alpha (w&d julia ducournau)

The critics have not been overly kind to Alpha. It is indeed, a messy film, so full of ideas and concepts that they seem to overflow. There’s a pandemic storyline, as society becomes gripped by a disease which turns people to crumbling stone. There’s a junkie storyline, as Amin, played by Tahar Rahim, struggles with his addiction. There’s a double timeline, with teenage Alpha and young Alpha living side by side within the film’s framework. Gradually we piece together that the pandemic scenes, with Alpha’s heroic mother, Golshifteh Farahani, sporting a different hairdo, happened in young Alpha’s past. There’s a coming of age storyline, as Alpha, (Mélissa Boros) fights for her independence and tries to reconcile with the family ghosts. There are loose strands featuring the anglo-french actors Finnegan Oldfield and Emma Mackey, which feel as though they might even have been included to keep the financiers happy. Finally, there are some great moments where the director explores her Berber heritage, a heritage from which Alpha feels alienated. The red wind whose myth permeates the film clearly has a saharan origin. So there is a lot going on, probably far too much and even more so than with Titane, one feels that the director might benefit from working with a screenwriter…. But none of this means that Alpha makes for anything less than a fascinating, visceral ride. As ever with Ducournau, there’s a vigour and energy to the filmmaking which propels the film over the course of its two hours, no matter how many highways and byways it goes down. It’s not perfect, but then who is?

 

brief encounter (w&d david lean, w. noël coward, anthony havelock-allan, ronald neame)

When the lights came up in Montevideo’s Cinemateca, there was more one person who could be seen unashamedly in tears. How can a black and white, subtitled British film made in 1945 continue to exert such an effect? The answer is twofold. On the one hand it’s simple. This is one of the classic cinematic Ur-Love Stories. The account of the doomed love affair of Dr Alec Harvey and Laura Jesson represents a transcendent vision of that thing called romantic love upon which so much of our western dreamlife is predicated. Their love is uncomplicated, unconsummated, and clear as mountain stream. It is a kind of dream we are born and bred to share and when we witness this framed within the rectangle of the cinema screen, it has a potency that real life, with all its complications, struggles to emulate. On the other, this is a result of delicious artistry. From Lean’s opening shot, as the camera initially focuses on Stanley Holloway flirting with the station cafe manageress, before panning to the protagonists, the film exudes a delicacy blended with high passion. We are spies on this couple’s intimacy. Coward’s script is a thing of joy, blending reserve with those moments when the reserve breaks and Howard declares, with an unbridled simplicity, that he loves Laura. The violence of love is laid bare, the way it creates great joy, but an equal measure of sorrow. Somehow Coward manages to squeeze in a reference to Keats, the prince of romantic poetry. This violence would, of course, have had a heightened resonance at the time of the film’s release, a moment when so many relationships would have flowered briefly only to be torn apart by war. Of course there is something that feels inimically British in the way that the characters wrestle to keep their passions under control, but at the same time the film makes one think of another great unconsummated cinematic love story, Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The yearning of love, also known as the tugging of the heartstrings, is a universal emotion. Lean and Coward’s encapsulation of these emotions, delivered in the flesh by the sublime performances of Howard and Johnson, reverberates across the decades.

 

romería (w&d carla simón, w. neus pipó simón)

Simón’s auto-ficción tale of a young woman getting to know her deceased father’s lost family and their drug-running secrets evolves gently, punctuated by the revelations Marina gleans along the way. It’s careful pacing leads towards an oneiric, staged finale, which shifts away from the steady naturalism of the rest of the film, a naturalism exacerbated by the frequent use of Marina’s, an aspiring filmmaker, camcorder shots. Even if there is an underwater sequence in the dream sequence which matches an earlier underwater sequence when Marina dives into the Atlantic waters off the coast of Vigo. This artful use of imagery helps to give the tale added depth. In a way it feels reminiscent of the work of Mark Jenkin, just as the rugged Galician coastline, which features prominently, echoes the rugged Cornish coastline. Both directors have carved out their niche on the edge of conventional cinema, allowing their personal aesthetic and themes to percolate into films which pay little more than lip-service to conventional narrative models. Marina’s journey is a slow, roundabout trip, featuring Galician grannies and heroin nights. It’s a film with capas that accompany the viewer as they follow the footsteps of Marina, who is in turn walking in the footsteps of her lost parents. 

nada (jean-patrick manchette tr. donald nicholson-smith)

