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.

140103 1021

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.

the cook the thief his wife and her lover (w&d peter greenaway)

Mr Curry selected the Greenaway classic to revisit. I had a false memory of having watched the film at York, only to realise after watching that it didn’t screen until ’89, by which time I was in London. We must have gone to see Belly of an Architect in York. The Prince Charles was full to the gunwales for the afternoon screening, a sign of an enduring fascination for the maverick director, whose marked aesthetic and (pseudo?) intellectual rigour fell out of favour with the powers that be within the British film industry.

To revisit the Cook the Thief and the rest was curious. Another timewarp watch, with its Gaultier outfits, Nyman score, a youthful Tim Roth, impeccable cast of British actors and a heavy handed indictment of a Thatcherite era that viewed books at the enemy and championed a reckless kind of bling that flirted insistently with criminality. (It would stand up today as a critique of the imperial delusions of the big yellow one.) This was the end of an era of percussive British filmmaking, when directors sought to make big statements, in this case explicitly operatic, a film in 7 movements, one for each day of the week in which it transcurs.

In many ways it is a cold, ornate, baroque piece of filmmaking, a chamber piece which occurs across two mannered sets. A tale of putrid meat and shallow abusers, dominated by the blunderbuss of Gambon’s bombastic crime lord. And yet, when the final sequence occurs, (the legendary final sequence), it retains its power and hits like a punch to the solar plexus. The words bravura filmmaking come to mind. Greenway has concocted an elaborate, overblown morality tale to build towards this climactic moment. Like all the best fairy tales, (ie morality tales), the punchline is all, and Mirren delivers this with aplomb.

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. 

flesh (david szalay)

Flesh is a good title. It grabs you. You want it. Which is also how Szalay writes. It’s quasi Pinteresque. Succinct. But enigmatic. Riveting. Absorbing. Ambiguous. Flesh is a book that talks about the here and now. In a way. The little man and where the little man might fit. Into the here and now. Where does he fit? Is he little? These are the questions the book might be asking. István is that little man. But he is also, in his way, exceptional. He kills. He saves lives. He ascends. It’s a dizzying ascent and the novel dizzies. And then?

And then comes the novel’s get-out-of-jail card.

There’s something faintly Hemingway about the book, in an understated fashion. Heroic deeds and terse sentences. Flesh reveals something of our world. And it hides away from other things. But it does all of this with precision and efficiency. As though the writer is constructing a machine. Which might just be his protagonist.

i soliti ignoti (w&d mario monicelli, w. agenore incrocci, furio scarpelli, suso cecchi d’amico)

It’s intriguing to watch films that are perhaps little known outside their country. Obviously the robust Italian cinema industry was already delivering work by directors whose names have entered the pantheon. The prolific Mario Monicelli, however, is not on that list. The title could almost be translated as The Usual Suspects. This is a heist movie, with a comic bent, somewhere between Rififi and The Lavender Hill Mob. The heist is a macguffin which offers a cross-section of society’s lower depths. A failed boxer gathers together a team, including a youthful Mastroianni, to pull off a job. The director delights in showing everything that can go wrong, right up to the very end. In keeping with Bertolucci’s early films, it shows Roman society as one where people are reluctant to work, they want to find a short cut to some money, and the greatest punishment the ringleader has to face is being made to do an honest day’s labour, something which is seen by his gang as shameful. This is a celebration of street smarts, of the little man, the loser. The criminal is just someone who’s seeking to get by. It’s a narrative tradition that reaches back into European history, through Dickens to Hugo to Shakespeare to Quevedo and the laughter of the Cinemateca public reinforces its enduring appeal.

Nb IMDB lists Italo Calvino as uncredited screenwriter. The film is based on a short story of his. Although it might be said that it doesn’t feel overtly like anything written by Calvino.

the asphalt jungle (w&d john huston, w. ben maddow, w.r. burnett)

Whilst on one level a straightforward heist morality tale, there’s something more deeply human operating in Huston’s glorious noir. The venality of the human species is laid, bare, determined by the amorality of capitalism. In the pursuit of wealth, everyone’s a loser in the end. The film is adorned with a host of topnotch performances from its ensemble cast, including the ingenue Monroe. Characters are conscious of the mistakes they make, the deep water they find themselves adrift in, and this recognition makes them strangely sympathetic, as though they have to suffer the journey to destruction in order to remember who they really are. Huston manages the innately difficult task of introducing new characters at regular intervals, without in any way affecting the rhythm or the tension. The hunchback driver, Lou, only really comes into his own well past the midway point, but suddenly he’s a vivid character, tragic in his own way. The director and his screenwriters post the heist itself at the midpoint of the film, rather than the end of the second act or the dénouement. The heist loses nothing of its tension, but this placing also allows the film to focus on its true interest, the hubris that greed provokes before the fall.

