Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JIMMY P. PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN – PSYCHOTH2RAPIE D’UN INDIEN DES PLAINES – ARNAUD DESPLECHIN – 2013

Based on a true story, this film is a documentary fiction. A Blackfoot Indian who has fought in France in the Second World War and had had an accident there that let him comatose for a couple of days experiences great behavior disorder when back I n the USA. He is treated in Topeka, Kansas, as a veteran and they come to the conclusion that there is nothing physiologically wrong with him and at the same time the diagnosis that comes next, that of schizophrenia, does not accommodate all the symptoms. The boss of this military hospital knows a French anthropologist, trained as a psychoanalyst, in New York and he invites him for a couple of consultations with the patient. From a couple it will lead to a few dozens if not more, one a day for a rather long period.

At the time psychoanalysis could only look for personal disorders at the sexual level having to do with parents, infancy, childhood, and then women (for men). The case concentrates on women and the patient finds some relief in that approach. This is very interesting how the anthropologist who is a specialist of come North American Indians, the Mojave actually, uses his knowledge of Indian culture and one language to build some trust between him and the Indian and on the basis of that trust he is able to penetrate the private life and mind of the Indian. But he does not really use the understanding of Indian culture to see what is shown in the film but not exploited at all, the fact that the Indians are systematically negated in their culture by all kinds of institutions. We can see in the film the fact that this military hospital for veterans does not have one Indian nurse or doctor able to understand the alienation of Indians in white society. Then you have the daughter of the Indian who is in the hands of catholic nuns for her education. Then you could speak of the way these Indians dress in the most white American way possible, with ties, shirts, suits, and the girls the very same way with scarves, dresses, etc. Hair cuts are standard north American.

At the same time this Indian cannot get money at the post office or the bank without a good Caucasian (not North American since the French doctor is able to do it) signing for him. A white nurse tells the Indian a tall tale one day in another hospital where he is supposed to go through special tests, and she cannot in any way ignore that what she is telling him is B.S. And even the French doctor who was called in because he was an anthropologist who had spent two years with the Mojave Indians, at the end, asserts that he did not help the Indian because he was an Indian but because he was suffering. In other words he negates his own expertise. And that is justified in his mind because he did think his expertise was not with Indian culture (that was only a means to build trust) but psychoanalysis. He even, early in the film, creates some blurred situation when he advocates the typically French godless secular philosophy to an Indian who declares himself a Catholic though he knows about old Indian religions that he has “rejected” under the influence of course, but not of alcohol this time. It is also called duress.

The problem we are dealing with here is Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome of American Indians who have been vastly exterminated, then locked up in reservations under rules that forced them to drop their cultures, their dances and their languages, to get educated and integrated in the American society, language, culture and all. What is the intention of Arnaud Desplechin? To remain as close as possible to the way the case was treated at the time? Maybe but naïve since the audience cannot sort out the real stake here. Yet it is surprising he does not use what has become standard today over the last ten years. It is called the decolonization of the mind. He only shows how the Indian mind is colonized and never questions his psychoanalytical approach that makes the syndrome the result of personal sexual problems.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

UN FILM SURPRENANT PLUS QU’ÉMOUVANT.

Il s’agit d’une histoire réelle, et le film est donc une fiction documentaire ( Ne dit-on pas bio fiction ?). Un Indien Blackfoot qui a combattu en France pendant la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale et a subi là un accident qui l’a laissé dans le coma pendant une paire de jours est la victime de troubles comportementaux graves après son retour aux USA. Il est traité, en tant qu’ancien combattant, à l’hôpital militaire de Topeka au Kansas. Les docteurs ne trouvent aucun trouble physiologique et il est donc un malade en excellente santé. Le diagnostic suivant de schizophrénie ne correspond pas à tous les symptômes. C’est alors que le directeur de cet hôpital qui connaît un anthropologue français à New York qui a passé deux ans chez les Indiens Mojave et a une formation de psychanalyste, fait appel à ce docteur pour une paire de consultations qui deviendront rapidement une consultation par jour pendant une longue période.

A l’époque la psychanalyse en était encore à vouloir tout expliquer au niveau sexuel et donc en faisant référence à l’enfance, les parents, la jeunesse et bien sûr les femmes (pour les hommes). Le cas se concentre donc sur les femmes et le patient trouve quelque soulagement dans cette approche. Le plus intéressant cependant est comment l’anthropologue utilise sa connaissance de la culture indienne et d’une langue indienne pour établir un climat de confiance entre lui et l’Indien en remontant au nom indien de l’Indien par exemple, et sur la base de cette confiance il est capable de pénétrer la vie privée personnelle de l’Indien. Mais il n’utilise en rien sa connaissance de la culture indienne pour comprendre ce que le film montre partiellement sans jamais l’exploiter, le fait que les Indiens ont vu et voient encore leur culture être niée par d’innombrables institutions. L’hôpital militaire n’a aucun infirmier ou docteur d’origine indienne qui puisse comprendre l’aliénation des Indiens dans la société blanche. La fille de l’Indien est entre les mains de religieuses catholiques pour son éducation. Les Indiens s’habillent à l’américaine avec cravates, chemises, costumes et les femmes avec robes et chemisiers. Les coupes de cheveux sont américaines. Il n’y a pas un seul élément indien dans ce que l’on nous montre.

D’un autre côté l’Indien ne peut pas retirer de l’argent de son propre compte à la banque ou à la poste sans avoir la signature d’un blanc (même pas d’un Américain puisque le docteur français peut le faire). Une infirmière blanche affirme une absurdité à l’Indien dans un autre hôpital où il est sensé subir des examens et il est absolument inconcevable qu’elle ne puisse pas savoir que ce qu’elle affirme est un mensonge éhonté. Et même le docteur français, à la fin du film, ose affirmer qu’il n’a pas aidé l’Indien parce qu’il était Indien mais parce qu’il souffrait. On ne voit alors pas pourquoi on a fait appel à un anthropologue avec deux ans d’expérience directe des indiens Mojave. Lui-même ne pense pas que cette expertise ne lui ai été autre chose qu’un moyen de pénétrer et mettre en confiance l’Indien. Son absence de compréhension le pousse même au début à causer un trouble chez l’Indien qui ne se révèlera que beaucoup plus tard en défendant la bonne vielle positon française laïque et sans dieu à cet Indien qui se définit comme catholique et qui sait qu’il y a des religions indiennes anciennes qu’il a « abandonnées » sous influence bien sûr, mais pas de l’alcool cette fois. On pourrait dire « sous pression ».

