Cinema history’s first film in Esperanto: “Angoroj” (1964)And here is the film itself / jen: Incubus.
Kaj jen Angoroj.
Jen artikolo en kiu menciiĝas Alfred Jarry:
Kakistokratio de Ibrahim WARDE, Le Monde diplomatique en Esperanto, junio 2020.
Verkistoj en diversaj medioj—teatro, kino, ktp.—utiligas absurdecajn kaj komediajn rimedojn por satiroj pri fiaskaj socioj kiuj enkorpigas malutopiajn koŝmarojn. Ekzemple: Eugène Ionesco, Charlie Chaplin, Dario Fo, Giuseppe ("Beppe") Grillo, Volodomir Zelenski,estas menciataj, kaj fine, kun longa priskribo, la kreaĵo Ubu Roi [Ubu Reĝo] de Alfred Jarry. Ubu estas ligata al kakistokratio kaj Donald Trump.
The use of Esperanto in cinema has been discussed, for example: Esperanto and Cinema. One example, which has been documented in various places, is the film Idiot's Delight. (The Esperanto version of the Wikipedia article does not give an adequate explanation for the use of Esperanto in the film). In a recent historical work, the political context is outlined:
Throughout the film industry's relatively brief existence, moviemakers—protective of their profits and worried about private pressure groups and government censorship—had done their best to avoid controversy. They were particularly concerned about not offending important foreign markets, which accounted for at least half their annual revenues. In the 1930s, Germany and Italy were key outlets for American movies, and studio heads were reluctant to do anything that might anger those countries' totalitarian leaders.Robert Sherwood was made aware of that fact when his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Idiot's Delight, was optioned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1936. Both antiwar and anti-Fascist, Idiot’s Delight, set in a small Italian hotel on the Swiss border, focuses on a disparate group of international travelers who are stranded when Italy launches a surprise air raid on Paris. To avoid annoying Italy, the head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, ordered the story's setting changed to an unnamed country whose inhabitants spoke Esperanto instead of Italian. There also was to be no mention of Fascism. The Italian consul in Los Angeles was given final script approval, and MGM previewed the film for representatives of the Italian government.
When Sherwood, who wrote the screenplay, was asked if he had had any collaborators, he ruefully replied, "Yes—Mussolini." Expurgated and defanged, Idiot's Delight was roundly panned by the critics when it was finally released in early 1939. And despite all MGM's efforts to placate Italian sensibilities, Italy ended up banning it, as did Spain, France, Switzerland, and Estonia.SOURCE: Olson, Lynne. Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 (New York: Random House, 2013), pp. 362-363.
My recent study of the history of utopianism and science fiction has spilled over into my musings about conlangers and speculations about alt culture. I think there is something essentially trivial about today's conlangers as there is about TV/cinematic sci fi. And therefore I think there is something grievously missed on the sociological plane by Arika Okrent who has otherwise rendered a great service by documenting this phenomenon. I also think that the otherwise admirable Sam Green made some serious and harmful errors in his two documentaries on utopias and Esperanto, for which Okrent is also egregiously guilty in the latter. She is a linguist, not a historian or social theorist. Thank Godless I'm a baby boomer. These younger folks have no sense of history.
I am being uncustomarily diplomatic here. Somewhere I wrote what is
wrong with the Esperanto documentary. I think Sam compounded
Okrent's misrepresentation of the era that produced Esperanto. As
for the Four Utopias and Sam's documentary approach, Stephen
Squibb nailed what is wrong with it.
I get constant updates in my Facebook newsfeed from conlangers, and
while I find the resources available in this area far more
sophisticated than what I recall being available in the era of
marginal print culture when I was a teenager, something has declined
in one area as sophistication has grown in another. In the old days,
most of the conlangers (when the term did not exist) at least
pretended to be interested in an international auxiliary language,
with an admixture of eccentrics and outright cranks making big
claims, especially those inventing a priori languages. (I
am so glad I was finally able to acquire my own copy of Fuishiki
Okamoto's 1962 book on BABM at the 2010 Esperanto USA
congress, which I recall from my nerd salad days haunting the
Buffalo main library.) In those days the figure most known for
inventing languages for the hell of it was J.R.R. Tolkien (whose
medieval nostalgia I soon learned to disdain), which he referred to
as a guilty pleasure. It was something for male nerds just past
puberty to do in those days, in a far more innocent but hardly
idyllic time.
