mars in aires (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. robert dassanowsky & john s. barrett)

Lernet-Holenia’s novel, the second of this year, takes place in the days at the start of the Second World War. A veteran Viennese soldier, Count Wallmoden, has no real inkling that war is about to break out. He becomes besotted by Cuba, a mysterious woman, a femme fatale. Just before he has an assignation with her, his company begins to march into Poland. The world is on the brink of war but Wallmoden is distraught he cannot meet up with Cuba. He is certain that the military manoeuvres will end shortly and this will all blow over. The account of the march into Poland is detailed and specific. It doesn’t have the feel of the start of a world war, and Wallmoden compares what is happening with the horrors of the First World War, which he fought in, and feels that it’s quite lightweight. Until he is almost killed as the battles intensify. It’s a fascinating account of a moment when the horrors that will be shortly unleashed are only just emerging from their chrysalis. The tale is also a ghost story. Cuba, Wallmoden is later told, has died. He later meets a woman in a deserted Polish mansion who has the same name. A ghost story in times of war feels even more  understandable or plausible. (One thinks of the seances in Gravity’s Rainbow and the fascination in the First World War.) Mars in Aires is a novel which on one level feels straightforward, but contains a concealed level of complexity, even danger. 

“However, there is no doubt that we – and how often! – for moments, for days, yes, sometimes even longer than that, are in completely different realms, even though we think we’re here, and we live a life there and do things about which we know nothing. But we do live it, that life, and perhaps it’s the real one.”

melancholia (w&d von trier)

If cinema, as occasionally noted, is a synthesis of multiple elements (screenwriting, acting, photography, music, art direction, editing etc), then the art of the director is to employ each of these elements to the nth degree. It might seem counterintuitive that Von Trier, who comes from a lo-fi school, which sought a return to a pared-back methodology, should end up excelling in every aspect of this directorial remit, but in Melancholia, we witness a seemingly effortless mastery of the medium.

Screenwriting - when discussing the quality of screenwriting, what is involved? Firstly the idea that the screenplay will introduce and discuss ideas that provoke thought, a condition so often neglected by the mainstream. Second that the narrative should take the viewer with it, should be involving. Thirdly, that the dialogue should be credible, even at its more recondite. So when Dunst’s character says that the earth is evil, in another film this line might feel trite or contrived. Whereas, in Melancholia, it feels not only credible, coming from the mouth of this character, but also resonant of the more complex ideas the film is raising. Cinema is not philosophy. It struggles to explore concepts with subtlety or depth. Von Trier appears to be investigating a Schopenhauer- ian or Manichean argument about the overblown importance of humanity, its relative insignificance within the immensity of the universe. Dunst character explores these ideas convincingly, brilliantly, in a way that allows us to understand the questions the film is posing. Should the world end, would it really be such a tragedy? What would be lost? It’s an existential, anti-renaissance line, which feels all too pertinent in this 21st christian century.

Acting - Acting is by definition, fakery. Someone pretends to be someone else. The question then becomes, how well do they do this? Do they still feel human? Or does the fakery feel contrived? Perhaps the greatest testament to the director’s skill is the performance of Kiefer Sutherland, an actor who sometimes seemed to relish the fakery, the exaggeration of acting for the camera. Here, as the hassled husband of Gainsbourg and Dunst’s brother-in-law his exasperation is completely convincing.

Photography - I was lucky enough to watch the film on a big screen. There can be few more imposing visions than the great planet Melancholia soaring over the horizon, at the same time beauty, monster and avenger. There is something of the formal composition of certain scenes that is reminiscent of Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad. Then, in the opening half of the film, Von Trier’s DOP, Manuel Alberto Claro, captures the nuances and energy of a wedding with all the brillo of the days of Dogma, a homage, in its way, to Festen.

Music - Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is used repeatedly throughout the film. Given the epic scale the film is looking to operate on, the choice feels just as apposite (and perhaps includes a nod and a wink) to Copolla’s uses of Wagner in Apocalypse Now.

Art Direction - someone (Simone Grau Roney) was doing something very clever indeed with the representation of the planet Melancholia, a second moon/ sun. The use of a simple piece of twisted wire as a messenger of salvation or doom is also extraordinary.

Editing - Editing is one of the least valued elements of the process of making cinema. You rarely get editors on the red carpet. Yet Molly Malene Stensgaard offers a masterclass. In the first half of the film, with its large cast, she ensures that the rhythm never drops as we flit from scene to scene, cutting at the perfect moment. In the second, which has only four characters, she ensures there is a rising sense of tension, propelling the film towards its glorious climax. 

the big nowhere (james elroy)

It’s so long ago since I read Elroy’s Underworld trilogy, which offered both a re-imagination and an examination of post-war US politics. One longs for either Elroy himself or another Elroy to analyse the Trumpian world with the same forensic discipline. Most history, as Marias observes, occurs in the shadows, and Elroy is a writer who is not afraid to walk in those shadows and take the reader with him. Perhaps because the trilogy felt so urgent, so necessary, I have resisted his crime novels. The Big Nowhere is the second of his LA Quartet, and whilst it doesn’t do so directly, it still flirts with politics, pulling up the skirts of the US establishment. Elroy writes with an urgency as he documents the way a crime investigation is railroaded by vested interests within the LAPD. There is no space for idealism or even honesty in this venal world. It’s a gripping, coruscating read, which gives a down-to-earth lowdown on what really makes the US tick. He is a writer blessed with a singular, scatty brilliance.

 

far from heaven (w&d todd haynes)

Todd Haynes achieves something complex in his Sirk homage. He bestows pathos on characters who at first seem laughable, even absurd. The film was released in 2002 and perhaps the lens through which an audience might watch the film has changed over the course of the last 25 years. Moore’s Cathy struggles to cope with her husband Frank’s gay infidelity,  The tone is melodramatic. Moore’s impeccably coiffed hair seems as much of a character as either of her children. Quaid’s Frank breaks down and weeps and then pinballs around like an archetypal repressed North American bourgeois. Everything is so on point that it feels like a pastiche, as indeed it is. It’s impossible not to laugh at these characters and their cliched fifties behaviour. Surely this is a world that we have left behind? Dennis Haysbert’s Raymond is the down-to-earth antidote to all this. A man whose solid decency transcends the boundaries of race and class. No wonder Cathy falls for him. All the same, this world and its characters feel like a caricature. Then something remarkable happens, in large part through the performances of Moore and Haysbert. The characters seem to slip the pastiche net. Their emotional distress touches us. The film becomes a film about love. its power and its limitations. These emotions are, of course, timeless.

