accattone (w&d pier paolo pasolini, w. sergio citti)

A second Pasolini film in a few weeks is a direct contrast to Theorem. Where that felt like a calculated, ordered and indeed theoretical piece of filmmaking, Accattone, made only seven years previously, has a chaotic, rambling feel, reflecting the life of the eponymous protagonist. Accattone is a pimp, and not a very successful one. He comes from a culture where it’s considered undignified to do a day’s honest work. His gang hang out drinking on the outskirts of Rome, in streets where the after effects of the war are still all-apparent. Accattone is both charismatic and unsympathetic, an existential proletarian anti-hero. Pasolini paints an unsentimental portrait of Roman low life which is perhaps stepfather to Coppola’s Godfather. Italian machismo in full flight, with women as second class citizens and a life of crime the only honorable profession. It’s a raggedly brilliant tale, part of a European cinema which, like Varda’s film, was seeking to create characters with greater psychological depth. 

cleo from 5 to 7 (w&d agnès varda)

This film, a little like the Haneke film I recently watched in London, is perhaps another of my Ur-texts. (As might be Performance, so this is a year for the father/mother texts). I would guess I had only seen Cleo once before, but the simplicity and urgency of the filmmaking left its mark. To tell the story of a woman, a character, in 90 minutes, which are more or less 90 minutes of her life, a way of sticking to the unities of time, place and action, is to create a lightning flash of a film, to stop and capture time. Varda’s Cleo has no great profound storyline to pursue. She’s scared she’s got a fatal illness, but we the audience are never sure whether this might be real or part of the drama she creates, part of her beauty and appeal. Aside from this she drifts around Paris, meeting friends and lovers. It’s inconsequential, but that’s part of its charm. Where film narratives seem so dependent on dramatic tropes, Varda resists, letting the star and the camera and the city guide us through the timeline. Indeed, in many ways the film, with the brilliant cinematography of Paul Bonis, Alain Levent and Jean Rabier, is a love letter to Paris, a Paris which still feels like it might be the city of the flaneur, a set on which its inhabitants play out their roles, blessed to be framed against the backdrop the designer has given them. 

the deserter (enard, tr. charlotte mandell)

I read a long essay on this book after finishing it, detailing the way Enard has been a defender of the idea of Europe, a Europe that stretches from Galway to Beirut, a Europe to which the Maghreb countries also belong. It’s a particular vision, which permits him to incorporate the Arab intellectual world, thereby paying homage to these cultures, so formative in the shaping of Europe, so constantly misrepresented as the colonial vision of Western Europe focused on mercantile expansion came to dominate. This is the fourth book of Enard’s I have read and I recognise, as the essay writer observed, that part of the fascination of his texts is precisely this investigation into what it means to call something European, above and beyond the economic or even socio-political perspectives.

The Deserter, as the writer of the essay observed, perhaps offers a more pessimistic vision than his previous books. It dovetails two narratives. Firstly, that of a deserter in an unnamed war, fleeing for his life. He connects with a traumatised woman, also fleeing, and her donkey. The prose and the story are stark, elemental. Enard makes much play of the sensory elements of their experiences. It might be described as a bleakly poetic text, albeit one which contains, perhaps, a hint of optimism, at the last. The deserter’s tale is interwoven with the account of the life of an East German mathematician, who survived Buchenwald, and who bought into the flawed aspirations of the DDR. His story is narrated by his daughter, and the kernel of her account is set on a boat near Berlin on the fateful date of 11/09/01, that foreboding hinge of two centuries. One steeped in atrocities and idealism, the other in a world without values. The daughter, now 71, is writing her account looking back at events from 2022, just as the war in Ukraine is igniting. These references suggest a fearfulness in Enard’s writing which hasn’t been seen before. As he looks into the future he sees more of the same: a vision out of a Sarah Kane play, an unravelling of all that has been stitched together to create that thing we call European civilisation. A process which has been in the process of beginning, of course, for centuries, in the concentration camps and the gulags, and the colonial misadventures.

