roland barfs film diary week 6

all the beauty and the bloodshed; variety; underground; don't worry, he won't get far on foot; nighthawks

February 7. Tuesday. I get up at six, which is very unlike me, and meditate for twenty minutes in the dark, which is even less like me. I am trying to become a new person. I drink two cups of coffee and eat a blood orange, and then L and I walk to the train station so we can commute in opposite directions. I get the 8:35am train to Huddersfield for my second day at my new job. I think it’s going pretty well, as far as it’s possible to tell after so little time. I catch the train to Sheffield in the dark, getting back around seven thirty. I go to the Rutland and drink a beer and wait for L, who arrives a little after me. We eat and then go to Showroom for to watch All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (dir. Laura Poitras, 2022). This is a very serviceable documentary about Nan Goldin’s quest to bring down the Sackler family, who spent however many years profiteering from the production of extremely addictive pharmaceuticals and then using large philanthropic donations to major international art galleries and museums in order to launder their reputations. As much as it’s a film about the opioid epidemic and Goldin’s activism as a founding member of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), it’s also a film about her career as an artist and photographer, and how this career has developed within in the context of her personal life and her participation in the Lower Manhattan avant-garde in the 70s and 80s — her adjacency to and friendship with people like David Wojnarowicz, John Waters, Cookie Mueller, and so on. It’s easy to imagine a version of this film which casts Goldin as a heroic figure, which veers towards hagiography, but I think Poitras just about avoids that — Goldin is very likeable, but she often comes across as nervous, edgy, depressed, brittle — never self-congratulatory. And she is extremely open about her background, about her sister’s suicide, the impossible dynamics she experienced in her family as her child, her relationships, her addiction. Before I saw this I was a little skeptical about how meaningful it actually was for the activists to get the Sackler name taken off the walls at museums — how much this is just a kind of PR victory or hollow gesture, since the donations by the Sacklers are still in the museums and the family is still impossibly rich. But having seen the film I can understand why the activists of P.A.I.N. saw it as the victory it is — all other options for redress have been exhausted: the Sackler family has been forced to listen to the testimonies of people who have lost loved ones to OxyContin overdose, no museum will (publicly) accept grants or donations from them (whether they’re doing it behind the scenes or without acknowledgement is another question), and there isn’t really much else that the activists can push for in terms of the family itself. Victories — even hollow ones — are rare in activism like this, so they should take what they can get. I suppose by focusing so much on Goldin as the driving force behind P.A.I.N., the film misses an opportunity to explore the social nature of the protest movement around the opioid epidemic, but it does also acknowledge that Goldin’s name carries a particular weight, since she’s usually represented in the collections of the museums she’s protesting. I guess it also doesn’t really get much into the experience of the opioid epidemic outside of the still comparatively glamourised realm of New York artists going to parties — it doesn’t quite get into the bleak, desperate mundanity of provincial addiction, or the addiction of people who aren’t also world famous artists. But that would be for another film; it’s not really reasonable to complain that the Nan Goldin film is too much about Nan Goldin, and, besides, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed actually makes me like her work more — in the past I’ve never been too interested in it, but hearing her talk about the context a bit more makes it much more compelling. Maybe I thought the film could have lost half an hour or so, here and there, but probably that’s just because I was watching it at the end of a long day and was starting to feel exhausted and impatient. 

