race issues
Sarah Kent
Ellen Gallagher is obsessed by the issue of black cultural identity; but if that sounds tedious or tendentious, think again. She explores her theme in work that is so varied, so beautiful and so humorous that the furrow she ploughs seems more like an endless opportunity than a narrow limitation.Take the early paintings, for instance. From a distance they look like exquisite minimalist compositions – explorations in pure abstraction. Gallagher paints onto sheets of penmanship paper used by American schoolchildren when practising their handwriting. This underlying grid is enhanced by the thin Read more ...
tanika.gupta
It was over four years ago that I was commissioned by Michael Boyd, then artistic director of the RSC, to write a play which I had vaguely pitched to him as “a costume drama set in the nineteenth century with Asians running around in it”. And here we are, finally, about to open an epic and ambitious play set over the last 14 years of Queen Victoria’s reign. My initial inspiration came from an old black and white photograph taken in an ayah’s home in Aldgate in the 19th century. The picture of a group of Asian women sat around a table sewing and reading, wearing saris and Victorian dress Read more ...
Simon Munk
We're at a moment of change in games – new consoles, new ideas, new ways of playing. And what better game to usher out one era and in a new one than BioShock Infinite?This first-person shooter is still wedded to the core mechanics of traditional big-budget console gaming, but layered on top of a core of classic run-and-gun is a series of innovations in terms of character, script, gameplay and scope of theme that point to exciting potential future directions for the next generation of games.The result is both hugely satisfying to play from a hind-brain, hand-eye coordination point-of-view, but Read more ...
carole.woddis
"Half-caste" and "mixed race" are terms that excite strong emotions. Are you black, are you white? Where do you belong? To whom do you owe your loyalties when the chips are down?Arinze Kene’s God’s Property will hardly be welcomed with open arms by the multicultural lobby. Kene, a hot new Nigerian-born actor turned writer, already widely admired for his debut play Estate Walls and follow-up, Little Baby Jesus, doesn’t mince his words. "Stick to your own" is the clear message coming from this Talawa-Albany-Soho Theatre co-production - your own in this case being black. Mixed marriage offspring Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football. Show Racism the Red Card. Say No to Racism. Such are today’s campaign messages. And then there’s the headline: “Colour Prejudice Problem” in a London newspaper. However, the latter is dated September 1909, perhaps the first time that racism in football (and other sports) was headline news. So, the issue has been around for more than a century in this country and the player who brought it to light was Walter Tull. This is his story.Tull, grandson of a Barbadian slave, was born in 1888 of mixed parentage, his father marrying a local white girl in Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its exuberant blood-spray, rambunctious dialogue and generous running time, Django Unchained is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s first full foray into Westerns. Although it’s not a remake, it pays tribute to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western Django, not only in name but in its use of the title song - which opens this movie as it opened that one - and in the fleeting appearance of the original's game star, Franco Nero (pictured below right).The year is 1858, two years before the American Civil War, and the setting "somewhere in Texas". We watch as a pair of slave trading brutes Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wow, what a lot of debuts. Adrian Lester (Hustle, Bonekickers, Merlin) makes his Tricycle Theatre debut in this new play about a black actor in Regency London, and it’s written by his wife, the actress Lolita Chakrabarti. The play is her first substantial piece, and it’s also the opener in the new regime of incoming artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, who directs. But is the play, which premiered last night, as redolent of greasepaint and plush curtains as its title implies?The story is certainly a revelation. I had assumed that the few black people in Britain in the early 19th century were Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We had Kevin MacDonald’s Bob Marley epic documentary earlier this year, and this is a similar film about another artist who became a symbol as much as a singer. I only saw Miriam Makeba in her sixties, by which time she had become a revered institution they called Mama Africa, as though she was the mother of an entire continent. This Storyville documentary took us back the amazing vibrancy and courage of her early years, with some terrific archive footage.By the 1990s, although her long exile from South Africa was over, Makeba had been bashed around by events, notably the death of her Read more ...
ronald.bergan
It was Lenin who realised early in the Russian Revolution that “of all the arts, film is for us the most important” and Hitler and Goebbels perceived the immense propaganda potential of the Olympics through the medium of film. The 1936 Olympic Games took place in Berlin a few months after Hitler’s armies occupied the Rhineland. Hitler spared no expense in making it the best organised and most efficiently equipped in the history of the Olympics.After Triumph of the Will (1935), the documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, the director Leni Riefenstahl became established as Germany’s foremost “ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Apparently it’s the taking part that counts, which would explain why recent weeks have brought unseemly howls of protest and threats of litigation from British athletes who have failed to make it into the Olympic squad. You’d like to sit these people with their adamantine sense of entitlement in front of a couple of this week’s releases. One we know all about. Chariots of Fire has jogged back along the beach and onto cinema screens in time to remind us about all our amateur yesteryears. The ageless story of two British sprinters who defied the Establishment, it finds a remarkably good Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Athol Fugard's 80th birthday is being marked by four major productions in New York this year, two of which have come and gone. How has the London stage honoured this 11 June milestone in the life of the South African playwright for whom the personal and the political have become inextricably linked across the years? With nary a word, which is just one reason why Tony Palmer's hefty documentary about this man of letters and more (Fugard has worked as a novelist, poet and actor/director, not just as a dramatist) is especially welcome. And why it also feels frustratingly incomplete. That Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sing Your Song isn’t a showbiz biopic of the actor and singer, it’s a history lesson that revolves around Harry Belafonte and his tireless, long-term espousal of civil rights and socio-political causes. Belafonte is an incredibly important figure, a man whose place in history is assured. What’s less certain is who he actually is. “He took all our struggles and made them his own,” says Miriam Makeba. Sing Your Song suggests that the price Belafonte paid for making that choice is to be defined by the issues he pursues. There is no man any more, just the causes.With his daughter Gina Belafonte Read more ...