Once upon a time in a barely disguised allegory

The Zapata western - a burgeoning subgenre of spaghetti westerns set during the Mexican Revolution - was always overtly didactic. Exploring US imperialism, revolutionary politics, militarism and violence with a furrowed brow, these films were far more obviously about the tense political situation in Italy than the only implicitly critical escapism proffered by the industry at large. I don't suppose the phrases 'carefully constructed Marxist critique' and 'box office gold' go hand in hand these days, but you must remember it was the sixties.

1968's Il mercenario (titled The Mercenary during its North American run, but since then known as A Professional Gun in the English-speaking world) was one of the most commercially successful examples of the form, but it wasn't particularly well respected among the more serious minds in Zapata western circles, for reasons we shall attend to presently. The film did, however, reunite director Sergio Corbucci and star Franco Nero, the team behind 1966's smash hit Django.

Sergei Kowalski (Nero, barely recognisable from his star-making role thanks to some magnificent facial hair) is a Polish gunslinger who is hired by Mexican mining barons to transport a load of silver to the United States, protecting it from the rebels roaming the area. Arriving at the mine, Kowalski finds the place in the hands of revolutionaries led by Paco Román (Tony Musante).

When the army attacks, Kowalski lets Paco pay him handsomely to fight them off with the machine gun he carries around ('Two hundred [dollars], you bastard - here, I hope you spend it on doctors!', Paco curses). The next day, Kowalski is accosted by Curly (Jack Palance), a villainous American trying to get his hands on the silver, but he is rescued by Paco's men. Curly swears revenge for the death of his men (one of whom, it is implied, was his lover), but is stripped naked and forced to walk back to civilisation by the rebels. Thereafter, Paco hires Kowalski as military advisor for the revolutionary war.

At a purely narrative level the film feels rote and uninspired. What isn't boilerplate is awkwardly shoved in: the character of Columba (Giovanna Ralli), for example, serves little purpose except as plot device and eye candy. And the film suffers from a series of false endings, stopping and starting repeatedly in its last fifteen minutes before coming to a close with a message that doesn't really respond to the arc of the character it's imparted to.

That mess is particularly odd considering the film seems to announce bold intentions early on. The credits are superimposed on photographs from the Mexican Revolution, drenched in red in the style of the previous year's Bonnie and Clyde, set to an insistent Ennio Morricone piece as if some sort of serious social critique was the aim. And it just carries right on, with a scene in which the miners are served scraps while the bosses feast right from the 'men and maggots' chapter of The Battleship Potemkin. And then there's the above image of company gun thugs hanged in front of a mural praising the revolution.

Nor would it be fair to accuse Corbucci of frivolity, and that makes it even stranger: that same year, after all, saw the release of The Great Silence, a film so grim and nihilistic it pushed the spaghetti western into and out the other side of parody. In other words, Corbucci's first entry into an ordinarily serious subgenre was pretty silly - no film in which one of the parties enters the climactic gunfight wearing a clown costume can claim to be all that straight-faced - while the 'standard' spaghetti western, which left more leeway for and would eventually descend into lightheartedness, was where he chose to place the darkest of his works.

Even though it does not deliver on the promise of its beginning - or, judging from the sort of person Corbucci was, possibly deliberately baits the audience - Il mercenario is far from a waste. Nero's self-amused bastard is as fantastic as ever, and he absolutely rocks the scenes in which he grants himself special treatment just to anger Paco (a device that would be reused by Eastwood in High Plains Drifter). Corbucci's style is nothing to sniff at, either: besides signature moves, the showiest bit of direction is a 360-degree tracking shot of Curly riding in a circle while a man is beaten offscreen. It's not great Corbucci, but is it ever interesting.

I love you, Dr Zaius

For some reason, 1968 was a standout year for science fiction. It saw the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barbarella (granted, one of these things is not like the other), and it also gave the world a third sci-fi classic: the amazing, entertaining and profound Planet of the Apes, whose glory could not be sullied by inferior sequels.

A bit of sullying was done by Tim Burton's widely disliked 2001 remake, but even that film raked in mountains of cash; and thus it was that 20th Century Fox held on to the franchise rights and eventually put into production a prequel variously titled Caesar, Caesar: Rise of the Apes and Rise of the Apes before being released as Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

That clunky final title proves that Hollywood executives firmly believe that you, gentle reader, are too thick to comprehend precisely which apes they might be talking about; and so we're all on the same page, Sean O'Neal will now explain:

'Not just any apes, mind, but specifically, those apes with the planet - the one from those movies - whose planet will now rise, metaphorically speaking, to replace that earlier, non-ape planet. Of course, none of this would have been necessary had Tony Danza and Danny DeVito not stolen Going Ape! all those years ago.'

The opening sequence prefigures what makes Rise of the Planet of the Apes special. A chimpanzee group is wandering the African jungle, and before we know it they're ambushed by humans; several apes are caught in nets and dragged off. This could be a standard scene, but it's notable for how totally subjectivity is reversed: the chimpanzees are subjects, persons, while the humans are faceless goons; and the visual quotes director Rupert Wyatt lifts from the famous scene of apes on horseback chasing human hunter-gatherers in Planet of the Apes underline the constant dialogue between the prequel and the original.

The captured chimpanzees end up at the labs of the horribly named Gen-Sys corporation, where scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) has just developed a new type of genetic therapy. ALZ-112, which repairs and improves brain function, may prove the longed-for and - hopes Will's boss, Jacobs (David Oyelowo) - lucrative cure for Alzheimer's. Of course, chimpanzees being imprisoned and studied by humans is a neat reversal of the situation Charlton Heston found himself in in the original, but I think 'constant dialogue' above summed it up pretty well.

