patria (homeland) (fernando aramburu, tr alfred macadam)

Patria is a phenomenon as much as a novel, the fate of books that get adapted into blockbuster TV series’. The doorstopper book relates the Basque independence conflict through the fate of two families, whose friendship is destroyed by politics and ideology. It’s a saga, which reveals the way in which ETA split the Basque world in two  and the novel reflects this, skipping backwards and forwards in time in clipped, syncopated chapters.

 

jumping jack flash (kieron pim)

This is a biography of David Litvinoff, a figure from sixties London who moved between the worlds of rock and roll, crime and cinema. He moved in the same circles as the Kray Brothers and the Stones, to name but two of his extensive web of connections. He was a friend of Donald Cammell and, the book asserts, the hidden animus of Performance. Events in that film directly echo incidents within Litvinoff’s own life. His face was slashed at one point in Earl’s Court as a punishment/ warning from the Kray twins for betraying them. All of which is fascinating, and Pim’s account of the interweaving of the criminal world and the rock world is comprehensive. However, there comes a point when the reader starts to realise that Litvinoff, whilst a larger-than-life personality, might not be quita as interesting as he or the book believe. Pim threads his personal fascination with LItvinoff and their shared Jewish heritage through the book. He travels to Australia, hangs out with Eric Clapton and minor aristocracy, as he seeks to get to the nub of his subject’s mystery. The B-narrative is why the author is so fascinated with Litvinoff, and there were moments in the second half of the book when this reader wishes that the author had gone further into exploring his own personal obsession. 

the shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us (christophe bonneuil + jean-baptiste fressoz, tr. david fernbach)

Not being au fait with current trends in intellectual thought, I don’t know where this obron of Bonneuiland and Fressoz sits in the firmament. What I can say is that it is a comprehensive and disarming read, which  brings together a collection of thought and references regarding the Anthropocene in a manner that makes one think, as one reads, that this book ought to be compulsory reading for anyone over the age of six months. Not that it will be, of course, as people are soon going to stop reading and process information through visual memes, which is part of the problem. It’s hard to read this book and think there is any coming back from the brink, be that the brink of extinction or radical social change. Hopefully the latter. However, the truly dispiriting element of the book is the way it shows how every step taken towards the present situation has been contested and could have been altered. My only question is whether the book’s conclusions/ implications don’t lead towards humanity moving into post-political era; which suits some of the current usual suspects down to the ground. Some might argue that such a thing does not exist, others might say we are already on the brink. 

white sands (geoff dyer)

Dyer is a curious writer, whose texts incorporate some of the finer British qualities, as well as smelling of some of the less desirable elements of late colonial Britain. A conspicuous and unashamed intellectual, he is happy not just to write about visiting Adorno’s LA house, but also to quote the philosopher, even interrogate the meaning of what Adorno wrote. When Dyer gets passionate, as when he writes about jazz, or land art, his embrace of the possibilities of these worlds offer a refreshing deviation from so much Anglo-Saxon thinking and writing. On the other hand, that slightly nauseating arrogance that permeated late twentieth century British thought sometimes rears its ugly head. Again, Dyer indulges this in an unashamed fashion, wearing it on his sleeve, as in the tale where he and his wife manage to rid themselves of a potentially dangerous black ex-con on a Nevada highway. There is a sense of self-mockery at work, but it is always clothed in a blanket of privilege.

White Sands is ostensibly a travel book taking in visits to Tahiti, China and the USA. (The majority of the essays occur in the US). Presumably derived in the main from commissioned pieces, Dyer is unafraid to be contrary, dedicating an entire article about visiting The Forbidden City in Beijing to his fantasies of bedding a woman he is smitten by. This sideways take on the travelogue starts to feel laboured after a while. When he takes his mission seriously, as when he writes about three pieces of site-specific art, it as though his brain suddenly flips into fifth gear, and the finely chiseled intellect of his prose consistently comes up with intriguing and unexpected observations - about the way the artists are using space, or even the way that space uses art. Or vice versa.

