le livre d'image (godard)

Cinema comes thick and fast at the end of the year. Nothing more appropriate than late Godard as a way of trying to review and summarise not merely a year of cinema and its interaction with the news, but the whole history of cinema and its relationship to just about everything. There’s no way to process late Godard except on a transparently subjective level. The multiple possible interpretations of the bricolage he assembles seems to demand subjectivity. As cultural experiences go, the closest comparison might be reading Derrida. Why is this edit next to that edit? Why has he chopped the world up in this way? Why is there sound here and silence there? You could spend a month deciphering and debating the filmmaker’s choices and be none the wiser, and much the wiser at the same time. 

As if to emphasis this, there’s a curious moment in the screening. About half way through the film, someone shouts out, in the style of the old Cinemateca, that there must be a problem with the sound, which cuts in and out. Someone else calls back, out of the darkness, that this is Godard and he’s doing it on purpose. Someone leaves the auditorium to check. At the end, this little community of Sunday evening filmgoers talk among themselves - is the sound part of Godard’s game, or is it the cinema’s new speakers? People check on-line, ask the attendants, but no-one seems any the wiser. It’s tempting to think of Godard chuckling at this wonderful ambiguity, where even the process of watching the film is put in question. We can’t even trust our five senses, which the film has taken note of in the opening reel.

This confusion is part of the game. A glass bead game, perhaps. However, there’s a stitching going on, a mind at work, a constant juxtaposition. It’s like studying the inside of the engine, what’s under the bonnet. Godard is the mechanic who is also the magician, operating in a dimension whose workings we can barely follow. 

roma (w&d cuarón)

I spent most of December trying to ensure that none of the thousands of people I knew in either Montevideo or London who had seen Roma told me anything about it. Every day, it seemed, someone else would ask me: Have you seen Roma? By hook or by crook I managed not to know too much by the time I finally settled down to watch the titles unfold. A shot which, there is little doubt, will go down as iconic, the water splashing over the tiled floor, conjuring like magic a reflection which will come back into play as the film’s credits roll in the final shot. 

Since watching it, I note there has been quite a backlash against Cuarón’s film. People find it too slow, or too mundane, or question its politics. Of course, there will always be naysayers, but the reaction comes as a surprise. It’s rare, in an age of hype, that a film lives up to the hype that has been built up around it, but in this case, there seems little doubt that Cuarón has managed to create a movie which will be regarded as a twenty first century classic.

In part because so little happens, especially in the first hour and a half of its two hours. The camera, (with Cuarón as DP), lingers lovingly over its frames. This is slow cooking, the flavours being left to marinate, baste, fuse, to produce a dish that feels as though it has exponentially transformed itself into something far greater than the sum of its parts. The decision to use black and white helps: the reduced palette serves to accentuate detail. There’s something of the joy of cineasta from an era where film was still in its infancy: that a frame can re-present information with the delicacy of a great painter, aware of every square inch of their canvas. It’s a film to bask in, to savour, a film which respects the rhythms of the artesan. (And here the reference to Enrigue’s Purepecha feather workers feels appropriate: Mexico is a country which has preserved a tradition of craftsmanship which predates the arrival of the Europeans.)

Which perhaps brings us to the politics. Is this a rose-tinted portrayal of the Mexican socio-political divide? The argument could be made, and there’s little doubt that the director is aware of this. The counter-argument is that this is a mainstream film which protagonises a female indigenous perspective, something which few other mainstream Mexican films have succeeded in doing, or at least those that have been widely received internationally. There will be debates about this, in part because the film is one that warrants and merits debate. A Mexican visitor suggested last night that the film depicted a romanticised vision of DF, and it’s hard not to argue with that. But Cuarón is using film as a dream-weaver and romance is part and parcel of that process. 

There are other sly political messages at work, not least when Cleo heads away from middle class Roma in search of her child’s father, when the film shows the other side of the Mexico City tracks. The sub-plot of Fermin’s involvement in a far-right group employed to smash student demonstrates is carefully woven. The final moment of confrontation between Cleo and Fermin is contrived, but at the same time it helps to set up the gruelling, humanistic sequence where her child is stillborn. It’s a mark of the film’s potency that it succeeds in transforming this moment into emotional dynamite, crystalising the audience’s sense of empathy with the protagonist.

Cinema is the most naturalistic of the arts, perhaps even more so than photography, but no matter how naturalistic the film, at the edges it will warp and bend into something fantastic. It’s an inevitable process in the art of constructing a narrative which fits within the scope of a film’s running time.  True naturalism, like Borges’ map of the world, would have to cover every second of the film’s characters’ lives and every angle of perception, an absurd, impossible task. A film as seemingly ‘documentary’ as Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Rosselini’s Rome, Open City, is shaped by the prism of its director’s perspective. The objective of recreating reality is a Quixotic endeavour and Cuarón seems completely at ease with this paradox, embracing the warp and woof of his naturalism to fire his and the viewer’s imagination. The cracks in the pavement where the plants flourish, that space also known as art. 

When a script is written, sometimes the screenwriter will be tempted to put in a line such as: “In the background, a human canonball is propelled across the sky, landing in a rickety safety net.” This kind of thing is almost always written in the knowledge that not once in a hundred thousand films would this detail be deemed worth the cost of setting it up and incorporating it within a shot where it is merely background detail. Yet Cuarón has managed to get this scene made; he must have fought for it. Along with hundreds of other tiny battles he must have fought in order to create the world he depicts in its hyper-real entirety. 

sudden death [álvaro enrigue, tr. natasha wimmer]

Sudden Death: An Unfinished Rally

Sudden Death is a novel about tennis and its origins.

No it’s not. It’s a novel about Caravaggio and the invention of modern painting.

On the other hand, it’s a novel about the fall of the Aztec empire.

And the birth of the Spanish empire.

The moment that the pursuit of civilisation passed from the Western hemisphere to the European.

Foot fault surely, at what point was the Western hemisphere more advanced than the European? And what exactly is the Western Hemisphere anyway?

The Aztecs and the Inca and the Sioux and the Navajo and all the other civilisations that got destroyed by the barbarian hordes from across the seas. 

Barbarian hordes? What kind of a trick shot is that?

Read the book. Which also describes the primitive state of pre-Renaissance Europe. 

So what’s his beef, Enrigue? Whose side is he on?

No-one’s. He just wants to recalibrate the historical balance. 

He must have a team.

Maybe it’s Mexico. A country that continues to negotiate the clash between American and European civilisations.

Didn’t someone else make a film about this recently?

You mean the ironically titled Roma, by Alfonso Cuaron. A title Enrigue would be proud of.

Why?

Most of his novel is set in Rome.

I thought you said it took place in Mexico?

Mexico is the glory which Rome inherited.

