Storm in a late arvo teacup time ...

 

An afternoon distraction ...

First the set up in the SMH ...

High-profile film critic Shane Danielsen has left the news and culture publication The Monthly after a dispute centring on the use of the N-word in a film review, and a subsequent decision by the magazine not to run his story about controversies at the Berlin Film Festival involving the war in Gaza.
Danielsen, a Hollywood-based Australian writer, filed a review of American Fiction that included the title of the Flannery O’Connor short story The Artificial N----r, which is referred to in the script and is a key part of the film’s storyline about the fallout from a black character’s use of racially loaded language.
Danielsen spelled the N-word out in full in his copy, but the magazine’s editor, Michael Williams, argued it shouldn’t be published. A forthright email exchange followed and the critic quit, citing censorship.
Williams agreed the context “could not be clearer or more unequivocally non-racist”, and argued he shouldn’t quit over the issue. Danielsen later backtracked and apologised for what he called an overreaction.

Well yes, it can be tricky. How would you review this book?

It's a good joke, and the pond is helping advertise the book.

But apparently nuance doesn't come easily in Williams' mind, and as for the movie, it has its own challenges, albeit lesser ones...

The pond didn't mind the film. The whole gag is the way that the black demographic is perceived through a kind of period Erskine Caldwell bubble in the writing game, though the allegedly reflexive sardonic ending manages to end with a classic Hollywood ending ...

Meanwhile, back at the storm in the tea cup...

But two weeks later, Danielsen filed the first of two commissioned reports on the Berlin Film Festival, writing about the botched handling of a controversy involving the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, and the fallout from the premiere of documentary No Other Land.
Directed by Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, the documentary centred on the elimination and removal of Palestinian villages in the West Bank by Israeli settlers, and the fallout of the filmmakers’ comments.
Danielsen was told the piece would not run, with Williams saying he had revisited the American Fiction email exchange and decided he would “regretfully accept” the critic’s earlier resignation.
“That exchange convinced me that we are clearly not simpatico, and as such an ongoing editorial relationship is not worth pursuing,” Williams said in an email to Danielsen.

Williams notified staff at the magazine’s parent company, Schwartz Media, about Danielsen’s departure on Monday, saying the critic had quit after the magazine refused his demand to publish a racial slur.
“Some weeks ago Shane quit from his role as film reviewer when the magazine refused his demand to include a racial slur in an earlier piece. He saw this as censorship,” Williams wrote to staff, in a Slack message seen by this masthead.
Danielsen said it was wrong to represent his use of the N-word in the article as a racial slur, given the context of the film.
“White liberal discomfort with that term is precisely the point of the scene I was discussing; to then succumb to it, seemed kind of ridiculous,” Danielsen told this masthead.

Golly gee (let's not go into golly) and there's still that book to review ...

Meanwhile, teabag at the ready ...

The American Fiction email exchange includes Williams saying: “I sincerely hope [and believe] that disagreement on this should not be resigning material, and have my fingers crossed that a solution can be found.”
Danielsen then apologised for threatening to resign, admitting he “overreacted”, with Williams telling him it was a “worthwhile topic to get exercised about, even if we reached somewhat different conclusions”. He added he was looking forward to reading his Berlin reports.
Danielsen suggested the decision to not publish his report was influenced by Schwartz Media’s alleged reluctance in covering the politics of Israel and Palestine, rather than a direct result of the pair’s discussion over his resignation.
“Why did he refuse to run a piece he’d commissioned – albeit one that touched upon a subject [the conflict in Gaza] which both the magazine and its sister publication had assiduously avoided covering? A piece which, by his own admission, he keenly awaited? And the answer to that question keeps changing.”
Williams said the decision to accept Danielsen’s earlier resignation was unrelated to the Berlin article.
“The decision was not a response to his report from Berlin Film Festival,” he said.
“I reject Shane’s characterisation of the company’s coverage of Gaza. The conflict has been covered extensively in The Saturday Paper, on 7am, and every day in our morning newsletter Post.”
The Berlin Festival piece was published on Friday by London Review of Books, with a note it had been rejected by its commissioners at The Monthly.
Staff across Schwartz titles have expressed displeasure over the company’s coverage of Hamas-Israel war in the past. It has created tensions for owner and publisher Morry Schwartz, who is Jewish and the son of Holocaust survivors.
About 10 staff across its titles signed a letter in November urging better coverage of the conflict in Gaza. Some staff members from this masthead were also signatories of the letter.
Schwartz later said internal opposition to coverage of the Gaza conflict did not play a role in the timing of his decision to step down as chair in December.
Despite perceptions, Schwartz said in October no one knew his thoughts on the historical conflict.
“It’s highly complex, and highly emotional subject,” Schwartz said. “My life is private, and I keep it that way. I don’t think anyone really does know my positions. They’re complex.”

