"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." The Communist Manifesto of 1848 gathered up all the ills of capitalism into an assurance of ultimate emancipation from wage slavery, but it had very little to say about how that transformation was to be effected. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concluded with a rallying cry, "Workers of the world, unite!" but what form was that common endeavour to take? Yet Mittleuropeans gained more chains under communism ... Exchanging one political brutalism for another is dangerous .... (Cold River Jozef Imrich)
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Red Scares, Then and Now Project Syndicate
Red Scares, Then and Now Project Syndicate
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An Imperfect Portrait, Review: 'Mrs Osmond' by John Banville
The first Slovak-language feature from lauded Czech filmmaker Jan Hrebejk, who directed the Oscar-nominated 'Divided We Fall,' took home the best actress award at the Karlovy Vary fest.
If a teacher helps her charges, then why shouldn’t the kids’ parents help the educator? That is a possible explanation for the behavior of the protagonist of the impressive Slovak-language drama The Teacher (Ucitelka), directed by renowned Czech director Jan Hrebejk (Up and Down, Honeymoon) and written by his regular screenwriter, Petr Jarchovsky. Though somewhat slow out of the starting blocks, this finally caustic drama, set in early 1980s Bratislava (then in Czechoslovakia), accumulates power and insight as it builds over the course of a tense parents-teachers conference, punctuated with the necessary flashbacks. A likely contender for either the Czech Republic or Slovakia’s foreign-language Oscar submission, especially since Hrebejk’s Holocaust drama Divided We Fall was already nominated back in 2000, this should also see a very respectable festival run and several offshore pickups, in especially Eastern Europe and cinema-loving territories such as France.
At first sight, the bespectacled Marie Drazdechova (Zuzana Maurery) seems like an ordinary middle school teacher, perhaps a little stern and on the dowdy side but the kind of sharp educator who can spot what a child’s needs are from miles away. Unfortunately, she uses her cunning insights mostly for her own gain, knowing just what to say to the children to get their parents to do her favors — a haircut, sending a package ... — in exchange for good grades or the lowdown on upcoming tests (“your child should especially revise …”). Since it’s 1982, smack in the
I came across this most interesting book via historian Anna Clark’s excellent review at the Sydney Review of Books and – seriously – that is where you must go if you want a proper evaluation of why this is an important book for Australians to read. Anna Clark was one of the historians at the History Summer School I attended in 2008, and she presented a paper about her research into why Australian students think Australian history is boring. It was a compelling argument and it changed the way I taught Australian history – and because I was Director of Curriculum at my school and also not shy about sharing my efforts at reform at conferences and on my professional blog Clark’s ideas went far beyond her audience that day in Canberra. (It was one of the criteria for selection into the Summer School that we brag about what we’d learned in other professional development forums).
In a nutshell, the take-home message from The Honest History Book is that we do ourselves (and our children) a disservice if we focus on Anzac at the expense of other aspects of our history.
When a single thread of our nation’s story is teased out to excess, it strangles the other threads. Australian history is social and cultural, political and economic, religious and anthropological, archaeological and scientific, as well as military. It is made by women, men, individuals, families, artists, philosophers, scientists, businesspeople, public servants, soldiers and politicians. We carry the imprint of the First Australians; the builders of the CSIRO, the Sydney Opera House and the Snowy Scheme; the pioneers of the bush frontier in the 19th century and the urban frontier in the 1950s and 1960s; and ‘boat people’, whether convicts, post-war ‘ten pound Poms’ and ‘New Australians’ and asylum seekers, Australian history is to the credit – and discredit – of all of us, not just our Diggers. (p. 4)
So the book covers some of the territory in James Brown’s Anzac’s Long Shadow, but it also explores our history of progressive nation-building reforms and our economic and environmental history and it does some myth-busting about our egalitarianism, our heroes and the role of women. Larissa Behrendt deserves special mention for her chapter ‘Settlement or Invasion? The Coloniser’s quandary’ in which she talks about the need to bury the myth of settlement:
For Indigenous people, the perennial questions posed by that moment of invasion in 1788 are about the best strategies for surviving it and determining how to assert Indigenous identity, culture and sovereignty as it faces assaults from the dominant culture every day. These continuing, two-and-a-quarter-century-old tensions lie beneath policy questions (Closing the Gap, dealing with incarceration, education, domestic violence, drugs and alcohol) and constitutional options (Recognise or Treaty or both). For the rest of Australia, there is the challenge of how the dominant national narrative – the story the nation tells itself – deals with the invasion moment. This question has become bogged down in the emotions of the ‘invasion’ or ‘settled’ debate. The stand-off gets in the way of a more sophisticated, nuanced and inclusive narrative. Unless and until we get that part of the story straight – finally – the other parts matter less. (p. 238)
And not only that, the chapter by Mark McKenna, provocatively titled ‘King, Queen and Country, will Anzac thwart republicanism?’ sounds an alarm bell for those of us very keen to rid ourselves of the anachronism of the monarchy before Elizabeth II dies so that we leave the excruciating embarrassment of having Charles III as a King to the Brits. Also looking to the future, Alison Broinowski, in ‘Militarism versus Independence’ says that Settler Australia had war in its genes, and asks thoughtful questions about the lengthening list of Australia’s wars – noting that Australia is increasingly disposed towards shaping the world with armed force – even as our leaders claim our country is a ‘good global citizen’.
