Cyril Effala 1970-2005 Yaoundé

The talented Cyril Effala dies in Yaoundé at the age of 35 from typhoid fever.

More songs (Le laboureur, Nuits Perdues, Ashuka Ngongoli, Saint Pierre) are available on this MySpace page.

May someone produce a compilation CD!

Thanks to my friend Jay Lou, I have one cassette somewhere…

Monsieur l’Abbé (some mistakes in the transcription – avec des erreurs dans la transcription)

La Grand’Galère

La Grand’Galère (lyrics/paroles)

LA GRANDE GALÈRE

« La grande galère est pleine de cons
Qui à Dieu font la leçon
De les avoir créé maçons
Au lieu d’en faire des forgerons
Notre misère c’est ça
La richesse est toujours là
Chez l’autre et jamais chez moi
La grande galère est pleine de rats.

La grande galère est pleine de cons
Qui à Dieu font la le sermon
D’avoir créé aussi des mormons
Au lieu de leur seule religion
L’égoïsme est notre lot
Et si l’autre est toujours de trop
La grande galère est pleine de sons.

La grande galère est pleine de gens
Qui baignent dans l’or et le diamant
Et qui trouvent encore chiant
De ne pas avoir quarante dents
Notre nature c’est ça
Ce qu’on a ne nous suffit pas
La grande galère est pleine d’ingrats
La grande galère est pleine de gens d’armes qui veulent refaire les lois
Et des juges qui veulent l’argent du banquier et la femme du roi

Notre malheur c’est ça
Le bonheur est toujours là
Dans le lit du voisin
La grande galère est pleine de chiens
La grande galère est pleine de rois
Qui ont déjà tout ce qu’il se doit
Mais qui de faire un coup d’Etat
Au bon dieu se font le serment.

Mon petit doigt me dit tout bas
Qu’après son céleste repas
Le rêve de dieu le père est de faire de petits gosses aux vierges
Pour respecter la trinité
Il n’est voudrait que des triplés
Qu’il m’absolve tant pis
Vive la démocratie
Mais là je crois que c’est moi le con

La grande galère est pleine de cons
Qui à Dieu font la leçon
De les avoir créé maçons
Au lieu d’en faire des forgerons.
Notre richesse c’est rien
Le seul bonheur qui soit bien
Est dans le lit du voisin
Dieu merci
On n’est pas que des cons et des chiens »
©Cyrille EFFALA

White against Black

Si tu la Croises un Jour

D’Africultures:
Avec sa voix claire et sa guitare sous le bras, Cyril Effala, arpégeait sur les situations cocasses de la société camerounaise. Comme son père spirituel Georges Brassens, le chansonnier osait mettre à nu les désordres de la société, l’ordre social, l’ordre religieux, l’ordre familial etc. Militant de l’humain, il mettait sa guitare et sa verve au service de l’ironie et de l’humour. Fasciné par les mots, Cyril Effala les réinventait en leur donnant toutes leurs densités, rendant un magnifique hommage à la vitalité de la chanson à texte.
Plutôt habitué des cabarets dans lesquels il s’accompagnait à la guitare lorsqu’il chantait en français, et au tambour de percussions lorsqu’il se mettait au Bikutsi, Cyril espérait revenir sur des scènes plus importantes.
Le succès de sa chanson “Monsieur l’Abbé” lui avait valu d’être surnommé ainsi par le public.
Il représentait avec Donny Elwood et Marcellin Ottou la nouvelle vague acoustique camerounaise.
Les premiers signes publics de la typhoïde qui le travaillait se sont fait sentir lors de son concert inachevé le 7 avril dernier au Centre culturel français de Douala. L’hôpital général de Yaoundé avait lancé à plusieurs reprises des SOS à la radio pour des dons de sang 0+. Il s’y est éteint à le 9 juin

Pendant son dernier concert, le 7 Juin il annonce: “Je suis désolé, je ne peux plus continuer. La typhoïde dont je souffre ne me permet malheureusement pas d’aller plus loin ce soir.”

