a short history of cahiers du cinema (emilie bickerton)

I don’t know if young romantics like I might have been, once upon a time, still grow up with Les Cahiers du Cinema acting as a kind of idealised wallpaper for what life, cinema and the arts ought to be. I don’t know if I ever actually read the magazine, but it inhabited a mythological place in my mind. The space from whence the young turks of the Nouvelle Vague emerged, encompassing a cultural diversity which ranged from Hitchcock to Godard, a place where cinema was treated as an art form rather than a business. All of this blended with the romanticism of Paris as depicted in the works of early Godard, Truffaut and company. All of this was summoned up by the title of the magazine itself, so allusive, so distant from the philistine perspective of the Anglo-Saxons.

Bickerton’s book is both a guide and a corrective. The early chapters document the magazine's origins, the incorporation of these young turks (even if Rohmer wasn’t so very young.) The relationship between Truffaut and Bazin is alluded to, and suggests a book or movie of its own. The middle part of the book deals with the way the Cahiers became consumed with ideological dogma, so much so that it excluded most cinema, treating it as beyond the Maoist pale. (Or whichever other pale was the dominant ideology of the day.) Finally, the book looks at developments in the 80s and 90s when the magazine abandoned ideological pretensions and became, according to Bickerton, just another film mag, competing for shelf space.

In her account of this final development, Bickerton is unflinchingly critical. Her thesis is that the magazine effectively sold its soul. Its repute was constructed on the independence of intellectual thought, which permitted it to distance itself from the idea of cinema as industry. Whilst Hollywood might be capable of making films which are beyond this paradigm, the marketing machine and festival circuit determine that, in general, films which refuse to acquiesce to their formulaic demands will be marginalised. Whereas in the sixties and seventies, Cahiers was interested in discovering and vindicating those films which were outside of the system, (and the early works of the Nouvelle Vague were informed by this), now it has become just another industry rag. Bickerton is deeply critical of what has happened to Cahiers, and, by implication, the way in which market forces have become the regulator of directors’ aesthetic choices. Cahiers, and cinema as a whole, has become the poorer for this, even as the magazine pretends to be richer and more popular than ever. But the romantic vision which I had as a teenager is, she avows, categorically dead. 

the literary conference (césar aira)

As ever one isn’t quite sure what to make of Aira’s fiendish mind. Is it that of a genius or a madman? This story involves, among things, cloning Octavio Paz and his tie, pirate’s loot, a lecherous writer, big blue worms. All of which occurs at a Venezuelan literary festival. It’s dotty, but it also feels calculated, in the way that extreme improvisation needs to be underpinned by an unlikely coherence. It’s reminiscent of Saer, rather than Borges, lacking the blind man’s love of logic. It’s also reminiscent of Aira’s cinematic compatriot Lucia Seles, another who comes from a small town on the edge of Buenos Aires, with his roundabout tales that engage but infuriate. There’s a fine line between madness, the artistic equivalent of scratching an itch until  you bleed, and otherworldly genius, which the margins of Argentina’s capital seem to provoke. Bolaño describes Aira as one of the best Hispanic writers of his generation in the introduction, and who are we to argue with Bolaño?

the man in the high castle (philip k dick)

Realised with some surprise I have never actually read any Phillip K. Perhaps, from so long ago I can’t recall it. His reputation is as something of a pulpy eccentric, bolstered by screen adaptations, including of this novel. So, the depth and complexity of a slightly rangy text came as a surprise. Dick displays an erudite, measured tone, in a counter-factual novel which is anchored in Japanese culture and Nazi lore. The play on the war being lost and the USA being conquered by the axis forces, dividing the country down the line of the Rockies, is a smart narrative idea, and Dick embraces the cultural impact of this with aplomb. It’s as much a novel about the meeting of East and West as it is about the speculative premise, or rather, that premise is an excuse to interrogate these ideas. 

perfection (vincenzo latronico, tr. sophie hughes)

Perfection had me thinking of Huysmans. A novel which is self-consciously smart, driven by a notion of aesthetics as much as narrative. A sardonic take on modern urban living, lancing the boil of pretentious but vacuous hipness. Which is all very well, and a remit Vincenzo Latronico pulls off effectively, however, this is a dry text, and his targets, southern European designers playing at being sophisticates in Berlin, feel like easy targets. Of course the twee middle class mores of liberalism can do with bing taken down a peg or two, but the novel, (hotly tipped to win the International Booker), never seeks to address what underpins the aspirations of its feckless protagonists, and never looks to scratch the superficial surface it describes with such precision. 

when we sold god’s eye (alex cuadros)

Where  is the frontline of the greatest conflict on earth, one that has been raging for over five hundred years? If one looks at earth’s history on a wider, geological scale, the one of the Anthropocene perhaps, then this line is to be drawn between the forces who are at war with nature and those who seek to engage in a mutually beneficial feedback loop with nature. The conflict between  those who believe in the idea of the human as part of nature as opposed to those who would place humanity ‘above’ nature’.. (I initially posited the idea of an urbanised concept of civilisation versus the hunter-gatherer model, but given recent archaeological evidence from the Amazon, this division seems outdated and artificial - the ancestors of those who live off the forest as hunter-gatherers might well have belonged to urban cultures before the genocide initiated in 1492).

