The Baader-Meinhof Complex REVIEWED. (BSDA #5)

So today I watched a film called the Baader-Meinhof Complex, about the Rote Armee Fraktion, the extremist left-wing terrorist organisation which operated in Germany mainly in the 1970s. Let's start with the simple bit. It was an extremely good film which I would recommend to anyone with an interest in terrorism (not in that way, you understand), late German history or social revolutions. Or indeed simply if you like good films. (Parental advisory, of course, given the copious amounts of violence, drug use and nudity.)

Fred Kaplan of the New York Times said that "when the film opened in Germany last year, some younger viewers came out of theaters crestfallen that the Red Army Faction members, still mythologized, were such dead-enders. Some who were older complained that the film had made the gang look too attractive. But they were dead-enders, and they were attractive. A film about them, or any other popular terrorist movement, has to account for both facts if it seeks to explain not just their crimes but also their existence."

I think this is a brilliant review, hence the shameless stealing. The best thing about this film is that it neither totally glamorises nor totally pathologises the RAF - instead it gives you the whole story. The violence, the sexual freedom, the casual misogyny, the brutal murders, the disdain for the law both from the RAF and the authorities, the madness, the Marxian politics and the wider picture of the radicalised German left of the time. There's very little in the way of moralising here; some have argued there's too little. It is the viewer's decision as to how to interpret the actions of the RAF: are they just brutal killers? Sexy freedom fighters? A group with ideals gone wrong? To me, the latter seems the case, but this is a matter of individual interpretation. 

Despite the German film industry only having about four actors, the movie is superbly acted throughout. Even the guys in bit part roles manage to fill you with an understanding of their characters' complexities and the difficulties of living in such a radical and brutal world as that of the RAF. I did however think some of the characters' roles were underdeveloped, and too many characters simply popped in and out of the action randomly, though this is probably a necessary consequence of trying to summarise the actions of a movement over ten years within two and a half hours. 

Whether you watch it as a study of a hugely controversial group in recent history, or as a crime drama, or as a political thriller, there is very little wrong with this film. It was a worthy recipient of its many awards, and is only a part of the 21st century renaissance within German film which happily shows no signs of abating.

9/10

Oi oi oi. If you enjoyed reading this, there's only one thing to do now. No, not hijack a plane or storm the German embassy in Stockholm. Follow this blog. And good stuff will probably happen.

The visual and narrative conventions of documentary television. (BSDA #1)

[So I'm attempting BSDA, my own acronym for Blog Some Days in April, a kinda cop-out version of the internet tradition. Two reasons why I can't do every day - I'm away from the 18th to the 22nd, and, well, I have a life. Not to mention revision. My challenge is therefore to do 20 blogs this month. I hope you'll join me in my quest. If you want to, please follow. Now - on with the rant.]

I really hate watching Andrew Marr walk around shopping centres. By this, I don't mean that I occasionally see him perusing the shelves at Topman or whatever, because I don't go to those kind of places. And I'm sure he doesn't either. What I'm talking about is documentaries. It seems that today it is absolutely essential for every director on the BBC to fill at least 40 minutes of their hour-long shows with fatuous nonsense, moody music and presenters walking around NOT SAYING ANYTHING.

Yesterday I watched a programme about the census with Marr and one about employment practices through the last half-century with Kirsty Young. They were an hour long each. I managed to watch them both in 37 minutes. Why was this? Simply, I fast-forwarded through any pointless scene-setting or conclusive narration (the BBC seems to take the philosophy of "tell them what you're going to say, tell them, then tell them what you've said" to ridiculous levels by giving each the same amount of time), transitional shots of the presenters a) walking through busy streets b) waiting for trains or c) driving massive cars through the countryside (green credentials writ large), and any attempts by the presenter to talk to a non-expert in the middle of the street, or, worse, their cosy suburban households. I simply hate listening to people tell me about their own life as if that somehow illuminates a wider social change (because very often this leaves gaping holes in the argument as the presenter searches desperately for some way to qualify a personal anecdote as though it were an established social trend). All these things are, it seems, held to be necessary for people to remain interested in a programme for a whole hour, a timespan so immense in the days of 24/7 television that it's necessary for newsreaders to tell us the time four times in every broadcast, as though we were fruitflies and might die, unfulfilled, before the next announcement.

