nights of cabiria (w&d. fellini, w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, pier paolo pasolini)

There’s a beautiful quote in the helpful back page of the BFI (NFT) notes from Fellini: “The film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene where the story reaches a conclusion so definitive  that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.” This quote strikes such a chord because it talks both about the film and about the act of creation. The filmmaker has constructed a character (played by his wife) with whom he has, you could say, fallen in love. At the end  of the film he has to leave her. Had he left her in a resolved ‘happy ending’ scenario, it would have been easier for Fellini to let her drift away, just another of his many characters. As it is, he leaves her deliberately in a state of uncertainty, and so he is compelled, as the quote says, to return to her fretfully, an uneasy god. 

The quote also feels relevant in so far as the happy ending the film almost postulates for Cabiria doesn’t seem faithful to her story. Cabiria is from the margins. This is by and large a cheerful film, one which celebrates its lead character and her world, in spite of its harshness. Cabiria is a survivor, a fantasist whose feet are nevertheless on the ground. Nevertheless, how many poor prostitutes struggling to get by in post-war Italy were granted a happy ending? Had Fellini given her this kind of resolution, it wouldn’t have felt truthful to the world he depicts. It would have been closer to Pretty Woman than Rome Open City. As it is Nights of Cabiria treads a fine line between social realism and something approaching disfunctional romcom. Cabiria is the sort of gutsy character producers dream of because they know an audience will fall in love with them. Giulietta Masina plays her with an irreverent delight. Even the breeze block shack she has created seems adorable on the inside. (A shack so reminiscent of the buildings in slums all over the world.) But, as much as the film delights in Cabiria’s joie-de-vivre (Chaplineque), the realities of her existence are discernible at the edges. A pitiable fate, living in a hole in the ground, lurks. We’ll never know whether Cabiria succumbed to this fate or escaped it. Fellini opted out of a definitive resolution, but in so doing he found a way of being truthful both to the spirit of his times and the spirit of his character. 

la dolce vita (w&d federico fellini; w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, brunello rondi, pier paolo pasolini)

The fascinating thing about watching unarguable classics comes in part from observing the way in which the director frequently approaches his or her film with no regard for the conventions of storytelling. Dolce Vita is a collection of bravura sequences rather than any kind of coherent, identifiable narrative. There’s the helicopter sequence, the miracles sequence, the Ekberg sequence, the aristocrats sequence etcetera. Each sequence could act as an extended short on its own. Fellini isn’t interested in telling a story in the conventional understanding of that term, he’s interested in creating a world. The brilliant world he creates, that of a paparazzi journalist in good-time Rome, is evident enough, but the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ are more complex. The movie is in effect a kind of prose poem focussed on the dissolute life of the charming Mastroianni. No-one quite exudes sophisticated hedonism like Mastroianni and he’s so charismatic that you can buy the idea that this is actually the perfect way to live. Yet as the film unfolds, the cracks begin to appear. His night with Ekberg is charming but converts him into a dogsbody, fetching milk for a stray cat. His relationship with his father is distant and less fulfilling than it should be. The one time he comes clean and declares an emotional attachment, the object of that declaration mocks him. He becomes increasingly misogynistic. The final scene is protracted, gratuitous, the tedious fag-end of a party which has gone on for far too long. Mastroianni is dressed like a roué. He has become abusive. No woman in the audience is going to like him anymore. His is the rake’s progress. Clearly there’s something in Fellini’s own psychodrama playing out here, which would require a more extensive knowledge of the context of the film within the director’s oeuvre. It feels as though it’s on the border of what is called in Montevideo ‘auto-ficcion’ which might just be the film’s skill. What is perhaps more curious is the way in which the film seems to wilfully seek to tire the viewer out. Yet another character says: ‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen the dawn”, something which we have witnessed several times in the course of three hours, something which is an elemental part of Marcello’s disrupted rhythms. It’s as though the filmmaker wants us to realise not just the beauty and bright lights of the world that Marcello inhabits, but also the erosive, draining impact of this lifestyle. He wants you to stumble out of the cinema, stunned, ready for your bed, never wanting to go out on the town again.  

shosha (isaac bashevis singer)