Twenty five years later, even those elements of the film that seem wilfully contrived suddenly feel far more plausible. Conservatism is back. Prejudice is back. The closet is back. It seems like we’re slipping back into the absurd, divided world of the fifties. 

la femme d’ à côté (d. françois truffaut, w suzanne schiffman, jean aurel)

Truffaut’s melodrama feels slightly misconceived. Depardieu and Ardant are former lovers. She just happens to move in right across the street from him. Both are slightly nuts but keep it under control with their respective sane partners. However, when they inevitably reconnect, it’s a tinder box. Both veer towards a shared madness, an amour fou. The charisma of the two leads almost pulls it off, but as the film veers more and more towards melodrama, it flirts with the ridiculous. At one point Ardant’s husband says that he’s not a jealous man, “I’m not a Spanish husband”, (something the subtitles struggled to translate), but Depardieu and Ardant both have a Lorca-esque streak to them (she actually comes from the south, her children’s book editor is informed). One wonders what someone like Almodovar might have made of this tale. The tension between a Gallic cool and a Mediterranean excess doesn’t quite come off, as it did in a film like L’Apartment, for example, or even Pierrot Le Fou. It’s an interesting study in how a remarkable director can slightly misfire, no matter how enticing the ingredients, actors and premise. 

the voice of hind rajab (w&d kaouther ben hania)

If we accept that this thing we call life has always been a delicate balance between civilisation and barbarism. That at any moment the barbarians might rear their ugly heads and ignore the established rules of civilisation, then we also tend to believe, from the standpoint of the post-war liberal order, (which gave birth to the state of Israel), that this won’t happen here, or be perpetrated by those we consider our allies. Included in that idea of civilisation is that children should not become the victims of warfare. Wilfully killing children is the kind of thing the barbarians do. Be they the Nazis or the Mongols or any of the other peoples who codes of warfare pay no heed to our idea of civilisation. When the mass murder of civilians occurs, this is what we have come to term a genocide. There are many Israeli politicians who openly advocate for the eradication of the Gazan population. Their rhetoric has fuelled the acts of barbarism which we have witnessed, whether we want to or not, over the course of the past three years.

Hind Rajab was another of the victims of this barbarism. And the weapons which our ‘civilised’ societies have provided. This film pays homage to her suffering. It does so intelligently by not attempting to take us into a fictional Gaza which can never be recreated, rather recreating the events during the hours Hind Rajab was being killed from the point of view of the Red Cross workers in the West Bank, who are trying and failing to save her. Just as we, those who are opposed to the killing of children, try and fail. The Red Cross workers are impotent. They betray one of the core credos of modern filmmaking which is that the protagonists have to be active. They cannot be anything but passive bystanders as they witness the crime occur in real time. We are also passive bystanders, unable to roll back time, make the world see sense, save a child who is begging for her life. It is a terrible thing to witness but the action of witnessing which the filmmakers demand of the audience, the passive, impotent audience, is in some ways a homage to Hind Rajab’s short life and cruel death.

No-one can be a saviour or a superhero in the face of institutionalised barbarism. 

chikamatsu monogatari/ the crucified lovers (w&d kenji mizoguchi, w. monzaemon chikamatsu, matsutarō kawaguchi)

Mizoguchi conjures a subtle tale of tragic love which is also a vivid portrayal of a society where privacy is as wafer thin as the sliding paper walls of the houses the characters inhabit. It’s a world of secret passions and strict societal codes. There is endemic to the tale a severe critique of a wealth-driven culture (and by implication capitalism?). The only real villain is the business owner, Ishun, who wants to cheat on his wife and reacts with no mercy when his loyal and dedicated employee, Mohei, uses his signature to seek a loan of five silver marks for Ishun’s wife, Osan. This precipitates a series of increasingly unfortunate chapters which result in Mohei and Osan fleeing the city together. Osan is increasingly drawn to Mohei, who resists her, until the moment when he reveals his love for her. The story becomes a version of Romeo and Juliet, as the lovers commitment to each other presages their execution by crucifixion for adultery. The story unfolds with a parallel sense of jeopardy and redemptive love. All the characters seem trapped by a social code that fails to recognise the human nature of love. Even Ishun falls prey to this, and is ruined.

At the same time, this is a story of literal sliding doors, as the paper walls of the claustrophobic living quarters make for the inevitable revelation of secret passions and betrayals. Mizoguchi’s camera seems to glide through these spaces, a spy in the house of love. 

nuestra tierra (w&d lucrecia martel, w maría alché)

Martel deviates into doc. Nuestra Tierra is a rangy documentary which looks, as the title suggests, at the issue of the land, who owns it, who has rights. The location is Tucuman, the northern province of Argentina. Northern Argentina has a far larger native or indigenous population than other parts of the country. One of the notable aspects of Martel’s documentary is the way it makes explicit how little representation this element of society has within the general Argentine audio-visual world. The film revolves around a dispute over land rights in a valley which the indigenous Chuschagasta population claim they have always inhabited, which several white families now claim ownership of. This lead to a clash between the local indigenous population and three men of caucasian descent which ended with shots being fired and one indigenous man dying. The film is loosely weaved around the subsequent court case, brought by the relatives of the dead men. There was one pointed moment in the cinema when an academic opines that there are no official rastros (traces) of Chuschagasta in the valley. Rastros can also mean features, and Martel juxtaposes the academic’s words with the faces of the Chuschagasta who are present at the trial. The irony of the academic’s negationist argument was not lost on the Cinemateca audience.

