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| Peter Jackson: Lovely Bones test audience demanded more violence The Lord of the Rings director reveals that he had to shoot new footage for his adaptation of the Alice Sebold bestseller after early audiences complained a death scene was not violent enoughWarning: this story contains implied spoilers Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson has revealed that he had to shoot new footage for The Lovely Bones after early test screening audiences complained that a death scene was not violent enough.The film is based on Alice Sebold's harrowing bestseller about how a murdered 14-year-old girl watches from heaven as her grieving family attempt to ensnare her killer.Jackson told Reuters that he had returned to the editing room to "basically add more violence and suffering". "[The audience] wanted far more violence," he said. "They just weren't satisfied."Viewers were particularly exercised about a scene in which a man falls off a cliff. "We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted to see [the character] in agony and suffer a lot more," said Jackson. "We had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed."However, despite the extra violence, The Lovely Bones will still be released under the PG13 certificate in the US on 11 December. It opens in the UK on 29 January.Peter JacksonFilm adaptationsBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Science, atheism and ironed trousers | Adam Rutherford Listen to Adam read his contribution to The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, edited by Ariane Sherine. The book is out now in print, audio and on iTunes. The contributors and editor have donated their full share of the profits to the Terrence Higgins TrustAdam Rutherford feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Rumpole at Christmas by John Mortimer Ian Sansom picks a final presentJohn Mortimer, alas, is dead but long live Horace Rumpole. The character who began life in a Play for Today in 1975 and who puffed and bluffed his way through three decades of Thames Television series and dozens of stories and books, returns for one last Christmas. He continues to quaff Chateau Thames Embankment, as he did in Rumpole of the Bailey (1978); he continues to defend the Timsons and the Molloys, as he did in The Trials of Rumpole (1979); he continues to needle Mr Justice Gerald "The Old Gravestone" Graves, as he did in Rumpole for the Defence (1982) and continues to hark on the Penge bungalow murder. He drinks at Pommeroy's, consorts with private detective Fig Newton, dines with the Erskine-Browns, treats everyone rather scurvily. And then goes home on the tube to Gloucester Road, and Hilda, She Who Must Be Obeyed. Every Rumpole is the same: every one an omnibus.Rumpole at Christmas is really a secular nativity scene; a tableau vivant. Mortimer set all of the characters on his stage some 30 years ago. "I'm not a great believer that people change," Mortimer remarked in an interview. "People who write Hollywood scripts always think that characters have to learn things and change and develop. I think nobody learns anything. I think they make the same mistakes throughout their lives till they drop dead." We love Rumpole because, like God, he doesn't change.And nor do the stories. The plots of these seven short Rumpole Christmas tales – culled from the Strand Magazine, Woman's Weekly, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Express – are, even the most diehard of diehard fans would have to admit, rather slight. Scraps, scrapings; apocryphal writings, if you like. In "Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces", an old lag turns up in a panto. In "Rumpole and Father Christmas", another old lag turns up as Father Christmas. In "Rumpole and the Christmas Break", the murder of Honoria Glossop, professor of comparative religion at William Morris University in East London, is not, it turns out, the work of a young Islamic fundamentalist. In "Rumpole and the Boy" there's a tart with a heart of gold. In "Rumpole and the Millennium Bug" Rumpole fails to bring a turkey home. But really, who reads Rumpole for plot? And who cares for turkey if you can have all the trimmings?Rumpole, again like God, is really an extraordinary effect of voice. The oft-told story of the genesis of Rumpole is that Mortimer was appearing with a learned colleague as the defence for some football hooligans in the early 1970s, when the learned colleague happened to remark: "I'm really an anarchist at heart, but I don't think even my darling old Prince Peter Kropotkin would have approved of this lot." Mortimer realised he had hit a perfect note, a voice just plummy enough, just vaunting enough, despairing enough, vain enough to be utterly admirable and not quite absurd. Rumpole, rackety old stager, anarchist at heart, is Miss Jean Brodie for boys.He is also, clearly, John Mortimer, a man on the side of the angels, full of benign and banal proclamations. Champagne for all! "In the varied ups and downs," begins the first story of this collection, "the thrills and spills in the life of an Old Bailey hack, one thing stands as stone. Your ex-customers will never want to see you again." When it comes to Rumpole, nothing could be further from the truth. For Christmas every year Rumpole presents Hilda with some lavender water, and she buys him a tie. This is the last Christmas you can buy a new Rumpole. For a while we possessed an unusual gift.Ian Sansom's Mobile Library novels are published by HarperPerennial.FictionJohn MortimerIan Sansomguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand Is the entire history of the Jews nothing more than a wilful fabrication? Jonathan Wittenberg remains unconvinced"How can we denationalise national histories?" asks Shlomo