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dweemeister · 4 years

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The Shop on Main Street (1965, Czechoslovakia)

Putting “New Wave” in a sentence referring to a film movement is asking for trouble. Whether the New Wave is French, Iranian, or Japanese in origin, the term implies a series of films and filmmakers breaking narrative and aesthetic norms in conventional moviemaking, exalting innovation. New Wave directors from those respective countries include Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda; Forough Farrkohzad and Mohsen Makhmalbaf; Nagisa Oshima and Seijun Suzuki. For those I have just listed, I am not denying their talents, their importance to film history. But show any of their films to someone who is less familiar with these New Waves, without the contextual understanding of the environment their works were released, and befuddlement and distaste will likely abound. Rare is the New Wave film that can be shown to unfamiliar eyes and minds without appropriate context.

Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’ The Shop on Main Street (adapted from Ladislav Grosman’s novel of the same name) is sometimes considered a part of the then-concurrent Czechoslovak New Wave. And if one considers it part of that New Wave, then it is one of the more comprehendible, technically grounded films of that movement. It certainly qualifies as one of those New Wave exceptions – a film that can be digested by a viewer not accustomed to older movies or has any experience with Czech- or Slovak-language cinema. I consider The Shop on Main Street a Czechoslovak New Wave film. When one looks beneath its World War II-era surface, its politics extend beyond its condemnation of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and the local Slovak population. Though rooted in the nation’s past, it was as timely as Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) upon release. The film outdoes many New Wave films by playing fast and loose with genre expectations: a black comedy in the first half, a tragedy in the second. Nazi Germany’s state-executed hatred, if not including the fringe groups inspired by their example, is no longer; Czechoslovakia has long been split in two. The Shop on Main Street and its censure of those who manipulate the oppressed, while pointing their fingers elsewhere.

In March 1939, the Slovak Republic was carved out of Czechoslovakia as a client state of Nazi Germany. The Slovak Republic never received recognition from the Allies (with the brief exception of the USSR until they were invaded by Germany), and they soon set about the process of Aryanization. Aryanization was a process in which Jewish property and businesses were to be put into “Aryan” ownership so as to “de-Jew” the economy. In The Shop on Main Street, Slovak carpenter Anton "Tóno" Brtko (Jozef Kroner) is offered by an official the ownership of a button store owned by the elderly, near-deaf Rozália Lautmannová (Ida Kamińska). Mrs. Lautmannová, a widow, is unaware that there is a war, that Czechoslovakia is being occupied by invaders intent on seizing her business and exterminating her fellow Jews. She welcomes Tóno as a helper and believes – mishears, really – that he is her nephew. Tóno, thrown into this awkward situation, soon learns that Mrs. Lautmannová’s store is not profitable and depends on community donations. The Jewish community implore Tóno to stay as de jure owner of the store, for fears that a more exploitative owner might be selected were he to give it up. Tóno agrees, accepting a small payment, and dedicating himself to the store’s and Mrs. Lautmannová’s welfare. They find time to see the humor in her mishearing and his stubbornness. In the final scenes, Tóno and Mrs. Lautmannová must make a horrific decision.

Czechoslovakia’s communist government, during the Czechoslovak New Wave, frowned upon films that could be construed as anarchic, insurrectionist, troublemaking. The Shop on Main Street – unlike many of its contemporaries – avoided government meddling. The villains here are the Nazis, whom communist forces across the Eastern bloc fought against. On its surface, The Shop on Main Street assigned no criticism towards Czechoslovakia’s communist regime or to communism. Yet the braggadocious Nazis are a minority in this film. A detestable sociopolitical minority becomes empowered when others sympathize with them, rationalize their prejudices and atrocities, and fail to defend the targets of that minority. We see non-Jewish Slovaks shrugging their shoulders about Aryanization. Why not pocket some extra money with this new policy, they reason, in a sluggish economy and a better-armed invading force now patrolling their streets? These are economically desperate times for non-Jewish Slovaks (and, if my hunches are correct, probably even more so for Jewish Slovaks), so they will use whatever programs necessary to survive, rooted entirely in self-interest.

