27 horas (w&d montxo armendáriz w. elías querejeta)

San Sebastian today has an affluent feel. Famed for its gastronomy and its cultural life. A tourist hotspot, an exclusive European enclave. Armendáriz’s film opens with a tracking shot, presumably filmed from a helicopter, of the bay of San Sebastian, with its beaches and waterfront, homing in on a clock which gives the time as 7am. It’s the start of a tragic 27 hours in the life of the film’s protagonist, Jan, a charismatic student junkie. Only this isn’t now, it’s back before the euro existed, when San Sebastian was still a fishing town, suffering from economic decline. The film tells the story of Jon and Maite, a pair of doomed Burroughsian lovers. Maite is played by Maribel Verdú, who would later figure as the object of the lust of Bernal and Luna in Y Tu Mama También, and a young Antonio Banderas also has a cameo, suggesting that Armendáriz was a great talent spotter. Their lowkey junkie lifestyle is juxtaposed with life in the city, where unemployment is high, riots are commonplace, and the only possibilities are to work in the fishing industry.

The film depicts this industry with a documentary flourish, getting in on the quayside and the fish market. The way that daily life in the city is captured, the bars and the dark, damp streets, is convincing. European naturalism blending with heightened Spanish drama. Cinema’s capacity to reveal the world as it is, the moment the camera runs, is one of its core strengths, something that doesn’t require a vast budget. The contrast between San Sebastián then and today is astonishing. Spain as it emerged from Franquismo was a far cry from the turbo-charged euro economy it possesses, or aspires to possess, today. Maite’s apartment overlooks the sea, and one imagines that today it would be worth a small fortune; likewise a meal in the restaurant that Jon’s parents run in a medieval quarter of the city would probably now be enough for a month’s worth of Jon’s fix. In which case it might be argued that things are better now than they were then, although it hasn’t stopped the youth from feeling disenfranchised and resorting to drugs to help them get through their days and nights.

27 Horas makes a great companion piece to Saura’s Deprisa, Deprisa. Also worth noting the brilliance of the table-football scene, where Jon plays against Banderas’ Rafa, his dealer and love rival for Maite. The table-football match is imbued with the drama of a penalty shoot-out and the skill of the players as they manipulate the stick-men is perfectly realised. It elevates this simple bar game into something epic, laced with an absurd humour. The young Banderas is great and you can see the seeds of his stardom being planted.

Finally: not a word of Euskari is spoken, so far as I could discern. The politics is implicit in the presence of the police and the riots at the edge of the story, but the film focuses on the issue of the disaffection of youth, rather than the wider causes of this disaffection. Having said which the scene where Yan is driven out into the middle of a riot is brilliantly filmed. 

the terrorist. (w&d edward yang, w. hsiao-yeh)

I only managed to catch one film in the Cinemateca Yang season. The Terrorist, which I dimly remembered having seen on MUBI once upon a time, is a beautifully layered work. A novelist leaves her husband (in order to write?) for a former lover. The husband starts to construct links between the novel she publishes and real life. It leads him to a seedy underground world, where a photographer, an extortionist pimp and his female accomplice operate. She is the bait which allows them to steal from rich men. Where do the lines between the fictional and the real cross, all of which is occurring within the context of the fictional, which the film is? And who are the terrorist, to whom the accomplice is connected, as the photographer discovers. The levels of story within story are almost Borgesian. It’s the kind of astute, literate, playful film that Anglo-Saxon culture tends to shy away from, unless there’s some kind of sentimental kernel, something which Yang decidedly resists. 

the moustache (emmanuel carrère, tr. lanie goodman)

Carrère’s curious tale of everyday madness. We can all go mad one day, just like that, and end up in a Macau hotel, wondering what we did with our sanity. I wonder if it was in any way inspired by Scorsese’s short, The Big Shave. I once read a book by the author that annoyed me so much that I didn’t write about it here, and almost made me quit this whole process. I can't remember why, or even what the book was called. Maybe I invented it. The Moustache did not have the same effect, albeit one gets the sense that the writer is a cold fish. But that coldness underpins this savage dissection of ordinary bourgeois society, so it’s all good. 

