The Lebanese Rocket Society – Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige

The Lebanese Rocket Society (Joana Hadjithomas/Khalil Joreige – Lebanon/France/Qatar) 90 minutes

In the 1960s, as the space race was heating up between the global superpowers, a small recently established Armenian university in Beirut was conducting its own rocket program of sorts. The program was headed by Manoug Manougian, a young professor of mathematics at Haigazian University, and it launched ten solid-fuel Cedar rockets over the course of seven years. The program had no avowed political intentions – something inconceivable today – but political leaders from across the Arab world – Nasser in particular – did try to get in on the action, albeit without success.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s third feature traces the history of the program, tracking down the protagonists – Manougian is now a professor in Florida while the university’s president at the time John Markarian is living in retirement in Pennsylvania. The film begins with some coy humour – the directors’ rudimentary Google research throws up nothing but Hezbollah Katyushas as representing ‘Lebanese rockets’. A trip to Haigazian University is more fruitful, though the archive news reports are all in Armenian and they have to get a student to translate. This front-ending of the research difficulties is a bit unconvincing as, even if Manougian’s rocket program has been largely forgotten, it is not all that obscure. There are ample witnesses to it, particularly Harry Koundakjian, the father of Lebanese photojournalism, who documented several of the launches. There is also Youssef Wehbé, a former army officer charged with observing it, who says that the government’s interest in the project was ultimately of a military nature.

The idealism of Manougian and his students was eventually quashed when the Lebanese government, under international pressure, put a stop to the project in the late 1960s. The researchers themselves had also exceeded their own expectations, to the extent that they almost got themselves into trouble, when one rocket made it all the way to Cyprus. It landed in the sea but there was an international complaint from the British government, who had (and still have) a military base on the island. What might have been is imagined in a futuristic animated sequence of Lebanese space travel at the end of the film.

The Lebanese Rocket Society is a conventional enough documentary and lacks the spark of Hadjithomas and Joreige’s earlier films Perfect Day and Je veux voir, both of which straddled fiction and documentary. As in those films however, the civil war looms large; in a way, the real focus of the film is not the rocket program per se but the society that was lost to the 15-year conflict. In many respects, Lebanon has weathered the last forty years surprisingly well – despite the bloody conflict, the rise of terrorism, occupation by both Israel and Syria and sectarian tension which keeps the country forever teetering on the brink of collapse, the country is still there. There has been none of the wholesale ethnic cleansing and population movements that have seen countries elsewhere in the world emptied of ethnic groups throughout the 19th century. Even Lebanon’s Christian community is faring much better than many others in the Middle East.

That instability has its own impact on the filmmakers. As part of a range of art installations to accompany the film, they decided to rebuild one of the rockets and give it as a gift to Haigazian University. Of course, they have to persuade authorities they have no military intent. They garner the requisite permits only to have to start all over again when Saad Hariri’s government falls in January 2011. It is this sense of portraying a historical flux that the film itself inhabits that gives The Lebanese Rocket Society an unexpected edge. This film may be a much lighter one than its predecessors but Hadjithomas and Joreige continue to have a lot to say about a small country with a painful but fascinating history.

In the Fog - Sergei Loznitsa

In the Fog (V tumane) (Sergei Loznitsa — Germany/Netherlands/Belarus/Russia/Latvia) 127 minutes

The predicament of Belarusians living through the Nazi Occupation during the Second World War — caught as they were between the barbarism of the Germans and the potentially deadly repurcussions that might be visited on them by Stalin if they were seen to be too compliant — was fertile ground for Soviet-era cinema. Husband and wife Elem Klimov and Larissa Shepitko provided notable examples, Shepitko with her 1976 Golden Bear-winning The Ascent and then Klimov nine years later with Come and See. Sergei Loznitsa’s second fiction film after the excellent, harrowing My Joy follows in this tradition but its historical connotations are somewhat broader.

To a Western European audience, In the Fog will just appear another gloomy eastern art movie — albeit a recognisably impressive one — but Lozitsna’s choice of source material tackled by Loznitsa is a ballsy one. The film is based on Vasil’ Bykaw’s novel of the same name. Bykaw, himself a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, is a big deal in former Soviet countries and he is arguably the most important figure in the literature of 20th-century Belarus. He is, if one may put it glibly, Solzhenitsyn, Günther Grass and Camus rolled into one. Bykaw had numerous brushes with Soviet officialdom but managed to maintain an independence of sort and was always a hugely popular writer before the break-up of the USSR. In the Fog was published in 1989, just as the Iron Curtain was coming down, presaging the split further east two years later. The novel, about the impossible situation a man falsely accused of collaboration finds himself in, may also be read as an allegory for more contemporary dilemmas. Bykaw would maintain his dissidence in Belarus up until his death in 2003 as the newly independent republic descended back into dictatorship under Aleksandr Lukashenka.

Loznitsa’s lucid and tough-hearted film adaptation offers similar scope to the attentive viewer. The hero of the film is Sushenya (Vladimir Svirksiy), a railway line-man in his 30s, who refuses to take part with three colleagues in what is a practically suicidal derailment of a Nazi train. When all four are arrested, Sushenya is offered to be spared by the local Gestapo Commandant if he turns informer; when he refuses the officer spares him anyway, only to leave him under the perpetual cloud of suspicion for having betrayed his comrades. One night two pro-Soviet partisans, Burov and Voitik, knock on his door and take him away to execute him. But there are more twists to the stories awaiting in the dark Belarusian forests.

In the Fog is deceptively titled, for all the mist that is evident on screen; it is a clean, uncluttered drama, recounting the back stories of all three characters, two of whom have been pushed to make conscious choices to decide their fate, the third caught up in an absurd web of destiny beyond his control. Loznitsa does remarkably well to bring the novel’s interrogation of moral quandaries to life. It is a living, organic film of speech and actions rather than contrived ideas. It also looks great, with Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu (who has worked with Christian Mungiu and Cristi Puiu as well as with Loznitsa on My Joy) capturing the drab autumnal tones in splendidly-mounted Scope, alternating stately set-ups with Loznitsa’s more trademark handheld, shoulder-hugging travelling shots. To successfully adapt a major writer such as Bykaw is an achievement in itself; to turn the material into such a fine film is something remarkable indeed.

Lincoln

Lincoln (Steven Spielberg - USA)  150 minutes

Ten or fifteen years ago, a Lincoln biopic (if this film, can, indeed, be so considered) in Steven Spielberg’s hands would have been a different thing entirely. The historical achievement Lincoln is most readily associated with — the abolition of slavery, more formally known as the 13th amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America — is ripe for complaisant scenarios, and complaisant scenarios — let’s be honest here — are Spielberg’s stock in trade. One need only look at the slave-revolt-courtroom-drama Amistad (1997) to see how Spielberg is so ready, like a contemporary Candide, to mine every historical event for its best possible outcome, one generally facilitated by the now notorious white-saviour complex.

