nostalgia (mircea cărtărescu, tr. julian semilian)

Cărtărescu’s fame has spiralled in recent years. The Twiterati are in a state of extreme excitement whenever his name crops up. Nostalgia is my first dive into his writing, and it’s clear that the author possesses what they always called back in my Writer’s Room days “a voice”. Nostalgia consists of five stories which are at most obliquely connected. The first deals with a Russian roulette player, who defies the odds. The last with an architect who creates the music of the spheres. Both these stories are breathlessly brilliant, in the way the writer’s imagination appears to stretch the boundaries, pushing the stories beyond any anticipated limits, in the process questioning the laws of probability and physics, respectively. These stories bookend three more which inhabit the middle of the book, and which this reader found heavier going. The intricacies of the writer’s mind at times seemed to overwhelm the scope of the story he was relating, or at least that was how it felt. The stories become ornately baroque and the quixotic Bucharest they occur in sometimes gets lost in the whorls and arpegios of the text. Or perhaps it was just the wrong week to be reading it. 

the seventh continent (w&d haneke; w johanna teicht)

Haneke’s first film, supposedly, which deals with the true story of a family who decided to drop out in the most merciless fashion possible. A few thoughts:

1 - Nostalgia. Weirdly, given that this is a film set in Austria about nihilism, one of the first sensations watching it was one of nostalgia. For an era of middle class, pre-digital living, where phones lived on walls and people read newspapers.

2 - Schopenhauer. I might be wrong but I believe that Schopenhauer had a standpoint wherein he suggested that the rational thing to do in life was basically starve yourself to death. I had also been thinking about Michael Landy’s Break Down. As the family in The Seventh Continent enter into the third phase of the movie, that of unexplained auto-annihalation, it strangely felt as though they were both participating in a hermetic tradition but also were at the vanguard of what would become a 21st century credo, the idea of anti-materialism, even if that credo goes hand in hand with its countermeasure, the worship of materialism.

3 - True Stories can never be realised on screen. Haneke seems to aspire towards an objective neutrality, shorn of any directorial adornment, but this doesn’t preclude the film from seeming, with the benefit of our retrospective perspective, completely and utterly Hanekesque. The attention to seemingly irrelevant details (the breakfast, a door opening, a tap running), whose later destruction will be key to the film, also helps to define a certain atonal style which would become a hallmark, over the years. These details serve to make the contemporary viewer feel that there is nothing neutral or objective about the film; rather it is the start of the director's visceral critique of a system he will continue to confront from his clearly marked standpoint over the course of the next thirty years. 

la vie et rien d'autre (w&d bertrand tavernier, w jean cosmos)

Tavernier’s film is set in the aftermath of the first world war. Philippe Noiret is Major Delaplane, in charge of recovering the bodies of dead soldiers whose remains have not yet been identified. In the course of his job he meets the aristocratic Irène de Courtil (Sabine Azéma) who is searching for her lost husband, even though it becomes clear that they were estranged and that he was the lover of another woman, whose path she crosses, looking for the same man. The premise (reminiscent of Guzman’s Nostalgia por la Luz) is fascinating, allowing the film to meditate on the hypocrisy of the veneration of the dead soldiers by those who continue to use their sacrifice for their own advantage. The relationship that evolves between Noiret and Azéma is well constructed, with Noiret a man who suffers no nonsense, and both characters overcoming an initial antipathy to discover that the things they have in common bind them far more than they realise. The budget was clearly expansive, and there are several set piece scenes whose artistry is impeccably executed. Unfortunately the script feels baggy and lends the film a discursive tone. Some of the strongest moments come towards the end, when the film foregoes dialogue in a moving sequence where both soldiers and those searching for their lost ones find a moment of consolation at an impromptu cabaret night. The atmosphere and music of this moment invoke a pathos which the film at other points seems to strain to achieve. 

the general in his labyrinth [márquez]

My parents are ageing. I’ve been staying with them for the first time in a year. They are ok, but that trickster death is popping his head around the door, saying, bear me in mind, before he slips off somewhere else. Marquez’s novel is about the last days of the great revolutionary, Simon Bolivar, but it is also about the egalitarian process of dying, a process that makes all men equal. Marquez traces the General’s final voyage, ostensibly towards exile, but in practice towards his final end. 

