1969: BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (Penn, USA, 1969)

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID was one of several Westerns to emerge in 1969, a year in which the United States reached towards an entirely new frontier with the moon landing. CASSIDY treats the nostalgia for the old Western frontier with a humor that played with varying levels of success in 1969.

The movie was given a platform release, with the limited release occurring September 23, and the American wide release one month later. At $6M, its budget was nearly 20 times that of EASY RIDER (Hopper, USA, 1969)– but at $49M in US rentals, its profit was two and a half times its counterpart’s. Adjusted for inflation, its US gross of $100M ranks among the 100 highest-grossing movies of all time.

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID was a movie of the Hollywood establishment. Starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who was riding high on the success of COOL HAND LUKE (Rosenberg, USA, 1967), the film employed studio and location shooting, a tremendously successful score by Burt Bacharach, and expensive special effects to impress audiences worldwide. For the Academy, at least, it worked: the film was nominated for seven Oscars (including Best Picture) and won four: for Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Original Song and Best Original Screenplay. In addition, it swept the BAFTAs and also took home a Golden Globe and a Grammy. Added to the National Film Registry in 2003, it is number seven on the AFI Ten Best Westerns list.

In spite of its mainstream critical acclaim, BUTCH CASSIDY did not play well among more serious and scholarly critics. New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby stated in 1969 that the film “did not succeed”, while Stephen Farber, writing for Film Quarterly, goes so far as to call the movie “offensive”. Roger Ebert blames CASSIDY’s flaws on the “millions of dollars that were spent on ‘production values’ that wreck the show”; Roger Corliss describes it as “a meticulous Boliviazation of Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, a sort of second-generation rebel – slick, handsome, a lot like mom and dad but a little too fat and self-conscious.” In the most forgiving review to be found in Film Quarterly at the time, Dennis Hunt calls BUTCH CASSIDY “a playful, effervescent Western that has been tailored to the tastes of the Pepsi generation.” The film is a neat counterpart to EASY RIDER, which achieved serious critical acclaim in spite of its financial limitations and roots outside the studio system. In contrast, CASSIDY suffers precisely because of its studio dollars and high production values. It is another angle from which to view the sea change that took place in the American film industry at the end of the 1960s.

Unlike EASY RIDER, BUTCH CASSIDY was filmed entirely after the 1968 DNC, and mostly after the 1968 presidential election. Perhaps that accounts for its more conservative, conformist industrial context. However, in a 1970 interview, Oscar-winning cinematographer Conrad Hall responded to the question of whether he thought people were serious enough about revolution to go into the streets, “I think so. I didn’t think so a year and a half ago, but I think so now.” Again, the uncertain climate of 1969 manifests in conflicting visions of the direction of American culture – away from revolution on the industrial side, but towards it in terms of vision or mood.

Critics at the time remarked that BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID was a film very aware of being at the end of an era. Writes Farber, “I suppose what drew [screenwriter] Goldman to the material was the sense that these men were the last Western bandits”. Similarly, Vincent Canby describes it as “the last exuberant word on movies about the men of the mythic American West who have outlived their day.” Like the motorcyclists of EASY RIDER, Butch and Sundance are the last hope of a rebellion that will be put down.

In his article American Cinematic Form, Richard Kenney eloquently describes this sense of impending doom:

Even in the atmosphere of nostalgic humor, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid cannot live as anachronisms beyond their Southwestern time; neither can the Wild Bunch hope to escape baroque death in an age of Verdun. Cassidy, the Kid, and the Bunch didn’t die because they were bad men, or even violent men – they were good men, or good enough, and they each died in an astonishing apocalypse of gunfire, under a far greater violence than they ever would have generated by themselves. The laws and soldiers and societies had become more dangerous than the outlaws.

According to Dennis Hunt, the film’s antagonists are “a ponderous symbol of progress closing in to snuff out the desperado’s way of life”. Each of these critics picks up on the sense present both in CASSIDY and in EASY RIDER that the outsiders or outlaws have become the last hope of society, and that nominally “respectable” people will be its downfall.