The Deserter is a strange, slightly unsatisfactory novel, which feels as though it’s reaching for something that the writer cannot quite grasp. But an unsatisfactory Enard novel still makes for an absorbing, provocative read. He is a writer who uses the novel as a means to flex our thought processes, to make us question, if we see ourselves as European, what the hell that means, or if we don’t, who the hell those people might really be. Because, filtered through his imagination, they sure as hell are not the people they think they are.

Have looked up the essay - the essayist is Nicholas Dames and it can be found here.  

au cimetiere de la pellicule (d. thierno souleymane diallo)

The macguffin in Diallo’s documentary is a search for what he believes to be the first sub-Saharan film from Guinea, a film called Mouramani, directed in Paris by Mamadou Toure. This is the hook Diallo uses to go on a voyage through Guinea, hunting memories or traces of a lost film which plenty have heard of but none have ever seen. Does the film even exist? At the end of his playful doc, Diallo recreates the received content of the movie, but this isn’t the real raison d’être of his film. His concerns are twofold: the role of cinema within Francophone Africa, and the declining role of cinema in culture per se. The former leads him to excavate disused cinemas and warehouses, where he is told about the glory years of cinema in Guinea, long since past. Now, people watch films on their laptops or TVs. The communal joy of cinema is being eroded, something that is happening all over the world, and leads to him visiting a guerrilla cinema in Paris that has been reclaimed. Diallo, who references Joris Ivens, goes barefoot through the parks of Guinea and Paris, hunting his elusive game. It makes for an affecting insight into a little documented corner of the world, and an engaging meditation on the role of cinema in the 21st century. 

municipale (w&d. thomas paulot, w milan alfonsi, ferdinand flame)

In Municipal, a playful documentary, actor Laurent Papot goes to Revin, a small town in the Ardennes, where he plans to stand as mayor. He makes it clear that this is an exercise in the functioning of democracy, saying that if he wins he will return to Paris and leave the chair vacant for his supporters. Perhaps unsurprisingly the project meets with some resistance, even as he garners some unlikely supporters.

The film has three strands. Firstly it interrogates how democracy functions on a local level, showing how local people become involved, tracing Laurent's journey towards polling day. Secondly it is a study in post-industrial decline. Revin used to be an industrial hub, and its economy thrived. Now, in common with so many Western European towns, it has no industry left and has consequently declined. The gilet jaunes candidate both befriends and harangues Laurent, and he clearly represents a more militant critique of 21st century European politics. Thirdly, the film ends up being a surprisingly tender portrait of a man struggling to find his place in an alien culture. Revin is still France, but the distance to Paris seems vast. Laurent is also on a voyage to feel as though he belongs, one the film, which is perhaps directed by his brother (?), traces with elegance and sympathy. 

caught by the tides (w&d jia zhang-ke, w. jiahuan wan)

Zhang-ke’s film is, like Linklater’s Boyhood, an assemblage, cobbled together from four different eras, four different films. At the very opening, we note that the ratio is 4:3, a ratio from 2001, as women practice songs in an industrial backwater, presumably filmed on a camcorder. The images are disconnected, almost random. Where is the story? What is this film about?

The answers to these questions emerge gradually. The film is a love story, of sorts. It is also an account of the transformation of China over the course of quarter of a century. The love story takes the near mute Qiaoqiao, played by Tao Zhao, on a journey from the north to find her lover in Ganghzou. Theirs is a flawed relationship. He is selfish and obsessed by money. She steps through the ruins of a city destroyed to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, like she could be tiptoeing through the remains of their relationship. China evolves from a deep industrial hardship into a world where a robot becomes your shopping friend and can see sadness in your eyes. The relationship bobs alongside the country’s changes. There’s no happy ending, just various kinds of survival.

