dmgrundy

Glenda Jackson's frustrated bourgeois housewife, having gone to the spa town of Baden-Baden for unspecified reasons, maybe or maybe doesn't have a brief affair with Helmut Berger's young gigolo. In town on a botched drug deal, Berger operates through a combination of what we might term freelancing: as a car or drug smuggler but, it seems, principally as a gigolo whose opening line is that he's a "poet". Meanwhile, back in British suburbia, Jackson's husband, writer Michael Caine abandons plans to work on a novel to begin a screenplay based on his jealous imaginings of his wife's Baden-Baden sojourn. When Berger telephones Caine to announce that he's an admirer of his work and turns up (literally) "for tea", the stakes are set for the triangle to play out, with the added drama in the final third of Berger's drug connections, among them the poker-faced, and sadly under-used, Michael Lonsdale, turning up in a kind of lugubrious pursuit.

During the 1960s and 70s, Joseph Losey reinvented himself from a filmmaker of social problem pictures and taut, gritty noirs, to an arthouse director, with mixed results. In some cases-notably his collaborations with Harold Pinter, 'Accident' and 'The Go-Between'-formal innovations-particularly Alain Resnais-style temporal ambiguity-were closely allied to a dissection of the British class system. In others, such as the camp classics 'Boom!' or 'Secret Ceremony', it's not clear exactly *what's* going on-and not necessarily in a good way. Essentially, what we watch is a set of variations on a theme, more or less successfully rendered. Take the use of flashbacks and flashforwards: longer or shorter inserts of scenes whose relation to the main narrative is not immediately revealed, used particularly good effect in the late '60s/early '70s Pinter collaborations 'Accident' and 'The Go-Between'. In 'The Romantic Englishwoman', the flashbacks/forwards centre on an incident that occurs near the start of the film: the moment Jackson and Berger take a lift together in their hotel and may or may not initiate a sexual relationship. This incident is a way to explore the boundaries between action and desire, and various real or imaginary pairings of the heterosexual couple and a third partner. What happened in the lift in Baden-Baden? From whose perspective do we see this?

As the film goes on, though, not much done is to expand these initially intriguing ideas. The film couldn't easily be called either a feminist or an anti-feminist film: Caine's obnoxious outburst at Jackson's friend, a visiting gossip columnist, for repeating feminist statements about female homemaking roles, is clearly absurd, yet, like Jeanne Mourea's Eve, Jackson's dreams of liberation from marriage can occur only through another man, offering no real possibility of sociability outside the heterosexual contract. We thus simultaneously watch the playing out of male jealousy and of Jackson's "romantic" desire for escape--the doomed template of much melodrama. Too often, though, the film simply *presents* this double-bind, offering little other perspective on what we already know. The flashback-flashforward structure insists on the claustrophobic way in which its characters play out pre-ordained social roles, yet it has little to say *about* such roles, apart from telling us that they exist. The result: a film that ultimately feels "cold", dead, an exercise in style.

The longest of the 1998 episodes, again as if winding down: once more, the focus on hands, hands reaching out or collapsing, hands that think. 1920s and 1930s vampire movies keep appearing, haunted monsters: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and in particular, Murnau's Nosferatu. From Rear Window, James Stewart looking through his camera in rear window looks into Hitler, who has morphed out of Charlie Chaplin. This recurs more than once as kind of tic or trope: Stewart peering through his binoculars, stand-in for the spectator, the director--but what he sees is revealed to be images from the camps, or images of a preening uniformed Hitler--framing and peering at atrocity. Cinema here is the fascinated and complicit peering on at horror, powerless to do anything. But that's not all it is. The final episode tries out some other metaphors and parallels--histories of cinema, stories of cinema, alternative pathways taken or not taken. The title cards present an oblique fable about a man who comes to a village, selling stories: they think it's the end of the world but it's the sunrise: the man is cinema. Echoing the unseen film from the Langlois episode (3(b)), here, the conceit of the impossible film, the 'other cinema', that which can't be written, like the invisible matter that scientifically makes up the universe's gravitational forces. The question is when to begin and end a shot. Godard asks, over an image of Maurice Blanchot, if time preserves cinema or cinema preserves time; the episode, and the film as a whole, ends with Godard, via Borges, describing himself as someone who wakes up from a dream of paradise still clutching a paradisal flower. And, for Godard, cinema remains this flower.

4a) begins with a political / historical meditation--Europe is divided between undeveloped states and states with a revolution which enables them the comfort of waiting without hope for the inevitable misery, the only remaining link. Auteur theory rears its head, as the great directors come up on screen, one by one, having followed on from female writers (Virginia Woolf central among them). The figure of the (male) auteur becomes the ultimate in this 'control of the universe', both a counter-force to and reflection of the mendacious power of state, propaganda, government (the recurrent images of suffering--the camps, the Warsaw ghetto, Joan of Arc in Dreyer's and Rossellini's films). And so to Hitchcock, whose spectral voice floats up--the greatest, Godard says, because he made you remember objects (the wine bottle or the key in Notorious, the bus in North by Northwest), elevated image beyond plot, beyond ideology--he succeeded where even dictators failed, but this was an empty victory, for even if 'billions' do remember the bottle, the key, the bus, what does this do? Cinema, as the title cards flash it up, is cursed, forgotten, unknown ("maudit, oubliée, inconnu"), the words "histoire du cinéma" broken down to "né a toi"--so yet, the viewer, birth, promise, the philosophical dialogue slowly read out which suggests cinema as a kind of lover ("beauté fatale"). In what may be the series' most startling image, Hitchcok's birds fly/explode out of Marilyn Monroe's head, a by now familiar repertoire of clips--The Searchers, James Stewart and Kim Novak in the water in Vertigo--flash past, Godard's voiceover increasingly ruminative, his cigar-chomping presence replaced by the sound of his voice, the series as if winding down, muted and melancholy, the flashed repeated phrases now more on screen than in Godard's voiceover, the projector noise and extraneous noise of the earlier episodes instead replaced by bursts of music as punctuation and hushed voices, visual and verbal noise reduced to a kind of muted flashing, flashes in the fog.

Almost no footage from actual French New Wave films here; instead, the films that inspired them. Beginning backwards; it ends with Godard's ruminative homage to Jean Langlois, founder of the cinémathèque where the directors of the Nouvelle Vague encountered formative and obscure films; the cinema Godard describes here, he says, is the unknown one, the unseen one, the films only known by legend rather than actually watched; an alternative current (bodies emerging into or falling out of rivers; a recurrent visual rhyme throughout these late episodes). Of course, I knew all these people, he ends--Truffaut, Demy, Duras--as their faces flash past, elements of hero-worshipping or name-dropping, of cinematic nostalgia (Godard himself once more at the centre) overpowered by a sense of mourning something lost.

A template for these films: Goya's Saturn eating his children intercuts in stroboscopic fashion (with Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes), as Godard's voiceover is delivered with little more than a whisper, describing atrocities, the hypocrisy of governments not held to human standards, the horrors of war. Again, the relation of cinema to reality and fiction: we exaggerated these atrocities, the child was not tossed from pike to pike but merely bayonetted once, the village was not destroyed in a couple of hours but a couple of days. The complicity of French actors and filmmakers in the occupation; a train ride to Berlin to take part in a film project; the ruins of the war meant that the only national cinema of any value (Godard's axis is, as ever in this series, firmly Euro- and US-centric) was that of Italy--Rome: Open City was not made by those in uniform; a curiously sentimental montage of moments from neo-realism under a crooned Italian song plays things out. These episodes are much slower, more reflective than what's gone before.