mauvais sang (w&d leos carax)

The thing about becoming a cult director is that you need to deliver something that is genuinely out there. Even if that pushes you into territory that is, frankly, unintelligible. I have no real idea what is going on in Mauvais Sang. There were long periods where I was scrabbling to make sense of things, but every now and again the screen would burst into life with a vengeance. More than a coherent narrative, Mauvais Sang feels like an archipelago of moments, which are loosely arranged around selected ideas. The fact that one of these ideas is that humanity is threatened by a retrovirus and that Piccoli, Binoche and Lavant are about to steal the vaccine, adds a certain piquancy. Other moments include: they’re not really going to make Binoche jump out of the plane are they? Lavant famously dance-running to Bowie’s Modern Love, for no real reason other than to give the film an injection of unimpeachable cool; Binoche and Lavant having a shaving cream fight; and so on and so forth. Carax sets out his stall as a filmmaker whose radical imagination is enough to get you hooked, and to be fair, he has continued to deliver, with Pont Neuf, Holy Motors etcetera. Film as event, rather than narrative; film as a sensory experience rather than an intellectual one, no matter how much of a debt is being paid to Godard, or, one would like to think in this film, Roeg and Cammell´s Performance.

america (baudrillard)

At one point in Geoff Dyer’s excellent introduction, he suggests that in the era of Obama, Baudrillard’s vision, rooted in the Reagan era, might come across as dated. It’s the only vaguely negative thing Dyer has to say about America. He extols the way it seems to transcend its intellectual silo to emerge as a classic text in its own right. However, this comment is one thing Dyer got wrong. Because reading it in the age of Trump, (albeit an age on pause, but Trump will surely define this era in a way that Biden never will), Baudrillard’s acerbic take on the dynamics and show of US power and politics feels more relevant than ever. 

America is a book riddled with observations of the utmost ingenuity and brilliance. Reading Baudrillard’s prose is not a straightforward process. The prose is frequently dense, contrived, at times seemingly overcooked, but then, as one comes across sequences of intolerable brilliance, one wonders if the density of the text means that the reader cannot process all the glory that it contains, and that it merits being reread until every ounce of meaning and non-meaning  can be extracted. I found myself rereading paragraphs multiple times, and sometimes it was only on the 235th reading that I finally got what the author was trying to say. People might say that this is a flaw in the writing, but it is also testament to its depth, one has to mine the text rigorously to extract its riches. 

Perhaps because his focus is so much on the juxtaposition between the desert and the city, the author’s vision feels in no way dated. The meditations on the comparative role of culture in European and American society are just as on point. Likewise his observation on societal structures: “Entire social groups are being laid waste from the inside (individuals too). Society has forgotten them and now they are forgetting themselves. They fall out of all reckoning, zombies condemned to obliteration, consigned to statistical graphs of endangered species. This is the Fourth World.”

The quotable passages are limitless, it’s like plucking pearls from the seafloor, but I leave the reader with one more which again leapt out for the way it demarcated the limit between a European consciousness and an American one: 

“We fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavour and seduction, we who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful and for whom only the heroic distinction between nature and culture is exciting, we who are unfailingly attached to the wonders of critical sense and transcendence find it a mental shock and a unique release to discover the fascination of nonsense and of this vertiginous disconnection, as sovereign in the cities as in the deserts. To discover that one can exult in the liquidation of all culture and rejoice in the consecration of indifference.”

blue velvet (w&d david lynch)