The message of BUTCH CASSIDY is of course complicated by the fact that it was deeply rooted in the very system of respectability it symbolically critiques: it was a big studio blockbuster, multiple Oscar-winner, the ultimate insider. However, the fact that its message is so similar to EASY RIDER’s, although the production processes were nearly opposite, demonstrates the pervading mood of 1969, a mood that is familiar today as we have watched the most respected businessmen of our era lead us to the worst economic crisis of the last several generations, and our top politicians condone practices held for decades to be barbarous. The last frontiers of America have been explored and exploited, and we are left with the sense that we will have to turn elsewhere, or give up.

At the Northwest Film Forum, with EASY RIDER: January 9-15, 2009, 8:30pm

1969 Begins: EASY RIDER

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Gentle readers,

over the next few days, weeks, or perhaps months, I will be offering here the fruits of my labor on behalf of the Northwest Film Forum as part of their 1969 series, which will take place over the course of 2009. The idea behind this program is not to present a nostalgic look back at a bygone era, so much as to use 1969 as a sociopolitical and aesthetic lens to examine our own time. Naturally, the outcome of this month's election will prove a major distinguishing factor between 1969 and 2009, but the parallels to be drawn are many, nevertheless.

The first wave of material will be essays I am composing on the first fourteen movies to be presented as part of the 1969 program. These essays have been loosely composed, and are rough and associative at best. Please be kind - but do leave comments, as I would like your engagement in the conversation to help spark ideas for new avenues of research and exploration. I begin with my work on EASY RIDER.

-alex b.

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EASY RIDER (Hopper, USA, 1969)


Given a wide United States release in mid-July, 1969, Easy Rider is often named as an exemplary film of its generation. The most problematic part of this statement is that few can agree on that generation’s identity. It was, as we have remarked, a period of transition, of schizophrenic perception and evaluation, of frightening uncertainty and terrifying expectations. Perhaps EASY RIDER is most emblematic of its filmic generation in its very contradictions and ambiguities, which range from the financial to the formal, hitting nearly everything in between.


The most obvious contradiction in the story of EASY RIDER is its critical and financial success in spite of its departure from the traditional Hollywood studio system. Its break with this system is viewed to this day as a forerunner of the Hollywood Renaissance. Produced on a shoestring budget of about $350,000, the film nonetheless netted $19M in the United States, grossing $60M worldwide. Nominated and rejected for two Oscars, EASY RIDER took the First Film Prize (Prix de la premiere oeuvre) at Cannes. Both its financial and (international) critical success seemed to be a slap in the face of the cinematic establishment, which tended to base expectation of return on financial investment. As Stephen Farber writes in the 1969 article “End of the Road,” the summer of 69 marked a turning point in the American film industry, when blockbusters failed and most top grossing films, including EASY RIDER and MIDNIGHT COWBOY, were low-budget independent productions.

Equally ambiguous and contradictory is the story of EASY RIDER’s pop soundtrack (the music also serves to tie the film to its cultural era). Though not the first film to use a pop soundtrack, it was perhaps the first to use it to such great effect. The myth of EASY RIDER is that with no money for an original score, Dennis Hopper played the a rock ‘n’ roll scratch track to accompany the film’s first studio screening. The studio executives allegedly loved it so much that they insisted it be kept on. Given that the rights for the music cost about $1M, or three times the film’s estimated budget, it seems doubtful that it was as spontaneous as all that, but the story exemplifies one of the film era’s defining characteristics, namely a desire to believe in the mythos of film-auteur-as-maverick, even when the “maverick” actions were only made possible by system dollars.

