Film

Left-wing films

History Of The Left Socialist Realism Films On Labor And Big Business Peace, Imperialism And The Third World Racism and anti-racism Feminist Films Sexual Freedom Anti-Authoritarian Struggle Films Environmental And Farm Struggle Films History Of The Left 1900 - Robert DeNiro learned to speak Italian for this 3-hour saga about the Italian Communist party and the rise of the Black Shirts. Absolute Beginners - A one-hour show about the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, starring Patrick Stewart as Lenin, which is one of 13 episodes of the British Series "Fall of Eagles" series. Bread and Roses (1994) -...

The business of folk

Hollywood has a long history of taking a real person and creating fictionalised versions. ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘Sunset Boulevard’, and ‘The Godfather’ all did this. The Coen Brothers did it themselves in ‘Barton Fink’ and they have done it again in their new film — ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’. Llewyn Davis, a former merchant seaman, is a folk singer on the Greenwich Village scene in the New York of the early 60s. Dave Van Ronk was a real folk singer who also used to be a merchant seaman. There are a couple of nods to some other similarities but one of the great strengths of the movie is that Llewyn Davis...

Capital without the proletariat?

"Playtime", a video installation by Isaac Julien. Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Rd, London N1 7RW (to 1 March). Of the six segments of film comprising Isaac Julien's "Playtime" video installation, the most ostentatiously playful and fictional is also the most literal and documentary. It is a parody of the adulatory celebrity interview, with the actress Maggie Cheung portraying an extravagantly gushing interviewer. The interviewee, Simon de Pury, one of the world's most famous art auctioneers, is however playing himself. When a wealthy person commissions him to sell an artwork, says de Pury...

Depicting a barbaric history

Solomon Northup, on whose autobiographical memoir 12 Years a Slave is based, was lucky by the standards of most of the thousands of “free negroes” kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Southern United States. His release in 1853 and the story he went back North to tell boosted the abolitionist movement which a decade later helped destroy slavery in the US. Yet, after regaining his freedom, his colour meant he was unable to testify against his kidnappers in a Washington D.C. court. Like Steve McQueen’s first film, Hunger, 12 Years is often difficult to watch, unflinchingly brutal in its...

When Gone With the Wind Glorified the Old Slave-holding South

Eighty million Americans visit the cinema every week, and in the course of the next year or so, perhaps ninety million will see the film Gone With the Wind. Millions will get from this film their most powerful impression of the greatest civil war in history and one of the decisive turning points in modern history. What will they see? At the very start we are informed that the film is a tribute to the “grace and gallantry” of a vanished civilization “the age of chivalry.” The South was a “land of grace and plenty” (our quotations are literal). The Civil War took place, God knows why: as far as...

Gone With the Wind Glorifies the Old Slave-holding South

Eighty million Americans visit the cinema every week, and in the course of the next year or so, perhaps ninety million will see the film Gone With the Wind. Millions will get from this film their most powerful impression of the greatest civil war in history and one of the decisive turning points in modern history. What will they see? At the very start we are informed that the film is a tribute to the “grace and gallantry” of a vanished civilization “the age of chivalry.” The South was a “land of grace and plenty” (our quotations are literal). The Civil War took place, God knows why: as far as...

A spark of hope

“You’re the mockingjay, Katniss. While you live, the rebellion lives...” Even though it’s a cliché, I did laugh and I did cry while watching Catching Fire, the thrilling second instalment of the film series based on Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy.. It was amusing, emotionally-touching, and it really can set a fire in your belly. Whether it was the casual way the Gamemakers manipulated the environment, or the tragic state of affairs on the ground in the poorer districts, the story roused a great feeling of injustice and made you want to walk out of the movie theatre and start a...

The invaded Australians

In June 2007, “remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory were invaded and martial law imposed”. So Diane Fieldes put it in the Australian journal Socialist Alternative, and she wasn't wrong. Six hundred troops were deployed. Aboriginals faced compulsory acquisition of townships; the “quarantining” of a proportion of their welfare benefits; new restrictions on alcohol; and the closure of government programmes which gave some of them part-time employment. In its initial form, pushed through by John Howard's conservative government in the run-up to the 2007 federal election, this...

How the US uses torture

Western democracies have prided themselves in applying humane standards to the treatment of prisoners of war. This treatment is encapsulated in the Geneva Convention, first formulated in 1864 and modified since, most recently in 1949. They have also signed up to the UN Convention against Torture. These conventions have been flouted by some democratic states (France in Algeria, Britain in Northern Ireland, USA in Vietnam, ...). The US explicitly banned torture and harsh treatment by military interrogators after the Vietnam war, introducing the Army Field Manual on Interrogation (FM 34-52) in...

Doctors of the Dark Side

Levels of violence in human societies have fallen drastically since Stone Age times, as shown by Steven Pinker in his excellent but gruelling exposition The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin, 2011). This includes the infliction of torture by the state. By mid-19th century, judicial torture had been abolished in major western countries. This also applied to inhumane treatment of enemies. In the American War of Independence from 1776, George Washington ordered that prisoners of war (soldiers from the British side) be treated humanely, while Abraham Lincoln forbade torture or cruelty to...

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