The film seeks to both relate the dramatic events of the confrontation, of which there is grainy footage, and also to recount the stories of many of the inhabitants of the valley. It is an object lesson in a non-netflix method of storytelling. It resists sensationalism, preferring to dwell on the complex history of the region and its inhabitants, shifting from courtroom drama to archeological/ sociological study. There is no dominant central character. The viewer is encouraged to immerse themselves in this valley, to walk through its ravines, to gaze at the wild horses, to listen to the memories of the elders. In so doing, Martel creates an important document about discrimination and the inequities of Argentine society.  

mother father sister brother (w&d jarmusch)

Jarmusch is a master of style. Cinema is a visual medium (natch) - nevertheless those artists who embrace their aesthetic identity tend, perhaps surprisingly, to be pushed to the margins. The list of directors who are valued for style as much as content is short. Parajanov, Greenaway to name a couple. Jarmusch has long been a master of the acerbic, stripped back narrative, which allied to his aesthetic charms can produce masterpieces. Down By Law, Dead Man, Night on Earth and so on and so forth. He is also one of the few directors who can use the portmanteau format effectively (Coffee and Cigarettes, Night on Earth). Mother Father Sister Brother goes back to this format. Three extended shorts glued together to make a whole movie. There are recurring tropes - skateboarders, water, and (to an Englishman the slightly annoying) riff on the phrase ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’. The three pieces are also showcases for his cast, a mix of the famous and the less-well-known. The theme is family. In the first two pieces, the leitmotif is discomfort, and Jarmusch’s employment of the awkward silence is impeccable. The final piece, Sister Brother, is the only one which depicts a loving family relationship. The overall vibe is arch, even mannered, perhaps offset by the siblings’ evident affection. The film falls somewhere between Chekhovian versus Style-Over-Content, dependent on the viewer’s predilections and, presumably, personal family condition.

Nb - The second short, featuring a fearsome Charlotte Rampling, takes place in Dublin. It feels as though it was written to take place in London, and got switched for tax breaks? Jarmusch’s engagement with British culture, which features the aforementioned Bob’s Your Uncle riff, also has Rampling, an English doyenne waxing lyrical about PG Tips. One wonders of this is a deliberate choice, ie an act of irony, or a strange misrepresentation. In which case, did no one have the courage to tell the director that there is no way that Rampling’s elegant character would be serving PG Tips, given her refined gastronomic tastes? It’s one of those details which makes the second short feel slightly off-kilter, an essay that doesn’t quite square with its material.

aparajito (w&d satyajit ray)

The middle chapter in the Pather Panchali trilogy, Aparajito is a sensitive coming of age story, as Apu moves firstly from Benares to the countryside, following the death of his father, and then from the countryside to Calcutta, where he studies whilst his mother pines for him back in the country. The three chapters in themselves allow Ray to depict three different elements of Indian culture. The devotion and poverty of the Ganges town, the more lyrical ballad of the countryside, (albeit a peace interrupted by the sound of the train on the horizon), and lastly city life. Even if Apu’s Calcutta seems less frenetic that its modern day incarnation. These transitions help to paint a picture not just of a young man growing up, but also of an entire society, its possibilities, its limitations, its aspirations. 

the disappearing act (maria stepanova, tr sasha dugdale)

Stepanova’s novella can be read in the course of a single day. It recounts the cute tale of an exiled female novelist who nearly joins the circus. A dream of so many. At the edge of the novella lurks the spectre of Putin and Ukraine. But they are kept on the edges, as the mercurial narrator tiptoes through a chaotic twenty four hours, seeking to escape fame and fortune, dreaming of another life. 

wizard of the kremlin (w&d olivier assayas, w. emmanuel carrère)

Assayas is a prolific filmmaker with the rangy curiosity that goes with this desire to create. As such, this pivot to big-budget geo-political drama is perhaps not quite so surprising. This is a film about the world as it is, if not today, then at least yesterday. Adapted from a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, the film describes Putin’s rise to power, supposedly aided and abetted by the maverick guru, Vadim Baranov, modelled, so wiki tells me, on Vladislav Surkov. Baranov is a onetime theatre director and TV producer, whose communication skills facilitate Putin’s rise, and who later helps shape his bellicose foreign policy, although this is somewhat glossed over. As a device to enter Putin’s world it might work, although the script seems to struggle with that old screenwriting chestnut, the passive protagonist, because everything Baranov does is overshadowed by the actions of his two bosses, first Berezovksky and then Putin. Towards the final third of a long film Baranov appears to start to take matters more into his own hands, but then the film runs up against the paradox that its ostensibly sympathetic central character, played with a wan intelligence by Dano, is just as psychopathic as Putin, as his participation in the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas implies. 

The film seeks to cram twenty five years of history into its two and a half hours. For the world of nineties russia, the novels of Pelevin or Sorokin might offer a more intriguing entry point. There will be several books on Putin’s rise - Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People gives a forensic account which a film cannot hope to emulate. One also wonders if Assayas might have been influenced by the work of Kirill Serebrennikov. The Wizard of the Kremlin is a valiant stab at documenting contemporary history within a dramatic format, but it also sometimes feels as though the screenwriters may have been biting off more than they could chew. 

to lose a war (jon lee anderson)

Anderson’s prose is elegant and efficient. Unlike TV journalists, he’s always after the story that hides behind the headlines. It’s old school reporting. He finds people whose voices would never normally be heard. He also hangs in there. This book is a compilation of nearly thirty years of reporting on Afghanistan, from the departure of the Russians to the departure of the North Americans. He recognises the patterns, not least because the Afghanis themselves repeatedly spell this out to him. This isn’t a territory that can be conquered. It still consists of warring tribes and factions whose loyalties are willing to shift to whoever will best serve them, be that Russia, NATO, the US or the Taliban. Out of all this emerges the hubris of empirical overreach. Even as the US and NATO are installing themselves in Kabul, ‘modernising’ the city, Anderson is aware that out there in the plains, deserts and mountains, there are local people biding their time, waiting for the moment when the imperial mission will crumble. Part of the reason he’s so aware is that, unlike most reporters, he has actually gone beyond the capital and spoken to ordinary people. With the current flirtation with the idea of invading Iran, there is no more timely book for the decision-makers in Washington to be reading, even if one questions whether many of them would have the intellectual capacity to read and engage with Anderson’s book. 

ljósbrot / when the light breaks (w&d rúnar rúnarsson)

My friend Mr Plester should see this film, as it has a scene of two people eating hotdogs in Reykjavik. Apart from that, When The Lights Breaks could be described as a tender study of grief. A young man, Diddi, is killed in a car crash.  He was about to tell his girlfriend that he was leaving her for Una, played by Elín Hall. Her Bowie-esque disposition (cerca Man Who Fell to Earth) holds the film together with an assured performance that shows the nuanced complexities of both revealing and hiding your feelings at the same time. When the girlfriend arrives, Una struggles to hide her secret. Her curious, near-androgynous look masks her vulnerability. She’s both hyper-human and a-human at the same time. In a film blessed with sympathetic performances, hers stands apart; she flies and the rest follow, like geese, in her wake.

