Bourdain in Cuba

Anthony Bourdain’s first impressions of Cuba, back in the day: “I’ve been to a lot of places, but I can’t think of another place that’s been less f**ked by time than Havana.” When Bourdain returned in 2015, it briefly looked as if that was about to change.

When Anthony Bourdain pulled back the curtain on the 2015 season of CNN’s Parts Unknown, the restless world traveller and homespun philosopher was nearing the midway point of what would prove to be his crowning moments in the TV spotlight.

Cuba was the 41st of, in the end, 95 hour-long TV episodes of Parts Unknown. In a departure of sorts for the often caustic, always irascible Bourdain, it also marked one of the few times he visited another country, cameras in tow, twice in such a short period of time. Parts Unknown’s Cuba episode followed just three years after his first visit for No Reservations’ 2011 season.

That was for Travel Channel;  the follow-up was for CNN, but that wasn’t the only difference.

In March 2016, then-US president Barack Obama announced he would be lifting travel restrictions to Cuba for American citizens. Bourdain, reasoning this was too good an opportunity to miss, made the short 90-mile hop from the Florida Keys in an uncharacteristically — for him — sunny mood, buoyed by optimism for a more hopeful future for a people snakebitten by history ever since Spanish colonization in the 15th century.

In 2015, Cuba — then as now — was a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, a historical oddity, disarmingly simple on the one hand and yet maddeningly complex on the other. Fidel Castro, still very much alive and kicking at age 89, was a bogeyman to descendants of the Cuban emigres who fled to South Florida in the wake of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, but a hero to a significant portion of the roughly 7 million Cubans who stayed behind, not all of them by choice, for good or bad.

Today, Cuba’s population has ballooned to 11.21 million (2022), more people than live in the states of Michigan and Ohio, but many of the same old issues remain.

Dates in history can play funny tricks on one.

Castro’s death on Nov. 25th, 2016, came 51 years and three days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on Nov. 22nd, 1963 — which, depending on how much faith you place in Oliver Stone conspiracy movies, Castro had a hand in … along with the CIA, the Russians, a cabal of disaffected Cuban emigres in South Florida, assorted Texas weirdoes, right-wing elements in the US military, and a lone nut with a gun hiding out in the Texas School Book Depository, now a museum no less, with a somewhat prosaic name, the Dallas County Administration Building.

Cuba features the work, too, of Parts Unknown director/producer Toby Oppenheimer and Bourdain’s longtime cameramen, Zach Zamboni and Todd Liebler, among too many others to name at production company Zero Point Zero.

Zamboni and Liebler must have done something right: They won the coveted Emmy Award for outstanding cinematography in a non-fiction program that year, to go with Emmys they won earlier in 2013, for Myanmar, and 2014, for Punjab.

As with so much of Bourdain’s best work — and Cuba is some of his best work if trapped in a weird political and socio-economic time warp thanks to unforeseen events, hello, President Trump! — Cuba very much has that signature Bourdain look and feel.

The rum no doubt helped. Cuba, lest we forget, is home to some all-world rum.

Bourdain repeatedly talks about how the island will drastically change, and for the better, in a matter of weeks — and, hey, What will all those people do with all those extra tourist dollars once the locals become cruise ship millionaires?

As we know now, to many’s regret, that never came to pass. Unless you’re Canadian, that is, as I am. Cuba has been something of a tourist mecca for Canadians — Europeans, too — since 1976 when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau visited Cuba and kissed the Beard.

Richard Nixon, America’s president at the time, was singularly unimpressed. He even made a tape recording to that effect. (Nixon taped virtually everything he said, including things that were perhaps best kept to himself.)

Despite its misplaced optimism for Cuba’s short-term future, Cuba remains one of Bourdain’s more fondly recalled episodes among Bourdainophiles.

Just look at this comment, posted on Reddit a few years back:

“… watching Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and for the umpteenth time marvelling at the images. Every goddam frame — well, 90% of them — is beautifully composed with perfect depth-of-field, rich contrast, colours and textures, and striking subjects.

“And the editing is really inventive, breaking up longer shots with tiny vignettes of apparently unrelated but complementary images. … (Even) if you don't like Bourdain, you can watch (the) episode with the sound off and just groove on the images and editing. … “

And that ending!

