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The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) posted an interesting Q&A with multimedia artist Sam Durant and documentary filmmaker Sam Green, who discussed 1969 and their work inspired by the Altamont Free Concert. Curator Jenée Misraje mentions my book and asks about the cultural resonance of 1969:

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2009/12/altamont/

I appreciated Misraje’s observation that “Artists, curators and historians have been placing a greater amount of attention to this time in history [1969]” and Durant’s suggestion that “1969 haunts the U.S. more than 1968.”  I especially appreciated their discussion given Carlos Lozada’s recent piece in The Washington Post, in which he argues I had to ”outdo 1968″:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121102590.html?hpid%3Dopinionsbox1

Perhaps for some people, the amazing slew of events from 1969 to which we still look back is not that big a deal. This Post writer seems to imply 1959 was the more momentous year, yet strangely I did not see many 50th anniversary celebrations this past year. 

The quote he cites from my Introduction is presented out of context, but I have a letter into the Post about this…

…also in honor of Thanksgiving, here’s a link to the complete words for Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice Restaurant Massacree,” courtesy of arlo.net:

http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/alices.shtml

Guthrie’s 18 1/2-minute talking-blues classic has become a Thanksgiving day standard. It also inspired the full-length feature film Alice’s Restaurant, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Guthrie himself, which hit screens in 1969.

I examine Alice’s Restaurant, Easy Rider, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in the chapter “Shaking the Cage” from 1969: The Year Everything Changed.

Check out this interactive road trip on Slate from film critic Keith Phipps, who recreates the archetypal journey of Captain America and Buffalo Bill from Ballarat, California to New Orleans, Louisiana in Easy Rider:

http://www.slate.com/id/2235693/

Film director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on Saturday on charges stemming from his fleeing sentencing for a sex crime in the United States in the late 1970s. In 1977, he pled to having unlawful sexual relations with 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. He fled the country before he could be sentenced, however, and U.S. authorities have had a warrant out for him ever since.

Polanski has been living in France and was in Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival, where he was to receive a lifetime achievement award. With advance knowledge of Polanski’s planned attendance, U.S. and Swiss authorities are said to have worked together on an extradition agreement.

Link to story:

 http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/27/zurich.roman.polanski.arrested/index.html?section=cnn_latest

I just read the great new novel, Genesis, from New Zealand author Bernard Beckett. Beckett’s short novel explores a dystopian future world after The Last War.  The last healthy strands of humanity on the island of Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) have closed themselves off from the rest of the world, by way of a massive sea fence and a coordinated attack team that demolishes any approaching refugees from the outside world, which has been ravaged by germ warfare and a global plague.  Anaximander, or “Anax,” the young female historian and applicant to the intimidating ranks of the Academy (the governing body of this new society), outlines this future history though the effective if transparent plot device of her dissertation-like “examination” before three impersonal ajudicators.

The author explores the nature and definition of consciousness and what he puts forth as the four stages of evolution: animals, humans, ideas, and artificial intelligence.  In the world that Beckett (who wrote the book while on a Royal Society genetics fellowship researching genetic mutations) imagines, the Idea emerges as a self-evolving, self-perpetuating phenomenon.  Much like genes, ideas mutate and spread like parasites, using the human mind as host.  Beckett is clearly influenced by the theory of memes.

This element of Genesis reminded me of similar descriptions I came across while conducting research for 1969: The Year Everything Changed.  In its January 3, 1969 issue, Time magazine spoke of a “virus of internal dissent” in describing the ”Protest marches, sit-ins and riots [that had] attacked every kind of structure, society and regime.” Later in the year, Newsweekobserved that newspapers had “started carrying front-page summaries of [campus] building seizures and general disruptions, muh like baseball box scores.”

Meanwhile, in the opening scene of Costa Gavras’s Z, a police leader for the Greek military junta describes Leftist political thought as a “mildew of the mind,” a philosophical disease that must be removed from society. The French-language picture won Best Film honors from the New York Film Critics Circle and was the first film to be nominated for Academy Awards for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture.

While these metaphorical descriptions from 40 years ago comment on the premise that resistance thought is a political virus, Beckett’s imagined world looks at the plague of the Idea from an existential perspective, considering it within notions of creation and consciousness. 

Is humankind defined by its ideas…or controlled by them?  

-Rob

A quick movie recommendation: just saw the brilliant Brazillian film Four Days in September, directed by Bruno Barreto and based on the 1979 memoir O Que É Isso Companheiro? from former political prisoner Fernando Gabeira. The movie stars Alan Arkin as Charles Burke Elbrick, the American ambassador to Brazil who was kidnapped by the revolutionary group MR-8 in Rio de Janeiro in early September 1969.  Although a political thriller, this isn’t cast in the same mold as any number of Tom Clancy-based cinematic adaptations. The revolutionary terrorists who seek to strike blows against Brazil’s military dictatorship provide the sympathetic core of the movie (Pedro Cardoso and Fernanda Torres are really the film’s main protagonists), although the notions of right and wrong with regard to the group’s methods are questioned. In the current geopolitical situation, this is a movie that tells a compelling story while having much to say on the politics of terrorism and torture.

After you watch Four Days in September, check out some other classic entries from the international cinema of insurgency: Costa Gavras’s Z and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, both released in 1969, and of course the classic Battle of Algiers from Gillo Pontecovo.

