the damned don’t cry (w&d fyzal boulifa)

Despite the portentous title, Boulifa’s film is ultimately an affectionate portrait of a mother-son relationship and a clear-eyed take on the vicissitudes of Moroccan society. Selim and Fatima are down on their luck. Thrown out of their grandfather’s home, they return to Tangiers and try to fashion a viable future in an inviable society. Fatima is a flakey flirt and her handsome son soon realises that following in her footsteps is the way to get ahead, as he enters into an uneasy relationship with Sebastian, the French owner of a downtown riad. The narrative keeps moving as the characters lurch from salvation towards damnation and back again. The precarious nature of life in Morocco, as in any third world country, is acutely described. What marks Boulifa’s film out, beyond all of the above, is his refusal to convert his twin protagonists into heroic figures.  Both Fatima and Selim are flawed survivors, getting by against the odds as they try to steer an independent path through a stratified society. Aicha Tebbae’s portrayal of Fatima, in particular, a middle aged ugly duckling convinced she’s actually a swan, is beautifully realised. In spite of her foolishness, Fatima is possessed of a survivor’s sly wisdom which keeps her both alive and sane, against the odds. If the film sometimes seems to skate over some elements of the harshness of the lives its characters endure (what is it really like to be a young man in a Moroccan prison?), it still succeeds in avoiding the trap of constructing a heroic or redemptive narrative of life in the third world, thereby offering a more convincing, less palliative depiction. 

paths of revolution (adolfo gilly)

Gilly is an Argentine writer who wrote for many years for the famed Montevideo diario, Marcha. He spent several years incarcerated in Mexico and is a figure who connects radical social movements across the Americas from Arbenz to Subcomondante Marcos. This book of collected essays is remarkable in the breath of its scope, with the writer acting as witness to the Cuban revolution up until the Zapatistas, and as such capable of lending his overarching gaze to more recent developments in the push-me pull-you of Latin American politics, as countries lurch from right to left in a post-dictatorship world. Gilly, who at one point mentions having meetings with a youthful Galeano, offers an astute analysis of the way in which leftist revolt so often connects with an underground stream of indigenous resistance, whose roots go back to the Spanish conquest and before. Much of this is based on time he spent in Bolivia and Mexico, societies where the indigenous cultures have retained a strong independence, for whom defeat is not a reality, with these things being no more than setbacks in a struggle destined to last centuries. Likewise, resistance on the part of these communities to the neo-liberal aspects of globalisation goes hand in hand with the fight to maintain an identity in the face of a world which seeks to erase them. Gilly’s observations on the continued sacking of resources by neoliberalism actually goes hand in hand with the observations of Zavala in his book Drug Cartels do Not Exist. Neo-liberalism in this sense is nothing more than an extension of neo-colonialism, a 21st century action which Gilly  helps to define. 

the naked year (boris pilnyak, tr. alexander r tulloch)

1917 was a year that changed the world and set up a paradigm for the twentieth century. What’s your take on Soviet Revolution? Amidst all the bombast and the dogma, the actuality of what it was like to be a human being in this moment, to live, fight, love, be scared, be confused, be Chekhovian, tends to be overlooked. Pilnyak’s remarkable novel, part Tolstoy, part Sterne, offers, as only literature can, an insight. Unsurprisingly, because on the whole writers need years like 1917 to give them polenta, there are several texts which deal with the human aspect of the revolution, including work by Babel and Marina Tsvetaeva, even if, like The Naked Year, these texts tend to be little known.

Pilnyak’s novel has a complex brilliance. It captures the effects of the revolution on a world beyond Moscow, out towards the East, on the edge of Asia. Here, even language becomes muddled up. Seismic changes occur and they are just changes. One particularly lovely sequence follows an elderly aristocrat, ordered to leave his stately home, who finds himself in a paradoxical way liberated, a freedom to just be a man walking miles to the nearest train station, even if that sense of freedom will only last a day or two. The Naked Year has no central character, moving through a panoply of different figures from chapter to chapter. The novel succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating how 1917, as well as being a forerunner for the century, also harks back to the dense, hermetic life of the Russian interior, a place where Europe and Asia are in constant flux with one another.

