March is the most wonderful time of the year in East London: just after the East Festival, and just before the East End Film Festival, lies the magical, fantasy land of the London Word Festival, a celebration of alternative literature, theatre, visual arts and music, which started last week and will continue in various, more or less quirky East End venues until the end of the month.

To understand the spirit of the London Word Festival, think of a concentrated, evening-only and miniature version of August in Edinburgh, mixed with that amazing party your coolest friend once threw in his Victorian house off the Roman Road: there is an amused buzz in the air, everyone is relaxedly enthusiastic, the room is full of people that you either know or would like to know, and while nobody is ever there at the supposed starting time, nobody really minds having to wait. Last Friday, in the sparingly art deco theatre of the Toynbee Studios, the Festival gave all fans of noir the alternative ride of their life in Avant! Noir, a combination of jazz music, modern criminal fiction, and graphic novels.

We started off with a set by Bristol-based quartet Get The Blessing, who took the stage as a musical version of the Reservoir Dogs gang, and who then accompanied Cathi Unsworth and Courttia Newland in their readings of two short stories. Unsworth’s was a classically noir, Whitechapel-based episode of criminal low-life, smeared lipstick and dirty pavements, read with velvet voice and Some Like it Hot hairdo. Newland built the hallucinatory tale of six friends who are off to a rave in the middle of a field, with an undercurrent of danger and imminent precipitation of control; Get The Blessing’s rhythm section (which used to be the Portishead’s rhythm section) sustained the wild feeling of Newland’s story with powerful suggestions of flailing arms and steam rising from human bodies. Between the two authors, the music punctuated a projection of comic strips from Huzzah! Noir, a sequential project in which a group of graphic artists take turns to complete a graphic novel, each one having only three days to continue the story on the basis of the last strip.

After an interval (which I slightly regretted, as it stopped the build-up of an out-of-time atmosphere), Get the Blessing left the scene to jazz quintet Led Bib, who provided the soundtrack to the following two short stories. The first, a vertiginous trip from an Ikea mock-up bathroom into the credit crunch by Ray Banks, occasionally felt oppressed by Led Bib’s sound, not exactly pushed along, but certainly over-exposed. The collaboration was happier with the second story,  Toby Litt’s nightmarish, deliciously ironic tale of girlfriend’s revenge hidden in the dark Clerkenwell mist. Led Bib also played for the continuation of the graphic story, in a rockier style,  surprisingly well-fitted for the turn of the plot towards Nazi-infested France, with a maybe fortuitous but still definite hat tip to Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The evening ended with an improvised set,  both bands quite literally facing each other on the stage.

Avant! Noir happily managed a smooth equilibrium of media and styles, music and words and images all melting into each other, suggesting further shapes and colours, stretching the genre without straining it. It would have been interesting to have more female perspectives and voices (the femme fatale of noir movies and stories seldom speaks for herself, and yet one is always very curious as to what she would have to say), and a less circumstantial lighting would have been the cherry on the cake - but the complicit smiles of the audience at the end of the show were an unmistakable indication of the success of the party.

One-off performance

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland sees Lewis Carroll’s Alice returning to ‘Underland’ at the age of 19, falling down a hole in pursuit of the familiar white rabbit, and more importantly in flight from an unwelcome marriage proposal. She has no memory of her childhood visit, and the fantastical characters debate among themselves whether she is in fact ‘the right Alice’. But of course, really this is a question Alice herself must answer: can she remain the free spirit with the wild imagination that was encouraged by her late father, or must she ‘grow up’ and learn to conform to Victorian Britain’s expectations of a young woman of her social class?

Naturally, the moral of Burton’s story is that freedom and imagination must triumph over conformism. As Alice’s father told her, all the best people are completely bonkers. But the moral is no less appealing for being predictable, and there are a few suprises and twists in the telling of the story. Significantly, screenwriter Linda Woolverton gives Alice herself the famous line about believing ‘six impossible things before breakfast’, something her father apparently used to do. In Lewis Carroll’s original Through the Looking Glass, it is the White Queen who reprimands the exactly-seven-and-a-half-year-old Alice for not trying hard enough to believe that the queen is a hundred and one, five months and a day. Now Alice has internalised the lesson that believing the impossible requires imaginative effort, and is challenged to act on it.

In the real world, this means turning down the awful aristocrat Hamish, despite the wishes of her family and an entire garden party gathered to witness her acceptance. While Alice refuses to wear her corset, and prefers gazing at clouds to dancing quadrilles, she doesn’t know if she has the courage to assert her own wishes against such oppressive expectations. Hence the visit to Underland. Here, Burton and Woolverton slip Alice into the role of the young boy (another impossible thing) in ‘Jabberwocky’, the nonsense poem included in Through the Looking Glass. Alice must find the vorpal sword and slay the Jabberwock before she can return to the world and slay the dragon of an unwanted marriage.

The quest is enjoyable enough, with 3D effects adding to the impression that Alice is trapped in a computer game, and an impressive cast of gargoyle-like characters including Helena Bonham-Carter as the huge-headed Red Queen and Johnny Depp as a tragic Mad Hatter. Alice herself is played by Mia Wasikowska (fresh from a more naturalistic teenage psycho-drama in HBO’s In Treatment), who brings just the right combination of vulnerability and assertiveness. If anything, though, the film is perhaps too star-studded, with celebrity turns like Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat distracting from the story.

The dramatic pay-off at the end is pleasingly unexpected, however. Having slain the Jabberwock and turned down Hamish, Alice announces that she will now take responsibility for her late father’s business. His impossible idea, now vindicated, had been to establish trading posts in the far east, and Alice now intends to expand into China. What a contrast with the more right-on 3D blockbuster Avatar, which slavishly follows the script of postcolonial guilt and suspicion of progress. By way of Underland, Alice takes herself out of her corseted role as a woman in Victorian Britain, and into the world. That sounds like progress to me.

Lone Twin’s is a trilogy marked by anomalies. While threads can be drawn between two of the pieces, one always juts out. Try to link them thematically and you’ll come a cropper on The Festival. Try to do so stylistically and Daniel Hit By a Train jars. Its square pegs and round holes; Its squeezing one object too many into a container, such that, each time, another pops out the other side. Funnily enough, I rather like the lack of neatness. It forces you to seek answers that may or may not exist. It makes you work to reconcile.

In fact, the strongest constant is the space itself. Each time, we find ourselves sat opposite another bank of bodies, separated by a strip of coloured stage. Alice Bell’s is a bright green: the sort that children colour grass when still under the influence of cartoons. Daniel Hit By a Train’s is a moody, Rothko red. When accompanied by the yellowish light, which bounces off the floor and picks up it colour, the effect is like the glow of a furnace. By the time you enter for The Festival, attempting to anticipate the new colour, you never consider white. Its freshness takes you by surprise; the speckled array of accompanying colours, dotted here and there, stand bright, crisp and cheery against it. From the floor alone, ideas spring to mind: not the concrete, clearly-defined sort; but hazier, not-quite-pinnable recollections. It’s as if Lone Twin make synesthetes of us all.

Alice Bell shows a city at war with itself, in which a young girl – twinkling with hope – crosses sides out of love, only to return out of force, carrying explosives back towards her family and friends. ‘I believe,’ she chants, ‘you can change your heart’. The most in-depth and intelligent of the three, Alice Bell partners gloomy content with the strum of ukeles and loopy, cartoonish characters. The enemy here, a faceless man in a wrestling mask, is a caricature of hatred. Over-embellished vitriol spills from his mouth: ‘Anne fucking Frank in your fucking cupboard, I will harm you…Captain fucking Kirk in your fucking space rocket, I will harm you…children who call your parents by their first names, I will fucking harm you.’ Alice’s best friend is equally and oppositely zany, buzzing around the stage, arms flapping and hands fizzing. And yet, there is a quiet, unshowy desolation beneath the cheeriness. It never sets out to make throats lumpen and chins quiver, but just to assert its presence without fuss.

In Daniel Hit by a Train, the same ensemble turn their hand to bitesize narratives. It is a roll-call of self-sacrifice, its lead taken from the memorial in the nearby Postman’s Park. With the same micro-structure repeated – a cry (‘Who saw the train? Who here. Saw the train?’), a response (‘I did. I saw the train’), a stylised enactment, end scene – the piece becomes a game of charades. It sorely lacks the non-literalism of movement encapsulating action of Alice Bell; to many answers are provided. However, Daniel Hit by a Train is not itself a eulogy. It is about eulogies. It looks at categorisation, our need to lump together, to commemorate these actions in order to inspire others to similar self-sacrifice. The focus is not on the catastrophes (re)presented, but on our behaviour in the wake of catastrophe and in the face of constant (potential) catastrophe. ‘Regard the train,’ the announcer demands: Re-guard the train.

If catastrophe makes its presence felt (and possibly over-felt) in these first two, it is almost a struggle to spot it in The Festival. A spirited story of a life more everyday, it tells of a whale-watching festival and a meeting in its midst. Perhaps love is the catastrophe, forever altering the landscape of a life; perhaps it is the breakdown of the love story we begin to anticipate; perhaps it is the flat ordinariness of everyday life that can never match such moments of heightened emotion. The tone is jovial, far more so than before, almost self-aware and mocking, but the comic return is strong. We get perky renditions, half-embodied impersonations, of U2, Bruce Springsteen and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. We get a mother, hopping bonkers, smoking in disguise. We get a real sense of a relaxing elsewhere, of time away, of rejuvenation and of fresh, coastal air. We get a theatre company savouring every individual flavour they use; really feeling movements, tasting words (van-der-graff-gen-er-a-tor) and registering the reverberations of a song sung. The result is a joyous end to the cycle.

Most worthy of note here is Lone Twin’s groundbreaking storytelling, more fully embodied by Alice Bell and The Festival than the shards of Daniel Hit by a Train. Though they remain resolutely post-dramatic, these two pieces manage to work through a full-blown narrative, carefully balancing singularity and multiplicity. The fiction itself is never embodied: performers don’t act, actions seen are dislocated from actions represented. And yet, the fiction is utterly present, hovering somewhere above the stage, vivid in the mind’s eye. Unlike a lot of post-dramatic theatre, which uses to irony as defence mechanism against narrative, there is no disdain for story-telling, no smack of superiority. Instead of half-hearted reconstruction (a la Forced Entz/Crimewatch), the effect is like a police storyboard: the overall emerges from the accumulation of evidence with the linkage left to us.

The mode is rigorously spare and yet never sparse. Each piece has a huge depth of tone, thanks to precise attention to atmosphere and, most importantly, rhythm. Lone Twin pitch their pacing deliberately out of sync with the world and, through repetition, force us to abandon everyday timeframes. They draw out sonic textures from movement – footfalls and breath, claps and clicks – and stretch them until you snuggle in and your blood pumps in time. The result is to entice you unwittingly, almost sub-consciously, such that to fight against it is impossible. It’s as if Lone Twin hold you underwater until you evolve gills and fins.

As so often at the Barbican, I world I re-entered afterwards was not the same one that I had left behind. Is there a better journey home than these post-Bite nights? I know of no other venue that alters one’s perception with such regularity. With ears attuned to the clatter of the tube and the rising, falling hum of passing cars, the double click of footsteps and the whoosh of smokers’ exhalations, London seemed a beat-poem carefully composed, teeming with unseen, unfolding narratives. And I was humming all the way home thanks to this infectious, breezy trilogy.

