Cabaret

Cinema offers countless ways of confronting reality. The director Bob Fosse, in this case, chose the musical. A musical from the 1970s that, curiously, remains enormously topical. It may, perhaps, seem paradoxical to choose this format in order to question complicit silence, cowardice, collective alienation, generalised social anaesthesia. Or perhaps not. It catches us off guard; it surprises us. Is that not, after all, what we want from a film?

The opening shots show a singer intoning a refrain, “Life is a cabaret”, that is, life is a place of entertainment. He does so in a small space that is more or less underground and perhaps even libertarian. There, the acute political problems, the questions of gender, and so forth, seem to dissolve.

There is a double visuality in the film that accentuates the discrepancies then beginning to deepen in the reality of the time: the interior of the cabaret and the exterior, which places us in the city of Berlin in the early 1930s — more precisely in 1931, that is, barely two years before Hitler’s seizure of power. Between the one and the other there is an enormous difference of light, of colour and even of composition. If, in the former, space, light and colour are enclosed, nocturnal; in the latter, all these elements embody their opposite. Just like reality. Life is entertainment, the singer tells us. And the rest? What he does not sing. The dangerous exterior of the city’s daily life in that troubled time.

Perhaps today some DJ might tell us that life is entertainment set to Berlin techno. The film echoes strangely in this present that speaks (speaks once again) of extermination or genocide. Out here, in the city, today, there are people being repressed, exhibitions being cancelled, film festivals that become problematic for taking a stand against the genocide under way in Gaza.

A strange coincidence, this — that the same city, a hundred years apart, should hold the same attitudes towards reality. Only the social actors change. We know today how little importance was given, in the 1930s, to the rise of Nazism, to the persecutions already beginning in the cities. We also know Brecht’s verses on the subject. A staged number shows us a man apparently “blind” with the dazzlement provoked in him by the grotesque woman at his side. We all see it; he does not. The woman’s identity is concealed. Her head flaunts the animality conferred on her by the beastly mask. What lay hidden in that supposed animality — attributed by the hateful ideology of Nazism — was her Jewish condition.

Today, we watch with astonishment as members of the Israeli government use the same language to classify the Palestinian population.

There are things that seem never to change.

Curiously, in the 1980s, in the United States, a group of feminist artists, the Guerrilla Girls, would use the same strategy but to the opposite end: no longer as a mechanism of power but as a way of confronting it. Incorporating the act into their artistic practice, the collective set out to criticise the misogyny that exists in art (and in society) towards women. Art and cinema have always drawn on history and memory to tell us things, through peculiar forms.

Marx wrote, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. He was entirely right. Although history does not repeat itself mechanically, its course seems marked by an interminable succession of tragedies. Yet the mediocrity of the politicians who dominate today and who hold the power to plunge us into tragedy adds a farcical dimension to it. One need only look at the contemporary world.

The final shot shows us the same singer intoning the same refrain as at the start of the film. Yet, within it, that space has changed; the singer has changed. A beautiful panning shot gives us an image reflected on a surface that distorts it. The figures are merely deformed archetypes and yet certain colours and symbols let us glimpse a different reality. That space had already been occupied. The outside reality had crossed the border, occupying the previously protected interior.

Today, reality is distorted (not in a moral sense, but a formal one, as in an anamorphosis) in a different way, but with similar results. Digital capitalism imposes a complex relationship with truth. It is no longer only the archetypal bodies that digital distortion produces. It is the very construction of the imagery that shows them that is distorted, compressed and neutralised. These are no longer even images, but rather para-images — a new structure that renders them non-existent, dematerialised: as they begin to appear, they disappear. The central figure of today’s totalitarian farce is called scrolling. Our attention to images shrinks to this timeless time. Anaesthesia completes the rest — what is missing.

In the 1970s, more or less the same year the film was made, a cybernetics theorist made an enigmatic statement about the bleak future he foresaw — one that today deserves the utmost attention; he said: “One cannot see that one does not see what one cannot see.” This is the power of dazzlement. This is the power wielded by those who dominate. By those who induce social anaesthesia, complicit silence.

At the same time, the shadow of a new fascism hovers and spreads. Perhaps the refrain “Money makes the world go’round”, sung by the duet on one of the nights at the cabaret, is premonitory. Perhaps this turning of the world between fascism and money is nothing new; what is new is the laudatory farce of this alliance that confronts us daily.

That is why we need these films so much. More than ever.

For life is not, at all, a cabaret.