 

apocalypse now (w&d coppola, john milius, michael herr)

Things that strike one on rewatching:

Coppola’s editorial boldness. The superimposition of faces over images. The management of rhythm. It’s a long film but it never feels long.

The American nightmare. Am also reading John Lee Anderson’s book on Afghanistan at the moment. It’s astonishing, perhaps criminal, how the same trope recurs over and again. The imperial overreach. The dystopia. The chronicle of a failure foretold. But whereas North American cineastes grappled with Vietnam, the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns have never had their Apocalypse Nows or Deer Hunters. Perhaps the decline of an empire goes hand in hand with the failing capacity for self-awareness. 

unfinished business (michael bracewell)

Bracewell’s novel is reminiscent of Szalay’s London and the South East. Middle aged man losing his way after a life spent in offices. After reading Souvenir, with its playful non-fiction elements, Unfinished Business feels less adventurous in its approach to a London that has been loved and lost. There’s a plethora of characters who gravitate around the hapless narrator, including his ex-wife and in-laws and daughter. Bracewell plays with time as we skip in and out of the present. At one point he writes of the narrator: “To walk through London, he always felt, was to walk through the many chapters of his unwritten autobiography.” The novel is perhaps at its sharpest when it reveals the way in which our personal histories become inscribed in the bricks and mortar of the city. 

PIL

Am walking down Sarandi, the peatonal. A cyclone is blowing. The palm trees double back on themselves. It’s quarter past eight. Birdland has started on time and the world as we know it is forty five minutes from ending.

I first encountered PIL as a thirteen year old. Jason had this strange metal box, and contained within it was even stranger music. I didn’t know much about music. The Sex Pistols had been no more than a noise offstage. Like the Silver Jubilee. Like Vietnam. Like the Oil Crisis and the Six Day Week. Jason played the strange music in the big hall which was known as Toyes. It got under my skin. More than I knew.

I check my phone as I try to avoid the squalls of rain. I don’t want the world to end. It ended once a few years ago and when the world ends I find myself trapped in the safest corner of the universe. Montevideo. With its bocas, (crack houses), its street beggars, its pasteros (crack addicts). With its desolate, empty streets and its tiny theatres full of pecunious creativity. I’ll be fine in Montevideo if the world ends but I’d prefer it not to.

The world hasn’t ended. There’s a ceasefire.

In the bar de los viejos, corner of Washington and Colon, (could there be a more american corner?), the tv isn’t showing the football for once. It’s showing someone talking about the fact that the world hasn’t ended. Without a great deal of clarity. Leo and I share a beer. Outside the cyclone is gathering force. Inside there’s just us and one old guy with a beard down to his toes.

John Lydon is already on stage when we get to the Museo de Carnival. He’s a punctual Englishman. His band is a bassist, a guitarist who sometimes plays mandolin and a drummer. They’re tight. Lydon stands in front of a lectern with a folder containing the lyrics of the songs. He’s seventy years old. He doesn’t need to fuck around with remembering his lines.

My dad was into Simon and Garfunkel and French chanson. Jason used to play PIL, Augustus Pablo, Lennon, Stravinsky. He educated me in the possibilities of the aural world. My brain opened and flexed under his influence. Music as an energy, music as a weapon, music as mystery.

“Drive to the forest in a Japanese Car” - the songs come back from the undergrowth of my teenage years. They’re there in my brain, waiting to be activated. Lydon gobs, Lydon speaks very bad Spanish, Lydon stares at us like he’s a lunatic or we’re all lunatics. Lydon, you can’t help thinking, wouldn’t mind welcoming in the end of the world. He’s a dirty, foul-mouthed shaman, who sings for his supper. Like some kind of warrior king from the annals of Lévi-Strauss, belonging to a tribe which both fears him and rejects him. He’s on the edge of being unhinged - menos mal that he doesn’t have his finger hovering over the nuclear button, sooner or later he would have pressed it. And we wouldn’t be here tonight, waiting for the end of the world.

As the gig steers towards its end, PIL steers its ship towards the rocks. Old man Lydon asks the question: what is anger? We reply, on cue: Anger is an Energy. It’s a chant, an invocation. Anger is an Energy. Anger is an Energy. Lydon looks on approvingly. He gobs. But he doesn’t look angry. He looks like someone who knows that if he wanted to, he could shepherd us all out into the cyclone night to riot, to burn down the whole damned world.

But he’s not going to. He’s going to go back to the hotel and go to bed early.

We return to the bar for a whisky after the show. The TV is showing the football. Boston River playing a team from Brazil in the rain. Boston River are losing. All’s well with the world. 

kairos (jenny erpenbeck, tr michael hofmann)

The transition of Berlin from a city divided to a city unified is one of the more epic geopolitical tales of my lifetime. My generation grew up with the Berlin Wall and this island outpost of “the West” within the communist empire. This in itself being one of the most long-lasting and evident aftershocks of the Second World War. The wall felt intractable, as though it would be there forever. So when it went, it revealed the porousness of historical absolutes. Nothing lasts forever.

Erpenbeck’s novel tells this tale from the point of view of the East, which could be termed the point of view of the losers. It’s a love story which from the get-go seems fucked up. Hans is in his mid fifties and Katharina is nineteen when they meet. For all that the narrative is largely told from her besotted point of view, the reader knows this isn’t a happy-ever-after tale. As Hans becomes increasingly controlling and abusive, with Katharina seemingly unable to see the wood from the trees, the novel takes a darker turn. The reader is asked to buy into their unpleasant, toxic relationship. The writing itself becomes more and more uncontrolled. Characters come and go, there are sudden jumps in time. Hans and Katharina are devastatingly unhappy, then they’re cosy all over again. It’s a vortex, and the vortex spins and spins. The point of view of Ingrid, Hans’ wife, is only touched on, and Katharina seemingly has no sense of guilt or responsibility towards the unfortunate wife, unable to see Hans for what he is.

