to the lighthouse (woolf)

Virginia Woolf occupies a strange place in both British literature and my personal literary cosmology. For me, in so many ways, she has become identified with so much that is wrong with British literature. A dilettante child of restrained privilege, whose merry band of Bloomsburyites swanned around, happy enough with their places in an unjust society, (one whose injustices persist), creating art which has been adopted by the upper middle classes as emblematic of a certain kind of aloof englishness. The films, the guided tours, the country houses, the wisteria, the pebbles in the pocket, the archness, the afternoon teas, the sound of voices retumbando in rooms that are too large and too chilly.

Obviously, this is an unfair appraisal of her talents, and those of her fellow artists. Obviously this too reflects my own hang-ups regarding my own englishness. What they might call projection. All the same, it colours my idea of her and her work.

So returning to Woolf after decades of steering clear of her is an interesting process. And dare I say it, but did it not to an extent blow me away, the reading of To The Lighthouse. There is something in its poetry and its generosity which won me over. The characters examining their own weaknesses and strengths, just as we always exist as characters within our minds, trapped between our weaknesses and our strengths. Our inclination to tell the paternal figure what for, and our reluctance to commit to that inclination. Our consciousness of the nearness of death, whilst still holding death at arm’s length. Our quest to reach the fucking lighthouse, even if it’s just a tower on an old rock. Woolf weaves time through the book, the comings and goings, the actual futures, the contemplated futures, the actual pasts and the contemplated pasts. All swishing through our minds like the tides, one way and then another. The truth is almost that we don’t live in the present. We live in a space that is defined by the circularity of time. The sweep of the lighthouse’s arc.

It’s a dense book that stops and starts, that trips you up, that feels as though it’s reaching towards being profoundly un-comfortable. And in that reaching, perhaps, I came back round to the writer, as she absents herself from the image that has been constructed of her and her world by history’s winners, an image of cosy teas on sheltered lawns, of happy families and a scabrous perfection. 

broken english (w&d jane pollard, iain forsyth, w ian martin)

Pollard and Forsyth’s film is a self-consciously pretentious intent to refresh the tired documentary format. Tilda Swinton offers aphorisms from the newly formed Ministry of Biography. George MacKay interviews the late singer with a puppyish enthusiasm. There’s a round table discussion group assessing Faithful from a feminist perspective. Various luminaries visit the studio to record versions of the singer’s songs, including a beautiful version of As Time Goes By by Beth Orton. It’s an enjoyable, scratchy mix, which doesn’t quite reinvent the wheel. It also felt as though, whilst Faithful is a willing participant in the project, the film still twinkle toes around whoever she really might have been. Part of the  valid pretentious aspect is that the film suggests it is going to provide a more holistic approach to the biographical format, and give us a sense of what the events conveyed really felt like. However, the close involvement of the singer perhaps works against this ambition. Faithful is a fascinating figure who comes across as a benign savant, when she herself states she was prone to anger and self-destruction. The years of living on the streets feel glossed over, and the mars bar isn’t even referred to. Those darker elements of her nature, the ones she might have had in common with some of her artistic heroes, the beats, les poètes maudits, are treated with kid gloves, and the film, in part as a result of its distancing devices, feels slightly sanitised. Then again, it can’t be easy directing a film about someone who dies in the process of making it. 

my friends (hisham matar)

Matar’s novel is framed by two events, one where the narrator, Khaled, is a participant, the other where he is not. The first is the shooting at the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, where the narrator is one of the protestors who is shot and nearly dies. The other is the killing of Gadafi, where the narrator’s two friends, Mustafa and Hosam, are present but he is not. After being shot, Khaled never returns to Libya. The novel fills in the intervening 27 years of his life, which is predicated around his friendships with the two other men. Compressing 27 years into 450 pages inevitably makes for a discursive, piecemeal read. The novel is composed of short chapters which sometimes leap across the decades. With Mustafa, the common link is that they were both shot and are both survivors. With Hosam the link is literature, as Hosam is a writer who Khaled admires, even though Hosam’s literary flame burned out long ago. Khaled teaches English literature, and this connection permits the novel to go off on the occasional tangent, such as when Hosam decides to research writers who lived close to Shepherd’s Bush, where Khaled (and briefly Hosam) are holed up. However, Hosam also investigates Near or Middle Eastern acts of political terrorism that have occurred in London. The book drops names merrily: Edward Said, Salim Lozi, Dambuzo Marechera. It feels as though there’s sufficient material for half a dozen novels, as the reader gradually realises that this will be a meandering read, drifting towards the great sea of Gadafi and the Arab Spring. Khaled himself is an insistently passive figure. His family flit in and out of the novel, making a solitary visit to London once (although Khaled himself travels to Europe on several occasions). Khaled’s reclusiveness doesn’t stop him from hanging out in Holland Park and Soho: he remains a sociable character, with an on-off lover, but he is also an empty figure, denuded of his homeland, cauterised by fear.