Manchette’s tale is something of a political-policier potboiler. A group of anarchists kidnap a US diplomat and encounter a predictable fate. It’s pacy, pulpy and seems very much rooted in its time. To think that in the seventies politicians and businessmen were kidnapped or assassinated on a fairly routine basis in France, Spain Germany, Italy, the UK, USA. It must have made the countries on the other side of the iron curtain seem like oases of peace. That kind of terrorism has been scotched, seemingly, to such an extent that the instinctive response to a supposed assassination attempt (cf the USA) is to dismiss it as a false flag. Manchette mentions the Tupamaros, who also kidnapped a diplomat, this time British, but whose fate differed from those of his anti-heroes. That event was part of the other Cold War, the war of idealists against the military-business consortium. It was a war that was definitively lost, as we can see from the way in which the weapons industry now exerts an outsized influence on political action, just as much if not more so than in the seventies. The tragic, unheroic deaths of almost everyone involved in the kidnapping operation feels like cynical but truthful takedown of the thwarted dreams of an alternative society to the capitalist model. 

resurrección/ kuángyě shídài (w&d bi gan, w. zhai xiaohui)

When this film came out last year, I read some gushing reviews suggesting it was reinventing the art. In order to find out whether Bi Gan has indeed reinvented, or resurrected cinema, I came to pay my dues. What emerges is the work of a cineaste student let loose with a seemingly infinite budget. There are homages to Welles, Tarkovsky and the rest. There are set piece scenes which any cineaste would die to put together. What there isn’t is much of a story. In some ways the film’s scale seems akin to much modern Chinese cinema (Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, the panoramic vistas of Jia Zhang-Ki, etc). Would it be too much of a reach to suggest that this reflects a culture struggling to come to terms with its new-formed grandiose status? However, Zhang-Ki’s films are rooted in the actuality of Chinese development/ expansion. Whereas Bi Gan is reaching for something altogether more poetic and pretentious, an overview of the history of cinema itself. The absence of an anchor means that, no matter how impressive the imagery, the film feels as though it drifts through a calm sea, going nowhere in particular. 

how to win an information war (peter pomertantsev)

Arrived at Pomertantsev’s book about Sefton Delmer via reading Marias, who cites Delmer in his recondite spy novels. Pomertantsev talks through then way Delmer coordinated and was the creative urge behind the British propaganda campaign against the Nazis during WW2, mostly via the medium of radio. Delmer is a curious character, whose approach was amoral, Wellesian, instinctive, and possibly brilliant. The word ‘possibly’ is because the author seems so taken by his subject that it becomes hard to evaluate from the book how effective Delmer’s broadcasts were - at times, it’s hinted, they were even counter-productive. Pomertantsev connects Delmer’s work with the way in which information is manipulated in the 21st century. The upshot would appear to be that you have to fight fire with fire: the power of coordinated propaganda is so effective that the only way to fight back is by playing dirty, ignoring any arguments based on idealism. In a fucked-up world, this might be true. Then again, it might not. 

basta! (d. ugo ulive)

How often do you walk out of the cinema and say to yourself, what the fuck was I just watching? That’s my current state, having just seen the 22 minutes long Basta. People talk about shocking films, from Chien Angelou to Titane. I thought about Cronenberg, Park Chan Wook, but none of these hold a candle to Ulive’s assault on the senses. Filmed in Venezuela, it’s the most delirious, terrifying attack on big oil capitalism possible. Like the Military industrial’s own pornographic violence, there’s no coherence, no receivable discourse. When the bomb hits, you don’t get to think though the logic of its hitting, and this film, nearly fifty years after its making, has the same demonic power, albeit a power realised through art, the art of selecting the image, editing the image, adding sound, creating rhythm. In short, through the employment of the art of cinema. It’s completely and utterly hateful, revolting, obscene. And therein lies its secret. If ever a film chose to step out of the received ideas of what should be shown in a cinema, this is it. If you ever get the chance to watch it, do - but watch it somewhere where the sound is turned up, and you cannot look away or glance at your phone or go and get something from the fridge when it gets too much. 

