trafalgar (galdós)

Trafalgar is part of a sequence of historical novels written by Galdós, which follow the character Gabriel de Araceli, as he moves through Spanish history. It’s not a complex novel, but it is informative in the telling of how the battle of Trafalgar, a name which means so much to the British identity but about which so little is actually know, transpired. Gabriel finds himself inadvertently aboard a Spanish warship in the battle, fighting on the French side. A telling detail is that he is surprised to see sawdust being placed on the deck previous to the battle, only to be told that this is to soak up the blood and guts. The battle is savage and the writing gives some insight into the Russian roulette of naval warfare. The novel also details the tactical acumen of Nelson as he strategises victory. Finally, Galdós’ treatment of this historical event shows how significant it was for the Spanish, and reminds us that war is actually something that connects societies as much as it separates them. The narration of the way the British help Gabriel to survive serves to humanise his enemy and reveals the common humanity which exists beneath the geo-political conflict. It seems surprising that none of the great British novelists of the nineteenth century tackled the battle. Trafalgar is not a major work of fiction, but it does offer a polished and humane insight into a historical event whose fame lives on today, and will do so long as the one-eyed sailor stands above the square. 

le mépris (w&d godard)

I figure it must have been in 1983, there or thereabouts, that my erstwhile friend Jason took me to a double bill at the Electric on Portobello Road of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Le Mépris. Back then the Electric was still a fleapit. I have a vague memory that we entered in daylight and exited into the night. That serendipitous shifting of the spectrum which seems to have been caused by the clash between light and darkness that cinema constructs. I was seventeen, I believe, and that screening of Le Mepris has always remained as a keystone in the process of falling in love with cinema. It has been, entonces, nearly forty years since I last watched the film. I guess it must have been in part Bardot herself, but my greatest memory of the film was of the shimmering Mediterranean which Godard’s film, a film about the making of a film of the Odyssey, a quintessential Mediterranean text, celebrates. The quality of the light from that far-flung world must have dazzled, all the more so to then emerge into the darkness of the London winter night.

How much has altered. When I watched it I would have been younger than all the cast and they would have seemed like gods to me. The trials and tribulations of relationships, around which the narrative is constructed, would still have seemed like a foreign land. I imagine I would have had no idea who Fritz Lang was, let alone Piccoli. Watching it yesterday, only the immortalised Lang would be older than me. The film within a film is about gods and men, although this is part of a sly game, because in the modern world, rather than the grecian one, the film stars have become gods. Bardot is an effigy of beauty, Palance of unredacted masculinity, Lang a sagacious world weariness. If any director filmed actors with an awareness that he was constructing a panoply of Homeric immortals, it was probably Godard, faithful to the first three letters of his surname.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Le Mépris, a story told in three acts, is the way in which Godard reins in his ironic detachment. This is a drama, in the conventional sense, with conventional narrative beats and characterisation. The characters are at once less obviously his puppets than in other films, and more so, subsumed as they are in the meta-drama of his personal narrative which underpins the film. (Filmmakers struggling with the complications of being both ambitious, beautiful, and human.) The extended scene between Bardot and Piccoli, which makes up the second act, foregoes the winks at the camera, permitting the actors to remain absorbed in the budding tragedy of their characters’ failed relationship.

With Delarue’s delirious strings, Raoul Coutard’s crystalline cinematography and the plasticity of the small cast, this is almost a model for what a film might be, a mix of the romantic and the intellectual, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. No wonder it seduced me back then, a young man on the brink of his journey into the big wide world of gods and monsters. 

les carabiniers (w&d godard w. jean gruault, w. beniamino joppolo)

Les Carabiniers, Richard Brody informs us, “In first run, it attracted so few viewers—an estimated 2,000—that its box-office statistics went unreported.” It’s a chaotic mess of a film, in many ways, adapted from a stage play, which sees Godard’s Brechtian instincts pushed to the max, and illustrates the limitations of this approach. The film tells the story of two country boys who are sent off to the war, where they rape and pillage to their heart’s content, only to return home and find that not only are their promised rewards non-existent, but they are also about to be executed, paying the price for defeat. The two protagonists are deliberately painted as two dimensional, and the whole film has the feel of something flat and didactic. Where, perhaps, the spectacle of theatre permits this, cinema, wedded to an idea of psychological truth, feels unconvincing when it goes too far in its abandonment of that notion. Godard might have argued that the film does indeed represent a tortured truth. “If Les Carabiniers had no success in Paris, it’s because people are worms. You show them worms on the screen, they get angry. What they like is a beautiful war à la Zanuck. For three hours they kill lots of Germans. Then they go home happy, heroic. Real war, they don’t want. It isn’t war that is disgusting, it’s ourselves. People are cowards.” Indeed, it’s not hard to think of the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine as one watches the film, and the realities that Godard presents. But the alienating devices that work are so effective when the audience is drawn to Godard’s characters are less so when pegged to characters we have no reason to fall for. Godard messes around with Belmondo and Karina, and it always feels as though they are in on the joke, even if it’s at their expense. Here, the joke is that these characters are, no matter how pretty, essentially heartless monsters, and it’s hard to want to identify with this.

Perhaps for this reason, if anything Les Carabiniers could be used as a study in the significance of charisma as an actuarial trait. Godard was more than aware of the importance of beauty and charm as weapons to be utilised by both actor and director. He repeatedly took full advantage of his actors’ charismatic qualities in order to rope the audience into an unconventional way of seeing. He tries the same thing here, but it doesn’t quite work, no matter how pressing and significant the subject matter of the film. 

une femme est une femme (w&d godard, w. geneviève cluny)

Back into Godard world, which will never die. Sit down in the cinema, having forgotten how the film opens. Think, Dios Mio, how destacado era ese pibe. Out there. Doing his shit like no-one else, before or after, no matter how imitated. The ebullience of the cinematic vision, ripping up the rule book like he’s one of the Lumiere brothers all over again, reinventing cinema for the masses. Yeah, sure, the whole film is balefully self-indulgent. Yeah, sure the vision of femininity is balefully masculine. Yeah, sure so the director gets to make a paean to the girl he’s crazy about. Probably knowing that it’s never going to last for ever, that all good things come to an end. Yeah sure, it’s got a soggy middle, which is basically Angela (Karina) and Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) cosplaying being Karina and Godard. There’s a hundred reasons to dislike or at least have reservations about this film, but there’s a million reasons to love it. Which is the same sort of thing that could be said about any child, and there is something so gloriously childlike about this film, with its dippy creativity, its gauche gender wars, its naive iconoclasm that you can’t help adoring it, no matter what. Children don’t respect rules and neither does Godard, playing with sound, image, character like a kid in the biggest, best playground on earth, aka making a film. 

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. 

hurricane season (w. melchor tr. hughes)

Having read Paradais , it made sense to get to grips with Hurricane Season, which some have compared to Marquez. If this is correct, (and in this translation it doesn’t feel like it is), then it is a frightening reflection of what has happened to the Latin American literary world, and perhaps Latin America itself. In her machine gun prose, Melchor takes the killing of a trans and spins it into a golgothic voyage through a dead end Mexican pueblo. In this place, everyone is desperate, everyone is driven by venal desire, everyone will meet a cruel fate. Teenagers have miscarriages, other teenagers fantasise about fucking and killing their best friends, the elders have had all hope extinguished. There is no magic in this realism, the magic has been expunged, even the black magic has had its throat cut and died in a ditch. It’s not an easy read and there is no redemption to be found. The only thing that the characters know is that it will rain one day and they are likely to die sooner rather than later.

Although the scale of Hurricane Season is grander that of Paradais, the novel feels less nuanced. There is a reliance on the flair of the prose over and above the development of character. It is, one imagines from an editorial perspective, seductive. Long sweeping tracts of text, stepsisters to Bernhard, trampling over the Mexican littoral, delivering adrenaline shots of brutality and sexual violence. It is a representation of Mexico which mirrors one reality, whilst at the same time annulling all the others. The novel has much in common in with the section in 2666, the Part about the Crimes, without any of the framing contextualisation of Bolaño’s novel. The horror is overwhelming and restrictive, the novel peering through the narrowest of lenses at a world no-one would ever want to visit IRL. 

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. 

passage to india. (e.m. forster)

It feels incumbent, after finishing Forster’s novel, to find out what, for example, Edward Said thought about it. I learn with a bit of research that Said saw it as an example of further mysticisation of the Orient, indicative of a late colonial attitude. Forster, it should be noted, spent time in India. Unlike those novels where the impact of colonialism is inferred, consciously or unconsciously, (Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair), this is a novel written with first hand experience of the colonial project.

