FOR A MOTLEY POLYCHROMATIC UNIVERSE

https://www.academia.edu/16048804/FOR_A_MOTLEY_POLYCHROMATIC_UNIVERSE

DISCUSSION

Fayadh is being sentenced to death after had been jailed for more than 22 months in the Saudi city Abha without clear legal charges beyond “insulting the Godly self” and having “ideas that do not suit the Saudi society.” These charges are based on the complaint of a reader’s interpretation of Fayadh's 2008 poetry collection titled, Instructions Within. 

This is not the first time that Saudi authorities have arrested Ashraf Fayadh. The poet was detained before after a Saudi citizen filed a complaint with the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice accusing Fayadh of having “misguided and misguiding thoughts.” Fayadh was bailed out of jail at the time, only to get arrested again.

According to sources close to Fayadh, the poet has been denied both visitation and legal representation rights. We condemn these acts of intimidation targeting Ashraf Fayadh as part of a wider campaign inciting hate against writers and using Islam to justify oppression and to crush free speech.

We express our solidarity with Fayadh, hoping to increase support for the poet as well as pressure to release him. Our efforts should come together to ensure the proliferation of free speech and personal freedoms. We specifically call on Saudi intellectuals to express solidarity with Fayadh against Takfiris’ intimidation practices meant to silence poets, writers, and artists like him.Let the flag of creativity fly free and remain innovative.

Remaining silent towards Fayadh’s detention is an insult to knowledge, literature, culture, and thought as well as to freedom and human rights. 

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

My opinion

Freedom of religion and freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of distribution and  broadcasting of ideas must be complete in the respect of the physical and moral integrity of others.

Apostasy is a crime against humanity because it refuses the right of any human being to choose his or her religion and to change religions if he or she so decides on her own volition.

Saudi Arabia in its judicial system is the most archaic state in the world, by far, and even the Islamic State could feel challenged by such practices as beheading people with a saber or blade of any sort, or crucifying people, or flogging them to death, etc. Not to speak of torture to force them to admit anything.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Lars von Trier is obsessed by sin, death, punishment, and all his films always come to that kind of an end: someone is punished for the evil doing of humanity, or of some people around the main character. We could understand that stance if it came from some sectarian fundamentalist, for example of the Christian Born Again in Jesus Christ, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons or some other affiliation of the Christian faith, not to speak of other religions. That makes some collaborations surprising like the one with Stephen King because Stephen King is strongly optimistic about the future of the world because he believes human beings can face and probably control any nasty negative and morbid situation. In the Dark Tower what is important is not that the last page is the same as the first but that all along the members of the team of adventurous volunteers led by a gunslinger have always been able to step over any difficulty and painful task.

IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA – (LEROI JONES) – THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL

The reference to Dante and his Hell is only a literary metaphor about the experience the author is telling us about when he was a child and growing young adult ending up in the air force.

You will wonder why the first chapters use a syntax that does not contain verbs, and practically only contains nominal phrases. This syntax freezes the description into some kind of ossified static sequences of images or impressions and you are free to rebuild an active world beyond. This is the vision of a child, a young child, an infant maybe. The child only experiences successive frozen tableaus that may make sense in their succession with some kind of syncretic associational architecture. And that’s the first vision of hell. As he says in the conclusion “Hell in the head.” And again “Hell is actual and people with hell in their heads.” For the child hell is already in his head. The book is written from the head or mind of a black male subject.

But the full verbal syntax of the language will emerge and with it the consciousness of a destructive force outside the said individual male subject. We find out then that time is not a dimension this young growing subject possesses. He crosses from past to future at will and the future then becomes dependent on the past and at the same time the future is sterilized by the past just as the past is haunted by a sterilized future. That explains why for a long time if not for ever the people, the characters do not speak, or hardly. A vision of a frozen past with no dynamic or so little. A dynamic will come but of another sort later on. Thus the total image of this life is just suffered.

The main character explains he is from the black middle class and thus is considered as rich and he cannot be a member of the gangs in the streets. He can only be on the outskirts of these gangs, an observer and a subservient member. What’s more he is reading, he is a reader and he reads poetry, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and a few more. Not only does he read these poets but several times he recites them to his uncultured and illiterate black audience. He thus is considered as crazy, mad, a poet, an intellectual, not a real man. Thus he is once again a subservient entertainer more than anything else.

