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Victoria & Abdul: Simulacra & Simulation

by Gajendra Singh
University of Exeter

Posted in partnership with the History Department at the University of Exeter and The Imperial and Global Forum.

One of the earliest films to be shot and then screened throughout India were scenes from the Delhi Durbar between December 29, 1902 and January 10, 1903 The Imperial Durbar, created to celebrate the accession of Edward VII as Emperor of India following the death of Victoria, was the most expensive and elaborate act of British Imperial pageantry that had ever been attempted. Nathaniel Curzon, as Viceroy of India, oversaw the construction of a tent city housing 150,000 guests north of Delhi proper and what occurred in Delhi was to be replicated (on a smaller scale) in towns and cities across India.

The purpose of the Durbar was to contrast British modernity with Indian tradition. Europeans at the Durbar were instructed to dress in contemporary styles even when celebrating an older British Imperial past (as with veterans of the ‘Mutiny’). Indians, however, were to wear Oriental (perceptibly Oriental) costumes as motifs of their Otherness. This construction of an exaggerated sense of Imperial difference, and through it Imperial order and Imperial continuity, was significant. It was a statement of the permanence of Empire, of Britain’s Empire being at the vanguard of modernity even as the Empire itself was increasingly anxious about nascent nationalist movements and rocked by perpetual Imperial crises.

It’s unlikely that Stephen Frears watched these films from 1902 or 1903 upon finalising the screenplay and then shooting Victoria & Abdul. They have only recently been digitized and archived by the British Film Institute. But his recent movie, filmed when most visions of the past are obscured by the myopia of the present, is an unconscious reproduction of films produced and shown when Empire was an idée fixe in the British mind. Abdul Karim, one of several Indians at Victoria’s court during her long reign (the other two, that I know of, were Dalip Singh, the last Maharaja of Punjab, and Victoria Gouramma, the daughter of the last Raja of Kodagu), is a cypher throughout the film. He shows no emotion or sentiment or stirring rhetoric except when genuflecting before his Empress – kissing her feet upon their first meeting, stoically holding her hand upon her death, sitting as a sentinel by her statue in Agra into his dotage.

Such a one-dimensional portrayal is partly a reflection of the populist histories used as source material for the film. Sushila Anand’s Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul is a titillating account of the possible sexual encounter between the matronly white Empress and her much younger lowborn Indian servant and Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant is a more sober tale of the scandal that the relationship caused among Victoria’s staff. But even in these accounts Karim has voice and agency. Anand and Basu are, in part, relying upon Karim’s own accounts of what transpired when he and Victoria were alone.

Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim, 1893 (via Wikimedia Commons)

That agency is consciously stripped by Frears. His instruction to Ali Fazal upon taking up the role was to play him as Peter Sellar’s Chance in Being There, a character who is a simple-minded, sheltered gardener suddenly catapulted into political power.[1] It is Judi Dench’s Victoria and, to a lesser extent, Eddie Izzard’s wonderfully corpulent Bertie/Edward VII who are the actual protagonists of the piece. The official synopsis makes this clear:

The film tells the extraordinary true story of an unexpected friendship in the later years of Queen Victoria’s remarkable rule. When Abdul Karim, a young clerk, travels from India to participate in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, he is surprised to find favor [sic.] with the Queen herself. As the Queen questions the constrictions of her long-held position, the two forge an unlikely and devoted alliance with a loyalty to one another that her household and inner circle all attempt to destroy. As the friendship deepens, the Queen begins to see a changing world through new eyes and joyfully reclaims her humanity.

Her rule, her favour, her humanity. It is a story told to redeem Victoria. It is through her eyes that the narrative is conveyed and any change or evolution in a character occurs in her attitudes towards India and her subject people – learning some terribly mis-pronounced Hindustani/Urdu and that Indians too can act as competent servants (huzzah!). Victoria is cast as the flagbearer of Imperial progress against her “racialist” son who despises Karim and is representative of a “bad” form of Imperialism. “If only the latter had not won out,” we are expected to cry, “then India would not have been lost!” Only in the uncovering of the fact that Karim had gonorrhoea by Victoria’s outraged staff do we get a glimpse of the many lives lived by Karim. One can only assume that he had at least some fun in England.

The film is an Orientalist fable that is not meant to reveal any social life of the Indian portrayed. But that is not what makes it remarkable. Stephen Frears made his career with My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, a film which presented the transgressive relationship between Gordon Warnecke’s Omar, a British-Pakistani from Battersea, and Daniel Day Lewis’ Johnny, a neo-Nazi. It seems that the complex filmic relationships that were once Frears’ stock-in-trade are no longer filmable or seen as commercially viable. Instead in Abdul we have a character who is childlike in his stupor at British munificence, completely asexual despite the revelation that he has a sexually transmitted disease, and is always ready with a word of wisdom that only a true Oriental can provide (lines that are, of course, from Rumi – always Rumi). It is an unconscious reproduction of the first films ever produced of and in India. But at least in those films the desire to cast Indians into caricatures was born from Imperial anxiety; this is merely the product of an absence of thought.

