Friday Full Fare (Reed on Precious, 2.0 + Embodied Cognition + Killer Phones + Free Stuff)

I still haven't seen Precious, Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, though I suppose I'll get around to it eventually. Having read the book, I really have no desire to see the movie, though many people whose opinions I value, including a notable Black filmmaker, have told me not only that Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique (at right, Lucy Nicholson - Reuters), like others in the cast, turn in excellent performances, and I believe them, because Mo'Nique could act her way out of a lead safe, but that they thought the film was very good.

My old prof, Ishmael Reed, isn't having it, nor is he having Hollywood's praise for and hyping of this film, nor, for that matter, producers Tyler Perry and Oprah [Winfrey]. Back in November I mentioned (and updated in December) his full-blast critiques of the movie, and he breaks it down, in much more condensed form, in today's New York Times: "Fade to White." A sampling:

Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme. D. W. Griffith produced a series of movies in which Chinese, Indians and blacks were lifted from savagery through assimilation. A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is “Dangerous Minds,” where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.

Yes sirree.

Any surprise that this film is also high on the Oscar buzz list?
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About three weeks ago while discussing orality and literacy I was trying to make a point in class and reached for a name I usually can utter without pausing--UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff--but what came to mind was a completely different scholar and intellectual, George Landow (the hypertext guru, of Brown University) ["I said Landow when I meant Lakoff" almost sounds like a line from a Michael Palmer poem, doesn't it?], so I offered a verbal ellipsis, to be filled in later, to the class, and proceeded to the next point.

Lakoff is probably best known for his important linguistic insights and, perhaps more widely, for the brief moment of public attention he received when the Democrats, who for a host of reasons, are incapable of sustained effective messaging, turned to him after their 2004 electoral disasters to help craft their appeals to voters. New York Times writer Matt Bai even wrote a longish Times Magazine piece about it. Lakoff's ideas on "framing" incurred some caricatures and ridicules--he wants the Democrats to use special words and phrases to gull people was the gist--but his larger ideas, about how people cognize ideas and why frames are so crucial, how metaphors are embodied, and so on, which in fact would have and should be internalized by every liberal commentator, though they still aren't, got lost in the shuffle. (Cf. "Jobs bill" vs. "stimulus package," "Employment spending" vs. "Deficit growth," etc.) Republican messengers--"death tax," "death panels," "welfare queens," etc.--long ago figured this out.

More stuff + the free joint after the jump!



Despite the dismissals, Lakoff and his predecessors (Goffman, etc.) are onto something, as anyone who has spent any time reading his or similar work, in cognitive science and psychology, linguistics, literary studies, and so forth, might realize. Earlier this week, the New York Times's science writer, Natalie Angier, published an article about "embodied cognition," and the powerful corporeal effect that metaphors in particular--more than just artful figures of speech--have on us. In fact, it's more powerful than you might imagine; the effects are often direct, and physical. To quote:

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time.

As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.

That is, our bodies process--embody--abstractions, involving directionality, temporality, temperature--physically. Or, as Angier notes, none other than William Shakespeare indelibly dramatized it in a way none of us will ever forget: "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" It isn't just thought, but the body itself, that feels and reacts to these metaphorical concepts, which thus have a cognitive and epistemological. (Here's a YouTube video of Lakoff, in a 2008 speech, talking about how we build up a storehouse, by an early age, of physical responses to metaphors, as part of the learning process.)

Angier goes on to discuss several other examples of this, concluding with the point that certain kinds of manual gestures can even help children who're experiencing difficulty grasping arithmetic or geometry. Now to some of the other things lightly weighing on my mind today....

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Did you think we lived in a right-wing paradise from 2001-2008? Did it make you as happy as you ever imagined? If not, here's the real thing: Colorado Springs, the county seat of El Paso County, Colorado, and home to over 414,000 people, has slashed taxes, and consequently services, to a level that even many right-wingers, I would imagine, might find unbearable. How severely curtailed are those services? This severe:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

Good times, good times. But hey, our President thinks a budgetary "spending freeze" during a time of economic crisis is a good idea, so what's a little austerity and suffering--but lower taxes!--among such a considerably smaller group of friends and neighbors?