-Rob

I saw Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen on its first night of release. I rarely care about seeing a movie on its first night; I tell people: “I’m pretty sure they’ll show the same movie tomorrow night.” But knowing and loving the source book as I did, and knowing that studios had been trying - unsuccessfully - to produce a film of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic graphic novel since soon after its release as a 12-part DC comic book series running from September 1986 to October 1987, I didn’t want to miss this premiere. For nearly two decades, it had seemed like a day that would never come.

I was introduced to Watchmen back in the spring of 1988 by Tom DeHaven in his American Studies course at Rutgers University. (DeHaven now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and is also an acclaimed writer of such novels as Funny Papers and, his most recent, It’s Superman!). His course at Rutgers was a fun and eye-opening look at the whole history of American comic strips and books in the 20th century, and reading Watchmen for the first time was a revelation. It’s a brilliant, postmodern tale, deep with subtext and rich in meaning – so much so that Time magazine named it one of the 100 best books of the year, period. And in retrospect, even that seems like faint praise.

One of the achievements of Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen was the ways in which it approached the history of the comic-book superhero in American popular culture. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster forever established the archetype of the superhero with their creation of Superman, who first appeared in the June 1938 debut issue of Action Comics. Last week, the Associated Press reported that a copy of Action Comics #1, of which “only about 100 copies” are known to exist, sold for $317,200 in an action. 

I’ve always thought the concept of superheroes was, well, corny. But seeing Watchmen and revisiting its story has had me thinking about the history of comic-book superheroes and how they are instrinsically American. In fact, they arose directly out of the concept of the American Dream. Both Siegel and Shuster were the sons of Jewish immigrants (Siegel born in Cleveland and Shuster in Toronto). Not coincidentally, Superman himself was an
“immigrant,” a displaced resident of an alien planet. Not only does he assimilate into American culture, he both protects and champions it. Nietzsche’s theories of the Übermensch in the 19th century gave us an early concept of the “super man”…and perhaps the philosophical precursor to Hitler’s visions for an Aryan master race. Just two years before Superman’s debut, Jesse Owens had struck a blow to Hitler’s Aryan mythology at the 1936 Summer Olympic in Berlin. In Superman, America’s immigrants could take pride in Siegel and Shuster’s answer to Hitler, a “Jewish-born” man of unearthly might who fought for the downtrodden. The character of Superman was initially a New Deal superhero of sorts, a left-leaning social activist who fought capitalist greed and corruption. During World War II, though, he became a superpatriot as he and comic-book colleagues Wonder Woman and Captain America helped the Allies defeat the Axis Powers. Following the war, as film noir challenged clean-cut notions of Good vs. Evil, superhero comics would decline in popularity. But they’ve made comebacks again and again as new generations of superheroes and new reimaginations of older ones like Superman and Batman have reflected changing moods and values in American society.

After searching local theaters on moviefone.com the morning of March 6, I found tickets for Watchmen at the Clearview Chelsea Cinemas on West 23rd in New York. I was transfixed as I watched the opening montage – set to Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” – which introduces the alternate-world history of the graphic novel, one in which superheroes really do exist. In this great segment, we watch a progression of superhero history from before World War II to the present day, one that closely mimics the history of comic-book superheroes (and American society as a whole) in our own world: from their role in WW2 as manifestations of American Exceptionalism to Cold War paranoia to fragmentation and deconstruction during the ’60s and ’70s. Watchmen is set in 1985 and follows the second generation of heroes, after the Keane Act that has outlawed them as vigilantes.

I rarely see movies that are based on comic books. I’m not a fan of the Batman films, never had a serious urge to see any of the Spiderman movies, and forget about The Hulk. I think there’s an inherent problem in trying to make a movie out of a comic book. As DeHaven observed in his course, by the very nature of a comic strip or book, each panel is frozen in time – the action takes place in between the panels. So it strikes me that in making a film out of a comic, you kill it at the same time. But the Watchmen trailer had me looking forward to the film; it sure looked like they had gotten it right.

Since watching the movie, I’ve been astounded by some of the bad reviews. The Washington Post declared, “Watchmen is a bore.” New York Magazine went one further: “The movie is embalmed.” The Hollywood Reporter smugly quipped, “Looks like we have the first real flop of 2009.”

Watchmen is not a perfect movie, but neither is it a bore.  As a film, not to mention one that took on the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, it’s a remarkable achievement. And at a length of 2:43, only at the end does the film seem to drag at all. Actually, Snyder (Dawn of the Dead, 300) somewhat drops the ball at the end, failing to fully represent the acopalyptic ending of the book. On the other hand, the depiction of Dr. Manhattan (the godlike character created by an accident at a nuclear research center) is one of the biggest triumphs in modern computer imaging in film. Malin Akerman is stunning and sexy as Silk Spectre II – the mutual love interest of Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl II (a close cousin to our Batman, played by Patrick Wilson), and Jackie Earle Harley – Kelly in the original Bad News Bears movies - is great as the enigmatic Rorschach.

Ironically, I’ve read that people who had read the book liked the movie more than those who didn’t; one would expect those who brought high expectations to be the film’s harshest critics. But speaking as a fan of the book, I have to admire what Snyder did with his adaptation.

Four out of five stars.

-Rob