The late Clive James wrote-
Edward Said (1935–2003) was the most spectacular intellectual asset of the Palestinians in exile.
James 'read' English. Thus, he considered Said an 'intellectual'. But Palestinians considered Mahmoud Abbas, who had a PhD from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, to be their greatest intellectual asset. Indeed, he is still, at 90, the President of the Palestinian State as recognized by UK, France, etc.
Because he had been exiled all the way to Columbia University,
He was an American citizen who went to American Prep School & Colleges.
where he was professor of english and comparative literature, it was possible to say, as the perennial crisis in the Middle East continued to shape his scholarly and critical work, that he was caught between New York and a hard place.
No it wasn't. Said family’s holiday home is in the Lebanese village of Dhour el Shweir. His sister taught at the American University of Beirut. Still, it is true that the family lost property in Israel. Boo fucking hoo.
But there is no call to doubt his integrity just because he had been raised in transit on luxury liners, laurelled at Princeton and Harvard, and otherwise showered with all the rewards that Western civilization can bestow.
More importantly, his family was Anglican (or Episcopalian, in America). Thus, even fellow Palestinian Christians felt his people were opportunistic turn-coats.
What can be doubted is his accuracy. His influential book Orientalism (1978) painted a picture in which Western students of African, Arab and Eastern cultures had practised racist imperialism under the guise of a search for knowledge.
Whereas Arabs had practised racist imperialism by killing people and taking over their territory.
The book was hugely influential: its “narratives of oppression” became the tunnels through which non-Western academics came to preferment in the West.
They got to teach worthless shite. What is the point of 'reading' Literature at Collidge unless you are congenitally illiterate?
Said’s ideas found such favour on the international left that he became a whipping boy for the right, but it is important to say that there were some Arab thinkers who equally found Orientalism a wrong-headed book.
It isn't important at all unless you studied stupid shite at Uni.
According to them, it encouraged a victim mentality by enabling failed states to blame the West for their current plight:
James did not live to see diversity-hire, Kamala, blaming everybody but herself for her defeat.
a patronizing idea, common to the Western left, which the emerging non-Western intelligentsia would find that much harder to rebut when endorsed by someone with Said’s credentials and prestige.
The intelligentsia didn't read Said. People studying worthless shite at Uni did. Why? Grievance Studies went hand in hand with Affirmative Action. You have to admit shitheads because you need the tuition fee income. Find some shit for them to 'study'. Then appoint them Professors of utter shit.
Though most of Said’s Western admirers were never aware of it, this ambiguity marked Said’s written work thoughout his career: he was continually telling the people he professed to be rescuing from Western influence
He never made any such claim. He wasn't the Arab Ali Shariarti. He wasn't even the Palestinian Michel Aflaq.
that they were helpless in its embrace. A quality of self-defeating ambiguity also characterized Said’s role as a practical diplomat.
James is ignorant. He doesn't get that Republican administrations always tried to get Israel to revert to something close to its '67 borders. Reagan was bound to continue the 'Rodgers Plan' approach after he and Gorby reached a modus vivendi. Reagan also set the ball rolling on ending Apartheid after the Cubans agreed to pull out of Angola. Said could have been useful if he had Arafat's ear. But what really mattered was the Soviet Union. Once it started to unravel, all bets were off.
In 1988 he helped secure the breakthrough by which the Palestinian National Council finally recognized the State of Israel’s right to exist,
He could play no role because the US would not then, and still will not, recognize Palestine. What mattered was that Egypt's recognition of Israel had held up. The other factor was the Syrian intervention in Lebanon. Assad didn't like Arafat. He had sent his soldiers to help the Christian Maronites against the PLO in 1976. The Taif agreement in 1989 confirmed the marginalization of the Palestinians. Syrian forces only left the country in 2005. Arafat had to accept that everybody else in the region had their own modus vivendi with Israel.
but in 1991 he resigned in protest at the Oslo peace process, before Arafat had even had a chance to scupper it.
Because he was useless.
If a solution had been secured it could well have meant that the lives of everyone involved on the Palestinian side of the negotiating table would have been forfeit, but Said was unlikely to be put off by Arab extremists, who for a long time had been threatening him with death in one ear just as loudly as extreme Zionists had been threatening him in the other.
Why kill a useless Professor of a worthless subject?
