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Adrienne Teicher

Tag: cinema

  • Cinema that shatters our illusions: I am Cuba and Come and See

    Cinema that shatters our illusions: I am Cuba and Come and See

    So you know, I reveal a few plot details.

    I am Cuba

    As bombs fell on Beirut last night, I was alone in my apartment, with a cold, feeling useless and afraid of the slide slide slide into war and fascism. To distract myself, I dove into the expansive archive of the Soviet movie studio Mosfilm, restored and freely available on YouTube. I watched I am Cuba, (dir: Mikhail Kalatozov) a film that weaves together four vignettes of everyday life in a society on the brink of transformation.

    As I watched, I thought, I need to adjust how I see myself and the society that I live in. I still carry the programming of growing up in a liberal democratic society: the belief that we live in a society of rules and norms impartially applied to all, that justice exists, that power is subject to checks and balances, and that when there is overreach or abuse–say by police or politicians–it is isolated. No-one is above the law; wrongdoers will be brought to justice, even when they wear a blue uniform.

    (And also that we have a free and indepenedent media, yada yada yada, fourth estate, blah blah, I can’t even be bothered to finish that sentence, because it is so worthless).

    We don’t live in that fantasy. The zone we live in is much closer to the world of I am Cuba, a dictatorship where power is exercised through control over the police, security services, consumer goods and the media. Of course, Cuba and Germany were and are on different ends of the chain of extractive capitalism, and I am not hopeful that we have revolutionary energies just waiting to be unleashed. Nevertheless, this vision of Cuba under dictatorship help me let go of the illusion of a free society.

    The film’s third vignette resonated most with me, and challenged me deeply. Perhaps because the protagonist, Enrique, is a middle class student revolutionary, while the other vignettes deal with the struggles of the proletariat and peasant classes.
    Enrique is wrestling with his desire to enact violent revenge after Castro is falsely reported to have been killed, and a friend is captured and murdered by the police. His comrades counsel him against what might sometimes be called “adventurism”–essentially saying, take out one guy and another functionary will take his place, just as violent or worse. Better to act rationally, strategically, and wait for the right, revolutionary moment.

    Nevertheless, Enrique follows his emotions to the top of a building, picks up a sniper rifle from its hiding place and aims at a palace in the distance. In his sights he finds someone I believe is the chief of Havana’s murderous police, enjoying a breakfast of fried eggs with his family on a terrace, laughing, smiling, and kissing his children. Faced with this domestic scene, Enrique puts down his rifle and falls into despair.

    As I watched, I observed that my mind was searching for a moral. A warning against acting on one’s own, perhaps, or a cautionary tale against impulsivity and adventurism. Yet Enrique’s hesitation seem less rooted in loyalty to the Leninist revolutionary cell, than a rush of sentimentality, of not wanting to shoot the man in front of his children. Maybe it has something to do with the dominance of the pater familias, a deep conditioning that prevents us from killing our fathers, lords, teachers, rulers, oppressors, literally, or metaphorically.

    Whatever the reason, this hesitation proves costly. In the very next scene, the police raid the apartment where his comrades are printing pamphlets confirming that Castro is alive. One of his friends is shot as he sends papers cascading from the balcony, his body landing in the street. Another is shot in the back after he dares to mouth a revolutionary slogan at the police. His killer? The same man Enrique had in his crosshairs.

    That afternoon, Enrique delivers a speech at a demonstration before the police forcibly clear the square. A dove is killed by a police bullet and falls near where Enrique stands. With the dove in one hand and a rock in the other, Enrique leads the demonstrators forward against the massive violent force of the state, manifest as water bursting fourth from cannons. Enrique spots the Chief of Police leaning on a car and he edges relentlessly forward. The Chief of Police sees Enrique approach and fires. But Enrique staggers on as bullet after bullet strike his body until he collapses on the ground.

    The vignette concludes with Enrique’s funeral, which becomes a sombre rally through Havana’s streets. It seems as if the whole city is observing his death, is galvanised by it. From balconies, endless streams of petals fall, and a vast Cuban flag is unfurled by cigar rollers from the top floor of their factory. Enrique’s pointless, irrational death–walking into bullets–in the end serves a strategic purpose: he becomes a martyr whose death galvanises the movement he died for.

