fuenteovejuna (lope de vega)

Fuenteovejuna is a story about citizens who take a terrible, courageous risk. In the face of oppression, they chose to unite and fight back, killing the oppressor. In the seventeenth century, this kind of action rarely ended well. I don’t know enough about Spanish history but Shakespeare’s take on the Peasant’s Revolt in Henry VI, and rebellion in general, makes clear the price that anyone who went against the established rule had to be prepared to pay. (Of course it is not so very different today.) So, how should this affect the staging of the play? Clearly the element of risk is fundamental. Lope’s play incorporates what they call in modern screenwriting terms, ‘jeopardy’. How should jeopardy be introduced into the staging? There must be a million ways, this is the beauty of staging a classic text, but one thing that has to happen is that the contract of the play, which is between those staging it and those watching it, should not be too cosy. To get to the heart of the play’s intentions and communicate this with the public, in other words to honour the writer, involves being prepared to incomodar the audience - to make them uncomfortable. This isn’t a cute classic comedy, it’s a cry of defiance and courage.

Watching a recent staging made me think about what radical risk takers the Golden Age theatre practitioners were, in both Spain and Britain. The plays repeatedly engage with stories, characters and perspectives which questioned the established social and political order at a time when theatres could be arbitrarily shut, when playwrights died in duels, when the very action of participating in theatre implied positioning oneself on a crepuscular margin of society. With luck, you made money and retired to Warwickshire. Without luck, you died in a ditch.

The trouble with the staging of classics, something the RSC also struggles with in my experience, is that there is a desire to tell the audience: don’t worry, we know this is a challenging watch, but we’re going to hold your hand and make sure you don’t suffer too much. When what is essential to the process of the play is a sense of danger, or unease, of uncertainty. Will the villagers be hanged for their valour? Will the forces of law and order bulldoze them in a pit? How scared are they? How scared are we for them? Without this tension, the play becomes an exercise in speaking verse, no more than an archeological process. How to achieve these ends is the great challenge the director faces. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb: better to fail valiantly than to anaesthetise the play’s radical premise.

Juan Rojo: So what do you think the town should do?

Alderman: The town should die, or kill these tyrants. We are many, they are few. 

pat garrett and billy the kid. (d. peckinpah, w. rudy wurlitzer)

A strange, episodic masterpiece from Peckinpah. Two hours that rumble along towards a long-awaited climax, which is inevitably anti-climactic, and deliberately staged as such. One of the two protagonists has to die, this much is known, only the manner of their death will be revelatory. That Kristofferson’s Billy is killed in such an unheroic fashion speaks to the filmmaker’s sympathies. There is no glory in Pat Garrett’s victory. As in the case of The Getaway, Peckinpah is rooting for the outsider; the villains are the cattle barons who have seized the land and with whom Garrett has made an uneasy alliance. He has sold his soul, his wife tells him, and no matter how much James Coburn’s implacable countenance might try to hide this truth, he knows and we know that she’s right. The existential struggle that underpins their conflict is artfully related by a director whose subtlety is masked by the vigorous masculinity of his films. This is as insightful a deconstruction of the western myth as you could hope for, and its relevance  in an era of snake charming capitalists is as valid as ever.

A note on Dylan. His puckish performance counterpoints the machismo of the other characters. He isn’t just acting: he’s infiltrating his whole cryptic take on art into the performance. A character that goes by the name of Alias, who doesn’t use a gun, who instinctively sides with the outlaw. 

pacification (w&d albert serra, w. baptiste pinteaux)

Colonialism. The Honorary Consul. Graham Greene territory, Malcolm Lowry territory. Shady dealings in the tropics. Opaque conversations which hint at the greater existential battles being waged on the planet, the unnamed battles, the undisclosed wars. It’s exciting material which Albert Serra seeks to constantly mystify and de-excite. Takes are long, conversations are cryptic, the stakes are never clear. The end result is a woozy, vaguely hypnotic movie which feels as though it’s struggling to resist the weight of its own pretension, which in turn is not such a bad trope in a film, albeit one which is always likely to register higher with the arthouse crowd than the general public, whatever that amorphous body might be. I might have missed things, but I was never quite clear what the post-colonial message was saying, beyond beware men in white suits. As a spectator I felt awash in this lush world, drifting through a booze-sodden lost weekend, absolutely certain that the events unfolding before my eyes held more meaning, more complexity, more gravity, than anything I could ever hope to understand in my inebriated state of mind.  