(It turns out that Ugo Ulive, like myself, directed in El Galpon and for La Comedia. Jorge Blanco also had one play produced by La Comedia before he left Uruguay. It makes one wonder what might have been. These days in this country, the cinema and the theatre have almost no intercambio. It’s one thing or the other.)

los chicos y la calle (d carlos echeverría)

In 2001 Argentina and Uruguay suffered a brutal economic collapse. Kids that grew up in that era are sometimes called here, los chicos del pasto, the kids who ate grass. Made during this recession, Echeverría’s documentary looks at the street kids of Buenos Aires. It is orientated around a refuge, called CAINA, where the kids go for food, clothing and shelter, run by willing young men and women with clear social consciences. The doc has a Wiseman feel, albeit interrupted at times with interviews. The kids roam the streets near Retiro. The film captures the humanity behind their hard facade. No-one finds themselves living on the street without a story that explains how they got there. Kids that most would walk past or shy away from become people in their own right. The camera roams the streets with them, listens in on their stories, a testament to the trust the director and his crew managed to engender. Below the surface there lurk tales of sexual abuse and violence. It’s impossible not to contemplate what has happened to these lost children twenty five years on, now that those who have survived will be adults entering middle age. 

argie (w&d jorge blanco)

Cinema is a medium which is hostage to money. It’s the objective of every financed film to make the most of its budget to ensure the product meets certain aesthetic standards. The biggest crime is to look cheap. Even if a decade or so later, the aesthetic has moved on, ether as a result of fashion or technology, and by the time a film is twenty years old it almost invariably looks dated. Nevertheless, almost all films that make it to the mainstream are polished, to one degree or another. Unlike a novel, which can get away with the odd scraggy loose end, or Shakespeare, of whom this is also the case, cinema tends to be an unforgiving medium. If your film fails to meet a certain aesthetic standard, it won’t be taken seriously.

Which is perhaps why there seems to be so little space for the maverick within the industry. The filmmaker who is more concerned with what they want to say than how they say it. Cine povere, or Outsider Art. Argie is a great example of what we lose with this reductive filter. It’s not a perfect film. It’s rambunctious, messy, underdeveloped. There are several war scenes that border on the silly. The director, the Uruguayan Jorge Blanco, is also the lead actor. There’s an overwhelming sense of chaos, but that chaos is also energy. However, this is a film which could never have been made through conventional methods. Pablo is an Argentine exile in London at the time of the Falklands War who decides to take the battle to the natives. But he’s no terrorist, not even a soldier. He targets a woman he fancies, who also happens to fancy him. She’s a topless dancer in The Dartmouth Arms, straight out of the seventies early eighties, who also happens to be the daughter of a Spaniard who fled Franco. The Argentine and the topless dancer go on a pseudo Bonny and Clyde journey through the badlands of London, causing damage to no-one except themselves. It’s a farcical journey, summed up by Pablo taking out his violent frustration on a man who tries to pick up his girl, only to be told by her, as he’s beating him up, that the man is actually Irish.

There’s plenty of humour and pathos in Argie, but more than anything else it’s a completely valid political-cultural statement. The Argentine perspective on the war, at the time of the film’s making, had no voice within the UK. The back story of generals and repression and lost pride. The actuality of who the men who were fighting were. Blanco seeks to give them a voice, in a honkytonk style, maximising his improvised budget to conjure something quietly extraordinary. 

mars in aires (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. robert dassanowsky & john s. barrett)

Lernet-Holenia’s novel, the second of this year, takes place in the days at the start of the Second World War. A veteran Viennese soldier, Count Wallmoden, has no real inkling that war is about to break out. He becomes besotted by Cuba, a mysterious woman, a femme fatale. Just before he has an assignation with her, his company begins to march into Poland. The world is on the brink of war but Wallmoden is distraught he cannot meet up with Cuba. He is certain that the military manoeuvres will end shortly and this will all blow over. The account of the march into Poland is detailed and specific. It doesn’t have the feel of the start of a world war, and Wallmoden compares what is happening with the horrors of the First World War, which he fought in, and feels that it’s quite lightweight. Until he is almost killed as the battles intensify. It’s a fascinating account of a moment when the horrors that will be shortly unleashed are only just emerging from their chrysalis. The tale is also a ghost story. Cuba, Wallmoden is later told, has died. He later meets a woman in a deserted Polish mansion who has the same name. A ghost story in times of war feels even more  understandable or plausible. (One thinks of the seances in Gravity’s Rainbow and the fascination in the First World War.) Mars in Aires is a novel which on one level feels straightforward, but contains a concealed level of complexity, even danger. 