    What does this say about our situation? That acts of symbolic sacrifice have their place in a revolutionary struggle. Decisions made in the heat of violence can resonate in ways that cannot be predicted or mapped out through rational analysis alone.

    I salute all the comrades right now, putting their soft, vulnerable bodies up against the armoured, weaponised bodies of the police—strangled, kicked, punched, insulted, pepper sprayed. When you see these sneering bipedal tanks in action, it is hard not to think that a crypto-Nazi movement has integrated itself within the ranks of the police.

    Yet Enrique’s death resonated among the population of Havana because the population were willing and able to allow their bodies to resonate with his sacrifice. I do not see anything like this from where I sit in Berlin. In this way, our situation and that of I am Cuba could not be more different.

    It is justified to feel angry at people who refuse to feel outrage after 12 months of killing in Gaza and now Lebanon supported, funded and legitimised by the German government. I understand—and I experience—the anger at a populace who justify, or by and large simply ignore mass rape in Israeli detention camps and city blocks in Beirut flattened by bombs.

    As people who desire revolution, we can feel these things in our bodies, but resentment cannot guide our politics. The task of changing society is changing society. And we don’t get to choose the material that we work with. Our task is to find the best way to work with we’re given.

    I’m not convinced that walking into gunfire from the Berlin police will spark a revolution, should it to come to that, because we are dealing with a very different time and place: a decadent Western empire, with just enough treats and fear to keep the population more or less invested in the status quo (whether that status quo be a coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals, or the far-right and ultra right–there’s not a lot of sunlight between them). The death of a demonstrator will be written over by the media and largely ignored.

    There is a role for strategy and a role for symbolic sacrifice. The question is timing. And the time may come when enough of our fellow humans become disenchanted with the status quo, and we can present an alternative that is worth fighting and dying for.

    The task now is to become ready to take on that role. I am not ready, but I want to be.

    Come and See

    I also watched Come and See (dir: Elem Klimov), the Soviet anti-war film, for the first time—alone. It’s a film best watched with someone else so you can process afterwards. But it is definitely worth seeing, especially if you need to be shocked out of apathy.

    Briefly, its about a young teenager named Flyora who joins the Belarussian partisans and is physically and psychologically transformed by the German and Nazi atrocities that he witnesses. I keep wondering how many children are living a similar nightmare in Gaza and Lebanon and other lands turned into hellscapes by war.

    The film is also a useful reminder that German violence in the Second World War was not limited to Jewish victims, nor even to the Sinti and Roma. Millions of Slavs, were murdered in violent, slightly less systematic ways, because they were also considered sub-human. And it was not only the SS carrying out the violence, but the regular German army.

    This is something that German zionism conveniently sweeps away. It may even be one of the key psychological pillars for the morbid philosemitism of the German media, political and cultural elite.

  • Everything Oedipal All At Once: Capitalism conquers the multiverse

    Everything Oedipal All At Once: Capitalism conquers the multiverse

    I blame my parents. For everything. For waking up every morning, twisted in sheets, worrying about everything and nothing. For my shame (except the sexy bits, I’ll keep those). For my addiction to vegan Instagram. For my lack of ambition. For the glob of self loathing nesting at my core. Above all, I blame my parents for the decay of the membrane that holds the multiverse in place.

    That, at least, is the vibe set by the science fiction comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once.

    So, briefly: the plot. Evelyn Quan Wang and her husband Waymond are proprietors of a flailing laundromat in a sun-bleached corner of suburbia. Their daughter Joy is a portrait of teenage nihilism, deeply depressed and estranged from her parents, especially Evelyn. Evelyn, for her part, barely registers the distance between them. Instead she coats their shared world in fat-shaming and homophobia, introducing Joy’s long-term girlfriend to her grandfather as nothing more than a “best friend”

    Alongside the domestic disquiet, the laundromat is creaking beneath crippling debts, and Evelyn is tormented by an upcoming meeting at the IRS, which could bring the whole house of soap suds down.

