the red cavalry and other stories (isaac babel, tr, david mcduff)

This collection of short stories is split into three. The first includes Babel’s early stories which appear autobiographical (but the excellent introduction by the translator, David Mcduff, assures us are not), telling tales of life in the Jewish quarter of Odessa in his youth. The second series deals, famously, with the Bolshevik war against the counter-revolutionary forces on its Western front. The third series returns to Odessa, telling tales of Jewish gangsters and other colourful characters. The first and last sections are clearly complementary and tie in to a Yiddish tradition that links to Bashevis Singer, among others, writers whose identity is constructed in large part by their Jewish roots. In the early stories, a progrom is described with a brutal intensity from a child’s perspective which we take to be the author’s, although as  Mcduff notes, it is in reality a reflection of the stories the Babel would have grown up with. The capacity of the writer to be on a bleeding front line between fiction and reality, war and peace, is evident again in the Red Cavalry series. The authenticity of the vision feels undeniable, the cruelty of this conflict where there are no obvious good guys. The struggle is desperate and existential, a supposedly philosophical conflict which in actuality boils down to men’s capacity for violence. Much of the conflict Babel describes takes place in what is modern day Ukraine and the echoes with today’s war are everywhere. This has been a land that has been fought over, on the hinge of East and West, for centuries, and that battle continues to be waged today, suggesting a more fundamental schism than whatever might be the ostensible reasons for war. Babel’s Jewish perspective, which places him both on the outside and the inside, allows him to view the war more dispassionately, and more honestly, in all its savagery, no matter the cause. 

deprisa deprisa (w&d carlos saura)

Saura’s early 80s movie has something of the trashy aesthetic that would colonise Spanish cinema with early Almodovar and the Movida Madrileña. Its Bonnie & Clyde narrative is set on the poor outskirts of Madrid, dusty tower blocks surrounded by waste land, a city starting to expand but not in any hurry. Pablo and Angela are two kids who are part of a gang which goes on a crime spree, stealing from institutions and people unprepared for their anarchic violence. All the members of the gang look more likely to be in a band than hard bitten criminals, and there are several scenes which take place, a la Scorsese, in pared-down 80s discotecas. Music is important to the group, and it is perhaps worth noting how their identity is formed in large part by Spanish, rather than Anglo-Saxon music. When the gang’s ambitions turn to the bigger fish of taking down a bank, disaster inevitably follows. But it seems clear that the director’s interest is less in the criminal elements of the movie and more in portraying a new Spanish generation, one that has become apolitical, takes drugs, doesn’t give a fuck. It feels as though it might have been influenced by Mean Streets. The stripped down, handheld aesthetic, with its washed-out colour palette and anti-heroes must have felt like a shot of pure modernity in the post-Franco era.

Nb -this IMDB note seems worth sharing: Jose Antonio Valdelomar González (Pablo) was recruited by Saura in a casting for non-professional actors. He was paid US$3,000. In 1992 he was found dead of a heroin overdose at Carabanchel prison (Madrid), where he was arrested for robbing a bank.

cria cuervos (w&d carlos saura)

The reception of a work of art is a curious, contingent process. In January, we went to the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa lurks. However, in order to see her, you need to queue in a room crammed with tourists pointing their phones at the old lady, in a scenario that feels more like queueing to board a plane than waiting to see one of the western world’s most celebrated artworks. We didn’t join the queue and as a result my reception of Da Vinci’s painting is nothing like what it might have been had I had the chance to contemplate her in my own time.

I only say this in relation to Saura’s film because it took me almost an hour to enter into a state of mind where I could start to access it. Maybe it was a far more contemplative film than I was in the mood for, or expected, or maybe I struggled to engage with the material, which is a memoir a young girl’s youth. Maybe I wanted to see more of Madrid, a city I am fond of, when almost the entirety of the film occurs inside an old house, which the occasional wide allows us to see, lurks hidden in a changing barrio of that city.

Then, and this is surely to the film’s credit, at a certain point, I began to enter into its Bergmanesque rhythms and became utterly seduced by them. In large part because it is such an understated narrative. The film is a poignant, beautiful portrait of youth, with its tedium and fantasy and deceptions. Ana, who tells the story of her mother’s betrayal by her father and early death (and who is played as an older woman by  Geraldine Chaplin, who also plays her mother, in a touch that is reminiscent of Sciamma’s Petite Maman), is a child whose love of life is entwined with her unhappiness, who has learnt too much too young, for whom the past will always hang heavy over her shoulder, like a character from a Marias novel or anyone who grew up under the Franco dictatorship. Without doing very much, Saura’s film does an awful lot. Its power creeps up on the viewer, just as the shadow of the past creeps up on us all. 

la caza (w&d carlos saura, w. angelino fons)

