Film

Kino Eye: Orchestra conductors on film

I haven't seen the new film Tár (with Cate Blanchett) yet. However, there are many films which feature conductors, this being rich territory for the dramatization of massive egos and conflicts, artistic and otherwise. Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984) is a good example. My choice is Taking Sides (2001), an international co-production with István Szabó directing and focusing on the famous German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (Stellan Skarsgård) and allegations of his collaboration with the Nazis while Musical Director of the renowned Berlin Philharmonic. He is interrogated by Major Steve Arnold of...

Women's Fightback: The Oscars, and bigger things

After two back-to-back Academy Awards in which women won Best Director — Nomadland ’s Chloé Zhao in 2021 and T he Power of the Dog ’s Jane Campion in 2022 — this year only men are shortlisted: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once ; Todd Field for Tár ; Martin McDonagh for The Banshees of Inisherin ; Ruben Östlund for Triangle of Sadness ; and Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans . In 2022, women comprised 24% of directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films, down 1% from 2021. The last Oscar time nominations...

Kino Eye: Holocaust Memorial Day - Eva's diary

Friday 27 January was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. My chosen film, unfortunately, is not easily accessible and is not that well-known. Omer Bartov in his otherwise excellent book The “Jew” in Cinema doesn’t even mention it, although it is one of the most interesting, if perplexing because of a peculiar twist, of the films depicting those terrible events. There was a publishing sensation in post-war Hungary when the diary of Holocaust victim Éva Heyman, a 13 year-old girl from the Transylvanian town of Nagyvárad (now Oradea in Romania), was found by her mother. Éva perished in...

Emmett Till: a lynching which fired the Civil Rights Movement

Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago When a young boy from Chicago stepped through a southern door This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well The colour of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till - Death of Emmett Till , by Bob Dylan Till , a film now showing at local cinemas, tells the story of a lynching in the Southern USA which did not go almost unnoticed outside its area as many other such lynchings did. Instead it became a cause célèbre and gave a major impetus to the Civil Rights Movement. The USA presents itself as a great “melting pot” — a country where diverse...

Kino Eye: All Quiet on the Western Front

I’ve never been keen on re-makes, so in order to “get my retaliation in first” I’m writing about All Quiet on the Western Front , the 1930 classic Hollywood film directed by Lewis Milestone, not the new German version directed by Edward Berger (which may or may not be good — I haven’t seen it). Along with Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and others, it remains one of the classic anti-war films. All Quiet… follows the young German recruit Paul Bäumer, who enthusiastically heads off to the war to fight for country and Kaiser, to be confronted by the horrors of trench warfare: the hunger...

Kino Eye: A landmark for gay rights

According to a number of sources it was the first British film to use the word “homosexual”. In the US, it was refused approval under the Motion Picture Production Code. Victim , directed by Basil Dearden in 1961, centres on successful lawyer Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde). He has an affair with working class Jack Barrett (Peter McEnery), who is being blackmailed due to his homosexuality. At the time homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Barrett appeals to Farr for help but he does nothing. Barrett steals money to pay the blackmailers but is arrested by the police. In his cell Barrett hangs...

Kino Eye: The Magdalene sisters

In Solidarity 657 Sacha Ismail highlighted the plight of young women taken to the Magdalene Laundries in 26-Counties Ireland, where supposedly “fallen” young women, many of them teenagers, were subjected to “spiritual” correction (in other words punishment). A number of films have been made in recent years featuring their plight and that of other young women and children dispatched to orphanages, also run by the Catholic Church. One of the most hard-hitting is The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002). The film follows the fortunes of four teenage women, one of whom, Crispina, is mentally ill...

Kino Eye: The story of the migrant Elias

One of Costas Gavras’ later films, Eden is West (2009), recounts the journey of Elias (Ricardo Scamarcio), a migrant of unknown origins, through Europe to the streets of Paris. Somewhere in the Mediterranean his crowded boat is chased by the coastguards. In desperation Elias dives overboard and washes up on a Greek beach at what turns out to be a holiday resort cum nudist camp for the rich. Elias adapts to survive, stealing a camp worker’s uniform from a washing line and pretending to be a cleaner. The police begin to look for him and the holiday resort manager even makes this into a “game” —...

Kino Eye: Chantal Ackerman and “the greatest film”

Every ten years the great and good around the film magazine Sight and Sound come together to list the one hundred greatest films ever made. Personally, I find this sort of exercise rather pointless. I mention it only because the number one slot has just gone to Chantal Ackerman for her film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce 1080, Bruxelles , made in 1975. Previous winners have all been men. Ackerman, who died in 2015, was a Belgian daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was a feminist whose work never embraced the mainstream, and was influenced early in her career by Jean-Luc Godard. In...

Kino Eye: Football on film

A football film? Not an easy choice: as a critic once put it, you either have footballers who can’t act or actors who can’t play football. The end-product is fairly predictable. A good illustration is the ludicrous Escape to Victory (directed by John Huston, 1981) where a scratch team of World War 2 POWs (which for some inexplicable reason includes Pelé) take on a crack German team and force a draw while managing to escape their captors in the post-match chaos. It’s good for a laugh — and not much else — but was partly inspired by a much better Hungarian film Two Half Times in Hell (1961)...

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