Given this, it felt to this reader as though the writer of Passage to India leaves little doubt as to his opinions. The portrait of the British community in India is scathing: “At Chandrapore the Turtons were little gods; soon they would retire to some suburban villa, and die exiled from glory.” At another point, Adela’s fiancé, says to his mother: “India likes gods. And Englishmen like posing as gods.” Forster dissects the Anglo-Indian community with understated savagery. The novel shows them to be petty, racist and philistine to boot.

There is, perhaps, a certain authorial courage in tackling the issue of colonialism head-on. It’s a subject which so many writers danced around the edges of. For three hundred years of British history, from the early 17th century to the mid 20th century, colonialism was a pillar of British society and wealth. And yet, as Said observes, its significance was only ever addressed in a tangential, allusive fashion. Whilst the British were politically and economically active, carving up the world to their own ends, its writers by and large ignored the colonial project. As such it felt, to this reader, looking back, a relief to find a writer prepared to take on the task of critiquing this centuries old policy. (People tend to talk about Colonialism as an inevitable practice, but it isn’t.) There is undoubtably, within the novel, a strand that perceives India as a place of mysticism and complex religion. Although, to be fair, this also leads to an examination of the complexities of the co-existence of India’s religious communities, one that India would still appear to be still struggling to come to terms with today. And it should be noted that Forster, in talking about these religions and their differences, is honouring them in a way that, he makes clear in the novel, the vast majority of the Anglo-Indian settlers failed to do. 

viridiana (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 6/6

Viridiana was the final film in a week of Buñuel. It marked his return to Spain as a filmmaker after years of exile in Mexico, and at the same time, it marks the start of his third incarnation as a director, the era that would produce a handful of copper bottomed classics.

It’s a remarkable film, full of complexity and what is known in Spanish as highly atrevido, a word that means bold or daring, but also implies a naughtiness, or a cheek. It has a narrative which is unafraid to twist and turn like a cobra, heading one way at one point, then changing gears. The film’s delirious closing sequence only features the protagonist, Viridiana herself, at the very end. The coda ending is like a throwaway sidewinder, which at once heralds the future of Spain and casts its past in the bin.

The story opens with the titular heroine Viridiana committed to a nunnery, seeking a life in Christ. Forced by her mother superior to visit her older but virile uncle, played by Fernando Rey, she finds herself drugged and abused by him. When it looks as though she has successfully escaped, she is brought back by a brutal strategic move on the uncle’s part, one which will wed her to life beyond the nunnery, whether she likes it or not. The film then switches tack, as Viridiana becomes a kind of Mother Theresa, welcoming the down and outs and outcasts of the local town to come and live with her on the estate. All this is then turned on its head again as her cousin, played by Francisco Rabal, comes to take over and modernise the estate.

In the course of all this, every single Buñuel trope is thrown into the mix. Perverse sexuality, the hypocrisy of religion, the marginals of society, and the overturning of the social order, depicted in a riotous scene which is like something out of Twelfth Night. Ancient European customs and class divides are represented and challenged. It’s a glorious jamboree of a movie which manages to conclude with the modern world subtly infiltrating and taking over the old world, as electricity and music flood the house and seduce, perhaps, a newly glamorous if tarnished Viridiana, her blond hair released like a dose of pure hedonism, the coming hedonism of the sixties. 

nazarín (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 5/6

Nazarín tells the story of a priest who is too virtuous for his own good. Adapted from a Galdós story, it’s a lumpy film, opening with a long sequence in the small community where the priest is based, before expanding in the second half into rural Mexico, as the priest is compelled to flee, followed by two devoted women who revere him. The opening half hour feels dialogue heavy and theatrical. The film struggles to catch fire, (until it does), and it’s only when the priest sets out on his odyssey that the film and the narrative gather pace. There is an obvious critique of the Catholic church, with the priest’s goodness proving to be his undoing (perhaps reminiscent of Greene’s The Power and the Glory), but more than anything the film offers Buñuel a chance to explore and reveal a deeper Mexico, a Mexico far from the big cities. His depiction of the campesinos and the pueblos is impressively filmed by DP Gabriel Figueroa, and this world, with its rogues and dwarfs is beautifully brought to life. The paradoxical majesty of the Hispanic architecture juxtaposed with poverty and struggle and the smallness of man in the face of the epic countryside, is captured as the priest’s calvary leads him and his followers towards a bitter end. The films of Reygadas are second cousins to Buñuel’s vision in Nazarín.