narciso (w&d marcelo martinessi, w. guido rodríguez alcalá)

Always good to get a chance to watch a film from Paraguay, and Narciso makes a decent fist of telling a quietly complex story which ties in the arrival of rocknroll in the country, the arrival of Stroessner’s dictatorship, the repression felt by homosexuals, the opening of a clean water dam and all that that represents, Dracula and radio theatre. If that sounds like a lot of themes, then this is indicative of the film, a slightly baggy assemblage of ideas and characters who revolve around Narciso, the charismatic would-be Paraguayan Buddy Holly. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise to see that the film is inspired by a novel, a medium that perhaps has more scope to pad out the narrative with liquorice allsorts.

It’s also perhaps notable how Narciso sticks to what would appear to be a Latam aesthetic for films with public funding support. This ensures that everyone working on the film is paid, clearly a good thing. However, it also means that budgets are so tight that it becomes hard to film exteriors with a whole crew. The films construct their narrative around interior scenes, with an inherent lighting aesthetic. There are very few exteriors in Narciso, and most of them occur at night. One daylight exterior scene takes place when Narciso is approached by a female fan and then he and his radio team drive away in a van. Another set-piece daylight exterior takes place at the opening of the dam, but feels underused. This budgeted aesthetic restricts the poetic potential of the movie. In Narciso we get very little sense of Asuncion - it could be set in late fifties Tacuarembo or Rosario. Given that the film is striving to talk about the events of that specific city, the aesthetic seems counter-productive, even if presumably a result of budgetary constraints. 

the house of hunger (dambudzo marechera)

Hisham Matar referentes Marechera’s book in My Friends, which is how I came to it. The author died young, after what would appear to have been a turbulent life. The House of Hunger has the feel of a semi-autobiographical novel, relating a ferocious youth in Harare whilst still under the imperial rule of Ian Smith, when the country now known as Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia. It’s a rumbustious book, full of protest, violence, sex and melodrama. A heightened narrative with echoes of Lautréamont and Bataille. Living in a police state, the narrator navigates a path between his shanty town family and a more literary interracial scene he becomes part of as he heads out of adolescence. Timelines crackle and pop, storylines blend into one another. Characters come and go. It’s a visceral read which distils the energy of this fucked-up colonised world. The book is split into two parts. The first half is a mazy romp through youth and Harare, the second switches to Oxford and England, where Marechera spent eight years after going to the university on a scholarship. This second half is split into small chapters, which flit backwards and forwards from the UK to Zimbabwe, and lend one of the chapter headings the title: Fear and Loathing in Harare. The echoes couldn’t be clearer. It’s a great, percussive read which communicates the energy of the world it depicts, a chaotic, brutal energy, steeped in sex, alcohol, racial tension and suspicion. 

the baron in the trees (calvino, tr. ann goldstein)

So much of my Calvino reading was tied up with studying literature at school. I discovered If On A Winter’s Night and its structure blew me away. I remember referencing it in a Lachlan Mackinnnon class. He approved in his Eeyoreish way. At that point in time, the eighties, I guess Calvino was still a relative newcomer, equivalent perhaps to a turn of the century author today, which doesn’t seem that long ago. Now he’s a full blown member of the modernist canon, which perhaps explains why I haven’t come back to his writing: he feels like part of the syllabus. So Baron came as a surprise, not so much for its expected playfulness, but for it being a pioneering work of environmental fiction, which could be read alongside Powers, or Amitav Ghosh. Set in Italy at the turn of the 18th century, it features that old chestnut Napoleon as well as the revolutionary movement of the time. Indeed, this is what the blurb highlights. But far more surprising in the tale of Cosimo, the baron who decides to live in the trees, is the fulsome defence of forests, trees, and environmentalism. Calvino feels far ahead of his time in his vision of a post-enlightenment world which seeks a way of co-existing with the natural world. The following quote could come straight out of the writing of Macfarlane, for instance.