Things started looking up with Spielberg’s 2005 Munich, which was a surprisingly nuanced dramatisation of Mossad’s reaction to the Munich massacres. The screenwriter was Tony Kushner, and it is he who provides the backbone to what is Spielberg’s finest film since Schindler’s List and possibly his best ever.

Lincoln announces itself as a film about the 16th president of the United States, and emphasises that primordiality by its casting of Daniel Day Lewis, a man who makes himself available for work with exceptional parsimony these days, in the lead role. Day Lewis as Lincoln is the perfect fit; as well as looking reasonably like him, he manages to incarnate the president’s goofish affability and looming political weight while never making the film about just him. He is, obviously, the subject of the film but Spielberg and Kushner are content to let him sink into the background, as indeed he did during the  lobbying for votes for the amendment in early 1865.

Kushner’s screenplay, adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln biography Team of Rivals, rightly focuses on the radical abolitionist faction of Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens (a superb Tommy Lee Jones), whose scepticism as to Lincoln’s amendment is slowly eroded in the face of circumstances and, more crucially, hope. It is this anchoring of the political dialogue that allows Spielberg to reach beyond the passing of the bill and accord it its rightful seismic historical importance without treating it as an ineffable historical end-point. Stevens is the anchor in Congress, a bruiser in debates with pro-slavers, most notably, Fernando Wood (played by Lee Pace), but also someone who knows when to cut a deal, however compromising that might be, when the moment is right.

What we see in Lincoln is the sausage of laws being made, as the shortfall of the necessary 20 votes is made up by the government using all sorts of incentives and threats. All of this is handled by the president’s fixers  — a wonderful Falstaffian troupe led by James Spader, who provide some of the film’s more humorous moments. They also imbue the film with much of its period texture — and I don’t think I have relished the detail of a period film so much since Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy. Some critics have suggested the film is an analogy for Obama’s presidency; it’s not an idea without merit, especially given Day Lewis’s tendency to drift in and out of congressional proceedings like the current president. Another description of the film that has floated about online - a "political procedural",  sums it up rather better though. This is testimony to Kushner’s sensibility for dialectic and also a sneaking suspicion that, in the story of every great man of history, the most interesting thing lies elsewhere (if not too far away).

Lincoln is a long and sumptuous film, though I can’t say I found it over-long, and, believe me, I complain about the length of films often enough. It marries Spielberg’s considerable technical and narrative talents with a screenwriter who has a nose for how stories can be told intelligently in mainstream cinema - notably, without any pretension. And Kushner gives the film a vital edge too that saves it from being yet another worthy slice of Hollywood hagiography. His screenplay, along with Janusz Kaminski’s rich, wintry photography, steers a recognisably Spielbergian film towards something exceptional.

Inconvictus

Though every new Clint Eastwood film is worth a gander, the quality control is not always the most stringent, so it's not terribly surprising that two good films, The Changeling and Grand Torino should be followed by one that's, well, more than a bit silly. Invictus is an adaptation of John Carlin's Playing the Enemy, the account of how Nelson Mandela put aside his well-founded prejudices toward the Springboks and got behind their surprise World Cup win in 1995. The film is very much a white person's wishful-thinking fantasy and it's hard to imagine Hollywood making a film about Bafana Bafana's victory in the Africa Cup of Nations a year later, despite the fact the footballers had more white players in their squad than the Springboks had black players in theirs. The rugby is likewise not too realistically filmed, and the matches take place in decidedly more balmy conditions than those who watched the World Cup in that South African winter will remember.

I also find it hard to believe that so many black South Africans shed their hostility towards the Springboks so quickly as appeared the case in the film. I would guess that the kindest emotion many of them expressed was rather indifference. Readers of this blog will know about my own indifference to rugby; I can't quite say I would always support Ireland's opponents in a match (though whenever Argentina dump them out of the World Cup, I always find it strangely amusing) but their Six Nations success last year left me as cold as a Chelsea-Man U League Cup semi-final would be likely to. If that's my reaction, I would find it strange that the majority of black South Africans could bring themselves to be so magnanimous to the sporting symbol of the hated apartheid.

But of course Mandela was exceptionally magnanimous, in this, as in many other cases in the years following his release. And, among his own electorate, he was largely alone. The film lacks the subtlety or the insight to really flesh out the historical stakes of Mandela's intervention; for all its good intentions it cannot avoid appearing to resolve more than four decades of apartheid by means of a unlikely sporting success. I'm reminded of a review I read of Roland Emmerich's Independence Day when it came out; the now forgotten critic said that though the world has been destroyed and civilization lays in tatters, the characters celebrate the conquest of the alien invader's like they've won a volleyball match.

But all this is a little unfair on Invictus. It's a likable enough film despite its manifest flaws. It is by Clint Eastwood after all, one of the more likable and admirable personalities in the US, never mind Hollywood.

Invictus - Official Trailer [HD]



It's as silly and enjoyable in its own way as this little masterpiece:

Disco Infernal

This is a film that has been and gone most places but I'll give it a mention because I wasn't on blog duty when it came out a few months back. Tony Manero is the tale of Raúl, a 52-year-old ne'er-do-well obsessed with Saturday Night Fever in the dark days of the military dictatorship in Chile in the late 70s. His dream is to appear in a TV talent contest as a John Travolta clone. So far, so-Full Monty. But Tony Manero is a far more scabrous, unobliging work, an ill-mannered riposte to the idea that popular culture (especially American pop culture) can provide redemption in the face of political repression. In this film, pop music is, at best a malign distraction from the evil within, at worst a vector for the rotten state of a country whose ruling élite has placed its consumer concerns above human ones. It reminds me of the lines parrotted by Pinochet supporters as the old bastard was held under house arrest in London ten years ago: "Before the General came to power, you couldn't even get blue jeans in Chile. He saved our country."

Apparently at its Cannes screening 18 months ago, several Hollywood studio executives left violently angry, incredulous anyone could envisage their product used for dark ends. Job well done, Pablo Larraín, whose second film this is. One of the films of 2009 so far.

Apologies for the lack of subtitles in the clip:

The Colonel's Protection Racket

Fred Halliday has a fine piece at Open Democracy about Libya on the 4th anniversary of Colonel Gaddafi's 'revolution' which led to the establishment of the Jamahiriya. Halliday's article is thorough and based on first-hand experience and a wide knowledge of the country. There's also an abundance of links and references that will inform most about this most secretive of Arab countries. Interesting asides tell us of Gaddafi's fondness for bestowing and removing names - he has Arabised the names of Western products from 7-Up to Johnny Walker (which brings us back to this).

Halliday is no admirer of Gadaffi nor an equivocator on his regime and its anti-imperialist rhetoric. His conclusion is apt, particularly so, in light of the probable innocence of Abdlebaset al-Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing:

Libya is far from the most brutal regime in the world, or even the region: it has less blood on its hands than (for example) Sudan, Iraq, and Syria. But al-Jamahiriyah remains a grotesque entity. In its way it resembles a protection-racket run by a family group and its associates who wrested control of a state and its people by force and then ruled for forty years with no attempt to secure popular legitimation.


