the sky trembles and the earth Is afraid and the two eyes are not brothers (w&d ben rivers)

Ben Rivers’ long titled film possesses the ascetic, ironic beauty of Two Years at Sea, married to the more philosophical reflections of Slow Action. The first half of the film follows the filming of a movie being made by a young Frenchman in Morocco, in the Atlas mountains and the desert. Rivers’ film is a documentary, following the real crew, making a real film. Rivers’ camera is a mildly subversive presence, observing the niceties of the European and North African worlds meeting; the difficulties of filming under taxing conditions. The film director mooches around looking suitably moody. It’s entertaining, but it feels slightly inconsequential. Then, at the midway point, the director gets into his 4x4, drives to a remote desert hotel, gets kidnapped and is used as a dancing tin-can gimp by a group of Moroccan bandits. 

The switch in tone is completely unexpected and hypnotising. The man who is supposedly making entertainment for the European masses instead becomes a source of entertainment for the third world minority. The second half of Rivers’ film is apparently adapted from a Paul Bowles story, but it would be wrong to see it as being a separate entity from the first half. The moment of ultimate horror, for the director, after all that he has unwittingly suffered, is the sight of a blank TV screen. It may not be the most subtle of messages, but it would appear that Rivers is questioning the whole nature of our idea of what entertainment is or should be. He does so with a deadpan humour which hints at the more profound disunities of the modern world. When the tables are turned, and only then perhaps, will we begin to understand the vacuity of that which we presently consider entertaining. 

Which is not to say that this is a worthy or dour film. It seems unlikely that Rivers is ever going to belong to the mainstream. Which again raises questions about what the function of cinema is or should be. Is it to observe, to reflect the world, or is it to tell stories, stories which might be mundane? In some of the scenes from the film the director is making, we see moments of real engagement from the Moroccan actors, which suggest a whole narrative whose content we never learn. (We also don’t know if these moments belong to the Frenchman’s film itself or are observations stolen by Rivers.) These flashes contain a humanity encapsulated in the angry shake of a head or a captured smile. We are outside the story, looking in. Later, we are inside the story, as we empathise with the director’s fate. Rivers, it seems, wants us to be both Brechtian observers and committed servants of his narrative. On the whole it’s the second side of the coin which determines how we watch film in this day and age. The early cinema, which caused amazement by doing nothing more than reflecting the world as it was, has lost its sway. We need the screen to dance; the director’s fate is a parody of our restricted expectations. The film’s earlier, observational take, has no place in the modern cinema; instead we look to rediscover the Wizard’s of Oz’s tin man in every film we choose to watch. If it doesn’t have pathos, if it doesn’t dance a jig, it doesn’t exist. 

son of saul (d. lászló nemes, w. nemes & clara royer)

It struck me about five minutes into Son of Saul that László Nemes, the director, probably knows the work of the previous entrant on the blog, fellow Hungarian Imre Kertész. The scars of the Holocaust on the Eastern European psyche still run deep. How is it still possible to make a film about the Holocaust that feels urgent, pressing, of the now? And why is it necessary? 

Son of Saul is brilliantly made, possesses a peculiar beauty, yet still succeeds in conveying shock. The shock is twofold. On the one hand there are the prosaic details of the process. The death, the barbarity, the bodies, the showers, the machine, the complicity. All these things are known, have been visited time and again. By framing his story through the prism of its ‘hero’s’ journey over the course of three days, maintaining a narrow focus, we observe all these things at the periphery of our vision. Every now and again the background leaps out at the viewer. A body dragged across the floor; a bloodstain being scrubbed. Sound and image are employed to make this terrible world come to life, every shot meticulously constructed to portray the heaving mechanism of the concentration camp, a machine of constant movement and barely-controlled chaos. 

The second shock has more in common with the wry observations of Kertész: that within the confines of this hell, a man can retain his values and his humanity, as shown by Saul Auslander’s desire to provide a fit burial for the child he believes (or chooses to believe) is his son. The simple, ludicrous, mission renders everything else secondary. It’s a classic piece of storytelling which is delivered via a masterly use of the cinematic format. 