Guerrilla filmmakers often face crackdowns by the powers that be, and Zachary Maxwell is no exception.

His hidden-camera documentary was almost derailed last year when he was caught filming without permission by a fearsome enforcer – the lunchroom monitor in his school cafeteria.

“She sent me to my teacher, and my teacher told me to delete everything,” said Zachary, who is now 11.

Zachary pretended to delete the day’s shots. After that lapse in production security, he said, “I fired my lookouts.”

What his teacher didn’t know, though, was that Zachary had six months of footage shot surreptitiously in the cafeteria, forming the spine of his 20-minute movie “Yuck: A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch.”

Next month, the film (watch trailer), which has been playing the festival circuit, will be screened at the Manhattan Film Festival.

Like many things in the life of a fourth grader, Zachary’s movie started as a dispute with his parents. He told them that he wanted to start packing his own lunch, but they were skeptical. Lunch is free at his school, P.S. 130 Hernando De Soto in Little Italy, and his parents liked the look of the Department of Education’s online menus, which describe delicious meals, full of whole grains and fresh vegetables, some even designed by celebrity chefs.

“I told them that’s not what they were actually serving me,” Zachary said. “But I don’t think they believed me.”

So he smuggled in a camera in his sweatshirt pocket the next day and filmed lunch.

“When I came back home and showed them the footage, they were like, ugh!” he said.

Soon, Zachary and his father, a lawyer and video hobbyist, were cutting together the footage he brought home every day. (In the film, Zachary goes by the name Zachary Maxwell, though Maxwell is his middle name. His family asked that their last name be withheld because of Zachary’s age.)

In the film, Zachary, who is not above cheesy costumes and goofy special effects, makes a point that is under the radar of most conversations about the quality of school lunches: that despite the Education Department’s efforts to improve nutrition, there is a disconnect between the wholesome meals described on school menus and the soggy, deep-fried nuggets frequently dished up in the lunchrooms.

Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
Zachary outside his school in Little Italy.

The film offers no shortage of examples. On a day advertising “cheesy lasagna rolls with tomato basil sauce, roasted spinach with garlic and herbs,” for instance, Zachary is handed a plastic-wrapped grilled cheese sandwich on an otherwise bare plastic foam tray.

A “Pasta Party” is described as “zesty Italian meatballs with tomato-basil sauce, whole grain pasta, Parmesan cheese and roasted capri vegetables.” Meatballs and pasta show up on the tray, if none too zesty-looking, but the vegetables are nowhere to be seen.

Salads devised by the Food Network chefs Rachael Ray and Ellie Krieger are similarly plagued by missing ingredients. On the day Ms. Ray’s “Yum-O! Marinated Tomato Salad” is listed, Zachary is served a slice of pizza accompanied by a wisp of lettuce.

Ms. Krieger’s “Tri-color Salad” is a no-show on one day it is promised, and on another, it lacks its cauliflower, broccoli and red peppers. The shreds of lettuce and slice of cucumber could still be described as tri-color, Zachary points out, if you count “green, light green and brown.”

Indeed, among the 75 lunches that Zachary recorded – chosen randomly, he swears – he found the menus to be “substantially” accurate, with two or more of the advertised menu items served, only 51 percent of the time. The menus were “totally” accurate, with all of the advertised items served, only 16 percent of the time. And by Zachary’s count, 28 percent of the lunches he recorded were built around either pizza or cheese sticks.

A spokeswoman for the Education Department, Marge Feinberg, said in an e-mail that vegetables and fruit were served daily and she suggested that Zachary must have chosen not to take the vegetables served in his cafeteria.

“It would not be the first time a youngster would find a way to get out of eating vegetables,” she wrote. Zachary responded that he always took every item he was offered.

Until this past September, Ms. Feinberg said, schools did have some freedom to deviate from the systemwide lunch menus. New federal regulations for the current school year set stricter guidelines for what elements need to be on each child’s plate.

On Monday, Zachary thought he was in trouble again when he was sent to the principal’s office and found two men in black suits waiting for him.

