apocalypse now (w&d coppola, john milius, michael herr)

Things that strike one on rewatching:

Coppola’s editorial boldness. The superimposition of faces over images. The management of rhythm. It’s a long film but it never feels long.

The American nightmare. Am also reading John Lee Anderson’s book on Afghanistan at the moment. It’s astonishing, perhaps criminal, how the same trope recurs over and again. The imperial overreach. The dystopia. The chronicle of a failure foretold. But whereas North American cineastes grappled with Vietnam, the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns have never had their Apocalypse Nows or Deer Hunters. Perhaps the decline of an empire goes hand in hand with the failing capacity for self-awareness. 

7 días de enero (w&d juan antonio bardem, w. gregorio morán)

Madrid, January 1977. Shortly following the death of Franco, Spain stands at a crossroads between continued autocracy (military dictatorship) and democracy. In the era when democracy meant something. Bardem’s film looks at events in the city that took place over the course of a week, when the military killed protesting students and committed a massacre of trade union activists and lawyers in Calle Atocha. Who will prevail? We know the answer to this question now. Democracy returned to Spain, and the events of the film played a part in that process. It seems astonishing that for nearly forty years, Spain was under the rule of Franco. The film is at its strongest when it shows the far right as they come together in antiseptic social surroundings or at masculine military gatherings which terminate with ‘patriotic’ singing. At other moments the film feels overlong and lacking the focus of the other film of Bardem I watched not so long ago. It feels as though the filmmaker is seeking to cram in as much information as he can. However, the importance of the film on a political level transcends its aesthetic limitations. At a time when the USA seems to be encouraging its own neo-fascist secret police to do whatever they want, it’s important to be reminded why the extreme right is so dangerous. Because it believes it has an entitlement to take the law into its own hands. One suspects the likes of Vance would have got on very well in Franco’s Spain. 

the marriage of maria braun (w&d fassbinder. w. pea fröhlich, peter märthesheimer)

Fassbinder’s rambling movie is gloriously chaotic, barging its way through the German postwar years like a drunk stocking up in a supermarket at closing time. Everything happens fast, then it doesn’t, then it does again. Maria is married! Her husband is dead! She starts sleeping with a GI! She’s pregnant! Her husband is alive! She’s not pregnant! She’s a businesswoman! Her husband is in prison! She’s sleeping with her boss! He’s free! He’s gone! He’s back! Two hours of seismic narrative beats and zooms. It’s an erratic but entertaining journey, which offers a commentary on modern West Germany which is hard to follow, so many years later. (Does anyone remember Helmut Schmidt, whose photo occupies the closing frame?) However, the sheer energy of the filmmaking seems to compensate for the spinning compass of the narrative needle.

The opening sequence, in bombed, post-war Germany, tallies with a biography of Nico I have just finished, and strangely, as my father flirts with death, (successfully keeping it at bay for now), I am given a window on the life my grandmother would have lead in the aftermath of the war, the life my father was born into. The generations that lived through the complete destruction of most German and Polish cities are ebbing away. Someone born today is not far short of a century from those times. (I was born in ’66, so the equivalent retrospective time journey from my birth would take me to 1886, a date which seems to belong to another consciousness altogether.) Fassbinder captures those years, the desperation they provoked and the way the drive for survival overrode pre-war’s social codes and quaint bourgeois morality. He relishes in the chaos and energy that those years inspired, with Maria Braun becoming a rambunctious anti-heroine, stepsister to the desperate Christa Päffgen. 

woyzech (d. herzog, w. büchner)

Herzog’s Woyzech is a faithful treatment of the play, which is notable for two reasons. One is the way in which the naturalism of cinema permits the story to be completely immersed in the world it emerged from. The small German town with its tavern, town square and nearby fields represents Büchner’s world in the way the theatre never can, for better and for worse. The second is the acting of Kinski, who could have been born to play the part.

The naturalism is actually quite strange, as Büchner’s text is famously unnaturalistic. Woyzech is one of the first great anti-heroes of the 19th century, stepbrother to Raskalnikov. His brain is disordered, he doesn’t fit within the bucolic constraints of provincial life. Büchner emphasises this via the strangeness (the unnaturalness) of the play’s dialogue. The inner workings of Woyzech’s mind are placed on display and spoken out loud. There are moments when the prettiness of Herzog’s pictures jars with this, as though the strangeness is seeking a way to get out, to make its presence felt. The only real outlet is Kinski himself, and the actor’s wild mannerisms feel suitably out of keeping with the idyllic surroundings.

A side note. I think the first time I saw this play was in Stratford, directed by my friend Sean Holmes. He was permitted to stage it in a large barn which was being used for more experimental work for a while, I believe. I have a memory of it being a brilliant white space, which he informs me it wasn’t, and the action playing out in a series of vignettes scattered across the space, which we looked down on from above. I recall it having an alt brilliance to the banal stagings of the RSC. (Living in Montevideo people eulogise the RSC but back then it seemed like it produced the most banal theatre imaginable.) In the cast were a future Hollywood star and other young actors who were clearly relishing the opportunity to do something a bit more leftfield. (Yes, gentle reader, for the RSC, Woyzech was still leftfield back then and probably still is.) Also in the audience on the night I saw it was Sarah Kane. 

camera buff (w&d krzysztof kieslowski)