If the film reminded me of any other, it’s perhaps Mungiu’s Five Weeks. The ability to convey a story with a claustrophobic focus, the bigger picture always present but kept in the background. Like the novel, cinema allows the storyteller to lead you through a world from the point of view of the narrative’s chosen protagonist. Why is it necessary? The urgency of the filmmaking stye succeeds in making Saul’s story feel like something that could be happening today. Nemes bridges the historical gap, creating empathy through shared experience. We don’t look on Saul as a historical figure, but as a contemporary. Cinema revokes history, and a modern audience is compelled to think: that this should never be permitted to happen again. The reasons why it might be necessary to remember this all over again right now, in the second decade of the 21st century, are, sadly, far too evident. 

fateless [imre kertész]

The brilliance of Kertész’ terrible novel is bound up with the tone of its narrator, Gyuri, a laconic boy who is incapable of seeing the worst in life, even when it’s placed in front of his nose. This boy happens to have been born Jewish and living in Budapest during the 2nd world war. He approaches life as would any other teenage boy, curious about girls, trying to work out why his parents separated, phlegmatic, reluctant to fall into the trap of self-pity when there’s so much to live for. This same boy is then sent via Auschwitz, to the Zeiss concentration camp. At no point could it exactly be said he was an innocent, because the writer is wise enough to know that children are no more innocent than anyone else; but equally, no more than anyone else, this is not a fate which he has in any way merited. The way in which the narrator struggles to maintain his dispassionate attitude towards life, something which it seems helps him to stay alive, whilst coming to terms with the cruelty of his destiny, is told masterfullly.

I know nothing about Kertész, but one imagines that this book is autobiographical. The author’s capacity to resist cliché, to not necessarily say those things we as readers want to hear, suggests a degree of honesty which is frequently present in the writings of Holocaust survivors, although rarely present in the writings of those who choose to visit the holocaust as fiction writers (or filmmakers). The last sentence of chapter seven in the book is worth quoting in full to demonstrate Kertész’ remarkable, ambiguous take on his plight: “Despite all the deliberation, sense, insight and sober reason, I could not fail to recognise within myself the furtive and yet - ashamed as it might be, so to say, of its irrationality - increasingly insistent voice of some muffled craving of sorts: I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.” 

The camp in question is Buchenwald, which Gyuri survives. It’s only when he gets back to Budapest that the real weight of his suffering seems to catch up with him. All too often, writers are accused of not showing enough “heart” or “emotional truth” if their characters fail to emote sufficiently, to talk about their pain or their suffering. Kertész’s novel, would appear to suggest that the privileged world’s need for emotional catharsis is a self-indulgence. The character who is genuinely immersed in a world of terror requires their energy, their cynicism and a certain dispassionate sang-froid to resist. It’s more important to find reasons to live than seek reasons to lament. 

liv and ingmar (w&d. dheeraj akolkar; w. ragnhild lund)

Any memoir which comes straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, should come with a sucrose warning. Similar to the one that ought to be put on the side of coca cola cans. Retrospectively, we all want to hang on to the good and partition the bad off into some unopenable drive. It’s logical. Yet, this doesn’t do much for the process of capturing the truth of what really occurred. Pinter, in both Betrayal and Old Times, is wonderful at dissecting the small deceits we make in order to make the past more palatable. He retains a truth-seeking gaze that others might term cynical; I’d like to think this is a British attribute but I’m sure we British can soft-soap it with the best of them when we want to. 

Liv and Ingmar is essentially a long filmed interview with Liv Ullman as she talks about the four years she and Bergman spent living together on a small island off the coast of Sweden. It was an idyll that turned into something out of the Shining. Bergman controlled the hours that his wife was allowed to stay out of the house and waited for her in the road, tapping his watch if she was late. He built a wall around the house to keep the world out. They argued with a vengeance. Ullman narrates a funny anecdote about him putting his foot through a door. Finally, after only four years, she couldn’t take it anymore and left with their daughter. But not before Bergman had recycled much of their domestic trauma for use in his films.