They turned out to be representatives from the Education Department’s Office of School Food, he said, who complimented him on his movie, asked for feedback on some new menu choices, and took him on a tour of the cafeteria kitchen.

There, Zachary met one of his school’s cooks, and got some insight into her thinking.

“She wants us to be happy,” he reported. “So she cooks what she thinks the kids will like.”

Then he sat down for lunch with the officials. The adults ate the cafeteria lunch of chicken nuggets, carrots and salad.

Zachary had pork and vegetable dumplings – brought from home.

The multi-talented world hero, musician & ethnomusicologist.
If you are not living on the edge, you’re taking too much room. B.B.
He used to quote Sun Ra: The planet is asleep, and it’s the fault of musicians who are not true to themselves.
[Ed.: I would add that it is NOT just musicians]
Bob is survived by his wife and partner of 15 years, Haley Sage Robertson Brozman, daughter Zoe Brozman, 20, and brothers in NYC [along with a tremendous international community of friends and fans. It is their desire to carry out Bob’s vision in the creation of a foundation to help third-world musicians obtain the musical basics that western musicians take for granted - Addendum from Guitar Player]



PLEASE WATCH THIS INTERVIEW/DEMONSTRATION!

Avec sous-titres en français:

Some of his “Tone Poems” with David Grisman & Mike Auldridge:

Lumière:

His latest CD:

From the “Resonate” documentary:

POST-INDUSTRIAL BLUES:

The list is endless – from his website: FIRE IN THE MIND, POST-INDUSTRIAL BLUES, BLUES REFLEX, METRIC TIME, ROLLING THROUGH THIS WORLD (w. Jeff Lang), NANKURU NAISA (w. Takashi Hirayasu), TONE POEMS 3: RESONATOR INSTRUMENTS (w. David Grisman & Mike Auldridge), GET TOGETHER (w. Woody Mann), THE RUNNING MAN, FOUR HANDS SWEET & HOT (w. Cyril Pahinui and Bob Brozman, KOSMIK BLUES & GROOVES, REMEMBERING THE SONGS OF OUR YOUTH (w. The Tau Moe Family . TRUCKLOAD OF BLUES, DEVIL’S SLIDE, LUMIÈRE (The Bob Brozman Orchestra), KANI WAI: SOUND OF WATER (w. George Kahumoku, Jr.), SONGS OF THE VOLCANO (w. Papua New Guinea Stringbands – CD & DVD), MAHIMA (w. Debashish Bhattacharya), DIGDIG (w. Rene Lacaille Ensemble), LIVE NOW (live on tour in the USA & Australia), IN THE SADDLE (w. Ledward Kaapana), JIN JIN (w. Takashi Hirayasu), KIKA KILA MEETS KI HO’ALU (w. Ledward Kaapana).

Time to Re-Read “Amusing Ourseslves to Death” author, Neil Postman?
Kevin Spacey’s “satire,” or is it a celebration?

Gondry’s Unofficial Poster – second film version(2013)

First Film Version (1968)

With the release in France of a second film version of L’Écume des Jours – Mood Indigo – by Gondry (cf. below for the 1968 version) the marriage of two French zany authors is a done deal!
Boris Vian (writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer!) is famous for his songs, his plays and his novels. He was also an integral part of the St. Germain des Prés cultural scene in the 1950s. The world of Jazz resonates throughout his work. At 39, he dies of a heart attack while watching an unauthorized film of his work; at his funeral, with a strike going on, his friends end up having to bury him. The singers Henri Salvador and Georges Brassens were in attendance… and the College of Pataphysics left a large wreath.
Find out why “faner le nénuphar” becomes vital to Chloé!