What does that mean?
Follow the money. Or in those days, the gold. And behold the wonder of the Michoacan feather workers, who made a mitre for the Pope which changed the way Caravaggio saw colour which changed the way the world perceived the world. The European world. 

The Michoacan feather workers??

It’s a long story.

That’s a curve ball.

Or an ace.

What’s the score?

Deuce, advantage Patzcuaro

Patzcuaro?

The lost Utopia, the one true marriage between Renaissance Europe and pre-Colomban America.

I’m not sure I follow the rules of this particular game of tennis.

It’s Mornington Crescent, via Sudden Death.

Which is the name of the novel.

Indeed it is.

So who wins?

mente revolver (w&d alejandro ramirez corona)

Mente Revolver is the second piece from Tijuana reviewed this year. A city on the hinges of the multi-fangled global movements of capital, people and political ideologies in the early decades of the twenty first century. One of the things the film does effectively is illustrate the proximity (not merely geographical) between the Californian cities of Los Angeles and San Diego and Mexico. There might be a border, but borders illustrate closeness as much as distance. The differences between the beaches in San Diego and Tijuana are contingent on an accident of history, nothing else. Within this framework, Revolver Mente delivers a slightly predictable narrative, as the lives of three lost souls criss-cross, unable to escape the web of criminality which controls the city. The camera follows them restlessly as they try to find a way to survive. Two are Mexican men and the third is a woman from the USA, who has no more control over her destiny than the pair from South of the border. The director employs a harshness of tone and content in order to emphasise the cruelty of this world where the value of a human life is negligible, but he does so without quite achieving the pathos that Escalante achieved in Heli. There are also hints of Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. This is a world which is short on pity, but the final scene when one of the characters escapes to the relative safety of the San Diego offers some hope. Perhaps the border can be transcended after all. 

belmonte (w&d federico veiroj)

That Belmonte’s curiously Francophone name sounds like something out of an Alexandre Dumas novel is alluded to only twice in the film. At one point, in what we come to realise is a vision, he grasps a musketeer’s sword, which never appears again. And at another he wields his paintbrush like a sword as he attacks the canvas, in a moment which is slyly abridged. These moments are part of the protagonist’s gradual transition into a kind of stylised madness, one which ruptures the film’s naturalism with a subterfuge which is almost, but not quite, bewildering. 

Belmonte is an expressionist painter, whose work is reminiscent of Kirchner and Gil. His paintings suggest a mind which exists on the edge of distortion. At one point his daughter asks why he always paints men naked. There’s a clear implication that Belmonte, who seems comfortably troubled, would like to get to grips with his inner self, although his life is too normal (Montevidean?) to allow him to do so. Recently separated from the mother of his child, and coming to terms with a friend’s suicide, he becomes increasingly erratic, until finally he becomes afflicted by low-key visions that betray the extent to which he has become unhinged. 

The film questions the scope of the artist to be different, or mad, within the context of conventional society. Belmonte is a dad who has to pick his child up from school, and one who wants to have a good relationship with his nearest and dearest. At the same time, he reserves the right to cling to the deviance which fuels his art. It’s a delicate tension, which the film negotiates with some wit. There are no fireworks, everything is understated, even madness, but there’s the feel of a steady hand at the tiller, aided by some exceptional camerawork, steering the tale into ever more choppy waters. The film depicts a convincing Montevideo, a city which appears at the edges of the frame, the camera never revealing more than it needs to. Belmonte might drive a hipster car, but we never see it in its entirety, just as we never get to see more than glimpses of his pictures. Even the eponymous title hints at things we don’t know and never will, but this is always beguiling, rather than frustrating; the film succeeds in pulling off its delicate mission with some élan. 

jeannette, l'enfance de jeanne d’arc (d. dumont)

Dumont’s film is the only film you’re ever likely to see with a  head-banging Joan of Arc. And accompanying nuns. This is a musical which effectively takes place in one location, which is the home and surrounding countryside of the young Joan of Arc. There’s a lot of bad singing and some songs which in other circumstances might be deemed less than convincing. These songs tend to be overblown and melodramatic, more Bonnie Tyler than Monteverdi. The songs are accompanied by amateurish dance sequences, featuring young Joan in two guises, first as peasant girl, and later as the teenager who is on the point of departure for a rendezvous with her destiny. To say this is an unconventional piece of film-making would be an understatement. It’s more like performance art. Joan drifts around her countryside, singing songs about the brutality of the English, her struggle with God’s calling, and the need for the French to overcome their apathy and fight back. Her uncle is the worst rapper in history, who tries to dissuade her with his rhymes and unsurprisingly fails. There’s no dramatic tension (we know what Joan is eventually going to do), no dramatic development, scarcely any narrative. Most of the songs are about twice as long as they need to be. And yet, in spite of everything, it ends up being utterly engrossing and in its own unique fashion, completely sublime.

summer with monika (bergman, w. per anders fogelström)

The feeling of sheer pleasure when the film began to screen cannot be overstated. Not just because I was about to watch another of Bergman’s films for the first time, although that was part of it, but also because I was sitting in the new auditorium, watching the film on an immaculate, impressively sized screen, on the first working day of the new Cinematica. Cinema was made to be seen on the screen, not on a laptop or TV. The trouble is that there are fewer and fewer screens available to watch the kind of films that don’t come from the commercial stable. Now, all of a sudden, there are three screens within walking distance. As black and white shots of Stockholm took form upon the screen, transporting me to a world I’ve never visited and never will, I felt as though, in a world where so much seems to be wrong so much of the time, finally something was right. 

The inauguration of Cinematica had occurred the night before. I didn’t go, but a friend who’s going to run the coffee shop concession told me that he gave away 600 cups of coffee. I’m not sorry to have missed it. The real opening, the first day of business, was a low-key affair. Staff struggled with a new ticketing system. The staff, who are the same people who worked in the old Cinematecas, greeted those who turned out with smiles. The Pantalla 3 for the afternoon showing of the Bergman was about a third full. Being there felt like belonging to a new community. 

Summer with Monika was an inspired opening choice. A wistful, nostalgic, sexy, film, that seemed to contain the seeds of so much cinematic history that came to pass thereafter. The film narrates the story of a blissful but doomed relationship conducted over the course of under a year. Harry falls for the wilful but charming Monika, they flee the city and lead a Summer idyll on a boat, then they have to come back and it all goes to pot. The narrative is simple and predictable, but the film has a splendid decadent charm. Made in 1953, it seems to foretell the whole of the decade that was to come. Emerging from austerity into a hedonistic, hippy heaven, before grim reality kicks in and the dream turns into a nightmare. Bergman infuses the film with the occasional expressionist touch, such as when Monika, played with insouciant charm by Harriet Andersson, stares at the camera. There are beautiful cameos from a range of character actors, and the way Bergman and his cinematographer capture the Summer idyll by the beach, most of which is without dialogue, is mesmerising. 