Le problème que nous considérons ici s’appelle le Syndrome du Stress Post Traumatique des Indiens qui ont été largement exterminés, puis ont été enfermés dans des réserves et ont été soumis à des règles qui posaient le rejet et l’interdiction des cultures, des danses, des langues indiennes et imposaient l’éducation américaine pour s’intégrer à la société blanche, donc la totale déculturation indienne et la totale acculturation caucasienne et américaine. Quelle est alors l’intention d’Arnaud Desplechin ? Rester aussi près que possible de la façon dont la cas a été traité à l’époque ? Peut-être. Mais cela est bien naïf puisque le public ne peut pas comprendre les véritables enjeux si on ne les lui explique pas. Cela est d’autant plus surprenant que ce dont je parle ici est devenu tout à fait standard depuis cinq à dix ans, sans parler du Mouvement des Indiens d’Amérique créé en 1969 et qui se bat depuis cette date pour la reconquête des cultures, des langues, des danses, des terres indiennes. On appelle cela la décolonisation des esprits ou mentale. Desplechin ne montre que comment l’esprit indien est colonisé sans jamais remettre en question l’approche psychanalytique qui attribue le syndrome dont nous parlons aux seuls dérèglements sexuels de l’individu.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MUSIC IS THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM OF HUMAN CULTURE (a critical approach of the ECM, A Cultural Archaeology exhibition)

http://synopsispaie.academia.edu/JacquesCoulardeau/Papers#add

The music we are given here is typical of a trend that may destroy diversity, that may become a norm managing music at some global level. Jazz is a style, or even a genre that implies any musical object can be dealt with along this style. John Steinbeck reported a long time ago his answer to a question someone asked him in the USSR about jazz. He answered that you can take Any musical piece of any tradition and you just produces it in a jazzy way and you have jazz. This is genetically modified music and you import into any music that genetic element called jazz. But then the original music is no longer what it was originally. In our days of genuine fidelity to what the music was or is in its real context, this rewriting of everything in a jazz style is homogenizing.

What’s more, as we are going to see, it is one criticism the musicians of this ECM label leveled at what jazz had become in the consumer’s society: a commodity, nearly elevator music. The danger in jazz is that it becomes, is becoming, always and systematically a standard often questioned and even rejected by some but to be replaced by another standard. It is obvious with these CDs that improvisation is non-existent since the music is recorded. They may be the recordings of improvised pieces but as soon as they are recorded they are no longer improvised. That’s where the DVD would be a better medium because then we would see the improvisation, not live but dead alive if I dare say so. On a CD it is necessarily dead by dissection.

Location: Olliergues, France

More Info: ECM A CULTURAL ARCHAEOLOGY – OKWUI ENWEZOR & MARKUS MÜLLER, eds. – PRESTEL VERLAG, MUNICH – LONDON – NEW YORK – 2012, catalogue of the ECM, A Cultural Archaeology exhibition, Haus der Kunst, Munchen, November 23, 2012 – February 10, 2013,

Publisher: Editions La Dondaine

Publication Date: Sep 28, 2013

Research Interests:

Music As the Core of Human Intelligence, Human Intelligence and Art, Brain - Mind Speed of Development, Brain Versus Mind, Hardware - Software Speed of Development, Second Industrial Revolution, Postmodernism, Free at Last, I Have a Dream Speech, Martin Luther King Jr., Improvisation,Jazz and Black Music, Free Jazz, Jazz, and Music

SELECTED SIGNS – III-VIII – AN ANTHOLOGY FOR THE EXHIBITION ECM – A CULTURAL ARCHAEOLOGY – HAUS DER KUNST – MUNICH – ECM Records GmbH – MUNCHEN – 2013

The music we are given here is typical of a trend that may destroy diversity, that may become a norm managing music at some global level. Jazz is a style, or even a genre that implies any musical object can be dealt with along this style. John Steinbeck reported a long time ago his answer to a question someone asked him in the USSR about jazz. He answered that you can take Any musical piece of any tradition and you just produces it in a jazzy way and you have jazz. This is genetically modified music and you import into any music that genetic element called jazz. But then the original music is no longer what it was originally. In our days of genuine fidelity to what the music was or is in its real context, this rewriting of everything in a jazz style is homogenizing.

What’s more, as we are going to see, it is one criticism the musicians of this ECM label leveled at what jazz had become in the consumer’s society: a commodity, nearly elevator music. The danger in jazz is that it becomes, is becoming, always and systematically a standard often questioned and even rejected by some but to be replaced by another standard. It is obvious with these CDs that improvisation is non-existent since the music is recorded. They may be the recordings of improvised pieces but as soon as they are recorded they are no longer improvised. That’s where the DVD would be a better medium because then we would see the improvisation, not live but dead alive if I dare say so. On a CD it is necessarily dead by dissection.

I say it is a danger in that procedure, but in these CDs many pieces are really original in tone or in treatment of the musical objects. But yet the trio or the quartet is a form that comes back over and over again. Such small “bands” were invented (in fact borrowed even if not consciously) by jazz because of the small places where they could perform, like churches, and because that Jazz was born in the poorest strata of the poorest class of the American society: the Blacks just after slavery and in the midst of segregation. It was practically clandestine at the time, if not outlawed by authorities and rejected by the white majority as degenerate, like the Black monkeys who were playing it. After a while, when listening to the CDs I seem to regret the absence of variations in these three or four musicians and the rather regular processing we have: the cult of the solo part in the middle of a piece. Rare are the real duets in these records, and when a real duet appears, it is a marvelous moment. Such moments could and should be multiplied.

