la jetee (chris marker) & la sixiéme face du pentagone (chris marker & françois reichenbach)

I receive a phone call from an unknown number which turns out to be Cinemateca advising me that due to the state of the print of Lettre de Sibérie, they have had to change the program and will be showing La Jetée and La Sixiéme Face du Pentagone. This is the kind of personal service one could come to expect from one’s local cinema.

In truth I am delighted to be able to watch La Jetee, a film I have probably seen but never concentrated on. The breathtaking modernity is breathtakingly modern. The humour is a surprise. The existential chic is both vapid and profound as all the best existential chic should be. Marker constructs a story from stills, (there is one moment when the image moves), and in so doing he challenges our idea of what a film might be, whilst also taking us back to a pre-modern language of painting, where stories were assembled on walls to be read as a sequence. The technique allows the storyteller to include so much detail that it’s like reading a Borges story via a Godard movie via Pierro de la Francesca. Flashbacks, flash forwards, romance, terror, existential dread, jokes, they’re all there.

The Sixth Face of the Pentagon is a documentary about the day the hippies tried to storm the Pentagon. Marker’s film is about protest, the specific protest of that day, but it is also about change, and how even seemingly omnipotent organisations can be resisted. It is assembled from footage of an anti-Vietnam protest on October 21st, 1967, mostly filmed from behind the protestors’ lines, which gets right into the thick of the action. The police wear ties and wield clubs, but they seem light years away from the 21st robocops. The hippies, as well as chanting in a bid to make the Pentagon levitate, succeed in almost storming the main doors of the Pentagon, and one’s initial reaction is to think that this could never happen now. Now the hippies and the protestors would be mercilessly driven back and be kettled or clubbed to death before they even got in sight of the Pentagon. Then of course one thinks of the events of 06/01/20 and the laxness that permitted whatever the fuck happened there to happen, and perhaps one concludes that the right is now more of a revolutionary force than the left.

irse yendo (leonor courtoisie)

Leonor Courtoisie’s novel a clef is part memoir, part novel. One might attribute the influence of Sergio Blanco and the whole school of auto-ficción, but this form of writing, the novel as journal, has been around forever. Hamsun, Rilke, Rousseau, to name just a few that my ignorance permits.

The style of the novel is wilfully anti-narrative. It threads together impressions and memories from the writer’s time watching her barrio transformed by development, a process that she is sure will soon claim her old family home and the memories contained within it. As such the novel is a homage to the dysfunctional family, a strident thematic in Uruguayan culture and one that links her with the subject matter of the play she quits, directed by a celebrated local director whose methods are put under the microscope.

There’s a certain courage to this latter strand, a readiness to take on the sacred cows of the writer’s culture in a self-enclosed society where honesty is not always the wisest policy. Irse Yendo floats between these poles of family, theatre and development, teasing out connections, flirting with self-indulgence, seeking to both provoke and retreat at the same time.

There’s something downbeat at play, which is reflective of the condition of inhabiting a city where the ceiling is always going to be low, and the head is bound to hurt when its aspirations bump up against that ceiling. Just as there is no way to stop the barrio being gradually submitted to the will of the developers, who tear down history to replace it with uniform blocks of flats, the challenge is to find a way to retain a sense of wonder and hope, in spite of everything that provokes the opposite emotions. As such Courtoisie’s novel captures almost too acutely the ennui of growing into your twenties on the edges of the western world. 

----

NB. As an immigrant citizen of this city, the novel’s insularity left me feeling uneasy. In a more cosmopolitan city, the presence of local social codes is far easier to negotiate. One is but one of many hundreds of thousands who are seeking to learn how to belong, how to adapt to this geography, with its architecture of place and memory. In a city where the immigrant is a stranger beast, the reminders that one comes from over yonder are perhaps more pressing. Irse Yendo is a book that describes a society that is slowly being hollowed out, but in capturing that society, the writer also helped to locate how distant the contemporary immigrant’s existence will always be from truly belonging to this world, even as this world itself is being lost. 

le cercle rouge (w&d jean-pierre melville)

So, whilst we watch Godard and even Truffaut send up or deconstruct genre, it’s easy to forget how, then, as now, genre was something the French cineastes adored. Perhaps it’s not so ridiculous to think of Barthes’ structuralism in this context. There is a fascination in French culture with the way in which something is assembled. Genre is all about variations on a theme. The theme is well known, by both the audience and the filmmakers. What is interesting is not so much the narrative as the mechanics of the story. The way the pistons move, the way that one element impacts on another. Le Cercle Rouge is a great example of this. It’s a straightforward heist movie. Delon, Montand and Volontè are three suave crooks who plan and execute a robbery, each one acting for different reasons. The film luxuriates in the fact that it doesn’t have to offer any surprises. The fundamental tension of the heist movie does all the leverage that the narrative requires to engage the audience. Will they pull it off or not? The film runs at 140 minutes, but Melville was clearly confident that this tension at the heart of the mechanics of the narrative was enough to engage the viewer, allowing him to explore a neo-existential vision of characters who are willing to put themselves under inordinate pressure and confront probable doom, because life only has value when it is put in jeopardy. Which is a journey we, as the audience, sitting back comfortably, share. The whole film is endowed with a poker-faced seriousness. The experience of watching it has more in common with watching a game of chess than a wrestling match. It is precisely because we as an audience understand the genre rules, that this game of chess feels weirdly engrossing, even fifty years on. 

—-

An aside here is perhaps to comment on how little cinema, for all its supposed technological gains, (HD/ 3D/ dolby/ digital compositing etc) has evolved over fifty years. The shifting experience of watching a film from 1920 in 1970 would reflect a truly radical transformation, (sound/ colour/ special effects/ acting etc). Whereas a film from 1970, viewed in 2021 can feel almost contemporary. 

to the friend who did not save my life. (hervé guibert, tr. linda coverdale)

Guibert’s novel à clef recounts the onset of his becoming HIV positive in the mid eighties. The novel is composed of a round hundred chapters of a few pages each. There’s something deterministic about this decimal figure. It is a countdown, we come to realise, to the irreversible triumph of the disease over his body. Whilst the novel does not take us up to his death, he lived for several more years after its publication, it is clear to the author and hence the reader that there will be no long term salvation. The friend referred to in the title, Bill, is an American medical entrepreneur who initially suggests that a cure has been found and then back pedals. Of course, ultimately, drugs were developed which put the disease into remission, but they came too late to save Guibert.

The Aids Epidemic feels like it belongs to another era. It has, of course, now been superseded by another epidemic whose impact on society as a whole mirrors the impact Aids had on the homosexual world, and large parts of Sub Saharan Africa. However, perhaps history will note the two epidemics as reflections of common problems of modernity. The incidence of airline travel in their rapid spread, the way in which it might be argued that both epidemics were the result of humanity seeking to impinge on the natural world without realising the inherent risks. During the eighties, the fear of Aids was tangible. Guibert’s account offers a coruscating insight into the sense of finding oneself trapped by a threat whose existential rage left people feeling like flies to the gods. Even people as sure of their deific powers as Michel Foucault, who appears in the novel under the guise of the author’s friend, Muzil.

Foucault died of the disease in 1984, as ever ahead of the curve. By 1986 I was studying a man whose influence was only just starting to become exponential. I had no idea he had died of Aids, neither did my tutor. Guibert’s novel, published in 1990, was one of the reasons this came to light. By the mid nineties I was fundraising for the Terrence Higgins Trust and the Mildmay Centre in Shoreditch. One of my colleagues was taking retroviral drugs, according to a strict timetable, which not only kept him alive but permitted him to live an active, normal life. In the space of a decade, Aids had become part of the mainstream but it had also been tamed. Had Guibert contracted the disease a few years later he would never have written this book, which is a testament to how fast history moves, but also how ignorant we remain of the subterranean channels which shape our present. 

pereira maintains (w. antonio tabucchi, tr. patrick creagh)

This is an affectionate portrait of a fat man who finds himself compelled against his wiser instincts to do the right thing. Set in Lisbon during the time of the Spanish Civil War, when Portugal was about to enter into its own dictatorship, the story narrates how Pereira, the protagonist, finds himself caught up with two sympathisers of the Republican cause and proceeds to help them even though they are feckless and he realises this will probably lead to his own demise. As well as being a tale of unassuming heroism, it is also a lovely portrait of 1930s Lisbon. It’s a slight book, but it has a sting in the tail and Tabucchi manages his narrative with a disarming charm. If, as is so often noted, for evil to triumph all it requires is that good men do nothing, here we see a man who has little pretension to being in any way political showing us that it is possible to act, and that there’s often a case for following your instincts even if they appear not to be in your interests.

three colours white (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

I went to watch 3 Colours White as something of a corrective to Blue, which blew me away. It feels as though the same, perhaps, was the case for the director, the second film in his trilogy acting as a counterpoint to the first. The tone is abruptly different, both more light-hearted, and more cynical. It’s an unhappy love story, telling the story of Polish hairdresser Karol’s quest for revenge, after being abandoned by Dominique, his French wife. The narrative is far simpler than Blue, with a clearer trajectory for the protagonist, who has to find a way to lure Dominique to Poland in order to achieve his objective. There is clearly a strong commentary about the ethics of a new capitalist Poland at play, as Karol both embraces capitalism, in a sequence which is almost comically slapdash, going from down-and-out hairdresser to wealthy entrepreneur in the space of fifteen screen minutes, but also embraces the cold-bloodedness of capitalism, setting Dominique up for her fall with a clear-headedness which is unexpectedly ruthless.

three colours blue (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

I don’t know how many times I have seen this film, and it’s worth noting that the print was very poor quality, but last night it connected with me in that way that happens when a work of art feels so direct that it’s as though it is speaking to you personally.

