Guillén Landrián‘s 1963 short En un barrio viejo, another intriguing film.

**** This isn’t the place for an analysis of suitable venues for a revolution (cf. Bill Bryson), but I recall a tour of France with an early music group playing worthy recreations of Qing-dynasty court music, where we ended up in the same hotel as a young early music group from Cuba, playing recreations of early Cuban music in the same festival. While our group were all buried in our arid, ponderous early music conservatoire shtick, the Cubans exuded sensuous physicality from every pore, laughing, grooving, alive. With All Due Respect, I realised I was doing the wrong gig—like the musos’ recurring dream. For the denial of the body, cf. Madonna and McClary.

Endeavour: recreation

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Movie directors still seem undaunted by the perils of trying to evoke orchestral life. The movie Tár has prompted a range of reactions, while recognising Cate Blanchett’s outstanding characterisation. [1]

Putting weightier matters to one side, while Inspector Morse was very fine (I always giggle at Alan Partridge’s suave dictum: “Think about it—no-one had heard of Oxford before Inspector Morse”). The prequel Endeavour (written by Russell Lewis), now on its ninth series, has been received with just as much enthusiasm. 

In the first episode of the latest series, Prelude, evoking orchestral life in 1972, after the principal violinist’s rosin is doctored with nuts, prompting a fatal anaphylactic reaction, a murky world of intrigue is revealed. Now, contretemps were not unknown within our orchestral world, but I’m not aware of anyone doctoring our rosin with nuts, or indeed our nuts with rosin (someone else, perhaps inspired by Nicolas Magriel’s work on the sarangi, might do a cross-cultural study of rosin for fiddle bows).

To follow his review of Philharmonia, Stuart Heritage welcomes the new episode; as he observes,

everybody, not just the violinists, is highly strung, has a silly name, and expresses themselves with rococo hubris or self-contempt.

The musical clichés are well-worn—like the ill-fated leader flaunting her superiority over the blokey men and frumpy women of the rank-and-file, and the supercilious, domineering conductor, complete with beard and cravat:

“Must I remind you, the lives of such as we are defined by sacrifice?”
Glam protégée soloist: “Other girls had friends, parties, fun—I had a rehearsal room.”

For all my musical cavils, the script and the acting are Jolly Good.  Just as Early Music gets later all the time, Endeavour is part of a rich seam of period pieces evoking life only a few decades ago. It’s not just about clothes, of course—cars, kitchens, you name it. Cf. Molvania:

Molvania 3

The episode is based on the City of Oxford Orchestra, founded in 1965. This was just the kind of milieu that I grew up in, taking part in amateur and semi-professional orchestras. But while I have a few images of what we Chinese students at Cambridge were wearing in the early 1970s, and of course there are plenty of photos for London professional orchestras (in both performance and rehearsal), it made me realise that even in 1972 Cambridge, I have only a hazy idea of what we musos actually looked like. How many of us even had a camera? Even for us nerds, taking photos was still rather nerdy. Besides, it was a bit of a faff: it might take months to use up a whole roll of film, and then you had to take it down to the chemists to be developed…

So I have no photos of my amateur youth orchestral life in the 60s. On the National Youth Orchestra website we can find an occasional image of a concert or rehearsal, but there’s a dearth of less formal photos of our summer courses, or the visits with Boulez to the Edinburgh Festival and the Proms (cf. this article, and The shock of the new)—a far cry from the embarras de richesse on social media today.

St Austell
Before a concert at the St Austell festival, Cornwall, c1973.
Me (FWIW) in middle row, 7th from right.

As a reminder that not everyone was dressing like Jimi Hendrix (we weren’t such an exotic 60s’ tribe), Endeavour lovingly recreates the range of sartorial choices at the time—Posh People, poseurs, hippies, jobsworths, and so on.

Good exchange between Morse and PC Plod:

Plod: “So, how was the West then matey? All pasties and scrumpy?”
Morse [studiously]: “I was mostly following in Hardy’s footsteps.”
Plod [confidently]: “Were you? There’s another fine mess eh!”

For more period crime drama from post-war Britain, I enjoyed Grantchester, both the TV series and the novels—again gently probing the tensions within a changing society, of which I was largely unaware at the time…

For more orchestral cliches, click here; cf. clichés of Chinese music.

[1] E.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/01/tar-review-cate-blanchett-is-colossal-as-a-conductor-in-crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jan/11/tar-review-cate-blanchett-is-perfect-lead-in-delirious-sensual-drama
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/movies/tar-review.html
https://www.indiewire.com/2023/01/tar-conductor-marin-alsop-slams-film-anti-woman-1234797612/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jan/16/thank-you-cate-blanchett-for-taking-up-the-baton-for-female-conductors
https://theconversation.com/tar-an-exploration-of-the-flawed-musicians-behind-decadent-music-197714
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-limits-of-control-lines-of-power-in-todd-field-s-tar?twclid=28sry1zxixpvjct4pxpula7ma

Satirising Chinese war movies through divine intervention

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If the heroic war movie is no longer so ubiquitous on British TV, in mainland China the War of Resistance against Japan and the early strivings of the Communist Party remain perennial, unavoidable themes of big-budget TV series.

The “Anti-Japanese oratorio” (kangri shenju 看日神剧, subject of an interesting article on Chinese Free Wiki—shenju literally meaning “holy drama”) is a satirical internet term for wartime dramas that incorporate tropes from imperial culture such as martial arts, romance, and miracle tales. Instances from the wiki entry include using a rifle to shoot down a plane, tearing the enemy in half with one’s bare hands, and kicking away incoming grenades. Such tropes recall the supposed invulnerability of the righteous—as in the 1900 Boxer uprising, another popular topic in Chinese film. An early instance of the genre was the 1989 movie Rennai mochao 人奶魔巢 (watch here). CCP ideologues have criticised such dramas as vulgar.

Recently on Twitter Yang Han relayed a short scene from WeChat, showing the divine intervention of Thunder Lord and Lightning Mother (leigong dianmu 雷公电母) from the clouds on behalf of the heroic Communist troops—a deus ex machina device, we might say. But Yang’s comment “I don’t know how this anti-Japanese drama passed the political censors? Communist Party members are clearly atheists” was premature. It transpires to be an ingenious spoof, * part of a mini-genre, with clips such as this.

And in this one it’s none other than the Buddha who intervenes—rebuking the Japanese for their barbarity as they sought to create a Buddhist empire. Indeed, villagers prayed to their temple gods for protection from the Japanese, as in north Shanxi; there too, household Daoist Li Qing recalled:

Our ritual business didn’t suffer during the occupation—the troops, themselves devout, even made donations when they came across us doing Thanking the Earth rituals! 

Similarly, in Gaoluo south of Beijing,

Japanese troops entered the village on 3rd moon 15th just as the ritual association was leading the annual ritual for the goddess Houtu in the ritual tent. But the invaders merely entered the tent respectfully and kowtowed before the ritual paintings (my Plucking the Winds, p.92).

What Party ideologues oppose in those spoof clips is not the vulgarisation of religion but the offence to wartime Communist heroes. Still, the regime’s relation with religion has never been simple. When pressure from central ideology has allowed, grassroots cadres have long showed a certain laissez-faire. Despite periodic campaigns, ritual life persisted through the 1950s (see e.g. my work on Gaoluo, the Li family Daoists, and under Local ritual).

Ritual painting, N. Qiaotou https://stephenjones.blog/houshan-daoists/

Left, Houtu painting, N. Qiaotou, Hebei; right, detail of pantheon, Wutai county, Shanxi.

And stories of divine intervention during times of war are common in the local folk cultures where the PLA recruited its cannon-fodder. In Hebei we heard accounts of how the female deity Houtu rescued a Chinese brigade during the Korean War; and in a Shanxi village, spirit mediums showed us a handsome ritual pantheon featuring a deified PLA soldier. Indeed, if those online clips came from real movies, they might speak to audiences who have heard such tales from their grandparents. Temples often have images venerating Mao and other national leaders (e.g. in Gansu).

But more often, religious groups mobilised to resist the social disruption of CCP campaigns. Throughout the high tide of Maoism in the 1950s and 60s, local sects rose up “under the cloak of religion” (as Party propaganda has it) in protest against coercive collectivisation, seeking divine protection just as they had done during the Japanese occupation. In Tibet too, as the Cultural Revolution caused extreme social and psychological breakdown, a divinely-inspired revolt against the Party broke out in Nyemo, with warrior-heroes again rashly claiming immunity from bullets. In Tibet since the 1980s’ reforms, the monasteries have been a focus for resistance to Chinese policies (see e.g. Eat the Buddha). And scholars have noted the irony of the atheist CCP claiming authority over the reincarnation of high Lamas.

Whether or not it’s reflected in Chinese media, the religious fabric is an enduring theme of social life (see e.g. C.K. Yang, Adam Yuet Chau, and Ian Johnson).

* After all, no-one would believe you if you told them Boris Johnson was a real politician.

Sentimentality in music

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Assessing sentimentality in music seems to be rather subjective (more on wiki here and here). I offer these random jottings largely as a reflection of my personal tastes.

It’s hard to police taste. In our times the term “sentimental” has come to have pejorative connotations—as wiki suggests, “a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason”; meretricious (and a Happy New Year), trite, even false. Other items on the word-cloud of sentimentality include maudlin, mawkish, tear-jerking, schmaltzy, manipulative, heart-on-sleeve, and self-indulgent—restraint being a virtue fraudulently claimed by the elite. Apparently emotions, and the declaration of sentiment, have to be earned (Oscar Wilde: “A sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it”).

Gender is a major element in the discussion, with the often-unpacked trope of rational/repressed men and emotional/communicative women. The “sentimental novel” (indeed, empathy itself) is often associated with the rise of female authors, although Dickens is a notable suspect, as well as some poetry of Wordsworth. In daily life, while objects of “sentimental value” seem exempt from censure, much-noted contexts include family, cute pets (the main content of social media, grr), teddy bears for Princess Diana, nature (the sentimental/pathetic fallacy; think sunsets), and Christmas cards. For a brilliant antidote, do listen to Bill Bailey’s Love song!

I note that my own playlist of songs is heavily weighted in favour of women singers, who seem most capable of emotional expression. By contrast with bubblegum/wallpaper music, at last the songs I’m considering are intense. Apart from the lyrics (even assuming we know or care what they mean!), much depends on the framing, the dramatic context. Irrespective of genre, one would suppose it difficult to “earn” the declaration of sentiment within the limits of a song lasting only a few minutes; but it’s perfectly legitimate to plunge right into a mood, as do many WAM songs. Performance is also crucial, the establishment of rapport: the vocal quality of the singer, the arrangement, harmonies, instrumentation (smoochy strings being a giveaway), and tempo. Some may find “the same song” sentimental (or not) according to such variables.

I’m not entirely fascinated by philosophical discussions, such as this from Charles Nussbaum (I’m somewhat thrown by his idea that “passion excludes sentimentality”—really?). He distinguishes sentimental music from the musical portrayal of sentimentality, which is OK, apparently. While critics defend such music by detecting layers of irony, detachment, and distance, isn’t it just those qualities that expose a song as false, a device for feigning passion? Surely we want sincerity; there’s nothing intrinsically superior about ironic detachment. It seems that a song can be both denigrated and excused for being fake.

I’m wary of Posh People claiming the cerebral high ground of lofty moral sentiments, trying to belittle the experience of the Plebs, moving the goalposts; as if their own emotions were noble, but those of the lower classes unworthy of expression. Corduroyed Oxbridge professors (and perhaps even the “tofu-eating wokerati”) pretend to more legitimacy in channelling feelings than a hairdresser from Scunthorpe, but if there was ever a time when this mattered, then fortunately it has receded. Responses to music can’t be policed (cf. What is serious music?!).

So the term is often used as a simple dismissal of a nuanced spectrum. WAM is a broad church, within which pundits make distinctions. Some more austere ideologues, still hooked on “autonomous music” (debunked by Small et al.), might claim to relegate emotion entirely, but WAM is full of it. Puccini is a classic case who appears to need defending (see e.g. here, and here), such as O mio babbino caro:

Predating anxieties over sentimentality, while I refrain from considering the courtly love of medieval ballads, we might now find sentimental some elements in the music of Bach (“O Jesulein süß, o Jesulein mild!”)—set within a religious frame. In WAM (as in Sufism) the portrayal of divine love can be controversial; some critics shrink from the sumptuous string harmonies that are part of Messiaen‘s unique musical lexicon. Baroque arias such as Handel‘s Lascia ch’io pianga, or Purcell’s When I am laid in earth, are never rebuked for sentimentality. Mozart arias too are presumably “rescued” by dramatic irony—such as La ci darem la mano (cf. Holding Don Giovanni accountable), the Terzetto from Così, or the Countess’s aria:

But many audiences, even “high-brow”, are presumably moved by such arias irrespective of the dramatic context.

Mahler 5 tune

Moving on to the Romantic era (generally considered OK, you gather), the OTT pathos of the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony is clearly “earned”. For Mahler, the kitsch of popular folk music made an essential and utterly moving counterpoint to his more metaphysical strivings. But he weaves layers of “sentiment”, such as the slow melody that contrasts with the monumental opening of the 5th symphony (above). The Adagietto, of course, is easily co-opted to what we might consider sentimental ends—a not uncommon fate, like Rachmaninoff in Brief encounter. Again, a lot rests on interpretation: conductors are often praised for toning down the sentimentality in Mahler’s music—WAM pundits are dead keen on restraint (cf. Susan McClary on the denial of the body). Returning to gender, this article by Carolyn Sampson on performing Schumann songs may also be relevant.

Modern times
Modern times (1936).

Just as in opera, music manipulates us strongly in film (e.g. “weepies”), such as The way we were or Cinema paradiso. Again, our dour WAM pundits tend to disdain the art of film composers such as Korngold.

Turning to popular musics, I revisit my (not to be missed!) playlist of songs. Again, in such pieces a certain dramatic distance seems to help. Charlie Chaplin’s Smile is a parody of the domestic bliss of which most people are deprived. The nuanced ballads of the Beatles seem sacrosanct—besides Yesterday and Michelle, She’s leaving home is a masterpiece of empathy. I’ve sung the praises of Dream a little dream (again, “elevated” by Mama Cass’s delivery, by contrast with that of Kate Smith). Am I “allowed” to relish Michel Legrand’s You must believe in spring? “Am I bothered?” Country music is more anguished than saccharine (indeed, the lyrics of the Countess’s aria could be from a Country song!)—I like the tone of this post. In jazz, the ballad was blown away by bebop, but survived despite recastings in a more edgy manner, like Coltrane‘s My favorite things. But while the modern reaction to sentimentality has been quite widespread, I can’t help wondering if it’s a handy slur used by the elite to denigrate popular culture.

While such concepts change over time, they clearly vary by region too. If WAM and popular musics share a considerable affinity in conceptual and musical language, the context broadens out widely with folk musicking around the world, where sentimentality doesn’t seem to be A Thing, confounding our narrow Western concepts. In the Noh drama of Japan, a transcendental message and austere sound-world pervade the common recognition scenes at the scenic site of an ancient tragedy. Conversely, the cante jondo of flamenco, its “brazen, overwrought, tortured, histrionic” style expressing “self-pity, posturing machismo, and hypersensitive adolescent egos”, doesn’t quite fit within the norms of sentimentality; nor does the heartache widely expressed in the anguished nostalgia of saudade and sevda. As in WAM or the sentimental pop song, the performance is exorcistic, cathartic.

So for some reason I seem to be requesting permission to be moved by certain songs—Pah! By contrast with some WAM-lite singers like Katherine Jenkins, Billie Holiday had a unique gift for singing sentimental lyrics without ever sounding remotely sentimental—such as Lover man, or You’re my thrill (“Here’s my heart on a silver platter”):

What knots we tie ourselves up in! In both WAM and popular genres, it’s worth positing all kinds of fine distinctions, and interrogating them; but pace the self-styled arbiters of taste, there’s little consensus on what is “legitimately” moving, and I’m reluctant to exclude any music along the spectrum of mood. Hmm, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”…

Li Manshan: another film screening

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film image

Among the numerous topics that have since amplified my blog, it’s always worth bearing in mind that its original raison d’être was to advertise my film Li Manshan: portrait of a folk Daoist (watch here!!!). It complements my book on the Li family, and numerous vignettes and updates on the blog (roundup here).

An initial round of screenings was followed by a lull during Covid, so I was happy to introduce it the other day for the Music Department of Bristol University, at the enterprising initiative of Michael Ellison, a composer with a strong focus on transcultural performance, in particular Turkish music (see e.g. here).

It was good to watch my film in company again. In my intro I observe that this kind of subject can’t be addressed only by reading old books in libraries: books are silent and immobile—fieldwork is the key! As I like to say, it’s not only about Daoism, it’s an everyday story of country folk—a bit like The Archers. So this isn’t some obscure academic subject, or some exotic remnant of ancient oriental wisdom—it evokes the basic concerns of local communities, and how they handle life and death.

Audiences will approach the film from different backgrounds: Daoist ritual (often with an emphasis on “salvage“), ethnomusicology, sinology, modern China, and so on. In my book (and on this blog) I try to show that all these strands have to be integrated. Students studying ethnomusicology (rather than “music”) will find it easier to grasp my comment that the film can’t be neatly pigeonholed under music; conversely, for students of Daoism (and even Daoist ritual) I stress that sound is the vehicle through which ritual texts are conveyed and animated; it should go without saying that soundscape must always be a major element in our study of ritual.