Sources and Related Reading:

Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (2015).

Kim Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’; Past and Present, 218: 1 (2013): 159-197.

Sushila Anand, Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul, (1996).

Shrabani Basu, Victoria and Karim: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant, (2010).

Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, (1997).

UK readers can find early films of India on BFI Player here, and a full list of films from this era (with commentary by the author) here. US and international readers can see a similar film, Delhi Durbar (1912) on Youtube here.

[1] According to Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, BBC Radio Five Live, 15^th September 2017. Hello to Jason Isaacs.

Chan is Missing (1982)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first historical film review we posted on Not Even Past. As the author says, Chan is Missing is: “an early classic of Asian American cinema, it holds up well to multiple viewings.”

By Madeline Hsu

In this affectionate insider’s portrait of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1970s, director Wayne Wang riffs on the well-known adventures of Charlie Chan, the stereotyped Chinese-American 1930s film detective, by following the meandering investigation of two cab drivers. Joe and his nephew Steve are searching for another Chan, their friend Chan Hung, who seems to have disappeared with $4,000 of their cash. Along the way, they encounter a gallery of Chinatown personalities and settings, revealing aspects of the district that are rarely visible to visiting tourists. They venture past the bustling restaurants and the pagoda roofs and dragon-embellished streetlights of Grant Avenue into the tight quarters of greasy commercial kitchens; the packed fish markets and grocery stores of Stockton Street; narrow, laundry-festooned residential alleyways; a local senior citizens center; and the Neighborhood Language Center offering English classes for new arrivals.

Along the way, the search for the elusive Chan uncovers a rich pastiche of the possibilities of being Chinese in America. Chan could be a victim of police misunderstandings; a possible murderer and political extremist; an aeronautical engineer who developed the first Chinese word processor; a genius who could find no other job than working in a restaurant kitchen; a sentimental music lover; a disappointing husband who refused to adapt and get US citizenship but was a good father. Joe and Steve find themselves increasingly befuddled as the movie unfolds.

The 1970s witnessed a reinvigorated Chinatown, with the civil rights movement and new waves of American-born advocates and new immigrants adding to the agitation of community rights groups. Through a cacophony of dialects, accents, and background noises, Wang skillfully shows that the earlier film hero Charlie Chan does not represent Chinese America in the 1970s. Wang obscures his subjects by shooting at angles and through windows even as he offers glimpses into a richly textured community framed by competing divides of generations and genders: American-born and immigrants; leftists and rightists; business successes, community activists, and the striving working-classes. Joe and Steve’s banter captures not just their strategizing about how and where to find Chan, but also whether and how Chinese can claim a place in America. If a man of Chan’s abilities and character seems to have fled the United States, what of those with less promise?

“Chan is Missing” was Wayne Wang’s first feature film and still his most enduring. Along with “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart” (1985) it is the most intimate of his movies before he launched into commercially successful hits such as “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and “Maid in Manhattan” (2002) as well as collaborating on independent films with writers like Paul Auster and Yiyun Li. An early classic of Asian American cinema, it holds up well to multiple viewings.

photos by Nancy Wong

Film Review – A Separation (2011)

By Golsheed Bagheri

A Separation is an Iranian drama directed by Asghar Farhadi. As is indicated by the title, the film focuses on the separation of Nader and Simin, an affluent couple residing in Tehran. Simin wishes to escape Iran’s repressive society and move to Canada, which she believes is a more suitable environment to raise their daughter, Termeh. Nader refuses to leave under the pretext that he must stay in Iran to take care of his elderly father who is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Their situation is further complicated by Razieh, a devout Muslim woman from the lower economic class, who is hired to help care for Nader’s father. Numerous financial and personal conflicts pit the well-off Nader and Simin against Razieh and her unemployed, debt-ridden husband, Hojat.

The Family Protection Law of 1967 mandated that all marriage contracts must include certain rights to divorce for women. While the FPL increased the number of female-initiated divorces in the urban community as a result, the overall rate of divorce dropped substantially. Women became more assertive in the home and in public as a result of this law, and embraced their roles in society with much greater confidence. With the establishment of the Islamic Republic and the institution of the Islamic Civil code in 1979, however, the FPL was repealed. Under the new system, women were expected to endure most forms of sexual, physical and mental abuse in marriage. Female initiated-divorce was permitted only in the case of male impotence, severe drug addiction, or intolerable violence. Women who did achieve divorce sacrificed their right to their children, as divorced women had severely limited custody rights. Of course conditions are not quite as austere in the present day and children can sometimes choose which parent they want to live with.

