le mépris (w&d godard)

I figure it must have been in 1983, there or thereabouts, that my erstwhile friend Jason took me to a double bill at the Electric on Portobello Road of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Le Mépris. Back then the Electric was still a fleapit. I have a vague memory that we entered in daylight and exited into the night. That serendipitous shifting of the spectrum which seems to have been caused by the clash between light and darkness that cinema constructs. I was seventeen, I believe, and that screening of Le Mepris has always remained as a keystone in the process of falling in love with cinema. It has been, entonces, nearly forty years since I last watched the film. I guess it must have been in part Bardot herself, but my greatest memory of the film was of the shimmering Mediterranean which Godard’s film, a film about the making of a film of the Odyssey, a quintessential Mediterranean text, celebrates. The quality of the light from that far-flung world must have dazzled, all the more so to then emerge into the darkness of the London winter night.

How much has altered. When I watched it I would have been younger than all the cast and they would have seemed like gods to me. The trials and tribulations of relationships, around which the narrative is constructed, would still have seemed like a foreign land. I imagine I would have had no idea who Fritz Lang was, let alone Piccoli. Watching it yesterday, only the immortalised Lang would be older than me. The film within a film is about gods and men, although this is part of a sly game, because in the modern world, rather than the grecian one, the film stars have become gods. Bardot is an effigy of beauty, Palance of unredacted masculinity, Lang a sagacious world weariness. If any director filmed actors with an awareness that he was constructing a panoply of Homeric immortals, it was probably Godard, faithful to the first three letters of his surname.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Le Mépris, a story told in three acts, is the way in which Godard reins in his ironic detachment. This is a drama, in the conventional sense, with conventional narrative beats and characterisation. The characters are at once less obviously his puppets than in other films, and more so, subsumed as they are in the meta-drama of his personal narrative which underpins the film. (Filmmakers struggling with the complications of being both ambitious, beautiful, and human.) The extended scene between Bardot and Piccoli, which makes up the second act, foregoes the winks at the camera, permitting the actors to remain absorbed in the budding tragedy of their characters’ failed relationship.

With Delarue’s delirious strings, Raoul Coutard’s crystalline cinematography and the plasticity of the small cast, this is almost a model for what a film might be, a mix of the romantic and the intellectual, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. No wonder it seduced me back then, a young man on the brink of his journey into the big wide world of gods and monsters. 

les carabiniers (w&d godard w. jean gruault, w. beniamino joppolo)

Les Carabiniers, Richard Brody informs us, “In first run, it attracted so few viewers—an estimated 2,000—that its box-office statistics went unreported.” It’s a chaotic mess of a film, in many ways, adapted from a stage play, which sees Godard’s Brechtian instincts pushed to the max, and illustrates the limitations of this approach. The film tells the story of two country boys who are sent off to the war, where they rape and pillage to their heart’s content, only to return home and find that not only are their promised rewards non-existent, but they are also about to be executed, paying the price for defeat. The two protagonists are deliberately painted as two dimensional, and the whole film has the feel of something flat and didactic. Where, perhaps, the spectacle of theatre permits this, cinema, wedded to an idea of psychological truth, feels unconvincing when it goes too far in its abandonment of that notion. Godard might have argued that the film does indeed represent a tortured truth. “If Les Carabiniers had no success in Paris, it’s because people are worms. You show them worms on the screen, they get angry. What they like is a beautiful war à la Zanuck. For three hours they kill lots of Germans. Then they go home happy, heroic. Real war, they don’t want. It isn’t war that is disgusting, it’s ourselves. People are cowards.” Indeed, it’s not hard to think of the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine as one watches the film, and the realities that Godard presents. But the alienating devices that work are so effective when the audience is drawn to Godard’s characters are less so when pegged to characters we have no reason to fall for. Godard messes around with Belmondo and Karina, and it always feels as though they are in on the joke, even if it’s at their expense. Here, the joke is that these characters are, no matter how pretty, essentially heartless monsters, and it’s hard to want to identify with this.

Perhaps for this reason, if anything Les Carabiniers could be used as a study in the significance of charisma as an actuarial trait. Godard was more than aware of the importance of beauty and charm as weapons to be utilised by both actor and director. He repeatedly took full advantage of his actors’ charismatic qualities in order to rope the audience into an unconventional way of seeing. He tries the same thing here, but it doesn’t quite work, no matter how pressing and significant the subject matter of the film. 

une femme est une femme (w&d godard, w. geneviève cluny)

Back into Godard world, which will never die. Sit down in the cinema, having forgotten how the film opens. Think, Dios Mio, how destacado era ese pibe. Out there. Doing his shit like no-one else, before or after, no matter how imitated. The ebullience of the cinematic vision, ripping up the rule book like he’s one of the Lumiere brothers all over again, reinventing cinema for the masses. Yeah, sure, the whole film is balefully self-indulgent. Yeah, sure the vision of femininity is balefully masculine. Yeah, sure so the director gets to make a paean to the girl he’s crazy about. Probably knowing that it’s never going to last for ever, that all good things come to an end. Yeah sure, it’s got a soggy middle, which is basically Angela (Karina) and Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) cosplaying being Karina and Godard. There’s a hundred reasons to dislike or at least have reservations about this film, but there’s a million reasons to love it. Which is the same sort of thing that could be said about any child, and there is something so gloriously childlike about this film, with its dippy creativity, its gauche gender wars, its naive iconoclasm that you can’t help adoring it, no matter what. Children don’t respect rules and neither does Godard, playing with sound, image, character like a kid in the biggest, best playground on earth, aka making a film. 

cine, registro vivo de nuestra memoria (film the living record of our memory) (w&d inés toharia)

This is one of those films that if you are a cineaste, you have to watch. There will always be this contradiction about cinema, in that it is an art that is inherently technological, but this is something which works against its longevity. Cinema exists in the dark, in cans or hard drives or clouds or DVDs. It is projected from these spheres of existence onto a screen, but when the projector is switched off, the film has to live on somehow. Toharia’s film opens by explaining how the vast majority of cinema from the silent era is lost forever, victim of recycling for the silver, or fire, because nitrate is highly flammable, or just decay, because film itself is an unstable substance. The film goes on to reveal how the art or science of restoration has evolved, referring to lost classics that have been rediscovered in the most unlikely of places (the lost footage from Metropolis which turned up in Buenos Aires, for example). It also addresses the fact that much of the great cinema of earlier eras is lost forever, and in amongst that is the work of great cineastes whose names we shall never know. The film is wide ranging in its remit, looking at the lost films of Africa, Asia and South America, as well as the more obvious spheres of North America and Europe. Toharia manages to cram a vast amount of information into the film’s two hour running time. The ghost images from lost films which have been partially recovered are inexplicably moving. The film constantly reminds us of the curious magic that is the moving image, a means of cheating time and capturing memory which humankind has never enjoyed before. This is a glorious film which should be seen by anyone with an interest in looking at screens. 

hurricane season (w. melchor tr. hughes)

Having read Paradais , it made sense to get to grips with Hurricane Season, which some have compared to Marquez. If this is correct, (and in this translation it doesn’t feel like it is), then it is a frightening reflection of what has happened to the Latin American literary world, and perhaps Latin America itself. In her machine gun prose, Melchor takes the killing of a trans and spins it into a golgothic voyage through a dead end Mexican pueblo. In this place, everyone is desperate, everyone is driven by venal desire, everyone will meet a cruel fate. Teenagers have miscarriages, other teenagers fantasise about fucking and killing their best friends, the elders have had all hope extinguished. There is no magic in this realism, the magic has been expunged, even the black magic has had its throat cut and died in a ditch. It’s not an easy read and there is no redemption to be found. The only thing that the characters know is that it will rain one day and they are likely to die sooner rather than later.

Although the scale of Hurricane Season is grander that of Paradais, the novel feels less nuanced. There is a reliance on the flair of the prose over and above the development of character. It is, one imagines from an editorial perspective, seductive. Long sweeping tracts of text, stepsisters to Bernhard, trampling over the Mexican littoral, delivering adrenaline shots of brutality and sexual violence. It is a representation of Mexico which mirrors one reality, whilst at the same time annulling all the others. The novel has much in common in with the section in 2666, the Part about the Crimes, without any of the framing contextualisation of Bolaño’s novel. The horror is overwhelming and restrictive, the novel peering through the narrowest of lenses at a world no-one would ever want to visit IRL. 

sabaya (d. hogir hirori)

Out on the other side of the cinemas or the blogs or the netflix or the ivory towers there is a whole other world which is the world that is waiting and the world before and in all likelihood the world that most inhabit now. This world remains outside the purview of the cinema or the blogs or the netflix or the ivory towers. There are no bridges or rope ladders. Then, every now and again, someone succeeds in jumping the gap, and the two worlds meet. In this documentary, Hirori achieves this.

