crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy (quinn slobodian)

Sometimes you read a book and it helps everything click into place. Which is part of the point of reading, to understand the world. Over the past twenty years or so, it has felt as though the political spectrum has been infiltrated and all those things which, as a child of the sixties, were held dear, have been undermined. Free health care; public transport; freedom of speech; that nebulous construct known as democracy, in whose name so many wars have been fought. The very idea of the state has been put into the crosshairs. On the one hand, this might be seen as a reaction to the failure of the Soviet Union and the respective Communist endeavours. On the other hand, the rise of China, which continues to declare itself a communist state puts that narrative in question. So where did these maverick insurgents come from? And how have they managed to shape the world?

Slobodian's book goes a long way to explaining this. Perhaps it is light on the philosophical origins, but it’s revelatory in its description of the intellectual/ political movements of the past forty years. In eleven succinct chapters he traces the dreams, realised and unrealised, of those on the edge of the capitalist spectrum, starting with Milton Friedman’s enthusiasm for Hong Kong and then leading the reader through a maze which includes the usual suspects of Singapore, London and Dubai, but also takes in the unusual suspects of Honduras, Somalia, Lichtenstein. Slobodian shows how the crack-brained schemes of new zones and nations, free of old laws, gradually obtained a foothold in the psyche of the right wing political classes. As a Brit, more than anything the book shows how the radical dreams of the Brexiteers were suckled by the Hayekian visions of previously extremist think tanks. As a neighbour of Argentina, one can trace a clear line to the anarcho-capitalist worldview of Javier Milei.

Crack-Up Capitalism perhaps wisely refrains from taking too subjective a stance on the movements and initiatives it describes. A sly authorial undertone is present, but kept in check, questioning what happens to the workers and the losers in a world without rights or democratic means to alter their conditions. Because the world of crack-up capitalism has a neo-fascist slant: it is a world where the strong flourish and the weak are condemned, where the narco’s wealth has far more value than the working man or woman’s sweat and tears. It is also a world of fantasists. Slobodian makes it clear that a stateless world is an anarcho-fantasy. What this fantasy succeeds in doing, however, is open up the resources of the state like an open cast mine, for those with the engineering capital to plunder at will. The fantasists create the bedrock for the pragmatists to flourish. The result is Brexit Britain, Milei Argentina, Israel… This is how we got to where we are now. 

fallen leaves (w&d kaurismaki)

The Finnish maestro, who throws some Gardel into his Helsinki set love story, reminds us of the power of simplicity. Woman meets Man, they encounter obstacles, they would appear to overcome them. Everything is stripped back. The camera is static, the acting is static, the narrative is by numbers. Only in his dialogue, with its offbeat humour, and his choice of film posters which populate the background (Brief Encounter, Pierrot le Fou, etc) does Kaurismaki let his hair down a bit. The simplicity is almost two dimensional and yet, by a mysterious alchemy, it is incredibly effective. The audience is sucked into the vortex of his two working class lovers, in spite of jerry-built obstacles which would never pass the BFI development stress test. (He walks into a tram, she, a woman with no apparent history, conveniently comes from a family of alcoholics). The final pay-off, as Ansa reveals the name of her dog, is a homage to the years of the early, silent cinema, and there is something about that era’s seemingly naive use of story and emotion which is echoed by Fallen Leaves. In contrast to the more baroque filmmaking of his Nordic compañero, Roy Andersson, Kaurismaki revels in how much you can do with how little. The language of dramatic storytelling is not as complex as some would like to think. 

crash (w&d. cronenberg, w. j.g. ballard)

Crash is a movie which is constructed upon a brilliant premise. About forty minutes in, Elias Koteas’ mysterious and charismatic psychopath introduces a staging of James Dean’s fatal crash, using identical cars, which actually collide. The world of the movie and technology fused in a single moment. The love of speed, which has driven the twentieth century, impaled on the steering wheel of the fixed punctum of the cinema frame. This moment seems to connect Hollywood with Marinetti’s Futurism, with Ducournau’s Titane, the automobile as the death drive of progress. The fact that the characters all want to have sex in cars, all the time, the cars being their potential murderers, only exacerbates the Freudian connotations where sex and death are all part of the same turbulent psychological crisis towards which modernity, and us, its guests, is constantly accelerating.

Having reached this point, 45 minutes into the film, it then feels as though Cronenberg wasn’t entirely sure where to go next. The tension that is laced into the film like a corset in the opening, a place where anything might happens, starts to slip as the characters settle into a playful Schnitzler-esque ronde, seeking to either screw or kill one another in the next car accident they can provoke. The film seems to decelerate rather than accelerate, and the brilliance of the opening forty five minutes becomes a tail light moving out of range, speeding away into a parallel film in another dimension, a dimension Cronenberg’s film would die to crash through to, if only it hadn’t lost the map.

saturdays disorders (w&d lucia seles)

Seles’ films have been feted in Cinemateca this week, a retrospective for a filmmaker who makes films on their own terms, patchwork assemblages of video and narrative. Part bricolage, part home movies, Saturdays Disorders has the feeling of an intense comedy psychodrama as found footage, an offering from a state at the edge of the accepted cinema rules. In its wilful idiosyncrasy and elaborate architectural vision (this film belongs to a tetralogy) it feels like the work of a vaulting Borgesian ambition to reinvent film with nothing more than a manic will and a digital camera.

The film itself melds two narratives. One is the arrangement of a tennis match, the only match of a tennis tournament, organised by a group of friends for no apparent reason. The other is the tale of one of those friends, called Lujan, who is coming to meet these friends, in a city called Lujan, but for reasons that are never quite clear, she is in a state of heightened anxiety and ends up patrolling the streets of the city, desperately searching for a church which might or might not be a point of rendezvous, leaving increasingly unhinged voice messages as she goes. The two stories are jemmied together, and the film as a whole feels as though it has been edited on speed, with a frenetic, semi-associative style, held together by Lujan’s odyssey and the anti-climax of the tennis match.

Whether Seles is Seles or Graf is hard to discern. The freedom the filmmaker has in setting their own aesthetic and narrative agenda gives the film energy, (even a “propulsive” energy, to use the word supplied to me in notes on a UK project), but the film also relies to an extent on accepting that the audience are in on the joke, with no attempt to give us any emotional hooks to cling to. Lujan is desperate, we don’t know why, it’s kind of funny, it’s all done on a shoestring, but where’s the beef? One of the curious things about Saturdays Disorders are the glimpses it offers at the edge of the frame of ordinary people going about their business in an Argentina on the point of implosion - a market outside a cathedral, a collection of people offering directions on a street corner. The ordinariness is in contrast to the slightly chummy activities of the group setting up the tennis match, obsessed by their own cruel particularity. 

puan (w&d maría alché, benjamín naishtat)

Puan is a comedy, and yet it was surprisingly moving to be watching this film which encapsulates so much that is vibrant and alive about the country it comes from, in the week that the elections delivered victory for someone who would appear to be violently opposed to everything the film represents. In which other country would a film be made, featuring some of its biggest stars, which is a comedy about philosophy professors? Where swathes of the film would be given over to dialogue about Hobbes, Plato, Rousseau and Kant and yet has the audacity to conclude with the recitation of a tango?

Naishtat, working here in partnership with María Alché, has moved away from the dark tone of his early work to embrace something warmer, more engaging, presumably more commercial. At the heart of the film is the paunchy middle-aged philosophy professor, Marcelo Pena , played by Marcelo Subiotto, a wilfully unsuitable protagonist, nervous and shy, who only comes into his own in the classroom. He is nearly eclipsed by a barnstorming performance from Leonardo Sbaraglia as Marcelo’s nemesis, the pretentious but brilliant Rafael Sujarchuk. This tension between the two makes for some great comedy, even if this is only one aspect of what is a communal film, peopled by the range of characters who feature in Marcelo’s life. There is a narrative thread, which revolves around which of the two will become head of faculty, even though the result seems a foregone conclusion, but the filmmakers seem less interested in the nuances of narrative and more concerned with constructing space to linger in this particular world where ideas still have agency; a world which is under existential threat.

A threat that is even more vigente today, long after the business of making the film has been concluded. The writers presumably had no way of knowing that the recent election would lead to the arrival of someone who wants to scrap the Ministry of Education altogether, handing it over lock stock and barrel to the private sector. The real-life defenders of Kant, Rousseau et al do indeed face being thrown out on the street, and under Milei’s new government’s strictures, they could face incarceration for seeking to protest. As such the film’s resolution feels eerily prophetic.

a short history of london (simon jenkins)

For evident reasons, (2000 years of history), a short history of London is a project that is doomed to be dissatisfying. No sooner do you engage with one century than you are onto the next. Jenkins’ text seems to slow down as it gets to the twentieth century, and the chapters become riper as a result of being longer. At times there’s the sense that the writer took the project on as a dare, to see if he could get around the world in eighty days. The results offer fascinating shards, but it’s all inevitably superficial. Having said which, the book nails the Westminster - City divide effectively, tracing the evolution of the royal countermand to the commercial bent of the city. Once that conflict eases, the book seems to tread water somewhat until we get to the architectural crimes of the twentieth century, where the author’s passion comes to the fore as he documents the architectural excesses that lead to the destruction of much of London’s heritage. Having said which, to live in a city is to exist in a state of constant flux, and the city that stands still is likely to atrophy, as happened to London in the post-Roman era. In some ways the city is in a state of constant tension between the forces of the future and the forces that wish to conserve. If the city is prosperous, its land acquires value, and people will seek to develop that value, in the process impinging on the past. These deeper issues tend to be skirted over by Jenkins, but again, that was probably inevitable in a project that seeks to concertina two thousand years into three hundred pages.

