Alexis's blog

auntie Beeb cops out again

2012-02-06T05:33:00.000-08:00

The latest example/victim of the compromises that the cop-out mentality involves was a play last Saturday night in the regular weekend drama series – The Wire, on Radio 3. The Radio Editor of the BBC's official Radio Times magazine selected this play, Zurich, as her Choice of the Day, ending her mini-essay with the words "it's an ultimately uplifting story". This, along with the play's title, was the giveaway that must have tipped off many listeners to the cop-out ending. Why then bother to listen, albeit incredulously, to a threequarter hour play trundling towards a foregone conclusion?

We stuck with the play, however, because the "issue", (ghastly overworked word) which it tried none too well to dramatise, was, and remains, an important one, and not just for older generations. Two fortyish Irish guys – Paul wheelchair bound, paraplegic for 16 years after a car crash, accompanied by his longtime best friend Aidan – travel to Zurich for an AC/DC concert. Paul has told neither mother nor friend that he's decided to end his life at a Swiss clinic. (Did we hear 'Gravitas' substituted for 'Dignitas'?) In the course of the play Paul tells Aidan and us quite insistently that his life is limited, painful, humiliating, lonely and depressing; he feels as a severely disabled person that he has not had and cannot have, any meaningful relationships, and has absolutely nothing to look forward to except more long years of even worse suffering.

But Aidan ducks out of doing the brave, moral and decent thing – to comfort and help his friend get to the clinic and offer support on that final journey; instead, he angrily lectures him and promptly takes a taxi to the airport. Then, in a completely unlikely last-minute volte-face, Aidan dashes back to the clinic and arrives in the nick of time before the irreligious cynic can quaff the hemlock. Aidan bursts in without demur and persuades Paul, in a couple of preachy minutes flat, not to persevere with his long-considered and courageous decision to put an end to what's been a meaningless continuance rather than a meaningful existence. And so back they go to Ireland, no problem. "Just like that", as Tommy Cooper would have said.

Well, how nice and neat and safe and heartwarming! We can all switch off and feel better. But what of proper, serious debate – what price good sense, humanity and reason? 'Dignity in (not) Dying' it certainly wasn't – more like 'Humiliation in Going-on-living, or Larkin's "Man hands on misery to man". (Incidentally, Zurich came across as predictably patronising and sanctimonious towards disabled people. But noticing the preponderance of Irish names involved – author, production credits etc – one rather suspects some religious pressure somewhere behind the scenes and the unconvincingly pat and moralistic 'argument'.)

On another note, if you ever listen to Feedback on BBC R4 you'll rapidly conclude it's a waste of time contacting Auntie with even the slightest whiff of criticism. Listeners invariably get fobbed off with some statement that exudes defensive smugness, rather than any logical explanation, apology or (gawd forbid!) admission that a programme, producer or presenter might possibly have got something wrong, might perhaps have been partial, biassed or mistaken. Political correctness, waffle and avoidance of what the managers perceive as potentially controversial, will always win out.

It leads to a feeble style of broadcasting – driven by a seemingly general dread of causing offence to somebody somewhere, to anybody anywhere! – and it has its inevitable consequences of fudging and cant. These are exemplified by numerous trailers and warnings about the strong language and possibly distressing issues raised in the programmes to follow. When there's a really important issue – life and death – to deal with, we deserve more honesty or at least something better than what we're currently being fed.

death of a master

2012-02-05T08:08:00.000-08:00

Upon the sad demise, a week or so ago, of one of the world's last indisputably great film directors, I'd meant to post some sort of comment, however sadly inadequate. But I did read some decent Obits, and meanwhile have been entranced, watching again (or in some cases seeing for the first time), various masterpieces (The Travelling Players; Landscape In The Mist, etc) by the man who was Greece's finest filmmaker, Theo Angelopoulos. At least he'd have had the brief satisfaction of seeing his films collected as dvds in three boxed sets, the last of which is generally available this month.

What a way to go, however! Angelopoulos was aged 75, directing his new film in Piraeus, when run down by a motorcyclist who turns out to have been an off-duty policeman. Road accidents of one kind and another, so often seeming absurd and arbitrary as well as particularly shocking, have curtailed any number of formidable creative talents (Nathanael West, Camus, Pollock, Clifford Brown, W.G. Sebald etc): you're left thinking 'I wish there'd been more time, more work, more opportunity to relish what might have come next'.

Still, the legacy of Angelopoulos, those long, slow, remarkable and remarkably complex films, may now be properly assessed. He was a true original, and anyone interested in the art of cinema will be fascinated by his work. You don't have to know about Greek myths, history or politics, but the more you do know or care to find out about Greece's past and troubled present, the better. If you want lots of violence, fast editing, loud music and all the other obvious and banal aspects of the current mainstream, you won't like Angelopoulos's unique style or his exquisite and original use of landscape, and the emotion and poetry will pass you by. Time and patience are required in order to appreciate to the full the imaginative and innovative cinema of Angelopoulos: one is drawn into these lives and images gradually, frame by frame… And like all true artists he creates an atmosphere, a special world that fascinates and almost hypnotizes: it's a genuine and extraordinary experience that, as they say 'grows on you', and one which you can grow with. 'Caviare to the general' maybe, but a taste very well worth acquiring.

all Allen ain't

2012-01-26T03:37:00.000-08:00

What a marvel is The Shop Around The Corner (d. Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)! Found a copy of this classic (Korean, what's more) in yet another recently opened local charity shop, for just a quid. The young James Stewart is the perfect foil for Margaret Sullavan (1911-60), that unique and highly original performer, who made a successful if relatively brief career on both stage and screen. Sullavan is now largely forgotten, except by older film fans: she projected a gutsy yet vulnerable, breezy but endearing charm. Her private life however, like that of many another Hollywood star away from the unreal celluloid world, seems to have been genuinely troubled – three marriages, ill-health, increasing deafness and death by her own hand… Her admirer Louise Brooks, another complex character and terrific actress, praised "that wonderful voice of hers – strange, fey, mysterious – like a voice singing in the snow."

Sullavan and Stewart are quite wonderful together, and the supporting cast, especially Frank Morgan as the shop owner, are also superb. This sublimely bitter-sweet – not quite screwball, if splendidly quickfire – comedy now seems perhaps closer to Renoir than Hawks or Preston Sturges, but with delightful hints of all three. Lubitsch directed with what was at the time labelled his 'touch' – a style full of feeling, European wit and elegance and just a dash of cynicism.

My favourite Lubitsch film, if anything even more enjoyable, remains the hilarious To Be Or Not To Be (1942), starring the lovely and equally ill-fated Carole Lombard. This, for whatever devious reasons of copyright or studio archival manoeuvres, seems currently unavailable. But maybe I'll be lucky enough to truffle out a Korean copy of this one too, and in some other inviting shop around the corner?

Allen's angst

2012-01-26T03:10:00.000-08:00

The decline of Woody Allen in recent years has been pitiful. I watched in disbelief (luckily having copped a freebie copy) Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) – a dismal waste of time, money and talent. Does this man inhabit the real world or, come to that, his well-heeled American tourist's idea of Europe? This dreary little travel brochure and vehicle for product-placement lacks wit, irony or any hint of humour or realism. Arty types and intellectuals, according to him, are all beautiful people who live in beautiful villas, drive flashy sportscars and fly private planes. And they all have unlimited time and money with which to indulge themselves. We're invited to admire them and empathize with their trivial love-lives. Their life-styles seem to have been inspired by Hello – or in this case perhaps, Ola! – while the clumsy cinematography and deadpan voice-over (not by Allen, and anyhow utterly banal) do nothing but expose some wooden performances. (Only the talented Rebecca Hall emerges from this cinemuddle without damaging her rising reputation.) Mysteriously, this trite tripe was an 'Official Cannes Selection'. But talking of damaging one's reputation, maybe Allen should simply pack it in now, while the going's not so good.

knife edge of hysteria

2012-01-22T05:23:00.000-08:00

Further to my previous comments about great B&W photography in Bela Tarr's MFL, the excellent work of Ernest Laszlo (another Hungarian, this time a long-term Hollywood emigré) in The Big Knife, 1955, is to be cherished. Robert Aldrich's terrific drama, which I saw in student days and had not seen since, seems better now than it ever did. Aldrich, once affectionately termed by French critics 'le gros Bob', was one of the very best Hollywood directors, specialising in gritty if not brutal movies about survival against the odds. Working mainly within the system, Aldrich produced some genre classics - war, westerns, noirs etc - including some of my absolute favourites in those fields: Attack, Apache, The Last Sunset, Ulzana's Raid, The Grissom Gang, Emperor Of The North, and the quite superb Kiss Me Deadly. You'd expect no less from a man who'd worked with Welles, while the physicality, the brilliantly expressive, almost expressionist, camera angles, the almost if not quite OTT performances, all seem perfectly right in these films' contexts.

As for The Big Knife itself, it features a matchless cast: the inimitable Jack Palance in one of his finest and most gripping dramatic roles; well supported by Ida Lupino, Shelley Winters, Everett Sloane, Wendell Corey, and Jean Hagen (she of "Aah jest caint stann um" fame in Singing In The Rain). And of course, there's Rod Steiger with a strange haircut and a deaf-aid, ranting and raving away as a studio mogul who's an unholy mix of Messrs Mayer and Cohn… Yet his "hammy outrageousness" (Time Out) somehow works when set against Palance's obdurate intensity.