It struck me, watching the film, that the China I know, having never visited, is entirely filtered through the lens of Jia Zhang-ke. His vision has not so much shaped mine, as formed it. 

the adventurist: my life in dangerous places (robert young pelton)

Pelton’s book is in a breezy autobiography. The author has so many stories to tell, it’s impossible to fit them all in, but the book is ultimately anchored, somewhat awkwardly, around his life story. It feels as though the book is an attempt to wrestle with and understand why his restless soul has taken him to so many extreme locations. Is it a result of his dysfunctional parenting? His absurd schooling? Does he belong to a line that goes back to the Victorians like Burton and Baden Powell, with their need to escape the confines of a stunted, conventional society? All these questions run through the book, even if it never really gets to grips with the conflict between his more conventional stable home-life and his quest for danger. The presence of his wife and daughters is a ghostly one. They are, he acknowledges, the other side of a coin which sees him rushing towards the world’s hotspots, knowing he has their love to come home too. In this sense, in spite of the love of adventure, the story is not one of a radical, Rimbaudesque figure. Pelton always seems to have his get-out covered. He is very much a North American hero, albeit Canadian rather than US; safe in the security that this culture bestows, in terms of money, equipment and kudos.  

time of the wolf (w&d haneke)

We had just arrived in London. A muggy summer afternoon in Whitechapel. Walking past the Genesis, I see that Time of the Wolf is on, re-released for some macabre reason. I contact Rob’s son, who says he’s not sure. A minute later he sends me a message saying he’s watched the trailer and it looks boring. Then he gives in and decides to come, munching popcorn through Haneke.

Is it boring? As ever with Haneke, it is a bit, but that’s kind of the point. The end of the world will be boring, interspersed with moments of sheer terror and classical music. When the daughter listens to the tape of a sympathetic survivor, I realised how much I must hace stolen from this film in the writing of Truck. My blog informs me that this is the third time I have seen the film (and the second time I have claimed to have stolen from it). It still feels fresh, unpredictable, treading a line between tedium and high tension. Rob says it’s not his greatest work, but his son seemed, in spite of the boredom factor, to have been sucked in by it. As was I and will probably watch another decade down the line, when it will feel just as novel, just as dull, just as radical. If we still have cinemas, ten years down the line. 

pd - a few weeks later Rob's son chose to go and see White Ribbon which apparently he loved.

stasiland (anna funder)

Funder’s non fiction book is an anecdotal investigation into the legacy of the DDR. An Australian living in Berlin ten years after the wall fell, she takes on a journey into her own curiosity about the ghost country she inhabits. What was it like to live there during the days of communism? Funder uses her easy-going naivety to reach places a more formal investigator might not. The result is a series of encounters with the winners and losers of the regime. Those who helped to shape its repressive regime and those whose lives were devastated by it. She gets drunk with rock stars and speaks to the people are who literally trying to piece together the crimes of the Stasi, from the shredded paper they left behind. Perhaps because she’s such an outsider, a female antipodean, people seem willing to open up to her and her account is at once shocking, amusing and melancholic.

red love: the story of an east german family (w. maxim leo, tr shaun whiteside)

What was the DDR? A country that only existed for less than half a century, like a hangover from a 19th century Europe where the borders were constantly shifting. A state founded with counter-fascist ideals that soon became almost as repressive and fascist as the state it sought to replace. The birth and death of the communist ideals within Western Europe. Leo’s book is an account of the state he was born into, one that didn’t exist when his parents were born and wouldn’t exist when his children were born. A brief, melancholy state, which was also a state of mind. Using his family history, he investigates how the DDR came to be and what it represented for his grandparents’ generation, and then his parents’. His parents, Wolf and Anne, come across as beautiful children of the post-war generation, their struggles every bit as romantic as those of their contemporaries through the sixties and seventies in the west. (My father’s original first name was Wolf, and the account of Leo’s father’s young life in the immediate post-war Berlin might echo that of my father’s.) By the time Leo himself reaches adolescence, the dream has well and truly died. Although his father was a committed doubter, his mother sought to kept the socialist flame alive. But Leo belongs to a generation that is in thrall to the west, and in his account the collapse of the wall and the DDR has such an inevitability to it that the ultimate experience of its end is almost mundane. There is still, to my mind, a sense of urban quiet to the leafy streets of east Berlin. As though, no matter the political state of the nation, this strange tranquility will always predominate. Leo does not appear to mourn the loss of his birth country, but perhaps, even in the act of writing about it, of excavating that past, there is a latent nostalgia, even if this is a nostalgia for something that never really existed.  

