To save me spamming your emails, I thought I’d do a 2-in-1 rather than two separate pieces, especially with them both being reflections on my reading, and of films that I have an attachment to.
This instalment of Essential Reading is a bit different. Having come across so much superb work on Substack of late, I felt it was only right to share a few words for anyone who receives and reads my newsletter and who is yet to be acquainted with the following writers. These works are genuinely excellent, and of high value, that should be shared as widely as possible.
Defining films of the 2020s: Megalopolis A stupid, senile movie for a stupid, senile age. By Nye Canham in Get Literate
I actually first came across Nye on TikTok of all places - my burgeoning algorithm on the app (I refused to have TikTok for a long time, deriding my partner relentlessly for her usage, before she informed me of “BookTok”, something that I was excited by but has yet to be of any use to me whatsoever) doing a fine job in pandering to my tastes. Whether Nye is the only person in existence who uses TikTok in such a meaningful way, I don’t know, but my TikTok is now full of people miming to Donald Trump voiceovers, doing impressions of Donald Trump, and dogs. Of course, I can’t blame anyone other than myself for this. It’s just who I am now.
Anyway, Nye’s TikTok is much like his Substack, a witty, intelligent, at times hilarious, but always enlightening take on his chosen topic.
Nye’s latest piece is a thoroughly hilarious, and entirely justified, assault on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. In an age such as ours, when we are relentlessly bombarded by the banal and mundane, when everything from art to philosophy to sport has been polluted by capital, where nothing is off limits from this, where to turn on the TV or radio, or to scroll through an app on your phone, is a perilous act for those who value their mental faculties, works such as this remind us that we are still sane, that we’re not alone in our despair, and that a culture that allows such nonsense to be made at such great expense, when, to cite just one example, starvation is a thing, is a truly perverse one. In short, our instincts are correct. Everything is going to shit.
In the case of Megalopolis, Nye exposes the egotism, elitism, and sense of entitlement behind the making of what is, in effect, a bizarre vanity project. But though it is Coppola’s project, the blame can’t be placed squarely on him. People agreed to this. Actors read the script and said, “Yeah, I’ll do it. Why not?” Such decisions can only be made by people completely detached from reality, living in bubbles, surrounded by PR people, their lives managed, their needs catered for, and who are told, inexplicably, that yes, people do want this. This is entertainment now.
Nye’s writing is so good because it doesn’t focus solely on theory, though theory is a crucial component and is analysed with expertise. He has a good instinct, and the awareness of wider cultural contexts in which to ground his chosen topic. This is why I would recommend this piece on Megalopolis, and Nye’s substack in general, as essential reading for all. Even if literary or film theory isn’t your thing, the cultural context, and analysis of this context, makes the work highly relevant.
Part II: Victor Klemperer's Language of the Third Reich Signs and Symbols under the Nazis
Part III: Victor Klemperer Captures the Essence of Nazi Propaganda - Blind Hatred for the Jewish People. By Cryn Johansson in Cryn’s Substack
Cryn’s Substack is rich in philosophy, history, and personal reflections, and exploring her work is an enlightening and rewarding experience. I could have chosen any of her articles to discuss in depth, and highly recommend that you check out her Substack.
This trilogy of articles on Victor Klemperer’s diaries was read in one afternoon. As is often the case with Cryn’s Substack, I wasn’t familiar with the source of the subject matter. So in my case, reading these articles is an education.
A study of Klemperer’s Language of the Third Reich, Cryn hones in on the power of language, and how language, in Klemperer’s words, “does not simply write and think” for us, but also “dictates” our feelings and “governs” our “entire spiritual being(s) the more unquestioningly and unconsciously (we) abandon (ourselves) to it.” This is a profound realisation, and to think of language in such a way is to exhibit a vigorous self-awareness.
Naturally, it is easy to take language, and the ability to communicate via words - which are, in essence, constructed symbols acting as arbitrary representations for ideas, objects, and actions - for granted. One would imagine that it would take an almighty shock to the senses to become engaged in this thought. Being the subject of State sponsored oppression, the target of racialised propaganda, is one such shock.