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Last week I was speaking a colleague whose mind is as sharp and fast as a laser, and somehow or other I got to talking about how I usually find my headphone cable tangled around my arms, wrapped around my gearshaft, or nearly caught in my down coat zipper. That is, it is always threatening to be the death of me, because I am preternaturally clumsy and constantly forget, at an eyeblink, that this white, plastic-covered wired cord, is hanging down the front of my body.

Yet I refuse to stop using it because headphones, for all their potential dangers, strike me as considerably safer than pressing a phone to your ear. It seemed a few years back that many other people had come to grasp this. I can vividly recall reading in the late 1990s about several young executives who died of brain cancer, and there was some speculation about a causal relationship between various kinds of brain and mouth tumors, and cell phone use. Perhaps this was even mentioned in conjunction with the early death of business icon Reginald Lewis (Black history month, look him up). That got me using an earpiece whenever possible, which I briefly traded in for a Bluetooth piece, before opting for the headphones. Then, for whatever reason, people forgot and threw caution to the wind (and who can say what influence the cell phone industry itself has had), and now, it seems, people cannot but press cell phones, tiny glowing electromagnetic powerstations, against their ear whether they're walking down the street, driving in a car, ordering coffee at a cafe, strolling down the aisle at a supermarket, sitting on the toilet.... The 21st Century Cartesian equation is, I talk on my cell phone, thus I am.

But--perhaps we should consider that a cell phone pressed against one's brain isn't risk-free. As in dangerous. When I mentioned this to my colleague, she looked at me and laughed, and I realized I sounded a bit nutty to be so concerned. I continue to think that cell phones pressed against your ear (brain) probably aren't so safe, particularly for children and adolescents. According to the American Cancer Society, the evidence is mixed, though no extended longitudinal studies on cell phone use and cancer correlation exist. Meanwhile, the French and German governments have issued warnings about cell phone use, especially among children. The Telegraph reported last year that a World Health Organization report does identify long-term cell phone usage with a cancer link. And good old GQ notes this month that the evidence is starting to solidify. My colleague thought this last piece was funny stuff. I say, why take the unnecessary risk, when you can get those headphones for almost nothing these day.

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Last but not least, in an earlier incarnation I used to amuse myself by drawing, painting, making books, and such things. (Nothing so clever as this, but I was a peasant child, what did I know?) A few years down the road I even made tiny (as in as small as my fingernail) handsewn books, a few of which are still in my possession (or a drawer in New Jersey). I hadn't made zines in years, though, and don't have a single one of the select few I assembled in those youthful days. But I recently saw an international call for zines, so I decided to assemble with dispatch some of those iPhone transit sketch studies (which is what they are) into a little folio, retitled "Subway Stories," and it turned out okay. I struggled to figure out how to rotate the drawings in MS Word 10.1.1 for OS X Leopard (I used to be able to do this in earlier versions of Word), but C suggested an excellent 2-step solution, so the next version will be a bit different, but more elegant. I will probably make a few more of this first batch, so the first 5 people who let me know in the comments section that they'd like one will receive a signed original free of charge (you can send your address here).





The zine!

Review: Alexander Sokurov's "The Sun"

