Szindbád (Zoltán Huszárik, 1971)

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2011)
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In terms of sheer pleasurable enjoyment, I don’t think any film I’ve seen this year has enraptured me as much as Zoltán Huszárik’s 1971 film Szindbád.

The film is based on Gyula Krúdy’s Szindbád stories, which detail the thoughts, dreams, journeys and fantasies of an ageing but ageless roué and his undimmable fascination with women and the mechanics of seduction. Szindbád is a flatterer, a confidant, a friend, a fantasist, a hypocrite and a contrary and jealous would-be lover, helplessly enmeshed in the fantasies and desires of his own making. He is also, in his imagination, a role player, never happier than when graciously extending advice and forgiveness to women, granting beneficent favour and releasing an admirer from his bond, only to tie himself ever more deeply in her affections. Greying around the temples, he is 50 years old, or 300, or already dead; he is a ghost, a repeated suicide, even, in the stories, a sprig of mistletoe that nearly wears through a pious nun’s skirts through the action of continuous friction.

The film in fact begins with one of his many deaths. ‘Take your master home,’ says a woman to a horse in the film’s opening words, with Szindbád slumped in the cart that it pulls. But just where is home? Certainly not the next house, in which the woman roughly strips him of his winter coat and sends the horse on its way again. In fact, home for Szindbád seems to be no physical place at all, but more a continual mood of subdued erotic affection, or affectation perhaps, that he carries with him to the women that call out to his shade, wearied but not too weary to glance at the ankle belonging to a violet hat that passes him in the street, from their provincial towns.

Conquests is too strong a word for one for whom the trappings and accoutrements of desire seem even more important than its release. Indeed, George Szirtes, translator of Krudy’s Szindbád tales, describes the character as a ‘creature of vestiges’. Huszárik understands this well, composing the film around details as much as character, and by so doing creating a suffuse erotics of autumnal melancholy in which the past intrudes and intertwines with the present, where flashes of a repeated gesture or a past kiss flicker into remembrance, and where a bunch of red carnations can be carried across the years, from a basket thrown into a snowy street to a vase in an old and knowing lover’s house. Where an apple green lampshade is repeated minutes later in the shape and colour of a painted wooden ceiling framed by an arch. And where, from the film’s opening images of close-up details of petals furling and unfurling, of circles of oil floating on soup, of a breeze reddening embers into life, of portraits, pressed flowers and lace, of rain dripping from shingles and a spider's web, we enter a world of restrained and refined sensual delight.

There are numerous moments in Krúdy’s stories of subtly beautiful descriptive phrases
that arrest fleeting images in the mind: ‘when she smiled faintly it was like dreaming on an early spring evening when late blossom covers the apple tree like a white veil,’ he says. The first lines of the story Youth read: ‘once upon a damp and moonlit night night a man with greying hair was watching the autumn mist form figures of chimney-sweeps on the rooftops.’ On an autumnal night in another, ‘the bloodshot moon was sitting like a tipsy old man in the branches of the poplar tree’, while in yet another Szindbád notes ‘the almost invisible lines on [a woman’s] face, like the marks of tiny scuffling birds’ feet’. A man has a voice ‘like broken snow crackling under the sleighs of a wedding party’.

They are moments you wish to dwell on but must leave behind, like Szindbád in fact. It needs someone with a deep understanding of the mood of the Szindbád tales to be able to bring their atmosphere to life without their poetry seeming forced, and Huszárik creates images and scenes drawn from the stories’ essence; scenes we would like to linger over but must consign to memory: a woman heading to a chapel in the blue light of dusk, her pale pink scarf trailing to the ground behind her cornflower blue cloak, the briefest glimpse of a forget-me-not blue dress on a stair between buildings in a provincial town, the glistening quiver of marrow fat knocked out from a bone on to a plate, its seep into the air pockets of warm toast, a comb stroked through long golden hair, bronze chrysanthemums on a Chinese screen.

In fact, the film is an art director’s and costumier’s delight. Scene after scene seem to have been built from a delirious colour scheme  based around the exuberance of a mixed flower-bed, in which improbable juxtapositions match perfectly. Indeed, given the way that Szindbád butterflies around his women, it is appropriate that many of them wear hats that either contain actual flowers or have crowns resembling petals; one woman’s the silk of an infurled yellow rose, another’s an orange lily.

Fanny, dining on a table surrounded by the turmeric walls of a yard, lichen green windows, dusky pink tablecloths and a jade wall trellis, wears a fuchsia dress netted with a coffee-coloured bodice, her fuchsia hat with candy pink feathers and a black silk bow, and eyes lightly shadowed with eau-de-nil.

Florentina wears a crocheted shawl of moss-green, leaf-green and dusk blue squares as she walks between an avenue of trees, their leaves falling in the thousand colours of autumn, as she cradles a bunch of bright orange blooms, a coil of thick copper hair hanging below her white lace hat.

And the film is also a catalogue of every shade of purple, with lilac, lavender, heather, violet, mauve, mallow and magenta catching our eye throughout.

‘Oh God, give me quiet sleep, a peaceful night – help me to forget the scent of their hair, the strange look in their eyes, the taste of their hands,’ says Szindbád. But how will that ever be possible when he returns to a room in which he has met so many, the bold and the shy, the seductive, the chaste and the tearful, and where he is assailed by thoughts of a bodice untied, or boots lying unlaced on the wooden boards, where a lilac silk dress still slips to the floor, and where tresses of long auburn hair are spread, before the candle is dimmed, across a tangerine counterpane and canary yellow pillows.

An ice skater’s red scarf fades into the fog, recalling Szindbád’s scarlet pepper shavings that crimson with the heat of his soup, as his winter fairy takes her leave across the frozen pond, the traces of their dancing marked into the ice as so many glides, curves, scrapes and skitters that will melt with the spring, when the water pulses with reborn urgency beneath.