Yet Said was exemplary in his insistence that Israel had an historic claim in Palestine and that anti-Semitism, with the Holocaust as its centrepiece, had better be understood by the Arab nations or there would be no end to the conflict.
This is hilarious. There is money in conflict. There isn't in teaching Literature.
When he simplified history, it wasn’t because he was a simpleton:
It was because he was had spent his life studying and teaching shit. This is a guy who noted that you need to tell your Graduate students that Dr. Jonathan Swift was not a medical Doctor. If, in one of his texts, he mentions the project of turning shit into food, this does not mean you should stir your own turds into your coco-pops. Don't eat your own shit. It is bad for you.
though many a buffoon hoped to acquire points for intelligence by sitting beside him,
Arafat was a buffoon- albeit a homicidal one.
his dignity was unimpaired, and he still looked wise even when accompanied by Tariq Ali looking serious.
Tariq Ali's celebrity predated Said's. Also, he was a Pakistani Aristocrat. The Pakistanis had clever diplomats and might use Ali to send a message or seal a deal. What was hilarious was General Zia and the Pak Air Force, slaughtering Palestinians during Black September, with the tab being picked up by Saudi Arabia. The PLO supplied anti-aircraft missiles to the Bhutto brothers so they could try to avenge the death of their father by bringing down the Presidential plane. They muffed it. Later, the younger was poisoned by his Afghan wife (or so the Bhutto family believe) while the older was killed on orders of his brother-in-law.
Said’s writing on the arts, at its best, has the exuberance that his writing on one art, music, always has.
Do Musicians find it valuable? Or, is his writing on art itself of great artistic merit? If not, it matters as little as whether Said farted exuberantly or scratched his arse in a lugubrious manner.
He played the piano to professional standard: a piquant demonstration that the Western and non-Western worlds of creativity had not been symmetrical.
Fuck does that mean? Prof. Leavis was shite at playing the Didgeridoo?
But his answer to that was convincing: if both sides had not created the music, they could both perform it.
Which is why F.R Leavis was greatly remiss in not playing the Didgeridoo to an acceptable standard.
After his death, his orchestra plays on: the West-Eastern Divan, founded by him and Daniel Barenboim, has performed in the Occupied Territories.
And weren't taken hostage. Sadly, they refused to play the Didgeridoo. At the very least, they could have hired a token wallaby in the strings section.
Said was an accomplished and charming man who presented his admirers on the left with the dangerous illusion that by appreciating his writings they were being fast-tracked to an understanding of the history of the Middle East in a refined form,
Nonsense! He'd have had to bang on about the vested interests of big corporations to achieve that. Said was too lazy to go down that particular rabbit-hole.
without having to study it in further detail. There were non-Western scholars who thought that he had the same illusion about his nominal subject, and that no Orientalist has ever been more damagingly superficial than he.
No. The notion that 'colonial epistemic systems' must be dismantled chimes with the old anti-colonial ideology which became the basis for State sponsored postcolonial ideology in the Global South. Thus, if the Indians decide to call their Penal Code the 'Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita', some hack will mention Said's Orientalism.
There can be no doubt, alas, that some of his themes were cartoons. His argument that every Orientalist racist imperialist scholar since the Enlightenment was furthering the territorial ambitions of his home country broke down on the obvious point that the best of them came from Germany, which before the twentieth century had no colonies to speak of.
So what? The fact is Hanover- which was in personal union with England- got in on the act first and did earn some money from John Company. Germany had a lot of Universities. Its pedants were poor. They could get paid a little money for doing donkey work which actual colonial administrators from other countries might nevertheless find it worthwhile to subsidize.
Simply because they believed in the objective nature of knowledge, the great European students of foreign cultures were all humanists before they were imperialists,
Fuck off! Most were Missionaries or believed in Proselytization save where that would be fatal to the commercial and geopolitical interests of their country.
and often defended the first thing against the second, out of love and respect.
The fact is, if you study recondite shite, you have to pretend it is really Humanistic recondite shite.
Today’s Indian scholars of Indian languages
are poorly paid pedants
further the work of English scholars whose names they revere,
Like whom? G.U Pope? Caldwell? This may have been true a hundred years ago. Today, there is the awareness that crazy linguistic chauvinism and sub-nationalism gave rise to corrupt, gangsterish, local politics.
The plain fact is, there is no part of the world where scholars of Literature or Philology are respected.
one fact among the many that Said found it convenient either not to mention or never to know.
