Italian buffonery at the outset of World War II

I'm reading The Second World War by Antony Beevor, which is yet another general account of World War II, distinguished by two things: 1) With the exception of Weinberg's World At War, this is probably the most global depiction of the entire war that I have read; and 2) Antony Beevor wrote it.

As always, reading a history of World War II can be dehumanizing or brutalizing: endless statistics and battle formations on one hand, a parade of endless atrocities on the other. Luckily, Beevor is an expert at the telling details and little anecdotes to help ground it.

And, at the moment, having reached the point where the Italians got involved in the war at earnest, there is lots of comic opera buffoonery from the Italian military. Here are some of the disasters that the Italians had inflicted upon them (or inflicted upon themselves) between June and October of 1940:

• The British took 70 Italian soldiers prisoner in Libya on June 11. The Italian soldiers were confused because no one had told them their countries were at war.
• During another raid a few days later, the British took captive about a hundred soldiers, as well as "a fat Italian general in a Lancia staff car accompanied by a 'lady friend', who was heavily pregnant and not his wife" (p 147).
• Marshal Balbo, the Italian military commander in Libya, died on June 28 because his plane was accidentally shot down by "over-enthusiastic Italian anti-aircraft batteries in Tobruk" (still 147).
• In September 1940, when the Italians finally started their invasion of Egypt, they "managed to get lost even before reaching the Egyptian frontier" (seriously, still on the same page, 147).
• Finally, in October 1940, Mussolini decided to invade Greece because he thought the Germans had sent troops into Romania without mentioning it to him first. Unfortunately, Ribbentrop, the German foreign secretary, had mentioned it to Count Ciano, Mussolini's foreign secretary. Ciano had just forgotten to tell Mussolini.

This is the kind of behavior you expect from Republic serial villains, not from a member of the Axis powers. I'm not trying to downplay the atrocities the Italians committed in Libya and Ethiopia. But, you got to take your levity where you can find it in this period.

The past is a foreign country...

I recently watched the two hour pilot of Showtime's The Borgias (I know, welcome to 2010, Mr. K) and the first two episodes of Roberto Rossellini's Age of The Medicis, which was produced as a three part miniseries on Italian television in the 1970s.

Both shows dealing with politics in the Italian Renaissance, both helmed by talented directors (Neil Jordan serving as the show-runner for the Borgias, as well as director for the pilot), and the two could not be more dissimilar.

The Borgias wavers somewhere between crime drama and sumptuous, sexy costume melodrama. It certainly has its moments (Irons is a little uneven, but he plays Pope Alexander as a charismatic, corrupt man who is utterly sincere about his belief in the power of the Church and God), but, as my Lovely Girlfriend put it, "well, at least during the boring parts, there's something pretty on screen to look at."

Which definitely sums up the aesthetic of The Borgias. Lots of beautiful naked bodies, lots of beautiful clothing, artwork and architecture, plus lots of sex and blood (which is usually deployed in beautiful ways). But also frequently boring.

And while it's never easy to figure out how accurately a pilot represents the rest of a series, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that The Borgias is going to totally do away with the Bloody Sexy History. What's most disappointing about the approach is the way that it just sort of flattens the lechery, venery and blood-lust, when it's all sex and violence, all the time.

In contrast, Rossellini's Age of the Medicis is a much more austere and glacially paced production. Rossellini's favorite device is to stage scenes like tableaus out of Renaissance artwork, with the actors merely an element of mise en scene. Unlike The Borgias, where everyone is usually manipulating or murdering or making love, but rarely working, the majority of the action in Age of the Medicis takes place while people are going about their daily work.

Even as Cosimo de Medici is making his triumphant return into Florence, for example, someone still has to go down to the local pawn shop and redeem his supporters' goods from the pawnbrokers. At one point, the Weaver's Guild commissions an assassin to do away with someone in a nearby town who is infringing on their patents. But that only happens after a scene where they analyze what production technique is being used, who had patented it, examining the recordbooks to see who could have passed along the information, etc.

The Age of the Medicis often feels closer in kinship to one of Peter Watkins "You Are There"-style faux-documentaries, where he approaches hypothetical or historical situations with the austerity and impartiality of a modern-day documentary film-maker.

That's not to say The Age of the Medicis doesn't have beauty. Rossellini's Florence is less ornate than Jordan's Rome, but Rossellini has a better eye for detail in the positioning of groups of actors, the atmosphere of their settings, and he is more adventuresome with his camera, sending it roving through a workshop, or panning across the various factions attending a funeral.

