the big goodbye (sam wasson)

Wasson’s book narrates the story of Chinatown, the film. How it came to be conceived, developed, made, distributed. It focuses on four key figures: Bob Towne, screenwriter, Robert Evans, producer, Polanski, director and Nicholson. In a sense the book is a tragedy, a paean to a world that might have been but never was, due to the obvious flaws of these four key players, but also because of the changing face of Hollywood and, by implication, the drift within the USA towards a more stupid vision of what it aspired to be as a nation/ culture. More commerce, less art. The balance between these two poles of a film’s production has always been a delicate one, film being an industry as well as an artform. Wasson describes how Chinatown’s success as a model of a certain kind of Hollywood filmmaking was the result of Evans’ indulgence and patronage, a production model which, even as the film was being released, was already in the process of being disassembled. For those interested in this complex equation, Wasson’s book is a masterly guide. The book doesn’t shy away from the Polanski issue, laying bare his crimes. However, it does look to contextualise this within the framework of the director’s life, noting the tragedies which befell him from birth, his mother killed in a concentration camp and the later murder of Sharon Tate and his unborn child. All the characters, save perhaps Nicholson, emerge ultimately as monsters of one kind or another, the product and victims of a kind of high Roman empire Hollywood epoch, where excess and wealth were celebrated, but whose fruits were a succession of films engaging with the artform in a manner that has never been equalled. Nicholson is described as a Falstaffian character within this network, at once vain, generous and brilliant. 

ukamau (w&d jorge sanjinés, w. óscar soria)

Sanjinés is not a well known name in Anglo- Saxon circles. Yet he has been one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers from this side of the world for decades, exerting a strong social conscious in his films. Ukamau, which translated from the Aymara, means something along the lines of ‘That’s how it is’, is one of his earliest films. Andrés Mayta leaves behind his wife, Sabina, when he goes to market. Whilst he is away, Ramos rapes and murders her. Andrés wants revenge, but knows the police won’t be interested and the indigenous social code forbids acts of violent retribution. The film, whilst showing the world of the Aymara on the Isla de Sol in lake Titicaca, slowly plays out to the moment when Andrés Mayta finally takes revenge, far from his own territory. The subtext of the tale is clearly about the abuse of the indigenous peoples by the colonial arrivalists. Whilst there is nothing too subtle about this, the depiction of Andrés Mayta’s moral dilemma is artfully described, and the insight into the world of the Aymara is beautifully shown. It was reminiscent of Rossellini or Paulo Rocha, as well as, (observed by Sñr Amato), Mark Jenkins’ Bait.

la batalla de chile, segunda parte: el golpe de estado (w&d. patricio guzmán, w. pedro chaskel, jose bartolome)

The scary thing about watching Guzmán’s fabled documentary (albeit only part 2) is that it feels closer than ever. A brilliant exercise in both compiling material and editing it, The Battle of Chile acts as account of events and a warning. This could happen in your back yard. With the efficiency of a thriller, the film traces the lead up to September 11th, 1973, the first 911, when the military staged a coup against Allende’s government. We know what’s coming, and surely Allende knows it too, but history is remorseless and irreversible. The film is an act of courage, in the filming of it, in the conception of it and in the execution. As such it contains a moral authority which cinema can rarely aspire to. Who knows how much of that courage will be needed as the world lurches in the direction of the golpistas. 

fort apache (d. ford, w. frank s. nugent, james warner bellah)

Ford’s sweeping cavalry western is the kind of stuff we in the Anglosphere were raised on. The cavalry is coming. The injuns speaking ‘mexican’. John Fucking Wayne. Watching it one can trace a line in the thinking of those who believe they have a right to annex other people’s territory by any means possible; to trick, cheat and attack those ‘others’ who help to define the supposed values that the aggressor represents.

And yet, whilst being the kind of film that helped to consolidate those opinions, merely by presenting the matrix, Fort Apache is in fact a complex work of art, conscious of the moral ambiguity of the material. Hell, even Wayne feels betrayed by the American hero. In choosing to tell this story, Ford analyses the cruelty and duplicity involved in the conquest of the West. Fonda’s Captain Thursday is revealed in the end to be a foolish popinjay whose arrogance leads his troops to destruction. In one great scene between Wayne and Fonda, the tension between the two reaches boiling point. The casting of Wayne as Fonda’s rival is inspired: the true American is not the one who seeks a genocidal confrontation, it’s the one who is prepared to risk his life to achieve a peaceable settlement with the Apache.

One wonders if the sweeping cinematography and the comedic Irish characters work to obscure this message. The film is layered with enough sub-plots and B-stories to make the most exacting script doctor happy. The images are still breathtaking, all these years later. In so many ways it feels like an emblematic US film. But contained within the apple is the worm of rapaciousness. In a way Fort Apache might have been the place where Doctor Strangelove was born. 

young mr. lincoln (d. john ford, w. lamar trotti, rosemary benét)

Films gain relevance through context. For decades, Ford’s Young Lincoln might have seemed outdated, irrelevant, a throwback to another North American era, one that had little to do with the present. However, watching it at this point in history, its lessons about what might truly represent US values is a sharp corrective. The quintessential American hero, Lincoln is homespun and folksy. He knows how to speak to the common people, successfully thwarting a lynching through the power of his oratory alone. He also has a clear idea that there is a difference between right and wrong. When two brothers are accused of murdering a local, Lincoln offers to defend them, convinced they are innocent in large part by his relationship with their mother, who reminds him of his own mother. Obviously, in this America, he is right, and he gets them off. The last third of the film is given over to events in the courtroom. The incohate values of the mob are thwarted and order is restored. It’s the beginning of the leader’s rise to greatness.

