responsabilidad empresarial (corporate responsibility). (d. jonathan perel)

Jonathan Perel’s austere documentary is an exercise in cinematic minimalism. A series of single shot takes, clearly filmed from within a car, of Argentine factories or workplaces. Each  shot is accompanied by a voiceover giving details of the way in which the owners of the particular factory, (some of which are now abandoned or in disuse, others still operating), collaborated with the Argentine military dictatorship. The unseen voice lists the crimes associated with the factory, from laying off workers for their militancy to participating in the disappearance of workers, as well as the pay-off that the businesses received for having collaborated.

As mentioned it is an austere watch, cinema pared down to the bone, which almost seems to invite a debate as to whether this is the best way to address this subject matter or not. The great debate surrounding political or activist filmmaking is the question of how much it chooses to preach to the converted and how much it seeks to reach out to a wider audience. Perel’s film, which premiered at Berlin, is very much a niche watching experience. It is a document(ary), in the purest sense of that idea. It documents, with no attempt made to entertain or seduce. As such it’s doubtful it will convince anyone who does not have a vested interest in watching the film about the iniquities of dictatorships. But it will also linger in my mind far longer than many a soft-soap drama about the subject matter might have done. 

andy warhol a biography (wayne koestenbaum)

Wayne Koestenbaum’s biography of Warhol is an incisive account which blends fact and theory. As well as recounting the Warhol story from childhood though to untimely death, the author also explores the logic and inspiration behind the creative work of an artist almost as famous for being famous as he was for his art. The art was received in his lifetime as something between genius and kitsch, with no-one all that certain which was which. I wonder if Warhol’s fame is quite what it was when I was growing up. Warhol, both the name and the work, was an omnipresent point of reference in the late twentieth century, in part because of his association with some of the most cultish pop stars in the universe, in part because his art had an iconoclastic freshness. It feels as though the likes of Koons, Hirst, Emin and Holzer have to a certain extent displaced his position within the zeitgeist, just as they are waiting to be replaced now.

Koestenbaum’s biography is so telling because it takes the reader back to the work itself, both pinpointing why it was so radical and also offering an artistic vindication of the pieces. He notes how Warhol’s sensibility reflected the gay NY world he inhabited as a young man when homosexuality was still a crime, a locus where “rigorous conceptual artists, (were) pioneers in understanding how perverse sexuality interrupts the distinction between public and private space.” Warhol’s private/public working space, The Factory, emerged from this consciousness, a place where the outrageous could flower in private, where societal norms and aesthetic criteria could be reinvented. Koestenbaum is also great on the way that Warhol’s fascination with fame was paradoxical: “His goal was to make everyone famous—the creed of “Commonism”; a Foucaultian recognition of the previously repressed role of narcissism in the human psyche which now blooms in the world of Instagram. These days anyone can put a filter on their portraits, following in the footsteps of Warhol, the first person to really grasp the iconic power of distortion, reframing and idealisation in the age of mechanical (later digital) reproduction.

One can’t help thinking there ought to be a play about Warhol and Foucault hanging out together in a NY sauna, because Koestenbaum’s text highlights the way in which the artist was a visionary whose sexuality was fundamental to his ability to reimagine the world, as was perhaps the case with Foucault. There’s also a lovely moment where the book notes a connection between Warhol and George Grosz, who voted to include the young artist’s work in an exhibition. The links between Warhol’s portraits and Grosz’s caricatures seem retrospectively obvious, both using human features to comment on the socially determined vanity of the human species. 

dune (w&d villeneuve, w. jon spaihts, eric roth)

Villeneuve has always shown Wagnerian tendencies and Dune allows him to indulge these to his heart’s content. Sweeping battle formations, caricaturesque villains, titanic scale, finely moulded body armour, sacred swords. All these boxes and many more are ticked. I realise that this is an adaptation of a novel, but the directorial thumbprint is all over it.