 

land and freedom (d. loach, w. jim allen)

Loach’s film is resolutely British. For all that Loach positions himself as being on the margins of the film industry, his narrative models tend towards the conservative. A young man goes to Spain on a coming-of-age journey. He has to overcome obstacles. He gets rewards. He obeys the beats, before returning to Liverpool, where he will die fifty years later, in a framing device that offers no insight into how his Spanish experiences changed him or those he loved. Like Orwell, whose book is clearly an influence, much of the narrative and tragic dimension of the film is taken up by the conflict between the anarchists and the communists on the republican side. Whilst this was clearly of note, the enemy in the Spanish Civil War really wasn’t Stalin, no matter whether his actions caused more harm than good. Without denying this element of the history, it seems a very British perspective to focus on the rifts within the movement. The film could undoubtably be read as an allegory for the travails of the Labour Party, which seems slightly beside the point. There is one famous lengthy scene of a discussion in a village about how to proceed, whether to collectivise the village agriculture or not. Whilst this scene is intriguing and perhaps inspired by Watkins, what it really does is highlight how the film, with its more sentimental approach to the narrative, dances around the edges of the theoretical, political issues, including the scene as a kind of sub-clause, an extended footnote. Again, this feels like the take of a deeply British sensibility, where serious things need to be kept at arm’s length. Loach handles the action sequences with surprising agility. The acting is committed, and it’s notable that at least two of the cast went on to have impressive careers behind the camera. It’s a solid, worthy piece of filmmaking that nevertheless never really threatens to catch fire and burn the house down.

 

el espíritu de la colmena (w&d víctor erice, w. ángel fernández, santos de blázquez)

Erice’s film lurks at the back of the room when people who know about film talk about film. It possesses a mystique, one of those films which has to be seen,  but which not that many have actually watched. It is one of several cult films where the protagonists are children (Night of the Hunter, Come and See, Ivan’s Childhood, Kes etc). I had managed to spend fifty years or so not watching it, but last night it finally caught up with me. It’s a woozy, mesmerising journey through childhood in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. 1940, the Republicans have lost, a generation is about to go into political lockdown. Ana and Isabel are sisters living in a rural village with their parents, who have survived the war. They are girls who have a vague awareness of the wider world, something they pick up through osmosis, perhaps. Which is a plausible way of communicating how we are all affected by those things which happen beyond the horizon, even though we are not directly conscious of this, or even fully aware of what those things beyond the horizon actually are. Erice threads tropes - Frankenstein, shaving, the taste of an apple. Was it just me who saw in the dead republican an echo of Guevara laid out on a table in La Higuera? Nothing much happens and at the same time all sorts of things are happening. The director plays with time, allowing the film to reveal or remember how childhood is a time of endless time, of games that always hide their true meaning, a time of fierce competition, quiet fears, small joys.

nb - in English this film is called The Spirit of the Beehive

hyperpolitics (anton jäger)

Jäger’s lauded book is a plausible interpretation of the way in which political engagement has morphed over the course of the past century and more. It takes in the rise and fall of the unions, the rise (and fall?) of fascism, and the rise of 21st century micro movements, such as Brexit or Black Lives Matter, movements which appear in a kind of suspended animation, at a remove from established political discourse, yet provoking a commitment which the day-to-day of political engagement struggles to emulate. It’s perhaps his concluding pages which are the most disheartening. Removed from any kind of social cohesion, capitalism’s children are increasingly atomised, cut off from even the possibility of contemplating fixity or a  long-term vision. Jäger cites Houellebecq, Baudrillard and Ernaux in his analysis of a society fraying at the seams, desperate for some kind of anchor, reduced to following the platitudes of witch doctors, spin doctors or snake-oil salesmen.  

