blood’s a rover (elroy)

Elroy’s novels always leave me punchdrunk. They’re like going not fifteen rounds, but fifteen rounds for a fortnight. His prose is merciless. His humour is merciless. He is beyond sardonic. He’s a grinning gargoyle, looking down from the cathedral wall at all the sin and venality that occurs beneath the eaves of its supposed sanctified space. Blood’s A Rover doesn’t even have the pay-off of a historical assassination. It skirts Watergate. It delves into arcane B-stories occurring in Vegas, LA, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As though he grew sick of lifting the lid on the obvious and now wants to show you all the other stuff you’ve never even contemplated. The conspiracy headlines only serve to distract from all the other shit that’s going down.

It’s a dense read, in typical Elroy style. Characters flower and fade. Life is short. However, in Blood’s A Rover he perhaps goes further into the moral maze. His key characters here are all, as ever, from the dark side, but each and every one of the three male protagonists finds themselves confronting the moral failings of their chosen side and fighting back. In interviews Elroy insists he’s not a liberal, but let’s take that with a pinch of salt, because he understands that in order to audit the empire’s crimes, you have to be prepared to walk beside the emperor(s) and their adjutants. Which he does. And in so doing, he documents and reveals the moral depravity of a society where greed and cruelty are rewarded with power and privilege.

Nb - discovered this from an old diary entry the other day:

Four in the morning and I’ve set the alarm for 7.30. The writing has been impacted by events this weekend, got next to nothing done. Also not helped that I picked up Elroy’s The Cold Six Thousand the other day, knowing it would probably get in the way, just because his machine gun prose and scale get into your head. Phenomenal book, in its scale. I realise now that he could not include all that detail if he wrote any other way. …But also, as I think I wrote about Tabloid, the work does not have the depth, quite, emotionally. You could say its not trying to, its fundamentally thriller, but you don’t write like that kind of a maniac without wanting to change the world whilst you do it, and have no doubt that Elroy wants to, if only change our perspective of the crooked, fucked-up world he lives in over there. But, forget all that. Tis compelling and fucks with your schedule.

Still off booze and fags.

140103 1021

How can I call Elroy thin. It’s like saying – I found myself in a thin carcrash. If that’s thin, then it’s double cream fat thin.

red love: the story of an east german family (w. maxim leo, tr shaun whiteside)

What was the DDR? A country that only existed for less than half a century, like a hangover from a 19th century Europe where the borders were constantly shifting. A state founded with counter-fascist ideals that soon became almost as repressive and fascist as the state it sought to replace. The birth and death of the communist ideals within Western Europe. Leo’s book is an account of the state he was born into, one that didn’t exist when his parents were born and wouldn’t exist when his children were born. A brief, melancholy state, which was also a state of mind. Using his family history, he investigates how the DDR came to be and what it represented for his grandparents’ generation, and then his parents’. His parents, Wolf and Anne, come across as beautiful children of the post-war generation, their struggles every bit as romantic as those of their contemporaries through the sixties and seventies in the west. (My father’s original first name was Wolf, and the account of Leo’s father’s young life in the immediate post-war Berlin might echo that of my father’s.) By the time Leo himself reaches adolescence, the dream has well and truly died. Although his father was a committed doubter, his mother sought to kept the socialist flame alive. But Leo belongs to a generation that is in thrall to the west, and in his account the collapse of the wall and the DDR has such an inevitability to it that the ultimate experience of its end is almost mundane. There is still, to my mind, a sense of urban quiet to the leafy streets of east Berlin. As though, no matter the political state of the nation, this strange tranquility will always predominate. Leo does not appear to mourn the loss of his birth country, but perhaps, even in the act of writing about it, of excavating that past, there is a latent nostalgia, even if this is a nostalgia for something that never really existed.  

a short history of cahiers du cinema (emilie bickerton)

I don’t know if young romantics like I might have been, once upon a time, still grow up with Les Cahiers du Cinema acting as a kind of idealised wallpaper for what life, cinema and the arts ought to be. I don’t know if I ever actually read the magazine, but it inhabited a mythological place in my mind. The space from whence the young turks of the Nouvelle Vague emerged, encompassing a cultural diversity which ranged from Hitchcock to Godard, a place where cinema was treated as an art form rather than a business. All of this blended with the romanticism of Paris as depicted in the works of early Godard, Truffaut and company. All of this was summoned up by the title of the magazine itself, so allusive, so distant from the philistine perspective of the Anglo-Saxons.