Here's fear and loathing in LA, via the flawed but often brilliant Clifford Odets! His "wordy and stagebound script" was nonetheless considered (also by Time Out) "intellligent and literate", and it seems in hindsight a rather accurate depiction of Fifties America, cold war paranoia and all.

Early last year we saw a stage production of Odets's first success, Waiting For Lefty, and this Thirties piece seemed both curiously timely and dated. The powerful verbal gifts (along with the accompanying torrential verbosity) retained much of their force, while most of the occasional sentimental blemishes could be overlooked: Odets's socialism, like his heart, was in the right, or rather the left, place. Alas, by the end of the McCarthy era, Odets had sold out and become an extremely well-rewarded Hollywood hack, albeit one of the best around: see also Sweet Smell Of Success, an equally fine, equally hysterical film scripted by him a couple of years after TBK.

Unfortunately, just like Aldrich himself, whose later output declined and became slickly commercial (remember The Dirty Dozen and what happened to the later careers of Mesdames Davis and Crawford?) Odets went for the easy money flowing down the mainstream. But he remained, according to Jean Renoir, a decent, warm and very generous friend. In My Life And My Films (1974) Renoir writes movingly of their friendship and Odets's last days. He praises Odets's only foray into directing - the very odd None But The Lonely Heart, which starred an absurdly OTT Cary Grant plus dreadful cockney (not even Bristolian!) accent. This praise was, one feels, down to Renoir's own comradeship and innate generosity, rather than a true reflection of an interesting failure: surely NBTLH is not, as anyone who's seen this muddled piece will agree, any sort of "masterpiece"? Still those were times of exaggeration, days of hysteria and suspicion, when friendship accorded to outsiders, foreigners and exiles in Hollywood was in short supply. Renoir simply notes that Odets was "like everyone representative of his period… a victim of the anti-communist obsession". The paranoia and blame of that time are in impressive and riveting evidence in The Big Knife.

cutting edge of pseudery

2012-01-16T10:15:00.000-08:00

What fairly recent movie garnered the following puffs on its dvd case? ("Mesmeric… This is film noir as metaphysical poetry… Extraordinary black and white camerawork" - Time Out. "extraordinary" - The Observer. "compelling" - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian. "majestic and mysterious"- Scotland on Sunday. "mesmerising… Swinton is just one highlight" - Jonathan Romney, Independent on Sunday.) And was a Cannes festival selection, at that? Answer: The Man From London, directed by Bela Tarr, 2007.

I recalled struggling with his earlier four hour effort, the dismal Satantango, whose opening sequence, a dark wet farmyard somewhere in Hungary, lasts for about half an hour – during which time we see some murky outbuildings, cattle crossing the mud in the wind and rain and nothing much else of any excitement or edification. We found ourselves eventually forced to fastforward in disbelief, and realised that nothing much else did happen during this interminable and lugubriously boring saga: nothing like our own dear and multiply-plotted Archers!

Anyhow, in all fairness, I checked out of our library this more recent film, because the time listed was only "90 mins approx". Also, The MFL was based on an author I admire, Simenon: this promised to be an unexpected marvel of psychological accuracy and gripping too. And the excellent and risktaking Swinton is always worth watching… Ah what a disappointment! The opening shot, up down and across, back and forth, along a ship's hull at night, was indeed leisurely. Thereafter the trades description act should have been invoked: a total of two hours ten minutes is not quite "90 mins approx", while all those carefully-selected, grandiose M-words and laudatory adjectives from various supposedly intelligent critics, from "mesmeric" onward, should have tipped us the wink. We dutifully stayed the course, again with considerable exasperation: was it really possible for any filmmaker to be so impossibly, wilfully slow, to show such complete and utter disdain for both narrative and audience?

Absurd multilingual dubbing and absolutely ludicrous 'storyline' didn't make for a riveting experience. Why should the extremely aged retiree Scotland Yard inspector, the eponymous TMFL, who speaks with the voice of Edward Fox, cross the Channel to investigate a missing sixty thousand quid – from a theatre box office of all unlikely places? He ignores a corpse in the harbour (Bastia apparently, rather than Belgium) and finally allows a murderer – the killer of the first killer, if you follow me – to go free with a large wodge of money and a pat on the back. (Tarr very much?) I don't think I have spoilt the film by hinting at the sheer absurdity of it all. Yes, it's indeed beautifully lit and photographed, but so what? Every face and object, longshot or closeup, is lingered on interminably, for no discernible purpose. A frustrated stills photographer Tarr may be or might have been, but an auteur he ain't. A pretty pretentious interview with The Man From Hungary is included as an 'extra'. This confirmed my misgivings and resolve never to watch another such piece of stodgily intellectualised boloney ever again. Life is too short, and good art is still shorter, but the Bela experience is far too long: beware and avoid!

those Quays!

2012-01-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

The Quay twins, never to be confused with the awful Krays, conceived and directed in 1995 the unique and extraordinary Institute Benjamenta, or This dream people call human life. It was great to catch up with this rare gem a few days ago (thanks once again to Exeter's fine film library!) in its new dual format edition. This includes an informative booklet and lots of fascinating extras – several other shorts by the Brothers Q, and interviews with them and the exceptional actors Mark Rylance and Alice Krige, who star in this wonderful film. Of course the fact that it's B&W and drawn from the weird works of the German-Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956), whose latter years, from 1929, were spent in a mental hospital, may discourage your average browser in search of digital tricks and zappy sledgehammer editing, but the loss will be theirs.

The distinguished British poet and translator Christopher Middleton refers to Walser's "charmed ironic clownishness", and certainly the Quays seem to capture this. "An exquisitely realised anti-fairytale, a fragile world shimmering with luminous energy and hypnotic beauty" says blurb, and for once that's spot on. I should think anyone who likes Beckett, Kafka and Keaton would love this film about a very peculiar training school for servants, but it's a truly independent and original piece of cinema. Gottfried John, a Fassbinder stalwart, also plays an important part, and the film is mysterious, comical, oneiric, surreal and gorgeous to watch. Those who have savoured the strangely distinctive, sometimes nightmarish animation and the singularly odd puppetry and dreamscapes of the Quays' earlier films – their adaptations of Bruno Schulz for example – and their affinity with Central European filmmakers like Svjankmaier and Borowczyk, will need no further recommendation.

two oldies but goodies

2011-12-23T14:56:00.000-08:00

Two amazing movies: one of the best ever documentaries; one of the most visually exquisite films ever made. First, The Thin Blue Line (1988), directed by Errol Morris the true story of the murder of a policeman in a Texan town. A grim and absolutely riveting chunk of lowlife exposing a dreadful miscarriage of US justice, it involved a mixture of corruption, malice and incompetence that resulted in the wrong man being convicted and despatched to Death Row. Uniquely and admirably, the filmmaker's dogged investigation into this crime proved instrumental in the innocent's belated release and the actual killer's eventual arrest and conviction. Apart from its vital crusading element, the film is brilliantly assembled – interviews trenchant and edgy, photography, editing and music all terrific. (The latter is by Philip Glass, what's more!) Gripping, grotesque and often blackly humorous, it's an indictment of ignorance, prejudice and the complete folly of judging by appearances.

A very different but equally extraordinary picture is Színdbad (1971), the wonderful Hungarian film directed by ill-fated, highly talented Zoltan Huszárak – dead at fifty and still scarcely known outside his homeland. The excellent Second Run outfit this year released a dvd of his single masterpiece: it's a film of breathtaking visual beauty, humorous, poignant and in the best sense truly colourful. In just 90 minutes, the eponymous protagonist is shown reflecting on his life of sensual indulgence: memories of food and women predominate, since Színdbad's a greedy connoisseur of both. Yet the singleminded pursuit of pleasure can't ever distract him from the awareness of time passing and of ageing, nor from the inevitability of that final encounter which always comprises the last voyage of every Sinbad. The film adapts some fictions dating from 1911-1912 by a well-known Hungarian author Gyula Krúdy – poetic, avant-garde for their time and, by reputation, extremely difficult to translate. It seems though that Huszárak accomplished the near-impossible in movie terms: if the narrative on first viewing appears baffling here and there, this stunning film absolutely holds the interest throughout. Spellbinding colour photography and editing, a fine central performance, and some of the strangest and most lingeringly beautiful images and sequences ever: think Ophuls, Renoir, Michael Powell, than whom there's no higher praise!

admirations and qualifications

2011-12-21T08:20:00.000-08:00

I'm a great admirer of Terence Davies and his extraordinary films and have told him so in the past, but The Deep Blue Sea is a sad miscalculation, curate's egg if ever there was! There's a wonderful cast, giving uniformly excellent performances, as one would expect from a lineup that includes Simon Russell Beale, Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and, in support, Barbara Jefford and Ann Mitchell… But, but, but – why remake what was originally a somewhat thin if 'wellmade' and rather middlebrow theatre piece (by T. Rattigan), already filmed, equally unexcitingly, with Kenneth More and Vivien Leigh in 1955?

As regards recreating the immediate post-WW2 period, it's all slightly wrong: the dark interiors aren't dingy enough, the film is generally too colourful and soft-focus, while London in the late 1940s and early 50s seemed – via my own recollections of a middleclass background and upbringing there – altogether more sombre, dirty and impoverished. The film's clothes and the people wearing them invariably look too clean; the streets and bomb sites are too 'theatrically' arranged and not really squalid; the smogs and grime are missing: the glum and downbeat plot required monochrome! Weisz is too young and glamorous for the role of Hester, while the age-gap between herself and Russell Beale, playing her husband Judge Collyer, makes their earlier relationship (or 'backstory' if you prefer) altogether unlikely.