contos do esquecimento (w&d dulce fernandes)

Fernandes’ documentary could be the flip side of Pinho’s O Risa e a Faca. Her film documents the discovery of a mass grave in a Portuguese town called Lagos, near Lisbon. The mass grave had been concealed by a vast rubbish dump. When the rubbish dump was cleared in order to build a car park, the bones of 158 skeletons from the fifteenth century were found. These were some of the earliest victims of the slave trade which would mushroom with the development of the Americas. In the case of Portugal this meant specifically the Angola/Congo - Brazil passage. Fernandes approaches this discovery with a quiet fury. The film is composed of a series of fixed camera or drone shots of landscapes which are pertinent to the discovery of the bones. The film as such is both a testament and a memorial to the victims, something which the voiceover comments is barely offered by the developers, who place a crazy golf course on top of the parking and a small, underwritten plaque to commemorate the victims. Fernandes’ film is a retort to this lack of respect: it honours the dead, who were never honoured in life, with its sober, measured rendering of their tragic fate, questioning as it does the basis on which the wealth of Europe was founded.

mean streets (w&d scorsese, w. mardik martin)

New York. Petty gangsters. Grime and flair. The first world before the first world was made reputable. De Niro like a violent scarecrow. Keitel like a man who would never quite fulfil his destiny. Scorsese as the enigmatic assassin, something out of another movie altogether, one by Hal Hartley or Soderbergh.

I saw Taxi Driver in this same cinema, and in truth there can’t be many better cinemas to watch early Scorsese than Cine Universitario, a damp, empty sala, which sings of the poverty and the glory of cinema, a medium that as well as making the most of technology, also defies it. You can have your iMax and your 4-D effects, but cinema will always be, at heart, flickering images thrown onto a sheet on a wall, the world’s greatest ever conjuring trick. 

the invite (d. olivia wilde, w. cesc gay, radisha jones, will mccormack)

The Invite, a film that appears to occur in real time based around a dinner party,  comes from a pedigree that would include the plays of Yasmin Reza, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, even My Dinner with Andre. There’s a notable theatrical bent to this sub-genre, which requires a polished script and actors who are capable of carrying it off. In all of this The Invitation hits the mark. However, this is also a marriage therapy film, more in line with something from Bergman. Unhappy couple have to confront marital demons and either sink or swim. There might be something smug about Wilde’s comedic interrogation of marriage, but on the other hand, just because the film is coddled in a kind of North American cocoon (money no problem, the outside world kept happily at bay) doesn’t mean it isn’t done with a certain flair and also - every society has the right to poke fun at itself and in the same week I watched a remarkably po-faced Hollywood film, at least The Invitation couldn’t be called that. 

fathers and sons (turgenev)

Turgenev’s novel has always felt like a lacuna in my reading. In a way it is an Austen-esque novel with an Austen-esque title. A novel that examines the petit bourgeois of the nineteenth century, their dreams, and frustrations, both romantic and pragmatic. Of course there’s a seismic difference in the way in which the respective writer’s country’s histories played out. Arkady gets his pleasant romantic finale,  but the book is dominated by the would-be anarchist, his friend Bazarov. It’s Bazarov’s fate which foreshadows the history that was to come, half a century later. It’s feasible to think that Arkady and his young bride, Katya, could have lived to see the revolution. So whilst the novel, published mid nineteenth century, is on the one hand a sentimental critique of bourgeois Russia, it is also prophetic. Bazarov himself is a man out of time, deluded as to the scope of his ambition and power, and revealed to be a child when faced with the realities of love, in the shape of the queenly Madame Odintsova. Arkady, who makes peace with his father and his way of living, is the survivor, supposed inheritor of a rural Austen-esque life of diligence and tranquility. There are, of course, other echoes. Of Chekhov’s mercurial landowners, Bely’s radical anarchists and Dostoyevsky’s extremists. Turgenev’s novel seems to exist in a state of suspended animation, half-way between two worlds. To an extent the novel surprised me with its moderation, its gentle examination of the lives and loves of a younger generation which is akin to the lives and loves of any younger generation, full of missteps, embarrassment and endings that could go either way. There’s something paternalistic in the novelist’s approach, and like any parent, it exudes love for each and every one of the book’s children, its characters.