The communist censors probably thought something, while viewing The Shop on Main Street, that is resurgent in modern-day Europe: that Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies (from Aryanization to concentration camps and much more) were Germany’s responsibility and no one else’s. Complicity with the Nazi agenda is being debated among historians, politicians, and within the 125-minute runtime of The Shop on Main Street. For Tóno, the invaders inspire mutterings out of earshot and disdainful moues. His wife, Evelína (Hana Slivková), is concerned only about money – she is thrilled when she learns that the Aryanization program will give them a financial cushion (so she thinks), never contemplating the possibility this it is the beginning of the Jewish community’s ruin. Has she ever known someone from the community? It is not clear. Tóno’s non-Jewish acquaintances, too, are unfazed by these proclamations. Life is already difficult in the Slovak Republic (Czechoslovakia itself was not formed because its patchwork of ethnicities had common political pursuits and aspirations, but due to expedience and tensions with other ethnic groups), and any economic lifeline that will be offered to the non-Jews will be taken. Are those who support and/or participate in Aryanization irredeemable, given their desperation and the Nazi aim to manufacture conflict between Jews and non-Jews? Is Tóno an accessory of the Nazis?

These are questions that may seem small when grasper the enormity of the Holocaust. But that is the intention of directors Kadár and Klos, who often worked together co-directing films. In his directorial statement for the film in the New York Herald Tribune’s January 23, 1966 issue, Kadár (whose parents and sister were murdered at Auschwitz) writes that he was the principal director for this film – Klos agreed to be a sort of secondary director for The Shop on Main Street, deferring to Kadár because of his personal connection to the material. Klos also notes:

[Klos] knows that I am not thinking of the fate of all the six million tortured Jews, but that my work is shaped by the fate of my father, my friends’ fathers, mothers of those near to me and by people whom I have known. I am not interested in the outer trappings—figures, statements, generalizations. I want to make emotive films.

This is not an epic film intended to sweep viewers into the broadest discussions of the Holocaust. The Shop on Main Street is foremost a film about an unlikely connection – one separated by age, language, and faith – that is formed when exploitation would be so much easier. This is where The Shop on Main Street derives its pathos, in places where despair ought to triumph.

When Tóno meets Mrs. Lautmannová for the first time, he is surprised to see how disconnected she is from the world. She knows little of what is happening outside of the storefront door, and she delights in the company of her few – but dedicated – customers and the letters she receives from a relative in America (she hasn’t received their letter in some months). She closes the store on the Sabbath (sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday), retreating to her bedroom to pray and to read. Her friends in the Jewish community realize her frailty and lack of understanding, deciding to protect her from the news of pogroms and war. When lacking any authority to make laws or force political change, all they possess are their words and neighborliness – which they share with Tóno freely. Tóno is struck by their generosity, and his friendship with Mrs. Lautmannová grows. Ida Kamińska (the Polish actress was sixty-six years old when The Shop on Main Street was released, and nicknamed the Mother of the Jewish Stage) and Jozef Kroner (a star of numerous Slovak films, but this is his most recognized work) play off each other. In a series of successive (gentle and dark) misunderstandings, these two commoners are each other’s foils. He is a drinker, impatient, and needs to learn diplomacy. She is kind, religious, and concerningly naïve.Their performances are incredible, helping The Shop on Main Street pull off its tonal transitions that should have seen this film crumble into treacle.

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Zdeněk Liška’s score to The Shop on Main Street alternates between foreboding string lines wracked with minor key, string-crossing double stops signaling the precariousness of the story’s developments, the unusual situation the characters find themselves in, and emotional torment. A memorable, carnival-like march that opens the film is used to stunning effect when employed ironically. Liška’s cue placement helps Kadar and Klos achieve the respective comedic and dramatic moods that the screenplay and actors so nimbly establish.

Lengthy is the canon of films depicting and commenting on the Holocaust. The Shop on Main Street, avoiding extensive declarations, is one of the earliest films on that list. Its examinations on complicity and the extent of human callousness reverberate to a present where Holocaust denial and blame-shifting continues to rail against the truth of untold millions and their descendants. It is a tremendous film, one containing unexpected power through its performances and the impossible situations the main characters find themselves in. Bathed in white, the final seconds of The Shop on Main Street show a wonderful dream, one that could only be crafted by a director pouring his decades-long grief for his parents and sister into his work. As the camera dances to the right, away from the shop on main street, we see in the background the shops and homes of the Jewish community now silent.