Which will finally be revealed when the novel reaches its epilogue. They have a word here, remate, which literally means ‘finish’, but is also used to mean something like ‘a sting in the tail’. Erpenbeck keeps this up her sleeve. (Perhaps a DDR public would have worked this out sooner.) Hans, a novelist and journalist, is not quite what he seems, and even Katharina, his long-term lover, is unable to work this out.

All of which is complex, even torturous. The middle of the novel is a mazy, roundabout read. The reader, blessed with historical knowledge the characters don’t have, knows where this is headed. The fate of the relationship is tied to the fate of the DDR, a country that will soon cease to exist. The last quarter of the novel documents the decline and fall of East Germany with great precision. The writer skips over the day the wall is breached, because this isn’t a novel about that moment. It’s a novel about the effects of the transition on the individuals who lived in the East, who, in one way or another, adhered to the values, flawed or not, of the East German regime. The novel suddenly becomes more political, as the looming demiurge of capitalism overtakes and invades. Erpenbeck knows that, like the relationship of her ill-crossed lovers, the project that is dying is doing so because of irredeemable flaws. But still - there was something there, wasn’t there? Another way of living, beyond callow materialism.

In this closing sequence a novel which seems at times to deliberately alienate the reader comes full circle. The sting in the tail is at most an afterthought. The dream died a long time ago. All that was left was the shadow of the dream, the missing teeth of the wall that sought to keep out Mammon. 

+++

Nb - I have recently read two non-fiction books about the DDR, Red Love and Stasiland, which help to contextualise the world of Kairos. As the world reverts towards an extreme dichotomy between ‘The West’ and all that this has come to imply, and the unknown, ‘East’, the dialectic which Berlin itself represented for nearly half a century seems more and more a representation of the different paths the world might have taken.

decline and fall (evelyn waugh)

Waugh’s first novel may be a minor piece of literature, but it still has the feel of a writer who knew how to capture the zeitgeist. Which is half the battle. The title itself is instructive. The decline and fall is not of the Roman Empire, but the British. However, Waugh is writing during the empire’s swansong, when Britain was still arguably the most powerful nation on earth and the map was still covered in pink. The world my grandparents grew up in, which would come to a terminal halt with the outbreak of the Second World War. Waugh namechecks Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The Honourable Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s Elizabethan Manor House is rebuilt as a modernist masterpiece/ horrorshow. The protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, is sent Virginia Woolf’s latest novel to read in prison. Waugh might be a young fogey, but he’s a fogey who knows which way the wind is blowing. The novel is a satire, but this is a gentle rather than Swiftian satire, with a commercial bent. Waugh came to my attention then other day when Peter Hitchens posted an interview with him, saying that the way he spoke English took him back to his youth. HIs lack of intellectual ambition feels like the product of high-englishness. As though to say, why in the world did this little island come to be so important? A historical fluke and a mercantile instinct, which had unforeseen and unnecessary consequences, whose demise was always imminent, even if it took a hundred years to fulfil. The United Kingdom today is not so far removed from Waugh’s world, with its archaic traditions and social divisions intact, but the full effect of the decline and fall has now kicked in, and it has become a country gradually slipping further and further into irrelevance, an archipelago of historical resonance. 

la grazia (w&d paolo sorrentino)

Sorrentino’s latest is a solid, affectionate meditation on ageing. It’s beautifully lit. Everything is high-Roman. Exquisite buildings, furnishings, tapestries. And yet the most powerful scenes occur in a prison school room. One of the attributes of cinema is the capacity of a small part, even a tiny part, to have an outweighing impact on the narrative. When the politician’s daughter goes to visit the woman convicted of killing her husband, and later, in the same room, the politician goes to visit the schoolteacher convicted of killing his wife, these scenes elevate the whole film on to another register, the register of passion and violence and reality which the politician appears to have been immune to, as he enters the final furlongs. The performances of both actors here, in what might have been at the most probably two days of filming, eclipse so much of the rest of the film, it feels like a magic trick, and indeed, though these characters are secondary or even tertiary, it’s their fates which provide the most cogent dramatic through line, even including a pair of ironic footnotes in the end credits. 

the monroe girls (antoine volodine, tr. alyson waters)

A strange post-civilisation world. A world where the dead and living live side-by-side. Mysterious squad of female assassins, who may or may not be coming back from the dead. A narrator who is two people, first person and third person. Discursive scenes followed by staccato moments of violence. Volodine’s text has something of Burroughs about it, with added humour and a post-apocalyptic slant. 

my childhood/ my ain folk/ my way home (w&d bill douglas)

There are figures who float on the edge of our knowing. Think of all the books you will never read, all the films you will never watch. Many of them in their own way, masterpieces. Or maybe not. Douglas is one such figure, a name, an idea, a part of the world, cinematic and more, that I have inherited, but until this weekend I had never watched his work, never known why the name of this obscure scot, who died in 1991, had ever been on my radar.

Cinemateca screened his trilogy this weekend, so I saw all three films. They are all short. The last, My Way Home, is the longest at 77 minutes, whilst My Childhood is a mere 44 minutes. Collectively, however, they add up to a vast, sweeping epic, consciously echoing the work of Maxim Gorky, consciously laying down a marker for a vision of British cinema as image-lead, sensorial, affective. Impossible not to see the seeds of Ramsey’s work there, not merely because of the correlation of Scottishness and poverty. More due to their shared capacity to make the image sing a song, to mine poetry from the banal.

The trilogy depicts the childhood and young adulthood of Jamie, growing up in a poverty which nowadays might be classified as third world. The palette is black and white. There is humour  and melodrama in this black and white world. The Scots may be portrayed as dour, but in a way this just shows up the moments of warmth and kindness. Douglas relishes the beauty of to be found in the everyday. The film is a lyrical ballad to the potential of a turnip field, an apple, even wallpaper. The final film in the trilogy includes a breathtaking long shot of Jamie stood in the ornate surroundings of a Cairo mosque. This is contrasted with the closing image of an apple tree orchard. All things have a remedial beauty in the world, and Douglas, recounting the story of his youth, hunts down that beauty with the eye of a cinematic panther. 