This also struck me because of the contrast between living in London and Montevideo, a city which has about 10% of the longevity of London. Most of the colonial buildings in this city have already gone, but the mansions and houses from the early twentieth century, when the city was briefly one of the richest in the world, have limped on in, many in a state of disrepair. As money comes into the city, much is funnelled into housing developments, which in this day and age mean blocks of shiny new flats, built like shoeboxes, which represent an entry point to the housing market for the younger affluent class. These blocks go up where the older, unwieldy art deco houses have been torn down. Barrios become disfigured, homogenised, but in theory, repopulated. A cycle of renovation is also a cycle of destruction. It’s sad to see the noble architecture, steeped in a rioplantense culture, torn down, but then this echoes so much of what Jenkins shows has happened to London, and it has to be accepted that this is how the process works, whether in Paris, London, Shanghai, Lhasa, Mumbai, Buenos Aires or Montevideo, a process only entropy or the asteroids can halt. 

lucio flavio (w&d héctor babenco, w. jorge durán, josé louzeiro)

Lucio Flavio, an early film by the lauded Argentine director, is a crime thriller, based on a true story, mostly set in Rio. This Rio of the seventies feels amazingly evocative, the men in flares and open long-sleeved shirts, drinking cold beers whenever they can. You can feel the heat and the sweat oozing through the screen, something complemented by the judicious use of long-shots when we see the street in all its dusty glory, with Lucio, the anti-hero, on his way to his next robbery or about to be busted. The film is based on the way that a police death squad used criminals for its own corrupt ends. Lucio knows he’s a dead man walking, but it doesn’t stop him walking with a strut, embracing his destiny, a strangely heroic figure in a tawdry world. The remarkable thing about Babenco’s film is the way in which it shows a society that has changed so little. A strange quirk of this blog is that for some reason, the 2007 Brazilian film, Elite Squad, is by far the most viewed review, (obviously as a result of some kind of strange algorithm), and Lucio Flavio is a clear predecessor to Padilha’s blockbuster, with both films revealing the baroque arrangements between the police and the underworld, as the police seek to muscle in on the streets which belong to the criminals. Babenco directs with flair, using occasional dream sequences to lend colour to the prosaic events. Whilst in some ways a generic crime flick, Lucio Flavio also infiltrates a sly commentary on the torture and summary executions carried out by the dictatorships of the time, and as such was a way for Babenco to comment on events in his native country in a way that the censors would never have permitted if the commentary hadn’t been smuggled in under the guise of a crime film. It’s a fine example of the way in which the codes of cinema permit a discourse which is more wide reaching that the apparent subject matter, as well as offering a telling insight into a lost Brazilian decade. 

ghosts (césar aira, tr chris andrews)

Ghosts is another of those slight, elliptical novels that the Argentines seem to specialise in. Apparently Aira has written more than 80 novels, his name is ubiquitous in this part of the world, but I had never read him. Ghosts has the feel of having been written in a few sessions. It’s a disconnected novel, which starts by focussing on one character, a teenage boy, then shifts focus to his female teenage cousin, Patri. Both are part of an extended Chilean family who have moved to Buenos Aires, where the men work in the construction of a luxury tower block with a swimming pool on the roof.  The family lives in the building as it is built, but will have to move out when it’s completed. There is one added complication: the building is haunted by masculine ghosts who wander around in the nude and have no qualms about being seen. They take a liking to Patri, inviting her to a party, although she can only come if she’s dead.

Aira appears to be touching on at least three themes in the novel: the immigrants who arrive in Buenos Aires to work in industries like construction; the expansion of the city as old barrios are replaced by anodyne tower blocks, and lastly, the ghosts themselves hint, inescapably, at the disappeared from the dictatorship. The extent to which these themes coalesce is perhaps debatable; at times it feels as though the weight of these subtexts sits uneasily within the architecture of the novel. 

the lightship (d jerzy skolimowski, w siegfried lenz, william mai, david taylor)

The film was introduced by Fernando Peña, who noted that Skolimowski was a screenwriter on Polanski’s Knife in the Water. The Lightship is another film set on a boat, with the unities of place time and action locked in. This solid dramatic framework is the platform for a grandstanding performance by Robert Duvall, whose arch criminal is generously allowed to steal the show by Klaus Maria Brandauer’s more understated captain, the Yin to the other’s Yan. The plot as such is rudimentary: Duvall arrives with a couple of cartoonish crooks on Brandauer’s lightship, which inevitably leads to conflict and tragedy. The taut direction makes the most of the claustrophobic intricacy of the ship, and as Peña observed the director’s craft is apparent. The film never drags and it permits a young Duvall to show off his prodigious talents: sometimes all we want from a movie is to watch great actors/ actresses strutting their stuff.

(Once again one cannot help but marvel at the remarkable roll call of Polish directors who emerged under the Communist regime.) 

l’eclisse (w&d antonioni, w. tonino guerra, w. elio bartolini, ottiero ottieri)

The third in Antonioni’s trilogy of Europeans on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In this case Vitti and Delon, paddling between the banality of love and the imminence of crisis. Scorsese, wiki informs, rates this as the boldest film of the trilogy, perhaps because it is the least definitive in terms of narrative. Essentially, Vitti, who leaves her older lover in the opening scene, tiptoes towards Delon, who seems as vacuous and arrogant as he is pretty, resisting his advances until she doesn’t. Not a great deal happens in the meantime. There’s a stock market crash, Vitti goes on a flight over Rome, she blacks up and dances a disconcerting ‘African’ routine, she hangs out with Delon in his parents’ posh gaffe. In narrative terms, it’s inconsequential and it builds towards the puzzling final sequence as the characters themselves drop out of the film and it lingers over random (or carefully selected) images of Roman life, a pared-back predecessor to the fireworks of Zabriskie Point. If anything, Antonioini seems to be using the medium as a meditative means of exploring the limits of freedom in a European woman’s life: social freedom, sexual freedom, the freedom to determine her own identity. The headline towards the end about threat of nuclear war suggests an altogether more existential cloud, hovering at the edge of the screen, and reminds us of how much the apocalypse was part of the post-war generation’s consciousness. 

los delinquentes (w&d rodrigo moreno)

Moreno’s lauded film has echoes of what would probably be described as Lo Ola Nueva, if more attention was paid globally to some of the remarkable cinema emerging from Argentina over the course of the past decade or so. This movement is headlined by Mariano Llinás, Santiago Mitre and Laura Citarella, but it is a generous and expansive community, one of whose key figures, Laura Paredes, has a small role in Moreno’s film. The movement, which would probably never recognise itself as such, is a broad church, but there is the sense of a unifying aesthetic, in the way it riffs off a skewed naturalism and a willingness to embrace a circuitous (and often drawn-out) form of storytelling, which holds little regard for the dictums of the script gospels.

At three hours, with the film self-consciously dividing itself into two parts, Los Delinquentes swims in this slipstream. Its meandering narrative starts in classic genre fashion, as Morán, a disillusioned bank employee, seizes his chance to effect a robbery. He then manages to drag the unwitting Román in as an accomplice, after the fact. However, the film soon moves beyond recognisable genre traits. Morán hands himself in, as Ramón tries to cope with the stress of his involvement. The action moves from Buenos Aires to the rural hills of the Cordoba countryside. Both men inadvertently fall in love with the same woman, further complicating things. As it evolves, the film feels like a meditation on city versus countryside, on the values of the working life, on the unattainable nature of happiness. All of this is processed in a leisurely fashion, with the narrative, charged by the dramatic punch of Morán’s initial theft, slowly unwinding like a spring which is loosing its kinetic power.

