kairos (jenny erpenbeck, tr michael hofmann)

The transition of Berlin from a city divided to a city unified is one of the more epic geopolitical tales of my lifetime. My generation grew up with the Berlin Wall and this island outpost of “the West” within the communist empire. This in itself being one of the most long-lasting and evident aftershocks of the Second World War. The wall felt intractable, as though it would be there forever. So when it went, it revealed the porousness of historical absolutes. Nothing lasts forever.

Erpenbeck’s novel tells this tale from the point of view of the East, which could be termed the point of view of the losers. It’s a love story which from the get-go seems fucked up. Hans is in his mid fifties and Katharina is nineteen when they meet. For all that the narrative is largely told from her besotted point of view, the reader knows this isn’t a happy-ever-after tale. As Hans becomes increasingly controlling and abusive, with Katharina seemingly unable to see the wood from the trees, the novel takes a darker turn. The reader is asked to buy into their unpleasant, toxic relationship. The writing itself becomes more and more uncontrolled. Characters come and go, there are sudden jumps in time. Hans and Katharina are devastatingly unhappy, then they’re cosy all over again. It’s a vortex, and the vortex spins and spins. The point of view of Ingrid, Hans’ wife, is only touched on, and Katharina seemingly has no sense of guilt or responsibility towards the unfortunate wife, unable to see Hans for what he is.

Which will finally be revealed when the novel reaches its epilogue. They have a word here, remate, which literally means ‘finish’, but is also used to mean something like ‘a sting in the tail’. Erpenbeck keeps this up her sleeve. (Perhaps a DDR public would have worked this out sooner.) Hans, a novelist and journalist, is not quite what he seems, and even Katharina, his long-term lover, is unable to work this out.

All of which is complex, even torturous. The middle of the novel is a mazy, roundabout read. The reader, blessed with historical knowledge the characters don’t have, knows where this is headed. The fate of the relationship is tied to the fate of the DDR, a country that will soon cease to exist. The last quarter of the novel documents the decline and fall of East Germany with great precision. The writer skips over the day the wall is breached, because this isn’t a novel about that moment. It’s a novel about the effects of the transition on the individuals who lived in the East, who, in one way or another, adhered to the values, flawed or not, of the East German regime. The novel suddenly becomes more political, as the looming demiurge of capitalism overtakes and invades. Erpenbeck knows that, like the relationship of her ill-crossed lovers, the project that is dying is doing so because of irredeemable flaws. But still - there was something there, wasn’t there? Another way of living, beyond callow materialism.

In this closing sequence a novel which seems at times to deliberately alienate the reader comes full circle. The sting in the tail is at most an afterthought. The dream died a long time ago. All that was left was the shadow of the dream, the missing teeth of the wall that sought to keep out Mammon. 

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Nb - I have recently read two non-fiction books about the DDR, Red Love and Stasiland, which help to contextualise the world of Kairos. As the world reverts towards an extreme dichotomy between ‘The West’ and all that this has come to imply, and the unknown, ‘East’, the dialectic which Berlin itself represented for nearly half a century seems more and more a representation of the different paths the world might have taken.

the monroe girls (antoine volodine, tr. alyson waters)

A strange post-civilisation world. A world where the dead and living live side-by-side. Mysterious squad of female assassins, who may or may not be coming back from the dead. A narrator who is two people, first person and third person. Discursive scenes followed by staccato moments of violence. Volodine’s text has something of Burroughs about it, with added humour and a post-apocalyptic slant. 

souvenir (michael bracewell)

This slight half-fiction, populated by pop stars and flaneurs, does what it says on the tin. It remembers. In a succession of vignettes, Bracewell traces an unofficial history of the capital from ’78 to ’85. This is the land of music and fashion, of the unheralded and the heralded. People who went to parties in council blocks or art galleries, people who walked the streets wondering at the dazzle, clocking the passers-by, living outside thoughts of the future. It’s a small, beautiful book which captures the city in the years before I knew it, albeit the traces of that time were still around when I arrived in 88, the last gasp of the pre-digital era. If you really want to know what London was like in those days, you can do much worse than spend an afternoon with Bracewell’s Memoir. 

