tierra de españa (d. joris ivens)

Ivens’ film is an unashamed propaganda piece for the Spanish republic during the Civil War. The film centres on a region to the East of Madrid and the capital itself. Of particular interest to this viewer were the scenes from the university city, where I stayed for a few cold weeks nearly twenty years ago, at what would have been the front line back in those days. Ivens’ film uses the voice of Hemingway as its narrator, and his magisterial tones suggest that despite all the difficulties, most significantly the German airforce, all will be well in the end. Of course, we know it wasn’t to be, and Ivens’ positive message turned out to be misleading. There is so much about a war we don’t know from the outside: why the republican cause faltered, what lead to eventual defeat. Was it due to strategic error; internal indiscipline, as Orwell suggests; the superior mercenary forces ranged against it, as the film suggests; or the will of the people, whatever that might be? Being a propaganda piece, Ivens’ film doesn’t offer much clarity on the subject, as its aim is to rally the troops. What did strike me, though, watching the film, double billed with Buñuel’s, is that this was such a key moment in history. The victory of the far right, a European far right, emboldened Hitler and his allies. The disinterest from the UK or the USA or other natural allies, and the mixed reaction of the USSR, suggested that an attitude of non-engagement was their priority. Where we in the UK are shown a heroic version of WW2, we are never confronted with the counter-narrative of the world as it might have been had that far right movement been confronted  earlier in the process, before it had the chance to become a messianic death cult. 

judgement day (ödön von horváth, tr christoher hampton)

Horváth play comes from a recognisable Mitteleuropean tradition. Dürrenmatt, Kafka, and many more. It’s a tale of a small town whose society becomes corrupted. Hampton’s useful introduction notes how Horváth, having fled Nazi Germany in 1933, then returned with the aim, according to Hampton, of documenting through theatre the effects of fascism on society. Judgement Day takes place in a rural town where a succession of minor disturbances in the fabric of the community leads to a fatal industrial accident, when a train crashes, killing seventeen people. In this sense the play feels highly prophetic. So often in an industrial society the small tears in the fabric can lead to tragedy. (In the UK alone, Grenfell, King’s Cross, Hillsborough etcetera). These accident don’t come from nowhere, they have their roots in how society is structured, and the opening scene, where the accident happens, makes it clear that the stationmaster, Hudetz, who will become the anti-hero of the story, has been over-burdened due to cuts or “rationalising, they’re going to keep going until there aren’t any trains left at all.”

The playwright then uses this tragedy as a way of examining the mores of the small town, the fickle way in which the residents change their allegiances, depending on how the news is reported, another feature of the play that feels all too contemporary (twas ever thus). However, the play takes a sudden turn when it gets to the last of its seven scenes. Here, Horváth veers off towards more metaphysical territory. At this point the narrative embraces what might now be called horror. The use of stage elements, sound, lighting, is employed to the full and this final scene is devastating both in its judgement of the society and its theatrical originality. 

the face on the cutting room floor [colin mccabe (ernest bornemann)]

The detective novel, written, or so it says on the cover, by Colin McCabe, begins with a film editor called Colin McCabe talking about how a studio head has cut an actress out of a film. She is the face on the cutting room floor. Soon afterwards, this same woman is discovered dead in an editing suite. Thus begins one of the more curious, post-modern of British novels, one that contains elements of the nouvel roman, that at times feels as though it might have been written, in the margin, by a gumshoe Robbe-Grillet. It’s a detective story that goes round in circles, circling itself, becoming so repetitive that it feels as though the mysterious author might suffer from a form of autism. The post-modernism reaches a new peak in the epilogue, written by a supposed second author, who refers to criticism by the likes of Cyril Connolly and Edmund Wilson of the novel, in the process dissecting the trajectory of the British detective novel, from Doyle to Sayers. Meanwhile he seeks to cast light on the dense complexity of the ‘original’ novel, a light that only serves to confuse the reader even more. All of which makes The Face on the Cutting Room Floor both a maddening and brilliant read at the same time. 