Watching the film again at a certain distance from my initial flurry of work, I worry that it may be somewhat tough going (Like, Hello?). For those eagerly awaiting the “red and fiery” bustle of ritual (Chau, Chapter 3), the opening sequence that sets the scene before we get to the funeral makes quite a lengthy prelude, and once the ritual begins the opening hymns (even abbreviated) are slow and a tad arcane for the uninitiated.

Li Qing’s widow https://stephenjones.blog/2017/06/13/women-of-yanggao-13-daoist-families/

The pace gathers as we follow the sequence of funeral segments; the scenes with pop music, and the afternoon clowning, make suitable interludes; and viewers are reminded of the human personalities who have maintained the tradition through thick and thin, with vignettes on the great Li Qing (including his 1991 Pardon ritual) and the reminiscences of his widow being particularly moving. Li Manshan’s own voiceover is illuminating. So I still feel this is the way the film has to be…

Zhaoqing screenshot

Again, watching it at a certain remove, I recall with a certain amazement all the work involved in providing the translations for the vocal liturgy (with original texts shown on screen), and karaoke-style captions for the mnemonics illuminating the percussion patterns—culminating in the exhilarating Yellow Dragon Thrice Transforms Its Body, coda to the Transferring Offerings ritual (from 1.07.55). And I constantly admire Michele Banal’s fine editing.

While I point out that compared to some such groups in the south, the ritual practice of groups like the Li family band is quite simple, I still find it remarkable that they still do so much, even if it’s still a pale reflection of what they did 80 or even 20 years ago. Audiences tend to be interested in the future of the tradition, which I address in The life of the household Daoist. Other relevant posts from my roundup include

Anyway, DO watch the film (including the excellent joke after the end of the credits!), and spread the word!

Trailer for a thriller

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TA thriller

Usually I shrug off airline safety videos like everyone else, but for some reason I’m mesmerised by the Turkish Airlines creation, which indeed transpires to be a classic of the genre:

Accustomed as we are In This Day and Age to searching for suggestive clues in tiny scenes, I can’t help regarding it as the trailer for a thriller [*Spoiler Alert*].

The opening—apparently taunting us real, frazzled passengers after we have finally managed to jostle our way on board, searching desperately for a space where we can cram our unwieldy luggage—shows a typically contented nuclear family (man, woman, and young boy) boarding what appears to be a private jet, with no queue at all.

At least, we assume the boy is theirs. The way the woman pushes him “playfully” towards his seat may suggest some kind of coercion; the man, typically, is relieved of tedious “parental” chores by craftily choosing a seat behind them.

They all have the most enormous eyes and pupils—a genetic trait amazingly also found in the flight attendant. In an editorial sleight-of-hand that may confuse, two tantalising scenes (0.31, and 2.31) show cameos of a different mother, with a toddler; and her eyes are suspiciously concealed from the viewer—could she perhaps be free of the outsized-eye syndrome? But is she another member of the international child-trafficking gang?

At 1.00, frustrated by his new domestic routine (even if it’s only a front), the vacuous man, in a vain attempt to flirt with the flight attendant (the frustrated middle-aged husband’s classic cry for attention), attempts a comedy juggling routine with his mobile (cf. Mark Heap, at the end of this clip). When it goes wrong, the attendant ignores his request with a polished, patronising smile; she seems to be a ventriloquist, though we’re not provided with subtitles (“Serves you right, you posh vacuous tosser. Have a nice day!”).

At 1.42 we at last get a glimpse of the only other two passengers on board. One, a shifty spectacled guy in a suit and tie, perhaps a CIA operative, looks round nervously to keep tabs on the cunningly-disguised family.

Besides being suspiciously skinny, the “family” are all blissed out, suggesting massive drug intake—even the captive boy conveys a jovial air, whether he’s been pumped full of heroin or because they’ve threatened him into keeping up the facade.

Even when there’s a SUDDEN LOSS OF CABIN PRESSURE OMG they remain eerily calm. “Oh cool, we’re all gonna plunge to a watery grave trapped in this burning coffin!” (cf. When you are engulfed in flames). The man is clearly delighted to have an excuse to inhale more drugs via the mask. The only thing that does seem to alarm him at first is that he can’t take his cabin luggage full of high heels, sharp objects, and smuggled diamonds with him—but the drugs are kicking in, and he soon regains his composure. If it’s realism you want, try Airplane (“Assume the crash position”):

Or did they know about the fake crash-landing all along—is it an ingenious attempt to escape the clutches of the CIA? I wonder if the elusive Woman with Normal Eyes, with her decoy toddler, will play a crucial role as the plot develops after they are rescued by a lurking mafia gunboat.

Apart from the captive passengers and my own deranged fantasies, one wonders about the psychology of the 1.8 million people who have watched the video on YouTube so far (Roll Over Godard), and the many who comment on it (“What am I doing watching this at 3am in my nan’s house? I don’t even have a passport!”).

I was less impressed by the soothing music, sadly not a taksim on the kanun or a rousing dance for davul–zurna—but there I go again, orientalising…

It was less of a challenge to interpret the phrases in Teach yourself Japanese as the plot of a horror movie.

TA’s earlier flight of fantasy is also most creative:

And here’s a cute safety demo from Pegasus:

Rock it, Mom

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Rock it mom 2

In an entirely futile effort to keep my finger on the pulse of Chinese popular culture, I’ve been watching the current TV hit series Rock it, mom (Yaogun kuanghua 摇滚狂花, directed by Li Jun 李骏 and Jing Lipeng 荆丽鹏). It’s well contextualised in a China Project article (cf. this review).

Rock It, Mom tells the story of Peng Lai [played by Yao Chen 姚晨], an over-the-hill, middle-aged rock singer. A run of disappointing relationships caused her to move to the US, where her music career never took off, leading her to return to China. As she tries to put her troubled life back together in her home country, she reconnects with her long-lost teenage daughter Baitian [Zhuang Dafei 庄达菲], whose passion for rock music inspires her to restart her career.

Rock it mom 4

The mother-daughter dynamic, competing in their destructiveness, makes a refreshing study in alienation. Once again I am reminded of Long March veteran Wang Zhen’s classic riposte to Cui Jian’s Nothing to my name:

What do you mean, you’ve got nothing to your name? You’ve got the Communist Party haven’t you?

You can watch all twelve episodes as a YouTube playlist, currently without English subtitles:

To help keep roughly on track, the first two episodes with woefully impressionistic subtitles are here:
https://www.iq.com/play/rock-it-mom-episode-1-l6o2m3oxv8?lang=en_us
https://www.iq.com/play/rock-it-mom-episode-2-m2ta0571zk?lang=en_us

It does make me miss Beijing—skyscrapers, underpasses and all (cf. Beijing yogurt).

Rock it mom 3

See also Platform, New musics in Beijing, and Liu Sola, voice of alternative China.

Molly Drake

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Cate DID

Desert Island Discs constantly reveals the personal meanings of music in our lives. Cate Blanchett’s thoughtful recent selection included Mahler 5, featured in her new movie Tár, in which she plays a conductor—despite rave reviews (see under Endeavour), I look forward to watching it with a certain trepidation, since Western Art Music seldom comes off lightly at the hands of directors (cf. Philharmonia). Anyway, her choice of the second movement (with Abbado, to boot!) was most discerning.

I have to admit that I’ve never warmed to the voice of Kathleen Ferrier, although I’m a devoted fan of Janet Baker. The series generally suggests Christopher Small’s plea to recognise the value of all kinds of musicking, not merely the “prestigious” (cf. What is serious music?!), and guests often include a track of amateur, domestic musicking that evokes intense memories or associations.

Molly Drake

Cate introduces Molly Drake (1915–93; playlist), observing: “So private, she was making music inside her home, for herself really… she gives me quiet courage.” Her choice is The little weaver bird:

Pundits have made a link between Molly’s “melancholy meditations on the fragility of happiness” and those of her son Nick.

Cate Blanchett’s final disc was Count Basie’s mantric, hypnotic rendition of Neil Hefti’s Lil Darlin’ (another gift from Tár):

Right at the end Basie slips in a little quote from In my solitude.

I’m even more infatuated by this version by the wonderful Sant Andreu jazz band (cf. here, and sequel):

Those hieratic wind chords remind me (and probably only me) of Messiaen.

Tibet: The Cup

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Cup 1
New refugees prostrate before the abbot.

Having watched The Cup (Phörpa) (Khyentse Norbu, 1999) when it first came out, I’ve enjoyed it just as much on a recent viewing. “Inspired by true events”, it’s a most endearing film, against the spectre of Chinese repression of Buddhism within occupied Tibet (wiki; reviewed e.g. here). This glossy trailer largely fails to convey its charm!

Director Khyentse Norbu is none other than the lama Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, who worked as consultant to Bertolucci for Little Buddha. Set in a Tibetan monastery in Indian exile during the 1998 World Cup, the film was shot in Himachal Pradesh, with amateur actors (including the abbot and monks) playing themselves, resulting in what Roger Ebert calls a “cheerful truce between the sacred and the mundane”.

Cup 2Orgyen displays his “shrine”.

The plot is driven by the football-obsessed young monk Orgyen (Jamyang Lodro), and his encounters with the abbot, (longing to return to the homeland), his assistant (more tolerant than he seems), and the oracle (belittled by the younger monks).

Charged with looking after two new arrivals have just escaped from Tibet, when Orgyen leads them in sneaking out of the monastery to watch a match after dark in the nearby village, one of the new refugees struggles to climb through the fence, prompting him to come out with one of my favourite lines:

How did you manage to escape the Chinese?

Another review observes the irony of the abbot’s bemusement at “countries fighting over a ball” while the Tibetans are deprived of their own homeland. Also subtly portrayed are Orgyen’s patronising attitude towards the new arrivals from China, the monks’ lament “When will this country ever develop?”, and their distance from the local Indian community.

Cup 3
Mischief during monastic ritual.

The aspect of ritual as chore—dozing off, fooling around—makes a refreshing change from the much-touted Wisdom of the Mystic East shtick. But beyond mere drôlerie, a message of benevolent wisdom shines through, and after the dénouement of the final between France and Brazil (glimpses of a youthful Zidane!), the final homilies are as gentle as the rest of the film.

Cf. Echoes of Dharamsala and other posts under my Tibet roundup.

Cunk on Earth

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Cunk 1

I’m delighted to find a new BBC TV series from Philomena Cunk (aka Diane Morgan), the “Landmark Documentary Presenter”, with her distinctive style of forensic investigation:

  • Cunk on Earth (available here for the next year).

Again, among targets that she sends up are the documentary format, her own persona, both elite and popular cultures, and indeed human history itself.

In the beginnings opens by exploring the achievements of early humans:

One thing they did invent was fire, which allowed them to see at night and kept them warm, tragically prolonging their already tedious lives.

Having conquered numbers, humankind moved on to something even more boring, by inventing writing.

The Ancient Greeks invented lots of things we still have today, like medicine and olives, and lots of things that have died out, like democracy and pillars.

And another invention:

Philosophy is basically thinking about thinking—which sounds like a waste of time, because it is.

On Pompeii,

Thanks to the volcano, we know everyday Romans had grey skin, were totally bald, and spent their time lying around inside their shockingly dusty houses. But it also preserved glimpses of how sophisticated Roman life was, with creature comforts like indoor plumbing and cunnilingus.

In Faith/off the intrepid Ms Cunk covers religion.

What’s ironic about Jesus Christ becoming a carpenter was that he was actually named after the two words that you’re most likely to shout after hitting your thumb with a hammer.

She perks up with an entirely gratuitous plug for an all-inclusive five-star resort near the temple of Kukulkan, “the last word in luxury”.

Islam represented a radical break from previous religions, because the buildings it happened inside were a slightly different shape.

And she asks

Why can’t the religions all learn to live together in peace, like they do in Ireland?

In The Renaissance will not be televised Ms Cunk sets the scene:

It’s the year 1440 (not now, but then, in 1440).

The historic present has always Got my Goat too.

Gutenberg’s press was the first of its kind in history—except Chinese history.

This is Florence—the Italians call it Firenze to try and stop tourists from finding it. […] Florence might look like a pointless mess today, but in the 15th century…

On the Mona Lisa:

Just looking at her prompts so many questions. Who is she? What’s she smiling about? Is she holding a balloon between her knees? And if so, what colour is it?

Cunk 2

Turning to the New World,

After arriving in America to forge a life of honest hard work and toil, many of these colonists quickly discovered they couldn’t be arsed, so they stole people from Africa and made them do it instead.

Eventually Washington won, becoming America’s first president, the single most revered role in the world until 2016.

Rise of the machines opens with a succinct recap:

Last time we saw how the Renaissance turned Europe from a load of mud and parsnips into a posh resort full of paintings…

Introducing Manifest Destiny, she helpfully explains:

Americans back then weren’t the humble unassuming people they still aren’t today.
[…]
The North asked the South what kind of America it wanted to live in—one where white people leeched off other races while treating them as inferior, or one where they pretended they didn’t.

Following the Civil War,

Now Lincoln was President, at long last slavery was abolished, and replaced with simple racial prejudice.

Turning to recording,

Thanks to Edison’s pornograph, classical music could now bore an audience of millions.

Cunk 3

She returns to the theme of femininism, on which she has already established her credentials;

Finally, with the vote, women could choose which man would tell them what to do.

Besides her collaboration with Charlie Brooker, in the final episode, War(s) of the World(s)?, “it’s easy to see why” she’s an admirer of the ouevre of Adam Curtis. Turning to Russia, Tsar Nicolas

was allowed to rule the country like a dictator, which I’ve been advised to say isn’t how Russia works today. […]

A world like this, where the masses toil for pennies while a tiny elite grow rich, seems so obviously unfair and unthinkable to us today. We can scarcely imagine what it must have been like.

Cunk 4

As to 1950s’ America,

Adverts were so influential that it made viewers at home want to be the sort of person who bought things too. They’d work hard to get money, to buy a car, so they could drive to the shops and buy more things, which they’d have to pay for by going back to work, which made them miserable, so they’d cheer themselves up by going out and buying more things, which they’d have to work to pay for.

On the birth of popular culture:

Unlike normal culture, which was paintings and Beethoven, this was stuff people actually enjoyed.

For decades, pioneering black artists had steadily built on each other’s work to develop an exciting new musical form for white people to pass off as their own.

Moving on to the technological revolution, the Apple Macintosh was

the world’s first inherently smug computer.

And

smartphones revolutionised the way people interact, by providing a socially acceptable way to ignore everyone around us.

But we’re not lonely—thanks to social media, it’s quicker and easier to bond with millions of others over something as simple as a cat photo or the ritual shaming of a stranger.

* * *

Cunk interview

Dr Shirley Thompson’s musicological expertise somewhat under-used
in fielding fatuous questions like
“Would it be fair to say the Rolling Stones were the Beatles of their day?”.

To help her unlock the mysteries of human civilisation Ms Cunk consults a range of academics, asking penetrating questions like “Why are pyramids that shape—is it to stop homeless people sleeping on them?”, “Has a mummy ever ridden a bicycle?”, and “Is there a Great Roof of China?”. Scholars such as Jim Al-Khalili, Douglas Hedley, and Ashley Jackson manage to keep a straight face, even as she disputes their so-called expert views with stories about “my mate Paul”, recommending them helpful YouTube videos wat ‘e sent ‘er. The Cunk interview is fast becoming the hallmark of the public intellectual; and I now feel that it should be a compulsory ordeal, a rite of passage for any aspiring lecturer. As Rebecca Nicholson’s review observes:

You could spend a lot of time wondering whether the interviewees are in on the joke or not; if they are in on it completely, it ruins the gag, which surely works best if they think Cunk is deadly serious. The same is true for viewers, in a way. If you look closely enough, you can see that there’s a formula: compare old thing to new thing, ask anachronistic question, wait for baffled response. In both cases, though, I don’t think it matters. None of the academics seem to think they are being mocked, nor are they trying to be funny; likewise, it’s so hilarious and well-written that if you can occasionally see the bare bones poking out, it isn’t much of an issue.

The interview in Cunk on Shakespeare, where she quizzes Ben Crystal on a list of words that Shakespeare, er, might or might not have made up, remains a great favourite of mine:

cuckoo?
ukulele?
omnishambles?
mixtape?
sushi?
titwank?

This series has a new, mystifying musical leitmotif, introduced by fine links such as

Descartes inspired an intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, during which metrosexual elitists published essays that expanded humankind’s horizons in a manner that will go unmatched until the 1989 release of Belgian techno anthem Pump up the jam… [cue music].

Philomena Cunk attains a level of vacuity with which no-one outside the current government could compete. Too bad she’s over-qualified to serve as the next Prime Minister.

The films of Yilmaz Güney

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Yol

Kurdish actor and film-maker Yilmaz Güney (1937–84) was prolific, despite being constantly in conflict with the Turkish regime as a result of his leftist sympathies for the subaltern poor and his highlighting of Kurdish issues (see e.g. wiki, and this review of his ouevre, both providing useful references).

Having admired his film Law of the border (1966—see Early Turkish verismo), I’ve been exploring his work a bit further. Hope (1970) was regarded as a Turkish equivalent of Bicycle thieves.

The theme of rural Kurdish blood-feuds continues in The herd (1978), but as Güney extended his sympathies to the plight of the urban poor, I’m struck by Zavallılar (“The fall”, 1974; literally “The poor”), the stories of three men fallen on hard times, driven to destitution by cruel fate. Here it is, alas without subtitles:

But most impressive of all is Yol (The road, 1982) directed by his assistant Şerif Gören while Güney was in prison. Jailed in 1972, soon after his release in 1974 he was sentenced again for shooting a judge to death. He managed to keep working on projects from prison, and after escaping in 1981 he took the negatives of Yol to Switzerland, editing it in Paris. The film was banned in Turkey until 1999.