The study's most promising test subject, a chimpanzee called Bright Eyes (Terry Notary), breaks free, attacks several handlers and, among much destruction, is gunned down by security guards just as Will is presenting his findings to the Board. Obviously, this disaster means no-one will ever fund Will's project again, and the chimpanzee handler, Franklin (Tyler Labine), is told to put down all the apes; but when Franklin discovers that Bright Eyes had given birth just prior to seemingly running amok, he can't bring himself to kill the infant, and Will agrees to take it home.

Not a chimpanzee.

Within a couple of years, the chimpanzee, now named Caesar (Andy Serkis), has grown to maturity. Caesar, having benefited from the gene therapy his mother received while he was still in the womb, exhibits signs of extraordinary intelligence, including sophisticated sign language and a fully developed sense of self. Meanwhile (there's a lot of 'meanwhile' after the first act), Will has been successfully treating his father (John Lithgow) with ALZ-112, stemming the progress of his Alzheimer's, but after a few years antibodies have started developing. Will manages to persuade Jacobs to fund the development of another, better drug.

Meanwhile, Caesar attacks Will's neighbour (Joey Roche) and is confined to a primate shelter run by the pragmatic John Landon (Brian Cox) and his sadistic jerk son Dodge (Draco Malfoy). After having a tough time at first and becoming disillusioned with Will, Caesar eventually escapes, discovers the new ALZ-113 and takes it back to enhance the intelligence of his fellow apes. Who rise.

In truth, the human characters in this film exist for two purposes only: to set the plot in motion, and to react with shock/sympathy/speciesist arrogance to the apes' actions. (It's fitting that the non-human primates are listed first in the credits.) The lead isn't Franco, and it certainly isn't Freida Pinto, whose character is entirely superfluous to the film but exists because she's just so pretty. No, our hero - anti-hero, perhaps, but the film doesn't really make that case - is Caesar, and after the latter two Lord of the Rings films and Peter Jackson's King Kong, everyone knows that if you want your humanoid computer-generated characters portrayed right, you get Andy Serkis.

Serkis gives the best performance in the film, an earnest and subtle portrayal of a person who comes to realise that he has the power to liberate his kind and change the world. He's part Moses, part Che Guevara, and totally awesome. The other actors portraying apes come close, though, creating wonderfully rounded characters like the aggressive alpha male Rocket (Terry Notary again), solitary gorilla Buck (Richard Ridings), Methuselah Koba (Chris Gordon) and gentle orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval). The last of these is my favourite character in the film, not only because I adore orangutans but also because his name is a shout-out to Maurice Evans, the hero who portrayed the greatest character in the history of cinema: Dr Zaius of the original film.

The best, most humane decision they ever made was not to use a single real ape in filming: every one of them is an actor's motion-capture work rendered in CGI, and it's quite beautiful, including the truly insane amounts of fur they had to create. I've resigned myself to the fact that on a large scale, CGI will never look as real as practical effects, which are real: compare the orcs (latex and make-up) to Gollum (CGI) in the Lord of the Rings films to see the difference. But CGI allows the creation of almost-real-looking things you could never do with old-school effects - and, as in this case, it helps avoid a great deal of unnecessary suffering caused by enslaving our fellow primates to perform for our amusement.

The dialogue Rise of the Planet of the Apes conducts with the original shows, though, how much our perception of great apes has changed in forty-odd years. In one of the film's key lines, Landon tells Will that '[t]hey're not people, you know'. The 1968 film argued that actually, they kind of were people, and how would you like it if someone locked you in a cage and studied you? (The analogy to racial slavery was unmistakeable.) The prequel, by contrast, sets out the apes' irreconcilable strangeness. Where the original's actors portrayed their apes as furry people, in 2011 they're all animal, aggressively physical, dextrous climbers, moving on all fours. (Caesar, of course, mostly walks on his hind legs, marking him as the leader.)

We're less certain of the similarities between us and our closest living relatives now, much more aware that we were and still are projecting aspects of ourselves onto great apes. (We did that even before we knew we have a common ancestor: see the medieval and early modern characterisation of the monkey as a clownish caricature of human beings.) In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, they're fascinating but often strange and violent. Wyatt films them to remind us that, pace decades of juvenile chimpanzees being cute on TV, an adult male of the species can grow 1.7m tall, has the strength of several people, and is prone to solving problems by violence.

It is, I should mention, a gorgeous film. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie (of the Lord of the Rings films, King Kong, and I Am Legend, proving again the producers knew to get the best people for this project) uses colour to accentuate the apes' personhood at the expense of the literally paler human characters, while Wyatt's direction is brisk and fleet, stylish but not showy, and filled with references to killer animal films from King Kong to The Birds without ever being obnoxiously post-modern. While parts of the film are silly and overblown, certain concessions have to be made to the twenty-first-century blockbuster. Otherwise it's delightfully old-fashioned, entertaining and thoughtful.

Where do oppressors go when they die?

Me in Ceasefire, on Christianity and social justice:

As a result of historic defeats the language of the Left is often focused on outcomes, 'equality' and 'social justice' The Bible, on the other hand, is more forthright: it talks of freedom, loosing the yoke, setting the prisoners free. Its vision of another world is not one that is more equal, but one in which the Downpresser Man has been vanquished, and revolutionary discourses heavily influenced by the Bible – reggae, for example – reflect this...

If he is 'the least of these', then Jesus is a Palestinian woman giving birth at a checkpoint in the West Bank, a fourteen-year-old jailed for rioting in Tottenham, a peasant starving in Somalia, a factory worker losing her home to foreclosure in Michigan, an Iraqi street orphan, a black man on death row in Texas, a raped woman who’s told she 'wanted it', a Foxconn employee who kills himself out of despair in China.

