a ciambra (w&d jonas carpignano)

‘Ciambra’ is the name of the estate where Pio, the film’s protagonist, lives. It’s an estate which is rubbish-strewn, which looks more third world than first. Located somewhere South of Naples, it’s where Pio’s gypsy family live, a hive of high density living and buzzing, low-level crime. Pio, the film makes clear, is another in a long line of bicycle thieves. 

In this sense A Ciambra functions in a very classical narrative fashion. The film is Pio’s coming-of-age tale, one that will feature loss of innocence and confrontation with moral complexity. All of this is done diligently by the narrative. However, the film’s strength is the way in which it captures Pio’s world. The camerawork is restless, handheld, a feverish reflection of the feverish life lived by the characters it depicts. 

Pio Amato, as Pio, an adolescent who wants to be a man, gives a performance of restless verisimilitude, for reasons which later become clear. It’s only when the credits roll that we realise the reason Pio’s family is so utterly convincing is because they are a family, the Amatos. The documentary feel is authentic. These aren’t actors, they’re the real thing. 

All of which makes for a film which succeeds in its mission to capture the realities of living on Europe’s front line. One lyrical sequence shows Pio softening, becoming more human, when he has to deliver a TV to a camp, peopled by African immigrants. The director captures this world which is the other side of the European coin (the Euro) with not only vast flair, but also unflinching humanity. 

vice (w&d adam mckay)

So, Dick Cheney, who the hell were you? What was that all about? As we enter another era, which makes the bogeymen of yesterday look like ‘maybe they weren’t so bad after all’, we’re left wondering. George W, who features heavily in a great performance by Sam Rockwell, (Vice is full of impressive performances, Bale’s being the icing on the cake), has been heavily rehabilitated in recent years. All of a sudden he isn’t the man who rushed headlong to war at the first opportunity, but a down-to-earth fellow who knows how to talk to his fellow americans and just happened to be president. Which is more or less how he’s played in McKay’s film, which makes it very clear that Cheney was the power behind the throne. Of course, this is the danger with revisionist history, something that has long afflicted Peter Morgan and is now occurring with James Graham in the UK: they turn men and women whose actions caused incalculable political and social damage into someone who might have walked out of a soap opera. We’re not much the wiser at the end of Vice as to what made Cheney tick. He doesn’t seem such a bad soul, and perhaps he wasn’t, but it’s the ‘perhaps he was’ that seems more important to me. The film tries to square its ends by putting titles at the conclusion giving figures for fatalities in the Iraq war, but this doesn’t really make up for the fact McKay soft soaps his role in Haliburton, and the personal gain he and his family levered as a result of the war. Because this is the heart of corruption, and it should be acknowledged that all political systems are always liable to corruption: who gains? It’s far easier to take ‘difficult epoch making decisions’ when you know they’re in your own personal interest. Vice lets Cheney off the hook here, in spite of the nice arty sequence of fish hooks at the end.

It’s the risk that McKay’s film-making takes. The jokey backhanders and the explicative, tongue-in-cheek subtitling. Personally, I rate him and respect him for getting movies made about big topics that need talking about. But having said that, Vice feels as though it bites off more than it can chew. It might have been far more effective if, rather than becoming a biopic, it had really given itself time to pick apart at the seams the reality of those days pre-and-post-911, pinning down the subject’s motives with greater clarity. Asking a few harder questions. And offering answers which were less easy to brush off.

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Regarding this last point, it’s perhaps worth addressing the Shakespeare correlative. Someone else who wrote political drama, and could obviously be used as a reference by the likes of Morgan, Graham and Mckay. There are two significant points to take on board here. One is that Shakespeare’s editorial line never fudges things. Richard 3, Richard 2, Henry 4, Henry 5: the virtues and faults of these characters are very clearly delineated, there’s no sitting on the fence (as opposed to the treatment of his tragic heroes, for example). And secondly it should be noted that Shakespeare never commented explicitly on contemporary politics. The closest he got was Henry 8. Perhaps because it was too dangerous or perhaps because he decided that it wasn’t the dramatist’s role to attempt to re-present the events of the day. In the relatively new fashion for re-presenting contemporary history, (docu-fiction), there’s always the suspicion that there’s a tendency to oversimplify, to paint with a brush that doesn’t allow for the subtlety of fine detail, detail which history will provide. There’s something which feels dangerously opportunistic and cosy about Graham’s depiction of Cummings, for example. Perhaps Brecht’s Arturo Ui is also relevant here. The “balance” demanded by docu-fiction is just as dangerous as the “balance” which contemporary broadcasters seem to believe necessary, without ever realising that the “balance” they provide is skewered by the fact that the theoretically neutral position adopted to arbitrate this balance is never actually neutral, is always the product of a system with its own interests. 

