KIAROSTAMI IV: THE KOKER TRILOGY / A TASTE OF CHERRY

And Life Goes On / Life and Nothing More

In 1992, Kiarostami filmed Life and Nothing More (aka And Life Goes On).It became known as the second part of a set of films known as The Koker Trilogy.  After the 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake in which 40,000 people lost their lives, a filmmaker and his son try to drive to the village of Koker, located in the heart of the region. Searching for the two young actors who played in his film, Where is the Friend’s Home?, the Kiarostami surrogate runs into all sorts of difficulties as he shows still pictures from the film to passersby in the hope of locating the lost boys. Koriostami and his cohort do not find them, but they arrive at something more important, which is to see close up that life does go on. That this conclusion of a spiritual quest is couched in material, everyday terms is entirely consistent with Kiarostami’s attempts to link the ephemeral and the concrete. (x).  Kiarostami uses the themes of life, death, change, and continuity to connect the films.

 

Stuart Jeffries
Saturday April 16, 2005

Guardian

In the third part of the trilogy, the 1994 film Through the Olive Trees, he seemingly peeled back layer after layer of fiction to expose a reality – and then challenged his audience to decide whether what they were seeing was real and if so, what exactly was going on. In Through the Olive Trees, Kiarostami initially seemed to be making a film about the making of And Life Goes On, shooting a film crew as it shot scenes in which Iranians rebuilt their earthquake-devastated homes. But one of the bit-part actors in the film we see being made is also pursuing a woman who thinks he is beneath her. 

At the end of the film, he pursues her through some olive trees and across the beautiful Iranian landscape, to the point where they become dots. But the shot never resolves the question of whether she does yield: indeed, instead, as at the end of Close-Up, Kiarostami could well be telling the audience that the intimacies of real-life relationships are none of our business.

Through The Olive Trees

 In 1995 the Iranian cinema achieved its first major international prize, the 1995 Camera d’or at Cannes for “The White Balloon,” scripted by Kiarostami and directed by his former assistant, Jafar Panahi.

But it was the Palme d’Or for Taste of Cherry (1997) that, for many, best demonstrated Kiarostami’s tender humanism and formal genius. 

In his dust-covered Range Rover, Mr. Badii (Homayon Ershadi) winds up and down the rocky mountain passes in Tehran’s outskirts. He is searching for someone to perform a simple task—to come to a specified location the following morning and throw 12 spades of dirt on top of a shallow grave in which he will be lying. It is a job, in a country where religion and politics are so delicately interwoven, for which there are few eager applicants….a patient, poetic and profoundly beautiful work that confirmed its director as one of the masters of modern world cinema.
[Wikipedia ]: Taste of Cherry explores the fragility of life and rhetorically focuses on the preciousness of life. Badii, a middle aged apparently healthy and well off Tehrani, cruises the city’s outskirts in his Range Rover trying to find a stranger who will help him commit suicide. Conversations with people on the way gradually convince him of the positivity and preciousness of life. From the young Kurdish soldier who is spooked by the shuddering request to a middle-aged Afghani seminarian who is unable to dissuade Badii with religious sympathy to a Turkish taxidermist at a natural history museum who urges the glories of nature — the taste of cherries — as the prime reason not to kill oneself, Kiarostami evokes a high degree of emphasis on the different elements of life. [15]

Senses of Cinema Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa: In Taste of Cherry, the reason for Mr. Badii’s suicide is not given to the viewer. Consequently, the audience has to imagine that reason. In Kiarostami’s words, the untold or unexplained parts of his films are created in the minds of his audience. What is presented as obscure or hidden becomes clear and apparent through the audience’s imagination (for example, characters’ motivations and inner worlds). In this way, the audience member becomes responsible for the clarity that she/he expects from the film.

Several of his films involve long takes of protagonists driving in the remote countryside. “He loves nothing more than heading off in a car on his own to photograph rural Iran,” says Geoff Andrew. His films, though, are hardly ever bucolic idylls. Many are shot in or from cars moving through the polluted and congested Iranian capital. “It is in cars,” says Andrew, “that Abbas has found a congenial environment for filming. It is an intimate space where people can talk freely. It’s also a very cheap location.”