My rating: 10/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. The Shop on Main Street is the one hundred and fifty-eighth feature-length or short film I have rated a ten on imdb.

#The Shop on Main Street #Jan Kadar #Elmar Klos #Ida Kaminska #Jozef Kroner #Hana Slivkova #Martin Holly Sr.#Frantisek Zvarik #Ladislav Grosman #Zdenek Liska #Vladimir Novotny #Czechoslovak New Wave #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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bebopjared · 5 years

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America is Not Better Than This

Concentration camps. A racist president. Families being separated at the border. White Nationalists proudly walking in the streets. Human rights violations being flagrantly committed and brushed off at the direction of the government. These are all statements about this country’s present. We live in uncertain times with an unprecedented president, Donald Trump. But is he not what America has been the whole time? He is in fact, as American as the Ku Klux Klan.

The Japanese Internment camps FDR set up in 1942 were called “concentration camps” until the government realized they would look to much like their enemy, the Nazis, if they continued to call them that. So they began to call them “internment camps”. But this country’s history of concentration camps doesn’t start in 1942. In fact, I would argue it goes back to the beginning of this country’s history.

Enslaved Africans imported to this country had already endured concentration camps built on their land in the form of huge slave fortresses. These forts could hold hundreds, thousands of people, before they were shipped off to “the New World”. Those that arrived were held until they sold. Some had families that were able to stay together, others were forced to watch their loved ones be sold off, never to see them again. Separation of families was often used as a punishment, this was the original family separation policy. And all the people and places that owned human beings operated some of America’s earliest concentration camps.

This country has had one civil war. That war was fought primarily over the institution of slavery. The North was not completely dependent on it for its economy to function in 1860, the South was. And while we remember Lincoln for being the magical white president that freed the slaves, we forget he was willing to drop slavery as an issue if it meant ending the war. While he was opposed to slavery, he despised Black people who wanted the same rights as whites. He, like the founders of this country, saw no place in American society for Black people. He actually helped push for and organize colonization of the lands now known as Liberia as a place for former slaves to go.

More presidents than not have been racists. The white men who have always run this country have always seen people of color(particularly Black, indigenous and Latinx peoples) as an issue they have to solve. “They’re too different, how do we either make them white “civilized” people or how do we get rid of them? Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States, a favorite of the current president and many in the country, was a genocidal maniac. He signed the Indian Removal Act, forced thousands of indigenous people to be moved west, broke a variety of treaties with indigenous people and he was a slave owner. Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, accelerated the system of federal hiring discrimination and office segregation, started by Theodore Roosevelt, screened the white supremacist film The Birth of a Nation as the first film ever screened inside the White House and he brainwashed a fairly pacifist American populace (at the time) into a bloodthirsty horde ready to destroy all of America’s enemies. Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, illegally invaded Grenada, allowed for the AIDS crisis to kill thousands of mostly queer people, he accelerated the War on Drugs that Nixon had declared, promoting racist stereotypes about people of color as drug dealers and welfare queens. He was also allowed to get away with Iran-Contra Affair, a corrupt and illegal plan to sell weapons to Iran and give the profits to the Contras, two things congress had barred the federal government to do. He along with many presidents promoted CIA coups a solution to the Soviet Union’s growing influence with nations populated by people of color. Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, signed the 1994 Crime Bill that accelerated mass incarceration in this country fast enough to impress Ronald Reagan. He instituted welfare reform which took benefits, power and independence away from poor people in this country and he, along with other military powers, watched as hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in Rwanda, unable to muster a force able to stop the genocide seemingly because he didn’t care about the issue or people that were being murdered.

Wars of aggression against dozens of peoples in and outside of North America have marked the US as a supporter of dictators all to achieve “foreign policy goals”. This is a cute name for imperialist agendas, meant to subdue and exploit anyone living on land valued by the United States. The Mexican-American War, the War of 1898 and all wars fought against indigenous peoples were all land grabs. There are no other reasons these wars were fought. The wars in Vietnam, Iraq (2003) and Afghanistan have been wars simply meant to promote the Military Industrial Complex and imperial agendas.

