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.)