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.