Libya’s regime at 40: a state of kleptocracy | open Democracy News Analysis

Technorati Tags: Libya, Politics, History

A Family History Gleaned from the 1911 Census

Like many others, I've been having some fun searching the 1911 census, which the National Archives in Dublin have just put online. I've done a bit of detective work seeking out the Becketts of Foxrock (or Ballybrack, as the census has it - the four-year-old Sam, it seems, was as of yet unlettered); what remained of the Joyces living out an impecunious existence at 20 Gardiner's Place; Eamonn Ceannt, one of the more easily traceable of the signatories to the Proclamation, at that time living in the shadow of the prison where he would be executed five years later; a young Christy Ring; An Craoibhín Aoibheann, and future President Douglas Hyde, and an infant Francis Bacon. A lot more work is needed to dredge up some of the other luminaries of the day or the future, given the commonness of surnames and, especially, Christian names, not to mention the difficulty of determining people's movements on the night of the 2nd of April of that year.

But often the more interesting stories are closer to home, and I had little difficulty finding my paternal family, seeing as they remained in the same house for another half-century and the family name is not terribly common (finding my mother's family, Gallaghers from Donegal, was a good deal more onerous). There were nine people present in the house that night, six members of the family and three lodgers. The head of the family was Maggie Farry, widowed at the age of 45. She had five children, aged from 5 to 16, all but the youngest were literate. She held the family pub and shop, which my grandfather Bernard (Bertie) would later run until his death in 1956. Maggie managed to combine intense Catholic bigotry (her sons once played a trick on her by pretending a church they had stopped into on a journey home one day was a Protestant one, causing her no end of pain) with a loyalty to the British crown (the second son was named John Albert after the late Prince Consort). Though, according to my father, later in life she developed a hostility towards the crown, which allowed her to turn a blind eye when her sons Albert and Bertie joined the Irish Volunteers. Maggie was also a bit of a snob, naming her children Bernard Agustine, Leo Tynation and Thomas Alphonsas (though Alphonsas was not unknown in the devout Ireland of the day and my own uncle was later named Alphonso).

The family, like most Irish, went their separate ways - Alphonsas (Al) went to New York and later Chicago. Albert lingered in Ballymote for a couple of decades after losing his job at the local creamery for backing the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War (like the rest of the family). His vaguely leftwing views later mutated into admiration for the Nazis (my father claims Albert had official Nazi party literature in his bedroom during the war) though this was driven more by an intense Anglophobia than out of any real ideological persuasion. He was probably naive and ignorant due to his isolation in the inter-war period; he spent the last two decades of his life in England, of all places, dying just as the outbreak of the Troubles may have landed the ageing Republican in prison for recrudescent activity. My grandfather took on the family pub and shop and was a founder member of Fianna Fáil and was elected county councillor in 1944. In 1938 he went bankrupt as his toeing the party line forced him to extend ruinous credit to farmers and party supporters at the height of the Economic War.

I never met any of the nine people listed as being in the house that night. All family members (bar Al) were dead by the time I was born. I was struck by the name of one of the three lodgers. I knew that the family took on lodgers and many of them were RIC men, which provided convenient cover for the house to be used as a safe house during the War of Independence.* But one of the lodgers that night was a Jewish Russian emigré by the same of Solomon Malamed who had the vague profession of 'wholesale marine dealer'. I had never known the family housed a lodger of such exotic provenance, though there's really no reason why I should as he may have stayed as little as a week or two. I'm not sure if my great-grandmother's strident Catholicism allowed her to look kindly on a member of the tribe of Israel, especially given the anti-semitism of the Church at the time, though business was probably looked on as business. Mr Malamed, two years later welcomed into the world a daughter, Yetta, who would later grow up to be a thorn in the side of the Apartheid regime as a prominent South African Communist, being charged with treason in December 1956, the same week my grandfather, young as the century, died at the age of 56. Yetta Barenblatt lived to see the fall of apartheid and died ten years ago in Johannesberg. It would have been nice had she met Albert, whom she might have managed to make see reason.

*Or rather it served as a clearing house, to temporarily shelter Volunteers after guerrilla attacks in the village. The lodgers, including the RIC men, stayed in a smaller annexe next door, so people could pass through the house without much notice.

The Farry family declaration for the 1911 census

Technorati Tags: ireland, history, Sligo

Well at Least He Has His Health...

The superlative and very funny French football magazine So Foot dubbed Group B of this European Championship (the one containing co-hosts Austria, Germany, Poland and Croatia) the 'anschluss group', a delightfully insensitive quip, but which has been proven to be pertinent in the light of events in the past week. While Croatia have been rock solid in defence so far, conceding only a late goal to Germany's Lukas Podolski, one of their countrymen, former Ustashe chief of police Milivoj Ašner let his guard slip by being out and about to enjoy the football in his town of domicile Klagenfurt, where Croatia played their games against Germany and Poland. Ašner, 95, who cunningly goes by the name of Georg Aschner in Austria, escaped extradition to his native land two years ago to be tried for war crimes, as the Austrian government claimed he was in too poor health to stand trial. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has again called on the Austrians to extradite him and that renowned organ of Nazi-hunting, The Sun, has snapped a hale and hearty Ašner with his wife among revelling football fans. Croatia has been criticised for its team's links to far-right groups but the country is surely doing more to atone for a shameful chapter of its past than Austria is by protecting this criminal. I wonder does it have anything to do with Klagenfurt being the home and fief of that pin-up boy of the far-right, Jörg Haider? And I wonder what Mister Ašner's secret for a long and healthy life is?

Ghosts of Glasgow Football

I wrote last year about visiting the Estadio Nacional Jamor, just outside Lisbon, where Celtic defeated Inter Milan in May 1967 to lift the European Cup for the first, and only time. The stadium is a beautiful old arena in a charming woodland setting, and though it's rarely used for anything other than the Portuguese Cup final or national team training sessions these days, it still imparts the same breezy meridional exoticism that so marked the colour television images of the final that memorable day. The same week their cross-town rivals Rangers were being defeated 1-0 by Bayern Munich in their second Cup-Winners' Cup final; but back in Glasgow another club, Third Lanark, was being wound up only five years after finishing third in the old Scottish first division. The club was the victim of mismanagement though many supporters claim that the board of directors deliberately ran it into the ground.

I remember first seeing references to the club in an old News of the World football annual that my uncle had retained from his schooldays, and the ghostliness of their history would even colour my reading, years later, of Alasdair Gray's mighty apocalyptic novel Lanark. I used to think that the club got their name from being Glasgow's third club (though Partick Thistle or even Clyde might dispute that classification) but it was actually from the Third Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, out of which the club originally sprang. The club's old ground Cathkin Park, which was itself formerly the second of the three Hampden Parks, still stands as a municipal park, and a new incarnation of the club plays junior football there. Two of the terraces also stand, going back to nature as trees and vegetation grow on them; this collection of photographs of the ground illustrates this and, if the sight of the ruined terraces were not haunting enough, they are also strikingly reminiscent of the sylvan setting of the Lisbon stadium where Celtic were making Scottish football history just as another chapter of that history was coming to a sad end.

