argie (w&d jorge blanco)

Cinema is a medium which is hostage to money. It’s the objective of every financed film to make the most of its budget to ensure the product meets certain aesthetic standards. The biggest crime is to look cheap. Even if a decade or so later, the aesthetic has moved on, ether as a result of fashion or technology, and by the time a film is twenty years old it almost invariably looks dated. Nevertheless, almost all films that make it to the mainstream are polished, to one degree or another. Unlike a novel, which can get away with the odd scraggy loose end, or Shakespeare, of whom this is also the case, cinema tends to be an unforgiving medium. If your film fails to meet a certain aesthetic standard, it won’t be taken seriously.

Which is perhaps why there seems to be so little space for the maverick within the industry. The filmmaker who is more concerned with what they want to say than how they say it. Cine povere, or Outsider Art. Argie is a great example of what we lose with this reductive filter. It’s not a perfect film. It’s rambunctious, messy, underdeveloped. There are several war scenes that border on the silly. The director, the Uruguayan Jorge Blanco, is also the lead actor. There’s an overwhelming sense of chaos, but that chaos is also energy. However, this is a film which could never have been made through conventional methods. Pablo is an Argentine exile in London at the time of the Falklands War who decides to take the battle to the natives. But he’s no terrorist, not even a soldier. He targets a woman he fancies, who also happens to fancy him. She’s a topless dancer in The Dartmouth Arms, straight out of the seventies early eighties, who also happens to be the daughter of a Spaniard who fled Franco. The Argentine and the topless dancer go on a pseudo Bonny and Clyde journey through the badlands of London, causing damage to no-one except themselves. It’s a farcical journey, summed up by Pablo taking out his violent frustration on a man who tries to pick up his girl, only to be told by her, as he’s beating him up, that the man is actually Irish.

There’s plenty of humour and pathos in Argie, but more than anything else it’s a completely valid political-cultural statement. The Argentine perspective on the war, at the time of the film’s making, had no voice within the UK. The back story of generals and repression and lost pride. The actuality of who the men who were fighting were. Blanco seeks to give them a voice, in a honkytonk style, maximising his improvised budget to conjure something quietly extraordinary. 

el desfile del amor/ the love parade (sergio pitol, tr. george henson)

Pitol’s rangy whodunit offers a vivid portrait of DF from both 1942 and twenty years later. The narrative is constructed around the enquiries of a historian into a murder at a house split into apartments in a fashionable barrio, during the war. The historian was a child living in the house at the time. Now married with two children, he has been living in the UK, but plans to return to his roots. The premise allows the writer to introduce a medley of colourful characters from the Mexican capital’s arts and social scene, highlighting its cosmopolitan nature. The narrative is slightly stop-start, and something of a shaggy dog story, but it gives an insight into the feverish atmosphere of wartime Mexico City.

cabra marcado para morrer (w&d eduardo coutinho)

Coutinho’s documentary is a testament to a filmmaker who refuses to give up. In 1964 he began making a film about the assassination of João Pedro Teixeira, the leader of a rural cooperative who had been protesting against working conditions. Two years after the activist’s death, Coutinho set about making his film, using local people as far as possible to recreate the events leading up to the murder, including Elizabeth, Teixeira’s wife and her eight children. However, the shoot was shut down by the authorities, accusing the filmmakers of being Cuban revolutionaries, and most of the material was confiscated. Some takes survived and in the early 80s, with the political climate having changed, Coutinho returned to Pernambuco in the North East of the country with a double mission: to rediscover the characters from his film and, in a different sense, to complete the film he started making twenty years earlier. The result is an act of political resistance per excellence. The story of Teixeira is narrated by the rediscovered characters, whilst luminous black and white images from the sixties fill the screen. Coutinho finally tracks down Elisabeth, who has been living for years under a different name. Now the director gets to tell her story as well, how she protested against her husband’s death and also how she lost touch with almost all of her children. Coutinho tracks them down, going to all corners of Brazil to find them, and in this way the film is also a tragic portrait of the effects of the dictatorship on the country, the way in which it ripped families to pieces. Coutinho’s film is at once a portrait of a society emerging into the light after years of repression, and a fierce political diatribe, which stands alongside the work of directors such as Pontecorvo, Costa Gavras and Solanas.  

