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Category: Film

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Art Film

The remaining 42

I have just modified the hatnote of the 50 films I recommended not to be bored at home when the COVID-19 epidemic started because I will no longer review those films individually.

While it is true that those films made a big impression on me as a child and young man, once I woke up to the real world, in the sense of stepping out of the System’s matrix that controls us, most of those films lost their original meaning. I prefer to continue reviewing Brendan Simms’ book about Uncle Adolf insofar as, now free from the matrix that controls the white man, I feel a moral responsibility to convey who he was under a completely different narrative from that of the ubiquitous System (a narrative that includes Simms’ POV). Nevertheless, I would like, in a single entry, to say what I think roughly about the remaining 42 films that I won’t review individually, as I did with the first eight on the list.

First of all, I have already said something about Shane, #9 on the list. (Incidentally, when the month before my dad died, I showed him the DVDs of the films we had at home to see which one my ailing father wanted to see, he chose Shane.)

About other films on my list from the 1950s, ten years ago I already said something about Ben-Hur and I don’t have much to add. The two movies that the Swede Ingmar Bergman filmed in his country the year before I was born are watchable, especially The Seventh Seal. Although Wild Strawberries is the only one, along with A.I., that made me cry, I would have to explain why I projected myself into it, and that would be getting deep into my biography, which I won’t do in this entry. (By the way, when I saw Wild Strawberries on the big screen I met, on the way out, my first cousin Octavio Augusto whom I said a few years ago he had just killed his daughter and then hanged himself.)

I already said something about Forbidden Planet in 2012 in the context of some paragraphs by the Canadian Sebastian Ronin that are worth re-reading. Of Journey to the Center of the Earth, I had already said something in 2011 (incidentally, it’s worth watching the clip of the film that I uploaded on YouTube, embedded in that post).

The other film from the 1950s, Lust for Life, I haven’t written anything about: the life of Vincent Van Gogh. Given that I have several books—huge books, by the way: those deluxe ones that seem to take up an entire table—on Vincent’s paintings, and that as a small child I tried, modestly, to copy his paintings with my watercolours, his life has a special significance.

This film was shot when the Aryans weren’t yet betraying themselves as nefariously as they do today. For those who still appreciate 19th-century Europe, it is worth seeing this novel-based interpretation of Vincent’s life. And the same can be said of Sleeping Beauty and The Time Machine: once upon a time there was an optimistic ethos about the Aryan race, with very blonde and extremely beautiful women indeed: films that one could even play to children being educated in NS.

So much for the films of the 1950s. As far as the films on my list from the 1960s are concerned, I have to say that 2001: A Space Odyssey is my favourite film, and I can conceivably write a review in the future about the film that has influenced my life the most. As for the others from that decade, I’ve already commented here and there but unlike the previous ones, I won’t link to my posts. And I can say the same about the films on my list from the seventies, except Death in Venice of which I’ll say something.

As for the only film on my list from the 1980s, Fanny & Alexander, I already said what I had to say in my entry on the 50 films; and as for my recommendations of films from the 1990s, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride & Prejudice—an English TV series, although here we could also include the 2005 film—, I already said what I had to say in Daybreak (page 42) and On Beth’s Cute Tits (pages 134-135). It’s precisely in this context that Death in Venice could be understood, albeit in the sense of purely platonic admiration that is in line with what I wrote in Daybreak (pages 163-164).

As far as the films of our century from my list of 50, why A.I. caught my attention so much can be guessed from what I say in Day of Wrath (pages 32ff) in the context of the bonding or imprint we all have with our abusive parents; and about LOTR I already said something here.

If a visitor is curious about the details of how any film on my list affected me (or another film that doesn’t appear on my list, as long as I have seen it) I’m willing to answer any questions.

Categories
Child abuse Film Mexico City

Los Olvidados

Known in the US as The Young and the Damned (1950)

 
This is the only Mexican film on my list of 50. The director wasn’t Mexican but Spanish, Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), whom I met in the living room of Arturo Souto Alabarce’s family a few years before he died. Part of Los Olvidados was filmed very close to where I now live, although the area has changed a lot in the last seventy-three years.

As a young man Buñuel studied in Madrid and emigrated to Paris, where he and Salvador Dalí made two films of the surrealist movement, one of which was banned in Spain. After an unsuccessful stay in the United States, and being unable to return to Franco’s Spain, Buñuel moved to Mexico and became a Mexican citizen. He was even awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961 and a Hollywood Oscar for his 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but he didn’t go to collect it.