When the images of Nazis marching in Charlottesville began to populate the air waves, many expressed disbelief that these people still existed in America, let alone marching with guns, ready for a fight. I was not one of these people. Nazis marching is nothing new. The Ku Klux Klan is still an active, albeit smaller than it used to be, organization that still organizes events. The Klan at the height of their size and power, organized a march on DC. They beat freedom riders under the watchful eye of the police, who signaled to end the assault. They have planned and executed terrorist attacks often in the open as police forces refused to do anything about them. The fact is that from the inception of this nation, Nazis have always been here. Not in name until the 1930’s, people who believe in the extermination of people of color have been politicians, from small city mayors to Presidents.

The United States is NOT better than what is going on right now. To say it is, is to be ignoring simple historic realities about this country. This country is a racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic state that seeks to exploit as many people as it can in the pursuit of profit for a few white men. These are the historical realities. But history is not necessarily a predictor of the future. If there can be a national reckoning in this country, where we would honestly examine this country’s history and call this country what is it; an empire, maybe there could be real, radical change that could transform the government into an organization that works towards justice, peace and equity in our society.

The words that founded this country were genuinely revolutionary. Equality among all peoples and the ability to have a say in what the government does. But America has never EVER fulfilled the promise of these words. So it’s not that America is better than this…no, it’s not. But America has the ability to become better than what it has been, with radical change as revolutionary as the words that founded this country.

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thebewisepodcast · 6 years

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Soft Kill 101 - Glyphosate ~ Herbicide or Genocide ?:

In June 2016 the EU Commission made a rotten compromise to allow an 18 month extension of use in EU of glyphosate-based weed killers, during which time more scientific studies would supposedly clarify whether glyphosate was a carcinogen.

It was the same member-states deadlock over whether to grant the toxic glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto Roundup herbicide, a license renewal as we saw this October. In March 2017 the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) of the EU, issued a report stating that,

"available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria in the CLP Regulation to classify glyphosate for specific target organ toxicity, or as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or for reproductive toxicity."

The ECHA, based in Hensinki is a body created only in 2007 and established to monitor safe use of chemicals and to make information available rather than conduct its own tests on safety of chemicals.

It made no independent study or tests to determine if glyphosate is or is not a probable carcinogen, a fact which Brussels and the pesticide industry slickly glosses over. In March 2015, the WHO's Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which has such research competence, classified glyphosate as a "probable carcinogen." In October 2015 before the license expiry deadline, some 47 environmental, health and cancer organizations, scientists and doctors wrote an open letter to EU Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis calling on the Commission to ban glyphosate pending a full scientific assessment.

The assessment that the EU Commission was using was provided by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), and was based on industry safety studies given to BfR by Monsanto and other industry sources.

EU Corruption and human health The determination of "non-carcinogenity" for glyphosate by using the ECHA was an apparent political ploy by the corrupt EU commission to get another "yes" body to back their pro-glyphosate stance, a stance that benefits only Monsanto and other agro-chemical producers at the expense of human life and health. The source for both,

the EU's European Food Safety Agency (EFSA)

the European Chemicals Agency,

...statements that glyphosate was non-carcinogenic, in contradiction to the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), is the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) responsible within the EU for the evaluation of glyphosate for the EU. According to stated EU regulations, a substance is to be considered carcinogenic if two independently conducted animal studies show an increased tumor incidence. In the case of glyphosate, at least seven out of twelve such long-term studies found an increased tumor incidence. A report by German toxicologist Dr Peter Clausing found that the EU bodies and the German body designated by the EU to evaluate the safety of glyphosate, the German BfR ignored those relevant studies.

Clausing states,

"BfR failed to recognize numerous significant tumor incidences, due to its failure to apply the appropriate statistical tests stipulated by the OECD and ECHA. BfR had instead relied on statistical tests applied by industry…"

And the German BfR report was the basis for the later rubber-stamp determinations of EFSA and now of ECHA, the EU bodies entrusted with protecting the population from dangerous chemical toxins.

Someone is being played for fools by Brussels, but the stakes involve far more in terms of human health and even human reproduction itself.

