European cinema “has still got it” per guest essayist Emilie Bickerton in last week’s Times.[1] Like her, I’m lifted by the prospect of new films by the Dardenne brothers and Mia Hansen-Love. Other films/directors she cites sound lively too. Yet Ms. Bickerton may have missed the most galvanizing French cinema of this moment. When a worldly friend heard I’d been to Paris last summer, he commended “wild” new movies based on life in banlieues on the edge of the city. (“You’ll want to head right back to see what you missed!”) The movies that moved him were made by filmmakers in Kourtrajmé (slang for “court métrage,” or “short film”)—a collective that includes Romain Gravas (son of Costa-Gravas) who has directed two fast and furiously French features, The World is Yours and Athena (both available now on Netflix). If you’re ready to catch Kourtrajmé’s New Wave, though, I’d start with Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables.
World
Tool of The People: Q&A with Ladj Ly
Les Miserables
Sight and Sound‘s Elena Lazic interviewed Ladj Ly soon after the UK release of Les Miserables in 2020.
Most people discovered you through Les Misérables, but you’ve been making films for a long time. Can you tell me about your work with the collective Kourtrajmé?
Kourtrajmé is, before anything else, a group of friends. We all grew up together. We’ve known each other since kindergarten or primary school.
The collective was formed in 1994 with the ambition to make our own films. I joined in 1996. I was close friends with Kim Chapiron as a kid. I started as an actor in his films, and then at 17, I bought my first video camera and began filming my neighbourhood.
“Baraye Azadi” (Iran’s Freedom Song)
The single best way to understand Iran’s uprising is not any book or essay, but Shervin Hajipour’s 2m anthem ‘Baraye’ which garnered over 40m views in 48 hours (before he was imprisoned). Its profundity requires multiple views. (Translation by @BBCArdalan)
The lyrics are a compilation of tweets for #MahsaAmini that evoke felt life among the young in a modern society ruled by a geriatric religious dictatorship. The tweets speak “to the yearning for ‘a normal life,’ instead of the ‘forced paradise’ of an Islamist police state.” [Per Karim Sadjadpour. More adapted tweets from him below the song.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0De6Asvzuso&ab_channel=iWind%21
Common Sense: Meredith Tax’s “A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State”
Meredith Tax died of breast cancer last month. Obituaries in the Times and Nation and Washington Post aimed to do justice to her spiky life as a class-conscious feminist organizer and author, but they may have slighted one of her larger achievements. Tax wrote the book on Rojava and the Kurds’ war against ISIS. Her A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State (2016) has picked up new resonance in this season of protest in Iran. I hope Tax was able to take in the current uprising before she died. It should’ve been an experience of confirmation for her. Imperatives of Iran’s protestors — “Woman, Land, Freedom!” — echo those of Kurds in Rojava. (The martyred Mahsa Amini was a Kurdish Iranian.) What follows is a review of Tax’s urgent report from Rojava that was first posted here in September, 2017.
“Stay with it”: Letter from a Disaster
Dear friends,
I write this letter fully aware of the continued devastation of the war in Ukraine, with so many serious consequences and even worries of nuclear war.
I am also very shocked and saddened by the tremendous destruction and loss of life by Hurricane Ian in Florida.
I am following with deep sympathy the destruction by the powerful storms devastating most of the countries in Central America, and the ongoing plight of so many refugees in that area and worldwide.
If you are reading this, it’s because the people of Haiti are also important to you, as they are to me. I have never in my life seen such a confluence of destructive forces as are afflicting the people here. There really are no words to describe what is happening.
A War Is Coming
I
. A scream on the border of consciousness. I feel the desire to vomit. You only talk about yourself, they say. I want to say something tender, but something else comes out (desire, vomit). They hang up on me. That’s the first time they’ve done something like that. The time between us grows unbearable. I wonder how you can go, in a month, from ineffable love to even more ineffable estrangement. You feel an instant and incandescent recognition, and then: a slow heatdeath of the heart. I go to the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror, hit myself in the face until the room starts to spin, dry heave into the toilet, reapply my eyeliner.
“I said her name!”: Roya Hakakian’s Statement on Mahsa Amini & #IranRevolution2022
“Here’s my testimony [in English] before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few days ago.