We went to Krochmalna Street, the street in Warsaw that Singer’s narrator, Aaron Greindinger, was raised on and the street Shosha, the woman he fell in love with as a child, still lived on when Aaron returned many years later, so that he fell in love with her all over again, in spite of the fact that they now had so little in common. It’s not clear to the narrator or the reader how much this second infatuation is with Shosha or with a romanticised vision of his own childhood, described so briefly in the opening pages of the novel. Walking down the street as it now stands makes the protagonist's act of nostalgia seem even more nostalgic, for the street full of Jewish life which Singer or Aaron would have known is no more. In its place is a long road with several stunted tower blocks. In one corner of the street there was a small stall under a tarpaulin, selling vegetables and pickles, maybe the only ghostly hint of the smells and the bustle which Singer so vividly describes. The Jewish quarter is no more. Almost all of Warsaw was destroyed in the war, and though much has been rebuilt, the Jewish quarter wasn’t. A whole world vanished. People, buildings, synagogues, customs. Nevertheless, it can still be visited in the pages of Singer’s novel. Literature transcends even genocide. The novel was published in 1978, so the world the novelist conjures was already an act of memory. The novelist would have been aware, when he wrote the book, of the alchemical nature of his craft. These characters might have died in the war; on the road, as supposedly happened to Shosha; in the camps; or in the ghetto, but in the writer’s happy-go-lucky prose they live on. As does Krochmalna Street. Because the truth is that I visited it twice when I was in Warsaw. Once when I walked down the street which is still called by that name in googlemaps, and a second time as I strode through the words of Singer’s novel. And of those two visits, the one that seemed most real, or most alive to me, was the latter.

the time by the sea (ronald blythe)

Blythe’s memoir is a warm-hearted, discursive ramble though the years he spent living in Suffolk, mostly in Aldeburgh. He describes his friendships with Britten, Imagen Holst and many others. A whole host of writers whose work is little read today, like Blythe himself, populate the book’s pages. The book is redolent of a lost post-war Britain. There’s far more poverty, but far more idealism as well. It feels as though the Britain Blythe describes still retains its ties to the nineteenth century and those  that preceded it. Much of the book is written in the shadow of George Crabbe, a figure more or less forgotten today. There are anecdotes about Samuel Palmer, Shakespeare, Clare. The romantic link between countryside, art and daily life is celebrated in the works of writers, composers and artists.  Nowadays it feels as though the British countryside, (particularly in Suffolk) has become a privileged retreat, colonised by second home owners and the wealthy; transformed from a county whose hardship people like my grandparents sought to escape. Blythe’s book therefore captures something that feels as though it is irretrievably lost. The car, central heating, out-of-town supermarkets: all these things have transformed rural life. A glimpse of how the author lived that transformation, for better or for worse, is also to be gleaned from this memoir. 

trans-atlantyk (witold gombrowicz, tr carolyn french & nina karsov)

This is one of the stranger books you will ever read. The story as such of the writer’s journey from the Baltic port of Gdynia to Buenos Aires at the outbreak of the Second World War. The writer, struggling to survive, falls in with a bunch of aristocratic, febrile emigrés. He gets caught up in a psychodrama involving a count and his son, who is being seduced by a wealthy Argentine, Gonzalo. There’s a fake duel and a potentially murderous denouement, when a whole host of Poles arrive and sing and dance a traditional Krakow song, even as the country itself is tottering to defeat at the hands of the invading Germans. This denouement, which by happenstance I read this morning in Krakow, is reminiscent of the final scene of Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds. War and defeat haunt this short novel which at the same time seems to be doing everything in its power to escape this haunting. The language is jaunty and mannered, even Joyceian. The tone is ribald, comic, scathing. The author’s intentions feel hard to decipher. Perhaps, in the face of absolute despair, the only option left is a demented hilarity. 

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This note from the introduction by Stanislaw Baranczak is of interest: “During most of the war years he was…struggling for survival, coping with extreme poverty and wasting his energies on a job as a bank clerk offered to him by a Polish banker in Buenos Aires. According to Gombrowicz he wrote Trans-Atlantyk on his desk at the bank, hiding the manuscript in a drawer whenever his superior entered the room.”

grâce à dieu (w&d ozon)

The journey of the protagonist. If you want to watch a film which shows why you don’t need to obey any of the so-called screenwriting rules, this might not be a bad example. Ozon’s film switches protagonist three times. Each protagonist has their own mini-narrative. These narratives overlap, but they don’t map onto each other within the overall narrative structure. Each character has their own journey to go on, and each one is protagonist of the film in their own right, for a while. 