    It’s in the midst of this turmoil that Evelyn’s grip on reality spins wildly out of control. During her humiliation at the hands of IRS inspector Deidre Beaubeirdre, Evelyn discovers not only that there are multiple universes each branching off from one another at every moment that a decision is taken, but that she is being hunted across this multiverse by a dimension hopping entity called Jobu, armed with a weapon that can devastate whole universes.

    This movie is no Solaris. It doesn’t attempt to dive deeply into the implications of a multiverse (nor should it necessarily). The quantum spiel operates purely as metaphor, but for what exactly?

    My initial assumption was that the multiverse stood as a metaphor for late capitalism. And I was justified. The film places a major emphasis on the corrosive role of debt on the Wang family. Also, visual effects seem to be inspired by contemporary social media aesthetics. The multitude of universes that Evelyn visits flicker past the screen giving of a world brimming with information but without the means to gain anything like knowledge or understanding. Debt and disorientation are palpable experiences in late capitalism.

    There’s even a monologue that may as well have been lifted from an Adam Curtis documentary. Describing Jobu’s mysterious weapon, an alternate Waymond reflects that:

    “We don’t know exactly what it is. We don’t know what it’s for. But we can all feel it. You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? Something is off. Your clothes never wear as well the next day. Your hair never falls in quite the same way. Even your coffee tastes… wrong. Our institutions are crumbling. Nobody trusts their neighbour anymore. And you stay up at night wondering to yourself… How can we get back?”

    At this juncture, I was reminded of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, a book observing the stark reality that our imaginations are so constrained that it’s easier to envision the end of the world (in Hollywood’s fixation with apocalypse) than the end of capitalism. I thought that Evelyn’s adventures in the multiverse might trace a line of escape from this predicament, insofar as, if every possibility exists, then an alternative to capitalism is not only possible, but necessary and inevitable.

    My hopes were dashed. In fact, the multitude of multiverses that Evelyn navigates are remarkably similar to her origin universe, with only one or two diverging details. For instance, there’s a universe where Evelyn is tasked with twirling a sign advertising a pizza parlour, or another where humans have evolved long, floppy, sausage-like fingers. Sausage-finger people – this is the limit of the human imagination.

    Ultimately, the cause for the breakdown of Evelyn’s reality is not capitalism, but the rift between mother and daughter. That’s it. Jobu, we discover, is a version of Joy who, has built a kind of everything-bagel/black hole which will annihilate her despair by destroying the entire multiverse system. Fortunately, an extended heart-to-heart mother-daughter conversation is all it takes to save the multiverse from destruction, while capitalism is let off the hook.

    So much of apocalyptic cinema is beamed through this familial lens. Think Birdbox or A Quiet Place. This is because, even though mangled and oversimplified, the ideas of Sigmund Freud cast a long shadow over Hollywood. The idea that all problems can be traced back to your family – especially your relationship with your mother – seems to lurk in at least every second film.

    This general tendency in Capitalism was traced by the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Capitalism exploits the nuclear family as both a means to propagate itself and obscure its dominance in everyday life. The home where estrangement festers, the IRS office where the state wields debt as social control, and the laundromat where Evelyn’s enormous capacities are whittled down to a few basic functions – these are all spaces where capitalism produces itself on and through human beings and the relations between them.

    But in the film, when Evelyn heals the rift with her daughter, everything goes back to normal, and she can resume her role as an obedient subjects of capitalism, even making friends with the IRS inspector who persecuted her.

    Not all films are blind to the role of capitalism. Beau is Afraid is a similarly psychedelic journey across a fractured reality that also uses familial trauma to drive the action. In contrast to Everything Everywhere All at Once, Beau’s adventures shows how parental guilt and shame makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Mega-corporations exploit anxieties produced at the site of the family to increase their profits and cement their control over consumers.

    Yet, even though its critique is on point, Beau is Afraid is just as clueless when it comes to offering alternatives, leaving us enlightened, but stranded in the abyss.

    Perhaps the rot is so deep, that it extends all the way to down to the kinds of stories we have been conditioned over centuries to enjoy. If so, we are badly in need of a multiverse if we’re ever going to find our way to a world where the human imagination is not so constrained as it is in ours.