time of the wolf (w&d michael haneke)

There’s a moment in Time of the Wolf where Eva, the daughter, asks to listen to some music a man is playing on a tinny tape recorder. Beethoven. I suppose I must have stolen that moment. And many others as well. Although I was never particularly aware of the impact the film must have had on me. Until I saw it for the second time, last night. The first time, if memory serves me well, and I’m far from convinced that it does, was in the flat of Mr C, when he still owned the flat in Kilburn, before he moved to Archway and then headed East. It was always a pleasure to work in that flat, with it’s kitchen/ living room and marble worksurface. It was a productive space, from within whose walls emerged the first film we made, a blend of Cortazar, Woman of the Dunes and other random influences.

Haneke’s film must have made its points. It was, as ever, far preferable to see it on the  big screen in Cinemateca. Haneke’s films are like way stations. Each one defining in their pared back austerity the state of the world and the state of your life. Last night, there were no more than half a dozen people in the cinema. They don’t know what they’re missing. An old man at the end said, as we left, that the film grabbed you from the start. He was right. The start which seems like a homage to Funny Games, as a middle-class people-carrier noses its way through the countryside with no idea of what it is about to confront.

However, in spite of the film’s savage opening, this is a gentler, more humane piece of storytelling than Funny Games. We assume that everything’s going to go all Cormac McCarthy on us (ie The Road) with horses eating one another and humans too. But somehow the savagery is kept in check. It’s internal, even, curiously for Haneke, poeticised. There remains the suggestion that beneath it all he’s a  repressed Romantic, searching out the humane within the disjointed chaos of a world which has, more or less, forgotten what it means to be humane. There’s something about the messianic figures who arrive bearing torches which suggests that Haneke believes there might be hope after all; that one way or another once we rid ourselves of all the junk that weighs us down we’ll remember what it means to belong to a community. And learn to breathe again.  

on the road to babadag [andrzej stasiuk]

Recently I learnt that Bolano wrote listening to heavy metal on his headphones. Franzen needs white noise. There always seems to be some debate about what are the best conditions for writing. How to disconnect yourself from the world in order to open up the interior space and let it loose on the page.

Reading Stasiuk’s remarkable prose I wondered how he goes about producing it. On The Road, as the title suggests, is a road movie of a book. A travel journal, to put it another way. But the prose itself feels like driving down a road. Through Eastern Europe. A road that sometimes meanders, sometimes crawls up hills, sometimes freewheels down them. Sometimes seems to turn into a blazing motorway. And sometimes, too, it feels as though the writer loses control of his vehicle, as the language takes over, barrelling forwards relentlessly, chasing the stars.

The book itself is an account of the writer’s wanderings through the netherlands of Eastern Europe. Places which, for the average Western European, might as well be in Asia. Moldova, Albania, Romania, Transylvania, Slovenia. However, his investigation is more abstruse than this. Stasiuk shuns the cities as far as possible, preferring to delve into the backwoods, searching out the roots that hark back to a rural Europe, unchanged by modernity. He doesn’t like motorways and he likes getting lost. He shows little interest in the tourist sights, preferring to drink beer or the local tipple in a bar than visit Roman remains. The writer seems to be on a constant search to find the essence of this other Europe which has managed to preserve itself in the face of the barrage of the modern world’s relentless quest for uniformity. Places are not the same as one another. They are different and people evolve with this difference as a result.

Stasiuk diligently investigates these differences. He searches out the thinginess of things, seeking the way in which man, beast and object are so tightly defined by one another that it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. This is the world of the object from the  pre-consumer age, when the individual retained a different relationship to matter. His descriptions of these societies, preserved by their place on the European margin, have the resonance of a William Carlos Williams poem and the intellectual acuity of Foucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses.

The book is split into several sections detailing his journeys in various countries, until the last essay, a long, haphazard, semi-stream of consciousness where he allows himself to hop from place to place, name to name, creating through the act of writing alone a kind of communality between these corners of Eastern Europe. It’s bravura writing, perhaps inspired as the title suggests by Keroac, but something all of its own at the same time. In the chaos of words which flash like sparks, passages of the most extreme beauty and insight emerge. This is writing as incantation, spell, lyric. Geography is let loose on the page and places converge and separate as though these names on the map are part of an ancient dance that Stasiuk alone has managed to unveil.

solaris (w&d tarkovsky, w. frederick gorenshtein)

