roland barfs film diary week 31

chungking express, king vidor's the crowd, brokeback mountain, two by alan clarke (elephant & christine)

July 26. Monday. I’m not in work; it’s still warm. I potter about, do some reading. I realise that, despite myself, the week before might have been one of my most productive weeks for a long time. Today I’m tired and I don’t really achieve anything. I spend some time outdoors, trying to shake off a lingering feeling of mildly paranoid anxiety which I can’t quite figure out. It passes, and then comes back. In the early evening L and I meet Kate and Catherine at Showroom to watch Chungking Express (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 1994). I guess I’ve seen Chungking Express two or three times before, though never in a cinema. This screening is part of the Wong Kar-wai season at Showroom, which is showing all the 4K restorations of his work, overseen by Wong himself. I remember some screenshots for these films appearing a while ago and a bunch of people being really pissed off by the colour correction on Fallen Angels; I read the statement Wong put out about the restorations, in which he says he saw this as an opportunity to make ‘the most vivid versions’ of these films, and that these restorations should be understood as different films from the iterations people might remember from watching in ‘unideal’ exhibition spaces, or on low-quality downloads seen on a laptop, or whatever. I don’t really care about the technical details of restorations, and I have no interest in whether something is in 4K or not, but I do like that a lot of people got upset with Wong about these, and he just said, well, sucks for you, they’re my films. Anyway, Chungking Express is great and it’s really good to see it in a cinema. I don’t know when I last watched it, maybe about five years ago, so I have a sense of the film—it feels familiar—but the details or the order of events are not too clear in my mind. Wong is an extremely stylish filmmaker, using a very idiosyncratic set of visual and sonic techniques to create films in which the vibe does more work than anything like plot or narrative. In Chungking Express dialogue and script feel very much like they’re in the service of mood, rather than exegesis. It’s nice. It’s also, perhaps unsurprisingly, an extremely 90s film: the shot in which Tony Leung drinks a cup of coffee in slow motion, while Faye Wong looks at him, while an out-of-focus crowd moves rapidly past him in the foreground of the shot, while ‘Dreams’ by the Cranberries plays especially feels like it contains every aesthetic idea from the entire decade. To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve got very much to say about Wong Kar-wai. I like his films a lot when I see them, but I don’t really tend to think about them very much when I’m not watching them. I dunno. I feel like there’s probably plenty to say about them, but someone else can say it. I enjoy watching Chungking Express at Showroom on a Monday night. Maybe I start to find the use of ‘California Dreamin’ a little grating in the second half, but whatever. I feel like everyone who is kind of interested in film has seen the work of Wong Kar-wai. During this experience I observe in myself a very particular pleasure that I get from watching a film made in Hong Kong, and I try to remember that I should watch more Chinese and Taiwanese cinema, because it often evokes a particular feeling in me which I would like to examine more. But I’m not going to do that now; maybe I’ll do it as I watch more of the Wong Kar-wai restorations, or maybe I’ll continue to have nothing to say about them. That’s the kind of incisive film writing you get with the Roland Barfs Film Diary.

