penda’s fen (w. david rudkin, d. alan clarke)

Stroud festival is a celebration of the British esoteric, from Morris Dancing to Jarvis. My friends’ film the Ballad of Shirley Collins played, as well as Penda’s Fen. This came from the BBC cycle The Play for Today, which ran for 15 years or so and was once a seedbed both for British dramatic talent and also, as Penda’s Fen shows, for the subversive. The 90 minute film is a coming of age tale which follows Stephen, who lives in the remote Worcestershire countryside. Stephen has to come to terms with the fact that he’s gay, and that he’s not the vicar’s son he believed himself to be. Directed by Alan Clarke, David Rudkin’s script is in many ways a fascinating treatise on Britain in the seventies, with references to dark political forces, industrial pollution and homophobia. It features dream sequences with Edward Elgar and King Penda himself. It is also, from a screenwriting point of view, a fascinating argument both for and against development. Whilst Stephen’s journey lends the narrative a central pillar, the film is messy, with a super-abundance of ideas which don’t always cohere. However, the very existence of these ideas is what makes the film unique, and still watched on a cult level fifty years later. Somewhere in the middle might be the perfect movie, but of course perfect movies have never existed, not even in Arthurian Britain. 

the conversation (w&d coppola)

“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”, is the phrase famously uttered by James Comey when it was suggested that his conversations with Trump might have been recorded. The importance of tapes in American political life can be traced back to Watergate and the conversations recorded by Nixon himself which helped to bring about his downfall. The Conversation was made around the time that Watergate was blowing the lid off American political life, in an administration beset by rumours of corruption and foul play. It sounds familiar. The film also feels frighteningly prescient in the way in which it articulates the idea of a surveillance state. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore. Anything we do or say can and will be monitored. This Kafkaesque notion of a surveillance state leads to a breakdown in trust. Human relationships are polluted by paranoia. By the end of The Conversation, a beleaguered Gene Hackman is a prisoner in his own home, trapped by a justified fear. The only sound left to articulate are the mournful notes of jazz he plays on his tenor sax. 

One supposes that great art doesn’t have to be prophetic, but on the other hand one supposes it does have to be rooted in truths about the human condition that go beyond the context of the art work’s setting. In this sense, Coppola’s The Conversation qualifies in the “great art” category. Technically it’s just about perfect. The script is tight as a drum. The edit is flawless and the sound edit, by Walter Murch, is a thing of genius. Hackman’s acting, the lugubrious fallguy who can never be too careful (but never be careful enough) is a masterly performance, all grunts and hidden sadness behind the eyes. (Of all the great actors who emerged in the seventies, Hackman might be the most underrated). The opening shot is a truly dizzying long sentinel take, lasting up to five minutes. The audience doesn’t realise it, but the whole of the film’s contents are contained within this single take, like a seed about to germinate. It succeeds in putting the audience on the edge of their seat, and from the word go we know that we can’t afford to take our eyes off the film for a moment, every detail is important. There is a mystery to be solved, even if, like the protagonist, we don’t even know what the mystery is. If that isn’t a metaphor for the human condition, I don’t know what is. 

woman under the influence (w&d john cassavetes)

Cassavetes' film is a gruelling, grimly compelling watch. Now regarded as a modern classic, it seems superfluous to offer anything other than a few observations.

Violence. The most disconcerting aspect of this film might be the very final sequence, after the kids have gone to bed, after Peter Falk’s Nick has slapped Mabel for the second or third time, after she has cut herself. It’s disturbing not because of the violence, but because of the way that the director seems to want to present this moment, as Mabel and Nick tidy up together, return to domestic normality, as an upbeat ending. The music is cheerful, Rowlands smiles, there appears to be complicity between the parties. I haven’t read commentaries on this and prefer to come at it cold: it feels almost crass. Just as much as this is a film about female psychosis, it’s also a film about domestic violence. Nick is a bully. A charming bully but also a violent one. HIs normalisation of violence (both physical and psychological) is surely the key driver in Mabel’s need to become insane to cope with it. Is Cassavetes being wilfully provocative with this conclusion? Or is it a testament to an era and a culture where this kind of patriarchal violence was the norm? However you look it, it’s a coup de grace, after all that has preceded this moment, that it should feel so chilling precisely because nothing shocking is happening. 

Acting. Without doubt, Rowlands and Falk offer masterclasses of a kind. What the film perhaps shows is how limited is the day-to-day palette of psychological representation. Cinema demands a shorthand approach to characterisation. Scenes are generally kept short and sharp; the emotional status of a character is conveyed through metaphor and elipsis. In Woman Under the Influence, the handbrake is off. Rowlands and Falk are permitted to explore in great detail all the ticks, mannerisms, weaknesses, strangenesses of their characters and their relationship. The long scenes permit a descent into the moment, captured by the camera, which is harrowing, bordering on the absurd (which is what any domestic dispute inevitably and tragically becomes). Hence a degree of reality infiltrates the camera which more conventional scriptwriting/ storytelling doesn’t permit. The nearest point of contemporary comparison is Reygadas’ Our Time. Acting in film is so often about minimalism, (think of Caine talking about how everything can be communicated by the face), but here Rowlands’ whole body seems immersed in the character, a body which seems to hum with inner tension and a secret inner life which is repressed by the restrictions of her day-to-day existence.

the lost honour of katharina blum [heinrich böll]

Böll’s novel seems redolent of a lost era. When the GDR and the DDR were still separate entities, when the Wall still stood. It’s the prerogative of the present to assume that the past was more innocent, unless, perhaps, one was born in wartime. Boll’s novel would seem to argue against the thesis that those more innocent days. The slight tale recounts the very modern trend of character assassination by the press, with Katharina seeking revenge for the way in which her life is traduced by the newspapers after she becomes involved with a suspected gangster. 

Of as much interest as the subject matter of the novel is the dry, even terse narration, with the authorial voice regularly filtering through. The book’s avowed aim is to offer a dispassionate account of the events surrounding Blum’s arrest and subsequent crime as they occurred, but the author’s sympathies are revealed via a sarcastic tone, which takes aim primarily at the authorities who are investigating Blum. The narrator’s irreverence keeps the story moving, via a series of short, sharp chapters. Ultimately, perhaps, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum doesn’t quite live up to its reputation; it has the feel of a minor, satirical work which touched a major nerve within its society at the time of writing. Having said which, satire is always trapped within the confines of the society it critiques; what shines through is the relish with which the author goes about lancing the boils. 

bring me the head of alfredo garcia (w&d. peckinpah, w. dawson)

There are films that linger in the background, which might also be the sub-conscious. Half seen, once, on a black and white TV screen late at night in a cold Dunnington flat. Beyond remembrance. The title awaiting the day it catches up with you, nails you to the seat, and asks: what kept you so long?

The co-director is a big Peckinpah fan. I've watched Pat Garrett and Cross of Iron with him. He says Peckinpah's title sequences are worth the entrance fee alone. I'm more take it or leave it, respecting all the things for which the director is clearly to be respected, including his disreputability. However, Alfredo Garcia is another matter, a title so evocative that it conjures up films which could never be made, made out of myths which have been long since forgotten.

In other words, the film had no hope of living up to the hype my imagination had bestowed upon it. And yet... somehow, it does. Pull it off. More as a result of its rough edges than its perfection. (The quest for which dogs and demeans any film industry.) 

Once again Mexico plays its weird role in the Gringo psyche. The other side of the border, where lawlessness is the norm. Just like a McCarthy novel, the film opens in a seemingly timeless epoch, a girl sitting by a lake, approached by peones on horseback. Only when there's a brutal cut to a plane taking off do we realise this is the twentieth century. This Mexico is the place to go to lose your soul and see if there's anything left at the end. Warren Oates' character, Bennie, has already lived in Mexico City a number of years, his soul a thing of the past. Somehow the quest to locate and deliver a severed head offers him the chance of redemption. It comes as no surprise, however, that Peckinpah decided to change his ending, and ensure the pay-off that was always awaiting Bennie after his dance with the devil. A website informs that the thick shades Oates wears throughout belonged to Peckinpah: it's clear that the director of this film knew a thing or two about flirting with damnation.

But it doesn't seem entirely appropriate to talk too much about the film that exists, the one I saw on Saturday. I prefer to believe that the head Oates lugs around like a curse isn't Garcia's at all. Alfredo Garcia never existed. That head belongs to someone else, someone who's waiting to meet you, or me, at the end of some kind of line. The film's merely pointing us in the right direction. It's up to us to climb into the grave, get dirty, get thrown out of a dustcart with the love of our life, smelling of nothing like roses, get up, keep going, knowing it's only a question of time before we die in a hail of gunfire (if we're lucky) or from some other terminal conclusion. (Please, Bennie, not quietly in our sleep.) Who knows, if we're lucky, some avatar, seeking to save his or her soul, will come for our heads when we're gone, knowing they contain some kind of value which was never reckoned upon whilst they sat, proud but inane, on our shoulders.

alice in the cities [d wenders]

1974 seems like a long time ago. We know that's where we are from the opening frames when Rudiger Vogler's bell bottoms hone into view beneath the boardwalk. His character, Phil Winter, dresses like an embodiment of a time which has become the territory of kitsch memorial. There are other hints of the way the world has changed: is that a woman smoking behind the protagonists on the Pan-Am flight from New York to Amsterdam? And the in-car phone used by the policeman on the ferry at the end, a slightly lugubrious plot device in such a free-wheeling film, looks curious and unlikely.

Phil Winter spends the first twenty minutes of the film drifting around the United States, taking photos. He's supposed to be writing an article, but the 'images' swallow him up, as he explains to his editor. In one of the few scenes of the film inveighed with any tension, he visits an old girlfriend in New York, looking for a bed for the night, and she throws him out, telling him he's only there to tell her his stories, and he's only doing this to prove to himself that they might be real, the same reason he's taken the photos. Edda Kochl's remarkable cameo as the 'friend' opens the door to another movie Wenders chose not to write, perhaps like the article that Winter's writing and of which we only catch a glimpse. The unwritten film would be the one in which the lead character's neurasthenia is explored and revealed. (There are hints in the film that Winter is an alter-ego for Wenders himself, not least when an announcement is made at Amsterdam airport for 'Mr Wenders' - and for a moment we in the audience think this must be for Mr Winter. Winter's name also seems like an obvious pun on a psychological state.)

However, Wenders chooses not to go down this route. Instead he explores the margins of Winter's condition. The film may be called Alice in the Cities, but it is really about Winter's sense of alienation and drift. (When he goes to see a Chuck Berry concert, the song Wenders' chooses to use is - Driving along in my automobile/ No particular place to go...) Alice in some ways offers the loner a sense of selfhood which nothing else in the vastness of America or Europe has done. Much as he might complain about being stuck with her, and although he says, on occasion, exasperated, do you not think I've got better things to do? - It's clear that he doesn't. In a mutable world, Phil needs something to hang on to, and Alice offers him a hook.

In this sense then, perhaps, 1974 is not quite as distant as the bell-bottoms would suggest. Part of the success and cachet of Alice in the Cities may well have been, at the time, the modernity it embodied, the way in which it suggested the path the future would follow. The film opens with a shot of a plane, going we know not where. The shot pans down to reveal Winter on the beach, taking polaroids. The film ends with a sweeping helicopter shot, panning from Phil and Alice up over the Rhine (strangely reminiscent of the closing shot of Into the Wild). Since the film was made, we have entered the era of globalisation, expanding migration, ever-increasing rootlessness. The solid houses of the Ruhrgebeit, an old man informs Phil, are being demolished. In their place will be built flats and smaller houses (the like of which my parents' once lived in in Essen).

Which finally leads us to Alice, who is nine when the film takes place, and would be in her early forties now. In constructing the film's narrative, Wenders decided that Phil needed a foil to his blankness, someone to offer shape to a character he was reluctant to excavate beyond the image. (For the first twenty minutes of the film, the character of Phil barely speaks, mainly reading signs in his pidgeon English. We never learn about Winter's past or why he ended up in America or even what kind of articles the journalist usually writes). Besides the effectiveness of having a charismatic child character fronting his film, the beauty of playing Alice against Phil is that it means Phil never has to explain anything. Rather than exploring the character from the inside, we slowly piece his personality together from the outside. This is shown through the way he interacts with his companion, sometimes affectionate, sometimes irritable, always learning more about himself in the process. And the reason he feels so at home with Alice, the child, is that she has so much in common with him. She too enjoys drifting, feels herself to be rootless, has no particular sense of place. As comfortable in New York as Oberhausen, Alice possesses an aura of world weary modernity, which is as pertinent now as it must have seemed then. She's nine years old and she's already seen it all.

Alice in the Cities is a picaresque movie, of detail and incident. The only thing I could remember from my previous viewing of it, two decades ago, was the modernistic Wuppertal transport system. It is neither gripping nor taught. It's a movie with no particular place to go. Which engenders the paradox that it goes all over the place, going nowhere. When we leave Alice and Phil on the train to Munich, it seems unlikely that this will actually prove to be their final destination. Who knows where they eventually ended up.