Bickerton’s book is both a guide and a corrective. The early chapters document the magazine's origins, the incorporation of these young turks (even if Rohmer wasn’t so very young.) The relationship between Truffaut and Bazin is alluded to, and suggests a book or movie of its own. The middle part of the book deals with the way the Cahiers became consumed with ideological dogma, so much so that it excluded most cinema, treating it as beyond the Maoist pale. (Or whichever other pale was the dominant ideology of the day.) Finally, the book looks at developments in the 80s and 90s when the magazine abandoned ideological pretensions and became, according to Bickerton, just another film mag, competing for shelf space.

In her account of this final development, Bickerton is unflinchingly critical. Her thesis is that the magazine effectively sold its soul. Its repute was constructed on the independence of intellectual thought, which permitted it to distance itself from the idea of cinema as industry. Whilst Hollywood might be capable of making films which are beyond this paradigm, the marketing machine and festival circuit determine that, in general, films which refuse to acquiesce to their formulaic demands will be marginalised. Whereas in the sixties and seventies, Cahiers was interested in discovering and vindicating those films which were outside of the system, (and the early works of the Nouvelle Vague were informed by this), now it has become just another industry rag. Bickerton is deeply critical of what has happened to Cahiers, and, by implication, the way in which market forces have become the regulator of directors’ aesthetic choices. Cahiers, and cinema as a whole, has become the poorer for this, even as the magazine pretends to be richer and more popular than ever. But the romantic vision which I had as a teenager is, she avows, categorically dead. 

nobody move (denis johnson)

I think this is what they call a potboiler. I read its 200+ pages in about 24 hours. Calling a book a potboiler sounds like a cheap shot, but there’s a great deal of skill gone into the creation of this addictive novel. The predictable Johnson prose verve, and some great characters from the marginalia of some marginal corner of the USA. A loser shoots a villain in the leg but can’t bring himself to finish the job. The villain survives. The loser hooks up with a femme fatale. The bad guys close in, the big denouement happens. It feels slightly formulaic but highly effective. We’re back in the product versus art debate, which haunts my working days. This is product, but it’s product with a smattering of stardust. Read too many Nobody Moves and you’re going to overdose, but read one every now and again and it’s a timely reminder of the importance of pacing, simplicity and dramatic tension. Johnson’s novel, from that hinterland of American fiction which maps on to a hinterland of ‘merican society where bad things happen and both good and bad die young, might not kill fascists, but it still bites. 

the hunger angel (herta müller, tr philip boehm)

This novel of Muller’s has a very different tone to the previous one of hers I read. It’s a fragmented, poetic read, beautifully translated by Philip Boehm, which narrates the experiences of Leopold, a Romanian of German descent (as is Muller), who is sent to a Soviet Labour camp with fellow Romanians of German descent after the second world war. As such it gives voice to another marginalised chapter from that teeming cauldron of 20th Century European history. Leopold is barely an adult when he’s exiled, obliged to pay compensation for the actions of others. Muller’s text, the helpful afterword explains, was shaped by her conversations with Oskar Pastior, a poet from her home village. She takes those memories and bends them into a cratered planet of language. In Leopold’s hunger driven consciousness, words sometimes seem more concrete than objects or actions. The landscape, the hardship and above all, the hunger, are minted in Muller’s words. It’s not a read that always flows readily, anymore than the life the exile experienced was one which was lived easily. There are moments of jagged beauty, moments of nonsense, and the banality of suffering, packed into short chapters that create a mosaic which presents Leopold’s years in the labour camp with, perhaps, far more authenticity than a more ‘realistic’ documentation of events would. 

drive your plough over the bones of the dead (olga tokarczuk, tr. antonia lloyd-jones)