Read around Sabaya and there is a controversy about how much is ‘real’ and who much isn’t ‘real’. The controversy is, in every sense, academic. Sabaya tells the story of two men who have made it their task to rescue the Yazidi women who were kidnapped by the Islamic State during its brief, tumultuous reign. The men know that many of these women are somewhere in the sprawling refugee camp in Northern Syria, close to the Turkish border, in theory controlled by the Syrian state, in practice the fiefdom still of Daesh. The villages surrounding the refugee camp are also sympathetic to Daesh. In one dramatic sequence, the men rescue a woman from the camp and are pursued and shot at as they make their way down empty roads, hoping to reach safety. We know the cameraman is in the car with the men and the woman. We know that this is documentary which is as real as it’s going to get, which is sharing the experience of those in the car with us, in the cinema.

It has been claimed that this scene has been staged. That the woman in the car who we see was not the actual woman in the car when the chase through the dark empty roads happened. That the interiors were filmed later. As though this discredits the authenticity of the film. I have no way of knowing whether these claims are valid or not, but what is evident is that the girl in the car was rescued (we see her later) and that the cameraman was in the car when it was pursued and shot at. What we have, at the most is a confluence of two realities, which does not in any way annul the reality of the film. If anything it underlines it. Every single representation of reality by a camera is a distortion of the actual reality (think Zapruder) and, should they so chose it to be, the task of the filmmaker is to present their version of the reality they claim to present as faithfully as possible.

And this, it feels, Hirori, a native Kurd, achieves. He shares with the viewer a reality which we realise is beyond our everyday ken. A reality of war, of abuse, of heroism, of hard choices, a reality which most of the world would rather not look at, with good reason, because these kind of realities only happen when everything has gone horribly wrong. All the same, someone has to document them, someone has to speak for the other side of the screens. Someone has to show that the Yazidi women can be rescued and are being rescued, that there is hope in the world, no matter how tarnished and flawed and desperate that hope might be. 

passage to india. (e.m. forster)

It feels incumbent, after finishing Forster’s novel, to find out what, for example, Edward Said thought about it. I learn with a bit of research that Said saw it as an example of further mysticisation of the Orient, indicative of a late colonial attitude. Forster, it should be noted, spent time in India. Unlike those novels where the impact of colonialism is inferred, consciously or unconsciously, (Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair), this is a novel written with first hand experience of the colonial project.

Given this, it felt to this reader as though the writer of Passage to India leaves little doubt as to his opinions. The portrait of the British community in India is scathing: “At Chandrapore the Turtons were little gods; soon they would retire to some suburban villa, and die exiled from glory.” At another point, Adela’s fiancé, says to his mother: “India likes gods. And Englishmen like posing as gods.” Forster dissects the Anglo-Indian community with understated savagery. The novel shows them to be petty, racist and philistine to boot.

There is, perhaps, a certain authorial courage in tackling the issue of colonialism head-on. It’s a subject which so many writers danced around the edges of. For three hundred years of British history, from the early 17th century to the mid 20th century, colonialism was a pillar of British society and wealth. And yet, as Said observes, its significance was only ever addressed in a tangential, allusive fashion. Whilst the British were politically and economically active, carving up the world to their own ends, its writers by and large ignored the colonial project. As such it felt, to this reader, looking back, a relief to find a writer prepared to take on the task of critiquing this centuries old policy. (People tend to talk about Colonialism as an inevitable practice, but it isn’t.) There is undoubtably, within the novel, a strand that perceives India as a place of mysticism and complex religion. Although, to be fair, this also leads to an examination of the complexities of the co-existence of India’s religious communities, one that India would still appear to be still struggling to come to terms with today. And it should be noted that Forster, in talking about these religions and their differences, is honouring them in a way that, he makes clear in the novel, the vast majority of the Anglo-Indian settlers failed to do. 

viridiana (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 6/6

Viridiana was the final film in a week of Buñuel. It marked his return to Spain as a filmmaker after years of exile in Mexico, and at the same time, it marks the start of his third incarnation as a director, the era that would produce a handful of copper bottomed classics.

It’s a remarkable film, full of complexity and what is known in Spanish as highly atrevido, a word that means bold or daring, but also implies a naughtiness, or a cheek. It has a narrative which is unafraid to twist and turn like a cobra, heading one way at one point, then changing gears. The film’s delirious closing sequence only features the protagonist, Viridiana herself, at the very end. The coda ending is like a throwaway sidewinder, which at once heralds the future of Spain and casts its past in the bin.

The story opens with the titular heroine Viridiana committed to a nunnery, seeking a life in Christ. Forced by her mother superior to visit her older but virile uncle, played by Fernando Rey, she finds herself drugged and abused by him. When it looks as though she has successfully escaped, she is brought back by a brutal strategic move on the uncle’s part, one which will wed her to life beyond the nunnery, whether she likes it or not. The film then switches tack, as Viridiana becomes a kind of Mother Theresa, welcoming the down and outs and outcasts of the local town to come and live with her on the estate. All this is then turned on its head again as her cousin, played by Francisco Rabal, comes to take over and modernise the estate.

In the course of all this, every single Buñuel trope is thrown into the mix. Perverse sexuality, the hypocrisy of religion, the marginals of society, and the overturning of the social order, depicted in a riotous scene which is like something out of Twelfth Night. Ancient European customs and class divides are represented and challenged. It’s a glorious jamboree of a movie which manages to conclude with the modern world subtly infiltrating and taking over the old world, as electricity and music flood the house and seduce, perhaps, a newly glamorous if tarnished Viridiana, her blond hair released like a dose of pure hedonism, the coming hedonism of the sixties. 

nazarín (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 5/6

Nazarín tells the story of a priest who is too virtuous for his own good. Adapted from a Galdós story, it’s a lumpy film, opening with a long sequence in the small community where the priest is based, before expanding in the second half into rural Mexico, as the priest is compelled to flee, followed by two devoted women who revere him. The opening half hour feels dialogue heavy and theatrical. The film struggles to catch fire, (until it does), and it’s only when the priest sets out on his odyssey that the film and the narrative gather pace. There is an obvious critique of the Catholic church, with the priest’s goodness proving to be his undoing (perhaps reminiscent of Greene’s The Power and the Glory), but more than anything the film offers Buñuel a chance to explore and reveal a deeper Mexico, a Mexico far from the big cities. His depiction of the campesinos and the pueblos is impressively filmed by DP Gabriel Figueroa, and this world, with its rogues and dwarfs is beautifully brought to life. The paradoxical majesty of the Hispanic architecture juxtaposed with poverty and struggle and the smallness of man in the face of the epic countryside, is captured as the priest’s calvary leads him and his followers towards a bitter end. The films of Reygadas are second cousins to Buñuel’s vision in Nazarín. 

robinson crusoe (w&d buñuel, w hugo butler)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 4/6

Since I read Robinson Crusoe a few years ago it has always intrigued me that Buñuel should have chosen to direct a version of Defoe’s novel. What Defoe’s tale depicts is, in so many ways, the antithesis of the classical Buñuel text. Buñuel is fascinated by society and the way in which the human vices and passions run beneath a veneer of civilisation. On a desert island with no-one for company, the only society Crusoe has is his pets. It’s perhaps indicative to see what Buñuel kept in from a novel which has to be cut to ribbons to fit the 90 minute format. One thing he retains is Crusoe, when leaving the mutineers behind on the island, telling them that they have one thing he lacked: human company and someone to talk to. The true challenge for the filmmaker is to make a film which doesn’t permit him to use his most effective skills: the dissection of human society. Instead, Buñuel pursues a study of loneliness and isolation, until the arrival of Friday. Crusoe goes through the wringer of existential despair, human activities which keep him distracted, self-pity, and optimism. This sequence, before Friday appears, is perhaps the more complex and intriguing part of the film, although it is slightly disturbing to see the way in which representation of native peoples, to use a phrase, does not appear to have developed greatly in the course of 250 years since Defoe. 

el (w&d buñuel, w luis alcoriza)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 3/6

El is the first of the Mexican films from this season which starts to feel like “Buñuel”. The dialogue-free opening five minutes set the scene. A priest washes the feet of a young member of the congregation. Francisco, a vigorous and wealthy middle aged man, surveys more feet, finally landing on those of the fetching Gloria and from that moment on it is amor fou, with Francisco determined to woo and steal Gloria from under the nose of his friend, which he does. What we don’t realise, and what seems in many ways a most modern approach, is that Francisco is an abuser, perpetrating both psychological and physical abuse on his new wife. The trajectory of this abuse is traced with subtlety, starting out as petty jealousy and then leading to violence and madness. The film is careful not to show Gloria as a victim; as is so often the case in abusive relationships, she is both hopeful that things will get better, and ground down, bit by bit, as they don’t. Buñuel and Alcoriza’s denouement doesn’t occur between Francisco and Gloria. Francisco follows a woman into a church, where he goes completely mad, with the madness conveyed from his point of view as he views the congregation mocking him, in his mind. This set piece scene is edited with comic glee. Other moments, such as when Francisco sits alone on his elaborate stairwell, contemplating killing Gloria with a stair rod, have real menace. There’s a wonderful final touch, when we revisit a supposedly cured Francisco in a monastery. Only the lie of the cure is given by the zig zag walk he adopts, which echoes the walk he made up the stairs when he set off to kill his wife. It’s one of those small details which give the film an added weight, and cleverly undercuts any pretence of a ‘happy ending.’

