FULL METAL MYTH

Ned Kelly, dir. Gregor Jordan. If Ned Kelly hadn’t lived it would have been necessary to invent him. He is the outlaw legend par excellence, our culture’s pre-eminent survival myth, built on distortions, half-truths and widely agreed misperceptions—a tapestry of lies that spells truth. And now the myth has arrived at a multiplex cinema near you. The Kelly phenomenon continues its rise, absorbing all critiques, critics and admirers in iron-clad embrace, an industry in itself.

In this manifestation the myth starts with Ned (Heath Ledger) kissing a horse on its nose. Then he rides the horse through town with a pretty girl (Naomi Watts) at his back, gets shot at and pistol-whipped by the first of many evil-hearted policemen and we’re away (with an underlying sense of trepidation that it’s going to be all downhill from here). Myth-making being myth-making, there is always going to be time for Ned to undress Julia, dance a jolly Irish jig in a bush pub, declare ‘The land belongs to us’ to rousing cheers from a town whose bank has just been robbed. But the tone has been unequivocally set: innocent boy with Irish brogue is harassed by evil men in uniform, eventually takes up arms to avenge his mother’s unjust imprisonment and seek justice for all who suffer under a tyrant’s yoke.

There’s a breathtaking ruthlessness to the narrative, and in a way, that works. Nothing to complicate the moral clarity of Ned’s vision.

Then Glenrowan. Cue men in armour, downpouring rain, gunfire, Ned making one heroic last stand (after another), orchestral accompaniment, more gunfire, innocent men, women, children, lions and monkeys shot by spineless city coppers. It works. It’s hard not to feel the mythic things grabbing you by the throat. Ned rises at dawn. It’s brave—like the landing at Gallipoli or a Collingwood Grand Final—and doomed.

It didn’t actually happen that way. But that’s not why we go to the movies.

—Alex McDermott

BEYOND WORDS

The Pianist, dir. Roman Polanski. Shortly after the Second World War, the German critic Theodore Adorno famously claimed that ‘Writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric’. He said that to treat such an unimaginable horror as a ‘subject’ for art, to aestheticise it, is to distort it and to betray the truth of the injustice done to its victims. How, then, do I write about Roman Polanski’s new film, The Pianist, which is winning prizes and being hailed as great Art wherever it goes?
It is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a classical pianist and survivor of the Nazi invasion of Poland, and of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. He was one of only 20 to survive the ghetto, out of half a million Jews forced there by the Germans upon seizing Warsaw. It also reflects Polanski’s own childhood experiences of the bombing of the Warsaw and Krakow ghettos. Szpilman’s entire family, and Polanski’s mother, were among the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camps.

The film is unflinching in its portrayal of the brutality of life in the ghetto—of the systematic violence and humiliation meted out by the Nazis, but also by many of the Poles, and even by the Jewish police who collaborated with the Nazis in administering their program of incarceration, exploitation and murder.

Perhaps the most disturbing moment, however, in a distressing and disturbing film, is when we first see Szpilman’s father forced to comply with the Nazi edict that all Jews must wear the Star of David on their sleeve—to mark him as a thing apart from ‘humanity’, a subhuman, a monster; in short, a Jew. One cannot doubt the truth of the voices behind this film, or their right to be heard, or indeed the absolute need for such stories to be told.

For all the valuable and important and truthful aspects of the film, I must confess to being troubled watching it. Narrative cinema inevitably deals with individuals, characters—it cannot show us six million. Such knowledge as we have of the experience of the Holocaust comes largely through its survivors such as Szpilman. It is a marvellous and miraculous thing that he and others like him survived, and that we know their stories, but it’s easy to forget that such stories are truly miraculous and anomalous, and that the ‘truth’ of the Holocaust is that almost no-one who entered its maw survived.

Szpilman’s story (and indeed Polanski’s) is real and true. But it seems too easy, in the uplifting final scene of the film when Szpilman performs once more to triumphant applause, to let slip the memory of all those others who left no autobiography, who made no film—murdered as he would have been but for luck. I do not know if this film is ‘barbaric’, as Adorno might have said had he seen it. Discussing it in terms of its Oscar chances certainly is.

—Allan James Thomas

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