paris qui dort (d. rené clair)

Clair’s astonishing silent film was accompanied in Cinemateca by three musicians, Juan Chao, Ignacio Echeverría y Luna Roura. Their pulsating score contributed to the delirious spectacle of a film which feels like a precursor of the zombie movie. Seeing Clair’s deserted 1925 Paris triggered thoughts of Boyle’s 28 Days Later. The flip-side of urban modernity, all that teeming life, is the living dead, which is what happens to the city’s citizens when Clair’s mad professor flips the switch, meaning the whole city is frozen. Only those who exist in the skies retain consciousness. At first it seems the only person to escape the spell is the warden of the Eiffel Tower, who lives on its third floor, just before the tower tapers, high enough to escape the impact of the professor’s forcefield. Later that same morning, the warden comes across a group whose plane had been above the city, coming in to land just before the professor struck. The Eiffel Tower becomes a place of retreat for the warden and the collection of odd souls who landed at Paris airport. It is the other star of the show, a place from which the beauty of the city can be mapped, but also one of peril, as the survivors go slowly mad and fight one another. The tower is a symbol of modernity which contains within it the seeds of its own emptiness. For all the lightheartedness of Clair’s vision, and there are plenty of laughs, there is also something disconcertingly haunting about this vision from a century ago of the materialist and technological instincts which fuel the city’s constant, restless movement and expansion. 

andriesh (d.sergei parajanov, yakov bazelyan, w. yemelian bukov, grigoriy koltunov, sergey shvartszoyd)

Parajanov’s first film is a Chagallian eco-fable. A boy loses his flock after the intervention of a malevolent storm god. The film occupies a space between nature and art, between naturalism and the oneiric. As the boy walks out of his village in the Caucasus, it feels as though we are witnessing images from a lovingly filmed documentary. Then, the film switches register. Nature speaks. The boy talks, memorably, to a weeping willow. He helps out a giant, who reciprocates. Myth and fable weave their way into the story. Andriesh is epic poetry reincarnated as cinema. 

advertising shits in your head, strategies for resistance (vyvian raoul & matt bonner)

This is a short sharp analysis and guide to subvertising, the art of both questioning and subverting advertising. Whilst the author could clearly have gone into more detail as to the science and strategic uses of advertising by the capitalist machine, this is not his pimrary mission. The first half of the book quotes Bernays and Sut Jhally as it briefly interrogates the way advertising has become an all-pervasive form of brain-washing. The second goes on to both demonstrate the work that has been done by subvertisers and their methodology. For all its brevity its a great book, both in terms of reminding ourselves quite how hostage we are in our daily lives to forces we are barely aware of annexing entire quarters of our brains, and  secondly that resistance is possible.  Raoul & Bonner’s book takes us to the levellers of our day, those brave, unheralded souls who strike back against the empire. 

astrakan 79 (w&d catarina mourão)

Astrakan 79 is a documentary of two parts. The first two thirds are taken up with a recreation of the journey of a Portuguese fifteen year old, Martim, to Askatran in what was then the Soviet Union. The child of left wing activists, Martim left Lisbon on his year long adventure, sent by his parents to study modern practices in agriculture . When he arrived, it wasn’t what he expected. He had two passionate love affairs, made friends with South Americans, rather than the Russians, and eventually dropped out of the course, sleeping rough and getting picked up by the police. The story is told using photos Martim took, which have a beautiful, nostalgic grainy quality. The account is hypnotic, fascinating, the story of an adolescent caught up in the geopolitical matrix, like a lost chapter from The Savage Detectives. The film is rounded out with a lengthy interview between Martim, revealed to have become a potter on his return to Portugal, and his grown-up son. The interview is somewhat anti-climactic. 

the piano teacher (w&d haneke, w. elfriede jelinek)

The Piano Teacher was scheduled by Mariana Enriquez as a part of a ciclo she curated, very little of which I am able to watch, due to rehearsals for Birdland. Nevertheless, I caught Huppert and her funny games. The film was more savage than I remembered. It might be one of the most extreme films ever made. Sexual violence, self-mutilation, and the closest Haneke perhaps gets to really letting the handbrake off. For all his cold art, The Piano Teacher feels furiously visceral. In all the wrong ways. By which one means - in all the ways that truly disturb. Unlike, say, Titane, which for all its extremism is nevertheless kind of alluring. Haneke is the high priest of deconstructing western materialism. His uncompromising vision, allied with where Huppert is willing to go as an actress, backed up by Jelinek’s source text, makes for something that seems designed to get its audience to walk out. Or stagger out, bloodied and beaten like the film’s titular protagonist. 

