The Square

The bottom line is that after two years of turmoil beginning in the winter of 2011 Mohammed Morsi remains under what the Times describes as "indefinite detention," Hosni Mubarak has moved from jail to house arrest “Mubarak to Be Transferred to House Arrest,” NYT, 8/21/13) and the military is still in power. These are the events that are narrated in Jehane Noujaim’s documentary, The Square, currently playing at Film Forum. Of course, the title referring to Cairo’s Tahir Square, the epicenter of unrest during the initial rebellion against the Mubarak dictatorship, also conjures up the memory of Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese movement was crushed in l989. Politically, both Arab Spring, of which the Egyptian uprising was a part, and the early rebellion in China both emanated from the same impulse--the struggle for human rights. The Square is a jeremiad since it betokens the tragic fate of many freedom movements in which resistance to authoritarianism becomes so ideologized that it spawns its own forms of repression. That’s what’s happening in Syria where Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist factions have co-opted the opposition. Who knows if parliamentary democracy would have been the product of a successful people’s revolution against the party elite in China? The narrative of The Square is told in microcosm through the eyes of Ahmed, a streetwise agitator, Khalid an actor (who has starred in films like The Kite Runner) and Magdy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most torn of all the characters, precisely due to a political agenda—which increasingly puts him at odds with his confreres. The Square recapitulates the sickening history of freedom movements from the Russian Revolution on, with the early millenarian fervor attendant upon shocking degrees of naivete. While one has to admire the courage of the protestors, one wants to give them a history lesson—or two. Have they never heard of an Italian sociologist named Vilfredo Pareto and his concept of  “the circulation of the elites?” Have they never heard the expression that that power is conservative and self-perpetuating, no matter how lofty the ideals it seeks to uphold? The film is rather straightforward and earnest, but there’s one exception and that’s the intermittent cross cuts to a mural that’s constantly being painted by an unidentified hand. This brilliant little touch links the film to the works of painters as varied as Goya, Orozco and Picasso and their narratives of human suffering.

Ian McEwan's Unified Theory

If Einstein never succeeded in creating a unified theory, we can take solace that we at least have Ian McEwan. His latest New Yorker story, “Hand on the Shoulder,” (4/30/12) accomplishes just that. The tale told from the vantage point of the present by his protagonist Serena Frome describes how she as a gorgeous young Cambridge student was recruited into British intelligence in her final year. All this information is communicated in one pithy sentence. We then move on to the anatomy of the sexuality of her lover Jeremy Mott. McEwan writes about sexuality like a pathologist doing an autopsy. And right away the MI5 connection and the sex are established. Jeremy is wonderful lover, but never has orgasms. “Did he want to to smack my backside, or have me smack his? Did he want to try on my underwear? This mystery aroused me when I was away from him, and made it al l the harder to stop thinking about him when I was supposed to be concentrating on maths.” Serena eventually takes up with Jeremy’s 54 year old history tutor, Tony Canning, whose age group she generalizes about thusly, “The body’s largest organ, the skin, bears the brunt—it no longer fits the old. It hangs off them, off us, like a room-for-growth school blazer. Or pajamas…Tony had a yellowish look like an old paperback, one in which you could read of various misfortunes—knee and appendicitis operations, a dog bite, a rock climbing accident, and a childhood disaster with a frying pan, which had left him bereft of a patch of pubic hair.” And it’s not only sex, Tony cooks porcini with olive oil and pancetta and they “...ate them with polenta…This was exotic food in England in the seventies.” Later, the reader is introduced to "akrasia  “which was, Tony reminded me, the Greek word for acting against one’s better judgement. (Had I not read Plato’s Protagoras?)” McEwan’s prose is painterly when it isn't emblematic, shifting between the micro and macro worlds. The realism of his bodies recalls Eakins’ "The Gross Clinic" and "The Swimming Hole" and the looming menace of history that hangs over the agglomeration of minutiae brings to mind great apocalyptic drawings and paintngs like Goya’s "Disasters or War" and Picasso’s "Guernica."

In the Spanish Manner

The Spanish Manner: Drawings From Ribera to Goya at the Frick is like precognition. If one had been alive to see these works in the 16th or 17th Century, one would have been able to travel through a wormhole to the future. The prescient character of art and the way it reflects both the strivings and turbulence of the mind never ceases to amaze. Here we see the seeds of the Spanish temperament that produced Dalì’s “The Persistence of Memory” and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. All the ingredients of the surrealist nightmare are represented: sex, extreme aggression (the auto da fé), and the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. “Studies of  Two Ears and a Bat”  by Jusepe de Ribera, with its inscription, “FULGET SEMPER VIRTUS” (Virtue Shines Forever), is hung next to a depiction of an enormous head covered with Lilliputian figurines. In Goya’s albums, which the curators describe as “a form of talking to himself,” there are drawings of women fighting, of a defrocked nun. “Beggar Holding a Stick” is a picture of poverty that foreshadows social satirists like Daumier. Like a graphic artist, Goya uses captions like “you are having a bad time” and “don’t fill the basket so full.” There is the torture of a man by Strappado, in which the shoulders are dislocated, and even the memory of horrible torture and mutilation in a drawing subtitled, “He Appeared Like This, Mutilated, in Zaragoza, Early in 1700.” “Tuti li Mundi” (Peepshow) is a garish drawing of a woman leering at the ass of a man looking into what is obviously a peep device. The Frick show is small in scale, but haunted by the future it augurs.