Communism
Tom Birchenough
Every incarnation of totalitarianism has its own specific mythology, which exists in different forms as it is believed at home and “translated” abroad (or not, in both cases). North Korea surely occupies a special place in any such hierarchy, possibly because we’ve entered the late phase of totalitarian statehood (which seems doubtful), or because the incarnations of third generation dynastic Communism have become so peculiar that they stand out even by the standards of the genre.Either way, it's a risky business when an outsider tries to take us inside such worlds: it can involve a step of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everyone knows a Nan – whether their own grandmother, someone else's, or maybe an elderly woman you see on the bus rudely (but rightly) telling youngsters they shouldn't be sitting when she has to stand. My grandmothers were nothing like the foul-mouthed curmudgeon that Catherine Tate has so vividly created, but the version of her I knew was a childhood neighbour; like Tate's character, dear old Mrs J would be perfectly nice to someone's face but when they left the room she would spit out: “Never liked him/her.”That Nan taps into some personal connection for many of us is a large part of her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Distributor Second Run’s second collection of the Czech New Wave (strictly speaking, Czechoslovak, although the three films included here are from the Czech side of the movement) reminds us what an astonishing five years or so preceded the Prague Spring of 1968. What a varied range of film-makers and filmic styles it encompassed, making any attempt to impose any external category – whether political or artistic – redundant.The fate of the directors involved was as varied as the works they produced during that short-lived period of political thaw and formal experimentation. Many of those who Read more ...
mark.kidel
Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his much-acclaimed The Act of Killing is a much more accomplished film. Once again, he is concerned with examining the large-scale, American-inspired massacre of Indonesian "Communists" in 1965.His first attempt – extraordinary and shocking – was in some ways undermined by the surreal reconstructions of killing and torture that the director filmed with the more-than-willing perpetrators. This time around, he has focused on one particular case of torture and murder, as a microcosm of the larger scale mass-slaughter. The film follows the optician Adi, as Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a screen quotation late in this remarkable documentary that reads, “An outstanding athlete cannot belong totally to himself.” The words are those of Soviet ice hockey trainer Anatoly Tarasov, who's one of the presences behind this story of the sport seen through the eyes and experience of the legendary defender Vyacheslav (Slava) Fetisov. But director Gabe Polsky has made a broader film, one which touches on the uncertain journey Russia has undergone over the last three decades.Red Army makes clear how, in a world in which sport was an extension of the superpower struggle, Fetisov and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave birth to the film movement was based.And that’s despite Štefan Uher’s Slovak film of 1962, The Sun in a Net, being generally acclaimed as the one that set the New Wave rolling. It makes for a situation, as Eastern Europe film scholar Peter Hames notes in a filmed extra on this Second Run DVD release, in which Slovak film of the period hasn’t so much Read more ...
Florence Hallett
There’s no sign of Oldenburg, Warhol or Lichtenstein and British pioneers Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake are notably absent from this gritty vision of Pop art. Only in the final room do we come face-to-face with a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin, the comforting bright colours and clean, supermarket-aisle lines blackened, singed and fragmented as if salvaged from some unimaginable disaster. Made by Russian duo Komar and Melamid in response to the state-sanctioned destruction of their 1974 self-portraits as Stalin and Lenin, this unaccountably shocking image is one of a series of paintings Read more ...
Paul Gent
Where in the world will you find the most glittering line-up of international orchestras? The Proms? Salzburg? Lucerne? Edinburgh? Bucharest, actually. The Enescu Festival, which began on 30 August, this year boasts appearances by the Concertgebouw, Vienna Philharmonic, Dresden Staatskapelle, Israel Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, St Petersburg Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra. And that’s leaving out the jewel in the crown, an appearance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle.The visit from the Berliners has taken 18 years of dogged negotiation. At a press Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you liked the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, with its Dave Van Ronk-esque hero in Greenwich Village in 1961, you'll enjoy the new exhibition Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival, a celebration of NYC as the centre of folk music from its beginnings in the Thirties and Forties to its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties. It's at the Museum of the City of New York, far uptown at 103rd Street in east Harlem, a block or two from Duffy's Hill, the steepest in New York and the scene of many cable-car accidents in the 19th century. The kind of thing Peter, Paul and Mary might have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any suggestion that the companion piece to director Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, his disturbing documentary on the state-supported mass killings undertaken for Indonesia’s Suharto regime, could actually be a more troubling film might seem surprising. The Act of Killing was extremely unnerving. The Look of Silence is even more distressing, even more frightening. Inong, a death-squad leader interviewed in the new film, chillingly says, “if we didn’t drink human blood, we would go crazy.”This was the still-pumping blood of a dying person whose throat he had just cut. In the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"There is no murder in paradise" is the official line of the authorities in 1950s Russia, but nevertheless Child 44 is the blood-drenched tale of a hunt for a mass-murdering paedophile in Stalin's deathly shadow. The source novel was the first in Tom Rob Smith's trilogy about Russia during and after the Great Dictator, and Smith based it on the real-life killer Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper".Director Daniel Espinosa has done a powerful job of rendering the misery and horror of the USSR in the early 1950s, where your best friend or the work-mate at the next desk may be an informer for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Iconoclast” is the word used in one of the booklet essays accompanying Second Run’s rerelease of two films by the great Czech director Věra Chytilová (1929-2014) to describe her work. Other terms that have appeared over the years include: feminist, formalist, “overheated kettle that you can’t turn down”, and “first lady of the Czech New Wave”. Not all of those are of similar value, but nevertheless catch an element of her diversity.Chytilová is best known for her early film Daisies, from 1966. Traps (Pasti, pasti, pasticky, 1998), from the re-commencement of her film career in post-Communist Read more ...