1982, janine (alasdair gray)

Gray’s northern elegy to women, sex, his youth, the vicissitudes of being Scottish, is one of the more recherché texts of twentieth century British literature. At the conclusion of the book he includes a long list of acknowledged influences, (from Chaucer to Buñuel), but some of the ones that aren’t there include Bataille, De Sade, even Barthes. The interweaving of the personal with the imaginary is pushed in a highly subversive way, as the novel explores the narrator, Jock’s, erotic fantasises, which are chain-linked to memories of youth and early manhood (almost Wordsworthian at times). At the centre of the book is a long section set in the early years of the Edinburgh Fringe, where Jock becomes the accidental lighting designer for a show that flickers and then implodes, with references to Albert Finney and Tom Courtney. This section is a captivating read which might have stood alone as a short novel, but instead, the author framed it within the patchwork of the other chapters which alternate between scenes of the narrator’s youth and aforementioned erotic fantasies. These fantasies gradually acquire context themselves, as the memories reveal the course of the narrator’s romantic and sexual history, which have shaped the nature of the middle-aged fantasies. The novel veers between the exasperating, (even the narrator is exasperated by his fixation on Janine et al), and the appearance of being corsucatingly honest. No-one knows the true contents of an author’s mind, so there is no way of knowing how much the musings of Jock are a palimpsest for the musings of Alasdair, and it is part of the novel’s skill that this ambiguity feels so unresolved, it lies there like a tempting peach, defying the bite of conclusion.

What might be said beyond doubt is that Gray, who I met once as a lad, on a night in North London of copious whisky drinking, was out there ploughing a channel far from the quaint, polite British mainstream of his contemporaries. Think of McEwan or Murdoch or other luminaries and they have none of the visceral wallop of Gray’s prose (in which sense Chaucer seems an extremely apposite reference). Gray skedaddles in the peaks and troughs of another landscape altogether. 

sexmission (w&d juliusz machulski, w. pavel hajný, jolanta hartwig)

Poland 1984. The country had recently emerged from Martial Law, under the rule of General Jaruzelski. In the shipyards of Gdansk, Lech Walesa was leading a social movement that would change the world. Great Polish directors like Wajda, Kieslowski, Agnieszka Holland, were more or less at the peak of their powers. And Juliusz Machulski released Sexmission, a satire so crude Jonathan Swift would have been proud. Two scientists, Maks and Albert, are cryogenically stored and wake up in the year 2044 to find that men have been abolished and women rule the world. Everyone lives underground because of a nuclear accident. Maks and Albert have emerged into this brave new world, and Maks, played by Jerzy Stuhr, the protagonist of Kieslowski’s Camera Buff, is determined to convince the women that they have been missing out on something. This leads to farcical scenes with the men eventually threatened with being ‘naturalised’, ie having their gender changed, before they finally escape. When they do, they discover that the world outside is far from what they, or any of the women living below, had been lead to believe. The point of the film is in this final sequence, which one imagines was conceived during Marital Law itself, as the film was released in 1984, and Martial Law only ended in 1983. The world outside (the world beyond the Communist block) is nothing like you have been lead to believe, the film boldly declares, dressed up as a sex romp to keep the old guard amused. Reminiscent to some extent of Brazil, and presumably made on a far smaller budget, IMDB informs that it is one of the most successful Polish movies ever made, and shows that subversive, political films don’t have to be po-faced. 

stranger than paradise (w&d jim jarmusch)

Quite apart from its muted lo-fi charm, it’s intriguing to contemplate what marked Stranger Than Paradise out as the work of a filmmaker who would go on to become an undisputed star of the independent circuit. What one notes is that, beneath the apparently messy veneer, there’s a straightforward but effective narrative discipline at play. The film is divided into three parts (or acts), in New York, Cleveland and Florida. The first act introduces the characters and sets up the dynamic between Eva, the Hungarian cousin, and Willie, the good-looking but aimless protagonist. The second act develops this relationship, and the third brings it to some kind of resolution. Nothing is ever on the nose, there’s never any great sense of purpose, but the film’s structural integrity prevents it from feeling aimless or overly self-indulgent. Add to this the bewitching charm of grainy black and white, off-beat characterisation, Screaming Jay Hawkins and a dry cinematic wit and you have the recipe for a sleeper hit. I overhead someone coming out of the cinemas saying, this is the model for so many indie films, including 25 Watts, and they’re right. Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law helped to define a sub-Vigo aesthetic which has an easy-assembly feel, a textbook ‘how-to-make-a-film-on-a-shoestring’, but it’s also evident that there’s a nascent instinct for the discipline of how to make 90 minutes of cinema time feel like time well spent, something which has helped to make early Jarmusch films so iconic. 

the lover (marguerite duras, tr. barbara bray)