His periods in captivity partly inspired the screenplay, which portrays the stories of five prisoners given a week’s home leave in the aftermath of the 1980 Turkish coup, travelling back to their troubled lives in rural south Anatolia to perform traumatic family duties. As this NYT review comments, the film portrays Turkey as one large prison, oppressed not only by political tyranny but also by superstition and bigotry. You can watch it without subtitles here, but it’s well worth buying the DVD: *

Güney’s final film Duvar (The wall, 1983)—recreating a Turkish prison in Paris (interview here)—again uses the metaphor of incarceration. It becomes progressively more involving, with a remarkable manifesto for Kurdistan in the riot near the end. This version is again without subtitles:

For more on Kurdish culture, see under my roundup of posts on west/central Asia.

* The effective soundtrack to Yol is by Zülfü Livaneli, who himself spent periods in jail before going into exile in 1984 (see e.g. his novel Serenade). His song Kardeşin Duymaz, pleading for Greek–Turkish coexistence, is heard at the climax of the TV series The Club.

China: One Second

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One second poster

I’m probably not alone in harking back to the early films of Zhang Yimou, rather neglecting his ouevre since then. While he later turned to glossy big-budget blockbusters, he still made more affecting films like Not one less (1999), The road home (1999), and Coming home (2014).

I admired his recent film

Set in the sand dunes of the barren northwest during the later years of the Cultural Revolution, it was filmed in Dunhuang (for Li Ruijun’s movies set in Gansu, see Fly with the crane and Return to dust). Click here for a roundup of posts on Gansu.

One second scene

Described as Zhang’s “personal love-letter to cinema”, One second has thus been likened to Cinema paradiso, but while both are set against the backdrop of a repressive regime, Zhang’s film is more permeated by pain. The main character is a fugitive from a state labour camp, desperate to catch a tiny glimpse of his long-lost daughter in a newsreel. His quest is hindered and helped by a young orphan urchin girl and “Mr Movie”, the projectionist responsible for the mobile cinema touring the desert towns; after the rather farcical mood of the opening sequence, their changing relationships become quite affecting. Most poetic are scenes of the villagers mobilised to clean and restore the damaged celluloid—a metaphor both for individual striving and for the herculean yet largely futile mass projects of Maoism.

Like Return to dust, the film has also fallen foul of the censors, despite international acclaim. Sensitivities perhaps concerned the Uyghur issue, as well as renewed caution about exposing the indignities of the Cultural Revolution. However the film has been re-edited, it looks to navigate political anxieties rather cleverly—the ending, as hope dawns with the collapse of Maoism, is almost saccharine. But as Cath Clarke observes in her review,

With all the tinkering and tweaks, what censors haven’t been able to expunge is the torment and suffering on the face of Zhang Yi’s political prisoner; this is a deeply felt film, grief and pain go to the bone.

I got to watch it on Mubi. Here’s a trailer:

The kiosk in Turkey and Europe

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kosk

The other day a further excursion around Kuzguncuk inspired me to reflect on the changing lives of its dwellers and the diffusion of the kiosk.

More grandiose than our humble kiosk, the Turkish köşk (a word itself borrowed from Persian kūshk) may denote a pavilion, gazebo, summer-house, pleasure palace, villa, or indeed belvedere (Chinese guan 觀, as in my own fantasy address “Priory of the Azure Cloud Bottle within the Belvedere of Tenuous Obscurity”).

Among several examples in the Topkapi Palace are the Tiled Kiosk and Baghdad Kiosk; many more köşks can be admired elsewhere in Istanbul; and such structures are dotted around the former Ottoman empire.

On the Asian side of Istanbul near Kuzguncuk are several fine köşks from the late Ottoman era, set in sylvan groves overlooking the Bosphorus. Two of them lead me to stories that encompass the Ottoman ancien régime, a household embodying the changing status of women under the Republic, and post-war Black Sea migrants in shanty settlements.

The Abdülmecid Efendi Mansion (wiki; more detail here) was gifted to the Prince by Sultan Abdülhamid in 1895. Abdülmecid (1868–1944), “the last Ottoman caliph”, was also a gifted painter and student of Western Art Music (for which in Turkey, see here)—he depicted salon life at his köşk in the painting Beethoven in the harem (1915):

salon 1915

Abdülmecid (right, in pasha uniform) listens to his Circassian wife Şehsuvar Kadınefendi playing violin, Hatça Kadın (Ofelia) on piano, and his son Ömer Faruk on cello.
One of the other two women may be his third wife Mehisti.

Abdülmecid went into exile in 1924, living in France. His mansion is currently open to the public for the Biennale, hosting an imaginative art exhibition.

The Cemil Molla Mansion (see here, and here) lies just above the main coast road towards the bridge and the Beylerbeyi Palace. It was redesigned around 1895 by the Italian–Armenian architect Alberti at the behest of Cemil Molla (1864–1941), minister and cultured confidant of Sultan Abdülhamid. It was even connected to the Beylerbeyi palace by a tunnel.

Cemil Molla mansion

Lavishly furnished, the mansion was equipped with electricity, central heating, and a telephone—at a time when such luxuries were the exclusive preserve of the Yıldız Palace. The new köşk made an elegant retreat for the pastimes of Cemil Molla with his wife and children, and their English and French governesses. The children not only studied the Qur’an (Cemil Molla sometimes served as imam at the Üryanizade Mosque) but also learned solfeggio; dignitaries and philosophers assembled for elegant soirées, as the air filled with piano and oud, Baudelaire and gazals—just the type of gathering that musicians like Tamburi Cemil might have frequented.

Left: Cemil Molla köşk, interior; right, from The shining.

Upon the founding of the Republic in 1923, Cemil Molla went into retirement. After his death in 1941 the mansion was confiscated by the State Security Department. [1] It was soon thought to be haunted, * with his ghost wandering in the gardens—“disconsolately” being the obligatory adverb here. Later buyers have felt unable to occupy the mansion, with the Nakkaştepe cemetery nearby. The story cries out (spookily) for a movie screenplay, like a Turkish version of The shining—with an eery soundtrack of taksim on kanun, and Ravel’s La valse, echoing through gilded salons adorned with sepia family photos… This brief introduction to the mansion has some of the ingredients:

* * *

To augment the story, with the encyclopedic Kadir Filiz we accompanied his neighbour, the sprightly Fatma Hanim (“Lady Fatma”), [2] to revisit the slopes where she had made her home. Her account takes us on to the migrations of the post-war period.

Fatma H and Am for blog
Fatma Hanım with Augusta.

Fatma Hanım, now in her mid-80s, is one of those delightful grannies whom one dreams of meeting—we only had to mention a single keyword and she came out with a whole stream of reminiscences.

She comes from the Black Sea town of Boyabat in the hills south of Sinop, just east of Kastamonu. After her husband Ilyas was sent to Istanbul on military service around 1959, he managed to stay on there; soon after he paid a visit back to Boyabat, they returned to Istanbul with their first baby—the first of four.

Their new home was a gecekondu shanty-settlement just behind the Cemil Molla mansion. The land was owned by a Greek boss, who ran a pig farm and slaughterhouse as well as a gazhane factory producing gas. (His son Emil became a great friend of the popular gay singer Zeki Müren.) Fatma recalls life on the estate, in the heart of nature, as paradise—though she was shocked by the informality of the Greeks, with the men wearing shorts… She pointed out the trees she had planted herself.

Ilyas was a gardener on the estate, while Fatma worked as housekeeper for a lady who lived in a relatively modest yalı house on the coast just along from the Cemil Molla Mansion. In a most intriguing digression from the köşk, Fatma’s employer was none other than Sare Hanım (Sare Mocan, Sara Okçu, 1914–2000). This leads us to a complex family history that I can’t even begin to get my head around…

From a distinguished Ottoman family, Sare had been abducted on horseback at the age of 15 by Sefket Mocan, grandson of Sefket Pasha, and was later married to him. Her (much) older sister Celile (1880–1956), a painter, was the mother of the left-wing poet Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63; see under The struggle for Turkey), and over his long years in prison Sare often visited her beloved nephew there.

Left: Sare Hanım in the 1930s, “the first woman to wear a bikini and trousers”
under the Republic. Source.
Right: Nâzım Hikmet with fellow inmates, Bursa Prison. Source.

Sare went on to become a modern cosmopolitan belle; she even flirted with the idea of becoming a Hollywood movie star. After divorcing Sefket she moved back into her family’s Bosphorus yalı; she remarried, and divorced again. Cemil Molla’s family also had a yalı below their köşk, so they were near neighbours.

Sharing the house with Sare was her niece Münevver Andaç (1917–97). Münevver had fallen in love with Nâzım Hikmet in 1949 while he was nearing the end of a long imprisonment, giving birth to a son and marrying him after his release in 1951—but he soon had to go into exile in Moscow. Prevented from accompanying him, she moved in with Sare; under surveillance, Münevver left for Warsaw in 1961 with her two children before making her home in Paris. Sare’s niece Leyla had also married, but moved back to the house after separating from her husband.

Left: Sare in old age, surrounded by her mementos
Right: the green yalı on the Bosphorus.

So the female household where our eloquent guide Fatma Hanım worked for over thirty years sounds like a microcosm of women’s changing status under the Republic (for more, see Midnight at the Pera Palace).

Returning to Fatma Hanım’s own story, in 1992, after the notorious campaign of Istanbul mayor Bedrettin Dalan to destroy the gecekondu shanty–towns, thanks to Ilyas’s honest reputation he was able to buy an apartment in the Kuzguncuk mahalle itself for a good price, where he and Fatma have lived ever since.

* * *

Turkey being Umlaut Heaven, ** when diacritically-challenged infidels adopted the word köşk they didn’t quite know what to do with the vowel (for my wacky fantasy on diacritics, click here). Somehow our borrowing in English isn’t quite how I’d expect the vowel to behave (says he, sipping coffee in his pyjamas while plucking the lute), although I don’t know how we could have done better—”kosk” wouldn’t have worked, anyway. ***

In 18th-century Britain, Ottoman architecture enjoyed a vogue thanks to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (see under Hidden heritage).

Fast Show
Another British homage to Ottoman culture.

Our modern kiosk is far less grand. It might serve as a bandstand, or more often a little stall selling newspapers, cigarettes, snacks, and so on. We don’t seem so good at them in Britain—the garden shed, immortalised by Jessy on The fast show (cf. Rowley Birkin QC), is quite a comedown.

But I do enjoy a good French kiosque or Italian (um) edicola, and I recall some fine examples around pre-1990 central and east Europe—where the vogue had begun with King Stanislaus I (1677–1766) of Poland; for me, the kiosks of East Berlin, Prague, and Budapest were part of the Iron Curtain mystique, with the buzz of street life.

Thrd Man kiosk

With All Due Respect to Ottoman architecture, perhaps the most iconic kiosk is the one in the middle of an eerily desolate Viennese square in The third man, accompanied by Anton Karas’s zither.

[1] By 1942, with the grossly discriminatory Wealth Tax (evoked in the Turkish TV series The Club), the brunt of the burden was to fall on Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities. For Istanbul during World War Two, see Midnight at the Pera Palace.

[2] In the more personal honorific style of Turkish relationships, Kadir and Augusta address her as Fatma Abla (“Elder Sister”) or Fatma Teyze (“Auntie”).

* The Cemil Molla Mansion is listed among the Top Five Haunted Buildings of Istanbul!

** Funny how “umlaut” doesn’t have an umlaut, eh. It seems that Turkish hardly needs a term to specify the ubiquitous dots, üzerine çift nokta koymak (“put a double dot on it”) being a tad over-generous. BTW, I’m very fond of the Hibernian umlaut, which I finally mastered on a tour of the States with a Scottish cellist, whose frequent refrain was “Shall we go and get some füd?”

*** This rather reminds me of my sample sentence of English borrowings from the Venetian language:

If you read in the gazette of the imbroglio over an arsenal of contraband artichokes; and if you’ve ever been quarantined after zany scampi and pistachio marzipan in the ghetto, or worn sequinned pantaloons to a regatta…

Godard and the Nouvelle Vague

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with a further note on Last tango in Paris

Godard Karina

In 1970s’ England, while my musical tastes were already imbued with Ravel, Messiaen, and Boulez [Weirdo—Ed.], continental cinema offered an exotic escape from the drab insularity of our lives. French and Italian movies made a particularly important education for us.

The films of Jean-Luc Godard, who died last week (obits e.g. here and here), were iconic. It’s of no great consequence that his ouevre never quite appealed to me, but I’m just trying to work out why. It’s not that I balk at abstraction—I love Rivette’s Céline and Julie go boating, for instance (although you may say that its surreal fantasy is underpinned by the plot of a conventional mystery thriller).

Godard’s images and framing are strikingly original:

But for all the visual attraction of such posing, I suppose I was wary of poseurs. In Bertolucci’s Last tango in Paris (whose main theme is not sex but pain; see under The conformist) the character of Tom is a parody—perhaps more of Truffaut than of Godard, but anyway a satire on the whole pretentiousness of the Nouvelle Vague. To cite this review,

Léaud plays a devoted cineaste much like his New Wave directors, a man obsessed with getting everything on film, capturing something authentic through the most artificial means possible. He’s a punchline, with a camera crew following him everywhere, concocting scenarios that are intended to examine race relations and his girlfriend’s past as the daughter of a French colonialist officer, but it’s all phony, a game. He screams at his camera crew for halting filming in a sudden rainstorm—it’s so romantic and photogenic—and then he runs off into the rain, screaming his love’s name, still acting out the big romantic moment even though the cameras have stopped rolling. In another scene, the background music seems to be non-diegetic until Tom abruptly switches off the tape recorder hanging around his neck, which had apparently been playing the music as an accompaniment to a confrontation with Jeanne. This is a guy who carries around his own soundtrack.

Tom is a walking, talking critique of the contrivances and artificiality of filmmaking, and I think also a critique, if perhaps an unwitting one, of Brando’s self-conscious performance style. Tom is obsessed with authenticity, trying to rearrange reality to fit within his frame. He’s always walking around with his hands held up to form a frame around what he sees, an obvious caricature of a pretentious film director, and all his attempts to capture the essence of reality only come out artificial and silly. Though superficially quite different from Paul—who claims to want to avoid the truth, not discover it—Tom winds up being very much like his counterpart, another character who’s hiding from reality, even while claiming to seek it. In his case, he hides in the cinema…

Similarly, this article comments:

Tom, of course, is a parody of the Godardian New Wave filmmaker, running around putting up his fingers to make camera shots out of everything, and apparently not knowing or caring what Jeanne is doing. He is fittingly played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who was discovered by Truffaut as a child and has since played in many New Wave movies, looking increasingly like Truffaut himself. Tom is characteristically in the New Wave ethos in trying to make a film about the progress of his love affair leading up to his marriage. His crew creep around after Jeanne, filming her meetings with Tom and then filming her childhood mansion complete with relics from the past. Real life and the world of their film become so entangled that it is hard to say anymore what their reality is. Jeanne’s life becomes the film; the film becomes their reality together; they live the film rather than making a film imitating their lives.

Bertolucci shows clearly the superficiality, irresponsibility, and triviality of Jeanne and Tom’s world together. It is a shrewd comment on contemporary, fashionably “hip” worlds where people are so sophisticated and blasé about everything that they have ceased to be human beings living in the realities of our society and historical moment. It is an entirely escapist world with all the inevitable consequences of shallowness that follow escapism.

The Nouvelle Vague was based on an aloof, impersonal ethos—for which I blame the alienated male auteurs, who were in charge, with women making decorative pawns. Call Me Old-Fashioned, but I still want a bit of plot, personality, communication. In many (perhaps all?!) films, such as La strada or The conformist, it’s the women who provide humanity while the men are swanning around being pompous and fucked-up. The women may be fucked-up too, but largely through being abused by all the fucked-up men. Revealingly, Godard showed his contempt for The conformist—as Bertolucci commented, recalling their meeting 37 years after the event:

He doesn’t say anything to me. He just gives me a note and then he leaves. I take the note and there was a Chairman Mao portrait on it and with Jean-Luc’s writing that we know from the handwriting on his films. The note says: “You have to fight against individualism and capitalism.” That was his reaction to my movie. I was so enraged that I crumpled it up and threw it under my feet. I’m so sorry I did that because I would love to have it now, to keep it as a relic. […]

Here are some trailers for Godard’s early films:

  • À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg:

  • Disprezzo coverLe mépris (Contempt, 1963), with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, is so overladen by Godard’s already signature style that it hardly seeks to do justice to the “humiliation and sexual frustration” of Alberto Moravia’s novel Il disprezzo (English translation titled A ghost at noon):

Of Godard’s successive muses, Anna Karina (wiki; obituary) was the most captivating. Their first movie together was Le petit soldat (filmed in 1960, released in 1963), followed by

  • Une femme est une femme (A woman is a woman, 1961):

  • Vivre sa vie (My life to live, 1962):

as well as Bande à part (1964), and Alphaville (1965). Their last film before they broke up was

  • Pierrot le fou (1965):

—which reminds me rather of Betty blue (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986) (in the words of Peep show, “great sex-and-suicide flick—turned a whole generation of men onto girls with mental illness”).

Godard’s originality emerged not only through his visual sense, but in music. Michel Legrand, known for working on less avant-garde movies, provided the soundtrack for Vivre sa vie:

Legrand also composed the soundtrack for Bande à part—this dance scene is actually endearing:

It’s as if all a male film director had to do was find a gamine muse (see under Moon river, and Ute Lemper), and success was guaranteed, no matter how minimal and inscrutable the plot-line.

