Entries by Michael

Access Restored

So, Putney Debater is back after my websites got hacked and went offline. A salutary lesson in what happens if you just leave things ticking over instead of constantly upgrading, because one of the blights of IT is that it isn’t stable but constantly ‘improving’ itself, forcing the user to spend their time and money […]

Raúl Pérez Ureta

Saddened by the news this morning of the death of the great Cuban cinematographer Raúl Pérez Ureta. Raulito, as we knew him, was the cameraman on Havana Report, the film I made in 1985 with Holly Aylett on the Havana Film Festival for Channel 4. The film was the result of an invitation from Julio […]

Waiting Game

This is a time for sitting quietly, waiting (for the winter to unfold, and your turn for the vaccine), watching (remotely, because the action is all going on somewhere else), listening. To the pain which comes across in brief snatches in the television news from health workers and smitten families, lives interrupted and lost. Listening […]

Paul Leduc In Memoriam

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/474388099[/vimeo] Latin American cinema has lost one of the foundational figures of the radical film movement which flourished fifty years ago, when the two avant-gardes, the aesthetic and the political – were conjoined. Paul Leduc, who died in Mexico City on October 21st at the age of 78, was the most maverick of filmmakers, in […]

Reflections on Cuban Cinema

Reflections on Cuban cinema, in answer to questions from the Havana Glasgow Film Festival, ahead of this year’s festival which opens on November 10th with ‘Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes’.  https://hgfilmfest.com/2020/10/19/extraordinary-cuba-an-interview-with-michael-chanan/

On packing up my library

Walter Benjamin wrote his delightful talk ‘Unpacking my library’ when he recovered his books after two years in storage. I turn to re-read it as I prepare to pack up my own far less impressive library in readiness to move house. The reason for the move is that I’ve given up my job as a […]

Going Viral: A Coronavirus Diary

Coronavirus brings globalisation into focus by forcing attention onto the different layers of interconnectedness in our twenty-first century world. As the virus spreads around the planet in waves, the pandemic impinges on different social and economic sectors each according to its own rhythm, throwing them out of joint one by one. The synchronisation which normally […]

Cuba in times of coronavirus

In the face of coronavirus, Cuba is proving to be thoroughly humane, in stark and vivid contrast to the stance taken by the impeached president in the White House. Coronavirus was late reaching Cuba, where it arrived with Italian tourists, but, soon after it did so, Cuba nevertheless gave safe haven to a British cruise […]