If Los Olvidados has any value, it is because, even now, there is not a single degree of how the mistreatment of parents destroys their children’s lives. 1973 and 1980 mark bibliographical milestones with the publication of Lloyd deMause’s History of Childhood and Alice Miller’s Am Anfang war Erziehung. For the first time, the magnitude of the psychological toll of childhood abuse—i.e., mental disorders—was discussed with due solidarity. But their work has become taboo in the so-called mental health professions.

Another facet of the toll of parental abuse is destitution: the number of street children who roam the Third World’s cities. Kids flee the violence at home and society plays dumb. A blocking appears at the beginning of Los Olvidados:

The great modern cities, New York, Paris and London hide behind their magnificent buildings, homes of misery that house abused children, without hygiene, without schooling: breeding grounds for future delinquents. Society is trying to correct this evil, but the success of its efforts is very limited. Only in the near future can the rights of children and adolescents be vindicated so that they can be useful to society. Mexico, the great modern city, is no exception to this universal rule.

Near future, really? In so-called developing countries, never in history have there been so many destitute children as there are today—much more than in the times when Luis Buñuel made his film. And most cases of child destitution are due to physical or emotional violence in the home.

In a personal letter to Buñuel, Benjamin Viel said that he hadn’t seen a clearer indictment of the supposed maternal instinct than in a dialogue of Los Olvidados. In contrast to the stereotype of the good and loving mother, Buñuel showed the detachment of parents from their children: a transgression that caused great fury in Mexico when the film was released in December 1950. Viewers’ discomfort with unmotherly mothers was so evident that even one of the film’s production staff resigned. Not even Gus van Sant’s Elephant, a Cannes award-winning film of the new century about teenagers with family problems, gets to the core of children’s pain as in Los Olvidados:

Pedro: Why do you hit me, because I’m hungry?
Mother: And I’m going to kill you, you scoundrel.
Pedro: You don’t love me.
Mother: Why should I love you?

The plot of the film can be read in the English Wikipedia article, and anyone who wants to watch the movie can do so on YouTube. In a nutshell, Los Olvidados is a fictionalised documentary featuring disparate characters such as El Jaibo and Pedro: a teenager and a smaller kid of different ilk: the former tends to be a troublemaker and the latter to be well-behaved. Both, however, wander hopelessly through the slums of Mexico City. The film ends in tragedy: the body of the boy Pedro, murdered by Jaibo, ends up in a rubbish dump.

Categories
Axiology Film William Shakespeare

Hamlet

Of my list of fifty, this was the first film that, as I recount in my autobiography, really made an impression on me when I saw it on television in 1975, with my dad by my side. Precisely in trying to understand how a defect or fault in my father’s character corrupted the whole family dynamics, years later I would ponder much in the words that, in Laurence Olivier’s voice, we listen at the beginning of Hamlet (1948 film):

So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit grown too much; that these men–
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

As a teenager watching it at home, I was most impressed by Hamlet’s inward-spiralling soliloquies in one of the early scenes, when he is left alone in the hall and the court guests leave. If instead of the forty-year-old actor Olivier, the director had cast a teenage actor of my age—as he appears in Shakespeare’s tragedy!—I would have connected much more with the character. But even so, his soliloquies near the beginning of the film made a big impression on me because that is what I used to do as a teenager, and precisely because of a family tragedy that no one but me seemed to have any introspection about.

However, it is impossible to critique the film without critiquing not only Shakespeare, but the Christian era of which both Shakespeare and I are a part.

As Alice Miller observed in one of her books, the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour the parent has been fatal to the mental health of Christians (and I would add, of atheistic neo-Christians alike). Although Christians destroyed the vast majority of the classical world’s plays, tragedies and comedies, in the little that remains it can be seen that in both Iphigenia and Electra it’s clear that there is maddening mistreatment of their children by their parents. But not in Hamlet where an uncle is the bad guy. Nevertheless, for the Elizabethan period Hamlet was a breakthrough in the right direction, although millennia earlier the Greeks had already reached the marrow of the human soul. In sum, for the time Hamlet definitely represented a leap forward to a more self-conscious self.

