1900 (w&d bertolucci, w giuseppe bertolucci, franco arcalli)

There’s a Bertolucci season on at Cinemateca, so this is the second instalment in a mini-Bertolluci binge. Cinemateca projected Novecento over two nights on film, which. during the first part, summoned up a nostalgic memory of the old Cinemateca. One of the projectors had a problem with the sound, which meant the reels had to be changed on the remaining projector that worked, giving a five minute break every twenty minutes or so. Given the slightly jagged nature of Novecento’s edit, this didn’t cause too much grief, although it has to be said that the second part, which flowed effortlessly, was a slightly less taxing viewer experience.

As for the film itself… Several thoughts occurred. Firstly, the seventies really were a golden age of epic filmmaking. The epic hasn’t entirely died (Bela Tarr springs to mind), but the great, sweeping arc of history movie certainly seems to be in abeyance. I would guess that Bertolucci, Angelopoulos, Coppola, Cimino all grew up watching Abel Gance, Renoir and Griffiths and thought, ‘anything they can do, we can do bigger.’ There may not be a lot of political nuance in Novecento, but if you want an example of how cinema can interrogate and represent history, then look no further. The scale of the film and the way in which it reveals the forces that lead to the onset of Mussolini’s fascism, is astonishing. 

On the other hand, there is a kind of crude subtlety (if that’s not a tautology) in the premise of childhood friends from different sides of the tracks, each struggling to get by in their own world, whilst seeking to maintain a friendship that grounds them in a common humanity. De Niro and Depardieu offer up compelling performances and their bromance is convincing. They put flesh and blood on the bones of the somewhat contrived premise. This is undoubtably one of De Niro’s great forgotten performances. (He was on a roll with Taxi Driver, Godfather 2, The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull all coming out within a four year period, which must be one of the most fertile acting periods in any career ever). He and Depardieu carry a film which retains its emotional power in spite of obvious issues, presumably to do with finance, in the edit. This is a film that seems to be fuelled by the sheer energy of its participants, (actors, cinematography, music), driving the narrative forwards in spite of its chronological leapfrogs. Novecento is both a testament to the political struggles in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century and the power of cinema to relate those struggles. 

new dark age [james bridle]

The full title of this book is New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. It addresses all the current shibboleths and more. Fake News. Surveillance. Chem-trails. Viral Youtube videos, etc.  These issues are not short of coverage. In fact, one of Bridle’s key tenets is that we are drowning in an excess of data, information, opinion. We can no longer see the wood from the trees.  What makes this book feel so relevant is the approach that the author adopts towards this tsunami. Firstly he places it within its historical context, tracing the lineage and origins of the idea of modern computing with all that this has entailed. Secondly, he places it within a cultural context. Joseph Heller, Walter Benjamin, Piketty, Debord and Ruskin are just some of the names that crop up. Thirdly, the book is filled with a wealth of anecdotal detail which constantly grounds what might be an abstract discussion. From Rwanda to Icelandic Volcanoes to the Teletubbies, the writer strides through the ploughed data fields of the digital age. Each and every chapter is thought-provoking, seeking to posit the issues of modern technology and the paradox of progress in the here and now. 

The ten chapters are titled with a single word that begins with the letter C (Chasm, Computation etc.) The naming of parts. This seems typical of the elegance of the mind behind the analysis, a spirit guide to help us plot a course through the revolution that has been unleashed in the course of a middle-aged lifetime. A revolution whose effects and consequences are only just beginning to be grappled with. The New Dark Age (which embraces the good and the bad in that term) feels like the best starting point I’ve stumbled across to help the ordinary soul take stock. If I had any influence, which I don’t, I’d make it part of the school curriculum. Humpty Dumpty has has a big fall. The young are the ones who will have to start to put the pieces back together again. They’re going to need all the help and guidance they can get. 

rojo (w&d benjamin naishtat)

Rojo is a baroque, offbeat movie about fascism. Although you might almost never know. It focuses on a small town lawyer, Claudio, who is comfortable in his provincial world, until one day a crazy man comes into his local restaurant and accosts him, before later shooting himself in the head, in front of Claudio and his wife. Claudio takes his body and ditches it in the desert. 

There’s a kind of rumbling plot about whether Claudio’s action will be discovered and whether he’s guilty of anything really. An eccentric Chilean TV detective gets on the case, which puts the wind up Alfredo, but this is 1975 and the military coup is coming and fairly soon its going to be considered to be more or less legitimate to take out subversives without having to account for one’s actions. 