It is appallingly cold in Chicago, but I nevertheless headed downtown to the Gene Siskel Film Center last night to see a screening of Russian director Alexander Sokurov's remarkable 2005 film The Sun, the third in his tetralogy of films on major historical figures. (The first, Moloch (1999) focused on Adolf Hitler, and the second, Taurus (2000), explored Vladimir Lenin's life; the fourth, I've read online, with treat Goethe's Faust, which perhaps is another way of saying he's shooting a film about Richard Nixon.) The Sun, a 110 minute feature, takes as its protagonist Japanese Emperor Hirohito (Emperor Showa) (1901-1989), narrowing in on his life during the final days of World War II, after the US has dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and begun its conquest of the main Japanese islands. I use the word "narrow" purposely, because Sokurov has produced something other than a biopic and instead, almost in keeping with Hirohito's marine biological preoccupations, focused in almost scientific fashion on the this pivotal historical and social moment, when this living embodiment of tradition and spirituality to his people--a descendent of the Sun God--accepts his country's defeat and renounces his divinity to become, as his wife says, both with bemusement and perhaps a touch of resignation, "a commoner" in the service of preserving what remains of his nation. Throughout Sokurov's treatment is more poetic than verisimilitudinous, though it mostly tracks the factual record, but its manipulation of time, its explorations of the spiritual underlining the human, and its immersion in the mise-en-scène, always chief interests of this director, here seem particularly apt. Hours and days, some of the most important in world history, meld into into indefinable time, almost as one imagines they must have for an emperor-deity existing almost outside of calendars and clocks, yet this same expanded, unreal temporality is punctuated with prosaic elements that underline this figurehead's humanness, even if his humanity is ultimately remains in question. In addition to depicting Hirohito, superlatively inhabited by Issey Ogata--down to what appears to have been the Emperor's strange labial tics, hesitant manner of speaking and almost robotic, ceremonial gait--getting dressed in military finery to meet with his war cabinet, Sokurov also shows him examining a hermit crab specimen, writing haiku, querying the astonished leader of a nearly destroyed scientific institute about the Northern Lights, and clumsily comforting his wife, all signs of apparent normalcy yet all amidst the destructive finale of the war he approved and oversaw.

In a sense, Sokurov's theme is the negotiation between royalty and humanity, between the exalted state and national state of the royal body and personhood (and I think here of Ernst Kantorowicz's famous but perhaps forgotten study of medieval European kingship, The King's Two Bodies), and his lonely human individuality, which Sokurov portrays in all their ironies. As Emperor and God, and living symbol and embodiment of Japan, Hirohito is viewed here by his courtiers and servants, like the Japanese people in general, as almost beyond the corporeal, always apart from them, and yet, as a living figure, they must serve his mundane personal needs, down to buttoning him into shirts, bowing deeply and averting their gaze when he is nearby, and opening and closing doors for him. His own negotiation of his status is a central element of the drama; at one point, he demands to be left alone, to think for himself--and make the momentous decision of capitulation and renunciation--yet his elderly servant is by habit almost unable to let him out of his sight, for fear that he might go a second without being properly attended to. It is a serious but comical moment, one of many in the film. Another comes when he agrees to the American military's demand to be photographed. Stepping outside of the laboratory where he has holed up--the Imperial Palace having been heavily bombed--Sokurov shows Hirohito, wearing neither the elaborate morning (and mourning) suit in which he goes to dine with General MacArthur (Robert Dawson) nor a kimono, but a simple tweed suit, with waistcoat and fedora, uneasily and unassumingly approaching the American military press gang, with none of the imperial pomp that might be expected, before he is directed to stand amidst the roses in the nearby garden. This tiny, bespectacled figure, posing with apparent diffidence and pleasure, leads some of the Americans to suggest that he favors Charlie Chaplin, to which he replies, with a tinge of amusement and to the absolute horror of his chamberlain, "Do I really look like that actor?" The shock of the Japanese around him--and perhaps even today for hardcore imperialists--is palpable. But Sokurov has only shortly before shown Hirohito in his beautifully appointed bunker, gazing consolingly not only through his family photo book, which includes snapshots of Hitler and Chancellor von Hindenburg, but through a picturebook of Hollywood stars, including Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and none other than the "Little Tramp" himself, Chaplin. Later still he claims not to see popular films at all. The effect is, as I've suggested, ironic by many degrees.