a day in the life of abed salama: a palestine story (nathan thrall)

Nathan Thrall’s book, published in 2023, is centred around a bus accident in the West Bank where several Palestinian schoolchildren were killed. The bus collided with a truck on a day of heavy rain and caught fire. The response from the Israeli rescue services took far too long. As noted, if kids were seen throwing stones at an Israeli truck, there would be a reaction in minutes. The response from the Palestinian rescue services was hamstrung by the tortuous procedural and geographical obstacles which the occupation of the West Bank has put in place. Thrall’s book perfectly captures the way in which Israel is an apartheid state, discriminating mercilessly against the Palestinians, both those who live within the official boundaries of Israel and those who live on the side which is in theory governed by the PA (or in Gaza, Hamas). Events of the past year have made this beyond obvious. What Thrall’s book shows, beyond the tragedy of the event it relates, is how the groundwork for the racist actions of the Israeli state in both Gaza and the West Bank had been constantly put in place ever since the Nakba. The tragedy Thrall’s book describes, of young kids needlessly dying a horrible violent death, now seems like a prelude to that which has come to pass. We inhabit an obscene era. Every day there are images of children, mutilated, killed in the most disgusting, cowardly manner. And it is excused by global politicians, or even celebrated by Israelis and other elements of a neo-fascist class which seeks to destroy the very notion of a shared humanity. Thrall was the Cassandra to all this, and the warnings contained within his devastating book are coming true every day in front of our desensitised eyes.

la habitación de al lado (w&d almodóvar, w. sigrid nunez)

Will Almodovar’s latest break the tradition of late twentieth century auteur cineastes going to the US and making a horlicks of it? Thinking Wong Kar Wai, Haneke, even Herzog. Well, not really. The Room Next Door, to give it its English title, is a curious construction. It sets out its stall early on that it’s about death, with some heavy handed dialogue (lost in translation?) as Tilda Swinton’s sepulchral Martha, clearly named for Martha Gellhorn, tells her long lost friend Ingrid that she has terminal cancer. Thereafter the film becomes a meditation of sorts on what makes for a good death. Martha coerces Ingrid into helping her go through this process, which is curiously bloodless. The most passion in the film comes from their shared ex-lover, played by John Turturro with a bullish charm, as he goes off on one about climate change and neo-liberalism. Worthy enough subjects, to be sure, but they feel shoe-horned into the film. And it’s a film of shoe-horns. There’s a gratuitous burning house scene, there’s a trademark flashback scene, which in another Almodóvar film might have been revelatory, but in this one just feels tacked on, because there was some spare budget?, there’s even a fleeting scene set in Iraq, where Martha the war photographer appears, learns that people like to fuck in wartime, then is banished to become sepulchral Martha once again. (The second film this year about a war photographer named after another famous war photographer.) There’s even a quickfire bowling scene, which might be another homage to Turturro’s role in Liebowski.

There’s the kernel of something intriguing about a late stage director musing on what will come his way shortly, and the homage to Joyce and Houston feels poetically on point, but at the same time the film feels uneven, unsure of itself. New York looks pretty, but the line: ‘Pink snow, at least something good has come out of climate change’, which Martha offers early on feels indicative of a film which isn’t entirely sure of its footing. Fortunately Turturro’s later monologue puts us straight, as he makes it clear that climate change is definitely not a good thing.

the war game (w&d peter watkins)

Playing as part of a radical season in Cinemateca, The War Game is a curious blend of horror and lost Englishness. A mock documentary set in Kent, describing the impact of a nuclear strike on Britain, the film is famous for having been banned by the BBC after being initially commissioned by them. Watkins manages the horror superbly. The film escalates in its brutality, starting with a kind of normality and then moving on to full blown nuclear firestorm, inspired, as made clear by the commentary, by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, but also Dresden and Hamburg. You can readily understand why the BBC got cold feet about screening it, as the images of a devastated Kent and its citizens are genuinely shocking. The horrors of war had rarely been so surgically captured.