2b) continues the female narrator's explorations of beauty, storytelling, dream, escape; this time, though, the focus is Proust, introduced by Godard: Albertine as the icon of lost beauty kept imprisoned: aesthetics and jealousy, the rage of vulnerability, art as fetishisation and reification of its objects. It's not a smell or a sentence or a piece of music that triggers involuntary memory and the re-finding of time--time's retrieval contains its 'trou', its gap or absence, its void, the way that Godard finds the emptiness within a shot that in context is given a panoply of meaning, the gap within a crowded scene, remixes them across time, puts them in dialogue. Godard starts early on that cinema could have been about flowers, babies, and so on, but it became about death. Eros/thanatos merge as icons of Hollywood martyrdom like James Dean brood in frozen still images, and the ever-present images of historical catastrophe--Vietnam, the holocaust, what I think is the First Intifada--allegorise this doubleness of spectatorship--most notably, an image of a little child walking past a field of bodies, apparently unconcerned, into which images of escape and fantasy (a woman clinging to an impossibly high streetlamp) enter, like one image emerging from the burning embers of another (Godard says that cinema comes from burning, a Promethean destructiveness that this repeated trope of emergence--a kind of joke about dissolves, wipes, fades, and the like--frequently enacts), more so in this episode than previously. Godard jokingly references the scopophilic and gendered nature of film viewing, a cap on his head, cigar in his mouth, sitting shirtless at his typewriter, his jaw dropping; images of female bodies and of the motif of hands (hands think, Godard states) grasping, groping, gesticulating: a visual equation between the gestures of power (fascist demagoguery, the salute and the raised arm) and sexual conquest? The episode's concluding section features a relatively fixed camera as an actor reads out statements on art and beauty: given the density of the preceding material, it feels like a moment of utter stillness, the suspended time that cinema always seeks and always rejects.

All the stories, all the histories, all at once: the episode, and the film as a whole, begins with simultaneity, with too much all once, visually and sonically. The opening minutes feel as if the tracking shot of the traffic jam in Weekend or its corollary, the assembly line in the car factory of British Sounds, had turned into an instant pile-up, every frame superimposed over the next. Nonetheless, a lot of this episode feels like throat-clearing (sometimes literally--a sound effect that will predominate in the much more aged voiceover, Godard wheezing and coughing, of Le Livre D'Image/The Image Book thirty years later). Godard repeats the history/story/stories pun of the title--Godard's story, the story of cinema, of history in general? The viewer spends the opening minutes acclimatising to method; the method is musical, in a sense; themes appearing, developing, crossing over: counterpoint, dissonance; but also the logic of the jump-cut, the tape splice, what musique concrète in music (or hip-hop sampling, plunderphonics, etc) and the Nouvelle Vague's separation of the elements of film-making accomplished in film. A dissection that is also a building up: accretion, bricolage, pile-up. Irving Thallberg as the epitome of invention--200 movies in his head everyday--and of despotic megalomania, cinema as dream factory, as illusion, as schizoid form--Howard Hughes' mania. Images of resistance and suffering--particular that of women--from Soviet and Third Cinema struggle from under the weight of these images, even as their heroisation contains its own problematics. (Godard's vision is here, as, as others have noted, almost exclusively that of a Western cinema, the 'Second Cinema' of Europe and of America with walk-on parts for Glauber Rocha but little else.) The sudden flash of corpses, the grasping of hands at guns or straws.

Dedicated to John Cassavetes and Glauber Rocha--thus moving beyond the Hollywood productions excoriated in the preceding episode, with these icons of US independent film and the attempt for a tricontinental Third Cinema (Rocha's debate with Godard, his cameo at the crossroads in Vent de L'Est sampled here). Scepticism about the possibility of cinema as medium was built into it from a start: its pioneers thought that it was a trick form, a parlour game, a fairground show. They were right and not right. The story of cinema alone, a history alone--cinema's connection and disconnection to world history--the role of newsreel. George Stevens filming the European camps in 1945--cinema as record; but is filming alone cinema? Reality and illusion. Cinema's aim to be more real than life. Godard looks up, off screen, at the screen, reads two books at once, at times types out a script we neither hear nor see with the exception of grunted words.

From its start, the series makes audible the sound of technology from various periods: Godard's typewriter, his squeaky marker pen, the sound of the projector; levels mixed too loud, delay on voices, sound effects, snippets of the classical music canon, pop songs, noises. Godard repeats a number of key ideas several times across the opening episodes, sometimes verbatim: like musical themes coming around, sometimes as obvious recapitulations, at others as ghostly half-echoes; visual and aural puns (words split, truncated, divided) emphasizing first one then another part of a combined, often contradictory meaning. Making use of video to conduct an autopsy of cinema, the series develops the notion of cinema as out-of-time, fated, cursed; the forces of the modern are beholden to the nightmare of the past, borrowed costumes of present and past in mutual disguise. The roots of all modern technology were developed in the 19th century; the 20th century merely provided the technical means to execute them (whether these be projection or imperialism). Photography developed as compensation for the freezing and totalisation of all relations under the sign of capital--the technology for colour photography existed, but it was developed in black and white ("the colours of mourning"). Rather than releasing that which photography had frozen, cinema was a melancholy reenactment of that freezing. Cinema came along as a further method of mourning; technicolour ("the colours of funeral wreaths") is not celebration, but denial. Meanwhile, video and television have supplanted cinema's faux-cosmic possibility, boxing it up, condensing it, and have erased cinema's overwhelming time of the sublime, where a Proustian temps retrouvé be enacted beyond the scope of language ("cinema exists for the words caught in the throat"), condensed and controlled through fast-forward, rewind etc (video's revenge on cinema enacted in the very form of this film). So this is a further act of mourning, made on the periphery of the end of the Cold War: a flattening and totalisation.

(See also separate reviews under each individual episode)

I came to this curious 1975 film through the late Milford Graves, who is very briefly glimpsed as part of the percussion ensemble. Not really a horror movie, though it was marketed as such, stars Marlene Clark of Ganja and Hess fame, and concerns spirit possession and the dead. Written by playwright Paul Carter Harrison--who also scripted 'Youngbood' (1978) and an un-produced biopic of Sam Cooke--and shot in Friendsville, Tennessee, it concerns the clash of Yoruba religion and Christianity, centring around the idea of sacrifice. (Graves, who served as African percussion consultant on the film, illustrates the Yoruba side, juxtaposed with the Howard Roberts Choir's spirituals--Roberts scored the film). Like 'Ganja and Hess'--on which Harrison explicitly modelled the film--it doesn't really fit any of the generic categories placed on Black cinema of the time--horror, Blaxploitation, drama--though it perhaps includes elements of all of these. And while it lacks the sheer surreal, a-narrative strangeness of Ganja--the pacing is more sedate and telegraphed--it's certainly distinctive.

Nicholas Foster has an interesting article on its production history and evasion of categories for black film at Black Camera which recounts more details. From Foster, we learn that it was a coproduction between the Ronald Hobbs Literary Agency, who represented Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and other Black Arts Movement literary figures, and distribution company Bryanston Pictures who'd also put out 'Andy Warhol's Dracula', Andy Warhol's Frankenstein', and 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and later, 'Deep Throat' (obscenity charges surrounding the latter leading to the company's collapse), with Hobbs apparently inviting the likes of Baraka, Neal and Adrienne Kennedy to evaluate the film at screenings. For all the sensationalist aspects suggested by Bryanston's involvement, 'Lord Shango' was consciously seeking *not* to be a Blaxploitation film--"the days of Blaxploitation are over" ran a newspaper report on its production. If Gunn's 'Ganja and Hess' is very much an auteur film--starring role, with the distinctive editing, the removal of exposition and backstory for the distinctive dream-like atmosphere--the director here, Ray Marsh, appears to have minimal input. He made a couple of shlock films and is never even mentioned in Harrison's reminiscence at Black Camera. As a result, the film lacks the visual distinctiveness of Gunn's film, with its slow-motion, temporal leaps, and slow zooms: camera angles are generally static medium shots, cutting between incidents to create tension--amplified by contrasts of drumming and singing--that are obvious and hackneyed. The opening scene, in which church-goers either deliberately or accidentally drown a Yoruba devotee who interrupts a Baptism, should be resonant and tense: instead it's near-plodding, desperately crying out either for longer, more patient atmosphere-building or some severe editing. At times-particularly in Clark's performance-we get glimpses of a better film, and it's worth watching for those-and for the chance to see Milford Graves in his motion picture debut!