There’s something hokey about the film, in spite of Henry Fonda’s subtle performance, a performance which constructs Lincoln as an outsider, seeking to find his place in society. After seeing his son getting lost in the maze of his mind in The Trip, this is a complete counterpoint, with Henry Fonda’s Lincoln sure of his own judgement, confident in the innate rightness of his actions. There appears to be no place for Ford and Fonda’s Lincoln in today’s United States. 

the trip (d. roger corman, w. jack nicholson)

The Trip is both a cultural emblem and a work of art. As a cultural emblem, it’s astonishing. Perhaps the high water mark of a liberated, prelapsarian LA, before Manson, before Altamont, before the dream died. Because the film, for all its druggy flightiness, is anchored in a Southern California actuality. The clubs and the streets, as well as the modernist mansions and the beaches. This is a world where drug taking is not so much transgressive as integrated into the development of the soul, the world of psychic experimentation, á la Aldous Huxley. Drug-taking isn’t hedonistic, it verges on a shamanic, religious experience. This appears to be what Corman is seeking to capture, and whilst it is easy to ridicule this intent, there is perhaps something remarkable about it, a road which LA and the rest of the world turned off of, fearful of the dark edges and the anarchy. (How curious that at the end of the Pennbaker Dylan doc, he is referred to, disrespectfully, as “an anarchist”.)

Form and content overlap, the medium is the message. In order to convey his protagonist’s journey, Corman has to employ visual effects which, in a technological medium, are bound to date. The film feels like a half-way house between Cocteau and Gaspar Noe. The capturing of dream, or nightmare, has always been one of the most elusive quests of art. The Trip includes visual motifs which are dreamlike, something that maps onto a LSD trip. Whilst at times it seems to drift, when the film builds towards the more nightmarish nighttime sequence in the bars and streets of downtown LA, it gathers pace and narrative tension. That it holds together at all is minor miracle, and credit to the screenwriter, none other than then unknown actor, Jack Nicholson. It makes one wonder what kind of material he might have continued to produce as screenwriter and/or director. Much of his rare talent is distilled in the acting roles he would take on over then course of the following fifteen years. But in another, less evidently commercial context, he might have had even more to offer. 

the transmigration of bodies (w. yuri herrera, tr. lisa dillman)

Herrera’s novela was originally published in 2013, something that is surprising given that it seems to belong to that nascent genre, the covid novel. It’s a short, elliptical tale, featuring characters with symbolic names (The Unruly, Romeo, The Redeemer, who is the narrator).The Redeemer is a form of fixer stroke PI, who is charged with recovering the bodies of the son and daughter of two rival families who had fallen in love, each dying in strange circumstances. One of the most notable elements of the book is the way it is set within a world where some kind of contagion is rife and people are supposed to use facemasks. It reads now like a quasi biblical parable from the parallel world we recently inhabited. Perhaps it is also kin of Escalante’s second film, the sci-fi thriller La Región Salvage. Mexico being a country which exists on a parallel hyper-symbolic plane, one which the rest of the world shared for a few brief years. 

don’t look back (d. d a pennebaker)

Pennebaker’s film is catnip for this reviewer. Dylan in London in ’65. That point on the crest of a rising wave when the world was turning, the times were changing, and the impish poet was at the epicentre of it all. With the laconic suaveness of a Swami. Bubbling with life and wit and energy. Whilst Great Britain tried to get its head about what it all meant. Young men in ties, women in starchy dresses, believing that this will be what normality will always look like.

At the same time as charting the locus of a global shift, Pennebaker’s doc is also great on the rigours of touring, The only time Dylan seems to move out of his gnostic mode is when he is forced to become mother hen, confronting a drunken Donovan and trying to get to the bottom of who threw a glass in the street. When he sings It’s All Over Baby Blue to a packed hotel room later that same night, there’s a beatific smile on his face. 

emilia perez (w&d audiard, w. thomas bidegain, léa mysius, nicolas livecchi)

Audiard’s film has become a bizarre phenomenon. Feted by awards, condemned by word of mouth. At once a blow for non-gringo, anti-imperialist impulses, and a betrayal of Mexico, trans people and the countless victims of Mexico’s dirty war. A radical reinterpretation of how to tell a political story which is mundane and over-simplistic.

There are many elements of the film which are either laughable or questionable. Audiard laces his story with songs, some of which feel cloying and witlessly sentimental. The whole premise of a reformed narco financing a charity to locate the dead victims of the narco wars feels wrong, before we even get to the issue of the arbitrary sex change. The closing shoot-out is generic and unimaginative. Audiard apparently didn’t do much if any filming in Mexico itself and there is an undeniable whiff of the interloper rolling into town and appropriating other people’s tragedies for his own benefit.

