Protest and revolution.

  Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,
  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
  The ceremony of innocence is drowned
  The best lack all conviction, while the worst
  Are full of passionate intensity ...
  --W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Note: I undertook to produce for this issue an article on the making of Salt of the Earth, but my discovery of James L. Lorence's magnificent and exhaustive book ('The Suppression of Salt of the Earth', University of New Mexico Press, 1999) has rendered this superfluous. I was also planning a far longer introduction, but the excellence and very generous responses of my contributors left me no space. I am going to restrict myself to two topics only: global warming and Aulis Sallinen.

Global Warming

One of my most vivid (if probably wildly inaccurate) childhood memories (I must have been fourteen, but a dreadfully introspective and hypersensitive fourteen) is of a newsreel I saw in the cinema of the end of Mussolini. The (perhaps imaginary) image I retain is of the body hanging upside down while people desecrated it with sticks, hatchets, etc ... I closed my eyes but it was too late. It haunted my nightmares for years. It seems to me that, ten? twenty? fifty? years from now something very similar will be enacted upon the bodies (dead or alive) of our corporate capitalists when the general populace finally awakens to what they've done to our planet. It will of course be too late--just as Mussolini's death was too late. And it's not my idea of justice: rather, it's the impotent rage of a mob who realize (but refuse to admit it) that it's their fault for not acting much sooner, for remaining what is dubiously called 'innocent: the corpses will be mere scapegoats, and life on our planet will already be beyond repair. According to many reputable scientists, there may be no life on our planet.

The question of course is 'But what can we do?', and it's a very difficult one to answer. It's no use appealing to our governments to take the necessary drastic measures to curb pollution and the devastation of the planet: they rely on corporate capitalism for funding for their elections. They presumably know what risks they are taking, but apparently their careers are more important. The only hope is popular revolt and a massive swerve to the Left, and that seems most unlikely to happen, or to happen soon enough. The most powerful nation in the world (whose participation would be essential) has a president who 'doesn't believe' in global warming. It is also a nation from which the Left has been effectively eradicated: its voters are offered only a choice between a moderate Right and an extreme (or immoderate) one. Canada is not that much better, with a (very moderate) socialist party that seems primarily concerned with not offending anybody. It is not just the United States that is the enemy. The people of my own adopted country are either ignorant of the issues or simply so uncaring that they elected a conservative government, with entirely predictable results. So Canada has joined the United States in its inexorable progress towards universal devastation. Meanwhile, as climate change escalates, temperatures rise, 'natural' disasters (which are anything but natural) become more frequent and more extreme, corporate capitalism sees to it that its ever more mystified populace are deluded into what is generally regarded as happiness, with the availability of more and more gadgetry, newer and newer fashions, 'the latest', with which we all have to keep up, rock, pop, TV sitcoms, outpourings of emptier and ever more repetitive Hollywood sex comedies, crazy comedies, horror, torture, dumbing down ... And on we go to the ending of all life on our planet. The time for socialist revolution is now, not when it is too late. Tell your neighbours. And ask your candidates how they relate to the corporations.

Aulis Sallinen: a composer for our time

I read or heard recently (I'm no longer sure where or from whom) of 'the death of classical music' (which seems to me infinitely more important, as our inheritance, than the death of cinema, on which it has a start of several hundred years), with Stravinsky named as 'the last great composer'. No one admires Stravinsky's music (as opposed to certain aspects of the man, such as his political 'innocence'--as Orson Welles tells us somewhere, a very dubious commodity) more than I do, but I believe the statement to be premature, perhaps based merely upon ignorance. Stravinsky died more than thirty years ago. The title of 'last great composer' may perhaps be more fittingly applied to the greatest Finnish composer (with all due respect to Sibelius), Aulis Sallinen, who is still very much with us and two years younger than myself: the composer of an extraordinary oeuvre that includes (so far) eight symphonies, six operas, five string quartets, a violin and a cello concerto, and numerous shorter pieces. What is he doing in the introduction to an issue of a film magazine dedicated to 'Protest and Revolution'? He is present because those are precisely what his music is about. (All the above works are available on CDs except his latest opera, King Lear, which will doubtless join them soon; one opera, Palatsi, a satirical assault on power, is also out on DVD). 'The last great composer'?--there is certainly an air of despair in his music, a long with the rage and the protest--music that is, in the widest sense, certainly political, which what seem to me its obvious if distant influences, Libelous (or perhaps simply the Nordic inheritance, the desolation of Tapiola) and Stravinsky (for his rhythmic and harmonic freedom and experimentation), were not. I get up around five every morning and by six I'm usually listening to music on my headphones. A few mornings ago I suddenly realized that tears were streaming down my cheeks, without my having been aware of it. The tears were occasioned by Sallinen's fourth symphony. 'Pure music', without any acknowledged programme, it seemed to sum up so much of what I've been needing lately: music of immense power and strength, that simultaneously acknowledges both despair and determination--without optimism, but with a refusal to give up the struggle.

It is music that absolutely refuses the kind of uplift, optimism and positive energies that have sustained us in the past: they are no longer available to us except as cherished memories. We cannot today expect any equivalent of an Ode to Joy, a Marriage of Figaro, a 'Great C Major': our world no longer sustains them--which is not of course to suggest that we should stop listening to them: in a better world, if any of us live to see one, they will resume their rightful places in human experience. Today they seem reminders of something we have lost, a phenomenon we called civilization, with all its inequalities and inequities alongside its richness and its creativity. What remains today seems primarily a reminder of the last days of the Roman Empire, but worldwide.

What is striking about Sallinen's music is precisely its fragmentariness. He himself sees his works (or certain of them) in terms of 'mosaics': they are composed, not of broad melodies, but of fragments juxtaposed and re-formed in different patterns ('These fragments have I shored against my ruin' ...). He entitled his fifth symphony (a work predominantly characterized by a sense of rage and desolation, and commissioned by an American orchestra with what seems today perfect irony) 'Washington Mosaics'; his most recent string quartet is subtitled 'Pieces of Mosaic'. The eighth symphony, a skeletal masterpiece, is subtitled 'Autumnal Fragments'; it could be described as humanity's final struggle against the all-pervasive, dehumanized percussion, a work without comfort but haunted by the intermittent memory of a lost plenitude, one of its episodes clearly suggesting birdsong in a landscape of desolation. In the fifth symphony one has to wait until some minutes into the third movement before encountering anything that could be called a 'tune'. The music's greatness arises from the continuous reforming, repatterning, rebuilding of the fragments, creating a structure of great power even when it's the power of desolation and despair.

Classical music is not dead yet. It is alive and well and living in Finland, and available to anyone with ears to hear ...

    ... And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches
    toward Bethlehem to be born?
    W. B. Yeats (ibid)

This is the last issue of CineAction that I shall be editing. I am retiring from the collective but intend to continue writing, in my own time and at my own pace.

--Robin Wood