There's a flashback scene to the blitz with people sheltering in the underground, which, again, is too extended and extraneous and so seems wilful, artificial, quite the opposite of truly atmospheric. (Matthew Sweet's recent book West End Front tells fascinating tales of the toffs – among whom would surely be numbered the likes of Judge and Lady Collyer – holing out in the posher London hotels whose cellars and basements had been specially adapted for the comfort and convenience of the better-orf.) Further details are off-kilter also: jolly pub singalongs, dwelt on indulgently, ditto the opening and closing Samuel Barber stuff. Oh dear, and Weisz doesn't even smoke her cigarettes convincingly, the only minor (if important!) criticism one might make of her very fine performance…

Once again, as in my previous comments on Andrea Arnold, one must stress that every talented director has the right to come a cropper every so often! It's hard enough to raise funding for any film, fullstop, and creative spirits need to work. So the temptation to remake or adapt a classic, or some tried-and-tested vehicle for actors, must be ever-present. At least this is a watchable couple of hours, dull and a bit camp, but not out-and-out exasperating drivel like Withering Depths: try again lads and lasses, to find, fund and film something worthier of your considerable talents!

ups and downs with books and films

2011-12-09T05:30:00.000-08:00

Julian Barnes's Man Booker win was predictable (a 'third time lucky' or consolation prize for a dependable if unexceptional veteran?), but his rather slight novel's not a patch on a longlisted debut noirish fiction by A.D.Miller Snowdrops. Barnes is a good critic of, and writer on, most things French, particularly literature, but Miller's terrific Moscow-set thriller with its chilly atmospheric descriptions, cool psychological insights and frighteningly casual brutality is very well written indeed, Graham Greene without the catholic claptrap, an uncluttered and intelligent look at current Russian society. (Maybe Snowdrops didn't have enough intellectual pretension, perhaps downgraded somewhat as a 'genre' novel, but we found it a fascinating and unputdownable read.)

Two recent films seen, by a couple of the best directors around (both women, coincidentally). Wuthering Heights (dir. Andrea Arnold), an absolute disaster, a dreadful film from what's anyhow a very over-rated novel. A friend who works in the theatre told us it was like having her face thrust in pig slurry for two hours! I suppose re Arnold and her directing of features it was "third time unlucky" and every director, however talented, has the right to try something and fail, but this was an absolute disaster with hardly any redeeming features, anachronistic to the point of absurdity. The idea of a rather sensitive black Heathcliff (a nod to updating and/or political correctness?) was simply misguided, and, given the 1820s, any such person who told his landowning 'superiors' to "Fuck off you cunts!"simply could not have existed, nor continued to exist thereafter! More generally, no one so much as shivered in all that cold and wet oop on they moors; the drippy closing song, a folk-rock indulgence was ridiculous, etc etc. But it's hardly worth serious analysis: avoid!

Lynne Ramsay's welcome return to direction, with We Need To Talk About Kevin, was something else altogether. Properly forceful and shocking. (Given a dvd of this, we were riveted, neither of us having read the book.) But we're longterm fans of the intense, statuesque and magnificent Tilda Swinton, a brilliant actress (no, not actor!) The casting was completely convincing too, all except for the husband, who – no fault of his own – looked like a bluecollar worker, someone off a building site, perhaps, and thus no intellectual or physical match for the brainy and literate Tilda character. It was never explained, either, how this taciturn geezer made his money – and there was lots of it, judging by the family's lavish home and life-style. Maybe we missed something that made sense or was explained adequately in the book, but this seemed the only flaw in a very absorbing and thought-provoking movie: recommended for those not, as they say, of nervous disposition.

travels and more films

2011-11-21T06:32:00.000-08:00

Getting around France by SNCF, especially if you are eligible for and invest in, a Carte Senior, booking well ahead, is a very pleasant experience, easy, affordable and stress-free. Too much in our three weeks to reflect upon and write about, as yet. Highlights included the biggest ever Diane Arbus exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Musée Angladon in Avignon (great collection of 19th and 20th century art, plus first editions, notebooks, sketches, MSS etc from the likes of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Jarry, the Surrealists and best of all where I was concerned – 3 of Lautréamont-Ducasse's 7 known letters). The amazing Roman arena/amphitheatre at Nimes, and walking over the hills to the equally stunning Pont du Gard. And staying, for several days in her Provençal village house, with Jean Rhys's granddaughter: thank you, Ellen! Following which, Mourjou's (23rd?) annual chestnut festival, where we spent a wonderful week chez our old friend the grand maître of the chataigneraie, author and cheesemeister Peter Graham. Bliss: wonderful weather, great company and fantastic quality and quantity of degustations of all sorts.

Adjusting to the UK on return has proved gradual if not downright strange. But at least a couple of good films (borrowed once again from the wonderful World Cinema section of our beleaguered local library) to regale us: Larks on a string (Jiri Menzel, 1969) and Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2011). The first, immediately banned in his native Czechoslovakia for years, did not resurface until 1990, and caused Menzel much hassle – disrupting a career that had promised so much, with the Oscar-winning Closely Observed Trains. His colleague on both films and several later ones, the fine author Bohumil Hrabal, also suffered when the shortlived Prague spring of 1968 was followed by the brutal Soviet occupation of their country. Larks… gained an underground reputation however, and in 1990 won the Berlin Film Festival's Golden Bear. The 2011 dvd reissue, plus short interview with Jiri Menzel, is highly recommended, a very funny yet poignant and instructive little satire and a colourful (in both senses) slice of European history.

As for this year's foreign Oscar-nominated Incendies, it's closer to Greek tragedy, but set in an unspecified Middle Eastern country whose inhabitants, whether exiled or returned, cannot escape past or present conflicts and all the various dreadful legacies of violence. If that sounds solemn or 'worthy', believe me it's not! This French-Canadian-Arabic production is impeccably acted by a cast that includes both professional and non-professional actors: indeed, some of the latter are actually refugees themselves. The result, adapted from a stage play, is an extremely powerful and moving cinematic drama, full of extraordinary landscapes, faces and situations. Unmissable for anyone interested in contemporary cinema, and also including some fascinating director interviews.

A French maestro

2011-08-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to another French trip in a couple of months, and meanwhile borrowed from our city library (grimly facing the threats of council and Cameronian cuts and austerities) two terrific films. Both are directed by that excellent (if still underrated – in this country at least) filmmaker Maurice Pialat (1925-2003). Pialat was one of the finest post-WW2 French auteurs, and remained a controversial figure throughout his distinguished career. The first in time, only recently available on dvd, is A Nos Amours (1983) and introduces, in her extraordinary cinema debut, the sixteen year old Sandrine Bonnaire. Bonnaire became one of the most attractive and intelligent European actresses of her generation, and this film examining a disturbed adolescence in a dysfunctional family has sensational performances by everyone involved, including Pialat himself as the father and failed patriarch, and Evelyne Ker as the mother. Bonnaire from the first to the very last frame is gorgeous and indeed unforgettable. It's a film that hasn't dated at all and packs a powerful punch, and I'm glad to have caught up with it at last. A classic!

Totally different, but also powerful and moving, is Pialat's take on Van Gogh (1991). On a second viewing, twenty years after its original release, I was struck by the superb performances, especially by Jacques Dutronc as the troubled artist. It is as it should be, an exquisitely colourful, beautifully photographed piece, full of surprises: the characters seem to live onscreen rather than 'act' in any costumed impersonation or BBC-style period drama. It's all strangely convincing, coolly framed yet highly emotional, unpredictable and always provocative.

One of the best-ever writers on cinema, David Thomson, who's invariably judicious, witty and illuminating, makes an apt final comment on Maurice Pialat in his indispensable New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Thomson links Pialat's humanist style and very distinctive approach to cinema with that of those other greats, Renoir, Ozu and Mizoguchi. Not much else to add! You can only agree with such an insightful and consistently reliable movie critic and biographer. And having now seen just four Pialat films out of what's a considerable oeuvre, I look forward to seeing as many of the others as possible.

A few more unmissables

2011-08-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

A Separation, the excellent Iranian film which won several awards recently at the Berlin film festival, is just about faultless. It's an absolutely riveting narrative demonstrating just how an inflexible Law (whether based on religionist or state control) can wreck lives and relationships. Terrific stuff, with performances that seemed lived rather than 'acted'.

As regards recent British cinema, there are some exciting younger directors around. Try to see The Disappearance of Alice Creed, a clever, twisty indie threehander, written and directed by (30ish?) J. Blakeson, and starring Gemma Arterton – very gutsy and convincing. The film, an economical, well-paced and rather nasty kidnapping tale, seems more than timely too, given the ordeal only days ago of that wealthy young heiress in Australia!

Saw a dvd of Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, which, like her earlier films Red Road and the award-winning short, Wasp, are mightily impressive on second viewings. What strong performances she draws from her young casts, and what a bleak and brutal Britain she exposes! Far from entertaining stuff, but completely gripping and provocative in the best sense. Only Clio Barnard's grim biographical documentary The Arbor – which recounts, via family, friends and colleagues, the truly horrific success-and-disaster-story of the late Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar – can match Arnold's unflinching and ferocious vision. In these films are to be found a wild bunch of bright but underprivileged young women, struggling against a male-dominated society that uses, torments and rejects them. Not recommended for depressives of either sex, however!

thirty years on

2011-07-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

In an earlier blog (20 Aug 2010) entitled Second Runs Indeed! I focussed on various central European gems from the Sixties and Seventies, films caught up with, and/or seen again, half a lifetime later. I mentioned a long unavailable classic film noir by the emigré Czech director Ivan Passer, yet another who had gravitated via France towards Hollywood after the upheavals in Europe of 1968. His quite excellent film, Cutter's Way (1981) has now re-emerged in a nice new digital form, and I had the rare pleasure of seeing it again recently, at my local Picturehouse no less. Thirty years on, it's even better than I remembered, with absolutely terrific performances by Jeff Bridges as a beach bum-gigolo, John Heard as his friend Alex Cutter, the cynical, disabled Vietnam vet and Lisa Eichhorn as Cutter's sad alcoholic girlfriend.