It’s intriguing seeing the film on the same day as the presidential debate in Argentina, a debate between a crazy maverick and a company man. Argentina appears to be a country which exists in a state of permanent economic crisis, although when you visit, this is barely noticeable. In a sense, Morán and Ramón’s theft of a lovingly filmed suitcase full of dollars, the camera lingering over the wads of bills as they are stacked and counted like something out of The Italian Job, ends up feeling like a Macguffin. The money is far less important, for both men, than the journey they go on as a result of their actions. The impulse to resolve our human problems through the acquisition of dollars is an illusory one. The wild yonder, with all its promise and beauty, is out there no matter what. In the same way, the film’s inconclusive denouement, threatening a conflict which is never realised, seems to be arguing that our cinematic need for narrative resolutions is also delusional: there’s nothing wrong with sitting through three hours just to find out that there is no ending, just an endless morass of verdant hills. 

the return of the native (hardy)

The Return of the Native offers another of Hardy’s winsome troubled male characters, the other side of the macho go-getting Victorian. Clym Yeobright returns from Paris, where he has been making a good living, and finds himself bewitched by both the land and its female avatar, the restless Eustacia Vye. Physically attracted to one another, they are nevertheless a disastrous match, as she has Smiths-ian dreams of being taken out tonight, whereas he is consumed by the irrefutable lure of the moor, (take me to the Moors). For Clym it feels as though it is the very texture of the landscape which seduces him, just as this same landscape feels oppressive and increasingly repugnant to Eustacia, who dreams of Paris, darling.

The soil to which Clym hoves is one that the local culture is steeped in, and has been for thousands of years. His is a return to the native, as well as being the return of a native. The tension between the two might almost be viewed as a tension between the indigenous and the globalised worlds, one that can only lead to schism and tragedy. It is also a battle between a conservative philosophy and a radical one. In the end, after his wife’s death, Yeobright becomes a lay preacher. But the final image of him preaching on a barrow would almost seem to have more to do with a druidical tradition than a Christian one. Yeobright is a man with no real philosophy or political instinct, and hence he retreats towards a fetishism of the known, as a way of escaping responsibility for having to actually do anything of any use. This might be a reaction to the fleshpots of Paris, but it’s hard not to sympathise with Eustacia’s frustration. 

“The pole lay with one end supported on a trestle, and women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with wildflowers. The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”

the siege (ismail kadare, tr. david bellos)

As I write we are witnessing the most grotesque siege in modern history, even worse than Sarajevo. The notion of enclosing a people within walls and slowly squeezing the life out of them is one that modern warfare in general seems to forego, as though there isn’t time for this kind of operation in an accelerated modern world. Kadare's novel documents the siege of an Albanian fortress by the Ottomans. As the afterword makes clear, the novel is functioning on many levels that perhaps will pass non-Albanians, or Balkans by, but the dynamics of the operation are cogently described, as the attackers, realising brute force will not do the job, try to cut of the fortress' water supply and finally use disease in their flawed bid to conquer. Both sides are so immersed in the brutality of war that ethics no longer appear to be a consideration, albeit the way the novel is framed, the attackers are the ones whose moral compass seems most awry. Typing this, and knowing what is happening even as I write in Gaza, generates a sense of unease, as well as an awareness of how much aerial bombardment has skewed the balance of siege warfare in favour of the aggressors. All war is grotesque, but when a civilian population becomes caught up in the horror, the concept of genocide comes into play, the futility of which is something the novel's most philosophical section touches on. In another moment, Kadare's novel might have felt like more of a curiosity, but its ongoing relevance has been made tragically apparent over the course of the past weeks. 

(Incidentally, where the novel posits the muslim invaders as the aggressors, the instances of siege in modern Western history have tended to be waged against muslim civilians.)

perdita durango (w&d álex de la Iglesia, w. jorge guerricaechevarría, david trueba, barry gifford)

Emerging from de la Iglesia’s bombastic movie, I was told that it went down a storm in Mexico when it came out, back in the twentieth century. It would be worth analysing why that would be, given that the Mexican lead, Romeo, played by an over-the-top Javier Bardem (is it cosplaying when a Spaniard plays a Mexican bandido as a psychotic?) fits a stereotype of the kind of deranged, amoral killer which US governments warn are exactly the type of people they need to keep out. Much of the action takes place on or near the border itself, which Flavio Martínez Labiano’s flamboyant camera work depicts with swooping helicopter shots, pre-drone. As Romeo and Rosie Perez’ Perdita criss-cross across this border, wreaking havoc, they tread a fine line between charismatic anti-heroes and sadistic monsters. I guess if one identifies as an anti-hero, something which the us-and-them of the border encourages, then it’s not that hard a leap to identify with Perdita and Romeo. It’s an interesting contrast with other border fictions. In McCarthy, the gringos are the good guys, crossing into a biblical world whose protean mores they grapple with. In Villeneuve’s lurid Sicario, the Mexicans are just as amoral and sadistic as Romeo and Perdita, but with none of the charm. So in a sense, de la Iglesia’s operatic tale can be seen as a vindication of those who are usually vilified, and their arbitrary vengeful abuse of two young kids is a turning of the tables. On the other hand, a film which glorifies a rapist, (or rapists, because Rosie also gets in on the act), is perhaps harder to like in this day and age, even if this might be termed a film which clearly comes from another era and the kids seem to get off on it.

In many ways Perdita Durango feels like one of those macho films with a female lead that got given budgets back in the day. Perdita is second cousin to Betty Blue or Thelma and Louise or La Femme Nikita, even Run Lola Run, eponymous avatars of a kind of kick-ass femininity which still feels a long way from feminism. 

the getaway. (d. peckinpah, w. walter hill, jim thompson)

Peckinpah’s film feels like the sort of film they don’t make anymore. A serious movie, even though it’s all car chases and shoot-outs. Counter-cultural antiheroes. A complex relationship. Gender wars. Effortless charisma which the lead actors actually have to make an effort to ruffle.

McQueen and MacGraw exude a kind of Iconic cool which can only exist because the narrative and direction construct the parameters within which this iconic cool is allowed to flourish. One thinks of Tarantino’s use of Pitt, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and everything about that feels contrived or tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps Travolta and Jackson came closer to the real thing in Pulp Fiction, but there’s a sense that these kind of iconic figures don’t really fit into contemporary narratives. Certainly, the gender politics feel as though they belong to another era, no matter how much the film seeks to emphasise that MacGraw is just as tough as McQueen. Perhaps surprisingly in a film with this title, she is the one who does the majority of the driving. She kills bad guys too, and they are a team, even if she’s also the one who fucks up at one point, putting everything at risk. The fact that she has traded her body for McQueen’s Doc’s release is part of the unstable gender politics, but if we believe that fifty years later we have gone beyond that kind of deal, surely we are living in a fantasy world. The female body remains a token of exchange amongst powerful men, even if it’s now less acceptable to recognise this in the movies. The other day someone told me that so many of the movies that they are watching have a gay protagonist, either male or female, and this might be a way to circumvent uncomfortable truths.

However, there is perhaps another reason that the film, and it’s nerveless cool, feels so alien to today’s culture. McQueen’s Doc is a felon, a representative of the anti-establishment, and his crooked antagonists belong to the establishment. The film occurs in the hangover shadow of the Vietnam War, when faith in the system was at a low point in the USA. The counter-culture, for want of a better phrase, was seeking, in the company of Pynchon, Coppola, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith et al, another set of ethical paradigms to live by. In the intervening years, that counter-culture has been crushed, or at least co-opted, absorbed into the mainstream. It’s not so much that stepping outside the system is impossible, it’s that the moment someone goes there, their posture or pose is welcomed and monetised. So, like Pitt in Tarantino’s film, what’s left is a shell (or simulacrum) of the anti-establishment pose. By contrast McQueen and MacGraw inhabit a dirty hinterland, and are literally consigned to the rubbish dump; the only place their anti-systemic heroism can survive is across the border, in Mexico. 

the secret life of trees (zambra, tr mcdowell)

This short novel has been much praised, and as such this reader came to it with high expectations. Zambra’s book is so slight it’s almost, but not quite, transparent. Set over a night when the protagonist’s partner fails to return home, it adopts a structure which allows it to drift and muse, shifting the point of view to that of the protagonist’s young stepdaughter, imagining her take on these events years down the line. In some ways the novel seems in keeping with the likes of Chejfec, a nouveau roman, albeit one with a soft, tragic centre. It would clearly appear to be riffing off the fate of the disappeared, a Latin American  phenomenon, one of the many crimes of the dictatorships. (Although one notes with a shiver the way far-right Anglo-Saxon groups in their vile T-shirts have adopted Pinochet.) Yet the allusion to the disappeared is so understated that one wonders if readers from other parts of the world would even pick up on it. Intriguingly I read an interview with another Chilean novelist, Labatut, saying he resented being compared to most of his contemporaries, and I found myself wondering if Zambra would be one of those. Perhaps The Secret Life of Trees is indeed a work of minor genius, in which case something was going over my head as I read it; in other ways it feels too slight and wispy to even stand on its own two feet: a gust of wind would be all that it takes to blow it over.

roter himmel (w&d christian petzold)

Roter Himmel could be translated as Red Sky. (Rather than the approved English title, which is the clumsy “Afire”.) The sky is red because there are forest fires on the Baltic coast of Germany where Leon has gone with his friend, Felix, to spend a few days working on his novel at the rundown country home Felix has inherited from his late father. Felix is ostensibly there to work on his proposal for an art diploma, but the lure of the coast and the sea and a few days holiday soon wins out, whilst Leon grumpily insists on trying to write.