That subservience is expressed by the trip down into Hell, from one episode of subservience to another. The subservience of homosexual episodes where the subservient subject is just submissive. He accepts what he is provided with without any consent, without any taking. He is just there to receive and receive he does in successive gang bangs. He thus builds some kind of inferno in his head that rejects the fact he is constantly the victim of people outside and his mind is entirely built like a castle where he is able to be what he wants to be, to dream himself as being what he wants to be. From this mental citadel he can then projects his poets onto the people around and he does not feel any pain any more, he does not feel the humiliation. Or does he not, really?

Thus his growing pains are successive episodes of violence, violation, submission, subservience, till he reaches the bottom of that hell. And that happens one day when he is on some short leave from the air force, in his uniform, cap and tie and all;, and he is more or less engulfed more or less by force or under pressure from people around him into going to some bar and meeting with black ladies of the night. He is literally captured by one fat one and practically forced to accept to live with her in that hellish bottom.

And this final and long chapter is his story of his escape. Gosh could we say! That escape more than redemption is heavy, hefty, brutal. He runs and he runs. Then he is pursued by some Jewish bum from under a house who wants to use him, the black man, as some kind of lollipop; then he has to be confronted to a dying black man and escape from the cops that are coming because by then he is AWOL; then he is attacked and brutalized by three black men who leave him for dead on the sidewalk out of the bottom of hell for one miserable dollar. Dante managed to get out of hell through the corporal bottom of Satan himself, and here the main character manages to get out of Hell through some escape route out of the bottom of it that brings him to some salvaging white hospital. But the redemption is in his head. He drops away from material consciousness because of the beating, escapes into his mind where he is reciting poetry to a black dancing audience till he passes out and he is rejected by the black dancing audience that does not do anything to bring him back. And then the next thing he knows is he wakes up surrounded by white people calling on God to save that black chap, in other words abandoning his salvation to God’s will. And that is the supreme vision of hell, white hell. Dying for black people, no matter how, is nothing but a divine fate. And be sure it means it is divine for the Whites.

And that leads the character, or the author, or in fact the person telling the story who is both author and character, to his conclusion about “hell in the head.” What he identifies as the torture of never being seen and yet always being observed, with an allusion to Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is the obligation to build in your mind a citadel where you can evade this “social dichotomy,” “the dichotomy of what is seen and taught and desired opposed to what is felt.” This dichotomy in fact contains the triple principle of this hellish experience: the first experience is what the child sees, and that seeing will of course last forever, even if you got blind. Hell is in the head. Then after seeing there is teaching, meaning here some teaching from outside and thus some learning for the black subject, learning what is taught which is not necessarily the truth, and it is not any black truth and it becomes another hellish element since this teaching is deculturating the black child or later man in order to acculturating him as a white mind in a black body that has to become invisible in its blackness. And the third principle appears here as what is desired because the black child and later man is made to desire being white, being invisible, being seen no more as black but at the same time not being observed as a black man trying to behave as a white man, which is bad both for the black community and for the white community. And that triple reality leads to the fourth element of the crucifixion in the feelings of the child and later adult.

And that triple principle leading to crucifixion has to end in God, but “God is simply a white man, a white ‘idea’.” And this third stage here, this triple white God is the final alienation and your survival is abandoned in this world to that white God, in other words to nothing at all, and you are abandoned to death on your cross. The only way out  is just as hellish as you can imagine and it is in your head, it is a stronger image in your mind that “can deliver [a black man] from the salvation of [black men’s] enemies.” And that’s the damnation of black men in the triple trinity of white America.

And it all leads to the “destruction of America.” “Dead hard ground. / Violence / against others, / against one’s self, / against God, Nature and Art.” And there is no escape from this since the escape is a mental citadel in the mind that is maybe mentally protective but that makes the white social destructive machine ten times more effective since it kills you from the inside and impose onto you a triple vision of reality with “God, Nature and Art.”

This book is the best ever testimony of what the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome of Slavery is for the descendants of black slaves. Written and published in 1965. It was a premonition of forty years of Post-Traumatic-Slavery-Syndrome and a post-monition of twenty years after Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Jean de Patmos

L’Apocalypse de

Jésus Christ

Atelier de Grec Biblique du Diocèse de Poitiers

 Traduction :

Ingrid Auriol, Katy Breuil, Michel Caubet,

Jean Couprie,  Jacques Lefebvre, Odile de Loynes.

