Film: Genghis Blues, the amazing story of how Paul Pena went to Tuva.
Well, I've been very derelict in posting to this blog with all the hectic craziness of back-to-school and finishing up my Barlow Aesop book manuscript... but what a great way to get back into posting here, in order to say something about a genius film, Genghis Blues. I saw this documentary by accident in San Francisco, back in 1999 when it first came out (I was still living in the Bay area then...) - I was absolutely captivated, by the sounds of the singing, and by the story of these people - Paul Pena, the blind American blues musician, Kongar-Ol, the Tuvan throat singer... and even the ghost of Richard Feynmann without whom it seems that it would never have been possible for all the pieces to fall into place.
This movie is unforgettable, and I was wondering very much what my husband would think of it. Would it be off the scale for his bizarrometer? Too weird for him to enjoy? Not so - he loved it. He kept saying during the movie every ten minutes or so, "This is so weird." And it is weird. But it's true. And you cannot help but love all of it!
The DVD we watched included a marvelous interview with the Belic brothers who made the film. In the interview they reported that Paul Pena had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I checked at Wikipedia, and learned that he passed away in 2005. I wish he were still with us, but he had a lot he could give thanks for.
When you watch this movie, you really think that music maybe could save the world.
Film: Conspiracy, a film about the Wannsee Conference, starring Kenneth Branagh.
What an EXCELLENT movie. It shows us the Wannsee Conference, that notorious meeting of Nazi leaders - military, civilian - who settled upon the extermination of the Jews in Europe. I became curious about this meeting after watching the miniseries War & Remembrance last summer, and also having watched the docudrama Nuremberg. So, I was excited when I found out that there was this docudrama about the Wannsee Conference itself - and the film is a masterful study of the event.
It opens with Eichmann nervously preparing for the conference - the servants are polishing the silver, the food is being set out, flowers in vases, and so on - and then the conference attendees begin to arrive: civilians and Nazi party officials like F.W. Kritzinger, Wilhelm Stuckart (brilliant performance by Colin Firth!) and Gerhard Klopfer, along with military commanders, like Otto Hofmann and Heinrich Müller. Finally, General Heydrich arrives - played to terrifying perfection by Branagh - and the meeting begins.
Then, what we see is the meeting itself. A highly edited transcript has actually survived, and that provides the basis for this reconstruction of the contentious argument about what to do with the millions of Jews not just in Germany but in the occupied territories (including Russia, which the Germans still believe they will occupy even though at that very moment the war in Russian is going disastrously for the Germans). It's not that anyone at the table has any love for the Jews. They despise the Jews. That still does not stop them from arguing intensely about what to do. Stuckart, who wrote the Nuremberg laws which laid the legal groundwork for Nazi persecution of the Jews, is outraged that the "rule of law" is going to be jettisoned in favor of putting the SS in charge of the Jewish problem. Erich Neumann, a bureaucrat in charge of the industrial "Four Year Plan," is distraught because valuable Jewish labor may be deported or sent to the gas chambers. The military men are worried about the negative effect on morale posed by asking soldiers to kill millions of Jews. It is blood-chilling to listen to all of this... a discussion which happened in the heart of Europe, just sixty years ago.
The script is brilliant - not a word wasted. I found the film completely gripping from start to finish, and even though I have read a lot of Holocaust literature, I had never really seen anything like this, the debate amongst the Nazis themselves - a debate which resulted directly in the establishment and the administration of the death camps.
Everyone involved in the production of this film deserves a round of applause. These surely cannot have been easy roles to play, but all of the performances were excellent, especially Branagh, Firth and Stanley Tucci, as Eichmann. At just 96 minutes, the film gives you the actual length of the meeting itself: 85 minutes, in which millions of people were condemned to death. Was there ever such a meeting like this in the history of the world? Let us hope there never will be again.
And here is YouTube video clip, which shows a crucial moment in the meeting, when the question of the actual murder of the Jews emerges into the open (I'm just now realizing what great film clips I can find at YouTube to add to these blog posts - thanks to the people who are finding such good clips to share).
I just finished reading this book for probably the 20th time or so... I've been reading the book every year since I first encountered it at the age of 16. I may have missed a few years - although in recent years, I have found even more and more of value here. That's a marvelous experience to have with a book. This book meant the world to me when I discovered the book as a teenager - and now it means even more to me as a very middle-aged adult. How many books work like that, eh? But this book is exceptional in every way.
With a book that has become this much a part of my own being and how I see the world, it's hard to even know what to say - so I'll just choose a quote here that expresses a nice good chunk of the books's meaning, and shows the wonderfully refreshing way in which Pirsig is able to tackle the big questions:
The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either. Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.
Ghosts, you can say - or Maya, illusion. Although I like the idea of ghosts. It's a word that still carries a punch, for all that most people might say they don't believe in ghosts. Even though, of course, as Pirsig points out here, we DO believe in ghosts. All of us do.
I poked around online to find a cover of the edition of Zen that is more or less the same as the cover of the first copy I owned and read, back in the summer of 1980. I've owned and given away so many copies of this book over the years that I've lost track. Another true sign of a good book! :-)
