Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush

Agnieszka Holland's Burning Bush, which is currently playing at Film Forum, takes place in the aftermath of Prague Spring when Russian tanks invaded and repressed the Czech revolution.
The movie, originally produced as a TV mini-series, is not a philosophical mediation like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (which was filmed by Philip Kaufman), but more a political thriller in the style of Costa-Gravas Z or Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. The title of the film comes from the biblical miracle that's echoed in the image of Jan Palach’s self-immolation with the conceit lying in the fact that while the body might have died his spirit lived on. Twenty years after his death came the Velvet Revolution of l989 in which Communism was finally overthrown. Apparently, the biblical metaphor still remains relevant. In a flagrant slap in the face to post-modernism with its promise of non-ideological drives in an equally  non-Manichean universe, what was deemed unthinkable in our day and age, occurred only weeks ago in the Crimea. Burning Bush splices real life footage as well as characters into its partially fictionalized narrative and the central figure is the real life figure of Dagmar Buresova (Tatiana Pauhofova), a lawyer who brings libel charges against a party apparachnik named Novy (Martin Huba) who had claimed that Jan Palach’s death was the result of a reactionary conspiracy. Novy claims Palach’s act was intended as a circus trick, “cold fire” in which the illusion of burning is created. The conspiracy theory derives from the notion that the Russians would be provoked into a full out annexation of Czechoslovakia if the ante were raised--something which those who preferred a veneer of autonomy to the truth of subjugation were out to forestall.The leitmotif of appearance and reality actually inserts itself from the beginning of the film when the iconic burning scene, which also recalls the Buddhist monks in Vietnam in a similar period, is reflected in a ticket kiosk and a number of other mirrored surfaces, mimicking the distancing effect the mind creates to protect itself from traumatic perception. Kafka’s cockroach, an honorary citizen of Prague, makes a cameo appearance in Holland’s film and he's neither killed nor freed from the box in which he’s kept as food for a lizard, which is one way to view the geopolitics of Eastern Europe at the time. Political films tend to create a black and white universe and Burning Bush is rescued from being a lives of the saints, employing the Czech penchant for ambivalence and irony, which serve to broaden its moral spectrum

He Gave Prague Castle the Bird

Michal Cizek/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images

Life is Elsewhere is the title of a novel by the Czech, novelist, dissident and pornosopher Milan Kundera, The title was taken from an expression graffittied on Paris walls during the '68 riots, which coincided with the soon to be repressed Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Now the former Czechoslovakia is made up of The Czech Republic and Slovakia and though both are free of the Communist party, they are not, in the opinion of a whole new generation of artists and dissidents free of corruption. Materialism of the undialectical sort brings is own form of oppression. The Times ran a story about the Czech artist David Cerny who is literally pointing his finger at the ruling party of Czech president Milos Zeman (“Angrty at Prague, Artist Ensures He’s Understood,” NYT 10/21/13). “He installed on the Vlatava River a 30-foot-high, plastic purple hand with a raised middle finger…that points directly at Prague Castle.”  Cerny, in general, according to the Times, doesn’t pull his punches “depicting Germany as a network of motorways resembling a swastika” and “displaying a caricature of a former Czech president inside an enormous fiberglass rear end.” Jonathan Franzen recently published a volume of essays by and commentary on the great l9th century satirist and editor of Die Fackel (“The Torch”), Karl Kraus, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus. Kraus excoriated the foibles of Viennese society (“psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy” is one of  his gems). Vienna is only a stone’s throw from Prague and one wonders if Kraus’s spirit doesn’t live on in Mr. Cerny’s freewheeling attacks.

Eurodammerung

Photo: Carl-Johan Sveningsson

In a special section of the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs pithily titled “Eurodammerung,” Timothy Garton Ash has brought his great erudition to bear upon the prospects of the EU. In the article, “The Crisis of Europe, "Ash talks about the political legacy of the Second World War, as informing the drive for an economically united Europe. There are some precious vignettes like the one in which Ash is talking to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl who asks, “Do you realize that you are sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolph Hitler?” He quotes Milan Kundera about “the kidnapped West,” describing the inertial force driving the inhabitants of former Iron Curtain countries. He invokes Gabriel Garcia Marquez when he describes the ensuing invention of the Euro as “Chronicle of a Crisis Foretold,” and in discussing how the scales of economic justice would be upset by the juggernaut of a united Germany, he quotes Thomas Mann, “Not a German Europe but a European Germany” and goes on to remark “What we see today, however, is a European Germany in a German Europe.” For Ash the collective memory which inspired the idea of unification and common currency has been lost. “There is a new dividing line across Europe, not between east and west but between north and south,” Ash soberly concludes. “Now, and probably for years to come it will be a very different experience to be a young German or a young Spaniard, a young Pole or a young Greek.” The cold war was a battle between two ideologies: capitalism and Marxism—both ideas, products of the Enlightenment. Now, if we are to read Ash correctly, European unity is threatened by something far more regressive, the return to a kind of tribalism in which to quote Jerry Butler, the sixties soul singer known as “The Iceman,” Only the Strong Survive.

