It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
What is cinema ethno-fiction? Some would see it chiefly in documentary, in works by anyone from Robert Flaherty to Jean Rouch — from the staged and planned documentaries that give the impression of fact offered by the former,or the more self-conscious even self-reflexive work by the latter. While Flaherty would stage the walrus hunt in Nanook of the North, Rouch makes us aware of the process…
In Thomas Hardy’s short stories, as in much of his work, there isn’t so much despair as contrived bleakness, a narrative mastery of misery which in another writer’s work might have led to farce. In Hardy’s, though, it suggests a dank realisation that life is a futile striving which will inevitably lead to human defeat and may take the form of disillusion, desolation or diss…
Twenty-five years ago I visited a friend for the first time. He was editing a small magazine in the southwest of England, and I was living in London writing for a newspaper whose perspective I abhorred but whose salary was remunerative. I turned out a gossip column twice a week and I had an ample allowance to trawl clubs and restaurants, cafes and bars, looking for information on those whose wealt…
Introducing Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva for the BBC Moviedrome series on cult films, Alex Cox reckoned the movie had no direction, only art direction. He said it was the only film he had ever seen where the walls, the set decoration, thecostumes, had all been designed around a packet of Gitanes cigarettes. A fine filmmaker himself (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy), Cox was maybe too busy directing f…