Forty years later, Ullman reflects wistfully. She and Bergman made up and became friends. They continued to make films together. As colleagues, their lives would appear to have been considerably more harmonious. He called her his Stradivarius, a monicker she appears to value. Of course, it’s for the best for everyone that Ullman now harbours positive memories of her time with Bergman and is able to laugh at the director’s various moments of sadism when he exploited her discomfort as an actress. However, the anger and the pain, two of the film’s subtitled sections, never really communicate themselves. For that, we have to watch the films. If anything, Liv and Ingmar reminds us of the dangers of being informed about the lives of artists, who all too often appear to possess a degree of self-obsession which is less appealing in the actuality than in the fictions they concoct in order to mask it. 

splinternet [scott malcolmson]

Once upon a time there wasn’t an internet. Or at least not one we knew about. Malcolmson’s book is an introduction to the process whereby something whose non-existence now seems unimaginable came to be. It’s a book which is split into three sections. The first part outlines the rise of the notion and development of the computer. The book touches anecdotally on a number of themes; the origins of IBM; the original computers, humans who made mathematical calculations for a living, many of them employed by the US military; the role of the US navy in making the advances necessary for the beast to become what it has. The second section of the book examines the way in which the private sector began to take a more active involvement, a path that leads to California, Jobs, Wozniack, Gates and Allen. It’s here that the internet comes into existence, although it’s fascinating to see how little interest there was in it for so long, even from the likes of Microsoft. Finally the book looks at the future of the internet, analysing its capacity to survive in spite of those that would prefer to see its scope diminished. (Principally national governments.) 

Splinternet is a handy introductory guide, filled with plenty of nuggets. It feels as though there’s probably a more detailed book waiting to be written; more often than not Malcolmson touches on historical moments which leave you wanting more, such as the maverick world of the military-hippy crossover which was a key axis in the development process: idealism bumper to bumper with military pragmatism. This section reads like something out of a novel Pynchon should have written. (Maybe he’s in the process of writing it right now.) There’s something about the posthorn from The Crying of Lot 49 underneath all this: the need to communicate across frontiers, an extension of the frontier spirit, which is recycled by zeitgeist fringe visionaries or lunatics who somehow or other end up changing the world, for better or for worse. Sketchy though the book might be, it’s nevertheless fascinating to gain a glimpse into the process which created the internet. It is astonishing to contemplate how the material world is capable of being transformed by forces of which democracy, governments, experts, know nothing; who knows which processes are being developed even now which, in 30 years or so, will feel so integral to daily life that we shall scarcely be able to imagine this world without them. 

hail caesar (w&d ethan coen, joel coen) & the big short (d adam mckay, w. mckay, charles randolph)

Hail Caesar

There’s not that much to say about Hail Caesar. A packed out Saturday night Ritzy settles down to watch some escapist fare and gets what it pays for. No matter how much the film theorists might speculate about an subtext of “faith” in years to come (the word Clooney cannot utter), the film’s narrative barely holds together; instead there’s just enough in its bricolage of ideas to muddle by as a plot. Reminding us that film, the artistic medium most lacking a process of creative unity, is no more than a collection of sequences which sometimes makes for a coherent whole, and sometimes doesn’t. And that sometimes this lack of coherence matters, and at others it doesn’t much. In this case, it doesn’t much. There are some lovely sequences which pastiche or homage the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood; some lovely comic moments; some lovely cameos. All strung together like a bunch of mismatching pearls by a narrative that just about gets the film from start to finish. Some of the comic moments, notably the meeting of the religious elders and Fiennes’ lovely cameo as the director of mannered, Cowardian melodramas are worth the ticket price alone. Hail Caesar might be more like a review sketch than a serious drama, but on a dank Saturday night in Brixton, it goes down a treat. 