 

At the end of that film, after more than an hour in which the sad-eyed protagonist has been driving around Tehran’s outskirts, looking for someone to bury him to consummate his plan to commit suicide by overdosing on pills and then lying down in a hole in the hills to die an anonymous death, we see the man lying in that hole and looking at the night sky awaiting death. Then the screen goes blank for several moments, after which the film begins again, except that now it is day and we see Kiarostami and his film crew wrapping up on the hillside. Who is that actor wandering around the hill? Wasn’t that the man who played the man who seemingly died in the last shot? Yes it was: Kiarostami was again, in Brechtian mode, drawing attention to the fabrication and confounding viewers’ expectations.

A Taste of Cherry

KIAROSTAMI III: CLOSE-UP

Close-Up

A.V. CLUB, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

 It was in the 1990s that Kiarostami ascended to the global stage, beginning with his first film of the decade, Close-Up, a groundbreaking study of a real-life incident in which a man conned a family into believing that he was Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Sometimes cited as the point where Kiarostami broke with the neo-realist influences of his early work, it inaugurated an extremely productive period.

 

GODFREY CHESHIRE, ROGEREBERT.COM

 

“Close-Up” was the film that broke the mold—or rather added a new one, a kind of self-reflexive film that meditated on film and filmmakers and blurred the lines between fiction and non-fiction, life and art. It was this heady blend that led critics like myself to see in Iran, of all places, a kind of cinematic sophistication that surpassed that of most film cultures in other parts of the world. Although “Close-Up” was passed over by the world’s top festivals, its mounting critical renown got Kiarostami on the radar of Cannes’ programmers, and he was canny enough to subsequently turn out two more films-about-film, “And Life Goes On” (1992) and “Through the Olive Trees” (1994), that put him among Cannes’ leading contenders while also solidifying his global critical reputation.

 

Stuart Jeffries
Saturday April 16, 2005

Guardian

So began a decade when he would become the darling of cinephiles around the world.

In the autumn of 1989, Kiarostami had read a bizarre magazine story about an unemployed print worker who had divorced and had very little contact with his little boy. The man had been jailed after impersonating his idol, Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, seemingly for dubious motives. Kiarostami decided to recreate the events on film – amazingly using the real-life protagonists (he has for many years enjoyed using non-professional actors). He enlisted Makhmalbaf’s support and then the two directors visited the impostor, Hossein Sabzian, in jail and secured his participation.

Kiarostami went about recreating the events that led to Sabzian’s arrest. Sabzian’s deception had begun on a bus, where he found himself sitting next to a woman reading a copy of the script of one of Makhmalbaf’s most popular films, The Cyclist. He passed himself off to her as the director and was invited back to her comfortable home where she and the rest of her family (also fans of Makhmalbaf) were delighted to learn that he intended to make part of his next film with their co-operation. But their suspicions were later aroused and the police were called to arrest the impostor. Kiarostami managed to secure the agreement of the judge (another Makhmalbaf devotee) to film the trial, where Sabzian was to be accused of not repaying money he had borrowed from the family to pay for a taxi and a gift for his son.

“Ultimately,” Kiarostami has said, “what the film is dealing with is the difference between the ‘ideal self’ and the ‘real self’; the greater the difference, the more unbalanced the person.” But the relationship between reality and fabrication was throughout indeterminate, no more so than at the end of the film in which, in a purported documentary scene, Kiarostami rewards Sabzian on his release from jail with a meeting with his hero, Makhmalbaf. The impersonated arrives on a motorbike and takes the impostor off to apologise to the Anahkhah family. “At this point, Kiarostami has already abandoned his more or less faithful reconstructions of these events using the real protagonists – now, like a real god, he creates reality and makes Sabzian’s dream come true,” wrote Elena. But there is a twist: as the bike pulls away and we hope to hear the conversation between impostor and hero, Kiarostami’s sound equipment packs up. Elena suggests that Kiarostami wanted to respect the privacy of the meeting and that the equipment may not have really broken down. It is impossible to be certain.