He is all the people we have been told to fear and despise, the whole suffering mass of humanity, the wretched of the earth. It’s not Christian to defend mansions and missiles just so long as the government will keep gay marriage illegal. Christian life is to unmask the discourses of power and to end oppression. The promise of Christmas is that injustice will not last forever.

Kim Jong-il memorial edition

So. Farewell, Kim Jong-il. Mourned only by latter-day Stalinists, the Dear Leader inflicted unspeakable barbarities on his people: his love, as Philip Gourevitch says, was indistinguishable from contempt. But besides being a terroristic dictator, Kim Jong-il was also, improbably, the world's most evil cinephile.*

And he wasn't content with passively enjoying his collection of 20,000 tapes and DVDs. No, sir, Kim went out there and made films, none more famous than the subject of this review, the 1985 creature feature Pulgasari. Gojira rip-off though it may be, Pulgasari, in all its glory and inadequacy, remains a weirdly chilling testament to both the horrors and the odd ambition of North Korea.

Kim, who had written On the Art of the Cinema in 1973, was concerned about the North Korean film industry even while his father was still alive. His flunkeys could churn out turgid communist propaganda, but they lacked the grand vision the people's republic required.

Shin Sang-ok (1926-2006) was one of South Korea's most successful directors. With a string of hits during the fifties and sixties - the Golden Age of Korean cinema - Shin was praised even in the North for the 'dedication and faith in the people' his works displayed. When the military regime of Park Chung-hee closed down Shin's studios in 1978, Kim Jong-il saw an opportunity. His agents abducted Shin's ex-wife, the actress Choi Eun-Hee, in Hong Kong, then nabbed the director himself when he went to investigate.

If kidnapping is the sincerest form of flattery, Shin had little cause to appreciate the compliment at first. Making several attempts to escape after his arrival in Pyongyang, he was confined to prison for four years, where he subsisted on grass, salt and rice. It wasn't until 1983 that Shin and his ex-wife were released and reunited at a party organised by Kim. There, the Dear Leader's heir apparent explained his plans. The couple - who soon remarried at Kim's suggestion - were to live in luxury while Shin directed films for the regime, Kim overseeing him as executive producer. The arrangement worked for several years, until Shin and Choi managed to flee to the United States in 1986.

Their most prestigious - and most lavishly budgeted - project was Pulgasari. A giant monster film, Pulgasari grew naturally out of Kim's obsessions: besides gangster films and the Friday the 13th** series, he was also a fan of the Japanese Gojira movies. Korean gwoesu ('giant monster') films, based partly on the Japanese daikaijū tradition going back to King Kong, partly on native Korean storytelling traditions, were already a popular genre in the South. (The film was, in fact, given a limited release in Seoul in 1998, where it bombed.)

In fourteenth-century feudal Korea, the peasants are oppressed by an evil king (Pak Yong-hok). Rebels, led by Inde (Ham Gi-sop) are harrying the king's forces from the mountains. The governor (Pak Pong-ilk) has decided to melt down the peasants' farm tools and cooking pots to make weapons; this leads to a riot in which the village blacksmith (Ri Gwon) is arrested. He's starved into submission in prison, while his fellow prisoners go on hunger strike in solidarity. (It's worth noting the film was made before the famine of the 1990s killed millions of Koreans.) With his last strength, the blacksmith moulds a small figurine of a reptilian monster out of rice, and when he dies his spirit lives on in the creature.

Soon, the blacksmith's daughter Ami (Chang Son-Hui) and her brother Ana (Ri Jong-uk) discover that the figurine is alive, and hungry: having devoured Ami's needles, it begins eating all the available metal at the forge and turns into a rather cute child-sized creature ('Little Man' Machan, a Japanese actor and former midget wrestler). Pulgasari - the name of the creature, after a legendary monster - saves Inde from execution by the king's forces and joins the rebel army. The task facing General Fuan (Ri Riyonun) is to stop the gigantic beast through increasingly implausible schemes before it helps the ragtag bunch of rebels overrun the whole country.

As in most gwoesu films, the monster appears early and receives a great deal of screen time. Kim clearly decided nothing but the best would do, thus guaranteeing the only reason anyone outside North Korea ever saw Pulgasari: the monster was created by the legendary Toho Studios, the home of Gojira. By guaranteeing safe passage, Kim managed to convince Nakano Teruyoshi to sign on as special effects director, while Satsuma Kenpachiro, who'd played Gojira before and would do so again, was the man in the monster suit.

Satsuma gives by far the best performance in the film. Compared to the overacting of Ham and Chang (on whose distraught face Shin lavishes countless close-ups), Satsuma manages to convey a range of emotions using body language alone (the other actors seem to have redubbed many of their lines). But he's overshadowed by the terrible monster design (it's sort of like Gojira, only with horns and worse in every single way) and the too-obvious special effects trickery. Pulgasari is virtually never seen in the same frame as the actors, except when human-sized, but I'd love to see the six-foot needles they must have used for an early scene.

Pulgasari is revolutionary propaganda: the monster creates a fictional scenario in which agrarian communism triumphs over the evil of feudalism. But there are rather sinister undertones to this superficially simple narrative. In the course of the film, Pulgasari increasingly overshadows the human characters both literally and metaphorically (Inde, our ostensible protagonist early in the film, is eventually killed by the king's soldiers in a throwaway scene). What's more, any 'faith in the people' is rather undercut by the fact that they're shown to be quite helpless until bailed out by a hundred-foot reptilian monster that singlehandedly accomplishes the liberation mere human resistance couldn't.

For this reason it's tempting to read the film as a fictionalised version of the DPRK's founding myth, with Pulgasari as a metaphor for Kim Il-sung. In that case the film's ending becomes even more intriguing. After killing the king and establishing a peasants' republic, Pulgasari - who, recall, turns swords into sustenance without going by way of ploughshares - begins to consume all the metal in the land. Soon the peasants are forced to offer Pulgasari their pots, pans and tools. Realising that the monster is unwittingly destroying the people, Ami convinces Pulgasari to turn to stone (or something like that: the ending is terrifically unclear).

