It was the autumn of the glory of  France, before it all came crashing down with the weight and deadliness of a guillotine; “the great equalizer”. Cardinal Fleury, Louis’s prime minister , had resisted the foolish War of the Austrian Succession as long as he could, but died in his ninetieth year, ending an era of relative tranquility….

It was deduced that each girl cost the public treasury a million Livres. “If only two a week came (little enough), this mounts up in ten years to a thousand and the result is thus ten thousand million Livres. And even then the great number of children born in the Deer Park is not figured, a matter of no little account.” It is accordingly viewed by many historians that the initial cost and upkeep of the Deer Park was the main cause of the financial ruin of Louis XV. Many rumors flitted about concerning the organized orgies in the Deer Park, which in any case have not been unduly exaggerated.

This painting by Boucher apparently portrays Louise O'Murphy, a poor irish girl who rose to membership in the royal French harem.

Was France on the brink of ruin? No matter-apres nous le deluge! The king must have a place to play, and have it he did, two steps away from the stuffy magnificence of Versailles.

“The Deer Park, that gorge of innocence and virtue in which were engulfed so many victims who when they returned to society brought with them depravity, debauchery and all the vices they naturally acquired from the infamous officials of such a place.” ( Mouffle d’Angerville’s Private Life of Louis XV by Norman Mailer as preface to his own Deer Park )

"What little story Mr. Mailer has to tell is a story of degradation. It would seem to suffer from the fact that--as in his previous work--he tends to think too badly of the human race, and so finally stultifies us with misanthropy. His most powerful scenes are invariably those of degradation, and when, on the last page of "The Deer Park," he speaks of "us noble humans," one feels that this is an afterthought, a lip-service to the idea of dignity. On the other hand, after two rather monotonously sober books, Mailer seems to have developed a certain mordant sense of humor. Some of the Teppis scenes are very funny in a horrible way; and a good deal of deft sport is made of the usually rather wearisome Hollywood dialect."

The prototype of Mailer’s Deer Park; that amalgam, he says, of all the Hollywood’s that ever existed, if only in the heated imagination, still exists at Versailles, at No.4, rue Saint Médéric, a discreet stone’s throw from the palace.A story and a wing have been added to the hotel, known as Louis XV’s Parc aux Cerfs ( literally, Stag Park ). The interior has been remodeled, but the garden may be the same. The house is shabbily distinguished, yet somehow disappointing: it is too small for the legends that cluster around it, stocking the grounds with two legged does who wait for a Pan-like, cloven hoofed Louis XV to slip through the rear gate and bring to grass one of them after another.

"Upon the death of her husband, the Marquis de la Tournelle, Marie-Anne attracted the attention of Louis XV and became his courtesan, like her sisters Louise-Julie and Pauline-Félicité before her. With the aide of the plotting marshal de Richelieu, she supplanted her older sister, Madame de Mailly, as titular mistress in 1742. Directed by Richelieu, himself dominated by Madame de Tencin, Marie-Anne tried to arouse the king, dragging him off to the armies, and negotiated the alliance with Frederick II of Prussia, in 1744. Her political role was great, despite that it was exerted from behind the scenes. Her triumph after the passing disgrace provoked by the king's illness at Metz did not last long, for she died unexpectedly on 8 December 1744. A few months later, the king already had a new mistress - Madame de Pompadour."

The very notion of a deer park evokes a nostalgic memory of Eden and sin, of lost innocence in a green shade. In its heyday as Louis XV’s private bordello, the place was a political powder keg. Paris mobs, inflamed by rumors that their daughters were being spirited there to appease the royal lust, rose in riots that foreshadowed the revolutionary upheaval to come. The story of the Deer Park under the “ancien regime” is mailer-made. “eroticism with social significance,” leading to, and ending in, the regime’s fall.

Louis XV was in his early forties when the first mention of the Parc aux Cerfs was made in the early 1750′s. “Beautiful as Eros” as a boy, he had become a handsome, easy going, Adonis-like King. He had been married at fifteen to Marie Leczinska, the penniless, pleasant, but very plain daughter of the sometime Polish king. Although she was his senior by seven years, Louis had entered wedlock with a Bourbon enthusiasm, and by the age of twenty-seven had given her ten children. But the pleasures of domesticity palled.

"But it gets worse. The future Madame du Barry, four-year-old Jeanne Bécu, went off to Paris to live with mom, mom’s new boyfriend Monsieur Billard-Dumonceaux, the paymaster of the city of Paris and inspector of the army commissariats, and his courtesan-mistress, the Italian Francesca or Madame Frédérique. Life in a courtesan’s household left its mark on the little child and not even nine years in a convent culled her love of luxury. A few lovers here and there, then a stint at Monsieur Labille’s fashion house, followed by falling in with the pimp Jean du Barry, le roué (”the rake”). Not quite a streetwalker, yet hardly off the mark."

It was sad, old Maréchal de Villars remarked to him one day, to see a king of France, so young and lacking nothing, so bored. Why did not His Majesty add such diversions as music or the theatre to his near madness for hunting? Such things, replied Louis, were not to his taste, and he turned soon afterward, to what was.

To the Marquis d’Argenson the cause of Louis’s ennui was clear: “The Queen behaved like a prude.” The courtier’s “Journal” quotes her complaining, “Always in bed, always pregnant, always having babies.” Marie swathed herself in bedclothes and feigned ill-health; worn out by childbirth and miscarriages, and running to fat, she made her corner of Versailles into a kind of convent to which she increasingly withdrew. There, with her entourage, she ate, played at painting and cards, sewed for the poor, chatted, and ate, dinners of twenty-nine dishes, not counting the fruit.

"What’s so interesting about the way Moffat creates Reinette—the future Madame de Pompodour, Official Mistress to King Louis XV—is that we see the seeds of greatness early on and get to watch them grow. From the time she is seven years old, she is the kind of little girl who doesn’t show fear as a strange man enters her room from her fireplace. She is the kind of girl who will look a monster in the eye and ask it, of her own volition, why it is pursuing her. She is the kind of girl who smiles during a duel between an android and a man wielding a sonic screwdriver."

Louis had not yet arranged “his” corner of the palace into a bachelor’s retreat of “petits apartements” , complete with suites for resident and transient girlfriends. It was at the little hunting ldge of La Muette, on the edge of paris’s Bois de Boulogne, that he lifted his glass to the winner of the royal sweepstakes in which all women ran. “To the unknown woman,” he said-to his first mistress. She did not remain unknown for long. She was Louise de Nelse,Comtesse de Mailly, one of the queen’s own “dames de palais” . Louise was exactly the same age as Louis, and of an ugliness that put him instantly at ease. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Adonis king suffered from shyness.

When Louis first made Mme de Mailly his mistress, he exercised discretion; the queen, informed , accepted the development. For years Louise was smuggled into the palace late in the evening, then smuggled out. But in 1738 she was installed in an apartment above Louis’s new “petits appartements” , which he reached by what is still known as the Dog’s Staircase and became “maitresse en residence” ….

” The search for pleasure and the sexual debauchery of the monarchy were especially stigmatized by( Marquis ) de Sade. Here, too, he had his prototypes in reality. “When a prince of the blood walks the way of vice he is accompanied by the entire society.” The example given by the French rulers must have had the most corrupt effects on the out and out materialistically minded society of the ancien régime. The time of the Regency created the name and type of roué , which became a characteristic phenomenon of the whole century. The roué par excellence was King Louis XV, famous for the number of his mistresses and for his Deer Park.

"Famous courtesan and outstanding personality, a trend setter for the age she lived in, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson was the most notorious mistress of King Louis XV of France."

…. In time, Louise was replaced by her sister Félicité. According to her sister, Hortense, Félicité ” had the face of a grenadier, the neck of a crane and the smell of a monkey”. Louis seems to have loved her within the limits of his small capacity, but not for long; pregnant, she took to her bed and died. Louise then introduced him to her third sister. Fat, clever and homely, Adelaide amused briefly, but the fourth sister, Hortense resisted him and became a friend of the queen’s. Then there was the fifth sister. Inevitably, Louis’s carrying ons with the sisters Nesle inspired the wits of Paris, and in 1741 a verse began to make the rounds:

“The first is almost forgotten, the second almost dust; / The third is ready to ride, the fourth waiting/To make room for the fifth./ Is it infidelity of constancy/To be faithful to an entire family? …

“His life, as Moreau says, was a “steadfast prostitution.” Hence, his mistresses, in spite of their great number and frequent exchange, could not keep him satisfied. In his famous Deer Park he had built the original of private bordellos, which played an important rôle in the works of Marquis de Sade. Imagine! A king maintaining a whole bordello for his private use! The Deer Park was built in 1750 in the hermitage at Versailles in the quarter called Parc aux Cerfs, by the Marquise de Pompadour who, in order to retain the reins of government, created this new sort of enjoyment for the king.”

Louis XV. Hunted for pleasure: stags, boars, wolves, and inmates of the deer park.

… Cleverer and more ambitious than her four older sisters, Marie Anne de Nesle arranged the conditions of her surrender through the Duc de Richelieu. This meant acknowledgement, a bigger apartment and the exile of Louise from Versailles. Louise withdrew into piety, though she did not take the veil. Several years before she died, she went as usual to her parish church. It was crowded, and the sexton obligingly pushed open a path for her. “That”, a man was heard saying, ” is a lot of fuss for a whore!” Louise turned to him. “Sir” , she said, “since you know my faults so well, pray God he will forgive me.” …

"Unfortunately, "The Deer Park" arrives preceded by strong gusts of publicity, bearing with them tidings of the novel's alleged offensiveness. It is not for a reviewer to give more than a personal opinion on whether or not a book is immoral or salacious; suffice to say that this reviewer found "The Deer park" considerably more wholesome than a good many popular movies. Mailer has undertaken to write about a group of procurers, lushes, casual adulterers, hypocrites, people not so much in love with evil as in search of it. One may say, if one likes, that this is an unworthy subject, but not that Mailer has taken it up casually or cynically. He has taken it up with honest anger and with a certain sympathy; his contempt, one senses, is reserved not for his characters but for whomever reads merely to smack his lips."

The administrator of the bordello was a certain Bertrand; the purveyor of the young girls was called Lebel. In the beginning there were only two or three inmates in the house. After the death of Pompadour it became very crowded (très peuplée). According to another version (Mouffle D’Angerville), “the Marquise de Pompadour, since she was superintendent of his (the king’s) pleasures, had incessantly to levy new and fresh beauties, in order to stock the seraglio, wherein she was sovereign; therefrom developed the so called Deer Park (Parc aux Cerfs), that grave of innocence and virtue, swallower of masses of victims, who, when returned to human society, brought with them depravity, debauchery and all those vices, which they must have been infested with by the infamous keepers of that pleasure resort.”

"An amazing portrait, allegedly of Madame la Duchesse de Chateauroux by Nattier. Madame de Chateauroux was one of the most rapacious and notorious of the mistresses of Louis XV before he turned his back on the grasping but lovely ladies of the aristocracy and made the middle class Madame de Pompadour his mistress instead. Amusingly, the beautiful and seductive Madame de Chateauroux was the youngest of five daughters of the Marquis de Nesle and Mailly, only one of whom did not become a mistress of the young King. Her eldest sister, Louise Julie, the Comtesse de Mailly was first into the King’s bed in 1732 before being succeeded by the second sister, Pauline Félicité, the Marquise de Vintimille who became royal mistress in 1740."

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Chevaliere/Chevalier D'eon

Diplomat, writer, spy, and Freemason, a member of the elite Dragoons and one of the best swordsmen France, whose true gender was a source of speculation and provoked public bets in the late 18th century. Generally it was believed that d’Eon was born female, but he had started to dress as a man in his childhood, and changed back from “a bad boy into a good girl” when his secret was revealed decades later. After his death it turned out that he was a man who had dressed as a woman. D’Eon is often called the patron saint of transvestites.

On May 21, 1810 , an urgent call went out for a physician from 26 New Milman street in London. Medemoiselle Genevieve d’Eon, the aged French  heroine was dying. There was a time when the news would have produced a sensation, for her bizarre secret had once stirred all England and the Continent to debates and unseemly jests. Now, more than thirty years had elapsed since the formal court announcement that she was no man, but a woman, had ended her turbulent, troubled career as soldier, diplomat, troublemaker and spy. At eighty-one, France’s “second Joan of Arc” had outlived both notoriety and fame.

But there was to be one final sensation after all. When her body was being prepared for burial, it was discovered that Charlotte Génevieve Louisa Augusta Andrée Timothée Marie d’Eon de Beaumont, Chevaliere of the Royal and Militaery Order of Saint Louis, was no woman, but a man. So occurred one of history’s more startled double takes, inspired by a fiercely proud little man, now all but forgotten, who once held the uneasy peace of Europe in his hand. He helped reconcile Russia and France during that spirited period of diplomatic wife swapping known as the Reversal of Alliances; he was probably instrumental in prolonging the Seven Years War ald altering the terms of its settlement; he was involved, long before his sex became a matter of International speculation, in an extraordinary diplomatic scandal that threatened to expose Louis XV’s plot to invade England; a plot Louis had kept secret even from his own foreign minister.

"Aside from his status as a historical curio, and a failed attempt by Havelock Ellis to borrow his name to describe transvestism—Eonism, the Chevalier seems less celebrated than he might be. So it’s a pleasure to hear that theatre director Robert Lepage has created a new stage production, Eonnagatta, based on the Chevalier’s colourful life: For a long time now, the actor and experimental theatre director Robert Lepage has been fascinated by the life of the Chevalier d’Eon, an 18th-century French soldier who had a flamboyant career as a diplomat and secret agent for Louis XV, and spent much of his adult life dressed as a woman. Officially, the Chevalier’s skirts were worn as a professional disguise: his exceptionally fine features allowed him to pass easily for a woman, and thus move around undetected as a spy. But the Chevalier didn’t just do it for the job. He was a genuine cross-dresser, an 18th-century transvestite."

Many details of his story are hidden in contradictions, but he general outline can be established. He had qualities the French court admired. So handsome that he drove the ladies to distraction, but he was somehow not distracted by them in return. A slight effeminacy in his manner was offset by the reputation he quickly established as one of the best swordsmen  in all France. He had a good, if not great, family name, a law degree, a familiarity with the classics, a ready wit and a flaming sense of honor. He became known as a brilliant conversationalist and essayist, which helped him eventually win the attention of Prince de Conti, who recommended him to the king.

Louis XV was just beginning to involve himself in an elaborate tangle known as “Le Secret de Roi” through which he intended to increase his influence in French foreign affairs whether his strong willed mistress, Madame de Pompadour, liked it or not. Conti would direct “Le Secret” ; its agents would spy on Louis’s own diplomats and undertake projects that might on occasion run counter to his government’s official policy. For work requiring such delicacy and dedication, De Conti told the king, D’Eon would be the ideal choice….

Louis XV’s plan to expel all homosexuals collapsed because his nephew and successor , Phillipe, Duke of Orleans, lived a transvestite and homosexual life. The most notorious transvestite of his time, Chevalier D’eon de Beaumont, was a good friend of the playwright Beaumarchais (1732-99 ). In addition, the court composer Jean-Baptiste Lilly (1632-87 ) who collaborated with Moliere on several court entertainments, was a member of the Sacred Fraternity of Glorious Pederasts… And rthe playwright Denis Diderot explored the details of forced celibacy and female sexual variance in his novel “La Religieuse” ( 1760 ). ” ( Paul Kuritz )

…E’on was swiftly initiated into “Le Secret” and whisked off to Russia on his first assignment. The mission was a success; Empress Elisabeth abandoned a British agreement and in 1756, allied herself with France and Austria in the Seven Years War. By now D’eon was a favorite in Elizabeth’s court and at Louis’s. After three  successful years in the French embassy in St. Petersburg, was granted a life pension, was promoted to captain of the dragoons, and went on active duty receiving a citation for courage.