I don’t mean to react merely with a surly Gallic shrug—each of Godard’s films was a tour de force (“too, er, deaf ‘orse”: Cheval trop sourd, unreleased?), and I quite see how epoch-making they were. Perhaps I should say not that his ouevre never appealed to me, but that it didn’t move me. But I guess that’s just the kind of bourgeois conceit that he was exposing; as Bertolucci continued in his recollection,

I had finished the period in which to be able to communicate would be considered a mortal sin. He had not.

Still, Godard’s stance against communication seems to dilute his radical political mission.

To end with an affectionate British parody, here’s a 1997 vignette from the Fast show:

Everyday life in a Syrian village

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Syrian village 1

I’ve been watching

  • Everyday life in a Syrian village (Omar Amiralay, 1974, with Saadallah Wannus),

“the first documentary to present an unabashed critique of the impact of the Syrian government’s agricultural and land reforms” (source), in the wake of the Ba’ath party coup of 8th March 1963.

Omar Amiralay (1944–2011) studied in Paris from 1966 before returning to Syria in 1970 (see also this interview). Following his short and uncritical Film essay on the Euphrates dam (1970), Everyday life in a Syrian village is set in al-Muwaylih, a “stronghold of tribal power” near the city of Deir ez-Zor in east Syria.

Syrian village 3The film revolves around the harsh life of peasants working the land. Interviews with villagers, teachers, health workers, officials, and policemen, lamenting the peasants’ “lack of awareness”, reveal the problems of introducing modern education and healthcare to the poor countryside—issues that remind me of rural China (see e.g. Guo Yuhua). Indeed, the brief IMDb summary proclaims that Muwaylih is “a place plagued with tribalism, ignorance, and evil”.

The filming is brilliant, with haunting images. On the soundtrack, besides the howling wind, traditional flute music is used to accompany scenes of manual labour, contrasting with the noises of basic mechanisation.

From 47.18, the villagers gather for ritual chanting with frame-drums—in his 1973 film about Kurdish dervishes on the Iran–Iraq border, André Singer suggests that one role of such rituals is to inculcate subservience to the sheikh’s feudal power. From 51.40, in a startling juxtaposition favoured by film-makers (again underlined by the soundtrack), the bemused villagers are assembled by the visiting town Cultural Unit to gawp at an utterly alien documentary on the blessings of progress.

By contrast, Everyday life in a Syrian village remains banned in Syria—here it is:

Amiralay’s third film The chickens (1978), also beautifully filmed (watch here), is a critique of the declining livelihoods of farmers and artisans in the Orthodox village of Sadad to the west—and is also banned in Syria. Having played a leading role in the Damascus Spring of 2000, he revisited the Euphrates region in 2003 to make A flood in Ba’ath country (working title Fifteen reasons why I hate the Ba’ath Party).

Besides R. Shaleah Taleghani’s chapter “Docu-ironies and visions of dissent in the films of Omar Amiralay” in a collection that she edited with Alexa Firat, Generations of dissent: intellectuals, cultural production, and the state in the Middle East and North Africa (2020), all this makes me keen to read studies such as Sulyman Khalaf, Social change in Syria: family, village, and political party (PhD, 1981, published 2021; foreword), and the work of scholars who pay tribute to the book here.

Further up the Euphrates to the northwest lies Raqqa, capital of the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017; for tribal manoeuvring in Deir ez-Zor since 2011 under Assad and IS regimes, see this report. The recent devastation of Aleppo is shown in the outstanding documentary For Sama; see also Aleppo: music and trauma. See also the early Turkish feature films Law of the border and Dry summer.

With thanks as always to Kadir.

Shaanxi in fiction: Jia Pingwa

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Jia Pingwa

The Chinese novelist Jia Pingwa 贾平凹 (贾平娃, b.1952) maintains his reputation despite often falling foul of the censors—a pattern all too familiar to other artists such as film-makers.

Brought up in southeast Shaanxi in a village in the Shangluo region, Jia Pingwa studied at the provincial capital Xi’an from 1971. His novels exemplify “native-place fiction” and the blending of traditional story-telling and modern verismo. For useful introductions to his work, click here and here.

I’m particularly keen to read

  • Feidu 废都 (“Ruined city” or “Abandoned capital”, 1993; translation by Howard Goldblatt, 2016), and
  • Qinqiang 秦腔, 2005; (forthcoming translation “The Shaanxi opera” by Dylan Levi King and Nicky Harman—see here, and here).

King introduces both novels in an evocative account of a trip on which he and Harman followed Jia back to his home village, now converted into a theme park…

“Native-place” writing has a clear affinity with the movies of Jia Zhangke (no relation!). Indeed, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and the female writer Liang Hong are the subjects of Jia’s 2019 documentary Yizhi dao haishui bianlan 一直游到海水变蓝 (“Swimming out till the sea turns blue”)—characterised by Liu Qing, in her critical review from a gender perspective, as “fixated on the self-mythologising of ordinary men”. Here’s a trailer:

For the use of local dialect in ethnography and fiction, see Guo Yuhua, under “Language”, and n.7 there. See also Chinese film classics of the early reform era, and Liu Sola; for Shaanxi under Maoism, cf. the memoirs of Kang Zhengguo. One might even venture into Shaanbei-ology and the traditional story-tellers of the region…

Early Turkish verismo

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Some depictions of rural life in Turkish cinema of the 1950s and 60s.

Law of the border poster

In my post on the Zaza Kurds I mentioned Yilmaz Güney. One of his first movies in a substantial ouevre (more here) was

which he wrote, also taking the leading role of Hidir. It’s set around a village near Urfa in the Kurdish region on the border of Turkey and Syria, “where lack of education, joblessness and general hopelessness have left the population little choice but to become outlaws in order to survive”.

The forces that push Hidir and his fellow villagers to smuggle and a telling of the plight of the poor and alienated group of people struggling to survive the only way they ever knew, from father to son.

Law of the border

It’s a constant contention between risk and reward —for the smugglers, the herders and the landowners—and the conjoined result is a provincial portrait of constricted desperation on all sides.

Amidst a violent patriarchal society, the film hints at the importance of education, as the teacher Ayşe (the film’s only female character) attempts to persuade Hidir to allow his son Yusuf to attend school.

Yet in the end reality crashes in while duty, survival, and emotions take over nobility, and people revert to what they know, be it teacher, commander, smuggler, or profiteer.

The only copy that survived the 1980 Turkish coup was rescued and restored in 2011 by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. It’s been described as “a Turkish Western”. Here it is:

* * *

  • Susuz yaz (Dry summer) (Metin Erksan, 1964; reviewed e.g. here) had already enjoyed huge international success, although it was banned in Turkey for fear of broadcasting negative images of society.

Dry summer poster

Showing power struggles over access to water in a poor village, as peasants resist the brutish agha Osman’s determination to deprive them of the “blood of the earth”. Jealous of his brother Hasan’s relationship with his young bride Bahar, Osman contrives to have him sent to prison for a crime that he himself committed, leaving him free to molest Bahar. In scenes of rare sexual voyeurism, the story exposes the subordination of women (for Erksan’s feminism, see here). It was filmed in Urla district of Izmir on the Aegean coast—and at a time when Turkish film used the standard language, most of the actors speak in Aegean accents. * The soundtrack effectively uses both traditional bağlama and remarkably avant-garde styles.

Watch here.

Dry summer

For a review of these two films, click here. 

* * *

Over a decade earlier, in 1952 Metin Erksan had made the biopic

about the renowned blind Alevi bard Aşik Veysel (see here, and here; cf. Kurdish bards, and blind bards of Ukraine and China; see also here).

Asik film poster

Shot in Aşik Veysel’s native village in Sivas, again the film was censored for depicting the harshness of rural life.

Asik Veysel still

Sorry, no subtitles, and with some breaks in sound:

With the Turkish film scene already dominated by urbane commercialism, such films controversially depicted rural deprivation and conflict. Cf. Omar Amiralay’s 1974 documentary Everyday life in a Syrian village.

Hulya* Dry Summer was the debut role of Hülya Koçyiğit (b.1947)—click here for her experience of making the film. I note with typical superfluity that she was brought up in Kuzguncuk—as she recalls in this interview for the Turkish Agricultural and Forestry Magazine, that indispensable cultural organ (cf. The Milk Producers’ Weekly Bulletin and Cowkeepers’ Guide).

The street players

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Gushu yiren promo

Another addition to our list of Chinese film classics of the early reform era:

Between The horse thief (1986) and The blue kite (1993), Tian Zhuangzhuang‘s movie Gushu yiren 鼓书艺人 (“The drum singers” or “The street players”) was released in 1987. It’s adapted from the last novel of Lao She—written in New York in 1948–49 before he made the fateful decision to return to serve the Chinese revolution (for Mr Ma and son, click here).

Gushu yiren still

The movie is set during the War of Resistance against Japan in the urban metropolis of Chongqing, where the Beijing drum-singer Fang Baoqing has sought refuge from the invaders with his family and opens a thriving tea-house with Tang Shaoye, another refugee story-teller. When Baoqing’s dream of setting up a school to ameliorate the lowly status of performers is shattered by a Japanese bombing raid, he sets up a little tea-house in the suburbs. There, as he makes friends with the progressive writer Mengliang, Baoqing and his daughter Xiulian soon do well from performing Anti-Japanese stories.

Gushu yiren still 1

But devastated by the loss of his “older brother”, Baoqing wants to give up his project. Mengliang encourages him to send Xiulian to school, but with her lowly background she is driven out by her well-to-do schoolmates. Xiulian, abused, abducted, and then abandoned by a ruffian entrusted to look after her, returns pregnant. As victory over the Japanese is declared, the film ends with the distressed family setting sail to an uncertain future (as did Lao She).

Here’s the film—sorry, no subtitles:

By comparison with Tian Zhuangzhuang’s other work (in particular The blue kite [1993], a most outstanding film) and that of other members of the “fifth generation” (cf. composers), I find The street players somewhat conventional and melodramatic. Under my post on Chinese film classics, far more creative and realistic is To live (Zhang Yimou, 1994), which sets forth from the travails of a shadow-puppet troupe in Beijing during the civil war; and for a (more magical than realist) movie on a rural bard, see Life on a string. For narrative-singing in Beijing and Tianjin, click here and here.

In search of the sacred in modern India

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Nine lives

Moving on from the early travels of William Dalrymple, I’ve been re-reading his splendid seventh book,

  • Nine lives: in search of the sacred in modern India (2009)
    (reviewed e.g. by Colin Thubron, and here).

By now Dalrymple had long been based in India. In the Introduction (click here for a variant) he traces the book’s origins back to the summer of 1993, when on a trek in the Himalayas he met an ash-smeared, naked itinerant sadhu of about his own age—who turned out to be a dropout from the world of commerce.

Living in India over the last few years, I have seen the country change at a rate that was impossible to imagine when I first moved there in the late 80s.

So extraordinary was the pace of development that

It was easy to overlook the fragility and unevenness of the boom. […]

Within twenty minutes of leaving the headquarters of Microsoft or Google Asia, cars and trucks are beginning to give way to camel and bullock carts, suits, denim, and baseball hats to dusty cotton dhotis and turbans. This is a very different India indeed, and it is here, in the spaces suspended between modernity and tradition, that most of the stories in this book are set. […]

While the West often likes to imagine the religions of the East as deep wells of ancient, unchanging wisdom, in reality much of India’s religious identity is closely tied to specific social groups, caste practices, and father-to-son lineages, all of which are changing very rapidly as Indian society transforms itself at speed.

So

I set out to write an Indian equivalent of my book on the monks and monasteries of the Middle East, From the holy mountain. But the people I met were so extraordinary, and their own stories and voices so strong, that in the end I decided to write Nine lives in a quite different form. Twenty years ago, when my first book, In Xanadu, was published at the height of the 80s, travel writing tended to highlight the narrator; his [sic] adventures were the subject, the people he [sic] met were sometimes reduced to objects in the background. With Nine lives I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories firmly centre stage.

Indeed, this has been a growing tendency in anthropology and ethnomusicology; see e.g. Helen Rees’s introduction to Lives in Chinese music (2009). This trend is reflected in my own work on Gaoluo, and the Li family Daoists.

Besides all the scholarly research on living Indian religious traditions in change, a popular book like this is most valuable. Many of these topics have been covered by other authors, and Dalrymple provides a succinct reading list by chapter. This might have taken the form of a rather more detailed annotated section (as Barbara Demick does in Eat the Buddha, for instance); he might even have included some audio-visual documentation, as I attempt selectively below.

So Nine lives focuses on ascetics and ritual specialists (the latter chiming with my own work on China). And as in China, women play a major role. Dalrymple’s work is no simple paean to the Wisdom of the Mystic East; despite all the evocative descriptions, he is concerned to reflect the ravages of modern change.

A great many of the lives of the searchers and renouncers I talked to were marked by suffering, exile, and frequently, great pain; a large number turned out to be escaping personal, familial, or political tragedies. […]

Nor (I note) does religion always provide an escape; often it compounds exploitation. Dalrymple again:

I have made a conscious effort to try [and] avoid imposing myself on the stories told by my nine characters, and so hope to have escaped many of the clichés about “Mystic India” that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion.

Amidst a widespread tendency towards standardisation, the stories highlight

the deeply embedded heterodox, syncretic, and pluralist religious and philosophical folk traditions which continue to defy the artificial boundaries of modern political identities.

As he notes,

The book makes no claims to be comprehensive, and there are many traditions which I have completely left out: there are, for example, no Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, or Jews in this book, though all have long histories in the soil of South Asia.

Nine lives map

The chapters follow a trusty formulaic sequence: some evocative scene-setting (often worthy of Stella Gibbons’ *** purple passages in Cold comfort farm); a vignette on his first meeting with the guru in question; some early history; “I will tell you my story”; and worries about the future.

* * *

The first chapter is The nun’s tale, in which Dalrymple meets the young Jain devotee Mataji on the pilgrimage to Sravanabegabola in Karnataka. Jainism, little known outside India (where it now has “only” four million followers), is rather more ancient than Buddhism, and more extreme in its asceticism.

Mataji had chosen the discipline gladly in her mid-teens. Despite the principle of non-attachment, she was still devastated by the loss of her constant companion, who completed the sallekhana fast to the death after contracting TB; and she herself has already embarked on the same path.

The dancer of Kannur introduces a theyyam troupe of ritual dancers and drummers in Kerala, with a typical opening Stella-esque*** paragraph:

In the midnight shadows of a forest clearing, bounded on one side by a small stream and a moonlit paddy field, and on the other by the darkness of a rubber plantation and a green canopy of coconut palms, lit only by a bonfire and a carpet of flickering camphor lights, a large crowd has gathered, silhouetted against the flames. Most have walked many miles through the darkness to get here. They are waiting and watching for the moment when, once a year, the gods come down to earth, and dance.

Dalrymple’s subject is Hari Das, a dance medium possessed by Lord Vishnu. For nine months of the year he works as a manual labourer building wells, and at weekends as a jail warder—other members of the troupe work as waiters, bus conductors, and so on. The theyyam season lasts from December to February; it now provides a much better living than labouring, and than it did in previous generations. While work in the prison is dangerous, performing theyyam is physically exhausting—dancers have a very low life expectancy—and mentally demanding.

Dalrymple notes that while Kerala appears idyllic, it has always been one of the most conservative, socially oppressive, and rigidly hierarchical societies in India. The theyyam, performed by Dalit outcastes, and free from Brahmin control, is “a conscious and ritualised inversion of the usual structures of Keralan life”.

After another typical transition (“We sat drinking chai on the veranda as the sun set, and he began to tell his story”), Hari Das describes how his father taught him the complex arts of thottam story-songs, mudra hand gestures, nadana steps, facial expressions, make-up, and headgear. He notes a certain recent increase in prestige for theyyam.

Here’s a YouTube playlist with 61 short clips:

Note also the research of Rolf Killius, also featured in my post on Shawm and percussion bands of south Asia.

The daughters of Yellamma tells the distressing story of the devadasi (for a version of this chapter in The New Yorker, click here). Dalrymple travels to Saundatti in north Karnataka to meet Rani, sketching the long history of the devadasi. Dedicated as children (by their family) to the goddess Yellama, they originally came from cultured families, serving as courtesans, dancers, and temple attendants; only in later centuries were they explicitly sexualized. From the 19th century, well-meaning Hindu reformers broke their links with the temples; in Karnataka further prohibitions were decreed in 1982, but only further demeaned and criminalised the practice, driving the devadasis underground; “several thousand girls, usually aged between six and nine years old, continue to be dedicated to the goddess annually.” As a government sign warns:

DEDICATING YOUR DAUGHTER IS UNCIVILISED BEHAVIOUR.

Today the women are low-caste Dalits directly involved in sex work. Their life expectancy is even lower than that of the theyyam dancers. Rani’s two daughters had died of AIDS, and she too is HIV-positive. Yet they still pride themselves on having a more exalted status than ordinary sex workers, being blessed by the goddess.

For Guardian coverage, see here and here. Do watch the BBC documentary Sex, death, and the gods (Beeban Kidron, 2010); and two more films within a controversial representational field:

In The singer of epics Dalrymple returns north to Rajasthan with Mohan Bhopa, a hereditary bard and shaman. He had first encountered the genre twenty years earlier on a visit to Laxmi Chundawat in Jaipur, who had documented the epic in the 1970s; she even arranged for Mohan to perform for him. Introducing the work of Parry and Lord on Yugoslavian epics, Dalrymple marvels at the “Rajasthani Homers” who still perform in another epic tradition.

He had already written about Mohan for The New Yorker in 2006, inviting him to perform at several urban festivals; but now he travels with him and his wife to their home environment.