Close-Up seduced western cineastes with its intertextual devices, its blurring of the line between documentary and fiction, and its compassion for the story’s ostensible criminal. Such was fellow Palme d’Or winner Nanni Moretti’s fondness for the picture, that he even made a tribute called Opening Day of Close-Up in 1996. This undermining of assumptions about truth and reality, was to become a characteristic of Kiarostami’s films in the next decade.

GODFREY CHESHIRE, CRITERION

Close-up is thus neither a documentary nor a drama but a provocative, unconventional merging of the two, a meditation on perplexities of justice, social inequity, and personal identity that also subtly interrogates the processes and purposes of cinema. … At the end of the 1990s, Kiarostami was voted the most important director of the decade by U.S. critics in Film Comment, while dozens of international and Iranian film experts surveyed by the Iranian magazine Film International named Close-up the best Iranian film ever made.

KIAROSTAMI II: HOMEWORK / WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE?

Stuart Jeffries
Saturday April 16, 2005

Guardian

 According to  cinema historian and his biographer, Alberto Elena, the young Kiarostami painted to combat his loneliness…. Asked once what he learned at university, he replied: “That I was definitely not made to be a painter.” In 1969, he joined Kanun. “We were supposed to make films that dealt with childhood problems,” says Kiarostami. “At the beginning it was just a job, but it was the making of me as an artist. The important thing is that I didn’t work in commercial films. I look at these 20 years as the best period of my professional life.” Iranian film historians Shahzad Rahmati and Majid Sedqi argue: “Film-makers who worked at the centre faced no financial restraints or problems, and thus could easily engage in experimentation with audacity, vigour and intellectual innovations.” Especially during the final years of the last Shah’s reign, when the Iranian film industry was subject to restrictions, this was a creative oasis.

In The Report (1977),  Kiarostami pivots his camera from his focus on children and their deceptively complicated lives, to the lives of a married couple. The husband is woefully beset with problems, seemingly everywhere he looks. As a tax collector, he’s already burdened with unenviable tasks and responsibilities. But to this, he must add accusations that he’s receiving bribes. Even worse, at home his wife—who’s rarely seen in the same frame with her husband—is considering suicide.

In 1979. he made the 53 minute First Case, Second Case, a documentary about a teacher who sends a group of pupils out of the classroom when one of them does not own up to talking behind the master’s back. Kiarostami showed this film to the Shah’s educational experts and filmed their opinions. Shooting was nearly complete when, on February 1, Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Tehran from exile and 10 days later declared an Islamic republic.

Kiarostami set about remaking the film, junking the commentaries and changing its structure. He decided he would make the film into a dramatised dilemma: First Case involved pupils refusing to name the guilty party; in Second Case one of the pupils names the culprit and is allowed to return to the classroom. All the new observers, including the new education minister, were filmed commenting on the two cases, many taking the film as a parable about the Shah’s secret police. First Case, Second Case was immediately awarded a prize at the Tehran Festival of Films for Children and Young Adults; shortly afterwards, though, the government banned it because its presumed message was deemed subversive and because some of the commentaries came from members of political parties (communist, democratic national front) which had been declared illegal. As a result, the film disappeared from view for decades.

In 1983, Kiorostami directed the autobiographical comedy Fellow Citizen. Caught up in Tehran’s insane bottlenecks and gridlock, a traffic cop tries to enforce the rules and regulations. Having done so, he then proceeds to demonstrate the flexibility of the law and the flexibility of…the traffic cop himself! Kiarostami, who was a traffic cop in his own youth, exploits the situation’s maximum comic possibilities in this disarming documentary portrait.

After the revolution, Kiarostami continued to make films about children. The last one he made for Kanun was called Homework (1989), and was born of fraught personal experience – his relationship with Parvin Amir-Gholi, the art designer he married in 1969, was collapsing.  “An internal revolution was taking place in my household: I was getting separated from my wife and was going to take care of my two sons,”  In the film’s opening sequence, Kiarostami explains to the headmaster of the school where he wants to film: “I’ve had problems helping my son with his homework… That’s why I decided to bring my cameras here, to find out whether it’s just my son’s problem or if it has something to do with the actual education system.” Some critics took the film as a denunciation of Iran’s repressive and disciplinarian education system. But it was also informed by Kiarostami’s own memories of school which, he admitted in one interview “are still traumatic.”