It is possible that the film’s defiant, sometimes naïve railing against “the system” and “the man” stem from its filming dates. Though released in July 1969, EASY RIDER was filmed from March-May 1968, before the assassination of RFK and the Chicago convention, two events commonly named in discussions of the downfall of 1960s optimistic idealism. The film centers on what Roger Ebert called “specific rejection of the establishment (by which is meant everything from rednecks to the Pentagon to hippies on communes)” in his original 1969 review. Perhaps it was the election of Richard Nixon, which distinguishes 1969 from 2009 perhaps more sharply than any other event, but 1969 onwards was a period remarkable for its return to conformity, not rejection of the establishment. In EASY RIDER, we can see the last vestiges of the 1960s’ rebellion. At the same time, the film, edited and released in 1969, ends with the cynicism that would come to characterize the 1970s.

Reviewers who see EASY RIDER today often criticize it as dated; nevertheless, it has proven to be important to American film history. Indeed, in 1998 it found a place on the National Film Registry. This significance stems in part from technical breaks with Hollywood style – the use of location filming, a pop score, lay actors and natural lighting – and in part from its role as a reflection of its era. That role is a dynamic one, as it is not merely a reflection of the events of 1968-69, but also of the mood that took hold of the country. In 1969, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that “Hopper, Fonda and their friends went out into America looking for a movie and found instead a small, pious statement (upper case) about our society (upper case), which is sick (upper case).” Canby claims that EASY RIDER is “pretty but lower case cinema”; regardless, the landscape from which it sprang is one that is familiar today, and the product perhaps something from which we can learn.

Writing in 1969 about the year’s films, Roger Corliss made two piquant remarks about EASY RIDER: first, he observed that it was “the most difficult to praise or blame by the old rules”. Facing the collapse of the studio system before the expansion of television, these filmmakers were working outside tradition to make something fresh, at a time when many in their leftist circle still felt optimistic about the immediate future. The result, claims Corliss, is that “the film does convey the direct feeling of an experience. Indeed, it may be in Hopper’s favor that he leaves it up to the viewer to show sympathy or disdain for the characters.” This statement captures more than that of any other reviewer the uncertainty, unpredictability, and new ambiguity of 1969. The transfer of agency to the viewer left the old system of didactic morality behind; we were no longer told what to think, or so it seemed to the movie-going public at that turbulent time.

Perhaps the most significant contradiction in EASY RIDER’s terms was that in spite of its groundbreaking aspects, it was also deeply rooted in the American film tradition. Writing in 1971 of Westerns in his article American Cinematic Form (published in Film Quarterly), Richard Kenney states, “Cowboys made the American romance of freedom and violence. Americans have always been a violent people, and they admire the rugged individualist, pioneer spirit, the loner and the open road…EASY RIDER is a romance of the open road.” This connection between EASY RIDER and the Western is commonly drawn; Roger Ebert, too, uses the Western as a tool to understand EASY RIDER in his original 1969 review. The American obsession with the frontier is still with us, and was certainly characteristic of 1969, with its Westerns and moon landings. EASY RIDER’s juxtaposition with BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, a much more obvious product of the Western genre, may help viewers understand the film through that lens. A glossy, high-budget production, BUTCH CASSIDY will also provide a counterpoint to EASY RIDER’s scrappy production values, as the two films demonstrate the two ends of 1969’s schizoid film continuum.

The pacifist pull of W.H. Auden

I recently pulled my Collected Poems of W.H. Auden from the shelf. For the last five or six years, my favorite poem by far has been the achingly horrifying O What Is That Sound? With its two voices suddenly reduced to one, its lilting refrain and strict adherence to verse form, this poem demands to be read out loud or even set to music. It is a picture of abandonment that is dramatic, dynamic, and enormously effective.

On this recent evening, when I returned to Auden for the first time in several months, I stumbled across the poem James Honeyman, a poem which illustrated to me again what I loved so much about O What Is That Sound? Both works, penned in the mid-late 1930s, are indisputably political products of Auden's deep-seated pacifism in the face of the Spanish Civil War and impending Second World War. Unlike many political poets, however, Auden remains deeply invested in form, and in a prettiness of language that never bows to the ugliness of content. In fact, it is this tension, between appealing form and repulsive content, that is the key to Auden's power. James Honeyman, in particular, makes use of simply formulaic verses. Like O What Is That Sound, it disarms the reader with its tripping rhythm and attractive images (a "ten-shilling chemistry set", or a small child who sits at a party dreamily dissolving sugar in his tea), pulling said recipient toward a moment of terrifying violence, which the poem's protagonist must confront alone.

