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. 

a journal of a plague year (defoe)

Whilst reading Journal of a Plague Year it struck me that the narrator seemed almost preternaturally relaxed about the whole affair. Yes, people were falling down dead in the street, yes, society was on the brink of collapse, but all the same, our unflappable narrator calmly guides us through the terrible year of 1665. Which is a great consolation, in the year 2020, that reassurance that there is a normality on the other side, not so far away, we will be able to return to doing those social things which we as a species tend to enjoy, unless you’re a Schopenhauer or a Saint Simon Stylites. The novel, (for that is what it is), includes typical Defoe-ian digressions, individual tales and anecdotes tucked away, unusual personalities who the narrator comes across in his wanderings around the city, in spite of the peril. There’s also a highly contemporary fascination with figures, with frequent tallies posted of how the plague affected the different London boroughs. For Londoners there’s the ghoulish fascination of locating where in the city the plague pits were dug and the descriptions of the circumstances of the burials of the sick are some of the most harrowing elements of the book, something our generation had never known the like of, until now. The tone of the book, it struck me, was remarkably similar to that of Robinson Crusoe, a laconic way of dealing with fate, making the best of things. Something which once upon a time we might have called inherently British. There’s no wailing or gnashing of teeth. The retrospective perspective consoles: the narrator lived this time, and got through to the other side and we shall too, god willing. (It is in times of plague that the instinct to believe in god seems most acute, for who else is it who should decide who lives and who dies, if not god?). 

So there was something reassuring about reading this novel, not least in the last thirty pages, as the plague recedes and people start to go about their business again. Until I clocked the publication date. 1722. Some sixty years after the events being recounted. As though someone was writing about 2020 in 2080. My stupidity immediately struck me; I know that Defoe is an 18th century writer. Yet, in the reading, I never once doubted that the narrator was Defoe himself. Because, and this is self-evident, this is what I wished to believe. I wanted that confident, fearless voice to be completely authentic. It was my consolation. 

Something which tells us as much about the process of reading as it does anything else. (It makes me think about the gospels for example.) Journal of a Plague Year is a masterly work of recreation, of pseudo-documentary writing, very much of a piece with Robinson Crusoe. Yet whether it has anything to teach us about how to manage the anxiety of living through plague is doubtful. I can imagine my niece’s grandchild wanting to write about the great confinement of 2020 and talking to her grandmother about it, and there will be value in those memories, and they might make for a great book, but time will have lent its balm to the actual events, because time ameliorates like nothing else can. 

drive your plough over the bones of the dead (olga tokarczuk, tr. antonia lloyd-jones)

Tokarczuk’s novel has a strain running through it which feels completely of-the-moment. The revenge of nature. In a quiet corner of Poland, near the Czech border, a small community is afflicted by a series of murders. The narrator, Janina, a woman who wears her eccentricity firmly on her sleeve, claims that the victims, all of them male hunters, have been killed by deer, who are seeking vengeance for the killing of the hunters. Janina is a wonderfully idiosyncratic soul, who could be a visionary or could be a nutcase. Her justified anger at the whole process of hunting, something she sees as murder, is complemented by a fervent belief in astrology. In her earlier life she has been a structural engineer who helped build a bridge in Syria. Tokarczuk’s text is as playful as her narrator. It takes great pleasure in Janina’s digressions and flights of fancy. It is peopled by eccentrics and oddballs, (including one character who in the english translation is named Oddball) and a Blake translating policeman. The novel is composed of 17 chapters which narrate a story which takes place over the course of a year. It is, in effect, a murder mystery, however the strongest underlying theme is the tension between humans and nature, a theme that seems more and more urgent with every passing day. 

le brio (w&d yvan attal, w. noé debré, yaël langmann)

