the napoleon of notting hill (g k chesterton)

The Edwardian decade is a ghost decade. That lost era between Victorianism and modernism. Between a kind of European peace and the wars that were latent. It’s also a curiously empty decade, from a literary perspective. The modernists had yet to get properly going, and the great Victorians were gone or going.

Chesterton’s comic novel might warrant a proper Barthesian exegesis. Here is a novel which doesn’t seem to want to make much of an effort to be a novel. There’s not a single female character in the book, so far as I could glean. There’s a refusal to take anything seriously. It’s a jaundiced critique of empire and nationalism, but one that sees it all as an absurd game, whilst the ramifications were soon to lead to global conflict and the rapacious aspects of Empire were just beginning to be confronted. Set in 1984, supposedly, a mad king awards London boroughs the status of medieval cantons, complete with heraldry and uniforms. When three of them gang up to attack Notting Hill, its leader, Adam Wayne, fights back. The war happens after decades of peace, and is almost viewed as an aesthetic gesture, in keeping with the heraldry and colours. The fact that a decade later, the citizens of Notting Hill, Hammersmith, etc, would find themselves caught up in a war that was, perhaps, equally senseless, is one of the disturbing aspects of Chesterton’s satire. The aestheticisation of war, the insistent irreverence and the name Adam Wayne feel like they could be something out of the Marvel universe. Both representative, perhaps, of societies unprepared for the shit that will soon be hitting the fan.  

the last englishmen: love, war, and the end of empire (deborah baker)

Baker’s tome seeks to encompass a multitude of historical nodal points, which over and underlap. The fall of the Raj, Gandhi and Nehru, the poets Spender and Auden, their brothers, their brothers’ lovers, the conquest of Everest, the impact of the second world war on geo-political history. Perhaps inevitably there are moments when it feels as though a certain shorthand is being employed by the writer. The book is lengthy, but could easily have been ten times as long if it were to fully investigate every strand it takes on. Nevertheless, there is much to be gleaned here. The way in which Auden and Spender’s brothers were part of teams that set out, unsuccessfully to conquer Everest as part of a colonial project, and how both came to realise the vanity, even stupidity of this, in spite of their personal ambitions. Also the way that the scientific work they did in the Himalayas and Karakorams would contribute indirectly to the war effort. In the process, Baker analyses the turbulent decline of the British empire in India, held together by an outdated ideology of British exceptionalism. As such, the book dovetails neatly with Baker’s husband, Amitav Ghosh’s account of the origins of the British empire in India, Smoke and Ashes. 

kobieta z… (woman of…) (w&d małgorzata szumowska, michał englert)

Kobieta Z taps into the wave of trans films that reflect the post-Foucaultian changes in global society, or at least western global society. Aniela Wesoly starts the film as Andrzej and the film follows the journey of their transformation over the course of forty years. Boldly, the film resists making Aniela an attractive woman, pushing the journey of transformation into middle age. Andrzej is a dreamy young man, confident in his sexuality, making the conversion all the more impactful. Deep down they feel themselves to be a woman in a man’s body and they remain true to this belief, no matter what it costs them. Which is almost everything: their social status, their livelihood, their loving marriage, their looks. There is an upside to all this at the end, when their sacrifices appear to be rewarded with another kind of happiness. But the journey is long and bleak and follows the journey of their country from tightly buttoned communism to something far more liberal. The edit style is pacy and sinuous. Scenes are rarely given time to settle, and when they do, the film pulls out of them as soon as possible. This curtails the possible melodrama which Aniela’s story is liable to, as family and friends react to their transformation. What the filmmakers seem to aim for is an epic vision of Aniela’s struggle, one where we too will come up against the relentless antagonism of the forces ranged against them. 

white noise (don delillo)

Once upon a time I used to read DeLillo. And then the reading stopped. Returning to the writer, twenty years later, is a curious experience. White Noise feels by parts frustrating, by parts brilliant. It has the feel of a sophomore work, full of tricks and conceits and authorial presence. Then I learn it was his eighth novel. The conceit of the narrator being a professor of Hitler studies at a remote US university, one who doesn’t speak German, feels like a brilliant idea, but doesn’t really go anywhere. The conceit of the narrator’s world being threatened by a toxic cloud, which takes up the central portion of the book, likewise seems a brilliant, Camusian idea, but again, it doesn’t really go anywhere. This is a novel bubbling with tricks and ideas, but one which delivers no coups de grace. Perhaps it’s in the vein of the nouveau roman, almost Barthesian, but there’s something showy about the whole contraption, made of bells and whistles that articulate the author’s intellectual chutzpah but fall short of ever really saying anything. 

la bella estate (w&d laura luchetti)

The Pretty Summer might be an English variant on this title, which would seem appropriate, as this is a pretty film with pretty people enjoying summer. And some winter. A slightly episodic drama which takes place from the summer of 1938 to 1939, it follows the coming of age of Gianna, a pretty young woman who has recently come with her brother to Turin from the countryside. She falls under the sway of artist’s pretty muse, Amelia, who leads her towards a life of moderate decadence. The shadow of what is to come hovers at the back of the film - there can be few better years in which to set a period film, with the sense of doomed youth that it portends. No matter how pretty you are, if it’s Italy 1938, the writing is on the wall. 

fuenteovejuna (lope de vega)

Fuenteovejuna is a story about citizens who take a terrible, courageous risk. In the face of oppression, they chose to unite and fight back, killing the oppressor. In the seventeenth century, this kind of action rarely ended well. I don’t know enough about Spanish history but Shakespeare’s take on the Peasant’s Revolt in Henry VI, and rebellion in general, makes clear the price that anyone who went against the established rule had to be prepared to pay. (Of course it is not so very different today.) So, how should this affect the staging of the play? Clearly the element of risk is fundamental. Lope’s play incorporates what they call in modern screenwriting terms, ‘jeopardy’. How should jeopardy be introduced into the staging? There must be a million ways, this is the beauty of staging a classic text, but one thing that has to happen is that the contract of the play, which is between those staging it and those watching it, should not be too cosy. To get to the heart of the play’s intentions and communicate this with the public, in other words to honour the writer, involves being prepared to incomodar the audience - to make them uncomfortable. This isn’t a cute classic comedy, it’s a cry of defiance and courage.

Watching a recent staging made me think about what radical risk takers the Golden Age theatre practitioners were, in both Spain and Britain. The plays repeatedly engage with stories, characters and perspectives which questioned the established social and political order at a time when theatres could be arbitrarily shut, when playwrights died in duels, when the very action of participating in theatre implied positioning oneself on a crepuscular margin of society. With luck, you made money and retired to Warwickshire. Without luck, you died in a ditch.

The trouble with the staging of classics, something the RSC also struggles with in my experience, is that there is a desire to tell the audience: don’t worry, we know this is a challenging watch, but we’re going to hold your hand and make sure you don’t suffer too much. When what is essential to the process of the play is a sense of danger, or unease, of uncertainty. Will the villagers be hanged for their valour? Will the forces of law and order bulldoze them in a pit? How scared are they? How scared are we for them? Without this tension, the play becomes an exercise in speaking verse, no more than an archeological process. How to achieve these ends is the great challenge the director faces. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb: better to fail valiantly than to anaesthetise the play’s radical premise.

Juan Rojo: So what do you think the town should do?