July 28. Wednesday. Thunderstorms. I’m not in work today, but I still spend a lot of the day trying to navigate work-related questions. I spend the day predominantly in the flat. It’s the 227th anniversary of Robespierre’s execution, 10 Thermidor Year II, so I start reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. L gets a notification from Track & Trace telling her she has to stay inside until next Tuesday. At some point in the afternoon I find myself watching The Crowd (dir. King Vidor, 1928). I have struggled to find a good quality version of this for a while, but after reading a lengthy and pedantic thread on the forum of a torrent tracker, learn that there’s a 720p version with a fairly quote-unquote authentic score available to stream for free over at Arte, which is only slightly marred by some unsightly proprietary letterboxing. Usually I’m not that bothered by this kind of thing and will quite happily watch anything in whatever shitty rip I can get hold of, but I accept that because The Crowd is a silent film, I will need it to look as good as possible for me to actually give it the attention it deserves. And I’m glad I did hold out for a good quality version, because The Crowd is a really wonderful film, a work of beautiful sentimental humanism, probably on a par with Vigo’s L’Atalante—which is high praise from me. The Crowd is the story of Johnny Sims, an average guy who moves to New York City when he’s 21, filled with his father’s sense that he could become anything he wants—something great, surely; President of the United States of America, even. He finds himself a clerk in an enormous anonymous office (filmed with a mise-en-scène that anticipates both Welles’ The Trial and Tati’s Playtime) with no prospects for advancement but plenty of misguided ambition and faith in his unique ability. He gets married, laughs and argues with his wife, faces the disapproval of his in-laws, has kids, experiences ups and downs, ends up quitting his job and wandering through a period of dissatisfied unemployment, encounters loss and joy and frustration and despair. He lives a life which, while Vidor’s focus is on him, feels as rich and as complex as any other life shown on film—a life which, as the film ends, and the camera pans out and away from his laughing face, is revealed to be one of countless other lives happening in the city. The Crowd is one of the great films of urban modernity, a film about the anonymity of the city. It brings to mind a lot of comparisons: Hawthorne’s ‘Wakefield’, a story about a man who walks out of his front door one day and disappears from his family’s life for decades by moving around the corner; the end of Middlemarch—the ‘unhistoric acts’ of ‘the number who lived faithfully a hidden life’; Whitman’s love of the crowd; Manahatta, the cinematic abstraction of New York by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. I think it would be very fruitful to compare The Crowd to Man With a Movie Camera: more or less contemporaneous, both deeply infatuated with the capacity of the film camera to depict everyday life and the metropolis—one insisting on the deep importance of individual, who has to struggle against a world which depends compliance from him at all times; the other deeply concerned with creating a society in which everyone can live to their full potential in order to develop the capacities of the whole. I’m surprised by how good The Crowd is, to be honest: I was expecting it to be just a pretty nice silent film, with some nice shots of skyscrapers, but I find it very compelling, and actually pretty moving. It was my first King Vidor experience; definitely won’t be my last.

July 31. Saturday. It’s overcast and damp and cold. The night before I went to Kate’s birthday party—my first larger social event for some time. I had a nice time. This morning I’m a little hungover and tired. I wake to a text asking me to go into work to cover a double shift, which I decline. I spend much of the day lying around feeling lethargic. I read about two-thirds of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I think about getting around to some edits but decide I can’t really be bothered. In the evening L and I eat some chips and then watch Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee, 2005). I haven’t seen this for years—perhaps since 2005. I remember very clearly seeing it at the Majestic Cinema in Bridgnorth with my grandparents. I think I’ve written about this experience a few times for one reason or another; it is a trip to the cinema that has a strange kind of significance for me, which I can’t quite figure out. I suppose I was 15 when Brokeback Mountain was in cinemas, and perhaps I hadn’t really watched many serious adult dramas before—let alone serious adult dramas about repressed feelings and same-sex desire. I don’t know that seeing Brokeback Mountain had a particularly immediate impact on me or my relationship to film-watching, but I still find myself thinking about the experience a lot; it has taken on some importance which I can’t quite work out. Anyway, it’s nice to rewatch it. It’s pretty good, an archetypal 2000s blockbuster. This time I’m more attuned to some of the references: The Hired Hand, Midnight Cowboy, and I can see the hand of Larry McMurty on the screenplay. In his review from when it came out J. Hoberman said that Brokeback Mountain is “less a movie than a chunk of American landscape,” and the cinematography really does relish the enormous sublimity and beauty of the empty middle of nowhere they’ve got over there. This expansiveness is used very deftly to make the claustrophobia of the protagonists’ closeted life feel even more repressive: it’s only out in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere that they can try to express their love openly, but even there they carry the weight of society inside them. There’s a frustrated Romanticism at work here; the same frustrated Romanticism that runs through the entire genre of the Western. The dynamic between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal works well, but watching this in 2021 is a reminder of the hole that Heath Ledger’s death has left in the roster of Hollywood hunks: his performance easily outstrips Gyllenhaal, in part because he’s allowed more complexity and agonised repression, in part because Ledger’s reticence is a very effective and compelling way of communicating the prison-house of social convention. Of course, if Ledger was still alive today he’d be more than fully absorbed into the Disney Superhero Cinematic Complex, since he’d already gone that way in his penultimate work with Nolan, and I’m sure he’d just be another jobbing actor making snarky quips in lycra. Anyway, I guess Brokeback Mountain was slightly shocking when it came out and I suppose it really opened the door for mainstream depictions of same-sex desire in huge budget Hollywood films. Watching it now, it feels extremely tasteful in its teary-eyed melancholy and feels like it’s concerned with a kind of respectability that feels quite murky—there’s a kind of emotional hygiene to the film that’s missing from Midnight Cowboy. But it’s Ang Lee, so what do you expect? It’s an impressive, well-made, elegant piece of filmmaking, which earns the acclaim it has. I feel like surely everyone has seen Brokeback Mountain at some point, but maybe not for years. It’s a little baggy in the runtime perhaps: could have been a round 100 minutes, rather than 135. But that’s OK. It’s all OK. Solid movie, has aged well, inescapably important for various reasons, some perhaps more meritorious than others.