Perhaps Dyer just needs to feel like he’s doing more than a hack job for money to get really excited. This book would make a great companion piece to Baudrillard’s America. 

the king of warsaw (szczepan twardoch, tr. sean gasper bye)

There is a large shadow which hangs over Twardoch’s novel, set in Warsaw in 1937. That shadow is, por supuesto, the imminence of war, the arrival of the Nazis, the construction of the ghetto and the holocaust. The protagonist of the novel, Jakub Szapiro, is Jewish, as are his family, his neighbourhood, his friends and partners and criminal associates. He doesn’t know, although the reader does, that this whole world is on the point of implosion, and all the petty disputes and conflicts which he is caught up in, with his enemies, partners, wife, family and lovers, will soon be rendered obsolete. This shadow creates its own dramatic tension, which the narrative emphasises by including flash-forwards to Jakub living a sad lonely life in Tel Aviv, decades later. The novel itself is something of a rip-roaring read, full of violence, sex, criminals and betrayal and feels ripe for the Netflix adaptation that subsequently occurred. There is a subsidiary layer which has to do with the history of Poland itself. Jakub’s contacts go to the very top, and his dealings with the far right and its political machinations has echoes of Poland’s recent history. 

the great derangement (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh does something  breathtaking in this work of non-fiction. He turns one of the colonialists’ most sacred tools, the modern realist novel, back on itself, to question the seemingly inexorable drift of Western society towards the annihilation of the planet. In so doing both vindicating the importance of the novel (he himself is, after all, a novelist) and also suggesting that its modern realist incarnation has become a symbol or symptomatic of the decadence that is leading the world towards catastrophe. Incorporated into his argument is a slyly savage assault on that prince of the modern inconsequential, if moral, writers, John Updike. Whilst the western novel has chosen to blackball the unlikely, the catastrophic, the in-credible, the natural world is sedately going about the business of making these tropes the norm. Rather than paying heed to the existential battles which humanity is confronted with, the modern novel hides under its shell of privilege, making cute novels about (bourgeois) moral dilemmas. So, Ghosh postulates, in a hundred years time, when the sea levels have risen and the deserts are marching on, people will look back and say: where were the Cassandras? Those who might at least have raised a flag of warning, seeking to include the great peril of our time on the cultural agenda. They are sidelined on grounds of taste, (here, tangentially, Ghosh’s book reminds me of Natalie Olah’s), their narratives not being deemed relevant or even saleable. 

As a result, The great derangement, as Ghosh puts it in biblical terms, is allowed to proceed unchecked. The derangement being that we blithely ignore the suicidal contradictions at the heart of “progress”. Contradictions whose full extent will be unleashed when those countries in Asia seeking, understandably, to catch up with this progressive agenda, contribute even more to humanity’s lemming like tendencies. 

As one more inclined towards the novel than the science, I would have to say how remarkable it is to to see the shibboleths of good taste and the well constructed novel being so rightfully savaged. Ghosh’s argument is that we are trapped in the bubble of our our own perception, which refuses to allow us to see that the trappings of our comfort contain the seeds of our destruction. Because that message is a turn-off, it’s a downer, it doesn’t sell. Instead we construct genteel narratives of personal crisis, ignoring the existential crisis that threatens to engulf each and every one of our descendants. 

east west street (phillipe sands)