”(It) ends with one of the most amazing shots I've ever seen on TV. For a couple of minutes, they roll slowly along a blocks-long seawall where people are hanging out in the twilight, but they frame it so they only show the people from the chest down. Two minutes of slow side-scrolling past headless bodies, graceful, casual, random, almost abstract patterns of arms and legs in the twilight.”

But wait, there’s more.

Here’s unit photographer, Zero Point Zero regular and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker David Scott Holloway, who bird-dogged Bourdain throughout his travels for CNN:

“The restaurants in Havana’s Chinatown were delicious, and surprising. Also, going to see a show at midnight in a club was great. Things could be a lot different than when we were there, but I’d still check the episode and see if any of it speaks to you. Good luck!”

And that music!

Watching Cuba is a little like watching Buena Vista Social Club coupled with Babette’s Feast.

Many of the places Bourdain ate at, and according to the site Eat Like Bourdain, are still open today, at least as of this past December: in Havana, Cafeteria a la BBQ, along with El Aljube, Fábrica de Arte and Paladar “Los Amigos” among others,  and in the small fishing town of Jaimanitas, Casy Santy, aka ‘Santy Pescador’ according to Google, where two brothers fish every morning for seafood they serve on the plate later that same day. It adds whole new meaning to the term, locally sourced.

Cuba was the first episode CNN aired after the emotional grind of Beirut, and the two make an unlikely yet oddly fitting couple. As with Beirut, the city that is, it’s clear Havana captured Bourdain’s heart.

He intimated as much in an essay for the social media platform Medium, titled Cuba!!!, which Bourdain shared in CNN's Field Notes.

“Whatever your feelings on the Cuban government of the last half-century,” he wrote, ”Cuba itself is beautiful. The Cuban people are uniquely wonderful: proud, resourceful (you sort of HAVE to be in Cuba), educated — and funny as hell. Even crumbling from neglect, Havana is the most beautiful city in all of Latin America or the Caribbean. The rum is the finest in the world, bar none. The music … fantastic.”

Bourdain saves a comment, too, for that shot at the end.

“A long tracking shot of people, mostly young Cubans, hanging out by the Malecon in Havana. We have sort of a bet among ourselves — those of us who make the show — where we challenge each other to see how long we can hold a sequence without voiceover, or dialogue. Just allow the images to speak for themselves.

“I think we outdid ourselves this time. I’m very proud of it.”

And rightly so.

Con razón.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/directors-cut/when-something-was-good-he-would-tell-you/

     https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-cuba/

CNN

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Bourdain in Beirut

”Is all the chaos and violence worth it for change?” Anthony Bourdain asked 10 years ago of his expedition to Beirut, Lebanon for CNN’s Parts Unknown. Ten years later, he may well have asked the same question.

Not so long ago, someone on this site wondered how Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown more politically minded programs would age over time, given how volatile and uncertain the world picture has been of late. The last new, original Parts Unknown aired in September 2018, after all. Much has changed since then — and continues to change, day to day, minute by minute in some cases.

Enter, Beirut.

‘Lebanese grapple with fear and tough choices as regional war looms.’

- Al-Jazeera English.

'Waiting for a Wider War, Lebanese Civilians Feel Helpless.’

- The New York Times.

‘Calls for foreigners to leave Lebanon as war fears grow.’

- BBC.

Veterans warn of echoes from the 1982 Lebanon war as new conflict looms on Israel’s northern borders.

- The Guardian, 22 hours ago.

Bourdain dealt in universal truths. We know this. We just need reminding on occasion, that’s all.
And so, enter Beirut.

Again.

Bourdain’s last Beirut episode for Parts Unknown — his third trip to Beirut, cameras in tow; his first, in 2006, was cut short after two days with bombs raining down on the city after war between the terror group Hezbollah, the political kingmakers propping up a relatively toothless government in Lebanon, and neighbouring Israel, forcing Bourdain and his team to evacuate the country — aired on 21 June 2015, and closed out Parts Unknown’s fifth season.

Bourdain’s “Beirut trilogy” would go on to become his defining cultural and cinematic achievement, his Alexandra Quartet.