As an aside, it’s worth noting the extraordinary generation of filmmakers that emerged in the UK, some feted, some less so. Alongside Jarman, Roeg, Loach and Anderson, there are also Watkins, Clarke, Potter, Potter, Bleasdale, Greenaway, to name a few. An inordinately masculine list, but one that reflects a commitment to provocative, political filmmaking before the likes of Curtis, Mendes, even Nolan, took over. 

juvenile court (d. frederick wiseman)

An earlier Wiseman. Same fly on wall diligence. Same immersive and demanding viewer experience. Here the precinct, as they call it, is more restricted. A specific Juvenile Court in Memphis, the Deep South of the USA. There is even a kind of heroic protagonist, the humanist judge who, a la Azdak, has to seek the best life-resolution judgement for the troubled youngsters who end up in his court. Wiseman is never afraid to let a storyline play out and this is a film with multiple storylines, enough for a dozen potential movies. Towards the end, the film follows one character in great and harrowing depth, as a 17 year old accused of armed robbery breaks down, saying he has been set up, that there is no ‘good’ outcome for him, whilst his lawyers and the judge try to ensure he doesn’t end up getting convicted when he turns 18 in an adult court, where, they say, he would likely get sent down for twenty years. It’s a bold approach to storytelling, as the film has already documented a host of other cases. The minutiae of the court’s dealings oscillates between being fascinating and tedious. Wiseman sticks to his guns, and as the storyline reaches its denouement, we come to understand that this is how the system works. It’s a long, slow grind, working towards a conclusion which is by its nature unsatisfactory, but might be the best playing of a bad hand.

in jackson heights (d. frederick wiseman)

In Jackson Heights is over three hours long. It’s fly on the wall. The directorial choices are all in the edit and the decision of what to film. One wonders how much was left on the cutting room floor. Given the length and the lack of any clear narrative, it’s inevitable that there are longeurs for the viewer. In a way it’s like going on a long bus ride through this little known barrio of New York, stopping off to drop in on people. Gradually, themes emerge. Gentrification. Immigration. Language. Towards the start of the film a middle aged white man states that this is the most diverse place in the whole world. More Spanish is spoken than English. There are scenes in mosques, in nail bars, in diners, in immigrant centres. As the film flows, like a river, the viewer starts to recognise elements of the geography. A railway bridge, a station, the mall. By the end, as the director offers a closing shot showing the NY skyline, we might almost be fellow citizens of Jackson Heights, a place most viewers will probably never have visited. And, like any place we have visited, people and images from that journey continue to reverberate in the head long after we have left the film and the place itself behind.

Nb - Uruguay Watch. La Banda Oriental features twice in the movie. Once when they play in the World Cup and are being defeated by Colombia, to the delight of a raucous Colombian crowd, and a second time when, more surprisingly, the annual pride parade passes in front of a Uruguayan restaurant. Which only goes to reaffirm the claim of Jackson Heights being the most diverse barrio in the world. 

count luna (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. jane b. greene)

Reading Lernet-Holenia’s curious text which is something of a shaggy dog story, I was myself haunted by the shadow of a Viennese count.

Count Luna tells the story of Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian citizen descended from a mittel-european family with roots in Poland, Ruthenia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When the Second World War breaks out, Jessiersky is tasked with buying some land from Count Luna, which he doesn’t want to sell. The end result of this mismanaged transaction is that Luna ends up in a concentration camp, and Jessiersky feels a cloying guilt which then transforms into a vengeful psychosis, as he tries to locate the mysterious Luna, who he believes is taking revenge on him. It’s a novel about psychosis and delirium, which fittingly starts and ends in the catacombs of Rome, the deep substrata of catholic Europe. The ideas don’t go as far as they might, but it’s an entertaining and quietly disturbing read.

My haunting came from realising the Viennese world which Luna, Jessiersky and the author belonged to was also a world my lost grandfather would have shared. He died in the Second World War, my father never knew him, and that whole strand of the family only slightly reconnected in the 21st century. Yet, the shadow of the Viennese count has always lurked in the background. Perhaps acting as a distancing mechanism from the actual world, as Luna does for Jessiersky. 

the lady vanishes (d. alfred hitchcock, w. ethel lina white, sidney gilliat, frank launder)

High jinks, dastardly europeans, cricket lovers and a folk dance historian. So much of Hitchcock’s film seems quintessentially English. As an Englishman, it’s hard not to feel as though the film tugs on some kind of deep national cord, and not just because of Caldicott and Charters’ overriding need to discover the score in the test match. This joke wouldn’t run anymore. There’s no way a thread about cricket could be used to activate the national consciousness. Something that might have seemed comically plausible back then would be absurd now. Part of the beauty of Hitchcock and his screenwriters’ representation of Britishness is that these aren’t all warm, sympathetic characters. THey’re a mixed bunch, with mixed interests. Cowardice and selfishness are also on display. Would a child born in the UK in the 21st century still recognise these archetypes? Or has that whole world gone the way of steam trains and cricket buffs? Post-war, Hitchcock would pick up sticks and move to Hollywood. If anything represents the definitive termination of the British as a significant global influence which, for better or for worse, was still the case when my grandfather was born, it might be Hitchcock’s exile. The war, which The Lady Vanishes, for all its comic import, prefigures, would be the final nail in the coffin of his career as a British director. From then on, he would become another immigrant craftsman brought in to embellish the North American empire.