On imdb, someone claims that the cowled actor in this final sequence is actually Buñuel. It’s also worth noting that there are echoes of Vertigo in the bell tower scene, although this should be the other way round, as Vertigo was made in 5 years after El, and some claim Hitchcock stole/ was inspired by El. 

susana (d. buñuel, w. manuel reachi, jaime salvador, rodolfo usigli)

 Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 2/6

There were mild guffaws in the audience as Buñuel’s overripe plot reached its melodramatic denouement. The narrative revolves around the tempestuous titular character, who escapes from the reformatory and is then taken in by a wealthy, kindly family on their estancia. The fetching Susana proceeds to cause havoc, as the master, played again by Fernando Soler, his son, and the head of the estancia all fall for her charms, with predictably chaotic results. The ending is so banal it’s positively subversive, as Susana is rearrested and everything returns to an idealised normal. However, in Susana one can begin to trace elements of Buñuel’s later work. The examination of the way in which a seemingly stable and righteous social order is vulnerable to Dionysian attack. The subversive power of sexuality. The fragility of civilisation. All these elements are at play within the film, which Buñuel again directed from someone else’s script. 

el gran calavera (d. buñuel, w. janet alcoriza, luis alcoriza, adolfo torrado)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 1/6

Buñuel had to leave Spain after Franco’s defeat of the Republican forces. He went to Los Angeles for a bit, then headed to Mexico to direct Gran Casino, which was a flop. According to Wikipedia, he then spent three years surviving on money his mother sent him and was contemplating giving up filmmaking, before he got given a break when he was drafted in to direct El Gran Calavera, featuring the Mexican actor Fernando Soler. There’s nothing particularly surreal or Buñuelesque about El Gran Calavera, a moral comedy about a lazy, wealthy family whose paterfamilias, Ramiro, played by Soler, has turned into a drunk following the death of his wife. His family sponge off him, until he gets so drunk he nearly dies, and as a cure he is tricked into believing that he has lost his fortune and the family has been compelled to move into a poor neighbourhood. The moral fable is given a twist when he learns about the deceit and turns the tables on his family. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this film, over 70 years old, is how funny and engaging it is. The narration is taut, the storytelling is lean and the script is endowed with humour and moral complexity. These are comic characters, but they are also three dimensional. The vision of Mexican society is curious with the class divisions noted, but, the film contends, far from insuperable. It would be interesting to see if a contemporary remake would have any chance of being in any way plausible. 

argentina, 1985 (w&d santiago mitre, w. mariano llinás)

Argentina, 1985 is a renewed testament to the power of cinema. In Argentina and Uruguay, the movie is drawing full houses and provoking an excitement that few films achieve. All this for a serious drama with little in the way of action. It contains a barnstorming performance from Ricardo Darin, Argentina’s most celebrated actor, but this isn’t the type of film that normally challenges box office records. Seen from a non Southern Cone viewpoint, it might be categorised as a political courtroom drama. The reason for its success, on more than just a commercial level, is that it tells the story of how the military leaders of the dictatorship were brought to justice, mainly, the film contends, as a result of the courage and hard work of the lone fiscal, Julio Strassera, played by Darin.

The director and his screenwriter pull out all the emotional stops. There have been many post-dictatorship dramas, from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. Argentina, 1985’s effectiveness has to do with the way it tempers the inevitable emotional impact of the film with a dedicated resistance to any attempt to ramp up the dramatic stakes with artificial thriller tropes. One car explodes, but only one, and it’s a a side note. Strassera is given police protection, but instead of using this to heighten tension, the writers use it for comic effect, punning on the plain clothes policeman’s mighty name. The action remains downbeat and character driven, and in so doing retains a real sense of Buenos Aires and its laconic citizens, the real heroes of this story.

Having said all of which, Argentina, 1985 is self-consciously formulaic. The opening sequence is reminiscent of Taxi Driver, and the film is steeped in feelgood Hollywood cliches: the sassy kid who helps his dad out, the supportive wife, the odd couple pairing between Strassera and his younger naive assistant. There’s something almost anachronistic about all this. It’s clear that the filmmakers are seeking a classical register to tell a story of import. Some of the film’s brightest moments come when Llinás’ discursive storytelling techniques come to the fore, as characters relate dramatically significant moments that they have witnessed rather than letting the audience actually see them. At these moments the film acquires a more playful air, as the more idiosyncratic influence of Llinás competes with the dramatic verve of Mitre.

It would be fascinating to see this film in another part of the world where the emotional pull on the audience would not be quite so explicit as it is here. Would the dynamics of the courtroom scenes have quite such an effect? Would the immediacy of history shine through so compellingly? Would the bold inclusion of Strassera’s closing speech, of such enormous local import, translate? I don’t know the answers to that, but I do know that over here, the film has been a resounding success and deservedly so. 

metropolis (d. fritz lang, w. thea von harbou)

Metropolis is almost a hundred years old. Watching this still astonishing vision, it crossed my mind that it feels as though it is perched between two centuries. Just as someone my age feels as anchored in the last century as this one, the film seems to be looking back to the 19th, from whence the great struggle of labour arose. The workers are despatched to labour and live in the lower depths, whilst the rich inhabit soaring spaces in the sky. The scene where the top hatted toffs are overrun by the workers, filmed from above, like some kind of choreographed Brownian motion, seems to encapsulate this conflict, which the 20th century would seek to ameliorate or export or dress up in other costumes where everyone more or less dresses the same, no matter which class they belong to.

The vision of the future contained within Metropolis is still, dare one say, futuristic. Just as in Blade Runner, which it surely influenced, the visionary world feels in some ways more representative of our actual world than the actual world does, like a future we are driving towards at full speed, the details coming in to focus but never quite arriving. Another thing one notes watching the film in its entirety is to what extent the images Lang constructed have remained embedded in the visual culture. Watching it is a bit like seeing a Shakespeare play were you find yourself hearing phrases which are now part of the language. The robot, the man-clock, the skyline, these are all now visual reference points which popular culture has recycled. In a sense it feels as though this is more than just Lang placing his signature on the way we think, it is all that remarkable coalescence of inter-war German thinking, with post-imperialism, revolution and fascism boxing together on a pinhead, seeing which will prevail. 

a heart so white (marias)

The novels of Marias have this irritating habit of you leaving feeling bereft and inadequate. Bereft because, like all great novels, they gradually absorb you into the warp and woof of their worlds, slowly overwhelming you until you are so lost in them that there is no reason for them to end and when they do, you are left alone in the dark. Inadequate, because in entering these worlds, you are given access to another way of thought, which is in so many ways identical to your own way of thought, only these thoughts acquire, within the texture and framework of a novel, a sense of completeness which life can never afford. In documenting the ways of the mind with such relentless and brilliant precision, the author achieves the paradox of illustrating a way of thinking we can never emulate, and in so doing we pale beside the words he leaves on the page.

A Heart so White is a story of generational conflict, hidden crimes, and the secret workings of the heart, and how these secret workings interact with the secret workings (desires/fears) of the mind. If indeed the heart and the mind might be separate entities, if they are not, essentially, one and the same. (I would love to ask Marias about this but unfortunately he passed on last month.) The story is woven around three relationships: that of Juan to his new wife, Luisa, that of Juan to his father, Ranz, and that of Luisa to her father-in-law, Ranz. For the details, as ever, one must interrogate the novel (although there is little doubt that there remain some details which will not be revealed within the novel). Ranz, in the vein of Lady Macbeth, murders sleep, Juan, who works as a translator, murders Thatcher’s words, helping to kill her off, and Luisa murders no-one. The novel is put together through a bricolage of scenes and moments, in Madrid, Havana, New York and Geneva, which create a narrative, jumping around in time, that gradually reveals itself, the end rarely in sight, until it arrives, in a hurry, leaving you, the poor reader, desolate, bereft, alone again, or.