Another thing that, now grown up, struck me when I rewatched the film was the character of Ophelia when Hamlet wants to grab her: the personification of the eternal feminine that I’ve been talking about on this site, which also appears in Shakespeare when we listen: ‘In her excellent white bosom, these…’ Hamlet’s scenes with Ophelia in the castle should be paradigmatic of how women will be in the future ethnostate, and are worth seeing. But back to what I said above.

Whites won’t mature as long as they are trapped by Judeo-Christian commandments. Even in areas as distinct from racial preservation as mental disorders (in Shakespearean tragedy we read that the teenage Hamlet was said to be deranged), we can never understand each other unless we transvalue our values to the values of the times of the Greek tragedies. Back then, before the commandment to honour our parents, it was easy to see that Clytemnestra’s mistreatment had affected the mental health of her daughter Electra; or that Iphigenia’s sacrifice by Agamemnon had affected Clytemnestra terribly, and so on. Even the tough Spartans wept at these open-air tragedies when they visited Athens because they reflected what was happening in the real world.

So much do Christian ethics permeate the secular world that even in his Dictionnaire philosophique Voltaire says that ‘It is natural for children to honour their parents’, and the so-called mental health professionals of our times feel the same way. In our century, the Judeo-Christian injunction to honour the parent, now secularised, moves writers to shift the villain of the story, for example from father to uncle as in Harry Potter (and Hamlet!) and only through such a shift is audio-visual drama permitted.

To transvalue all values is to recognise that the tragedies of the classical world were more profound and direct than the indirect tragedies of our Christian era. And even though Shakespeare, like Montaigne, set religion aside in their writings, they still moved on the axiological scale of our age, where the mandate to honour the parent is so profound that there is a whole fraudulent profession, psychiatry, which tries to keep the parental figure out in the cases of traumatised children and adolescents at home (cf. my books in Spanish).

Categories
Film French Revolution Videos

Danton

This is a postscript to today’s previous post, in which I touched on Ridley Scott’s latest fiasco, Napoleon (2023 film).

After what I said to Vlad Tepes I remembered another scene from Waterloo (1970 film): the French didn’t surrender after losing and preferred to be cannonaded by the English.

Then I also remembered that Kubrick had wanted to make a film about Napoleon. My guess is that unlike Scott’s merde it would have been, visually, something as stunning as Barry Lyndon (the #35 film of my list).

Without the resources of Kubrick or Scott, on the subject of the French Revolution, I also remember Danton: a Franco-Polish film by Andrzej Wajda from 1983, starring Gérard Depardieu as Georges-Jacques Danton. A revolutionary friend of mine loved it, and my filmmaker cousin once told me it was ‘perfect cinema’.

I highly recommend watching it with the French audio and subtitles instead of the English dubbed version.

Categories
Degenerate art Film Voltaire

It’s a Wonderful Life

Like Beauty and the Beast, this is another film that was shot while the Hellstorm Holocaust was being perpetrated. What if it were possible for the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Germans who fought against Germany in the 1940s to see our Woke century thanks, as in the film, to a guardian angel? Just as George Bailey, the central character in It’s a Wonderful Life, after the vision of the nasty alternative world shown to him by the angel decided not to kill himself, would these soldiers of the 1940s decide to fight Hitler?

Clockwise from top: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Carol Coombs, Jimmy Hawkins, Larry Simms and Karolyn Grimes.

My father loved a couple of Frank Capra films, including It’s a Wonderful Life. When I saw this film as a teenager, it was easy to grasp this idealised vision of American culture in those days. George Bailey’s Aryan children couldn’t help but make a good impression on the teenage César who, decades ago, was unaware of what the Allies had done to the Germans. Had I known, I wouldn’t have been left with the inspiring impression I was left with when I saw It’s a Wonderful Life.

With the above I have said all that can be said about this 1946 film, but I would like to use this evening to talk about the last film I saw tonight: the last film I will ever see on the big screen, inasmuch as, after tonight’s experience, I will never enter a cinema theatre again.

At this stage of my life it is extremely rare for me to go to cinemas. Before tonight, the last one I saw was The Northman, a film I debunk here despite the fact that many racialists loved it.

Given that Ridley Scott had made films like Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, I figured I might be entertained this Sunday with Napoleon (2023 film), that I thought it would be one more of those silly, though highly entertaining, Hollywood movies. What a surprise as soon as the film started!