 Homework was initially banned for three years in Iran, and subsequently only screened for adults. “After I made Homework I was forced to leave Kanun because they disagreed with the film,” he says.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

On the surface at least, Homework shows Kiarostami’s documentary methods at their simplest. “It’s not a movie in the usual sense,” we hear him saying offscreen to another adult as we see several boys on their way to school. “It’s a research work. It’s a pictorial research on students’ homework.” He goes on to explain that he got the idea to do this while helping his own son with his homework, and shortly afterward we see the boys reciting elaborate religious chants while performing calisthenics outside in what looks like winter weather. (Because the sexes are segregated, no girls are in sight. In fact, we never see any females in the film; we only hear one woman later on, delivering expository narration about questionnaires sent by the filmmakers to the boys’ parents.)

Then the movie settles down to its main bill of fare: interviews with a succession of grammar-school boys by Kiarostami himself about how they do their homework — whether their parents help, punish, or encourage them, whether they like doing it more or less than watching cartoons on TV, and so on. The most striking thing about these interviews is their formal presentation: the boys are filmed frontally, as in passport photos, and though Kiarostami is heard more often than seen, there are periodic cuts to the camera and cameraman supposedly filming the boys.

Late in Homework there’s an even more ambiguous and ironic play with documentary film rhetoric than the inserts of the camera when the film returns to the boys’ extended Islamic chants and calisthenics outdoors.

Kiarostami films pupils standing in serried ranks in a playground chanting a prayer, which breaks down as the increasingly distracted children start playing around while continuing to recite, thereby undermining the massed display of religiosity. Kiarostami cut the soundtrack to this scene after complaints from religious groups angered that the recital of the prayer was robotic and ultimately not very  devout.

    Offscreen the narrator, presumably Kiarostami, says, “In spite of all the attention of responsible people to arrange this ceremony properly, it was not performed correctly. So in order to show the proper reverence, we preferred to delete the sound from the filmstrip.” At this point the sound is abruptly turned off as the camera pans across the crowd of boys thumping their chests and declaiming, eventually arriving at the figure of the male teacher leading them in the foreground. 

As simple and charming as most of Homework is, it winds up telling us a great deal about Iran in the 80s — everything from what some little boys think of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq to what some Iranian parents think of education in America and Canada. (According to one father interviewed, homework is never assigned at American and Canadian schools.) There’s also the boy who cries during his interview, in part because he’s frightened of the filmmakers. (Kiarostami also reportedly filmed his own son, though it’s unclear whether he appears in the picture.)

Where is the Friend’s House?

GODFREY CHESHIRE, ROGEREBERT.COM

He began attracting notice outside Iran with the feature film “Where Is the Friend’s House?” (1987). Come the Revolution, he, like many Iranian filmmakers, hunkered down and waited for the storm to pass. When authorities of the Islamic Republic decided to revive the cinema in the mid-80s (the Ayatollah Khomeini had hailed its potential for moral education), Kiarostami was among the filmmakers invited to resume making features.

His first under the new regime, “Where Is the Friend’s House?,” was a spare, witty, poetically resonant tale of a conscientious schoolboy determined to return a friend’s notebook to keep him from being expelled. Told from its young hero’s point of view, it placed the boy’s small story in the social context of rural Iran, with sweeping shots of the landscape. Cited as one of the essential films made for children. it helped launch the child-centered film’s hugely successful post-revolutionary career.

 

Where is the Friend’s House?

Kiarostami once told Cahiers du cinema, “In Where Is the Friend’s Home? the child who is looking for his friend didn’t find the house, but instead he earned his friendship.

 

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI I: INTRODUCTION AND THE EARLY YEARS AT KANUN

A.V. CLUB, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Abbas Kiarostami, one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary film, died in Paris. The Iranian director and artist—whose unconventional and wide-ranging body of work made pointed use of ambiguity, sometimes blurring the line between reality and fiction—had been undergoing treatment for gastrointestinal cancer. He was 76.