“However, there is no doubt that we – and how often! – for moments, for days, yes, sometimes even longer than that, are in completely different realms, even though we think we’re here, and we live a life there and do things about which we know nothing. But we do live it, that life, and perhaps it’s the real one.”

melancholia (w&d von trier)

If cinema, as occasionally noted, is a synthesis of multiple elements (screenwriting, acting, photography, music, art direction, editing etc), then the art of the director is to employ each of these elements to the nth degree. It might seem counterintuitive that Von Trier, who comes from a lo-fi school, which sought a return to a pared-back methodology, should end up excelling in every aspect of this directorial remit, but in Melancholia, we witness a seemingly effortless mastery of the medium.

Screenwriting - when discussing the quality of screenwriting, what is involved? Firstly the idea that the screenplay will introduce and discuss ideas that provoke thought, a condition so often neglected by the mainstream. Second that the narrative should take the viewer with it, should be involving. Thirdly, that the dialogue should be credible, even at its more recondite. So when Dunst’s character says that the earth is evil, in another film this line might feel trite or contrived. Whereas, in Melancholia, it feels not only credible, coming from the mouth of this character, but also resonant of the more complex ideas the film is raising. Cinema is not philosophy. It struggles to explore concepts with subtlety or depth. Von Trier appears to be investigating a Schopenhauer- ian or Manichean argument about the overblown importance of humanity, its relative insignificance within the immensity of the universe. Dunst character explores these ideas convincingly, brilliantly, in a way that allows us to understand the questions the film is posing. Should the world end, would it really be such a tragedy? What would be lost? It’s an existential, anti-renaissance line, which feels all too pertinent in this 21st christian century.

Acting - Acting is by definition, fakery. Someone pretends to be someone else. The question then becomes, how well do they do this? Do they still feel human? Or does the fakery feel contrived? Perhaps the greatest testament to the director’s skill is the performance of Kiefer Sutherland, an actor who sometimes seemed to relish the fakery, the exaggeration of acting for the camera. Here, as the hassled husband of Gainsbourg and Dunst’s brother-in-law his exasperation is completely convincing.

Photography - I was lucky enough to watch the film on a big screen. There can be few more imposing visions than the great planet Melancholia soaring over the horizon, at the same time beauty, monster and avenger. There is something of the formal composition of certain scenes that is reminiscent of Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad. Then, in the opening half of the film, Von Trier’s DOP, Manuel Alberto Claro, captures the nuances and energy of a wedding with all the brillo of the days of Dogma, a homage, in its way, to Festen.

Music - Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is used repeatedly throughout the film. Given the epic scale the film is looking to operate on, the choice feels just as apposite (and perhaps includes a nod and a wink) to Copolla’s uses of Wagner in Apocalypse Now.

Art Direction - someone (Simone Grau Roney) was doing something very clever indeed with the representation of the planet Melancholia, a second moon/ sun. The use of a simple piece of twisted wire as a messenger of salvation or doom is also extraordinary.

Editing - Editing is one of the least valued elements of the process of making cinema. You rarely get editors on the red carpet. Yet Molly Malene Stensgaard offers a masterclass. In the first half of the film, with its large cast, she ensures that the rhythm never drops as we flit from scene to scene, cutting at the perfect moment. In the second, which has only four characters, she ensures there is a rising sense of tension, propelling the film towards its glorious climax. 

the big nowhere (james elroy)

It’s so long ago since I read Elroy’s Underworld trilogy, which offered both a re-imagination and an examination of post-war US politics. One longs for either Elroy himself or another Elroy to analyse the Trumpian world with the same forensic discipline. Most history, as Marias observes, occurs in the shadows, and Elroy is a writer who is not afraid to walk in those shadows and take the reader with him. Perhaps because the trilogy felt so urgent, so necessary, I have resisted his crime novels. The Big Nowhere is the second of his LA Quartet, and whilst it doesn’t do so directly, it still flirts with politics, pulling up the skirts of the US establishment. Elroy writes with an urgency as he documents the way a crime investigation is railroaded by vested interests within the LAPD. There is no space for idealism or even honesty in this venal world. It’s a gripping, coruscating read, which gives a down-to-earth lowdown on what really makes the US tick. He is a writer blessed with a singular, scatty brilliance.