A few random thoughts:

Iraq

Villeneuve has turned Dune into an allegory for the US imperial adventures in the Middle East. The references are not subtle, down to the interpolation of the Mahdi myth into the narrative. This world with its palm trees, its shifting sands, its veiled women, feels like it could be one of those slightly abortive Iraq films from a decade ago. Having said this, the message surrounding these signifiers remains confused. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Because Chalamet’s princely Paul has a definite gringo feel, but he’s also the heroic epicentre of this narrative. In fact all the heroic characters have a gringo air to them, with Bardem’s maverick rebel commander being the strangely accented exception. Meanwhile, the lead villain is resurrected as a pool of oil. The point of this is that the film offers no clarity on its take on late imperial USA: it just throws a few semiotic signifiers into the mix and lets them stew.

Global Warming

There’s much made in the film about the way in which the Dune planet might have been a paradise but has been turned into a desert hell by the quest for spices (ie oil - the actual process of extracting oil along with the demonic worms seem redolent of fracking). Sous la pavee la plage, or, under the sand, the green. Chalamet and famille live in a verdant, Atlantic land, which they give up in order to pursue the riches inherent in the spice trade. What all this means is anyone’s guess and it there is an eco-parable lurking here, it’s also buried beneath the sands of its Wagnerian hero-worship narrative.

Desert

One of the strongest aspects of Dune is its realisation of the desert, with some remarkable cinematography by Greig Fraser. However, the one thing that I felt on emerging from the air-conditioned Cinemateca into the hottest day of the year, was that the film never succeeded in conveying the claustrophobic, stifling sensation of pure heat, which is fundamental to the idea of the desert and the narrative itself. There’s too much going on for this sensation to ever emerge and seize the audience in its grip. Again this speaks of the use of image and signifier over any real immersion in the film’s professed themes. We can see that we’re in the desert, but it never really feels like a desert, because on the whole this film feels more like walking through a tastefully designed shopping mall full of beautiful customers.

Infantilisation

“I’m all lost in the supermarket”, they sang once upon a time. That song, it seems now, feels like a lament for the way that the commodification of life seeks to strip it of meaning. Dune is a well executed piece of cinema, with some splendid design work and 3D effects. The post production budget must have made the execs’ eyeballs swim with the kind of fear the film never really conveys, for all of Zimmer’s intent to ramp up the tension with his score. However, in the end, what does all this money and glitz actually buy? The reference to Wagner made me think of the finest use of that composer’s music in modern US cinema, in a film that was also about US imperial adventures, but one which actually sought to comment on the reality of the Vietnam war, a gruesome, absurd reality that reflected the dark side of modern USA. Dune just uses these notions as wallpaper to cover the empty cinema wall. Content has been Baudrillarded, it has been stripped of any intent at meaning. We are all children, waiting for the next thrill. Personally I blame George Lucas. 

de la noche a la mañana (w&d manuel ferrari, w rodrigo muñoz galvez & gabriel medina)

De la Noche a la Mañana is a movie about getting lost. In this case Ignacio, a Porteño architect, finds himself dazed and confused in Valparaiso, where he goes ostensibly to give a talk on modern architectural trends. His reasons for going feels slightly contrived: two students approach him at the end of a class he gives in Buenos Aires saying they were in touch a while ago and on the basis of this and nothing else he leaves his newly pregnant wife, paying his own to Valparaiso where he discovers the uni has been occupied by the students, no-one knows anything about his proposed talk and the two female students who invited him are nowhere to be found. He proceeds to have a lost weekend in Valparaiso, where he is robbed, offered a life-changing job and seduced by a younger teacher from the uni who offers him a place to crash. Tonally there’s a lot to like about the film’s dry humour and the way in which the hangdog character of Ignacio is developed. However, the narrative starts to feel as though it turns into something of a shaggy dog story about half way through. Nothing very bad is going to happen to Ignacio and nothing very exciting either. The film’s dry depiction of university life has something in common with Santiago Mitre’s El Estudiante and its depiction of an Argentine lost in the wilds of South America (although Valparaiso is not that remote a place to get lost) felt reminiscent of Santiago Loza’s La Paz. The role of the architect in Latin America is also a fascinating one, with the tremulous relationship between urban and natural environments which the film explores in Ignacio’s opening seminar. But having laid a foundation, setting the story up for an earthquake to strike, the film then seems reluctant to confront the possibility that any real harm could ever come to its forlorn protagonist. 

tess of the d’urbervilles (hardy)

The novel’s final chapter, which reveals Tess’ tragic end, occurs in Winchester. There’s a beautiful description of the city: “In the valley beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings showing as an isometric drawing - among them the cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St Thomas’, the pinnacle tower to the College and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine’s Hill, further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.”