Given the forests and terabytes which have been dedicated to this movie, it seems redundant to add much more. Mr C and I watched it at the Curzon Soho, prefaced by one of those unfortunate spoiler introductions which have you putting your fingers in your ears so that you don’t lose the surprise of what you’ve hoped you’ve forgotten. It’s another one of those films I saw on the floating island in York University’s man-made lake, thirty years ago. There was hype about it even then and the hype has only increased. I realised that I hadn’t  seen it since, even though I’ve probably talked about it ad infinitum. So, a few notes and no more:

Hopper & Rossellini. The film rests on Hopper’s evil and Rossellini’s insanity. Hopper achieves something which even now seems shocking. His character seems unhinged and it feels as though the actor is as well. It’s grand guignol and a great, unnerving performance. Likewise, Rossellini gives film-star wattage to her damaged chanteuse. There’s no real character development, there’s no great logic to what’s happening, it’s not James Elroy, but the film succeeds in surfing mood and colour, with a frothy peak of violence, which gives this scarcely credible world enough substance to carry it off. In spite of:

Dern & MacLachlan. The love story between the two of them is pure pastiche. It ties into Lynch’s subversive vision, but it also tips the movie towards farce. Dern feels wasted in her girly role: she manages to suggest that she too has a darker side which the script has neglected to develop. 

Drugs. One of these days, a la Said and colonialism, someone is going to write the study of the influence of the drugs trade on US culture. Although it’s underplayed, the foundation on which the film’s evil is based is the drugs trade, the pernicious root which facilitates the plot. 

Dean Stockwell. This is one of the great cameos in one of the great Lynchian scenes, blending humour and horror and caricature. Lynch does great (bad) party scenes. 

The finding of the severed ear is the American counterpoint to the cutting of the eye in Chien Andalou? 

the legend of suram fortress (d. parajanov, dodo abashidze, w. vaja gigashvili, daniel chonqadze)

This is a wonderfully chaotic film, a beautiful collection of images, stories, characters, thoughts, dreams. Like stumbling across the notebook of an unknown genius in a language that you can’t read, but whose very form is enough to tell you all you need to know. In a way perhaps cinema at its purest is a return to the pictogram, sign and meaning unified to reveal all in the image of a frame. If this were really so, Parajanov is one of those few poets who offers hints of what a wonderful world it could be.

Legend of Suram Fortress is ‘about’ a fortress which has been destroyed and cannot be rebuilt. Until, the soothsayer, whose circuitous story we have already learnt, reveals what’s required and a valiant young warrior agrees to entomb himself in the castle walls. However, most of this emerges in the film’s final ten minutes. In the preceding seventy, we travel the length and breath of Georgia, meeting too many characters to keep count of. Pomegranates are abused, bagpipes are blown and camels wend their way towards the coast. In one dazzling scene, medieval warriors pace the waterfront with supertankers lurking in the sea behind them.

There must be a whole host of ways of interpreting The Legend, with subtexts relating to national myths; the filmmaker’s own relationship to the USSR; and who knows what else. These aspects for now pass me by. What remains is the declaration of a filmmaker who’s willing to challenge his audience into re-evaluating what the experience of watching cinema can be. Not the act of following the thread of a narrative, but leaping from star to star. As such he almost seems to be challenging the whole notion of the Western narrative tradition, which had been waiting for cinema to be invented and Parajanov to arrive and show that stories don’t need beginnings, middles and ends. They need visions.  

warriors of tibet: the story of aten and the khampas' fight for the freedom of their country [jamyang norbu]

What happens when exiled, bereaved, your family killed, your home purloined, your life is brought to a premature conclusion?

Jamyan Norbu’s account of the life of Aten, a native of Tibet displaced by the Chinese in the early sixties, does not provide us with the answer to that question, because it is at exactly that point that the book ends. Aten finally crosses the Himalayas, arriving in Dharamsala in India, his life as he knew it now no more than a memory. It is these memories that the book vividly conveys. Life on the high Tibetan plain. The day to day domestic problems. The importance of religion and pilgrimage. As well as the presence of the Chinese, whose occupation is cruel yet benign until Mao finally turns to the task of subjugating the ancient culture, beginning a process of destruction which continues to this day.

