The Batman: Decadent Ordure Hailed as Artistic Accomplishment.

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •
Patrice Greanville

Prefatory Note: The hero is tough, in fact, indestructible. The seductive chick, as tough-taking as she is alluring. Society is in chaos, imploding, but the cause (we are led to believe) is a bunch of retail, often juvenile and half-crazed criminals, not anything resembling a true ruling class gallery of villains. The latest iteration of the saga of the cape crusader, an improbable, immature billionaire bent on vigilantism, is 100% typical of this crushingly tedious genre's DNA: exploitative (but elaborately produced) action films based on comic strips once designed to entertain subteens but now widely marketed to much broader audiences. The latter sorry fact is itself proof of the deliberate infantilisation and depoliticization of the masses, which have become stupid enough to thirst for this kind of decadent and vacuous entertainment.

I admit to being a bit disappointed by the fact the Rotten Tomatoes' critics site gave this poor excuse of a film an 85% rating. I naturally could not find any mainstream film critic capable or willing of seeing this pile of excrement for what it is. Even the generally respectable Roger Ebert site gave the film an absurd, gushing review, clearly a betrayal of what the late founder of the site stood for:

"And yet, despite these touchstones, this is unmistakably a Matt Reeves film. He accomplishes here what he did with his gripping entries in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise: created an electrifying, entertaining spectacle, but one that’s grounded in real, emotional stakes. This is a Batman movie that’s aware of its own place within pop culture, but not in winking, meta fashion; rather, it acknowledges the comic book character’s lore, only to examine it and reinvent it in a way that’s both substantial and daring..."  (Christy Lemire, Roger Ebert.com)

But don't be fooled, for even the couching of a review in sophisto language cannot ultimately elevate this bloated concoction to anything resembling true art. In that sense, I am grateful and relieved the wsws.org site remains dependable for this kind of assessment. Their cultural compass is not yet broken.—PG



The Batman: Obscuring reality behind shadows and capes

Directed by Matt Reeves; written by Reeves and Peter Craig

The Batman, recently released on the streaming service HBO Max, is the latest big-budget film starring the well-known DC comic book vigilante. It follows his exploits as he battles various enemies, including a deranged serial killer, a criminal syndicate, and various corrupt government officials in the fictional city of Gotham.

The film’s production and release had been derailed multiple times by the COVID-19 pandemic, pushing it nearly a year from its initial June 2021 release date. Its March 2022 theatrical release took place amidst the ruling elite’s campaign to declare that “COVID is over,” leading to the scrapping of all measures to contain the virus, including occupancy limits and mask requirements in movie theaters. As a result of the film’s ubiquitous marketing campaign and the officially sanctioned lies about the state of the pandemic, the film has drawn sizable audiences, with global box office revenue over $760 million as of this writing.

The past two decades have seen half a dozen major film iterations of the Batman character. These films have involved the efforts of numerous talented performers and filmmakers, thousands of crew members, countless millions of labor-hours, not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars of production costs.

What has been the result of this significant investment of society’s resources? In our evaluations of the Christopher Nolan-directed Dark Knight films, we referred to them at various times as “another dreadful film for the most part praised highly by the critics” (Batman Begins, 2005); “ill-conceived and poorly done, overlong, confusing and emotionally muddy” (The Dark Knight, 2008); “an aesthetically one-sided and emotionally distorting encounter—condescending, cruel, misanthropic, ugly and unreal” (The Dark Knight Rises, 2012).

Of the superhero crossover film Batman v Superman (Zack Snyder, 2016), we wrote that “The characters are lifeless and flat, with scarcely more development and backstory than one would find printed on the back of an action figure box.” We referred to Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), which concerned Batman’s arch-nemesis, as “a deeply confused work that is more a symptom of a rotten social order than a coherent commentary on it.”

Little needs to be added to these statements to describe the latest Batman film.

Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) is a reclusive billionaire who spends his nights prowling the streets of Gotham City and savagely beating petty street criminals as the masked vigilante Batman. When a sadistic serial killer calling himself the Riddler (Paul Dano) murders and mutilates the city’s mayor, Batman and his Gotham City Police Department ally James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) join forces to hunt down the Riddler before he can claim more victims.


Even the tepid attempt at a romance soon collapses given the cartoonish idiocy of the underlying premises.


Batman’s search for answers leads him into an underworld nightspot owned by the Penguin (Colin Farrell, looking fairly ridiculous in prosthetic makeup) where he meets Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), a waitress whose friend was the mayor’s mistress and has gone missing. Catwoman and Batman share moments of (frankly inexplicable) intimacy, but Batman, still traumatized from witnessing the murder of his parents at a young age, is reluctant to form a connection.

