evidentemente comieron chocolate suizo (d. manuel marzel)

Evidentamente comieron chocolate suizo (They had obviously eaten Swiss chocolate) was the last of five amateur Cuban films which have been restored and were screened in Cinemateca. The five films were a mixed bunch, but Marzel’s was a playful jewel. Cuba 1991 - a society on the edge of all the things that are happening in the rest of the world. The film shows what appears to be a moment of extreme violence as a man and a woman go from dancing in what might be a typical Havana family home, stacked with women from three generations. The dancers dash out into the street. The man seems to be dragging the woman violently by the hair. A mother and her daughter follow. They get to a church… and then we see the St Vitus Dance twist. The film seems to be over, everyone is dead, but suddenly Madonna’s Vogue cuts in. The dead dance. Other realities are permeating this arcane world. Everyone dances and the credit sequence is like a short film all of its own. There’s something breathlessly brilliant about this 13 minute film, which claims to be the last reel of a lost movie, featuring, the rolling credits claim, Geraldine Chaplin and Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others. The playfulness elevates everything and gives this short film a vivid, distinctive Swiss chocolate flavour.

kafka (d. soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

I have memories of Soderbergh’s second feature coming out and being an unmitigated disaster, both critically and at the box office. The zietgesity wunderkind of SL&V coming back down to earth with a bump. Perhaps this is a false memory, but in the Soderbergh canon, you don’t offer hear people referring to Kafka. Of course it always helps a film to go in with low expectations, but Kafka, for all its predictability, still succeeded in charming. Perhaps it was the sight of Guinness and the youthful Irons helming a familiar looking cast, featuring one of those zany double acts with Keith Allen and Simon McBurney, the type of humorous conceit which never normally works, but in this case seems to. Perhaps it was the sight of Prague in all its pre-touristy glory. Or perhaps it was just the evident glee of a young director getting to fulfil his dream of making a passion project, all homage to expressionism, Fritz Lang, and so on.

Later in the Cinemateca cafe, Victor appeared. He had a garish orange painting. On closer inspection it showed McDowell from A Clockwork Orange. In that film’s expressionist glory, there lurks perhaps another homage to Lang’s violence. It was too auspicious to pass up, and so I bought the picture for Sñr Amato, who had also chanced to come to the screening of a blousy Sunday evening. Hopefully the picture will find a home on the bright shore of the Maldonado coast, a far cry from the foggy dunes of Prague. 

regeneration (pat barker)

Pat Barker’s book, the first part of a trilogy, was nominated for the Booker Prize a long time ago. (The third part of the trilogy won in 95.) It feels, in so many ways, like a paradigmatic work of British fiction. Firstly for its subject matter, and secondly because of the novelist’s stylistic choices.

The content involves the rehabilitation of soldiers suffering from PTSD in WW1. Rivers, a fictionalised version of a real person, is one of the medics at the remote Scottish hospital where patients are treated, humanely, as they recover. The kicker is that, if they recover, they can then be sent back to fight in France. Something one of the patients, Siegfried Sassoon, who has written a letter in protest at the ongoing carnage, decides he wants to do, if he is deemed to have recovered. Rivers is is chief medical officer, aware of the Sassoon paradox of both objecting to the war and seeking to continue to wage it, and he himself wrestles with his conscience as he realises he is only curing young men in order to send them to their deaths. Along the way other figures who my generation grew up with, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, make cameo appearances. The First World War poets were our British poetes maudits, weaving from the mud, blood and death of the trenches beautiful flowers of verse which would echo through the generations. These were romantic icons long before rock and roll made its claim on the youthful psyche, and I remember myself declaiming Owen’s poem, An Anthem to Doomed Youth, on a stage at prep school back in the seventies. Choosing to fictionalise the reality of this moment in history, using factual testimonies and the poems themselves, Barker must have known she was digging up literary gold, and so it proved to be.

The form of the novel is, by and large, utilitarian. Much of it is constructed from pages of dialogue, as soldiers and medics discuss their predicament. The author refrains from anything that might be considered flowery, although the occasional passage where her imagination appears to have been given freer reign. such as when a soldier goes awol in a wood and encounters a menagerie of dead animals, are the ones that stand out. Maybe this means less is more, but at the same time the novel’s insistence on a rational engagement with the irrationality of PTSD feels, at times, almost surgical. It made me think of the course I did at Faber, where flights of fancy were seen as vaguely bad taste. There’s something almost brutally British about all this, and whilst the authorial efficiency is undeniable, the resistance to any sense of flair feels like it would have been given full approval by the generals of the war office as they sent the young men out to do their duty.

desierto. (charles bowden)

“He is old enough to pre-date the modern border. Until about 1930 it was a line on a map, not on the earth, and Don Pedro remembers cattle drives from the valley up to Tubac in Arizona. The same kind of border the Yaquis knew and crossed in their endless comings and goings for refuge and guns and bullets. For these people at some level it is all a piece of ground and the ground is absolutely connected.”