Leon’s hapless mission is rendered even more unviable by the presence of the alluring Nadja, who Felix’s mother has, unbeknownst to him, allowed to stay in the main bedroom. Nadja is having vigorous sex with the local lifeguard, Devid, which can be heard through the thin walls and keeps Leon awake at night, so that he ends up sleeping outside with the mosquitos. The set-up suggests a holiday rom-com, albeit one which is disconcerted by the presence of the forest fires which glow on the nightly horizon, and the buzzing helicopters which dump water on the fire and echo the buzzing of the mosquitos. Leon is smitten by Nadja, but is too much of a self-obsessed oaf to do anything about it, even when he realises she might be interested in him. In the classic comedy situation, they would end up together, and this seems even more likely when Felix and Devid decide to embark on an unexpected fling.

I have been on a slight Petzold tip of late, watching both Undine and Phoenix on Mubi. Paula Beer appears to have replaced Nina Hoss as his muse, but the tone of the films remains the same: a sense of intellectual playfulness, anchored by a literary leitmotif - in this case a poem of Heine’s - married to a dispassionate take on the vicissitudes of love and human frailty. Roter Himmel and Undine, unburdened by the presence of too much history, offer unlikely character studies, with Leon in particular seeming like an almost Shakespearian anti-hero, an unwieldy Hamlet who will have to come to terms with his own flaws in order to overcome them and write the novel he needs to, rather than the one he doesn’t. The eco-message which lurks at the edges feels more like a footnote than a central axis of the film, constructing the possibility of tragedy in a world where affluence has rendered everything almost too comfortable (down to the Birkenstock Bostons which Leon sports). Where Barbara, Transit and Phoenix (which I have yet to watch) seek to wrestle with the implications of history on the German psyche, his later films appear to be addressing a more elemental agenda, where fire and water become protagonists. The resulting films have the feel of a short story by a nineteenth century master like Chekhov or Kleist, situating an ordinary soul, shaped and limited by the frailties of their society, in a situation where only tragedy or magic can give true meaning to their lives. 

regeneration (pat barker)

Pat Barker’s book, the first part of a trilogy, was nominated for the Booker Prize a long time ago. (The third part of the trilogy won in 95.) It feels, in so many ways, like a paradigmatic work of British fiction. Firstly for its subject matter, and secondly because of the novelist’s stylistic choices.

The content involves the rehabilitation of soldiers suffering from PTSD in WW1. Rivers, a fictionalised version of a real person, is one of the medics at the remote Scottish hospital where patients are treated, humanely, as they recover. The kicker is that, if they recover, they can then be sent back to fight in France. Something one of the patients, Siegfried Sassoon, who has written a letter in protest at the ongoing carnage, decides he wants to do, if he is deemed to have recovered. Rivers is is chief medical officer, aware of the Sassoon paradox of both objecting to the war and seeking to continue to wage it, and he himself wrestles with his conscience as he realises he is only curing young men in order to send them to their deaths. Along the way other figures who my generation grew up with, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, make cameo appearances. The First World War poets were our British poetes maudits, weaving from the mud, blood and death of the trenches beautiful flowers of verse which would echo through the generations. These were romantic icons long before rock and roll made its claim on the youthful psyche, and I remember myself declaiming Owen’s poem, An Anthem to Doomed Youth, on a stage at prep school back in the seventies. Choosing to fictionalise the reality of this moment in history, using factual testimonies and the poems themselves, Barker must have known she was digging up literary gold, and so it proved to be.

The form of the novel is, by and large, utilitarian. Much of it is constructed from pages of dialogue, as soldiers and medics discuss their predicament. The author refrains from anything that might be considered flowery, although the occasional passage where her imagination appears to have been given freer reign. such as when a soldier goes awol in a wood and encounters a menagerie of dead animals, are the ones that stand out. Maybe this means less is more, but at the same time the novel’s insistence on a rational engagement with the irrationality of PTSD feels, at times, almost surgical. It made me think of the course I did at Faber, where flights of fancy were seen as vaguely bad taste. There’s something almost brutally British about all this, and whilst the authorial efficiency is undeniable, the resistance to any sense of flair feels like it would have been given full approval by the generals of the war office as they sent the young men out to do their duty.

les cousins (w&d chabrol)

Chabrol’s second film is a slightly stagey piece, set in Paris, as opposed to his first, rural offering. In a sense though, the character of Charles, played by Gérard Blain, is almost an extension of Serge, played by the same actor in the director’s eponymous first film. Charles is the cousin from the sticks who comes to stay with Paul (played by Jean-Claude Brialy, who is also the co-protagonist in Le Beau Serge), his worldly cousin. Both are studying law, but where Paul is a hedonist socialite, Charles immerses himself in his work,  all the more so when rejected by Florence, who appears to choose Paul over him. The narrative is somewhat stilted and melodramatic; what is of more interest is the way the director seeks to explore these tensions between a version of an older, conservative, rural France, and a younger more liberated strain which prefigures the arrival of the sixties. There are moments when Les Cousins has the feel of an Antonioni or Fellini film, notably when an Italian aristocrat gets embarrassingly drunk at one of Paul’s decadent parties. In these moments, as in the slightly anti-climactic tragic ending, it feels as though the fabric of this new French post-war society is being stretched towards some kind of breaking point, although this might also just represent the habitual tension between the capital, with its celebrated decadence, and the rest of the country. Chabrol is never as formally innovative as Godard, nor as radical in his vision of humanity os Truffaut, rather it would appear his cinema is occupying another space, that of the self-examination of contemporary mores and morals. 

the catalogue of shipwrecked books (edward wilson-lee)

Wilson-Lee’s book succeeds in incorporating a ranch of fascinating material. It recounts the life of Hernando Colón, Colombus’ second and youngest son, who, having travelled with his father to the newly discovered Americas in 1502, subsequently set about creating the biggest, most diverse library in the western world. Hernando did this at a time when printing was in the process of growing exponentially. His mission, according to Wilson-Lee, was positively Borgesian. It was to construct a repository of the world’s knowledge, not just from within christendom, but from every corner of the globe. The inference here is that Hernando’s knowledge of his father’s journeys, as well as his personal experiences of the Americas, meant that he was able to conceive the importance of embracing the multiple cultures of the expanding world which was only just starting to become known. (A fascinating side-note to Hernando’s library was his garden, created on the banks of the Ebro in Sevilla, where he cultivated many plants from the Americas, among other sources.) As such, Hernando represents one of Europe’s first globalised minds, as well as constructing a knowledge-base which prefigured the arrival, centuries later, of the World Wide Web.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books exudes scholarship, as the author investigates and imagines the contents of the library, much of which has since been lost. However, as much as anything else, this is an intriguing study of a man at the centre of a world perched on the brink of a radical transformation, one whose effects were being processed by European societies struggling to come to terms with the forces unleashed at the close of the fifteenth century. Hernando’s quixotic response, one that sought to consolidate and protect not just the world’s extant printed knowledge, but the very idea of knowledge itself, comes across as a heroic and progressive reaction. The significance of ‘the book’ as a pillar of society, is one that has been constantly threatened. Not for nothing is the image of book-burning associated with an idea of bringing down the classical conception of a knowledge based society, to replace it with one of superstition and conspiracy. 

cold enough for snow (jessica au)

Au’s brief tome, a novella, is another text which would appear to flirt with the genre of auto-fiction (although who is to know?) as the Australian narrator goes on a trip to Japan with her mother, who was raised in Hong Kong. In the course of the trip, the narrator indulges in a few recollections, (of kayaking on a lake, of a childhood visit to Hong Kong), and some meditations on the nature of family. With her mother, she visits museums and takes trains across the country, before their paths separate and the narrator goes on a solo walk in a more rural zone. If all of this sounds somewhat mundane, that’s because it is, unashamedly so. Au’s text doesn’t have quite the same laconic tone as the like of Chejfec or Toussaint, whose work explores a similar aesthetic of the quotidian, rather it trades on a shaggy-dog suspense, as the reader suspects that something more dramatic is bound to happen sooner or later, even though it never does. There is a moment of potential tension in the closing pages which is soon punctured, leaving the reader with the not unpleasant sensation of a leisurely stroll through a partial Japan, via Hong Kong and a volcanic lake. 

mato seco em chamas (w&d adirley queirós, joana pimenta)

Mato Seco em Chamas, translated in English into Dry Ground Burning, is a curious blend of Ghetto Mad Max, muscular feminist filmmaking and documentary footage. Three women succeed in stealing petrol from an underground pipe, which they sell at a discount to the motoboys in their marginal barrio, situated in the hinterland on the edge of Brasilia. Two of the women, Chatara and Lea, are sisters, with Lea recently released from prison. A third, Andreia, is setting up her own political party, PPP, which could be understood as the Prisoner’s Party for the People. The trio defend their territory as the police move in, before Lea is rearrested. The filmmakers smartly employ some barnstorming biker imagery, as the motoboys procession through the barrio, and at another point when Andreia leads them, as though at the head of a great cavalry movement. These moments, and the shots of the oil well, have a romantic cinematic power, summoning up the ghosts of Brando in The Wild Ones or Dean in Giant. The images feel as though they are being skilfully welded onto the unwieldy mechanism that is the film overall.

