I didn't used to read biographies.

I used to dislike biographies. In the library, I avoided them like some people avoid grapefruit juice. Then I started reading about the cinema and found that most cinema books were so heavy with incomprehensible theory that I reached for a book about Alfred Hitchcock. It wasn't a book about feminism and Hitchcock or violence and Hitchcock. It was about Hitch, from his birth to his death and every fear of eggs in between. I read it, I enjoyed it, I sought out more biographies. Soon, I broadened my scope. I went from the biographies of film directors to the biographies of film producers, then writers, and finally, earlier this year, I read the autobiography of a Latino guy from Texas.

The cinematic biographies gave me what I didn't find in the books "about cinema", i.e. they described the actual process of making movies, and how the production and business of filmmaking influenced the content of films. Suddenly, the lack of lighting wasn't a deliberate choice by the immigrant German Expressionist director but a cost-cutting measure that happened to turn out stylish. I don't think that lessens the magic of the movies any more than knowing something about honey bees lessens the magic of watching them buzz around a garden full of flowers.

For me, the study of cinema has always been too focussed on theories, screens-as-mirrors and philosophy, and too little on the nuts, bolts and budgets.

Biographies and autobiographies were my answer.

P.S. The first biography I ever read was about the hockey player Eric Lindros. It was for an elementary school book report. The book was short. That's why I chose it.

The Jackal of Nahueltoro

El Chacal de Nahueltoro (English: The Jackal of Nahueltoro) is a 1970 Chilean film by Chilean director Miguel Littín. Much like Jorge Sanjinés, the Bolivian filmmaker whose The Blood of the Condor was the focus of the first entry in my YouTube Film Treasure Series, Littín is a political leftist who's made a career of films about history that often focus on the plight of the poor.



The Jackal of Nahueltoro is based on a real life murder: a man kills a woman and her children. He's apprehended, imprisoned and eventually sentenced to death and executed by firing squad. Before he dies, the government educates him ("improves" him) and gives him a shiny new pair of shoes. The irony, of course, is that nobody cared about the man before he committed murder. The government didn't want to educate him. He didn't have nice shoes. If he would have had these things, he might not have become a criminal. Giving these things to citizens chosen to die rather than those fated to live is also a waste of resources. That's the message, but it's Littín's raw, visually expressive presentation that makes the film unforgettable.

Blood of the Condor

There are a lot of great films on YouTube. Sometimes they disappear, but that's life. I still can't find my favourite scarf that I lost. Consequently and until I find that scarf here's the first entry in a series of posts I'm calling the YouTube Film Treasure Series. If I were a Soviet bureaucrat I'd call it YTFTS.

Yawar Mallku (English: Blood of the Condor) is a Bolivian feature film by Jorge Sanjinés, a Bolivian director who started making films in 1966 and has been making them ever since. He'll be 80 years old in a few years. His latest film, Insurgentes, came out in 2012 but doesn't even have an entry on the IMDB, and I've no idea how to get to copy.



Sanjinés is definitely what you'd call a "political" filmmaker. Blood of the Condor is a good example of what that means. It's set in Bolivia and concerns a member of an indigenous Andean tribe who leaves his rural mountain home and heads for the capital La Paz to get blood for a wounded family member who needs it. The city is a scary place, and despite the tribe member's best attempts he fails to get the blood or generally blend in with urban society. Although he tries to act western, none of the Spanish-speaking city people accept him as a worthwhile citizen. Meanwhile, the tribe itself is being wiped out by the American Peace Corps, which has set up a medical clinic that purports to be providing free medical services but is actually secretly sterilising the women of the tribe. When the tribe finds out, its members use the dead man who needed blood as a martyr and rise up against the imperialist Americans, leading to one of the most famous and effective freeze frame endings in film history—the tribe members lifting their guns in defiance. Although far less known, it's right up there with the last frame of Truffaut's The 400 Blows.

The copy of the film on YouTube doesn't have English subtitles, but subtitles aren't really necessary.

Samuel Fuller

One of America's best film directors, and one of its most distinctive auteurs, was born in 1912, lived eighty five years and made the kind of raw, brutal and primitive (in the most positive sense) films that independent filmmakers have seemingly forgotten how to make. It's always a pleasure to pull another Sam Fuller picture out of the vault, or The Pirate Bay, and make it play. So far, I've seen:

• Fixed Bayonets! (1951) about comradery during the Korean war.
• Park Row (1952), an absolute gem about the beginnings of the newspaper business in 19th century New York.
• Pickup on South Street (1953), where men steal and ideologies crash in one of the cinema's greatest film noir.
• Forty Guns (1957), a visually dazzling pre-David Lynch western with Barbara Stanwyck.
• Merrill's Marauders (1962), where WWII Burma comes alive and dies.

And there are many more to go, but in doses, man, in doses. Every hour spent with Samuel Fuller is an hour well spent. I'm that way with Yasujiro Ozu, too. Both men made amazing art.