The film ends as it begins, with one of Szindbad’s many deaths, this time, while pumping the bellows so his female companion can play the church organ. It is sudden, grotesque, ridiculous and ungainly, and I can well imagine Szindbád stepping out from behind a gravestone – as he does some way through the film in fact – and smirking at its recollection as he follows the call to yet another provincial town to look up an old flame and see how the years have treated her, gently brushing her proffered hand with his moustache when they meet and thinking of which violet-scented words he will use.

City Girl (FW Murnau, 1929)

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2011)
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Watching Murnau's City Girl, I was struck by how many significant scenes were centred around words on paper, printed or written, and how these letters, cards, tickets, receipts and newspapers advanced the story, revealing significant items of information to different characters, and holding this information hostage to future scenes. This is a story shaped around a weighing machine ticket, a telegram and a newspaper headline, to name just three.

At the same time as these items of written and printed information advance the story, Murnau also composed the film around scenes of modulated visual repetition and resonance, and it is these complementary elements, one looking forward, one referring back, that help to make the film such a rewarding viewing experience. City Girl is also, on one level, a film in which a series of hands ask or demand things from others. Now, I realise this sounds both hopelessly vague and overly reductive, so it’s worth considering in a little more depth. And there’s no better place to start in fact than the very opening scene.

Farmer’s son Lem is on the train to Chicago, where he has been sent by his father to sell his winter wheat at the grain market. He sits, gazing out of the window, before, like the appendage of an implacable automaton, the guard’s arm thrusts in from the edge of the frame, requesting his ticket. Lem, increasingly flustered, hunts through his waistcoat and jacket pockets, emptying his wallet before he eventually finds it. The guard himself remains out of shot, even when clipping Lem’s ticket. The scene is presented as comic, but there is also a slight menace to the guard’s unwavering hand, demanding proof of payment. In fact, it’s an image that prefigures Lem’s situation in the film, trusted by his uncertain father to be sent off alone to sell his wheat at $1.15 a bushel and no less (something reinforced by the very first piece of written information that we see in the film, a letter from his father which exhorts, ‘you must get this amount or it will be serious’. The guard’s is not the only hand expecting payment.

Let’s skip forward now to some way through the film. In Chicago, Lem has met and married waitress Kate (and I’ll note in passing that the very first shot we see of Kate is actually of her hands only, collecting bread from the slicing machine to be handed out to diners in the restaurant), and has returned with her to his home, which, for all Kate’s calendar-fed dreams about sheep beneath the trees, is an isolated house, with no garden apparent, surrounded by thousands of hectares of wheat which grows up to the door. The house is placed in the middle of large-scale rural industry, surrounded by the claims of continual labour, and, as we will see, continual worry about the weather. Lem’s father’s face is deeply lined for a reason.

Nevertheless, in an exuberant scene, Lem and Kate have run happily through the wheat towards the house (though one can only hope, given the harsh words that Lem’s father Pa had for young Marie when he spied her playing with a few stray ears, that he hasn't seen their crop-crushing frolicking - not that it would have made any difference to his cheerless welcome). They rest a while by a shed and recover their breath before they complete their journey by taking the few steps along the path to the house – a distance that for Lem is longer than the entire train journey from Chicago which saw the newlyweds sleeping contentedly, hands held and heads resting against each other’s. As Lem  turns to face his home, this distance is reinforced by the ominous black smoke that is rising out of the chimney. In a moment, his face falls, he loses his confidence as he nervously realises what awaits. All the while however, Kate is out of sight, but her fingers are curled over a piece of wood jutting out from the shed. It is all we see of her. Hers is a new claim on Lem that cannot be ignored. Again, we are shown a hand requiring payment, support or succour. They head to the house, brushing each other down. After the brief, happy interlude in which Kate is introduced to Ma and Marie, comes the inevitable introduction to Lem’s father. Lem tries to introduce her but he ignores her completely, refusing to recognise her existence. ‘How much did you get for the wheat?’ he demands. And Lem, again flustered and fidgety, rummages through his pockets and wallet, the comedy of the earlier moment on the train turned sour as he finds the grain contract which reads $1.12 a bushel, and hands it to his father, the figure floating free of the page.

Another repeated scene through the film begins with Lem flinging Kate over the gate when they first arrive at his homestead. After things have soured and the harvesters arrive, Lem’s rival, Mac hauls her down and manhandles her up into the cart she was climbing in to. Later still, when Lem has been goaded out of self-pitying inaction and goes to fetch Kate after fighting Mac, he motions to help her up into the cart. She gently palms him away, refusing his aid and making her own way up to sit beside him, this time on her own terms. And finally, after the proper greeting and welcome by Lem’s father, Lem himself can lift her into the cart which returns through the night and through the wheat that Mac and his fellow harvesters have returned to clear before the hailstorm hits.

In a letter to Lotte Eisner, quoted by Scott Eyman in his essay Sunrise in Bora Bora, Murnau talks of his conception of an ‘architectural film’. He says, ‘What I refer to is the fluid architecture of bodies with blood in their veins moving through mobile space; the interplay of lines rising, falling, disappearing; the encounter of surfaces, stimulation and its opposite, calm; construction and collapse; the formation and destruction of a hitherto unsuspected life; all of this adds up to a symphony made up of the harmony of bodies and the rhythm of space; the play of pure movements, vigorous and abundant.’

One of the most famous examples of this conception, of fluid human architecture moving through a film, comes in Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise, when, after the man has tried to drown his wife on the lake, she runs from him when they reach the shore, catching a tram into town which he also manages to board at the very last moment. The next 10 minutes or so, in which the couple moves from fear, shame and galling realisation to tenderness, reconciliation and forgiveness, has much in common with the expressive attributes of dance. During the tram ride, the couple – she tiny, utterly submissive, he, a looming presence that does not know how to tender protection instead of fear through his size – are the still central point about which the tram winds its way along tracks and around corners. Later, after she has refused his beckoning hands and run into traffic, he shepherds her, nearly carries her into a café. She is cowed, bewildered, innocent. He buys cakes and with utmost gracefulness, guides the plate across the table to her. She, the band on her wedding ring prominent, reaches for one, but her body is wracked with sobs as she goes to eat. He – the band on his finger prominent as he slowly rubs his wrist, is sunk in shame, thought and awoken tenderness, as if this woman with him is suddenly the most pale and precious flower once more. When they exit to the street, he can barely touch her back as he motions to guide her. When they walk into a church as a wedding ceremony is taking place, he ends up sobbing in her lap, she cradling and stroking his head. As bells toll forgiveness, she smiles and kisses him. The actors’ movements and gestures are a sort of heightened naturalism, the actions of living sculptures whose every motion is charged with meaning.

