cider with rosie (laurie lee)

At one stage towards the end of the book, Lee states that he is describing the last gasp of a way of life which existed for a thousand years. The arrival of the motor car would destroy a social fabric which had survived more or less unchanged since the village he lived in had been founded. So there is a double nostalgia at work in the text. On the one hand for the people, family and friends of his youth. On the other for a world which exists no more, which cannot be revisited. 

Reading the book I thought a lot about my grandparents, in particular my grandfather, who was born in Suffolk and moved to the outskirts of London in the wake of the great depression. HIs upbringing was urban (in Ipswich) so there are many differences, but he too was born into a world that was conclusively lost by the time he was in his mid twenties. My grandfather loved the automobile, the joy of speed which it brought, the connectivity. One of his many jobs as a young man was to be a coach driver, where he would take groups on excursion, much as Lee describes his village’s visit to Weston-Super-Mare. The great game of these excursions, my grandfather told me, was to stop at as many pubs as possible and get the coach driver drunk. Luckily for him, my grandfather was never a great drinker. 

Lee is, one senses, more of a poet than a prose writer, something that works in his favour in what is a Proustian memoir. His evocation of place possesses a sensory feel which is intoxicating. There’s also a disarming honesty, which resists any sense of shame. Warts and all is the way. This also speaks of a rural life which possessed less romanticism, less concern for the niceties of life (killing animals, sexual encounters at an early age, causal violence). There’s a rugged shrug of the shoulders in Lee’s depiction of his teenage flings or the violence of a farmer’s fist. This was how people were and always had been. To suggest that they were failing to adhere to moral or political codes would have seemed bizarre to the villagers, who were instead adhering to a code that had been formed, as Lee puts it, over the course of a thousand years. 

The comparison with Proust is interesting. Lee is no Proust, no-one else was or shall be. Yet his invocation of a lost world is rooted in a quest to capture it in the word. Like Proust, he appears to write in an easy, fluid way, the words seem to “come naturally”. However, the efficacy of each word feels like an imperative. The wrong choice of word would conjure another memory, not the one the writer seeks to invoke. As such the writing is driven by a fierce pragmatism that leads to great beauty.

if on a winter’s night a traveller (italo calvino)

The longer I was reading this book, for the third or fourth time, the harder I found it to finish. There were several points over the fortnight I was reading it when I really believed I could find myself  reading it for years. Sentence by sentence, idea by idea. 

I first read the novel as an eighteen year old. I have a memory of mentioning it in a Eng lit class of Lachlan Mackinnon. In relation to Shakespeare’s technical ingenuity. Or something pretentious like that. I recall being dazzled by it. Hard not to be, on the first time of reading. Re-reading again, certain passages are lodged in the brain. The ringing phone. The vision of the world stripped bare. There is much that is still breathtaking. 

At the same time, even works of structural genius start to date. There’s something a little tired about the depiction of women. Even if the writer seeks to acknowledge this. The novel has more context now. Structural ingenuity went mainstream with David Mitchell, David Nicholls, Tom McCarthy among others in the UK, not to mention those beyond these island shores. People have read Borges now, if not Cortazar. Of course, Calvino himself was writing within the tradition of the nouveau roman, not to mention Sterne, Rabelais et al. 

In a sense I can’t help thinking that Calvino failed, for all the brilliance of If On A Winter’s Night. He should never have stopped writing it. The idea and the novel deserve to be a thousand chapters or a thousand years long. Perhaps I slowed down because I didn’t want to finish. The idea is infinite. It should never end. Neither should the book.

ghost town anthology (w&d denis côté)

In Australia, it seemed to me, there was always the great lurking unknown. Something like 95% of the country inhabit a small band of land near the coast. The interior is a pulsing, potentially malevolent, potentially benign god. Roeg’s Walkabout and Weir’s Picnic On Hanging Rock captured this effectively. Canada has a similar wilderness, which is great expanse of the North. Bleak, inhospitable and for the most part unknown. Drive a couple of hours north of Quebec, where this film is set and it does indeed feel as though you’re approaching the edge of the known civilised world. In Cote’s bleak but watchable parable, this has become the land of the dead. They live side by side with the living, only the living don’t notice them. Until, in this instance, a young man dies and comes back to haunt his parents and only brother, precipitating a mass incursion of the dead into the tiny township of Irénée-les-Neiges. There are all kinds of reference points here, from Benjamín Naishtat’s History of Fear, another cold modern dystopian fable set at the opposite end of the Americas, to Miller’s The Crucible. Even, in the use of one memorable image, Chagall. In the corners of the world which are furthest removed from the trappings of the modern world, closest to the wilderness, the forces of magic can still do their thing. 

battle in heaven (w&d reygadas)

It took a few days to process Reygadas’ second film, which provoked much debate in the Fénix bar on a Saturday night before the world changed. Debate focussed as I recall on the breach between Reygadas’ undeniable distinctiveness as a filmmaker as against the coherence of the story his film was setting out to tell. On the one hand, it’s not often that I feel so baffled by a film’s plot. Who’s kidnapping who? Why is the boss’s daughter shagging the driver/ odd-job-man? Why does he do what he does (to refrain from a spoiler). Who the hell is that little police chief and whose side is he on? Not to mention the family that get out of the car in the posh neighbourhood. However, even as I write these questions, I realise that this scene is a mirror image of the quite brilliant scene in the petrol station when an entire indigenous family, at least 20 of them (including Magdalena Flores from Japón) emerge from a car, one by one. This is one of many remarkable scenes in the film, including the march of the penitents. In an ordinary narrative film, the hook that keeps you watching is wanting got know what is going to happen next. In a Reygadas film, the hook is what you’re going to see next. Sometimes the two overlap, but there’s a sly difference. Narrative is normally primary; with Reygadas it’s secondary. We’re closer to the territory of Cocteau or Parajanov. The tension between a cinema of the image and a cinema of the literary is so strong in Reygadas’ work. It makes for an absorbing dialectic.