The film was moving (emocionante - Spanish has a word which better captures the sensation), both emotionally and intellectually. As regular readers will know, this is not something that happens all that often. In part because of my incipient Englishness, which makes me wary of triggered emotional reactions, in part because my instincts are probably on the whole intellectual rather than emotional (if that division has any kind of validity). I am also wary of what might be called ‘Great Artist Syndrome’, which is the disease which means people go weak at the knees when in the presence of a supposedly great artist, losing all critical faculties.

So I have tried to analyse why this particular film, which tells the story of a young woman’s recovery from the tragedy of losing her child and her husband in a car crash, was so affecting.

Juliet Binoche in a Portobello Cafe

Given the premise, opening the film from an emotionally charged standpoint as we witness the actual crash, the director was steering the viewer into highly emotive territory. Binoche’s performance is, thereafter, the triumph of reason over emotion. Where we are guided to react to moments of emotional distress with our own outpouring of matching distress, Binoche’s character, Julie, (her name so similar to the protagonist’s) reacts with unfettered intellectual rigour. There’s an early scene where the old housekeeper weeps, saying she is weeping the tears that Julie will not. In classical narrative terms, the script would be steering the character towards a moment of catharsis, when the emotion would finally be expunged and Julie would weep those tears which she refuses to or cannot at the start. This doesn’t happen. Kieslowski/ Binoche/ the Script never offer the character this cathartic moment. The more the script held off from permitting the character this moment, the more emotionally charged the film became. I remember once spotting Binoche in a Portobello Cafe, looking utterly and completely herself. This might sound like a stupid thing to say, but I think it reflects the way she as an actress succeeds in fusing outer and inner appearance on screen: we never for a moment question a performance which is a sublime example of screen acting, in spite of the fact she the script refuses to let her do what we expect or anticipate a dramatic character to do in this situation. She at once defies us and convinces us, a balancing act that never wavers

The Act of Killing the Act of Kindness

The director Joshua Oppenheimer made a very powerful film called The Act of Killing, which is a slightly leftfield way of introducing the idea that Blue could have been retitled An Act of Kindness. In modern narrative models, the protagonist is supposed to be decisive, to take action. So often, the action of action leads towards violence, even cruelty. This is because violent acts are considered dramatically more engaging, from Homer and Beowulf until the present day. Julie is a character who is hiding. She is in retreat from the world. When asked by an estate agent she’s going to rent a flat from what she does, she says “Nothing”. Instead of going out and fighting against fate and anyone who backs fate up, she retreats. Hiding, in our world. is usually associated with cowardliness. (In others it is associated with saintliness.) But we never feel Julie is a coward, in part because of the ferocious strength Binoche’s performance manifests. Instead, she is someone who is resisting conventional models of grief. This culminates in an action which is one of both forgiveness and inordinate kindness. In dramatic terms it is a small action, one which requires no physical exertion, one which doesn’t demonstrably alter her own well-being. It is at once the most innocuous of dramatic twists and the most radical and it is in its small way reflective of a director who appears to be turning his back on thousands of years of narrative (and social) conformity.

The Lost Dream of Europe

Julie’s husband is a composer who has a commission to write a symphony to celebrate European Unification. He dies with the symphony unfinished. Julie and her lover, Olivier, eventually complete it. If there is anything that signifies Julie’s final recuperation from the tragedy it is that she comes to accept the legacy of her husband’s music (which she collaborated in the writing of) and agrees to help in the completion of the score. There is in this narrative angle an intimation that Julie’s process of healing runs parallel to a European process of healing, which for Kieslowski and his generation goes back to the wars of the twentieth century and subsequent ideological conflict. The progressive, pacifist element of the European project is celebrated in Julie and her husband and her lover’s shared project, and the film’s music itself. It goes without saying that there is, from an English-British perspective, something heartbreaking about witnessing this, (from our point of view), lost dream of European Union. It only serves to consolidate the known fact that what has happened to our nation has been a triumph of the philistines, and those bellicose instincts which Kieslowski’s film so roundly and subtly subverts.

The Bravery of a director who Empowers Sound above Image

Finally, in a note that is connected to the above, there is the issue of the music itself and the way the director prioritises it within his structural use of the elements at his disposal as a filmmaker. The music is employed in an entirely intrusive manner. It rears up at moments, out of context, like another character stamping on stage. Kieslowski worked with Zbigniew Preisner, the composer, on numerous occasions. He clearly had complete faith in Preisner to construct a music which would not only possess a dramatic potency which would counterpoint Julie’s passivity, but would also be, in so many ways, the star of the show. Music has a transcendent power which the word and its cinematic sister, the image, can never quite match. It communicates with the listener in a visceral manner, uncluttered by the noise of ideas and the rationality. The use of music is where Kieslowski front ends the emotional charge of his film, in so doing defying the audience, like his protagonist, to resist its power. And we cannot. The music overwhelms us. 

a short film about love (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

 Kieslowski became the celebrated European auteur towards the end of his short life. He died at the age of 54. His final Three Colours Trilogy is what he is most celebrated for now, but he had already had a prolific career before he “burst onto the scene”, as they say. A Short Film About Love is an extended version of one of his Dekalog series, where he made ten films set on a Warsaw housing estate. These ten films were originally an hour long, and two of them, ‘Love’ and ‘Killing’, were then given feature length versions. Wikipedia notes that all twelve were made in the same year, but when there was a plan to do the same for ‘Jealousy’, “exhaustion eventually prevented him from making what would have been his thirteenth film in less than a year."

There is something disarmingly simple about Kieślowski’s storytelling. He does not appear to make films about great themes, although there are themes that run through his films. Instead he creates fables about people, locating the universal in the individual. These days, in an atomised capitalist world, it is very hard to get a film financed unless it has a marketable theme and ‘target audience’. The target audience for A Short Film about Love, which clearly riffs to an extent off Rear Window, can only be described as frustrated post-adolescent lovers and confused adults, which is quite a broad audience base. The film tells the tale of a young man, Tomek, who spies on a woman who lives in the opposite block, and, believing himself to be in love, engineers a way of letting her know. The woman, Magda, understandably finds it hard to take Tomek seriously, but then finds herself surprised to discover how his infatuation affects and changes her.

Watching the film, one is struck by the way in which Kieślowski’s better known masterpieces were a product of the freedom he had enjoyed to learn his trade, that trade being to both be a filmmaker and also a poet of the human consciousness. His focus is on the way our weaknesses can become our strengths, and vice versa. How courage so often manifests itself, for the common person, in the most unlikely, even cowardly fashion. How heroism and anti-heroism in the real world are rarely what they might claim to be in the movies. Cinema needs more Kieślowskis, more poets of the every day, artists capable of transforming the banal into the transcendent. 

nb It is worth noting the remarkable quality of Kieślowski’s actors, who lend their humanity to these complex characters. It’s gratifying to note that both Olaf Lubaszenko (Tomek) and Grazyna Szapolowska (Magda) are still working, according to IMDB. The beautiful secondary performance of Stefania Iwinska as the godmother should also be celebrated. 

the wasted vigil (w. nadeem aslam)

Afghanistan. A few months ago, the word was on everyone’s lips. The country had fallen for a second time to the Taliban and the consequences, we were assured, were going to be terrible. Then the news cycle moved on and the consequences became almost invisible. So far as can be discerned from news feeds, the consequences have, indeed, proved to be terrible, but no-one is looking.

Nadeem Aslam, a British Pakistani writer, is probably an exception to that last phrase. In a search for literature about Afghanistan I was directed to his book, not knowing where the writer was from. But as a primer for how to understand the last thirty or indeed three thousand years of Afghan history, The Wasted Vigil is a vital starting point. It’s also a coruscating read, skilfully woven, full of portending dread. Which is entirely justified and, so far as we can discern, is even more justified today, 14 years after the book was published.

The book tells the story of four characters. Marcus, a British man who has converted to Islam, whose wife was killed by the Taliban. David, a former CIA agent who fell in love with Marcus’ daughter, Zameen, who was herself killed by an Afghan. Lara, a Russian woman who is searching for her brother, a Soviet soldier by whom Zameen had a child, who might still be alive. Lastly, Casa, a Taliban soldier, who finds himself holed up with these three foreigners in a remote but beautiful part of the country. Each character reflects a different element of Afghanistan’s recent history and their fate is constantly in jeopardy. A sense of dread lurks over the book and its characters: it feels as though none can possibly emerge unscathed.

