Holocaust
DVD/Blu-ray: German Concentration Camps Factual SurveyTuesday, 02 May 2017
This is an impeccably restored presentation of the 1945 feature-length documentary that was intended to be shown in German cinemas in order to counter any remaining support for Nazism. Backed by the British Ministry of Information, it was overseen... Read more... |
The Promise review - genocide reduced to melodramaFriday, 28 April 2017
The Armenian genocide by the Ottomans during and after World War One killed 1.5 million people and is a wound that won’t heal for Armenians, though modern-day Turkey continues to insist that no genocide occurred. It’s only through the efforts of... Read more... |
The private life of Stefan Zweig in EnglandThursday, 09 February 2017
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest rented house. Despite the late hour, the tenants had not... Read more... |
DenialThursday, 26 January 2017
As alternative facts go, few are as grievous as the assertion that the Holocaust didn't happen. That's the claim on which the British historian (I use that word advisedly) David Irving has staked an entire career. Its day in court provides... Read more... |
DVD: The Shop on the High StreetFriday, 12 August 2016
There will surely be no end to the debate as to how any work of art can approach treating the Holocaust, and its depiction in cinema, with the great immediacy of that form, has always been especially problematic. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s 1965 film... Read more... |
Haïm: In the Light of a Violin, The Print RoomWednesday, 15 June 2016
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focused little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1930s Poland is dismally familiar. The story of life-... Read more... |
Son of SaulFriday, 29 April 2016
In the world of the concentration camp, clothes or the lack of them sealed your fate. What you wore marked out your role; whether it was the blue-gray Waffen SS uniform, a doctor’s grubby white coat, the striped suits given to slave-workers, or your... Read more... |
ExperimenterWednesday, 23 March 2016
If an authority figure ordered you to inflict pain on another person, to what extent would you comply? That is the subject of Experimenter, which focuses on Stanley Milgram's controversial obedience experiment. Unable to secure a theatrical run in... Read more... |
Fabio Mauri: Oscuramento, Hauser & WirthSaturday, 12 December 2015
Following his inclusion in this year’s Venice and Istanbul biennials, Italian artist Fabio Mauri has leapt into the limelight. He is from the same generation as Mario Merz; but whereas Merz and his Arte Povera colleagues have long since enjoyed an... Read more... |
Lee Miller, Imperial War MuseumTuesday, 20 October 2015
What a woman. Does the news that Kate Winslet is to play the polymath Lee Miller in a Hollywood biopic mean a kind of sanctified apotheosis of Miller's quite extraordinary life? The story is so dramatic it transcends any fiction. Her path was... Read more... |
Philip Guston, Timothy Taylor GallerySunday, 21 June 2015
Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his... Read more... |
Now This Is Not the End, Arcola TheatreSaturday, 06 June 2015
Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein... Read more... |