Cryn understands this, and her study acts as a substantial introduction to Language of the Third Reich, whilst simultaneously tapping into the importance of recognising the way language is used beyond Nazi Germany. Cryn’s study reminds us that the Nazi’s did not invent the distortion of language, and the manipulation of people through language, nor was this exclusive to them. Understanding the function of language, as opposed to taking it for granted as something natural, is crucial, enabling us to recognise the underlying meanings of language, and the ease to which language can corrupt.
Next task - obtaining a copy of Language of the Third Reich.
Chapter 1: Humanity and its Horrors Part I. The horror of daily life within capitalism. By Godfrey Moase in Solidarity Wedge
Having recently discovered Godfrey’s Substack, I can’t go too in depth into the general subject matter. This is something I will catch up on, however.
In the article shared here, Godfrey reflects on the parasitical, vampirical, nature of capitalism. Expanding on a notion put forward by Mark Fisher - “[c]apital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us” - Godfrey makes the fascinating link between the rise of zombie and vampire fiction and neoliberal era “repressed class trauma.”
In Godfrey’s own words:
“Capital, like a vampire, can exist in perpetuity as a thing which is already dead. The ongoing functioning of capital is dependent on its ability to continue to extract value from living labour (amongst other living systems) much like the vampire’s dependence on its capacity to extract blood from people. Some of this extraction results in the creation of new capitalists and new vampires but most people are left completely sucked dry.”
“The zombies, however, symbolise the fate of the working classes as “living corpses” within a capitalist system. A classical zombie lacks any sort of conscious thought or ability to form emotional relationships. They shuffle day and night mechanically working away at their tasks. A zombie aims to consume human flesh whereas more often than not it's a worker who is consumed themselves by the productive process.”
Godfrey qualifies these images with personal experience, citing his work as a trade union official, and reflections from workers of feeling like a zombie at work. One account, from a manufacturing worker, tells of the soul-destroying experiences of working in poor conditions and challenging environments (in this case, prolonged exposure to severe heat) - “If you go home after a long day, you just kind of want to stare at the ground for ten, fifteen minutes, until you, I don't know, become alive again”.
Ultimately, Godfrey’s article serves as an understanding of capitalism “as an ever mutating but always horrific social system” - one embedded within all areas of society, contaminating our education systems and media outlets, thus controlling the means of communication and learning, as well as production. The result is another notion given treatment by Fisher - the state of capitalist realism.
If Islam Vanished Tomorrow… On the Racialization of Islam and the Performance of Power. By I. Rida Mahmood in Naked Shadows on a Black Wall
As with Godfrey Moase’s Substack, I. Rida Mahmood’s Naked Shadows on a Black Wall is a new Substack to me, and I’m looking forward to reading more of her work.
In this article, Mahmood talks about the racialisation of Islam and the contrasts displayed in media outlets between Islam and the other Abrahamic faiths - Judaism and Christianity. This is done, considering the infuriating prevalence of ignorance on this, with a lot of restraint. Of course, it is easy to make a case when the facts back you up.
Facts in tow, Mahmood comes with the receipts, using pictures of American First Ladies, from Hilary Clinton to Melania Trump, covering up for the Pope, then making a point of appearing unveiled on visits to Saudi Arabia. And just like that, Mahmood exposes the hypocrisy at the root of Judeo-Christian culture vs Islamic culture discourse.
The fact that the existence of such similarities between Islam and Judaism and Christianity need pointing out is a tragic indicator of our societies general knowledge and IQ being in dismal states. And though other factors are at play here - historical, geo-political, dogmatic, etc - good old racism is of course the primary one. Centuries of empires and institutions fighting over a “Holy Land” and arguing over whose faith is the “true faith” have shaped divisions and opinions, but such a rationale for ignorance is no longer suffice for explanation, if indeed, it ever was. If you are that interested in theological debates, or concerned with the rise of Islamic terrorism, a quick Google search will tell you that Islam is not a cultural practice “alien” to “Judeo-Christian” society. In fact, Islamic countries are more true to the Bible than any country claiming these “Judeo-Christian” values. If England, for example, was truly a Christian country, we wouldn’t be too far away from a society akin to Saudi Arabia’s. To claim England as a Christian country in the 21st century is, frankly, preposterous.