Though Thirds disappeared from Scottish football while the country was still a force in European football - and would continue to be for another twenty-five years, their fate sadly mirrors the decline in Scotland's own footballing prestige. Though the national team have made great strides in the last couple of years, despite limited resources, and Celtic and Rangers have made decent dents in European football after years of underachieving, beyond the Old Firm there are few clubs capable of competing consistently, a far cry from the 1980s when Dundee United and Aberdeen were teams feared by some of the giants of European football. Meanwhile, Gretna, a club with a far lesser pedigree than Third Lanark, may also go the same way having gone into administration.

For more on Thirds - or the Hi-Hi, as their fans knew them - here is a clip from a Channel 4 documentary commemorating the 40th anniversary of their folding:

May 68

A plug for myself here; I am currently to be seen occupying the Essay of the Month slot at my other online home Irish Left Review where I give my views on the legacy of May 1968. It's a long one, one must be warned...

After You...Non, Pleeze After You

From Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944, a great little book issued to every Tommy before the Normandy landings and now reissued by the Bodleian library:

'The French are more polite than most of us. Be sure to address people as 'Monsieur', 'Madame' or 'Mademoiselle.''

From a brochure issued by the Paris Chamber of Commerce to businesses anticipating increased foreign trade during the Rugby World Cup:

'The Anglo-Saxons, as well as being largely amiable, are also notable for their politeness.'

Curiously the 'Anglo-Saxons' comprise the Scots, Irish and Welsh but not the Americans or Canadians, who are afforded their own rubric. I wonder have manners changed that drastically in the past sixty years?

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

Abortion lends itself well to drama, almost too well in fact. A subject that arouses strong emotions on both sides of the polemic is ripe for overwrought dramatisation. Too often the result is disappointing, more the stuff of a TV movie than cinema. Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is a more sober-minded approach to the topic, and, at the risk of making a grotesquely disproportionate analogy, it is more powerful than your average abortion film just as Primo Levi's writings on Auschwitz, composed in the cold light of his own experiences are more jarring than many a commercialised emotional Holocaust book or movie that has appeared since.

Mungiu, born in 1968, is one of that generation of Romanians known as the decretei - the children of the decree - the decree being that of Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1966, forbidding abortion and enjoining on all Romanian women to reproduce as a patriotic gesture. The dictator's words 'the fetus is the property of the entire society; anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity' dwarf even the worst attempts of Western moralists to exert control over women's bodies. Ceauşescu's abortion ban was part of a drive to increase the populaton of the country by 50% by the end of the century and though it didn't quite succeed, it did produce a generation of sufficiently rebellious youngsters that, like Mungiu, were approaching adulthood in 1989 and toppled the regime that caused them to 'be too many'. Such is the theory put forward by Steven Leavitt in Freakonomics, a not-entirely-persuasive one, but one which does have a good deal of logic to it. Mungiu, in an interview with Libération last week, stated that the moral debate over abortion that exists in the West was never applicable in Romania. People arranged clandestine abortions simply out of necessity and, as he says, partly out of defiance to the regime. It is this relatively simpler context that gives his film more air to breath and greater room for dramatic manoeuvre. It also helps that Mungiu, one of the new wave of hugely impressive Romanian directors, is a masterly technician who also knows how to manage actors perfectly.

The film takes place in a provincial city in Romania in 1987, and it charts the efforts of a young student Gabita to terminate her pregnancy, with the almost-single-handed help of her immensely resourceful friend Ottilia. A dodgy, yet consummately professional, illegal abortionist - superbly played by Vlad Ivanov - is engaged but Gabita's panicked modification of the truth causes problems that have disastrous effects. The film is beautifully shot, alternating between long virtuoso handheld sequences that remind one of the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta and even longer one-take static scenes that forensically observe both the abortion process and the girls' efforts to avoid detection. The lighting is despairingly gloopy, all grey and green tones, and it seemed even bleaker on second viewing, which makes further demands on the viewer. But the performances of all the cast, particularly the afore-mentioned Ivanov and Anamaria Marinca as Otilia, line the film with a surprising amount of humanity that leavens the task somewhat. Mungiu also leaves many things hanging in the film - for instance we are never told why Gabita has left it so late to have an abortion, and it is never exactly clear what the exchange that leads to the central tragic sacrifice articulates - and this once again gives the film a wider resonance than the average issue-of-the-week movie. There are of course many nuances that will only be familiar, I imagine, to Romanian audiences, many of which are delivered by the older generation at a birthday dinner for Otilia's boyfriend's mother. This scene is brilliantly shot in claustrophobic close-up and is the stuff of great drama; it is not even without some biting humour, such as a doctor and probably Party member (played by the ubiquitous Ion Sapdaru) who lashes out at the spoiled, ungrateful young.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days is the fourth Cannes prizewinner to come out of Romania in the past three years and though the films have not been commercial successes back home (this one has yet to be released there in fact) their international profile has ensured that the directors Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu and Catalin Mitulescu, and others to come, will be able to continue making films. Quite why there is this sudden proliferation of great films from the country is unclear though there is really no reason why a country like Romania with a strong and celebrated artistic heritage and a pained history to accompany it should be short of the raw material to make great films. Some might argue that Mungiu's film is not as great as Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu but it looks likely, in my eyes at least, to emulate it as film of the year.

...Names Don't Bother Me

Football is notable, apart from the fact that it the most-widely played team sport in the world, for the relative sobriety of its club names, no more so than in the home of the sport. English football is replete with a plethora of Uniteds, Cities, Towns, Rovers and Wanderers. There are a few more adventurous monikers, such as Arsenal (repeated in many countries around the world, most notably in Argentina), Tottenham Hotspur (feeding off the Boy's Own popularity of Harry Hotspur in the late Victorian era), Nottingham Forest and, of course, those midweek specialists Sheffield Wednesday, whose name is echoed in the Welsh part-timers Abergavenny Thursdays. But in the main the names are standard, as a result of which football fans are not too fond of the more colourful American-style team names, which were foisted on Rugby League about ten years ago. The advantage of ordinary team names is that a nickname can then be appended to the team. With the American naming tendency, the Boston Red Sox remain the Red Sox, the Green Bay Packers the Packers and so on; it seems, to European ears, one-dimensional.

Irish football is similarly bereft of colourful names, with the exception of Bohemians south of the border - a name that is more evocative in its official title 'The Bohemian Football Club' and Distillery in the north. In Scotland though, the names are more creative, akin to rugby clubs in their originality, which always made the Scottish results on Final Score a greater pleasure to listen to, almost like the Shipping Forecast in its lilting recitation of lengthy names. Some are well-known, such as Heart of Midlothian, named for the eponymous prison in Walter Scott's novel; others less so, such as Queen of the South, one of the few teams to have taken their name directly from the Bible. The musicality of real placenames such as Stenhousemuir (with their equally lyrical Ochilview Park home - beside the McCowan's toffee factory) and Cowdenbeath complete the medley.