Perhaps the film contains an innate metaphor for the act of going to the cinema itself: the escape from reality, the isolated reality in the bubble of the cinema; then the return to the world with its harsh realities. Only this time, as I left the cinema on a suitably rainy December afternoon, and headed to the Farmacia for a coffee, the world didn’t feel so bad after all. 

resistance [julian fuks tr. daniel hahn]

Fuks’ novel is another of those tricksy texts that feel as though it’s autobiographical although it’s quite possibly not. The kind of text which makes one want to reach for Wikipedia to avoid the risk of saying something stupid. Which is to say that it would be easy to write here “Resistance is the story of the author’s struggle to come to terms with the cruelties of the Argentine dictatorship from which his parents fled before they settled in Brazil, where Fuks was born.” This is what the book feels like it’s about, but this might just be the skill of the writing which feels so convincingly first person that one can’t help but think this is a quasi autobiographical tale. Something which is reinforced by the closing chapter, where ‘the author’s’ parents comment on the factual inaccuracies in ‘the author’s’ version of events. Are these ‘parents’ really Fuks’ parents? Or are they just modelled on his parents? Or have they got nothing to do with them, or him, at all? We’re at the squeaky end of fiction, Rousseau’s Confessions, Proust’s memoirs, the sea wherein truth and fiction swim around each other like sharks. 

This matters principally because, in a tale about the consequences of dictatorship, authenticity feels important. Which might still be the point. Fuks’ elliptical novel details the narrator’s relationship with his adopted brother, who might or might not be the child of a woman who was ‘disappeared’ by the dictatorship. The narrator visits the headquarters of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers who have maintained a stoic, unflagging search; firstly to discover the fate of their missing children and then to re-locate their adopted grandchildren. Crimes that have reverberated through the generations. In Resistance, there’s a double irony in that the narrator’s parents, who adopt his brother, are left-wingers who have fled Argentina. The novel, again elliptically, explores with little specificity the way in which the narrator’s brother struggles to fit in, is always something of an outsider, no matter that he’s within a warm, loving family environment. The implication is that the adopted brother has somehow been saddled with the psychological burden of the Argentinian dictatorship’s crimes, whether he’s the child of political prisoners or not. In so doing, there are moments where the novel feels awkward: is Fuks suggesting that adoption as a rule tends towards this sense of psychological displacement? Or only in the event of the adopted child having been born into a state of emergency or crisis of which the child is unaware? 

The measured tone, reminiscent of the nouvel roman style of Chefjec or Toussaint, lends distance to the tale, which perambulates around Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo. Of itself the tone suggests that recovery from the crimes of history is feasible for the second generation, a measured sense of distance can be achieved; or at least it would do so if it were not for the nagging awkwardness of the narrative, which seems reluctant to ever pin down its subject matter, offering clues to the family conflict without ever showing the whole picture, like a jigsaw puzzle wherein some of the pieces can never be found.

la doleur (w&d emmanuel finkiel, w. marguerite duras)

La Doleur is a curious film. A big budget, glossy production, which is at the same time a literary mediation on the French experience of the second world war. The film is an adaptation of an autobiographical Marguerite Duras memoir, which describes her desperate wait for news of her husband, Robert, who has been captured by the Nazis. The first half of the film details a relationship with a French agent of the Gestapo, who claims to have information about Jean, but whose ulterior motive would appear to be his attraction for Duras. He invites her out for lunches at Nazi restaurants, as their relationship becomes more and more torturous and perverse. The agent, played with a dogged, lumpen charm by Benoît Magimel, is a curious figure, a compromised representative of a compromised France. This is when it feels as though Finkiel’s film is at its strongest, as it probes the divisions within French society which the war threw up. Those who threw their hand it with the invaders and those who resisted. Britain never had to face up to any latent fascism that may have underpinned society (the film made me think of the passage in Maclaren Ross’ Of Love and Hunger when he discusses the burghers of a South Coast town praising Hitler in the lead-up to the war), so the British war narrative has always been a less complex, more heroic one. La Douleur succeeds in capturing the stark duality of facing fascism: you’re either for it or against, there’s no middle ground. 

The second half of the film takes place following the war’s end, as Duras waits for news of Robert, who it emerges has been sent to a concentration camp. Here, the focus is on Duras’ emotional struggle to cope with the possibility of hope and the reality of loss. This provokes some grandstand acting on the part of Mélanie Thierry, although it feels as though the dramatic tension slips somewhat once Magimel’s character vanishes from the narrative. La Doleur has a stately feel. It’s the other side of the French coin. There’s no intellectual playfulness, rather a grand, emotional bagatelle, which seeks to pull off the trick of offering a cinematic depiction of a great writer’s inner thoughts. There are moments in its two hour duration when it feels as though the film is straining for effect, but there are others when it completely nails Duras’ inner turmoil and the cruel realities of living in wartime France. 

die, my love [ariana harwicz, tr. sarah moses & carolina orloff]

Harwicz’s short novel brought to mind her compatriot Schweblin’s Fever Dream. Both novels are set in a menacing countryside, feature a confused mother as a narrator, and are vertiginous nouveau-roman reads. Schweblin has become a darling of contemporary literature. Harwicz so far has not. The differences between their texts perhaps explain why. Where Schweblin’s text has a measured, even orderly tone, Harwicz’s prose sits on sanity’s borderline. There’s a slightly surprising (and then unsurprising) reference to Mrs Dalloway thrown in there somewhere. Harwicz’s narrator’s voice is the bride stripped bare, the unedited stream of an unhinged consciousness. Except, for the fact, of course, that to write ‘unhinged’ prose in a legible fashion is a great art. Harwicz’s prose contains a poetic density. Constructed out of small chapters, no more than a few pages long, the novel creates space for the taboo to be voiced, for the madness within civilisation to be articulated. 

Which is about as rational as you need to get. The fact of the matter is that this is a breathtaking little novel, which may not be to many people’s tastes, but is all the braver and more brilliant for being so. It’s a novel from the margin, the novel of an immigrant, the novel of a hyper-charged female psyche, but it’s also a novel which captures the inner voice of anyone and everyone, regardless of gender, with our subliminal Pinteresque cruelties and our unacknowledged Klimtian beauty. 

the physics of sorrow [georgi gospodinov, tr. angela rodel]

It struck me, whilst reading Gospodinov’s novel, how much of the Eastern European literature I’ve read has a blog-like quality. Where the line between fact and fiction appears to be elided. Tokarczuk’s Flights, Andrzej Stasiuk, now Gospodinov. I realise it’s hardly a comprehensive list, but all the same it felt like there was a kind of pattern emerging, even if that pattern is one shaped by the whims of translators and publishers. There’s a restlessness to the format of shorter sequences, coupled with an apparent bid to create a new taxonomy of the world, one that allows for factors which previous taxonomies had not.

