sorcerer (w&d william friedkin, w. walon green, georges arnaud)

Back in the Ipswich Film Theatre, half-full for this restored print of Friedkin’s minor classic. I might have seen the Wages of Fear, but if I have I can’t remember when. Friedkin expands the story in a bold opening, stitching together three long sequences which introduce the key characters, all renegades of one form or another, living on the edge of their country’s laws. The long shots, the zooms, have a bravura feel, which echoes the scope of a film that moves from Mexico to Palestine to Paris and New York in the opening twenty minutes. These characters come together in the Colombian jungle, on an oilfield run by the gringos. The colonial aspect of the story is clear: the USA wants the oil and it will do anything to get it. This sets up their trip through the jungle, two souped-up lorries like something out of a Mad Max film. The fact that there are two trucks, as in the original, is a simple but brilliant device to maintain tension. One of the trucks is going to get to the destination, but we don’t know which one. Friedkin is a dystopian anarcho-futurist. A kind of Verlainian Marinetti. These trucks are behemoths, but they are also, literally, timebombs, primed to go off. It makes for scenes of forced but remarkable tension. There’s elements of Aguirre to the movie, the challenge of the white man to tame the untameable terrain. Although the one who survives will be brought down not by nature, but by man.

the american friend (w&d wim wenders)

Wenders’ films are indeed like old friends. They seem to fit the viewer’s hand like a glove. The enigmatic tone, the waspish humour, the flirtation with melodrama, the pseudo thriller tone. People will die, hearts will be broken, but life will go on. HIs choice of actors seems to reflect this: figures who seem almost too knowing for their roles: Harry Dean Stanton, Rüdiger Vogler, Kôji Yakusho. And here, again, Bruno Ganz, whose sympathetic features and tendency to smile wryly seem to speak to a world beyond the screen the film is set in, a life lived by his character with pleasures and sufferings we will never know. Wenders is neither slave to narrative nor afraid of it. His films contain stories that hold them together, but he seems more interested in the detail: the angle of the frame that Ganz’s character, a picture framer, is holding, or the tilt of Hopper’s hat, or the worry on the face of Lisa Kreuzer, rewarded by one of the film’s rare close-ups. Yet, this concern for the image is never permitted to become self-indulgent, and the pace is maintained by the zesty edit of Peter Przygodda.

It would be interesting to speculate on what inspired the director to tackle this story. If anything, the juxtaposition of the raddled cityscape of New York, contrasted with the high industrial orange hues of Hamburg and its port, might be the film’s most arresting element. That and the chance to juxtapose the broad tones of Hopper’s acting with understatement of Ganz. At the very end, Ganz appears to gain a kind of revenge via his melodramatic death, outdoing Hopper’s baroque beachside barbecue. These tonal contrasts fire the film, they give it an edge that transcends what might otherwise have been a generic mafia tale. 

cross of iron. (d. peckinpah, w julius j. epstein, walter kelley, james hamilton)

Peckinpah’s films represent an apex macho worldview, which is so macho it permits the existence of weakness. Cross of Iron feels like it might be the apex of this apex. It takes a squadron who are perhaps in the worst situation any humans could possibly find themselves in, a German battalion on the Eastern front, (once again Crimea), as the front collapses. Peckinpah’s grand conceit, apparently financed by German money, is to have these doomed characters be German. The enemy becomes heroic, with the uber American, James Coburn, playing the fearless squadron leader. Steiner. Hence the characters are transformed into everymen, and the film lays bare the irreversible cruelty of war, no matter which side of the fence you belong to. The capacity of mankind to inflict suffering on mankind transcends historical divisions. The film itself struggles to hold up, with the director making the most of his tank and explosion budget, but its intentions feel entirely honourable. 

lucio flavio (w&d héctor babenco, w. jorge durán, josé louzeiro)