Mademoiselle Alba dans le role de Chevalier D'Eon

Unfortunately, France’s fortunes in the war had gone from bad to worse; it was time to quit fighting and talk peace, which offered a new opportunity of advancement, which resulted in his appointment as first secretary to the ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais. This went well; Nivernais plied the British undersecretary with wine and women, and D’Eon made off with his portfolio, copied the secret British bargaining position on Cuba, and rushed it off to Versailles.

D’eon was approaching the pinnacle of his dazzling rise. The king promised him money, and most intoxicating of all, gave him the Cross of the Order of St. Louis. D’eon was now a chevalier. He was dispatched to London and was to serve publicly as France’s representative to the English court; in addition to working privately to further the latest secret plan hatched by Louis XV.

For no sooner had the Peace of Paris been signed than the French king, without informing either his ministers or mistress, began to plot the conquest of England to regain the glory and empire so newly lost. D’eon’s secret orders were to undertake a series of espionage assignments to help pave the way for the invasion and to keep an eye on the new ambassador. He would report to the Comte de Broglie who had succeeded De Comti as director of “Le Secret” .

Half man, half woman, all fashionplate: Chevalier/Chevaliere d'Eon in all his/her glory.

D’eon was a natural in the brilliant social swirl of London, a polished an extravagant host and frequent guest of George III and Queen Charlotte. But back home the enemeies of Louis’s espionage networ, which by now was not as secret as the king believed, began plotting D’Eon’s downfall. The foreign office accused him of spending too freely.

“Since he came from the Burgundy region of France, wine was a passion and a means of influence.  He lavishly entertained with bottles he’d imported to England at the French government’s expense.  One invoice indicates that d’Éon received 2,800 bottles in one shipment. Then he had the audacity to ask his superiors to advance him money as his personal finances were also a mess. D’Éon was quickly becoming more of a liability than an asset.”

The complaints worked, and under the pressure of the pushy,  Pompadour, Louis XV abandoned his agent to the enemy. The Comte de Guerchy, an old enemy of D’Eons, was sent to London as ambassador and ordered him to return to Paris and await instructions without going to court. But D’eon refused to turn over correspondence, would not present his letter of recall to King George, and would not leave the country.

What followed was diplomatic fantasy. Guerchy had plans to kidnap his troublesome predecessor and return him to France. D’eon fortified his apartment, mined the ground floor and staircase,assembled bodyguards and collected an arsenal of pistols and guns. London watched in amazement. The situation grew worse; D’eon was formally disowned by the king and branded a traitor. George III proclaimed him an outlaw. Meanwhile, D’eon continued, or so he claimed ever afterward, to receive secret letters from Louis urging him to guard his papers with his life. In return, D’eon threatened to “embrace the cause of the King of England” and reveal all if his persecution continued.

D’eon accused Geurchy of trying to poison him which led the ambassador to sue for libel and D’eon countered with formal charges to a grand jury, which indicted the ambassador on charges of conspiracy against his countryman’s life. It was a situation without precedent. Such intrigues usually die out within months; this one rocked along from crisis to crisis for more than ten years. Guerchy went home to die, perhaps of sheer irritation and his successor tried in vain to wrest the secret papers from D’eon. Louis claimed D’eon was mad, but prudently sent him funds from time to time to assure his silence.

The stalemate might have lasted forever had Louis not died and put an end to the whole rickety structure of “Le Secret”. Now began Act III, where D’eon a branded traitor, was about to become of all things, a celebrated heroine. Rumors that he was actually a woman were not new. A Russian exile, Princess Dashkoff told friends in London that D’eon had appeared as a woman in Empress Elizabeth’s court, a story which soon became the scandal of he day.

London gamblers bet fantastic sums  on the chevalier’s sex and D’eon claimed that wagerers had tried to kidnap him.Britain’s finest minds did not know what to make of him. In the words of Horace Walpole, “she” was a “noisy and vulgar individual whose hands and arms… are fitter to carry a chair than a fan”. James Boswell concluded that “she seemed to me to be a man in woman’s clothes”.Louis XVI’s representatives found this quite interesting in terms of settling the old fued. Certainly the “reparations” D’eon sought in return for surrendering his moldering secret papers would be unnecessary:  He could not be restored to his former office, for example, if he were a woman.

" In order to save the French government embarrassment, d’Éon had to justify his female to male transvestism. His back story explained that his mother was a noble and his father had squandered her dowry, sending the family into debt. Her family would give them a large inheritance if she had a son. D’Éon was born a girl but was immediately dressed and treated as a boy to fulfill this requirement. In the creation of this mythical background, d’Éon intimated that the cross-dressing position in Empress Elizabeth’s court was fabricated. An agreement was reached between d’Éon and King Louis XVI allowing d’Éon to retain the military honors he’d achieved as a man. The King insisted, however, that d’Éon dress and act like a woman. He acquiesced and in 1779 she became the Chevalière d’Éon and returned to her homeland, spending the next six years living with her mom."

The sharpest tongued Frenchman of his day, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, was sent to London to negotiate an agreement. A comic opera interlude followed in which D’eon appeared to confess that the rumors were true and Beaumarchais succumbed, or seemed to succumb to the D’eon charms. Whatever the facts, the famous playwright composed a convincing script for his sovereign. When the sex of the wonderful creature was considered, he wrote Louis, the heart was moved with sweet compassion.

Acrimoniously, an agreement was finally reached. Having been officially declared a female, D’eon headed for Versailles. The condition being D’eon had to give up all male attire except his uniform, which was to be kept purely as a souvenir, but she attempted to wear nothing but the uniform, much to the irritation of the king. At this point a delighted marie Antoinette announced she would outfit D’eon with her own funds. Once the wardrobe was ready, the gallant lady, the heroine was presented a court before a tremendous crowd. The excitement, the adulation, the constant attention, could only have been soothing: she was appreciated again at last.

"Beaumarchais was as thoroughly taken in as any dupe in his own comedies. In d'Éon he 'saw a blushing spinster, a kind of Jeanne d'Arc of the eighteenth century, pining for the weapons and uniform of the martial sex, but yielding her secret, and forsaking her arms, in the interest of her King. On the other side the blushless captain of dragoons listened, with downcast eyes, to the sentimental compliments of Beaumarchais, and suffered himself, without a smile, to be compared to the Maid of Orleans,' says the Duc de Broglie. 'Our manners are obviously softened,' wrote Voltaire. 'D'Éon is a Pucelle d'Orléans who has not been burned.' To de Broglie, d'Éon described himself as 'the most unfortunate of unfortunate females!' D'Éon returned to France, where he found himself but a nine days' wonder. It was observed that this pucelle too obviously shaved; that in the matter of muscular development she was a little Hercules; that she ran upstairs taking four steps at a stride; that her hair, like that of Jeanne d'Arc, was coupé en rond, of a military shortness; and that she wore the shoes of men, with low heels, while she spoke like a grenadier! At first d'Éon had all the social advertisement which was now his one desire, but he became a nuisance, and, by his quarrels with Beaumarchais, a scandal."

During the next eight years, the second Joan of Arc became a living legend; portraits were bought of her and songs written in her praise. Visiting princes sought her out. Now the chevaliere began to embroider on the story herself. Yes, she had appeared in Elisabeth’s court as a woman, but, she confessed, because she was a woman!. She had only donned male attire at the request of her king and how faithfully she had served him. The nation rang with her praises.

The years passed, the cheers subsided and the reputation began to fade. She returned to England, in the hope of creatin another sensation. And create it she did. The chevaliere was lionized by British society  and won praise by taking up fencing again. The Prince of Wales attended a match at which she is said to have defearted Saint-George, one of the great fencers of Europe. She stayed in England permanently now; the revolution brought an end to the pension she had received since the Beaumarché settlement. She remained in seclusion now, living out her years in near poverty on a small pension conferred by Queen Charlotte.

"The poor old boy was badly hurt at a fencing match in his sixty-eighth year, and henceforth lived retired from arms in the house of a Mrs. Cole, an object of charity. He might have risen to the highest places if discretion had been among his gifts, and his career proves the quantula sapientia of the French Government before the Revolution. In no other time or country could 'the King's Secret' have run a course far more incredible than even the story of the Chevalier d'Éon. "

Still, the question remains as to why he spent thirty-three years of his life as a woman? One theory suggested a scandal involving Queen Charlotte, which could be suppressed only if D’eon spent the rest of his life in petticoats. In the end the man who had failed so often in his search for fame gave the language a word to remember him by. Havelock Ellis seized upon the chevalier as ” the protagonist of transvestism” to describe a psychic anomaly. Ellis seemed to have the final say on a character who may survive longer in psychiatry than in history.

” ( Gary ) Kates argues that d’Eon’s gender transformation was in part a response to a failed political career as a spy and ambassador. But the book also draws on d’Eon’s never-published autobiographical writings and examines his extensive collection of radical feminist books to reveal the extraordinary theory of sexual differentiation that inspired his adventure into womanhood. In the end, d’Eon had come to believe that a person who lived as a man was doomed to a life of sin; the only hope for moral redemption was to live one’s life as much as possible as a woman. D’Eon wrote: “God created man and woman, the one for doing good, the other for doing bad. So long as a man is a man, the earth is his; so long as a woman is a woman, virtue is hers.”

Comment from a contemporary:

FROM EDMUND BURKE’S Annual Register (1781): “It must indeed be acknowledged that she is the most extraordinary person of the age. We have several times seen woman metamorphosed into men, and doing their duty in the war; but we have seen no one who has united so many military, political, and literary talents.”

“But for all the farce, many commentators - including Mary Wollstonecraft - considered d’Eon to be one of the pioneers of the feminist movement, articulating views about the female perspective from a unique position. The Brotherton archive reveals how he built up a library of 6,000 volumes and 500 rare manuscripts including a collection of radical feminist books which explored the 18th-century Querelle des Femmes (quarrel about women). Gary Kates suggests that these inspired his views about sexual differentiation and his adventure into womanhood. “God created man and woman, the one for doing good, the other for doing bad,” d’Eon wrote. “So long as a man is a man, the earth is his; so long as a woman is a woman, virtue is hers.”

…Whatever the private motivations behind his extraordinary life, d’Eon’s 49 years as a man and 34 as a woman do not seem to have provided the one experience that someone who has enjoyed life on both sides of the gender divide might be expected to encounter. Documentary evidence suggests that Monsieur d’Eon may well have died a virgin. ( Ian Herbert )

She ends up being put in a hospital, where she lies in bed, mute – not speaking. Her silence reminded me of Holly Hunter’s in Piano, where the not speaking is an act of will and ego, a giant ego withholding from the world. A kindly doctor says to Elizabet, “I think being in the hospital is actually harming you. There is nothing wrong with you mentally. I think you and Nurse Alma should go stay at my summer house – she can take care of you and you can rest.” And so begins this descent into hell. A two-person hell.”

"Alma talks throughout Persona but is never answered, so that her own insecurity and instability grow. Technically the part calls for domination of timing, speech, and movement that exposes the chasms in the soul. And it was in showing that breakdown, in reliving Alma’s experience of the orgy on the beach years before, in deliberately leaving glass on the gravel, and in realizing with awe and panic that she is only another character for the supposedly sick actress, that Andersson herself seemed one of the most tormented women in cinema.”

In Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” ( 1966 ) there is extensive use of minimal composition and extremely tight close-ups to illustrate the theme of psychological deconstruction; a prevalent use of single camera shots throughout the duration of a scene. The lack of camera movement forces us to study the characters’ faces. Persona, after all, as the title suggests, is not about who the person actually is, but the different identities, or facades, that the person projects. Figuratively, Elisabeth Vogler ( Liv Ullmann ), having played the role of celebrity, wife, and mother, has decided to abandon her persona and walk off the stage. A variation on the idea of duality provides an essential ingredient to the plot development. The themes of experience, children, and romantic relationships take on very different meanings for the two women. Among other central themes, there is a demonstration among two women about how cruel and destructive the human will can be.

"Ullmann – who says nothing throughout the film – is riveting. After a time, you become used to her silence, and the film becomes a meditation on her face. It’s a very movie-ish movie. Obviously. Lots of talk about acting and art and playing make-beliieve, and what is a role … and in the end, Elizabet Volger remains a mystery. She is opaque. Her eyes shine, Bergman gets so close to her at times that you can see the light peach-fuzz on her cheeks … you can see her messy eyebrows – her freckles. We are not inside her – the way eventually we are inside Alma. We are outside. She is objectified. She is an object – to be studied, which I suppose makes some sense, seeing as the character is an actress. Her face becomes an artifact, like the crumbly face of the statue outside the house. It is something to be contemplated, but not understood."

“Persona” is perhaps Ingmar Bergman’s most challenging and experimental film, in part because it delves into the psychology of women, where essentially is a “do-go” zone for a man to tread. Except he is a witness on the perimeter. A male permitted to rest his own weary psyche in a DMZ .He kind of voyeuristically “gazes” at Alma and Elisabet duke it out, as is above the fray, a non-participating participant in a threesome.    Elisabeth is an accomplished stage actress who, in the middle of performing Elektra, ceases to speak. Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson), the young nurse assigned to care for her, learns that there is nothing physically or even psychologically wrong with Elisabeth – she has simply, consciously decided not to speak. Alma (the name, not accidentally, is the Spanish word for soul) describes her initial impressions of Elisabeth as gentle and childlike, but with strict eyes. She takes Elisabeth to the attending physician’s remote summer house to facilitate her recuperation.

""Persona", for example, not only has psychological breakdown and seemingly a personality-transference between an actress and her nurse, but also plays with a wealth of vampire imagery. Or, perhaps, we are dealing in split personality, which we must puzzle out and which is another horror staple. Bergman happily has his characters and dramas interacting with seemingly supernatural elements that may or may not be genuine. I have always loved this because you never know when he is going to spring these moments upon you, and when you are not watching as a horror audience, your guard is often down and the effect is often genuinely surprising and chilling."

At first, the two seem ideally suited: a talkative, candid, and inexperienced nurse, and a sophisticated, enigmatic, and silent patient. They take long walks, bask in the sun, and read together. It is obvious that their isolation has cultivated a sense of intimacy between them, albeit one-sided. But it is a curious attachment. At first, Alma attempts to fill the void of Elisabeth’s silence. She talks incessantly about her life, unburdening her soul to the seemingly attentive patient. But soon, it is obvious that Elisabeth’s interest is more than mere politeness or voyeuristic curiosity. She is, in fact, “willing” her identity – the facade she created as Elisabeth Vogler – to the mentally weaker Alma. Elisabeth’s struggle for absolute transference – the proverbial battle for the soul – is a means of further divorcing herself from the pain of her own existence. Persona is a provocative, highly cerebral, and artistically complex depiction of human frailty, cruelty, and identity.

" But it is the nurse who uses the actress’s silence for experiments in unburdening herself in a quintessential Bergman confession of an adulterous dalliance. When the nurse feels her confidence has been condescended and betrayed, a confusion of the women’s characters threatens meltdown. What is real and what is fantastic is not clear: does the actress’s husband really turn up to the beach house and mistake the nurse for his wife? Some kind of emotional vampirism is occurring here, and the actress pours out of fog to seduce her victim. There is also some sucking of blood, completely Nosferatu."

