three days of the condor (d. sydney pollack, w. james grady, lorenzo semple jr, david rayfiel)

At the time of writing, the USA is on the verge of attacking Venezuela. Since Pollack’s film was released, the USA has invaded Iraq, and intervened in Libya.

Redford is a CIA desk jockey whose job is to analyse literature for clues of global turbulence. He stumbles across a text linking Iraq, Libya and Venezuela without at first joining the dots. But his discovery triggers the summary execution of his colleagues. Someone desperately needs to make sure that what Redford has discovered doesn’t get out. The narrative plot points might be tenuous, but the underlying thesis is as valid as ever. At the end of the film Redford confronts the head of the maverick CIA within a CIA - and realises it’s all about the oil. Same as it ever was.

Besides its ongoing geopolitical resonance, Three Days of the Condor remains a terrific thriller, blessed by extravagantly good Hollywood performances from Redford, Dunaway and Von Sydow. Pollack’s camera roams New York, with a protagonical role for the World Trade Centre, where the CIA office is based. Dunaway and Redford somehow manage to convince in their star-crossed one-night stand. This is a Hollywood thriller par excellence, which also happens to be an endlessly relevant treatise on the political systems of the past 50 years.

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As I post this, as ever weeks after watching the film, the USA has just bombed Venezuela. 

the monkey wrench gang (edward abbey)

I have just finished reading Christophe Bonneuiland and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene, which examines the idea of the Anthropocene and the relationship between human action and the planet. In the final chapter the authors mention a few novels which have reflected upon this idea. They don’t mention the Monkey Wrench Gang, but they should. The novel relates the actions of four characters who set about to sabotage the mining and forestry industries, as well as blowing up some bridges, in Abbey’s beloved Deep South of the US. This is the land the author dedicated a valedictory account to in Desert Solitaire, tracing the course of the Colorado river in canyons which would soon be flooded by the arrival of a dam.

In contrast to Desert Solitaire, this is a novel and a more rambunctious read, as the four eco-warriors plot and carry out their missions and then seek to evade capture from the forces of law and order. At times the narrative runs the risk of feeling predictable, and lacks some of the more poetic elements of Desert Solitaire. Nevertheless, it’s a forceful stricture against human exploitation of the wild spaces and a significant addition to the canon of works which have sought to place in evidence the idea of another way of interacting with the planet.

mirror (w&d tarkovsky, w aleksandr misharin)

There are moments in Mirror when it feels as though Tarkovsky is exploring the outer boundaries of the possibility of fiction, and he has no option but to concede that fiction will not do what he needs. In these moments we see images of war, as soldiers trek through mud-wracked fields, or alternatively, more curiously, a mass of Chinese wave Mao’s little red book. These Chinese images fall out of apparent context into the film. The images of the Soviet war have a logic in this memory piece, reflecting the ubiquity of the second world war in post-45 Soviet filmmaking. The images of Russian soldiers lock us into the world of Tarkovsky’s children and describe the terror that helped form that world. But the images of the Chinese seem to push the narrative further, seeking to locate it in a more universal twentieth century experience, something which is amplified by the curious Spanish section, when unexpected characters appear, talking in Spanish about bullfighting, again contrasted with documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War.

Who are these Spaniards, or these Chinese, and what are they doing in Tarkovky’s delicate memory piece? But then our memories are not confined to the details of family or place. Our imaginations even as children engage with the morbid fears of the age. At another point, there’s footage of the nuclear bomb exploding, and any child who grew up in the shadow of the cold war had the bogeyman of nuclear annihilation lurking somewhere in their consciousness. Fiction can only go so far, at some point the filmmaker has to declare that his imagination has been formed by the actuality of the world. 

Having said that, in Mirror we see again the breathtaking scope of the auteur’s imagination. The way he painted poetry with a camera that glided, like a ghost, through the scenes of a child’s past. There are so many moments for the high priests of cinematic criticism to dwell on that we could be here all year. Ideas and images thrown together in a style that sometimes borders on the Dada-esque, Tzara racing around fitting pieces together that don’t appear to match, but somehow do anyway. There is something almost childlike about this investigation of being a child. The construction of the film foregoes the adult demands of coherence, delighting in a language that is being created anew, for the very first time, all over again. In this film, more perhaps than any of his others, there is a connection with Godard, both employing a seemingly haphazard process of assemblage to stretch the boundaries of cinematic possibility. 

correction (thomas bernhard, tr sophie wilkins)

 I’m not sure where this novel sits in the oeuvre of the Austrian arch-miserabilist, Bernhard. A figure both shunned and venerated. Years ago, when I was friends with Mr C, we used to discuss his work and I guess I used to read his novels, but it’s all a blur now, all part of that hinterland life which is also known as ‘the past’. 

It might be that I came to Correction expecting something more nuanced than I encountered. In so many ways this feels like a piledriver of a novel, reminiscent of the sound of the road being dug up outside your window when you’re trying to work. It’s a meditative, relentless, exasperating noise, yet not without its fierce beauty. This novel of two parts, the first half dedicated to the narrator’s account of his friendship with the misanthropic Roithamer, the second a reworking (or correction) of Roithamer’s text stroke diary, which he was keeping in the weeks leading up to his suicide. Reading the text is like stumbling forward in a blizzard. Sometimes the words overwhelm, threaten to asphyxiate; at others the snow clears and the clarity seems all the more so for the text having been so dense and illegible moments before.

“…all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products…”

dersu uzala (w&d kurosawa, w. yuriy nagibin)

Dersu Uzala is, in narrative terms, a straightforward bromance. The Russian explorer, Arsenev meets Dersu, a Siberian hunter, in the taiga. The film recounts the series of adventures the two have over the course of nearly a decade. It’s based on a real-life account, written by the explorer himself. Arsenev and Dersu survive snowstorms, tigers and raging rivers. There’s shades of Herzog at times, (although apparently this is a project Kurosawa  first contemplated in the thirties). In many ways it’s a boys-own movie, there’s barely a woman in the film, until the explorer’s wife appears in the final ten minutes or so. (Tragic to learn that Aresnev’s wife was later executed in a Stalinesque purge.) Some of the imagery is astonishing, and it would appear that one aspect of Kurosawa’s drive to make this Dersu Uzala, á la Herzog, was to push the actual physical process of filmmaking to its limits. 

However the film transcends its macho context. There’s something remarkably touching about the relationship between Dersu and Arsenev. The narrative is also an exploration of the schism between an urban view of humanity and a more pantheistic one. Dersu calls all the animals in the taiga ‘humans’. In common with other native cultures, he appears to view the relationship between himself and nature as a symbiotic one, to be treated with respect and care. The way in which Arsenev comes to respect and love his friend, and vice versa, implies a subliminal message about the need for so-called ‘civilised’ society to embrace and engage with the so-called ‘primitive’ society. All of which is related in an understated and constantly engaging manner. Kurosawa constantly seduces, both with the breathless scale of the image and with the warmth of the characterisation. 

w, or the memory of childhood, [georges perec]

Perec’s novel includes a whole section is apparently set on an island in Tierra del Fuego, visited last year, which is what lead me to it. I didn’t realise that it’s also another novel to add to the cannon on the Holocaust. Perec adopts a subversive, lateral approach to the subject. The novel describes an island where the narrator’s namesake has perhaps ended up after being shipwrecked in the South Atlantic ocean. The island is a paean to sport, with rituals dedicated to an annual athletic event which is an echo of the (modern and ancient) Olympic games. As the author describes the island in more and more detail, it becomes increasingly nightmarish. What at first seems like healthy competition eventually proves to be a desperate battle for survival in the face of an exterminatory system. At the very end of the novel, the link between the island and the concentration camps is made explicit. There’s something remarkable about the way in which Perec posits links between a society constructed around the banality of sport, and the historical reality of the Holocaust. Our continued glorification of sport as an antidote to politics or political action gives the book an ongoing prescience. W is a brief novel, which includes alternating chapters that offer a potted version of the author’s childhood, revealing how he managed to evade the Nazis, even though his mother didn’t. She died in the camps. The arm’s-length tone of the book’s description of the island masks the author’s personal stake in the terrible history W recounts. The book’s brevity gives it an added power, as the novel traces its metaphor towards a  terrible, seemingly logical end. 

fateless [imre kertész]

The brilliance of Kertész’ terrible novel is bound up with the tone of its narrator, Gyuri, a laconic boy who is incapable of seeing the worst in life, even when it’s placed in front of his nose. This boy happens to have been born Jewish and living in Budapest during the 2nd world war. He approaches life as would any other teenage boy, curious about girls, trying to work out why his parents separated, phlegmatic, reluctant to fall into the trap of self-pity when there’s so much to live for. This same boy is then sent via Auschwitz, to the Zeiss concentration camp. At no point could it exactly be said he was an innocent, because the writer is wise enough to know that children are no more innocent than anyone else; but equally, no more than anyone else, this is not a fate which he has in any way merited. The way in which the narrator struggles to maintain his dispassionate attitude towards life, something which it seems helps him to stay alive, whilst coming to terms with the cruelty of his destiny, is told masterfullly.

I know nothing about Kertész, but one imagines that this book is autobiographical. The author’s capacity to resist cliché, to not necessarily say those things we as readers want to hear, suggests a degree of honesty which is frequently present in the writings of Holocaust survivors, although rarely present in the writings of those who choose to visit the holocaust as fiction writers (or filmmakers). The last sentence of chapter seven in the book is worth quoting in full to demonstrate Kertész’ remarkable, ambiguous take on his plight: “Despite all the deliberation, sense, insight and sober reason, I could not fail to recognise within myself the furtive and yet - ashamed as it might be, so to say, of its irrationality - increasingly insistent voice of some muffled craving of sorts: I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.” 

The camp in question is Buchenwald, which Gyuri survives. It’s only when he gets back to Budapest that the real weight of his suffering seems to catch up with him. All too often, writers are accused of not showing enough “heart” or “emotional truth” if their characters fail to emote sufficiently, to talk about their pain or their suffering. Kertész’s novel, would appear to suggest that the privileged world’s need for emotional catharsis is a self-indulgence. The character who is genuinely immersed in a world of terror requires their energy, their cynicism and a certain dispassionate sang-froid to resist. It’s more important to find reasons to live than seek reasons to lament.