hamlet goes business (w&d aki kaurismäki, w. shakespeare)

On Friday we were lucky enough to attend a talk by the Argentine philosopher, Eduardo Rinesi on Shakespeare. Much of the talk focussed on Hamlet as a bridge between the renaissance world of machiavelli, and the coming world of the enlightenment, signalled by the work of Hobbes. Hamlet acts as a hinge between these two worlds, which saw the evolution of the idea of the contract, both legal and social, as society moved away from the blood feud, the revenge tragedy. The talk was engrossing and entertaining, and suggested echoes in the evolution of Latin American society, in a world where clowns roost on the political stage and seize power.

All of which set up perfectly Kaurismäki’s take on the tale. Aside from a twist at the conclusion, which could be said to lend a more Marxist take to the narrative, Kaurismäki stays faithful to Shakespeare. The originality comes from two elements: positing the story in the world of business (similarly to Kurosowa), where contemporary figures squabble to control a business empire; and the ingenuity required to relocate the play in a cinematic near-present. The former allows Claudius the priceless moment of suggesting he is sending Hamlet to London to negotiate with ‘Murdoch’, testament to the omnipresence of the Australian in the shaping of modern culture. As the writers of Succession realised, the modern globalised business world is fertile territory for Shakespearian drama. It would be interesting to learn if Jesse Armstrong is a fan of Kaurismäki.

As for the ingenuity, the director employs his now accustomed blend of deadpan humour and simplicity. If a gun is useful, he uses a gun. If poison works best, he poisons a drink or a chicken. The film flirts with realism, (notably during the titles and credits) whilst constructing its own logic, permitting characters to do whatever is needed to advance the plot. There are few exterior shots, but when Hamlet appears framed against a shipyard he has saved, it has a real impact. (And strangely makes me think of the Long Good Friday.) Kaurismäki is seeding ideas here about manufacturing, trade, globalisation and capitalism. Ideas which are often explored in his work, but tend to go under the radar, as audiences revel in his downtrodden characters, punkish sensibility and smiley Nordic misanthropy. 

kapo (alexander tisma, tr, richard williams)

As David Rieff notes in his afterword, there has been a sentimentalisation of the holocaust. The need to make it a palatable experience for a film-going public has lead to an event of unimaginable horror being the backdrop for imaginable stories of love or valour. Aleksandar Tisma’s novel is a severe corrective to this trend. It is a book which I did not enjoy reading. This seems entirely in keeping with how the process of reading about the holocaust should be. It’s not meant to be entertaining or fun. It’s meant to be unpleasant. Kapo, tells the story of a Croatian kapo, Lamian, who survives Auschwitz in large part because of his own immorality and cruelty. Tisma presents the character in old age, as his day-to-day life and memories merge. Lamian escaped but on the other hand he can never escape. He wants forgiveness, but he is too imprisoned in the gaol of his mind, deservedly so, to ever be able to seek it. Tisma, I learn, translated Kertész's Fatelessness into Serbian. He is writing within a discourse about the holocaust. (And the asides in his novel about Israel are fascinating.) In short, although the novel is shocking, cruel, to the point of being transgressive, even Sadeian, he is not writing in order to shock the reader. He is writing in order to inform, that history, the real history, might not be forgotten.  

full metal jacket (w&d kubrick, w. michael herr, gustav hasford)

I spent much of the film thinking about Docklands. What it was and what it became. How does the barely-remembered Vietnam war map onto the barely remembered Docklands  (before it became the current megalopolis Docklands). For those who don’t know: Kubrick, who didn’t like leaving Britain, reconstructed Vietnam in the ruins of the part of London known as Docklands, once the maritime hub of the capital, which as Britain declined as a trading nation, was an area that had fallen into disuse. The same Docklands would soon become the site for the development of a new financial and commercial zone, Canary Wharf.

Is there a link between Kubrick’s retrospective vision and the neo-liberal explosion that was constructed on the charred relics of his fictional Vietnam? Does the defeat of the USA reverberate with the unleashing of capital that was to follow, an unleashing that has transformed the landscape on the other side of the Thames? I remember, living in Blackheath, watching from the window of the bedsit I was living in at the time, as Canary Wharf tower was being built, going up floor by floor, like some unlikely and unwanted donation from a New York billionaire. I can date that to 1990, because I watched Mandela being released from prison on a TV in that same bedsit. 32 years ago now. Kubrick’s film is set around the Tet Offensive, in 1968, only 22 years earlier. He filmed in 1985-86, only a few years before the area’s transformation. He was closer to the Vietnam war then than we are now to the birth of turbo-capitalism, which rose from the ashes of the USA’s defeat, rising on the land where he realised his fictional recreation of that defeat.

