“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”; these were the words that sprang to mind as I watched Leo Carax’s Holy Motors on Friday afternoon. After a veritable silence of thirteen years, Holy Motors is a two-hour excursion into the utterly bizarre. After drumming up considerable conversation at Cannes, Read More
Selling Dreams: One Hundred Years of Fashion Photography is the second exhibition being held at the Mcmanus Galleries in partnership with the V&A.The exhibition charts the evolution of fashion photography, from its humble beginnings in the early 1900s, through its 1960s heyday, to its changing status and significance in an image- saturated 21st century. Included Read More
No One But Me is a deeply personal and yet easily accessible documentary from filmmaker Brian Ross, telling the life story of Scottish-born Jazz sensation Annie Ross. Annie was born in Glasgow but moved to New York at the age of four to live with her aunt Ella Logan, a successful singer. Annie describes the Read More
For those familiar with director Andrew Dominik and Brad Pitt’s last collaboration, 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly may surprise. Whilst the former revels in the beauty of its location, the latter ratchets up the violence, so much so that any beauty present is mixed with sheer Read More
Anne Stevenson’s sixteenth collection, Astonishment, examines the everyday in an extraordinary way. Love, nature, childhood and old age are put through her alembic of lyrical compression and technical inventiveness. The opening poem, “The Loom”, marks the beginning of life itself: “ And once my lungs were gills”. The image of the loom shapes both the Read More
It has always been difficult to give an adequate definition of the Modernist movement in literature that does justice to its complexities. What we can be certain of is Modernism’s complete departure from tradition. In Umbrella, which could be described as Will Self’s most experimental piece of work to date, the reader is without a Read More
Directed by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr and co-directed by his wife, Ágnes Hranitzky, The Turin Horse stands triumphantly alongside Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), two of his films widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces. Although Tarr and László Krasznahorkai (his long-time screenwriter) discussed the idea for The Turin Horse around 1990, its production was postponed Read More
Swimming Home, Deborah Levy’s first novel for fifteen years, is a slim volume which has the outward appearance of a novella rather than a novel. This, coupled with what seems to be a somewhat conventional storyline of marital infidelity in a holiday villa in the south of France, makes Levy’s book, at first sight, an Read More
Mortality is, of course, a regular concern of poets. How much more pressing might be the need to explore our relationship with death if the poet were born Jewish in 1942? How much weightier yet might that feeling be were he to have sprung from “a long line of rabbis”, and his father, by his Read More
The introduction to The Queen of Versailles comprises a collage of pictures and interviews, and these opening scenes establish the tone of Lauren Greenfield’s documentary. Two main players of the piece are introduced: David Siegel is the king of Westgate, the largest and most lucrative timeshare company in the world; Jackie Siegel is his estranged Read More