Sand, quoting with approval the French historian Marcel Detienne, before sharpening the challenge in his own words: "How can we stop trudging along roads paved mainly with the forged materials of national fantasies?" This is the key issue in a book intended, from the title onwards, to be provocative.Uncomfortable books, if they are good, can be important. National narratives do need deconstruction; they often blind us to different perceptions of the world and deafen us to the just claims of others. This is certainly true of the Middle East, and I am one of many Jews who would agree with Sand that a decisive factor in the future of Israel will be its capacity to be far more attentive to the narratives and rights of its Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens.But the book is a great disappointment. Its sweeping attempt to take apart the entire history of the Jewish people from its origins to present day Israel and prove it to be a wilful fabrication is marred by tendentious premises, the misreading of key events and the ignoring of central texts and institutions.Sand's argument begins with 19th century European concepts of nation- and people-hood. He maintains that Jewish historians such as Graetz were deeply influenced by Germanic notions of the "Volk" on which the idea of the modern state is built. This nationalism was sharpened by the discourse of race and eugenics current then and later in Europe, with such disastrous results for Jewry. Sand traces a line from Graetz to the Zionist historians who, he argues, employ such bioethnic concepts to invent an imaginary entity, a racially continuous Jewish people who were exiled from their land, and therefore deserve to return to it 2,000 years later. Such continuity, argues Sand, is a fiction and the Jewish people are therefore an "invention".A key point for Sand is the fate of the Jews after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70CE. Sand attempts to prove that the exile of the Jews in the wake of this and subsequent defeats never happened. It is a fiction of modern Jewish historiography: hence neither later North African nor European Jewish communities can be the products of a diaspora of exiles, but are rather the result of mass conversions of the most racially diverse populations. Therefore there is no genetic continuity between today's Jews and those who once inhabited ancient Judaea.The flaws in Sand's argument are both historical and conceptual. The idea of exile, he suggests, was adopted from the Christian view that the Jews were punished with dispersion for the crime of killing Jesus. But this makes no sense. The paradigm of exile and return is found in the Bible in Deuteronomy and Jeremiah in relation to the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians in 576BCE. It is thus part of the Jewish narrative centuries before Christianity. Further, contrary to what Sand maintains, serious historians of the period consider that the Romans did indeed kill or sell as slaves very many thousands of Jews. The rest of the population was banned from access to Jerusalem, which was renamed Aelia Capitolina. This would surely engender a sense of exile in any people.What is indisputable is that early Jewish communities grew through conversion. But Sand's key thesis, that the bulk of modern eastern European Jewry owes its origins to the converted kingdom of the Khazars, has been widely debated, and rejected, especially in the wake of Arthur Koestler's famous book on the subject. Sand's allegation that this whole episode was hushed up because it vitiated the Zionist notion of Jewish ethnobiological continuity, cannot be maintained.Equally important is what Sand fails to discuss. To vast numbers of Jews, arguments about racial origins are both ugly and, more importantly, irrelevant. Instead, Jewish continuity is premised on religious factors, including observance of the Torah, the study of the Talmud, the creation of communities, the life of the synagogue and the bonds of the liturgy. These are what form the vital links between generations of Jews. To examine Jewish history almost without reference to its religious life and literature is like attempting to discuss Islam without mentioning the Hadith, the Shariya or the role of the Muslim community. Whereas Sand is quite right that Jewish life has always reflected local cultures, his claim "that there had never been a Jewish people's culture" cannot be taken seriously.Sand virtually ignores persecution and antisemitism as contributory factors in forming Jewish narratives, just as he omits the role of hostility towards it in fashioning Israeli attitudes later.In the final chapter Sand offers a severe critique of the limitations of Israeli democracy. It is a tribute to the country's liberalism, which he acknowledges despite deep reservations, that his book has been widely read there. Rejecting the practicability of a bi-national state, he stresses the urgent need for an end to the occupation and for the genuine equal participation of all the country's citizens in its civic processes if it is to avoid profound conflicts within its pre-67 borders. In this, I agree.Sand makes it clear from the outset that he identifies with those excluded by the Jewish-Israeli narrative. Regrettably, the book lacks the empathy for the outsider which one might have expected. Instead, it is driven by a sustained polemic against a misreading of Judaism imposed more by the author himself than by those "authorised historians" whose supposed repression of "cheeky little facts" he sets out to unveil. Ironically for a book intended to deconstruct myths, it may well be taken up by those with an alternative mythology in which the Jews have no right to a state at all. Sadly, this would be unlikely to further the interests of Palestinians, or Israelis, or