Restlessness and Revolutionaries

Couldn’t find anything to watch. Started with the Richard Fleischer CHE! which almost immediately seemed inadequate. A bunch of halfhearted tropes nobody seemed to believe in. Begins with Che Guevara (Omar Sharif) lying dead, with a whispered postmortem VO saying things probably shouted in life, and then we get ugly stupid splitscreen effects during the titles. The callback to THE BOSTON STRANGLER (whose image mosaic was inspired by an actual IDEA) feels sad and underdeveloped. Folding the film’s fictitious reconstructions in with actuality footage could be useful, but you also need an aesthetic idea to make it look good.

Then there’s odd confessional scenes of actors talking to camera in mockumentary-interview snippets that don’t look like either fiction or documentary, and of course it’s an accentless mess. The more-than-usually disembodied bits of narration suggest that Fleischer may have seen I AM CUBA, but nothing suggests that it’s excited him to one of his occasional fits of brio.

The casting, of course, is disastrous. Sharif is not the worst of it — Jack Palance as Castro is still feeling his way through unlearned lines, and the idea of doing another take or two so he can grow more confident seems to have been too painful to consider. Worse, there’s dialogue testifying to Castro’s awesome rhetorical skill. Maybe Palance looked at film of Castro speaking, awkwardly, in English, and decided that’s how he must sound all the time?

Reader, I bailed on it. So I put on Oliver Stone’s COMMANDANTE, and lasted about the same duration, half an hour. At least it was lively. Multiple handheld cameras provide low-fi footage that can be cut rapidly, with various kinds of tatty archive material and lively, colourful Cuban docu-material, the voices of the Cuban leader and his translator overlapping. An attempt to mimic the ordered chaos of JFK and NATURAL BORN KILLERS in a documentary. This was interesting but a touch wearing.

Stone is a somewhat fearless interviewer, but he’s not curious about the same things as me, and anyway interviewing politicians may be a pointless procedure. I mean, OK, I hadn’t seen Castro talking like this, informally. But once you get over that, it’s something that’s very familiar — a guy talking informally. And then what becomes hopefully interesting is what he has to say, but…

It’s perhaps an ingrained aspect of the political mind: incapable os thinking deeply about anything outside of their chosen field, and incapable of speaking frankly about anything in it. Castro is not a particularly extreme or egregious example of this, but the problem is glaring enough for me to not want to spend a feature film in his company.

He was still better than Palance, though.

I cast my eyes around for other films picked up whimsically, and settled on Abel Ferrara’s PASOLINI, bought on Blu-ray from a charity shop for probably £2. (total cost of the day’s viewing materials: probably £5).

This is only 85 mins I think, so after half an hour I made the decision to stay with it even though I was continually uncertain as to why Ferrara was making the decisions he was making, including the central ones about what to include and what to leave out.

I ended up slightly cross about it all, though the casting of Willem Dafoe, who has some slight resemblance to Pasolini’s very uncommon facial type (the high-and-wide cheekbones and pronounced, sprawling nasolabial fold), proved somewhat effective despite WD being twenty years too old and not speaking Italian. Those issues proved not to matter too much.

This being Ferrara, the director’s murder is rendered graphically, but what are we to make of its forensic inaccuracy? — PPP was not kicked multiple times in the balls, he was struck there with an iron bar. Why is it preferable to show this with distressing detail, but with the detail WRONG? The movie refuses to speculate on any conspiratorial theories, and it’s presented as probably queerbashing, in which the young trick PPP has collected takes part — which does make it ambiguous and strange, and may have some relation to the true facts, but is not as evocative as more recently uncovered information — was PPP trying to recover stolen footage from SALO? This would have tied the death in with the beginning of the film where we see PPP screening (or maybe mixing?) his final film. But Ferrara isn’t interested in that kind of plotty, structural storytelling. I’m not sure though what he IS interested in.

Filming sex? This may be the main connection between AF and PPP, a desire to get graphic and biological with cinema. It’s not that the two are a terrible match… more like maybe they’re not a match at all, despite Catholicism and use of shock tactics.

(I’m now curious to see WHO KILLED PASOLINI? though, which sounds like it has more the kind of approach I’m interested in.)

Still, I made it through! And a day later some of it stays with me, not in a boring “I can still remember it” way (though these days that is in itself an achievement) but in a “kind of haunting” way. And mingling PPP’s last days with fragments of unfinished or unfilled works seems a reasonable approach, even if it’s more reminiscent of Fellini than his occasional collaborator.

A rentboy refers to PPP as “Jack Palance,” at one point, which kind of tied my whole day together.

Taiga, Taiga, Burning Bright

SOMEBODY on Twitter was saying that Mikhail Kalatazov’s LETTER NEVER SENT had the most beautiful b&w cinematography they’d ever seen, which reminded me that I’d never seen it. Sorry, can’t remember who it was who said that. But they’re not altogether wrong.

Kalatazov is best known for I AM CUBA, where his camera sways across a rooftop, glides down the side of a six-storey building, ambles through a bar and descends into a swimming pool, all in one shot. THE LETTER NEVER SENT is almost equally stunning in its sustained shots, following the characters through blazing Siberian forests, all done for real without visual effects, unless setting fire to an actual forest qualifies as a visual effect.

Four government prospectors are looking for diamonds. There’s a romantic triangle. They find the diamonds. And then everything goes wrong and it’s a desperate struggle for survival, the goal of which, this being a Soviet film, is not individual survival but the safe delivery of the diamond map to the proper authorities. It begins to look as if the happy ending might be the recovery of the map from our heroes’ frozen corpses…

All along the way, stunning images.

Kalatazov and his regular cinematographer Sergey Urusevskiy favour wide angle lenses and a hand-held camera much of the time, so there’s not only scenic beauty and packed, thrusting compositions, but tremendous visual tension and dynamism. The contrast between stable, beautiful long shots (POV Siberian taiga) and unstable, panicked close-ups (the individual experience), is electrifying.

And despite the slightly inhuman (OK, a lot inhuman) state that’s being celebrated, where human life does not have the highest value, Kalatazov seems to like his characters and admire their sacrifice. The beauty isn’t just visual. There’s also, as in DERSU UZALA, the real terror of the vast unpopulated wilderness, where the sheer size of the landscape becomes frightening.

(Musician Laurie Anderson went camping in the wilds, and when she was chopping firewood the axehead flew off — up, up, up in the air — and she thought, “If that thing hits me on the head, who’s going to help me?” The planet is TOO BIG. And yet too small, as we’re managing to mess it up.)

There are scenes on the ice flow which put D.W. Griffith to shame. The whole film is like a suicidal endurance test for cast and crew. A film unit can get to be kind of like a cult, I suspect. Doing this kind of stuff is NOT NORMAL. Can any movie be worth this? But nobody died for real, so far as I know, and the result is astounding.

I have seen SALT FOR SVANETIA, I AM CUBA and THE RED TENT, all excellent, though his astonishing gusto was diminishing a little by that last one. But I have to get my act together and see NAIL IN THE BOOT and THE CRANES ARE FLYING (where, I know, actors and camera plunge through swathes of actual flames in a burning building). And there’s a bunch of lesser-known ones. What am I waiting for?

A Perfect Storm

Today our graduating students at Edinburgh College of Art have their public screening of their films, and yesterday Rishi Sunak announced the next general election — effectively his resignation speech, hilariously carried out in a torrential downpour with a genius of a troll playing “Things Can Only Get Better,” the Labour part’s 1997 election campaign theme tune, in the background.

My mind went back to 1997 when our graduating class got their degrees immediately after Tony Blair’s election, and I recall sitting on the grass and one of them pondering why he felt so good — “Oh yeah, I’ve just graduated, and oh yeah, Labour have just got it.”

Having lived all that, I now view Labour’s forthcoming victory with some cynicism, I’m waiting to see in what way they’ll disappoint us, but at the same time they CAN only be better than the current crowd.

The students, meanwhile, who went through the pandemic in their first year, did us proud in their fourth. I hope you’ll be hearing from them soon, at the movies.