These Polaroid photographs, by contrast, were deeply English, neo-Romantic in spirit: Paul Nash, John Minton, Derek Jarman; the lane in deep green evening light, abstraction on the beach, the personality of inanimate objects (a jar on a windowsill, a dirty windowpane, a stricken tree, moss on blackened brick); the stilled or violent atmosphere of time and place thickening to numinosity.

faraway the southern sky (joseph andras, tr. simon leser)

Curiously, Faraway the Southern Sky is billed as a novel. It tells the tale of a narrator who is researching the years that Ho Chi Minh, who at that stage went by various alias’, spent in Paris. The novel recounts the narrator’s wandering through Paris as he seeks out the sites where Ho lived, and digs into the archives to find documentation of his time in the French capital, from 1918 to 1924. It is full of observations from the time of the author’s writing, about the gilets jaunes, about the changes to the geo-dynamics of Paris since Ho’s day. It doesn’t feel like a novel. It feels like the account of a flaneur with an interest in Marxism, the colonial struggle and the workings of power. It is a slight book, but anchored around the search for Ho Chi Minh, it is captivating. The level of espionage and state security around Ho, at that point no more than a dreamer, an anti-colonial wannabe, is striking. The police state was not invented by the Nazis or the Chinese or Trump. It has been around forever. Ho comes across as an elusive, idealistic soul, almost a flaneur in his own right. 

municipale (w&d. thomas paulot, w milan alfonsi, ferdinand flame)

In Municipal, a playful documentary, actor Laurent Papot goes to Revin, a small town in the Ardennes, where he plans to stand as mayor. He makes it clear that this is an exercise in the functioning of democracy, saying that if he wins he will return to Paris and leave the chair vacant for his supporters. Perhaps unsurprisingly the project meets with some resistance, even as he garners some unlikely supporters.

The film has three strands. Firstly it interrogates how democracy functions on a local level, showing how local people become involved, tracing Laurent's journey towards polling day. Secondly it is a study in post-industrial decline. Revin used to be an industrial hub, and its economy thrived. Now, in common with so many Western European towns, it has no industry left and has consequently declined. The gilet jaunes candidate both befriends and harangues Laurent, and he clearly represents a more militant critique of 21st century European politics. Thirdly, the film ends up being a surprisingly tender portrait of a man struggling to find his place in an alien culture. Revin is still France, but the distance to Paris seems vast. Laurent is also on a voyage to feel as though he belongs, one the film, which is perhaps directed by his brother (?), traces with elegance and sympathy. 

open water (caleb azumah nelson)

Nelson's novel details a failed London romance. The ostensible reason for its failure, given by the narrator, is that he has become emotionally impotent in the face of the trauma of being a young black man struggling to cope with police violence and black-on-black violence. However, given that the object of his affections remains something of a mystery femme fatale, transformed into magic pixie girl whose thing is dancing, it  suggests that part of the relationship’s problem is an inability to connect with the significant other and see her in terms that go beyond a predictable vision of urban romance. There's lots in the novel that chimes with anyone who has lived a London youth - the Ritzy, dive bars in Dalston, etcetera. But it's also striking that the protagonists have a decent amount of disposable income, forever hopping into Ubers to cross town on a whim. They live with their parents so presumably pay minimal rent - reflecting a two tier London system between those who are sheltered by their parents and those who have to fend for themselves - a division that is determined by neither race nor class. 

assembly (natasha brown)

Brown’s slender text presents contemporary Britain from the perspective of an apparently successful female black banker. However, given the immensity of history, the perniciousness of the class system and the irradicable vestiges of racism, success is always a relative term. Something the narrator grapples with as she heads to her posh boyfriend’s parents’ country estate for a weekend. In modern Britain, the dragnet of the past will always drag you down. The novella is discursive, composed of moments, thoughts, fears, rather than seeking to construct a complex narrative. Instead, we wander through the highways and byways of the narrator’s mind. Dealing with issues ranging from reparations paid to slave owners to cancer to what it’s like to sit on train puling out of London into the wilds. 

a night of knowing nothing (w&d. payal kapadia, w. himanshu prajapati)

“Eisenstein, Pudovkin ... we shall fight, we shall win”

