close up (w&d abbas kiarostami)

The playful intellectualism of Iranian cinema seems to have echoes in the mind games of Rio Plantense cinema. This is what happens when you yoke cerebral educated filmmakers who don’t have a capitalist imperative to the artform. See also Communist era Poland.  There’s something Borgesian about Close-Up, with its imagined film within a film and its impersonating director. But there’s also a tragic social history there, as the impersonator, Hossain Sabzian, a film lover with no hope of ever making a film, indulges his Walter Mitty life for a while. Sabzian is so disarmingly charming and unassuming, playing himself in the movie, that you cannot help but root for him. The humanism that underpins Kiarostami’s vision is also indicative of Iranian cinema’s progressive agenda, which seems so little in keeping with the country’s official or apparent politics over the course of the last thirty years. In addition, the very fact that Sabzian’s fraud is constructed around the fame of a director speaks of a society that  values cinema in a way that the West does not. Even our most famous directors, the likes of Nolan, Mendes or Macqueen, are unlikely to be recognised in the improbable event they decided to go rogue and travel on public transport. 

the woman in the dunes (d. hiroshi teshigahara, w. kôbô abe, eiko yoshida)

Curry and I went to see this at the NFT all those years ago. No idea why we chose to go, a blind whim, or perhaps he had done his research. It was, in its way, a revelatory viewing experience which shaped our thinking on The Boat People just as much as Cortazar & co. Little did we realise, cinema ingenues that we were back then, that no-one in the UK was either going to be interested or impressed by a film referencing Teshigahara. As ever, it was a trip returning to see a film that has lingered in the memory over the course of twenty years. The near sadistic brilliance hasn’t waned a bit. I couldn’t help thinking about what the cast and crew must have gone through to film in this relentless jungle of sand. An almost Herzogian process. In many ways this is a classic horror movie. Man who is hoodwinked by callous locals, held captive against his will, starved and brought to the edge of sanity through thirst, flees only to get caught in quicksand. And yet, as the title suggests, it is also a warped love story, of the kind that appears to recur so frequently in Japanese culture. 

the man without a past (w&d kaurismaki)

Kaurismaki’s cinema really doesn’t feel as though it ought to work in the 21st century. It feels like the lost child of the silent era. The photography is beautifully crude. The colour palette is unashamedly contrived. The dialogue lacks any obvious subtext. The stories are simple, without any of the derivations or complications so beloved of modern scriptwriting. It feels like the anti-Nolan, if you like, whose bombastic cinema is the apotheosis of what the movies, even ‘serious’ movies have become. And yet, Kaurismaki’s cinema is always an unadorned delight. Simplicity, as his fellow Nordic savant, Fosse, also understands, has a power that all the machinations of the world struggle to compete with. The Man without a Past is yet another example of this, a fable which feels timeless, which nevertheless succeeds in communicating so much about the nature of identity, and its construction, a sly peaen to the IG generation, all of them deadset on creating themselves from scratch. It can be done, but it helps if someone smashes you over the head with a baseball bat first.  

perfect days (w&d wenders, w. takuma takasaki)

Daily life is a repetitive strain syndrome. Sometimes it feels ok, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, just maybe, it feels great. The beauty of Wenders’ film is the way, in telling the story of Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, he captures this so perfectly. Film is generally about dramatic action. Plot points. Development. Whenever these threaten to appear in Perfect Days, Wenders and co-writer Takaski rein them in. What matters about this film, what makes it special, isn’t what happens. It’s what doesn’t happen. Not many filmmakers get to the point where they’re permitted to explore this kind of vibe. I for one am thankful that in this instance, someone has given Wenders money to do just that. I could watch this film a hundred times and never get bored.

Ps I got a counterpoint to this on my first night back in the UK from Mr Curry, who said that the more he thought about the film the more it got on his nerves. In is view, a film about a toilet cleaner  who just happens to have a wealthy background and drives around playing their favourite songs was the kind of project overprivileged males dream up in fancy hotel rooms… and he might have a point…

swimming underground (mary woronov)

Watching Wenders’ Perfect Days, with its nods to the VU, Lou Reed et al, one can’t help thinking about how influential that music and that time has become. There is something about the dirty nihilism of New York in the Warhol era, an era of washed out art-as-capital, that has coloured the way we in the West perceive the world. The maw of the great superpower, where a perverse, sado-masochisitic consciousness flowered in filthy needle-strewn rooms, driving the engine that makes the rich richer, turning a soup can into a million bucks, laughing in the face of honest toil. In a way this is also the world of Trump, the fast buck, the cheap con. Or rather, this was the environment in which the Trumps of this world could flourish. A few of these rich Nuyoricans drift around the edge of Woronov’s captivating description of her time as part of the Warhol inner circle. They hang out with Andy, knowing that the more the works of art they buy from him are inflated, the richer they, the owners, will become. She has little time for them. From a suburban background, Woronov is fascinated by the decadence and strangeness of the characters she comes across, hating them as much as she loves them. She shows the world as dirty and degrading, with little of the glamour that has subsequently been bestowed on it. The lives of impoverished artists and drug addicts are always more glamorous in the movie than IRL. Woronov describes how she herself fell into a drug addled purgatory which neutered her moral compass (in one notable chapter she tries and fails to kill her groupie) and lead her to tread the fine line between survival and its opposite. She later moved from NY to LA, where at least she wasn’t constantly on the verge of killing herself. Through all this, Warhol glides like a grey ghost, the shrewdest of operators in a world whose true value he alone grasped. 

los colonos (w&d felipe gálvez, w. antonia girardi, mariano llinas)

The story of Red Pig, the Scottish mercenary and Indian killer Alex MacLennan, is one we came across when we visited Punta Arenas. The savage war that was waged against the Selk’nam in Tierra del Fuego, on both sides of the border, is the central pillar of Gálvez’ curious film, which follows in the footsteps trodden by Théo Court’s poetic Blanco en Blanco, also featuring Alfredo Castro. Los Colonos is split into two parts, the first describing one of Maclennan’s savage trips, the second reflecting on this seven years later. Camilo Arancibia’s wistful mestizo, Segundo Molino is the connecting link between the two parts, when a Santiago politician arrives to question him about Maclennan’s terrible crimes, provoking in Camilo and his wife the question of what it means to be Chilean as the nation celebrates its centenary. There’s a sense at times that the film doesn’t quite know what it wants to be: a mixture of Western, social commentary, historical testament. There’s even an apocalyptic sequence featuring a Scottish soldier who appears to have gone full Kurtz, (played by old acquaintance Sam Spruell). Perhaps it’s the presence of Mariano Llinas in the screenwriting team that leads to the inclusion of so many fascinating detours and side avenues: the sequence at the end of the world felt like it could quite happily have made for a whole film on its own. Maclennan, the central figure, drops out of the narrative before the final act; the conflict between him, the Texan and Segundo is arbitrarily curtailed. This final act feels relatively disconnected from the aesthetic and tone of all that has gone before, at once more assured now that the dialogue is not in English, but more stately, consisting essentially of two long set piece scenes. It might also be relevant to the film’s unevenness that its financing has come from so many different territories, many of them a long way away from the land of the Selk’nam. In spite of this unevenness, Los Colonos is always watchable, even if it feels as though, in the shadow of the overwhelming scenery, it sometimes pulls its punches. 

the straight story (d. lynch, w. john roach, mary sweeney)

