Cold War
Tom Birchenough
In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.But Olsson’s masterstroke, which gives this diverse material a uniting context, is Read more ...
theartsdesk
It has long since become a cliché that the news of John F Kennedy’s assassination is implanted on the memories of those who remember hearing it for the first time. As that generation thins out, their children are now likelier to think of the breach of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago this weekend.To mark the anniversary, theartsdesk’s writers have come together to nominate works of art inspired by divided Berlin. Necessarily, many of the songs, films and books suggested here have a British perspective, but others are more indigenous commentaries on what one film memorably refers to as the lives Read more ...
Graham Fuller
John Halas and Joy Batchelor's Animal Farm, adapted from George Orwell's 1945 allegorical novel about the emergence of Stalinism, was Britain’s first animated feature film. Clearly influenced by Walt Disney's early 1940s classics, the husband and wife team (he was from Budapest, she from Watford) necessarily avoided sentimentalism but were unafraid to milk pathos in depicting the plight of Orwell’s oppressed proletarian beasts.The ultimate victim of the tyrannical porker Napoleon (pictured below) is the workhorse Boxer, who slaves devotedly to build a windmill for the agrarian collective Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan opens in Russia early next year it won’t be in the director’s cut. Given new legislation effective from this past July, it will be against the law to include the very distinctive Russian expletives, known locally as mat, that are plentiful in the director’s film, and add a very distinctive quality to his depiction of contemporary Russia.It’s a difference that may be lost on non-Russian speaking viewers who won’t be surprised by the usual procession of f-words and the like. But for Zvyagintsev himself, it’s a matter of considerable concern. “Film-makers, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The key lines are “you’re reborn into an untroubled world” – a world “where everyone’s the same.” The 1956 Don Siegel science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is often taken as a response to America’s fear of Communism and the associated suppression of self, or as a commentary on the encroaching conformity brought by the spread of consumerism and a regimented suburbia. In both cases, homogenisation and standardised behaviour were the potential result.Seeing the film anew does nothing to alter these interpretations. In cinemas again as part of the BFI’s Days of Fear and Wonder Read more ...
graham.rickson
Groan-inducing rhymes are becoming a feature of Opera North’s autumn season. Like their Coronation of Poppea, this revival of The Bartered Bride has some cracking lines. Matching "swanky" with "cranky" and "lanky" is pretty neat, but hearing James Creswell’s oleaginous Kecal slip in "hanky-panky" is a masterstroke.Quite why we’ve got sporadic surtitles is a mystery; Leonard Hancock and David Pountney’s smart translation is clearly audible throughout. This company’s chorus is one of its greatest assets, and every syllable tells.First staged in 1998, Daniel Slater’s production of Smetana’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble may well be the film that foretold the end of Communism in Poland. Its script gestation period lasted almost 14 years, starting from 1962, and though its official release in 1977 was kept to a minimal level by the authorities, even in that form it’s believed that almost a fifth of the nation’s population saw the work.Aleksander Scibor-Rylski’s script plays loosely with the Citizen Kane narrative device of hunting down the personal truth behind a past legend. In this case it’s a socialist hero bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, centre, main Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
History may be written by the winners, but its verdict is surely still out on Kim Philby. The presenter of Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal, Ben Macintyre, acknowledged that Philby is “the most famous double agent in history”, but though such acclaim will never guarantee any kind of moral endorsement, at least it keeps his seat of notoriety warm. The fascination remains, not least for television.Francis Whately’s two-part docu-drama is the second BBC film in a year (the first was last winter's The Spy Who Went Into the Cold by George Carey, focusing on the crucial Beirut period in 1963 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The cumulative effect of the BBC's Cold War season hasn't been to remind us that truth is stranger than fiction so much as to demonstrate how they swirled together into a miasma of delusion and uncertainty. We've seen Reds under the bed and spies in the ointment and revisited once again notorious episodes of the highest treason.In BBC Two's Cold War, Hot Jets, we were shown not only how Britain suicidally sold its cutting-edge jet engine technology to the Russians, but how the crews of the RAF's nuclear-equipped V-bombers were trained to fly their final, cataclysmic missions beyond the Iron Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Money, love, professional jealousy - the three undying motives for personal crime, and all three were present in the Bolshoi Ballet acid trial. An international public that scoffed happily at the OTT ballet horror-show that was the film Black Swan was suddenly sobered up by real-life events that needed no cinematographers and screenwriters. A dancer had commissioned a criminal with a murder conviction to seriously hurt his boss, the artistic director of the great Bolshoi Ballet, Russia’s most glamorous, skilled and commercially desirable cultural export, and the boss was now scarred and near- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Did we really ever have it quite so bad? One-off drama Legacy, the latest addition to the BBC’s Cold War season, took us back to 1974, civil unrest, power-cuts and the three-day-week. And in Spyland, that nether world of lost certainties and perennial jadedness, the weather’s rarely great anyway. So the lack of sun in Paula Milne’s tight and nuanced adaptation of the Alan Judd novel was no surprise: the clouds of le Carré were lowering.Which made the yellow Rover driven by rookie spy Charles Thoroughgood (Charlie Cox) about the brightest thing around (along with the red telephone Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The images really do say it all in Strange Days – Cold War Britain. It’s a style of documentary making which puts archive material in first place, ahead even of presenter Dominic Sandbrook, who’s the sole screen presence here (no interviews, no talking heads). We can only wonder exactly how this challenging mêlée of material came together, but can be sure that archive producer Stuart Robertson had every bit as much input as director Rebecca Templar. And we presume that historian Sandbrook was standing over the process, suggesting the tone and nudging the choice and juxtaposition of clips, as Read more ...