 

lou reed - a life (anthony decurtis)

Having read a biography of Arthur Miller last year whilst working on All My Sons, it is fascinating to see how Reed and Miller, seemingly two very different beasts, had so much in common. The offspring of the pre and post war Jewish immigration to New York were a generation that was intellectually ferocious and creatively brilliant. (Sontag is another that comes to mind.) Both Reed and Miller lived in the shadow of their fathers. Both rebelled in their fashion by choosing to take up a career in the arts. Thereafter their lives might be said to have taken a different course, but both were provocateurs and rebels, an impulse forged in the furnace of their family background. DeCurtis’ biography of Reed is rigorous. He shapes the book around the albums Reed produced, which were numerous. The music is the key to tracing the singer’s concerns, desires and psychosis. Reed comes across as complex, difficult and a slave to his own creativity. In another era he might have died in a pauper’s grave, but the biographer informs us he actually accrued considerable wealth. The tension between maintaining a stance on the outside of the industry whilst still seeking critical and financial validation is clear from the book. Reed’s relationship with the transexual, Rachel, is perhaps the apex of this dialectic. Rachel, who was Reed’s partner for several years but from whom he split, unceremoniously, (as he did with almost all his partners, romantic or musical or professional), ended up as a lost figure in the Reed mythos, someone who vanished into the dirty boulevards of the city, whilst Reed ascended towards its heights. 

sirat (w&d oliver laxe, w santiago fillol)

This is, as they say, a polemical, marmite, movie. It walks in the footsteps of Sorcerer, (which walked in the footsteps of Wages of Fear.) The film deliriously refuses to give the viewer what they want. The westerners who have taken their colonial noise war into an alien desert are not going to get off scot free. As a road movie, influenced by the above named films, it’s clear early on that there will be those who survive and those who don’t. What Laxe does with a certain gleeful degree of emotional manipulation is ensure that this equation is always in the balance. And the final shot speaks of another, real-life road movie, where other souls, less privileged, are also rolling the dice to see who will make it to their destination, and who will not. 

tardes de soledad (d. albert serra)

We are living through an age of war and savagery. Few films I have seen have captured the latter with quite the unremitting insistence as Serra’s bullfighting doc. It’s a relentless attack on the viewer’s senses, as we watch the spectacle of death unfurl time after time. It is a spectacle indeed, as the preening bullfighter, Andrés Roca Rey, dandies his way through the killing fields in his exquisite, homoerotic costume. Most of the film takes place within the bullring, punctuated with scenes of the team in the back of a minivan, but one intricate sequence shows Roca Rey getting dressed, almost being winched into his skintight costume by his batman. The scenes beyond the ring are the viewer’s breathing space. In the ring, Serra’s camera, welded with surgical effectiveness by DOP Artur Tort, captures every straining sinew of both torero and bull. The blood flows down the bulls’ flanks. After the coup de grace is executed, the bulls are dragged away unceremoniously, their might reduced to nothing more than dense flesh. The camera offers a different view of the spectacle to that of the stalls. There’s no hiding from the cruelty or the torero’s valour. The torero’s face contorts with courage and concentration. In this the film is reminiscent of Douglas Gordon’s remarkable Zidane. But it also possesses the unflinching violence of an Ulrich Seidl film. You want to look away. You don’t want to watch the act of killing. Just as we always look away from the killings, day after day. Tardes de Soledad is a fitting film for this age of savagery. 

hamnet (w&d chloe zhao, w. maggie o’farrell)

Two connected thoughts on Zhao’s take on the novel.

Firstly - In The Rider and at times in Nomadland, Zhao employed what might be described as cinema verité to great effect. Naturalistic lighting, a roving, deliberately unsteady camera. Muted performances punctuated by dramatic moments. In Hamnet, she stays true to this, in spite of what must have been an inflated budget (although the CGI London riverbank scenes feel slightly low-cost). The trouble is, and perhaps this is exacerbated by coming from an English POV, cinema verité in a faux elizabethan England is always going to be a stretch. Rather than the viewer being sucked in by the style, it draws attention to everything that possesses the artifice of cinema. In a sense the nature scenes are the most effective: here the backdrop feels no more than regularly artificial. In contrast Elizabethan Stratford/ London feels like a construction, as indeed it is. The plague that is a motif and key plot diver is communicated via cinematic shorthand.  Secondly, given the presence of star names doing a lot of heavyweight acting, rather than getting lost in their story, as is the case of The Rider, one is constantly aware of the heavy-lifting the stars are doing. The naturalism is undercut and what remains is pure performance. Which also explains why Buckley was a shoe-in for the Oscar.

uncle anghel (panaït istrati, tr. maude valérie white)

Uncle Anghel is a novel of two halves. The first is told from the point of view of Adrian, a young villager whose uncle, Anghel, a formerly prosperous innkeeper, has gone to ruin. Adrian returns from travelling just in time to attend the death throes of Anghel, a formidable, cursed soul, who has no regrets. The second half of the book is narrated by Adrian’s cousin, Jeremy, who is present at the deathbed. Jeremy tells the story of his rumbustious childhood living with the famous bandit, Cosma. These adventures have less of a Schopenhaurian feel than the first half of the book. It has the flavour of a Jack London adventure story, as the author returns to the tales of his youth. 

the song of the earth (jonathan bate)

Bate’s examination of the links between romanticism and ecology offer up the moral that the poet is the unacknowledged connection between the soil and the mind. As such the poet, like the aborigine in the outback, can sing us out of the dystopia which we have constructed. At times beautiful and other time befuddling, the book ranges from Heidegger to Clare and gives perhaps unexpected prominence to Byron. Bate is strong on that paradox of modernity whereby an appreciation of nature is coupled with an alienation from nature. Are his conclusions in the end somewhat hippy-chic, as he discourses from this Oxonian ivory tower? There was a feeling in the reading of the book (and feelings are not to be negated according to his thesis) that the urgency of the opening chapters, or the radicalism of the opening chapters, became diluted as the book expounded its argument. However, this might also be an inevitability in the actual process of writing itself; perhaps according to Bate, the tendrils of poetry are the truest form of the word, and the more that writing seeks to investigate the roots of those tendrils, the less, ironically, it becomes possible to hear the flower’s song.