Because, Mato Seco em Chamas is clearly far more than just a dystopian drama. It’s also clearly rooted in the everyday turmoil of Brazilian society. There is footage from a Bolsonaro rally, as well as several sequences in the favela where the women are based which have a vivid fly-on-the-wall feel. A female singer performs to a favela crowd; Andreia sings in a Pentecostal church. The line between fiction and fact is blurred, even more when the film suggests that its protagonists aren’t actually actors, but real people who have been drafted into this fiction, and the apparent reveal that Lea has gone to prison a second time actually means that the actress who is playing Lea has gone back to prison.

The resultant film is percussive, punctuated with music from the barrio, treading a fine line between the real and the imagined; showing us a favela world which is lived like a Mad Max movie, and who are we to know how true or not this is. A sequence towards the end seems to suggest that the petrol which the women trade is actually a cipher for narcotics, but even this remains unclear. At two and a half hours long, this is a challenging, radical film which feels as though it has emerged from some kind of parallel cinematic sphere, one which knows and uses the tropes of cinema, but isn’t all that interested in them: instead it seeks to capture something of the reality of the Wild West of Brazil’s edge-lands. 

french connection (w&d william friedkin, w. ernest tidyman, robin moore)

French Connection is a film that can’t stay still. Everyone is constantly on the move. In cars, in trains, in a boat, but more often than not, on foot.  Freidkin has a similar restless energy to early Godard. It feels as though he wants to devour every corner of the city and in many ways the film ends up being, as much as anything else, a portrait of New York. This is cinema as flaneur. The film moves from high end hotel district to Harlem to the riverside, and it crossed my mind whilst watching it to wonder how those cities I know well, London and Montevideo, might have looked had the film been set there. This capturing of the city helps to reaffirm the director’s desire to shoot the film with the realistic feel of a documentary, (there’s also a hint of Cassettes’ roaming NY camera), transporting the slightly generic thriller material into something harder-edged, straight off the streets. At times this makes for a film that has the feel of a whisky hangover: life is washed out, desperately needing sleep or the blackest of black coffee, struggling to stay alert, numbed by the inevitability of the next chase, the next frenetic declaration which will reassure the detectives, Gene Hackman, even you, the viewer, that we are not hovering at the edge of coma; we remain riotously alive. 

the third part of the night (w&d andrzej zuławski, w. mirosław zuławski)

Żuławski’s first film is a bewildering but brilliant mash-up. Set in wartime Poland, it combines the quest for a cure for typhus, which involves putting infected fleas in matchboxes to bite the skin of volunteers, with the Gestapo hunt for Michal, the charismatic lead. Żuławski’s camera darts around like a cat on a hot tin roof whilst the plot moves forward like one of the film’s jumping fleas, frequently hiding in remote corners before leaping into the light. Zuławski narrative uses leaps in time to wilfully disorientate and confuse the viewer. Michal’s wife and child are murdered by the invaders at the start of the film, and Michal’s dead son haunts him as he helps a woman who looks just like his dead wife give birth. The idea of the double permeates the film, lending it an existential flavour to go with the bio-thriller elements. It’s a film that feels at once modern and baffling, the work of a mad scientist, a visionary or an idiot. But what can also be said, without doubt, is that it’s a film that’s aggressively original. The same could of course be said for much of Polish cinema that emerged out of the communist era: a cinema perhaps compelled by censorship to say things in cryptic tongues, to hide meaning in suitcases or coffins, to use the camera to disorientate as much as it clarifies, throwing the dogs off the scent, allowing its secret messages to slip through the net. 

senselessness (horacio castellanos moya, tr. katherine silver)

This is one of the least comfortable reads you are likely to come across. A writer accepts the job of rewriting a report on human rights abuses in an unnamed Central American country. He works in an office in the cathedral complex, in the centre of the city. He complains that he’s not being paid enough. He complains there aren’t any good looking women around. He finds two good looking Spanish women and sleeps with one of them. Then he gets scared because the woman he sleeps with has a (Uruguayan) military boyfriend, who is arriving any day. He is haunted by phrases from the report he is working on. He goes mad. It’s all over in a flash. Is the author mocking the process of compiling human rights reports? Is he trying to equate the feckless writer with the feckless and dangerous men who have committed these crimes? The novel’s satirical intentions walk a Swiftian line and the discomfort this engenders is, one imagines, the object of the exercise.

nobody move (denis johnson)

I think this is what they call a potboiler. I read its 200+ pages in about 24 hours. Calling a book a potboiler sounds like a cheap shot, but there’s a great deal of skill gone into the creation of this addictive novel. The predictable Johnson prose verve, and some great characters from the marginalia of some marginal corner of the USA. A loser shoots a villain in the leg but can’t bring himself to finish the job. The villain survives. The loser hooks up with a femme fatale. The bad guys close in, the big denouement happens. It feels slightly formulaic but highly effective. We’re back in the product versus art debate, which haunts my working days. This is product, but it’s product with a smattering of stardust. Read too many Nobody Moves and you’re going to overdose, but read one every now and again and it’s a timely reminder of the importance of pacing, simplicity and dramatic tension. Johnson’s novel, from that hinterland of American fiction which maps on to a hinterland of ‘merican society where bad things happen and both good and bad die young, might not kill fascists, but it still bites. 

to live and die in LA. (w&d william friedkin; w. gerald petievich)

Friedkin’s frenetic film stars William Petersen as a character who can’t walk past an obstacle without jumping over it. A chair, a fence, a table. The energy is great but there’s always the danger that you’re going to trip and fall flat on your face. There’s probably no way of knowing whether Petersen and Friedkin purposefully built this in as a metaphor, but whether they did or not, it works, because the golden boy, Chance, (Petersen) is heading for a mighty fall, a fall that is in part the result of this propulsive energy. The great thing about this quintessentially 80s movie is that it has no qualms about jackknifing the script and character in directions you never quite expect. Whilst Chance’s mission seems to be one of virtuous vengeance, it turns into a clusterfuck, (which permits for a truly gripping car chase). Morality becomes an abstract idea which has no application to the plastic realities of the here and now. The director’s bravura use of soundtrack, palette and even costume feel like a brash fuck you to any arbiters of taste: in this city we do things faster, harder and louder than anywhere else. Which leads, inexorably, to the sense that there’s a second metaphor at work here: the arbitrary nature of ethics in policing reflecting the arbitrary nature of ethics in film-making, where being beautiful is something to be turned to your advantage, where stars live fast and die young, and life moves on without missing a beat. 

71 fragments of a chronology of chance (w&d haneke)

The third of Haneke’s early films seen on consecutive nights, this was in structural terms the most ambitious, perhaps, but in narrative terms the most straightforward. A note at the front of the film informs us of a multiple murder in a bank followed by the suicide of the assassin, so we know what’s coming. The point isn’t dramatic tension, it’s to construct a societal collage, as we follow the lives of various characters whose fates will cross in the bank, just before christmas. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and like any jigsaw puzzle, the nearer you get to completion, the more apparent the design becomes. There lurks beneath the austere takes and the cold logic a strong narrative drive in Haneke’s films, and this is no exception. The frequent inclusion of news reports (Michael Jackson and the Yugoslav wars) root the film in its interrogation of what history might mean, and how much our perspectives are shaped by this consumption of a constructed idea of the present, an idea the film’s end appears to mock, with its repetition of the Jackson news story. Yet 71 Fragments is always more detached than the earlier films from his glaciation trilogy. There is a fascination with the physical process of putting a film together (also known as editing) which hints at the way we edit our own lives, perhaps, seeking to control the narrative but never knowing when the nutter is going to walk in and blow our brains out. 

benny’s video (w&d haneke)

Pub quiz question. In which Haneke film does the British queen make a cameo appearance? The answer… is Benny’s Video. A clip from Spitting Image lampoons the royal family, but this is just one of the panorama of seemingly random images which populate Benny’s screens and to which he will contribute his own devastating additions. Benny’s Video is from 1992, a time just before the internet was about to transform our lives into a restless sea of images, and in this Benny feels like a preternaturally modern character, one step ahead of his peers, right down to his savage amorality. However, this amorality perhaps has a more complex root than sheer information overload. Talking to the young girl he will soon murder, Benny tells her that the violence in the films they watch is all fakery, composed of paint and plastic. He, and perhaps even she, wants to rediscover a reality beyond the movies, to discover what real blood looks like. (Something which Haneke can paradoxically only show with fake blood, no matter how shocking it might seem.)