And yet, having said all of this, in comparison to a film like Villeneuve’s Sicario, it does feel as though the director is seeking to do more than just cash in on a suitably cinematographic conflict as a backdrop for his film. It’s a far cry from Escalante’s Heli, but Audiard at times feels as though he is seeking a more poetic or lyrical discourse on the issues of power and violence. Regular narrative structures struggle to do any kind of justice to this topic and run the risk, as was the case of Sicario, of resorting to caricature. Audiard seems to have succeeded in offending, whilst intending to avoid these caricatures. Something he formerly succeeded in doing in The Beat that my Heart Skipped, for example.

Working in the business, one often comes across people suggesting ideas that at first glance seem preposterous, but, within the strange economy of cinema aesthetics, seem to work (Carax, Lynch, to name just two.) Going out on a limb sometimes pays off. One can imagine Audiard positing ‘Sex Change Narco,  the musical’, and the execs looking at him blankly. Thinking either he’s a genius or an idiot. When maybe the truth is a bit of both. It’s a position that has both paid off spectacularly and backfired, spectacularly. 

43 missing: a detective emilia cruz novel (carmen amato)

Ayotzinapa is a name that anyone with any Latino political awareness will know. It refers to an event which took place in Iguala, Guerrero, in 2014, when 43 students were kidnapped and murdered. It is an event which came to encapsulate the arbitrary cruelty of the silent Mexican war which has lead to possibly hundreds of thousands being killed or disappeared. The very number, 43, has acquired an emotive power.

I am not sure how I came to Amato’s book. It is, as the subheading says, part of a series of detective novels which focus on Emilia Cruz, a policewoman in Acapulco. Presumably the fact that Cruz is from the state of Guerrero explains why Amato relocates the action to the neighbouring state of Michoacan. Cruz is assigned to the task force of five trusted police who are allocated to a commission whose intentions is to draw a line under the numerous unsuccessful investigations into the deaths of 43 students in the town of Lindavista. They are not expected to solve the crime or even locate the site of the students bodies, but Emilia’s resourcefulness leads her to achieve this, tying the story in to other non-fictional elements of Mexico’s recent history, notably the escape of El Chapo from a high security prison.

The novel uses Ayotzinapa as a backdrop for this chapter in Emilia’s life. Whilst offering insights into the original crime, one can’t help wondering what people make of it in Mexico. In a similar way to the furore over Emilia Perez, which I saw this evening, it feels as though art is in danger of cashing in on a recent tragedy. Or perhaps it is seen as a way of bringing the case to a wider public? In many ways this speaks of the issues surrounding the writing of crime fiction, perhaps above all in Mexico, where the actuality is so much more arresting than fiction. Before she is kidnapped in Emilia Perez, the Zoe Saldaña character stands next to a newsstand. In Mexico, these newsstands are covered with periodicals describing in gory detail the latest violent killing. Fiction struggles to compete. 43 Missing is a fast-paced read with a plucky heroine, but it doesn’t have much to do with Ayotzinapa, the crime its title refers to. 

bonnie and clyde (d. arthur penn, w. david newman, robert benton, robert towne)

1. Acting. Dunaway and Beatty offer one of those rare masterclasses in how to elevate a role through the use of innate charisma onto an epic level. In some ways Penn’s movie is reminiscent of The Getaway, with McQueen and MacGraw, where the sexual tension between the two leads offers the story an extra dimension. Only in this film, the brave choice is made to explore Clyde Barrow’s impotence and push this as far as they can, showing how their love affair flowered in spite of this. It feels like a very modern choice, foregrounding the relationship problem, which helps both actors give such nuanced performances.

2. History. The story of Bonnie and Clyde takes place against the backdrop of the recession. The first bank they plan to rob is actually bankrupt, there’s nothing there. The film carefully locates the story within this social milieu. It’s nothing extraordinary but at the same time it feels different. Bonnie and Clyde and the film itself become part of the counter-culture. Nowhere more so than in a scene that might have come out of a Midwest Vineland, when they arrive, bloodied and wounded, at a small lakeside community of people who appear to have been made destitute, but who offer the mythical criminals what little they have, recognising and confirming them as folk heroes. This chapter of the American dream tends to be glossed over, the Mice and Men moment, by the narrative of post-war prosperity, but the US has always had an underclass, looking for champions, and the film engages with its characters’ stories on a mythic level.

3. Myth. Nowadays, Hollywood myths are constructed around comic book characters. Big budget films run shy of humans. The division between the real and the idealised imaginary has rarely been greater and every new offering from the popcorn stable reinforces it. The sixties and early seventies, for some reason, bucked this trend. It is not fanciful to think that the drift towards an ahuman politics, a turbo-charged mechanistic vision of capitalist nirvana, embodied by the current US president and the by the country’s role within the world, has been facilitated by this abstention on the imaginary scale by the country’s most powerful myth makers. 

nosferatu (w&d robert eggers, w henrik galeen, bram stoker)

The remake is an interesting directorial choice. Nolan did it with Insomnia. Guadagnino with Suspiria. Van Sant with Psycho. Herzog also tackled Nosferatu. It implies a labour of love, coming from a privileged place: you are an established director who can pick and choose which projects you want to make. Unsurprisingly, Eggers seems more interested in the aesthetics than the acting or the dialogue. He delights in the possibilities of CGI, the construction of this medieval world. There is, perhaps, an analogy to be made between the arrival of the plague and recent global events. However, the insertion of dialogue into the gothic mix seems to derail the mystery and the terror. Every time the actors open their mouths and emit sounds, the movie feels as though it changes register. Although when I commented on this to non-English speakers here in Montevideo, no-one seemed to agree. Perhaps I would have entered more thoroughly into Eggers’ reimagined world if I had understood less, if it had been done in, say, Serbo-Croat. 