The tendency of a chaotic architecture in many pieces is not a real challenge to the rather dominant formal elements. Chaos is interesting in many ways but it has to get to some kind of pattern to be meaningful, and that is not always true. Then we have the trumpet for the sake of the trumpet, or the double bass for the sake of the double bass. As Picasso would say, when you only use one color to paint with no real shape or form, then you just paint blue. Many pieces are just that. They play trumpet, or saxophone, or double bass, or drums, with rhythmic patterns that are basically always similar. To have several rhythmic patterns superimposed one onto the other can only lead for us to some beauty if the patterns build together a higher meta-pattern. We are too often missing that meta-level when we do not have the traditional patterns.

I am all for the use of Bach’s or Mozart’s or Shostakovich’s music in jazz. But it has to be clearly said it is variations on Bach’s music and not Bach’s music. Many musicians have done that over the centuries, used the music of someone else, but they never pretended it was that music of someone else. Actually we cannot even know if it is the real score of the original music performed in a new jazzy way or if it is a set of variations on the original score.

I have heard some Vivaldi violin piece played in the typical gypsy or fiddler on the roof style. It was impressive but it was not Vivaldi any more because Vivaldi never thought of his music being played that way. Ivry Gitlis performed that particular “improvisation” in La Chaise-Dieu as an encore at the end of a Vivaldi concert in which he had been the violin soloist. Ivry Gitlis can afford that originality in an encore but that would be very questionable if a whole Vivaldi concert were performed that way. Anyway it would not be Vivaldi any more but (and I DO NOT say only) variations on some scores by Vivaldi.

In other words and to conclude this general remark, I find it hard at times, and even quite a few times, to capture e meaning in the music we are given and when the words or the music of someone else are used, there is always an iconoclastic approach that bothers me: Blake is not used to the full meaning of his poetry. Henry Vaughan is reduced to little. The words of Heiner Müller or Bertolt Brecht are interesting but they are given as such, with little change, and that is respectful of the words and their authors. This does not concern the style in which they are read or performed, which is the responsibility of the director who is free to have the words produced the way he wants, but if he cuts them then it is no longer the original author. Zeffirelli has cut short the opening poem of Romeo and Juliet in his film adaptation (1968) but he did not cut one word out of the “pilgrim’s sonnet” tough it has two lines too many.

More and more we see “adaptations” of plays or music works without any mention of the fact it is an adaptation, as Romeo and Juliet with only two actors could be attributed to Shakespeare. Somewhere I tend to believe this is cheating on the real work. Somewhere there is a lack of authenticity. If one wants to produce a Hallelujah it is not mandatory to use Handel’s music. Too often we are given variations on a plagiarized classic musical work. It is fine with me but what does it bring as for a new meaning? They may say the meaning is in the pleasure. Is there any pleasure when you recognize the plagiarized work and necessarily compare the variations with the original? Pleasure can only come – for me at least – from a really and authentically original work.

I have had the privilege of watching in 2003 a performance of Berlioz’s Requiem with the supplementary brass performers making believe they were playing (that was in 2003 during a harsh social movement of intermittent performing artists in France) but President Giscard d’Estaing who was present for that performance was clear when he said in the cocktail after the concert that at last he had watched a performance of this Requiem in which the brass instruments did not crush the whole work. You cannot dupe someone who has a culture. […]

Dt Jacques COULARDEAU

ECM A CULTURAL ARCHAEOLOGY – OKWUI ENWEZOR & MARKUS MÜLLER, eds. – PRESTEL VERLAG, MUNICH – LONDON – NEW YORK – 2012, catalogue of the ECM, A Cultural Archaeology exhibition, Haus der Kunst, Munchen, November 23, 2012 – February 10, 2013, http://www.hausderkunst.de/index.php?id=132&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=1624&L=1

The first thing we have to say about the catalogue is to enthusiastically mention the extremely rich iconography. Hundreds of pictures from the time of birth of the company to today. This gives a visual dimension to the catalogue of an exhibition about a music firm, hence an auditory firm that could have at best produced audio-visual products. Their business was recording musicians and music. That rich inside iconography is a great idea.

The second thing is that this catalogue is a luxury product (though easily accessible on Amazon and other virtual vendors) that can be an enhancement for a personal library but also a coffee table book for businesses dealing with music and of course a reference book in any musical library, or the department dedicated to music in any library. Yet there might be a problem here because of the digitalization of libraries in the world. I am not sure this catalogue, if digitalized, would be easy to use and pleasant to read on a computer screen because of the size of it which is in no way adapted to a computer screen. Some might say a book is still an object and its virtualization by digitalizing it is not to be considered as a priority. I am afraid digitalizing books has to be taken into account today, and what’s more portable tablets or smart phones are becoming the rule and the book has to be in the size of the screen, one way or the other, vertically or horizontally.

This point is not targeting this particular catalogue, but the fact that in many museums and exhibitions it has not yet been taken into account that communication is no longer what it used to be. The audio guide in a museum that is giving explanation as you go is good but expensive when a simple smart phone could get the same program, with images and hence visual orientation, and yet contained within the limits of the museum by some kind of protection. It would be really better to invest on 3D virtual visits for people who cannot come, or for people who want to have an idea about what they may encounter in this or that museum than on artifacts like printed catalogues that cannot reach the wide public of the world. The world is changing and any cultural product, artifact, heritage or creative work has to be available to the whole public in the world, which does not mean for no cost, but freely accessible within clear protection of the intellectual property concerned.

Note the site of the Haus der Kunst has a slide show about the exhibition. That’s a good beginning. Then move towards a 3D video rendition of one or two rooms, if not all, of the exhibition. That would be creative.

We are far from that still.

Now what about this exhibition and the catalogue?