The bhopa are performers of epics, of which the most popular is The Epic of Pabuji. It is not merely entertainment, but a religious ritual. As with “precious scrolls” in China, the epic is rarely performed complete today, which would five nights from dusk to dawn. Punctuated by bhajan hymns and Hindi film songs, it is performed before a phad, a long religious painting on cloth (see e.g. here, here, and here), which also serves as a portable temple. Victor Mair’s 1989 book Painting and performance introduced such traditions around China and south Asia, including the Tibetan lami mani with their thangka.

bhopa 1989

Parbū Bhopo of Mārwāṛ Junction and his wife Rukmā Devī performing the epic of Pābūjī for a small audience in their own village in 1989. Parbū is using the bow of his fiddle to point to a narrative detail on the paṛ while he chants the equivalent section of the epic story.
Caption and photo: John D. Smith.

Again like the precious scrolls, the phad is treated with reverence; the bhopa themselves earn respect through their knowledge despite their low caste. Dalrymple learns that the motives of the rural audience “were less to hear the poetry than to use him as a sort of supernatural veterinary service”; the bhopa also protects children from djinns. Again, these are among the functions of rural Chinese bards.

The bhopa are illiterate—which stimulates their prodigious memory. They accompany their songs on dholak drum and ravanhatta (not a zither but a bowed lute)—a reminder of the rich instrumentarium of Indian folk cultures, another striking instance of which I showed in Gujurat.

The epic is performed by husband and wife in duet; Mohan was fortunate that his wife Batasi had become a fine singer too. But when Mohan died—all too soon after the visit to the rural home—their son (who had been unable to continue the vocation since his own wife turned out to be tone deaf) began performing the epic with his mother.

John D. Smith, working with the eminent Rajasthani folklorist Komal Kothari (for whose own work see e.g. here), wrote his PhD on the bhopa in the 1970s—you can find an updated edition of The epic of Pābūjī here, along with instructive images and audio/video examples.

When Smith returned to Rajasthan some twenty years later he found the art much impoverished by the drift to the cities and the popularity of cable TV and DVDs. FWIW, Dalrymple is not quite so gloomy about the future of the tradition.

The bhopa have been the subject of a succession of documentaries. Here’s Pabuji ki phad (Shammi Nanda, 2005):

See also e.g. here. The lost music of Rajasthan (BBC, 2011), a tour of various traditions., includes a brief scene with a bhopa from 25.45. Note also Daniel Neuman, Shubha Chaudhuri, with Komal Kothari, Bards, ballads and boundaries: an ethnographic atlas of music traditions in west Rajasthan (2007).

The red fairy takes us into Pakistan, to the Sufi shrines of rural Sindh, a centre of Hindu–Muslim syncretism. There Dalrymple visits Lal Peri, devotee of the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine at Sehwan Sharif. He witnesses the ecstatic dhammal devotional dance, with its massed kettle drums.

Lal Peri was the sort of deeply eccentric ascetic that both the Eastern Christians and Sufis have traditionally celebrated as Holy Fools. She was an illiterate, simple, and trusting woman, who saw the divine and miraculous everywhere. It was also clear that she had lived an unusually traumatic life, which had left her emotionally raw. She was in fact a triple refugee: first as a Muslim driven out of India into East Pakistan after Hindu–Muslim riots in the late 1960s; then as a Bihari driven out of East Pakistan at the creation of Bangladesh in 1971; and finally as a single woman taking refuge in the shrines of Sindh while struggling to live the life of a Sufi in the male-dominated and increasingly Talibanized society of Pakistan. […]

The longer I explored Sehwan Sharif, the more it became clear that, more even than most other Sufi shrines, this was a place where for once you saw religion acting to bring people together, not to divide them. Sufism here was not just something mystical and ethereal, but a force that demonstrably acted as a balm on India’s festering religious wounds. The shrine provided its often damaged and vulnerable devotees shelter and a refuge from the divisions and horrors of the world outside.

The Qalander dervishes

have chosen a life of wandering and calculated impropriety, seeking God on the road and in Sufi shrines through a regime of self-punishment and celibacy, while trying to generate a sense of religious ecstasy with the aid of music and dance and hallucinogens.

Lal Peri is fearful of the advance of Wahhabism.

As in 16th-century Europe, the reformers and puritans were on the rise, distrustful of music, images, festivals, and the devotional superstitions of saints’ shrines. As in Reformation Europe, they looked to the text alone for authority, and recuirted the bulk of their supporters from the newly literate urban middle class, who looked down on what they saw as the corrupt superstitions of the illiterate peasantry.

Several shrines had already been attacked. Dalrymple goes to meet the director of a new madrasa, who while cordial is severe in his views (“Musical instruments lead men astray and are sinful. They are forbidden, and these musicians are wrongdoers. With education we hope they will change their ways.”). He regards it as his duty to destroy all the mazars and dargahs.

Lal Peri takes Dalrymple to meet her pir at his desert retreat, who believes in the resilience of the Sufi tradition against the jihad of the mullahs. But in 2017 a suicide bombing inside the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar killed 90 and wounded over 300.

This clip gives a flavour of the festival:

In The monk’s tale Dalrymple visits Dharamsala to consult an elderly Tibetan monk from Kham who had reluctantly taken up arms in resistance to the Chinese invasion. He recalls his early monastic training, and the arrival of the Chinese forces in 1950. As repression escalated, Kham was the heartland of the Tibetan struggle. He joined the “Four Rivers, Six Ranges” resistance force (for links, see the work of Jamyang Norbu).

Though we acquired some old guns, we were outnumbered and knew nothing of fighting. All we knew was how to pray, not how to kill. As soon as we came across Chinese troops they put us to flight. It was a total fiasco.

After making his way to Lhasa to warn people of the imminent catastrophe, he describes the tension there that led to the escape to India of the Dalai Lama, for whom he served as escort and then as decoy while the Chinese went in pursuit.

After fleeing Tibet, from 1962 he spent many years in a secret CIA-trained Tibetan unit in the Indian army—but he finds himself fighting in the war that led to the creation of Bangladesh. Always vexed at having abandoned the monastic precepts, not until 1986 could he retire to Dharamsala. In atonement for the violence he had committed as a soldier, he began to make printed prayer-flags, and in 1995 he renewed his monastic vows. In his old people’s home there, thirty of the 150 occupants had been engaged in a similar struggle against the Chinese.

Again, the exodus from Tibet of the Dalai Lama, and the resistance to Chinese occupation, are much-studied topics (see my roundup of posts on Tibet), with many biographical accounts. As a suitable illustration on film, do click here to watch the footage of the Dalai Lama’s “graduation” rituals in 1958–59!

In The maker of idols we return to the south, to Swamimalai in Tamil Nadu. Dalrymple meets Srikanda, a ritual artisan who comes from a long line of hereditary casters of bronze images for temple worship, dating back to the Chola empire.

There was a growing market for what he called “show pieces” for tourists and collectors, but the family’s main work was idols created in exactly the same manner as laid down by the ancient Hindu religious texts, the Shilpa Shastras, and specifically designed for temple worship.

Dalrymple reflects:

It seemed to me that Srikanda had mentioned three quite different ways in which an inanimate statue could become a god: by the channelling of divinity via the heart and hands of the sculptor; a ceremony of invocation when the eyes were chipped open [cf. “opening to the light” in China]; and through the faith of the devotee. I pointed this out to Srikanda, but he saw no contradiction; all that mattered was that at a certain point a miracle took place and the statue he had made became divine.

He attends a temple festival when the god statue is paraded on a chariot. He waxes lyrical about the sensual bronze statues of the Chola dynasty, and admires the complex discipline of Srikanda with his team in his workshop, where ritual also plays a role. He meets a singer of thevaram devotional songs before the gods. Typically, after the lineage’s 700 years of transmission, Srikanda’s son wants to become a computer engineer.

For ritual artisans in China, see Ritual artisans in 1950s’ Beijing, Ritual paintings of Li Peisen, and the makers of masks for Nuo ritual drama.

The Lady Twilight takes us to a cremation ground in Bengal—dwelling place of Tantric sadhus, devotees of the goddess Tara, who celebrate the power of skulls and fresh blood.

Again, Dalrymple’s guide Manisha hints at a painful past: she was beaten by her husband, rejected by her mother-in-law, and had lost her home and her three daughters. For her Tara was a saviour, not a fearsome ogre. Although the ruling Communist Party in Bengal sometimes sent out Anti-Superstition Committees to persuade people to embrace more mainstream forms of Hinduism, for the inhabitants of the cremation ground is a place of illumination, despite its ghoulish reputation. And Dalrymple finds an

oddly villagey and almost cosy feel. There is a palpable sense of community. Among the vulnerable outcasts, lunatics, and misfits who have come to live there, and those who might be locked up, chained, sedated, hidden, mocked, or shunned elsewhere are here venerated and respected as enlightened lunatics full of crazy wisdom.

Dalrymple surveys the history of Tantrism and early Tantric sex—

an unimaginable distance away from the sort of faddish Tantra cults embraced by Western rock stars, with their celebration of aromatherapy and coitus reservatus, a movement well described by the French writer Michel Houllebecq as “a combination of bumping and grinding, fuzzy spirituality, and extreme egotism”.

But as with the Sufis, behind modern Tantrism lies “the idea of reaching God through opposing convention, ignoring social mores, and breaking taboos”.

Manisha confides,

I am beginning to think that Tantra only really works properly when it is coupled with intense devotion, with bhakti. When I first came here, I was very obsessed with skulls and the secrets of Tantra. I would do anything to collect new skulls and tend to them […].

But now my attention is more directed on Ma Tara herself, and increasingly I believe that the most important thing is to get close to her through devotional love.

Meanwhile Manisha’s partner Tapan Sadhu, himself deeply committed to the life of renunciation, punctuates their conversation with updates from the radio on the latest Test score:

“England are 270 for four!”, he shouted excitedly.

Still in Bengal, The song of the blind minstrel introduces the bauls, itinerant minstrels who practice their own form of renunciation.

Dalrymple attends a major festival at Kenduli where several thousand bauls gather each year. He talks with the blindman Kanai, who finds the lifestyle one of great freedom. His companion Debdas explains:

“He taught me everything, how to reject the outer garb of religion and to dive deep into the ocean of the heart.”

The ecstatic singing of the bauls is another popular topic, appearing early on the world music scene (see e.g. the introduction in The Rough Guide to world music, under “Bangladesh”). Here’s a short film:

Deben Bhattacharya was very much on the case of the bauls. His CD Bauls of Bengal: mystic songs from India was issued in 2001—here it is as a playlist:

Charles Capwell’s 1973 LP Indian street music: the Bauls of Bengal (again, playlist):

A track from the more reflective CD Shahjahan Miah: chants mystiques bâuls du Bangladesh (Inedit, 1992):

And Radha Bhava, from the female singer Parvathy Baul (as playlist):

* * *

The fluency with which Dalrymple’s characters appear to tell their life stories is presumably an authorial device, a concession to the demands of the genre. No-one has ever given me such a fluent account—many peasants just shrug and say “I ain’t never done nothing much… um, I’ve just tilled the fields and gone out to do ritual, like”, and my many biographical sketches have been pieced together over several years, as my mentors open up and I gradually think of more promising angles. And Dalrymple’s subjects seem to have a remarkable ability to explain things in a fashion that neatly resembles our own conceptualisations.

In some chapters he notes how his visits punctuate invitations at his behest to appear at urban festivals; yet despite his worthy cause of highlighting their own lives, more scholarly (and perhaps less readable) accounts flag the gulf between the status of fieldworkers and that of their subjects, and the complications that such relations involve. In this short clip Dalrymple introduces some of the ritual performers on stage:

Such urban performances are a compromise in a worthy cause, part of the continuum of festivals. I too have found it most instructive to take the Li family Daoists on tour in Europe (see e.g. here; cf. the Hua family shawm band at the 2002 Smithsonian Festival of the Silk Road).

Anyway, Dalrymple does well to remind us of the riches of folk cultures by following the performers back to their local environments. Full of vividly-told stories, Nine lives makes an admirable book, extending the audience for Indian religious traditions way beyond the arcane realms of ethnography.

Cf. my extensive series on the very different spiritual milieu of north Indian raga, and under the Indian tag in the sidebar.

From the holy mountain

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The ancient fortress, monastery of St Anthony, Egypt.

Travel writing takes many forms, from Evliyâ Çelebi to Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron, and Bruce Chatwin (for a wise survey of the genre through changing times, see this article by Barnaby Rogerson). Female authors like Dervla Murphy and Sarah Wheeler are in a minority. With added focus, generally sacrificing a certain readability, travel writing may shade into anthropology.

William Dalrymple (website; wiki) may seem like a natural successor to his travel-writing guru Patrick Leigh Fermor (see e.g. his tribute to Mani: travels in the southern Peloponnese). But whereas I find Leigh Fermor’s confident purple prose irksome, as he zigags “between sleeping on peasants’ mud floors and bursting into consular drawing-rooms or baronial halls with his letter of introduction: ‘Oh, good, there you are, just in time for the brandy’ ” (I concur with Neil Ascherson, who cites Vesna Goldsworthy‘s book Inventing Ruritania), Dalrymple’s own work is more endearing. Before going on to write distinguished scholarly tomes on Indian art and history, he hit on a winning formula with several popular travel books—including

Xanadu

His first book

soon became a bestseller. It describes his four-month journey along the Silk Road over the summer of 1986, before his final year as a Cambridge undergraduate—just as I was returning from my first stay in China.

In his own words,

In Xanadu records the impressions, prejudices, and enthusiasms of a very young, naïve and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate. Indeed my 21 year old self—bumptious, cocky, and self-confident, quick to judge and embarrassingly slow to hesitate before stereotyping entire nations—is a person I now feel mildly disapproving of: like some smugly self-important but charming nephew who you can’t quite disown, but feel like giving a good tight slap to, or at least cutting down to size, for his own good.

Indeed, “gazing at flowers from horseback” can produce trite generalisations (“Dogubayazit was full of sinister, swarthy Turks”), but his jovial tone makes for good reading.

His journey makes a cultured latter-day variant of the hippy trail that had borne fruit in leading Veronica Doubleday and John Baily to Afghanistan, where they made a base in Herat on the eve of the Russian invasion. With Dalrymple’s historical bent he reads up on early travellers’ accounts rather than on modern ethnography.

He begins at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where, having noted the sectarian divide, he takes some holy oil (which, as he notes wryly, he pours not into a goatskin flask but into a plastic phial from the Body Shop) to deliver to the site of Xanadu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan, just as Marco Polo had done in the 13th century. Following in Polo’s footsteps, * he embarks on an ambitious trek east, with two intrepid female companions in relay.

At my primary school we knew all about Marco Polo. He wore a turban, a stripy robe a bit like a dressing gown, and he rode a camel with only one hump. The Ladybird book which had this picture on the cover was the most heavily thumbed book on the school bookshelf. One day, my friends and I put some biscuits in a handkerchief, tied the handkerchief to a stick, and set off to China. It was an exhausting walk as there were no camels in Scotland, and by teatime we had eaten all our biscuits. There was also the problem that we were not absolutely sure where China was. It was beyond England, of that we were certain, but then we were not absolutely sure where England was either. Nonetheless we strode off manfully towards Haddington where there was a shop. We could ask there, we said. But when it began to get dark we turned around and went home for supper. After consultation we decided to put the plan on the shelf for a while. China could wait.

The trip, long unfeasible, at last looked more promising with the opening of the Karakorum Highway in 1986. In Jerusalem

the streets were filled with elderly Saga pensioners on pilgrimage from Preston; in the Via Dolorosa weeping Evangelicals sung “Kum-ba-ya” against the background of wailing muezzin. There were a few miserable-looking Presbyterians, some rotund Eastern European widows, and an Ethiopian cleric in his flowing cassock of grey serge.Pallid, short-sighted Orthodox Jews shuffled past clutching Uzi sub-machine guns. The Arabs—wearing pin-stripe for practicality, and keffiyeh to attract the tourists—had taken up station outside their shops: Rainbow Bazaar, The Omar Khayyam Souvenir Museum, Magic Coffee House, The Al-Haj Carpentry Store.

But as he notes,

This pantomime of subservience had gone on day after day for centuries. Jerusalem has always been a tourist town. The pilgrims have changed, religions have come and gone and empires with them; only the knickknack sellers remain.

Travelling through Israel by bus, he notes

the shoddy sprawl of supermarkets, warehouses, drive-in cinemas, factories, and military installations—all imposed over the old Palestinian villages, bulldozed after their inhabitants were evicted in 1948.

In Syria they go in search of traces of the Assassins, a militant wing of the heterodox Isma’ili sect in medieval times. In Aleppo he tuts at child slavery in a shoe factory, visits a nightclub (Django Reinhardt songs played by an Armenian band), and admires the architecture, commenting on the city’s long history of massacres and sieges.

They move on to Turkey, travelling northeast from Ayas to Sivas and Erzurum. His companion Laura tempers his romanticism:

“We could be the first people to see this view for hundreds of years,” I said, moved to unusual lyricism.

“Balls,” said Laura. “People come up here all the time.”

Gok medresse

In Sivas he contrasts the styles of the Ulu Cami mosque and (above) the nearby Gök medresse. With the medieval Armenian connection looming large, they also get a lesson on the 1915 genocide.

Laura chador

As they near the border with revolutionary Iran, logistical challenges become ever more daunting, with Laura now equipped with a full-length black chador and headscarf. They are underwhelmed by Tabriz:

The atmosphere of Tabriz on our arrival exactly paralleled that at the time of Polo. The oil wealth of the 60s and early 70s had financed a population explosion in the town, and if the town had ever had an old-fashioned, Russian flavour [as their guidebook claimed] it had certainly lost it by the time we visited. Like any other rapidly developing town in the Third World, Tabriz was surrounded by miles of ugly urban sprawl.

