american war (omar al akkad)

It’s tempting to see Al Akkad’s polished imagination of a USA which has plunged through civil war, pandemic and beyond as an allegory of what is happening today, as was the case with Garland’s Civil War. Yet, it also belongs to a dystopian tradition whose most celebrated text is perhaps Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, but would also include McCarthy’s The Road, among others. Contained within the North American utopian vision is its correlative, the dystopian vision, which will come to pass some day when the wheels come off the capitalist train and it hits the buffers. Al Akkad’s vision might be more astute than the others, and right now it feels like it’s just around the corner, but as in the case of 1984, the fixing of dates within the text means the longer we head towards those dates without the events the novel suggests will occur actually happening, the less terrifying the novel will become. In practice, this is a skilfully realised thought experiment, of the kind Robert Harris employs effectively on a more commercial basis. What would happen if….

The book works not so much because of its prophetic qualities, but because it is constructed around a complex anti-heroine, Sarat, whose life we follow from the age of six until her death as an avenging angel of the south. As in the case of Garland’s film, surely influenced by this novel, mapping the local US politics onto the current state of the nation feels perhaps irrelevant. In American War there is an alliance between Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, a kind of confederate rump, but Sarat and her family are mixed race, so far from conventional rednecks. What the book seems to be exploring  is the divide between a more diversified form of capitalism against a more regimented version in the north. All of which is slightly Dionysus versus Apollo, although the deeper implications of this are skirted. Interestingly the image that is given of the narrator’s final southern home (the narrator, Benjamin, is Sarat’s nephew) contains a homespun idealism which perhaps speaks to the lost world of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. 

anul nou care n-a fost / the new year that never came. (w&d bogdan mureșanu)

I imagine if the viewer was more cognisant of the events leading to Ceausescu’s, Mureșanu’s film it might have felt less surprising. We are in Rumania, 1989. The film carefully lays its groundwork as we get to know five different characters whose lives only overlap tangentially. One is an actress, another a  TV director, his son who is a student, a woman in a house due to be demolished and the worker who comes to help her move. Over the course of two hours their stories will criss and cross, as each one struggles with the harsh realities of a socialist state riven with informers and fear. The Securitate lurk at every turn. When the worker finds out that his son has written to Father Christmas with not just his own wishes but wishes for his parents, and that the absurd wish he has made and written down for his dad could potentially lead to him ending up in prison, we get a glimpse into the terrifying comic absurdity of life under Ceausescu.

The film has echoes of PTA’s Magnolia, with its telling use of song, and beautifully crafted script. However, allied to this, is it possesses a fierce political agenda, which leads to a devastating and emotional finale, where fiction and reality collide. Rumania has a great tradition of social realist filmmaking. Anul Nou Care N-A Fost belongs to this tradition, but the scope and ambition of the film adds another dimension. Not knowing where this was headed, the ending came as a truly moving surprise. Of course, had I been more clued in, as mentioned above, the surprise would not have been as powerful. But all the same, the way the director conjures the lives of these ordinary people, fleshing out their dreams and fears, is masterly as step by step the viewer becomes more and more immersed in the story. This is the opposite of filmmaking which seeks to grab the audience by the throat and drag them through the hedges. This is filmmaking as architecture, carefully laying the groundwork, putting down foundations, building brick by brick until the final mighty edifice is revealed. 

evidentemente comieron chocolate suizo (d. manuel marzel)

Evidentamente comieron chocolate suizo (They had obviously eaten Swiss chocolate) was the last of five amateur Cuban films which have been restored and were screened in Cinemateca. The five films were a mixed bunch, but Marzel’s was a playful jewel. Cuba 1991 - a society on the edge of all the things that are happening in the rest of the world. The film shows what appears to be a moment of extreme violence as a man and a woman go from dancing in what might be a typical Havana family home, stacked with women from three generations. The dancers dash out into the street. The man seems to be dragging the woman violently by the hair. A mother and her daughter follow. They get to a church… and then we see the St Vitus Dance twist. The film seems to be over, everyone is dead, but suddenly Madonna’s Vogue cuts in. The dead dance. Other realities are permeating this arcane world. Everyone dances and the credit sequence is like a short film all of its own. There’s something breathlessly brilliant about this 13 minute film, which claims to be the last reel of a lost movie, featuring, the rolling credits claim, Geraldine Chaplin and Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others. The playfulness elevates everything and gives this short film a vivid, distinctive Swiss chocolate flavour.

vermiglio (w&d maura delpero)

Italy in the last months of the second world war. An alpine community, isolated from the war and everything else, save for the warplanes that sometimes fly overhead. Two deserters, one from the village and another a tender Sicilian, seek refuge. A local girl, one of the schoolmaster's many children, falls for the Sicilian and marries him. The war ends and the Sicilian heads back to visit his family. Will he return or not?