Beirut was also — and this is just my opinion mind — director/Producer Tom Vitale’s finest hour. Nobel material. It was as if everything came together in a confluence of historical, geo global and cultural ripples in time. It was partly unfinished business — Bourdain felt he owed it to the place, to the country and to the people who live there to finish what he started — and partly to make peace with himself. He returned to Lebanon to film the original episode interrupted by the war, this time using a new approach. He would use food as a way to tell the stories of real, actual people with dreams, hopes and real fears about the future and the future of their children, and politics with more depth than the news ever could. In an interview with Blogs of War, as recalled by veteran BBC Lebanese correspondent Kim Ghattas in a 2018 essay for The Atlantic (the essay is still available for reading, behind a paywall; Ghattas also posted it on her Twitter account), Bourdain described the trip as a “defining moment for the show, and a kind of crossroads … personally,” while talking up Beirut as a “magical” place of “unbelievable possibilities.”

Ghattas, who wrote the 2013 book The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power about her travels with Hillary Clinton during Clinton’s tenure as US Secretary of State, would later write a seminal post-1979 history of the Middle East, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East, was profoundly affected by Bourdain’s take on her home country, and with good reason. Ghattas was raised Christian in Lebanon during that country’s 1975-1990 civil war; she attended the American University of Beirut, worked as an intern at a local English-language newspaper during her studies, and went on to work for the Financial Times and the BBC from Beirut. She would go on to become the BBC’s chief correspondent covering the US State Department.

Beirut, topographically and geographically similar to Tel Aviv in many respects, is a glittering modern city by the sea, just up the coast on the Eastern Mediterranean, and has been called the Paris of the Middle East, and with good reason, at least in past, happier years.

Beirut’s geopolitical location, though, in the crosshairs of an unending parade of regional wars, has ensured that it has a troubled past, imperilled present and equally uncertain future. Watching Beirut today, at this every hour, and listening to Bourdain’s words once again, it’s hard not to be struck by his wisdom, his grace, and his telling insights into human nature.

This was personal.

“In 2006,” he recalled later, “I, along with my crew, had been taken off the beach by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and transported to the USS Nashville, and from there to Cyprus and home.

“One day, I was making television about eating and drinking. The next, I was watching the airport I’d landed in a few days earlier being blown up across the water from my hotel window.”

Bourdain came away from the experience deeply embittered, confused — and determined to make television differently than he had before.

“I didn’t know how I was going to do it or whether my network at the time was going to allow me, but the days of happy horses**t, the uplifting sum-up at the end of every show, the reflex incursion of a food scene in every act — that ended right there.

“The world was bigger than that. The stories were more confusing, more complex, and less satisfying in their resolutions. As I noted in my utterly depressing last lines of voice-over in the show, we eventually put together, in the real world, good people and bad people are often crushed under the same terrible wheel.

“I didn’t feel an urge to turn into Dan Rather. Our Beirut experience did not give me delusions of being a journalist. I just saw there were realities beyond what was on my plate, and those realities almost inevitably informed what was — or was not — for dinner. To ignore them had come to seem monstrous.”

And yet.

It’s the “and yet” that gives Bourdain his grace.

“And yet, I’d already fallen in love with Beirut. We all had — everyone on my crew. As soon as we’d landed and headed into town, there was a reaction I can only describe as pheromonic: The place just smelled good. Like a place we were going to love.

“You learn to trust these kinds of feelings after years on the road.”

They met lovely people. They found fantastic food everywhere. A city with a proud, almost frenetic party and nightclub culture.

“A place where bikinis and hijabs appeared to coexist seamlessly — where all the evils, all the problems of the world could easily be found right next to and among the best things about being human and being alive.

“This was a city where nothing made any damn sense at all — in the best possible way. A country with no president for over a year, ruled by a power-sharing coalition of oligarchs and Hezbollah, with neighbour problems as serious as anyone could have, a history so awful and tragic that one assumed the various factions would be at each other’s throats for the next century.”

And yet.

“And yet, you could go to a seaside fish restaurant and see people happily eating with their families and smoking shisha, people who in any other place would be shooting at each other …

“That is an egregious oversimplification. … It defies logic. It defies expectations. It is amazing.”

“Beirut. Everybody should come here. Everyone should see how complicated, how deeply troubled, and yet at the same time beautiful and awesome the world can be.”

Supplementary reading:

      https://explorepartsunknown.com/beirut/episode-intel-from-beirut/

      https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-beirut/#:~:text=For%20starters%2C%20Bourdain%20tries%20cracked,spicy%20potatoes%20seasoned%20with%20coriander%2C

     https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/how-lebanon-transformed-anthony-bourdain/562484/

CNN

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Bourdain in Hawaii

Ohana. It’s a Hawaiian term meaning “family,” and family is probably not what devoted Anthony Bourdain followers expect if they come across a Parts Unknown episode dedicated to Hawai’i, that heavily touristed island state found in the Pacific Ocean some 3,200 km (2,000 miles) southwest of the US mainland.

