Do We Really Want To Forget?

I haven't, as they say, read the book but I have read the article. The book - Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia by Francis O’Gorman - is concerned with what is described as the 'systematic devaluation' of the past since the 19th century. As I understand it the basic points are that:

- societies are increasingly obsessed by the future and as such want to relegate where they came from in order to create the new order that will be so much better

- big organising ideas like communism found it necessary to sweep away everything that went before

- liberal societies are increasingly critical of their pasts and wish to denigrate them for failing to live up to modern ideals. 

To say that this left me mildly puzzled is something of an understatement.

Listening to our current political discourse one could be forgiven for thinking that the past is in fact the major obsession of many of our politicians constituted as a weird amalgam of Our Island Story, The Second World War and Britain as viewed (by many of those very politicians) through sepia tints from parts of the world that had in the not too distant past been British colonies. 

Indeed, it seems that our future is increasingly affected by deliberately distorted notions of the past which people across the globe are eager to use to justify all kinds of disastrous policies. That nice Mr Putin is very much the Imperialist and a latter day Peter the Great. The tragic state of the USA arises from completely separate narratives about the past and the foundation myths of the country and a systematic failure to reach any kind of common ground on the history of slavery and discrimination. The horrific events in the Middle East reflect an active ambition to go back to an imagined medieval past and to destroy all other cultures in the process. 

The point about all of this is the not forgetting but the complete exclusivity of the views being propounded. 

The past is not being used to draw some carefully calibrated lessons about what can happen and to aid understanding and reflection. 

It is being used for malign purposes. It seems to me that we do not have a problem with amnesia. Far from it. We have a problem with spending far too much time on partisan commemoration but far too little time on reflection. 

The commemorating focus is on 'heritage' (which is now often coupled with the word 'industry'). And one of the things about heritage is that it is deeply cultural and is associated with an expectation that it be viewed positively. It is in short reinforcing some of the story that we tell ourselves. It is about identity.

This commemoration obsession can seem mildly quaint or more than a touch ridiculous when seen in the obsessions of many British people with a past that is characterised by big houses, latter day indentured retainers and a class ridden stratified society represented in frankly repulsive programmes like Downton Abbey. This is indeed the Our Island Story version of history and it is more than just quaint or ridiculous when it becomes part of a wider narrative about our Imperial past as somehow a good thing rather than a disastrous exercise in expropriation and domination. 

I spend more time than I should wandering around houses that were built by people who I would have found completely abhorrent. The past is fascinating but it needs to be viewed in a clear sighted manner. I want to understand but I have no interest in celebrating aristos and swaggering roaring boys.

So whenever I hear some nonsense about The War and how we were a top nation and how much better it would be if we were to let the lion roar again, my immediate reaction is to suggest that people should take a deep breath, have a cup of tea and spend some time reading the magisterial book The Uses And Abuses Of History by Margaret Macmillan. As she says:

'History is not a dead subject. It does not lie there safely in the past for us to look at when the mood takes us. History can be helpful; it can also be very dangerous. It is wiser to think of history not a a pile of dead leaves or a collection of dusty artefacts but as a pool, sometimes benign, sometimes sulphurous, that lies under the present, silently shaping our institutions, our ways of thought, our likes and dislikes.'

Using history as a basis for identity is a manifestation of history at its most sulphurous. Much of our history is not one of which we should be particularly proud. It is, however, what made us what we are today for good and ill. We should remember it but we should not commemorate; we should reflect and understand and be clear eyed in doing so. Above all we should see history and the study of the past as one of the great liberal disciplines and a bed rock of pluralism. 

The danger it seems to me is from obsessives who choose a narrative grounded in the past to posit a purportedly better future. That these are frequently extreme nationalists or religious fanatics should come as no surprise.

At this Clio, the muse of history (you can see her at the top of this blog), would weep copiously (and that's not just from the sulphur). 

Yet we know that there are still exercises in enforced amnesia which continue and in these cases remembering what others have tried to eradicate is a wholly laudable enterprise. And when that is done with the kind of grace and intelligence that is on offer in this film Spell Reel about remembering the recent past in Guinea-Bissau one can see the power in doing so. 

Remembering what others want forgotten is after all fundamentally about pluralism. 

London Film Festival

A brief account of films seen over the last 10 days in what was a bit of a bumper year in terms of quality with only one really loudly squawking turkey. They aren't in a precise order but the ones towards the top are those I most liked. The one at the bottom is running around the room flapping wildly.

Zama by Lucrecia Martel which is a simply wondrous existential fever dream of disappointment and dashed hopes with a stunning walk on llama adding further bathos. Not an easy watch but amply rewards attention with some stunning images and cinematography. Having also just read the book on which the film is based there is a separate blog post about both for those who truly are gluttons for punishment.

Columbus a luxuriantly talky but deeply felt film set amidst the quiet comforts of modernist architecture and dumb phones.

Ava by Lea Mysius which is as zesty as its teen protagonist is spiteful, complex and enterprising.

Jeune Femme with an absolute powerhouse of a performance by Laetitia Dosch cast adrift in the Paris precariat and nostalgic for things she never had.

Manifesto by Julian Rosefeldt: a laudable, droll, sophisticated, inventive reaction to populism with an extraordinary set of performances by Cate Blanchett.