japón (w&d reygadas)

There’s a strange magic to Reygadas’ film making. What is this magic? Firstly there’s a pursuit of the elemental. Cinema is about light and Reygadas reveres light. It’s also about relationships, human or other and he is one of the most fearless investigators of what that means. One of the things it means is being prepared to embrace images that others might find ridiculous. Masturbation, copulating horses, unsexy sex. On the page this seems like it could be bad taste, but Reygadas is prepared to run that risk if it takes us further into the complex avenues of his mind. This kind of material has long been explored in literature, from Ovid to Chaucer to Donne to Bataille, and many more, but the image is a hard taskmaster and the line between what’s considered tasteful and what crosses the line is a visceral one. Japón is a film about an artist’s search for some kind of redemption. Contemplating suicide for reasons that are never clear, an artist comes to the reclusive home of Ascen, an elderly woman. There, he becomes embroiled in the village politics, as her nephew, recently released from prison is trying to take over her home. The artist finds a cause which gives him some reason to live. It’s a doomed cause, but even so his relationship with unlikely bedfellow, Ascen, offers each of them some kind of strange succour. The film is unwieldy, awkward, but remorselessly brilliant all the same. Reygadas is not afraid to stare into the abyss and ask himself, his characters and the audience, if there’s anything worth fighting for. Perhaps, his films suggest, there might be. 

1917 (w&d mendes; w krysty wilson-cairns)

OK chaps. This is what we need. We inhabit a country that’s becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea that fundamentally we won two world wars single handed. Vanquished the monstrous Hun, saved a lot of fetching French women and basically acted with a degree of heroism and British sang-froid which marks us apart as clinically superior to our European neighbours. We don’t want anything too meaty, let’s have some straight-off emotional plot points, photos of loved ones back in Blighty, brother saving brother, a good death scene, (which is also a narrative twist, catchy?),some communal male singing, because that’s what they all did, and plenty of doomed bonhomie. And for fuck’s sake, let’s not make it too deathly serious. Let’s have lots of swearing and lets reel in the youts by giving it a real video game aesthetic. You know, like you’re there living this and the Hun is coming after you and it’s kill or be killed, and you’ve got a fixed target which gives you a big (emotional) pay-off. Let’s package it up with a shedload of extras and some nifty explosions and maybe just maybe we can do it like in one take?

You’re an intern in the production company at an early planning meeting (concept; target audience; reference) with the esteemed Cambridge graduate director. After keeping quiet for a long time you summon up some courage and say - ‘Has anyone seen Son of Saul?’ Some people in the room nod approvingly, others look slightly confuesed. Then you add: ‘Let’s make the Apocalypse Now of the first world war’. The team look at you and say: this chap or chapess knows her shit. What you don’t say is: ‘Do you realise that this is just going to reinforce national stereotypes and play up to the increasingly ultra-right agenda of modern British politics?’ (You definitely wouldn’t mention the B word.) Or, let’s hypothesise that if you did say that, you would have been quietly lead away to the room reserved for people with a modicum of political awareness and farmed out to Loach or someone of their ilk. 

1917 is a technically well-executed movie which uses an off-the-peg Blake Snyder template. Sadly it’s an exemplar of where we are now, a culture that cooks up effective but vapid, bellicose content targeted at the world’s conservative heartlands. No idea what a ‘European’ watching this film would make of it; in particular the quite absurd necessity to turn the German pilot into the villain of the piece, a scene that could have been scripted by a Mail-Murdoch hack. Personally I can’t say I found it depressing or moving or challenging. It’s blandness and predictability washed over me like a stolen vote that you’ve got no option but to learn to live with. 

o método (d. liliana sulzbach, carlos roberto franke, w denise marchi)

Liliana Sulzbach and Carlos Roberto Franke’s film is a documentary about the art of documentary. They speak to approximately ten documentary makers from Germany and Brazil, exploring the individual methodologies and motivations. There are two ways of looking at this project. On the one hand it would make a great learning tool. There’s a clear focus on the role of documentary as a tool of social activism, something which unites the filmmakers from both countries. Brazil is a country with multiple social issues and the presence of the Amazon represents an ongoing challenge to Brazilian filmmakers: how to interact and document this vast territory which is constantly under hidden attack from the forces of capital. All the German fillmmakers appeared to be addressing social issues, such as the origin of cheap clothing in the West or the mining industry (one director who had made a film about Bauhaus seemed like the exception brought in to prove the rule). Any student contemplating the range and reason for their potential enquiry would benefit from watching El Metodo. On the other hand, the film adopts a studiously asceptic format. It is composed from talking head interviews with the subjects interspersed with clips from their films. The playfulness of Varda or the dramatic interventions of Morris or the idiosyncrasy of Herzog is eschewed in favour of a wilfully limited use of the format’s aesthetic capacity. In a film which made a point of enquiring into the motivation of documentary filmmakers and how this tied in with their ambitions, the filmmakers’ own technique comes under scrutiny and one questions why they have chosen such an orthodox, conservative approach to relate their point of view.