L’Apocalypse enfin révélée ! Ecrite à la fin du premier siècle de notre ère, cette œuvre prophétique, un des piliers de la littérature chrétienne et du Nouveau Testament, n’existait pas encore en langue française dans une traduction fiable, fidèle, et qui respecte le style et les intentions de l’auteur, Jean de Patmos, « le disciple que Jésus aimait ».

La signification profonde de ce livre, perdue vers le VIII^e siècle, quand l’Église dut rechercher la protection des rois francs pour assurer sa survie, est enfin restituée par une équipe de spécialistes du grec biblique. Soucieux d’offrir au public le plus large les secrets de cette œuvre majeure,  ils ont fait appel aux commentateurs antiques, qui en détenaient encore les clés, mais aussi aux ressources les plus modernes de la linguistique et de l’exégèse biblique.

Sceau après sceau, le livre se révèle enfin pour éclairer le lecteur de sa lumière éclatante sur les destinées du monde.

La couverture a été réalisée par le graphiste Jean-Paul Chabrier.

Remerciements à Véronique Ragagnon, gemmologue, pour ses précieuses remarques concernant les pierres.

Edition KDP Amazon Kindle

Gestion Editions : La Dondaine, 8 rue de la Chaussée, 63880 Olliergues (Puy de Dôme)

ISBN – 2-905831-28-4

ASIN: B014Y4BE0C      EUR 5,20                               $5.83

Publisher: Editions La Dondaine; 1 edition (September 4, 2015)

Publication Date: September 4, 2015

Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

ELMORE LEONARD – TIMOTHY OLYPHANT – JUSTIFED – 2010- . . .

THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON – 2010

This second season does not bring the big surprise we could have expected. The Bennett family who have been controlling Harlan County for two or three generations, this Bennett family being in the hands of the mother, with no father available, but with three sons the mother uses as her direct servants and hit men, let’s say slaves in crime because that is what it is, this family,has to come to an end one day and generally it happens with a lot of pain and suffering.

Why does it have to come to an end?

Because the power of this family is based on crime: illegal cultivation of marihuana at a very high level, grand style and all, for tremendous amounts of money. Because the power of this family is reinforced by one son who is the local sheriff and has turned the local police force into a gang to enforce and reinforce the power of and the decisions of the mother. Because the other two sons are plain criminals and nothing else, killing for fun and torturing for kicks. Because some company from outside decides that the tremendous amount of coal that is hidden in these Kentucky mountains has to be taken out and the Bennett family is an obstacle to this industrial venture and has to be either bought, or even bribed, or eliminated. Since the sons are die-hard criminal minds there is no other way but to eliminate them, and get rid of the mother.

The agents of that cleansing mission will be the Deputy US Marshall Raylan Givens from the Givens family, a rival family to the Bennetts, and the Crowders, another rival family to the Bennetts. Raylan is the only one who is on the side of more or less legal means, the use of force if it is justified. The other members of these two families are on the side of justice for themselves, vengeance for their dead, revenge for their businesses and lives. So they want the Bennett empire to be split up into pieces and the viable pieces to be entrusted, or recuperated, by them. 

So the brothers have to go one after another. One is shot dead by a girl he tried to molest and whose father he had killed, the second ends up in prison, the third, the local sheriff, ends up badly too and the mother has her own fate on her own hands. The chief of a tribe, or a clan, of a gang deserves some modest reward in their ends, in this case her end, face to face with Raylan.

The details you’ll have to get from the 13 episodes, but we knew from the very beginning that this second season was the end of the monstrous criminal corrupt dictatorship or a dumb mother and her three slaves of sorts, and sons by name.

There are tricky moments to eliminate secondary corrupt dummies, and some sensitive moments about the girl whose father was assassinated by the Bennetts. There are also some surprising moments concerning the two female characters, Raylan’s ex-wife who became his new girl friend, and his high school lover of sorts who is connected to one of the last surviving Crowders. Not to speak of Raylan’s step mother he calls his aunt. A very strong woman but to be strong is nearly a disadvantage when confronted to unethical criminals.

But I am sure you will enjoy the suspense. At the end, which could have been the end of the series, Raylan has applied for some promotion out of Kentucky or the Marshall service, he has just learned some good news about his ex-wife and we do not know what will happen. That’s not a cliff hanger but that will be a new start next season.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

There is not much to say about this story. We all know it is a tale of miscarriage of justice, of sexual greed, of alienation and injustice, and of final revenge that turns sour. This is a typical Victorian story in the line of Jack the Ripper and so many other crimes of that type, and I should say multiple killers or serial killers one century before the FBI invented profiling.