• L’Écume des jours (Foam of the Days) – famous for its “pianocktail” (1946, published 1947 by Éditions Gallimard; translated variously as Froth on the Daydream, Mood Indigo and Foam of the Daze) – It is number TEN in a list of the hundred best books of the XXth century!
• L’automne à Pékin (Autumn in Peking) (1946, published 1947 by Éditions du Scorpion, revised version published in 1956; Autumn in Peking)
• L’Herbe rouge (The Red Grass) (1948–49, published 1950 by Éditions Toutain)
• L’Arrache-coeur (Heartsnatcher)

Michel Gondry is an Academy Award-winning French filmmaker, whose works include being a commercial director, music video director, and a screenwriter. He is noted for his wild creativity.

• Human Nature (2001)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
• The Science of Sleep (2006)
• Be Kind Rewind (2008)
• The Green Hornet (2011)
• The We and the I (2012)

The Website for L’Écume des Jours

A bit of an interview with Boris Vian in English


The first version of L’Ecume des Jours (1968) – complete version with Jacques Perrin, Marie-France Pisier, Sami Frey, Bernard Fresson

Addendum:

What I read to the dead (Szlengel’s poems)
Ce que j’ai lu aux morts (les poèmes de Szlengel)

W?adys?aw Szlengel 1914-Ghetto Warszawa 1943

…These poems-documents I was supposed to read to human beings who believed they will survive, I was supposed to review with them this volume as a diary of a dreadful period, which has passed to our joy, memories from the bottom of hell – but comrades to my wanderings disappeared and the poems became in one hour the poems which I read to the dead… W.S.

From The Manhattan Review:
Emanuel Ringelblum wrote an appreciative essay about Szlengel he included in his archive, Oneg Shabbat, that he later buried in the ground. Ringelblum wrote that Szlengel’s poems succeeded in moving the inhabitants of the ghetto “to tears. . .he spoke about what they lived, what they were most passionate about.” Ringelblum noted that Szlengel’s poems were popular, succeeding in communicating the spirit and atmosphere of the place. The poems were recited at many evening gatherings, and passed from hand to hand in versions copied by hand or typewriter. Several observers wrote that Szlengel’s poem “Counterattack” was one of the most popular poems among the ghetto’s inhabitants; it is an exhortation to take up arms, the point of view not only that of participant but leader.

Until Sunday on the BBC iPlayer
(Eva Hoffman is featured in my video piece, Say I’m a Jew)

“What I read to the dead.”

Writer Eva Hoffman explores the extraordinary verse and little known life of Wladislaw Szlengel, poet of the Warsaw Ghetto. Before the war and the Nazi invasion of Poland, he had written poetry in his native tongue and witty lyrics for popular tunes sung in the nightclubs of Warsaw. But confinement in the Warsaw Ghetto and its increasingly tragic circumstances changed Szlengel’s work into urgent bulletins for both fellow Jews, trapped inside the walls of their prison city, and his former Polish neighbours.

Szlengel wrote until his last days which came with the discovery of their hiding place in April 1943. Poems like The Little Station of Treblinka, What I Read to the Dead and Counterattack captured with ruthless immediacy the confused, terrifying, days and nights of Ghetto life until the beginnings of the doomed uprising in 1943 that finally brought total destruction.

The station is tiny,
Three firs grow in a line,
This is Treblinka station,
Says the ordinary sign.

There’s not even a cashier’s window,
A porter’s room? Do not seek it.
For a million you won’t get
A simple return ticket.

People read aloud Szlengel’s verses in their hiding places. In them they recognized not just their plight but their own humanity as family and friends continued to be deported. His poetry survived in versions committed to memory by a handful of survivors, in a small cache of poems kept safe and buried in a unique, secret archive and, decades later, in the form of a sheaf of pages found hidden inside a table marked for firewood.

I am looking through and sorting the poems that were written to those who are no more. Read it. This is our history.
This is what I read to the dead.

Reader Elliot Levey
Producer Mark Burman.

Kontratak Jan. 1943
Slysz niemiecki Boze,

                Jak modla/ sie/ Zydzi w dzikich domach,

                Trzymaja/c w re/ku zlom czy zerdz.

                Prosimy Cie/, Boze, o walke/ krwawa/.

                Blagamy Cie/ o gwaltowna/ smierc.