Tokarczuk’s novel has a strain running through it which feels completely of-the-moment. The revenge of nature. In a quiet corner of Poland, near the Czech border, a small community is afflicted by a series of murders. The narrator, Janina, a woman who wears her eccentricity firmly on her sleeve, claims that the victims, all of them male hunters, have been killed by deer, who are seeking vengeance for the killing of the hunters. Janina is a wonderfully idiosyncratic soul, who could be a visionary or could be a nutcase. Her justified anger at the whole process of hunting, something she sees as murder, is complemented by a fervent belief in astrology. In her earlier life she has been a structural engineer who helped build a bridge in Syria. Tokarczuk’s text is as playful as her narrator. It takes great pleasure in Janina’s digressions and flights of fancy. It is peopled by eccentrics and oddballs, (including one character who in the english translation is named Oddball) and a Blake translating policeman. The novel is composed of 17 chapters which narrate a story which takes place over the course of a year. It is, in effect, a murder mystery, however the strongest underlying theme is the tension between humans and nature, a theme that seems more and more urgent with every passing day. 

in the night of time (w. antonio muñoz molina, tr. edith grossman)

Plaza Santa Ana, a place where a young American rents a room, living beside washerwomen and labourers The smell of homemade food wafts its way up to her third floor apartment. Caldos, or sopas, tomato based, heavy on the pimenton, earthy flavours which make the most of the leftovers from the day before the day before. Down the road, on Alcala, just off Sol, a politician sits in a bar and consumes vast quantities of prawns and beer. The city hums with a life which reflects the way the capital has become a pole star, integrating every corner of the country, Andaluz, Asturian, Catalan, Galician and so on and so forth. It’s a far cry from the Santa Ana and Calle Alcala of today. Today, Santa Ana is full of dainty restaurants with prices geared towards the tourists. Sol is a catch-all, gaudy to the point of ugliness. As such, Molina’s novel, which is about many things, feels like a lament for a lost Spain, a Madrid which has been appropriated by the tourist dollar. The first time I ever visited Madrid, it still had a provincial feel; a town for insiders, full of secrets. Now, its secrets have been cast to the wind and it bustles with the energy of a modern, global capital. 

The novel captures Madrid on the eve of the Civil War. It’s framed around the affair conducted by its protagonist, Ignacio Abel, with Judith, a youngish American who is falling in love with him and Madrid. The novel has a double focus. On the one hand it’s a brilliant portrayal of a city which is teetering on the brink of disaster. Day by day, as the affair unfolds, the city steps closer and closer to the abyss, never realising where it will end until it’s too late. Molina details this process immaculately. The reader feels as though they are entering the vortex alongside the characters, many of whom will meet, we know, a tragic end. Hindsight is the novelist’s great weapon, and Molina wields it like a fencing sword. At one point he writes: “How strange to imagine with such clarity what I haven’t lived, what happened more than seventy years ago.” That strangeness is communicated to the reader, looking on in horror as the net closes. For an English reader in these times, the novel is more than disconcerting, it’s positively scary. 

The secondary focus of the novel is the affair. This too is detailed meticulously. Every step of Judith and Ignacio’s voyage is mapped. The novel itself is framed around Ignacio’s voyage from Penn Station to Rhineland, the university town on the Hudson where he has been commissioned to design a library, (his ticket out of Spain). At the end of this journey, he will meet Judith once again. The novelist never seeks to place his protagonist in a sympathetic light: he’s not merely fleeing Spain, he’s also running away from his family. There’s a coldness to Ignacio which perhaps goes with his chosen profession, a coldness which Judith succeeds in melting. At times it’s hard not to question Ignacio and by implication the author himself. if there’s any part of this novel which felt less than satisfactory to this reader it was the last twenty five pages, which might be said to allow Ignacio to have his cake and eat it.

Nevertheless, this last section cannot take the shine off a novel which succeeds brilliantly in conjuring up the lost world of pre-Civil War Spain, capturing in the process the way in which families and communities were rent asunder. At one point in the novel there’s a barbed reference to Hemingway and the other foreign writers who passed through Spain during the Civil War. In non-Spanish speaking countries, our understanding of that conflict is very much shaped by an outsider’s perspective. Here, in a fine translation by Edith Grossman, Molina recalibrates that, offering a compelling, evocative portrayal of a land teetering on the brink. 

a philosophy of walking [frédéric gros]

There are plenty of books around about walking, tramping, the fundamentals of the act of treading the planet’s curvature, mapping it, returning to a human scale. Solnit and Macfarlane are two who come to mind instantly, but there are also those from previous generations including Lee and Stephen Graham. Often this interest is associated with a desire to counteract the way in which high modernity has abandoned what might be called the human scale. Planes, trains and automobiles have ruptured a connection to the land which the human species has had for thousands of years. The need to reclaim that bond is pressing and it comes as no surprise that writers who care about our relationship not just to nature, but also to our ancestors, seek to re-vindicate an art that in many parts of the modern world has come to be considered a near-redundant irritation.

