Tag: history
How to Become a Tyrant
Saturday, July 17th, 2021 Film Reviews,Politics is a fascinating game, but hard to win. Under the yoke of a tyrant people clamour for democracy but after generations of democratic rule they hanker for a strongman to come and make all their decisions for them. As we watch the United States careening towards a complete crack-up, with millions of people obsessed […]
Martin Eden
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Film Reviews,Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden is getting a limited release in Sydney and Melbourne but it deserves a much bigger audience. It’s a huge film – not in terms of running length, but in its themes, its characters and ambitions – the latest in an outstanding sequence of foreign-language titles that have overshadowed anything produced by […]
De Gaulle
Friday, May 7th, 2021 Film Reviews,Charles De Gaulle was an imposing figure, both physically and morally. Standing at 196 cms, he was a man almost everyone looked up to. As leader-in-exile of the French Resistance, the head of the provisional post-war government, and the nation’s dominant political figure of the 20th century, De Gaulle enjoyed an unshakable power and prestige. […]
Judas and the Black Messiah
Saturday, March 20th, 2021 Film Reviews,“Fred Hampton” may not be a name that rings any bells, but after watching Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah you wont be forgetting it quickly. This historical drama of the 60s is driven by a memorable performance by Daniel Kaluuya in the role of the youthful Black Panther supremo. King’s theme, needless to […]
Ammonite
Friday, January 15th, 2021 Film Reviews,An ammonite is a mollusc with a distinctive spiral shell that flourished in the Devonian period, (400 million years ago) and died out at the end of the Cretaceous, (roughly 66 million BCE). In biological terms that was a pretty good run. Homo sapiens will be lucky to survive for even a fraction of this […]
Endeavour Voyage
Tuesday, September 29th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,In the Bicentenary celebrations of 1970 Captain Cook was hailed as the discoverer of Australia. At primary school we received a special booklet telling us about the great navigator and his achievements. There were commemorative coins, badges and postage stamps. Every form of sporting competition had its dedication to Cook – from surf life-saving to […]
Koo Bohnchang
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,“In matters of art,” wrote the erudite poet, Paul Valéry, “erudition is a sort of defeat.” The argument is that the freshness of first perceptions may be destroyed by specialised knowledge. Imagine, for example, an expert on ceramics standing in front of a great piece of pottery. There are questions about where and when the […]
Hillary
Friday, September 11th, 2020 Film Reviews,In his classic study, In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick argued the case for a messy but flexible political discourse underpinned by ethical beliefs. The art of politics maintains both social order and personal freedom, standing guard against those ideologues who seek to pervert the process. One can only wonder what Crick, who died in […]
The Art of the Spanish Flu
Tuesday, August 4th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Anyone who thinks COVID-19 has claimed a huge number of lives should look at the Spanish flu of 1918-20. In Pale Rider (2017), a compelling history of that earlier pandemic, Laura Spinney writes: “Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between […]
The Great
Thursday, May 28th, 2020 Film Reviews,With films based on actual people it’s always tempting to take a peek at the historical record. Fictional characters will invariably be created and genuine ones omitted, myths will be treated as facts. No-one can resist adding a dash – or a bucketload – of romance to prosaic reality. In the case of The Great […]