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.

Marketa Lazarová (Frantisek Vlacil, 1967)

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2010)
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Although the story of Vlacil’s film about clan rivalry in the middle ages is essentially straightforward, its whys and wherefores on a first viewing are occasionally opaque. Surprisingly, this matters little as the film’s realisation of a medieval world, shot through with mysticism, folk beliefs, and an interpenetrating paganism and christianity is so convincing that the disorientation helps to draw us into the film. It is as if we had been dropped bodily in a world we only dimly apprehend, but which is alive with portent and ancient significance. We are like the child shown gnawing on a joint of meat by the fire as the adults talk of important matters with an unknown guest. We hear and recognise the names in their talking, their voices increasingly rough with drink, and we will follow their will. What follows are notes made after a first viewing which, I hope, give a taste of the world in which the viewer is immersed and which also try to preserve that delicious state of partial comprehension that is so thoroughly involving.

The lamb of god wandered through the mud of the early spring thaw and into an encampment, where it was slaughtered and eaten; eaten even by its own shepherd while he was drunk. Bereft, he then stumbled to the hills where he followed the bleats of an escaping thief. Later he took to the tracks once again and a goat served for his needs.

This is a thoroughly elemental film, a film of wind and flame, of marshes and mud. The winter is long here. We are so long with the snow that when an hour in, Lazar announces that the thaw is coming and water drips from the melt on the rooves, we are also expectant for the tentative warmth of spring. Instead we see the cold glister of chain mail on a man’s back as he rides home. At dusk, horses’ silhouettes skitter across the thawing ground which has the sheen of mercury, a slippery bed for the rough violation of a stolen girl. Wet, claggy snow clings on cart wheels. Pied carriage dogs hold their ears alert.

Marketa’s sleeves extend to the base of her fingers, a comfort nearly as soft as the down of the dove she pulls from her breast, its feathers loosed to the wind; an offering for the devout. Alexandra offers a blood sacrifice and a necklace of beads and feathers to the skulls on the fetish tree, kisses her brother’s left arm. The seeds of the wild grasses ripen in the sunlight. A serpent watches.

The creaking of ice, the wind through stone passageways and windows, the muted hammering on an anvil, the clank of implements hanging from carts, the splitting of carcasses and the beating of hides, the thunk of stone on a head, a chain against a breast-plate, the clash of swords, bells on a sled, the splash through water and the rolling of wheels, the burning of wood, the howl of wolves. These are some of the sounds behind Zdeněk Liška’s film music.

Clear air after snow, horses and their muck, burning brands, coltsfoot and butterburr, leather and hide, warmed skin, charred meat, pine woods, a bed of leaves, marsh mud, burning tallow tapers, burning logs, stale sweat, fear, blood. These are some of the film’s smells.

Characters call out to each other and catch sight of one another across time and space. Premonitions and memories fly, land and flash into vision, as if the falcons tethered to branches had been loosed. Men and women are assailed by visions, and omens have as much bodily presence as any reality. Black beasts and deer approach. Kozlik’s antlers are bigger than branches. Man is transient as a shadow.

The air is thick with voices, arrowed from the darkness of a wood at dusk. The trees talk. Later, limbs are but logs among the twisted branches and the leaf mould. Voices are ever on the air, echoing through Straba’s delirium around the walls of Rohacek, along with cries, whip cracks and the faintest of knocks on a thick wooden door. A sister offers the warmth of fur, a brother feels the rough, thick knots of a cord garment across his shoulders.

There is much hiding here, behind scrub and lacerating thorn-thicket. A white mare struggles to escape from the marsh, leaps through the water, but cannot pull herself out from the suck of the mud, watches us, then grazes on the marsh grass as we look back over our shoulders. We are caught, like the wood mice that snuffle between apparently sleeping fingers.

On a blasted bone-strewn heath, love and certainty fought with cruelty and doubt for the issue of the children’s souls. As ever was.