The narrative is spun around this slender thread, but Delpero's deeper interest is in detailing the growing pains of the sisters in this remote world. The filmmaking displays a meticulous artistry. The rendition of this remote world is perfectly realised and the nuances of the sisters' coming of age stories, which might have been tainted by melodrama, are perfectly captured. This is immersive filmmaking: we walk out of our world and into that of the film. Our time stops and the time of the film takes over.

upstream color (w&d shane carruth)

As I left the house on Monday to go and see Primer, the lock on the door broke. So I missed Primer. Which was annoying as it’s a film I have long wanted to catch as well as being an opportunity to return to the cinema after too many weeks rehearsing at night, not to mention other outstanding issues. En tonces — this, the second in the maverick Carruth’s season was the film I caught.

What a weird and wonderful creation it is. After ten minutes I adored it. By half way I was still plugged in. By the end I was thoroughly baffled, but the bafflement seemed worth it. Woman gets kidnapped, and contaminated with weird bugs, which appear under her flesh, then get transferred to a pig, all part of a program that is later uncovered. At the same time she starts an affair with a corrupt but amiable broker. The register switches from sci-fi to down-at-heel US indie romcom, to thriller, and the viewer is never quite sure what is going on or where the film is headed. But it’s beautifully shot, the tone is menacing and intimate, it might have been the greatest indie film ever made, but it isn’t quite, but what the fuck. Better than sitting through something which cost a fortune and ties up all narrative possibilities by the time it reaches the “inciting incident”. 

enjo (conflagración) (w&d kon ichikawa w. keiji hasebe, yukio mishima)

Icihkawa’s adaptation of Mishima’s novel is effortlessly stylish and beautifully shot in languid black and white. It tells the story of Mizoguchi, a Buddhist monk with a stammer whose purity causes problems for his monastery, an institution which has become dissolute, making money out of tourism, with the head monk having a lover and fathering a child. Mizoguchi is known as the son of a devout monk who committed suicide. The film proceeds elegantly to expound a story which leads to the inevitable conflagration of the title. Whilst the storytelling isn’t always as clear as it might be, in a telltale sign of being an adaptation, the film’s visual rigour would appear to reflect Mizoguchi’s fervour which contends with the presence of the post-war occupying US forces which are contributing to the corruption of the buddhist doctrine. This critique of the US influence on Japanese post-war culture comes almost as a side-note, though there are evident metaphorical implications to Mizoguchi’s ultimate act of arson. 

from the city, from the plough (alexander baron)

All roads this year lead back to the Second World War. Baron’s book came to my attention when someone posted something about neglected post-war British writers. This book is, as the poster claimed, a completely credible and unsentimental fictional account of the D-Day landings. The first half of the novel follows the battalion as it waits in the UK prior to the invasion. The soldiers are regular men: farmers or East End wide boys. The novel employs a wide palette, with a varied cast. Some are good men, some are rogues. Most are ambivalent about being in the army. There is none of the triumphalism or heroism espoused by the pseudo nationalists who have tried to appropriate history for their own ends. Baron’s eye is a cold one, but irrefutably honest. The cruelty of war itself, as the novel in the second half moves with the men into France, is laid bare. People die. They are forgotten, the war machine moves on. Some will survive, but this has to do with luck rather than judgement. My grandfather was one who didn’t. 

the good soldier (ford madox ford)

There was a scrawled note in the book, which I have had for many moons, from 1985. Which suggests it is forty years since I last read it. I have clung to the memory of the book, no matter how faint. But I had forgotten quite what a barnstormingly brilliant piece of writing it is.

Structurally you might say it’s all over the place. The narrator leaps from one moment in the past to another, seemingly at times willy-nilly. The story unfolds like a crumpled sheet. The affairs of Edward Ashburnham, around which the narrative is constructed, flicker and fade. Even the affair with the narrator’s wife, Florence. In the hands of another writer this would be the tragic spine of the story, but Ford has a shrewder take on human nature than most. He recognises that relationships, including marriage, are arrangements. Even love affairs, supposedly driven by the imperatives of the heart, are contingent on time, place and the individual’s tendency to want to fall in love. Edward is a wanton fool, but he is also driven by an excess of what the narrator calls sentimentality, but might also be called affection. In spite of his infidelities, he is a good man to many. Just not his wife. And, as the novel explains, there are reasons for that, which might include that his wife wasn’t ready when she became his wife. Timing is all. Affairs of the heart are accidents waiting to happen.

