Battles over democratic citizenship in Europe

The European Commission has come to the bewildering decision to support the mass fingerprinting of Roma in Italy, a decision which the European Roma Rights Center and the Open Society Institute Justice Initiative have challenged the EC to defend.

I am so disturbed by this whole situation in Italy.

(See also EU Roma Policy Coalition.)

New Czech blog about integration in urban space in Europe. Hmmmm. Could be interesting.

The latest episode of Italian xenophobia

"The reaction to the death of these children goes beyond anything that has happened before. The incident has exposed a long-held social realism in our country: that many working-class people think the Roma no better than animals, and the government is using this xenophobia to win votes and popularity. People are ashamed. The deaths of these girls has come to represent something more, perhaps a battle for Italy's soul."
-- Francesca Saudino, a campaigning Naples-based lawyer with Osservazione, a Roma rights organization, quoted in The Observer in an article on the recent (non)reaction in Italy to the deaths of two teenaged Romani girls on a beach in Naples

Notes on Central European Cinema

The clip above is from the beginning of Daisies by Vera Chytilová. As our film technician pointed out to me the other day, it's hard for most people really to grasp how completely innovative much of the technique was that Chytilová used in making this film in 1966. Apart from the incredibly subversive content of the film, both in terms of the private lives of these two wacky characters, but also in terms of the film images of explosions and other signs of broader social critique, the film is also pretty amazing in terms of the images she managed to produce on film in the absence of digital technologies.

. . .For those of you who didn't know, I'm teaching a Central European cinema course with a professor at U of M this term. I am bracing myself for the upcoming films, Adoption (Örökbefogadás) by Márta Mészáros* and A Woman Alone (Kobieta Samotna) by Agnieszka Holland (better known in the US for her Holocaust film Europa, Europa).



Adoption (see first image above) isn't quite as painfully depressing as Holland's devastating film (see second image above), but both have a kind of unnerving, creeping loneliness that penetrates you as you're watching them. If they weren't genius, I don't know that it would be bearable.


For our other films about gender and women under state socialism, we watched Milos Forman's wonderful 1965 film Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky; see image above), Dušan Makavejev's Man is Not a Bird (Covek Nije Tica; 1965) and Vera Chytilová's masterpiece Daisies (Sedmikrasky; 1966; see the clip above!) in the past couple of weeks, since we finished the unit on Holocaust film.

* See the entry on Mészáros here, too, if you're interested, and more on Makavejev here. For a discussion (in Czech) of Loves of a Blonde that includes lots of stills from the film, check this out. For some more discussion of women in Polish women filmmakers' films, check out this discussion in Kinoeye.)

Writing this little entry is getting me really excited about seeing some of these directors' other films, like WR: The Mysteries of the Organism, the film that got Makavejev exiled from Yugoslavia for its sexual-political content (see image below), and Mészáros's Eltávozott Nap, the first feature-length film made by a female filmmaker in Hungary. Oh, and Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I somehow never managed to see before!

Below is a little clip of Mészáros's Eltávozott Nap.

By the way, in an only distantly related vein, one of the stranger pieces of news from this part of the world recently is that electricity seems to be nothing more than a game of cat and mouse in Albania. No, really. I wonder if I might be able to use this piece of contemporary trivia to my advantage in convincing a friend of mine to watch Emir Kusturica's bizarre and hysterical film Black Cat, White Cat (Crna Macka, Beli Macor; 1998; see below) with me. (Of course, when I refer to a 72-hour blackout in a European capital as "trivia," that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, perhaps drawing on the older meaning of trivia -- that is, etymologically speaking, a crossroads where three roads meet).

Let's come together

I found out about this advertisement for the EU arts subsidy program through a particularly funny Wait Wait Don't Tell Me this past weekend.

European Integration and Franco-German R&B

Sometimes I just have to think that Europeans do it with more style. I can't say I love the R&B number that the French and German foreign ministers have just recorded on the theme of European integration, but the concept of working with artists and new media to demonstrate a sentiment is one that I can subscribe to, and there's a freshness and a candor about their message of inclusivity and the appreciation of cultural diversity in the new Europe that I can't imagine too many of our politicians generating.

As they explained on the PR Newswire, "Steinmeier and Kouchner brought two messages with them as they met and exchanged ideas with the young people in the studio in Berlin's diversNeukolln neighborhood. "We are not here to learn how to sing," Steinmeier said. "We want to show that we benefit from the abundance of cultures. Even with all the mistakes, the omissions in the process of integration, there are successful cooperations," Steinmeier said. The second message, he said, is that young artists tell their own people: Learn German, get training." There's something intriguing about the promotion of German language here too . . . and something telling in a French minister singing along to the German lyrics.

The song, by the way, was written by Muhabett, a German-Turkish musician, and a 17-year-old budding artist, Sefo. The style is apparently a newly emerging one called R'nBesk, which "combines American R&B, Turkish Arabesk and Pop with German lyrics" (PRNewswire).

And just for your enjoyment, here's a video of the ministers jamming with the musicians and a handful of other energetic youngsters. It's even better than the clip I heard on PRI's The World the other night on my car radio (pretty much locked in place on NPR).