Daily Archives: April 5, 2016

Ida: The Sound and The Silence

Film review

Ida, the 2013 Polish film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and the 2015 Academy Award winner for the Best Foreign Language Film, is stunning. Austere and minimal, the film is refreshingly simplistic. In a film with a notable absence of music and dialogue, the interplay of sound and silence provides an informative lens to consider the story.

Set in 1962 Poland, the film shows a country under Stalinist dictatorship just beginning to feel the reach of the West through the introduction of jazz. Poland lost a fifth of its population during WWII. Among the losses were three million Jews. A Communist takeover by the USSR and Red Army followed, leading to further loss. The viewers see a desolate country, which hints at the suffering and aftermath of Nazi occupation during WWII and Soviet rule in a process of recovery not yet complete. This isn’t explicitly expressed, but is felt in the heavy silence throughout the film. The lack of sound forces the viewer to visually focus on the film. The prevalence of silence highlights the importance of the few sounds the viewer hears.

Pawlikowski guides the viewer through Ida and Wanda’s journey with the efficient peppering of music throughout the film. Jazz is the mostly commonly played music form in the film. The viewers see people dancing in jazz clubs as a popular pastime and a sign of how Poland is westernizing. Lis, the handsome saxophone player the main characters, Ida and Wanda, meet on the road, embodies the free spirit of jazz. Jazz here is associated with improvisation and the free jazz of the 1960s in the US and other Western European countries. From the Polish perspective, jazz is unfettered by the past. But away from these pockets of freedom in the jazz clubs, other parts of the country still are shrouded in silence, such as the convent.

Ida plans to take her vows and devote herself to God. However, before doing so, she is instructed to seek out her only living relative, her aunt, Wanda Gruz. When she leaves the convent to go to the city and meet Wanda, she embarks on a journey to discover her own history. To start, she learns that she is actually a Jew born with the name Ida Lebenstein, while in the convent she is known as Anna. Wanda sardonically calls her a “Jewish nun.” There’s bitterness in her words as Ida was the one that escaped persecution during the war while Wanda had a different experience of immense loss. From that moment, their paths merge. They take a road trip to the village Wanda and Ida’s family lived in to find out more about the Lebensteins, which forces them to face the past. When they finally recover the bones of Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son and bury them in their Lublin family grave, the past is supposedly buried. However, the memory of the past persists, which leads Wanda to commit suicide as a result of losing faith and Ida to retreat back into the convent to protect her faith.

When Wanda prepares to commit suicide, Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, known as the Jupiter Symphony, plays in the background. At first, it almost seems like she is just preparing for a normal day until she disappears through the window. Viewers may feel disoriented by the unexpected action and jolted by the sudden blast of music after prolonged silence in the film. The aural reengagement with the film is jarring.

The Jupiter Symphony is Wanda’s motif. Like the song, Wanda is loud and bold. She appears in Ida’s life embodying a grand change and leaves just as suddenly. Viewers find out she chose not to raise Ida because of how much Ida reminded her of her dead sister. There are moments Wanda dotes on Ida and marvels at the resemblance, but grief overpowers her. Her affection for Ida stood no chance against Ida’s faith and conviction.

Ida’s return to the convent is set to Bach’s chorale prelude “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” represents her choice to choose the convent and God. The song name translates to “I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ.” Pure in style, it has been described as “a supplication in time of despair” by music critics. This could be how Ida feels after getting a taste of the outside world through her travels with Wanda and after Wanda’s death, trying on her clothes, habits, and sleeping with Lis. She experiences life as Wanda said she should, to know what she is sacrificing. She doesn’t choose Lis and the world because of its uncertainty. What Lis replies when she asks, “and then?” is unfamiliar. He says “life” but the only life she knows is the repetitive stability of the convent. However, she doesn’t return to the convent as the same person. Ida carries the memory of Wanda with her. She may be retreating back into her comfort zone, but there is a hint of confidence and drive that reminds the viewer of Wanda. The camera focuses on Ida’s face and movements in the last scene, whereas previously, she was more often depicted beside a larger and stronger presence – be it Wanda, nature or the city.