Till 13 March 2010

Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, re-issued at the end of last year by Penguin, is an important book, and there are at least three reasons to read it. First, it is a deeply humane account of a social group (the mainly Northern working-class) at a decisive historical conjuncture, experiencing the interaction of the two broad cultural forces of the (predominantly pre-war) local traditions of the working class and the increasingly powerful commercialism of post-war consumer capitalism. Second, it is routinely cited as one of the foundational texts of Cultural Studies—along with Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) and EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963)—and is both theoretically far-reaching and easy to read, making important points about the relationship between art (especially popular publications) and everyday life without a resort to hyper-theoreticism (which marred much cultural theory of the 1970s). Third, the reception of The Uses of Literacy in the British New Left of the late 1950s tells us much about both the text itself and the political movement it soon related to, as well as our own difficulties in formulating a compelling and popular account of radical politics today.

The ‘Early’ British New Left, in its initial late-1950s, early-1960s incarnation, attempted to re-define the very meaning of socialism: beyond, that is, the narrow ‘economism’ of the Stalinist orthodoxy of the Communist Party and the arguably even narrower ‘Gas Board Socialism’ of the Labour Party, to a system of thought that included the importance of literature, cinema, criticism, housing, schooling, human relationships, experimentation—in short, the ‘total scale of man’s activities’. If the ‘Early’ New Left has any relevance to contemporary politics, as I would argue it does, then it is through its emphasis on cultural renewal and the question of how to orient ourselves to the cultural force of a pervasive, high-powered and ambiguously satisfying consumer capitalism—and The Uses of Literacy is a key text in thinking through these ideas of ‘culture’ and everyday, lived experience.

A brief word on the structure and argument of The Uses of Literacy. It is arranged, significantly, in two conflicting parts: the first, a reading of the dense working-class life (the place of mother and father, the sights, the smells…) which Hoggart grew up with in Leeds, and the second, a wide-ranging (and almost curmudgeonly) critique of the post-war ‘commercial culture’ beginning to take root and interface with that culture. The tension between these two sections is clear; The Uses of Literacy was originally titled ‘The Abuse of Literacy’. Its subtitle, ‘Aspects of Working-Class Life, with special reference to publications and entertainments’ demarcates Hoggart’s initial interest in written content and the social practice of reading, but I would argue that it also suggests the limits of literary studies of the mid-1950s as Hoggart talks importantly about many more aspects of working-class life than just those ordinarily subject to the method of literary criticism.

The first part of Hoggart’s account, then, describes ‘An “Older” Order’. It is deeply readable, probably because it is noticeably shot-through with a emotional identification with and intuitive sympathy for the manners of speech, behaviour, and even thought of the working-class community Hoggart studies. The first response to The Uses of Literacy is, as a result, emotional—a comparison of your upbringing with Hoggart’s. (Briefly: I was raised in a suburb of Reading in what was held by local legend to be, at the time, the largest housing development in Europe outside of Sweden, full of identical brick semis and mock-tudor detached houses, all built in the mid 1980s. So, I thought about the effect on ‘community’ of the following two facts: the houses were all, as I realised, deliberately constructed so as not to face each other—you looked at your neighbours’ garden wall, or the side of their house—and therefore you could not easily see if your neighbours were home (we did not know our neighbours); and, as all the houses had been put up in one go, like turning the page of a pop-up story-book, there had been no development of smaller streets, with corner pubs or shops, and there was no local high street, only a massive Asda.)

Part of the value of The Uses of Literacy as a historical document to a twenty-first century reader lies here, in the ethnographically-rich autobiographical first section, which details ‘The Personal and the Concrete’ of working-class life. Hoggart details an entire order, from the centrality of the neighbourhood to group life, to characteristic attitudes to fate and luck, and (influentially) ideas of ‘Us’ (working-class) and ‘Them’ (bosses and the rest) to understanding the inequalities of life and the way things work. Stuart Hall has called this method ‘social hermeneutics’, with The Uses of Literacy as a signal example. Two important partialities must be noted though. First, Hoggart takes regional (West Yorkshire) culture for class culture, forgetting that in Britain there is not, for example, such a thing as standardised ‘working class speech’: there is, even today, upper-class and middle-class speech, and working-class speech exists as a set of regional variants. Second, and the greater partiality, Hoggart’s experience is, as he notes, based on his life as a hard-working scholarship boy: he stays at home, struggling for a quiet place to study rather than entering the work of work. The Uses of Literacy, it is often pointed out, is an account of the private life of the working-class, with the public world of politics centred around the workplace, and the (at times creative, at times destructive) tension between the two wholly excluded.

Hoggart’s account, then, is incomplete (not that we could reasonably expect anything else). But even in placing politics to one side and examining one aspect of working-class life—with such detail and compassion—Hoggart contributes decisively to a movement that would later find its home, directed by Hoggart, in an off-shoot of the Birmingham Eng. Lit. department in 1963: ‘Cultural Studies’. In The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart, along with (in radically different ways) Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, radically overturns the meaning of ‘culture’ used in any kind of literary studies, by providing an account of a way of life not merely marginalised but excluded from the dominant discourse of culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said’, running from Arnold to Eliot and, later, the Leavises.

‘Culture’ here, in a way that we easily accept today, instead also refers to the experiences and habits of everyday group life, even filtering down to varieties of light (‘the sun forcing its way down as far as the ground-floor windows on a very sunny afternoon, the foggy gray of November over the slates and chimneys, the misty evenings of March when the gangs congregate in the watery yellow light of the kicked and scratched gas-lamp’, p56) and tastes (‘not so much the ordinary toffees and boiled sweets, nor even the sherbet-fountains, monkey nuts and aniseed balls, but the stuff of which each generation of boys transmits the secret—a penny stick of licorice or some cinnamon root from the chemist, two pennyworth of broken locust, a portion of chips ‘with some scraps, please’, well soused with salt and vinegar and eaten out of a piece of newspaper which is licked at the end’, p57) in this case known to a working-class boy. For Hoggart, all these aspects of a way of life must be given their place for us to begin to understand culture; The Uses of Literacy is a warning against any kind of ‘reductionism’ that does not hold on to these complexities of human reality.

The Uses of Literacy also provoked wide-ranging and vocal debate in the British New Left of the late 1950s, and it is the nature and contours of this debate that I find instructive: by looking at the criticisms made of Hoggart’s work at the time, we can better situate it in its historical and political context, particularly by looking at why it was thought by the Left so important to engage with it.

In the Summer of 1957, shortly after the publication of The Uses of Literacy, the Oxford-based New Left journal Universities and Left Review printed three responses to The Uses of Literacy based around a central review by Raymond Williams. The responses collected around the regional differences between the Irish and Welsh working-class and that of West Yorkshire, structural changes in the position of ‘the scholarship boy’, and the twin theoretical poles of the importance of cultural subordination and cultural classlessness.

Williams’ response to The Uses of Literacy’s critique of commercial society and the idea of this culture ‘replacing’ or ‘subordinating’ existing working class ways of life seems to me to be valuable. Hoggart correctly identifies in the second part of The Uses of Literacy the shallowness and specious populism of popular publications, as well as their banality and the meretriciousness of the industry that produces them—which he compares fairly straightforwardly to the (in parts) resilient working-class culture he has previously outlined. Hoggart argues that questions about the interaction between these two cultures are important, and the unbalanced nature of their meeting is something we must bear in mind, unless we are satisfied with losing all that is good in the older order and uncritically accepting the newer mass art.

This thought was an important one for the Early New Left, caught up in the same quick processes of cultural shift that Hoggart described. However, there are passages, notably about the ‘Juke-Box Boys’ where Hoggart talks about the ‘spiritual dry-rot’ of those who hang around in milk bars with ‘no aim, no ambition, no protection, no belief’, in which a moral critique is offered of those members of the working class seduced by ‘sex in shiny packets’ (p. 204). Williams is however correct in emphasising that it is the exposure to ‘commercial culture’ not its consumption to which we must attend, and that this culture has influenced all classes (even if not equally). Our response, then, must be not only to examine the content of the publications that are read, but to accord central importance to the ownership of the media and the institutions for cultural dissemination and promotion. Analogously, free speech is not just a matter of what can be said; it is increasingly important who owns the vehicles through which that speech is produced, circulated and received.

The question of cultural classlessness—which Hoggart is clear in the Conclusion we are heading towards, or have already started achieving—is more complex, and I will do no more than scrape the surface of that debate here. Williams’ key insight into The Uses of Literacy was how Hoggart focuses on the (class) similarities in the use of material objects (for example, newspapers to paperbacks—but this equally applies to, to take two, washing machines and cars) without highlighting the persistent class differences in understandings of society and constitutive human relationships (1).

Williams sees a distinctive working-class culture as inhering in (among other things) an emphasis on ‘extending relationships’ through associational groups and political organisations, in contradistinction to bourgeois ideas of competition (economically) and ‘service’ (which Williams sees as complexly providing the explanation for Tory preaching about family values to single mothers while packing their children off to boarding school). While the centrality of ideas about society and constitutive human relationships to any type of thinking about politics is difficult to exaggerate, we must also think carefully about the role of associational (sports, volunteering, political) groups in today’s society and whether the idea of ‘extending relationships’ is still one with much currency today.

The continuing relevance of ideas of ‘cultural struggle’ and the relationship between culture and class can be seen, among other places, in Stuart White’s recent ‘ideological map’ of the four strands of evolving progressive thought in the New Statesman (2). Here White delineates ‘Left Communitarianism’, ‘Left Republicanism’, ‘Centre Republicanism’, and ‘Right Communitarianism’. More relevant here (but perhaps less important) than the simple observation that there must be more to progressive thought than these (where is socialism? where is public ownership? what is our conception of a radically different and better way to live?), is the central conceptual importance within Communitarianism of determining ideas of culture. ‘Left Communitarianism’, for instance, contends that ‘human beings are social creatures… we need a social vision that emphasises solidarity and mutuality’.

Here culture, in Hoggart’s sense of the texture of lived experience and the real social vision that exists in actual communities, is key to how we emphasise solidarity, and which mutualities we should endorse (and which we should oppose). A key legacy of the ‘culturalist’ New Left, as shown in, at least in my reading, The Uses of Literacy and the debate around it in the Early British New Left, is the taking seriously of culture as constitutive ground for all social practices—including politics. For instance, debates about affluence in the 1950s and the ‘embourgeoisement’ of the working class, about the dangers of ‘Americanisation’ and what Hoggart calls ‘the candy-floss world’ of the newer mass art with its sugary consumerist treats, have a deep resonance with Right Communitarians worrying about the effect of the ‘moral vacuum created by… lifestyle liberalism in society’.

The Uses of Literacy poses, directly and indirectly, a set of difficult questions for the strands of progressive thought White describes: where could an alternative to an atomistic liberal view of human beings come from (‘working-class culture’)? on the other hand, what is the role of materialism in progressive politics (does it undermine bases of solidarity)? what about class (does it still exist, does it form the basis of political action)? how are class, politics, and the potential for radical change expressed in popular culture? how do we avoid taking the facile intellectual shortcuts of thinking about ‘the masses’ and ‘the common man’ when contrasting the real bases of solidarity and mutuality that exist in society with a culture in television and the newspapers which seems to emphasise wholly different aspects and values of life (the value of competition, the necessity of having low (and even fearful) opinion of others)? In short, can we construct a radical politics which takes into account the complexities and contradictions in contemporary culture and does not end up anti-humanist or with a thinly-veiled contempt for ‘the masses’?

To answer these questions with the resources set down by Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy must be placed in its dual historical context. In the story of the foundation of cultural studies, it plays a key part, particularly in its insistence that ‘ways of life’ must be studied in and for themselves, and culture should thus be understood as a matter of ‘meaning’ or, as Hoggart puts it, the ‘practices of ‘making sense’’. On its release, The Uses of Literacy raised questions for the Early New Left about the character of a class culture, the very meaning of culture, and the interaction between culture and politics (in cultural struggle) and culture and class—questions which have not (cannot?) be decisively answered once and for all and are still core to a truly ‘progressive’ politics.

