the fugitive (d. john ford & emilio fernández, w. dudley nichols, graham greene)

Ford’s Mexican movie is a curious, beautifully lit creature. Loosely adapted from the Graham Greene novel, The Power and the Glory, it tells the tale of a priest being pursued by the Mexican army during the religious persecutions following the Mexican revolution. Henry Fonda plays the priest with a deadpan solemnity. The whole movie feels as though it has been mounted and framed, which is gloriously effective during many of the beautifully shot action sequences, or the impeccably lit interiors, but makes for a slightly stiff human narrative. Ford seems to relish the visual possibilities of filming in Mexico, but his actors aren’t given scope to do much more than look the part. 

nb - curious to think of Ford and Buñuel filming in Mexico at more or less the same time.

voyager (nona fernández tr. natasha wimmer)

Another Chilean tome which mines the alignment of the Atacama and the stargazers with the dark history of the dictatorship. In this case Fernandez participates in an Amnesty project to rename distant stars after a group of activists who were disappeared by the Pinochet regime. In the book, she mediates on the arbitrary nature of star signs; the process of growing up under the influence of the dictatorship; her mother’s sickness; how we might want the world to be perceived by extra terrestrials. Particularly fascinating is the way the writer investigates the notion that our genetic make up is connected to the very foundation of the universe itself, something successive generations of creatures, leading to humans, all share, once again reminding ourselves of what a mess we have made of this planet, where every individual has so much in common with every other individual, neighbours all of us within our tiny barrio in the giant megalopolis which is the universe. In spite of which man’s cruelty towards fellow man continues to flourish.