Evicting The Tenant The certainty of our comfort rests on what we can exclude from it. My reading of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant centres on the violence of identifying the ‘trespasser’ and requires that we reconsider our entitlement to name, judge, exclude and attack those whom we perceive as outsiders. […]
Saving London’s Cinema Museum: From Hammer to Chainsaw – Horror of the Sixties and Seventies
By Deirdre O’Neill. The horror film genre has never enjoyed the respectable status of other genres such as the western or the thriller, rather, it has, to a greater or lesser extent, remained the property of the committed fan and cult film devotee. Indeed, one of the pleasures in watching […]
Saving London’s Cinema Museum: French Sundaes
By Deirdre O’Neill. For the next six months as part of its ongoing fundraising effort The Cinema Museum is hosting a season of French films that will, hopefully, provide a snapshot of French cinema over the last 80 years. The programme has been curated by Jon Davies and will screen […]
Saving London’s Cinema Museum: Silent Clowns
August 30, 2011
By Deirdre O’Neill. Sometimes it’s easy to forget film has a history and that silent cinema is that history. And sometimes it is easy to think of silent cinema as a genre. But as Bryony Dixon silent film archivist at the BFI Southbank has pointed out silent cinema is not […]
Larry Portis, 1943-2011
By Daniel Lindvall. ‘Comradeship implies a common “situation” or “position” in relation to social classes, political institutions, historical change and the shared emotional commitment to act on knowledge of what must be done to combat domination and exploitation. “Comrades” are linked in struggle, struggle against either a vicious, merciless enemy […]
In Production: Film International 52
August 19, 2011
‘Based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut’ ‘Disillusioned and beloved, Kurt Vonnegut finally became a man without a country and an American institution. When his books are filmed, the cultural stakes are high. Not many socialist films come out of the Hollywood Hills, and this socialist distrusted this profligate medium. […]
Wine Before the Massacre
By Rajko Radovic. Before picking up an automatic weapon a man savours a glass or two of a vintage wine. He wants the moment to last. He looks around and sees his surroundings with new eyes. Then comes the police uniform. He masks himself so he can become what he […]
The Implication of “WOW”
By Gary McMahon. “Films should be made with innocence,” someone said Orson Welles said, and someone else said Charles Laughton knew exactly what Welles meant if indeed he said it when Laughton directed his own first-time masterpiece. Let’s not get hung up on whether and when Welles said it and […]
The Spirit of Journalism: Requiem for News of the World
By Celluloid Liberation Front. ‘Representation is a denial of participation’ (Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi in The Green Book) ‘They can sneer all they like, I’ll keep the 15000 extra copies’ (Keith Rupert Murdoch) Slap the Monster on Page One gave the title to Marco Bellocchio’s film about media manipulation of social […]
The Efficacy of Vacuity: Deciphering The Quiet Art of Keanu Reeves
By Alexander Kirschenbaum. There is something to be said for instinct as a crucial acting tool. Cinematic acting is as much a passive and reactive art as it is an assertive one. So much of the story can be conveyed in frame composition, editing, and visual and aural mise-en-scene, that […]