We went to Krakow last year. It’s a fetching city. This was in the last days of open borders and the streets teemed with happy tourists snapping away. Sands’ book focuses on the city of Lwow, which is in neighbouring Ukraine, but as the book makes clear (and perhaps the title alludes to), the borders in this region in the first half of the twentieth century changed frequently. Krakow was the seat of government for Hans Frank, the Nazi overlord of this region, and one of four key characters in the book. Ironically Frank is the only one who loses his own life as a result of the war. The other three principle characters, Leon, the author’s uncle, Lauterpact and Lemkin are all Jewish, and all lost their families in the holocaust. Sands interweaves the stories of the four men’s lives, in the course of which he investigates various mysteries related to his family history. The author is a human rights lawyer, (there were moments when I might have liked more observations from his work, drawing out the way in which the work of Lauterpact and Lemkin has impacted our understanding of more contemporary issues), and the book builds towards the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, including Frank. Lauterpacht’s and Lemkin, though obviously driven by the same agenda, had competing views on the basis of how the trial should be prosecuted. Lempkin was a pioneer of the idea of genocide, a concept which Lauterpacht rejected, choosing to emphasise the transcendence of individual human rights. East West Street traces the way these two schools of thought emerged from the shared root of Lwow. The terrible history of this part of the world, which experienced the second world war with a psychotic ferocity, and whose history of pogroms and racial discrimination existed long before the arrival of the Nazis, is in stark contrast to the elegance of its architecture and its culture. This contradiction haunts history. The trappings of civilisation are no guarantee against the triumph of the most venal barbarism. Watching interviews this past week with young Israelis talking about the need to exterminate the Palestinians, using the very language that was used against their grandparents during the events the book documents, is a terrible reminder that the cruelty of history is endemic, that ‘civilisation’ is nothing more than a word.

things we lost in the fire (mariana enriquez, tr megan mcdowell)

Enriquez is something of a phenomenon in the Southern Cone. Many people whose opinions I value rate her highly and one can see why, from this early collection of short stories. The writing blends horror with social realism. In so doing it hones in on two complementary but not identical themes. The legacy of the dictatorship in Argentina; and the issue of specifically urban poverty, so often connected to drug abuse and the narcos moving in on inner cities, turning them into a dangerous no-man’s land. In many of the stories, the remate, or punchline, is constructed around the disappeared. Either those who are known as Los Desaparecidos, the political prisoners who were vanished by the military dictatorship, or, more prosaically, simply people who disappear, sometimes conveniently, as in the case of the annoying husband in the story Spiderweb. As the introduction outlines, Enriquez was born at the tail-end of the Argentine junta’s rule, and the echoes of their crimes filter down the years and make themselves heard in her tales. At the same time, the focus on what might be called social concerns, has a more immediate, topical feel. Buenos Aires is city where poverty is never far away. There are barrios, such as the one the DA visits in the story Under the Black Water which are no-go areas. But as well as that, there are the walking dead, the pasta base addicts, who patrol the streets, one of whom is brilliantly brought to life in the opening story of this collection, The Dirty Kid. This intersection between the zombified underclass and the struggling lower middle class, and then the middle class itself, is a febrile pressure point in Latin American society, and Enriquez puts her finger on it and squeezes, to devastating effect. The final story Things We Lost in the Fire, has a Saramago feel as it translates her themes into a more explicit feminist context. Enriquez’ willingness to use the coarse tools of horror in order to explore social and historical psychoses is highly effective. She uses the horror as a can opener, a way of exposing her society’s guts, in a way that a more measured take might not. 

the dead (sebastian kracht, tr. daniel bowles)

The Dead, portentous title aside, is like a delicious if slightly unsatisfying first course. It’s a slim novel, which takes a lot on. The narrative recounts the story of a Swiss film director, Emil Nägeli, who is commissioned by a Nazi director of culture in the early days of the Third Reich to make a German language film in Japan. This offers the novelist Pynchonesque scope, which he takes advantage of. The action flits from Japan to Switzerland to Berlin, back to Japan, to Hollywood and finally Zurich once more. It takes in figures including Chaplin, whose visit to Japan is skilfully interwoven into the narrative, Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang, and others. The Berlin sequence, where Nägeli spends a whirlwind few days, is brilliantly realised. One half-expects Nägeli to run into a pre-GI Slothrop. However, the bittiness of the book ultimately works against it. The pages end up feeling like fragments from a larger novel which hasn’t been written. The narrative hop, skips and jumps until it runs out of steam. 

the hatred of poetry (ben lerner)

