Carnival of Wrath
by Andre Soares
Recommended viewing: At a time when so many - and I’m not referring only to Fundamentalist Muslims - would like the world to revert back to the Middle Ages, and considering that the latest religious furor involves cartoons published in Denmark, I would like to recommend Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vredens dag / Day of Wrath.
Set in a 17th-century Danish village, Vredens dag is an indictment against religious fanaticism and intolerance. Made in 1943, while Denmark was under Nazi occupation, Dreyer makes clear that religious control and political control are nuanced manifestations of the same powerlust. Sadly, millions still haven’t grasped that obvious reality.
While I’m at it, I’d also like to recommend Billy Wilder’s corrosive 1951 drama The Big Carnival / Ace in the Hole. The tale of a reporter desperate for a story - no matter the costs - remains more than half a century later one of the best attacks on the yellow press (and that pretty much covers nearly every media outlet today) and the human propensity to use the suffering of others as entertainment. If the ambitious Kirk Douglas character had felt that inflammatory Mohammed cartoons - instead of a trapped miner - would help sell newspapers, he would have gone for that. (Douglas, by the way, is his usual overbearing self in The Big Carnival, but Jan Sterling is brilliant as the cynical, peroxide small-town girl Lorraine Minosa.)
Despite all the pompous - and ultimately empty - rhetoric about freedom of the press, what guides almost every single news organization is the desire for profits. News items unfit to print are those that won’t sell, or that will go against the financial interests of the news organization in question. Had the editors of the Jyllands-Posten known the consequences of their infantile exercise in “freedom of expression” - they had apparently been living on Mars - those Mohammed cartoons would never have been published simply because they wouldn’t have been cost effective.
And if freedom of the press means being gratuitously offensive, then those publications that have so self-righteously reprinted the Mohammed cartoons should play fair and offend everybody. The world is holding its breath as it awaits the upcoming blasphemous - and I mean blasphemous; whatever will most offend - Jesus, Buddha, Jehovah, and Shiva comics. Since religious fanatics come in every color and follow all sorts of holy books, there’s no reason why Islam should be singled out for ridicule. Unless, of course, freedom of the press is nothing more than a cover for anti-Muslim bigotry.
But then again, perhaps it’s time we start exercising our self-proclaimed freedoms to build bridges - not burn them.
Note: I don’t believe The Big Carnival has been released on VHS. It’s not available on DVD, yet. But it does pop up on TV every now and then.
No anti-Christian or anti-Jewish cartoons at the Jyllands-Posten says editor-in-chief Carsten Juste
Why I Published Those Cartoons by Jyllands-Posten culture editor Flemming Rose
Alexis Kouros on “Caricaturing Freedom” for 6d
List of the British Academy of Film 2006 nominees and winners
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