'Golden Eighties' is a far cry, formally and thematically, from Akerman's films of the 70s--the rigorous studies, influenced by structuralist film, of domestic environment and gendered power dynamics in 'Jeanne Dielmann'; such dynamics as transposed onto loneliness, travel and connection in 'Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna'; the atomisation and anatomisation of the trope of lover's partings in 'Tout un Nuit'. Instead, this is a bona fide musical, set entirely in a shopping mall, with its vibrant colours, choreographed tightness, and tendency to burst into song every few minutes undeniably close to the sentimentalist cinema of Jacques Demy which might previously have seemed the antithesis to Akerman's cinematic rigour. With Demy's best-known films, 'Les Parapluies de Cherbourg' and 'Les Demoiselles de Rochefort', it shares the concern with romantic coincidence, reappearance, the chance meeting or missed opportunity the balance between an idealised lost or distance love (idealised because lost or distant) and a pragmatic relational compromise associated with career and with petit-bourgeois stability.

The plot's best enjoyed in its unfolding, rather than in drab summary: but briefly--Robert, son of cloth store owners, is in love with Lili, who runs the salon directly opposite, gifted to her by the married Mr. Jean, corrupt owner of mall property with a reputation as a gangster, and head-over-heels in love with her. His parents wish to take over the salon and turn it into an additional store, and Robert's desire gets in the way of their plans; meanwhile, Mado, an employee at the salon, shares a passion of her own for Robert. Into the mall steps an expat American--the long-lost lover of Robert's mother (played, in one of her final roles, by Delphine Seyrig), who nursed her back to health after she'd escaped the death camps (Akerman's concern with the genocidal traumas of European history figures even here), leaving her a dilemma of her own. Various pairings, proposals and betrayals later--along with plenty of generally brief songs, generally sung in chorus rather than as solo vehicles--Mr. Jean destroys Lili's store, Robert's parents get their expansion, his mother decides for longevity and security over the promise of revived romance, Robert himself decides to become a model capitalist, and all ends in a curious mixture of happiness, unhappiness and compromise that's given the feel, more than the content, of resolution.

Of the relatively little written on the film, reviewers seem to assume that Akerman must have distrusted or disliked the musical form as an inherently fallacious form--the epitome of Hollywood falsity. That hardly seems to be borne out by Akerman's own statements or by the film itself. This is, for sure, a criticism of the propaganda of fulfilment through commerce, patriarchy and romance narrative associated with a generalised sense of the American musical, but Akerman clearly loves the form, the material in itself. One can work with, and critique, cliche, whilst loving its forms, the joys and freedoms it affords--and, after all, the fixed camera and stark structural exercises of Akerman's early films are just as much 'artificial' affects as the elaborate choreography of the musical. In fact, what for Akerman retrospectively disappointed were the limitations placed on the film's scope--that she was not afforded the lavish canvas--particularly the spatial dimension--of bigger-budget musicals, and that what transpired is, in effect, a kind of chamber version, the piano reduction rather than the full score, as it were. Yet, though its ambitions were compromised by the circumstances of production--a confined set, limited crew, chamber ensemble rather than full orchestra, and so on--it makes of these its material. This is, after all, a film which doesn't leave the confines of a shopping mall--indeed, of a space of three stores within it--until the very final scene, where the characters emerge blinking into the sunlight and we realise with a shock that it's the middle of the day. And so the film turns the perpetual motion of dance and movement as expression of choreographed spontaneity, restricted freedom, into a kind of allegory for its entire operation: from the opening shots of stilettos moving across a floor to their echo in the scenes of illicit lovers caught in the act, feet visible beneath changing room curtains, and then to the filming of entire bodies, perpetually alone or jostling, connecting, touching, then moving away, all within the confines of a small set that functions like a kind of expanded version of the domestic interiors of 'Jeanne Dielmann' or the lesser-known, comedic 'L'Homme a la Valise'. Instead of static shots, there are quick cuts from person to person, a camera swooping to contain moving chorus lines, the frame filled almost to bursting with all-singing, all-dancing employees; central characters either get caught away in the crowd, shouting or singing their lines to each other while being jostled apart, or bemoan the empty space, devoid of customers in a time of recession. References to the economic crisis gradually build up as the film reaches its conclusion; Robert, the aimless romantic ('Romeo of the trousers', as the film's barbershop-quartet chorus put it, perpetually lounging at the bar) spouts the ethic of self-help, business practice, efficiency and competition ('expand, expand') learned from his father in parody sped-up tele-prompter speak; his father deploys a cynical metaphor of investment in love vs. the risks of passion while commiserating with the bride Robert has jilted; the beauty salon owned by a corrupt businessman as a pad for his lover is smashed up by said owner, who gets to trash the entire store, firing a gun, and seemingly escape any kind of legal consequences. Is the recession--and the allusions to the power of American global capital, investment and consumer patterns--the 'background' to the musical narrative, with its fast-moving plots and sub-plots, or is that musical the allegorical expression of it? In a sense, it's the same question as to the role of the Algerian war in Demy's 'Les Parapluies', but whereas the war there functions as absence, lacuna, the experience that can't be expressed, here recession and the language of economics, planning, expansion and the like unavoidably maps onto the (gendered) nature of love, even as it's perfectly possible to watch and enjoy the whole film for its surface pleasures--movement, orchestration (the mimicking of mall sounds in music and sound design), studies in group dynamics, rhymes alternately biting and bittersweet. Unjustly neglected.

The key question, beyond revolutionary romanticism, is what happens after independence, Chris Marker wrote of Cape Verde when assembling for Sans Soleil footage shot during the Angolan and Guinea-Bissaun independence struggle of the 1970s. For Marker, Cape Verde served as a potent figure for points of access, of entry or exit. Located in the central Atlantic ocean, and inhabited only upon discovery by Portugese explorers in the 15th century, it was the first European settlement in the tropics, and a key stopping point during the Atlantic slave trade, and its independence struggles during the era of decolonisation-along with its innovative linkage with the struggle in Guinea-Bissau, spearheaded by Amilcar Cabral-suggested new ways in which internationalism might be incorporated into a praxis of liberation. Likewise, the efforts of the Guinean filmmakers suggests what Cesar calls "the promise of a militant cinema of emancipation, born from the struggle as a praxis of liberation". Yet in 'Sans Soleil', the Guinean archival footage, along with Marker's images of Cape Verde, serve as indices of failed hopes, of the failure of both political struggle and the aesthetics of what he calls 'revolutionary romanticism' which invests in that struggle a hope for the future of the world. Over footage of Cape Verdean ports, queues at stores and labour on building sites or market places, Marker's narrator comments: 'Rumor has it that every third world leader coined the same phrase the morning after independence: "Now the real problems start." Cabral never got a chance to say it: he was assassinated first. But the problems started, and went on, and are still going on. Rather unexciting problems for revolutionary romanticism: to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome postwar exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege.'

Originally planning to make a film along the lines of the agitational, collective work developed with the SLON and ISKRA groups, Marker subsequently reshaped footage shot through the 1960s and 1970s into a video-essay meditation as much on his own role as on the broader narratives of which his footage provides a slice: a meditation on memory and on ways of narrating history, rather than that narrative itself. Including the footage shot by the Guinean filmmakers-Cabral embracing fighters, shaky black and white images that appear to be shot from within guerrilla conflict-Marker presents a doubly-lost moment of possibility, in which the documentation of African independence struggles by African filmmakers both fail. "Who remembers all that?" asks Marker's narrator at one point, referring to the Cape Verdean-Guinean liberation struggle. "History throws its empty bottles out of the window". Much of this filmmaking activity was lost when cannisters of film were thrown into the street during the civil war at some point in the 1990s.