Kapadia’s documentary opens and closes with extended scenes of people dancing, with the music they are dancing to kept offstage. It’s a neat if somewhat flashy device, an understated imprimatur. The film documents in a loose, poetic manner the resistance of the Mumbai Film School to the appointment of a BPJ choice as director of the FTII film school. It is an account of friendship and struggle, told via black and white photography and a muted voiceover, against a backdrop of Modi’s divisive politics. Kapadia invests the film with a wistful, elusive aura as it captures a lost moment in the narrator’s history. This voiceover adds a metatextual level to the doc, allowing it to float somewhere between capturing a reality and capturing time lived as a dream. 

the night always comes (willy vlautin)

I am not entirely sure how Vlautin’s brief novel reached my library, but it was a perfect accompaniment for the latter part of a transatlantic flight, finished shortly before landing at Heathrow. The novel tells the story of Lynette, a down-on-her-luck thirty year old resident of Portland, who learns that her dream of owning her own home has been put in jeopardy by her mother and determines to do all she can on one fateful night to call in her debts and raise funds for the deposit. Predictably things don’t according to plan. Will Lynette escape everything the night throws at her or will the rainy Portland night destroy her? Whilst the narrative and thematic are generic, there is a warmth to the writer’s portrait of his heroine and a sense of immersion in the geography which helps to keep the read moving. It comes as no surprise for see that the book is already slated to be a movie. It has all the ingredients: a heroine whose desperation drives her to action, the propulsive tension of the night, the unities of time place and action. It’s a hard fast read which is also a love letter to the author’s hometown. 

medusa (w&d anita rocha da silveira)

Medusa has some elements in common with a project we are working on, which also has its roots in Latin America. It may be a massive generalisation, but it feels as though the issues surrounding feminism, which include class and race, not to mention violence and femicide, are lived on a sharper edge in that continent. Medusa spins the trope on its head, opening with a scene where a band of women hunt down their female prey, accusing her of being a slut and beating her up. The vigilante band, to which the film’s protagonists belong, are religious evangelists, who sing sexy songs in the name of Jesus for their church choir. The church is lead by the handsome and charismatic pastor who also has a band of vigilante boys as part of his congregation. As the film unfolds, the protagonists undergo a perhaps predictable transformation, turning against the church and indulging in sexual relationships out of marriage, as well as becoming victims of male abuse. The film has various narrative threads which seem to function more as platforms for its discourse than roads to go down. A missing mythical burns victim, a lesbian romance, orgies in the woods. Nevertheless there is a verve to Da Silveira’s direction which keeps driving the movie forwards. The preacher who embodies the Bolsonaro subtext is righteously skewered, and the narrative around evangelism, so strong in Brazil, helps to illustrate the way in which oppression of women is perpetrated in many different guises. 

post-capitalist desire (mark fisher)

Mark Fisher has acquired guru status, something one suspects he would never have really desired. Desire being an actionable word, as this collection of the last lectures of his life in 2016 makes clear. Transcribed verbatim from recordings of said lectures at Goldsmiths, Post-capitalist Desire sees the academic wrestling with the failure of the counter-cultural movement that emerged in the sixties, as it fractured into representative silos, and the possibilities for hope for the future at the dawning of the age of Trump. One of the key aspects of the lectures is the way in which capitalism both constructs and satisfies the desires of its subjects, rewarding them for their obedience with shiny toys and the serotonin rush of purchase. Fisher sets out to investigate, looking at a wide range of references, how these desires are made and how the innate human yearnings of desire might be reconstructed within a society more concerned with ideas of fairness and empathy. (At one point he discusses why he is wary of words like Communism which have become tainted by their twentieth century associations). The series of lectures, punctuated by interventions from the students, are an inclusive format for entering into and understanding a discourse which so often blinds with its science. The discussion of Lyotard’s vision of different versions of Marx, for example, has a clarity which helps to unveil the complexity of the text being discussed. More than anything else, it feels as though this series of lectures, which remained unfinished due to the Fisher’s suicide, offers some challenging but bizarrely optimistic guidelines for emerging from the stasis and hangover of twentieth century political thinking which still afflicts us, as we move towards a world whose underpinning philosophical, epistemological and even erotic concerns are rapidly evolving. Permitting discussion of the way in which capitalism has succeeded in constructing a matrix of desire which, no matter how unjustly, serves to ensure it’s continued procreation, feels like an essential step in beginning to evaluate how we/ the world/ society might go beyond this reductive matrix and transform it into something more joyous and communal. 