Another tremendously irritating convention is to send your superstar presenter all around the world to film tiny little segments of to-camera work in front of as many different examples of "nature" as possible. The rockstar-turned-physicist Brian Cox has fallen victim to this, with his latest series Wonders Of The Universe featuring him making sandcastles and smiling inanely into camera in the Namibian desert. Not Brighton, not Blackpool, not even a freaking studio but a country thousands of miles away whose only connection to a spiel about entropy seems to be its larger collection of sand. Despite that, he still used a regular bucket.

I like TV documentaries. I like their capacity to inspire, educate and entertain, in the great Reithian tradition on which public service television was founded. So it really hurts me to see directors waste their presenters' talents by filming them silently reading train timetables or standing in front of Patagonian glaciers as though that in itself were somehow information. This madness has got to stop.

Barely quantifiable anger

So I was reminiscing today about last year's student protests, and how a largely peaceful and passionate movement was hijacked by a few vandals, who of course got all the attention from the conservative media. While a pessimist might note that the protests entirely failed in their aims, that seems a fairly pointless conclusion to reach given that a majority of the population supported the protesters (who did include me, though on a school-level protest, not the main London one - we got on the local news though!) and the disapproval rates of the government have stayed high all winter.

Last Saturday, the March for the Alternative in London brought together 400,000 people opposed to the irrational and ideologically motivated cuts to public services introduced by this government. (Let's be clear - no-one voted for this, me because I was too young (!) but most people because even the Tory manifesto said "no frontline cuts" and "no top-down reorganisations of the NHS".) Once again, there was sporadic trouble but this time literally only 50 or so people did anything criminal at all. The Daily Mail's resident bigot, Melanie Phillips tried to tar the legitimate protest group UK Uncut with the epithet of anarchists, but, y'know, they aren't. However, it emerges that the UK Uncut members who occupied Fortnum and Mason were tricked into arrest by the police, who, a video released on the Guardian website makes clear, said they would be free to go when they left the store. They then walked out... straight into a police kettle where they were immediately arrested. Ho hum.

So this brings me back to this blog's title. Anger is a relative concept. It's possible to get astoudingly angry about tiny little things, while allowing capitalists to get away with paying only a pittance in taxes to a country which gives them everything. Anger must be directed if it is to achieve anything. The March for the Alternative and the UK Uncut movement are all legitimate harbingers of anger, but we must be so careful not to let vandals and wreckers destroy them as they did the tuition fees protests. An irresponsible and biased media is clearly not going to help here. Therefore activists must keep making their case eloquently and passionately in the British democratic tradition, so that the barely quantifiable anger against the government of the country's progressive majority can be refined into a real popular movement - a movement with the power to change.

Phillips: http://bit.ly/fK7Pe7
Guardian footage: http://bit.ly/fto02l
My point made better: http://bit.ly/iaxIEH

Anthems

I made a list of good national anthems. This is good revision. Oh... wait. No, the other one. A complete, albeit satisfying, waste of time. I waste time frequently.


The official top seven.

• Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit - Germany. This is the best cos it's nice, int'it? *
• La Marseillaise - France. This one fits best the country's national stereotype. There's something about letting impure blood water your furrows that can only be French. Maybe it makes the garlic grow better or something.
• Advance Australia Fair - I won't insult your intelligence. Some Aussies don't like this. They say it's too dull. But believe me, guys. You were right to choose it over GSTQ, which is simply the worst dirge ever written.
• O Canada - best used to make ironic statements about the United States. **
• Fratelli d'Italia - aside from an introduction that sounds like a fairground ride's music, this is absolutely brilliant. You just can't help but love it.
• Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau - inspiring and beautiful. This is why the Welsh often beat us at rugby. ***
• Het Wilhelmus - possibly the only anthem to be written in the first person. The reference to the king of Spain is admittedly odd, but this does sound wonderful, although I totally understand that it is slow and reverent and suffers from the two problems I always attack GSTQ for, being, a praising of God and a monarchical sentiment. Also, ik hou van hoe de Nederlanders spreuk woorden. (Sorry. Google translate.)

