Wednesday 25 May 2011

An old favourite resurfaces

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.

Thursday 5 May 2011

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

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!

Monday 2 May 2011

Movie treats, bread and circuses

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!