                Niech nasze oczy przed skonaniem

                Nie widza/ jak sie/ wloka/ szyny,

                Ale daj dloniom celnosc, Panie,

                Aby sie/ skrwawil mundur siny,

                Daj nam zobaczyc, zanim gardla

                Zawrze ostatni, gluchy je/k,

                W tych butnych dloniach, w lapach z pejczem

                Zwyczajny nasz czlowieczy le/k.

 --

Counterattack, Jan. 1943

Hear, O German God,

                The squatter-house Jews at prayers,

                Clutching a crowbar or a scrap of wood.

                We ask you, God, for a bloody battle,

                We beg you for a violent death.

                Spare us, before we die, the sight

                Of slow-receding rails,

                Give us, O Lord, a steady hand

                To stain their bluish tunics with blood,

                And let us see, before mute groan

                Chokes our throats,

                In their haughty hands, their whip-swinging paws

                Our common, human fright.

The film’s website

I just finished viewing the Director's Cut: this is a MUST SEE FILM, a public service announcement about "DEVOURING IMAGES."
This film may sear straight into your memory because it clearly implicates, as all film viewing should, the complicity of the viewer.
Yes, it is about killing, but not just by thugs or politicians, but the killing (and ecocide) behind our omnipresent spectacle, and the merchandise that surrounds it.
It is also very much about the ego's delusions, and who does not have one?
Buñuel's grandchild is alive and kicking, making (brilliantly disturbing) documentaries!
Before the film plays in St. Louis, I will write a short review. P.M.

You won’t find better people to endorse your film:

“An absolute and unique masterpiece.”
– Dusan Makavejev

“I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade… unprecedented in the history of cinema…”
THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.”
– Werner Herzog

“Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. An amazing and impressive film.”
– Errol Morris

“If we are to transform Indonesia into the democracy it claims to be, citizens must recognize the terror and repression on which our contemporary history has been built. No film, or any other work of art for that matter, has done this more effectively than The Act of Killing. [It] is essential viewing for us all.”
– National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia

“The Act of Killing is the most powerful, politically important film about Indonesia that I have ever seen. The arrival of this film is itself a historical event almost without parallel. [It] witnesses the bloody destruction of a foundation of this nation at the hands of Indonesians themselves. On top of a mountain of corpses, our fellow countrymen rolled out a red carpet for the growth of gangster capitalism and political Islam. In documenting this, The Act of Killing exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of this country’s notions of ‘patriotism’ and ‘justice.’ The film achieves all this thanks to the director’s genius and audacious choice of filmmaking method.”
– Ariel Heryanto, Historian and Cultural Critic, Tempo Magazine (Indonesia’s premier newsmagazine)

“Every now and then a non-­fiction film comes along that is unlike anything else I have seen: Buñuel’s LAND WITHOUT BREAD, Werner Herzog’s FATA MORGANA, Hara’s THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON. Well, it’s happened again. Here, Joshua Oppenheimer invites unrepentant Indonesian death-­squad leaders to make fiction films reenacting their violent histories. Their cinematic dreams dissolve into nightmares and then into bitter reality. Like all great documentary, THE ACT OF KILLING demands another way of looking at reality. It is like a hall of mirrors––the so-­called mise-­en-­scène––where real people become characters in a movie and then jump back into reality again. And it asks the central question: what is real Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in a Paris Review interview, wrote about reading Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” for he first time, “I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.” I have the same feeling with this extraordinary film.”
– Errol Morris




An important interview with Joshua Oppenheimer.

From the film’s website:
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
by Joshua Oppenheimer

CO-DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
by Christine Cynn

—
Edited from observations on the massacres, their aftermath and implications, by Historian John Roosa. Many thanks to him for providing this summary. Additional opening and closing notes by Joshua Oppenheimer.

In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, founder of the non-aligned movement, and leader of the national revolution against Dutch colonialism, was deposed and replaced by right-wing General Suharto. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which had been a core constituency in the struggle against Dutch colonialism, and which had firmly supported President Sukarno (who was not a communist), was immediately banned.