Alderman: The town should die, or kill these tyrants. We are many, they are few. 

pat garrett and billy the kid. (d. peckinpah, w. rudy wurlitzer)

A strange, episodic masterpiece from Peckinpah. Two hours that rumble along towards a long-awaited climax, which is inevitably anti-climactic, and deliberately staged as such. One of the two protagonists has to die, this much is known, only the manner of their death will be revelatory. That Kristofferson’s Billy is killed in such an unheroic fashion speaks to the filmmaker’s sympathies. There is no glory in Pat Garrett’s victory. As in the case of The Getaway, Peckinpah is rooting for the outsider; the villains are the cattle barons who have seized the land and with whom Garrett has made an uneasy alliance. He has sold his soul, his wife tells him, and no matter how much James Coburn’s implacable countenance might try to hide this truth, he knows and we know that she’s right. The existential struggle that underpins their conflict is artfully related by a director whose subtlety is masked by the vigorous masculinity of his films. This is as insightful a deconstruction of the western myth as you could hope for, and its relevance  in an era of snake charming capitalists is as valid as ever.

A note on Dylan. His puckish performance counterpoints the machismo of the other characters. He isn’t just acting: he’s infiltrating his whole cryptic take on art into the performance. A character that goes by the name of Alias, who doesn’t use a gun, who instinctively sides with the outlaw. 

pacification (w&d albert serra, w. baptiste pinteaux)

Colonialism. The Honorary Consul. Graham Greene territory, Malcolm Lowry territory. Shady dealings in the tropics. Opaque conversations which hint at the greater existential battles being waged on the planet, the unnamed battles, the undisclosed wars. It’s exciting material which Albert Serra seeks to constantly mystify and de-excite. Takes are long, conversations are cryptic, the stakes are never clear. The end result is a woozy, vaguely hypnotic movie which feels as though it’s struggling to resist the weight of its own pretension, which in turn is not such a bad trope in a film, albeit one which is always likely to register higher with the arthouse crowd than the general public, whatever that amorphous body might be. I might have missed things, but I was never quite clear what the post-colonial message was saying, beyond beware men in white suits. As a spectator I felt awash in this lush world, drifting through a booze-sodden lost weekend, absolutely certain that the events unfolding before my eyes held more meaning, more complexity, more gravity, than anything I could ever hope to understand in my inebriated state of mind.  

a day in the life of abed salama: a palestine story (nathan thrall)

Nathan Thrall’s book, published in 2023, is centred around a bus accident in the West Bank where several Palestinian schoolchildren were killed. The bus collided with a truck on a day of heavy rain and caught fire. The response from the Israeli rescue services took far too long. As noted, if kids were seen throwing stones at an Israeli truck, there would be a reaction in minutes. The response from the Palestinian rescue services was hamstrung by the tortuous procedural and geographical obstacles which the occupation of the West Bank has put in place. Thrall’s book perfectly captures the way in which Israel is an apartheid state, discriminating mercilessly against the Palestinians, both those who live within the official boundaries of Israel and those who live on the side which is in theory governed by the PA (or in Gaza, Hamas). Events of the past year have made this beyond obvious. What Thrall’s book shows, beyond the tragedy of the event it relates, is how the groundwork for the racist actions of the Israeli state in both Gaza and the West Bank had been constantly put in place ever since the Nakba. The tragedy Thrall’s book describes, of young kids needlessly dying a horrible violent death, now seems like a prelude to that which has come to pass. We inhabit an obscene era. Every day there are images of children, mutilated, killed in the most disgusting, cowardly manner. And it is excused by global politicians, or even celebrated by Israelis and other elements of a neo-fascist class which seeks to destroy the very notion of a shared humanity. Thrall was the Cassandra to all this, and the warnings contained within his devastating book are coming true every day in front of our desensitised eyes.

la habitación de al lado (w&d almodóvar, w. sigrid nunez)

Will Almodovar’s latest break the tradition of late twentieth century auteur cineastes going to the US and making a horlicks of it? Thinking Wong Kar Wai, Haneke, even Herzog. Well, not really. The Room Next Door, to give it its English title, is a curious construction. It sets out its stall early on that it’s about death, with some heavy handed dialogue (lost in translation?) as Tilda Swinton’s sepulchral Martha, clearly named for Martha Gellhorn, tells her long lost friend Ingrid that she has terminal cancer. Thereafter the film becomes a meditation of sorts on what makes for a good death. Martha coerces Ingrid into helping her go through this process, which is curiously bloodless. The most passion in the film comes from their shared ex-lover, played by John Turturro with a bullish charm, as he goes off on one about climate change and neo-liberalism. Worthy enough subjects, to be sure, but they feel shoe-horned into the film. And it’s a film of shoe-horns. There’s a gratuitous burning house scene, there’s a trademark flashback scene, which in another Almodóvar film might have been revelatory, but in this one just feels tacked on, because there was some spare budget?, there’s even a fleeting scene set in Iraq, where Martha the war photographer appears, learns that people like to fuck in wartime, then is banished to become sepulchral Martha once again. (The second film this year about a war photographer named after another famous war photographer.) There’s even a quickfire bowling scene, which might be another homage to Turturro’s role in Liebowski.

There’s the kernel of something intriguing about a late stage director musing on what will come his way shortly, and the homage to Joyce and Houston feels poetically on point, but at the same time the film feels uneven, unsure of itself. New York looks pretty, but the line: ‘Pink snow, at least something good has come out of climate change’, which Martha offers early on feels indicative of a film which isn’t entirely sure of its footing. Fortunately Turturro’s later monologue puts us straight, as he makes it clear that climate change is definitely not a good thing.

the war game (w&d peter watkins)

Playing as part of a radical season in Cinemateca, The War Game is a curious blend of horror and lost Englishness. A mock documentary set in Kent, describing the impact of a nuclear strike on Britain, the film is famous for having been banned by the BBC after being initially commissioned by them. Watkins manages the horror superbly. The film escalates in its brutality, starting with a kind of normality and then moving on to full blown nuclear firestorm, inspired, as made clear by the commentary, by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, but also Dresden and Hamburg. You can readily understand why the BBC got cold feet about screening it, as the images of a devastated Kent and its citizens are genuinely shocking. The horrors of war had rarely been so surgically captured.

At the same time, as an Englishman, there is something nostalgic about viewing a lost Britain, with its clipped accents and eccentric dress sense, and a certain reticence which seems to have been foregone with the coming of Britpop, Brexit and post war prosperity. At one point the documentary mentions ration cards, reminding us that the film was made at a time when every adult would remember what a ration card implied, something subsequent generations would never have to contemplate, or even understand. There is also something in the tone of Watkins’ film, a blend of the extreme with a tight-lipped understatement, which speaks to the qualities which might once have been perceived to represent Britishness, or at least a version of Britishness which this writer might identify with. 

orbital (samantha harvey)

Orbital is a short, Calvino-esque novel set in space. Six astronauts on a space station pass their day passing days, spinning around and around the globe, zooming through timelines and over continents. The novel is more of a meditation than a story. A meditation on what it must be like to possess this perspective, to live weightless, to be pioneers for a new version of humanity. There are several bravura passages, including one which shows humanity’s seconds within the twenty four hour clock of the universe’s existence. The six characters are all given their due, with memories and dreams folded into the view they share of the planet earth. The vast immensity of space, with its strange silences, is a suitable backdrop for a book which navigates a path between sly tedium and great beauty. 

the man with the golden arm (d. otto preminger, w. walter newman, lewis meltzer, nelson algren)

In the olden days you went to Cinemateca half expecting that the projector might break down and the film would struggle to get to the end. Those days have gone, just like the old salas have gone, but this screening was a throwback. Half way through, the film gave up the ghost, and even though valiant efforts were made to resuscitate it, I ended up watching the final hour in a much better print on YouTube.