soula (w&d salah issad, w. soula bahri)

Soula tells the tale of its eponymous heroine, a young woman with a child born out of wedlock, desperately trying to keep it together in spite of the fact she is a social outcast. Soula is a free spirit, who enjoys the things young women all over the world enjoy: drinking, smoking, hanging out, having fun. But in the society she inhabits, this isn’t encouraged. The film is made up of various chapters set over the course of around 12 hours, each time stamped, as we follow the course of a tragic day. Soula flees from her home, is betrayed by her friend, raped, picked up by her crazy cousin, who sets out to drive her 300kms with his newly arrived friend from France to a party town on the coast. In the midst of all this she has to try to ensure her baby daughter is safe. The film and Soula’s crazy night ends in predictable tragedy. The film does a vigorous job of representing the way in which women are maltreated in Algeria, and the hairline fractures that exist in a society seeking to balance western liberalism with the perceived social conditioning of religion. 

patient 1 (charlotte raven)

Raven’s book appeared in my library for two reasons. Firstly because I am old enough to remember when she, alongside Burchill, appeared on the scene as a literary enfant terrible. How strange to think that she was working for Toby Young’s Modern Review. In so many ways this seems to encapsulate all that went horribly awry with Britain in the nineties. Raven and Burchill were brilliant writers who captured a certain zeitgeist, flames that burned for a while. As Raven acknowledges in her memoir, it was a flame which burnt itself out far sooner than it should have done. Toby Young turned out to be an over-privileged dork with a patina of intellectualism which was enough to pull the wool over people’s eyes, (reminiscent of a former prime minister), whose greatest skill was probably appropriating the talent of gifted women for his own greater good. The flair of Raven the journalist had nowhere to go, and as she notes, was coerced into writing lame controversy pieces, which didn’t do her any good. The other point of reference is that one of my closest friends had a close friend himself, called Tom, who I would meet from time to time, and always seemed lovely. Tom was Raven’s husband for many years. A long-suffering husband, as the book makes clear. It was a curious reading experience to vicariously share the history of an acquaintance, and his combustible marriage. There are all these lives out there, in London, which run parallel to our own, with their dramas and their tragedies and their false dawns and happy moments and unhappy endings and we see just the very edge of these lives, like catching a glimpse of a lurid lining inside a coat. This book effectively turned the lining inside out. Whilst primarily a memoir about living with the hereditary Huntington’s disease, I read it as a roman a clef, shedding shards of light on a world I walked beside but never quite knew. 

On the day of writing, there’s an article in the Guardian with the author making the case for assisted dying, stating that her disease is worsening and she is in great psychological and physical pain. In the book, Raven talks a lot about the dire possible outcomes of her having Huntington’s disease, but ends on something of an up, as she gets a place on a treatment test which could lead to a breakthrough. Even though the news that the test has not worked is revealed at the close of the book, we don’t really as readers register the severity of what is soon to hit the writer, in part because she writes so cogently. Today’s article brought it home in tragic fashion. 

a plein temps (w&d eric gravel)

Gravel’s taut film has something of the Uncut Gems about it, as the heroine, Julie, struggles to survive in the big city against the odds. Julie, separated from the father of her two kids, commutes from a long way out from the centre of Paris, where she has a job as senior chambermaid in a five star hotel. In the week we meet her, strikes are paralysing Paris (plus ça change) and her commute becomes the kind of ordeal any big city dweller knows all too well. The situation is complicated by the fact she’s been invited for a job interview for the kind of job she used to do, before the separation, but in order to attend the interview she has to bunk off work. What with arriving late and having to deal with a Scottish singer who has done a ‘Bobby Sands’, (a touch of black humour which I and one other in the cinema laughed out loud at), and then being invited back for a second interview, Julie finds herself skating on thin ice at work, at a time her ex is failing to pay his share of the bills and her bank account is close to zero. Will Julie make it to the end of the week, or will she throw herself under a train? The tension is ever-present, as Julie flags down lifts to get home and is threatened with being reported to social services. At times the script feels almost sadistic, as though it has been sent to the obstacle lab, but the film painfully succeeds in documenting the first world stress of survival in the urban jungle, even if the ending seems a bit cakeist, as her possible salvation involves plunging right back into the hideous capitalist machine which has brought her to such a pass in the first place. 

