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.