Benny’s quest for the real, which doesn’t seem to change him at all, also ties in with his parents post-Nazi amorality, driven by petty bourgeois greed and fear (to be revisited in White Ribbon). Like so many post-war austro-german auteurs, Haneke is also a captive of his nation’s past, and aware of the fact. What this means is that there are multiple factors which contribute to the listless amorality in which Haneke’s film is apparently immersed. The absence of value is only of them, even if within a world of images, this is the one that comes to the foreground. The extended and seemingly irrelevant Egypt section, which goes on for perhaps ten minutes, feels like another manifestation of this: if all images are of equal import, from the killing of a pig to a Spitting Image clip to a  camera view of the street outside, why shouldn’t a film just be composed of arbitrary images, which have no relevance to plot or character? Except that there has been a key development in this sequence, which is that the mother has picked up the camera herself, she has become one for whom the production of images is a way of fending off their meaninglessness, as has been the case with Benny. Two of the videos he has made, one of the killing of the girl, the other of his parents’ acknowledgement of their complicity in his crime, will determine everything that occurs, and in so doing, Benny becomes actor/ director in his own drama, rather than mere passive recipient. It’s not a comfortable space, it’s fucked up, but it affirms the fact that, for better or for worse, he is alive.

The echo into the 21st century of this philosophy is chilling: a world where people only come to life through the manipulation of their image, a manipulation that goes beyond good or evil, transforming the subject into a kind of aestheticised zombie, seemingly in control of their image/fate, but actually atomised, all at sea, lost in a maze of empty referents. 

the seventh continent (w&d haneke; w johanna teicht)

Haneke’s first film, supposedly, which deals with the true story of a family who decided to drop out in the most merciless fashion possible. A few thoughts:

1 - Nostalgia. Weirdly, given that this is a film set in Austria about nihilism, one of the first sensations watching it was one of nostalgia. For an era of middle class, pre-digital living, where phones lived on walls and people read newspapers.

2 - Schopenhauer. I might be wrong but I believe that Schopenhauer had a standpoint wherein he suggested that the rational thing to do in life was basically starve yourself to death. I had also been thinking about Michael Landy’s Break Down. As the family in The Seventh Continent enter into the third phase of the movie, that of unexplained auto-annihalation, it strangely felt as though they were both participating in a hermetic tradition but also were at the vanguard of what would become a 21st century credo, the idea of anti-materialism, even if that credo goes hand in hand with its countermeasure, the worship of materialism.

3 - True Stories can never be realised on screen. Haneke seems to aspire towards an objective neutrality, shorn of any directorial adornment, but this doesn’t preclude the film from seeming, with the benefit of our retrospective perspective, completely and utterly Hanekesque. The attention to seemingly irrelevant details (the breakfast, a door opening, a tap running), whose later destruction will be key to the film, also helps to define a certain atonal style which would become a hallmark, over the years. These details serve to make the contemporary viewer feel that there is nothing neutral or objective about the film; rather it is the start of the director's visceral critique of a system he will continue to confront from his clearly marked standpoint over the course of the next thirty years. 

counternarratives (john keene)

Keene’s collection consists of several stories which seek to tell the unspoken history of various figures whom history has failed to grant a voice. In a sense this is a highly Derridean project: an ambition to write in the margin of the authorised version of the western cannon. Unsurprisingly, many of these voices are of African descent, some of them slaves, although this is not always the case. Keene’s remit is broad, stretching from the discovery of Manhattan to twentieth century Africa. Along the way, the writer’s stories occur in Haiti and Brazil as well as the United States. Many of the stories relate to recognisable historical or fictional characters (Huckleberry Finn, Mário de Andrade, Miss La La), rooting the text with a historical authenticity which at the same time playfully questions that very authenticity. The stories that are set around the time of the US Civil war, a war that often seems to have been brushed under the carpet, felt particularly enlightening. On the whole Keene writes with a fluid, natural prose style, luring the reader in to his unlikely tales. A Haitian girl who draws her apocalyptic visions and in so doing perhaps brings them to life. A black servant who ends up participating in the balloon reconnaissance division of the Unionist army. The leader of a Brazilian quilombo. (One imagines Keene is aware of how this word has entered the South American lexicon.) The text never fails to surprise and at the same time succeeds in its radical mission to rewrite the reader’s understanding of what “history” really is, a considerable fictional achievement. 

passages (w&d ira sachs; w. arlette langmann, mauricio zacharias)

Passages confirms the adage that there is nothing better than a good villain and nothing worse than a bad villain. The film revolves around the supposedly charismatic Tomas, played with an ugly charm by Franz Rogowski, married to Ben Whishaw’s Martin, who has a fling with Adèle Exarchopoulos’s Agathe at the wrap party of his film, (Tomas is a film director, natch), which then turns into something more serious and then doesn’t as the maverick charismatic egoist decides he really prefers banging Ben to Adèle. The actor’s prominence is because this is an actors’ movie, where they get to fuck a lot, argue quite a bit and look like movie stars, even if Whishaw does a sterling job of trying to underplay his role, in contrast to the melodramatic material he is given to handle. There’s more than a hint of Cassavetes about their menage a trois, (and the closing shot of Tomas), only this is an alt-bourgeois version of Cassavetes which inhabits a twee Paris, where everyone has a nice apartment with lots of books. The slender spine of the narrative (“Agathe is pregnant”… “Didn’t Tomas tell you, I had an abortion”…) struggles to hold up these ambitions and the various ‘full-on’ sex scenes seem to compensate for the lack of real dramatic action elsewhere. Nothing is particularly credible. Tomas has been living in Paris for a decade, but can’t be arsed to learn French, so most of the movie is in English, his film apparently is about to screen in Venice at the end, but he drifts through the whole process doing nothing more than sometimes popping into the edit suite, and Agathe, it turns out half way through, is actually a homely teacher. The most coherent line in Passages is the way it confirms Paris as the go-to city for cinematic romantic liaisons. There is, por supuesto, a strong tradition of this, from Godard to Linklater, but there has been a spate of films in this vein of late, (Denis’ Avec Amour and Audiard’s 13 Arrondissement). However, at the end of the day, in spite of the actors’ endeavours, what scuppers Passages is the fact that Tomas is more whiney teenager than Rimbaud or Verlaine. 

jesus' son (denis johnson)

This collection of short stories is pretty much the perfect length for a collection: eleven taut stories, all of them screaming silently about the state of the fucking nation. The nation being the USA, the date any time you’ve been lost in the great wilderness of backwaters USA. Even if only in a figurative sense. There’s something so remarkably homely about these tales of drifters and petty criminals, losers the lot of them, just trying to find a way to get by in the maw of a cruel world. Johnson bestows the gift of poetry on these poor souls, as though he wants to redeem them and himself through the power of the broken word. The penultimate story is nothing more than a conversation with a man about being shot by both his wives, as the narrator shaves his moustache and says he’s going to immortalise him in print. Which, in a way, he has done. You can understand why this collection in particular, with its nod to the Velvets, has acquired a cult status. Maybe it’s just those of us who grew up in the Anglo-Saxon world, but all of these characters have an innate affinity with the flotsam and jetsam of the great capitalist mother hen. From William Carlos Williams to Bukowski, from Huckleberry Finn to Slothrop, there’s a dance to be had through the badlands of the North American psyche and in this collection Johnson joins the dance with  the cruel verve of a Lou Reed monologue and the wit of Cale guitar riff. It’s not going to kill you to read this, and it might just make you exhale with relief that you have landed on the right side of the various tracks, in this life, at least. 

ps - for long term readers, the following is of note: Johnson is quoted as saying that Jesus’ Son is "a rip-off of Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry"

almas de la costa (w&d juan antonio borges, w. antonio de la fuente)

Almas de la Costa is apparently the first Uruguayan long form feature, even if the restored version only runs at around 45 minutes. The Sala Verdi is the perfect setting to watch the screening, accompanied by a pianist. Like the theatre itself, the film emerges from a moment when this relatively new country was finding its cultural feet, (some might say an ongoing process), as indeed was the medium of cinema. The acting has that theatrical feel that one finds in the silent films of Lillian Gish, the codes of which are well nigh impossible for a contemporary audience to grasp. Less than five years later Dreyer’s Joan of Arc would land like a dam-busting bomb, releasing a new wave of naturalistic emotion which is still being ridden, a century later. As such, one has to read between the lines to try and understand what the director and the film sought to communicate. The story revolves around the illness of Nela, who is afflicted with a malignant cough. Whilst this all seems very mundane today, at the time it would have been a clear reference to TB, and the audience would have grasped the fatal threat that Nela was confronting. Somehow or another, a supposed shipwrecked sailor is washed up on the shore of Nela’s fishing village (he is actually the heir to his wealthy mother’s fortune). Social mobility was no easier back in the day, but this stroke of fortune will change Nela’s life, as the two fall in love, enabling her to move away from the clearly documented poverty of the village. There is also a violent drunk character, whose macho impulses resonate with contemporary society, even if the film redeems him by having him undergo a benevolent transformation.