Aslam peppers his tale with anecdotes and a vast knowledge of Muslim history and religion. Beside offering an insight into the Koran, it gives insights into Afghani history, gem stones, Buddhism, sacred art of the region and much much more. It is, in a way, a treasure trove of knowledge and information, albeit a Pandora’s box kind of treasure trove, one that once opens seems to send the world into a tailspin from which it will never emerge.

As is indeed the case. Even if the characters featured in the novel were to have survived, it seems impossible that recent events would not have now caught up with them and that their survival then was only postponing the inevitable. How the Americans and the British and the Russians and the Pakistanis and probably many others have managed to fuck up Afghanistan. Doubtless they have had help from Afghanis too, but The Wasted Vigil succeeds in harrowing style in showing how geo-politics impacts on individuals of all colours and creeds. 

boogie nights (w&d paul thomas anderson)

Another film I saw once upon a time, a long time ago, and have not seen since. It struck me that if there’s a cultural point of reference for Boogie Nights it’s probably Angels in America. (One of the films within a film is called Brock Landers: Angels Live In My Town.) The kaleidoscopic presentation of US history and decline which Anderson presents is no doubt softer in its impact than Kushner’s play, in spite of all the sex. Nevertheless, the film represents an incredibly bold statement by the youthful director, one which took the porn industry and used it as a metaphor for the evolution of US capitalism in a similar way to which Coppola used the Mafia to the same end. Boogie Nights is rangy, overly-ambitious and brilliant. It’s the chronicle of hubris, as Wahlberg’s character rises and falls. What might have been tacky, isn’t. If the film’s ambition sometimes outruns itself, with the last half hour in the eighties lacking the narrative coherence of the rest of the film, this is still a reminder that with strong enough characters, you can get away with overreaching. Creating cinema on the scale of a novel is something few manage to achieve, for all kinds of reasons, many of them to do with the relative costs of producing a minute of cinema compared to a page of a novel, but when a director comes along who can pull off the trick the result is something delirious.

hard eight (w&d paul thomas anderson)

I can still recall the posters for Hard Eight going up in the tube and a certain buzz about the film which put it on my radar although I never got round to watching it. No-one knew at the time that this was the first offering of one of the modern masters of the art. There’s something quite affecting about watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s cameo appearance, which is so distinctive and at the same time so unlike Hoffman, because of the youthfulness, the cockiness of his performance, which looking back retrospectively almost makes it look as though he was cast against type. The film is full of future stars, not the least of them Gwyneth Paltrow who gives a performance which suggests the potential of a greater actress than the media personality she has subsequently become, capable of portraying an erratic emotional instability. Not to mention Samuel L Jackson, even if he had already broken through with Pulp Fiction. Hard Eight revealed Anderson to be a director who knew how to get the best out of his actors, also including Philip Baker Hall and John C Reilly, how to make the most of their tics and mannerisms. The film is essentially a character study, with the narrative rather less consequential than it initially purports to be. A sub-Mamet movie which in the end out-Mameted Mamet, by somehow ignoring the intricacies of the gambling world, using it as a backdrop rather than a focal point. The film hinges on a just about credible sequence of events which feel, nevertheless, contrived. As though the writer-director is giving a nod in the direction of narrative, but is more interested in tone and ‘clima’, the mood of a man walking through a Vegas gambling parlour of more importance than anything he actually does there. There’s already something stately about Anderson’s filmmaking, hinting at the more operatic path he would soon follow. 

white noise (d. daniel lombroso)

White Noise follows three figures from the US alt-right, Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern, following them over the course of the years 2016 to 2018, more or less. The film is an investigation into the phenomenon of the far right, which at its most extreme takes the from of Nazi salutes, and saying the unspeakable, but can also have a more insidious influence in shifting the terrain of debate, pushing previously extreme views towards the mainstream. The British have suffered from this as much as any nation, although the guiding light of Daniel Lombroso’s film, unsurprisingly, is Trump, to whose bandwagon Spencer and Cernovich were inexorably tied. As Trump’s campaign starts to falter, their post-election euphoria starts to wane and the glow of success begins to wear off.

However, the film is most acute in those moments it reveals the way in which all three are, to a lesser or greater degree, grifters, flying their kites more from a sense of expediency and opportunism than conviction. Cernovich’s amiable wife is Iranian, and their baby is mixed race. He ends up selling pills for skin care like some modern day quack doctor. Cernovich comes across as a slightly bumbling fool who made his name by being controversial but has no real political beliefs beyond saying things that will help him sell his products. Southern, starts the film as an ingenue 22 year old, and is shown gradually beginning to become aware of the murky moral waters she’s getting herself into, even though she’s reluctant to face up to them. The clinching moment comes towards the end when, pregnant, she is asked about the colour of her partner and we learn that this white ethno-warrior is another who will have a mixed race child. Spencer is an eternal man child, who ends up living with his mother, and shrugs off any responsibility for anything he has ever said or done.

As such, the film is a useful and effective vehicle for debunking these would-be sacred cows of a movement which has caused untold damage. At times it feels as though the director might have gone a bit harder on his subjects, especially Southern, but part of the complexity of constructing the intimacy necessary to debunk these figures, to hoist them on their own petards, is that you have to be close enough to get past the carefully curated facade and discover the reality. 

la promesa [the promise] (silvina ocampo, tr suzanne jill levine & jessica powell)

Ocampo’s novel is more of a collection of fragments towards a novel than a novel in its own right. The Promise consists of a series of anecdotes about a succession of individuals who have featured in the writer’s life. As such, it offers a whimsical insight into a lost Argentine world, full of feckless men and confused women, caught up in awkward social relationships which leave the participants feeling frazzled. The novel is constructed around the conceit of a woman falling overboard into the Atlantic Ocean, with her past flashing before her eyes as she wrestles with the waves. It’s a brief novel which shouldn’t be read in a hurry, as each sequence carries its own particular weight, although the fact that Ocampo is better known as a writer of short stories is reflected in the fragmented nature of the text. The detail that Ocampo was working on such a slight novel for over 25 years speaks of the fact that this is an unfinished text, one that was perhaps never destined or even meant to be completed. 

martin eden (w&d pietro marcello, w maurizio braucci)

Cinemateca’s programming sometimes has a random feel. Every now and again it throws up a gem which I would never have got to see on the big screen if I were not a socio, who goes two or three times a week. As such I will go and see a film purely on the basis it is showing. I knew nothing about Martin Eden or the director before watching it. There was no danger of being seduced or betrayed by the hype. What I discovered was a film whose complexity and verve, both aesthetic and political, took me by surprise.

Martin Eden is an adaptation of a Jack London novel, published in 1909. My grandfather liked the work of Jack London, as did so many born at the start of the 20th century. London’s writing appealed to a working class demographic, fully aware of what they had missed out on by not having had a secondary education. My grandfather was not a widely read man but he respected the power of the word, and treasured poets like James Elroy Flecker. The narrative of Martin Eden follows the eponymous hero, a working class man who sets out to acquire an education and become a writer. The film, adapting the novel to southern Italy, follows this Italian Eden as he struggles against rejection, determined to be recognised as a writer, something he finally achieves, albeit at the cost of his soul.

Pietro Marcello and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci’s adaptation of the novel to an Italian context is of itself bold, but the streets of Naples, both the poverty and the opulence, make for a perfect setting for the tale. However, the director goes further in his re-imagining of London’s novel. He sets it in an ahistorical zone, which could be 1929 or could at times be 2020. For long periods it feels like we’re in the first half of the twentieth century, the time when the book became popular, at other times, a container ship glides past in the background and we are given a Brechtian jolt, realising that the story could be happening today. As indeed it could. The war on education is something that has become more and more endemic in the twenty first century. In constructing the tale in an anachronistic fashion, the film draws out parallels between this century and the last. In so many ways, when you remove the surface patina of technology, smartphones and the like, so little has changed. The adroit use of music reaffirms this, as does the utilisation of vintage footage, which is inserted into the fabric of the film, lending depth and complexity to its texture.

Finally, there is the complex issue of the film’s politics. Eden goes on a journey towards Fascism, after having rejected socialism as being anti-individual. The way that Martin Eden maps on to the nuances of Italian politics is clearly one of the reasons Marcello has chosen to adapt the novel. The rise of an individual ‘liberty’ seeking right wing has become prevalent all over the world and has echoes in the protagonist’s journey. It’s to the film’s credit that it sets out a more complex political worldview than the standard right-left dialectic, one that perhaps has far more relevance to the way that the world is headed than the more standard Loach-Hollywood dichotomy. The issue is too complex to be addressed here in a single paragraph, but it is rare indeed for a filmmaker to be exploring politics with such a nuanced, potentially controversial perspective.

