Obituaries

Harry Belafonte, 1927-2023

Better known as a singer, Harry Belafonte performed in a number of films and was a long-standing civil rights activist in the United States. Born in Harlem, he was the son of Jamaican parents, becoming attracted to the theatre at an early age. His first film was Bright Road in 1953. followed by Carmen Jones (1954), Island in the Sun (1957) and others. He famously turned down the role of Porgy in Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of Porgy and Bess , saying the role was racially stereotyped. From 1954 to 1961 he refused to perform in the American South. He concentrated on his singing career, but...

Women's Fightback: Dorothy Pitman Hughes, 1938-2022

Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneering black feminist, child welfare advocate, and community activist has died at 84. She will be remembered for her tour with Gloria Steinem in the 1970s which gave us one of the most iconic photos of the second-wave feminist movement. The photo, now in the National Portrait Gallery of the US, shows the the two raising their fists in the Black Power salute. Where Steinem came to feminism from journalism, Hughes came from grassroots activism, and pushed liberal feminism to look at the experience of working class black women. She was brought up in Lumpkin, Georgia...

John Molyneux, 1948-2022

John Molyneux, who died aged 74 on 10 December 2022, was perhaps the last of the actual 1968 generation still prominent in the Socialist Workers Party, SWP (or, rather, near it: since retiring in 2010 he had been in the Irish offshoot, SWN). In IS (as the SWP was then called) he first became prominent as part of the Southampton IS branch which in 1970 allied de facto with the Trotskyist Tendency (forerunner of the AWL) in opposing the IS’s August 1969 shift from tinny (as we saw it) sloganising about troops out of Ireland to mealy-mouthed but unmistakable support for British troops on the...

Jean-Luc Godard, 1930-2022

When film academic David Bordwell wrote his classic Narration in the Fiction Film he brought together various directors under headings — Montage cinema, Classical Hollywood etc. — but only the Franco-Swiss Jean-Luc Godard had a chapter all to himself. Bordwell, like many others, saw Godard, who died on 13 September, as unique. His career spanned sixty years but he will be best remembered for his early films, which were an important part of the French New Wave and a major influence on filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci in Parma, István Szabó in Hungary, Jiři Menzel in Prague and Quentin...

Kino Eye: Jean-Louis Trintignant, 1930-2022

During Kino Eye’s recent brief absence, of one of Europe’s great cinema actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant, died. He made his name in such New Wave films as Un Homme et une Femme ( A Man and a Woman , 1966) directed by Claude Lelouch. His best known appearance, however, is probably his role as Clerici, the confused and hesitant fascist sympathiser in Bernardo Bertolucci’s brilliant Il Conformista ( The Conformist). Drawn into a fascist plot to assassinate the leader of the Italian left, in exile in Paris, once his professor when a student, Clerici is clearly not up to the job; as the film’s title...

Jovan Divjak, 1937-2021

A year ago, on 8 April 2021, former Bosnian general Jovan Divjak died aged 84. He should be remembered. 2022 is thirty years since the start of the Bosnian War . Between 1992 and 1995 the newly independent ex-Yugoslav republic defended itself against Serbia and Bosnian Serb nationalist militias. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, the great majority of them Bosniacs (Bosnian Muslims). Since the 1995 Dayton agreement, Bosnia has had a fragile and divided peace. Now Serb nationalists are threatening secession, raising fears of a new war. Divjak was one of Bosnia’s top generals during the...

Kino Eye: William Hurt, 1950-2022

I once met William Hurt, who died 13 March, at a director’s Q and A which I moderated at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. What I remember most is that after the Q and A he came up to me and thanked me for chairing the session so well. No one, director, actor, or whatever, had done this before, or has done since. Usually the moderator of these events is either ignored or complained about, as in “I had my hand up to speak and you ignored me!”. The gesture seemed typical of the man. Three of his films stand out for me: Gorky Park (1983, Michael Apted), where he plays Moscow policeman Arkady...

Alain Krivine, 1941-2022

Alain Krivine died on 12 March 2022 at the age of 80. He was maybe the first Trotskyist since Trotsky himself to be a "household name", at least in France

Neil Faulkner, 1958-2022

Neil Faulkner, a Marxist historian, archaeologist and a leader of Anti-Capitalist Resistance (ACR), died on 4 February, aged 64, after suffering from lymphoma for seven months. Condolences to his partner, family, friends, comrades, and colleagues. In summer 2020 Neil Faulkner took part in a panel debate on behalf of Mutiny (which later merged into ACR), alongside activists from Workers’ Liberty and Red Flag, entitled “Towards a new revolutionary left?” Following that debate, he had a written exchange with Solidarity editor Martin Thomas titled “Cooperate where we agree, debate where we...

Lillian Lane Murphy, 2003-2021

Lilly Murphy, who died from cancer on 4 November 2021, joined the Socialist Alliance in Melbourne when she was in high school. Like many other children of socialists, Lilly was in agreement with her parents’ general worldview. Her parents, Maureen Murphy and Richard Lane, met through left politics, and share a similar commitment to anti-capitalist, democratic, working class, revolutionary socialism, that fights for the rights of all oppressed people. Richard Lane has been a supporter of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and predecessors since 1981. Lilly, unlike most children of socialists...

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