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.