Having read a great deal about Pan's Labyrinth on other blogs several months ago (for example Theofantastique), I had to wait impatiently for it to be released in South Africa, and wondered if it ever would be.
I finally got to see it last night, and it lived up to expectations. Even my wife enjoyed it, and she is not normally a fan of horror films, and this one, as those who have seen it will know, is a blend of fantasy, horror, and stark brutal realism.
It probably had a greater impact on me because I'm in the middle of reading George Bizos's Odyssey to freedom, a memoir of his time as a human rights lawyer in the apartheid era. Pan's Labyrinth is set in Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, where Franco's fascist forces are mopping up the remaining groups of Republican insurgents hiding out in the woods.
The villain of the film, Captain Vidal, could stand in for just about any of the police witnesses that George Bizos had crossexamined in court, when any evidence of torture of political detainees was denounced by prosecutors, and sometimes by the flagrantly biased judges, as attempts to besmirch the good name of the South African Police.
I wonder if the release of the film in South Africa wasn't timed to coincide with the release of Bizos's book. In the torture scenes in the film I kept thinking of the lonely death of Steve Biko, or the defenestration of Phakamile Mabija, a church youth minister who was being interrogated by the Security Police in Kimberley. The day we heard the news of his death, I was with a group of people who were saying Anglican Evening Prayer, and the Psalm set for the day was Psalm 94, which seemed most appropriate, especially verses 20-21:
You never consent to that corrupt tribunal
that imposes disorder as law
that takes the life of the virtuous
and condemns the innocent to death.
About 10 years ago I tried to write a children's fantasy novel set in the apartheid era, with a similar blend of fantasy and reality. It wasn't very good, and was probably too dark for a children's novel, so I abandoned it. But one thing different about Pan's Labyrinth was that the this worldly and other worldly realms appeared to have different agendas, which coincided quite coincidentally, as when the little girl's ailing mother gets better following the advice of the faun who sets her tasks for the other world. In this there are echoes of Narnia, where the young Digory Kirk is seeking an apple from Eden to heal his sick mother.
But there are also sharp contrasts with Narnia. In Narnia the faun, Tumnus, regrets and repents of his role as a Security Police informer, and ends up being detained himself, but in Pan's Labyrinth the faun turns out to be not much different from Captain Vidal, demanding unconditional obedience in the same terms and in the same tone of voice.
I go out to see films about once or twice a year, and Pan's Labyrinth was well worth seeing. Thanks to all my blogging friends who wrote reviews of it and made me want to see it. If it weren't for that I would probably have missed it.
Showing posts with label George Bizos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Bizos. Show all posts
14 July 2007
18 June 2007
George Bizos -- lawyer for social justice
On Youth Day last year, George Bizos, the human rights lawyer, was the main speaker at the Youth Day commemoration aranged by the Orthodox Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Now George Bizos has published a book about his life and struggles, and was interviewed on the radio yesterday. South African bloggers don't seem to have had much to say about him or his book, but I did find a mention on this blog, which apart from a couple of minor inaccuracies, is a very good article.
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16 June 2006
Youth day - 2006
Today is Youth Day, and I've described some of the events of the day more fully elsewhere in my LiveJournal, with more pictures.
Fr Pantelejmon Jovanovic (in picture) spoke to the Orthodox youth on the monastic life, and Advocate George Bizos, the human-rights lawyer, spoke on the meaning of the day.
If anyone is interested in the meaning of the day, there are two books I recommend. One is fiction, A dry white season by Andre Brink, which really does tell it like it was. Names and events may havbe been changed, but these were indeed the kind of things that happened. The other book is The rocky rioter teargas show by Pat Hopkins and Helen Grange, which is illustrated by photographs and documents not available at the time, including secret cabinet documents giving explicit approval to more deaths through police action.
George Bizos spoke on the damage caused by Bantu Education, but in 1976 Andries Treurnicht, the Minister of Bantu Education, and his Deputy, Ferdi Hartzenberg insisted that in black schools half the subjects in high schools should be taught through the medium of English, and half through the medium of Afrikaans. The irony of this was that 70 years earlier Afrikaners, in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, had suffered something very similar under British rule, when Dutch was forbidden as a medium of instruction, and all teaching had to be in English. They learnt the lesson that the language of the conqueror in the mouth of the conquered is the language of slaves.
But Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educationist, points out in his book Pedagogy of the oppressed that the oppressed internalises the image of the oppressor as the image of what it means to be truly human. So true humanity becomes linked with the power to oppress others. And this clearly happened in the case of Andries Treurnicht and Ferdi Hartzenberg. They were the avatars of Alfred Lord Milner, who had almost single-handedly started the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1899, and oppressed the Afrikaners after the war.
The disease of Bantu Education was harder to eradicate, however. When it was introduced in 1954, it was part of the ideology of Christian National Education, which, as its Christian liberal opponents pointed out, was neither Christian, nor national, nor education. In 1942, when South Africa was at war with Nazi Germany, B.J. Vorster, who was prime minister in 1976, was reported to have said
One thing that interested me was that when George Bizos spoke of the ravages of Bantu Education, and Fr Pantelejmon spoke of growing up as a young person in a communist country, they spoke of very similar experiences, though they themselves did not perhaps realise how similar they were. The generation of young people Fr Pantelejmon spoke to had indeed not experienced much of the repression that Fr Pantelejmon spoke of, but the generation of Soweto 1976 certainly had.
To the youth of today all this is ancient history, and history is one of the boring school subjects that is being downplayed in modern education, with its emphasis on science and technology, which our youth must learn if we are to compete in the dog-eat-dog competition of neoliberal economics. Humanities, which do not have quantifiable economic value, are downplayed. We must gain riches instead of soul, and the all-pervasive ideology of free-marketism could well be responsible for the complaint of many of the Class of '76, aired in radio talk shows and the like, that the youth of today are shallow and materialistic.
Where does this come from? Well, one possibility is that the current crop of ANC leaders, including some of the generation of 1976, spent a good part of their exile in Thatcher's Britain, and this may go quite a long way towards explaining the ANC's Thatcherist policies today.
But I think the image of the youth of today projected by the radio talk shows and the like is not a complete one. The people they interview are mostly "Model Cs", who often speak with Woozer (ie WUESA - White Urban English-Speaking South African) accents. "Model C" was the last attempt of the dying National Party regime, in 1992, to perpetuate Christian National Education in white schools, or at least white Afrikaans schools, by privatising them. "Model Cs" are black pupils who have attended such schools (still referred to as "Model C" schools, in spite of their having been in existence for less than three years).
The Model Cs are the ones most advertising is aimed at, and the ones most likely to make it in the broadcast media. But the young people at the Orthodox youth gathering do not fit the Model C stereotype. Their concerns may be different from those of the Class of '76, but they give me hope for the future.
The Front Line: Youth Day, 3 Decades of Struggle.
the moon's favors: Poem for Youth Day
the imperfect poet: More irrelevant conversation
Morphological Confetti: Youth Day: 30th Anniversary
Reluctant Nomad: The day that changed South Africa for ever
Fr Pantelejmon Jovanovic (in picture) spoke to the Orthodox youth on the monastic life, and Advocate George Bizos, the human-rights lawyer, spoke on the meaning of the day.If anyone is interested in the meaning of the day, there are two books I recommend. One is fiction, A dry white season by Andre Brink, which really does tell it like it was. Names and events may havbe been changed, but these were indeed the kind of things that happened. The other book is The rocky rioter teargas show by Pat Hopkins and Helen Grange, which is illustrated by photographs and documents not available at the time, including secret cabinet documents giving explicit approval to more deaths through police action.
George Bizos spoke on the damage caused by Bantu Education, but in 1976 Andries Treurnicht, the Minister of Bantu Education, and his Deputy, Ferdi Hartzenberg insisted that in black schools half the subjects in high schools should be taught through the medium of English, and half through the medium of Afrikaans. The irony of this was that 70 years earlier Afrikaners, in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, had suffered something very similar under British rule, when Dutch was forbidden as a medium of instruction, and all teaching had to be in English. They learnt the lesson that the language of the conqueror in the mouth of the conquered is the language of slaves.
But Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educationist, points out in his book Pedagogy of the oppressed that the oppressed internalises the image of the oppressor as the image of what it means to be truly human. So true humanity becomes linked with the power to oppress others. And this clearly happened in the case of Andries Treurnicht and Ferdi Hartzenberg. They were the avatars of Alfred Lord Milner, who had almost single-handedly started the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1899, and oppressed the Afrikaners after the war.
The disease of Bantu Education was harder to eradicate, however. When it was introduced in 1954, it was part of the ideology of Christian National Education, which, as its Christian liberal opponents pointed out, was neither Christian, nor national, nor education. In 1942, when South Africa was at war with Nazi Germany, B.J. Vorster, who was prime minister in 1976, was reported to have said
We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism. You may call the anti-democratic system dictatorship if you like. In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany National Socialism, and in South Africa Christian Nationalism."
One thing that interested me was that when George Bizos spoke of the ravages of Bantu Education, and Fr Pantelejmon spoke of growing up as a young person in a communist country, they spoke of very similar experiences, though they themselves did not perhaps realise how similar they were. The generation of young people Fr Pantelejmon spoke to had indeed not experienced much of the repression that Fr Pantelejmon spoke of, but the generation of Soweto 1976 certainly had.
To the youth of today all this is ancient history, and history is one of the boring school subjects that is being downplayed in modern education, with its emphasis on science and technology, which our youth must learn if we are to compete in the dog-eat-dog competition of neoliberal economics. Humanities, which do not have quantifiable economic value, are downplayed. We must gain riches instead of soul, and the all-pervasive ideology of free-marketism could well be responsible for the complaint of many of the Class of '76, aired in radio talk shows and the like, that the youth of today are shallow and materialistic.
Where does this come from? Well, one possibility is that the current crop of ANC leaders, including some of the generation of 1976, spent a good part of their exile in Thatcher's Britain, and this may go quite a long way towards explaining the ANC's Thatcherist policies today.
But I think the image of the youth of today projected by the radio talk shows and the like is not a complete one. The people they interview are mostly "Model Cs", who often speak with Woozer (ie WUESA - White Urban English-Speaking South African) accents. "Model C" was the last attempt of the dying National Party regime, in 1992, to perpetuate Christian National Education in white schools, or at least white Afrikaans schools, by privatising them. "Model Cs" are black pupils who have attended such schools (still referred to as "Model C" schools, in spite of their having been in existence for less than three years).
The Model Cs are the ones most advertising is aimed at, and the ones most likely to make it in the broadcast media. But the young people at the Orthodox youth gathering do not fit the Model C stereotype. Their concerns may be different from those of the Class of '76, but they give me hope for the future.
Other views, and other ways people spent Youth Day
The Front Line: Youth Day, 3 Decades of Struggle.
the moon's favors: Poem for Youth Day
the imperfect poet: More irrelevant conversation
Morphological Confetti: Youth Day: 30th Anniversary
Reluctant Nomad: The day that changed South Africa for ever
Technorati tags: liberation struggle, Youth Day
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