Special; content articles IU Press

http://inscribe.iupress.org.
Special interest articles on a variety of subjects

Also Indiana University Press publishes a variety of Journals on historical and ethnic subjects addressing and linking the past to the present engaging modern scholars in an open forum atmosphere. Note the example of the Journal below.

Journal of Folklore Research
An International Journal of Folklore and
Ethnomusicology
Edited by Moira Smith
The Journal of Folklore Research
provides an international forum
for current theory and research among
scholars of traditional
culture. Each issue includes articles of theoretical
interest to
folklore and ethnomusicology as international disciplines,
as
well as essays that address the fieldwork experience and
the
intellectual history of folklore.

Darwin's continuing voice

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/em/email_images/JRNLS_Presspage/IUP_J_F09_CAT.pdf


and Levine’s discussion of the melding of science and wonder, train their gazes insistently forward, to a present in which biodiversity and climate change are no mere intellectual concepts.,

Quote The idea of the melding of science and wonder is accented profoundly in our modern age of quantum physics where science reaches even beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge and enters the thresh hold of wonder beyond what science can answer. Perfect examples of this melding are the concepts of biodiversity and climate change even exceeding man's understanding of these concepts and involving the best minds of our time in turmoil and with no answers to the Gordian knots they present to consciousness.

Jim Endersby draws on recent work on masculinity and the emotions in Victorian culture to reconsider Darwin’s relationship to the botanist Joseph Hooker
The idea of masculinity as presented above in relation to Victorians is a novel concern of which I have never been aware. The gendering of the natural scientist is another such concern I would like to be enlightened.

Darwin’s contemporaries were
learning to understand the implications
of
contingency as meaningful and
productive. Jim Endersby draws on
recent
work on masculinity and the emotions
in Victorian culture to
reconsider
Darwin’s relationship to the botanist
Joseph Hooker, and, by
implication, the
gendering of the natural scientist in the
period. And
contributions from Gillian
Beer and George Levine—two founding
figures in
Darwin criticism—reflect their
confidence that attention to
Darwin’s
language enables us to better understand
both the Victorian
moment and our
own: Beer’s analysis of extinction in the
Origin, and
Levine’s discussion of the
melding of science and wonder, train
their
gazes insistently forward, to a present in
which biodiversity and
climate change
are no mere intellectual concepts.

,

Holocaust 20 films -Schindler a self-server?

http://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/02/04/schindlers-list-steven-spielberg-1993/

Debunking heroes in the name of sensationalism and deflating them in the process by ascribing, yes,ulterior motives to the film maker, and creating "revisionist whitewash" without documenting and proving Schindler as a self serving bottom liner seems obvious from a review of the film. Character is never analyze3d for motives or the why of his later saving actions ,according to Grunes. But is this true? Cannot providence or a divine event so intervene implying God's hand in the matter and that is not a facile undertaking but could be the explanation for his life change in a moment of time,credible in the very nature of this divine event.Not all can be facilely or otherwise explained in such a life wrenching change of motivation to save the lives of these Jews. The invisibility of righteous gentiles is creative license to give focus to Schindler's character and actions, not indeed taken but for the craft and art of the film as an organic whole. The twenty films mentioned give a spectrum of views and perspectives of the period and I am grateful for their listing for my follow-up.

The subject matter is the Holocaust. Based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel, the film depicts the rounding up of Polish Jews during the Second World War. A Catholic businessman and Nazi Party member, Oskar Schindler manages to spare more than a thousand persons the fate of six million other European Jews by gaining them official exemptions based on their war-vital production work at a factory that he has taken over. Schindler’s “list,” then, consists of the names of these fortunate few. Spielberg is here renewing Keneally’s fictional license. For the real Schindler was a self-serving bottom-liner who, far from manipulating Nazi policy, periodically selected for extermination members of his in fact changing, not growing, list. (At war’s end, fewer than three dozen of the original persons listed were among those rescued.) This revisionist whitewash, though, serves Spielberg’s purpose. For out of the overwhelmingly somber event of the Holocaust Spielberg has been able to extract material suitable for his brand of sentimental uplift, although a few unnerving sequences suggest a loftier intent: an ironic use of the lucky few to evoke the terrible fate of the unlucky many. In one of these passages, female prisoners, their names on Schindler’s list, are mistakenly transported to a death camp where the mass shower they are herded in to take, amidst their frantic fear of imminent gassing, turns out to be just a shower after all. Coldly manipulative, scenes like this end up seeming lurid and cruel, effectively undoing any ironic strategy Spielberg may have had in mind. In all, his film fails its subject matter by grossly sensationalizing it.Schindler changes appreciably and therein lies this inexplicable nature of goodness and the attendant evil juxtaposed with it This is legitimate and motifs for the grand work of art the film is and has turned out to be precisely because of concentration on these motifs.

_________________________________________________________

Nor does the film investigate character. What motivates Spielberg’s Schindler? At first he is shown merely courting Nazi favor while chasing a deutsche mark; the notion of saving lives comes later. But we never learn how or why—only when: after a recreational horseback ride affords him a panoramic view of Jews being routed below. The lofty vantage facilely implies God’s hand in Schindler’s shifting sense of purpose; and, true enough, caring non-Jews did risk their own safety hiding Jews and working underground against the Nazis—people, by the way, this film makes invisible the better to mythologize its Schindler. But many more saw what Schindler saw and cared little or nothing about it. So why was he different? What got him onto such a righteous road? Are his rescue efforts a guilty reaction to his earlier indifference to Nazi ideology and practice? Is his game-playing with Nazis a mischievous extension of his entrepreneurial bent? What gives with him?