The origins of most football clubs lie in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and many of the most popular names reflect the nationalisms of the day, such as Borussia, Hansa and Hertha in Germany; Español (recently Catalanized to Espanyol) and Real Sociedad in Spain; Maccabi in Israel, Hajduk in the Balkans, Thistle in Scotland and Albion in England and, strangely, Scotland too. Irish football is lacking nationalist names, probably because the GAA was more concerned with using them. Also popular, and not surprisingly given the public school origins of the game, were references to antiquity in names such as Corinthians, Ajax, Atalanta (of Bergamo in Italy), Sparta and Hellas (as in Hellas Verona). There are also teams around the world that retain names in English due to their English founders or a simple anglophilia such as Milan (never referred to in Italy as 'AC'), Athletic Bilbao (as opposed to 'Atletico'), the Racing clubs of Paris, Strasbourg, Lens and elsewhere in France, Sporting Club de Portugal (better known as Sporting Lisbon), River Plate and Newell's Old Boys in Argentina, though not, as I pointed out yesterday, Red Star Belgrade.

Most continental clubs are similarly restrained in their nomenclature, Scandinavian clubs, in particular, being almost exclusively named after places. There are exceptions though, such as two Swiss clubs with English-language names, such as Young Boys of Bern and Grasshoppers Zurich. The former was a simple riposte to the more common fashion of calling alumnus teams 'Old Boys' but its name does provoke mirth in the English-speaking world these days. A couple of days ago, the URL BSC YOUNG BOYS - OFFIZIELLE INTERNETSEITE appeared in my del.ic.ious subscriptions and I was momentarily disturbed by the prospect that I had been directed to a site that was not only unsavoury but also possibly illegal. But I soon realised that these Young Boys are a much more wholesome lot, though it must be pointed out that they do play at the Wankdorf Stadium. Grasshoppers, for their part, apparently owe their name to their early players' 'energetic goal celebrations', which evokes the image of old black-and-white newsreel footage. The vigour of youth is also celebrated in teams such as Juventus, the Jeunesse teams from Auxerre to Yaoundé and the recently-formed Wexford Youths, rescuing that fine word from its long-standing connection with juvenile courts.

Eastern bloc teams were often named after their connection with a particular state body, such as the Lokomotiv teams, from Leipzig to Plovdiv to Moscow; Dynamo teams, who were usually associated with the Secret Police; Honvéd Budapest, who were named after the Hungarian Army; Shaktior Donetsk is named after the local mine ('Shaktior' is Russian and Ukrainian for 'mine') and both they and Zenit St. Petersburg were at one time in the past named 'Stalinets'. Probably the best name from the former Soviet Union is Torpedo Moscow, the team of the Soviet armaments industry, funnily enough. Though the team's name has rarely stricken fear into the hearts of opposition since the glory post-war years the name is a suitably formidable one for a Stalin-era football club.

Dutch football provides us with one of the world's greatest football team names, Go Ahead Eagles of Deventer, a case of someone using the English language to invoke powers that were well beyond it. A similar name is provided in the name of the Breton club En Avant Guingamp ('En Avant' meaning 'ahead' or 'in front'), who spent a couple of years recently in the French top flight. French football team names are usually a lot more elaborate in their official denomination than in the names that end up in the newspapers and often they are referred to by almost unrecognizable acronyms, such as ESTAC for Troyes, LOSC for Lille, MUC72 for Le Mans.

But one must venture outside of Europe for the best club names; South Africa veers close to the American formula whilst still being distinctive, giving us Kaizer Chiefs (the Britpop band uses an 's'), Orlando Pirates, Platinum Stars and best of all, Mamelodi Sundowns. One of the greatest clubs in African history is Hearts of Oak of Accra, the Hearts that Valentin Romanov has yet to get his mitts on, but Ghanaian football has even more impressive club names such as Ebusua Dwarfs and King Faisal Babes. In Cambodia there is a team called Hello United, while Bolivia boasts some great names such as Blooming, Destroyers and The Strongest, who started off as 'The Strong' before graduating to the superlative, and they are considered formidable opposition every year in the Copa Libertadores.

Trinidad & Tobago's Joe Public FC is also an inspired name and their chairman is the dodgy, populist FIFA vice-president Jack Warner. Jamaica's Violet Kickers is also a good one, an echo of the Ruhr Valley legends of yore Kickers Offenbach. There are some teams that have great names by dint of their mundane professional connections such as Botswana Meat Commission FC or FC Impôts (i.e. 'Taxes FC') of Cameroon while others such as the Sierra Leone trio of Real Republicans, Golf Leopards and Mighty Blackpool have a deeper resonance. Though Big Bullets of Malawi is a fair attempt at a great club name, the overall crown must go to the Swazi club named Eleven Men in Flight. Pure poetry.

Of course, some team names have been missed out upon because their names were in languages unknown to me. Feel free to point any out that I might not have mentioned, be they famous or otherwise.

I Had an Uncle Who Once Played for Red Star Belgrade

Reading in the Guardian today about Rangers' 1-0 win over Crvena Zvezda Belgrade in the Champions' League qualifying round I noticed yet another erroneous referral to the Serbian club being 'formerly known as Red Star Belgrade'. There's no 'formerly known' about it; they are still known as Red Star in English - as the official club site testifies - it is just that for some reason they are being referred to these days by UEFA and by English-language media by their Serbian name. The club was always known as Crvena Zvezda, as anyone that paid close attention to the Yugoslav lineups in the Panini World Cup sticker albums back in the 80s will know. If some in Britain or Ireland (the 'formerly-known as Red Star' line was used in the Irish media when they played Cork City in last year's competition) imagine that a Yugoslav club founded by communists in the last days of the second world war would choose an English moniker, only to change it to the Serbian sixty years later, then the English-speaking world has an even more Ptolemaic sense of its own position as centre of the universe than I previously thought. Funny that: they speak Serbian in Serbia. Will the Guardian's reporter be referring to Spartak Moscow - Celtic's European opposition tonight - as 'formerly known as Sparta Moscow'? Tomorrow on Underachievement: a piece on exotic club names from around the world. In the meantime, a bit of trivia: what song does the title of this post come from?

Parity of Esteem

Another Twalfth has passed and as this charming Flickr photo album will attest, the sales of Irish tricolours along the Shankill show no signs of decreasing. Unfortunately I couldn't get hold of the 'money shot' with the Irish flag bearing the legend 'KAT' (Kill all Taigs), which can however be viewed here, courtesy of Slugger O'Toole. Slugger also reports that in Coleraine, a placard on one bonfire mocked the recent death of a 16-old Catholic schoolboy, and Loyalist paramilitaries threatened to kill his father after he removed it.

What I want to know is where is the chorus of condemnation from mainstream Unionism, those folks usually so fond of (rightly) calling on Republicans to condemn violence done in their name? Instead the main condemnation was of the DUP for bending its resolve and making a painful compromise with the Shinners. The Irish Times, meanwhile focussed more on the environmental threat posed by the bonfires (a genuine concern but not the priority in this context).