Just as Murnau’s human dance plays out in an expansive setting in Sunrise, in City Girl, it is confined within the bare walls and wooden door frames of Lem's house, not least in the tussle of wills between Kate and Lem's father, when he confronts her, asking her what she expects to get out of his son, before hitting her hard on the face. The next couple of minutes can be watched almost entirely as a drama conceived around hands and eyes. Lem’s determination to avenge the wrong is punctured by his mother’s soft pleading and her hand pulling him back through the doorway through which he had gone to confront his father. His hand on hers, he looks back, deflated, to Kate standing in the other doorway. He is motioned out of the screen door by his mother, who strokes Kate’s back, her own hand mirroring Kate’s on the wall.  City Girl is filled with such patterns of movement, showing Murnau’s pure cinematic vision to be a hybrid artform grown and twined from other sources and disciplines.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)

(Written for a MovieMail podcast in 2011, with the core of the piece appearing in Artesian magazine the previous year as a reflection entitled Dark with Power.)
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Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is his film about Chauvet cave, a significant site of prehistoric art discovered in 1994 and situated in the Ardèche region of southern France. In addition to its many fossilised remains and numerous bones of different animal species, some now extinct, wall scratchings and footprints from cave bears and the 25,000 year-old footprints of a child, it contains the oldest known cave paintings, usually dated to around 30-32,000 years old, which in their quality, range and preservation provide some of the finest early human paintings discovered thus far. Access to the cave is difficult, the original entrance having been covered by a landslide, and the environment in the cave so delicately balanced that fungal invasion promoted by an excess of human breath, as has happened in Lascaux, could damage the images irreparably. Therefore, the cave is closed to the public and will remain so. Herzog’s film is the closest that we are likely to get to the experience of visiting Chauvet cave. In order to give some context to Herzog’s film, and based on visits to other painted caves throughout France, this essay reflects on cave paintings in general and the relationship they hold to us now.


Our journey takes us into darkness – the secret, velvety darkness of subterranean passages, their time marked by the drip of stalactites, and the shapeless darkness of long-forgotten knowledge, knowledge lost through disconnection with its source. Whatever light we have for this journey is too strong, too constant; it obliterates. It cannot create the forms our peripheral vision requires, nurturing them, drawing them forward as our fire dims, jerking them back into shadow with its flicks of flame. Better instead to take a tallow-filled stone bowl wicked with lichen or a smouldering pine brand blown into sparking life and then, in the brightest part of day or in the pitch of night – where we are going it makes no difference for the black is profound, the temperature constant – enter the earth, beneath the looming rock ceiling of Grotte de Gargas, deep into the echoing cavern of Niaux, between the narrow engraving-filled walls of Grotte des Combarelles, and into the sacred central chamber of Grottes de Cougnac. These caves respond and breathe to the glimmer of an ancient light, appearing mammalian with their passages and tubes, nodules, glands and rippled flanges. These were not places of sight so much as places of touch, where the walls were tense with the might of a neck, the sinew of a leg and the shaggy hang of a mane. In this regard, Herzog’s decision to film in 3D in the Chauvet cave makes a perfect sense.

‘le dos, la tête, le ventre, patte avant, patte arrière…’ These days, guided tours in the caves are mainly devoted to delineating body parts by laser pointer ­– sections of mammoth and bison, auroch and deer; as if the people we are now could judge by our deracinated standards of representation the accuracy of an animal’s depiction by people who were intimately involved with the stalking, killing, carrying, butchering and eating of a deer, bison or ibex; they would have known a beast’s every move, bone and muscle. Our appreciative mutterings about accuracy and perspective in the paintings are laughably wide of the mark. In Chauvet, Herzog points out the delicacy with which a female lion not ready or willing to be mated has been depicted in a few spare lines, and points out another lion, drawn around a single stroke 6 feet long for its spine.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams captures something of the disorienting excitement and anticipation of entering a cave for the first time and even the experience of being deep in the earth, surrounded by traces of long-passed people. ‘The presence of humans in the cave was fleeting like a shadow,’ says Herzog; ‘Listen to the silence of the cave.’ says the leader of the visit, archaeologist Jean Clottes.

In the darkness of a cave, our eyes are drawn to the things we feel we can understand, often the showpiece paintings of animals, relegating what we think of as dots, lines, stipples and palm prints to marks of lesser importance. And the thought to which I keep returning; we are missing the essential charge that would help us know these images so much better – a charge of fear, awe and uncertainty, a feeling of needing to claim a place in a world that is evidently not ours, a teeming land of animals on which man has but a fingerhold. Of the many thousands of paintings in the painted caves of France and Spain, fewer than a hundred figures of humans have been found, and those usually incomplete or fragmentary, deliberately crude or schematised. Some have suggested there was a taboo against the depiction of human figures – a conceit that is thoroughly in tune with the anthropocentric egotism of our age; maybe we simply weren’t important enough to warrant it. Our precarious hold on the world these days is of a different order entirely. As Herzog says at one stage of the makers of these images: ‘we are locked in history, they were not.’