Through these family frays and a vivid depiction of the limitations of the Islamic court system, Farhadi composes a brilliantly accurate rendition of the current issues in Iranian society today. The “bi-culture” phenomenon, which is often cited as a contributing factor to the culmination of the 1979 Revolution, is effectively demonstrated by the two conflicting families in the film. Nader and Simin represent the urban, upper-middle class, educated and with secular leanings, who grapple with such issues as to whether or not they should emigrate to a more open society for the sake of their child. Razieh and Hojat embody the lower economic echelon, which is composed of the more traditional and religious elements of Iranian society. The struggles endured by this class typically arise from poverty, as is exemplified by Hojat’s unemployment and debts, which in turn forces Razieh to take a job that gives her religious qualms.

Through his expert direction, Farhadi masterfully elicits a sense of empathy for each one of the characters, despite the nature of their involved conflict. Indeed there are no antagonists in this film; all of the characters are inherently good people and are simply striving to survive against life’s challenges. What distinguishes A Separation from other Oscar-nominated dramas is the fact that it is a portrayal of the experience of an entire nation, contained in an engaging story, based on the realities of present-day Iranian society.

Camila (1984)

By Julia Ogden

Romeo and Juliet may be the most well known tale of star-crossed lovers, but ask any Argentine and they will know the story of Camila O’Gorman and Ladislao Gutierrez just as well. The ill-fated love affair between the strong-willed daughter of an elite landowner and a Catholic priest, depicted in the 1984 film Camila, is a multi-layered story that ties together romance, the political history of the nineteenth-century Latin America, and echoes of government corruption across centuries.

The story of Camila and Ladislao unfolded during Juan Manuel de Rosas’s twenty-year rule of Argentina from 1829 to 1852. The conservative caudillo directed the newly independent country with an iron hand. He upheld the colonial social hierarchy, allied with and supported the Catholic Church, closed the country to external trade and censored the flow of information in and out of its borders. In this claustrophobic setting, the fiercely independent Camila read contraband books and dreamt of marrying for love rather than familial duty. When a new priest arrived in Buenos Aires from the province of Tucumán and spoke out from the pulpit against the violence of the Rosas regime, Camila fell desperately in love. It did not take long for Ladislao, forced into the priesthood as the filial duty of a second-born son, to reciprocate her feelings. Knowing their love was forbidden, they fled in the night to the neighboring province of Corrientes, where they began life anew as a poor schoolteacher and his wife. Soon, however, a priest from Buenos Aires recognized Camila and reported her whereabouts to her father. The two were quickly arrested and sentenced to death – despite the fact that Camila was eight-months pregnant.

The execution of Camila and Ladislao in 1848 was a severe overreaction. At any other time, the pair would likely not have suffered the same fate. Historian Ann Twinam has shown that in the colonial era, the celibacy of priests functioned far more in breach than in observance, and that, while upholding their public reputations of virginal innocence, elite women often had pre-marital sexual relations in private. If sexual digressions were generally accepted social practice, why did Rosas kill the lovers? Historians postulate that his reaction was tied to the political climate of early nineteenth-century Argentina in which conservative caudillos like Rosas battled fiercely with their liberal opponents. Argentine liberals vehemently attacked Rosas from exile in Uruguay and Chile. They first used the news of Camila and Ladislao’s affair to highlight the lack of morality and law in Rosas’s Argentina. Once he captured them, Rosas decided to make an example of the unfortunate duo in order to silence his opponents. Unfortunately, his overreaction only provided more fuel to their onslaught by providing proof of the caudillo’s barbarism.

Argentine director, María Luisa Bemberg’s Oscar-winning movie Camila, adds yet another layer to this tragic story. Released only a year after the end of the right-wing dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), Bemberg’s cinematic depiction of the stifling oppression of Rosa’s regime in the 1840s struck a chord with Argentine audiences. The two conservative governments share noticeable similarities. In the same way the rise of Rosas to power in the 1820s forced his liberal opponents into exile, the repressive regime in the 1970s caused a mass exodus from Argentina. Both governments then carried out tactics of terror to subdue and control their populations – Rosas left the heads of subversives killed during night on stakes, while the bodies of those “disappeared” by the military dictatorship washed up on the shores of the Río de la Plata. Finally, the death of Camila’s unborn child not only conjured images of innocent citizens murdered by their government, but it also evoked memories of the dozens of babies taken from executed leftist women to be raised by members of the conservative regime. From love story to political intrigue to visions of cross-century government violence and oppression, Camila is a must watch for those interested in cinematic genius as well as Latin American history.

