The fraternity of Djangophiles

Elliot

My thoughts exactly. Politics probably did not mean a thing to Django. It's true that he played in clubs that Nazi officers frequented, but millions of other Frenchmen and -women went on with their lives during the occupation, too. That didn't make them Nazis. Not everybody is cut out to be a resistance fighter.

I smell denial here.

Films like these often push their angle too far in the interest of entertainment, and it is unfair to comment on something unviewed, but the man has a real point. The millions of other Frenchmen and women mentioned above were not seeing most of their countrymen being taken away and slaughtered. I certainly wouldn't have had the heart to entertain these people while they killed my relatives (which they did) and looked at me as nothing more than a performing piece of vermin. Did Django have any money or access to some by this time? I believe yes, and I know that every other artist who paid the least bit of attention to what was going on - in the visual field for example Dali, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Ernst, Duchamp, Hofmann, Chagall, Mondrian and a host of others in Paris, I could provide you with a longer list - who could get enough money to get the hell out of there did just that. There was no mystery to what was going on, and the Nazis telegraphed their intentions long in advance, as far back as 1932.

I don't hold Django's personality against him, let him wear red socks if he wants to, it is hard enough for creative personalities in any age to get along with others, but people in general definitely need to somewhat de-Djangoize their approach to GJ. I for one don't want to see the world view Samois on the same level as a Star Trek convention.

klaatu

Elliot wrote:

I for one don't want to see the world view Samois on the same level as a Star Trek convention.

In one sentence, you pretty much summed up my reaction to that movie!

noodlenot

Elliot wrote:

I for one don't want to see the world view Samois on the same level as a Star Trek convention.

sorry, had to requote this. FTW!

scot

I certainly agree with Elliot - there are whole worlds of gypsy jazz descended from the Ferret family and other branches of the family tree which are rarely discussed here. Which leads me to believe that few people are exploring these styles of music and that is really pretty sad IMO. Kastner's movie does gleefully skewer the cult of personality, though at the expense of some nice people who were unnecessarily made to look like buffoons.

Django was not a collaborator. To imagine this is applying middle-class thinking and expecting middle-class behavior from a person who was not in any way middle-class. I wouldn't pretend to know what Django thought, but I'm sure that many gypsies saw the nazis as just one more government out to get gypsies. This wasn't a new experience for them and they had their own strategies for dealing with it and surviving it. Collaboration and/or active resistance and the reasons why people do or don't do those things is a very complicated subject. I spent the last six months reading a variety of books on this subject, and what I came away with is this: in an occupied society, both sides will do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, many of which you'd never imagine.

To gain any real understanding of this complicated subject requires some study. Kastner did not do his homework, so the movie is a failure.

crookedpinky

Great level headed response about ascribing motivations to people we didn't know and at a time and place far removed from we are today. The rise of Nazi-ism and all of it's horrors can be charted clearly with hindsight but to suggest that Django - and everyone else - knew of the genocidal actions of the final solution has to be challenged. Similarly the suggestion that Django -aware of this - chose to somehow condone it by playing for the perpetrators and not leave as many others did somehow places him in the position of having Nazi sympathies is a conclusion drawn with nothing to base it on other than a guess at what Django knew and thought and the supposition that he could and should have made a moral judgment and left.

I certainly don't want the world to view an event like Samois as some quasi religious affair or something along the lines of a Star Trek convention and I don't think anyone visiting Samois would get that impression. Sorry but there's no offence meant to Star Trek fans there and who's to criticsie them anyway for maintaining/expressing their interest in that show by attending conventions. I have been to Samois 3 times and although the focus is obviously on Django people do talk about other players - and through this forum - other players are regularly remembered and promoted. Django will always have the distinction of being the originator of what we love today but that means nothing more than that to me.

Any subject of interest - art, music, film - will always have its quota of obesessive fans who invest more meaning in the content and the creators of that content than was ever intended. For the rest of us we simply enjoy and maybe even try to emulate that work. However it sounds as though this film-maker has deliberately focussed on the extreme end of gypsy jazz afficionados and presented a deliberately biased and misrepresentative version of the majority of people who are interested in the whole Gypsy Jazz scene.

I have no idea how many people will ever see this documentary and to be honest I don't care. The world has more pressing matters to be concerned with than how we are viewed and perceived

rimm

..Its an excellent documentary.

For one the director is a fan. I found the quest for truth and debunking myths in the film to be excellent. There is so much bull about Django that when someone delves into the subject matter like this there is always going to be critics. There is a great scene when a local in Libercies tells the director that he has Django's original birth cetificate. Turns out to be a photcopy, and the guy seems really annoyed by this revelation. If you think for a second that Django did'nt profit to a certain extent during the war then you are sadly mistaken. War makes poeple do crazy things and to put bread on the table or prevent your family being gased maybe you too would play for the Führer.

And if the characters that were interviewed at Samois were normal Joe Scmo's then a very boring documentary it would have been indeed. The highlighting of Belgiums zero tolerance to the travelling community in the movie is shocking though.

scot

No doubt, Django did quite well during the war. Look at his discography, it's clear that he recorded constantly during the war, when his popularity was at it's peak. Yet it's is a very common misconception that the Nazis prohibited jazz in the occupied countries. That's understandable, because it is about impossible to imagine nazis and jazz coexisting. But the facts say otherwise - hundreds of high-standard jazz recordings were made in all the occupied western countries during their occupations. That's a fact - it really happened.

Djangomania is a sneering and sarcastic look at cult behavior on the one hand, and a bogus "documentary" based on a faulty premise on the other. If a person wanted to know what actually happened in the jazz world in the occupied countries, there are a number of well-written and well-researched books on this subject. "Jazz Under the Nazis" by Mike Zwerin and "Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany" by Michael Kater are two of the best in English. Richard Cobb's "French and Germans, Germans and French" is an excellent and scholarly look at life in France during the occupation - how different classes of people were affected and how they behaved.

All I am saying is this - it's easy to have preconceived ideas about this subject, because it involves Nazis. The facts did not line up with my preconceptions, nor with Mike Zwerins, who wrote his book from a musician's perspective, and certainly not with Kastner's presumptions. If you find this subject interesting, at least read Zwerin's book, get some of the facts.

Musicians who were seen as collaborators were punished after the war. The violinist Michel Warlop who made numerous recordings with Django, was denounced for having played in Berlin with Michel Legrand, and was banished from Paris and died of shame and alcoholism in the Pyrenees where he was playing for tips in cafes. See http://claude.torres1.perso.sfr.fr/Ghet ... ichel.html

There is also a French documentary film called "Chantons sous L'Occupation" which is also worth seeing as it looks at behavior among entertainers from a variety of perspectives - http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review? ... A962958260 . This subject has been covered many times here and this is it for me!

mr arp

Elliot wrote:

but people in general definitely need to somewhat de-Djangoize their approach to GJ. I for one don't want to see the world view Samois on the same level as a Star Trek convention.

You wrote the above on » Wed Mar 02, 2011 10:07 am ....then, in another thread a few days later (post by Elliot » Fri Mar 04, 2011 10:59 am) you write:

Elliot wrote:

I have a life size painting of Django I'm finishing that would generate $3-$5k at a gallery (it would have to), including the half they'd get to display it. Should I have charged the person who commissioned it that much? Or even half that? I only got to sell it once! Ouch!

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see a photo of your masterpiece, but how on earth are you 'helping' to "de-Djangoize" anything whilst producing life-sized paintings of Django?

You don't have to answer Elliot, I'm just having fun, no harm intended...I get a kick out of your posts, very entertaining indeed. But I do honestly hope you post a photo of your painting when finished for all to see and enjoy.