*Some stupid people think it's Deutschland über alles, which hasn't been true since Hitler and is totally at odds with modern German liberalism. They're not crazy militarists, you idiotic British racists.

** How many Americans know that their anthem's tune comes from an old English drinking song called To Anacreon In Heaven? The song was commonly used as a sobriety test: if you could sing a stanza of the notoriously difficult melody and stay on key, you were sober enough for another round. Haha. I'd buy a drink for anyone who could recite Francis Scott Key's lyrics after a couple, though.

*** Except this year!!! Yay for England. Boo for the Grand Slam fail. :(

Honourable mentions.

• Auferstanden aus Ruinen. So yeah, this isn't an anthem anymore, and yeah, it was kinda the anthem of a repressive totalitarian regime... but come on. It's lovely. It's sweet and fluffy, like clouds and sheep in springtime and hummingbirds and pillows and the Stasi. 
• The Internationale and The Land. Two anthems here, each not to a nation, but rather to political ideologies, socialism and liberalism ( the latter is more specifically for land value taxation, but let's not overcomplicate things). Regardless of your political inclinations (I sit uneasily between both these camps) these songs are magnificent anthems for what they claim to represent.
• Jerusalem. So this isn't actually the anthem of anywhere, but it should be. The only important patriotic song which actually mentions England, a progressive anthem to unity and a theologically and politically radical song (no, it isn't a hymn and the mentions of Jesus are deliberately ambiguous and ultimately negative) which is nicely complex and affords many potential interpretations, this is the only possible anthem for England. 

I hope you enjoyed that. Procrastination over.

Dream School?

British people will no doubt be aware that chef-cum-Superman Jamie Oliver, who in earlier series has saved us all from the evil Twizzlers of Turkeia, who zoomed down from outer space to defile our children and destroy the nation's health, only to be vanquished by the Crepe Crusader, has recently turned his attention to the failing education system, and has taken to trying, in his own inimicable way, to solve its problems.

Oliver's plan basically rests on the idea that celebrities can teach subjects they claim to know about far better than so-called professionals. Predictably, however, most of them were catastrophic failures - David Starkey alienated the entire section of the population that Oliver had earlier tried unsuccessfully to humiliate and segregate by calling a boy "fat", and then proceeded to carry on with the ensuing argument for so long that I had to check he wasn't actually one of the children. After all, as Connor reminded us, he is "only four foot tall". Alastair Campbell gave splendid advice as to how to follow in his footsteps: to become a lying, sycophantic apologist for a war criminal, and, rather imaginatively, simultaneously aroused the homophobic sentiments of some of the class, leading to an outright brawl of words of the kind not seen on Channel 4 since Brookside was cancelled.

As far as I can tell, the kids seem about as interested in this scheme as Nick Clegg is in listening to the electorate, judging by the amount of time they spend on their gadgets, hiding away from doing any work and wearing the now-patented gormless hangdog look that has become so associated with Clegg over the last year. This whole programme seems like a propaganda exercise for Michael Gove's Free Schools project. No, you don't need specialist or trained teachers, any old C-list celebrity will do! I can only imagine the sequels:

Jamie's Dream Hospital, where Hugh Laurie carries out emergency heart surgery while Ducky Mallard sets 80% of the commissioning budget...

Jamie's Dream Forestry Commission, where TV's Robin Hood Jonas Armstrong carries out the demanding task of keeping ramblers off land that is rightfully theirs while Bear Grylls and Ray Mears show us all the proper way to tend to 5% of our national area...

Jamie's Dream Foreign Policy Crisis Unit, where Ross Kemp solves the Libyan problem by having a mealy-mouthed shouting match with Gaddafi from the top of a Chinook while Jack Osbourne tells the search-and-rescue operatives of the day how to correctly throw yourself out of a plane at thirty thousand feet.

(Although in that case I still might consider them over William Hague.)