The Big Short 

So, the demise of the intelligent Hollywood star-fuelled blockbuster has been overrated. All this in a year when Spotlight, which I haven’t seen, won an awards competition which people take note of. The Big Short is a fluent, compelling tale of how the system failed in 2008, which manages to pull it off despite making its protagonists a group of disconnected white guys who never meet and who make it rich by outwitting that said system. It really shouldn’t work as a movie, under any of the usual terms. Sympathetic hero - no. Clear protagonist - no. Unity of action - no. However, whilst Hail Caesar is not really a film about faith; The Big Short is. The faith of the individual in his capacity to hold firm to his beliefs when all the evidence is screaming that he’s wrong. This is the uniting narrative of all the eight lead characters; although none more so than in the case of Christian Bale’s drum-toting investment guru, whose main function in the movie is to do nothing other than wait. Waiting, as we all know, is fundamentally anti-dramatic. There’s no action in waiting. There’s stress and no release valve. Even the drums Bale bashes don’t help much. Yet this is what his character does for the best part of two hours. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Which is largely down to two things: McKays bravura direction, which isn’t afraid of flirting with ridicule and in the process provides a light touch to what might have been a dour tale; and Steve Carrell’s grandstanding performance as the one banker who really seems to care, his shock at the stupidity of his nation constantly etched onto his face. The film makes much play of being based on fact; there is something in the relentlessness of Carrell’s performance, its lack of any sense of redemption or catharsis, which helps to convince us that this is indeed a real character, who will die being pissed off, rather than a script developed concept who has to go on his journey towards a greater sense of enlightenment. The film, with its flouting of so many of the standard rules of script-assembly, is something of a heist in itself. 

a bigger splash (d luca guadagnino, w david kajganich)

Since arriving in London I’ve seen two films. The contrast between them seems to encapsulate the problems of scale and ambition that British cinema faces. One is Stephen FIngleton’s The Survivalist. A worthy, sturdy piece of filmmaking which seems entrapped by its simplicity, resolutely refusing to lend any kind of global dimension to its post-apocalyptic landscape, no matter how effectively plotted and filmed it is. A film that leaves with you with the feeling of something austere and underwhelming. The other was Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, nominally an Italian film, but more of a pudding, featuring Brits, Americans, Italians a Belgian and, somewhat awkwardly, immigrants from undisclosed African countries. 

For all its imperfections, and there are a few, including the final flawed 20 minutes, A Bigger Splash is an engrossing film, marked by its very ambition as a distinctive piece of filmmaking. The story is essentially simple, four people holed up in an idyllic Italian hideaway, with their various connections and dependencies. The outcomes are not unpredictable, (what else can happen in these circumstances apart from fucking and fighting?), but the storytelling refuses to tow an easy line, constantly kicking against the inevitability of its characters’ destinies. There is a price to pay for this inventiveness. The refugee storyline feels half-baked; there’s a hint of something Haneke-esque to be wrought from their presence on this outpost of Europe, and the one moment where Schoenaerts and Johnson are met by a group of uneasy men has potency, but in the end the strand feels like a red herring. Similarly, the final twenty minutes are a disappointment; this film should not descend into the TV mechanics of a murder enquiry. It has had too much going for it upto then. 

However, these flaws are forgivable within the bigger picture. Luca Guadagnino displays the same delicate touch for the nuances of personal relationships he showed in his previous film, I Am Love. This time he pushes the characters to their limits. No more so than in a show-stopping performance by Ralph Fiennes as Harry, the verbose, larger-than-life record producer. Fiennes is one of those actors whose appeal, from the point of view of a recondite Englishman, is sometimes hard to grasp. Neither Bond-esque nor subtle enough to be a character actor. But here, he steps out of his shadow (or perhaps into it) to deliver a rip-roaring, relentlessly annoying character whose inability to control his particular lust for life leads to scenes of toe-curling embarrassment but also a weird kind of post-middle-age pathos. Why shouldn’t the self-absorbed middle-aged dads dance with the same sense of abandonment as the nubile youngsters? There’s something glorious about Harry’s refusal to bow to the rules of refinement, even if you know spending more than 15 minutes in his unedited company would be a kind of living hell. It’s a remarkable performance, which offers a counter-balance to Swinton’s more glacial Thin White Duke; allowing the two younger characters to tail the older characters like formula 1 drivers looking for the moment they’ll overtake. 