As Marker notes, hearing the stories of the sheer hell of such guerrilla warfare makes a mockery of those who described theirs as 'guerrilla filmmaking'. If, at one stage Marker travelled the globe, documenting the revolution, documenting new modes of living--in footage that was, as in his early film on Cuba, often banned within Euro-American contexts--and emphasizing film-making as a collective process, later films like 'Sans Soleil' take the very same footage as the basis for the melancholic reflections which have as their overarching theme the failure of global transformation promised by radical movements in Europe and Third World struggles in Europe's colonial 'possessions'. The out-of-time nature of that footage, material to be re-inscribed, alternately written over or uncovered in a kind of politicised Proustianism, a palimpsestic reflection on defeat, needs as its corollary Marker's science-fiction image of the future traveller, the traveller from the year AD 4000 in which earth has become a world of total recall, viewing with compassion the sadness mixed with aesthetic pleasure--the forms of art, of cinema, the failures of memory and desire. Noting the problematics of the gaze he projects onto the Cape Verdean women he films until they cast their gaze back at the camera, Marker ends his film on the image of the Cape Verdean woman who locks eyes with the camera for a fraction of a second--the exact length of a frame of film--Marker appears to hold this out as a possibility, if not of mutual contact, of the resistance to objecthood, and the possibility of a self-creation that would not need the mediation of the white, male filmmaker, world-traveller, revolutionary romanticist. Yet, as with much of the footage in the film, Marker feeds these images into the image-synthesizer of the (fictional) Japanese artist Hayao Yamanoko, producing solarised, distorted images that distort and transpose their sources into blotches of irreal colour and indistinct, amorphous forms. Feeding the footage into the machine serves as a surreal analogy for the mediations that exist between filmmaker and object, the problems of colonial framing, and the vagaries of historical memory, that are Marker's subject. The returned gaze, the flicker of tacit acknowledgment of performance, suggests the possibility of an artistic response--to frame oneself, rather than to be the always-framed-a fragile, yet vital force against the power imbalances of a 'world cinema' whose legacies are still firmly rooted in colonial power relations.

Given the difficulties he faced in assembling money to make films, and the obscurity of those he did manage to make, Rocha's outspoken media presence had been his major role since 1969 at least, and it now entered into the films. This is a key weakness: a kind of egoic messianism, losing more and more political sense as he praised military dictators, with scenarios for ambitious films which could, in all likelihood, never be made. Both epic summation of Rocha's career and an incoherent end-of-the-line, 'A Idade' is like almost nothing else in cinema. We find one more the allegorical figures whose interactions are epic and poetic rather than realist, though we're also presented with near-documentary scenes, interviews and chaotic, seemingly improvised moments which appear closer to performance art (or, to be less kind, amateur theatre). Rocha claimed that the reels of the film could be shown in any order-history as linear order is firmly rejected for the repetitions and non-sequiturs that are held in place by mythic overlays which at the same time provide the fulfilment and solution to history. Is this a mystical escape from reality, the result of political impasse? Absolutely. But at times it's no less breath-taking for that.

The allegorical forces this time are four 'Christs' who are also the four horsemen of the apocalypse, St George, and so on, and their female counterparts-Aurora (sunrise is an important figure for the film), Magdalena, the queen of the Amazons. A businessman-imperialist, the hulking and Aryan 'John Brahms' staggers through the city in hysterical displays of sadistic power. These figures move around in public spaces in sequences that appear improvised, shot amongst traffic or in crowd scenes with puzzled onlookers, or in cramped interiors with Rocha's own voice shouting offscreen at the actors to scream their lines 'ten times louder'. Rocha further destabilises time by often including multiple takes of the same lines, repeated as many as five times-the 'military Christ' sitting in front of a café and proclaiming that, even if he uses violence and ignores human rights, he upholds essential 'spiritual' rights-and what would appear to be 'outtakes'-Brahms collapsing and apologising to Glauber for his weaknesss; Rocha's infant daughter banging at a piano. The shifting alliances of the film's allegorical figures, in their gendered pairings and their various speeches, provide uneasy mapping of betrayal, power and, at times, possibility. The gringo imperialist, Brahms, appears perpetually on the verge of collapse, yet that collapse never comes: political stasis is the overwhelming feel, despite the surge of action and event and the promises to provide a more democratic future Brazil, couched in the language of mystical, syncretic Christianity. This is a paradoxical teleology without end in its interchangeable reels, the film can have no conclusion. In what is probably the film's key sequence, Rocha yells out an incoherent voiceover speech to footage of the 'Black Christ' as St George, holding aloft a garish Expressionist icon of the crucified Christ, in which he claims the ultimate political ambition should be to defeat death itself. Rocha's voiceover-which, in its halting pauses and streams of language, sounds improvised rather than scripted-explains the genesis of the film as a life of Christ inspired by Pasolini's murder. Pasolini serves as the corpse from which a new, third world Christ can emerge, as Rocha preaches an incoherent political gospel in which a transformed Christianity serves as the beacon of global hope, along with a vision of Brazilian 'democracy' that functions beyond 'capitalism, socialism, communism'. This utopian, ultimately nonsensical vision-which also claims that the ultimate political ambition must be to defeat death itself-has to be expressed in manifesto-like words in order to give some coherence to what see onscreen, even as the film itself seeks for a visual 'trance' based on fragments of language, overwhelming and jarringly intercut blasts of sound, from Villa Lobos to carnival music and improvised free jazz, that rejects the cohesion Rocha's speech seeks to impose. The whole film is a total blaze of overkill-too loud, too long, with the maximum of excess as fundamental methodogical starting point-that cannot and does not end. Ismail Xavier call this the limits of national allegory as methodology-while apparently mythic structure presented in Rocha's previous films is ultimately grounded in a historical basis, it fails when it comes to the present of the 1980s, of a decade lived under military dictatorship. Rocha in essence admits as such in his voiceover description of the utopian city project of Brasilia, an analogy, it would seem, for his own film: "strong irradiation, light of the Third World, a metaphor that doesn't come true in history, but meets a feeling of greatness, the vision of paradise". This is a matter of faith: but faith, while it might at times seem the only possible way to survive a dictatorship with no end in sight, is hardly adequate on its own. Unable to account for the profusion of elements brought into the audience's view, 'A Idade' asserts the positive force of Brazilian syncretism against the violence embedded in its history and as a way beyond the crippling underdevelopment fostered by American imperial interests in the region. But this nationalism-even if it seeks to counter the mendacious nationalisms of religious and military power-ultimately cannot see a way out of them, falling prey to a disunited model of national unity that veers near to complicity with the repressive forces that governed the nation, against which Glauber might at times have staked his life.

Ironically, it was at the height of his fame as an exponent of a specifically cinema that Rocha was exiled from Brazil and began to operate within a European framework, seeking funding wherever he could. 'Antonio das Mortes' had effectively put Brazil on the international (read: European) cinematic map, providing a populist left-wing icon that combined the appeal of the 'Zapata westerns' with that of the left-leaning arthouse crowd, coincided with Rocha's (self-imposed) European exile, yet Rocha was now cut off from the folk practices which gave his early films their force: the cangaceiro myths of 'Antonio' and 'Black God', the cadomblé of 'Barravento'. His embrace of identity as a 'tricontinental' filmmaker, and consequent depiction of the Third World thus in turn becomes more generalised, at once suggesting solidarity along the lines of tricontinentalism, and reflecting an unmooring from the specificities of Brazilian cultural production. During the 1970s, Rocha shot films in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ('Der Leone'), Spain ('Cabezas Cortadas') Italy ('Claro') and, as part of a collective production, the documentary 'As Armas e o Povo' on the 1974 carnation revolution in Portugal. In other words, he participated in the political questions both of the European 'West' (including its dictatorial, military aspects) and the decolonising 'Third World'. Beginning with 'Der Leone', Rocha gives new meaning to the term 'international coproduction'. If this new confluence of state and private funding arose in part from the inability of national cinemas to compete with Hollywood, it also enabled the production of a notably left wing, third wordlist cinema-the 'Zapata westerns', films like Bertolucci's 'Novecento', Pontecorvo's 'Battle of Algiers' and 'Quiemada'. The film's cast is international and, though the film is shot primarily in French, each the five languages that form its title are also spoken. Rocha thus insists, while operating from a perspective informed by the particular experience of brazil, that the film is international, in terms of filmic influence-he mentioned Brecht, Einstein and godard in relation to this film, along with cinema novo-and the issues of colonialism, an international phenomenon. 'Der Leone' differs from almost all existing models of political cinema: the Maoist-but white and European-left found in Godard's work from 'La Chinoise'; realist depictions of revolution (Pontecorvo); neorealism; the attempt to create empathy for the struggles of the oppressed. Instead, he turns to allegory and dream, not just as one element, but as influence on total structure, at once stressing the technological mediation of cinema in a firmly materialist manner and insisting on the importance of an apocalyptic, revolutionary mysticism to its conceptualisation of politics, resistance, revolution. Thus, Rocha at once emphasizes the defamilisarising-'modernist'-elements of his previous work, bringng together a secular, materialist tradition-Brecht, Godard-with the ecstatic, the mystical and the musical that differed sharply from such models. If Rocha's Antonio films had borrowed their figuration from existing folk myth and, to a lesser extent, film trope-St George, the cangaceiro, the landowner, the cowboy-the allegorical canvas here is broader and more international. Unlike Godard-who avoided Africa-or Pasolini-whose African and Arabic settings were, to say the least, romanticised-Rocha took seriously the possibility of Africa as part of the tricontinental axis. His African extras are not anthropological specimens but real people, sometimes laughing at the actions they're asked to perform: in one key moment, the camera zooms past the European actors and lingers on the faces of the crowd who watch them with a kind of defiant bemusement that extends to the filmmaker himself. The scenarios sees the tricontinental revolutionaries-associated with Zumbi, the Black Brazilian founder of the quilombo community Palmares, with African leaders such as Cabral, and with Che Guevara-unite against Marlene, the Aryan figure identified with the seven-headed beast of the apocalypse and with the mendacious forces of money and European colonial ideology, and her henchmen-a series of European mercenaries and the neo-colonialist ruler from the African national bourgeoisie. At the films end, a procession of militants in guerrilla fatigue slowly march up the hill, singing a revolutionary song. The protagonists of 'White God', Paulo in 'Terra em Transe', or Antonio in 'Antonio das Mortes', who end those films stuck on the edges of things with no way out-the coast, the desert, the endless road-with no way out. Here, however, the militants, unlike those isolated figures, move as a group and march with a purpose, even if it's not clear where they're heading. Moreover, their song unites art and struggle: the song and the machine gun, the spear and the dance are connected. Rocha's exilic internationalism is thus refigured as space of possibility as well as the product of political catastrophe. At this point, there was evidently a world to win.

For Glauber Rocha, Noronha's short, semi-documentary film was foundation, presenting an 'aesthetic of hunger' against the 'aesthetic of digestion' (and consumption) that governed the myth-making of official Portugese cinema, which it countered with "characters who eat dirt, characters who eat roots, characters who steal in order to eat, characters who kill in order to eat, characters who flee in order to eat, characters who are dirty, ugly, skinny, living in filthy, ugly, dingy homes", and for which it was criticised of 'miserablism'. But the family shown here are not simply victims: the film shows their impulse to continue, to survive, to build; humour, intimacy, humanity. They're the survivors of a quilombo, the descendants of those who ran away from the slave regime, and though they have to survive within a semi-arid landscape, their separation from an affluent urban landscape within underdeveloped regions an index, not only of their defiant legacy, but of the continuing racialised, classed and regionalised imbalances of Brazilian society. The film presents those who have refused and have been refused 'integration' into the broader body politic: its title suggests the Afro-Brazilian religious conception of a spirit world, of embodied spirits who take the form of the 'wretched of the earth', a syncretic form with political ramifications. As such, it gestures towards the revitalising myths which Rocha will find in such communities, which serve to present hunger and misery, not in fatalistic fashion, but as a dialectical source for new myths, new ways of political and cinematic thinking.

Maldoror's 'Monangambé' plays out a similar scenario to the feature-length 'Sambizanga': the visit of a wife to her imprisoned militant husband-with a more darkly comic frame and a more avant-garde soundtrack and visual style serving to illustrate both the extreme brutality of the situation, the ironies of paranoid misunderstanding, and the psychological effects of torture (in the shadowy scenes of the imprisoned man traumatised by torture). Its title-a warning, literally meaning 'white death', of the approach of slavers, and subsequent colonial powers, and then as signal to gather during the liberation struggle of the 1960s-performs a linguistic reversal suggesting the importance of contextual knowledge, and it's this sense that the oppressed can utilise language as a weapon that remains opaque to the colonialists that leads to paranoia such as that seen by the prison authorities here. The prisoner's wife promises him a 'complet'-that is, a three-course dish, food for someone deprived of proper nutrition-misunderstood by the prison director as a three-piece suit, and thus as the reward for escape from prison, leading to renewed sessions of interrogation and torture. At once stroke, prison authorities exercise near-unlimited power within the confines of their domain, sadistically wielding torture whenever they feel like it, and are revealed to have little true understanding of what they're dealing with-a misunderstanding that can perhaps be exploited. The soundtrack by the Art Ensemble of Chicago emphasizes discontinuity over mimetic guidance, the independent parts that constitute the individuals within a freely improvising ensemble, and of the tracks of visuals, soundtrack and speech that constitute a film. This is a film about the risky ambiguities of language and of the emotional truths that go beyond language, not as existential concerns, but as the arena of real political struggle, of real consequence, for which cinema finds an experimental vocabulary. Maldoror's films of this period are films in process-films subject to an extreme precarity of material circumstance, such that an entire film might be lost mid-way through film-making, which are forced to improvise and adapt in their methods, and which suggest a kind of improvisatory viewing as well. Virtually unseen within the canonical habits of Western film consumption, they've lost none of their power.

Maldoror's vital film was made for practical purposes-to document the struggles of the Angolan War of Independence, and the widespread imprisonment and torture of members of the MPLA, at a time when the war against Portugese colonialists was by no means over. With its cast of non-professionals and its absence of visual flourish, Maldoror's film emerges from and speaks to its circumstances: functional film-making, which doesn't mean a suspension of 'quality' for the contextual, but which makes a strong claim for a mode of cinema that cannot be disentangled from 'context', in which form and function match. The film is neither the exposée of neo-realism nor the humanist of 'poetic realism', but something entirely its own. The scenario is simple, but has its heart the willed obscurity of a colonial regime who lock away and murder those who challenge them in secret: Domingos, an MPLA militant, is abruptly kidnapped by colonial authorities in a horrific dawn raid of the village; his wife Maria walks from prison to prison, and the film follows her journey, and that of a network of clandestine militants who seek to obtain information on Domingos' location while themselves remaining ever-careful to avoid exposure. It's a woman-Maria-and an old man and a young boy-the pair who watch the prison for those who have been secretly deposited there-who form the central points of identification, and while a superficial viewing might suggest that the film reinforces normative gender roles-Maria's entire focus is on her husband, rendering her in that sense secondary to a political struggle figured as male-that would miss the point. Maria's grief and uncertainty is genuine, her task is practical: screaming Domingo's name outside the prison is a practical, political act, as well as a raw welling-up of grief. And the collective network which seeks to aid her, and which can only emerge through mediated forms of communication, the slow process of connection, the discovery of information piece by piece, involves men, women and children, suggests a model of the society that might emerge once the struggle is one, eventually coming into focus in the closing performance of song, a public statement of solidarity and resolve, a joyful memorial for the dead. Made ten years after the events it describes the film is able to close with end titles that note the progress such struggle ensured, even if that struggle has by no means by entirely won. Though Domingos dies, Maria's persistence, along with that of the network of other militants who receive the news of his death, and who will soon go on to storm the prison, suggest qualities of survival and defiance that assume both a personal and a collective level. A luta continua.

After the twenty-year period of silence following the success of 'Touki Bouki', Mambéty's second film gives its satire a more analytical frame. The quasi-allegorical narrative structure explores the relation of past to present within a specifically-though exaggerated-political frame; its events are specifically set in a collective context, where the continuing legacy of imperialism as it effects relations gendered, sexual and economic relations in the (post)colony. Returning to her village as a fabulously wealthy citizen, for whom wealth is also index of damage, literal prosthesis-the arm made of gold!- Linguère Ramatou is something like 'Touki Bouki's' Anta some decades on, returned to take revenge on Dramaan Drameh, the man who abandoned her and has since taken up a role as a comfortable, well-liked bar owner-and a kind of de facto, unofficial mayor-within the still impoverished town. The devil's bargain-that her wealth will be that of the village if they execute him-is not only index of personal revenge, a kind of just deserts for the past sins of patriarch-Drameh paid false witnesses to testify that he was not the father of her child, leading her to be driven out of town and to a career as a sex worker-but of the inhuman and dehumanising bargains of global capital, the mendacious ways in which continuing underdevelopment and the power relations of the centre-periphery relation structure the life it's possible to live. Ramatou simply serves as the agent of the ways in which collectives are divided-whether by the structures of gendered power relations or by the 'hyena-like' rapaciousness the promise of money brings. Such economic structures rely on the mythic realities that any dream can be bought, and that its fulfilment will invariably come at the expense of others. Through a satirical broad-brush, Mambéty seeks to make such bargains specific, rather than the abstract underlay of virtually every human interaction; it makes a vivid and convincing case whose laughs have the sting of accuracy.

The simple scenario, based on a newspaper report, finds the titular character, Diouana, moving from Senegal to the South of France to take up a position as domestic for a bourgeois French couple whose business interests in Dakar are, it's implied, waning in the post-independence moment. But the power relations within the French apartment are still very much titled in their favour-horrifyingly so-as their neglect and abuse of Diouana, withholding her earnings and preventing her leaving the apartment, see her ultimately commit suicide rather than continue in the status of property. Little under an hour in length, the spatial and temporal constriction of the film gives it at once the clarity of a fable and the brute reality of the observed. Few other films that so well to suggest space, to excavate the contours, the power relations of a series of rooms ('Petra Von Kant', a very different film-though, at least in its ending, it also has something to say about labour and silence-has a similar constriction, whilst seeming more 'theatrical'). Sembène relentlessly exploits the way imprisoning social walls take place within a domestic space-the rooms of the apartment paced, evaded, sites of divided and perpetual labour in which white employees take out their frustrations on themselves and on their servant, demanding that their ash trays, their dishes, the traces of their afternoon boozing be cleared almost as soon as they've appeared by a worker whose human presence must be reduced at every cost. Trapped within the apartment with no way to escape, Diouana faces few options for active resistance. How can one organise a workplace when within that workplace-which is also one's new home-one is kept entirely solitary, essentially cut off from the outside world? Diouana's eventual acts of resistance are to reclaim the mask she'd gifted her employers in Dakar when they wooed her with promises of a cosmopolitan lifestyle and apparent personable tolerance; refusing to work even when told 'no work, no food'; and ultimately, her suicide, the newspaper report which inspired the film. As the ambiguity of the film's title-erased (and gendered) in its English translation-suggests, Diouana has been rendered the property 'of' her employers-'Le Noir De'...' as at once 'The (Property) *of* (her employers)' and 'The (Property) *from* (Dakar, transplanted to Antibes)'. Given this, her hunger strike, work stoppage and ultimate removal of herself prevents her from becoming something to be used, even as it also removes her from the world as such. In the film's coda, 'Monsieur' returns to Dakar to bring her parents news of her death, his offer of money-a kind of bad conscience pay-off-brusquely refused by her mother. The tables have not exactly turned, but as he's followed by the child wearing the mask that Diounna had gifted her employers, which they've taken as a trophy of display just as they bring Diounna herself back from Dakar, his discomfort suggests the white subject no longer quite as at home in the world he surveys-even as this post-independence film strongly suggested that the official ending of colonialism had by no means solved the majority of its problems, the systems of racialised and gendered exploitation that take place in centre as well as periphery, the sharp distances that keep the two separate and invisible to each other.

Such invisibility has, in part, to do with the linguistic consequences of underdevelopment-the lack of access to the written word (or, for that matter, the spoken word of the colonial powers by which so much of the economic and power relations is transacted, upheld and sustained.) Sembène, whose political career began as activist (see Billy Woodberry's excellent recent 'Marseilles Apres la Guerre'), thence to writing and thence to cinema, makes films because this is the only way to convey an artistic statement-by which art is meant in its fully socialised senses, not as removed domain for the edification of an already-trained class-to those who literally cannot read. Illiteracy forms a key role when Diouana's employers read out to her the letter written by her mother-in dictation to the schoolteacher-asking for money and for news, and themselves write out 'her' reply with its lies of good treatment and happiness. Having had her earnings stored away from her and having been prevented from leaving her place of work, and lacking the literacy to write, Diouana has been completely cut off, doubly deprived of a voice. Diouana's response-to rip up the letter from her mother-suggests, that as Tessa Nunn puts it, "No message is better than a message that upholds the status quo." Likewise, after Diouana's death, her mother's response to Monsieur's offer of money is simply to walk away: not denunciation, not spoken refusal (across the gap of language), but a palpable silent gesture. Sembène does not suggest that these silent gestures-the mother's walking away, Diouana ripping up the letter, refusing work and food and then life itself-are anything like acts of resistance that have reached to the level of the collectively politicised. If cinema can depict them, literacy will enable a voice to be given to that which can only figure its defiance through a militant silence.

To move beyond such silence, Sembène insists that tools of resistance and re-education against the mendacious and continuing forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism include art, far from the 'luxury' it can be assumed to be within certain Western Marxist discourses. Sembène places himself to the edge of the film's final scenes, a figure of relaxed gravitas as the pipe-smoking schoolteacher in the cheaply constructed École, a figure of authority and transmission paralleling his own conception of the role of the filmmaker. It's the schoolteacher who writes Diouana's families letters to her-the only means of communication they have with their daughter once she leaves the country-and he who translates for 'Monsieur' when he performs his exculpatory visit. Sembène the filmmaker also serves as both translator, educator, and the one who will provide the audience the means to articulate themselves, rather than through the representational projections and occlusions of others. Cinema here functions as resistance and re-education, but it also serves as access to an affective truth without which the film would be useless. The film thus depicts not only the objective grimness of Diouana's situation but the intwined the subjective effects within her, a subjective mode that can never be articulated within the frames in which she finds herself trapped: it externalises that which cannot be externalised, tries to give voice to the experience of a person whose death otherwise occupies a few sentences of sensational newsprint, no more. To externalise requires language-oral if it can't be written, visual, if it can't be spoken-hence cinema.

Surprising as it might seem to those who've only seen Hondo's earlier films, this is very much a musical. The film is slicker, larger more choreographed than 'Soleil O', and feels at once theatrical and totally filmic. A run-through of the history of the Francophone Caribbean, and a political argument against dependence on and migration to France, in a sense, it sets Soleil O's Pan-African migrant experience in a more specific context and extends the more pageant-like chronological fables that pepper the former film to greater length, using Daniel Boukman's play as its basis. Shot inside an enormous, life-size ship constructed inside a factory, seen in the opening shots, the film-both for practical purposes (there would be no other way to film it), and for structural ones-reveals its own set. Hondo has actors double multiple roles; further doubling occurs in presenting multiple spaces and time frames in this single, capacious structure. As such, 'West Indies' borrows two important conventions of stage plays that are generally left out of film, with its greater flexibility of available actors and available space. In doing so, it turns these conventions into a potent comment on a history in which the same basic colonial power relations are perpetually retained under a different guise; in presenting the ship as both the metropolitan centre and the (post)colonial periphery, Paris and the Caribbean, it amplifies their connections; in staging all of this is in a giant factory, it suggests the ways in which the raw materials worked at through slave and post-slave labour were always at the heart of, and entrapped within, the industrial potency they enabled. The music and choreography are elaborate, slick, witty and moving all at once; I can think of little like this.

A more fictionalised, more extreme, more clandestine, more single-minded version of the sprawling cast of 'Milestones', Kramer's more condensed and fictionalised 'Ice' depicts the planning of a Tet-style 'Spring Offensive' by a group of would-be urban guerrillas engaged in strategy meetings, armed raids, and-in a self-conscious move no doubt relating to Kramer's own work in collective political film-making (from which some felt this individually-directed film was a step back), the making of propaganda films, whose intertitled slogans flash up throughout the film. The members of the group are all young, all white (though in one brief scene they negotiate with a group who, it seems to be implied, are the Panthers), more Weather Underground than Symbionese Liberation Army, but beset by the suspicion and isolation of the close group-the paradox where the path to accomplish total societal transformation is now felt to lie in necessarily secret and small-scale activity. The scene where the group kidnap and then explain to the residents of an apartment block their vision is the awkward test case for the beginnings of bridging this gap: having taken oneself out of circulation for the sake of one's ideas, one's methods, how to put oneself back in, how to spread such action? Filmed before the collapses and revelations of such groups documented in excruciating detail in Wakamatsu's 'United Red Army' some decades later, the film reserves judgement. The group is of mixed gender, and women appear to play equal roles in the organisation, but it's unclear to what extent Kramer shares the apparent obsession with impotence and depleted masculinity literalised here in the figure of the castrated revolutionary now in a purely defensive position, typing up reports and waiting with his shotgun behind a desk in an office. These are not glamorous rebels (as per 'The Baader-Meinhof Complex'), nor sociopathic terrorists, but, given the demands they've placed on themselves, ironically enough, professionals who must act with a total focus on the task and little time for an un-fraught human intimacy. For me, the most striking moment is one of the least flashy. Temporarily alone in the snow while on a training retreat, the figure who adapts the role of protagonist-or at least of leader (though the structure of both film and group itself refuses such roles)-imagines that thought is like a river which exceeds the subject in whom the thought supposedly originated. 'What we have here is a situation where we find ourselves in the midst of a river with very strong currents and with no way of getting out of the river, but that's not bad. And you just go ahead and do what you can't avoid doing. And your mind follows along. So, you've got to change your mind around, ...no need to even ask some of those questions you used to be asking... Interesting to think of the ideas being not your ideas but being part of a movement... What do you make of that? A little crazy?' Conceptualising the individual as part of the currents of history isn't new to revolutionary thought-or to other kinds of thought-but there's something terrifying about this-the movement of the river not that of a collective of people, but of some impersonal, natural, abstracted force. Is this the force which the melting of the titular 'ice' through revolutionary action might release? Or is that 'ice' the coldness, the suspension of affect and emotional responsiveness to accomplish revolution? Or to 'ice' someone-as when the same individual is abruptly thrown into a river on his return to the city, presumably by a group of government agents? If this is a movement, it's not the movement of public protest, marches, and declarations of togetherness, but of an atomised, fractured and precarious collective that at times seems like the mirror image of the alienated society it seeks to destroy.

Kramer has described this film in interview as, in essence, following around his friends-activists, actors, theatre and film people performing themselves, versions of themselves or characters. Though this is a film whose title proclaims its desire to tackle big subjects, big events, its narrative method refuses such historical logic, or embeds it in the vicissitudes and differing scales of daily lives where it occurs as a network of relationships rather than a newspaper headline, a date, a statistic. Over the lengthy running time, we encounter large group/s of (largely) of declassé white people involved in particular with the anti-war movement, living on communes, embedding themselves in factories, involved to a greater or lesser extent with the more militant wings of movement activism (one character has just been released from jail), all of them in various ways, and for different reasons-personal, political, both-reckoning with whether or not to keep up activism as the possibility of revolutionary change fades, as the war itself ends-and with it, the movement that built up against it. It's hard to provide any total or totalising summary-though the scenes with Grace Paley reflecting on politics, gender roles and motherhood are highlights, and those featuring a blind, queer potter (played by co-director John Douglas) have an open and surprising tenderness to them. There are moments and movements of disenchantment and renewal, occasional sketches of a broader perspective, largely through historical montages: the glue of broader historical forces keeps coming unstuck, but, as the film nears its close things are brought together into a kind of statement of resolve, the film ending with footage from a live home birth, throughout which the mother is witnessed and helped-through collectively. It's at once heavily allegorical and one of the most intensely 'documentary' moments of the film. In important 1975 'Cahiers du Cinema' symposium on the film-a collective format for a collective film-featuring Serge Daney and others, several of the participants note that racialised groups are seen as focal points of exploitation and struggle, but are depicted only in pictures or identificatory rituals such as the activist released from prison who visits a hogan in a kind of restorative 'vision quest' (in another scene, his father, a doctor, invites him back into the class he'd tried to mark himself out from). Such groups thus rarely feature in the lives of these characters-suggesting that, of the dividing lines that appear in the film, and that fracture the communities they attempt to build, race is still the principal structure. Given this, Daney remarked in an essay for 'Cahiers' the following year, the films risks being apologia for 'American conviviality', based on the 'ethnological masquerade' of the 'tribe'. (On this note, Lou Cornum has an important essay in the first issue of Pinko magazine about the use of the 'tribe' metaphor in a host white radical writings, from David Wojnarowicz to Leslie Feinberg, and a complex identificatory history, the way the American white (New) Left positions itself vis-à-vis the non-white might equally apply to Kramer's film). For Daney, though, while there may be elements of such thought, reflected in the positions of the filmmakers as well as the figures in the film, 'Milestones' also suggests the fragility of this re-imagined community, specifically through two moments-an attempted break-in and sexual assault and the sudden death of a demobbed GI, about to join a collective house, who accepts an invitation to a break-in and is killed by a cop. In terms that suggest both what unites the individual figures to their various collectives (family, lover(s), activist group, commune, etc) and what unites the narrative strands of the film to each other, he describes the film's structure not a 'chronicle', nor a 'document', but a 'fabric', one which 'spreads, getting progressively larger, with invisible knock-on effects'. As such, the unknown is both space of political possibility, of dialectical process (and hopefully, progress) and risky territory in which the most vulnerable-or simply the unlucky-can succumb to the daily dangers against which the provisional collective(s) here envisioned can't always protect them. Daney: 'Human relationships don't knit together with complete dependability; they are tied together over an empty space, on a wire without a net. To fall through the meshes of the net, to pass through a void, is to die'. And literally so. Milestone's shelters are provisional, flimsy, and in constant negotiation, and if their dreams might seem alternately smaller or larger, more idealistic or more problematic than those we might be able to cultivate now, they resonate all the more for that: rather than a milestone to be mourned in left melancholy, nor a glowing icon of exemplary action, like Daney's thread, they're still unspooling, spreading, in all their complexity.

This four-hour sprawl and slice-of-America docu-fiction bears obvious comparison to Kramer's earlier 'Milestones', though it doesn't function as a sequel as such. 'Milestones' gave us a constantly-rotating cast, through whose various storylines played out the collective dreams of revolution, activism, communal living, as things both held onto and slowly abandoned by a white middle-class emerging back into the class mantle which they'd temporarily left behind. In 'Route One', which traverses the entirety of the titular road from top to tail, we instead have a central figure-'Doc' (Paul McIsaac), who McIsaac described as a kind of fusion of his and Kramer's characters, and who here serves as a travelling companion for the behind-camera Kramer himself. Doc first appears as character in 'Doc's Kingdom' two years previously, where it's suggested that he had a revolutionary past as a member of the Weather Underground and, upon leaving the states, in situations alluded to briefly here, became involved as a doctor in various revolutionary situations in Africa. Like Doc, Kramer returned to the States after a period of some years in Europe to make the film (though unlike Doc, he didn't settle). And Doc/Kramer are now jaded, morose, bemused, sometimes amused-a relation to America not that of forging a new sense of collective being within it (one connected to often romanticised notions of 'tribes', dropping out and the like) but as an individual standing on the outside: the individual now rendered a 'foreigner' in the midst of his homeland. In conversation with Frederick Wismenan, Kramer used the 'foreigner' metaphor to describe the situations that unfold in the film, where an actor is placed in a 'real life' event (say, a Pat Robertson fundraiser); for Kramer, the ease with which the two could be integrated suggested that the American popular relation to representation had changed, conscious or unconscious notions of acting and performance (particularly as they relate to being filmed) altered through the ubiquity, not only of commercial cinema, but of television. To challenge the traditional division between fiction film and documentary-which Kramer sees as arbitrary-is thus not only a formal claim, but an assertion about the nature of social relations as the Cold War ground to its close, in which 'image' has become a 'way of life'. Here, fixed in place by codes of race, class and gender, one is always 'playing one's self'. To set up these situations, the conceit of Doc and Kramer's journey down the road at a time of political campaigning -a journey whose contours are arbitrary yet precise. While 'Milestones' has elements of the road movie-notably, the couple who try to make the transition from life on a commune to an urban job and house-'Route One' takes both the cross-sectional methodology and the rootlessness of the genre as its raison d'etre. Certainly, it must be one of the longest road movies in film history; the road, not as escape, celebration of speed, doomed romanticism, and so on, but as a standing to the side, observing. For a film with such a wealth of incident, the overall mood is subdued, melancholic: the clear gains made by the political right and the absence of viable sources of living together that don't simply blame the marginalised or play out through the capitalist nexus are registered with what one critics calls a 'long sigh'-and inequality and moral hypocrisy is didactically illustrated through one of the film's best sequences, juxtaposing a teenage newly-wed who falls foul of the judicial system with the wealthy lawyer wandering his estate and talking about the need to maintain a work-life balance (because, if he kept the class immiseration he sees in his day job "in my mind, I would literally go out of my mind"). Yet, once he reaches Florida, Doc eventually gains some sense of possibility through community work with marginalised groups: like the characters in 'Milestones', trying to find a way to settle down, to resolve the sense of wandering, exile and the inability to overhaul society as such through revolutionary means with the possibilities for more local, patient, yet perhaps no less valuable modes of change-or perhaps, in the case of his patients, simply survival.

The shorter of the two Aurélia Steiner films moves from black and white to colour, the tracking shots of the French countryside that stood in for 'Vancouver' replaced by shots from a boat moving along the Seine-Paris this time as 'Melbourne'. While the Vancouver film removes all sound save that of Duras' voiceover, this shorter companion piece mixes in the sound of the water, or occasionally, of the boat's engine, albeit low down in the mix. In the Vancouver film, the use of the tracking shot inserts itself into history-the debate over the Shoah and representation, Rivette and 'Kapo': in its Melbourne equivalent, as in 'Les Mains Négatives', 'Le navire night' and 'Le Camion', the perspective of the fixed camera transported in a vehicle-by car, lorry, or boat-renders the entire image with a different kind of constant, but passive movement. As in those films, the movement is also temporal: the rough span from dawn to dusk-but unlike those films, the focus is not so much on spatial peripheries, for we see the Seine's monuments, the iconic bank, its bridges; yet we think of that which passes beneath them, to their side, that which is hidden in the heart of the capital; we think of what else passed under these bridges, on these streets that witnessed war, occupation, suicide, murder. Bear in mind here Duras' comment that seeing the river made her think of the Algerians murdered there in 196-Steiner names the Shoah, but not the Algerian war or other murderous projects of extermination and conquest-recall the overlay of occupied France with Hiroshima in Duras' most famous cinematic contribution. Equivalence, displacement, replacement: these traumas of history, linked in the project of capitalism and fascism, their confrontations and complicities, the resistance to them and the victims they wrought, in films which refuse the grand narratives constructed around them in the attempts to render them legible-genre films, the war picture, the films that emerged even out of the same rubble through to the studio recreations as endless borrowed glories that, if anything, celebrated the wars existence for the narratives it gave them. In showing nothing, hardly a person, Duras' films are far truer to the ethical demands facing film and text. As the film closes with just the sound of engines in the early dawn (or is it the dusk?), and a single, miniaturised figure passing over a bridge passes over our heads, what kind of crossing, what kind of passage does history provide?

A film of the name- Aurélia Steiner a name invented by Duras to stand in for and (this a matter that's more complicated, and perhaps more dubious) to identify with the losses of the Holocaust-the girl of 18 (as Duras was when she left Vietnam for France; as is 'she' in 'Hiroshima Mon Amor' when her lover is killed), on the cusp of adulthood, who decides, as Duras did, to write. The name is that which is given, over which on has little control-here, not the name of the father but of the mother, passed on (the Jewish maternal line)-a name signalling ethnicity ('Juden Aurélia Steiner' repeats a lover)-a name which echoes the name of the dead mother and stages a revenant return even as it also associates the living with the dead, on that wider scale of historical horror. Half way through the film, we see the handwritten name on screen-though we never see a face, a body, a person to put to that name; and towards the end, Duras speaks the voice of repeating the name in an erotic encounter, obsessively, turning over each syllable until those are the only words he can speak, yet which become more and more detached from personal connection and meaning the more he repeats them. This erotic pairing plays throughout the film, in multiple variants: the man with black hair and blue eyes, who is at once the father hanged in the camp for stealing soup to feed his new-born daughter, and the speaker, the daughter Aurélia, seeking her father in teenage sailors and other lovers-the pairing of I and you, she and he that so preoccupied Duras at this time, in writing that grew out of epistolary texts to absent or imaginary addressees.

Filmed in black and white, unlike the majority of the films from this period, the visual methodology, the movement of the film is that of the tracking shot-the use of this particular form echoing the debate about Holocaust and famously emblematised in Jacques Rivette and excoriation of the tracking shot in Pontecorvo's 'Kapo', later turned into a kind of basis for a critical ethics of film by Serge Daney). While, in 'Les Mains Négatives', humans appear fleetingly at the edge of the picture-moments central to how one might interpret that film politically-this 'Aurélia Steiner' is devoid of any such traces. What we see, however, serves as symbolic representation or displacement of a trauma which, as Rivette had argued, lies beyond the ethical boundaries of representation. Thus, the figure of the 'white rectangle' described as the spot of execution-the camp under a German sky-seems to find its equivalent in a burst of sun through cloud; and the tracking shots of trees, chopped down and laid out, numbers inscribed on their lopped off trunks, of the overgrown tracks and platforms of an abandoned railway station, suggest the mechanisation of death in transport and execution of the camps, as the speaker describes substituting erotic encounters for the impossible encounter with the dead father. Or the space with which the film begins-that of the edge, viewed in calm-the sea, the horizon, the waves-reconstructed by the voice as, on the one hand, the space of death, of execution in the camp, and on the other of erotic desire, felt as a giving over of self, of entry, which seems at once to assuage and to replay the trauma of that death, Aurélia Steiner an infant laid on the ground beside her dead mother in the 'white rectangle'. The speaker recollects a storm, real or imagined, that has previously exploded over (and under) the city, then receded: landscape in calm bears the trace of a foundational, invisible disruption, and, even in calm, the white rectangle (the sun through clouds) and a 'black spot' on the horizon form something like visual floaters on the most absent or distant of landscapes.

Duras picked Vancouver and Melbourne as Aurélia's locations, though filming in France, because of their distance from Europe; trauma is not bounded by geography. Spending so much time by the sea-as in many of Duras' other films-a space at once of arrival and departure, the film ends as the lover sails away, bids farewell. Aurélia Steiner seems to become both the woman he sails with, or to, and the one he leaves behind: Aurélia, this figure who Duras later said 'is everywhere, writes from everywhere at the same time', as a figure of total identification, disavowal and loss, of writing as survival-writing to the impossible recipient, here, the dead father and the lovers who replace him, in the companion film, another lost lover. The address seeks to bring back to life the lost object against the impossibility of resurrection, whilst the activities of the living-writing, sex, the present inhabitation of a landscape far removed from the horrors of Europe-is itself under/over-written by death. For Duras, such paradoxes are the only way to represent that which is hijacked, overdetermined, defamed. Duras said that it was this project that brought her back to writing after years of writing only for the cinema-yet a writing whose conditions of possibility seem here to be that of cinema, a cinema whose conditions of possibility are those of writing, all for that which cannot be written, that which is written in numbers on skin (a number equivalent to that of the camp tattoo appears after the words of Steiner's name in the close ups of handwritten text), the film ending with the statement of identity-name, place where you live, age, parents, occupation-its final words the statement of continuance that, for Duras, is that which enables one to keep on living, that becomes like breathing itself: "I write".