He was an Arab Anglican. His Bishops were happy to gas on about such things till the cows came home.
Also his idea that Napoleon had wrecked Egypt’s advance into the modern age was not one shared by Naguib Mahfouz, who said that Egypt had Napoleon to thank for everything modern it possessed.
The French had to leave quite soon. Mehmet Ali- an Albanian by birth- took over after the French withdrawal. He was the founder of modern Egypt. Mahfouz's charm, as a writer, is his resistance to the siren song of Pan-Arabism. Like Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, he saw Egypt as possessing a distinct culture and nationality.
Said was right to this extent, however: Occidental intellectuals find out very little about what is thought and written in the Oriental world.
Intellectuals tend to be ignorant and stupid. If they aren't we would call them rich dudes or dudes with a lot of power.
Very few of Said’s admirers in the West could begin to contemplate
anything at all. They were too stupid.
the fact that there are some bright people in the East who thought of Said as just another international operator doing well out of patronizing them, and with less excuse.
Still, if your son or daughter is a complete moron, they might as well do a PhD in Saidian shite and get tenure on the basis of affirmative action.
I finished writing the piece that follows not long before Said finally succumbed to cancer, and I have left it in the present tense to help indicate that I was treating him as a living force, brave in a cause that was very short of his kind of soldier.
Because the Palestinians need terrorists not tenured Professors.
'I pressed harder. What about the admiring caresses lavished by the camera on Mathieu marching into Algiers?'
—EDWARD SAID, REFLECTIONS ON EXILE, P. 286
The natural answer to the question would be to ask how lavishly Said had caressed his dick till it jizzed into his popcorn as he gazed longingly at the French dude in question.
ANNOYINGLY UNDATED except for its opening phrase, “A few months ago,” Said’s essay on Gillo Pontecorvo
the runt of the litter of a high IQ Jewish family.
is the account of a personal meeting that probably took place in the late 1990s, by which time Pontecorvo had not made a film in many years.
By then, Islamists in Algeria were discovering what the Army already knew- viz. the French had won the war. It was just that the game was not worth the candle- financially speaking. That changed when oil prices soared. France and Italy soon became best buds of the dictators in their former North African colonies.
But he had once, in 1966, made a film that Said continues to admire as a masterwork of political analysis: The Battle of Algiers.
I saw it in Baghdad. The message was simple. Bull doze the fucking Souk. Get rid of the old narrow streets. Anti-Baathist elements- Islamists, Bazaari Capitalists, Feudalists- are likely to entrench themselves there.
I feel the same, but for different reasons,
Pontecorvo married a wallaby who played the Didgeridoo?
and by focusing on the second of these two quoted sentences it is easy to make the difference plain. Said wants the film to be an outright condemnation of imperialism,
So did I. It would have been much shorter. Just get a wallaby to play the Didgeridoo while other wallabies stand about shouting 'Fuck you Imperialism! Fuck you very much!'
with no concessions made to the forces of oppression. Said thinks that the French claims to have extended civilization to Algiers had nothing to be said for them, and that the rebellious native Algerians, whatever atrocities they might have committed, were well within their rights, considering the magnitude of the atrocity that had been committed against them.
Wallabies, too, have much to complain about.
I want the film to be what it is. It certainly does condemn imperialism, but it shows that the French imperialism in Algeria was the work of human beings, not automatons.
nor wallabies. Similarly, I want every film- even those I don't like- to be what it is rather than a wallaby up my bum. The odd thing is, I didn't 'read' English at Pembroke College. I guess I was just born stupid. Some people are lucky that way.
It need hardly be added that Said is right about how their apparently successful colonial efforts in Algeria corrupted the French into illusions of manifest destiny.
Do I need to point out that there was a dude named Napoleon who conquered a large portion of Europe? It was he who gave the French delusions of gloire. The French conquest of Algeria began 15 years after Waterloo.
Elsewhere in the same book, Said gives an exemplary caning to Tocqueville, who was respectful enough about the repressed minorities in America, but who chose to despise Islam when he became gung-ho for a French Algeria.
James should give an exemplary caning to both Tocqueville and Said for ignoring the plight of wallabies.