It is the very mundanity of the worlds Marias depicts that lend his novels their terrifying power. Because most who inhabit the Europe he depicts have been blessed with mundanity, a lack of dramatic action, a sense of inconsequence, and yet, at the same time, we still feel our lives to be inundated in action and dramatic action and the presence of seismic events, because this is what it means to be human. It means to experience the universe as though it has been constructed in order to give us heartache and terror, and a few good things too. The fact that we haven’t fought in wars or visited the moon doesn’t make this any less so. It was the genius of Marias to recognise and value this mundanity, to spin from its inaction stories and insights that pay homage to the trials of tribulations of living in peacetime, long may it last. 

asaltar los cielos (josé luis lópez linares y javier rioyo)

Storm the Heavens might be an English translation for the title of this documentary. It is constructed around the killing of Trotsky in Mexico in 1941, tracing the life of his assassin, Ramon Mercader. In the process it moves from Spain to Moscow to Paris to Mexico and finally Cuba, following in the footsteps of Mercader’s peripatetic and curious life. Following the assassination he spent twenty years in prison in Mexico, before being released and sent to Moscow, where he didn’t settle, moving finally to Cuba, where his grandparents had come from. The film recounts a vivid, restless story, collecting anecdotes from Mercader’s family, but also Trotsky’s US bodyguards, Parisian friends of Mercader’s lover, Silvia, and a host of astonishing figures who made up the Spanish exodus in Moscow, sent by their parents to escape the Spanish Civil War. These personalities belong to one of those hidden corners of the helter skelter twentieth century history. Old men at the time of the interviews for the film, they had spent most of their lives since childhood in Moscow. Nevertheless, they spoke Spanish without a trace of an accent, and manifested a completely Iberian temperament, as though they might have spent all their lives as friends in a tiny village in Extremadura. One of them recounts that in 1956 he went back to Spain, but couldn’t face it, and was soon back in Moscow. These interviews are some of a host of conversations with these long lost warriors of the great ideological conflicts of the twentieth century. The film is now nearly thirty years old, and most of the interviewees must be dead by now. Quite apart from the fascinating insights into the lives of Trotsky and his assassin, trained by his mother, who was waiting in a car for him to emerge from the house after the deed, Asaltar los Cielos opens a captivating window on this lost era, a time when utopian ideologies determined the world’s fate. 

invasion (w&d hugo santiago, w. jorge luis borges, adolfo bioy casares)

Hugo Santiago’s futuristic thriller is most famous for being written in part by Borges. It is considered to be elliptical, confusing, opaque. The premise of the film is an imminent invasion of a city called, Aquileia, clearly Buenos Aires. An elderly man, Don Porfidio, is trying to organise resistance. He has secured a consignment of weapons and has enlisted a crack team of brooding tango singers to lead the resistance. The crack team, lead by the extremely brooding Lautaro Murúa, plans and executes a heist, but gradually they are picked off and the resistance appears to have been thwarted, until the revolutionary coda at the film’s conclusion.

There’s been quite a lot of writing about how Borges was a closet supporter of the dictatorship, but it’s not hard to read Invasion as a corrective to that viewpoint. Julian, the hero, is killed in a football stadium, (the Bombonera), in an eerie echo of the repression that would come during Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende in ’73, with the murder of Victor Jara in the Estadio Chile. The final scene, when young people collect weapons to combat the invaders, feels like something inspired by the events of 68 (and the Tupas). However, the film is sufficiently cryptic to allow for alternative readings. The only clear discrepancy between the invaders and the defenders is that the defenders wear black and the invaders white gaberdines.

On a less overtly political level, the film reads as a metaphysical struggle between a dogged band of ciudadanos and their alien attackers. The final sequence which shows invasion by plane, car, boat and horseback is gloriously deranged. There is perhaps a suggestion of Nolan in its black and white philosophical underpinning, but it is also reminiscent of other avant-garde texts from that era, ranging from Point Blank to Last Year at Marienbad to Alphaville and even Performance, a film which acknowledges its debt to Borges at one point. This was an era of experimentation, with filmmakers willing to manipulate genre to fit their intellectual preoccupations. Invasion fits snugly into this tradition, aided and abetted by its Troilo score and tango sensibility. 

wood and water (w&d jonas bak)

This is one of those films that might be a gem, or might be utterly self-indulgent, probably depending on your mood as you enter the cinema. A grandmother, Anke, retires from her job in the church. She goes to visit her son, Max, in Hong Kong. Max never shows up. She wanders the streets of Hong Kong during the days of the umbrella protests, slipping by on the margin, someone who is on the edge of not only the world, but even her own world. She returns to her home in the Black Forest. Time has passed. Seismic events occur, but we are just spectators. The meta aspect of all this is that the director is using his own grandmother to play the grandmother, and the cast is made up of much of his family. Which smells to an extent of cinema-as-gestalt, and perhaps contributes to the sense that the whole project is somewhat contrived. There are some beguiling sequences, such as the encounter between Anke and the Hong Kong porter, but it’s hard to tell if the parts of this movie add up to a whole. 

the inferno (strindberg)

Like most, I imagine, I know Strindberg as a dramatist. The purveyor of gender wars and dreamscapes. The Inferno is a Knausgardian novel, one of those books which are clearly based on personal experience but invite the reader to suspect a literary embroidery of the stated facts. Which are, in themselves, wonderfully bonkers. Strindberg describes the way in which he is assailed by demons, who crop up in the scum left on the side of his bath or manifesting themselves through the strange noises that echo through the walls of his rented room. The demons have got into his head and this is no literary lion swanning around Europe (the book moves from France to Sweden to Germany to Austria and back to Sweden), but a man on the edge of reason and poverty, struggling to keep his head above water. If only our contemporary literary greats had this kind of manic, catastrophic energy. Whilst being assailed by demons, Strindberg turns his hand to alchemy, trying to create gold from chemical compounds. It’s unclear whether he succeeds or not, but he believes himself to have been punished for his audacity. At war with just about everyone, but especially the women in his life, he rediscovers his humanity via the intercession of his young daughter, who helps him to restore peace with his mother-in-law. Even here, however, he finds himself in a pink room which turns black in his presence and harbours more demons. Finally he advocates a return to Catholicism, which the editor’s note informs he would later turn his back on, and finds consolation for his purgatory in the writings of Swedenborg. In short, this is a delirious novel, which has no qualms about explicitly flirting with madness and suicide. The author displays a manic energy which goes beyond any quest for literary success; this is just another stage in his struggle with the reasons for being condemned to this inferno which some call life. 

ripples of life (w&d shujun wei, w. chunlei kang)

Wherefore Chinese cinema? One opens with this question because this is how Ripples of Life begins and ends. A film crew arrive at a hotel-restaurant in an out-of-the-way town, to make a film (called Ripples of Life) about how China is changing. The film is set in a downtrodden hotel restaurant. Gu, the frustrated young mother who lives with her in-laws who run the establishment, becomes friendly with some of the crew, and for a while it looks as though this is going to be a Pygmalion narrative. Gu would be perfect for the part of the owner of the restaurant in the film, and she’s keen for a way out of her humdrum life. She gets her nails done and is roped in to try out the costume for the role. And then the real movie star arrives and her narrative is cut short, in every way. The film is structured in three parts. The second part deals with the movie’s star, who has agreed to do the film in spite of the absence of a definitive script, because it is set in her hometown. We see another side of the town, the side that has been developed. She stays in a fancy hotel and finds herself both realising she misses the town and also wants to get away. The final chapter is an extended dialogue between the director and the screenwriter, who is incapable of producing a finished draft. Their exchanges are intricate and wordy. The screenwriter has worn an Argentine Football jacket all along, and at one point the blue and white shirt. At the moment when the conflict between him and the director seems on the point of becoming irreversible, the director looks at his phone and sees that Maradona has died. Which prompts a montage sequence of all the characters, over the singing of Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina. If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, it also feels like one. Ripples of Life, with its meta premise, veers between fascinating insights into the role of women in this new China, and self-indulgent theorising. The final section of the narrative does indeed feel as though the film is emulating its narrative, with both director and writer unsure how to conclude and resorting to didacticism, although I am sure there are elements of their conversations I might not have grasped. Nevertheless, I emerged from the cinema little the wiser as to the answer of the question, wherefore Chinese cinema?

1984 (orwell)

So, this book is like, prophetic, it’s like what the future used to look like and the future that never was but still might be, if you were a Spanish Civil War veteran stroke Old Etonian who’s lost faith in their youthful counter-revolutionary dreams but wanted to have it on record that those dreams existed even if they never came to fruition which is what happens with most dreams anyway, is it not?

And I imagine the writer sitting in a pub in Fitzrovia, walking home to his cottage at the top of Portobello, home of the Spanish exiles, feeling at once out of step and in step with a society which had given him so much and deprived him of so much at the same time and out of all this walking and talking and drinking and thinking emerges:

A dystopia.

Which in some ways perhaps is more of a work of autobiography than a work of socially aware politics. I write these words in ignorance, knowing little about Orwell, but trapped in the unbending cynicism of this vision, which is riddled with laborious prose and middle aged longing.