My reading took in a couple of personal reactions. Khaled’s home town, for which he feels a steady nostalgia, is Benghazi. When the Arab Spring happens, he could return, as do his friends, but he chooses not to. I recall in 2011, the early days of Twitter, following the uprising in Benghazi, marvelling at the courage of Mo Nabbous, a civilian journalist who was shot dead by the regime. Whilst My Friends references and uses the Arab Spring as a touchstone, the secondhand rendition of events (mostly through emails sent by Hosam to Khaled) doesn’t quite seem to do justice to the bravery shown by ordinary citizens who were willing to lay down their lives to overthrow dictatorial regimes. Likewise, although the novel was published in 2024, and Khaled notes that parts of Benghazi have been destroyed by the militia wars that came in the wake of the uprising, it feels as though this is all glossed over. There is one passage in the novel which talks of the beauty of Derna, Khaled’s mother’s home town. Looking it up, I learned that the city had been virtually wiped out and thousands were killed when a dam burst flooded the town. Despite all the detail of the novel (and recognising that this event occurred outside the novel’s timeframe), Khaled’s curious relationship to Libya colours the book. It is a Libyan novel where Libya feels almost entirely absent. The narrator’s traumatic reaction to his shooting reflects the book’s traumatic relationship with his country. 

alexandre le bienhereux (w&d yves robert, w pierre lévy-corti)

The France of 1968 is known as a year of conflict and radicalism. Robert’s old-fashioned comedy would appear to have little to do with this zeitgeist. It tells the quietly misogynist tale of Alexandre, played with a roguish debonair by Phillipe Noiret, a henpecked farmer whose wife dies in a car crash. He reacts by retreating to his bed to lead a life of indolence and sloth, before being lured back into the world by the shapely charms of Marlène Jobert. The film is a portrait of a bucolic rural France. The locals are friendly. They drink pastis and play billiards. The nearby small town has a regular market. People only drive French cars. The fishing is good and the living seems easy. It’s a long way from riots in Paris. And yet… there might be a subtext to Alexandre le Bienhereux which resonates with the era. Don’t dedicate your life to work. Enjoy the good things in life. Don’t be a slave to the system. Alexandre is turned into a kind of cult hero as he refuses to get out of bed and tend his fields. He is a small-time anarchist. What could be more ’68 than this?

transcription (ben lerner)

Lerner’s book reminded me to a certain extent of Schweblin’s Fever Dream. A short sharp read which embraces various elements of contemporary life through the medium of a related narrative. In Lerner’s case, this is actually three different, associated narratives, linked by the presence of an enigmatic, Archimboldi figure, Thomas, a refugee philosopher from Germany, onetime disciple of Adorno, who lives on a North American university campus. The first narrator is an ex-student who goes to interview Thomas. He’s a friend of the third narrator, Thomas’s son. A short section narrates how the first narrator attends a seminar in Madrid about Thomas and is criticised for something he did when he interviewed him. The story is by its nature fragmentary, slightly dissatisfying, leaving the reader wanting to know more about Thomas who remains, to all intents and purposes, a deus ex machina. At the same time, the story permits the author to interrogate the themes of society’s digital addiction, the pandemic, the bloated nature of 21st c US capitalist society, parenting, and the work of art in the age of mechanical representation. No small selection of topics, given the slight nature of this beguiling, determinedly North American text.

As a postscript it should be noted that there seems to be, in the circles I sometimes circumnavigate via, natch, social media, an ambiguity around Lerner, a suggestion that he has pumped up his volume. I haven’t read The Topeka School, the novel that appears to have prompted this reaction, but I still feel as though he’s one of the more dextrous prose writers working in the English language. One whose debt to Bernhard and others who explore the limits and powers of ‘a voice’ is something that gives his writing an elasticity that more conventional narrational methods struggle to achieve. 

laguna (w&d šarūnas bartas, w geoffroy grison)

Laguna is a deeply personal film that features the director and his daughter as they hole up on the coast of Mexico, processing their grief at the untimely death of his daughter and her sister. It’s a  film that possesses an inevitable tone of mourning, with an accompanying intensity which is draped in the robes of the jungle and the beach. 

germinal (zola)

So many thoughts go through one’s mind reading Zola’s seminal text for the first time.

I thought about the Miner’s Strike, which was reaching its finale when I arrived at York University. The North versus the South. Zola’s mining community is also in the north.

I thought about Jäger’s Hyperpolitics and how Zola depicted the origins of a trade union movement that might defend the rights of workers being mercilessly abused by a mercantile system. Thinking on Jäger’s text, I thought about how the unions and political interaction per se has declined in the course of the 21st century. Battles won and battles lost.

I thought about the overlap with the novels of Hardy, the way in which these novelists confronted social injustices with rigour, using the strength of narrative as a weapon to exculpate, reveal, unveil.