 

far from heaven (w&d todd haynes)

Todd Haynes achieves something complex in his Sirk homage. He bestows pathos on characters who at first seem laughable, even absurd. The film was released in 2002 and perhaps the lens through which an audience might watch the film has changed over the course of the last 25 years. Moore’s Cathy struggles to cope with her husband Frank’s gay infidelity,  The tone is melodramatic. Moore’s impeccably coiffed hair seems as much of a character as either of her children. Quaid’s Frank breaks down and weeps and then pinballs around like an archetypal repressed North American bourgeois. Everything is so on point that it feels like a pastiche, as indeed it is. It’s impossible not to laugh at these characters and their cliched fifties behaviour. Surely this is a world that we have left behind? Dennis Haysbert’s Raymond is the down-to-earth antidote to all this. A man whose solid decency transcends the boundaries of race and class. No wonder Cathy falls for him. All the same, this world and its characters feel like a caricature. Then something remarkable happens, in large part through the performances of Moore and Haysbert. The characters seem to slip the pastiche net. Their emotional distress touches us. The film becomes a film about love. its power and its limitations. These emotions are, of course, timeless.

Twenty five years later, even those elements of the film that seem wilfully contrived suddenly feel far more plausible. Conservatism is back. Prejudice is back. The closet is back. It seems like we’re slipping back into the absurd, divided world of the fifties. 

la femme d’ à côté (d. françois truffaut, w suzanne schiffman, jean aurel)

Truffaut’s melodrama feels slightly misconceived. Depardieu and Ardant are former lovers. She just happens to move in right across the street from him. Both are slightly nuts but keep it under control with their respective sane partners. However, when they inevitably reconnect, it’s a tinder box. Both veer towards a shared madness, an amour fou. The charisma of the two leads almost pulls it off, but as the film veers more and more towards melodrama, it flirts with the ridiculous. At one point Ardant’s husband says that he’s not a jealous man, “I’m not a Spanish husband”, (something the subtitles struggled to translate), but Depardieu and Ardant both have a Lorca-esque streak to them (she actually comes from the south, her children’s book editor is informed). One wonders what someone like Almodovar might have made of this tale. The tension between a Gallic cool and a Mediterranean excess doesn’t quite come off, as it did in a film like L’Apartment, for example, or even Pierrot Le Fou. It’s an interesting study in how a remarkable director can slightly misfire, no matter how enticing the ingredients, actors and premise. 

the voice of hind rajab (w&d kaouther ben hania)

If we accept that this thing we call life has always been a delicate balance between civilisation and barbarism. That at any moment the barbarians might rear their ugly heads and ignore the established rules of civilisation, then we also tend to believe, from the standpoint of the post-war liberal order, (which gave birth to the state of Israel), that this won’t happen here, or be perpetrated by those we consider our allies. Included in that idea of civilisation is that children should not become the victims of warfare. Wilfully killing children is the kind of thing the barbarians do. Be they the Nazis or the Mongols or any of the other peoples who codes of warfare pay no heed to our idea of civilisation. When the mass murder of civilians occurs, this is what we have come to term a genocide. There are many Israeli politicians who openly advocate for the eradication of the Gazan population. Their rhetoric has fuelled the acts of barbarism which we have witnessed, whether we want to or not, over the course of the past three years.

Hind Rajab was another of the victims of this barbarism. And the weapons which our ‘civilised’ societies have provided. This film pays homage to her suffering. It does so intelligently by not attempting to take us into a fictional Gaza which can never be recreated, rather recreating the events during the hours Hind Rajab was being killed from the point of view of the Red Cross workers in the West Bank, who are trying and failing to save her. Just as we, those who are opposed to the killing of children, try and fail. The Red Cross workers are impotent. They betray one of the core credos of modern filmmaking which is that the protagonists have to be active. They cannot be anything but passive bystanders as they witness the crime occur in real time. We are also passive bystanders, unable to roll back time, make the world see sense, save a child who is begging for her life. It is a terrible thing to witness but the action of witnessing which the filmmakers demand of the audience, the passive, impotent audience, is in some ways a homage to Hind Rajab’s short life and cruel death.

No-one can be a saviour or a superhero in the face of institutionalised barbarism. 

chikamatsu monogatari/ the crucified lovers (w&d kenji mizoguchi, w. monzaemon chikamatsu, matsutarō kawaguchi)

Mizoguchi conjures a subtle tale of tragic love which is also a vivid portrayal of a society where privacy is as wafer thin as the sliding paper walls of the houses the characters inhabit. It’s a world of secret passions and strict societal codes. There is endemic to the tale a severe critique of a wealth-driven culture (and by implication capitalism?). The only real villain is the business owner, Ishun, who wants to cheat on his wife and reacts with no mercy when his loyal and dedicated employee, Mohei, uses his signature to seek a loan of five silver marks for Ishun’s wife, Osan. This precipitates a series of increasingly unfortunate chapters which result in Mohei and Osan fleeing the city together. Osan is increasingly drawn to Mohei, who resists her, until the moment when he reveals his love for her. The story becomes a version of Romeo and Juliet, as the lovers commitment to each other presages their execution by crucifixion for adultery. The story unfolds with a parallel sense of jeopardy and redemptive love. All the characters seem trapped by a social code that fails to recognise the human nature of love. Even Ishun falls prey to this, and is ruined.