Said’s only mistake,
was to have studied and taught and written stupid useless shite. He may have done well as an importer of dates and other dry goods.
but a crucial one, is to question Pontecorvo’s directorial emphasis at the exact moment when Pontecorvo is being most sensitive. At his most sensitive, he is at his most comprehensive, and comprehending. In letting the camera, and thus the audience, be impressed by the French general’s heroic stature as he marches into Algiers at the head of his paratroopers, Pontecorvo shows
he knows which side his bread is buttered on. The Algerian government financed the film. Colonel Houari Boumédiène had seized power. He was the counterpart to the French General who, in consequence, must be depicted as heroic.
why he ranks with Costa-Gavras as a true auteur of the political film.
In my part of South India, films were genuinely political- i.e. changed politics. 'Reel Society' took over 'Real Society'. Film stars or Scriptwriters dominated politics.
In Costa-Gavras’s film The Confession, there is a similarly penetrating moment when Yves Montand, released from gaol, meets his torturer in the street, and can show nothing except embarrassment, while the torturer (Gabriele Ferzetti) assumes that the victim will join him in blaming the whole episode on unfortunate circumstances.
Nonsense! The torturer knows that both their fates depend on the Kremlin. The Czechs simply weren't free agents. They were a conquered people.
These are human reactions, in all their ambiguity.
In Soviet controlled Czechoslovakia- maybe. Otherwise, if you meet your torturer in the street, you very unambiguously kick his head in- if it is safe to do so.
In The Battle of Algiers, the paratroopers’ commander, Mathieu (in real life he was General Jacques Massu), is greeted with rapture by the pieds noirs as he leads his soldiers down the main street. They cheer, weep, do everything but lay palm fronds before his polished boots. He is greeted with hosannas because he looks like a saviour. Here is the man who will take the necessary measures to ensure that our innocent children are no longer blown to pieces in the nightclubs and restaurants. When the camera is on him, it has the eyes of his worshippers. If the camera bestows admiring caresses, it is because the crowd is doing the same.
I suppose the gerontocrats ruling the country in the 1990s hoped they too would be seen as Messiahs for the ruthless manner they crushed the Islamists.
Since 1834, generations of the French in Algiers had grown up believing they inhabited part of France. In 1963 they believed de Gaulle when he said that Algeria would stay French.
Nonsense! De Gaulle recognized Algerian Independence in July 3, 1962. But it was the January 1961 referendum which was decisive.
To them, the paratroopers looked like the guarantee that it would do so. The paratroopers believed it too, and the film, in its tragically logical unfolding, shows that belief being undermined by horror at the tenacity of the other belief that they encountered, and at what they must do to fight it.
Militarily, the French gained the upper hand. But the game was not worth the candle.
“Non siamo sadici,” the general tells the press: “We are not sadists,”
i.e. did not derive pleasure from inflicting pain. Sadly, a reputation for sadism can be salutary for an occupying army.
and one of the measures of the film’s unique subtlety is that we believe they are not, even as they set about doing sadistic things.
The experience of the World War showed what humanity was capable of. Forget genocide, the Great Powers were developing weapons which could blow up the entire planet.
There is a key moment when a couple of the paratroopers say a respectful “Courage!” to the man who is about to be tortured.
Perhaps they had family members who had been in the Resistance.
Said might legitimately have objected to that. In any military group conducting interrogation by violence, no matter how reluctantly the policy is pursued, there are always a few genuine enthusiasts who relish the opportunity to make their sinister dreams come true.
Sadly, torture is a specialised profession. One needs empathy and imagination to get under the skin of your victim. I suppose the French soldiers thought they were dealing with 'terrorists'.
But Said’s objection is directed elsewhere, at the very idea that the French in Algeria might have had a point in thinking that they had something to protect.
Both the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Indo-China and Algeria seem to have believed that National Glory was connected to keeping Colonies. It seemed obvious that such possessions were the source of wealth. Yet, this was not actually the case. France grew rapidly after giving up its colonies. Refugees from Algeria filled the factories and enabled France to become an affluent Welfare State.
Wedded to his conviction that imperialism is always and exclusively a force bent on destruction, Said writes as if the French could have had no reason to believe in their mission civilisatrice.
In some cases- e.g. Martinique- the colonial possession chose to remain part of France. Recently, some people in Lebanon were wishing France was still the mandatory power.
He writes as if they would only have had to take thought to see the truth.
Said himself was an admirer of French literary culture. People like him were conscious of a divided loyalty.
But they had been bred to believe that there was something to it.
It did appear that the might of the French Army would prevail. Surely, the US would back its ally against Left wing Arabs?
