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. 

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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.

pillion (w&d harry lighton, w. adam mars-jones)

For reasons that have to do with a long-held editorial stance the doe-eyed critic is not able to comment on Pillion, except to say chapeau to whoever chose to have Skarsgård reading several volumes of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Screenwriter? Director? Art director? The actor himself? A tiny stroke of genius. (And of itself this detail/question illustrates how fluid is the process of 'writing' a film.)

happiness and love (zoe dubno)

Came across Zoe Dubno via an article on her friend, Adam Tooze, which included Tooze’s sclerotic take on the Biden-era democrats whose complacency has, in his view only facilitated the rise of Trump. Tooze is one of those writer-journos, like Jäger, whose take on geo-politics or eco-politics (in both senses) is always worth reading, so was curious as to what kind of a novel a close friend of his would come up with.

Whilst reading up about her, I discovered, like Calderon, she’s a fan of Bernhard, and indeed this is made explicit through a note at the end of the book acknowledging the influence of The Woodcutters on the novel. Fans of Bernhard in the Anglo-Saxon world are a select bunch. As I began to read the novel. I realised that it could almost be seen as a homage to the Austrian. Happiness and Love is a stream of consciousness thought-piece set at a New York supper party, supposedly held in honour of a recently deceased actress friend.

Apart from this structural echo, the narrator’s tone is also decidedly Bernhard-esque. She is full of loathing for Eugene and Nicole, the pretentious pseudo-intellectual couple hosting the party. Eugene is a mediocre but well-connected artist, subsided by his wife Nicole, scion of a wealthy family. The echo with Tender is the Night is probably not accidental . (“Nicole trapped in the perfectly terrible cage of her own creation”). The novel, through the narrator’s voice and that of another actress who arrives late to the party, lays into these over-privileged mediocrities with gusto.

There is an unlikely synchronicity, a crossover, with the last novel I read, also about metropolitan socialites. At one point someone in the novel says: “I see no difference between someone reading Virginia Woolf and Twilight.” Perhaps, as in the case of Latronico’s Perfection, Dubno runs the risk of being hoisted on her own petard. (Or indeed, Fitzgerald himself.) In focusing on the objects of her scorn, Dubno could end up actually promoting them. Maybe this is why she makes the decision to switch from the narrator’s voice to the actress’ to deliver the coup de grace at the book’s conclusion - by framing this sclerotic attack in the third person Dubno intends to lend the book’s critique a sense of a greater objectivity.

Or perhaps not. Whichever, the novel is a great addition to the canon of novels about the superficiality and vainglory of the upper classes. (Although referring to my above point I note that it was listed as one of Vogue’s best books of last year…)

I also enjoyed the writer’s observations on contemporary trends in literature:

That’s why it’s such a great failing that literature these days has become so incredibly banal, so fixated on worthlessly depicting the mundane thoughts that their authors have as they drink a cup of coffee and mourn that their lives aren’t more special. They’ve given us in Hollywood a monopoly on joy and humor and wonder.

mrs dalloway (virginia woolf)

The other day we walked through Bloomsbury and saw a sign for a Dalloway court, or some other confection made up to honour Woolf’s protagonist. Even though Mrs Dalloway doesn’t live in Bloomsbury, she lives in Westminster, and she never goes there. This seems to reflect the way that Dalloway (and perhaps Woolf herself) have become signifiers which might not have that much to do with their original essence. It’s not clear to what extent the author even likes her protagonist, a woman who has chosen an easy metropolitan life above any bohemian  instinct she might once have had. Who has rejected the more dangerous Peter Walsh and married Richard, a minor member of parliament, someone who couldn’t be more establishment if he tried. The Prime Minister comes to her party. She’s a far cry from the ideal of Bloomsbury independence and self-publishing. The emotional heartbeat of the book, surely influenced by Joyce, is the tragic returning soldier and his Italian wife. The soldier suffers from shellshock, or PTSD in today’s terms, and his delirium is at odds with the addled comfort of Dalloway’s life. When news of his death infiltrates her party, she feels resentment. A resentment at the realities of politics and history intervening on her idyllic set-up. Which in reality is far from idyllic, as she has lost touch with Walsh and her friend Sara Seyton, the two real conduits for any kind of emotional or artistic life she might have lead. Dalloway has been mirrored onto Woolf, but she feels like a vacuous copy. The sort of lady who lunches that would now be found in Notting Hill and environs rather than Westminster.

