padeniye berlina / the fall of berlin (w&d. mikhail chiaureli, w. pyotr pavlenko)

My father is nearing the end of his life. So many things I have seen or read this year have, by chance, lead me back to the start of his life. Post-war Germany, specifically Berlin. We are losing the last of the generations that experienced a time when Europe was reduced to rubble. When armies marched across its broad plains. Perhaps it is because the holders of these memories are leaving us that the fear of war on European soil seems to be receding on the part of the North Americans, and growing on the part of those who inhabit the territories that suffered so much in the twentieth century.

The Fall of Berlin is a Soviet propaganda piece about the events leading to the Russian advance on Berlin, culminating in the Hammer and Sickle flying over the destroyed Reichstag. As a film it goes for a kind of docu-drama, following the fates of two lovers from the Ukraine, who will meet in Berlin after being separated for so long. Stalin features heavily, as the wise leader who oversees triumph. There's no subtlety to the movie and it was clearly made to stir Soviet pride in the difficult years after the war. The budget would appear to have been substantial: the battles scenes are extensive, and an imitation of the Reichstag was apparently constructed for the closing scenes.

It's not the greatest film ever made, but it does hark back to a past which feels all but unthinkable when one walks the multicultural streets of Berlin today. Was that all some kind of terrible fever dream? As events fall back into folk memory, as the real memories of great grandparents, grandparents and parents are lost, only art can hope to retain an idea of what happened, once upon a time, on the thriving streets of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Charlottenburg. 

(nb My great grandparents home, where my father spent the first years of his life, was out in Spandau, on the leafy border with the East.)

the skin (curzio malaparte, tr david moore)

Malaparte’s novel is a collection of extraordinary scenes. Set at the conclusion of the Second World War, it contains all the decadence of a dying continent, measured against the brash optimism of the ‘invaders’, the US troops who the narrator, Malaparte himself, has been seconded to as a translator, as they make their way up through Italy from Naples, then Rome, towards the Alps. The novel is composed of 11 chapters, each one effectively a set piece, dealing with one or another aspect of this clash between brave new and decadent old worlds. What we get is a decidedly anti-heroic vision of the war, perhaps appropriate given that it comes from the point of view of the losers, but this anti-heroicism spills over to the US troops as well. There are no heroes in this dystopian landscape, only survivors or the dead. Malaparte comes from a European tradition of scandal and shock. Names like Pasolini or Celine might be placed alongside his. He seeks out the venal in humanity in a bid to touch the base notes of this thing called civilisation, which is so close to barbarianism. Those who fail to recognise the connection between the two states of being are either stupid or hypocrites. Another touch note reading the book was Von Trier’s Europa. In the UK we have been overwhelmed with a glorified and false vision of this war. The Skin is more than a corrective, it’s an enema, extracting the blood and guts of all the grotesque and disgusting detritus of war and placing it on full display. 

el gran calavera (d. buñuel, w. janet alcoriza, luis alcoriza, adolfo torrado)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 1/6

Buñuel had to leave Spain after Franco’s defeat of the Republican forces. He went to Los Angeles for a bit, then headed to Mexico to direct Gran Casino, which was a flop. According to Wikipedia, he then spent three years surviving on money his mother sent him and was contemplating giving up filmmaking, before he got given a break when he was drafted in to direct El Gran Calavera, featuring the Mexican actor Fernando Soler. There’s nothing particularly surreal or Buñuelesque about El Gran Calavera, a moral comedy about a lazy, wealthy family whose paterfamilias, Ramiro, played by Soler, has turned into a drunk following the death of his wife. His family sponge off him, until he gets so drunk he nearly dies, and as a cure he is tricked into believing that he has lost his fortune and the family has been compelled to move into a poor neighbourhood. The moral fable is given a twist when he learns about the deceit and turns the tables on his family. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this film, over 70 years old, is how funny and engaging it is. The narration is taut, the storytelling is lean and the script is endowed with humour and moral complexity. These are comic characters, but they are also three dimensional. The vision of Mexican society is curious with the class divisions noted, but, the film contends, far from insuperable. It would be interesting to see if a contemporary remake would have any chance of being in any way plausible. 

