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?