Film

Kino Eye. Oppenheimer: a complex film

Given the complexities of J Robert Oppenheimer’s life even the three hours of Christopher Nolan’s epic film probably aren’t enough.

Flame and Citron

There are many films about the anti-fascist resistance to the Nazis in occupied Europe. This, I think, is one of the best. Released in Denmark in 2008, Flame and Citron tells the story of two resistance fighters, based on real life figures, in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Flame (real name Bent Fuarschou Hviid) and Citron (Jorgem Hogen Schmith) are part of the famous Holger Danske resistance group. They operate as a kind of “hit squad”, assassinating collaborators. Initially they are reluctant to kill any Nazis, fearful that this may mean retaliatory killings meted out to the Danish population. They...

Uyghur film director arrested

Ikram Nurmehmet, aged 32, studied cinema at the University of Marmara in Turkey and then returned to China. In 2019 he directed Elephant in the Car (which I haven’t seen) — a story of two young Uyghur men, a Chinese woman, Xiao, and a taxi driver. The taxi driver picks up all three and he soon hits it off with the two Uyghurs who enjoy some music together on the taxi’s stereo system. Xiao becomes uneasy in the presence of the two Uyghurs and eventually tells the driver to stop the taxi and she gets out. It appears that this film — and maybe others that he has directed – have angered the...

The Beer Hall putsch on screen

It is November 1923, Munich. Germany is still recovering from the trauma of defeat in World War One and lurches from one crisis to another. The demagogue Adolf Hitler rallies his motley band of supporters for an attempted take-over of power. The putsch fails miserably: Hitler ends up in prison (with a lenient sentence) and writes Mein Kampf … the rest, as they say, is history. There are some documentaries of the event. The only fiction film I know of is a two-part 2003 Canadian TV drama Hitler: The Rise of Evil , directed by Christian Duguay, which has been screened in the UK and is available...

A railway documentary

Night Mail is said to be one of the most popular British documentaries ever made. With lyrics by W H Auden, music by Benjamin Britten, produced and directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt, this story of the night mail train’s journey from Euston station to Glasgow (and onward) was part of what was broadly known as the British documentary movement. It was shot by the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit in 1936. In the 1920s and 30s there was a sense, among some, that society might be improved if people were better informed as to how society “worked”. It was a vague notion, partly inspired by...

A film for trackworkers everywhere

It’s no surprise that the first film to be screened featured a train. Think of the number of films that include train journeys: The General (Buster Keaton), The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock), Shanghai Express (von Sternberg)… and many more. Night Train (1959) by Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz does have resemblances to a Hitchcock thriller, but there is more to the film than that. There is a killer on the Łodz-Hel train (Hel is a resort on the Baltic coast). The murder occurs before the journey starts and the director seems more interested in exploring the personas of nine particular passengers...

Horace Ové, 1936-2023

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Horace Ové grew up loving film after frequenting the cinema on a nearby US military base. Later, he became deeply influenced by Italian Realism. He was one of the first black filmmakers to make his mark after he moved to England in 1960, directing his first film, a short documentary, in 1966. He went on to make a number of documentaries, one of which featured the Black American writer James Baldwin. After numerous difficulties finding funds he directed his best known film, Pressure , in 1975. Co-written with Samuel Selvon, it centres on the life of a 16 year...

Terence Davies, 1945-2023

One of the greatest of British film directors, Terence Davies, died on 7 October. He grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool, the youngest child in a family of ten. His father died when Terence was only six and a half but left a legacy from his violent behaviour. All Davies’s films are well-worth seeing, but I would particularly single out Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), which begins in the Second World War with bombs falling on Liverpool. Peter Postlethwaite features as the abusive father figure. The documentary Of Time and the City (2008) follows the ups and downs of a...

The hell of war in Mariupol

The film 20 Days In Mariupol confirms many times over the essential truth of the old saying, “war is hell”. At times so grim as to be unwatchable, the film, produced by a small team of Ukrainian journalists working for Associated Press (AP), documents the first days of the siege of Mariupol, (24 February-20 May 2022). The port and industrial city was an important target of the initial Russian invasion. Its capture was key to providing Russia with a land route to Russia-controlled Crimea (to the west of the city). Russian-speaking Mariupol was a city that was largely and traditionally Russian...

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