Alexandra

Films often remind me of other works of art- poetry, novels or paintings. Alexandra, a film by the Russian director Alexandr Sokurov, reminds me of nothing more than a painting, a still. An old woman visits her grandson fighting in the Second Chechen war. Her eyes become our eyes looking in on the life of the camp and on the relationship between grandmother and grandson. They enable us to understand the nature of what it is to be a soldier in the 21st Century in particular conflict. Like a painting, the film does not explore the 'before' or 'after', the tragic history of colonialism and terrorism that has brought Russia into Chechnya and Chechnya into Russia: rather like a painting it provides a still of what life has to offer for the soldier on the front line from the civilian perspective.

The first thing you notice about the film is the heat. Sitting in the British Film Institute, watching the film, all I could think about was how much I required a glass of water. Characters, especially our grandmother are continuously complaining about the heat. Beads of sweat run down the heads of the young soldiers. The dust is ever present and the barren land reinforces the image of heat. Within the camp, the world is sterile, metallic and dusty. Sand and fire are the materials of a particular type of nightmare: there are no trees here and I immediately thought of the science fiction horror of Visitor to a Museum as a natural counterpart. There is something of hell in every military barracks.

Alexandra comes into the barracks and meets the troops and her own grandson. Two things immediately strike you: the first is that this is a world of young men without any women- old or young. The young men behave as any young men do: but you can see they are bored. They are condemned to wait in the dust for whatever is coming next. Furthermore their boredom is bleak. Alexandra's grandson tells her that he will never marry: firstly because he knows that marriage in his own family has turned to disaster (a comment by Sokurov on Russian marriage as a whole) and secondly implicitly because he knows he will die in Chechnya. So he makes do with a succession of girlfriends from St Petersburg. The barracks has removed him and his fellows from the civilisation of their contemporaries- and plunged them into a strange half light, bored they wait for a bomb at the side of the road or to be ordered into committing an atrocity.

We follow Alexandra discussing with her grandson their own family and we glimpse the loss from the other direction. Having lost her own husband, living in loneliness and confronting her own mortality the old woman wants and requires companionship. As the light dims, she wants to see her family- war has taken this as it takes all other things away. As she departs on the train to the north, the viewer of the film knows both that this is the last time that grandson and grandmother will ever meet, and that this is a tragedy.

Sokurov never comments directly on the war itself- but affords us one last glimpse of the tragedy that it embodies. Alexandra leaves the camp and goes to a market one day: she meets there a Chechen woman and goes back with the Chechen woman to her house and has tea. The ties that bind are more powerful in this case than the division of war and nationality: so Alexandra relates to the Chechen woman who comes to bid her farewell at the station and her son whose political protests she treats with patient, stoic, grandmotherly practicality.

Sokurov never tells us that the war is unjust, never says that Russia should not be fighting it. He just shows us the cost of the war. A viewer inclined to optimism might say that the last exchanges show that war should never happen. A viewer inclined to pessimism might say that wars like the poor are things that we always have with us. The gods play dice and make us their sport- despite the cost to us all and there is nothing we can to stop the roll of the die. Sokurov allows us to understand the costs and pity the individuals who bear them: perhaps that is all that we can do.

Old Soldiers and women

I noticed in browsing tonight an interesting case at the Old Bailey from 1735. As usual it is interesting for what it doesn't say rather than what it does. The indictment is clear: three men, Charles Hooper, Thomas Baugh and James Farrel robbed a third John Wood. The robbery was performed with masks- though Wood was able to identify Farrel and at gun point. Hooper and Farrell were found guilty when Baugh turned the King's evidence and they were sentenced to die.

That isn't what I found interesting. Two things in particular struck me about the case. The first is this, Farrell was wearing according to Baugh a red waistcoat because he was in the third regiment. Farrell called some witnesses up to the bar to give information about his character. John Postern, Joseph Walker and Francis Patterson all testified that he had had a job, making earthen wear pots but had enlisted recently. Baugh also testified that he, Hooper and Farrel had met that evening to go out to rob. The picture we get from this small fragment of evidence is that Farrel had enlisted in the army following an unsuccesful career and now was on the way out to rob. That tells us a lot about the life of a soldier in the eighteenth century.

