Journalist at RFI (ex-DW, BBC, CBC, F24...), writer (on art, music, culture...), I work in radio, podcasting, online, on films.
As a writer, I also contributed to the New Arab, Art UK, Byline Times, the i Paper...
Born in Paris, I was based in Prague, Miami, London, Nairobi (covering East Africa), Bangui, and in Bristol, UK. I also reported from Italy, Germany, Haiti, Tunisia, Liberia, Senegal, India, Mexico, Iraq, South Africa...
This blog is to share my work, news and cultural discoveries.
I'm as much of a user as many of you. And because I am, I believe we have a responsibility to insist on stopping this.
Apple used to be the outsider, the intelligent resource that could beat the market-dominating Microsoft. They are also making billions of dollars a minute... Can't they pay properly workers in the USA who need decent jobs? All is wrong with this, all.
In an extract from his new book, Brian Merchant reveals how he gained access to Longhua, the vast complex where iPhones are made and where, in 2010, unhappy workers started killing themselves
The sprawling factory compound, all grey dormitories and weather-beaten warehouses, blends seamlessly into the outskirts of the Shenzhen megalopolis. Foxconn’s enormous Longhua plant is a major manufacturer of Apple products. It might be the best-known factory in the world; it might also might be among the most secretive and sealed-off. Security guards man each of the entry points. Employees can’t get in without swiping an ID card; drivers entering with delivery trucks are subject to fingerprint scans. A Reuters journalist was once dragged out of a car and beaten for taking photos from outside the factory walls. The warning signs outside – “This factory area is legally established with state approval. Unauthorised trespassing is prohibited. Offenders will be sent to police for prosecution!” – are more aggressive than those outside many Chinese military compounds.
But it turns out that there’s a secret way into the heart of the infamous operation: use the bathroom. I couldn’t believe it. Thanks to a simple twist of fate and some clever perseverance by my fixer, I’d found myself deep inside so-called Foxconn City.
It’s printed on the back of every iPhone: “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China”. US law dictates that products manufactured in China must be labelled as such and Apple’s inclusion of the phrase renders the statement uniquely illustrative of one of the planet’s starkest economic divides – the cutting edge is conceived and designed in Silicon Valley, but it is assembled by hand in China.
A protester dressed as a factory worker outside an Apple retail outlet in Hong Kong, May 2011.
Photograph: Antony Dickson/AFP/Getty Images
The vast majority of plants that produce the iPhone’s component parts and carry out the device’s final assembly are based here, in the People’s Republic, where low labour costs and a massive, highly skilled workforce have made the nation the ideal place to manufacture iPhones (and just about every other gadget). The country’s vast, unprecedented production capabilities – the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that as of 2009 there were 99 million factory workers in China – have helped the nation become the world’s second largest economy. And since the first iPhone shipped, the company doing the lion’s share of the manufacturing is the Taiwanese Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Ltd, better known by its trade name, Foxconn.
Foxconn is the single largest employer in mainland China; there are 1.3 million people on its payroll. Worldwide, among corporations, only Walmart and McDonald’s employ more. As many people work for Foxconn as live in Estonia.
Today, the iPhone is made at a number of different factories around China, but for years, as it became the bestselling product in the world, it was largely assembled at Foxconn’s 1.4 square-mile flagship plant, just outside Shenzhen. The sprawling factory was once home to an estimated 450,000 workers. Today, that number is believed to be smaller, but it remains one of the biggest such operations in the world. If you know of Foxconn, there’s a good chance it’s because you’ve heard of the suicides. In 2010, Longhua assembly-line workers began killing themselves. Worker after worker threw themselves off the towering dorm buildings, sometimes in broad daylight, in tragic displays of desperation – and in protest at the work conditions inside. There were 18 reported suicide attempts that year alone and 14 confirmed deaths. Twenty more workers were talked down by Foxconn officials.
The epidemic caused a media sensation – suicides and sweatshop conditions in the House of iPhone. Suicide notes and survivors told of immense stress, long workdays and harsh managers who were prone to humiliate workers for mistakes, of unfair fines and unkept promises of benefits.
The corporate response spurred further unease: Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou, had large nets installed outside many of the buildings to catch falling bodies. The company hired counsellors and workers were made to sign pledges stating they would not attempt to kill themselves.
Steve Jobs, for his part, declared: “We’re all over that” when asked about the spate of deaths and he pointed out that the rate of suicides at Foxconn was within the national average. Critics pounced on the comment as callous, though he wasn’t technically wrong. Foxconn Longhua was so massive that it could be its own nation-state, and the suicide rate was comparable to its host country’s. The difference is that Foxconn City is a nation-state governed entirely by a corporation and one that happened to be producing one of the most profitable products on the planet.
A cab driver lets us out in front of the factory; boxy blue letters spell out Foxconn next to the entrance. The security guards eye us, half bored, half suspicious. My fixer, a journalist from Shanghai whom I’ll call Wang Yang, and I decide to walk the premises first and talk to workers, to see if there might be a way to get inside.
The first people we stop turn out to be a pair of former Foxconn workers.
“It’s not a good place for human beings,” says one of the young men, who goes by the name Xu. He’d worked in Longhua for about a year, until a couple of months ago, and he says the conditions inside are as bad as ever. “There is no improvement since the media coverage,” Xu says. The work is very high pressure and he and his colleagues regularly logged 12-hour shifts. Management is both aggressive and duplicitous, publicly scolding workers for being too slow and making them promises they don’t keep, he says. His friend, who worked at the factory for two years and chooses to stay anonymous, says he was promised double pay for overtime hours but got only regular pay. They paint a bleak picture of a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine and where depression and suicide have become normalised.
“It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying,” Xu says. “Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.”
Over several visits to different iPhone assembly factories in Shenzhen and Shanghai, we interviewed dozens of workers like these. Let’s be honest: to get a truly representative sample of life at an iPhone factory would require a massive canvassing effort and the systematic and clandestine interviewing of thousands of employees. So take this for what it is: efforts to talk to often skittish, often wary and often bored workers who were coming out of the factory gates, taking a lunch break or congregating after their shifts.