The Graeco-Roman counterpart to the story of Eden is that of the lost Golden Age. It is a story which has had an extraordinarily long and fertile history as a mythic and literary archetype. It tells of how all beasts had horizontal backbones and a gaze that looked down towards the earth, until there came Prometheus who ‘Upended man into the vertical’, and ‘tipped up his chin / So to widen his outlook on heaven’. Once man looked away from where he walked, the earth became vulnerable. The desire for transcendence, the aspiration to higher realms, was predicated upon a denial of biological origin, a departure from ground.

daisies (w&d vera chytilová, w. pavel jurácek, ester krumbachová)

At a time when there is much discussion about the difference between female filmmaking and male filmmaking, it is perhaps instructive to savour a film I have spent many years waiting to watch. It is fascinating to note how many of the film’s images have crept into the cinematic consciousness, so that watching the film was a little bit like reacquainting with something you have never known. Chytilová’s film is non-linear, imagistic, provocative, playful. Non-linear in so far as there appears to be no concrete story, just the adventures of two young friends in a city, their encounters, their pranks, their dreams. Imagistic in so far as the image is prioritised over the word. Provocative in several fashions: featuring  two young women frequently scantily clothed, seemingly assured in their sexuality, feels as though it is a challenge to those who adhere to a masculine perspective of how young women should behave (and the film has them repeatedly take the piss out of older men). It might be that fifty years later the attitudes of the two Maries have become the norm, which only makes one wonder how a contemporary version of Daisies might seek to provoke. Playful in so far as there is a constant sense of the director seeking spontaneity, (and cinema is the hardest medium in which to be spontaneous), creativity, fun. As I ran up Shaftesbury Avenue after the movie, in an incoherent and disruptive fashion, swimming against the tide, I felt a certain affinity with Chytilová’s anti-world stance. 

the secret agent (w&d kleber mendonça filho)

I had been told so much about this film, and harboured a longing to see it for so long. And there are few better cinemas in central London to watch it than the Garden Cinema, where our own Latino experience occurred last year. Kleber Mendonça Filho sets out to make an epic, a homage to Recife and to an era. The film opens with a brief montage of stills of musicians, and then moves into a superb opening scene as Wagner Moura’s character, Armando, fills up with petrol. The scene is perhaps ten minutes long and completely captures the sense of being in the middle of nowhere in deepest Brazil. Then Armando arrives in Recife and the film settles down into something else, a leisurely north eastern reflection on corruption, carnival and the cinema. The film is peppered with humour and the grotesque. It’s in the tradition of Babenco’s Lucio Flavio, without quite possessing the hard edge of the Argentine director’s movie. It feels like a movie about that time, told from the standpoint of a safer time, something the film’s 21st century framing device would appear to acknowledge. 

souvenir (michael bracewell)

This slight half-fiction, populated by pop stars and flaneurs, does what it says on the tin. It remembers. In a succession of vignettes, Bracewell traces an unofficial history of the capital from ’78 to ’85. This is the land of music and fashion, of the unheralded and the heralded. People who went to parties in council blocks or art galleries, people who walked the streets wondering at the dazzle, clocking the passers-by, living outside thoughts of the future. It’s a small, beautiful book which captures the city in the years before I knew it, albeit the traces of that time were still around when I arrived in 88, the last gasp of the pre-digital era. If you really want to know what London was like in those days, you can do much worse than spend an afternoon with Bracewell’s Memoir. 

These Polaroid photographs, by contrast, were deeply English, neo-Romantic in spirit: Paul Nash, John Minton, Derek Jarman; the lane in deep green evening light, abstraction on the beach, the personality of inanimate objects (a jar on a windowsill, a dirty windowpane, a stricken tree, moss on blackened brick); the stilled or violent atmosphere of time and place thickening to numinosity.

no other choice (w&d park chan-wook, w. donald e. westlake, lee kyoung-mi)

11am on a Friday morning is a great time to watch a film which questions the new world order we are all subject to. Chan-wook’s film has enough highways and byways for the viewer to undergo their own personal journey down its highways and byways. After the set up, with Man-su losing his job and embarking on his dastardly scheme to become re-employed, there were moments when the film teeters on the edge of self-indulgence, in the style of a Jacobean tragedy which becomes obliged to go through its revenge story beats. (With some gratuitous comedy beats thrown in). Yet, as the narrative starts to swirl towards its centrifugal conclusion, the investment of director and audience is rewarded. Chan-wook’s meditations on the diabolical nature of a world given over to dehumanised capital, aided and abetted by AI, comes into flower in a darkened lights-out factory. The dedication to Costa Gavras in the closing credits feels like game recognising game. 

the shepherd and the bear (w&d max keegan, w. sabine emiliani)

Keegan’s doc is what might be called lovingly made, as it follows the travails of an ageing shepherd in the Pyrenees. The shepherd is one of the last of his line, happy to spend months living in a small shack in the high country. When bears are released into the wild, re-establishing a bear community, local livestock owners are fearful. The ancient conflict between man and nature has a new battleground. The shepherd keeps doing his thing, no matter what, even after a few savaged sheep carcasses make spectacular appearances. The film, like the conflict, simmers rather than coming to a boil, but it’s a well crafted portrait of a remote rural society which highlights the paradoxes around ideas of re-wilding and environmentalism, concepts that can lead to the sense of an agenda being imposed by metropolitan diktat on the rural communities who inhabit the countryside and the wild places the environmentalists seek to preserve.

 

sorcerer (w&d william friedkin, w. walon green, georges arnaud)

Back in the Ipswich Film Theatre, half-full for this restored print of Friedkin’s minor classic. I might have seen the Wages of Fear, but if I have I can’t remember when. Friedkin expands the story in a bold opening, stitching together three long sequences which introduce the key characters, all renegades of one form or another, living on the edge of their country’s laws. The long shots, the zooms, have a bravura feel, which echoes the scope of a film that moves from Mexico to Palestine to Paris and New York in the opening twenty minutes. These characters come together in the Colombian jungle, on an oilfield run by the gringos. The colonial aspect of the story is clear: the USA wants the oil and it will do anything to get it. This sets up their trip through the jungle, two souped-up lorries like something out of a Mad Max film. The fact that there are two trucks, as in the original, is a simple but brilliant device to maintain tension. One of the trucks is going to get to the destination, but we don’t know which one. Friedkin is a dystopian anarcho-futurist. A kind of Verlainian Marinetti. These trucks are behemoths, but they are also, literally, timebombs, primed to go off. It makes for scenes of forced but remarkable tension. There’s elements of Aguirre to the movie, the challenge of the white man to tame the untameable terrain. Although the one who survives will be brought down not by nature, but by man.