Lerner’s slimline elegant dissection of the problematics of both writing and reading poetry can be devoured in one sitting. Essentially, of course, The Hatred of Poetry is a love letter to poetry. Lerner’s neo-Platonic thesis is that all poetry is measured against an archetypal and fictional idea of ‘poetry’ to which the poet can aspire but never reach. “Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry…” As someone who struggles with the act of reading poetry for altogether different reasons, reasons wrapped up in the relentlessness of modern life, the presence of so much else that needs reading, the lack of space for poetry, (utopian or otherwise), I felt as though there were many aspects of the poetry debate, and the decline of poetry (If such a thing exists) that Lerner skirts around.  Even if the universal Whitmanesque poet appeared (a possibility he challenges), would anyone actually read him/her? How universal can a marginal sport be? The sense of academics shouting at each other in empty rooms perhaps permeates the text; nevertheless it is an engaging, nimble-footed read. Even if it left me wondering whether I shouldn’t have dedicated the time I spent reading the book in reading some actual bloody poetry…

will and testament (w. vigdis hjorth, tr charlotte barslund)

It feels like a mistake to have read up about Vigdis Hjorth upon completing her novel, because in truth the book is far more interesting than the minor scandal which accompanied its publication. The novel is a tale about incest, a curiously Scandinavian theme. The narrator, Bergljot, makes several references to the film Festen, which the novel resembles. A wronged child confronting not just the parent who wronged them but also the familial structure which permits the offender to get away with their crime. In this sense the novel is about more than just incest. It’s about how families create their own myths, their own distortions of the truth, and the power struggles that go with the structure of the family itself. At one point Bergljot says that Festen got it wrong, because the victim is never given the chance in reality to confront their accuser as happens in the film. And the writing is brilliant in the minute way it examines all the ins and outs of Bergljot’s inhibition and the courage she requires in order that she can bring herself to confront her childhood demons, no matter how futile the task of changing the received family history should prove to be. The novel, which also refernces Ibsen, Jelineck and other Nordic poets, manages the trick of being both a difficult read and eminently readable, split up as it is into short sharp sections that keep the narrative moving in spite of Bergljot’s tendency to go round in circles as the prose nags away at a wound which can never heal. 

four futures (peter frase)

Four futures is a brief work of political futurology which offers four potential visions of the future: communist/ socialist/ rentist/ exterminist. The latter is the most terrifying and most akin to the current situation. Frase argues that as automated work replaces human work, the need for a low-skilled ‘working class’ population diminishes. They then become a burden, meaning that the cleanest solution for those who possess wealth/ power is to remove them from the social fabric. In a sense this was the Cummings/ Johnson line at the start of the current crisis. This is the books most dystopian vision. At another extreme, Frase suggests that the introduction of universal income could lead to a more egalitarian society where poverty is eliminated. Intriguingly, this is another idea which is receiving far more attention in the wake of the pandemic. The book is readable, thought-provoking, peppered with astute references from science fiction and other futurologists. Nevertheless, at its conclusion, it’s clear that no-one really has the faintest idea how the world is going to pan out as we head towards the middle of the century; something that the 99.9% of the world who hadn’t anticipated the startling arrival of a pandemic for Christmas are now more than aware of. 

ps. I wrote the above words about three weeks ago. The argument that in certain cultures (notably UK&USA) the pandemic was viewed with a certain amount of sanguine disinterest at the start, and there was an inherently fascist notion underpinning that attitude, feels even more convincing today than it did three weeks ago. In the USA figures of authority in the bio-poliitcal establishment have openly come out and stated that those who are not of economic value are disposable. If it was not apparent that Covid-19 is something that has caught the governments of these countries completely by surprise, one might have been forgiven for believing in a conspiracy theory that tallies with Frame’s exterminist vision. The pandemic urges our societies to recalibrate notions of social value. Perhaps the more effective south-east Asian response is connected to a sense that the old still retain ‘value’, even if that value cannot be measured in bland economic terms. 

landscapes [john berger]

This collection of essays spans many years. (It might have helped if all the essays were dated, rather than just a few.) The book is divided into two parts: the first a more personal account of artists and writers whose influence he has relished; the second a more discursive set of essays ranging from anything from the role of the peasantry in society to a visit to Palestine. The first half is perhaps the more engaging: Berger’s passions for cubism, Benjamin, Barthes etc shine through. He writes with a generous enthusiasm. There are other essays, notably the one entitled White Bird, about the peasant tradition in Eastern Europe of carving a white bird for the home, where his analysis of the intersection between culture and society (and names) feels wonderfully lucid. 