In her article, Mahmood deconstructs the basis of biased cultural discourse, arguing compellingly, and rightly, that the “Western” world’s fixation with the “Middle-East”, and elsewhere, goes beyond mere, superficial, religious differences, that the distorted narratives around Islamic culture vs a Judeo-Christian one are products of Western imperial politik.
To evidence this, Mahmood points back to the “War on (of) Terror”, and George Bush the Younger’s choice of wording in key speeches, tapping into traditional “Christian zealotry” - “This is a new kind of evil. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”
By using this language, the Bush administration deliberately chose to exacerbate cultural and religious factors, consciously choosing to match the rhetoric of Al-Qaeda propaganda. Though this isn’t the space to talk in-depth on this, the point to make, in-keeping with Mahmood’s article, is to understand this use of language as a means to separate and dehumanise the “enemy,” to paint Islam as being alien and incompatible to the society of “the free world”. This elevates a war over imperial dominance into an existential battle of civilisation vs barbarism. One key figure from that time was Christopher Hitchens, a former voice of the left, and staunch atheist, who fell hook, line, and sinker for the neo-con response to 9/11, and the distorted narratives put out in response to Al-Qaeda lunacy. Voices like Hitchens’ added to the demonisation of general muslims and Islamic culture, exacerbating the perceived division between Islamic and Judeo-Christian cultures.
Voices such as Mahmood’s push back on this, challenging an all too willing acceptance of imperial narratives, that can only be explained by pre-disposed prejudices and out-right racism.
Norway's Right is Obsessed With Immigration and Crime Norway is a safe, prosperous, and diverse society. So why can't the right stop talking about immigration and crime? By Victor Shammas in The Theory Brief
With the spotlight falling on the UK, France and Germany’s response to the crisis of displaced people, it’s easy to overlook responses in smaller nations. In this article, Victor Shammas talks about Norway, and the actions of the Norwegian right, exposing the hypocrisies of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
What makes Norway both peculiar and concerning is, as Victor demonstrates with evidence, the countries low crime rate - with crime being a major driver in the right’s messaging. This points to a general mistrust and dislike of non-Europeans, a typical fear of the Other example.
Victor widens his scope beyond the typical right-wing fascists, however, highlighting the labour governments inability to provide answers to the catastrophe of neoliberalism. Not just that, the Norwegian Labour Party, as with the UK’s, doesn’t even recognise neoliberalism as the problem, persisting in neoliberal policies. This is a government, then, that is complicit in the catastrophe, rendering them pointless, which could well be, with an election looming, their downfall.
Our lives are not our own Wage labor fundamentally shapes and distorts the way we think about and relate to work. By Ryan Ward - a guest post featured in Grace Blakeley's substack. For more of Ryan’s work, his substack is Free Market Moralism
Ryan’s Substack, Free Market Moralism, was one of the first I paid real attention to, recognising his voice to be a genuine proponent of leftist thought. Grounded in a strong understanding of Marxist theory, Ryan uses his Substack for political theory, to question the neoliberal reality, and, occasionally, dismantle the typical anti-Marxist tripe that dominates mainstream political discourse.
In this latest article, Ryan turns his attention to wage labour, explaining how this tyranny (my description, not Ryan’s, though I’m sure he wouldn’t mind it) “fundamentally shapes and distorts the way we think about and relate to work.” Identifying wage labour as unnatural but all encompassing, Ryan analyses the societal effects of a system he describes as becoming “so ingrained in our social consciousness that it is like wallpaper. We can think about changing or modifying the color or pattern, but no one really thinks about doing away with the wallpaper altogether.”
As with so many other of his pieces, Ryan doesn’t just identify the problem, its characteristics and symptoms, but puts forward either possible solutions or the rationale for seeking an alternative. In the case of wage labour, the alternative offers an end to worker alienation (a hugely significant state of being with equally significant social consequences), and the restoration of meaning, purpose, and our basic humanity.
Films of Sentimental Value
In my life, there have been various bouts of depression. The most acute were in the late 2000s and early 2010s. During this period I became increasingly more reclusive, spending less time with friends and more time holed up in a small terraced house, smoking too much weed - my personal choice of self-medication.
In 2013, I managed to get on a Creative Writing course at the University of Bolton. Having access to the university library, and physically incapable of reading for prolonged periods of time (probably because of a diminished attention span due to being constantly stoned), I would explore the surprisingly decent selection of DVD’s.