Quisling

Vidkun Quisling

Mitt Romney may not really laugh but Gary Wills is really brilliant. Why has Wills never been nominated for elective office? And is he the potential number #2 man, the dark horse that Romney has been looking for? Perhaps you are smiling in the confused nervous way that people do when they are being confronted with nonsense. In his short piece in the June 21^st New York Review of Books, “Why Is This Man Laughing?” Wills attempts to analyze Romney’s “non-laugh laugh,” as either a defense, an attempt to fit in, an offense, “comic rictus as a non-sequitur,” or as subterfuge. In his attempt to understand the laughter Wills invokes the author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a seemingly logical step, that is probably sui generis in the annals of Romney scholarship. Even followers of string theory which gives eleven possible dimensions in which one could exist will find it hard to locate Kundera and Romney in the same universe. Wills’ reference point is actually not the novel itself but an essay entitled “The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoevsky, The Idiot).” Wills then attempts to account for Romney’s symptoms with the “etiology and taxonomy of senseless laughter…in examples of humorless humor in the defensive-aggressive response of Prince Mishkin to other people’s senseless laughter.” But it’s not Kundera’s analysis of Mishkin that provides the most stirring insight in Wills’ search for gold. It’s from an aside of Kundera’s about “a man standing uncomfortably in a crowd.” “I was seeing a person laugh who had no sense of the comical and was laughing only to keep from standing out from the crowd, like a spy who puts on the uniform of a foreign army to avoid recognition,” Wills quotes Kundera as saying. Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian politico who seemed to be defending his own country, but was really a Nazi collaborator.  The London Times made a noun out of his behavior. Wills description of Romney’s uneasy laughter is that of the quisling who is trying to appear like one of his people, but whose allegiances lie elsewhere. The question is where?

O Quebec IV: The Golden Book

Photo by Hallie Cohen

Le Livre d’Or is the name of store on la rue Principale Sud, which is Main Street in Sutton, a high-end tourist destination in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Sutton boasts tasteful shopping nooks and upscale B and B’s, exemplified by Le Pleasant Hotel and Café, whose stark modernity embodies the anomalous cosmopolitanism you’ll find in similar out-of-the-way oases of sophistication like Kinsale in southern Ireland. Le Livre d’Or is one block down from rue Pine and two blocks from rue Maple, the street names reminding us that Sutton, for all its Frenchness, is only a hop, skip and a jump from the English speaking world. On the used book table is the Livre de Poche edition of Ernest Hemingway’s L’Adieu aux armes, published by Gallimard in 1948. It begins, “Cette année là, à la fin de l’été, nous habitons une maison dans un village qui, par-delà la revière et la plaine, donnait sur les montagnes.” Next to L’Adieu aux armes is Milan Kundera’s L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être, published by Folio. It would not be surprising to find these tomes in a bookstall overlooking the Seine, but the proximity of Le Livre d’Or to the U.S. border makes the cultural displacement all the more startling. Signs on the road outside of Sutton alert drivers to la Douane, or customs, which is only a few miles away. No culture wars are being fought on rue Maple, but it’s a different civilization.

Life is Elsewhere

Life is Elsewhere is the title of a novel by the Czech writer Milan Kundera. It is a phrase that was graffitied on Paris walls by student revolutionaries during the riots of ’68. George Carlin famously quipped, “I’m into a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence.” In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Clov asks Hamm, “Do you believe in the life to come.” His response: “Mine was always that.”

Oliver Sacks’s recent essay on asylums in The New York Review of Books is a reminder that not all mental institutions are snake pits, and that in the 19th century, some asylums offered the possibility of companionship and community for those who had inadvertently opted out of so-called normalcy. In The Divided Self, another ‘60s artifact, R.D. Laing argues for schizophrenia as a viable form of existence characterized by forms of expression that have value in and of themselves, and that are not only significant as manifestations of mental illness.

When the stock market moves from inflated values to values more commensurate to the equities they reflect, financial analysts call it an adjustment . Whether for reasons financial, political, or geological, the earth seems to be in the throes of something more drastic than an adjustment. It is wobbling on its axis, both metaphorically and literally. Tectonic and climatic shifts have caused massive upheavals, taking the forms of tsunamis in Southeast Asia, flooding in the Southwest United States, drought in Africa, and the melting of polar ice caps. It was recently reported that in the next 10-15 years, shipping companies may no longer have to use the Panana Canal, as they can make their way through the North Pole, thus shaving thousands of miles off their trips. But this savings has been achieved at a cost, and not only in environmental terms. Technological advancement has been met with the equal and opposing rise of fundamentalism, with triumphs of reason overshadowed by desperate millenarian passions.

Every age has its upheavals, its plagues, its inquisitions. In the twelfth century, the Arab world, now so fraught with the ravages of war and religious strife, was the seat of advanced science, with polymathss like Averroes making historic contributions. Today, globalism has compounded the effects of local upheaval. Modern transportation exports viruses and violence with equal efficiency. A once economically viable society like Iceland finds its whole financial system in danger of collapse due to the alacrity with which it leveraged its investments abroad.

Can we still refer to Imperial America when talking about a country whose deficit exceeds the trillion-dollar mark? And when and how do changes in the bulwarks of a society filter down to the foot soldiers of the everyday life? Astronomers believe that a meteor hitting the earth may have caused the ice age, eradicating a huge reptilian population. Which economic or meteorological scourge will hasten the onset of the newest stage of evolution, and where will it lead? Will life still be here—or elsewhere?