Closing down our cinematographic extravaganza of a holiday week, this evening we watched Jeremiah Johnson. I first saw this (strangely) obscure film in 1976, four years after its release, at the Ultimate Picture Palace, and then only thanks to my contemporary, Gerald W., who raved about it (and to whom I am eternally grateful). He was quite right to insist. You have to look hard on the internet for detailed reviews of this film but it surely deserves to be better known. It is a beautiful allegory of the American dream: advance, stand up for yourself, survive, and people will respect you. Robert Redford clearly warms to his role as Johnson, and the backdrop – the savage beauty of the Rockies – is brilliantly captured. The film is also objective in terms of clashing moralities and cultures. The Crow Indians never kill gratuitously. Even as Johnson loses his adoptive family, in a mist of grief, he understands that a price had necessarily to be paid for trespass on a Crow burial ground. Redford, as Johnson, is at the forefront of a human tide that will inexorably wash ever further westwards. The indigeneous Indians, faced by a mutual enemy in the form of the mountains and the elements, understand respectfully the fact that Johnson would prefer to deal with them on their terms in their world, rather than the world that he has fled. But a cameo appearance of the US Army signifies the beginning of the end of the world in which Johnson and the Crow would prefer to struggle. The film ends with Johnson and the Crow making peace – but the audience knows that they will be over-run and will disappear. Brilliant, poignant.

Another classic this evening; Blade Runner, but Ridley Scott’s Final Cut, so without the irritating voiceover of the original version. Sadly, my fellow home audience members did not share my enthusiasm. In part, I suspect it was the violence and, more generally, the dark and smudged view of humanity and morality in a dystopian future. This is unquestionably a very dark film. I read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? last year and have wanted to revisit the film ever since. Whether Rick Deckard is a replicant or not, both the story and the film cleverly juxtapose human beings with a lack of empathy and replicants that have clearly developed compassion and fellow-feeling. What, then, is it to be human? The blade runners’ empathy test (with its echoes of the Turing test) seems to chart the decline of a decadent human civilisation, steadily losing its essential humanity. Rutger Hauer, playing the replicants’ leader, Roy Batty, is perfectly cast and, in my opinion, puts in the strongest performance in the film. Somewhere, in one of Evelyn Waugh’s writings, he explains a simple novelist’s trick; if you want to create a sad atmosphere, then let it rain. In Ridley Scott’s futuristic Los Angeles it never stops raining. The constant rain, the almost complete lack of daylight and the constant intrusion of searching spotlights do much to create a world in which we surely wouldn’t want to live but which, to our discomfort, we vaguely recognise.

This morning we went to the Wiels Museum (worth a visit in its own right) to see the retrospective exhibition of Francis Alÿs’s work, A Story of Deception. Please go and see it if you can. Born in Antwerp in 1956 and based in Mexico City since 1986, Alÿs is chiefly an ‘action artist’. His ‘actions’ are described by the catalogue as being ‘simple, sometimes quotidian gestures that reveal the unspoken logic structures of a society or revise typical ways of doing things – which he documents in various ways.’ I don’t want to give too much away, but just to give a flavour, you can see him pushing a block of ice around Mexico City until it finally melts away (‘sometimes making something leads to nothing’), or accompany him in chasing a tornado and actually running into it, or watch four hundred students with spades shifting a massive sand dune (slightly), or accompany him as, with a leaking can of green paint, he retraces the former ‘green line’ in Jerusalem. I noted down the following wonderful quotation in some of the background information: ‘The lines were sketched on a mandatory 1:20,000 scale map. Moshe Dayan drew the Israeli line with a green grease pencil, while Abdullah Al-Tal marked his front line with a red one. The grease pencils made lines 3 to 4 kilometres wide. Sketched on a map whose scale was 1:20,000, such lines in reality represented strips of land 60 to 80 metres in width. Who owned the ‘width of the line’?’ from Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone. The Hidden History of Jerusalem.