Bowden’s book is an account of a land that transcends the border humans have imposed on it. This land is the territory that exists between the hills of Sinaloa, the wastelands of Texas and the coastal reaches of Southern California. Within this territory live Mexicans, North Americans, and the indigenous people whose forefathers predated the arrival of either. It is also the home to coyotes and lions. It is a territory whose modern economy is dominated by the exploitation of the desert and the narcotics industry. Bowden’s book, reporting back from the front line in the nineties, is the godfather to Cormac McCarthy and the stepson of Edward Abbey, whose influence he acknowledges in the opening pages. Thereafter it’s a ride of remarkable brilliance through the highways and byways of the territory. Bowden hangs out with the Sari fishermen, the Sinaloa narcos, and the gringo entrepreneurs who get swallowed by the savings and loans scandal that prefigured the crash of 2008. All of this against the backdrop of the desert, that immutable space which contextualises all human actions and puts them in its cruel shade. Bowden possessed the unusual capacity for a gringo, firstly of having curiosity for the Mexican and native cultures, and secondly of being able to gain their trust sufficiently to write about these worlds with the authority of a quasi insider. His voice, little known, is that of a poet-journalist who understood a land which can never be understood within the conventions of human power, no matter how much that power seeks to scar its landscape.

Nb. I remember in Michoacán when the elder of the community, Don Esteban, told us how when he was younger he would head to the US and there was no demarcated border. For generations the border wasn’t even an idea. Then it became an idea, but nothing more. Now it is a frontline. However, the land and nature, Bowden suggests, know no border and his remarkable book offers a glimpse of this alternative geography.

night on earth (w&d jarmusch)

There is, as Snr Amato pointed out afterwards, a glorious faith in the latent possibilities of globalisation inherent in Jarmusch’s 1991 globetrotting movie. Alongside 21 Grams, and with a sideways nod at Magnolia, the movie adopts the portmanteau approach with five stories included under the titular umbrella of a single night on earth. Each night is captured in the exchange between a taxi driver and their client(s). The movie is set in LA, NY, Paris, Helsinki and Rome, but the globalisation is given added emphasis by fact that the two cab drivers in NY and Paris, (Armin Mueller-Stahl & Isaach De Bankolé), give two of the film’s finest performances as fish out of water looking to make a living as immigrants. Indeed, one of the best sequences is the scene with Isaach De Bankolé and two arrogant, drunken Africans whose condescension leads to him telling them to get out. From the outset there’s a heady, liquid pleasure to Jarmusch’s filmmaking, as though the possibilities are endless now, the wall is down (Armin Mueller-Stahl’s character comes from Leipzig, “near Czechoslovakia”), the Twin Towers are still visible in the background. Globalisation is going to be fun, baby, it’s going to open doors, create connections, reaffirm the kind of honest working class values that Winona Ryder’s cab driver defends. In which sense, Night on Earth, pre Covid, pre-Iraq, pre-911, pre-Brexit, Trump, Ughyurs, feels not so much like a night on this earth, but a night on another earth, one that was swapped out for the earth we are currently saddled with. Another earth which existed once upon a time, before Brooklyn became gentrified. 

cape fear (d. scorsese, w. wesley strick, james r webb)