Gospodinov makes no bones regarding the relationship of his thoughts to the past. There’s a generational investigation into the narrator’s second world war ancestry, thereby helping to show how the war and the Soviet invasion shaped Bulgaria. But this investigation is located within a wider investigation into the human condition, where he takes the misunderstood Minatour as a central metaphor, a monster that isn’t actually a monster, just a deviant version of a lost boy. The narrator himself, a writer hidden away in a cellar, identifies with this lost boy who is also a minatour, weaving a written thread to find his way out of the labyrinth.

In truth The Physics of Sorrow is a fragmentary read, a book you can dip in and out of, following the discursive nature of the writer’s thoughts. There are Barthesian hints of other books contained within the text. An investigation into the relationship between physics and metaphysics; a history of the Soviet bloc; an autobiography. These threads are stitched together to create a baggy, quasi-novel which perhaps is at its strongest in the way it reveals the formation and spectrum of the post-communist psyche. 

an american story [christopher priest]

Sometimes books define their importance not so much through their excellence as literature, but through the courage of the writing, or even, perhaps, the necessity of the writing. Books that say things that need to be said, and in the saying, affirm the potency of literature, as a force. The pen mightier than the sword. 

Priest’s novel is one of those. It’s not a complex book, despite the multiple timelines, some of it set in the future and much set in the past. It is narrated by a scientific journalist, Ben Matson, who has become obsessed by 911, for understandable reasons. His then girlfriend, Liv, was on the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. Or, as the novel speculates, was reported to have flown into the Pentagon. Matson, over the course of twenty years, investigates what really happened that day. However, the author is smart enough not to make his narrator an obsessive. He’s someone who doesn’t want to believe what the evidence points to. Who would have been happier accepting the official story. Except for the fact that, as the book shows, the official story doesn’t make sense.

This is where Priest’s text becomes subversive. In fact, the very mundanity of the prose (in general) and the book’s hero, help to heighten this subversiveness. Put simply, it doesn’t feel as though it has been written with someone with an axe to grind. There’s a constant tension between the matter-of-factness of the authorial voice, distilled through that of his protagonist, and the explosive nature of the information that is being disseminated. 

At which point, an aside. I find it hard to believe that anyone with a curious mind wouldn’t run up against some of the obvious incongruities of the events of the day which have shaped this century and our lives to such an extent. Even a cursory reading of the given facts suggests more questions than answers. Furthermore, you don’t need to be a Shakespeare scholar to know that history is written by the winners. The given story of 911, the one which launched two wars (at least), and whose residual effects quite possibly include the new wave of nationalism, is tenuous. 

Priest constructs the character of a naturalised US-Russian mathematician. who is employed by the US govt, (and interviewed twice by the narrator), to meditate upon the profounder effects of 911 and its received story on political culture, the way in which the truth is less important than the story, something the author overtly links to Brexit and Trump. The fictionalisation of the facts, which Priest never hides, (this is, after all, a novel), permits the author to re-present those facts that have been dismissed, discounted, or concealed. Of course, the reader can question whether these facts have veracity, but by presenting them within a fictional context, the author implicitly accepts that there can be no authoritative version of “the truth” of that day. Which also implies that the official story should never be accepted as authoritative.

I have never come across Priest, and only know of his work via Nolan’s adaptation of The Prestige, a story about magic. An American Story displays a master of sleight of hand analysing the work of another perpetrator of sleight of hand, albeit a perpetrator so ephemeral that we will never know their identity (or identities). In a way, the terror that might once have been generated by the defrocking of the sleight of hand which Priest conducts has dissipated. Time salves wounds. The truth becomes an interpretive science. Things happened that will never be known. The world moves on. All that is left is the wake of the lies, which continues to wash up against the shore of the present. 

el motoarrebatador (w&d agustín toscano)

Toscano’s film, with a title that perhaps is a nod to Bicycle Thieves, is set on the outskirts of Tucuman, in Northern Argentina. This is a city where the police are on strike, and where gangs of bored men loot electrical shops in broad daylight.  A petty thief who robs old ladies on his motorbike is caught up in this listless world of borderline poverty, where people seek out any way possible to get hold of the desirable gimmicks of modern life. When one of his victims ends up in hospital, he starts to get pangs of conscience, and an odd-couple movie ensues, as the thief and his victim develop a mutual dependency on one another.

Whilst the world feels slightly Latin American generic, the narrative has just sufficient twists and turns to keep the viewer guessing and cover up a few holes. The good guys aren’t all they seem and neither are the bad guys. But what distinguishes Toscano’s film is its cinematic aplomb. The acting is impeccable, with Sergio Prina making for a credible, sympathetic petty criminal, whose complex desire to create a different kind of life for himself and his young son is portrayed with a deadpan assurance. The cinematography of Arauco Hernández contains an edgy dynamism, which excels in the looting scene, captured in one long take with a great pay-off. The soundtrack is punchy and effective. Everything possible is done to give the film an edge, one that helps it to steer clear of the Latin clichés, and makes for a solid, engaging piece of film-making. 

vivre sa vie (w&d godard, w marcel sacotte)

Godard, for a third time in as many months. Godard, which is like watching a brand new way of making cinema every time. No matter that the film is nearly 60 years old. It feels like it could have been made yesterday and still knock spots off the most avant-garde cineasta out there today. Maybe the avant garde has eaten itself. There’s no room left in the multiplex. And those with avant-garde predilections have no option but to shut the system down, adapt, meet the market criteria. Does anyone today use sound with the creative dexterity that Godard did? With the brash, assertive dislocation? Does the notion of playfulness even exist anymore? Watching Godard is like watching a lost innocence, the joy of film still vibrant, still singing. Coutard’s darting, swirling camera work has undoubtably been imitated a million times, but the overall tone of reckless esprit de jeu has been consigned to the cutting room floor. And to think that Godard became a byword for pretension? When his creative impulse stems from a childlike delight in the medium’s creative and iconographic possibilities. Perhaps children are secretly the most pretentious of them all.

man tiger [w. eka kurniawan, tr. labodalih sembiring]

Man Tiger, a novel which caused quite a stir in the English speaking world when it was first translated, is an elegantly written tale of provincial Indonesian life. It has more than a little in common with Mia Couto’s Confessions of the Lioness, with the idea of anthropomorphism to the fore. Margio, a likeable young man with a troubled history finds himself killing the father of the woman he loves when he is possessed by a tiger. The killing itself is described early on in the book in savage detail. It’s an arresting moment, but it becomes clear as the novel unfolds that this objective is not sensationalism, but to grip the reader in the vice of the story which then goes on to explore gender mores and morals. The violence that surges in Margio is an extension of a casual violence that pervades, from the boar hunts to the domestic violence suffered by Margio’s mother at the hands of his lazily sadistic father. Kurniawan teases out the complexities of the society he depicts, showing how Margio’s savage, irrational act possesses a clear and tangible context, as well as making it clear that the real victim here is Margio, rather than the man he kills. 

punk rock an oral history (john robb)

This is the third book of oral history I’ve read in recent months. It’s an innately satisfying way to get your history. John Robb’s edited account is comprehensive, looking at the evolution of punk in the early 70s through to the end of that decade, by which time the movement had mutated and fractured. 