Lucio Flavio, an early film by the lauded Argentine director, is a crime thriller, based on a true story, mostly set in Rio. This Rio of the seventies feels amazingly evocative, the men in flares and open long-sleeved shirts, drinking cold beers whenever they can. You can feel the heat and the sweat oozing through the screen, something complemented by the judicious use of long-shots when we see the street in all its dusty glory, with Lucio, the anti-hero, on his way to his next robbery or about to be busted. The film is based on the way that a police death squad used criminals for its own corrupt ends. Lucio knows he’s a dead man walking, but it doesn’t stop him walking with a strut, embracing his destiny, a strangely heroic figure in a tawdry world. The remarkable thing about Babenco’s film is the way in which it shows a society that has changed so little. A strange quirk of this blog is that for some reason, the 2007 Brazilian film, Elite Squad, is by far the most viewed review, (obviously as a result of some kind of strange algorithm), and Lucio Flavio is a clear predecessor to Padilha’s blockbuster, with both films revealing the baroque arrangements between the police and the underworld, as the police seek to muscle in on the streets which belong to the criminals. Babenco directs with flair, using occasional dream sequences to lend colour to the prosaic events. Whilst in some ways a generic crime flick, Lucio Flavio also infiltrates a sly commentary on the torture and summary executions carried out by the dictatorships of the time, and as such was a way for Babenco to comment on events in his native country in a way that the censors would never have permitted if the commentary hadn’t been smuggled in under the guise of a crime film. It’s a fine example of the way in which the codes of cinema permit a discourse which is more wide reaching that the apparent subject matter, as well as offering a telling insight into a lost Brazilian decade. 

opening night (w&d cassavetes)

Cassavetes’ baroque movie, once again placing his wife centre stage and riffing off their marriage, is one of the great theatre films. Once upon a time the worlds of theatre and film essentially overlapped, nourishing each other in a mutually beneficial feedback loop. Perhaps it can be said that this is still the case on Broadway and the West End, but, having worked in both mediums, the relationship feels more tenuous than it was back in the day. Cassavetes’ film describes the build up to an opening night in New York of a new play, staring Myrtle (Gena Rowlands) as the vampish lead who is well into middle age and scared of being defined as old. The part she has been contracted to perform is that of an ageing woman and she fights back against the writing and the role, as she goes through her own mid-life crisis. Ben Gazzara is the director trying to hold everything together. The film meanders and deviates and could be described as self-indulgent, were it not for the fact that this very self-indulgence is integral to the movie’s dynamic. In an early scene, Gazzara spends an age on the phone to Myrtle assuring her she is brilliant, in spite of the fact it is four int he morning and his wife wants to go to bed with him. Everyone loves Myrtle but they all know she’s a disaster area. The film is a remarkable study in stardom and its excesses, as well as what makes for the type of person who can become larger than life, both on stage and off it. In the closing sequence, Rowlands and Cassavetes are playing a couple on stage, within the play, but it is clear that they are riffing and improvising and basically making the whole thing up. The director, producer and writer can hardly bear to watch. But when the curtain goes down they are cheered to the skies. Cassavetes’ vision feels both deeply cynical and deeply honest: when you get to be *the star* anything you can do is untouchable and revered, even though Rowlands is blind drunk and making it up as she goes along. The scene goes on too long, it becomes self-indulgent, and anyone who has ever been inside a play and seen the actors start to take it over, will see this for the painful exercise it is, but that’s the whole point. The figure they applaud and deify is in all likelihood a liability, and a danger to themselves. The toxic industry of stardom is a bride stripped bare in Cassavetes’ tortured masterpiece. 

victims of the aurora (thomas keneally)

Keneally’s short novel reminded me a little of an early Sergio Blanco play I saw last year. (Was it last year? Time seems to have succumbed to snowblindness of late.) The play was about a group of people stranded on the Arctic ice, who gradually pick each other off. The premise of a murder mystery in a snowbound wasteland, where every track is a clue, where just to go outside means to risk your life, has allure, but is very hard to pull off. In part because of the restrictions of this world. Keneally’s high Edwardian tale is set on the expedition of Captain Sir Eugene Stewart to the South Pole, as narrated by the expedition painter, Anthony Piers, who in a framing device is recounting the story from his Californian nursing home, sixty years later. The expedition journalist is murdered and Piers is tasked by Stewart to find out who did it. The ingredients, which include forays into the scientific and artistic goals of the expedition, as well as premonitions of the Great War, make for a rich blend. Yet this is a slight book, over almost before it has begun, and the shards of brilliance which sometimes penetrate the text also have the effect of illuminating the way in which the novel is, to a certain extent, coasting, drifting over its material without ever seeking to explore what it all means. At one point the narrator notes that in the Antarctic, seven million cubic miles of ice lie on top of the six million square miles of the continent. What lies beneath the surface is as vast and important as that which lies above, but no matter how entertaining, the novel rarely succeeds in sending a plumb line below, to explore those hidden depths.  

