joker (w&d todd phillips, w. scott silver)

So, just to follow the thread. The Joker came out, was lauded, was a box office smash, then came the backlash. Bradshaw in the Guardian really has it in for it: “a shallow, ugly, boorish film”. I missed it when it came out, and sometimes it’s better not to catch a movie until the froth of the hype is over and done with. Given its box office success (apparently close to breaking $1billon) and given the backlash, I went out of a sense of duty more than anything else. I am firmly in the Scorsese camp when it comes to the Superhero franchises, a genre which holds about as much appeal as a Brazilian soap opera. So I wasn’t expecting much. The film started and there was some neat retro footage of New York, an understated chase sequence, some evocative titles. Sad protagonist with sick mother was kind of predictable and for a while it felt like I was watching You Were Never Really There all over again. Then came the implausible romance, which was curious, and all the time this slow, increasingly compelling narrative build. Who is the Joker? Is he hero or anti-hero? When the Bruce Wayne character appears the answer to that question still wasn’t clear, to the script’s credit. This character, sure he’s got a bit of De Niro in him, but more than that, he’s got a lot of Mersault, or someone out of Cannetti’s Auto da Fe, and gradually the power of Phoenix’s performance began to crystallise into something extraordinary, something that isn’t De Niro at all, it’s far closer to Dean or Zbigniew Cybulski or Kinski. And it began to dawn on me that this director, Todd Phillips, whose credits include The Hangover (parts 1,2&3) and, get this - Starsky and Hutch, the 2004 movie - was making what in the good old days they called an “art movie”. Not only was he making an art movie, he has also somehow convinced $1billion worth of audience to pay up to see his art movie.  

And yes, it’s also completely zeitgeist. It flips the tedious Batman narrative on its head. The ersatz strong guy is in fact a bastard. This is a movie about a country that can elect Trump, (or Johnson), one that can be manipulated by the media like zombies. It’s Jungle of the Cities or Drums in the Night, as we wait for the sheeple to finally be snapped out of it by some masked anarchic joker.  That’s the reason the film has resonated. It’s not the narrative beats. This is a slow, lumbering film, which glories in a cello score (kudos to Hildur Guðnadóttir) and a downbeat grade. The violence is actually restrained (three incidents), it’s earned and it’s cathartic. Above all it’s a film that creates a platform for the finest actor of his generation to remind us that great screen acting is something that should be dredged up from the depths, from a place deep inside, the darklands of the mad, the vain and the brilliant.  

chacabuco (d roberto suárez)

Suárez is the maverick genio of the Rio Platense stage. Roberto Arlt meets David Lynch. HIs characters are oddballs, wackos, weirdos, but bizarrely loveable. They’re loveable because they all belong to the same family. Literally, in so far as all the characters in Chacabuco are related, metaphorically, in so far as they are all off the spectrum somewhere, and theatrically, in that Suárez takes several years to develop, rehearse and produce his shows, meaning his band of actors become as tight and incestuous as a family unit. Sometimes this kind of process might not pay off, but in Chacabuco it does so, spectacularly. The players interact like a finely honed machine, aware of every look, every nuance of their companions' behaviour. It’s a play where it’s just as compelling observing those who aren’t speaking as those who are. The word is shared around between the company, something to be usurped or exchanged or held on to sometimes, as a character makes a bid for the attention they believe they, as a character in this unlikely tale, deserve. However, above and beyond the word, the feature which defines Chacabuco is the quality of the silences. A silence speaks as much if not more than words. Silence is that moment of strange uncertainty on stage, as though the characters and the audience are given pause to think: where are we going? Are we on the right course or are we completely fucked? The spectators, like the characters, are never really sure. In fact we’re not even sure if we’re living in the present or some other, parallel Borgesian time. There are about fifteen endings to Chacabuco, which is normally not a good sign. But when you’ve worked on a play for several centuries, you can get away with it. The wonder is that each ending is an advance or improvement on the last one, until we finally get to the last delirious end, which blows the mind and then comes back to stroke the mind with a send-off full of strange tenderness.  

nightmare abbey (thomas love peacock)

It’s curious the way in which some novels from the many novels written are selected to be put aside for posterity. Not being a scholar of early nineteenth century British literature, I don’t know how many other novelists there were out there when Nightmare Abbey was published but I’d wager there were several that were as worthy of immortality as Peacock’s flighty tome. Which is not not to say it’s terrible, it’s just not particularly good either. Its longevity hinges on the author’s links to the romantic poets, and the fact that the novel is a gentle satire on Shelley and Byron. What little plot there is revolves around the book’s protagonist, Scythrop, the heir to a gloomy East Anglian pile, Nightmare Abbey, getting caught up in romantic misadventures with two different women, Marionetta O’Carroll and Celinda Toobad. As the names suggest, the novel doesn’t take itself too  seriously. The author has a lot of fun reproducing the pretentious conversations had by Scythrop and his various visitors, another manifestation of the way in which the British adore anti-intellectualism. And fair enough, one might think, because the book has a certain wry charm. In the 21st century it might have made for a 2 series Netflix comedy, à la Addams Family, one of those whose first series is an unexpected success but then fizzles out by the time it gets to second series, with the realisation that there wasn’t that much meat on the bone in the first place. 

the third bank of the river: power and survival in the twenty-first century amazon (w chris feliciano arnold)

Feliciano Arnold’s book is the result of various trips to the Amazon, during the period between the 2014 World Cup and the Rio Olympics of 2016. Using Manaus as a base, the book is composed of several strands. The fate of the indigenous peoples is a central plank, but this is incorporated into a concise understanding of the forces at work in the Amazon, much of them finding their focal point in Manaus. Illegal deforestation, drug smuggling, dam building, mining, and the never-ending conflict between ‘virgin territory’ and the pressing demands of modernity. One of the most effective aspects of Feliciano’s book is the way in which he begins to establish the back story behind the myth of the ‘primitive’ tribe, explaining how tribes located in what is now Brazil have used the jungle as a safe haven to retreat to, a haven which has always been eroded but even more so now, when mining concessions and drug smuggling routes mean that the non-native people are penetrating deeper and deeper into the jungle. The book is also very effective on the debate over whether ‘unconctacted’ tribes should be left to their own devices or whether there’s a moral obligation to try and protect them before danger strikes. It’s a discursive read, with some engaging personal touches. Feliciano, (with his Brazilian blood), isn’t scared to go into the bars where the gringos wouldn’t normally go, and knock on doors which few gringo journalists would be interested or willing to approach. It’s this capacity to go deep not just into the jungle, but into more ‘Brazilian’ world which is parasitically feeding off the jungle which lends the book an added dimension. The line between the “virgin” Amazon and encroaching “civilisation” is one of the most urgent pressure points on the planet, but this can’t be studied from above. The forces which determine where this line is drawn (and it’s being constantly redrawn) can only be understood on the ground, talking as far as is possible to the ones who are pushing that line further and further into territory that was previously the preserve of the indigenous peoples. 

an elephant sitting still (w&d hu bo)

Film and context. I’ve just read the wiki entry for Hu Bo, the film’s director, writer and editor. One paragraph instantly throws the four hours of film I watched yesterday into a different light, a prism through which this film is bound to be seen forever more. 

The film itself takes place over the course of a single day. Á la Magnolia or Amores Perros,  it interweaves the stories of four characters in a backwater Chinese city, one which has yet to reap the full benefits of China’s economic transformation. The city is post-industrial, cold, filmed with a washed-out grade, as though colour itself struggles to thrive in this environment. Over the course of four hours we participate in this fateful day, when Wei Bu accidentally kills the brother of a local gangster, Yu Cheng, who himself has witnessed a man committing suicide at the start of the film, after discovering that the gangster has slept with his partner. Death stalks the screen; sooner of later it seems its going to catch up with at least one of the protagonists. 

Four hours is a lot of screen time. The pace is wilfully slow. There are myriad shots of the back of people’s heads as they walk towards the next point in their day’s journey. The director compels us to experience the same lassitude, the same sense of creeping, omniscient despair, that his characters face. Secondary characters, parents or school staff, live in a vortex of rage or petty corruption. When the hunter Yu Cheng and hunted, Wei Bu finally meet, this despair gives way to a Beckettian humour. Both laugh bleakly together at the absurdity of the game they have been caught up in. The poetic motif of a motionless elephant, which is part of a travelling circus in another city, nearby, unites them. For both, life is like the elephant, a vast, useless alien which just sits around, provoking curiosity by the mere fact of its existence. And, of course, the film itself is also the elephant, this extended, unwieldy body of time, which seeks to be so vast that it encapsulates every aspect of these characters’ harsh lives, but does so going nowhere. It too has provoked curiosity by the mere fact of its presence, an unwieldy suicide note.

