Media

...Not that the two forms, on the face of things, have a great deal in common...

...The distinction between "high" and "popular" art has always been much more real to midcult arbiters of taste like Time and Newsweek than it has to the artists themselves...

...When first considering flight from their village, they see the United States as pictured in Spanish editions of Good Housekeeping...

...In the last section of his book, therefore, he presents a suggested program for the reconstruction of the Muslim intellectual tradition...

...The scene in the sewage tunnel at the border -- before Enrique and Rosa emerge to see San Diego -- outdoes in power and terror the heroism of pasteboard martyrs and the suffering of faceless casts of thousands...

...Rock--let us be frank--is either upsetting, musically or lyrically, or it is not rock at all, but rather what rock critics call, contemptuously, "pop...

...He argues that a permanently ongoing process of "rethinking Islam" is necessary to enable its reapplication to continuously changing circumstances...

...Now, as someone once observed (and the observation is clever enough that I am sure it must have been Chesterton), inventing a new art form is about as difficult as inventing a new sin, and equally worthy of celebration...

...To their great credit, they resisted such blandishments...

...And it is taking over...

...Or the latest Madness...

...Both books deal with past and present trends in Muslim thought and each looks at some half dozen Muslim areas repeatedly, at different periods in time...

...The movie is dominated by the contrast of two sets of images...

...The video, in fact, is a three-minute art form that grew up, like most art forms, accidentally...

...As John Powers observes in a recent American Film, the plots of such movies can be seen as implicitly racist -- not in the Kipling but Conradian manner: they concern no white man's burden to save the "lesser breeds," but document the need for the white man to be saved from a heart of darkness...

...But in California their principal sidekicks are spunkier father and mother figures: one is Monty (Trinidad Silva), owner of the motel and a requisite Fernando Valenzuela sweatshirt, who tries to guide Enrique to new jobs...

...not a foreign film since it was made by Americans, it still might qualify as the best "nonEnglish language film" next year...

...Nevertheless, El Norte is a remarkable film...

...El Norte is no f'wst-world version of a sanitized third-world saint...

...The acting throughout is superb ensemble work...

...MUSLIM THOUGHT IN TRANSITION . . . . . . . . . . . . . Islam: faith & ideology JANE HUSSAIN I N STRUCTURE, Faith and Power and Islam and Modernity are quite similar, while their subject matters overlap...

...But the two forms have made inevitable union in the new art of the video -- utilizing yet another distinctively modem technology, TV, and generating a form which is perhaps as close as the cinema has come to the impressionism of the lyric poem, and as close as rock has approached to the status of symbolism...

...Already this has happened, in the case of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," which is virtually a short feature film -- and which has spun off its own TV special in "The Making of Michael Jackson' s 'Thriller.' ") To be sure, out of ten videos, seven (I am being generous) will be garbage: so will seven out of any ten novels, poems, or symphonies...

...Although his treatments of the six Muslim areas are to my knowledge accurate and objective, Edward Mortimer has of necessity had to provide his history of political thought without either its political or its intellectual context...

...It can be as simple as a mere film of the group performing (e.g...

...The problem, of course, is that the outrage becomes, fairly rapidly, the predictable...

...and that, increasingly, is what will alter both American popular music and American television...

...Unlike Under Fire, Missing, or The Year of Living Dangerously, El Norte does not concern an Anglo hero and/or heroine who is plunged into a barely comprehensible jungle melodrama and Who evolves from partial sympathy toward this alien world to final rejection of it...

...According to Nava and Thomas, they approached some Hollywood studios with El Norte and were told to remake it with anglicized protagonists as human fights activists, casting, as one producer suggested, Brooke Shields in the lead...

...world...

...They have also caused a controversy about what category El Norte belongs in at the 1985 Academy Awards...

...Kafka's wonderful parable tells us that leopards keep breaking into the Temple and consuming the bread and wine, and that eventually this is accepted as part of the ritual...

...There is terror there, to be sure, especially in scenes set at a picturesque, catacomb-like old hacienda where soldiers murder and mutilate their father...

...Synchronicity II" by the Police) or as complicated as a three-minute daydream/nightmare narrative ("Gimme All Your Lovin' " by Z Z Top...

...Fazlur Rahman is not at all discouraged by the diversity of interpretations to be found over space and time in the Muslim world...

...Or, in terms of rock-and-roll apocalyptism, you can only smash your guitar at the end of the concert so many times before that becomes part of the concert...

...Although sharply realistic on the whole, El Norte uses dreams, hallucinations and reminiscences of Guatemala as expressionist brushstrokes to highlight the pathos of uprootedness -- as, for example, when Rosa fantasizes her mother preparing tortillas in her dingy motel room...

...And the avant-garde film, likewise, has a long tradition of deliberate outrage, from Buimel's Un Chien andalou to the films of Stan Brakhage...

...Certainly, Faith and Power can be thought of as a useful handbook, an easy reference guide, if you please, to the political thought of the Muslim world, past and present...

