First things first. Jean Renoir’s dark The Testament of Dr. Cordelier, made for French television, has little to do thematically with Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, on which it’s ostensibly based. For Stevenson’s late Victorian novella addressed a momentous issue: the transformed meaning of Judeo-Christian myth in […]
Daily Archives: March 12, 2007
The tragedy of Czechoslovakia, including its cutting-up, and the ceding of the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938 as part of the West’s pursuit of a policy of “appeasement” in the hope of averting war: this, and other benchmark events in Czech history before and after the outbreak of World War II, appear […]
There are any number of reasons why an authentic filmmaker might wish to redo or revise something already done by another authentic filmmaker. Later artists may wish to test their abilities against the earlier artists’ achievement, or they may wish to relocate or update the narrative (or both) in order to see whether these changes […]
The destruction of the Babri Masjid, a mosque dating back to the sixteenth century, in December 1992 by Hindu extremists triggered the 1993 “Bombay riots” in Mumbai (Bombay), India, which led to more than 1500 deaths among the clashing groups, Muslims and Hindus. Using this recent national tragedy as backdrop, Khalid Mohamed’s Fiza, a Bollywood […]
On the occasion of her film The Hidden Half (Nimeh-ye penhan, 2001), director Tahmineh Milani was detained for trial by Iran’s Revolutionary Court, which adjudged the film to contain “counterrevolutionary” elements. This court is the premier legal arm of the fundamentalist Islamic clerics who currently have the final say in Iranian social, cultural and political […]
Dennis Grunes 