Because, I learn from Wiki, Hu Bo himself is no longer with us. He committed suicide after the film was completed. A startling fact which seems to warp the density of this movie, giving it an immortal element. The director might not walk the earth anymore, but he lives on through his art. As though it is sending a sign that the sitting elephant can and will move at some point. And when it does, be careful, because it will tread on you.

the years (annie ernaux, tr. alison l strayer)

Ernaux’s text is the kind that one would love to be paid to write. Fragments of a life, bottled up in some kind of a chronological order, and served up on the plate. It’s a rambling, sub-Proustian voyage which captures the rapid scale of change post-war, the loss of innocence that came with the digital age, the sexual revolution and the highs of May ’68, the anti-climax that followed May ’68, and haunting of post-68. Ernaux’s personal experience is mapped onto the changing position of women within her society, one which allows her to break with the model inherited from her parents, and essentially relive her twenties in her forties. Everything is in there, from philosophers to politicians, from Concorde to 911. Small details like a solar eclipse unexpectedly resonate, “Blind faces raised to the sky seemed to await the coming of god or the pale rider of the Apocalypse. The sun reappeared and people clapped. There wouldn’t be another solar eclipse until 2081 and we would be long gone.” She’s also unafraid to address the rise of identity politics: “One no longer heard the words “goodness” or “good people”. Pride in what one did was substituted for pride in what one was - female, gay, provincial, Arab, Jew, etc.” There’s a laconic quality to much of her writing which allows Ernaux to flirt at the edges of her themes, never quite disclosing her personal take on them, letting them ride on the froth of her prose, leaving the reader never quite knowing where the wave will fall. 

the irishman (d scorsese, w steven zaillian)

What a strange experience it watching The Irishman. A bloated film, in keeping with late Scorsese, that has its high points and its low points. Which is woefully self-indulgent, but has moments of quiet genius. It was said that The Joker, which I have yet to see, was a homage/ pastiche of early Scorsese, but the same might be said of The Irishman. Much of the film is like watching someone doing Scorsese well enough to feel as thought they truly studied at the feet of the master, knowing that they could never quite attain to the standards he set. The same could be said for the acting; De Niro is too old to really carry the menace he once did, (although Pesci pulls it off), and Pacino has long since moved beyond being capable of being directed, treating acting like a party piece, which perhaps it is. We go not to watch great performances, but to watch the ghost of great performances. It’s not all that different from going to see the Stones or Dylan in concert. Perhaps the strongest acting comes from De Niro right at the end, when he’s confronting his weakness, and imminent death.

Indeed, this is an old man’s film. It makes one sorry in a way that the director didn’t follow the example of one of his idols, Kurosawa, and do a version of Lear. In the final half hour, when all the deeds have been done, De Niro is alone with his frailty and all of a sudden a tenderness, totally out of keeping with the rest of the film, creeps in. Something more honest, more homespun. Beyond the gratuitous budget-busting explosions and the ham-fisted violence. The scene with the nurse, whom he asks if she knows who Hoffa is, has a surprising pathos. De Niro finally laughs at himself, the wannabe who history has outrun. All his enemies and allies (who are all potential enemies) are dead, and he’s left isolated, philosophical. There’s a jarring scene with a daughter who has barely appeared in the script, the counterweight to the under-developed storyline of his relationship with another daughter, Peggy, who banishes him for his wicked ways. There’s a great scene with a coffin-salesman. Everything feels as though it doesn’t quite hang together, as though Scorsese wants to tell a hundred stories and he’s only got space for three or four, which is one or two too many. 

However, this sequence is the film’s coda, which comes 200 minutes in. After a potted history of the mob with De Niro & co trying to act down their ages. Kennedy’s come and go. The same old story is played on the old joanna. If anything it makes one wonder why no-one has ever tried to film the political novels of James Elroy, who did all of this so much more convincingly. Maybe the novels defy the scripting process. The mobsters progress is ramshackle, predictable, melodramatic. Again, this seems more like decoration, a giant arena wherein the old timers can strut their stuff. We come for the Pacino grandstanding, the De Niro bum-rush or his little-man-caught-in-a-big-man’s-game-face. We come for Pesci’s squeaky well-dressed psychopath. We come for Keitel’s suave arrogant charm, but that is merely hinted at, as it feels as though his part must have been written out in the edit. People haven’t swooned over The Irishman because it’s a great film. They’ve swooned over the Irishman because it allows them to remember what a great film felt like, back in the day. 

chico: artista brasileiro (w&d miguel faria jr., w. diana vasconcellos)

One of the pleasures of having a local cinema is that you get to see films on the big screen you otherwise might not. I’m not a particular fan of Chico Barque, but it was a Monday night after football, there was nothing to eat in the house, so we moseyed out to Cinemateca in the middle of a rainstorm, enjoying the privilege of being able to take in a film without having to make any real effort. If I lived in London I wouldn’t have made it. It’s not the most extravagant of privileges, but let’s name it for what it is. The idea of privilege feels relevant to Chico Barque, a golden boy blessed with charm and looks who hit the big time at the age of 22, coming from a well-connected upper-middle class background. There’s not much regarding this in the film, but you can feel it behind the singer’s eyes, a sense of ‘how did I get to live such a charmed life?’ Of course, there’s no such thing as a charmed life, and his time in exile and participation in the struggle against the dictatorship becomes a key element in his story. The documentary functions on three levels. Firstly there’s an extended interview with the subject which is played out over the film’s near two hours. Then there are recurring versions of his songs, sung somewhat ironically in the Teatro Poiera, by celebrated Brazilian singers. All of this is broken up with archive footage. Then, towards the end, a sub-plot appears, perhaps, which is the remarkable story of Barque’s lost German brother. The camera crew follows him to Berlin for a fascinating if slightly tacked-on postscript where he discovers footage of the lost, now-dead brother. It feels as though there’s a whole other film here which the filmmakers have glimpsed, aware that it wasn’t going to fit into their film’s structure, but one with such an added poetic dimension that they felt the need to shoe-horn it in anyhow.

All of which is not to say that Chico: Artista Brasileiro isn’t a thoroughly competent and effective piece of documentary making. Above all for the way it recounts, perhaps even more than Barque’s musical genius, the history of a vast country and culture which exists, to a certain extent, at the margins. Barque himself relates a couple of self-effacing anecdotes about how little known he is in much of the world, in contrast to his iconic status in his homeland. The film offers an insight into the transformation of the country over the course of fifty years, from the post-war period to the fall of the dictatorship, revealing how much Barque’s art was formed and influenced by politics, in spite of the fact that by the end the singer says he’s seeking to retreat from engaging in any kind of political discourse. The film was initially released in 2015: it would be fascinating to know whether that position has changed now that politics have so rudely come back to haunt Brazil.

middle england (jonathan coe)

Coe’s novel unashamedly addresses the issue of Brexit. A married couple split up over the vote; the central character falls out with his father; families are divided. The toxic racist element that felt liberated by the vote is also represented, as a Lithuanian family feel forced to leave the country. The narrative is multi-character: at the centre is Benjamin, a listless part-time novelist whose initial attitude is strictly apolitical, but finds himself summoning up a toast of “Fuck Brexit” by the end. Around him are spun the stories of his family and his old school friends, one of whom is a political journalist with an inside take on the Cameron government. The sharpest conflict comes in the story of Sophie, Benjamin’s niece, whose marriage to Ian falters on the rocks of the referendum vote. All of this is told in an eminently readable, breezy prose. The fact that the novel is situated so adroitly within the context of recent British history makes it addictive. Do we even remember the Clegg-Cameron coalition anymore? It feels like it belongs to another century, although it’s less than a decade ago. The novel is peppered with references to the stuff of yesterday’s papers, from the Olympics opening ceremony to the murder of Jo Cox. For a British reader it’s like re-living history all over again. 