_____________________________________________

This failure to consider motive has led some to babble on about the inexplicable nature of goodness. Inexplicable to whom? No one forced Spielberg to make this film; if he wasn’t interested in the whys or wherefores, or couldn’t fathom them, he should have turned over Steven Zaillian’s script to someone else to direct. For what we do always derives from who or what we are. We don’t see this in Spielberg’s Schindler only because the character isn’t searched, or shown in sufficient detail. (Given his goonish Nazis, one can assume that Spielberg also finds evil inexplicable.) As it happens, Spielberg may have been on to something without even knowing it. It’s potentially interesting that Schindler hardly seems to change at all; for, had he been more perspicacious, Spielberg might have built upon this apparent constancy of Schindler’s in order to suggest that our very best behavior sometimes originates in the same complex of attitudes and impulses as our very worst. Good deeds can proceed from other than noble minds and bleeding hearts. But Spielberg, a melodramatist, evinces here no such basic grasp of human complexity.

_____________________________________________________

The twenty films on the alphabetical list all touch upon the
Holocaust or its aftermath. They come from more than a half-dozen countries,
including Poland, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Italy, France and Israel. An “x”
indicates that the film is a documentary.
ANNE FRANK REMEMBERED. Jon Blair,
x, 1995THE BLACK FOX. Louis Clyde Stoumen, x, 1962BORDER STREET. Aleksandr Ford,
1948CHILDREN REMEMBER THE HOLOCAUST. Mark Gordon, x, 1996DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT.
Jan Nemec, 1964EUROPA, EUROPA. Agnieszka Holland, 1991FATELESS. Lajos Koltai,
2005THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS. Vittorio De Sica, 1971IMAGES OF THE WORLD
& THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR. Harun Farocki, x, 1989KORCZAK. Andrzej
Wajda, 1990THE LAST STOP. Wanda Jakubowska, 1948LODZ GHETTO. Kathryn Taverna,
Alan Adelson, x, 1989MEMORY OF WATER. Hector Faver, x, 1993.THE NEW LAND. Orna
Ben-Dor Niv, 1994NIGHT AND FOG. Alain Resnais, x, 1955PARTISANS OF VILNA. Josh
Waletzky, x, 1986PASSENGER. Andrzej Munk, Witold Lesiewicz, 1963PHOTOGRAPHER.
Dariusz Jablonski, x, 1998THE PIANIST. Roman Polanski, 2002

THE WANNSEE
CONFERENCE. Heinz Schirk, 1984
Tags: Holocaust/grunes, Roman Polanski

CS Lewis ' The Abolition of Man'

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYUEhVwFz0A Video

Laws of the Tao recounted in appendix









It looks like a brave new world of value conditioners and gurus doing away with traditional values is in the offing . The last men who overcome 'human nature' will produce a predicament in that nature will master what man had as meaning under the aegis of the moral code called the TAO and the very reverse of the intended results of freeing human nature will ensue.In past ages not currently that remote , teachers of youth passed on what was the age old value system called the TAO in Lewis' essay. Teachers and students alike were subject to this norm, the laws of which are explained in the appendix to this essay. Man's meaning in the abstract and in the concrete derived from having the TAO passed down to them by their teachers who handed the TAO on to them and did not part from "the way". (they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike) QUOTE. THIS PATTERN OF THE PASSING DOWN OF THESE TIME HONORED VALUES WILL BE CHANGED.


Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning.
QUOTE
They are the product and not the motive of education. The value conditioners produce conscience and decide which type of conscience they will produce. Human nature has been conquered at this stage wit great irony at that in that the final victory is that of nature over human nature and not the other way around.
Man in the traditional and philosophical sense was defined by the values of the Tao but these conditioners are not bad men, not men at all as defined by the set of values and laws existent from inception of the TAO, always part and parcel of our fabric.They and not the TAO shall henceforth be the determiners of what humanity shall mean . It shall be every changing according to natural law, as that vagary suggests the very vicissitudes of nature.They (the conditioners) create surreptitiously a commonality of appetites that are fictitious in that the conditioners are prone to like certain values which they cannot justify, and not all men would come to accord on these values,nor are they safeguarded by the henceforth fictitious accords they are forced to bear. Have they truly discarded the TAO after all? Note the following quote.