no country for old men (cormac mccarthy)

This is an almost Manichean novel. The author includes an ersatz narrator, Sheriff Bell, whose thoughts are presented in italics. Sheriff Bell is an old-school boy, with old-school values. He doesn’t like hippies, probably dislikes Nietzsche, is wary of people with their hair died green. He’s also sheriff in a Texas border region which is suffering an epidemic of drug-related violence. Sheriff Bell is conservative, presumably Republican. He harks back to a world he and his parents grew up in, where common values of decency were instilled in society. As soon as those values, (which presumably include not dying your hair), were lost, things started to go to hell in a handcart. Sheriff Bell is set up as a sympathetic character in a world of mindless sociopaths. He loves his wife and serves his community. His values go beyond the performative - he knows that a medal is just a piece of metal, and that wealth and consumption are part of the problem.

On the other hand there is the mercurial, charismatic, and sociopathic villain, Chigurh, so brilliantly played in the film by Javier Badem. (So brilliantly that it’s hard to read the novel without thinking of Bardem’s lanky hair and awkward physique.) Chigurh is a  monster who kills without mercy or regret, and believes himself to exist on another moral plain altogether.

The complexity of the novel, and McCarthy’s approach, comes from the fact that the dramatic epicentre of the novel, that which propels the action and ensures the reader’s undivided attention, is not the worthy Sheriff Bell, but the unworthy Chigurh. His actions and cod-philosophy drive the narrative and lend the novel its gothic splendour. When he dies, the bottom drops out of the book. It’s a paradox which, for all of McCarthy’s benediction of Bell, feels unresolved. Bell’s goodness functions in response to Chigurh’s evil. They might be two sides of the same coin that the killer spins to decide people’s fates.

Perhaps there’s something about the way in which the USA functions at work here. Just as the myth of the west required the myth of the savage (touched upon in the novel and much of McCarthy’s writing), a myth that was still hyperactive in my youth, contemporary USA needs to construct it’s antithesis courtesy of a ‘savage’ enemy. Be that communism or islam or even, as is the case of Trump and co now, the immigrants, supposedly illegal, who infiltrate the purity of the nation through a porous border. Which brings us back round to Cormac McCarthy. The strength of his writing is contingent on the idea of the other, which lurks across the border, waiting to poison the homespun decency of small-town America. 

the maniac (benjamin labatut)

Labatut’s novels read like documentaries. The Maniac is split into two parts. The first is a fictionalised biography of John von Neumann, the Hungarian genius who participated in the greatest advances in mathematics and physics in the twentieth century. Von Neumann was present at the birth of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the modern day computer and, as the novel goes on to explore in greater depth, the birth pangs of what is now known as artificial intelligence. Labatut goes under the hood of von Neumann’s curious mind, constructing a portrait of him from fictionalised accounts of those who worked with him and loved him. In so doing, the author presents both the man, his ideas and his flirtation with madness. One of the key takeaways of Labatut’s novels is the way in which genius, which shapes the world, is almost always a hair’s breadth away from what we might call madness. Both despair and exhilaration go hand in hand with the imaginative vision required to stretch humanity’s boundaries. The Maniac is in many ways a treatise on technology and the pernicious effect it can have. Where we tend to view technology as an unbridled good, Labatut, like von Neumann and many of the scientists who feature in the book, end up exercising extreme doubts about where the quest for technological advancement is taking humanity.

The second half of the book deals with the advancement of AI, framed around the success of a computer in defeating the world’s greatest go player. Much of von Neumann’s later life was taken up with the quest for self-replicating forms that might be used in some form by humanity to ensure its survival and the eventual conquest of the universe itself. The Maniac explores the perils inherent in creating machines which can outthink humans, a subject which has become increasingly topical, in its account of the computer’s victory. The beauty of Labatut’s work is that he leads the reader into this rarefied world, seemingly the arcane province of scientists and experts, and, holding our hand, encourages to jump into an inscrutable future. 

la práctica (w&d martín rejtman)