This sense of creeping lawlessness is what underpins Naishtat’s film. He’s fascinated by the way in which polite society welcomes the breakdown of the rule of law, which permits both authoritarianism and corruption. Claudio gets involved in a scam to steal a house which has been left vacant by political victims of the state. A young man is kidnapped and disappeared by Claudio’s daughter’s jealous boyfriend. Everything starts to unravel. 

The film presents a world right on the edge of a delirious insanity, where the light of day is eclipsed not by darknesss, but by an infra-red parallel reality, with perception warped into something out of a science-fiction film. (Literally in one sequence) What’s telling is that even those who stand to benefit from the arriving military coup are also profoundly unsettled by it, their world tilted off its axis, with any kind of madness now posited and possible. Fascism is a false prophet: the myth of order it disseminates might be popular, but it turns out to be deeply troubling for your state of mind and catastrophic for your sanity.

before the revolution (w&d bertolucci w. gianni amico)

If I was looking for a contemporary filmic reference point for Bertolucci’s early, neo-romantic drama, it would be his fellow Italian, Guadagnino’s, Call Me by Your Name. Both films are constructed around the premise of an illicit sexual relationship which profoundly shapes the consciousness of their young protagonists. However, Bertolucci’s film ultimately feels far more transgressive than Guadagnino’s. It recounts the love affair of Fabrizio, a handsome, intellectually confused young man, with his aunt, Gina, a beautiful, slightly tragic figure, who has few qualms about seducing her nephew. There’s one breathless scene, where, with the family falling asleep after dinner, Gina and Fabrizio dance together in front of them. Seeing that they are the only ones awake, they cannot resist the desire to kiss. It’s a protracted kiss, charged with the risk of terrible, instantaneous scandal, filmed in close up, with the audience as conscious of the other people in the room as they are of the lovers, just as they themselves must be. We become complicit in their illicit affair; something which, watching it over fifty years later is still dramatically potent, even shocking, because incest is one of the last remaining taboos. In Italy in the mid 1960s it must have been a coruscating scene to watch.

The film is peppered with remarkable moments such as this, sandwiched between scenes with slightly less convincing dialogue. Whenever Fabrizio attempts to articulate his pre-revolutionary, bourgeois angst, he comes across as a vapid, spoilt youth. But when he is living this precipitous affair with his aunt, he becomes an audacious radical. Bertolucci’s film rightly puts its finger on the Chekhovian premise that the revolution begins at home, with the decisions people take in their most intimate moments pre-figuring political change. (Something Foucault was also writing about). In many ways, Before the Revolution is a parlour piece, a melodrama set in a provincial town. Parma is beautifully filmed, and there’s even the hint of an eco-message in the Antonioni-esque closing sequence, set in marshes which are soon to be sold off and drained. However, this is a parlour piece endowed with all the recourses of cinema, with some remarkable camerawork and a compelling score by Ennio Morricone. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the striking crowd scenes, which depict day-to-day Parma life, and then zoom in to pick out the protagonists as they search for one another in the madding crowd: at the same time part of the mass, but also alienated individuals trying to find in one another a reason to overcome the banality of bourgeois living. 

This mash-up of the intimate, domestic family drama, (echoes to be found also in Coppola and Scorsese), allied to an epic approach, make for a film which feels as though it’s talking about its generation, even if it does so before, as the title states, the fireworks of the revolution are set off. 

cold war (w&d pawel pawlikowski; w. janusz glowacki, piotr borkowski)

Cold War opens beautifully and the first ten minutes or so suggest a riveting investigation of issues which are as vivid today as they were in 1949, when these opening scenes occur. Issues such as the dangerous notion of racial or cultural purity; the malign influence of walls; the political manipulation of ‘tradition’. These issues are explored within the context of the protagonist Wictor’s mission to collate and document, as part of the communist cultural aparatus, Polish folk songs. A communist Alan Lomax. However, this is just the framework for a narrative which soon veers off in another direction altogether, becoming a love story as Wictor falls for Zula, a high-spirited, young singer-dancer who’s enlisted as part of the troupe Wictor is putting together to tour and showcase these folk songs. Once the group has been set up, the political-cultural agenda of the film falls away and we’re caught up in a prosaic love story. One where the pretty younger woman supposedly falls for the craggy older man and together they embark on doomed Europe-wide love affair. Quite apart from the fact that the film seems to abandon its fascinating thematic context after fifteen minutes, there’s the additional problem that these two people seem to lack any kind of chemistry. They don’t laugh, they don’t talk to each other, they don’t do much except gaze at one another in a faintly narcissistic fashion and snog a lot. And sometimes play music together. There are inevitable comparisons with La-La Land, but whatever else you might say about Chazelle’s film, there was chemistry between Stone and Gosling, they came across as two people who enjoyed each other’s company. When the Polish couple’s relationship hits the rocks soon after they’ve finally got together after 10 years of separation, it comes as no surprise. Sooner or later you’re going to get bored of chewing each other’s faces, no matter how varied and beautiful the scenery.