you dreamed of empires (alvaro enrigue, tr natasha wimmer)

Enrigue’s pandemic text is a playful dissertation on the arrival of Cortes at the court of Moctezuma. This is the ur story for the founding of modern Mexico - Iñaritu also incorporated it in his ‘Mexican’ film, Bardo. That first clash of kingdoms, civilisations, ways of thinking, that would shape the geographical territory now known as Mexico, from whence cometh Enrigue himself. The author chooses to engage with the narrative in a playful, self-acknowledged Borgesian form. Using well-known accounts from the time, and great big ice cream cones of his own imagination, he takes the reader back to those days which can only be described as fateful, letting them unravel like the skin of a dead warrior left too long in the sun.

For those who are not familiar with the more Latino account of the tale, the Mexica and their glorious city of Tenochtitlan, were not brought down by the Spaniard’s superior military skill or technology, but by the conflicts endemic to the territory, which Cortes skilfully turned against the Aztecs, and the decadence of their own empire. Enrigue’s Moctezuma is a mushroom junkie. He has the mental confusion and lucidity of a Burroughs, which is exciting but hardly suitable for maintaining an empire against multiple threats. His court is riven with paranoia, given its ruthless martial politic. A warrior culture ensures rigid discipline and clean streets but when the leader goes rogue, more Kurtz than Genghis, the whole edifice topples and it only takes one jumped up conquistador to bring it down.

Enrigue details all of this with playful charm. He takes us through the long-lost streets of the Aztec capital, one of the lost wonders of the world. His cast of characters are all possessed of a glorious, doleful humanity which goes above and beyond cultural origins. If you want a cracking read about the end of the world, and one can imagine why the author chose to address this subject during the pandemic, this is it. 

teorema (w&d pasolini)

This is a paint by numbers narrative. Wealthy industrialist family is thrown into sexual turmoil by the arrival of louche Terrence Stamp, who doesn’t appear to do anything except read Verlaine and screw. When he leaves the siblings, wife and maid all have their own respective breakdowns. It’s all beautifully unsubtle and formulaic. Sometimes you don’t need anything more than a basic blueprint to get your ideas across. 

performance (d. donald cammell, nic roeg, w. cammell)

At what might be termed a difficult moment, there was no greater balm than the chance to watch Performance on the big screen for the first time. It’s a film I have seen and loved several times, but always on TV or a laptop. Details of the edit and the sound design shone through. There might be points of comparison, (Godard, Antonioni), but Cammell and Roeg genuinely push the envelope with the abrasive, atonal edit, especially in the opening minutes. It’s still striking today, so god knows what it must have been like when it came out. Added to the violence, sex and general sixties overdose, the film feels as fresh as a daisy. Whilst the social mix of Notting Hill might have changed almost beyond recognition, the film’s jangly, jarring unspiralling narrative would still probably have film execs sweating today. Surely they can’t do that? Oh yes they can. All of this is wedded to a garrulous british humour, located somewhere between Carry On and Sterne. There was a generous audience at Cinemateca and it was fascinating to see how they reacted with laughter and a clear sense of glee. This is/ was filmmaking done with panache, verve and technical brilliance. Jagger, Fox and Pallenberg have a ball. We are along for the ride to the vivid end of a Borges-tinted decade.