Sokurov's further dramatizes the concept of negotiation, in reference to the relationship between the US and Japan, still complex and ongoing. The Americans we see through its GIs and officers, in their crisp khaki, mostly white, mostly full of boisterous cheer, but also brimming at points with disrespect, yet always in full command of this country on which they have leashed the then-ultimate weapon in a successful effort to win a war. Dawson's MacArthur engages in mental games with Hirohito; he orders him around, cuts him off, commands him to eat, and at one point claims to have a pressing appointment, though we see he has secreted himself away to spy on this "childlike" figure, to use his term, who, he also comes to recognize, is a lot smarter and wilier than he'd imagined. (Sokurov shows this as well earlier when, in the meeting with the War Cabinet, Hirohito commands them to fight on, by way of an inscrutable poem written by his grandfather, the Meiji Emperor, which is to say, in essence to the death.) Hirohito in fact does surprise him, and the viewer; when the Japanese-American translator begs him to speak Japanese, as by diplomatic protocol and because of his elevated station, Hirohito nevertheless speaks fluent if somewhat stiff English, noting to MacArthur that he can also speak French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, and a host of other languages, noting at the same time that as the defeated party, he will use the language of the victor. When left alone, he examines the wares in the dining room, before waltzing by himself and peering out on the devastated landscape of Tokyo; this, we gather, he realizes is what he's wrought. As such, he commands if not the viewer's sympathy, then perhaps a modicum of acknowledgement that he is something other than a monster or a buffoon, an empty figurehead or a caricature thereof. Hirohito's sense of his and his nation's severely straitened circumstances, particularly in relation to the USA, are clear on Ogata's mobile face, just as MacArthur's sense of his value are clear on Dawson's. The hierarchy of the victor and vanquished is apparent on one level, yet not so much on another.

One of the most interesting moments in the film to me, and which I haven't seen any other reviewers mention, was the Hirohito's repetition, once as a throwaway comment and later as part of a rant, about one of the causes of the war. As Sokurov presents it, Hirohito carried inside him an ember of rage and resentment at the US's racial and white supremacist policies, particularly California's Racial Exclusion Act of 1924, which barred Japanese immigration, and in the film mentions this early on to an elderly servant, who nods it off, but later, as he is seething about his military's failures, he cites it again, specifically mentioning Japan's support for global brotherhood after the First World War and the Golden State's anti-Japanese legislation and US racism, which provoked the military leadership. I found myself wondering whether this was Sokurov's intervention or one of Hirohito's actual hobbyhorses; in fact I think most Americans would be hard pressed to register any of the specifics the history of anti-Asian prejudice in this country beyond the Japanese internment during World War II and more recent attacks, in the 1990s, let alone grasp that this might have been a historical fuel for World War II. Yet I also had to note the irony, very likely intentional by Sokurov, of this excuse for a war that was already a budding possibility after the failure of Japanese civilian government control of the military in the 1920s and Japan's alliance with the most racist regime that has ever ruled anywhere on earth, the German Nazi Reich, and Japan's own extreme brutality, based in part on a feeling of ethnic and cultural superiority, against its neighboring Asian states, such as China, Korea, and the Phillipines, both before and during the Second World War. Sokurov thus pushes the underlying discourse beyond the usual commonplaces, forcing the viewer to take a more nuanced reading of history from a personal and geopolitical standpoint.

I have said little about the technical aspects of the film, but I should note that despite being shot in digital video, the cinematography is often pristine, with the right amount of color bled from the images to render them vivid yet of the past, and a slight haziness enhancing the otherworldiness of the subject matter. Sokurov's uses of long and close shots, and a static camera, repeatedly capture the at-times sarcophogal atmosphere, the mood, of the Emperor's life, its spatial contours, the mise-en-scène unfolding, like the leaves of a chrysanthemum outwards, towards the wider world of which, we soon realize, Hirohito is very much a part. The slow, stately pacing only enhances this. Breaking what could have been too much visual and temporal gravity, however, are several lyrical and fantastic moments, such as when Hirohito imagines the firebombing of Tokyo, and instead of airplanes, we see fish-bird-like creatures zooming through an animated, fiery space before turning into, becoming bombs. This episode manages to link the Emperor's fascination with the natural world to his poetic sense of time and space, and his achronological existence and his chronotopic perception of the war, while also showing both how out of touch and simultaneously in touch he is. He is shown finally viewing the destruction of Tokyo on his car trip to meet with MacArthur; his has been aware of what has been happening, and yet, we gather, unlike the British royal family during World War II, has been studiously kept away from it. In the end, the viewer leaves without an assured sense that Hirohito has fully gotten what he's presided over; when he is told that the engineer who recorded his surrender speech, broadcast over the radio and marking the first time most Japanese had ever heard his voice, has committed hari-kiri, and he asks his chamberlain if he tried to stop him and is told "No," there is a glimmer of the Emperor's recognition, or perhaps the viewer projects one, of the unspeakable chain of tragedies that have occurred in his name and of the radically changed world to come, before he heads off with his wife, the Empress, to reunite with his children, now returned from safekeeping in the countryside. It is, in the end, a strange and riveting portrait of a man and figurehead who, even today, remains, for intentional and non-intentional reasons, a historical and personal enigma.