This mirrors the way that Woolf has been appropriated as an exemplar of a certain kind of studied, pseudo-aristo, pseudo-bohemian Englishwoman. An image that lurks at the edges of brands like Marks and Spencers and Laura Ashley. She has been appropriated by the marketeers of this type of ghoulish loveliness, to be consumed by the Mrs Dalloways of her day. Walsh, whose underwhelming career has played out in India, as part of the great colonial project, feels an extreme ambivalence about this England to which he has just returned. “Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage!"

At the same time, Woolf’s prose contains the lyricism of poetry. The most vivid moments are reserved for Septimus, the shellshocked soldier, and it’s via his shellshocked voice that the writer achieves an Eliot-esque song: “Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.”

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“It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

sentimental value (w&d joachim trier, w. eskil vogt)

We watched the film at the Ritzy, a cinema which used to be one of my many London homes, but one I hadn’t visited for almost a decade. Given this the title seemed more than  appropriate. The film itself made me think of Trueba’s Volveréis. A film within a film, the overbearing shadow of a father. The ghost of Bergman, perhaps. As well as the observation that this kind of measured, serious cinema-making, which to an extent wears its heart on its sleeve, is the preserve of a European mindset, one which, like the house within the film which is a kind of church for the protagonists, feels almost out of time, in need a makeover. The most curious scene within the house (revealed within the shot not to be the actual house but a re-creation on a sound stage) is the final image, where it has undergone an IKEA makeover. The more ramshackle charm of the absent mother’s house is turned into something sleek, clean lines, graphic design. For some this new version of the house will be an upgrade. For others, it will be a reduction to a norm. What exactly this says about the film Gustav is finally making with his daughter, or the film Trier himself is making, is hard to tell. An ironic commentary? Or a declaration of faith in the existence of a new future, where this type of film will continue to be made, and these kinds of filmmakers will continue to be financed? It also provoked the thought that Trier’s cinema might have become so fashionable and lauded precisely because it is the kind of cinema that the Anglo-Saxon world recognises it is incapable of producing. His films are rare, exotic gems from a distant stratosphere. 

the book of blam (aleksandar tišma tr michael henry heim)

The Book of Blam was Tisma’s first novel in a trilogy. In some ways, having already read Kapo, it feels as though the author must have been building up towards the extremes of the later novel. The Book of Blam, set in Novi Sad, is a circuitous read, stitching together diverse fragments taken from the life of the book’s protagonist, Blam, tracing his ancestry, his lost love life, his failures, his escape from the pogrom, but also the fate of his family and friends, almost all of whom died during the war. As stated, this feels like a less traumatic entry point into Tišma’s writing, which, given the cruelties the book relates, seems astonishing. Tišma’s even handedness in describing events in Novi Sad during the war is extraordinary. 

l’histoire de souleymane (w&d boris lojkine, w. delphine agut)

The second screen at the Ipswich Film Theatre is small enough to make one miss Cinemateca and question whether it’s worth spending ten quid to watch something you could project larger on your wall. However, the cinema is also half-full on a bitterly cold night, and this engenders the sense of a communal experience which reminds one why it is still worth it. Lojkine’s film is a classic piece of neo-realism, following a day and a half in the life of Souleymane, an illegal immigrant from Guinea, trying to get by in Paris. The line between documentary and fiction feels suitably fine, and the film feels credible, even when the narrative takes advantage of every possible twist to make his day as bad as possible. If this smacks of script development, the film wraps up with a brilliant scene where Souleymane states his case for asylum to a sceptical if sympathetic female official. The scene is a long dialogue scene, but we as the audience are right inside Souleymane’s experience, and look on with the same pained hopelessness as the interviewer. This is the brass tacks of the world, the place where life-changing decisions are made, where the pitch has to be more than perfect, it has to be authentic. The scene is theatrical, urgent and compelling. For a small moment in our privileged world we get to live, from one side of the fence or another, the arbitrary cruelty of our geo-political system. 

martyr (kaveh akbar)

