by John Duncan Talbird. At the midpoint of Isao Takahata’s animated Only Yesterday (1991) narrator-protagonist Taeko gives us a lesson on the making of rouge: on the picking of the safflower, on its pounding to mush, on its drying in the sun in little discs. She tells us of the […]
Not Quite Dark Enough
By Elias Savada. Dark is another day (and night) in the life of a West Virginny girl in the Big City. It begins with a lesbian couple au naturel yet, also, oh so much in despair. Their lovemaking could be interpreted as break-up sex (at least for one of them). […]
CGI and the Audience: Things Better Left Unsaid
By Fred Wagner. The Show of Shows (2015), a recently released documentary made out of archive footage shows the lost world of the circus – a cornucopia of acts the like of which were once the vanguard of kitsch but that now seem so alien you can look at them […]
The Battle for Fair Remuneration: A Slovenian Drama with International Consequences
By Edgar Tijhuis. Sometimes it seems like time stood still in Slovenia. In 2009 Variety magazine reported about a “royalty battle” in central and eastern Europe. Television producers and other rights-holders of audiovisual material, were allegedly losing up to 10 million euros a year in royalties, as the international collecting […]
Denmark vs. Afghanistan: The Moral Dilemma of A War
February 16, 2016
By Elias Savada. In a world forever at war, Denmark doesn’t float to the top of the list as a country promoting military involvement in remote venues. Interventions have been few and far between since World War II, with its percentage of defense expenditures generally sliding over the last 60 years […]
Beyond the Myths of Mt. Everest: Jennifer Peedom on Sherpa
February 16, 2016
By Paul Risker. “I feel like it was a risk and I feel proud that I pulled it off,” says Jennifer Peedom of her Everest expose Sherpa (2015). The documentarian’s intentions are certainly noble, adopting the medium to capture a view of a world dramatised in fiction, explored in other documentaries, […]
“All My Treasures”: On Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words (2015)
By Tony Williams. Critic-director Stig Bjorkman, well known for his studies on directors such as Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, has made an intriguing documentary on this well-known star to which he has also collaborated on the screenplay. Most documentaries either concentrate on abundant clips from films already well known […]
Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane by Patrick McGilligan
A Book Review by Tony Williams. I must admit that I approached this book with hesitation. Although the author has edited excellent interviews with blacklist victims and screenwriters from Hollywood’s Golden Age to the 1990s, his biographies have sometimes tended to go into National Enquirer territory distracting from a more […]
Reframing Realism in My Beautiful Laundrette
February 9, 2016
By William Repass. “You’re dirty. You’re beautiful.” “What is it that the gora Englishman always needs? Clean clothes!” In the world of Stephen Frears’ and Hanif Kureishi’s 1985 cult classic, My Beautiful Laundrette—a world meant to recreate, in-miniature, a South London turned upside down by Thatcherism—cleanliness is not only a […]
Shakespeare on Film – The Bard’s Big Screen Odyssey
February 9, 2016
By Cleaver Patterson. A cold and blustery January morning at London’s BFI Southbank, saw the launch of Shakespeare on Film, the BFI’s latest themed season which promises to be their biggest and most ambitious to date. Shakespeare, often referred to as England’s national poet, is one of cinema’s most filmed […]