They get another lesson on politics from an Armenian priest. At Sultaniya and Saveh they ponder the story of the Three Wise Men and Zoroastrianism.

Unable to attempt the northern route through Afghanistan, they keep moving southeast, cadging lifts with groups of devout Afghans until they reach Baluchi Pakistan, a welcome relief. They move on to Quetta, where Dalrymple’s great-aunt had lived as the wife of the Commander of the Western Command, India.

They recover from the ordeal of the train to Lahore by enjoying the luxurious hospitality of a Pakistani friend from Cambridge—air conditioning, baths, clean clothes, a swimming pool, and Mozart, all making a well-deserved interlude between their travails (cf. Nigel Barley on the veranda). As he bids farewell to his brisk companion Laura—a cross between Boudicea and Joyce Grenfell—his fragrant accomplice Louisa arrives for the latter leg of the journey, “dressed as if for the King’s Road”. His love for Lahore has remained a major theme of his ouevre.

Having faced more Kafkaesque bureaucracy to gain permits to enter China, they set off again. With an interlude on Alexander the Great, they cross the border into Xinjiang, rejoining the trail of Marco Polo at Tashkurgan, yet another drab border town. More ingenuity is required in order to keep moving north towards Kashgar.

There they stay at Chini Bagh, residence of George Macartney for twenty-eight years around the turn of the 20th century as the Great Game was being waged, now converted into a dowdy hotel—offering yet another illustration of decline. Kashgar in the 1980s might now seem an unspoilt paradise, but it was already the object of modernisation with Chinese characteristics, its old city walls being demolished over a long period, like those of Chinese cities such as Beijing. Still, as yet there were no cars, and few bicycles; no police surveillance on every corner or labour camps. Venturing behind the façade, they are shown the sights by Mick, a genuine 60s’ hippy who has moved on from Kabul and Goa. They find a world of bazaars and craftsmen, and admire the Id Kah mosque; they even glean further clues to the Nestorians.

Uyghur kids KeriyaUyghur children, Keriya.

In retrospect this seems like a happy period for the Uyghurs, when despite the scars of the Cultural Revolution, cultural and religious traditions were reviving on a large scale. Along with local scholars, Sabine Trebinjac and Jean During were just starting to document the riches of Uyghur musical life.

Sabine KashgarWedding band, Kashgar 1988,
from booklet with 2-CD set Turkestan chinois/Xinjiang: musiques Ouïghoures.

Having spent ten days in Kashgar they negotiate a series of lifts to skirt the desert by the southern route via Khotan and Keriya. In Keriya they gatecrash a drunken banquet for German geologists hosted by effusive Chinese apparatchiks—which unexpectedly eases their onward progress in the company of a busload of stoned Uyghurs (hash “is to the Sinkiang People’s Autobus Company what McEwan’s Export is to British Rail”). In Charchan, exhausted, they are finally apprehended by the Public Security Bureau, who deport them by sending them by train all the way to Beijing, away from what they realise is the Lop Nor nuclear testing ground peopled by mutants.

By way of the Gansu corridor and Shaanxi, the train to Beijing takes six days, so they’re happy to graduate from Hard Seat to the luxury of Soft Sleeper.

I vowed never again to travel on a heap of coal slag, never again to stay in a hotel that smelled like a morgue, never again to use a squatter that belched up its contents over the user. I had done all that. If something needed to be proved it was proved. From now it would be a holiday cottage by the seaside, a rocking chair and some new, relaxing hobby, perhaps knitting or crochet.

After exploring Beijing by bike, and eating fourteen chocolate eclairs in three hours, they set off on one last mission north to the site of Kublai Khan’s summer capital Shangdu (Xanadu), on the steppe of what is now Inner Mongolia. Taking the train as far north as Chengde, summer palace of the Qing Manchu emperors, they again dodge the Public Security Bureau to take the bus to Duolun. Although the cops catch up with them, they finally reach their goal, where Dalrymple pours the oil from the Holy Sepulchre into the earth.

Then, rather as in the dénouement of Teddy bears’ picnic, they have to hurry back to take the plane home for the start of term.

WD and Lou
Back at Cambridge with Louisa, “looking smug”.

* * *

While In Xanadu makes some telling observations on the societies he travels through, the people whom Dalrymple encounters often seem merely a drôle backdrop.

Far from dropping out, his youthful Long March was the start of an illustrious career. Following City of Djinns (1994), I’ve been re-reading his third book,

It’s already in a different league. By now his blend of early history and contemporary observation is more assured and thoughtful. He’s no longer a backpacking student but an accredited journalist and author, and his budget is less constrained. The people he gets to meet are more informed, and at 454 pages the book is considerably longer than In Xanadu, allowing for more detail.

Holy mountain map

Dalrymple follows the path of the 6th-century monk John Moschos, guided by his book The spiritual meadow, a diary of his travels around the Eastern Byzantine world. He embarks on a six-month journey in search of the modern descendants of the Christian Levant—different political exigencies often making a dangerous trek.

In the popular imagination, the Levant passes from a classical past to an Islamic present with hardly a break.

Yet for over three hundred years before the rise of Islam in the 7th century the Eastern Mediterranean was almost entirely Christian. The spiritual meadow

could be read less as a dead history book than as the prologue to an unfolding tragedy whose final chapter is still being written. […]

Today the West often views Islam as a civilisation very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity’s Eastern homelands do you realise how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodies many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity’s modern Western incarnation.

Moreover,

In the Middle East, the reality of continuity has always been masked by a surface impression of cataclysm.

Dalrymple had already mastered the art of the short suggestive opening sentence with In Xanadu:

It was still dark when I left Sheikh Jarrah.

And the following chapter opens:

Latakia is a filthy hole. I had forgotten how bad it was.

He opens From the holy mountain at the Orthodox monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos—with another winning opening sentence:

My cell is bare and austere. **

Moving on to Istanbul, his vignette of the Pera Palace Hotel makes an extreme contrast with Athos. He reflects on the multi-ethnic Byzantine history of Constantinople, and the gradual erosion of tolerance since the late Ottoman era. Greek and Armenian priests give him a gloomy picture of the severely reduced current circumstances of their flocks. He visits the nearby Princes’ Islands, where Greeks were in a majority until the early 20th century.

But his quest is only just beginning.

As the physical world fell into decay, thousands left their families, intent […] on becoming monks and hermits in the desert.

He moves on to Antakya (Antioch) in southeast Anatolia, going in search of clues to the early stylites. From Moschos he gathers that

visiting these pillar saints was a popular afternoon’s outing for the pious ladies of Antioch’s more fashionable suburbs. […]

It was strange: a ragged illiterate hermit being fawned over by the rich and highly educated Greco-Roman aristocracy; yet odder still was the idea of a hermit famed for his ascetic simplicity punishing himself in the finest setting money could buy. It was like holding a hunger strike in the Ritz. […]

They were men who were thought to have crossed the boundary of reality and gained direct access to the divine. It is easy to dismiss the eccentricities of Byzantine hermits as little more than bizarre circus acts, but to do so is to miss the point that man’s deepest hopes and convictions are often quite inexplicable in narrow terms of logic or reason. At the base of a stylite’s pillar one is confronted with the awkward truth that what has most moved past generations can today only sometimes be only tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith, while remaining quite inexplicable and absurd when seen under the harsh distorting microscope of sceptical Western rationality.

Next he visits the frontier town of Urfa, site of ancient Edessa, another crucible of diverse faiths (including Manicheans, Zoroastrians, and Nestorians), where

Orthodoxy was only one among a considerable number of options available to the inquiring believer. […] Doctrine was still in a state of continual flux, and no one interpretation of the Christian message and no single set of gospels had yet achieved dominance over any others.

In modern times, after waves of incidents, the whole region had been purged of Armenians in 1915 (though for a detailed recent ethnography, note Avedis Hadjian, Secret nation). He learns of the ongoing neglect of Armenian monuments, and the political constraints on archaeology.

Holy mountain 2
Suriani woman at the fortress church of Ein Wardo.

Diyarbakir, Dalrymple’s next stop, was now the centre of the Turkish army’s struggle with the PKK (cf. Some Kurdish bards). Braving a succession of checkpoints, Dalrymple manages to reach the ancient Suriani Orthodox monastery of Mar Gabriel, now much reduced but still functioning, as well as the fortified village of Ein Wardo, stronghold of Suriani defence against the Ottoman and Kurdish troops in 1915—an Assyrian genocide was under way at the same time as that of the Armenians.

Holy mountain 1

In search of clues to living Nestorianism, he is told:

“I believe there is a very large Nestorian community in … is there somewhere in London called Ealing?”

“Ealing?”

“Yes, I think that’s right,” said George. “It was in Ealing that the current Nestorian Patriarch was crowned. There should be far more Nestorians in London than here. Ealing has the largest Nestorian community in Europe.”

Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century: go in search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you find that they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.

After another fraught journey into Syria, then a relatively safe haven for Christians, he reaches Aleppo, with notes on another faded grand hotel that appealed to a former generation of English travellers:

The inexplicably horrible food, the decaying neo-Gothic architecture, the deep baths and the uncomfortable beds: no wonder Lawrence and his contemporaries felt so much at home here—the Baron is a perfect replica of some particularly Spartan English public school strangely displaced to the deserts of the Middle East.

Exploring the countryside, he notes the role of monks and holy men in quelling evil spirits, a tradition that still continues. He visits the convent of Seidnaya (previously visited by Colin Thubron), with Muslims praying together with Christians.

Back in Aleppo, he finds a church where the monks still sing Urfalee chant, “apparently the most ancient form of Christian music still being sung anywhere in the world” (cf. Chant and beyond). As Dalrymple fishes for a simple, exotic soundbite on the style, the Italian scholar Gianmaria Malacrida offers careful caveats—which I admire as much as I admire Dalrymple for citing them.

Click here for his update on the cultural damage in the early days of the Syrian civil war.

En route to Lebanon, he is struck by the surreal roadside artwork:

Perhaps strangest of all were the unlikely lines of hoardings that rose above the forbidding ruins lining the highway:a smiling Claudia Schiffer stretched out leopard-like in Salvatore Ferragamo next to a yellow sandstone French colonial villa so riddled with great round shrapnel-holes it resembled an outsize slice of Emmental; the Marlboro cowboy with his ten-gallon hat and herd of steers beaming out over an apocalyptic wasteland of shattered tower blocks; a metal tube of Bodymist—un beau corps sans effort—set against a carbon-black skeleton of twisted metal that had once been a filling station. […]

It was like a morality tale, spiralling downwards through one of the world’s greatest monuments to human frailty, a huge vortex of greed and envy, resentment and intolerance, hatred and materialism, a five-mile-long slalom of shellholes and designer labels, heavy artillery and glossy boutiques.

In Beirut he gains insights from the historian Kemal Salibi, who directs him to Leila Badr, an archaeologist who gives him leads to Byzantine remnants around the city. And he consults the journalist Robert Fisk, “a chronic war junkie” who gives him some valuable, if dodgy, contacts. He learns more of the Maronites, Christian supremacists who emerged from the civil war “with their reputation for ruthlessness, barbarity, and political incompetence enormously enhanced”. The trail leads him to the Maronite town of Bsharri, once famed for its saints, now for its warlords. It was soon to become a scenic tourist destination, not least as the birthplace of Khalil Gibran—whose bequest of the royalties from The prophet had led to a bitter war between rival Maronite clans. Back in Beirut, Dalrymple visits a camp for Christian refugees from Palestine.

Continuing south by a tortuous route into Israel, he gives a succinct introduction to the modern history of the occupation of the West Bank. He delves further into the Armenian history of Jerusalem, and (as in Turkey) learns more about the highly politicised world of archaeology in Israel. He expounds the history of St George, on whom the English have no monopoly.

As the various Christian populations of the Middle East seek sanctuary abroad, without them

the most important shrines in the Christian world will be left as museum pieces, preserved only for the curiosity of tourists. Christianity will no longer exist in the Holy Land as a living faith; a vast vacuum will exist in the very heart of Christendom. As the Archbishop of Canterbury recently warned, the area, “once centre of a strong Christian presence,” risks becoming “a theme park”, devoid of Christians “within fifteen years”.

Holy mountain 3
The monastery of Mar Saba.

Dalrymple enters the desert of the West Bank—once a rather densely populated terrain of monks and monasteries. Staying at Mar Saba, the only living monastery there, he admires their austere regime, but is less impressed by the inedible food. Again recalling Mount Athos, his descriptions of monastic rituals are always evocative (see below).

Ever the historian, he visits the chapel of St John Damascene, whose refutation of heresies The Fount of knowledge makes a critique of Islam—as a new, if heretical, form of Christianity:

What Damascene wrote in this cave was largely responsible for saving Byzantium from the ban against sacred art that has always been part of Islam and Judaism. Without Damascene’s work, Byzantine ars sacra would never again have been permitted, Greek painters might never have been able to pass on their secrets to Giotto and the Siennese, and the course of the Renaissance, if it had happened at all, would have been very different.

And he draws our attention to the prayer niche, “another of those features of the early Christian world which has been lost to modern Western Christianity, yet which is still preserved in Islam”.

His explorations of Egypt start in Alexandria, long deserted by its Greek, Jewish, and Armenian entrepreneurs. Dalrymple visits an abandoned synagogue, and finds the gathering place of the city’s last Greeks.

He offers a vignette on the 1895 discovery of ancient papyrus fragments at Oxyrhynchus by the British archaeologists Grenfell and Hunt, remarkable not just for their classical texts but for their rich archive of Byzantine correspondence and administrative documents, revealing the lives of ordinary people.

In the desert southeast of Cairo he reaches the Coptic Orthodox monastery of St Anthony, still flourishing. Again, the 3rd-century hermit monk was pursued by a fan club of fashionable intelligentsia. By the early 5th century some seven hundred monasteries filled the desert between Jerusalem and the southern border of the Byzantine Empire.

In contrast to medieval Western monks, the Egyptian desert fathers also tended to reject the concept of learning, the worship of knowledge for its own sake. St Anthony was particularly scathing about books, proclaiming that “in the person whose mind is sound there is no need for letters”. […] Many of St Anthony’s Coptic followers emulated his example, preferring a life of hard manual labour and long hours of prayer to one of study.

Indeed, Plato had already lamented the discovery of writing!

Unlike the other monasteries on Dalrymple’s journey, St Anthony’s continues to attract young monks—literate, often university graduates, and keen students of arid farming techniques. Dalyrymple finds them “kind, gentle men, much more modest and reasonable than the bristling Greek brigands of Mar Saba or their sometimes fanatical brethren on Mount Athos”. He gives another vivid depiction of vespers:

Now, as if from nowhere, at least sixty monks had materialised in the nave and all were chanting loudly in a deep, rumbling plainchant quite different from the elusive, bitterwseet melodies of Gregorian chant or the angular, quickfire vespers of the Greeks. Individually the gentlest of men, the Copts at prayer made a massive, dense, booming sound, each stanza sung by the monastic cantor echoed by a thundering barrage of massed male voices. The wall of sound reverberated around the church, bouncing off the squinches of the dome, crashing onto the mud-brick roof then down again like a lead weight into the nave. Yet despite its heaviness, there was nothing harsh or brutal about the Coptic chant, the swelling notes of the refrain resolving to give the whole threnody a tragic, desolate air, as if all the distilled deprivations of generations of monks were being enunciated and offered up, at once an agonised atonement for the sins of mankind and exorcism foretelling the terrors of the night to come. […]

There was a moment of silence as the monks marched from the middle of the nave, through the swirling incense, to a long lectern near the sanctuary where a line of ancient bound vellum lectionaries lay open. There the brethren split into groups. Quietly at first, those on the north began singing a verse of the psalm of the day, those to the south answering them, the volume gradually rising, the stiff, illuminated pages of the service books all turning together as the chant thundered on into the late evening, accompanied now by an occasional clash of cymbals or an ecstatic ringing of triangles. As the service progressed and the tempo of the singing rose, novices swung their thuribles and the great cumulus clouds of frankincense coagulated into a thick white fog in the body of the nave…

I’d love to find videos of such rituals.

After five days in the seclusion of St Anthony’s, he is horrified by the mundane chaos of Cairo, and soon moves on in search of more desert monasteries. He eventually gains permission to visit the province of Asyut, centre of Egypt’s Coptic population, but closed to foreigners since the Islamist insurgency. The prospects seem gloomy, with Copts migrating, first to the anonymity of the cities, and then abroad. With an armed guard he reaches the fortified Coptic Abbey of Deir al-Muharraq, which had recently been attacked. As the convoy moves on to Kharga, an even more remote area, he reflects on the different problems confronting Christians around the Middle East:

In southeast Turkey the Syrian Christians were caught in the crossfire of a civil war, a distinct ethnic group trodden underfoot in the scrummage between two rival nationalisms, one Kurdish, the other Turkish. Here it was their ethnicity as much as their religion which counted against the Christians; they were not Kurds and not Turks, therefore they did not fit in. In Lebanon, the Maronites had reaped a bitter harvest of their own sowing: their failure to compromise with the country’s Muslim majority had led to a destructive civil war that ended in a mass emigration of Christians and a proportional diminution of Maronite power. The dilemma of the Palestinian Christians was quite different again. Their problem was that, like their Muslim compatriots, they were Arabs in a Jewish state, and as such suffered as second-class citizens in their own country, regarded with a mixture of suspicion and contempt by their Israeli masters. However, unlike most of the Muslims, they were educated professionals and found it relatively easy to emigrate, which they did, en masse. Very few were now left. Only in Egypt was the Christian population unambiguously threatened by a straightforward resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, and even there such violent fundamentalism was strictly limited to specific Cairo suburbs and a number of towns and villages in Upper Egypt, even if some degree of discrimination was evident across the country.