Akbar’s novel is a tremulous US-Iranian tome, featuring a maudlin poet and a cunning plot twist. It’s a novel that meanders, drifting between scenes from Indiana, Iran and New York. It might be described as a coming-of-age tale, even if Cyrus, the protagonist, is nearly thirty. But he’s a loser, baby, and this is the story of his coming to terms with being an immigrant and a slacker, as he seeks out the secrets of his family history, supposedly left behind in the unknown lands of the orient which he has never visited. The novel is punctuated by Cyrus/Akbar’s poems, and held together by a thread that pretends to deal with Martyrdom, as the title suggests, even if Cyrus’s declarations in favour of martyrdom lack credibility, and feel as though they come from the US side of his nature, rather than the Iranian. He’s too comfortable in his uncomfortable skin for us ever to really believe that he would do anything more extreme than catch a plane to New York. One remains with the lingering query of how different his journey and the novel might have been had he taken a plane to Tehran instead. 

bass instinct (two fingas)

Bass Instinct is set in nineties London. Its protagonist is a cycle courier stroke DJ stroke Ladies Man. Much of the book is couched in the terms of a black macho identity, where women are little more than bodies and the music and the weed is all that makes life worth living. As much as a novel, this feels like a document of a time and a place, that esoteric world of clubs and high rises, of men and women doing humdrum jobs by day before transforming into romantic superstars when they head out into the glory of the city’s nightlife. This encapsulates the bittersweet glamour of living in one of the world’s great cities, where your mere allegiance to that tribe appears to endow you with magical powers, in spite of having little to back up that endorphic sensation.

 

patria (homeland) (fernando aramburu, tr alfred macadam)

Patria is a phenomenon as much as a novel, the fate of books that get adapted into blockbuster TV series’. The doorstopper book relates the Basque independence conflict through the fate of two families, whose friendship is destroyed by politics and ideology. It’s a saga, which reveals the way in which ETA split the Basque world in two  and the novel reflects this, skipping backwards and forwards in time in clipped, syncopated chapters.

 

yek tasadef sadeh/ it was just an accident (d. jafar panahi)

It Was Just an Accident opens with all the hallmarks of Iranian cinema: neorealism, long scenes in cars, an opaque layer of mystery. It also won the Palme D’Or, an instant source of scepticism. However, I would suggest its roots are more tied to that rare genre, the camper van drama, which includes Little Miss Sunshine and the Sorin’s Historias Minimas. In Panahi’s tale, the minivan contains five clearly defined characters and a kidnapped torturer. Unless the kidnapper, driver and owner of the van, Vahid, has made a mistake and kidnapped an innocent man. This becomes a twisted road movie, which is also a meditation on state abuse and revenge. Panahi’s narrative has a straightforward, traditional brilliance: we need to know if the kidnapped man is indeed the torturer, and if he is what actions his victims will take. It deserves all the garlands and prizes it has received. Cineastes don’t need to spend big bucks to construct a film which is gripping and thought-provoking. The irony is that this film is reflective of issues in so many countries: the next night we went to see a documentary about the Uruguayan dictatorship, and Panahi’s story speaks eloquently to that time: the cruelty and damage inflicted by state terrorism on defenceless people who might, one day, seek retribution.

three days of the condor (d. sydney pollack, w. james grady, lorenzo semple jr, david rayfiel)

At the time of writing, the USA is on the verge of attacking Venezuela. Since Pollack’s film was released, the USA has invaded Iraq, and intervened in Libya.

Redford is a CIA desk jockey whose job is to analyse literature for clues of global turbulence. He stumbles across a text linking Iraq, Libya and Venezuela without at first joining the dots. But his discovery triggers the summary execution of his colleagues. Someone desperately needs to make sure that what Redford has discovered doesn’t get out. The narrative plot points might be tenuous, but the underlying thesis is as valid as ever. At the end of the film Redford confronts the head of the maverick CIA within a CIA - and realises it’s all about the oil. Same as it ever was.

Besides its ongoing geopolitical resonance, Three Days of the Condor remains a terrific thriller, blessed by extravagantly good Hollywood performances from Redford, Dunaway and Von Sydow. Pollack’s camera roams New York, with a protagonical role for the World Trade Centre, where the CIA office is based. Dunaway and Redford somehow manage to convince in their star-crossed one-night stand. This is a Hollywood thriller par excellence, which also happens to be an endlessly relevant treatise on the political systems of the past 50 years.

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As I post this, as ever weeks after watching the film, the USA has just bombed Venezuela.