Fw: Goulash Socialism (was Bartok)

[rwan]

----- Original Message -----
From: <KXX4493553 at aol.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 04, 2000 7:37 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Goulash Socialism (was Bartok)


> In einer eMail vom 04.06.00 18:38:41 (MEZ) - Mitteleurop. Sommerzeit
schreibt
> r.wank at cable.a2000.nl:
>
> << And with it went the ideal of socialism
>  down the drain as well. Here History endeth, said Ms.Thatcher. Bartok
says
>  otherwise. And so does/would Pynchon. >>
>
> I don't think that we should do Mr. Huntington, his "students" and The
Iron
> Lady the pleasure to believe in such an apodict point of view. The show
goes
> on as we see: 73 wars in the world at the moment.
> Perhaps the anarchists have got a second chance, after the disaster of the
> communists? About the first that failed you can learn a lot of in Ken
Loach's
> movie about the Spanish Civil War (what was the title? I''ve forgotten at
the
> moment...)
> kwp
>
I can't rememeber the title either, even though I saw the movie myself.
Knowledgewise it was nothing new, but all I knew of the Spanish Civil War
became more personalized, more emotional. (Pökler dreaming away in a kino?)
Dolores Ibarurri, the Grand Old Dame of Spanish Communism turning out to
have been a grand old tyran. Frederico Garcia Lorca being informally
senteced to death because of being a homosexual. The works of Picasso that
were not supposed to go to Spain as long as the Generalissimo (Franco) was
in power. And the plays and movies of that genius, Fernando Arrabal, who
kept up a syndicalist fervour until the late seventies. One of his
beautifully anarchistic, surrealistic films was called - speaking of
Picasso - The Tree of Guernica. The life-story of Fernando Arrabal in itself
is symbolic: he was a very young kid, maybe only a baby, during the Civil
War. His father fought for the Republic in some unit of the syndicalists. He
was taken prisoner and sentenced to a long term. During one of the winters
he escaped from the prison where he was held in the middle of barren nowhere
and nobody has ever heard anything of him ever since. Arrabals' mother tried
to raise the young lad the proper way: "Do not go your father's way. He
didn't take care of his family and didn't believe in God. Look at what
became of him. A schlemil! A prisoner! A frozen corpse, instead of a good
husband and father!
All because he couldn't accept authority!" Etc.,etc. I don't know of anyone
who grew up, and lived, hating his mother as much as Arrabal did.

The opening scenes of "The Tree of Guernica" tell it all. It goes thus:
three youngish man with hunting guns walk through the fields at ease, having
a conversation about sweet nothing and totally ignoring the "peasants", the
people working the fields. Cut. An impressive man - the landowner - seated
behind his impressive bureau in an impressive study is lecturing his
youngest son. You see only their upper torso: the son, who seems to be
listening quite attentively, from the right-back side from a relatively high
camera-angle, right profile slightly from the back and the "Father" almost
face on, but other than the upper torso, hidden behind the desk. Father says
(approximately): "You make such a mess of it son. Why? Why all the
demonstrations? Why all that anarchy? You wanted to go to the university in
Madrid and I had no problems with that. But now, instead of studying, YOU
ARE getting into trouble. Political ones. Stupid ones. Mocking the values
our very lives are based on. Why can't you be like your brothers (the ones
going on a leisurely hunt)? If you carry on like this....etc." Different
camera-angle, at desk-top height, from the side, showing the son jerking off
and ejaculating into a glass, which he then raises and offers to his father,
saying:"Father, this is the only thing you ever gave me and now you get it
back, so we are even", standing up and leaving (for good). That's the last
we see of the "family". The movie goes on in a hallucinatory stream of
images of love and defeat. Guernica being bombed by the Luftwaffe; still a
symbol of destruction. Destruction with a political purpose just as well as
destruction for destruction's sake.

The movie played for all of two weeks in one single cinema in Amsterdam and
was gone. The one review I've read (in the NRC/Handelsblad, a slightly
rightish, conservative newspaper of the "liberals" at the time: late
seventies) said something like "Yes, it's a view one should appreciate, were
it not that mr. Arrabal made the mistake of doing the editing himself. He
should have left it to a professional." In other words, an amateuristic
effort that failed. The f*ckers didn't even have the courage to say that
they hated  his vision of loveful revolt, (re. the army of lovers that
couldn't win, in nazifying Berlin , in GR). The editing was not only
exquisite as such, but an integral part of the "direction" of that stream of
images/ideas. Arrabal should be just as well known and appreciated as Luis
Bunuel or Ingmar Bergman - two truely great filmmakers - but he isn't. He is
hardly known at all.
The greatest contrast is however between Arrabal and Salvador Dalí. Dalí,
one of the pioneers of Surrealism, see "Un Chien Andalou", a film by Bunuel,
that he wrote the screenplay for, blessed with an incredible visuality - and
the ability to reproduce his visions of the very emergence of sight - turned
into a reclusive reactionary with more and more Catholic mysticism in his -
even then astonishing - work. ( A very nice anagram of Salvador Dalí's name
is "avida dollars" (=I want dollars) in the Swedish movie "The Adventures of
Picasso", an incredibly funny, intelligent and moving comedy.) Dalí stayed
in Spain (unlike Bunuel or Arrabal, who both lived and worked in France) and
managed somehow  to legitimise the Franco regime. And he lost all sense of
humour as well. Well, that's serious isn't it? He sure was.
But yes, the movie of Ken Loach was giving a good idea of the Moscow
oriented communists and the anarchoid syndicalists not quite knowing whether
they should go for the fascists first and shoot each other afterwards or
rather the other way around.

Best regards,

Richard