Ozon has a scarcely credible 20 features listed on IMDB. One has few doubts that being this prolific, and working within a system where he presumably knows his next film is going to get made, no matter what happens to his last one, permits the director to take what might be seen to be a more unorthodox approach. There’s also a coherent thematic logic for the approach. Grâce à Dieu (like the Oscar winning Spotlight), takes on the issue of pedophilia in the catholic church. It tells the true story of a priest in Lyon who abused young boys for decades, whilst the bishop chose to turn a blind eye. It’s a very recent case, with individuals being sent to trial even as the film was being made. There were perhaps hundreds of victims. The film can’t tell all their stories, but by refusing to select one ‘heroic’ protagonist, it sets out to at least broaden the scope of its representation. Perhaps it’s this fragmentary approach which permits Ozon to approach the subject with such subtlety, revealing the way in which his characters are flawed rather than heroic human beings, individuals who have been scarred by their abuse. Grâce à Dieu is revelatory in its nuanced handling of one of the more complex, awkward stories out there, one that needs to be told, but if it is to be told, needs to be told right. 

joker (w&d todd phillips, w. scott silver)

So, just to follow the thread. The Joker came out, was lauded, was a box office smash, then came the backlash. Bradshaw in the Guardian really has it in for it: “a shallow, ugly, boorish film”. I missed it when it came out, and sometimes it’s better not to catch a movie until the froth of the hype is over and done with. Given its box office success (apparently close to breaking $1billon) and given the backlash, I went out of a sense of duty more than anything else. I am firmly in the Scorsese camp when it comes to the Superhero franchises, a genre which holds about as much appeal as a Brazilian soap opera. So I wasn’t expecting much. The film started and there was some neat retro footage of New York, an understated chase sequence, some evocative titles. Sad protagonist with sick mother was kind of predictable and for a while it felt like I was watching You Were Never Really There all over again. Then came the implausible romance, which was curious, and all the time this slow, increasingly compelling narrative build. Who is the Joker? Is he hero or anti-hero? When the Bruce Wayne character appears the answer to that question still wasn’t clear, to the script’s credit. This character, sure he’s got a bit of De Niro in him, but more than that, he’s got a lot of Mersault, or someone out of Cannetti’s Auto da Fe, and gradually the power of Phoenix’s performance began to crystallise into something extraordinary, something that isn’t De Niro at all, it’s far closer to Dean or Zbigniew Cybulski or Kinski. And it began to dawn on me that this director, Todd Phillips, whose credits include The Hangover (parts 1,2&3) and, get this - Starsky and Hutch, the 2004 movie - was making what in the good old days they called an “art movie”. Not only was he making an art movie, he has also somehow convinced $1billion worth of audience to pay up to see his art movie.  

And yes, it’s also completely zeitgeist. It flips the tedious Batman narrative on its head. The ersatz strong guy is in fact a bastard. This is a movie about a country that can elect Trump, (or Johnson), one that can be manipulated by the media like zombies. It’s Jungle of the Cities or Drums in the Night, as we wait for the sheeple to finally be snapped out of it by some masked anarchic joker.  That’s the reason the film has resonated. It’s not the narrative beats. This is a slow, lumbering film, which glories in a cello score (kudos to Hildur Guðnadóttir) and a downbeat grade. The violence is actually restrained (three incidents), it’s earned and it’s cathartic. Above all it’s a film that creates a platform for the finest actor of his generation to remind us that great screen acting is something that should be dredged up from the depths, from a place deep inside, the darklands of the mad, the vain and the brilliant.  

chacabuco (d roberto suárez)