Perhaps the way in which 1984 is most modern as a novel is in how it satisfies the dystopian instinct of the capitalist era, wherein the worst excesses of our imaginations help to justify the moral compromises of the hangdog, individualistic society we find ourselves enclosed in, with its craving for indulgence dressed up as romantic freedom. This is in no way to sympathise with the excesses of the fascist regimes it critiques, but it is notable that Orwell’s alt vision feels jaded. The depiction of the proles, Winston’s last hope which is no kind of hope, feels entirely in keeping with the ongoing travails of the British class system, which has been consolidated by an era of alt-capitalism which has defeated both the communist autocracy and the fascist excesses which Orwell’s book decries. There is something hidebound and weary about the prose, which is the prose of a dying man, unhappy in his life and caught up in the petty machinations of the British publishing world.

nb Cursory research tells me Orwell lived at Portobello Road in 1927, long before the Spanish Civil War. So the above is an example of thoughtspeak or the desire to rewrite history as exhibited by O’Brien in the novel. 

cadejo blanco. (w&d justin lerner)

Cadejo Blanco, the notes advise, is a local Guatemalan name for a mysterious beast. Towards the end of the film, the protagonist, Sarita finds herself alone in the jungle and hears a strange animal cry, which might be the Cadejo. On the other hand, the real malevolent beast is clearly the gangster who runs the local crew in the sleepy seaside town of Puerto Barrios. Sarita has come there looking for her sister who has gone missing from the home they share in a poor corner of Guatemala City. Before she leaves for the coast, she visits her rich boyfriend in the house he inhabits in the private gated community, indicative of the two tier world, reminiscent of Melchor’s Paradais. Things go much as one might expect when Sarita reaches the coast. From bad to worse. She survives on her wits, as the narrative makes her face one challenge after another. The film on the one hand does an effective job of getting under the skin of this marginal community, and on the other perhaps soft-soaps a tad, particularly with regard to the problem of sexual violence. One worries that, no matter how testing Sarita’s journey will be, what the director shows is just the tip of the iceberg of what really goes on. The film is held together by Karen Martinez’s fearsome performance, an actress exuding complete commitment to the role. In an interview, the director noted that he worked on the whole with local kids/ actors, but for the lead he recognised the need to cast a more experienced actress and Karen Martinez delivers with real verve. 

apples (w&d christos nikou, stavros raptis)

Is there such a thing as the greek new wave? Apples feels as though it fits neatly into the Lanthimos model. A low-fi high concept narrative which in this case revolves around random members of society finding themselves struck down with total amnesia. It’s an epidemic, but not as we know it. Nikou deadpans through the recovery process of his protagonist, whose strongest link to his past life is his love for apples. Aris is assigned mundane tasks by his medical team. Go out to a club and get drunk. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Or, most movingly, befriend someone who is on the verge of death and accompany them to that end. The tone and the texture of the film is austere. Even when Aris goes out and dances, he does so in a minimal, semi-comic fashion. He has a brief relationship with a similarly afflicted young woman, which seems like it might turn into a love affair (and in the Hollywood remake undoubtably will) but wanes just at the moment it might have waxed.

There are hints in the narrative of Saramago’s Blindness, even Camus’ La Peste, and the idea of an epidemic has firmly seized hold in a Covid world. (Although one suspects Apples was conceived before the pandemic struck.) However, perhaps it makes more sense to posit the film within the overarching drama of Greece’s rumbling economic crisis. These are notes from the underground, Aris’ amnesia is the product of a society which has been compelled by forces beyond its control to sever social ties, reducing its citizens to lost souls, drifting through life searching for clues about the life they used to lead, or might have been leading. The result is something strangely muted and undramatic, a tale whispered in the corners by characters who look like someone you might know but can’t quite place.

Nb - Browsing imdb I discover Nikou was 2nd AD on Dogtooth)

the radetsky march (joseph roth, tr michael hofmann)

We go searching for clues in life. Perhaps the fact that I finished Roth’s classic text on the day that the British queen was buried is one of them. The potential parallels are striking. Roth’s novel depicts the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which had been held together for so long by the figure of its ruler, the Emperor Franz Joseph. The novel opens with Lieutenant Trotta saving the emperor’s life at that battle of Solferino, which occurs in 1859. For this act he is rewarded by being made Baron Trotta von Sipolje. His son becomes the District Administrator of a small town in the Empire and his grandson, forever in awe of his grandfather’s heroic reputation,  joins the cavalry. The novel follows the family over the course of 55 years, reigned over by an increasingly doddery monarch, as the internal tensions within the Austro Hungarian empire begin to fray, tensions which will lead to the assassination of Franz Joseph’s heir, Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.

The Radetsky March is about fathers and sons and grandfathers, but it is also about the way that historical certainties are constructed on myths and destined to become uncertain, sooner or later. After the initial meeting of Emperor and the first of the Trottas, there will be subsequent future meetings between Emperor and family, all of which hark back to the original incident, which becomes more and more obscure in the mists of time. The Emperor will come to physically resemble almost exactly the District Administrator, whose peaceful life will be overtaken by tragedy as his son’s fate becomes more and more conjoined to the eventual fate of the Empire, which will be extirpated by the Great War. Periods of peace contain entropy which will provoke the onset of tragedy and destruction. The more something appears to be set in stone, the more this is true.

Roth expresses a marvellous humanism in his portrayal of this family and its empire. The characters are beautifully flawed and their flaws are shown to be related to the nature of the society they have been born into. A society whose apparent inertia, taken up by small scandals and plaintive festivities, is invisibly disintegrating. This is the world of Freud and Schiele, as well as the world Hitler was born into. Not to mention my grandfather, whose parents might have had similar expectations to the District Administrator’s, before the twentieth century burst onto the scene and interrupted the peace with all its sound and fury. 

the line (w&d ursula meier, w. stéphanie blanchoud, antoine jaccoud)

Meier is one of those European directors alongside the likes of Petzold and Ozon, who seem to keep effortlessly bumping out high quality films which are humanist and sceptical with regards to genre. Her films interrogate family and its constraints. Dramatically engaging characters seek to sort out their lives against a backdrop of confusion and thwarted dreams. In The Line, Christina is the middle aged mother of three grown up children. A former concert pianist, she is dominant and stifling, but much loved. The film kicks off with a deliberately melodramatic sequence where the tension breaks and the angular and angry Margret, her eldest daughter, attacks her. The film then becomes about the fall-out from this moment, as Margret struggles to overcome her anger, whilst Christina’s other two daughters, Louise & Marion, try to find a way to live within a family at war. Stéphanie Blanchoud’s portrayal of Margret as a scarred soul seeking to overcome her flaws is beautifully acted. Whilst never appearing to be groundbreaking or sensationalist, Meier delivers constant tension around the simple premise: can this fucked up family recover? Or is it destined to be caught in a brutal cycle with no way out? 

never gonna snow again (w&d malgorzata szumowska, michal englert)

Never gonna Snow Again is a film full of ingredients. A psychic masseur from Ukraine. A gated community on the edge of Warsaw. Peopled by the dissociated upper middle class. A teacher dying of cancer. A woman in love with her bulldogs. A frustrated mum. A racist ex UN peacekeeper. Kids home-cooking MDMA tablets. A little bit of everything that makes the modern world go around. The film is beautifully shot, with every frame composed and lit with real flair. The only hitch is that the narrative itself doesn’t really make the most of all these ingredients. The film strolls around the gated community, following Zenia, the masseur, as he soothes souls and muscles, and charms the locals to no particular end. There is a suggestion at the film’s conclusion that this is all about immigration, with Poland now part of the promised EU land which Zenia uses his gifts to infiltrate. But unlike Ramussen’s Flee, which treads similar territory, the film backs away from any kind of emotional involvement. Zenia remains a blank canvas of a figure, who literally vanishes one day, never to return. The overall effect is of a film brimful of ideas which never quite amount to as much as they might have done. Watching it on the day Godard’s death was announced, it was hard not to think about how the aesthetisisation of cinema sometimes works against any more polemical or discursive ambitions it might aspire to, something Godard was well aware of and fought against. 

empire of the sun (d. spielberg, w. stoppard)

At one point in the film, the young Jim, played by Christian Bale, stands in front of a giant poster for Gone With the Wind. It’s a statement shot. This is going to be a big sweeping epic movie, it’s going to transport you as only cinema can. You will experience the British experience of WW2 in the Far East from the comfort of your cinema seat. The beatings, the hunger, the desperate struggle for survival.

This might have worked, only it doesn’t. On the whole it feels as though Spielberg has too much money to play with. We as an audience are far too conscious of the vast, Hollywood expense on show. This distracts us from focusing on the deprivations of being a POW in China. It feels like Spielberg wants to walk in the footsteps of Griffiths and Gance, but he can’t find the manual to tell him how to do it, as a result revealing the limits of the Hollywood project. Just because you can throw money at something doesn’t mean you’re going to get the public to empathise with the characters, or even understand what the hell they’re going through. Empire of the Sun is kiboshed by a dodgy script and an over reliance on a child actor who has no antagonist. One wonders what Wong Kar Wai might have done with this material.

