Newsreels of Ukrainian families flood my TV screen. They run through blasted streets, they howl in air-raid shelters. What I see is raw and direct, this is how it is. But how heartbreaking it is, how terrifying the dry sound of firearms, how cruel life when you can no longer count on the safety of the door locked, only comes to me at the cinema, where I cringe at Belfast† Kenneth Branagh filmed his childhood memories of a very different conflict in a very different place at a very different time.
I see a little boy screaming at the attack on his familiar street. I see a mother diving under the windowsill. I see smashed windows, I hear the dry bang of firearms. This is about the Northern Ireland Troubles in 1969, but Branagh’s images also make me feel the war in Ukraine and how overwhelmingly scary it is to be involved as a civilian in a war situation that you don’t want and over which you have no influence at all. have. The Journalimages mean much more now, and I owe that to this feature film, which is ultimately also about the healing tenderness of a close-knit family. I experience that more often; art clarifies what is murky, not through detailed knowledge but boiled down and with a striking blow.
I expect more such clarification in the Kranenburgh museum in Bergen, op the exhibition The Roaring 20s, which promises to expose a similarity between two decades. 1920s art responded with a wealth of creativity to the First World War and the Spanish Flu. But what I see is aged and distant. And the art of our 20s isn’t even here at all roaring† But there is so much that it could be better, right?
I mean, which dance company now puts the power ballet like the wiedeweerga The green table on his schedule? Can not? The season is already planned? Sounds like a lame excuse to me, but hey, stream it. The green table is from 1932 and a masterly expressionistic ballet. The legendary choreographer Kurt Jooss made it in the year that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. He gave it the prophetic subtitle ‘a danse macabre in eight scenes’, and it turned out indeed to waver from the First World War to the next. It bombards the audience with stylized military violence and civilian grief, and everyone is partnered by De Dood.
But first there’s that scene at a conference table, where immaculate white-gloved politicians ore, stand on their pontiffs, clench their fists… and continue talking – until they raise their pistols and shoot the sky. Being on YouTube aged fragments of The green table to find. Slightly decayed, video is not a sustainable image carrier. But it is a blessing that they are there. Despite stains and shivers, I experience the timeless beauty of this piece – and the shivers down my spine. 1932 and 2022 rhyme with each other.