The Straight Story, which the director interestingly doesn’t claim a writing credit for, is a homespun tale of americana, the apple pie version of Lynch. It’s the flip side of his dark America, something that the imagery of the sprinkler early on, that keynote of Blue Velvet, reminds us of. It seems fair enough that Lynch, the great dissector of the dark underbelly of his country, should also honour it in this fashion, and Alvin Strait’s journey towards reunion with his estranged brother is genuinely moving, as evinced by the round of applause at the film’s conclusion from a packed Cinemateca audience. However, there were times when it felt as though what we were witnessing was the US brand of Soviet social realism. The tractor itself feels like a signifier that could come from either side of the Cold War divide, and it encapsulates those things the two superpowers had in common. Vast lands that look inwards more comfortably than outwards. Countries whose values are defined by their rural heartlands, whose great cities are outliers rather than cornerstones of empire. The endless plains of central russia map on to the endless great plains. Alvin’s journey pays homage to the more homely values of the USA - this is a world without villains, drug taking, or Indians to kill. The sentimentality of Lynch’s vision here pays tribute to the soft power of these supposed US values, and if it wasn’t for all the times he has defrocked those values, this film might have felt like propaganda. 

wild at heart (w&d lynch, w. barry gifford)

Lynch lets his hair down. One of Lynch’s greatest talents is the use of dramatic tension. Constructing a scenario where you expect terrible things to happen, and holding off and holding off until, finally, they do, or they don’t. He is a master of mood, knowing that the audience is trapped in the cinema, they can’t escape, and he can persecute them as much as he wants. There is something sadistic about horror, and Lynch, genial figure though he is, knows how to exploit his dark side. Yet, in Wild at Heart, the director chooses to forego this. From the opening sequence, where Sailor kills his would-be assassin in brutal fashion, it’s all blowsy surface action, dialled up to twelve. The Cape Fear reference, which Scorsese would later echo, tells us we’re headed on a wild ride, which isn’t going to have any great subtlety. Cage and Dern have a ball, overacting to their heart’s content, full on Dennis Hopper mode from the word go. It’s an end-of-the-eighties movie, big shoulder pads, Duran Duran, that kind of aesthetic. Post the politics of the seventies, that brief spell between the Cold War and 911 when mindless violence could still somehow be portrayed as more innocent. Something Lynch revels in here, not least in the decapitation of Bobby Peru, an iconic moment for a director giving himself free ride to go over the top. In some ways it feels like the work of an auteur who has temporarily lost their way, but nonetheless is happy to be lost, to go out on a limb in some faraway Texas holdout. We tend to look back at a director’s career and impose a pattern of conscious and coherent decision-making on it, but the film industry doesn’t work that way, and Wild at Heart feels like an outrider. 

the elephant man (w&d lynch, w. christopher de vore, eric bergren)

Lynch’s adaptation of the Victorian tale is a surprisingly tender one. It is underpinned by Hurt’s performance as the sensitive monster, who never raises his voice. In a sense this is the anti-monster film, where the monsters are those who would take advantage of John Merrick, and the society itself. The film becomes a beautifully realised Victorian fever dream, full of dissolves to black and vignettes. Lynch takes great care over these set pieces. The cinematography feels like an extension of the fierce monochrome of Eraserhead, fleshed out with a glorious array of tremulously sensitive British actors. Gielgud, Freddie Jones, Hannah Gordon, etc all complementing Hopkins’ beautifully restrained performance as the doctor who discovers the humanity of the elephant man and saves him. In a way the film seems to signpost a path that Lynch chose to forego, using a more classical narrative structure and leaving the surreal on the surface, as a kind of false lead. Because this isn’t so much a film about deformity as it is a film about humanity, its kindnesses and its cruelty.

Interesting IMDB note: The actor Frederick Treves  appears in The Elephant Man (1980) and shares the same name as the doctor who took John Merrick into the hospital (Frederick Treves 1853-1923). Dr. Treves was actor Frederick Treves' great uncle in real life.

voyager (nona fernández tr. natasha wimmer)

Another Chilean tome which mines the alignment of the Atacama and the stargazers with the dark history of the dictatorship. In this case Fernandez participates in an Amnesty project to rename distant stars after a group of activists who were disappeared by the Pinochet regime. In the book, she mediates on the arbitrary nature of star signs; the process of growing up under the influence of the dictatorship; her mother’s sickness; how we might want the world to be perceived by extra terrestrials. Particularly fascinating is the way the writer investigates the notion that our genetic make up is connected to the very foundation of the universe itself, something successive generations of creatures, leading to humans, all share, once again reminding ourselves of what a mess we have made of this planet, where every individual has so much in common with every other individual, neighbours all of us within our tiny barrio in the giant megalopolis which is the universe. In spite of which man’s cruelty towards fellow man continues to flourish.

blood meridian (cormac mccarthy)

Cormac was a rite of passage for a certain class of artistically orientated male Londoner back in the nineties. Perhaps because all his novels seem to be constructed around the notion of young men enduring their rites of passage. Perhaps because the apparent harsh reality of McCarthy’s world was such a counterpoint to our urban existence. Secretly we all longed to be riding a horse across the frontier, the horse being our best friend, in order to confront the innumerable demons that growing up threw at us. Blood Meridian contains the coming of age thread, even if it is less pronounced than in later works. The kid who becomes part of Glanton’s scalping band, and obtains an existential nemesis in The Judge, is blood brother to the young men in The Crossing and All The Pretty Horses. There is something brittle about McCarthy’s neo-biblical prose, as though you could pick it up and snap it and feed it to desert fire. Is it truly as powerful as it would like to be, or is there a cod-potency, which is achieved by whacking the reader over the head with relentless descriptions of suns rising and moons waxing, mountains on the horizon, violence forever around the corner? The books cry out for a female or feminist reading to counterbalance all their raging testosterone, with women barely featuring in the gothic western. As a man, you find yourself thinking, it’s pushing all these buttons, but what would I think if I was a woman reading this? Perhaps there’s something elemental at work here, a subversive analysis of gender - or perhaps not. The strange thing about violence is that it becomes oddly repetitive and its power seems to diminish as a result; power tires of itself, and in the end the kid, one can’t help thinking, will be happy to be put out of his misery, to escape the nihilist world he has been condemned to ride through. 

the limey (d soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

The Limey includes footage of its star, Terrence Stamp, from another film, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, to show Stamp as a young man (and handsome devil). Soderbergh cleverly weaves this footage into his film, part of a masterful edit, lending The Limey an instant nostalgia factor. This nostalgia factor is amplified watching the film 25 years after its release. The Limey seems to hark back to a different, bolder era, when filmmakers were permitted a certain licence to indulge and hence enrich what might otherwise have been fairly regulation genre fare. In The Limey, alongside Out of Sight, Soderbergh constructed a pair of whip-smart films which perhaps would struggle to be financed today. Reminiscent of French thrillers like Cercle Rouge or Le Samurai, The Limey makes a virtue of its difficulties: the choppy edit, a la Godard, the playfulness of the dialogue, Stamp’s weirdly monochromatic acting, only broken every now and again by a sly smile behind the eyes. It’s a minor direction masterclass. If this is where film is headed, we thought back in those last of the pre-millennial days, we’re in good hands. 

schizopolis (w&d soderbergh)

Doing a spot of research whilst trying to make my mind up whether to head to Cinemateca to catch another in the Soderbergh season, I read several people saying Schizopolis is the worst film ever made. Which meant that I really didn't have much choice: I had to go and see it. Schizopolis is not the worst film ever made, I am disappointed to have to say. It's not the best, but it's also far from the worst. It is quietly and pleasantly bonkers, as one might expect from a film where the director plays three characters, all variations on the same person, who is probably himself. What is admirable about Soderbergh is the way he games the system, making big studio films alongside his own smaller scale projects. There’s something quasi Godardian about all this., not least in the sense that he clearly doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of a film like Schizopolis, which was never going to be a box office hit and which many people will deem a self-indulgent mess. Which it sort of is, but sort of isn’t, as Soderbergh plays with humour and confusion to construct a narrative of multiple identities which almost works. On another level, it’s a slice of unadorned American life, shot without any trimmings, revealing the petty neuroses of the most powerful citizens on earth. 

kafka (d. soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

I have memories of Soderbergh’s second feature coming out and being an unmitigated disaster, both critically and at the box office. The zietgesity wunderkind of SL&V coming back down to earth with a bump. Perhaps this is a false memory, but in the Soderbergh canon, you don’t offer hear people referring to Kafka. Of course it always helps a film to go in with low expectations, but Kafka, for all its predictability, still succeeded in charming. Perhaps it was the sight of Guinness and the youthful Irons helming a familiar looking cast, featuring one of those zany double acts with Keith Allen and Simon McBurney, the type of humorous conceit which never normally works, but in this case seems to. Perhaps it was the sight of Prague in all its pre-touristy glory. Or perhaps it was just the evident glee of a young director getting to fulfil his dream of making a passion project, all homage to expressionism, Fritz Lang, and so on.

Later in the Cinemateca cafe, Victor appeared. He had a garish orange painting. On closer inspection it showed McDowell from A Clockwork Orange. In that film’s expressionist glory, there lurks perhaps another homage to Lang’s violence. It was too auspicious to pass up, and so I bought the picture for Sñr Amato, who had also chanced to come to the screening of a blousy Sunday evening. Hopefully the picture will find a home on the bright shore of the Maldonado coast, a far cry from the foggy dunes of Prague. 

aliss at the fire (jon fosse, tr. damion searls)

When Fosse won the Nobel prize last year, a few people got in touch. Being the one of the few English directors to have worked on a Fosse play, there was a kind of perceived reflected glory. When I directed Winter I had a brief email exchange with Fosse, my second correspondence with a Nobel prize winner. He was warm and open. Which is pretty much the oposite of his work, which is closed and cold, or if not cold, like a figure in a big coat huddled over a fire which isn’t giving off much warmth. Aliss at the Fire is the first of his novels I have read, albeit the tone is very similar to his plays. An intense and mysterious examination of human interactions, interactions which span the generations. Fosse comes from a world where the dead grandparents walk side by side with their living heirs. It’s a worldview which ties into one held by so many cultures that have been shunted into the shade by the rampant god of capitalism. We encountered it in a Mexican graveyard, for example. Part of Fosse’s appeal is that in a society where human ties are frayed to breaking point, he spells out the incontrovertible truths of our tragic connections. We are all children of someone who is a child of someone and so on and so forth. Aliss at the Fire spins out its slender cross-generational tale like a ghost story, one where the terrifying thing isn’t the jump scare: it’s the proximity of someone who is dead, the way they are just outside the window, looking in. 

poor things (w&d lanthimos, w. tony mcnamara)

I realise this is a stretch, but it crossed my mind that Lanthimos’ film is perhaps stepsister to Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which I saw on the Montevideo stage last year. Like Faustus, Bella Baxter goes on an educational tour of Europe (the Grand Tour). Like Faustus, hers is a voyage of discovery: the limits of human pleasure, and power. Faustus is almost the anti-Hamlet, the proto-magic cyborg, who can indulge his whims at will, just as Bella does. Like Faustus, Bella satisfies her desires in an almost mechanical fashion, bereft of any eroticism. For all the sex in Lanthimos’ film, it is doggedly anti-erotic, in a Barthesian or Bataille-esque sense: this is sex as ‘furious jumping’ rather than an exploration of temptation or transgression. Faustus is a child of the devil; Bella Baxter is a child of a Scottish Frankenstein - neither are their own person, even if Lanthimos twists the tale at the end to suggest that this is where she is headed. Bella’s encounter with the radical sex worker echoes Faustus’ visit to Heidelberg, which is echoed by Hamlet’s academic companionship. All of which makes Bella a kind of Faust de nos jours, only one who rather than being condemned to hell, is rewarded for her vaulting ambition, as she is rebirthed into a 21st C variation of the happy nuclear family, with her husband, her lover and her tamed monster in a garden of Eden. If Marlowe’s Faust represents the last cry of medieval man, whose blind faith in magic/ knowledge will soon give way to Hamlet’s alienation, does Lanthimos’ Bella Baxter represent the last gasp of optimism in the possibilities of five centuries of faith in science and its empiricism? 

a tale of love and darkness (amos oz, tr nicholas de lange)

Oz’s lengthy book is part autobiography, part deep dive into his roots. The first half deals extensively with the Ukrainian origins of his mother’s family. He traces the routes of both sides of his family towards their arrival in the state that would soon become Israel. His mother’s subsequent decline in her new land is illustrative of the uneasy ties of Oz’s parents’ generation to their new land. They were bookish, urbane people who had deep ties to the lands they left behind, far from the arid soil of Palestine.

The Palestinians themselves, as Oz makes clear in the two sequences where Palestinian people feature in this 700 page book, were a reminder of the immigrants’ foreignness. The Palestinians exist on the edge of this account, shadowy creatures who the new arrivals assume crave the annihilation of the newcomers. Which, from the perspective of the immigrants, has a certain logic, given the war footing at the founding of the state. Then, in two episodes, the young Oz succeeds in stepping out of his silo and having actual human interaction with Palestinians. In the first instance, Oz, aged 6, is dragged into an Arab-owned Jerusalem clothes shop by his nagging aunt. In the cavernous women’s clothes shop the child wanders off and finds himself terrified and lost, until he is rescued by the kindly Palestinian owner of the shop. In the second episode, an adolescent Oz is invited, the year before the state of Israel is officially brought to exist, to an event at the house of a wealthy Palestinian in an Arab quarter of Jerusalem. There, he is attracted to a young Palestinian girl, and seeking to show off, he causes a terrible accident to her young brother.

For a contemporary reader, these incidents have more impact than almost anything else in the book. It’s impossible not to see them as parables, which Oz might have intended. The outsider clumsily trying to assert his presence, sowing disaster. What is perhaps curious is that the implication of these stories are never followed through. The Palestinians remain a categorical ‘other’ and return to the edge of the narrative. There is consciousness, but there is no attempt at reconciliation. Instead the dominant conflict in the writer’s worldview is between the immigrant Jews of his parents generation and the Kibbutzers who have another vision of Jewery, one that is active, vigorous, uncowed. Oz moves away from Jerusalem and becomes one of this new school, working on a rural kibbutz, to his father’s dismay.

However, as the book sometimes makes clear, the story is still more complex than this. Because there has been another sector of the new Israel which has always existed, co-existing with the Palestinians, Christians and other sectors of society that made up this multicultural land. They too have been displaced from this narrative by the arrival of the immigrants. And the old Jerusalem that Oz catches glimpses of before the state of Israel is declared will soon be dismantled, with the arrival of the first Nakba. The Arab quarters will be annexed, geography rewritten, and the seeds of an ongoing, unresolvable crisis which will haunt Israel forever will be sown.

Oz’ account of the way the UN declaration of the state of Israel was received in Jerusalem and the war that followed is one of the most effective pieces of writing in the book. But every word about the hardship endured in those days now feels as though it has been mirrored and multiplied a million times by the violence inflicted on Gaza, part of that unacknowledged other which the new state has displaced.

“After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, my man did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he’s still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?”

Nb - i recognise that this is only one of Oz’s books and it might be injurious to comment on the author’s attitudes through a reading of this work alone. However, it is an autobiography, and as such feels representative of the new Israel’s first generation, something the writer’s accounts of his interaction with Ben Gurion only helps to reinforce. It’s also worth noting what Khoury has to say in My Name is Adam: “I can’t understand how a novelist could write about Jerusalem without revealing the scale of the tragedy that befell the original inhabitants of the city’s western districts, which the Israelis occupied, expelling their occupants from their homes. I both blame him and wonder at him for not seeing the light in the stones of Jerusalem, of whose gradations of colour the Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote at such length. Oz saw only a dark city clothed in the fog of his European memories, but anyone who visits Jerusalem knows that it is a city of light and that its roseate stones radiate and glow even in the darkness.”

el caso padilla (w&d pavel giroud)

El Caso Padilla recounts the tale of the night the Cuban poet, Heberto Padilla was released from prison and proceeded to give a speech lasting several hours to his fellow writers in the hall of the Cuban Writers Union. The speech is a self-flagellation and a warning, and Padilla is clearly speaking under duress. He confesses to having written poetry which in its tone and its negativity is counter-revolutionary. He then goes on to name various writers who share his views, some of whom come forward to perform a public mea culpa after Padilla has finished speaking. The documentary is constructed around the filmed footage of the night, which the film claims at the start has never previously been seen, even though fragments were used in a play by the Cuban Abel Mello on the same subject around five years ago.

The film is frustrating in many ways. In order to understand the context of his confession, it would have been helpful to have been given more of an insight into Padilla’s personality and history. At the end we learn that he emigrated to the USA, and sought to define himself as someone who was neither of the left or the right, although the trauma of these events must have scarred him. It’s one thing to confess to being a traitor, it’s another to implicate your friends and colleagues. It’s also frustrating that the film doesn’t offer any clue as to the fate of his fellow writers, characters who feel as though they emerge from an anti-Bolaño novel.

Which also leads on to the other thought the film provoked. Which is that writers might be free to say what they like under capitalism, but that’s because capitalism doesn’t give a shit about what they have to say. There’s also another kind of censorship under capitalism, which is the censorship of the market. The very fact that Castro, like Plato, may have felt threatened by the poets who were once his champions feels like a testament to a power that poetry still possesses within that society.

All of which is not to defend censorship or the Cuban regime. Anyone who has visited Cuba will be aware of that it’s a society which is far from Utopian. Nevertheless, in a historical moment where, once again, the political and social values of “the West” are being stripped bare to reveal the brutality that underpins them, the case of Padilla feels as though it is probably more nuanced than the film suggests. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mello, the playwright who wrote about a play about Padilla, was employed by a university in Havana to teach theatre when we met him there, in spite of his criticisms of the state and the fact he spends half his time in Spain. Cuba is complicated and the film, whilst doing a service in exploring the case of Padilla, doesn’t really do justice to these complexities. 

anatomy of a fall (w&d justine triet, w. arthur harari)

[Warning, spoiler!] So, the blind kid’s anecdotal testimony swings the trial and gets his mum off a murder charge. The implausibility of this only helps to reveal the effectiveness of Triet’s clever  courtroom drama, (which isn’t really a courtroom drama). This is actually a movie about relationships more than anything else. Principally, Sandra’s relationship with her dead husband, her son and her lawyer. What are the limits to a relationship? Is trust more important than truth? Do conventional ideas about marriage have any real bearing on how relationships actually work?

It’s curious that the script goes for the Rambertian decision to give the married couple the same first names as the actors who play them. There is much play made towards the latter part of the film and trial of the fact that Sandra’s life has echoes in her fiction, and that within the fiction might be found the truth of what happened on the day Samuel, her husband, died. In truth, this, like many of the strands in Anatomy, is slightly loose, an idea that is teased into our consciousness as we watch, without really going anywhere. Which is perhaps just as well, because had the film relied on this plank too much, it might have turned into a Branagh adaptation of Agatha Christie. In a similar way to the fact that Sandra’s charming lawyer, the baleful Swann Arlaud, is someone who was once in love with her. There’s no narrative reason for this to be the case, but it adds another ingredient to this complex soup of a film, which succeeds in part because so much mud is thrown at the wall that things are bound to stick. The lengthy argument scene, the only time Samuel speaks, is a fish out of the film’s water (perhaps reminiscent of the dialogue scene in Hunger), another of these quietly random elements that are stuck together to construct a film which …

Which ultimately talks, as so many great films do, about society. It’s reminiscent of Farhadi’s A Separation, a film that took us inside the Iranian legal system to offer a sweeping portrait of its society. It feels as though Triet is using the theatricality of the courtroom as a lever to prise open questions about love, relationships, and how we, in the west, live now. The little lies which help to construct the basket within which we float down the stream. The legal interpretation of our actions and these lies, which is the codification of our morality, ends up being an instrument of blunt force, with which society attempts to perform its autopsies. The actuality of our actions and our lies lie beyond the law’s scope of true understanding. Sandra’s deceits may be innumerable and suggest guilt; her innocence or purity can only be inferred from her unreliable son’s unlikely tale, which is a form of love that transcends justice. 

unrueh/ unrest (w&d cyril schäublin)

Schäublin’s curious film left both myself and sñr Flamia somewhat bemused. It’s a very elliptical telling of the way in which events at a Swiss watch factory on the 1870s influenced Kropotkin, who happened to be drifting around the valley where the factory is located at the time. The socialist principles of the watchmakers are emphasised as they offer to donate some of their wages to striking workers in Baltimore, part of a worldwide union movement that doesn’t prevent four of the female factory workers from being unjustly sacked. Kropotkin moseys around, looking out wistfully, perhaps nursing a crush on one of the factory workers. Whilst obviously based on facts, the film seems less concerned with exploring and developing its narrative and more interested in becoming a mood piece. Much is made of the element of time, with the valley having several different time zones. Whilst this helps to restrict the homogeneity of life, it also makes it hard to plan. It felt as though there was a lot bubbling under the surface of a likeable premise, but the lid is never lifted to release the full radical force of Kropotkin’s ideology on the audience. Which is a pity, as one suspects that the Cinemateca audience would have been well up for it. 

le théorème de marguerite (w&d anna novion, w. agnès feuvre, marie-stéphane imbert, philippe paumier)

Novion’s film boasts four screenwriters, and feels as though it’s been polished and chiselled to kingdom come. It’s the story of a female mathematician who loses her way, discovers her inner woman, becomes a mahjong wizard, finds her way, loses herself in her obsessive quest for greatness, and finally finds love. As a narrative it’s as contrived as it sounds, hitting formulaic beats which may well have come out of a screenwriting textbook. Which is not to say that it’s ineffective. There’s a lot of craft in the construction of the film, plenty of art design, graphics, and a concerted effort to show us that maths isn’t boring. On the contrary, the true mathematician is an artist, seeking to unearth universal truths for the good of society. In many ways it feels as though Le Théorème de Marguerite would make for a great case study. What makes for an effective movie as opposed to a great movie? Or are these criteria in any way useful? Perhaps someone can attempt to construct an equation to solve these riddles, or perhaps this is indeed the question that Marguerite is seeking a solution to, as she turns her walls into a beguiling work of cave art, which might just contain the secret to the universe. 

walk up (w&d hong sang-soo)

Hong Sang-soo is a big lacuna in my film viewing, but I suspect that Walk Up isn’t the ideal place to start to get a handle on his work. Clearly a stocking filler, the film takes place in the same house which doubles as a restaurant. A film director visits an old friend with his daughter, and she offers to let him stay. Some time later, having not taken up the offer, he returns to the restaurant part of the house, where he hangs out with the friend and her friend, the restauranteur. At this point the director reveals that a big project has fallen through. He starts a relationship with the restauranteur, moving in to the house. He starts smoking heavily and drinking heavily. He gets depressed. He falls out with his friend who has now become his landlady, and doesn’t mend the leak in the roof. His daughter comes to visit. The film ends. The film is split into several long narrative sequences, which revolve around the use of the house and the steady deterioration of the gnomic film director. It’s languidly paced, with long talky scenes. In many ways it feels more like a stage play than a work of cinema, split into its various acts. Whilst there’s an undeniable charm, the film seems in danger of drowning in (self-referential?) whimsy. It provokes a hunger to see what happens beyond the walls of this hidden-away building, out there on the streets of Seoul. Whilst this is clearly intentional, Walk Up remains a charming but frustrating watch. Hopefully I will get a chance to see more of the director’s work, the films that didn’t get the rug pulled from them by the financiers. 

visitation (jenny erpenbeck, tr susan bernofsky)

Erpenbeck’s novel reads almost as a collection of short stories. The unifying theme and principal protagonist is the house where the novel occurs, although in fact the singularity of the house is inaccurate, as the house is connected to a neighbouring house as well as a boat house, all of them situated by the side of a lake at a short distance to the east of Berlin. The novel has one fixed character, the gardener, a constant presence as the inhabitants of these spaces come and go. The gardener is allotted his own brief chapters, which intercut those of the changing cast. The novel’s conceit allows Erpenbeck to pirouette through modern German history. At one point the householders of the neighbouring house are Jewish, and they are forced to sell to the owner of the main house at a knock down price, which should help them to emigrate, but doesn’t. Another chapter is dedicated to a relative of the Jewish family who succeeded in getting out to South Africa, and whose memories of the German land are flavoured by his new surroundings and his sadness. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the most arresting chapters are those which occur before or after the war, including the fleeting stay of a Russian cavalry officer. The novel, though flowing towards the twenty first century, when the house will be demolished, is not afraid to step back in time on occasion. It’s a short, dense piece of writing, which harbours sadness, happiness and thwarted dreams, and offers a recondite vision of Germany’s complex twentieth century. 

A touch of sin/ tian zhu ding (w&d jia zhang-ke)

Zhang-Ke’s magisterial film yokes complexity with simplicity, micro with macro, tragedy with comedy, violence and humour. Each of the four tales within the film employs the eternally potent dramatic tool of violence, to offer a savage X-ray of society, moving from high end hotels to scabrous street restaurants where anonymous faces slurp noodles like there’s no tomorrow. I was watching it with Mr Presno, who said at the end: But they can’t show that in China can they? How Zhang-Ke gets financing for his films remains a mystery but in many ways they give the lie to the idea of China as an overwhelmingly repressive state, in part because they are permitted to show the worst of the corruption and decadence of the new money with its communist party kickbacks. Despite being split into four parts, A Touch of Sin in many ways employs a classical narrative character framework. Each of the featured four flawed characters have to fight to find their significance within a world which reduces the individual to a part in a vast machine. Whether this is through the cathartic act of killing the bad guys, as in stories 1 and 3, or choosing a tragic end, as in story 4, or just assuming a role beyond the moral or social remit of society, as in the story 2, each character realises themselves though their capacity to enact violence. This model makes for straightforward storytelling, which is at the same time a radical critique of the society they emerge from. 

the world/ shijie (w&d jia zhang-ke)

The World is named for a theme park in Beijing which features selected wonders of the world, including Big Ben, a mini Manhattan complete with Twin Towers, (long after they have fallen), a mini Eiffel Tower as well as a Taj Mahal, a St Mark’s Square and other sundry wonders. The film follows the lives of several performers who participate in the shows staged in the theme park, where they dress up in national dress of different regions. Tao, the central character, appears as an Indian dancer and a Japanese geisha, among others. However, Tao longs to travel, and although the world is on their doorstep, few of the people who work there have ever been out of China. So Jia Zhang-Ke’s conceit takes shape: the image of a burgeoning China where the world appears to be opening up is nothing more than a simulacra. The reality is that this is a kind of prison. So far so Baudrillard. It’s also interesting to note that the film occurs just as mobile phones are starting to infiltrate the social web, another mechanism that appears to expand the world, but actually contracts it, with jealous individuals constantly asking why their partner hasn’t answered their call, using the phones as a tool to micro-manage day to day relationships.

Within this context, the film looks at the realities of the lives of these ordinary citizens, many of whom are internal immigrants, coming from rural parts of the country to participate in the economic boom. This is perhaps more typical Jia Zhang-Ke material, the struggle of its citizens to adapt to the rapidly changing face of China. What he succeeds in doing so skilfully is conjuring out of this material an overview of an entire society. By the time we reach Tao’s tragic end in a flat on an old industrial estate, a far cry from the fake glory of The World, it feels as though we have traversed the length and breadth of Chinese society, from high class karaoke joints for the elite to the desperate hotels where internal immigrants turn up when they first land in town. There are many things which make Jia Zhang-Ke one of the greatest living directors, but one of them is the sheer scale of his cinematic imagination. 

film after film (j hoberman)

Hoberson is a New York based critic. This collection is made up of three parts: selected reviews from his articles for the Village Voice, a more academic section on the evolution or non-evolution of cinema, and a central collection of essays on the relationship between film and the events of the era that he was writing in, which encompassed 9/11 and the Iraq war, among other things. Besides being well versed in both popular and “world” cinema, Hoberson also displays an academic frame of reference which isn’t always to be found in the work of Anglo-Saxon film critics, happy to refer to the obvious suspects such as Bazin, but also the likes of Virilio, Baudrillard etc, without fear of sounding pretentious. (That fear being the bane of Angel-Saxon writers.) The results, particularly in the central section of the book, are a welcome reminder of the idea that cinema, even in its most commercial guise, is intricately linked with the politics of the time in which it is produced. Notably, Hoberson traces the way that the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan were reflected by Hollywood, both literally and allegorically. He also refers to the “cinematic” dimension of the attack on the Twin Towers and the way in which the defence department summoned filmmakers from Hollywood to participate in blue sky debates about combatting America’s enemies. Apart from being studded with impeccable reviews, including films by Reygadas, McQueen and Kariostami, amongst many others, Hoberson’s book brilliantly yokes together a diverse range of films, from A History of Violence to Munich to A Mighty Heart, among many others. The overlap between geo-political ambition on a militaristic and cultural scale has rarely been so well analysed from a US perspective. 

da-eum so-hee/ next sohee - (w&d july jung)

Jung’s film, whilst never radical, is a great example of how cinema acts as a portal to other parts of this small world. South Korea’s education system is frequently lauded in the West as a progressive example of the quest for excellence and the advantages of conformity. Next Sohee is a heartfelt corrective to this vision. Sohee, a bright but assertive student, is sent as part of her education to work in a call centre, where the female agents are expected to operate in as mechanical a fashion possible, convincing people who want to cancel their internet subscription to renew. Sonhee, whose secret dream is to be a dancer, rebels against the malfeasance of the company. She complains that it exploits the trainees, as well as protesting against the inhumanity of its commercial practices. But her protest comes at a terrible cost and leads to suicide. The second half of the film switches focus, with the female detective, Oh Yoo-jin, investigating the circumstances of Sonhee’s death. Her investigation takes her to the heart of a system that is both corrupt and inhumane. When her superior criticises her, saying that if they investigated every suicide they would be swamped, Oh Yoo-jin says that this is exactly what the police are for: to find out why and how society is flawed, and how that leads to tragedy. Whilst there is something discursive about all of this, the film is held together by the striking performances of its two female leads, Kim Si-Eun and Bae Doona who put raw flesh on the conceptual bones. Whilst never being a radical piece of filmmaking, Next Sohee succeeds in offering a telling portrayal of a society on the other side of the world, revealing the cracks in the South Korean economic miracle, reminding us that every society has its demons.

It is also, for anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work in a call centre, a telling reminder of the stultifying nature of that particular means of employment.

beast in the shadows (edogawa ranpo, tr. ian hughes)

Rampo is a pseudonym for the writer, Tarō Hirai. This is a novel about detective story writers, who operate under pseudonyms. Reading wikipedia, I learn that some of the novels named in Beast in the Shadows were written by ‘Ranpo’ himself. In the novel they are the work of a sadistic detective story writer who threatens a woman who jilted him. The woman then seeks the support of the narrator, another writer of detective stories, supposedly the only one who might have a brain as twisted and wily as Detective story writer #1. When the woman’s husband is murdered in bizarre circumstances, the book becomes a whodunit, with the investigation taking place across the length and breadth of Tokyo. Learning that it was written in 1928 gives what might have been a dated feeling book the sense of actually being ahead of its time, notably in its arch portrayal of the sado-masochistic anti-heroine who the narrator ends up falling for, before starting to wonder if he is being manipulated by her. Beast in the Shadows is also an interesting example of Britain’s soft cultural power, as Hirai/ Ranpo was influenced by Chesterton and Conan Doyle, turning Tokyo into a dirty, foggy Edwardian soup of a city.

priscilla (w&d sofia coppola, w. priscilla presley, sandra harmon)

Glass Half Full

Coppola looks at the other side of fame, stripping away Presley’s aura as she presents events from his young bride’s POV. Jacob Elordi’s Elvis is an anti-Elvis, all boyish moodiness and very little charisma. It’s a pared back performance which carefully deconstructs the myth, with Priscilla given centre stage. Her evolution from child bride to emancipated woman is convincingly rendered and one senses the director’s own journey from being a cog in the Coppola machine to becoming her own woman and director shadowing the film’s narrative.

Glass Half Empty

Coppola’s uneasy film, which seems to have been deliberately stripped of emotion in a flat, monotone edit, never really comes to the boil. Seeking to tell the abusive story of Elvis’ child bride, railroaded into a claustrophobic world which is controlled by Elvis, his father, and the absent Colonel Parker, the film never engages fully with the conflict or abuse inherent to her situation. The film suffers from moments of arch cliché, such as the sequence where Priscilla and Elvis take a hackneyed LSD trip, scored by suitably ‘Indian’ music, or the predictable closing scenes. In the end, for all its endeavour, Priscilla falls into the biopic trap of trying to tell too much in too short a span of time, something which the director attempts to paper over with various lukewarm montage sequences. The desire to show Elvis as a proto-monster but also a loveable poet leads to a muddy, vacillating narrative which feels as though it can never quite make up its mind. 

Iko shashvi mgalobeli / there was once a singing blackbird (w&d otar iosseliani,, w. sh. kakichashvili, dimitri eristavi)

Iosseliani’s second feature is a narrative-light account of a day in the life of a percussionist in Tbilisi. Gia is a freewheeling, happy-go-lucky percussionist in the orchestra. Something of a lothario, with an eye for the ladies and a galaxy of friends and acquaintances, his day is crammed to the gills with rehearsals, meetings, family and generally living his best life. He sometimes complains that he never has time for anything, but this is clearly down to the fact that he’s too busy running around being a lad about town. Played with a charming verve by Gela Kandelaki, Gia is a stepbrother to Agnes Varda’s Cleo or Keitel in Scorsese’s Who's That Knocking at My Door. What seems doubly remarkable about Iosseliani’s film is that despite the fact it is filmed behind ‘the iron curtain’ in the demonised USSR, Gia feels like a typical product of the late sixties, a figure endowed with so much personal freedom that it consumes him absolutely. There’s a lovely narrative strand where two visitors from Russia arrive at his home; he tells them to hang out until he gets back later, but in the social blizzard of his day he forgets all about them. Marine, played by the luminous Marina Kartsivadze, makes a cameo appearance and the film revolves around Gia’s capacity to time his entrance to play the kettle drums to the second, infuriating the conductor by only arriving in the nick of time. The film manages to remain compelling despite it being entirely episodic, with almost no attention paid to narrative: this is an immersive day in the life of a Tiblisi social butterfly and its 90 minutes are as thoroughly instructive and entertaining as the life of its protagonist, the singing blackbird of the title.

giorgobistve / falling leaves (w&d otar iosseliani, w. amiran chichinadze)

I don’t think I have ever heard Otar Iosseliani, who died last month, being referenced in the British film world. Cinemateca is honouring him with a retrospective. This early film of his, shot in his native Georgia, is an engaging coming of age tale. It focuses on Nico, a young man who gets a job in a winery as a quality control inspector. The naive Nico, engagingly played by Ramaz Giorgobiani, soon learns that his job is meaningless: the quality of the wine is of secondary importance to the need to hit quotas. When he goes against the majority to declare that the wine in Barrel 49 is not good enough, (It’s like vinegar, another worker says), he is mocked. Nico is smitten by Marine, a neighbour, another who doesn’t take him seriously. When a local bully punches him in the eye for having the temerity to visit her, Nico suddenly turns. At work he takes it on himself to put Barrel 49 out of action and snubs Marine’s attempts to apologise. 

Giorgobiani’s likeable performance holds the film together. But it’s clear that the director’s aim is to capture a portrait of his society. The film opens with on extended rural sequence, showing the vines being picked and turned into wine. Iosseliani then takes us into the homes, cafes and bars of the city. The camera darts around, capturing details, and the aesthetic feels akin to the French Nouvelle Vague or early Bertolucci. As such, the film builds up a compelling portrait of life in Soviet Georgia, which doesn’t seem so very different to life in any other part of Europe. Indeed, what is striking are the similarities, in terms of architecture, anxiety and ambition. Also notable is the representation of the female characters, Marine and her friend Lali, whose self-possession and confidence are in striking contrast to the naive Nico. 

baudolino (umberto eco, tr. william weaver)

Eco is a curious writer. One whose work as a semiotician attracted a whole generation of philosophy students and the admiration of many of Europe’s most prestigious intellectuals, but also one whose fame is based on a rip roaring medieval detective story. It’s many years since I read Name of the Rose, and in spite of labouring somewhat through Baudolino, I hope to return to it one of these days. Baudolino, tells the tale of the eponymous protagonist, who is adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, gets involved in all kinds of scrapes and battles with the emperor, before setting off on a hapless mission to find the kingdom of Prester John, the lost Christian prophet who reportedly ended up in the Indies. The novel is divided into two parts, written through forty chapters. The first deals largely with the Middle Ages politics of central and Eastern Europe. The second, a section that is more magical allegory, deals with Baudolino’s mission to the East in search of the lost prophet, and includes centaurs and cyclops other mythical creatures. There’s the sense of a writer straining to locate the precise register to tell what might have been a fascinating story, had that register been nailed down. Eco’s interest in pre-Renaissance Europe, aka the dark ages, is attractive. What were the people of that warlike continent like? Why is their history less well known than that of the Roman Empire? To what extent were the innumerable international conflicts a reflection of what we would now describe as globalisation? Where did our received idea of Europe end and the myths begin? These and other questions are latent in the text, but it never feels as though the writer quite gets to grips with them. As such, Baudolino is a lengthy curiosity, which lacks the narrative coherence of Name of the Rose. 

heaven can wait (d. ernst lubitsch, w. samson raphaelson, leslie bush-fekete)

I remember watching Ninotchka as well as To Be Or Not to Be, back in the mists of distant time. So I had a memory of Lubitsch as a subversive figure within the Hollywood cannon, someone with a measured European sophistication. In that regard, Heaven Can Wait felt like an anti-climax, with its conservative discourse on what makes for an ethical man. The apparent moral being that it’s ok to be a bit of a roguish philanderer, so long as you settle down sooner or later and marry a good woman. Don Ameche’s Van Cleve never seems wicked enough to be permitted entry to hell, which is what the initial set-up suggests.

Perhaps more interesting is the comparison between Heaven Can Wait and It’s A Wonderful Life, both films made in the shadow of war, which analyse the ethical question of what represents a well-lived and honorable life. At a time when death was riding pillion all over the world, this was clearly a pertinent issue, although both films neatly sidestep any political grandstanding. Both are helmed by European-born directors who would have been well versed in the Faust story, and both films adopt an upbeat, anti-Faustian position, where the everyday North American actions are given greater weight than vaulting European ambition. Faust goes to hell, whereas Van Cleve is promised heaven. This upbeat celebration of North American banality made sense in the forties, when the USA had ridden to Europe’s rescue and the tricky question of the country’s origins could still be ignored under the rubric of civilisation versus ‘the savages’. Films couldn’t be made without the technology of this civilisation, and film is what rescued both directors from the hell that Europe had recently become. All of which might help to explain the slightly soft-soap tone of Lubitsch’s popular film. 

forgotten manuscript/ ultimas noticias de la escritura (w. sergio chejfec, tr. jeffery lawrence)

Chejfec’s fiction has a dry charm and this non-fiction essay about the nature of writing in the pre and post digital age employs a similar tone. Broken up into 27 sections, the writer analyses the meaning of writing itself. Does a note in the margin of a book then become part of that book? Does reading a book on a screen alter the reader’s reception of said book to reading it on the page? How does the material consumption of a text affect interpretation? The book (which I read as a digital copy) poses all these and many more Barthesian questions, whilst permitting itself regular nods in the direction of the paterfamilias of Argentine literature, Borges. 

trenque lauquen (w&d citarella, w. laura paredes)

There’s a monster in Trenque, which the protagonist, Laura wants to see. She’s told she can’t see it, but she can listen to it. She strains at the door to hear, and what she hears, along with us, is the sound of the monster breathing. Which seems wholly appropriate for a film which relishes its capacity to breathe. Rather than being measured in minutes or story beats, it might be measure in breaths, the breaths the characters take as they try to work out what’s happening, and we take alongside them.

Trenque Lauquen has garnered critical plaudits and global recognition for Citarella. Its genesis as part of the Pampero stable is evident, with Llinas credited as a collaborator. At nearly five hours long, it is in the vein of Historias Minimas and La Flor, films where the director worked as a producer. All of which goes some way to explain the surefooted way her magnum opus handles the challenge of filling so much screen time so artfully. It’s almost as though a parallel version of cinema has been quietly evolving in the province of Buenos Aires, one which has no fear of taxing the audience’s attention span, something which is such a concern in other parts of the world. Because Trenque isn’t just long, it also revels in its longeurs, even down to the modes of dialogue, where the Pinteresque pause is employed to full and touching effect.

The film is divided into twelve parts, each of which has its own distinctive flavour, sometimes, as in Spregelburd’s part, defined by the acting, and sometimes defined by the mood. In her talk following the screening of Ostende, a film she said was shaped as a mash-up between Rohmer and Hitchcock, the director said that Trenque is a conversation with at least eight directors. Hitchcock might be there again, along with Antonioni, using the trope of the lady who vanishes, and the end felt as though it might be a nod to Varda’s Vagabonde. The multiplicity of influences and tones, another thing that more conventional filmmaking tends to be wary of, actually helps to define the aesthetic of Trenque Lauquen: it is many things at once, always predicated on a mystery. The mystery of the poetess, the mystery of the creature, the mystery of the missing protagonist. These hooks are enough to constantly engage the audience, and maintain the film’s rhythm: we’re not that bothered how long it takes, in fact, the drawn out nature of the quest if anything adds to our enjoyment. This is cinema operating like a sprawling novel, where the detours and distractions are part of the pleasure. 

las poetas visitan a juana bignozzi (dir. laura citarella, mercedes halfon)

The Poetesses visit Juana Bignozzi, to translate the title into English, is a lovingly crafted documentary co-helmed by Citarella with Halfon, a writer, poetess and critic. Halfon has been entrusted with the papers of the titular poetess, a formidable woman and a wonderful poet. The film offers a loving introduction to Bignozzi’s work, but more than this, it is also delightfully self-referential, asking the question of to what extent a film can ever truly represent a subject like poetry, or a poet(ess). The tension between directors is noted, with Citarella more preoccupied with these questions, whilst Halfon is engaged in the more prosaic task of paying homage to Bignozzi. There are two main areas where their approaches coincide. Firstly, with the more Bolañoesque elements of Bignozzi’s story: she spent thirty years living abroad, and the contents of this time in her life remain mysterious. She was married, but travelled extensively; in the dense forest of photographic memories left behind, many of the figures who appear are unknown and appear untraceable. There’s something of The Savage Detectives about all of this, as well as the spy narratives which Citarella loves: a fortuitous touch is the way that in a doc filmed about Bignozzi when she was still alive, there’s a sign which says in Spanish - From Russia with Love - outside the block of flats she lived in. Secondly, their approaches coincide in ultimately letting the poetry do the talking, (even if the director has to ask the question: which version of the reading is the best one to use? Is it better (more truthful) to get actors to read or not?). The final section of the film is given over entirely to the poems, although even here there’s a dialectic between sound and image, with the poems being presented both through being read and via the text itself appearing on screen. 

ostende (w&d laura citarella)

Ostende is a masterclass in how to make your debut. The film is predicated on the quiet charm of its protagonist, Laura Paredes. Staying at the eponymous off-season balneario, she observes what she believes is a conspiracy evolving between three of the other guests, an older man and two younger women. This gives the film a Hitchcockian guile, a hook to anchor the film’s quiet observations and gentle humour. As is so often the case with the films from the Pampero stable, there are elements of the shaggy dog story to the narrative. The journey is more important than the destination, even if this is to a certain extent belied by the film’s final sequence. The story Paredes constructs in her head about her fellow guests is echoed by a story for a film that one of the hotel staff tells her, a tale that promises darkness, violence and mystery, but is no more than a first act. The presence of a John Le Carré book which Paredes is reading reinforces the idea that the audience is watching a spy movie, searching for clues along with the protagonist. But the film also makes it clear that in this sense the cinematic thriller is a game, played between audience and director. The director’s role is to keep the audience guessing, which is also a way of keeping them awake and alive, as we try to decipher what the hell this all means.

There’s probably a more complex essay to be written about how this tallies with a Rioplatense consciousness, with its echoes of the oeuvres of Borges, Saer, Cortazar, Onetti among others. The ludic power of art. Maybe one day I, or another me, will get round to writing it. Meanwhile it was fascinating in the post-show talk to hear how the director was prepared to return and film another scene even after the film had premiered at BAFICI. The dexterity of the Pampero aesthetic is matched by the flexibility of their shooting methods. Ostende possesses a freshness predicated on its constant willingness to surprise, even if that surprise is a five minute sequence where someone narrates a film which will never get made. There’s the constant sense that you, along with the protagonist, have no real idea what is going to happen next, and that just makes you all the more anxious to find out, even if the subsequent discovery proves anti-climactic. Cinema becomes a maze full of dead ends and wrong turns, but there’s something fundamentally active and pleasurable contained within the frustrating process of navigating this labyrinth. 

napoleon (d. ridley scott, w. david scarpa)

It’s not hard to imagine a film where a young lad, growing up in the north, sits in his history class, listening to the teacher talk about the megalomaniac traits of Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose name, for generations, was synonymous with an idea of military prowess as well as being an existential threat to the British way of life. The man who apparently belittled Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. And this lad, rather than complying with his teacher’s derisory, arrogant attitude towards the Emperor, that curious arrogance beloved of history teachers, those who analyse the world rather than shape it, actually feels inspired by the short Corsican’s story. He thinks: one day, I too will be a kind of Napoleon. And as the lad grew, and took his place in the world, he did, indeed, become a kind of Napoleon. A general capable of summoning armies, making them march to his beat, creating a legacy which would give him the power to indulge his most outlandish whims and convert them into spectacles which cost more than anyone in the north in the fifties could ever have imagined. He was, and is, his own brand of Napoleon, and now, with the light of evening beckoning, it was time to finally pay homage to that figure that had inspired him in the classroom all those years ago, a man whose name could be uttered in the same breath as Alexander the Great, a ruthless imposer of order, a doomed lover, a tyrant to some and a hero to others.