The edition I read includes an interview with the actual author, (not McCabe) whose identity has remained a mystery for many years. (Maclaren Ross in his memoirs recalls speculating with Greene as to who he might be, suggesting that it might even be Greene himself.) This interview is of itself slightly mind-blowing, recounting the story of Ernest Bornemann, a German childhood student of Brecht’s who fled to the UK pre-war, when he wrote the book, before being interned in Canada, then becoming part of the Wartime film propaganda team, returning to the UK where he had an eventful and successful career as a screenwriter, (at one point working with Orson Welles), before finally settling in Austria as a revered sexologist. His whole story, a bit like the narrative of The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, reads like a tall tale. In some ways the unlikeliness of Bornemann’s life story helps to explain how it was possible for a young immigrant, barely fluent in his new language, to write a novel that feels like a modernist dagger thrust into the heart of a staid British literary tradition. Albeit one that has, itself, more or less been cut out of the canon, left on the cutting room floor. 

la grande illusion (w&d jean renoir, w. charles spaak)

A meditation on La Illusion

The first world war was one of the last wars fought without being extensively filmed. There are moving images, but the cameras were still primitive, pre-sound, and the footage has more of the feel of a dream than a documentary.

Thus, apart from the obvious historical significance of the war, it also marks a before-and-after in terms of how great events are perceived. Today, we live in a world where if something has not been filmed it is almost as though it never happened. So much more will be known and documented in a quantitative sense from the 20^th century onwards than was known and documented in the centuries that came before. Something which permits a mystique to the latter which the former cannot emulate.

Renoir’s film hinges on a changing social code. Von Stroheim’s German commander, von Rauffenstein, believes in the existence of an aristocratic world which exists above and beyond the commonplace one. This belief allows him to befriend his enemy, the Frenchman Boeldieu, (Pierre Fresnay) with whom he feels more kinship than his fellow German soldiers. It’s made clear in Boeldieu’s last scene that he feels the same way as his German counterpart, even if a pragmatic patriotism leads to him betraying this kinship.

The film treats this relationship between von Rauffenstein and Boeldieu sympathetically, in spite of the narrative’s overt support of a more democratic and patriotic approach to life, embodied in Gabin’s earthy heroism. As such, it’s tempting to read the officer’s complicity as a metaphor for something more than mere aristocratic indulgence. The way in which these men are capable of understanding a broader framework, above and beyond the geo-political one in which they are trapped, suggests perhaps the last remnant of the possibility of living beyond the confines of history. We are all caught in the trappings of our surroundings: class, race, religion, nationality, language etc. Renoir appears to posit the existence of a greater freedom, one which the war is seeking to remove. The war, and by implication, modernity too. Beneath its jovial patriotism there lurks an existential treatise, hardly surprising for a film made in France in the thirties.

This greater freedom might perhaps be associated with the privilege of not being filmed or documented. Was it so ridiculous of the apocryphal Red Indian to believe that the photograph was a theft of his soul? The more we are defined as who we are, the more the image of who we are is pinned down, the harder it is to escape the circumstances of that moment of definition. The facebook/ selfie era restricts the possibilities of individuality, rather than enhancing it.

Perhaps this is too much of a leap to extrapolate from Renoir’s movie. But part of what lends it a power above and beyond the classic narrative of a wartime prison escape is the way in which the film captures, twenty years after the events it is documenting, a particular place and time. Showing the ways in which a mutating world seeks to define the individual through notions of race, nationality and creed. A form of definition which blights and limits, rather than liberates.

the blind owl [sadeq hedayat]

I discovered this book in the Calder bookshop across the road from The Young Vic. The blurb referred to the writer as the Iranian Kafka. He's not. He's something else altogether.

The Blind Owl is a short, very dense text, of just over a hundred pages. It's narrated by a lunatic, a lunatic possessed by a cold thread of reason. The first forty pages of the book contain some of the most brilliant, hallucinatory writing I've ever come across. The last sixty aren't bad either. Hedayat employs horror, humour, repetition and acute powers of description to describe one man's madness as told by himself. You could say it emerges from a style of writing pioneered by Dostoyevski, specifically in works such as The Double, (so much in twentieth century literature seems to come from Dosteyevski) or, as mentioned in the forward, the French poets maudits, with their delirious introspection. From an Anglo-Saxon point of view, it feels like it might be the direct heir to Coleridge's Kubla Khan: this is what it's really like inside the pleasuredome, in a land where time drips off the walls and every bead of sweat contains a world refracted within.

What marks out Hedayat's text in particular is the remarkable use of repetition. Which serves as both a source of stability in a world where events seem to obey no temporal logic and also the source of a kind of comic damnation. It's all going to come around again, it's never going to change. Trapped as we are in the same old patterns (script after script; flaw after flaw; fight and flight, etc) the simplicity of Hedayat's device works to remind us that the narrator, for all his opium habits and exotic strangeness, is one of us, human, obedient to the inescapability of fate.