I have mixed feelings about Carlos. I mean, I enjoyed it – it was split into three two-hour parts, so I had two perfectly good chances to walk out if I didn’t – but it had a strange structure for a movie, presumably because they wanted to stick as closely to history as they could.
A few things stood out for me with this film. One (which might not be true in real life, but seems consistent across various depictions) was how often self-styled revolutionaries would accuse people who annoyed them or didn’t accept their whims as “petit-bourgeois”, and yet seemed to be just as attached to the material markers of success as those they condemned, making seem more like parasites than society-changers. There was also a certain amount of authoritarianism, with plenty of talk about being a revolutionary soldier and following orders – though it always seems to be the one talking about the need for discipline that is doing the ordering. I wonder whether, in the case of Carlos, “machismo” had anything to do with this? He certainly didn’t treat the women in his life very well, and didn’t seem to trust them in the same way.
I suppose that this might make his testicular problems later in life an ironic comment on his gradual fading from the international scene. This was one of the weirdest things for me, I think – I tend to associate this sort of terrorism, the sort of Baader-Meinhof stuff, as being part of the seventies, but Carlos was active in the eighties, and wasn’t caught until 1994.
I certainly feel like I have more of an idea of who he was, what he was doing, and the world he was doing it in; but I kind of wish I had a better idea of how everything fits together. I liked that they showed the diversity of opinion within the movement, with one of the group (who later breaks away) expressing disgust at two Germans separating out the Jews in a hostage situation – he was opposed to Zionism as well, but on the basis of politics, not race.
(I wonder whether this is why the police and our political masters got so anxious about our own “terrorist training camp”; the seventies feel like a long time ago, but they probably left a lasting impression on those who were young adults at the time. And except for the people who blew up a rail bridge in the 50s at Huntly, Wikipedia tells me all our bombings were in the early 80s, when those people would have been coming into power. This isn’t to excuse them; but it’s easy for me to forget how different the world was when those making decisions were learning how things work. And it makes me wonder what the post-Cold War generation will think about these things, and us.)
As to the movie – as I said, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’ll be watching it again soon.
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I then went to The Strange Case of Angelica, which was… odd. It was kind of a ghost story, I suppose; but it had a stage-play feel, with people delivering their lines one after the other at a measured pace. This feeling was enhanced by the camera-work: often we’d have one long wide shot of a scene, rather than a sequence of shots to tell the same story, and there was very little camera movement other than the occasional slow pan. And I don’t know whether it’s the translator or the dialogue, but some of the scenes had a strange, Waiting For Godot quality. There’s also a weird mix of old and new technologies – modern cars, but old film cameras, for example.
(Basic story: a recently married woman dies, and a young Sephardic man is summoned by her mother to take some pictures of her that night; he thinks he sees her smile at him through the viewfinder, and falls in love. Then he becomes more and more withdrawn and strange, as he sees various apparitions…)
I found it interesting but slow. Most of the interest was in the odd way they chose to film the story, rather than the story itself, however. I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t think I’d watch it again.
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My final film, which I got to watch with C, was Nostalgia For The Light, a movie about… well, history and Chile, really. It was set in the Atacama desert, and focused on three groups – the astronomers who use its thin air and zero humidity to study the stars; the archaeologists who use its dry conditions to study the remains of Pre-Colombian civilizations; and the women who search for the remains of those “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime. They are all looking for answers from the past, but only the last group has to battle society’s desire to actively forget.
I hadn’t realised how much the military regime tried to hide what happened – they dug up buried bodies and hid them again, for example. They also dismantled the concentration camp up there, but one of the prisoners was an architect who deliberately paced out the grounds of all the camps he was put in, and who drew them from memory when he was exiled to Denmark. And this legacy touches unexpected aspects of Chile – one of the organisers of the country’s astronomical society was grabbed with her grandparents when she was one, and the grandparents were told that they had to give the location of her parents, or this one year-old would be “disappeared”. They gave the parents address, and then had to raise their grand-daughter themselves.
The pace is contemplative, but it felt respectful of the people who’ve gone. It made me wish that the women searching for remains on the plateau could be given satellite imagery, since any activity is likely to have left a mark.
I enjoyed it, though it did feel long.
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