I have no quarrel with the Orange Order celebrating their day, provided there is no triumphalism and no intimidation of other people, as has been the case with the marches on the Garvaghy and Ormeau Roads in the past. When there is nobody that really cares, as with the marches in Rossnowlagh, the marches go off peacefully but, I suppose that would defeat the purpose for many Orangemen. For more than ten years there have been Twelfth celebrations at Áras an Uachtarán, which is a remarkably magnanimous gesture from its Northern Catholic incumbent.

Nobody is suggesting that Paisley and the Orange Order should start commemorating the Easter Rising but for some Ulster Unionists, a Republican acknowledgement of their traditions is not enough. Now, another 'Love Ulster' parade is planned for Dublin in August or September; the go-ahead has been given, which I say is fair enough. But what do the organisers want exactly? They state that they wish to highlight the Protestant victims of Republican violence, while being seemingly oblivious to the fact that the majority of people in the Republic were fully aware of those murders and abhorred them. There is a discomfiting (and most aberrant) use of the imperative in 'love' there. If you ask me, there is something vaguely vampiric about it. No doubt there will be a few teenage yobs on hand to hurl projectiles at the marchers (despite the exhortations of even Republican Sinn Féin) and they'll trot back over the border happy, confirmed in their bigoted preconceptions about the Republic. When will Ulster unionism grow up and cease cleaving to its persecution complex?

Persepolis: Sometimes Things Are Black and White

I have written quite a bit on this blog about Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, both the four-volume comic book that has been a huge international success, chalking up over one-and-a-half-million sales, and the animated film version which she has herself directed, together with fellow comics artists Vincent Paronnaud. The film has just been released and I was pleased to see that it is more than a simple slavish adaptation of the book.

For those unfamiliar with the book, Persepolis is the autobiographical tale of Satrapi growing up at the time of the Iranian revolution, in a communist family that also had royal heritage. As for many liberal, left-wing Iranians, the Satrapis saw their initial joy at the overthrow of the Shah quickly evaporate with the rise to power of the Mullahs, who foisted a viciously demented totalitarianism culled from the Dark Ages on a country that already had one foot in the modern age. Satrapi's uncle, an activist with Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party, who had already been imprisoned and tortured under the Shah saw his complaisance at the coming to power of the Islamists rewarded with first imprisonment and then execution.

There then follows the Iran-Iraq war, waged by two squalidly despotic regimes, in which one million people needlessly perished. The war is refracted through tales of Marjane's childhood friends coming from back from the front forever altered and the deaths of neighbours in Iraqi airstrikes. When the feisty teenage Marjane begins to question her teachers' indoctrination too loudly, her parents send her off to the French Lycée in Vienna for her own safety, a wise move considering how the Islamists had few qualms about executing dissident schoolchildren, taking the trouble to rape them so as to circumvent the Koranic prohibition on subjecting virgins to capital punishment.

In Vienna, in the 1980s she encounters Europeans with dismayingly one-dimensional views of her country and following a number of fallings-out with people she ends up sleeping rough and almost dying, something which her own parents never found out until the publication of volume three of he comic. She returns to Iran to brave a country where ordinary people are forever at the mercy of the dour, viciously puritanical Moral Police. After a failed marriage she decides to move to France, where she still lives, her international success having made a return to Tehran impossible while the current regime remains in power.

Part of the success of Satrapi's work is the simple, almost child-like line of her two-tone drawings, which feature clunky, cartoonish people, which she herself claims is a result of being forced to draw life studies in art school in Tehran of models absurdly draped in full-length chadors (something which is alluded to in one scene in the film). The film elaborates on this style, introducing more shade for the sequences depicting the revolution and the subsequent war. The model Satrapi and Paronnaud followed was German expression, which is suitable on a poltical as well as aesthetic level, considering how many of the UFA filmmakers had to flee on the Nazis' assumption of power. They also based the family sequences on Italian neo-realism, which carry a recognisable stamp of Rosselini, de Sica and early Visconti, and offer an equally brilliant condensing of the political climate of the time. Both Satrapi's parents (voiced by Simon Abkarian and Catherine Deneuve) are admirable characters but the real scene-stealer is the outspoken, opium-smoking grandmother with the voice of veteran French actress Danielle Daressieu.

Marjane herself is played by Deneuve's real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni, and she is the same ballsy, likeable and occasionally infuriating woman and girl that appears in the comic. The film is often funny, rarely passing up an opportunity to ridicule the lethal God-fearing nonsense of the Mullahs but many of the scenes are also devastating, from the very beginning, when the adult Marjane puts on her chador at Orly airport (instantly attracting derision from a French bystander) in order to board a flight home. Satrapi never allows us to lose sight of the tragedy of the revolution that was betrayed and crushed by a crowd of fundamentalist madmen, yet there is also a complete lack of the sentimentalism that often mars such accounts of exile. Persepolis the film, like the comic that preceeded it, is a moving, indispensable portrait of a country with a formidable civilisation that has lived a nightmarish existence for the past fifty years, and it is a fitting companion piece to the courageous work of Jafar Panahi, among others, in offering a view of Iran that will challenge the preconceptions of many in the West.

It looks like being huge too, if the queues that prevented me from seeing it on its opening day are anything to go by. It is due to released later in the year in an English-language version (it is produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall - Spielberg's regular producers) and should be guaranteed large audiences. Not to be missed.

In His Defence...

Jacques Vergès is one of those people whose reputation in French would be known as 'sulfureuse' (the literal English translation gives only an incomplete indication of this adjective's resonance). Vergès, now aged a very healthy-looking 82, has made his name defending the indefensible in the courts of law, such as Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal (albeit only briefly), Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, Slobodan Milošović, countless African despots in suits brought against Amnesty International and he also offered to defend both Tariq Aziz and Saddam Hussein following their capture. A former Free French guerrilla, Vergès was a Communist Party member and anti-colonial agitator (he is Reunionese and half-Vietnamese on his mother's side) before he came to prominence defending the glamorous Algerian guerrillas Djamila Bouhired and Zohra Drif, whose bombing of two Algiers cafés in 1956 featured in Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers. Both were sentenced to death and later had their sentences commuted to life in prison and were released on Algeria's independence in 1962. Vergès later married Bouhired, but could not live in the shadow of a woman who seen as a national hero by most Algerians and disappeared for eight years from 1970 to 1978. Many people close to him believe that he spent those years in Cambodia with Pol Pot (with whom he was friendly) but former Khmer Rouge president Khieu Samphan disputes this.

Vergès is the subject of a new documentary L'Avocat de la Terreur by Barbet Schroeder, most famous in the English-speaking world for his Hollywood films Barfly, Reversal of Fortune and Single White Female. Schroder also directed the excellent General Idi Amin Dada in 1974, which was made with the co-operation of Amin himself and which was also featured in Kevin MacDonald's recent film The Last King of Scotland. I was expecting the film on Vergès to be equally gripping but it fails in a number of ways, not least because it is so uncinematic, having little to distinguish it from the intelligent but modest historical and political documentaries that can be seen on French TV every night after 12. Equally, the failure to cast any real light on Vergès' missing years (in spite of extensive interviews with the loquacious advocate) hampers the film.