As well as a sardonic picture of the sunny American dream turned very dark and sour, it's a full-on noir thriller as bleak as any of those B&W classics from the Forties and Fifties. But then it's scripted from a first-rate novel, one of the most impressive postwar American prose works – Cutter And Bone, by Newton Thornburg (1973). Read the book – if you can get hold of a reprint of this grim yet drily humorous genre masterpiece – and do try to see the film while it's re-released. (Presumably there's a dvd around too?) At any rate the characterisation, dialogue and tension are gripping and the photography and editing are faultless.

An old favourite resurfaces

2011-05-25T07:54:00.000-07:00

Just been reading 2 sharply ironic and distinctive novels, recently published in the USA, by someone I first read in the early 1960s. Albert Cossery (1913-2008) was an Egyptian author who settled in Paris after WW2, remained there for the rest of his long life and wrote in French. His short stories and novels are inimitable and as for the 2 novels I mentioned, A Splendid Conspiracy (Un Complot de Saltimbanques, 2000) and The Jokers (Violence et la Dérision, 1993), they are funny, absorbing and elegant despite their occasionally awkward or clumsy American translations. James Buchan and John Murray both recommend The Jokers, and Cossery has been translated into 15 languages and widely praised, but his earlier books have been hard to find.

On my shelves I see editions of If All Men Were Beggars (MacGibbon & Kee, UK 1957); The House of Certain Death (Hutchinson, 1947); and Proud Beggars (Black Sparrow, USA, 1981). All of them fine novels! The first Cossery work I read, Men God Forgot is an excellent short story collection which City Lights published in 1963, and it came with an enthusiastic puff from Henry Miller, who also wrote about Cossery elsewhere. It seems Albert Cossery led a rather dandified but bohemian Left Bank life: his irrepressibly nonchalant, humorous variety of cynicism admirably suits the entrancing yet satirical stories that he tells so elegantly. France and the French it seems welcomed him, as is so often – happily – the case with artistic and political exiles in Paris. Thanks to that enlightened support within Cossery's adopted country and the measure of recognition he received there, Anglophone readers too can look forward to more of Cossery's books being available before too long.

Let's hear (and see it) for Skolimowski!

2011-05-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

Last night on BBC R3's Night Waves, what did I chance to hear, but some estimable film critics, (including Kim Newman and Iain Sinclair) lauding the rather belated re-release in cinemas, 40 years or so after its first appearance, of what they were labelling a cult masterpiece. This was none other than my own strong recommendation– see my previous blog of a day or so before – Jerzy Skolimowski's terrific film Deep End. This features Diana Dors and Jane Asher, no less, in a startlingly coloured piece of London-themed weirdness, filmed there and in Berlin. Almost sounded as if somebody out there heard my meditation about the difficulties of seeing this rare and original filmmaker's work! Good on you BFI or whoever is now distributing this film: don't miss it!

Movie treats, bread and circuses

2011-05-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

How much longer will our excellent Exeter library be able to stock such wonderful world cinema, given the present attacks on kulchur by the ghastly koalition? Films viewed recently include La Peau Douce, an undervalued Truffaut gem from his early low-budget B&W days, starring the beauteous Françoise Dorléac, Deneuve's sister who died sadly prematurely in a car crash. And three by Mikio Naruse, the great Japanese director, each wonderfully photographed and acted, and each better than the last, in this order: Late Chrysanthemums, When A Woman Ascends The Stairs, and the quite superb Floating Clouds. (Thank you Jean Louis Gregoire for enthusing to us about him!)

And, going the rounds of picturehouses currently, there's the latest, prizewinning work from another master of world cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski. This one, Essential Killing is only 90 minutes long, and for the most part without dialogue – an absolutely gripping and indeed timely tale, in the classic 'man-on-the-run' mould. But it's riveting and original in its narrative twists and its psychological and political message. Skolimowski is another 1960s name, a Polish exile contemporary of Polanski and Zulawski (re whom, see my earlier blogs). Skolimowski was recently seen as an actor in David Cronenberg's gutwrenching thriller Eastern Promises, but I can still remember moments from a few of Skolimowski's own very quirky films. They're all quite different in style and tone, and it's a great pity they're not readily available these days or reissued on dvds. Let's hope they will be, and he has a season at the NFT. I'd like to see again, for instance – Le Depart; The Shout; Deep End; Moonlighting… All of these, spanning thirty-odd years are full of unexpected moments and a certain (very middle-European?) dark humour.

Movies and proof corrections: what better ways to avoid reading the reams of media reverence and grovelling re the recent royal nuptial nonsense? Duke and Duchess of Cambridge indeed! I think 'Duchess of Cambridge' is a title which should have been reserved for, and might especially have suited, one of the grandees of my King's College days – Dadie Rylands. (Or possibly E.M. Forster, in those days a delightful old geezer I once had tea with.) Couldn't the Pope have broken with arsy RC tradition and beatified this exquisite young couple while he was at it? Living Saints as well as style icons? If Gilbert & George are Living Sculptures, why not Saint Will & the Blessed Kate? I mean what the hell, Duke & Duchess of Cam aren't nearly exalted enough!

A further film note and a bit on Sterne

2011-04-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

Talking of excellent films directed by Tourneur, J., I omitted to mention Cat People, another 1940s horror classic, this one starring the delectable and kittenish French actress Simone Simon. Quite a track record for a director all but forgotten these days, though treasured by every true cinephile…

Also forgot to mention that Martin Rowson has to his credit, as listed in his excellent book Stuff, a graphic novel version of Tristram Shandy. This sounds a curiously eccentric yet appropriate thing to have done. But then Laurence Sterne's influence has been widespread: his weird and hilariously experimental 'novel' seems to continue to prompt or encourage equally ambitious and/or extraordinary projects. Two dear friends of ours, who for many years ran The Mirror and The Lamp bookshop in St Ives – radio producer Jan Starink, and his late wife, the artist and prizewinning poet Gertrude Starink – spent no fewer than fourteen years translating this singular classic into Dutch. Jan is in his mid-80s now and lives in the hometown of one of our favourite artists, Hieronymous Bosch. If you should chance to read this, Jan, I raise my glass to you and wish you lots more oud genever and strong black coffee!

film demons past and present, and a fine book

2011-04-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

Pleased to find various friends agree with my view of Night of The Demon. (A few months back the Fortean Times reviewer called it a "genre masterpiece" and awarded it 10/10!) And yes, the producer's quite unnecessary insert of the diabolical apparition was indeed the film's only false move. The director Jacques Tourneur never did put a foot (or giant claw) wrong… In fact he directed various brilliant movies, just as good in their various ways: he's what the Cahiers du Cinema crew would once have dubbed (and probably did, for all I know) "un cinéaste maudit". Tourneur's superb Caribbean horror version of Jane Eyre – I walked with a zombie – a B&W cheapie from 1943, produced by the equally original Val Lewton, I've already discussed in my book Jean Rhys revisited. And there are other Tourneur-directed gems, including 2 great noirs, well worth seeing: Out of the past, with Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, and Nightfall, adapted from a David Goodis novel. These will surely delight any connoisseur of 1940s and 50s B&W cinema.

But alas for imagination, inventive low budgetry and 'less is more'! In recent years, the more graphic, highly coloured and expensively choreographed the movie violence, the less convincing it gets. Having sought out the second film of The Girl Who… trilogy (see previous blog) I must admit that The Girl Who Played With Fire is a sad disappointment. Another terrific performance from the intrepid heroine Noomi Rapace, but what with a different and not as competent a director, some poor continuity plus a risibly unlikely script and action-sequences, it's subject to the inexorable law of sequels and diminishing returns. Which is not to say I wouldn't watch part three, if only out of curiosity and admiration for the remarkable Ms Rapace, though I won't be in any rush to borrow the dvd.

More imaginative is a slow-burning, modest-budget British treat, very low-key, almost music- and action-free – Joanna Hogg's slyly satirical dissection of a posh, dysfunctional family group holidaying on the Scilly Isles, Archipelago. This concise little flick maps out its territory and sets its tone in a downbeat area somewhere between Chekhov and Eric Rohmer, but it's certainly far more involving than the latter's endlessly pretentious and miserabilist chatter! There are, too, several exquisitely revealing and embarrassing scenes involving food and mealtimes (these seemed once to be the favoured preserve of Nouvelle Vague types, e.g. that grim joker Claude Chabrol) but Joanna Hogg matches the French here. The editing and colour photography are impressive also; the faces and landscapes unfamiliar and all the better for it. Recommended.

