Literature and Film

October 24, 2018

Currently, ‘Literature and Film’ is one of the most popular ‘suggested options’ under Part 4: Options (a bit confusing, to say the least, though it all shakes out as ‘Free Choice’, really). There are a lot of great ideas coming from...

In space, no one can hear you scream

February 13, 2017

Silence seems to have become a key cue in the science fiction film, from Scott and Cameron’s iterations of the Alien franchise (Alien UK/US 1979 and Aliens US 1986), through Nolan’s Interstellar (US 2014), and Cuaron’s Gravity (US 2014) to the recent...

Two german films, different histories

September 23, 2016

Last week I attended a film presentation at the London Reviews of Books bookshop by the novelist Ali Smith (her novel ‘How to be both’ is extraordinary, try to read this). The film was Mädchen in uniform (Germany 1931 dir: Leontine Sagan). I mention this as the film...

Spectre’s Touch of Evil

April 8, 2016

The opening shot of Sam Mendes second James Bond movie, the 24th iteration ‘Spectre’, appears to be an unbroken take of about seven or eight minutes. This is a fluid master shot which at first that appears to have made using a Steadicam, although later in...

A quick glimpses over some of the key ideas revealed in Visual pleasures and narrative cinema

January 13, 2016

The purpose of this article is to offer a brief explanation to some of key elements of Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasures and narrative cinema. With particular reference to her points about how modes of cinema spectatorship and the suturing of audiences are...

‘Drones’ (Rosenthal US 2013): the rarest of things in popular cinema. An allegory.

October 2, 2015

This one is just a relatively quick post. More by way of recommendation than anything else. I was pleasantly surprised this week to discover a film called ‘Drones’ (Rosenthal US 2013). Essentially I was searching for some kind of guilty pleasure to pass a...