Author Archives: B Merritt

Watching J’Accuse (1919)

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This post was contributed by Dr Ludivine Broch, an Early Career Research Fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism

‘With the creation of J’Accuse (1919), a new epoch in the life of Abel Gance and in the history of the French cinema begins.’
– Welsh & Kramer (1975)

The French History Network is showing its first film of the 1914-45 in Cinema film series at the Birkbeck next Friday evening. It will start at 18:00, in the Cinema at 43 Gordon Square. Feel free to bring wine & nibbles to share before the film starts.

The chosen film is J’Accuse, which was directed by Abel Gance in 1919. Gance is the director who also directed Napoleon (1927), a film I have not  seen yet – although I plan to do soon.

J’Accuse is a wonderful way to launch the 1914-45 film series. Technically, it was a pioneering work in the dawn of the age of cinema. Politically, it was an anti-war stand. Culturally, it captured the great malaise of post-WW1 France. The last scene is infamous: the ghosts of the ‘unknown soldiers’ who died for France come back to haunt a population who has not understood their sacrifice, who has not honoured their deaths, who has not realised the extent of the death, the loss, and the horror of what happened. Had these men died in vain? 

Gance’s final scene highlighted many of the tensions between ‘anciens combattants’ and civilians which existed in WW1. This is a theme which Henry Barbusse had already picked up on in Under Fire (1917). When one of his characters returns to the front following a few weeks of leave, he is boiling with anger at the French population who complains about the war, about rations, about daily struggles. Their woes, which lie in such sharp contrast to the horrors of the trenches and of the front line are ridiculed, belittled, tossed aside as meaningless and idiotic. More than that, the men on the front begin to feel isolated from the rest of France. Experiences in the trenches create an ever-growing gap between soldiers of modern warfare and civilians. Even railway workers, who were involved in the military effort but exempt from military service, were criticised for not being ‘real’ front line soldiers. Many felt railwaymen had gotten off lightly. To defend themselves, railwaymen constantly argued that, although they were not front line soldiers, they were ‘soldiers of industry’, risking their lives during peacetime as well as wartime.

But J’Accuse also marked the beginning of a widespread phenomenon: the commemoration of the dead. Far from being forgotten, the ‘anciens combattants’ haunted France’s landscape throughout the interwar period. Street names, memorials, ceremonies, associations… physical reminders of their death were everywhere. This of course was not a purely French phenomenon: Britain and Germany also experienced a vivid and tangible commemoration process.

To fully grasp the trauma of post-WW1 France, come along to watch J’Accuse on 1 March 2013. For, in my view, if anything can explain the start of WW2, and the development of post-war Europe, it is first and foremost the remains of a fragmented society in 1918.

To further contextualise J’Accuse, I would recommend the following articles:

  • Joëlle Beurier, ‘La Grande Guerre au Cinéma’, Vingtième Siècle, n.108 (Oct-Dec 2010)
  • James M. Welsh & Steven Philip Kramer, ‘Abel Gance’s Accusation against War’, Cinema Journal, vol. 14, n°3  (Spring, 1975)
  • David Williams, Media, Memory and the First World War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009)
  • Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995)

Post-War and Post-Olympics: East London, Architecture and Regeneration, Across the Generations

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This post was contributed by Dr Leslie Topp, Senior Lecturer in the History of Architecture in Birkbeck’s Department of History of Art and Screen Media.

What is regeneration? What builds community? And who defines and steers these processes? Architects, planners, politicians, the public? The cold post-Olympic winter, with the built and planned legacy of those games forming around us, seemed a good time to bring local people together to discuss these questions. The day workshop, which was held at the historic House Mill in Bromley-by-Bow on 23 February 2013, was a collaboration between Fundamental Architectural Inclusion, an architecture centre based in Newham, and Birkbeck’s Department of History of Art and Screen Media. Funding was generously provided by the Association of Art Historians Initiatives Fund.