Given all this, it’s worth noting that the screening was part of a season of alternative films that managed to sneak under the radar. Preminger’s Chicago, full of sleaze balls, femmes fatales, and flop houses, not to mention the junk, is beautifully realised. It feels like something out of Gorky, the lower depths, a place where the crushing  inevitability of poverty is bound to get you in the end. In the midst of this, Sinatra gives a bravura performance, part junkie, part matinee idol. The operatic notes of the direction clearly play to his hand, but we perceive another man in his performance to the smooth entertainer he became. The desperation of his character, Frankie Machine, is completely credible, which perhaps hints at another life Sinatra might have lived had the gods not smiled on him. 

cerrar los ojos (w&d víctor erice; w. michel gaztambide)

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, watched Erice’s classic film, The Spirt of the Beehive. Or at least, I don’t think I have. Perhaps one day I will watch it and go - oh yes, I remember seeing this in Winchester or York or London or Adelaide. And that would be an entirely appropriate method of remembering, according to this, Erice’s third film. Close your Eyes deals with the issues of memory and ageing, in a luminous, humane fashion. As the third near three hour film I have seen in a row at Cinemateca, it is a wonderful correlative to the supposed need to cram a film with beats and desperate rhythms. Film is storytelling as much as it is percussive, and Erice’s meditative mystery tale is an exemplar of this.

Its simplicity is a large part of its effectiveness. A TV program about strange disappearances contacts Miguel, a director who has long since quit the business. The TV show is making an episode about Julio, the protagonist of the director’s last, abortive movie, who went missing overnight. Due to the actor’s disappearance, the film was never finished, and Miguel’s career fizzled out. Not that he is bitter: he has found a kind of peace living in a small coastal community, with his dog and his translations and spells as a fisherman. But the call to participate in the program will lead to a rupture in this quiet reclusive life, as he goes in search of not so much a meaning for his lost art, as a function. At the heart of the film, perhaps, is the idea that film is both eternal and functional, on a very straightforward basis. Looking at a screen is more than just a way of passing time: it can also change the way your mind works, the way you think, the way you see the world and what is in front of your eyes.

There is something of Prospero about Miguel, albeit a calm Prospero, reconciled to his fate. HIs art will reconfigure those things which have gone awry in the past. Cerrar los Ojos is a valedictory work of art, reminding this viewer of the way in which film is capable of unfolding layers of story and meaning without resorting to histrionics. 

white sands (geoff dyer)

Dyer is a curious writer, whose texts incorporate some of the finer British qualities, as well as smelling of some of the less desirable elements of late colonial Britain. A conspicuous and unashamed intellectual, he is happy not just to write about visiting Adorno’s LA house, but also to quote the philosopher, even interrogate the meaning of what Adorno wrote. When Dyer gets passionate, as when he writes about jazz, or land art, his embrace of the possibilities of these worlds offer a refreshing deviation from so much Anglo-Saxon thinking and writing. On the other hand, that slightly nauseating arrogance that permeated late twentieth century British thought sometimes rears its ugly head. Again, Dyer indulges this in an unashamed fashion, wearing it on his sleeve, as in the tale where he and his wife manage to rid themselves of a potentially dangerous black ex-con on a Nevada highway. There is a sense of self-mockery at work, but it is always clothed in a blanket of privilege.

White Sands is ostensibly a travel book taking in visits to Tahiti, China and the USA. (The majority of the essays occur in the US). Presumably derived in the main from commissioned pieces, Dyer is unafraid to be contrary, dedicating an entire article about visiting The Forbidden City in Beijing to his fantasies of bedding a woman he is smitten by. This sideways take on the travelogue starts to feel laboured after a while. When he takes his mission seriously, as when he writes about three pieces of site-specific art, it as though his brain suddenly flips into fifth gear, and the finely chiseled intellect of his prose consistently comes up with intriguing and unexpected observations - about the way the artists are using space, or even the way that space uses art. Or vice versa.

Perhaps Dyer just needs to feel like he’s doing more than a hack job for money to get really excited. This book would make a great companion piece to Baudrillard’s America. 

the substance (w&d coralie fargeat)

It seemed strangely appropriate that we watched Fargeat’s Grand Guignol film on the same day I saw that Dennis Quaid, the film’s evil driving force representing the male gaze at its most lascivious and destructive, had come out in support of Trump, one of the very few Hollywood stars to do so. One suspects that Fargeat would be secretly pleased with this news, she might even have engineered it. The battle lines even more clearly drawn within the great metaphysical struggle over the beauty myth.

At the same time, it feels as though there’s something dangerously Trumpian in the film’s excesses. Trumpian in so far as the gesture and the controversy become more relevant than anything that is actually being said. Fargeat pushes the visual excesses of the story as far as she can go. This is set up from the start, with an edit style that seems derived from advertising, all fast cuts and pumped up musical beats. The characters are deliberately two dimensional. Subtlety is not going to be part of this discourse. It’s in-your-face, a punk assault on the senses. The object is firstly to titilate and then to revolt, two sides of the sensory coin.

The result is somewhere between shock and awe and tedium, two sides of the war coin, perhaps. The issue one might have with the film is that the war is woman versus woman, with woman losing twice over. It might be that everyone else also loses, in the end, but Demi Moore’s Elizabeth and Margaret Qualley’s Sue seem to get the rough end of the stick. Which again, might be the point: that no matter what, the fetishisation of women’s bodies by this society always means that women get the rough end of the stick.

I spent much of the film wondering what Mariana Enriquez would make of it. One suspects she would delight in its transgressive intentions, whilst perhaps hoping for something else to emerge from the melange. There’s no shortage of wearing of influences on sleeves. From Picture of Dorian Grey, (inverted), to Jekyll and Hyde, to Frankenstein. With direct references to The Fly and The Elephant Man. The combination of all these elements perhaps contributes to a sense that for all its outrageousness, this feels like a conservative piece of filmmaking, with few narrative surprises.

I also then found myself wondering what Trump would make of it. Suspecting he would publicly denounce it, whilst privately loving it, for all the wrong reasons. 

la bête (w&d bertrand bonello, w.guillaume bréaud, benjamin charbit)

La Bête has a Cocteau-esque title and is almost as bewildering a film as Le Sang d’un Poète. Set across three timelines, it features a death-trap doll factory, a psychotic incel, Schoenberg, and AI. The movie occurs in the 2014, 2044 and 1904-ish. The fundamental axis of the story is simple: Gabrielle seeks out Louis, her true amour, across time and beyond death. He is a weirdo three times over. Firstly as her would-be lover who pursues her as a married woman in the nineteen hundreds, secondly as the LA incel and lastly as an elusive would-be companion in the near future. Léa Seydoux and George MacKay wrestle with the contrivances of the plot across two and a half hours. The tonal filmmaking feels erratic, at times throbbing with suspense, at others bogged down in cryptic metaphysical dialogue. Gabrielle feels threatened by an opaque disaster, or beast, which might be her lover or might be climate change. There are earthquakes and floods and vague talk of an unspecified disaster which lead to a world where emotions need to be cauterised. The nods to Lynch are overt. Does it measure up? Perhaps, perhaps not. It’s one of those films that take you on a perplexing ride from tedium to hyper-alertness. The dénouement sequence in LA towards the end of the film is brilliantly constructed and edited. But then this proves not to be the dénouement of the film, and the viewer has to come back down to earth, or rather the future, with Gabrielle having still more hoops to go through. It has the makings of a cult film, the kind of experience that some will revisit time after time, and wait for midnight screenings to accompany them through the long night, parroting some of the more risible dialogue, sitting on the edge of the seats for the moments of tension and screaming along with Seydoux at the anti-climactic finale. 