tésis (w&d alejandro amenábar, w. mateo gil)

Tésis is a film which has acquired the notoriety it clearly sought. A great, if underdeveloped premise, has Angela, a female film student writing a thesis about violence in cinema, leading her to search for illicit, unwatchable material. So far so engaging. Thereafter, perhaps too soon, she discovers that the source of the worst of this material lurks within the university where she studies. The film then becomes an investigative cat-and-mouse game: will the killer get to her before she can discover and reveal him? There is quite a lot of random pursuits and false leads, although some of the plot twists are entirely predictable. Curiously for a film that would appear to be suggesting a critique of Hollywood storytelling, with the villain of the piece saying in one of the film’s most interesting scenes that the Spanish film industry needs to ape the North Americans and give the public what they want, the film then seems to take on his advice. Instead of taking us to the heart of the problem (and perhaps discovering why Angela is so interested in this subject), it embarks on the kind of roundabout story beats which would not be out of place in the concluding episodes of a supposedly gripping Netflix series. There are moments where the darkness the film purports to reveal shine through, as in the closing hospital sequences where patients gaze like drug addicts at the titillating violence on their TV screens, but these moments are interspersed with the generic jokey tone of the Scream franchise.

conclave (d. edward berger, w. peter straughan, robert harris)

Back in Montevideo, and of course going to the cinema you run into someone you know. Not to mention the folks in the cafe. The difference with impersonal London is stark. Anyhow, this person, a critic of sorts, called out to me after the film, asking me what I thought. He told me he thought it was ‘todo muy correcto’ but he was clearly underwhelmed. Which perhaps surprised me, as Conclave is the kind of high-end ‘quality’ film-making which crosses international boundaries and presumably has a universal appeal. The very content of the film, a bringing together of Cardinals from all over the world, plays to this. I’d enjoyed it more than I expected, and Fiennes does a good job as the protagonist of a resolutely unglamorous film, or rather, the glamour comes from locations and artwork, rather than the actors. It’s not an easy premise and Berger employs a great deal of oficio to make a constantly watchable movie out of a collection of old men sitting around and repeatedly having to write a name on a piece of paper. So on the one hand this is a great example of classical filmmaking, the kind of film that perhaps they don’t make anymore, and on the other, there’s something so polished about it that it’s in danger of feeling like an expensive car in a Belgravia shopwindow. 

the shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us (christophe bonneuil + jean-baptiste fressoz, tr. david fernbach)

Not being au fait with current trends in intellectual thought, I don’t know where this obron of Bonneuiland and Fressoz sits in the firmament. What I can say is that it is a comprehensive and disarming read, which  brings together a collection of thought and references regarding the Anthropocene in a manner that makes one think, as one reads, that this book ought to be compulsory reading for anyone over the age of six months. Not that it will be, of course, as people are soon going to stop reading and process information through visual memes, which is part of the problem. It’s hard to read this book and think there is any coming back from the brink, be that the brink of extinction or radical social change. Hopefully the latter. However, the truly dispiriting element of the book is the way it shows how every step taken towards the present situation has been contested and could have been altered. My only question is whether the book’s conclusions/ implications don’t lead towards humanity moving into post-political era; which suits some of the current usual suspects down to the ground. Some might argue that such a thing does not exist, others might say we are already on the brink. 

the monkey wrench gang (edward abbey)

I have just finished reading Christophe Bonneuiland and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene, which examines the idea of the Anthropocene and the relationship between human action and the planet. In the final chapter the authors mention a few novels which have reflected upon this idea. They don’t mention the Monkey Wrench Gang, but they should. The novel relates the actions of four characters who set about to sabotage the mining and forestry industries, as well as blowing up some bridges, in Abbey’s beloved Deep South of the US. This is the land the author dedicated a valedictory account to in Desert Solitaire, tracing the course of the Colorado river in canyons which would soon be flooded by the arrival of a dam.

In contrast to Desert Solitaire, this is a novel and a more rambunctious read, as the four eco-warriors plot and carry out their missions and then seek to evade capture from the forces of law and order. At times the narrative runs the risk of feeling predictable, and lacks some of the more poetic elements of Desert Solitaire. Nevertheless, it’s a forceful stricture against human exploitation of the wild spaces and a significant addition to the canon of works which have sought to place in evidence the idea of another way of interacting with the planet.

the brutalist (w&d. brady corbet, w. mona fastvold)

 In a party of five, The Brutalist had an approval rating of 3.5. The way in which the issue of the holocaust was addressed with subtlety and discretion was praised. The reveal of Guy Pearce’s repressed sexuality was deemed by most a convincing device. The acting was in general admired. I found myself as the lone dissenter, feeling as though the film failed to live up to its ambitions, denoted in part by its running time, in part by its thematic. It felt as though there were too many breathy scenes in closed rooms, and lacked the bravura panache of Childhood of a Leader. But, as noted, I was in a strong minority, and it would appear that the director’s vaulting ambition has been well received. One aspect of being in London is that I find myself seeing far more of the buzzy films when they come out, rather than a few years later. The industry generates a sense of expectation, clearly required for marketing purposes, but perhaps unhelpful for a more considered take on the latest must-see. Either in terms of admiration or deception.