Gros belongs firmly to this canon. His lovely book rambles through an articulation of the styles and benefits of walking. He cites several writers as cases in point, including Nietzsche, Nerval, Wordsworth etc, revealing the way in which they used the act of walking to further their thinking and their writing. He uses these examples in conjunction with an analysis of the different benefits that accrue as a result of walking, looking at how it stimulates us to think differently. The section on the differing approaches within Greek philosophy to walking offers a particularly lucid insight.

As mentioned, The Philosophy or Walking is more of a ramble than a hike. It’s one of those books you can dip in and out of. The terrain feels familiar, but it’s full of occasional unexpected sights. Take it out for a stroll. It will be good company. The road will not tire you. It will leave you refreshed. 

notes from no man’s land [eula biss]

Eula Boss’s text is both a journey through her own history and, as a consequence, contemporary USA. Raised in upstate New York, she subsequently moves to New York itself; California, with a brief sojourn in Mexico; the midwest; before ending in Chicago, where she lives with her husband. The unifying theme is race. Biss herself is white, but some of her family are black, some are mixed race. All have a pot-pourri of genetic inheritance, something she notes is the case for the vast majority of North Americans. Underneath her discourse, she would appear to be investigating the possibility of a post-racial consciousness, something that ought to be emerging, but isn’t. Colour and its genetic imperative shouldn’t be the determinants they still are. But they are nevertheless. The lynchings have stopped but the police killings go on. There’s something discursive about Biss’ approach, to an extent that there are times when it feels as though she’s reluctant to reach conclusions, which is no bad thing, Her prose is restless, searching for clues, seeking to find significance in detail which is then backed up with scholarship. At the heart of these investigations is the body of Biss herself. Resistant to being defined, yet recognising the inevitability. There are echoes, acknowledged, of Didion in the text as well as, once again, Baldwin. 

The sheer quantity of material which takes the issue of race as its dominant theme, from Get Out to Markovits to Biss, not to mention the Beyonce’s and Kanye’s, is striking. All the more so in the wake of the police repression documented over the course of the past five years or so. The USA feels more and more like an intractable, unknowable concept, a work of fiction being written in a secret room, from which only the occasional pages emerge, scattered, random, disconnected. Biss’ description of the university town in Iowa shows an America which perhaps corresponds with the America of both Trump and Obama. No matter how much one might want to differentiate the two, they still have something in common. It’s as though there’s something cooking in the US, something which we still scarcely know, deep in the rock formations, in Saunders’ post-apocalyptic caves. This isn’t the America of Fitzgerald or Mailer or Updike or even Pynchon, It’s something else entirely, a battle zone whose wars get little more coverage than the skirmishes in the Paraguayan chaco. A whole host or writers are starting to document the fringes, but the coverage remains fragmentary. Pages from a medieval manuscript offering shards of light on life in the dark ages.

signs preceding the end of the world [yuri herrera]

On one level this is a very simple tale of a young Mexican woman, Makina, who, on her mother’s instructions crosses the border to go and look for her brother. When she finds him, he’s serving in the US army under a false name and doesn’t want to go back. Makina returns empty-handed. There’s not much more to the plot than this and it soon becomes apparent that you’re not reading the portentously titled novel for plot. What you’re reading it for its whimsical poetic register, which the translator, Lisa Dillman, wrestles with manfully. The use of words which at first seem alien or invented start to make sense, even if one suspects there are many linguistic layers which simply cannot be accessed in translation. The book is about Makina’s journey to cross the border, but it is also about language and the way that it is wielded by the powerful and powerless. Language is one of the signs of that the title refers to. There’s a high concept pulse percolating through the apparently straightforward framework. Although, having said that, it still feels as though Herrera’s novel is something of a sketchy, introductory text, perhaps mapping out directions that the writer will explore in other works. 

do something do something do something [joseph riippi]