Engravings, scratches, marks, finger-flutings and paintings in a cave are inseparable from the place of their creation, resonance and significance, and the rocks which they emphasise. In Chauvet for instance, paintings of animals are clustered around an ancient rain hole, a mammoth is lightly outlined in red ochre around the natural relief of a stalagmite, while a prominent roof boss features the cave’s most enigmatic image, of the bison with, perhaps, a human hand, whose contours are shared with a woman’s torso. In some places, the image has been named ‘the Venus and Sorcerer’, which only takes us back to the darkness with which I began. It seems appropriate that now and again, the rock, and the beyond the rock, returns to claim its own: a deer browsing at a fissure in La Caverne de Niaux has had its nostrils blocked by a creamy calcite exudation; in La Grotte de Villars, a horse, blue from a covering of calcite, is returning to its origin, being shielded from our uncomprehending eyes.

After about an hour of any given Herzog film, my mind unfailingly begins to wonder how he is going to end it, with what oddly apt image he is going to shift our perspective of the film into a new and unpredicted area. I think of the horseman riding across windblown sands in Nosferatu the Vampyre, I think of Kaspar’s vision of a caravan led by a blind Berber across the desert in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and of course, there’s the infamous dancing chicken at the end of Stroszek. Well, being eyeballed by an albino crocodile basking in a water’s nuclear-sourced warmth at the end of Cave of Forgotten Dreams was certainly unexpected. It is an image that suddenly places us in a different timescale, one in which we are outlasted on the planet, and one that also recalls Herzog’s words from within the cave, ‘It felt like eyes were upon us,’ he says at one point. Well, those eyes upon us brings me onto my final thought, which is about claims of kinship and responsibility.

The final credits of Herzog’s film roll over an image from the cave that has come to be known as a ‘negative hand’ – the shape of a hand outlined by blowing paint over it to mark its outline. This ‘negative hand’ is an iconic symbol for a number of painted caves. It’s often taken and reproduced on brochures, flyers and website ‘contact’ buttons to extend a Pioneer plaque-style greeting across the millennia. These paintings were created by modern humans it is taken to say; this is where we recognisably began. Except it seems to me that we are attempting to establish a meaningful link with the incidental trace of something far more important and intangible – an act of supplication through the resting of a hand on a rock wherein spirit animals were nurtured and lived. If we could only grow from this urge to connect without being distracted by a visual residue, fetishised into 'the art of our origins' – as if our sated selves could know anything about the necessity of laying our hands on a rock membrane to contact the world within. With claims come responsibility; if we could but touch things and leave no mark, if only we did not erase with our presence and our touch.

Interviewed in the film, Jean Clottes says that he has always thought that ‘homo sapiens’ is a terrible description of who and what we were and are, suggesting instead that the term ‘homo spiritualis’ would be more appropriate. He talks of the cosmos in which the people who created the art were living, introducing notions of fluidity and permeability; a fluidity between modes and forms of their imaginative being, and a permeability that saw no barriers between assuming such states, least of all a rock wall in a cave that notionally separated them from the animals within.

The experience of entrance and descent into the earth is commonly told, less so the return to earth. How would it feel, how would your mind be changed, what new knowledge would you walk across the crust of a land poised between other levels of a world in which you risked wrath or rejection? It is such a feeling that is missing from our unchecked usage – our management – of the earth and its animals today.

I’ll end with a line from a poem by Wendell Berry, called Openings, from 1968. Originally written in the context of the Vietnam war, it now stands as an important lament and a plea for our times. It reads simply: Dark with Power, we remain / the invaders of our land.

Lunch Hour (James Hill, 1961)

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2011)
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There’s a new girl in the art department of Amalgamated Wallpaper & Associates. She (she is not given a name) has attracted the immediate interest of the males in the company: one particularly oily individual says, ‘bit of new? Art school if you ask my opinion. Well they present no problems,’ to his smitten colleague, who is the other person (also without a name) with which this film, adapted by John Mortimer from his own play, is concerned.

The opening credits play over that immediate marker of distance: railway tracks, travelling one way then the other, mixed up and fractured in their editing, before we fetch up in a cheerless but respectable hotel room overlooking a station. The couple – the woman and the man already mentioned – are shown into the room. He is eager, she less so. ‘What is this place?’ she says, ‘It’s just a hotel,’ says he as a statement of trivial fact. ‘Hotel,’ she repeats, the word suddenly new and loaded with uncertain significance in her mind, its meaning open to question. ‘It’s convenient,’ says he, ‘what for?’ says she, with a curious questioning smile that we will see quite a lot of throughout the film.

They have come for a tryst, an illicit lunchtime liaison. He is out for a ‘long business lunch’ with the textile buyers; she is ‘having an open continental sandwich in the coffee bar’. With their previous attempts at finding a little loving space for themselves interrupted by gallery attendants, an usherette’s torch, chatty friends and a wintry park attendant spearing happiness like litter on the end of his spiked stick, they are a couple with nowhere to go, trapped by a crowded city, weather and the assumptions of conventional morality. More practically however, at this moment, they are trapped by their overcoats. Heavy, warm, practical things. ‘You look so big in that overcoat, like a house,’ she says. ‘’I'll take it off,’ says he, ‘not yet,’ she replies, which goes quite a long way to proving Philip Larkin’s contention about sexual intercourse not having yet begun. The setting is England in 1961, and sex seems to inhabit a different universe entirely – or France at least.

Indeed, at one point, when she is drinking milk from a bottle through a straw during a lunch hour, and the couple are looking out over London from a balcony, he says ‘it’s a big town, I mean it has 7 million inhabitants. Look at all those building projects, redevelopments ... there must be somewhere we can go.’  It's almost as if the film had received instructions on filming outdoors in a capital city from the French new wave, but they came over on the cross-channel ferry and customs and excise pored over them and stamped them with the words ‘permission must be sought for all filming,’ and ‘no local bylaws should be contravened in the filming of this entertainment,’ along with their standard rubber-stamped notice applying to the whole film that ‘no incitement to immorality should be condoned.’ That and the obligatory inclusion of a scene featuring ‘a nice cup of tea’.

