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

International Relations 101: Checkers or Chess?

Illustration of the Red King Snoring from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

The United States has to stop playing checkers and start playing chess. The kind of transparency that Snowden and Wikileaks have championed is a nice ideal, but it leaves casualties in its wake when you are playing the board game known as international relations. In checkers you take the man in front of you, but when you play chess you learn that you might have to sacrifice a pawn to spare a more powerful piece. We must return to the world of Machiavelli and realpolitik which is chess in political terms and we may have to learn how to play from those who we’d like to hate. Vladimir Putin is a great chess player who's a master of the art of brinkmanship. He lined up all his ducks in the Crimea and then simply walked away (instead playing The Terminator), coming out the victor though the move might not have seemed economically expedient, in terms of Russia’s relationship to the EU. He called in an IOU with his Syrian client during the chemical weapons crisis and at least for the moment seemed to be ready to step into his adversary’s shoes. Imagine Vladimir Putin claiming the Nobel prize for Peace! For a moment it didn’t seem like a far flung idea. Perhaps Putinism with a human face is what America needs to strive for. It’s nice to have the power to bully and repel bullies in a darkened schoolyard. But like in a computer game with its garish cast of hellions, there’s always going to be someone bigger, stronger, more deadly. Lots of intelligence, in both the real and metaphorical meanings of the word, less carpet bombing and an occasional drone may sound like an uglymix, but these might be the only cocktail that leads to peace, anywhere.

Are There No Coincidences?

The two top stories in the news are the fates of flight 370 and the Crimea and the prospects for neither seems particularly hopeful. So what that someone in the cockpit programmed the plane to fly off its course. As much as the Times tried to make out of this “scoop,” (“Lost Jet’s Path Seen as Altered via Computer,” 3/17/14), it doesn’t lead us any further toward discovering the changed trajectory or the reason’s for it. Of course it did take about a week for the Malaysian government to enter the houses of the pilot or co-pilot and it’s hard to fathom the rationale for the delay. Traveling to the right column of yesterday’s front page of the Times, we read, “Putin Recognizes Crimea Secession, Defying the West.” But what can we really say about this? Obama and Putin are like two drivers with their chests pushed up against one another in an incident of road rage. Will they both return to their respective vehicles and simply drive away or will somebody actually get hurt? But the more profound question that those interested in the paranormal, who believe there are no coincidences, might ask is, are these two events in some way connected? One thing is certain they are both dead ends of one sort or another. NATO, the US and Russian will continue to be at loggerheads and the plane’s disappearance will continue to be a source of hope—though hope of what kind? Some day it will all make sense. The pieces of the puzzle will fit together. Hindsight is always 20/20 as the expression goes, but whether 370 crashed as a result of terrorism or malfunction, then the absence of the wreckage only prevents the families and friends of passengers and crew from getting closure.