So too is a marvellous memoir I picked up recently for a quid in a local charity shop. A hardback a few years old now but clearly unread – more's the pity – by one of my favourite cartoonists, Martin Rowson. Rowson as caricaturist is currently second only to the great Steve Bell: here, in Stuff, this graphic artist shows most of the over-hyped British wordsmiths a thing or two! Sometimes sharp as a stanley knife, sometimes poignant, often very funny and quite without sentimentality, Stuff is the work of a genuine original. There's probably a paperback around by now, and so there bloody well should be.

grim films

2011-03-21T04:28:00.000-07:00

When grim things keep happening around the globe (Japan, Libya and Middle East), a nice slice of escapism is occasionally in order… So I can recommend a couple of quite contrasted but gruesome and compelling movies. One is a small-scale B movie in B&W from 1957, which I'd seen only in a very poor print back in the early Sixties, and was glad to view again in its recent dvd reissue. The other's a much longer, more complex and glossy colour production from 2008 which I'd avoided on its original release, feeling one should resist the extensive hype. What they have in common, other than their being based on goodish prose narratives (in English and Swedish respectively), is style, pace, fine cinematography, gripping twists and turns within the melodramatic yet just credible storylines, plus completely convincing and committed acting. Titles of these gems, half a century apart, but seeming so timeless in their effective portrayals of lurking horror? Night Of The Demon, directed by the undervalued Hollywood Jacques Tourneur, from M.R. James's story 'Casting The Runes', and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (from the late Stieg Larsson's novel). If you haven't seen them, don't miss!

travels in the unholy land

2011-03-09T08:02:00.000-08:00

for this please check Maggie's blog which is http://magssjournal.blogspot.com

walking, Walken and watching

2011-02-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

Another belated update, this time because M and I have been regularly walking around the city's "Green Circle" (15 miles worth of wonderful countryside surrounding us, via bridle-paths and footpaths and fields). This very pleasant activity has kept us happy and fit in all weathers, before we take off soon to join a small group of walkers in the West Bank. From where, eventually, we shall both blog on. Should be an interesting trip in any case.

Meanwhile 2 recommended films, both by Brit directors, excellent oddities I've recently picked up for a couple of quid apiece in local charity shops. Donald Cammell's Wild Side, starring our old favourite, the wonderfully weird Christopher Walken, well over the top as always, and especially so in this lurid little psychosexual thriller. And one from 1971, Red Sun, directed by Terence Young, a generally undistinguished action specialist (e.g. he orchestrated all the early James Bond flicks). Red Sun has the utterly superb Toshiro Mifune in vivid Eastmancolor and quite resplendent in full samurai kit. Swordsman Tosh easily steals the show from a strange international cast heavily reliant on both beef- and cheesecake – Bronson, Andress and Delon. They're all Out West, by the way, circa 1860, and this violent East-Western oater (plus railways, Mexicans and Comanches added to the mix) is nevertheless something of a neglected gem. Both these films are, you could say, colourful escapism , but thoroughly good, decadent fun for any true cinephile. Entertaining nonsense and none the worse for that.

festivities, flu, Ambit and Angela

2011-02-08T10:38:00.000-08:00

Long lapse in the journal, or 'dear diary', aspect of this blog. Perhaps not so surprising, for after the successful book launch of Haiku At Seventy last December, as noted, came the snow and ice: minus 15 degrees just across the River Exe. Then 2 weeks of flu over xmas and my birthday, so the celebrations were necessarily scaled down. Lethargy ensued, along with the depleted energy of septuagenarianism etc.

Visitors from France, providing excellent and convivial cheer, arrived early on in the New Year, staying 10 days, a time which also proved most enjoyably inimical to writing anything here, except for a couple of miserabilist poems… We were given 2 extraordinary films, Claude Miller's Mortelle Randonnée (Deadly Run), a terrific thriller from 1982, with Michel Serrault and the wonderful Isabelle Adjani, about whom I've already raved. This sumptuously photographed and surprising movie (from Marc Behm's rather original American pulp noir) was quite a contrast with Vitaly Kanevski's gritty monochrome Russian epic, Bouge Pas, Meurs et Ressuscite! (Dont Move, Die and Rise Again!) (1989) which chronicles a nightmarishly wretched childhood in Siberian wastes. Marvellous children's performances: how do directors manage to get these non-professionals to act, or rather, exist, this way – so movingly and convincingly on the screen? The grimness though was riveting and quite relentlessly conveyed. Nothing like horrors of one kind and another to cheer one up, I always say! Read Gissing, for example; you'll feel so much better about your own health, finances, relationships and prospects etc: "there but for the grace of Fate" [certainly not god!] go we.)

Revitalised by these and other wintry experiences, I was glad of a brief London trip to see old friends Paul & Val and read at the launch of Ambit magazine's splendid issue no. 203. Apart from my own poems (of course!) there are excellent graphics and prose, and no less than 12 pages devoted to the unique American poet Fred Voss. Voss is absolutely one of a kind, and how many machinists in steel foundries are there who write anything at all, let alone such funny, moving and utterly distinctive work?

Finally, a superb concert a few nights ago, given by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Exeter Cathedral, with the great Angela Hewitt playing Mendelssohn and Schumann. A nice note on which to close.

new haiku book

2010-12-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

Haiku At Seventy my new collection from Anarchios Press (see website) was launched successfully at the gallery and bar of the beautifully refurbished Exeter Picturehouse on December 8th. This proved to be a very enjoyable occasion. Despite quite a few people unable to get there (snow and ice around Dartmoor area in particular), over fifty did turn up, bought books and said how much they'd enjoyed the reading. (Their reactions were especially welcome, as I'd felt I had a hard job to equal, if not top, the reading at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, on fireworks night, as mentioned in earlier blog.) Friendship and euphoria alike are all too often fleeting: who said that? It has an alliterative ring about it, but I think it's actually a fugitive line of mine from some unwritten poem… Anyway, I'm blessed with some lovely friends, two of whom were staying over with us, and so being a septuagenarian doesn't worry me unduly: I want us all to live as long and happily as possible, compos mentis and in decent health. Keep well all of you, and remember it's books not blogs and poems not politicians, that will survive.

Catching up, new book, film fun, etc

2010-11-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

Lapsed grievously (no it's not RC guilt!), in not having written up the blog for exactly 2 months. But much has happened during that time, of course: inspiring – rescued Chilean miners; sad but inevitable – deaths of Tony Curtis and Joan Sutherland; gruesome and/or surreal – the Pope's visit to UK; and the usual depressing jawjaw deadlock between Israel and the Palestinians, as mediated/invigilated by an increasingly powerless Obama administration, biassed as always in favour of the occupiers… But enough of World-stuff and Large Issues.

We've been to visit friends in St Ives, Paris and Wales during this time, and have also produced a new book Haiku At Seventy, which will be launched at Exeter Picture House on 8th December: if anyone out there happens to be local – you're very welcome to come along! (The newly refurbished Picture House, with its fine bar/café/gallery is indeed impressive.) I'm very much in the mood to read again after some recent gigs, especially the latest, at the Dylan Thomas Literature Festival on Guy Fawkes Night. A full house and lovely, lively audience, with fireworks over Swansea docks as a spectacular backdrop!

This is a necessarily brief post, but I'll end with another weird and wonderful recommendation, the newly released dvd of Andrzej Zulawski's extraordinary 1981 film Possession. This manages to combine psychodrama, horror, politics and is filmed stunningly in Berlin's Turkish area, Kreuzberg, in sight of the dreadful Wall. It has one of the most ferocious and bravely committed performances by a film actress that I've ever seen: Isabelle Adjani giving her all! The performances, script and photography are all, shall we say, striking, while the emotional and physical mayhem, after 30 years, remain gorily convincing, the special effects still awesome. Adjani got a deserved Best Actress award at Cannes, but the film was regrettably butchered (by half its length!) in the USA, and greeted with general incomprehension and supercilious moral outrage elsewhere. But Zulawski, a longtime Polish exile in Paris, is a considerable and very intelligent filmmaker, as anyone who checks out the fascinating extras and interviews on the dvd will soon learn. I've already previously praised Z's earlier film The Third Part Of The Night, but it now seems that this new, full-length version of Possession (not to be confused with a later novel of that title by boring Dame Byatt) will reach a wider audience and transcend its earlier reputation as a lost, cultish film maudit. Fair enough: it's a dark classic of sorts, a flawed gem, but a gem nonetheless.

Purveyors of tripe, literary and other

2010-09-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

Just been reading an unspeakably dreadful book I found in our library. (Why did they order it and why did I bother? Not sure, but if I manage to put a few people off this abomination, I shall have performed a literary-critical service, that's for sure!) Between The Sheets, by one Lesley McDowell, is subtitled The Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th Century Women Writers. And yes, you guessed it, I was curious to check out the chapter [fourth out of nine] on Jean Rhys.

But in all fairness, I did read the book through with growing exasperation and speed (for one can't, at my age, afford to waste too much precious time on clumsy and shambolic drivel). Here then is a brief taste of this fanciful, ill-written, appallingly proofed, shoddily 'edited' and wildly misbegotten tome. Katherine Mansfield, "possibly the greatest short story writer in the English language rivals masters of the art like Chekhov". H.D. produced "some of the most brilliant poetry of the twentieth century". Elizabeth Smart was "author of one of the greatest works on love ever written." Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn "were a literary Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the Posh and Becks of American letters". Phooey, piffle and codswallop, of course, and therefore hilarious passim. Who is she, this sublimely insouciant humourist, perhaps one of the funniest of the 21st century?

Ms McDowell, we learn from the jacket, is a young literary journalist who writes for the TLS and the Independent on Sunday; she's gleaned "a Scottish Arts Council award for her second novel" and "earned a Ph.D. for her work on James Joyce". Wow, all very impressive. Yet I do hope her clunky, turgid style eventually improves, and hope too that, however assiduous her future researches may be, her accuracy and fact-checking prove less slipshod. It's pretty clear that Ms McD. never met or knew the people about whom she blithely pontificates and fantasises, but that of course needn't necessarily be a stumbling-block to the litcrit faculty. The trouble is, all this pretentious pseudo-feminist tosh is relentlessly recycled, fifth and sixth-hand stuff, as the citations and bibliography make clear: the devil is very much in the detail here. And boy, does the girl get those details wrong! One example (I can't bear to trawl through this 365pp. weighty tome looking for more, but just take my word for it): Dr McDowell imagines that Sleep It Off, Lady is a Jean Rhys novel.

Well I did happen to know four or five of the excellent writers selected for her tendentious generalisations, and so found both style and content doubly depressing. Libelling and labelling the dead is a cheery post mortem pastime, it seems, and perhaps now even a profitable one. As for this sort of slack, unappetising, fashionably speculative piece of trash, it's neither useful literary dissection nor detection. I'm really rather relieved that my own two books about Jean Rhys are apparently unknown to McDowell. She does, though, draw upon the equally fanciful, if marginally better written, recent 'portrait' of Jean by Lilian Pizzichini, whose The Blue Hour (2008) seems to derive its title and some other biographical angles via pp. 233-4 of my first book about Jean, Jean Rhys revisited (2000). Pizzichini was inevitably lauded for her gushing middle-of-the-road fabrications by the dreadful Sunday Times panjandrum and hackademic, Professor John Carey (for whom, see also pp. 149-151 of JRr). But she did deign to mention my memoir of Jean, even though the publication was listed incorrectly… As to the whole issue of spurious criticism and tired, sensation-seeking books about 'fascinating personalities' who reportedly behave in a larger than life, bold or 'bohemian' manner, we've surely had enough of them: save the trees, for heavens' sake!

Polish And Hungarian Movies

2010-09-05T14:50:00.000-07:00

We caught up with a couple more Second Run dvds of Central European movies, both Cannes Special Jury prizewinners: the Polish Mother Joan Of The Angels (d. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1961) and the Hungarian Diary For My Children (d. Márta Mészáros, 1984). What else do these have in common, apart from their powerful originality, terrific B&W photography and excellent acting? Well, they're both about ideology and dogma : religious superstition and sexual repression in the former film, political corruption and state control in the latter. Of course both directors therefore incurred suspicion and criticism within their respective countries, losing work and opportunities as a result. Both were married to actors and directors, after training at film schools; progressing from editing and writing scripts to direction, they became highly professional and original filmmakers.

Based loosely on the French 1634 Loudun 'possession' case, MJOTA is appropriately intense and claustrophobic and far more worthwhile than the often risible Ken Russell flick from the 1970s. Kawalerowicz died in his eighties, a few years ago, and is now largely forgotten, his other films currently out of circulation. Mészáros's Diary is highly autobiographical, and has been called "an unusually graphic picture of Hungarian political, cultural and social life in the late 1940s". Both films, dealing as they do with eras 300 years apart, offer grim yet convincing, almost coldly-observed perspectives on gullibility and fanaticism. Not feelgood entertainment by any means, but still very relevant and provocative today. (Think Papal visits, holy hypocrisy, personality cults, self-serving memoirs by corrupt politicians, etc!)

Another European Gem

2010-08-30T04:13:00.000-07:00

Catching up with more impressive European cinema, this time the Austrian film Revanche. This dates from 2007, and was made by a director new to me, Götz Spielmann. I learned that it beat Haneke's White Ribbon and Audiard's A Prophet to the Foreign Language Oscars a while back, so you can guess the quality! At several minutes under 2 hours, there isn't a shot wasted, whereas it must be said that its main rivals that year were both rather too long, and compared to Revanche both seemed almost ponderous. This highly original, shocking and yet understated thriller feels rather Bressonian (than which there's hardly higher praise) in its spare, concentrated and unrelenting way. The performances seem less like acting than existing-on-the-screen; the motivations are entirely believable; the twists-and-turns of the plot are unpredictable but inevitable. Shots are held for just as long as they need to be, and the editing is terrific. The film grips and involves from start to finish: it's provocative, moving and highly recommended. Another excellent (2010) dvd release from the now long-established distribution outfit Artificial Eye.

Second Runs indeed!

2010-08-20T07:31:00.000-07:00

Some amazing films from Central Europe 1969-71 – once banned for a whole generation, then hailed and garlanded with praise and prizes post-1989 – have resurfaced during the new millennium as DVDs. These, along with fine extras, booklets, commentaries and interviews, stem from a company called Second Run, which should be congratulated and supported.

Two Czech gems, first of all. Jan Nemec's terrific debut Diamonds of the Night (1964). WW2 with a pair of young men escaping from a deportation train. Gritty B&W cinematography and a physically gruelling yet hallucinatory experience throughout its very economical running time. Nemec was only 28, and his career suffered badly after the 1968 Soviet invasion. He was allowed to leave, to France in 1974, had a difficult period there and went to the USA – since when, apart from a credit as consultant on The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, his career unfortunately seems to have almost petered out.

The Ear (Ucho) (1970) by an older film maker Karel Kachyna, is if anything even more harrowing and technically accomplished. This is a ferocious masterpiece (think of one of Ingmar Bergman's dissections of a marriage, plus a strong anti-totalitarian theme!) Time Out called it "by far the best of the Czech movies banned when Dubcek was toppled in 1969… the bitterest and most scathing account of what it takes to get ahead in a Communist bureaucracy." It's also one of the earliest but still most frightening, concise and creepily effective films about bugging: by comparison, movies like The Conversation and The Lives Of Others seem unconvincing commercial compromises that use well-known actors and reach neatly reassuring middle-of-the road conclusions. Kachyna (1924-2004) stayed in Czechoslovakia, despite this, his best work, being banned until after the Velvet Revolution, 20 years later. He then got his old job back at Prague Film Academy and made features and TV films till his death, though never with the force, assurance or eventual success of The Ear, which like Nemec's film belatedly won prizes at festivals here and there when it resurfaced…

A few excellent Czech filmmakers such as Jiri Menzel of Closely Observed Trains also stayed put, experiencing many difficult years of state disapproval, limbo and/or censorship; others, like Forman and Passer, took off via France and New York and ended up in Hollywood, with varying degrees of success. Best of all their emigré products is perhaps the finest film Ivan Passer ever directed, a poignant and gripping thriller called Cutter's Way (1981). It's adapted from a neglected noir classic, Newton Thornburg's novel Cutter And Bone: both film and book are highly recommended and both have stood the test of time, like all the works mentioned above.

Last but by no means least, the Polish director Andrzej Zulawski's stunning debut, an original masterpiece from 1971, The Third Part Of The Night. In superb colour, and with some quite extraordinary handheld camerawork (which incidentally, doesn't give you a headache, despite the fact that there was no steadicam then, and cameras weighed a ton!), this is a terrifying and terrific piece of work. Supervised by the great Andrzej Wajda – who had supported and worked with so many contemporaries and younger colleagues from the famous Lodz film school, Polanski, Munk, etc – TTPOTN seems hallucinatory enough, but is actually almost documentary to the core. In fact, this film, co-written by Zulawski and his father Miroslaw, is closely based on the latter's horrific wartime experiences. (Certain sequences involving lice, for instance, are not for the squeamish: if Lautréamont were a filmmaker alive today, this section of the film, and its apocalyptic, anti-authoritarian, sardonic tone would surely have appealed to him!) But it seems that Zulawski, born in the 1940s and thus the youngest of these three masterly Central European film directors, then ran into career problems similar to those encountered by most of the other filmmakers mentioned above. By all accounts he has never quite matched this first, shattering classic. He too moved to Paris and continues to make films there. I've ordered a copy of Possession (1981) his horror movie featuring Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill and Fassbinder's Margit Carstensen, and shall expect some effective grand guignol gruesomeness, even if it can't rival his brilliant early achievement.

We watched these three superb works recently, having borrowed them from our excellent city Library. So, little Cleggerons and Camerleggs, whichever ambitious and uninformed bureaucrat within your fudging "coalition" is charged with cutting supposedly expensive luxuries – those perceived as soft targets (eg. literature and the performing arts) – kindly do not chop, or further squeeze, funding for the UK's hitherto wonderful public libraries! And on the subject of libraries and library borrowing, why be so miserably stingy year by year with Public Lending Right? If, in times of such austerity, the UK can still afford to finance distant, interminable and pointless wars, and to pour money into really useful and/or deprived areas like Trident, banker's bonuses, and the Pope's forthcoming visit, then why should books and films – so much less destructive and more enjoyable – miss out?

Politicians And Significant Others

2010-07-12T03:44:00.000-07:00

Both of us snailed and emailed letters – to our recently re-elected New Labourite MP Ben Bradshaw and to new Deputy PM Libdem Nick Clegg. And we both subsequently received two-page, very nearly identical replies, electronic and hardcopy! How interesting that this 'form-letter' or official handout statement, or whatever one can call such a fudging, bland piece of hypocritical guff, should be the 'official' cross-party, Whitehall line on… guess what? The IDF's brutality toward the Palestinians and against anyone trying to bring humanitarian aid to refugees, of course!

Never mind the killings and ill-treatment of those on board the recent flotilla headed for Gaza, never mind the continuing illegality of Israel's occupation-annexation of the so-called Holy Land, international critics can continue to be ignored and/or conveniently dismissed as antisemitic, if there is even a whisper of protest against Zionist attacks on defenceless civilians.