This particular production is special since it is a Broadway production of the musical that Tim Burton brought to the silver screen many years later. This particular production was actually brought to TV a long time ago and it is this TV version that they remastered and brought to us in this format. The sound is perfect of course since in the 1980s FM sound also call hi-fi sound was already arrived. The pictures are good though from a TV standard, probably professional, probably Betamax. The remastering was only used to clean up the sound and probably too to densify the resolution. So we can consider we have the best possible rendering of this old production.

The interest is to have a stage production from Broadway and from a period when special effects were not yet the norm on the stage. The stage production was supposed to create emotion in the spectators and they mostly only had human means to do so. They only wrapped up the human means in a stage setting that could increase or decrease the realistic effect. They chose to break up that realistic effect with the systematic use of machinery visible to the audience. Constantly elements, some enormous, are moved on the stage, turned around more or less building up structures that are supposed to render the various locations and the various scenes. It is totally artificial and it works perfectly because of the other dimension which is used in the most genial way imaginable.

This other dimension is the use of actors, singers and “dancers,” in  one word stage performers. The music is good but we do not see the musicians. The singers are not opera singers but musical singers and they are good not so much because of their voices but because they use their voices as one element of their performing. That performing is physical and the voices are part of this physicalness. The voices, the physical performing on the stage (movements and other physical contact or absence of contact) and the phenomenal body language and facial expressions, it all is extremely effective to create emotion and density. The situations are deep and heavy because of this performing qualities. It is what has slightly been reduced in the most recent period by the use of special effects. In those old days special effects were hardly available and the actors had to work with their bodies, voices and faces to create those emotions. And that was a time that has unluckily mostly disappeared.

In this case we have a real masterpiece because everything is looking artificial and yet the emotions look extremely realistic. That’s a stage directing choice that was more or less the only solution at the time if the stage director wanted to produce an emotional and powerful show. This is a real success along that line.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This film in its original version is entirely or nearly entirely sung and the music is probably the best part of the film. It is thus a musical tragedy, mind you, not drama.

First, Tim Burton recreates in color the bleak black and white vision we can have of London in Dickens’s time among others. Oliver Twist is there in front of us all over again, and his world of coal, smoke and dirt. And the house of this barber is a lot bleaker than any bleak house in Dickens. In fact it goes as deep in squalor as D.H. Lawrence’s early autobiographical novels like Sons and Lovers. The only real color Tim Burton uses is red, the color of blood and nothing else, but all its possible shades and intensities. That is already a piece of art and a masterpiece at that, a film in black, red and grey. Nothing white of course.

Second, the actors are so great in their roles and characters that we do believe they are what they pretend to be. Sweeney Todd is really a monster at first look, at first sight, and he will not vary from that identification one single iota. He may be justified in his monstrosity or monster-ness, but he is a monster through and through. And he drags everyone around him into that ugliness. He is only motivated by vengeance and he finds in the pie-maker a perfect accomplice though she would stop at the meat of Sweeney Todd’s victims and may forget about the vengeance itself. But circumstances are never what you can control entirely and Sweeney Todd will have his own vengeance fully and totally, though he made a few mistakes.

Third, there is no hope whatsoever. In the film at least. He abandons the younger ones behind, the youngest has just killed Sweeney, the two others, the sailor and Todd's daughter are just abandoned alone and frightened, though they should not be too much since the preying predator of a judge has disappeared in Sweeney’s Todd meat grinder. You can also imagine what the good old English Victorian society is going to do to them when they are discovered or captured in that vast cemetery of corpses and cadavers. At the same time you may imagine some kind of clemency for the sailor since he committed no crime, well, except at the “loony-bin” where he kidnapped Johanna. As for the girl her fate is more obscure since she is a girl and has to be protected and she comes from Bedlam. So, this is this and back to Bedlam.

Fourth, the speaking is voluntarily fuzzy, misty, dark, difficult to follow, often too low, and that is done on purpose. The dialogue is not so much important, apart from a few sentences now and then. It is an atmosphere that is created as if everyone was more or less whispering or mumbling in order not to be overheard or understood, misunderstood maybe. And the cockney of the actors is not always cockney, some pale and fuzzy imitation. But this linguistic opaque texture creates the atmos-fear of angst and fright.