A tedious investigation, reminiscent of a television police procedural, ultimately uncovers a vast network of corruption that implicates many of Gotham’s political and financial elite, controlled by mob boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Riddler continues his killing spree, murdering the city police chief and the district attorney, all the while claiming that he is revealing the “truth” about corruption in Gotham.

Ultimately, the Riddler’s plot culminates in a devastating attack on the city. Amidst the chaos, Batman fights to stop the Riddler’s followers from assassinating the city’s newly elected Mayor Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson, doing a fairly convincing impression of a demagogic, yet thoroughly toothless and ineffective Democratic Party politician). After realizing that Riddler and his followers had been inspired by Batman’s own crusade for vengeance, Batman decides to dedicate himself to inspiring “hope” instead.

Comic book films generally, and Batman films in particular, are bland, conformist and reactionary efforts. Their main role is to affirm the essential virtue of official institutions, chiefly the police and military, while overwhelming the audience’s critical faculties with computer-generated spectacle.

Batman films tend to be the most openly right-wing of the lot. The film’s depiction of Gotham as a filthy, blighted mess in the grip of an irrepressible crime wave seems straight from the fantasies of the fascistic pro-police crowd (perhaps yesterday’s issue of the New York Post), as is Batman’s closing monologue where he promises to fight “looting and lawlessness.”

A handful of limp gestures are made in the direction of social criticism, including institutional corruption. But the malefactors are depicted as merely isolated “bad apples.” While this or that individual officer may be led astray due to greed or cowardice, the police as a whole are depicted as defenders of the public good, selflessly working to keep the city from harm. If anything, the police are presented as being insufficiently accepting of Batman’s brutal and extralegal methods.

Director Matt Reeves (best known for other big-budget films like 2008’s Cloverfield and the recent entries in the Planet of the Apes series) has said that he was inspired by the noir films of the 1930s and ’40s, as well as neo-noir works such as Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic Chinatown. But Polanski’s film had far more biting and disturbing social commentary than anything on display here, as did the best works associated with the noir and mystery genres. There is nothing in Reeves’ film that approaches the urgency and tension of a work like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) (based on a James M. Cain novella) or the potent social realism in the writings of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. These artists, with all their contradictions, were defined by distrust or outright hostility toward authority and official life.

In any case, one doubts they would have ever included a denouement where a recently elected mayor delivers a speech insisting that “We must rebuild people’s faith, in our institutions, in our elected officials, in each other,” which is how Reeves’ film ends.

A number of talented and appealing performers appear in The Batman. Pattinson has demonstrated artistic seriousness in the right circumstances, most notably in Ciro Guerra’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Turturro and Wright are veteran actors capable of moving work. Dano, Kravitz, and even Farrell have done well in the right roles. Yet, no one here seems to be able to inject any life into the grim, murky proceedings, which drag on for nearly three hours.

There is much that is disturbing, even horrific about social and political life. An artist committed to exposing harsh truths certainly would not lack for material. Yet, the “darkness” on display in The Batman is entirely without substance—timid, socially amorphous and non-threatening. It is the type of market-friendly “darkness” out of which a studio can make three-quarters of a billion dollars.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos Delgado is a film critic with wsws.org • Patrice Greanville is this publication's editor-in-chief.


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Museums: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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EXPOSING CAPITALISM'S MULTITUDE OF VICES AND INCURABLE PROBLEMS—
FROM INGRAINED RACISM, COLONIALISM, & TERRIBLE ECONOMIC CRISES & EXPLOITATION, TO ENDLESS WARS

John Oliver

Museums: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)


LastWeekTonight / Oct 3, 2022

John Oliver discusses some of the world’s most prestigious museums, why they contain so many stolen goods, the market that continues to illegally trade antiquities, and a pretty solid blueprint for revenge.

We don't always approve of John Oliver's analyses. As a man of the establishment, he, more often than not, despite his obvious decent streak, can be found mouthing verities that benefit the global imperial status quo. However, like many liberals, he can also be quite effective at analysing glaring problems of capitalism that do not quite threaten the status quo. Call it the reformist impulse. This is one such instance, and the information is certainly welcome.
Editor

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Classic Cinema: The Ascent

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See this film and think about how degenerate American films and reality have become.  Look around and observe this huge culture bathed from top to bottom in despicable lies—everything an imposture, 24/7, a cynical falsehood that few really detect and still fewer rebel against. 