Saura’s early film belongs to a template which was already well established (Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and has continued to thrive (Deliverance, En El Pozo). A group of men head out to the wilderness where they will come face to face with their own savagery. The four men in question are three old friends and one of of their sons, who are going into deep Spain to hunt rabbits. The tensions within the group are soon established with the usual problems of masculinity rearing their head. The hunting sequences are surprisingly brutal. It doesn’t look as though the famous card: No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of this Film could be employed here. Saura presents the hunt as raw in tooth and blood with a strikingly edited sequence that has a percussive violence. Later, another sequence where a ferret is sent down a rabbit hole to join the hunt adds a layer that is almost horror, with the terror of the rabbits captured through sound and edit. Another element that is added is that many of the rabbits are sick with myxomatosis, meaning that the very hunt is both devalued and the rabbits that are caught are diseased. At one point, one of the men, Paco, shows another his secret cave, where the skeleton of a dead soldier lurks, and earlier in the film there is a throwaway remark about how this area was a killing field in the Spanish Civil War. Which is clearly the film’s subliminal agenda. Saura wants to confront the violence that underpins Franco’s civilised Spain. He does it with an unflinching commitment to display this violence, and it is highly effective. The finale as the protagonists finally flip and take each other out, is perhaps predictable, but the bloodied image of Luis is like something straight out of a horror movie - or a civil war. 

the charterhouse of parma (stendhal)

Inspired by seeing a sign in Stendhal’s honour in Trieste, I decided to get to grips with the writer’s other classic novel, having read Le Rouge et le Noir so long ago that I cannot really claim to remember it, beyond a vague sensation of being in the presence of a writer who was managing the complexity of moral behaviour in a manner that seemed exceedingly modern. This quality is also at work in The Charterhouse of Parma, whose main characters, Fabrizio and his aunt, appear to exist according to a moral code that is driven as much by exigency as any kind of deeply held set of values. Of course, this has the effect of making them feel incontrovertibly human, which is one of the art of the novel’s greatest facets. Investigating behaviour over the course of a protracted timeline, as is the case with writers such as Eliot and Hardy allows the writer to dig beneath a heroic surface in order to excavate the viscera that drives our actions. Having said all of this, and having beautifully set up Fabrizio as a flawed hero in the description of his participation of the battle of Waterloo, Stendhal’s novel does have a tendency to go around the houses. The sub-plots relating to the court at Parma seem infinitesimal, and the reader yearns for the flawed hero to return and take up centre stage. The writer’s analysis of the experience of amorous love is beautifully nuanced, and reminded this jaded reader of the vicissitudes of uneasy passions. 

vitalina varela & cavalo dinheiro (w&d pedro costa)

The director, Pedro Costa, is in Montevideo, and is introduced at the screening of Vitalina Varela by the Portuguese ambassador, who informs the audience of his ignorance regarding his native film industry. The ambassador is a portly figure, who then takes his seat for the two hours of Vitalina Varela and is perhaps the one who snores lightly, dreaming of the next chapter in the Fast and the Furious franchise. Because Costa’s films are not an easy watch. He is a painterly director, who adores the play of light on the screen. For much of the time in both films, this screen is bathed in near darkness, with a chiselled light illuminating quadrants of the protagonists’ faces. In both films the eponymous protagonist is a black immigrant to Lisbon from the Cape Verde islands and their colour becomes doubly significant for how Costa chooses to light his films, accentuating the darkness, meaning their faces are crepuscular, rearing out of the shadows. The narrative has a similar quality. Very little is clear in this world, much is opaque. Tiny hints of connections between the films, which are part of a series, are occasionally discharged, as Vitalina reappears in Ventura’s film and some of the dots start to join up. But on the whole, the viewer finds themselves seeking to glean shards of meaning from jumbled elements, and it is a taxing mission which runs the risk of leaving his audience in the dark. 

caché (w&d haneke)