As a portrayal of post-middle aged pre-dementia, Guadagnino’s film cannot be topped. Its characters parachute through the screen with the splendour and abrasiveness which is normally reserved, these days, for 3-D effects. As though the director is reminding us (and even himself, given the film’s iffy ending) that cinema is just as much about character and story as it is about visuals or coherence. That you need to take a risk if you want to achieve anything exceptional. That the straight and narrow are all very well, but they are straight and narrow and they offer scant help of emotional rescue when you are most in need of it. 

this is london [ben judah]

The author has a fascination with his city that goes beyond pure journalism. If you’re of a curious mind, London is a gift. There always have been and always will be corners and cultures to explore. Judah’s thesis would appear to be that in the past 20 years the process of immigration has grown at an exponential rate. There are times when he appears to delight in this, and others when his book, or at least the characters who populate it, would appear to be taking a more ambivalent line. These characters being the immigrants themselves, who are more honest and aware of the racial and cultural conflicts that the multicultural model turns a blind eye to. What Judah’s text does with a great deal of rigour and fidelity (sometimes to the point of near-incoherence) is offer these new Londoners their voice; a voice which the mainstream doesn’t have time for. The Romanian beggars and prostitutes; the Nigerian contract health worker; the Arab princess; these are just some of the London voices which speak through the text. Whilst mainstream drama is still struggling to incorporate the previous generations of Caribbean and Asian immigrants, Judah leaps straight to the next. He roots them out, from Edmonton to Plaistow to Knightsbridge with a journalistic doggedness. These sub-cultures, demi-mondes are the new margin and he pursues this edge even to the point of personal danger. (One of the curiosities or possible inconsistencies of the book is that in the opening pages, Judah seems set on enforcing his presence as the narrator, something that he subsequently, and in the opinion of this reviewer, wisely, downplays. They are the protagonist, he’s the shadowy figure on the edge of their vision, a place which reflects their position in society and perhaps helps to explain why so many open up to him with such apparent honesty.)

Is this melting pot. or Babel, a utopia or a dystopia? As mentioned, there are moments, such as the haunting episode with the prostitutes, remembering their murdered colleague, which seem to veer towards the latter. At the same time, the author himself observes that the murder itself is an echo of the Ripper murders; the city’s margins have always been a dangerous place, inhabited by the marginals. Judah is also acute about the issue of gentrification, observing the way in which barrios that the white middle class wouldn’t have touched a decade ago have now been transformed, just as happened to Notting Hill and Bayswater in the 60s/ 70s. The demographic impact of this on communities has been much discussed; the comparison that isn’t made is with the mega-cities, where the very idea of centrality has begun to erode, something that will happen to London, perhaps, allowing for more elasticity in the way it’s structured, with the line between suburb and centre eliding. 

Maybe the centre doesn’t need to hold. Maybe it needs to fragment.  The issue is tangible in the cafe I’m sitting in right now, in a corner of Peckham that hasn’t been transformed. Judah is a bit sniffy about Peckham and its gentrification.However, as I write, there’s the visible image of a racial mix that has integrated, to the degree at least that they come here and drink coffees and eat pricey bread, not just the white middle class emigres but also the 2nd generation Caribbean, Indian, the 1st generation Polish and Eastern Europeans. Maybe this is all a phantasmagoria, the wool pulled over my eyes, but from the seat I’m sat it, it does look as though there might exist the possibility that the city can continue to integrate, recycle, develop, in spite of all that isn’t working, in spite of the avarice and the philistinism. 

Judah never seems to draw any real conclusions about the capital’s ultimate fate, although many of the characters who people his book hold strong opinions, both positive and negative. No matter what London’s future, Judah’s book offers an intrepid, back-door portrayal of his city, a worthy successor to a tradition that banks and skirts Pepys, Defoe, Cobbett, Addison and Steele, Dickens… The list could go on. There is a fine tradition of British writers getting down and dirty in their investigations and This is London is a welcome addition to that club.

sankja [zahar prilepin]

Let me start again. I have tried to write this review about three times and stumbled each time. There is something about Prilepin’s writing that is so effortless and direct that it seems wrong to over-compose. So, in keeping with this spirit, I’m going to bash this out with as little thought as possible.