J. Edgar (2011)

By Dolph Briscoe IV

Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood presents a biopic of one of the most powerful and controversial figures of twentieth-century America in the film J. Edgar. Acclaimed actor Leonardo DiCaprio brilliantly portrays John Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Eastwood and DiCaprio depict Hoover as a complicated individual, dedicated to modernizing crime investigation in the United States yet consumed with a desire for power, respect, and adoration. Hoover’s insecurities lead him to legal and ethical abuses of his authority, which cause great problems in both his personal life and professional legacy.

J. Edgar begins in the early 1960s, as an aging Hoover reflects upon his life to young agents writing a history of the FBI. Hoover grew up in Washington, D.C., the favored son of a domineering mother who continuously predicts that he will bring greatness to the family name. Such familial pressures cause Hoover to perpetually seek his mother’s approval throughout his life. While working in the Department of Justice following World War I, he catches the attention of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and plays a key role in the notorious Red Scare, hunting down and deporting individuals suspected of Bolshevist sympathies. Hoover’s experience with the Palmer Raids converts him into a strident anticommunist.

Following his successes during the Red Scare, Hoover becomes director of the Bureau of Investigation (which would become the FBI in the 1930s). Hoover immediately sets out to professionalize his agency. He only hires individuals of excellent physical stature who commit to complete loyalty to the Bureau above any other persons or goals in their lives. His organization practices the most advanced crime-fighting techniques, as Hoover rigorously studies the new sciences of fingerprinting and forensics. During these years, two critical people enter Hoover’s life, Helen Gandy and Clyde Tolson. Miss Gandy, as Hoover calls her, chooses to forego romantic relationships in order to dedicate herself totally to her work. Impressed by such conviction, Hoover hires her as his personal secretary. He also feels an instant connection with Clyde Tolson, a young law school graduate, whom he names as his right-hand man.

Hoover perceives leading the FBI as the vehicle to achieve glory for both himself and his family name. He also truly believes his agency serves as the watchdog for his beloved country’s safety. The film recalls many famous historical events. Hoover’s FBI investigates the kidnapping and murder of renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby, contentiously finding only one suspect in the crime. Agents battle organized crime, and bank robbers, like John Dillinger. Hoover himself markets the organization, supporting efforts to lionize his “G-Men” in both comic books and movies, often exaggerating his own personal role in suspenseful accounts of arrests.

Yet Hoover’s obsession with empowering his beloved FBI causes him serious problems and raises ethical questions. His fear of losing the directorship and anxiety about domestic subversives leads him, with the help of Miss Gandy, to create a secret file with salacious information about some of the most powerful people in America. In a reoccurring scene, the FBI leader meets with new presidents entering the White House and asserts his authority though barely veiled blackmail. In a flashback, a young Hoover visits President Franklin D. Roosevelt, inquiring about how to handle information he has obtained detailing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s intimacy with another woman. Understanding Hoover’s purpose, FDR gives the Bureau even more autonomy.

Thirty years later, Robert F. Kennedy and Hoover engage in a tense meeting, where the new attorney general attempts to reassert the Department of Justice’s authority over the FBI. Hoover makes clear that he possesses files detailing President John F. Kennedy’s extramarital affairs, and is not afraid to make this information public. A disgusted Robert Kennedy acquiesces to Hoover’s demands, fearful of a scandal that could embarrass his brother. In another infamous episode, the FBI director bugs Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hotel room, collects evidence of the civil rights leader’s marital infidelities, and unsuccessfully attempts to blackmail him to prevent King from accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hoover’s weaknesses also cause conflict in his own personal life. Though doted upon by his mother, he seems incapable of ever fulfilling her high expectations. When the body of the abducted Lindbergh infant is found, Hoover’s mother chastises him for failing to save the child and condemns him as possessing blood on his hands. The FBI director struggles with romantic relationships. The film presents him as awkward around women, but illustrates the deep bond he develops with Clyde Tolson, long rumored to be Hoover’s lover. However, even with Tolson, Hoover often demonstrates cruelty and chooses solitude. Because of his mother’s harsh warning to avoid homosexual relationships, Hoover withholds affection from the ever loyal Tolson, whom he clearly loves. Likewise, when Tolson and Miss Gandy express concern regarding Hoover’s obsession with destroying Dr. King, the FBI director ruthlessly berates them for questioning his judgment.

At the film’s conclusion, Hoover remains concerned with the future of the FBI and his own legacy. Following a meeting with Richard Nixon, the FBI leader expresses alarm to Miss Gandy and Tolson about the new president’s lust for power. Eastwood presents Nixon as even more sinister and paranoid than Hoover. At his request, Miss Gandy promises Hoover that she will always protect his secret files, and thus the integrity of both the FBI and himself. Sure enough, when Hoover passes away a few years later, President Nixon, while publicly praising Hoover, vulgarly orders his aides to confiscate the secret FBI files. When Nixon’s men search through Hoover’s office, however, they only find empty file cabinets. The film then ends showing Miss Gandy privately shredding a mountain of documents. The credits note that only a few misfiled papers from Hoover’s collection were ever found. Even in death, J. Edgar Hoover once again asserts his power over a sitting American president.