This catalogue tries to explore the “important legacy of the twentieth-century cultural accomplishment” (page 50) that ECM may represent. It was founded in 1969 and it is very precisely situated in the vast movement of the 1960s with here and there, but not systematically, a widening of this period to what preceded, in fact the period from 1945 onwards. Then this project contained in ECM and coming from its founder Manfred Eicher is considered as a turning point in jazz music for various reasons we are going to consider here. Three are given as the three interpretation of the title of Waldron’s 1969 album “Free at Last.”

First the rejection of consumer’s society in which the jazz musician is antagonistic to the commodity form that has brought jazz to its own death by succumbing to commercialization. It considers then Jazz has been frozen into a commercial mould, meaning a form that enables the music to sell in the public, to make a profit. This is implied to be the only interest of the people who possess the means of production of this music on sellable media and this is antagonistic to the people who possess the product itself, the music then. Eicher proposes then “the credo of the relationship between producer and musician” that has to be “cemented” by working with a producer who believes in this freedom from commodified forms.

The second meaning is the fact that this new practice of jazz is based on the radical form of improvisation, “improvisation and group dynamics” being the two sides of this new approach though it is important to keep in mind that “free jazz does not mean complete anarchy or disorganized sound. In my vocabulary disorganized sound still means noise. And don’t forget that the definition of music is organized sound” in Waldron’s own words. But his formulation is clear: it means anarchy, even if not complete anarchy. Then it means some disorganization even if not complete disorganization.

The third meaning is the reference to the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King and the 1963 demonstration in Washington DC and the speech “I have a dream” that ends with the sentence:

“Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

It is surprising to see that reference in third position. I cannot see how Black musicians could not be fully part of this struggle for civil rights and how this objective could NOT be the first and upmost perspective in their life and creative work. This is slightly distorted from this period. Jazz was originally Black. It became commodified when it stopped being only performed for a poor, segregated Black audience and when it became a music that was reaching out for the whites thanks to the radio and the presence of jazz on this medium. Jazz became what it is today, what it was in the 60s thanks to the emergence of the radio in the 1920s, after the First World War. But we come here to another point I will develop later.

What is happening after 1945 is not entirely identified when it is reduced to an epistemological change or transformation. In the 1960s “political, cultural, artistic and intellectual changes” are taking place, but that is not enough. It reduces the transformation of this period to altogether only mental, abstract, non material and even ideological elements. In the same way it is not enough to speak of the revolutions in the third world, the fall of colonial empires and decolonization to characterize the post WWII period. We miss something if we do not speak of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 that sent a wave of panic in the USA, the Korean war and the Indochina war, the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the Algerian war that will produce doubt and even fear in France, and the emergence of the important nouvelle vague that is nothing but the result of the failure of modern culture to prevent all the catastrophes starting in 1914. One word has to be brought up here: we have entered a “post-modern” period, a word I have not seen exploited in this catalogue. In fact we entered it just some time before WWII when the socialists in France let the Spanish Republic die in 1938, and when Stalin started in 1936 having thousands of people expurgated just the same way Hitler had similar numbers deported and executed.

This is reflected in Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech when he speaks of “God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” and does not mention the Buddhists (including the Chinese), the Hindus (including the Indians) and the Muslims (including the Arabs, the Indonesians, the Iranians, the Pakistanis, etc). Why wasn’t King more inclusive though a certain Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam or Black Muslims already existed? And I will not mention the absence of the communists, the socialists and the capitalists? These absences are significant and meaningful. And that is the melting pot that produced the 1968 mental and material revolution as well as the tremendous cultural upheaval and boiling over that started with the Hippies of Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair or Fritz the Cat, and was to develop for decades avec Woodstock and is still developing, though we have reached a new stage in this movement. […]

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

THE GREAT GATSBY – 1974

To really understand this film, or the novel behind, you have to keep in mind the alternative story that D.H. Lawrence tells us in Women in Love. In the same way we are dealing with love in the upper class of the very rich  before the First World War and then after before the big crisis of 1929. I will not compare the two here but the two films also came out in the same period, the early 1970s after the 1968 political and generational crisis. They both carry the denunciation of the upper class.

We are telling the story from an outside point of view but yet close to the protagonists. The story teller, Mr. Nick Carraway, is a neighbor of Mr. Jay Gatsby and a bond seller in Wall Street, New York. Nothing to do with present time golden boys, the traders in Brokerage firms. Well-off but definitely not rich and anyway with no rich parents. Yet he is the cousin of another woman who is from an extremely rich family, married to an extremely rich man. Gatsby is the black sheep in the neighborhood.

He is from an extremely poor family. He managed to get an Oxford education after 1918 because he became an officer and was heavily decorated during the war and he then took advantage of veterans’ privileges. He had also the chance to fall in the hands of a certain Meyer Wolfsheim who introduced him to business, though we are never told what that business really is. We can imagine, due to the speed with which he became rich (less than eight years) that it had to be in some financial speculation in the 1920s. That period is clearly identified with the paraphernalia of the time and with the music, including the dancing, including the famous song Charleston. Note that Jay might not be a real first name, but an initial and that the name Gatsby is not the real name of the man who was the son of  a certain Mr. Gatz we see at the end. Note too that the name Wolfsheim is of course meaningful and the main principle of this man is “we can be a friend of a man when he is alive, but not when he is dead.”

At the end of WWI, Jay Gatsby, alias Major Gatz, fell in love with Daisy, a rich girl. But he was a poor man. She fell in love with him on a short-lived whim and he fell in love with her forever. But a rich girl does not marry a poor boy, as she says so well. So he disappears to build a fortune and she got married to a rich boy and became Mrs. Daisy Buchanan.  She had promised to wait but rich girls never wait.

When he is finally rich he manages to get close to her and then to be introduced to her by her cousin, Nick Carraway, and before he had tried to attract her attention by having enormous garden parties every week end in that summer of 1926 or 1927. She eventually falls in the trap.

The rest is to be discovered in the film, or the book.