Their duty? But that is only the Tao, which they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If they accept it, then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened. QUOTE

To step outside the TAO is truly to step into the void,a frightful prospect they cannot even conceive of. The subjects they conquer are men no longer but artifacts and we have the Abolition of Man.
These new values embraced are necessarily capricious and whimsical never claiming an objective basis from the outset But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism. The impulse to scratch when I itch or to pull to pieces when I am inquisitive is immune from the solvent which is fatal to my justice, or honour, or care for posterity.
"Corrupt" and "degenerate" are meaningless terms.
Benevolent impulses arising in the minds of the conditioners will be empty of spiritual content will be emptied of rational and spiritual motives arising through the TAO now debunked.They are left to their natural strength as psychological events . Consequently, they would not be of much influence if any at all. Such benevolent impulses rests on chance that our conditioners will rise to the occasion of having such. A presupposition must exist that "Benevolence is good" and the TAO must be entered to attain this value which would occur by chance(nature) if not so re entered.
I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned. Though regarding as an illusion the artificial conscience which they produce in us their subjects, they will yet perceive that it creates in us an illusion of meaning for our lives which compares favourably with the futility of their own: and they will envy us as eunuchs envy men. QUOTE
For without the judgement `Benevolence is good'—that is, without re-entering the Tao—they can have no ground for promoting or stabilizing these impulses rather than any others. By the logic of their position they must just take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature QUOTE
Their extreme rationalism, by `seeing through' all `rational' motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behaviour. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere `nature') is the only course left open. QUOTE



This is a fully planned and conditioned world where seemingly man conquers nature. In reality nature has lured us on to this most irrational of passes.



If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold QUOTE

Asides- These are laws mankind has followed for commensurate prolonging of the race and happiness and the law detailing 'Utter not a word by which anyone could be wounded.' (Hindu. Janet, p. 7) details the more than wounding effect of words over physical blows seemingly transplanted on Indian soil , the bible, and scores of other of the world's spiritual aphorisms and sayings.

Man's victory over nature is only seemingly so. Nature is not trammeled by values and rules humanity through the conditioners and rules the conditioners also:cold At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. QUOTE

Nature's reverses are but apparent. She is luring us on to what we regard as our victory as nature enfolds us in a vise like grip whence there is no escape. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt.Eugenics seem the epitome of the ultimate biological control of the race especially as used by the last men through their "conditioners".

Ferum victorem cepit - from Horace Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et/ Artes intulit agresti Latio.: "Greece, once overcome, overcame her wild conqueror,/ And brought the arts into rustic Latium." The vanquished were actually the victors; Lewis is saying that nature, being conquered, is the true winner. This appeared in the endnotes of the essay and reverses the role of the apprently vanquished as the victor.

The use we make of nature for our own self aggrandizement bespeaks our gross insensitivity to the quality generally. Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of `Nature' in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity . QUOTE The price exacted for our use of nature is reflected in our impiety at the natural objects of nature which we quantify solely and merely. An excellent illustration is the quote now given. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. QUOTE

The reality of the object as quality has been lost as all is conceived of as quantity.

The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany/Traditional values are to be `debunked' and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. QUOTE

The process of the debunking of the tao, reducing all to quantity, can be subtlr and differ in brutality and can be deceiving as well as noted in the above quote. The belief that we can invent `ideologies' at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere υλη, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are `potential officer material'. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance. QUOTE

Even our language is affected by the invention of cosmic and destructive ideologies.

These destructive ideologies are a destructive process, a dehumanization process, and will abolish the traditional concept of man as found int the TAO, and the process is subtle and operates by subeterfuge and always remains unchecked. The process is endemic among democracies and Communism as well as Fascism.

What sins have not been committed on behalf of that abstraction "Man" . We must remain in the TAO to be able to apply our concrete realities to that abstraction and ever branch out to more beautious and dignified applications of that abstraction. Self control is truly what staying within the TAO entails.

I. The Law of General Beneficence
(a) NEGATIVE
'I have not slain men.' (Ancient Egyptian. From the Confession of the Righteous Soul, 'Book of the Dead', v. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics [= ERE], vol. v, p. 478)
'Do not murder.' (Ancient Jewish. Exodus 20:13)
'Terrify not men or God will terrify thee.' (Ancient Egyptian. Precepts of Ptahhetep. H. R. Hall, Ancient History of the Near East, p. i3}n)
'In Nastrond (= Hell) I saw... murderers.' (Old Norse. Volospá 38, 39)
'I have not brought misery upon my fellows. I have not made the beginning of every day laborious in the sight of him who worked for me.' (Ancient Egyptian. Confession of the Righteous Soul. ERE v. 478)
'I have not been grasping.' (Ancient Egyptian. Ibid.) 'Who meditates oppression, his dwelling is overturned.' (Babylonian. Hymn to Samas. ERE v. 445)
'He who is cruel and calumnious has the character of a cat.' (Hindu. Laws of Manu. Janet, Histoire de la Science Politique, vol. i, p. 6)
'Slander not.' (Babylonian. Hymn to Samas. ERE v. 445)
'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.' (Ancient Jewish. Exodus 20:16)
'Utter not a word by which anyone could be wounded.' (Hindu. Janet, p. 7)
'Has he ... driven an honest man from his family? broken up a well cemented clan?' (Babylonian. List of Sins from incantation tablets. ERE v. 446)
'I have not caused hunger. I have not caused weeping.' (Ancient Egyptian. ERE v. 478)
'Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.' (Ancient Chinese. Analects of Confucius, trans. A. Waley, xv. 23; cf. xii. 2)
'Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart.' (Ancient Jewish. Leviticus 19:17)
'He whose heart is in the smallest degree set upon goodness will dislike no one.' (Ancient Chinese. Analects, iv. 4)

The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the
kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him
were prescribed by the Tao—a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject
and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some
pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated
the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them
alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed.
Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in
the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the
product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated
from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered. The
ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given. They
have surrendered—like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to
control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and decide what
kind of conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside, above. For we
are assuming the last stage of Man's struggle with Nature. The final victory has
been won. Human nature has been conquered—and, of course, has conquered, in
whatever sense those words may now bear.