The Uses of Literacy is above all, in my view, a study of a class living through a period of cultural change that has proved, while still incomplete and deeply contradictory, to be one of the most crucial developments in Western European society of the last century, and continuing in this one. Hoggart charts a moment in the movement from, as Stuart Hall puts it in a recent retrospective of Hoggart’s work, ‘older, tiered, socially embedded, hierarchical class structures and Protestant Ethic typical of West European bourgeois societies to the more truncated, ‘post-industrial’ class structures of the US, based in corporate capital, money, celebrity, lifestyle, hedonism and consumption’. In the process of understanding that change—and responding to it politically—The Uses of Literacy marks a starting-point.

1) Perry Anderson, in a superb essay, takes this one step further, suggesting that culture can be said to be, when thinking politically, the set of ideas about man and society that are created by the thought of a society produced between the boundaries of natural science and art (that is, philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, and so on). See Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, NLR 50, 1968.
2) An ideological map, by Stuart White, New Statesman, 3 September 2009

2008 was the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, the book that is widely regarded as the first African novel. Its Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, turns 80 this year. His output has been spectacular, in both scale and quality, including novels, children’s books, collections of short stories and poetry, academic essays and political commentary. The Education of a British-Protected Child, a collection of autobiographical essays written by Achebe between 1988 and 2009, does not explicitly set out to celebrate these anniversaries, but that is exactly its effect. A relatively slim volume of just 16 short pieces, Education succeeds not only in enlightening the reader on a wide range of topics relating to colonialism and decolonisation, African literature and contemporary race relations, it provides a distillation of this great man’s philosophy that is both humbling and inspiring.

In his ‘Preface’ Achebe writes of the difficulty of selecting from the many important events and individuals in his life when it came to pulling this collection together. Realising how much he will be forced to leave out, he describes the ‘entire scheme for this collection’ as ‘untenable’. We expect Achebe to go on to lay out a revised structure before us, but this doesn’t happen. Just acknowledging the impossibility of containing an entire life within one book of essays somehow solves the problem. He just gets on with it.

This example is illustrative of Achebe’s modus operandi: by adopting a pragmatic and forward-looking approach to difficult issues, political, social and moral debates are demystified and the reader is presented with ways of thinking that appear to offer the possibility of overcoming all the world’s evils.

Several of the essays in the collection offer us insights into Achebe’s upbringing and adult family life. Raised by Christian missionary parents in the midst of a traditional Igbo community, Achebe was made aware early on of the cultural, political and linguistic complexity that characterised 20th-century Nigeria. The collection’s title essay sets out Achebe’s ‘fundamental objection to colonialism’ through reference to his school and university days. Despite Achebe’s explicit statement of his wish to avoid ‘giv[ing] a discourse on colonialism’ (p4), this essay is a powerful declamation of the evils of a system that ‘was essentially a denial of human worth and dignity’ (p22). What is so effective about Achebe’s writing is his ability to transmit the urgency of these issues to his readers. The arguments he offers here and elsewhere in this collection are not new, but by personalising them and tying them into his own experience, Achebe causes us to re-examine our attitudes towards them.

‘Africa is People’ is a case in point. This essay from 1998 addresses the way the international community regards the African continent. We in the West have become so familiar with the semantic pairing of ‘Africa’ and ‘poverty’ that we have allowed ourselves to become lazy in our thinking about the place and its peoples. ‘If poverty springs so readily to our minds when we think about Africa, how much do we really know about it?’ (p162). What Achebe argues so persuasively for is proper understanding as well as political and economic policies that acknowledge Africa’s enormous potential and provide it with the opportunity for self-development.

Achebe makes reference to the thinking of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and David Livingstone in his discussions of how Africa should engage (or not) with its colonial past, and considers how their messages can help us move forward. The short 1992 essay ‘Martin Luther King and Africa’ is a poignant reminder of the necessity to stay vigilant against ‘fear and prejudice and all the other frailties of our human condition’ (p137).

‘Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature’ is an insightful and irreverent summary of the debate surrounding the use of English as the language of African literature. Those familiar with this topic will enjoy this 1989 essay as a witty refresher, and anyone unaware of the debate but interested in world literature would do well to begin their research here. Included too is a little essay entitled ‘Things Things Fall Apart’, a charming reflection on the international influence of the novel that made him famous.

As in Things Fall Apart, Achebe draws on traditional African sayings, tales and songs throughout the collection, revealing a rich culture that Achebe himself has been instrumental in opening up to the Western and pan-African reader. By referring to the sophisticated philosophical frameworks underpinning different African tribal cultures – the Bantu saying he quotes on p136, ‘A human is a human because of other humans’, is a particularly good example of this - Achebe diminishes the perceived gap between African and Western sensibilities: there is no room for ‘us and them’-style thinking in our newly globalised society.

A 1988 essay entitled ‘The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics’ perhaps surprisingly offers a message directly applicable to the current moment in British politics. ‘Leadership is a sacred trust, like the priesthood in civilised, humane religions’, Achebe writes. ‘No one gets into it lightly or unadvisedly, because it demands qualities of mind and discipline of body and will far beyond the need of the ordinary citizen. Anybody who offers himself or herself or is offered to society for leadership must be aware of the unusually high demands of the role and should, if in any doubt whatsoever, firmly refuse the prompting’. (p.143) The subject of discussion in this essay is the failure of leadership in Nigerian politics and the knock-on effects of this failure on society as a whole, but Achebe’s universal philosophy takes in so much more, allowing us to apply these comments to a situation occurring thousands of miles away and two decades into the future. His writings should be on a list of required reading for all those thinking of taking up office; perhaps then we might end up with a political class ready to treat the electorate with the respect it is due.

In the end, what makes Achebe so readable and his work such a valuable resource when it comes to thinking about colonialism, race relations, international relations or literature is the humanity that suffuses his writing. Born a ‘British-protected’ Christian member of the Igbo tribe, educated courtesy of a colonial-controlled Nigerian state, now resident in the United States of America and well respected in the international literary and academic community, Chinua Achebe belongs to and is claimed by many groups. By drawing on the positive aspects of each of these areas of experience, but ultimately refusing to be limited by their boundaries, Achebe brings these disparate worlds together in his work, creating a literary voice that speaks to and of humanity. He is a writer to be treasured and respected.

The Muslim World and Cinema

Every culture promotes its history, beliefs, heroes, values, norms, and attitude. The African-American director Spike Lee said about his films, ‘I’m just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets’. Is there a parallel to African-American, Asian, or Latin cinema, called ‘Muslim Cinema’? Does it exist, and if so, how can it be understood? Before one can understand the cinema of a people, a little more light needs to be shed on the actual people.

The Muslim world, with approximately one fifth of the world population and in turn its politics, economics, and culture, plays a very important role on the world stage. Headline news is the most popular venue promoting what is known about Muslims, so it becomes imperative for Muslims to be seen and heard from other vantage points. One of these vistas is art, and in the present world Cinema, due its mass appeal and significant availability. An introduction to Muslim Cinema allows Muslims to take a critical reflection about their own beliefs and culture, as well as providing a window for those who are of other faiths to see who Muslims are. Where does one start?

Some countries like the US, Japan, France and India have a strong arts culture, and an affinity or presence to the medium of film. The Muslim world does not easily fit in this category, so how else can it be viewed. Besides providing entertainment, film can present a window to the economic, social or moral challenges of society. There are volumes of books on world cinema, regional cinema (e.g. Arab Cinema), and national cinema of Muslim-majority countries that have a cinema and history like Egyptian or Turkish cinema. However, ‘Muslim Cinema’ is not a known entity. This introduction to the subject is at best like the Indian story of a group of blind men feeling different parts of an elephant, trying to determine what an Elephant is like. Maybe this introduction is its tusk or tail, but it is a starting point for discourse.

The Muslim world, although perceived as one entity, is not monolithic. It is made up of different regions, countries, states and communities. And although religion is the basic underlying theme, each region comes with its own differentiating culture. There are over 1.4 Billion Muslims in the world represented in 48 Muslim majority countries from Morocco to Malaysia.

There are also a large minority of Muslims in many countries including the US, UK France, Germany, Russia, China, and India. Although ‘Muslim countries’ have Muslim majority populations, they also represent people of other faiths. With so many Muslims spanning the globe, there are hundreds of cultures, languages and dialects. With such diversity, there is no easily definable commonality other than faith which can describe ‘Muslim Cinema.’ So what is Islamic or Muslim Cinema?

As these terms are not defined, the following are working definitions: ‘Islamic Cinema is film that conforms to Islamic laws, customs and values.’ This one represents a high ideal, and due to the vagaries of film it is a sensitive and difficult subject to address. Any art-form, by its very nature, is subjective. Alternatively, then: ‘Muslim Cinema is a film movement by or about Muslims’ affords a wider perspective. This paper focuses on the latter. It is a discourse on belief and culture, politics and perception. It is not meant to proselyte or promote religion. It provides a platform to provide social commentary and social criticism. In some areas, it ties into the global social justice movement and highlights common humanity, the universal language of freedom and love.

Muslim Cinema can be loosely broken down into two categories. The first is indigenous cinema of Muslim-majority countries like Iran, Egypt, and Turkey. The second is cinema of Muslim-minority countries like the US, France, and India. The films can be made by Muslims or people of other faiths. Most of the films discussed or listed have some representation of Muslims or issues faced by minorities which juxtapose to the Muslim.

Indigenous Cinema of Muslim-majority countries

There are 48 Muslim majority countries in the world. Due to religious, social and economic challenges, only a few have a history or presence in making films.

The most influential of these countries have been the triad of Iran, Egypt, and Turkey. Each country has a different national language. For Iran it is Persian, Egypt has Arabic and Turkey has the Turkish language. Each country also has a distinct sphere of influence.

Spheres of cinema influence

Each cinema has had a beginning, a golden age, its decline and its present condition. Iran as a country with a cinema is well documented given the success of filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Majid Majidi. Indonesia is not as well known, but has a history in film making that stretches back to 1926 and peaked in the 1980s. Its influence has spread into neighboring countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.

Egypt, with its long history and its pre-eminent position, has played a critical role in the films that have influenced both African and Arab cultures. Turkey, similarly being a bridge between Asia and Europe as well as its Ottoman heritage influences many of the former Central Asian-Soviet states including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Iran, not only has a long history of cinema but their filmmakers have made a presence on the world stage from Cannes to Oscar nominations. Their influence overlaps that of Turkey and also impacts Iraq and Lebanon.

The following table lists countries with the most active cinema in terms of film production.

Other countries worth a mention are Pakistan, countries of the former Central Soviet states and sub-Saharan Africa. Pakistan had a good presence in film-making after partition from India. It too had a golden age in the sixties and seventies, before going into decline. There is a small revival of cinema going on, with the strongest presence of films like Khuda Kay Liye (In the name of God) which became a blockbuster film.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, some of the former Central Soviet states, notably Kazakhstan, have also come into the foray of filmmaking. Amongst many films which depict their culture and history was the Oscar nominated film ‘Mongol’ for best foreign-language film in 2008.

In sub-Saharan Africa, Senegal, Niger and Nigeria are some of the Muslim countries that have led the way in film-making. The director Sembene Ousmane is regarded as Africa’s most notable film-maker, who has inspired many other African filmmakers.

Not all people have a national identity which is reflected in a national culture and cinema. A primary example are the Kurdish people who do not have a nation. Due to colonial rule of the middle east and its later sub-division the Kurdish people are split amongst Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and several other countries. Some films from the region are starting to address Kurdish people and their issues.