On the eve of the coup, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world, outside of a communist country. It was officially committed to winning power through elections, and its affiliates included all of Indonesia’s trade unions and cooperatives for landless farmers. Its major campaign issues included land reform, as well as nationalizing foreign-owned mining, oil, and plantation companies. In this, they sought to mobilize Indonesia’s vast natural resources for the benefit of the Indonesian people, who, in the aftermath of three hundred years of colonial exploitation, were, on the whole, extremely poor.

After the 1965 military coup, anybody opposed to the new military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist. This included union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, and the ethnic Chinese, as well as anybody who struggled for a redistribution of wealth in the aftermath of colonialism.

In less than a year, and with the direct aid of western governments, over one million of these “communists” were murdered. In America, the massacre was regarded as a major “victory over communism”, and generally celebrated as good news. Time magazine reported “the West’s best news for years in Asia”, while The New York Times ran the headline, “A Gleam of Light in Asia”, and praised Washington for keeping its hand in the killings well hidden.

(The scapegoating of the ethnic Chinese, who had come to Indonesia in the 18th and 19th centuries, was done at the incitement of the US intelligence services, which sought to drive a wedge between the new Indonesian regime and the People’s Republic of China. The slaughter of village-level members of the PKI and its affiliate unions and cooperatives was also encouraged by the US, who was worried that without a “scorched earth” approach, the new Indonesian regime might eventually accommodate the PKI base.)

In many regions of Indonesia, the army recruited civilians to carry out the killings. They were organized into paramilitary groups, given basic training (and significant military back up). In the province of North Sumatra and elsewhere, the paramilitaries were recruited largely from the ranks of gangsters, or preman. Ever since the massacres, the Indonesian government has celebrated the “extermination of the communists” as a patriotic struggle, and celebrated the paramilitaries and gangsters as its heroes, rewarding them with power and privilege. These men and their protégés have occupied key positions of power – and persecuted their opponents – ever since.

The pretext for the 1965-66 genocide was the assassination of six army generals on the night of 1 October 1965. (above written by Joshua Oppenheimer).

1.10.1965: The Thirtieth of September Movement (Gerakan 30 September, or G30S), made up of disaffected junior Indonesian Armed Forces Officers, assassinated six Indonesian Army Generals in an abortive coup and dumped their bodies down a well south of the city. At the same time, the Movement’s troops took over the national radio station and announced that they intended to protect President Sukarno from a cabal of right-wing army generals plotting a seizure of power. The Movement was defeated before most Indonesians knew it existed. The senior surviving army commander, Major General Suharto, launched a quick counter-attack and drove the Movement’s troops from Jakarta within one day.

Suharto accused the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) of masterminding the Movement and then orchestrated an extermination of persons affiliated with the party. Suharto’s military rounded up over a million and a half people, accusing all of them of being involved in the Movement. In one of the worst bloodbaths of the 20^th century, hundreds of thousands of individuals were massacred by the army and its affiliated militias, largely in Central Java, East Java, Bali, and North Sumatra from late 1965 to mid-1966. In a climate of national emergency, Suharto gradually usurped President Sukarno’s authority and established himself as the de facto president (with the power to dismiss and appoint ministers) by March 1966.

The massacres were out of all proportion to their ostensible cause. The Movement was a small-scale conspiratorial action organized by a handful of people. In total, it killed twelve people. Suharto exaggerated its magnitude until it assumed the shape of an ongoing, nation-wide conspiracy to commit mass murder. All the millions of people associated with the PKI, even illiterate peasants in remote villages, were presented as murderers collectively responsible for the Movement.

Indonesian government and military officials, to the very end of the Suharto regime in 1998, invoked the specter of the PKI in response to any disturbance or sign of dissent. The key phrase in the regime’s argument was “the latent danger of communism.” The unfinished eradication of the PKI was, in a very real sense, the raison d’être of the Suharto regime. The original legal act under which the regime ruled Indonesia for over thirty years was Sukarno’s presidential order of 3^rd October 1965, authorizing Suharto to “restore order.” That was an emergency order. But for Suharto, the emergency never ended.