Duras is a name whose resonance perhaps surpasses the knowledge of her work in the Anglo-Saxon world. I had an extremely vague memory of having read her most famous novel about thirty years ago, but if this was the case, few memories remained. The novel is a strange hybrid, reminiscent in many ways of the writing of Annie Ernaux. A feminine frankness married to a deliberate flouting of narrative norms. The story roams from point to point, at times a fictionalised account of a love affair in French Indochina between a rich Chinese man and a poor French teenager, at other times a family narrative, describing the trials of the narrator’s experiences in the colonies and her turbulent relationship with her mother and her brothers. In general told in the first person, the writer has no qualms suddenly switching to the third person if she wants to change the framing. The result is easily digestible, on the edge of salacious, and incontrovertibly auto-fiction. The writer as subject, the doyenne of her story. With scope to lie and elaborate, no doubt, as a cursory read-up around the novel reveals. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the novel from this reader’s point of view is the description of the torpid world of the colonialist. Never capable of integrating into the society they inhabit, seeking to construct some kind of false entity which represents a homeland but which can never become one. As such the colonial project always seemingly doomed to failure and, more than that, a form of existential despair, an eternal failure to connect. The mother’s depression, the older brother’s psychosis, the treatment of the Chinese lover and his own neuroses, all seem to reveal the hollow foolishness of this imperial reach, one which comes at a cost to all involved. 

war and cinema: the logistics of perception [paul virilio]

Virilio’s text has a straightforward premise: that the developments in cinema and the developments in weaponry (or war) have been a complementary process. Which is also to say developments in methods of perception. These developments are evidenced in cinema’s ability to view the world from different perspectives, which is related to the demise of the horizontal battle, with war now being followed from the perspective of the sky, or space. Elements such as the introduction of colour, widescreen, sound are all charted in cinema’s technological arms race. There are fascinating details about the Nazis' quest to make colour films, spurred on by American advances. Many of the regular tools of modern warfare: radar, ballistic missiles, surveillance methods etc are linked to developments in the audio-visual field, such as the rise of television. Virilio carefully depicts the way in which the atomic bomb itself acts as a kind of camera, leaving a negative: “It left its imprint on stone walls, changing their apparent colour…the same was the case with clothing and bodies, where kimono patterns were tattooed on victim’s flesh.”

It’s a small, sweeping book, originally published in 1984, something which gives pause, and makes the reader wish there was an updated edition to take the grandiose themes the book addresses forwards. Hollywood cinema, post Star Wars, has become ever more military in its technological creation and its thematics. The links between Hollywood and the military (industrial complex) would appear to be more and more firmly entrenched, whilst US military might continues to dominate on a ‘global stage’. Soft power and hard power create a united front. There’s the remarkable paradox that people all over the world who would rage against US military intervention will happily absorb the soft power cultural warfare of Netflix and its ilk, never thinking twice about how they are made subjects of a global power structure whilst they consume the pretty pictures. 

War and Cinema would have a field day with this issue, along with the issue of 21st century surveillance and the way in which the machines we thought would liberate us are in fact being used to control and monitor our every move. 

tosca's kiss (il bacio di tosca) [dir daniel schmid 1984]

The Goethe institute on Exhibition Street is a small venue. You get neither trailers nor adverts. There's a homely air to the red seats. It feels not unlike a school hall.

The films they show are not mainstream. My friend recommended Tosca's Kiss. I knew nothing about it. The film is a documentary, made over twenty years ago. In it's company the audience visits the Verdi home for retired musicians in Milan. The opening and closing shots of the building are the only exteriors in the whole film. The rest is captured in people's rooms, in the dining room, in an old storage room, on the stairwell.

The featured characters are all over seventy, and most will be dead by now. Some sung with Callas. Others refer to Caruso as though they knew him, as they may have done. Many performed in New York, Rio, Buenas Aires or Montevideo. All have opera in their bones. The caretaker and the cleaner appear. The cleaner sings with one of the former sopranos. The small audience in the Goethe Institute burst into applause. The staff say that no-one lives in the present in this place; everyone exists in a golden past.

Schmid captures these characters with a disarming charm. It would not be hard to make the film seem like an exercise in nostalgia, but the film resists. Instead, it is a study of ageing. The characters sing with enthusiasm. They play around. They are arrogant or self-obsessed, they are kindly or lovable. Age doesn't seem to have induced wisdom, neither has it dulled their appetite for life.

I don't care for opera. By the end of the film I was happily swimming in it. Within the film, opera feels like the folk music of Italy. There's only the one shot of the outside world, but few films have ever transported me to the country of their filming so effectively. Revealing that a country is made up of the personages who live, age, and will die there. As the film began I feared that ninety minutes in this world would be stretching it. When the credits rolled it felt like the viewer was being forcibly removed from a quirky corner of musical heaven.