that obscure object of desire (w&d. buñuel, w. carrière)

Buñuel’s famed late seventies parable of the gender wars is a curious shaggy dog story of a film which appears to be about a wealthy older man trying to get his end away with a fetching, poor younger woman. In these banal terms, it might be thought that this is another dubious sex comedy, something out of the apolitical wing of the Aries studio, or primetime seventies ITV scheduling. However, from the outset, we get hints, in spite of the light-hearted tone, that something stranger is occurring. Firstly, the film is framed in flashback. Fernando Rey’s Mathieu boards a train at Seville and begins to narrate a tale that will last all the way to Madrid. The framing device lends the piece an unreliable air: the narrator is always going to present the story, which is triggered by his throwing a bucket of water at a young woman before the train leaves Seville, from his point of view. Secondly, radically, the woman in question, Conchita, is played by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). This is a device worthy of a Milo Rau or Pirandello. It’s unsettling, awkward, it leaves the viewer struggling to work out why two in place of one. The story doesn’t flow with the same naturalness as an ordinary romantic tale. As viewers, it feels all wrong. Finally, in the background, things keep getting blown up. These are times of terror, with young idealists belonging to bizarre political sects blowing up cars and kidnapping people. 

At the same time, the tone, framed by Rey’s laconic style, feels humorous. As he narrates how he is frustrated in his desires at every turn by Conchita, he gradually turns from being a rouê into a sap. The ‘natural’ course of events is constantly disrupted, subverting the Hollywood trope which still exists today of charming older man seducing beautiful young starlet. The old order is overthrown by the twin Conchitas, whose individuality is too much for him, eventually driving him to violence. To question the heteronormative dynamics so mercilessly in a mainstream movie was and still is an act of sly subversion by the director. Just as much as the young radicals who exist on the fringes of the film, he wants to blow up our concept of normality. The words ‘blow-up’ leads us towards Antonioni. What we can take form that generation of white male directors, which also includes he likes of Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Fellini, is that, even if they owed their place to a system that was skewed in their favour, they were prepared to play out their concerns, anxieties and doubts on the screen. This is not the film of a man comfortably settling into his pampered slippers. On the contrary, it’s a film that seeks to shake up that idea of comfort, to ridicule it, to blow it up. 

the ascent (voskhozhdenie) (w&d larisa shepitko, w. yuri klepikov)

There are so many films from the USSR or Russia set in the second world war that it’s not hard to think there’s nothing new to see. The Ascent, a film I had never heard of, proved this thesis wrong. It has to be one of the most remarkable, harrowing films I have ever seen. The director, Larisa Shepitko conjures an astonishing bleak, visceral film which drives itself forward over the course of two hours to a gut-wrenching conclusion. The first hour of the film sees two partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak struggle through a snowbound landscape in search of food to take back to their group. This is almost all filmed with hand-held camera, which tumbles through the snow with the two partisans, sinks up to its waist in the snow, genuinely makes us feel as though we are also there, fleeing for our lives. Cinema as immersive experience. Just as it seems they’ve succeeded in their mission, Sotnikov and Rybak run into a German patrol and Sotnikov is wounded. Rybak saves his life, but seeking to hide in a farmhouse, they are captured. This is a plot twist that it complete contrast to anything Hollywood might have come up with. What we assume to be a film about how the plucky heroes’ escape, turns into something completely the opposite. A tale of torture, betrayal, collateral damage, death. In short, a stunningly convincing and unsettling portrayal of the realities of having an enemy force invade your homeland and the price that is paid in both physical and spiritual terms. The Ascent is another example of the remarkable talent of Soviet cinema. The Soviets didn’t just lose the Cold War, they also lost the culture war, but in their cinema we can discern a sensibility in complete contrast to that of their enemies, a capacity to create cinema that is immersive, compelling, terrifying and beautiful. Perhaps Soviet cinema whispers to us that there was another course for humanity to take, another way to put the technology into practice. Or perhaps this is just a wilfully romantic notion on my part.

in patagonia [bruce chatwin]

I read In Patagonia in Patagonia. The reading of it was more accidental than that phrase might suggest. A few days before travelling, we went for supper with my old friend Mr Jorge Suarez, who said he had some books in English he was throwing out and asked if I wanted to have a look to see if there was any I was interested in. In Patagonia appeared with the kind of serendipity that occurs with a frequency to make you question whether more time and trouble shouldn’t be dedicated to the understanding of the term ‘serendipity’. 

The book has received a certain amount of revisionist criticism of late. Michael Jacobs, in his tome The Andes, suggests that Chatwin went around making things up. Jorge’s notes in the margin are not exactly complementary. It’s not hard to view Chatwin as a slightly over-educated dilettante who’s strolling through a landscape of which he has less understanding than he claims. HIs observations sometimes verge on the trite, and Jorge didn’t like his rude comments about Buenos Aires, which have a patronising British condescension to them.

Having said this, once Chatwin gets going on his mission to explore the region, In Patagonia becomes a wonderful piece of travel writing. Chatwin peppers his narrative with anecdotes and observations. He searches out and talks to all kinds of people, lifting the lid on the hybrid immigration which helped to define a remarkable, secluded part of the world. Plenty of doughty elderly British ladies, along with Scots, Germans, Persians and who knows what. There’s always an edge to Chatwin’s descriptions, but that just makes them all the more entertaining. Travel writing is an inevitably selective exercise. The writer picks out the things that grab their attention, missing all the other everyday material that doesn’t. Chatwin is constantly on the look-out for the offbeat, for the curious tale. Maybe it makes for a distorted picture, but any picture painted by the traveller is liable to be distorted. 

I’d hazard a guess that the Patagonia that Chatwin got to know, 40 years ago, has changed dramatically. National identities have been cemented in that time, and communication has changed beyond recognition. Chatwin doesn’t seem to have much interest in the original inhabitants of this land and one suspects this matches the opinions of that generation of Patagonians. Now, there’s a clearer consciousness of the lost world of the Selk’nam and the Yanhgan, the indigenous tribes who understood this land far better than the settlers. There’s also an Antarctic identity which has evolved, with the province seeing itself as much an extension of the great white continent as part of the Americas. The Patagonia that Chatwin portrays is one that was tied to the earliest settlers, who arrived at the turn of the 19th century and the start of the 20th. New stories have emerged in the forty years since the book the book was published; the speed of change across the globe affects everyone, even the end of the world. Nevertheless, the book is a fascinating record of a time and a place, and acts as a marker for a quixotic, self-sconsicouly subjective style of travel writing that has since been much imitated; a suitable flattery for a restless, peculiarly British mind.

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Another thought  upon returning: when Chatwin visited Patagonia, one imagines that, as a tourist, he was a rare beast. However, the tourist has now become a common species. The novelty factor of being an Englishman abroad has long gone in this part of the world, where goretexed folk with limited or no Spanish are ten a penny. This is clearly not just true for Patagonia, but all kinds of remote corners of the world which have recently opened up. Just as the explorers began to run out of new territory, now the travel writers’ framework has altered. He or she is no longer an emissary from a remote, exotic land; they have become commentators on cultural interchange. The anthropological aspect of travel writing recedes as every new internet connection shrink-wraps the an increasingly homogenous, globalised world. In few ways is this more apparent than in the clothing people wear; from Kashmir to Moscow to Lima, in my experience, a kind of neutralised, jeans and sweatshirt combination has become a norm. This doesn’t mean there aren’t stories to be told, (or that there’s aren’t exceptions to the rule to be hunted down), just that, from a travel writer’s point of view, the context and content of those stories have altered markedly since Chatwin’s time as a result of the abrupt rise in globalised tourism. 

flying doctors of east africa & la soufriere & the white diamond (herzog)

A Herzog doc triple bill of a Sunday lunchtime. Mr P and myself keeping an eye on the audience, trying to determine their provenance, finally deciding they were all German. Which they clearly were not.

The three films covered three continents, more or less, and came from three separate decades. The links however, include people placing themselves in remarkable situations, often perilous, with objectives that are tinged with a spiritual rather than a material dimension. A man who chooses to stay on the island of Guadeloupe, in spite of a mass evacuation, saying he has no fear of the death that the volcano might bring. The doctor who has no qualms about landing his plane on an airstrip whose dangers he lists as he and Herzog prepare to descend, the first plane to ever land on the strip. The scientist driven to fly his zeppelin over the jungle canopy in spite of, or because of, the fate of the friend who crashed in an earlier incarnation of the vehicle.

There's Werner to document it all, sharing their risk, revelling in the freedom to discover his camera has offered him over the course of forty years. Allowing their stories to unfold, step by step, always alert to the whimsical detail which brings the project down to earth: Mark Antony, whose best friend is his rooster, and who christens the airship a 'white diamond'; or the Masai whose fear of steps threatens to prevent them receiving the medicine the flying doctors want to bestow. Tracing the intersection between our 'modern' world, and an older ancient one, that persists.

Three hours of films and never a dull moment; the unexpected forever at the door, the story always told with a sense of purpose.

killer of sheep (w&d charles burnett)

Once upon a time I found myself researching the Jonestown massacre, which took place in Guyana in 1978. Most of the victims of the mass suicide were disenfranchised black Californians, who'd fled the poverty of the USA in the hope of creating a new society in the jungle. Killer of Sheep, made in 1977 and filmed on the LA back streets, (a part of the city which the movie cameras never normally reach), gives a sharp insight into the world that the doomed pioneers left behind.

Burnett's movie, a neglected classic, is a small slice of life drama. The film has a documentary feel, interwoven with a gentle narrative about Stan's (played with an effortless nobility by Henry G Sanders) efforts to keep his family life together. Burnett was influenced by neo-realist cinema, and the early scenes of young kids playing in vacant lots are reminiscent of Los Olvidados. The film is full of shrewd, localised observation, as kids play, squabble and cry, and men find ways to preserve or lose their dignity in the face of their poverty. There are dozens of moments which illustrate what can be achieved by doing nothing more complicated than pointing a camera in the right direction at the right time, moments which engender both humour and pathos. However, in spite of its apparent simplicity, Killer of Sheep's potency comes from the director's touching narrative, illustrating the way that Stan's marriage is affected by his circumstances, notably the dehumanising job of work in an abattoir. The scenes between him and his wife are resonant with both the struggle and rewards of love, as both work to keep the flame of their marriage alive in spite of their poverty.

Any film seeking to get under the skin of a world has to show both the rough and the smooth. Killer of Sheep pulls this off. It's possible to see how one of the characters at the grimmest margin of this world could have chosen to chuck it all in to join Jim Jones' peculiar Utopia. However, it's also clear why most wouldn't even have considered it. No matter how impoverished the world it describes, it's full of life and humour. The streets themselves become a kind of walking theatre, where you never know if a child will suddenly fly across your head leaping from building to building, or run out in front of you wearing a dog-mask. Burnett pins the world down, his camera immortalising the rhythms of the streets and speech he seems to know like the back of his hand.

If you wander round the backstreets of downtown LA today, you soon find yourself much further from the Hollywood Hills than simple geography would have you believe. Burnett's LA looks a lot like one imagines Haiti to be. In a way, it seems as though Burnett's grainy camera, lighting and sound, are the only way to truly represent this world. The minute the full force of cinematic technology is unleashed, even the grimiest corners acquire a hint of glamour. The down-to-earthness of Burnett's cinematography reveals the way in which Hollywood's technological dominance constantly helps to mythologise the American Dream. Usually, even their ugly has a beautiful, distorted feel. Killer of Sheep, is rarely ugly (though the abattoir scenes are unforgiving), but somehow it succeeds in presenting Los Angeles as ordinary, something which ironically begins to lend the city a charm that is never normally captured on film.