The vision of life inside an iPhone factory that emerged was varied. Some found the work tolerable; others were scathing in their criticisms; some had experienced the despair Foxconn was known for; still others had taken a job just to try to find a girlfriend. Most knew of the reports of poor conditions before joining, but they either needed the work or it didn’t bother them. Almost everywhere, people said the workforce was young and turnover was high. “Most employees last only a year,” was a common refrain. Perhaps that’s because the pace of work is widely agreed to be relentless, and the management culture is often described as cruel.
Since the iPhone is such a compact, complex machine, putting one together correctly requires sprawling assembly lines of hundreds of people who build, inspect, test and package each device. One worker said 1,700 iPhones passed through her hands every day; she was in charge of wiping a special polish on the display. That works out at about three screens a minute for 12 hours a day.
More meticulous work, like fastening chip boards and assembling back covers, was slower; these workers have a minute apiece for each iPhone. That’s still 600 to 700 iPhones a day. Failing to meet a quota or making a mistake can draw public condemnation from superiors. Workers are often expected to stay silent and may draw rebukes from their bosses for asking to use the restroom.
Xu and his friend were both walk-on recruits, though not necessarily willing ones. “They call Foxconn a fox trap,” he says. “Because it tricks a lot of people.” He says Foxconn promised them free housing but then forced them to pay exorbitantly high bills for electricity and water. The current dorms sleep eight to a room and he says they used to be 12 to a room. But Foxconn would shirk social insurance and be late or fail to pay bonuses. And many workers sign contracts that subtract a hefty penalty from their pay if they quit before a three-month introductory period.
On top of that, the work is gruelling. “You have to have mental management,” says Xu, otherwise you can get scolded by bosses in front of your peers. Instead of discussing performance privately or face to face on the line, managers would stockpile complaints until later. “When the boss comes down to inspect the work,” Xu’s friend says, “if they find any problems, they won’t scold you then. They will scold you in front of everyone in a meeting later.”
“It’s insulting and humiliating to people all the time,” his friend says. “Punish someone to make an example for everyone else. It’s systematic,” he adds. In certain cases, if a manager decides that a worker has made an especially costly mistake, the worker has to prepare a formal apology. “They must read a promise letter aloud – ‘I won’t make this mistake again’– to everyone.”
This culture of high-stress work, anxiety and humiliation contributes to widespread depression.
Xu says there was another suicide a few months ago. He saw it himself. The man was a student who worked on the iPhone assembly line. “Somebody I knew, somebody I saw around the cafeteria,” he says. After being publicly scolded by a manager, he got into a quarrel. Company officials called the police, though the worker hadn’t been violent, just angry.
“He took it very personally,” Xu says, “and he couldn’t get through it.” Three days later, he jumped out of a ninth-storey window.
So why didn’t the incident get any media coverage? I ask. Xu and his friend look at each other and shrug. “Here someone dies, one day later the whole thing doesn’t exist,” his friend says. “You forget about it.”
‘We look at everything at these companies,” Steve Jobs said after news of the suicides broke. “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. It’s a factory – but my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theatres… but it’s a factory. But they’ve had some suicides and attempted suicides – and they have 400,000 people there. The rate is under what the US rate is, but it’s still troubling.” Apple CEO, Tim Cook, visited Longhua in 2011 and reportedly met suicide-prevention experts and top management to discuss the epidemic.
In 2012, 150 workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump. They were promised improvements and talked down by management; they had, essentially, wielded the threat of killing themselves as a bargaining tool. In 2016, a smaller group did it again. Just a month before we spoke, Xu says, seven or eight workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump unless they were paid the wages they were due, which had apparently been withheld. Eventually, Xu says, Foxconn agreed to pay the wages and the workers were talked down.
When I ask Xu about Apple and the iPhone, his response is swift: “We don’t blame Apple. We blame Foxconn.” When I ask the men if they would consider working at Foxconn again if the conditions improved, the response is equally blunt. “You can’t change anything,” Xu says. “It will never change.”
Wang and I set off for the main worker entrance. We wind around the perimeter, which stretches on and on – we have no idea this is barely a fraction of the factory at this point.
After walking along the perimeter for 20 minutes or so, we come to another entrance, another security checkpoint. That’s when it hits me. I have to use the bathroom. Desperately. And that gives me an idea.
There’s a bathroom in there, just a few hundred feet down a stairwell by the security point. I see the universal stick-man signage and I gesture to it. This checkpoint is much smaller, much more informal. There’s only one guard, a young man who looks bored. Wang asks something a little pleadingly in Chinese. The guard slowly shakes his head no, looks at me. The strain on my face is very, very real. She asks again – he falters for a second, then another no.
We’ll be right back, she insists, and now we’re clearly making him uncomfortable. Mostly me. He doesn’t want to deal with this. Come right back, he says. Of course, we don’t.
To my knowledge, no American journalist has been inside a Foxconn plant without permission and a tour guide, without a carefully curated visit to selected parts of the factory to demonstrate how OK things really are.
Maybe the most striking thing, beyond its size – it would take us nearly an hour to briskly walk across Longhua – is how radically different one end is from the other. It’s like a gentrified city in that regard. On the outskirts, let’s call them, there are spilt chemicals, rusting facilities and poorly overseen industrial labour. The closer you get to the city centre – remember, this is a factory – the more the quality of life, or at least the amenities and the infrastructure, improves.
‘Not a good place for human beings’: Foxconn Longhua. Photograph: Brian Merchant
As we get deeper in, surrounded by more and more people, it feels like we’re getting noticed less.
The barrage of stares mutates into disinterested glances. My working theory: the plant is so vast, security so tight, that if we are inside just walking around, we must have been allowed to do so.
That or nobody really gives a shit. We start trying to make our way to the G2 factory block, where we’ve been told iPhones are made. After leaving “downtown”, we begin seeing towering, monolithic factory blocks – C16, E7 and so on, many surrounded by crowds of workers.
I worry about getting too cavalier and remind myself not to push it; we’ve been inside Foxconn for almost an hour now. The crowds have been thinning out the farther away from the centre we get. Then there it is: G2. It’s identical to the factory blocks that cluster around it, that threaten to fade into the background of the smoggy static sky.