And to say that Cosimo in that time had written and distributed a Plan of a Constitution for a Republican City with Declaration of the Rights of Men, Women, Children, Domestic and Wild Animals, Including Birds, Fish, and Insects, and of Plants Both Forest Trees and Vegetables and Grasses. It was a beautiful work, which could serve as a guide for all who govern; instead no one took it under consideration, and it remained a dead letter.

It’s a lovely, ludic book, typical in its way of Calvino’s love of manipulating the idea of the novel to twist it in directions the reader doesn’t expect, in the process exploring the dynamic between reader and writer that his era was so fascinated by. (Barthes, Foucault etc.) Perhaps, within the terms of that investigation, there is also a latent investigation into the dynamic between the human and the natural world, the latter being a book that is written by no-one. 

hope (w&d na hong-jin)

Hope reminds me of why sometimes it’s best not to go into something blind. The idea of a Korean film featuring Fassbender, as well as the teaser trailer which showed the opening sequence,  tickled my curiosity. The opening ten minutes are great. Suspenseful, strong characters swiftly established, a suitably exotic borderland world. And then the action starts. And I realised that I was not part of the target audience for this movie. In fact, watching it reminded me of why people like to eat popcorn with movies. What happens, the narrative, the pathos, the journey, all that shit, doesn’t really matter to a great many moviegoers. They just want to see something that goes with the popcorn. Laugh at how ridiculous the whole thing is. And that’s another form of cinematic consumption, as valid as the day the Lumière brothers drove a train into the station.

 

digger (w&d iñárritu, w. alexander dinelaris, nicolás giacobone, jez butterworth)

Digger sums up the contradictions of Hollywood trying to make films about ‘important’ issues. This is a film about climate change. Which spends its whole time, no matter how carbon neutral the budget might have been, making you wonder, rightly or wrongly, how much damage the making of it might have done to the environment. It’s Cruise’s correlative to Top Gun and all the other petrolhead dreams he might have inspired. It’s Iñárritu’s late baroque period. Lots of excessive flourishes and gold leaf. The medium and the message feel as though they are struggling to coalesce. 

the director (daniel kehlmann. tr. ross benjamin)

The Director tells the story of G W Pabst, the German director who returned to Nazi Germany having earlier fled to California, a place where he didn’t fit in and his only film is a flop. Pabst directed Brooks and Garbo, amongst other names. He had a prolific career in Germany and France. He was one of a bunch of great German/ Austrian directors, including Lang, Wilder, Zimmerman and others, a collection which helped to shape Hollywood. He also worked with Riefenstahl. His accommodation with the Nazis was not held against him and he directed after the war. Kehlmann is given a rich palette to paint with and he uses it in part to interrogate the Holocaust in an oblique manner.

Curiously, the novel reminded me structurally of another recent Booker nominated novel by a European writer, Szalay’s Flesh. Both novels use disconnected chapters to relate the life of a man occupying an ambivalent role within their moral universes. Neither writer outright condemns or outright defends his protagonist. The construction of a life through discordant passages (a bricolage) is a neat way to knit together an historical overview, which doesn’t require too much scene setting and permits the narrative to flow. 

the watergate caper (d. shane o’sullivan)

As a pocket guide to Watergate, O’Sullivan’s film is effective and entertaining. He incorporates references from popular culture and the arts into his broad-brush account of the scandal that brought down a president in the era when scandals still meant something. The obvious cinematic references are there: All The President’s Men, The Ice Storm. But there are also excerpts from Medium Cool and other films that are more or less off the radar. On a personal note I would have loved a bit more Hunter S Thompson, and also felt the spectre of James Elroy haunting events, with his Cuban break-in maestros and uneasy Agency tyros. But the film does what it says on the tin, as well as offering a commentary on how much contemporary culture seems to fight shy of the corruption that sits under its nose, in comparison with the bolder age of Tricky Dicky. 

barrio triste (dir. stillz)