_________________________________________________________

To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask, `Why should you suppose they will be such bad men?' But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what `Humanity' shall henceforth mean. `Good' and `bad', applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived. Nor is their difficulty factitious, "We might suppose that it was possible to say `After all, most of us want more or less the same things—food and drink and sexual intercourse, amusement, art, science, and the longest possible life for individuals and for the species. Let them simply say, This is what we happen to like, and go on to condition men in the way most likely to produce it. Where's the trouble?' But this will not answer. In the first place, it is false that we all really like the same things. But even if we did, what motive is to impel the Conditioners to scorn delights and live laborious days in order that we, and posterity, may have what we like? Their duty? But that is only the Tao, which they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If they accept it, then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened. The preservation of the species? But why should the species be preserved? One of the questions before them is whether this feeling for posterity (they know well how it is produced) shall be continued or not. However far they go back, or down, they can find no ground to stand on. Every motive they try to act on becomes at once petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

___________________________________________________________

Yet the Conditioners will act. When I said just now that all motives fail them, I should have said all motives except one. All motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed them. Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo has been explained away. But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism. The impulse to scratch when I itch or to pull to pieces when I am inquisitive is immune from the solvent which is fatal to my justice, or honour, or care for posterity. When all that says It is good' has been debunked, what says 1 want' remains. It cannot be exploded or `seen through' because it never had any pretentions. The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. I am not here speaking of the corrupting influence of power nor expressing the fear that under it our Conditioners will degenerate. The very words corrupt and degenerate imply a doctrine of value and are therefore meaningless in this context. My point is that those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.

____________________________________________________________

We may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all `rational' or `spiritual' motives, some will be benevolent. I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently. I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned. Though regarding as an illusion the artificial conscience which they produce in us their subjects, they will yet perceive that it creates in us an illusion of meaning for our lives which compares favourably with the futility of their own: and they will envy us as eunuchs envy men. But I do not insist on this, for it is a mere conjecture. What is not conjecture is that our hope even of a `conditioned' happiness rests on what is ordinarily called `chance'—the chance that benevolent impulses may on the whole predominate in our Conditioners. For without the judgement `Benevolence is good'—that is, without re-entering the Tao—they can have no ground for promoting or stabilizing these impulses rather than any others. By the logic of their position they must just take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature. It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will spring. Their extreme rationalism, by `seeing through' all `rational' motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behaviour. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere `nature') is the only course left open.

__________________________________________________________

At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows coldAt the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows coldAt the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows coldAt the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold

___________________________________________________________

My point may be clearer to some if it is put in a different form. Nature is a word of varying meanings, which can best be understood if we consider itsvarious opposites. The Natural is the opposite of the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural. The Artificial does not now concern us. If we take the rest of the list of opposites, however, I think we can get a rough idea of what men have meant by Nature and what it is they oppose to her. Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of `Nature' in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to `body-snatchers' is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

__________________________________________________________

I am not here thinking solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of those who are our public enemies at the moment. The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany/Traditional values are to be `debunked' and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent `ideologies' at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere υλη, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are `potential officer material'. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.

_______________________________________________________

The true significance of what is going on has been concealed by the use of the abstraction Man. Not that the word Man is necessarily a pure abstraction. In the Tao itself, as long as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application. While we speak from within the Tao we can speak of Man having power over himself in a sense truly analogous to an individual's self-control. But the moment we step outside and regard the Tao as a mere subjective product, this possibility has disappeared. What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F., and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.

If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe's Faustus, the similarity is striking. You will read in some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants from the devils, but gold and guns and girls. `All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at his command' and `a sound magician is a mighty god'.3 In the same spirit Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit.4 The true object is to extend Man's power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work;5 but his goal is that of the magician. In Paracelsus the characters of magician and scientist are combined. No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power; in every mixed movement the efficacy comes from the good elements not from the bad. But the presence of the bad elements is not irrelevant to the direction the efficacy takes. It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it, was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have-been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required.

Margaret Atwood the Writer The Year of the Flood

http://margaretatwood.ca/books_by.php

http://margaretatwood.ca/links.php

http://mousemedicine.blogspot.com/2009/11/ready-for-storm.html

As an aside, I would greatly like to hear the sound books on Atwood's short works and novels and have access to her articles as listed below:

• Audio editions of Margaret Atwood’s novels are available, read by actresses and actors. Ms. Atwood's reviews and critical articles have appeared in Canadian Literature, Maclean's, Saturday Night, This Magazine, New York Times Book Review, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, The Nation, Books In Canada, The Washington Post, The Harvard Educational Review, and many others.
• Also I noted these works for my shelf" True Stories; Oxford, 1981. The Door; McClelland & Stewart, 2007; Houghton Mifflin 2007; Virago 2007. Short Fiction: Wilderness Tips; McClelland & Stewart, 1991; Doubleday, 1991; Bloomsbury, 1991. » Good Bones; Coach House Press, 1992; Bloomsbury, 1992; Doubleday, 1994. Moral Disorder; McClelland & Stewart, 2006; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2006; Bloomsbury, 2006
• Her children's books and nonfiction make of her an extremely versatile writer covering many different topics and facets of our world including her proactive environmentalism.