Martin Eden isn’t flawless. In the adaptation of the novel, there are gaps and threads which feel somewhat loose. Nevertheless there’s a bravura and ambition to the film which reminds one of Bertolucci at his best. The film taps into a tradition of politically aware, neo-operatic Italian cinema which used to be so potent but seems to have been on the wane. It’s as bold a piece of contemporary filmmaking as you are likely to encounter. 

on time and water. (andri snær magnason, tr. lytton smith)

Magnason’s book seeks to instil the reader with an awareness of the perilous course the world is taking as temperatures rise inexorably. His focal point is the worldwide demise of the glaciers, with particular attention to those of his native Iceland and the Himalayas. Magnason writes clearly and passionately about the way in which the vanishing glaciers are part of a trend which is going to have drastic impacts on the natural world and the human world. The book itself is a hotchpotch affair, including two conversations with the Dalai Lama, visits to the coral reefs of the Caribbean and the mountains of Nepal and lengthy reflections on the way the world his grandparents were born into has changed beyond recognition. He speculates about how the world will be in the epoch of his grandchildren, noting how, within the wider scheme of the earth’s timeline, five human generations is a drop in the ocean. The book addresses these issues with clarity and the author’s intentions are clear and honourable, even if the fragmented nature of his book at times means that his argument seems to ebb and flow. Furthermore, On Time and Water only helps to consolidate the thought expressed by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement, that it is only through the writing of fiction and the construction of modern myths that a narrative will emerge whose impact might match the hopes and aspirations Magnason espouses for On Time and Water.

amour (w&d haneke)

This was not perhaps the wisest of weeks to finally catch Haneke’s paean to old age and death. At a time when I have recently witnessed how fast decay can take hold of the body, Haneke’s splenetic description of Emmanuelle Riva’s demise was a gruelling watch. As ever, he goes about the task of charting this demise with rigorous efficiency. Although it might be that the trope of the sudden moment of extreme shock, witnessed in so many of his films, was beginning to lose its edge here. When Piccoli articulates his love in an act of brutal kindness, it comes as no real surprise. There is also a curious dream sequence, with its bona fide jump scare, which seems somehow coarse for this most frostbitten of directors. Haneke’s lingering camera always invites reflection. Watching Amour, a film that engages with the realities of dying in a way that cinema almost never does, one can see why death in cinema veers towards the cartoonish or the symbolic. The awareness of death is not something we cannot bear too much of. One can applaud the director for having the courage to confront the issue, but one is also relieved that one doesn’t have to face it all that often. 

directamente para video [straight to video] - (d. emilio silva torres)

I was informed about the existence of this film by a Welshman I had never met before in a zoom conversation. He told me about the existence of a cult Uruguayan film, about a cult Uruguayan film, neither of which I had ever heard of. Nor had I heard of their directors. The Uruguayan cinema world is inordinately small. It’s very hard not to know or at least be the gym buddy of most people working in the medium, and if you don’t know an individual personally, then you’re sure as hell going to know someone who has fought or slept with or drunk with them. It’s a tight circle, so when the Welshman told me about this film, it sounded apocryphal. However, I did a bit of investigation and discovered the film did indeed exist and an actor I know, Alfonso Tort, was apparently in the movie. Then, in an even more unlikely turn, I was told by an acquaintance who learned I was going to the Sitges film festival that the director was going to be going there too and that he had been sitting at the table with her in a rundown bar on San Jose when our paths had last crossed, a month or so previously.

So I sought this director out and we drank a coffee under the Mediterranean sky and he told me about his movie and said that it would soon be released in Montevideo and we should meet up again there. I returned to Montevideo and his film opened and I went to see it. The film is a wonderful box of tricks, part documentary, part fiction, part Borges fable. It tells the story of a mysterious director who lived in Ciudad Vieja, as do I, and made the cult film, Acto de Violencia en una Joven Periodista, in the 80s. There are clips of the film within the film, images of a Montevideo which doesn’t look so very different to the Montevideo of today, because nothing ever changes here, we are trapped in a clock that never reaches midnight. It is a land of melodramatic films and empty streets, enigmatic clues which lead nowhere, promising change that never materialises.

Directamente para Video captures all this beautifully. It captures, above and beyond the mystery of the film and its absent director, the way that Montevideo is a puzzle which doesn’t want to be solved, in a way that no film I have ever seen has quite managed to do. Most want to capture empty streets and melodrama. But there was no sign of the director. He has vanished into the night. The man sitting at the bar with the producers, who I know, because in the world of Montevideo film, everyone knows everyone, was not the same person, I am sure, as the one I met in Sitges. The director of a film about an absent director has now gone absent himself. Perhaps he has fled to a Borgesian Patagonia, or a Bolaño-esque Catalunya. Perhaps in thirty years someone will be making a film about him, and, should I still be alive, they will come to interview me about that fleeting meeting in Sitges, when the world was still up for grabs.

jane eyre (charlotte brontë)

Not for the first time, it’s hard to know how to write about a classic. The classics have already constructed their frames of reference. Victorian psychoanalysis. Imperial hauntings. The gender wars.

One, of course, wonders what a West Indian reader of the book thinks, more than one wonders what one thinks oneself. The monster in the attic. The ‘other’ Frankenstein. The hideous implications of colonialism. The unwitting zombie movie.

The way that the novel now makes us question the society from which it emerged in ways the author perhaps intended, or perhaps didn’t. The whole twentieth century shitshow, already nascent like a baby acorn, in the prose of a woman writing to keep her sisters entertained.

With a happy ending suitable for a twenty first century horror movie. 

la marrana (w&d josé luis cuerda)

It’s not every film you come out of thinking about how the art design stole the show. La Marrana (The Sow) is a picaresque journey through Spain in 1492. The film opens with a voiceover setting the historical context: Colombus, the banishment of Jews and Muslims from Spain, etcetera. It then picks one ordinary man, Bartolome, whose story it will follow. Bartolome is hungry, and he has his eyes on the pig which another vagabond on the road, Rey, says he’s taking to Portugal. The film proceeds to follow them over the course of a few days as they wander round the countryside, hoping to enlist as sailors on Colombus´ voyage. Not a lot of any great significance happens. In essence this is a buddy movie, which to my mind promised rather more than it delivered. There’s something of Lazarillo de Tormes about this rustic yarn, and one can see how it would have appealed to a local audience. Having said this, the beauty of the art design deserves highlighting. When we enter a 15th century tavern, it really feels as though we’re there. Down to the tone of the soft Spanish light. The production design on imdb is listed as being by Rafael Palmero, set direction by Gonzalo Thovar, costume by Javier Artiñano. Even if nothing of great note is occurring in the film, you can always luxuriate in the images, and at cinema’s capacity to bring a past era to vibrant life. 

vernon subutex, part 1 (virginie despentes, tr. frank wynne)

The fame of Vernon Subutex is Manchurian. It grinds sausages. It provokes electoral fraud. It plummets to previously unknown depths. The fame of Vernon Subutex far outweighs the content of the novel which bears its name. As though the novel had been written with the clear intention of creating a myth, which it has succeeded in doing. The reality of a myth never lives up to the aura of a myth. Vernon Subutex has whispered sweet nothings to me in Mexican bars, has brutally attacked my long lost enemies on a deserted Moscow street, has hypnotised me into swimming with sharks off the coast of Recife. It, or he, has managed to do all these things without my having needed to read the novel. Having now read the novel, I suspect that I am in danger of trashing the myth.

Because the novel is a picaresque stroll through a post-Houllebecq 21st century Paris which never really hangs together. The novel goes on random digressions, it exploits its two dimensional hero in order to talk about abuse or transsexuality or a hundred and one other things which might concern the characters of a near contemporary Paris but only barely assemble themselves into what we might expect or demand of a novel. But this is where we go wrong. Because Despentes isn’t constructing a novel. She’s constructing a myth.

madame deffand and the idiots (marias, tr. margaret jill costa)

Marias’s brief account of the lives of five writers (Madame de Deffand, Nabakov, Djuna Barnes, and  Emily Bronte) is a brilliant piece of economic writing, which benefits from the sympathy Marias has for the travails of the process of composition, be that letter-writing or novel writing. It’s a book that can be read in its entirety on a flight, in between multiple films, no sleep and terrible food, and still seem inordinately enjoyable and there’s really no greater compliment that can be paid to any book than that. It will only take you an hour, but it might be the best hour you’ll ever spend doing anything at all ever. 

titane (w&d julia ducournau)

Interesting to see Titane after having seen two Carax films recently. Titane feels as though it’s the bastard child of Carax, who in turn is the bastard child of high-Godard. Perhaps throwing a few garlands in the direction of Clare Dennis whilst we’re at it. Which is perhaps another way of saying that the film, for all its stylised violence and energetic gender politics, has a classically French feel. It is a dislocated narrative of the image, rather than the coherent narrative of story. Even the unifying structural line, which is Alexia’s pregnancy, is constantly interrupted by scenes where she doesn’t appear to be in the least bit pregnant, contrasted with other scenes where her pregnant belly is displayed in all its glory.

The effect is a film which is stitched together by image and shock. A Rumsfeldian bravura, which is at its goriest in the opening half hour. The audience is rapidly crowbarred into submission and thereafter meekly surrenders to the director’s caprices. We just want to get out unscathed and whenever the tone changes towards something that hints of warmth or humanity, we are duly grateful.

Through this there emerges the line of Alexia’s complex (to say the least) relationship with the automobile. Which firstly scars her for life, then goads her into killing, seduces her and finally becomes the father of her child. This child, like Alexia, is far from standard operating procedure. The child will be a hybrid, part machine, part human, like Alexia herself. On one level Titane could be viewed as an eco parable - this is what our petrolised world has done to humanity, ripping out the love. Or it could also be read, conversely, as a paean to the dying petro-culture, the sleek, erotic age of the car, which is on the wane. There is also, clearly, many a dissertation to be written on Alexia’s pregnancy, the film’s elemental treatment of a process which rarely gets the cinematic dues it deserves. Titane´s capacity for interpretation, its openness, is part of its Gallic appeal.

Finally, a feeling which was exacerbated by walking through the Reina Sofia the following day, Titane also belongs to a surrealist tradition. Bending the framework of the body to fit the artist’s vision of a world which has become disconnected from its natural roots. A hundred years ago, as the world entered a period of terrible change, surrealism emerged as a methodology for communicating what it was like to inhabit this change. Now, in an era of bio-politics and gender fluidity, all the old certainties of liberalism going up in smoke, perhaps surrealism once again is the most exact science for seeking to engage with our brave new world. 

in the earth (w&d wheatley)

Went to see Wheatley’s latest not expecting much having heard it was a minor work which has received little acclaim. Low expectations might help to dull one’s critical faculties but the film succeeded in ways I had not expected. The story is somewhat hokum, a pot pourri of English folk horror and pantheism, but the film transcends its roots to deliver an experience, on the big screen, which has a real punch. In part this is because the director uses violence with all the skill of a Webster or a Tourneur, delivering well-time doses with surgical precision, but it’s also because the film makes use of all the elements of the filmmaking craft. Sound, light, visual design and editing, are deployed like troops on a battlefield to outflank the viewer, distracting from the more absurd plot elements, the thinly drawn characters and a sense of the predictable coming to pass. Rather than dwelling on the film’s potential weaknesses, the viewer finds themselves immersed in a hypnotic, visceral experience. Wheatley’s masterful employment of post-production resources seems to cock a snook at both the idea of the big budget blockbuster and the low-budget indie film, amalgamating the two to deliver a fearsome and fearless onslaught which leaves you dazed when you finally step out into the gentle balm of a Catalan evening. 

the power of the dog (don winslow)

Back before this blog existed, so many years ago, I read James Elroy’s novels American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. It could be argued that his novels did more to document and reveal the realities of US post-war history than any other source of information. Elroy achieved this by taking actual and frequently unreported events and inserting them into a fictional framework. He was writing crime thrillers which were also history texts. He also wrote with a succinct effective style, which kept a complex narrative moving whilst retaining a literary ambition.

Elroy’s historical novels have dried up. History has not. Winslow has taken up the baton with this novel, the first in a trilogy. The areas the novel treads, connecting US foreign policy with the War on Drugs and the submerged wars of Central and Southern America, is terrain that demands the Elroy treatment. Winslow makes the necessary connections, putting the pieces of the jigsaw together, from Putamayo to Hell’s Kitchen. History tends to belong to the victors, and the only ones who can mitigate against this are the writers.

Unfortunately, in this early novel, much of the subliminal messaging of the characterisation works against the writer’s central thesis. His central thesis is that the USA is a rogue state which will do anything, get into bed with anyone, in order to sustain its primacy. However, within the novel, the only characters endowed with any kind of heroism are those who come from the USA. Those who come from south of the border are all, with the exception of a priest who will be sacrificed for his goodness, deranged psychopaths. The North Americans are valiant pursuers of justice, who even in their most ambivalent moral moments (because even good men have to go to bad places) exude a craggy nobility. The South Americans are dashing criminals. There’s a touch of the Cormac McCarthy’s about all this and as the novel unfolds it starts to grate, precisely because it seems to go against the writer’s stated historical agenda.

Nevertheless, I am sure I shall read at least one more novel from this trilogy. Because, even if the execution is shoddy, the value of literature as a medium of recalibrating the effects of power is one that cannot be underestimated. 

annette (w&d carax, w. ron & russell mael)

Two hours twenty minutes of film-opera. In a Madrid cinema called the Renoir with uncomfortable chairs, (supposed to be comfortable), still adjusting to a lost night’s transatlantic sleep and a return to the old continent for the first time in 18 months. To be confronted with Carax going the other way, making a Hollywood movie in unspoken English. It might not have been the ideal way to watch Annette, a movie whose pretensions of mystery are undercut by the banality of its narrative and the manner in which the director forces his agenda on the audience. No matter how hard he tries, Adam Driver as Henry McHenry never really comes across as having any evil in him, which means his daughter’s assertion that he kills people doesn’t feel entirely convincing, in spite of anything the plot seeks to say. Everything, including the songs, feels laboured, a wet tea-towel of a simple idea wrung out for every drop of moisture that can be extracted. It’s not that the movie doesn’t flirt with brilliance, it’s just that it doesn’t achieve it. Perhaps if the seats has been kinder and the conditions more conducive, or if I was younger and less jaded, I might not have been left so cold, but as we discussed it with Señor O, walking back through a glorious Madrileño afternoon, it felt as though this was a movie with a personal agenda so marked it’s as though the director is crying his eyes out in the seat next to you. No matter how much you want to sympathise or empathise or engage, this is distracting. All the more so as it never feels as though the movie gives any one else any kind of emotional entry point. 

mauvais sang (w&d leos carax)

The thing about becoming a cult director is that you need to deliver something that is genuinely out there. Even if that pushes you into territory that is, frankly, unintelligible. I have no real idea what is going on in Mauvais Sang. There were long periods where I was scrabbling to make sense of things, but every now and again the screen would burst into life with a vengeance. More than a coherent narrative, Mauvais Sang feels like an archipelago of moments, which are loosely arranged around selected ideas. The fact that one of these ideas is that humanity is threatened by a retrovirus and that Piccoli, Binoche and Lavant are about to steal the vaccine, adds a certain piquancy. Other moments include: they’re not really going to make Binoche jump out of the plane are they? Lavant famously dance-running to Bowie’s Modern Love, for no real reason other than to give the film an injection of unimpeachable cool; Binoche and Lavant having a shaving cream fight; and so on and so forth. Carax sets out his stall as a filmmaker whose radical imagination is enough to get you hooked, and to be fair, he has continued to deliver, with Pont Neuf, Holy Motors etcetera. Film as event, rather than narrative; film as a sensory experience rather than an intellectual one, no matter how much of a debt is being paid to Godard, or, one would like to think in this film, Roeg and Cammell´s Performance.

don quixote (cervantes, tr. edith grossman)

It is, evidently, an absurd task to try and write about Quixote in a few lines here, as though this were just another book. Which it is, but it isn’t.

Some of the reasons why it isn’t.

On a most obvious level, no book I have ever read has taken me as long to read as the twin volumes of Don Quixote. It has taken me this long to read in part because of its length. But also because I was in no kind of a hurry. There is no urgency to the reading. A factor which modern publishing criteria might decry. There was no urgency, as I knew that I was setting out on a journey with Sancho and his master, and they were in no hurry. There was no dramatic imperative. No pot of narrative gold at the end of the rainbow. They were drifting through Spain and the reader is invited to drift along with them. Is the reader accompanying Sancho Panza and Don Quixote on their journey, or are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza accompanying the reader on their journey? Sin dudas, it is a little bit of both. The two wanderers have kept me company through the peaks and troughs of this year’s Covid, through my absence from the story of Censor, through times of exile and languor, through work, hangovers and arguments. In which, sense, they, and their author, have been part of my life this year, just as much as I have been part of theirs.

On another level, with reference to the author, because this is a novel which is, as is well known, the godparent of all Western novels. When one says ‘all’ one means the novels of all the European and by default American canon. One of the most remarkable things Cervantes achieves, centuries before the words post-modernism or nouveau roman or Joyce or Derrida or anything else you care to throw at the fan might have been coined, is the construction of a text which is also an auto-commentary. Again, noting that these notes are barely enough to flesh out an idea about an idea, one has to register the difference between the first book, which adopts what might once have been termed a more naturalistic feel, and the second which blows naturalism and all its shiny towers to smithereens. The number of times I found myself highlighting a passage, astonished by the author’s audaciousness, was many. I realise that this too, was a writer working within a context and a tradition, but the originality of thought and execution and the playfulness that goes with it, is a constant delight. The book sings and the author sings with it, rarely letting the reader forget it. As an English soul, steeped to some extent in contemporary British approaches to the novel, Cervantes’ approach felt like a dousing of iced champagne over the crowd of po-faced guardians of the keys to the literary kingdom.

The novel is also godparent, to every other style in the canon. Two examples. Firstly, the comic book. The violence in part one is gratuitous, but entirely in keeping with the Kapows!!! of any comic. No man or woman could withstand the punishment meted out to Quixote, Sancho, Rocinante and the ass. Violence is a trope, a device, a way of grabbing the reader’s attention and subverting reality.

Secondly, there are the novels within the novels of the opening section. These stories, of maidens and their lovers, of overheard conversations, misunderstandings and perilous outcomes, are nevertheless rooted in a far more naturalistic register. These are the stepsisters to Shakespeare’s lovers, characters who feel as though they might have fallen out of Measure for Measure or Much Ado, but they are also the godparents of the naturalistic novels of Marias, Austen or Eliot, to name three at random. The writer, whilst at other points in the book subverting notions of emotional truth, burlesquing notions of courtly love, finds space and time within the novel to present the other side of the coin.

All of which is like being presented with a film script which contains every genre, from fantasy to romcom to drama to Western to horror, a script which in usual terms has no chance of ‘working’ only for it to prove to be the king and queen of cinema, against all logic.

I was talking to a friend, Nicole, about the novel, who described how she had to read it for school, chapter by chapter, demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of every episode. She related how she would wake in the mornings and read a chapter in bed. Her mother would hear her laughing, and ask what she was laughing about. Oh nothing, she would say, just Quixote. Cervantes invites one to laugh at every opportunity, he understands that laughter binds the reader to the book, across the divide of time. The essentials of narration sit side by side with the most abstruse elements of meta-fiction. When you’re in need of company, feeling lonesome, when the world isn’t cutting it, there will always by the travails of a man out of his time, sagacious fools, brilliant crazies, to keep you going, to remind you of the charms of having been born a human. 

cuadecuc vampir (w&d pere portabella, w joan brossa)

Portabella, a name I have conjured but whose films I have never caught, comes up with a slightly delirious deconstruction of both the vampire myth and the cinematic fascination with said myth. Portabella uses footage from the Jesús Franco film Count Dracula, which featured Christopher Lee, no less, as a dashing Dracula who sinks his fangs into various lovely youths. There’s also Herbert Lom wandering around as Van Helsing (?), reminding me of his appearance in Marias’ Thus Bad Begins.

Portabella´s approach is vividly unconventional. Until the very closing moments., the movie has no dialogue. It’s not silent, as there is an invasive and brilliant sound design/ score, but it has tropes of the silent movie, as actors speak without their words being heard. It then goes one step further, and completely deconstructs the filmmaking process, with the camera team featuring as the actors are filmed ‘out of character’. The nuts and bolts of the cinematic process are exposed. A kind of Pompidou vampire, perhaps reminiscent to some extent of Truffaut’s Nuit Americaine. Only Portabella goes further. The bat is revealed to be a model on wires. An actress winks at the audience. Lee clowns around in shades. The film within a film is called El Proceso (The Trial). Is the trap of eternal life a cinematic version  of the Kafkaesque state? At the very end of the film Lee reads Stoker’s original text which reveals that before he is finally killed, Dracula smiled, relieved, it would appear, at being released from eternity. Of course, cinema is a paean to the eternal: the beautiful youths who populate the screen will age and die, what we are watching is a vampiric process at work, and this is what Portabella discloses, as he strips away the veneer.

With its bleached out print, its hysterical zooms, its beguiling close-ups, Cuadecuc Vampir  is simultaneously a homage and an ironic shakedown of the image. The effect is amusing and bewildering, in equal measure. 

+++

Watching images on the big screen from Portabella’s Cadeuc, I have the feeling that few people will experience this process in the future. The cinema as it used to be is dying. Few go now. Even dedicated cineastes watch on the small screen of their television or their laptop. If one were to say, yes but now home projectors exist, and this is true, they are just as good, this would still be to lose the effect of watching a film with others, sharing the magic or mysticism or excitement, which has always been part of the cinema process. Which used to be something that was in no way elitist, but will only become more and more so as the social world is picked apart at the seams. As people retreat to their homes, where the world is smaller and seems safer. 

The passing of cinema feels like the passing from one human state to another, just as its arrival must have done, when people first marvelled at the capacity of the medium to capture ‘reality’ and reproduce it. In little more than a century, humanity has hopped, skipped and jumped onto the next phase. This process has accompanied the one that I am participating in now, the switch from the written, which had existed for centuries, to the type-written. Humans move on, things are gained and things are lost. Literacy is not that old a concept in the great scheme of things. I feel sorry for the generations that will never know the freedom that the individual knew before the internet; just as the generations who first learned to read must feel sorry for the freedom that was lost when the knowledge of reading was inculcated into greater humankind. With every technological advance, freedoms and pleasures are forgotten and left by the wayside. New pleasures, and, perhaps, new freedoms, arrive to take their place. I wonder what they shall be in another century’s time, after this era has receded into the memory of a grandparent; pictures on screens, lost dreams. 

topsy turvy (w&d mike leigh)

Watching Leigh’s lengthy film allows plenty of time for reflection. It’s curate’s egg of a film, perhaps appropriately, given its Victorian setting. A first thought is that this is a film that abandons the central tenet of its narrative half way through. The fist half of the film is constructed around the emerging conflict between Sullivan and Gilbert. Sullivan aspires to greater things that operetta. He wants to be a serous musician. Whereas Gilbert is happy repeating the age old formula which is growing weary, but if it isn’t broke, why change it. They fall out, agree to disagree. Then Gilbert has a new idea, to set a work in Japan, and without ever engaging with Sullivan’s reasons for accepting this new project, the two are back, working as harmoniously as ever, with the second half of the film dedicated to the process of putting the Mikado on. It’s a curious shift, which makes for a rambling, whimsical film. The second observation is that Leigh’s actor’s cinema is rife with danger. The actors certainly seem to be enjoying themselves, but whether this is entirely to the benefit of the characters they are portraying is open to question. There are moments when gold is struck, such as Manville’s closing speech, but other moments when the tone, as ever in a Leigh movie, feels forced. Leigh is only really rescued by a towering central performance, (Thewlis in Naked, Spall in Turner). This goes against his collective approach, which is evident here when every character seems required to have their moment of glory, which generally encourages them to seek to upstage everyone else. As a result excellent actors frequently come across as bizarrely overacting. It’s a constant mystery the way in which Leigh is feted for his work with actors when the autonomy he grants them frequently leads them to deliver their most questionable performances. Lastly, there is the issue of self-consciousness. The Mikado is an operetta set in Japan. It’s exoticism, according to the film, helped reinvent the careers of Gilbert and Sullivan. But there is never any sense of the film interrogating the cultural implications of this appropriation of the Orient as a marketing device. How do the protagonists’ aesthetic choices lock into the context of peak Empire? This isn’t so much to suggest that the film has to come down on any side, but the film’s almost complete lack of interest in the context of The Mikado, its subject matter, feels indicative of a mindset which hadn’t changed in over a hundred years. 

vida en sombras (w&d llorenç llobet-gràcia, w. victorio aguado)

The high concept idea always feels modern. Nolan, Vila-Matas, Nichol’s One Day are just a few references from recent years, which follow on from the likes of Robbe-Grillet and chums. But of course, it isn’t. High Concept has been at work forever, with A 101 Nights, A Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Life is a Dream, just a few examples. 

Perhaps it feels less well established in the cinema, and this is why Llobet-Gràcia’s delicious 1947 love story stroke homage to cinema feels so surprising. The film opens with the protagonist’s parents watching a Lumiere brothers film as a novelty in a Barcelona circus. A decade or so later, Carlos himself is watching an early Chaplin film with his friend Luis. They are joined by Ana, who twenty years later, will become his wife. He becomes a documentary director. With the arrival of the Civil War, he headset into the streets to film, following his documentary instincts. But whilst he is out, Ana is killed, so he volunteers for the front and foregoes the camera. After the war, his friend Luis, now a film star, persuades him to go and watch Hitchcock’s Rebecca. This would appear to have been a terrible decision when he walks out the cinema, unable to bear the narrative. But this has actually reawakened Carlos’ understanding of the power of cinema, and helps him to return to his former vocation.

The way in which Llobet-Gràcia constructs his story, weaving the history of cinema into the thread of Carlos’ life is magical. The film also manages to insert a sly counter Franco message, which lead to it being censored and meant that Vida En Sombras was the director’s first and last feature. It’s a lost classic, a bewitching succinct celebration of the power of cinema and its importance and possibilities as a story telling medium. 