The morality, bad word, the immorality of this film is that in spite of the American Dream, rich people attract and mix with rich people and poor people can only eventually be accepted when they are rich. The second lesson is that rich people with a rich pedigree can always manage to get through any crime or accident or whatever particularly by pointing at another of their class but that does not have the rich pedigree they have. This immorality can even be worse: rich men can have as many poor mistresses they will furnish with some luxury as much, and as many, as they want or can afford. But a rich woman is not supposed to have any affair with a rich man of any sort, and she will not condescend to have an affair with a poor man. It would not be in anyway anything but a short and exciting sexual episode that would be doomed even before it starts, and like the praying mantis she would destroy the poor lover after using it.

In other words a woman is the property of her husband but in no way the husband is the property of his wife, and social inequality is absolute in the USA, just like in Great Britain, in the 1920s just the way Henry James described it in his novels more than thirty years before. Nothing has changed.

The narrator is able to express this immorality and that is the only moral element in this film, and novel. Morality is on the side here of the upper middle class, and a lower stratum in that upper middle class. That means there may be some hope for such a society that is doomed because the rich do not care for their neighbors in all the meanings of this word. They only care for their money and the gossips that can be aired around them about them.

This older film shows these elements with great care but at the same time it is obvious Jay Gatsby is not natural as a rich man. He is not able to play the game properly: he is awkward, he is shy, he is inconsiderate in his presents and in his lavish help he may give to someone who is trying to make him realize one of his intentions or desires. One hundred white roses are not even enough in such a situation and he very well may send one thousand. The dialogue is good too in the fact that Jay Gatsby is the only one who has a linguistic idiosyncratic tick and he calls every man “old sport” and such an Oxfordian tic shows in him a rather recent integration in the class of the super rich: he cuts a role, a character, a behavior and sticks to it: he believes in a way the tuxedo makes the money aristocrat. And he is wrong: the money aristocrat is in the careless and nonchalant way he wears the tuxedo and that cannot be imitated.

All together a beautiful but cruel film on the egocentric selfishness of the super rich born super rich.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

SYLVESTER STALLONE – KURT RUSSELL – TANGO 1 CASH – 1989

A small film to just laugh at the naïveté and superficiality of action films. But it is a good think to laugh from time to time. The only serious thing is that the police in Los Angeles, LAPD as well as FBI, is rotten to the core of the core, the heart of the heart, soul, mind and brain, and even probably the tripe and the gut. But that is no secret and it is not close to changing in the near future.

The two cops are heroes, then framed, then thrown into prison among the criminals they have managed to send to prison, then they escape, then they clean themselves up and destroy a whole drug cartel, and finally they are heroes again.

The action is both spectacular and not too expensive. It is a film for teenagers, teeny boppers if I can say so, in the summer or something like that. Parents can sleep peacefully, there is nothing that can be seen as or said to be in anyway off the straight line of don’t ask don’t tell don’t say don’t do and any other don’t you may think of.

Enjoy the trip into mentally-challenged Hollywood productions, where big wheels means little brains

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MATT DAMON – HEATH LEDGER – THE BROTHERS GRIMM – 2005

A very funny film which is nothing but a patchwork of Grimm characters and Grimm fairy tales, all mixed up and all crisscrossed together with some unavoidable details or situations, though there is no kissing of frogs, yet a little bit of licking a toad, and of course the kissing of a princess who is a witch and yet a princess and finally the kissing of a Grimm brother by the witch princess, or is it Veronica, and all that works.

Nature is totally crazy with walking trees, burning forests and magic towers in the middle of a bewitched country. The Grimm Brothers are nothing but perambulating crooks that make believe they can kill or capture witches and other wizards and free villages of all the bad demons they can imagine. There are so many suckers in this world that the Grimm brothers or their modern equivalents can make a fortune and at the same time have great fun. Walt Disney or Miramax are the least offensive ones among those.

But nothing is simple in Germany in 1811 under the occupation of Napoleon’s troops. The frogs are no longer the jumping neobatrachias we enjoy in ponds and other lakes, but these strange human beings wearing tricolor feathers on their heads and advocating the non existence of fairies, witches and other supernatural beings inhabiting the minds of superstitious simple minded people. They are not afraid of what does not exist though they are ready to fight a real battle against that haunted forest.

The Frenchies have also brought with them snails and they use them to torture good Germans who cannot stand snails of course, whereas Frenchies are eating them, generally cooked in some tomato stew. There are all kinds of tastes in this world but Frenchies sure have the most surprising – and disgusting – ones.

Entertaining and never really humdrum because of the innumerable distortions performed on the tales we know they introduce at every single moment of the story. And they destroy the witch who believes she is the most beautiful girl in the world since her mirror is telling her so with the typical action dictated by the simple logic of a child: break her mirror and she will be shattered into smithereens.

And then they can be happy finally like good boys and good girls and we will not speak of the children they will make because after all we are working for a family audience and in a world where marriage is for everyone and not only for those who can collect little babies in lilies or whatever other flower or accept babies delivered to them by some storks. Let the others adopt some orphans.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

THE END OF POVERTY? THINK AGAIN – © 2008 – DVD 2010

You do need to think again, Mr Producer and general audience. The film was produced in 2008, before the present crisis that started in 2009 and the discourse it contains is typical of that older period. Everything today has to be rethought again and again.

The film is spectacular in pictures and figures about poverty in the world but we have to be careful with these figures at times because they are spectacular but just an unfairly misrepresentation of reality. One example. It is said that the number of extremely poor people increased from 434 million in 1970 to 854 million today. This is spectacular indeed absolutely un-objective. “Today” means nothing. The DVD was copyrighted in 2010 but the film itself was copyrighted in 2008. Which date is the right one? I will then compare these figures with the world population in 1970 and in 2008 to be honest, not 2010. In 1970 the number of extreme poor people represented 11.76% of the world’s population and in 2008 it represented 12.74% of the world’s population. It did increase but a lot less spectacularly. What’s more to consider that people who have to live with less than one dollar a day as being extremely poor means little. When I was in Sri Lanka in 2005 the world UN Conference on poverty was being prepared and in Sri Lanka they did insist on the common opinion in third world countries at the time: one dollar is a lot in a village away from any big city and it is really nothing in the slums of one capital city, both in Africa. Most of the daily resources of people living in a far away agricultural area are not monetary resources and it is extremely important to know how they are evaluated into monetary terms. They should be evaluated in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) that is absolutely different in a village in Masai country in Kenya and in the slums of the capital city Nairobi. You can easily see it if you observe an agricultural zone in Sri Lanka and Colombo, the capital city.