But fifth, in this atmos-fear the most important element is the music and the singing. It is in no way attractive, charming, harmonious or whatever you may expect from music and singing. It is always the same tone, even when the tune is changing, a very minor dirge that stretches out without any kind of harmony or even attractive rhythm. It is a slow tempo for a very flat music and a minimal singing. A dirge I said, maybe even more than that, the complaint of surviving undead living-dead ghosts. We are in the deepest most sinister cul-de-sac blind alley you can imagine in full darkness, with no public light, just a smidgeon of moonlight between two heavy clouds and a lot of dark ill-smelling if not foul smoke coming out of the chimney of this diabolical barbershop-cum-pie-factory.

And Sweeney Todd is so much engulfed in his vengeance that he does not see anything any more. He is made blind by his desire, impulse and need to kill in order to alleviate his conviction that he was convicted for no reason at all and eliminated for the only sake of stealing his wife Lucy. And that leads him to the supreme killing: he kills his own wife who has become a deranged, hallucinating and totally mental beggar roaming around the judge’s house, her own predator. Sweeney Todd does not recognize his own wife except when it is too late. He nearly performs the same crime of oblivion and blindness with his own daughter, though he is distracted just in time, at the last moment when the razor was just going to hit her throat. He even gets rid of his main accomplice, Mrs. Lovett who loves it too much to accept it all, probably out of pure blind vanity and addiction, the addiction to his own vengeance and killing, and she will burn in the furnace before burning in hell for all eternity. And his unaware – well, at least for a short while – child accomplice is getting just like him at the end and the final razor cut sinks deep in our sensitive mind. Nothing to save that Sweeney Todd and his world! Victorian it is to the very last second and even right into the credits.

If you believe in love, stay away. If you believe in the beauty of man's heart somewhere, at least the hearts of a few people, stay away: there is not one single beautiful heart in this film, not even Johanna who has been warped by her detention in the soiled hands of Judge Turpin who has the mind of a turnip merged with terpenoids that have the soul of a rubber tire and the taste or turpentine. But what is Tim Burton trying to do? To scare us witless out of our pants and frocks with what the world really is behind the shiny and sparkling façade of a fake and hypocritical vicious court of justice with wigs and potbellied rotten beadles, white ermine fur and red robes? Probably, but maybe it is his vision of the world and that is very frightening.

A pessimistic film to make us feel relieved when we get out of it because Tim Burton has read his Aristotle and he sings his cathartic faith every morning while shaving with an electric razor, which is a lot less dangerous that the foldable machete we call a barber’s straight razor: after all, the world is not that bleak.

But is it or is it not? Maybe it is after all. Maybe it is not all in all.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

AMAZON.COM

5 STARS Colorful black and red

By Jacques COULARDEAU on March 30, 2008

AMAZON.CO.UK

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5 STARS Red and black color film

By Jacques COULARDEAU on 30 March 2008

IMDB

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Olliergues, France, March 30, 2008

10 STARS A dark parable of light

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Nothing to compare with the French version seen at the cinema some years ago. This film in its original version is entirely or nearly entirely sung and the music is probably the best part of the film.

First Tim Burton recreateS in color the bleak black and white vision we can have of London in Dickens among others. Oliver Twist is there in front of us all over again, and his world of coal, smoke and dirt. The only real color he uses is red, the color of blood and nothing else. That is already a piece of art and a masterpiece at that.

Second the actors are so great in their roles and characters that we do believe they are what they pretend to be. Sweeney Todd is really a monster at first look and will not vary from that identification one single iota. He may be justified in his monstrosity or monster-ness, but he is a monster through and through. And he drags everyone around him into that ugliness.

Third there is no hope whatsoever. In the film at least. He abandons the younger ones behind, the youngest has just Killed Sweeney, the two others, the sailor and Todd's daughter are just abandoned alone and frightened. You can also imagine what the good old English Victorian society is going to do to them when they are discovered or captured in that vast cemetery of corpses and cadavers.


Fourth the speaking is voluntarily fuzzy, misty, dark, difficult to follow, often too low, and that is done on purpose. The dialogue is not so much important, apart from a few sentences now and then. It is an atmosphere that is created as if everyone was more or whispering or mumbling in order not to be overheard or understood, misunderstood maybe.