Also note Life Before Man; McClelland & Stewart, 1979; Simon & Schuster, Cape, 1980.

today is the 70th birthday of margaret
atwood, one of my absolute favorite writers. this weekend I finished
atwood's newest novel the year of the
flood. no one weaves a dystopia like atwood! the book overlaps with atwood's
2003 novel oryx and crake. I hear there may be another book in this series, gosh
I hope it won't be a six year wait - I can't wait to find out what happens to
the those who survived the waterless flood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Major Press Editions:Poetry:
»
The Circle Game;
Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1964; Contact Press, 1966; Anansi, 1967.
»
The
Animals in That Country; Oxford University Press, 1969; Atlantic Little-Brown,
1968.
»
The Journals of Susanna Moodie; Oxford, 1970 illus. by Margaret
Atwood; illus. by Charlie Pachter, Macfarlane, Walter & Ross,
1997.
»
Procedures for Underground; Oxford, 1970; Atlantic Little-Brown,
1970.
»
Power Politics; Anansi, 1971; Harper & Row,
1973.
»
You Are Happy; Oxford, 1974; Harper & Row,
1975.
»
Selected Poems; Oxford, 1976; Simon & Schuster,
1978.
»
Selected Poems, 1965-1975; Houghton Mifflin, Oxford,
1976.
»
Two-Headed Poems; Oxford, 1978.
»
True Stories; Oxford,
1981.
»
Interlunar; Oxford, 1984.
»
Selected Poems II: Poems
Selected and New, 1976-1986; Oxford, 1986; Houghton Mifflin,
1987.
»
Selected Poems 1966-1984; Oxford University Press,
1990.
»
Margaret Atwood Poems 1976-1986; Virago Press Limited,
1991.
»
Morning in the Burned House; McClelland & Stewart, 1995;
Houghton Mifflin, 1995, Virago Press, 1995.
»
Eating Fire: Selected Poetry
1965-1995; Virago, 1998.
»
The Door; McClelland & Stewart, 2007;
Houghton Mifflin 2007; Virago 2007.
Short Fiction:
»
Dancing Girls;
McClelland & Stewart, S&S, 1977; Cape, 1979.
»
Murder in the Dark;
Coach House Press, 1983.
»
Bluebeard's Egg; McClelland & Stewart,
1983; Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
»
Wilderness Tips; McClelland & Stewart,
1991; Doubleday, 1991; Bloomsbury, 1991.
»
Good Bones; Coach House Press,
1992; Bloomsbury, 1992; Doubleday, 1994.
»
The Tent; McClelland &
Stewart, 2006; Bloomsbury, 2006; Doubleday, 2006.
»
Moral Disorder;
McClelland & Stewart, 2006; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2006; Bloomsbury,
2006.
Novels:
»
The Edible Woman; McClelland & Stewart, 1969; Andre
Deutsch, 1969; Atlantic Little-Brown, 1970.
»
Surfacing; McClelland &
Stewart, 1972; Andre Deutsch, 1973; Simon & Schuster, 1973.
»
Lady
Oracle; McClelland & Stewart, Simon & Schuster, Deutsch,
1976.
»
Life Before Man; McClelland & Stewart, 1979; Simon &
Schuster, Cape, 1980.
»
Bodily Harm; McClelland & Stewart, 1981; Simon
& Schuster, Cape, 1981.
»
The Handmaid's Tale; McClelland &
Stewart, Houghton Mifflin, 1985; Cape, 1985.
»
Cat's Eye; McClelland &
Stewart, 1988; Doubleday, 1989; Bloomsbury, 1989.
»
The Robber Bride;
McClelland & Stewart, 1993; Bloomsbury, 1993; Doubleday, 1993.
»
Alias
Grace; McClelland & Stewart, 1996; Bloomsbury, 1996; Doubleday,
1996.
»
The Blind Assassin; McClelland & Stewart, 2000; Bloomsbury,
2000; Doubleday, 2000.
»
Oryx and Crake; McClelland & Stewart, 2003,
Bloomsbury 2003, Doubleday, 2003.
»
The Penelopiad; Alfred A. Knopf
Canada, 2005; Canongate, 2005.
»
The Year of the Flood; McClelland &
Stewart, 2009; Bloomsbury, 2009; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.
Children's
Books:
»
Up In The Tree; McClelland & Stewart, 1978.
»
(with
Joyce Barkhouse) Anna's Pet; James Lorimer & Co., 1980.
»
For The
Birds; Douglas & McIntyre, 1990.
»
Princess Prunella and the Purple
Peanut; Key Porter, 1995; Workman Publishing, 1995.
»
Rude Ramsay and the