One of the masterstrokes in the script is that Bergman has made Elisabet an actress, not because she must “lie” every night, pretending to be someone else, but because the truth in that pretense- the truth of art- is greater than any truth she can achieve in her own life. Late one night, Elisabet watches television, a filmed report of the Vietnam war.  In her nightgown she shrinks into a corner of the hospital room, now lit only by ghostly television light, and watches a Buddhist monk burn himself to death, a man whose protest against imperfection is so strong that it takes the form of permanent silence. Elisabet watches in horror, perhaps with a touch of shame but possibly with some touch of reinforcement for her present “role”

It is an isolated place, “the human interior” in which these two physically similar women, dressed in similar country clothes, partake in a drama of virtually isolated forces, opposed yet melding. One woman of strength and intellect has had a vision of nullity. The other woman, of strength and intelligence, is there to bring Elisabet back, in effect, to her point of view, to a plane of function. Yet the reverse happens. without philosophical process, Alma is drawn more and more to the cavern  in which Elisabet is now hiding.

Daniel Shaw: "Elisabeth's stereotypically masculine rationality and self-control are coupled with a tendency that is common in narcissists: "They are plainly seeking themselves as a love object." Such individuals are practically impervious to outside influences. In a lengthy epilogue to the original Bergman script, Elisabeth's psychologist is represented as saying: "In December, Elisabeth Vogler went back to her home and her theater...the whole time I was sure she would come back. Her silence was a role like all her others. After a while she didn't need it any longer, and she laid it aside."

What attracts Alma consciously is Elisabet as artist; the nurse is pleased to be with this gifted and renown woman. What attracts Alma unconsciously  is the sense that Elisabet has found some sort of explanation for the bewilderments of existence, that the actress’s so-called abnormality may be a “reasonable” reaction to the confusions and pollutions of life. Alma’s hunger for clarity is shapest in the sequence where the two women draw closest, a sequence where Alma recounts the story of a sex orgy:

“The significance of the orgy at the beach is that Alma was able to let herself go only because of the presence of the aggressive Katarina, her female companion. It was Katarina who initiated sex with the older of the two boys, who showed up at the beach to watch the women sunbathe naked. Alma admits that she felt strangely attracted to Katarina’s big breasts and thighs. She went so far as to interrupt the initial coupling of Katarina and the older boy, insisting the boy enter her as well (as if he could serve as a conduit between the two women). Alma orgasmed immediately, and was aroused yet again when Katarina subsequently seduced the younger boy as well. The intense sensuality of her experience on the beach was sufficient to carry over to her intercourse with Karl-Henrik that same evening, which was better than it had ever been before or since. Her pregnancy, and the resultant guilt caused by an abortion of convenience, no doubt contributed to her inability to experience satisfaction since that day….

Buck Theorem :"It is open to readings of criticism of psychotherapy, and it also acts nicely as a tale of the unreal affinity and emotional demands audiences make of artists: the nurse (Bibi Andersson) may just as well be telling her secrets to a poster of Liv Ullman. But for all this stark, pretty imagery and genre bending, Bergman knows that the real horrors can be existential states of despair and fear, that non-communication, disloyalty and superciliousness can force wide open cracks in vulnerable people. Fascinating, frustrating and compelling, very few can force such ideas to work and transcend. Bergman had a vast output and range, and even now he never fails to surprise and, frequently, to chill."

…It is in this very bruised emotional state that Alma finds herself when she meets Elisabeth, who is everything Alma is not. Proud and self-sufficient, a great beauty widely acclaimed as an actress, Elisabeth has an indomitable will. Alma’s obsession exhibits the same love-hate ambivalence that often characterises the breaking (even unconsciously) of the taboos that have repressed our constitutional bisexuality.” ( Daniel C. Shaw )

Eventually, Alma gets more and more desperate  as she realizes that soon she must leave this place; as she sees that she is getting further and further  away from acknowledgement by this woman in whom she has confided so much. ; as she hates herself for still wanting that acknowledgement ; as she feels snared and infuriated by Elisabet’s unshakable silence, which is now colored by pride and resentment. That silence seems to have vanquished everything in Alma: her competence as a nurse, her attempt to draw close as a friend, even her unconscious attempts to hover on the edge of Elisabet’s philosophical view.

"Most of the discussions which I've seen about Persona seem to start off with the concept that the film is somehow about transference and is crammed with Freudian imagery, especially in the opening, closing and midway sections. Now, I want to keep those interesting, legitimate ideas in the bank account, so to speak, and spend my initial post discussing that I think there is an even more overriding concept found in the film. Most of the mysteries which the film seems to conceal (more than it reveals) involve communication between people. Now, it's true it could be communication between the two central characters in the film, who are set up to be very similar yet utterly different (or perhaps even two halves of the same person)."

The entirely rational disaffection of Elisabet sucks in and almost swamps the extra-rational, vitalist Alma, who pulls herself free to go on living on the other side of this experience, profoundly altered but not by untruth. Effectively, these are Bergman’s explorations on the possibilities for modern tragedy. It is modern, because it is unhinged from past conventions; the tragedy lies in the realization of the insuperable distance between truth and possibility. Not death or blindness or suicide is the outcome but “existence” with greater perception for both women.

Elisabet knows, as the doctor indicated, that she will go on living her various roles in the tragedy of “life” , rather than completing an architecturally modeled tragedy in one sequence  of her life. Alma’s tragedy is that, though primed by experience to be vulnerable to Elisabet’s vision, she might not have reached it by herself  and must now discover whether she can bear it. Her ealy misgivings about taking this case  may have been a premonition of her vulnerability. Now her premonition is realized: she is not an intellectual “role player” ; she now has a new persona to live with.

In an essay on “Persona”, Robert Boyers wrote: ” the tragic hero is one who loses confidence in reality as he has always known it, and articulated it.” The life that Alma will make for herself, he says, “will be tragic, because to be conscious, and to go on living, is to suffer as only our heroes can.”

Daniel Shaw:"The obsession that the woman had for the actress, then, was a regression to the pre-Oedipal phase of her development. Her low self-esteem dictated that she must attach herself to a powerful personality. The actively masculine character of the actress, as evidenced by the promiscuous sex life she so vigorously pursued, was an additional bonus. The girl's inversion thus received its final reinforcement when she found in her "lady" an object which promised to satisfy not only her homosexual trends, but also that part of her heterosexual libido which was still attached to her brother. Her choice of love-object-as it is for all of us, according to Freud-was dictated by the history of her psychosexual development."

This condemnation due to consciousness, does seem a bit severe, even provocative; but fits with Bergman’s eschewing of the traditional tragedy  seen as a conscious comprehension of the dimensions of imagination and concept, trumping the dimensions of act and fact. As Bergman’s father was a Lutheran minister, it does seem ironic that his point of departure is a God-hungry probably godless universe. And his assumption that self awareness is a contemporary phenomenon, the literal awareness of self as an entity to be watched; the compulsion, almost injunction to observe one’s own life as a performance, may be both hubris and a  strong dose of narcissism on his part. The view that authenticity is a quest only in the sense that one is sentenced to observe oneself seems equally short sighted. What he calls modern truths are simply ancient neuroses transposed into a modern context.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi

“The critical points come quite close together in the film. Firstly where Ullmann seems to speak for the first time, then denies it and then when Andersson says “I think I could turn myself into you, if I made an effort.” Until then the thought had been that Ullmann was studying Andersson, but then we suddenly become aware that the reverse is equally possible. However, the real clincher is when Ullmann’s blind husband returns home and Andersson pretends to be Ullmann and indeed has sex with him. Surely a blind man would have enhanced hearing having lost one of his senses, so why didn’t he recognise the different voice? Could it be possible that Andersson is actually the wife who has taken Ullmann home? As speech is so symbolic here, one recalls the line from Sophocles’ play where Electra cries out “tell me of anything worse than this I suffer now and I will say no more.” Is it at this point she is as good as her word? I suppose we’ll never know and that’s half the film’s magic.” ( Alan Fish )

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“As Kelly Oliver writes, alluding to the enigmatic opening sequence with its images of sacrifice, vampirism, crucifixion and death, “in their exchange, Alma is figured as the sacrificial lamb of the opening visual poem, while Elisabeth…is figured as the vampire.” However, the potentially devastating results of this psychological vampirism are insufficiently appreciated by most critics. Even Oliver claims that, at the end of the film, “they each go back to their respective lives to take up their duties, their personae, as they did before.”  For Alma, at any rate, that is not likely to be as easy as it sounds.” ( Daniel Shaw )

The word “persona” has several meanings: among them, mask; person; and a character in a play.”Persona” is the consummate title for Ingmar Bergman’s film. Made in 1965, it was the twenty-seventh film he directed. Born in 1918, near Stockholm, the son of a Lutheran minister, he began in the theatre, but film, of course, is what made Bergman’s international reputation. By the time he came to “Persona” he was known as one of the cinema’s prime explorers of psyche and spirit; strongly influenced by August Strindberg through such films as “Winter Light”  and “The Silence”.

Bergman’s specific impulse toward “Persona” he said, came through featuring a then new Norwegian actress, Liv Ullman. Some have called the film difficult and abstruse which is not mistaken; its materials are dark and its difficulties are the source of its fruitfulness. Also, in addition to engaging profound subjects it is, through its very being as an artwork, a profound statement on modern life.

"...Nevertheless I think that was Bergman's purpose to challenge the viewer to ask himself/herself questions about personal identity , plus to what extent an artist could go to portray/express something.I can't say I really like it ,,as I was confused , but I would say it's one of the best films I've seen and probably my favourite Bergman film."

The picture begins with a nurse in a hospital, Sister Alma, ( Bibi Anderson ) assigned by a doctor to the case of Elisabet Vogler ( Liv Ullmann ) Elisabet is an actress about Alma’s age, successful, who has become mute. She is physically well, she is intelligent; but from the psychic imperative she has decided not to speak, not even to her husband and young son.

Though Alma has seen the actress on stage and film and idolizes her, she has inexplicable misgivings about taking the case after she meets Elisabet. However, the doctor persuades her to continue and then has a talk with Elisabet. While the actress keeps absolutely silent as usual, the physician shows sharp perception of her patients condition. The doctor claims that Elisabet is in a state of revulsion with the world and herself, and is convinced that every word she might speak would only add to the sum of the world’s lies.What can she do? “Suicide?” reflects the doctor. “No, too   vulgar”. But at least Elisabet can decide to keep silent. Elisabet’s quality of attention indicates that the doctor has not erred in making a fairly accurate diagnostic.

"What makes Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) begin to unravel is the silence. Hearing her own voice and having nothing come back to her. At first, when she talks to Elizabet, she is uninhibited, unashamed, the chatter goes on without stopping for about half an hour. You wonder, watching this, how it can be sustained, you wonder what is driving Alma to divulge so much – what is it in the silence of the other character that propels her so? It is the silence, in the end, that breaks Alma down."

In what follows, … the impact on Alma will most certainly be disastrous, perhaps to the point of causing her to commit suicide. Freudian diagnoses of the behaviour of both women, based on parallels to actual case histories recorded in his Collected Works, will serve to substantiate this contention. According to the concept of femininity that emerges from those volumes, women are more likely to take out their aggressions passively, in psychological rather than physical violence. While Nurse Alma acts out her aggression in physical ways, by leaving a piece of glass out for Elisabeth to step on, and by threatening to throw boiling water in her face, Elisabeth’s assault is far subtler and (potentially) far more devastating. ( Daniel Shaw )

…The doctor has a cottage by the sea. She says there is no point in keeping Eliabet in the hospital so she is sending the patient and the nurse to her cottage until, as she puts it, the actress is ready to move on to other roles. Most of the film takes place in this small isolated house on the rocky Swedish coast; and all the rest of the action, except for one episode with another person, is between these two women, only one of whom speaks.

Precisely because the other woman only and always listens, Alma soon progresses into details of her life at its most intimate and recessed. The cottage becomes a kind of confessional. Alma feels drawn almost entreatingly to Elisabet, her patient, and stimulated by being here alone with this famous artist, who listens to her; she tells Elisabet about a long wretched love affair she had with a married man, about the fiancé she now has, and more.

The one day Alma drives to town to mail some letters, including one from Elisabet to the doctor. Curiously, Elisabet left this letter unsealed, and Alma can’t resist reading it. In it Elisabet has written patronizingly of Alma, saying that she like the nurse who has taken to telling her secrets, and that she finds it amusing to study her.

…Freud proposed a primary and normal narcissism, which, in turn, led him to postulate a difference between ego libido, which is essentially narcissistic, and object libido, which is directed at the external world. The normal individual transfers much of their initial ego libido to object libido, thereby passing beyond the limits of primary narcissism. The factors alluded to in Persona that contribute to this “damming up” in Elizabeth include her great beauty, her choice of profession and her oversensitivity to the horrors of the objective world ….

Such individuals find themselves incapable of loving. Their chief aim and source of satisfaction in relationships consists instead in their being loved. Their “self-regard” cannot permit them to be humble, or to sacrifice the part of their narcissism that love requires. Reacting to demands for love from others, paraphrenics withdraw their libido from its natural objects (husband, lover, child). They do not wish to undergo the feeling of dependence that inevitably lowers self-regard. ( Shaw )

The shock is severe for Alma who, though not naive, is straightforward. Her attitude to Elisabet changes readically. No longer a nurse and an aspiring friend, she becomes a competitor, an avenger, desperate to vindicate herself in a particular way; by being recognized as a person. Eventually, this leads to a physical fight between the two women, during which Alma, in a fury, almost pitches a pot of boiling water at Elisabet, her patient, and provokes the one unequivocal utterance the actress makes in the film, a cry of “Don’t!”

Later, the tearful Alma follows the outraged Elisabet down to the beach, explaining how fond she had become of the actress and how badly the letter had hurt her, saying that she knows they must leave the place soon and that she hopes they can part as friends. But Elisabet keeps walking, as stony as the stony beach.

Now Alma, failed as a nurse, offended as a person, scorned as a supplicant, starts to crack. She begins to have fantasies that border on hallucination, including one about Elisabet’s hisband whom she has never seen. In an effort to reclaim herself, Alma takes off her informal country wear and puts on her nurse’s uniform. This does not help. She has only ceased to be her earlier self, she has slipped even closer toward Elisabet, as she imagines her.

“The behaviour of Elisabeth Vogler exhibits precisely this degree of narcissism. She withdraws from the world after performing in Electra, and shows little concern for her husband and son. Indeed, she fails to respond to her husband’s letter, and tears up her son’s photograph near the beginning of the film. Her treatment of Nurse Alma reflects the same callousness to the feelings of others. As a letter to her doctor reveals, Elisabeth sees Alma as an interesting “case study,” bemused by the recognition that Alma is “a little in love” with her.

Her megalomaniacal attitude is demonstrated in her willingness to use Alma as a vehicle for her own recovery: “as you see, I am grabbing all I can get, and as long as she doesn’t notice it won’t matter…” But Alma does notice, and confronts Elisabeth with her need to hold a conversation. In denying her this human courtesy, Elisabeth shows her inability to respond to Alma (or anyone else) in a caring fashion. While Alma shared her confidences in the hope of securing (at least) a friendship with Elisabeth, the latter only observes her in a detached fashion, enjoying her nurse’s guilty torments.”

She confronts the actress and tells her; twice, once with the camera on the other woman, once with it on herself; why she thinks Elisabet had a child and then rejected the the boy: That the actress had thought of motherhood as a role but the reality had frightened her. The account ends with Alma gibbering.

These are the last words she speaks in the film, except for some dream utterances. We see he two women packing in silence, closing the house. We see a very quiet Alma leaving. A voice on the soundtrack tells us that Elisabet returned to the theatre “in December” and continued her career, of which we get a glimpse of her acting again. Then we see he quiet Alma getting the bus to take her away from the coast. There iis a quick reprise of two images from the very beginning, and the film ends.

Why would Bergman want to tell this story?

The performances are A+. Andersson , carrying almost all the dialogue, never fluctuates from a complete grip on the truth of the moment, and the means of conveying it truly. Ullmann, nevertheless creates creates a complex human being in herself and by the use of things that are said to her.