landscapes [john berger]

This collection of essays spans many years. (It might have helped if all the essays were dated, rather than just a few.) The book is divided into two parts: the first a more personal account of artists and writers whose influence he has relished; the second a more discursive set of essays ranging from anything from the role of the peasantry in society to a visit to Palestine. The first half is perhaps the more engaging: Berger’s passions for cubism, Benjamin, Barthes etc shine through. He writes with a generous enthusiasm. There are other essays, notably the one entitled White Bird, about the peasant tradition in Eastern Europe of carving a white bird for the home, where his analysis of the intersection between culture and society (and names) feels wonderfully lucid. 

It’s hard to know how to place Berger. On the one hand, he might be seen as a lost prophet of British culture. One, like Brook, who fled the country and whose local influence waned as a result. On the other, he might be seen as a kind of Ruskin in waiting, a writer whose work will continue to be read years after other contemporaries in the art world are forgotten. The reason for the latter is that Berger, at his best, goes towards the nub of the experience of ‘experiencing’ art, in all its multiple dimensions. He tries to get under the skin of the weird relationship between society and culture, and on occasion in this collection of essays it feels as though he nails it. Having said which, although this book namechecks Debord, among others, at other times his insistent Marxism feels dated. Which is not to say that Marxism is dated; rather than the relationship Berger writes about feels dated, as he struggles to come to terms with the dashed dreams of the post-war world. 

history of fear (w&d benjamín naishtat)

Naishtat’s early film is a stark, Haneke-esque dissection of a society teetering on the brink. How does the medium represent fear? The jagged edit and mash-up of naturalism with stylised moments make for an unsettling watch. The film follows various characters who either or live or work on a private housing estate on the edge of Buenos Aires. The lives of these characters are portrayed through short scenes, like vignettes, with no obvious narrative through line. An elderly home help who collapses as she vacuums. The alarm from one of the houses on the estate sounds for no reason, and the security guard goes to investigate. The alarm stops sounding, but the security guard doesn’t reappear. People are trapped in lifts, the electricity is erratic, strangers throw rubbish into people’s lush gardens, wild dogs roam free. The edge of darkness is menacingly close, so much so that at one point all the lights go out and the characters and audience are left in the dark. The film maintains a steady, grounded pace and tone, in contrast to the melodrama of the title. The narrative is a patchwork which slowly coalesces towards a finale that hints at terror. Argentinian cinema since the turn of the millennium has forged a rich, acerbic path, and Naishtat is a welcome addition to the canon. The duality between a society which recognises itself as both progressive and impoverished, European and American, ‘third world’ and ‘first’, generates tensions which create narratives unafraid of walking up to the cliff edge of the technological society which permits cinema to exist, and peering over the edge to see what it looks like on the other side. The closing frames of History of Fear, where the director has the actors assume faces representing states of emotion, including fear, perfectly expresses the boundaries of cinema’s capacity to capture these realities. 

chronicle of a death foretold [márquez, tr gregory rabassa]

Having read the book in a day, which is not hard to, and having then been trapped in a mosquito net of sleeplessness, I pondered what Márquez’s novel was really about. Pondered and decided it had to do with the random stupidity of violence and of codes of violence. Márquez writes with the voice of one who is investigating a crime which took place in the past, at least twenty years ago. The fate of Santiago Nasser is conveyed with a detached tone. One that renders the violence, as it is conveyed twice towards the end of the book, all the more shocking. Márquez first offers a surgical description of the autopsy, in all its gory detail, and then repeats the account of the knife thrusts themselves when describing the murder within the book’s narrative. Each time, the violence jars, renting asunder the placid tone of the novel, just as the supposed act rent asunder the placid tone of the small Caribbean town where the murder occurred. The description brought to mind Bolaño’s chapter on the Killings in 2666. 