White on Precious + College for Fewer + CC Reading + AAWW Awards

I haven't seen Precious yet. I'm torn; on the one hand I feel I ought to see it, and on the other hand...I recall Sapphire's extremely disturbing book, Push, which it took every fiber inside me to get through. (And yet the other night Mariah Carey told Larry King she read it twice. Really? Okay.) I had some issues with the novel, but on the whole I felt the author was telling a story that she felt needed to be told, even if it often felt gut-gnawingly wrenched from deep inside (if not her, then someone else.) The book and film, I recognize, are different. Entertainment titans Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey have gotten behind it, and the kudos from cinetomanes has been strong and sustained. A filmmaker I admire tremendously went to see it last week and tweeted his praise. Yet not everyone is agog over it. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane and New York Magazine's David Edelstein weren't sold. And there's always Armond White, in the New York Press, to challenge the cheering chorus. His review is titled "Pride and Precious," and it is an erupting volcano of critical vehemence. Brotha ain't playing:

SHAME ON TYLER PERRY and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious. After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches. They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious’ con job—even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade. Perry and Winfrey naively treat Precious’ exhibition of ghetto tragedy and female disempowerment as if it were raw truth. It helps contrast and highlight their achievements as black American paradigms—self-respect be damned.

And he continues:

Winfrey, Perry and Daniels make an unholy triumvirate.They come together at some intersection of race exploitation and opportunism. These two media titans—plus one shrewd pathology pimp—use Precious to rework Booker T. Washington’s early 20th-century manifesto Up From Slavery into extreme drama for the new millennium: Up From Incest, Child Abuse,Teenage Pregnancy, Poverty and AIDS. Regardless of its narrative details about class and gender, Precious is an orgy of prurience. All the terrible, depressing (not uplifting) things that happen to 16 year-old Precious recall that memorable All About Eve line, “Everything but the bloodhounds nipping at her rear-end.”

It starts with the opening scene of Precious’ Cinderella fantasy. Tarted up in a boa and gown, walking a red carpet light years away from her tenement reality, Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) sighs, “I wish I had a light-skinned boyfriend with nice hair.” Her ideal smacks of selfhatred—the colorism issue that Daniels exacerbates without exploring. He casts light-skinned actors as kind (schoolteacher Paula Patton, social worker Mariah Carey, nurse Lenny Kravitz and an actual Down syndrome child as Precious’ first-born) and dark-skinned actors as terrors. Sidibe herself is presented as an animal-like stereotype—she’s so obese her face seems bloated into a permanent pout.This is not the breakthrough Todd Solondz achieved in Palindromes where plus-size black actress Sharon Wilkins artfully represented the immensity of an outcast’s misunderstood humanity. Instead, Sidibe’s fancy-dressed daydream looks laughable; poorly photographed, its primary effect is pathetic.

It never lets up. In fact, the final paragraph includes a description that verges on being gratuitously cruel, even as it underlines a critique White has made more than once about other films that appear to traffic in the same toxic brew as this one.

So who knows, I may go see it. Or not. It would be great, however, to see some films and non-"reality" TV shows about middle and working-class and poor people, black, white, latino, asian-american, all races and ethnicities, that did not hinge on stereotypes, pathologies, criminal activity, and the like. Does anyone in Hollywood or New York or elsewhere in the US remember how to make those films anymore? (Or get financing to do so....)

Ishmael Reed mentions Precious in one of his harsh critiques...

UPDATE: Oh my! Reed goes even further, in "The Selling of Precious."

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The United States has shed millions of manufacturing jobs over the last 30 years. Under conservative and neoliberal economic policies, union membership and influence have ebbed dramatically since their heyday half a century ago. Low-skill jobs, in the construction and service sectors, which abounded a decade ago, have evaporated with the national and global economic collapse. Leaders on the right and left are still urging people to "go back to school" for retraining, for jobs that might not be there, in an economic environment that has already seen dramatic structural transformation, and for which college-level study, and the social, political, economic, and cultural capital, and accreditation it brings, have become increasingly necessary. And financially out of reach of more and more students.

So the Chronicle of Higher Education last week asked: Are Too Many Students Going to College?

I thought the question was, How Will Most Students Who Want to Go to College But Aren't Rich Going to Afford to Do So? (When I was a freshman, my total tuition, with room, board and facilities fees, was about $13,150. When I graduated four years later, it was around $16,145. Though I have paid off my student loans, it seemed impossibly exorbitant, especially compared to state universities, like my home one, where a year's tuition was around $3,300-$5,000 over the same period. This upcoming year my undergraduate institution's tuition, with room, board, and facilities fees, will be $48,868. Insane, even if students whose parents earn under a certain amount can essentially attend for almost nothing. My former home state's flagship public university's costs, for 2008-9? $20,600!)

In case you haven't seen it, how people with and without high school educations and college degrees are faring in the current economic environment.

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Also taking place tomorrow, a Cave Canem event:

Angela Jackson & Patricia Spears Jones will be reading at Poets House!

Chicago-based poet Angela Jackson and New York City’s Patricia Spears Jones will read from their work and talk about their literary coming of age in the cities they call home. The Cave Canem Writers Foundation joins Poets House and Northwestern University Press in celebrating the launch of Angela Jackson's new and extraordinary novel Where I Must Go.

Thursday, November 12, 2009
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Poets House
10 River Terrace
New York, NY

Catch it if you're available!

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This weekend the Asian American Writers Workshop will host PAGE TURNER: The Asian American Literary Festival, in New York City. Events begin on Friday, November 13, with a cocktail party and gala dinner that will include special guest and Booker Prize-winner Michael Ondaatje, and the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award legendary Alfre A. Knopf Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Sonny Mehta

A full slate of readings, and the AAWW's 12th Annual Literary Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday, November 14, at the Powerhouse Arena in D.U.M.B.O., Brooklyn, at 37 Main Street.

This year's Asian American Writers Workshop Award winners and finalists:

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Fiction is Jhumpa Lahiri for her short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. The two finalists are Amitav Ghosh for Sea of Poppies and Ed Park for Personal Days.

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Poetry is Sesshu Foster for his collection World Ball Notebook. The two finalists are Monica Ferrell for Beasts for the Chase and Jeffrey Yang for An Aquarium.

The winner of the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Award in Nonfiction is Leslie T. Chang for her book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. The two finalists are Kao Kalia Yang for The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir and Kavitha Rajagopalan for Muslims of The Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West.

Congratulations to the winners and finalists!

Review: The Class

When I read the other morning about President Barack Obama's planned announcement on education, I realized it was as good a prompt as any to post my review of Laurent Cantet's Oscar-nominated film The Class (Entre les murs [literally 'Between the walls']), which despite its French setting explores some of the issues central to contemporary discussions on US public education. Cantet has based his film on a highly praised novel by former teacher, soccer journalist and singer François Bégaudeau, with whom he co-wrote the script, and the film has the feel of documentary truth; in fact, in its adroit use of non-actors, primarily the schoolchildren who populate the film's classes and playgrounds but also some of the teaching staff, and its somewhat grainy, handheld digital high-definition images, it impressively straddles the feature/documentary line. 38 year old writer Bégaudeau also stars in the film as a fictional version of himself: François Marin, a French teacher leading a diverse, packed French class of 14 and 15 year olds. As the French title literally and figuratively suggests, The Class tracks events between the school's walls, and more specifically, in Marin's class and the teacher lounge, over the course of a school year. In fact, except for the opening scene, the film never leaves the school building or grounds. The effect at times is claustrophobic, particularly in the classroom scenes, where the students appear to be stacked on top of each other in their tiny desks, or when they gather for recess on the outdoor asphalt lot which is smaller than a soccer field. Another way to read the title might through the trope of the domestic; the film repeatedly shows both the physical and emotional connections and distances between the faculty and students, putting the viewer in mind of a large, contentious, dysfunctional family, in which communication and understanding occur in alternating measures. Communication and misunderstanding across the figurative family of the school and within a specific family, as it turns out, are central elements of the film's plot.

The Class opens with teacher Marin polishing off a coffee at a tabac across the street from the school and then heading to a first-day meeting of the teaching staff. Old and new teachers introduce themselves, with the veteran staff, which includes Marin, urging the new staff the best. What we see is a mostly middle-class white teaching staff, with a few people of color scattered among them, a narrative fact that will prove key to the film's central theme and plot hinge of miscommunication and disrespect. Then we're in Marin's in the classroom, and the students pour in. They could easily be sitting in a New York public school classroom, though the racial and ethnic mix is specifically metropolitan French: there are Maghrebians, West Africans, Turks, several East Asian students, along with a smattering of white French middle and working-class students. Marin's primary antagonists turn out to be two girls, Esméralda (Esméralda Ouertani) and Khoumba (Rachel Régulier), the second of whom he's taught before, but who has now become intractable. Both girls use his grammar lessons as a scene to hash out personal and larger political issues. For Esméralda, the issue is belonging, or not belonging, in France, and her awareness of her position, expressed in constant challenges to Marin, gathers force throughout the film. For Khoumba, the issues are more diffuse and inexpressible, and Marin cannot grasp or tolerate them. But there are other antagonists, particularly the young men, whose degrees of participation, embodied by the bright and talkative Boubacar (Boubacar Touré) and non-participation, which is most of the boys, bedevil Marin. Among the most problematic is a popular Malian-French student, Souleymane (Franck Keïta), who rarely speaks and just as infrequently completes or turns in his work. The film shows Marin trying to connect with him, even after Souleymane, in a striking moment, tries to clock Marin by asking if he's "gay," but Cantet shows that Marin's view of and approach to dealing with Souleymane, while full of empathy, will not be reduced to this. Amidst all of the problem children, there are a few ideal students, including Marin's favorite, a Chinese immigrant named Wei (Wei Wang), on whom he and the rest of the faculty can heap no few praises. But Wei'spersonal life, like those of all the other students mirrors the various social crises and fractures affecting contemporary France; his father, in France illegally, is sent back to China, and there's great concern about how this will effect the son and the rest of the family.

The French class setting is a brilliant touch, since language is the material and discursive embodiment of any country's history, its society, its culture, its ideals, and its identity. In terms of France, the language also indexes the country's incapacity, at various levels, to fully acknowledge sociopolitical, economic and cultural differences and counternarratives to its sense of itself as a beacon of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. As I watched the struggles in the class, through the language itself, play out, I thought about debates in the US over Ebonics, English-as-a-Second-Language, and testing standards, while also considering the flexibility and pragmatic aspects of English itself. At various points in The Class, we see Marin's or students' questions or arguments over language, such as the use of the highly formal and rarely used French past subjunctive, which Khoumba knows and deploys correctly, to Marin's surprise and disbelief, then disdain, expand into serious arguments over class, race and ethnicity, citizenship and Frenchness. The more casual and colloquial language the students deploy, the language of metropolitan France, butts heads with the textbook French that Morin is trying to teach, that he wields at times, as a vehicle not only of learning, but also of condescension and superiority. For nearly all the students, including the white French students, there appears to be no easy identification with the language of Pierre Corneille and François Molière, André Malraux and Simone de Beauvoir, or the vast array of attitudes, the vast culture, these figures represent: they define themselves and their ideas against this France discursive, by other means and modes, such as religious affiliation, national belonging, racial categorization, or identity categories such as Goth culture. And in the classroom and outside, these forms of identity and identification keep clashing; during a series of in-class talks, students quarrel over the teams in the African Cup of Nations, dividing along national lines (Morocco/Arabs/winners vs. Mali/Black Africans/losers vs. Ivory Coast, whose teams have done well in international competition), which leads to a near fistfight between Malian champion Souleymane and a newcomer, Carl (Carl Nanor), a young Afro-Caribbean student who has been ejected from another school, and who identifies with...France. For Souleymane, the epithet "brother" goes no further than Mali touches Guadeloupe; blackness here fractures like French society itself.