* * *

Dalrymple’s work exemplifies why many foreigners are attracted to the Mystic East, in search of grand architecture and the vestiges of ancient civilisations. Sometimes his work reads like a more dependable modern rebranding of Gurdjieff and the Truth Seekers; but his highly readable blending of early history, spiritual quest, and current affairs is really most impressive. 

FWIW, all this reminds me why I really don’t like travelling. It’s not really that I have any sense of “belonging” in London; but I’m averse to being a stranger, an ignorant foreigner unable to communicate. If I’m going to go somewhere, I want to stay there a bit, and get to know at least the basics of what makes the society tick. In China, “hit-and-run” missions can be useful, such as Yang Yinliu’s Hunan survey in 1956, or our reccies of south Fujian (1986/1990), north Shanxi (1992), and the plain south of Beijing; but I’ve relished making a base in one village, and with one family. Indeed, Dalrymple perhaps reached a similar conclusion, having made his home in Delhi since 1989, producing erudite (and always accessible) studies on the art and history of the Indian subcontinent.

* * *

Dalrymple has also written and presented several TV series. In From the holy mountain he himself exposed the long history of bitter conflict in the region (Moschos makes clear “the horrifying, almost apocalyptic nature of the destruction he witnessed around him”), exacerbated in a polarised modern world; so while he might have chosen to join the media in focusing on the gloomy outlook, with all the irreconcilable schisms, instead he prefers to preach a contrasting gospel—the shared roots, diversity, and historical tolerance of Christianity and Islam.

His pacifist credo is clear from the documentary Sufi soul: the mystic music of Islam that he presented for Channel 4 in 2005, directed by Simon Broughton (cf. the 2-CD set The Rough Guide to Sufi music). Filmed in Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, India, and Morocco, the programme offers a broad survey of Sufi musical traditions:

The exigencies of commercial TV suggest that I shouldn’t mark them down too much for including some of the Usual Suspects like the Whirling Dervishes (cf. Bektashi–Alevi ritual, 1). But hey, I continue to churn out armchair vignettes of world music—so “I can’t talk”…

* Later, Frances Wood‘s doubts that Marco Polo even reached China have not been well received.

** Perhaps someone can give me a more accurate version of the spoof on the classic opening for a crime novel that goes something like this:

Dead.

That’s what the portly middle-aged man lying in a crumpled heap with blood seeping over the bare warehouse floor from a gaping wound in his skull was.

Gansu: Return to Dust

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Li Ruijun

Though I’ve never ventured as far as Gansu, I’m always keen to include it in our picture of the culture of northwest China (for more, with a roundup of related posts, click here).

Among the talented younger generation of Chinese film-makers is Li Ruijun 李睿珺 (b.1983). A native of Gaotai county of Zhangye prefecture in Gansu, his style is based on the challenges faced by the dwindling populations of his poor rural home.

I included his Fly with the crane (2012) in my list of documentaries and verismo movies on rural life in China. Inspired by films such as Bicycle thieves, Li (like recent Iranian directors) adheres to the splendid tradition of using amateur actors, judiciously training professionals to immerse themselves in the local lifestyle—as in his latest movie Return to dust (Yinru chenyan 隐入尘烟, 2022), premiered recently at the Berlin International Film Festival (interview; reviewed e.g. here). Here’s a trailer:

and an excerpt:

By September, playing safe before the Party Congress, the film was removed from streaming sites, and online discussion censored. Zhang Yimou’s film One second had to endure similar scrutiny.

For more northwestern verismo, Jia Zhangke continues to bear the torch for rural Shanxi; and for Shaanbei, I’m still enamoured with The story of Qiu Ju, among the movies featured in Chinese film classics of the early reform era. Further south in rural Hunan, note the documentaries of Jiang Nengjie. Given the ongoing repression of the cultural scene, young directors are showing remarkable creativity in negotiating the shifting sands of censorship. Cf. the “native-place fiction” of Jia Pingwa and others.

Ethos: one of a kind

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Ethos 1

After The Club, I’ve been hooked on Ethos, another fine Turkish TV series on Netflix (Berkun Oya, 2020), again popular both in Turkey and abroad. Among many reviews [1] is this perceptive critique by Haziran Düzkan on the feminist site 5Harfliler, from which I borrow below.

Here’s a trailer:

The Turkish title Bir başkadır (“One of a kind”) alludes to Ayten Alpman’s 1972 song Memleketim (“My homeland”). Set in Istanbul, the story exposes the faultlines within Turkish society. It’s centred around the mesmerising character of Meryem, played by Öykü Karayel. At once naïve and astute, Meryem is a part-time cleaner who lives on the outskirts of Istanbul with her ill-tempered brother Yasin and his traumatised wife Ruhiye. After experiencing fainting spells, Meryem consults the uptight psychiatrist Peri, whose culture is quite different: educated, affluent, and secular, she is prejudiced against openly religious people.

Ethos 2

Peri herself sees the therapist Gülbin, to whom she complains about the growing conservatism in Turkish society. Gülbin, from a Kurdish family, has a fraught relationship with her headscarved sister, a supporter of the ruling AKP Party; and she is having a desultory affair with the feckless playboy Sinan—as is the soap-opera star Melisa, who has some wise words to offer Peri when they meet socially. Meryem is under the influence of the benign hodja of the local mosque—whose daughter Hayrünnisa is a gay electronica fan.

Gradually the paths of this disparate group of urban, working, lonely women intersect; their attempts to seek meaningful relationships with men only exacerbate their sense of alienation.

The first episode ends—somewhat obscurely for outsiders like me—with footage from a concert by Ferdi Özbeğen, evoking a nostalgia for “old Turkey”—as Haziran Düzkan explains, as the gay son of an Armenian mother and a migrant father born in Crete, Özbeğen too carried a social burden on his shoulders. Düzkan also notes that while the finale offers a certain redemption, the (female) characters’ triumphs are petty, suggesting that the real “triumph” is that of the (male) director, “for showing us how much we missed talking about the society rather than getting sick and tired of talking about those in power”.

The filming is distinctive, with evocative scenes of the Istanbul landscape, and static portraits of the characters facing the camera framed against a sumptuous colour palette.

And there can be no better incentive to learn Turkish than to relish the nuance of Meryem’s speech in the exquisite dialogues with her therapist and with her suitor Hilmi.

Ethos 3

[1] E.g.
https://ewn.co.za/2021/01/05/turkey-s-latest-netflix-series-ethos-interrogates-the-country-s-social-divides

https://www.duvarenglish.com/ethos-has-put-us-all-in-the-therapists-office-and-asked-us-to-speak-article-55126

https://www.trtworld.com/life/netflix-s-ethos-takes-turkey-by-storm-41790

https://dmtalkies.com/ethos-tv-series-analysis/

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/do-not-burn-coffee-beans.

Rom, Dom, Lom

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kids

Do watch the fine documentary Buçuk [“The Half”] (Elmas Arus and Haluk Arus, 2010) on vimeo, an all-too-brief portrayal of the lives of three minority groups in Turkey: Rom around the Aegean, Thrace, and the Black Sea; Lom in the Armenian regions of Sivas, Erzincan, and Erzurum; and Dom in southeast Anatolia. *

Rom map

Elmas Arus is deeply involved in the campaign for Roma equality, with her campaign Zero Discrimination. Perhaps unavoidably, some of the filming looks exotic, contrasting with the articulate comments of locals and scholars on poverty, social issues, and discrimination. It deserves to be revamped with a more comprehensible version of the subtitles.

Among scenes are the work of a hereditary family of circumcisers and dentists; Lom basket weaving; blacksmiths; waste recycling; training dancing bears.

kemence

The soundtrack is effective throughout. From 6.57 an exhilarating sequence of musicking among the Dom people segues from Gaziantep to Mardin—reminding me yet again of how much we lose in “refined” society” by shackling music acquisition to the classroom (cf. the Growing into music project, and flamenco).

From 22.15 another musical sequence shows a Rom municipal wind band in Bergama north of Izmir; the only instance I know of folk violin played with a mute; and a female wedding group (cf. Afghanistan). Music makes a crucial income:

If we did not have this job, we would have died of hunger—no farm, no land, no income.

Urban demolition, as in the Sulukele quarter of Istanbul, is ironically followed by Erdoğan expressing support for the Roma in 2010. The film goes on to sketch weddings; the transition from nomadic to settled lives; the hıdırellez festival and the annual pilgrimage to Hacıbektaş. All the themes deserve more lengthy treatment.

In her excellent book Bury me standing, Isabel Fonseca only touches on Turkey in her chapter on the Bulgarian Roma, but it makes a fine introduction to the wider context around east central Europe.

This is the latest in my series on culture in Turkey.

* See e.g. here. Relevant wiki articles include

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people_in_Turkey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lom_people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdal_of_Turkey

South American getaway

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Butch

At Cambridge in the early 1970s, as a counterpart to my studies of Chinese culture (here, and here) and WAM, movies also made an important part of my education. At some remove from the arthouse European films that were all the rage was the outlaw movie

  • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) (wiki; see also e.g. here).

Despite mixed reviews, the film soon became a huge hit. Besides Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the title roles, Katherine Ross appears as Etta Place, following her part in The graduate. She went on to star in the sequel Wanted: the Sundance woman (1976). And Hill used the Newman–Redford partnership again with The sting (1973), with a Scott Joplin soundtrack.

The soundtrack for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (playlist) is by Burt Bacharach, whom I revere eternally for I say a little prayer. Robert Redford was not impressed by Raindrops keep falling on my head, sung by B.J. Thomas (“What the hell is that song doing in this film?”)—despite its wonderful major 7th leap:

A scene that undermines the pomposity of soundtracks in traditional Westerns is South American getaway, with the Ron Hicklin singers in fine form:

The disembodied audio is here, so as to focus on the musical artistry of the alternating zany and nostalgic passages, and that major 7th leap again (0.28, 3.18). They might have come up with more imaginative instrumental bridges, but hey. And this is clearly not the time for ethnographic study of musicking in Bolivia…

Another scene that remains with me is “Can I move?”:

which somehow for me evoked Kyūzō in Seven samurai (rather than anything in the remake The magnificent seven), and now even reminds me of the importance of context in folk musicking…

La voix humaine

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BH LVH

Back home from Istanbul, my ears still buzzing with Bektashi–Alevi ritual and the call to prayer, I went along to the Barbican to be astounded yet again at the innovative genius of Barbara Hannigan with the LSO (programme notes here).

They opened with Richard Strauss’s searing Metamorphosen, composed at the end of World War Two—all the more moving on a day when war came to Europe again. Dispensing with Denis Guéguin’s pre-recorded video montage (shown in the 2021 concert below), Ms Hannigan left the hushed lower strings to open the piece by themselves—an effective device (cf. Noddy and Hector). It’s a threnody that deserves to be the intense focus of any programme, yet tends to suffer as a kind of overture.

After barely a pause to reset the stage, Hannigan’s brief, mind-bending spoken introduction on screen prepares us for Francis Poulenc’s “brief and devastating” tragédie-lyrique opera La voix humaine (1958), in which she embodies the abandoned and distraught “Elle” on the phone to her former lover.

This is the latest of several versions she has been working on since 2015; through Clemens Malinowski’s live video projection (subtitled in English) we find Elle caught in her own fantasy, directing the orchestra. Following on from her signature incarnation of Lulu, Hannigan observes:

Elle has been a significant role for me as my career has evolved, and we now see an Elle who sings, an Elle who conducts. The theme of transformation runs throughout the programme on many levels, as we confront issues such as ageing, deterioration, decadence, loss, and disintegration. I had always thought that Elle’s forays into fantasy, delusion, and control made La voix humaine a highly possible sing-conduct performance.

Poulenc completed the opera soon after Poulenc’s Dialogue des Carmélites. Based on the 1928 play by Cocteau, it was composed for Denise Duval *—Poulenc worked closely with them both on the piece.

Duval Voix

Here’s Duval in a 1970 film of the opera, using her 1959 audio recording (first of four parts):

Barbara Hannigan is the most mesmerising physical presence on stage. As she sings she cues the orchestra with demented nodding, pummelling them with clenched fists—a far cry from the austere male maestros of yesteryear. Though some reviewers (e.g. here and here) found the interpretation narcissistic, her standing ovation was well deserved.

This is her 2021 performance of the programme with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France:

* Although Poulenc wrote the opera for Duval, Jessica Duchen’s programme notes cite a drôle story about Callas, the ultimate diva:

Another spur for the piece may have been an incident at La Scala, Milan, when, at a performance with some friends in January 1956, Poulenc watched Maria Callas taking a curtain call. He recalled: “As the last notes faded beneath thunderous applause, Callas violently pushed the splendid Mario [del Monaco] into the corner of the wings and advanced by herself into the middle of the stage. At which point one of my dear friends, my publisher [Henri Dugardin], who was sitting next to me, said: “You should write an opera just for her—that way, she wouldn’t be such a nuisance.”

The Club

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Club actors

Like Turkish audiences, I’ve been riveted by the recent ten-instalment TV series The Club (Netflix, 2021), directed by Seren Yüce and Zeynep Günay Tan. The drama exposes the multicultural Turkish elephant in the room, probing the boundaries of free speech today (cf. The Armenian genocide).

Netflix offers a choice of seven languages, with subtitles, in any combination you please; I wasn’t too disturbed by the somewhat stilted voices in the dubbed English version, but I envy local viewers their ability to catch the nuance of the conversational switches between Turkish, Ladino, and Greek in the original soundtrack.

Club mother daughter

Revolving around Istanbul’s Jewish community (with Ladino often heard), the plot is framed by the wealth tax of 1942—heavily penalising non-Muslims—and the anti-Greek pogrom of 1955, also ignited by ethnic tensions in Cyprus. In 1955, Matilda, a Jewish ex-convict, finds work in one of Istanbul’s leading nightclubs. As she tries to rebuild her relationship with her daughter Raşel, Matilda struggles to keep her away from Muslim playboy İsmet. With the outrageously camp singing star Selim, she also stands against her boss Orhan and nightclub manager Çelebi.

With such issues unfamiliar to many viewers, the series has been warmly received by Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike (reviews e.g. here and here). It’s also a visual period-piece, with charismatic actors—and some great songs carefully chosen to enhance the dramatic moment.

Club Selim

This YouTube playlist includes, in Ladino, the exquisite Yo era ninya (cf. this popular version):

and Adio kerida, sung by Yasmin Levy:

Here Salih Bademci (as the dreamy Selim) performs Masal (Fairy tale), by iconic Turkish singer Sezen Aksu—though the song is later, it’s another astute choice, given her link to progressive causes:

The directors’ pluralistic agenda is further underlined in their recruiting of pianist-composer-arranger Fazil Say; charged with blasphemy in 2012, he went on to compose a series of pieces reflecting on the suppression of the 2013 Gezi Park protests. And the final débacle of The Club is accompanied by alternating Greek and Turkish versions of Zülfü Livaneli‘s 1979–80 song Kardeşin Duymaz, pleading for coexistence:

 * * *

1955 pogrom

Photo: Ara Güler (I think).

In Istanbul today the dwindling Jewish community remains under threat. As this Al Jazeera review observes,

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has occasionally referred to what he calls the “fascist mentality” of the single-party era before 1950 in criticism of the opposition Republican People’s Party, which ruled at the time, and how it treated minorities. “They were ethnically cleansed because they had a different ethnic cultural identity”, Erdogan said in 2009. “The time has arrived for us to question ourselves about why this happened and what we have learned from all of this”.

If that sounds rather enlightened, the review goes on:

But neither Erdogan nor other Turkish leaders have taken any concrete steps to address the Wealth Tax, the 1955 pogrom, or other attacks on minorities. The Democrat Party, which won the first free and fair elections in the country in 1950, campaigned on a pledge to pay reparations for the Wealth Tax, but never kept the promise.

In fiction the sensitive topic has been broached before in works such as Mrs Salkim’s diamonds (1990 novel; 1999 film), but The Club is now giving it a far wider audience. Not only is the unfolding of the drama compelling in itself (with regular Doof Doof moments), but it’s educating viewers within Turkey—and, I hope, further afield.

A recent scholarly panel offers a critique of the series:

See also Ethos: one of a kind.

Bambi reconsidered

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Bambi

I boldly suggested that my film on the Li family Daoists might make more stimulating Christmas viewing than watching Bambi for the umpteenth time—but now it transpires that the original story of the latter has been gravely diluted and sugar-coated, as shown in

The original novel Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde was written in 1923 by Felix Salten, an author and critic in Vienna. Far from being a cute children’s story, the new translation shows that Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and precarious life of Jews and other minorities as fascism loomed. In 1935 the book was banned by the Nazis, who burned it as Jewish propaganda.

Meanwhile the original English translation, published in 1928, “toned down Salten’s anthropomorphism and changed its focus so that it was more likely to be understood as a simple conservation story about animals living in a forest”.

In 1933 Salten sold the film rights to MGM producer Sidney Franklin for a paltry $1,000; Franklin then sold them on to Walt Disney, who read the 1928 translation, and loved animal stories. Hence the saccharine 1942 animated movie about a young deer who finds love and friendship in a forest. While there is much to admire about Disney, from his movies to his koanesque aperçu (n. here, and under Daoist non-action), Salten himself never earned a penny from the movie.