As a side note. In the UK, the Hollywood/ Art Movie dichotomy is frequently set up, with the cards usually falling on the side of Hollywood, for reasons which are linguistic but also ideological. Spielberg, master of the box office, is revered. One wonders to what extent language is the real determinant in this debate. Of course, it’s erroneous to make a judgement on the basis of one film alone, but it is interesting to note that Empire of the Sun, really doesn’t hold up. The lack of narrative coherence is precisely the thing that ‘arthouse’ film is so often criticised for, but the script of Empire of the Sun is all over the shop and the whole project ends up feeling gratingly self-indulgent. 

cries and whispers (w&d bergman)

You never quite know what you’re going to get with Bergman. Cries and Whispers is an astonishing film. Part Exorcist, part Piano Teacher. As rough and raw as Cassavetes with the added no-holds-barred of Haneke. Four women in a claustrophobic house. Scarcely an exterior shot. Relentless use of the close up, as the anguished faces of the four women flicker with pain, desire or fear. There is not much of a story, this is more of a character study. Agnes, in an astonishing performance by Harriet Andersson is dying. How often has the pain of illness been represented with this much honest cruelty? I can’t remember a film which has had the bad taste and/or courage to show pain with as much candour, a scream from the depths which actively makes you, the viewer, want to turn away. Her other two sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullman), each one bearing the repressed pain of their marriages, each one adopting their own avoidance techniques to distance themselves from their unpleasant husbands. And finally, Anna, the maid, (Kari Sylwan) whose humanity trumps everyone else. A final sequence that is a straight out ghost story, with the bravura of Strindberg in an Ibsenesque world. Cries and Whispers is one of those films which is blazing a trail towards some other vision of humanity, femininity, cinema. Four extraordinary performances in a film which is, at times, almost unwatchable, which is the highest praise that can be bestowed. 

Incidentally, this was in so many ways the most appropriate possible film to have seen on the day that QE2 died, to witness an unadulterated version of death and its consequences. 

the burning of the world: a memoir of 1914 (bela zombory-moldovan)

I imagine there were two reasons which lead me to this book. Firstly, rightly or hopefully wrongly, the northern hemisphere summer, dusky, full of reports of blissful weather and the shadow of war, has had a very 1914 feel to it. Secondly, because of my own obscure roots in the Austro-Hungarian empire, an empire on the verge of dissolution when this book was written. Zombory-Moldovan’s account of the early months of the war on the Eastern front is almost banally harrowing. There is one chapter full of great violence on the newly opened Eastern front, bookended by preparation and recuperation. The violence is fleeting but its mark is irreparable. (The translator’s introductory notes are worth reading for context of the brutality of this Eastern front.) The writer was an artist and one of the most beguiling aspects of the book is his capacity to capture the colours of war, peace and landscape. The author’s description of Budapest and the Hungarian countryside contain a quintessentially European air. The beauty and consciousness of European civilisation permeates the author’s prose. Retreating from the front, he finds himself in Horyniec castle, with its art treasures, ancestral portraits. staircases, and galleries. A few hours after being forced to flee again, he looks back and sees the castle on fire. Civilisation is no insurance against the perils of war, and the notion of European ‘civilisation’ has always been more fragile than we like to believe in peacetime. 

1982, janine (alasdair gray)

Gray’s northern elegy to women, sex, his youth, the vicissitudes of being Scottish, is one of the more recherché texts of twentieth century British literature. At the conclusion of the book he includes a long list of acknowledged influences, (from Chaucer to Buñuel), but some of the ones that aren’t there include Bataille, De Sade, even Barthes. The interweaving of the personal with the imaginary is pushed in a highly subversive way, as the novel explores the narrator, Jock’s, erotic fantasises, which are chain-linked to memories of youth and early manhood (almost Wordsworthian at times). At the centre of the book is a long section set in the early years of the Edinburgh Fringe, where Jock becomes the accidental lighting designer for a show that flickers and then implodes, with references to Albert Finney and Tom Courtney. This section is a captivating read which might have stood alone as a short novel, but instead, the author framed it within the patchwork of the other chapters which alternate between scenes of the narrator’s youth and aforementioned erotic fantasies. These fantasies gradually acquire context themselves, as the memories reveal the course of the narrator’s romantic and sexual history, which have shaped the nature of the middle-aged fantasies. The novel veers between the exasperating, (even the narrator is exasperated by his fixation on Janine et al), and the appearance of being corsucatingly honest. No-one knows the true contents of an author’s mind, so there is no way of knowing how much the musings of Jock are a palimpsest for the musings of Alasdair, and it is part of the novel’s skill that this ambiguity feels so unresolved, it lies there like a tempting peach, defying the bite of conclusion.

What might be said beyond doubt is that Gray, who I met once as a lad, on a night in North London of copious whisky drinking, was out there ploughing a channel far from the quaint, polite British mainstream of his contemporaries. Think of McEwan or Murdoch or other luminaries and they have none of the visceral wallop of Gray’s prose (in which sense Chaucer seems an extremely apposite reference). Gray skedaddles in the peaks and troughs of another landscape altogether. 

belle de jour (w&d buñuel, w. jean-claude carrière)

That curious moment in history when men were permitted to make contentious films about women, something that is less and less condoned. And perhaps, looking at Belle de Jour, one might say that it was a prime example of why this shift has happened. Does it really make sense for a male director to make a film about a beautiful woman who has perverse fantasies and decides to take up prostitution for no very good reason? Is this either plausible or praiseworthy? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that Belle de Jour is an uncomfortable watch, which might be a virtue was as well as a vice. Is this not actually a film about Freud and bourgeois manners? No-one comes out of the film looking good, from Deneuve herself to her husband to the madam who runs the very genteel brothel Deneuve decides to work for. Part of the complexity of the film arises from the fact that the director would not appear to be in the least bit interested in naturalism or psychological accuracy. Rather, he is using the story of Severine as a lens through which to gaze at the fucked up nature of desire in the civilised world, something the film undoubtably achieves. Few have had the nerve to go beyond naturalism to explore the subconscious mire of the modern mind and watching Buñuel now, albeit it feels dated in some ways, one is also made aware that when a director is willing to use cinema as a tool to prise open consciousness, it leads to the most unexpected of places. 

malina (ingeborg bachmann, tr phillip boehm)

This novel reads like the genius clandestine work of a marginal figure. It comes as some surprise to discover after finishing it that Bachmann was a central pillar of Austrian culture, a reference for the likes of Bernhard and Jelinek, who adapted the novel for the screen. Malina is a dense, complex read, structured around the thoughts of a woman who lives with one man, Malina, and has an affair with another, Ivan, although her relationship with Malina is probably platonic. The book is composed of three sections, one where the primary emphasis is on her relationship with Ivan, another, the last, with Malina, and a section in the middle where the focus is her father. This section is the most nightmarish, as it becomes increasingly evident that the relationship between father and daughter was incestuous.

There is so much going on in Malina that the threads sometimes seem to run away from the reader, perhaps even the writer, but that is part of the novel’s complex glory. The game of the novel involves following these threads, sometimes getting caught up in their unlikely logic, sometimes trying to make sense of them. The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ is perhaps used too much when discussing female writers, but it’s clear that Bachmann delights in leading the reader up the garden path and back again, at times with sequences that don’t even pretend to make grammatical sense, at others with a ragged challenging brilliance. At the same time, this is also a novel which explicitly details the joys and sufferings of being an independent Viennese woman.

“I’ll sleep on my questions in a deep intoxication. I’ll worship animals in the night, I’ll lay violent hands on the holiest icons, I’ll clutch at all lies, I’ll grow bestial in my dreams and will allow myself to be slaughtered like a beast.”

twenty four seven (w&d shane meadows, w. paul fraser)

Has anyone ever laughed as much as I did in an Uruguayan cinema upon hearing the words ‘Edwina Currie’? I doubt it. This reference to the erstwhile politician and lover of the former prime minister actually taps into the wider themes of Meadows’ engaging early work. The central character, Darcy, played by Bob Hoskins with an irascible glee, keeps a diary, which one of the lads who make up his boxing team later discovers. In it, he writes, and narrates, that he was one of those left behind in the Thatcherite boom of the eighties. Which is why he finds himself down on his luck, identifying with the gang of kids who hang around and get into trouble. His mission to set up the boxing club and give the kids a focus in life is a communitarian reaction to the warped individualism of Thatcherite Britain.

The film rides on the back of Hoskins’ charm, the director’s verve and the humour of the kids. Meadows’ future as a spinner of stories for TV can be noted here, as there are more than enough sub-stories and narrative strands to fill out another three movies at least. The closing credits come over the scenes of Darcy’s funeral, a few years after the film’s events, picking out the lads and their new families. The film is carried by Hoskins, whose commitment to the boxing club presumably reflected his commitment to the film itself, an actor with a notable track record mucking in with a rookie director and an even more rookie cast.

The film’s depiction of a depressed Midlands town, where multi-racial youths feel as though there is nothing to do except look for trouble, feels acute and authentic. It is also a telling prefiguration of a country which, no matter how wealthy it has appeared, has been in many ways running on empty for forty years.

alexander the great (w&d angelopoulos, petros markaris)

The frame is set up. Someone enters. Action occurs. The camera follows the action. The sequence ends or is interrupted. People leave. Someone remains.