However, whilst the novel is addictive, one can’t help wondering if this is a useful lens through which to look at the issue which has rent the country in two. There’s something relentlessly convivial about Coe’s prose, one could even call it smug. As the novel flowed forwards towards a feel good finale, it made me question whether the words I was reading weren’t part of the problem the novel appears to be trying to identify and address. At the end of the book, the reader is off the hook. If he or she had ever questioned what was going on in the country over the past decade, those questions could be conveniently shelved by the most anodyne of endings, where Benjamin gets to wallow in the middle class bliss of opening a B&B in an ancient French farmhouse, which he can afford because he’s cashed in on the London property market boom. There’s not a hint of self-awareness on the part of the writer about the irony of his protagonist being able to drift through life and emerge in some kind of liberal Eden merely as a result of the historical accident of his birthplace and his willingness to play a system that has rewarded shrewd property investors. Even the warring party, Sophie and Ian, are offered an upbeat conclusion. There’s no price paid by any of the characters for the chaos which has been unleashed on the country. This is no Swiftian assault; it’s more like the Archers does Brexit. Entertaining in its way, but never as thought-provoking as it sets out to be. 

leto (w&d kirill serebrennikov, w. lily idov, michael idov, ivan kapitonov, natalya naumenko)

Leto means Summer in Russian. I picked this detail up from the subtitles. In the first twenty minutes of the film, there’s an exquisitely filmed beach sequence, when the youthful musician Victor is introduced to Maik, the world-weary Soviet rock star. The sequence is filmed with a diffuse, black and white grain which feels both nostalgic and like it could be happening tomorrow. The work of the DOP, Vladislav Opelyants, throughout the film is electric, achieving that rare quality, when you’re happy to watch the screen for the images alone. During the beach sequence, Maik sings a song  called Leto; a lazy, going-nowhere verse which drips with an insouciant cool. As though these people knew, back then in Leningrad, that you could listen to Lou Reed singing Walk on the Wild Side, but nothing could match the outlandish dream of being a rock and roll rebel in the USSR. 

There’s something very beautiful about the idea of Soviet rebellion (which reminded me of Limonov who I read thirty years ago). The film is set in the Leningrad punk and post-punk scene. Samizdat copies of Reed, Bowie, T-Rex, the Velvets, even Echo and the Bunnymen, are the currency of independent thought. Rock music is rigidly controlled by the authorities, who have to give their approval to lyrics and control the gigs. In this context, subversion is survival, smuggling the counter-culture in though sly lyrics and a deadpan gaze which hides the beating pulse. The songs are steeped in a Baudelaireian celebration of rock and roll, the home of the lazy, the degenerate, the drunkard. In the latter days of the Soviet empire, they get away with it, and Victor will go on to front Kino, one of the most successful Russian bands ever.

Indeed, if you’re Russian, this movie will have other resonances, reminiscent of Corbijn’s Control. Both Victor and Maik were stars who died young. Leto is loosely based around Maiik’s wife, Natasha’s attraction to Victor, making for a Jules et Jim narrative.  Serebrennikov’s film has a punky vitality which extends to several reworkings of classic favourites. Some of these interventions, adorned with graphic design touches, are more effective than others. A rumbustious fantasy sequence set to the Heads’ Psychokiller comes brilliantly out of the blue, taking the viewer by surprise. But more than these western songs, it’s the subtitled Russian tunes that quicken the pulse. The poetic roots of rock and roll reverberate. Pushkin was a rock star. So was John Clare. César Vallejo. All the young dudes carry the news. 

the nun [diderot]

Diderot’s scabrous little tale tells the story of Sister Suzanne, a young woman despatched to the convent by her family, against her wishes. She’s a weird mix of naif and modern. Diderot was clearly taking the piss, to a certain extent, as Suzanne recounts with an other-worldly innocence the advances of the mother superior who develops a fierce crush on her. Her innocence is also abused in her previous nunnery, with the other nuns going full shlock horror psycho on her, sprinkling broken glass on the floor where she walks barefoot and mixing ashes into her food. There’s something very Piano Teacher about all this, with Suzanne remaining a voice of sanity, insistent on her desire to terminate her vows and lead a life beyond the convent walls. Reading Diderot, it feels as though the psychological make-up of modernity, a modernity in deep conflict with itself over ideas of duty, adherence to social structures, sexuality, power, was already in place two hundred and fifty years ago. Not that much has altered or evolved, in spite of Freud, in spite of the liberal revolution of the twentieth century (which is itself experiencing blowback in the twenty first). Suzanne’s desperate struggle against the corrupt mechanisms of power is as valid today as it ever was. Currently reading Annie Ernaux, I discover that Rivette’s screen adaptation of the novel, made in 1966, was itself banned, something that triggered similar societal divisions between the liberal and authoritarian sectors of French society. It’s as though a matrix was constructed with the arrival of the Enlightenment and we’ve been imprisoned, like the nun, in this matrix forever more. (With acknowledgement to the intellectual parent of this idea). To read The Nun is to read your own story: to what extent are you trapped within a capitalist bubble that you can never escape? The use of the word ‘capitalist’ is not pejorative: it might be that you/we are better off and safer within this bubble, than we might be outside it. Which doesn’t stop us gazing at the convent walls and longing for the chance to escape from a world which has never quite succeeded in convincing us that God exists, or that there are not other, more fertile worlds on the other side. 

+++

Point of note: This is a book that has sat on various shelves unread for over thirty years, having been purchased in May 1987. Presumably whilst still in university, being ushered on to the next stage of my supposed path, one whose smooth flow I have sought to disrupt. This book will have accompanied me through the Wars of the Roses, marriage and divorce, the London Dayz, before finally finding a moment to be read on a continent I knew nothing about when the book was purchased. The immortality of books as a repository for everything the world could ever contain. Had this book been bought in a digital format, what are the chances I would finally have caught up with it 30 years later?

tomorrow in the battle think on me [marias, tr. margaret jull costa]

Back in the day, working for some Stakhovian corner of the BBC, we were constantly being told about the importance of creating “sympathetic” characters. No-one would want to engage with a central character they couldn’t warm to. The mealy-mouth tediousness of this dictum seems to me more or less fully responsible for the shit-storm which has since overwhelmed Britain. No-one ever wants to engage with anything or anyone they don’t like, as though the complexities of story and discourse are of secondary importance. All that matters is that we feel good about ourselves: that the mirror held up to our society shows us that we are nice, likeable, and therefore worthy of our own attention. I realise that there have been dramatic and literary exceptions, nevertheless, the pervading need to ‘complacer’ the audience has had a deadening effect on our culture. It’s as though Britain hasn’t had a civil war or been invaded in so long that people have forgotten that good people can do bad things, and bad people good. The complexities of moral representation have been eroded. We  have turned into the land of Harry Potter. All of which springs to mind because Marias, whose affection for Britain would appear to be considerable, has such a radically different attitude towards character. At times it’s as though he’s seeking to challenge the audience to engage in spite of his characters, rather than because of them. The narrator of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a brilliant but flakey man, whose first thoughts on meeting the sister of a woman who died in his arms only weeks ago, is to seduce her. The husband of the woman who died in the narrator’s arms turns out to be an even less likeable specimen of humanity, recounting at the book’s denouement a terrible tale of mortal betrayal, a tale which occurs in a London which crucially still had open-decked double deckers. Like The Infatuations, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me is another curious tale of unfortunate death and the mixed reactions people have towards death. As though the writer is determined to puncture any kind of sentimentalism regarding that most inevitable of processes. Philosophical asides are smuggled into the great rolling tide of Marias’ prose. The story takes a Cortazarian twist when the narrator sleeps with a prostitute, in a bid to find out whether she’s his ex-wife or not. Everything teeters on the brink of the unbelievable, the unpalatable and yet, somewhere in these morbid, amoral observations, there lurks a deranged wisdom. The oft-dismissed whispers of those who don’t paint pretty, palatable pictures, those who insist on reminding us that the world isn’t a box of chocolates; it is full of random cruelty and stupidity. Those who die young aren’t necessarily good; those who mourn them aren’t necessarily noble. Humans are fickle creatures, easily lead. 

the conversation (w&d coppola)

“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”, is the phrase famously uttered by James Comey when it was suggested that his conversations with Trump might have been recorded. The importance of tapes in American political life can be traced back to Watergate and the conversations recorded by Nixon himself which helped to bring about his downfall. The Conversation was made around the time that Watergate was blowing the lid off American political life, in an administration beset by rumours of corruption and foul play. It sounds familiar. The film also feels frighteningly prescient in the way in which it articulates the idea of a surveillance state. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore. Anything we do or say can and will be monitored. This Kafkaesque notion of a surveillance state leads to a breakdown in trust. Human relationships are polluted by paranoia. By the end of The Conversation, a beleaguered Gene Hackman is a prisoner in his own home, trapped by a justified fear. The only sound left to articulate are the mournful notes of jazz he plays on his tenor sax. 