peace.Jonathan Wittenberg is rabbi of the New North London Synagogue. His books include The Silence of Dark Water: An Inner Journey (Robin Clark/Joseph's Bookstore).HistoryJonathan Wittenbergguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Introducing Wordsworth Wordsworth changed forever the way we view the natural world and the inner world of feeling. He also connected the two indivisibly. We are his heirs, and we see and feel through him. His vision illumined our landscape.His name is inextricably connected with the Lake District, where he was born in Cockermouth in 1770. His mother died when he was only eight, his father five years later. These early losses gave him an acute apprehension of mortality, but did not impair the flow of his affections. His mother had loved him enough, and her love lasted beyond the grave. He had a free and happy country childhood, and joy is one of his themes: through his vocation as a poet he transformed fear of mortality to intimations of immortality. The story of his early life – his schooldays, his education at Cambridge, his wanderings in France, his response to the French revolution, his love of his sister Dorothy and his passionate friendship with Coleridge – are told in his great autobiographical work in blank verse, The Prelude, most of which written when he was in his 30s (only sections of it were published in his lifetime.) It is a work of astonishing originality, both in its subject matter (childhood and the growth of the mind, described with a pre-Freudian insight unprecedented in literature) and in its form. The verse is powerful, supple, subtle, freely flowing. Wordsworth revered both Shakespeare and Milton. His is the third great iambic voice in the English language.His first volume of poems, Lyrical Ballads, written in collaboration with Coleridge and published in 1798, stakes his territory: the plain, the rustic, the thoughtful, the everyday, the organic: a poetry in which "the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature". It includes The Idiot Boy, a moving ballad treating its challenging subject (a mother's love for her "idiot" son sent out into the night to fetch the doctor for a sick neighbour) with the deepest respect and in the plainest language, and Tintern Abbey which records in higher language the intensity of the solitary poet's youthful response to a sublime landscape (his "aching joys" and "dizzy raptures") and his sense of a more "sober pleasure" associated with maturity, the presence of his beloved sister, and the power of re-creative memory and recollection.Wordsworth was perhaps the most sober of the great romantics, a water drinker, a walker of the hills, an exemplary family man who had put behind him (though he had not denied) a youthful indiscretion and an illegitimate daughter. He liked to read with his wife and sister of an evening, and to listen to the kettle's "faint undersong". (Wordsworth loved the word under, as a prefix-adjective: it suggests to me his ever-present sense of the subconscious and the imminent, his ear tuned to music we can hardly hear.) He invested his hopes in family life and domesticity, in plain living and high thinking, with a tenderness towards his children inherited from the newly child-conscious theories of the enlightenment.But children are hostages to fortune, and some of his finest poems pre-emptively record early death and the sorrow of losing a child. The enigmatic Lucy poems (1799), inspired by a winter sojourn in Germany with Dorothy before he had a family of his own, foreshadow loss. Were these poems connected with incestuous feelings for his sister, or with his apprehensions of the tragic risks of love, or with the early loss of his mother? Much has been written on this, little explained. The sources of the imagination are not as clear and simple as Wordsworth often makes them seem. Five years later, in 1804, he wrote The Affliction of Margaret, whose son is missing, perhaps dead:Beyond participation lieMy troubles, and beyond relief.If any chance to heave a sighThey pity me, and not my grief.The lonely precision of this strange cry of bereavement is heart-rending.Then, in 1812, the Wordsworths lost a little daughter and a son: his sonnet to Catherine, Surprised By Joy, composed some time after her death, is the most touching of elegies, the movement of the verse mirroring the movement of the body, heart and mind, the simplicity of diction shockingly enriched by the Latinate "vicissitude". He had mastered his medium and wedded it to the strength of his feelings. His sonnets stand with Shakespeare's and Milton's.As he grew older, he was to lose his powers, and he had premonitions of this, expressed in his Immortality Ode (1802-4) and most famously in his 1802 poem on the leech gatherer, Resolution and Independence:We poets in our youth begin in gladnessBut thereof come in the end despondency and madnessHis youthful belief that "our destiny, our being's heart and aim/ Is with infinitude and only there" is deeply entangled with his sense of failure, of check, of sober disillusion in the light of common day. The highest affirmation and loftiest verse in The Prelude immediately follow his feeling of anti-climax as he discovered that he and his travelling companion had crossed the Alps without knowing it. And one poem for which I have a particular fondness is an odd 1804 piece about a small celandine (in contrast to more cheerful poems he addressed to this flower) in which he confesses to an unsentimental, no-nonsense meanness of pleasure as he regards its withering.This neither is its courage nor its choiceBut its necessity in being old.He tells unwelcome truths as well as providing consolation. He is a poet for old age as well as youth.William WordsworthPoetryMargaret Drabbleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |