from the city, from the plough (alexander baron)

All roads this year lead back to the Second World War. Baron’s book came to my attention when someone posted something about neglected post-war British writers. This book is, as the poster claimed, a completely credible and unsentimental fictional account of the D-Day landings. The first half of the novel follows the battalion as it waits in the UK prior to the invasion. The soldiers are regular men: farmers or East End wide boys. The novel employs a wide palette, with a varied cast. Some are good men, some are rogues. Most are ambivalent about being in the army. There is none of the triumphalism or heroism espoused by the pseudo nationalists who have tried to appropriate history for their own ends. Baron’s eye is a cold one, but irrefutably honest. The cruelty of war itself, as the novel in the second half moves with the men into France, is laid bare. People die. They are forgotten, the war machine moves on. Some will survive, but this has to do with luck rather than judgement. My grandfather was one who didn’t. 

fort apache (d. ford, w. frank s. nugent, james warner bellah)

Ford’s sweeping cavalry western is the kind of stuff we in the Anglosphere were raised on. The cavalry is coming. The injuns speaking ‘mexican’. John Fucking Wayne. Watching it one can trace a line in the thinking of those who believe they have a right to annex other people’s territory by any means possible; to trick, cheat and attack those ‘others’ who help to define the supposed values that the aggressor represents.

And yet, whilst being the kind of film that helped to consolidate those opinions, merely by presenting the matrix, Fort Apache is in fact a complex work of art, conscious of the moral ambiguity of the material. Hell, even Wayne feels betrayed by the American hero. In choosing to tell this story, Ford analyses the cruelty and duplicity involved in the conquest of the West. Fonda’s Captain Thursday is revealed in the end to be a foolish popinjay whose arrogance leads his troops to destruction. In one great scene between Wayne and Fonda, the tension between the two reaches boiling point. The casting of Wayne as Fonda’s rival is inspired: the true American is not the one who seeks a genocidal confrontation, it’s the one who is prepared to risk his life to achieve a peaceable settlement with the Apache.

One wonders if the sweeping cinematography and the comedic Irish characters work to obscure this message. The film is layered with enough sub-plots and B-stories to make the most exacting script doctor happy. The images are still breathtaking, all these years later. In so many ways it feels like an emblematic US film. But contained within the apple is the worm of rapaciousness. In a way Fort Apache might have been the place where Doctor Strangelove was born. 

the tunnel [ernesto sabato]

Snr Sabato died recently. His is a name, like Bioy Cesares or Saer, that seems to live in the shadow of Borges. Consequently it was interesting to note that The Tunnel, originally published in Sur magazine, was championed by Camus and presumably was reasonably well known in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.

The book has some of the playful internal machinations of a Borges story. It describes an artist's obsessive and ultimately catastrophic love for a woman whom he spies looking at one of his paintings in a way that leads him to believe she alone has grasped its significance, and hence the significance of his art and his self. Intriguingly, it's not the whole picture that Maria is looking at: it's 'a remote scene framed in a tiny window' in a corner of the picture's canvas. What does she see though this window? On the one hand she sees a vista of the sea, but on the other the artist decides she's seeing into his soul. Sabato's text is delightfully cryptic. Maria and the artist begin an affair, one which is plagued by his jealousy, but details remain sketchy and the 'truth' of her position is never revealed.

This deconstructed, playful approach to narrative, taking Kafka or Dostoyevsky's unreliable narrators a stage further, might be seen as pure modernism, in the vein of Borges's mindgames and Calvino's fractured narratives. But there are two aspects to the book which help to shift it onto another, less cerebral plane. Firstly, it is extremely funny. Castel, the book's anti-hero, has a raw, sardonic sense of humour. The author indulges his frequent asides as he muses on the role of the critic, for example, with scathing vindictiveness. His humour reflects his intelligence as an outsider and it's not hard to see how this voice seduced the likes of Camus.

Secondly, the book deals as tellingly with the subject of love and its lunacy as almost anything you could come across. Castel shifts from anxious passion to deluded paranoia. The way in which the book traces the stages of his ferocious and ultimately misguided love for Maria is masterly. It's not hard for love to become a disease rather than a life-force: the lover's unrealised obsession has more to do with themself, the subject, than the other, the object, even when the lover has convinced him or herself that the other is the one calling the shots. Sabato's occasionally incoherent narrative helps to illustrate the perils of the delusions of love, a world where clouds can look like bears, and the temptation (or dramatic need) to interpret information supersedes any rational appraisal of what's actually occuring. This way, Sabato, seems to suggest, madness lies, no matter how brilliant the lover might be (and perhaps the more brilliant they consider themslves, the more dangerous they become.)

With its humour and meditation on love, The Tunnel comes across as a brief, understated masterpiece. Whilst short, Sabato's text acts as a fascinating counterpart to Borges: the work of someone who shares the maestro's intellectual talents, but seeks to locate these within a more tragic, humane literary context.

the red shoes (powell & pressburger)

Powell and Pressburger. The alliterative combination itself seems to conjure up some kind of lost golden age of British cinema. When their curious, quixotic talents were allowed to flower, producing unconventional gems, against the odds, quintessentially British, both for their charm, and their peculiarity.

It's the end of a decade, and there all sorts of lists drifting around quoting the finest films of the last ten years. As ever, this prompts reflection on what makes for a great film, what are the magic ingredients that enable a filmmaker to achieve something with the medium which lends a distinction to their work which others can only hope to emulate. Of course there are a hundred and one analyses available. However, The Red Shoes, it all its curious glory, brought to mind the idea that for a film to rise above its peers, to shine, it requires a boldness of vision, a kind of majesty, which is quite likely to be at odds with given diktats of genre and form, but which the filmmaker(s)' chutzpah somehow pulls off. These are films which aren't afraid of boredom or loose narrative threads, which are prepared to test their audience's patience, but which reward them in the end.

The Red Shoes is a film about ballet. So perhaps it's not surprising that about two thirds of the way in, the film abandons its narrative to enter into a twenty minute sequence (at a guess) which is pure ballet, a ballet conceived and executed for the screen. Only, of course, it is surprising. Because what rule book allows a narrative to cut itself off for this length of time, suspending character development and narrative action? Yet, without the ballet sequence, the Red Shoes would not have pulled of its strange, fairy tale alchemy. Whilst there are characters, and a narrative to speak of, in fact the filmmakers are consciously creating an exploration of what it means to create art, the tension between life and art, the irresistibility of the will to create. It's Nietzche wrapped up in technicolour. However, it's also dazzling entertainment, a son y lumiere show underpinned with philosophical intrigue.

These are (some of) the reasons why it works. Whilst the acting is engaging, and the quirky humour engaging, and the louche charm of this itinerant ballet world is engaging, ultimately it's the film's near absurdly grandiose ambitions which lift it out of melodrama onto another plane altogether. Ambitions which demand a cinematic verve; it's hard to think of any other film of any other era which has captured the process of dance so compellingly, something which its lofty ambitions absolutely require. Powell and Pressburger do indeed reach for the stars, and in the act of reaching, take their audience with them, offering a perspective which the everyday or the banal or the rulebook cannot permit.

the bicycle thieves (d. de sica; w. zavattini, d'amico, de sica, biancoli, franci, guerrieri)

A couple of hours ago I was walking across the bridge at Goldbourne Road, when I heard a shout. A van was taking a right turn over the bridge, and had trapped the rear wheel of a cyclist. For a moment it looked as though the cyclist's leg was about to be crushed, but the van stopped. The leg was preserved, but the bike was a write-off. The cyclist, wearing all the modern paraphernalia, was suitably aggrieved. A bleak day for him, but not quite a tragedy. The theft of Antonio Ricci's bike in Rome in 1948 was a far greater personal disaster.

I am sure that vast tomes have been written about this film, so I shall try and keep my contribution brief. I'd never seen it before and am grateful to the Curzon chain, which does more than most to keep cinema alive in this city, in the wider sense of that word (alive). (There was even a showing of the critic's own short in Curzon Soho this year, possibly the cheapest film ever screened there.) There's not much better way to round off a year's movie going than watching Bicycle Thieves, despite the film's pessimism.

This pessimism is the making of it. The characters are so endearing, and the audience so wants them to find the bicycle, for some kind of natural justice to be seen to be done - for the movie world to trump the real one - that when it doesn't, the shock to our system is equitable to the shock to Antonio's, discovering himself converted into nothing better than his enemy. In spite of its wilfully simplistic tone, the film employs a clear and subtle use of narrative to achieve its ends.

It seems worth noting the connections between De Sica's film and Bunuel's Los Olviadodos, among other neo-realist works of the post-war era, if only to ask - what does this 'neo-realist' tag really mean? It's interesting to see the way in which the directors are not only trying to beard the cliches of cinema through their choice of subject matter, focusing on the disenfranchised. They are also attempting to subvert cinema's use a wish-fulfiller. People go to the cinema, so we're told, to make their dreams come true - to escape the real world and enter a pampered land where reality is put on hold, and things turn out right in the end. (Expect a glut of feel-good movies to be funded as the recession bites). This leads to the inevitable comedic ending, where resolution is achieved in spite of the odds. De Sica shows us the odds - every shot with cyclists flying through the Roman streets in the background feels like a slap in Antonio's face - and refuses to deny them. A stolen bicycle has no chance of being recovered, in the real world or the movies. His bicycle thieves aren't just stealing Antonio's means of earning a living, they're also stealing the audience's cosy assumptions of what the cinema is there for, replacing them with something altogether more disturbing (the innate thief that lurks within us all).

It's hard to imagine a film funded today in the US or the UK with the same premise to get away with such a downbeat finale (even 5 months... let its audience off the hook). Maybe that's because our cultures just don't possess the same stakes as the one De Sica depicts. (Interesting to note how like some of the South American cities post-war Rome looks.) The cyclist whose bike was crushed just this afternoon may be able to claim on his insurance, or if not he'll probably be able to replace his bike sooner rather than later. Only in a black farce would his accident lead to the loss of his job, the potential break-up with his family and a descent into crime. Stories like these are made in other countries, other continents, and we continue to believe that an ending which isn't happy just isn't doing justice to its narrative or the characters we have chosen to invest in.