May your house be filled with health and happiness. May your oxen thrive.

Sundays and Cybèle (Serge Bourguignon, 1962)

(written for a MovieMail podcast in 2010)
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Sundays and Cybèle (Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray) is a profoundly elemental film. Water, fire, trees, even glints of light are shown to be of essential significance to the story. They are filmed not as mere background to the human interest of the relationship between a pilot (Hardy Kruger), traumatised by the killing of a child in a colonial war and the young orphaned girl (the 12 year-old Patricia Gozzi) whom he meets as he waits to recollect both memory and the scattered parts of his self, but as central elements of their time together.

Beginning with a clash of cymbals that we later learn is taken from a Tibetan ceremony that signifies the encircling of the universe, we see Pierre, a fighter pilot, through a screen of flashback, in a raid over an Asian village. As he flies, water appears to sparkle in the sun in the fields below him. We then see that these glints of light are reflected from his own cockpit. He flies in close and fires at the village. His bullets pummel the quicksilver land which accepts the seeds of his future harvest. As he flies in closer still, a child’s terrified eyes are imprinted in his mind, he rips away his oxygen mask and floats free into stilled silence.

when I was glass
the land below me was glass
that would shatter at my touch
but at my approach it was water
and then earth I was seeding
and my body was this earth
rent by my fire
and a child took my eyes
and filled me with her fear

The surge of a train recalls Pierre to his surroundings, the railway station of Ville d’Avray. Now a bewildered man-child living with Madeleine, the woman who nursed him, he rises from his bench to regard the passengers that go past, looking for some kind of contact or recognition. A man and a chld arrive in his orbit and he is asked for directions to a convent which he cannot give. He catches eyes with the child and, distressed by her crying, follows them outside, where he attempts to console her by offering a handful of shining stones which he shows her by the light of a match. ‘Take one’, he says, ‘it’s the piece of a star.’ Her father will not allow it. ‘But it was just for fun’, says Pierre. ‘It’s water, only water’, and points of light, the first of those that gleam and sparkle throughout the film, twinkle in his and the girl’s eyes. As they head to the convent through the inky night, the whites of their faces, and the car lights that pass seem like planets in a dark night sky. A little while later, when, through chance and happenstance, Pierre has come to be taken for her father, and he and the girl, Françoise, are shown together, in silhouette in the dark of his room, the light from the landing catches the few reflective surfaces around them, and, for a while, it seems that they have formed their own universe.

They make their home in water, in the ripples of a lake that are set in motion when they dislodge a stone as he spins her around in play. As they look into the water, the trunks  and branches of trees loom large above their reflections, protective but dominant, knowing all already. ‘We’ve entered the circle’, says Françoise, and we see their reflections walk among trees in the water. Pierre’s vertigo, his fear of falling into water, is replaced by a fear of falling into the present.

with nothing to offer but stones
I offered stones, in lamplight
spilled across a cobbled road
a child appeared, and made
a home for me in water
that rippled our reflections
wavered the winter trees
and these I hung with flames


These ripples circle out into the rest of the film, into the coffee bowl that Pierre holds when he visits his friend Carlos, to help him construct a circular cage for his birds, into the music of the Tibetan ceremony that they listen to, into the windows of the derelict temple on the hilltop that Françoise first sees while looking through the facets of one of Pierre’s stones, into the finger bowl into which Pierre drops a stone at a wedding lunch when he cannot be with Françoise, into the dampened glass rims on which fingers circle their notes, into the broken rim of a champagne glass that cuts Pierre at his private Christmas celebration with Françoise at the derelict temple.

During one of their Sundays, Pierre carries Françoise through the trees around the lake. She stretches out across his arms as if she is floating upside-down and dreams of a Christmas together, a fir tree hung with stars and garlands, and glistening champagne, this image resonating with Madeleine’s eyes as Pierre tries to tell her, but cannot, why he is happier these days. The curious mixture of healing with subterfuge and misunderstood intentions, the adult conversations and emotions between children, one of whom is an adult, is too difficult to broach. Then winter comes and the lake is iced over. Their stone skitters across the surface, and they must break the ice with a foot for their weekly homecoming ceremony.

