woyzech (d. herzog, w. büchner)

Herzog’s Woyzech is a faithful treatment of the play, which is notable for two reasons. One is the way in which the naturalism of cinema permits the story to be completely immersed in the world it emerged from. The small German town with its tavern, town square and nearby fields represents Büchner’s world in the way the theatre never can, for better and for worse. The second is the acting of Kinski, who could have been born to play the part.

The naturalism is actually quite strange, as Büchner’s text is famously unnaturalistic. Woyzech is one of the first great anti-heroes of the 19th century, stepbrother to Raskalnikov. His brain is disordered, he doesn’t fit within the bucolic constraints of provincial life. Büchner emphasises this via the strangeness (the unnaturalness) of the play’s dialogue. The inner workings of Woyzech’s mind are placed on display and spoken out loud. There are moments when the prettiness of Herzog’s pictures jars with this, as though the strangeness is seeking a way to get out, to make its presence felt. The only real outlet is Kinski himself, and the actor’s wild mannerisms feel suitably out of keeping with the idyllic surroundings.

A side note. I think the first time I saw this play was in Stratford, directed by my friend Sean Holmes. He was permitted to stage it in a large barn which was being used for more experimental work for a while, I believe. I have a memory of it being a brilliant white space, which he informs me it wasn’t, and the action playing out in a series of vignettes scattered across the space, which we looked down on from above. I recall it having an alt brilliance to the banal stagings of the RSC. (Living in Montevideo people eulogise the RSC but back then it seemed like it produced the most banal theatre imaginable.) In the cast were a future Hollywood star and other young actors who were clearly relishing the opportunity to do something a bit more leftfield. (Yes, gentle reader, for the RSC, Woyzech was still leftfield back then and probably still is.) Also in the audience on the night I saw it was Sarah Kane. 

the last tycoon (fitzgerald)

The Last Tycoon is an unfinished novel, and there’s something fitting about this in so many ways, as so much of Fitzgerald’s writing is about the unattainable, the out-of-reach. Furthermore, it feels as though the author was perhaps, like his protagonist, Stahr, at the end of the line, conscious of his fragrant mortality. The novel is about a dying man, and the writer knew of what he was speaking.

The novel is full of comments about the role of the writer in Hollywood. Cecilia, the narrator, daughter of a fellow producer, says: “I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails… they were spoken of in the same way when they were not around - except for a species called playwrights who… were treated with respect if they did not stay long - if they did they sank with the others into the white collar class.”

Fitzgerald, perhaps his era’s finest novelist, looks on with a jaundiced detachment at the way the movies changed the pecking order of image and word, relegating the writer to the role of a factotum deployed to help realise the dreams of the great visionaries such as Stahr. At another point Celia says: “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” Stahr has a pragmatic attitude to narrative, which is something embodied by actors telling the public want they want to hear. “Our condition is that we have to take people’s own folklore and dress it up and give it back to them.” This feels as true today as it was back then, even if some of the folklore is now cannibalising itself (Star Wars, Marvel, The Crown).

At one point Stahr decides to make a film about revolutionary Russia and watches Chien Andalou and Dr Cagliari, with Fitzgerald adding the brilliantly subversive note that “he had the script department get him up a two page treatment of the Communist Manifesto”. Perhaps we can sense here Fitzgerald seeing how cinema and its adjuncts would eat politics whole and repackage it for the masses, in order to make a profit. But it’s Fitzgerald who is the cynic, rather than Stahr, finding himself trapped in a world where the values he inherited are being used in a back lot for a B-feature. 

the brig (d. mekas, judith malina, w. kenneth h brown)

The Brig is a film as claustrophobic as its setting. A military prison the size of a large postage stamp where ten prisoners and their guards cohabit. The prisoners are reduced to numbers and the guards have no qualms in dishing out corporal punishment, part of a process of breaking the prisoners down into malleable subservients, suitable to be reintegrated into the US marines. The film feels as though it must have influenced Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, but it also feels astonishingly balletic, as though it has been choreographed by Pina Bausch. The ten prisoners and as many guards move around the space with a rhythmic ferocity which contains a perverse beauty.