After the idyll of content and form established in the early verses, that moment of confrontation shocks the reader, takes her by surprise and abrades her sensibilities, which have been finely tuned to the peaceful opening stanzas. This switch, contained in rigorously designed verses, portrays the fiendishness of violence, and its embeddedness in society, with unsurpassed accuracy. As we know all too well, violence is not a breaking of societal forms or norms, but the result of conforming to them and pursuing them to their natural conclusion. If we do not pay attention, we too must die (and we know why) by Honeyman's N.P.C.

48 HOUR FILM CHALLENGE THURSDAY 6:30PM

If you're in the Seattle area, come check out films made for the 48-hour film project this past weekend - especially this one. The screening is this Thursday, July 17, at the Neptune Theatre.

The address is 1303 N 45th St, Seattle.

See you there!

Local Sightings Film Festival

Hey Northwest filmmakers! Are you from WA, OR, ID, MT, AK, or BC? Submit to the Northwest Film Forum's Local Sightings Film Festival by Friday, July 18!! All necessary info in the link provided.

All the world's a bubble

I stumbled on this photo, and many more like it, via BoingBoing yesterday.

Photographer Jason Tozer was commissioned by Sony to show off its schmancy new camera line, in a stunningly beautiful collusion of art and commercialism.

These brought to mind a question I ponder on about a fortnightly basis: does everything really look the same, or do we just see it that way because we understand our perceptions in our own lived contexts? Do soap bubbles look like planets, or beer bottles like the human form? Is there an underlying, a priori pattern governing the shape of things, or is it an a posteriori imposition of our own narcissistic brains?

In any case, I want to live on this planet.

Is my blog ALL WRONG?

Once again, I mine Slate for a thought provoking meditation, this time on how we read on the Internet.

Professional Dreamers

Werner Herzog's new documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, is my favorite of his films yet.* Commissioned by the National Science Foundation, the film is Herzog's attempt to make a movie about Antarctica that isn't "just another penguin movie". On countless levels, he succeeds.

First and foremost, he succeeds by turning the spotlight not on the stunning and terrifying Antarctic landscape, but on the peculiar folk who choose to make that landscape their home. The real fascinators here are the bus drivers, greenhouse keepers, maintenance people, whose biographies could put many a Nobel laureate to shame. Herzog's editorializing ("her story goes on forever") adds a delightful touch to these remarkable narratives.

When Werner does get to the nature, it is tear-jerkingly beautiful, accompanied by swelling music that will give you the sensation of having your heart extracted with an ice cream scoop. That is, for the most part - in fact, some of the most intriguing footage is of the town and NSF research station McMurdo, which Herzog unflinchingly films in all of its ugliness. The prosaic and mundane have a place in Antarctica, too.**

In Herzog's Antarctica, penguins can be gay or deranged; diving scientists are rooftop rockstars; seals make noises like an army of robots; and humans are well advanced on the long path to extinction. Musing on what the future dominant beings on this planet will be like, Herzog remarks that they may wonder what human beings were even doing in Antarctica; for the moment, we should at least be glad that this human being went.



*I haven't seen them all - but I'm working on that.
**Until I saw this movie, I thought those neon CGI fish in "The Life Aquatic" were a joke.

TweedleDum and TweedleEvil

Check out these bad boys:

Swan song, here we come.
(The short one is Silvio Berlusconi, BTW)

Things Younger Than McCain

Please note the newest "Blog I Like": Things Younger than McCain.
My personal favorites are SPAM and both of Barack Obama's parents.

Love Songs

On Sunday I had the good fortune to go see Les Chansons d'Amour, the latest film from Christophe Honore. Part tragedy, part comedy, part love story, and all musical, this film is, at its most basic, an exploration of loss and confusion.