And had this film been made, by Lynn Ramsey or the late Terrence Davis, for example, the only British directors who spring to mind who might have conceived and convinced others of their vision, then it would possibly have been a far more insightful film about power and ambition than the one the lad ended up making. 

minor detail (adania shibli; tr. elisabeth jaquette)

Man not the tank shall prevail

Next, I pick up the map showing the country until 1948, but I snap it shut as horror rushes over me. Palestinian villages which on the Israeli map appear to have been swallowed by a Yellow Sea, appear on this one by the dozen, their names practically leaping off the page.

It’s been a long time since I’ve passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right.

Perhaps it has always been the way that the workings of the wider world, which have no obvious material impact upon our personal lives, nevertheless impact on other, more atavistic levels. When I was a child, the ghost idea of Boney, (Napoleon Bonaparte), still existed in the folk memory of the British isles, and one can imagine generations of British children being touched by the residual fear of a figure who died in the early nineteenth century. Wars have an effect which go far beyond the waging of them; the effects percolate through into the future. In my lifetime this has been true of Vietnam, Iraq, the Malvinas, Rwanda, Afghanistan, to name but a few.

The past months have added another war to that list. A war which feels like the apogee of the unjust twenty first century war. All war is perhaps a perverse blend of courage and cowardice, and the objective of those who wage war is to minimise the amount of courage required, as courage comes with a cost. Twenty first century warfare has evolved into an object lesson in cowardice. Dropping bombs from the sky to kill civilians requires no courage. Anymore than leaving cholera infested blankets on trees. When the armoury of the media is employed to reinforce this cowardice, the effect is doubly obscene. Children stagger across the eleven inches of your laptop screen, wailing in terror, blood-soaked, and this is pronounced as some kind of act of courageous military valour. When, in your bones, you know you are witnessing actions which are crimes against humanity.

All of this has a terrible relevance to Adania Shibli’s slender, compelling novel which uses fiction to investigate the theft of Palestinian land and the reality of Palestinian oppression within the apartheid state which Israel has since become. The novel opens with an account of the events leading up to the criminal rape and murder of a girl by soldiers who are participating in the establishment of Israel’s southern border. The prose is relentlessly material: language as an unvarnished testament. The skill in the writing is the way in which the authorial voice is reduced to the bare minimum. The story is presented from the point of view of an officer, commanding his troops, and there are moments where the reader almost (but never quite) comes to sympathise with the officer, who seems to be a force for the maintenance of civilised mores within war, until he isn’t anymore. The soldier is in great pain following an insect bite and this pain ultimately destroys his moral compass, and he becomes as much of a criminal as the soldiers he is trying to keep in line.

The second part of the novel is told from the point of view of a female writer, an avatar for the author, who is investigating the crime committed by the soldier all those years ago. History filters through and repeats itself. Once again, the story is told using pragmatic prose, which describes the fearful and absurd constructions placed upon an ordinary Palestinian citizen within their own country by the Israeli state. The narrator decides to research the crime, a process which involves entering the Israeli side of the country, with all the fearful paranoia that this engenders for a Palestinian. Simple things like hiring a car and driving that car down a road become fraught with risk. Terror stalks her heels, a terror that was initiated in the construction of the Israeli state and the theft of Palestinian land, and a terror that is all too understandable today, because it is underpinned by an apparent right to kill Palestinian citizens with impunity.

In her trip, the narrator notes how the geography of the land has been rewritten over the course of the last fifty years. Towns and villages which existed for centuries have been erased. The current events in Gaza appear to be an extension of this colonial practice. Reading Shibli’s novel reinforces a sense of impotence in the face of injustice. The only thing we can do is bear witness, as writers and as readers. The scales of history will have the ultimate word on whether the occupiers’ cowardly war will be one which succeeds in its aims or ultimately, as is the case with so many cowardly wars, leads only towards a Pyrrhic victory. What is undoubtable is that the end of the war will not come with the cessation of violence, because, as Shibli’s novel so eloquently shows, the violence committed by one generation lives on to haunt those that follow. 

stavisky (d. alain resnais, w. jorge semprún)

Resnais had a curious career. From the avant-garde to this somewhat run of the mill version of what might have been a remarkable tale. You can understand the attraction of the story, one that he perhaps learnt about as a kid. Stavisky was a maverick Ukrainian born near Kiev who immigrated to France and built himself up as an impresario. He dabbled in the entertainment business as well as the bond market, where he made fraudulent profits which lead to his eventual demise in spite of having bribed a fair quantity of politicians. It’s a jazz age story set in Paris and Biarritz with an expensive costume budget and music by Sondheim, but besides these technical elements and Belmondo’s grandstanding, this feels like a film which is searching for its raison d’être. The narrative, told in part via flashback, has a heavy handed feel, and the film starts to sag under the weight of the menagerie of French character actors who traipse across the screen. It’s a long way from the formal playfulness of the director’s early work. 

killers of the flower moon (w&d martin scorsese, w. eric roth, david grann)

There’s a certain irony in Scorsese, an alpha male filmmaker, whose films so often revolve around the activities of other alpha males, making a film in his dotage which is predicated upon the strength of a woman. Lily Gladstone’s performance as Mollie brings a subtle charge to proceedings which all the grandstanding of De Niro and DiCaprio cannot compete with. She inveighs the film with a sense of that which goes beyond dialogue, the power of a look, the throwaway line. Where De Niro and DiCaprio are all surface - the latter surface emotion, surface stupidity, the former surface cunning, a typical late De Niro genial monster, Gladstone seems to be all depth, as though she has no need to speak in order to convey thought. It’s a compelling performance, which ties in with De Niro’s early observation to his nephew that the Osage say that the white person’s speech is like the chirp of a blackbird, and they will use silence to counter this, examining the weakness of their white interlocutor.

Around the midpoint of the film, Mollie gets sick. She drops out of the narrative to a certain extent, and the film shifts to more familiar Scorsese tropes of the family and its corrupting influence. It descends into a meta drama about the relationship between DiCaprio’s Ernest and his uncle, William Hale, played by De Niro. Their interaction feels predictable and follows a vein that runs through Scorsese’s work of the seductive but malevolent power of the family. There is a fearsome attempt to depict DiCaprio’s Ernest in a not altogether unsympathetic light, in spite of the fact that he is responsible for the killing of two of his wife’s sisters, amongst other crimes. This feels a lot like the exec producer actor interfering with narrative logic.

Having said which, the first half of Killers of the Flower Moon, until Mollie becomes bedridden, is almost vintage Scorsese.  At his best, he is a master of making big issues fit the screen, as though they have been waiting for him to boil them down into 120 minutes. The intercutting of archive footage, the grand set pieces, the swooping camera, the rhythmic edit, the sense of the narrative being driven through the use of music and edit, the ellipsing of time, all these are present in the opening hour. Then, like a marathon runner spotting the tape and slowing down, the second half of the film, robbed of Gladstone’s ludic energy, seems to run out of gas. (Or oil.)