The second interesting thing about the case is that there was a dispute between Wood the victim and Baugh the witness. Wood deposed that he had been wandering about on a field near Highbury around 3 or 4 in the morning when he was robbed. Baugh agreed with him but said that there was a woman there with him. Wood states as soon as Baugh gave that evidence that the woman was with the gang not him and the trial leaves the matter unresolved. What's so interesting is the vehemence with which Wood rejects the allegation. All we have here is a fragment and there is no way of saying who that woman was or what she was to the gang or to Wood, but it is an interesting detail none the less.

One might speculate about what more it tells us about Wood and his encounter with the gang on the field near Highbury that the court never heard.

Bismark's ideology

Democracy encourages truth telling by politicians about their priorities. We'll hear a lot in 2012 about flip flopping- especially if Mitt Romney runs for the Republican nomination and a fair number of people on the right in the UK deride David Cameron as a communist, just as I'm sure the knives will be out for Ed Miliband should he win an election. Those perceptions may well be fair- and there are good institutional reasons for wanting politicians who believe what they say before the election and then do it after the election. Often one way of ensuring that is obtaining people with a strong ideology whose ideology frames both their rhetoric and their politics: to use a phrase beloved of a conservative friend of mine, if someone is 'sound' they are more likely to be predictable in their political conduct and if you believe in the ideology that probably will make them more effective too.

The interesting thing is what this leads us to underrate- political flexibility and nous. The career of Bismark illustrates this perfectly. According to Jonathan Steinberg's recent biography, when Bismark was first selected for a political career he was brought in by the influence of the hardline conservatives in the Prussian state. This influence guarenteed him his first job and guarenteed him his Chancellorship in 1862. Bismark though was never a real conservative: he was in favour of breaking the German states and was capable of appealing over the heads of the pro-Austrian princes to their subjects. In the late 1860, his mentor Leopold von Gerlach wrote to Bismark saying that 'It depresses me that through your bitterness towards Austria you have allowed yourself to be diverted from the simple choice between right and revolution'. Bismark had nothing but contempt for conservative solidarity though: 'The system of solidarity of the conservative interests in all countries is a dangerous fiction' he wrote ' we arrive at a point where we make the whole unhistorical, godless and lawless sovereignty swindle of the German princes into the darling of the Prussian Conservative party'. The gap between these two writers- the first who wishes to side with anyone who opposes the French Revoluton and the second who sees ideology as unimportant in foreign policy is largely a division between someone for whom ideology is a central principle in foreign policy and someone for whom that central principle is statecraft.

The interesting thing about Bismark's attitude is that whilst he won the battle (surviving in power whereas Von Gerlach did not), he has not won the war. In Bismark's lifetime he never managed to sustain a political party with even a fractional support base. There have not been many Bismarkian politicians since- Henry Kissinger is a possible candidate and there will be others- but they are few. Most politicians today appeal to their electorate's interest or morality overseas- few see statecraft as a species of separate activity. Bismark's politics therefore died possibly when democracy was installed as the governing mode in the West. But its interesting nonetheless because I think his behaviour throws into relief the kind of politician that a democratic society finds difficult to sustain.

Melancholia

Kirsten Dunst is said to be a candidate for an Oscar for her performance in Melancholia, the latest film from Danish director Lars von Trier. She deserves the accolade but it says something about the film that the first thing to admire, the first thing I felt when I left the cinema, was admiration and pity for the actress who played in what I had just seen. For Dunst is the vehicle with which Von Trier takes us on a journey right into the heart of a particularly desperate depression. Dunst's character is implicated in two narrative arcs, the second of which takes place days after the first. The first concerns her character- Justine's- wedding to Michael (played by Alexander Skarsgard). The second concerns Justine's relationship with Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg), her sister, and Claire's husband and son as a planet, Melancholia, heads towards the earth for a collision which will end everything. There are three interesting films at least here- one about depression, a second about a bourgeois wedding and the third about the day at which the world ends. The real issue that Von Trier faces throughout the film is how to draw these three films together. He does it, if he does it through the relationship between the conventional Claire and the depressed Justine.