The book brings to mind Pinter’s Mountain Language. The Chinese are even attempting to destroy the words the Tibetans employ. At first Aten tries to work with the Chinese, his journey mirroring that of the Dalai Lama, spending a year in China being trained to become a figure they will use to govern the country. Here are fascinating insights into the way in which China’s seemingly sudden emergence as an economic superpower is actually part of a process and a way of thinking that has been in development for far longer than anyone realised. The subjugation of Tibet and other indigenous peoples within and on the edges of its borders marked the start of a process which continues apace. Aten notes the way in which the occupation became more and more savage, until it reaches the point where he has no option but to join the catastrophic resistance campaign, with devastating personal results.

This is a book written in memory about a lost world. The miracle is that the narrator, as conveyed by the author, seems to have retained through his affection for what he has lost, his sense of humour and humanity. Where one might expect fierce anger, the reader encounters equanimity. For anyone with an interest in the fate of Tibet, or displaced peoples anywhere in the world, this book represents a compelling read.  

in search of a distant voice [w. taichi yamada]

Yamada's story is so slight you can barely hear it whispering between the pages. The narrative describes an episode in the life of Kasama Tsuneo, an immigration officer who lives and works in Tokyo. One day, whilst out on a mission, he is overwhelmed by an unexplained orgasmic wave; a short while later the voice of a woman appears in his head. The voice has sought him out, and is able to communicate with him at any given moment. The voice disrupts his career and his arranged marriage, and generally haunts poor Tsuneo. He finally reveals to the voice a story of how he brought about the downfall of Eric, a gay antiques dealer, who he worked for in Portland, Oregon, when he was staying in the States, as an illegal immigrant. The voice could be Eric, come back to haunt him in the guise of a woman, or it could be nothing to do with Eric. Yamada offers little by way of explanation.

This is part ghost story, part love story, and part (one suspects) commentary on the disconnectedness of modern Japan. To my mind it felt somewhat undercooked, but this might be because the culture I belong to is too clumsily steeped in notions of discernible significance. There's one point where the Woman's voice offers Tsuneo a haiku. The delicacy of this poetic form might be the best way of appreciating what Yamada is trying to achieve; the subtle unwrapping of a seemingly centred soul; the revelation that all of us have secrets in our closet. Furthermore, ghosts would seem to be, by definition, ephemeral creatures, beyond any evident grasp, and Yamada's use of the ghostly voice as an agent of disconcertion, rather than fear, is part of its appeal. Tsuneo never seems scared of this voice, indeed he feels a greater affinity with it than he does with the people he knows. Perhaps, to extrapolate, Yamada's thesis might be that love is like a ghost: something with the power to possess the soul without effort; something that, when it reaches out and siezes us, we are powerless to resist, no matter how great or small its connection to our daily lives. When the voice tells Tsuneo, shortly before leaving him, that she loves him, this seems entirely plausible, even though the two have never apparently met. Love functions, as do ghosts, on a metaphysical plane, its presence both tangible and intangible at the same time.

the sacrifice (d. tarkovsky)

I first saw The Sacrifice when I was at university in York, presumably upon its release in 1986 or 87. I used to go to the film club in the large comfortable auditorium, frequently in N's company. The auditorium was built on what was claimed to be the largest artificial lake in Europe, though that now seems doubtful, and word had it that it was sinking, as the direct result of a Boomtown Rats concert the year before I arrived. I vaguely realised that the film I was watching was supposed to be the work of a seminal director, but my memories of that viewing remain vague, and dominated by the spectacular closing scene.