The most important and internationally recognized artist to come out of Iran after the Islamic Revolution, Kiarostami had a tremendous impact on film, effortlessly bridging the philosophical and the mundane. In addition to directing features and countless shorts, he was also an accomplished photographer and poet, and dabbled in countless other art forms. A cosmopolitan figure never seen without his trademark dark glasses—which he wore because of an extreme sensitivity to light—Kiarostami often claimed to be neither especially political nor “politically religious,” though he openly criticized Iran’s leadership in interviews.

Photo: Kaveh Kazemi / Getty Images

DAVID HUDSON, FANDOR

The Hollywood Reporter has passed along a statement issued by Martin Scorsese:

He was one of those rare artists with a special knowledge of the world, put into words by the great Jean Renoir: ‘Reality is always magic.’ For me, that statement sums up Kiarostami’s extraordinary body of work. Some refer to his pictures as ‘minimal’ or ‘minimalist,’ but it’s actually the opposite: Every scene in Taste of Cherry or Where Is the Friend’s House? is overflowing with beauty and surprise, patiently and exquisitely captured.

 

Wrote Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa for Senses of Cinema in 2002. “What distinguishes Kiarostami’s style is his unique but unpretentious poetic and philosophical vision. Not only does he break away from conventional narrative and documentary filmmaking, he also challenges the audience’s role. He plays with their expectations and provokes their creative imagination.

 

Akiva Gottlieb for the International Documentary Association: “Kiarostami worked in nearly every case with nonprofessional actors he encountered on location, who spoke dialogue so naturalistic that it must have been at least partially unscripted. Each film also called attention to narrative frames of reference, the presence of the camera and the artifice of storytelling, but for Kiarostami, to construct ‘reality’ did not necessarily mean to falsify it. The so-called hybrid documentary, with an active and often visible filmmaker oscillating between observation and instigation, would not exist without Kiarostami’s innovations.” Via Movie City News.

 

“The American commercial movies have made all the audiences throughout the world accustomed to sound, explosions, and the close-up. That is part of cinema, but not, I think, part of life. I do not claim that my films are cinematic, but they are a slice of life.’”

DAVID HUDSON, FANDOR

A.S. Hamrah for n+1 on Abbas Kiarostami: “Thinking about his films while watching an American film leads to a sobering realization: all the things that Kiarostami could not show in his films became the only things Hollywood filmmakers chose to show in theirs. What he showed in his films were the things abandoned by Hollywood: conversation, friendship, understanding, compassion, and empathy.”
The films of Iranian master Kiarostami, [are often a] sophisticated Chinese-boxes structure…of Kiarostami’s explorations of the relationship between reality, artifice and the film-making process….Beyond this playful, philosophical veneer,Kiarostami’s humane compassion for his characters shines bright, his simple compositions and stories and long takes a mark of deep respect for their quiet integrity and strength of spirit.” – Geoff Andrew (The Director’s Vision, 1999) (via TSPDT )

Photograph by Abbas Kiarostami.

A.S. HAMRAH, n+1

The 1990s were a period when filmmakers like Kiarostami and Hou, who were already regarded as important artists, were ignored or marginalized while, at the same time, intellectuals began to write about the death of cinema. In the 1960s, Hollywood cinema was much less vibrant than it was in the 1990s, but instead of declaring cinema dead, American critics celebrated filmmakers as “difficult” as Antonioni and Bergman. Looking back, willfully ignoring filmmakers from Iran and Taiwan should be called what it is: racism masquerading as populism.

ROBERT HORTON, FILM REFERENCE

At the beginning of the 1990s, even the most ardent filmgoer could be forgiven for never having heard of Abbas Kiarostami. The Iranian filmmaker, fifty years old in 1990, had worked for two decades for his country’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Most of his films had been about children, and thanks to some European film festivals in 1989, one of them—Where Is the Friend’s House?(1987)—had finally attracted attention outside Iran.

By the end of the 1990s, Abbas Kiarostami had been widely and passionately acclaimed as the director of the decade.

Kiarostami unquestionably (along with his protégés, and his younger, more explosive compatriot Mohsen Makhmalbaf) pulled the cinema of Iran onto the world stage, both inducing and capitalizing on the gradual thaw in Iran’s strictly controlled popular culture. ….Kiarostami’s achievement rests on a complex combination of factors, one of which is that his films can be utterly, beautifully simple. Kiarostami is a humanist artist, with a strong commitment to stories of ordinary life. “My technique is similar to collage,” he has said. “I collect pieces and put them together. I don’t invent material. I just watch and take it from the daily life of people around me.” The films of Italian neo-realism were an early and lasting influence, with their unvarnished plots and homely settings. “I always think,” Kiarostami told Sight and Sound magazine, “that directors who look for stories in books are like those Iranians who live next to a stream full of fish, but eat out of tins.”