At the same time, this is a story of literal sliding doors, as the paper walls of the claustrophobic living quarters make for the inevitable revelation of secret passions and betrayals. Mizoguchi’s camera seems to glide through these spaces, a spy in the house of love. 

nuestra tierra (w&d lucrecia martel, w maría alché)

Martel deviates into doc. Nuestra Tierra is a rangy documentary which looks, as the title suggests, at the issue of the land, who owns it, who has rights. The location is Tucuman, the northern province of Argentina. Northern Argentina has a far larger native or indigenous population than other parts of the country. One of the notable aspects of Martel’s documentary is the way it makes explicit how little representation this element of society has within the general Argentine audio-visual world. The film revolves around a dispute over land rights in a valley which the indigenous Chuschagasta population claim they have always inhabited, which several white families now claim ownership of. This lead to a clash between the local indigenous population and three men of caucasian descent which ended with shots being fired and one indigenous man dying. The film is loosely weaved around the subsequent court case, brought by the relatives of the dead men. There was one pointed moment in the cinema when an academic opines that there are no official rastros (traces) of Chuschagasta in the valley. Rastros can also mean features, and Martel juxtaposes the academic’s words with the faces of the Chuschagasta who are present at the trial. The irony of the academic’s negationist argument was not lost on the Cinemateca audience.

The film seeks to both relate the dramatic events of the confrontation, of which there is grainy footage, and also to recount the stories of many of the inhabitants of the valley. It is an object lesson in a non-netflix method of storytelling. It resists sensationalism, preferring to dwell on the complex history of the region and its inhabitants, shifting from courtroom drama to archeological/ sociological study. There is no dominant central character. The viewer is encouraged to immerse themselves in this valley, to walk through its ravines, to gaze at the wild horses, to listen to the memories of the elders. In so doing, Martel creates an important document about discrimination and the inequities of Argentine society.  

mother father sister brother (w&d jarmusch)

Jarmusch is a master of style. Cinema is a visual medium (natch) - nevertheless those artists who embrace their aesthetic identity tend, perhaps surprisingly, to be pushed to the margins. The list of directors who are valued for style as much as content is short. Parajanov, Greenaway to name a couple. Jarmusch has long been a master of the acerbic, stripped back narrative, which allied to his aesthetic charms can produce masterpieces. Down By Law, Dead Man, Night on Earth and so on and so forth. He is also one of the few directors who can use the portmanteau format effectively (Coffee and Cigarettes, Night on Earth). Mother Father Sister Brother goes back to this format. Three extended shorts glued together to make a whole movie. There are recurring tropes - skateboarders, water, and (to an Englishman the slightly annoying) riff on the phrase ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’. The three pieces are also showcases for his cast, a mix of the famous and the less-well-known. The theme is family. In the first two pieces, the leitmotif is discomfort, and Jarmusch’s employment of the awkward silence is impeccable. The final piece, Sister Brother, is the only one which depicts a loving family relationship. The overall vibe is arch, even mannered, perhaps offset by the siblings’ evident affection. The film falls somewhere between Chekhovian versus Style-Over-Content, dependent on the viewer’s predilections and, presumably, personal family condition.

Nb - The second short, featuring a fearsome Charlotte Rampling, takes place in Dublin. It feels as though it was written to take place in London, and got switched for tax breaks? Jarmusch’s engagement with British culture, which features the aforementioned Bob’s Your Uncle riff, also has Rampling, an English doyenne waxing lyrical about PG Tips. One wonders of this is a deliberate choice, ie an act of irony, or a strange misrepresentation. In which case, did no one have the courage to tell the director that there is no way that Rampling’s elegant character would be serving PG Tips, given her refined gastronomic tastes? It’s one of those details which makes the second short feel slightly off-kilter, an essay that doesn’t quite square with its material.

aparajito (w&d satyajit ray)