After his return, Vergès turned to defending members of the Baader Meinhof group and also Palestinian militants. When Carlos the Jackal began to terrorise Paris and other European cities, on the command of the Iranian Islamist regime, but also for purely selfish financial motives, Vergès moved on to defending Carlos' wife Magdalena Kopp. According to Stasi files released in 1994 and compiled when Carlos was living in East Berlin in the early 80s, Vergès was party to the transport of explosives for which Kopp was arrested and convicted in 1982, though he has never been charged with this. Vergès insists that his defending undesirable people to be something he does merely out of professional duty, claiming at one point onscreen that he would 'even defend Bush' if he was asked to. However Vergès' connections with many dubious characters, such as Carlos and Swiss Nazi banker François Genoud, bankroller of Islamist terror groups and the defence of Klaus Barbie, suggests that perversely skewed convictions have been an equally strong motive.

Vergès, a charismatic man, who has an imperturbable composure talking on film about his life and convictions, is the epitome of the engaged, well-off 20th-century Leftist who has little concern for any of the blood shed by the causes which he espouses. The defence of Barbie rested on selective prosecution being mounted by the French state; Vergès claimed that far greater crimes were committed by French colonial regimes abroad. An arguable point (in Barbie's personal case) though a particularly repugnant use of moral relativism to try and exonerate a man who was clearly a murderer.

Shroeder's film, though enthralling in parts, is a disappointment in both its incompleteness and the fact that it fails to penetrate the opacity of Vergès' motivations and character. It is also a depressing film to watch, where perpetrators of genocide, mass murderers, Nazis, Islamic terrorists and psychopaths like Carlos are paraded in an essentially neutral light, remnants of the confused but vicious Leftist-Marxist pragmatism of the late Twentieth Century. A nightmare we're still trying to wake up from.

Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French

I remember watching, as a very young lad, the 1982 RTÉ-Channel 4-France3 co-production The Year of the French, an adaptation of Thomas Flanagan's novel about the 1798 Rebellion (or Revolution, as it has come to be erroneously known). It is striking how vividly I remember the mini-series, which I watched compulsively every Sunday night and despite not having seen it since I can still recall the title sequence where a sleán digs brutally into the ground in extreme close-up. Likewise I remember the scenes at the end where the rebels are hanged for their acts, especially the face of the Romantic hero, the rakish Gaelic poet-hedgeschool-master Eoghan Ruath MacCarthaigh. I had suspected that my admiration for the show might have been a bit misplaced because of how young I was at the time but a few people a good deal older than me have confirmed my memories of it. Which makes one wonder why it has never been screened since - to the best of my knowledge it did not even get an airing during the bicentenary commemorations nine years ago - or released on video or DVD.

Flanagan's novel stood on the shelf at home for years when I was growing up, not too far from Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, another doorstopping bestseller that was adapted for TV at the time. Because of this I imagined for a long time that Flanagan's novel was a Leon Uris-style potboiler, a novel that peddled comfortable truths about the glorious failure that was the rebellion and the foundation of modern Irish Republicanism. Last year I came across a re-issue of the book, published by the New York Review of Books, a publication that usually knows a good thing when it sees it. Flanagan, a third-generation Irish-American from Connecticut, and a childhood friend of Truman Capote, was a pre-eminent scholar of Irish literature - particularly the nineteenth-century, pre-Celtic Twilight variety, and published often in the NYRB, which has also re-issued his collected essays. He was one of those Americans (of whom there have been quite a few) that knew Ireland and its history better than many natives of the island, and he brought his extensive reading of 18th and 19th century writing to bear on the stylistic and political tour-de-force that was this, his first, novel.

The 1798 rebellion, like much of Irish history, is enveloped in the mists of collective memory and is usually evoked as an event far more cogent and straightforwardly noble than it actually was. From a modern perspective, it seems like an easy choice to make between the two principles: an avowedly non-sectarian Republican movement founded on Enlightenment ideals versus a foetid, decrepit oligarchy given free rein to rule at whim by a reactionary crown in London. Many of us - myself included - would naturally choose the former party though in doing so one runs the risk of extricating the event from its historical context. Flanagan's great achievement is to flesh out that contemporary world of the rebellion and to people it with characters with credible (if sometimes venal) concerns and motives. His narrative is a masterpiece of dialectical story-telling; though his sympathies are clearly with the rebels, there are few outright villains to be found on the side of either the loyalists (many of them Catholic) or the British. Flanagan is a believer of Jean Renoir's adage that 'every villain has his reasons'.

The novel makes use of a polyphonic narrative, much like a 19th-century novel, using multiple narrators, some in the first and some in the third person. The main character is the poet-schoolmaster MacCarthaigh, emblematic of the old Gaelic world that is about to die out, no matter how the Rebellion might fare. He wavers between idealism and cynicism, trusting neither the United Irishman leading the rebellion nor the French prosecuting the military expedition, reserving his chief concern for the wretched Irish peasants, his own people. There is also the narrative of Malcolm Elliott, a Mayo solicitor and landowner and United Irishman, who leads the insurgency in Mayo (the scene of the French landings and the start of the latter part of the rebellion); that of Arthur Broome, the humane Protestant minister of Killala; some exhilarating passages involving Wolfe Tone in Revolutionary Paris cajoling the Directory and Bonaparte into sending troops to help the Irish, and other narratives from the British perspective, many of them laced with a mixture of paternal condescension for and disbelieving resignation at the status and behaviour of the Irish peasantry and their aristocratic overlords. There is much in their narrative that many Irish nationalists will recoil at and denounce (quite rightly) as racism but Flanagan never allows his convictions to cloud his cool command of the narrative.

Flanagan's style (or styles, as they change as the narrators do) is elegant but never ostentatious and he has a meticulous eye for detail - both social and historical - that is indispensible in the historical novel. The build-up to the Rebel's ultimate routing at Ballinamuck is masterfully rendered as is the chilling retribution meted out to the Irish peasants by the British afterwards (30,000 summarily executed) which, as Seámus Deane, in the introduction, points out, made the French Revolutionary Terror seem a cake-walk in comparison. But the novel is also thick with the air of tension between the peasantry and the Protestant Irish, bearing in mind that the rebellion spiralled out of control in places, such as Vinegar Hill in Wexford, where the local Protestants were massacred in a horrific sectarian attack. Given the animosity harboured by each for one another, it is remarkable how the rebellion, and later Irish history, avoided a level of savagery that marked many other ethnic disputes throughout 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Often the remarks of the Protestant gentry and their English backers regarding the Irish carry the echo of the pronouncements of many contemporary Israelis about the Palestinian people; there is a willingness to be generous tempered by both a deep mistrust and a failure of introspection.