In the opening sequence of the movie, Pontecorvo showed that their belief was an illusion. As the future insurgents look on silently from the gaol window, an anonymous colleague, with frightening efficiency and speed, is executed in the courtyard. Civilization means the guillotine. But the pieds noirs thought the repression of the natives was incidental, not fundamental.
There is an element of truth to this. The Colonists believed that the indigenous people were tribal and lacked a sense of nationalism. They were being misled by Communist agitators who would turn the territory over to their Soviet masters. This was also a popular view in Apartheid South Africa.
They had developed a culture, had some reason to believe in its superiority, and were concerned to protect it.
Sadly, once Egypt became Nasserite, it was obvious that more and more Algerian & Libyan & Tunisian Arabs would receive military training & plenty of weaponry. The French could either fuck off or lose a war of attrition.
(There is a constant assumption behind Said’s writings that multiculturalism, in imperial times, was an a priori view that had to be suppressed by propaganda,
The French weren't into multi-culturalism. The Brits were.
rather than a view which grew out of the imperial experience as a result of the contact.)
The French believed they had a civilizing mission. The Brits believed they should conserve existing institutions- more particularly if there were kingdoms. That's the reason Uganda was a Protectorate while Kenya was a Crown Colony.
For the French in Algeria, their mission to rule by right
might, not right.
was an understandable belief. Even Camus shared it to a certain extent: he could be single-minded in despising Nazism and communism, but he was in two minds about Algeria until his last day.
French Algerians had been there for generations. Few thought they would have to leave en masse. But most became much better off as a result.
How would Said have had Pontecorvo film the scene in question, the one about the paratroopers arriving in Algiers like redeeming heroes at the striding heels of their suave commander?
He would have wanted him to enter humbly like Allenby entering Jerusalem. Don't forget, it was Allenby who insisted on u.d.i for Egypt in 1922. Back in the Thirties, it seemed possible that the Brits would favour the Arabs over the Jews. Sadly, Arab fanaticism- contained by Tegart- and the fiscal infeasibility of a Palestinian state meant that the Brits had to do a deal with the East European Jews whom they despised.
Should the actor playing him have been uglier, even though Massu looked like a film star in real life? Should his dialogue have been less subtle, even though Massu was well aware that a holding action was the best that could be hoped for, and said so? Should he have been wearing a swastika armband?
No. He should have been humble, like Allenby, and flanked by Imams and local potentates wearing robes and carrying scimitars.
Said has similar objections to the glamour of the Marlon Brando character in Pontecorvo’s other big political statement, Quemada!
A stupid film. Portugal is England's oldest ally. The Brits wouldn't try to take over a Portuguese colony. It would be cheaper to deal with the existing administration.
The imperialist looks too good.
Film stars tend to look good. That's why my own Hollywood career never took off even though I was willing to put out to Jane Fonda.
This bothers Said even though Quemada! like The Battle of Algiers, is scrupulous in attributing all the impetus and justification of history to the insurgents: scrupulous, relentless and disturbingly convincing for those of us who doubt the efficacy of the outcome.
It was stupid shit. That's why Turd Worlders wouldn't watch that shite. The plain fact is, it looked like the Kremlin's neo-colonialism- not that of the Brits who, after all, had peacefully transferred power to Socialist politicians like Nehru, Nyerere etc.
Said doesn’t doubt it, yet he detects in Pontecorvo a lingering tendency to admire the envoys of established power.
Said rejected 'established power'. He refused to remain in the US. He went to Bangladesh to help feed the starving during the 1974 famine. He also married a Trotskyite wallaby.
The same tendency can’t be imputed to Said. One detects in him a puritanical determination to remain unsullied by the blandishments of his own cultural sympathies.
One would detect this only if one also believed that Said was working on famine relief in Bangladesh while married to a Trotskyite wallaby.
As a critic and man of letters he has an enviable scope,
But he was a shite critic. If Said said 'x is a good film or novel' everybody understood that it was tedious shite.
but it is continually invaded by his political strictness. It would be foolish to blame him for this.
What was foolish was to think he had any genuine political standing.
If he had a secular Islamic intelligentsia
Secular Islamic is a fucking oxymoron.
behind him, he could leave a share of his self-imposed task to others.
There were plenty of Ivy League cretins happy to plough his sterile farrow.
But he is pretty much on his own, and needs his absolutism if he is to fight his battle.
i.e. his business is to say Whitey be debil.
