Farewell the Trumpets is the title of the final volume of the Pax Britannica trilogy on the rise and fall of the British Empire, written by the late Jan Morris. As the three books mostly cover the Victorian era, with the third opening with Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, it feels like a goodRead More
After the happy news back in 2018 that The Bioscope, the leading silent era British film journal, had been digitised for the British Newspaper Archive, some would come up to me and ask, what about the other leading silent era British film journal? What about the Kinematograph Weekly? Ah, I would say. That would beRead More
One of the cinema’s great gifts to us all is the closing shot. Each art form becomes distinctive through its ability to tell stories through devices unique to itself, and so there is nothing in the novel, theatre, opera or any other dramatic method that has anything to compare with the closing shot of cinema.Read More
The first feature film that Buster Keaton directed, The Three Ages, is not perhaps as familiar as it should be. A comic history of love in prehistoric, Roman and modern times, it has Keaton fighting his rival, Wallace Beery, over a girl and winning her against the odds each time. Allegedly parodying Intolerance, it isRead More
My new year’s resolution for 2019 was to go to the cinema once a week. It’s a sad admission that someone whose career has been mostly built around film should need this sort of a spur, but though films attract me no less than ever they did, cinemas do not. There seems to be somethingRead More
Martin Scorsese has been inveighing against modern cinema trends. He cannot see the dramatic value in all these films based on superhero comic characters, and indeed it is puzzling how such thin content can have been stretched so far and yet has remained popular. But he has also said that he does not want usRead More
It is good to explore a river. One can proceed upstream, in search of a source whose precise location might never be determined. Or one can follow the river downstream until it widens out upon reaching the sea, the exact point on the map at which the one turns into the other being equally beyondRead More
Thirty years or so ago, the Museum of the Moving Image opened on London’s South Bank. Funded privately then operated by the British Film Institute, the museum traced the history of motion pictures from ‘pre-cinema’ days to the blockbusters of 1988. It was notable for the many rare and unique objects on show, for theRead More
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, newly released theatrically and on Netflix, opens with a film by Georges Méliès. Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (1896), known in English as The Vanishing Lady, features Méliès in his familiar role as a magician, placing a woman (Jehanne d’Alcy) under a cloth and, throughRead More
The past did not take place in black-and-white, but many of the technologies for documenting that past when it was present operated in that way. But in our age of never-ending marvels we can right the egregious errors of such out-moded systems. So it is that the colourisation of black-and-white actuality films and photographs hasRead More