Now artificial languages are commissioned ad hoc for
superficially sophisticated sci fi and fantasy films and TV shows.
But Dothraki could not get me to endure Game of Thrones.
And my opinion of Avatar
was none too favorable either. I have already expressed my "esteem"
for Klingon (see the post reproduced below).
All of this reminds me of a visit to Buffalo in the past year, in
which I was taken to a congregation of a sci fi film club,
coincidentally located a block from where I grew up. I had to endure
episode 6 of Star Wars all over again, a scenario so
preposterous even the person who brought me found it dubious. Every
stereotype you can imagine about this subculture is true; the
reality is even worse, much seedier and much more awful than
anything I grew up with. It's a sad case of arrested development.
There are, of course, a few conlangs of philosophical or ideological
interest: Lojban, Laadan, maybe Toki Pona and a few others. I don't
think so highly of these either, but the conlanging hobby as I see
it flowing into my newsfeed strikes me as decidedly infantile, as
infantile as blockbuster films and "reality" TV, more childish even
than all the crackpot Esperantists combined I've encountered over
the past 45 years. Esperanto, at least, was designed for a serious
purpose, and its subcultures exist at least to communicate, and
while conlanging is a creative endeavor as any other, most of it in
the final analysis is as pointless and redundant as the latest
American film or TV series. O Stanislaw Lem, where art thou when I
need thee?
Many Klingonists seems to lose their interest in Star Trek after speaking Klingon a while. This may be a result of that the average age is higher among Klingonists than Klingon fans. Star Trek fandom is in many ways a youth culture (Gibberman, 1991).But compare this to respondent Adam:
However the KLI as a socializing institution is probably one reason for the fact that many Klingonists not consider themselves as trekkers anymore. In the process of Klingonists becoming Klingonists is not only the process of languages learning. A kind of secondary socialization (Berger & Luckmann) is occurring when interacting in the peer group of KLI. Officially the KLI emphasize that they not are a fan organization. Their journal it is not a newsletter or a fanzine, it is supposed to be a scholarly journal, indexed by the Modern Language Association, that uses blind peer review. The education level of the Klingonists is as we have seen very high and it would be reasonable to assume that the use of an academic language and style is endorsed.
The fact that there’s a rich fictional background to the Klingons gives this language incredible character, and makes speaking it fun.Note the perversity:
If you’re speaking Esperanto, you can’t ask yourself, ‘how would an esperantoan express this idea,’ because there’s no such thing as an Esperantoan. There are fictional Klingons with a fictional culture, so one can ask ‘How would a (fictional) Klingon express this idea,’ and that makes it more fun.”
Many Klingonists choose to perceive and treat Klingon as a “real”, actual alien language and not as an artificial language. Thus they are not interested in creating new words for human concepts. Their goal with the language is not that it will be as easy as possible to use for humans, but rather they want to understand how Klingons use their language. This adds another dimension to the Klingon community. To become a notable member among Klingonists linguistic capital is not enough -- you need cultural capital as well to know how a Klingon would think in a certain situation. Or more specifically: how the group of Klingonists think Klingons think.However, the influence of attempting to adapt Klingon to earthly needs is also felt.
In the ordinary Klingon fan world where role-playing and dressing-up as Klingons is the major activity, the knowledge of Klingon is to be considered as sub-cultural capital, in the eyes of the relevant beholder. Though to be a Klingonist seems not automatically to get you sub-cultural capital. By judging from my informants opinions there is a conflict between Klingon fans and Klingonists. To actually learn the full Klingon language is seen as a waste of time and somewhat strange. In my opinion this conflict can be connected to the fact that the KLI states that it is not a fan organisation. It may as well be a result of different focuses; the KLI’s primary concern is intellectual and the fan groups activities is more practical (creating uniforms, Klingon weapons etc.)Different respondents have different views, of course, so I may sense a contradiction based on conflating informants, but it's odd, I think, to wonder how a Klingon thinks without being interested in Klingons, i.e. as they exist in the Star Trek cosmos. It's like being interested in a culture without being interested in it. I suppose this could be just a small step beyond being interested in a language only for the language. So I guess this is not as pathetic as dressing up as a Klingon after all. Still, wondering how a Klingon thinks is like wondering how a thug from South Buffalo would express himself, and I'm glad I haven't had to think about that for some decades.