This is not a bad thing. There are all kinds of ways of writing. Some are tortuous, sinuous, knotty. Others flow like a brook, albeit one whose borders have been artfully tended. And others, as Shelley or Keats, might have said, fall like an apple from a tree. There’s a glorious, pure romanticism to Prilepin’s tale of a young Russian who is so disaffected with his society that he takes up arms against it. It’s a romanticism which is tied to a specifically Russian tradition which the novel itself recognises. At one point, in his reflections, Sankya, the protagonist, says that Russia is condemned to a cycle of state-ism and revolution. In the face of Putin’s moribund society, he opts for revolution. It’s in no way an idealistic or even, perhaps, a political revolution. It’s more of a way of expressing the existence of his identity in the face of a society that doesn’t seem to care if he exists or not. In this, of course, Sankya has much in common with Dostoyevski’s more tortured heroes or, more pertinently, the protagonist of Bely’s radical and neglected novel, Petersburg. 

Sankya’s revolution involves various stages. He goes to Riga to shoot a judge. He goes to Moscow to protest violently. He is beaten up and left for dead. He joins an armed insurrection. And, at one point, he leads the trashing of a Macdonalds. Here is the point where Sankya’s quest for identity through violent revolution tallies with that of a broader, global dissatisfaction. The process that Russia has embraced as it slipped from corrupt Communism to corrupt Capitalism is particular to its historical circumstances. But, in Sankya’s embrace of fatalistic glory instead of a slipshod treadmill, there are echoes not only of a nascent Western resistance to the forces of capital, but even the instinct expressed by young men and women towards Islamic extremism. Better to die for a cause than stagger forward through life like a zombie. It’s here that Prilepin touches a dangerous, romantic nerve which throbs far beyond the borders of mother Russia, the banner that Sankya adopts as the totem of his personal revolt.

With its rat-a-tat prose and driving narrative, each chapter another step in Sankya’s journey towards doom, Prilepin’s novel seems to declare its indisputable significance without really trying. Apparently it has become a cause celebre in Russia, and one can understand why. In contrast to Pelevin’s aesthetic complexities, this is a visceral declaration of war. The novel as blunt political instrument, in a society which flirts with Stalinist repression whilst presenting itself as a new model capitalist state. 

+++

(Note. In 1993 I read Bely’s Petersburg. We were still at the tail end of the Tory oligarchy which had shaped my whole sentient political life. Unemployment was at 3 million. A degree seemed like more of a hindrance than a help, particularly a degree in english and philosophy. When I came to write my first play, Mickey Valid, Bely’s novel was my model. Mickey, an everyman, decides that the only way to give meaning to his life is through an act of political violence. The play opens with a dialogue between two bullets, the two bullets Mickey will later fire in order to assassinate a member of the royal family. The royal family being the ultimate representation of an alienating societal order. The play had a workshop at the National Studio. In the process, to my mind, it was chopped around and diluted. The original version of the play is lost. I only have the weaker, revised version.  Nothing else happened to Mickey Valid. It sunk into the quicksand. I would not be surprised if one of these days, Prilepin’s hero Sankya acts as a similar inspiration to a writer seeking a model for a figure on the brink of falling off the edge of his society.)

jacob the mutant [mario bellatin]

Jacob the Mutant is a genuinely strange exercise in writing. Bellatin presents the extracts of a lost novel written by Joseph Roth. These fragments are stitched together to tell a weird, cabalistic tale. Jacob lived in a border town on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He has a zoo. He helps people to cross the border. His wife is having an affair. She flees to the States with her lover. Jacob ends up following her. He has a transformation and becomes a late-middle-aged woman, who tries to shut down the town’s multiple dance schools. This is a basic summary of the apparent plot of the missing, fragmented novel. Which the author then rewrites in his own words. The author might be Jacob’s great great grandson. Then again he might not be. The translator adds his version. There is more exegesis. There are explanatory drawings which explain very little. There is also a latent hassidic mysticism to the book, which makes precise if baffling references to aspects of the Torah. In short, this brief book contains a degree of mystification which is impressive. What it all means I have no idea, but if you enjoy being bamboozled, this is a great read. I am looking forward to getting my hands on another of his books: The Uruguayan Book of the Dead.