 

the odyssey (w&d nolan)

Random Thoughts on the Odyssey

Throwback to the seventies. Waiting for Burt Lancaster to pop up. 

Damon is playing a man who is in exile and far from home. However, he always comes across as someone, in every scene, who is completely at home. With himself, with his surroundings, with his colleagues. Of course, he is at home because he is on a film set, which is where Matt Damon, the person, rather than the character, feels at home. But this works against the character he is supposed to portray, and strips the film of much of its tension. 

Like Scott’s Napoleon, one can imagine a teenage film buff dreaming of making a big budget movie of one of his favourite texts. Don’t we all do that? Filmmakers or not? Dream of making a film of a text we love? Only Nolan has the chops to make it happen on a budgetary scale that can allow him to realise his vision. The trouble is that the film comes across like an adolescent vision: lots of noise, battles, pretty girls and clunky dialogue. 

Rhythm - the film casts the rapper Travis Scott as a variant on the blind Homer (who was an enigmatic invention too). He beats out his song to the rhythm of the hexameter. Nolan was always a master of rhythm, the way in which a film is constructed out of carefully edited beats and the manipulation of time. Momento, Dunkirk, Inception, all benefitted from this vision, capable of translating complex ideas into the language of cinema, with its impatient rhythms - you only have an hour and a half to three hours to fit it all in. But here, as for me, in Oppenheimer, he seems to have lost his touch. The rhythm is off. Odysseus’ return journey takes seven years or more, but events in Ithaca can’t keep pace with this and remain trapped in the present day. The timelines, which gelled in such a Borgesian manner in the other named films, don’t quite seem to click together. 

Finally - what is this film actually about? When Damon talks to Hathaway at the end, expressing a jaundiced regret for the genie of war he has let out of the bottle, we flash back to the dreadful pillage of Troy. And yet, over the course of this past decade, we see things far worse on our phones, day-in, day-out. When they used to sing of war, those who listened thankfully had a disconnect from its realities. Nolan is singing of war; but we no longer have the privilege of that disconnect. Modernity, the smartphone which the director famously shuns, means we carry the realities of war around in our pockets. The film’s recreation of war feels like a pale, sanitised imitation. As ever, the barbarity of another middle eastern conflict, Gaza, overshadows everything. Hollywood exists in such an escapist bubble that it really has no right to pontificate about civilisation and war. Or if it wants to, it should do it consciously and overtly. Metaphors feel cowardly. The message of this movie has all the punch of an instagram post. 

in diamond square (w. merce rodoreda, tr peter bush)

Rodoreda’s quietly expansive novel covers the years before the revolution in Spain, the war itself, and the aftermath. The narrator, Natalia, is a Barcelona native. Rodoreda recounts her life with simplicity and moments of lyricism. As such the novel gets under the skin of an ordinary woman, who has moments of dire struggle and moments of comfort and happiness. And lots of pigeons. Her first husband, Joe, decides he’s going to make money out of pigeons and converts their home into a pigeon sanctuary. Natalia puts up with this for as long as she can bear it. Eventually Joe is called to the Aragon front, and the pigeons leave. These are the kind of cotidian details that make up people’s lives and the author captures Natalia’s cares with precision. The novel also serves as a document registering a Barcelona that has been lost. A friend was there this month and talked of how it has been overrun by tourists. Barcelona is now a global city. Whether this is for the better or the worse of its citizens is open to debate. Rodoreda’s novel shows a level of poverty which was terrifying, and which conditions life choices Natalia feels compelled to make. At the same time, the novel reveals a communal life in the heart of the city which has doubtless been eroded by property speculation and hyper-tourism.

ajuste de pérdidas (w&d miguel calderon, w. guillermo fadanelli)

