When you’re a worker, it rains stones seven days a week. Set in North England, Ken Loach’s persuasive tragicomic Raining Stones, from Jim Allen’s original script, opens with a wide-angle shot of a gorgeous misty country landscape at dawn—a moment of quiet and serenity, which the second shot explodes. Two men are scrambling to catch […]
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Robert J. Flaherty’s visual ironies contradict the propagandistic aims of Industrial Britain, a documentary paean to British labor of various kinds, from “the coal fields of England, Scotland and Wales” to British steel, which “is used to build bridges, dams and power stations across half the world.” The confident, borderline bombastic narrator’s passing mention of […]
During the Second World War, French-colonized West Africans were recruited by the army and fought with distinction. In late 1944, instead of being paid and sent home to their countries and communities, they were detained in a prison camp in Dakar. When they rebelled against the French military’s intention to pay them at half-rate, they […]
Written by Eva Kacírková and herself, Věra Chytilová brilliantly directed the satirical Panelstory aneb Jak se rodí sídliste—Panelstory, in short. The setting is a vast apartment building complex just outside Prague; the complex is partially occupied, partly still under construction, with all the attendant machine-noise, mud and debris due to the latter. The overflowing, mostly […]
Paul Newman, handsome as a god, could also act. He may have been one of a slew of onscreen Brando-imitators in the fifties, but by the end of the decade his own persona had begun to come into focus. Newman gave many performances that coasted on that persona (from which untalented Tom Cruise’s perpetual plagiarisms […]
Dennis Grunes 