For Bourdain, family was both personal and private. However, the idea of family as both a social ideal and a balm from the vicissitudes of life lies at the root of this reflective and unusual episode of Parts Unknown, which first aired on CNN on June 14, 2015. This was a strikingly different hour of television than Bourdain’s foray to Hawaii for No Reservations in March 2008, some seven years earlier.

Bourdain was the same man he was then, of course — none of us really, the philosophers say, we simply become more of who we are — but the Hawaii of 2015 caught him in a more reflective mood. Hawaii is one of my favourite Parts Unknown episodes for that reason, and not just because it both opens and closes with Bourdain breaking bread with one of my favourite writers, Paul Theroux, New England born, a resident of London, England for much of his early writing career, and now an avowed — and passionate — resident of and advocate for the island state.

Fun fact: Theroux first discovered Hawaii for himself while paddling a sea kayak around islands in the equatorial Pacific — this is true — for his 1992 book The  Happy Isles of Oceania. Theroux’s doctor at the time diagnosed him with terminal cancer and gave him a year to live; Theroux, somewhat of a philosopher himself, decided to vanish somewhere in the Pacific, never to be seen or heard from again. A year later, it turned out, his doctor sheepishly admitted he had got the diagnosis completely wrong. Theroux emerged from Oceania healthier and happier than when he left, and he would go on to write nine more travel books and a dozen more novels, including this year’s Burma Sahib. He is now 83. That doctor’s diagnosis was off by some 32 years, and the clock is still ticking — an irony Bourdain himself would have likely appreciated if not laughed out loud at.

It’s not as if Theroux hasn’t tried: In 2019, at age 79, he drove his beaten-up old car through cartel Mexico, taking copious notes along the way, for On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey, and managed not to get himself murdered in the process. When you’re old, he noted wryly at the time, people tend to ignore you, even drug cartels.

Back to Hawaii. Theroux, who knows a thing or two about island life, is quick to explain the island mentality to Bourdain in Hawaii’s opening moments.

“Hawaii is America,” Bourdain says, “as American as anything could possibly be, yet it also never shed what was there before in the layers and layers that have come since. It's wonderful, tricky, conflicted, and what, for lack of a better word, you'd have to call paradise.”

“Paradises don't exist,” Theroux corrects him. “Paradise is kind of in your head.”

“Wait a minute,” Bourdain replies. “You look at your window here. You look at those hills, those mountains, all that green, that blue sky, the gin-clear sea, it sure looks like paradise to me. Does it matter that it's America?”

Theroux: “The big thing is that it is America. It has elements of the Third World. The nicest elements of the Third World, which is the self-respect, the pride. There are things that don't work at all. But then it's mainstream USA. Where we are now, there are PTA meetings here. They get together and watch the Super Bowl. It’s the most Main Street USA as much as you will find. …  To be Hawaiian to me, there needs to be a sense of connection to a place. Some sense of responsibility for it. It should be about being honest to a place, to be honest to what you love and to be honest to what you value is a road that's constantly trying to be more and more informed … what I love about the oceans, that's my pathway. That I go on the ocean to seek that sense of truth.”

Bourdain is both curious and passionate about the native Hawaiian campaign for political and social autonomy, most evident on the island of Molokai —one of the most evocative and heartfelt sequences in the entire episode — and Theroux takes pains to explain what makes Hawaii so unique, and special, and why, in a strange way, for those willing to look below the surface and see past easy answers, Hawaiian nationalism is not the simmering cauldron of repressed violence that is New Caledonia, a French territory to the west of Tahiti — or French Polynesia as the official maps label Tahiti — in Melanesia.

“It's not a particularly welcoming or friendly part of the world. Contrary to the aloha myth. No island is. Nantucket isn't. The island of Hawaii isn't. The Isle of Wight. Name an island that wants foreigners there. Sicily. Do they want foreigners there? No way. Did anyone come to an island with good intentions?

“Captain Cook put his sailors ashore, just to the northwest of here. He was the first haole. Like Magellan,  Hawaii killed its first tourists. The Philippines killed their first tourist. People born on the islands view anyone who comes ashore with suspicion.

