Once my Mother

Once my Mother is a kind of two-pronged documentary in which the Australian director, Sophia Turkiewicz, explores the horror journey that her mother, an orphan from a young age, had to endure, as well as her own journey of learning to forgive her mother after she’d ‘abandoned’ her in an orphanage in Australia. 

Helen, the mother, born in Poland in the years before the Second World War, lost both her parents early on. She went to live for a few years with an uncle in Poland, but he suddenly threw her out on the streets when she was 11 or 12. In the first of several intrepid undertakings she walked to the nearest big town, and survived on the streets for four years (!), without ever being forced into prostitution.

The Russians took over half of Poland after Hitler divided the country up between Germany and Russia - without asking the Poles. Thousands of Poles were sent to Siberia by train where they were forced to work in the freezing weather. Their general, Anders, refused to train them for the Russian army. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Anders (he must have been a brave man to stand up to Stalin): Continued friction with the Soviets over political issues as well as shortages of weapons, food and clothing, led to the eventual exodus of Anders' men – known as the Anders Army – together with a sizeable contingent of Polish civilians via the Persian Corridor into Iran, Iraq and Palestine. Here, Anders formed and led the 2nd Polish Corps, fighting alongside the Western Allies, while agitating for the release of Polish nationals still in the Soviet Union. 

In the movie Sophia makes the point that the Polish men wouldn't leave without the women and children, so they all went. 

Helen was part of this huge exodus; it required them to walk 2000 miles to the south of Russia, and later they went on another extraordinary walk 2000 miles east. Finally after these two awful treks she finished up in Africa, in a British refugee camp. She met an Italian prisoner-of-war and he fathered a child with her. However, he was sent back to Italy after the war. Being a solo mother she was castigated yet eventually, when the refugees were sent on, she got to Australia (Perth, initially) and finally to Adelaide. She was forced to leave her daughter in the orphanage for two years so she could get work; again, as a solo mother she was sidelined. 

She managed to find a Polish man amongst the circle of refugees, a man who was willing to marry her, even though he knew she didn’t particularly love him or find him attractive. Thankfully he was a good guy, and Sophia was brought home into the family. The marriage prospered and other children came along. 

It took Sophia a long time to get over her sense of abandonment, but finally in her fifties (!) she managed to see that her mother’s abandonment had been far more severe than her own. How the mother got through all she did when hundreds were dying around her is hard to grasp. 

There's a great deal of archival material, some of it seeminglessly woven in with acted shots, clips from an earlier film Sophia made about her mother, and more recent material filmed when Helen was living in an old people's home. It's an extraordinarily moving film. 

A surfeit of news

I just came across a line in a quote I'd kept which reads: institutions of fear that promise safety by the destruction of others.

This is a wonderful line that epitomizes what's happening in much of the Western world at the moment: we are being led increasingly to believe that we're in great danger from some (unknown) source and therefore the 'institutions of fear' need to look out for us, and in so doing, will destroy others. Hasn't this been exactly what's happened since 9/11?  But it goes back much further than that: the McCarthy era was one particular and horrendous example of it; Hitler persuaded an entire country - or so it seemed - that one racial group needed to be destroyed in order that Germany would be safe. And there are innumerable examples of it throughout history. The worst facet of the contemporary version is that the media picks up on this fear and safety issue very quickly, and very quickly makes an enormous big deal out of the words of men (and some women) who ought to have been ignored for their foolishness. 

Some people would claim that it's our own fault that the media is the way it is. The interesting thing is, however, that if you go without a newspaper, or without television or radio, even for a few days, you quickly realise how unimportant a great deal of the so-called news is.  The news world is a fantasy, for the most part. For thousands of years human beings have got on without the wealth of news that we're subject to, and survived. Only really important things got through (or sometimes didn't), and these things were important to the particular people involved rather than their neighbours in the next city or country. News today involves us even when we have no need to be involved, and makes us feel guilty when we have no need to be guilty.  So in many ways, the media is an institution of fear, like those in the first paragraph.

There are no safety equipment suppliers to overcome the problems of this kind of perpetual interruption of news from the outside as we receive it in this century. Some people, a very few, will not only ignore the news but will hide themselves away from society, as though this somehow helped. It helps them, perhaps; it doesn't get rid of the main issue, which is a superabundance of so-called news. How in the world can it be that we need 24 hour news channels?  Who can absorb so much news?  Who would want to? 