Perhaps the one aspect in which The Age of the Medicis suffers compares to The Borgias is, oddly enough, in its treatment of the female characters. The Borgias' female characters are not given as much to do or as much depth as the male characters, and too much of their characterization depends on their sexual desires. But women are really only extras or bit players in The Age of the Medicis. My guess is that, given that Rossellini's script seems heavily based on primary sources and focused on day-to-day business, it's bias towards the masculine sphere is understandable. At the same time, given the effort put into portraying not only the power-brokers but also the common men and bourgeois, it is disappointing.

Quick Link Love...

I already have a bit of an intellectual crush on Jess Nevins for his series of pulp posts at io9, his annotations of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Top 10, and his tumblr blog.

But now he has to go write an awesome and inspirational article about Asian history in the 18th and 19th century and Asian pulp literature for sci-fi publishers Tor.

RTWT, but my favorite part (and best idea for a story ever) is this:
 "From the mid-17th century through the 1920s Chinese novels translated into Mongolian were in huge demand in Mongolia, and there was a flourishing trade in them. But the problem for the Mongolian bookbuyers and booksellers was not only the bidding wars which would break out with Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese buyers, but that getting the manuscripts back to Mongolia to sell was difficult because of the very real chance that those transporting the books would be attacked on the way back by bandits wanting to get the manuscripts and sell them for themselves. This resulted in decades of adventurous Mongolian book traders as skilled with sword and gun as they were at selling books." [Emphasis mine].

A network of swashbuckling mercenary booksellers in Mongolia that had to fight off bandits who wanted to steal their wares! That would be a great trope to replace the archaeologist/explorer that usually pops up in adventure narratives.

Updated to add: P.S. Had to share this, which I posted on Twitter. NY Times review of HUUUUUGE Spanish history book mentioned Phillip II of Spain planning an invasion of China in 1580. What the what what? How has that not been written by some spec-fic/fantasy genius yet?

John Brown's Body is Moldering in the Grave...

Watched Santa Fe Trail (d. Michael Curtiz, 1940) last night and was very disappointed. It's one of those Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland swashbucklers, but here Flynn is JEB Stuart, doing his best to restore order to "Bleeding" Kansas and defeat John Brown.

Now, there's certainly a lot to discuss about how the picture gets history wrong (we're talking National Treasure 2 levels of inaccuracy) but what's most disappointing is that the movie just isn't very good. It's Flynn/de Havilland, but they keep getting pushed aside by the need to plug more historical b.s. in. They Died With Their Boots On is incredibly inaccurate, but it manages to give us plenty of romance and derring-do for Flynn. Instead, Flynn barely does anything in the finale of Santa Fe Trail.

Overall, the film is as mediocre as Ronald Reagan's performance as George Armstrong Custer. The movie is at its' most interesting when it totally rewrites history, because then it allows the mind to occupy itself with thoughts of what it changed and why did they change it?

This might make an interesting acid test, though, because anyone defending it as a great movie, from whatever side of the political spectrum, clearly has no love for cinema, only propaganda.

The Trial of Lucullus and/or Jesse Camp...

I watched Aeon Flux, the animated series version, for the first time tonight. The first few episodes are fascinating. I'm pretty sure indie comics tackling genre stories are only now exploring that kind of territory.

However, the legacy of MTV's original programming reminds me of a Brecht piece called the Trial of Lucullus. I'm retelling this mainly from memory, so excuse any errors.

The Roman general Lucullus dies and enters the underworld. The Gods put him on trial to decide whether or not he deserves punishment or reward. The people who he dealt with in life are called before the assembled group to testify for or against him.

A long group of witnesses come forth, who condemn Lucullus for the lives lost and ruined to war, his service in the extension of an imperialist dictatorship, and for pillaging & looting his victims.

On his behalf, a cook comes forth. In the course of his conquests, Lucullus developed a taste for cherries. So he ordered his cook and other servants to bring some cherry tree saplings to plant in Italy. Thus, Lucullus has advanced Western civilization by introducing a new food-source. However, it is not enough on balance, and thus he is sent to hell.

In the same spirit, I am grateful that, for a brief period, MTV gave us The State, Aeon Flux, The Maxx, Beavis and Butthead and Daria. But it in no way makes up for them inflicting The Real World, Road Rules, Rob & Big, Laguna Beach, and Jersey Shore (among a list of others) upon us.

Great moments in history, part 1...