Having no internet at home, and not much money, this was my primary source of accessing films at the time, watching them on a second-hand X-Box 360 that a mate had donated to me.
The following films lifted me out of the darkest moments, reigniting my imagine and the love of storytelling I had in childhood. This is not necessarily a list of favourite films, by the way. Many other films will have been added if it was. Instead, this is a list of films that illuminated a dark time in my life - films that made me dream of a life outside my own, and rejuvenated me into a creative mindset.
The Conversation
The Godfather Part II
Apocalypse Now
With Francis Ford Coppola being mentioned in the previous reflections, I thought I’d start with him. He is an unusual case. Having made four truly great films in the 1970s, Coppola has since had a long decline, culminating in the abomination that is Megalopolis.
The first of these 1970s films is The Conversation. I was obsessed with this film after first watching it, around late 2013 I would say. I think it also has my favourite score, a minimalist jazz-infused piano piece composed by David Shire. This composition does was a good film score ought to - contributing to the atmosphere and mood of the film.
A few years after first seeing it, the film still held a strong influence, and I attempt to recreate the mood in a short story called The Assignment. Nearly ten years later, it remains unfinished, but I’ve shared a link to my website, where it waits patiently for further input - https://craigsnelgrove.co.uk/the-assignment
The score from The Conversation was running through my head throughout the writing of the first draft.
First film to recognise as one of my favourite films not on this sentimental list is The Godfather. However, The Godfather II is.
I think my attachment with the second instalment of The Godfather trilogy lies in the films mediations on change and subsequent loss. In the context of the actual film, this sense of loss is captured in this short exchange of dialogue between Michael Corleone and his mother:
MICHAEL
Tell me something, Ma. What did Papa think -- deep in his heart? He was being strong -- strong for his family. But by being strong for his family -- could he -- lose it?
MAMA
You're thinking about your wife -- about the baby you lost. But you and your wife can always have another baby.
MICHAEL
No, I meant -- lose his family.
MAMA
But you can never lose your family.
MICHAEL
Times are changing.
But more than this is a realisation of cultural change, of shifts in sense of place, drifting as the film does, between the America that Vito Corleone arrived in decades before, to the one inhabited by his son and heir.
Apocalypse Now is the great war film, rivalled only be Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. As entertaining as war films can be, I am often left feeling icky afterwards, having been subjected to blatant propaganda. I wasn’t left with that feeling after watching Apocalypse Now, being drawn in by the slow pace of the film, and Captain Willard’s journey into the unknown.
It’s source material being Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now differs from other war films in its exploration into the human mind and sense of identity. It is also the only American war film I’ve seen that makes comment on the hypocrisy of American imperialism. Whereas Full Metal Jacket reflects on the psychologically destructive effects of war on soldiers, Apocalypse Now dares to challenge official narratives and justifications for the American war in Vietnam, channelled through Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz.
Despite only having a couple of scenes, and despite excellent performances from Michael Sheen and Robert Duvall, Brando steals the show. His monologue on “the will” of the Viet Cong, some of the best lines written for film, in my opinion, is a devastating one:
“I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”
Taxi Driver
The King of Comedy
My favourite filmmaker, two Martin Scorsese films have particular significance. Taxi Driver isn’t probably a surprise, not just because, like The Godfather, it features routinely on many lists of great films, but because of my own state of mind when first watching it - sometime in late 2013. Not in the John Hinckley Jr sense by the way, but in the sense of recognising the alienation, the sense of meaningless, the urge to simply wander around, solo, in a state of toxic masculinity informed self-loathing. But enough of that - it’s simply a great film.
To my mind, King of Comedy has a lot in common with Taxi Driver, both being films about alienated, obsessive men who project their neuroses onto a society that seems indifferent to their existence. Despite the lighter tone, De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin is arguably more dangerous than De Niro’s Travis Bickle. Bickle doesn’t really have a purpose until he creates one of his own - eventually settling on rescuing Jodie Foster’s teenage prostitute. Pupkin does have a purpose, becoming a world famous stand up comic. He will do anything to achieve this aim, and is capable of anything too.