Though not a fan in general of the musical genre, I found this playful but melancholy romp through Paris benefited greatly from Alex Beaupain's low-key, melodious compositions, sung with those special French throaty vocals. Perhaps it is because songs allow a poetic lyricism that, when spoken without a tune, sounds merely kitschy if not downright absurd. This way, Chiara Mastroianni can describe returning to a park she once frequented with her dead sister and end with "et puis rien [and then nothing]", and the effect prompts your heart to break, not your eyes to roll.

This film is successful not only because of its ability to use music well, but for the reasons any narrative film is successful: a compelling and universal story, characters we can care about, actors who can make us care about them, pretty cinematography, a fresh style, and an inherent likeability. (A film critic whose name I don't recall put it best: "Christophe Honore's films aren't just films you like; you develop weird little crushes on them.") Basically, it's a good story relayed by good storytelling.

Really, though, I think the reason I like this movie so much is ultimately narcissistic: it speaks very eloquently to my generation. Recalling movies of another time that were aimed at confused and disenfranchised youth - the New Wave - "Les Chansons d'Amour" recognizes the confusion of fulfilled desires. In this film, the open sexuality the 68ers strove for has come to pass; everything is possible, allowed, even accepted by the parents, but nothing is easier. Loss is still loss, grief grief, and sorrow a big confusing mess that can't be shared nearly as easily as sex. In the end, all we might be able to do is stumble along until the person we wake up next to is someone we might want to see again when the night returns. And then hope that that person might "love us less, but love us for a long time" - because whatever else life and love are about, they are certainly about learning to compromise.

The Billy Letters

Courtesy of Radar Magazine (via Boing Boing), a story about a manchild soliciting advice from serial killers -- and getting it.

The Devil You Know is Better than the Devil You Don't

I can't think of a better way to describe Zoe Scofield's choreography than she does herself: "feral ballet". Her work, as I saw it in my first-ever zoejuniper show last night at On the Boards, is compelling, rigorous, intense, and never ever boring.

This show, like all other zoejuniper projects, is a collaboration between Scofield and Juniper Shuey, whose theater-influenced visuals nicely complement Scofield's choreography. Terrific music comes from composer Morgan Henderson. Altogether, this show is clean, vibrant, and disconcerting. The principles' jerky movements and extraordinarily toned bodies feel like ballet stuck into a pencil sharpener. Scofield's, and her dancers', extraordinary talents range from mind-boggling solos to skilful creation of highly affective stage pictures. If you're in town, go!

The devil you know is better than the devil you don't...
April 24-26, 2008, 8pm
On the Boards
100 West Roy Street Seattle, WA 98119
206.217.9888

Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul

The last two weeks featured two remarkably different programs of short films by Apichatpong (friends, and people interested in keeping their tongues untied, call him "Joe") Weerasethakul at Northwest Film Forum, my second home. After the first program, of muted colors, meandering narratives and a deliberate mix of the happenstance and the mythical, I thought I knew more or less what to expect. Joe's work in the second program, however, full of vivid hues and irrepressible Thai pop music, not to mention a dose of gorgeous animation, pleasantly surprised me. Don't get me wrong - I liked the first round - but the second has planted itself in my brain like a dream I might have had myself.

What all the films have in common is a playfulness with storytelling. Joe has a tendency to flip back and forth between verite-style street (or jungle!) scenes and highly constructed parables. Throw in a dash of music video, and you're in for a fun evening of thinking about theories of communication. Strikingly, the most accessible short was the one without subtitles (0116643225059), in which several still images and static shots are mixed to match the audio track of a conversation. I guess synesthesia has no borders...