This cinematic sequence is repeated many, many times in Alexander the Great. It becomes mesmeric. The viewer is always an active participant in the action, attentive for clues and details. Each set-up is a minor mystery which may or may not be resolved. This is evident from the very first shot, which we are informed happens at the dawn of the twentieth century, as a great house sits in darkness, remains in darkness, and then, of a sudden, the lights are switched on, people appear in profile in the windows, the world is alive, the sequence ends.

The story itself is deceptively simple and in so many ways it feels as though Costa Gavras’ recent Adults in the Room contains echoes of Angelopoulos’ epic. A group of British aristocratic capitalists are kidnapped by Alexander, a legendary brigand, who takes them to his mountain village, which is undergoing a radical egalitarian program. Some Italian anarchists arrive, seeking shelter. The political-military machine starts to close in as the British send gunboats to the Greek shore. Tensions rise in the village and the villagers turn on Alexander. There is an assassination attempt. Alexander seizes absolute power. Anyone who tries to flee the village, including the anarchists, are killed by the military. The film ends with Alexander taking the lives of his hostages before he is killed in a sequence reminiscent of Mifune’s demise in Throne of Blood.

This is an epic narrative, which plays out over the course of nearly three and half hours. What this timeframe permits the director to do is twofold (at least). On the one hand it emphasises the epic aspects of his vision. Alexander’s story is played out in the shadow of his namesake and in a Greece to come, with a child named Alexander escaping the village and, in a final shot, approaching modern day Athens. The story of Alexander, with its greatness and its flaws, is destined to be repeated endlessly. The length of the film also allows the director to immerse the viewer in the complex world of this simple village. We come to understand the geography of the village, its bridge, its central square with a tree, its cliff facing the river, like the back of our hand. We know how they dance, how they celebrate, how they argue. The village is the other character, the counterpoint to Alexander, whose aspiration to greatness struggles to come to terms with the notion of the free social individual, it can only function within a wider concept of power.

This is movie making on a grand scale, with a socially conscious political drive which would appear to have been more or less eliminated from the cinema, sublimated to the more narrative driven demands of TV series. It is cinema in the tradition of Eisenstein, Gance and Griffith. The Bertoluccis, the Tarkovskis, the Ciminos - those who saw cinema as a canvas on which to paint examinations of great social upheaval and complex political order, have been exiled. 

el año de la furia (w&d rafa russo)

Authenticity is a strange thing in cinema. Russo’s film deals with events in Montevideo in 1972 which lead up to the coup which brought on a decade of military dictatorship. However, if this film was made to be watched anywhere, it probably isn’t Montevideo. The North Americans have done this for years, but casting actors whose accents are clearly not from the place where the film is set instantly jars. Most of the secondary actors are recognisable Uruguayan faces, including my compinche Fernando Dianesi, but they are just background noise, like the moodily filmed Ciudad Vieja exteriors. The lead actors are Spanish or Argentine. Hence, the film becomes a curious study in cultural appropriation. The confusion around casting extends to the rest of the film as it seeks to engage with its political context whilst incorporating genre elements of a romantic thriller. The result is uncomfortable and consistently unconvincing. El Año de la Furia feels indicative of a trend which has been driven in recent years by the streaming giants who have significant budget to invest and are desperately seeking stories. Recent political history works as a canvas upon which a story can be drawn. The true historical events and players are exploited for the purposes of mainstream ‘entertainment’. The result is a two dimensional exposition, which cannibalises real events. Cinema is always waging a Borgesian war with actuality, (cf The Map and the Territory), but recent developments have meant that the bad habits of Hollywood have now permeated the global industry.

(Whilst not a particular fan of Tarantino, one of the most interesting elements of his work is the way he transparently manipulates and deviates from assumed ideas of historical truth in his films, as though to say it is not the duty of cinema to seek authenticity. A film like El Año de la Furia, with its closing notes and aspirations to historical accuracy fails to recognise the way in which its use of narrative and character inevitably distorts audience perception of actual events. In its defence, the filmmaker might say, ‘So did Shakespeare…’)

mudar de vida (w&d paulo rocha, w. antónio reis)

Rocha’s 1966 offering is a beautifully shot tale neo-realist tale set on the Portuguese coast. Adelino has returned after years in exile in Angola. The coastal community he returns to is desperately poor, and his former sweetheart is now married to his brother. He returns to his former life, labouring and working on the fishing boats that crest the Atlantic, but the hardship of this life is destroying his health. He falls in with a younger woman and begins a tremulous affair with her, which arouses the ire of a conservative community. The film ends with the couple looking as though they are on the point of perhaps leaving together to start a life somewhere else. The narrative is very much in the Neo-realist vein. The images of the fishermen rowing on the open sea and bringing in  the boats and the nets are shot with an urgent, vivid clarity. There is one devastating scene where the family’s beachfront timber house begins to collapse as the high tides undermine the wooden scaffolding that holds it up. People scramble to break it down and recover anything they can, including the timber. It’s an astonishing scene of coastal erosion. Other scenes of the villagers participating in the local festivities are just as brilliantly shot and the film builds up a compelling vision of this impoverished seaside community. It felt curious watching it to think how this world would transform in the second half of the twentieth century with the arrival of mass tourism. The insidious poverty would presumably be alleviated, and this landscape which in the film is harsh and unforgiving would soon come to seen idyllic to German and British visitors. As such the film offers a fascinating portrayal of the transformation of Europe over course of the past fifty years (my lifetime), both in terms of labour and comfort, and consciousness. That which was considered abrasive and harsh is transformed into the supposedly idyllic. What has subsequently befallen the communities Rocha depicts would be fascinating to discover. Have they survived or has tourism hollowed them out?

brodeck’s report (phillipe claudel, tr. john cullen)

Brodeck’s Report is one of those slightly deceptive books, set in an undefined, postwar village in a country which is never stated. The writing includes the use of a foreign language which feels like a variant on German. The village has its own language, as well as its customs and its sins and its secrets. It is narrated by Brodeck, a man who was sent to a concentration camp and lived to tell the tale, only to return to his village to find that the evil is still present. Brodeck is commissioned by the village elders to write a report about the killing of a mysterious stranger who has descended on the village for no obvious reason and whose understanding of the village’s crimes eventually provokes a violent, fatal response. The novel is constantly allusive, swathed in mystery and a certain mysticism. In the closing notes the writer acknowledges the work of Primo Levi. The use of the holocaust as a literary device is always problematic and in Brodeck’s Report, it engenders a certain unease. The descriptions of Brodeck’s time in the camp feel sketchy, relying on the power of images, whose power perhaps never feels as compelling as they ought to, to describe the evil they represent. That these images are then juxtaposed against similar images from the village leaves the reader in an awkward position: should the reader interpret the villagers’ actions as equivalent to those of the Nazis? Or is the book saying that all middle European societies have inevitable Nazi tendencies? The book’s poeticism only seems to shroud these issues in more confusion. 

flee (w&d jonas poher rasmussen, w. amin nawabi)

As we settled down to watch Flee, we realised that we had seen it before. It was in Sundance last year, I believe, alongside Censor, which permitted us to watch it on their platform. However, within a few minutes of that strange sensation when you re-acquaint yourself with images that you’ve forgotten you’ve already seen, the film took over and it felt like the first time all over again. Flee is a film about a refugee, but it approaches the subject matter using animated recreations of filmed scenes, something the final image makes clear. The effect is enormously powerful. There are limits to the possibilities of naturalistic representation. There comes a point when the presence of an actor representing a supposedly real event interferes with the audience’s reception of that event. The scene doesn’t feel quite “true”. Rasmussen’s use of animation as he tells the story of Amin’s flight from Kabul to Moscow and eventually Copenhagen, erases this doubt. Using animation allows the viewer to avoid the question of literal, documentary truth and engage with the story on another register. The use of interspersed archive footage, from Afghanistan and Russia (something I don’t recall from the Sundance cut - was it added later?) helps to root us in the reality of these places, but we identify with Amin all the more because his story is not framed by an actor playing him. It’s a highly subtle form of storytelling which has the effect of making Amin’s experiences feel achingly real. 

adults in the room (w&d costa gavras, w. yanis varoufakis)

Adults in the Room is a fascinating and unlikely work from the veteran director, Costa Gavras. He’s 89 years old and still hard at it, an inspiration to us all. This is clearly something of a passion project. The film is a fictional account of the events surrounding the Greek financial crisis which began in 2009, following the global crisis and rattled on for years and years. The film picks up with the election of Syriza in 2015, with Tsipras as the new prime minister and Yanis Varoufakis his finance minister. The events the film describes are based on the book by Varoufakis, who is credited as co-writer.