There’s nothing very radical about Almas de la Costa, (Souls from the Coast), nevertheless it is fascinating to map those ways in which a society doesn’t appear to change all that much over the course of a century, with so many recognisable traits embedded in the restored reels. Perhaps that lack of radicality also speaks of Uruguayan culture, the land that Lautréamont left behind, one that looks warily at the mavericks and the codebreakers. 

la chasse du lion a l’arc (d jean rouch)

Nowadays we are festooned with TV programs documenting obscure corners of the planet. The images are always seductive, attractive, whispering of a pre-lapserian time when nature and mankind co-existed in a seemingly more harmonious time. Rouch’s film, made over the course of seven years, opens with these kinds of images, as his jeep is filmed headed into the deep interior of the African continent, crossing the river Niger and entering a zone which, the narrator tells us, has neither roads nor villages, and is referred to as the Nowhere Place. This is the inhospitable southern edge of the Sahara, a land of scrub and thorn. The only inhabitants are pastoral nomads who bring their herds to the water holes. This territory belongs to the animals more than the humans, giraffes and hyenas and of course, the lions. The lions, the narration observes, generally live in peaceful co-existence with the humans, only killing cattle that are sick. But sometimes, a lion will turn savage, and kill just for the hell of it. And that’s when the lion hunters are called up.

Up to this point, Rouch’s film has been an amiable watch, in keeping with modern documentary methods. But when the hunters enter the frame, this changes. After showing us how the hunters prepare their tools, including the lethal looking traps, the film then follows two hunts, one unsuccessful, the other successful. This latter hunt occupies the last third of the film. Now we are witness to the other side of the harmonious picture. The hunters traps snap shut on the paw of a civet, a hyena, a young lion and finally a grown lion. The hunters execute the final kill with their poisoned arrows, but the animals are already on a death spiral once they have been caught in the traps. The rest is putting them out of their misery. Rouch’s film doesn’t spare the viewer any of the savagery of the kill. The dead lion is brought back to the village as a trophy, where it is reduced to skin and bones, its meat carried off to be cooked. The images are disturbing, horrific, savage. This, the film shows us, is the other side of that seemingly Edenic world. Blood and viscera. The mirage of the bucolic life is eviscerated. And this is also honest; revealing how dishonest are all those lovely images that populate our screens and our consciousness, as some kind of ‘other’ to our cosy, ‘civilised’ existences. 

chronique d’un eté (d. edgar morin, jean rouch)

At the start of the film, the filmmakers declare their objective is to document the city of Paris over the course of summer, 1960. This is clearly an unviable objective and the filmmakers make clear that they are conscious of the limits of their project. Things open with a straightforward device, as two young women stop people in the street and ask them, bluntly, if they are happy, with predictably humorous results. It’s vox pop, ahead of its time, which allows the film to engage with a variety of people from differing backgrounds, but it’s a limited strategy. Then the methodology shifts as we move into a series of interviews with seemingly random characters: a worker in a Renault factory, an Ivory Coast immigrant, Marceline, one of the young women doing the interviews. Gradually the film starts to piece these seemingly random elements together. They meet, they interact, they discuss the events of the day, including the post-imperialist wars in Algiers and the Congo. They even go on holiday, to Saint Tropez, a paradoxically essential element of the Parisian summer. Along the way there are surprises and moments of raw emotion. Some of the characters open up, others are more guarded. The joys and futilities of living in the French capital are laid bare. The film closes with a sequence where the participants are shown the film in preview, a device which allows for more surprises and a further layer of commentary on the viability of the project in itself.

What do we get out of all this as viewers? Well, on the one hand, we do indeed get an idea of what Paris was like over the course of the summer of 1960. We get to see what it looked like, and what the concerns and hopes and fears of its citizens were. We also get an investigation into the limits of a certain observational fly-on-the-wall filmmaking style, what it reveals and what it hides. Where the traps might lie. But more than all of this, we also get a sometimes marvellous study of humanity, the simplicity of humanity, its everyday charm and its everyday despair, a life clothed in the secrets that every soul carries around with them. 

diego garcia (natasha soobramanien & luke williams)

As the title suggests, the novel’s focus is on the eponymous archipelago that was ceded by the British to the USA as a military base, meaning the Chagos islanders who lived there were forcibly deported, destined to roam the world as they sought to make the case for being permitted to return to their islands. One of the co-authors, Natasha Soobramanien, is of Mauritian descent, which helps to explain her interest in the islanders’ fate, as their first port of call after being deported was Mauritius, where a strong community of Chagos islanders remains. Others have moved to the UK, specifically Crawley,  a consequence of the stateless islanders arriving at Gatwick when they first came to Britain. A select cohort of the islanders have been granted UK citizenship, but others haven’t and their fate, as is the fate of so many stateless individuals, is to roam the world in limbo. One of these, called Diego, is a character in the novel, albeit a peripheral figure, as the novel on the whole revolves around the relationship between Damaris and Oliver, which appear to be nommes des plumes for the writers themselves. This auto-fiction is the dominant strand of the book, as it traces the relationship between the two writers, who are also writing this novel we are reading together. The novel thus becomes a somewhat solipsistic project, albeit very Fitzcarraldo. It comes as no great surprise to discover that Soobramanien is an alumni of the UEA Creative Writing MA, which in turn has been so influenced by the work of Sebald. Whilst the novel incorporates segments which are memoirs of other characters, figures in the story of Diego Garcia, there is perhaps a sense that it is slightly less radical than it purports to be and the interweaving of the novelists’ stories with that of the Chagos islanders has moments which feel somewhat tenuous. 

aguas del pastaza / juunt pastaza entsari. (d. inês t. alves)

Aguas del Pastaza (The Waters of the Pastaza) is a beguiling little film. Running at a shade over an hour, it documents the lives of a small tribe of children who live, learn and play on the banks of the river Pastaza, deep in the Amazon rainforest, somewhere on the border of Peru and Ecuador. Throughout almost the whole film, there are no adults present, just the kids. Alves shows them with an affectionate, observational eye. There is no intent to interview them or speak to anyone who might be shaping the way their minds work, in part, one suspects, because it is clear their minds and bodies are shaped more than anything by the world around them, in which they live in a state of seemingly Wordsworthian joy. They climb tees, forage for fruit, hunt for shrimps by night, play football in the teeming rain, paddle down the river in their pirogues, go fishing, cook etcetera. As such this is no more and no less than a vivid fly-on-the-wall portrayal of what life is like for these children, a life that they clearly relish.

As it happens I watched the film with Sñr Amato and his friend, Juanma, who explained that this way of life was one his mother had lived in the Paraguayan selva, not so very long ago. Juanma is a very urbane figure so I had no idea of his rural background. He said that Alves’ film transported him back both to stories his mother told him and his own experiences when he went to stay with family in the jungle, and the sense of wondrous liberty of existing in this environment, an element of the continent’s consciousness that is constantly under threat, (a threat that is latent but never declared in the film). Rather, what we get to see is everything we have already lost and everything that clings on regardless in the face of supposed ‘progress’. 

youth of the beast /yaju no seishun (d. seijun suzuki w. ichirô ikeda, tadaaki yamazaki, haruhiko ôyabu)

Suzuki’s B-movie was a random pick, one of the joys of living close to your local arts cinema, as they are known. Great title aside, the film is resolutely action driven, with the hard-nosed hero, Jôji, wreaking havoc in the Japanese underworld. I have to confess that there were numerous moments where I lost the plot as it stitched together the rivalries of the Yakuza bands. The gaudy tone and colour feel like the antithesis of those movies loved by the arthouse crowd, the stately oeuvres of Ozu and Mizoguchi. This is unredacted action, and one can imagine a youthful Tarantino adoring the vibrant if senseless tones. Kill Bill is just a few steps away from Youth of the Beast, and then the family line leads to the banalities of those movies which feature on the lists of films that have somehow grossed over a billion dollars. Indeed, Suzuki’s tone feels that it owes as much to the American occupation as it does to anything which might be defined as ‘Japanese’. 

full metal jacket (w&d kubrick, w. michael herr, gustav hasford)

I spent much of the film thinking about Docklands. What it was and what it became. How does the barely-remembered Vietnam war map onto the barely remembered Docklands  (before it became the current megalopolis Docklands). For those who don’t know: Kubrick, who didn’t like leaving Britain, reconstructed Vietnam in the ruins of the part of London known as Docklands, once the maritime hub of the capital, which as Britain declined as a trading nation, was an area that had fallen into disuse. The same Docklands would soon become the site for the development of a new financial and commercial zone, Canary Wharf.

Is there a link between Kubrick’s retrospective vision and the neo-liberal explosion that was constructed on the charred relics of his fictional Vietnam? Does the defeat of the USA reverberate with the unleashing of capital that was to follow, an unleashing that has transformed the landscape on the other side of the Thames? I remember, living in Blackheath, watching from the window of the bedsit I was living in at the time, as Canary Wharf tower was being built, going up floor by floor, like some unlikely and unwanted donation from a New York billionaire. I can date that to 1990, because I watched Mandela being released from prison on a TV in that same bedsit. 32 years ago now. Kubrick’s film is set around the Tet Offensive, in 1968, only 22 years earlier. He filmed in 1985-86, only a few years before the area’s transformation. He was closer to the Vietnam war then than we are now to the birth of turbo-capitalism, which rose from the ashes of the USA’s defeat, rising on the land where he realised his fictional recreation of that defeat.