Punk arrived half a decade early for me, but I knew the Britain that the opening chapters describe, a time when the idealism of the sixties had perished, when Britain’s inner cities felt hollowed out and dedicated to concrete. The grimness of British high streets in the late seventies was pandemic. (In fairness, in the more deprived parts of the country this is something that hasn’t changed all that much.) There was nothing to do except hang out and look for trouble, or look to avoid trouble. On a tangential note, I think this is when I first began to feel European as much as British, because visiting Europe seemed to offer another vision of urban interaction, one which ran parallel to the British version, but seemed warmer, more inclusive. This might have been rose-tinted spectacles, but at the very least it suggested a communality which persists to this day.  My friend Jason listened to PIL’s Metal Box. By this point, about 1980, the Pistols were already past tense, and the unravelling and recalibration of punk which the book captures so acutely was under way. The Damned was more Captain Sensible than The Damned. The Clash were already transforming into a brand that could be appropriated by frat boys and their ilk.

However, as the book makes clear, many of the punk pioneers were only a few years older than me. Again and again the book highlights the tiny world that the movement sprung from, a few musicians cross-fertilising, swapping from band to band, influenced by each other’s music and fashion. People in Manchester, Glasgow or other towns would get the night train to London, sleep on station floors and then carry back their R&D to the homeland. Perhaps this localised world still exists, in the sphere of styles of music whose name we don’t even know yet, but in an information age, it seems hard to conceive of the same kind of scene emerging. Firstly, the minute it could be defined, it would be hyped to kingdom come, and secondly the sheer range of musical possibilities has mushroomed. 

So in a way, the book ends up feeling like a lament for a lost era no-one would particularly want to have to revisit. There’s a lot of nostalgic affection expressed by the interviewees for the halcyon days, but also a frequent clear-sightedness about the way in which this was a fleeting moment which was contained the seeds of its own destruction, and was perhaps all the better for being so. It’s a great introduction to punk, that much-used word whose meaning is so hard to pin down. 

darling (d john schlesinger, w frederick raphael)

Darling is a curious movie, almost interesting for those movies that it isn’t than the one that it is. The movies that it isn’t include two vertiginous London portrayals: Repulsion (1965) and Blow Up (1966), as well as Accident (1967). Also Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), not to mention Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962). Indeed, with its Paris and Capri sequences, this is a film that seems to aspire towards a European sensibility, something the occasional freeze frame and ambitious tracking shot reinforces. 

However, there’s an uneasiness to the whole melange, as though the director and screenwriter’s thematic and stylistic ambitions don’t quite marry. In part, one suspects, this is because there’s a timidity surrounding the protagonist, Julie Christie’s Diana. Diana, her erstwhile boyfriend, Robert, (played by Dirk Bogarde with his usual judicious flair), says, is a whore, someone who has slept her way to the top. But Christie is far too homely to really convince in this role. Christie is as luminous as ever, and any moral doubts we might have regarding her behaviour are never given room to flower. She doesn’t have the vulnerability of Deneuve in Repulsion either, we never really worry she’s about to go off the rails.

However, given that this is a flawed film, it’s still fascinating to observe the scope of the movie’s ambition. It’s not hard to see how a script like this would nowadays be shepherded straight off to the TV execs, to turn into a series. Which on one level makes sense: this is a film trying to package a raft of narrative which it doesn’t quite  pull off; but on the other hand it reminds us of cinema’s capacity to investigate not just a sector of society, but the whole raging caboodle. In which sense, one suspects that Schlesinger’s greatest influence might have been Fellini, a filmmaker who successfully used the medium to offer panoramic views of his psycho-sexual-social environment. These kind of films just don’t get made any more in the UK (I can’t think of any). Which seems a pity: we have the stars; we have the technical resources; we have the screenwriters… maybe we don’t have the audiences? Or maybe that kind of overarching remit is no longer relevant to the localised issues that British cinema seeks to address. 

nick cave and the bad seeds at the teatro del verano, montevideo

Jair Bolsonaro won the first round of the Brazilian election on Sunday. I messaged my friend who is following the campaign for the indigenous candidate for the vice-presidency, Sonia Guajajara, as a photographer. He said her campaign HQ was “like a funeral.”

#

In 1994, Luis Charamello, a sweet-hearted gay actor, invited my 27 year old self, and my friend Sedley, for supper. We knew fuck all about the Latin American history, really. Isolated in a Western European, Anglo-Saxon bubble. We knew there had been a dictatorship, which had only ended 10 years ago. I think we both commented that, all the same, Montevideo seemed very normal. You’d never have guessed. Yes, Luis told us. But we know they’re still out there, waiting. 

#

Twenty five years later, the fascists, the self-avowed fascists, are coming back with a vengeance. Bolsonaro might not have won the presidency in the first round, but he’s going to win the second. Nearly 45% voted for him. The age of social democracy is dying. All over the world. Your right to be the person you choose to be isn’t going to last much longer. You belong to the state. Because fascism, no matter how much it might be dressed up as libertarianism, always comes back to state control and the abolition of individual rights. Bolsonaro has no qualms about taking about indigenous people the same way the white settlers of the the 17th century did. Women do not have equal rights in his world. As for “the minorities” and their right to be different, forget it. Brazil, like the USA, like Russia, like China, like Hungary or Poland, Italy, and my own self-harming country, is heading in one direction and that direction has nothing to do with ‘the rights of man’.

#

On Sunday, the street I live on bustles with life. It’s Día del Patrimonio.A day when the Ciudad Vieja gets transformed, a normally sleepy barrio is consumed by the city. We walk down the street. A trombone player catches Claudia’s eye. Mine is caught by a skinny, tall man in a crisp shirt, with long hair, looking like a decadent banker. It’s Nick Cave, going for a stroll through the Old Town, before he plays his gig with The Bad Seeds on the following day, a gig we’re going to. No-one seems to bother Cave. A photo appears on Twitter of him buying something in front of my house. 

When I first came here, Sedley arrived to visit soon after I’d settled in. He told me he’d been at a party a few weeks ago, and Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss or someone had been there. I told him, somewhat smugly, that part of the reason I liked being here was that no-one had the faintest idea who those people were. The cult of celebrity didn’t appear to hold much sway. It’s changed a bit, but not that much. 

#

The day of the gig, the day after the first round of the Brazilian election, is swelteringly hot. We all know that means a storm is going to break in the evening. In the rehearsal with Claudia and Pato, we talk about Cave and about rock ’n roll and whether the good die young and how you keep going, doing the same thing over and over, time after time. At what point does that repetition imply a distillation of value. How do you keep the flame burning, as you move into your fifties, your sixties. 