Nb. One of the things that strikes me, thinking about the film a few weeks later, is that the title would imply a reflection on the idea of brutalism as an architectural genre. Whereas what Lazlo seems to be designing is something closer to a neo-classical temple. In the brief scene where his future employer shows images of his earlier Bauhaus-y work, we get a glimpse of this ‘brutalist’ architecture, but this line of Lazlo’s work doesn’t feel as though it is explored in any great detail thereafter. Perhaps he will later gain acclaim as a brutalist, or perhaps the point is that with success he rejects this style. Whichever option he has taken is never interrogated, and the architect’s intellectual framework, so redolent in the title, seems to be swallowed up by the examination of his emotional framework.

a complete unknown (w&d. james mangold, w. jay cocks)

Wasn’t it at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, that someone shouted Judas? Hadn’t Dylan already gone electric before he came back to Newport in 1967?

One asks these questions because the act of watching a biopic is one of constant interrogation of the veracity of the purported facts being conveyed. One gets the impression that Mangold and his writer, Jay Cocks, have culled every available source of documented image to lend their film authenticity, but of course, no one truly knows what was said in heated conversations with Joan Baez or Suze Rotolo. And no-one really knows what that early Dylan was thinking or feeling. It’s a lifetime ago and the memories are shrouded in myth and rumour. As Pinter noted, memory is an unreliable companion. So what the biopic generates is more questions than answers, and the more it purports to approximate to the truth of what occurred, the more it probably errs.

All the same, Chalamet does a decent job of imitating Dylan. There was a quote the other day from the man himself about not understanding from whence his lyrics came, as though he was indeed Keats’ nightingale, the song leading the singer, a baffling blessing of genius. This bafflement never surfaces in the film. Dylan remains an enigmatic seer, in tune with his genius, plugged into a higher plane, one which inevitably leads to conflict on the human plane, above all when it comes to the issue of romance, the structural hook on which the film is vaguely hung. That coruscating strangeness is never broached, we never feel as though we begin to explore Dylan as poet, rather than cultural figure mired in the perils of fame and the public eye. This angle is the one the film pursues, an and it does so efficiently, without ever taking the viewer into the more baffling corners of the singer’s brain.

soundtrack to a coup d'état (w&d johan grimonprez, w. daan milius)

Soundtrack is a tour de force of editing. Editing to music is an art, and Grimonperez and his editor, Rik Chaubet, weave the jazz notes of the score into the found footage with aplomb. In truth, the jazz link in what is essentially a film about Patrice Lumumba and the Congo is slightly tenuous, anchored on the one visit Louis Armstrong paid to the country shortly before Lumumba’s murder. But this is also a film about connections: linking Lumumba to Castro to Malcolm X to Thelonious Monk, who briefly mentions how he went to check out the activist. What were the connections between the jazz greats and politics? The clips of Dizzy Gillespie’s satirical presidential bid are marvellous, but the deeper resonance of the musicians’ political consciousness is mandated mostly by the sound of their music. Clearly Nina Simone’s lyrics are charged with a political anger, but this becomes the backdrop, or soundtrack, to the tale of Lumumba. There is a verve and a jazz feel to the film, it’s a jazz edit, and this bowls the viewer along through the film’s two hours plus. It might also be noted that the only actually filmed footage for Soundtrack to a Coup, rather than found footage, would appear to be of Koli Jean Bofane, both reading from Congo Inc, and narrating a harrowing story from his childhood.

kapo (alexander tisma, tr, richard williams)

As David Rieff notes in his afterword, there has been a sentimentalisation of the holocaust. The need to make it a palatable experience for a film-going public has lead to an event of unimaginable horror being the backdrop for imaginable stories of love or valour. Aleksandar Tisma’s novel is a severe corrective to this trend. It is a book which I did not enjoy reading. This seems entirely in keeping with how the process of reading about the holocaust should be. It’s not meant to be entertaining or fun. It’s meant to be unpleasant. Kapo, tells the story of a Croatian kapo, Lamian, who survives Auschwitz in large part because of his own immorality and cruelty. Tisma presents the character in old age, as his day-to-day life and memories merge. Lamian escaped but on the other hand he can never escape. He wants forgiveness, but he is too imprisoned in the gaol of his mind, deservedly so, to ever be able to seek it. Tisma, I learn, translated Kertész's Fatelessness into Serbian. He is writing within a discourse about the holocaust. (And the asides in his novel about Israel are fascinating.) In short, although the novel is shocking, cruel, to the point of being transgressive, even Sadeian, he is not writing in order to shock the reader. He is writing in order to inform, that history, the real history, might not be forgotten.  

anora (w&d sean baker)