Roaring Radishes; Key Porter, 2003; Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003.
»
Bashful
Bob and Doleful Dorinda; Key Porter, 2004; Bloomsbury Publishing,
2004.
»
Up in The Tree; Groundwood Books (facsimile reprint),
2006.
Non-Fiction:
»
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature;
Anansi, 1972.
»
Days of the Rebels 1815-1840; Toronto, Natural Science of
Canada, 1977.
»
Second Words: Selected Critical Prose; Anansi,
1982.
»
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature;
Oxford University Press, 1995.
»
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on
Writing; Cambridge University Press, 2002.
»
Moving Targets: Writing with
Intent 1982-2004; House of Anansi Press, 2004.
»
Curious Pursuits:
Occasional Writing; Virago, 2005.
»
Moral Disorder; McClelland & Stewart, 2006; Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2006; Bloomsbury, 2006Payback: Debt and
the Shadow Side of Wealth; Anansi Press, 2008.
Edited:
»
(with Shannon
Ravenel) The Best American Short Stories; Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
»
The
Canlit Foodbook; Totem Books (Collins Publishers), 1987.
»
The New Oxford
Book of Canadian Verse in English; Oxford University Press, 1982.
»
(with
Robert Weaver) The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English; Oxford
University Press, 1986.
»
(with Robert Weaver) The New Oxford Book of
Canadian Short Stories in English; Oxford University Press,
1995.
Theatre:
»
The Penelopiad – The Play; Produced by NAC / RSC.
Script by Faber & Faber, 2007.
Art & Small Press
Editions:Poetry:
»
Double Persephone; Hawkshead Press, 1961;
pamphlet.
»
Kaleidoscopes Baroque: a poem; Cranbrook Academy of Art,
1965.
»
Talismans For Children; Cranbrook Academy of Art,
1965.
»
Speeches For Doctor Frankenstein; Cranbrook Academy of Art,
1966.
»
Marsh, Hawk; Dreadnaught, 1977.
»
Notes Towards a Poem That
Can Never Be Written; Salamander Press, 1981.
»
Snake Poems; Salamander
Press, 1983.
Fiction:
»
Encounters with the Element Man; Concord, New
Hampshire, Ewert, 1982.
»
Unearthing Suite; Grand Union Press,
1983.
»
Bottle; Hay Festival Press, 2004.
Television
Scripts:
»
"The Servant Girl," CBC, 1974.
»
"Snowbird,"
1981.
»
(with Peter Pearson) "Heaven On Earth," CBC, 1986.
Radio
Scripts:
»
"The Trumpets of Summer," CBC Radio,
1964.
Recordings:
»
"The Poetry and Voice of Margaret Atwood," Caedmon,
1977.
»
"Margaret Atwood Reads From The Handmaid's Tale," Caedmon,
1985.
»
“Margaret Atwood Reads Unearthing Suite,” American Audio Prose
Library, 1985.
»
“Margaret Atwood Reads from The Door.” Houghton Mifflin,
2007.
• Audio editions of Margaret Atwood’s novels are available, read by
actresses and actors. Ms. Atwood's reviews and critical articles have
appeared in Canadian Literature, Maclean's, Saturday Night, This Magazine, New
York Times Book Review, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star,
The Nation, Books In Canada, The Washington Post, The Harvard Educational
Review, and many others.Ms. Atwood's work has been translated into many
languages including French, German, Italian, Urdu, Estonian, Roumanian,
Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Turkish, Russian, Finnish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian,
Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, Japanese, Icelandic, Spanish, Hebrew, and
others. All of the fiction is available in paperback in Canada, the U.S., and
the U.K.Surfacing was produced as a film by a Canadian production company in
1981. The Handmaid’s Tale, was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter, directed
by Volker Schlorndorf and released in 1990, starring Natasha Richardson and
Robert Duvall. The Robber Bride was adapted as a TV movie featuring Mary Louise
Parker in 2007