The Loss Adjuster would be the English title. It’s a bracing little mockumentary, made by the artist who features within his own film as himself. It follows Pedro, a Loss Adjuster, a disillusioned, charismatic bon viveur and art collector who, spoiler, we are informed at the end of the film is a real character being played by someone else. It’s hard to know who in the film is real and who is played by an actor, something that retrospectively colours the viewing. Pedro visits sites of tragedies to ascertain what was responsible. He buys art. He’s filmed smoking cigars and drinking whisky. He has a louche, hyper Mexican approach to life. The film took, for me, an even more surreal turn, when Pedro, on a boat going through some everglades, starts explaining how he’s met an actress who wants him to participate in a play by a female English writer, none over than Sarah K. Pedro, who is not an actor, accepts, because he fancies the actress. The play is Blasted, even if the title is never stated. There is a coherence to performing Sarah’s play, a meditation on violence and the effects of misogyny, in Mexico. There are scenes where Pedro argues with the director, who also happens to be the actress’ partner, about how to represent Ian, holed up in a Leeds hotel room. Pedro, searching for someone’s grave for reasons I couldn’t entirely understand, eulogises the work of the young English writer. It’s not entirely clear if he realises she is no longer alive. For obvious reasons this was the point in the film when it went from being quite entertaining to downright fascinating. Even if the angle the film is seeking to explore never seemed entirely clear, it is never less than intriguing. One suspects that the young English writer would have appreciated it.  

a second life (w&d laurent slama, w. thomas keumurian)

Slama’s Paris based film is mostly English language. It’s constructed around the charismatic presence of Agathe Rousselle, star of Titane, who looks as though she was born to play a moody bilingual traipsing round the streets of the capital in an indie movie. The aesthetic is breezy, handheld, capturing the energy of the city on the opening day of the Olympic Games. Elizabeth, a US citizen who is more French than American, works for a concierge firm, welcoming rich tourists. She’s also quasi-suicidal, for reasons we never get to understand, beyond a certain Camusian gallic leaning. One of her clients, pink-haired Elijah, played with a winsome charm by Alex Lawther, becomes fascinated by her, perhaps because she comes across as an alt-Parisian it-girl, and tags along with her as she gets increasingly stressed out by her job. Elizabeth (name derived from a Bergman character) is also deaf, and inevitably loses her expensive hearing aids. Slama directs with an energy which perhaps compensates for a somewhat whimsical narrative which never confronts the source(s) of Elzabeth’s disaffection with the world. At the same time, this feels like guerrilla filmmaking done with a certain aplomb, benefitting from great casting. The fact that it’s made mostly in English, with several sympathetic gringo characters, makes one wonder if it was conceived with one eye on the US festival circuit - it’s hard to empathise with North American tourists in Paris, even if they are hypnotists. (Is this supposed to be the anti Emily-in-Paris?)

the reverse centaur's guide to life after AI: how to think about artificial intelligence before it's too late (cory doctorow)

Doctorow’s text is a bracing takedown of many of the AI myths, which, he suggests, are promoted in order to increase the share value of the tech firms that are driving the supposed AI revolution. These myths include the idea that AI can drastically reduce the need for a human workforce, as well as the fear that the machines will end up taking over the world. This is all, suggests the writer, a form of froth designed to pump up the value of the tech firms, attracting more and more investment, thereby creating a bubble which will, he contends, have to burst sooner or later. Doctorow is not anti-AI, he has many suggestions as to how it can be a beneficial tool (which is summed up by the perhaps clunky reverse Centaur metaphor), but he is anti the way the quest for AI is manipulating political and economic practice.

 

the deer hunter (w&d michael cimino, w. deric washburn, louis garfinkle)

When I got home I thought it was incumbent to look up the discourse on ‘Deer Hunter Racist’. There was not as much as I might have anticipated. Cimino’s film occupies a curious space. Known as a Vietnam war movie, the Vietnam sections of the film actually feel like background for the director’s real interest, which is is the dissolution of the immigrant American dream. It might be that twas ever thus, but this is effectively a buddy movie, about three men from a close-knit community who stray into a nightmare. A nightmare which just happens to have been caused by the demented actions of their government. Cimino’s film is always at its purest when the action occurs in the Pennsylvania mining town that Mike, Nick and Steve come from. First names as common as any in the Anglo-Saxon world, but their surnames are of Russian descent, a telling choice, given that it’s the commie Russians that the USA was supposedly trying to defeat in South East Asia. A Russian Orthodox Church looms over the small town, looking like something out of the Donbas, and it’s here that the citizens are married and buried. The first hour of the film is locked into the creation of this world and the personal relationships that lurk there. This could be American Graffiti, or The Last Picture Show.