far beyond the pasturelands (d. maude plante-husaruk, maxime lacoste-lebuis)

How much is a mushroom worth? Far Beyond the Pasturelands is an account of how, in the Nepalese highlands of the Himalayas, villagers take time out of their lives to go and search for a particular rare strain of caterpillar mushroom, which are worth five dollars  a pop, and presumably far more when they eventually get to market. The film’s remit remains strictly within the mushroom picking season of the villagers, so how this process fits into the wider matrix of globalisation is never revealed. At the same time, the villagers in their tents are seen watching a Bollywood movie or getting their phones charged as they camp out for the season, miles from their homes and any notion of urban civilisation. They seem to enjoy their foray into the highlands, even if the work is back-breaking and frustrating: it’s possible to go an entire day without finding a single mushroom. The wider context of their lives is only alluded to, although the desire to give their children a better education to escape poverty comes through as a common theme when we hear what the villagers have to say. 

mis hermanos sueñan despiertos (w&d claudia huaiquimilla, w. pablo greene)

Huaiquimilla’s film is a worthy if dogged dramatisation of the events leading to a fire in the juvenile remand centre of Puerto Montt, where ten young adults died. The closing titles also refer to the more than a thousand others who have died whilst within the system. The movie recounts the story from the point of view of the young adults, focusing on a pair of sympathetic brothers who don’t appear to deserve to be locked up. Perhaps one of the weaker elements of the film is that all the kids are excessively likeable, so the logic behind why they have ended up where they have, and the social conditions within Chile which lead to its youth being locked up, aren’t explored, in spite of the use of occasional flashbacks. Whilst the lead character, Angel, is known as the poet, and his brother Franco, (known as Pulga or Flea, a Messi reference) has dreams of playing for Barcelona, the edges of these characters feel as though they have been ironed out in the script, which veers towards the functional. The film has received support from various International Film Labs, and there is more than a suggestion of the construction of a vision which meets Western requirements of Latin American stories, no matter how well acted and authentic the film feels. 

cine, registro vivo de nuestra memoria (film the living record of our memory) (w&d inés toharia)

This is one of those films that if you are a cineaste, you have to watch. There will always be this contradiction about cinema, in that it is an art that is inherently technological, but this is something which works against its longevity. Cinema exists in the dark, in cans or hard drives or clouds or DVDs. It is projected from these spheres of existence onto a screen, but when the projector is switched off, the film has to live on somehow. Toharia’s film opens by explaining how the vast majority of cinema from the silent era is lost forever, victim of recycling for the silver, or fire, because nitrate is highly flammable, or just decay, because film itself is an unstable substance. The film goes on to reveal how the art or science of restoration has evolved, referring to lost classics that have been rediscovered in the most unlikely of places (the lost footage from Metropolis which turned up in Buenos Aires, for example). It also addresses the fact that much of the great cinema of earlier eras is lost forever, and in amongst that is the work of great cineastes whose names we shall never know. The film is wide ranging in its remit, looking at the lost films of Africa, Asia and South America, as well as the more obvious spheres of North America and Europe. Toharia manages to cram a vast amount of information into the film’s two hour running time. The ghost images from lost films which have been partially recovered are inexplicably moving. The film constantly reminds us of the curious magic that is the moving image, a means of cheating time and capturing memory which humankind has never enjoyed before. This is a glorious film which should be seen by anyone with an interest in looking at screens. 

sabaya (d. hogir hirori)

Out on the other side of the cinemas or the blogs or the netflix or the ivory towers there is a whole other world which is the world that is waiting and the world before and in all likelihood the world that most inhabit now. This world remains outside the purview of the cinema or the blogs or the netflix or the ivory towers. There are no bridges or rope ladders. Then, every now and again, someone succeeds in jumping the gap, and the two worlds meet. In this documentary, Hirori achieves this.