“To go back to what defines a Hawaiian, maybe we should go back in our imaginations, it could have been 2,000 years ago. … you get (the idea) that these were very productive people. They were industrious, healthy, strong. They had time for the arts. That was a large population, more than half of what we have in Hawaii today. Fully sustainable, because there were no other choices. So over time, the native Hawaiian population grew. It's the same story. Diseases were introduced from outside …, and the inability to deal with them caused people to die. In 1926, the public school system outlawed language and the practice of culture in public schools. The road to extinction was already being paved.”

Later in the hour, Bourdain spends quality time with native Hawaiians who warmly and gently share their concept of ohana with Bourdain, and it’s one of Parts Unknown’s most telling — and poignant — moments.

“The ocean is all around for thousands of miles,” Bourdain says. “It’s a humbling feeling knowing, at all times, the ground upon which you live and breathe is but a tiny speck in the middle of all this. So in Hawaii, (you learn) you’re able to handle yourself in the ocean no matter what it throws at you. It implies you're capable of almost mythical things. The ability to live in the water, handle its many moods above or below the surface.”

A lot has been written and said about Bourdain’s struggles with substance abuse and addiction over the years and whether he was physically worn down by the time it ended for him, but there’s a moment in Hawaii when, tanned and fit and looking a man half his age, is helping paddle a traditional Hawaiian canoe, far out at sea, when he is purely in his element — a man high on life, a discoverer and ocean explorer, learning about new cultures and coming ever closer to finding the meaning of life.

“Always bring the ohana. Bring the family, bring the kids. You rarely ever see a party here where there aren't kids.”

For me, Hawaii marked one of the high points of his entire run on Parts Unknown.

Aloha, and mahalo.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/hawaii/bourdains-take-hawaii/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/hawaii/episode-intel-from-hawaii/

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Bourdain in Madagascar

“He was a poet of life.” Filmmaker Dareen Aronofsky on Anthony Bourdain, after the two visited Madagascar and then Bhutan for CNN’s Parts Unknown.

Over the years, Anthony Bourdain allowed a great many extraordinary landscapes — his words — only to have them fade into a blur outside his windows. “I’ve looked, maybe seen, maybe noticed, then gone,” he intones in his opening voiceover for Madagascar, the fifth-season episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown that first aired in May 2015.

“We all carry different experiences inside us. We see things differently, don’t we?”

Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island by area, left an indelible impression on Bourdain’s psyche, and the result is plain to see in Parts Unknown. The journey which Bourdain undertook with avant-garde filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and others) caught him in an unusually pensive, reflective mood, even by his standards. The break-up of his first marriage affected him deeply, and Madagascar, an island of almost unparalleled beauty — and scene of almost apocalyptic environmental ruin — will remind long-time Bourdain followers of his 2011 visit to Haiti for No Reservations, which he undertook during a cholera outbreak shortly after an earthquake killed 3,000 people in a single day, and with a hurricane looming on the horizon. A moment toward the end of Madagascar, in which Bourdain and Aronofsky are surrounded by hungry children while sampling a smorgasbord of local food delicacies, has uncomfortable parallels with a similar moment in that No Reservations episode in Haiti, where Bourdain broke bread and talked social injustice with Sean Penn, who was running a local aid project at the time.

“Madagascar,” Bourdain continues in his opening monologue, “exotic, unspoiled paradise, or microcosm for the end of times?”

Real life is no Disney cartoon. This much we knew, of course, but this Madagascar really breaks it down.

Over the years, there have been any number of reasons to watch Parts Unknown, even a decade after its making, but Madagascar is unique in that it provides viewers a glimpse into the process of making one of these episodes — a look, if you will, of how the sausage is made.

That’s in no small part because Bourdain wanted the episode to reflect Aronofsky’s signature style of filmmaking — surrealism, rooted in social consciousness. Visually striking but also emotionally involving. Entertaining and reflective by turns.

In an essay Bourdain penned for CNN’s Field Notes at the time, he shared some of the deepest thoughts of his entire 12-season odyssey with Parts Unknown.

“Travel is not always comfortable,” he wrote, “even when the scenery is at its most beautiful. Look out the window, get too close, and the reality of the situation — the world you will soon be leaving behind — intrudes.

“On Parts Unknown … we make choices all of the time. Choices about what I will show you of what I saw and experienced during my limited time in a destination, and choices about what I won’t. It’s my show. I decide where we go. I decide what we do when we get there. And I decide what we show you when we edit down 60 to 80 hours of footage to 42 minutes.