The interplay of silence and sound defines the film. Silence is the drone in the background, symbolizing a country still recovering from the past. Jazz, through Lis, is the sign of a new openness and westernization. In the same way, Mozart and Bach are classical music representations for Wanda and Ida, two people affected by a heavy past. The minimal but effective use of music further elevates an already cinematically artful film. I don’t know another film that uses this technique as efficiently as Ida does to tell a story, so listen closely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQvx6Gxgtp0

Racism all’Italiana

Op-Ed

Italy has produced some of the most celebrated movies in the Western world, featuring directors and actors like Federico Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni—household names for many cinema lovers. From the irreverent movies like La Dolce Vita and Marriage Italian Style to the tearjerkers like Cinema Paradiso and Life is Beautiful to the social justice-oriented films like Rome, Open City and Bicycle Thieves, Italian cinema has brought to light many facets of the country’s culture.

Italian identity has undoubtedly shaped and been shaped by its cinema, yet there are still groups that are ignored, fetishized, and even mocked by the country’s widely-renowned movies. The groups that are most misrepresented by Italian cinema include immigrants, Italians of color, and southern Italians. The way that we represent our society through cinema, one of Italy’s most beloved cultural activities, provides excellent insight into the divisions and tensions that exist in the country. Because Italian cinema is key to understanding the country’s culture, there must be a more concerted effort on the part of cinema makers to represent the society more accurately.

The lack of complex representation in Italian cinema is especially frustrating because it is clear that Italian filmmakers do not lack insight or nuance. In fact, marginalized groups have been accurately represented and valorized by the country’s cinema. Most notably, some of Italy’s most famous and best-loved Italian films—the Neorealist movies of the 1960s and 1970s—largely focus on the issues faced by working class people in Italy. These films help bring to light the differing levels of opportunity that social and economic status afford people in Italy. However, it is important to examine where race fits into this picture.

Though it is not apparent from Italy’s most popular films, there have been black actors in the country’s movies since the inception of filmmaking. Fred Kuwornu, a black Italian director and activist, has brought this issue to light with his 2016 documentary Blaxploitalian: 100 Anni di Afrostorie nel Cinema Italiano (100 Years of Blackness in Italian Cinema). This film discusses the presence of Italian actors of African descent and black foreign actors in Italian movies in order to highlight the historic and continued presence of black actors in this cinema.

With his films—which also include Inside Buffalo and 18 IUS Soli— Kuwornu has helped to map out a more realistic vision of Italian society today, a vision that cannot be gathered from most of the country’s media. Kuwornu forces his audience to ask themselves whose voices have been privileged in Italian media.

Unfortunately, even if many actors of color are born and raised in Italy, they are usually still cast in the roles of immigrants and are sometimes forced to fake accents that are not their own. It is clear that actors of color have been given a narrow space in Italian media: they are cast in roles of people that are represented as being outside of the country’s cultural identity.

These flawed representations prove that Italian cinema makers have been unable to depict a nuanced and critical vision of Italy. They have not been able to represent the ever-changing demographic landscape of the Peninsula. In fact, to be black and Italian, or to be Asian and Italian, or to be Hispanic and Italian, is becoming more and more common: around 14% of Italians were born to immigrant parents. Italy does not have as far-reaching or complex a colonial history as France or England, so it is a less attractive country for French and English-speaking African immigrants. However, Italy’s colonial history does impact the country’s demographics. In fact, Eritreans and Somalis have been migrating to Italy since at least the 1970s. Yet, when you turn on the TV or go to the movies in Italy, it is highly unlikely that you will see a newscaster or actor of color. It is rare to hear an accent that falls outside of the acceptable “native” and “well-educated” Italian—it is even uncommon to hear a strong southern Italian accent on TV.

Until we see more Italian cinema makers like Kuwornu, who highlight the voices and experiences of marginalized groups in Italy, we will only see a small portion of Italian society portrayed in its media. Cinema makers must seek to represent all facets of Italian society if Italy is to maintain its status and relevance in worldwide cinema.

