Galileo’s heliocentric discoveries were put before a jury of Galileo’s peers. That’s not a promising beginning and it didn’t go well from there; he was forced to recant before the Inquisition, but his sentence of life imprisonment was commuted to house arrest, which is just the sort of punishment me and Galileo like best. The ultimate consequence of Galileo's failure, in Brecht's view, was the development of the atomic bomb centuries later, and a still-looming “universal cry of horror.”
At the end of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, our hero is defiant and productive under house arrest, getting lots of work done and smuggling out the best. Just like the house-arrested Iranian film director Jafar Panahi who just won the Palme d’Or this past May (same month I moved into my house). I was in the same room as Mohsen Makhmalbaf that one time I went to Cannes and I sat there hands folded and beaming like some mesmerized super geek. Iranian cinema for life! Persian poetics in perpetuity!
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