The exhumation of the affairs and relationships which make up the novel is surgical. Unlike Waugh in Brideshead, perhaps, any romanticism is excised, even if the narrator, and perhaps the reader, cannot help but construct from the figure of the Wykehamist, Edward Ashburnham, a vision of the ideal Englishman, right down to his clumsy naivety in love. He is the cursed romantic, whose absurdity is both admired and reviled by the Yankee narrator.  The differences between an English romanticism and an American pragmatism is laid bare. The novel offers a counterpoint to the typical generalisation of the English as a cold, passionless race. Under the starchy surface, blood rages. The weasel under the cocktail cabinet, as Pinter puts it. 

pasazerka (w&d andrzej munk, d. witold lesiewicz, w. zofia posmysz)

Munk died in a road accident whilst making this unfinished film, at the age of 40. The narrative develops around Liza a female former SS guard at Auschwitz, returning to Europe aboard a cruise ship from the Americas. A passenger boards who she recognises: Marta, a prisoner who she had 'adopted' as her assistant at the camp, before being transferred to Berlin. She has assumed that Marta was dead, and that the secrets Marta holds about her past had gone with her. Their relationship is also affected by the love that Marta had for a fellow prisoner. Theirs was a love which transcended their dreadful circumstances and Liza was both fascinated and jealous.

The complexity of this relationship is posited against the backdrop of the horrors of Auschwitz. Munk, (of jewish descent, who managed to escape during the war), filmed in Auschwitz itself. The realism is overwhelming, as is the horror. At one point, a stream of children file, smiling, oblivious, into a hut. One girl even stops to pet the guard's Alsatian. Meanwhile, on the roof, a soldier dons a gas mask and drops Zyklon B into cavities. The cruelty is pervasive, sometimes foregrounded, but even when not, it is always occurring, at the edge of the screen. Added to which, the mud, the darkness, the sickness, the hopelessness, is laid out by Munk, through the eyes of the guard. Glazer chose to stay on the other side of the wall. Munk takes us inside Auschwitz, with its barbarism and its string quartets.

The film is unfinished, with his contemporaries supplying a voiceover and including stills from the material on the cruise ship which couldn't be coherently edited together. This blog exists in part to document films that have slipped under the radar, names that should be revered but are not. I have the luck to live near Cinemateca, where it's possible to stumble over films that one would otherwise never get to see. The Passenger is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking and perhaps the first and last time that a fictional movie about the holocaust has ever got as close to capturing something of its reality. 

padeniye berlina / the fall of berlin (w&d. mikhail chiaureli, w. pyotr pavlenko)

My father is nearing the end of his life. So many things I have seen or read this year have, by chance, lead me back to the start of his life. Post-war Germany, specifically Berlin. We are losing the last of the generations that experienced a time when Europe was reduced to rubble. When armies marched across its broad plains. Perhaps it is because the holders of these memories are leaving us that the fear of war on European soil seems to be receding on the part of the North Americans, and growing on the part of those who inhabit the territories that suffered so much in the twentieth century.

The Fall of Berlin is a Soviet propaganda piece about the events leading to the Russian advance on Berlin, culminating in the Hammer and Sickle flying over the destroyed Reichstag. As a film it goes for a kind of docu-drama, following the fates of two lovers from the Ukraine, who will meet in Berlin after being separated for so long. Stalin features heavily, as the wise leader who oversees triumph. There's no subtlety to the movie and it was clearly made to stir Soviet pride in the difficult years after the war. The budget would appear to have been substantial: the battles scenes are extensive, and an imitation of the Reichstag was apparently constructed for the closing scenes.

It's not the greatest film ever made, but it does hark back to a past which feels all but unthinkable when one walks the multicultural streets of Berlin today. Was that all some kind of terrible fever dream? As events fall back into folk memory, as the real memories of great grandparents, grandparents and parents are lost, only art can hope to retain an idea of what happened, once upon a time, on the thriving streets of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Charlottenburg. 

(nb My great grandparents home, where my father spent the first years of his life, was out in Spandau, on the leafy border with the East.)