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.