She and He make an interesting, if mismatched couple. She is younger, fresh from Essex Technical College, and more inscrutable as to her motivation for going through with the affair. He is older, 37 (‘that’s not too bad,’ she says), and the way he wears his honest, desperate seriousness is painful to see, nudging at the tragic. He has the luckless, hangdog look of a man facing middle-age while living with his obviously dominant mother and her many labour-saving devices in the home. ‘Of course, in the daytime, I'm more my own master then,’ he says (a line which for me unfailingly calls to mind Kathy Kirby singing her Tarzan fantasy for the suburban male, Big Man, a couple of years hence. I can imagine the man’s mirthless laugh upon hearing its lyrics). This girl is his chance to escape drizzly loneliness. Hence the ridiculous subterfuge he has gone through to rent a ‘respectable’ hotel room for an hour one lunch time at the exorbitant price of 2 guineas, spinning the owner a tale about the Rotarians and needing a space for a good family chat with his wife, who happens to live in Scarborough, but is coming down for the day with their two young children in tow who are going to be left with their stern, matronly auntie while said chat takes place.

Sandra Leo, who plays the daughter after her apparent father’s story has come to life, has one of the best lines in the film. ‘We don't like auntie,’ announces her brother, ‘she sort of crackles while she walks,’ chimes in the girl. By now, the man is floundering into confusion in the hotel room. ‘She’s not real,’ he says; ‘She’s real to me,’ the woman replies. And there we have the nub of the film’s conceit. The poised ambiguity around the question comes from whether she truly believes what she is saying through some inner disturbance (“If anyone says ‘I want to talk to you’ I get this sick feeling”) or whether she is play-acting, going along with the hopeless charade all the better to show up the hypocrisy of the society’s morals.

Before this point, they go for lunch to celebrate her 24th birthday, where his musing on the menu ­– ‘to start with, prawn cocktail, or smoked salmon or pate maison ... followed by scampi ... duck a l’orange’ is cut short by the unimpressed waitress’s ‘Halibut’s off’ and banging down a bottle of OK sauce on the table. The woman insists it doesn't matter and praises his eyes, ‘they’re very honest,’ she says, ‘they look like they’d never tell a lie.’ ‘Well not unless it was absolutely necessary,’ he replies. And that may well be the set-up that leads to the absurdist denouement in a room in the Durbar ‘Private & Residential’ hotel with a picture frame without a picture, a horribly ornate chiming clock and a dog-eared train timetable on the mantelpiece, in which their argument about the non-existent kids and the Victorian relic of an auntie, and the reason for dragging her 203 miles down from Scarborough for a serious talk, comes to a head. ‘You should never have explained our presence,’ she says. Their overcoats stayed on. He resignedly picks up the temporary ring that she has left on the mantelpiece and turns off the gas fire (in which they have lost a shilling in the meter); she goes back to her painting of parrots on a branch and smiles enigmatically to herself.

It’s fascinating how Lunch Hour looks forward to the decade ahead. On her side is escape and possibility; she makes me think of Julie Christie’s character in Billy Liar, when she comes swinging into the picture, smoking a cigarette and hopscotching the paving slabs, looking like she inhabits another realm entirely, one of possibilities, opportunities and fresh starts. I think this is partly because there is something curious about Shirley Anne Field’s character and her performance, as if she is play-acting her own words – which, as it turns out, she might well be. All along, she doesn’t seem to be quite in the same physical space as her would-be beau, played by Robert Stephens (and this in a film that takes place largely in one room). It’s as if she is looking forward to the decade ahead as an outrider alert to hypocrisy, dishonesty and needless embarrassment. It seems to be a course she decides on from the time that Stephens’ character manufactures an excuse to walk past her in the art department early on in the film, and can do no more than make a sort of embarrassed gulping sound of approval as he looks at the work on her easel. On his side – and this came to me as the man goes around the London streets looking for a suitable place for their lunchtime rendezvous, checking the small ads in newsagents’ wall cabinets, investigating hotels with ‘Models Top Floor’ and ‘Lita - Trained Masseur, by Appointment’ signs outside – the seedy world of Arnold L. Miller and his exploitation documentaries such as 1964’s London in the Raw, loom darkly and shamefully ahead. No wonder he is so serious about this opportunity, if that is indeed what it is, or ever was.

Love (Károly Makk, 1971)

(revised for a MovieMail podcast in 2010. A poem about the same film, Notes on Love, appears in The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger, published by Smokestack Books in 2016)
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As you might expect from a film with such an artless title, Love tests expectations and definitions of the word, not least because the main characters are separated – János has been locked up as a political prisoner in early 1950s Hungary, while Luca is managing as best she can while also visiting Janos’s dying, bedridden mother. To ease his mother’s mind, Luca writes her letters, ostensibly from János in America, where she has invented for him a madly successful life as a film director. Her letters – touching in their transposition of local detail, fantastical in their imaginings, poignant in her need that fills the spaces between the lines – are read through the prism of his mother’s need to sustain her final days through belief in his success.

Appropriately for a film that use objects and associations in a web of visual poetry, threaded through reminiscence, memory and a present darkened by the wearying effort of holding the fear of loss at bay, I was reminded of the film and rewatched it after reading a poem from 1961, also called Love, and written by the Serbian poet Ivan Lalić. Its quiet celebration of physical proximity and the tenderness of ageing together is utterly different to that of the film and yet, through its enquiry into the intersection of time and love, it stands as a promise of unrealised possibilities, of an intimacy that has been deprived from János and Luca, or anyone else who has been needlessly and forcefully separated at the whim of political expedience. Here is part of it:

For years I have been learning your features, where the days
Impress their tiny fires; for years I have memorised
Their shimmering uniqueness, and the latticed lightness
Of your movements behind the transparent draperies
Of the afternoon; and so I no longer recognise you
Outside the memory which surrenders you to me,
And every day I find it harder to tame the current of time
Which does not flow through you, through the gentle metal
Of your blood;
            if you change, I change equally,
And with us that world built around an instant
Like fruit around a kernel, woven of unreal flesh
With the taste of lightning, the taste of dust, the taste of years,
The taste of snow melting on the flame of your skin.

The film Love is built around a kernel of absence. As such, it is unsurprising that it concentrates on the objects and textures of lives inhabiting the everyday space of that absence, the grain of waiting that fills the silence between the chimes of the clock in János’s mother’s room.

From the pane of glass that trembles ever so slightly after the opening credits, breaking their spell and leading us into the film, as János’s mother looks out of the window, framed by the reflection of bare, dark winter trees, Love is a film filled with screens and lenses, transparent images of separation and distortion – spectacles, a magnifying glass, window glass, mirrors. In fact, this theme of separation is signalled even before the credits as, to a dark subterranean pulsing, photographs of stamps on a letter, then János and Luca are flashed up, separated in the film itself by black frames.

I don’t think there is an extraneous image in this film. Even the brief linking shots, of leaves in a dark puddle, of Luca walking alone down a cobbled street or sitting in a tram waiting for it to leave, reinforce an feeling of a relationship abraded by arbitrary injustice.

The camera tracks across surfaces: a cracked pavement wet with rain, a metal boot scraper, more rain collecting in the pitted treads of steps, the peeling varnish on fence posts creating its own patterns to spite the smooth surface that was once laid down. And meanwhile, Luca and János’s mother play out their relationship with the coaxing out of familiar stories and the exasperation with helplessness, their teasing dialogue capturing the mixture of affection and resentment that typifies such situations. Janos’s mother is often shown with her hand outside the sheets, needing touch but resentful too that it can’t be her son who touches her: ‘When I die, only my son will touch my hand … if my son can’t hold my hand then I want to be alone.’ Scenes of contact are used sparingly and are all the more tender because of it. When Luca washes her mother-in-law’s hand, sponging it, holding it, towelling it dry, she prolongs the touch beyond the perfunctory needs. It is a brief but central moment to the film. It is a touch that neither prefers but because of the absence of János – one’s husband, the other’s son – it is all they have. There are a number of types of love in this film. This is one composed of fortitude and forbearance, restraint and fear, nobility in the face of injustice; the belief that you may meet again, the acceptance that you may not.

In the space of a few frames, days leak from one to another, as days do during a time of dying. A few steps walked on a street, a bunch of flowers placed into a vase an emptied glass phial and cotton wool on a table carry us through hours and days, as does the brief light from an opened door that falls across the old woman’s bed. The hand and arm that Luca holds is faintly speckled, like the skin of the halved lemon on the saucer near the bedside, on which a light is turned on and off.

The grille on János’s cell door is like the grille of a stove. Inside, he is given a shave, his eyes trying to probe from the barber what this unexpected care might mean. He is without expectation. Even when he is walked along the chain-link passageways and then through a door, his eyes are downcast; anything that wishes for his attention will claim it from him soon enough. After the return of his possessions, an inspection and signing out in the bleaching light of a doctor’s room, the contrast harsh on Janos’s face, he sets out to return to what was once his home. Sudden release does not mean shocked happiness or pleasure, he is too numbed and too fearful for such emotions yet, too fearful that his ground is still uncertain – as when he nearly bumps into soldiers when boarding a tram – and can yet be taken away from him. His taxi driver recognises his look immediately. Political? he asks. Yes, responds János.

At one point, as we watch him through the glass of a window, he buys a newspaper. In a film in which his wife and mother have established a relationship through letters, in which what is said and what is not said dance through their words, nodding at mischievous duplicity and desperate need as they do so, it seems appropriate, and if he but knew it, portentous, that the print has leached through the thin paper, blurring what can be read. How to begin to make sense of his new situation? He makes it home, a sprig of forsythia in his hand, blossom on the trees after a cold, wet spring, but there is no-one behind the net curtain covering the glass of the door of the apartment. The concierge lets him in when he returns. He waits, glances into a mirror that faces him down, leading him to drop his head in shame at the blank weariness he sees in his own eyes. He glances at the door, listens to the glass bowl squeal of a tram taking the bend, peers out of the window beneath the blind, waits, sees his mother’s spectacles in a box of her odds and ends.

Later, after an age of waiting, János and Luca are in the same room.

- Can you get used to me again? asks János.
- I love you, Luca replies.
- I’ve grown old, says János.
Luca washes his body.
- Will you sleep with me tonight? asks János.
- Yes
- Will you stay with me all night?
- Yes. Every night, as long as I live, replies Luca.

The place where we leave them, a place of tender sadness, forgiveness and a proximity that can finally allow the comfort of weariness, a place where there need be no barriers for nothing can be hidden, calls to mind the words from another Lalić poem, Four Psalms, in which he writes:

I’ll make you a land where words turn of their own accord
into birds, taking on lives of their own
That last as long as they have meaning

A land which won’t go away if you close your eyes,
Like a strip of light under someone else’s door
Extinguished by a stranger’s indifferent act

Love can be many things. At this moment in the film it is the gift of a starting point in the middle of a life.

Vapor Trail (Clark) (John Gianvito, 2010)

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2010 after viewing the film and interviewing its director at DocLisboa, the Lisbon Documentary Film Festival, in 2010)
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An extensive documentary about toxic contamination from a decommissioned US airbase in The Philippines, John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) also serves as an extended meditation on colonial occupation, national identity and the erasure of historical memory. One of the presiding spirits of the film is the historian and activist Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States. With Zinn, Gianvito came up with three premises on history that open the film, the first being:

‘All history is selection, and emphasis; neutral neither in origin or effect.’

Vapor Trail (Clark) presents a filmic archaeology of waste. The waste is quite literal; it’s the toxic junk and the heavy metals that remain in the soil of Clark airbase in Pampanga Province in The Philippines. Its effects are still being felt, tragically and lethally, by the many innocent victims who were unwittingly exposed to it after being resettled on the base temporarily after the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, and by those who continue to be exposed to the pollution that has seeped into the groundwater and found new ‘pathways of exposure’ through local rivers to the nearby town of Madapdap. On one level, this is a film about this waste, the lives of the people it continues to effect, and those local people and organisations who are pressing for someone to take responsibility for a clean-up operation. In making the film however, Gianvito found that to get to the root of why this waste was there in the first place and why nothing was being done about it now, he had to go back over a century to a now mostly forgotten war, the American-Philippine war of 1899-1902.