+++

Footnote - posting this a month or so after seeing the film, whilst in Catalunya, one cannot help thinking that the unorthodoxy of Catalan architecture and thought must play a part in the originality of artistic thought that emanates from this corner of the world, something Llorenç Llobet-Gràcia’s only movie exemplifies. 

night on earth (w&d jarmusch)

There is, as Snr Amato pointed out afterwards, a glorious faith in the latent possibilities of globalisation inherent in Jarmusch’s 1991 globetrotting movie. Alongside 21 Grams, and with a sideways nod at Magnolia, the movie adopts the portmanteau approach with five stories included under the titular umbrella of a single night on earth. Each night is captured in the exchange between a taxi driver and their client(s). The movie is set in LA, NY, Paris, Helsinki and Rome, but the globalisation is given added emphasis by fact that the two cab drivers in NY and Paris, (Armin Mueller-Stahl & Isaach De Bankolé), give two of the film’s finest performances as fish out of water looking to make a living as immigrants. Indeed, one of the best sequences is the scene with Isaach De Bankolé and two arrogant, drunken Africans whose condescension leads to him telling them to get out. From the outset there’s a heady, liquid pleasure to Jarmusch’s filmmaking, as though the possibilities are endless now, the wall is down (Armin Mueller-Stahl’s character comes from Leipzig, “near Czechoslovakia”), the Twin Towers are still visible in the background. Globalisation is going to be fun, baby, it’s going to open doors, create connections, reaffirm the kind of honest working class values that Winona Ryder’s cab driver defends. In which sense, Night on Earth, pre Covid, pre-Iraq, pre-911, pre-Brexit, Trump, Ughyurs, feels not so much like a night on this earth, but a night on another earth, one that was swapped out for the earth we are currently saddled with. Another earth which existed once upon a time, before Brooklyn became gentrified. 

stranger than paradise (w&d jim jarmusch)

Quite apart from its muted lo-fi charm, it’s intriguing to contemplate what marked Stranger Than Paradise out as the work of a filmmaker who would go on to become an undisputed star of the independent circuit. What one notes is that, beneath the apparently messy veneer, there’s a straightforward but effective narrative discipline at play. The film is divided into three parts (or acts), in New York, Cleveland and Florida. The first act introduces the characters and sets up the dynamic between Eva, the Hungarian cousin, and Willie, the good-looking but aimless protagonist. The second act develops this relationship, and the third brings it to some kind of resolution. Nothing is ever on the nose, there’s never any great sense of purpose, but the film’s structural integrity prevents it from feeling aimless or overly self-indulgent. Add to this the bewitching charm of grainy black and white, off-beat characterisation, Screaming Jay Hawkins and a dry cinematic wit and you have the recipe for a sleeper hit. I overhead someone coming out of the cinemas saying, this is the model for so many indie films, including 25 Watts, and they’re right. Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law helped to define a sub-Vigo aesthetic which has an easy-assembly feel, a textbook ‘how-to-make-a-film-on-a-shoestring’, but it’s also evident that there’s a nascent instinct for the discipline of how to make 90 minutes of cinema time feel like time well spent, something which has helped to make early Jarmusch films so iconic. 

laurus (w. eugene vodolazkin, tr, lisa hayden)

At its richest and strangest, Laurus, a meditation on death, sainthood and Russia, summons up the aura of a Chagall painting. Vivid colours which defy gravity, lovers whose love beatifies them for a moment in time (as love beatifies all lovers), a sense of infinite space beyond the edges of the canvas or the page. Vodolazkin’s tale narrates the story of a boy who acquires the gift of healing from his grandfather, a gift that it also a burden. This is another story set in times of plague when the skills of Arseny, the novel’s protagonist whose name changes several times, (ending as the eponymous Laurus), can make all the difference between life and death. The author locates two facets of Arseny’s abilities: on the one hand there is the more technological skill of being able to identify which plants offer which cures; on the other a more mystical capacity to channel a healing energy through his touch. Laurus is very much a novel about Russia, and the forces at work in the construction of the Russian psyche. This duality in Aresny feels like a commentary on the equilibrium which Russia seeks between the poles of mysticism and modernity, between the worlds of East and West. All of which is implicit rather than explicit. Arseny himself evolves from medicine man to holy fool to ambassador. The book acquires a quixotic feel as we follow his life story towards death. The writer’s take on the relationship between life and the afterlife is one of the more powerful elements of the novel; there’s a reflection on what it means to be mortal that few Western writers are willing to engage with. The sense that our travails upon this earth are part of a wider journey, one humans are very far from understanding, one that defies time (which is illustrated by the novel’s willingness to engage with anachronism). Laurus is a novel which constantly seeks to go beyond materialism to provoke a contemplation of the transcendent, the words flying off the edge of the page towards an unknown corner of the galaxy. 

a lonely man (chris power)

Power’s novel is what might be termed deceptively slight. It’s a seductively easy read, set in the life of Robert Prowse, a British novelist living in Berlin, with his Swedish wife and two children. Much of the first half of the book is ruminatory, with the banalities and frustrations of Robert’s day-to-day life addressed, the pleasures of middle aged Berlin contrasted to his youthful visits to the city when he partied hard. As such the novel touches on the transformation of that city over the course of the late twentieth/ early twenty first century as the exhilaration of freedom gave way to the mundanities of capitalism. At one point I thought the novel was going to be a Toussaint/ Chejfec like drift, but narrative kicks in as Robert becomes absorbed in the story of Patrick, another writer he meets by chance who is fleeing Putin’s henchmen. Patrick had been contracted to ghost write the biography of an oligarch who got on the wrong side fo the Russian kleptocracy and died in suspicious circumstances. Patrick has fled, paranoid, to Berlin and relates his story to Robert, who gradually finds himself caught up in the tentacles of Moscow’s thread. 

The acknowledgements show that Power has done his research and the novel forments a sense of growing dread as Robert inadvertently appears to be putting his family at risk. It’s an effective piece of writing, and a useful addition to the cannon of Putin’s novelists who include, of those I know, Pelevin, Sorokin, Lebedev and Prilepin. 

Robert and Partick connect in a book shop when Patrick picks up an early Bolaño novel and they discuss the Chilean. (The novel concludes with another nod to Bolaño). To reference Bolaño is audacious, setting the bar exceedingly high. A Lonely Man feels far more like the throwaway earlier works of the dead writer, in so far as it shares that deceptive lightness; an easy read which might contain multitudes. Having finished the novel I looked up the author and browsed his twitter feed. Besides Roberto there are references to a host of others who influence I share. SK, Pinter, Calvino, to name a few. The author himself, it transpires, is part of the literary world of the UK and seems like an eminently likeable individual. Which is something he has in common with Robert, his protagonist. There’s enough in Robert to make him feel like an essential product of 21st Englishness. Which also had me thinking about why the novel perhaps lacks the punch of some of the author’s favourites. The conclusion I came to is that the problem is that everything is just a bit too likeable. One of the elements of being a white male Englishman in the twenty first century is that we want to be clear that, unlike our forefathers, we are not on the side of the oppressors. It might be a slightly Nietzschean vantage point, but there is a decadence in wanting to be liked. You don’t find it in Elizabethan or Jacobean literature. It’s a reasonable, even admirable, life goal, but it’s not great for literature. I might be wrong. but the writers we love (including the above named) never gave a flying fuck about being liked. The desire to be even-handed, to not offend has become engrained in modern liberal British culture. It is part of the both sides approach of the media and something the neo-Fascists have taken advantage of. For some reason it seemed to me that A Lonely Man, whilst a skilful and enjoyable piece of writing, somehow fails to land the broader punches it is seeking to make, for reasons that have to do with all of this. The book walks out on to the ice, the ice is threatening  and beautiful, but the ice somehow never seems likely to crack. The surface will be described, ruffled, questioned, but it will never be broken. 

interiors (w&d allen)

Interiors, a family drama which has s tragic conclusion strangely reminiscent of Roma, is the film that reveals the filmmaker Allen might have been. A famous admirer of Bergman, among other European auteurs, this was Allen’s serious film whose Bergmanian influence is worn on its sleeve. There’s many a carefully composed shot which goes against the usual Allen grain, giving the film a somewhat ponderous air which at times has the feel of a student homage. On the other hand, there are moments and scenes, in particular the wedding scene, which suggest a more emotionally invested artist than he eventually became. (There may be exceptions to this rule, such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Blue Jasmine). Allen will always be a curious figure, very much of the zeitgeist, revered and now despised in almost equal measure. His star is waning, and has been for many years, even without the scandal, so much so it’s hard to remember how influential and loved he was back in the dog days of the twentieth century. (Or should that be the glory days.) The Allen who turned down the Oscars to play with his jazz band, the one who had mastered the art of independent film making in a way no-one else quite managed in the USA, master of his own destiny, standing apart from the system. Interiors would be an example of this, the artist who was prepared to piss everyone off, the clown who suddenly starts acting in Chekhov plays. It suggests a destiny that Allen would never be able to pursue, because the truth is that his independence was always limited; it was always contingent on working within a lighter register which would make the stars who still queue up to work with him look good. In this context it’s worth celebrating the work of his cast, in particular Keaton, Marybeth Hurt, Geraldine Page and Richard Jordan, who were willing to forego the usual pleasures of being an engaging Allen character to join him on his curious mission to discover his inner, unironic artist. 

blue jasmine (w&d allen)

What to make of Allen’s curious tale of his protagonist’s demise? What to make of the unsympathetic husband who runs off with the teenage au-pair? It’s hard to get a handle on an Allen film these days, especially one which purports to adopt a female perspective. Blanchett’s Jasmine is a wreck of a woman, and on one level, it’s to the film’s credit that it portrays her warts and all, as she unravels, stitches herself back together and then unravels oncemeore. She is the trope of the neurotic, dippy but beautiful woman whose refusal to see what it going on around her will be her downfall, a downfall she in so many ways deserves. Nevertheless, to Blanchett’s credit, we can’t help rooting for her, even if just a bit. We want things to work out for her in the end, and when they don’t, it smarts. This is indeed, a three dimensional character, and there is a certain courage to be found in the construction and her depiction. Great characters can be a pain in the neck.  

