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.