Besides film production, proper distribution plays a critical role in getting exposure to new releases. The Cairo International Film festival in Egypt, along with the Fajr International Film Festival in Iran, are the longest running festivals in the Muslim world. The International Festival of Muslim Cinema also called ‘Golden Minbar’ held in Kazan, Tatarstan; the Dubai film festival; and the Kara film festival held in Karachi, Pakistan are some of the emerging festivals that are making a strong presence in the Muslim world. Besides these many of the other Muslim majority countries like Morocco and Kazakhstan have their own festivals. Festivals like these are not limited to representing Islam and Muslims to the world community but as the mission of Golden Minbar articulates, ‘representatives of other faiths creating films, popularizing universal spiritually-moral and cultural traditions.’

Elements of Muslim Cinema

Imagery and Censorship in Islam

Every frame in film is an image and traditionally in Islam images of living beings have been shunned in favour of the abstract. Islamic art has, in spite of this limitation, flourished and made use of the abstract. This can be seen in architecture and other art forms. The photographic image however, has faced resistance in conservative circles. Based on both form and content, many conservative Muslims find that film opposes the beliefs and values of the Muslim faith. In several Muslim-majority countries, Movie theaters have been burnt to the ground when religious fervor has gotten out of control. But this represents only a small minority of the Muslim world. The rest enjoy cinema. Since the early twentieth century, the still photo along with moving images, have now become an accepted part of life. Being an audio-visual medium, film in many instances contains graphic content of nudity, sex, violence or language. Some may have music (sensual or not). Most Muslim countries attempt to control these images and messages in the form of censorship.
Censorship varies by country and its laws. However, there are some common themes that are censored and can be found in the Muslim world. These cover the areas of politics, religion and sex. Criticism of government and its policies is generally frowned upon. Many well known filmmakers have been detained in jail, or attacked by vigilante mobs for their film’s message or content. Any attack on religion, whether it is against Islam or any other faith, is curtailed in Muslim Cinema. Because Muslims feel they are the ‘victims’ of negative media portrayal in the West, there has been strong emotional responses in an attempt to counteract this victimization. Any representation of the Prophet Muhammad, his family, or companions in any form of imagery is forbidden. There are many reasons why images are forbidden and they go beyond the authors limited knowledge. A very basic reason is images can lead to idolatry, which Islam came to abolish. Traditional family is held as a core pillar of society, and anything that undermines this is also challenged. In addition to this, vulgar language and violence and anything else typically immoral according to Islamic teachings are typically censored. Most but not all of this type of censorship is not however unique to Muslim culture and cinema, it is highlighted for emphasis.

Women and gender

The Muslim film industry, as in most eastern and western cultures alike, has been dominated by men and has given primarily a male point of view. As a broad and generalizing statement, it has taken women in Muslim countries a long time to become spectators, then actors and now directors. Women’s issues including the role of women in society, women’s rights, widowhood, polygamy, male-female interaction in societies where segregation has been the norm and female sexuality have been in the background of themes in Muslim Cinema. Things are changing, especially in countries like Iran where Cinema and women are making a presence, and these issues are coming to the foreground. Gender issues, men-women interaction and other social issues are being explored. At the other end of the spectrum are countries like Saudi Arabia where Cinema halls have been banned for over three decades and where permitted, mainly allow male-only audiences. However, there too change is taking place, albeit at a slow pace. The objections to mixed screening are based upon religious, political and cultural reasonings. In an interconnected world, women are coming to the forefront of not only politics but other facets of life, including cinema. Of all the Muslim countries, Iran stands out as the leader in women directors and making films related to gender issues. This trend is spreading in other countries including Turkey, Pakistan, and other nations.

Muslim politics and the world

Muslim cinema cannot be seen in a vacuum from local and global politics. Unlike the cinema of America, China or India, the Muslim world is not one political nation or union like the European Community. Most of the Muslim world has been colonized by the British, French and other colonial powers. The last Muslim Caliphate, the Ottoman empire ended in the early twentieth century, and with its breakup the Western powers carved up large parts of Muslim lands into nation states. Today although with the exception of Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya, all the Muslim countries have some form of independence. Some would argue that most of them are still ruled through neo-colonialism. Regardless of this fact, faith is the largest common denominator that ties them together. However, there are other divides that come into play including the Sunni versus Shia branches of Islam. Even where language is common, e.g. Arabic, what separates people are the numerous Arabic dialects. Given both the history and the present political condition of Muslim countries, cinema has either flourished in a few counties or not evolved to its full potential. Cinema requires both intellectual and financial capital to make its mark. It requires freedom of thought and expression, which is sadly lacking in many of these lands. It also needs public and private support to help cultivate the cinema. Without an infrastructure that helps facilitate not only production of film but provides channels of distribution, Muslim cinema may not thrive to it’s potential.

Cinema of Muslim-minority countries

i) Hollywood and its representation of Muslims

By its very nature, cinema reflects and amplifies interesting parts of life through drama and conflict. The narratives that make it to celluloid have their heroes and villains. In Hollywood the villains have varied over time. In the Westerns they were native Indians. In war films they were the Germans and Japanese. Generally, Muslims were absent in the early days of Hollywood. There were the occasional Arab and Muslim villains but a Muslim hero was unheard of. This may be due in part to the history of past conflicts going back to the Crusades.

Since the early 1920s, the role of the Arab-Muslim in films like Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik and A Son of the Sahara set a precedent of negative depiction, of a people who were dangerous and not to be trusted. Fast forward to the seventies, eighties and the oil crisis where for a short time Muslims were portrayed as greedy billionaires.

In the 1980s and 1990s, films like Not without my daughter, whose subject of Muslim Drama, Kidnapping, True Story and Betrayal, were the key ways Muslims were identified. The tagline of the film ‘In 1984, Betty Mahmoody’s husband took his wife and daughter to meet his family in Iran. He swore they would be safe. They would be free to leave. He lied,’ were common. This film was used for diversity training and understanding of Muslim culture for many years.

However, the predominant stereotype has been that of bombers. In Black Sunday, an Arab terrorist plots to bomb a stadium during the Super Bowl. These were followed by a spate of films where the antagonists are Muslims, including Executive Decision, True Lies and Rules of Engagement. With all of them the basic premise is that the Muslims are out to destroy our Western (American) society and it’s OK to stop them even if it involves collateral damage.

In some examples where a story has no direct bearing on Muslims, plots have included them as the ‘fall guys’. Examples being Back to the Future, where Libyan terrorists show up out of nowhere. Father of the Bride II, a rich Arab and his Harem show up to buy the prized home of Steve Martin, only to tear it up. All these examples built of stereotypes that have been used to project Muslims and the danger of that is described by Jack Shaheen, author of ‘Reel Bad Arabs’.

‘If you take the same images and you repeat them over and over again, and the images teach us to hate a people and to hate their religion, what happens is that we, in spite of our intelligence, our innate goodness, actually turn around and let these images despise and vilify an entire people.’ (2001)

However, it is not all bad news. One of the first positive portrayals of Muslims in film was made by the director Moustapha Akkad, who made two epic films. The first, The Message, about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, and the second, Lion of the Desert about a Libyan tribal leader Omar Mukhtar who fought the Italian army around World War II.

There are positive changes taking place in Hollywood. In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Azeem played by Morgan Freeman is a Muslim who helps Robin Hood fight the evil doers, eventually saving his life. In The 13th Warrior, Antonio Banderas plays a courageous Arab trave’ler, who helps a group of Scandinavian adventurers in a battle with a tribe of cannibalistic raiders. In Kingdom of Heaven, Saladin (along with other Muslims) is shown as a thoughtful, compassionate, respectful, brave and human leader. Although Hollywood has not done an about turn, these examples are of positive change taking place. In the French film Days of Glory, Arab-Muslim soldiers fight for France and the Allies during World War II. Both the director and main cast were Muslim.

ii) Bollywood and its representation of Muslims

In Bollywood the story about Muslims is a little different. Muslims have had a small presence in Hindi film since the early days of Cinema.

There have been many Muslim Bollywood heroines from Madhubala, considered to be one of the most beautiful actresses to grace the Indian silver screen. She starred in many films, including one of the greatest Indian Epic films Mughal-e-Azam, which can be compared to Gone with the Wind. Other actresses include Nargis, Waheeda Rahman, and Zeenat Aman. On the male actors side, Dilip Kumar, real name (Yusuf Khan) was a major star in the early days of cinema. Some of the top lead male stars of the nineties and beyond are the Khans, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan and Shah-Rukh Khan. Although the presence of Muslims in Bollywood sounds positive, it is not all good news.

Although Muslims have had an on and off-screen presence in Hindi cinema, most of the narrative has avoided the Muslims or relegated them to the sidelines. There is a strong theme of Indian and Hindu nationalism in films. The role of minorities, not just Muslims, but Christians and Sikhs as well, has largely been stereotyped. Bollywood is secular but it still has its dominant Hindu religious motifs in almost all films. These show up in the presence of worship, marriage and death. Muslim character portrayal of men has been either timid or violent. In the case of women, the typical portrayal is that of someone who is promiscuous.

Indian cinema’s coverage of Muslims can be broken down by a timeline. There have been three periods and trends in Indian Cinema which reflect the portrayal of Muslims. These are best described by Kalyani Chadha and Anandam P. Kavoori in their essay on ‘The Muslim Other in Indian Cinema’ in the book Global Bollywood. They describe three time periods. The 1950s and 1960s was the exoticised period where Muslims are portrayed from the Moghul period as Kings and nobility. A world which is far removed from the present day Muslims in India. Mughal-e-Azam is an example of a film of that period. The second period is the 1970s and 1980s where the Muslim role is marginalised into supporting roles of the protagonist Hindus. These Muslim roles were the stereotypical tailor, preacher, Qawali singer and in the case of women the promiscuous courtesan. From the 1990s to the present, the majority of roles and depictions of Muslims was that of the demonised other. For example, the story of India’s partition into Pakistan in the film Gadar was reduced to romance between a Sikh man and a Muslim woman and Rambo like rage as he goes to rescue her from her evil Pakistani parents. A significant number of other films show Muslims as criminals, crooks, and every day people who cannot be trusted.

However, just as in Hollywood, there are positive changes taking place in Hindi Cinema too. Although typically films do not have the protagonist as a Muslim, sometimes the anti-hero reflects a Muslim point of view in films like Dil Se and Kurbaan. My Name is Khan is one of the new wave of films by director Karan Johar and legendary actor Shah-Rukh Khan, a Muslim, where the latter portrays for the first time a role of a Muslim. It will take time before more films of this caliber make it to the mainstream, as they cause political turmoil with the far-right political parties.

The next chapter

If this were a book, there would be a chapter on the cinema of each Muslim country or a chapter on each of the major themes that appear from the Muslim world. There could be analysis of films that define Muslim Cinema, and interviews with writers and directors who help shape Muslim Cinema. Instead, the reader is referred to the excellent books that will provide some of this information and insights. A few books are worth a special mention.
Contemporary world cinema : Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia by Shohini Chaudhuri and Asian cinema : a field guide, by Tom Vick, provides a very good overview of World and Asian cinema respectively. Many of the Muslim countries’ cinema, especially that of Iran, Turkey and Egypt, are included.

Arab cinema : history and cultural identity, by Viola Shafik, and The Cinema in the Arab countries, by George Sadoul, provide an excellent overview about Arab Cinema. This includes its history, censorship, relationship to images, music and culture.

Women, Islam and cinema, and Turkish cinema: identity, distance and belonging, both by Gönül Dönmez-Colin, are wonderful resources on the subject of women in Muslim cinema and the latter on Turkish cinema.

Ousmane Sembene Interviews, edited by Annett Busch and Max Annas, provides insights of a master filmmaker known as the father of African Cinema.

MyFavoriteReview.com’s Top 101 Muslim theme films

Selection Criteria

In a sea of films produced since the last century, how does one select a film that makes it to the top 101 Muslim theme films? It is not an easy proposition. The finalist films were rated on narrative, direction/editing, the positive message or reflection on Muslim culture, and finally the uniqueness of the way the filmmaker has carried that message.