The Brig is a slightly disingenuous film, which was awarded the prize for best documentary at Venice, but is actually a brilliantly filmed account of a stage play by the Living Theatre, originally directed by Judith Malina. Mekas filmed the play during a special performance staged for his camera. Many have commented at the brilliance of the movie in capturing the cruelties of a military penal system and in this it is unflinching, but clearly credit here should go to Malina, the writer, Kenneth H. Brown and the actors themselves. However, what has made this such an iconic film and marks it apart from other filmed versions of stage plays, is the brilliance of the composition and the camera work. The camera is right in there, and we experience the play in a way the theatre audience never could. At one point the cameraman’s shadow appears on a wall. Whether this was deliberate or not, it is testament to its sly infiltration, and the brilliance of the filmed version of a devastating play. 

bardo (w&d iñárittu, w nicolás giacobone)

Iñárittu is a showman and Bardo is nothing if not a show. From the opening, a delirious, icarus-esque swooping over the desert, segueing to an underwater sequence on the LA subway, to a bravura non-interview in a Mexican TV studio, to the close, the film is composed of vivid, sometimes delirious sequences where the camera jockeys for position with text and actors. Once again Iñárittu frequently uses a fish-eye lens, as though he is trying to cram as much information into the screen as it can take. The nods to other filmmakers, in particular Tarkovsky, are explicit. Like many a gaudy show, it is in danger of outstaying its welcome once the bells and whistles become predictable, even repetitive. We know when we enter the gents in a vast Mexican club that we’re not going to go out the same way we came in, that this is just a portal to another cine-set which is waiting behind the next door.

This is undeniably an imperfect film, but perhaps all the better for being warts and all. The themes the filmmaker addresses are interlocking: family, fame and Mexico. It probably helps to know something about Mexico and its relationship with the USA to get the most of the film, which opens with the conceit that Amazon is going to buy Baja California and a vast set-piece sequence about the Mexican-USA war of 1845. The protagonist, Silverio is a Mexican filmmaker caught between two worlds, just like Iñárittu, struggling to retain his Mexican identity when he has made his career in Hollywood. The typography of the credits alludes to the Mexican flag, and the times when the film becomes most discursive is when characters address the dichotomy between being Mexican and remaining in Mexico, or leaving it. It should be remembered that it’s not just the director who heads North. In large swathes of Mexico much of the population has crossed the border to find work. In this sense, the Silverio/ Iñárittu journey reflects that of much of the nation, even if the majority of those exiles’ arguments about their reasons for having left might be less recondite.

At the same time, the film is a telling celebration of the capital, DF. Most of the film takes place in its streets and there are times when Bardo captures the glorious dissonant energy of Mexico DF with real aplomb. This is a very different DF to Cuarón’s ode to the city in Roma. (In Bardo the indigenous maid is refused entry to the beach, so she wouldn’t be able to save the children if they were in danger of drowning, a telling indictment of the country’s classist society). Iñárittu’s Mexico is wild, sweaty, drunken, consumed by family and friends, petty jealousies and deep loyalties. The very messiness of Bardo, its incompleteness, feels completely authentic to the culture it is seeking to portray. Down to the complexity of Mexican identity, as noted by a scene where Cortes claims to be the first Mexican on top of a pile of indigenous bodies in the Zocalo (another ‘spectacle’), or when Silverio is mocked in a fictitious interview for his ethnicity. Mexico is a melting pot and has been for thousands of years, the Spanish just added more blood to the mix. Bardo grapples with the multiple contradictions of Mexico and being Mexican with more than enough vigour to compensate for the director’s self-indulgence. 

trafalgar (galdós)

Trafalgar is part of a sequence of historical novels written by Galdós, which follow the character Gabriel de Araceli, as he moves through Spanish history. It’s not a complex novel, but it is informative in the telling of how the battle of Trafalgar, a name which means so much to the British identity but about which so little is actually know, transpired. Gabriel finds himself inadvertently aboard a Spanish warship in the battle, fighting on the French side. A telling detail is that he is surprised to see sawdust being placed on the deck previous to the battle, only to be told that this is to soak up the blood and guts. The battle is savage and the writing gives some insight into the Russian roulette of naval warfare. The novel also details the tactical acumen of Nelson as he strategises victory. Finally, Galdós’ treatment of this historical event shows how significant it was for the Spanish, and reminds us that war is actually something that connects societies as much as it separates them. The narration of the way the British help Gabriel to survive serves to humanise his enemy and reveals the common humanity which exists beneath the geo-political conflict. It seems surprising that none of the great British novelists of the nineteenth century tackled the battle. Trafalgar is not a major work of fiction, but it does offer a polished and humane insight into a historical event whose fame lives on today, and will do so long as the one-eyed sailor stands above the square.