It is revealing in this context to examine Alma’s analysis of Elisabeth’s behaviour, offered twice near the end of the film. Alma contends that Elisabeth had a child in response to the suggestion by some that she wasn’t “motherly” enough. She conceives only to develop this aspect of her personality, and then bitterly regrets her decision. Though the child loves her, she cannot accept the self-sacrifice that raising it requires. Shoving the child off on a nurse and some relatives, she returns to the theatre, which alone can assuage her incessant craving for adulation.Elizabeth’s impenetrable self-regard, her great beauty and success, and the strength of will that she embodies all prove irresistible to Alma, whose own neuroses dovetail tragically with her patient’s.

Caravaggio

The beginning of the film sees a pastiche of images , disjointed falshes, rolling thorugh a projector: old slapstick, a sheep being dissected, a spike being driven through a hand. Then we are in the morgue, with bodies under sheets. A phone rings. A dead old woman’s eyes blink open. A dead boy sits up, puts on glasses and starts to read; he reaches toward the camera and, in a reverse shot, we see that he is reaching toward a woman’s immense face behind glass. It becomes another woman’s face, Elisabet and Alma. The faces blur together. The credits appear.

The very start emphasizes that what we are going to see is a film: reality is not going to be recreatred, it is going to be abstracted and represented. Bergman seems to be giving us a quick , jagged tour of Elisabet’s mind; one of the few sequences in which the film is subjectively hers; usually it is either Alma’s or objective. It can even be argued that the film-projector and film strip opening are Elisabet’s , since, as the doctor notes, she sees life as a show, a succession of roles.

"The narcissist invests himself in his own reflection and in projections of himself, which he consistently misrecognizes as Other. Other people are merely surfaces onto which the narcissist projects his idealized images. He relates to the images, not the people themselves. The narcissist continually idealizes or demonizes people around him, to the extent that they serve the purpose of suitable surfaces on which he can see his own reflection. Narcissistic love continually effaces its supposed object. In fact, the most perfect object for narcissistic love is the absent object (e.g. the person who has died or the unattainable lover) as the projections of self-desire fill the vacuum that the absent object leaves and can masquerade as the object without really being challenged. Narcissistic love is self-obsessed and seeks pleasure apart from responsibility. It seeks the gratification of the self apart from the giving of the self. Narcissistic love collapses the painful distance between love and its object,..."

Elisabeth’s stereotypically masculine rationality and self-control are coupled with a tendency that is common in narcissists: “They are plainly seeking themselves as a love object.” Such individuals are practically impervious to outside influences. In a lengthy epilogue to the original Bergman script, Elisabeth’s psychologist is represented as saying: “In December, Elisabeth Vogler went back to her home and her theater…the whole time I was sure she would come back. Her silence was a role like all her others. After a while she didn’t need it any longer, and she laid it aside.” Having nourished herself by feeding off of Alma’s pure spirit, Elisabeth returns refreshed to that most narcissistic of professions, acting.

The film begins with the insinuation that Alma is abstracted from the world, a distilled presence, and that what we are seeing is only a “seeming” realism. When the doctor says that Elisabet stopped dead in the middle of a stage performance of “Electra” , we see a flash of this, but there is a camera filming the performance, surely a theatrical oddity. Again, Bergman seems to be reminding us that everything we see here as reality is itself observed by at least one other reality. Thus his very method keeps asking the question: What is truth?

“Alma is threatened by her first meeting with Elisabeth, wondering whether she is up to confronting such a strong-willed person. She nervously reaffirms her conventional goals during the restless night that follows. Trying to initiate a friendship (and perhaps more) between them, Alma soon shares intimacies that she had never before revealed to anyone. When rebuffed, and reduced to a mere case study, her obsession escalates to the point where possessing Elisabeth is not enough: Alma wants to be Elisabeth, and failing that, to hurt her terribly in retaliation.

A crucial moment in the film, is early, when Alma puts some music on for her. It is powerful in its simplicity and power. The camera holds on Elisabet’s face turned to the radio; she listens, her eyes unblinking. The light dims; it is twilight, yet this is a theatrical fading. Bergman is leading us subtly over the edge of realism. In the dusk Elisabet stares intently, held by the music, “feeding” on it. After a long, motionlress moment, she turns her head as if in pain.

This scene is no facile utilization of great music. Bach is not mere soundtrack accompaniment; he is in this scene, the music is part of the drama. It provides the best statement that Bergman could find of the perfection that is out of Elisabet’s reach, so unattainable that she has decided to be silent rather than settle for less. This music, we may infer, is particularly pertinent because of what we know about her. One of the masterstrokes in the script is that Bergman has made Elisabet an actress, not because she must “lie” every night, pretending to be someone else, but because the truth in that pretense, the truth of art, is greater than any truth she can achieve in her own life.

“The significance of the orgy at the beach is that Alma was able to let herself go only because of the presence of the aggressive Katarina, her female companion. It was Katarina who initiated sex with the older of the two boys, who showed up at the beach to watch the women sunbathe naked. Alma admits that she felt strangely attracted to Katarina’s big breasts and thighs. She went so far as to interrupt the initial coupling of Katarina and the older boy, insisting the boy enter her as well (as if he could serve as a conduit between the two women). Alma orgasmed immediately, and was aroused yet again when Katarina subsequently seduced the younger boy as well. The intense sensuality of her experience on the beach was sufficient to carry over to her intercourse with Karl-Henrik that same evening, which was better than it had ever been before or since. Her pregnancy, and the resultant guilt caused by an abortion of convenience, no doubt contributed to her inability to experience satisfaction since that day.

…It is in this very bruised emotional state that Alma finds herself when she meets Elisabeth, who is everything Alma is not. Proud and self-sufficient, a great beauty widely acclaimed as an actress, Elisabeth has an indomitable will. Alma’s obsession exhibits the same love-hate ambivalence that often characterises the breaking (even unconsciously) of the taboos that have repressed our constitutional bisexuality. Freud contends that bisexual desires are less thoroughly repressed in women than in men, because women (having already been “castrated,” so to speak) avoid the castration anxiety that drives those desires so deeply into a boy’s unconscious. … ( Shaw )

… So Elisabet is constantly abraded by the difference between the truth of concept and the circumscriptions of self and action as woman and wife and mother. Remember, too, that she stopped cold for the first time while playing Electra, the Argive princess whose fierce mission is to cleanse away stain and impurity at whatever cost to herself. This crystalline moment of bach is a statement in art to an artist, of a perfection that never existed except in imagination; it is also a reminder of a time when such imagination was possible: a time now gone.

"Yes, that whole question of starting and stopping and then starting something else again—the Darwinian as opposed to the Lamarckiansometimes seems hard to reconcile with the idea of a cumulative progress. Because it almost implies that each artist starts all over again and has to have his or her ideas put through the trial-and-error process."

…This is not an expressionist theory—as you see, it is a theory, again, of trialand-error. I think that the development of Western music, for instance, shows that somehow, gradually and step-by-step, a system has been developed which is appealing to a very, very large number of people and minds—and not only culture-bound, because Japan, for example, has taken to Western music like anything. There’s something objective in the effects of great music, and not only great music. ( Ernst Gombrich )

"PL: And those things that do survive are the ones that are accepted, or the ones that become the dominant art forms. EHG: Entirely. You were mentioning the Beatles: there must have been any number of pop groups at that time who tried to be original and this and that, and they are forgotten; but the Beatles, perhaps because they had a very good manager, perhaps because they struck a chord, hit it off. That is a kind of Darwinian survival affair. PL: Yes, they were the most musically "fit." But now, you see, that type of statement disturbs some people in art, because they would say that whereas in science there is a need and benefit in eliminating incorrect ideas, isn't this a bit of a cold way to look at art—to say that certain things are eliminated or falsified?"

Edward Zerin: You have asserted that you respect religion for two reasons:(1) You know nothing about it, and (2.) some people may need it and, therefore, it might be useful to them.

Karl Popper: I do think that all men, including myself, are religious. We do all believe in something more and–it is difficult to find the right words-than ourselves. While I do not want to set up a new kind of faith, what we really believe in is what we call a Third World, something which is beyond us and with which we do interact, in the literal sense of interaction, and through which we can transcend ourselves. It is a kind of give and take, but not on the animal expressive level, of learning from works that have been created. The arts are an example. Music is the art that means the most to me. I can lose myself in my music which for me is an objective experience through which I try to improve myself.

"Jacob is clearly a Jesus-like figure. He travels around providing comfort and guidance to the pre-crash Flight 815 survivors. He is, according to Richard, the one who will save us all. Jacob is a subscriber to the messianic/Hegelian worldview detested by Karl Popper, which suggests that mankind is on an upward journey toward perfection, and that all conflict and strife is a requisite part of that progression. Sooner or later, Jacob says, the perfect society will be created. Jacob also has only one rule: he cannot interfere with the free choices of others. He mentions this rule to Hurley; he mentions this to Ben Linus. This is the loophole Nemesis will eventually exploit – because Jacob cannot interfere with the free choices of others, he must submit to Ben Linus’ free decision to kill him, even though Ben has been manipulated by Nemesis in the body of Locke. Nemesis is a subscriber to the Hobbesian theory of the universe – it’s a constant war of all against all. Life is nasty, brutish and short. Man is inherently corrupt and evil. "

Since Bertrand Russell, there has probably been no philosopher writing in English who could match Karl Popper ( 1902-1994 ) in the range, or in the quality of his influence. Yet Popper, was not only, or even primarily, a political philosopher. What is perhaps the outstanding work in art criticism in the modern era, Ernst Gombrich’s “Art and Illusion” , contains in its preface the sentence: “I should be proud if Professor Popper’s influence were to be felt everywhere in this book”.

Politics, science, art. In fact few broad areas of human thought remain unillumined by Popper’s work. The mere fact that one man could span such a range explodes a lot of myths about our so-called age of specialization and reveals something about the underlying unity of culture.

"Plato was, of course, really wrong about all of this, and Popper does an excellent job of tearing down the edifice Plato built. It’s brilliant. The part that’s revolutionary, though, is what Popper offers as an alternative to Plato’s closed society - the open society, where advances are made on a piecemeal basis, by individuals or groups trying new ways to solve old problems. It doesn’t seem so revolutionary now, fifty years after Popper wrote about it, but it still is..."

In the 1920′s he was part of the avant-garde in the Vienna Circle, whose revolutionary innovation was logical positivism. And it was, in a sense, against the views of the Vienna Circle that Popper’s first published book was written in 1934. The logical positivists regarded themselves as bringing scientific method to bear on philosophical problems. Popper argued, and in the end his arguments carried the day, that their conception of scientific method was fundamentally in error.

The attack was against induction, whose first formulations about the logic of scientific discovery were first articulated by Francis Bacon. The inductive method evolved into the hallmark of science, secure in its expansion consisting of the continual addition of new certainties to the corpus of those that already existed. Some embarrassing questions about induction were raised in the eighteenth century by David Hume, who pointed out that no number of observation statements could logically entail a general statement. For example, though all observed swans may have been white, it still could not follow that all swans were white.

http://www.knowledgejump.com/knowledge/popper.html

Consequently, there arose the famous problem of induction, the skeleton in the famous cupboard of philosophy. Scientific laws appeared to be incapable of rational demonstration. They all assume the regularity of nature and that the future will be like the past. In effect science works, but we are at a loss to show why it works. Popper’s seminal achievement was his solution to the problem of induction.

Popper pointed to a logical asymmetry between verification and falsification.Although universal statements cannot be proved, they can be disproved. So, although any search for conclusive verification is irrational in that it is a search for something that is not to be found, attempted refutation is perfectly rational. Scientific statements can be tested to any degree we like, by systematic attempts not to prove them right but to prove them wrong. This would mean that we never actually “know” a scientific statement to be true. Popper showed that the history of science is a history of superseded theories, theories that do not arise out of our observations and experiments but precede them and are tested by them. The formulation of a fruitful theory is thus seen as a creative human act that requires great gifts, not least of which is boldness and imagination.

- Mauro Chiappa - Karl Popper

From the very beginning Popper realized that his views about the natural sciences had profound implications for the social sciences. Theories that claimed to be scientific in his time, psychoanalysis and Marxism , made no allowance for their own fallibility. Whatever happened, they were able to provide an explanation. Indeed, it was this ability to explain everything that so excited their adherents, and gave them a sense of revelation as if having discovered the key to life. Popper’s views, coalesced into a devastating onslaught on the scientific claims of Marxism that he was later to incorporate in “The Open Society and its Enemies”. But his first full scale demolition job was carried out on logistical positivism.

"But for me, this rehabilitation of the savage mind seemed to miss Popper’s point. He was not talking about different mental types but about different social types: different kinds of society. He did not doubt that tribal people could act rationally, or that contemporary Western thinking was not to some extent still magical and taboo ridden. But a radical break had occurred in the West in the 6th century BC in Athens, and after that a different kind of society from the tribal became possible."

The central concern of the logistical positivists was with meaning. In their desire to clear away all the unnecessary verbiage from intellectual activity, they sought to distinguish those statements that really do mean something from those that do not. This meant meaningful statements were of two kinds; the purely formal in mathematics or logic and the false which are ultimately self-contradictions. From this developed the famous verification principle , which held that a statement only contains information about the world if it is somehow or other susceptible to verification. Such statements may be false as well as true, of course, but in either case they have a meaning. Statements that no conceivable observation could veify have no meaning: they are mere noises in the mouth: exhaust. This meant the elimination of he whole of metaphysics.

Popper argued that science had its historical origins in metaphysical theories; in religious, magical, mythical and superstitious views of the world; so metaphysical theories could demonstrably be of the highest  value and importance. And once that was admitted it was hard to see how they could be held to be meaningless. His most powerful argument was that the verifiability criterion eliminated not only metaphysics but the whole of natural science, since scientific laws were themselves unverifiable.

"It is easy to criticize Popper’s picture by demonstrating the rationality of tribal people, but I think we must view his “closed” and “open” societies as Weberian ideal types. Depending on their degree of contact and their stage of social evolution, “tribal” societies might have degrees of openness. The great civilizations of India and China, for example (which Popper does not discuss), while being absolute theocratic despotisms, did have some open features. Confucius could travel around China peddling his ideas of good government to the tribal despots, and while he was not very successful, he was not persecuted."

His deepest argument, the bedrock underlying several of the others, was that the conception of scientific method that the logical positivists regarded themselves as bringing to philosophy was wrong; indeed, it was the one he had overthrown. This idea was so radical that his opponents failed to grasp it. They did not see that Popper, having debunked the inductive method, was proposing another to put in its place, namely falsifiability.

Instead, because of their obsession with meaning, they took him to be putting falsifiability forward as the criterion of “meaning” to replace their own verification principal. And because they, contrary to Popper, thought that empirical statements not of a scientific character were meaningless, they dismissed attempts to put the matter straight with the assertion that the two things came to much the same in the end. it was years before the full implications of what he had done sank in.

"EHG: Yes, yes—intention isn't everything, is it? I mean, Edgar Allan Poe invented the whodunit, the detective story. I don't think he dreamt of the incredible snowballing of one little story. He couldn't have. PL: No. So these people—and their unintentional creations—are almost the genes, or the source of mutations, if you want to stretch the analogy. EHG: Almost, yes. I agree."

He left for New Zealand during the rise of Naziism as he realized that the Left in Austria would be quite incapable of stopping Hitler. He became seriously disillusioned with the realities of left-wing politics; the flabbiness and cowardice of the social democrats no less than the self-deluding Machiavellianism of the Communists. He saw the Nazi takeover resulting in a European war in which his beloved Austria would be on the wrong side.