Certainly there are advantages in having access to news as you need it, but it's the 'as you need it' factor that's important.  And we don't actually need it as much as we think. We've just survived a week in Auckland with very little news: I gave the newspaper a cursory glance some days and spent more time on the CodeCracker or the Cryptic Crossword, or the Sudoku than I did on the news. We didn't watch the TV news the entire time, nor did we hear the news on the radio.  Presumably it went on its blathering way, day in and out, and yet we survived with no problem whatsoever. 

I don't want to go to the extreme of never hearing any news at all. I think that's foolish. But neither do I feel we need anything like the amount of news we get, and we certainly don't need it played up to the hilt as it's so often done. News needs to be kept in its place, or it becomes a fearsome monster that eats your life away.

A movie and a book

Having heard good reports about A Song for Marion (also known as Unfinished Song) I was surprised at how disappointed I was.  It's mostly about Terence Stamp, a grumpy old man who seems to have no good reason to be so grumpy.  The script never actually gives him a reason, so Stamp is forced to  be grumpy just because he is. Vanessa Redgrave plays his wife who loves him dearly (he seems to love her greatly too); she dies fairly early on from a cancer that's returned after remission. Gemma Arterton plays the young schoolteacher who takes a community choir that Redgrave enjoys going to, and Christopher Ecclestone plays Stamp's son; at one point he asks the obvious questions as to why his father is so grumpy, but since Stamp isn't given any reason in the script he doesn't get a response (!)

The movie swings between delineating the realities of old age, and patronising old people: why is it filmmakers think old people want to do heavy metal songs or songs where sex appears in every line?  The two best songs in the movie (one sung by Redgrave and one by Stamp) are both much more worthy of inclusion than the rubbish ones the choir is supposedly learning.  Stamp and Ecclestone bring reality to their characters (it's a pity the mending of their relationship takes place off-screen) and Redgrave is good in the short amount of screen time she gets. The rest of the cast (including Arterton) seem to have forgotten that when your face is blown up on a cinema screen there's no need to gawk and gawp and overdo every reaction.  I lost count of the number of times people reacted in an actorish way (rather like people in bit parts in the worst kind of amateur theatre); presumably the director thought this was good.  Or else the movie was made for television primarily, where such reactions aren't so overblown.

I'd been told it was a film needing a box of tissues.  Nope, it isn't.  In contrast, I finished Chaim Potok's massive novel, In the Beginning, last night.  The end of this book definitely requires a couple of tissues (well, a handkerchief in my case, since I still use those now-seemingly-despised objects).  Potok seems to take a long time to get to the end; some judicious cutting would have helped, I think, but he weaves and connects themes and images constantly throughout the story, and perhaps without the space to do so the book wouldn't have been so effective. 

It's a pretty gloomy piece: the Jewish narrator, Daniel, is injured in a fall as a baby and damages something in his nasal area, meaning that he is prone to illnesses throughout his childhood.  The operation to cure this only happens in the last fifty pages of the 450 page novel.  His father was once a soldier fighting against the Polish Cossacks, back in his home country of Poland, and he has formed a group to bring his Jewish friends and their families to America, which is supposedly a land where Jews are treated better.  He has been greatly successful in this, and works as a real estate agent in the US.  There's a great sense of Jewish community and fellowship throughout the book, as well as the huge strength of family.  However, Daniel's grandparents on his mother's side are still in Poland, along with a number of other relations.  They dither and shilly-shally about coming to the US until it is too late.  Hitler comes to power, and the Nazi concentration camps come into existence.

We discover that Daniel's mother had been married before, to her current husband's brother. Confusingly he was also called Daniel, and Potok plays with this confusion a number of times in the book.  Daniel was killed by the Cossacks, and in proper Jewish tradition, Max takes his brother's wife as his own.  It wasn't that he had to; he could have put the tradition aside.  But there is obviously great love between Daniel's parents; it's never considered to be a marriage of convenience. The older Daniel was set to be a great scholar, and the younger Daniel inherits his uncle's brains. This turns out not to be such a good thing; he is bullied often in school, and despised for knowing more than those who have to work hard to study. And as he comes into manhood, he makes a decision to study outside the world of Judaism, in order to understand the Torah in a much deeper sense. We don't know whether he truly believes that the Torah is God's word (his younger brother tells him, eventually, that he doesn't, but he keeps up the traditions all the same); rather he is concerned for the argument, the jot and tittle of debate, the disagreements between ancient Jewish scholars, the reading between the lines, the working out why the Torah appears to contradict itself and much more. We read about a good deal of this during the book. Daniel soaks up all this kind of information as he grows, reading deep into the night, and causing those around him bewilderment.