Jason Alexander mocks William Shatner and Incubus:
How to review a movie in Esperanto
Stephen Colbert: The Colbert Report:
Here is an entry link for conlang buffs to the Nav'i language, created in tandem with the scenario for the film AVATAR.
My mini-review of the film Avatar itself can be found on my "Reason & Society" blog.
Por Esperantistoj: jen pri la artefarita Na'via lingvo kreita por la filmo Avatar. Mi kritikas la primitivisman ideologion de la filmo anglalingve, aliloke.
Some interesting metaphorical history here.
For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
Thomas Y. Levin
October, Vol. 55. (Winter, 1990), pp. 23-47.
. . . particularly on pp. 35-38, where Esperanto is discussed. See the original text for illustrations.
At first glance there is a striking similarity between Adorno's evocation of a post-lapsarian utopia and the universal language topos that accompanied early cinema. [27] The parallel logic in what one could call the Esperantist conception of the cinema is evident, for example, in D. W. Griffith's claim in a 1921 interview that "A picture is the universal symbol, and a picture that moves is a universal language. Moving pictures, someone suggests, 'might have saved the situation when the Tower of Babel was built.' " [28] Just as cinema was heralded as a transparent, unproblematically accessible (because visual) alternative to national languages, an analogous discourse of democratization and univocal, natural signs accompanied the prehistory and invention of the phonograph. During the first half of the nineteenth century, phonography—defined in the OED as "a system of phonetic shorthand invented by Isaac Pitman in 1837"—was heralded as a "natural method of writing" [29] and was arduously defended by worker's groups as a means of making writing more widely accessible. [30] In the same vein, the "phonautographe," invented by Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857, was an attempt to produce, as the machine's subtitle explained, an "Apparatus for the Self-Registering of the Vibrations of Sound." The resulting "natural stenography" would be, according to the title of Scott's book on the subject, sound writing itself. [31] Illiteracy would thus be eliminated by substituting hearing and speaking for reading and writing. Indeed, one of the most popular uses of the early phonographs—which, one should recall, could both play and record—was acoustic correspondence. The "phono-post" speaking postcards, which one recorded and sent through the mails, made writing superfluous, a fact stressed by advertisements that invited potential users to drop their dictionaries and "Speak! Don't write any more! Listen!"OK, most of this will be impenetrable gobbledegook to most of you, though it fits in to my research interests. But note that the universal language idea became popular for the first time in the 19th century, and as a master metaphor persisted into the early 20th century. The popular universal interest in a universal language dovetails with various media, symbolic codes, notations, etc. that could function as "universal languages". Of course, people still use the word "Esperanto" neutrally, positively, or pejoratively in a metaphorical sense, but we're in a different era. I wonder if it was the 1930s that killed off this earlier sensibility, both metaphorically as well as literally.
Unlike the visual Esperanto of the cinema, however, the possibility of universal language held out by the gramophone is just that: only a possibility, a hope. While the traces of the gramophone are just as indexical as the cinematic signifiers, they are not, as Adorno is careful to point out, readily intelligible like photographs. Rather, they are both indexical and enigmatic. In this regard they can claim both of the contradictory qualities of the hieroglyph: "universal" and "immediate" by virtue of their "natural," necessary relation of sign to referent, and also esoteric, recondite and requiring decoding, due to their surface inaccessibility. [32] Phonograph records are, to quote an astonishing early anticipation of Adorno's techno-cryptogrammic characterization, "cabalistic photographs [by means of which] sound can outlive itself, leave a posthumous trace, but in the form of hieroglyphs which not everyone can decipher." [33] Despite their shared millenarian formulations, the universal language rhetoric accompanying early cinema is thus far indeed from the post-Babelian figure employed by Adorno in his recuperation of gramophonic reification by means of what is almost a theology of indexicality. The latter must be located, rather, in a very different tradition: the hieroglyphics of nature articulated in German romanticism and, in particular, as mediated by Walter Benjamin.