Rejtman is a whimsical auteur, and La Practica is no exception to this. His flawed characters negotiate the pitfalls of modern urban living. Things that can go wrong probably will. Connections will be missed and relationships are likely to be dysfunctional. There’s a dry acerbic humour hovering at the edge of the screen, even where there’s no apparent joke to laugh at. Gustavo is a porteño yoga teacher living in Santiago. He’s getting divorced from his Chilean wife, another yoga teacher, but determined to stick it out in the city rather than return home. His job gets harder when he does his knee in and becomes an inflexible yoga teacher. The film drifts through his life with him, as he deals with divorce, meets ex-students, tries to recover. The action is minor scale and affectionately comic. Gustavo is played by Esteban Bigliardi, who played a similar character in Rodrigo Moreno’s Los Delinquentes. There are other echoes to Moreno’s film, with Gustavo experiencing some kind of epiphany when he spends an earthquake night outside in an Andes forest. The juxtaposition between ‘the natural world’ and the urban world perhaps opening a space of personal reconciliation for the protagonist. This feels like an axiomatic southern cone tension: what does the wilderness have to teach us in a world where the city delivers a tenuous and unsatisfactory security?

smoke and ashes: a writer's journey through opium's hidden histories (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh’s non-fiction book is a rendition of much of the research he has done for the construction of his sequence of novels on the opium trade and wars of the nineteenth century. He looks at how the East India Company, later absorbed into the British Empire, set about trading with China by creating a market for opium which they fed by growing opium in India, and exporting it. In India, Ghosh argues, there were two distinct poles of trade: Calcutta in the east,, which was rigidly controlled by the British, and Bombay in the west, which functioned as a more liberal market, thereby setting up the basis for Mumbai’s future commercial acumen. Ghosh also looks closely at how Guangzhou became the nodal point for the entrance of opium into China, a place where foreign interests held sway, rather than the Chinese emperors, a kind of proto Hong Kong/ Singapore.

Whilst there are times in the book when it becomes immersed in detail, cataloguing, for example, the various east coast North American families whose fortunes were founded on the opium trade, Smoke and Ashes might nevertheless be classed as one of the most important books on modern history you could possibly read. Because, using a novelist’s sensibility, Ghosh reveals the way in which opium trading, the equivalent of the narco-industry that the western world’s ‘war on drugs’ is so keen to demonise, was one of the cornerstones of the great capitalist advancements of the European colonial era, if not, he might argue, the key pediment which held up the roof over the whole process. Ghosh identifies how the pursuit of profit lead to an abandonment of any kind of moral criteria in business dealings, as though this might be considered a luxury which wealth could not afford. He follows this line of thinking through to the opioid epidemic which is still gripping large swathes of North America. As a novelist, more than a historian, Ghosh has no qualms in making these judgement calls. His takedown of the British empire, with its opium factories and tenured ‘opium agents’ is devastating, and all the more powerful for being written by someone who was born as a child of empire, on the other side of the historical power divide.

We are still living in the wake of the world Ghosh reveals in the book and the moral complexity of our position (written as an Englishman) is something we are far from recognising, let alone understanding. 

"Or, as an article in a journal published by the US National Defense University notes: ‘English merchants, led by the British East India Company, from 1772 to 1850, established extensive opium supply chains … creating the world’s first drug cartel.’"

"There could be no clearer summation of the most important accomplishment of the doctrine of Free Trade—the erasure of all ethical constraints in regard to profit-making."

copacabana (d. martin rejtman)

Rejtman’s documentary addresses the wave of Bolivian immigration to Buenos Aires. This relationship between Bolivia and Argentina is at once close and distant. Spanish is the lingua franca between the two countries and the north of Argentina which borders Bolivia is, culturally, similar. But Bolivians retain a fierce identity in their music, dress and traditions which marks them apart. There has been a steady stream of immigration from the Andean country to Buenos Aires. A Bolivian man shows his almanac with photos of an early Bolivian community established there in the sixties. Rejtman films in Bolivia, Buenos Aires and, in the closing sequence, on the border. It’s an observational doc, made of long sequences which show Bolivians dancing or processing. The complexities of immigration aren’t addressed: this feels like a Porteño spying on a secret world that exists within his city. There could be said to be a cross-reference here to the Bolivian labourers in César Aira’s novel, Ghosts. The distance which the camera imposes means that its subjects remain mysterious, semi-alien beings, walking the streets but carrying a different flame in their chests.