It’s so many years since I saw Cape Fear, perhaps when it came out. In my memory it’s dominated by the denouement, which takes place in the everglades on a boat, in a sequence which I remembered as being half the film, although it turns out it’s only the last twenty minutes or so. The reason the end looms so large is because it truly is a case of Scorsese pushing the boat out. Loads of CGI and De Niro’s portrayal of Jack Cady, always pushing the envelope, goes overboard. I get why the film chose to go where it does, but it felt as though in a bid for an operatic finale, it flirted with anti-climax. There’s nothing subtle about Cape Fear, but it is tremendously well directed. The acting of Lange and Nolte and Lewis is impeccable, the score and the production design and the editing maintain rhythm and tension despite the predictability of the narrative. Meanwhile, De Niro gives the kind of grandstand performance that only he can, relishing the malevolence of his character without ever sacrificing his charisma. (One can’t help thinking that Sorsese’s subsequent use of DeCaprio as a leading man is why so many of his later films feel hollow: DeCaprio wants to be loved too much, he’s never prepared to take the film into the ambivalent Faustian waters that De Niro excelled in as an actor.) Scorsese is having fun, paying homage to the B movie and Hitchcock at the same time, the camera ever ready to zoom in, to capture every nuance of the acting. The Nolte-Lange marriage is completely plausible: two fearsome egos whose shared happiness is a delicate balancing act. The film was so much better in the viewing than it had been in the memory. However the finale, with its pretensions of showing the family stripped back to a kind of Simian primitivity, overshadows all that comes before. 

england’s dreaming (jon savage)

The country is going to the dogs. Young, semiotically charged, apolitical dissidents set out a campaign of national provocation. It all ends in tears.

A great “logline” for a feature. Reading Savage’s sometimes astonishing account of the rise of the Sex Pistols, it strikes one as how ignorant we are about the emergence of punk. The realities of the movement. The Sex Pistols remain one of the most famous bands on the planet. Anywhere you go in the world, you will find people of indeterminate ages who know the lines: “I am an anarchist, I am an anti-christ”. Yet, unlike the Beatles and the Stones, for example, the true story of the Pistols remains opaque. They were, indeed a shooting star. Their legacy, punk, (and it does feel on reading Savage’s book that this is the legacy of McLaren, Lydon, Jones, Cook, Matlock and Vicious), is immense. The punk (a name derived from Elizabethan slang) became as identifiable a signifier of Britishness as the Queen. The semiotics of this initial transgression subsequently transformed into marketing.  

Savage’s book, which deals with the broader movement of punk, but revolves around the narrative of the Pistols, shows how the pieces came together. McLaren and Westwood’s odd-couple marriage, which spawned the image; Jones and Cook’s neo-cockney ingenuity, is the quasi-Dickensian strand which roots the movement in working class London values; Lydon’s neurasthenic charisma; Sid Vicious’ post-adolescent nihilism. The book traces how all of these factors stirred together in the pot, at a time of national decay, lead to the great counter-cultural movement. There’s a sense of the way in which, unlike so many British cultural movements, which tend to be insular, navel-gazing, punk embraced a cultural cosmopolitanism. A smattering of Debord and situationism coupled with a strong dosage of USA/ New York individualism, forged by the likes of Iggy and New York Dolls. Even a strong hint of mental European Dadaism. Perhaps this helps to explain how Punk evolved into something that imposed itself as a global movement, not just musically, but semiotically. 

As the logline states, it all ends in tears, but then it was the very volatility of the movement, a Molotov cocktail, which meant that it burned so bright, and was destined to bun out so quickly. Savage was there and his diary entries, allied to the extensive interviews mean it really feels as though we are getting the inside story on something that went from a few oddballs rehearsing in any old corner of London to global stardom in the space of two years. He’s also very good on the early days of McLaren and Westwood, with their chameleon shops, Sex, and Seditionaries. This is the only strand of the story which feels as though it isn’t followed through. With hindsight it seems obvious that the true victor of the punk movement, the one who reaped the most eventual success (in terms of prestige, finance etcetera) was Vivienne Westwood, who succeeded in maintaining the uneasy balance between edginess and commercial viability for decades. Her shop at World’s End was still, when I worked on the King’s Road in the early nineties, a beacon of counter-cultural chic, which you entered with heart in mouth, like an outsider intruding on a clandestine world. 

Savage’s  book should really be on the school syllabus. At a time when the notion of Englishness is once again in a state a crisis, when the need to assert a national identity seems to have overwhelmed all common sense, it dissects that curious anti-establishment strand of Englishness which can lead to the most astonishing creativity. The Sex Pistols were a product of disenchantment (Chant Chant Chant) which flowered for a day, before withering, only to be adopted by British mercantilism as it lay dying, resurrected as a stock image in the panoply of English eccentrism. We remain caught on the horns of the clash between establishment and anti-establishment, struggling to impose an identity on the conflict, trapped in bondage trousers and the discordant violence of disaffection. 

a moment of war (laurie lee)

I picked this memoir up under the arches of Waterloo Bridge, with Sedley. The bookstalls under the arches feel like a throwback now. Firstly as we now live in a digital age, secondly in the allowance of the use of prime public space to such a marginal enterprise as second hand bookselling. There’s always a book there you feel like buying, one that will take you by surprise.

