on zionist literature (ghassan kanafani, tr mahmoud najib)

Read around the issue of Palestine and you soon come across the legendary figure of Kanafani. Critic, novelist, politician and revolutionary, who achieved all of this by the age of 36, when he was assassinated by Mossad. Not many literary critics are targeted by foreign secret services: the power of the word proven in the act of killing. On Zionist Literature explores how the very notion of the Zionist state was seeded through literature. Its critique encompasses authors from George Eliot to Arthur Koestler to Leon Uris. It’s one of those breathtakingly brilliant treatises that recognises the soft power of the written word as a seedbed for the cultivation of ideas. In this case the idea that Israel had a right to occupy Palestinian land and displace the Palestinian population. There are elements of the better known Edward Said’s intellectual project at play here, but Kanafani’s argument is all his own. How do ideas succeed in taking over the world? Insidiously, by stealth, Kanafani argues, showing how writers who believe in the concept of Zionism have manipulated historical data to support the brute force colonialism they seek to propagate. 

os verdes anos (w&d paulo rocha, w. nuno bragança)

Os Verdes Anos, Rocha’s first film, is an effortless, affectionate dive into the emerging Lisbon of the early sixties. Julio, a winsome lad from the provinces, comes to the big city at the invitation of his uncle. He gets a job at a cobblers and falls for Ilda, who works as a maid for a wealthy family. Their nascent love affair, perfectly captured by the fine-honed screenplay, plays out as an inspiring model and cautionary tale. Julio is gauche,  but gradually begins to find his feet and his manhood. Ilda has ambitions to change her station, ambitions which her wit and beauty more than justify. Will they find a way to construct a future or will the big city swallow them up? The narrative is rendered with such unfettered charm that their story seduces, no matter the resolution. This charm lies in the pared back dialogue, the remarkable cinematography of Luc Mirot and the beguiling score by Carlos Paredes. One instantly understands how Os Verdes Anos thrust Rocha to the forefront of European cinema. The theme of a rural soul coming to the big city echoes Chabrol’s Les Cousins, and the way the film captures urban life is reminiscent of the nascent films of Godard, Iosseliani and others. That movement from the rural to the urban feels as though it has more or less played itself out in Europe. The contemporary version of this journey is one of immigration from the south or the third world to the fortresses of the western economies. 

clorindo testa. (w&d mariano llinás)

WTF is Clorindo Testa? If you don’t know beforehand, you’re not likely to emerge from Llinás’ film much the wiser. In a similar vein to Citarella’s Las Poetas Visitan a Juana Bignozzi, also from the Pampero stable, the director uses the commission of a film about the Argentine architect as a vehicle to interrogate the very idea of the documentary biopic, stripping out most of the bio in the process. The result is playful, frustrating, laugh-out-loud funny, and inevitably polarising. People come to the film to find out about Clorindo Testa, and leave either dazzled or ennervated by Llinás and his Rioplatense playfulness. It may be an acquired taste (but then so is cinema these days, and documentaries even more so), but there’s something enchanting about Llinás’ determination to go against the grain. When he shows the work-in-progress to friends and ex-wife, the ubiquitous Laura Paredes, they criticise him for making a film about himself, whilst he lurks at the back of the shot, raising his eyebrows. It’s all very arch, very offbeat, but it’s also great to see someone being given plata and taking the attitude that he’s going to do what he wants with it, even when everyone is telling him he’s in the wrong. In a medium that is so much formed by the compromise of artistic vision and the importance of treading a populist line, Llinás and Pampero remain a shining light on behalf of maverick self-indulgent genius. 

down these mean streets (piri thomas)

Piri Thomas’ Nuyorican memoir serves as an intriguing counterpoint to Arenas’ Before Night Falls. Although Thomas’ memoir ends before he becomes a writer, both address the way in which their conflict with the state grew out of a romantic vision of the self which couldn’t find a home within their society. Thomas, like Arenas, ends up in prison, albeit for more explicit criminal behaviour. Thomas’ romantic struggle has to do with race. A child of Puerto Ricans, he is mixed race, and finds himself caught between the twin poles of whiteness and blackness. Another accompanying text would be Baldwin’s Another Country. Thomas is haunted by his identity vacio, even going so far as to go on a mission to the south of the USA to see what life is like as a black man there, a journey which only serves to confirm the prejudice he has always felt, in spite of the fact he is not ‘black’, in the same way as his Harlem friends are. The melting pot of NY is the perfect arena for Thomas to play out this crisis, but seemingly inevitably it leads to addiction, crime and prison. This is a heart-on-sleeve memoir, and the reader finds him or herself curious about all that must have come after the book ends, the journey towards poetry and literature which would become another home for Piri Thomas. 

l’atelier (w&d laurent cantet, w robin campillo)

