"O Lithuania, My Homeland..."

This week in COMM 199 we're seeing a pair of films from perhaps THE most prolific and important director in Polish film, and a celebrated auteur in the realm of what we lovingly refer to as "global cinema": Andrzej Wajda. This weekend, we'll screen his canonic Ashes and Diamonds (1958), his third film, and the completion of his "WWII war trilogy." First, though, we're starting with a more recent film set nearly two centuries ago, Pan Tadeusz (1999). Though they're made over four decades apart, with wildly different geo-political and industrial contexts for their productions, both films are dealing with Polish statehood and national identity.

Perhaps not surprisingly, though, things can start to get complicated once you get underneath the surface a little. Consider the opening line of Adam Mickiewicz's epic poem upon which the film is adapted:

O Lithuania, my country, thou

Art like good health; I never knew till now

How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see

Thy beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.

For some, this couplet points to the Polish-Lithuanian union which existed in what we commonly call the Middle Ages, until the partitions of Poland that forced this part of the world to become a part of Czarist Russia from 1795-1918. It's remembering a state of the nation that no longer exists (note that both Tadeusz and Ashes chronicle nobly doomed attempts to reassert independent Polish statehood). But as is alluded to in the end of Pan Tadeusz (with a discussion about serf emancipation), the reassertion of Poland and Polish rule over the land puts the Poles back as colonial rulers in their own right. Lithuanians might hear this opening couplet from Mickevičius (as he's know in Lithuanian) and have their own sense of this country that they lost time and again...

Remembering 9/11

Driving down the Cape this morning on an errand, I came across coverage of the 9/11 anniversary ceremony in New York on WCBS (880 AM). Listening to the names being read, I was reminded that, unlike most of America, I experienced much of that day mediated via radio rather than television. We'd just moved back to the US from LT a few weeks earlier, and didn't have cable in our apartment yet. Workers on our bathroom told me that something big was going on in New York, and I should check the radio--it never turned off that day. I remember playing an intramural tennis match that day (?!) and also teaching my 16mm film class. Walking here and there, I was listening on my Walkman radio. Only in the middle of the afternoon, at the country library, did I start to see the video images...

2006 was (to my knowledge) the first time that you could relive the TV coverage on 9/11, as CNN streamed their coverage from five years previous in real time. That was my first semester at Bridgewater, and was quite an "in" to discussions in both Intro to Mass Comm and Mass Comm Theory & Research courses. Today, I found out (from WEEI-AM, who declined to name the specific network!) that CNBC is replaying NBC coverage from eight years ago today. I can't spend more than an hour with it--it's too hard. And I'm tuning in now, after the towers have fallen, and I am so ok with that. If you have time, reviewing the coverage is well worth the effort....

And for a palate cleaner (I need a lot of those this year, it seems), I offer the trailer for last year's documentary Man On Wire. Really nice film--and it's available to stream on Netflix. Worth a look.

And then tell your important folks that you love them.

Farewell, Amanda

This is an odd way to start the semester, but I just wanted to publicly wish my former colleague in the Department of Communication Studies, Prof. Amanda Brozana, all the best as she leaves Bridgewater State. Those of you who have worked with Amanda know about her passion for all things journalism--we will miss her as she pursues other projects.

By the miracle of facebook, you might even read this yourself, Amanda. Take care, and be in touch.