ugetsu (d. kenji mizoguchi, w. hisakazu tsuji, akinari ueda, matsutarô kawaguchi, yoshikata yoda, isamu yoshii)

Mizoguchi’s fable is far darker than one might expect. It’s a long way from Disney, in spite of its fantastical nature. The film shifts through the gears as it narrates the story of an ambitious potter, caught up in the wars of medieval Japan. Moving between comic and tragic registers, it finally settles in a fantasy world of spirits, incorporating a spiritual embodiment of death and what death might mean. The director delights in the spectral, the ghost ship that drifts through the mist to find us all, sooner or later.

el (w&d buñuel, w luis alcoriza)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 3/6

El is the first of the Mexican films from this season which starts to feel like “Buñuel”. The dialogue-free opening five minutes set the scene. A priest washes the feet of a young member of the congregation. Francisco, a vigorous and wealthy middle aged man, surveys more feet, finally landing on those of the fetching Gloria and from that moment on it is amor fou, with Francisco determined to woo and steal Gloria from under the nose of his friend, which he does. What we don’t realise, and what seems in many ways a most modern approach, is that Francisco is an abuser, perpetrating both psychological and physical abuse on his new wife. The trajectory of this abuse is traced with subtlety, starting out as petty jealousy and then leading to violence and madness. The film is careful not to show Gloria as a victim; as is so often the case in abusive relationships, she is both hopeful that things will get better, and ground down, bit by bit, as they don’t. Buñuel and Alcoriza’s denouement doesn’t occur between Francisco and Gloria. Francisco follows a woman into a church, where he goes completely mad, with the madness conveyed from his point of view as he views the congregation mocking him, in his mind. This set piece scene is edited with comic glee. Other moments, such as when Francisco sits alone on his elaborate stairwell, contemplating killing Gloria with a stair rod, have real menace. There’s a wonderful final touch, when we revisit a supposedly cured Francisco in a monastery. Only the lie of the cure is given by the zig zag walk he adopts, which echoes the walk he made up the stairs when he set off to kill his wife. It’s one of those small details which give the film an added weight, and cleverly undercuts any pretence of a ‘happy ending.’

On imdb, someone claims that the cowled actor in this final sequence is actually Buñuel. It’s also worth noting that there are echoes of Vertigo in the bell tower scene, although this should be the other way round, as Vertigo was made in 5 years after El, and some claim Hitchcock stole/ was inspired by El. 

trans-atlantyk (witold gombrowicz, tr carolyn french & nina karsov)

This is one of the stranger books you will ever read. The story as such of the writer’s journey from the Baltic port of Gdynia to Buenos Aires at the outbreak of the Second World War. The writer, struggling to survive, falls in with a bunch of aristocratic, febrile emigrés. He gets caught up in a psychodrama involving a count and his son, who is being seduced by a wealthy Argentine, Gonzalo. There’s a fake duel and a potentially murderous denouement, when a whole host of Poles arrive and sing and dance a traditional Krakow song, even as the country itself is tottering to defeat at the hands of the invading Germans. This denouement, which by happenstance I read this morning in Krakow, is reminiscent of the final scene of Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds. War and defeat haunt this short novel which at the same time seems to be doing everything in its power to escape this haunting. The language is jaunty and mannered, even Joyceian. The tone is ribald, comic, scathing. The author’s intentions feel hard to decipher. Perhaps, in the face of absolute despair, the only option left is a demented hilarity. 

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This note from the introduction by Stanislaw Baranczak is of interest: “During most of the war years he was…struggling for survival, coping with extreme poverty and wasting his energies on a job as a bank clerk offered to him by a Polish banker in Buenos Aires. According to Gombrowicz he wrote Trans-Atlantyk on his desk at the bank, hiding the manuscript in a drawer whenever his superior entered the room.”

summer with monika (bergman, w. per anders fogelström)

The feeling of sheer pleasure when the film began to screen cannot be overstated. Not just because I was about to watch another of Bergman’s films for the first time, although that was part of it, but also because I was sitting in the new auditorium, watching the film on an immaculate, impressively sized screen, on the first working day of the new Cinematica. Cinema was made to be seen on the screen, not on a laptop or TV. The trouble is that there are fewer and fewer screens available to watch the kind of films that don’t come from the commercial stable. Now, all of a sudden, there are three screens within walking distance. As black and white shots of Stockholm took form upon the screen, transporting me to a world I’ve never visited and never will, I felt as though, in a world where so much seems to be wrong so much of the time, finally something was right. 

The inauguration of Cinematica had occurred the night before. I didn’t go, but a friend who’s going to run the coffee shop concession told me that he gave away 600 cups of coffee. I’m not sorry to have missed it. The real opening, the first day of business, was a low-key affair. Staff struggled with a new ticketing system. The staff, who are the same people who worked in the old Cinematecas, greeted those who turned out with smiles. The Pantalla 3 for the afternoon showing of the Bergman was about a third full. Being there felt like belonging to a new community. 

Summer with Monika was an inspired opening choice. A wistful, nostalgic, sexy, film, that seemed to contain the seeds of so much cinematic history that came to pass thereafter. The film narrates the story of a blissful but doomed relationship conducted over the course of under a year. Harry falls for the wilful but charming Monika, they flee the city and lead a Summer idyll on a boat, then they have to come back and it all goes to pot. The narrative is simple and predictable, but the film has a splendid decadent charm. Made in 1953, it seems to foretell the whole of the decade that was to come. Emerging from austerity into a hedonistic, hippy heaven, before grim reality kicks in and the dream turns into a nightmare. Bergman infuses the film with the occasional expressionist touch, such as when Monika, played with insouciant charm by Harriet Andersson, stares at the camera. There are beautiful cameos from a range of character actors, and the way Bergman and his cinematographer capture the Summer idyll by the beach, most of which is without dialogue, is mesmerising. 

Perhaps the film contains an innate metaphor for the act of going to the cinema itself: the escape from reality, the isolated reality in the bubble of the cinema; then the return to the world with its harsh realities. Only this time, as I left the cinema on a suitably rainy December afternoon, and headed to the Farmacia for a coffee, the world didn’t feel so bad after all. 

hurry on down [john wain]

Hurry on Down is a novel that I arrived at via Humphrey Carpenter’s lucid review of the Angry Young Men, with eponymous title. Wain is not a fashionable author; indeed none of the authors that feature in his book, save perhaps Larkin, (who it could be argued was somewhat shoe-horned into the group by Carpenter). have succeeded in retaining their status. Colin Wilson, John Braine, John Osbourne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, etc, all white educated males whose stock has fallen. First the sixties happened, then Rushdie and Amis M, then, by and large, oblivion. Old copies of Wain’s novel will adorn the shelves of my parent’s generation, but will rarely be read. 

However, as Carpenter’s book reveals, in its day, Hurry on Down was a groundbreaking text, which, along with Lucky Jim and other works of the Angry Young Men, denoted a generational break, a new way of thinking. It’s intriguing to contemplate why that was the case, and also why the novel has since fallen out of favour. I don’t imagine it pops up on the syllabus of many 20th century literature courses. 

The novel tells the story of Charles Lumley, an Oxford graduate, who, unenthused by the destiny life appears to have chosen for him, decides he’s going to choose another course. This leads to him getting a job as a window cleaner, which leads to him becoming a driver, a drug smuggler, a hospital orderly, a chauffeur, a down-and-out, a bouncer and finally he ends up a gag-writer for radio. The list is indicative of the fact this is a picaresque novel. In the book’s final pages, there’s a direct reference to Moll Flanders, but perhaps the model might be the works of Fielding, Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones. The novel used as a way of creating an over-arching portrayal of society, its values and, above all, its class structure. Lumley is a rebel in large part because he chooses to go against his class, a class he despises. He seeks to break down the rigid stratification of post-war British society. He seems a prototype of the generation of the sixties which would follow, one that ostensibly wanted to cast off their inherited shackles and embrace something altogether more “free”. Lumley’s chosen word is “neutral”. He wishes to remove himself from the prejudices of the class struggle altogether, dreaming of living, a la Crusoe, on an island, even though he recognises that this dream is a chimera. Whenever he gets close to realising it, he finds himself compelled to dive back into the maelstrom. 

The protagonist’s picaresque journey is knitted together by his love for the slightly nebulous Veronica. The book perhaps suffers from a slight tone of existential disdain: Lumley’s reluctance to commit to any kind of role in society could be read as inverted snobbery. However, this laconic attitude (again echoing new ways of thinking being perpetrated on the other side of the channel) clearly struck a chord with a generation sick of the war and the way in which war stratifies society. Wain succeeds in never mentioning the war, which all his characters would have experienced in one form or another; this erasure of itself must have felt like  a relief to a generation desperate to look forwards rather than backwards. 

As to the reasons the novel has fallen out of fashion. Perhaps it’s not enough to say that the stories of white, educated post-war males no longer have agency in today’s Britain. After all, we’re a society inclined to recycle anything and everything from our cultural history if it can be sold. Rather, it might be that the portrait of Britain it offers is not one that lends itself to this process. In contrast with a novel like Waugh’s Brideshead, it offers a portrayal of Britain as a slightly, squalid, class-ridden society, consumed by petty jealousy and shit jobs. (Macjobs, if you like). There’s no redeeming narrative whereby these petty jealousies are ultimately superseded as the characters acquire wisdom. Lumley’s is a lone crusade, which doesn’t really go anywhere. The ending is wilfully ambivalent. Wain’s novel might have come just before and after events which are now seen as defining of recent British history, (The War, mass immigration, the sixties, the fraught relationship with Europe, multiculturalism etc), but in this way it feels like his book poses a question that remains unanswered. Why does our society continue to be so class-ridden, why does a vision of middle-class Britain feel so removed from a working-class vision of the same geographical space? A question which has lead, directly, to Brexit, but also one that the middle-class has shied away from. Other stories have been viewed as more urgent, or perhaps been allowed to distract from the seismic breach which Wain’s novel identifies. The tone might sometimes feel too knowing, but being knowing doesn’t mean the author hadn’t touched a nerve, a nerve that has never gone away.