That contrast runs through the film. It could be Trier wants us to understand Justine's predicament: I'm not sure that without understanding whether his portrait of depression is accurate, I can draw useful lessons about depression from the film. I am not a psychologist and therefore cannot really comment on how depression works in this scenario. What I think is more interesting is the set of questions that Justine's behaviour pose about our own conventional society. During the wedding her listless behaviour mocks the ceremony surrounding her. One of the comic master pieces in the film comes from Udo Kier, a wedding planner, who won't look at Justine because she has ruined his wedding! But there is a sense in the wedding scene that Kier's character is not alone. All these middle class sophisticated individuals are not demanding that Justine and Michael marry but that they satisfy their expectations of how you marry. The theatre of the wedding is important to them. Justine's behaviour turns those expectations on their head and you feel the embarrassment of the guests as she and her family manage to destroy their theatre. Nowhere is this frustration more evident than in John Claire's husband who like a stage director imagines the wedding as his production and is furious when Justine mangles her lines.

The second story line about the planet is equally a stage production and this time it is nature not a woman who fails. John has designed a scientific (it could be a theological, historical) explanation about why Melancholia won't hit the earth. Again he is trying to stage manage and control the world. Again he fails. His response is fatal. His wife's response is to retreat into anxiety. Justine though becomes calmer and calmer, more and more sublime, till at the end she creates a religious retreat- a golden cave- for her family. In this sense the conventional pieties cannot protect the other characters. Claire who has so much to lose- a husband, a son- cannot relinquish her ideals about life. Her very kindness acts against her- as she prepares to greet the end of the world with a glass of chardonnay. Two situations reveal the powerlessness of the bourgeois individual: in the first human artifice can be undermined, in the second natural forces twist the carefully created bourgeois world apart. Artifice hence becomes as Trier argues the centre of the world that we all believe in: the world of jobs and marriages is a world of human creation and due for inevitable destruction- the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

This is a nihilistic film. There is no hope for humanity post the apocalypse and all our creations- divine and scientific will fall before the end of the world. It did make me wonder, what it will be like billions of years hence when your and my children look out their windows to see the Sun expand in fire or die in silence. This is a beautiful film but its nihilism makes it incredibly hard to watch.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

One of the odder things about talking to people about politics today is the sharp generational divide. There are people who became politically aware before 1990, who remember the Soviet Union and there are those who became aware in the 1990s and 2000s. It seems almost amazing now, looking back through depression and terrorism, that in 1990 the world was transfixed by the fact that President Gorbachev had been kidnapped in his dacha and that the Soviet Union might be whirling back into disaster. The geopolitics of Brezhnev and of Stalin seem far off- shadows that have faded into the past and the haunting fear of the bomb has been replaced by the fear of the reemergence of the 30s. Keynes has replaced Kennan as the intellectual de jour. In that context, it appears strange that the political film of the year focusses not on tax and spend and the consequences of depression, but on intelligence and super power politics. John Le Carre's Tinker Tailor was dramatised brilliantly in the 1980s on the BBC of course- it returns to a very different world and its lessons are perhaps different.

The story of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was modelled on Le Carre's experiences as a British agent in Berlin in the 1950s when Kim Philby defected. Those shadowy events are transferred in the film to the 1970s and based around the character of George Smiley. Smiley the deputy to C, Head of the Secret Intelligence Services of the United Kingdom, is sacked with his master when an operation to find out the mole is botched. Years later, he is recalled to the Circus (the code name for MI6) to find out who the mole is. The story is convoluted and worth watching as a thriller. This is not a mindless film though. It leaves the viewer in no doubt what the cost of a double agent is: he spends not merely his treachery to his country but also his treachery to those he knows and loves the most. Matt Damon in another film dealing with the Philby episode said to the Philby equivalent that after betrayel he would always be alone. That truth is what Smilley and the others know about their double agent.

They also know it about themselves. This is a darker film than the original series. In that original series Alec Guiness fenced in the dark mentally with his Soviet opponent, Carla. In the film, Gary Oldman's Smilley does not fence intellectually: he sits like a Spider, like a Domitian in the centre of a vicious web of torture and broken images. There is no doubt in this film that Smiley is cruel. He lets people know that he knows their weaknesses- he reminds one not so much of a distinguished Oxford academic as of a deranged Strangelove. Gary Oldman's performance in this film is the supreme opposite of Guiness's performance: Guiness made Smilley a hero, Oldman makes him an anti-hero. Smilley has lost any sense of a private life and private redemption: we never see his estranged wife in the entire film, even Smilley's memories have cut her out- we see her back, we see her hair but never her face. Its significant because Smilley never shows himself to love or respect any other man or woman.

