in diamond square (w. merce rodoreda, tr peter bush)

Rodoreda’s quietly expansive novel covers the years before the revolution in Spain, the war itself, and the aftermath. The narrator, Natalia, is a Barcelona native. Rodoreda recounts her life with simplicity and moments of lyricism. As such the novel gets under the skin of an ordinary woman, who has moments of dire struggle and moments of comfort and happiness. And lots of pigeons. Her first husband, Joe, decides he’s going to make money out of pigeons and converts their home into a pigeon sanctuary. Natalia puts up with this for as long as she can bear it. Eventually Joe is called to the Aragon front, and the pigeons leave. These are the kind of cotidian details that make up people’s lives and the author captures Natalia’s cares with precision. The novel also serves as a document registering a Barcelona that has been lost. A friend was there this month and talked of how it has been overrun by tourists. Barcelona is now a global city. Whether this is for the better or the worse of its citizens is open to debate. Rodoreda’s novel shows a level of poverty which was terrifying, and which conditions life choices Natalia feels compelled to make. At the same time, the novel reveals a communal life in the heart of the city which has doubtless been eroded by property speculation and hyper-tourism.

the trial (d. orson welles)

Welles’ version is both expressionist and baroque. Expressionist in the way it uses its Zagreb locations, its off-beam photography, its heightened acting by a stellar cast. This is in keeping with a perceived conception of how Kafka’s world might have looked (not so far removed from Soderbergh’s version of The Castle). Welles does it in style and there are many moments where the set eclipses the action. In the days before CGI, the scenes of mass typists have a demented glory, and the gargoyles and brickwork of the high nineteenth century architecture speak of the Hapsburg world Kafka was born into. Baroque, because of the mannered use of text and ponderous nature of the edit. There are no short cuts on show here, no matter how much Welles’ script has edited down the novel. Scenes play out with a papal solemnity. Welles himself, as the advocate, feels like he might be a cardinal. Women are demented and lascivious. Men are doomed to a warped, frustrated middle age. Antony Perkins strides around through all this like a lost high jumper being asked to take part in a marathon. His demise at the end, as Welles tinkers with the novel, comes as a kindly release. The spirit of Welles hangs over the film just as much as the spirit of Kafka, a monomaniacal presence which challenges the viewer to stick with his vision as the dialogue unfurls at its stately pace and the illogical narrative keeps going round in circles. 

cleo from 5 to 7 (w&d agnès varda)

This film, a little like the Haneke film I recently watched in London, is perhaps another of my Ur-texts. (As might be Performance, so this is a year for the father/mother texts). I would guess I had only seen Cleo once before, but the simplicity and urgency of the filmmaking left its mark. To tell the story of a woman, a character, in 90 minutes, which are more or less 90 minutes of her life, a way of sticking to the unities of time, place and action, is to create a lightning flash of a film, to stop and capture time. Varda’s Cleo has no great profound storyline to pursue. She’s scared she’s got a fatal illness, but we the audience are never sure whether this might be real or part of the drama she creates, part of her beauty and appeal. Aside from this she drifts around Paris, meeting friends and lovers. It’s inconsequential, but that’s part of its charm. Where film narratives seem so dependent on dramatic tropes, Varda resists, letting the star and the camera and the city guide us through the timeline. Indeed, in many ways the film, with the brilliant cinematography of Paul Bonis, Alain Levent and Jean Rabier, is a love letter to Paris, a Paris which still feels like it might be the city of the flaneur, a set on which its inhabitants play out their roles, blessed to be framed against the backdrop the designer has given them. 

the man in the high castle (philip k dick)

Realised with some surprise I have never actually read any Phillip K. Perhaps, from so long ago I can’t recall it. His reputation is as something of a pulpy eccentric, bolstered by screen adaptations, including of this novel. So, the depth and complexity of a slightly rangy text came as a surprise. Dick displays an erudite, measured tone, in a counter-factual novel which is anchored in Japanese culture and Nazi lore. The play on the war being lost and the USA being conquered by the axis forces, dividing the country down the line of the Rockies, is a smart narrative idea, and Dick embraces the cultural impact of this with aplomb. It’s as much a novel about the meeting of East and West as it is about the speculative premise, or rather, that premise is an excuse to interrogate these ideas. 

manchurian candidate (w&d john frankenheimer, w. richard condon, george axelrod)

It had been a while since I visited my home from home. I had avoided the festival which took place during turismo altogether. I didn’t have the energy. I was travelling, I was rehearsing, I was too busy and the truth is that Cinemateca isn’t the same in the festival . Of course the festival has its charms, but I prefer Cinemateca without the hype. A screening of The Manchurian Candidate, the Monday after the festival, the night before I left for London, was ideal. Cinemateca was back to being half full, with familiar faces, the cinema tragics, como yo.

