Holocaust
Philip Guston, Timothy Taylor GallerySunday, 21 June 2015
Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his... Read more... |
Now This Is Not the End, Arcola TheatreSaturday, 06 June 2015
Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein... Read more... |
1945: The Savage Peace, BBC TwoMonday, 25 May 2015
“Enjoy the war, for the peace will be savage,” was apparently a macabre joke circulating in the German military towards the end of World War Two. Peter Molloy’s searing documentary, 1945: The Savage Peace, showed us just how prescient it would prove... Read more... |
DVD: Germany Pale MotherFriday, 22 May 2015
This is a great, neglected film of Nazi Germany. After being savaged by German critics for its “subjective” and “sentimental” perspective on the Third Reich at its 1980 Berlin Festival premiere, it was released with 30 minutes slashed. This is the... Read more... |
Phoenix reviewFriday, 08 May 2015
Although the shadows of the Holocaust and German guilt hang over Christian Petzold’s sixth outing with his formidable muse Nina Hoss, Phoenix is more concerned with the essence of female identity. It contextualises in dreadful circumstances and... Read more... |
I Wish to Die Singing, Finborough TheatreThursday, 30 April 2015
Agitprop is a term that seems to have dropped out of use. It has too many negative connotations; it smacks of political rant. Yet artistic director Neil McPherson, whose small and feisty Finborough Theatre at Earls Court receives no public funding... Read more... |
The Decent OneSaturday, 18 April 2015
Remember the Hitler diaries? Stern and the Sunday Times were so eager for them to be true they went ahead and published even after historian Hugh Trevor Roper had changed his mind about their authenticity. Such was the hunger for stories about Nazis... Read more... |
DVD: Night Will FallFriday, 06 February 2015
The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was... Read more... |
Touched by Auschwitz, BBC TwoWednesday, 28 January 2015
There’s been a pronounced sense of finality at this year’s 70th anniversary commemoration of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. No closure, of course, but an awareness that the ranks of survivors are diminishing, and that soon their first-person... Read more... |
Holocaust: Night Will Fall, Channel 4Sunday, 25 January 2015
More than once in André Singer’s documentary Holocaust: Night Will Fall – marking in advance the 70th anniversary, on 27th January, of the liberation of Auschwitz, having added that explanatory first word to the title with which the film was... Read more... |
Surviving the Holocaust - Freddie Knoller's War, BBC TwoFriday, 23 January 2015
First-hand testimonial is surely the building block of history. Whether it’s in the form of written diaries or the television memory, it allows us to go back to the very basics as we, the reader-viewer, effectively re-experience the life of the... Read more... |
The Last of the UnjustSaturday, 10 January 2015
It is 30 years since Shoah. In the filmography of the Holocaust Claude Lanzmann's document is the towering monolith. At nine-and-a-half hours, it consists of no archive footage at all, just interviews with witnesses unburdening themselves of... Read more... |