le sang d’un poète (w&d jean cocteau)

Cocteau’s celebrated film, scored on this occasion by Federico Deutsch y Verónica Ramos, is composed of four sequences. A poet in his garret, with hints of revolutionary France. The same poet passing through a void into a gravity free corridor, where he spies on different events occurring in a series of rooms. The third sequence features a group of schoolboys, and then finally the set where the schoolboys’ playing area is transformed into a theatre where aristocrats gaze down from the balcony on the poet and Lee Miller as they pose. The film is elliptical, cryptic, potentially occult. It’s also full of moments which other films have stolen, knowingly or unconsciously. There were prefigurations of Nolan, in the gravity free corridor and Glazer as the poet sank into the void. Cocteau, however, goes beyond any kind of coherent storytelling, as he pushes his imagination to its limits. Rather than a story, the film feels like a collection of stories, or strands featuring blood, revolution, homoeroticism, cruelty, and destiny. Among other elements which I am sure I missed. 

clandestina (w&d maria mire)

Mire’s experimental film juxtaposes the words of Margarida Tengarrinha, an artist who participated for decades in Portugal’s anti-fascist movement, with contemporary images which riff off those words. Tengarrinha used her talents to help forge documents for fleeing revolutionaries to cross the border into Spain during the fifties and sixties, eventually moving to Russia. (An interesting parallel with another Portuguese film seen this year, Astrakan 79.) Mire constructs vivid contemporary images to accompany the words, as a young woman silently goes through the same processes as Tengarrinha, working with her partner at a computer, tending to their child, setting up a false office full of pot plants. The modernity is designed, one suspects, to give a fresh perspective on the radical activities and dangers of the anti-fascist movement of another generation. However, there’s something a little winsome about all this, and the element of danger never feels overly present. The fact that the characters frequently use carnival type masks is engaging, but doesn’t help to take us deeper into the perilous, nightmarish world that Tengarrinha inhabited. It’s notable that the director is also listed as Art Director in the credits, and there’s a sense of playfulness at work in the project which isn’t entirely in keeping with the intensity of the source material. 

the colour of pomegranates (w&d parajanov)

How to write about a film which refutes every conventional notion of what a narrative film should be and at the same time reinvents the possibilities of what a narrative film might be. Storytelling through the amalgamation of images. Post-post-modernism, a generation or two before digital. You can discern an axis in Parajanov’s masterpiece. A moment where the word would be supplanted by the image, setting fire to 500 years of conventional thinking, after Gutenberg, that the word should hold priority. Parajanov destroys that theory. Every image contains the semiotic power of a word, with a seductive power the humble word and its cousin alphabet could never aspire to. The pictures ravish, charm, provoke. The camera lingers on them just long enough for the questions to arise. Who is the boy? The woman? The man? Why is he holding a peacock feather? What is the silver ball? And so on, an endless parade of information bathed in all the colours of the rainbow. Yet, at the heart of the film, a story is still being narrated. The story of a poet, but also the story of a culture, a culture that feels at once eternal and transient. Armenia, a land that time forgot. 

Nb I note I saw the film previously in 2008. The print of this version was far superior to the one I saw back in the Cine Lumiere, a cinema in South Kensington I can scarcely recall. 

paris qui dort (d. rené clair)

Clair’s astonishing silent film was accompanied in Cinemateca by three musicians, Juan Chao, Ignacio Echeverría y Luna Roura. Their pulsating score contributed to the delirious spectacle of a film which feels like a precursor of the zombie movie. Seeing Clair’s deserted 1925 Paris triggered thoughts of Boyle’s 28 Days Later. The flip-side of urban modernity, all that teeming life, is the living dead, which is what happens to the city’s citizens when Clair’s mad professor flips the switch, meaning the whole city is frozen. Only those who exist in the skies retain consciousness. At first it seems the only person to escape the spell is the warden of the Eiffel Tower, who lives on its third floor, just before the tower tapers, high enough to escape the impact of the professor’s forcefield. Later that same morning, the warden comes across a group whose plane had been above the city, coming in to land just before the professor struck. The Eiffel Tower becomes a place of retreat for the warden and the collection of odd souls who landed at Paris airport. It is the other star of the show, a place from which the beauty of the city can be mapped, but also one of peril, as the survivors go slowly mad and fight one another. The tower is a symbol of modernity which contains within it the seeds of its own emptiness. For all the lightheartedness of Clair’s vision, and there are plenty of laughs, there is also something disconcertingly haunting about this vision from a century ago of the materialist and technological instincts which fuel the city’s constant, restless movement and expansion. 

andriesh (d.sergei parajanov, yakov bazelyan, w. yemelian bukov, grigoriy koltunov, sergey shvartszoyd)

Parajanov’s first film is a Chagallian eco-fable. A boy loses his flock after the intervention of a malevolent storm god. The film occupies a space between nature and art, between naturalism and the oneiric. As the boy walks out of his village in the Caucasus, it feels as though we are witnessing images from a lovingly filmed documentary. Then, the film switches register. Nature speaks. The boy talks, memorably, to a weeping willow. He helps out a giant, who reciprocates. Myth and fable weave their way into the story. Andriesh is epic poetry reincarnated as cinema. 

advertising shits in your head, strategies for resistance (vyvian raoul & matt bonner)

This is a short sharp analysis and guide to subvertising, the art of both questioning and subverting advertising. Whilst the author could clearly have gone into more detail as to the science and strategic uses of advertising by the capitalist machine, this is not his pimrary mission. The first half of the book quotes Bernays and Sut Jhally as it briefly interrogates the way advertising has become an all-pervasive form of brain-washing. The second goes on to both demonstrate the work that has been done by subvertisers and their methodology. For all its brevity its a great book, both in terms of reminding ourselves quite how hostage we are in our daily lives to forces we are barely aware of annexing entire quarters of our brains, and  secondly that resistance is possible.  Raoul & Bonner’s book takes us to the levellers of our day, those brave, unheralded souls who strike back against the empire. 

astrakan 79 (w&d catarina mourão)

Astrakan 79 is a documentary of two parts. The first two thirds are taken up with a recreation of the journey of a Portuguese fifteen year old, Martim, to Askatran in what was then the Soviet Union. The child of left wing activists, Martim left Lisbon on his year long adventure, sent by his parents to study modern practices in agriculture . When he arrived, it wasn’t what he expected. He had two passionate love affairs, made friends with South Americans, rather than the Russians, and eventually dropped out of the course, sleeping rough and getting picked up by the police. The story is told using photos Martim took, which have a beautiful, nostalgic grainy quality. The account is hypnotic, fascinating, the story of an adolescent caught up in the geopolitical matrix, like a lost chapter from The Savage Detectives. The film is rounded out with a lengthy interview between Martim, revealed to have become a potter on his return to Portugal, and his grown-up son. The interview is somewhat anti-climactic. 

the piano teacher (w&d haneke, w. elfriede jelinek)

The Piano Teacher was scheduled by Mariana Enriquez as a part of a ciclo she curated, very little of which I am able to watch, due to rehearsals for Birdland. Nevertheless, I caught Huppert and her funny games. The film was more savage than I remembered. It might be one of the most extreme films ever made. Sexual violence, self-mutilation, and the closest Haneke perhaps gets to really letting the handbrake off. For all his cold art, The Piano Teacher feels furiously visceral. In all the wrong ways. By which one means - in all the ways that truly disturb. Unlike, say, Titane, which for all its extremism is nevertheless kind of alluring. Haneke is the high priest of deconstructing western materialism. His uncompromising vision, allied with where Huppert is willing to go as an actress, backed up by Jelinek’s source text, makes for something that seems designed to get its audience to walk out. Or stagger out, bloodied and beaten like the film’s titular protagonist. 

no country for old men (cormac mccarthy)

This is an almost Manichean novel. The author includes an ersatz narrator, Sheriff Bell, whose thoughts are presented in italics. Sheriff Bell is an old-school boy, with old-school values. He doesn’t like hippies, probably dislikes Nietzsche, is wary of people with their hair died green. He’s also sheriff in a Texas border region which is suffering an epidemic of drug-related violence. Sheriff Bell is conservative, presumably Republican. He harks back to a world he and his parents grew up in, where common values of decency were instilled in society. As soon as those values, (which presumably include not dying your hair), were lost, things started to go to hell in a handcart. Sheriff Bell is set up as a sympathetic character in a world of mindless sociopaths. He loves his wife and serves his community. His values go beyond the performative - he knows that a medal is just a piece of metal, and that wealth and consumption are part of the problem.