One of Cave’s songs references Robert Johnson, the original devil-dealing rock ’n roll star. Or the first documented, mythologised one. There have been rock ’n roll stars since the dawn of time. Johnson, who made the pact and sold his soul, but never sold out. 

#

The Teatro de Verano fills up. We’re in the expensive seats, in the front. A local band, Buenos Muchachos, opens. They are dark and intense. Claudia’s friend is going out with the long haired guitarist. She thinks the friend is in Spain, working on a theatre tour, and sends her a WA video. It turns out the friend is sitting five rows behind. Everyone knows at least half a dozen people at the gig. If you did even three degrees of Kevin Bacon separation, we’d all be cousins. I go to get beers after the Buenos Muchachos and in the queue, an actor starts speaking to me, and then an actress I don’t know appears and says she’s there with my actor, Pato. Montevideo is one big little village. 

#

Nick Cave is a daddy-long-legs. In my mind’s eye he was always a short Tom Thumb figure, but my mind’s eye was all wrong. Nick Cave is a gangly, long-limbed puppet of a man. His limbs splay all over the place. He’s a dancer who convinces through performance rather than grace. In the blink of an eye his body concertinas to the floor, then he’s up, drop-kicking the mike. 

Above all, Cave loves to love and be loved. Pretty soon he’s perched on the barrier separating crowd from stage, held up by nothing more than the strength of a dozen audience members’ hands. His song talks about the heart going ‘boom boom boom’ and he beseeches the audience to place their hands on his open breast and feel his heart going ‘boom boom boom.’ 

#

The night is warm but the storm is coming. Cave and the Bad Seeds’ music plunges into the humid air. Elaborate orchestral arrangements, with cowbells, electric violins, swooning endless choruses. Songs made to be re-arranged, songs which are a journey all of their own.

In the Punk book oral history I’ve just read, there are accounts of the ‘1,2,3,4’ songs. Every song starts like that and ends two minutes later. The book tells of the impact of the Ramones, who I saw in Leeds, in 1984, a decade into their reign. And every song was indeed punctuated by that numeration, as though the songs were olympic sprints, over before you knew it. The cumulative effect was bewildering, dramatic: you didn’t know where one song began and another ended, as though all the songs were all part of one great song whose chorus was ‘1,2,3,4’. As though the band would have been happier playing their forty minute set as one long, impenetrable song, but tradition dictated that this one song be broken down, and Joey Ramone paid lip service to this with the religious use of numerology.

Cave’s songs seemed to have skipped the need for lip service. His songs spiral into themselves, blues riffs which could last all night. Every song has secret rooms and loud rooms and an altarpiece and devotees prostrate before the altar, and renegades spitting at the altar, and Cave in the middle, leading the service like the gothic high priest he aspired to be and then became, the short man who became an alien god. 

#

And in the night there are demons and devils. Cave sings about them, but they’re out there now, I can sense them. Bolsonaro. The guys who go to Trump rallies with T-shirts saying “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” The liars and the snake-oil merchants. They’re always there in the Manichean struggle but for forty years or more they’ve been kept at bay, pushed back, forced into the shadows. The world appeared to belong to tonight’s audience who have come to listen to an Australian and his band shine their mocking light on authority, the smell of weed in the air; a crowd who glory in their difference, their right not to be who their parents wanted them to be, noses pierced, hair dyed, defiantly searching their id. 

When punk kicked off in the grey lowlands of my very youth, the kids recognised that the easiest, quickest ticket to questioning the status quo was to represent yourself as different. Safety pins, plastic clothes, spiked hair. Chains and dog collars. The beauty of ugliness. Once upon a time you could have been shot or lynched for dressing like that. Strapped to a witches’ chair and dunked until you drowned. But the world was so rundown, so down-at-heel, that a chink appeared, a space where the freedom not to be like all the rest opened up, and the punk movement seized that slice of light and used it to prise society open.

Which has lead to this place, here, this night, beneath the stars. Where the threat has been forgotten. Where liberty, in the shape of a six-foot Australian and his demented band, strides the blast, saying, Yeah Yeah Yeah. Telling us to push the night away. 

#

I glance over my shoulder. The lightening in the clouds above the great open spaces of the River Plate is constant now. Cave doesn’t speak much to his audience. He has other ways of communicating, song and trance and hypnosis, but now he looks to the sky and tells us that the storm is coming. It’s held off, but it’s coming. He wants the rain. You can sense it. He’ll play until the rain comes. He’s playing for the storm.

Then he surges out into the auditorium. He scales the barrier and climbs the steps. They reach out to touch him. They scream ‘thank you, Nick’ or ‘gracias Nicki’. He reaches the divide, where the cheap seats are perched high in the bowl of the Teatro de Verano. On stage his image is filmed, projected back. The priest with his congregation. He stands there, glorious in the adulation.

The song surges, ebbs, gets lost in time. He’s there with his people for an hour or two or three or four. For a day or two or three or four. For all the years of their lives. 

Then he’s back on stage and the rain comes. Fat dollops of rain, falling like manna. ‘At last,’ he says, ‘the fucking rain’.

And then the band really starts to play. 

We stand there under the rain which falls in sheets now. Is the rain a presage of the flood? Or is it washing away our sins? Or is it all of this and more? 

The stick-man on stage plays the piano, communes with his followers. He wants to be part of the band, he wants to be part of the crowd, he wants to be everything and nothing all at once. 

The rain falls and the night is a blasted heath and we push the darkness away. 

tijuana (d. gabino rodríguez, lagartijas tiradas al sol)

A man with a moustache is already on stage as the play opens. He has his back to us. There is a large TV screen on set and a small neat pile of bricks. Behind is a large painted canvas with a representation of Tijuana. The man proceeds to explain that he is an actor who decided to go to Tijuana and work in a maquillardora (a sweatshop factory) near the border for six months as an investigative project. He tells us that he filmed secretly and badly and also recorded audio. This is the story of his time in Tijuana. 

What follows over the course of the next hour or so is his account of his stay, punctuated by a recorded interview of the same actor somewhere else, (DF), giving an interview about his experiences. We, the audience, know that we are part of a theatrical game: the account being given is partial and not particularly trustworthy. In the end the actor says that he had to cut his time short, because he was scared of being found out. In the neighbourhood where he is staying, a poor neighbourhood, he has heard a story of a lynching. There are codes in the barrio, and he doesn’t want to fall awry of them. 