Vietnam is the fly in the ointment. It’s not an unreasonable position to criticise the film for not reflecting the Vietnamese experience, or indeed for portraying the Vietnamese characters as bloodthirsty gamblers, hooked on Russian Roulette, an idea which was apparently the invention of Cimino and his screenwriters. But it would also be to miss the point. The Russian Roulette is a device, which ties in with the band of brothers’ love of hunting, guns and violence, a violence which does a 180 degree turn, turning the gun back on themselves. The deer aren’t going to provoke that, but the Vietnam War will.

Through all this De Niro gives a magisterial performance. Vaguely normal, vaguely handsome, vaguely ugly with his sailor’s beard, he has the air of a leader and a survivor, a man who is of the world he inhabits and yet is not. It’s intriguing that in the credits, the last image is of De Niro’s Mike falling over. For all his capacity to control and lead, he is unable to rescue his friend from the trap that has been laid.

So Deer Hunter is a film which opens itself to perhaps deserved criticism, whilst at the same time providing a coruscating vision of American Imperialism. It has been over thirty years since I last saw the film. Its impact was telling then and its power has not diminished. It’s also instructive to think that the chances of a similar film being made about more recent US adventures is minimal. As though the military PR men sat down and watched the ’Nam movies, and then told Hollywood: no more next time round. The scenes of the US Saigon embassy is in its final days could be mapped on to events in Kabul. A critique of a government willing to cripple and kill its own in pursuit of its imperialist ambitions is no longer the kind of thing the studios are willing to finance. Instead we get the false war wish fulfilment of Tarantino or the vapid escapism of the Marvel franchise. (Or “ancient Greece”)

false war (carlos álvarez, tr natasha wimmer)

Álvarez’s exile novel is a bricolage. There are scenes from Cuba itself, but also Miami, Mexico City and Berlin. The novel adopts the fractured narrative so beloved of postmodernism (or wherever it is we have got to), skipping not just from country to country but also across timelines. The unifying thread is a deadpan discomfort, shared by many of these characters, from the first person narrator to the female psychologist. There are various strands whose juxtaposition makes for an abrasive read: no sooner does the reader begin to connect with one sequence than they are thrown into another. It’s reminiscent of Enrigue’s Hypothermia  or Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, other writers who appear to embrace a mosaic narrative, as they seek to portray the complexity of the modern day frontlines between first world and third.  

o riso e a faca (I only rest in the storm) (w&d pedro pinho, w. miguel seabra lopes, luisa homem)

France 2 - Morocco - 0. No extra time. Which gives me time to get to Cinemateca for the 7.10 screening of Pinho’s film. About which I knew nothing, except that it was set in Africa and was on the long side.

Africa is Guinea Bissau, the Portuguese speaking West African nation. Long is 3 hours 37 minutes. Which is getting up to Angelopoulos levels of long. It starts with a scene that could be out of Antonioni’s Passenger, as Sergio, a white Portuguese man, breaks down on a wind-blown Saharan highway. He is on his way to Bissau, where he is due to deliver a report on the construction of a road which, he is told by a fetching white NGO worker, will threaten the habitat of the last remaining hippopotamuses in the region. His predecessor, in a Bolaño-esque move, has vanished. We never get to see the hippos, but we do get to see just about everything else. There’s a reason this film is so long. It’s because it seeks to faithfully capture every aspect of Sergio’s trip. From a social and anthropological perspective, but also a personal level, as Sergio goes on a voyage of spiritual and sexual discovery.

Of course, there is an angle that says this is excessive. The film should have condensed the material, made a more coherent narrative, reduced the elements. Who wants to sit and watch a film that’s three and a half hours long set in country most viewers outside of West Africa will never have visited. On the other hand, how do you make a film about neo-colonialism and its offset, neo-liberalism? What happens when you simplify the thesis that underpins the film? There are at least three scenes which cut to the heart of the matter. One in a club, when the ‘progressive’ Horacio gives Sergio a lecture on the advantages of development, another with Daria, the woman he fancies who can’t believe he turned down Horacio’s bribe, and a third when Sergio finds himself with a sex worker in the desert, paid for by a Portuguese worker who’s trying to make up for losing his temper with him. This last scene is raw, naked and wilfully on the nose. The sex worker, who speaks perfect English, better than Sergio, berates him for trying to understand and empathise with something that goes beyond his understanding or his capacity for empathy. This is the North-South divide laid bare. The progressive north is like the rich man in the parable. No matter how well-intentioned, its citizens can never truly grapple with the realities of being born in the ‘under-developed’ world.