Lee’s Spanish Civil War memoir felt an appropriate find. Lee is an unfashionable writer. He was a background voice in the childhood of anyone growing up in the second half of the twentieth century in the UK. A connection to another, supposedly more innocent age, allied to the romantic, Hardyesque notion of the wanderer, the rural exile. In this sense Lee’s journey echoes those being taken in other parts of the globe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as the countryside is emptied with people seeking work in the great cities. Yet as ever, the ideals of romanticism and the actuality exist at arm’s length. Lee’s account of his year in Spain is a hard, dispiriting document. He arrives late, with the war already being lost. The in-fighting, which Orwell also wrote about, means he spends more time incarcerated than he does fighting. There’s more chance of him being killed by a Republican bullet than a Fascist one. It’s an account of someone on the losing side, trying to understand why. His poetic but always accessible prose escorts us through a strange year of defeat, even if at times it reinforces the sense that he was but a visitor, lending his time to the cause. Having said which, he is clear in his account that the Spanish civil war was the precursor of the war that followed, and as such there was no real escape to be had from the fascist enemy. You could flee the battle, but the war would catch up with you in the end.

When they remove the second hand booksellers from beneath Waterloo Bridge, perhaps this will be the day that we realise the battle has well and truly been lost, there is no escaping the war. 

reticence [jean-philippe toussaint]

Toussaint's novel is essentially a shaggy dog story. A man arrives in a seaside town with his son and settles into a rhythm of paranoia and fantasy. His thoughts are conveyed with stream of consciousness, reminiscent of Bernhard and Bolano. A slim 130 pages, it should probably be read in one sitting, although I read it in four.  It’s one of those novels which relies on the implication of menace. The game is trying to figure out whether there’s any substance to the narrator’s musings or whether he’s just deranged.

Descendant of the Nouvel Romain, it has to be said that Reticence is ultimately underwhelming.  This is acutely apolitical writing.  An exercise in epistemology, it deals exclusively in the act of perception. (What little I’ve read of Nicholson Baker would be another point of reference). The word ‘political’ is one that has many variations to its understanding. In this context it perhaps means that it seeks to talk ‘of’ something. Toussaint’s novel approaches the stage before we can even talk ‘of’ anything. It addresses the acts of perception and interpretation humans engage in before they can get anywhere near the act of assertion. The world is a blizzard of data (even though this book was written in ’91). How can anything be asserted when we can’t even establish what the signifiers look/ smell/ sound like?

the diving pool [yoko ogawa]

The Diving Pool is the second of Ogawa's books I've read in quick succession. This is a collection of three novelas. All three are told from the point of view of a female voice, each one on the point of alienation from her society. In The Diving Pool, a young woman lives with her religious parents who act as foster parents to a bunch of children; inspiring in the narrator complex passions of both lust and a muted sadism as she guiltlessly terrorises her younger foster sister. In Pregnancy Diary, the narrator is herself subjected to her pregnant sister's self-indulgent whims; in the final part a woman who is putting off moving to Sweden to join her husband who has a job there finds herself drawn into the menacing world of a nearly limbless caretaker.

There is more to Ogawa's writing than their featherweight narratives. She is what they might call a consummate stylist. There's that pleasure to be gleaned from reading her work of knowing that every sentence has been worked on, but not in an abrasive, ponderous manner. Rather they have been honed and polished, the rough wooden edges of words rendered now as smooth, yet unexpected, as a mirror. Ogawa succeeds in making the physical tangible: food has a curious presence in her prose, it's something alluring but also potentially revolting. Nature is Herzogian: as liable to sting as it is to caress. The depiction of the caretaker who has no arms and only one leg would appear to be something out of a horror movie, and the story feels as though it belongs to that genre, but the careful, cruel-comic descriptions of his method of making tea or opening a door gives the piece another dimension: maybe this man in not so much a figure from a horror story, more a self-sufficient hero? Ogawa's naive narrator opens up this space and the story is defined not just by what it tells, but also by what it might become; the writer playing with the reader's expectations in a delicate game of literary charades.

The interesting thing is that it's the featherweight nature of the narrative that allows the writing to get away with this level of suppressed potential: she leaves her audience wanting to know more. And we are happy to be teased like this on this scale; it never reaches the point of becoming grating. What we don't know is as important as what we're told. The unwritten text perfectly complementing the written text.