This spectacular use of figures is irritating after a while because we know it is absurd. What I have just said is also true in western countries. Life in a village in the mountains is a lot cheaper than life in a capital city, and what’s more you may have a garden in a village. You won’t have one in a capital city (it is exceptional to have a garden there). You may raise a couple of rabbits or chicken in a village. You won’t in a capital city if you live in an apartment block of any type for one example.

The 1492 date is fetishized. In fact it is one side of the picture. Before that date the center of maritime commerce was the Indian Ocean up to 1433, when Admiral Zheng He died and the Chinese government taken over by the Confucian mandarins banned maritime voyage and commerce. China up to 1433 was the essential player there irrigating the whole rim of that ocean with commerce and exchanges. The Portuguese had it easy when they arrived later on since they found the Indian Ocean practically deserted since the main actor in that ocean had been absent for more than two thirds of a century. I would consider 1433 as being the real turning point in the commercial architecture of the world. That does not change the fact that 1492 was the turning point in Western Europe from an entirely closed continent after the mishaps in the Middle East and the Crusades, not to speak of the Black Death plague, to an open continent initially towards the Indies, hence the Indian Ocean, and by accident towards the Americas.

Then the film is clear about the horror of this colonization but it is very frigid about details, hence once again it is spectacular about slave trade and slavery, but it is a lot less spectacular about the extermination of Indians in Mexico and in Northern America, not to speak of the West Indies. It appeals to some kind of romantic acceptation of the barbarity of European colonizers, though it is essentially if not only speaking of the Spaniards, and eventually the Portuguese. In fact the English and the French are not really considered in Northern America, though they are the only ones to have done anything there. The French and the English are only considered in Africa and Asia. Then the role of the USA is by far over-estimated even in Latin America, but it can only be considered after their revolution in 1786 and Monroe’s theory of the manifest destiny of the USA. What about between 1608 (first English settlement in Virginia) and 1786? We would have to wonder why most Latin American countries are now governed by rather anti-US left wing governments duly elected there, even in Nicaragua (whose president is the leader of the guerrilla against which the US employed all means at their disposal to prevent his winning, in vain, and then his election, in vain) and El Salvador. In fact it does not even quote the heads of the governments in countries it quotes like Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and a few others.

But the film has far more important shortcomings. Think again please. It does not speak of the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). It does not even quote China once, nor India actually. Of course it was filmed in 2008 but China was already the big helper of underdeveloped peoples. It cannot speak of the 2009 crisis since it was made before. But this crisis has changed everything. Some in the USA were dreaming of bringing China to its knees and in fact it is the West that was brought to its knees. The debt that was and still is crushing African or Latin American or Asian countries has brought down to its knees, and at times even lower, Europe globally and in particular Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, in chronological disorder. It was discovered that Greece did not even have the basic four taxes that are required to be in the Euro-zone. It was discovered that in Greece, for one example, a minority of workers had tremendous and outrageous privileges: civil servants had eight extra vacation days if they accepted to use a computer, and that is one example. Railroad workers in France had to retire (compulsory) at 50 with of course their full pensions. These are not even privileges. These are outrageous benefits, in fact hijacked shares of added value produced by millions of people in Europe and in the world who have a lot less to live on, or in many cases to survive on if not to die on. This is not spoken of. Forbidden subject!

2008 became the beginning of the end of the domination of the world by the USA and the West. The change is radical: terrorist movements have been brought down since then: LTTE terrorism in Sri Lanka, Osama Bin Laden, the fundamentalist Iranian President, Gaddafi in Libya, various autocratic regimes in Arab countries, the Islamist movements in the Sahara are being put under control and dried out, etc. Pretty soon Corsica in France will be the last terrorist battle field in the world since even the Basque independent movement, ETA, has stopped its terrorist campaign. This video does not take into account the great change of this century already at work in 2008: we are shifting from all kinds of autocratic systems and governments to an ever wider democratic order.

The only thing on which they are right is their denunciation of neo-liberalism (note the unacceptable meaning of this word from an American point of view where “liberal” means “left-wing” and even for some “socialist”) attached to Thatcher and Reagan. The proper term should be “deregulated free market” in a market economy. They are right to expose the privatization of things like water or natural resources basic for simple survival. But in a galloping demography these natural resources have to be regulated and even properly shared, meaning finding market regulations that will not encourage waste and that will charge the bigger users. Every person has to have clean drinkable water for drinking and cooking, but why should that water be used for washing, washing up or baths? Privatization is not the solution, but the absence of regulation is just as bad. And it is here the film is most deficient. The world’s demography has to be curbed. What the Chinese edicted in the late 1970s about having to choose between having more than one child per family and being unable to develop the economy is true for the whole world and there is some improvement everywhere. I am surprised by some examples of families who have up to eight children: one case shows five children and three grandchildren. If the children were as prolific as their parents they should all have five children. It is of course absurd and it is of course not happening even in the countries where procreation is the main objective if not the only objective of marriage, like fundamentalist Christian countries and fundamentalist Islamic countries. Even in Africa the number of children is down under four and it still has to go on getting lower. Children mean poverty at all levels of society, including in the rich elite because then their fortune will have to shared and thus squandered.

The solutions that are proposed:

1- forgiving the debt;

2- changing the tax systems for taxes to fall essentially on property and not on people and wages;

3- land reform to give land to those who want to and can cultivate it;

4- ending the privatization of natural resources;

are debatable.