رویا حکاکیان، عضو هیئت مدیره توانا:
ایرانیان حاضرند بهای آزادی خود را بپردازند#مهسا_امینی #اعتراضات_سراسری #یاری_مدنی_توانا #رویا_حکاکیان pic.twitter.com/d0mTJ9TWiC
— توانا Tavaana (@Tavaana) September 24, 2022
The Birth of Our Power
We’re honored to repost this (slightly adapted) excerpt from Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1982) — her inspiring, heartrending and newly relevant account of her time in Tehran witnessing women’s struggles against Islamist misogyny after the fall of the Shah.
Aftermath
A few years back Lucian Truscott tried on a writer’s experiment, posting chapters (as he composed them) from his non-fiction novel/memoir, Dying of a Broken Heart, at a word press website (here). Your editor was doing due delving since I’d always enjoyed Truscott’s stuff when I bumped into the following piece of felt history in Heart‘s second chapter. I should probably wait for some Iraq War anniversary but reposting Truscott’s memory of “Mission Accomplished” boosterism feels urgent. I’ll allow his report seems like it belongs in First as a warning to be permanently wary of consensual wisdom. Not that I’ll cop to having been a lap-top general around the time of W.’s wargasm. Still, to the extent First countenanced power of powers-that-be back then – even as this mag busted anti-anti-Islamism – me and all y’all need to suck on Truscott’s truths (all over again). He won’t stop saying it plain, btw. After you read him below, try his substack newsletter here. B.D.
Watch the Sequel to “Jonas who will be 25 in the Year 2000”
No need to make invidious comparisons, but the films of Alain Tanner came closer to me than Godard’s. If you dug Jonas who will 25 in the Year 2000, click the link above and watch Jonas and Lila, Until Tomorrow, which Tanner made in 1999.
The Assumption of Hope
A letter from from Fr. Frechette on the day of this year’s Feast of the Assumption.
“The poor will have hope, and the evil one will be made to shut his mouth.” (Job 5:16)
Before the War [& After Friday’s Murderous Assault on Rushdie]
In the spring of 2006, when Ellen Willis was battling the cancer that would take her life later that year, she emailed approval of First’s pieces on the Danish Cartoon terror attacks. Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d written at the start of the Rushdie affair, she wondered if we “might be interested in reprinting the editorial I wrote in the Voice as a historical affirmation of the bad road we are going down…” As Rushdie begins a tortuous comeback from the maiming that had him on a ventilator and seems likely to leave him blind in one eye, the piece of the past Ellen thought belonged in First remains horrifically prophetic.
Below “Before the War” is a passage from another First protest against Fatwas that’s still on time.
Flo Jo
Message to a nephew on the road to Florence…
O quick and true, the best pieces of art in the world — Michelangelo’s PRISONERS, statues fighting their way out of the stone that creates them and same time jails them, they are as renaissance and post modern and perfect as art can be. Just stand and weep.
August Sander
Originally published (along with August Sander’s “Photography as a Universal Language”) in the Massachusetts Review in 1978. This re-print is tuned to the Pompidou Center’s current exhibit, Germany / 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander.
The Faces We Envision in the Scrapbook of the Dead
Today marks the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called “the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history.” A shooter motivated by what he called a “Hispanic invasion” and the racist concept of “replacement” killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
A Photographic Album
Review of The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based Upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, by Peter Hellman (Random House, 1981). First published in Aperture 89 (Winter 1982). Reprinted in Danny Lyon: American Blood: Selected Writings 1961-2020, (Karma Books, New York).
Paris in the Present Tense
I’m out to write something fresh about Paris after going there with my wife for four days in July to visit my son who’s doing a summer semester in the city. (If you hear a whoosh, it could be the sound of a fool rushing in.)
Cities by the Sea
William Kornblum’s Marseille: Port to Port is (per Howard Becker) “a new kind of travel book.” What follows are (slightly adapted) excerpts from Kornblum’s testament to sociological imagination and soulful uses of ethnographic method…
Banjo (Remix)
Claude McKay’s Banjo is a true life novel about a band of black and tan outsiders living by the sea in mid-20s Marseille.
Tuition
The plan was to buy a Land Rover and spend three months traveling in Europe, Turkey and North Africa. It would take the money earmarked for my tuition to carry it off. So there was a sub-plan – a way to recoup the money with a victimless crime – to import some exotic hashish and Berber marijuana. We would be taking our dog Tina, a Siberian Husky with champion bloodlines. She had to be properly crated in order to fly with the other live animals that the airlines transport and that got me thinking, “I might be clever enough to build the perfect crate, one that would hold more than just the dog.” I felt compelled by the times to take the risk.