The 10 participants were drawn from the first and second years of Birkbeck’s innovative Certificate in HE in Understanding Visual Arts, which is run out of the Rosetta Art Centre in Newham, and the group of young people which Fundamental works with in initiatives like the Architecture Crew and the Legacy Youth Panel, who are regularly consulted on regeneration plans around the Olympics and its legacy.  All local to East London (Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Waltham Forest), the workshop participants had experienced the current wave of regeneration first hand, and knew too the experience of living in the neighbourhoods and estates built in the post-war years.  They were also (the Birkbeck students) well versed in cultural history, and (the Fundamental participants) in architecture and planning, and the combination of life experience, knowledge and confidence in discussion made for a stimulating and compelling day.

We watched two films, both dealing with ambitious utopian plans for the rebuilding of large sections of Newham. One was made in 2008 by the Architecture Crew, a group of young people 13-19 years old, who Fundamental was working with. The other was made in 1948, by the then West Ham Borough’s Architecture and Planning Office, about the plans for rebuilding West Ham after the extensive destruction caused by the 1940-41 air raids.  One of the most striking differences between them, which emerged strongly through the subsequent discussions, was that while the first offered a ‘bottom up’ perspective, and was a critical enquiry by some of the people who’d be most strongly affected by the regeneration, the second was a piece of ‘top down’ propaganda, representing an ‘experts know best’ position. A lively debate broke out about the extent to which things had or had not changed in this respect since the post-war era. Some argued that while lip service is paid to community consultation, the ‘community’ has very little actual impact on the plans that are carried out. Nick Edwards, the director of Fundamental, and the young people who came along to the workshop, gave a nuanced sense of the particular ways in which people could have an impact on plans (though it was clear that to do this involved a considerable sustained effort over a long period of time.)

Another topic that kept cropping up was mobility. On the one hand, as one participant pointed out, East London has always been a place people move on from when they had the means to do so. Others wondered though whether that may now change – with the regeneration around the Olympics, East London had the potential now to be a place where people would want to stay, or come back to. But the new transport infrastructure, and the increased opportunities to move around, (including Birkbeck’s own courses, such as the Cert HE Understanding Visual Arts, that bring students out to East London and into Bloomsbury) mean that East London is now more connected than ever to the world beyond it. The parts of East London that had been very separate from each other, with some people never venturing much beyond their immediate neighbourhoods, had become more interconnected as well. The homogeneity and static, inward looking quality of the post-war estates (seen as the height of modernity in the 1948 film) were being directly challenged by the latest wave of regeneration.

An extra unexpected treat at lunchtime – enthusiastically taken up by all the workshop participants, despite the cold – was a tour around the Grade One listed 18th century House Mill. History in East London doesn’t begin with the Blitz!

“Visual and other pleasures” by Laura Mulvey

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This post is contributed by Dr. SE Barnet, an artist and Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martin’s

BIH Celebrates Laura Mulvey, Saturday 9 February 2013

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this event was the informal atmosphere of the day.  Laura Mulvey’s friends and colleagues gave a series of introductions, each introducer introducing the next introduction, acknowledging their near parody in doing so. Familiar names and faces filled the room, and of course, references to pleasure were not overlooked.

The other delight of the afternoon was seeing Mulvey’s films and videos, most of which can be difficult to find, outside of ubuweb. Seeing her videos Marilyn and on Imitation of Life were a treat, as was her extemporaneous commentary over a clip from Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt). Her wealth of cinematic knowledge opens up film scenes to richer readings and interpretations. The term palimpsest cropped up frequently in her presentations and for good reason. Mulvey highlights what is hidden in plain sight. Commenting on a background of movie posters papering the wall behind Fritz Lang’s character of the director in Le Mépris, she enlightens us to Godard’s own influences and cinephilia of the 1950s Hollywood studio system. The film as palimpsest is not the pentimento of the painting. These traces are intentional, not reversed or negated.