To renegotiate the debt is one thing. To forgive it is another thing. Third world countries have to come together to be strong enough to impose a renegotiation of their debts including how it was contracted and what for.

The BRICS countries are showing the way.

To modulate VAT (or sales tax) is one thing but to nullify it is absurd since some items this tax is imposed on are luxury items, property items, and some property items are needed for decent living, some others are not needed at all. Is a jaguar a need or a caprice?

Income tax is justified and it has to be regulated and modulated not cancelled. Then you create situations like in Greece where sooner or later the trap closes on your own feet and then you may try to impose taxes that should never have been cancelled or neglected and the task is then gigantic, herculean.

The land reform is essential but we have to be careful and not go back to a purely directly consumable food production, hence autarky. No country will be able to produce all they need. So every country has to produce something that can be exported to pay for what has to be imported. And that has been the rule since Homo Sapiens emerged in Africa. Why should it change? Once again it is the balance between the two orientations that is to be regulated and properly managed.

Privatization are not supposed to be systematic but at the same time nationalizations are not supposed to be systematic either. It is not the type of ownership that is important, but the management and regulations of the market economy, otherwise you end up with highly subsidized services and industries that do not have any incentive to improve and that sooner or later cost so much that the whole country gets into stagnation. Ask the Soviet Union and their satellites what it costs to implement to the extreme end the dogma of anti-privatization and nationalization, of anti-market economy

In fact this film does not make any difference between the market economy that has always existed in human societies and will go on existing forever in human societies, and the deregulation of this market economy that extreme capitalism brought to our planet when it imposed total deregulation and private ownership, not to speak of financial ownership of everything and speculation on everything and the rest, including your debt with sub-prime speculation. We have to fight for a regulated market economy “of the people, for the people and by the people.” The 2009 crisis and its subsequent episodes are the crisis of a deregulated market economy “of everyone, for everyone but BY only a very few.”

The worst project comes from a Frenchman, because it cannot come from anyone else. If you consider that “less than 25% of world population uses more than 80% of the planet’s resources while creating 70% of its pollution” you come to the idea that you have to punish these bad western boys and girls and that the west has to accept what this middle class cushion-protected and pillow-oriented French intellectual calls “de-growth” and even “a-growth” meaning that we in the West have to accept to see our share of the use of resources to go down for the share of the use of them by the rest of the world to go up. In relative terms that is already happening, but not in absolute terms. In the west they have to learn how to use less resources to get the same comfort, hence to save and be more effective, and in the rest of the world they have to develop their economy to produce more resources and to use these resources in the most efficient way possible.

All ideology – because it is ideology then – that will preach undressing Paul to dress Peter will be rejected by the people on Paul’s side and will not satisfy the people on Peter’s side. This will produce extreme right nationalistic movements in the west and it will produce unstable and unmanageable political institution in the rest of the world. We have to move towards a global management of the economy and the world that will balance the growth of everyone so that no one will be left on the shoulder of the road if not in the ditch. This film does not propose such a balanced approach but in fact preaches and advocates a global freezing of the use of resources and a more equal if not equalitarian redistribution of these frozen resources among people meaning less for some and more for others. That’s the best recipe for a third world war, nuclear or not, for water or whatever pother natural resource.

There would be so much more to say that this review would never end. So it’s better to stop here and now.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

DAYS OF HEAVEN – 1978

That’s a very sad film about young people in the USA of 1916-1918.

A couple, probably not married, pretending to be brother and sister escape hard work in  Chicago and go south to Texas and work on a farm. The young and isolated parentless farmer falls in love with the woman who accepts to stay provided her “brother” and the girl presented as her sister who is travelling with them can stay too.

The ambiguous situation did not last long and when the next harvest comes the drama come to its natural end in a cloud of locusts, an accidental fire of the wheat field and the death of the young farmer duly married to the woman who had managed to fall in love in a way or another with him but could not choose.

No escape possible in that case and the funny hunt against buffaloes or rabbits or coyotes becomes a hunt after a murderer. And justice will not cost one single penny, not even for the rope.

The woman and the girl have to disappear in a way or another and they do.

That’s a time in America when being on the road, or railroad, being on the move was part of the life style but at the same time part of the poverty and the only way for many to escape poverty, overexploitation, and crowded misery. But then obscurity and lies do not lead to a clear future and all human relations get exploded in a jiffy. Survival is then the only objective left and the means are not supposed to matter very much.

Don’t think this has disappeared. In our societies there is still 20 to 25% of the population that is under the level of self-sufficiency, be it in education, in financial means, in hygiene or health, and they run around trying to survive in cardboard boxes or dealing and peddling anything they can put their hands on. It is sad indeed but there is no village to look after these lost souls. Sooner or later it turns catastrophic for them, or they turn catastrophic for the others with a gun and a few rounds of bullets. They say it is nothing but insanity. Is it really only that?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

PHILIPPE JAROUSSKY – DARINELLI – PORPORA – ARIAS – 2013

Read the booklet and you will know a lot about Porpora and Farinelli, and especially the end of both at the same time, Farinelli as a castrato when he stopped singing, and Porpora as a composer when he lost his castrato. There is no explanation about that breach of professional collaboration, a real breakdown for Porpora who ended in misery and the full disappearance from the public eye for Farinelli.

But one thing is sure: the famous film Farinelli has to be remade, at least for its music sound track since there is a voice now that can sing like Farinelli without voice processing or whatever they used at the time.

Now a recording of separate arias is frustrating because you only have thin slices of the various operas but you do not get the dramatic dimension, the real charm of the opera and all that is happening on the stage. So you are reduced to listening to the voice and trying to enjoy it in its beauty scattered all over the recording studio. For Philippe Jaroussky it is a challenge to follow Farinelli and Porpora in their tracks but when are we going to get their operas?