Not long after his arrival in New Zealand the news reached him that Hitler had annexed Austria. He decided that very day to write “The Open Society and Its Enemies” . He spent the entire war in New Zealand , a place he once described as the last stop before the moon. He called “Open” his war work, a fact that explains the book’s biting emotional drive and unremitting sense of urgency. In two volumes, it is the most massive and powerful statement in the English language  of the case for political democracy.

Gomrich:" Our reality is always in motion because we are in motion. And the question of what is actually involved is even a little more complex, because we look with two eyes. However, from a certain distance there is no such problem because we don't see 3-D in things that are far away. And the photograph has shown that, well, you can record very faithfully what is seen from a particular point of view. That is to say, what is occluded and what is seen when I stand ten yards from the window and look out into Central Park—this, tree is in front of this place, and so on and so forth. You must keep your eyes still, and you must measure, and you must do all these tricks which are taught, in order to achieve this likeness of a particular view."

“The Open Society” traces the history, and tries to analyze the appeal, of totalitarianism; in doing so, it singles out the greatest geniuses of “right” and “left” totalitarian theor, Plato and Marx respectively, and subjects their political philosophies to extended criticism of a sustained an passionate brilliance.Popper asserted that when Karl Marx imported what he thought of as scientific method into socialist theory, he made what was essentially the same mistake as the logical positivists when they imported scientific method into their philosophizing. In effect, Popper laid the groundwork for his disciple George Soros’s attack on the theory of the efficiency of financial markets by attacking the basic assumption that the market is efficient, meaning that all information, collectively, is priced into asset values.

The Fugs. "EHG: Darwinian view PL: Yes, unintentional creation and then selection EHG: and the ecological niche of the image, you see. That's what we do. PL: And you would draw an equation between the ecological niche of the image and the needs of the society that the image is created in. EHG: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Of course, usually it isn't just one need, there are many needs; but there may be, as I have tried to say, a dominant need. For instance, in the Middle Ages, it's surely religious art that is the dominant need; and in our society it is "Art" with a capital "A," isn't it? To create something which has prestige value and expression value and so on, something entirely different."

“What Popper saw clearly  was “the strain of civilization” that afflicted the open society. The open society was difficult to achieve. It was not “natural” to us; we had to work devilish hard to make it succeed. Popper agreed with Freud that, as the latter would have put it, the burden of the super-ego was too great. Popper would have said the burden of individual moral responsibility. Too many of us too much of the time were only too happy to have some absolutist doctrine, some sacred text, or some charismatic leader take the burden of responsibility from us: to return us to the familial comfort of closed, tribal society, where it was all decided for us.

If all this sounds very contemporary, then Popper has made his point. It is not just the gullible mob and the crypto-aristocrats who are ready to betray the open society: its own intellectuals are often in the forefront of the stampede. Why, asked Popper, were his intellectual contemporaries so bewitched by Fascism and Communism, just as Plato was by Spartanism?

"PL: But underlying these views you would still agree with Popper that there is an absolute, objective reality out there—a reality which people perhaps see differently—but you would not at all be a subjectivist or a relativist. EHG: No, I am not a subjectivist or a relativist. I do think that there are very clear standards of accuracy, only you have to state them at first—for example, by what standard is this an accurate map? If you have a map of New York, you don't terribly worry about the curvature of the earth; but if you have a map of the United States, it becomes a bit of a problem."

The sinister appeal of the closed society to even the best minds haunted Popper. The Western democracies are the most open societies yet achieved, but they too tend to become, or try to become, empires. Their growing complexity makes harsh demands on our capacity for rationality and individual moral responsibility. The “perennial appeal of tribalism” (my phrase not Popper’s), both to the masses and the elites, is often overpowering. When things are looking bad for us we cry out for a savior — a doctrine and a leader to return us to the safety of tribal society and the tribal mentality.

Max Weber was just as bothered as Popper by this. But he added an important point. He saw that charismatic leadership had an innate appeal, but he also saw that the growth of giant bureaucracies — indeed the very bureaucratic principle itself — added a new and dangerous variable to the equation. This was the most “rational” of rational social developments, and yet it had no inherent moral impulse. It could serve a vicious tyranny with the same amoral efficiency as it served a beneficent welfare state. Indeed it was the perfect instrument for totalitarianism.

"PL: Well, you make the point, and I agree with you on this completely, that very often nature comes up with, or has come up with, solutions to problems which technology and artifice can only begin to address. EHG: Exactly. And I do think that, from this point of view, it comes back to the problem of response: if you look at the matter of likeness, not as, "is a like b?" but, "do a and b elicit a similar response?" PL: a functional likeness EHG: It's a functional likeness. You can say that the bait which the angler puts on his hook obviously creates a response in the fish to snap. And whether it is for us like a fly, well, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But the likeness is in the response. That, it seems to me, is the key problem here."

Popper misses this. The Soviet Union under Stalin, and the Fascist dictatorships, were nightmares of bureaucracy as much as nightmares of tribalism. The tribal elements were the more spectacular (Nuremburg), but the bureaucracy got the totalitarian job done (Eichmann). The Soviet system eventually broke down because this form of government became perilously inefficient. The result of the breakdown is not the free enterprise democracy that was our hope, but a resurgence of Russian tribalism.” ( Robin Fox )

"PL: What would your reaction be if someone were to say to you that it's meaningless to talk about the circle of mushrooms as an objective state? That although the mushrooms themselves exist objectively, they look like they are in a circle only in the ordering of our minds, when we perceive it. So it really is the human sense of order, not "natural" order, that gives us this pleasing effect. EHG: Well, the pleasing is in the human mind. But the geometry of the arrangement is surely an objective fact. You could say that if you measure the circumference in relation to the diameter of the circle, you get the figure"pi," or whatever else. That is, after all, not something subjective."

Paul Levinson: So would it be exaggerating things too much to say that in a sense what you’re doing by applying Popper—applying some of what Popper has worked out in the philosophy of science to the philosophy of art—is really raising the correct primacy of art as opposed to science?

"Similar elective affinities can be observed in relation to Popper – though, at first sight, both seem to have little in common. Popper’s critical rationalism is usually regarded as the essence of science: logical, objective, and committed to truth; whereas Wilde is commonly viewed as an eccentric writer: paradoxical, playful, often inconsequential and incongruous in his modes of thought; above all, committed to art rather than science. A closer look, however, reveals a highly meaningful epistemological potential in Wilde’s work, both in his essays and plays, anticipating important premises of Popper’s philosophy of science. As these prefigurations occur in a literary context, that is, in a fictitious medium, and as they are – particularly in Wilde’s case – expressed most imaginatively and playfully, they tend to be overlooked, although they constitute a highly significant structure in his work. "

Ernst Gombrich: I wouldn’t see it that way. You see, I have always resisted the category of”Art” with a capital “A.” As you may know, what people call art in various civilizations differs enormously. In fact, our notion of art is an eighteenth-century notion—”fine arts,” you know. After all, even earlier and even later were the “art” of healing, and the “art” of love, and the “art” of war, and the “art” of who knows what. It really is a term for skill, isn’t it?…

Ernst Gomrich. " He characterized most of art criticism as simply the critic’s emotional response to art. Parallels have been drawn between Gombrich’s melding of art history with psychology and that of the philosopher Karl Popper's psychology and the history of science. Gombrich publicly claimed a debt to his friend, Popper, assisting Popper in the preparation of Popper’s manuscript of The Open Society and its Enemies,1945. Although Gombrich wrote about Picasso and modern artists, he had little affinity for contemporary art. His essay “The Vogue of Abstract Art” (reprinted in Meditations) denounced American action painting, as a “visual fad” supported by dealers rather than ideas. Elsewhere he wrote skeptically about Schoenberg's 12-tone system. Many of Gombrich’s theories on art were drawn from his rich life experiences. As radio translator of Nazi broadcasts during World War II, he frequently had to glean words from faint transmissions. Later, in Art and Illusion, he wrote that “you had to know what might be said in order to hear what was said.”

Now, like Popper, I don’t think one should waste a lot of time on definitions; but one must be aware that our grouping of, let us say, Lascaux under “art,” and the arrowheads which may be found there not under “art,” is our point of view, our categorizing.
About Lascaux, though I have been lucky enough to have seen it, I am very much aware of the depths of our ignorance about these cave paintings. People always enthuse how marvelously naturalistic they are—I have never encountered a bison in my life, and I don’t know what they looked like.

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“By doubting, we come to inquire and by inquiry we arrive at truth”.

"Heloise may have been born illegitimate. She was being raised by her uncle who was a canon named Fulbert. Some believe she may have been Fulbert's daughter since their relationship was more like parent and child than uncle and niece. Canon Fulbert was determined that his niece get the best education that money could buy. He hired Peter Abelard to tutor her."

The church has never quite understood Abelard to the fullest, or known what to do with him. Should the church condemn his writings or revere him as a saint? He was a man of spectacular gifts and intellectual talent but the fundamentalism of today despises his intellectualism, appeal to reason and philosophic attitude. He possessed like passions as other men and his view of the trinity bordered on tri-theism. Calvin would have had him burned at the stake in his day.

"Heloise was unusually educated for a seventeen-year-old girl in the 12th century AD. Her favourite topic was philosophy. After she and Abelard had falled in love, she exchanged numerous letters with him on the nature of love, lost and the meaning of marriage (he wanted to marry her but she did not). Heloise was strongly opposed to the institution of marriage, arguing of "...the basic impossibility of combining marriage and scholarship...". Heloise was greatly influenced by her Classical studies and she often expressed her disdain for the idea of a woman giving up her independence in order to enter into a profitable marriage. She wrote: "God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable to me to be called not his Empress but your whore. ..."

In the year 1117 a thirty-eight year old logician named Peter Abelard seduced with no difficulty whatever an ardent teen-aged girl named Heloise and the world has never forgotten them. Yhe reason, however, is far from apparent. For one thing, their love affair lacked the most essential ingredient for immortality: namely an immortal lover, a man ho, for his love, throws away an empire, like Antony, or pollutes his honor, like Tristan. Abelard’s infatuation with Héloise began cooling the moment it began causing him trouble….

"According to the notations on this photo, this is from a May 1970 production of Abelard and Heloise at the Wyndham Theatre, with Rigg and Michell in the title roles. This play includes a brief nude scene that stirred up a bit of controversy when it was first produced."

In his day, theologians tended to prove their points chiefly by quoting statements from the Church Fathers. Abelard produced a book called Sic Et Non (“Yes and No”), in which he took numerous theological issues and produced quotations from the Fathers on one side, set next to quotations from the Fathers on the other side. He then proceeded to reconcile the contradictions, pointing out that language is ambiguous and depends on context, and that statements that appear to answer the same question “Yes” and “No” may on closer examination turn out to be answering different questions.

Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard c.1780 D'agesci Bernard

….Abelard’s affection was so dubious that it inspired in Héloise the most common doubt; years after their separation she was still asking if Abelard loved her for herself or her body. He set her doubts to rest: “I satisfied my wretched in thee, and this was all that I loved…Weep for thy Savior, not for thy seducer.” And he meant every word. …

Abelard’s teaching was condemned at Soursouns in 1121 and his first theological work had been burned as heretical. He followed Plato in theology and his best teachings emphasized Aristotle’s dialectic, holding that the system of logic and dialectical method of intellectual reflection could be applied to the truths of faith, this pre-dated Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics by a century. His concept of ethics maintained that an act is to be judged by the intention of the doer.

A fourteenth century artist remembered Abelard simply as Héloise's tutor.

By any conventional historical reckoning, Abelard was not even a figure of the first rank. He was the best logician of his day, but he founded no philosophical school and it was the men he bested in debate who set scholastic philosophy on its future course. Nor was he a great spirit who labored to reform and strengthen a shaky, if universal church. To enemies such as Bernard of Clairvaux, he was an impudent adventurer, and a self vaunting troublemaker who spoke for no established order and served no established institution.

“In those days, theologians tended to prove their points chiefly by quoting statements from the Church Fathers. In his book he collected a list of 158 philosophical and theological questions and produced quotations from the Fathers on one side, next to contradictory quotations from the Fathers on the other side. He then proceeded to harmonize the contradictions, pointing out that language is vague and depends on the context. Abelard pointed out the foolishness of relying on authorities and showed the most respected theological authorities to be hopelessly at odds with each other. Abelard left these questions open for discussion and thereby left himself open to charges of heresy. For quite some time the Church had included his writings in the Index of Forbidden Books.”

Kauffmann. "Abelard wrote, Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words. Our hands sought less the book than each other's bosoms - love drew our eyes together far more than the lesson ..."

…On the whole they were right. He was a genuine spiritual anomaly, and therein lies his significance. He was the first truly free individual in postclassical Europe; the first, that is, whose personality expressed with superb force and clarity not class, caste, code or office, but itself.

From the moment he swaggered into Paris, a handome, well-born Breton youth who endeavored to refute the opinions of his teachers, personal fame was Abelard’s chief spur. The old feudal order of the Dark Ages was crumbling and Europe was more open and free . The High Middle Ages had not yet been pieced together and the Church was not yet the vast highly centralized hierarchy it was soon to become, with its majestic autocratic popes. In fact, in Abelard’s day there were often two popes at once, each seeking to prevail over the other in the lively court of public opinion on which their authority rested; no Inquisition to efficiently extirpate heresy and no Church controlled universities  directing intellectual life.

Abelard was one of these utterly new men, disturbingly ardent in their religious faith, ripe for every heresy, and inclined to look on the indolent Church, an organization adapted to serfs and rude warriors, with a less than worshipful eye. In that short-lived ferment Abelard made his way like an ambitious politician  seeking the main chance. To his own rationalistic views and his own dashing personality , Abelard gave the widest currency by seeking out and vanquishing in public debate whatever champions of the prevailing view he could corner.

By the time Abelard decided to seduce Héloise, the orphaned ward of the canon of Notre Dame, Abelard had come to regard himself as “the only philosopher remaining in the world” . He was the leader of the young “moderni” , a pied piper with all of Europe”s restless youth in his train. It was more than sheer mental power that drew the youth from near and far to him; there was a magnetic freshness about a logician who sang songs like a troubadour and strutted like a prince. There was freshness, too, in his belief that the truths of faith must be true to reason, and freshness in his scorn for orthodox reputations.

When the swarming students of Paris learned that their champion was making love to the canon’s ward, they sang his praises even louder, seduction having completed the portrait of a personality more vivid, more expressive, more unfettered than any they had seen. For her par, Héloise rejoiced in her role as Abelard’s “whore’ , her word, but her guardian was less thrilled, despite Abelard’s efforts to placate him. His grisly vengeance is well known: He gathered some kinsmen together and had him castrated, surprising him in his sleep. Abelard’s reaction is revealing:

” In truth I felt the disgrace more than the hurt to my body and was more afflicted with shame than with pain. My incessant thought was of the renown in which I had so delighted, now brought low, nay utterly blotted out, so swiftly, by an evil chance.”

Unmanned and ashamed, Abelard joined a monastery and forced Héloise to become a nun. That was the end between them, and if his life were a tale of romance, it would have ended there. But it did not. During his remaining twenty-three years Abelard largely ignored Héloise, but he himself was far from done. If anything, his fame grew greater, his followers more formidable, while his own intellectual ambitions became more lofty, more courageous, and in a sense, more serious.

Abelard now began to elucidate rationally on that mystery of Christian mysteries, that pandora’s box of heresy, the doctrine of the Trinity. And worse, he wrote down his conclusions in writing. This led to his treatise being burned, forcing him to take refuge in the wilderness and to live a hermit’s existence; but inevitably young men from all over the Continent gathered around him again. In 1140, he was accused of being a “heretic in spirit” and the pope concurred. Abelard and his works were formally condemned and his defenders excommunicated.