The rebellion of course failed, having been badly-organised from the start (though the failure of Hoche's 15,000 men to land at Bantry two years earlier was a crucial setback) and its leaders executed, leading to the abolition of the Irish Parliament and the Act of Union, and a century that was as tragic for the Irish as the previous one, though one which ended on a hopeful note, following the Land Wars and the Irish Cultural Renaissance. It is hard to guess how different things might have been had the United Irishmen succeeded in imposing their Revolution. After the fall of Bonaparte at Waterloo, the British would probably have moved back in, for the industrial jewel of Belfast, if for nothing else. Ireland may have become more economically-self-sufficient sooner though it is unlikely that the peasantry would have fared much better and the Irish language certainly would not have survived the United men's 'civilising' drive any more than it did the one that the British later implemented. The ideals of the United Irishmen were admirable though this is no guarantee that they would have informed the state of Ireland that followed; both the 1916 proclamation and the (original, unamended) Irish Constitution were admirable progressive documents that failed to have much effect on the society that followed them. But 1798 was nonetheless crucial in sowing the seeds of Republicanism in Ireland without which modern Ireland would undoubtedly not exist. That a group of men in a small, underdeveloped country in Europe at the time could be so audacious and far-sighted to follow the examples of the US and France and attempt to force change was a remarkable thing.

The streets in the towns of Mayo and Sligo - where much of the rebellion took place, bear the names these days of Wolfe Tone, Teeling - the Belfastman who was a General in the French Revolutionary Army - and Humbert, the French General who led the expedition and whose name has been hardened into English - as it would later be in Nabokov's Lolita - in towns such as Tubbercurry. Flanagan's novel is one of the greatest of all Irish novels of the 20th century - it is, to all intents and purposes an Irish novels - and deserves a new, wider audience.

If You Can Keep Your Head While All About You Are Losing the Plot...

Last week I read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, the last novel but one of the remarkably prolific American writer. The imagined tale of an isolationist Charles Lindbergh presidency, surreptitiously commanded by the Nazis in order to prevent the Americans from opposing their march to power in Europe, the novel is, like much of Roth's recent work, a meticulous and carefully-reasoned portrayal of mid-century American society, as seen through the eyes of a Roth alter ego (in this case his fictional nine-year-old self). There was much potential for hysterical hypothesis in the story, given the unanimity of contemporary opinion on Nazism and its threat to Western civilisation. Roth however restores the danger to its proper context, and also the complaisance of so many people (many of them decent folk) in the democratic world towards the barbarity of fascism. In a Newark community where most people (including many prominent Jews) take Lindbergh at his word regarding his intentions when he tempers his anti-semitism as soon as he gets into power, the heroes are Roth's parents, his excitable and belligerent father Herman and his world-weary mother Bess, who aren't fooled. The narrative is a masterly depiction of a few people's principled and prescient stand in the face of what they only see as the madness of others. This in itself is an achievement on Roth's part but what makes the novel even better is the way that he laces the tale with the doubt that perhaps it is only paranoia and angst at the Jews' historical persecution that makes the Roth family imagine that they could be at risk in the freest country on earth. The way in which their freedoms are gradually chipped away at - in a very 'reasonable' way - via the 'Office for American Absorption', a tool for dividing Jewish families by targeting their impressionable young is chilling as well as entirely believable.

Roth knows the dangers of precedent in any form of civic persecution and the ghost of Guantanamo and the reminders of the Bush administration that 'we are living in a different world since 9/11' haunt the book. Similarly, though I refrain from making any wild comparisons between the fascist Lindbergh and the recently-elected French president, there is a disturbing echo of the 'Office of American Absorption' in Sarkozy's newly-established 'Ministry of Identity and Integration', as there is of the institutions of Vichy France.

Ghosts of Paris

In an attempt to take my mind off the elections I decided to take advantage of the free admission to Paris museums usually available on the first Sunday of every month. But not all museums subscribe to this offer, including the Bibliothèque Nationale at its old site on rue Richelieu, where I went to see a retrospective of the photography of Eugène Atget, the first great photographic chronicler of Paris. The exhibition celebrates the 150th anniversary of Atget's birth and is an impressive show, encompassing some 350 prints, many of which were sold directly to the BNF by Atget himself in the years either side of the turn of the century.

Atget was a superb photographer, an unwitting forerunner of both the surrealists and much 20th-centuty urban photography, producing phenomenal work despite many technical limitations that his descendents did not face. Though he was a former art student he had no grand conception of himself as an artist, operating primarily as a shrewd upmarket commercial photographer with well-chosen clients, such as the BNF and the Musée Carnavelet - the city of Paris' museum. He worked to pre-established themes, possibly the first photographer to do so, and he had a particular penchant for le vieux Paris, which was beginning to recede in significance and visibility due to the Haussmanian overhaul of the city. Interests of his included the city's old mansions - the hôtels of the Marais, the warrens of courtyards on both banks of the Seine and the gens aux petits métiers, the pedlars and chimney sweeps that eked out a precarious existence on the city's streets. There are many tropes and interests that were to become standards (and later clichés - it is strange that in French, cliché has both that meaning and 'shot', as in a photograph) of urban photography: photographs of statuary, of empty staircases that seem to lead nowhere (later to become vital motifs in the works of Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson and Kertesz) and also of the downtrodden folk of the urban landscape.

Another thing that makes Atget's work particularly fascinating is the ghostly quality of the photography, something that endeared him to André Breton and the other surrealists, which was engendered primarily by technical exigency. The photographs are mostly sepia-tinted (he began to print in black and white towards the end of his life) and the lack of fast lenses at the time necessitated long exposure times which resulted in the spectral half-corporeality of many of the subjects, as in the example above 'Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères', dated 1900. The need to shoot in bright daylight also bestows a ghostly lustre on his work.

It might be said that Atget was an accidental artist because of this, but such is the case of many artists in nascent art forms - particularly photography and its close contemporary, the cinema - and, more importantly, photography has always been and continues to be a synthesis of accident and artifice, something that goes for fashion photography and the staged tableaux of Jeff Wall as much as for more obviously kinetic artists such as Walker Evans, Weegee and Robert Capa.

For someone that knows Paris well (and such a person is still far from really knowing Paris) Atget's work is intriguing because of the brief snatches it offers of a vaguely familiar city - a landscape is given meaning by the outcropping of the columns of a local church or the familiar ornamental stonework of a old town house. It is a veritable jigsaw puzzle, out of which the city, its history and its ghosts can be reassembled and attempted to be understood. I found a similar thing in an engaging film I saw the night before, Emmanuelle Cuau's dark comedy Très bien, merci, which plays about with the Parisian cityscape - no doubt for reasons of budget - expecting us to believe that the Métro station that Gilbert Melki's beleagured accountant gets off at to go to work (Porte des Lilas) is close to his actual workplace (beside the Bibliothèque François Mitterand - the opposite side of the city). Though Cuau's shuffling of the urban topography is duplicitous, its disorienting effect is suited to the film's lean sense of 'rational paranoia'. Another good accompaniment to both Atget and this film is Andrew Hussey's enthralling Paris - A Secret History, which I am currently reading and which is a mine of fascinating information on the depraved, dissolute and glorious history of this wonderful city.