The following is a disclaimer. Reviews and lists by their nature are subjective. Ratings and numbers even though apparently having a scientific feel to them are still based on the reviewers’ assessment. No list is perfect, in inclusion or ranking including this one.

A few words on ratings and inclusion. The Motion Picture Association of America rates films G, PG, PG13 and R. These ratings, although a guideline, are still very subjective. MyFavoriteReview avoids reviewing films that are needlessly offensive. The number of good films with a Muslim theme is relatively small compared to the total number of films produced. This is the first attempt to compile such a list. Some of the films included in the list may contain some scenes that are graphic, but the overall message of the film is so strong, they are included. It is up to each individual, in addition to checking the review, to check ratings and screen the film before showing to audiences and or younger children.

101 Must-See Muslim-themed films

101 A Mighty Heart Mariane Pearl embarks on a frantic search to locate her journalist husband, Daniel, when he goes missing in Pakistan.
100 Al-massir (Destiny) (1997) Set in 12th century Arab-ruled Spanish province Andalusia, famed philosopher Averroes is appointed grand judge by the caliph and his liberal court judgments are not liked by everyone.
99 A New Day in Old Sana’a A photographer, Tariq, must choose between his love or an arranged marriage
98 A Time for Drunken Horses After their father dies, a family of five are forced to survive on their own in a Kurdish village on the border of Iran and Iraq.
97 Jenin Jenin (doc) Documentary about the Battle for Jenin refugee camp
96 Man Push Cart A night in the life of a former Pakistani rock star who now sells coffee from his push cart on the streets of Manhattan.
95 Noorie A simple and touching story about Noorie, a girl from the valleys with a simple dream: a house, family and life filled with love - and who is forced to defend this dream at the cost of her life…
94 Occupation 101 (doc) A thought-provoking and powerful documentary film on the current and historical root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. political involvement.
93 Persepolis A French animated film about a girl who comes of age in Iran during the Islamic revolution and how she sees it once she moves to Europe.
92 Prince Among Slaves The True Story of an African Prince who Survived Slavery in America.
91 Rana’s Wedding A Palestinian girl of 17 wants to get married to the man of her own choosing.
90 Sorry, Haters Against the anxieties and fears of post-9/11 America, an Arab cab driver picks up a troubled professional woman (Robin Wright Penn) with unexpected results.
89 The Band’s visit A comedy about a band comprised of members of the Egyptian police force head to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab arts center, are lost and welcomed instead in an Israeli town.
88 The Kingdom A team of U.S. government agents is sent to investigate the bombing of an American facility in the Middle East.
87 The Road to Guantanamo A docu-drama about a trio of British Muslims who were held in Guantanamo Bay for two years until they were released without charge.
86 Three Kings In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, 4 soldiers set out to steal gold that was stolen from Kuwait, but they discover people who desperately need their help.
85 Al Otro Lado This drama features three stories about the bonds between children and absent parents. One of the parents is a migrant from North Africa.
84 Ali A biography of sports legend, Muhammad Ali, from his early days to his days in the ring.
83 Arranged A Jewish and Muslim woman become friends in a Brooklyn school
82 Brick Lane A young Bangladeshi woman, Nazneem, arrives in 1980s London, leaving behind her beloved sister and home, for an arranged marriage and a new life.
81 Cape of Good Hope A Drama revolving around 3 women’s lives and how they are intertwined.
80 Daughter of Keltoum A woman travels to a Berber settlement in Algeria—to find her biological mother and in the process finds a world untouched by contemporary society.
79 Dev A story about love and hate as Muslim militancy and the police in India collide.
78 Gallipoli Two Australian sprinters face the brutal realities of war when they are sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey during World War I.
77 Girdap (Whirlpool) A naive apolitical young man, who is interrupted by a fundamental religious environment, turns bitter against society. The film follows his journey.
76 Inch’Allah Dimanche The story of an immigrant woman struggling against old world traditions.
75 Journey of Hope The story of a poor Turkish family who tries to emigrate illegally to Switzerland.
74 Kite Runner After spending years in California, Amir returns to his homeland in Afghanistan to help his old friend Hassan, whose son is in trouble.
73 Maryam An Iranian-born teenager living in suburban New Jersey thinks of herself as simply an American until anti-Iranian sentiment erupts in her community after American hostages are held in Iran.
72 Partition A former Sikh soldier comes to the rescue of a traumatized Muslim girl, marries her but then has to rescue her from Pakistan.
71 Rambo III Rambo’s Vietnam commanding officer Colonel Trautman is held hostage in Afghanistan, and its up to Rambo to rescue him.
70 Silent waters A former Hindu, now Muslim widow in a village in Pakistan sees her 17 year old son being attracted to Islamist militants.
69 Takva A promotion brings a Muslim’s relationship with God into question.
68 The Dove’s Lost Necklace The second part of Nacer Khemir’s Desert Trilogy
67 The Hunting Party A journalist and cameraman go to Bosnia to find the number one war criminal
66 The Tiger and the Snow A love-struck Italian poet is stuck in Iraq at the onset of an American invasion.
65 Traitor An FBI agent heads an investigation into an international conspiracy, all clues seem to lead back to former U.S. Special Operations officer, Samir Horn.
64 Waltz with Bashir An Animated Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memoriesof the massacres in Sabra and Chatila camps.
63 Abouna The lives of two brothers, who live in N’djamena, are upended when they awake one Saturday morning to find that their father has left the family…
62 Bombay A Hindu man and a Muslim woman fall in love in a small village and move to Mumbai, where they have two children. However, growing religious tensions and erupting riots threaten to tear the family apart.
61 Charlie Wilson’s War A drama based on a Texas congressman Charlie Wilson’s covert dealings in Afghanistan, where his efforts to assist rebels in their war with the Soviets have some unforeseen and long-reaching effects.
60 Dil Se The clash between love and ideology is portrayed in this love story between a Hindu radio executive and a beautiful Muslim revolutionary, set in Kashmir.
59 Dirty Pretty Things An illegal Nigerian immigrant discovers the unpalatable side of London life.
58 Islam, Empire of Faith History of the Islamic Empire
57 Kandahar An Afghan-born woman from Canada takes a perilous journey through Afghanistan to try to find her sister
56 Laal Salaam Although not specifically about Muslims the film is about the “other” tribes and cultures who do not fit into mainstream India and their treatment by the authorities.
55 Lawrence of Arabia An Epic film about T.E. Lawrence and how he along with the British government and Saud family fought against the Ottoman empire
54 Leila A young couple face family pressure for the husband to take a second wife when they cannot have children.
53 Monsieur Ibrahim In Paris, a Turkish shop owner befriends a Jewish boy in his mid-teens.
52 Moolaadé When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female circumcision, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.
51 Mr and Mrs Iyer A bus journey set during riots in India where a Muslim journalist is rescued by a Hindu woman who pretends to be his wife
50 Rendition An American wife searches for her Egyption husband who is kidnapped and tortured under the CIAs secret rendition program
49 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves When Robin and his Moorish companion come to England and the tyranny of the Sheriff of Nottingham, he decides to fight back as an outlaw.
48 Taxi To the Dark Side In 2002, a cab driver picked up a few passengers near his home in Afghanistan. He never returned.
47 The Visitor A college professor comes to the rescue of an Arab-Muslim who is detained by US. Immigration
46 The Yacoubian building Based on the award-winning novel of the same name and covers a cast of characters in a building and touches upon themes of corruption, fundamentalism, prostitution, homosexuality, and drugs in central Cairo.
45 Times and Winds A coming of age story in a mountain village in northwest Turkey as seen through the eyes of three children on the verge of adolescence.
44 Turtles can fly Near the Iraqi-Turkish border on the eve of an American invasion, refugee children like 13-year-old Kak (Ebrahim), gauge and await their fate.
43 Umut (Hope) Umut is the story of an illiterate poor man and his family who when he loses his only income goes on a quest for lost treasure
42 Valley of the Wolves A Turkish action-adventure film set in northern Iraq during the American occupation. This has been a mega-hit in Turkey and Europe.
41 When we were Kings (doc) An award winning documentary of the 1974 heavyweight championship bout in Zaire between champion George Foreman and underdog challenger Muhammad Ali.
40 Yol Five Turkish prisoners are given a week’s home leave, and we see its people and its authorities interweaved through their stories
39 Al-Ghazali the Alchemist of Happiness A film about the philosopher Al-Ghazali and his parallels with our own times.
38 Bab’ Aziz The story of a blind dervish named Bab’Aziz and his spirited granddaughter, Ishtar.
37 Color of Paradise A blind boy and his father struggle to co-exist in rural Iran
36 Decoding the Past - Secrets of the Koran (doc) A wonderful documentary about the Quran which has shaped the Muslim faith and continues to influence the world.
35 Firaaq Deals with the aftermath of Gujrat riots and effects on everyday people.
34 Inside Mecca (doc) A National Geographic special following 3 Pilgrims from different parts of the world on a journey of their lifetimes.
33 Kingdom of Heaven Balian of Ibelin travels to Jerusalem during the Crusades of the 12th century, and there he finds himself as the defender of the city and its people against Saladin
32 Le Grand Voyage A young French-Moroccan man and his old father drive from the south of France to Mecca in a conflict-ridden humorous journey
31 Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (doc) Tells the story of the Prophet of Islam not only historically but how it unfolds, into the homes, mosques and workplaces of American-Muslims
30 Pitch Black: The Chronicles of Riddick A group of marooned space travellers including an Imam struggle for survival
29 Rachida A look at terrorism in Algeria through the eyes of Rachida, a teacher in one of the school districts.
28 Ramchand Pakistani A young Hindu-Untouchable Pakistani boy and his father accidentally cross the border into India and languish in an Indian jail.
27 Salvation at 8:20 A dejected Iranian student comes under the influence of a self-righteous friend who wants to clean society of its ills in post-revolution Iran.
26 Slum Dog Millionaire A Mumbai teen is arrested under suspicion of cheating and then terrorism, in a game show while his life history shows how he was able to come up with the right answers.
25 The Battle of Algiers A film based on the bloodiest revolution in modern history, Alegria’s war of independence from the French.
24 The Clay Bird A film about religion and diversity in politically charged East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)
23 The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam Kamran is a 12 year old boy in the present day who discovers that his ancestor is the 11th Century Mathematician, Astronomer, Poet of Persia, Omar Khayyam.
22 Blood and Oil (doc) The film shows how oil has been at the core of American foreign policy for more than 60 years—rendering our contemporary energy and military policies virtually indistinguishable.
21 Ceasefire This comedy, whose Persian title is Atash Bas is a fast-paced comedy about a volatile marriage of a young couple and their attempt at reforming their childish and selfish ways.
20 Dor Two young wives one Hindu and one Muslim share a common pain.
19 El Naser Salah el Dine (Saladin) A story about the Kurdish Ruler Salahadin and his defeat of the Crusaders.
18 Indigènes (Days of Glory) During WWII, four North African men enlist in the French army to liberate that country from Nazi oppression, and to fight French discrimination.
17 Mughal-e-Azam Set in the 16th century AD, the movie brings to life the tale of the doomed love affair between the Mughal Crown Prince Saleem and the beautiful, ill-fated court dancer,
16 New Muslim Cool (doc) Puerto Rican American rapper Hamza Pérez ended his life as a drug dealer and started down a new path as a young Muslim. This film follows his journey.
15 The 13th Warrior The story of Ibn Fahdlan a refined Arab courtier, of the powerful Caliph of Baghdad, who encounters a band of Viking warriors on their journey to the barbaric North.
14 Fatih An animated feature about Ottoman Ruler Mehmet II, who conquered Constantinople (modern day Istanbul)
13 Bagong Buwan A film about the Muslim rebellion in Mindanao, Philippines and its effect on civilians.
12 Children of Heaven This Persian-language Academy-Award nominated film is about a poor brother and sister in Iran who have to share one pair of shoes, and the troubles her brother goes to get her a pair.
11 Dreams of Dust A Nigerian peasant comes looking for work in a dusty gold mine and seeks to redeem his past by giving all he works for to a widow and her daughter.
10 Lion of the Desert A film about Omar Mukhtar,  who fought against the Italian conquering of Libya in WW II
9 My Name is Khan A film about a Muslim man whose name is Khan and his Hindu wife and how their life and relationship changes because of 9/11
8 Amreeka The story about a Palestinian mother and her son as they journey for an exciting future to America
7 Babel Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families.
6 Baran An Iranian boy falls in love with an Afghan refugee girl who has to become the breadwinner for her family.
5 Paradise Now An Oscar-nominated film about two childhood friends who are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
4 Khuda Kay Liye (In the name of God) Three interleaved stories based in the US, UK, and Pakistan and how they are impacted after 9/11
3 Syriana A politically-charged epic about the state of the oil industry in the hands of those personally involved and affected by it.
2 Malcolm X The life and times of controversial African-American civil rights leader who joined the Nation of Islam and then finally converted to Islam.
1 The Message An epic film about the Story of the life of the Prophet of Islam, his message and challenges.