“That is a manipulative process. And not, inherently anyway, a bad one. I want you, the viewer, to feel the way about a place the way I want you to feel. I want you to look at it and see it from my point of view, if at all possible. Or at least consider other points of view.

“But it is, almost always, one point of view—or one lens through which you see: mine.”

At the time time, people often asked Bourdain what it would be like to accompany him on a film shoot.

“Now you will see. We look at Madagascar, in many ways, through Darren’s fresh set of eyes. It’s a useful reminder, worth having, that what you see on the show is not the only angle. That we are looking at the world out my window, but that there are other windows — that maybe I’ve omitted or shaded something, if only to present myself in a more flattering light.”

Aronofsky approached Bourdain interestingly, not the other way around.

Bourdain was “thrilled, honoured and delighted” — again, his words — to draw the attention of an acclaimed filmmaker whose work he admired, but he had one proviso.

“My only request was that he shoot some footage—with whatever device he wanted to use. And that, at some point, he give us his version of at least a portion of the show for which we have already seen my version.

“So, in Act 6, you will get an example of what may or may not be missing from the shows we make. An ugly, uncomfortable reminder that it’s not just pretty pictures and neat, hopeful sum-ups. It does not, I’m pretty sure, portray me in the best light. Or any of us, for that matter. But there it is. I thought it was important.”

When Bourdain passed on 8 June 2018 — years ago now, though it still feels like yesterday — Aronofsky was among those CNN approached to pen a eulogy of sorts. The two would later travel together to the mountain kingdom of Bhutan for a Parts Unknown episode.

Aronofsky’s words, written just four days after Bourdain’s passing, resonate to this day.

“I was asked to share some thoughts on my time with Tony in Madagascar and Bhutan,” he began. “I’ve been staring at a blank page for days. His death is incomprehensible. I don’t know how to process him being gone.

“I do remember how easily words flowed from him. He made it seem so effortless. He was a poet of life. So I’ll let that inspire whatever flows now.”

And, at the end:

“You turned a light on what it means to be a human right now, right here on planet Earth.

“Thank you for letting me tag along and witness a master storyteller shape the unexpected into the relatable and unforgettable.

“I will never forget how passionate you were about life and this world. You loved love, cinema, food, artists, people, idiosyncrasies, pain, relief, martial arts, chefs, music, the Lower East Side. You loved the whole damn world (even the parts you despised). And the whole world loved you.”

Bourdain was seemingly incapable of producing an underwhelming hour of television, even with the passing of time, but Madagascar, for me, is on a whole other level. Now seems as good a time as any to revisit it.

Supplementary reading:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/bhutan/anthony-bourdain-darren-aronofsky/

    https://www.foodrepublic.com/2015/05/18/what-its-like-to-film-anthony-bourdains-parts-unknown-in-madagascar/

CNN

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Bourdain in Budapest

“My Dinner with Vilmos:” The one in which Anthony Bourdain sups at the table of Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the greats of film cinematography, in a city Bourdain describes as one of the most beautiful on Earth, and the two share memories and anecdotes from the Hungarian Revolution.

Anthony Bourdain was captivated by the power of the image from a young age, and that’s possibly no more apparent in CNN’s Parts Unknown than it is in the fifth-season episode Budapest, which first aired in June 2015.

Spending much of the hour with Vilmos Zsigmond, the Hungarian-American cinematographer who informed Bourdain’s own cinematic eye from the time Bourdain first became interested in cinema. Zsigmond came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and his camera helped shape the look of American movies in the 1970s. Zsigmond would go on to become one of the leading figures of the American New Wave movement in movies at the time.

He worked with Robert Altman, Brian DePalma, Woody Allen, Michael Cimino and Steven Spielberg. Yes, that Steven Spielberg. Zsigmond “lensed” Close Encounters of the Third Kind., as they say in behind-the-scenes movie parlance, and won the Academy Award for The Deer Hunter, which he made for Michael Cimino.

Zsigmond also shot Heaven’s Gate for Cimino, which, regardless of its merits or lack thereof — I quite liked it, despite its being savaged by critics at the time (Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both rated it one of the worst films they saw that year) and a major fail at the box office, profoundly so — is gorgeous to look at, like turning the pages through an elegant coffee-table book, sumptuous and yet oddly moving.

Yes, you may be thinking, but if  Zsigmond was such a Hungarian patriot, how did he end up in America? Well, therein lies a tale.