These scenes, among others, can only play out within the context of Sergio’s journey and the wider world he and we get to know. On their own they would be top-heavy, expositional. But the scale of Pinho’s ambition allows him to incorporate them, pebbles on the river’s floor. This expansive approach permits the film to access so many elements of Guinean society, from the clubs of Bissau to the riverine villages in the mangroves, to the Koltesian outposts in the desert. And this is the short version - there’s a five hour director’s cut!

I walked back from Cinematica in my second world city. O Risa e a Faca is, without doubt, one of the most challenging, astonishing pieces of contemporary cinema I have seen. I realise, in the writing of this, that my perspective is that of the white male European. Perhaps the black, female, non-european would have another take. (There’s a great moment when the black Brazilian drag queen is told s/he’s not black and reacts with annoyance, provoking the question, what exactly does it mean to say someone is ‘black’ or ‘white’ (The Nigerians told me I had black blood in me somewhere, I wasn’t a ghost)). But - parenthesis over - this is a remarkable film which explores the boundaries of our world, and how we can even attempt to speak about those boundaries in a medium with costs that are, for the vast majority of countries, prohibitive.

[Final thoughts - this film seems to sit alongside Martin’s Great Yarmouth and the work of Pedro Costa, (there may be others) suggesting a boldness to Portuguese filmmaking which is going under the radar. - This film is the anti-Sirat. No sudden dramatic thrills. No emotional volte-faces.] 

stalingrad (vasily grossman, tr. robert & elizabeth chandler)

It’s taken a month to read Stalingrad. Which given the thematic, seems quite rapid. Vasily Grossman’s epic text is in many ways an anti-novel. It has no central character as such. Minor characters appear and take over the book for chapters at a time, then vanish, never to be heard from again. Split into three parts, it feels in the opening part as though this will be a classic Russian novel (with an acknowledged homage to Tolstoy), following the fate of a single Stalingrad family, the Shaposhnikovs, but as the book evolves, this central thread becomes more and more tenuous. Characters of apparent significance are despatched to Kazan, or death. This is a counter-intuitive methodology, which would go against all the tenets of the courses dedicated to the art of the novel. Yet there it stands, Stalingrad, a bastion, a monument, a living embodiment of sacrifice and struggle. Day by day, it feels, both in the reading of it and in the chronology of events, Grossman draws us into the looming conflict, which finally explodes in the third book.

Literature isn’t about character journey or narrative structure. It’s about capturing reality. So, Grossman will move from the frontline to a factory hundreds of miles away - where the weapons which permit the frontline to keep fighting are created. Or even, in one extended sequence, the coal mines from whence the power to keep the factories running is sourced. War is a chain of social interactions and commitments. To document its reality, the writer has to be prepared to dig down into the roots. Even the camels on the steppe and the fish in the rivers are affected by the hell that has been unleashed by Hitler, and the writer’s pen pays its dues to the beasts too.

The book, more than aware of its own significance, moves from scenes with peasant women to scenes with Hitler himself. The battle of Stalingrad signalled the beginning of the end of the fascist war of conquest, a war that would end in ignominious defeat. In the UK we are weaned on D-Day and Dunkirk as the great heroic events of the Second World War. Grossman explains with an almost clinical brilliance how it was at Stalingrad that the tide was turned. German soldiers idly speculate on taking India next. The riches that lie to be claimed in the Urals will continue to fuel their conquests. But a few brave soviet soldiers hold them back, fuelled, the writer argues, by a commitment to the communist cause and the sense of solidarity that the philosophy engenders, a solidarity that endows the resistance with the strength to defeat the geo-political odds. 

the misfits (d. john houston, w. arthur miller)