G2 looks deserted, though. A row of impossibly rusted lockers runs outside the building. No one’s around. The door is open, so we go in. To the left, there’s an entry to a massive, darkened space; we’re heading for that when someone calls out. A floor manager has just come down the stairs and he asks us what we’re doing. My translator stammers something about a meeting and the man looks confused; then he shows us the computer monitoring system he uses to oversee production on the floor. There’s no shift right now, he says, but this is how they watch.
No sign of iPhones, though. We keep walking. Outside G3, teetering stacks of black gadgets wrapped in plastic sit in front of what looks like another loading zone. A couple of workers on smartphones drift by us. We get close enough to see the gadgets through the plastic and, nope, not iPhones either. They look like Apple TVs, minus the company logo. There are probably thousands stacked here, awaiting the next step in the assembly line.
If this is indeed where iPhones and Apple TVs are made, it’s a fairly aggressively shitty place to spend long days, unless you have a penchant for damp concrete and rust. The blocks keep coming, so we keep walking. Longhua starts to feel like the dull middle of a dystopian novel, where the dread sustains but the plot doesn’t.
We could keep going, but to our left, we see what look like large housing complexes, probably the dormitories, complete with cagelike fences built out over the roof and the windows, and so we head in that direction. The closer we get to the dorms, the thicker the crowds get and the more lanyards and black glasses and faded jeans and sneakers we see. College-age kids are gathered, smoking cigarettes, crowded around picnic tables, sitting on kerbs.
And, yes, the body-catching nets are still there. Limp and sagging, they give the impression of tarps that have half blown off the things they’re supposed to cover. I think of Xu, who said: “The nets are pointless. If somebody wants to commit suicide, they will do it.”
We are drawing stares again – away from the factories, maybe folks have more time and reason to indulge their curiosity. In any case, we’ve been inside Foxconn for an hour. I have no idea if the guard put out an alert when we didn’t come back from the bathroom or if anyone is looking for us or what. The sense that it’s probably best not to push it prevails, even though we haven’t made it on to a working assembly line.
We head back the way we came. Before long, we find an exit. It’s pushing evening as we join a river of thousands and, heads down, shuffle through the security checkpoint. Nobody says a word. Getting out of the haunting megafactory is a relief, but the mood sticks. No, there were no child labourers with bleeding hands pleading at the windows. There were a number of things that would surely violate the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration code – unprotected construction workers, open chemical spillage, decaying, rusted structures, and so on – but there are probably a lot of things at US factories that would violate OSHA code too. Apple may well be right when it argues that these facilities are nicer than others out there. Foxconn was not our stereotypical conception of a sweatshop. But there was a different kind of ugliness. For whatever reason – the rules imposing silence on the factory floors, its pervasive reputation for tragedy or the general feeling of unpleasantness the environment itself imparts – Longhua felt heavy, even oppressively subdued.
When I look back at the photos I snapped, I can’t find one that has someone smiling in it. It does not seem like a surprise that people subjected to long hours, repetitive work and harsh management might develop psychological issues. That unease is palpable – it’s worked into the environment itself. As Xu said: “It’s not a good place for human beings.”
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• This is an edited extract from The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant, published by Bantam Press (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
• The Samaritans can be contacted in the UK and Ireland on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
I know, I post too much. I talk too much. And I love too much.
I know.
You can like it or not, I think it's too late to change now!
One thing I still love deeply, in these times of highly complex technology, is correspondance. Letters are not able to lie. When you write, you put too much of yourself, or you just don't.
And I particularly love correspondance between musicians and artists.
Here is an amazing, deep, thoughtful insight into the loving friendship between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms...
Enjoy.
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When a Friendship Is More Than Friendship: The Tender Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms
“I would gladly write to you only by means of music, but I have things to say to you to-day which music could not express.”
Half the beauty of life lies in its complexity — in those experiences whose depth and dimension cannot be sliced, flattened, and contained into neat categories. Nowhere is that complexity greater, richer, nor more replete with nuance than in the emotional universe of human relationships, the most expansive of which defy and interpolate between the various labels we try to impose on them. Those relationships we call platonic are difficult enough to taxonomize, but when a friendship becomes punctuated by the pulse-beat of romantic love, when two people cease to know what to call each other and know only what they mean to each other, the level of complexity crescendoes and can become either destructively shrill or transcendently symphonic.
Those rare symphonies of connectional complexity, like the relationships between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman and Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, continue to enchant and fascinate me. One such uncommon connection blossomed between the virtuosic pianist Clara Schumann (September 13, 1819–May 20, 1896) and the composer Johannes Brahms (May 7, 1833–April 3, 1897).
Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853
The two became acquainted in 1853, when Clara’s beloved husband, the famed composer Robert Schumann, was struck by Brahms’s musical genius and took him under his wing. In a letter to Brahms’s father, Schumann called him a “darling of the Muses.” He then wrote an impassioned piece for one of the era’s leading music journals, extolling the young musician’s creative ingenuity and prophesying his forthcoming fame. For this Brahms was immensely grateful and wrote to his “Revered Master”: “You have made me so extremely happy that I cannot attempt to express my thanks in words. May God grant that my works will soon be able to prove to you how much your love and kindness have uplifted and inspired me.” He wished for himself to “always be worthy” of Schumann’s confidence in his talent.
But only four months after the Schumanns met Brahms and bestowed upon him their generous patronage, Robert suffered a nervous breakdown. On February 27, 1854, he climbed a bridge and threw himself into the river Rhine. He was rescued and dragged ashore, then immediately committed to a private psychiatric institution, where he spent the remaining two years of his life afflicted with auditory hallucinations and other psychological infirmities. But he remained so fond of Brahms that when Clara sent him a portrait of the young composer, Schumann wrote to Brahms saying that he had placed it “under the looking-glass” in his room — an assuring suggestion that he saw much of himself in his protégé.
