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But we are proud to say that Michael contributed 286 entries already.
I’ve recently caught up with Charles O’Brien’s splendid, paradigm-shifting book, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound, subtitled Technology and Film Style in France and the US. Briefly, O’Brien combines thorough research into primary sources and empirical methods of analysing film style to critique the conventional idea that the coming of sound produced a homogenisation of cinema which spread […]
Back from the Cuba Research Forum event in Nottingham. Came away thinking once again, as many times before, that Cuba is a mass of paradoxes. A small country which punches far above its weight in international politics, in dire economic straights but ruled by a strong regime which still upholds the communist ideology. This regime, […]
Having made a film about Detroit a few years ago (Detroit: Ruin of a City), my attention is periodically caught by items about the Motor City, like this, over at One Way Street: There’s probably no more emblematic set of images for this time of economic and ecological disaster than James D. Griffioen’s series of […]
Let’s have no illusions. It was probably inevitable. The government has announced plans for a merger of the BFI and the Film Council [UKFC]. As The Guardian has it, ‘The British film landscape could be facing its biggest upheaval in almost a decade…’ That is to say, since the Film Council was set up in […]
The Times reports today that the withdrawal of his appeal by the supposed Lockerbie bomber, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, and his expected repatriation on compassionate grounds (he is terminally ill), looks like part of a deal, indeed a cover-up, designed to avoid the courts having to reconsider the evidence. Christine Grahame, a member of the […]
Posted at the behest of a friend, this from Amnesty International on 7th August: Hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the recent war in North East Sri Lanka and living in camps are being denied basic human rights including freedom of movement, said Amnesty International on Monday. The organization’s Secretary General, Irene Khan, […]
Here comes another film on Che Guevara. This time it’s a documentary with the somewhat naff title of Chevolution, directed by Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez, opening at the ICA in London on 18th September. In fact there’s been a constant stream of films, both dramas and documentaries, about el Che for several years now, […]
As a student of Isaiah Berlin’s back in the late 1960s, I have been intrigued by the media treatment of his hundredth birthday, which with one or two exceptions, faithfully celebrates both the memory of his dazzling personality and his role as the philosopher of liberalism in the age of the Cold War. His ideological […]
Having completed my new film, The American Who Electrified Russia, which was funded by the AHRC, I have to fill in the end-of-award report. Since the last time I had to do this, they’ve added a new section on ‘impact’, which is extraordinarily ill-conceived. It’s all on-line, of course, and very rigidly implemented, but the […]
What’s been happening, at a popular level, in response to the economic crisis? Back in February there was a remarkable upsurge in street protest and direct action in a range of different countries, sometimes in response to local events which sparked things off (like Greece), and sometimes with an unpleasant element of xenophobia (like England). […]