Though his aesthetic judgements are often finely nuanced, there can be few nuances in his basic political position, so he is easily put out when the same turns out not to be true for an established Western radical he would like to admire without reserve.
Why can't Whites just slit their own fucking throats already?
At the end of his encounter with Pontecorvo, he is disappointed to discover that Pontecorvo
hadn't slit his own fucking throat
has been making commercials without telling anybody. The implication is that if Pontecorvo had lived up to the seriousness of his early masterpieces, he would now be living in a tent,
like Gaddaffi?
and proud of it. But Pontecorvo, until 1956, was a Communist, and Said has underestimated—or, rather, overestimated—the grandees of the Italian Communist intelligentsia.
Like other Arabs, he felt they had done a good enough job supporting Libyan independence, denouncing the monarchy, condemning Suez etc. The fly in the ointment was support by intellectuals like Toni Negri for the Zionist kibbutz which they considered a challenge to the Arab absentee landlord urban bourgeoisie
Few of them ever embraced the privations of the proletariat.
The Italian proletariat was doing okay. It was the peasants in the South who faced privation.
The Italian intellectuals of the post-war sinistra might have paid lip service to Gramsci but their true models were among the perennial left-leaning artists of Europe: the Picasso who disguised his limousine as a taxi, and the Brecht whose rough-looking blue work-shirts were tailored for him out of matted silk.
Every country had plenty of Champagne Socialists.
The luminaries of the Italian left were concerned with taking their place in a current society, not a future one.
Some thought there would be a revolution in the Seventies and that they themselves would move into the offices and mansions of the Cabinet Ministers.
Fundamentalism was corrupted by the temptations of civilization, and Said might eventually reach the conclusion that it would be better if the same thing could happen in the Islamic world.
Said's generation of Arab intellectuals assumed that 'Secular Socialist' Generals would rule the roost. If the bazaari Middle Class allied with the Mullahs and sought to take power, they would be slaughtered. Iran was a different case. It wasn't Arab.
In his fine long essay “Nationalism, Human Rights and Interpretation” (appearing as chapter 36 of Reflections on Exile) there is an encouraging sign that he has already reached it.
It suddenly occurs to him that 'Secular Socialist' kleptocrats were shite. The bazaari middle class might prevail.
He notes that the Lebanese writer Adonis,
greatly hated now because he failed to support the Syrian uprising
like Salman Rushdie, was reviled for suggesting that a strict literalism in the reading of sacred texts kills the spirit.
Hilarious! This is like saying- 'Aleister Crowley suggested that the Archbishop of Canterbury really ought to try sodomy with a goat'.
Said is only a step away from saying that no text is sacred.
The Quran isn't sacred for Christians. Nobody gives a toss about a Christian saying the Biblical God is a bit of a shit.
He is brave enough to take that step: he is used to having his life threatened.
By whom?
His other fear is the disabling one: the fear of giving aid and comfort to the automatic enemies of Islam. But one is not necessarily an enemy of Islam for saying that although all good books are holy, no book is the word of God.
Good books aren't holy.
Even the greatest books are the work of human beings, in all their frailty. Without the frailty, there would be no art, or even any thought.
If humans weren't frail, they wouldn't be humans. They would be rocks.
When Said saw the general up there on the screen looking so seductive, he
jizzed in his pants?
thought that he had caught Pontecorvo in a weak moment.
what makes for good cinema is strong from the cinematic point of view
But the weak moment was a moment of strength.
We'd rather Count Dracula be played by a handsome actor rather than a guy who looks like me.
Pontecorvo had asked himself: “How would I have reacted, if I had been a French Algerian, and had been there in the street for the arrival of the strongman who had come to reassure me that my life had not been wasted?”
Strong men don't have to be good looking.
By looking into himself, he was able to see everything else: the sign of the artist.
Because he was an artist- not an actuary.
As for Pontecorvo the ex-artist, he made those commercials
which were artistic
in order to maintain his way of life as a figure of prestige, a man who counts.
A guy who provides for his family.
And after all, the prestige was impressively brought into play when Pontecorvo strode forward as a headline act in the demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan.
Nobody gave a fuck.
There he was, up there on the screen: the great director, being lavished with the camera’s admiring caresses. One imagines that Said was pleased enough to see that.
It would have been a reminder of the utter futility of his own shitty career.
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