Il y a une autre canaille à laquelle on sacrifie tout, et cette canaille est le peuple. —Voltaire [1]

The only memorable scene is the first one. A number of times on The West’s Darkest Hour I have repeated what I read in Pierce and Kemp’s histories of the white race: that the French revolutionaries guillotined a large number of blondes. This is clear in the first scene of Napoleon when the rabid mob, a mob in which I saw no blondes by the way, cut off the head of Empress Marie Antoinette. If Hitler had won the war there would already be several films in which we would see Marie Antoinette and other French blondes as the victims and the mob as canaille!

After Prometheus I hadn’t seen another grotesque disaster filmed by Scott. Unlike Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, Napoleon is filmed in dull colours: a sign of the decadence of recent years when even the vivid technicolour of yesteryear has mutated into the ochre tones of this decadent age. But that’s not the worst of it.

Scott uses Napo’s life to promote typical Woke propaganda, painting Empress Josephine as a character on par with that of her husband Napo. And even worse, Scott throws in a few Negro actors in Republican France here and there—even black children!

As I was saying, I will never enter a cinema again for the rest of my life. The only way for me to do so would be if there was a racial revolution in some Western country, the new government asked me to emigrate there to lend my services to the new state, and a cinematic art emerged that is perfectly antithetical to the merde we see in today’s cinema. As it is highly doubtful that this will happen, I will never see the big screen again.

By the way, although I watched Scott’s Napoleon this evening, and also tonight Sunday 26 November I wrote this review, I will post this entry after midnight.

_________

[1] There is another rabble to whom we sacrifice everything, and this rabble is the people. —Voltaire

Categories
Feminism Film Patriarchy

La Belle et la Bête


This film, Beauty and the Beast was released when the Allies were perpetrating the Hellstorm Holocaust on the defenceless German people.

It’s been so many years since I saw it on the big screen, that I only used to remember when Belle’s father enters the Beast’s castle and we see how the torches with human arms light his way; as well as the ending, the couple’s ascent, as the audience applauded (something very rare in cinema theatres). Yesterday when I saw it again, in French and with subtitles in my native language, I remembered some things, but many others I had forgotten.

Although I hadn’t seen it for decades, the reason I included it in my list of 50 films that influenced me is because what I do remember perfectly well is my interpretation. I thought, for many years, that this fairy tale symbolises women’s sexuality. At first glance, our urges seem bestial to little women. But under the sacred institution of marriage, the beautiful one begins to realise that behind the animal lies a prince, and then they can live happily for the rest of their lives. In other words, only from the moment Belle can assimilate sexual relations with a Beast like us, can she ingratiate herself with Nature.

Without mentioning that movie, The Double Flame, a book that has been translated from Spanish into English, the Nobel laureate in literature Octavio Paz, who was my neighbour before he died, talks about how the ‘red flame’ of the horny male becomes a ‘blue flame’ over time in a couple’s relationship. But let’s do some history.

There are multiple variants of La Belle et la Bête. Its origin could be a story by Apuleius entitled Cupid and Psyche. The first published version of La Belle et la Bête was by the French writer Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740, although other sources credit Gianfrancesco Straparola with recreating the original story as early as 1550. The best-known written version was a much-abridged revision of Villeneuve’s original work, published in 1756 by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. The first translation was made into English in 1757. Although there are many variants of the story throughout Europe, Beaumont’s version is the most famous and is the basis for almost all subsequent versions or adaptations.

It is a story that has circulated throughout Europe for centuries, both in oral and written form and, more recently, in film adaptations. In addition to the interpretation I was left with in my soliloquies (how women’s sexuality works), the fairy tale can also be interpreted as the love of a father, who adored Belle above her sisters, with pure paternal-filial love. But besides the fact that the girl perceives sexuality as something perverse, any man who feels a sexual desire for such an innocent creature can only be a beast.

The above-mentioned 1946 French film, directed by Jean Cocteau, is the first film version of the 1757 tale of the same name and is recognised as a classic of French cinema.

This adaptation adds a secondary plot, with the appearance of a villain: a suitor of Belle’s named Avenant. He intends to take advantage of Belle’s visit to her father to kill the Beast and steal his riches, while Belle’s sisters, the villain’s accomplices, delay Belle’s return to the castle. When Avenant enters the magical pavilion, which is the source of the Beast’s power, he is struck by a fiery arrow from the statue of the Roman goddess Diana, which transforms him into a beast and reverses the curse of the original creature.
 