Tuned in to the growing obsession with instant fame, much more prevalent by the time I saw the film in 2014, King of Comedy was very much ahead of the curve. My short story ‘Georgie & Georgie’, featured in Young Mancunians and available on this substack for paid subscribers, is directly influenced by The King of Comedy.
Bicycle Thieves
Umberto D
My love of cinema growing, I started branching out beyond the typical classics that everyone has seen. Watching an interview with Scorsese (it must have been Scorsese though I’m not 100%), I got on to Italian neorealist filmmaker Vittorio de Sica. His two most famous films, The Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D, were watched on consecutive mornings one summer - 2014 or 2015 - and taught me the power, and importance, of realist storytelling. I love them both, but Umberto D just edges it. That shot of Umberto looking up at the hospital as his tram pulls away, catching sight of the nurse leaning from a window - and of course, the greatest dog in cinema history, Flike. Bellissimo.
The Conformist
Another Italian film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s “expressionist masterpiece” (as described in a review featured in The Guardian) is both a political and psychological drama, exploring the need for people to conform to dominant socio-political trends. Though not spelt out in the film, the wider context is of people falling in line, fearful of being maligned and outcast. The protagonist, Marcello Cierici, is one such individual, whose motives, wants, and needs are put under scrutiny, revealing a fear not just of the Other, but of being categorised in the Other category. Cierici, an anxiety ridden, emotionally damaged individual, willingly places himself in the hands of Fascism while his heart, seemingly, isn’t really in it. His motivation isn’t a fanatical belief in Fascism, it is much more simple, more human. His motivation is to belong, to be an accepted, and respected, member of the collective. This is something we are all vulnerable to, and the film has informed my existentialist approach to identity, sense of place, and fear of the Other.
The Pianist
Watched for the first time in the Autumn of 2013, The Pianist introduced me to Chopin, and his music is now a regular feature of my Autumns.
Based on the memoir of classical composer Władysław Szpilman, the film is primarily one of survival. I think my own attachment lies in this. Obviously, I’m not comparing my struggles with Szpilman’s, that would be beyond absurd, but the film does provide a sense of hope, amid all the horror and destruction. Nothing lasts forever, endured torture will have an end, if you can hold on long enough, a change will come. Don’t take this as the actual meaning of the film, by the way. It’s just my interpretation, my expression of what the film means to me.
The 400 Blows
Like The Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D, The 400 Blows is an education in the power of realism in storytelling. Also watched in the Autumn of 2013, this film has one of my favourite opening sequences.
Truffaut’s masterpiece is a cultural landmark in many ways, one of the great films of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. To me, it is about the search for meaning, the oppressiveness of alienation, and the natural urge to rebel against authority.
Eraserhead
Mulholland Drive
David Lynch is my second favourite filmmaker after Scorsese, though the two are entirely different in their approach to cinema and in their thematic concerns. The latter could be a consequence of vastly different upbringings and childhood environment. Whereas Scorsese was the working-class son of Italian immigrants, raised in the tough neighbourhood’s of New York’s Little Italy, Lynch was middle-class, raised in “idyllic” suburbs, his father a scientist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So Lynch was very much born into upper echelons of American society.
It is interesting, then, to think about the unseen malevolence that lurks within Lynch’s films. Lynch’s greatest attribute, I would argue, is an awareness of this unseen force in the real world - particularly for those middle-classes of suburbia. You can only imagine, for example, growing up white in 1950s middle-class America, in this supposed golden age of capitalism, having an awareness that the real America was a racist, white supremacist, imperial power, built on multiple hypocrisies and outright lies.
This sense of living a lie, or of reality itself being a lie, is pervasive, I would argue, throughout Lynch’s work. I’ve no idea whether or not the child David Lynch was aware of America’s dark reality, but I’d be surprised if he hadn’t at some point experienced an epiphany on this.
As for the two films, Eraserhead was unlike anything I’d seen. I watched it probably around 2015 or 2016, discovering Lynch quite late in my film education. My reading has always been of an acute sense of alienation within the film, a complete disconnect between the human protagonist and his fellow humans, and with nature itself, symbolised in the birth of a grotesque, alien-like child.
My favourite Lynch film is an obvious one, I’m afraid - Mulholland Drive. This was the first Lynch film I watched, and was captivated by the sense of the unheimlich, and that awareness of a lurking evil. The ambiguity of the film’s meaning has had an influence on my own writing. Through films such as Mulholland Drive, Lynch teaches us the importance of nuance, subtlety, and subjectivity in storytelling.
Five Easy Pieces
By now you may have noticed a running theme in this list - alienation, fragile realities and sense of identity, and what Frank O’Connor called the “intense awareness of human loneliness.” Though O’Connor was speaking directly about the abilities of the short story, I have made the case for the existence of this awareness in cinema. The difference would be that the awareness is a fundamental feature of the short story, whereas this is not true of cinema. But, cinema does have the capability to capture it just as powerfully.
Five Easy Pieces is another example of this, with Jack Nicholson’s oil rig worker Bobby Dupea, who has made the conscious decision to exile himself from his upper-class family and demote himself, if you will, to the ranks of the working-class. After hearing of his father’s illness and imminent death, Dupea has to go home, where he is confronted with all the things he left behind. Dupea, we learn, is essentially a wanderer, a man who refuses a conventional existence. See this review of the film’s final scene, written by Charles Higham in the The Art of the American Cinema: 1900-1971:
"The last sequence is of the finest quality. Bobby decides to leave both girlfriend and family and abandon life entirely...a truck driver gives him a ride to a place where 'it is very cold': the country of death. Rafelson and his cameraman László Kovács fix the scene in our minds forever: the filling station and its discreet restroom; the grey surrounding buildings; the dripping autumnal vegetation of the Pacific Northwest; the parked truck waiting to go to Alaska; the face of Nicholson, already aging and filled with premonitory shadows, fixed behind the windshield. Religion, love and family have all failed to work, leaving absolutely nothing at the end but a journey to nowhere."
The Desperate Hours
The Desperate Hours remains the ultimate home invasion movie, making this list as it contributed to my understanding of storytelling. In the film, the home invasion represents the contrasts between 1950s suburban America and the real America, exposing the facade, and the fragility of the facade, that is suburban life. The Desperate Hours is a story of suburbia and middle-class family life breached, penetrated by the Other - represented in a trio of convicts, led by Humphrey Bogart, who bring the outside chaos into the domestic order.
Many analyses of the film talk about cold war paranoia, but I’m not so sure. For one, the film is loosely based on real events, so any paranoia that exists in the film is surely of a domestic threat. For me, it can only be a fear of class and non-conformist infiltration, depicted here in the guise of petty criminality.
It also has another one of the great opening sequences.
The Third Man
Carol Reed’s The Third Man is very much a film of moral ambiguity found in the aftermath of World War II, exemplified in the famous ferris wheel scene, where Orson Welles’ Harry Lime looks down at people, comparing them to dots, asking, “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving?” Here, human life has been reduced to abstraction, a direct echo of the dehumanisation of the war years.
This film has some of my favourite sequences and images, including the end sequence - a powerful depiction of estrangement and loss.
Winter Light
The influence of this film on me is purely existential. I watched it for the first time in January, 2014 - a highly appropriate month for such a film. Here, Ingmar Bergman is primarily concerned with faith, not too far away, I think, from Nietzsche’s thinking behind his “God is dead” declaration. Bergman’s protagonist, Tomas Ericsson, has lost the faith, and is purely going through the motions of being a priest. He is, essentially, living in a void.
The most profound effect on me was the suicide of the Jonas Persson character, which I have written an essay on for my Substack. It is a fictional death that has stayed with me, with Persson pointing to Cold War anxieties and the existential threat of nuclear war - a powerful statement of the director’s own outlook on the state of the world.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
As unbelievable as it may sound, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the film that inspired me to write again. I first seen this film on TV one spring afternoon in 2013, and through a combination of warmer, brighter weather, the enjoyment of the film, and being high, I came away wanting to write my own love story, though ironically I never did. Instead I just daydreamed about it for months on end.
This is a problematic choice in the insanely racist depiction of Mr Yunioshi, played by Mickey Rooney. I did cringe every time he was on screen. I’ve also rewatched Breakfast at Tiffany’s a few years ago, and though I admired some of the shots of the city landscape, I do wonder how on earth it had such on effect on me. It says a lot about how our state of mind dictates our response to works of art. It also says a lot about watching films stoned.