birth of our power (victor serge, tr richard greeman)

Serge is a neglected figure. Although flirting with autobiography, his writing lacks that spark of irony or self-reflection that the late twentieth century western literature was prey to, before it became overrun by the confessional tracts of the belligerent individual. He recounts the dreams of what we call politics. The revolution, the overthrow of the old guard, when Marxist idealism was still a recognisable thing. Having said that: what is politics, if not the actions of men and women at the coalface of history? Serge’s text here recounts his passage from Barcelona to Leningrad, 1917-1918. The war across the border rages and the radicals in Barcelona carry the hope that this might fuel their revolt. For now, they are frustrated. Serge flees to France, hoping to travel to Russia, but he is arrested and interned in a POW camp. Only when the war ends can he finally resume his journey. He arrives in a sepulchral Leningrad, another refugee seeking food, shelter and warmth. The reality of the revolution’s dreams are laid bare; glory will not be given, it will be earned.

There is something in the controlled naivety of Serge’s writing that draws the reader in, makes a friend of them. The reader becomes his belated co-conspirator, not least because Serge is clearly not seduced by the romance of revolution; rather he is wedded to it, warts and all. 

night flight [saint exupéry]

Curiously I finished the last ten pages of Saint Exupéry’s tale whilst in the sky above South America, which is where much of the novel takes place. (The rest takes place on the ground in Buenos Aires). I’d begun it a month or so ago, and although it’s short, the pressure of land-living lead to a fallow period of reading, and I only managed to recover the book once I myself had taken flight. It’s a short novel with an existential twinge. Curiously, again, I watched a documentary on the flight about a free climber, Alex Honnold, the man who climbed the sheer cliff face of El Capitan without ropes. (Free Solo, d. Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi).  Both Free Solo and Night Flight are meditations on society’s relationship with death. In Free Solo the climber, a naif, categorises himself as someone who has a warrior spirit, who finds value in life through the act of occupying the edge on which life and death is balanced. Saint Exupéry’s pilots explore similar celestial territory. Situated between the earth and the stars, they roam a neverland where the day-to-day realities are left behind; a celestial sphere which soars, Nietzschian, above humanity’s mundane glories. Night Flight, however, makes it very clear that this intergalactic consciousness is actually at the service of the mundane. The pilots are part of a system which has been carefully organised in order to deliver the mail from South America to Europe. Their existentialism is assimilated by society. Similarly, the free climber becomes part of a system, his individualism curbed by the presence of a camera crew and his growing awareness that the freedom he encounters in his perilous escapades is no longer something he can keep to himself. The world will claim its share. Both Saint Exupéry’s pilots and the free climber have been blessed to see and inhabit another world which mere mortals never get to experience. The longing to go beyond, to explore that space which is sacred, private, is still out there. But modernity curtails this instinct. We live this longing vicariously, through books or films. These adventurers are our high priests, our shamans, eccentrics communicating from the other side, revealing another way of living which the ‘civilised’ world has banished. 

the lady and the beard (d. ozu; w. kitamura; ozu (gagman))

Cinema, more than any other art, is a hunter of the verisimilitude of life. Ozu's images may be grainy, but here is a Japanese martial arts competition, taking place in 1931, there or thereabouts, with an appreciative, masculine audience. However, the swordsman isn't any kind of obvious Zen master. He fools around, stopping to tie a shoelace, taking the piss, entertaining the crowd, before delivering the telling blow that wins the fight.

Aha, you say as you settle into your seat, so this is what it was like. However, verisimilitude is a curious beast. You don't capture the heart of things by just showing images. You have to find a way under the skin. And the film, in it's rambling way, does just that, taking the swordsman, removing his costume, his weapon, his dignity and finally, the ultimate sacrifice, his beard. The dashing hero is revealed as an oddball misfit, struggling to find a way through the complexities of a Japan where swords and platform shoes are being replaced by smart cars and even smarter suits.

Accompanied by a pianist, The Lady and Her Beard meanders through the story of Okajima's various potential love affairs, and a film which started as a macho action flick turns into a somewhat winsome comedy of manners. However, it also strips bare the local class system, and feels like a convincing portrayal of a hero trapped in a world which has no need of heroes anymore. Which helps to substantiate this visit to a lost world which is Japan at the turn of a decade, almost a century ago.