One supposes that great art doesn’t have to be prophetic, but on the other hand one supposes it does have to be rooted in truths about the human condition that go beyond the context of the art work’s setting. In this sense, Coppola’s The Conversation qualifies in the “great art” category. Technically it’s just about perfect. The script is tight as a drum. The edit is flawless and the sound edit, by Walter Murch, is a thing of genius. Hackman’s acting, the lugubrious fallguy who can never be too careful (but never be careful enough) is a masterly performance, all grunts and hidden sadness behind the eyes. (Of all the great actors who emerged in the seventies, Hackman might be the most underrated). The opening shot is a truly dizzying long sentinel take, lasting up to five minutes. The audience doesn’t realise it, but the whole of the film’s contents are contained within this single take, like a seed about to germinate. It succeeds in putting the audience on the edge of their seat, and from the word go we know that we can’t afford to take our eyes off the film for a moment, every detail is important. There is a mystery to be solved, even if, like the protagonist, we don’t even know what the mystery is. If that isn’t a metaphor for the human condition, I don’t know what is. 

midsommar (w&d ari aster)

There are several levels upon which to read Midsommar. Firstly as a horror film. Here, we encounter the problem that it lacks tension and it’s not particularly scary. The film employs a trope that has been used more effectively by Claudia Llosa (Madeinusa) or Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust) among others, that of the callow Westerners trapped in a tribal society. Four USA grad students (and two aimless Brits) are parachuted into a remote Swedish festival. The fact that ‘the tribe’ is Swedish (blond, white), gives it a twist; it could be said to subvert the stereotypical image of ‘the other’. The art department has a ball, and it all looks pretty, but the studied plot points, as the ‘westerners’ are despatched, feel contrived and only serve to dilute the tension that is supposed to be building around the fate of plucky heroine Florence Pugh, (who does a decent job). Not for the first time, it feels as though a big-budget Hollywood film is suffering from an excess of everything. It’s hard enough to sustain tension over ninety minutes, let alone 147 and the film gradually warps under the weight of its own gravity. The longer it goes on the more the holes in the plot seem to gape and the nods to Von Trier (and even Tarkovsky at the very end?) feel forced, lacking either the discipline peak Von Trier brought to his outrageousness or, of course, the vaulting ambition of Tarkovsky. 

So as a film, whilst Midsommar ticks a lot of pretty picture boxes, and a few gruesome ones, it’s disappointing. However, to return to the connection to Pocock’s Surrender. Pocock visits on a sub-anthropological level various communities in the Midwest. The thing that links these communities is they all have a fierce stance regarding their relationship to nature. As the title Midsommar suggests, the Swedish tribe that Pugh & co visit are steeped in an ersatz relationship to nature. They worship the tree of the ancestors, where the ashes of sacrificed elders are scattered. The festival is also a fertility rite (which chimes with Pocock’s visit to an Ecosex festival). Petals are scattered and trees are venerated. Magic mushrooms are consumed in large quantities in a kind of group shamanic ritual. Yet, in the hands of a Hollywood director, there is still no way to present this world other than as dystopian. In this sense, for reasons that the film seems to be in no way aware of, Midsommar might well be the scariest film of the year. Confronted by the image of a society which seeks to co-exist with nature, the technological military machine which is a Hollywood film production sees itself as having no option but to treat this society as a violent, terrorist threat. 

surrender [joanna pocock]

The tradition of the American west seems to have fallen away somewhat in the 21st C. As I grew up, people were still weaned on images of a wild country, full of men riding horses across dusty plains, women in caravans, native indians on the edge of the horizon. It was still a time when young children were given The Little House on the Prairie to read. The West was that uncharted territory which lay beyond the boundaries of ‘civilisation’, waiting to be explored and, implicitly, ‘tamed’. At university, we studied Willa Cather, along with commentaries on Gatsby, even Jack London. The West as an intellectual space, one which the mind had yet to colonise. That strain of Americanism seems to have dissipated. Silicon Valley, the Hollywood machine, the hipsters of Seattle, have collectively buried the idea that the west contains territory, mental as well as physical, which is a point of conflict with an oriental, European tradition. 

Pocock’s book does a lot to resuscitate this notion. The book feels like a travelogue, as it details the writer’s explorations of alternative cultures from her base in Montana. Pocock, along with her family, is on a kind of pilgrimage, looking to find a way to reconcile her materialist (Londonised) existence with her fears for the world’s future. There is something millenarian about this quest, one which any rational, thinking person cannot help but be aware of. Anyone who belongs to the capitalist materialist system would appear to be complicit in the slow (but quickening) murder of the natural world. Nature and mankind, it seems, have become pitted against each other in a zero sum game, a new hot Cold War. Pocock goes in search of those who are are seeking alternatives. Some are nomadic rewilders who have gone off-grid, others are more settled, searching for a middle ground which will help to gradually bring about the changes required to rebalance the human and natural worlds. Floating around the edges is a more scary, libertarian movement, one which goes around armed and questions the very notion of the state. Pocock weaves her way through these groups, like a modern day Cobbett, detailing her observations and offering up pointers for anyone who’s trying to work out how to keep going in the face of the anthropocene apocalypse. 

What roots the book (which has a certain crossover with Powers’ Overstory) is its resolutely subjective tone. Pocock discusses the death of her parents, her menopause and above all, her relationship with her family who share much of her journey with her. She’s not proselytising; she’s trying to work something out; a city-dweller’s journey into the possibilities of a de-urbanised future. 

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(nb: a memory: The driver tells me that we’re going to visit a nuclear power station. His car is a green 2CV with a roof that flies off at regular intervals. There might be a tape recorder on the seat playing Bo Diddley or Stravinsky. The driver rolls his cigarettes one handed as he steers. We roll through an England which is as green as history suggests it always has been and always should be. We get to the power station late in the afternoon. We’ve driven half a day to get out of the car and stare at a monster. Albeit a beautiful, brutalist monster, framed against a dying sky. I have no real idea why we’re here, or what the reason for this mission might be, but as we gaze at the monster, with the sea behind, everything makes a kind of unintelligible sense.)

high life (w&d claire denis, w. jean-pol fargeau, geoff cox, andrew litvack, nick laird)

High Life is unhinged in all the best senses of the word. Dennis throws whatever she can at the wall to see what sticks. The remarkable thing in this starry, high concept jamboree of a movie, is that she gets away with it. In part, it’s because of the Dennis trademarks of a vivid editing style, astute use of score and understated emotional output from the actors. However, there’s a flair to the lo-fi sci-fi which allows for the unlikely, somewhat Hollywood premise to remain convincing, despite the unlikely logic and the ghost of Solaris & 2001 which haunt any film set on a spaceship hurtling into the void. The use of flashback is as astute as ever, timelines criss-crossed like a cat’s cradle. We get into  protagonist Monte’s head via some subtle images from a long-lost earth. Robert Pattinson keeps a lid on the fireworks and allows a baby to steal his scenes, making for a compelling performance. Binoche is demented, showcasing another side of her spectrum altogether from anything seen in Assayas, as though glorying in the chance to get down and dirty. The highball mixture of weird sex, the inevitable heightened sexual tension, a Lord of the Flies meets Alien narrative, beautiful weird people on a train to nowhere, is juxtaposed with an unashamed sentimentalism, as Pattinson coos to his baby and later bonds with her as an adolescent. It’s a cocktail which really shouldn’t work, but gloriously does. 

it gets me home this curving track [ian penman]

Penman is an enthusiast. A music journalist, who in this collection of essays showcases his writing on artists he loves. The field is eclectic and for reasons which the book makes clear, translucently hip. So hip that he can include an artist like Donald Fagin of Steely Dan, who no-one really believes is hip now. But that is being hip: it’s being awake to those signs which are flashing, Pynchonesque, beyond the immediate. The dodgy looking back alleys of the Mississippi delta. The jazz club no-one’s ever heard of, before it becomes the jazz club everyone’s heard of. And this world fascinates Penman not because he’s some kind of would-be trendsetter, but almost entirely because he wants to escape the world of would-be trendsetters. Return to a world where people made music in order to live, rather than to acquire fame or glory. Where the music was a mirror to the soul.

The essays on Parker, Brown, Presley and, above all, Prince, investigate this territory. Penman identifies the way in which the music, for all these men, was a way of defining identity, an identity each in his own way became trapped in. The same applied to another unlikely subject, Sinatra, with a great observation about how Sinatra never wanted the night to end, as though he was frightened of what the day might bring. Penman, having traced where the spark for their creativity and genius originated, then goes on to describe how each, in their way, became trapped, seeking to replicate an unfettered drive to create within an increasingly commercialised context, one which hindered development of their creative horizons. In some ways, the most interesting essay in this book is one that hasn’t been written, about Miles Davis, a figure who recurs frequently, but one who succeeded in slipping the leash of his origins and reinventing himself, taking his genius with him as he explored other lands.

In this sense, the word “home” in the title is curious. The author explains that the line comes from an Auden poem. But the book’s collection of essays hints at various interpretations. A curving track which appears to lead towards the home which is death. The word “track” also suggests something that’s laid out, impossible to deviate from. The tragedy of genius, so often (and Penman mentions Billie Holiday as the “empty chair” of the book), is that by the time you’ve hit your stride, the journey is more or less over. The only destination left is the finale. If this isn’t quite so true for Sinatra and Fahey (because they’re white?), it’s still there. Once the trailblazers have escaped the cocoon, turned into butterflies, there’s nothing much left to achieve. Perhaps this is why the only true rock star is the one who dies young. 

for sama (waad al-khateab, edward watts)

It’s impossible not to react to For Sama on a visceral level. This is a visceral film. As visceral as anything you might ever see. Babies are born. Babies are brought back to life. People die. More people die. People’s faces are ripped open. Limbs torn off. Blood. Blood on the floor on the body in the bed in the street on your soul. The poetry of blood. War. Encrusted dirt on children’s faces. Death. Real death. Not the kind of death you see in the movies. Not the balletecised death of Tarantino. Not the “realism” death of Saving Private Ryan. Real stinking obscene death, the line between something that breathes and something that has nothing left to do but decay and rot. 

The music in the cafe where I am writing is excessively jaunty for this time of the morning. Someone next to me says that someone they know “is meeting PJ Harvey today and I’m like send me pictures of PJ Harvey”, and all of this seems perfectly inappropriately appropriate for writing about this film. Because the flip side to For Sama is that we have to value our deformed reality, no matter how much we might love or hate it, because just over the hill lies the equally human reality of hell. Which is what Al-Khateab’s camera captures in Aleppo. A descent into hell.

Where we learn that hell isn’t all bad. There’s still tenderness and solidarity and beauty, even if that’s only the beauty of blood. The red that the narrator says has infiltrated every corner of her life. The reasons for living, to keep on keeping on, are irrevocable, on every day that you wake up knowing it could be your last, or worse, the last day of your loved ones. At one point in the film, Waad says that she was envious of a woman who had died before she had to see her child die. Because there is nothing worse than that. Hell is a place where the gods play endless jokes. The miracle of a life spared, shown in the most astonishing scene in modern cinema, when a child we presume is dead is brought back to life, with a gasp which is also yours when it occurs, might also, for all we know, be a life taken away the next day, off camera. 

Hell isn’t so bad because it’s hell. You might even be crazy enough, like Waad Al-Khateab and her husband, Hamza, to want to return there. Hell is so bad because it will be the slow death of everything you love. 

There is no way to respond to For Sama except on a visceral level. To connect with For Sama, you don’t need to have been to Syria or walked the alleyways of Aleppo’s ancient souk, or even pretend to care about a war that is still taking place, day after day. The only thing you need to have done is to have been human, at least once in your life. 

the overstory [richard powers]

This is a curious novel in so far as on one hand it made me want to buy it for almost everyone I know and on the other hand it ended up driving me a bit nuts. The one hand has to do with the thematic and the first half of the novel. The other has to do with the second half, when to my mind the writing started to lose its way. I read on compulsively, but increasingly frustrated by the way the book seemed to drag itself out. This is, it should be acknowledged, quite a banal reaction to what is in so many ways a remarkable novel, so perhaps as the reaction to that frustration dissipates what will remain is the potency of the book’s thematic. Powers has an agenda and he maps it out. Trees communicate. They are older and wiser than humans. We continue to destroy forests, oblivious of what we are losing, slaves to short-term capitalism. It looks as though this thesis will never lose its topicality. One thinks that in the age of Bolsonaro and Trump its importance is even more pressing, but Humbolt noted how the eco-system in South America was already being affected by colonial exploitation of timber, and one can go further back to the destruction of forests for shipbuilding as far back as the middle ages. Humanity has been persecuting trees for as long as ‘civilisation’ has been a thing. 

The novel collects a group of characters who get drawn into the struggle to preserve Pacific North American forests. The first part, or the roots of the book, set out these individuals’ stories, which are brought together in the second part, which ends in tragedy. The book then addresses the aftermath of that tragedy, over the course of twenty years. Lacking the glue of a unifying mission for the characters, It becomes more rangy, or dispersed. The conceit is that this is like the crown of a tree, where the branches veer away from the trunk into their individual journeys towards the sky. The novel becomes increasingly metaphysical, as the years and events fly by. Whatever its literary merits, and they are many in spite of reservations, the significance and brilliance of the premise is undeniable. Powers succeeds in opening up a new way of perceiving the world. I defy anyone to read this book and ever look at a tree in the same way again. 

on the president’s orders (d james jones, olivier sarbil)

Emerging from the film, contrasting thoughts come to the fore. Firstly that this is filmmaking which does indeed get eye-catching access to a world which is little known, that of the Philippine slum of Caloocan, in Manila. Olivier Sarbil’s camera is right there on the ground floor, capturing the feverish intimacy of an overcrowded patch of land. This is a fundamentally visual film, steeped in the colours and textures of the slum. A group of slum kids are filmed washing in the street. They look like something out of a Dolce and Gabanna video. The film’s visual flair is its strength and its achilles heel. Because at the end of the day, this doesn’t feel like a film which is all that interested in establishing context or any kind of account of the realties of the role of drugs within this society. Anyone who resides in an environment where you see good people ruined by cheap drugs, will know the fearful damage they can cause, stripping out the life and possibilities of the people who live there. Dutarte’s ruthless campaign to eradicate drugs feels instinctively immoral, but on the other hand it’s still a reaction to a pressing social issue. The film’s only real interviews are with the police chief, who is either promulgating or turning a blind eye to the execution of suspected dealers. His tough guy image ends up looking like a macho pose and the audience waits for his inevitable fall from grace, supplied by the end notes. However, it would have been interesting to have been offered some kind of wider perspective from within the Philippine community. Who controls the drugs trade? What other strategies have been tried to mitigate or eradicate it? The film’s reluctance to engage with the deeper context of its material brings us to the question of who is making this film and to what end? It’s notable in the credits that there’s doesn’t appear to be a single Philippine name involved (this might be wrong, but if so they are clearly a significant minority). It feels as though this is a movie which has been made with a view to being exhibited on Western screens, allowing people to dip into a dangerous world without needing to engage with it or even think about the content to any real degree. As the credits rolled, a woman in the cinema said out loud: What a beautiful, terrible film. One can’t help thinking that the filmmakers would have been delighted with this. It feels as though the film will find a happy niche on a suitable streaming service. Everyone’s a winner, but no-one is much the wiser about the complexity of Coloocan’s social issues and how they should be addressed. This is outside-in filmmaking, rather than inside-out. 

nb - I read that: “the International Criminal Court has opened a preliminary investigation into Duterte and these extrajudicial killings. And, it’s asked to review footage from the film.” (https://www.justsecurity.org/66514/on-a-presidents-orders-new-frontline-docs-look-at-duterte-and-mbs/) So perhaps, to put the counter view, the above reading of the film is overly harsh.  

the souvenir (w&d hogg)

1984. Thatcher’s Britain. An elegantly wasted young man called Anthony. The Fall on the soundtrack. There was a lot about The Souvenir that felt familiar. 

It’s curious that the publicity for the film has suggested a sub-Downton world of elegant dresses and tuxedos, as though the publicity people feel it’s impossible to market a British film which doesn’t posit itself beneath the chandelier of post-war imperialism. Anthony is always dressed in a slightly fogey-ish manner. He’s the anti-Thewlis from Naked. One who has concocted a myth around himself that’s part Lawrence of Arabia, part Bond, which actually conceals the fact he’s a desultory heroin addict. An alternative way of looking at Anthony would through the refracted mirror of another doomed youth figure from the early Thatcher years, Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead. Except Anthony isn’t really posh, he just affects to be. Anthony's pose is in fact a commentary on how the British are so readily suckered by the image of the charming aristo. In contrast Julie, the film’s protagonist, is posh, but affects not to be. Hogg opens her film with documentary footage of Sunderland, where Julie has thoughts of making a film, as though to affirm that she, like her fictional filmmaker, is determined to move away from her pigeonholing as a doyenne of the upper middle classes. 

Although The Souvenir is still a film steeped in the complexity of the British class system, it succeeds in being far more than a film about class. It’s about love and drugs and notions of feminine strength, as well as being a meta-film about filmmaking. It’s this density which permits the film to get away with its somewhat lugubrious storytelling, dragged out to the bitter end. There’s always something going on, the unexpected is around the corner. Some of the deviations - the trip to Venice - feel like adornments, tacked on to flesh out the spectacle, as much as the narrative. Yet at other  times, the juxtapositions, between opera and pop music, between the overblown Harrods dining rooms and the council estates, feel like a jagged, effective way to portray a country which was evolving and adapting, seeking to construct a new identity, one it is has never really found. 

Hogg captures the nuances of Julie’s strength, masked by passivity, putting the boot into all those theories of the active protagonist, showing how someone can grow through experience and resistance, as much as through becoming a warrior. The love affair between the two leads is delicately painted, with tiny moments of convincing, intimate humour, illustrating the way in which two ill-matched souls could fall for one another. Without ever quite grabbing you by the guts, something Hogg has never seemed inclined to do, the film carefully builds. Living with an addict is not a black and white scenario. It’s full of greys, some light, some dark. The temptation is to paint the addict as dysfunctional, asocial, alarming; but The Souvenir doesn’t do this. Instead it shows, in a world where being a misfit is a necessary evil, how two misfits can help each other grow, and, perhaps, survive. Or perhaps not.

bait (w&d mark jenkin)

I had no pre-expectations about Bait. I thought it was going to be a gritty documentary about the fishing industry. It’s not. it’s a sly, poetic examination of gentrification and social tensions. Set in a Cornish fishing village. Which is the kind of subject matter which could readily veer towards melodrama. Noble fisherman confronts arriviste townies who buy his family house and turn it into a BnB, whilst he struggles to make a living selling fish caught without a boat. However, the director/ DOP/ editor of bait is interested in aesthetics as much as politics. The film is shot on grainy Super-16. Each shot is carefully composed and delineated, an exercise in cinematic composition, like watching Vigo crossed with Eisenstein. In the opening minutes, one starts to wonder if there isn’t something overcooked about the edit, but as the viewer settles into the rhythm, you realise that it is actually beautifully crafted. The aesthetics take the burn off the politics, allowing the narrative to rumble along beside it, offering an acute portrayal of the current state of Britain. A land where urban wealth can displace rural industry and tradition; where accent is as significant as it was in the time of Hardy; a country which is more than happy to sell off its heritage to a seasonal tourism industry, leaving the traditional fishing industry to fend for itself against insurmountable odds. If this was one of those review pages that people read, I would urge my public to go and enjoy one of the finest British films of the decade. As it is not, I urge the reader, should they come across these words, to seek out a film of remarkable artistry, even if it’s destined to be no more than a footnote in British cinema history. A film which harks back to the origins of cinematic narrative, whilst looking the present squarely in the eye. 

psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power [byung chul han]

Once upon a time, the theory goes, there was an Orwellian big brother who sought to scare his subjects into submission. He was a twentieth century phenomenon. He ruled with gulags and execution squads and ford falcons and martial law. He strode around the world shaking his fist and some called him fascist and others communist and an old Etonian wrote a book about him, a book that defined him as a bogeyman who would haunt the dreams of little children and old age pensioners alike. There was only one problem: big brother’s tactics were scary but in the end they weren’t that effective. People resisted. Dictatorships were overthrown. People don’t enjoy living in fear and they got so sick of it that they tore down the walls and the statues and installed something known as democracy. Which meant big brother needed to find another way to get people to do what he wanted. He had to do it under the rubric of choice. And also around this time, the start of the 21st century, a phenomenon known as the internet began to invade people’s lives. In a much more effective way than anything big brother had dreamed of. And the interaction of the internet and the people created data. Which could be processed, manipulated, used to understand and control the subjects. It was done not by threatening them, but by asking them what they liked. And what they didn’t like. And promising to deliver these wishes. It created, in the words of Han, “a dictatorship of emotion”. Which also served the purpose of making people more stupid. Because stupid people are docile. They don’t think, they feel. Feelings can be manipulated and satiated. Thoughts are harder. People weren’t really worried about whether or not the information big brother was feeding them was true or false: the point was that it felt good to receive it. Like children being given sweets. And because the data had been studied, big bother always knew which people liked which sweets, and it was no skin off big brother’s nose to give them those sweets. And make them pliant and happy at the same time. 

Byung Chul Han’s text is indeed a text for the age of Cummings, the age of digital data manipulation, the age that we live in. It’s not always an easy read, but it ought to be a compulsory one.  Should you have any interest in understanding why you are thinking what you are currently thinking….

fraylandia (d sebastián mayayo, ramiro ozer ami)

Fraylandia is a classic documentary which adheres to a well-worn formula of following various characters in order to tell a complex story. The story is that of the Botnia plant built at Fray Bentos on the Uruguayan side of the River Uruguay, a plant which was claimed, on the Argentine side, to be contaminating the river. The dispute lead to the bridge spanning the two countries being shut for nearly five years. It was a low-key dispute in a low-key part of the world. The film follows life on both sides, focusing on various characters: a Uruguayan living on the Argentine side of the border, one of the protestors; another Uruguayan who’s a vigorous defender of the plant, a Finn who works there, and loves the life in South America, and finally a woman who had a relationship with a Czech worker who returned home but sends her baleful love letters, regardless of the fact she’s now seeing someone else. The pace and tone of the film are gentle as it seeks to maintain an even-handed, affectionate appraisal, which rather skirts the issue of any possible contamination and the potential effects on the environment. 

the german room [carla maliandi, tr. frances riddle]

The German Room is one of those diaphanous Argentine novels which is so slight it feels almost, but not quite, transparent.  The narrator is a pregnant Argentine who is returning to Heidelberg, the city she and her parents fled to in exile during the Argentine dictatorship, fleeing a failed marriage. She has no active connection with the city, until she runs into Mario, a friend and fellow exile of her parents. However, this is in no way a turning point in the novel. Neither is her discovery of her pregnancy. Neither is the suicide of the Japanese girl who befriends her.  This is a novel that seems to relish its lack of direction, as embodied by the protagonist. Life, the author seems to suggest is banal. We seek mystery to lend meaning to it, but this is just window dressing. Or at least the author appears to be saying so, until the mystical tinge of the final pages. There is a playfulness to Maliandi’s text, which has something in common with the writing of Schweblin and Chefjec, but all the same The German Room ends up feeling something like a milenesa en dos panes without the milanesa.  

once upon a time in hollywood (w&d tarantino)

For a while it feels as though Tarantino is back where he belongs. In Hollywood, poking fun at the bear, as only he’s allowed to. The film feels less ‘talky’ than some of his more recent endeavours. There’s a flow to the edit. The design, as ever, is impeccable. You know you’re in for a long ride but it’s going to be a good one. Then, gradually, the ride starts to fizzle out. Perhaps it’s when Pitt’s lop-sided grinning stuntman visits the Manson ranch and nothing happens. Perhaps it’s when the director decides to interrupt the action approximately two thirds of the way through and skip six months. Whenever it is, there’s a gradual realisation that this film isn’t really going anywhere. It’s just driving around the Hollywood hills, looking at itself in the mirror, saying “you’re looking mighty fine”. A friend of mine said it was a bit like a slacker movie, which it is. A low-key buddy movie, where Brad and Leo hang out and chill. Nowhere does the film feel more like itself than the scene where the two of them watch an old ep of DiCaprio as a villain in the series “FBI’. Right there you feel you could almost be hanging with Quentin, chuckling at the hammy acting and the melodrama and plotting how you’re going to find a way to fit this into a movie some day. 

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, but nevertheless it all feels mighty smug. Perhaps Tarantino has always been smug but when he kicked off he succeeded in recalibrating the use of dialogue in US movies, employing a Mametian use of subtext. His early movies (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) also seemed as though they were saying something about race, even if that something was nebulous. Always a stylist, the style started to completely overwhelm any real attempt at content. Extreme semiotic gestures replaced any need for plot. A candy-coated wish-fulfilment ethos began to dominate. Tarantino discovered he, like Shakespeare, could rewrite history. Once Upon a Time is the culmination of this. A real-life tragedy becomes a grotesque comedy. Flame-throwers are cool. Sharon lives. Polanski’s a harmless sixties pixie. The question is whether this means anything, apart from the fact that Quentin gets to do whatever he wants with his mates? In a Trumpian dystopia, the notion that Hollywood can make everything doozy feels even more of a cop-out than ever. Politics is irrelevant because it will all work out well in the end. Some might say there’s some high-end Zizek intellectual irony at play, but I don’t really buy it. A generation of US moviegoers get to see their favourite stars larking around and come away with the adrenaline high of justified violence. At the end of the day, one suspects people will look back on Tarantino as the high priest of American imperialism, the greatest spinner of fake news in the greatest fake news factory on earth. 

robinson crusoe [daniel defoe]

How to place a novel whose impact on the Western psyche has been so immense? There can be few novels more famous than Crusoe, and the image of a man alone on his island has invaded the consciousness of every British child growing up, perhaps, since it was written.

Atomisation - Crusoe is the Garbo of imperialism. He wants his own island, but he wants to be left alone on his island. Long before he reaches the island, Crusoe is a loner. He quits his family, takes to the sea, is captured by Moors, escapes, returns to the sea, goes to Brazil, lives a solitary life on his own plantation there. He simultaneously laments his solitude but also relishes it. Even in the final chapter, when he supposedly finally acquires a family on his return to England after over thirty years, he soon ups and leaves again. He’s a restless soul who is also a progenitor of Mersault, the original anti-social man. In spite of the famous idea of Crusoe and Friday, Friday only actually appears as a fleeting figure in the book, alone with Crusoe for little more than a chapter. Above all, what emerges is the vision of a man who it comes to feel hasn’t ended up in isolation by accident. There’s a dangerously strong urge in the modern psyche, an urge assisted by technology, to break away from society and construct a world where the individual is lord and master, freed from the chains of social relationships. Crusoe isn’t actually all that far from the mainland (he can see it from his island), and it isn’t until the island begins to become overrun by visitors (cannibals, mutineers, Spaniards etc) that he finally commits to leaving. 

Globalisation - Crusoe is the son of immigrants who settled in Hull. He inhabits an expanding world. South America, Africa and Europe are all inter-connected, with the slave trade one aspect of this. Trade is booming and Crusoe ends up rich, not as a result of the treasure he finds on board the Spanish galleon that founders off his island’s coast, but the investment in his sugar plantation in Brazil. This is not a closed, inwards looking society. Even on his island, he finds himself visited by people of various races and cultures. 

Slavery - The great underpinning motor of the story is the slave trade. Crusoe himself is a slave at one point, in West Africa, before he escapes. He ends up on his island because he agrees to go on a slaving expedition to get labour to work the sugar fields of Brazil. When he comes across Friday, he instantly assumes that Friday will become his servant, as he does. Said’s Orientalisim detailed the significance of the Orient as underpinning British literature, but in Crusoe, it’s the driving winds of trade, and specifically the slave trade, which lure the protagonist to his shipwrecked destiny.

Shipwrecks - Shipwrecks were the sliding door of the day. As in Shakespeare, with the Tempest, Pericles and Winter’s Tale, the shipwreck is the deus ex machina, the hidden hand of fate, which permits a character to undergo transformation. In this sense, for much of the world, little has changed. People are still risking their lives on the seas in search of another life, which is at the mercy of the lottery of the tides. There are so many shipwrecks in Crusoe it’s hard to keep up. They provide a religious dimension to the narrative, the hand of god. 

la fundición del tiempo (d juan alvarez)

Alvarez’s film is one of those which you begin to enjoy far more the moment you step out of the cinema. This is not a back-handed compliment. There is a code (codigo) to watching cinema, and when a film wilfully disrespects that code, as a viewer we feel disorientated, unsure of ourselves. However, the act of breaking the code, of fucking with time, is something that a bold filmmaker is prepared to do in order to assault and reform perception. There were times, watching La Fundición del Tiempo, when I struggled with the lassitude, but within seconds of leaving the cinema, stepping out into the actuality of Bartolome Mitre, I was basking in it. A curious paradox, but an admirable one.

The film is split into two halves. One is set in Japan. It studies a tree doctor who saved some trees which had been half-carbonised by the nuclear bomb at Nagasaki. The doctor continues to grow trees from the fruit of those atomic trees. The second half occurs in Uruguay. It focuses on a man who tames wild horses. The process is documented in painstaking detail. We learn little about the man, but everything about the process, the way in which man brings nature to heel, with a mixture of cruelty and kindness. Alvarez’ camera lingers, frets, rides with the tamed horse, as it buckles and resists before it ultimately capitulates to man’s will. 

The two halves are married by an extended, Reygadas-esque sequence of mist and white light. Images appear and fade away; a metaphor for the process of watching a film where the viewer’s engagement seems to drift in and out of focus. In that sense this is a profoundly meditational experience. Rather than seduce us with narrative and flow, the film challenges the viewer to reflect. The translated title of the film might be: The Casting of Time. Alvarez compels the viewer to question their relationship to time, as a viewer and as a human being. 

the lives of michel foucault [david lacey]

part 1

Last year, an Argentine play, helmed by a distinguished director, called something like “Searching for Foucault”, arrived on tour in Montevideo. It was about a teacher having a nervous breakdown. There was disappointingly little about Foucault himself. It was clear that the play was using his name to give itself a certain caché. Apart from the fact I had wanted to see more of this director’s work, it felt as though I had gone to see it under false pretences. Still, the title demonstrates the curious allure of the philosopher’s name. More than any other late twentieth century intellect, the myth of Foucault has grown from the days when I first studied him, a year after his death, at York university. If the last thirty years have been the age of any given figure, we might well look on back on them as the Foucault years. 

Macey’s book traces Foucault’s life from birth to untimely death. As well as detailing the story of his life, it also tackles the story of his intellectual development, not an easy task for such an intellectual magpie. Suffice to say that Macey is rigorous and comprehensive in his detailing of Foucault’s work, which is the most important element of his life. However, as regards the secondary issue of describing the person, Foucault remains as enigmatic a figure upon the conclusion of the book as he was at the start. He’s a bundle of contradictions. Sage-like but quick-tempered. An espouser of political causes of all kinds who was criticised for not being political enough. An ascetic soul who was also a hedonist who frequented the bathhouses of San Francisco. A would-be outsider who was very much an insider in the highfalutin circles of French academia. Perhaps these contradictions are fundamental to the construction of a mind that taught the world to think in terms of matrices rather than absolutes. 

Nevertheless, even Macey’s book seems to cling to the notion of an absolute truth that underpins thought. The final pages relate a coded secret account of Foucault’s past (written by a possible ex-lover) as though this might indeed be the key to understanding him. (One that made me think of Hanecke’s Caché.) One imagines Foucault himself would not have warmed to this theory/ conceit. Or perhaps this was a way for the biographer to acknowledge that whilst his book discloses a great deal of information about Foucault, the philosopher, it also leaves many a stone unturned. 

+++

part 2

Additional note written whilst reading this book:

“On reading Foucault’s biography:

When I first read Foucault, in 1986/7, it felt as though one had discovered a writer who could map out the shape of the world. Not just the world as I knew it to be then, but also the world which was to come. In so many ways this proved to be correct. Foucault was the prophet of identity, of post-truth (for better and for worse). The iconoclast of the post war systems he and my parents grew up with. However, this is not the thought. The thought is thus: the world requires a successor. For the first time since those days, one is conscious of the fact that Foucault’s view (pendulum) is no longer sufficient. In the ensuing decades three things have occurred which have yet to find a mind capable of synthesising them. These elements are the digitalisation of the world (internet; personal computers; robotics etc); climate change; accelerated globalisation. The latter has always existed as a concept, but has been hyper-extenuated by the rise of aviation and the digital shrinking of the world. The other two factors were no more than flecks on the distant horizon back in 1987. There may be writers/philosophers who address any of these issues with imagination and insight. But I have yet to come across anyone who has in any way synthesised these elements of the present, permitting the reader to peer into a future and begin to comprehend the shape and needs of advancement/ survival within this future. The global warming of information. The rising simulacrum tide.”

balnearios (d mariano llinás)

Llinas’ first film is a blink-and-you-miss-it 80 mins long. Watching this, if he reminded me of anyone as a filmmaker it’s perhaps, no matter how tangential this might feel, Adam Curtis. An idiosyncratic vision which gives free rein to an intellectual playfulness. (Curtis might not like this word but all the same it seems appropriate). Llinas headed off towards the waters of fiction, whereas Curtis is all heavy-hitting politics, but watching their films feels like a similar experience. We are in the hands of a conjurer who will come up with unlikely associations and unpredictable combinations. They also both leave the viewer with the feeling that they are basking within the timeless waters of cinema. Even this reduced length film felt like it had an elastic timeframe. You never quite knew where you were headed or when the film might come to a natural conclusion. 