Cuadros’ book takes us to the heart of one of the last remaining frontiers of this conflict. It tells the tale of a tribe which has lived the last 500 hundred years of history on fast forward. In the 1960s, the Cinta Larga were still an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Then the white men appeared, followed by mass extermination through disease, followed by a period of retrenchment on the part of the survivors and adaptation. Those who endured began to fight for their rights and also to ensure that the pillage of the jungle, their home, was something that might benefit their people as well as the imperialist invaders. Firstly in the seventies with the hardwood trade, then in the nineties with the diamond trade. The book delivers a comprehensive overview of this process, where vast sums of money are in play, and nobody wins.

Cuadros touches on the epistemological and existential aspects of the accelerated historical changes that the Cinta Larga have lived through. It’s a tale of bitter fruit and inevitable tragedy. This is reporting from the true Great War, the one that has haunted the edge of our consciousness, a window onto a way of life the world has foregone, another consciousness free of the traps of our supposed civilisation. Which is not to say this might be some kind of utopian perfection, but it represented an alternative, and as the tales of the the Cinta Larga reveal, an alternative whose advantages might well have outweighed the benefits of our chosen way of living. 

assembly (natasha brown)

Brown’s slender text presents contemporary Britain from the perspective of an apparently successful female black banker. However, given the immensity of history, the perniciousness of the class system and the irradicable vestiges of racism, success is always a relative term. Something the narrator grapples with as she heads to her posh boyfriend’s parents’ country estate for a weekend. In modern Britain, the dragnet of the past will always drag you down. The novella is discursive, composed of moments, thoughts, fears, rather than seeking to construct a complex narrative. Instead, we wander through the highways and byways of the narrator’s mind. Dealing with issues ranging from reparations paid to slave owners to cancer to what it’s like to sit on train puling out of London into the wilds. 

the houseguest (amparo dávila, tr. matthew gleeson)

Dávila’s collection of short stories tend to feature the incursion of a bizarre, threatening element into the life of the protagonist. In the titular story, this is the houseguest, whose menacing presence ruins the narrator’s life. In other stories it might even be a Dostoyevskian version of the narrator him or her self. The stories possess a crisp economy, a sly window into the neuroses of mid twentieth century Mexico. 

the view from the train: cities and other landscapes (patrick keiller)

Keiller is the maker of several cult films, which I have never seen, even if they have dwelled in my consciousness for decades. So it is perhaps perverse to engage with a book of his before seeing them. Having said that, the author is self-consciously operating, both as writer and filmmaker. within a defined intellectual framework. He cites the writing of Aragon, Lefebvre, Benjamin, amongst many others. His space is space: the space of the city, the space of the city within film, the space of film. His writing interrogates the representation of space, and how this has lead to its reconfiguration since the genesis of film and photography in the nineteenth century. The book is composed of various essays, written over the course of twenty years. This allows him to trace how the city he inhabits, London, has shifted over the course of this time, as well as permitting him to reference Dickens among others as descriptors of the city that came before. The book is something of a pot-pourri, but the essays on the early years of cinema, and how that medium was received and changed perceptions, are gloriously readable. 

mickey 17 (w&d bong joon-ho)

What happens when success catches up with you and you can make all your dreams come true? You go big budget and make a sci-fi parody. Bong Jung-ho’s bloated extravaganza is leaden, pacey, and permits Pattinson to execute some bravura acting. It’s like a train ride which slows down and speeds up. Thinking specifically of  a train we took in Bolivia, through the Chaco, where sometimes we were rolling merrily along and at others we were stuck, gazing at a few bushes, twigs, a suspicion of life. Looking back on the journey it was, all-in-all, enjoyable, albeit with moments of frustration. I don’t know if there’s anything much to take away from Mickey 17. The premise is Phillip K Dick lite, (Dostoyevsky lite?) and never quite extracts the full potential of the idea of a one person (soul?), inhabiting two bodies. It’s played for laughs, which is fair enough, but works against any pretension to actually have any underpinning philosophy. There is the constant sense of a project that has had money thrown at it, seeing what sticks. Fortunately in Pattinson the film has a protagonist who is charismatic enough to just about hold the whole thing together. 

small things like this (d. tim mielants w.enda walsh)

Mielants’ film has heavyweight support. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are named as exec producers. Oscar winner Cillian Murphy takes the lead. The film deals with the issue of the abuse of girls in Catholic convents in Ireland over the course of decades. It occurs in that broad era known as the time before mobile phones. In a sense it feels as thought the casting of Murphy slightly unbalances the film, with his back story taking prominence over the that of the mistreated girls. We understand his actions and his morose disposition, but his story is not the film’s focal point. The film employs a downbeat tone to relate its narrative, endowing it with the seriousness it deserves, even if it sometimes feels as though it’s leading its audience by the nose.