On the other hand there is the mercurial, charismatic, and sociopathic villain, Chigurh, so brilliantly played in the film by Javier Badem. (So brilliantly that it’s hard to read the novel without thinking of Bardem’s lanky hair and awkward physique.) Chigurh is a  monster who kills without mercy or regret, and believes himself to exist on another moral plain altogether.

The complexity of the novel, and McCarthy’s approach, comes from the fact that the dramatic epicentre of the novel, that which propels the action and ensures the reader’s undivided attention, is not the worthy Sheriff Bell, but the unworthy Chigurh. His actions and cod-philosophy drive the narrative and lend the novel its gothic splendour. When he dies, the bottom drops out of the book. It’s a paradox which, for all of McCarthy’s benediction of Bell, feels unresolved. Bell’s goodness functions in response to Chigurh’s evil. They might be two sides of the same coin that the killer spins to decide people’s fates.

Perhaps there’s something about the way in which the USA functions at work here. Just as the myth of the west required the myth of the savage (touched upon in the novel and much of McCarthy’s writing), a myth that was still hyperactive in my youth, contemporary USA needs to construct it’s antithesis courtesy of a ‘savage’ enemy. Be that communism or islam or even, as is the case of Trump and co now, the immigrants, supposedly illegal, who infiltrate the purity of the nation through a porous border. Which brings us back round to Cormac McCarthy. The strength of his writing is contingent on the idea of the other, which lurks across the border, waiting to poison the homespun decency of small-town America. 

the maniac (benjamin labatut)

Labatut’s novels read like documentaries. The Maniac is split into two parts. The first is a fictionalised biography of John von Neumann, the Hungarian genius who participated in the greatest advances in mathematics and physics in the twentieth century. Von Neumann was present at the birth of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the modern day computer and, as the novel goes on to explore in greater depth, the birth pangs of what is now known as artificial intelligence. Labatut goes under the hood of von Neumann’s curious mind, constructing a portrait of him from fictionalised accounts of those who worked with him and loved him. In so doing, the author presents both the man, his ideas and his flirtation with madness. One of the key takeaways of Labatut’s novels is the way in which genius, which shapes the world, is almost always a hair’s breadth away from what we might call madness. Both despair and exhilaration go hand in hand with the imaginative vision required to stretch humanity’s boundaries. The Maniac is in many ways a treatise on technology and the pernicious effect it can have. Where we tend to view technology as an unbridled good, Labatut, like von Neumann and many of the scientists who feature in the book, end up exercising extreme doubts about where the quest for technological advancement is taking humanity.

The second half of the book deals with the advancement of AI, framed around the success of a computer in defeating the world’s greatest go player. Much of von Neumann’s later life was taken up with the quest for self-replicating forms that might be used in some form by humanity to ensure its survival and the eventual conquest of the universe itself. The Maniac explores the perils inherent in creating machines which can outthink humans, a subject which has become increasingly topical, in its account of the computer’s victory. The beauty of Labatut’s work is that he leads the reader into this rarefied world, seemingly the arcane province of scientists and experts, and, holding our hand, encourages to jump into an inscrutable future. 

la práctica (w&d martín rejtman)

Rejtman is a whimsical auteur, and La Practica is no exception to this. His flawed characters negotiate the pitfalls of modern urban living. Things that can go wrong probably will. Connections will be missed and relationships are likely to be dysfunctional. There’s a dry acerbic humour hovering at the edge of the screen, even where there’s no apparent joke to laugh at. Gustavo is a porteño yoga teacher living in Santiago. He’s getting divorced from his Chilean wife, another yoga teacher, but determined to stick it out in the city rather than return home. His job gets harder when he does his knee in and becomes an inflexible yoga teacher. The film drifts through his life with him, as he deals with divorce, meets ex-students, tries to recover. The action is minor scale and affectionately comic. Gustavo is played by Esteban Bigliardi, who played a similar character in Rodrigo Moreno’s Los Delinquentes. There are other echoes to Moreno’s film, with Gustavo experiencing some kind of epiphany when he spends an earthquake night outside in an Andes forest. The juxtaposition between ‘the natural world’ and the urban world perhaps opening a space of personal reconciliation for the protagonist. This feels like an axiomatic southern cone tension: what does the wilderness have to teach us in a world where the city delivers a tenuous and unsatisfactory security?

smoke and ashes: a writer's journey through opium's hidden histories (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh’s non-fiction book is a rendition of much of the research he has done for the construction of his sequence of novels on the opium trade and wars of the nineteenth century. He looks at how the East India Company, later absorbed into the British Empire, set about trading with China by creating a market for opium which they fed by growing opium in India, and exporting it. In India, Ghosh argues, there were two distinct poles of trade: Calcutta in the east,, which was rigidly controlled by the British, and Bombay in the west, which functioned as a more liberal market, thereby setting up the basis for Mumbai’s future commercial acumen. Ghosh also looks closely at how Guangzhou became the nodal point for the entrance of opium into China, a place where foreign interests held sway, rather than the Chinese emperors, a kind of proto Hong Kong/ Singapore.

Whilst there are times in the book when it becomes immersed in detail, cataloguing, for example, the various east coast North American families whose fortunes were founded on the opium trade, Smoke and Ashes might nevertheless be classed as one of the most important books on modern history you could possibly read. Because, using a novelist’s sensibility, Ghosh reveals the way in which opium trading, the equivalent of the narco-industry that the western world’s ‘war on drugs’ is so keen to demonise, was one of the cornerstones of the great capitalist advancements of the European colonial era, if not, he might argue, the key pediment which held up the roof over the whole process. Ghosh identifies how the pursuit of profit lead to an abandonment of any kind of moral criteria in business dealings, as though this might be considered a luxury which wealth could not afford. He follows this line of thinking through to the opioid epidemic which is still gripping large swathes of North America. As a novelist, more than a historian, Ghosh has no qualms in making these judgement calls. His takedown of the British empire, with its opium factories and tenured ‘opium agents’ is devastating, and all the more powerful for being written by someone who was born as a child of empire, on the other side of the historical power divide.

We are still living in the wake of the world Ghosh reveals in the book and the moral complexity of our position (written as an Englishman) is something we are far from recognising, let alone understanding. 

"Or, as an article in a journal published by the US National Defense University notes: ‘English merchants, led by the British East India Company, from 1772 to 1850, established extensive opium supply chains … creating the world’s first drug cartel.’"

