This author has not written his bio yet.
But we are proud to say that Michael contributed 285 entries already.
Students take to the streets [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/14966533[/vimeo] Students in Buenos Aires have taken to the streets in protest against the appalling conditions to be found in many of the city’s schools. A lack of heating in the cold winter just coming to an end has brought to a head a state of neglect which has been […]
Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic reports a meeting with Fidel Castro in which Fidel made some extraordinary statements about the failure of Cuba’s economic model and his own past mistakes, including his position at the time of the missile crisis in 1962. He has not renounced his revolutionary principles. Goldberg writes: ‘When I asked him, over […]
or, Advice for Writers in the Age of Digital Orthography In his book of aphorisms, One Way Street, published in 1928, Walter Benjamin has a remarkable premonition. ‘The typewriter’ he says, ‘will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception […]
Screening at the Barbican on September 25, 2010 For his new film on the Cuban national hero Martí, Fernando Pérez has returned to classical narrative after a run of offbeat movies, both fiction and documentary. In Martí, el ojo del canario (Martí: The Eye of the Canary), he reinvents the childhood and adolescence of Cuba’s […]
I’ve started a new blog for snippets of news and items which interest me for one reason or another. You can find it here: Michael’s Digest.
There is continuing confusion about the use of frame grabs for illustrating books and articles about film. It’s a question I get asked regularly, and yesterday there was a query about it on a discussion list I subscribe to, which prompts this post. My understanding is this.
Neoliberalism and Global Cinema Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique Edited by Jyotsna Kapur, Keith Wagner Using film, this study investigates the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Includes Michael Chanan, ‘Cuban Cinema: A Case of Accelerated Underdevelopment’ Forthcoming, Routledge, April 2011
Spent or good deal of time setting this up. The theory is that a new website using my service provider to host WordPress will be easier to maintain and keep up to date than a static site, especially when mobile. But the truth is that for all the bells and whistles, it’s typographically more limited, […]
There is something very seriously rotten in the State when the Government can decide to abolish the Film Council to save £15m a year at the same time that the head of BP is said to be about to take a severance package of approaching the same amount. The disparity is all the more striking […]
Glauber Rocha’s Antônio das Mortes is surely one of the most astonishing films to come out of Brazil in the 1960s… See my review of the new DVD release in Sight & Sound here