The Epic of Everest: Closing the Gap Between Man and the Impossibly Distant

By Axel Andersson.  An epic of Everest? The heroics of nature? John Noel’s remarkable 1924 documentary, expertly restored by the BFI with a new evocative score by Simon Fisher Turner, encapsulates the most paradoxical of Romantic tropes. The mountain, Everest, is for sure present—a forbidding thing to be conquered. But it […]

The Past As It Is: Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush

By Paul Risker. Agnieszka Holland’s three part mini-series Burning Bush (2013) opens with a pictorial and musical energy that swings like a pendulum between freedom and oppression. Just as day and night are two fundamental ontological opposites, so too are these titanic forces. Holland infuses the show’s title sequence with […]