Loneliness is one feature of this adaptation but so is viciousness. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a post Guantanamo adaptation of the novel. The British agents in Soviet hands are tortured and we see it. A Soviet defector's guts spill into his bath- and the audience briefly sees his intestines flowing in the water. Smilley smiles as his friends cry. The mole maintains his sang froid as he sends his friends to hell of the Lubyanka and we are left in no doubt of what he has done. In that sense the film represents a time much more disposed to confront rather than endure its suffering- the rhythm of the 1980s was, for good or ill, different to that of the 2000s. Post Diana, Britain has changed: we are no longer a society in which it is axiomatic that agents are tortured and killed, but one that requires to see that torture, that death. This brutality reinforces the earlier theme: if Smilley must always think of darkness, then his character, smiling under its glasses becomes darker. Guiness's Smiley remained avuncular, Oldman's Smiley is vicious.

I think the medium of film suits this new darker Smiley. He is given fewer words to say, fewer things to understand. The social atmosphere of the series- the Oxbridge sophistication of the higher circus- has disappeared. Class is absent. Films cannot be as subtle or as drawn out as tv serieses but this leaves the characters within the film exposed, they can no longer talk to hide what they do. They have less time to give us excuses, to make us forget in the complexity of the character the simplicity of the role. Perhaps as well there is less time to develop the sense in Tinker Tailor of the ideology of the thirties- that low dishonest decade which created Philby and the rest was a profoundly serious decade. There isn't that sense of the disillusion with the West, of old men grown old who were once picked for their idealism and their youth but have now grown wrinkles over both the idealism and the youth. That's not there in the film and it darkens further the picture.

Fire in Babylon

Cricket has often become a metaphor for politics- it did so in the 1930s when the famous Bodyline series became part of Australian national identity and Sir Donald Bradman the first Australian icon. Its done so several times on the sub continent- I was at the Oval Test Match this summer to see Tendulkar score 91 and saw a devotion to him that eclipsed the purely sporting. Fire in Babylon is about another such moment- when West Indian cricket came to dominate the sport for a twenty year period. Led by their thoughtful captain Clive Lloyd the West Indies moved from being a team of talented individuals to becoming a team of amazing players who bonded and played together like a team. Having been scarred by Australia in 1976, Lloyd found a group of fast bowlers- famous names that will endure- Holding, Croft, Garner, Marshall, Roberts and the rest who put the world's cricket teams to the sword. Just look at the clip above where Brian Close confronts HOlding at the Oval: you can feel the aggression in Holding's bowling.

Fire in Babylon tells the story of the transition from Calypso Cricket to this new more fiery and determined West Indian side. It puts it into the context of the racial and colonial politics of the late 20th Century. The story suggests that West Indian cricket was partially motivated by a national struggle to put the West Indies on the map. Independence was only managed in the late 1960s so the teams that played England in the seventies and eighties were teams that came from a very new set of countries. Furthermore they were filled with the ethos of the American civil rights movement. Interview after interview- particularly with Viv Richards- proclaims the importance of Luther King and of Bob Marley. These men when they came to England or Australia were racially abused by the crowds who would shout insults at them: some of which stunned a West Indian team brought up in a newly independent world. They knew about South Africa and events happening under Apartheid. They understood themselves in some sense as messengers from the third world, coming to beat the first world English and Australians. Part of the story of the cricket of that generation was as Michael Holding argues, putting their cricket up with English and Australian Cricket: saying to the English and Australians that West Indies Cricket had to be taken seriously. Fire in Babylon is metaphor used by a rastapharian member of the Wailers and friend of Richards to describe what the cricketers were doing. Running through the film are interviews with Richards’s teacher, with the Wailers, with others who were involved at the time.

This part of the story was definitely there- you can see it in the interviews with Roberts and Richards and the rest- they cared and thought about this stuff and were politically motivated. The film neglects though to develop two important angles on the cricket of the time. The first is that it doesn’t show that the West Indies were a clever cricket team. This wasn’t just a matter of getting together four guys who could bowl at 90 m.p.h: that’s happened before and will happen again, it was that these young men were intelligent cricketers. They could think as well as blast batsmen out. That cricket sense is actually not given the attention it should have: consequently you don’t develop during watching the film the admiration you should develop for these guys. They aren’t political philosophers- their political theory is bound to be less developed- but they were amazing cricketers so should be interviewed about how they worked out how to get batsmen out and intimidate bowlers. It wasn’t just brute strength. Secondly the political aspect isn’t allowed the complexity it needs. There are hints during the film that things were not so straight forward. Colin Croft and Clive Lloyd toured South Africa in the early eighties- they aren’t allowed to explain why. There is a political edge that some of the interviews belie. Furthermore lots of the politics comes from those who were hanging around Richards: its not to deny that it was there but equally the multiplicity of experience that went to make up that team has to be appreciated.