Riippi’s terse, brutal novel is recounted by three different narrators whose idiosyncratic voices dovetail. A pair of siblings and a disenchanted playwright. The novel is set largely on the East Coast (New York) and the West, (Seattle), with both cities casting their shadow over proceedings. It’s a deliberately fragmentary book, assembled from a clutch of interconnected anecdotes and memories, which get shared around by the three characters. There’s considerable skill in the way the writing will throw out a reference which the reader can’t quite pin down; where did it occur previously, who owned this image before? Into this lattice-work effect the writer stitches scenes of cruelty; a man loses his infant child; a woman recovers from a brutal rape; her brother is in hospital because he cannot control his violent urges. This is dog-end America, a country you probably don’t want to know, where the legacy of 911 generates racism and suspicion. It’s a slender, desperate text which, in spite of its erudition, never has that smug tone which too many US writers cannot avoid. The voices it grants space to feel genuinely on edge, carved out of nightmares which contain no redemption. 

inherent vice [thomas pynchon]

OK, so this isn’t vintage Pynchon. In amongst the laurels there were quite a few brickbats for the novel when it came out. It’s not hard to understand why. There’s a relentless frothiness to the narrative and prose, something akin to the holy surfer who is one of the dozens of barely-fleshed-out characters who pops up. Like the surfer, Pynchon seems to ride the waves of his prose, waiting for the one that will propel him onto a higher plain. This doesn’t occur all that often in what is a typically lengthy, if not meaty, tome. However, in the decision to riff off Chandler and Hammett, (with even an occasional nod to his contemporary, Elroy), Pynchon doesn’t seem too fussed with the transcendental or the parabola. This is a nostalgic, amiable text, where the hero, Doc Sportello, will not end up propelled into space, where the hero is, in fact, a hero, who tends to the meek and skirmishes with the forces of evil. It’s more Tolkien than Dostoyevsky. The novel doesn’t even have the metaphysical aspect of a similarly secondary text, Vineland. However, who’s to say that every writer should always emulate his or her peaks? If twere all peaks, the land would be flat. Inherent Vice has enough to keep the reader on their toes, trying to keep pace with the manic process of the detective novel, something Pynchon embraces with delight. This is a Maltese Falcon of a novel, ridiculous and charming at the same time. If anything, it would seem to suggest a paean to a youth the author may or may not have known, the beguiling simplicities of a pre-connected world, when personal space still existed; before we were all plugged into the mainframe. For those that remember that time, Inherent Vice is a treat; for those who, increasingly, will not, it is a pseudo-archeological record, as befuddling and vital as a Mayan codex. 

i was born there, i was born there [mourid bargouti]

Bargouti’s book is a picaresque memoir of his Palestinian life. Bargouti is a poet and the book displays his poet’s eye as it assembles fragments from a life not lived. That life should have been his Palestinian life, but it's a life interrupted by politics, meaning he spent time in Egypt, the Gulf, Eastern Europe, Jordan and other parts of the globe. The only time he goes back to live in Palestine, in the West Bank, he finds himself coming into conflict with the corruption of the Palestine State, something that he believes will always undermine any deals negotiated with the Israelis. (Bargouti is a fierce critic of the Oslo agreement.)

The book offers insight into life in the West Bank as it has been lived over the course of fifty years, charting the attempts of its society to retain its integrity and customs in the face of the Israeli aggression. An aggression which doesn’t merely show its face with the force of its weaponry, but also through the way it insists on interceding on the daily lives of ordinary Palestinians. The problems of the Israeli occupation are more corrosive and insidious than the headlines of war. It’s the removal of normality which Bargouti documents. Any journey becomes an odyssey; any family becomes divided; any life becomes ruptured. (“The Occupation distorts the distances between humans as much as those between places.”)

The book is also studded with apercus about the strange role of the poet within society. Bargouti’s son follows in his father’s footsteps, taking on the Romantic role of the “unacknowledged legislator”. Bargouti is highly conscious of an obligation for his poetry to be representative of its roots, whilst at the same time retain its creative ‘independence’. He notes that “to be a poet you need two contradictory things – a great amount of vitality and a great amount of idleness”. It's a note that suggests the poet liable is always liable to be in conflict with any social system. 

meisjes (d. geoffrey enthoven, w. chris craps, jean-claude van rijckeghem)

This is the kind of film which they make in the UK starring Bill Nighy, Judi Dench or Geraldine McEwan. An unabashed, formulaic crowd pleaser. It's set in an obscure Belgian town and tells the story of three elderly women who reform the trio they used to have forty years ago. This is part of Claire’s mission to reconnect with her wayward son, Sid, who used to be something in music but is now going nowhere. Sid’s music is not the kind of music which elderly women are supposed to like. Some tracks are a kind of grinding R&B, others more trip-hoppy, perhaps. But somehow he and the singers manage to find some kind of middle ground. The action builds towards the climactic concert where the film subverts itself neatly. Rather than a triumphant finale, Claire collapses and her incipient alzheimers emerges full-blown. The concert does take place, but it does so in her mind.

