the deer hunter (w&d michael cimino, w. deric washburn, louis garfinkle)

When I got home I thought it was incumbent to look up the discourse on ‘Deer Hunter Racist’. There was not as much as I might have anticipated. Cimino’s film occupies a curious space. Known as a Vietnam war movie, the Vietnam sections of the film actually feel like background for the director’s real interest, which is is the dissolution of the immigrant American dream. It might be that twas ever thus, but this is effectively a buddy movie, about three men from a close-knit community who stray into a nightmare. A nightmare which just happens to have been caused by the demented actions of their government. Cimino’s film is always at its purest when the action occurs in the Pennsylvania mining town that Mike, Nick and Steve come from. First names as common as any in the Anglo-Saxon world, but their surnames are of Russian descent, a telling choice, given that it’s the commie Russians that the USA was supposedly trying to defeat in South East Asia. A Russian Orthodox Church looms over the small town, looking like something out of the Donbas, and it’s here that the citizens are married and buried. The first hour of the film is locked into the creation of this world and the personal relationships that lurk there. This could be American Graffiti, or The Last Picture Show.

Vietnam is the fly in the ointment. It’s not an unreasonable position to criticise the film for not reflecting the Vietnamese experience, or indeed for portraying the Vietnamese characters as bloodthirsty gamblers, hooked on Russian Roulette, an idea which was apparently the invention of Cimino and his screenwriters. But it would also be to miss the point. The Russian Roulette is a device, which ties in with the band of brothers’ love of hunting, guns and violence, a violence which does a 180 degree turn, turning the gun back on themselves. The deer aren’t going to provoke that, but the Vietnam War will.

Through all this De Niro gives a magisterial performance. Vaguely normal, vaguely handsome, vaguely ugly with his sailor’s beard, he has the air of a leader and a survivor, a man who is of the world he inhabits and yet is not. It’s intriguing that in the credits, the last image is of De Niro’s Mike falling over. For all his capacity to control and lead, he is unable to rescue his friend from the trap that has been laid.

So Deer Hunter is a film which opens itself to perhaps deserved criticism, whilst at the same time providing a coruscating vision of American Imperialism. It has been over thirty years since I last saw the film. Its impact was telling then and its power has not diminished. It’s also instructive to think that the chances of a similar film being made about more recent US adventures is minimal. As though the military PR men sat down and watched the ’Nam movies, and then told Hollywood: no more next time round. The scenes of the US Saigon embassy is in its final days could be mapped on to events in Kabul. A critique of a government willing to cripple and kill its own in pursuit of its imperialist ambitions is no longer the kind of thing the studios are willing to finance. Instead we get the false war wish fulfilment of Tarantino or the vapid escapism of the Marvel franchise. (Or “ancient Greece”)

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. 

interiors (w&d allen)

Interiors, a family drama which has s tragic conclusion strangely reminiscent of Roma, is the film that reveals the filmmaker Allen might have been. A famous admirer of Bergman, among other European auteurs, this was Allen’s serious film whose Bergmanian influence is worn on its sleeve. There’s many a carefully composed shot which goes against the usual Allen grain, giving the film a somewhat ponderous air which at times has the feel of a student homage. On the other hand, there are moments and scenes, in particular the wedding scene, which suggest a more emotionally invested artist than he eventually became. (There may be exceptions to this rule, such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Blue Jasmine). Allen will always be a curious figure, very much of the zeitgeist, revered and now despised in almost equal measure. His star is waning, and has been for many years, even without the scandal, so much so it’s hard to remember how influential and loved he was back in the dog days of the twentieth century. (Or should that be the glory days.) The Allen who turned down the Oscars to play with his jazz band, the one who had mastered the art of independent film making in a way no-one else quite managed in the USA, master of his own destiny, standing apart from the system. Interiors would be an example of this, the artist who was prepared to piss everyone off, the clown who suddenly starts acting in Chekhov plays. It suggests a destiny that Allen would never be able to pursue, because the truth is that his independence was always limited; it was always contingent on working within a lighter register which would make the stars who still queue up to work with him look good. In this context it’s worth celebrating the work of his cast, in particular Keaton, Marybeth Hurt, Geraldine Page and Richard Jordan, who were willing to forego the usual pleasures of being an engaging Allen character to join him on his curious mission to discover his inner, unironic artist. 

shosha (isaac bashevis singer)