...Fazlur Rahman, who is a Muslim, has a FAITH AND POWER THE POLITICS OF ISLAM Edward Mortimer Random House, $19.95, 432 pp...

...The two books differ sharply in viewpoint as well as readability...

...As a result though routed politically, Enrique and Rosa never exactly leave Guatemala, the subject of El Nome's best cinematographic poetry...

...Therefore, Islam should not be thought of as a geopolitical force in the II JANE HUSSAIN, a writer and educator in Pakistan, where she has lived for many years, is the author of two volumes of An Illustrated History of Pakistan (Oxford University Press...

...Edward Mortimer's work, on the other hand, is meant for the general reader...

...Rock and the cinema have both grown into fantastically, perhaps even grotesquely, high-tech forms of contemporary art...

...But there is something I hope you noticed...

...Both rock and the avant-garde film were in severe danger of this kind of exhaustion, before they met and married...

...The result is a minor masterpiece with a rich sensual texture and vibrant heart...

...Or the latest Def Leppard...

...I did not ask if you had heard the latest Fleetwood Mac, etc.: I asked if you had seen them...

...Yes, yes--and then there's Norman Mailer...

...And it is also an interesting question -- one that could not have been asked before this century -- how far an "art" can presume to expend the dwindling amount of available energy on this planet...

...The video, indeed, may turn out to be not only a new art form, but the salvation and resurrection of two other art forms in severe danger of exhaustion: rock music and the avant-garde film...

...when they arrive, however, they must settle in a squalid Los Angeles motel for migrant workers...

...You will notice that I have not yet told you what the video is: this is not (at least not wholly) a lapse in expository style, as much as it is an admission that (a) maybe you don't need to know since you've read all about videos in Time and the enterainment section of your local paper...

...From the bottom up, the view is different: not a mass of foreign faces, but a tangle of jealousies among Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Central Ameri, cans (not to mention the recent Asian arrivals...

...Short, fast, hallucinatory, and lyrical: those are the characteristics of the video at its best...

...Because Edward Mortimer is a journalist concerned with Muslim thought on politics, his book is more readable and accessible to the average layperson than that of Fazlur Rahman, an Islamic scholar exploring the more esoteric topic of Muslim ideas on thought (and education...

...And as the form evolves -or perhaps the word is exfoliates -- it is interesting to observe how the filmmaking eventually becomes as important as, or more important than, the lyrics of the song itself...

...Except they are both forms which rely, for much of their energy, on deliberate outrage...

...Significantly, the villain of EINorte is not a "gringo," but another member of the California Latin community, whom the "gringos" see as "all alike...

...El Norte has the real stuff...

...El Norte, on the other hand, looks at some of the hearts from the dark world (dazing to be particular and really discriminate) and finds them bright, sympathetic, and inspiring...

...But the country is lushly presented at the beginning and never forgotten...

...Villalpando and Guttierez are ably assisted in El Norte by Ernesto Gomez Cruz as their father and Alicia del Logo as their mother...

...The group called Motley Crue has an even more detailed narrative video, "Looks That Kill," which can be seen either as a parable of male dominance or a parable of the dangers of sexism, but which is in either case a startling, and vaguely sinister, piece of filmmaking...

...Edward Mortimer ends with an anticonclusion: There is not one but many islams...

...It is an interesting question, in fact, whether more sheer expenditure of effort and power is involved in making a full-length film, or mounting a tour for a group like The Who or Led Zeppelin...

...Nor is this really anything new...

...Commonweal: 212 What i am talking about is the phenomenon called, somewhat redundantly, the "video...

...III l/Ill I Media II II I I I I I!11 I INFANT ART THE VIDEO IS BORN H AVE YOU SEEN the latest Fleetwood Mac...

...Joyce and Nabokov, two of the most Olympian figures of modem writing, are also two of the most deeply immersed and versed in the bric-a-brac of comic books, pop songs, advertisements, etc...

...Fazlur Rahman's book is obviously aimed at a particular readership: Islamic scholars, would-be scholars, and educators...

...But the other three will be extraordinary...

...In short, Under Fire and the others are first-world third-world films, El Norte is thirdworld first...

...If you didn't know that, you can keep on reading anyway...

...and (b) in fact I don't know how to describe a video unless you've seen one -- or many...

...ISLAM AND MODERNITY TRANSFORMATION OF AN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION Fazlur Ruhman University of Chicago, $15, 172 pp...

...For originally it was intended simply as a visual adjunct to records about to be marketed by major groups...

...In whatever case, it is usually a very high-tech performance, involving the kind of strobe-like cutting and elaborate editing that is the dream of every director and the despair of every poor soul sitting over the videotape editing machine...

...in this respect, at least, the young Stravinsky of the Sacre du printemps and the early Rolling Stones of "Jumping Jack Flash" have more in common one with the other than either does with, say, Barry Manilow...

...the true Islam is always under construction...

...Fats Waller, the great jazz pianist, was once asked by a wealthy matron what" swing" meant, and responded with the immortal line, "If you gotta ask, you'll never know...

...It is, nearly, a new art form...

...This leads to two inevitable, albeit unintentional distortions: we receive an Commonweal: 214...