There is, no doubt, something masterly in the author’s handling of his material. At the same time, it’s perhaps hard to read without a smidgeon of concern for the way it presents its world as something out of the old testament. An approach to the presentation of ‘world’ literature that can also be seen in the work of many authors whose work has become successful in those parts of the world which generate revenue streams. Perhaps it might be said that the author is helping to construct the mythical bedrock of a still youthful country. That this work will indeed become, one day, part of the old testament of his nation’s literature. 

An alternative POV: The novel, which by the middle of the twentieth century had become a hideout for the middle classes, the literary classes, or else for tales of remarkable endeavour, is returned by Márquez to the people. He drags it back to the world of Chaucer or Lazarillo de Tormes: a space to recount the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. And in so doing he helped to democratise an art form that had become beached on the shore of the literati. 

sueño florianópalis (w&d ana katz, w daniel katz)

Ana Katz’s slow burning family comedy-drama evolves into an affirmative tale about the protagonist, Lucrecia, played by Mercedes Morán. Lucrecia and Pedro (Gustavo Garzón) have gone to Florianópolis on a family holiday which is not all it seems. Lucrecia and Pedro, both psychoanalysts, are actually separated, using the holiday as a means to see if their relationship has any chance of rehabilitation. Something both seem to rapidly decide is unlikely, as they embark on romantic liaisons in the tropics, ironically with another separated husband and wife team, Marco and Larisa. The family holiday trope is rounded off by their daughter enjoying a fling with Marco’s son, Julian. 

The mood of the film, set on Brazil’s lush Atlantic coast, veers away from the melodramatic towards the meditative. Lucrecia’s journey through the film is one of gradual acceptance and reconciliation with her fate. It’s a measured, likeable performance, although from this viewer’s perspective the film was unbalanced by the fact that Pedro, her husband’s character, an ageing clown, remained underdeveloped, meaning that their relationship, and the pain of their separation, never felt completely convincing. Nevertheless, Sueno Florianópalis is a family holiday movie with a twist, that gives a limpid insight into the differences between Brazilian and Argentinean culture. The south’s wistful dreaming of tropical delights; a brief escapism which the Argentine family embraces before it has to return to the day-to-day realities of Buenos Aires. 

hangover square [patrick hamilton]

On one level, Hangover Square could be viewed as a cruel, neo-misogynist text, trapped in a repetitive rut. The protagonist, Bone, a schizophrenic, is fatally attracted to Netta, a femme fatale whose only objective is to exploit Bone for anything he can offer. She leads him on, takes his money, ridicules and humiliates him and unsurprisingly his thoughts turn towards revenge. Netta is far from a sympathetic character, and never becomes any more than two dimensional; the reader is given little insight into why she is like she is, what has turned her into such a malevolent soul. Furthermore Bone’s masochistic pursuit makes for a weak protagonist, one whose refusal to learn from his errors becomes more and more frustrating. 

On the other hand…. Hangover Square is perhaps a novel which is less interested in psychological veracity and more interested in recounting the kind of fever dream of the build-up to war. The novel opens on the eve of 1939. and Bone’s calvary runs parallel to Britain’s descent towards war. Netta and her sidekick Peter are both staunch believers in Chamberlain and the Munich deal, something which Bone despises. Hamilton clearly posits Netta and Peter as quasi fascists, potential Hitler sympathisers. They represent something rotten in British society. (There are echoes of Maclaren Ross here.) Britain itself teeters on the verge of fascism, a country where people have nothing better to do than get drunk and ride the hangover and get drunk again. As such Netta and Peter represent an amoral core at the heart of British society, which can only be excised with violence. 

To categorise Hangover Square as cruel or misogynist, as I’ve just done in the opening paragraph, is perhaps to miss the point. Because the cruelty is representative of its time. A time gripped by a fever, on both sides of the channel, one that needed to be cauterised and expunged. Once again, a writer seems to suggest that if Britain hadn’t had to confront a foe across the water, it too might have drifted towards fascism. Far from nearly destroying Britain, the war came just in the nick of time to rescue it.