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.