Whose film is this? It feels as though there are three separate animi for the movie, each pulling in their own direction. The film opens with some classic, droll MIllerian dialogue, as Monroe’s Roslyn is introduced. Miller wrote the script for his then-wife, and much of the opening sequence deals with the pains and pleasures of being, or being married to, America’s pin-up girl. The Rino sequence is light, almost frothy, with Monroe showing off her comedy chops. When the film moves out of the city, the tone changes. It becomes a meditation on the America west, reminiscent of the plays of Shepherd as much as Miller. There’s a metaphor at the heart which feels as though it might work better in the theatre than film, as Gable, Wallach and Clift go hunting for wild mustangs to make a buck. Nevertheless, the filming on the Nevada salt flats is visceral. Here it feels like Houston’s film, a vigorous tale of men and their values, the rights and wrongs of the American way, with an implicit critique of the men’s petty greed reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Finally, of course, this is Marilyn’s film. She is the pivot around which everything revolves, the one who questions the men’s phallocentric vision of the world, the one who gets the big emotional moment, filmed curiously in the middle distance, as though Houston felt uncomfortable with her scene disrupting his high-octane hunting sequence.

All of which makes for an awkward, angular film, which struggles to fit in its variant, misfitting parts. Nevertheless in spite of the over-simplified, sentimental finale, it acts as a warped homage to warped dreams. The dream of the American west, the dream of the American beauty, the dream of the Miller-Monroe marriage. It’s not perfect, but then no marriage is. 

cabaret (d. bob fosse, w. joe masteroff, john van druten, christopher isherwood, jay allen)

Germany, interwar. So much of my reading and watching seems to return to these times. Whilst there is a personal connection to pre-war Berlin, it is also disconcerting the way in which interwar Germany seems to resemble contemporary western society. The culture wars and the xenophobia. The hankering for a strong leader which goes above and beyond a hankering for democracy. The societal petri dish which leads to fascism is always latent, but these days the ingredients feel more combustible than ever. Cabaret, the film of a musical inspired by a book written by Isherwood, who must have been jotting down notes in the clubs and beer gardens and parks he would have frequented, does a sterling job of capturing Berlin in the thirties. A heightened, musical Berlin with a shadow hanging over it. How many of these english speaking German characters would be dead a decade later? Would Fritz and Natalia manage to flee? Would Maximilian end up dead on the eastern front? It’s a curious film in so far as the fate of the lead protagonists, no matter the scrapes they get into, seem to have less jeopardy than that of the secondary characters. Minelli is barnstormingly brilliant. I once, in another life, saw her perform two nights in a row at the Royal Albert Hall. Presumably singing many of the songs from this film. What stays with me most, however, is how the two nights were carbon copies, even down to the supposed ad-libs. Minelli was a meticulous pro. That quest for perfection underscores her representation of Sally Bowles. She appears to capture her character’s comic timing and apparent chaos effortlessly - something that suggests there must have been a world of effort involved.  Fosse choreographs the whole film, not just the dance sequences. The editing is sharp to the point of jagged. The rollercoaster ride reflects the rollercoaster lives that everyone was living in those dangerous days, both exhilarating and ghosted by imminent terror. 

palo y hueso (w&d nicolás sarquís, w. raúl beceyro, juan josé saer)

Palo y Hueso (Stick and Bone) is a low-fi, casi nouvelle vague tale from rural Argentina. Besides being an intriguing film in its own right, it has the added kudos of being adapted from a story by the great Argentine novelist Saer, who is credited as co-writer. There’s something about harsh tales from the countryside which suit that a Chabrolian black and white aesthetic (thinking of Sanjines and Paolo Costa, among others.) Palo y Hueso tells a simple story of an older campesino, Don Arce, who ‘buys’ himself a fifteen year old wife. He also happens to have a good-looking twenty-something son, Domingo, who lives with him. It comes as no great surprise that Rosita is more interested in Domingo than Don Arce. One of the more surprising elements of the film is the way in which the agent of change turns out to be Rosita, rather than either of the men. Although she finds herself in a weak position, she emerges as a strong character, prepared to take charge of her life. The film is threaded through with images of the local culture and landscape. The riotous festivities of the local pueblo contrast with the emptiness of country life. All of it is captured by a camera which feels as though it is constantly probing the slim tale’s possibilities, employing depth of field in the manner of Bergman, another who enjoyed putting the passions and bleakness of rural life on screen.