Thumbs up to Anna Maria

I gladly came back from my holidays today in order to participate in a meeting of the EESC’s Communication Group, its first meeting under its new Chairwoman, Anna Maria Darmanin (Malta, Employees’ Group). The meeting had a richly heavy agenda, but the point that took me there was the possibility for the Committee to create some sort of organised civil society data base of which it would have sole ownership and which it could offer to the other institutions as an additional source of ‘added value’ in the context of participatory democracy. Sensitive to the resource implications of such large-scale projects, I wanted clear political instructions, and I got them: ‘yes’ to the basic concept, ‘no’ to any major, resource-intensive schemes and ‘yes’ to exploratory thematic pilot projects to test the practicality and the feasibility of such a concept. Afterwards, I cleared the backlog that had rapidly accumulated on my desk and my e-mail in-tray. The EESC is a very small institution relative to giants such as the Commission and the European Parliament and I frequently get the impression that we are watching the gods at sport above our heads. Will there be an agreed budget for 2011? The gods – aka the twin arms of the budgetary authority – will decide. In the meantime, we must necessarily plan for the ‘provisional twelths’ that would ensue if the Council and the Parliament are unable to agree before the end of the year.

Whilst on war, the picture to the left shows my sprightly eighty-seven year-old father-in-law saluting his old regiment at Bastogne on 1 October this year. The occasion was the dissolution of the First (Belgian) Field Artillery Regiment, to which, as an ardent young man, he had once belonged. In fact, my father-in-law fought in the Piron Brigade, composed of Belgian volunteers, and absorbed into the Regiment after the war. The surviving members of the Brigade marched before the Regiment, and then the Regiment marched before them before its final dissolution. The soldiers my father-in-law is saluting in the picture have seen active service in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Lebanon. He saw the Normandy landings and the push east. Ever since, he has been a militant supporter of European integration. It is no coincidence.

At a recent talk I gave I was asked from where I, a North London boy, had got my interest and passion in the European integration process. After a few moments’ thought I was able to trace it back to my schooldays and several parallel developments. The first was a production by the school of Oh! What a Lovely War! We knew all the First World War trench songs, but I’ll never forget the statistics on casualties, projected like ticker tape above the stage. One battle, the Somme, cost 432,000 British soldiers their lives. In the same battle 200,000 Frenchmen and 500,000 – half a million! – Germans died. Most of these, we realised, were just a few years older than we schoolboys, playing the parts. Literally, because a year or so later on the same stage I played Mason in R.C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End. Mason provides light comic relief in an otherwise hellish dugout and now we couldn’t escape the horrible truth that we were about the same ages as the characters we were playing. At the same time, one of our English literature O level set texts was Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. We were taught by an inspirational English teacher, Ma’am Griffiths (as she liked to be known), who did not shy away from difficult themes, such as Owen’s tortured homosexuality. But it was the imagery in the poetry – an ‘ecstasy of fumbling’, ‘froth-corrupted lungs’ – that brought across the full horror of that stupidest of many stupid wars. Nobody mentioned Europe to me, but I knew there had to be a different way of doing things. I am writing this today because on this day ninety-two years ago Wilfred Owen was shot dead whilst trying to cross a canal in northern France. He was twenty-one years old. The end of the war was just seven days away – indeed, his mother received the telegram notifying her of his death on Armistice Day itself, with church bells ringing out joyously around her: ‘my friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.’

A film again in the evening, and this time a very different sort of cinema. House of the Flying Daggers is a 2004 Chinese production that received a twenty-minute standing ovation at its first viewing at Cannes. The director, Zhang Yimou, clearly uses the screen as a giant canvas on to which he paints the story (apparently according to wuxing colour theory), so it was a shame to see this on a small screen at home. Nevertheless, the use of colours and contrasts – the emerald green of a bamboo forest, the vertical striations of a silver birch wood, blood on snow – are one of the film’s strongest points. The film radiates an undefinable sense of Asiatic grace and mysticism and the complicated plot (blind people who see, double and triple agents) revolves around a simple eternal truth; love and loyalty cannot always be compatible. It is based on a Han dynasty poem: ‘In the north there is a beauty; surpassing the world, she stands alone./A glance from her will overthrow a city; another glance will overthrow a nation./One would rather not know whether it will be a city or nation overthrown./As it would be hard to see a beauty like this again.’ Described in genre terms as an ‘action romance’, House of the Flying Daggers is much more than a kung fu weepie but I suspect its full potential can only be admired on a proper screen.

