1960s
Sebastian Scotney
One German writer found a neat yet teasing way to sum up the difference between Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first film in the Italian director’s “German trilogy”, and the two films that followed it.The Damned, known in Italian as La caduta degli dei (meaning "the twilight of the Gods"), the writer explained, is “a masterpiece which is nonetheless suitable for the cinema-goers who fell asleep during Death in Venice (1971) or Ludwig II (1973)."Visconti did, indeed, set out deliberately to surprise and to shock with The Damned, as he explains in a 1970 interview that Read more ...
mark.kidel
One of those films weighed down by a considerable reputation, La Dolce Vita (1960) is rarely taken as seriously as it should be. From the very first sequence in which a figure of Christ sails across Rome’s skies, suspended from a helicopter, a sensational image that summed up the spiritual bankruptcy of the time, until the last when an innocent and beautiful girl smiles quizically in close-up, this is a deeply moral film.On one level this satirical depiction of the “sweet life” consists of a series of wild parties, hosted and attended by the city’s beau monde, but it also a film about the Read more ...
David Nice
Neo-Nazis held a Trafalgar Square rally under the banner "Free Britain from Jewish Control" in the year of my birth; I had no idea until I watched Ridley Road. Most of us know about the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, but, until now, next to nothing about the Jewish resistance against fascist Colin Jordan and his gang of thugs, some of them cynically recruited from borstals and children’s homes, 17 years after the end of the Second World War.Sarah Solemani's adaptation of Jo Bloom’s novel plays with the chronology a bit – arsonists did kill a boy in a Jewish theological college, but after Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Wes Anderson and Jarvis Cocker do 1960s French pop – this frothy confection couldn’t be any more “art school” if it were smoking a gauloise in a black polo-neck. Truly, what a match made on the Eurostar! For one so thoroughly Sheffield born-and-bred, Mr Cocker has oodles of French chic (plus a French ex-wife and Paris-based son). He nails yé-yé, of course, but you can imagine he was weaned on the genre.It all started with his cover of the 1965 Christophe hit “Aline” made for Wes Anderson’s latest film, The French Dispatch (Jarvis told We Present recently that the director actually guided Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While there’s undoubtedly some of “Papa Was a Rollin' Stone” in Rare Earth’s “Come With me”, another correspondence also immediately springs to mind – the Melody Nelson-era Serge Gainsbourg. And maybe, due to the female moaning, the “Je T’Aime”-period Gainsbourg too. The track-by-track commentary in the booklet with Psychedelic Soul - Produced By Norman Whitfield notes the resemblance of the 1973 single to the creations of France’s prime musical provocateur, but also says that “Come With me” was anomalous for Rare Earth, a band which usually traded in a form of soul-rock. It was Norman Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Its more than 50 years since Yoko Ono first presented Mend Piece at the Indica Gallery, London in the exhibition through which she met John Lennon. The piece is currently being revisited at the Whitechapel Gallery and, in the intervening years, its meaning has subtly shifted. Strewn over four tables are dozens of broken cups and saucers along with everything you need to attempt a botched repair – glue, sellotape, scissors and string.According to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired using lacquer mixed with precious metals like gold and silver that are clearly visible Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In October 1964, New York’s Goldie & the Gingerbreads boarded the RMS Mauretania for Southampton. In the midst of the British Invasion, they were taking on the beat boom at its coal face. The Beatles, Animals, Dave Clark Five, Rolling Stones and more were cleaning up in their home country but – counter intuitively – Genya Zelkowitz aka Genya Ravan aka Goldie and co went in the opposite direction. Their champions in this venture were The Animals and their manager Mike Jeffrey. Rolling Stone Keith Richards also claimed to have discovered them at a New York party he’d attended with Stones’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
One of several 1960s Czech films which explicitly addresses the Holocaust, Zbyněk Brynych’s 1964 thriller The Fifth Horseman is Fear ( …a pátý jezdec je starch) wrong-foots us from the first frame. There’s Jiří Sternwald’s jagged, brittle score, and the glimpses of contemporary Prague. The lack of explicit period detail is deliberate, Brynych admitting that “our story begins in 1941, but it could have occurred at another time.” The parallels between the Nazi occupation and Czechoslovakia’s post-war plight would have been as clear then as they are now.Adapted from a novel by Hana Bělohradská, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“She is a 20-year-old white New Yorker who sings like a 55-year-old black lady from Mississippi. The experts say she will do for soul pop what Dylan did for folk.” Lillian Roxon’s verdict on Laura Nyro appeared in her ground-breaking 1969 book Rock Encyclopedia, issued before Nyro’s third album New York Tendaberry.In January 1970, Life magazine ran a feature on Nyro which was headed “The Funky Madonna of New York Soul.” By then, New York Tendaberry was out. Her follow-up, Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat, was being recorded when the article appeared.Both descriptions demonstrate a unanimity Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After a band’s back catalogue has been reissued countless times, any new release needs a fresh approach to attract attention. Archives and collections can be scoured to find previously unissued tracks. There might be otherwise unknown recordings released under aliases, or maybe something which escaped via an obscure continental soundtrack album. But on their own, such discoveries aren’t enough. They need to be married-up with the familiar. Hence what can be a last-resort release: a complete works collection.A few bands can have their original master tapes mucked about with to offer a new spin Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s always a bit worrying when distributors choose to open a film in August at the best of times, but after 18 months of covid playing havoc with release schedules, the backlog of titles has to be dealt with somehow. The Courier is one such movie, seeping out now in selected art house cinemas: if it doesn’t set the box office on fire, the distributors can blame the sunshine, not the drabness of the movie itself. This tale of Cold War skulduggery, based on a true story, has been waiting for a UK release since before 2020 and provoked mixed reviews on its American release in March. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Saunders' Ferry Lane” elegantly paints a picture of revisiting an empty, out-of-season neighbourhood to reflect on an old relationship. It’s cloudy and begins raining. The grass where the couple lay is dead. Birds have flown away. The gentle arms which held the narrator are gone. “I find no present comfort for my pain” sings a forlorn Sammi Smith. Swelling strings darken the mood, as does a plaintive pedal steel.Discomfort of a different kind is addressed by Billie Jo Spears’ up-tempo “Mr Walker, It's All Over.” After leaving Garden City, Kansas for New York to work, she fetches coffee for Read more ...