Introductory note. This was the last film I saw before the great confinement began. It has now been over two weeks since the cinemas were shut. Cinema is a strange beast. The value of theatre as a social tool is self-evident. The day the theatres reopen people will be on their feet applauding no matter the show. The actors will applaud the audience and the audience will applaud the actors and this is exactly as it should be. There’s a tradition of thousands of years of culture which will be being upheld, a tradition which has vanquished plagues, fires, puritans and dictatorships. Cinema is a more private experience. It always feels off-key to me when people applaud a film. No matter how moving or significant the film, it should be greeted with a murmur of appreciation, the contemplation of the credits, the shared sense of having participated in an experience which borders on the religious. Ever since I first started attending the cinema to watch films I have always felt as though the cinema is a second home. There are few places I would rather be if the world were to come to an abrupt end. Perhaps if this goes on much longer we should break into Cinemateca and live there, projecting films through the darkness. Perhaps this is the key to the religious beauty of cinema: the way in which it uses light to transform our darkness. It also explains why television will always be its poor cousin, no matter what they tell you nowadays. On the bad days, and there will be bad days in all of this, I sometimes wonder if Le Brio might not be the last film I ever see in a cinema. Fortunately the good days do battle with the bad ones, and I conclude there will be more moments of sheer luminescence to come. I also give thanks to the brothers Lumière and those others who helped to construct one of the great wonders of the modern age. 

+++

There’s something slightly uncomfortable about Yvan Attal’s modern day Pygmalion narrative. On the one hand the message is clearly supposed to be a positive one for French second gen immigrants. You can make it to the upper echelons of society if that’s your ultimate intention. On the other it postulates that you’re going to need the dedicated help of a self-confessed anarcho-racist to get there. Auteuil plays the loose cannon, Mazard, a brilliant law professor who cites Nietzsche and Baudelaire in his classes, and has a fierce libertarian streak. In his mind it’s fair game to insult minorities, presumably on the basis that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Camélia Jordana’s Neïla is the winsome young student lawyer who he is designated to give a course of intensive teaching, in order to get him off the hook of a racist attack he made against her which has been uploaded to Facebook. 

The film opens with a brilliant sequence where Neïla rushes across Paris, late, to arrive at the Uni. She walks into a vast, 21st C lecture hall, with hundreds of students hunched over their laptops as Auteuil’s professor speaks to them using a microphone. The scene feels like an embodiment of Western European modernity, where lawyers are mass-produced, where the sheer scale of life means even education is dehumanised. However, thereafter, the film slips towards both cliche and a more ambiguous (and less ambitious) mode. The Pygmalion story contains a twist, in that Neïla ultimately, follows her own path, rather than that dictated by her guru, but it feels as though the film is wary of damaging the feelings of Auteuil’s Mazard, eeking out a happy ending which never feels deserved. Attal seems to pull his punches as the film drifts towards a feel good conclusion. It feels like a film which isn’t entirely sure how it wants to situate itself within the context of an evolving modern France. 

cider with rosie (laurie lee)

At one stage towards the end of the book, Lee states that he is describing the last gasp of a way of life which existed for a thousand years. The arrival of the motor car would destroy a social fabric which had survived more or less unchanged since the village he lived in had been founded. So there is a double nostalgia at work in the text. On the one hand for the people, family and friends of his youth. On the other for a world which exists no more, which cannot be revisited. 

Reading the book I thought a lot about my grandparents, in particular my grandfather, who was born in Suffolk and moved to the outskirts of London in the wake of the great depression. HIs upbringing was urban (in Ipswich) so there are many differences, but he too was born into a world that was conclusively lost by the time he was in his mid twenties. My grandfather loved the automobile, the joy of speed which it brought, the connectivity. One of his many jobs as a young man was to be a coach driver, where he would take groups on excursion, much as Lee describes his village’s visit to Weston-Super-Mare. The great game of these excursions, my grandfather told me, was to stop at as many pubs as possible and get the coach driver drunk. Luckily for him, my grandfather was never a great drinker. 

Lee is, one senses, more of a poet than a prose writer, something that works in his favour in what is a Proustian memoir. His evocation of place possesses a sensory feel which is intoxicating. There’s also a disarming honesty, which resists any sense of shame. Warts and all is the way. This also speaks of a rural life which possessed less romanticism, less concern for the niceties of life (killing animals, sexual encounters at an early age, causal violence). There’s a rugged shrug of the shoulders in Lee’s depiction of his teenage flings or the violence of a farmer’s fist. This was how people were and always had been. To suggest that they were failing to adhere to moral or political codes would have seemed bizarre to the villagers, who were instead adhering to a code that had been formed, as Lee puts it, over the course of a thousand years. 