Weirdly, it’s hard not to mourn for that cinematic vision of the Vietnam war, a cinematic vision which produced material as rich as anything US cinema has produced since. Watching the likes of Barbie and Oppenheimer, popcorn movies, one step removed from the Marvel franchise, it’s hard not to yearn for the generation whose horizons were broadened by defeat, by the tarnishing of the dream. Full Metal Jacket feels more schematic than Apocalypse or Deer Hunter, but it is still a rigid, sceptical examination of history, one which permits the construction of anti-heroes, rather than heroes, of doubt rather than affirmation. What came in the wake of this doubt was the bombast of Dockands, a requirement to shroud weakness in steel, to obliviate it from our narratives. The only time that narrative was punctured, in 2001, it was met with the force of a militarised blowback which, in theory, would insure against another Vietnam, although in practice, the empire was still just as wobbly. only this time, no-one got to make films about it. There are no wastelands in our modern techno-cities to re-enact the catastrophes of Fallujah, or Kandahar. And where the will might exist, the interest has waned. What turbo-capitalism has done so effectively is to out-source trauma, even failure. It happens in another dimension, not ours. And should anyone start to question that narrative, the counter-narratives of Trump or Brexit or Milei or Bolsonaro are wheeled out, to say: you too could live in that shiny steel tower. You may live in the ashes and debris of a bombed-out society, which was once harmonious, but don’t despair. If you kill your inner gook, you too can construct a temple in the sky, draw the blinds, press play, and lose yourself in the virtual reality of other people’s wars. 

empire of the sun (d. spielberg, w. stoppard)

At one point in the film, the young Jim, played by Christian Bale, stands in front of a giant poster for Gone With the Wind. It’s a statement shot. This is going to be a big sweeping epic movie, it’s going to transport you as only cinema can. You will experience the British experience of WW2 in the Far East from the comfort of your cinema seat. The beatings, the hunger, the desperate struggle for survival.

This might have worked, only it doesn’t. On the whole it feels as though Spielberg has too much money to play with. We as an audience are far too conscious of the vast, Hollywood expense on show. This distracts us from focusing on the deprivations of being a POW in China. It feels like Spielberg wants to walk in the footsteps of Griffiths and Gance, but he can’t find the manual to tell him how to do it, as a result revealing the limits of the Hollywood project. Just because you can throw money at something doesn’t mean you’re going to get the public to empathise with the characters, or even understand what the hell they’re going through. Empire of the Sun is kiboshed by a dodgy script and an over reliance on a child actor who has no antagonist. One wonders what Wong Kar Wai might have done with this material.

As a side note. In the UK, the Hollywood/ Art Movie dichotomy is frequently set up, with the cards usually falling on the side of Hollywood, for reasons which are linguistic but also ideological. Spielberg, master of the box office, is revered. One wonders to what extent language is the real determinant in this debate. Of course, it’s erroneous to make a judgement on the basis of one film alone, but it is interesting to note that Empire of the Sun, really doesn’t hold up. The lack of narrative coherence is precisely the thing that ‘arthouse’ film is so often criticised for, but the script of Empire of the Sun is all over the shop and the whole project ends up feeling gratingly self-indulgent. 

bonfire of the vanities (tom wolfe)

Tom Wolfe’s novel was a key text for us back in the late eighties. It was both the zeitgeist novel and our zeitgeist novel, with its Dickensian portrayal of the Big Apple, the other York. At one point the novel even mentions Limelight, (given the article ‘the’ in front of it), visited by the degenerate British hack, Fallow. This article by Bruce Bawer says a lot of the things I might say here, acclaiming the novel as both influential and one of the few that has survived the test of the time from that epoch, another world, another New York. Wolfe’s tome was modelled on the great novels of the nineteenth century, initially serialised in Rolling Stone, before being reworked prior to its final publication. Even if the author was perhaps prone to caricature, he was still operating on a vast, challenging scale. Rereading the novel today, it feels as though it successfully captures that pre-Giuliani era of a city with sharp edges, which seemed headed for inevitable conflict and societal collapse. As Bawer notes, these things never took place, even though the culture wars that Wolfe denotes rage just as fiercely, if not more so, today. In a sense it might be that they have been subsumed by the third estate in the novel, the media, for whom these culture wars are grist to their mill. Wolfe’s novel might be said to flirt with Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle, where real political change is chewed up and spat out by the recurring requirements of the media machine. One aspect of this is the way in which the novel’s narrative remains unresolved at the end, even with a coda set a year later: as though the characters are caught in an endless media cycle. The greatest survivor of this New Yorican era is presumably Trump, who no matter what else he did, learnt to ride the back of the media tiger with aplomb and has used it to his advantage ever since.

Contemplating this world with hindsight, one can’t help thinking of all the elements of the city that Wolfe chose not to include. (Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Springsteen, Warhol, Basquiat, the New York Dolls, Jarmusch, Spike Lee etc) This more artistic, less polarised vision of the city doesn’t fit with the thesis of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Whilst the race wars and urban decay which the novel appears to predict have not quite come to pass over the following thirty years, what does seem to have remained constant is the culture war matrix which the book constructs. This matrix has shaped subsequent political and social development, with the alternatives from beyond the matrix pushed to the margin. In our era, you are either a so-called woke-ist or a preppy neo-capitalist. Anything else barely gets airtime. Wolfe understood this societal evolution all too well, and in this sense Bonfire of the Vanities is distressingly prophetic. 

wings of desire (w&d wenders, w peter handke, richard reitinger)

Various thoughts occur after watching Wenders’ film for the first time.