Barrio Triste might be a companion piece to Un Poeta. The film goes into the cantegriles of Medellin to show life on the other side of the tracks. It opens with the conceit of some kids stealing a camera, which is then used to document life in the cantegril. A bravura sequence shows the kids descending from the cantegril in a beaten-up old car to rob a jewellery store in the centre of town. A serial killer speaks on the radio as the car moves downhill and up through the class barriers. It’s the only time the film leaves the cantegril, where the remaining action plays out with an abstract, woozy indifference to narrative. A car burns, an alien makes an appearance and life in the cantegril goes on all around. It’s part fly-on-the-wall documentary, part street-kid fable, and it doesn’t seem all that surprising to learn that Harmony Korine is named as one of the producers.

balcony in the forest (julien gracq)

Gracq’s novel details the phoney war of 1939-1940, seen from the perspective of a French lieutenant, Grange, sent to the Ardennes on the Belgian border. He lives in a bunker on the deep forest. There is a village nearby. He engages in an affair with a local girl. The war is happening elsewhere, in Finland, in Eastern Europe. If anything, Grange, about whose history we learn little, seems to enter into a Walden-ian reverie. The forest cradles him. He savours his walks and his isolation, holed up as he is with a few other soldiers under his command. There is a slow burning fuse to this life and the novel, which is the imminent arrival of the German forces, but for now he lives in the present, the past at arm’s length and the future held in abeyance. It’s a curious novel, with the tension between what is to come (the war) and what is happening (not a lot) making for a strange, hypnotic energy. It’s also interesting how Gracq has his protagonist compare memories of the start of the First World War with the start of the Second. That was a festive, foolish time. This is a cautious, uncertain time, a breathing space, before the world changes forever all over again.

It’s perhaps worth also considering how this novel, published over a decade after the war ended, might have been received in France, a country whose relationship with the Second World War is more complex that our British take. The ambivalent, oneiric time that Gracq documents is also the ambivalent time before the nation would be split in two, in more ways than one. 

blood’s a rover (elroy)

Elroy’s novels always leave me punchdrunk. They’re like going not fifteen rounds, but fifteen rounds for a fortnight. His prose is merciless. His humour is merciless. He is beyond sardonic. He’s a grinning gargoyle, looking down from the cathedral wall at all the sin and venality that occurs beneath the eaves of its supposed sanctified space. Blood’s A Rover doesn’t even have the pay-off of a historical assassination. It skirts Watergate. It delves into arcane B-stories occurring in Vegas, LA, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As though he grew sick of lifting the lid on the obvious and now wants to show you all the other stuff you’ve never even contemplated. The conspiracy headlines only serve to distract from all the other shit that’s going down.

It’s a dense read, in typical Elroy style. Characters flower and fade. Life is short. However, in Blood’s A Rover he perhaps goes further into the moral maze. His key characters here are all, as ever, from the dark side, but each and every one of the three male protagonists finds themselves confronting the moral failings of their chosen side and fighting back. In interviews Elroy insists he’s not a liberal, but let’s take that with a pinch of salt, because he understands that in order to audit the empire’s crimes, you have to be prepared to walk beside the emperor(s) and their adjutants. Which he does. And in so doing, he documents and reveals the moral depravity of a society where greed and cruelty are rewarded with power and privilege.

Nb - discovered this from an old diary entry the other day:

Four in the morning and I’ve set the alarm for 7.30. The writing has been impacted by events this weekend, got next to nothing done. Also not helped that I picked up Elroy’s The Cold Six Thousand the other day, knowing it would probably get in the way, just because his machine gun prose and scale get into your head. Phenomenal book, in its scale. I realise now that he could not include all that detail if he wrote any other way. …But also, as I think I wrote about Tabloid, the work does not have the depth, quite, emotionally. You could say its not trying to, its fundamentally thriller, but you don’t write like that kind of a maniac without wanting to change the world whilst you do it, and have no doubt that Elroy wants to, if only change our perspective of the crooked, fucked-up world he lives in over there. But, forget all that. Tis compelling and fucks with your schedule.

Still off booze and fags.

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How can I call Elroy thin. It’s like saying – I found myself in a thin carcrash. If that’s thin, then it’s double cream fat thin.