aparajito (w&d satyajit ray)

The middle chapter in the Pather Panchali trilogy, Aparajito is a sensitive coming of age story, as Apu moves firstly from Benares to the countryside, following the death of his father, and then from the countryside to Calcutta, where he studies whilst his mother pines for him back in the country. The three chapters in themselves allow Ray to depict three different elements of Indian culture. The devotion and poverty of the Ganges town, the more lyrical ballad of the countryside, (albeit a peace interrupted by the sound of the train on the horizon), and lastly city life. Even if Apu’s Calcutta seems less frenetic that its modern day incarnation. These transitions help to paint a picture not just of a young man growing up, but also of an entire society, its possibilities, its limitations, its aspirations. 

calle mayor (w&d juan antonio bardem, w. carlos arniches)

Franco era cinema is a fascinating topic. Reading around Calle Mayor, one learns that the director was arrested during filming and was only able to complete the movie after an international campaign to get him released, a campaign which included the film’s Amercian leading actress, Betsy Blair. In addition, the film was deliberately set up as a Spanish-French co-production to assure that it could be presented in festivals and get around Spanish censorship. As a result it premiered to great acclaim at Venice and became a massive hit in Spain when the authorities subsequently permitted its release.

These notes are relevant, not just because of the personal risk that Bardem was taking in making the film, but also to contextualise how radical Calle Mayor was at the time. In a world of Titane and Infinity Pool it’s hard to perhaps contemplate how a relatively low key drama might have resonated with such potency. Nevertheless, the narrative is quietly brutal. In a small Spanish town, a well-heeled group of amigos decide to play a practical joke on ageing but still attractive thirty something, Isabel, setting her up with Juan, a personable banker from out-of-town. Isabel falls head over heels with Juan, who realises he is being a bastard but can’t find a way out. He seeks the help of his friend, Federico, who advises him to fess up, but when Juan runs away, Federico takes it on himself to tell Isabel the truth. The film ends without any redemptive ending: Isabel and Juan will remain trapped, shackled by the realities of small town life.

Bardem’s script includes some lovely throwaway lines about the joys of US cinema and its pristine kitchens. The sound mix, particularly in the scene where Federico tells Isabel the truth about Juan, is remarkable and the cinematography is always considered. The film creates a compelling vision of the fecklessness of small town life, where the pampered sans and daughters of the middle class indulge their wayward games and fancies and no-one emerges with any great credit. 

the death of grass (john christopher (sam youd))

The Death of Grass is one of those strange dystopian post-war texts. There are obvious points of comparison with Butler’s Parable of the Sower, with Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, not to mention more obliquely, 1984. Part of the reason for this could be attributed to the nuclear angst which gripped so much of the world in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowing that weapons of mass destruction were at hand. The Death of Grass postulates a British prime minister planning to use nuclear weapons against his own cities. The other reason, perhaps, is that society needs dystopian narratives just as much as it needs utopian narratives. Christopher’s book is great at puncturing the myth of the British stiff upper lip. Following famine in the Far East which has lead to terrible food riots, the British characters are convinced that “the same thing would never happen here”. And then, of course, it does.

The book is also prescient in so far as it sets up the idea of a virus that will destroy civilised society as it is understood. The virus, as the title suggests, is one that affects grasses, destroying the world’s food supplies, leading to famine and social breakdown. Christopher’s narrative traces the build up to the crisis breaking, before it hones in on the efforts of John to get his family out of London and then across the country to his brother’s stockaded farm in the Lake District. The action is compelling and strangely believable, with the author examining not just the social breakdown but also the moral breakdown of the individuals participating in the flight from London. Englishness is no defence against the desperation that comes with just trying to stay alive, in fact it would appear to be a hindrance.

It might be seen that The Death of Grass is as much as takedown of Britain as it is a prophetic text. Like Orwell and Pinter, he roots out the weasel beneath the cocktail cabinet. It seems ironic, given this, that the writer’s greatest success came following the adaptation of another of his dystopian novels into a major BBC children’s series. 

hiroshima mon amour (d. resnais, w. duras) & nuit et brouillard (d. resnais, w. cayrol)

There is a lot said and written and thought about this movie and if I’m honest I don’t feel as though I have much to add. I recognise its venerated status in the cannon but a few days after watching it it has merged in my mind into a single shot of Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada talking endlessly as they mosey through the Hiroshima night. It felt in many ways akin to another film that I struggle with, which is Linklater’s Before Sunrise (whilst recognising the influence is of course the other way round). Some films tiptoe the line between pretension and art and some films run the risk of falling into the abyss. Whilst the split Cortazarian narrative is a neat device, with Elle reliving her past in Nevers as she embraces the post-atomic, post-war era, it neither felt as mind-bending as anything Resnais achieved in Last Year at Marienbad, nor as challenging as Nuit et Broiullard, his devastating Holocaust short which was shown before HMA. The use of politics as a semiotic tool is fraught with danger and Resnais’ employment of Hiroshima, the city and the event, feels problematic. Would a filmmaker today get away with a mawkish love story between a Westerner and a Syrian set in Aleppo? We are nearly into Blier territory, and if anything it is the relative lack of confusion which left me cold in HMA. If the film had pushed its characters closer to the abyss, or maintained the cinematic language it adopts in the opening fifteen minutes, perhaps the semiotics of Hiroshima would not seem so ponderous, but it doesn’t and in the end it just feels immeasurably French.