"It may not be a lot, but he's large"

In 1980, Robert Altman took on the not-unformidable project of making a live action film of Popeye, one of the most cartoonish cartoons ever. Beyond great music by Harry Nilsson and a brilliant performance by Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, this bizarre film is a little unsettling to watch. Altman follows through with a 1:1 conversion of cartoon action into live action. The result is the disappearance of whimsy that usually mitigates the gruesome violence and slapstick with which Popeye, in particular, is so fraught. When it's a real flesh-and-blood face that Robin Williams is repeatedly pummeling with his gigantic forearms, it's more grotesque than funny. Similarly, spectacular falls, flips and tramplings leave you wincing instead of chuckling. In a way, it provides a cultural comment about the violence inherent in our supposedly "family-friendly" entertainment - but it's really more strange than moralizing.

"All that comes out are zeros"

Yesterday, I saw Jen Erickson's work at Punch for the second time. This time, the title, "Sad Math", really struck me. These works are sad. Something about the gravitational pull on the oil paint shapes, filled in with graphite zeros and visited by infrequent flying creatures, exerts weight on the brain. Perhaps it's the tension Bonnie noted between depth and flatness, but these pieces evoke absence and emptiness, reflecting the artist's statement about the Internet. It's full of information, but it leaves us none the wiser and empty more often than not. (Also, given binary, half this information is dependent on zeros...)

I was struck by the repetition of the "systems" in these works found on the gallery floor - coincidental, providential, chaotic or inevitable, or all of it. This is a nice show, that might leave you feeling a tiny bit hollow.

Grasping at Grief

Dawn Cerny's new show at the Henry is about death and mourning in the West. Her works are pretty good, especially the hordes of paper doll-type figures caught in the throes of death, many of them with red yarn entrails pouring out. The inclusion of medieval warriors in this collection was particularly charming. There's also a series of watercolors of death-related T-shirts with a modern goth aesthetic (in a clever marketing stratagem, you can buy one of these in a limited edition from the gift shop), which I found impressive in their technique, as Cerny convincingly related the wrinkly, floppy texture of T-shirt material using paint and paper.

The conceit of the exhibit is the comparison of mourning rituals across centuries, highlighting continuity. In the room with the T-shirt paintings are cases of Victorian artifacts and seven taxidermed owls. 19th-century photographs of people in mourning garb and vast flower memorials also decorate the walls.

The most impressive things in this exhibit were intricately woven pieces fashioned from the hair of the deceased. Two were watch chains, one of which was probably three feet long when measured end-to-end and reminded me of the lanyard braids that children make in crafts classes. This, however, was almost excruciating to look at for the fineness of its craftsmanship, knowing that it was made from a material as delicate as human hair. I can't imagine that anyone ever actually used it as a watch chain (though the implication of its role as an anchor of time is appropriate to an artifact of mourning). The other watch chain was much thicker in diameter and was a weave between human hair and gold links. Again, the painstaking labor that went into it was obvious. Finally, and this piece was the most moving for me, there was a locket that appeared to be empty. However, on a closer look, it was in fact upholstered on the inside by finely woven black hair. By invoking the "missing" photograph in the locket, this piece evoked with incredible effectiveness the emptiness inherent in mourning, and the necessarily futile effort to retain the tangible.

Grieving and mourning are a process of coming to terms with the impossible, of accepting "never again". Commonly, the most painful part of death is the survivors' consequent inability to touch the deceased. The frank admission of this, evident in these hair pieces, struck me in contrast to our modern terror of corpses and any of their byproducts. Now, carrying a watch chain or wearing an adornment made of a dead person's hair would seem "creepy" or "morbid" - like the Victorian portraits-in-death of children posed to appear as though they were alive. As stirring as these portraits can be, the works in hair as a sort of Ariadne's thread for the beyond, doomed to fail, were ultimately the most moving pieces in this show, if only for their sheer difference from our rituals of mourning today.

Okay, I give in.

Today, Edward suggested that I start a blog.

I am resistant.

But: I sort of miss writing. And I have lots of faraway friends, who in theory can check up on me here, maybe. Or at least what I think about things. Because this is, I hope, the most I will ever write about myself in these virtual pages.

So Anne Frank and the diary. It's got me thinking about authenticity, and how much that ephemeral concept really matters in the face of universal identification.