References and Bibliography

Busch, Annett and Annas, Max: Ousmane Sembene Interviews
Chadha, Kalyani and Kavoori, Anandam: Global Bollywood
Chaudhuri,Shohini: Contemporary world cinema : Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia
Dönmez-Colin, Gönül: Women, Islam and cinema
Dönmez-Colin, Gönül: Turkish cinema: identity, distance and belonging
Films produced by country source: www.screenaustralia.gov.au
Kabir, Alamgir: The Cinema in Pakistan
Karriker, Alexandra-Heidi: Film studies: women in contemporary world cinema
Qumsiyeh, Mazin B.: 100 Years of Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim stereotyping
Sadoul, George: The Cinema in the Arab countries
Shafik, Viola: Arab cinema: history and cultural identity
Sheehan, Jack, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, 2001
Vick, Tom: Asian cinema : a field guide
Ward, Lucy. From Aladdin to Lost Ark, Muslims get angry at ‘bad guy’ Film images, Guardian, January 25, 2007

On a raised, circular stage, against a splash of pink, four near-adults are trying to forget. They are trying to forget how bored they are; how unloved, over-loved and frightened they are. They are trying to forget that they are nearly grown-ups. But the stage won’t let them: initially comforting music takes on a haunting edge, a clock ticks loudly but unheard, booze that once helped is now only hindering and a gun shot occasionally booms off-stage. This is the world of Arthur Schnitzler’s Sweet Nothings, where love might start with innocent murmurings but soon rumbles into something darker, stronger and beyond these characters’ control.

Director Luc Bondy (esteemed across Europe but a rare presence in London) has tussled admirably with David Harrower’s new version of the play, and skilfully draws out the links between hedonism, self-destruction and denial. The first half – the edgiest by far – makes the skin crawl. It tingles with contradictions: music that continues to play long after the piano has been deserted, laughter that sounds threatening not joyful and harmless whistling that pierces the heart. The extravagantly slow-paced delivery of the four young actors helps to tighten the tension to the point you’ll want to reach out and snap it. This languorous pace also creates a deep desire within the spectator to slip between the silences and stave off the inevitable.

Yet, although the audience (along with the other observers in this play – family friend, Katharina and dad, Weiring) can see the play’s tragic trajectory all too clearly, Fritz and best friend Theodore, along with respective love interests Christine and Mizi, do their utmost to ignore the signs. They barely even flinch at the gunshots. Indeed, the crawling pace of their speech feeds into this idea of wilful denial; though every tick-tock brings these characters closer to an ugly conclusion, they take their time over every wrong decision, every phrase, every word, refusing to acknowledge the urgency of their dilemma.

Fritz – a broody lad who friend Theodore accuses of ‘coming over all Nietzsche’ – is at the heart of Schnitzler’s deadly time-bomb. Though he encourages Christine’s innocent but insistent advances, only yesterday he was seen cavorting with a married lady in the opera house. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of this dangerously public flirtation, the spurned husband has caught on and retribution cannot be far off. The first act becomes a terrifying waiting game; although Fritz might be old enough to love an adult, is he mature enough to deal with the consequences?

Tom Hughes’ Fritz is heart-breakingly young and puffed out and summons up the atmosphere of a son anticipating a hearty hiding from his dad. It is tricky to tell if any of the characters, despite the promise of a duel between Fritz and harrowed husband, recognise the real danger they face. Indeed, this is what makes Fritzs’ wilful embracing of his fate so hard to witness.

Bondy has encouraged striking – stylised but truthful – performances from his actors. Jack Lasley as best friend Theodore is all spike and bravado. The very first scene, when Theodore tiptoes around the edge of the stage only to tumble to the ground below, tells us everything we need to know about this posturing man and the dangerous path he is following. Christine, the young and self-effacing lover of Fritz, could have been a bland role, but Kate Burdette finds a resolve and stubbornness that makes this an interesting, even noble, part. Natalie Dormer (playing best friend Mizi) is the best drunk I’ve seen on-stage – all loose limbs and misdirection – and although she is more knowing than her friend, her resemblance to a China doll in the second half (chalk white face and rosey lips) reminds us of the young girl hiding behind this flippant front.

Hayley Carmichael as family friend Katharina – ostensibly concerned but mostly just miffed and mildly scandalised by Christine’s affair – draws out a different aspect of Schnitzler’s writing. She is the everyman observer of this tragedy and her tight-lipped observations (interrupted by occasional and unstoppable outbursts – ‘trollop!’) tightens the context of life in early 20th century Vienna, while also adding a piquant, stylised humour to the show. David Sibley’s ‘father’ feels slightly top-heavy with emotion – his eyes and heart are open far wider than anyone else’s – but since we are really experiencing this dad through the eyes of his cosseted daughter, perhaps this embarrassing overflow of emotion makes sense.

Luc Bondy’s direction occasionally feels indulgent without cause (the lights coming up on the audience feels particularly pushed) but it is mostly challenging, deeply poetical and patient. This is a strange and arresting show, which leaves one desperate to escape Bondy’s posse of self-deceiving and self-defeating young lovers.

Till 10 April 2010

Douglas Maxwell’s monologue was inspired, according to the author’s note in the programme, by a real story. It is set in a London primary school, on the day in which a little Somali girl is going to be exorcised in front of her classmates to cure her ‘elective’ mutism,: the ceremony is to be performed by ‘a community leader and some others’ - but only if Maggie Brodie, the officially retired, temporary substitute teacher, does not slay the politically correct dragon and save the day.

Given these plot premises, when I entered the Soho theatre and saw Lisa Sangster’s set, I started to worry: on the wall of the classroom, in a series of brightly-coloured everyday words with respective illustrations, the central sequence went: ‘GIRL - FAITH - CAGE’. This, it seemed, would not be a play for the subtly hearted. Fortunately, it turns out that Promises Promises is not at all a play about an issue, nor a tirade against the follies of dumbed-down multiculturalism. Instead, it is a voyage to the centre of Miss Brodie, which moves swiftly and masterfully from comedy to gothic horror story, passing through Miss Brodie’s projection into six-year-old Rosie (or Nadifa), with a definite touch of doppelgänger motives.

Obviously, there is still no escaping the topic at hand: Maggie, in many ways a liberated and progressive middle-aged woman, is being patronized by her much younger headmaster and by a social services officer (whose infantilising tone is fantastically rendered by Joanna Tope in her own one-woman show), mostly in the name of Tolerance. She is furious when she is told she has to put up and even welcome the ritual that will be performed in her class, enraged at this ‘mob of good intentions rampaging, destroying everything in its wake’. Because she is so funny, and because she seems to stand for common sense, and because of course she is the beguiling narrator of this story, we are naturally drawn to take her side.

But Maggie is also a biased, if not altogether unreliable, narrator, and she is someone with a very dark past; in her shiny red shoes, the same colour as Rosie’s, she is on a mission to make things right again, very much like an older Dorothy lost in the absurdities of the Kingdom of Oz - but she is also just as ambiguous as Dorothy, and as confused by her options. Slowly, we find out that this rage in front of her own impotence was not born in this occasion; that she often drinks too much and in fact sounds very much like an alcoholic; that her sister was taken away from her by their father and put into a convent, and that she thus has more than one reason to hate religions. Even her free attitude to sex, the power she keeps telling us she has on men because of the way she walks and the way she touches them, eventually becomes entangled in her more shadowy traits. Joanna Tope delivers Maggie’s sophisticated and twisted personality as it unfolds, without spoiling the surprise too early, and without drowning her in malice or lunacy later on. Maggie’s bond with Rosie, immediately resulting in the child literally following in her footsteps and imitating her gait, is the reason why Rosie shares her terrible secret only with Maggie: not because the latter is the only adult she can trust, but because she recognises in Maggie someone who will, at all costs and with all means, keep her promises.

Rosie being incarnated as never more than a silhouette of light, or a few red footsteps on the floor, reinforces both the uncanny quality of the play’s style and direction, and the indignation-inducing foundations of the plot, with momentous references to childhood torture in a synthetically staged girls’ bathroom. Karen McIver’s music provides a traditionally gothic soundtrack, highlighting the arabesques of words and blood, and Tope seems to control even the amount of gleaming in her eyes, ensuring it is in tune with the pace of the play. Maggie is, perhaps, the one who is really possessed by demons, but thankfully, nothing is quite that clear-cut: Maxwell still keeps his protagonist believable, so that we cannot dismiss either the depth of her misery or the full-scale horror of the episode of which she is protagonist. Maggie and Rosie ‘s stories are equally difficult to forget.

Till 13 March 2010

Heroic horizons

This week on CW, Karl Sharro challenges the low horizons of London mayor Boris Johnson’s anti-high rise policy. Mark Carrigan argues that contemporary cynicism about heroes, reflected in everything from The Wire to The Dark Knight Returns merely perpetuates the dearth of heroism. And in London theatre Matt Trueman reviews an imaginative Measure for Measure at the Almeida, Miriam Gillinson admires Judi Dench in the Rose Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Giulia Merlo reviews a new translation of Thomas Bernhard’s controversial Heldenplatz at the Arcola.

Next week, coverage of the London Word Festival, Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy revisited, Muslim cinema, and Alice in Wonderland.

4 March 2010

In 1986 DC Comics published a four issue mini-series called Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. While few would have predicted it prior to its publication, this work of Frank Miller was soon regarded as one of the touchstones for the medium and, through commercial success and critical controversy, almost single-handedly reinvigorated a moribund character. Time magazine suggested the portrayal of a ‘semiretired Batman [who] drinks too much and is unsure about his crime-fighting abilities’ was an example of trying to appeal to ‘today’s sceptical readers’.

Regardless of the criticism which the series received in some quarters, it undoubtedly did appeal to readers and the manner in which its ‘dark’ and ‘adult’ approach were progressively taken up by other comics points to the ‘scepticism’ of those readers being a widespread condition rather than the aberrant property of a cynical minority. The same dark approach lay behind the critical and commercial success which Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight enjoyed at the box office in the summer of 2008. Why is this kind of approach so popular? What explains its manifest resonance amongst vast swathes of the cinema-going and comic-buying public?