Brecht’s influence was a central theme over the course of the event as well.  In Mulvey’s video on Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life, she shows us the Brechtian gesture of Sirk’s mise-en-scène. Not only does she focus on the camera’s lingering close up of Lana Turner’s legs in the crane shot at the beach and the subsequent emphasis on Turner’s breasts, but through her slowing down and stopping of the scene, Mulvey shows us something quite extraordinary. With this viewing technique she demonstrates Sirk’s contrasting representations of women; white/black, spectacle/ordinary, negligent/maternal. And then she stops the scene on a frame that viewed in normal time would last less than a second. Behind Turner, in the background, a young, well-dressed black woman has taken Turner’s previous position on the stairs. And just as Turner was photographed by the man at the foot of the steps, so is this woman. Is Sirk covertly suggesting a black woman may assume a sophisticated role comparable to a white woman? This would have been a radical presentment for 1950s America. Then Turner sweeps back to the steps, knocking into the photographer as she does, re-instating her place.

The access Mulvey provides to these hidden gems comes as a result of what she describes as her preferred viewing experience. She insists a first viewing should be linear, from start to finish. But then, the viewer should let her instinct guide her viewing, lingering over those moments that pervade and prickle. Slow down and stop. Repeat. Reviewing as a methodology of informing the viewership. And then she should return to the linear viewing, now educated into the language of the film, able to derive fully the pleasure offered.

Routes and roots: a talk by Claudia Roden

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This post was contributed by Rebecca Heald, a student on Birkbeck’s MSc Social and Political Theory.

I remember as a child my mother making us falafel as a treat. Whenever she did so, she would tell us the story of a couple in Cairo and how they would order falafel from the place below where they lived and hoist them up to their balcony using a pulley. At the beginning of their time living there they were young and lithe; but slowly, with the falafel and the convenience of obtaining them, they became round. I know now this story came from Claudia Roden’s legendary 1968 A Book of Middle Eastern Food.

Roden is one of Britain’s most revered cookery writers. She was born in Egypt in 1936 into the extensive Sephardic Jewish community living there until the 1956 Suez Crisis. Once propelled into exile, she began to miss the food she grew up with and set about gathering recipes. Subsequently she explored and documented a number of cuisines and she has just published her eleventh book, The Food of Spain.

As in Roden’s other work, recipes become a vehicle for history and emotion. This book, like the others, is an extremely personal offering. Experiences over the five years she spent researching the book triggered memories she didn’t know she had. Roden’s family was descended from Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492; her grandmother spoke an old Judeo-Spanish language called Ladino, and once immersed in Spain, traces of the old Muslim presence reminded her of the Arab and Jewish world she grew up in.

The starting point for her research was to ask everyone she met for their favourite recipes, what their parents and grandparents cooked, how they lived and what region they were from. Almost without exception the recipes confirmed that Spain is a country of carnivores. They also belonged to what Roden calls the “rural world”, going against the fact that now 80% of Spain’s population live in cities, not on the land, and seemingly in contrast to Spain’s now fashionable culinary avant-garde. The Catalan writer Josep Pla wrote that cooking is “the landscape in a saucepan”. For Roden, in recipes, there are also ghosts: she sees who was there before.

In the case of Spain, those who were there before include Jews, Muslims, Romans, Visigoths, French, Italians, Belgians, and Germans. In previous books Roden has used recipes to explore the differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews: history, joys and hostilities. Here in Spain, Roden finds that much of the food tells the story of population movements from north to south, coast to mountain to centre, and also, importantly for Spain, the Spanish Inquisition. Pork is shown to be a tool of the Inquisition. Putting it in everything was proof of being Christian. One never knew when the Inquisition was coming, but it seems it often came at lunchtime.

Now many regions are proudly rediscovering their past, many of those Roden meets declare they are descended from conversos. Every dish has a story, and often this is something to celebrate. Upon eating Santiago cake, made of almonds, sugar, eggs and oranges, Roden declares, that none of the ingredients are local to Galicia and it tastes like a Jewish Passover cake. Her hosts are delighted and push her onto local television to share her observation. The area has been celebrating its Jewish history for tourists and on a local farm they have been reenacting weddings complete with ceremonies under a hoopa. Roden’s culinary analysis was welcome confirmation of the fact that in Galicia there were many Jews who converted rather than leaving.

Roden herself has summarized ‘Spain’s regional dishes are memories and people want to hold on to them,’ a sentiment to which The Food of Spain bears rich and delicious testament.

This event was organised by the Birkbeck Food Group, part of the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.