Loveless by Andrey Zvyagintsev: classy extreme Russian miserabilism about serious family dysfunction seen at 11 am on a Sunday. On the upside it's less grim than his previous film.

Bright Sunshine In by Claire Denis. A quite luminous Juliette Binoche in a droll but also deeply poignant assessment of the effects of wanting to be wanted. This is, naturally, in French and really could only be made in France (and I say that as an entirely good thing).

Mademoiselle Paradis by Barbara Albert which magnificently captures in high Rococo relief the 18th century's fascination with prodigy.

Promised Land by Eugene Jarecki in which "America is the fat Elvis'. A resonant metaphor for the current tragic situation of a country that has lost its way.

Western by Valeska Griesebach about East German 'cowboys' (aka construction workers) in Bulgaria; a meditation on belonging, empathy and being strong which magnificently undercut conventions.

Thelma by Joachim Trier which checked in with a veritable flock of 70s horror flicks, threatened to really take off but didn't quite, so to speak, ignite.

The Meyerowitz Stories by Noah Baumbach which can now be found on your very own Netflix service and has humour, pathos and some scenes close enough to home that they require viewing through latticed fingers.

Ingrid Goes West which is a pretty good satire of deranged Instagram culture.

Downsizing by Alexander Payne. As a fan of many of his other films this was a deeply disappointing Charlie Kaufman-lite flop. Baggy, unengaging and at times close to embarrassing.

Zama: Life Is Not That Hard And Then You Still Don't Die

"I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No."

That is the novel - written by the Argentinian author Antonio Di Benedetto in the 1950s but set in a Spanish colony in Paraguay in the 1790s - in a single line.

The book and the magnificent film adaptation by the Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel just now being released on the festival circuit are concerned with existential despair; the disappointment in the realisation of hopes being forever deferred, of ambition never being satisfied, of the quotidian as what happens before real life starts.

They are also concerned with the identity that we assign to ourselves. As the director said at the screening last night: 

"I believe that identity creates an inevitable trajectory so it becomes a trap in itself."

That may feel rather hard to unpick but she is saying that once we fasten on to a set of assumptions about who we are and our place in the world we struggle ever to escape them. In the case of Zama this is as a white,  Spanish corregidor who has a wife back in Spain and ambitions to continue to rise in Royal service but is living in a colonial backwater surrounded by people, most of whom are indigenous, who he considers beneath him. 

As he gradually sinks in terms of his career and his prospects, however, he is increasingly desperate for approval (particularly from children who he sees as being his own younger self) and interprets that approval as a reflection of his own merit:

"Zama had been and could not modify what he once was. Should I believe I was predestined by that past for a better future? This boy, Indalecio’s son, demanded that of me with all the force of his admiration."

He lives both in the past in terms of how his expectations have been shaped but also crucially in the future in terms of those ambitions being satisfied. In the restrictive nature of the times he can only hope to move on thorough Royal favour and to secure that he must attract attention, most obviously by being recommended by a superior for promotion.

Zama's whole existence is therefore founded on waiting. He waits for messages from his family. He waits for the governor to write letters of recommendation to Spain. He waits for his merit to be properly appreciated by the few people in his local society whose good regard he values. He waits to have relationships with the few Spanish of equal standing having already fathered a child with a local indigenous woman.

It is with these attempts and failures at relationships that much of the novel is concerned. Zama is haughty. He should be appreciated. He is self centred but he is also blind to the reality of what is happening because it is all refracted through his own sense of merit and being the focus for whatever occurs.

In practice, he is being exploited but his self obsessed, narcissistic temperament, almost solipsistic in its resolute focus on securing his own future fails to appreciate what is happening until it is too late. In one moment he is considering how to respond to one of the objects of his desire and weighs up the choice between feeling that he can almost punish her on the one hand and on the other that he may need to exploit her in the future:

"I hesitated between a lengthy epistle of postponement designed to stoke her longings on the chance that I might one day find myself in need of her help, or a few laconically expressive lines, like those she had sent me, to dash all her hopes."

Gradually, Zama becomes feverish both in terms of being ill and in terms of hallucinating figments of what he wishes to see; the things that are not there but were they to be realised would satisfy his hopes and dreams.

Nature also seems to take a delight in undercutting him with its insistent concern only with the present. There is a glorious sequence in the film when a stray llama wanders backwards and forwards behind Zama coming into view over his shoulder but wholly unconcerned with his inner crisis as it chews on some grass suffusing the whole scene in the most delicious bathos.

His hopes of preferment both by the governor and by these women gradually fading, Zama determines to join an expedition in search of a notorious local bandit who has been terrorising the area and disrupting trade. His calculation is that success in this venture will lead to his immediate elevation back in Spain.

Zama and his colleagues travel through extraordinary scenery, as they ride and then wade their way through the flooded swamp land in search of the bandit. They are sinking and with their bodies and their animals their hopes of success also gradually fade until they are the ones being pursued and finally captured by warriors from a local tribe.

There are final delicious disappointments and realisations for Zama. Towards the very end as he drifts between conscious and unconscious states and between life and death he is yet again visited by a child: 

"He was me, myself from before; I hadn’t been born anew. I understood that when I recovered my own voice and was able to speak. Smiling like a father, I said, “You haven’t grown. . . .” With irreducible sadness he replied, “Neither have you.”