And it’s that tale Bourdain chooses to tell in Budapest — to Bourdain’s eye, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, cities in the world.

Yes, Bourdain takes time to eat out — Parts Unknown was sold to CNN at least partly as a food show, if not exactly a cooking show: at the somewhat eccentrically named New York Café — which turns out to be a distinctly Hungarian-flavoured homage to New York City’s intellectual art scene, where saying what you think comes with the menu choices and free-speech rules — and at the working-class eaterie Pléhcsárda, where he samples venison stew, pancakes with chicken liver sauteed in marrow and paprika sauce (better than it sounds), and a pork schnitzel the size, Bourdain says only half-jokingly, of a small surfboard.

Budapest is, first and foremost, a show about revolutionary politics, though, not food per se.

In 1956, Hungary bore witness to one of Eastern Europe’s bloodiest revolts against Soviet oppression and occupation. It would not be the first.

Zsigmond, a film student at the time, used a 35-millimetre movie camera purloined (i.e., without permission) from the arts academy where he was studying to record the fighting — and Russian atrocities — in Budapest at the time.

You could be shot for simply carrying a camera, Bourdain says, and Zsigmond did a lot more than just carry his camera.

Zsigmond, together with his friend and fellow student László Kovács — who would go on to have an influential career as a respected cinematographer in his own right; Easy Rider and Paper Moon were among his list of credits — hid their movie camera in a shopping bag and filmed through a hole they cut in the bag’s side.

It’s a good thing they did.

Their footage survives to this day as virtually the only footage to have survived that time, and a testament to the human will to survive, even in the face of terrible odds.

Most photographers and cameramen, student and professional alike, were cowed into silence by the carnage. Many people died.

Hard as it may be to believe today — insert sarcasm emoji here — the Russian invaders were brutal.

Bourdain was always a rebel at heart, and there’s little question, based on his off-the-cuff remarks in Budapest, that had he been fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he would have sided with the left-leaning Popular Front of Spain’s Second Spanish Republic, basically artists, teachers and writers, you know, the bad guys, and not the military junta of patriots, monarchists, conservatives and “traditionalists” led by Gen. Francisco Franco — the eventual winner in what US ambassador Claude Bowers called at the time a dress rehearsal for the Second World War.

Just as Franco quashed dissent in Spain, Russia quashed dissent in Hungary, and Zsigmond and Kovács were among those who decided that perhaps it might be better to leave — for America — rather than end up being lined up against a wall and shot.

Bourdain, a Hungarian partisan in mind if not body, could relate.

The irony, of course, is that some of Zsigmond’s best work — and the work he remains best known for — is in the childlike wonder depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film Bourdain felt a special affinity with. The images from Close Encounters shown in Budapest are a reminder of just how stunning visually — and emotionally uplifting — that film really was. Bourdain saw it at a time in his life when it left an indelible impression.

“Our style in photography was not realist; it's called poetic realist,” Zsigmond tells Bourdain toward the program’s end. “That's what we always thought about that certain photography. Emphasizing the beauty of things, basically. But, also, I make it more beautiful.”

“This is no kind of an answer to me,” Bourdain tells him. “You've made some of the most iconically beautiful images we've known in the modern world. And you keep telling me, ‘Well, I was smart in school, I was good at math—‘“

“So tell me,” Zsigmond interrupts. “What would you like to hear?”

“‘I don’t know,’” Bourdain replies. “‘I was touched by God.’ If you're regularly creating the sublime, I'm looking for a metaphysical answer, I don’t know.”

“You learn this,” Zsigmond says simply. “You learn to be an artist.”

What a great meal,  Bourdain tells his hosts at the end. “Thank you.”

And then, in his closing voiceover:

“Do we emerge fully formed with a God-given eye for pictures, images that can move people?

“Or, are we the end result of all the things we've seen, all the things we've done, the places we've been, the places, the people we've had to leave behind, all that's happened in your life. Is it those things that bring the light or the darkness to the blank screen?

“And what about the faces of those we capture in our magic lenses for a minute, or second, or hour? Afterwards, should we think about them, and where they might be now?”

Remembering Anthony Bourdain, 1956-2018.

And remembering Vilmos Zsigmond, for that matter. 1930-2016.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/budapest/remembering-vilmos-zsigmond-1930-2016/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/budapest/bourdain-off-the-cuff-budapest/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/budapest/bourdains-field-notes-budapest/

CNN

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