For all the sincerity of his philosophy, Kiarostami is also a formally challenging filmmaker—and much of his “naturalism” is carefully planned. Most of his latter-day movies include glimpses of the filmmaking crew, as though to remind the audience of the artifice of what they are watching;Taste of Cherry actually ends with a video sequence of the camera crew on location, dispelling the force of the mesmerizing story we have been watching. Film, Kiarostami has declared, is not “the manipulation of the audience’s emotions. It’s not educational, it’s not entertainment. The best form of cinema is one which poses questions for the audience. So if we distance the audience from the film and even film from itself, it helps to understand the subject matter better.”

Read more:http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Jo-Ku/Kiarostami-Abbas.html#ixzz4GcDigv4S

A.V. CLUB, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

 He made his first short film, Bread And The Alley, in 1970.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Born in Tehran in 1940, his father was a painter and decorator, and from him Abbas may well have inherited his inclination towards visual expression. He studied graphic arts at the University Of Tehran School Of Fine Arts, supporting himself by working part-time as a traffic officer. After graduation, he designed posters and children’s books, before moving on to film title sequences and commercials, directing over 150 TV ads in the space between 1960 and 1969. In 1969, as well, he was invited to set up a film unit at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, a state-supported arts and education organization started by the shah’s wife and now known as Kanun that has produced practically all of his films to date.

Bread and Alley (1970)

The first film he made there — the delightful, Chaplinesque, Bread and Alley (1970) — is a ten-minute narrative about a boy carrying a loaf of bread home through an alley and trying to get around an unfriendly stray dog. Shot without dialogue, the whole thing is deftly accompanied by Paul Desmond’s jazz version of the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” and it already marks its director as a master of integrating landscape and action, as well as merging documentary and fiction.

Wikipedia]: “Bread and Alley was my first experience in cinema and I must say a very difficult one. I had to work with a very young child, a dog, and an unprofessional crew except for the cinematographer, who was nagging and complaining all the time. Well, the cinematographer, in a sense, was right because I did not follow the conventions of film making that he had become accustomed to.”[13]

Kiarostami followed this a few years later with a short, Breaktime. Punished for having smashed a window with his ball, a child has to stand in the school hallway. When school lets out, he heads home but finds his way blocked by a football match. He manages to get through, but then follows a bumpy road that leads him to the outskirts of the city.

In 1974, Kiarostami directed his longest film to date, the 84 minute The Traveler. [Wikipedia} The movie told the story af a troublesome, amoral ten-year-old boy in a small Iranian town. He wishes to see the Iran national football team play an important match in Tehran. In order to achieve that, he scams his friends and neighbors. After a number of adventures, he finally reaches Tehran stadium in time for the match. The film addresses the boy’s determination in his goal, and his indifference to the effects of his actions on other people, particularly those closest to him….The film furthered Kiarostami’s reputation of realism, as well as initializing his subsequent fascination with physical and spiritual journeys.

 

In 1975, he did the more experimental Two Solutions for One Problem and So Can I (both 1975). Both are remarkable conceptual miniatures that recall the imaginative freedom of early Jane Campion. (The first is a hilarious fictional essay about feuding schoolmates; the second, combining animation and live action, records the responses of two little boys to cartoon animals.)

 

TRUMP’S ASSASSINATION DOG WHISTLE WAS EVEN SCARIER THAN YOU THINK.

ROLLING STONE

—–

 It’s really irrelevant what Trump actually meant, because enough people will hear Trump’s comments and think he’s calling for people to take up arms against Clinton, her judges or both. Though most of the people hearing that call may claim he was joking, given what we know about people taking up arms in this country, there will undoubtedly be some people who think he was serious and consider the possibility.

In other words, what Trump just did is engage in so-called stochastic terrorism. This is an obscure and non-legal term that has been occasionally discussed in the academic world for the past decade and a half, and it applies with precision here. Stochastic terrorism, as described by a blogger who summarized the concept several years back, means using language and other forms of communication “to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”

Let’s break that down in the context of what Trump said. Predicting any one particular individual following his call to use violence against Clinton or her judges is statistically impossible. But we can predict that there could be a presently unknown lone wolf who hears his call and takes action in the future.

Stated differently: Trump puts out the dog whistle knowing that some dog will hear it, even though he doesn’t know which dog.

Those of us who work against anti-abortion violence unfortunately know all about this. Valerie Tarico wrote about this form of terrorism following the Planned Parenthood murders in Colorado Springs last November. The pattern she noted there is 100 percent applicable to Donald Trump and his supporters right now – except that we haven’t yet had the major act of violence at the end of the string. As Tarico wrote:

“1. A public figure with access to the airwaves or pulpit demonizes a person or group of persons.
2. With repetition, the targeted person or group is gradually dehumanized, depicted as loathsome and dangerous—arousing a combustible combination of fear and moral disgust.
3. Violent images and metaphors, jokes about violence, analogies to past ‘purges’ against reviled groups, use of righteous religious language—all of these typically stop just short of an explicit call to arms.
4. When violence erupts, the public figures who have incited the violence condemn it—claiming no one could possibly have foreseen the ‘tragedy.'”

This explains Donald Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton to a letter. He has 1) demonized her whenever he can by calling her “Crooked Hillary” and constantly degrading her; 2) organized a convention around which the central theme, repeated over and over, was that Clinton is a criminal who needs to be locked up, clearly using fear and moral disgust as motivators; and 3) is now using violent metaphors (or “jokes,” if that’s what you think his statements were) against her, just short of an explicit call to arms.

Now we just have to hope that #4 doesn’t come about – that violence does not erupt. Though, if it does, we know exactly what Trump and his supporters will say: that they never could have foreseen this tragedy.

Following Trump’s comments, we all have to hope that it doesn’t come to this – that the lone wolves out there don’t read this as urging someone to take the next step in the cycle.

LOCK HIM UP!

JOE SCARBOROUGH, WASHINGTON POST

The Muslim ban, the David Duke denial, the “Mexican” judge flap, the draft dodger denigrating John McCain’s military service, the son of privilege attacking an immigrant Gold Star mother and the constant revisionism and lying about past political positions taken are but a few of the lowlights that have punctuated Donald Trump’s chaotic chase for the presidency.

Any one of these offenses would have disqualified any other candidate for president. But the Republican nominee remained competitive against a historically weak Democratic nominee on the promise of bringing radical change and dramatic disruption to Washington.

That appears to be changing. Post-convention polls show Trump falling behind by double digits both nationally and in must-win swing states like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia.

And the political ride will only get rockier for Trump in the coming days after he suggested that one way to keep a conservative Supreme Court after Hillary Clinton got elected would be to assassinate her or federal judges. Trump and his supporters have been scrambling wildly all day to explain away the inexplicable, but they can stop wasting their time. The GOP nominee was clearly suggesting that some of the “Second Amendment people” among his supporters could kill his Democratic opponent were she to be elected.

We are in unchartered waters but that does not mean that the way forward is not clear. It is.

1. The Secret Service should interview Donald Trump and ask him to explain his threatening comments.

2. Paul Ryan and every Republican leader should denounce in the strongest terms their GOP nominee suggesting conservatives could find the Supreme Court more favorable to their desires if his political rival was assassinated.

3. Paul Ryan and every Republican leader should revoke their endorsement of Donald Trump. At this point, what else could Trump do that would be worse than implying the positive impact of a political assassination?

4. The Republican Party needs to start examining quickly their options for removing the Republican nominee.

A bloody line has been crossed that cannot be ignored. At long last, Donald Trump has left the Republican Party few options but to act decisively and get this political train wreck off the tracks before something terrible happens.

COULD THIS BE THE END OF TRUMP? (HAVEN’T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE?)

Trump continues his attacks, now on party leadership.