It’s hard to know how to place Berger. On the one hand, he might be seen as a lost prophet of British culture. One, like Brook, who fled the country and whose local influence waned as a result. On the other, he might be seen as a kind of Ruskin in waiting, a writer whose work will continue to be read years after other contemporaries in the art world are forgotten. The reason for the latter is that Berger, at his best, goes towards the nub of the experience of ‘experiencing’ art, in all its multiple dimensions. He tries to get under the skin of the weird relationship between society and culture, and on occasion in this collection of essays it feels as though he nails it. Having said which, although this book namechecks Debord, among others, at other times his insistent Marxism feels dated. Which is not to say that Marxism is dated; rather than the relationship Berger writes about feels dated, as he struggles to come to terms with the dashed dreams of the post-war world. 

sudden death [álvaro enrigue, tr. natasha wimmer]

Sudden Death: An Unfinished Rally

Sudden Death is a novel about tennis and its origins.

No it’s not. It’s a novel about Caravaggio and the invention of modern painting.

On the other hand, it’s a novel about the fall of the Aztec empire.

And the birth of the Spanish empire.

The moment that the pursuit of civilisation passed from the Western hemisphere to the European.

Foot fault surely, at what point was the Western hemisphere more advanced than the European? And what exactly is the Western Hemisphere anyway?

The Aztecs and the Inca and the Sioux and the Navajo and all the other civilisations that got destroyed by the barbarian hordes from across the seas. 

Barbarian hordes? What kind of a trick shot is that?

Read the book. Which also describes the primitive state of pre-Renaissance Europe. 

So what’s his beef, Enrigue? Whose side is he on?

No-one’s. He just wants to recalibrate the historical balance. 

He must have a team.

Maybe it’s Mexico. A country that continues to negotiate the clash between American and European civilisations.

Didn’t someone else make a film about this recently?

You mean the ironically titled Roma, by Alfonso Cuaron. A title Enrigue would be proud of.

Why?

Most of his novel is set in Rome.

I thought you said it took place in Mexico?

Mexico is the glory which Rome inherited.

What does that mean?
Follow the money. Or in those days, the gold. And behold the wonder of the Michoacan feather workers, who made a mitre for the Pope which changed the way Caravaggio saw colour which changed the way the world perceived the world. The European world. 

The Michoacan feather workers??

It’s a long story.

That’s a curve ball.

Or an ace.

What’s the score?

Deuce, advantage Patzcuaro

Patzcuaro?

The lost Utopia, the one true marriage between Renaissance Europe and pre-Colomban America.

I’m not sure I follow the rules of this particular game of tennis.

It’s Mornington Crescent, via Sudden Death.

Which is the name of the novel.

Indeed it is.

So who wins?

paterson (w&d jarmusch)

For my money, Jarmusch is always happier working with a limited palette, maximising the recourses he has been allocated. Down by Law, Coffee and Cigarettes, of those I know, are lovely, self-contained films, which thrive on their chosen minimalism. Paterson, with its clear homages to the art of poetry, and more specifically, William Carlos Williams, is an addition to that club.

Poetry, of all the narrative art forms, is perhaps the greatest antithesis to film. Film is a team game. It requires equipment, specialisation, budget. Poetry is a one-man band, which requires nothing more than a pen and paper. (Or in this day and age a smartphone, something Paterson might reject.) Poetry thrives on formal rules: metre, scan, rhyme. Not to mention the rhetorical devices, (alliteration, onomatopoeia etc). Perhaps Jarmusch has always embraced the poetic possibilities of the cinematic form, but never more knowingly so than in Paterson. A clearly defined structure of seven stanzas, one for each day of Paterson’s working week. A recurrent use of image, character and trope. The adoption of stylistic flourishes (the composition of overlapping images to accompany the poems, as well as the use of ‘writing’ to illustrate them.) Even in the narrative construction, there would appear to be a nod to the art of the narrative, with what appears to be one significant incident per stanza. 