As part of his Christmas gift, Pierre hangs the boughs of trees around the ruined building  with candles liberated from the church, and which shine like picture-book stars in their own sky. As her gift of thanks and love to Pierre, Françoise gives him the one thing that matters more to her than anything – her real name, the ancient one the nuns have tried to erase, which she writes on a piece of paper that she tucks into a matchbox and hangs on a tree. Her name is Cybèle, the earth mother, goddess of trees and the earth, of fertility and nature, of regeneration.

Meanwhile, the film has been heading ineluctably towards the tragedy borne of misunderstanding that has been intimated all along, the payment perhaps for Pierre’s actions against the earth that began the film, but which is worked through people’s habitual suspicions about the couple.

Best to leave instead with two of the many beautiful images from the film that come to my mind. The first is of the headscarfed Madeleine, secretly watching Pierre and Francoise in the trees by the lakeside to assuage her fears. As she sees them playing, listening to trees, her face relaxes into a smile tinged with melancholy as she turns and walks away.

Secondly, I think of the smiling, earnest face of Cybèle, eyes sparkling with promise in the light of a fire, as she tells Pierre that when she drinks her Christmas champagne she will make a wish, a wish that they will go to the seaside. She has never been, but she has read that there you can see fish that have wings, and which can fly.

when the water froze
glints of ice lodged in men’s eyes
let us go to the sea, the child said
I have heard there are fish that fly
this I can give you

Unearthly Stranger (John Krish, 1963)

(written in 2009 and previously unpublished)
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To the sound of a pulsing alien hum that intensifies into an ear-splitting squeal, a forlorn and desperate Dr Mark Davidson runs through the inkily damp, lamplit London streets to his office at the Royal Institue for Space Research, where he charges up the spiral staircase, parks himself in front of a Grundig reel-to-reel, waits for Edward Williams’ music to stop, and then begins to speak his final words into the microphone: ‘John, in a little while I expect to die ... to be killed, by something you and I know is here, visible, yet moving unseen, amongst (here fixing the viewer with a significant raise of his eyebrows) us all, each moment of the day and night. There were times when you thought I was insane, but listen to this tape I beg you, so you know what it is you have to fight. Or is it too late? Even if I had known what I know now, could I, or anyone, have held back … the terror?’

So begins Unearthly Stranger, John Krish’s treatment of the ‘they are here with us already’ fiction. In truth, its dramatic start is a little at odds with the fairly low-key approach of the rest of the film, nearly all of which takes place in an office suite, a cottage and a car in a lane, and whose best bits are in the details rather than the overall conception. (Its opening is nothing next to the ludicrously inaccurate text used for the posters; anyone enticed into the cinema with the words ‘Terrifying … Weird … Macabre, Strange things walk among the living to quench their vile desires’ would have nursed a justifiable grievance on their exit). In terms of the plot, the real beginning comes with Professor Munroe (a Scottish Warren Mitchell) announcing to Miss Ballard that he has solved the first part of a formula and that she should immediately telephone his colleague with the news. Well, Jean Marsh’s face full of foreboding is unlikely to be a wasted on the minor role of a secretary without an ulterior motive. Very soon afterwards, the alien shrieking (seemingly made up of strings, squealing train wheels and ghostly cries punctuated by the occasional whiplash twanging of overhead train lines) fills the air, the camera tilts, there is the sound of an explosion and Professor Munroe, brain ‘blown out of existence’, is no more.

