Entries by Michael

Repeated Takes Revisited

For readers of my book on the history of recording, Repeated Takes, a musician blogger in North Carolina, John H. Davis, has recently posted a set of photos and video clips to go with the book. Kudos. Snippets of Repeated Takes

Spirit of Coutinho

This video presents an overview of the work of the Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014), one of the most original documentarists of recent decades, whose films remain shamefully little known in the English-speaking world. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/99022268#[/vimeo] Read an accompanying discussion of the themes and preoccupations of his work here.

Thinking Creative Practice on Campus

The symposium on audiovisual creative practice held at Roehampton University on June 14th, ‘Image Movement Story’, threw up an issue that reflects the incoherence of the research policies that fund our activities. On the one hand, judging from the wide range of projects under discussion, including work by supervisors of creative practice PhDs as well […]

Avi Mograbi: A fly in the soup

 Here’s a piece I’ve written on the Israeli documentarist for Sight & Sound: Variety calls him a “gadfly documaker” and Cineaste quotes his own self-evaluation: “If some [filmmakers] see themselves as a fly on the wall, I see myself as a fly in the soup”. In short, he is a performative documentarist, like Nick Broomfield, Michael Moore […]

Latin America in Tübingen

In the world of film studies, Germany is a country not much associated with the investigation of Latin American cinema, but here we were, gathering in the small university town of Tübingen for a Spanish-speaking symposium on ‘Encuadrando La Dictadura en el Cine Latinoamericano’—’Framing Dictatorship in Latin American Cinema’.  It’s an odd sensation, going some […]

Eduardo Coutinho In Memoriam

Poetic injustice. The terrible irony of it. On the same day, the news that the US actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has died from a heroine overdose, and the veteran Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, has been stabbed to death by his son, who is reported to suffer from schizophrenia. (According to a BBC report, the police […]

An Encounter with Miklós Jancsó

The Round-Up (1965), The Red and the White (1967), The Confrontation (1969), Red Psalm (1972): the films of Miklós Jancsó were one of the most exciting discoveries of radical cinema in Europe in the late 1960s, but hearing of his death last Friday at the age of 92 brings back a personal memory, for at […]

Did Allan Francovich get it right?

A forgotten documentary about Lockerbie On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Channel 4 News has broadcast a very interesting report claiming that  Abdelbaset al-Megrahi wasn’t the Lockerbie bomber, and Libya wasn’t the country responsible, but that the bombing was actually carried out by a Palestinian terrorist group backed by Hisbollah, […]