It started out as another film entirely, as part of a debate on the effective uses of sound and image in political documentaries. This issue of ongoing toxic contamination from US military bases was one that Gianvito had read about some time before and remembered, and he planned that it would form one of the filmed sequences to be debated. However, when he went to The Philippines and started filming there, the responsibility he felt to address the problems he was hearing about in people’s testimonies became overwhelming. ‘How can this filmmaker help us?’ was, he felt, the continual appeal directed his way, and to which he responded, changing his film in the face of the injustice he encountered in people’s stories. Being in the position to actually do something about it and bring the issue to wider attention, he accepted responsibility.

Ah yes – responsibility; the word itself runs like a toxic term through the film. The situation lying behind the noxious waste is this: as part of an exit strategy from their decommissioned military bases, the US offered – and the Philippine government signed – an agreement that meant the US could not be held responsible for any problems arising from their use; however, the mess on the bases not being theirs, the Philippine government does not think that the clean-up is their responsibility (even though they signed the contract), and have said that ‘they will not pay a single centavo’ towards addressing the problems caused by contamination. The likelihood of the US shifting their stance is nil – if they clean up one base what about all their other bases across the globe? Unfortunately, waste, whether old and unexploded ordinance, medical waste or harmful chemicals that have seeped into the soil, is inconvenient, not knowing that it has been decommissioned and is meant to be out of action. The people caught in the middle, the ones with the leukaemia, diarrhoea, nosebleeds, lead and arsenic poisoning, the ones who suffer fevers, nausea and persistent headaches, miscarriages, the ones who were born prematurely, or with defects, or who died with their bones still soft, are the innocent. ‘My eye wants to close and doesn’t want to open,’ says one woman, left with a persistent sickness since her stay in CABCOM, the central section of Clark Air Base from where the problems stem. It is a statement that could just as well apply to the US and Philippine governments.

Gianvito and Zinn again: ‘All history is the history of what is remembered, and what is remembered by those with the power to inscribe that memory – and thus open to question.’

A little way through Vapor Trail (Clark) we are shown a brief CNN news report on the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the event that precipitated the ongoing situation. The report is slick, the presenter assuming his concerned voice as he presents a glib synopsis. Its effect, coming as it does in the middle of this committed and compassionate investigative film of interviews and testimony is loathsome, a presentation of one aspect of the human theatre in reprehensible slo-mo. The non-stick commentary and presentation contrast tellingly with Gianvito’s work, which is a film of necessary leakages between subjects and eras, unfinished business, sticky mess and waste, of uncleaned-up experiences told at length and in a person's own words instead of paraphrased into acceptability of length and phrase.

Throughout the film, Gianvito asks interviewees if they have heard of the American-Philippine War (he admits that he himself didn’t know of the war until he read A People’s History of the United States); of those that have, he asks if they know any details. No-one does. ‘I know there was a war,’ says one child, ‘but at school they didn’t teach us specifics’. In a park containing the statue of the Filipino nationalist, radical and revolutionary Andrés Bonifacio, founder of the Katipunan movement that sought independence from Spanish colonial rule, Gianvito asks people nearby if they know who he is. One offers the suggestion that he is a guardian of the park. Bonifacio's statue holds a raised, and now broken, scimitar in his hand.

This loss of apparent relevance for significant events in a country’s past, and over such a short space of time, is troubling. For in the end this film is is about how something as intangible as the loss of historical memory, and the loss of an awareness of how a national identity has come about, can lead to very tangible effects in the form of deaths from polluted land. This is one of Gianvito’s points, for if a citizen was aware that their present country was founded on an act of betrayal and broken promises by America, in which they initially said that they would support Philippine insurgents against their then Spanish colonisers, but instead ended up ‘buying’ the Philippines from Spain for 20 million dollars in 1898 and excluding the insurgents from the negotiations, and that an American General – General Shafter – declared in 1899 that ‘the war is over, no matter what 10 million niggers think about it,’ then maybe that citizen would be more wary about the same country’s intentions in the future. If they were a government official, they might even be a bit more savvy about signing contracts regarding responsibilities for ongoing pollution from military bases.

Vapor Trail (Clark) is a long film, 4 ½ hours, and that’s just the first part. The second, Wake (Subic) is being edited together at the moment from the 90 hours of material Gianvito shot across his three summers in The Philippines on non-renewed visas so as not to attract too much attention to what he was doing. Gianvito is aware of the problems of that such length imposes, but is unrepentant. ‘It demands a lot from you, but I could argue that it should demand even more,’ he said before the screening. ‘It’s asking you to watch a movie – in the bigger scheme of things, what’s that?’

However, the film’s strength lies precisely in its uncompromising approach. It isn’t going away any time soon – and nor is the problem. In fact, with US bases worldwide currently numbering over 700, and, quote, ‘non-traditional security concerns’ apparently justifying their continued presence, it is a problem that is going to be with us for some time to come.

Campaigning documentaries in our time tend to founder in a film wasteland with their neat borders tended by the already converted unless they demand something of you and cross boundaries. This is wholly part of Gianvito’s exercise – to make links and aid practical assistance: a handout at the screening gives the name and address of the Alliance for U.S. Bases Clean-up, Philippines. After such a powerful experience in the film, the responsibility for action is transferred to the audience.


‘The soul of history is economic.’

President McKinley referred to the newly purchased Philippines as ‘a gift from the gods’. In the film we see the same words painted on the front of a lorry parked outside of a backyard waste-sorting enterprise, complete with a large unexploded bomb, near to the fence of Clark military base. Other sorters are at work through the film, men digging down into foul-smelling, foetid earth of decades-old toxic landfill on the ex-Clark Base in the hope of scraps to sell. These are men digging their own graves.

Vapor Trail (Clark) is a thoroughly inconvenient film for all sorts of reasons – not least because Clark Base is now Clark Freeport Zone, a rapidly expanding and economically important commercial centre for The Philippines that certainly doesn’t want to hear tales of ongoing contamination from its land, situated (as its website blurb has it) at the heart of growing markets in the Asia-Pacific region. The ‘toxics’ have been fenced off according to the spokesman for the Clark Development Corporation. What more can they do? But, as one nearby resident says, ‘the juices of the garbage are creeping to Madapdap,’ where drinking water from a pump turns milky yellow overnight when left in a plastic bottle, and if that wasn't enough, also incubates a couple of orange oily lumps for good measure. The flow of rivers runs through the film, but by the end of the 4 1/2 hours, the opening images of flowing water at dawn have assumed a terrible retrospective portent.

I am reminded of Heavy Water, Phil Grabsky and David Bickerstaff’s 2007 film about Chernobyl, which allies poet Mario Petrucci’s words about the disaster and its aftermath to images from the exclusion zone: This side of the fence is clean, that side is dirty. Understand? / You must forget that soil is like skin. In their film they show a farm in the Chernobyl area. A flycatcher rests on a corrugated iron fence, respecting no such niceties of differentiation, as a cat peers over, readying to leap.

Along with Howard Zinn, the other person whose influence is felt throughout the film is Mark Twain, or rather his lesser-known side; the one whose caustic tract against imperialism in general and the American prosecution of The Philippine War in particular, entitled To the Person Sitting in Darkness and written in 1901 for the Anti-Imperialist League of New York, Gianvito quotes from in the film. ‘There must be two Americas,’ Twain says, ‘one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.’ At the end Twain, presciently, proposes a new flag for The Philippine Province, ‘It is easily managed,’ he says ‘... we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.’

Some images from the film: a Sodium Hydrosulfite barrel used as a planter in a street front yard; a billboard with the words Don’t Give Up – Pray, It Works, another, for a washing powder, saying Tide With Sun Power Washes Clean, and lastly, at the end of this first film, children flying black kites over a black river in Madapdap.

Vapor Trail (Clark) makes the point (and this is still current practice today when a state wants to discredit an enemy) that during the American-Philippine War, America downgraded the terminology by which it referred to Filipino fighters for independence from revolutionaries, to insurgents, and finally to bandits and brigands. ‘What do you think of yourself as?’ I asked Gianvito. ‘A troublemaker,’ he replied, and later (only half joking), ‘enemy combatant,’ though adding that ‘ultimately labels are good for washing instructions but not as useful for people’.

Diamonds of the Night (Jan Nemec, 1964)

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2010)
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Applauding themselves for their day’s work, a group of rheumy, toothless old men suck at their bread and sausage, gum the tearings from a cooked chicken into submission, and wash their food down with beer and song, while to the sound of a tinny piano in an echoing hall, a man calls up the shade of an imaginary partner for a hobbled dance. He finishes his halting twirls and the other men applaud, while the starving boys they have captured are set free to walk the path away from their guns. Fire the men are commanded, and perhaps they don’t, sending the boys off into the darkness of the woods once more to the sound of their mocking laughter and song.

Diamonds of the Night begins with two boys jumping from the train that is transporting them to a wartime concentration camp. It is a film that takes place in the time between. Between the squeal of brakes on iron rails and the silence that follows the command to fire, between the shouted command to halt and the dull sound of rifle shots thudding the earth. It is a film that takes place in the the distance between the shot and its intended target. The two boys carry their deaths inside of them, but just for now, they are alive, their bodies steaming in the cold air, their chests tight with running, hearing but beyond reacting to the puff of the engine pulling away, leaving them to their fate.

To be in dark spruce woods is to hide without hope of refuge. There is neither home nor comfort to be found on its ground, littered with the branches of uprooted trees. Its earth is thin and fungal, hollow-sounding beneath its browned needles. It is impossible to be quiet in such woods with its rifle snap of twigs and underfoot crunch of debris. Its spikes and broken branch shards threaten to take out an eye, jab at a soft cheek. Its light is old, grey-green and stagnant. It is woodland that must be passed through and endured; this is why we follow the boys from behind as they walk into the darkness that we share.

Their trudge through woodland calls up other journeys. Sunlight through treetops is the light that floods through a tram as it travels across an occupied city; the light that fills the back streets walked through to a rendezvous or uncertain promise. It is while lying in the snagging, prickly brush that footsteps and voices echo off the walls from the cobbled streets. Flaking signs and glimpses of physical intimacy invade the mind – bedclothes airing through a window, a woman leaning out of a window, waiting, while another squats in the shadows. There is a girl in sunlight and a white dog running past passageways, while inside a doorway a woman is stuck in the act of pulling a dress over her head, a broken automaton, or a sea anemone writhed by underwater currents.

Church bells toll the boys’ walk, as does the cuckoo’s broken honk of late spring. The suck and squelch of marshy ground softens the skin that rubs against too-tight leather boots, hardening into the shape of another owner’s feet. A desperate laugh born of this pain sends trees crashing down like hopes of an end to the boys’ journey.

There are few words here, and those that are spoken are necessary. As the boys cross steep rocky scree, deep hunger gnaws. The boy with the boots is hobbling badly now, the boy without trails behind and lies down. He says three phrases: sit down next to me, go by yourself, wait for me, words that shift his thoughts through wilfulness, independence, bloody-mindedness, hate, fear, need and companionship in less than a minute – the time it takes for ants to cover his hands and an eye.

A crust of bread is a rind of plough-turned earth, the hair of a boy’s head as he waits for this bread is woodland moss running with water. He unties the bloodied rags from his heel. Diamonds of the Night takes place between the bark of a guard dog and the opening of a stranger’s door, between the deal made to exchange boots for a half-eaten root vegetable, between the bread that bloodies the gums and the inedible woody clutter of a mouthful of pine cone, between the walk that begins again and the memory of grasped pine branches and heather in sandy earth, as a train wails into the distance.