by Jonathan M

Release of A Traveller in Time – The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller (2023) edited by Nina Allan

I have, in my sweaty little palms, my contributor copy of A Traveller in Time – The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan. The book is officially launching on the 12th of September and is available to pre-order from the website of Luna Press Publishing.

My little piece about Maureen is included alongside pieces by Nina Allan, her husband Paul Kincaid, and her collaborators at Strange Horizons Aisha Subramanian and Dan Hartland. As a passing note, you can heard Dan and Aisha chatting to Paul about his own critical practice in the latest edition of their podcast.

When I first heard that this book was going to be a thing, I was intrigued to see what form the project might eventually take: Was it going to be an overview of Maureen’s entire critical career? Was it going to be one of those academic-style Festschrift things like the one they did for John and Judith Clute back in the day? Would it include the older stuff that Maureen wrote for Vector? Would it include any of her traditional fan-writing?

The answer is that A Traveller in Time draws mostly from Maureen’s later work including pieces written for Vector, Strange Horizons, and her blog Paper Knife. Aside from the fact that I think that Maureen would have approved, I also think this was quite a canny editorial decision as a lot of Maureen’s critical charm lay in her voice and that voice was often most evident when Maureen was writing for her blog and allowing her guard to slip on the assumption that nobody was paying attention, though of course some of us were. Nina Allan really has done an amazing job with this collection and it deserves to be read and remembered.

by Jonathan M

Maureen

Maureen died a little while ago and her funeral was yesterday but it’s taken me a while to pull together my thoughts. I felt it appropriate to post this here as my friendship with Maureen was born of the period when I used to publish stuff here and I know she used to read and occasionally comment on the site.

Maureen Kincaid Speller was one of the most remarkable people I have ever known. I consider myself immeasurably richer for having known her and infinitely poorer for the knowledge that I will never see her again. She was unique.

I first met Maureen on one of three separate occasions. Memory rebels at any further attempts at ordering as I cannot remember a time when I was aware of her existence whilst not also being her friend. This is because Maureen didn’t so much meet you as effortlessly envelope you in her social world. She was not one for tentatively moving up through the gears from polite smiles to small talk and then on to shared references… No, she just reached out and included you in whichever conversation it was that she happened to be having. I may not be able to remember exactly when it was that Maureen and I first met but I am certain that the first thoughts I had about her in person were ‘who the fuck is this madwoman and why is she talking to me?’

Maureen’s casual but persistent inclusivity was unusual in that it came less from an extrovert’s need to stage-manage conversations and more from a genuine desire for intellectual connection. Maureen would sometimes speak to me of her youth and I always got the impression that, prior to her relationship with Paul, the people in her life tended to view her love of books as a baffling and border-line embarrassing eccentricity rather like going to the shops clad in a beard of bees.

This lack of early support and encouragement seems to have cast a long shadow over Maureen’s life. It left her feeling as though she were perpetually on the outside looking in, always hearing exciting conversations taking place in other rooms whilst not being allowed to participate. This sense of pre-emptive rejection meant that when Maureen Kincaid Speller included you in a conversation, it was not because she valued inclusivity as some kind of abstract liberal principle but because she wanted to hear what you had to say as a person. More than anyone I have ever known, Maureen believed in the power of conversation and the ability of books to shrink the distances between human hearts. She never once took for granted either her connection to SFF or the connections she made with individual fans.

Maureen viewed herself as a critic. She treated criticism with the upmost seriousness and revelled in that identity even when she struggled to do much writing herself. Indeed, it is telling that two of her final contributions to the discussion of SFF include a lengthy piece about the challenge of engaging critically with a much-loved author and a podcast that was politely trying to clear a space for critical engagement in spaces that have, over time, come to view it with no small degree of suspicion.

A few years ago, Maureen was going through one of her periodic bouts of self-doubt. No longer able to see the value of her contributions to the field, she asked me where I thought her critical strengths lay and I, having been put on the spot, answered that I most valued her voice. At the time, this went down like a lead-balloon as I suspect she was looking to me for reassurance her that she had the requisite number of skill-points to unlock the ‘Critic’ prestige class. While Maureen may not have liked my answer, I continue to stand by it as the things that draw me back to Maureen’s writing are her sensibility and her voice rather than her ‘take’ on any specific book or trend. Maureen viewed herself as a critic and it is only right that we should honour that self-image but I believe that thinking of Maureen in terms of her contributions to criticism is to diminish both the scope of her intellect and the depth of her commitment to the conversation surrounding SFF.

Back when I was most active in SFF, people used to produce manifestos and series of blog-posts expanding their thoughts on criticism and the ways in which it differed from reviewing and the kinds of unpaid PR work that have become increasingly common in book-adjacent spaces on social media. While there is, naturally, discourse to be had over power dynamics within SFF and who has the ability to speak in a disruptive manner in spaces that have come to be dominated by marketing and professionalised cliques, the point is that fandom is a set of social relations and social relations change. The window for certain forms of speech opens and closes with the passage of time and while Maureen seems to have felt most at home inhabiting the role of critic, she was other things as well. In fact, she was arguably one of the most adaptive thinkers in SFF commentary because she was willing to change and to follow the conversation.

Glancing at Maureen’s page on ISFDB, it is hard not to be impressed by the sheer scale of her commitment to writing about science-fiction and fantasy. Most people who try their hands at reviewing often wind up burning out or migrating towards other areas but Maureen started putting her work out there in the 1980s and continued producing work right up until this year. As someone whose critical career pre-dated the internet, the scale of Maureen’s output also had physical implications. I remember visiting Paul and Maureen in Folkestone for the first time after being asked by the British Science Fiction Association to help put together a collection of her reviews. They pulled these huge stacks of zines off of shelves that were deeper than a man’s arm and piled them all at my feet. At one point, Maureen flicked through a magazine with some hand-drawn cover art, harrumphed, peered over the round spectacles she favoured at the time and fixed me with one of her fabled Hard Paddington Stares before instructing me that some of these pieces were going to need a vigorous edit if they were ever to see the light of day again.

At the time, I knew Maureen’s work chiefly from its appearances online and in the magazines of the British Science Fiction Association but as soon as I started looking into her back-catalogue, I quickly realised that Maureen’s engagement extended much further. I was lucky enough to know Maureen for more than fifteen years and before I had met her she had already served on award juries, been a guest of honour at conventions, been responsible for convention programming, made the Hugo shortlist for Best Fan Writer and administered the BSFA. I mention all of these things in the same breath because these were all honours and activities I understood as someone whose engagement with SFF post-dated the creation of online venues and spaces. The further back I looked, the more I realised that Maureen was an accomplished and celebrated contributor to SFF before online fandom was even a thing.

This is significant as, back in the noughties, a lot of older and more established fans were acutely hostile to the idea that publishing stuff online might be viewed in the same light as publishing stuff in the form of a fanzine. This may seem absurd in the current climate but a serious attempt was even made to restrict the Hugo fan-categories to material published in traditional zines. To her eternal credit, Maureen was not one of those fans… she was simply delighted to discover that people were discussing books on the internet and so followed the conversation online. In fact, one of Maureen’s more endearing traits was her desire to overcome whichever technological barrier stood between her and the conversation. For Maureen, there was no fundamental difference between mimeographed zines, academic journals, blogs, online magazines, Discord servers or podcasts; they were all just different places to talk and if you wanted to participate in the conversation you learned the technology and adapted your thinking.

It is in this sense of continuity between different venues and forms of conversation that Maureen’s voice really rings out. If you are fortunate enough to read her more recent criticism or receive her editorial advice, you will find the same voice and sensibility that once graced the pages of traditional fanzines like Bottled Lightening, Snufkin’s Bum or Steam Engine Time. That voice was so distinctive and endearing that it not only won Maureen a Nova award for traditional fan-writing, it also helped her become the beneficiary of the 1999 Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund. Decades later, Maureen would still speak animatedly about the many experiences she had travelling the country and meeting American fans. She had even internalised regional American culinary discourse on a number of issues including what constitutes a proper ‘barbecue’.

In the years that I knew her, Maureen tended to downplay the work she had done in non-critical fanzines because that whimsical and intensely personal style of fan-writing had fallen out of fashion in an SFF culture that was growing steadily more serious and commercialised. Whenever I asked to see her earlier writings, Maureen would adroitly change the subject but when I did eventually track down copies of her non-critical work, I was delighted to find the exact same voice that was present in all of her criticism. A voice that was somehow always on the brink of both exasperation and child-like glee; the id of fandom’s passion always held in check by the wry and erudite superego of someone who treated the act of writing with a sense of magisterial solemnity.

I called the collection of Maureen’s early reviews …And Another Thing because Maureen was someone who always had something more to say. There were times when starting a conversation with Maureen was like popping the cork on a bottle of champagne; it was as though her ideas had spent years maturing in an oaken cask beneath a French chateau only for them to force themselves out with such force that you could only stand clear and help mop up the spill. Maureen wrote the way she spoke; in long, looping sentences that moved effortlessly from one insightful observation to another, filling the room as quickly and efficiently as possible lest someone dare to try and shut her up. There was always more to say and more conversation to be had. Lunch at the Speller Kincaid household only ever ended when someone looked up and noticed that the sun had gone down.

Maureen’s commitment to SFF and her desire for intellectual connection broke through all boundaries. When the energy began to ebb away from traditional fanzines and towards online publication, Maureen simply altered her methods and followed the conversation. When the energy began to ebb away from blogs, Maureen altered her methods again and drew more heavily upon her skills as both an editor and an administrator. Many recent arrivals into the orbit of SFF’s institutions may know Maureen chiefly as the long-standing senior editor of the reviews department at Strange Horizons but Maureen’s commitments extended to a number of other institutions including research bodies, journals and small presses. Maureen’s commitment to the conversation was such that she not only followed it wherever it went, she also rolled up her sleeves and did the work required to allow others to participate. SFF culture will miss Maureen because even when she wasn’t participating in the conversation, she was helping to include, empower, and welcome others. The casual inclusivity that Maureen practiced in person was echoed at every level of her work.

Maureen will be missed for everything that she was and everything she did.

by Jonathan M

Auto Focus (2002) – Made Free, Yet Everywhere in Chains

Paul Schrader is better known as a writer than a director. Having co-written most of Martin Scorsese’s better-known films, his own directorial efforts have often left him stranded between two cinematic cultures; his themes are often two weird and downbeat for Hollywood and yet his style is too conventional for the aesthetes of Cannes. As a writer/director, the creative high point of his career remains the beautifully demented and heavily-stylised Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

Well-received at the time and since largely forgotten, Auto Focus is very much a companion piece to Schrader’s best-known film: Like Mishima, Auto Focus is a biopic chronicling the rise and fall of a relatively obscure cultural figure. Like Mishima, Auto Focus uses cinematic style rather than narrative or dialogue to deliver its intellectual substance. Like Mishima, Auto Focus is about a man who is hollowed out and destroyed by his commitment to an unsustainable model of masculinity.

 

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

REVIEW — A Quiet Passion (2016)

After a period of considerable silence on my part, FilmJuice have my review of Terence Davies’ wonderful biopic of the American poet Emily Dickinson entitled A Quiet Passion.

It was interesting to find myself writing about Davies for the second time in five months after having spent a number of years bouncing off his films…

Whenever you acquire a passion for a particular cultural form, there is always a period in which you wind up feeling obliged to be a good citizen and, at the very least, experience the great canonical presences of the field. This gravitational pull can arise from social gatekeeping but even if you never experience a dude in a stained T-shirt snorting dismissively at your faves, you can still wind up being drawn into a cultural gravity well.

For example, once you acquire a passion for a particular cultural form, it is only natural to seek out respected commentators on that form and when those commentators all point towards the same cultural artefacts then it is quite hard to avoid engaging with those tastes and values. This is particularly obvious in the world of film criticism where an already limited range of canonical critics all tend to wind up writing about a limited range of canonical directors.

Davies is a director who sits at the bottom of quite a deep critical gravity well, which is to say that his work is respected by a lot of very respectable people and the amount of gravitational force he exerts on the culture around him means that there will always be some pressure to give his work another try, if only to try and work out what other people see in him.

I wrote about Davies’ long-awaited Sunset Song back in April and found it sorely wanting. A Quiet Passion is very similar to Sunset Song in that it is also quite dark, emotionally controlled, and oppressively internal. However, while the aesthetics of Sunset Song seemed a questionable fit for the source material, those same aesthetics turned out to be a perfect fit for the life of Emily Dickinson:

 

A Quiet Passion reads a lot like a critique of contemporary liberalism: It begins as a light and fluffy comedy of manners in which brilliant young women drop truth bombs on stuffy 19th Century caricatures but the comedy of manners collapses into tragedy when it turns out that material reality is immune to your zesty one-liners and epic owns. What follows is an absolutely uncompromising vision of genius and depression rooted in the realities of 19th Century life. Indeed, while many of Dickinson’s friends and family affect a form of world-weary cynicism, Dickinson expands those insights beyond the punchline and towards their logical conclusion in the realisation that society is built upon a series of monstrously unjust lies.

 

I went into the review-writing process rather unsure of my feelings on Davies and so I talk a bit about how I view Davies’ career and I begin to elaborate a narrative about the aesthetics of British art house film that I may wind up returning to at some later point:

 

The root of the problem is that Davies is a director in the great tradition of British art house film. Indeed, while many of the art films to come out of continental Europe tend towards the abstract and novelistic, British art films tend to be theatrical and rooted in social realism. To put it another way, European art film is a house built by Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean-Luc Godard whereas British art house film owes considerably more to left-leaning social realists such as Alan Clark and Mike Leigh. Unfortunately for Davies and many directors like him, the 1990s saw the economic heartlands of prestige cinema shift a lot closer to the American middle-class and while the abstract tendencies of European art film survived the transition, the British art house tradition did not.

 

 

by Jonathan M

REVIEW — Melody (1971)

Bit late uploading this but FilmJuice have my review of Waris Hussein’s thoroughly excellent and recently re-released British drama Melody (also known as S.W.A.L.K.)

Set in 1970s East London, Melody begins by introducing the resolutely introverted and middle-class Danny to a working-class community that his shit-munching parents are hoping to gentrify. Initially alienated from his class-mates, Danny soon manages to establish a friendship with a local lad whose home life is so horrifying that you never actually see it on screen. Made in the great tradition of British post-War social realism, Melody explores not only the dynamics of gentrification and middle-class ‘concern’ for the lower orders but also the ways in which proximity and cooperation can work to establish solidarity between people from ostensibly very different backgrounds. Filled with these lovely scenes in which the camera runs and runs as kids go about their normal daily lives, the film soon transitions into an utterly charming and genuinely moving love story between Danny and a little girl called Melody:

 

Despite being set in a recognisably socialist universe in which social class shapes both your identity and your hopes for the future, Melody is a deeply romantic film that wants to believe in the absolute power of love to remake the world. At first, these two thematic strands appear to be in conflict as nobody but Danny (and later Melody) believe that they should be in love or want to get married. However, as the film reaches its conclusion, opinions begin to shift as kids rally to the couple’s cause and set about creating a world of their own. In a move that recalls the ending to both Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Melody ends with the protagonists running away from a world that they can’t escape… because sometimes all you need for happiness is a bit of breathing room. As Ornshaw says, “Don’t forget to change at Clapham Junction!”

 

Interestingly, the weakest element of this film is probably the soundtrack that inspired its makings. Dominated by profoundly not-famous tunes by the BeeGees, it feels way too folky and blandly up-beat for a film with the urban setting and realistic tone of a film like Melody. This being said, Melody is a thoroughly excellent film from an era when the British film industry was still interested in making films that spoke directly to the experiences of British people.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW — Paterson (2016)

This week sees the home release of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, his first film since 2013’s Only Lovers Left Alive (which I adored). Unlike most of Jarmusch’s recent films, Paterson comes without the sugar-frosting of genre tropes. No vampires, no spies, no cowboys, and no assassins.  Just a dude who writes poetry and drives a city bus.  My FilmJuice review can be found over here.

There are many paths into an evocative film like Paterson but the one that caught my attention was the relationship between the poet who exists in an oppressively repetitive world where he is just happy to be a normal guy and the wife who spends her days trying to perform the identity of an artist only to have her true calling almost creep up on her. It would have been easy for Jarmusch to unpack this tension in moral terms and so take a swipe at the culture of public performance created by social media but the view he adopts is actually far more nuanced in that it supports the poet who keeps beauty locked up inside his own head as well as the people who feel the need to ‘fake it till they make it’ creatively.

Like many of Jarmusch’s more memorable films, Paterson is episodic, urban and filled with a wry melancholy over the isolation and strangeness of normal lives but Paterson uses those themes to explore the creative process as it plays out in the lives of normal people.

 

Paterson is a beautifully conceived, beautifully shot, and beautifully acted film that serves as a reminder of how sensitive and humane Jarmusch can be when he isn’t forcing the round peg of his vision into the square holes of popular culture. It is also an interesting piece of cinematic business as while the age of austerity is forever turning the screws and forcing works of art further and further outside of the cultural mainstream, Jim Jarmusch managed to convince Amazon.com to help distribute a $5 Million film about a bus driver who writes poetry.

 

 

by Jonathan M

REVIEW — Indochine (1992)

My first review of the year is of a film that is as intriguing as it is flawed and problematic. First released in 1992,  Regis Wargnier’s Indochine can only be described as a piece of post-colonial Oscar-bait.

The “post-colonial” bit refers to the fact that Wargnier’s film followed the example set by David Lean’s A Passage to India and used France’s colonial history as an excuse to make a beautiful and nostalgic film about an exotic foreign land. Wargnier’s producers knew full well that nostalgic prestige productions tend to do disproportionately well at the Oscars and so Indochine was always a cynical exercise in bringing home the gold. Hence the term “post-colonial Oscarbait”.

However, while the idea of white people from former colonial powers making films about former colonies is always going to be problematic, I think that Indochine deserve some credit for not only siding with the oppressed but also presenting colonialism as a system that was both monstrous and politically unsustainable. My FilmJuice piece about the film can be found here:

Indochine is a beautifully made and well-performed film that handles a difficult subject in both a progressive and sympathetic manner. However, while the film’s production values and ambitions may scream quality, there is no escaping the fact that this was a film about colonialism made by white people for the consumption of other white people. The writers and director do try their best to get beyond this limitation but the decision to use the Vietnamese characters thematically rather than narratively means that the film retains a cool, detached, and ultimately frustrating viewpoint that denies its subjects agency when it should be seeking to understand their actions.

Re-reading my review, it strikes me that Indochine exemplifies many of the problems presented by cultural appropriation. Though many of the film’s narrative problems do stem from a decision to focus on the white characters rather than the Vietnamese characters, having a bunch of French people tell a story about Vietnamese people struggling to defeat French colonialism would arguably have been just as bad.

 

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Chevalier (2015)

FilmJuice have my review of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s excellent third film Chevalier.

Tsangari is a director who sits in the shadow of Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos began to turn heads back in 2009 when the excellent Dogtooth used surreal imagery to paint a picture of a young generation that was being slowly crushed by the deluded ideas of their parents. Tsangari may have produced Dogtooth and given Lanthimos his big break but the fact that Dogtooth hit big while Tsangari’s first film did not means that it was easy for some critics to view Tsangari as the junior in that particular creative partnership. This is rather unfortunate as Tsangari’s breakthrough film Attenberg showed her to be by far the superior talent. Indeed, I consider Tsangari (along with Celine Sciamma) to be one of only a handful of really interesting film directors working in European cinema today.

Much like Attenberg, Tsangari’s Chevalier is funny, weird and politically astute in a way that will only become more obvious with the passage of time.

The film is set onboard a luxury yacht where a group of wealthy middle-aged men are enjoying an off-season holiday. Right from the start, the energies at work within the group are noticeably weird but things start to get really strange when one of the men suggests a competition that involves everyone awarding each other points in order to determine something resembling an objective pecking order within the group:

Unsurprisingly, the boundary-less nature of this competition serves only to accelerate and amplify tensions present within the group. This means that an already bizarre holiday gets progressively weirder and more unpleasant the longer it is allowed to last: Time and again, failure to succeed at challenges set by the group leads to loss of face and emotional breakdowns that somehow never quite blossom into either outright violence or the kind of transgressive sexual activity suggested by that image of the bloke showing his feet to someone over the internet. This is a holiday on which older men obsess about their sexual potency while younger men smoulder with resentment at the amount of control exerted over them by more senior and wealthier members of the group. Friendships rise and fall, alliances are made and broken, lies are spun and abandoned, but none of it ever seems to matter.

What makes this film so interesting and timely is the fact that it is — quite obviously — about male sexual desire and how those thwarted desires can result in the birth of political abominations.

There was an interesting piece in this week’s Guardian about the Alt-right and how Donald Trump’s head political strategist has nurtured a connection between right-wing politics and what is often referred to as the ‘manosphere’:

An online subculture centred around hatred, anger and resentment of feminism specifically, and women more broadly.

I have a lot of respect for Abi Wilkinson as a political commentator but I actually think that she has this precisely backwards… The Manosphere is not built around hating either women in general or feminism in particular, it’s a space devoted to indulging male sexual fantasies to the point where they are completely unconnected to reality. It is that disconnection from reality that fuels the resentment and anger.

The Manosphere is in some ways quite similar to the world of fan-fiction where a predominantly female crowd write stories that take characters from popular culture and imagine them not only in non-canonical emotional relationships but also in sexual relationships that are as explicit as they are transgressive. The difference between the worlds of fan-fiction and the Manosphere is that while the literary and derivative nature of fan-fiction allows women to indulge their various kinks whilst keeping a clear boundary between their kinks and their ‘real’ sexualities, the Manosphere not only encourages men to fantasise but to do so in a way that stresses the connection between the stuff they have and the stuff they secretly want.

The Manosphere encourages men to internalise their pornographic obsessions and urges them to act on those obsessions. It achieves this by forging links between the consumption of porn and the employment of sex workers on the one hand and learning how to trick desirable women into sex on the other.It’s no surprise that Reddit features so prominently in discussions of the Alt-Right as the structure of Reddit allows people to indulge their pornographic desires and their desire for political engagement without ever leaving the site. The problem with connecting the stuff you use to jerk off with the stuff you use to make decisions about your life is that almost nobody can afford endless escorts, expensive cars, exclusive gym memberships, and flash wardrobes that are positioned as solutions to the problem of involuntary celibacy.

In effect, the Alt-right is an epidemic of blue balls that has bootstrapped itself into a political movement as all of that sexual frustration has curdled into resentment at the women who refuse to play ball. That resentment has now been weaponised by political operatives in the same way 1970s Republicans weaponised the moral discontent of the Evangelical revival.

The plot of Chevalier does not explicitly mention the Alt-right but it does deal with a load of emotionally under-developed men who are incapable of controlling their sexual desires and so allow those desires to manifest themselves as a weird yearning for social domination. The film’s political edge comes from the fact that while the men battle for dominance, the real world is seen as nothing more than a set of empty buildings on a distant horizon. The sexual energies of the Alt-right are not just toxic but solipsistic in that it begins by drawing on male desire for things they cannot have and then tells them that they can have these things by brutalising women and minorities on their way to remaking the world.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Day for Night (1973)

FilmJuice have my review of Francois Truffaut’s thoroughly excellent Day for Night, also known as Nuit Americaine in reference to the practice of recreating night on-screen by shifting the white balance and deliberately under-exposing the shot.

Despite not having seen this film in about twenty years, Day for Night was absolutely central to my discovery of art house film. I first discovered a love of film while my parents were getting divorced as my mother would take me to the video store and allow me to rent as many films as I wanted, regardless of their age-appropriateness. I took my love of film to the next level as a teenager when my GCSE English teacher started showing us films in an effort to make us think critically about texts. I rather enjoyed the process and so started going out of my way to rent unusual films and one of the films I stumbled upon quite early on was Day for Night, a film whose true brilliance I really only understand now that I’m able to spot all the jokes and references…

Day for Night is a film about film-making or rather the process of film production and how films are assembled by a combination of authorial vision, individual incompetence, collective brilliance and blind fucking luck:

Throughout the film, characters frequently ask themselves why they have chosen to work in the film industry and whether cinema can ever be more than a job and a way of making money. Though never addressed directly either in the plot or dialogue, Day for Night must be viewed as an answer to both of those questions as the film can be read as a picture of what Marxists refer to as non-alienated labour, which is to say work that offers spiritual and psychological succour as well as financial remuneration. Imagine a job that does more than just fill the pockets of wealthier people. Imagine a job that defines you as an individual and provides you both with a sense of purpose and a tangible connection to the people that surround you. Imagine a job that you look forward to doing because it tells you who you are, where you came from, and where you are headed tomorrow. Imagine a job that makes both yourself and the world a better place and you will understand how François Truffaut felt about being a filmmaker.

The film is full of lovely moments and great performances but the really famous bit is a montage sequence when everything on a seemingly disastrous and doomed production suddenly slots into place and — as Truffaut famously put it — cinema reigns:

 

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – La Grande Vadrouille (1966)

FilmJuice have my review of Gerard Oury’s La Grande Vadrouille. Which, despite being one of the most insanely popular French films of all time, remains largely unappreciated by English-speaking audiences.

Set during World War II, the film involves a pair of bumbling Frenchmen being sucked into the resistance movement and deciding to help three allied Airmen escape into unoccupied France. As I explain in my review, this image of ordinary French people as ‘citoyens resistants’ was part of a concerted effort to re-write history by replacing the truth about French collaboration with a myth that restored pride to the French military, honour to the French political class, and self-respect to ordinary French citizens:

 

Though challenged in the wake of the May ‘68 riots through films such as Marcel Ophuls’ epic documentary The Sorrow and The Pity, the myth remains very much a part of contemporary French identity.  The memories of occupation still hurt, the taint of collaboration is still present, and even though the generation of Frenchmen who fought the Second World War is now dying off, the need of the French people to protect themselves from the darker recesses of their shared history is still very much alive.  It is kept alive by comforting and wonderful films like La Grande Vadrouille.

 

The question of French collaboration and the policies of the Vichy regime has been one of my favourite historical riffs since I first saw The Sorrow and The Pity. One of the strange things about having spent my entire Childhood in a French school is that I grew up with a very clear myth of Frenchness that stretched from the caves right up to the figure of the citizen resistance fighter. The Sorrow and the Pity really helped me to see beyond that propaganda and considerably darkened my vision of humanity.

This being said, it occurs to me that something really needs to be done about the British equivalent of the ‘Citoyen Resistant’ myth as British politics is shifting further and further to the right and this move to the right is being at least partially fuelled by this myth of Britain as a plucky little nation that managed to survive on its own outside of Europe. Indeed, one of the things I really like about the British TV series Peaky Blinders is that it portrays 1920s Britain as an ethnically diverse and deeply multicultural place where the Establishment either murdered its opponents or plied them with money in an effort to bring them into line. At a time when people like Winston Churchill are being lionised by fascist revanchistes, Peaky Blinders dares to present him as nothing more than an Edwardian supervillain.