Sperm disruptor? The dimensions of the human and animal exposure to the enormous quantities of glyphosate-based weed-killers in the world food chain are only dimly beginning to be appreciated.

The reason is the enormous clout of the agro-chemical industry lobby around companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer AG, soon to be the owner of Monsanto.

They have so far managed to use their financial resources and their legal resources to distort test results and to win regulatory approval from the demonstrably corrupt Monsanto-influenced Washington Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. From there it has spread to the EU Commission and relevant agencies such as EFSA and European Chemicals Agency, this despite the overwhelming popular rejection of GMO crops. A recent study published by the Journal of Environmental Toxicology and Pharmacology - a study given no visibility in mainstream media - sounds the alarm over the effects of long-term human exposure to glyphosate for the healthy production of human sperm, an issue that is beginning to be cause of great alarm across the western countries where chemical herbicides and pesticides are used in massive doses by agro-industry producers. The study, which definitely warrants major follow-up studies, found effects of a glyphosate-based herbicide after an 8-day exposure of adult rats, including,

"a significant and differential expression of aromatase in testis."

Aromatase is an enzyme responsible for a key step in the biosynthesis of estrogens according to Wikipedia, found among other locations of the body in the brain and in the gonads, and is an important factor in sexual development.

The authors concluded that,

"The repetition of exposures of this herbicide could alter the mammalian reproduction."

Ample tests now exist, independent of Monsanto and other corrupt industry sources demonstrating to an alarming degree that the exposure of human and animal species to glyphosate-based herbicides or weed-killers can cause cancer tumors but can also be damaging to human sexual reproduction, that is, as in the future of the human species. Other tests have revealed presence of significant amounts of glyphosate from spraying of weed-killers in major portions of the population in the United States where Monsanto Roundup and other glyphosate-based weed-killers are used in massive doses in agriculture as well as in home gardens.

A study of urine samples of willing volunteers seeking to know if they had glyphosate exposure by the University of California at San Francisco found glyphosate in 93% of the urine samples tested at an average level of 3.096 parts per billion (PPB).

Children had the highest levels with an average of 3.586 PPB. The highest levels of glyphosate were found in the American West and Midwest, the heart of US agribusiness farming.

The US-based Detox Project which published the study notes that,

"Glyphosate has never been studied by regulators or the chemical industry at levels that the human population in the U.S. is being exposed to - under 3 mg/kg body weight/day.

This is a huge hole in the risk assessment process for glyphosate, as evidence suggests that low levels of the chemical may hack hormones even more than high levels… many toxic chemicals have as much or even more of an influence on our health at low doses - these chemicals are known as hormone hackers or endocrine disruptors."

Isn't that what eugenics advocates such as,

Bill Gates

George Soros

Warren Buffett

the Rockefeller family

more recently Britain's Prince William,

...are cheering for?

Culling of the human herd so that the wealthy have more wildlife species? Frederick Osborn, first President of John D. Rockefeller III's Population Council, and a founding member of the American Eugenics Society, formulated the problem the eugenics advocates around Rockefeller, people who financed Nazi eugenics research in Berlin, faced after the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps was uncovered and their inhuman experiments in eugenics of killing off inferior human beings as defined by the Third Reich. In a 1956 article in the Rockefeller-financed Eugenics Review,

"The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters… We must ask ourselves, what have we done wrong? We have all but killed the eugenic movement."

Osborn had a ready answer: people for some reason refused to accept that they were "second rate" compared to Osborn, Rockefeller, Sanger and their "superior class."

As Osborn put it,

"We have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in human nature.

People are simply not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character was formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation…

They won't accept the idea that they are in general second rate…"

The refusal of Monsanto, a company founded in World War I as part of the Rockefeller network of war chemicals makers, and which numbered a Rockefeller on its board until recently, to remove glyphosate-based Roundup, or even to allow independent testing of its "trade secret" adjuvants that by some estimates make the glyphosate 2000% more toxic, has more to do with that long-standing Rockefeller eugenics agenda of killing off or "culling" the human herd than with corporate profit.

Prince William's grandfather, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in an interview in 1988 with a German press agency declared,

"In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."

Hmmmmm…

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