"There could be no clearer summation of the most important accomplishment of the doctrine of Free Trade—the erasure of all ethical constraints in regard to profit-making."

copacabana (d. martin rejtman)

Rejtman’s documentary addresses the wave of Bolivian immigration to Buenos Aires. This relationship between Bolivia and Argentina is at once close and distant. Spanish is the lingua franca between the two countries and the north of Argentina which borders Bolivia is, culturally, similar. But Bolivians retain a fierce identity in their music, dress and traditions which marks them apart. There has been a steady stream of immigration from the Andean country to Buenos Aires. A Bolivian man shows his almanac with photos of an early Bolivian community established there in the sixties. Rejtman films in Bolivia, Buenos Aires and, in the closing sequence, on the border. It’s an observational doc, made of long sequences which show Bolivians dancing or processing. The complexities of immigration aren’t addressed: this feels like a Porteño spying on a secret world that exists within his city. There could be said to be a cross-reference here to the Bolivian labourers in César Aira’s novel, Ghosts. The distance which the camera imposes means that its subjects remain mysterious, semi-alien beings, walking the streets but carrying a different flame in their chests.

the old oak (d. ken loach, w. paul laverty)

My friend Flamia asked me in Bar Hispano what I thought of Loach’s latest. I tried to make the argument that the Loach aesthetics are predicated on a social realist furrow he has been ploughing for decades and that his narratives have a predictability to them that neuters any real engagement. Whilst maintaining that this is still valid, there is a dextrous tugging at the heart strings employed in this by-numbers tale of an oddball friendship between a fetching Syrian refugee and a gnarly veteran of post-Thatcher decay. TJ comes from a family of miners, and with the closure of the pits, he and his village have lost their sense of identity. (This despite the fact that TJ’s father died in a mining accident when a seam collapsed three miles out under the North Sea.) Yara and her family are Syrian refugees, struggling to adapt to the harsh realities of post-Brexit Britain. The regulars at the pub don’t take kindly to TJ choosing to support the Syrians and TJ finds himself caught between communities. Good will out in the end, Loach reassures us, with his bittersweet denouement. But there’s something which feels pre-packed, ready to be sold, about The Old Oak and Loach and Laverty’s reluctance to go beyond the range of cliché feels as though it short-changes their grander ambitions to tell stories about contemporary Britain.

Perhaps ironically, another friend I met yesterday told me he’s been watching Pennies from Heaven, which adopted a different register to talk about British society, and one can’t help feeling that it’s a shame Potter and Loach never got together to pool their differences. 

kinds of kindness (w&d lanthimos, w. efthimis filippou)

Lanthimos is back, baby! Todo bien con Poor Things, but it didn’t feel like pure Lanthimos, a smart director who knows how to play the long game and not get pigeonholed as one of those insufferably European arty types. All the same, this blog feels more affinity with weirdo Lanthimos, and in Kinds of Kindness, he’s back with a vengeance. We get mind control, reincarnation, and self-mutilation, among other choice cuts in this anthology piece, which is scripted with co-writer, Efthimis Filippou. There’s more than enough surreal meat on these bones. Stone and Plemmons deliver in spades, giving the more arcane philosophical elements of the film a consistently plausible human root. The script delivers, not least Stone’s monologue when she talks about dog-world, dialogue which is echoed in some of the smart cut-aways, not to mention Stone’s abuse of a stray dog in the film’s third chapter. The animal elements lend the film a Rilkean dimension: humans are shown to be naive, befuddled, cruel, desperate, in contrast to the more straightforward world of the animals. The ensemble use of the same cast across the three stories adds another playful dimension, reminiscent of Buñuel. What is the film actually about and how might this tie in with its cryptic title? I guess it’s about what it means to be human in this day and age, the desperate need to belong to a tribe in a world where fools are lauded as kings or queens. 

le samouraï (w&d jean-pierre melville, w. joan mcleod, georges pellegrin)

Some films radiate a kind of perfection. They delimit their boundaries and ensure that everything within them is honed and chiselled and ticks like a Rolex. Le Samourai is one of those. Its structure is straightforward. Delon’s Jef Costello is a hired assassin who kills someone in the first act. In the second act the police and the gangsters who hired him close in. The third brings the tightly worked denouement, which contains only one potential flaw (how do the police know that Jef is going to show up at the club when he does?). Melville directs with an extreme economy, his washed- out pallet reflecting a desire to sand the film down it its bare essentials. Having said which, the film isn’t averse to taking the risk of shooting on the streets of Paris, with these less controlled moments acting as a counterpoint to the carefully mounted studio scenes. The metro, the cafes, the cars: the film smells of a time and a place, and Delon’s hired killer moves through this world like a ghost. 

if we burn (vincent bevins)

‘The mass protest decade and the missing revolution’ is the subtitle of Bevins’ book. I came across the writer via Twitter, where he was one of the best English language posters on all things Brazil, and exercised a downbeat, laconic vibe, which his book perhaps might have had more of. If We Burn is a rigorous review of a decade of protest, which kicked off in Tunisia and then went around the globe, incorporating, according to Bevins, Brazil, Chile, Hong Kong, Egypt,  Bahrain etc. Those giddy days of 2011, when the ‘Arab spring’ broke, feel a long time ago now. Bevins looks with a cold eye at the reasons for the eventual underwhelming results of so many of these protests, questioning why the energy unleashed on the streets never lead to more comprehensive political change. Of course, his attitude is that of an insider. If you live in one of the countries that was not touched by this spirit of protest, or no more so than normal, as was the case with most Western European countries, then the argument already feels distanced. If anything, it might be possible to reframe the Brexit vote as an act of mass protest, a protest which was far from progressive.

Bevins is perhaps at his best when writing about Brazil and the way that the right wing Bolsonaro supporters hijacked what was originally a straightforward protest about bus fares, lead by activists who were nearer to being anarchists than anything else. He writes about how these movements resisted hierarchical structures, which, he argues, was part of the reason they could be manipulated by the far right into a destructive critique of Dilma Rousseff and Lula’s left-wing governments. As such, If We Burn reads like a cautionary tale for any would-be activists. The more successful your campaign, the more likely it is to be railroaded by forces beyond your control. The book is both a vindication of idealism and a damning critique of the perils of naivety that are inherent to any form of idealism.

animal (w&d sofia exarchou)

Animal’s opening shots appear to come from the very end of the film. Set in a hotel resort on a Greek island, the film takes place in the Summer tourist season, but the opening images are wintery, spidery, beautiful. There’s more than a hint of Lynne Ramsey in the way Exarchou paints her story with images. A poeticism which will course through the two hours of a film where narrative always appears to be of secondary importance. In pride of place is character. The film looks at a bunch of ‘animators’ who will perform over the season for tourists from Europe and Russia. The central character is Kalia, a Greek woman who is approaching middle age and finds herself trapped in the youthful lifestyle of all night discos, casual sex and a determined instability. Played with great pathos by Dimitra Vlagopoulou, Kalia is a mother figure to her younger colleagues, especially the dreamy seventeen year old, Eva. But as the film progresses, we understand more and more how lost Kalia is. Exarchou’s use of narrative and edit always resists melodrama, often cutting before the scene reaches its denouement, but in the hypnotic, desperate final karaoke scene, we enter directly into Kalia’s putative nervous breakdown as she sings one of her stalwart songs, Baccara’s Yes Sir I can Boogie. It’s a devastating moment which is all the more powerful  for sneaking up on the viewer without the usual mechanics of plot. Rather we have been slowly immersed in Kalia’s world and her desperation, so that when it is revealed in full, it is almost overwhelming.