In constructing a legitimating ideology for his dictatorship, Suharto presented himself as the saviour of the nation for having defeated the Movement. His regime incessantly drilled the event into the minds of the populace by every method of state propaganda: textbooks, monuments, street names, films, museums, commemorative rituals and national holidays. The Suharto regime justified its existence by placing the Movement at the centre of its historical narrative and depicting the PKI as ineffably evil. Under Suharto, anti-communism became the state religion, complete with sacred sites, rituals, and dates.

It is remarkable that the anti-PKI violence, as such a large-scale event, has been so badly misunderstood. No doubt, the fact that both military personnel and civilians committed the killings has blurred the issue of responsibility. Nonetheless, from what little is already known, it is clear that the military bears the largest share of responsibility and that the killings represented bureaucratic, planned violence more than popular, spontaneous violence. The Suharto clique of officers, by inventing false stories about the Movement and strictly controlling the media, created a sense among civilians that the PKI was on the warpath. If there had not been this deliberate provocation from the military, the populace would not have believed the PKI was a mortal threat since the party was passive in the aftermath of the Movement. (The military worked hard to whip up popular anger against the PKI from early October 1965 onwards; and the US Government actively encouraged the Indonesian military to pursue rank and file communists). It prodded civilian militias into acting, gave them assurances of impunity, and arranged logistical support.

Contrary to common belief, frenzied violence by villagers was virtually unheard of. Suharto’s army usually opted for mysterious disappearances rather than exemplary public executions. The army and its militias tended to commit its large-scale massacres in secret: they took captives out of prison at night, trucked them to remote locations, executed them, and then buried the corpses in unmarked mass graves or threw them into rivers.

The tragedy of modern Indonesian history lies not just in the army-organized mass killings of 1965-66 but also in the rise to power of the killers, of persons who viewed massacres and psychological warfare operations as legitimate and normal modes of governance. A regime that legitimated itself by pointing to a mass grave at the site of the well, vowing “never again,” left countless mass graves from one end of the country to the other, from Aceh on the western edge to Papua on the eastern edge. The occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999 similarly left tens, if not hundreds, of thousands dead, many anonymously buried. Each mass grave in the archipelago marks an arbitrary, unavowed, secretive exercise of state power.

The obsession with a relatively minor event (the Movement) and the erasure of a world-historical event (the mass killings of 1965-66) has blocked empathy for the victims, such as the relatives of those men and women who disappeared. While a monument stands next to the well in which the Movement’s troops dumped the bodies of the six army generals on October 1, 1965, there is no monument to be found at the mass graves that hold the hundreds of thousands of persons killed in the name of suppressing the Movement. (above written by John Roosa).

Focus on who killed the army generals on 30^th September 1965 has functioned as a fetish, displacing all attention from the murder of over one million alleged communists in the months that followed. Suharto’s regime produced endless propaganda about the “brutal communists” behind the killing of the generals, and still today most discussion of the genocide has been displaced by this focus. And this is true even in most English-language sources. To me, participating in the debate around “who killed the generals” feels grotesque, which is why it does not feature in The Act of Killing.

The Rwandan genocide was triggered when Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana (a Hutu) died after his aeroplane was shot down on its approach to Kigali. To focus on who shot down the plane (was it Tutsi extremists? was it Hutu extremists acting as provocateurs?) rather than the murder of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates over the next 100 days would be unconscionable. Similarly, who started the Reichstag fire is irrelevant to an understanding of the Holocaust. Whether or not the disgruntled army officers behind the killing of the six generals had the support of the head of the PKI is much more than beside the point: it plays, as John Roosa points out above, the pernicious role of deflecting attention from a mass murder of world-historical importance. Imagine if, in Rwanda, the fundamental question about what happened in 1994 was “who shot down the president’s plane?” This would only be thinkable if the killers remained in power… (above written by Joshua Oppenheimer).