1:50 pm update

I just reread some passages from a disciple of Jung that are worth including in this entry. On pages 137-138 of Man and his Symbols by various authors (first published in 1964), under the heading ‘Beauty and the Beast’, Joseph Henderson said:

Girls in our society share the masculine hero myths because, like boys, they must also develop a reliable ego-identity and acquire an education…

I saw an example of this in a young married woman who did not yet have any children but who intended to have one or two eventually, because it would be expected of her…

She had a dream at this time that seemed so important she sought professional advice to understand it. She dreamed she was in a line of young women like herself, and as she looked ahead to where they were going, she saw that as each came to the head of the line she was decapitated by a guillotine. Without any fear the dreamer remained in the line, presumably quite willing to submit to the same treatment when her turn came.

I explained to her that this meant she was ready to give up the habit of “living in her head”; she must learn to free her body to discover its natural sexual response and the fulfilment of its biological role in motherhood. The dream expressed this as the need to make a drastic change; she had to sacrifice the “masculine” hero role.

As one might expect, this educated woman had no difficulty in accepting this interpretation at an intellectual level, and she set about trying to change herself into a more submissive kind of woman… A universal myth expressing this kind of awakening is found in the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast…

The story can be said to symbolize a young girl’s initiation—i.e. her release from her bond with the father, in order to come to terms with the erotic animal side of her nature. Until this is done, she cannot achieve a true relationship with a man.

Compare this wise psychoanalyst with the anti-motherhood shit that the System tells young women these days.

Categories
Film

Fantasia

Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) is the fourth film on my list of fifty. When I saw it as a child on the big screen it made a big impression on me, and when I saw it again as a teenager, once more on the big screen, it continued to impress me. Today, I am still impressed only by the first segment: the orchestration of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. At the other extreme, the segment about the hippos dancing with crocodiles is too grotesque and should have been replaced by Debussy’s Clair de Lune segment. This was developed as part of the original Fantasia programme. After being fully animated (watch it here) it was removed from the final film to shorten its length!

In my recent post on the first chapter of Simms’ book on Hitler, I said that young Adolf would go far because he was initiated into art; and that without art it is impossible for contemporary racialists to reach his level. From that point of view, one might think that Fantasia could serve as an initiation to classical music for the Aryan child. But things are a little more complex.

If one looks closely at the festivities of the National Socialists, say in Munich, they were permeated with a paganism that is absent in Fantasia. The segment of the film in which the Disney Studios used Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony with Greco-Roman mythology would have come across as too cloying and childish to the Teutonic palate, more imbued with the Roman severitas of the Republic than the dissipation of imperial Rome. And while the animation of the amalgamation of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain with Schubert’s Ave Maria is artistically very well done, it makes too many concessions to Christianity, including those seconds when the devil Chernabog throws souls into hellfire.

At midnight Chernabog awakes and summons evil spirits
and restless souls from their graves to Bald Mountain.

In other words: both the pseudo-Greco-Roman paganism of Disney Studios’ Pastoral and the Christian motifs of the Mussorgsky-Schubert animation aren’t exactly healthy for the child who is to be introduced to genuine Aryan art.

It is very difficult to pronounce myself on this matter, while in the West there is much splendid art which has the misfortune that has been used as propaganda for unwholesome messages (see for example what I say about Bach and Wagner on pages 149-156 of Daybreak). Bach himself, whom I said above is the only segment of Fantasia that still impresses me and which I openly recommend, I sometimes view with great reserve.

For example, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s orchestration of the Toccata in Fantasia, originally written for organ, is not only truly magnificent but detracts from the ominous charge we hear in churches: something like paganising Christian music. This also happened to me with a piece of Bach’s music we don’t hear in Fantasia, the Partita No. 2 for solo violin, which I find extremely disturbing and ominous on violin but which, when performed on classical guitar, miraculously takes away all that burden of Christian obscurantism, typical of the Reformation ethos in which the Protestants of Bach’s time were still living.

In a nutshell, it is difficult to recommend Disney films without reservation for the education of the Aryan child, including Fantasia. On the internet I have just read the following:

Disney WWII Propaganda Emerges As Part of the War Effort

Walt Disney and his staff were no exception, and with [his] Studios commandeered by the military on December 8, 1941, they soon found themselves entrenched in the ongoing war effort. Of the dozens of training, propaganda, and educational films Walt and his staff made over the next four years of the war, none reached the popularity of the Donald Duck short Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943), in which the irascible duck takes on the role of a munitions factory worker in “Nutzi Land”…

Walt himself would later recall the popularity of the film: “[It] was the most popular propaganda film we had. It was put in all languages. They had it in the Underground. The Underground were running it and were getting a good laugh out of it while they were under the heel of Hitler, you know?”