The book almost seems like a biography, though one told in fictional terms. There is no plot as such, and yet in the last pages of the book, what we have learned over many pages about Daniel and his extended family causes us to be deeply affected as we read the last few events. The book is full of vivid characters, of wisdom and a deep understanding of people, particularly Jewish people. The book is soaked in the traditions and teaching of the Jewish people, and in their longstanding complaint against God and the world as to why they are treated so badly. There are no answers to this question - different characters offer different views on it, on why it should be so, and what can be done about it.  None of these things actually alter the suffering of this people.

Reading this book is like going on a long journey: there are varied discoveries, there are people you meet and get to know for a time who then vanish completely, there is a sense of humanity and warmth, and of travelling immense distances from one event to another.  Though there were times, as I've noted above, when it seemed a drawn-out journey, at the end it proved to have been worth the effort. 

Free movies

Thanks to Vodafone, we now have so much upload/download data available to use each month that we'd barely be able to use it in two months, let alone one.  We've gone from having only 5 gb a month (which we were running over regularly) with Orcon, to 20 gb with Vodafone, which we also began to run over slightly (!), to having 80 gb, which is just far too much.  We'd have to be online watching movies all day long to use it.

Anyway, I do watch the occasional movie online, if it's free.  There's a great site called Open Culture which lists hundreds of free feature-length movies, and shorts, as well as all sorts of other educational programmes.  Some of the older movies aren't much to write home about, to be honest, but there are several of Hitchcock's older movies available, which I've caught up on, such as Jamaica Inn (one of his worst) and Juno and the Paycock.

I discovered the other night that there was a TV feature-length film called Breaking the Code available.  It's about Alan Turing, the man who basically invented the computer, although he was also well-known as a brilliant mathematician, and code-breaker.  (He worked on breaking Hitler's Enigma Code, at Bletchley Park.)

Turing was also homosexual, and his admission of this (which seems rather ridiculously done in the film) brought him not only to court but to a 'punishment' of having to take oestrogen to reduce his male desires.   It didn't work, of course, and he died unexpectedly a few years later: it was officially listed as suicide for many years, but recent investigation considers it may be more likely that he accidentally killed himself by eating an apple that had cyanide on it.  He was an experimenter in all sorts of scientific fields.

Turing is played by Derek Jacobi in the film.  Jacobi is one of the best of British actors, and he does very well with his role as Turing.   However there is a major problem.  Turing is at most only in his thirties when the film takes place but at the time of filming, Jacobi was 58.  You're too often aware of his real age, even though he doesn't always look quite so old.  In some scenes it's irrelevant, but in the scenes with the young man with whom he has a brief affair, and the young woman who's fallen in love with him, his age is a barrier to real belief in the story.  (Incidentally, Prunella Scales plays his mother in the film: she was born in 1932.  Jacobi in 1938.)

Nevertheless, this is an interesting film, and has an excellent cast.  The long explanation of some mathematical problem that takes place in the middle of the film will probably leave many viewers gasping for breath, but in general things are straightforward - mathematically.  The film leans a little heavily on the homosexual aspects, I think: Turing was a good deal more than a homosexual who happened to be a brilliant mathematician.

Wagner & Fry

Watched a documentary called Wagner & Me by Stephen Fry yesterday in which he expounds his enthusiasm for Wagner's music.  Fry has loved Wagner since he was a child, and he was like a child in the way he reacted to coming for the first time to Bayreuth, and the theatre Wagner had built for his music-dramas.  His enthusiasm was certainly one of the high points of this otherwise rather sluggishly-put-together doco, in which the music is often heard but there is only a little sign of it being performed on stage.   (We see some rehearsals, but no actual performances, I don't think.)

Fry also examined his Jewish background in relation to the way Hitler had 'taken over' Wagner, and smeared the huge colourful tapestry that Wagner created.  He sits on the steps where the Nuremberg rallies took place and feels uncomfortable about being there.  He can't bring himself to stand up on the platform where Hitler stood, even though it's a well-known tourist spot.  Towards the end of the doco he meets up with a women who survived Auschwitz - she was a young cellist and played in the orchestra that was produced from the prisoners.  Fry discusses his quandary with loving Wagner's music when Hitler had so besmirched it and left his historical stain on it.  The woman, in so many words, tells him to get over it.  At the end of the day, Wagner's genius is far more important than Hitler's attempt to use Wagner for his own ends.  (Though Fry also points out that Wagner wrote a particularly nasty anti-Semitic article at one point in his life, possibly because two Jewish composers, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were much more popular than him at that point.)