There is a real issue here. We seem to have been sucked into the vacuum of assuming that "celebrity" equates to "worthy", that fame and fortune and everything that goes with it are substitutes for training, hard work and a real focus on doing your job properly. In their continuing war against the state and what it stands for, the coalition government seem to be following a very dangerous paradigm that suggests that anyone who actually does a job for money (in the capitalist tradition) is some kind of scrounger off the state - hence why we apparently need to cut all the real staff at libraries and post offices and run the bleedin' things ourselves, in our spare time. I'm not sure whether this is stupidity or arrogance, because the two are never too far apart within the Tory party.

It seems that in this age of 24-hour news and instant gratification, we only want stories that can be tied up neatly into bundles. No-one wants to hear about the teachers who work day-in, day-out to slowly improve the standards of less talented kids in their schools - we'd all much rather some televisual superhuman waltzed in at the eleventh hour and saved the day with moments to spare. So this is the real message of Dream School for me, and I hope the producers will be honourable enough to make this their ultimate conclusion too. Very little outside the goggle box happens in a scripted order, with climaxes before the ad breaks and a neat conclusion at the end. Life is messy and inconsiderate, and so our TV companies, and, more importantly, our elected representatives, must stop looking for elegant and quick solutions to our nation's woes and concentrate on what really matters - helping people to live their lives in a better, fairer and more understanding society.

CREDITS: The idea for this comes from Charlie Brooker's Guardian column and commentators thereon. It's alright.

Pretentious philosophical post

The insoluble problem of human existence is defining its goal, its direction, its purpose. The great minds of our species sparked with electric impulses, neural pathways connecting in hitherto unnoticed ways, as their owners wrestled with their membership of this elite caste called humanity, and the consequences of such an association for the activity of the independent brain.

What separates our cognitive biology, in tissue terms, from that of the so-called lower animals, is well known to our psychologists. We have a larger brain in proportion to body size. This, from a purely biological perspective, tells one all there is to know about the mystery of human consciousness. Darwin tells us in The Descent Of Man that “No one, I presume, doubts that the large proportion which the size of man's brain bears to his body, compared to the same proportion in the gorilla or orang, is closely connected with his mental powers.” That, then, may well describe why we have intelligence. We are even beginning to learn from which segments of the brain certain actions and ideas are controlled; the prefrontal cortex, to take a simple example, governs the prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and complex decision making, it is hypothesized. These are known as executive functions: an ironic title, given that they seem all too frequently absent from our senior businessmen and political leaders.

Nevertheless, there is much we do not, and, many would say, cannot, know about the human consciousness. What is inbuilt, what comes from the environment outside – are we at source as bees in a hive or the empty hard drive of a shiny MacBook? Whence comes compassion, whence hatred, whence love? In what sense is there a target for our existence – service to a higher conscience, devotion to an ideal or ideology, or the elimination of worldsuck, perhaps? These questions can be assessed, say the scientists, by their emotionless, empirical method. But there is, it seems, a deeper meaning under the purely measurable, further complexities that underpin the human psyche. Here exists the difference between merely electrocuting flesh and bones, and creating what Mary Shelley’s tale calls “the modern Prometheus”.

A newly created true Man, were such possible, would have more than cells, tissues, blood and mucus – as hidden within the physical cage sits the metaphysical other, the unknowable soul, the undistillable essence of humanity.  Such a concept cannot be understood by a rock, or a table, or a pencil, for precisely the reason that such objects lack a soul of their very own. Without any way of attesting that one lives, one cannot live. Cogito ergo sum, it would seem. When the writers of the Enlightened Age told us that the new extra-human science could explain away superstitious notions of love, God, spirit, they gave up understanding what life means to those that live it. Our goal must be to die without wasting the brief span of breaths and heartbeats on impossibilities; to drive forward the boundaries of understanding, yes, but always to understand that at the centre of our humanity lies a thing, an idea, an essence, that elevates us into sentience, and, as far is it is possible to tell, into a position of free will, of power over our biological instincts, and of liberty to live as beings, and as thinkings, within this universe of our own minds.

NOTE: I am not a psychologist, nor in fact any kind of academic. If the science is wrong, so be it; the philosophy is mine and mine alone.