Director David Greene has gone on record as saying that he finds upheaval in society to be dramatic and exciting. “I like my films to be a sort of reportage of the world around the action.” For me this accurately describes the effect of his three remarkable films of the late sixties. I Start Counting (1969), The Shuttered Room (1968) and The Strange Affair (1968) reveal a brilliantly confident sense of circumvention of plot and action.
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Rarely does the cinema provide us with such perfect opportunities for directly (and appropriately) comparing the work of two very different auteurs, but the release, just two months apart, of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour, provides just such an opportunity.
Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, Victoria and Albert Museum. Review by Carla Scarano. .”..a marvellous but unsettling journey through the origin of Alice’s stories and their adaptations and reinventions in films, art, music, fashion, photography and design.”
A Fine Day for Seeing: ten artists/ten poets. In the wide art world, artists are often inspired by literature and writers write about artworks. This exhibition focuses on the collaboration between ten internationally known artists and ten renowned poets.
The Rome Plague Diaries, Lockdown Life in the Eternal City: In times when many of us have been wondering why we didn’t get ourselves stranded near a Caribbean beach, Matthew Kneale decided there was nowhere on the planet he would rather be locked down than where he was in his adoptive city of Rome.
Poetry review – COOKING WITH MARILYN: Emma Lee enjoys Angela Readman’s poetic portrait of a film star
The Painted Bird. Review by Julia Pascal. Vaclav Marhoul’s film, based on Jerzy Kosincksi’s 1969 novel, is the episodic survival story of a Jewish boy whose parents have been deported by the Nazis.
Ghost Light, National Theatre of Scotland film. A theatre never goes completely dark, even in lockdown: a single light bulb, known as a ghost light, carries on glowing like a sanctuary lamp.
Poetry review – AFTER-IMAGES: Sue Wallace-Shaddad reviews Antony Johae’s collection of poems and prose inspired by the films of Eric Rohmer
Many critics and cinephiles regard “Kind Hearts and Coronets” as the best comedy made at Ealing Studios between 1947 and 1958, surpassing classics like “The Lavender Hill Mob” and even “The Lady Killers”.
As a half French, half American individual, I give in to a pastime common to double nationals, which consists of regularly comparing both countries of origin.
by Graham Buchan • added recently on London Grip, film • Tags: film, Graham Buchan •
Spencer Pablo Larrain’s Spencer achieves a great deal that the other major bio-pic, Diana, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and released in 2013, did not.