Suárez is the maverick genio of the Rio Platense stage. Roberto Arlt meets David Lynch. HIs characters are oddballs, wackos, weirdos, but bizarrely loveable. They’re loveable because they all belong to the same family. Literally, in so far as all the characters in Chacabuco are related, metaphorically, in so far as they are all off the spectrum somewhere, and theatrically, in that Suárez takes several years to develop, rehearse and produce his shows, meaning his band of actors become as tight and incestuous as a family unit. Sometimes this kind of process might not pay off, but in Chacabuco it does so, spectacularly. The players interact like a finely honed machine, aware of every look, every nuance of their companions' behaviour. It’s a play where it’s just as compelling observing those who aren’t speaking as those who are. The word is shared around between the company, something to be usurped or exchanged or held on to sometimes, as a character makes a bid for the attention they believe they, as a character in this unlikely tale, deserve. However, above and beyond the word, the feature which defines Chacabuco is the quality of the silences. A silence speaks as much if not more than words. Silence is that moment of strange uncertainty on stage, as though the characters and the audience are given pause to think: where are we going? Are we on the right course or are we completely fucked? The spectators, like the characters, are never really sure. In fact we’re not even sure if we’re living in the present or some other, parallel Borgesian time. There are about fifteen endings to Chacabuco, which is normally not a good sign. But when you’ve worked on a play for several centuries, you can get away with it. The wonder is that each ending is an advance or improvement on the last one, until we finally get to the last delirious end, which blows the mind and then comes back to stroke the mind with a send-off full of strange tenderness.  

nightmare abbey (thomas love peacock)

It’s curious the way in which some novels from the many novels written are selected to be put aside for posterity. Not being a scholar of early nineteenth century British literature, I don’t know how many other novelists there were out there when Nightmare Abbey was published but I’d wager there were several that were as worthy of immortality as Peacock’s flighty tome. Which is not not to say it’s terrible, it’s just not particularly good either. Its longevity hinges on the author’s links to the romantic poets, and the fact that the novel is a gentle satire on Shelley and Byron. What little plot there is revolves around the book’s protagonist, Scythrop, the heir to a gloomy East Anglian pile, Nightmare Abbey, getting caught up in romantic misadventures with two different women, Marionetta O’Carroll and Celinda Toobad. As the names suggest, the novel doesn’t take itself too  seriously. The author has a lot of fun reproducing the pretentious conversations had by Scythrop and his various visitors, another manifestation of the way in which the British adore anti-intellectualism. And fair enough, one might think, because the book has a certain wry charm. In the 21st century it might have made for a 2 series Netflix comedy, à la Addams Family, one of those whose first series is an unexpected success but then fizzles out by the time it gets to second series, with the realisation that there wasn’t that much meat on the bone in the first place. 

the third bank of the river: power and survival in the twenty-first century amazon (w chris feliciano arnold)

Feliciano Arnold’s book is the result of various trips to the Amazon, during the period between the 2014 World Cup and the Rio Olympics of 2016. Using Manaus as a base, the book is composed of several strands. The fate of the indigenous peoples is a central plank, but this is incorporated into a concise understanding of the forces at work in the Amazon, much of them finding their focal point in Manaus. Illegal deforestation, drug smuggling, dam building, mining, and the never-ending conflict between ‘virgin territory’ and the pressing demands of modernity. One of the most effective aspects of Feliciano’s book is the way in which he begins to establish the back story behind the myth of the ‘primitive’ tribe, explaining how tribes located in what is now Brazil have used the jungle as a safe haven to retreat to, a haven which has always been eroded but even more so now, when mining concessions and drug smuggling routes mean that the non-native people are penetrating deeper and deeper into the jungle. The book is also very effective on the debate over whether ‘unconctacted’ tribes should be left to their own devices or whether there’s a moral obligation to try and protect them before danger strikes. It’s a discursive read, with some engaging personal touches. Feliciano, (with his Brazilian blood), isn’t scared to go into the bars where the gringos wouldn’t normally go, and knock on doors which few gringo journalists would be interested or willing to approach. It’s this capacity to go deep not just into the jungle, but into more ‘Brazilian’ world which is parasitically feeding off the jungle which lends the book an added dimension. The line between the “virgin” Amazon and encroaching “civilisation” is one of the most urgent pressure points on the planet, but this can’t be studied from above. The forces which determine where this line is drawn (and it’s being constantly redrawn) can only be understood on the ground, talking as far as is possible to the ones who are pushing that line further and further into territory that was previously the preserve of the indigenous peoples.