But fifth in this atmosphere the most important element is the music and the singing. It is in no way attractive, charming, harmonious or whatever you may expect from music and singing. It is always the same tone, even when the tune is changing, a very minor dirge that stretches out without any kind of harmony or even attractive rhythm. It is a slow tempo for a very flat music and a minimal singing. A dirge I said, maybe even more than that, the complaint of surviving undead living dead ghosts. We are in the deepest most sinister cul-de-sac blind alley you can imagine in full darkness, with no public light, just a smidgeon of moonlight between two heavy clouds.

And Sweeney Todd is so much engulfed in his vengeance that he does not see anything any more. He does not recognize his own wife except when it is too late. He nearly does the same thing with his own daughter, though he is distracted just in time. He even gets rid of his main accomplice probably out of pure blind vanity and addiction, the addiction to his own vengeance and killing. And his unaware child accomplice is getting just like him at the end and the final razor cut sinks deep in our sensitive mind. Nothing to save that Sweeney and his world. Victorian to the very last second and even right into the credits.

If you believe in love, stay away. If you believe in the beauty of man's heart somewhere, at least the hearts of a few people, stay away: there is not one single beautiful heart in this film. But what is Tim Burton trying to do? To scare us witless out of our pants and frocks with what the world really is behind the shiny and sparkling façade? Probably.

A pessimistic film to make us feel relieved when we get out of it: after all, the world is not that bleak. But is it or is it not?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

A dark parable of light

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Sweeney Todd could have been a swine representing "der Tod", in German in the text, death in one word. And he does represent a fate that should be ashamed of existing. A young barber is the husband of a beautiful woman and the barber is sent to forced labor for no other reason than to clear the way for the judge. The wife will be the possession of the judge but she will poison herself, though she will survive as a deranged homeless woman. The daughter will be adopted by the judge for his unique later use. This Victorian society is shown as being absolutely horrible, disgusting. That denial of justice creates and feeds the desire to get his vengeance in the barber when back from his deportation. He will manage to get his vengeance, with the help of a woman who will lead him to opening a kind of human butchery to produce meat pies that are amazingly successful. This Victorian society is hypocritical for one and cannibalistic for two. This horror will lead to the worst crime. Sweeney will kill the surviving ghost of his own wife. When he recognizes his guilt he is then killed by the young teen orphan he had retrieved from absolute enslavement. A new Oliver Twist of some sort. The story is ugly, horrible, gross, unbearable and yet the film is admirable. Why? Because Tim Burton transforms this clair obscur of the soul and the society into a clair obscur on the screen that provides us with a full black and white film in an orgy of colors. Because Johnny Depp is the best at expressing a world that is totally out of sync with purely dramatic and aesthetic means that his body serves perfectly. He has just the right face to carry the ugly make-up of an unrecognized monster, for example. In other words a cinematographic master-piece with no original content or so little.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

For 1936 that was a good English film? No embellishment, just the drama, the horror, the descent into hellish London when Fleet Street was really deserving its name when it was the disembarking entrance into London for all ships that still went up the Thames beyond Tower Bridge.

The Barber is Sweeney Todd and the pie-maker is Mrs. Lovatt. They are associates in crime to share the profits since it targets isolated travelers arriving on the ships mostly from the Indies, West or East, or even in-between Africa. The objective of their waiting for them and then on them is to rob them and make them disappear, though there is no real allusion to any cannibalism.

Johanna is the daughter of a shipmaster who sends a new ship at sea and has accepted to be associated to Sweeney Todd (12,000 pounds mind you). But the contract was probably not correct and the ship is announced as lost. Sweeney Todd will then bring the shipmaster down or if the latter wants to save his bones he can give the former his daughter in marriage. The father refuses.

It is then the arrival of the supposedly lost ship is announced and the captain is apparently Johanna’s lover. Be careful we are in the Victorian period. Lover only means that he expects to marry her one day, virginal and pure of course.

And that’s when the plot sickens without thickening too much. Rivalry between the pie-maker and the barber, greed on both sides and mishaps on all sides leads to the happy ending we are expecting. The evil ones are punished by death and the good ones are rewarded with marriage and the loot of the evil ones. Isn’t it moralistically pure?

It is classified as a horror film. It is in fact a rather bleak crime story from the 19^th century sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion in a barber’s shop of the 1930s. The “modern time” customer suddenly doesn’t fancy the razor..

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU