camera buff (w&d krzysztof kieslowski)

Camera Buff  is one of Kieslowski’s earliest features. A cursory glance at IMDB however reveals that he had more than a decade of experience making documentaries by the time he came to make Camera Buff. Given this, it would seem there is more than a slight element of autobiography to the film, which narrates the story of Filip, a seemingly innocuous husband and worker with a young son who is given a camera which changes his life. Filip is commissioned by the factory boss to make a short documentary about an anniversary celebration, a documentary which ends up winning third prize in a festival and launching him on an erratic and perilous career as a filmmaker. Filip becomes increasingly obsessed by the camera’s perspective, seeing the world through its viewfinder, something that leads to him becoming distanced from his wife, as well as compelling him to capture aspects of the world which the state would rather weren’t acknowledged. It’s a film about film, with plenty of wry humour (“Why did you include a shot of a pigeon in the documentary?”) and a slightly acerbic take on the industry. It’s also a great portrayal of the extent of freedom in communist Poland. 

steal as much as you can (nathalie olah)

Sometimes I wonder why i have ended up living as an exile. What lead to me ending up on the other side of the world. As much as one might want to say it’s all about to do with the wonders of my present surroundings,  which in part it is, it’s also to do with the country I was born and raised and lived most of my life in. A strange country with a variety of names. The United Kingdom. The ironic Great Britain. England. Formerly of the European Union. Olah’s provocatively titled book gives some insight into the reasons why, as a white middle-class person born into a certain strata of privilege, one has to either embrace the system or run away from it. Because the system is so obviously skewed towards the class I belonged to. And no matter how officially free the speech and thought is within that system, it sets up its own structure of traps and rules to ensure that the structure of the system maintains itself and colonises any signs of resistance. Olah identifies the way in which class perpetuates its structure not just through the distribution of wealth, as is well known, but also through the application of taste. Defining cultural norms which exclude is just as important as defining economic norms that exclude. 

In truth, one might have liked a little more flesh on the bone of what is, as the title maybe suggests, a manifesto-type text. There’s a great deal of scope for the writer to amplify and develop her thesis. Nevertheless, it still feels as though she’s putting her finger on what happened to Britain in the post-Thatcher world. Her comments on education are as sharp as her comments on culture. The UK has evolved an educational and cultural methodology which has reinforced the individualistic, anti-social Thatcherite doctrine. In the process, those who cannot master the cultural codes find themselves on the outside, seeking to create an entity founded in enmity rather than solidarity. The era of the great working class actors has come to an end; the Burtons and Caines and Courtenay’s etc. Now, our culture reflects this notion of a great, hollow Britain, which dines off its former glory, encapsulated by the idea of a monarchy and the class system which is geared towards it. The Crown and Downton have become the acme of our cultural output, as well as fixing a vision of social boundaries which are just as relevant today as they were a century or more ago.

Of course every country has its flaws, every country has its inbuilt prejudices and class systems, with their embedded corruption. However, Steal as Much as You Can does a great job of dissecting one of the most hypocritical of them all. There’s plenty in the text which I didn’t agree with, (I was always more dubious about Corbyn than the author, and find it perplexing to talk about him without mention of Seamus Milne, etcetera), but there’s enough there to make one breathe a sigh of relief that someone is kicking back. 

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nb - this morning in an email exchange with Mr Curry I find myself coming back to a story I discovered a decade ago, about a soldier who came back from Iraq, clearly suffering from PTSD, and went rogue, ending up in prison. The story was real. I went and visited the soldier’s father in Birmingham. Then, through a friend, took the idea to a small production company with offices i Soho. They were initially excited and took the story to their commissioning contacts. Pretty soon it became clear that if the story was going to advance, it would only do so through a more ‘positive’ filter. (The mother’s story etc). This was made very clear. The interest in the story was how it impacted on a ‘human’ level in the UK, rather than anything addressing the ‘secondary’ issue of the war. Everything about this made me feel uneasy. This sense that the story was more important in how it could be manipulated to suit an idea of mainstream taste, rather than addressing the issues that seemed to me (and the father) of real consequence. The soldier would become secondary to his own story. Of course there are arguments to be made, that this was the ‘best’ aesthetic choice, or that the production company was right and this was the only way the story would get told, or that I too in looking to develop the story was guilty of everything being discussed by Olah. However, the whole business left me with a sense of unease, the sense of people who believed they were arbiters of taste deciding how a story they had no connection to should be told. A story that went nowhere, as the soldier sat in prison and the war which the British participated in continued. 

blanco en blanco (w&d théo court, w samuel delgado)

The atrocities committed in Patagonia at the turn of the twentieth century are another relatively unknown chapter in the history of colonialism. Alexander McLennan, aka Red Pig, paid bounty hunters by the indigenous ear, in the process nearly wiping out the Selk’nam peoples. That historical figure is rechristened in Court’s brooding film as Mr Porter, a malevolent off-screen presence. The film opens with the arrival of Alfredo Castro’s creepy photographer, Pedro, on Porter’s isolated, windswept estancia, hired to photograph Porter’s child bride. Pedro then finds himself trapped there, caught up in the aimless, drunken lifestyle of the international band of mercenaries/ crofters. He struggles to fit in, finally participating in the indian hunts which the men conduct, and photographing them.

