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. 

my year of rest and relaxation [ottessa moshfegh]

New York, fin de siècle. An, unnamed, feckless young woman stares the 21st century in the face and decides the only way to deal with it is to try and blot it out. So she embarks on a project dedicated to sleeping as much as she possibly can. 

There’s something of a Roman Candle effect to Moshfegh’s novel. in the opening chapters it blazes brilliantly. The protagonist’s sardonic voice and the beauty of the idea, (the rational beauty), are engrossing. Why wouldn’t you?, one can’t help thinking. How much better it would have been to have slept through the last two decades. The privileged narrator, who lives on the smart side of New York, previously working in a brilliantly described modern art gallery, exists at the supposed apex of civilisation, mixing with the brightest crowd in the most ostensibly sophisticated city on Earth. Yet she retains an outsider status, deliberately thwarting her own capacity to fit it, or to be ensnared, by this seemingly brilliant world, whose shallowness she’s only too aware of. Hence, she decides to embark on her project. 

The problem, perhaps, is that this is a fiercely anti-dramatic project. The sleeping beauty without a prince is a narrative dead end. So the author introduces various tricks and ticks to keep the idea bubbling. Under the influence of a certain drug, the narrator has black-outs, where she wakes up aware that her drugged sleep has masked somnambulant adventures, of which only traces, like her credit card bills and random purchases, remain. The focus switches to her relationship with her doomed friend, Reva, the anti-cool to the narrator’s über-cool. 

The narrative starts to fray at the edges as it tries to sustain the brilliance of the opening chapters. Nevertheless, Moshfegh’s novel lucidly captures the uneasy, proto-digital age that dawned with the 21st century, the onset of a time that has lead to the increasing interiorization of communal space, steering us towards a world where no-one needs to leave their bedroom ever again.