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.