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But we are proud to say that Michael contributed 285 entries already.
The thought can hardly be original, but visiting the Acropolis during a recent trip to Athens, I couldn’t help but see it as a symbol of the condition of Greece: under renovation, but work currently suspended. At the end of April, the liquidity crisis forced the government to stop payment on public works because the […]
Reports that Labour has lost its ‘soul’ may not be exaggerated. Whoever they pick as their new leader is probably beside the point, because judging from the opening salvos, they just don’t get it. In fact they never did. Five years ago, Labour took so long to replace Gordon Brown that the Tory/neoliberal media apparatus […]
Farage, good riddance. Greens, good vote share. SNP, amazing. Labour, pathetic. Lib-Dems dug their own grave. New government, shite. Turnout, poor, but UKIP vote share depressingly high. So now, good people, brace yourselves. And Europe, Scotland, watch out.
There was something magical about the first time I met Fernando Birri, who celebrated his 90th birthday a few days ago. I had just arrived in Cuba for the first Havana Film Festival in 1979. Checking in to the Hotel Nacional in the late afternoon, I looked for a bar to quench my thirst, where […]
One of the notable features at the inaugural conference of the Radical Film Network in Birmingham last weekend was the mix of generations, from new blood to survivors from the days of the IFA (Independent Filmmakers Association) in the 1970s. Speaking as one of the latter, it was pleasing to find that what the comrades did […]
A story Putney Debater cannot ignore… What Crossrail’s unearthed Levellers could teach us about today’s world http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/10/unearthed-levellers-crossrail-robert-lockyer-teach-us-today
This term, I’m running a class blog for a module about Music on the Screen – not film music, but the representation of music making in different forms of film and video. Because the blog tools on the University’s digital learning platform (we use Moodle) aren’t very good, I’ve been using an external platform called […]
‘Interrupted Memory’ at Birkbeck Friday 9 January at 6pm One of the interviewees in Interrupted Memory (Memoria interrumpida) (Michael Chanan, 2013, 116mns) recalls being detained in the 1976 coup in Argentina. She was beaten and raped. She began, defensively, to play a role. ‘Me, I know nothing about politics. I’m just a girl, I’m 17.’ […]