Watching Caché on the big screen reminded me of how important his film was in the development of our film, Censor. No-one really believes us when we reference Haneke, or they think we’re being pretentious, because UK films aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing, but the director’s use of video has echoes in ours, the rewinding of tape, the whirr of the video machine, the hidden messages that may or may not lurk. This is not to compare the films, just to note its influence. After watching Caché, C & I met up with Santiago and Flamia in the Imperial, and Flamia noted that in the first interview I gave him, a decade ago, I referenced the Austrian. I am not sure if that strand has sustained itself in my personal creative process, which seems disappointingly slight when measured against the achievements of Haneke and his ilk. How, one wonders, watching Caché for the umpteenth time, did he get to make this film? Although the answer is that once you have succeeded in convincing the right people of your genius, you can start to control your destiny, (only don’t tell Orson), and make the films you want to make. Caché is remarkable in so many ways. On the one hand, it is a taught psychological thriller. The film sets up a mystery with its opening shot, one that the viewer and the characters will seek to resolve as the film goes on. It’s reminiscent, in this sense, of Bolaño’s love of cheap detective thrillers. Secondly, it is a coruscating slap across the cheeks of the bourgeois literati. Auteuil’s character, Georges, hosts a literature program where guests slag of Rimbaud’s girlfriend. In a lovely little scene, Binoche’s Anne speaks on the phone at a literary soiree whilst a figure who never reappears just barks names in the background: “Baudrillard, Wittgenstein…” The couple’s lives collapse under the stress of an unknown truth. Thirdly, Haneke’s use of the camera is forensic. Just like the camera of whoever is making the videos which upset Auteuil and Binoche’s apple cart, it is an inert, threatening presence, allowing the viewer to analyse the image for clues. The very opening shot, for example, of their home, shows a pretty little house, screened by an unlikely hedge, set against a backdrop of highrises which rear up behind. The house wants to cut itself off from the outside world, turn its back on the poor dwellings that are a stone’s throw away, but the camera doesn’t permit the viewer to forget. Perhaps I am over-reading the image, but the director’s use of the camera invites this kind of engagement from its viewer, compels one to be active, rather than passive. You could easily write a thesis on the detail which is disclosed in each and every shot, so much so that I found myself wondering about the art direction and how much Haneke himself would have participated in this. Lastly, for now, as I could evidently spend hours writing about Caché, but have work to do, the script itself, in spite of what might otherwise have been a languid pacing, is brilliantly constructed, fuelled by the dramatic tension of the mystery. The film contains key narrative beats: the appearance of the tapes themselves, the tape in the door, the disappearance of the son, and of course, its one moment of shocking violence. (The effectiveness of this was apparent in the cinema, as one or two who had clearly never seen the film before cried out in dismay when it occurred.) In this sense, it feels as though Haneke is engaging with a classical script diagnostic, as determined by the gurus and the quacks. His mastery of the rhythm of filmmaking ensures that the viewer remains constantly hooked (to use a word), whilst never permitting him or her to become passive. 

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I note that this is the first film that has been written about twice on this blog. Normally if I see a film for a second time, a rare event, I don’t get round to writing anything, but in this instance, the urge would have appeared to have overtaken me.

in the mood for love (w&d wong kar wai)

Wong Kar Wai´s classic is another one which has been stored away in the memory box, to be revisited during this Cinemateca season. The remarkable thing about the film, often cited as one of the most romantic movies of all time, is that the couple in question never actually get it together. The ache of their reluctance to copy their respective spouses and actually commit adultery, no matter who much they want to, is an ache shared by the audience. When their surface calm finally breaks into emotion, it is devastating, for them and for us. Wai introduces the devilish conceit of the rehearsal into the film, permitting moments where the two would-be lovers role-play dramatic scenarios. The most astonishing of these is when they role-play their own final separation, the moment the dam breaks, and then the lovers and the director step away, saying with an almost sadistic nerve, don’t cry, this is only a rehearsal. Hamlet would have been proud of this self-mastery. The way the film seems to fracture towards the end, the would-be lovers’ separate lives running parallel to one another’s, never to cross again, is also astonishing, because this, surely, is how life works. The greatest love stories don’t get the Hollywood treatment, they don’t even have to be consummated, they live on forever in the what-might-have-been. 

cabra marcado para morrer (w&d eduardo coutinho)

Coutinho’s documentary is a testament to a filmmaker who refuses to give up. In 1964 he began making a film about the assassination of João Pedro Teixeira, the leader of a rural cooperative who had been protesting against working conditions. Two years after the activist’s death, Coutinho set about making his film, using local people as far as possible to recreate the events leading up to the murder, including Elizabeth, Teixeira’s wife and her eight children. However, the shoot was shut down by the authorities, accusing the filmmakers of being Cuban revolutionaries, and most of the material was confiscated. Some takes survived and in the early 80s, with the political climate having changed, Coutinho returned to Pernambuco in the North East of the country with a double mission: to rediscover the characters from his film and, in a different sense, to complete the film he started making twenty years earlier. The result is an act of political resistance per excellence. The story of Teixeira is narrated by the rediscovered characters, whilst luminous black and white images from the sixties fill the screen. Coutinho finally tracks down Elisabeth, who has been living for years under a different name. Now the director gets to tell her story as well, how she protested against her husband’s death and also how she lost touch with almost all of her children. Coutinho tracks them down, going to all corners of Brazil to find them, and in this way the film is also a tragic portrait of the effects of the dictatorship on the country, the way in which it ripped families to pieces. Coutinho’s film is at once a portrait of a society emerging into the light after years of repression, and a fierce political diatribe, which stands alongside the work of directors such as Pontecorvo, Costa Gavras and Solanas.  

ash before oak (jeremy cooper)