I’ll admit that some parts of The Honest History Book are a bit dry. When I think of ways and means for Australians to broaden their awareness of other parts of our history, it’s novels that come to mind. Almost any one of the books by Indigenous authors that I’ve reviewed make a good starting point for learning about our Black history. Kate Grenville’s Colonial Trilogy involves truth-telling about settlement, though I’d stick to The Secret River and The Lieutenant and not bother with the last one with its fantasy of reconciliation ending. Lucy Treloar has also written movingly about the realities of settlement including dispossession in Salt Creek; while inRobbed of Every Blessing, John Tully draws a link between the colonial appropriation of indigenous land and the British Occupation of Ireland. Richard Flanagan’s Wanting is another that has shaped my knowledge of the Black history of colonial Tasmania, as has Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party. We can learn about the Depression and the truths about egalitarianism by reading vivid novels like Ruth Park’s Harp in the South and Hunger Town by Wendy Scarfe. Tom Keneally, the Balzac of Australia, also writes illuminating historical fiction, including – for example – The People’s Train about a communist union leader in Brisbane just before the Russian Revolution. Paranoia about communism also gets a run in Frank Moorhouse’s Cold Light and The Memory Room by Christopher Koch. Proper historians will quibble with some justification that novelists have been known to play fast and loose with the historical record, and if there is one thing that the contributors to The Honest History Book all want is for our knowledge of history to be based on evidence but still, I would argue that novels written by authors of great skill and integrity play a crucial part in making our real history palatable.
In the conclusion, the editors consider the skills that should be taught to schoolchildren and that our journalists need too, and they quote the philosopher Raymond Gaita:
… ‘the capacity to think critically requires also that we develop an ear for tone, for what rings false, for what is sentimental, or has yielded to pathos and so on.’
Yes. Yes indeed…
Editors: David Stephens and Alison Broinowski
Title: The Honest History BookPublishers: New South Publishing, 2017
ISBN: 9781742235264
Source: Kingston Library
Title: The Honest History BookPublishers: New South Publishing, 2017
ISBN: 9781742235264
Source: Kingston Library
The setup of the story, inspired by a real-life event in the late 1970s in Jarchovsky’s own life, cuts between the beginning of a new school year, when each student is asked to present themselves and their parents’ jobs to the teacher (a simple task that turns out to be not all that innocent in hindsight), and the parents of each of the pupils sitting down at a parents-teachers meeting. Good casting, clever camera blocking and sharp cutting by Vladimir Barak help clarify which kid belongs to which family, with three of them rebelling against Ms Drazdechova’s behavior, much to the dismay of the others present, who are happy their offspring are doing so well. But Hrebejk and Jarchovsky need too much time to properly establish all their players on two timelines, how they are connected and how these connections relate to the film’s subject.
The story begins to gain steam and its thematic complexity finally comes into view when all the accusations against the titular protagonist are out in the open and Hrebejk and Barak can move back and forth between the parents-teachers conference and the protagonist’s suspicious behavior in the past school year. This illustrates the dangerous moral vacuum that is created by repressive systems such as Soviet-style Communism, where a combination of several factors — including the fact that the enormous working class had no money and social mobility was the antithesis of state ideology — ushered in an epoch of favoritism that people got used to very quickly, since it’s an inexpensive way to advance two different players in an unfair system at once.
The corrosive effect of favoritism among (almost) equals is the real subject of Jarchovsky’s screenplay, because unfair advancement in a system in which everyone is supposedly equal causes not only resentment but also has the terrible side effect of squashing the very people who are actually talented but whose personal morality or lack of access or funds might prevent them from playing the games others — in this case, Comrade Drazdechova — expect them to play. The best example of this is the storyline involving father Littmann (Peter Bebjak), a former astrophysicist whose equally brilliant wife escaped to the West, turning him into an outcast and effectively denying Czechoslovakian science his potentially brilliant contributions. His interactions with the titular protagonist, who might have an eye on him, go right to the heart of the material.
Hrebejk has always been an exceptional director of actors and his latest, though in Slovak rather than Czech (the two are mutually intelligible), is no exception. Maurery, who won the Best Actress prize at the recent Karlovy Vary fest for her performance, delivers a complex take on her character, making her not the villain of the piece as much as someone who sees herself go tragically down the wrong path and then can’t stop herself since her behavior makes her life better; Ms. Drazdechova is a victim of the system as much as a proactive wrongdoer. She’s surrounded by a standout ensemble that includesDivided We Fall’s Csongor Kassai, as one of the parents, and the young Richard Labuda, the grandson of respected Slovak actor and Jiri Menzel regular Marian Labuda, as one of the children.
Cinematographer Martin Ziaran, art director Juraj Fabry and costume designer Katarina Strbova Bielikova have come up with a warm look, with colorful, 1970s-like patterns. This initially counterintuitive choice is the opposite of the cold, austere and bleak way in which the Romanian New Wave has visualized the Communist era, for example. But it works beautifully as a counterpoint because despite the warmly nostalgic look, the film’s themes and message make it clear the era was not something we should look back on fondly in any way.
Production companies: Rozhlas a televizia Slovenska, Pub Res, Offside Men, Ceska Televize
Cast: Zuzana Maurery, Csongor Kassai, Peter Bebjak, Martin Havelka, Ondrej Maly, Eva Bandor, Zuzana Konecna, Richard Labuda
Director: Jan Hrebejk
Screenplay: Petr Jarchovsky
Producers: Tibor Buza, Zuzana Mistrikova, Lubica Orechovska, Ondrej Zima, Jan Prusinovsky, Kateriny Ondrejkove
Director of photography: Martin Ziaran
Production designer: Juraj Fabry
Costume designer: Katarina Strbova Bielikova
Editor: Vladimir Barak
Music: Michal Novinski
Sales: Level K