'Tis strange

Bizarre news day: Martin McGuinness launches the Derry Gay Pride festival, presumably because his immediate superior, the Reverend Ian Paisley was unavailable to get down with the Foyleside sodomites. And then Kanye West, who has already fiddled about a bit with Swedish indie lads Peter, Björn and John, has asked them to be his backing band at the Gothenburg Way Out West festival next week. Topsy-turvy indeed.

Ingmar Bergman to Meet His Maker

Ingmar Bergman has passed away, and while I bear the man no ill will, I find the fulsome regret being expressed by some folk I know a bit silly. Bergman, great director that he was, was renowned for being a much less great man, admitting as such himself in his autobiography Laterna Magica, which is a wonderfully Proustian account of his life and career tinged with equal amounts of pride and regret. It is unlikely that Bergman would have been too disconsolate at the demise of many of the people he encountered over his long life and his familiar biliousness and misanthropy would have led him to scoff at those that think the cinema has lost a great talent. It is true that Bergman, like Ousmane Sembène, who passed away two months back, was working until close to his death - the majestic swansong Saraband was made three years ago - but one can hardly expect a man of his 89 years to go on forever.

My knowledge of Bergman's films is patchy; though I have seen over half of them, it has been over a period of ten years and some remain foggier in my memory than others - I still find it hard to distinguish Winter Light and Through a Glass, Darkly, more than ten years after having first seen them. In many of his films there was a mea culpa struggling to get out - Wild Strawberries in particular is a barely-disguised intellectual version of A Christmas Carol - while Scenes from a Marriage, Faithless (which he scripted for his ex-wife and sometime muse Liv Ullmann) and Saraband are all efforts to expiate his serial philandering and general unpleasantness. Personally my favourite of his films is Persona, where Bibi Andersson's mute actress grapples with her nurse, played by Ullmann. The references to God are less explicit than in the earlier films (this was made in 1966) and the shocks - as in The Silence, made a few years earlier, both more psychic and cerebral.

Bergman is not too well-known for his humour though there was, in spite of the man's almost inveterate misanthropy, an unusual strain of humanity (if not quite humanism) in many of his films, such as the early To Joy and Summer with Monika (which was absurdly marketed as soft-porn in the 1950s US). As I said there are a number of gaps in my acquaintance with the films, even if I have seen all the major works; it is only Fanny and Alexander, his greatest success - it won four Oscars - that I am missing. Thankfully his films are available on very cheap double-DVDs here in France. So it might be a good time to get back to them. Whatever about the difficulties of the man it has to be acknowledged that he took a greater interest in Swedish cinema and theatre than might have been expected for a man of such stature. Until his last days he would watch every new Swedish release (among many other films) shipped out to his island home on Fårö in the Baltic Sea. One of the few younger directors that merited his praise was Lukas Moodysson, whose very un-Bergmanesque Fucking Åmål was hailed by the old master as the 'young master's first masterpiece'.

News Round-up

Gay people are having a rough time of it in Eastern Europe of late, especially at Sunday's Gay Rights protest in Moscow, where a shower of Nazi thugs laid into the likes of Peter Tatchell, Fred Fairbrass, and, I imagine many, more, lesser known people. The cops stood by and intervened only to arrest those that were being attacked. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov has vowed to never allow Gay rallies in the city (despite homosexuality being legal under Russian law), calling them 'satanic'. I have always thought there was something fishy about them queers but couldn't put my finger on it. Thanks to Mayor Luzhkov for clarifying the matter for me. Incidentally, the young thug preparing to punch Tatchell in the Guardian's photograph (don't you just love all those cameras primed, ready to intervene?) has a curiously 'manly' 'tache. He couldn't possibly have been there for other motives, could he have?

