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| Mr Jones, 2019 |
There is so much to learn about the Second World War that I
sometimes think I will live an entire lifetime and die and it won’t be enough
time to learn about everything that happened to the world during those few
years in the middle of the XXth century. I felt that way when I first read the
tales in Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War. And again when I read
We were young and at war. And again and again and again with so many other
books and movies and photographs and TV shows that I can hardly even keep count
of anymore. Well, this weekend I had a chance to learn yet something else about
the War when I watched Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones is a 2019 film selected to compete at he 69th
Berlin International Film Festival. It’s a British/Polish/Russian production,
and it was one of the films in an exhibition at the Sao Paulo International Film
Festival this year. It’s based on the real story of Gareth Jones, a young Welsh
journalist who gained some notoriety in the 1930s when he managed to interview
Adolph Hitler in an airplane.
When the movie begins, Gareth is making a case to the
cabinet of Lloyd George that they should be doing some investigation into the
Soviet Union. For all their claims of prosperity, Gareth argues, he does not
understand where the USSR money comes from. The whole world is going through a
recession and the Soviets are on a spending spree? It doesn’t add up! Unfortunately however, the Russians are allies and no one is too inclined to
investigate them and risk losing their support in the near future. No one, that
is, except for Gareth.
Mr Jones uses his connections in the government to arrange a
trip to Moscow even though he is not backed by Lloyd George at all (actually,
the minister doesn’t even know about his plans). The young journalist has
personal ties to Russia. His mother taught English there for a bit, and he
studied Russian language at uni. He still remembers the stories his mum told
him about that country. As soon as he gets there however, he realizes things
are not what they seem… He expected to rent a room in a small hotel by the
train station but the Soviet government placed him in the most luxurious (and intensely surveyed) hotel in
Moscow. Furthermore, alth
ough his Visa had been approved for a whole week, he
discovers he can only stay at the hotel Metropol for a couple of days and he is
not cleared to stay anywhere else in the country, which means he is expected to
leave after a mere couple of days. His friend Paul – also a journalist - is
missing and the community of international journalists in the city is
surrounded in a veil of mystery.
It does not take long for Gareth to take charge of the
situation and arrange a trip to the countryside to see how people live under
the Soviet regime with his own eyes. This is how he becomes an eye witness to
the Holodomor.
The Holodomor which translates as “death by starvation” (морити
голодом, holod means hunger and mor means plague) was a man-made famine in
Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. It’s also known as the Great Famine or the
Ukranian Genocide.
In the early 1930s, there were policies in place all over the
Soviet Union that demanded peasants to transfer land and livestock to
state-owned farms on which they would work as laborers only. Those farms had
to send a percentage of their production to Moscow to increase the Soviet’s
grain exportation rates. For the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities could only
procure 4.3 million tons as oppose to the 7.2 million tons of 1931, and as a
result, town rations were cut back drastically.
Peasants had no choice but to
starve if they were to fulfil their requisitioning quotas, and the penalty for
food theft was death. In time, urban workers were also affected by the famine. Major cities like Kiev, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk,
Vinnytsia, Donestsk and Kharkiv Oblast were affected. There were reports of
mass malnutrition and deatj, mass “difficulties”with food as well as epidemics
of typhus and malaria.
There is no way to know with certainty how many people died as
a consequence of the famine. The estimates vary from 7.5 to 10 million people.
There was evidence of widespread cannibalism:
“Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A
woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a
cannibal, but was "not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter
reaches you." The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to
prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who
refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died.
Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.”
There were even posters printed by the Soviet regime at the
time that addressed this issue. One of those stated: “To eat your own children
is a barbarian act.”.
"People who eat one other because of the famine are not
cannibals. Cannibals are those who don't want to redistribute the church's gold
to the starving."
More than 2500 people were convicted of cannibalism during
that time. Euthanasia followed by butchery, murder and black-market trade in
human flesh was not unheard of. Quantities of nondescript meat appeared in
markets in Russian towns and cities, some of it undoubtedly human. An aid
worker wrote of the situation in late 1921:
“Families were killing and devouring fathers, grandfathers
and children. Ghastly rumours about sausages prepared with human corpses (the
technical expression was ‘ground to sausages’) though officially contradicted,
were common. In the market, among rough huckstresses swearing at each other, one
heard threats to make sausages of a person.”
Most historians believe that this famine was man-made. There
were natural conditions that contributed to it (most noticeably a draught), but
there is evidence to suggest that the famine was a way of Stalin to eliminate
the Ukranian Independence movement. Rejection of outside aid, confiscation of
household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement seem to indicate
intent, which is why some regard Holodomor as a genocide.
But at the time, most of the world knew nothing about it.
The image the Soviet Union projected was one of strength and prosperity, a
credit to the socialist regime. And this is the situation Gareth Jones
encounters when he arrives in Moscow. Journalists from the most important news
outlets in the world living a life of luxury and scrutiny under the eyes of
Stalin, relaying misinformation to every corner of the globe. Walter Duranty
was Moscow Bureau chief of the New York Times for fourteen years after the
Russian Revolution, and he was awarded a Pulitzer for a series of reports on
the Soviet Union in 1931 and 1932. Not once in those reports did he mention the
famine, and in fact, in 1932 he denied a famine exhisted at all in what the New
York times itself stated constituted “some of the worst reporting to appear in
this newspaper”. He published reports stating "there is no famine or
actual starvation nor is there likely to be" and "any report of a
famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda". His
Pulitzer was never revoked.
Mr Jones does a really good job of putting this story out in
the open. The movie is a little slow at first, but once Gareth gets in the
train to Ukraine, everything he sees is so inconceivable it can barely be
described in words. He peels a fruit and the people around him grab the skin
off the floor to have something to eat. A man trades a heavy winter coat for a
piece of bread. There are corpses everywhere. At some point he eats tree bark
because there is absolutely nothing else.
The movie stands largely on the weigth of the story it’s
trying to tell. The script is not one of very memorable lines or anything like
that. But the story is so horrifying (and interesting), that one forgets about
that for a while.
Another thing the movie does is to insert George Orwell in
the story. There is a theory that Orwell named his character “Mr Jones” in
Animal Farm after
Gareth Jones,
who may have been a crucial influence in his work. Whether or not mr Orwell (or
Blair, actually) ever met Gareth Jones, his insertion in the movie lends it one
of it’s most brilliant moments, when even after he learns that there is a
famine and the extent of how bad things are he still clings on to hope and
asks: “what about free schools? And free hospitals?”, as if the famine was a
small hiccup, a fixable mistake on the way of this new regime that was still
adjusting it’s gears. The scene is wonderful… It shows how poisonous an idea
can communism really be, that even when confronted with its failure, people
still hang on to it, desperate for it to succeed – much like the farm animals
in George Orwell’s novel.
This festival has started slow, but Mr Jones was definitely
the best movie I watched to on the first Saturday… I can’t wait to see what else is coming.
Mr Jones, 2019 | Directed by Agnieszka Holland | Written by Andrea Chalupa | Jaames Norton, Vanessa Kirby, Peter Sarsgaard | Poland, Ukraine, UK
