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.