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. 

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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. 

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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.