Camera Buff  is one of Kieslowski’s earliest features. A cursory glance at IMDB however reveals that he had more than a decade of experience making documentaries by the time he came to make Camera Buff. Given this, it would seem there is more than a slight element of autobiography to the film, which narrates the story of Filip, a seemingly innocuous husband and worker with a young son who is given a camera which changes his life. Filip is commissioned by the factory boss to make a short documentary about an anniversary celebration, a documentary which ends up winning third prize in a festival and launching him on an erratic and perilous career as a filmmaker. Filip becomes increasingly obsessed by the camera’s perspective, seeing the world through its viewfinder, something that leads to him becoming distanced from his wife, as well as compelling him to capture aspects of the world which the state would rather weren’t acknowledged. It’s a film about film, with plenty of wry humour (“Why did you include a shot of a pigeon in the documentary?”) and a slightly acerbic take on the industry. It’s also a great portrayal of the extent of freedom in communist Poland. 

if on a winter’s night a traveller (italo calvino)

The longer I was reading this book, for the third or fourth time, the harder I found it to finish. There were several points over the fortnight I was reading it when I really believed I could find myself  reading it for years. Sentence by sentence, idea by idea. 

I first read the novel as an eighteen year old. I have a memory of mentioning it in a Eng lit class of Lachlan Mackinnon. In relation to Shakespeare’s technical ingenuity. Or something pretentious like that. I recall being dazzled by it. Hard not to be, on the first time of reading. Re-reading again, certain passages are lodged in the brain. The ringing phone. The vision of the world stripped bare. There is much that is still breathtaking. 

At the same time, even works of structural genius start to date. There’s something a little tired about the depiction of women. Even if the writer seeks to acknowledge this. The novel has more context now. Structural ingenuity went mainstream with David Mitchell, David Nicholls, Tom McCarthy among others in the UK, not to mention those beyond these island shores. People have read Borges now, if not Cortazar. Of course, Calvino himself was writing within the tradition of the nouveau roman, not to mention Sterne, Rabelais et al. 

In a sense I can’t help thinking that Calvino failed, for all the brilliance of If On A Winter’s Night. He should never have stopped writing it. The idea and the novel deserve to be a thousand chapters or a thousand years long. Perhaps I slowed down because I didn’t want to finish. The idea is infinite. It should never end. Neither should the book.

133 (d. eugeni bonet & eugènia balcells)

133 is a curio. The story goes that in 1979, in Barcelona, Eugeni Bonet came across a record which contained 133 sound effects. He and his co-director, Eugènia Balcells, would collect old footage from the Barcelona flea markets. They set about selecting a piece of footage for each on of the 133 sound effects. The resulting film is 45 minutes long. Some sound effects last for no more than a few seconds. Each moment is stitched together with a brief frame of black. The 133 moments are encyclopaedic. There is home footage from people’s super-8 cameras. There are scientific treatises. There’s documentary footage. There are also clips from old studio films. There’s black and white footage and colour footage. Some images are banal: a plane sound effect has footage of a plane. Others are spectacular, including a memorable black and white sequence where a group of Africans try and fail to capture an elephant. Some moments appear diagetic, with the sound effect complementing the image on screen; others are subversive, with the sound effect making a commentary on the images, or vice versa. Although it wouldn’t be quite true to say the whole world of cinema is contained within the film’ s 45 minutes, what might be true to say is that the film, a sublime Borgesian text if ever there was one, offers the possibility of imagining what a film containing every possible permutation of cinema might look like. This is simultaneously one of the most down-at-heel, straightforward films ever constructed, requiring nothing more than the capacity to select and edit footage, and also one of the most elaborately ambitious films ever made, with aspirations to a vision of cinematic possibility that the sly premise gradually reveals. If you can ever find a way to catch it, do so, it will be one of the best spent 45 minutes of your brief life. 

days of heaven (w&d terrence malick)

Just because a film is pretty to look at doesn't make it a masterpiece. It needs a bit more than sweeping vistas and chiselled jaws. Fortunately Malick's now seminal film is more than just a pretty face. 

All the Malick tropes are here in action. The voiceover, the imminence of death, the poeticism of the everyday. This was just his second film and it was as though he emerged fully formed, a filmmaking monster who acted with complete assurance whilst everyone else was scrabbling around learning the rules. The real danger which Days of Heaven faces as a work of art is that it is too perfect. Something the filmmaker appeared aware of, deliberately throwing away his ending as though to throw the audience off track. It comes as no surprise that he followed the young girl Linda down the railway line at the end of the movie, heading off into the unknown, not to make another film for over a decade.

It's Linda who narrates. Her deadpan tone and offbeat perception keeps the film grounded in the face of the epic menage a trois love story that drives the narrative. The child's eye sees things in a different light; it has more in common with the philosopher than the adults, caught up in their emotional ties. The things that Malick really seems to delight in are the offcuts, the shards, the scraps of life around the edges. A tap dancer; a locust; the shape of the wind. As a result the most affecting aspect of the film's narrative has nothing to do with the drama of its central characters. It's the way in which it somehow captures the impermanence of the life these people lived and the value which this impermanance bestowed on the ordinary, small aspects of being human.

Days of Heaven is, in its way, a Western. If a Western is a movie that captures what it meant to live at the edge of the known world. The precariousness, the sense that you could fall off at any moment. Meaning you had to savour what there was to be savoured; something Malick's vision and Almendros' cinematography do with a vengeance.