This is part of a eulogistic final chapter which terminates the story abruptly, with little interest in the technical proceedings which lead to Tess’ execution. One imagines these proceedings would have fascinated Dickens and been a key part of his telling of the story, but the difference between the vision of the two authors, contemporaries, albeit from different generations, is immense. In terms of novelistic structure, Hardy flows in the line of Dickens, but in terms of world view, they diverge like separate rivers from the same confluence, one remaining in the nineteenth century, the other heading towards the raging sea of the twentieth century.

Three observations:

Curitiba

The issue of empire underpins so much of the nineteenth century novel, from Jane Eyre to Middlemarch to Vanity Fair. Enterprising men go abroad to make their fortunes and bring back unconscious issues which will plague the twentieth and twenty first centuries. One of the three key characters in Tess is Angel Clare, who also ventures abroad to seek his fortune. But he doesn’t go to the empire. He heads to Southern Brazil, via Curitiba, where nothing goes right for him. Hardy broaches the flip side of the colonial dream. Angel’s flight is a mistake and is touched by the death of a companion and barren soil. Reading the novel I almost imagined him as the counterpoint to those immigrants who have gone the other way, heading to Europe in a bid for glory, only to find the soil rocky and the streets paved with alienation. Hardy’s localised oeuvre stands in contrast to a great globalised movement which fuelled the rise of the Victorian novel. The supposed benefits were mined from colonialism, but Angel’s fate, (and by implication, that of Tess), explores the dark side of this process.

Whitman

Hardy cites Whitman in the novel. It’s one of those culture shock moments, almost as strange as if he had referenced the Velvet Underground or Caetano Veloso. There’s something so solipsistic about the Hardy world, so introverted, and yet on the other side of the mirror, lurks Whitman, a pantheism which is father to the thought of the 21st century. The roots of change are embedded in Hardy’s world in a manner that the characters themselves are scarcely aware of.

Bonny and Clyde

The novel offers Tess and Angel a (slightly) redemptive finale, as they find an epiphany in a deserted house before stumbling into the heart of the pre-industrial, pre-modern Britain, which is Stonehenge. In the brief time the novel permits them together, it is clear that they have stepped out of their societal constraints, crossed over to the other side. They are outlaws on the run, but they are also prototypical romantic heroes, closer to Baudelaire and Verlaine than Pip or Oliver Twist. It is a touching and beautiful sequence, after all the sadness the book has put them through, but it is also a declaration of war against a society whose moral scale has lost its centre, a warning shot across the bows of a seemingly stable world, trapped in hypocrisies, waiting to be ruptured. 

la azotea (fernanda trias)

Trias’ slight, early novel is another in the catalogue of women going crazy in the attic. See Repulsion by Polanski and Jane Eyre, among others. Quite why Clara, the narrator, has lost it to such a degree that she goes from having a job and living apart from her abusive father to moving in with him, doting on him and being abused by him, is never entirely clear. The writing is sparse with a growing sense of inevitable dread as the fate of the childlike narrator and her little world hurtles slowly towards impending doom.

the kill/ la curée (zola, tr. brian nelson)

There is a strange irony about Zola’s novel, which is situated during the time that Baron Haussmann was redeveloping Paris. The novel recounts the way in which Aristide Saccard acquires a fortune by manipulating a corrupt system, buying up houses condemned to be demolished in order for the redevelopment to occur, and obtaining outlandish compensation as a result of having allies in the city government who will wave through his fraudulent claims. The corruption on display feels eminently contemporary at a time when old cities are gutted in order for rich consortiums to put up unnecessary towers, something which is happening on a global scale, from London to Beijing to Montevideo.

However, the Haussmann development is retrospectively viewed as something of a triumph, a part of the reason why Paris is held in such esteem as one of the most stunning cities in the world. (eg Buenos Aires likes to be referred to at the Paris of the Southern Hemisphere). Does that mean that Zola, in questioning the process, was out of step with his times? Or merely documenting the inevitable realpolitik of massive socio-cultural changes as they are effected?