I thought about the astonishing dexterity of the novelist. Our era’s watchword is ‘authenticity’ and the demand that the seed of the narrative emerges from personal experience. Zola’s prolific genius lambasts this concept of the novelist. The novelist is someone who examines all elements of society, from top to bottom, from east to west. His or her domain stretches beyond their known experience, towards the requirements of their calling. Because Germinal feels like the novel written as an act of social conscience and, hence, activism. 

un poeta (w&d simón mesa soto)

Several people had mentioned this film to me, having watched it on-line on a dodgy download. Which seems entirely appropriate. This is a film which perhaps comes from the edge of the edge, and does its thing with an astonishing, sophisticated zeal, plunging from out-and-out comedy to raw tenderness. Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry. There’s something almost overtly Bolaño-esque in a film about a struggling poet. The opening scenes establish Oscar, the poet of the title, as a failure. But poetry is a vocation which is twinned with failure. The world has no need of poets yet they insist on existing, albeit in penury. The irony at the heart of the film is that nations end up putting the faces of poets on their banknotes.

The film captures, with zero sentimentality, that Oscar, who published two volumes of poetry years ago, is a loser. He still lives with his mum. He has an alcohol problem. He is estranged from his teenage daughter. He is a stunted husk of a man. All of which is, of course, in narrative terms, fertile ground. Oscar has so much to overcome that whilst we are encouraged to laugh at him and his world in the opening act, we will be encouraged to root for him as he seeks to overcome these obstacles as the film unfolds.

This narrative sleight-of-hand lends the film its spine, but what super-charges it is the casting, the editing, the world-creating. A dogma camera takes the viewer into the heart of Oscar’s world, at home, in the classroom, with his fellow poets. The editing starts staccato, with comic cuts, establishing a resounding rhythm; and later unfolds, allowing long, complicated scenes to play out. The director handles all the elements with aplomb. It’s a low-key technical marvel, showing how cinema can be imbued with energy when all it’s doing is showing a man running around Medellin making a mess of his life.

But perhaps te greatest extravagance of Soto’s film is the title. What is a poet? Why are they allowed to run free? What is the point of poetry? All of these are questions which cannot be answered, but Soto makes a stab at making us ask these questions, and discover, in our own way, that poetry has a value, only it’s a value that has nothing to do with banknotes. These are questions which are sung from the edges, where the battle between survival and the dream-world is at its most acute. It’s not ridiculous to say that in its way, Oscar’s journey is homeric: he has to fight the cyclops, ward off the sirens, find his way home. Soto’s film tells us more about poetry, warts and all, than any motion picture blockbuster ever could.

NB - having said all of this, it should be noted that, as ever when a film appears from left field from a country whose cinema traditions are not well known, there is a temptation to view it as a burning bush or water turned into wine. But Soto has been doing his thing for many years, and this film was a success at Cannes, as well as having production funding from some of the big guns of European producing houses. Un Poeta doesn’t come out of the nada, there is industry and process behind it.

NB2 - in the bar, later, the name of Mike Leigh came up as we spoke about how a film that succeeds in dazzling foreign audiences might include nuances that a local audience would question. With regard to which when I got home I found the following article from a Colombian journal (in Spanish) which offers a counter-take to the one you’ve just read.

https://gaceta.co/contenidos/donde-esta-la-poesia-de-un-poeta/#:~:text=Un%20poeta%20ve%20la%20nueva,y%20su%20aparente%20incorrección%20política.

sexy beast (d. jonathan glazer, w. louis mellis, david scinto)

Glazer’s sophomore film is another that has lived in the memory, primarily for Kingsley’s psychotic performance. With the casting of James Fox and the scenes of the gangland bosses’ faces in close up, drinking grotesquely, there’s a nod to Performance in the direction. The dialogue is theatrical, expertly edited, and full of memorable lines. The actors were clearly having a ball. Glazer’s flair is obvious, even if the sum of the parts don’t quite add up to a whole. The jagged underwater sequence, the opening boulder device, H’s sense of humour, it’s a jigsaw puzzle which doesn’t quite fit together. But I did love Winstone’s final scene, being dropped off on the Harrow Road, next to Royal Oak station, a few hundred yards from where I used to live, a spot I’d walk past on a daily basis. 

 

thief (w&d michael mann, w. frank hohimer)

Mann’s early film is laden with flair and atmosphere and bad blood effects at the very end. The director’s eye for a frame is impeccable. His ability to capture mood matches it. This is accompanied by dialogue scenes with a free-flowing rhythm which bestows the sense of improvisation, of actors and director reaching for the moon together. The scene between Caan and Tuesday Weld when he convinces her to hook up with him is allowed to ramble and rumble. There are no short cuts and this helps to make characters who might otherwise have seemed generic into ones who are both plausible and tragic. As ever, this is a celebration of the ambitions of the small-timer (who wants to cash out just once). Movies about heroes are hung on the shoulders of stars, but stars are actors who are capable of turning the minor character into a heroic figure. Caan is brilliant in the role, a jaundiced head of hair who almost falls for the dream, before remembering that dreams aren’t for everyone.