Dyer in Zona talks about Tarkovsky's roving camera. He talks about the camera 'breathing'. It's true. Tarkovsky's camera is more like a living creature than an inanimate object. The machine that feels. We can never settle, just as the narrative never settles, caught up in the restless quest of its characters. It's a device that has been used in horror or suspense movies extensively, but rarely in drama. In horror it's clear that the intention of the roving camera is to put the viewer ill-at-ease, to subvert the feeling of security that the standard viewing position offers. But Tarkovsky does not appear to be out to unsettle us. Rather, he wants us to be aware of how 'real' the scene is. To fracture the assumed complicity of viewer and screen, in order to rebuild. Just as with 'reality' we can never be entirely sure what's going to come next, so within the world of Tarkovsky's camera. Don't blink. Because when you look up everything might have altered irredeemably, and you'll have missed the reason why.

Not that logic is necessarily the key factor in the sequence of events within a narrative adapted from a Stansislaw Lem novel. Some of the most entertaining dialogue occurs when the script starts to explain the apparitions in the spaceship. The 'real' characters, we are informed, are made of 'atoms', whereas the apparitions are made of 'neutrons'. So that's cleared that one up. Tarkovsky would appear to be escorting us into a zone where the rules of physics have become susceptible to unexplainable distortions. The search for a logical solution is spurious. The question is whether one chooses to go with the flow or resist it. A choice to be made by both spectators and characters.

I went with it. As Dyer’s book corroborates, reaction to Tarkovsky’s art is a highly personal affair. One can quite understand someone walking out at any point. It’s a reasonable response to a film that drifts and ebbs like a river, bringing to mind cinema seen through the lens of Heraclites rather than Ridley Scott. At some point the film wrapped me up in its dreams and I floated downriver with it, gravity-free, headed for the great ocean which contains another earth with its alternative philosophies. Like any journey downriver on a foreign planet (Apocalypse Now?), there are moments which drift, punctuated by moments that take your breath away. You would need to write a book, in the vein of Dyer, in order to begin to do justice to the power of this cinema, a few words here are but a frippery.

a lesson in love (w&d ingmar bergman)

Those sassy Scandanavians. This may not be Bergman’s finest film, but all the same there’s a dexterity to the composition and thematic which marks it out. David is a successful gynaecologist who is having an affair with one of his patients. But when he learns that his wife is headed for Copenhagen to hook up with her old flame, Carl-Adam, he realises the error of his ways and takes drastic action.

Although there’s something slightly stagey about the film’s scenes, a reminder of Bergman’s debt to the theatre, there’s also a great deal of play with regard to the timeline and the revelation of information to the audience. At first we have no idea that the attractive woman who David sits next to in the train is actually his wife and the film cleverly manages to sustain the conceit for an entire scene. The writer plays fast and loose with the use of flashback, jumping back twenty years to show the unlikely circumstances under which David and Marianne’s marriage came about. The film, with its set-piece scenes might look a bit dated, but if a contemporary scriptwriter chopped and changed as effectively as this, the critics would be swooning.

In addition, there’s the whole mannered, measured attitude towards the complexities of love and marriage, in such stark contrast to a more straight-laced Anglo-Saxon approach. There’s an understanding that the course of true love does not run smooth which allows Bergman leeway to playfully explore his characters’ attitudes towards fidelity and sex, themes that would recur. It’s a comedy with fangs, which owes more to Shakespeare than the ‘romcom’, to which genre it could probably be described as belonging. 

zona [geoff dyer]

It’s a party just off Clapham Common. The host is a young woman who will later become an auspicious feminist. Judy Rumbold is there, something I find vaguely exciting, as I’d spent the last four years or so having her Guardian pieces force-fed to me as part of my crash course on all things fashion. (Alaia; Westwood; Gaultier; Alaia. It’s still the eighties, just.) The party is full of literary/ journo types fresh out of Oxbridge. All quite clearly on their way to somewhere, their destinations marked out, their lives bursting with their first and finest and final flowering, when it still feels like there’s such a thing of freedom of choice.

The hostess invites me into a room that is locked. Inside there’s about half a dozen people. There’s a man sitting on the sofa. He’s clearly very important, in spite of the fact that he’s no older than anyone else there. The others in the room as good as genuflect towards him. His every word is hung upon. Which is not something he seems to mind. The hostess introduces me to him. His name is James Wood. She says we need to speak about Saul Bellow and leaves us to it. We speak about Saul Bellow. I don’t think I have anything of any great import to say about Bellow and I’m not sure that he does either. But the important point is to talk about him. Of him. To be known, one to the other, to have spoken of Bellow. Our conversation is cloistered, a kind of samizdat. It lasts about ten minutes. At the end we acknowledge the Bellowness of our conversation. I leave the room, with the satellites still wheeling round the critic, grateful that Bellow and myself have given him back to them. The room is locked behind me.

This is my first and only meeting with the man who will later write, with some insight, of Geoff Dyer: “To spend one’s life writing is a betrayal of the writer’s life: Dyer knows this is a lunatic paradox, that even Romantics have to sit at boring desks and write, but he would rather have his battered paradox than Barnes’s clean coherence.” At the same time as the critic and myself are discussing Bellow, Dyer is quite possibly getting hammered down the road in Brixton. Ten years later I will stumble across Dyer’s memoir/ novella of Brixton life and it will register as authentic. Thereafter I shall never read anything else by Dyer or Bellow, never meet the critic or Rumbold or the feminist or discuss literature ever again.

And Dyer will begin to mutate into one of the more unlikely success stories of the London literary scene. Who quite possibly now has his own room where the door is locked. Where he might discuss Tarkovsky. Or Alan Watts. Or Calasso. Or Azzedine Alaia. Or not.

Now, having ignored Dyer and this world for so long, I find myself reading his latest book, whose full title is: Zona, A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room. It’s a blow by blow account of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In another culture, this might not be such a surprising tome, with its overtly Barthesian premise, but in London it marks Dyer out as a maverick. People are far more likely to talk about Tarkovsky than watch his films. The intellectual exercise of writing a book about Stalker would by and large be viewed as a pretentious Europhile project. Of course, having pulled it off, it then becomes brilliant. As indeed it is. Zona is a small tour de force, a mini-Pegasus, flying over Tarkovsky’s territory, his zone, appropriating the master’s work as a means of displaying the writer’s breath of vision as well as his loyalty. It’s a book about the way in which time works, the way in which we create anchors to measure our progress. For Dyer, Stalker is one such anchor. It’s a point of constant reference, with regard to his relationship with cinema, and hence art, but also his own changing desires and ambitions.

At the heart of the book, as at the heart of the film, is the Room. The room is the place where our greatest desire can be realised. It’s only here that one starts to question the writer’s authenticity. His greatest desire, as he puts it, is so banal that it threatens to undercut the validity of his whole project. As though, on the cusp of the room, his inherent Englishness suddenly exerts itself, and he rises up against any risk of being branded a pseudo-intellectual Europhile. All of a sudden, the book veers towards GQ territory. Denuding his deepest desires, Dyer redeems himself. He doesn’t want to be a savant or a yogi or a radical or a revolutionary. He wants to get wasted and be an extra in Shame, hanging out with a desiccated, overacting Fassbender, whom he vaguely resembles.  

I have my doubts. I have a feeling that in the background of Dyer’s supposed orgy, his veritable Room, there would be a screen with a film on it. Something by Antonioni. Which would gradually lure him in. Whilst others hedonised, his mind would drift. In spite of his best intentions to pillage like an Anglo-Saxon, he’d turn to the critic, who just happened to be there because he’s a critic, not a writer, so can get away with the odd orgy without feeling like he’s blowing his creative juices, and find himself locked into a conversation about Barthes. Or Flaubert. Or Virginia Bloody Woolf. 

reticence [jean-philippe toussaint]

Toussaint's novel is essentially a shaggy dog story. A man arrives in a seaside town with his son and settles into a rhythm of paranoia and fantasy. His thoughts are conveyed with stream of consciousness, reminiscent of Bernhard and Bolano. A slim 130 pages, it should probably be read in one sitting, although I read it in four.  It’s one of those novels which relies on the implication of menace. The game is trying to figure out whether there’s any substance to the narrator’s musings or whether he’s just deranged.

Descendant of the Nouvel Romain, it has to be said that Reticence is ultimately underwhelming.  This is acutely apolitical writing.  An exercise in epistemology, it deals exclusively in the act of perception. (What little I’ve read of Nicholson Baker would be another point of reference). The word ‘political’ is one that has many variations to its understanding. In this context it perhaps means that it seeks to talk ‘of’ something. Toussaint’s novel approaches the stage before we can even talk ‘of’ anything. It addresses the acts of perception and interpretation humans engage in before they can get anywhere near the act of assertion. The world is a blizzard of data (even though this book was written in ’91). How can anything be asserted when we can’t even establish what the signifiers look/ smell/ sound like?

river of smoke [amitav ghosh]

River of Smoke is a curious book. At once vast, full of fascinating detail, engaging; but at the same time the storytelling is flawed and the book’s structure means it sags somewhat as it homes in on the finishing line.

In my (perhaps) former job, a script was defined by character, narrative, (dialogue) and ‘world’. The last being the most relevant here and frequently the hardest for a scriptwriter to master. A novelist has more scope to conjure an unknown world, and Ghosh takes full advantage. He appears to know mid c19^th Canton like the back of his hand. His prose leads us through the alleyways, across the Maidan, weaving in and out of the 13 factories. It’s a world as brilliantly realised as Dickens’ London and the depth and breath of the author’s scholarship is never in doubt.

However, his fascination with the intricacies of Canton’s geo-political structure is at the expense of his plot. Ghosh treats his characters with the irreverence of a historian, rather than the reverence of a novelist. Paulette and Penrose, two of the principle characters in the book’s opening section are rudely removed from the plot, left to dawdle about in Hong Kong, offstage. Similarly, Bahram’s son, perhaps the most fascinating character in the book, a true product of Canton’s miscegenation, is introduced and then expunged. There are other figures who flicker into life only to fade out before they are allowed to catch fire. Instead, the author’s focus turns to the historical detail of the lead-up to the opium wars and the actions of the British and US merchants as they strive to resist the Chinese emperor’s will. Whilst Modi’s fate remains of interest, the novel increasingly feels as though it’s marking time before it can knit up its plot, with the day-by-day account of the last days of Canton’s foreign enclave overstated.

Having said which, River of Smoke is still an absorbing read. Ghosh displays an authoritative, over-arching take on the way the modern world has been shaped. Furthermore, he does the European the grand favour of removing their continent from the epicentre, shifting history’s focus further Eastwards, revealing the centuries-old mercantile structures that Europe’s military might took advantage of. Furthermore, River of Smoke contains a vigorous commentary on the nature of the drugs trade. It’s a strong critique of European double standards, one with echoes of today’s world, proving there’s little new under the rising sun.

+++

[Some of the characters named above, I realise after a cursory glance at Wikipedia, feature in the first part of the trilogy, Sea of Poppies. Which might mean that I am being unjust in my criticism. Nevertheless, it still feels to me as though the book lacks balance as a result of the way the author manipulates his characters.]

elena (w&d andrei zvyagintsev; w. oleg negin)

Andrei Zvyagintsev manages to pull off the remarkable trick of creating in Elena a film which is both slight and magisterial at the same time. The film has the gravity of a 500 page novel, although the narrative itself is little more than a fable.

This tells us something about the way in which cinema works. Zvyagintsev’s attention to detail is meticulous. We seem to know every inch of the apartment Elena shares with her wealthy but dispassionate husband, Vladimir. The polished surfaces are contrasted with the bleakness of the estate where her son lives with his family. It’s the accumulation of detail which lends the film its power. The opening shot shows Vladimir’s flat through the branches of a tree. Peering more closely at the twilight frame, we notice a bird in the bottom left hand corner. The shot is repeated at the end. The metaphor is clear: this is cinema as ornithology. The filmmaker brings the same attributes of patience and a sheer appetite to watch as the bird-watcher, attributes his audience are obliged to share. There are sporadic moments of action, all the more intense for the way in which they suddenly flicker to life from a canvas which is so passive for so much of the time.

Whilst this runs the risk of sounding dull, it is in fact compelling. In the process Zvyagintsev reminds us that more than mere story-telling, cinema is also an exercise in perception. As such he gets away with the slight narrative, a cuckoo-in-the-nest tale which is tied up with all the neatness of a Chekhov short story in the film’s closing moments. One suspects there is an allegorical power to the story which resonates more in Moscow, perhaps, land of the newly minted super-rich, than it does here.

This is Zvyagintsev’s third film. I saw The Return on tv one night, chez Mr P. We had been channel hopping and came across it and found ourselves hooked, against all expectations. This is a director, in the model of his countryman, Sokurov, who knows the weight of the cinematic hammer he wields. His films have substance; the substance of life observed and related with a painstaking yet exhilarating precision. 

mobile home (d francois pirot, w. pirot, marteen loix, jean-benoit ugeux)

This pliant comedy is my second Belgian film in a month. Like Meisjes it is a bittersweet comedy. Two friends, Simon and Julien decide to buy a mobile home and go travelling in order to escape their small town lives. But the mobile home breaks down before they can get away. Trapped, having invested all their savings in the vehicle, they are forced to work in order to raise funds to fix it. But the longer they stay the harder it becomes to leave.

The film is leavened by the acting of the two leads, Arthur Dupont and Guillaume Gouix. The journey they go on in the film is not the intended one. Unable to flee their flaws, they discover things about themselves they hadn’t expected or wanted to. It’s a neat narrative device and the film works well on its own terms. It manages to change gears and unearth some real pathos as Julien realises the importance of his relationship with his father. There’s nothing groundbreaking about Mobile Home, but there’s an assurance to the direction and it does what it says on the tin. 

brideshead revisted (evelyn waugh)

Reading this book is a journey through the wardrobe. A journey back in time. To being a teenager. To belonging to one of the most privileged, renowned schools in the world. A place marked by medieval craftsmen, Christopher Wren, Gibbons, Mallory, Victorian gothic, the first world war, the second, the wars to come. A place steeped in the history and nature of England and being British. A place I turned my back on, rejecting the roots I had been assigned, seeking to retain only the most catholic aspects of an education that offered existentialism, Colin Wilson, drugs, deviance, depression, repression and, for some, the birthright of privilege.

In the midst of the years I spent there, Waugh’s panegyric appeared as a luscious television series. Touched by old and new generations of British acting aristocracy. Geilgud, Olivier, Irons and more. Someone somewhere screened the episodes for us, and no matter how large the distance which might have been supposed to exist between the twenties and the eighties, the television in fact reflected our lives. The fey Sebastian and the louche Anthony Blanche were characters we knew well, fossils that had survived. And along with their feyness we also recognised their romanticism. A doomed hedonism, gilded with a hint of religious transcendence. The curse of entitlement. The mysteries of the elite.

I went away and sought to leave it all behind. Cut my ties and sought to enter into something more akin to the “real” world, as subsequent friends and partners might have put it. And these characters, both the fictional ones and the ones who echoed their fictional forefathers, came to seem egoistical, blinkered, narrow-minded. Crass. Indeed, some of their likes can now be found flitting around the current government, my contemporaries, shallow souls whose lives have been lead within this insulated bubble of privilege.

I left Waugh’s world behind and I never read the book. Indeed, I struggled with British literature per se, especially from the 20^th C. So much of it filtered through the sieve of inured Oxbridge privilege, so far from the pulse of the world. But now, in Montevideo, I felt a yearning, a good Waughian word, to reconnect. Because, I suppose, there’s a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are aspects of England, Britain, the England of which Winchester, with all its mordant beauty, was a part, which will always have a hold. With the sense or ironic detachment which accompanies knowing the value and the absence-of-value attached to this culture, so apparently ancient, beseeching so much respect.

Waugh’s Ryder, the book’s narrator, ends up becoming a cynic, cursed by his association with Brideshead. He cannot bring himself to love his own family, even his children, The very notion of love is so lost in the Arcadian fields of Sebastian’s youth that he never recovers it. His relationship with Sebastian’s sister is a pale imitation, sacrificed on the altar of this agnostic cynicism. Conventional values and desires pass him by. He yearns for the transcendent, to live in a Poussin pastoral, the world kept at bay by beauty. Realising this is something he cannot have (and those who do have it don’t want it) reduces him, stymies his ambition, leaves him in middle age as nothing more than the husk of his youth.

Ryder is a model for many who have the fortune to attend the Winchesters of the world, which keep on trucking, Oxbridge and its ilk. Real life is a disappointment in the wake of the romanticism of youth. The drive to do things, to make the world in your image rather than pursue a forlorn image of Englishness, is missing. They find a way to make society accommodate them, carving out their anointed niches, but everything is hollow. Life becomes a perpetual hangover. It’s no surprise that Blanche declaims TS Eliot through a megaphone. This is the danger of history: it consumes the muscles from within, a silent malevolent host.

All of which helps to explain why I should turn to this book now. On the one hand, it is a symptom of homesickness, or nostalgia (albeit a nostalgia for a life which has nothing to do with the one I lead when in London). And on the other, if I read this book in the UK, it would quite possibly make me ill.