There's one particularly delightful moment in the film.  A pianist whose name I didn't catch is playing and discussing the Tristan und Isolde 'chord' that only gets resolved at the very end of the opera.  (It's interrupted at one other point when resolution seems imminent.)  He's playing on Wagner's own piano, a Steinway that was presented to Wagner by that company.  It's a massive grand and still holding up well after more than a century of use.  Fry, who claims no great skills as a musician at an earlier point in the film, waits with enormous anticipation to play the very last note of the opera, when all has been brought to fruition.  And hits the wrong note!  His embarrassment and hilarity makes it worth watching the film.

The other interesting thing was seeing the inside of the Bayreuth theatre, which is an odd building.  It's design - inside and out - is fairly ugly, to be honest, and from the film it looks as though the stage is narrower than the audience area.  Yet every seat has a clear view of the stage, according to Fry.  The stage seems as deep as it's wide, which is an odd way to design a stage.  However, it obviously works, since it's been showing successful productions since it was first built.  We saw the stage machinery as well, both under the stage and high above it - very high, in fact.  And then there's the intriguing way in which the orchestra isn't in a pit at the front of the stage, but virtually underneath it.  Only the conductor is visible to the singers.  There are a few comments on it here in Wikipedia.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationships with Wagner's music myself.  Personally I think the music-dramas (he wouldn't call them operas) are excessively lengthy and exhausting for audiences.  They're self-indulgent in terms of how much Wagner thinks needs to be included.  And the best tunes, by far, are given to the orchestra.  In fact, it's the orchestral music that grabs me far more than the singing, which, while it might be dramatic in form, is often tuneless to the point of tedium.  The orchestral interludes in the operas make me wonder if perhaps Wagner mightn't have been a much better composer of symphonies, if he'd gone in that direction.  Though if he'd considered that those needed to be as long, comparatively, as his operas, I might struggle!

Happy New Year, and a thought

As always it's going to take a while to get used to putting 2010 or '10 on the dates. As usual we'll come to it.

Just reading Vincent Donovan's Christianity Rediscovered, one of the great books for re-thinking how we do 'mission' in the world. (I mean mission as Christians to people who don't know about Christ, of course, though I note how strongly this word has been adopted by the business world - here, for example.)

Donovan makes a very strong point (particularly around pages 37-9) that God is the 'High' God - the one above all petty, personal, local, national gods. There's nothing new in what he's saying, but we still find it very hard to comes to terms with. Each of us has our own view of what God should be like, and we don't think at least some of those other people ought to be allowed to share him. Nations claim him as their God - the US is a prime example at the moment (and even Hitler managed to invoke him as the German 'God').

Different Christian denominations claim that He's their God - they don't say it outright, but they're often very suspicious (underneath) of the God those other denominations adhere to. This has changed enormously in my lifetime - when I was a child, Catholics - of which I was one - didn't walk on the same side of the street as Protestants, let alone go to each other's churches. While we were by no means as intolerant as our Irish forebears (only a generation or two behind us), I can remember distinctly hearing the chant, Proddie dogs, stink like frogs, being shouted from one side of the street to the other - Proddies being Protestants. Fortunately I had no idea what this about at the time!

And within denominations we're not always sure that the god that the Baptists/Presbyterians/Catholics up the road worship - those very people who ought to be our brothers and sisters in Christ - is quite the god we worship.

But God is the High God, the God overall. It took the Israelites quite some time to come to terms with this, even though their prophets shouted it into their ears again and again, and their father Abraham left his home country in order to be a blessing to all nations, not just the tiddly little one he begat. Even when Jesus spoke it out again and again, he was struggling to get the idea across. Ultimately - and temporarily - the god(s) of the Pharisees and Romans prevailed, and Jesus was executed. The High God, however, the one that Jesus told us was the Father of everyone, raised him up again - He wasn't having any of this nonsense about the petty little local Jewish god that the Pharisees and Sadducees worshiped.

Donovan points out that the Masai, to whom he was a missionary, already had a High God. But He was their god; he wasn't even the god of their neighbours three miles down the road.

How we delight to be tribal, whether we're African or American or Asian, or New Zealanders...