J. Edgar omits several critical historical episodes. Eastwood does not address Hoover and the FBI’s role during World War II. Surprisingly, the film barely mentions the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism, surely a seminal period in the time of Hoover’s FBI directorship. Also, we see scant attention to the larger civil rights movement beyond Dr. King. What about the FBI’s surveillance of organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers? Furthermore, how about FBI monitoring of antiwar groups during the Vietnam era? Certainly, a director can only cover so many stories in a movie, but these are important events, too.

Despite this minor criticism, Eastwood tells us much about the past that certainly is applicable today. The film’s central theme is power, and how its abuse can be very dangerous. Hoover’s lust for power causes him to breach legal and ethical boundaries, raising issues that continue to remain divisive among Americans. We live in a time when leaders, often in the name of national security, much like Hoover, utilize their powers with questionable methods. Much controversy surrounds the Patriot Act and electronic surveillance, supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Civil liberties in the age of terrorism, as in the Cold War era, again seem at risk. Hoover’s paranoia about subversives appears eerily similar to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s obsession with capturing suspected Islamic militants. What does it mean if, in our dedication to protect the United States, we violate the moral codes our country holds most dear?

J. Edgar is an excellent presentation of an individual and an organization which had profound, and controversial, influences upon American life in the twentieth century. Recalling many historical episodes with dazzling acting and fascinating storylines, viewers will find J. Edgar both intellectually stimulating and movingly entertaining.

Photo Credits
Uncredited photographer for Los Angeles Daily News, J. Edgar Hoover and his assistant Clyde Tolson, c 1939.
Abbie Rowe, John F. Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy, Oval Office, 1961
Yoichi. R. Okamoto, J. Edgar Hoover in the Oval Office, 1967

Two documentaries on Guatemala’s violent civil war

By Virginia Garrard-Burnett

Discovering Dominga (2003), directed by Patricia Flynn

Denese Joy Becker, a cosmotologist living in Iowa, was adopted as a child from Guatemala. Although she remembers nearly nothing about her past, a cousin from her American family realizes that Denese’s age corresponds with the period of la violencia in Guatemala. Denese and her adopted family travel to Guatemala, where she discovers she is Dominga Sic Ruiz, a survivor from a 1982 Guatemalan massacre in which both her parents were murdered by the Guatemalan military. The documentary recounts how Denese rediscovers her own identity as Dominga—an Achí Maya woman, and the horrendous political context that led to her being put up for adoption in the United States.

When the Mountains Tremble (1983), directed by Pamela Yates

This is a documentary about the armed conflict between the Guatemalan military and one of that nation’s most important armed guerrilla groups, the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP), who in the context of this film are primarily indigenous people, the Maya. This documentary was made during the nadir of Guatemala’s 36-year long civil war, and includes remarkable footage from both sides of the conflict. It also includes narration by a very young Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the Ki’che’ Mayan activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

Virginia Garrard-Burnett recommends related books here in READ.

Sarah’s Key (2011)

by Julia M. Gossard

Just before dawn on July 16, 1942 the French Police began Opération Vent Printanier, or “Operation Spring Breeze.” That morning over 13,000 Jews were forcibly removed from their homes and trudged through the streets of Paris to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the Winter Bicycle Racetrack, on the rue Nélaton in the city’s fifteenth arrondisement. Situated next to the Bir-Hakeim métro, not far from the Eiffel Tower, the Vel’ d’Hiv’ (as it was commonly called) was the first indoor track in France that hosted numerous sport and cultural shows. But in July 1942 the Vel’ d’Hiv’ hosted a much different spectacle: the inhumane detainment of Jews before their deportation to concentration camps in Parisian suburbs, such as Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande, that sent Jews directly to Auschwitz. Inside of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ the French Police denied Jews water, food, medical attention, and even lavatories, treating the prisoners worse than livestock. Despite the atrocities that took place at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ and later in the concentration camps where families were separated and eventually convoyed to Auschwitz for extermination, the French rarely acknowledged or spoke about the Vel’ d’Hiv’. It was not until 1995 that the French Government, under the leadership of Jacques Chirac, addressed Vichy French compliance in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup and the Nazis’ ultimate answer to the “Jewish Question.”