The middle chapter in the Pather Panchali trilogy, Aparajito is a sensitive coming of age story, as Apu moves firstly from Benares to the countryside, following the death of his father, and then from the countryside to Calcutta, where he studies whilst his mother pines for him back in the country. The three chapters in themselves allow Ray to depict three different elements of Indian culture. The devotion and poverty of the Ganges town, the more lyrical ballad of the countryside, (albeit a peace interrupted by the sound of the train on the horizon), and lastly city life. Even if Apu’s Calcutta seems less frenetic that its modern day incarnation. These transitions help to paint a picture not just of a young man growing up, but also of an entire society, its possibilities, its limitations, its aspirations. 

the disappearing act (maria stepanova, tr sasha dugdale)

Stepanova’s novella can be read in the course of a single day. It recounts the cute tale of an exiled female novelist who nearly joins the circus. A dream of so many. At the edge of the novella lurks the spectre of Putin and Ukraine. But they are kept on the edges, as the mercurial narrator tiptoes through a chaotic twenty four hours, seeking to escape fame and fortune, dreaming of another life. 

wizard of the kremlin (w&d olivier assayas, w. emmanuel carrère)

Assayas is a prolific filmmaker with the rangy curiosity that goes with this desire to create. As such, this pivot to big-budget geo-political drama is perhaps not quite so surprising. This is a film about the world as it is, if not today, then at least yesterday. Adapted from a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, the film describes Putin’s rise to power, supposedly aided and abetted by the maverick guru, Vadim Baranov, modelled, so wiki tells me, on Vladislav Surkov. Baranov is a onetime theatre director and TV producer, whose communication skills facilitate Putin’s rise, and who later helps shape his bellicose foreign policy, although this is somewhat glossed over. As a device to enter Putin’s world it might work, although the script seems to struggle with that old screenwriting chestnut, the passive protagonist, because everything Baranov does is overshadowed by the actions of his two bosses, first Berezovksky and then Putin. Towards the final third of a long film Baranov appears to start to take matters more into his own hands, but then the film runs up against the paradox that its ostensibly sympathetic central character, played with a wan intelligence by Dano, is just as psychopathic as Putin, as his participation in the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas implies. 

The film seeks to cram twenty five years of history into its two and a half hours. For the world of nineties russia, the novels of Pelevin or Sorokin might offer a more intriguing entry point. There will be several books on Putin’s rise - Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People gives a forensic account which a film cannot hope to emulate. One also wonders if Assayas might have been influenced by the work of Kirill Serebrennikov. The Wizard of the Kremlin is a valiant stab at documenting contemporary history within a dramatic format, but it also sometimes feels as though the screenwriters may have been biting off more than they could chew. 

to lose a war (jon lee anderson)

Anderson’s prose is elegant and efficient. Unlike TV journalists, he’s always after the story that hides behind the headlines. It’s old school reporting. He finds people whose voices would never normally be heard. He also hangs in there. This book is a compilation of nearly thirty years of reporting on Afghanistan, from the departure of the Russians to the departure of the North Americans. He recognises the patterns, not least because the Afghanis themselves repeatedly spell this out to him. This isn’t a territory that can be conquered. It still consists of warring tribes and factions whose loyalties are willing to shift to whoever will best serve them, be that Russia, NATO, the US or the Taliban. Out of all this emerges the hubris of empirical overreach. Even as the US and NATO are installing themselves in Kabul, ‘modernising’ the city, Anderson is aware that out there in the plains, deserts and mountains, there are local people biding their time, waiting for the moment when the imperial mission will crumble. Part of the reason he’s so aware is that, unlike most reporters, he has actually gone beyond the capital and spoken to ordinary people. With the current flirtation with the idea of invading Iran, there is no more timely book for the decision-makers in Washington to be reading, even if one questions whether many of them would have the intellectual capacity to read and engage with Anderson’s book. 

ljósbrot / when the light breaks (w&d rúnar rúnarsson)

My friend Mr Plester should see this film, as it has a scene of two people eating hotdogs in Reykjavik. Apart from that, When The Lights Breaks could be described as a tender study of grief. A young man, Diddi, is killed in a car crash.  He was about to tell his girlfriend that he was leaving her for Una, played by Elín Hall. Her Bowie-esque disposition (cerca Man Who Fell to Earth) holds the film together with an assured performance that shows the nuanced complexities of both revealing and hiding your feelings at the same time. When the girlfriend arrives, Una struggles to hide her secret. Her curious, near-androgynous look masks her vulnerability. She’s both hyper-human and a-human at the same time. In a film blessed with sympathetic performances, hers stands apart; she flies and the rest follow, like geese, in her wake.

 

apocalypse now (w&d coppola, john milius, michael herr)

Things that strike one on rewatching:

Coppola’s editorial boldness. The superimposition of faces over images. The management of rhythm. It’s a long film but it never feels long.

