palo y hueso (w&d nicolás sarquís, w. raúl beceyro, juan josé saer)

Palo y Hueso (Stick and Bone) is a low-fi, casi nouvelle vague tale from rural Argentina. Besides being an intriguing film in its own right, it has the added kudos of being adapted from a story by the great Argentine novelist Saer, who is credited as co-writer. There’s something about harsh tales from the countryside which suit that a Chabrolian black and white aesthetic (thinking of Sanjines and Paolo Costa, among others.) Palo y Hueso tells a simple story of an older campesino, Don Arce, who ‘buys’ himself a fifteen year old wife. He also happens to have a good-looking twenty-something son, Domingo, who lives with him. It comes as no great surprise that Rosita is more interested in Domingo than Don Arce. One of the more surprising elements of the film is the way in which the agent of change turns out to be Rosita, rather than either of the men. Although she finds herself in a weak position, she emerges as a strong character, prepared to take charge of her life. The film is threaded through with images of the local culture and landscape. The riotous festivities of the local pueblo contrast with the emptiness of country life. All of it is captured by a camera which feels as though it is constantly probing the slim tale’s possibilities, employing depth of field in the manner of Bergman, another who enjoyed putting the passions and bleakness of rural life on screen. 

teorema (w&d pasolini)

This is a paint by numbers narrative. Wealthy industrialist family is thrown into sexual turmoil by the arrival of louche Terrence Stamp, who doesn’t appear to do anything except read Verlaine and screw. When he leaves the siblings, wife and maid all have their own respective breakdowns. It’s all beautifully unsubtle and formulaic. Sometimes you don’t need anything more than a basic blueprint to get your ideas across. 

mandabi (w&d ousmane sembène)

Anyone who lives in the third world could relate to Mandabi. A man receives a cash giro from his nephew who is working in Paris. It’s for a lot of money. There are two problems. One is that everyone in the barrio gets wind of it and comes to the man asking for a loan or a favour. The other is that in order to cash the giro, he has to go through a whole heap of bureaucratic hoops, and the further down then line he gets, the further away the money seems to be. The chaotic results are desperately predictable, as the tensions affect the man’s family and ultimately his personal safety. Sembène’s film is also about a society on the verge of change. Once upon a time, the reach of the state was less invasive. People could get by without needing to possess an ID or even knowing the date of their birth. But by 1968, the time Mandabi is made, that innocence is fading. Now there will be few in the world who don’t have to possess all the accoutrements of citizenship and its clutter, digital or otherwise. It’s a secondary effect of globalised travel, the movement of peoples which underpins the entire narrative of Sembène’s film.

je t’aime, je t’aime (w&d resnais, w. jacques sternberg)

Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime is a remarkable and brilliantly conceived movie. A man is put into a time capsule in an experiment to travel back in time. He is on a beach on the South of France. Then he jumps into another scene from his past life. The experiment isn’t working as it should. The scientists are puzzled. The man’s life is relived as fragments, cut up, 30 second clips. He was in love with a woman who wasn’t happy. They went to Glasgow. He might have killed her. He wants to kill himself. He tells a friend about it. She doesn’t believe him. She does believe him. The film assembles fragment after fragment, piecing them together in a way that makes no linear sense, but gradually the viewer, and the man, the subject of the experiment, begin to discern a pattern, a shape. He’s back on the beach. He’s in a restaurant. We have to play catch up. Time is eddying and flying, forwards and backwards. All the time it is also shaped by the passing of real time, which is the time of the movie and the time of the experiment. Eventually the scientists give up. They can’t get him to come back. He’s on a beach. He’s chatting to his lover. He’s waiting for a tram. He’s gone.

The film is Borgesian in the extreme and there are echoes of elements of Performance, another film from the time which references Borges, in the cut-up nature of reality they both depict. It is a masterpiece of editing and narrative construction. The closest popular cinema has come to Resnais’ film is Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, which may or may not have been influenced by Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime. It is a film which takes us to the heart of the beast, as it explores and challenges the way in which time functions, reminding us that time and its passing are the cornerstone of the cinematic experience.

desert solitaire (edward abbey)

Abbey’s book is a paean to a lost land. Quite literally, in one instance, as he takes a canoe trip down a canyon river that is soon to be flooded by the construction of a new dam. As such his words capture something that humans might never witness again, and there is a wistfulness implicit in the writing, an awareness that the natural world he is inhabiting is facing not just a possible but an actual extinction. Abbey’s is the voice of an Aztec scribe, writing upon hearing the news of the landing of Cortez. Desert Solitaire describes a season spent in the Arches national Park in Utah, at a moment when mass tourism, driven by the automobile, was just about to take off. He rails against the impact this will have on the natural world, whilst confident that in the end the natural world will come out the victor in a battle initiated by humanity. However, this only confirms how Desert Solitaire is an early epistle from a new frontline that had never been contemplated until the dawning of the industrial age, a frontline that pits humans against their environment.

However, beyond the fatalism, there is an implicit celebration of the natural world and the gift of being a human, capable of contemplating this world. Abbey is a cowboy poet and conjures words to capture the things that he sees that feel as though they could only have emerged from his profound immersion in the natural world.

“He saw the stars caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape.”

“Comfort yourself with the reflection that within a few hours, if all goes as planned, your human flesh will be working its way through the gizzard of a buzzard, your essence transfigured into the fierce greedy eyes and unimaginable consciousness of a turkey vulture. Whereupon you, too, will soar on motionless wings high over the ruck and rack of human suffering. For most of us a promotion in grade, for some the realization of an ideal.”

“the spadefoot toads bellow madly in the moonlight on the edge of doomed rainpools, where the arsenic-selenium spring waits for the thirst-crazed wanderer, where the thunderstorms blast the pinnacles and cliffs, where the rust-brown floods roll down the barren washes, and where the community of the quiet deer walk at evening up glens of sandstone through tamarisk and sage toward the hidden springs of sweet, cool, still, clear, unfailing water.”

“with yellow centers and vivid purple petals, the flowers stand out against their background of rock and coral-red sand with what I can only describe as an existential assertion of life; they are almost audible.”

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.

shame (skammen) (w&d bergman)

Shame is one of the bleakest most brilliant films I have seen in a long while. Bergman’s narrative takes a couple, Jan and Eva, violinists who have retreated to live a quiet life in the countryside (an island). In today’s language, Jan and Eva might be said to have dropped out. The world around them seems to be in turmoil. There are military manoeuvres and low-flying jet fighters. But they do their best to wilfully ignore the world, content in their bubble, receiving news from neighbours. Their only real interaction with the real world is their radio, which doesn’t work, although they sometimes take the ferry to go to the nearest small town where they sell their fruit. Their marriage is very Bergmanesque: volatile, loving, the fortnight Ullmann a perfect foil for the more neurasthenic Von Sydow. Then reality catches up with them. Undefined opposing forces occupy the island. One army makes Ullmann record a propaganda statement on their behalf. Island folk are murdered. Planes bomb the land at will.  The couple try to flee but they are arrested and rounded up and threatened with being sent to a concentration camp for having collaborated with the enemy. It emerges that Ullmann’s Eva has slept with the local mayor to secure their freedom. They are allowed back home to their island, but when the mayor visits, Jan discovers what’s happened. The mayor is then captured by the other side, who have Jan shoot him. His personality has changed. He’s not the meek violinist anymore. (His violin has been destroyed along the way). He’s a desperate man who will do anything to survive. In a final, breathtaking sequence, the couple flee the island on a boat, which would appear to be a boat to nowhere.

There’s so much going on in this film, that it seems from a resumé, excessive. But the cumulative effect is overwhelming. More so in this era of chaos and fear. Bergman’s use of sound is quite brilliant, from the noise of the bombing to the silence of the boat at the end. The film keeps punching, becoming more and more harrowing. It’s clearly set in a metaphorical world (to the best of my knowledge there was no civil war in Sweden in the sixties), but not only are the effects brilliantly realised (apparently using models), but also the film is all the more powerful for occupying this unclear, open-ended space. It’s a mystery who’s fighting who and why, but what is clear is the destructive effect of the war on the psyche of those caught up in it. Both Ullmann and Von Sydow give grandstanding performances which are rooted in their completely believable marriage. Perhaps the film might be read in more peaceful times as a metaphor for a marriage, but it also feels like a sentient warning of the dangers of an apolitical lifestyle, the impossibility of truly dropping out, no matter how tempting. 

the colour of pomegranates (d. sergei parajanov)

The film buff suggested we go. He and I both thought we'd seen it twenty years ago. I thought it was 4 hours long and he said it was 72 minutes. He was almost right, it would have been, if it wasn't for the fact the print kept going into meltdown, the lights coming up and down, the washed colours dissolving into the orange glow of a blank screen.

The scratchiness of the print and its state of imminent collapse contributed to the sense of watching a relic, discovered perhaps in one of the ruined churches the film shows. The film has the feel of a tone poem. It is a succession of mise-en-scenes, artfully put together, with no dialogue and little narrative. Every image is a thing of beauty, from the carpets flapping in the wind to the sheep bleating in a church. Like looking at a Renaissance fresco that's faded through the centuries, it's hard to tell what the original colours would have looked like, but in this print they had a subdued grandeur, hinting at the richness of the colours that underpin the images shown on the screen, without quite giving them away.

Parajanov's film is meditative. It felt to this viewer like a cross between a sixties acid movie and a nineties fashion spread in a glossy magazine for people with so much money they needed to prove it through the quality of their austerity. The only people in the audience who looked like this was their reason for watching it left after the second projector meltdown. Maybe 7 minutes was enough for them to get a feel. No matter how beautiful, Pomegranates is not an easy thing to watch, stripped away as it is of assumed dramatic ingredients. Towards the end the poet's voice says - I'm so tired, I'm even tired of writing poems - and the audience knows where he's coming from. We too couldn't go on for much longer staring at this alien beauty, not without pharmaceutical assistance.

The film buff noted that there was a surprising amount of religious imagery for a film made in the Soviet Union. I felt as though there may well have been a thousand messages contained within the images that I had missed, which perhaps all save a few now-elderly Armenians would miss. However, to go and see this film expecting to make sense of it would appear to be missing the point, for it's a film that deals with the limits of intellectual understanding, provoking a sensory response instead. It's as close to an experience of other-worldly asceticism as you can get without spending a year sitting on a pillar in the middle of the desert.

the beautyful ones are not yet born [w. ayi kwei armah]

There's a lot of shit in Armah's visceral novel, set in Accra. Shit in the literal sense. The issues of shit-stained shared lavatories. The smell of shit on the air. The stench of sweat and fear and hunger. This isn't an easy place to live. The never-ending contaminating heat seeps through the pages as the writer's unnamed hero goes about the business of trying to live in a society where there appears to be little reason to continue.

There is more than a hint of La Nausée in the book, the first half of which examines the minutiae of the hero's life as he goes to work, refuses to take bribes, is patronised by his wife, Oyo, for his attitude and struggles to continue when even the most basic of human functions has become an odious chore. The man's virtue is the product not of a saintly disposition but of a cussed determination not to follow the crowd, to attempt to remain an individual when everyone else is playing the game. His existentialist disposition sustains him, even when the corrupt government minister, Koomson, pays a condescending visit with his wife to the man's home, so that Oyo and her mother can buy into a loss-making scheme to own a fishing boat.

Armah peppers his book with memories of more optimistic times, when the overthrow of colonialism seemed like an opportunity to create a new society. The most damning critique of the corrupt oligarchy that take power in the name of the people is that they end up behaving like white people - they even end up speaking like white people, mouthing African names as though they were essentially inferior. The hero's memories of white rule are instructive: the novel makes it clear that the only relationship any ordinary Ghanaian would have had with the colonial rulers was one of fear and exploitation. But the book is just as scathing about the Nkrumah government, so riddled with corruption that it seems to be part of the stench that attacks the hero's nerves.

The second part of the book is set in the 48 hours or so which followed the 1966 coup that ended the Nkrumah regime. The hero's nemesis, Koomson, comes to him begging for help. In a memorable scene, the novel describes the fetid smell of fear clinging to Koomson's skin. The protagonist is almost suffocated by it, trying to think of any excuse to get himself out of the fallen politician's presence so he can breathe clean air again.

This dense, sensory examination of a national malaise makes, initially, for something of a daunting read (in much the same way as Sartre's novel takes a while to get into.) However, as the novel unfolds, the reader beings to find his or her way through the hothouse streets in the company of the stubborn man whose story is being told. Published in 1968, its individualistic message seems in keeping with a year which saw a questioning of the state and its accoutrements being articulated from Paris to Mexico City.

From media accounts of African politics in the decades since the book was written, it would appear that the man's struggle must have been repeated by countless other men and women. Somehow, for no good reason, people stubbornly go on doing what they do, fighting against a seemingly inexhaustible tide of shit. The book is careful not to present the man as heroic: he is a stubborn stoic who believes that resistance is not futile, neither will it normally be written about in the pages of history books. Resistance is just what you do, in order to prove to yourself that there's a reason to go on living.