Film
Zona: Geoff Dyer’s personal take on Tarkovsky’s Stalker
Are you going to teach me about the meaning of life? Stalker is a film about a journey to a room undertaken by three men. Possibly searching for the meaning of life. Stalker guides the other two men through the Zone towards the room, circling, weaving, never approaching the chosen destination directly. The room may […]
The Spirit of ’45: dreams of building a better tomorrow
The Labour landslide election victory of 1945 has attained an iconic, almost mythical stature in the memory of the British left. It was the first election in which Labour gained a majority of seats, and also the first time it won a plurality of votes – another 68,767 votes and the party would have gained […]
Malick’s To the Wonder: film as film, pure and simple
‘Self-indulgent twaddle’, muttered the woman in the row behind as the credits rolled at the end of To the Wonder, Terrence Malick’s latest film, when I saw it in FACT the other day. For good measure she added that he ‘couldn’t tell a story’. She would certainly appreciate reading Chris Tookey’s entertaining Daily Mail review, […]
No? Oh Yes We Can!
This autumn 40 years will have passed since that first, bloody September 11 when the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. That event marked the beginning of a regime that committed horrific human rights abuses for 17 years, during which an estimated 3000 people were killed […]
McCullin: a conscience with a camera
He has been called by his former editor Harold Evans, ‘a conscience with a camera’ and by Henri Cartier-Bresson as ‘Goya with a camera’. Certainly, that is how photographer Don McCullin - whose haunting images in the 1960s and 70s helped define my generation’s perception of modern war – comes across in the stunning documentary McCullin […]
Haneke’s Amour: ‘nothing more terrible, nothing more true’
I finally got up the courage to go and see Michael Haneke’s new film Amour after it returned to our local Picturehouse for a brief run this week. It’s about an elderly married couple who are suddenly forced to confront the imminence of bodily decay and death. George (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle […]
John Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Conversation
‘Difference is what is really exciting about the world’. – Stuart Hall I haven’t seen much of the contemporary art on display in the 2012 Liverpool Biennial – somehow the hermetic, jargon-laden language that seems to permeate this year’s jamboree makes me feel like an unwelcome guest at a party strictly for those in the […]
Sounds and Silence: journeying with Manfred Eicher
Records from the ECM label always begin with moments of silence. The ECM motto is the Most Beautiful Sound Next to Silence. Moments of silence are as important as sounds in the documentary film Sounds And Silence: Journeys with Manfred Eicher which I have just seen. Peter Guyer and Norbert Wiedmer followed Manfred Eicher, the […]
5 Broken Cameras: healing is a challenge
By one of those curious coincidences that occur every now and then, I had just finished reading Raja Shehadeh’s book Palestinian Walks, when5 Broken Cameras, a superb documentary shot entirely in and around a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank by a peasant smallholder popped up in a rare Liverpool screening. Both book and film […]
Beasts of the Southern Wild: pointless, infantile and mendacious
How can critics get it so wrong? Today we watched Beasts of the Southern Wild – a film that has received accolades from critics across the board , yet a more pointless, infantile and mendacious film I have not seen in a long while. About ten minutes from the end the film’s main character, a […]