We went to Krochmalna Street, the street in Warsaw that Singer’s narrator, Aaron Greindinger, was raised on and the street Shosha, the woman he fell in love with as a child, still lived on when Aaron returned many years later, so that he fell in love with her all over again, in spite of the fact that they now had so little in common. It’s not clear to the narrator or the reader how much this second infatuation is with Shosha or with a romanticised vision of his own childhood, described so briefly in the opening pages of the novel. Walking down the street as it now stands makes the protagonist's act of nostalgia seem even more nostalgic, for the street full of Jewish life which Singer or Aaron would have known is no more. In its place is a long road with several stunted tower blocks. In one corner of the street there was a small stall under a tarpaulin, selling vegetables and pickles, maybe the only ghostly hint of the smells and the bustle which Singer so vividly describes. The Jewish quarter is no more. Almost all of Warsaw was destroyed in the war, and though much has been rebuilt, the Jewish quarter wasn’t. A whole world vanished. People, buildings, synagogues, customs. Nevertheless, it can still be visited in the pages of Singer’s novel. Literature transcends even genocide. The novel was published in 1978, so the world the novelist conjures was already an act of memory. The novelist would have been aware, when he wrote the book, of the alchemical nature of his craft. These characters might have died in the war; on the road, as supposedly happened to Shosha; in the camps; or in the ghetto, but in the writer’s happy-go-lucky prose they live on. As does Krochmalna Street. Because the truth is that I visited it twice when I was in Warsaw. Once when I walked down the street which is still called by that name in googlemaps, and a second time as I strode through the words of Singer’s novel. And of those two visits, the one that seemed most real, or most alive to me, was the latter.

the snow leopard [peter matthiessen]

Journeys. When compiling a script report, much attention is paid to the journey of the character. The notion that something starts in one place, proceeds to another, and in that process, is altered, changed, their perception of the world shifted.

What better way to do this than through the vehicle of a journey itself? But then, as all life is a journey, how should a journey be classified? These criticisms are a kind of journey, embarked on for a reason, to come to an end for another. People go on journeys abroad all the time, and come back much the same as they started. And, perhaps, if one listens to one's inner Buddhist, there's no such thing as 'development', that holy grail of script editors, NGOs and governments. There is nothing but the realisation of our incapacity to change anything, and the acceptance of that fact, and the enrichening of our lives as a result of this acceptance.

Matthiessen is a Buddhist, and his book describes a journey he took, in 1973, across the Nepalese Himalayas to a land called the Inner Dolpo, a land as much Tibetan as Nepalese, and one which had remained essentially unchanged for as long as it has been populated by man, the inhabitants eking out a harsh living in a cruel climate. The author treks through the varying topography, the Winter accelerating the higher he climbs, with each new settlement seeming like a different world, so separated are they one from the other, with no television or internet to generate a common culture between villages only a few miles apart, but a mountain pass away. Part of the pathos of reading Matthiessen's account of his time there is the not-knowing how the last thirty years or so has treated this corner of the world. If you look on the internet, you'll find dozens of trekking expeditions advertised, but little information as to Dolpo's development. If that's the right word. Matthiessen's thesis would appear to be that its inhabitants are content with the life they live, no matter how harsh, and that this contentment is connected to the pervasiveness of the Buddhist faith.

At one point he describes visiting a hermetic monk who lives in a small walled cave, perched on the side of the mountain. The view, the view which has never changed, is of sky and mountain. He cannot see the valley below. Matthiessen asks if this doesn't become monotonous, and the monk laughs and talks of how lucky he is. In a sense this pinpoints the Buddhist's dilemma: if you've chosen (or been chosen) to live in the middle of nowhere, you either learn to love it, or you go mad. However, as the slightest awareness of Tibet's political history reveals, it's perhaps more complex when you leave (or are made to leave) your middle of nowhere, and find yourself thrown into a world where the fact of your acceptance of your lot can be turned against you.

This issue isn't really within the remit of Matthiessen's book. He's offering nothing more than his personal account of a journey, which also manages to be a description of his journey through Buddhism itself. With his rangy, easy going prose, Matthiessen succeeds in conveying the details of his religion to the reader in a way which always seems informative, never preachy. If this journey does anything, it seems to cement and root his understanding of Buddhism, as he discerns its traces and influence in the faces and habits of the men and women he meets along the way, taking his readers with him. It seems doubtful to this reader that any single book has ever truly changed or 'developed' anyone, and this book is just another stepping stone, or mountain pass, on the long journey of reading. Nevertheless, it succeeds in reminding the reader that there are other ways of living, beyond books, beyond the material, and leaves the reader feeling a mixture of jealousy and a mysterious nostalgia for this other life, which was known in another life, which lives on in us still, a lost cousin, beckoning from a mountain hideaway.