Further west in Poland, a country that is labouring under the right-wing Catholic fundamentalism of the Law and Justice Party and the President-Prime Minister double act the Kaczynski twins, that government's spokesperson for children's rights has asked psychologists to determine if handbag-swinging Teletubby Twinky-Winky is gay. Ms Ewa Sowinska thus takes up the mantle of the late, unlamented Jerry Falwell, who, at least, did not deign to ask a psychologist for their opinion. Falwell knew a propagandising fag cuddly toy when he saw it. Interestingly one of the Kaczynski twins is rumoured to have exotic tastes in young men surprisingly at odds with his government's hounding of gays.

Old Europe is not to be outdone however, a Dutch reality TV show has needy contestants competing for a dying woman's kidneys. The producers claim that they have a serious sociological intent in making the show but one suspects that they are not going to donate the royalties to the Dutch kidney foundation.

In Sweden, the lodestone of European righteousness, the nation pressurised Miss Sweden Isabel Lestapier Winqvist into withdrawing from the Miss Universe competition, because of it being 'demeaning to women'. Ms Winqvist, presumably fearful of becoming a Nordic Hester Prynne, complied and even the organiser of the Swedish franchise, a swimsuit company that has done away with the swimsuit section of the national competition, stands by the decision to boycott the competition. While I will not disagree that a competition as grotesque, inane and tacky as Miss Universe degrades women and many of the women involved are objects of pity more than anything else, this official stance by Sweden strikes me as the worst form of pedantry, a grandiose smashing of a walnut with the biggest mallet that Protestant Social Democracy can buy. There are far more important issues that concern women worldwide, such as people trafficking, unequal pay and even underprovision of toilet facilities (in the third-world particularly, a hidden killer). Attacking Miss Universe looks like Sweden wants to say something to the world about itself rather than the rights and concerns of women.

Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting in Sweden

Sweden, according to a piece in today's Libération, has just lifted its ban on professional boxing, which had been in force since 1969. A 'Comeback Gala' of eleven fights marked the return of the sport in Gothenberg on Saturday night. Boxing has long been a bête noir of middle-class lefties (but rarely of working-class ones) and Sweden has had it in for it for a long time: I remember, when visiting Stockholm's Olympic Stadium, venue for the 1912 games, reading that the boxing tournament was not held that year due to its illegality in the kingdom. Which obviously means that there was an interregnum of legality between then and 1969.

Pro boxing didn't go underground in Sweden, it merely moved across the Gulf of Bothnia to the Swedish-speaking Finnish island of Åland and it attracted a big following on satellite TV, numbering among its supporters former Prime Minister Göran Persson. Now only Norway, Iceland, Cuba and North Korea remain as countries where pro-boxing is forbidden (though of course the Cubans and the Koreans have little problem with the sport per se). Sweden is not going bananas in its tolerance of the sport though, the fights on Saturday night's card were all limited to four rounds of three minutes.

Artistic Licence

The new Swedish goverment of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's Alliance for Sweden has seen two of its new cabinet appointees resign after only ten days in power. After Trade Minister Maria Borelius resigned having been caught hiring nannies on the black, new Culture Minister Cecilia Stego Chilo handed in her badge for the same misdemeanour, as well as a failure to pay her TV licence for sixteen years, which, for a Minister for Culture might raise eyebrows even among a people as legendarily uncivic as the Irish.

When Reinfeldt's government took power a couple of weeks back I was not too concerned as Sweden's conservatives these days are more like so-called socialists in most other parts of Europe and are unlikely to attempt the (relatively) disastrous social rollbacks that Carl Bildt's early-90's government effected, though Bildt is back in government as Foreign Minister. And besides, after almost ten years of rule by Göran Persson's SDP, a change is not a terrible thing for a couple of years, and neither is the far right involved, as has been the case in Norway and Denmark. Change might even be healthy.

What is amusing though is the fact that minor offences can be such causes for concern in the body politic. One part of me giggles while another part salutes this alertness to a rot in the state of Sweden, an alertness that has its root firmly in Protestant righteousness. Irish people would laugh at you if you suggested that tax evasion was a resigning issue. And so would many other peoples in Europe. No surprise then that Bertie's doctoring of the substantial payments he received from friends and donors while Minister for Finance in 1993 should see his governments rating rise. We have a lot to learn from those self-righteous Swedes.