Tag: politics
Nomadland
Friday, March 5th, 2021 Film Reviews,Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland has been racking up awards and rave reviews since it first appeared in the United States late last year. This week it took out Best Film and Best Director at the Golden Globes. It’s a movie in which almost nothing happens but the images and scenarios remain lodged in one’s mind for […]
Five Artists, Seven days
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021 Sydney Morning Herald Column,It seems like an age ago but in September 2019 I travelled with five artists and a film crew to Mount Zero Taravale in far north Queensland, a property owned by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC). We spent a week in the bush preparing for an exhibition that has just opened at Defiance Gallery, Mary […]
Jewish International Film Festival 2021
Friday, February 26th, 2021 Film Reviews,No-one could ever accuse the Jewish International Film Festival of taking soft options. Most festivals choose to screen something suitably light-hearted on opening night but the 2021 JIFF was launched with Yaron Silberman’s Incitement, a film about the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Incitement was crammed with political dialogue and small, significant […]
Just Not Australian
Tuesday, December 8th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Just Not Australian made its debut at Artspace early last year but will be touring ten regional galleries in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia until October, 2022. I caught the show at the Wollongong Art Gallery where it may be seen over the holiday period. The longevity of the tour suggests this is […]
David Byrne’s American Utopia
Friday, November 20th, 2020 Film Reviews,In the liner notes to his 2018 album, American Utopia, David Byrne reflects on the title. “Is this meant ironically? It is a joke? Do I mean this seriously? Am I referring to the past or the future? Is it personal or political?” These questions, which echo the lists of questions in wellknown songs such […]
American Dharma
Friday, November 13th, 2020 Film Reviews,Steve Bannon is not stupid, he can even be charming, but he is not the kind of guy you’d like to see loitering-with-intent in the corridors of power. In American Dharma, Errol Morris brings us an extended interview with the man Time magazine called “the Great Manipulator”, interspersed with excerpts from Bannon’s favourite films. Morris, generally […]
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 Murder of the Powerhouse Museum
Friday, June 26th, 2020 Blog,It’s not a museum. This is not a matter of opinion, it’s not a slander being spread by critics of the project. The proposed building in Parramatta the NSW government would like us to see as the home of a ‘relocated’ Powerhouse Museum will be nothing more than an entertainment venue stuffed with cafes and […]
Captain Cook and the New Iconoclasm
Thursday, June 25th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,At the end of the Cold War, Moscow created an impromptu memorial to the Soviet Union in a park alongside the Tretyakov Gallery. It was the dump of choice for statues of Bolshevik heroes torn from their pedestals by mobs celebrating the demise of the communist system. Looking around one could see the battered and […]
It Must Be Heaven
Thursday, June 18th, 2020 Film Reviews,Elia Sulieman says he’d never seen a movie by Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati before he made his first feature in 1996. This may be true but these comics remain the inevitable points of comparison for his own style of silent humour. In It Must Be Heaven, Sulieman says exactly four words. When a New […]