The other less Flaubertian way of reading the film is as a critique of the excesses of Wall Street, although social commentary always rings somewhat hollow in Allen’s world. He is a director whose insularity lead to him treating the world as essentially a vehicle for his movies to be set in, an attitude as solipsistic and neo-imperialistic as that of his successor, Wes Anderson, who inherited Allen’s love of guest stars and ‘exotic’ locations. However, Allen at his best also riffs off of the loss of his European soul, the paradox of having cinematic power but lacking the cinematic profundity to match up to his idols. Allen’s very fecundity, his capacity to stitch together an off-the-cuff story with a few gags, which would always be financed, year after year, seemed to be something which, at the peak of his power he railed against. The creation of an anti-heroine, in the shape of Jasmine, is the fruit of the labours of this other Allen, a filmmaker who occasionally lived up to his own aspirations. 

and their children after them (nicolas mathieu, tr william rodarmor)

There’s a moment in the book when one of the characters, Steph, starts to study literature. She gets into Robbe-Grillet, but can’t handle Proust and “the whole business of the slightest oscillation of the heart…. give me a break.” If there’s a division in French literature between Flaubert, with his pared back, precise prose, and Proust, with his art-nouveau twirls, Mathieu would appear to be coming down firmly on the side of Flaubert. This is an almost utilitarian novel about ‘ordinary people’ in an ordinary town leading ordinary lives, which allows itself precious few flourishes. At the same time, it is very much a novel which is steeped in the ‘oscillations of the heart’. So perhaps there is a bit of both worlds at play here.

The novel recounts the lives of Anthony and Hacine over the course of six years and four chapters, taking place in the 90s, with the last chapter constructed around the day of the semi-final of the 98 World Cup when France beat Croatia. The two characters are boys at the start of the novel and young men by the end. Their paths will cross over the years, with far more in common than they realise, in spite of the racial divide. Hacine’s parents are Moroccan immigrants and Hacine himself oscillates between the two countries, seeking an identity he never quite seems to locate. However, the same can be said of Anthony, whose life is shaped by the failure of his parent’s marriage and his infatuation for Steph, a girl who will always be out of his league. Mathieu describes a post-modern listlessness that only ever seems to find a release in the traditional escapes of alcohol, drugs, violence and sex. The ennui is palpable, the idea of self-determination and escape thwarted whenever either seeks to break out. Anthony joins the army to escape their hometown, but is invalided out after a football injury ruins his knee. Hacine has dreams of becoming a high-end drug dealer which only lead to domestic frustration.

The novel is beautifully constructed, resolutely readable. It teeters on the edge of the banal without ever quite tipping over the edge. It does the job it sets out to do, which is to document the hopes and disappointments of small town French/ European/ modern life. Mathieu’s unadulterated naturalism, redacted with a sparse aesthetic formalism, desperately resists any genuflection towards the transcendent. 

turtles can fly (w&d bahman ghobadi)

A Kurdish refugee camp on the border of Iraq and Turkey. The refugee camp is littered with destroyed tanks and plagued by mines. The children in the camp earn their pennies by deactivating the mines and selling them on. In the arms bazaar in the local town they exchange mines for weapons. It is 2003, the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. The Kurds in the refugee camp have been brutally repressed by Saddam’s regime. They long for the war to start, even though there’s no security that this will make their conditions any better. However, it could hardly make them worse. The refugee camp is a sea of mud and chaos, with the ever-present risk of being killed or maimed by a stray mine, or being shot at by the Turkish border guard. This is the frontier between war zone and a gateway to Europe, or even the USA.

In this world, the bespectacled Satellite is prince. He buys the antenna that permits the elders to decode the news. He announces the arrival of rain and war. The kids follow him as though he’s a kind of pied piper. but he falls in love with Agrin, a young woman with a child, an armless brother and a death wish. We are a long way from Hollywood. The war will start, the Americans will come, Saddam will be deposed, but there can be no happy endings here.

Bahman Ghobadi’s film is achingly prescient, 20 years on. It’s a drama with the authenticity of the rawest of documentaries. Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurd whose sensibility to the issues of the Kurdish refugees is at times unbearably plausible. Cinema is a tool that allows us to walk through the mud with these characters, to feel as though we could reach out and touch them, even though we know we could never save them. It seems astonishing to me that Ghobadi is not better known. Perhaps his sensibility is considered too raw, too harrowing. But I don’t know of any work of art that has taken me closer to the realities of life in the shadow of 21st century geo-politics, and the way that the machinations of men and women in power impact on the lives of innocents. This is a masterpiece of filmmaking - an art which can make the intimacy of another’s life in a land we will probably never visit touch us in a way news reporting never can. 

sole (w&d carlo sironi; w. giulia moriggi, antonio manca)

Sole is an unspectacularly brave piece of filmmaking. Its braveness comes from its commitment to being unspectacular, The action at times appears to progress at a glacial pace. Yet what is occurring is that the pieces are being meticulously assembled so that as that plot simmers it will eventually come to a searing, devastating boil. An extended shot of the protagonist, Ermanno, playing the slot machines isn’t there by chance. It’s a seed in the narrative. 

The story is on on the one hand proto-modern European, and on the other as old as time itself. A young woman, Lena, dolefully played by Sandra Drzymalska, is pregnant. We never learn who the father might have been. In return for €10K, she agrees to give up the baby to the uncle and wife of Ermanno, (Claudio Segaluscio), a sullen youth whose blank face gives nothing away. The two live in a rented apartment for the final months of the pregnancy. Both are orphans. Ermanno’s father killed himself by jumping out of a window. Emotionally stunted, the two, bit by bit, begin to discover love and meaning from the other, without expecting it. When the child is born prematurely, they became, for a few short weeks, a family, albeit one that is doomed.

The financial exchanges that underpin the movie speak of an atomised modernity, where money is thicker than blood. They tell of the choices people are coerced to make in a globalised world, where the ties of family, barrio and culture have been cut. The ending of the film parachutes one back to being 21, to being condemned to discover the cruelty of the world, to feel the cold wind blowing in your face and realising you are going to have to learn to live with that cold wind for the rest of your life. It is an ending of astonishing power, because this is a sensation we have all had to confront at one point or another. It is for this reason that love exists: to teach us that there is hope in the world, and hope brings despair in its wake. 

Carlo Sironi manages the ingredients of his film with impeccable control. The remarkable acting of the two leads; the muted palette of the art design and the score, by the Polish composer Teoniki Rozynek, which is as fine a piece of music for camera as you are ever likely to encounter. 

the verge (patrick wyman)

The book sets out to tell the story of a pivotal forty year period in European history through the stories of seven separate characters, all of them players to one extent or another. The period in question is 1490 to 1530, a period which, the author theorises, saw the beginning of the transformation of Western Europe from a provincial backwater to the dominant force in world politics for centuries to come. Some aspects of what is recounted are better known than others. Two of the seven chapters are dedicated to Columbus and Isabella, the discoverer of the New World and the queen who oversaw the final defeat of Muslim Europe, when she drove the Moors out of their last redoubt in Southern Spain. The book takes on the rise of the printing press, new technologies of war, Martin Luther and the expansion of the Ottoman empire. Most of the chapters are pithy, all of them setting out to verify the author’s thesis that it was the rise of capital and its capacity for expansive and remunerative investment that drove the changes the book describes. As such, the key chapter might be the one titled Jakob Fugger and Banking, wherein Wyman describes how one banker helped to bankroll so many of the endeavours, military and exploratory and even cultural, that were occurring at the time. I was quietly delighted to see the Fugger family make an appearance in Quixote (“My friend, tell your mistress that her troubles grieve my heart and I should like to be a Fucar (Fugger) so that I could solve them”, ch 23). In the same chapter Merlin is also cited, and perhaps nothing more sums up the shift from medievalism to modernity that was taking place from one end of Europe to another. Having said which, it feels at times as though Wyman’s thesis, and its vindication of capitalism, raises as many questions as it provides answers. In the final chapter which deals with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, the peasants’ revolt is named as a key element which lead to the failure of Charles’ reign, without in any way broaching what provoked these revolts, in much the same way as Luther’s success is put down in large part to the commercial benefits of printing his texts, without any real analysis of why the contents of those texts had such an impact. The Verge is a highly effective and thought provoking book, but I have to confess that I bought it hoping for more of a hint of how the anonymous man or woman’s life was similarly transformed in this time, how changed the lives of the groundlings in the Globe might have been from those of their grandparents, but the book's focus is steadfastly on history's players, rather than history's followers.