The Greek financial crisis has been lengthy and complex and not, in this day and age, obvious material for a feature film. It is remarkable how the director succeeds in recounting the intricacies of the negotiations of the Greeks with the Troika of financial organisations, managing to both maintain the film’s rhythm as well as never lose the spectator. Part of the film’s thesis is that this is something that the financial organisations desire. They want to obfuscate, they seek to make it seem as though their decisions are beyond the understanding of the common man or woman, and hence have to be taken on trust. Varoufakis and Costa Gavras go about deconstructing this mystical thesis highly effectively. We always understand both points of view, and at the times the conflict makes for great drama. The film feels as though it belongs to a register which cinema has abandoned: a Brechtian exhumation of contemporary political economic history, where cinema seeks to engage the viewer in issues that normally are supposed to go over their head. (The work of Adam Mackay might be one of the few contemporaries working in this vein.) This quasi Shakespearian approach is generally despatched to be dealt with via documentary, with the suggestion that it’s in slightly bad taste to taint the hallowed halls of fictional cinema with these mordant details.

It’s a film which feels as thought it shouldn’t really work and yet it does. I remember following the Greek crisis for years with no real idea of what was occurring. I left Adults in the Room enlightened. The counter-argument to that of the charismatic Varoufakis might perhaps be underplayed, but the issues are clear. It’s also fascinating to watch the presentation of Varoufakis, played by Christos Loulis, a man who for a while seemed like the epitome of some kind of undefined counter cultural messiah. It’s curious how Varoufakis seems to have subsequently dropped off the global radar, no matter how influential he might still be in Greece. The film succeeds in making the viewer contemplate the possibility of another order of things, even if, looking through the prism of Brexit, the endgame feels more ambiguous than the film suggests. 

trick mirror (jia tolentino)

Trick Mirror is a collection of 9 essays. Many of these essays address the issue of feminism, or being a woman in today’s (post?) feminist western world. Others dovetail and overlap with this theme as they explore notions of identity in the age of the internet and social media, and the construction of the self. There are essays on university life and marriage, but also the way in which the USA has always been a huckster’s paradise (which lead to Trump) and another on the link between religion and ecstasy, that being ecstasy the drug. The essays which most struck this reader were the ones that dealt with the relationship with the internet and another titled Always be Optimising.

The latter again interrogates feminism: “Today’s ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form.” Tolentino then goes on to question to what extent feminism has been sublimated by capitalism, and the cult of the spectacle, and how far this has truly made for the liberation of women. It’s a thesis that seeks to ruffle feathers, and is all the better for it. “The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite - de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.” It is also one that perhaps, as we live in a world where the commodification of the image is ever more prevalent, goes beyond the gender divide.

Tolentino’s article on the internet is one of the sharpest critiques of a thematic that has erupted in the 21st century and is only destined to become more problematic. “The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us”, she writes. The way in which knowledge has been neutered by being located in the virtual world, whilst the real world goes about its process of removing rights and restricting education is something that requires writers like Tolentino to shout about as vociferously as possible.

However, in contrast to reading, say, Virilio, who might be said to explore similar cybernetic territory, Tolentino writes with a relaxed, intimacy. She is willing to add her own autobiographical experiences and put them to the test, holding the reader’s hand as she talks through the complexities of being a woman in the internet age. It’s no doubt this capacity for the candid that has helped to build a solid base of readers, and gives her leeway to move from a specific, personal to a more general, philosophical viewpoint. Whether you agree with what she’s saying or not, she is always readable and engaging. The fact that she is also skewering some of the biggest problematics of capitalism, feminism and modernity, is a bonus. 

cemetery of splendour (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

Acknowledging that there might be much in the way of context which I could not grasp, and that perhaps it was overkill to watch three Apichatpong films in a week, I have to say that Cemetery of Splendour was the first to try my patience, and not really work for me. Which, as noted, might be down to circumstances. At the same time this also appears to reveal quite how delicate a process this kind of meditative filmmaking is. A hair’s breadth too drawn out, which is what the long cemetery sequence at the end felt like, or too solipsistic, and the experience runs the risk of becoming torpid, and the film of appearing self-indulgent. Cemetery of Splendour is constructed around the idea of sleeping sickness affecting soldiers in Thailand, but I struggled to understand who these soldiers were and why they had been struck down. All the questions which shouldn’t come to mind started to interfere and I felt as though I has been left outside of some kind of magic circle with all the real action happening over there, behind the screen, just out of sight. 

le père goriot (balzac, tr ellen marriage)

Reading Balzac, in a similar way to reading Zola or Proust, is to dive into a corner of a vast sea. La Comédie Humaine, “consists of 91 finished works… and 46 unfinished works” (cf wikipedia). To read one of these works on its own seems a bit akin to watching a single episode of an endless TV soap. There is no way of placing the work in context, because the reader is lacking the other 140+ pieces of context, and to spring to quickfire conclusions seems an act of ignorance.

So, having completed my first novel from this vast collection, Père Goriot, to offer any kind of commentary feels ‘atrevido’. The novel tells the story of an impoverished father who continues to support his two daughters, in spite of the fact that they are married to figures from high society and are ostensibly well-off. Goriot lives in a boarding house with the young legal student Rastignac, among others, whose own ambitions to move into high society will be conditioned by his strange friendship with the devoted father, who is taken advantage of by his ungrateful daughters.

The thrust of the novel’s moral education for both Rastignac and reader is clear and the study of Paris’ social worlds is effusive. One of the most intriguing elements of the novel concerns its pre-history. Goriot, we are told, made his fortune in the wake of the revolution. At a time of food scarcity, he began to control wheat supplies and this lead to him becoming rich. Later in the novel, impoverished and near his end, he repeatedly says he will go to Odessa to return to the wheat business. Within the course of a single generation, the whole upheaval of the revolution, as described in the novel, has been forgotten. The aristocracy have regained complete control of society and absorbed any social differences. Goriot’s sole ambition is to get his daughters into that society, which he achieves, only to find that this offers none of the security either for them or for him he imagined. The result is that the revolution, the most seismic event in the recent history of Europe, as well as Goriot’s life, is reduced to a footnote. It becomes, in the novel, a kind of black hole, with Parisian society accelerating away from its centre at warp speed. The poor are poorer than ever and the rich more venal than ever. History has moved on without, it seems, having taken on any of the lessons that the years of strife might have imparted.

mysterious object at noon (d. apichatpong weerasethakul)

Mysterious Object at Noon would appear to be Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first full length feature. A doc/ drama, it combines an immersive trip through rural and urban Thailand, with the narration of what appears to be a folk story about two sisters/ teachers who are the same person, or who replace each other, which is of course something of an Apichatpong trope. At one point the film shows a set of travelling players giving an open air performance of the story to a village, with the actresses wearing identical, beautiful costumes. The viewer has to do quite a bit of work to stitch the story together, and the fact that there is no definitive version is revealed by the sequence at the end, where a group of school kids offer up their differing versions of how the story should end, which all seem to feature a bewitched tiger. Many of the tropes of his later work are therefore present, like tantalising clues. It was also notable, the day after watching Memoria, how similar rural Thailand looks to rural Colombia. The film helps to determine the director’s aesthetic, taking the viewer into a sensory exploration of modern Thailand in all its languid diversity. 

memoria (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

I picked the perfect evening to go and watch Memoria. There are some days in your life when you want nothing more than to be plunged into a dense, visionary spectacle. Memoria delivered in spades. Only the goofiest, most irreverent of creators gets to smash the system with so much glee. In which regard this film made me think of other Latin based films which somehow manage to interrogate the edge-of-life feeling which the islands of life and empty spaces lend to Latin America, those being the films of Reygadas and the recently viewed Latin excursion of Wong Kar Wai.

I don’t know why Apichatpong chose to film in Colombia, but in so many ways it works. From the flash scene of kids dancing in the square of a remote town to the moment a man falls to the floor in Medellin, scared he has been shot, and then starts running, the film locates pinpricks of Colombian life that pepper the movie, that make it feel it is of that place, despite the multinational creative team. The scene set in the uni courtyard is another, as is Swinton’s character just drifting into a jazz rehearsal in a cramped room, with other students watching with blank but attentive faces. The detail feels both improvised and pitch perfect. Something that surprised me about the film, was the sly humour which Swinton embraces as well, with several scenes provoking an entirely unexpected laughter.

Memoria is a quest film, as Swinton goes looking for the source of her auditory hallucination and finds that it was either to do with someone hiding under a bed in a remote tropical village or it was the departure of an alien spaceship, or both. It is also, one supposes, a premonition of a death she has already lived. At some points it could almost be said that everything gets a bit M Night Shyamalan, not that anyone else would probably think that.

Don’t watch this film at home unless you are properly stoned, or it is the middle of the night when nothing and no-one is going to disturb you. If possible, watch it in on a vast screen in a near empty sala. Let the sounds disconcert you. Strain to hear every word. Watch Tilda’s face become a mask of Tilda’s face. Watch the dead walk amongst you. Dream about your origins as you ride the clouds with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in no particular hurry to discover where you are going or where you have come from.