Robert Schumann
Schumann never recovered from his mental illness and died in the asylum on July 29, 1856, leaving Clara to raise their three sons and four daughters as a single mother and a working artist who provided for them through her musical talent, performing and touring tirelessly to put them through school.
During Robert’s illness and confinement at the asylum, Clara began corresponding directly with Brahms. He soon grew to be her closest confidante and most beloved friend. The doctors at the asylum had forbidden her to visit, for fear of overstimulating the ailing Schumann’s frail nervous system, so Brahms even served as a messenger between Clara and her husband. In the darkness following Robert’s death, he became Clara’s sole source of light and their friendship took on a new dimension. Clara would later write in a letter to her children:
You hardly knew your dear Father, you were still too young to feel deep grief, and thus in those terrible years you could give me no comfort. Hope, indeed, you could bring me, but it was not enough to support me through such agony. Then came Johannes Brahms. Your Father loved and admired him, as he did no man except [the violinist Joseph] Joachim. He came, like a true friend, to share all my sorrow; he strengthened the heart that threatened to break, he uplifted my mind, he cheered my spirit when[ever] and wherever he could; in short he was my friend in the fullest sense of the word.
Indeed, between them stretched a fullness of affection defying confinement and classification, blurring the line between the filial and the romantic, between friend and lover, so that rather than two distinct territories divided by a borderline, a rich and radiant spectrum is revealed.
A century and a half later, the Pulitzer-winning poet Lisel Mueller would devote a beautiful poem to this remarkable and unclassifiable relationship, found in her collection Alive Together:
ROMANTICS
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry “how far it went,” their tender friendship. They wonder just what it means when he writes he thinks of her constantly, his guardian angel, beloved friend. The modern biographers ask the rude, irrelevant question of our age, as if the event of two bodies meshing together establishes the degree of love, forgetting how softly Eros walked in the nineteenth-century, how a hand held overlong or a gaze anchored in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart, and nuances of address not known in our egalitarian language could make the redolent air tremble and shimmer with the heat of possibility. Each time I hear the Intermezzi, sad and lavish in their tenderness, I imagine the two of them sitting in a garden among late-blooming roses and dark cascades of leaves, letting the landscape speak for them, leaving us nothing to overhear.
At the outset of their correspondence, Brahms addresses Clara Schumann as “Honoured Lady,” perhaps because he saw her more as a benefactress than as an object of love. But beneath his grateful admiration, a slow-burning infatuation with his guardian angel soon takes hold of his heart. In a letter from August of 1854, 21-year-old Johannes writes to 35-year-old Clara while touring across Europe:
I should not have enjoyed a single moment of the trip. The [cities] which otherwise would have thrilled me with joy, leave me cold, so dull and colorless does everything seem to me.
I will go home and play music and read to myself until you appear, and I can do so with you. If you wanted to please me very much indeed you would let me find a letter in Düsseldorf… If the great longing that has possessed me during the last few days has any influence on my playing etc. it ought soon to enable me to cast a spell over people.
I would gladly write to you only by means of music, but I have things to say to you to-day which music could not express.
And yet his devotion is unpossessive, holding Clara’s happiness as its highest object — a happiness darkened by her worries about her husband’s fate at the psychiatric institution. To relieve her restless anxiety, Brahms travels to the asylum himself to check on Robert Schumann and reports back to her with as much assurance as he can wrest from the circumstances:
His look is friendly and bright, his movements are the same as ever, he keeps one hand constantly to his mouth, and smokes in short puffs as he always used to.
He infuses with romantic air even the news of his visit to this grim and dispiriting place:
Herr Sch. then turned to look at the flowers and went further into the garden towards the lovely view. I saw him disappear with a glorious halo about him, formed by the setting sun.
In these early letters, there is almost a sense of deification — Brahms seems enamored not with Clara alone but with the Schumanns as a unit that embodies what he perceives to be the loftiest qualities of the human spirit:
Even I, before I knew you, imagined that such people as you and such marriages as yours could only exist in the imagination of the rarest people.
[…]
People … do not deserve that you two, Robert and Clara, should be on earth at all, and I feel uplifted when I think that I may see the time when people will idolize you — two such wholly poetical natures. I almost wish that the world in general might forget you so that you could remain all the more sacred to the elect…
By November of that year, Clara herself is insisting that Brahms address her by “thou” — the second person singular reserved for an intimate friendship. By the following March, Brahms not only begins using her first name, but addresses his letters to “My dearly beloved Clara” and, by June, simply to “My Clara.”
In a letter from August of 1855, Brahms writes to his Clara:
Clara, dear Clara… I feel ever more happy and peaceful in my love for you. Every time I miss you more but I long for you almost with joy. That is how it is. And I knew the feeling already but never quite so warm as it is now.
The following May, he amplifies the warmth to a heat:
My Beloved Clara,
I wish I could write to you as tenderly as I love you and tell you all the good things that I wish you. You are so infinitely dear to me, dearer than I can say. I should like to spend the whole day calling you endearing names and paying you compliments without ever being satisfied.
At the end of another letter, penned after Clara and her four youngest children had come to celebrate Christmas with him in Düsseldorf, he signs:
With heartiest wishes for your welfare, and begging you to kiss me,
Your Johannes
Four months earlier, Robert Schumann had died in the mental asylum. Clara had been forced to begin mourning his loss while witnessing his deterioration, but his death delivered a shock of grief for which no one could prepare. Brahms’s affectionate devotion became her only comfort. She threw herself into popularizing her late husband’s compositions, which she performed unwearyingly around Europe as she single-parented their seven children. But she was equally enchanted by Brahms’s own genius — she praised and encouraged his work privately, and extolled and recommended it publicly. This mutuality of artistic admiration became a centerpiece of their layered love.
In a letter from July of 1858, penned after she had made yet another spirited recommendation of Brahms’s work, Clara protests that her creative opinion isn’t influenced by “blind enthusiasm” for him and writes tenderly:
That I am often mightily captivated by the wealth of your genius, that you always seem to be one on whom heaven has showered its fairest gifts and that I love you and honor you for so many magnificent qualities — all this is true, dearest Johannes, and has taken deep root in my heart. So do not try to kill it all in me by your cold philosophizing — it is impossible.
