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. 

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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. 

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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.