I have spent more than a few hours over the holiday period in sticking some three years’ worth of photographs into albums. There have been periodic catch-ups before, but never quite so big. It all started to go wrong in 2008 because, first, I landed a very busy job; second, ownership and use of cameras in the family expanded; third, cameras started going digital, so there were no longer simple sets of negatives to be rounded up; and, fourth, a lot has been happening. Why do I do this (nobody else in the family would)? Is it a muted expression of the hoarding gene (my brothers and I have inherited scores of albums from our mother)? If not therapeutic, it is certainly meditative; after all, we tend to take photographs of happy or significant occasions – seeing the images again triggers pleasant memories or retrospective reflection. I know, also, that at least one of my children is a frequent traveller through the albums and the memories they contain. But for how long can I can keep up my secret raids on hard disks and computer files, in an effort to keep it all together? Why bother, when everything can now be filed and stored electronically? Well, the more electronically-inclined of my brothers had a ghastly experience in Prague. An insistent burglar did his house over with a pneumatic drill and took everything, including the back-up hard disk salted away in a hidden safe. Now he and his family are bereft of a whole slice of their recorded life. Does it matter? Probably only marginally. Earlier, I put the question to my Facebook crowd. The consensus seems to be that I should just leave the prints (to the extent that there are any anymore) in a shoebox and get on with life. So complete is the digital revolution that I sense I’ll shortly have no choice anyway.

This evening it was another great classic. Twelve Angry Men is very cleverly scripted so that, as Henry Fonda’s character persists with his doubts, the motives of the other jury members are gradually revealed for what they should not be: impatience to be at a ball game; desire to be part of the gang; desire to avoid standing out; intellectual arrogance; and, last and worst of all, sheer prejudice. It’s a great American message. In just one of two shots away from the room where the jury deliberates we see the Palace of Justice and, emblazoned on its pediment, the declaration ‘Administration of justice is the firmest pillar of God.’ Sadly, as I know through my correspondence with a prisoner on Death Row and with a number of anti-death sentence campaigners, administration of justice is definitely not the firmest pillar of State legal systems, particularly not in the South, where one respected academic lawyer, Stephen Bright, has strikingly described the death sentence as lynch law by other means (see also From Lynch Law to Killing State.) I write this on the eve of mid-term elections in which a President is about to get a drubbing from the electorate. Thankfully, this has nothing to do with his race. But anybody who has read the first part of his lyrical Dreams From My Father, with its graphic depictions of the racial prejudice he encountered, will understand that Obama, whilst undoubtedly a noble man, knows deep in his heart that all is not well and yet also that, irony of ironies, he of all people – precisely because of what he is – is the least well placed to do anything about it.

This morning I loaded up the car with all sorts of rejects and was about to set off for the Council’s rubbish dump when a van drew up alongside and its cheerful driver asked ‘Got any metal in there?’ There was indeed metal in there and, no I didn’t mind if he took it, so I helped load it all into his van. His wife and kids sat patiently in the front. He reminded me of the rag and bone men who used to patrol the London streets where I lived as a child, with their strange cries, sounding like marsh birds. He was Bulgarian, it transpired, though his French was excellent. I got back to the job of loading the car. A man hovered on the pavement. ‘Mind if I take the wood?’ he asked. No, I didn’t mind if he took the wood, so he disappeared and reappeared with the bottom part of a child’s pram and wheeled away the wood. He was Turkish, it transpired, and would use my cast-offs as ‘small wood’ for his kitchen stove. As I queued at the dump, a gang of men patrolled the queue, looking for metal and other valuables. In my case, they took away some electrical equipment. I felt like Hemingway’s Old Man’s fish! By the time I got to the dump, all that I had left was an old mattress and some plastic.

Postscript: As Brian’s comment shows, what’s happening is no more and no less than a response to market forces; scrap metal is worth scavenging for because its value has gone up.

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