“A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip” by Gabby Giffords in the NYTimes

Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

My review – [Attention: this film does not fit any category nor any short blurb.]

“seeing the state as a value is the essence of the fascist conception” & “the sacred cow of national unity”
Yeshayahu Leibowitz
The film may inspire one to consult (again?) Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s important book, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State.

The short of it:
This is not a mea-culpa-film trying to exonerate Israel’s secret services, it is an indictment of the state and any institution, probably anywhere where authority is not questioned.

The slightly longer review:
To appreciate this film requires a viewer’s sustained reflection; otherwise one would fall into the “pro/against dichotomy” decried by Robert Frost  (Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.)
Like the tip of an iceberg (here a volcano), the film’s material represents only two percent of the interviews.
Even within such a tiny segment, one witnesses the first of a historical moment: all of the speakers - each one holding a key component of Israel’s past thirty years – struggle for the first time, so it seems, to articulate what happened.

Considering the steady erosion of Zionism’s progressive ideals and the continued occupation of the West Bank, it is easy to attack Israel.
Dror Moreh, the courageous filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated documentary, cares enough about Israel, his country, to walk the tight rope and reveal some of its major problems. He seems to echo the words of Carl Schurz: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.
Politics and culture feed their passive audiences with simple answers, the difficult questions are for those who seek change.
Unfortunately The Gatekeepers is already being used as ammunition by hasty critics like Democracy Now!

We move into the future by acknowledging the past. Can this movie revolve as that axis?

What else?

• What every news channel, every storyteller promises: secrets revealed.

• In the shadow of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, how often do you get the head of a secret organization speaking about his work?

• Here  we get six of them, each one providing one facet of the Israeli policy puzzle.

• They do so as individuals with no support from the government (which did not acknowledge the Oscar nomination).

• As if entering one (only one) chess player’s mind, we assume we witness “the best Israeli thinking” – a possible let down for some. While Jewish survival is the carrot touted by each government, as in a suspenseful detective story where life and destruction comingle – for this reviewer with echoes of the movie Shoah – each moment is both precious and precise.

Like most important work, it disturbs.
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Dror Moreh with the Film Society Program Director and NYFF Selection Committee Chairman Richard Peña, Oct. 2012:

DROR MOREH:

I have to say that I feel a little bit uncomfortable in the way that you present the things here, because you portray the things as if Israel is the brutal, aggressive all the time, with the Palestinians, that they are like doves. There is reason why the Shin Bet is doing what it’s doing there. And the fact of the matter is that you cannot say—in a way, portray Israel as the aggressive and the Palestinians are the innocent bystander who are always being killed by those aggressive forces. It’s not the case at all, and I think that this is misleading the people that are watching that.

And I think that there is—if there is something that I failed while doing this film, it’s that the whole situation is different shades of gray. There is no really total aggressive person there or aggressive entity towards a very innocent and not violent entity on the other side. It’s both. Both are doing the worst that they can. I think that I can relate to what Abba Eban said once, our former foreign minister. He said that the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I can say that on both sides. Both sides have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

And this is the whole goal of The Gatekeepers. The Gatekeepers portrays Israeli occupation in the last 45 years and basically says, “Enough of that. It’s not going anywhere. It’s only tactic without strategy. Where do you want to go with this conflict ahead?” and to show that in a way that will only benefits both sides. If you portray only one side as the brutal, aggressive force and the other one as the innocent naive, you are doing wrong to the truth or to the facts on the ground. And I have to say that this is something which my movie tried to do very, very strongly: to portray the situation as it is. The Palestinians are doing terrorist attack. They have right to do, in a way, something which they want to create their own country, their own homeland, and they oppose the aggressive occupation.

… you portray that the Palestinians are people that are sitting there, you know, and not doing anything, it’s not the reality on the ground. And by that, you have to show both sides, because I think that when you do that, you portray only one side. And I said that before. It’s—you have to be balanced. And this is something that I felt that is not so much here.