LARISA SHEPITKO

The Ascent

The crowning triumph of a career cut tragically short, the final film from Larisa Shepitko won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and went on to be hailed as one of the finest works of late Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belorussia. When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film’s earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory. With stark, visceral cinematography that pits blinding white snow against pitch-black despair, The Ascent finds poetry and transcendence in the harrowing trials of war. (From Criterion collection edition). 


More details about this haunting film.

  • The Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1977) – her last completed film and the one which received the most attention in the West. The actors Boris Plotnikov and Vladimir Gostyukhin gained their first major roles in the film. Adapted from a novel by Vasili Bykov, Shepitko returns to the sufferings of World War II, chronicling the trials and tribulations of a group of pro-Soviet partisans in Belarus in the bleak winter of 1942. Two of the partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak, are captured by the Wehrmacht and then interrogated by a local collaborator, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, before four of them are executed in public. This depiction of the martyrdom of the Soviets owes much to Christian iconographyThe Ascent won the Golden Bear at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival in 1977.[11] It was also the official submission of the Soviet Union for the Best Foreign Language Film of the 50th Academy Awards in 1978, and it was included in "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" by Steven Schneider.
    • Shepitko wanted to film to adhere to the authenticity of what Soviet soldiers would have experienced during World War II. The cast derived of no-named actors whose backgrounds fit similar to how she wanted their characters to portray. The film was shot in Murom during the severe winters of Russia where temperatures reached 40 degrees below zero. Shepitko refuse any special treatment and only wore clothing that the cast wore to embody the suffering that they went through.[12]

Ukrainian Soviet film directorscreenwriter and actress. Larisa Shepitko is considered one of the best female directors of all time, and her film The Ascent was the second film directed by a woman to win a Golden Bear, and the second film directed by a woman to win a top award at a major European film festival (Cannes, Venice, Berlin). Larisa died instantly in a car crash in 1979, while scouting locations for her next film. Four members of her crew also perished in the accident.


The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience. 

 








The Triangle Building fire changed things, or did it?

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100 years since tragic blaze killed 146 garment workers
Triangle Fire on PBS’s “American Experience”: compelling documentary marred by liberal perspective

By Charles Bogle 
| Dateline: 12 March 2011 • THIS IS A REPOST 

Directed by Jamila Wignot, written by Mark Zwonitzer


March 25 marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which took the lives of 146 workers, 122 of whom were women and the children—some as young as thirteen—who worked beside them.


On February 28, the PBS “American Experience” series commemorated this workplace tragedy by airing Triangle Fire. Producer-director Jamila Wignot (director and/or producer of other “American Experience” episodes, including Walt Whitman, The Supreme Court: The Rehnquist Revolution, Jesse James and The Massie Affair) borrows Ken Burns’s production techniques to compellingly recreate the workers’ lives, their struggles against brutal conditions, the fire and its horrific consequences.


The tragedy sparked protests and the call for regulations.

The work floor the day after the fire.

 


Wignot allows those involved in the tragedy to tell their stories through voiceovers in which portions of letters from victims, family members, and survivors of the fire are read out. The viewer learns that many of the victims and survivors belonged to the great wave of European immigrants who, as the documentary notes, “understood that their fragile hold on the American dream depended on a willingness to work in such places.”

One also learns that many of these women were the sole supporters of large families. Following Burns’s lead, Wignot correctly lets the moving stories speak for themselves.

The accounts and photos, along with comments by contemporary historians, also help bring out the inhuman working conditions that led to the fire. The women worked 14-hour shifts on the 8th and 9th stories of a building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in lower Manhattan (while the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, Russian-born Jewish immigrants themselves, sat above them on the 10th floor) for $2 a day. Because it was a shirtwaist (women’s blouse) factory, rags and other highly flammable material littered the floor.

Triangle Waist Co. owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were known as the Shirtwaist Kings. COURTESY KHEEL CENTER

The documentary makers also point to the immediate economic causes of the tragic blaze, i.e., the rising cost of material and competition from rival factories led Blanck and Harris to increase the level of exploitation of their workers.

The owners’ cost-cutting efforts included checking the women’s bags for any “stolen” material before they left the factory. To ensure that no employee left work with pilfered items, the owners locked one of the two exit doors, forcing the women to leave in single file though one exit as supervisors checked their bags.

Similar conditions existed throughout the city’s garment factories, and by the fall of 1909, mostly Jewish women workers at some 500 of the factories participated in “the Uprising of 20,000,” the largest strike in New York City history. (At the time more than a quarter of a million garment workers in New York produced nearly two-thirds of the clothing sold in the US.) The owners responded by declaring the strike an attack on private property and “the American Dream,” and hiring goons and bribing cops to beat striking workers and arrest them.