Perhaps the answers lies towards the end of the film when Batman and Jim Gordon attempt to make sense of Harvey Dent’s actions, as the brave and virtuous district attorney was driven to attempted murder by the cruel machinations of the joker. The public regard Bent as a hero, but the public face of heroism becomes a fiction, crafted by powerful men in midnight schemes because the masses could not countenance the grim truth and social order necessitates the illusion. The heroism of Harvey Bent becomes a cruel joke, which Batman, alter ego of the billionaire Bruce Wayne, attempts to hide in the best interests of the public. If it wasn’t for his own personal biography, as a man forever damaged by the murder of his parents as a child, he might have channelled this patrician impulse into philanthropy. As it is stands he rushes off into the night, chased by police and dogs, taking the blame for the crimes which Bent committed. His parting words sum up the ethos of the exchange: ‘You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain’. This is the bitter truth which the public must be protected from at all costs. The closest thing to heroism which The Dark Knight portrays is the attempted deception of the public towards this end.

Compare this critically lauded portrayal of heroism within that of another popular film series. While The Dark Knight was an enormous critical success, the Rocky films were, with the partial exceptions of the first and the sixth, critically panned. Yet both, in a sense, portray heroism. Once you look beyond the crass jingoism which frames large aspects of the Rocky series, a rather earnest narrative about heroism and virtue soon comes into focus. Each of the films follows the same format, as constancy and courage enable Rocky Balboa to triumph over adversity. The virtues the films portray have a long moral history in Western culture and yet for most of us the narrative which portrays them is one we struggle to take seriously. While the moralisation of professional boxing probably takes some blame for this, it is by no means the whole story.

What we can take seriously however is The Wire, and, its gritty social realism notwithstanding, it comes equally equipped with its heroes. Foremost among these is stick up boy Omar Little. He prowls Baltimore in his trench coat, with his shotgun slung at his side, robbing drug dealers. With his facial scar, ethical code and fearsome reputation, he becomes a mythic figure known throughout Baltimore. He crafts a mythology from the ruins of deindustrialised desolation and he sustains a heroic existence one day a time. Yet he cannot, ultimately, escape from his surroundings, and he dies ingloriously on the floor of a convenience store after being shot to death by a child.

What message can we take from this? Perhaps that when a hero is reduced to a daily struggle for survival, his or her heroism is unsustainable. The Wire’s realism ultimately conveys, perhaps inadvertently, the impossibility of heroism in the late modern age. We can struggle against the constraints of circumstances and the debasing forces of contemporary times. We can craft an honourable life in the midst of violence and suffering. However the effort required is herculean and inevitably, at least in the long run, beyond us. This is the message conveyed by the sudden and pointless death of Omar, as well as by this sort of social realism more generally.
Yet if we accept this realism I think we have lost something important. Though The Wire itself admirably retains the capacity for imminent social critique, this is the exception rather than the rule and it’s primarily a consequence of the sheer talent of the creators of the series. The ‘scepticism’ which Time magazine suggested was responsible for The Dark Knight’s success has only grown since 1986 and it’s far from a positive cultural trend. The cultural theorist Mark Fisher calls it ‘capitalist realism’: the aestheticisation of capitalist hegemony. As Fisher puts it, ‘capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable’ and, as such, dominates the sensibility and aesthetics of cultural production. However unlike historical instances of a politicised aesthetics, the ensuing cultural style is neither narrowly aesthetic nor superficially political. It manifests itself in a ‘machismo of demythologisation’ which proudly undercuts heroism in the name of psychological realism (‘you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain’) and hope in the name of sociological realism (everything ultimately comes down to power and deceit). It counsels suspicion and scepticism in the name of an acceptance of reality which will help protect us against the ideological machinations of the powerful.

In fact its acceptance helps, in a sense, bring about the reality it purports to reflect. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests that, far from being a post-ideological acceptance of sheer reality, contemporary cynicism is profoundly ideological in character because its hyperbolic fixation on the worst the world has to offer (cruelty, corruption, deceit) and its suspicion towards those ideals and practices seen to provide masks for that deceit (heroism, morality, authority) leaves us mired in an apathetic irony (unable to take the possibility of social change seriously or think beyond present circumstances). The sad truth is that, as he puts it, ‘even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them’. The error lies, he argues, in an overvaluing of belief. Far from representing an act of resistance, the subjective disavowal of the cynic (eg, ‘don’t you know all politics is manipulative bullshit?’) facilitates their objective complicity (a passive disengagement from political life). This cynicism precludes critique as well as protection. It simply engenders an subjective anger and an objective impotence. It also cruelly erodes the kind of social historical vantage points which would be necessary to address the question of overcoming it. Therefore in their absence perhaps the first step is to take Rocky a bit more seriously and Batman a little less so? 

You can tell the measure of a Measure by the way it treats its prisoners. In 2004, Complicité’s Claudio – dressed in an obligatory orange jumpsuit – was incarcarated in a complex of maximum security; all laser-beams and retina-scanners. By contrast, Michael Attenborough’s thoroughly intelligent staging casts its inmates in the denims and ankle-shackles of a Folsom concert crowd.

If, six years on, the political prisoners have been replaced by romanticised ne’erdowells, the authorities remain the play’s villains. Only, this time, the crimes they commit are different. Paranoid abuse of authority is replaced by a damning hypocrisy. Ben Miles’s Duke begins pacing his chaotic study, fidgeting with the fixtures in an attempt to shake off lascivious thoughts of strippers. He puts on one habit to throw off another. Likewise Rory Kinnear’s Angelo seems more culpable for his own lusty descent than for his broken promises to free Claudio. At least those hustlers and whores that stalk this very East End Vienna are honest in their lecherous lifestyles.

This is, you may have sensed, a production driven by canny characterisation rather than design. What it offers, even where some are less persuasive than others, are interesting subversions of classic roles.

Best of all is Kinnear, whose physical attributes force him to delve deeper into Shakespeare’s lead in search of credible answers. His Angelo is a portrait of repression. He enters every inch the office clerk – square glasses, short-sleeved shirt and beige trousers so ill-fitting they could be worn backwards – and quickly renovates himself as a slick-suited, greasy example of contrived masculinity. There is an easy comparison with Sam West’s Jeffrey Skilling, who shares the same over-confident authority spun from nothing.

This super-imposed show of strength makes Anna Maxwell-Martin’s fervent Isabella a well-matched sparring partner. Their first real locking of horns is eked for every last drop of drama, such that when Kinnear eventually delivers a death sentence on her brother, his words thud like arrows into a target. While her stillness gives way to a slow-crumple, he kneads his palms nervously under the table.

Yet for all that Maxwell-Martin’s individual choices are strong, she doesn’t quite knit Isabella into a concrete whole. She brings an unconscious, albeit uncomfortable, sexuality to the role, sliding herself slowly up from her chair with a sliver of sensuality not dissimilar to the lap-dancers of the Duke’s imagination. Rather brilliantly, there is also an ugly goodness – malnourished rather than wholesome – about her over-zealous piety, suggested by hands gnarled into crooked claws. She’s right, of course, but too strong in her scorn for others. Her lofty morality manifests itself in an unattractive superiority from which emerges a withering contempt for pathetic men. Her rebuttal of the Duke’s final proposal – which also undermines his own nobility – is silent rather than sympathetic.

Attenborough’s production is less successful in its treatment of the play’s broader comedy. Lloyd Hutchinson’s harsh-toned Lucio is more irritating than lubricating and, as a Pompey become bouncer, Trevor Cooper doesn’t quite match the inspiration of his initial casting. For all that the underclass are victorious in this cartoonish class war, they themselves cannot match the authorities for interest.

Regardless, this is a superb production – the sort that makes you reassess your list of Shakespearean favourites – and, in Kinnear, it is driven by a tremendous central performance. By the end, as his hands returned to his sheepish side, Angelo seemed to me the exact opposite of Malvolio: a man most notoriously absolved.

Till 10 April 2010

When Thomas Bernhard died in 1989, one year after the opening of this play had been greeted by journalistic attacks and public outrage, his will blocked his theatrical works from being produced or published within the Austrian borders. And yet in apparent contrast with this extreme choice, it is possible that Bernhard had anticipated, and perhaps even encouraged, the reactions elicited by Heldenplatz: it was maybe him, maybe his friend Klaus Peymann (also the director of the Burgtheater, where the play was being staged), or maybe his publisher Suhrkamp, who leaked some carefully chosen lines from this damning, painful text to the press in the days before the opening. Once the text was actually circulated (a full 24 hours after the first night), popular rage at Bernhard’s attack against his own country was such that he was even assaulted in the street.

Meredith Oakes and Andrea Tierney’s new translation of Heldenplatz, directed by Annie Castledine and Annabel Arden at the Arcola, makes it obvious to see why the play was found so upsetting. We begin in a flat that faces the famous Heldenplatz in Vienna, in 1988, where an older and a younger housekeeper are nervously tiptoeing around the recent suicide of their Jewish home owner, Professor Schuster, while ironing his white shirts and polishing his shoes, and emptying the suitcases he had prepared for a trip to Oxford that will now never take place. The not-too-subtle symbolism of the suitcases is made more unequivocal by the directors’ choice to have all the other characters wait for their turn at the outskirts of the scene, dressed in black 1940s clothes on which are stitched bright, obedient yellow stars of David (later on, a character will reinforce the connection by saying, with apparent nonchalance: ‘The sight of luggage has always been terrible to me’).

As the housekeepers discuss the Professor’s personality and temper, two fundamental things emerge. The first one is a somehow typical, unspeakable undercurrent of tension, cruelty and sadism, that same feeling of glass shards lying just underneath the surface that one gets when reading Elfriede Jelinek’s novels. In this psychologically violent context, Barbara Marten as Frau Zittel, her bright blue eyes shining icily from her mourning outfit, is as frighteningly controlling and submitted as you can possibly wish her to be. The second thing made clear during the first few minutes of the play is that the Professor jumped out of a window because of his discouragement and desperation at the state of his country, a state that reminded him of the year which made Heldenplatz famous in history: 1938, when Hitler was cheered enthusiastically by the Austrian population as he entered the square. These same loud cheers are still being heard fifty years later by the Professor’s wife, in regular fits that overtake her since they moved back from Oxford, where they had escaped during the war, to this particular flat in Vienna.

In Berhnard’s falsely lulling theatrical style, we are rocked rhythmically back to recurring considerations over the new, fresh rise of antisemitism in Austria throughout the rest of evening, each line bringing us nearer to the center of the spiral, until we are so close and the noise is so loud and the violence so incandescently bright that we can barely control our pulse. It is uncle Robert, the Professor’s brother, who, in spite of his resignation, delivers the most scalding condemnations against the Austrians, during a long and foggy scene at a cemetery, as he sits white-faced but gentlemanly with his two nieces: ‘The Viennese are Jewhaters and will remain Jewhaters to all eternity’; ‘this Austrian stupidity is utterly repulsive’; Austrians are nothing else but ‘six and half million feeble-minded raving mad people/screaming incessantly at the top of their voices for a director’ - and the director, who had already come once, will come again and ‘give them the final push down the abyss’.

The black and white rigor of Iona McLeish’s set, the clock ticking louder and louder, the cacophony of moods during a family dinner of dissonant dialogues and geometrically angled cutlery, they all turn the screws tighter and tighter. Yet the atmosphere remains reasonably civilised - until, that, is we first hear those cheers ourselves, the hysterical chanting to Hitler,  and then they seem so wildly unexpected and yet so obviously anticipated that it is hard, if not impossible, not to find them profoundly affecting and upsetting. And one can understand why this would be a deeply uncomfortable truth to be told about ourselves, for any of us whose grandparents might have been complicit of the cheering, and again here and now, at a time when in the aftermath of a recession, hatred is once again raising its head.

