It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
1 From a Western perspective, and probably the world’s, the most important events of the 21st century have been the atrocities of 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, and Covid, which started in late 2019. There have been important wars, disasters, movements and political surprises, including the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza, the 2004 Tsunami in South East Asia, and also the 2…
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 He told the story as if searching for its ending, aware that there was more to the telling than he could presently convey. Five of us were sitting outside, around a small table at a pub in Marchmont. It was mid-summer, and the weather was as warm as we could ever recall. We were all in tee-shirts commenting on the weeks of dry, windless heat, and, of course, couldn’t help wondering if this…
While Ronald Neame’s film can appear to be a faithful adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel (via the play by Jay Presson Allen), it both changes the emphasis and the form. While the book is chiefly about religion, with education, sex, and politics secondary in an intricate atemporal weave, the film is a chronological account that emphasises education, sex, and politics in a more orderly f…