When public opinion began to shift to the side of the striking workers—due partly to the decision of Anne Morgan (daughter of J.P. Morgan) and several of her upper-class friends to go “slumming’ and side with the workers—Blanck and Harris and the other owners made moderate wage and benefit concessions, but did not agree to improve working conditions or grant the right to organize. The striking workers initially rejected the offer, at which point Morgan and her friends showed their true class colors by withdrawing their support in fear of stoking “social upheaval.”

By February 1910 the strike was settled, leaving the workers without a union and no changes in working conditions. It was practically inevitable, then, that some disaster would occur, and the documentary’s depiction of the March 1911 fire is all the more powerful and disturbing for this reason.

Reenactments depict a single cigarette being dropped on a rag and the women leaving their work-stations and attempting to flee. Above them, the owners managed to leave through the roof, but the single unlocked exit through which the workers could escape was blocked by smoke and fire. (The owners were eventually acquitted of any legal wrongdoing.)

Unfortunately, Triangle Fire’s timid, liberal perspective results in a mistaken understanding of the Progressive movement’s role in 20th Century America. This misconception is especially apparent in the documentary’s final scene. “Following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire,” we are told, “other workers saw the dangers of uncontrolled factories, resulting in 30 new laws. New York became a model [of reform] for the rest of the nation.”

But this “model” was not meant to fight the power of capitalism. In fact, Progressive reforms of this era were intended, in the final analysis, to solidify and protect the new economic order of monopoly capitalism and imperialist policies. They were also meant to defuse the increasing social tensions and crush the rise of socialism in early 20th Century America (and in particular among the immigrants on the Lower East Side).

The history of the 20th Century, and especially the last several decades in the US, demonstrates the disastrous consequences of the belief that the present economic order can be modified in the interests of the working population. Triangle Fire offers a sympathetic portrayal of the victims of this fire, but the decision to end it so uncritically does a disservice to their memory and the audience’s understanding of the period. One wonders if the right-wing attacks on PBS might not be at least partially responsible for this decision.

The author also recommends:

The dawn of reformism in the US
[27 January 2005] 

Charles Bogle is an arts and cinema critic with the World Socialist Web Site.




Art pro human solidarity: the example of neorealist directors

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Italian neorealism, conceived in Italy during the 1940s and concretised in the immediate postwar, when the nation was still in ruins, by three unique artists, Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti, is a cinema that holds an implacable but poetic mirror to the human condition under the most extreme circumstances. Working with ludicrous budgets by Hollywood standards, often employing non-professional actors, these men let their subjects do the talking and the effect was powerful and memorable. The canvas included all the curses that humanity has harvested from its fall into class-divided society: slavery, feudalism, and now capitalism, the latter ensuring war, pervasive unemployment, poverty, and untold misery for millions.  But the neorealist movement also gave us visions of faith and love, and the need for moral political action, and therefore hope in a future that seems to be increasingly in doubt by the younger generation.  Below we provide two intros to this important cinematic revolution, one by Marty Scorsese, and the other by Tyler Knudsen.  And two examples of neorealist art, as created by Roberto Rossellini, quite probably the leading exponent of this movement, and Vittorio de Sica, another towering figure. —PG


Intro by Martin Scorsese


Intro by Tyler Knudsen

No Film School

This insightful new video essay by Tyler Knudsen (AKA Cinema Tyler) shows how great directors like Visconti, De Sica, and Rossellini ushered in the raw, unfiltered reality of Italian Neorealism. The Italian Neorealist movement was a sister to French New Wave, wherein Italian directors were dealing with the political reality of fascism by showing life as it was lived by ordinary working people. They wanted to show these people grappling with large, sometimes unsolvable problems, sometimes coming from their own lives, and sometimes stemming from larger social structures over which they had no control.

Europa '51 / Roberto Rossellini


The topic of Europa '51 is typical Rossellini: A socialite, Irene (Bergman) loses her young son and the tragedy plunges her into a search for meaning. A communist relative introduces her to the lives of poor people, whom she soon begins to help. Eventually, once clear about what she wants to do with her life, she becomes unable to function in bourgeois society and her increasingly "strange" behaviour prompts her husband and relatives to think she has lost her mind. This is adult cinema, not exactly the kind of movie we could ever expect from an American director. Especially these days of near-total neoliberal escapism and wholesale infantilization.


Bicycle Thieves / Vittorio de Sica


Below, one of De Sica's classics, Bicycle Thieves (1948).

 

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