The lateral thought which occurs is that the nineteenth century French novel contains similar grandiose elements to the Haussmann’s aspirations. The Kill is one novel in a vast series. Hugo has a similar grand perspective, not to mention the works of Proust. These were writers contemplating their world on a grand scale. Zola prefigured Proust, whose prose could be seen as an extension and elaboration of the quest for descriptive perfection which Zola articulates in The Kill. The novel also has hints of Bovary, in its account of the demise of Saccard’s beautiful and liberated wife, Renée, a tragic heroine who is the agent of her own destruction. It’s a cruel world which Zola depicts, and these characters feel like collateral damage in the seismic recalibration of the mores and morals of the city they inhabit.

the last duel (d. ridley scott, w. nicole holofcener, ben affleck, matt damon)

Disclaimer. I am not the target market for this movie. It has been the subject of some discussion in the bars of Montevideo, suggesting that the film might have a feminist slant, so seeing it was on, randomly, in Cinemateca, I proposed to C that we go and see it. On the plus side, the film possesses an interesting structural take, revisiting the same story three times, like a wonky dialectic, in order to arrive at the synthesis of men beating the shit out of each other. Clearly men beating the shit out of each other isn’t an overly feminist premise. Neither is Ben Affleck romping with a bevy of naked teenage girls. (Editorial note: Maybe they weren’t teenagers.) Neither, to be honest, is replaying a rape scene twice, with the second occasion adding precisely nothing to our dramatic understanding of the situation. I can’t help thinking that the writers would have liked to have pushed the script in the third act, presented from the female point of view, towards the slant that the victim secretly desired the rapist, which is where her story appears to be heading. Until they realised that this was such a heinous storyline that they had to backtrack and were stuck with repeating the scene without any real rationale. All in all this felt like a boy’s story, lots of yomping and spurting blood, dressed up as a post-macho story, a dubious conceit which Affleck’s exaggerated performance reveals to be a complete contradiction. With a director as multi-faceted as Ridley Scott, as with a duel to the death, you win some, you lose some.

desert solitaire (edward abbey)

Abbey’s book is a paean to a lost land. Quite literally, in one instance, as he takes a canoe trip down a canyon river that is soon to be flooded by the construction of a new dam. As such his words capture something that humans might never witness again, and there is a wistfulness implicit in the writing, an awareness that the natural world he is inhabiting is facing not just a possible but an actual extinction. Abbey’s is the voice of an Aztec scribe, writing upon hearing the news of the landing of Cortez. Desert Solitaire describes a season spent in the Arches national Park in Utah, at a moment when mass tourism, driven by the automobile, was just about to take off. He rails against the impact this will have on the natural world, whilst confident that in the end the natural world will come out the victor in a battle initiated by humanity. However, this only confirms how Desert Solitaire is an early epistle from a new frontline that had never been contemplated until the dawning of the industrial age, a frontline that pits humans against their environment.

However, beyond the fatalism, there is an implicit celebration of the natural world and the gift of being a human, capable of contemplating this world. Abbey is a cowboy poet and conjures words to capture the things that he sees that feel as though they could only have emerged from his profound immersion in the natural world.

“He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape.”

“Comfort yourself with the reflection that within a few hours, if all goes as planned, your human flesh will be working its way through the gizzard of a buzzard, your essence transfigured into the fierce greedy eyes and unimaginable consciousness of a turkey vulture. Whereupon you, too, will soar on motionless wings high over the ruck and rack of human suffering. For most of us a promotion in grade, for some the realization of an ideal.”

“the spadefoot toads bellow madly in the moonlight on the edge of doomed rainpools, where the arsenic-selenium spring waits for the thirst-crazed wanderer, where the thunderstorms blast the pinnacles and cliffs, where the rust-brown floods roll down the barren washes, and where the community of the quiet deer walk at evening up glens of sandstone through tamarisk and sage toward the hidden springs of sweet, cool, still, clear, unfailing water.”