Donald Trump has refused to endorse Paul Ryan and John McCain, despite being endorsed for the presidency by both men. “I like Paul, but these are horrible times for our country. We need very, very strong leadership. And I’m just not quite there yet,” the Republican nominee said of the House speaker. Ryan’s campaign spokesman said: “Neither Speaker Ryan nor anyone on his team has ever asked for Donald Trump’s endorsement.” Earlier on Tuesday, Barack Obama called Trump “unfit” and “woefully unprepared” to be presidentand urged Republican leaders to denounce their nominee. The French president, François Hollande, also chipped in, saying the real estate magnate made people “want to retch”. Early on Wednesday morning, Trump denied reports of growing unhappiness within his campaign over erratic public conduct and missteps: “There is great unity in my campaign, perhaps greater than ever before,” he tweeted. On Tuesday, he also told a supporter to “get the baby out of here” after the infant in question began crying during a speech he was making. And in more than a dozen interviews at two Trump rallies this week, Trump supporters tell Ben Jacobs they either don’t know or don’t care about his recent comments criticizing the parents of a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq.

 

 

GOP reaches ‘new level of panic’ over Trump’s candidacy, from the Washington Post’s Phillip Rucker, Dan Balz & Matea Gold

“Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was described as “very frustrated” with and deeply disturbed by Trump’s behavior over the past week, having run out of excuses to make on the nominee’s behalf to donors and other party leaders, according to multiple people familiar with the events. Meanwhile, Trump’s top campaign advisers are struggling once again to instill discipline in their candidate…. “A new level of panic hit the street,” said longtime operative Scott Reed, chief strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s time for a serious reset.””

 The best polling news for Donald Trump on Thursday was that an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll had him down only 9 points to Hillary Clinton.That survey was released a little while after a poll from McClatchy/Marist that showed Trump down 15 points, pulling only 33 percent of the vote. Those numbers are, to put it bluntly, shocking. Mitt Romney was never down by that much to President Obama in 2012; his worst poll was a survey in June from Bloomberg that had him down 13, with 40 percent of the vote.

 In only one of the four major polls released this week is Trump over 40 percent, which is itself remarkable. Each of the four had Clinton gaining ground since the last time the same outlet released a poll, by an average of about 5 points. Three of the four showed Trump losing ground, by a little more than 3 points.

 The two new polls show a pattern that’s consistent with other recent surveys, including at the state level. Clinton is getting more support from Democrats than Trump is from Republicans, and his advantage among men and white voters has diminished. In both of the new polls, Clinton leads with men, which has not been the trend over the course of this election….

Relative to Election Day in 2004, 2008 and 2012, Clinton’s lead is more than twice that of the eventual victor at this point. In 2004, George W. Bush had a 6-point lead for a few weeks; in 2008, Barack Obama led by 6 points or more for the final month or so. Donald Trump now trails Hillary Clinton in the polling average by more than Mitt Romney ever did in the final 150 days. In fact, Romney never trailed by that much for the last year of the campaign.

And then there was a Politico investigation into whether his wife, Melania Trump, violated immigration laws when she came to the United States from Slovenia in the ’90s. This all came about after nude photos from her modeling past surfaced. (Melania Trump is now a U.S. citizen.)

Former CIA director Michael Morell (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

 The former head of the CIA endorsed Clinton: Former director Michael Morell broke his silence about national politics to say Clinton “is highly qualified to be commander in chief.” He accused Trump of being “a threat to our national security” and of being an “unwitting agent” to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump “may well pose a threat to our national security,” Morell says.

Clinton has a lead in Georgia. Georgia!

A new Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll has her with a slight lead over Trump, 44 to 40, in this traditionally deep-red state. (Though we caution: this is just one poll and her lead is within the margin of error.) But it’s not inconceivable that in a wave election, Clinton could win in Georgia.

Apparently Hillary’s no fan of Donald Trump ties. [They’re not made in America] (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

He got caught saying something untrue. Again.: That video Trump reportedly saw of U.S. officials handing Iranian officials $400 million? It doesn’t exist. Trump repeated the claim even after his campaign said they knew it didn’t exist. Then on Friday morning, Trump did something rare: He acknowledged his mistake.

What about Hillary Clinton?

Clinton is smartly staying out the way while Trump steals all the headlines.