Baker’s films might be said to be reminiscent of Rossellini. Plucky outsiders confronting a skewed social system and fighting for their dignity. Anora, or Ani as she likes to be called, might not appear to have much of it, getting by on her body and unashamedly sleeping with men for money, but deep down she has it in spades. The plucky outsider is a trope that has flourished throughout cinematic history, given that cinema is to such an extent a naturalistic medium. Like Parasite, the film I watched at the same cinema the day before, Anora explores the world’s wealth divides, with much of the action occurring within a privileged mansion (interesting to read that Bong Joon-ho constructed his from scratch). This space is also a voyeuristic space. We the audience, assuming we don’t belong to the one percent, react with the same awe as Annie or the Kim family. We are bred to want this, and we are perhaps no smarter than Ani, who surely ought to realise sooner that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If there’s a weakness to Baker’s film it’s this: his youthful leads are charismatic and attractive but resolutely thick, without a political bone in their bodies. For all her charisma and street-smarts, it’s hard not to feel that Anora needs to wise up fast, and the film takes its time getting her to this point. It’s also curious to contemplate how the trope of the Russian oligarch is already on the wane. They probably can’t flit across frontiers like they used to, back when Anora was in pre-production. It would be interesting to know what a writer like Sorokin would make of all this: the risque stuff would be right up his street, but he would perhaps have Ivan and family not get off not quite as lightly as Baker lets them. 

parasite (w&d bong joon-ho, w. han jin-won)

Parasite escaped me when it emerged to a smorgasbord of acclaim. There’s a chutzpah to the direction which anchors the movie as it goes through various phases. The build-up, the takeover, the long night, the catastrophe, the coda. Perhaps something Shakespearian in this structure, and the film is rangy, shifting focus, with scope for surprises and new characters. Evidently the Upstairs Downstairs thematic is present, but at times it feels as though the film is too mired in narrative and humour to really get to grips with what it means to be poor in South Korea. It might be said that this is encapsulated by the way the deluge floods the Kim family home, but equally this could be a metaphor for a sinking planet (and has strong echoes of Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness with their mutual exploding toilets). The film’s humour and the warmth of this family unit clearly help to explain why Parasite became such a break-out hit. Bong Joon-ho’s direction is assured: he knows exactly which buttons to push to maintain the pace and keep the audience on-side.

all we imagine as light (w&d payal kapadia)

Having seen Kapadia’s first film recently, I came perhaps expecting to be mildly disappointed. How could a feature reproduce the off-the-cuff feel of a documentary? Would it have the same freshness, the same variable dynamic? The director appears to confront this concern from the opening shots of the city, with a Vox Pop voiceover. Those of us who do not know Mumbai are in uncharted territory, as are those of us who expect a script that will adhere to conventional beats. An obviedad, as they say in Spanish, but the film’s tone is always perched between silence and the noise. The noise of the city, the silence of the characters. Whose words sometimes appear almost as a voiceover, as they move like flaneurs through the metropolis. Their words are delicate things, lightly spoken, competing with the hubbub. In both films Kapadia shows herself to be a master of the use of sound, with the score by Topshe adding a constant non-intrusive presence. The acting, in part as a result, is always on point, sanded down, extracting emotion with the minimum of effort. This film is almost the anti-Titane, another emblematic female-directed movie. Where that film was strident, this one is featherlight, demanding attention, resisting dramatic beats. It makes for a viewing process that is constantly active, as opposed to reactive (reactive being the holy grail of commercial cinema - to get the audience hooked by the next dramatic twist, the next blow to the cerebral cortex). When Anu heads to visit her lover for an illicit night of passion, she is literally railroaded: flooding has stopped the trains. The night never happens. When something dramatic does happen, towards the end, it is never clear whether this is a real event or a figment of Prabha’s imagination. All We imagine as Light enraptures, it holds the viewer’s hand so gently the viewer barely notices it, and leads them down the by-ways of one of the world’s great cities, whose characters are as anonymous and significant as we are. 

Nb - The way this film’s conclusion echoes Kapadia’s first film is a sly, beautiful device. 

crook manifesto (colson whitehead)

That a novel has the power to immerse you in a time and place and thoroughly lose yourself there, is one of the beauties of the form. Whitehead’s novel, in essence a sequence of three interconnected stories, featuring the same characters, does this effectively, transporting the reader to New York of the seventies, specifically the black New York of Harlem and neighbouring boroughs. It’s beautifully written, as the author’s twin protagonists, Pepper and Ray Carney, decent men moving in a murky world, get caught up in nefarious high jinks. There’s an affectionate tone to the writing, and we never suspect that anything too terrible will happen, but we’re along for the ride. There are odd hints of Pynchon in amongst the novel’s neo-classical perfection, (three sections of nine chapters each, neatly splitting the book into three parts), but the book would also seem to pay its dues to the hard-boiled simplicity of Chandler and Elroy. The final section could perhaps be read as a commentary on the NY from which someone like the future president might have evolved, as it probes the corruption in the real estate business.

"He crossed Sixth Ave. The Twin Towers still startled him when they lurched into view, freed by this or that turn around a street corner. Looming over the city like two cops trying to figure out what they can bust you for."

birth of our power (victor serge, tr richard greeman)

Serge is a neglected figure. Although flirting with autobiography, his writing lacks that spark of irony or self-reflection that the late twentieth century western literature was prey to, before it became overrun by the confessional tracts of the belligerent individual. He recounts the dreams of what we call politics. The revolution, the overthrow of the old guard, when Marxist idealism was still a recognisable thing. Having said that: what is politics, if not the actions of men and women at the coalface of history? Serge’s text here recounts his passage from Barcelona to Leningrad, 1917-1918. The war across the border rages and the radicals in Barcelona carry the hope that this might fuel their revolt. For now, they are frustrated. Serge flees to France, hoping to travel to Russia, but he is arrested and interned in a POW camp. Only when the war ends can he finally resume his journey. He arrives in a sepulchral Leningrad, another refugee seeking food, shelter and warmth. The reality of the revolution’s dreams are laid bare; glory will not be given, it will be earned.