The makers of the medieval world finished by crushing him. More than a century later, when french writers began to revive Abelard’s memory, they scarcely knew what to make of him, for in the new medieval order a free spirit such as Abelard’s was unknown. So they absorbed him into the romantic tradition and cast him in the role of star-crossed lover. He does not fit the part. In life Abelard had played only himself; that was his sin and his glory.

“Then, turning from the consideration of such hindrances to the study of philosophy, Héloïse bade me observe what were the conditions of honourable wedlock. What possible concord could there be between scholars and domestics, between authors and cradles, between books or tablets and distaffs, between the stylus or the pen and the spindle? What man, intent on his religious or philosophical meditations, can possibly endure the whining of children, the lullabies of the nurse seeking to quiet them, or the noisy confusion of family life? Who can endure the continual untidiness of children? The rich, you may reply, can do this, because they have palaces or houses containing many rooms, and because their wealth takes no thought of expense and protects them from daily worries. But to this the answer is that the condition of philosophers is by no means that of the wealthy, nor can those whose minds are occupied with riches and worldly cares find time for religious or philosophical study. For this reason the renowned philosophers of old utterly despised the world, fleeing from its perils rather than reluctantly giving them up, and denied themselves all its delights in order that they might repose in the embraces of philosophy alone. One of them, and the greatest of all, Seneca, in his advice to Lucilius, says: “Philosophy is not a thing to be studied only in hours of leisure; we must give up everything else to devote ourselves to it, for no amount of time is really sufficient thereto”

“The great philosophical dispute of the day concerned Universals. We say that Citation, Secretariat, and Man-o-War, are all horses. One group of philosophers (then called “Realists” but now called “Idealists”, and taking their cue from Plato) said that there is an objectively existing Something that the aforesaid C, S, and MoW all have in common: namely, their equine nature. A second group of philosophers (then called “Nominalists” but now called “Realists”, and taking their cue from Aristotle) said that it was silly to assert the existence of anything here except the concrete individual particular objects called C, S, and MoW, and the name “horse” which we agree to give to them all. Hence the competing slogans, “Universals are Real” and “Universals are Names.” When Abelard appeared on the scene, it was dominated by Realists. He took the Nominalist side, with modifications that enabled him to sidestep the standard realist objections, and his skill in debate won him many admirers. (He tells us himself that he mopped up the floor with his opponents, and silenced or convinced all his professors, but that may be a teeny bit exaggerated.) For background material, the reader is referred to Chapters 14 to 16 of Henry Adams’ book Mont-saint-michel and Chartres. For evidence that the question can still rouse passions today, the reader is referred to Ayn Rand’s An Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology, available in paperback at your local bookstore or library.” ( James E. Kiefer )

JMW Turner . The Slave Ship. "James Mallord William Turner painted "The Slave Ship" to help an Abolitionist anti-slavery campaign. Today this famous painting hangs in The Boston Museum of Fine Arts. John Ruskin (see The City Review article) called it the one painting he would choose to vouch for Turner's immortality, both for its moral content and its awesome painterliness. The painting shows slaves being tossed into swirling surf filled with hungry sea creatures by slave traders that routinely ploughed the ocean between Africa and the United States."

By the same token, Pinel did not so much free the insane from their hellish confinement as much as he released their madness from total censure. In this way he returned them back into the world, or rather, into the social government of the asylum from which the insane had been banished. And in which for centuries scores languished, under lock and key, behind high walls, where no ‘serene’ gaze of rationality and respectability would ever fall on that insolence that represents the ruined human character.

In Western democracies,  race constitutes its own form of madness, along with its own asylums and governmentalities. From the earliest moment that European colonists arrived on  American shores,for example,  race has been the great alloy of a potent social experiment, one that produced slavery and the plantation economy. If the Bicetre and Salpetriere hospitals were more than therapeutic zones – being as they were places of seizure – the confinement on the plantation under slavery mobilized similar senses of capture and stigma. Race in America simultaneously represents the unspeakable and the irrepressible, as well as an epistemological model of biological differentiation that produces a prodigious body of discourse and representation.

This shift is very effectively captured in Simpson's lyrical film/video "Corridor." in which dual dramas of the past and present occupy the same screen. The left vignette portrays an African American woman dressed as the world once used to see her - as a slave or servant in a plantation house, with white apron, turbaned headdress, and simple calico dress: "Mammy" in "Gone With the Wind."

And like madness in the asylum, it enjoys a particular kind of censure behind the high walls of its own asylum. Except, unlike the asylum, which is ringed by thick, mortared walls and protected by a forbidding gate, the madness of race exists nakedly visible in the tumescent flesh of the American social ideal and is practiced in the open terrain of the cultural landscape.

Thus, is identity based on attitude or belief system at the intersection of race and gender? There seems to be a lot of false premises to choose from from which to construct our lives, and much of it superficial and inconsequential. Still waters can run deep; lingering unease and proliferating sets of doubts mark their time. We blindly accept images as truth, yet there is also a  power of the “voided” image and how that impacts on identity. And is  reality actually what one makes of it? Is  reality tangibly  ”out there” or is it  all an illusion or delusion of our  minds, which cannot differentiate between real and unreal, fact and fantasy?

"What happened outside the frame of this beautifully, knowingly Raphaelesque image of a black woman in a white shift with disheveled hair, seen from behind against a very dark ground, emptying a silver pitcher with one graceful arm and a plastic jug with the other? A rape? An escape? A lynching? Who is this witness to an invisible event, who is herself invisible? A nineteenth-century slave or a twentieth-century citizen, whose citizenship still doesn't count? The complex poignancy of those questions about what is unseen is enhanced, rather than undercut, by the stylish play with what is seen, including black skin, white shift, and silver pitcher (in which it matters that this is a black-and-white gelatin silver print)."

“…it appears as if this film is furthering the divide between cultures. Pointing out cultural and religious differences that are purely superficial, even if it be through comedy furthers separation and hate between cultures. If humanities ultimate goal is peace then recognizing similarities in our cultures is important rather than differences.
“We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another”
“The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace” …

"One of the nicer moments in the film is when Mahmud puts on a kippah, then panicks and places a taqiyah on top of it -- for the next few scenes, he’s walking around with a Jewish headpiece underneath a Muslim prayer cap, and it perfectly represents his struggle at being outwardly committed to one faith while inwardly born into another. Read more: http://www.natioThis is what happens when a middle-aged Muslim man suddenly discovers that he is actually Jewish.

“…as I completely disagree that this film has an influence to make a divide larger than it already is. Personally I think it highlights an awareness of the current divide that exists. The only thing that makes a divide is people and there actions behind there beliefs.I beleive you can still have a culture a religion and accepting/respecting other cultures and belief. War does not grow on trees its people strong beliefs also greed that can cause a war the same applies to segregation/divide. Its only a comedy that should be treated as a commedy….To treat this any differently than a commedy would be suggesting/demanding negative divide that no one wants in my opinion. ( www.arabist.net, Issandr El Amrani )

"Ultimately, Simpson's art is not about victimization - that is firmly left behind in the dust. Her modern imagery is about taking back the power, and carving a new African-American niche, or female niche, however the viewer chooses. The truths exposed in Simpson's art - and she is truthful - are grounded in the footprints of history, with all the painful realities picked clean from the carcass, the bones laid bare. There is a sadness in her vision, but a sense of moving forward, of independence from the chains of memory."

Josh Appignanesi’s new film The Infidel not only has its opinions; it wears them on its sleeve, even though it may be short sleeves.  It’s about a Muslim who discovers, while going through his recently deceased mother’s papers, that he was adopted. His birth records contain an even more shocking fact: He’s Jewish. Through a series of events, he comes to embrace his Hebraic roots while also strengthening his devotion to Islam. The fact that he’s British, but of Pakistani origin, occasionally comes into play as well, but this is more about faith than nationality. The premise is very intriguing, since it shows how fragile identity is, and how easily it can collapse. The film itself is pretty average; too much below the belt generic laughs to keep it far from the proximity of  the Adam Sandler nation.

"Suddenly, the play among the surfaces of "black" skin, "white" fabric, and "silver" print became vibrant, making me pause and seriously question what was black, what was white, what was gray or silver or in-between, and whether what I was seeing was "real" or not. (For several moments, what I knew to be silver print looked like it was really white fabric, and the texture of skin began to trade places with that of emulsion-coated paper.) And in turn, that ambivalence brought to life the multivalence of the words between the two circular frames, and their sliding between the states of noun and verb, between body and sex and their policing, and gave way to the bright red of the groundlessness of semiosis and point of view, and above all to the vividly colored vertigo of human desire. This is matter and thought working together, as it is the business of visual art to bring about, to have a real effect on a viewer who consists of a thinking mind in a sensing body, however that mind and body are gendered and raced."

British comedian Omid Djalili plays Mahmud Nasir — or, as his adoption papers reveal, Solly Shimshillewitz. (Nasir’s neighbour asks: “Why didn’t they just call you Jewy-Jew-Jew-Jew-Jew and be done with it?”) Anxious to reconcile with his aging father, he first decides he must “Jew up” enough so as not to shock the old man. Enter Richard Schiff as Lenny Goldberg, Nasir’s cab-driver neighbour, who agrees to instruct Nasir in the fineries of Jewish thingies, Fiddler on the Roof and a few yiddishisms.

Appignanesi was probably intrigued by the identity-swap aspects of the story, seen in films such as   Trading Places.Essentially, its the old switched at the cradle premise, where this new Moses in the form of a Homer “Saladin”  Simpson, is not in line to the throne of the Pharaoh.  The Infidel lacks the traditional “assimilation narrative,” in which the question usually is, how far does one assimilate. The set up being ethnic minority against majority culture. The Infidel’s narrative structure is based on a dialogue between two minority cultures; two groups which are no stranger to the politics of oppression.

" We meet him in London as Mahmud, a second-generation Anglo-Pakistani who has assimilated all too well. Short, chubby and balding, speaking with a rude Cockney accent, the guy is an East Asian Bob Hoskins with a vocabulary to match – the kind who arms every sentence with a payload of f-bombs. As for his faith, Mahmud is a “relaxed Muslim,” relaxed enough to go light on his daily prayers and heavy on his pale ale."

Another play on the conflicts of identity is in Howard Jacobson’s new book “The Finkler Question”. Surprisingly, the main character in his new novel, Julian Treslove, is a Gentile. Sort of.  Though Treslove may not be Jewish, he caught that particular Jewish virus that leads one to be obsessed with Jews and Jewishness for better or double portions of neuroses.  One day, Treslove is mugged by someone who, he later becomes convinced, used the words “you Jew” during the attack. This sets him to thinking, maybe he is Jewish. Before long, he’s brushing up on his Yiddish, wondering if it’s too late to get circumcised and moving in with a woman called Hephzibah Weizenbaum. There’s also a full supporting cast representing every possible shade of Jewish opinion. It seems predictable stuff and kind of fluffy but the obligatory political messages are combined with unsparing ruminations on love, ageing, death and grief; a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms, elevates the whole and the quality of writing appears first rate.

“In short, I admire what seems to be( Lorna) Simpson’s counterview to a prevailing idea, nourished by many strands of “theory” in the academy and by garden-variety “identity politics” in and outside of the academy alike, namely, that aesthetic engagement amounts to bad faith. On the contrary, the bad faith lies in the easy conventionality with which the antiaesthetic view aligns itself with the critical and the subversive. Bravo to artists of any affiliation whose work does not fall in line with such unthinking carelessness. It is time to think anew about such matters: about what “identity” is, and what “aesthetics” can do with it. Good to know I am not alone in thinking so.” ( Carol Armstrong )

"Yes, it is necessary to live without this knowledge. I think of the play “Our Town”. Someone claims that only poets and saints really suck out the marrow of life. Perhaps Flannery O’Connor’s stories, such as ”A Good Man is Hard to Find”, suggest that the heinous, nihilistic sinners also sense the truth about life and death. Perhaps we are still so genetically engaged in the acts that promote living on a personal level, like the simplest of animals–survival–that we fail to think as do the philosophers, saints, poets, and great sinners. "

It is said that God moves in mysterious ways, and only he possesses the omniscience to be everywhere. But what if this was false? An untruth. By extension,  if in fact there is an unknown truth, then there is a truth that couldn’t possibly be known. More specifically, if X is a truth that is never known then it is unknowable that  X is a truth that is never known. The proof has been used to argue against versions of anti-realism committed to the thesis that all truths are knowable.

"When Harvard dismissed Leary in 1963, he set up the Castalia Institute in Millbrook, New York, to continue his studies. Leary's approach to taking LSD was the opposite of Ken Kesey'sÐLeary believed in "set and setting," a practice of taking the drug in a controlled environment, as a safeguard against bad trips. He coined the phrase "Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out," and formed the "League of Spiritual Discovery," an LSD advocacy group. In the mid sixties, he began attending numerous musical events and public forums that promoted the use of LSD. Leary spent a number of years in prison for various charges related to drug possession."

For clearly there are unknown truths; individually and collectively we are non-omniscient. So, by the main result, it is false that all truths are knowable. The result has also been used to draw more general lessons about the limits of human knowledge. Still others have taken the proof to be fallacious, since it collapses an apparently moderate brand of anti-realism into an obviously implausible and naive idealism.

…The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld.

To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. ( Camus )

"Camus in "The Myth of Sisyphus," said basically that there's only one question, "Am I going to kill myself today?" once you get that one figured out the rest is - small potatoes. "

Events continually unfold, and its often recurrent and chronic pattern would indicate that the unknowable is somehow blocking a comprehension and that even this search for comprehension may be in vain. Like the myth of Sisyphus, this odd and sometimes perverse relationship with the deities by necessity leads us to the default position of Neitzsche’s eternal recurrence. Perhaps there is an imperative necessity to go deeper and change the settings that seem to regulate our collective existence.

"... his case for the benefits of psychedelic drug use, noting that millions of Americans have had hallucinogenic experiences: "We include marijuana smokers, the adepts in hatha yoga, meditators, peyote eaters, mushroom eaters, the LSD cult, and those millions who have had an involuntary psychedelic experience, those institutionalized mystics we call psychotics." Leary suggests historical, psychological, and biological bases for his arguments. The book also includes a number of poems from Lao Tse that Leary believes were a result of psychedelic experiences."

…At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.” ( Albert Camus )

Bruegel Seven Deadly Sins. Pride

Akira Kurosawa’s vision, his power to make the screen teem with riches, produces a question: Can an artist really have bothered to make a film about the “knowability of truth”? The answer, well, it has to be ambiguous; one that would ask more than it could rationalize. And with regard to Japan, the inextricable link between Japan and the Atomic bomb is often a dramatic subtext for this ambiguity. The beauty of film, and also its flaw, is that we know where we are at every moment; we know the complexity of the narrative and as such, the “unknowability of truth” superficially, does appear as a trite theme. …

This past August, A U.S. representative participated for the first time  in Japan’s annual commemoration of the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima, in a 65th anniversary event.  The site of the world’s first A-bomb attack echoed with the choirs of schoolchildren and the solemn ringing of bells  as Hiroshima marked its biggest memorial yet. At 8:15 a.m. – the time the bomb dropped, incinerating most of the city – a moment of silence was observed. The commemoration, began with an offering of water to the 140,000 who died in the first of two nuclear bombings that ensured Japan’s surrender in World War II. As for this and may other tragic events, the Why’s? are in the majority.

The very quality of Kurosawa’s art opens up this banal version of relativism to reveal the element that generates the relativism: the element of ego , of self. This curse, this weight, that is like the stone Sisyphus can’t seem to unload. Finally, “Rashomon” deals with the preservation of self, an idea, that in this film outlasts earthly life. That idea is not the sanctity of the individual as a political concept, not the value of each soul as a religious concept, but stark fundamental “AMOUR PROPRE”.