At times the book feels like a prosaic read, riddled with details and flashbacks. The narrative, like the journey, is stop-start. It flows, then it comes to a halt, then it picks up again. It’s not a history book, but the writer clearly felt the need to educate his reader with pertinent facts; the country’s greatest living novelist writing about its founder and great patriot. Anyone who has travelled in South America knows the obsession with the continent’s founding fathers, venerated and elevated to mythic status. Young countries seeking to construct a mythic history. Marquez seeks to humanise this figure, bring him down to earth, inject his flaws into the narrative, although at times it feels like the writer struggles. There’s a hint of uncertainty in the way the writer documents Bolivar’s voracious sexual appetite, describing him like a rock star with groupies, before at the very end there’s a reference to his first and only wife who died soon after they got married. In fact, the contradictions and complexities of Bolivar’s history are never explored in any depth. His Damascene conversion to the cause of independence, something which Alexandra Wulf’s biography of Humbolt refers to, is ignored. The psychology of the liberator feels underworked, the text promising more than it delivers.  

Rather, the novelist seems most engaged in the aforementioned issue of the process of dying. If there is any way to bring a glorified historical character back down to human scale, it is to chart his weakness in the face of the one enemy he can never defeat. The book is a portrayal of Bolivar, but it’s also a portrayal of the stalking horse, death, who lies in wait on the bend of a river down which we are all headed.

eversmile new jersey (d. carlos sorin, w. sorin, goldenberg & scheuer)

This is a curio. It features the most acclaimed Hollywood actor of our times. It's made in Patagonia. With everyone speaking English. Directed by someone who would wait 13 years to make his next film, but who would then go on to become one of the most acclaimed Argentine directors.

Watching Eversmile, you can undertand why Sorin hit a career lull in its wake. Perhaps conceived as a Wendersesque road movie, it feels like a collection of parts and ideas that add up to a film that never gets going. The fact that all its Patagonian characters speak dubbed English in strange accents doesn't help. The actors seem unsure of themselves and the script doesn't seem to know where it's going. In some ways its like a palimpsest for what would come later. A road movie built around the unlikely premise of a travelling Irish dentist, you can detect the crossover points where quirky new wave Argentine cinema and US indie cinema would later meet. (It's worth noting that one of the biggest Indie crossover hints of recent years, the schmaltzy Little Miss Sunshine, is a rip-off of Trapero's Familia Rodante.) Day-Lewis is allowed a few grandstand moments as the luckless dentist, including some trademark hollering scenes. On these occasions he seems to be enjoying himself but at other times his performance is as lost as those of the dubbed Argentines. 

It's hard to say whether the film's quality is a reflection of the state of Argentine cinema in the late eighites or the result of the fact that it's a botch-job caused by the fact this as international co-pro. (All the post was done in the UK). Whatever, the story has a happy ending, even if the film doesn't really have any ending at all. Day-Lewis became Day-Lewis. And Sorin set about the task of working out what it meant to be an Argentine director. In a way Bon-Bon El Perro is the same story as Eversmile, only with a dog instead of a girl as a travelling companion, everyone speaking Spanish, and much better made. The lesson would appear to be that you have to be prepared to have a few fracasos in order to find out what works and what doesn't work. Also, that the wheels of the film industry grind slow, and it pays to hang on in there.

days of eclipse (d. aleksandr sokurov; w. pyotr kadochnikov, yuri arabov)

Has a film ever had a better opening? The camera falls to earth. Yuri Khanin’s astonishing score plays out over images of the Turkmeni community. Faces stare out at us. We listen and we watch.