There is something in the controlled naivety of Serge’s writing that draws the reader in, makes a friend of them. The reader becomes his belated co-conspirator, not least because Serge is clearly not seduced by the romance of revolution; rather he is wedded to it, warts and all. 

disaster nationalism: the downfall of liberal civilization (richard seymour)

How has it come to this? I vaguely remember, it must have been in 2014 or thereabouts, walking through a barrio of London, and seeing stickers for UKIP all over the place. I know, thanks to the accounts of friends, how present the National Front had always been in London and the UK, but it tended to be something clandestine, kept out of sight. A guilty secret. All of a sudden, there it was, out in the open. A fringe political cult which was being celebrated en masse. UKIP’s greatest victory, thus far, has been Brexit. But now Farage has finally become an MP, Musk is supposedly on the point of financing them and they loom larger than ever in the national consciousness. UKIP, rebranded as Reform, is a retrograde, divisive, nationalistic movement. It had no place in the Britain of yesteryear, of if it did, it was hidden away somewhere, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

Seymour’s book looks at the emergence of nationalist movements around the globe, many of them proto-fascist. He is well aware of the difficulties of defining someone or something as ‘fascist’ so treads the linguistic line carefully, using historical parallels to make his case. The book looks at selected aspects of the nationalist movement, from the Lone Wolf killer to genocidal regimes. His analysis looks at how power manipulates emotion, which, rather than the classic capitalist idea of self-advancement, he takes as the primary driver of human action. People will take decisions against their own better interests if they can be emotionally engaged. Hence, for example, Brexit. He also skewers the lie of the white working class as the prime mover for the nationalist movements: suggesting that the forces of nationalism have infiltrated society on a far more pervasive level. The current state of Israel being a prime example.

Most disturbingly, he shows how the logical culmination of the nationalist movement is a desire to expand borders, to create an other that needs to be conquered. Nationalism is about the “us” against the “them” and the uncontrolled barbarity of actions in Gaza, against muslims in India, in Rohingya, are evidence of how the manipulation of this idea can lead to a societal breakdown of the moral order. In an existential nationalist conflict, there are no limits: indeed the more extreme and barbaric the actions of the neurotic nationalist force, the more it satiates the bloodlust of ‘its’ peoples. 

“Disaster nationalism today harnesses the insecurity, humiliation and miseries of heterogeneous classes and social groups, including some of the poorest, to a revolt against liberal civilization, with its pluralist and democratic norms.”

“Historical fascism reposed its trust in myth. Disaster nationalism, coming of age in the era of the internet, trusts in the simulacrum.”

a night of knowing nothing (w&d. payal kapadia, w. himanshu prajapati)

“Eisenstein, Pudovkin ... we shall fight, we shall win”

Kapadia’s documentary opens and closes with extended scenes of people dancing, with the music they are dancing to kept offstage. It’s a neat if somewhat flashy device, an understated imprimatur. The film documents in a loose, poetic manner the resistance of the Mumbai Film School to the appointment of a BPJ choice as director of the FTII film school. It is an account of friendship and struggle, told via black and white photography and a muted voiceover, against a backdrop of Modi’s divisive politics. Kapadia invests the film with a wistful, elusive aura as it captures a lost moment in the narrator’s history. This voiceover adds a metatextual level to the doc, allowing it to float somewhere between capturing a reality and capturing time lived as a dream. 

congo inc.: bismarck's testament (koli jean bofane, tr. marjolijn de jager)

Bofane’s short novel is a knowing, ironic take on life in the DRC. At one point he writes: The women dancing showed her what to do, rubbing their rumps and pubic areas against the hard male organs, ostensibly unimpressed; you would have thought it was an Alain Mabanckou novel, and it isn’t clear if Bpfane is being ironic or not. His approach is scattergun and all-embracing. There is a central character, Isookanga, a pygmy who comes to Kinshasa from the deep jungle. He is a kind of Candide, an innocent abroad who gets mixed up in all kinds of trouble, but the novel also includes as characters a warlord and his wife, a lost Chinese immigrants, a Latvian UN peacekeeper and an exploitative preacher, among others. These characters flit through the book, some interacting with Isookanga, others not, all of them contributing to the construction of an overarching vision of a chaotic, vigorous society, at once on the edge of the modern world and at the same time at the heart of it. 

immediacy: or, the style of too late capitalism (anna kornbluh)

Kornbluh’s book is by turns devastating and impenetrable. The latter would be down to this reader’s philosophy deficit; some half-remembered fragments of Hegel and a thirty year old reading of Writing and Difference aren’t going to do the trick here. You will get lost along the way. But you will also stumble into corners of brilliant elucidation. Above all the way in which the author riffs off up to the minute references (Knausgaard, the Safdie Brothers etc) to interrogate where the fuck we are at, culturally, psycho-culturally, as a species etc. I might get this all wrong, but it feels as thought she is constructing a connection between rampant ‘late’ capitalism and its cult of the individual (pace Foucault?) and the vogue for auto-fiction in things literary and immediacy in things audiovisual. Auto-fiction is the attempt to erase the idea of the fiction within fiction, even if the act of writing and ostensibly translating reality into words is of itself an inevitably fictional process. It also encapsulates a society where the individual has become prioritised over the collective. Kornbluh is very effective in the manner she explores the negative aspects of this process and how it betrays some of what might be called the fictional project. Immediacy has to do with a quest to extract the middle man from the audio visual process, a clearly paradoxical endeavour, in keeping with a world where we expect everything, everywhere, all at once. The way in which this restricts the possibilities of depth, or reflection, are self-evident, and noted.