___
27. As Miriam Hansen has pointed out, this metaphor of universal language, which was "used by journalists, intellectuals, social workers, clergy, producers, and industrial apologists alike . . . drew on a variety of discourses (Enlightenment, nineteenth-century positivism, Protestant millennialism, the Esperanto movement, and the growing advertising industry) and oscillated accordingly between utopian and totalitarian impulses" (Miriam Hansen, "The Hieroglyph and the Whore: D. W. Griffith's Intolerance," The South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Spring 1989), p. 362. For more on the universal language discourse in early cinema, see also Hansen's "Universal Language and Democratic Culture: Myths of Origin in Early American Cinema," in Myth and Enlightenment in American Literature: In Honor of Hans-joachim Lang, ed. Dieter Meindl, et al. (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlagen-Nürenberg, 1985), pp. 321 -51.
28. D. W. Griffith, "Innovations and Expectations," in Focus on Griffith, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 56.
29. See Pitman's 1840 treatise, Phonography; or, Writing by Sound; Being a Natural Method of Writing, Applicable to all Languages, and a Complete System of Shorthand (London: S. Bagster & Sons, 1840).
30. This accounts for its appearance as a topic of debate at the 1867 congress of the International Worker's Association in Lausanne, a discussion that is summarized in G. Duveau, La Pensée ouvrière sur l'éducation pendant la Révolution et le Second Empire (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1947), pp.115- 16.
31. Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, Le Problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même: La France, l'Amérique (Paris, 1878). Earlier Scott had published a study of stenography entitled Histoire de la Sténographie depuis les temps anciens jusgu'à nos jours (Paris: Ch. Tondeur, 1849).
32. As an early nineteenth-century scholar has pointed out, ancient hieroglyphs were also, in fact, phonographic: "Hieroglyphic characters are either ideographs, that is, representations of ideas, or phonographs, that is, representationsof sounds" (Hincks, On Hieroglyphics, cited in OED
33. Emile Gautier, Le Phonographe: son passé, son présent, son avenir (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1905), p. 28. The implication in Gautier's remark that some people might be able to "read" the gramophone record is curiously confirmed by the case of Tim Wilson, a thirty-three-year-old Englishman who made the rounds of British and American talk shows in 1985 demonstrating his particular ability to identify unlabeled records, ostensibly by reading the patterns of the grooves (DPA press release, October 1985).
The combination of these two concepts just occurred to me. Why now, or why not earlier? Why now? Here's my guess. First, there was my recent reading of Borges' "The Aleph". Then there was reading about Novalis' Romantic Encyclopedia. All of this recapitulates in some way the earlier history from Raymond Lull to Leibniz, but in each epoch the ars combinatoria play a different role. Now, divorced from "serious" purposes, it becomes a device of self-conscious art for making a point without taking the enterprise literally, i.e. for what it purports to be. The ars combinatoria has historically become playful with the delineation between reality and the artifice of imagination. It finally popped into my head to combine one aspect of avant-garde literature with another.
'Pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, a playful notion concocted by Alfred Jarry. Once science itself has been solidified and differentiated from myth, poetry, and the symbolic use of language, we not only have the possibility of creating symbolist poetry in a secularized environment, and avant-garde play with language and myth (to culminate in Joyce), but play with science and other systems of thought, eventually surrealism and surrationalism (Gaston Bachelard) and Borges, and Oulipo, and now virtuality of all sorts, but first Jarry. Once it occurred to me that Jarry might be engaged in combinatorial play, I connected 'pataphysics to ars combinatoria. Has anyone else made that connection? (Or Jarry himself? I don't recall Jarry's own work.) Well, Oulipo, which is founded on combinatoric play, is a descendent of 'pataphysics, so a connection is obviously there.
Here's what I've found, mostly classifiable under the rubric of avant-garde arts.
Speculative Computing: Instruments for Interpretive Scholarship (2004) by Bethany Paige Nowviskie
Oulipo packet (several works by noted authors: Calvino, Queneau, Motte, Mathews, et al)
Deformography: the poetics of cybridised architecture (2005) by Neil Spiller
The Clinamanic Medusa, with a hole for its face causes the first order aesthetics of form finding to coagulate into stone and seduces the viewer into a world of vicissitudes and attitudes of chance, of joy, of sweet and sweaty embrace of an ars combinatoria, so dear to Jarry, Roussel and Ramon Lull. Here ‘Pataphysics joins with the mathematic of Oulipo to construct an all too few example of Ouarpo - a miniature architecture of potential.
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