It's appropriate to call The Class a tragedy with a small "t," as the unrelieved conflicts build to a sad but foreshadowed end. At the same time, tragedies of this sort, I imagine, occur all over France and, as we know, all over the United States, the larger tragedy being a national one, as generations of students remain undereducated, their psychological, emotional, economic, and cultural needs unmet, and the country, our country and the world, are the worse for it. In this film's case the triggers are language, naturally enough, and the concept of respect. At a teacher's meeting, the faculty debate the progress of students, and, in a truly French touch, student representatives must be present. In this instance, Marin's antagonist Esméralda happens to be one of them, and displays her utter respect for the teachers through giggling, joking, misremembering comments that will prove explosive when she recounts them later in Marin's class. The next day, Marin, in a bit of pique, tosses off an insult at Esméralda and her fellow conspirator, basically calling them sluts, and this leads to a violent outburst and confrontation with Souleymane, who is determined to preserve their honor. The altercation provokes a trial, but again Cantet mixes things up by having Marin as the chief defender of Souleymane, who, we learn, is in danger of being sent back to Mali by his father if he is thrown out of school. I won't give away the ending, but there are no comic turns here, no deus ex machina, no easy or slick redemptive turns. Marin takes his knocks, as does Souleymane, and the liberal attitudes the teachers may individually hold are no match either for the parents' representatives, the students' proxies or what amounts to the rule of law. When the film ends, as the academic calendar itself reaches its end, the school, Marin fields responses from the class on what they got out of his class, and the responses vary, but one young woman, who has barely uttered a word, her eyes wide with something verging on despair, expresses an anxiety that is redolent of many classrooms across France, the US and elsewhere: she has not learned anything, she says. Nothing. It was all beyond her. And we gather that she'll pass, move up a grade, and then what? Marin has no answers, as film offers none, instead uniting everyone on screen, as a family, even if the various dramas and traumas have not fully healed and what passes for the respect that the faculty and students have reestablished is as a fragile as a very thin pane of glass.

The acting throughout is unmannered and effortless, grounding the film in a realist mode. Bégaudeau inhabits Marin completely, demonstrating more than once that he is neither an angel nor a monster, but utterly human. Nearly as good are Jean-Michel Simonet as the principal, many of the teachers, and Fatoumata Kanté as Souleymane's mother. The performances by the student actors, however, are what set this film apart. All of them are excellent, but particularly noteworthy are Ouertani, Régulier, Keïta, Touré, and Nanor. Keïta is like a silently smoldering volcano, all charm and youthful cool covering a rage that could split an opponent in two, while Nanor smolder like an ember from the moment he hits the screen, his lips pouty and unibrow furrowing, as if it is taking every fibre in him not to punch anyone who crosses him out cold. Ouertani, however, is the revelation. Smart-mouthed, with a breathy voice and a cutting wit, the young actress plays her character as the kind of student many a junior and senior high school teacher may secretly fear, someone whose sense of outrage and justice fuels a contempt that matches a brilliance the teacher hardly expects or wants to deal with ever. All contribute to making the movie one of the best and truest to life I've seen about contemporary public school education. I now wish that an American filmmaker would attempt something along these lines, instead of the endless, soupy features and comedies about the education of the suburban rich and upper-middle-class, or the urban school redemption stories, which are more about the (usually white) teachers and less about the (usually not white) students, that flood our screens. There is a rich and worthy vein of narratives across this country, just awaiting a writer and a director talented enough to tell them.