The comparison with Proust is interesting. Lee is no Proust, no-one else was or shall be. Yet his invocation of a lost world is rooted in a quest to capture it in the word. Like Proust, he appears to write in an easy, fluid way, the words seem to “come naturally”. However, the efficacy of each word feels like an imperative. The wrong choice of word would conjure another memory, not the one the writer seeks to invoke. As such the writing is driven by a fierce pragmatism that leads to great beauty.

if on a winter’s night a traveller (italo calvino)

The longer I was reading this book, for the third or fourth time, the harder I found it to finish. There were several points over the fortnight I was reading it when I really believed I could find myself  reading it for years. Sentence by sentence, idea by idea. 

I first read the novel as an eighteen year old. I have a memory of mentioning it in a Eng lit class of Lachlan Mackinnon. In relation to Shakespeare’s technical ingenuity. Or something pretentious like that. I recall being dazzled by it. Hard not to be, on the first time of reading. Re-reading again, certain passages are lodged in the brain. The ringing phone. The vision of the world stripped bare. There is much that is still breathtaking. 

At the same time, even works of structural genius start to date. There’s something a little tired about the depiction of women. Even if the writer seeks to acknowledge this. The novel has more context now. Structural ingenuity went mainstream with David Mitchell, David Nicholls, Tom McCarthy among others in the UK, not to mention those beyond these island shores. People have read Borges now, if not Cortazar. Of course, Calvino himself was writing within the tradition of the nouveau roman, not to mention Sterne, Rabelais et al. 

In a sense I can’t help thinking that Calvino failed, for all the brilliance of If On A Winter’s Night. He should never have stopped writing it. The idea and the novel deserve to be a thousand chapters or a thousand years long. Perhaps I slowed down because I didn’t want to finish. The idea is infinite. It should never end. Neither should the book.

ghost town anthology (w&d denis côté)

In Australia, it seemed to me, there was always the great lurking unknown. Something like 95% of the country inhabit a small band of land near the coast. The interior is a pulsing, potentially malevolent, potentially benign god. Roeg’s Walkabout and Weir’s Picnic On Hanging Rock captured this effectively. Canada has a similar wilderness, which is great expanse of the North. Bleak, inhospitable and for the most part unknown. Drive a couple of hours north of Quebec, where this film is set and it does indeed feel as though you’re approaching the edge of the known civilised world. In Cote’s bleak but watchable parable, this has become the land of the dead. They live side by side with the living, only the living don’t notice them. Until, in this instance, a young man dies and comes back to haunt his parents and only brother, precipitating a mass incursion of the dead into the tiny township of Irénée-les-Neiges. There are all kinds of reference points here, from Benjamín Naishtat’s History of Fear, another cold modern dystopian fable set at the opposite end of the Americas, to Miller’s The Crucible. Even, in the use of one memorable image, Chagall. In the corners of the world which are furthest removed from the trappings of the modern world, closest to the wilderness, the forces of magic can still do their thing. 

battle in heaven (w&d reygadas)

It took a few days to process Reygadas’ second film, which provoked much debate in the Fénix bar on a Saturday night before the world changed. Debate focussed as I recall on the breach between Reygadas’ undeniable distinctiveness as a filmmaker as against the coherence of the story his film was setting out to tell. On the one hand, it’s not often that I feel so baffled by a film’s plot. Who’s kidnapping who? Why is the boss’s daughter shagging the driver/ odd-job-man? Why does he do what he does (to refrain from a spoiler). Who the hell is that little police chief and whose side is he on? Not to mention the family that get out of the car in the posh neighbourhood. However, even as I write these questions, I realise that this scene is a mirror image of the quite brilliant scene in the petrol station when an entire indigenous family, at least 20 of them (including Magdalena Flores from Japón) emerge from a car, one by one. This is one of many remarkable scenes in the film, including the march of the penitents. In an ordinary narrative film, the hook that keeps you watching is wanting got know what is going to happen next. In a Reygadas film, the hook is what you’re going to see next. Sometimes the two overlap, but there’s a sly difference. Narrative is normally primary; with Reygadas it’s secondary. We’re closer to the territory of Cocteau or Parajanov. The tension between a cinema of the image and a cinema of the literary is so strong in Reygadas’ work. It makes for an absorbing dialectic.