Till 6 March 2010

Boris Johnson has made a virtue of opposing the construction of towers in London. One of his first appointees was former Westminster Council leader Simon Milton, a fierce critic of towers, who was named chief advisor on planning days after Boris took office. The hype that surrounded this appointment and Boris’ anti-tower policy claimed that under Ken Livingstone London was on its way to becoming Dubai-on-Thames. Aside from the factual inaccuracy of this statement (see below), London already had a strict anti-tower policy in place maintained by a number of planning departments, quangos, and conservation groups. As London prepares to get out of the recession the question of towers will become important once again. It is worth challenging Boris’ policy and making a case for the construction of more skyscrapers in London.

The conservation lobby’s favourite phrase when it comes to towers in London is that they are ‘visually intrusive.’ In fact, what is really visually intrusive is the sight of so many organisations working to halt the development of London and freeze it in time. The unchallenged assumption that such bodies promote is that the existing condition of London cannot be bettered and that any modern development needs to be modest in comparison to historic buildings. This self-effacing ethos is truly baffling: if the architects of St Paul’s Cathedral or the Palace of Westminster had followed the same reasoning, neither would have been designed as ambitiously as they were. The conservationists’ attitude, and Boris Johnson has firmly established himself within that camp, betrays a lack of faith in our generation’s ability to produce buildings of equal quality.

The outstanding buildings that have been built in London over the past few years show that this pessimism is wholly unjustified. The Gherkin, the London Eye, and the Millennium Dome have not only displayed ambitious architecture and cutting-edge technology but have quickly become symbols of London. The Dome may have been a PR disaster, but it broke new grounds in architecture and engineering, illustrating what British firms are capable of if given the chance. Yet the critics curiously insist on seeing these as the exceptions rather than the norm. This partially explains why the most talented architects and engineers in the UK have to do their best work abroad.

Before and since taking office, Boris has thrown his rather hefty weight around in opposition to several high-rise schemes, such as Ian Simpson’s Beetham Tower on Blackfriars Road, Allies & Morrison’s ‘Three Sisters’ on York Road, and Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands’ Doon Street. Armed with new mayoral powers that allow him to order local councils to refuse applications, Boris has become the uncertain element in the equation for developers planning high-rise buildings in London. However, Boris’ policy on, or against, towers has not yet become the subject of intense public debate, because his term has coincided with the recession, forcing most developers to shelve or postpone their planned schemes. In a sense, economic stagnation carried out Boris’ policy on his behalf. But as we prepare, or so the theory goes, to get out of the recession, several schemes are expected to be revived, and with them Boris’ anti-tower policy.

A closer look at the Dubai-on Thames claim reveals how ludicrous it is, and how misguided Boris is in making opposition to towers a central plank of his planning policy. Between 2000 and 2009, 34 high-rise schemes (taller than 100m) were proposed in London, compared to 111 in Dubai. (Source: http://skyscraperpage.com) The Dubai towers are nearly all concentrated along one road, the London towers spread around a much larger city. The tallest tower in Dubai is 828m, the tallest in London will be 300m (the yet-to-be-built The Shard by Tower Bridge, designed by Renzo Piano.) The average height of a London tower in this category is 150m; the average in Dubai is twice as high at 300m. Furthermore, most of the Dubai towers are either finished or under construction, few of the London towers have been completed.

Not that I am opposed to the idea of Dubai-on-Thames – in fact I think it’s a rather exciting prospect – but the idea that the few modest buildings planned for London threatened to transform it into a Dubai-like city is the product of a very fertile imagination with little grasp of the facts. In reality most of the opposition to high-rise buildings is based on a conservative outlook expressed in a highly moralistic language. The ‘visual intrusion’ that so many of the critics of skyscrapers deride is the intrusion of the 21st century into our contemporary fields of vision. However, this is not simply a clash of modern versus traditional, but a wholesale abandonment of ambitious development as a valid path of progress. Even the advocates of high-rise buildings have to coach their support in the language of sustainability, arguing that they make more environmental sense. Even more ludicrously, designers have to go out of their way to prove that towers have a minimal impact on the skyline of London in order to gain consent, begging the question of why would you bother to build a tower if you don’t want it to be visible!

While Boris has come to represent the rounded end of the anti-skyscraper spear, in London, in truth the opposition runs much deeper and wider. It ranges from curmudgeonly individuals who regard every proposal for a tower in London as a personal insult to themselves, to local councils who, with few exceptions such as the more enlightened City of London and Southwark, regard towers with the dread usually reserved for invading barbarians, to a variety of official and semi-official outfits whose chief function is to put the case against development. In a typical development in London, designers have to deal with the local council’s planning department, consult with the local community and ‘stakeholders’, a very flexible definition that allows any busybody to have a say on the development in question, English Heritage (who as a principle regard the 20th century as one lengthy mistake), CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment), who serve as a sort of taste police monitoring ‘design’ as if it’s a separate entity from the rest of the scheme, and the Minister of State for London.

Into this already crowded scene steps the Mayor and the GLA with the full force of the law behind them, with powers to cajole and bully designers and developers into modifying their schemes downwards and if all else fails reject them altogether. Boris has used these powers to galvanise the anti-high-rise sentiment into an object of policy. So far, he has gotten away with this unchallenged. But it is incumbent on us, those who welcome the prospect of transforming London’s skyline into an exciting scene that represents the city’s dynamism, to publicly challenge this short-sighted and un-ambitious policy. This requires challenging not only Boris Johnson’s anti-tower bias, but the entire planning context that regards any development proposal as ‘guilty until proven innocent’.

The cultural dimension of this opposition should also be challenged. We often hear words like ‘vanity’ and ‘greed’ brandished around when discussing high-rise towers, and they are often seen as the representation of the nasty side of capitalism. But this only reflects the esoteric context within which this debate is carried out, the assumption that any developer in the UK would sink hundreds of millions of pounds into ‘vanity’ projects is as ignorant of economic facts as it is the result of a general sense of pessimism. What makes towers attractive to developers is that they represent a solution to the shortage of space in dense contexts. Towers make particular sense in London where available land is always at a premium. In fact, high-rise projects often create a much better condition on the ground, freeing up valuable space for public use. The bias against towers is largely a manifestation of the prevalent culture of low expectations that looks at any ambitious development with suspicion. The ‘phallic symbols’ seen by tower critics are products of their own dirty minds.

Towers do indeed have a symbolic value, they represent the ambitions and power of a society on its way up. New York would not be the same without its famous skyscrapers, which once represented the optimism and ambition of America. The reason thousands of people move to London every year is not to enjoy the ‘uncorrupted’ view of the Treasury from St James’s Park as Boris Johnson and his deputy mayor for planning Simon Milton seem to think, but to be part of the dynamic metropolitan experience that London has to offer. It is only befitting that the city’s skyline should be allowed to reflect this dynamism, and a few more houses and nicer offices wouldn’t hurt either. Time to tell the Mayor who takes pride in setting his sights low to retrain his sights and aim higher. Boris, don’t stand in the way of progress.

Karl Sharro is an architect and writer based, grudgingly, in a low-rise building in London. Visit his website. 

The visualisation company Hayes Davidson has developed a tool to allow members of the public to design their own London skylines.

Stella Gonet was the first Titiana I saw; I remember being faintly shocked by her randy Fairy Queen, who tussled loudly with a man named Bottom in a huge, swinging hammock. That was at the Barbican in 1995 and, as a young girl, I was frightened a little by this prowling Fairy Queen; she also lent the play a veneer of sophistication and ‘adultness’ that somehow pushed me away.

Yet A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that is obsessed with young love and young people. This is perhaps why Gonet’s horny Titania upset – she felt too grown up. Judi Dench, now in her 70s, might not be the obvious choice to solve this problem, yet her performance is remarkably youthful, innocent and free.

Dench’s Titiana is both regal and ridiculous. In the opening scene, Dench is a dead-ringer for Elizabeth I, processing smoothly above and amongst her subjects. But the clues to her later transformation are there from the start: though she sweeps about in a majestic gown, two white forms sprout up from behind her dress, faintly reminiscent of angel’s wings. Once under Oberon’s spell and trapped by Bottom’s questionable charms, Dench’s early commanding presence melts away and her Titiana dissolves into a giddy school-girl, in love for the first time. 

Dench abandons herself to the role and finds real innocence in her performance. Everything about her feels young: her smile is impossibly wide and her laugh guttural and unconscious as she fawns over her ass, clinging onto his furry form and affectionately joining in with his snorting laughter. To see one of our finest, most experienced actors drool over a donkey only notches up the silliness of these scenes, as well as highlighting Shakespeare’s talent for conjuring up near-impossible fantasies, yet somehow making them believable on-stage.

Dench’s playfulness is systematic of the light, whimsical feel to Peter Hall’s absorbing Rose Theatre production. The show is underpinned by a desire to have fun with Shakespeare; a quality that is sometimes lost in more ‘complicated’, modern-day productions. Hall achieves this playful feeling by encouraging exuberant but unfussy performances from his actors and creating little interference on-stage. The floor is black, the props kept to a minimum and the scenery sketched in with some clever lighting; these simple stage effects allow the piece to skip along at quite a pace and prevent any feeling of formality creeping in.

The smooth staging and unfettered performances mean the show often feels more like a drama festival, a family Christmas schtick, than a Shakespeare production. This is just as it is should be and means that Bottom and his amateur actor pals, rehearsing a sublimely awful play to perform to Theseus, fit in seamlessly with the overall production. In fact, whereas sometimes this framework involving Bottom and his pals can feel a little stiff - tagged onto a more formal, ethereal Shakespeare play – here, this paltry but plucky group of performers set the tone for this bubbling, high-energy production.

Chris Jones as Bottom absolutely owns the stage, which juts into the audience and allows him to grab hold of the audience instantly. It is a performance packed with natural comic flourishes – silly gestures, winks, lewd noises, whatever feels right at the time – from an actor unfazed and inspired by Shakespeare. From amateur actor to ass, he is an explosive and addictive presence on-stage and when his slow-mo death finally arrives, the audience is reluctant to let him go.

Bottom is obviously comic gold, but there are nuggets lurking everywhere in this production and none more sparkling than Charles Edwards’ Oberon. Looking and sounding like Dr Who in fancy dress, Edwards plays the Fairy King as a limelight-hogging Queen. Edwards sulks, struts, gossips and meddles his way through the play in a vibrantly camp performance, which works well with Dench’s giddy transformation.

There are notably tougher, more complicated roles in this play and Rachael Stirling, though she is an undoubtedly powerful actress, feels slightly out of synch with the show. Her Helena is the character on the wrong side of young love and her absolute submittal to the dashing Demetrius sometimes feels too painful in this relatively painless production.

Reese Ritchie also has some problems as Puck – he can cackle and pounce across stage as much as he likes, but his Puck is missing some punch. It is a gem of a role – open to bold, unique interpretations – but Ritchie misses the mark, hovering somewhere between frightening and fun. 

That the two palpably darker roles stutter slightly is perhaps indicative of a production that, although deeply enjoyable, can feel a touch light in places. But does that really matter in a play that ends with a spectacularly awful amateur production, which is largely there for big, belly laughs? This is a play that both celebrates and laughs at the illusion of theatre and the illusion of young love - something that Hall’s production recognises and recreates quite wonderfully.

Till 20 March

Doing politics

This week on CW, as speakers are announced for the London Pre-Election Summit: the Battle for Politics on Saturday 20 March, Luke Gittos reviews James Fishkin’s When the People Speak, and argues that ‘deliberative democracy’ is more deliberate than democratic. Simon Belt explains how the Manchester Salon is filling a gap in the market for critical debate. Cheryl Hudson is disappointed by the political banality of the otherwise enjoyable My Name is Khan, while Sarah Boyes participates in a politically unchallenging poetic performance on the legacy of 1968, and Timandra Harkness finds a little bit of politics in The Gambler at the Royal Opera. Meanwhile, Matt Trueman reviews some comedy.

25 February 2010