Called back from Switzerland, with his mysterious new wife in tow, Dr Davidson takes over Munroe’s job at the experimental research unit. An intense, pursed-lipped boffin, with little more than a slide-rule to help him solve the unit’s pet theories of harnessing the power of concentration to enable minds to travel across time and space, he is also – surprisingly for one engaged in such research – unerringly and irritatingly dim to the conclusions that certain facts, such as his unblinking wife not having a pulse, might awaken in others. In fact, characterisation in the film is inconsistent throughout, with knowledge and scepticism regarding who knows and suspects what passed around like a game of pass the parcel. ‘You will find there must be some logical explanation,’ says the momentarily sniffy Professor Lancaster of Munroe’s mysterious death, moments before outlining his Department X theories of mind-space travel using ‘a hitherto unknown force that lodges in the back of all our minds – the force we call TP91’. Not being mentioned again, this mysterious force remains unknown for the remainder of the film too.

As security chap Major Clarke, Patrick Newell brings his enjoyable Dr Watson-ish persona to the mix, switching between sweetie-sucking Bunterish bonhomie and sly scepticism, occasionally even turning on an assassin’s grin. He unwittingly hits the nail on the head to Davidson when he asks him about his new wife: ‘She’s a alien isn’t she?’, ‘She was born in Switzerland,’ flat-bats Davidson in reply. When the Major visits said wife Julie in her home, his enigmatic, man-in-the-moon face seems to imply that he could well be an unearthly stranger himself, though this tricksy notion is soon quashed when he, and Davidson’s precious documents in his hand, are zapped by an attack of the alien squeals.

The film makes good use of simple effects, such as picturing Davidson against a blind which makes shifting binary pattern criss-crosses with the lined opaque glass behind it, or the tear tracks that scald Julie’s cheeks after she has made a baby cry and repelled a playground full of children by simply staring at them over the fence (her particular ‘vile desire’ being to fall in love with the human being she is meant to kill). Notable too is the film’s dramatic music from composer Edward Williams (who would go on score David Attenborough’s Life on Earth), especially the moment when his romantic ‘new wife waiting at home’ theme curdles into something more sinister as Davidson enters the house to find Julie cataleptic on the bed.

Unearthly Stranger makes a few pointed barbs along the way about integration of foreigners into a society, not least when Davidson notes that the programme director’s wife wouldn’t need to undergo the same level of scrutiny as his, being from ‘a nice respectable English family’. Such lines add another dimension to the film that perhaps grew out of Krish’s own experience as the son of a refugee and who had also, in 1960, made the film Return to Life for the Foreign Office to celebrate World Refugee Year. This context makes Miss Ballard’s final lines linger in the mind. ‘You talk a lot about love,’ she says to Davidson, ‘love of freedom for example, but do you have it? Do you really have it? It’s an illusion, and we have learned to live without illusions.’

Lancaster and Davidson’s answer is a clumsy attack that sends her through the window, ignoring her warning that there are already too many of them to combat – something they soon realise the truth of as they lean over her empty coat and find themselves staring up at the encircling faces of ordinary women, who before that moment they would have passed in the street without a second glance.

No Blade of Grass (Cornel Wilde, 1970)

(written in 2009 and published in 2012 in Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems)
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As the opening credits roll over bleached, cracked earth, an apocalyptic orange sun and sketches of fleeing figures that recall prehistoric rock-paintings (albeit with a gun), to the tune of a doleful guitar, Roger Whittaker sings words that – if you weren’t already aware of John Christopher’s flintily unsentimental 1957 source novel – give a fair idea that things are going to end badly, for everyone: No blade of grass grows and birds sing no more / No joy or laughter where waves washed the shore / Gone all the answers, lost all we have won / Gone is the hope that life will go on.

’By the beginning of the seventies,’ says director Cornel Wilde, also on narrator duty, in words that chime closely with the sharpened concerns our own age, ’man had brought the destruction of his environment close to the point of no return. Of course there was a great deal of rhetoric about saving the earth, but in reality, very little was done.’ To press home the point, stock footage of car dumps, belching chimneys, sulphurous skies, exhaust fumes, clogged roads, and brown smog blanketing a city lead us into the film, and then – to press home the point a little harder – there’s more footage of smoke-belching chimneys, sewage-spouting pipes, poisonous river spume, open-cast mining, oil spills and dead fish. And then a nuclear explosion to cap it all off. No blade of grass here and no blue above / No you and me, it’s the end of love, sings Roger.