And the voice is so charming that we forget all that dubitative blah-blah, and along with it the black sheep of criticism, critique and critics, and we dive into the beauty of this voice that has no limit in the conquest of our mental virtual sky, and that conquest is so real we are mesmerized, hypnotized, charmed and we are ready to lie down like Cleopatra and let the snake do its work. In two arias we are beyond reason, beyond control, beyond the real world that has just vanished like a dark cloud dissolved in the bright sunshine of this mystery, and mystery it is in its old Renaissance meaning. You have to be initiated to appreciate it. But don’t be afraid, the initiation is simple: once again, lie down and open the breast of your mind to the snake that comes up from this treasure chest of this voice and let the snake get warm in your brain and try to enjoy the slow comfort that comes from its cool warmth.

I absolutely love all the tracks but I have to choose one or two, maybe more, that are more striking than the others and that sent me in such an acme of pleasure that I nearly fainted, they would have said swooned in older times, pass me the salts, please.

The third track is one of that kind, with that power. The wild conqueror is just running after us, up our fortified slopes and over our crenellated defenses and there he is jumping out of his wild box into the serene yard of our private garden and he just stamps and tramples with full force our roses and we just stand, kneel, lie there and ask for more of this astounding vocal power. You beg for pity and you pray it may go on for ever. Beauty is at times the most brutal thing that we can hardly bear and yet we want to let it penetrate us so deep that we lose our mind, loosen all our canons and we become popish sinners and with no astuteness like Pope Francis. Just plain vocal and auditory sinners who like being dragged into that forceful sin that is enjoying a voice that beats us about in its tournament and we are no equal to refuse or resist that chasing knight who will, it’s sure, transpierce us with his spear and then put us on the grill for more exquisite enjoyment of the beauty of his voice.

The fourth track is a duet with Cecilia Bartoli and we wonder who is the soprano and who is the countertenor though we know who is the man and who is the woman, the woman and its trembling voice as if she was awed and frightened by the man in front of her. And they come to a perfect moment when the two voices are merging and merged together and yet it is a miracle because you can make the difference between the two, especially since at that moment they are singing a cappella.

The fifth track is long and of a completely different style. We are amazed by and at the double tone we have in this aria. Aci is thanking Jove for the goddess he gave him. We expect awe and joy, happiness and humility, and we get all that probably but yet this spirit is completely over-drowned in some tone that the singing alone, and the music then, carries through with such a force that we are wondering if this is not a lamentation, a dirge. At least in the first part of the aria. To be grateful to Jove the human’s subservience has to be expressed with some sorrowful tone that maybe regrets the conquest of the goddess was not exactly romantic, just divine, by divine decision; There is then in Aci something like an attempt to recapture himself. And move away from the lamentation, but that is short lived when the lamentation comes back, when it becomes a contemplation that has to make that poor human who receives a goddess as his love partner absolutely impotent and unable to perform what Jove authorizes him to perform. No shiny knight in a golden tournament, just a plain teenager meeting his first sexual partner, like begging for the divine inspiration that could make him up to the task. The humility this singing contains is more than just humble love. It is a dirge, as if it regretted and repented the fact he is going to lose, maybe waste, his human virginity on a goddess he desires, he wants, he longs for, he fantasizes and yet who will leave him emasculated on the bed. And yet the last note is a total submission to the pleasure of this encounter, joy in the instant no matter what may come afterwards: just take this instant of orgasm as what it is supposed to be a gift from the gods that will only last an instant but will leave your mind and body so fully satisfied that then the future, life or death, torture or the stake does not matter any more. That’s what love is and it may last forever though the instant of pleasure will only last a minute.

The seventh track is just another aria in which ambiguous and contradictory motivations are expressed by the music and the voice. Though Phoebus is requiring the sacrifice of a virgin on the altar to blow the Greek fleet to Troy, how can he, or rather Achilles, accept the sacrifice of this beautiful Iphigenia he must be in love with? And both the composer and the singer excel in that ambiguous dual allegiance: the duty to go on that punitive war against Troy and at the same time the gallant dedication to protect and love the beautiful Iphigenia who will nevertheless be sacrificed for the first duty to be fulfilled. That’s where Philippe Jaroussky is best because he can use his voice with such subtle nuances in his expressive feelings that we just wonder at times if that singer is not the devil himself capable of fascinating and capturing all our attention and mental energy into total submission to the sad sorrow of this chant, the beautiful exquisite suffering of this hymn to life in and beyond death.

The eleventh and last track starts as a dirge and it is dedicated to love. Orpheus is in love, is singing his love and yet he is in mourning, mourning his love and that last piece is a prodigy of vocal expertise and genial inspiration. Philippe Jaroussky is for me one of the rare singers, if not the only singer who is able to use his voice to express joy and sadness together, pleasure and suffering as the two sides of one single coin. And that duplicity, duality of his singing makes him the doppelganger of my most intimate desires and impulses. How can a man be so divided in his unity, unified in his division, so much able to merge together the antagonistic dimension of life and death?

To compose such ambiguous arias for Farinelli, Porpora must have been in love with this voice, and probably man, that and who could bring together in the same notes, in the same sequences, in the same measures both the accents and the tempos of sorrow and joy, of sadness and happiness. This is so rare, so amazing that we remain totally frozen in front of such depth and multiple facets of life and death so well crisscrossed together that we just wonder if love is not hate, if hate is not desire, if desire is not destructive of the love we started with and that remains discarded in a way into impotence and sterility, fantasy and virtuality. And yet every musical sentence, every vocal cadenza is full of the belief and even faith that love is the most human value, I would like to say the human-est value.

Philippe Jaroussky makes the voice that some see as the voice of angels, or of God, or of the Holy Virgin, or even of the Devil and Satan, Philippe Jaroussky makes this voice, his voice so human that we are ready to die for it, I mean die with pleasure, die from enjoyment, die for the promise of an orgasmic communion with supernatural beauty. I only felt that emotion with the first soprano I ever listened to: Teresa Stich-Randall singing some cantata by Johan Sebastian Bach.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU