film

Werner Herzog’s pilgrimage to Paris

September 28, 2019 1 Comment
Werner Herzog’s pilgrimage to Paris

Many think Werner Herzog our greatest living film-maker.  His major fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s will always find new viewers.  Aguirre, Wrath of God, a study in conspiracy, tyranny and madness, has a claim to be one of the most powerful ever made.  Once you’ve seen it the first time, with its dense […]

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North from Cwmgïedd

July 13, 2019 2 Comments
North from Cwmgïedd

Some of the solo days out I remember best are the result of fleeing from some ‘unmissable’ public event.  The marriage of Charles Windsor and Diana Spencer on 29 July 1981 was the excuse for a blissful day-long bike ride, from Hereford to Cardiff via the Wye valley, when the lanes were emptied of cars […]

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Norman McLaren’s ‘Neighbours’

October 28, 2018 3 Comments
Norman McLaren’s ‘Neighbours’

In the year I was born, 1952, just seven years after the end of the Second World War, the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal released a remarkable political film entitled Neighbours.  Just over eight minutes long, it was the work of Norman McLaren, a Scottish director who’d settled in Canada.  It was widely […]

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A Pointless trip

March 4, 2018 0 Comments
A Pointless trip

1    M4 The thermometer’s well below zero, but we’re bowling happily along, in light traffic.  Apocalyptic language in the news and weather reports – ‘Beast from the East’, amber warnings, trains cancelled before a flake has fallen – suggests the whole country lies under a thick layer of snow and ice.  On the radio […]

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Walking to meet heroes

December 22, 2017 4 Comments
Walking to meet heroes

In October 1705 Johann Sebastian Bach set out on foot on a journey of 260 miles.  He was twenty years old.  He’d recently been in a brawl with a musician he’d insulted in the market place of his home town of Arnstadt in Thuringia, central Germany.  The church authorities who employed him as organist in […]

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‘A kestrel for a knave’: in memoriam Barry Hines

May 15, 2016 6 Comments
‘A kestrel for a knave’: in memoriam Barry Hines

In March the news came that Barry Hines had died. My mind flashed back to the time when I went with my mother to a cinema in Barnsley to see Kes, Ken Loach’s second feature film that was based on Hines’s short novel, A kestrel for a knave, published in 1968. It was late 1969 […]

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Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett

March 16, 2015 0 Comments
Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett

Buster Keaton, the twentieth century’s greatest comic, and Samuel Beckett, its most naked and unillusioned writer, once collaborated on a short silent film, based on Beckett’s only film script. I hadn’t realised this till yesterday. Or maybe I did know at one time, but forgot long ago – a common enough Beckettian condition. It was […]

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