white sands (geoff dyer)

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

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

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

the substance (w&d coralie fargeat)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

le sang d’un poète (w&d jean cocteau)

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

clandestina (w&d maria mire)

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

the colour of pomegranates (w&d parajanov)

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

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

paris qui dort (d. rené clair)

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

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

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

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

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

astrakan 79 (w&d catarina mourão)

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

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

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

no country for old men (cormac mccarthy)

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

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

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

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