The film is light on narrative and heavy on atmosphere. The cinematography is breathtaking, José Ángel Alayón effortlessly capturing the desolation and the beauty. It’s slightly more opaque on the narrative front. Pedro is a reactive figure, an observer, and the film is happy to hang back and see events from his distanced perspective. There’s no great effort made at emotional engagement. Something which bothered this viewer initially, but then less and less. Gradually the horror of this place creeps up on the viewer, horror which is a mood as much as a sensation. The ending, framed by farce and cruelty, is a desperate and appropriate anti-climax, with Pedro having finally, irretrievably gone over to the dark side.

Nb: It seems a pity that the trailer for this film exploited its most inspired and haunting image, one which otherwise might have elicited a gasp and awe. This seems important on another level, as this moment is the one which straddles the apex between the two Patagonian worlds, the one which went before colonisation and the one that came after. As such the image is the film’s touchstone, which, seen out of context in a trailer,  loses the value which it holds within the narrative of the film. 

la bronca (w&d daniel & diego vega)

A Peruvian film set in Canada in the early eighties. A fierce Canadian winter, where Roberto, recently arrived, gets dragged into his father’s macho snowy landscape, with predictably violent results. The closing credits make it clear that Roberto’s story runs parallel to events in Lima, where the Sendero Luminoso uprising is threatening to bring society to its knees. However, Lima, except for one call Roberto has with his mother, remains firmly off-screen. Instead the drama plays itself out as these immigrants, trapped in a self-regarding circle, edge their way towards tragedy, with Roberto’s frustrated adolescent energy proving the catalyst. The film profits from a suitably offbeat edit, the story gradually playing itself out with many details remaining unclear. Who exactly is Toño, the red-headed friend of Roberto’s father, Bob, who lives downstairs? How did Bob and his Canadian wife, who claims to be a journalist but shows no real sign of doing any journalism, actually meet? Bob is at the heart of the tale, a character straight out of Dylan’s Poor Immigrant, desperate to fit in and please and always destined to be on the outside. La Bronca, is a well-crafted domestic drama, but if you’re Peruvian one suspects there’s a whole other, darker level at work. 

when we cease to understand the world (benjamín labatut, tr. adrian nathan west)

I am not sure how I came across Labatut’s spectacular text. It was only in the final section, when the word araucana cropped up, that I realised the writer would appear to occupy the same Southern Cone as me. I had assumed the book to be the work of some nebulous Frenchman, out to save the planet from the repercussions of the first world’s scientific acts of hari-kari. 

Labatut’s book is about the way in which the world has evolved and been formed over the course of the last century, and not, as the epilogue makes clear, for the better. The book looks at half a dozen or so high priests of science, including Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger, and the way in which their theories interacted with their lives. We learn how these eminently masculine souls wrestled with their flesh and their minds to come up with ways of contemplating the world which not only seemed at first extra-terrestrial, but also laid down the matrix upon which, the book contends, modern technological society is structured. From computing to global warming.

This in itself, the writer’s capacity to convey ideas of enormous complexity in a graspable, human fashion, would be one achievement. However, When We Cease to Understand the world achieves something else. The longest chapter in the book deals with sub-atomic theory, the idea that an atomic particle is both a wave and a fixed point. How this seeming paradox came to be defined and what it means for the world. We start to read the book as a work of non-fiction. It is discussing real people, real events, real history. However, as the book evolves, it gradually starts to inhabit spaces that seem beyond the author’s objective knowing. The inside of a scientist’s mind. The secret world that only they can know. We, as readers, perhaps assume that the author has somehow obtained letters or a journal written by the scientist, to allow him, the author, this privileged access. Only as the book hurtles towards its atomic finale, do we start to glean that this is not a work of non-fiction, but a work of fiction. Or perhaps it is both fiction and non-fiction at the same time? 

le voleur (d louis malle, w carrière)

It’s a slightly strange experience watching this Malle film, written by Carrière, two giants of late twentieth century French culture. It has the feel of a project which has been dashed off, lacking any real narrative depth. Except for the fact that the film is so over-extended and the budget was presumably so high that it doesn’t feel as though it could have been a side-project. A period romp set in late nineteenth century Europe (Paris, Brussels, London), Le Voleur is essentially a showcase for Belmondo’s splendid ability to pout. He was one of the great faces of post-war cinema, with features that express everything whilst seemingly doing nothing, a classic cinema actor, like Caine or Monroe or Connery. The film tells the story of how his character, out of revenge, becomes a crack thief, living a glamorous life of crime and high society, pursued by an array of women in fetching dresses, whilst pining for his cousin, played by Genevieve Bujold. There’s the suggestion of an anarchist subtext, a hint of the criminal as society’s Outsider (pace Camus), embodied most clinically in the downbeat final scene where Belmondo is alone on a train, but all in all this feels like window dressing to give a smidgeon of intellectual sauce to what is an otherwise mundane period piece. All of which proves the old adage that the jewel thief directors who can pull off the cursed caper movie genre are few and far between, and even being a cinematic genius doesn’t help.