Complex? Sure looks like the fix was in, and on the most specious grounds.

As noted above the LRB picked up the piece and ran with it ... on 1st March, with an explanatory introductory note ...

Shane Danielsen is a screenwriter and former artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. His piece on the Berlin Film Festival was commissioned but rejected by the Australian magazine the Monthly, for which he had served as film critic since 2017.

When the pond took a look at the piece, it was unexceptional, with the enormous stupidity of the Germans noted, and the positions of a few Israelis revealed ...

At the beginning of February there were reports that members of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party had for the first time been invited to attend the Berlin Film Festival’s opening night. The outcry was immediate. More than two hundred members of the European film industry signed an open letter protesting at the invitations, declaring them ‘incompatible with the festival’s commitment to being a place of “empathy, awareness and understanding”’.

The festival’s staff called a meeting with the directors, Carlo Chatrian and Mariëtte Rissenbeek, and demanded they explain the decision. They claimed they were helpless: the invitations, according to Rissenbeek, were issued at the behest of Germany’s culture minister, Claudia Roth, not by the festival: ‘Both the federal government commissioner for culture and the media and the Berlin Senate receive invitation quotas for the Berlinale, which are allocated to the democratically elected members of all parties in the Bundestag and House of Representatives.’

But a few days later, Rissenbeek’s story changed: now it was all about free speech and inclusivity, and allowing even those with whom you disagree to be heard. ‘Members of the AfD were elected to the Bundestag and the Berlin House of Representatives in the last elections,’ she said. ‘Accordingly, they are also represented in political cultural committees and other bodies. That is a fact, and we have to accept it as such.’ Never mind that the AfD have proved themselves inhospitable to most democratic principles, and certainly to the values of the Berlinale, which has long been proudly polyglot, cosmopolitan and queer.

None of this was encouraging. But then, a few days later, during a radio interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Rissenbeek somehow managed to make matters even worse, suggesting that the invitations had mostly been a question of risk-management. Since there was no way of predicting how the AfD will do in the next election – they currently have 83 seats in the Bundestag and 17 in the Berlin State Parliament, and are polling second in the country – it would, she implied, be unwise for a festival such as Berlin, funded primarily by the state, to make an enemy of the party.

By now the festival’s full-time staff were in open revolt, many of them already angered by Chatrian’s ‘blasé’ response to concerns about their safety. Emergency meetings were held, PR teams consulted, and eventually the AfD representatives were uninvited, 24 hours before the opening night, a development which allowed the far-right to claim a moral victory: they were being ‘cancelled’, were they not, by the very people who supposedly espoused tolerance and the free exchange of ideas?

None of this is exceptional. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Germany is happy to cheer on a new genocide ... with nary a word allowed against it ...

On Feb. 27, No Other Land co-director Yuval Abraham in his own X post said he had received death threats after calling for “equality between Israelis and Palestinians “ during the Berlinale closing gala when he accepted the best documentary prize. Abraham said he was forced to cancel his flight back to Israel out of fear for his safety.

Chatrian and Peranson said they “stand in solidarity” with other filmmakers, jury members and festival guests who may also have received direct or indirect threats. Their social media post follows an escalating political debate in Germany over the closing ceremony last weekend where award winners were allowed to call out the Israeli government for its actions in the war in Gaza.

On Tuesday, German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann criticized the Berlinale for allowing what he called “antisemitic” statements to go unchallenged at the awards gala. Berlin mayor Kai Wegner called the gala “intolerable” saying “antisemitism has no place in Berlin, and that also applies to the art scene.” He said the Berlinale management must ensure “such incidents” do not happen again.