This twist saves the film from drifting into a sea of sentimentality. This isn’t a film I would ever have been likely to watch, were it not for the blind tasting of Cinemateca. How it arrived here I have no idea. The plotting is as obvious as a game of tic tac toe, and the act of creating a film based on the three glamorous grannies reeks of a calculated marketing technique. However, within the confines of its ambition, the film works, more or less. It’s effective, efficient and shows that the judicious application of the disciplines of cinema should be enough to create a functional 90 minutes of celluloid.

complices (d. frédéric mermoud, w. mermoud & pascal arnold)

The subject of child abuse and sex rings has been prevalent in the European media over recent months. (Even though this film predates this). Without in any way denying the requirement of society to defend its most innocent and vulnerable citizens, it’s also apparent that the media fascination goes with a  certain prurience. There’s a voyeuristic element to the furore. The pseudo-Foucaultian sex-power matrix generating a neo-pornographic response. No doubt that shrewd reader of the sexual politic, Foucault himself, would have offered an incisive commentary on the contrasting Macalpine and Saville cases.

Mermoud’s film bellyflops into this arena. It tells the story of the murder of Vincent, a 19 year old prostitute who pretends to be underage in order to fulfil the fantasies of his wealthy clients. His life becomes confused when he acquires a girlfriend, Rebecca, with whom he falls in love. Her reaction when he comes clean about his real job (having earlier made the unlikely claim to be working for an estate agents) sets off a chain of events which will end in tragedy.

We know it will end in tragedy because the film opens with Vincent’s body being fished out of the river. The other half of the film follows the investigation of the police into his murder. The mixed-sex police team, Hervé and Karine, enjoy a mildly flirtatious, world-weary relationship which looks like it should go somewhere but never does.

All of the above is all well and good, and the first half hour of the film, with its use of flashback and a brisk editing style, rolls along effectively enough. We assume a narrative connection will evolve between the stories of the police and the young couple. We assume that at a certain point the narrative will take an unexpected turn. We also assume that the scenes of Vincent and Rebecca having sex with unpleasant, seedy men, are there for a reason which is more than merely mundane narrative-filler. The adopted premise implies an examination of the true meaning of corruption, the worm in the apple, the other side of the capitalist tapestry. The film’s insinuating title suggests there must be something more to it than the equivalent of a glossy TV drama episode.

But there isn’t. There’s nothing there. It comes as no surprise to learn that the director has worked mostly in TV. What does come as a surprise is that a script as banal and cynical as this has been feted and given a global release. One suspects the reason is that it is cashing in on a global prurience which would make Michel smile. Complices is the twenty first century equivalent of the Victorian flash of ankle on an expensively printed dirty postcard. 

vaho (w&d alejandro gerber bicecci)

Vaho follows in the traditions of Mexican cinema narrative, threading together the stories of three young men, whose childhood friendship was abruptly cut short when one of them was inadvertently responsible for the lynching of the school caretaker, killed when the neighbourhood wrongly believed him to have molested Abigail, the young school beauty. In reality Abigail, trapped in the school, looking for her lost backpack, was in fine fettle, but fear stalked the community and tragedy ensued.

This whole sequence is told in flashback, with the opening forty five minutes of the film describing the humdrum, slightly desperate lives of the three former friends. The flashback sequence then places into perspective everything we have seen up to then, revealing the reasons for their disassociation from society. Perhaps the most intriguing strand is that of the young plumber's son, whose father was instrumental in the killing and has later turned to drink. His son's way of dealing with all this is to immerse himself in a group which celebrates the old Aztec traditions. He dons the feathers and the footshakers to dance at the markets, picking up a few pennies. The presence and lack of respect for the ancient culture seems emblematic of the holes in Mexican society that the movie shows up.