One's reaction to a work of art is always conditioned by the conditions under which one sees it. These conditions might include one's state of mind, the person in whose company one sees or experiences the work, one's age, or countless other factors. It seems pertinent to allude to this earlier watching as the film itself is so self-consciously addressing the issue of ageing. It is the last film Tarkovsky made; it is dedicated to his son; the final scene is of Alexander's young son addressing a question to his father who is being removed in the manner of a modern day Lear. One cannot help but feel that, perhaps like Lear, which it so consciously echoes, this is a film best seen from a reflective perspective, located not so far from the threshold of death; even if that death were merely the starting point for the next round of eternal recurrence (or 'return' in the script's translation) as the mysterious postman, Otto, suggests.

Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche are all name-checked in the opening twenty minutes. The parameters are laid down. But the influence of two other northern artists seems stronger. It's impossible not to feel the shadow of Bergman looming over Alexander's struggles. Alexander is played by Erland Josephon, a long term collaborator of Bergman's. His depiction of an isolated soul, seeking not merely to create but actually to become a work of art, references the filmmaker, as does his character's name, an echo of Bergman's childish incarnation in Fanny and Alexander. The other key influence seems to be Chekhov. In some ways The Sacrifice feels like a dystopian reading of Chekhov (through Beckett). Although two of the characters arrive in a nifty BMW, the women wear dresses that look more like something out of turn of the century Russia than an Abba influenced Sweden.

All these influences are brought to bear and, as one of the key moments of the film shows, they all count. The reason the characters are gathered is to celebrate Alexander's birthday. Otto, the postman who seems more like the boatman at the Styx, brings Alexander a large 16th century map of Europe as a present - a present which is a sacrifice, as all presents, he says, should be. They talk about how Europe has altered, and what those early inhabitants might have made of it. All this precedes the film's central tenet: the occurrence of the fabled nuclear strike. Unless Alexander is prepared to sacrifice himself to redeem time and the world, nuclear winter is upon us. In the lead-up to the moment when the world ends, the film explores what it is that will be lost, and what it might be that has brought us to that point.

At the time the film was made, Europe was still the front line of a potential nuclear war. Now, twenty years later, the terms of the chess match have changed. The fear of a third world war, which clearly haunted Tarkovsky, has receded, to be replaced by other millennial fears. The slow, sepia shots of crowds rushing through a devastated street, which punctuate the movie, seem just as pertinent in this era of ever-more-dramatic Hollywood apocalypse movies; or McCarthy's The Road. Alexander's sacrifice may have staved off one damnation, but it hasn't kept the others at bay.

In a film so steeped in Western culture, (this review hasn't mentioned the influence of Leonardo, Pierro della Francesca or Russian icon painters), the latter stages suggest that Tarkovsky perceived another direction for the world to turn. Alexander listens to Japanese music, and wears an oriental cloak, decorated with the Yin and Yang, as he summons up the courage to take the step of destroying his home in order to save the world. His son tends to the tree he has 'created' in a Japanese manner. He carries water to nurture it. This echoes an idea Alexander expresses at the film's opening, as he 'plants' the tree, that if we were to find one ritual to perform every day, at a set time, even were that just to pour a glass from the tap and then throw that water away, it might create a foundation of meaning in our lives.

This notion, redolent of Zen Buddhism, allied to the restoration of faith (those who fail to believe in God are those who have never been desperate enough to need to, Alexander claims as he prays) offer, so the filmmaker seems to suggest, an escape route from the terminal end that centuries of Western culture have created. In burning his home, Alexander destroys his possessions, books, maps and all. There is a way out, but it requires sacrifice.

Tarkovsky's film is no easier to watch twenty years on. It is still a long haul of a movie, demanding the viewer's exhaustive attention. The underlying themes the film explores seem no less pertinent today than they did twenty years ago. The notion of sacrifice, personal, societal and cultural, in the quest for nothing more than survival, seems even more relevant. The conditions under which the film is watched have altered less than time might have lead one to expect.

The lake still may or may not be the largest artificial lake in Europe, (this remains debatable), but the auditorium would still appear to be sinking.