Weirdly, it’s hard not to mourn for that cinematic vision of the Vietnam war, a cinematic vision which produced material as rich as anything US cinema has produced since. Watching the likes of Barbie and Oppenheimer, popcorn movies, one step removed from the Marvel franchise, it’s hard not to yearn for the generation whose horizons were broadened by defeat, by the tarnishing of the dream. Full Metal Jacket feels more schematic than Apocalypse or Deer Hunter, but it is still a rigid, sceptical examination of history, one which permits the construction of anti-heroes, rather than heroes, of doubt rather than affirmation. What came in the wake of this doubt was the bombast of Dockands, a requirement to shroud weakness in steel, to obliviate it from our narratives. The only time that narrative was punctured, in 2001, it was met with the force of a militarised blowback which, in theory, would insure against another Vietnam, although in practice, the empire was still just as wobbly. only this time, no-one got to make films about it. There are no wastelands in our modern techno-cities to re-enact the catastrophes of Fallujah, or Kandahar. And where the will might exist, the interest has waned. What turbo-capitalism has done so effectively is to out-source trauma, even failure. It happens in another dimension, not ours. And should anyone start to question that narrative, the counter-narratives of Trump or Brexit or Milei or Bolsonaro are wheeled out, to say: you too could live in that shiny steel tower. You may live in the ashes and debris of a bombed-out society, which was once harmonious, but don’t despair. If you kill your inner gook, you too can construct a temple in the sky, draw the blinds, press play, and lose yourself in the virtual reality of other people’s wars. 

thérèse raquin (zola)

Thérèse Raquin is a kind of blockbuster novel, possessing many of the hallmarks of contemporary crime/horror. There is only one real moment of dramatic action in its thirty something chapters, which is sufficient to drive the motor of the book’s narrative. This moment is a gruesome murder, conducted by Laurent, Thérèse’s lover. Zola describes the murder and its subsequent effect on the couple in lurid detail. It’s the extreme psychological examination of the event which raises if above being a mere potboiler. Its sister novel is surely Crime and Punishment, both novels examining, through the incidence of a murder, the structure of late nineteenth century social society. Perhaps it could even be said to have something in common with a contemporary novel such as Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais. Crime as a surgical tool, with all the mystery removed, unlike say, the work of Conan Doyle, designed to strip bare the bride of social mores. Perhaps when the murder mystery started to become a genre, it signified a moment when the social divisions that so often underpin criminality were being swept under the carpet. Zola roots the actions of the protagonists in their hopeless social environment, a space where dreams have no currency and just knuckling down and surviving is all there is to aim for. Curiously, when Thérèse starts to go off the rails in the latter stages of the book, she goes and hangs out with those Parisian bohemians who would later become so fetishised within popular culture, as a kind of ersatz role model for the modern hipster. But she rejects this, suppurated with an unatoneable guilt. The existential weight of karma eventually does for the couple, suggesting a religious dimension at work, over and above everything else.

almamula (w&d juan sebastián torales)

Almamula is a coming of age tale with echoes of Martel’s La Cienega and, perhaps, La Niña Santa. Set in the backwoods of Santiago del Estero, it follows the travails of Nino, a pubescent boy who is not only discovering that he is gay, but also that he has a crush on Jesus. Nino is beaten up at the opening of the film, so his mother takes him and his winsome older sister to the home of their estranged father, out in the country. This is a profoundly religious environment, and Nino is scheduled to receive his confirmation whilst there, something which is threatened by the confession of his unorthodox crush to the local priest. The film is beautifully shot by Ezequiel Salinas, optimising the phantasmagoric elements of the rural surroundings and the local forest where the mythical titular beast, the Almamula, is said to lurk, threatening to punish children who give in to their wicked desires. As well as his crush on Christ, Nino also becomes fascinated by the Almamula, who he thinks he sees on various occasions. The film starts to ruminate somewhat, as the leisurely rhythms of the lazy countryside take over, nevertheless this is an assured directorial debut which conjures a convincing sense of place and mood, even if the sense of danger or threat seems at times slightly undercooked. 

avec amour et acharnement (w&d claire denis, w. christine angot)

You have to hand it to Denis. She doesn’t let up. Her latest feels like a vehicle for Binoche & Lindon, as the twin superstars of French cinema strut their tortured stuff. There are two ways of looking at Love and Fury: as self-indulgent Gallic melodrama; or, stripped to the bone, raw emotional heroin. Several scenes feel like they’ve been captured ‘in the moment’, as the two leads go head to head. The mood of the film is one of being constantly on the edge of something terrible about to happen, reflecting the reality of sharing a failing relationship, one which Jean (Lindon) and Sara (Binoche), for all the love their characters have for each other, are trapped in. It all starts to go tits up when François, Binoche’s ex-husband, reappears. His role is perhaps the weakest in the film, as he comes across as the equivalent of a male bunny boiler, evidently narcissistic bad news. That Sara, Binoche’s character, should be so readily infatuated with him seems, to this Anglo-Saxon temperament, implausible. If one were watching this in the guise of a psychologist, one might infer that Sara is using François to get out of her relationship to Jean, even if she would never admit it. In the end, both Sara and Jean seem to be more in love with the notion of romantic drama, relishing the big scenes, than getting on with their lives. The postscript , which perhaps has echoes of that alt-melodramatist, Reygadas, shows Jean happily reunited with his estranged son, one of the various under-developed strands in the film. (Why was Jean in prison; how does Sara’s instability affect her job as a radio presenter.) However, these details aren’t really the point. The structure of Avec Amour et Acharnement is gerrybuilt as a platform to allow the leads to do their thing, and if that’s your thing, you’ll roll with the film. And if it’s not, you won’t. 

zero zero zero (roberto saviano, tr. virginia jewiss)

Zero Zero Zero is an all-embracing account of the cocaine industry as well as being a sort of tragic bildungsroman. The book’s origins are intertwined with the author’s destiny. Having found himself committed to a life of 24h security patrols and restricted freedoms following his first book, Gomorrah, which took on the mafia, Saviano now writes from with a reinforced bubble. His book is in part a quest to understand why this bubble exists, why his life has become this closed, hermetic existence. (In the ‘Thanks’ section, there’s a nod to Salman Rushdie, “who taught me how to be free even when surrounded by seven armed bodyguards”. As the author’s life has become a kind of huis clos, he has less qualms about seeking and exposing the facts behind an industry which he claims makes the world go round. This makes for a rangey read, flitting from Mexico to Italy to Africa to Spain and a hundred other points on the compass which are touched by the narcotics industry, which is essentially the whole world. At times, the writing gets so caught up in the detail that it is hard to follow, but as this is a book which people will come to via the author’s fame, something he is aware of, it represents an invaluable guide to the world’s shadow economy, the one that doesn’t figure on the books, nor will be discussed in summit meetings of the G7, but whose vast mark-ups ensure it is perhaps the most lucrative business in town and undoubtably one of the largest too. Through it all Saviano’s voice emerges as a kind of Cassandra, singing a song he knows no-one wants to listen to, but if he doesn’t sing - who will

Nb - One of the more powerful angles of the book is the way in which Saviano’s own semi-incarceration clearly feeds into his understanding of how people operate in prison or facing the risk of prison. With his own life in constant jeopardy, he can emote more readily than many commentators or writers to the impulses of people living on the edge. One of the most telling chapters in the book is the one where he talks to a drugs mule, explaining the training and execution of this painful process. Of course, the drugs mule is very far down the pecking order, effectively just another victim of the industry, as is, in his own way, the author himself. 

la nuit du 12 (w&d dominik moll, w. pauline guéna, gilles marchand)

Moll’s film, the second of his I have seen this year at Cinemateca, opens with an act of psychopathic brutality. For a while it feels as though the film is staggering in the wake of this action. Where can it go from here? Particularly as it is clear Moll doesn’t want to do anything gratuitous. He wants to pay homage to the victim, re-vindicating the murder mystery as a means to explore the psychic damage that is inflicted by a violent action. As such, the figure of the police chief, Yohan Ives, emerges as the protagonist. Yohan is part of a male-dominated world that has no option but to treat violent crimes as part and parcel of their daily lives, something which contributes to an inevitably sardonic, macho culture. Yohan, played with a delicate subtlety by Bastien Bouillon, has natural leadership qualities, but he is also a gentle soul. HIs failure to resolve the crime nags away at him, representing not only everything that is flawed about the job, but also a world ridden with gender wars and violence. Moll handles the material with restraint and tact. It feels, to an extent, as though this perhaps restricts his filmmaker’s flair, but it permits him to succeed in converting a story which perhaps shouldn’t work, shifting the focus of the crime from the victim to the policeman, but in the end sort of does. The film traces Yohan’s journey towards a reconciliation with the flawed world he inhabits, even if it is a world without mercy or justice.