i’m alright jack (w&d. john boulting, w. alan hackney, frank harvey)

This film screened as part of a Sellers season in Cinemateca. It’s the only one I caught. The context is given perhaps because it seems such a curious film to watch on the big screen in Montevideo. The audience laughed along with Sellers. There was one particularly loquacious fellow who reacted effusively all the way through. Watching it now is a bittersweet experience. It should be remembered that this seemingly gentle satire came out at the same time as the Angry Young Men were doing their thing, and Kitchen Sink drama was on the rise. The cosy caricatures of I’m Alright Jack were already being eroded. Curious, too, that these stereotypes include the Trade Union leader, holding industry to ransom with strikes and pickets. This was a story which would continue for decades. In my youth, the Trade Union leaders were household names (Len Murray, Scargill, Hugh Scanlon) and seemed to wield a power which has faded, just as perhaps British industry has faded. The irony that Boulting presents in his movie is that despite their class differences, all the characters fall under the umbrella of a cosy British familiarity. The capacity to bond over a cup of tea or a drink is always there. (Irene Handl really steals the show here.) There is an idea of a unified Britain that will bind us all together, no matter what. And, given the film was made little more than a decade after the end of the second  world war, that’s perhaps not so surprising. Whether the same could be said of Britain today seems doubtful. As an Englishman I would not want to share common ground with the more bigoted sectors of society who the new right seeks to recruit and promote. But it might be that the Boulting view of Britain was always rosy-hued. A truer version would be revealed in the filmmaking of Loach and Clarke, the writing of Osbourne, Wesker, Pinter and Shelagh Delaney. Although it might be said that within the work of Loach, there lurks a lingering hankering for the Britain depicted in I’m Alright Jack, one of confident workers forever quarrelling with cunning bosses, with some kind of compromise inevitably reached by the end.

the houseguest (amparo dávila, tr. matthew gleeson)

Dávila’s collection of short stories tend to feature the incursion of a bizarre, threatening element into the life of the protagonist. In the titular story, this is the houseguest, whose menacing presence ruins the narrator’s life. In other stories it might even be a Dostoyevskian version of the narrator him or her self. The stories possess a crisp economy, a sly window into the neuroses of mid twentieth century Mexico. 

les cousins (w&d chabrol)

Chabrol’s second film is a slightly stagey piece, set in Paris, as opposed to his first, rural offering. In a sense though, the character of Charles, played by Gérard Blain, is almost an extension of Serge, played by the same actor in the director’s eponymous first film. Charles is the cousin from the sticks who comes to stay with Paul (played by Jean-Claude Brialy, who is also the co-protagonist in Le Beau Serge), his worldly cousin. Both are studying law, but where Paul is a hedonist socialite, Charles immerses himself in his work,  all the more so when rejected by Florence, who appears to choose Paul over him. The narrative is somewhat stilted and melodramatic; what is of more interest is the way the director seeks to explore these tensions between a version of an older, conservative, rural France, and a younger more liberated strain which prefigures the arrival of the sixties. There are moments when Les Cousins has the feel of an Antonioni or Fellini film, notably when an Italian aristocrat gets embarrassingly drunk at one of Paul’s decadent parties. In these moments, as in the slightly anti-climactic tragic ending, it feels as though the fabric of this new French post-war society is being stretched towards some kind of breaking point, although this might also just represent the habitual tension between the capital, with its celebrated decadence, and the rest of the country. Chabrol is never as formally innovative as Godard, nor as radical in his vision of humanity os Truffaut, rather it would appear his cinema is occupying another space, that of the self-examination of contemporary mores and morals. 

the island (w. ana maria matute, tr. laura lonsdale)

Matute’s book belongs to a genre which might be called mythological reminiscence. Sitting alongside The Grand Meaulnes, for example. Perhaps Ferrante, although I have never read her. It’s a tale from the Spanish Civil War, told through the eyes of Matia, a fourteen year old narrator, living on the island of Mallorca, long before it became a playground for the rich. Matute’s island is a depopulated place where kids can roam, row around by boat, have fights with rival gangs and discover secrets. It’s also an island split by two fissures. Firstly, the differing sides of the Civil War, with Matia’s grandmother firmly on the side of Franco, and secondly a more ancient dispute, when the Jewish inhabitants of the island were persecuted in the inquisition, even if their descendants live on. As such, a violence underpins life on the island, a violence which is connected to Matia’s grandmother’s relationship with her children, who are all away, caught up in the war, and the other locals. Matia strikes up an adolescent friendship with Manuel, whose Republican father has been killed. It’s a relationship which teeters on the edge of politics, adulthood and sex. Her cousin, Borja, who lives with her, who is resentful and jealous, plots his revenge. The Island is a delicate, nostalgic tale, anchored in the scenery and nature of the island, an opaque coming of age tale which subtly seduces the reader with its mysteries, as well as framing the war as a tangential, background event in the lives of these children as they grow up. 

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. 

cider with rosie (laurie lee)

At one stage towards the end of the book, Lee states that he is describing the last gasp of a way of life which existed for a thousand years. The arrival of the motor car would destroy a social fabric which had survived more or less unchanged since the village he lived in had been founded. So there is a double nostalgia at work in the text. On the one hand for the people, family and friends of his youth. On the other for a world which exists no more, which cannot be revisited. 

Reading the book I thought a lot about my grandparents, in particular my grandfather, who was born in Suffolk and moved to the outskirts of London in the wake of the great depression. HIs upbringing was urban (in Ipswich) so there are many differences, but he too was born into a world that was conclusively lost by the time he was in his mid twenties. My grandfather loved the automobile, the joy of speed which it brought, the connectivity. One of his many jobs as a young man was to be a coach driver, where he would take groups on excursion, much as Lee describes his village’s visit to Weston-Super-Mare. The great game of these excursions, my grandfather told me, was to stop at as many pubs as possible and get the coach driver drunk. Luckily for him, my grandfather was never a great drinker. 

Lee is, one senses, more of a poet than a prose writer, something that works in his favour in what is a Proustian memoir. His evocation of place possesses a sensory feel which is intoxicating. There’s also a disarming honesty, which resists any sense of shame. Warts and all is the way. This also speaks of a rural life which possessed less romanticism, less concern for the niceties of life (killing animals, sexual encounters at an early age, causal violence). There’s a rugged shrug of the shoulders in Lee’s depiction of his teenage flings or the violence of a farmer’s fist. This was how people were and always had been. To suggest that they were failing to adhere to moral or political codes would have seemed bizarre to the villagers, who were instead adhering to a code that had been formed, as Lee puts it, over the course of a thousand years. 

The comparison with Proust is interesting. Lee is no Proust, no-one else was or shall be. Yet his invocation of a lost world is rooted in a quest to capture it in the word. Like Proust, he appears to write in an easy, fluid way, the words seem to “come naturally”. However, the efficacy of each word feels like an imperative. The wrong choice of word would conjure another memory, not the one the writer seeks to invoke. As such the writing is driven by a fierce pragmatism that leads to great beauty.

the world of apu (w&d satyajit ray, w. bibhutibhushan bandyopadhyay)

The rain falls in Montevideo. I sleep in my new bedroom for the first time. The house has come close to flooding twice of late, and as the lightning flashes I can’t help worrying that if I were to sleep it will do so again, this time in earnest. The house is full of strange noises. Hungover, I try to adjust to the novelty but it isn’t easy. 

These kind of domestic details spring to mind because Ray’s film is so absorbed in similar details, transforming the mundane to something magnificent. The sequence where Apu and his bride, Aparna, learn to live with each other, is a celebration of the domestic; the simple joys which Apu learns to love, and then laments when they are cruelly curtailed. 

Having been fortunate enough to have seen films by Ray, Kurosawa, Bergman and Bertolluci on the big screen in recent months, what these filmmakers have in common is the ability to turn the screen into a world, one which transcends genre, or even classification. Humanism may be a common thread., but above all, the filmmakers seem to be embarking on a desperate quest to leave behind the traces of the worlds they have known or imagined. 

In which sense the great art of cinema is not so far removed from the great art of cave painting. These are the things I have seen. Marvel at them.