If Hitler and not these morons had won the war, we can already imagine the kind of animation art that would have captured the imagination of the Aryan childhood.

Categories
American civil war Film Patriarchy

Gone with the Wind

I have already written on several occasions about this 1939 film, the third on my list of 50, and here I would just like to copy and paste what I have said in past years.

Above, we can see the image of the carpetbagger scene in Gone with the Wind, a war that freed the Negroes and occurred at a time when there were no Jewish-owned mass media and even before mass Jewish immigration began. (Oh, Judeo-reductionist racialists who don’t want to see that, in addition to the JQ, we have a Christian problem…!)

In a couple of those opera-type theatres, I saw Gone with the Wind as a kid and then as a teenager. Many scenes of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) with Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) made a deep impression on my youthful mind:

– Throughout the film, from the opening scenes in Georgia, women’s outfits duly concealed the sexual appeal of their bodies, especially the dresses of the Southern beauties; and I don’t just mean Scarlett and the feminine elements of her family, but Ashley’s fiancée and the other society women. Melanie Hamilton, who eventually married Ashley, is the perfect model of how women should behave again in the future ethnostate! (the actress who played Melanie died three years ago at the age of 104!).

– At the Twelve Oaks party, before the barbecue is interrupted by the declaration of war, all the women are taking the obligatory nap (except Scarlett, who escapes to the upstairs bedroom) while the men discuss serious matters. It was unthinkable that a woman would have a say in such matters.

– Even after she is widowed, Scarlett is called ‘Mrs Charles Hamilton’, in the sense that her reputation remains in the shadow of a man who died in uniform.

– Similarly, following the Entr’acte Frank (Scarlett’s second husband), Ashley, Rhett and several other accomplices carry out a night-time raid on a shanty town after Scarlett, driving alone, is attacked by Negroes resulting in Frank’s death. Needless to say, on this night the wives of these brave men stayed at home sewing and reading decent literature.

– Once married to Rhett Butler, ‘Captain Butler’ was always greeted first by pedestrians in the street as he strolled with Scarlett. She, faithfully at her husband’s side on these street strolls, was only mentioned after pedestrians greeted Rhett.

– Let us never forget Scarlett’s marital rape when Rhett lifted her in his arms and said, ‘This is the one night you’re not going to throw me out’.

In those luxurious cinemas of yesteryear, when I was young, the film depicted wholesome Western mores, before values were corrupted and completely reversed in our darkest hour. I even remember that my mother, who wasn’t racist at all, felt compassion for the Southerners in the scene where the carpetbagger we see in the image above appears, and we both resented the presence of the black singer who took advantage of the situation. That must have happened about forty-five years ago in one of those theatres.

Categories
Christendom Christian art Film

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Notre-Dame de Paris is a novel by Victor Hugo, published in 1831, that focuses on the unhappy story of Quasimodo, the gipsy Esmeralda and the archdeacon Claude Frollo in 15th-century Paris. Its elements—medieval setting, impossible loves, and marginalised characters—make the novel a model for the literary themes of Romanticism.

Hugo’s book opens with a popular celebration of the Epiphany of 1482 at the Palais de Justice. The play introduces us to Esmeralda, a gipsy dancer, Quasimodo, a deformed young hunchback who is in charge of the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral, and the archdeacon Claude Frollo, the bell-ringer’s foster father.

Esmeralda, thanks to her great physical beauty, attracts the poet-student Pierre Gringoire and Captain Febo de Châteaupers, but also Claude Frollo, who decides to kidnap her. Frollo then orders his protégé Quasimodo to kidnap her.

The intervention of Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers prevents the kidnapping from taking place and leads Quasimodo to be condemned to public torture. The hunchback is flogged in the square and receives all the hatred and insults of the people, who cruelly despise him for his ugliness. Quasimodo asks for water and Esmeralda climbs the scaffold to quench his thirst.

I don’t want to tell the whole story but I do want to point out that at midnight I modified the post about my 50 recommended films, reversing the order of the first two, for reasons I am about to explain.