These holes have in large part been filled by Christianity. The movie's strongest sequence takes place during the Calvary festivities of the town, when men drag huge crosses to a new Golgotha, with Roman centurions charging by on horseback. There's an energy and daring to these scenes which feel like cinema verite. Overall the film struggles to contain the various strands it introduces. The bold narrative device of the flashback helps to anchor it, but at times gives it the feel of two separate movies squeezed into one.

frontier blues (w&d babak jalali)

Jalali's film is a deceptively smart piece of filmmaking set in Gorgan, the filmmaker's hometown, on the Iranian-Turkmeni border.

Gorgan a kind of nowhere-ville. The film focuses on three characters. One wants to get married to an Iranian woman he never speaks to (one of only two women in the film, the other being her mother). A second, who later joins the first working in a chicken factory, is inseparable from his donkey, and pines for the mother who left him for his youth to go to Paris. The last, perhaps most adroit of the three, is a Turkmeni minstrel who is taking an Iranian photographer around. His contempt for the photographer is made clear, with the photographer constantly seeking out 'authentic Turkmeni' shots, which have no authenticity at all. On one level this leads to hilarious results, such as the staged wrestling match; on another it generates a poignancy, with the photographer constantly asking the minstrel to take him to a wedding or a funeral, only to be told that these things don't happen anymore. No one dies and no one gets married. At one point a character is asked where he wants a lift to. He replies 'nowhere', and his told to hop in, they'll take him there. Slyly, the film critiques our need to view exotic locations as romantic: with its muted cinematography, Jalali seems to be suggesting there's nothing exotic about his location at all. Instead, the carefully composed shots capture the banality and hopelessness of life in this dead-end town, only it does so with a dry, comedic tone.

Perhaps its because of its refusal to romanticise its locale in any way, (in contrast to Strickland, for example), that Frontier Blues has been slated by many British critics. As far as I'm concerned, that's an indictment of our criticism rather than the film. Frontier Blues is a slow watch, but it's peppered with moments of guile and humour which only a tired soul could fail to enjoy. Furthermore, it manages to achieve a poignancy in its depiction of the dead-end lives of its protagonists. From the shopkeeper trying to sell an oversized jumper to a boy to a man learning English so that he can communicate with people in Baku, the film is riddled with humane detail which helps to bring this obscure part of the world to life. Jalali clearly knows his world, and his portrait of it blends affection with honesty.

white material (d. claire denis, w denis & marie n'diaye)

Denis and Huppert. A potentially explosive combination. Which, in this case, smoulders rather than combusts. Like the coffee factory which the troops burn, where Huppert's son dies, where she enacts an Apocalyptian Now moment at the end, felling a strangely Brando-esque lookalike (the underused Michel Subor). It appear that Denis deliberately keeps the lid on this somewhat Conradian tale of the redoubtable coffee plantation owner who believes she belongs to Africa, only to discover that Africa isn't convinced about the relationship.

Huppert is utterly convincing as the bedraggled, faintly elegant neo-colonialist, Maria Val. Because of course, this unnamed country is no longer a colony. It's now a failed state, with echoes of the Congo, or Rwanda. A place where children are the lords of misrule, as they were in another French film, Sauvaire's Johny Mad Dog. However, Denis brings her distinctive vision to bear. When two child soldiers infiltrate Maria's house, they leave dirty footprints in the bath. They nearly kill her son, but no-one seems to think much of it. In Maria's world view, these things are always on the brink of happening, and that's part of the reason she loves it. Her occasional references to France reveal something bordering on contempt for the privileged Europeans. At one moment she mutters in a rare voiceover her opinion that this country is too beautiful for Europeans, as though she believes herself completely assimilated, an African native. In spite of the fact that the leader of the rebels criticises the exploitative foreigners, which include her. Another artful scene shows her showing her hired hands their living quarters. The coffee pickers peer into a darkened shed, full of bunks. Their world remains divorced from the white people's living quarters, no matter how much Maria thinks they're all the same.