As to the vicious racism and destruction involved, I can recommend Ben White's extraordinary and illuminating book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide. Anyone interested in the Middle East and indeed in the future of world peace should read it! A review of the book originally caught my eye when I saw it in that fearless and provocative publication The Spokesman, founded by Bertrand Russell. Its distinguished editor for many years, Ken Coates, died only a couple of weeks ago. He will be remembered with considerable affection and respect by those who never actually met him, among them myself. I've contributed (haiku) to the magazine for some years and have been reading it for longer. I did correspond with Ken though: as with his writings in general, even his briefest communications radiated humour, compassion, dislike of lies and injustice, and an outspoken honesty. The decent, uncompromising and uncompromised Left will miss him greatly.

Berlin and on

2010-07-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

A wonderful swelteringly hot week in Berlin a month ago. Our artist friends' flat in Friedrichshain, in the former East, overlooks a big tree-lined square, on which there are two huge markets every week. Cafés, bars and excellent small restaurants surround the square itself, the streets are cobbled, and there are more bikes, tattoos and original outfits to be seen than anywhere else I've been in the last twenty years. Art galleries, craft shops, studios abound – mostly friendly and unpretentious: in the best sense, its a cheap and cheerful area, as is the city as a whole (about half the price of living in London, and the UK generally!) As for the exhibitions and museums, these were wonderful, and given our limited time and energy, we had to pick and choose carefully. No question about our two top favourites, however: the largest show of Frida Kahlo's work ever assembled, on at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, and well worth an hour's queuing to get in. And the Käthe Kollwitz house and museum. Wonderful gutsy leftwing women and great artists both, by any standards. Also, elsewhere, in a couple of mixed exhibitions of well-known 2oth century names (Gabo, Dix, Beckmann, Grosz, Heartfield etc) we discovered a third terrific woman artist, whose life-span was almost exactly the same as dear Jean Rhys's: this was Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976), well worth checking out.

Catching Up

2010-05-31T16:04:00.000-07:00

Why haven't I blogged since last December?! Well, real life as opposed to screen-life caught up with me, I turned 70 in January and enjoyed a terrific party (about 80 people in a small house) organised for me by dear Maggie. She also completely surprised me with a wonderful festschrift cum birthday book to which 40 friends old and new contributed: this she produced brilliantly, in around 3-4 weeks just before xmas '09, with invaluable aid from the indefatigable Francophile and techno-wiz Ken Clay, editor of the wonderful Crazy Oik magazine, and webmeister co-editor of the equally splendid Penniless Press.

All this took quite some time to recover from. Then a couple of extra birthday treats, long- anticipated and early booked in 2009 – for January (Lisbon) and April (St Petersburg) – never got off the ground (thanks to snow and volcanic ash respectively). These unavoidable cancellations resulted both times in unexpected but delightful stays in London, with M and I ligging around, seeing various friends, exhibitions etc and enjoying some unplanned and very pleasant times.

Since then, a stream of visitors to Exeter from France, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere, have made for a highly social year, all of which excitement hasn't prevented my writing quite a few new poems. A sizeable pamphlet of new haiku will come next, written since Haiku Of Five Decades last year, while a further full collection covering the last few years is also ready.

Less happily, quite a few friends, relatives and acquaintances have died during these last few months and various others are being treated for serious illnesses. (New Year resolutions to drink less and walk more, kept sporadically: seize the time is more like it!) But the year had begun dismally with massacres in Gaza; now, as May turns to June, the IDF has just attacked the convoy of peace ships, the international flotilla attempting to bring humanitarian aid and supplies to an area that has so long been suffering under Zionist blockade. Deaths and more suffering are the inevitable result, and the Israelis don't seem to realise or care that their illegal occupation and cruel bullying tactics continue to lose them the goodwill of most of the rest of the world. On which sombre note I'll close: I've signed petitions, written to Messrs Clegg, Hague and others, but verbal tut-tutting is not enough. What else can be done? BDS for a start – Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions – yet have our (or any) politicians the guts to demand or organise such action against Israel? I doubt it, though similar moves helped bring an end to apartheid in South Africa. Meanwhile we must all protest and hope brute force does not in the long run prevail.

horrifying movies and horrible errors

2009-12-11T11:02:00.000-08:00

A friend from our King's College Cambridge days, who later became an eminent Professor of Psychology, recently sent me a dvd of M R James's finest ghost story, Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad. This was made for BBC tv in the 1960s (minus the first and last 2 words of the original title), filmed quite beautifully at that, in monochrome and presumably on a minimal budget, by yet another Cambridge alumnus, Jonathan Miller. It's short, only 50 minutes or so, but a terrific performance by Michael Hordern is central to the film, which manages to be creepy, poetic, imaginatively suspenseful, psychologically fascinating and true to its original source. Dr Miller, before he turned into the portentous panjandrum of latter years, must have grown sick of being lauded for Beyond The Fringe and this marvellous little film… But those were after all perfect achievements of a high order, unusually provocative entertainments at their best. So it was good to see the film again after so long, and to realise that over two generations later it hadn't dated one iota – crisp and creepy as ever: thanks for sending it, Dr Halliday!

Contrast this minor classic with a "major movie" such as The Shining, which I also saw again the other day. Inflated budget and length, very high-tech for its day, boasting a riveting if outrageously over the top central performance from Jack Nicholson, in full colour, full volume all the way… And yet by the end, how disappointing, even boring. Certainly unsatisfactory and short on shock, with every gory episode overdone and underlined. Stanley Kubrick now seems a rather overrated director, apart from his earlier monochrome, low-budget movies, Killer's Kiss, The Killing and Paths of Glory. These, though derivative in various respects, all packed a punch and showed imagination alongside the hysteria and violence depicted. High quality black and white photography and youthful energy won the day. Money, attention to detail and stars and gloss can't rescue The Shining from being something of a horrid mess – as were Kubrick's later films, for the most part. But those early, less pretentious works should be enjoyed and remembered however, along with the grotesque fantasy Dr Strangelove. He also offered some friendly support and encouragement to genuine talents like Stuart (Overlord) Cooper and Kevin Brownlow during their own youthful directorial struggles: Stanley K. seems to have been, by different accounts, either a warmly generous, meticulous craftsman or a coldly dictatorial, eccentric obsessive. But then perhaps nearly all the most individual filmmakers display a wild and weird mixture of divergent and/or extreme character traits?

two kinds of reading

2009-12-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

Last week, 3rd December, I did a 2nd launch of Haiku Of Five Decades at Joel Segal's excellent secondhand bookshop in the high street of Topsham, that very attractive if somewhat dormitorial estuary suburb of Exeter. This proved very enjoyable, and though the rain was lashing down (it's rained almost every day and night this month, so far!) about 40 people showed up during the evening and quite a few bought quite a few books. Good to see some old friends among the new faces, some of whom hadn't been able to get to the earlier event in mid-October. And I managed to confirm what my late poet friend Patricia Beer, a stickler for proper West Country pronunciation, once told me years ago, that it's "Tops-Ham" not "Topshum"!

As for the second kind of reading, the kind one does by and for and to oneself, I caught up recently with Edward W. Said's last and alas posthumously published book, On Late Style. This wonderful collection of essays on music and literature, is as stimulating, wise and concise as you'd expect from such a prolific, perceptive and committed writer. The concept of 'lateness' in art that Said tries to define and describe includes the likes of Richard Strauss, Glenn Gould, Jean Genet, Cavafy, Adorno, Beethoven, Mozart, Visconti, Lampedusa and others. Said, as Palestinian, polymath and insightful cultural critic, was a truly impressive figure who will be much missed. This unusual book is part of an enduring and properly provocative testament: highly recommended!

politics and film

2009-11-27T08:58:00.000-08:00

I was bewildered today (Friday 27th Nov) to hear several mentions on Radio 4 and the World Service of "the Israeli-led blockade [sic] of Gaza". Dare one ask precisely who is 'following' where the Israelis lead? Seems like it's the BBC!

But enough on corrupt politics, dodgy reporting and rhetoric, and the manifest abuses of power: let's have far more political honesty, humanism and cinematic artistry. In these last three areas a couple of previously rare, quite brilliant screen gems by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo are now available in painstakingly restored copies on DVD, along with some witty and revealing interviews. The two films in question are It Happened Here (1956-64, not released till 1966)) and Winstanley (1975) With beautiful black and white cinematography, and movingly acted, for the most part by non-professionals, both films reflect the idealism, energy and youthful enthusiasm of their makers. Yet it's amazing that either was made at all: what with minuscule budgets, low or no salaries, and meticulous, authentic period-design (for the 1940s and 1640s respectively), and filming always on location and generally part-time! Indeed, it's clear that their making involved a quasi-fanatical commitment and obsessive determination against the odds. As to the dramatic subject matter of these films, whose own production histories are as extraordinary and fascinating as the violent eras of upheaval they deal with, I'll say no more here except to urge everyone to make the effort to see them. They surely rank with the best and most poetic British cinema of the past 50 years, alongside the work of such creative, independent spirits as Bill Douglas and Terence Davies.

Also recommended are Kevin Brownlow's memoir, How It Happened Here (1968), recently reissued, and his masterly personal chronicle of the silent screen, The Parade's Gone By (1968). The former relates how the 18 year old Brownlow came to make his highly original first feature and what happened to it. The latter book, a monumental and impeccably researched work containing unique stills and interviews with all sorts of stalwarts of the silent movies, from stars to stand-ins and technicians, belongs in every filmlover's library. I remember reading the MS. for a publisher in the late 1960s: despite my most enthusiastic recommendation, I couldn't persuade that particular firm to publish Kevin's manuscript. No, it was 'uncommercial', 'too long', 'too limited in appeal', etc… Luckily a rival firm soon snapped up this wonderful book, which has remained in print ever since and taken its rightful place as one of a handful of indispensable accounts of the pioneers of cinema.

