Last night I attended a lecture by Alex Schmid, director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, on state terrorism. Linking competing conceptual definitions of terrorism with the ongoing practice of state terror in countries around the world, it was incredibly confronting, largely due to the many slides Schmid displayed revealing statistics on the numbers of people killed, tortured, disappeared, incarcerated in concentration camps etc, from the 1970s till the present.
Then, today, I read David Thomson in the Guardian: “It may be fanciful to read national impulse in the tropes of art,” he writes, yet eloquently does just that. He muses on the violence in Hollywood’s latest cinematic output – from There Will Be Blood to Sweeney Tod: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, it’s awash with blood – and links it to America’s crises of conscience regarding its country’s practices of torture and prisoner abuse.
Can art really reveal a nation’s interior violence? I’m planning to see the Coen brothers’ latest offering, No Country For Old Men, this weekend, so will let you know.
Art, by definition, is too individual to ever lead to this notion of a “national” art–such categorizations go against the initial impulse to create and are facile in the extreme. I always shudder when cultural gits here in Canada talk about “Canadian” literature (or CanLit), throwing all writers together in one big lump and assuming that, at heart, we have more similarities than differences. What rubbish. A certain artist or writer may capture the national zeitgeist with a particular work but I think that’s as far as it goes.
My two cents’ worth…