Maria's characterisation is rich and strange, part heroic, part idiocy, part condescending, part integrated. Denis seems inclined to let Huppert's acting do the work, using less music than usual, having her roving camera follow her like a spy. Although the film yet again posits an Africa which exists on the edge of anarchy, ruled by boys in dresses and mystic warlords, it draws strength from the complexity of its portrayal of the coffee grower, who doesn't even own the plantation she works on, which is now worthless. Her quixotic faith in the value of the land makes this is a film about belonging and our understanding of what that means. The way in which it is choice as much as a birthright. If White Material initially seems like an unlikely film for Denis, after 35 Rhums, perhaps it might be seen as its obverse. Where the latter dealt with African immigrants in Europe, this one deals with European immigrants in Africa. All of them seeking their identity in a mixed up muddled up shook up world.

tetro (d coppola)

These are the dog days of Summer. As can be gleaned by the amount of cultural activity being undertaken. It feels a bit like an inverted hibernation. Football, travel and the vagaries of life have taken over, as the sun toasts us all on a daily basis.

In between World Cup matches, I took up the offer of a trip to see Coppola's latest, supposedly low budget offering. It's over a fortnight now since I saw it. Although it's not his first, the idea of Coppola doing a low budget film seems something of a contradiction in terms. Clearly he thought so too, because, after managing to keep the lid on the budget in the first half, the second descends into hints of extravagance. Both budgetary and thematically, as the characters suddenly find themselves at a gaudy, not very Patagonian arts festival, where Vincent Gallo's terrible play is hailed as a masterpiece. Suddenly, an intriguing film is thrown off-kilter, as though the director lost patience with having to scrimp: two frugal acts are followed by a splurge of a desert, a would-be low budget knickerbocker glory added to the menu at the last moment.

It's a pity, because the premise and opening acts are engaging. No matter how limited his resources, Coppola still has friends in the right places, and the black and white photography of Buenos Aires is beguiling. The set up of a rich man's son (Gallo) who's run away to the South to escape his father's grip, has sufficient weight to keep the audience engaged. The use of Buenos Aires as a counterpoint to New York is also astute; BA being the other great city of destination for Italians fleeing poverty in the early 20th Century. The Argentine and US cast works together more effectively than has been the case in similar cross-cultural endeavours.

All in all there's enough to make the film work. Until the script founders on the notion that Gallo's scrawls actually hide a demonic literary genius; and then his novel becomes a play; and that play is performed at the ludicrously posh Ushaia literary festival, and Gallo isn't his brother's brother, and it all becomes Oedipal and relentlessly silly. Leading to the implication that, no matter how much he'd like to be, Coppola wasn't born to make low-budget movies. He doesn't possess the discipline, he needs the adrenaline of the potential of catastrophic failure in order to provoke him into producing work which doesn't drown in whimsy.

first as tragedy, then as farce [slavoj zizek]

It's been a few weeks since I finished Zizek's entertaining book on the plane. Zizek is now part of the zeitgeist, gradually insinuating himself into a mainstream discourse, overlapping the kind of territory occupied by Alain De Botton, Chomsky, Schama, Dawkins and their ilk. Philosophical discourse for the masses.

Which, given his professed Communism, seems appropriate. Even if 'the masses' actually means 'the chattering classes'. One wonders how long before he has his own TV show. On the basis of his book, the sooner the better. He makes his case for the reinvention of Communism, a kind of post-Marxist Communism , succinctly. In the process he uses a host of contemporary references (including demonstrating a penchant for the more portentously tacky side of Hollywood), in a text which ranges from the Haitian slave revolt to Berlusconi, from Obama's Cairo speech on religious tolerance to Starbucks, from Hegel to Foucault. All via Marx himself.

It would be presumptuous of me to try and summarise his arguments, and I suspect they may be amplified in greater detail in other tomes, but as an introduction to his work, First as Tragedy... acts as an inspirational text. Anyone who has an interest in the fate of humankind in the forthcoming century would probably find it worth their while to read. As to what we do with the information, how we disrupt ourselves out of our comfortable mass socio-political hibernation in the Chocolate Factory of World Cups, iPads and modernity's other trappings - that's another issue. Just as the actual likelihood of the return of (genuine) Communism cannot be confirmed by the reading of this book. Nevertheless, Zizek seems to know whether the toast is going to land butter side down or not, and in his confident prose there emerges a kind of optimism for another way. Not the first, nor the second nor the third, but a way out of the mess we all secretly (and increasingly) suspect we've made of things, in the quest to make life 'better'.