[…]
I have always considered myself so fortunate to be able to be to you a friend who understands you, and who is in a position to recognize your value as a musician and as a man.
Indeed, what at first appeared as one-sided infatuation and idolization on behalf of Brahms has by this point deepened into a profound symmetry of affection. At the end of her lengthy letter, Clara adds:
I am waiting for another letter, my Johannes. If only I could find longing as sweet as you do. It only gives me pain and fills my heart with unspeakable woe. Farewell! Think kindly of Your Clara.
Write me as often as you can. One requires to be cheerful during a cure and whence would good cheer come to me if not from you?
In a letter from February of 1861, Clara touches on another essential element in their bond — their shared artistic integrity:
You cannot imagine how sad I am when I feel I have not put my heart into my playing. To me it is as if I had done an injury not only to myself but also to art.
I have been talking as if you had been patiently sitting listening at my side all the while. If only it were so! Oh, write to me often, my beloved friend! You know how you can show your love in this way, particularly when I can feel that you do it willingly and from your heart. Greet your dear ones for me and for yourself a thousand greetings from Your devoted Clara.
Rather than crumbling with the erosive passage of time, the way an infatuation does, their love only deepened as the years wore on. In a letter from the spring of 1872, nearly twenty years after they first met, Brahms writes on Easter Monday:
My beloved Clara,
I always enjoy festivals in solitude, quite alone, with perhaps just a few dear ones in my room, and very quietly — for are not all my people either dead or far away? But what a joy it is to me then to remember how big with love is a certain human breast. For, after all, I am dependent upon the outside world — the hurly-burly in which we live. I do not add my laughter to its medley of voices, nor do I join its chorus of lies, — but it is as if the best in man could shut itself up, and only half of him sallied forth dreaming.
How fortunate you are, or, I should say, how beautiful, how good, how right! I mean that you bear your heart as a conscious possession, securely; whereas we are obliged every minute to conceal ours. You see everything so warmly, with such beautiful serenity, just like a reflection of yourself; and then with the same serenity you give unto each his due. All this sounds so stupid, and I cannot say what I think; although it would be even more stupid to speak of lilies and angels, and then to come back to you and your sweet nature.
It is with this loving sweetness that Clara shares in Brahms’s growing success. In the spring of 1874, shortly after the Bavarian king Ludwig II awarded him the prestigious Maximilian Order for Science and Art, she writes:
Just received your letter, so I can thank you for it at once. The joy it has given me may well compensate you for the pains it cost you to write. What I like more particularly is that you frankly acknowledge the pleasure which such recognition must give you. It cannot be otherwise; an artist’s heart must feel warmer for it. And I must say that to witness your growing fame constitutes the happiest experience that the latter years of my life could bring.
Now please sacrifice a little more time and send me a few words after the festival. Think of the lonely friend who is concentrating all her mind upon you now, and to whom every stroke of good fortune that reaches you is an added joy. Your old Clara.
When Clara Schumann died at the age of 76, Brahms survived her by only eleven months.
This blog is mainly written in English for a simple reason: I've lived in Prague, London, Miami, Nairobi and Bristol, so most of my friends around the world, people I interviewed and worked with are English-speakers. Also people I met in India, Mexico, Istanbul or in the Middle East are reading English and not French.
But sometimes, great things happen in France too!
The release of this film, The Young Karl Marx, or Le Jeune Karl Marx, by Raoul Peck, is among these events. I started working with Raoul on this film, when it was only a project, and worked regularly with him since.
And this is also my new family. On Monday, I'll join his fantastic and devoted team at Velvet Film to work on his next feature and documentary projects.
For now, if you read French, just enjoy this interview Raoul Peck gave to L'Humanité :
Avec le Jeune Karl Marx, le cinéaste engagé nous montre une pensée émancipatrice se forgeant au cœur de l’action politique pour changer le monde. Son film sera projeté en avant-première dimanche matin.
Comment est née l’idée de ce film, le Jeune Karl Marx ?
Raoul Peck Au départ, c’est Pierrette Ominetti, d’Arte, qui m’a sollicité. Je n’aurais jamais osé proposer moi-même à une télévision française de faire un film sur Marx. N’oublions pas que nous sommes alors avant la crise financière de 2008 : l’idée selon laquelle le capitalisme serait l’horizon indépassable de l’histoire est encore largement dominante ; parler de « lutte des classes » est perçu comme une aberration. Le capital avait gagné sur toute la ligne. Quoi qu’il en soit, quand Arte m’a demandé de travailler sur le sujet, j’ai sauté sur l’occasion. Car, pour moi, Marx a toujours été incontournable. On ne peut rien expliquer de la société (capitaliste) dans laquelle nous vivons sans revenir à sa pensée, aux concepts qu’il a forgés et à sa grille d’explication. Je me suis donc attelé à la tâche. Mais au bout d’un certain temps, réalisant l’ampleur du projet, et n’ayant pas réussi à trouver une façon efficace de traiter le sujet en docu-fiction, j’ai décidé de revenir à une fiction pure et de le produire avec ma société de production, Velvet Film.
Pourquoi avoir choisi de vous focaliser sur les années de jeunesse ?
Raoul Peck Je savais d’emblée que je ne pourrais pas me confronter au « vieux barbu ». Car, en ce cas, il m’aurait fallu non pas un, mais dix films, pour pouvoir défaire toutes les instrumentalisations et les déformations dont son œuvre a été l’objet. J’ai donc pris le parti de me concentrer sur la genèse de sa pensée, cette période qui court de la thèse de doctorat (1841) au Manifeste du Parti communiste (1848). C’est dans ces années que naît chez lui l’ambition d’établir une science de l’histoire des sociétés. Et tout est là.
Dans l’histoire du marxisme, l’évocation du jeune Marx renvoie, en France, à ce qu’on a appelé, dans les années 1960, la « querelle de l’humanisme », avec Louis Althusser postulant une « coupure épistémologique » entre le jeune Marx, empreint d’idéalisme humaniste, et celui de la maturité, du Capital, devenu pleinement « scientifique ». Aviez-vous cette idée en tête ?