August 1. Sunday. Another gloomy day. I get some more edits back on an essay; I open the email, skim-read it, don’t download the attachment and then try to put it out of my mind. I finish reading Tayeb Salih. I write a bit of this diary. I buy some stuff I don’t need on eBay: a miscellaneous collection of very small studio pottery bud vases and a 1992 Ian Hamilton Finlay exhibition poster. I spend some time thinking I should watch a film for the sake of the diary but I can’t decide on what to watch; I waste half an hour clicking variously on Letterboxd. At some point mid-afternoon I find myself watching Elephant (dir. Alan Clarke, 1989), which I then follow immediately with Christine (dir. Alan Clarke, 1987). I’ve only seen one other Alan Clarke film: Road, which I watched in February and which I thought was very good. Elephant and Christine are also both very good too. Alan Clarke is an intense filmmaker, who takes something of the tone of social realism and strips back the style as far as possible, relying on just a couple of techniques—predominantly long Steadicam tracking shots of people walking around fairly miserable suburbs. There is little narrative cohesion, little dialogue, no plot to speak of here, no character development. Elephant is a film about sectarian murders in Northern Ireland, and consists of a series of 18 of these long walking shots, in which men silently and unexpectedly shoot other men in broad daylight. There are about three lines of dialogue in the whole forty minute work. I’m sure you’re all probably aware Gus Van Sant made a film called Elephant in 2003 about the Columbine School Shooting, which is a highly derivative homage to Clarke’s film, using exactly the same toolbox of aesthetic tricks. I’ve not seen Van Sant’s Elephant for a long time, but I can’t imagine it having the compressed power of Clarke’s work. Elephant makes me feel very uncomfortable mostly because of how quickly I feel desensitised to the violence on display: I knew what to expect before I start watching it, but I still find the first few murders to be quite intense and horrible. And then I start to zone out a little, and I find myself focusing more on the bleak landscapes, interior design, architecture, which creates an atmosphere of damp, sordid, lightly polluted misery. And then I catch myself thinking about the environment of the film, rather than the murders unfolding one after another in front of me, and I feel like a sharp point about the mediation of violence has been effectively made. Then I watch Christine, which is a film about English adolescents shooting up heroin in the suburbs, nodding out on their parents’ floral sofas in the mid-afternoon while they’re home alone. Christine walks around to various friends’ houses, selling some heroin to support her own use, not dealing in a very serious way. It’s completely routine and unshocking: the mundane, boring, habitual side of drug addiction, complete with a kind of background nausea which is enhanced by watching it on a woozy and low-quality VHS rip that I got from some illicit corner of the internet. Again, it’s a very effective film: grim, bleak, sordid, grubby. But it also feels very weirdly normal; the conversation is not about heroin, it’s about borrowing records for a party, or about someone who just got a job in IT in Torquay. It’s about addiction as a quiet hum in the background of everyday life, something which is persistent but temporarily forgettable, as long as it’s incorporated into a routine. There’s no sensational Trainspotting-style dope sickness here, just some teenagers feeling a bit ropey in front of the TV after getting some smack out of a biscuit tin. It’s an incredible film, really. I think Elephant is generally better regarded, and I feel like it’s probably more quote-unquote important, but I find myself more absorbed by Christine and its hum-drum depiction of sustained dissolution. A very compelling and strange film. Well worth seeking out.