Courtesy of Julia Lovell's hilarious and nuanced history, The Great Wall: China Against the World:

After Wang [a eunuch tutor with great hold over the previous emperor]'s death in battle, officials took a terrible revenge on Ma Shun, one of Wang's surviving eunuch lieutenants at court. In an extraordinary scene, unprecedented and unrepeated in Chinese political history, a bloody fistfight broke out at an imperial audience when, unable to restrain his hatred of his eunuch rivals any longer, a censor rushed at Ma, wrestled him to the ground and bit him. Other officials immediately abandoned all sense of decorum and leapt into the scrum. Lacking in conventional arms, the struggle was brutishly drawn out with improvised bludgeons: officials eventually blinded and battered the eunuch to death with his own boots [Emphasis mine]. The nervous new emperor tried to escape the bloody fray by tiptoeing out of the audience chamber, until the new minister of war grabbed him back by his robe, forcing him to condone this spontaneous execution scene. (199)

Let me add, that Ma Shun's superior basically caused the massacre of an entire Chinese army because he didn't want soldiers marching through his own property and then forced them to delay after a valiant rear-guard defense against a Mongol horde.... because he was afraid he had lost his luggage.

Truth is definitely stranger than fiction.

UFA versus Hollywood: or, what Archie Hickox was talking about...

I'm reading Klaus Kreimeier's The UFA Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company 1918-1945, because I've been very interested in Nazi Germany art and culture for a while and the way the state interacted with artists beyond mere censorship. Watching Inglourious Basterds again, which briefly touched on the way UFA tried to be both a branch of the entertainment industry and of the propaganda industry, definitely piqued that interest, but there have been other factors as well.

Spotts' Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics already touched on the visual arts in Nazi Germany and Richard Evans' The Third Reich at War touched on the performing arts, though Evans is most interested in statistics of consumption, production and attendance. It wasn't until I recently watched the fascinating Goebbels Experiment on Netflix Instant Viewing and heard some of Goebbels' attempts at film criticism that I got an idea of how seriously the party (or Goebbels, at least) took the integration of art and propaganda in the film industry.

[A side note: only after watching The Goebbels Experiment did I get an idea of how unrepresentative of UFA's work Nation's Pride is. For the sake of the film, I understand why it ends up being a weird Samuel Fuller-esque shoot-out, but, at least judging from the clips of Uncle Krueger and Kolberg the documentary displays, UFA's directors seemed capable of some expressionism, but never such frenetic usage of editing and montage.]

I'm probably going to be blogging about it as I read, but right off the bat, what is most striking is how the early German film industry came down to a fight between big industrial interests and the military. Heaven knows Hollywood ended up being a giant collectivist trust, but it was never so heavily tied to the government and the corporatist state as the early German film industry was.  On top of that, both sides of that fight are conservative or right-wing, but in different ways.

More to come...

She's Lost Control... of France

Just finished watching Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, which I really liked. There's something about the way she deploys anachronism in the film to mess with the audience's heads.

I think the decision to play against costume drama really works. The '80s music cues, the lack of Costume Drama dialogue (or pretentious classical drama delivery) and an impressionistic structure that mostly works from the POV of Marie Antoinette all serve to distance the viewer from getting lost in the romance of nostalgia while at the same time keeping us from condemning her as a tool of an oppressive regime. The biggest take-away of this film is that whether Marie was good or bad didn't matter, because the arena she actually had control over had only the most tangential relationship. There's a very telling moment early on in the film when one of Marie's hangers-on gossips that Madame du Barry (Asia Argento) is political because she refuses to reign only in the boudoir.

The movie functions as an amazing bait-and-switch, because it is only in the last twenty minutes that Coppola starts pulling the rug out from under us and Antoinette. For the first three quarters of the film, it's a coming-of-age/romance that we think we're watching and that Antoinette seems to think she's living in (notice how much her life is constructed around consumption and artifice). Then her portraits start getting vandalized and you start hearing the angry crowds. And the rest is literally history. How often do we think we're living one story and it turns out we're only supporting characters in another one?

Compare this to Alex Cox's Walker, where the anachronisms and ironies feel heavily italicized, or Anthony Mann's Reign of Terror, where you can mostly feel the actor and director getting uneasy any time it moves away from its weird noir moments and back into historical drama. Coppola strikes a good balance without losing focus or falling apart, and she's assembled a game, if eclectic cast (Asia Argento! Marianne Faithfull! Rip Torn! Steve Coogan!). So yeah, I'd recommend checking it out, provided you don't prefer Serious Costume Drama. Those movies have their place, but we won't run short of them any time soon.