It's otherwise a watchable film: not good, certainly, but Shin's work is competent at least, and the scene of Pulgasari's creation is really quite beautiful (if hindered rather than helped by the soundtrack, a very 1980s combination of synthesizers and traditional Korean music). The martial arts choreography, too, is efficient even if it never shines (the hundreds of extras are real-life North Korean soldiers, apparently). But beneath the feel-good propaganda of Pulsagari, a Stalinist horror lurks.

*In a world where Michael Bay and Eli Roth continue to find funding, that's saying something.
**I, of course, prefer the morally much less objectionable Halloween series.

Ed Miliband: cowardly man trapped between two different forms of cowardice

Ed Miliband spoke at TUC Congress today. While much of his speech was crowd-pleasing, Miliband refused to budge on a central point. 'While negotiations were going on, I do believe it was a mistake for strikes to happen [he said in reference to the 30 June walkouts]. I continue to believe that. But what we need now is meaningful negotiation to prevent further confrontation over the autumn.'

Well, that sounds familiar, since it's the only statement available to Miliband in recent months. Apparently he's still not impressed by the argument, eloquently made by Mark Serwotka back in June, that the 'negotiations' are a sham. Mary Bousted reiterated the basic point: 'Just for information, the government are not prepared to negotiate. All they are prepared to do is negotiate how to implement the changes they have decided. There are no real negotiations going on. We can give you chapter and verse about that.' This sort of fake 'consultation' favoured by managerial types is well known to anyone who's ever been involved in conflict with our rulers.

The real kick, however, came during questions, when Miliband outlined his idea of what trade unions should be. Highlighting the need to increase unionisation in the private sector, he said:

Unions can offer businesses the prospect of better management, better relationships, as you did during the recession. Of course the right to industrial action will be necessary, as a last resort. But in truth, strikes are always the consequence of failure. Failure on all sides. Failure we cannot afford as a nation. Instead, your real role is as partners in the new economy.

This phony 'vision' for trade unions is quite familiar to me. I've been involved in negotiations with employers, and that's what they want unions to be: 'partners' helping them realise their aims. Channels of communication. Enablers. Miliband is parroting the rhetoric of Thatcherism, but in nicer-sounding New Labour packaging. Unions aren't useless relics, they can help the capitalists realise their profits! Let's all pull together! Unions should reject Miliband's patronising notion that they can be 'partners in the new economy'. To reiterate a basic point New Labour has always pretended not to grasp, workers and employers are locked in an antagonistic relationship, and a refusal to recognise that means surrender to the business owners.

Miliband topped it off with the beautiful reassurance that trade unions were a 'huge asset' to the Labour movement, adding that '[t]hey should never ever feel like passive or unwanted members of our movement. I want them to feel part of it.' Well, that's nice of you, Ed, if a little patronising. But the Labour party was founded to be the political arm of the working class - nothing more, nothing less. Unions are not an 'asset' to Labour: they are what Labour is about, or else the party is nothing. Despite his assurances to the contrary, it hardly seems that Miliband has any plans to reverse New Labour's efforts to subjugate the unions.

You might say that Miliband is caught between a rock and a hard place. He must at least pay lip service to trade union struggles; at the same time he's afraid of what the gutter press will do to him if he appears to openly challenge the neoliberal settlement. (And maybe there are actual political convictions in there somewhere: he never appears to believe what he says, but who really knows?) But this is not the time to be concerned with popularity. Miliband's fear reveals that he is not interested in the wellbeing of the working class, but in his political fortunes and, more broadly, those of his party: and that points to a politician who has seriously lost his way.

Why I won't condemn the riots

As unexpected as the riots in England's cities were, the response was tediously predictable. Beside the hang-'em-high fulminations of the right-wing press, media consensus from the Guardian to the Telegraph was to deplore 'mindless', 'senseless' violence by 'feral youths', 'thugs', and so on. We're used to this: it's how they've talked about all clashes on Britain's streets since Millbank (and long before that).

The BBC's stance, too, was well-rehearsed. Their reporting was thoroughly on-message, narrowing the issue at stake to 'Is the police response effective or not?' The most distinctive characteristic of such reporting on Tory Britain, however, was that from Diane Abbott to Nigel Farage, anyone who had a microphone shoved in their face was asked to condemn the rioters before anything else.

Those who did not do so with sufficient force ran into trouble with their interviewers, as Darcus Howe found out. It's a test of loyalty: agree with our political elites or become a non-person, an Other as far as the media are concerned. Such ideological rigidity rather gives the lie to our liberal democracy's self-professed openness.

David Starkey's racist comments, on the other hand, were not condemned as vigorously. (Toby Young's incompetent attempt to exonerate Starkey is typical of the 'He wasn't racist' crowd.) I don't think Emily Maitlis gave Starkey a free pass: she challenged him repeatedly. The historian may simply have been ignorant: he confused Jamaican Patois with Textspeak and saw rap as the reason for the riots (one might ask him about the role of rap in 1790s riots).

But there's something more malicious and calculated here. Starkey consistently attempted to racialise the debate, reducing debates about gang culture (valid by themselves) to questions about 'black culture' (and Owen Jones was spot on when he pointed out that by 'white' Starkey meant 'respectable'). Of course, the last forty years have seen a change in the discourse: instead of skin colour the Right now talks about culture, understood as a fixed quality innate to human beings, not a constantly changing process influenced by all sorts of factors, i.e. dialectically. Thus the sign 'culture' still points to the signified 'skin colour', but without embarrassingly blatant racism.