Different Journeys

2009-11-26T09:49:00.000-08:00

Maggie's back from olive-picking in the scorching heat (for her adventures and impressions of life on the West Bank, you'll need to read her own detailed and excellent blog, http://magssjournal.blogspot.com/, it's much more interesting than mine, and convinces me I must go out there with her next time, next year.

While she was away I did catch up with quite a bit of reading, though, and can particularly recommend Hans Fallada's wonderful novel Little Man, What Now? This dates from 1932, and is a chilling and quite fascinating account of an ordinary young couple's struggles to survive in Germany with the deutschmark worth almost nothing and Nazism on the rise. Fallada (1893-1947) was a great social realist writer with terrific storytelling ability. The other 2 novels of his that I'd previously read, still more gripping – and even better translated, by the redoubtable John Willett and Michael Hofmann respectively – are The Drinker and Alone In Berlin. Quite extreme and extraordinary, like 'Fallada's' own life! I'd eagerly read anything else available in English by this German author, which means for me he's in the class of Joseph Roth, Brecht and B.Traven…

Picked up a mint and clearly unread copy for 50p in a local charity shop, of Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility Of An Island, his latest, longest and most savagely satirical novel. I think he's my favourite contemporary French novelist: this is no letdown and pulls no punches. It's sharp and funny and scathing about the world and all of us in it. I think he hates and despises religion and bogus belief-systems (including the media and consumer society) as much as I do, so I could even forgive him a couple of passing swipes at 2 of my heroes, Joyce and Nabokov! Houellebecq clearly loves causing offence and tackling the most potentially painful and/or universally sensitive issues, such as sex, aging and death, and good luck to him, for he'll need it if he carries on as grimly, hilariously and outrageously as this, and doesn't drink himself into oblivion first.

As for film, Peter Strickland's exciting debut Katalin Varga is simply unmissable. The best new British indie work in years, made on a shoestring (a thirty thousand quid legacy), subtitled (it's in Romanian and Hungarian), and beautifully shot and acted in some of the most stunning areas of Transylvania. It's the cinematic equivalent of a page-turner like those mentioned above, and is guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat. Thanks, Mr Strickland, you're quite an auteur, and I hope you can get funding to make more movies: those pupils of yours at your Reading school are lucky indeed to have a teacher like you, but everyone who's seen your film will also be hoping that you don't have to stay there for too much longer.

A Religious Rant

2009-10-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

I'm looking forward to Maggie's return tomorrow and to hearing in detail about her trip helping Palestinian farmers with their olive harvest: the aggressive Zionist settlers and the IDF bully and brutalize their victims daily to an almost incredible level of hostility, a murderous fanaticism. Ah if only we could simply do away with religion, all religions, and just behave towards each other like decent human beings and partners on this earth – sharing it and caring for it, not stealing and destroying it!

But hey, all's OK in the UK, for C of E parson-persons can now turn RC and happily bow down to His Holiness the Blessed Krautpope Ben Ratzinger: it seems the absurd and bumbling Rowan The Beard, Archbish of Cant, was unprepared for this recent slippery-popery manoeuvre. Maybe St Tony, with his uncanny gift for following the real power and money, guilt-free at that – he himself a man who managed the conversion bit (or crossover bid) a while back – might have tipped Williams the wink? So much for current Christian 'unity': yet nearly all the other cults and sects, the heresies and -isms and schisms, are as ridiculous and/or abhorrent. Such silly gibberish, promoted by 57 different varieties of men in skirts, does at least advance the world's necessary move towards a rational and humane atheism: let's hope common sense prevails soonest.

2009-10-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

For the last few days I've been a 'grass widower'. Odd term, that, which the Rev Ebenezer Brewer will doubtless clear up for me when I look it up in his amazing Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable. (I tend not to google such things but prefer to look em up in my own more than adeqate library, inveterate bookman that I am…)

So, left to my own devices, I've been getting round finally to reading various books piled up on my shelves, including J. G. Ballard's last fiction, Kingdom Come. I'm two thirds of the way through, and it seems to me he remained on absolutely cracking form. (The very last book, his poignant memoir, Miracles Of Life, is a quite superb swansong.) I've read almost all Jim's books now, in the order they appeared, more or less, and consider him a true original, one of the most readable and significant English language authors of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Way back during the paperback boom of the 1960s we were both published by the wonderful Panther Books, and had several convivial meetings, thanks to a couple of editors there. He signed my copy of his 1967 book The Disaster Area thus: Alexis, From one disaster area to another, Jim. A friendly and humorous man whose work had both style and substance. I wish we'd met again and/or corresponded more than very occasionally over the years. But I was pleased to have introduced Jim, via my first book about her, to the work of Jean Rhys, whom he said he intended to read 'Pronto'. This was nine years ago now. A few weeks back, I heard his quietly ironic, slightly drawling voice again – extracts from various old radio interviews: it only served to remind one what a fine and prescient writer we'd lost.

Haikus launched

2009-10-15T10:33:00.000-07:00

I'm never quite sure about the plural, should it be haikai? But that word does look a bit too unfamiliar if not over-pedantic for English readers! At any rate, the book was launched very successfully. Exeter Picturehouse bar is an ideal and friendly venue, PA system and all, and through the evening about 60 people turned up (lovely to see all you excellent people, the cream of Exe intelligentsia?!) Lots of books sold, and I was particularly pleased to see the fine photographer Ed Hughes, who provided that great monochrome cover image. We'd never met previously, just corresponded via email. Ed's photo, taken looking out of a ruined house in Balaclava, Crimea, is stunning and perfect for the book: much appreciated, while the whole production seems to have found favour generally. We plan to repeat the gig at a different Devon venue in early December. Watch this space!

Checking Out The Daily Mail!

2009-10-11T05:12:00.000-07:00

Eh? Ken Clay might raise an eyebrow here, the DM's not my usual read, but its front pages (10 Oct) covered the 'Iraq Service of Remembrance 2003-9', starring our gracious Monarch and the Archbish of Cant. Stealing the show though was St Tony – raddled-looking in closeup. He was rightly rebuffed by Paul Brierley, one irate bereaved father he'd thoughtlessly offered to shake hands with. Blah was told angrily that he had blood on his hands. The somewhat bewildered war criminal is an outstandingly thickskinned creature, but Bliar's insensitivity and vanity know no bounds, it seems. He'd even autographed the Form of Service, as if it were some Mourner's Menu or Celeb Carte du Jour. Some crass christianity in action here. The EU if it's 'headed up' by Blare will surely lose global goodwill and credibility.

My own rants in Unholy Empires re this sanctimonious crook were justifiably satirical, I thought, but as for Phony Tony, murderous millionaire and purveyor of Middle East peace, this unimpeachable truthteller and man of Phaith has now ascended beyond mere satire and into the sublime reaches of Celestial Surreality.

plug for Trevor!

2009-10-10T04:46:00.000-07:00

Went to Trevor Hamilton's book launch at Topsham yesterday. He's written an interesting book on FWH Myers, yet another Victorian oddball, wealthy eccentric, explorer of the paranormal, spiritualism etc. Myers was also in his day a well-regarded poet and philosopher. Trevor has done some amazing research and writes well so I'm looking forward to reading this (beautifully produced and illustrated) book, Immortal Longings. It's definitely the sort of thing Fortean Times devotees would enjoy.

Haiku book launch - stills and moving images

2009-10-06T10:13:00.000-07:00

new collection, Haiku Of Five Decades, is being launched at Exeter Picturehouse on Monday evening 12 Oct from 7-9. I'll be doing a short reading at about 8. if you haven't already received your invitation, please come! and a big thank you to Ed Hughes for his superb black and white photographic image which he's let us use for the book cover.

talking of Exeter Picturehouse, yesterday saw there Andrea Arnold's terrific new film, Fish Tank. she's quite a talent and a young one at that. anyone who hasn't seen her first prizewinning film Red Road should catch up with it soonest - it's on DVD.

Spain and writers

2009-09-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

Just back from the Costa del Concrete. a shock after an absence of 47 years. Churriana, once a tiny village from which one could walk a couple of miles to a deserted beach, is now all part of the urban sprawl. Then it was Gerald Brenan's home and I used to talk to him daily over a few months. We went to the same dreadful public school 50 years apart during which time nothing had changed - beatings, cold baths etc. He told me the trenches in WWI were easier to deal with. For anyone who doesn't know his books, South From Granada and The Face Of Spain are musts. As is The Spanish Temper by his friend VS Pritchett. Earlier than these classics, go back to Borrow and Richard Ford. For a brilliant contemporary novel about the aftermath of the civil war, read Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas and of course Pan's Labyrinth is a properly 'fantastic' film in all senses.

philosophic musing

2009-09-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

Blog Jam

I won't be somebody who tweets and twitters:

all word-lovers avoid the verbal squitters.

new collection

2009-09-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

have been proofing new collection - Haiku Of Five Decades - always a gruelling process! hope to get proofs to the printer in the next couple of days. book will be launched in Exeter on 12 Oct. more details later.

new website

2009-09-02T02:56:00.000-07:00

thanks to the know-how and enthusiasm of Ken Clay, I've got a new and improved website. I'll be adding more articles to it so the site will be a sort of archive. hope you like it!