Reviews

Rediscovering Dorothy Arzner

Dorothy Arzner is someone I had never heard of before, and maybe you haven’t either. Arzner was the only director of films in Hollywood under the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s and she made some pretty remarkable films in those years. Her work is currently being celebrated at the BFI in London and this week I got to see her last film, First comes courage . Here is how BFI described her: “Her films were multifaceted revisions of Hollywood norms, paying sharp attention to the intersection of women’s working and romantic lives. Her protagonists were snappy and headstrong, subverting...

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

At the end of the credits of Napoleon , there is a brief dedication for Lulu, Ridley Scott’s dog. My guess is that the poor mutt died of shame after watching this pile of dross. It is difficult to think of anything positive to say about Napoleon . That is surprising, given Scott’s previous offerings include Blade Runner , Thelma and Louise , and Gladiator . The French Revolution is portrayed as only an orgy of ritualised sadistic murder. Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Toulon is said to have fixed his military reputation, although his much greater success in the Italian campaign (ignored...

A hero? Better a democratic leader

At the end of June 2022 I was jubilant, having just taken part in three days of national strike as part of the RMT union’s campaign to defend jobs, pay and conditions on Train Operating Companies (TOCs) and Network Rail (NR). It was a similar feeling for many of the strikers. And we weren’t alone. We had taken heart from the disruption we’d caused and the passing public’s positive response, and a far larger group of people had learnt about our dispute by gleefully watching hostile interviewers being taken down by our General Secretary (GS) Mick Lynch. Gregor Gall, who published a biography of...

A half-story of the miners’ strike

Some aspects of the Channel 4 documentary on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, The Battle for Britain , are worth paying attention to. It includes interviews with former striking miners, who give straightforward, honest and hard-hitting accounts of what happened to them and, in particular, their appalling treatment at the hands of the police. The contrast is stark with the accounts from miners who worked through the strike: they seem blissfully unaware of the broader issues of the strike. They offer a fixation with the idea of “intimidation” as driving the strike, but little in the way of evidence...

Gramsci’s laboratory: “subaltern social groups”

Despite his fame, a considerable part of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its revolutionary period of the early 1920s who then wrote Prison Notebooks in Mussolini’s jails, is not available in English. Joseph Buttigieg’s English translation of Prison Notebooks 1 to 8 was published in three volumes by Columbia University Press in 1992, 1996 and 2007, but Buttigieg died in 2019, and it is not clear when the remaining Notebooks may be fully translated. However, another volume from the Notebooks has been published in English: Antonio Gramsci, Subaltern...

What the “Rustin” film leaves out

Colman Domingo has just been nominated to win an Oscar for best actor. I hope he wins — and not just because he did an excellent job playing American civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in the recent film made about his life. I hope he wins and uses his platform, when the eyes of America and much of the world will be on him, to speak about who Bayard Rustin was, and his legacy. Anyone making a film about the life of Rustin, or any other prominent individual, is forced to make choices. Not everything can go into a movie lasting at most a couple of hours. Choices are made. In the case of Rustin...

Yes, the day will come

Interesting, isn’t it, that the same thought is often conveyed in different languages, by oppressed people living through difficult times, across the world. Battling Apartheid, the South African poet, Mongane Wally Serote, put it most elegantly: It is a dry white season dark leaves don’t last, their brief lives dry out and with a broken heart they dive down gently headed for the earth not even bleeding. it is a dry white season brother… indeed, it is a dry white season, but seasons come to pass. The Irish have Tiocfaidh ár lá (Our day will come). Strange And Arash Azizi, who has written a...

From the Sahara to algal blooms

The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance by Dan Egan documents the history of humanity’s relationship with one of the essential building blocks of life and one of our most important natural resources. Phosphorus in its pure form is extremely reactive and combusts at around room temperature. It was first discovered by German alchemist Hennig Brandt in 1669, who stumbled upon it after conducting elaborate experiments involving boiling gallons of his own urine. Egan charts its use in war and detergent through to the irreplaceable role it now plays in feeding the world’s eight...

Women in revolt!

• Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-90 8 November 2023 to 7 April 2024 Tate Britain This is an exhibition born out of love, respect and admiration. It is loud, proud, angry and gritty. It gives space and voice to those traditionally excluded: “working class [women], women of colour, the queers and the punks”. It is trans-inclusive, intersectional and socialist focused. It is groundbreaking and rule breaking, audacious and unapologetic. It brings together the work of over 100 artists alongside feminist-activist artefacts and ephemera in an exhibition of art, social history and...

Foster: soiling his own nest

John Bellamy Foster's latest book, Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022) continues a trajectory that risks spoiling his contribution to understanding ecological questions from a Marxist perspective

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