There's the first reason we shouldn't condemn the rioters: the racist vocabulary in which they are being execrated. Starkey is only making explicit what has been implied in much of the condemnation: the rioters are, pardon my Disney, savages, barely even human. Here's Max Hastings's astonishing tirade:

The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame... They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries. They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. (emphasis mine)

Hastings goes on to express regret that looters were not shot, and complains about their antisocial refusal to watch the royal wedding. Disadvantaged young people are constructed as an utterly alien and contemptible Other. This isn't new: the people we now dismiss as 'chavs' were once Burke's 'swinish multitude' and the Victorians' 'vicious, semi-criminal' urban poor. To smear an entire segment of the population as the forces of chaos is hardly ethical.

Secondly, this demonisation both ignores and facilitates neoliberal 'reforms'. The Right initially insisted that any attempt to search for root causes amounted to an endorsement, and with good reason: such a search might uncover that youth club closures left young people with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It might find that 20 per cent of youth and half of young black people are unemployed, or that black people are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white peers. By moralising looting and demonising the young such inconvenient facts can be ignored, while their 'feral' nature can be used to justify the attacks on jobs and services this government is anxious to push through.

Thirdly, the condemners keep bad company. The moralism now echoing through the Commons, from people who cheerfully defrauded the taxpayer, is nought but rank hypocrisy. David Cameron enjoyed smashing private property in his youth. The BNP and EDL racists now coming out of the woodwork to act as Freikorps are using understandable fear and anger to preach a message of hate. Frankly, I don't want to agree with these people on much at all.

Lastly and perhaps controversially, looting shows a response to real injustice, however poorly expressed. I hold that any attack on property is political - it claims that 'this should not belong to you'. What sort of politics this expresses depends on the situation: after all, imperialism or the current looting of the public sector are also attacks on the property of others. But the riots attacked a system in which corporations and the rich running them control the vast majority of human wealth, expropriating and withholding them from the majority. Ultimately, looting is an unhelpful, sporadic, localised response to this general malaise: a much better response would frankly be to expropriate all capital.

In refusing to condemn the riots, let's not fall into the trap of claiming they were not terrifying and destructive to many people, few of them wealthy. It's in the nature of riots that most of the people hurt will be subaltern, not the elites. But that doesn't mean we should collude in demonising the rioters: it means that we should argue for better working-class politics and engage with frustrated young people in building resistance movements. Riots are counter-violence, but ultimately they do little to hurt ruling-class violence. For that, we need revolutionary politcs.

Smash the dragons!

Occasionally, life is awesome. And thus it was that the local 'independent' cinema put on a screening of The Battleship Potemkin (1925), a film I had previously only seen on DVD. It absolutely blew me away. If you see The Battleship Potemkin - and until you do, your life will be incomplete - you must see it in the cinema: the film needs the space the big screen affords to develop its full power.

It's worth recalling the extent to which the Russian Revolution, which director Sergei Eisenstein served as a Red Army soldier from 1918, inspired an incredible boom of the avant-garde in Russia: in music, visual arts and film, Russia was world-leading in the first half of the 1920s, until the ossification of Soviet public life stifled the arts.

The Battleship Potemkin was Sergei Eisenstein's second full-length feature, after 1924's Strike. At twenty-seven years Eisenstein was considered a prodigy when he filmed The Battleship Potemkin, the troubles with Soviet authorities that would cast a shadow over his masterpiece, October (1927), still ahead of him. Although the film's success at home was less than stellar, it fared better internationally.

Designed as the ultimate revolutionary propaganda film, The Battleship Potemkin is divided into five dramatically distinct parts. In 'Men and Maggots', sailors on the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet become angered by the rotten, maggot-infested meat they are asked to eat during the first, failed Russian Revolution of 1905.

In 'Drama on the Deck', the conflict comes to a head as the officers' decision to shoot down those unwilling to eat is confronted by a mutiny led by Grigory Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov). After a fight, the mutinous sailors take over the ship.

After the fallen Vakulinchuk is mourned over by the people of nearby Odessa in 'A Dead Man Calls for Justice', the revolutionary population is massacred by Tsarist troops and Cossacks on 'The Odessa Steps'. Finally, the Potemkin must face a naval squadron sent to quash the mutiny.

The version I saw was restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek and claims to be as close to the original as possible, unlike previous versions compromised by Stalin-era re-editing. It is distinctive for its soundtrack, a re-recording of Edmund Meisel's original score, and for the colouring of the red flag the Potemkin flies after the successful mutiny. The brilliant red in a black-and-white film is quite striking and I am more than willing to accept this deviation from the original, since it seems very much in the spirit of Eisenstein. There, are, however, some errors in the subtitles: the call to 'smash the dragons!' is a point of particularly hilarity, although thankfully it does not impede efforts to disarm the dragoons.

Seeing The Battleship Potemkin on the big screen I was very much struck by the perfection of the compositions by cinematographer Eduard Tisse and Eisenstein himself. Image after image is perfectly created; this almost leads to a feeling of sensory overload as the modern viewer is too used to the narrative-centred, 'getting out of the actors' way' style of twenty-first-century direction.

The Odessa steps sequence is the film's most famous by far. And it deserves to be: it's perfectly shot and shockingly violent by the standards of the times. But it shouldn't overshadow other scenes. The early confrontation between recalcitrant sailors and officers is particularly tense, as is the climactic showdown between Potemkin and the Tsarist squadron.

Eisenstein films are notable in eschewing the individualism that is endemic in western cinema. So it is with The Battleship Potemkin: although Vakulinchuk is the only named sailor, he is killed in the second of the film's five episodes and remains a cipher, no more than a spokesman for the revolutionary proletariat. No, the protagonist of The Battleship Potemkin is the collective of the mutinous sailors and, in chapters three and four, the revolting populace of Odessa. It is virtually only the villains who actually receive names.