As such, dramatically, not a lot happens. Nevertheless, the piece remains compelling. This is in part because of the dramatic suspense inherent in the set-up, but also because the story offers a window on a world from which few stories have emerged. Pace Humbolt, in an age where the geographical world has been charted, then the uncharted waters are the urban no-go areas where the majority of the world’s population now lives. What is it really like to live in a barrio where the police won’t enter on the California border? The actor makes clear in the play, repeatedly, that he doesn’t want to romanticise poverty. He wants to communicate what it’s like to live there on a subsistence wage, making the goods which the Western world consumes, at the hard end of the neo-liberal machine. 

Inevitably, the portrait is partial. As the actor observes, he knows it’s not for life. But there are moments in the play, - the sad disco, the classical music loving political activist, family meals, the social codes - that register on the audience’s consciousness above and beyond the confines of the theatre. For a while, we walk in the actor’s footsteps, through the alleyways of Tijuana. 

ps - There is a more detailed and scholarly debate to be had (which was touched upon in the post-show discussion) about “documentary theatre” as well as the wave of quasi-biographical theatre (“auto-ficcion”) which is sweeping Latin America (Sergio Blanco, Lola Arias etc.). The ethics and the effectiveness of this re-imagining of theatre. However, that debate, discussion could perhaps wait for another moment.

the invention of nature [alexandra wulf]

If the world is truly going to hell in a handcart, (and who came up with that phrase?), now is a good time to read about punk, about which more anon, but it’s also a good time to read about Alexander von Humboldt. As Wulf notes in her biography, Humboldt is little known now, certainly in Britain. My friend Mr Amato told me about him and I noted a sign commemorating his stay in Mexico City earlier this year. But he has never been on my radar, despite his significance as a key player in the development of the Americas, among his many other achievements.

In 1799 Humboldt embarked on a mission with the unfortunate Bonpland to the Americas, taking in present day Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and the USA. It was a time when ignorance was still rife regarding the new world. Humboldt was a scientist and a writer, and his books not only represented an important scientific account of previously uncharted territories, they also helped to communicate to his vast readership something of the wonder of this new world. Wulf is very good on Humboldt’s influence on figures as diverse as Darwin and Bolivar. She also gives Humboldt credit for being one of the first to recognise the damage that mankind was doing to the natural world and the threat this poses to the planet, even before the industrial revolution has got into full swing. There are also intriguing references to Humboldt’s engagement with the indigenous peoples he met on his travels. Here was a figure, at this key point in modernity, looking both into ancient methods of interpreting the world and the future consequences of the vast changes to the relationship between man and nature that were being put into action on a global scale. 

The Invention of Nature is a fine, diligent biography which does its utmost to not only recount the life of a forgotten intellectual powerhouse, but also place that life within a clearly defined context, one which extends to this day. To that end, the final chapter focuses on John Muir, the founder of the Yellowstone National Park in the US, a park which is now under threat from the retrograde, anti-Humboldtian attitudes of the current US administration. As Wulf’s book makes clear, the explorer and naturalist’s relevance remains pressing to this day. 

la noche de 12 anos (w&d álvaro brechner)

Brechner’s film tells the tale of three political prisoners in the Uruguayan dictatorship. (One of whom subsequently went on to become a celebrated president.) What gives the film its strength is that, save for a few flashback scenes, you’d barely know it. This isn’t so much a film about the dictatorship as a film about the capacity of the human mind to survive, in spite of everything. Astutely, the director, who also wrote the screenplay, sidesteps the impulse to explain or clarify why the three men whose story the film tells, are in prison. Instead it focuses, particularly in the first half, on the sensory experience, something that cinema, more than any other art form, is capable of conveying. The audience enters the labyrinth with the three prisoners and, as far as is possible when compressing twelve years into two hours, experiences their captivity with them.

The title hints at Steve McQueen’s Oscar winner, but far more than that, La Noche de 12 Anos is reminiscent of Hunger, McQueen’s first film. In addition to its cinematic artistry, and in contrast with other dramas about Latin American dictatorships, Brechner does his utmost to eschew sentimentality. Each character is allotted a certain leeway to explore their past and their personal lives, but this is never permitted to distract from the essence of the physical ordeal the men experience. Furthermore, it’s a necessary part of detailing prison life, which is not only that which the prisoner has to endure, but also that which he is deprived of. The love of family, companionship, seeing your children grow up. The acting, in particular the remarkable Alfonso Tort as Huidobro, exercises a similar restraint. These are three nuanced portraits of resilient humanity, in spite of the fact that these are characters who are barely allowed to speak and who have minimal interaction with anyone else. 

The result of the director’s restraint is a film of slow-building power. To watch this film in a full house in Montevideo is, inevitably, an emotional experience, one that illustrates the capacity that art offers to re-live and also to re-think the past of a given society. One would refrain from using the word ‘cathartic’: for some watching this film will be a bitter reminder of time and friends lost. As the audience drifted out I spoke to one veteran actor, a man a long way from the mainstream, who stood and watched the credits roll to the end, clearly deeply moved. However, this is a film which sets out to articulate the anguish of political prisoners on more than just a localised level, meaning that it triggers thoughts about those still held in Guantanamo, or living in limbo in refugee camps. For the film’s three subjects, there was, after twelve years, what might almost be called a happy ending, but again it is to the film’s credit that it does little more than hint at this. The film succeeds because it articulates the universal in the local; because in describing the three men’s ordeal with such vivid, cinematic precision, it compels an audience to confront inhuman political realities which continue to exist and which should never be allowed to occur in any decent civil society, (a concept that is increasingly under threat as ghosts of dictatorships past return to haunt us).

second-hand time [svetlana alexievich, tr bela shayevich]

This is a monster of a book. So much so that I read it in two phases, roughly half and half. It’s not that it’s hard to read: the prose of reported speech flows like a smooth stream, words piling up on each other, short, brutal words which compose, amassed, a remarkable testimony. It’s more that the density of meaning underpinning these simple words is so potent that I needed, at one point, to take a breather, which I did for a few months, before returning to it.

The book recounts, in the words of people who lived through it, the break up of the USSR, the transition from a homogenous communist state to a brand of oligarcho-capitalism. The book describes the termination of an empire, a termination which was not, like the British Empire, a gradual process, but a seismic one, which happened over the course of less than a decade. People who had lived with values and a belief-system set in stone suddenly found that that belief-system, and those values, crumbling. Alexievich talks to those people, and their children, and details what it’s like to live though this process, in their own words.

As such the book is both a castigation and a lament for the Soviet Union. The book doesn’t spare details of the crimes of a totalitarian regime. There are many accounts from the camps, of lives torn in half, destinies shattered and desperate hardship. At the same time, the first half of the book details with pathos the way in which the intellectual values changed. How under the Soviet model, the greatest currency was ideas, books; under the post-Soviet the greatest currency reverted to being that which it ever was. The accounts of people huddling in Soviet kitchens, the safest place to speak, to talk about ideas, are bewilderingly touching. These accounts never suggest a vindication of the Soviet system, (far from it), but they do suggest that a society with a different set of values, one not predicated on material gain, might be a feasible concept. Perhaps in these moments, the book comes closest to suggesting how a Marxist dream might have worked, if it wasn’t for all the reasons that it didn’t. (Which the book details unsparingly). 

