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.