Speaking of villains: as a work of Soviet propaganda, the film of course deals in broad stereotypes. The bad guys walk around in finery and sport monocles; one attempts to turn the people's assembly in Odessa into a pogrom and is beaten to death for his troubles by the people, who of course know their woes cannot be blamed on the Jews. But such a clear distinction between heroes and villains is not necessarily a bad thing; indeed The Battleship Potemkin absolutely could not work if the counter-revolutionaries were treated fairly.

Propaganda, then: but what propaganda! You don't need to be a dirty Red like me to enjoy this film (although it helps): Joseph Goebbels was apparently a jealous admirer of Eisenstein's craft. But you must  bring a willingness to accept collective protagonists, the flexibility to adjust to silent film, and sturdy footwear to prevent your socks from being blown off. What are you waiting for? To the cinema, post haste.

Property crowned and uncrowned

The classes team up to take down the monarchy.

 

According to the Guardian, sixty-seven per cent of Britons believe the monarchy is 'still relevant'. That figure, of course, is rather worthless since it tells us nothing about approval. We'll all agree that Nelson Mandela is 'relevant'; so, I'm sorry to say, is David Cameron. The point stands, however: the monarchy does not inspire abject hatred. But neither are most Britons of the flag-waving loyalist variety. Before the royal wedding, only 37% professed interest in the event; according to YouGov, 35% would do their 'best to avoid' the whole affair. Indifference seems to be the prevailing attitude towards the House of Windsor.

Among sections of the Left there's a long-standing puzzlement about the British monarchy. It is assumed that a democratic republic is the 'typical' form of bourgeois government and that, accordingly, Britain represents an anomaly. A more Marxist response, surely, would be to argue that 'typical' forms of government hardly exist and that historical materialism is a critical method rather than a template for understanding every historical event. Indeed, the notion that republics are natural forms of government under capitalism can be quite easily refuted. Before the First World War, of the Great Powers only France and the United States were republics; Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia and Britain were all monarchies of varying types. Indeed new monarchies were constantly being created at the height of nineteenth-century capitalism. In the century following the Congress of Vienna, new monarchies were installed in France (which didn't last), the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece; both Germany and Italy were unified under conquering monarchies. Where these crowned heads fell at the end of the Great War, this was caused by proletarian revolutions that threatened the entire propertied order.

The French Revolution was a revolution against royal absolutism - yes, but what does this mean? Was it a revolution against untrammelled executive power, against the constant subordination of the periphery to the centre, of the part to the whole - a revolution for 'checks and balances' as Montesquieu advocated them? (This advocacy led Carl Schmitt to dismiss Montesquieu as, essentially, a medievalist.) On the contrary: the Revolution not only displayed all these characteristics of the ancien régime, it shattered all the obstacles to absolute rule the king had been unable to remove. It is in this sense that the Revolution was fulfilled by Napoleon. Lord Elton was right to claim that the twin principles of the revolutionaries of 1789 were order and equality: the removal of all the inefficiencies, corruption and arbitrariness caused by privilege - and the removal of decision-making from a single, weak individual, controlled by advisers, mistresses and outdated noblemen: in short, the replacement of the unchecked rule of a monarch by the unchecked rule of a class.

The reasons for the creation and fall of the Second French Republic (1848-52) are laid out by Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The July Revolution of 1830 had led the bourgeoisie to embrace not republicanism but the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. The July Monarchy, however, struggled against proletarian uprisings and increasing hostility from those sectors of the bourgeoisie that felt left out by a state that mostly represented high finance. The February Revolution of 1848 left no option but a republic as the system that divided Frenchmen least (Adolphe Thiers). It was simply impossible to hand the crown over to yet another dynasty, although Louis Napoleon was waiting in the wings. The uprising of the masses in June 1848 was defeated by the bourgeoisie in alliance with the lumpenproletariat and the petite bourgeoisie. Thereafter the country was run by a parliament mostly composed of monarchists that could not muster the strength to resist Louis Napoleon's bid for power.

As the French bourgeoisie discovered in 1830 and 1848, it is very difficult to have a revolution against monarchy and privilege without opening Pandora's box: revolution, where it happened, constantly threatened to create a maelstrom in which the bourgeoisie, having participated in the overthrow of the old order, would itself be destroyed by the propertyless classes. This happened, of course, in Russia in 1917, and was a distinct possibility in Germany, Hungary and Italy after the First World War, France in 1871, Spain after 1931, and others. The result was that, where it perceived a threat from below, the bourgeoisie would prefer to work with rather than against the old order. Sometimes, of course, the bourgeoisie simply repeatedly failed at wresting power from the ancien régime: thus most infamously in Germany.

The accommodation that the bourgeoisie reached with monarchs as well as aristocratic and ecclesiastical elites removed the need for a republican form of government. Today, in Britain at least none of the main bourgeois parties advocates republicanism, although republican views are presumably more commonly held by Labour and Liberal supporters than they are by Tories and the associated Church-and-King mob of the gutter press.

The conclusion must be that the abolition of the monarchy is now quite impossible without a wide-ranging reconfiguration of British society as a whole: in other words, revolution. (The argument that a socialist society would of necessity be republican need not be made here.) The sort of liberal republicanism that impotently mocks the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in the pages of the Guardian rightly elicits little more than pity from the Right. They may not have chosen it, but republicans and revolutionaries can only achieve their aims together.

La Revolución, exploitation style

By way of an introduction: Machete is awesome, of course. I mean, look at the poster. Or at the announcement, in the movie itself, that 'Machete will return in Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again'. Or the fact that Machete is not a nickname, but the protagonist's birth name. If you type 'Machete' that many times, it stops looking like a word. In any case: Machete is awesome, by which I mean to convey that I more or less squealed with giddy delight throughout the film.

Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo) is a former Mexican Federale ('CIA, FBI, DEA, all rolled up into one mean fucking burrito', according to one character) who has fallen foul of drug lord Rogelio Torrez (Steven Seagal). Now Machete works as a day labourer in Texas - until, that is, he is hired by Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate far-right anti-immigration senator John McLaughlin (Robert De Niro). But he's double-crossed: one of Booth's gunmen wounds McLaughlin in the leg and shoots Machete to guarantee the senator's re-election. Now Machete must take revenge and uncover a conspiracy involving a racist vigilante organisation headed by Von Jackson (Don Johnson) - a task in which he's aided by honest immigration cop Sartana Rivera (Jessica Alba), his brother, a priest (Cheech Marin) and a network helping illegal immigrants run by Luz (Michelle Rodriguez).

Ultimately the film comes down to a showdown between the vigilantes and Mexican immigrants. It's awesome, but it's also the one part of the film that director Robert Rodríguez treats without any irony. 'La revolución', as Luz calls it early in the film, is of course a fantasy - the marginalised and maligned immigrant working class rising up to overthrow the oppressive order, symbolised by racist paramilitaries. But it's an immensely gratifying and empowering fantasy, in tune with Frantz Fanon's assertion that the colonial subject's desire is not for equality but for the defeat and death of the coloniser. That Rodríguez takes such a clear stance is not self-evident in a B-movie; but at a time when immigrants are under fire (sometimes literally) both in the US and in Europe it's something to cheer every leftist's heart.

That, then, is politically pleasing to me; but what about other aspects of the film? Does Machete reinforce patriarchy, for example? For Machete most certainly does 'get the women', as the trailer promises - seven by my count, excluding his wife who is murdered roughly three minutes into the film. That the male gaze predominates in Machete I cannot deny. But I'd like to protest that the topic is treated ironically: with respect to sixty-six-year-old Mr Trejo, it is not quite plausible that Machete is irresistible to every woman in sight, and Robert Rodríguez makes not the slighest attempt to make it plausible. It's merely another homage to the conventions of 1970s exploitation films, in which heroes would womanise like nobody's business.

It's all a delight: the performances from an all-star cast (Rose McGowan was left on the cutting room floor) are over the top in just the right way. The villains stand out, from Jeff Fahey's magnificently purry drug dealer to Don Johnson as a murderous redneck ('There's nothing I'd like better than to see that Mexican dance the bolero at the end of a rope'). I don't need to mention that Michelle Rodríguez is bad-ass as usual (nay, more so than usual), and even Jessica Alba manages not to grate. Lindsay Lohan, as a 'nun with a gun', has a small but functional part. Of course, Machete is intensely violent. If you're squeamish about the severing of limbs, I recommend you do not see this. Nonetheless, if you have seen something utterly vicious like last year's Piranha, rest assured Machete is less depraved than that. Meaning it is still quite depraved. Be that as it may, Machete is ultimately a full-throttle thrill-ride, bloody and sexy and hilarious. A guilty pleasure, of course - but oh, how very pleasurable.

In this series: Grindhouse (2007) | Machete (2010) | Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

Nach unten wird getreten...

Thilo Sarrazin hat sein Ziel erreicht: er ist zum Impulsgeber für die Politik geworden. Groß war das Geschrei zunächst: krudester Biologismus! Pseudowissenschaftlicher Murks! Fast sofort aber hieß es, der Bundesbanker spreche echte Probleme an: zu schrill sei nur seine Sprache. Angela Merkel verlangte öffentlich eine Debatte ohne Tabus, die sie als Kanzlerin eigentlich führen und nicht bloß fordern könnte. Analysierte der „Spiegel“ letzte Woche noch den „Provokateur“ Sarrazin, fragte das Magazin in der nächsten Ausgabe, „warum Deutschland an der Integration scheiterte“.

Der Konsens, Sarrazins Kritik sei überspitzt, enthalte aber ein Körnchen Wahrheit, ist keineswegs neutral: in ihm spiegelt sich ein Weltbild, das der Wirklichkeit kraß widerspricht. Die Kanzlerin gab den Ton bereits vor. Integration dürfe keine Einbahnstraße sein, sagte Merkel. Die deutsche Gesellschaft habe sich um die Integration ihrer ausländischen Mitbürger bemüht. Die aber sollten nun auch das Ihre tun.

Dieses Schema erinnert verblüffend an das Muster, nachdem eine andere Bevölkerungsgruppe besprochen wird: die Ärmsten. Auch diese gelten der Regierung und der ihr freundlich gesinnten Presse als starrsinnig und kulturell degoutant. In ihrer „spätrömischen Dekadenz“ (so der Außenminister) schlügen sie, trotzigen Kindern gleich, die großzügigen Hilfen des Staates aus, um mit ihren stetig wachsenden Kinderscharen die Sozialsysteme (also Sie, liebe Mitbürgerinnen und Mitbürger!) zu belasten. Sie lebten parasitär in ihren selbstgewählten Ghettos auf Kosten der Allgemeinheit in Saus und Braus. Einwanderer wie Arbeitslose seien undankbar und schotteten sich aus moralischer Verwerflichkeit und zweifelhaften religiösen Vorstellungen von einer Gesellschaft ab, die sie gerne mit offenen Armen aufnehmen würde.