The net result is a languid, understated film, which is rich in detail, where every marginal moment has a resonance. In that sense, weirdly, it also seems to be faithful to those scriptwriting gurus who state that every scene should reinforce your film’s theme. Perhaps, the film suggests, the connection between film and poetry is closer than one imagines: in the art of the screenplay, which seeks to contain a precision to rival poetry’s precision and economy; and also, one imagines, the storyboard, where the formal visual elements are mapped out and composed with as much rigour as a poet seeking to construct the perfect line. 

the death of the french intellectual [shlomo sand]

In spite of the recherché title, there’s something pressing and universal about Sand’s disjointed text. There’s a reason it’s disjointed, that in the end it feels like two texts knitted into one. However, it’s a compelling reason, which only goes to show that scholarship need not always be about conformist lines and arguments. 

The book’s first part is an analysis of the role of the intellectual in French society. Working his way through the usual culprits, including Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as a host of others who are lesser known in the Anglo-Saxon world, Sand looks at the dialectic between the intellectual functioning as an apparatchik of the state or, in contrast, as a kind of spiritual guide, someone capable of surveying society from a lofty distance, removed from the petty debates of politics. Sand analyses both positions, questioning their integrity and the degree to which they truly promoted the idea of independent thought. Examining the role via the complexities of French socio-politics leads him, via Gramsci, to state at one point: “the ‘independent’ intellectual appears as bearer of the universal interest, and by this fact alone manages to better conceal both the specific interests of the rulers and their own. This is one of the ways in which cultural hegemony so essential for the maintenance of social order is created.”

Which is not to sat that Sand seeks to reject the importance of the intellectual. The book is spotted with small details from his own life, which help to explain how and why he himself has become an intellectual, and the role that the intellectual plays within a socially conscious world. If anything, there’s sometimes a tone of nostalgia for the days of serious thought, which, it would seem from the final chapters, he feels is being displaced by soundbite-savvy, media-literate figures who have learnt to package a semblance of complex thought into digestible doses. This is most apparent in the final chapter, where he specifically takes on two ‘philosophers’ whose work has risen to prominence as they embrace a critical stance towards Islam. (He also look at Houllebecq’s novels in this context.) Sand is an Israeli by birth, who has a strong residual understanding of the way in which cultural stigmatism functions. The closing chapter of the first part of his book has looked at the way that some French intellectuals embraced fascism. Part of the book’s argument is an investigation into how the idea of the intellectual, constructed in the enlightenment, could have lead to representatives of that term embracing the impoverished ‘philosophy’ of fascism, with its specifically ethnic prejudices. He then sees this being repeated in the twenty first century, as intellectuals turn on Islam, in the same way many from the wartime generation turned on judaism. 

All of which makes for a book which is brave and urgent. Sand has the courage to make clear his mixed feelings regarding Charlie Hebdo, calling out the magazine as having been openly racist (whilst never suggesting that this meant it deserved its fate). His closing chapters trace what he sees as a dangerous trend towards Islamaphobism, noting the way in which the arguments in favour of this trend are backed up and given agency by “intellectuals”. Clearly, Sand is identifying a trend that goes beyond the borders of France. At a time when the spectre of fascism appears to have re-emerged to threaten civil society as well as moral absolutes which in another age are envisaged as unimpeachable, Sand’s book is a vital tool to an understanding how we’ve got to where we’ve got to, and possibly signals ways we can start to get out of this mess, before it gets any worse. 

el rey tuerto (w&d marc crehuet)

This Spanish film, featured as part of the human rights festival, is a curiosity. It’s a drama, rather than a doc, which is constructed around the premise of David, a policeman, meeting the man whose eye he shot out at a demonstration (Nacho). They meet because their respective partners used to know one another, and have arranged to have supper together. If this feels somewhat stagey, it’s because that’s the way the film, unashamedly is. Heavy on the dialogue and meticulously acted, the film always has the feel of an adapted stage play. It’s well shot and well lit, which lends it a more cinematic air, but the project clearly has its roots in the theatre. The story unfolds through a sequence of acts, as David is forced to confront his prejudices and, perhaps predictably, strikes up a complex relationship with the one-eyed Nacho.