Bambi cover

A new translation by Jack Zipes reasserts the book’s original message warning of the persecution and dangers faced by Jews in Europe. It soon becomes apparent that the forest animals are living out their lives in fear and that puts the reader constantly “on edge”. As Zipes comments, “All the animals have been persecuted. And I think what shakes the reader is that there are also some animals who are traitors, who help the hunters kill”. Without being didactic, Salten could encourage the reader to feel more empathy towards oppressed groups—and Bambi could openly question the cruelty of their oppressors. “Many other writers, like George Orwell, chose animals too because you’re freer to tackle problems that might make your readers bristle. And you don’t want them to bristle, you want them to say, at the end: this is a tragedy.”

When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Salten managed to flee to Switzerland. Stripped of his Austrian citizenship by the Nazis, he spent his final years “lonely and in despair” in Zurich and died in 1945—like Bambi, with no safe place to call home.

Roundup for 2021!

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Emma Leylah

As I observed in my roundup for 2020, since part of my mission (whatever that is) is to vary the distribution of the diverse posts on this blog, keeping you guessing, this latest annual mélange is an occasion to group together some major themes from this past year. This is only a selection; for reasons of economy, I’ve tended to skip over some of the lighter items. You can also consult the tags and categories in the sidebar.

Some essential posts:

I’m going to emulate Stella Gibbons and award *** to some other *MUST READ!* posts too…

China: on the Li family Daoists, recent and older posts are collected in

and it’s always worth reminding you to watch our film

Elsewhere,

Tributes to three great sinologists:

The beleaguered cultures of the

  • Uyghurs (posts collected here) and
  • Tibetans (posts collected here), including

I’ve begun a growing series on Turkey (with a new tag for west/Central Asia):

Among this year’s additions to the jazz, pop, punk tags are

In memoriam Fou Ts’ong https://stephenjones.blog/2021/01/02/fou-tsong/

WAM:

Bach (added to the roundup A Bach retrospective):

as well as

On “world music” and anthropology:

Patricia Lockwood https://stephenjones.blog/2021/02/13/lockwood/

On gender (category here, with basic subheads):

Germany:

Italy:

Britain (see also The English, home and abroad), and the USA:

More on stammering:

On a lighter note:

Even just for this last year, I realise there’s a lot to read there, but do click away on all the links! And I can’t resist reminding you of some of my earlier favourites, notably

Ma Yuan

Karen Dalton

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Karen Dalton

Jumping belatedly on a bandwagon long driven by Bob Dylan and Nick Cave, I’m moved by the plangent voice of Karen Dalton (1937–93)—a worthy addition to my essential Playlist of songs!

For some reason I can warm to Country, but I seem to have a blind (deaf) spot about Anglo-American folk. Apart from being a tad allergic to guitar songs, it’s quite unfair of me to reduce it to a wholesome image of apple pie and right-on social activism. But Karen Dalton crashes right through all that.

She may not have approved of Dylan likening her voice to that of Billie Holiday, but it’s inevitable. Billie only rarely sang the blues—though she saved her greatest ever blues for her 1957 TV appearance.

Dalton, Dylan, Neill

Bob Dylan, Karen Dalton, and Fred Neil, early 60s.

There’s more artifice, and variety, in Billie’s voice, and in her opulent backings. Karen emerged from the Greenwich village folk scene, but there’s a rare depth of anguish in her sound, accompanying herself on twelve-string guitar or banjo. “Not interested in playing the music industry’s games in an era when musicians had little other choice”, she managed to self-destruct without going through the usual stages of celebrity and tabloid exposure. So despite her admirers, her music remained a niche taste until quite recently (see e.g. here).

Here’s a playlist for her 1969 album It’s so hard to tell who’s going to love you the best:

Though she only sang covers, she transformed them. It hurts me too had long been a popular blues standard—here’s Elmore James (1957):

and Junior Wells (1965):

But Karen’s version has a plaintive, personal quality:

While I prefer the very basic production values of It’s so hard to tell…, her 1971 album In my own time is also very fine, opening with Something on your mind—another Yesterday… song:

Here’s Katie cruel:

This playlist has more.

Here’s a short documentary from 2009:

And a trailer for a recent documentary:

How little I know of all the cross-fertilisations of blues, Country, soul, pop, and onwards… Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the 60s were remarkable—Coltrane, Miles; soul; Beatles, Stones… Meanwhile in the rarefied echelons of WAM, the Mahler craze was growing, and the early music movement was getting going.

Karen Dalton 2

Art Pepper

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Pepper meets cover

In my post on Frank Morgan I mentioned how he managed to keep active on sax while in San Quentin by playing along with fellow inmates.

That post set forth from LA detective Harry Bosch’s good taste in jazz, and again Michael Connelly’s novels have some pertinent comments on Art Pepper (1925–82), who was one of Morgan’s jazz colleagues in jail.

Pepper 1966

Pepper was no angel either. Like Chet Baker, he was a white West-coast junkie. In Connelly’s A darkness more than night (2000) he evokes the classic 1957 album Art Pepper meets the rhythm section:

He went into the house and got two more beers out of the refrigerator. This time McCaleb was standing in the living room when he came back from the kitchen. He handed Bosch his empty bottle and Bosch wondered for a moment if he had finished it or poured the beer over the side of the deck. He took the empty into the kitchen and when he came back McCaleb was standing at the stereo studying a CD case.
“This what’s playing?” he asked. Art Pepper meets the rhythm section?”
Bosch stepped over.
“Yeah. Art Pepper and Miles’s side men. Red Garland on piano, Pau Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums. Recorded here in LA, January 19, 1957. One day. The cork in the neck of Pepper’s sax was supposedly cracked but it didn’t matter. He had one shot with those guys. He made the most of it. One day, one shot, one classic. That’s the way to do it.”
“These guys were in Miles Davis’s band?”
“At the time.”
McCaleb nodded. Bosch leaned close to look at the CD cover in McCaleb’s hands.
“Yeah, Art Pepper,” he said. “When I was growing up I never knew who my father was. My mother, she used to have a lot of this guy’s records. She hung out at some of the jazz clubs where he’d play. Handsome devil, Art was. For a hype. Just look at that picture. Too cool to fool. I made up this whole story about how he was my old man and he wasn’t around ’cause he was always on the road and making records. Almost got to the point I believed it. Later on—I mean years later—I read a book about him. It said he was junk sick when they took that picture. He puked as soon as it was over and went back to bed.”
McCaleb studied the photograph on the CD. A handsome man leaning against a tree, his sax cradled in his right arm.
“Well, he could play,” McCaleb said.
“Yeah, he could,” Bosch agreed. “Genius with a needle in his arm.”
Bosch stepped over and turned the volume up slightly. The song was Straight life, Pepper’s signature composition.
“Do you believe that?” McCaleb asked.
“What, that he was a genius? Yeah, he was with the sax.”
“No, I mean do you think that every genius—musician, artist, even a detective—has a fatal flaw like that? The needle in the arm.”
“I think everybody’s got a fatal flaw, whether they’re a genius or not.”

The full album seems to have disappeared from YouTube, so here’s Straight life:

The song Patricia features in The black box (2012):

Bosch had begun making his way through the Art Pepper recordings his daughter had given him for his birthday. He was on volume 3 and listening to a stunning version of Patricia recorded three decades earlier at a club in Croydon, England. It was during Pepper’s comeback period after the years of drug addiction and incarceration. On this night in 1981 he had everything working. On this one song, Bosch believed he was proving that no-one would ever play better. Harry wasn’t exactly sure what the word ethereal meant, but it was the word that came to mind. The song was perfect, the saxophone was perfect, the interplay and communication between Pepper and his three band mates was as perfect and orchestrated as the movement of four fingers on a hand. There were a lot of words used to describe jazz music. Bosch had read them over the years in the magazines and in the liner notes of records. He didn’t always understand them. He just knew what he liked, and this was it. Powerful and relentless, and sometimes sad.
He found it hard to concentrate on the computer screen as the song played, the band going on almost twenty minutes with it. He had Patricia on other records and CDs. It was one of Pepper’s signatures. But he had never heard it played with such sinewy passion. He looked at his daughter, who was lying on the couch reading a book. Another school assignment. This one was called The fault in our stars.
“This is about his daughter,” he said
Maddie looked over the book at him.
“What do you mean?”
“This song. Patricia. He wrote it for his daughter. He was away from her for long periods in her life, but he loved her and he missed her. You can hear that in it, right?”
She thought a moment and then nodded.
“I think. It almost sounds like the saxophone is crying.”

Like Frank Morgan, Art Pepper rebuilt his career after being freed from prison in 1965. Here’s a 1978 recording of Patricia:

Don McGlynn’s documentary Art Pepper: notes from a jazz survivor, filmed in 1982, his last year, also features his third wife Laurie (with Patricia discussed from 24.00):

In the LRB Terry Castle riffs brilliantly on Pepper’s 1979 autobiography Straight life.

Aside from “the music itself” (sic), while accounts of jazzers’ lives are vivid (e.g. Miles, Mingus, Chet…), it’s possible to tire of them: self-destruction is one thing, but the misogyny is hard to take. As with WAM composers, we may learn from their stories and the society in which they lived, but admiring the music doesn’t have to entail endorsing its creators. Men behaving badly yet again… (cf. Deviating from behavioural norms).

Jonny spielt auf

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Jonny promo

Getty Images: Ullstein Bild.

In my post on Erich Korngold, I mentioned Richard Taruskin’s 1994 essay “The golden age of kitsch”, where he reviews CDs of Korngold’s Das wunder der Heliane and Ernst Krenek’s 1937 “jazz opera” Jonny spielt auf [Jonny goes to town, or Jonny strikes up]. So here I’ll introduce the latter.

Alex Ross (The rest is noise, Chapter 6 “City of nets: Berlin in the 20s”) provides background.

For a little while in the late 20s, Krenek acquired certifiable, almost Gershwin-like celebrity. […] Like so many young Austrians and Germans, he yearned to break out of the hothouse of Romantic and Expressionist art, to join the milling throngs in the new democratic street.

Taruskin’s typically polemical essay is worth citing at some length.

The Nazi concept of artistic degeneracy was incoherent and opportunistic, and so is Decca/London’s marketing strategy. It took very little to run afoul of the Nazis then, and it costs very little to deplore them now. Their opposition, especially when it was passively incurred, conferred no distinction, unless their approval is thought to confer distinction on the likes of Beethoven or Wagner. There are no lessons to be learned from studying the Nazi index of banned musical works, which, like the Nazi canon, contained masterpieces, ephemerae, kitsch, and trash, covering a wide stylistic and ideological range. […]

So just this once let’s forget the Nazis. They had nothing to do with Krenek’s opera or Korngold’s opera. They didn’t even ban them. They didn’t have to ban them, for both works had fallen out of the repertory by 1933. […]

What makes these first [CD] releases fascinating is not what they have to say about the Nazis but what they have to say about the artistic atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, which had a thriving operatic economy—the last truly thriving, that is, consumption-driven, economy in the history of opera. Composers wrote for a market. Their work was in demand. They strove not for eventual immortality but for immediate success. Producers could recoup their investment in new works and sometimes exceed it, so they sought out new works. Premieres were more noteworthy than revivals, and commanded the interest of the press.

Was this a degenerative ecology? Did it lead to exploitative “populist” formulas, or to weak imitation? No, it was synergistic; it led to experimentation and to emulation, with the aim of surpassing previous standards of novelty and distinction.

He goes on to note the great success of operas like Berg’s Wozzeck (for Lulu, see here). But even more popular was Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf. Still, Taruskin describes what strikes me as a common trait of WAM until the late 19th century:

Sudden eclipse was part of the bargain. An opera had its place in the sun if it managed to earn one, and then it moved out of the way.

He attributes the waning of this nurturing operatic ecology to the talkies:

The movies did not only preempt the operatic audience. At a profound level, the movies became the operas of the mid- to late 20th century, leaving the actual opera houses with a closed-off museum repertoire and a specialised audience of aficionados, rather than a a general entertainment public hungry for sensation. With the advent of the sound film, opera found its preeminence as a union of the arts compromised and its standing as the grandest of all spectacles usurped. […]

Cinematic transport to distant times and climes was instantaneous. Evocative atmosphere, exotic or realistic, could be more potently conjured up on film than on the best-equipped operatic stage, and the narrative techniques of the movies were unprecedentedly flexible and compelling. […]

But wait, isn’t there another difference, a bigger one? Opera, however, popular, remains an art, while movies, or at least Hollywood movies, are a mass-produced and mass-reproduced medium and amount only to kitsch. Or so we are told. I am not so sure.

The operatic world from which Korngold and Krenek emerged, like the wider world of art in the period following the Great War, was a bitterly divided world. The division was not simply between stylistic radicalism and conservatism, or between a liberating iconoclasm and a hidebound tradition, though that is how a stubbornly Whiggish historiography continues to represent it. Nor was it primarily a division between a senile romanticism and a new classicism, as so many artists of the time liked to say. It was, rather, a difference in the way that art was viewed in relation to the world.

Citing the early Soviet critic Boris Asafyev:

An authentic modern music would have to be “nearer to the street than to the salon, nearer to the life of public actuality than to that of philosophical seclusion”,

Taruskin goes on to contrast the operas of Korngold and Krenek:

Though they are being marketed now under a crude common rubric, they embodied antithetical values.

Jonny poster

Unlike Korngold, “the master of musical sacroporn” (an epithet that Taruskin also applies to Turangalîla!), Krenek embodied the new genre of Zeitoper, “now-opera”:

“Now-opera” was not simply a matter of contemporary action, of references to current events and American pop-genres (shimmies, tangos, blues, Negro-spiritualen) and pop-timbres (sax, banjo), though these were the grounds for Jonny’s immediate audience appeal and its subsequent (misleading) reputation as a “jazz opera”. Its main novelty was irony: the clash between the ephemeral content and the “classical” form. And this implied another, more fundamental clash: in place of the music of timeless inner feeling, its unabating fluidity of tempo dissolving chronometric reality, there was now to be a music that proceeded just as unabatingly through through busy ostinatos at what Krenek at one point labelled “schnelles Grammophon-tempo”, emphasising uniformity of physical and physiological motion and banshing psychology. It was a music of corporeal elation and spiritual nihilism, a tonic for the tired and the disillusioned, for people who felt betrayed by the lie of transcendence. It was, in short, the music not of America but of “Americanism”. And so the now-opera was not really sachlich after all but still märchenhaft, embodying not a new reality but a new fairy tale, a new allegory and, yes, a new kitsch.

In Jonny spielt auf, the first now-opera, the allegory is overt and sledge-hammer-subtle. The protagonist is not the title character—a negro band-leader vaguely modeled, it seems, on Sam Wooding, whose Chocolate Kiddies Revue swept Germany in 1925–26—but Max, a Central European composer of traditional transcendental bent.

As the glacier-like Max pursues banjo-playing operatic diva Anita (an evocation of Anna Mahler, to whom Krenek was briefly married), Jonny attempts to steal the enchanted Amati violin of Daniello, a slick, matinee-idol classical virtuoso.

A tiny leitmotif, just a descent through the interval of a fourth to a downbeat, pervades everything. (Anyone who has heard Ravel’s “jazz”-tinged L’enfant et les sortilèges of 1925 will recall this very distinctive idea as the “Maman!” motif. Did Krenek?).

Finally Max, his glacier persona melting, sets off with Anita for America, whither Krenek followed in 1938.

Here’s a playlist of excerpts:

Actually, the opera is far from the accessible populism of The threepenny opera (1928), and jazz plays a very minor role—not least because when Krenek “conceived his libretto, he had never met a Negro or an American”. What he set out to provide was “a hope-inspiring Pied Piper, or a latter-day Papageno, as alluringly Other as possible”.

The everyday, the ephemeral, and the phenomenal […] could function convincingly within the world of opera only as an exotic import. By its very presence, it was exceptional, numinous, and threatening. So now-opera was stil, opera. It could only be a special case, a subgenre; and it could not escape the fate of the genre as a whole.

Taruskin finds the opera dubious politically too:

The freedom celebrated at the end of Jonny spielt auf is only the freedom to seek new masters, to submit to a new hypnosis.

He notes the tendency to forgive both the operas of both Korngold and Krenek their cynicism.

The indulgence, it seems pretty clear, is purchased courtesy of the Nazis. Take away their seal of disapproval, and we are left not with easily dismissed “degeneracy” but with decadence, which is more real, more disquieting, and much harder to get a grip on.

This was the downside of the thriving consumer culture that, in our day, with opera a walking corpse, seems at first so enviable. But this was a culture of frisson and titillation posing as a culture of liberation and uplift.

Going rather far in imputing a moral purpose for “serious music” (“The danger of Taruskin”?!), he suggests:

However it may tickle our sense of irony to contemplate it, and even if we choose to excuse its practitioners on grounds of naïveté or sincere bad taste, it entailed a lack of moral purpose that rendered the “serious” arts defenceless against totalitarian rhetoric, and passively complicit in its triumph.

Given Krenek’s hazy acquaintance with the world he was evoking, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the Real Thing (more leads under Clarke Peters’ radio series on black music in Europe): here’s the Sam Wooding band with Shanghai shuffle in 1925 Berlin (leading us nicely to Shanghai jazz):

and the Chocolate Kiddies in 1933:

Note also the post about Jonny spielt auf on the stimulating site Black Central Europe.

* Ross also cites Slonimsky’s fine summary of Max Brand’s Machinist Hopkins (1929) (evoking Stella Gibbons’ spoof synopsis of a Britten opera):

A cuckolding libertine pushes the husband of his mistress to his death in the cogs of a monstrous machine and strangles her when he finds out she has become a promiscuous prostitute, whereupon the foreman, Machinist Hopkins, dismisses him from his job, ostensibly for inefficiency.