japón (w&d reygadas)

There’s a strange magic to Reygadas’ film making. What is this magic? Firstly there’s a pursuit of the elemental. Cinema is about light and Reygadas reveres light. It’s also about relationships, human or other and he is one of the most fearless investigators of what that means. One of the things it means is being prepared to embrace images that others might find ridiculous. Masturbation, copulating horses, unsexy sex. On the page this seems like it could be bad taste, but Reygadas is prepared to run that risk if it takes us further into the complex avenues of his mind. This kind of material has long been explored in literature, from Ovid to Chaucer to Donne to Bataille, and many more, but the image is a hard taskmaster and the line between what’s considered tasteful and what crosses the line is a visceral one. Japón is a film about an artist’s search for some kind of redemption. Contemplating suicide for reasons that are never clear, an artist comes to the reclusive home of Ascen, an elderly woman. There, he becomes embroiled in the village politics, as her nephew, recently released from prison is trying to take over her home. The artist finds a cause which gives him some reason to live. It’s a doomed cause, but even so his relationship with unlikely bedfellow, Ascen, offers each of them some kind of strange succour. The film is unwieldy, awkward, but remorselessly brilliant all the same. Reygadas is not afraid to stare into the abyss and ask himself, his characters and the audience, if there’s anything worth fighting for. Perhaps, his films suggest, there might be. 

1917 (w&d mendes; w krysty wilson-cairns)

OK chaps. This is what we need. We inhabit a country that’s becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea that fundamentally we won two world wars single handed. Vanquished the monstrous Hun, saved a lot of fetching French women and basically acted with a degree of heroism and British sang-froid which marks us apart as clinically superior to our European neighbours. We don’t want anything too meaty, let’s have some straight-off emotional plot points, photos of loved ones back in Blighty, brother saving brother, a good death scene, (which is also a narrative twist, catchy?),some communal male singing, because that’s what they all did, and plenty of doomed bonhomie. And for fuck’s sake, let’s not make it too deathly serious. Let’s have lots of swearing and lets reel in the youts by giving it a real video game aesthetic. You know, like you’re there living this and the Hun is coming after you and it’s kill or be killed, and you’ve got a fixed target which gives you a big (emotional) pay-off. Let’s package it up with a shedload of extras and some nifty explosions and maybe just maybe we can do it like in one take?

You’re an intern in the production company at an early planning meeting (concept; target audience; reference) with the esteemed Cambridge graduate director. After keeping quiet for a long time you summon up some courage and say - ‘Has anyone seen Son of Saul?’ Some people in the room nod approvingly, others look slightly confuesed. Then you add: ‘Let’s make the Apocalypse Now of the first world war’. The team look at you and say: this chap or chapess knows her shit. What you don’t say is: ‘Do you realise that this is just going to reinforce national stereotypes and play up to the increasingly ultra-right agenda of modern British politics?’ (You definitely wouldn’t mention the B word.) Or, let’s hypothesise that if you did say that, you would have been quietly lead away to the room reserved for people with a modicum of political awareness and farmed out to Loach or someone of their ilk. 

1917 is a technically well-executed movie which uses an off-the-peg Blake Snyder template. Sadly it’s an exemplar of where we are now, a culture that cooks up effective but vapid, bellicose content targeted at the world’s conservative heartlands. No idea what a ‘European’ watching this film would make of it; in particular the quite absurd necessity to turn the German pilot into the villain of the piece, a scene that could have been scripted by a Mail-Murdoch hack. Personally I can’t say I found it depressing or moving or challenging. It’s blandness and predictability washed over me like a stolen vote that you’ve got no option but to learn to live with.