open water (caleb azumah nelson)

Nelson's novel details a failed London romance. The ostensible reason for its failure, given by the narrator, is that he has become emotionally impotent in the face of the trauma of being a young black man struggling to cope with police violence and black-on-black violence. However, given that the object of his affections remains something of a mystery femme fatale, transformed into magic pixie girl whose thing is dancing, it  suggests that part of the relationship’s problem is an inability to connect with the significant other and see her in terms that go beyond a predictable vision of urban romance. There's lots in the novel that chimes with anyone who has lived a London youth - the Ritzy, dive bars in Dalston, etcetera. But it's also striking that the protagonists have a decent amount of disposable income, forever hopping into Ubers to cross town on a whim. They live with their parents so presumably pay minimal rent - reflecting a two tier London system between those who are sheltered by their parents and those who have to fend for themselves - a division that is determined by neither race nor class. 

the living stones: cornwall (ithell colquhoun)

We came across Ithell Colquhoun’s artwork at an exhibition in Falmouth. The artwork, which could be classified under the rubric British Surrealism, is extraordinary. Vivid colour, complex forms, organic abstraction, much of it inspired by the Cornish landscape. Colquhoun was interested in the occult, and its relationship with nature. Yet, in this text dedicated to the time she spent in a corner of Cornwall called Vow Cave, where she had a cottage, she comes across as an extremely dry, level headed soul. The book’s chapters escort us on her journeys to witness folk fairs and find hidden wells. She is an archeologist/ anthropologist and her love for her adopted county is evident, even if the book lacks the strangeness and mystery of her artwork. 

What would the world be, once bereft 

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, 

O let them be left, wildness and wet; 

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

dekalog, five (w&d krysztof kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

Of course I watched this thinking I had seen it before. I hadn’t. I’d seen a Short Film About Killing. This is the shorter version, the sketch, if you like. But this shouldn’t in any way detract. The shorter version is astonishing. Perhaps more so than the longer. Kieslowski employs a sparse dialogue. Images are distorted. A vignette blurs the edges of the frame. For a while we have no idea who is the protagonist. The stressed out lawyer or the unpleasant taxi driver or the youth. Then we realise it’s the youth. The killer, who will be killed. The narrative is already chopped in three, and then, as the pieces come together, the whole thing coalesces into a terrible, mortal whole. The ultimate effect, compressed into 55 minutes, is devastating, Needless death begets needless death. You can see why the director chose this tale to expand. But you can also see why it wasn’t entirely necessary. 

dekalog, four (w&d krysztof kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the fourth chapter of Kieslowski’s Dekalog is the lack of astonishing things. There are no big dramatic moments. There’s one long dramatic scene, which culminates in a decision (or two decisions), but no-one fights, no-one fucks, no-one even screams. All those things which are taken for granted as being necessary to make captivating drama are missing. In spite of this, the short film has you sitting on the edge of your seat. There a tension which is almost nebulous, but instilled in every frame. The shadow of incest, which might have become the focus, is dispelled. This is a simple tale about the meaning of love, rendered with minimal effort. 

the marriage of maria braun (w&d fassbinder. w. pea fröhlich, peter märthesheimer)

Fassbinder’s rambling movie is gloriously chaotic, barging its way through the German postwar years like a drunk stocking up in a supermarket at closing time. Everything happens fast, then it doesn’t, then it does again. Maria is married! Her husband is dead! She starts sleeping with a GI! She’s pregnant! Her husband is alive! She’s not pregnant! She’s a businesswoman! Her husband is in prison! She’s sleeping with her boss! He’s free! He’s gone! He’s back! Two hours of seismic narrative beats and zooms. It’s an erratic but entertaining journey, which offers a commentary on modern West Germany which is hard to follow, so many years later. (Does anyone remember Helmut Schmidt, whose photo occupies the closing frame?) However, the sheer energy of the filmmaking seems to compensate for the spinning compass of the narrative needle.

The opening sequence, in bombed, post-war Germany, tallies with a biography of Nico I have just finished, and strangely, as my father flirts with death, (successfully keeping it at bay for now), I am given a window on the life my grandmother would have lead in the aftermath of the war, the life my father was born into. The generations that lived through the complete destruction of most German and Polish cities are ebbing away. Someone born today is not far short of a century from those times. (I was born in ’66, so the equivalent retrospective time journey from my birth would take me to 1886, a date which seems to belong to another consciousness altogether.) Fassbinder captures those years, the desperation they provoked and the way the drive for survival overrode pre-war’s social codes and quaint bourgeois morality. He relishes in the chaos and energy that those years inspired, with Maria Braun becoming a rambunctious anti-heroine, stepsister to the desperate Christa Päffgen. 

clean (alia trabucco zerán, tr. sophie hughes)

Clean is marketed as a literary thriller. Marketing it as a deep dive meditation on the inequalities of Chilean society probably wouldn’t be seen to be as effective. It tells the story of a cleaner, a 40 year old woman from the south of the country, by implication Mapuche, who has come to the capital and worked for the same affluent family for seven years. It’s a job that dehumanises her and destroys her psyche. She narrates the book, charting the family’s descent towards tragedy. Although this tragedy feels like something of a macguffin: the author’s real interest would appear to be the narrator’s gradual disintegration, as she yearns for the south she realises she has foolishly left behind. 

the american friend (w&d wim wenders)

Wenders’ films are indeed like old friends. They seem to fit the viewer’s hand like a glove. The enigmatic tone, the waspish humour, the flirtation with melodrama, the pseudo thriller tone. People will die, hearts will be broken, but life will go on. HIs choice of actors seems to reflect this: figures who seem almost too knowing for their roles: Harry Dean Stanton, Rüdiger Vogler, Kôji Yakusho. And here, again, Bruno Ganz, whose sympathetic features and tendency to smile wryly seem to speak to a world beyond the screen the film is set in, a life lived by his character with pleasures and sufferings we will never know. Wenders is neither slave to narrative nor afraid of it. His films contain stories that hold them together, but he seems more interested in the detail: the angle of the frame that Ganz’s character, a picture framer, is holding, or the tilt of Hopper’s hat, or the worry on the face of Lisa Kreuzer, rewarded by one of the film’s rare close-ups. Yet, this concern for the image is never permitted to become self-indulgent, and the pace is maintained by the zesty edit of Peter Przygodda.

It would be interesting to speculate on what inspired the director to tackle this story. If anything, the juxtaposition of the raddled cityscape of New York, contrasted with the high industrial orange hues of Hamburg and its port, might be the film’s most arresting element. That and the chance to juxtapose the broad tones of Hopper’s acting with understatement of Ganz. At the very end, Ganz appears to gain a kind of revenge via his melodramatic death, outdoing Hopper’s baroque beachside barbecue. These tonal contrasts fire the film, they give it an edge that transcends what might otherwise have been a generic mafia tale. 

grand tour (w&d. miguel gomes, w. telmo churro, maureen fazendeiro, mariana ricardo)

Am holding fire on Grand Tour. It’s a film that left me a little cold. An intellectual exercise which never quite comes off. But maybe I’ll come back to it and it will hit me in a different way. The interweaving of contemporary documentary footage with a period narrative, shot in a studio, has  neo-colonial elements, even in a film that appears to be seeking to make a critique of colonialism. But is it really all that different from the much maligned Emilia Perez? European director films his narrative with local actors in the comfort of his backyard, whilst sending out teams to scour footage of the Orient. I also wondered if the film would have been received with quite such acclaim had it been set in Africa, rather than Asia, the dependable other. Maybe it was just being subjected to the Eton Boating Song, but the whole endeavour felt whimsical, off-key, great festival fare, light on the palate, overly enjoyable. Am far from saying that Europeans shouldn’t make films set in Asia, Africa or Latin America. But perhaps, as Wong Kar Wai did when he made a movie in Argentina, or Herzog in Peru, you have to be prepared to get down and dirty with it, or at least dip your toes in the water. 

