Agnes Varda may sometimes give the impression in the various conversations to be found in Agnes Varda Interviews that there isn’t a great deal of difference between fiction and documentary, but she also sometimes makes clear that there happens to be. Talking about The Beaches of Agnes she suggests this ambivalence when saying she won’t make any more fiction. “But fiction films, I…
In an essay on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, V. S. Pritchett muses over the Victorian fascination with murder. “In earlier periods, when life was cheap, rape, seduction and incest were the crimes favoured by literature. If we look to literature rather than to life, it is certain the Victorian writers took over murder from the popular taste of the eighteenth century and succeeded, against the o…
If we can choose our friends but can’t choose our family, at least we can choose to give our inheritance to those we care about over those we might share a couple of features with. What we have in common with our brothers and sisters, mother and father, is often no more than a nose or a skin tone, hair colouring or a similar jawline. I would notice some of these features were present and cor…
Let us start with a joke and follow with a question. Before a criminal would rob a bank; now they might be more inclined to work in one. This joke might be some sort of answer to Duncan Campbell's claim in the Guardian, “The golden age for armed robbery – golden for the robbers rather than the petrified cashiers – was in the 60s and 70s in an age before every street corner ha…