By Tony Williams. Two years before the disastrous election in England that gave the Conservatives a majority to complete the Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s, The Spirit of ’45 appeared theatrically. This was Loach’s documentary on the stunning 1945 General Election that put the Labour Party into power reflecting a […]
Peter Bogdanovich: The Comedy Smuggler
By James Knight. This August will see the US theatrical release of She’s Funny That Way, the latest feature from Peter Bogdanovich. Since his directorial debut in 1968, Bogdanovich has been a man who has lived cinema to its fullest, experiencing everything the medium has to offer. He’s been a […]
Mise-en-scène and the Rebirth of Film
By Tom Silva. Film is a living thing and so it faces an unending series of deaths. Like the mythic hero in Joseph Campbell’s magisterial book The Hero of a Thousand Faces, if film is to experience a long survival, it must be continually reborn. As Campbell wrote, it requires […]
Fair Game: Democratic Principle in Hollywood Romances, from Tracy and Hepburn to the Present
By Robert K. Lightning. Lovers that demonstrate both spiritual affinity and spiritual equality have long been popular in middle-class entertainment. Repartee has often expressed that equality: one thinks of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict, Austen’s Emma and Knightley, Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rochester. Romantic relations defined by repartee are inherently democratic, […]
Can We Do It Ourselves?
By Elizabeth Mizon. Why, in our democracy-obsessed society, do we balk at the idea of economic democracy in our workplaces? Why do we – the majority of us wage-reliant labourers, working in organisations we have no influence in – so willingly defend and trust the capitalist business model, “the most […]
Revisiting the ‘Hard to Swallow’ Morality Tale of Tod Browning’s Freaks
July 21, 2015
By Cleaver Patterson. In today’s age of anything goes splatterfests and in-your-face CGI, it’s perhaps hard to appreciate the full effect Tod Browning’s infamous horror classic Freaks (1932) had upon its first release. At the time, the film that was banned in many countries—it would remain unseen in Britain for […]
Bollywood: Gods, Glamour and Gossip (2012)
July 16, 2015
A Book Review by Alison Frank. It is difficult for a book of just over 100 pages to cover any topic in sufficient detail; a decent overview of one director’s career, perhaps, or an in-depth reading of a single film. Nevertheless, Wallflower’s Short Cuts series has the ambitious aim of […]
American Movies vs European Films: a Review of Leaves of the Tree
By Noah Charney. There are some films that you watch and repeatedly think to yourself, “Wow, that’s beautiful.” The director, cinematographer and often-overlooked location scout mesh their talents to harvest the world around them through the camera’s lens. Leaves of the Tree, the debut feature film by director Ante Novakovic, […]
The Puzzle of Money: getting the economic story right
https://vimeo.com/121445041 By Lee Salter. Four years ago Michael Chanan and I embarked upon an ambitious project to tell the story of the Corporation of the City of London in our documentary film, Secret City. In the midst of the economic crisis, with the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK […]
End of a Saga: Andrzej Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope
By Geoffrey Fox. The credits roll over a black-and-white newsreel of missiles and men parading before an austere Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow on the 52nd anniversary of the October Revolution. A leap in time and place, and we see as through a car window the sepia and rust-brown hulks and […]