Balnearios, a word which is probably best translated as ‘resorts’ opens with some lovely archive footage of the Argentine and Uruguayan coast. The film is constructed out of various parts. There’s a section on the balnearios’ annual cycle, the transformation from the dead times of winter to the frenzy of summer. The film ends with an extended, warm-hearted section about an eccentric sculptor. At times the film feels like a slightly cobbled-together piece, a bricolage if you like, hints of a student movie, albeit one touched with brilliance. Towards the end of the first half of the film, however, there’s a section which is pure Llinas, anticipating Historias Extraordinarias. The story of a once-glorious, now decayed hotel is related via photos and recreated footage, detailing  how the hotel has passed through various hands in dodgy business dealings, at one point being owned by a fraudulent playboy with a French chanteuse wife. One of her songs plays balefully over images of the crumbling hotel. The sequence has a lazy Borgesian charm; an epic narrative recounted in ten minutes with a few broad brushstrokes, no more than a subset of the movie itself. A clear pointer for the direction in which this idiosyncratic filmmaker was headed.

woman under the influence (w&d john cassavetes)

Cassavetes' film is a gruelling, grimly compelling watch. Now regarded as a modern classic, it seems superfluous to offer anything other than a few observations.

Violence. The most disconcerting aspect of this film might be the very final sequence, after the kids have gone to bed, after Peter Falk’s Nick has slapped Mabel for the second or third time, after she has cut herself. It’s disturbing not because of the violence, but because of the way that the director seems to want to present this moment, as Mabel and Nick tidy up together, return to domestic normality, as an upbeat ending. The music is cheerful, Rowlands smiles, there appears to be complicity between the parties. I haven’t read commentaries on this and prefer to come at it cold: it feels almost crass. Just as much as this is a film about female psychosis, it’s also a film about domestic violence. Nick is a bully. A charming bully but also a violent one. HIs normalisation of violence (both physical and psychological) is surely the key driver in Mabel’s need to become insane to cope with it. Is Cassavetes being wilfully provocative with this conclusion? Or is it a testament to an era and a culture where this kind of patriarchal violence was the norm? However you look it, it’s a coup de grace, after all that has preceded this moment, that it should feel so chilling precisely because nothing shocking is happening. 

Acting. Without doubt, Rowlands and Falk offer masterclasses of a kind. What the film perhaps shows is how limited is the day-to-day palette of psychological representation. Cinema demands a shorthand approach to characterisation. Scenes are generally kept short and sharp; the emotional status of a character is conveyed through metaphor and elipsis. In Woman Under the Influence, the handbrake is off. Rowlands and Falk are permitted to explore in great detail all the ticks, mannerisms, weaknesses, strangenesses of their characters and their relationship. The long scenes permit a descent into the moment, captured by the camera, which is harrowing, bordering on the absurd (which is what any domestic dispute inevitably and tragically becomes). Hence a degree of reality infiltrates the camera which more conventional scriptwriting/ storytelling doesn’t permit. The nearest point of contemporary comparison is Reygadas’ Our Time. Acting in film is so often about minimalism, (think of Caine talking about how everything can be communicated by the face), but here Rowlands’ whole body seems immersed in the character, a body which seems to hum with inner tension and a secret inner life which is repressed by the restrictions of her day-to-day existence.

los últimos romanticos (w&d gabriel drak)

It would be tempting to use Los Ultimos Romanticos as a template for a less than perfect script development process. The film is essentially a buddie movie, constructed around the affable characters of Perro and Gordo (to Spanish readers those names alone perhaps suggest something slightly too easy), who get by selling marijuana plants in a small Rio de la Plata balneario. The off-season seaside village is deserted, as most of the residents are Europeans summer there in the European winter. However, one Hungarian couple have remained. Perro finds them dead in their bed. He also discovers a stash of four million euros in their home which he removes and hides with Gordo’s help. The title of the script refers to the fact that the two are in theory writing a film script, (although they seem to have no connection at all to the film business in any shape or form), hence the maverick cop who will prove to be their nemesis ascribes the duo the titular nickname. A couple of bohemians living their lives free from the system. The problems with the film are thus: firstly, neither character seems in any way ‘romantic’ (in the poetic sense of the word). Secondly, the discovery of the money should be a Maguffin, rather than the driver of the plot. Thirdly, the twists feel predictable. Fourthly, there’s no tension at all. In the end, Los Ultimos Romanticos falls into that dangerous comedy-caper territory which is so hard to pull off. For undisclosed reasons, filmmakers all over the world choose possibly the hardest genre of them all to carry off with recurring frequency. The bonus is this allows the script to include jokes for the locals to enjoy. The downside is that it’s very hard not to make a pedestrian comedy-caper movie, especially when the caper element is as contrived as it is here. 

the wind will carry us (w&d abbas kiarostami)

The film’s title makes it sound as though this might be an Iranian version of a Douglas Sirk movie. In practice this film couldn’t be further from melodrama, or even drama. Essentially, it’s a study of an engineer who visits a remote rural village with a team of work companions who are never seen and spends most of his time trying to find reception for his mobile phone. His phone has no problem ringing, but he cannot hear what’s being said. So he runs across the village, gets into his car, drives up a hill, gets out of the car, and speaks to someone in Tehran. Either his boss or his family. This happens approximately 75 times. The use of repetition is clearly deliberate, but the intention behind this use of repetition remained cryptic. The engineer’s desperate need to communicate? The chasm that exists between rural and urban Iranian society? All of the above? The engineer also befriends a boy, who is constantly (repeatedly) sitting exams. At the end of the film someone falls into a hole they have been digging but gets out alive. Which in some ways felt like a metaphor for watching the movie. I realise that Kiarostami is considered a genius, and I think I’ve seen other films of his which I engaged with more readily, but I have to confess to a feeling of bemusement brought on by The Wind Will Carry Us, a film whose hermitic qualities escaped me upon this occasion. Having said that, there is always the subjectivity of the moment to consider when watching cinema; perhaps on another day the film might indeed have blown me away. 

dolor y gloria (w&d almodóvar)

Sometimes a filmmaker succeeds in occupying a role within their culture which permits them to grow old gracefully, like an artist or a novelist. There’s no need to worry about commercial viability, because there are stars who will line up to take part; the filmmkaker is free to indulge their whimsy or their genius as they see fit, without the interference of script development or production executives. Almodovar has never been near Hollywood, no matter how much his aesthetic contains elements that tally with that other culture. There’s nothing austere about his films, or overly intellectual. They possess a design elan, a delight in colour, music, artifice, which would sit happily across the Atlantic. But he’s never strayed far from Madrid, where he’s allowed to get on with doing what he wants, with budgets that more than meet his needs. The fact that the films are produced by his own production company no doubt facilitates the process.

This allows him to make this kind of film; one which is about a topic that doesn’t get much airing: the ageing of a middle-aged man. Salvador, played by Banderas, is a film director stricken down by illness. His youthful brio has faded. He mopes. Banderas plays this in a splendidly low-key tone. At one point, pace Hamlet, he offers advice to an actor: don’t cry, don’t force the emotion. Which is precisely what Banderas succeeds in doing. He offers a portrait of a man who has everything but at the same time feels as though his life is lacking. He tries heroin, (a slyly subversive twist, for those who might say that Almodovar has lost his punch; how many other directors casually introduce heroin into their films without it being for heightened dramatic purposes?), he visits old friends, he finds a lost lover, he drifts through doctors’ appointments and, above all - he remembers. Age accrues memory and the more we age, the more memory there is to process. Dolor y Gloria articulates this in three ways: firstly through the reconstructed scenes, staring Cruz, from Salvador’s childhood. Secondly in the lucid and brilliant theatre sequence, where the actor who has appropriated Salvador’s memory text, delivers a soliloquy about the lost lover (which the lost lover happens to see), and thirdly in conversation. There’s something almost Beckettian about all this, albeit a gaudy, gay Beckett, who lives in the kind of apartment with the kind of art one imagines would have made Beckett deeply uncomfortable. 

The sum of all these parts is a meandering movie, with characters who appear and then slip away, with a narrative which is tenuous, contrived, charming. It’s a film of quirky moments and high tenderness. It’s ostentatiously and gloriously self-indulgent. It’s as akin to reading a novel as cinema can be, a loose-limbed novel that celebrates the process of ageing and the exquisite library of memory.