The process of watching a well-rendered stage adaptation is interesting. Theatre offers far more scope for discussion and polemic, something the audience appeared to enjoy. They were in no way put off by the wordiness, if anything they relished it. The dramatic product, most of which takes place in the same location, isn’t dependent on a sophisticated manipulation of image, something that film schools and funding bodies seem obsessed by. Instead, the argument and the dynamic between the characters carry the film towards its end. The fact that the narrative ends up feeling somewhat obvious is neither here nor there; what’s fascinating is how the cinematic form and the stage play format work in tandem. It makes one wonder to what extent cinema might have backed away from the joys of the spoken word, allowing it to become the stuff of television. When film does allow itself to indulge in ample dialogue (the Boyle/ Sorkin venture Steve Jobs comes to mind; or even Andrew Haigh’s Weekend), it too often tends towards a slightly verbose pudding. Marc Crehuet’s text shows how the use of a solid scene structure helps, as in theatre, to give shape to the words, to keep them in check, and in the process reminds us of how entertaining a cinema of language and ideas is capable of being, something that tends to get forgotten.

safari (d ulrich seidl)

Seidl’s deadpan, disturbing documentary is a fearsome piece of stripped-down filmmaking. As the title suggests, the film follows various  Austrian characters on safari at a game reserve in Namibia. The reserve is run by a German couple whose visitors include a family of four, father, mother, son and daughter. It’s obvious that these people are extremely wealthy. Safaris aren’t something many can afford, as one of the hunters observes, stating they bring far more money into the country than ordinary tourists.  

The film is set up to intersperse moments of action, as the hunters track down game in the bush, with snippets from staged interviews, where they talk about their attitudes to hunting, killing and death. Those characters seem harmless enough on first viewing; their attitudes appear to be formed by a need to prove their alpha status, for example when the son questions his sister as to why she’d draw the line at killing a lion or a giraffe. They come across as banal figures, playing out some kind of power fantasy as they tramp through the bush, searching out targets. Another older couple are even broadly comic, with the wife spending her time sun-bathing whilst her husband drinks beer in a hide, waiting for game that never arrives.

But in the last third of the film the killing takes on a different dimension. The mother has already shot an impala and posed by it, but now the son shoots a zebra. The beast’s beauty appears to be unconquerable even in death, but then the filmmaker shows the zebra being skinned by the African workers, who also increasingly figure in the film’s narrative. Then the father shoots a giraffe. It feels like an act of terrible, senseless vandalism. When they get to the beast, it is still dying. The camera observes its death throes in a chilling sequence, made all the more so by the family’s pride in their actions. It’s not a boastful pride; it’s a kind of self-serving bourgeois pride in a job well done. Seidl then films the giraffe being loaded onto a truck, driven away and skinned, with the family looking on. The images of the entrails are worse than anything you’d encounter in a horror movie.  The film has captured the obscene reality of killing: a beast that was alive and wondrous a few hours ago is reduced to a carcass. 

The exact message of the movie is never stated, but the viewer comes away with a deep feeling of unease; that this kind of sport should still exist; at the senseless violence of man; and an implicit critique of a class of people who choose to indulge themselves using killing as a kind of bonding experience. The film is framed with two shots, pre and post credits, of horn players performing in a European forest, suggesting that this is a movie which is more concerned with questioning European values than anything else. The reserve is owned by slightly racist Germans, (with suits of armour in their colonial home) who have created a kind of savage idyll. Safari is a very simple piece of filmmaking, but the director succeeds in creating a deeply unsettling narrative from his material. 

the encounter (w&d simon mcburney, d kirsty housley)

This is one of those, on the one hand, and then again, on the other hand, shows.