Is this is a novel? A roman a clef? A journal? Ash Before Oak is billed as a novel but feels like a confessional, with so much of the author’s evident lived history carved into its pages. The autobiographical element becomes all the more fundamental to the narrative when, after opening as a nature journal, it unexpectedly turns darker, about a third of the way through. The narrator’s suicidal urges take over and the journal comes to an abrupt halt for almost two months, after, we later learn, he tried to cut his wrists in the forest and was hospitalised. This event adds a chilling dramatic motor to what might otherwise have been a genial tale of an urban soul settling down in the Somerset countryside. Will the narrator relapse? And what will happen in the tempestuous relationship with Beth, the woman who would appear to have become his lover and soulmate, but also his enemy? These questions pulse through the remaining 300 pages of the book. In the end, it doesn’t matter if this is all a conceit, or not, because the novel succeeds in engaging the reader in caring about the fate of the narrator, with his transparent and privileged concerns, no matter what. Cooper, his father a depressive headmaster at Harrow; an art/ furniture dealer; an insider to the likes of Gavin Turk, Carl Freedman and Joshua Compton, denizens of what would later be known as the YBAs; a Shoreditch pioneer, would appear to encapsulate a lot of the best and the worst of a certain breed of post-Orwellian white British male. Lacking a cause to fight, saddled with the values of another era, struggling to escape from a net of psychological despair, (the black dog), he nevertheless conjures from the very land itself a kind of magic prose, which maybe, just maybe, keeps him alive. It’s an engrossing read, albeit one which feels as though it comes from another Britain, a slightly self-indulgent world of antiques and prep schools, laced with a dose of arsenic. 

e la nave va [and the ship sails on (w&d fellini, w. tonino guerra)

Fellini’s late film is reminiscent in some ways of Östlund’s recent Grand Prix winner. A privileged group aboard an ocean liner, which will then run into difficulties as the conflict between the elite and the below decks comes to the fore. However, where Triangle of Sadness seeks to wreak a Swiftian chaos, Fellini’s satire is gentler and more tender. The characters on board his vessel are figures from the opera, who have come to cast the ashes of one of their own into the sea. These are strange creatures, some of them scarcely human, but their love of song redeems them. Many of the film’s most vibrant sequences occur via music, such as when the opera characters sing for the men who work in the boiler room, or join the dance of the Serbian refugees. Fellini is after all, a humanist as well as being a satirist. Whilst there is something rather arch and contrived about the film, there are also exquisite moments of what might be called cinema magic. These include the opening sequence, where historical footage collapses into the artifice of fiction, and another moment when the artifice is stripped away and the camera pulls out of the fiction to show the remarkable set constructed for the ocean liner. Fellini has often flirted, a la Pirandello, with the film within the film, the way that the cinema director is either conman or magician, depending on your perspective. En La Nave has an elegiac feel, its narrative constructed around a funeral, set on the eve of the First World War, with the world about to be transformed. The magician’s tricks will soon be swept away. 

the man who shot liberty valance (d. john ford, w. james warner bellah, willis goldbeck, dorothy m johnson)

I follow someone on twitter who has an Anglo Saxon name and goes to Cinemateca a lot. He’s one of a few regulars who I do not know, but who, I learn from their twitter posts, live alongside me as hardcore Cinemateca aficionados. Anyway, this person tweeted in Spanish the other day about how much he loves Liberty Valance, Ford’s last great western, one which is full of nostalgia for an era that has ended, whilst also seeking to celebrate the era that replaced it. I have a feeling the writer of the tweets is North American, and clearly has a far firmer footing on the Fordian ground than I do, but watching the film you can see where he’s coming from. Even in its attitudes that today would be questionable, there is a kind of gauche charm, the charm of the frontier, of men and women co-existing with the imminence of violence, and seeking to cherish every new day as a result.

Liberty Valance is also of interest in regard to its portrayal of the Mexican community, who have their own cantina, and to one of whom the hapless sheriff, Link Appleyard, is married. These Mexicans are seen knowing how to party, how to live each day at a time, and when Valance is killed, they come running over, as though they have no real skin in this game, which is after all, a battle between gringos. They are only really humanised when Jimmy Stewart is teaching the sheriffs daughter grammatical English and North American values. Here lurks a forerunning echo of Cormac Macarthy, the sense that that other world, the one which is being displaced by Stewart’s lawyer and is his ilk, will continue to flourish across the border, where the frontier rules will still apply.

There is also, in the film’s remate, an implicit critique of the way notions of history and even civilisation are constructed on the back of myths which are in fact false. The only man who could ever have killed the malevolent Liberty Valance was Wayne, another pea out of the same pod. But Wayne will be buried in a pauper’s grave, only retaining the dignity of his boots because the rival he sent on his way to Washington, and who has stolen the credit for Valance’s death, has come back to Shinbone to honour him.