I’ve watched the two parts of a documentary seen on the BBC about a Baka family living in the Cameroon rainforest. The first part is really the original documentary made in the mid 1980s from a two year period spent filming with them. They were still living a forest life this family, hunting and gathering, …
Category archives: film
coriolanus
It befits me not to prate on Coriolanus, one so ennobled of spirit that he doth transform me beyond my citizenship by the simple mention of his name. The Great Leader! What piffle. The man at the insistence of the people was, the others to whom he needs must turn in foreign places banished, such …
super 8 (2011)
Set in 1979, the film Super 8 can be read as an allegory of the American civil rights movement. The allegory is caught up in the web of a small time psychological drama. I am concerned at the way film offers grief and anger at slavery and racism as a subset of internal psychological issues.
persona (bergman, 1966)
What is it to want to watch any film? If film teaches us how to desire and fictions structure our reality what am I doing watching this slow half conversation between two women who are one?
300
Well what am I to make of the 300? Second time I’ve seen it and a very different watching in some ways and not in others. This time too I hear the entirely fictional and impossible speeches made by Spartans about saving ‘little Greece’, that home of ‘reason and justice’, setting out to defeat the …
Dogville
Dogville (Lars Von Trier) allows interpretation from many perspectives. As SP said, it is like a Shakespeare play in that respect amongst others. I focus below on a set of ideas, perhaps more words, I encountered in Lacanian writing about the film. Zizek refers to Dogville in A perverts guide to Cinema, and elsewhere other …
Afghanistan, Allegory, the Kite Runner and Knowledge
I watched the Kite Runner, the film directed by Marc Forster (2007). I’ve not read the book but from the comments of various people who had read it I was expecting something very different, something more. I experienced the film as profoundly allegorical, relating a story of America’s involvement in Afghanistan prior to the current …
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