love and anarchy (w&d lina wertmüller)

This was my first Wertmüller film. I had no real idea what to expect. However, it seems clear that she fits right in with a golden age of Italian cinema. Fellini, Bertolucci, Pasolini. Directors who are unafraid of making bold, sweeping films that mix the serious with the bawdy. Love and Anarchy is set in a Roman bordello, as the naive Tonino commits himself to assassinating Mussolini - with the film set long before the war, evidently with zero success. In the process he falls for Tripolina, one of the prostitutes, whilst being encouraged by Salome, another. Could a man make a film about a naive would-be assassin hanging out in a whorehouse? It seems debatable. But in Wertmüller’s eyes this place is one big raucous family, and her female characters are exuberant and powerful. Cinema has a curious way of reflecting national traits. With her over-the-top, sometimes operatic direction, this is a film that seems to capture the craziness of Roman life, in much the same way as Fellini did. Italian cinema has a love-hate relationship with realism, allowing it to push narrative boundaries and characterisation to an extreme edge. Nothing feels particularly believable, but it is all relentlessly entertaining, and somewhere within the beating heart of the story is a fragrant political message.

 

my childhood/ my ain folk/ my way home (w&d bill douglas)

There are figures who float on the edge of our knowing. Think of all the books you will never read, all the films you will never watch. Many of them in their own way, masterpieces. Or maybe not. Douglas is one such figure, a name, an idea, a part of the world, cinematic and more, that I have inherited, but until this weekend I had never watched his work, never known why the name of this obscure scot, who died in 1991, had ever been on my radar.

Cinemateca screened his trilogy this weekend, so I saw all three films. They are all short. The last, My Way Home, is the longest at 77 minutes, whilst My Childhood is a mere 44 minutes. Collectively, however, they add up to a vast, sweeping epic, consciously echoing the work of Maxim Gorky, consciously laying down a marker for a vision of British cinema as image-lead, sensorial, affective. Impossible not to see the seeds of Ramsey’s work there, not merely because of the correlation of Scottishness and poverty. More due to their shared capacity to make the image sing a song, to mine poetry from the banal.

The trilogy depicts the childhood and young adulthood of Jamie, growing up in a poverty which nowadays might be classified as third world. The palette is black and white. There is humour  and melodrama in this black and white world. The Scots may be portrayed as dour, but in a way this just shows up the moments of warmth and kindness. Douglas relishes the beauty of to be found in the everyday. The film is a lyrical ballad to the potential of a turnip field, an apple, even wallpaper. The final film in the trilogy includes a breathtaking long shot of Jamie stood in the ornate surroundings of a Cairo mosque. This is contrasted with the closing image of an apple tree orchard. All things have a remedial beauty in the world, and Douglas, recounting the story of his youth, hunts down that beauty with the eye of a cinematic panther. 

As an aside, it’s worth noting the extraordinary generation of filmmakers that emerged in the UK, some feted, some less so. Alongside Jarman, Roeg, Loach and Anderson, there are also Watkins, Clarke, Potter, Potter, Bleasdale, Greenaway, to name a few. An inordinately masculine list, but one that reflects a commitment to provocative, political filmmaking before the likes of Curtis, Mendes, even Nolan, took over. 

juvenile court (d. frederick wiseman)

An earlier Wiseman. Same fly on wall diligence. Same immersive and demanding viewer experience. Here the precinct, as they call it, is more restricted. A specific Juvenile Court in Memphis, the Deep South of the USA. There is even a kind of heroic protagonist, the humanist judge who, a la Azdak, has to seek the best life-resolution judgement for the troubled youngsters who end up in his court. Wiseman is never afraid to let a storyline play out and this is a film with multiple storylines, enough for a dozen potential movies. Towards the end, the film follows one character in great and harrowing depth, as a 17 year old accused of armed robbery breaks down, saying he has been set up, that there is no ‘good’ outcome for him, whilst his lawyers and the judge try to ensure he doesn’t end up getting convicted when he turns 18 in an adult court, where, they say, he would likely get sent down for twenty years. It’s a bold approach to storytelling, as the film has already documented a host of other cases. The minutiae of the court’s dealings oscillates between being fascinating and tedious. Wiseman sticks to his guns, and as the storyline reaches its denouement, we come to understand that this is how the system works. It’s a long, slow grind, working towards a conclusion which is by its nature unsatisfactory, but might be the best playing of a bad hand.

pat garrett and billy the kid. (d. peckinpah, w. rudy wurlitzer)

A strange, episodic masterpiece from Peckinpah. Two hours that rumble along towards a long-awaited climax, which is inevitably anti-climactic, and deliberately staged as such. One of the two protagonists has to die, this much is known, only the manner of their death will be revelatory. That Kristofferson’s Billy is killed in such an unheroic fashion speaks to the filmmaker’s sympathies. There is no glory in Pat Garrett’s victory. As in the case of The Getaway, Peckinpah is rooting for the outsider; the villains are the cattle barons who have seized the land and with whom Garrett has made an uneasy alliance. He has sold his soul, his wife tells him, and no matter how much James Coburn’s implacable countenance might try to hide this truth, he knows and we know that she’s right. The existential struggle that underpins their conflict is artfully related by a director whose subtlety is masked by the vigorous masculinity of his films. This is as insightful a deconstruction of the western myth as you could hope for, and its relevance  in an era of snake charming capitalists is as valid as ever.

A note on Dylan. His puckish performance counterpoints the machismo of the other characters. He isn’t just acting: he’s infiltrating his whole cryptic take on art into the performance. A character that goes by the name of Alias, who doesn’t use a gun, who instinctively sides with the outlaw. 

the wicker man (d. robin hardy, w. anthony shaffer, david pinner)

I had never previously seen The Wicker Man. Even if I feel as though I have seen it a thousand times. At some point in the past decade it began to insert itself into the zeitgeist, the id, the greater consciousness. The film’s title would appear in every meeting, every discussion, every set of notes. The Wicker Man became the ur Wicker Man, the ideal film that lurks at the edge of British filmmaking, a mix of folk, horror and Carry On. Not that the last reference is frequently cited, but Britt Ekland and the horny islanders inhabit a very Carry On dimension, one which is skilfully wedded to notions of fertility and the Gulf Stream. There is artistry at work in The Wicker Man, in amongst the camp. The writers knew what they were putting on the plate. The imagery of the film is part of the reason for the renaissance of the British folk movement and the notion of indigenous rites that have lain dormant through the great upheavals of the industrial revolution and globalisation. It’s not hard to imagine the PhD one would want to write about this film, an idea pays tribute to its calculated pretentiousness and glorious finale. 

stavisky (d. alain resnais, w. jorge semprún)

Resnais had a curious career. From the avant-garde to this somewhat run of the mill version of what might have been a remarkable tale. You can understand the attraction of the story, one that he perhaps learnt about as a kid. Stavisky was a maverick Ukrainian born near Kiev who immigrated to France and built himself up as an impresario. He dabbled in the entertainment business as well as the bond market, where he made fraudulent profits which lead to his eventual demise in spite of having bribed a fair quantity of politicians. It’s a jazz age story set in Paris and Biarritz with an expensive costume budget and music by Sondheim, but besides these technical elements and Belmondo’s grandstanding, this feels like a film which is searching for its raison d’être. The narrative, told in part via flashback, has a heavy handed feel, and the film starts to sag under the weight of the menagerie of French character actors who traipse across the screen. It’s a long way from the formal playfulness of the director’s early work. 

under a cruel star; a life in prague 1941-1968 [heda margoilis kovály]

There are several little known second world war texts written by Jewish writers, besides those of Primo Levi. Mihail Sebastian’s tragic diary is one, Piotr Raciz’s novel is another. Heda Margoilis Kovály’s memoir incorporates not merely the horror of the concentration camps but also the subsequent Stalinist purges in her native Czechoslovakia, which lead to the death of her husband. At times it is a terrible document, laced with a survivor’s chutzpah. The book contains three principle sections. The first describes her experiences in the second world war; the second the events surrounding her husband’s murder by the state; and the final section deals with the Prague Spring. The stories from the second world war are unadorned and brutal. They include one astonishing anecdote, when the young and spirited Heda tells a local factory owner exactly what the Nazis were doing. He has either been unaware of feigned unawareness; her account stuns him. It’s impossible to know what people did or didn’t know in wartime Germany about the extremity of the barbarism of Nazi policy. This anecdote is one of the few, coming from a Jewish source, which suggests that the state acted at a level the populace was unaware of. Having escaped, Heda is then subjected to another kind of ignominy, which is the way in which her fellow Czechs are too scared to protect her once she gets to Prague. This prefigures what will happen to her in the fifties, when the local population buys the Communist state’s lies and accords her and her son pariah status following the false imprisonment and execution of her husband, Rudolf. This episode contains a terrible sense of inevitable doom, with Heda unable to change the tide of history. To say it’s a Kafkaesque fable might seem somewhat obvious, but to think that he was another Prague Jew who, but for his early death, might have shared this fate, is unnerving. As though in his novels he is prefiguring what will happen to his countrymen and women over the course of the following decades. The final section, which describes events surrounding the Prague Spring, is revelatory in so far as it shows that, even though Dubcek and the reformers failed, they sowed the seed for the eventual demise of the repressive regime through the way in which the people themselves changed as a result of a taste of freedom. A change what would take another 20 years to bear fruit, but, as Kovály’s memoir shows, the pace of history operates in a way is not always apparent on the surface. Kovály’s book is another testament to the power of literature, or the written word, as an agent of resistance; no matter how crushed the human spirit, the word will always remain as a weapon to counteract the banal cruelties of history. 

for bread alone (mohamed choukri)

This book is mentioned in Teju Cole's Open City, when the young Moroccan his narrator meets in Brussels recommends him rather than Ben Jelloun. Choukri's book is told in the first person and from the notes supplied by Paul Bowles, who translated it, it's largely autobiographical. Given this, it may well not be representative of his wider work.

The underlying narrative of For Bread Alone is Mohamed's journey towards the light of literature. Born in desperate poverty, his father a vicious bully who kills Mohamed's younger brother, his mother constantly pregnant with children who may or may not survive infancy, the book recounts his teenage years as he learns to fend for himself, taking in the pleasures of sex, alcohol and opiates along the way. It's a bawdy, energetic read, which glories in the narrator's discoveries of the pleasures of life as he does all he can just to survive. It may not be great literature but at the same time, in a message the book is consciously making as it closes with Mohamed's discovery of literacy, it's a testament to the power of literature. How it can honour the uncharted life, destroy obscurity, grant a voice to the voiceless. As such, you can see why Cole's Moroccan valued this book, (and why Harbor by Adams feels like such a prescient modern text). Choukri articulates a life which was destined to go, like the stories of so many others, unfeted, unknown.