And Bettina Stark-Watzinger, the German minister for education and science, posted on X that the pro-Palestinian statements represented a “perpetrator-victim reversal on an open stage.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also condemned the Israel-critical statements at the Berlinale finale as “one-sided positioning” that “cannot be allowed to stand,” according to a government spokesperson.

The Berlinale as an organization has distanced itself from the comments made by festival winners, saying the statements made on the festival stage were “sometimes one-sided and activist” and were an “expression of individual personal opinions” that “in no way reflect the festival’s position.”

And so on and on, but back to that unexceptional summary ...

The Golden Bear, in the end, went to Mati Diop’s documentary Dahomey, about the return of 26 looted artworks to Benin from France, and the ongoing legacy of colonialism; it was the second documentary in a row to win the prize, following Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant last year. But another non-fiction film, which premiered out of the main competition in the festival’s Panorama section, caused a bigger stir. No Other Land, directed by the Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, chronicles the elimination of Palestinian villages in the West Bank. In his acceptance speech, Abraham said: ‘I am living under a civilian law and Basel is under military law. We live thirty minutes from one another, but I have voting rights, Basel does not have voting rights.’ He ended with a call for a ceasefire in Gaza and a ‘political solution to end the occupation’.

This was not exactly incendiary, let alone antisemitic. Nor was it without precedent among Israeli artists: a number of prominent Israeli directors, including Ari Folman and Nadav Lapid, had recently published a letter declaring that ‘critique of Israeli policies in the occupied territories is not antisemitism.’ Yet Abraham, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, was branded an antisemite by German politicians – including Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, who described the speech as an ‘intolerable relativisation’. The festival, pusillanimous to the last, issued a statement declaring that ‘the sometimes one-sided and activist statements made by award winners were an expression of individual personal opinions. They in no way reflect the festival’s position.’

That night, anonymous activists briefly hacked the festival’s Instagram feed. Under the heading ‘Genocide is genocide: we are all complicit’, they wrote:

In response to the pro-Palestine actions that targeted Berlinale 2024, and in light of the rise of the extreme far-right in Germany, we acknowledge that our silence makes us complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. After long internal discussions, we have decided to finally shed the idea that ‘German Guilt’ absolves us of our country’s history, or our current crimes as a nation. We are raising our voice to join the millions around the world who demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and we urge other cultural institutions in Germany to do the same. From our unresolved Nazi past to our genocidal present – we have always been on the wrong side of history. But it’s not too late to change our future.

A press release from the Berlinale referred to this message as ‘antisemitic image-text posts about the Middle East war’, and said that the festival had filed criminal charges ‘against unknown persons’ with the LKA, the State Criminal Police Office.

Claudia Roth, the federal culture minister, was meanwhile facing intense criticism after TV footage aired of her applauding Adra and Abraham as they accepted their award. To which her office replied, unbelievably, that she had been clapping only for the Israeli director, not for his Palestinian colleague. When this didn’t stop some of her parliamentary colleagues from demanding her resignation, Roth quickly doubled down, calling the speeches at the gala ‘shockingly one-sided and characterised by deep hatred of Israel’.

Yuval Abraham tweeted on Tuesday:

A right-wing Israeli mob came to my family’s home yesterday to search for me, threatening close family members who fled to another town in the middle of the night. I am still getting death threats and had to cancel my flight home. This happened after Israeli media and German politicians absurdly labelled my Berlinale award speech – where I called for equality between Israelis and Palestinians, a ceasefire and an end to apartheid – as ‘antisemitic’. The appalling misuse of this word by Germans ... empties the word antisemitism of meaning and thus endangers Jews all over the world.

His message concludes: ‘If this is what you’re doing with your guilt for the Holocaust – I don’t want your guilt.’

On the strength of that storm in a teacup, the pond doesn't much want to subscribe to The Monthly or The Saturday Paper ...

Perhaps they'll have more luck flogging their stuff to German politicians.

Or will they? For a start they don't have the first clue about marketing...

And now for those who endured the storm in the teacup, a serve of a TT scone...