Die Wissenschaft nennt das „negative Integration“: mehrere Gruppen, die eigentlich ganz verschiedene Ziele verfolgen, werden geeint, indem man auf Minderheiten hetzt. Dazu gehört: die gewünschte Gemeinschaft wird als großherzig und hilfsbereit, die Minderheit als feindlich und fremd hingestellt. Was dem Bismarckschen Reich Polen, Sozialisten und Katholiken, das waren der Bundesrepublik nach dem Zusammenbruch des zuvor die Allgemeinheit bedrohenden „Weltkommunismus“ zunächst Asylanten, dann, als deren Zahl ob abschreckender Maßnahmen immer weiter sank, die Nachkommen der Gastarbeiter.

Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft bröckelt. Die sozialen Unterschiede werden immer schärfer. Während wenige an der Spitze sich über staatliche Wirtschaftsspritzen freuen dürfen, schwindet die Mittelschicht, und immer mehr Menschen müssen mit immer weniger auskommen – übrigens nicht nur bei schlechter Wirtschaftslage: schon vor der Finanzkrise stagnierte das Realeinkommen der meisten. Die Schaffung von Randgruppen ist dabei eine bewährte Herrschaftstaktik. Der steigende Druck, die Angst, die Wut äußert sich überall. Da könnten sich die spätrömisch Dekadenten gegen ihre Herren wenden. Lieber schiebt man denen die Schuld zu, die noch weniger haben.

Natürlich ist es Unsinn, den Armen und Arbeitslosen ihre Lage selbst zuzuschreiben. Niemand wird ernsthaft behaupten, Millionen weltweit hätten entnervt gekündigt, als die Finanzkrise begann, nach dem Motto: nun habe ich aber keine Lust mehr. Darauf läuft dieser Randgruppendiskurs aber hinaus. Er grenzt die Verlierer dieser Gesellschaft aus, schiebt ihnen die Ausgrenzung in die Schuhe und verlacht sie dazu noch. Wer so denkt, hilft den Westerwelles und Ackermanns.

Individualism must disappear (Steven Soderbergh, 'Che')

Che's very title is a lie. It's a lie because Steven Soderbergh's 2008 two-part opus is not a biopic. Because, despite the advertising campaign's desperate attempt to convince us of the contrary, Soderbergh has not the slightest interest in showing us 'the man behind the myth'. James Verniere is right in calling Che a feature-length version of the famous portrait, but wrong in considering that a flaw.

Che: Part One (also known as The Argentine) opens with Che Guevara giving a radio interview in New York. The scene is shot in grainy black and white, with extreme close-ups of Che, and it immediately contrasts with the next scene that takes us back to Mexico City in 1955, and into colour and medium shots. This progression through opposites is preserved throughout The Argentine as Soderbergh switches between black-and-white scenes of Che's visit to the United States in 1964 and an account of the Cuban Revolutionary War from the beginning to the victory; the film ends with the victorious revolutionary troops on their way to Havana after the decisive battle of Santa Clara. By contrast, Che: Part Two (Guerrilla) is structured as a single relentless slog from Guevara's arrival in Bolivia in late 1966 to his capture and execution by the military eleven months later. It's a difficult experience to sit through as the situation of the guerrillas goes from bad to worse to catastrophic, with no relief in sight.

Watching Che is in many ways a jarring experience to us consumers of Hollywood films. The biographical picture in our depoliticised culture bestows on its hero a simple, everyday motivation: William Wallace in Braveheart fights the English because they murdered his wife, Johnny Cash in Walk the Line becomes a tortured musician because of his abusive father and dead brother. Both films personalise a process that is in reality larger than the individual, but which, the filmmakers assume, the audience won't understand or care about: thirteenth-century politics in the former, early rock'n'roll in the latter case – thus draining whatever subversive content the material may have had. (As Slavoj Žižek remarks of Warren Beatty's Reds, '[e]ven the October Revolution is OK, according to Hollywood, if it serves the reconstitution of a couple'.) Hollywood attempts, foolishly, to isolate the individual as archetype from his socio-political context. In Che Steven Soderbergh resolutely refuses to do this, and the extent of his commitment becomes clear when you consider that other Che film, Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries (2004). That's a good movie, but a firmly conventional one: impetuous young man sets out on road trip across South America and on his journey encounters oppressed people that make him re-think his priorities.

Che is not about a person at all. Each part opens with a map – Cuba in the first, South America in the second film – that brings home the point that what we are about to see is not about Ernesto Guevara, but about his revolutions and why one succeeded while the other failed. Soderbergh frankly admits that he had no interest in Che's personal life, and neither film tells you anything at all about the time before the Sierra Maestra. Soderbergh drives the point home by filming virtually everything in medium shot, with the very notable exception of the black-and-white 1964 scenes of Part One. Benicio del Toro's performance is a wonder to behold not because he allows us deep insights into his psyche, but precisely because it is so detached and deliberately underplayed. 'Individualism must disappear', Guevara insisted, and in Soderbergh's opus it does as Che the person disappears into his struggle.

Hollywood loves a linear narrative: it's the cinematic expression of the bourgeois idea of progress. Che, by contrast, is structured dialectically. Part One and Part Two are opposites in almost every respect. They aren't even in the same aspect ratio: The Argentine is shot in 2.35:1, while Guerrilla is presented in more cramped 1.85:1, as befits the second film's almost claustrophobic feel. Further, The Argentine employs a vibrant colour scheme rich in greens and browns, while Guerrilla is extremely desaturated, using feeble greens and blues and pale light for a sickly and depressed look.

Soderbergh insists on showing us Che not as an individual, but as a revolutionary, and a revolution is always achieved by a collective. We are not invited to ask 'Who was this man?', but 'How did he try to bring about revolution?'. This uncompromisingly political and procedural stance that led some critics to call Che curiously impersonal and dramatically unsatisfying. On the contrary: in removing the man from the revolutionary, in rejecting the accumulated clichés of the Hollywood biopic, Soderbergh has made the best possible film about a man who chose to dedicate his life to the revolution – more than that: to embody it.