"So, point-of-view is not so much about who is telling the story, but how he sees the world. You don’t even have to limit the narrative to just the things a character thinks and sees, as long as the world you are showing is colored by his attitudes. The textbook example of using point-of-view is Kurosawa’s Rashomon. You see the same event three different times, from three different perspectives. The details and the feeling of the story are widely different with each telling, depending on the attitudes of who is telling the story at the time."

When Rashomon opened in New York in 1951, it was the first Japanese film to be shown there in fourteen years. The cultural shock that followed the Venice Festival showing was a smaller mirror image of the shock felt in Japan a century earlier when Commodore Perry dropped in. Then the Japanese had learned of a technological civilization about which they knew very little; now the West learned of a highly developed film art about which they knew even less. The first japanese director to be known in the West was Akira Kurosawa, who made “Rashomon” , and as it turned out this was fortunate, because Kurosawa was one of film’s great masters.

"The world's first nuclear bomb, lovingly named "Little Boy," was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In one instant, it killed an estimated 140,000 people, effectively ended WWII, and ushered in a new era of military strategy based on apocalyptic-style destruction. The bomb used a simple "gun method" to achieve the nuclear fission chain reaction: It worked by using conventional explosives to blast two pieces of uranium-235 into each other inside the bomb chamber, which would then go critical and commence bringing about death and destruction in a very good impression of 18,000 tons of TNT."

The script of Rashomon,  by Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto is based on two short stories about medieval Japan; From the first story, “Rashomon” the film takes little more than a setting: the place where the film begins, to which it returns, and where it closes- along with a mood of desolation caused by the waste of civil war. Rashomon was the name of the largest gate in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan ; it was built in the eighth century, and by the twelfth century, the time of the film, it was already in disrepair.

In this great but dilapidated gate three men- a woodcutter, a priest, and a man called simply a commoner- huddle together out of a pouring rain and recount various versions of a murder that took place recently in the vicinity. The second story, “In a Grove” is the source of the murder narrative. There are some central facts: a samurai and his wife traveling through a forest were waylaid by a notorious bandit, who tied up the husband and ravished the wife; the husband was killed and his body was found by the woodcutter.

There are four versions of the events surrounding these central facts, and we see each of the versions as it is recounted, and each are wildly different. The bandit say he assaulted the wife who quickly became compliant. Afterward, at the wife’s insistence , he released the husband so that they could fight, and killed him in a long hazardous duel. The priest said that after the rape the bandit left. Her husband looked at her with such hatred, perhaps because she had not resisted sufficiently, and in a frenzy of grief and shame she apparently killed him, then ran away.

" If you've ever seen 'Dr. Strangelove,' you understand the combination of fear, military escalation, and sheer insanity that followed the development of the bomb. A single bomb dropped from a propeller-driven airplane gave way to thousands of thermonuclear warheads squirreled away around the globe in missile silos, jet bombers, and nuclear submarines during the greatest arms race of all time. By the end of the 1950s, the world had enough nuclear firepower to blow up half the solar system. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed when Little Boy's cousin Fat Man blew up Nagasaki and became the last nuke ever used in battle."

The third version, also told by the priest, is that of the dead husband who speaks through a medium. The husband says that after the seduction his wife urged the bandit to murder him and take her along. The bandit declined, released the husband, and left. Alone, the husband killed himself with a dagger. Later, after his death, he felt someone take the dagger away.The woodcutter claims he came along just after the ravishing and watched from behind a bush. The wife was crying, and the bandit was pleading with her to go away with him. She said the men would have to decide whom she was to go with.

She cut her husband free with the dagger, but at first he was unwilling to fight for this woman he now despised. She taunted them into fighting; a brawl that was a parody of the noble duel recounted earlier by the bandit. The husband was killed. The woman fled. Dazed, the bandit limped off with his sword and the samurai’s.

The end of the movie sees the three men at the Rashomon gates in various states of the human condition; the woodcutter’s depression about human beings, the commoner’s cynical glee and the priest’s desperate hope. Suddenly, they hear a baby crying- an abandoned infant. The commoner tries to steal its clothes and when reproached by the woodcutter, calls him a hypocrite and accuses him of stealing the samurai’s expensive dagger, which was not found at the scene of the crime. The wood cutter does not explicitly admit to the theft, but offers to take the infant into his already large family, perhaps as a penance for his lie and perhaps as a taken of his hope for human hope.

On paper, the film is little more than another statement on the contradictory nature of truth. On film, because of the cinematic qualities  that grow out of the script and surpass it, “Rashomon” becomes a work of greater size. One reason for the film’s impact is its cultural accessibility; the work is intrinsically Japanese , yet not remote in style and dynamics.

… In “Rashomon” ego undelies all, the film says at last. What is good and waht is horrible in our lives, in the way we affect other lives, grows from ego; not merely the biological impulse to stay alive but the wish to have that life with some degree of pride. In Christianity, pride is the first deadly sin; but in our daily lives, Christian or any other flavor, we know that this sin is at least reliable.

We can depend on it for motive power. All of us acknowledge that we ought to be moved primarily by love; all of us know we are moved primarily by self. “Rashomon” reaches down to a quiet giant truth nestled in every one of us. Ultimately, what the film leaves us with is candor and consolation; if we can’t be saints at least we can be understandingly human.

a

In 1793 France’s smart set, its “chic and swell” , checked into a “hospital” on the rue de Charonne, where , for about $50,000 or more per month, they could drink champagne, play cards, and discuss the current theatre. The Reign of Terror was filled with some unusual incongruities…

"How it changed the world: As the Revolution progressed, citizens began to vocalize their complaints about perceived inequality in execution methods of the day. This was a new France! It wasn't fair that nobles got beheaded with a dignified sword and everyone else got tossed on the agonizing breaking wheel. Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin was tasked with finding a way to humanely separate people from their heads. Inspired by a similar beheading device from 13th century called the Halifax Gibbet, Guillotin's crew emerged with a sleek, indiscriminate machine that would come to represent the entire revolution. It was the first real effort to make capital punishment quick and painless (not to mention efficient), and after the revolutionaries ran out of people to kill, they finally got around to shoring up their democracy. "

Essentially, an underground market for Certificates of Good Citizenship flourished as well as bribing Vigilance Committee members to be excluded from the list or paid to have their records mislaid. When one realizes that arrest meant certain death, one can understand why this phase of the Revolution was called the Reign of Terror. Once the public’s appetite for blood was whetted, often two or three tumbrils were required daily to cart the daily batch of condemned to the guillotine on the Place de la Concorde.

The contrast between Dr. Jacques Belhomme’s so-called jail and the other prisons of the city, most of them little better than dungeons, must have made the amenities of the doctor’s establishment seem even more delightful. Here, between courtyard and garden in a tanquil setting that belonged more to the country than to a city in the grip of terror, one could still enjoy some of the vanished pleasures that constituted the famous “douceur de vivre” of the eighteenth century. A vast, walled park with a garden and an orchard of fruit trees invited one to stroll of a morning. In the evening Dr. Belhomme’s “patients” would gather in the principal salon for cards, conversation and music. Visitors from the outer world were not only permitted but encouraged. Every evening a long line of carriages waited in front of the gates, and the sound of laughter and music drifted into the street until the early morning hours.

“For a sizable fee, prisoners could get themselves declared sick or mentally troubled and transferred to a maison de santé, where the “infirm” could recover while still under (nominal) police surveillance. In theory, once the prisoner had been declared “cured” he or she would have then been transferred back into the normal prison system to await sentencing. But, in practice, as long as the prisoner was willing and able to pay for his or her room and board at the maison de santé, a certification of recovered health would not be forthcoming. Health was directly related to wealth and as long as money flowed to grease the wheels of State corruption patients could largely avoid execution.”

On January 21st, 1793 Louis XVI was executed by a Guillotine in front of the people of France who saluted his death as the beginning of what they believed to be a better era.

The food was perhaps not all that an epicure might desire, but arrangement permitted Belhomme’s more affluent pensioners to dine at a table separate from fellow guests. Here, for a supplementary sum, one could order from a different menu; a la carte as it were. Although officially a prison, guards and bars were not needed at 70 rue de Charonne. Confinement to Dr. Belhomme’s asylum assured one of something far more important than comfortable living in uncomfortable times. Somehow the accusations made against Belhomme’s prisoners became mysteriously misplaced by intermediaries in the busy offices of the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. No inmate in Dr. Belhomme’s custody was ever brought up for trial. Thus it was not pleasant quarters or dainty food or music and laughter that one bought from Dr. Belhomme. It was life itself.

James Gillray

As the guillotine began to go about its work in earnest, as the number of the condemned rose from ten to twenty and even thirty a day, as the arrests increased and the terror progressed, Belhomme’s business flourished proportionately. Clients poured in from all the prisons of Paris and from all walks of life. The actual insane; there remained a few of these whom he could hardly put out onto the street; were packed off to rooms in the attic to make way for more lucrative pensioners.

A house next door, the Hotel Chabannais, was taken on long lease and hastily refurbished. The Duchesse d’Orleans, widow of the guillotined Philippe Egalité and at one time the richest heiress in France, arrived. There was a Talleyrand, a Nicholai, and the Comte de Saint-Aulaire, from whose memoirs have come many of the details about the everyday life in this curious prison.

Jean Baptiste Rayneaud. Liberty or Death

“This is precisely what seems to have happened in the Marquis de Sade’s case. His own assets, combined with what was most certainly an active campaign on the part of Quesnet and other representatives ensured that he was declared ill, transferred to Coignard’s maison de santé,( a competing establishment ) and protected from the Terror’s grasp. In a letter to his agent, Gaufridy, following his release from the Maison Coignard in October 1794, Sade explicitly cites several thousand livres of expenses incurred during his seven-month stay at Picpus.Sade desribed the Maison Coignard as “un paradis terrestre; belle maison, superbe jardin, société choisie, d’aimables femmes.”Having become a veritable connoisseur of French prisons since his first imprisonment in 1777 this was high praise indeed!”

The clientele was by no means limited to the former nobility. The widow of the revolutionary Pétion found shelter on the rue de Charonne, as did the deputy Rouzet. The theatre was represented by Mlle Mézeray and also by the most beautiful actress of the day, Mlle Lange. Literature arrived in the person of the Comte de Volney, author of “The Ruin and Falls of Empires” .

"From here we see a new freedom arise in painting, as well as in the thinking, as Protestantism gives way to Secular commissions and the artist begins to portray historical scenes. Let's follow the progression on thinking through these next three paintings. First, this painting from 1789 by English painter Joseph Wright, depicts a scene from the French Revolution. "

It was an oddly assorted group that found itself tossed together under Belhomme’s roof. This seems to have lent the place an additional interest, for a number of unexpected friendships were made there. The Duchesse d’Orleans and the deputy Rouzet formed an attachment that was to last the rest of their lives. After the terror ended and Belhomme’s prisoners were dispersed, Rouzet joined his friend in exile, remaining with her even when, under the Bourbon Restoration, the Duchesse regained her rank of Princess of the Blood. When he died, she insisted that he be interred in the royal crypt at Dreux so that even in death they would not be parted from each other.

James Gillray

Only one cloud cast a shadow over this happy little haven that seemed so far from the storms lashing the outer world; but it must have brought a singularly disagreeable chill into the sociabilities of the salon. This was the small matter of one’s monthly bill. For the fees were by no means over when one had paid the intial five thousand livres. There was one,s board and keep as well. As with any well regulated hotel, the price varied according to the accomodation. Small back rooms, rooms sparsely furnished and shared with several others , could be had for as little as four hundred livres per month. There was a long waiting list for these. For average or superior accomodations, the rate was substantially higher. Nor was the end in sight when one had paid the rent. There were other charges too: forced contributions to neighborhood patriotic funds, tips to the concierge, exactions for wine and various services. All in all, one could count on paying something in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars a month, or more.

marcus Stone. An Appeal for Mercy, 1793. 1876 oil on canvas A picture of the French Revolution showing an aristocratic woman pleading before an official. 1876

aIn the midst of a revolution in which all usual sources of income had been cut off, such a sum as this was not readily available. The rich who had lived off rents and revenue from their lands were now destitute. The nobility whose positions automatically meant the confiscation of their pensions and property were now penniless. Survivors of proscribed or executed spouses such as the Duchesse d’Orleans were withour means due to state confiscation. Only those who had friends in the outer world, or those who had wisely hidden a pile of gold or managed to conceal small negotiable objects of value were able to meet Dr. Belhomme’s monthly exactions. The fate of those who came to the end of their resources or whose family and friends refused to make further payment was well known. They were sent back to a public prison, brought up for trial, and finally guillotined.Business was business.

According to every report, Dr. Bellemare was an amiable man. Those who survived, recall him as good humored, and one who managed the unpleasant business of expelling an indigent pensioner with such affability, grace and style , that nearly everyone parted on the best of terms. The fate of the Duchess de Chatelet was a salutary example to other boarders who might think Belhomme’s prices were beyond their means. The Duchesse, after claiming that she was unable to scrape up further money, was summoned to the office and told it was no time to pinch pennies. Belhomme gave her a few days in which to reconsider her assets, but to no avail. She was sent back to prison and within a short time brought before the Revolutionary tribunal and guillotined. Belhomme was as distressed by the news as the Duchesse’s friends were. “The lady fell victim to her misplaced thrift,” he declared.

One is left to imagine the sensations of those who were themselves running out of money. Evening gatherings over the bezique and the clavecin may not have been quite so carefree as they appeared. Nor can the disconcerting presence of the insane, who were continually drifting down from the attic, having contributed much to the general gaiety. A demented old priest of rather wild appearance seemed to get on people’s nerves particularly.

At the very least, in January 1794, Coignard scored a symbolic victory over his competitors when Belhomme himself checked in for “illness” while serving a six-year sentence for having blatantly extorted huge sums from his guests and abused the authority vested in him by the Convention.

He did not long enjoy the mysterious immunity he had been able to give others. He was brought up for trial and sentenced to six years in irons. The lightness of the sentence only contributed to the conjecture that he enjoyed protection in high places. Before running away to Coignard’s business, Belhomme turned over his operation to his wife. Incredibly, she continued to manage it on the same terms and conditions until the overthrow of Robespierre’s Committee of  Public Safety on 9 Thermidor. Belhomme was released in 1798 and resumed control of his institution; dying there in 1824 at the age of eighty-seven.

The question has to be asked. The “what if” begs a response. Could you imagine Naomi Campbell and Berlusconi as “patients” of Dr. Belhomme? .It is to be assumed that French nobility and the aristocracy of 1793 were not the best behaved, if we compare them to the English version found in the caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray. One can only surmise how Belhomme would has responded to Silvio Berlusconi’s demands for exotic lap and pole dancers. It is plausible that Berlusconi is the reincarnation of Alfred Jarry and his “pataphysics of protocol” . An insane asylum for the following cast is not that far-fetched:

Silvio Berlusconi received a pole and lap dance during an official visit to Brazil, it was claimed yesterday. The Italian premier, 73, who has been involved in a series of sleaze scandals in the past year, was said to have been entertained by six dancers in a hotel room. But aides in his office said reports of an exotic dance show were ‘wide of the mark’, describing the event as a ‘brief display of traditional local dancing’.