1984 (orwell)

So, this book is like, prophetic, it’s like what the future used to look like and the future that never was but still might be, if you were a Spanish Civil War veteran stroke Old Etonian who’s lost faith in their youthful counter-revolutionary dreams but wanted to have it on record that those dreams existed even if they never came to fruition which is what happens with most dreams anyway, is it not?

And I imagine the writer sitting in a pub in Fitzrovia, walking home to his cottage at the top of Portobello, home of the Spanish exiles, feeling at once out of step and in step with a society which had given him so much and deprived him of so much at the same time and out of all this walking and talking and drinking and thinking emerges:

A dystopia.

Which in some ways perhaps is more of a work of autobiography than a work of socially aware politics. I write these words in ignorance, knowing little about Orwell, but trapped in the unbending cynicism of this vision, which is riddled with laborious prose and middle aged longing.

Perhaps the way in which 1984 is most modern as a novel is in how it satisfies the dystopian instinct of the capitalist era, wherein the worst excesses of our imaginations help to justify the moral compromises of the hangdog, individualistic society we find ourselves enclosed in, with its craving for indulgence dressed up as romantic freedom. This is in no way to sympathise with the excesses of the fascist regimes it critiques, but it is notable that Orwell’s alt vision feels jaded. The depiction of the proles, Winston’s last hope which is no kind of hope, feels entirely in keeping with the ongoing travails of the British class system, which has been consolidated by an era of alt-capitalism which has defeated both the communist autocracy and the fascist excesses which Orwell’s book decries. There is something hidebound and weary about the prose, which is the prose of a dying man, unhappy in his life and caught up in the petty machinations of the British publishing world.

nb Cursory research tells me Orwell lived at Portobello Road in 1927, long before the Spanish Civil War. So the above is an example of thoughtspeak or the desire to rewrite history as exhibited by O’Brien in the novel. 

vida en sombras (w&d llorenç llobet-gràcia, w. victorio aguado)

The high concept idea always feels modern. Nolan, Vila-Matas, Nichol’s One Day are just a few references from recent years, which follow on from the likes of Robbe-Grillet and chums. But of course, it isn’t. High Concept has been at work forever, with A 101 Nights, A Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Life is a Dream, just a few examples. 

Perhaps it feels less well established in the cinema, and this is why Llobet-Gràcia’s delicious 1947 love story stroke homage to cinema feels so surprising. The film opens with the protagonist’s parents watching a Lumiere brothers film as a novelty in a Barcelona circus. A decade or so later, Carlos himself is watching an early Chaplin film with his friend Luis. They are joined by Ana, who twenty years later, will become his wife. He becomes a documentary director. With the arrival of the Civil War, he headset into the streets to film, following his documentary instincts. But whilst he is out, Ana is killed, so he volunteers for the front and foregoes the camera. After the war, his friend Luis, now a film star, persuades him to go and watch Hitchcock’s Rebecca. This would appear to have been a terrible decision when he walks out the cinema, unable to bear the narrative. But this has actually reawakened Carlos’ understanding of the power of cinema, and helps him to return to his former vocation.

The way in which Llobet-Gràcia constructs his story, weaving the history of cinema into the thread of Carlos’ life is magical. The film also manages to insert a sly counter Franco message, which lead to it being censored and meant that Vida En Sombras was the director’s first and last feature. It’s a lost classic, a bewitching succinct celebration of the power of cinema and its importance and possibilities as a story telling medium. 

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Footnote - posting this a month or so after seeing the film, whilst in Catalunya, one cannot help thinking that the unorthodoxy of Catalan architecture and thought must play a part in the originality of artistic thought that emanates from this corner of the world, something Llorenç Llobet-Gràcia’s only movie exemplifies. 

the case of comrade tulayev [victor serge]

Victor Serge is little known now, as Sontag’s introduction points out. In his heyday, Serge’s fame was such that Gide campaigned for his release from a Soviet prison, and he became the only writer to be freed by the Stalin regime, making his way around the globe until he ultimately settled in Mexico. 

The Case of Comrade Tulayev is an epic novel, with its roots in 19th century realism, coupled with a knowing, jaundiced twentieth century tone. The book is constructed around the murder of Tulayev, a senior Soviet official. It occurs in the late thirties, shortly before the outbreak of the second world war. Most of the characters the multi-person novel follows are battle-hardened men who participated in the Russian Revolution, many of them supposedly associates of Stalin, referred to throughout as ‘the chief’. Tulayev’s murder, which the reader knows has been committed by an insignificant, dreamy figure, is used as the excuse for a radical purge, where a whole swathe of the old guard is rounded up and found guilty of belonging to an imaginary plot. Most are executed, and their families are sent to internal exile in far flung corners of the empire.

The multi-character narrative is recounted in ten chapters. Each one effectively presents a different case study, with the action moving all over Russia and including sections in Civil War Spain and Paris. Serge creates an all-embracing portrayal of the purges within the pages of his book, revealing the savage political mechanisms which drive it and the complex reactions of its victims. Some are desperate, others succeed in placing it within a socio-historical context according to their Marxist principles. Most of the characters are world-weary figures who have seen so much that nothing more can surprise them. Their key conflict is whether they hang on to the principle of truth or not, in a land where truth has become a dangerous commodity. Serge writes with the authority of one who knows the reality behind the state’s lies, and his characters carry the burden of these lies/truths with them to the grave. 

This account does little justice to the ferocious wisdom and humanity of Serge’s novel, the writing of which appears to be an act of courage in itself. Speaking truth to power is never an enviable destiny; the weight of this truth permeates the whole, devastating novel, which manages to defend and honour the principle of the communist revolution whilst lambasting the inhumane bureaucratic system which colonised the revolution’s wake. 

kind hearts and coronets (w&d robert hamer)

I went to see this with my sister. She said she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen it. Then, upon leaving the cinema, she commented that she wasn't sure she'd actually ever seen it in its entirety. Kind Hearts is one of those films which my generation by and large feels as though it has seen, even if it hasn't. It occupies its own, obscure place in the national psyche. In its way, it is as British as Loach or Hancock. The audience at the NFT revelled in the screening; it isn't every time you go there that an audience seems to bask so contentedly in the shade of its screen. There is a peculiar moment, however, towards the end of the film, when Price and Greenwood, both making acting look effortless, have an exchange which included that phrase 'ten little niggers'. For a split second, the glow was punctured, the gap between the eras rent asunder. On one level Kind Hearts encapsulates a kind of ageless quality of Britishness. On another, it belongs to another era altogether.

What is this ageless quality? It is distilled in the performances of the film's leading actors. The first is that of Dennis Price, the would-be Baronet and serial killer. Price invests the part with an insouciance which is almost Gallic. He is descended from the ranks of Sidney Carlton, Oscar Wilde and Hamlet. The absurdity of existence always flirting with its actuality. However, unlike the French, the Bristish never succumb to or indulge that absurdity. Rather it is incorporated. Into our customs, our sexuality and our disdain for the serious. So many of the greatest British characters succeed in capturing this disdain, upto and including Bond. The rules are paid lip-service, and then broken. Greenwood, that most under-rated of actresses, enters into this game with gusto. It justifies both her affair and her complete lack of scruples at the end. In contrast to these two, there is the famouly Titanic performance of Guiness, playing eight different characters. There is something heroically ridiculous about Guiness' performance, a bit like our empire and our delusions of grandeur. That Price should exercise that other aspect of Britishness to bring down the Guiness set seems entirely appropriate. As though our devilish good nature is triumphing over our pompous banality.

These traits persist in our psyche today. If I was being mischevious I might call it the battle between Pinter annd Hare. Hamer pinpoints this conflict with glee. In addition to this, there is a faultlessness about the film's tempo and execution which lends it the quality of a classic. As with any work of art, it is of its time, a time that has long since elapsed. But Kind Hearts manages to transcend its time and remain one of the most British, and beautifully British, films ever made.