Since the films on my list are arranged in order of their release, before the midnight change, I had The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as #2, and Frankenstein (1931) as #1. But yesterday, when I started watching the 1939 film after half a century of not seeing it, I detected some terrible messages from its opening.

It didn’t take me long to discover that the director was born into a German family of Ashkenazi Jews and that he even returned to Germany after the Allied dogs won the war!

Fifty years ago I had seen this 1939 film in black and white with my family on television, and both my sisters and I loved it (some of Hugo’s high culture is reflected in this adulterated version of the novel).

Since then I had not seen it again: I only remember that as a child I was impressed by the story. But yesterday when I started watching it again, after so long, I realised, as I just said, that the movie starts with bad messages.

In Paris, there is a new order preventing the passage of gipsies. True, the director cast mudblood actors to play them, but typically in Hollywood (and we’re talking about 1939!) he artfully chose an Aryan actress to play the gipsy Esmeralda, and has the King of France say ‘Who cares about her race, she’s pretty’.

This 1939 film has scenes too burlesque for my taste today (how I have changed since I saw it fifty years ago!) and the Christian piety in Notre Dame couldn’t be missing: ‘Please, help my people’ says the Nordic actress playing Esmeralda when referring to the mudblood gipsies while the French ask Providence for riches in their prayers. Surrealism reaches the viewer when the movie’s bad guy, Claude Frollo, says ‘You come from an evil race’ to the Aryan actress posing as a gipsy.

I stopped watching the film at that point and started watching the original film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I mean the one from 1923: a film that, this year, has just turned 100 years old!

Now this is the one that is at #1 on my list not because it is very good, but because it has historical value for connoisseurs of cinematic art. This 1923 film is silent, although they added some music to it and it can now be seen, complete, in a colourised version on YouTube.

Although Esmeralda, in this century-old film, isn’t as Aryan as the other, in this version it is explained at the outset that her whiteness is due to the fact that she was born in a high cradle and, as a child, had been abducted by gipsies.

Naturally, being a hundred years old, the film is closer to theatre or operatic scenes than to the cinema that followed, once the human voice was technically synchronised with the soundtrack. That would revolutionise the Seventh Art.

I don’t want to get too much into the film from the point of view of the sacred words. That would mean messing directly with Victor Hugo—and that would mean another entry: an entry of literary criticism rather than cinematic criticism. Suffice it to say that baby Quasimodo wouldn’t have been allowed to live in Sparta, and that Hugo is right that Notre Dame reflects the soul of France which, unlike the teen I was half a century ago, is no longer the soul that interests me. (My surname, ‘Tort’, comes from France and Catalonia and my ancestors were devoted to Notre Dame of Lourdes.)

Categories
Art Film

Frankenstein

As far as the Seventh Art is concerned, my life is divided into two great crises.

The first occurred in the early 1970s. As I recounted in ‘Beneath Ridley Scott’s Planet’, as a child I realised that the film industry didn’t always coincide with art, but could betray it badly.

The second crisis occurred more recently when I realised that even artistic films that are not solely driven by economic interests, but where the creator may be a genuine artist, often contain bad messages for the 14 words (as I showed this Monday with my brief review of The Godfather).

So today’s mature César not only demands of cinema that it be genuine Seventh Art. Even more important is that the film industry doesn’t betray the sacred words (and nowadays almost all of the industry betrays it).

This day I will start my series of fifty movie reviews with Frankenstein (1931 film): the second one to appear in my entry ‘50 films during the quarantine’.

It is important to bear in mind when reading my movie reviews that my confessed crisis in ‘Beneath Ridley Scott’s Planet’ represented an early awakening to the colossal crap that Hollywood makes just for profit, without the slightest concern for true art. From this point of view, when I saw on YouTube the black-and-white film of the 1931 horror movie produced by Universal Pictures and directed by James Whale—the adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, starring Boris Karloff and Colin Clive—I was very impressed by its artistic value.

The first thing that came to my mind was that it was unbelievable that, in the consumer society where I live, I had to watch this classic on YouTube because I had never seen it advertised for theatres, not even in art cinemas! I was also struck by the fact that the colour films about Frankenstein that can now be seen on TV lack artistic value when compared to this old black-and-white film.

Of course, both Shelley’s novel and the 1931 adaptation don’t promote our sacred words, so I won’t include it in a new list of my National Socialist must-see films. But at least, from an artistic point of view, it passes the test of my tastes: something that cannot be said of the sequels, remakes or parodies that have been made since that year to date.