Which is the fundamental praxis of receiving cinema. Listening and watching. Only, usually, there is so much information to be processed that we almost forget this is what we’re doing. Sokurov follows in the footsteps of Tarkovsky, who sought to make his art of cinema into an experience to rival that of the great masters; which is also to say to rival or equate to a religious experience. Perhaps the key to this experience is to become aware of our existence through the act or art of engagement. This demands something most of our cinema rejects: self-consciousness as a part of the process; rather than the eradication of the self (also known as escapism) so much of cinema has sought to bring about.

Days of Eclipse lasts for over two hours but it reached a point where as far as I was concerned it might have lasted for six. The film depicts a Russian doctor who is living in Turkmenistan at the fag end of the Soviet empire. He is young, good looking and listless. The world is draped in the torpor of heat. It’s as though it’s under glass. A friend of his dies and there’s no explanation of why. Another friend of his has a weird, animalistic stain growing out of his wall. The doctor crosses a road and gets involved in a fight. He’s told his work is potentially seditious, so he decides to burn it, but then, the papers already alight, he has second thoughts and puts the fire out. Strange beasts crop up in his life: lizards, snakes, lobsters. Finally he escorts his friend as he leaves, heading for the sea.

What does it all mean? There are undoubtedly narratives at work here, about the demise of an Empire, about the search for significance in a world where the quest for Utopia has stalled and ground to a halt. However, perhaps as an aspect of these themes, or perhaps as part of the director’s own investigations into the real nature of and potential of cinema, the film also comes across as a dialogue between viewer and screen: an exploration of how the act of viewing oscillates between the passive and the active. Sometimes Sokurov’s images and use of sound overwhelm us, demanding nothing but reception. But at others the film asks its audience to make an effort, to engage, to find the humour and the pathos without these things being spelled out.

Sokurov has achieved belated fame beyond his country’s borders. I recently saw his feted Russian Ark on DVD. Where that seemed showy, slightly ponderous, with occasional flashes of brilliance, this earlier work felt swathed in a viscous genius, which seeped through the colour distorted print, frame after frame.

the tenant & the motive [cercas]

These are two novellas by Javier Cercas, brought together in one volume. They are primarily of interest in the way they show how far a writer is capable of profiting (in every sense) from the process of re-invention. The Tenant's setting, an American university campus, has something in common with The Speed of Light, but this aside Cercas' later work seems almost unrecognisable. In these early texts we get an idea of the writer's capacity for attention to detail encased in a relaxed prose style and a certain structural playfulness, (both stories containing a circular dimension), but its all done in a limited, slightly arch fashion: the novellas feel like exercises in writing, rather than the raw-blooded thing itself.

I have a feeling that in one of the later works that I've read, the author refers to these earlier texts, slightly dismissively. This is an aside, but in my early years in the capital, I went to a gathering at The Poetry Society, which was then in Earls Court, to listen to a clack of poets talk about their "juvenilia". It might be a false memory, but I have a feeling Motion was there, wearing a green suit, along with perhaps, Morrison and others. They read some of their youthful poetry and then dissected its awfulness; attempting to pinpoint the moment at which they acquired maturity as writers. I remember the evening feeling bizarrely self-congratulatory, and realised that anything I had written upto that point could only be seen by them as 'immature'. In a sense I suppose they were a pale equivalent of the figures in Cercas' friend Bolano's opening to The Savage Detectives. Whether time will recognise the distinctions being made by these poets between their immature work and their mature work will only be revealed in their remembering. Maybe I was just kicking against the pricks, as a would-be angry young man, frustrated by the green suits.

Because Cercas' experience shows that there is such a thing as development and there's no doubt that in the twelve years between the publication of these novellas and the publication of Soldiers of Salamis, he evolved, or rather, discovered another method of writing which was more appropriate for his skills. Having said that, there is then the danger that he will typecast himself as the clever writer who made texts out of historical faction. I'd like to think that there's no such thing as juvenalia (even if there is) nor is there such a thing as mastering the beast. The process is one of ongoing change, peaks, troughs. Keep trying, as Beckett put it, although he said it rather more eloquently.