.

Roald Dahl's Writings 1st Post

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_dahl

His first published work launched his writing career by accident and his wartime adventures are depicted inaccurately and sensationally.His children's books were some of the best beloved of the twentieth century and the gremlins were creatures of RAF folklore. He also wrote adult macabre stories with dark humor and surprise endings, more than 60 of them. "The Smoker" was filmed twice in 60 and 85 on Alfred Hitchcok Presents, and adapted in the 95 film The Four Rooms.
Tales of the Unexpected was adapted to a successful TV series of the same name, Quote Note his references to My Uncle Oswald.

Roald Dahl's story "The Devious Bachelor" was illustrated by Frederick Siebel
when it was published in Collier's (September
1953).
Dahl's first published work, inspired by a meeting with C. S.
Forester, was "Shot Down Over Libya." Today the story is published as "A
Piece of Cake". The story, about his wartime adventures, was bought by The
Saturday Evening Post for $900, and propelled him into a career as a writer.[citation
needed] Its title was inspired by a highly inaccurate and sensationalised
article about the crash that blinded him, which claimed he had been shot down
instead of simply having to land due to low fuel.
His first children's book
was The
Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore.
The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that
was never made, and published in 1943. Dahl went on to create some of the
best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the
Giant Peach.
He also had a successful parallel career as the writer of
macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humour and a surprise
ending. Many were originally written for American magazines such as Collier's, Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Playboy and The
New Yorker, then subsequently collected by Dahl into anthologies, gaining
worldwide acclaim. Dahl wrote more than 60 short stories and they have appeared
in numerous collections, some only being published in book form after his death
(See List of
Roald Dahl short stories). His stories also brought him three Edgar
Awards: in 1954, for the collection Someone Like You; in 1959, for the story
"The
Landlady"; and in 1980, for the episode of Tales of
the Unexpected based on "Skin".
One of his
more famous adult stories, "The Smoker" (also known as "Man From the South"),
was filmed twice as both 1960 and 1985 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock
Presents, and also adapted into Quentin Tarantino's
segment of the 1995 film Four Rooms. This bizarre,
oft-anthologised suspense classic[citation
needed] concerns a man residing in Jamaica who wagers with visitors in an
attempt to claim the fingers from their hands; the 1960 Hitchcock version stars Steve McQueen and Peter
Lorre.
His short story collection Tales of the Unexpected was adapted to
a successful TV
series of the same name, beginning with "Man From the South".
When the stock of Dahl's own original stories was exhausted, the series
continued by adapting stories by authors that were written in Dahl's style,
including the American writers John Collier and Stanley Ellin.
He
acquired a traditional Romanichal Gypsy wagon in the
1960s and the family used it as a playhouse for his children. He later used the
vardo as a writing room, where he wrote the book Danny, the
Champion of the World.[23]
A number
of his short stories are supposed to be extracts from the diary of his
(fictional) Uncle Oswald, a rich gentleman whose sexual exploits form the
subject of these stories. In his novel "My Uncle Oswald" the uncle engages a
temptress to seduce 20th Century geniuses and royalty with a love potion
secretly added to chocolate truffles made by Dahl's favourite chocolate shop, Prestat of
Piccadilly.
Memories with Food at Gipsy House, written with his wife Felicity
and published posthumously in 1991, was a mixture of recipes, family
reminiscences and Dahl's musings on favourite subjects such as chocolate,
onions, and claret.
Dahl ranks amongst the world's
bestselling fiction authors, with sales estimated at 100 million.[24][25]

Children's stories
The Gremlins (1943)
James and the Giant Peach (1961) — Film: James and the Giant Peach (live-action/animated) (1996)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) — Films: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
The Magic Finger (1 June 1966)
Fantastic Mr Fox (9 December 1970) — Film: Fantastic Mr. Fox (animated) (2009)
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (9 January 1972) A sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Danny, the Champion of the World (30 October 1975) — Film: Danny the Champion of the World (TV movie) (1989)
The Enormous Crocodile (24 August 1978)
The Twits (9 October 1980)
George's Marvellous Medicine (21 May 1981)
The BFG (14 October 1982) — Film: The BFG (animated) (1989)
The Witches (27 October 1983) — Film: The Witches (1990)
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (26 September 1985)
Matilda (21 April 1988) — Film: Matilda (1996)
Esio Trot (19 April 1990)
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (9 May 1991)
The Minpins (8 August 1991)

Schindler's List

http://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/schindlers-list-no-23/





http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/kapo_daney.html



THE COLDNESS IS PART OF THE FABRIC OF THE HORROR

Good point about the impersonal camera achieving maximum and "horrific effect",very apparent in this film. Note other points underscored below:

1. Subliminal parallels to other films.









2. Note spielberg's borrowings from his favorite directors, ie the two David Lean films.









3. Fiennes as Amon Goeth is a masterful performance of evil with a human face ,His "I pardon you" letting go of the boy and then shooting the boy as he leaves and goes into the prison yard is a macabre scene .The shooting is not openly shown and is shown by suggestion and the reaction in the face "of the passing by Kingsley."









4. There is a superb cacophony of editing design and photography recalling the film of wartime documentaries all weaving a horrifying tapestry of man's inhumanity and the remnant of humanity in man that always remains and resonates.








5. Movies watching us. Curious. They embed images in our brain as a secondary projector We are truly early hostages of our future biographies as I decipher the full import of that phrase.








6. The innocence of "the gaze" is put in a WAY making the American experience of film to be innocent as defined in this passage. After WWII that innocence can no longer be claimed as successive disclosures of our role in the WAR reduced our idyllic scenes to the naked calumny of our revealed acts.








7. It is the other pornography – the “artistic” pornography of Kapo, of The Night Porter and other retro '70s movies – that has always revolted me. QUOTE

It has been said by some people that Schindler himself is associated with
Spielberg and that this film is his dream project, one which only a director of
his standing would be able to undertake (yet even so he still tried to persuade
Roman Polanski to do it, though he would wait until The Pianist to tackle the
Holocaust). Spielberg dares to have his camera as impersonal towards each
individual atrocity as it would have been to the robotic Nazis committing them,
knowing that this understatement achieves the maximum impact. It may have
a few Spielberg touches of sentimentality – the colour transformation at the end
to show the real life Schindler Jews is unnecessary and the colour of the flames
and the little girl in the red coat is rather gimmicky – but in general he keeps
such sentiment away. Here at last Spielberg the filmmaker was
comfortable in an adult world, with all the censorables that had been so lacking
in his more financially lucrative assignments. That he made his massive
hit Jurassic Park in the same year is evident in the fact that certain scenes do
have subliminal parallels (one recalls the young boy escaping the Nazis in the
Plaszow camp, reminiscent in style to the two kids escaping the raptors in
Jurassic). Mind you, Spielberg doesn’t only borrow from himself, but from
his favourite directors. In the very first shot he cuts from the
extinguished candle smoke to that of a train in Krakow station, which pays
homage to two David Lean films (the cut from the matchstick to the sunrise in
Lawrence of Arabia and that from the glass slide to the tram in Doctor
Zhivago). Other shots recall Kubrick, Kurosawa and even Eisenstein.
This is a cinematic royal family of larceny and it works splendidly.