On Body Hair

Op-Ed

“Have you heard the one where Abram complains to Moishe, ‘you know, my wife has been going out of her mind with worry. My youngest, Sarah, has grown a beard.’ Moishe responds, ‘Mazel tov! You have a boy to run your shop!’”

“Thanks for that, mom!” said Roza, as she picked up the tweezers.

— — — — — —

“How do you tell the bride at an Italian wedding?” Cecilia’s grandma told this joke at every family dinner, to the embarrassment of her grandchildren.

“She’s the one with the braided armpits!” Nona Torchio laughed uproariously at her own jest.

— — — — — —

“Female armpit hair. Hmm, sounds a little gross.”

We wonder: is it the “female armpit” part?  Or the “armpit hair” part? Or just the “female hair”? What about coarse female stomach hair? Or beard hair? Or nipple hair? Is any female hair okay?

None of it was okay when we were kids.

Roza’s middle school friends all straightened their already-straight hair every morning. But her massive, coarse Jewfro took three hours to straighten–and would rematerialize at any hint of wind or humidity (or normal human movement).

Three states away, Cecilia was walking barefoot with some camp friends when one of them asked “are you a hobbit?” Cecilia wasn’t sure what this Lord of the Rings reference had to do with her until she looked down at her hairy toes. Thanks to her Mediterranean genes, she did in fact have foot hair that could compete with Bilbo Baggins’s.

Back in school, the popular girls were either blonde or mysteriously smooth like babies. We figured that we were just maturing a little earlier when our hair came in thick and sprouted everywhere. But as the years passed, it became very clear that not all women have Italian toes or Jewish fros.

In any case, coarse dark hair anywhere on the body does not conform to Western beauty standards. According to dermatologists who specialize in hirsutism (excess hair growth in women), variations in hair growth are significantly related to race and ethnicity.* The Mayo Clinic reports that women of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian ancestry are more likely than other women to develop excess hair growth.

Societal standards for female beauty are often seen as a feminist issue so it’s common for activists to grow out their body hair in protest of societal norms. However, those women who feel the most comfortable growing out their body hair tend to be women with sparse and light hair. So barely-visible female body hair becomes more normalized but this doesn’t make it any easier for women with coarse, dark hair. And, as such, we are still left to do battle with our hair.

One reason that it is so easy to ignore the role of ethnicity in determining the distribution and density of body hair is that hair can be fairly well-concealed noninvasively, unlike other physical characteristics linked to ethnicity, like dark skin, big noses, or flared nostrils. Our mothers taught us what they knew to help us blend in: Shaving with coconut oil instead of shaving cream or soap. Repurposing beard trimmers for arm hair. Tweezing your Italian lady-beard. Bleaching your mustache. Though none of this would ever be completely effective, still we battled on. At the beach, no one could guess that we had spent hours going through these remedies, while our friends took just five minutes to shave their calves.

Abram’s hirsute daughter and Nona Torchio’s Italian bride made us squirm as kids, but as adults we can see the discrimination hidden in the punch-lines of those jokes. Instead of turning a blind eye to the discriminatory implications of Western beauty standards, feminists and hair-lovers everywhere should acknowledge the relationship between body hair and ethnicity. Just as women are expected by men to be hairless, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern women are expected by Caucasian women to have fine hair. The female body hair debate is an instance not only of sexism, but also of discrimination on ethnic grounds.

We’ve slowly accepted our hairiness and have come to the realization that we are not at all exceptional in having a physical trait that subjects us to judgment. Plenty of people face much worse. As we come up with new ways to hide and remove our hair, we think of all the people who are severely discriminated against, and not merely laughed at, for having physical features that they do not have the option of hiding. Growing up a little bit different ourselves, we’ve seen this discrimination, however minor, first-hand. Just as we’ve learned to accept ourselves, we’ve learned to accept others and hope you can do the same when we walk around in shorts with our unshaved luscious leg hair.

*http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4025516/

Harry Potter and the Blunders of J.K. Rowling

Op-Ed, ,

“I am told that people have been twittering on my behalf, so I thought a brief visit was in order just to prevent any more confusion!”

