This review of the James Baldwin symposium at Virginia State University weighs the insights presented by a number of Black and white scholars, only a few of whom might be considered deeply informed about his life and legacy. Even so, the emerging thinkers provide a wealth of new and interesting perspectives on Baldwin, and the event was highlighted by Molefi Kete Asante’s critical lecture. His comments are a veritable call to arms, an invitation to Baldwin devotees to contend with his conclusions, a process which this article will begin.
wonderful way of earning, not perhaps a living, but at least a crust. Soon afterwards I was asked, out of the blue, to be film critic of the Spectator , and entered what now seems a very foreign country indeed, the film world of the 1950s, in which I stayed for ten years. It was a past separated from us today not just by the changes in films and film-making, but by the social upheavals between then and now
subject’s ‘moral courage’ and eliciting many letters from members of the public ‘saying that before the film they had never quite understood what she had been through, others saying how glad they were that the film had finally tried to tell the truth they had always accepted’. 5 As film critic David Thomson succinctly concludes, the film is ‘the most sophisticated public relations boost HRH had had in 20
features of the decade. Archivist Bryony Dixon shows her expertise on how these films are preserved; Sarah Easen recalls the impact of the Festival of Britain on the British film industry; Eric Hedling and Robert Murphy pay homage to two of the most valuable film commentators of the period, Lindsay Anderson and Raymond Durgnat. Isabel Quigly sharply evokes the life of the national film critic during this time, in so doing
is handled like a pen, that is, the author/film director employs his personal instrument, the pen/camera, to express a personal vision and create a work of art. 3 Unsurprisingly, most of the would-be European authors were writers before entering cinema, eventually exchanging their pens for cameras. Antonioni was a highbrow film critic for the Italian journal Cinema during the war, Truffaut and his
, however, and I wonder to what extent non-Swedes have pondered the knight’s strange answer to the question as to whether he is prepared to die. (Although I suppose his answer may appear less strange than Death’s walking around incarnate in the first place.) In British film critic David Thomson’s musings over his youth in the 1950s, and Bergman’s role in it, he makes particular mention of the Swedish language ‘blooming in our mouths with its gentle, pious, slightly smug closed vowels and its swallowing
Vietnamese people, as represented by North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese Communist guerrilla force, or Viet Cong (a stance often challenged by contemporary historical research on the Vietnam War). 27 This strong anti-Bergman sentiment, including harsh accusations of his being a bourgeois artist with no relevance for the working class, persisted into the 1970s, and it is summarized in Maria Bergom Larsson’s book Ingmar Bergman och den borgerliga ideologin . 28 Some film critics continued to view Bergman
gaps in the collection and may not appear in these figures as yet. Of course, for the film critic, historian or scholar the key issue is accessibility. Of the total number of titles held in the archive 1,184 have viewing copies, meaning that the archive has several copies so one or more can be made available for viewing or screening. As a percentage of 5,493, this is 22 per cent. At first sight this
remote control and quick reflexes has showed us that it is not. Ultimately, by transmogrifying the countdown leader’s asexual 6 into the male’s sex , Persona anticipates second-wave feminist film critics’ key arguments by half a decade. Sontag was surely the first Anglophone critic to mention Persona ’s penis in writing, although she incorrectly claims that it appears after ‘the leader flashes by’, near the brief shot of the ‘chase scene from a slapstick silent film’, one of ‘a nail being hammered
representatives from the Association of Specialised Film Producers, Dilys Powell ( Sunday Times film critic), F.A. Hoare, F. Hill, Paul Wright of the Festival Office and Oliver Bell of the British Film Institute. 5 Many other sponsored documentary films were made for the festival, such as Bristol – British City