Film

Something very different to bring to a conclusion my series of four films for the 40th anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. The Miners’ Hymns was premiered in July 2010 in Durham Cathedral, directed by Bill Morison the avant-garde filmmaker, with music by Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson, the founder of Kitchen Motors, an experimental art group in Reykjavik. It is a beautiful, poetic celebration of mining culture and particularly its music. Using archive footage, the film features “The Big Meeting”, otherwise known as the Durham Miners’ Gala, and the music blends with and highlights...

In UK cinemas from 5 April is Monkey Man , an ultra-violent revenge movie starring, written by and directed by film star Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire , The Green Night and Lion ). Your tolerance for Monkey Man will probably depend on your tolerance for films like the John Wick or Equaliser series. As a fan of the genre I think it’s a interesting and satisfying variation. It’s set in a fictional Indian city ruled over by corrupt cops, gangsters and a fictional Hindu nationalist party that incites attacks on minorities. It touches on themes of extreme inequality, discrimination and the...

Kameradschaft (1931) is my third film for the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, this one to celebrate the international solidarity for the strike. In the Lorraine–Saar region, it was not unusual for mines on either side of the Franco-German border to be close together, separated on the map by a red line which meant absolutely nothing underground. Gas, flooding, subsidence, dust — the ever present dangers of mining life — were no respecter of cartography or the wheeling and dealing of nationalistic politicians. A fire breaks out in a French mine and threatens to engulf the German...

Along with Ken Loach, Trevor Griffiths, who died aged eighty-eight on 29 March 2024, was the most prominent left wing dramatist (and occasional film screen writer) of the post war era in Britain.

Michael Baker reviews "The Dmitriev Affair" (documentary film, 2023, dir. Jessica Gorter).

Proud Valley , the second film I’m highlighting for the 40th anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, was directed by Penrose Tennyson in 1939. It was the last British film to feature the Black American activist, singer and actor Paul Robeson. He plays David Goliath, an American sailor stranded in Cardiff, who makes his way up the valleys to find work at a colliery. He is accepted into the community, partly due to his splendid singing voice which immediately assures him a place in the colliery choir. However, all is not well. An underground explosion kills the choirmaster and the management...

This week, and for another few weeks, I will introduce films for the 40th anniversary of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. The first of those, The Stars Look Down (1940), was based on the 1935 novel by A J Cronin and directed by Carol Reed. It is set at the fictional Neptune Colliery in the North East and centres on Davey Fenwick (Michael Redgrave), son of a local miners’ leader, Bob Fenwick. Davey intends to go to college and hopes with education he can assist in the improvement of conditions in the mining industry. But Jenny Sunley (Margaret Lockwood) persuades him to abandon his studies. They are...

Made in 1937, Jean Renoir’s brilliant La Grande Illusion is set during World War One and features a group of French prisoners of war, their interactions, escape attempts and relations with their German “hosts”. Two French pilots, the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin). are shot down by von Rauffenstein (Eric von Stroheim), also an aristocrat. The collapse of their world and its shared values is one of the themes of the film. In a POW camp they are joined by the wealthy Jew Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) who shares his food with the other prisoners...

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...

i>entleman’s Agreement (dir. Elia Kazan) and Crossfire (dir. Edward Dmytryk) both released in 1947, were two of the first American films to address antisemitism after World War 2. Kazan’s film stars Gregory Peck, a journalist who poses as Jewish so as to be better placed to write a report on antisemitism in New York. What he finds shocks him. Crossfire centres on an investigation into the murder of a Jewish man in a hotel room (in the original novel the victim was homosexual). The suspects are all serving US soldiers. As the police and army (Robert Mitchum plays the sergeant heading the...