This was the inaugural tweet of J.K. Rowling, author of the acclaimed Harry Potter book series. Since then (September 2009), Rowling has cultivated a reputation as an author ready and willing to personally respond to her fans’ questions. In recent years, she has fielded much online criticism for expanding the Harry Potter world beyond the initial series, in somewhat tone-deaf attempts to make her characters’ world more diverse.

Rowling has two strategies for making Harry Potter more multicultural: Twitter interactions with curious fans, who often want to know if their identities are present in Harry Potter, and pseudo-encyclopedic entries about character backstory and world-building published on Pottermore, the interactive Harry Potter fan website. In Rowling’s tweets, her assurance of fans that they are, in fact, represented in her world, feel more like surface-level tokenism than meaningful reflections on her work. On Pottermore, Rowling’s essays about magical communities outside of the U.K. reveal her inexpert knowledge of other cultures and histories.

In early March, Rowling published on Pottermore a four-part “History of Magic in North America,” which provided a stereotypical portrayal of Native American cultures. Several Native American groups have spoken out, saying Rowling’s depiction of indigenous people as practitioners of “animal and plant magic” plays into historical representations of Native Americans as noble savages. These groups, as well as individual fans, also object to Rowling’s blanket use of the term “Native American community.” If she can bother to differentiate between the cultures of different houses at Hogwarts (Britain’s top wizarding school and the original books’ main setting), surely, they say, she can differentiate between tribes.

One of the most inflammatory aspects of “History of Magic in North America” is Rowling’s description of “skin-walkers,” people with the ability to transform into or disguise themselves as animals. This is a concept lifted from Navajo religious beliefs, which Rowling attributed to all Native Americans as an example of nature magic. On March 8, Rowling responded to a fan’s request for an explanation about skin-walkers with the following tweet: “In my wizarding world, there were no skin-walkers. The legend was created by No-Majes [non-magical people] to demonise wizards.” This statement upset members of the Navajo Nation because skin-walkers, considered evil and dangerous creatures, are an important aspect of their religion. Rowling’s attribution of skin-walkers to her fictional world plays into a long history of calling Native American beliefs magical, making it easy to dismiss their cultural importance. Adrienne Keene, a post-doctoral fellow in Native American Studies at Brown University and a member of the Cherokee Nation, describes Rowling’s blunder in a blog post: “If Indigenous spirituality becomes conflated with fantasy ‘magic’—how can we expect lawmakers and the public to be allies in the protection of these [sacred Native American] spaces?”

Skin-walkers in “History of Magic in North America” is only Rowling’s most recent misstep in expanding diversity in Harry Potter. In December 2014, Rowling answered a tweet asking about Jewish wizards at Hogwarts with the following: “Anthony Goldstein, Ravenclaw, Jewish wizard.” Although Rowling probably meant to use Goldstein as an example of Jewish wizards at Hogwarts, rather than singling him out as the only one, her reply comes across as flippant. Fans were also quick to point out that Goldstein is a very minor character in Harry Potter, which barely evokes his personality, much less his Judaism. (And how many Jewish couples would name their child after a Catholic saint?) Rowling was similarly called out for her revelation in late 2007 of Albus Dumbledore’s homosexuality, since the original books don’t mention of this aspect of his character. Put simply, Rowling’s after-the-fact pronouncements about her characters’ diverse identities are too little too late. They feel inadequate and even opportunistic.

Rowling has not yet responded to recent complaints made about skin-walkers and “History of Magic in North America.” Her silence is unusual; perhaps she is taking her time to come up with the right response. In the meantime, she should remember how the original Harry Potter books gained the recognition they did. Rowling earned her fans’ respect for her nuanced usage of European mythology in her writing. Much of the magic in Harry Potter comes from her detailed knowledge of British culture and history. But her sloppy treatment of Native American cultures is clearly not up to par with her past work. Ultimately, if Rowling plans to continue expanding the world of Harry Potter, she should make sure the quality of her world-building matches that of the original series.

Rowling_inauguraltweet