performance (d. donald cammell, nic roeg, w. cammell)

At what might be termed a difficult moment, there was no greater balm than the chance to watch Performance on the big screen for the first time. It’s a film I have seen and loved several times, but always on TV or a laptop. Details of the edit and the sound design shone through. There might be points of comparison, (Godard, Antonioni), but Cammell and Roeg genuinely push the envelope with the abrasive, atonal edit, especially in the opening minutes. It’s still striking today, so god knows what it must have been like when it came out. Added to the violence, sex and general sixties overdose, the film feels as fresh as a daisy. Whilst the social mix of Notting Hill might have changed almost beyond recognition, the film’s jangly, jarring unspiralling narrative would still probably have film execs sweating today. Surely they can’t do that? Oh yes they can. All of this is wedded to a garrulous british humour, located somewhere between Carry On and Sterne. There was a generous audience at Cinemateca and it was fascinating to see how they reacted with laughter and a clear sense of glee. This is/ was filmmaking done with panache, verve and technical brilliance. Jagger, Fox and Pallenberg have a ball. We are along for the ride to the vivid end of a Borges-tinted decade. 

Iko shashvi mgalobeli / there was once a singing blackbird (w&d otar iosseliani,, w. sh. kakichashvili, dimitri eristavi)

Iosseliani’s second feature is a narrative-light account of a day in the life of a percussionist in Tbilisi. Gia is a freewheeling, happy-go-lucky percussionist in the orchestra. Something of a lothario, with an eye for the ladies and a galaxy of friends and acquaintances, his day is crammed to the gills with rehearsals, meetings, family and generally living his best life. He sometimes complains that he never has time for anything, but this is clearly down to the fact that he’s too busy running around being a lad about town. Played with a charming verve by Gela Kandelaki, Gia is a stepbrother to Agnes Varda’s Cleo or Keitel in Scorsese’s Who's That Knocking at My Door. What seems doubly remarkable about Iosseliani’s film is that despite the fact it is filmed behind ‘the iron curtain’ in the demonised USSR, Gia feels like a typical product of the late sixties, a figure endowed with so much personal freedom that it consumes him absolutely. There’s a lovely narrative strand where two visitors from Russia arrive at his home; he tells them to hang out until he gets back later, but in the social blizzard of his day he forgets all about them. Marine, played by the luminous Marina Kartsivadze, makes a cameo appearance and the film revolves around Gia’s capacity to time his entrance to play the kettle drums to the second, infuriating the conductor by only arriving in the nick of time. The film manages to remain compelling despite it being entirely episodic, with almost no attention paid to narrative: this is an immersive day in the life of a Tiblisi social butterfly and its 90 minutes are as thoroughly instructive and entertaining as the life of its protagonist, the singing blackbird of the title.

the siege (ismail kadare, tr. david bellos)

As I write we are witnessing the most grotesque siege in modern history, even worse than Sarajevo. The notion of enclosing a people within walls and slowly squeezing the life out of them is one that modern warfare in general seems to forego, as though there isn’t time for this kind of operation in an accelerated modern world. Kadare's novel documents the siege of an Albanian fortress by the Ottomans. As the afterword makes clear, the novel is functioning on many levels that perhaps will pass non-Albanians, or Balkans by, but the dynamics of the operation are cogently described, as the attackers, realising brute force will not do the job, try to cut of the fortress' water supply and finally use disease in their flawed bid to conquer. Both sides are so immersed in the brutality of war that ethics no longer appear to be a consideration, albeit the way the novel is framed, the attackers are the ones whose moral compass seems most awry. Typing this, and knowing what is happening even as I write in Gaza, generates a sense of unease, as well as an awareness of how much aerial bombardment has skewed the balance of siege warfare in favour of the aggressors. All war is grotesque, but when a civilian population becomes caught up in the horror, the concept of genocide comes into play, the futility of which is something the novel's most philosophical section touches on. In another moment, Kadare's novel might have felt like more of a curiosity, but its ongoing relevance has been made tragically apparent over the course of the past weeks. 