Philippe Pétain meeting Hitler in October 1940. (via Wikipedia)

Though a work of fiction, Tatiana de Rosnay’s poignant novel, Sarah’s Key, helps inform the reader about the lesser-known atrocities committed against French Jews under Nazi occupation and the Vichy government. Simultaneously set in July 1942 and sixty years later in July 2002, the novel alternates narratives between the lives of Sarah Starzynski, a ten-year old Jewish girl imprisoned with her parents in the Vel’ d’Hiv’, and Julia Jarmond, an ex-patriot American journalist writing a piece on the sixtieth anniversary of the Roundup. In researching her article, Julia begins to discover tragic secrets about Sarah’s life that have a devastating impact on Julia’s own life sixty years later.

Weaving together mystery, history, and intense emotion, de Rosnay provides an engrossing story. Though at times the plot can seem somewhat predictable this does not significantly undermine the book’s success. What is most significant and moving about the book is de Rosnay’s piercing criticism of France’s seeming ambivalence and long denial of involvement in the atrocities of the Holocaust including the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup. As one character poignantly remarks, “Nobody remembers the Vel’ d’Hiv’ children, you know… Why should they? Those were the darkest days of our country.” Despite the dedication of several sites in Paris to the memory of those deported during the war, such as the Mémorial de la Shoah and the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, there still remains a certain amount of unfamiliarity with Vichy France’s role in the Holocaust in France today. Sarah’s Key reminds readers that Vichy France’s compliance in the “Jewish Question” is not something to be forgotten or swept underneath the rug. It is a topic that deserves reexamination and further explanation.

Wikipedia on the round-up of French Jews
Mémorial de la Shoah website
A walking tour of the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation with informative pictures

Trailer for the new film version of Sarah’s Key

Photo credits:
Jewish women in Paris, just before the roundup
Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia Commons

Death and Decadence: Vatel (2000)

By Julia M. Gossard

According to the infamous seventeenth-century gossip, Madame de Sévigné, on April 24, 1671 François Vatel, distraught over the late arrival of fish for a banquet in honor of Louis XIV, committed suicide by impaling himself through the heart with a sword. Sévigné and other nobles speculated that Vatel, a well-known perfectionist, succumbed to the overwhelming pressures of planning an extravagant three-day banquet in honor of the king’s royal visit and decided to kill himself instead of having to face public humiliation for his failure.

Roland Joffé’s 2000 film, Vatel, is a reinterpretation of Vatel’s (Gérard Depardieu) death, portraying him as a victim of the rigid social politics that ruled seventeenth-century French noble society. In 1671 the Marquis de Lauzun (Tim Roth) delivers a message from Louis XIV to the Prince de Condé (Julien Glover) that the king wishes to spend three days at Condé’s chateau, Chantilly. Hoping to use this opportunity to raise his social standing, the Prince de Condé orders his “Master of Festivities and Pleasures,” François Vatel, to organize a lavish affair to impress the king and secure Condé a position as general in the upcoming military campaign against the Dutch Republic.

The film chronicles Vatel’s intense drive to create innovative and delicious meals, sumptuously decorated quarters, and beautiful performances including a water and fireworks show that will be used as the event’s grand finale for the king and the 2,000 other guests expected at the banquet. Despite Vatel’s meticulous plans, when the first day actually arrives mishaps abound. To complicate matters further, Vatel becomes enamored with Anne de Montausier (Uma Thurman), a beautiful women presumed to be Louis XIV’s new lover. Disaster after disaster occurs throughout the three-day festivities, with Vatel becoming increasingly disillusioned with the prodigal nobility, leading to his suicide.

Vatel illuminates the complexity of the early modern patronage system. A hierarchy existed, in which patrons were often clients themselves. In this case the Prince de Condé’s was both Vatel’s patron and the King’s client. The patronage system was so deeply embedded in the minds of early modern people that, as Vatel demonstrates, one misstep resulting in the loss of a patron’s favor could mean social (and even actual) death. Clients worked solely to serve their patrons, knowing that their livelihood depended on their patron’s benevolence. In Vatel, that service involved a luxurious, spectacle of sensory pleasures, the very decadence of which highlighted the costs of failure.

If you are a gourmand this movie will have you salivating within ten minutes. Not only do you learn the origins of whipped cream, aptly called “chantilly” in French, but the many palatable dishes created by Vatel play a prominent role in the film. Additionally, the film is a visual feast for the eyes. Shot primarily on location at the Château de Chantilly in France, the setting is authentic and beautifully presented. While some of the vividly colored costumes and synthetic hairpieces are not necessarily unique to the seventeenth-century, overall the costumes, jewelry, coiffures, and other accessories work together to portray the luxurious ambiance that surrounded the king and his nobility. For anyone interested in the lavish, extravagant, and decadent French nobility of the seventeenth century, this is a must see movie.

For more on the history of French cuisine, you can read Susan Pinkard’s, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1789 (2008)

A wonderful children’s book, called A Medieval Feast, by Aliki, details the extraordinary lengths the nobility were expected to go to entertain the French king when he decided to come for a visit. Delightful illustrations depict social and cultural events with considerable historical accuracy (though for a somewhat earlier period).

The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV by W.H. Lewis (1997) discusses social life under Louis XIV.

In The Fabrication of Louis XIV (1994), Peter Burke explores the ways Louis XIV was represented in painting and other images to show how the Sun King consciously managed his public image and invented a new image of the king.

See also our READ section for Julia Gossard’s recommendation of a book about this period that treats some of the same issues as this film, A Tale of Two Murders.

Everyday Crimes: The Shop on Main Street (1965)

By Tatjana Lichtenstein

“They did it. Not us!” According to historian Tony Judt, this was the way Europeans tried coming to terms with the fate suffered by their Jewish neighbors during the Second World War. Pointing their fingers at the Germans, other Europeans chose to repress the memory of widespread participation or acquiescence in the persecution of Europe’s Jews. The role of ordinary people in betraying their Jewish neighbors, often in the hope of material rewards, appears in survivor testimonies and was remembered by families and communities as the war came to an end. Nevertheless, this knowledge was suppressed in the name of reconstruction, a process of social, political, and moral reconstitution after years of occupation and war. It took a generation before historians, writers, filmmakers, and other voices began questioning this public memory of the Second World War. In Germany, the Auschwitz Trial (1963-1965) confronted Germans with the Nazi past, and in France, the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) created a storm of controversy and helped break the taboo surrounding collaboration with Nazi rule. In communist Eastern Europe, the 1960s witnessed similar challenges to popular memories by writers, artists, and other activists.

The Academy Award-winning, The Shop on Main Street was one of a series of Czechoslovakian films that looked critically at the participation of regular people in the Holocaust. Set in a small town in Slovakia, at the time a Nazi puppet state, the film suggests that ordinary men and women were deeply involved in the destruction of Jewish lives. In difficult conditions, good people do bad things; this is the tragic story of just such a person.

In 1942, Tono Brtko, an underemployed carpenter, embarks on his ‘career’ as an Aryanizer, the non-Jewish manager of a store belonging to the elderly, Jewish widow Rozalie Lautmann, played by the famous Yiddish actress Idá Kaminská. Driven by an ambitious, domineering wife and his own desire for greater status, Tono becomes a mild-mannered oppressor, but his affection for Mrs Lautmann grows. Unable to comprehend the new moral order and hence Tono’s real business in her shop, she embraces what she believes to be a new, helpful assistant as a long-gone son. Kaminská and Josef Kroner as Tono give us complex, powerful, and deeply touching performances. The film brilliantly investigates the ways people became morally and materially invested in the removal of Jews, the blurred boundary between bystander and perpetrator in moments of persecution, and the fragility of love and courage in times of fear. Although the filmmakers invited audiences to reflect on the limits of personal responsibility in Communist Czechoslovakia, The Shop on Main Street raised questions that we continue to ask ourselves today: Why do ordinary people become participants in the persecution and murder of their neighbors?

Rebel With a Cause: Johnny Tremain (1957)

By Robert Olwell

Johnny Tremain Cover (via Wikipedia)

As a historian of early America, my subject predates the invention of film or video, voice or music recording, or even photography. When I watch my modernist colleagues deliver multi-media lectures – including film clips, snatches of popular music or speeches, and photos – I feel a twinge of envy. The closest 18th-century Americans ever got to a multi-media presentation was to paint the words: “No Stamp Act!” on the side of a porcelain teapot. A few years ago, after discussing the origins and consequences of the Boston tea party, including reading contemporary newspaper accounts, letters, and cartoons, I treated my students (and I will admit, myself) to the Boston tea party scene from Disney’s 1957 film Johnny Tremain, based on the 1943 novel by Esther Forbes. The depiction of the “tea party” as an oddly orderly act of vandalism is probably accurate, but one cannot escape the impression of watching 1950s Americans playing at being 18th-century revolutionaries, and not even bothering to wash the Brylcreem out of their hair. Of course, as I told my students (in self-defense) before showing them the clip, any historical film is a document of the age that produced it rather than of the age it depicts. So what can Johnny Tremain tell us about America in the 1950s?

At the start of the film, Johnny Tremain, a young orphan and silversmith’s apprentice, is portrayed as petulant, conceited, and disdainful of authority. In one scene that anyone who has ever seen the movie will remember, Johnny breaks the rules by working on the Sabbath and gets his come-uppance when he accidentally puts his hand into a puddle of molten silver. Audiences in the 1950s would likely have recognized Johnny as a colonial version of an emerging cultural phenomenon: the “teenager.” Newspapers, radio, and the new medium of television were full of stories of teenage “rebellion,” which, sociologists warned, was creating a new social problem called “juvenile delinquency.” In the spring of 1954, a Congressional sub-committee held televised hearings on the causes of juvenile delinquency that competed for viewers’ attention with the simultaneous, and subsequently far more famous, Army-McCarthy hearings. The troubled and violent teen became a common character in popular films. Perhaps the best known were Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” (1953), and James Dean in “Rebel without a Cause” (1955).

Theatrical Release Poster, 1955 (via Wikipedia)

Hal Stalmaster, who plays Johnny Tremain, is no Brando or Dean in terms of acting skills. Similarly, Johnny’s angst is depicted far more crudely; with a crippled hand he literally cannot find a place for himself in society.

Fortunately, the American Revolution arrives to give Johnny a healthy outlet for his destructive (and patricidal) impulses. At the tea party, Johnny gleefully smashes tea chests alongside approving and participating adults (Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and Joseph Warren). Even an on-looking British admiral admires the tea partiers’ politeness and principles. The only disapproving authority figure is, significantly, also Johnny’s only blood relation, his uncle, played with panache by Sebastian Cabot as an effete popinjay who is eventually revealed to be an anti-revolutionary loyalist and thus, in a phrase that was loaded with meaning in the 1950s, “un-American.” The film’s depiction of the American Revolution as an Oedipal conflict resembles (in a far less disturbing and simplified fashion) the version provided by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his 1831 short story: “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux.”

After the tea party, Johnny joins the “Sons of Liberty” and becomes active in the revolutionary underground. Eventually, he finds himself on Lexington green when the first shots in the war are fired, and takes part in the running battle to drive the redcoats back to Boston. The film ends that night with Johnny in the camp of the patriot army gathering outside of Boston, a warrior in the cause of American (and his own) freedom. But unlike Forbes’s novel, in which the outbreak of the war (and the death of a friend) forces Johnny to grow up and accept the responsibilities of adulthood, the film’s Johnny makes no such psychological breakthrough. He is the same callow, smart-alecky teen at the film’s end as at the beginning. War (and revolution) do not change him. In the film’s depiction of combat, it is disconcerting to watch Johnny cackle with laughter as he ambushes and kills the king’s soldiers (as if fulfilling a long repressed desire). The film also shies away from espousing any overt political ideology. James Otis, the only character in the film who tries to articulate a larger meaning to the struggle, is described and portrayed as mentally unbalanced.

The film’s reluctance to ground the revolution on either abstract ideals or nitty-gritty class struggle closely reflects the views of American historians writing in the 1950s, who argued that, by crossing the ocean, the colonists had left the ideological conflicts of the old world behind them and instead shared in a broad liberal consensus. In 1955, Louis Hartz argued, in The Liberal Tradition in America, that colonial American society was an egalitarian world of small property holders. Lacking either an aristocracy or a peasantry, concepts such as class (and class struggle) were meaningless. Not that they thought about politics much. Lockean, possessive individualists by nature rather than persuasion, early Americans were blessed with a “charming innocence of mind.” For obvious reasons, these historians tended to focus their attention on the northern colonies, where slavery was of relatively small consequence.

In retrospect, one can readily see how the hopes and fears of larger 1950s society shaped this so-called “consensus school” of early American history, both in terms of its celebration of middle class values and bourgeois conformity, and its dread of radicalism. Forbes’s novel, written in 1943, reflected the concerns of the depression era and was far more focused on issues of class and poverty than was the film. After a brief theater run – it premiered on July 4, of course – Johnny Tremain was broadcast on Disney’s weekly television program in 1958 and was rerun many times thereafter. Like me, the vast majority of Americans probably first saw Johnny burn his hand in the comfort of their living rooms. For this reason, Johnny Tremain perhaps should be compared not to contemporary movies, but to 1950s television. More than Brando or Dean, the fictional teen who Stalmaster’s Johnny Tremain most closely resembles is Eddie Haskell, played by Ken Osmond in the T.V. series Leave it to Beaver, who made his first appearance in 1957. Although a wiseass and troublemaker when adults are absent, Eddie’s sycophancy in their presence indicated his desire to conform. Likewise, with the singular exception of his loyalist uncle, Johnny is deferential to all the adults in the film. Even when he takes up arms against the establishment, it is a reflexive, almost thoughtless, act rather than the result of a deliberate decision to turn the world upside down or from a radical hope to build a new heaven and a new earth. Johnny Tremain’s version of the revolution is an orderly one, in which rebellious teens fall in line behind their patriotic elders, Brylcreem tubes in hand.

For more on history writing in the 1950s, see
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
On the invention of juvenile delinquency:
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s
On the Boston Tea Party, take a look at:
Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution

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