L’Atelier has a brilliant premise. A small group of mixed race teenagers from the Mediterranean town of Le Ciotat come together one summer for a writing workshop, helmed by the Parisian author, Olivia Dejazet, (Marina Foïs). The kids are supposed to create a thriller. They debate different ideas, touching on violence, history, race. One of them, Antoine (Matthieu Lucci) presents work which feels ultra violent. He provokes conflict with the second generation kids, from Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa. He’s a troublemaker, but he fascinates Olivia, who starts to investigate and discovers Antoine’s links to the far right. This set-up is highly effective, but the meta-drama between Olivia and Antoine starts to feel as though it pulls focus from the other kids’ story (and the fictional story they are creating). Their stories get lost, and the device, which seems ideal to explore the shape of French history over the course of the post-war period, feels as though it is sacrificed in order to explore Antoine’s neo-romantic radicalisation. It’s great to discover a film with the ambition and the wit to take on the issues L’Atelier does, but the resolution and enlace didn’t feel as though they quite lived up to these ambitions. 

before night falls (reinaldo arenas)

Cuba is a recurring fever dream in the western imagination. At once an unimpeachable ideal and a communist anathema. Arenas’ sad autobiography comes down firmly on the anti-Castro side, for reasons which the narrative makes clear, even if there is a wistfulness about the early childhood chapters which help to reinforce the idea of an island idyll. The book is more or less from the cradle to the grave. After his rural upbringing, Arenas briefly joins Castro’s cause, but soon finds himself considered an enemy, both for his homosexuality and his criticisms of the state, some of which appear in novels he manages to get published outside the country and the censor’s reach. The repression he receives as a gay writer, which leads to the harshest of imprisonments, also means that Arenas bears witness to the human rights abuses of the Castro regime. Throughout it all, Arenas never loses his lust for life or men and his hope to escape the island. He finally makes it out,  reaching New York. Whilst enjoying a greater sense of personal liberty in the US, he is also shunned for his political views and soon realises that the grass may be greener on the other side, but there are still worms. The tragic Padilla is a recurring figure in Arenas’ story, and the way in which a whole generation of poets and writers was crushed is a key part of the book, although Arenas is sassy enough to realise that in the other world, writers are crushed by other forces, those of capital. There are always forces out to crush writers, there’s no getting away from them. 

l’emploi du temps (w&d laurent cantet, w. robin campillo)

Cantet, who died earlier this year was, for a while, one of the most feted directors on the planet. Looking at his IMDB page, it looks as though things might have started to go awry when he directed Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, in 2012, adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates novel. Up to then his cerebral, measured movies were big festival hitters. L'emploi du temps, a title I suspect is a pun, although my French isn’t quite good enough to confirm this, is a slow burn drama which looks at corporate life and the capitalist world. Vincent, a dreamy misfit, lies to everyone about his career. Unemployed, he constructs a narrative about another job working for a development agency in Geneva, where he theoretically helps small African start-ups. In reality he’s fleecing his former acquaintances by falsely promising to invest their savings in emerging Eastern European markets, as well as getting caught up in a smuggling business. Vincent thereby positions himself at the most dubious edges of the capitalist Ponzi scheme, which helps him maintain his wife and family in their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle. All of his is slightly thematic, and the narrative perhaps sags under the weight of the film’s ambitions, but L'emploi du temps nevertheless represents an attempt to puncture the creeping materialist comfort of affluent Europe, a companion piece to Hanecke’s more radical Seventh Continent. 

penda’s fen (w. david rudkin, d. alan clarke)

Stroud festival is a celebration of the British esoteric, from Morris Dancing to Jarvis. My friends’ film the Ballad of Shirley Collins played, as well as Penda’s Fen. This came from the BBC cycle The Play for Today, which ran for 15 years or so and was once a seedbed both for British dramatic talent and also, as Penda’s Fen shows, for the subversive. The 90 minute film is a coming of age tale which follows Stephen, who lives in the remote Worcestershire countryside. Stephen has to come to terms with the fact that he’s gay, and that he’s not the vicar’s son he believed himself to be. Directed by Alan Clarke, David Rudkin’s script is in many ways a fascinating treatise on Britain in the seventies, with references to dark political forces, industrial pollution and homophobia. It features dream sequences with Edward Elgar and King Penda himself. It is also, from a screenwriting point of view, a fascinating argument both for and against development. Whilst Stephen’s journey lends the narrative a central pillar, the film is messy, with a super-abundance of ideas which don’t always cohere. However, the very existence of these ideas is what makes the film unique, and still watched on a cult level fifty years later. Somewhere in the middle might be the perfect movie, but of course perfect movies have never existed, not even in Arthurian Britain. 

sleeveless (natasha stagg)

Authors who might act as references for Stagg’s essays include Jia Tolentino, Mark Greif and further back, the ubiquitous Didion. Stagg’s essays are mainly NY based. They inhabit the edges of the fashion world and ‘new media’, both of which industries she dissects wryly, as well as making observations on what it’s like to be a young, literate woman in NY, with its complex dating scene and harsh economic realities. There are times when the essays appear to meander, but within these rivers there are gems. This is where you need to come to get the skinny on what IG influencer culture is really like: one well-researched essay in particular goes further into the mindset of these new young capitalist puritans than anything else I have read.  

“The way the political situation is infiltrating my social life is alarming, because it isn’t.”

“The nineties, as seen by millennials, were the last decade of ignorant bliss.”