that obscure object of desire (w&d. buñuel, w. carrière)

Buñuel’s famed late seventies parable of the gender wars is a curious shaggy dog story of a film which appears to be about a wealthy older man trying to get his end away with a fetching, poor younger woman. In these banal terms, it might be thought that this is another dubious sex comedy, something out of the apolitical wing of the Aries studio, or primetime seventies ITV scheduling. However, from the outset, we get hints, in spite of the light-hearted tone, that something stranger is occurring. Firstly, the film is framed in flashback. Fernando Rey’s Mathieu boards a train at Seville and begins to narrate a tale that will last all the way to Madrid. The framing device lends the piece an unreliable air: the narrator is always going to present the story, which is triggered by his throwing a bucket of water at a young woman before the train leaves Seville, from his point of view. Secondly, radically, the woman in question, Conchita, is played by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). This is a device worthy of a Milo Rau or Pirandello. It’s unsettling, awkward, it leaves the viewer struggling to work out why two in place of one. The story doesn’t flow with the same naturalness as an ordinary romantic tale. As viewers, it feels all wrong. Finally, in the background, things keep getting blown up. These are times of terror, with young idealists belonging to bizarre political sects blowing up cars and kidnapping people. 

At the same time, the tone, framed by Rey’s laconic style, feels humorous. As he narrates how he is frustrated in his desires at every turn by Conchita, he gradually turns from being a rouê into a sap. The ‘natural’ course of events is constantly disrupted, subverting the Hollywood trope which still exists today of charming older man seducing beautiful young starlet. The old order is overthrown by the twin Conchitas, whose individuality is too much for him, eventually driving him to violence. To question the heteronormative dynamics so mercilessly in a mainstream movie was and still is an act of sly subversion by the director. Just as much as the young radicals who exist on the fringes of the film, he wants to blow up our concept of normality. The words ‘blow-up’ leads us towards Antonioni. What we can take form that generation of white male directors, which also includes he likes of Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Fellini, is that, even if they owed their place to a system that was skewed in their favour, they were prepared to play out their concerns, anxieties and doubts on the screen. This is not the film of a man comfortably settling into his pampered slippers. On the contrary, it’s a film that seeks to shake up that idea of comfort, to ridicule it, to blow it up. 

sauve qui peut (d. godard, w. anne-marie miéville, jean-claude carrière)

Godard’s mid-period film, which Richard Brody says he described as his second first film, is a rambling box of tricks and sighs. The tricks are beautiful, the sighs are ugly. The tricks are ugly, the sighs are beautiful. A trick might be the use of slow motion, as Nathalie Baye’s progress on a bicycle through the Swiss countryside is slowed down into a sequence of digital movement, frame by frame, discovering a poetry in the simplest of actions, a trick he repeats at other moments throughout the film. Another trick might be the imposition of the most lyrical music, for a few seconds, propelling the film towards a dreamy romantic level, only to cut the music off before the viewer can get lost in it. Another trick, the ugly tricks, are the turns that seedy men ask Isabelle Huppert to perform as a prostitute. Godard pushes the ugliness towards Centipedal lengths, confronting the viewer. The sighs are the human moments, when the characters who so often feel like marionettes in Godard’s psycho-sexual landscape suddenly step out of character and become real people, with real concerns. Something Baye excels out, inveighing her lost character with a pathos that seems to go against the filmmaker’s grain. Brody’s comments on Huppert’s thoughts on Godard’s direction are great in this regard: “She spoke of Godard’s control of her diction and of her gestures, of his sense that “one must imprison the actor so that his true soul can emerge.” She felt that Godard’s methods brought her closer to herself and, paradoxically, to the character she was embodying, and she found the experience artistically gratifying.” The complexity of the process the actors faced is complemented by the complexity of everything in Sauve Qui Peut: the narrative; the blurred urban/rural division; the mash-up of visual styles; the mash-up of tones. In this sense it feels, as perhaps all Godard’s work feels, like the predicted apex of a modernity which has already passed. His bricolage was ahead of its time, the time came, it went, leaving a film from the future firmly in the past. In this sense it’s a commentary on a world on the eve of the digital. Innocent pleasures of the kind to be found in his earlier films are banished, we are now in the aseptic land of sex, lies and videotape. Identity begins to fracture, the director is Godard, the lead character is called Godard, people’s lives will not flow in straight lines, they will be broken down with slow motion and out-of-synch musical interludes. Emotion no longer comes naturally, it will be constructed in spite of moral indifference.