February 9. Thursday. I get up early and meditate again. Not sure what, if anything, it’s doing for me, but it makes a change. I eat a blood orange and drink some coffee and read some John Ashbery. I do a little bit of writing in the morning; not very much. I start thinking in earnest about an essay I’ve been putting off thinking about for a couple of months. The day drifts by. I walk up to Broomhill after lunch. I come home and drink some more coffee, and reflect a little on how much coffee I’ve been drinking recently. I go to therapy. I come home. And so on. In the evening L has a bath and I watch Variety (dir. Bette Gordon, 1983). I have wanted to see this for a couple of years; during one of the lockdowns I even started watching it, but gave up after less than five minutes. I had kind of forgotten about it until I watched All the Beauty and the Bloodshed the other day, which features a few extracts from Variety — the scenes in which  Nan Goldin makes an appearance. Where All the Beauty and the Bloodshed reflects on No Wave New York from a distance, Variety is, in part, a document of the moment, featuring collaborations and participation from a bunch of the relevant people: John Lurie did the score, Kathy Acker wrote the script, Cookie Mueller turns up at one point, there are certainly others involved. Christine (Sandy McLeod) gets a job selling tickets at the Variety, a porn cinema in Times Square — Nan Goldin herself tells her about the opportunity in a swimming pool’s changing room. Her only coworker is an usher called José played by a young and Luis Guzmán, who is great. I always like seeing Luis Guzmán. Don’t know why, really. He just seems like a good guy, he has a good presence. Anyway, this new seedy job makes Christine’s boyfriend, a journalist who is working on a story about corruption in the seafood unions, feel uncomfortable. Christine embarks on a strange fixation around one of her customers, a guy who wears a three-piece suit and takes her to a baseball game before suddenly abandoning her. The film takes on the atmosphere of a kind of gender-switched Hitchcockesque psychosexual thriller in the second half, as Christine becomes less uptight and more erotically liberated thanks to her exposure to pornography. I don’t really find the plot very engaging — could do without the psychosexual thriller, really — and I also think Acker’s screenplay is pretty shoddy and doesn’t really give the actors much to work with, but despite these reservations I do quite like Variety. Mostly I like it for the depiction of the grimness of New York in the early 80s, the world of the porn cinemas, echoes of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the shitty bars, the sex work, the boredom. It’s incredibly easy to romanticise life in New York in the 1980s (or, I guess, at any time) as a period of particularly impressive cultural flourishing, and I guess it was, but Variety explores the atmosphere of hollowness, emptiness, dilapidation and tedium too — not unlike After Hours, though that film feels more polished than this does. My favourite scene is one in which Christine is sitting in her apartment, smoking a cigarette while eating ice cream, listening to her answerphone messages from her mother and her increasingly distant boyfriend, before she suddenly gets a very sexually explicit call, which she listens to repeatedly. I’m sure there’s much to be said about Variety’s sexual and gender politics, its relation to the (fe)male gaze, its gendered subversion of genre, and so on, but I’m not going to get into it myself, and I’m sure smarter people have already said plenty about those things. It’s an interesting document, a slightly mixed bag, but with a lot to like about it.