Back up. Everyone knows, or can assume, that the version of Anne Frank's diary we get to read is a highly edited version, particularly for the lion's share of us, who aren't wasting our brainspace knowing Dutch and thus read it only in translation. Also commonly known is that many of the edits in the trade paperback version were done by Anne's father, Otto Frank, who wanted to keep at least the skeleton's knuckle bones in the closet. Then came the edits we know the publishing house must have done, anything that went lost in translation, etc. etc. Good.

What most readers with more than a passing interest in Anne Frank find out, is that many of the edits were actually done by the author herself. In 1944, the precocious child undertook the massive project of rewriting her two-year-old diary, with the goal of ultimately turning it into a publishable novel. Inspired by a radio broadcast in which the exiled Dutch government expressed an interest in retrieving "everyday" war documentation when the fiasco finally ended, Anne began at 14 to reframe her own diary, which she had begun two days after her 13th birthday. This revamped version was the "first draft" for much of what was ultimately printed. Okay.

You get to another layer of interesting meddlery when you start to really delve into it - and I mean by reading biographies and tomes like the "Revised Critical Edition," which is 800 pages and probably weighs 10 pounds. What I just recently learned, and what made me ponder this authenticity problem even more, is that the "real" original of Anne's diary for almost the entirety of 1943 no longer exists. What exists is the second version that she wrote out on copy paper in her novelization project following the aforementioned radio announcement. So not only is the entire year of 1943 - the chronological center of what we think of as the diary - an edited version of an edited version, the unedited version is unavailable for comparison.

So why does this matter? (Aside: As I see it, it probably doesn't.) However false and idolatrous our view may be, we see documents like diaries and journals as vehicles of original, untouched and untouchable, authentic truth. And we are moved by a document like Anne Frank's journal because we think it is the ultimate expression of a real person's inner and outer life, her original experiences. We feel like we can get inside her head, like we can identify with her. And knowing that we are actually removed from this real person by several layers of editing somehow disturbs the connection and falsifies our organic experience of truth. Right?

Wrong, for two reasons, the first of which is the more nihilistic. In essence, the sweet authenticity promised by the diary format is an illusion. Anne, who edited her diary with the intention of publishing it, and who hoped someday to become a "famous author," made serious stylistic choices, as conscious and artificial as those made by any author of fiction. Once my friend James suggested a neat project: look at Anne Frank's diary as a work of fiction produced by an adult trying to construct an accurate picture of a life in hiding. As it turns out, he wasn't too far off the mark. The authenticity that is apparently betrayed by the editing and translation of the diary was never there to be betrayed. It is a construct of our minds, hungry to feel like we really knew someone - it's the same general thing that makes us feel like we know Brad and Angelina, etc. For really, anyone who puts pen to paper, fingers to keys, or paintbrush to canvas is picking and choosing, constructing a work that is always self-edited (the possible exception to this is Finnegan's Wake, which is incidentally one of the most alienating works of literature extant). So our disappointment when we think about the diary's "fakeness" is false, because "fake" implies a "real" that doesn't exist.

To take a more optimistic view, the diary is a richer and more authentic historical document, precisely because of the edits. Instead of an ejaculation of adolescent experience onto paper, we are presented with the considered work of a conscious young writer. In addition, we get to see what her father found appropriate to present to the world, and what the publishing houses felt inappropriate. Passages about her beginning menstruation, for example, were left in by Otto Frank but cut out by the first publisher, a moralistic Dutch company. The Germans and Americans, on the other hand, printed them. In the constructed, edited diary, we see Anne as she wanted to be seen; we get clued into the (grieving) father-(dead) daughter dynamic; and we can compare cultural differences between eras and nations, as the Germans and Americans saw fit to include the menstruation passages in the 40s, while the Dutch didn't until later (the 80s? really?). With a more holistic view of what authenticity can mean, Anne's diary actually gains "realness" through every edit, instead of losing. In the meantime, it also becomes a more graceful and readable piece of writing. Now isn't that a nice resolution?