At the same time, as an Englishman, there is something nostalgic about viewing a lost Britain, with its clipped accents and eccentric dress sense, and a certain reticence which seems to have been foregone with the coming of Britpop, Brexit and post war prosperity. At one point the documentary mentions ration cards, reminding us that the film was made at a time when every adult would remember what a ration card implied, something subsequent generations would never have to contemplate, or even understand. There is also something in the tone of Watkins’ film, a blend of the extreme with a tight-lipped understatement, which speaks to the qualities which might once have been perceived to represent Britishness, or at least a version of Britishness which this writer might identify with. 

orbital (samantha harvey)

Orbital is a short, Calvino-esque novel set in space. Six astronauts on a space station pass their day passing days, spinning around and around the globe, zooming through timelines and over continents. The novel is more of a meditation than a story. A meditation on what it must be like to possess this perspective, to live weightless, to be pioneers for a new version of humanity. There are several bravura passages, including one which shows humanity’s seconds within the twenty four hour clock of the universe’s existence. The six characters are all given their due, with memories and dreams folded into the view they share of the planet earth. The vast immensity of space, with its strange silences, is a suitable backdrop for a book which navigates a path between sly tedium and great beauty. 

the man with the golden arm (d. otto preminger, w. walter newman, lewis meltzer, nelson algren)

In the olden days you went to Cinemateca half expecting that the projector might break down and the film would struggle to get to the end. Those days have gone, just like the old salas have gone, but this screening was a throwback. Half way through, the film gave up the ghost, and even though valiant efforts were made to resuscitate it, I ended up watching the final hour in a much better print on YouTube.

Given all this, it’s worth noting that the screening was part of a season of alternative films that managed to sneak under the radar. Preminger’s Chicago, full of sleaze balls, femmes fatales, and flop houses, not to mention the junk, is beautifully realised. It feels like something out of Gorky, the lower depths, a place where the crushing  inevitability of poverty is bound to get you in the end. In the midst of this, Sinatra gives a bravura performance, part junkie, part matinee idol. The operatic notes of the direction clearly play to his hand, but we perceive another man in his performance to the smooth entertainer he became. The desperation of his character, Frankie Machine, is completely credible, which perhaps hints at another life Sinatra might have lived had the gods not smiled on him. 

cerrar los ojos (w&d víctor erice; w. michel gaztambide)

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, watched Erice’s classic film, The Spirt of the Beehive. Or at least, I don’t think I have. Perhaps one day I will watch it and go - oh yes, I remember seeing this in Winchester or York or London or Adelaide. And that would be an entirely appropriate method of remembering, according to this, Erice’s third film. Close your Eyes deals with the issues of memory and ageing, in a luminous, humane fashion. As the third near three hour film I have seen in a row at Cinemateca, it is a wonderful correlative to the supposed need to cram a film with beats and desperate rhythms. Film is storytelling as much as it is percussive, and Erice’s meditative mystery tale is an exemplar of this.

Its simplicity is a large part of its effectiveness. A TV program about strange disappearances contacts Miguel, a director who has long since quit the business. The TV show is making an episode about Julio, the protagonist of the director’s last, abortive movie, who went missing overnight. Due to the actor’s disappearance, the film was never finished, and Miguel’s career fizzled out. Not that he is bitter: he has found a kind of peace living in a small coastal community, with his dog and his translations and spells as a fisherman. But the call to participate in the program will lead to a rupture in this quiet reclusive life, as he goes in search of not so much a meaning for his lost art, as a function. At the heart of the film, perhaps, is the idea that film is both eternal and functional, on a very straightforward basis. Looking at a screen is more than just a way of passing time: it can also change the way your mind works, the way you think, the way you see the world and what is in front of your eyes.

There is something of Prospero about Miguel, albeit a calm Prospero, reconciled to his fate. HIs art will reconfigure those things which have gone awry in the past. Cerrar los Ojos is a valedictory work of art, reminding this viewer of the way in which film is capable of unfolding layers of story and meaning without resorting to histrionics.