“with yellow centers and vivid purple petals, the flowers stand out against their background of rock and coral-red sand with what I can only describe as an existential assertion of life; they are almost audible.”

confessions of a recovering environmentalist. (paul kingsnorth)

We need to talk about Kevin, was the name of a very successful book. Substitute the word Kevin for the word ‘ecocide’ and you get an idea of what this intriguing collection of essays is and isn’t about. The essays span a decade. Kingsnorth claims at times to have lost his faith in Environmentalism as a movement, as it seeks accommodation with realpolitik, in a bid, he laments, to maintain our current way of life, rather than to radically reform it. There’s a slightly doleful essay where he talks of planting five hundred trees on the plot of land he and his partner inhabit, and then points out all the environmental compromises that were involved in the planting. (Use of plastic, machine made tools, diesel to move materials, etcetera). This points to the way in which, even this most would-be radical of environmentalists, who is dubious about windfarms and solar energy, cannot avoid the paradoxes of modernity. The very fact that you are reading his book, in my case on an iPad, feels like its testament to the inviability of his idealism.

However, these observations are to miss the point, somewhat. Because it is evident that Kingsnorth is more than aware of the paradoxes involved in his project. These essays, on the other hand, which come close to extolling the virtues of the Unabomber, and at times might even give succour to a rightist, anti-environmental movement, are a provocation, a way of broadening the discussion. Kingsnorth’s loss of faith in the environmental movement is replaced by a new kind of pantheistic faith, one that references Wordsworth, among several other key figures in the eco-literature movement. He espouses, in line with Ghosh, the importance of narrative as a means of changing perception and the dreaming of modernity, steering it towards something that can reconcile humanity with what might be its imminent decline, or at least its recalibration.

As such, his voice, which came to me via a fellow sceptic, Aris Roussinos, feels like a significant addition to this discourse. Anyone who has children, or nephews or nieces or just knows children, needs to wake up and smell the coffee, and realise that even the best case scenarios which the green movement postulates are unlikely to be realised. The change that is required, Kingsnorth argues, is a spiritual one, and once that has been achieved, the material changes that he says are inevitable will be far less difficult to face. 

the bridge on the drina (ivo andric)

First things first. Ivo Andric’s novel is completely radical in so far as its central character is not a human or even an animal. It’s a bridge. Which is in theory an inanimate object, but the novel traces the way in which this inanimate object touches the lives of those who live on either side of it, over the course of hundreds of years. This isn’t a typical approach. Shape shifting, generation busting novels come along every now and again, (eg Orlando), but even these rarely span 600 years. The effect is oddly hypnotic. Characters recur, particularly towards the end, and at times the novelist notes something that happened to an ancestor in another era of the bridge which we have already seen, but the emphasis remains, more than anything else, on the bridge.

And what the bridge represents. Reading about the novel and knowing something of the history of Bosnia (where the novel is set), something my generation became aware of back in the dog days of the post-Yugoslav wars, one notes there has been criticism of Andric for being too pro-Serb, and anti-Moslem. I have to say that this did not strike me during the reading of the novel. This might have to do with my ignorance in terms of reading the codes, but it felt to this reader as though the novel was a constant celebration of ethnic and religious integration. Generation after generation is marked by a harmony where the greatest threat is the possibility of the river flooding. The only time this harmony is disturbed is when politics rears its ugly head, and suddenly the differences between the townsfolk become an issue, where for decades or more the mix of Serb, Moslem and Jew has allowed each to value the differences of the other.

As such, it feels as though the bridge itself is more than something that links two sides of a river. It is also the bridge between cultures. Whenever the bridge is threatened, the community as a whole, consisting of these different peoples and their stories, is also threatened. The affection that permeates the novel for people from every walk of life feels tangible. The Bridge on the Drina doesn’t read, to an ignorant stranger’s mind, like a novel setting out to promote discord, but one seeking to bridge difference. 

lettre de sibérie (d. chris marker)

In the end I got to Letter to Siberia, as it seems Cinemateca discovered the print or restored it or something. It’s highly playful Marker, with jokes and cartoons and a beautifully executed version of the Kuleshov effect. The film is a voyage through Siberia as revealed from found footage. It takes us irreverently through the traditions, history, palaeontology and architecture of a region which is larger than the USA and scarcely known. A place where wooly mammoths can emerge whole from the permafrost, where the reindeer is source of nutrition, transport and much more. The film tells us a lot about Siberia, but it tells us just as much about the possibilities of the documentary, a medium that so often feels po-faced and awash with its own seriousness. We might detect the influence of Marker in the work of Varda, Herzog, Adam Curtis and Mariano Llinás, to name some whose use of the documentary seeks to go beyond the talking heads of pseudo authenticity.