Dagen H (Any resemblance to ice cream is purely coincidental)

While on the subject of films, but otherwise completely unrelated to the Oscars, so excuse me, I went to see the Hollywood version of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, a couple of weeks ago. I suppose at this point I should bow my head and admit to the shame of having read and enjoyed the Millennium Trilogy. Moving swiftly on, I found the film to present an accurate portrayal of the novel with the characters, settings and events, meeting my expectations. However, there was one incident, the details of which I have been trying to recall without success. The story involves a flashback scene to 1965 and a motor accident that occurred on a bridge. What I have been trying to remember is whether the film shows the cars driving on the left or the right. Some of you may remember that until 1967 cars in Sweden drove on the left. What adds a little bit of spice to the story is that Swedish cars were a ‘left hand drive’ as well. It should be fairly easy to spot such an anomaly, so if any of you have seen the film and can recall the moment, perhaps you can put me out my misery and let me know whether the producers got it right.

I am keen to see the Swedish version of the film which I know that some people preferred to the American version, though I suppose it is safe to say, ‘they would wouldn’t they’. I wonder whether they got it right with the bridge scene.

Note: the day on which the Swedes changed sides 3rd September 1967, was known as Dagen H. You can read more about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

Will Meryl do Julia next?

Awesome photo: Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher in Film4 part-production The Iron Lady. Australia"s Prime Minister Julia Gillard speaks during a news conference at Parliament House in Canberra on 27 February, 2012

I can’t wait for the announcement that Ms Streep, still bouffant from her Maggie efforts, will accept the challenge presented by Australia’s own iron lady, who has seen off her closest rival in short order.  It was understandable that the top 2012 oscar honours went to a silent film, when the alternative was to reward  those famously strident tones echoing along Downing Street. But as voices go, Julia’s deserves to be immortalised too – and who better than Meryl to pull it off? A bit of a red rinse and hey presto!

Orientalism?

Oriental. Orientalist. Orientalism. The terms used to be simple with a meaning commonly agreed upon. From the perspective of the people who were charting new naval passages and drawing the maps, Asia was to the east. Hence, the use of the Latin term for it.
Logically a person who studied the Orient would be called an Orientalist, the study itself could be described as Orientalism. Things being as they were, it made sense. Then came that snivelling pseudo-intellectual twazek, Edward Said, and decided that he knew better and that everything would have to change because he wanted it to.

This leads me to, at long last, ask the central question — is it fair, or even relevant, to subject literature, scholarship, and art that was painted decades, if not centuries, before to a contemporary mindset?

This topic has come into my mind because I have just finished reading the Travels of Marco Polo. It was great fun. Perhaps the accuracy is dubious, but the stories are entertaining and the style quick and easy. The task for next week is to try to see if there was a vein “Orientalism”, using Said’s hijacking of the term, in it. It certainly did involve the East, the Orient. It was also told from the perspective of a Venetian from a different day and age. Was it world-class scholarship? Hardly. But does it deserve negative scrutiny, to be drug through the dirt because some prat writing in the 1970s decided that he wanted to kick up a fuss? Hardly.

It seems facile to accept Said’s perspective, to impose it on a different era. “Orientalist Painting” was simply an outgrowth of Romanticism. The fantastic, the improbable, the exaggerated in the paintings of the East were really not that much different from the depictions of the West at different times in its history — the romanticisation  of the Mediaeval Era, of the countryside. More broadly, was the use of East Asian motifs in 18th and 19th century Europe, UK, and the Americas really any different than the Ch’ing Emperors living in a summer palace that blended traditional Chinese styles with the Baroque? Cultural interchange has always gone both ways, not always evenly.