Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude) (Mubi)
Angela ( Ilinca Manolache) drives around Bucharest filming ‘safety’ videos with injured workers which are really just a way for the corporation involved to wash their hands of the injury. In her spare time, using a video filter), she makes TikTok videos as an Andrew Tate-like character spouting misogyny. Jude put the film in conversation with a 1981 Romanian film about a female taxi driver, and Angela visits some of the same spots. What Jude is best at is showing how a slight change, becomes a compromise, becomes complicity. The last section is a master class in the slow eroding of truth.
Ed Wood (Tim Burton 1994) Criterion
Is this the last Time Burton movie that was any good at all. Mars Attacks has its moments, but it’s been a downhill slog since. You can see the beginnings of Johnny Depp’s pick-one-affectation-and-make-it-a-character approach here, but the movie is still fun. It pretty much refuses to be cynical about Wood’s wild-eyed enthusiasm, creating a world of misfits around him who have nothing better to do than have faith in him.
Ennemonde (Jean Giono) translated by Bill Johnston
Bookended by ravishing descriptions of landscapes, Ennemonde is about people (and families) who live in solitude in various harsh landscapes and how they survive and even flourish. The title character, a wily mountain woman with an appetite for romance and occasional violence, is rendered lovingly, as are those around her. Giono’s style is deceptively straightforward, yet captivating and humane, tempered with a sly, dry humor it might be easy to miss. His plots—well, he doesn’t so much have plots as incidents that begin to form into something approaching a story.
Speaking in Tongues (J.M. Coetzee/Mariana DiMopulos) publishes 5/25
J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians) discusses the issues and intricacies of translation with Dimopilous, a translator he’s worked with extensively. They talk about the colonization of languages by culture and the state (That is, the languages and dialects lost when an official language is mandated), the complexity of translating gendered language into ungendered language, as well as the role, and duty, of the translator. The book is written as a dialogue. If you read much translation and sometimes wonder how it works, this isn’t a bad place to start.
World without End (Edward Bernd 1956) HBO
Virile American males teach the pale and over-intellectual Earthlings of the future how to defend themselves from mutants by, basically, just beating them up. Needless to say, the women of the future fall in love with our virile Americans. In the end, all is well in the future. Rest easy.
Antwerp (Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer)
A deconstructed noir detective novel in which the author has a speaking part, Antwerp is told in short sections which resemble photographs we can enter and walk around in, and its scenes are generally the scenes which would be left out of a noir, the things happening on the fringes of the action, the life of the characters before, or after, the murder. The vitality of the book derives from these images and its understanding of the aimlessness of poverty and loneliness.
The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing)
I first read this novel over forty years ago. It was during a period in my life when I was reading Lessing, Didion, and Marguerite Duras, as an offset to the white male writers I’d been told were the pantheon. (Virginia Wolff didn’t even make the list at the time.) Perhaps you can imagine the state these three authors put early-twenties Steve in. It was a mixture of confusion, exhilaration, and doubt. Above all, I felt I’d found types of writing that spoke more deeply to me than much of the male canon. Lessing’s novel profoundly influenced me, both in its ruthlessness toward the self, and in its form.
In the late fifties and early sixties when she was writing it, Lessing had left the Communist Party after years of dedicated Party work, as the first hints of Stalin’s atrocities began in whispers. She had also entered psychotherapy. The relentless self-criticism in the Party and the relentless self-examination of therapy created a perfect storm, enabling her to address the fragmentation of the modern human, the endless romance and disgust of gender relationships, and the ways one might begin to write about all of these things at once.
The result is a kitchen-sink novel, in which she attempts every form at hand, and layers them in ways that intersect, contradict, and confuse. While the relentless self-examination can become tedious at times, the sheer force of will driving the novel is overwhelming. Above all, she’s attempting to document the way a self can fracture, dis-integrate, then put itself back together. Her attempts don’t always work, but they are honest and compelling. And she gives herself no quarter, as the novel is clearly somewhat autobiographical, in the same way the protagonist, Anna, a writer; in the same way Anna’s writing about Emma, her character, is clearly autobiographical.
A novel about friendship, mirrored in ways by Ferrante’s, about gender and its aspirations and humiliations, about the discovery of self, as well as about the ways creativity manifests to compel the artist, The Golden Notebook retains much of its original power to seduce and shock.
Harrow (Joy Williams)
A young girl navigates a world after ecological disaster. Sometimes preachy about the ways humanity denies and defiles the environment, Williams has a Flannery O’Connor-esque disdain for humans and their many sins., which is a reputable stance. Just not one I have a lot of patience for.
Season of the Swamp (Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman)
Herrera imagines the 18 months Benito Juarez spent away from Mexico in the midst of political struggle there. (He eventually became the first indigenous President of Mexico.) Season of the Swamp drops Juarez in New Orleans and, in many ways the book is a love letter to the city. But, more than that, it’s about the wonder and anxiety of finding yourself in a new world and learning to navigate it. Here, America is a land of chaos, of many worlds , languages, and terrors.
Grand Theft Hamlet (Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane) MUBI
In the height of the pandemic lockdown, two out of work actors who spend too much time gaming decide to attempt to stage a full production of Hamlet inside the cars and carnage game, Grand Theft Auto. This film takes place entirely inside the game as they audition, rehearse, and mount Hamlet, while attempting to avoid being shot, run over, or killed in ways involving blimps. It’s ridiculous, sometimes hilarious, occasionally compelling, and fun to watch. The full production was finally staged in the game, but I can’t find the date of the event.
The Utopian Generation (Pepetela) translated by David Brookshaw
A novel of idealism, disillusionment, and resignation. Pepetela documents the war for Angolan independence through five Angolans over thirty years. We meet them first in Lisbon, in school, arguing politics, communism, and colonialism, then follow the through the war and after. I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did, but I found myself drawn to the characters and their conversations, as they attempted to work out what they thought and felt, as well as how each responded to the broken promise of independence.
The Villain’s Dance – Fiston Mwanza Mujilla
Clearly influenced by jazz, Mujilla’s vibrant, rhythmic language propels us into the 90s streets of Zaire as Mobuto’s regime is crumbling. Our characters are boys who live on the street,hustling for whatever they can, not always legally, and observing the decay of a government at ground level. From the danger of the diamond mines to their tenuous survival on the street, The Villain’s Dance shares a colorful, unstable world with compassion and a humor that is borne of desperation.
Dahomey (Mati Diop) 2024/You Hide Me (Nii Kwate Owoo) 1970
Two short films about the theft of African art and culture by their colonizers. You Hide Me pulls no punches in laying out how the museumification of African relics was meant to promote and support a white supremacist agenda. In Dahomey, about the repatriation of 26 artifacts (among the thousands held) to the Republic of Benin, Diop imagines the artifacts themselves speaking, of their homelessness and their anxiety for return, then she turns the film over to students, discussing how much these objects should or should not mean to them.
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) Everywhere
A beautifully over-the-top scream of rage about objectification, aging, and the terror of becoming invisible. Fargeat pulls out all the stops in this gruesome feminist body horror tale, continuing her mission to make genre films from a feminist perspective and she joins a number of brilliant French women making films, including Julie Ducournau and Celine Sciamma.
Wasp – Andrea Arnold. (Mubi)
Zoe lives in the projects and is too young to have the four kids she has, and she doesn’t really have the skills to take care of them. Still, she’s young and desperate for someone to care for her. So, she drops her kids in the parking lot of a pub to attempt a date with someone inside. The beauty of Arnold’s film is that we can feel empathy for Zoe and her need for romance, even as we are horrified by what might happen to the children.
The Tube with a Hat – Radu Jude. (Mubi)
A short film in which a man and his son lug a large TV across field, mud, and highways into the neighboring town for repair. Not miserabilist. An offhand, touching story about parenthood.
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock) Criterion
Not my favorite Hitchcock, though it’s full of bravura sequences but man, that final cut is great.
Big Fiction: how Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Dan Sinykin) Columbia University Press
Sinykin tracks the American publishing industry from the late 19th Century to now, from personal publishing houses with dedicated (and underpaid) staff to an industry run by accountants, beholden to huge multinational conglomerates that expect endless growth. He focuses on the transformations of particular houses, but also uses the books and authors being published at the time as a guiding principle for changes in the industry. Big Fiction explains how Big Money decides what we can read and what is unavailable and how that has changed over the last century.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Linda Poitras) HBO
This documentary packs a lot in: Nan Goldin’s early life and career, the devastation of the AIDS crisis, specifically on the NY art scene, the reprehensible acts of the Sackler family in marketing Oxycodone, and the Goldin-led attack on art museums around the world who allowed the Sacklers to whitewash their reputation by buying wings and financing collections. It’s also a master class in finding how you can resist in your corner of the world, and doing it.
Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
Pretty isn’t interesting for very long and this film is very long.
World’s Greatest Sinner (Timothy Carey) (1962) Criterion
Laughably bad (occasionally) but mostly boring and misguided, this film has that garish no-set noir lighting that always spooked me as a kid and became my visual representation of Hell. It can still creep me out. Music by Frank Zappa (!) but, not being a Zappa fan, I didn’t notice.
The Bloodiest (Jean-Pierre Bekolo) (2005) Mubi
DIY Afrofuturist film from Cameroon that begins with a placard asking: “How can you make a science fiction film in a country with no future?” The Bloodiest follows a pair of young sex workers who find they have supernatural powers and go about dispatching heads of state. Fiercely feminist, it’s also a great example of creating effect with a little smoke and blue light. Pairs well with the Rwandan film Neptune Frost.
Fragments of a Paradise (Jean Giono) translated by Paul Eprile
Giono (with others) was the first to translate Moby Dick into French, and he wrote a novel about Melville. Fragments of a Paradise is about a sea voyage and it basks in the oceans of islands of Melville. It seems everyone on the ship wishes to escape the ‘civilized’ world of 1940 and much of Fragments alternates between the powerlessness of surviving on the winds, and the transcendent beauty of the natural world. These fragments celebrate searching, friendship, and reverence in equal measure.
The Passenger Seat (Vijay Khurana)
Two boys, or men, attempt to escape from the backwater town where they grew up by getting in a truck and ‘heading north.’ The Passenger Seat is finely controlled, compulsively readable first novel about the masculine rituals involved in male friendship when the males are unsure whether they are men or still boys. It takes us inside their heads as they attempt to negotiate how to enter a larger world, and the horrible mistakes that arise from a performative masculinity.
Civil War (Alex Garland) HBO
Civil War really doesn’t have much to say beyond the hoariest of cliches and it can’t be called prescient by anyone who’s been paying attention over the last ten years. Alex Garland films always seem like they’re about big ideas, but they generally have no core, as if he couldn’t be bothered to think things through. The actors are given little to do but react to the horrors around them with a stoic we’re-journalists-after-all set jaw. Runtime is nearly (but not really) worth the four minutes or so that Jesse Plemons is onscreen.
The Antarctica of Love (Sara Stridsberg) translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner
This is not a miserablist novel, though the description may make it sound like one: the nameless victim of an assault and murder floats above her world, looking back at her life, while following the continuing lives of those she loves, most of whom are marginalized members of Swedish society struggling in sex work or with addiction. Stridsberg (who also wrote Valerie, a fantasia on the life of Valerie Solanas) writes about the marginalized with a gentle approach and a lack of judgment. The book is grounded in the voice of our narrator and her tenuous connections to the people of her life, and often stunning in its imagery and insight.
/Atlantiques (Mati Diop) (2009) / L’Avance (Djiby Kebe) (2024) Mubi
Two short films about difficult decisions. In Atlantiques, young Senegalese friends discuss getting on an illegal boat again in an attempt to reach Europe, even though they nearly dies and were deported the first time. A matter of fact presentation of the reasons people risk their lives. In L’Avance, a young African painter is offered a lot of money by a famous white collector for a painting of his mother and must decide whether he can live with the decision. An understated look at the currencies of exchange around art.