Spielberg has never made a film as complex as Schindler’s before or since, his enthusiasm and commitment to the project also rubbing off on his actors and crew. Liam Neeson can often seem too worthy an actor, but his Oskar Schindler is a masterful performance. There is a wonderfully revealing yet also misleading shot of him peering through his cigarette smoke at a group of Nazis out for a good time, seemingly the unacceptable face of capitalism. It’s Neeson’s greatest performance and Kingsley is equally memorable as the stalwart Stern, the brains behind the enterprise, who allows Schindler to do what he’s good at, “not the work, not the work. The presentation.” Yet both are outshone by Fiennes, whose Goeth is one of modern cinema’s great monsters, all the more so because he’s human, for all his faults. His performance is summed up in one brilliant scene where he lets a boy go with an “I pardon you”, subliminally pardons himself in the mirror, then goes out and shoots the boy, which Spielberg ingeniously doesn’t show, only through the reaction in the face of the passing by Kingsley. Throw in the superb editing, design, photography (recalling the wartime documentaries of the period) and music and Spielberg weaves a horrifying tapestry and document about man’s inhumanity to man and, equally importantly, his humanity in the face of such inhumanity. When watching it again to review it here, at the point where the naked women receive water in the gas chambers, a relative tells me “can you imagine the relief?” I said “no, and nor can you.” All we can hope for is that, for all time, nor will anyone else ever have to.

What does a child know? And especially that child – Serge D. – who wanted to know everything except what was about him? What absence from the world will later make being present in front of the images of the world necessary? I know of few expressions more beautiful than the one coined by Jean-Louis Schefer when, in L'homme ordinaire du cinéma, he speaks about the “films that have watched our childhood”. Because it is one thing to learn to watch movies as a “professional” – only to verify that movies concern us less and less – but it is another to live with those movies that watched us grow and that have seen us, early hostages of our future biographies, already entangled in the snare of our history. Psycho, La Dolce vita, The Indian Tomb, Rio Bravo, Pickpocket, Anatomy of a Murder, The Sacrilegious Hero or precisely Nuit et brouillard are not for me movies like any other. To the brutal question “Is this watching you?” they all answer yes.
The dead bodies of Nuit et brouillard and two years later those in the first frames of Hiroshima mon amour are among those “things” that have watched me more than I have seen them. Eisenstein attempted to make such images but Hitchcock succeeded. Just as an example: how can I ever forget the first encounter with Psycho? We snuck into the Paramount Opera theatre without paying and the movie was very ordinarily terrorising us. But then, towards the end, there is a scene on which my perception slides, slapdash editing from which emerge only grotesque props: a cubist dressing gown, a falling wig, a brandished knife. And from the fear shared with the rest of the audience follows the calm of a resigned solitude: the brain functions as a secondary projector that would keep the image going, leaving the film and the world continuing without it. I cannot imagine a love for cinema that does not rest firmly on this stolen present: “to continue without me”.

What I understand today is that the beauty of Stevens' movie is due less to the justness of the distance than to the innocence of the gaze. Justness is the burden of the one who comes “after”; innocence is the terrible grace granted to the first arrived, to the first one who simply makes the gestures of cinema. It wasn't until the mid '70s that I recognised in Pasolini's Salò or even in Syberberg's Hitler the other meaning of the word “innocent”: not so much the non-guilty one but the one who filming evil doesn't think evil. In 1959, young boy stiffened by his discovery, I was already caught in the sharing of the collective guilt. But in 1945, it was perhaps enough to be American and to witness, like George Stevens or Corporal Samuel Fuller at Falkenau, the opening of the real gates of the night while holding a camera. You had to be American – i.e. to believe in the fundamental innocence of the show – to make the German population walk by the open tombs, to show them what they were living next to, so well and so badly. It took ten years before Resnais began editing and 15 years before Pontecorvo made one move too many that infuriated us, Rivette and I. Necrophilia was therefore the price of this “delay” and the erotic body double of the “just” gaze – the gaze of guilty Europe, Resnais' gaze and consequently mine.

It is the other pornography – the “artistic” pornography of Kapo, of The Night Porter and other retro '70s movies – that has always revolted me. To the consensual attempts to create post-aesthetics, I would prefer the stubborn return of the non-images of Nuit et brouillard or even the flowing desire in Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS that I would not see. These films at least had the honesty to acknowledge an impossibility to tell a story, a stopping point in the course of history, when storytelling is stilled or runs in neutral. So we should not speak about amnesia or repression but rather about foreclosure. I would later learn the Lacanian definition of foreclosure: hallucinatory return into the real of something upon which it had not been possible to produce a “judgement of reality”. To say it differently: since moviemakers had not filmed the policies of the Vichy government at the time, their duty 50 years later was not to imaginarily redeem themselves with movies like Au revoir les enfants but to draw today's portrait of this good people of France who from 1940 to 1942 (and that includes the Vel' d'Hiv raid) did not move. Cinema being the art of present, remorse is of no interest.