Read around Sabaya and there is a controversy about how much is ‘real’ and who much isn’t ‘real’. The controversy is, in every sense, academic. Sabaya tells the story of two men who have made it their task to rescue the Yazidi women who were kidnapped by the Islamic State during its brief, tumultuous reign. The men know that many of these women are somewhere in the sprawling refugee camp in Northern Syria, close to the Turkish border, in theory controlled by the Syrian state, in practice the fiefdom still of Daesh. The villages surrounding the refugee camp are also sympathetic to Daesh. In one dramatic sequence, the men rescue a woman from the camp and are pursued and shot at as they make their way down empty roads, hoping to reach safety. We know the cameraman is in the car with the men and the woman. We know that this is documentary which is as real as it’s going to get, which is sharing the experience of those in the car with us, in the cinema.

It has been claimed that this scene has been staged. That the woman in the car who we see was not the actual woman in the car when the chase through the dark empty roads happened. That the interiors were filmed later. As though this discredits the authenticity of the film. I have no way of knowing whether these claims are valid or not, but what is evident is that the girl in the car was rescued (we see her later) and that the cameraman was in the car when it was pursued and shot at. What we have, at the most is a confluence of two realities, which does not in any way annul the reality of the film. If anything it underlines it. Every single representation of reality by a camera is a distortion of the actual reality (think Zapruder) and, should they so chose it to be, the task of the filmmaker is to present their version of the reality they claim to present as faithfully as possible.

And this, it feels, Hirori, a native Kurd, achieves. He shares with the viewer a reality which we realise is beyond our everyday ken. A reality of war, of abuse, of heroism, of hard choices, a reality which most of the world would rather not look at, with good reason, because these kind of realities only happen when everything has gone horribly wrong. All the same, someone has to document them, someone has to speak for the other side of the screens. Someone has to show that the Yazidi women can be rescued and are being rescued, that there is hope in the world, no matter how tarnished and flawed and desperate that hope might be. 

wood and water (w&d jonas bak)

This is one of those films that might be a gem, or might be utterly self-indulgent, probably depending on your mood as you enter the cinema. A grandmother, Anke, retires from her job in the church. She goes to visit her son, Max, in Hong Kong. Max never shows up. She wanders the streets of Hong Kong during the days of the umbrella protests, slipping by on the margin, someone who is on the edge of not only the world, but even her own world. She returns to her home in the Black Forest. Time has passed. Seismic events occur, but we are just spectators. The meta aspect of all this is that the director is using his own grandmother to play the grandmother, and the cast is made up of much of his family. Which smells to an extent of cinema-as-gestalt, and perhaps contributes to the sense that the whole project is somewhat contrived. There are some beguiling sequences, such as the encounter between Anke and the Hong Kong porter, but it’s hard to tell if the parts of this movie add up to a whole. 

ripples of life (w&d shujun wei, w. chunlei kang)

Wherefore Chinese cinema? One opens with this question because this is how Ripples of Life begins and ends. A film crew arrive at a hotel-restaurant in an out-of-the-way town, to make a film (called Ripples of Life) about how China is changing. The film is set in a downtrodden hotel restaurant. Gu, the frustrated young mother who lives with her in-laws who run the establishment, becomes friendly with some of the crew, and for a while it looks as though this is going to be a Pygmalion narrative. Gu would be perfect for the part of the owner of the restaurant in the film, and she’s keen for a way out of her humdrum life. She gets her nails done and is roped in to try out the costume for the role. And then the real movie star arrives and her narrative is cut short, in every way. The film is structured in three parts. The second part deals with the movie’s star, who has agreed to do the film in spite of the absence of a definitive script, because it is set in her hometown. We see another side of the town, the side that has been developed. She stays in a fancy hotel and finds herself both realising she misses the town and also wants to get away. The final chapter is an extended dialogue between the director and the screenwriter, who is incapable of producing a finished draft. Their exchanges are intricate and wordy. The screenwriter has worn an Argentine Football jacket all along, and at one point the blue and white shirt. At the moment when the conflict between him and the director seems on the point of becoming irreversible, the director looks at his phone and sees that Maradona has died. Which prompts a montage sequence of all the characters, over the singing of Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina. If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, it also feels like one. Ripples of Life, with its meta premise, veers between fascinating insights into the role of women in this new China, and self-indulgent theorising. The final section of the narrative does indeed feel as though the film is emulating its narrative, with both director and writer unsure how to conclude and resorting to didacticism, although I am sure there are elements of their conversations I might not have grasped. Nevertheless, I emerged from the cinema little the wiser as to the answer of the question, wherefore Chinese cinema?