‘And then, one day, the polluted earth could take no more,’ says Wilde, as the blue planet seen from space is smeared with orange clouds. Welcome to Earth, circa 1970, where London is no longer any place to be, a fact to which architect John Custance is alerted by a middle of the night phone call from her daughter’s boyfriend Roger, telling him that, as they have been expecting for some while, the situation has suddenly turned critical and the government is sealing off the cities. As they grab their suitcases and ready themselves for a hasty exit, the film winds back a year to the news breaking on television of a desperate famine in China and south-east Asia caused by an epidemic of grass disease, derived, according to the ‘emergency committee of world ecology’, from cumulative residues of pollutants and pesticides in both soil and atmosphere. As joints of ham are carved on a buffet table and diners feed their faces, images of famine appear on the screen. More worrying reports then come through, of cannibalism and, in China, nerve-gas bombings of major population areas. Well at least that couldn’t happen here. Could it?

With the themes of eco-disaster and over-consumption now well and truly established, the film then – barring a few intermittent fill frames of more dead fish – drops them for a by-the-numbers treatment of the well-worn theme of a band of disparate survivors travelling through a decimated, dangerous country of unofficial checkpoints and intermittent crackly wireless news, mixing action scenes with disconsolate wandering across bare moors as the party head to the safe haven of Blind Gill, a Yorkshire farm owned by John’s brother. Nigel Davenport plays the eyepatch-sporting leader of the group, the archetypal decent man forced to adjust his behaviour to the needs of the time, while Jean Wallace, as the director’s wife, takes the role of Mrs Custance. Their party is boosted by Pirrie, handy with a rifle, and his pouty, petulant wife (a black-haired and well-upholstered Wendy Richard), who has an eye for anything in trousers. Her attempted seduction of Custance leads Pirrie to debate throwing her out of the group. ’She's got a survival kit between her legs,’ he says, but then he shoots her anyway so she doesn’t get the chance to use it.

Although Wilde attempts to jazz up proceedings with flash-forwards that signal (in tinted blinking red) the dangers they will face along the way, including a rape and an attack by horned-helmeted bikers, the leaden script, which veers between shock one-liners and flaccid sentimentality (‘a year ago I wouldn’t have believed it could happen to us’), means the film loses its way on the journey. At one point, Burnell Whibley’s music signals, somewhat unexpectedly, that we are in a western, following a group of pioneers on the trail, but by the time we get to watching a biker’s nightmare as a motorbike hits a rock and explodes in slow-motion, the plot, and any focus on ecological issues, has long taken a back seat to set-pieces and not-so-fancy effects. It doesn’t help that some time before a coup has been announced on the car radio by a spokesperson who seems to be none other than Peter Sellers in the guise of Fred Kite: ’This is the, er, citizen’s emergency committee in London,’ he says, ‘we've taken charge of the BBC’. Let’s just say that the film’s ambition outstrips the talent and judgement available for its realisation.

It does capture some of the matter-of-fact, casual brutality of Christopher’s novel in which killing has become a necessary part of survival, and a scene that plays out in negative in which men seem to kill a squealing dog for food with rocks and a spade is genuinely unsettling. (’No living creature was killed or mistreated in the making of this film’, assures a disclaimer.) In the end though it can’t justify its grandiloquent final claim that ’this motion picture is not a documentary ... but it could be’.

As evidenced by Penguin's 2009 ‘Modern Classics’ edition of the original novel, with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane (who notes that Wilde’s film is so ’arrestingly bad that Christopher himself has never been able to watch more than a few minutes of it’), the story itself still carries a powerful charge and relevance over half a century after its creation. It still awaits a film adaptation that does it justice.