Raoul Peck Je connais bien sûr ce débat, mais, en l’occurrence, non, ce n’était pas l’arrière-plan de ma démarche. Précisément, j’ai commencé par mettre à distance tous les « experts » de Marx, les interprétations, pour ne me baser que sur les correspondances. Je voulais montrer Marx, Engels et Jenny, la femme de Marx, dans leur vie concrète, à partir de leurs propres paroles. Ils sont jeunes, ils ont la vingtaine, ils sont révoltés et ils ambitionnent de changer le monde. C’est cela, le cœur du film. Et mon but, dès le début, a été que cette formidable histoire inspire les jeunes d’aujourd’hui, qu’elle nourrisse leurs propres combats. Je n’ai pas fait ce long métrage en regardant dans le rétroviseur, mais bien devant, vers le présent et l’avenir. Ce film se veut un appel à prendre sa vie en main, comme l’ont fait ces trois jeunes gens à leur époque, et à changer tout ce qui doit l’être, sans se poser de limites a priori. Connaissez votre histoire, apprenez à repérer les liens entre les événements à première vue épars, armez-vous intellectuellement, organisez-vous et battez-vous ! C’est un travail ! Tel est le message.
Votre film comporte une scène qui condense les débats ayant présidé à la transformation de la « Ligue des justes » en « Ligue des communistes ». L’exigence de scientificité paraît centrale dans le propos d’Engels, qui est alors à la tribune pour défendre les idées qu’il partage avec Marx…
Raoul Peck Oui, il met en avant la nécessité de sortir du romantisme. La Ligue des justes avait pour devise « Tous les hommes sont frères ». Engels confronte avec éloquence ce slogan à la réalité des contradictions sociales. Comment soutenir, en effet, que le patron et l’ouvrier, l’exploiteur et l’exploité, sont frères ? Non, décidément, tous les hommes ne sont pas frères. La nouvelle devise s’impose alors : « Prolétaires de tous les pays, unissez-vous ! » Bien entendu, aujourd’hui, à nous de savoir qui inclure dans le terme « prolétaire ».
L’idée centrale du film n’est-elle pas là, justement ? Dans la façon dont il montre la maturation d’un communisme partant des contradictions du réel pour aller à la réalisation de l’idéal, contre un socialisme utopique plaquant l’idéal sur la réalité, et désarmant, dès lors, les prolétaires ?
Raoul Peck Les réponses qui venaient dans l’esprit des gens de l’époque étaient celles de leur temps. On se trouve au début de la révolution industrielle, après la Révolution française. On commence juste à comprendre que ce sont les hommes qui font l’histoire, alors même que se met en place une nouvelle aliénation du travail, au travers des grandes fabriques. Ce contexte contradictoire favorise l’essor des grandes utopies, tel le Phalanstère de Fourier. Mais, c’est vrai, Marx a fondamentalement renouvelé la pensée du mouvement ouvrier naissant, en invitant à repartir de l’analyse méticuleuse des structures de la société. Pour lui, c’était la seule vraie méthode pour décider ensuite – ensemble – dans quelle direction s’engager. Le romantisme ne l’intéresse pas ; il veut des démonstrations, avec des arguments et des preuves. C’est une manière de penser très allemande, en un sens. En allemand, le verbe est placé en fin de phrase. Cela oblige à réellement réfléchir à ce que l’on veut dire, avant de le dire. C’est une langue structurante. Dans le film, la scène où Marx pousse Proudhon dans ses retranchements sur la question de la propriété illustre bien cette différence culturelle. Face à un Proudhon qui décrète que, « la propriété, c’est le vol », Marx demande : « Quelle propriété ? » Et il ne le lâche pas. Il ne peut se satisfaire de telles généralisations.
Comment êtes-vous parvenu à rendre captivants, à l’écran, des débats philosophiques complexes qui, sur le papier, peuvent rebuter les non-avertis ?
Raoul Peck Cela nous a pris dix ans pour y parvenir (rires). Il n’y a pas de secret. La première ébauche du scénario était beaucoup plus didactique. Il a fallu énormément travailler pour se rapprocher, version après version, du cinéma. Mais un cinéma basé sur le réel, un cinéma rigoureux ! Nous n’avons rien inventé. J’ai pu aussi compter sur le talent de mon ami scénariste Pascal Bonitzer, qui sait transformer des scènes susceptibles d’être trop théoriques en scènes vivantes, sans jamais rien lâcher sur le fond, sur la rigueur du propos. J’ai également choisi en priorité des acteurs venant du théâtre : August Diehl (Karl Marx), Stefan Konarske (Friedrich Engels) et Vicky Krieps (Jenny Marx). Ce sont des gens qui ont la capacité de créer d’authentiques personnages. Un dialogue, c’est une manière de se tenir, de bouger, d’habiter ou non les silences. Dans ma façon de filmer, j’ai par ailleurs souvent recours aux plans-séquences, qui offrent une vraie respiration aux acteurs, qui leur permettent de modeler véritablement leur personnage.
Quelles sont les idées-forces que vous retenez de Marx ?
Raoul Peck Contrairement à certains de mes contemporains qui ne retiennent de lui que la partie théorique, Marx est pour moi, d’abord, une façon d’appréhender le monde avec une insatiable curiosité. Dans une joute mémorable avec Wilhelm Weitling, la figure de proue du socialisme utopique allemand de l’époque, Marx a cette phrase, que je trouve particulièrement inspirante : « L’ignorance n’a jamais aidé personne. » Or, nous baignons aujourd’hui dans l’ignorance. Ignorance de l’autre, ignorance de notre histoire. On nous présente insidieusement les migrants comme une menace, l’Europe se referme sur elle-même… On assiste à la mise en œuvre de recettes de décadence, de recettes pour fin de règne. Il faut réapprendre à penser dialectiquement, en faisant apparaître les liens cachés, en replaçant les faits dans une historicité. Il n’y a pas plusieurs histoires sur cette Terre, mais une seule dans laquelle tout est lié. La création de richesse sur un point du globe est accompagnée de la création de pauvreté ailleurs. Lorsqu’une entreprise quitte une région, y créant ainsi du chômage et de la misère, elle ne se volatilise pas. Elle part seulement exploiter ailleurs, là où les salaires sont moindres, là où le rapport de forces capital-travail est davantage en faveur du capital. Et surtout, quel que soit le lieu, ce ne sont pas ceux qui créent les richesses qui en profitent, mais les propriétaires, les actionnaires.
