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Index: Film, Television, Video & Theatre

Event: ‘David Holzman’s Diary’ at MOMA NYC, 15 June.

Sunday, 5 June 2011

…as much as anything else David Holzman’s Diary is one of the great New York movies.

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· In the Congo, classical music with a catastrophic backdrop.

Sunday, 1 May 2011

Before coming across the Kimbaungist Symphony Orchestra in 2008, Bleasdale had spent nearly a decade documenting the rapes, murders and dislocation that have gone on virtually unchecked across Congo’s countryside. His work from Congo has been published in many newspapers and magazines, as well as two books.

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· Event: Smile! You’re on candid kino. Vertov at the MOMA. (And here.)

Friday, 15 April 2011

Dziga Vertov, of course, considered his films to be documentaries, records of actuality, but all his work reflected his very personal, highly poetic vision of Soviet ‘reality,’ a vision he maintained throughout his life, long after the dustbin of soviet history had claimed him, too.

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Elizabeth Taylor, a Welsh Cleopatra in ‘Under Milk Wood’.

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Andrew Sinclair: I put down a costly gold Egyptian serpent bracelet as a peace offering from my pocket. Unfortunately, she was making herself up as Cleopatra, all kohl and rouge and peacock eyelids. “That won’t do,” I heard myself daring to say. “You’re a Welsh sailor’s whore of the ‘fifties. You can’t look like that.”

“I always look like Cleopatra,” she said, and dismissed me.

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Sarah Bernhardt in London, best of all possible Samaritans.

Saturday, 26 March 2011

Arthur Croxton: IN 1913 SARAH BERNHARDT reached the apex of her theatrical career in this country. Her wonderful success in the previous season naturally lead Oswald Stoll to engage her once more for the autumn of the following year.

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· William Shatner, boldly going right through the scenery.

Sunday, 20 March 2011

But just as “Kafkaesque” doesn’t just describe the condition of having too much paperwork to do, “Shatnerian” isn’t merely shorthand for hammy acting demarcated by a certain truncated enunciation. More than that, to be Shatnerian is to be dynamically, effervescently alive in a role.

Also filed in Broadcasting, Canadian Eccentricities, Chronicle & Notices, Noted elsewhere | | Comments (0)

· ‘The Walking Dead’: Still dead, still ungrateful, still trucking.

Tuesday, 8 March 2011

The zombie keeps on: it’s what he does.

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Radio signals and royal symbols.

Saturday, 26 February 2011

Stan Carey: Albert’s sympathetic listeners needed a reassuring and articulate voice from a figure of moral authority – a “symbol of national resistance”, as the end credits assure us he became. Indeed, the film can be read as a study of our relationships with symbols. We are what Terrence Deacon called the symbolic species, and our symbols can inspire fear as naturally as confidence.

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Charlotte Cushman: ‘a woman who played the man’. And won.

Friday, 11 February 2011

As an artist who was also an “intellectual” performer, a woman who played the man, and a single woman whose life reads like an adventure novel Cushman deeply influenced American culture in the time of great upheaval around the Civil War.

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The genial grit of John Wayne, the grittier grit of Jeff Bridges.

Monday, 7 February 2011

Bridges is a riskier proposition than Wayne. He feels like a dangerous man, seriously out of control, not playing at decrepitude and disorder.

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Strictly watching Strictly Come Dancing.

Tuesday, 28 December 2010

Michelene Wandor: The twin attractions of Strictly are an uneasy couple. The drama is reassuringly there, the eroticism divisive.

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A solution to the mystery of Macbeth’s witches.

Saturday, 20 November 2010

W. J. Lawrence: Plague had occasioned the closing of the playhouses in July 1608 and, save for a few days at Christmas, acting was not permitted again till late in November of the following year. One result of this, it would seem, was that Shakespeare, no longer a player and wearied out by his spell of corrosive inaction, retired for good to Stratford-on-Avon, thenceforth only taking occasional trips to town to bring his old associates a new play and to receive from them his dividends as “housekeeper.”

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