“The rulers of Russian during the past two centuries, since Peter, have wanted to adopt this culture. Russia languished in a stifling, utterly Gogolian atmosphere. And the Revolution set Russia against Europe. And furthermore immediately after the first days of the Revolution, Russia, in its way of life, customs and towns – returned to the seventeenth century. On the border of the seventeenth century there was Peter… there was a native Russian art, architecture, music… Peter came along – and genuine folk art disappeared… – Popular rebellion is the seizing of power and creation of their own genuine Russian truth by genuine Russians. And this is a blessing!… The whole history of peasant Russia is the history of sectarianism. Who will win this struggle – mechanized Europe or sectarian, orthodox, spiritual Russia?…”

This is one of the most instructive and playful texts about the Russian revolution, one which offers a perspective which incorporates the multiple truths of that event, truths which the subsequent victors of history, from both sides, chose to bury, because ambiguity is a fervent opponent of dogma. 

on savage shores (w. caroline dodds pennock)

Dodds Pennock’s book treads similar territory to The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow, a more broad ranging book but one which also sought to reverse the mirror, examining indigenous American attitudes to Europe, as opposed to the other way round. Where The Dawn of Everything lent heavily on the interpreted perspective of the Wendat leader Kondiaronk, (also mentioned in this book), On Savage Shores seeks to harvest multiple indigenous points of view, noting that within a decade of Colombus having landed in the Americas, the cross-Atlantic peregrinations went two ways. The Native American visitors sometimes came as dignitaries and sometimes as servants or slaves. Dodds Pennock faces the age-old problem that so far, few written accounts of these visits to European shores have emerged. Where there is information, it tends to be cursory or viewed as a depiction of “the other”, even when the author’s take is sympathetic (cf Montaigne). Surprisingly Dodds Pennock doesn’t really tackle Caliban, and even more surprisingly to this reader, there appeared to be no reference to Garcilaso de la Vega. Nevertheless, Dodds Pennock assiduously mines the records and addendums to find traces of these early visitors, and the book is perhaps at its strongest when the author seeks to convey an idea of the way the indigenous people might have blended in to societies that were already more cosmopolitan than orthodox (school) history would tend to suggest. On Savage Shores does a great job of revealing the way that the Americas (for want of a better word) insinuated themselves into global culture, a process that involved both goods and people, although it could be said that the greatest riches of the Americas, their philosophies and cosmologies, have sadly struggled to make as much of an impact.

 

la notte (w&d antonioni, w. ennio flaiano, tonino guerra)

La Notte takes L’Avventura’s elaboration of mood (what they call clima over here) and welds it to a disciplined twenty four hour structure. Moreau and Mastroianni make for an impeccably charismatic troubled couple, as the film documents their marriage on the verge of collapse. Cinema in mid-century Italy embraced existential angst with a vigour that even the French can’t claim to match. The French fascination with the rules of form meant they were always more playful than their Italian neighbours, who seem to be perpetually chewing on the hollow bones of affluence. (Perhaps it is more than coincidence that the Godard film which feels closest in tone to the likes of Antonioni, Fellini et al was shot in Italy.) In La Notte, Antonioni pushes the ennui and angst towards a kind of perfection, a perfection which is conveyed through the cinematography and lighting, where every shot is another element in the couple’s exquisite decadence. It is at once claustrophobic, deadening and brilliant, as is the case of their marriage.

Unfortunately I was teaching on the night of the screening of LÉclisse, the third in this kind-of trilogy. But seeing the first two on consecutive days, you can see how the director had no choice but to gravitate towards colour and the fractal explosion at the end of Zabriskie Point. La Notte would appear to be pushing an aesthetic as far as it can go. Even if there was one more step, the end of this journey, the one he and his characters is on, is clearly nigh. The constrained concerns of the mid twentieth century cannot be masticated for much longer, no matter how beautiful they (and their avatars, Antonioni’s perfect actors) may be. People will soon stop wearing perfect suits, their hair will be a mess, the codes of civilisation will be challenged and overthrown, to an extent. The whole of late twentieth century thought is encapsulated in the films of Antonioni, leading to Jack Nicholson going awol on the edge of the world’s great desert. 

l’avventura (w&d antonioni, w. guerra, elio bartolini)

L’Avventura hinges on a brilliant moment of melodrama, which is also something so down to earth that the audience can readily connect with it, in spite of the fact that this is a film about wealthy socialites. A group of loose friends go on a day trip to an island in a yacht. One of their party, Ana, is in a troubled relationship with her fiancé, and disappears off the face of the earth. The group search the rocky, uninhabited island but Ana persists in her vanishing. Later there are reports of another boat in the area, and then reports of her having been seen on the Sicilian mainland. Her fiancé and friend, Sandro and Claudia, go in search of her, but there are tensions between them, which leads to the revelation of a secret which might explain Ana’s disappearance.

This story, which is echoed at the start of La Notte, is direct and straightforward in a film where so much is opaque and confusing. It gives a spine to the film’s 144 minute narrative, even if the second half of the film struggles to maintain the dramatic tension as the focus shifts to Sandro and Claudia’s relationship. As much as anything else, Antonioni is a master of mood. Scenes unfold gradually, allowing the tensions and conflicts to reveal themselves without ever needing to be underlined. The humorous character is later revealed to be heartless, the charmer is stripped bare by the end. There is a preoccupation with what we might now call toxic masculinity, but this is always crafted, never bludgeoned. This leads to the creation of what the textbooks might describe as 3-D characters, albeit the kind of 3-D characters that Anglo-Saxon moviemaking tends to shy away from: complex characters struggling with the simpler things of life like desire, faithfulness, the bricks and mortar of the (post-)Christian societies we inhabit. 

tierra de españa (d. joris ivens)

Ivens’ film is an unashamed propaganda piece for the Spanish republic during the Civil War. The film centres on a region to the East of Madrid and the capital itself. Of particular interest to this viewer were the scenes from the university city, where I stayed for a few cold weeks nearly twenty years ago, at what would have been the front line back in those days. Ivens’ film uses the voice of Hemingway as its narrator, and his magisterial tones suggest that despite all the difficulties, most significantly the German airforce, all will be well in the end. Of course, we know it wasn’t to be, and Ivens’ positive message turned out to be misleading. There is so much about a war we don’t know from the outside: why the republican cause faltered, what lead to eventual defeat. Was it due to strategic error; internal indiscipline, as Orwell suggests; the superior mercenary forces ranged against it, as the film suggests; or the will of the people, whatever that might be? Being a propaganda piece, Ivens’ film doesn’t offer much clarity on the subject, as its aim is to rally the troops. What did strike me, though, watching the film, double billed with Buñuel’s, is that this was such a key moment in history. The victory of the far right, a European far right, emboldened Hitler and his allies. The disinterest from the UK or the USA or other natural allies, and the mixed reaction of the USSR, suggested that an attitude of non-engagement was their priority. Where we in the UK are shown a heroic version of WW2, we are never confronted with the counter-narrative of the world as it might have been had that far right movement been confronted  earlier in the process, before it had the chance to become a messianic death cult. 

tierra sin pan (d. buñuel)

Buñuel’s early short film is a trip to a desolate corner of early 20th Spain, Las Hurdes, a mountainous region not that far from the Portuguese border. The film reveals a society steeped in poverty, which doesn’t look as though it has changed much since the Middle Ages or before. Children and adults go barefoot, the diet is impoverished, with the voiceover informing that very little grows in this region. The men go to seek work elsewhere, leaving the women to keep the villages alive. In a highly Buñuelesque touch, the film shows a donkey which has been attacked by bees and is on its last legs. At another point we are shown a sick baby and informed that it subsequently died three days after the filming. Coffins have to be carried across rivers, because the soil is too stony to dig. Everything is precarious and the similarities between standards of living in poorer areas of Latin America and Spain seem striking. Having said which I passed through Caceres, the nearest town, a few years ago, and the changes were remarkable: this is a society that has succeeded in more or less eliminating poverty, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the rural communities which Buñuel reveals in this 90 year old film.  

dead man (w&d jarmusch)

My friend, Mr P, has long lauded this film to me. I have seen stills and had it referenced many times. Somehow I had never got round to watching it. The screening in Cine Universitario, in the underwhelming Sala Chaplin, was 25 minutes late starting. I was almost tempted to give up. But I didn’t. And to be honest, I was quietly blown away by the lyrical beauty of Jarmusch’s elegant, oneiric movie. As is the case with the best of the auteur’s movies, very little actually happens. A few moments of violence, never overstated, punctuate William Blake’s journey to the other shore, which is where his spirit guide is leading him. Is Blake alive or dead? Does it matter? Perhaps he inhabits an in-between zone, that hazy space between the two supposedly separate states. The very fact that the viewer is compelled to muse upon these issues, rather than the more traditional fare of a western, is testament to the director’s transcendent vision, a vision which feels as though it might be rooted in traditions that pre-date the occidental worldview. 

l’été meurtrier (d. jean becker, w. sébastien japrisot)

Jean Becker is the son of Jacques Becker and the two of them were a spinal cord of French cinema for over half a century. The Beckers never achieved the level of global fame of the likes of the Nouvel Vague and subsequent directors like Audiard, Noe etcetera, although I remember Truffaut singing the father’s praises in his collection of reviews. L'Été meurtrier is a very gallic tale of revenge, featuring a femme fatale, (Isabelle Adjani), who spends most of the film wearing the skimpiest of outfits, and sets out to find the men who raped her mother, one of whom must be her father. In the course of her mission she seduces and then marries Alain, the son of one of the men she suspects, who is now dead. The tale is convoluted, and at over two hours long, relies heavily on the charms of Adjani to maintain interest. Perhaps the most intriguing element of the film is the way it looks at the legacy of the Second World War in provincial French culture, as the violent rape which is at the core of the film’s narrative happened in the wake of the war, at a more catastrophic moment in time than the charming village life of the late sixties which Eliane and Alain enjoy.