the hive (camilo josé cela tr. james womack)

It’s an interesting side-note to learn, after reading The Hive, that Cela not only won the Nobel prize for literature, but he was also on the Nationalist side in the civil war. In my reconfigured world, no Franquista can be a good guy. The novel is set during WW2, the early years of Franco’s regime. Whilst Franco is never referred to, there are several characters who are rooting for the Nazis. As I read it, before discovering the above, I took it as the writer’s way of illustrating their character’s lack of historical judgement, but the above information suggests this might not have been the case. At the same time, the novel was censored in Franco’s Spain, and had to be originally published in Argentina, a source of some ironic mirth on the part of the writer, as noted in his introduction.

The Hive is one of the more remarkable works of twentieth century literature. It features a multitude of characters (at least 160, according to the writer’s intro.) There is no coherent plot. The characters drift in and out of the book. Whilst the first section occurs in a cafe, and one thinks this is the bedrock of the novel, subsequent sections range out into other barrios of Madrid. Only one character, the impoverished poet, Martin, maintains any kind of a followable thread. The effect is, as the title suggests, a representation of the city as a teeming nucleus of souls, all of them with their own agenda. Sometimes the paths of these souls will cross, but more often than not they won’t. It’s a Cubist novel, and as brilliant a representation of the life of a city as you are likely to come across, a sister novel to Ulysses or Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Whilst one might imagine that a novel so lacking in plot or narrative might be unreadable, the opposite is the case. The Hive is a breezy, gossipy read. We drop in on people’s lives, and then drop out. There are pearls of wisdom, and gobbets of stupidity. Every character has their fears and their desires. The Hive might be another  way of thinking about the very idea of the novel. Stories scribbled on the subway wall, buried beneath the streets.

I started the novel last Thursday, during the final hours in my stay in the Spanish capital. I was sitting in a cafe, near my hotel, on the Calle Fuencarral. I did not expect that the novel would lead me into another cafe on Calle Fuencarral, peopled like this one, with the flotsam of the streets, the teeming life of a city that lives in its streets and its cafes and bars, a city which was little different from the one I was inhabiting, in spite of the bridge of seventy years of history. 

the fugitive (d. john ford & emilio fernández, w. dudley nichols, graham greene)

Ford’s Mexican movie is a curious, beautifully lit creature. Loosely adapted from the Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory, it tells the tale of a priest being pursued by the Mexican army during the religious persecutions following the Mexican revolution. Henry Fonda plays the priest with a deadpan solemnity. The whole movie feels as though it has been mounted and framed, which is gloriously effective during many of the beautifully shot action sequences, or the impeccably lit interiors, but makes for a slightly stiff human narrative. Ford seems to relish the visual possibilities of filming in Mexico, but his actors aren’t given scope to do much more than look the part. 

nb - curious to think of Ford and Buñuel filming in Mexico at more or less the same time.

tobacco road (d. ford, w. nunnally johnson)

Tobacco Road is adapted from a stage play, written by Jack Kirkland, in turn adapted from the novel by Erskine Caldwell. It deals with a family from the Deep South that has fallen on hard times, following the depression. The family has turned into a group of likeable larrikins, who drive like maniacs, squabble and seem to survive on a wing and a prayer. In the introduction to the film, it was asked why these characters would have appealed to Ford as the subjects of one of his movies. But the family belong to a lonG line of hillbillies, a strand of US culture which can be traced from Huckleberry Finn to The Dukes of Hazard right through to JD Vance today. The idea of a genial company of characters living off the land is embedded in the North American psyche, and not so very far removed from Thoreau. These characters have an innate charm which is loosely tied up with the idea of freedom, a freedom to break the rules and live how they want to, which has inspired US consciousness since the earliest days, and Ford does a stirring job portraying their rumbunctious energy.