1. Berlin

Wings of Desire was released in 1987 - filmed in the closing era of the Berlin wall, which features prominently. There’s a remarkable sequence where an old man is accompanied by an angel as he stumbles through the wasteland which used to be Potsdamer Platz (and would soon become again). There’s also archive footage of Berlin destroyed during the war. (Which did indeed bring to my mind my grandmother and great-grandparents and what they lived through). I visited Berlin two or three times as a child. Hazy memories of deserted railway tracks, which lead nowhere and were a fine playground; crossing Checkpoint Charlie; the constant sense of a city which harboured a clear and present physical threat, articulated by the wall. All of which is incidental, but related to the fact that Berlin contained a peculiar energy. West Berlin was a bubble, a dreamspace, suspended in the aspic of communism. Wenders film represents that limbo with flair. The monuments which no longer carry their intended weight, and have become a resting place for angels. The wastelands, made for circuses and reflection. The faded glory of clubs which ooze post-punk decadence; punk being the noise that empires make when they are hollowed out, leaving an empty shell where people can scream with fury or delight. Wings of Desire is very much a companion piece to Żuławski’s Possession or Bowie’s Low. 

2 Nick Cave

Who should wander into this dreamscape but the youthful magi himself, Nick Cave. I played the song he and the Seeds sing in the film (From Her to Eternity) on the jukebox in Fenix the other day and my companions’ attitude was that this might be a great song but I really didn’t need to inflict it on them. Cave’s stringent rock adds the perfect touch to cut against the way Wenders’ allows his film to drift towards sentimentalism. The subsequent sequence where Ganz and Solveig Dommartin meet is perhaps the weakest in the movie, and reflects the way that it might be said that Wings of Desire loses its way, as it tries to winkle out a feelgood finale, abandoning the more ambiguous tone of the first black-and-white two thirds of the film. 

3 Camera work

The opening twenty minutes or so of Wings of Desire are astonishing. The angels eavesdrop on the thoughts of man and woman, with only the children in on the game. The film seeks to capture the inner monologue of an entire city. Like something out of Kierkegaard or Strindberg All of which is made possible by the magical camera work of Henri Alekan. His camera soars through the skies, before dropping into a flat or a library or a car to steal thoughts. Reminiscent of Gasper Noe’s camera (Benoît Debie) or that of Soy Cuba (Serguey Urusevsky), the camera itself is transformed into a technological angel, one who takes the arm of the poor human and accompanies that lesser creature along the bumpy road of life. 

From Wiki:   “During filming, Alekan used a very old and fragile silk stocking that had belonged to his grandmother as a filter for the monochromatic sequences.”

the doorman [reinaldo arenas]

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A long, long time ago, New York felt like it had to be the centre of the universe.
On both a political and personal level. Even though I’d never been there.
It was culturally dominant. The films, Scorsese, Allen, natch, and a whole
lot more besides. The music, The Velvets, Dylan, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson
and what the kids now call post-punk. Blondie, Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders,
all that jazz. The art. Warhol, Basquiat, Schnabel. The club scene, which to
the ears of a curious youth sounded like the apogee of a new Roman Empire
(And from subsequent accounts it probably was.) The literature.
Interesting to note that this periodemerged before NY became ‘gentrified’ to the
extent that it supposedly has today. When there were still no-go areas. Also
interesting to note the role that a type like Kushner has occupied in this
cleansing of the city. Kushner, the mini-me Trump, the bruiser who will also
have played his part in the process of remodelling it as a sanitised, deracinated
environment which has little to do with its earlier incarnation.

The literature was spearheaded at that time, by Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the
Vanities. A vast book which we read with avid expectation. One of those
books which is no longer in fashion, but, in its moment, felt as though it
defined the shape of the world.

The first half of Arenas’ novel, which is a profoundly New York novel,
reminded me of Bonfire of the Vanities. Its premise is the travails of a
spiritual doorman in a high-end NY block of flats, and his interactions
with the residents, who seduce him, abuse him and ignore him. The
clash of cultures, which made the city seem so vital, is present in
spades. Juan, the doorman, is the beautiful immigrant ingenue, the
type who will go on to help construct the city. Although many of the
characters have a Cuban connection - Juan is a recently arrived Cuban
immigrant, others have been there longer or have more tenuous links to
the old country, Arenas succeeds in keeping this theme and his personal
issues regarding Castro’s regime in the background. In the foreground
is the satirical vision of the city.

At least for the first half of the book. The second half veers off into
the realm of metaphorical fable. Perhaps, it could be argued by the
PhD student that this fable, which involves a biblical exodus of the
rich owners’ pets, presages the way in which the city would be stripped
of its vibrant, animal life over decades to come. Although, as is the
way with metaphorical fables, it could be read in many other ways.
Needless to say, Arenas’ novel is something of a tale of two halves,
and the first Wolfeian half is the one that engaged this reader more
effectively than the second. The Doorman is one of those books which
is perhaps more interesting for the position it takes up within a cannon
than the text itself, but its a fine example of the author’s Swiftian aesthetic,
capable of mixing extreme satire with what might pass for a children’s book.