On the one hand:

McBurney weaves a sterling theatrical tale, adapted from Loren McIntyre’s account of his journey to the Amazon, where he experienced a profound and intoxicating encounter with a native tribe. An encounter wherein he flirted with death and was forced to face up to the meaning of his values, as he became engaged with the tribe’s anti-materialistic theology/ philosophy. The story is told via the use of headphones and dazzling technological manipulation of the theatrical space. Light, sound and little else are used to turn the vast Barbican stage into a convincing jungle, alien, terrifying and wondrous. McBurney pulls off a redoubtable one-man performance, taking the reins as the narrator himself, then slipping into the character of McIntyre, and alternating between the two with confidence and aplomb. 

On the other hand:

This is a piece of theatre which appears to be about the problems of materialism. At one point, the tribe which McIntyre is visiting destroy all their possessions. McBurney, as himself, then goes on a Lear-esque rant, wherein he proposes that we destroy all our possessions too. Or at least contemplate the possibility. Clearly it’s not going to happen, and much less as a result of a show which chooses to tell its story through the use of technology. Western theatre returns to its essential paradox of telling people who can afford to pay 50 quid for a seat a message which, no matter how worthy, is completely redundant. There’s something vaguely unsatisfying about the process, an itch being scratched which maybe only makes the rash worse. 

However, this might be to quibble in the face of history. Because at the end of the day, what McBurney pulls off is something which has a life and dynamism which you don’t always encounter in the theatre, and no matter the ins and outs of the context or the message, as a theatrical experience it feels radical and remarkable. Special mention should be made to the technical team, Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin who explore the potential of sound in the theatre with flair, as well as the design of Michael Levine and the lighting of Paul Anderson. 

la región salvaje (the untamed) (w&d. amat escalante, w. gibrán portela)

I had the good fortune to watch Escalante’s film in Mexico City, with an attentive local audience. I say this because, although cinema is such a private event, there is clearly a communal aspect to the act of attending a film in the company of others, something which lends the viewing another dimension. The only films I watch that I discuss here are ones I have seen in a cinema, or at a public screening. Whilst for many cinema is increasingly something to be experienced at home, there is still a distinction to seeing it in a cinema, and the instance of watching La Región Salvaje only emphasised this.

La Región Salvaje is quite off the wall. In Europe, were it to be released it would probably be marketed as an art film. Escalante’s Cannes hit, Heli, was seen in this light, and well received because, one suspects, it could be treated as such a serious dissertation on the state of narco-Mexico. In spite of the fact that it’s very much a film about real people living real lives. La Región Salvaje might be said to be even more so. Its high concept premise is based around the existence of a creature which landed on the earth, dedicated to pleasure, which is kept by some old hippies in the countryside. However, it needs feeding, (or pleasuring), so the hippies use a beautiful girl, Veronica, as bait to lure a young doctor, who’s bisexual. His experience with the creature proves too much and leaves him in a coma. The doctor had been having an affair with his sister’s husband, something she finds about. Through Veronica, the sister learns about the creature and visits it, which in her case does her no harm at all. But when her estranged husband tries to come back into her life, she offers him up to the creature, which kills him. 

The plot then is complicated, perverse, pretentious, daft. It’s really hard to place La Región Salvaje: is it a horror film? Is it social realism? Is it a sex comedy? Of course, the answer is that it all of these things, as well as being, no doubt, a metaphor for the current state of the nation. (Is the creature that can only deliver pleasure but also kills an analogy for the drugs/ narco world?). At the same time, as the audience reaction made clear, it’s also extremely entertaining. The laughter of the local audience was a corrective to any pretension. And perhaps goes to show, as does Escalante’s film, how cinema has found itself so entrapped in a high/ low culture divide. La Región Salvaje seems to mock the very notion of an “art” film. The director and writer steer a narrative course which belongs to neither camp, or both camps, at the same time. It defies categorisation, something that might be tricky for the marketing men, but is more reflective of cinema’s capacity to tackle issues of import (politically/ aesthetically) whilst at the same time engaging with an audience on a visceral level.