The Manchurian Candidate is a funny old film. Paranoia, war, humour and some crackerjack neo-HItchcockian dialogue between an oddly sympathetic, low status, Sinatra and a criminally underused Vivian Leigh, oozing screen charisma, even if her relationship with Sinatra’s Major Marco is completely superfluous to the plot. A film that came at the start of the sixties and predicted everything, from Kennedy to Trump, yet doesn’t seem to want to take itself nearly as seriously as those paranoid thrillers of the seventies, when the true extent of Frankenheimer’s Cassandran powers were revealed.

And now am sitting in Carrasco airport, looking out over the runway, where military planes share the space with a handful of passenger jets, and think about how in ’62, when the Manchurian Candidate was made, this view would have seemed equally mundane, with little intimation of the events which the film foreshadowed. Events which would destroy this tranquility and devastate whole generations. 

l’eclisse (w&d antonioni, w. tonino guerra, w. elio bartolini, ottiero ottieri)

The third in Antonioni’s trilogy of Europeans on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In this case Vitti and Delon, paddling between the banality of love and the imminence of crisis. Scorsese, wiki informs, rates this as the boldest film of the trilogy, perhaps because it is the least definitive in terms of narrative. Essentially, Vitti, who leaves her older lover in the opening scene, tiptoes towards Delon, who seems as vacuous and arrogant as he is pretty, resisting his advances until she doesn’t. Not a great deal happens in the meantime. There’s a stock market crash, Vitti goes on a flight over Rome, she blacks up and dances a disconcerting ‘African’ routine, she hangs out with Delon in his parents’ posh gaffe. In narrative terms, it’s inconsequential and it builds towards the puzzling final sequence as the characters themselves drop out of the film and it lingers over random (or carefully selected) images of Roman life, a pared-back predecessor to the fireworks of Zabriskie Point. If anything, Antonioini seems to be using the medium as a meditative means of exploring the limits of freedom in a European woman’s life: social freedom, sexual freedom, the freedom to determine her own identity. The headline towards the end about threat of nuclear war suggests an altogether more existential cloud, hovering at the edge of the screen, and reminds us of how much the apocalypse was part of the post-war generation’s consciousness. 

the man who shot liberty valance (d. john ford, w. james warner bellah, willis goldbeck, dorothy m johnson)

I follow someone on twitter who has an Anglo Saxon name and goes to Cinemateca a lot. He’s one of a few regulars who I do not know, but who, I learn from their twitter posts, live alongside me as hardcore Cinemateca aficionados. Anyway, this person tweeted in Spanish the other day about how much he loves Liberty Valance, Ford’s last great western, one which is full of nostalgia for an era that has ended, whilst also seeking to celebrate the era that replaced it. I have a feeling the writer of the tweets is North American, and clearly has a far firmer footing on the Fordian ground than I do, but watching the film you can see where he’s coming from. Even in its attitudes that today would be questionable, there is a kind of gauche charm, the charm of the frontier, of men and women co-existing with the imminence of violence, and seeking to cherish every new day as a result.

Liberty Valance is also of interest in regard to its portrayal of the Mexican community, who have their own cantina, and to one of whom the hapless sheriff, Link Appleyard, is married. These Mexicans are seen knowing how to party, how to live each day at a time, and when Valance is killed, they come running over, as though they have no real skin in this game, which is after all, a battle between gringos. They are only really humanised when Jimmy Stewart is teaching the sheriffs daughter grammatical English and North American values. Here lurks a forerunning echo of Cormac Macarthy, the sense that that other world, the one which is being displaced by Stewart’s lawyer and is his ilk, will continue to flourish across the border, where the frontier rules will still apply.

There is also, in the film’s remate, an implicit critique of the way notions of history and even civilisation are constructed on the back of myths which are in fact false. The only man who could ever have killed the malevolent Liberty Valance was Wayne, another pea out of the same pod. But Wayne will be buried in a pauper’s grave, only retaining the dignity of his boots because the rival he sent on his way to Washington, and who has stolen the credit for Valance’s death, has come back to Shinbone to honour him. 

la jetee (chris marker) & la sixiéme face du pentagone (chris marker & françois reichenbach)

I receive a phone call from an unknown number which turns out to be Cinemateca advising me that due to the state of the print of Lettre de Sibérie, they have had to change the program and will be showing La Jetée and La Sixiéme Face du Pentagone. This is the kind of personal service one could come to expect from one’s local cinema.

In truth I am delighted to be able to watch La Jetee, a film I have probably seen but never concentrated on. The breathtaking modernity is breathtakingly modern. The humour is a surprise. The existential chic is both vapid and profound as all the best existential chic should be. Marker constructs a story from stills, (there is one moment when the image moves), and in so doing he challenges our idea of what a film might be, whilst also taking us back to a pre-modern language of painting, where stories were assembled on walls to be read as a sequence. The technique allows the storyteller to include so much detail that it’s like reading a Borges story via a Godard movie via Pierro de la Francesca. Flashbacks, flash forwards, romance, terror, existential dread, jokes, they’re all there.

The Sixth Face of the Pentagon is a documentary about the day the hippies tried to storm the Pentagon. Marker’s film is about protest, the specific protest of that day, but it is also about change, and how even seemingly omnipotent organisations can be resisted. It is assembled from footage of an anti-Vietnam protest on October 21st, 1967, mostly filmed from behind the protestors’ lines, which gets right into the thick of the action. The police wear ties and wield clubs, but they seem light years away from the 21st robocops. The hippies, as well as chanting in a bid to make the Pentagon levitate, succeed in almost storming the main doors of the Pentagon, and one’s initial reaction is to think that this could never happen now. Now the hippies and the protestors would be mercilessly driven back and be kettled or clubbed to death before they even got in sight of the Pentagon. Then of course one thinks of the events of 06/01/20 and the laxness that permitted whatever the fuck happened there to happen, and perhaps one concludes that the right is now more of a revolutionary force than the left.

ivan’s chidhood (w&d tarkovsky, w vladimir bogomolov, mikhail papava, andrey konchalovskiy)

 The face of a goat. A tracking shot across a field. A ruined church. An icon. Trees in water. Birch trees. Albrecht Dürer.

There are a thousand and one images to be harvested from Tarkovsky’s first film. He was a painter. He was also a philosopher. He married the two disciplines and came up with cinema. An art form he did indeed invent, even if some say it had been around for nearly a century when he got going. 

The war. The sudden drastic switch to documentary footage. Dead children, Goebel’s cowardly offering. A death cult. The documentary footage jarring, all wrong compared to the aesthetic splendour of all that has preceded it, but all right too, for this is a film about a boy who died, who was captured and executed. A boy whose life was enshrined in childhood. 

Sound, like water, a relentless rebarbative rhythm, the rhythm of being alive. 

Image on the front line, language left behind in the rearguard. Words are for the moments when joy or tears are called for. Words are for joking or flirting. Not for when you reach the frontier between life and death. A frontier Ivan crosses, never coming back. Neither to his companions, nor to us, nor to language. 

vivre sa vie (w&d godard, w marcel sacotte)

Godard, for a third time in as many months. Godard, which is like watching a brand new way of making cinema every time. No matter that the film is nearly 60 years old. It feels like it could have been made yesterday and still knock spots off the most avant-garde cineasta out there today. Maybe the avant garde has eaten itself. There’s no room left in the multiplex. And those with avant-garde predilections have no option but to shut the system down, adapt, meet the market criteria. Does anyone today use sound with the creative dexterity that Godard did? With the brash, assertive dislocation? Does the notion of playfulness even exist anymore? Watching Godard is like watching a lost innocence, the joy of film still vibrant, still singing. Coutard’s darting, swirling camera work has undoubtably been imitated a million times, but the overall tone of reckless esprit de jeu has been consigned to the cutting room floor. And to think that Godard became a byword for pretension? When his creative impulse stems from a childlike delight in the medium’s creative and iconographic possibilities. Perhaps children are secretly the most pretentious of them all.

le doulos (d. jean-pierre melville)

Quand j'etais petit, my friend Jason gave me a book by Trauffaut about the films of his life, a collection of reviews. A few of the names were known to me, but most were alien. The names the man wrote about seemed to hold an unbearable promise. Becker; Autant-Lara; Kurosowa and more. Many of them are still no more than names, whose films have existed as words on a page, rather than images on a screen. One of the striking and well noted aspects of Trauffaut's collection was the reverence in which US cinema was held. A New Wave loved nothing more than settling back with a big bag of popcorn, a mega cola, and a dirty print of the latest Bogart classic.

Melville's Le Doulos, is very much in this tradition. Everyone walks around in a Bogart mac, with a Bogart fag hanging out of their mouth and a Bogart hat on their head. The film is more Humph than Humphrey himself. People doublecross one another and end up in shoot-outs they shouldn't be at but have to be because, like Bogart, they are party to a cinematic code demanding the character does the right thing, no matter the consequences.

In truth, Belmondo almost out-bogarts Bogart, (High Bogart) and Serge Reggiani, in a fine small-town crook performance, doesn't do a bad job either. (Early Bogart). At its best, such as the mesmerising scene that runs over the titles of a man walking along a fearsome footway, the film has a grimy authenticity. When the jewels are buried, they're really buried, mud under the fingernails. When Belmondo smacks Monique Hennessey in the face, it looks real enough, even if the macho sting is taken out of the act by the final twist.

Bogart and his world feels outdated now. The things he stood for, the manner of his masculinity, that cinematic code he lived and died by so many times. Likewise, Le Doulos is a curiosity piece. Like humour, few things in society change as rapidly as the relationship between police and criminals. What was shocking in one decade is tame in the next. Lastly, the French and the Yanks no longer like one another, french fries have become freedom fries and Macdonalds have been torched. It's hard to imagine a French director making a film that feels like a tribute to Sly Stallone.

The world that Melville captures in all its grittiness has been swept away, initially by the wave that Truffaut and his ilk surfed. Le Doulos was probably hard boiled in its day; now its a competent policier, only we laugh when the good guy cops it at the end. That narrative lost its power when Godard started taking the piss out of it. All that was left for Bogart was immortality and Woody Allen pastiche.