...FRANK McCONNELL (Frank McConnell's most recent book is a novel, Murder Among Friends, Walker, $12.95...

...The heart comes mostly from two Mexican novice actors, David Villalpando and Zaide Silvia Guttierez, who play Enrique and Rosa, with simplicity, grace, and grit...

...to find the possibility of meaningful utterance in the very stuff of contemporary mechanism, the ghost in the machine...

...The video, briefly, is a short film to accompany a rock song by a prominent (or sometimes not so prominent) group...

...Its nearest ancestors are, probably, TV commercials -- some of which, at least, as people have been saying for years, are cleverer than the shows they interrupt -- or brilliant, short bits of filmmaking like the main title sequences of the James Bond or Pink Panther movies...

...the other is Nacha (Lupe Ontiveros) who saves Rosa from police raids on garment sweatshops, gets her cleaning work, and disguises her as a local with a trip to Sears...

...Or, as we used to say in Chicago, "You hadda be there...

...She is completing an economic history of the region...

...Well, if you haven't, I can't really say that i blame you (much as I might be inclined to do so...

...But I trust you are at least hip enough to know that Fleetwood Mac, Madness, and Def Leppard ate all rock groups-- the first now, unfortunately, defunct and the latter two, with rather ambiguous means for rejoi.cing, still alive...

...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics currently reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...

...But they did meet, and they did marry, the over-funky and the over-sophisticated, and the marriage has begotten the video...

...A Tracy-Hepburn marriage, to be sure: and the child as healthy as one might expect from such...

...Both authors agree that while social justice is a basic aim of Islam, there is no definitive sociopolitical blueprint to be found either in its scripture or traditions...

...He feels that his refusal to choose the "true Islam" from among the many versions which he has come across in his two years of travel and research is appropriate to his identity as a non-Muslim...

...Rock was in danger of spiraling downward into the deliberately untalented abyss of Punk, and the experimental film was in danger of becoming the increasingly abstract, artsy-craftsy product of a few UCLA film majors...

...To both of these readerships, Edward Mortimer excuses himself from drawing any relevant conclusions whatsoever...

...El Norte's Guatemala is mountains and mist, turkey vultures capering in village doorways, candlelit altars in every cottage, women dressed in stark, neat ponchos dyed vivid yellows, reds, and indigos...

...He assumes that if he were a Muslim, he would be obliged to pick and choose...

...From Petronius'sSatyricon, written, like the Book of Revelations, under the reign of Nero, down to Mailer, a large proportion of Western art attempts to shock us out of our normal expectations of what a r t " should" be like...

...One can imaginetwo major types of readers for Mortimer's book: Westerners who are wondering about Islam as a geopolitical force in world affairs, and inhabitants of the Muslim world who are wondering about Islam as a political force in their own lives...

...6 April 1984:213 But it is pointless to go through a catalogue of videos, since there are so many of them...

...That is, unlike many recent films about the struggles of third-word peoples, El Norte actually concerns them, their viewpoints, their hostilities, their backgrounds, and even the distortions crucial to their survival...

...different perspective...

...It is in the final chapters of their books that the two authors really diverge...

...Even in this capacity, however, the book has certain limitations...

...If the art is still in its infancy -- ten years ago there were no videos -- and still struggling with elemental clumsinesses, that is no reason to doubt its validity, its interest, or the degree to which it reaffirms the perennial ability of popular culture to resuscitate itself...

...Chris de Burgh's "Don't Pay the Ferryman," for example, is simultaneously song and story, a three-minute film that works as a short film even though it is populated -- or spangled -- with radically unconnected images: Charon, the classical ferryman to the underworld, an eerie wedding scene, and de Burgh's own Gothic, Heathcliffe-like countenance lipsynching some of the words of the song...

...we can't all, after all, know everything (I, for one, have never been certain of the precise reasons for Walter Mondale...

...As both a Westerner and a long-time resident of the Muslim world, I found this doubly disappointing...

...indeed, there is a strong relationship between the scandalous Satyricon and the Book of Revelations: a Christian culture has to live in the perennial expectation of Apocalypse, and the culture's art has, correspondingly, to remind us of the possibility of the breaking of forms, the explosion of the normal...

...It is the lack of creative, rational thought and scholarly method displayed in the currently dominant trends which he finds most disturbing...

...Perhaps El Norte deserves more: certainly it compares favorably with 1983's best picture, Gandhi...

...For him, a Muslim's duty is not to choose but to think anew...

...And Billy Joel's "Pressure" is, simply, not only a brilliant song but one of the most brilliant, dream-like actualizations of the paranoid state of mind that I have seen, equaling even a film like Polanski's Repulsion...

...That, I think, is increasingly what kids are asking one another about their favorite groups...

...To be sure, there are defects in El Norte: Indifferent filming of Los Angeles and some hackneyed melodrama at the close...

...That is, when does "art" become waste...

...When I first drafted this piece, I predicted that sooner or later we would see credits, at the end of a piece, not just for the group performing the song, but for the director also...