(Incidentally, where the novel posits the muslim invaders as the aggressors, the instances of siege in modern Western history have tended to be waged against muslim civilians.)

a dream in polar fog (yuri rytkheu, tr. ilona yazhbin chavasse)

A Dream in Polar Fog offers a deep dive into the world of the Siberian Chukchi people, who live on the Russian coast near the Bering Sea. Set in the years before the Russian Revolution, it tells the story of John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor who suffers debilitating frostbite after an explosives accident. The captain of his icebound ship sends John, in the company of the local elder, Orvo, to the nearest town to be treated. But on the way, they are caught in a blizzard. Nearing death, a female shaman amputates John’s hands. When he returns to the coast, the ship has sailed. This is the set up for Rytkheu’s tale, which is thereafter an account of John’s integration into the Chukchi way of life. Rather than seeking any chance to flee, John finds himself more and more integrated, embracing a more traditional, holistic and ecological existence in the company of the Chukchi, who become his family. In this sense, the novel, published in 1970, feels way ahead of its time. Even more so, when one realises the novel emerges from an industrial Soviet culture which Rytkheu had previously embraced as a writer. Rytkheu’s need to capture and convey a way of life he knew as a young man shines through in the sometimes prosaic text. The author acknowledges the way in which technological advances have helped the Chukchi, but he is also fiercely protective of a way of life which is threatened by the onset of ‘civilisation’. The novel’s value as an anthropological text is clear, as well as offering a fascinating glimpse into one of most curious borders on earth. At one point the narrative mentions that people from Nome used to visit a festival on the Siberian coast. Curious, I looked up where Nome might be, to discover it is in Alaska. At their closest point, Russia and the USA are less than a hundred miles apart. The polar fog the people of these lands inhabit has little respect for arbitrary political or ideological divisions.

le cercle rouge (w&d jean-pierre melville)

So, whilst we watch Godard and even Truffaut send up or deconstruct genre, it’s easy to forget how, then, as now, genre was something the French cineastes adored. Perhaps it’s not so ridiculous to think of Barthes’ structuralism in this context. There is a fascination in French culture with the way in which something is assembled. Genre is all about variations on a theme. The theme is well known, by both the audience and the filmmakers. What is interesting is not so much the narrative as the mechanics of the story. The way the pistons move, the way that one element impacts on another. Le Cercle Rouge is a great example of this. It’s a straightforward heist movie. Delon, Montand and Volontè are three suave crooks who plan and execute a robbery, each one acting for different reasons. The film luxuriates in the fact that it doesn’t have to offer any surprises. The fundamental tension of the heist movie does all the leverage that the narrative requires to engage the audience. Will they pull it off or not? The film runs at 140 minutes, but Melville was clearly confident that this tension at the heart of the mechanics of the narrative was enough to engage the viewer, allowing him to explore a neo-existential vision of characters who are willing to put themselves under inordinate pressure and confront probable doom, because life only has value when it is put in jeopardy. Which is a journey we, as the audience, sitting back comfortably, share. The whole film is endowed with a poker-faced seriousness. The experience of watching it has more in common with watching a game of chess than a wrestling match. It is precisely because we as an audience understand the genre rules, that this game of chess feels weirdly engrossing, even fifty years on. 

—-

An aside here is perhaps to comment on how little cinema, for all its supposed technological gains, (HD/ 3D/ dolby/ digital compositing etc) has evolved over fifty years. The shifting experience of watching a film from 1920 in 1970 would reflect a truly radical transformation, (sound/ colour/ special effects/ acting etc). Whereas a film from 1970, viewed in 2021 can feel almost contemporary. 

five easy pieces (d. rafelson, w. rafelson & eastman)

As mentioned I've now made the oceanic leap, but before doing so I was thankfully coerced into seeing Rafelson's small scale masterpiece, Five Easy Pieces. Killing time in Garulhos this morning, I tried to concoct a theory connecting the old world with the new, mapping it onto Nicholson's conflict as he tries to escape the (European) legacy of his family's classical music burden by whooping it up in a new (American) fashion in California's ahistorical playground.

I like the theory, largely because I was working on it having freshly arrived after a sleepless night on the wide American continent. However, in some ways it seems a bit European to pontificate thus, and I might as well listen to the American inside me, (there's an American inside us all, that's their secret, those darned Americans (Norte y Sur)), and merely laud it for its brilliance, its wit, its charm, its ability to be a film which is both recklessly entertaining and worthy of the most outlandish theories; a movie made for adults, not kids, and unashamedly so, from its dialogue to its cinematography to its unerringly acute sense of humour. And for Jack, giving one of those performances that succeeds in reminding us that there is such a thing as genius in acting. Although it requires a director who appreciates it in order to flower.

(Incidentally a brief look at Rafelson's directing career on IMDB makes it clear that his was one of the great lost Hollywood careers. Whether this is do with his own hedonistic failings, or a system that even as he was hitting his stride was running out of space for the kind of films he was capable of making is one of those debatable questions. But rarely does a director put so many feet right as Rafelson does in this strangely moving tale.)

dark spring [w unica zürn]

Dark Spring is a book so slight it doesn't take much more than an hour to read. It is recounted from the point of view of a twelve year old girl, living in Germany after the war. Its 80 pages recount the girl's emerging sexuality. Things happen, some of which have no right to happen. However, more than the sequence of events, which of their own might be perceived as being salacious, the key to Dark Spring's compelling, slightly nightmarish brilliance, is the way in which it captures pre-adolescent fears and desires, spearing them like one of Golding's children might have speared a fish, using a crude piece of wood, barely up to the task, but effective nonetheless.

I know very little about Zürn, save for the fact she had relationships with various surrealists, her psychiatrist was also, apparently, Artaud's, and she committed suicide by jumping from a window, something worth knowing before you read the book. However, I do know her little book captures a world which adults would rather forget. Rather than the child within the man, beloved of the Romantics, Zürn's text reveals the adult within the child. Reminding us that childhood, aware of the great secrets that have yet to be revealed, is forced to use its imagination to conjure up a vision of sex; as well as love; and that so much of what we will experience in adulthood, upon which our notions of happiness depend, will have been the result of choices made when we were of an age before we could possibly know what those decisions meant. Within a society that would prefer to believe these things didn't even cross its children's minds.

Dark Spring, (perhaps an echo of Spring Awakening), is one of those rare texts which is bold enough to tackle the shibboleths of childhood. This transgression ensures there's a timelessness about the book, in part because the society that acknowledges a pre-pubescent sexuality is a rare one. Zürn was brave enough to remind the world that it's something that does exist, and Dark Spring is a kind of true mirror to the sanitised fantasies of Alice in Wonderland.

Some writers resist society's codifications, and their books are like postcards from a reality it would rather ignore.

the conformist (d. bertolucci)

It's been a quiet weekend. Today I took a stroll in Regents Park with my sister. I've read three scripts, done some washing, watched a bit of the rugby with Mr Blue and sat in Carluccio's with the same discussing the venn diagrams of relationships.

And in the middle there somewhere, yesterday, I saw this weirdly lit 1970 adaptation of a Moravia novel. The Conformist.

Carluccio's, where we retreated after seeing the film, felt like an extension of the movie. The lights adorned with strong primary shades. The waitresses in possession of a european prettiness. Two balding men at a neighbouring table with a Derrida tome on the table. To be replaced by a well-built woman who slices her spaghetti with a knife before consuming. Where we discussed relationships and ageing in a pleasantly esoteric manner. Bertolucci land, where nothing really seems to mean all that much, and it's all cloaked in a veneer of mildly distracting weirdness....

The film. I enjoyed the storytelling of the first half hour. Since all I seem to do these days is read other people's stories, it was refreshing to see how he'd chopped Moravia's text up and put it back together in a fractured dance. And then they all got to Paris and for some reason the director lost his nerve and the last hour was plaintively linear. The lighting seemed like a prefigurement of Saturday Night Fever. The imminent gaudiness of the seventies about to rain its dayglo patterns on film star faces. The girls... similar precursors of a decade of hair care and decadent innuendo.

At some point a critic has to hold up his hands and say it just doesn't work for him or for her. That's what happened with The Conformist. A book I savoured in a North London garrett in the weeks before a fateful trip to Italy, steeped in that subtle Italian equation of persona as opposed to soul, societal conformity jousting with apocalyptic desire, transfigured on screen, (in a supposed masterpiece), into a gaudy display of a director's gusto which sometimes paid off but eventually turned into a kind of gloopy mess. (How the austere brilliance of the Rome office scenes contrast with the mundane obviousness of the Parisian scenes). Bertolucci supposedly released from the shackles of his mentor, Godard, but actually floundering around in his wake, all the moves with none of the meaning.

So, as this is about the film and not the book, and also about my aesthetic response to the film in this day and age and not its significance in another day and age, nor the resonance of a political idealism which now seems as shallow as Clerici's own, let's leave it with the heretical notion that this film, The Conformist, has for reasons which some will know and others will deny, been over-rated. And if you want to enjoy the 1970's Bertolucci experience without having to sit through the film, save a few bob and buy yourself one of those fancy coffees in Carluccio's.