Votre film met le doigt sur les clivages de classes de la société capitaliste. Autant dire qu’il n’est pas a priori au diapason de l’industrie du spectacle… N’avez-vous pas rencontré d’embûches ?
Raoul Peck Si, bien sûr ! Il faut réaliser que ce film sur Marx est le premier du genre, en Occident. Donc, forcément, on devait s’attendre à ce que des obstacles puissent surgir. D’abord, il existe encore une certaine autocensure. Moi-même, j’ai pu être pris dedans. Mais je m’en suis libéré bien volontiers. Et quand j’ai commencé à travailler, personne n’a tenté d’intervenir sur l’orientation du projet. Je ne l’aurais de toute façon jamais toléré. C’est sur le financement que nous avons connu quelques péripéties révélatrices. Avant tout, je tiens à dire que j’ai toujours pu m’appuyer sur un système qui reste largement démocratique, avec des aides, des institutions qui vous permettent, dans un cadre européen, d’atteindre un certain budget. En aucun cas je n’aurais pu faire ce film avec des investissements américains, vous l’imaginez bien… Donc, pour revenir à votre question, en France et en Belgique, nous avons obtenu plus ou moins les financements escomptés. La surprise est venue de l’Allemagne, où nous avons dû faire face, dans un premier temps, à des réactions de rejet. Lorsque nous avons soumis le film à la commission franco-allemande de soutien à la production de films, les trois membres allemands ont voté contre comme un seul homme, et le seul des trois Français à avoir également voté contre était d’origine allemande. J’ai du mal à croire à une coïncidence. Ils n’ont pas dû apprécier qu’un non-Allemand fasse un film sur une figure majeure de leur patrimoine intellectuel. À partir de là, nous avons décidé de politiser la chose et de le présenter ainsi à nos partenaires allemands. Une digue est tombée, paradoxalement devant une commission d’aide dans l’ex-Allemagne de l’Est. Après, ce fut plus simple. Le vrai scandale, en revanche, a été l’attitude de l’instance européenne d’appui au cinéma, Eurimages, qui nous a refusé une aide décisive, sous la pression de certains pays de l’ex-bloc de l’Est. Ils ont dit en substance : hors de question de faire Marx sans Staline. Un acte de censure politique pour une institution qui n’a aucune vocation d’instruire des contenus, mais de se prononcer sur le montage financier d’un projet de film et sur sa solidité. Un projet porté solidement par les trois nations les plus importantes en termes de cinéma en Europe (France, Belgique, Allemagne) a été éliminé d’office par Chypre et quelques autres pour des raisons politiques !
Votre film vise un large public. Mais que dit-il aux spectateurs qui se reconnaissent dans l’héritage de l’auteur du Capital ?
Raoul Peck Le Jeune Karl Marx met en question les fourvoiements dans les logiques répressives, autoritaires, en montrant tout le bouillonnement démocratique auquel Marx et Engels participaient au sein du mouvement ouvrier en voie d’organisation. Les deux amis sont durs ; ils ne mâchent pas leurs mots… Mais ils sont toujours ouverts à la discussion, ils ne renoncent jamais à convaincre leur auditoire. Toute la radicalité du film est là, dans le fait de montrer la portée transformatrice de ce geste démocratique, et surtout la nécessité d’une pensée claire. Le camp progressiste, au sens le plus large, n’a jamais pu, de bataille en bataille, réellement faire son autocritique. Or, il faut confronter les erreurs, les errances, les illusions, les crimes aussi, pour initier un autre combat. Et ce, dans la démocratie.
Le jeune Karl Marx à la fête
Ministre de la Culture d’Haïti de 1996 à 1997, président depuis 2010 de la Femis (École nationale supérieure des métiers de l’image et du son), Raoul Peck participera à un débat au stand des Amis de l’Humanité, samedi 16 septembre, à 18 heures. Le lendemain, à 10 heures, à l’Espace cinéma, Halle Léo-Ferré, le public de la Fête pourra découvrir en avant-première le Jeune Karl Marx, avant la sortie en salle le 27 septembre.
This exciting exhibition of international artists is coming to my beloved Marseille!
One more reason to go soon :)
"Matière Noire"
Opening: October 7th
Entry: free
Location: Marché aux Puces
Until: January 31st, 2018
Borondo presents Matière Noire at Marseille’s Marché aux Puces
Two years after his London show ‘Animal’, Spanishartist Borondo presents Matière Noire, his biggest exhibition to date, in the heart of Marseille’s famous antique Marché aux Puces, from October 7, 2017 to January 31, 2018.
Curated by Carmen Main, Matière Noire deals with the dark matter - everything we cannot directly see or detect but allows the universe to exist - as a metaphor of the invisible in our perception. The show is a reflection upon different cultural, social and generational human realities and the media through which they are filtered, from earlier forms of representations to contemporary digital technologies.
In the free entry 4,000-square-meter exhibition, Borondo will present its universe for the first time through more than 30 in-situ artworks - animations, holograms, installations, paintings, videos - in collaboration with 8 international multidisciplinary artists from the last generation, all born before the digital boom: BRBR Films, Carmen Main, Diego López Bueno, Edoardo Tresoldi, Isaac Cordal, Robberto Atzori, Sbagliato and A.L. Crego, author of the exhibition's dynamic visual content, such as gifs and videos.
Divided in 3 acts – projection, perception, and creation – the exhibition casts doubts on the uniqueness of reality and its representations, penetrating and questioning the edges of human perception; from Plato’s allegory of the cave to a 2.0 reality which shows a world flowing behind a screen, to the free creative contribution of each artist.
Unknown, imperceptible, invisible and yet so present, dark matter is the manifestation of a poetry inherent in the universe and in every individual. Matière Noire is the multisensory trail through which the dark world manifests itself: the rational thought encounters the infinite, the world of consciousness meets with the conscious one, in a fast-paced dialogue between old materials and new technologies, analog and digital, classical and contemporary.
While preserving the nature of public art, Matière Noire marks a step forward in the Spanishartist’s research, through which he explores the potentialities of indoor installation work and addresses a wider audience.
During the 3-month art residency in Marché aux Puces, the artists have lived and worked together, curating and organizing every detail of the show, sharing that space with merchants of a disappearing neighborhood, the dark matter of Marseille.
The overall result is a living organism in close connection with the place and its history, one of the last reserves of collective memories expressed through the objects found on site. They become the raw material used for most of the works, a fil rouge for the whole exhibition as opposed to the digital archive of our times.
Borondo makes use of collective symbols and myths, and touches archetypes and latent unconscious, bringing the audience to a kaleidoscope of infinite universes to explore and capture.
They are drafts of an invisible past without which our existence would not be possible, as the dark matter of our present.
M A T I È R E N O I R E BORONDO SHOW 7.10.2017 – 31.01.2018 FREE ENTRY
Featuring BRBR Films Carmen Main Diego López Bueno Edoardo Tresoldi Isaac Cordal Momo Lui Même Robberto Atzori Sbagliato
Curated by Carmen Main Visual content A.L. Crego
Catalogue pictures Blind Eye Factory
Co-produced by Gonzalo Borondo Edoardo Tresoldi
Presented by
Catherine Coudert Galerie Saint Laurent Association Marseille Street Art
L'artiste espagnol Borondo présente Matière Noire au célèbre Marché aux Puces de Marseille
Deux ans après son exposition "Animal" à Londres, Borondo présente "Matière Noire". Se déroulant du 7 octobre 2017 au 31 janvier 2018 au cœur du célèbre Marché aux Puces de Marseille, il s'agira de la plus grande exposition, à ce jour, de l'artiste espagnol.
Avec Carmen Main en tant que commissaire d’exposition, Matière Noire aura pour sujet tout ce qu'on ne peut ni voir ni détecter directement, mais qui permet néanmoins à l'univers d'exister : une métaphore de l'invisible à notre perception. Une réflexion sur les différentes réalités humaines au niveau culturel, social et générationnel et sur les moyens qui permettent de les assimiler, des premières formes de représentation jusqu’aux plateformes digitales contemporaines.
L'exposition, gratuite, s’étend sur une superficie de 4 000 mètres carrés où Borondo présentera pour la première fois son univers à travers plus de 30 œuvres d'art - animations, hologrammes, installations, peintures, vidéos - avec la participation de 8 artistes multidisciplinaires internationaux appartenant à la dernière génération ayant grandi avant le boom digital : BRBR Films, Carmen Main, Diego López Bueno, Edoardo Tresoldi, Isaac Cordal, Robberto Atzori, Sbagliato, Momo lui Même and A.L. Crego, auteur également des contenus visuels dynamiques de l'exposition, tels que gifs et vidéos.
Déclinée en 3 actes – projection, perceptionet création – l’exposition remet en cause l’univocité de la réalité et de ses représentations, tout en pénétrant et interrogeant les extrêmes de la perception humaine. Du mythe de la caverne de Platon à la réalité 2.0 où le monde est découvert à travers un écran, jusqu'à la contribution créative de chaque artiste.
Inconnue, imperceptible, invisible et pourtant si présente, la matière obscure est l’expression de la poésie inhérente à l’univers et à chaque individu. Matière Noire est la trace multisensorielle à travers laquelle le monde obscur se manifeste : le rationnel entre en contact avec l’infini, le conscient avec le subconscient, dans un dialogue serré entre anciens matériels et nouvelles technologies, analogique et digital, classique et contemporain.
Tout en maintenant intacte la nature de l'art publique, Matière Noire constitue une nouvelle étape dans la recherche artistique de Borondo, lui permettant d’explorer les potentialités de l’art installatif d’intérieur, en s’adressant à un public plus vaste.
Au cours des trois mois de résidence artistique au Marché aux Puces, les artistes ont collaboré et vécu ensemble, organisant l'exposition dans les moindres détails et partageant les espaces avec les marchands d’un quartier en voie de disparition : la matière noire de Marseille.
Le résultat est un organisme vivant collectif en symbiose avec le lieu et son histoire, l’une des dernières réserves de mémoire collective exprimée à travers les objets ci-présent. Ces derniers constituent le matériel principalement utilisé pour la réalisation des œuvres, véritable fil rouge du parcours de l’exposition, en contraste avec les archives digitales de notre temps.
Borondo, faisant recours aux symboles et mythes collectifs, tout en passant à travers archétypes et subconscients latents, nous conduit dans un kaléidoscope infini d’univers à saisir et explorer. Des giclées d’un passé invisible, sans lequel notre existence serait impossible, matière obscure de notre présent.
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M A T I È R E N O I R E BORONDO SHOW 7.10.2017 – 31.01.2018 ENTRÉE GRATUITE En collaboration avec BRBR Films Carmen Main Diego López Bueno Edoardo Tresoldi Isaac Cordal Momo Lui Même Robberto Atzori Sbagliato
Commissaire d’exposition Carmen Main
Contenus visuels A.L. Crego
Images du catalogue Blind Eye Factory
Co-produite par Gonzalo Borondo Edoardo Tresoldi
Présenté par
Catherine Coudert Galerie Saint Laurent Association Marseille Street Art
Le mouvement social se réveille enfin ! Ami(e)s des associations citoyennes, des syndicats, des partis de progrès plus que jamais l'héritage de la pensée de Marx nous aide à penser le futur... N'hésitez pas à vous emparer du film pour organiser partout projections et débats citoyens... Contactez nous en MP, nous vous aiderons à contacter votre cinéma s'il ne l'a pas déjà programmé, à trouver des intervenants possibles si vous n'en avez pas, etc... Cinéphiles de partout unissez vous ! Via la page Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/LeJeuneKarlMarx/