All of this and more is contextualised in rampant theory. Although there was much in the book with which this reader struggled, to see the way it articulated a theory in defence of the collective, against the cult of the individual, which is so clearly an apolitical cult, one with a strong capitalist vibe, was refreshing. 

the night always comes (willy vlautin)

I am not entirely sure how Vlautin’s brief novel reached my library, but it was a perfect accompaniment for the latter part of a transatlantic flight, finished shortly before landing at Heathrow. The novel tells the story of Lynette, a down-on-her-luck thirty year old resident of Portland, who learns that her dream of owning her own home has been put in jeopardy by her mother and determines to do all she can on one fateful night to call in her debts and raise funds for the deposit. Predictably things don’t according to plan. Will Lynette escape everything the night throws at her or will the rainy Portland night destroy her? Whilst the narrative and thematic are generic, there is a warmth to the writer’s portrait of his heroine and a sense of immersion in the geography which helps to keep the read moving. It comes as no surprise for see that the book is already slated to be a movie. It has all the ingredients: a heroine whose desperation drives her to action, the propulsive tension of the night, the unities of time place and action. It’s a hard fast read which is also a love letter to the author’s hometown. 

green border (w&d agnieszka holland, w. gabriela lazarkiewicz-sieczko, maciej pisuk)

Green Border is at once arresting, epic and yet strangely empty. The experience of watching it is visceral: a collection of Syrians and Afghanis are seeking to enter fortress Europe via the Belarus-Poland border, a great wooded area which offers no shelter and is soon revealed to be a trap, as the Polish and Belarus border guards take turns in forcing the immigrants back and forth across the border. They find themselves stuck in a terrible limbo, which is only alleviated by the kind actions of a bunch of activists who head into the forest and offer medical and legal assistance, in so far as they can. The film switches focus at this point, remaining with the Polish activists, as well as recounting the story of a border guard who discovers his humanity. However, this switch seems to dislocate the movie to an extent. The perils faced by the Polish activists, whilst extreme in their own way, cannot compare to what the refugees have had to face and are facing. The activists’ stories feel like a lighter touch, steering us away from the crueller realities the first half of the film has engaged with. Green Border becomes more palatable, it moves away from the obscene. The refugee characters are left half-drawn, or dead. We do not have to suffer with them anymore and we are grateful to the filmmakers for this, but at the same time, it feels as though we have been let off the hook. In many ways Green Border captures the complexities and paradoxes of seeking to make political work within the cinema market place. The demarcated limits of how much empathy is permitted are clearly on display. For all the Europeans’ noble intentions, they almost inevitably sell their own stories, and that of their supposed subjects, short. Meanwhile, those on the wrong side of the fence have to fight for funding from wealthier nations, funding which comes with its own marketplace imperatives as to what will be palatable to the wider target audience the film is supposed to reach. 

sunken lands (gareth rees)

The subtitle of Rees’ waterworld is “A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds”. The author notes how, since his childhood, he has been fascinated by the idea of lost underwater worlds, and in this book, part historical exegesis, part travel guide, part eco-warning, he gets to explore this fascination in more depth. The author skilfully interweaves mythic lore to substantiate his theories about how previous moments in humanity’s history have been impacted by rising sea levels and tsunamis. We are, at the end of the day, the servants of Mother Nature, not her masters, as some from the techno-industrial world would like to believe. Rees ranges across Britain to Italy to the southern states of the USA to make his case and it is a fascinating one. There are times when one longs for his scope to have been less anglo-centric, but there is nevertheless a great deal of scholarship in his integration of mythic history, geological data and gut instinct. 

the memory police (yōko ogawa, tr. stephen snyder)

Several people have brought Ogawa’s novel to my attention. I had anticipated something moderately cute. An unreliable but engaging female narrator, coping with an extraordinary situation, assisted by neutral but sympathetic secondary characters. Set in a world which is removed from ours, but still recognisable and just about plausible. The Memory Police delivers all of this, but then shifts to become one of the more nihilistic texts you might come across. The Memory Police are a totalitarian body who disappear people and objects at will. People flee into hiding to escape them. This much is already reminiscent of Latin American or Arab dictatorships. (On the day of writing there are images of Syrians who have been incarcerated for years finally being released following the fall of Assad.)  The unnamed female narrator, a novelist, takes in her editor, as objects as disparate as flowers and photos are disappeared. The editor clings to his memories. At any point we anticipate that the Memory Police will be confronted, that the world will turn, that the struggle will have been worth it. But what the novel delivers is almost the opposite, in spite of a tsunami and a new ice age. The novel is as mannered as I had imagined it might be, only Ogawa then adds a layer of bleakness that is completely unexpected.