Animal feels like a big, ambitious film about Europe, about modern youth, about listless, disconnected communities. The older tourists feed off the blood of their youthful animator hosts, whilst the wealthy retirees, with their their grotesque taste, get the chance to pretend to be young again. It’s often funny, sometimes hideous. Without making any great statements, the film articulates the transience and joys of youth, something our vampire society tries to package and inject, with no real care for the harm it might be causing the younger generation in the process. Animal is an artful piece of neo-realism, which weeps as it sings its cheerful hits. 

exit west (mohsin hamid)

It is noted with some amusement that the Obamas' production company has acquired the rights to Exit West. On imdb the putative film project, ‘in development’ is headlined by a pair of British tyros, one of whom is a friend of a friend. The presence of the Obamas is, these days, something of a double edged sword. On the one hand a badge of liberal consciousness in a world where the extremists are on the rise, on the other, a badge of compromise, a validation of a system, (US imperialism, with all that implies), which remains a dangerous and far-from-beneficial influence on the shape the world is and has been taking over the course of the last 50 years, or more.

Why would the Obamas be interested in Exit West? The novel opens in a Middle Eastern town, which might be Aleppo or Mosul, but is in fact a fictional space, where extremists are seizing power. The semiotics smell of Isis, (the ritual executions, the sense of lawlessness under the shroud of religious devotion). Nadia and Saeed find themselves falling in love against the backdrop of this turmoil. They know they have to flee, which they do, escaping through a magic door to arrive on a Greek island. From there they will hop to London and finally California. The complex process of flight and exile is reduced to a literary device, which, whilst convenient on an allegorical  level, might be accused of minimising the realities and risks of these migrations. However, this also reflects the way that the novel transforms from being a meditation on surviving the impact of religious extremism to a more spaced-out, opaque vision of the near-future, redolent of hypothetical dystopias such as the Parable of the Sower.

Clearly there’s a market for this kind of story, which in the end offers a positivist vision of a millennial future where religious fundamentalism, xenophobia and climate change have been overcome, laying the basis for a kinder, simpler civil society. However, this also means that the novel might be deemed open to charges of over-simplifying what are, in essence, seismic and perhaps intractable problems. The knottiness of these problems is skated over. You open a door and arrive on the other side. 

the savage detectives (bolaño, tr wimmer)

 Re-Reading the Savage Detectives.   

In another winter you came to me. I was lost then.

As perhaps now. Lost in the nights that have lost

Their discipline. Errant children, out on the lash. 

With me, a single parent, left to fret. You came to

Me then, on the eleventh floor, Wembley Stadium 

Grinning at my rear window, Paddington bear 

Goofing down the canal. You came to console,

Unbidden, the mystery guest, with your tired 

Eyes and tequila prose. And now you’re back.

It’s the middle of a midwinter night and you’re 

Riding pillion again, humming a tune so catchy

I can’t help but sing along, the Encrucijada

Blues. You’ll see me through these insomniac

Ciudad Vieja nights, just as you did then, the

Resolute beat of your words casting spells,

Luring the night to its false, gleaming, dawn. 

pax in lucem (w&d emiliano mazza de luca, w. alejandro díaz lageard)

Pax in Lucem is an affectionate and informed documentary about the life of Torres Garcia, who was the great grandfather of the co-writer and narrator, Alejandro Diaz. As such it occupies what is now somewhat well trodden ground in Uruguayan documentary filmmaking: the investigation of the family heritage. However, the story of Torres Garcia is complex and perhaps not so very Uruguayan, as he left the country at the age of 16 and only returned when 60. In a sense his story is one of perpetual confrontation with ruin and failure, as the commercial ventures he embarked on in New York and Paris ended on the point of bankruptcy. As the film recounts, the return to Montevideo was almost a choice of last resort, even if he was subsequently venerated as a prodigal son on his homecoming. The film is constructed around the process of recreating a work, Pax in Lucem, that was destroyed when the Museo de Arte Moderno in Rio caught fire. Some 60 of the artists’ most important works were lost in the fire, and the director talks emotively about this loss, as he follows the process of trying to recreate the original artwork. As such the film morphs into a meditation on originality, and is all the stronger for this philosophical desvio. 

club zero (w&d jessica hausner; w. géraldine bajard)

Hausner’s film about food ends up being a bit of a suet pudding. There’s a lot of ideas in there, but they never seem to settle into a coherent narrative. It could be subtitled Five go Mad for Fasting. Charismatic teacher, Ms Novak, played with a fierce lack of emotion by Mia Wasikowska comes to a private school to teach a class about conscious eating. What is conscious eating? It’s a process of moderating your food intake to an absolute minimum, for the good of your body and the planet. A select group of five are later initiated by Ms Novak, into Club Zero - which is when you stop eating altogether. The kids embrace this as an attack against the system and their parents - it’s essentially a teenage rebellion. The kids become wanner, their skin touched by a sulphuric yellow, as they gradually wither away, and head towards an entirely enigmatic fate, in between offering their parents diatribes on how the consumption of food only serves to fortify the capitalist system. It’s all very po-faced, reminiscent of mid-period Godard or Lanthimos, but the ideas seem to hover at the edge of the screen, chomping at the bit to be allowed in. There are the occasional gross-out moments which are stitched into the narrative, obvious calling-cards, but these moments have the feel of clunky necessity in a script which has been boiled to within an inch of its life.  

tender is the night (scott fitzgerald)

Fitzgerald’s text is one that has recurred several times in my reading. Initially it was read at University, where I wrote an essay on the connection with Macbeth, a connection which fascinated me as I started to get to grips with the issues that go with relationships. This is a novel about relationships: specifically the doomed love affair between Nicole and Dick. To what extent is our idea of love merely a crutch to help us see out the darkness of the universe in which we find ourselves abandoned? Nicole’s trauma has a specific incestuous root, but her sense of crisis, which Dick inherits, feels existential. The pointlessness, the pointlessness. We can conjure the most beatific and beautiful surroundings, but in the end we are all caged tigers. There’s a disarming nihilism at work here and the more glorious Dick and Nicole’s mystique, the more hollow it becomes.

I wonder where Fitzgerald slides to in my worldview as I get older. As I bypass youth and enter late middle age. Is Fitzgerald a young person’s writer? When we all go through the mirror does it all start to look tawdry? Which is the paradox that lends his novels their existential glory. Those shallow western dreams and their hollow hearts.

Then reading Bruccoli’s biography, the book is cast in another light. The tragic roman a clef. Because Scott and Zelda lived on both sides of the mirror. They had the Divers’ glamour lifestyle. But they also inhabited its hollowness, as their genius was ignored, hung out to dry, and their empire faded to dust.

It’s hard not to have a soft spot for Tender, for Dick’s relentless drive towards middle American mediocrity, for Nicole’s flight from a madness which is positively glorious. The vainglory of humanity, like a sparkling Mediterranean morning blue, iridescent, seductive, irredeemably flawed. 

 

men in the sun & other stories (gassan kanafani, tr hilary kilpatrick)

Kanafani’s stories deal with the consequences of the Nakba, rather than the event itself. Desperate refugees, having lost everything, doing what they can to make ends meet. The celebrated opening story recounts the tragic journey of three men seeking to cross the desert from Basra to Kuwait, a land of supposed opportunities. (Following the same path that Saddam fatefully took years later.) It is a mission that ends in absolute disaster, of a similar vein to the disasters that occur at borders across Europe and between Mexico and the USA, among others. Desperation is the driver, a desperation far removed from the kind of problems these characters’ ancestors might have faced. Ancestors who lived quiet lives near the orange and olive groves, in villages which no longer bear the names they did then, or don’t even so much as exist. To think that Kanafani’s tales are even more prescient today than when he wrote them is just another factor in the indictment of the Israeli state’s crimes against the Palestinian peoples.

crime and punishment (dostoyevksy, tr. david mcduff)

What brought my reading back to this strange, savage novel? In part it has been inspired by working on Rambert’s Repetition, in which a character at one point talks about how ‘everything was written, the truth was to be found in the fiction’, which chimes with the idea of the writer as amanuensis and prophet. In part it was to explore a thought in my head that the world of St Petersburg described in my memory was akin to the worlds that lie just down the road, or even sometimes across the road, in the Americas I now inhabit.

