Film

Eighty million Americans visit the cinema every week, and in the course of the next year or so, perhaps ninety million will see the film Gone With the Wind. Millions will get from this film their most powerful impression of the greatest civil war in history and one of the decisive turning points in modern history. What will they see? At the very start we are informed that the film is a tribute to the “grace and gallantry” of a vanished civilization “the age of chivalry.” The South was a “land of grace and plenty” (our quotations are literal). The Civil War took place, God knows why: as far as...

Eighty million Americans visit the cinema every week, and in the course of the next year or so, perhaps ninety million will see the film Gone With the Wind. Millions will get from this film their most powerful impression of the greatest civil war in history and one of the decisive turning points in modern history. What will they see? At the very start we are informed that the film is a tribute to the “grace and gallantry” of a vanished civilization “the age of chivalry.” The South was a “land of grace and plenty” (our quotations are literal). The Civil War took place, God knows why: as far as...

“You’re the mockingjay, Katniss. While you live, the rebellion lives...” Even though it’s a cliché, I did laugh and I did cry while watching Catching Fire, the thrilling second instalment of the film series based on Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy.. It was amusing, emotionally-touching, and it really can set a fire in your belly. Whether it was the casual way the Gamemakers manipulated the environment, or the tragic state of affairs on the ground in the poorer districts, the story roused a great feeling of injustice and made you want to walk out of the movie theatre and start a...

In June 2007, “remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory were invaded and martial law imposed”. So Diane Fieldes put it in the Australian journal Socialist Alternative, and she wasn't wrong. Six hundred troops were deployed. Aboriginals faced compulsory acquisition of townships; the “quarantining” of a proportion of their welfare benefits; new restrictions on alcohol; and the closure of government programmes which gave some of them part-time employment. In its initial form, pushed through by John Howard's conservative government in the run-up to the 2007 federal election, this...

Western democracies have prided themselves in applying humane standards to the treatment of prisoners of war. This treatment is encapsulated in the Geneva Convention, first formulated in 1864 and modified since, most recently in 1949. They have also signed up to the UN Convention against Torture. These conventions have been flouted by some democratic states (France in Algeria, Britain in Northern Ireland, USA in Vietnam, ...). The US explicitly banned torture and harsh treatment by military interrogators after the Vietnam war, introducing the Army Field Manual on Interrogation (FM 34-52) in...

Levels of violence in human societies have fallen drastically since Stone Age times, as shown by Steven Pinker in his excellent but gruelling exposition The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin, 2011). This includes the infliction of torture by the state. By mid-19th century, judicial torture had been abolished in major western countries. This also applied to inhumane treatment of enemies. In the American War of Independence from 1776, George Washington ordered that prisoners of war (soldiers from the British side) be treated humanely, while Abraham Lincoln forbade torture or cruelty to...

It is difficult not to warm to a film that places a radical left wing philosopher into mock ups of various film sets to lecture on his theory of ideology. That is what film maker Sophie Fiennes has done with Slavoj Žižek. So we have Žižek dressed as a priest talking about the ideology of fascism in the mother superior’s room from The Sound of Music, about the vampiric attitude of the ruling class towards the working class in the lifeboat from Titanic and about the nature of political violence in Travis Bickle’s single iron bed from Taxi Driver. All of this is amusing enough and makes a long...

Cinema documentary has undergone a renaissance in recent years, with fine examples exploring subjects as diverse as sushi in Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) and death squads in 1960s Indonesia in The Act of Killing (2012). Nonetheless, a film about the semi-Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall is unexpected. Hall was born in Jamaica in 1932, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1952 and was the founding editor of New Left Review (NLR) in 1960. This was a journal which explicitly adopted a “third way” approach between Soviet Communism and social democracy, but was ambivalent about the working...

The City of Bones is based on the first of The Mortal Instruments series of books by Cassandra Clare, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the film adaptation. I was especially impressed by Lily Collins, who played Clary, the young female protagonist. Clary always thought she was just like everybody else until she started drawing a mysterious symbol. From there, everything she thought she knew is changed. She goes from being a “mundane” (a human) towards becoming something else entirely. She is joined by her best friend, Simon (Robert Sheehan), who appears a fairly run-of-the-mill...

On 5 August, Workers’ Liberty Sheffield held a film showing of The Navigators, the Ken Loach film about railway privatisation written by Workers’ Liberty member Rob Dawber who died of mesothelioma contracted from exposure to asbestos during his time as a track worker. The showing, which included food and drink, raised £75 and featured a discussion about the fight for public ownership today. Workers’ Liberty branches in North East London and South London are also planning an ongoing series of film showings. North East London’s next showing takes place on Sunday 18 August at Menard Hall, Galway...