The American nightmare. Am also reading John Lee Anderson’s book on Afghanistan at the moment. It’s astonishing, perhaps criminal, how the same trope recurs over and again. The imperial overreach. The dystopia. The chronicle of a failure foretold. But whereas North American cineastes grappled with Vietnam, the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns have never had their Apocalypse Nows or Deer Hunters. Perhaps the decline of an empire goes hand in hand with the failing capacity for self-awareness. 

unfinished business (michael bracewell)

Bracewell’s novel is reminiscent of Szalay’s London and the South East. Middle aged man losing his way after a life spent in offices. After reading Souvenir, with its playful non-fiction elements, Unfinished Business feels less adventurous in its approach to a London that has been loved and lost. There’s a plethora of characters who gravitate around the hapless narrator, including his ex-wife and in-laws and daughter. Bracewell plays with time as we skip in and out of the present. At one point he writes of the narrator: “To walk through London, he always felt, was to walk through the many chapters of his unwritten autobiography.” The novel is perhaps at its sharpest when it reveals the way in which our personal histories become inscribed in the bricks and mortar of the city. 

PIL

Am walking down Sarandi, the peatonal. A cyclone is blowing. The palm trees double back on themselves. It’s quarter past eight. Birdland has started on time and the world as we know it is forty five minutes from ending.

I first encountered PIL as a thirteen year old. Jason had this strange metal box, and contained within it was even stranger music. I didn’t know much about music. The Sex Pistols had been no more than a noise offstage. Like the Silver Jubilee. Like Vietnam. Like the Oil Crisis and the Six Day Week. Jason played the strange music in the big hall which was known as Toyes. It got under my skin. More than I knew.

I check my phone as I try to avoid the squalls of rain. I don’t want the world to end. It ended once a few years ago and when the world ends I find myself trapped in the safest corner of the universe. Montevideo. With its bocas, (crack houses), its street beggars, its pasteros (crack addicts). With its desolate, empty streets and its tiny theatres full of pecunious creativity. I’ll be fine in Montevideo if the world ends but I’d prefer it not to.

The world hasn’t ended. There’s a ceasefire.

In the bar de los viejos, corner of Washington and Colon, (could there be a more american corner?), the tv isn’t showing the football for once. It’s showing someone talking about the fact that the world hasn’t ended. Without a great deal of clarity. Leo and I share a beer. Outside the cyclone is gathering force. Inside there’s just us and one old guy with a beard down to his toes.

John Lydon is already on stage when we get to the Museo de Carnival. He’s a punctual Englishman. His band is a bassist, a guitarist who sometimes plays mandolin and a drummer. They’re tight. Lydon stands in front of a lectern with a folder containing the lyrics of the songs. He’s seventy years old. He doesn’t need to fuck around with remembering his lines.

My dad was into Simon and Garfunkel and French chanson. Jason used to play PIL, Augustus Pablo, Lennon, Stravinsky. He educated me in the possibilities of the aural world. My brain opened and flexed under his influence. Music as an energy, music as a weapon, music as mystery.

“Drive to the forest in a Japanese Car” - the songs come back from the undergrowth of my teenage years. They’re there in my brain, waiting to be activated. Lydon gobs, Lydon speaks very bad Spanish, Lydon stares at us like he’s a lunatic or we’re all lunatics. Lydon, you can’t help thinking, wouldn’t mind welcoming in the end of the world. He’s a dirty, foul-mouthed shaman, who sings for his supper. Like some kind of warrior king from the annals of Lévi-Strauss, belonging to a tribe which both fears him and rejects him. He’s on the edge of being unhinged - menos mal that he doesn’t have his finger hovering over the nuclear button, sooner or later he would have pressed it. And we wouldn’t be here tonight, waiting for the end of the world.

As the gig steers towards its end, PIL steers its ship towards the rocks. Old man Lydon asks the question: what is anger? We reply, on cue: Anger is an Energy. It’s a chant, an invocation. Anger is an Energy. Anger is an Energy. Lydon looks on approvingly. He gobs. But he doesn’t look angry. He looks like someone who knows that if he wanted to, he could shepherd us all out into the cyclone night to riot, to burn down the whole damned world.

But he’s not going to. He’s going to go back to the hotel and go to bed early.

We return to the bar for a whisky after the show. The TV is showing the football. Boston River playing a team from Brazil in the rain. Boston River are losing. All’s well with the world. 

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. 

+++

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.