Crime and punishment is a tale from the underworld. An anti-murder mystery, where we know who did it from the very start. Here is the paradox, because we know the criminal is not the image of the desperate criminal, but rather the sensitive student, Raskolnikov, almost likeable, forever intriguing, cursed by his very hand as it enacts the murder he has intellectually decided to commit. In another world, he might have become the muddied intellectual with a career in academia or ‘the media’. But in the impoverished conditions he lives in, his intellect and imagination prove to be the road to hell, or at least Siberia, rather than a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle in Ealing, to pick a name out of the hat. All of which goes to show that the problems of an impoverished society don’t just impinge on the underclass. They also lead to a deformation of the idea of education, or, to put it another way, a Nietszchean re-evaluation of the idea of education: not as a means of furthering the health of society, but as a means of advancing the individual.

Raskolnikov crumbles under the weight of the moral bind he has placed himself in. He would be a superman, but he can’t sustain the illusion. But in his endeavour, as described by the author, we can indeed see the future written, the future which would lead to the Russian revolution, but would also lead to fascism and the love of the figure of the all-powerful leader. The fragile cat’s cradle of society only needs to lose a few threads for the whole thing to unravel. In these Americas, there will be Raskolnikovs aplenty. Driven to desperate acts in the name of their own higher purpose. Nothing much has changed, the great cities and the less-great cities continue to be the site of desperate, unheeded struggles, hidden behind the shop windows of fashion stores and car dealerships. 

raíz (d. franco garcia becerra, w. annemarie gunkel, alicia quispe)

Raíz is an effective piece of filmmaking, which manages to blend the sentimentality of the story of a football-obsessed child who lives as a llama shepherd in the highlands of Peru, with a dash of the Sanjines, as the film tackles the impact of global capitalism on this obscure, and beautiful part of the world. Feliciano is, as his name suggests, a happy-go-lucky child who roams the mountains with his flock, and has particular affection for one llama which he has christened Ronaldo. At the same time, the mining industry is looking to drive the villagers and homesteaders out of the area. Feliciano’s parents are dragged into a conflict the child can only really understand when his flock and Ronaldo go missing, the result of an attack on the villagers by goons hired by the mining company. Set against the backdrop of Peru’s quest to go to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the film adroitly weaves these twin strands together, and the overall impact is aided by the stunning scenery, immaculately captured by DOP, Johan Carrasco. 

the moustache (emmanuel carrère, tr. lanie goodman)

Carrère’s curious tale of everyday madness. We can all go mad one day, just like that, and end up in a Macau hotel, wondering what we did with our sanity. I wonder if it was in any way inspired by Scorsese’s short, The Big Shave. I once read a book by the author that annoyed me so much that I didn’t write about it here, and almost made me quit this whole process. I can't remember why, or even what the book was called. Maybe I invented it. The Moustache did not have the same effect, albeit one gets the sense that the writer is a cold fish. But that coldness underpins this savage dissection of ordinary bourgeois society, so it’s all good. 

cowboy graves (bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

Returning to Bolaño after so long feels like coming home. This book is a collection of three separate texts, excavated apparently from his hard drive, composed in the nineties and in the year before his death. As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas’ afterword puts it eloquently, the themes and characters are culled from the Bolaño universe. Familiar figures pop up. New arrivals appear. The stories range between Mexico, Chile and Europe. There is nothing new here and plenty that is new. To what extent are the stories autobiographical, marked by the presence of Bolaño’s alter ego, Arturo Belano? Two of the tales feature the day of the Pinochet coup, and these have the smell of the real, albeit we know they are not the real, they are fictions, spun from the writer’s skull. The author will always be a touchstone of my literary life. Part of the pleasure of reading is diving into the themes and issues which fascinate the reader. Few writers of my time have scaled the divides of my own life; but the one who unfailingly goes there is Roberto Bolaño.

el castigo (d. matías bize, w. coral cruz)

Bize’s chamber piece is what they might call whipsmart in the pages of TimeOut, if TimeOut still exists. A single shot sustained over 90 minutes, marked by the setting of the sun in a forest beside a main road, with the nagging tension of a lost child and a disintegrating marriage. The single shot film is perhaps the acme of low budget filmmaking, (cf La Casa Muda, Victoria etc), a skill which when well-executed demonstrates the Aristotelian power of cinema as a rival to the stage. El Castigo (The Punishment), takes place in a space which is perhaps no more than 500 square metres, where the action is occurring offstage. Ana has punished their 7 year old child by leaving him at the side of the road for two minutes, after he nearly caused a crash. When they come back the child is missing. With this simple premise, the film dissects her and Mateo’s marriage, and the possible collapse of their comfortable lives. It’s beautifully acted by Antonia Zegers and Néstor Cantillana, and, as is necessary, brilliantly filmed by Gabriel Diaz. In a medium which so often rewards those who do the flashy things well, doing the simple things well becomes the mark of a bold sensibility, prepared to swim against the tide. 

el viento que arrasa (w&d paula hernández, w. leonel d’agostino)

Hernandez’ film opens with a great set piece as the lay preacher/ evangelist, Alfredo Castro, does his stuff in a rural backwater. His daughter, Lena, is the one who looks after him and runs the show. They are an oddball team and given the daughter is reaching an age when she’s more interested in boys than god, we know they’re heading for trouble. Trouble arrives when they break down and find themselves holed up in the ramshackle hillbilly hideaway of mechanic Gringo and his disfigured teenage son. Everything is bubbling up, but at this point the narrative stalls somewhat, trapped like the characters in an endless afternoon in the back of beyond.

blind fanatics (pankaj mishra)

Pankaj Mishra’s collection of essays is a takedown of both liberalism and its bastard offspring neo-liberalism. The essays span a number of years and some are extended book reviews. Nevertheless, the book as a whole offers a comprehensive alternative slant on the history of the past 300 years. In particular the way in which the Anglo-American model, incorporating a ‘democracy’ which can be exported using force, has been of devastating harm to all those societies it has exploited rather than served. The curious element of Mishra’s commentary is that he appears to do as more of an insider than an outsider. He has read all the figures who have participated in the intellectual construction of the late twentieth and early twenty first version of Anglo-American/ European hegemony. Writers in the US as wide-ranged as Mark Grief or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or the ubiquitous Jordan Peterson. On the Anglo front, he skewers the Amis, Hitchens axis, showing how it has a direct lineage to Imperialist racism, particularly in tis attitude towards Islam. Mishra recognises that political actions are fertilised by intellectual standpoints and that there is a cross-fertilisation which benefits the writers and thinkers whose prose backs up established attitudes. The higher up the food chain you go, the more weight a magazine like The Economist, The Spectator or The Atlantic has. People who write for these publications are writing to speak to and with the elite, those who will decide whether it’s permissible to bomb or to turn a blind eye to genocide. So many critiques of ‘the system’ appear to come from people who have no idea of how the system really works, or how insulated it is. Mishra’s coherent grasp permits his critique to be more comprehensive and telling. Whether we are entering the death throes of the Anglo-US-European age and embarking on a new Asian age is another matter, but the iniquities of liberalism are well and truly skewered in these essays.