At the same time, Second-Hand Time also succeeds in placing the USSR within the narrative of Russian dream-history and expansionism. This is something, as the book makes clear, which will never change. Russia in itself is such an unwieldy, mysterious geographical entity that it has always and will always generate a particular geo-political perspective. It perhaps requires a certain mysticism to knit the country together, one that goes hand-in-hand with neo-fascist dreams of empire. Something which helps to explain the effectiveness of the current political regime, one which clearly follows in the footsteps of the Communist autocracy. In the end, as Alexievich’s book clearly observes, for so many, the difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is marginal at most. The standard of living remains the same, the stultifying nature of regional life remains the same; the consumption of vodka remains the same. 

Finally, and perhaps the element of the book which has helped to lead the author to the Nobel Prize, among other plaudits, Second-Hand Time revindicates the force of oral history. There’s something Homeric about the great rain of words which fall on the page. Somewhere in this deluge, the reader knows, lies the absolute truth of the time the book describes. A historian or a novelist can aspire to the truth, but the reader knows that truth will always pass through the prism of their consciousness. Here, refracted through then prism of a hundred consciousnesses or more, shards of extreme truth glint like precious metals underground. This is what it was like and what it is like now. There is no argument. These voices have no agenda, beyond the desire that what they have known in their brief time upon this world has a value which can live on after them. Which is all any of us, perhaps, really aspire to. 

paterson (w&d jarmusch)

For my money, Jarmusch is always happier working with a limited palette, maximising the recourses he has been allocated. Down by Law, Coffee and Cigarettes, of those I know, are lovely, self-contained films, which thrive on their chosen minimalism. Paterson, with its clear homages to the art of poetry, and more specifically, William Carlos Williams, is an addition to that club.

Poetry, of all the narrative art forms, is perhaps the greatest antithesis to film. Film is a team game. It requires equipment, specialisation, budget. Poetry is a one-man band, which requires nothing more than a pen and paper. (Or in this day and age a smartphone, something Paterson might reject.) Poetry thrives on formal rules: metre, scan, rhyme. Not to mention the rhetorical devices, (alliteration, onomatopoeia etc). Perhaps Jarmusch has always embraced the poetic possibilities of the cinematic form, but never more knowingly so than in Paterson. A clearly defined structure of seven stanzas, one for each day of Paterson’s working week. A recurrent use of image, character and trope. The adoption of stylistic flourishes (the composition of overlapping images to accompany the poems, as well as the use of ‘writing’ to illustrate them.) Even in the narrative construction, there would appear to be a nod to the art of the narrative, with what appears to be one significant incident per stanza. 

The net result is a languid, understated film, which is rich in detail, where every marginal moment has a resonance. In that sense, weirdly, it also seems to be faithful to those scriptwriting gurus who state that every scene should reinforce your film’s theme. Perhaps, the film suggests, the connection between film and poetry is closer than one imagines: in the art of the screenplay, which seeks to contain a precision to rival poetry’s precision and economy; and also, one imagines, the storyboard, where the formal visual elements are mapped out and composed with as much rigour as a poet seeking to construct the perfect line. 

le grand meaulnes [alain fournier]

Never go back…. Reading this novel, in itself steeped in nostalgia, was an entirely nostalgic enterprise. I was about fifteen when I first read it, for school. I recollect sitting in a Victorian classroom, high windows lending a gloomy, ecclesiastical light. A member of staff walks past outside, over cobbles, whistling Jerusalem. Boys look around, bored. The teacher, probably an earnest young man, who has made the Faustian pact of a healthy salary in exchange for a life of tedium in the provinces, talks about Alain Fournier. 

Why this book should have been chosen for us to read, I don’t know. It seems too much like something out of a novel. The wistful novel within a wistful world. Yet it was well chosen, because it resonated. It has stayed with me, the distant bell of youth.

This is a novel all about being young, the romantic dreams of youth. A coming-of-age tale, if you like. Seurel, the narrator, recollects the impact that the stranger, Meaulnes had on his life as a teenager, and then the impact of Meaulnes’ doomed dreams. He does so, conjuring a lost world of ruined estates, gypsy boys, and wan maidens. To an English reader, it felt and still feels quintessentially French, a marriage of beauty and melancholia, the well-behaved step-child of the poets maudits. Meaulnes discovers a lost estate, or domain, which has been taken over by children, and later goes to ruin, before being sold off. This lost domain is also, of course, childhood itself, a land of dreams which will be gradually disassembled as adulthood encroaches. 

It makes one think that those who stay truest to the noble ideals of childhood are those least suited to the world of adults. Meaulnes’ sweetheart doesn’t make it, and Meaulnes himself becomes a wanderer, forever exiled from his kingdom, which was the kingdom of childhood. The more one ages, the further removed one becomes from that fairy land. It’s a beautiful tale, constructed on a universally tragic truth. 

le petit soldat (w&d godard)

More Godard. In the highly appropriate surroundings of Cine Universitario, a cinema that feels as though it continues to exist in a mid 70’s timewarp. (20 pesos for a cup of tea, something that reminded me of pre-Picture House carrot cake at the Ritzy in Brixton.) 

Le Petit Soldat is a strange, frenetic film. People are always running everywhere. They run to their cars, they run away from their cars, they’re constantly in a hurry, never getting anywhere. The camera indulges in sudden, swinging pans, from one character to another, or up the side of a building. The restless energy suggests a director chasing something down, without knowing exactly what. All the classic Godard tropes are there: moody boys, pretty girls, metaphysical conversation, outlandish US automobiles, slapstick gun-play, pretension, misogyny, but all of this is allied to an unwieldy political consciousness. It’s a bit like watching the natural history footage of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, that frantic struggle which ends in a brilliant fluttering of wings, only in reverse. This is a film that gets dirtier, less funny, uglier, as it unfolds. The torture scenes in the last fifteen minutes, whilst perhaps soft fare compared to what we are permitted to see now, nevertheless still pack a punch, especially the waterboarding. The film documents techniques of cruelty which will be repeated ad nauseam over the coming decades. Images which had never been shown before with such vivid, manic clarity. A man with a wet T-shirt over his head, explaining how the air is being sucked out of his lungs, an image of grotesque beauty, stuff to make a CIA or KGB agent weep with joy, whilst the resistance screams with anger.

There’s nothing new about torture, but there was something new in presenting it so pornographically, like a Bataille novel brought to life. The director himself seems caught in the paradox of the seductive power of his camera to create images beyond the pale. How does he react? He pans, he cuts, he runs, he desperately seeks the seriousness that might be permitted in his crazy world of make-believe.