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The recent BBC documentary ‘The Camera That Changed the World’, directed by Mandy Chang, about the birth of direct cinema at the start of the 1960s, was a solidly crafted and conventionally narrated television documentary containing a good deal of fascinating material, especially in the form of the testimony of surviving participants. Unfortunately, however, these […]
by Patrick Ward Socialist Worker Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how much has gone on over the past eight months. This documentary is a celebration of the anti-cuts movement in Britain. It charts the movement from the student protests of late last year through to the huge 26 March TUC demonstration. Director Michael Chanan […]
There’s an interesting new piece of research about the perceptual process of watching films which I can’t get out of my head without writing a blog about it. This research is not just of theoretical interest, but touches on pedagogic concerns. Part of learning to watch films critically is to understand how editing works, and […]
Three Forgotten Early Soviet Sound Films on the Electrification of the USSR (This is a revised version of the talk I gave at the BFI Southbank on 1st June 2011 as part of the Soviet season, to introduce Macheret’s Men and Jobs and an extract from Shub’s K.Sh.E. Here I also discuss Dovzhenko’s Ivan.)
Brilliant cartoon by Raúl de la Nuez, La memoria del comandante 2 The Comandante’s Memory (No.2) ‘Don’t rememer who sang ‘Los zapaticos de rosa’..??? The Beatles or the Rolling Stones’ (Los zapaticos de rosa is a song to a poem by José Martí) http://cartoonuez.com/ via http://bostoonsmag.com
East End Film Festival London, UK May 2011 Frances Morgan Emma-Louise Williams’ Under the Cranes, which premiered to a capacity audience at Dalston’s Rio Cinema, featured the work of [a] long-time resident, Michael Rosen, whose documentary play Hackney Voices steered this engaging, gentle, slightly dreamlike documentary… Rosen also appears in Michael Chanan’s Chronicle of Protest, extolling the revolutionary potential […]
Following the KCL Postgrad Film Studies Conference that I wrote about last week, I’ve been up to Glasgow for a similar event. In fact, two. The first was a workshop on documentary as research, with a focus on human rights and video activism. The panel I joined included folk from the Manchester collective Castles Built […]
Will postgrad film studies continue to thrive under the new dispensation being engineered for universities by the Tories (with Lib-Dem connivance)? What will have been destroyed if it doesn’t is in evidence at this time of year in postgrad events up and down the country. An impressive three-day conference was mounted last week at King’s […]
Today at 1545 local time, Chronicle of Protest, a film directed by Michael Chanan premiered at The Rio Cinema, Dalston, as part of the East End Film Festival. On seeing its inclusion, I was heartened fearing a lack of films commentating on the events which have engulfed the capital over the past year. And so, looking forward to […]
Activist video is providing a corrective to the mainstream media – but nothing beats the power of a cinema screen. One of the qualities I love about cinema is its assertiveness: it’s so much harder to overrule or ignore a film when it’s on a cinema screen, whether that screen is in the Grand Palais […]