Thomas Rowlandson. Lady Emma hamilton

Belhomme’s rules did encourage plenty of house visitors however:

Miss Valenca added: ‘We were told that they were looking for Brazilian dancers for a show in Italy that would be broadcast in two weeks’ time. ‘Berlusconi was very charming. He said that he wanted to take Brazilian dancers to Italy.
‘We did a 12-minute lap and pole dancing show. I didn’t stay but the party went on all night.’ …

Back to business: Campbell (third from right) with (left to right) Elisabetta Gregoraci, Leonardo DiCaprio, Philip Green, her boyfriend Vladimir Doronin and an unidentified female guest at the Billionaires club in Sardinia on Sunday night Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1301725/Naomi-Campbell-arranged-gift-diamonds-Late-night-delivery-surprise.html#ixzz0yL4lf9sd

If house rules prevent importing such exoticism, the charming Italian P.M may have been able to prevail on Naomi Campbell:

The woman Naomi Campbell once regarded as her ‘surrogate mother’ yesterday cast grave doubts on the supermodel’s account of how she received ‘blood diamonds’ from an African despot. Her former agent Carole White told a war crimes trial that Miss Campbell was promised the gems as a gift from ex-Liberian president Charles Taylor and accepted them by arrangement from two of his henchmen.

The damning testimony was in stark contrast to the model’s earlier evidence to the international court in The Hague that the diamonds were delivered – out of the blue – to her hotel room in the middle of the night, and she had no idea who had sent them. While Miss Campbell said she barely remembered meeting Taylor at a dinner in Pretoria in 1997 hosted by Nelson Mandela, Miss White insisted the model and the dictator had been ‘flirting’ through the evening.

Another witness, American actress Mia Farrow, said she had heard the model boast that she had received ‘a huge diamond’ from Taylor when they were guests at a celebrity-studded dinner hosted by South African president Nelson Mandela in September 1997.
Miss Campbell told the court last week that she had received three small, uncut diamonds but had not known who had sent the ‘dirty looking pebbles’. But Miss White told the court there were five or six gemstones, and that Miss Campbell had not only known who sent them, but made the arrangements for their delivery personally.

Finally,what possible Reign of  Terror could be complete without the gracious presence of Dr. Laura Schlessinger. The nightly variety show held around the clavecin could have been further animated by this long time and perhaps chronic care “patient”, if they let her come down from the attic.  Schelessinger’s  Her views are actually quite complementary to values held dear by the old guard. Only. if a web-cam could be installed to watch Belhomme in his unpleasant business of expelling this trio. Seeing him give a few days grace and then, if the required liquidity was not forthcoming, well, the axe, quite literally, would fall. And perhaps to more than a smattering of applause.

"That Great Equalizer" During the French Revolution and the Terror that followed, the new government executed tens of thousands of members of the former ruling classes. In 1792 Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814) invented an improved version of an ancient execution machine that was vigorously employed during the rule of the Jacobins from 1793 to 1794. The French government and other governments adopted the method of execution widely through the 19th century. A weighted blade, raised between two upright posts, would be released to descend to sever the head of the victim. Dr. Guillotin had intended the device to provide a more humane and sure form of execution than the sometimes inaccurate blow by an axman, hanging on ...

…The script for the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution was in serious need of a philosopher. And fast. For whatever reason, Nietzsche is the name that seemed to pop up when the script writers needed one. In Good Will Hunting, the therapist Sean (Robin Williams) asks Will (Matt Damon) whether he has a soul mate. Will says he has several, including Shakespeare and Nietzsche. In The Fisher King, Jack (Jeff Bridges), seriously drunk, remarks that “Nietzsche says there’s two kinds of people in the world: people who are destined for greatness like Walt Disney … and Hitler. Then there’s the rest of us, ‘the bungled and the botched.’ We’re the expendable masses.” And so, it was decided that Nietzsche, despite the handicap of being German, would be the poster boy for the French Revolution. …

" His son - who later became King Louis Philippe - insisted that Orléans was never personally ambitious; so was he truly an idealist, or did he fund the revolution in a fit of pique? Was Jacobinism a hobby to him, like his intrepid ballooning or his pornography collection? After the death of the king he became politically isolated. He called himself "the slave of faction". France was at war but, as Danton said, the national convention was a more dangerous place to be than the army. Philippe was guillotined in November 1793, having dined that day on oysters and lamb cutlets. His last words, to the executioner, were "Get on with it."

A visitor searching today’s Paris for the “monuments historique” of the French Revolution is likely to return home disappointed. Gone is the hotel where Charlotte Corday spent the night before she murdered Marat, gone to all intents and purposes Robespierre’s lodgings on the rue Saint-Honoré , gone the Jacobin Club and the Temple Tower.Even the palace of the Tuileries, the rallying point of so much disturbance, has vanished forever. The French, who have raised anecdotal history, “la petite histoire” , to a level approaching art, have been notably unsentimental about preserving the monuments that are so integral a part of that history.

On the rue de Charonne, at the far edge of the unvisited eleventh arrondissement, one more irreplaceable relic of the Revolution was only demolished in the early 1970′s. Its disappearance is to be regretted, for its walls were witness to one of the strangest stories in the repertory of revolutionary anecdote.

"In 1793, in the ultimate show of disloyalty and hypocrisy, Chartres cast his vote in favor of sending Louis XVI to the guillotine. Louis Philippe Joseph d'Orleans, a prince of the blood, one of the most powerful aristocrats in all of France, condoned and supported regicide. His actions deeply wounded his wife, Adélaïde. She did not agree with his political waffling, nor his underhanded, spiteful tactics. In Ghosthunter, Marsden writes that the memories stored in inanimate objects could be replayed if the conditions were right, if the people present were "sensitive to such paranormal emanations." Paranormal emanations? I know. It sounds like a ridiculous heap of stinking crap, doesn't it? Still, I can't help but wonder if the rings of the Duc and Duchesse de Chartres would emanate any particular memories. Would they project the hope and joy the young, naive Adélaïde must have felt when her dashing duke slipped the bands on her finger? Or would they convey the heartbreak she suffered when she first discovered her husband was as faithless as a hound in heat? Or perhaps the slender golden bands would emanate the profound sorrow Adélaïde surely felt upon learning that her gentle, sweet, much beloved sister-in-law, Princess Lamballe, had been raped, mutilated, and decapitated, her head stuck on a pike and marched through the squalid city streets. "

In the opening days of the revolution the building at 70 rue de Charonne housed a small insane asylum owned and administered by one Dr. Jacques Belhomme. Belhomme’s insitution should not be confused with the madhouse of similar address at Charenton where the Marquis de Sade spent his declining years and which was the inspiration for the play “Marat/Sade” . In its own fashion the Maison Belhomme might have offered  the dramatist almost as macabre a setting. But to understand the significance of what Belhomme’s insane asylum was to become during the Reign of Terror, one must first have some picture of the Terror itself.

… Nietzsche is  appealing to the Reign  because his life sounds like a narrative for the event. Certainly the combination of confidence and madness makes him highly pertinent.  He believed he was changing the world and he was right, like a Robespierre. His unrequited love for the exotic Lou Andreas-Salomé, a Russian-born psychoanalyst and friend of Wagner and Freud, promises both excitement and melancholy; it could be the storyline that would fit the passions of Philippe Egalité or Talleyrand.

The rumour about his incestuous affair with his sister adds perverse interest. And then there’s the horse story, often repeated, not quite authenticated, but certainly cinematic: In 1888, when he saw a man whipping a horse, he ran to the animal and threw his arms around its neck to protect it. Then he fell to the ground, unconscious. ….

" If you want to understand the historical moment, however, better to read Carlyle's The French Revolution, which describes Robespierre, at the moment of his downfall, as "unhappiest of windbags blown nigh to bursting". Even Anatole France can't beat that."

Until the autumn of 1793, despite more than three years of revolution, the day-by-day life of Paris had continued in a more or less normal course. The acrimonious political disputes that raged within the Convention and the Assembly did not really disturb the average citizen. For most people the principal effect of the Revolution was food shortage; but this had always been a problem in Paris and three years of revolution and the dethornement of the king had not ameliorated matters.

"In September 1793, the "Reign of Terror" spread all over the country. This was a cruel period when France was killing its people by hundreds in a frightening movement of rage and decadence. People were arrested and executed without trial if they were accused of being enemies of the revolution. It is estimated that about 40,000 people died during this 15 month period."

Still, despite severe controls, the price of food continued to rise. By 1792 it had become frightening, and hunger or the fear of it undoubtedly added fuel to the rioting and uprisings that rocked Paris between 1789 and the autumn of 1793. When one reads today of the massacre on the Champ de Mars, of the September massacres, of the June 20 assault on the Tuileries, or of the historic August 10 attack on that palace, one might wonder how life in Paris during those days in Paris during those days could be described as continuing on its normal course. One must try to put oneself back in the city as it was in 1790.

It should be remembered that the wide boulevards that cut through today’s city did not exist then. In its general appearance Paris of the revolution was still a medieval city, a conglomeration of crooked streets and fetid, cobbled alleys, many of which, like a maze, led nowhere. In 1790, for reasons of administrative convenience, the city had been split into forty-eight wards called sections, but this in no way affected the character of the age-old parishes into which Paris had been divided into centuries before. These parishes were distinct in flavor as to form a series of self-sufficient little towns within the larger community of Paris itself. One was baptised and married, one lived and died within the same parish.

Paul Delaroche. "As the terrible year of 1793 unfolded, the Girondins discovered themselves successively overthrown, expelled from the Convention, proscribed, and hunted. Though many more — Girondists and others — were to follow in their steps, the trial of these 21 before the Revolutionary Tribunal and subsequent guillotining, the first notable mass-execution of the Revolution, raised the curtain on the Terror."

…Nietzsche speculated on “eternal recurrence,” the idea that human life endlessly repeats itself in precisely the same form, over and over. He considered that process burdensome, and so probably did the forty thousand souls who had their heads severed. Sort of like Woody Allen’s character, Mickey, in Hannah and Her Sisters: “He said that the life we lived we’re gonna live over again the exact same way. Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.” ….

Early in 1793, the atmosphere of Paris suddenly changed and the Revolution entered that phase known as the Reign of Terror. Although the subject has been studied to exhaustion, even tearful boredom; what has been overlooked, is the point of view and perspective of the ordinary Parisians of the time, people who were not of the prescribed nobility, nor part of the mob, not engaged in the factional battles of the Convention. Most of them were ignorant of the various factors that we today, in the safety of time, and academic horsepower, have learned were the factors that were instrumental in the making of the Terror.

"On January 21, 1793, King Louis was guillotined, an episode which created political turmoil; from January to May, Marat fought bitterly with the Girondins, whom he believed to be covert enemies of republicanism. The Girondins won the first round when the Convention ordered that Marat should be tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal. However, their plans were scuppered when Marat was acquitted and returned to the Convention with a greatly enhanced public profile and popular support. Read more: http://www.myspace.com/jeanpaul

The Parisian of 1793-94 saw only two of these elements. And very clearly. The first was the Revolutionary Tribunal, whose sentence, with few exceptions was death. And the second was the terrible Law of Suspects which fed the Tribunal its raw material; its victims. The last article on this list that struck at the ordinary people of  Paris, for to obtain a Certificate of Good Citizenship one had to appear before the Vigilance Committee of one,s local section and make application for this paper whose possession would mean life or death. Many section leaders were relatively honest, good men; prototypes of the austere and incorruptible patriots envisioned by Robespierre in the distant sanctum of the Committee of Public Safety.  Others, not surprisingly, were of weaker clay. So there was according to the historian Taine, a fair amount of bribery and sexual favors exchanged in order to have dossiers mislaid. 

…Long before the French Revolution and Vigilance Committees,  the best-known Nietzsche readers anywhere were two college students in Chicago, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. In the 1920s they saw themselves as supermen whose exceptional intelligence put them beyond good and evil. As Leopold wrote to Loeb, a superman’s superior qualities exempt him from “the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.”

They decided to demonstrate that theory by committing, for thrill and satisfaction, a perfect murder, the kidnapping and killing of a 14-year-old. When they were caught their parents hired America’s greatest lawyer, Clarence Darrow, who argued against the death penalty on the grounds that the killers “took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously” and it’s not fair to hang boys for philosophy taught to them at university. Leopold and Loeb received life sentences. The story became the basis of a play, Rope, which Alfred Hitchcock adapted in 1948 with James Stewart as the teacher who taught Nietzsche to the murderers. In 1956 Meyer Levin wrote a novel, Compulsion, later adapted as a film with Orson Welles in the Darrow part. ….

Death of Marat. Jacques-Louis David

Every description of the day indicates that what made these local Vigilance Committees particularly odious was the power their members had to score off old rancors. Neighborhood enmities, including street squabbles between women, were undoubtedly at rthe origin of many arrests effected by the section leaders. When one realizes that these arrests were equivalent to death, one can then understand why this phase of the Revolution has been called the Reign of Terror.

The executions were few at first, but after the learning curve, they picked up speed at a startling rate. Belhomme, in the Popincourt section of Paris, had always been a popular figure, and an enthusiastic partisan of the “new ideas” expected of a solid patriot. It was only natural that he be given a position of responsibility on his local committee. In this capacity, he came upon the inspired idea of converting his insane asylum into a prison. Even before the Law of Suspects, the jails of paris were at standing room only.

Madame Tussauds started her trade by making death masks from the victims of the guillotine. These faces are remodelled from those originals.

The authorities had been obliged to find new places of incarceration for suspects awaiting trial. Belhomme’s asylum would not only answer a civic, it would also respond to a special need.His prison was not to be like the others; as a man of medecine he proposed his facility be put at the disposal of those who were too sick or infirm to be brought to immediate trial.

It seems odd that in the midst of the French Revolution special consideration might be given to anyone, let alone the sick. But the Reign of Terror is, in fact, filled with such incongruities. Even the pitifil creatures at the Conciergerie were able, if they could afford it, to rent a less verminous mattress on which to spend their last few nights of life. Not far from the gates of the Conciergerie there was even a catering service and one could send out for a bottle of champagne and the wing of a chicken. At the Luxembourg one or two dowagers were still attended by their faithful maids.

"Who now reads Anatole France? Clearly Glyn Maxwell, who has boldly turned France's once-celebrated 1912 novel about the reign of terror, Les Dieux Ont Soif, into a play. It is a decent, honourable work that raises the expected questions about the bloody price of revolution. But you feel the drama is overshadowed both by the momentous public events and an infinitely greater play about the period in question, Büchner's Danton's Death."

It was in this spirit that Belhomme’s prison was conceived. There was not enough room for all the sick and infirm scattered in the prisons of paris. the line would have to be drawn somewhere. Revolution or no revolution, the realities of the world went on: the larks don’t fall from the skies already roasted… In short, Dr. Belhomme’s clients would be expected to pay their board and keep. And pay they did. The initial fee, once one had established contact with those empowered to make the negotiations, could be as high as six thousand livres. Upon payment of this sum, one was pronounced too “sick” to stand trial, transferred out of whatever disagreeable prison one happened to be in, and committed to Jacques Belhomme’s remarkable “maison de santé”.

… One of the best examples of how to survive and prosper during a Reign of Terror, regardless of time and locale, can be found in the film  Baby Face (1933), starring the young Barbara Stanwyck. its advice is err… quite explicit. Stanwyck’s character is a small-town waitress forced into prostitution by her father.  An old man who comes into the restaurant tells her she should make something of herself and gives her a copy of The Will to Power, the posthumous collection of Nietzsche’s essays.

The next time he comes in she acknowledges that she found the book hard going. “You read it!” he says. “That’s the best book ever. Nietzsche was a great man.” She studies it and decides that sex is the way to get better jobs. She methodically sleeps her way up the ranks of a New York bank, from a clerk in the personnel office to the executive suite. During one crisis she pulls out her copy of Nietzsche and we watch her read an underlined paragraph about asserting herself. In the end she falls convincingly in love — but her new love just happens to be a major executive in the bank, played by George Brent. She’s become a practical philosopher, turning Nietzsche into a how-to book for gold-diggers.