February 10. Friday. I suppose I should be writing, but I’m not. I am really not being very productive these days, but it doesn’t seem to matter very much. Who cares! I just about bring myself to write some of this diary in the morning. I get distracted by reading a PDF of a book about IBM’s role in enabling the Holocaust. I have a driving lesson at lunchtime, but my instructor doesn’t turn up. Or, he does turn up, but his phone isn’t working, so we spend an hour missing each other repeatedly until we eventually find each other. I spend an hour practicing driving in traffic and wonder what I’m doing with my life. In the afternoon I read some of Michael W. Clune’s White Out on my laptop. It’s pretty good. L goes to The Light with Kate and Catherine to watch Titanic in 3D. I do not join them. Instead I drink some wine and watch Underground (dir. Emir Kusturica, 1995), which was commissioned by Nick (thank you Nick). I have really been meaning to get around to watching some Kusturica for a very long time — probably around 15 years or so. I don’t bring this up very often nowadays but before I went to university I spent a summer ‘working’ (i.e. occasionally doing some housework and admin but mostly drinking heavily) at a youth hostel in Budva, a small coastal resort in Montenegro. I was there for six weeks or so, at the end of ambling around the former Yugoslavia and bordering countries. I would often get a bus into Bosnia and Herzegovina or Croatia or Albania or Serbia, the radio playing turbo-folk, where I’d look at buildings with some bullet holes in with all the non-comprehension that can be expected of an eighteen year old who is mostly interested in making a serious start on wrecking his liver. It was a weird summer, which I guess is what I wanted — although, really, it wasn’t that weird, it was a fairly typical kind of extended tourist piss-up which countless British eighteen year olds go on, or went on, I don’t know if they still happen. Most of my peers were more interested in going to Thailand or South America, but the Balkans really sang to me for some reason that I’ve never reflected on much. This is all by the by. People in Montenegro and Serbia kept talking to me about Kusturica, especially Black Cat, White Cat, but I wasn’t really interested in film then — maybe I had some kind of nascent, flickering curiosity about it as a medium but, as I’ve intimated already, my priority was the rakia. So I am pleased to finally have a reason to watch one of Kusturica’s films, and I am even more pleased to find that it is great. At first I feel a little resistant to something in it: the unremitting zaniness, the slapstick, the pacing, the frenetic brass band, but I soon come round to it. For a good while I feel a little unclear on how to ground myself in the film, in terms of the aesthetic points of reference — what does this remind me of? what am I supposed to make of this? — but then a little over two thirds of the way through there’s an appearance from Fassbinder-regular Hark Bohm, and something suddenly clicks. But Kusturica takes certain elements of Fassbinder and rejects others — he replaces Fassbinder’s melodrama with a kind of extended allegory, one that remains open to the polysemous connotations in the idea of ‘the underground’, exploring moments of repression, resistance, crime, betrayal, immorality, morality, heroism, villainy, and so on. The film covers around fifty years of Yugoslavian history — 1941 to 1992 — the Nazi occupation to the nationalist seperatisms and ethnic cleansing that emerged in the decades after Tito’s death — and, behind its anarchic tone and pacing, its buffoonery and bawdiness, ultimately takes up a melancholic position about the repetitions of violence and aggression in the Balkans. And then it kind of shrugs its shoulders and says, ah well, life is hell, let’s get drunk, and the brass band starts playing again. It takes me a while to warm up to it, but by the end I’m kind of astonished by it, and I could have sat through another hour or so (I watched the two hours fifty minutes theatrical release, but apparently there’s a five hour television edit somewhere out there). A really great, eccentric, irritating, smart, occasionally maddening film.

February 11. Saturday. More of the same. I can barely bring myself to write about how the day passes. I sleep in, I drink coffee, I write this diary in the morning. I go to the pottery studio in the early afternoon and manage to ruin a few pots; not just an unproductive couple of hours but a destructive couple of hours. I come home. I start reading Fish Have No Feet by Jón Kalman Stefánsson. It’s ok — he’s no Jon Fosse. In the evening L and I watch Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2018). I’m trying to think a bit more about Joaquin Phoenix in anticipation of writing something about his career, so I’m trying to fill some of the gaps in my knowledge. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot seems to have been totally ignored and barely promoted by Amazon Studios. I can remember seeing the trailers for it when it came out, but it felt like it was in cinemas for about thirty seconds and is now just buried in the depths of Prime. Maybe they were overly cautious after Gus Van Sant’s previous film, Sea of Trees, got booed at Cannes and completely bombed. I read that Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot was originally optioned sometime in the 90s by Robin Williams, with the intention that he would play the lead — John Callahan, a quadriplegic alcoholic in recovery who draws off-colour cartoons in Portland. This version of the film never got made, but after Williams’ death Gus Van Sant eventually figured out a way to make it with Joaquin Phoenix instead. Knowing this, it’s hard not to see the shadow of Williams cast over the film, and it’s easy to imagine how that version would have allowed itself to veer a little closer to mawkishness than this one does — though, since it’s ultimately a film about recovery and AA, it’s never too far away from the saccharine. Phoenix is good, as he usually is, but it’s not exactly a stand-out career-best performance from him; he’s pretty far in the role, good at pushing through shame and guilt and despair, still flirting with earnest sentimentality, as is his wont, particularly recently. He’s supported by some solid performances, especially from Jonah Hill, who has said that this film is probably the best performance he’ll ever manage. After watching Stutz last year I can see exactly why Jonah Hill would think a role in which he gets to wisely trot out a series of self-help clichés is his best. Maybe that sounds mean-spirited, but there is something about his performance here that feels so suited to the particular model of Los Angeles psychic wellness that he’s signed himself up to. This is a funny and likeable minor film — it is by no means Gus Van Sant’s most exciting or innovative work, but it is pretty solid and interesting enough in its non-linearity. Like the majority of addiction memoirs, it ultimately weaves a course towards happiness and fulfilment and verges on triteness at points — but that’s part of the film’s honesty and it’s real understanding: in a series of group therapy sessions we see the characters realise that there is no earth-shattering revelation, there’s no real cure for life, there’s just a gradual acceptance of the same old clichés. 

February 12. Sunday. A quiet day. Reading, coffee, some washing up, more coffee. After lunch I walk to Forge Dam and back. The small red flowers are out on the hazel trees, which always makes me think of Women in Love. Spring is approaching, but slowly. The woods smell of smoke. In the late afternoon I watch Nighthawks (dir. Ron Peck, 1978). This has been described as the ‘first’ gay British film — whether that’s true or not is a question that I suppose is open for discussion. It’s also the first film with a credited appearance from Derek Jarman. It’s a film about the loneliness, mundanity and hollowness at the heart of gay everyday life in London in the late 70s. Jim, a geography teacher by day, spends his evenings going to bars, clubs and discos and picking up men. They have sex. They talk about work. They have a cup of tea. Jim gives them a lift to work, then goes and teaches for the day, then goes out again. Sometimes he sees the men he picks up more than once, but nothing quite sticks. Sometimes he goes out for a drink with a colleague before hitting the bars. The same music plays in every club. Gay liberation is on the edge of consciousness — someone who’s moved down from Bolton mentions reading about the Pride marches in The Telegraph as his inspiration to relocate — but nobody in the film is very interested in it. It’s kind of desolate in its mundanity. Obviously this is exactly the kind of thing I like, and I think Nighthawks is fantastic — like Cruising without any of the plot or violence, reduced to pure repetition. I read an interview with Ron Peck where he describes it as a ‘structuralist film’, in which the view feels the tension of the repeated situation, and starts to want Jim to break out of the cycle. But the film doesn’t suggest any kind of escape — even by the end of the film, where Jonathan seems to have found someone he might be able to sustain a relationship with, he still drags himself and his lover to the same clubs, and they still dance to the same song, eyes scanning the room in a kind of permanent dissatisfaction. It reminds me a lot, unsurprisingly, of Guillaume Dustan’s I’m Going Out Tonight, which is really a book about feeling extreme anxiety in the club. There’s a fantastic scene in which the camera zooms very slowly into Jim’s face while he leans against a wall, smoking a cigarette, drinking a pint of lager, his eyes roving around the room. Derek Jarman is smoking a cigarette behind him with his eyes closed. The camera gets closer and closer to Jim until it’s just framing his eyes, which are uneasy and restless and nervous. It’s almost like Wavelength in miniature. There’s a kind of experimental shabbiness to Nighthawks, an uncertainty, a technical backwardness, a kind of awkward improvisatory element to the performances (almost all of which are by non-professionals), which makes it fall somewhere between Ken Loach and early Cassavetes. Compared to more contemporary, slicker examples of queer British cinema, this might make Nighthawks feel a little amateurish, but that’s exactly what I like about it. The conversations are dull, because conversations are often dull. People aren’t very elegant in real life. Not every gay British man in the 1970s was an activist; not every gay British man in the 1970s ended up married or dead. There’s an unresolved aspect to the loneliness on display here, and despite the hints towards the idea that homosexuality could be politicised, especially in the classroom (in an astonishingly good scene in which Jim’s pupils interrogate him about his sexuality and he answers them as honestly as he can), Nighthawks never resorts to position-taking. It’s just a film about the quiet desperation of daily life, which actually makes it extremely British.

---

Dear friends, the end is truly nigh. Just nine films left until the end of the film diary. That’s probably just two weeks. I still have a few commissions to get through, but don’t bother sending any more in. As always you can always express your appreciation of the film diary financially. Thanks, as always, for joining me. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like. Take care, A