Fire in Babylon is ultimately disappointing because it doesn’t focus on the cricketers and the cricket enough. It presents a story whereby West Indian nationhood was remade by cricket- that’s partly true and its important that the West Indian team demonstrated that a third world, black team could play the white first world teams at their own game and win. It was a reminder that its not the colour of your skin, but in this case the content of your cricket character that determines your life. But its also important to note that the team was not a political movement but filled by individuals who had different perspectives on their times. What propelled them to the top wasn’t just their brute strength and speed, it was skill and intelligence. Ultimately these men were phenomenonal- just look at the clip above again, when you see Close duck and dive you are seeing the last of the cricketers of the 1950s dive out of history and when you see Holding bowl, you see the twenty first century. That the twenty first century cricketer was created not in England, nor in Australia or South Africa or India, but in a set of small islands out in the middle of the Caribean is testament to the brilliance of the individuals who performed that task. In that process they overcame the hideous racism of the cricket establishment and also assisted in the creation of nations in the Carribean (and it would be interesting to know how the different islands saw the team- something the film doesn't get into). Ultimately though I wanted more cricket and less politics.

Secularism or how to change the subject

One of the great myths of modernity is that the battle between secularist politics and religion is a battle in which one side roars about evolution and science and the other counters with revelation and faith. To argue this is to frankly misunderstand the nature of both secularism and religion. It is not conclusive but often instructive to look at the origins of discussions. Mark Lilla in his study of the rise of secular politics identifies the important switch as being made, not by those who opposed religion, but by those who wished to ignore it. Lilla's argument is that the seventeenth century thinkers who created modern secular politics- specifically Hobbes and Locke- did so by suggesting that those who discussed the nexus between religion and politics did not offer the wrong answers, they got the questions wrong.

The traditional set of questions about the interrelationship between religion and politics focussed on the divine nature of rule and rules and the roles of church and state within an entity that recognised the authority of God. Calvinists and Lutherans alike wished the realm to be based upon divine law- or as William Sedgewick said for example to create an English or a European Isreal. Hobbes in Leviathan- according to Lilla- said that the problem with this wasn't that it was wrong but that it answered the wrong question. For Hobbes the sixteenth and seventeenth century had shown that polities built upon religion swiftly became polities built upon confessional identity. He argued that the real question for men to understand, if they were to enter politics, was not how religion and politics should relate, but what were the reasons that men believed. He turned the study of the relationship of politics and religion from a question of theory- a question of bringing theology into the world- into a question about anthopology, a question about how religion influenced the world.

Lilla's complication of the secularist narrative is not enough: I reccomend Katznelson et al's recent volume on the subject. However I think it is important because it establishes a feature of secular thinking that is less understood today. Grotius famously argued that his theories were independent of his own religious beliefs. He argued this, and Hobbes argued this, because they believed that conflict over religious belief had rendered European society after the reformation impossible to live within. You may disagree with their point of view- however the historical change caused by their reaction to the English Civil War and Thirty Years War is profound. The profoundity is not caused by either thinker's attack on religion (Hobbes's religion is a fascinating subject) but by the fact that what they were interested in was religion's role in politics. In this sense, they pick up on the interest of Machiavelli centuries earlier who also was interested in asking the question, what does religion do to society, rather than asking the question, what would God ask me to do within politics.

I think Lilla is right to mark this as an important move in the argument. As my citation of Machiavellli suggests- there are antecedents to this train of thinking. But the suggestion that secular politics represents not so much a change of thought as a change of subject is one that I think is interesting and worthy of consideration. Definitely looking at today's politics and seventeenth century politics, the main difference I can see is the refocussing of the subjects that politics talks about. One of the difficulties of working on earlier periods is looking across that chasm- between a politics of economics and society to a politics of confession and godliness.