Which is another issue: the film’s beauty begins to feel counter-productive. Nowhere more so than a sequence in Croatia, which seems shoe-horned in largely so that a beautiful shot of a cathedral fronted by urchins playing football can add to the film’s aesthetic capital. When they are finally united in Paris, the couple live in a garrett which looks like something you’d nowadays pay an arm and a  leg for on AirBnB. This is supposed to be a gritty story about the desperate struggle of two people to find love in spite of the geo-political odds, but increasingly it starts to feel like an ad for a very expensive perfume. Even the best scenes, such as Zula’s frenetic and desperate jive in a Paris nightclub, are subsumed by the aesthetic: more interested in how her desperation looks than how it feels. 

Cold War presents history as instagram project. Choose your setting and enact a scene of passion, throw yourself in each other’s arms and hold that kiss. As though the sufferings caused by the Cold War were ultimately something rather glamorous, and if you wanted a break you could always nip across the border (to Paris) or marry a Sicilian count and high-tail it round Europe for a few years, before deciding it hasn’t really worked out and heading home. The realities of the Cold War in eastern Europe, as the films of Wajda or Kieslowski or even Zulawski make clear, were nothing like this. The further we move away from the actuality of historical events, the more they become deformed; their realities distorted and caricatured. In an age where we are suffering in a very visceral fashion from the gross over-simplification of recent historical processes, Cold War offers a surprisingly lumpen vision of the history its title refers to. This is painting-by-numbers history. Beautifully painted, of that there’s no doubt, the composition and camera work is well-nigh flawless. However all those other elements of cinematic narrative: character, dialogue, plot, are simplified to such a degree that it feels at times as though one is watching the over-extended trailer for a vastly more interesting film than the one which is playing on screen. 

compass [enard tr. charlotte mandell]

A second Enard novel. A suitable tome to initiate a new year. 

There’s a lot to unpack when reading Enard.

Firstly - what kind of a novel is this? In so far as novels usually depend on plot. Something Enard quite clearly isn’t that interested in. There is a plot in Compass, of a kind. Franz Ritter, the narrator, is lying awake in his Vienna flat, dying, one is informed, probably (although maybe not). He has recently received a document from Sarah, the love of his life, who is in Sarawak. The novel will detail their past history, but in terms of plot development, you can more or less forget it. The novel follows the musings of an insomniac night. At the end of the night, there’s a brief flurry of real-time email exchange between the pair, but nothing is resolved or even destroyed. So, this is a meditative novel. It’s a rumination, as much as a story. It’s also, it feels at times, a wilful counter-novel. It doesn’t want you to be seduced by the novel’s tricks, which are those canny plot twists which keep the reader wanting to turn the page. If that’s what you’re after, Enard appears to be saying, give up now, because you’re not going to get it. 

At the same time, this is a love story. A reflexive, poetic love story. The word poetic is used here to clarify the fact that Enard writes about love in the same way as a poet does. A poet rarely sets out to recount the story of the love they are celebrating. The poet sets out to detail the sensations and emotions which the state of love provokes. There might be a narrative to the Sonnets, but the reader doesn’t read the Sonnets for this reason. The Sonnets exist to capture the sensation of love, something poetry by and large achieves more effectively than prose. Because, as they say, love is fleeting, it is about lived moments, rather than a coherent story. One pure moment of love can outweigh a lifetime. Love recalibrates value. Those moments weigh a million times more than all the others. Enard’s book flowers when Franz tells his readership about the moments he and his beloved, Sarah, finally achieved the proximity that he has dreamed of. In Palmyra and Tehran. The lack of any clear plot, the deviations and the anecdotes, so tangential, are eclipsed by these moments of intimacy. Something which lent the ending of the book, for this reader at least, a curious emotional power. We can go round the houses, do our jobs, run our races, but this notion of “love” will always be shadowing us, we will always be awaiting the moment it chooses to seize and twist our dreams once again. 

Then again, this is a book which is dedicated to an exploration of the relationship between the Occident and the Orient. In the same way that Zone was centred on the Mediterranean. This is where the text acquires a scholarly dimension, perhaps a didactic one. Both Franz and Sarah, the narrator’s beloved, are fascinated by the way in which the construct of the Orient by Western European artists has shaped the way in which Western European culture has evolved and also how the Orient has been perceived. Allowing the notion of an organisation like Isis to be seen as an Oriental phenomenon, something the novel refutes, saying that Isis is just as anathema to most Middle-Easterners as it is to most Europeans. (For Enard the Orient is circumscribed by an arc that stretches from Istanbul (or Vienna) to Tehran, via Aleppo and Damascus, even if Sarah ends up in Indonesia, and the latter stages of the book engages to a minimal degree with India and Buddhism.) There is a Saidian exegesis of the way in which notions of the Orient, filtered via the accounts of early European visitors, are manifested in the work of many artists including Flaubert, Wagner, Beethoven and a hundred other figures of greater or lesser renown. At the same time, Sarah’s scholarship investigates the circularity of the process, the way in which the Orient has used the Western notions of what it is as a mirror to further define its own cultural identity. The shifting territory of ‘the other’ as they might have said back in the days of my 80s philosophy classes. Enard’s scholarship is dazzling, and clearly a large part of the reason he writes is to try to communicate the subtleties of these relationships, to break down the assumed, trenchant visions of cultural identity, a task which seems even more urgent in these times of phoney cultural warfare. 

So, given the varied aspects of this particular novel, here’s a speculative conclusion to the question of Enard’s true novelistic agenda. Enard is a writer whose greatest concern is to maintain the urgency and import of the word, as an agent of communication. Which sounds slightly highfalutin, but isn’t really. In a society where the image has become transcendent, where the capacity of concentration on the word is ebbing, Enard seeks to re-vindicate the power of language as a means of bridging difference. Compass is a paean to this; a great torrent of words which break over the reader in wave after wave, constantly seeming to urge us not to be seduced by the simplicities of narrative, to dig deeper, to assimilate, to love, even to learn…. 

numéro une (w&d tonie marshall, w. raphaëlle bacqué, marion doussot)

Tonie Marshall’s overtly feminist feature has been made with impeccable production values and a whiplash edit which gives it the feel of a thriller. The narrative is straightforward: Emmanuelle Blachey is headhunted by an influential feminist group, and encouraged to put herself forwards to become the CEO of one of France’s top 40 companies, the first woman to do so. In order to achieve this she needs to outsmart the obnoxious but powerful fixer, Beaumel, who wants to instal his own man in the post, in large part to cover up for personal corruption. There’s nothing subtle about the narrative, and the script uses every trick in the book to lever up the pressure on its protagonist: loving but sensitive husband who feels vulnerable in the wake of his wife’s success; glass ceiling sexism in the job she currently has; a concealed history of mental health problems. It makes for a frothy, enjoyable movie, which wears its feminist credentials on its sleeve. One could quite easily imagine a Hollywood remake. At times, with its sharp edit and carefully selected panoramic shots of La Defense, it feels like it could almost be a Bourne movie. There’s a slight nagging doubt that, in setting out to beat the boys at their own game, the director is nonetheless seduced into playing their game, with a phallocentric plot development and ostentatious display of the length of its budget, but maybe this is what is needed to do more than preach to the converted? As Blachey struggles to overcome the obstacles placed in her way, we root for her to succeed. It may well be that this is in large part due to the ersatz normality which Emmanuelle Devos bestows on the character. She might be a high-flying, Mandarin speaking uberwoman, who’s capable of drinking her Chinese business associates under the table (and out-karaoke-ing them to boot), but Devos convinces us she’s also a regular, vulnerable Josephine. Whether ambitious CEOs of large capitalist organisations are in reality capable of being quite as homely and sympathetic as Blachey is questionable, but the fact that we buy into this idea is another aspect of the sleight-of-hand this resourceful movie succeeds in pulling off. 

the other side of everything (d. mila turajlic)

Mila Turajlic’s documentary is at once a potted history of modern Serbia and a sensitive but deeply honest portrait of the filmmaker’s mother. It also goes to show what can be achieved with little more than a camera and a good story. The hook around which the narrative is constructed is that there is a door in the apartment where Turajlic’s family have lived for generations, in central Belgrade, which has remained shut for sixty years. When Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia, when the war had just ended, and the communists were redistributing living space, two rooms from their apartment were annexed. A family moved in next door. The two sides of the door never met. However this is just the hook, upon which is framed the portrayal of the mother, a fearless mathematician who campaigned vociferously against Milosevic, and is now, as Serbia veers back towards right-wing politician extremism, accused of being a traitor for her part in Milosevic’s downfall. The film shows her relating her past and details her ongoing struggle today. whilst gently probing the mother-daughter relationship, as Turajlic tries to live up to her mother’s example. This film is, of course, her way of pursuing and honouring her mother’s struggle. 

heroes [franco “bifo” berardi]

Heroes is a cautionary tale for the twenty first century. The author collects accounts of those mass killers and suicide killers whose notorious stories have peppered recent decades. Breivik, John Holmes, Colombine to name but a few. He details the stories behind the actions of these young men, connecting them via a shared absence of empathy and a sociopathic disconnection from society, a concept which, the author declares, quoting Thatcher, is collapsing in the face of neo-capitalism and the internet. There are intimations of a biological-political evolution, none of which, as he points out, looks in any way like a positive step for the human race. This discursive tome also examines the syndrome of mass suicide, in India, in Japan and Korea among other countries. Again, Berardi ties this in with a sense of despair that individuals face as the very notion of society seems to implode, leaving behind nothing more than an atomised wreck of something which was once the glue that bound humanity together. The book also uses this prism as a means of understanding Islamic extremism, associating it with the anarcho-libertarianism of the US school killers and Breivik. 

This is a pugnacious, desperate book which peers into the well of nihilism and then tries to take a few steps back in the final chapter. In its analysis of the failings of democracy and the impotence of political activism, allied to the death of the utopian communist dream, it clearly presages the neo-fascism of Trump, Bolsonaro et al. As though conscious of the terrible implications of his book’s logic - for the environment, individual liberties, and even the human race - when suicidal nihilism starts to seem like a rational reaction to living in a social dystopia, Berardi seeks to row back in his final chapter, urging the reader to disavow received theories or philosophies of life. The only trouble with this is it sounds a little but like the bluster of a Trumper or a Brexiteer, urging us to ignore the experts. It also goes against the more classical humanist grain which seems to be latent in Berardi’s erudite use of culture, from Kim-Ki-Duk to Baudrillard. In the end, in spite of the author’s upbeat and engaging dialogue with the reader, and in spite of his urgings to ignore the warnings contained within the text, this is still a terrifying book, which outlines at the very least a future period of history where the very idea of the “human” as a rational, empathetic, religious animal will cease to exist, to be replaced by a body whose nerves have been cauterised and whose sensitivity destroyed. A fascist dystopia which might have been written by his near-namesake, Ballard. 

la villa (w&d. robert guédiguian w. serge valletti)

Robert Guédiguian’s film is a chekhovian family drama. Three siblings come together when their elderly father is taken ill in his Corsican fishing village home. The siblings, all of them seemingly in their fifties, contemplate the life that has been and the life to come. One is an actress, another a writer and former political activist, who arrives with his younger girlfriend, and the third has run his father’s small restaurant, The Mange-Tout. Each will have their moment of epiphany as they come to terms with their father’s mortality. This is a solid, slightly theatrical drama, which moves at a stately pace, and is touched by occasional moments of serendipity which offset a slightly predictable narrative. It’s the kind of film the French, and only the French, seem to make a lot. There’s a subplot of some Moroccan children who have arrived as refugees and are being pursued by the police (a European trope now, as this notion has also featured in films by Kaurismäki, Guadagnino and even Haneke). The strand is touching but feels slightly contrived, and is a plot development which exists in order to reinforce the theme of French family dysfunction rather than reveal the suffering that might lead a family to take a boat from the coast of Africa across the Mediterranean. One wonders what Edward Said would make of this narrative twist. The most potent moment in the film, perhaps, is a sudden jagged sequence showing the characters arriving for the first time in the fishing village, thirty years previously, in a washed out Summer’s day, a sequence set to a rampaging Bob Dylan track. All of the sudden the film seems to transmogrify into something else, the bleak colours doused in Summer. 

(Checking imdb I discover: “Footage from the film Ki Lo Sa, by the same director, is used in a flashback sequence. The footage features the same actors of the main characters, but 31 years younger, which gives the flashback a realistic feel.” I also learn that Guédiguian works repeatedly with the same stable of actors, over the course of many years, which perhaps gives La Villa’s examination of the process of ageing an added resonance.)