Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic reports a meeting with Fidel Castro in which Fidel made some extraordinary statements about the failure of Cuba’s economic model and his own past mistakes, including his position at the time of the missile crisis in 1962. He has not renounced his revolutionary principles. Goldberg writes: ‘When I asked him, over lunch, to answer what I’ve come to think of as the Christopher Hitchens question – has your illness caused you to change your mind about the existence of God? – he answered, “Sorry, I’m still a dialectical materialist.” ‘ However, he admits that Cuba’s economic model doesn’t work. He also had some very pointed things to say about Iran’s Ahmadinejad who he says should stop slandering the Jews, while his advice to Israel is to give up its nuclear arsenal. The links can be found on my other blog, Michael’s Digest.
Walter Benjamin and the iPad
or, Advice for Writers in the Age of Digital Orthography
In his book of aphorisms, One Way Street, published in 1928, Walter Benjamin has a remarkable premonition. ‘The typewriter’ he says, ‘will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.’ [p63-4]
This is exactly what started to happen with the advent of the desktop computer six decades later, and with the internet, email and the web, digital command extended into a virtual domain which even a prescient fellow like Benjamin couldn’t have imagined. Continue reading
Martí according to Pérez
Screening at the Barbican on September 25, 2010
For his new film on the Cuban national hero Martí, Fernando Pérez has returned to classical narrative after a run of offbeat movies, both fiction and documentary. In Martí, el ojo del canario (Martí: The Eye of the Canary), he reinvents the childhood and adolescence of Cuba’s nineteenth century national hero José Martí, covering the years he lived in Cuba before being sent into exile for political sedition at the age of seventeen. Not a subject to be approached without care, since Martí is a figure, as Guiteras points out on La Joven Cuba, who is adored and put to use by contrary political tendencies to legitimise their own position. Continue reading
Posted in Cuba, Film matters
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Michael’s Digest NEW
I’ve started a new blog for snippets of news and items which interest me for one reason or another. You can find it here: Michael’s Digest.
Posted in Miscellany
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Screen Grabs, Fair Use, and the Digital Economy
There is continuing confusion about the use of frame grabs for illustrating books and articles about film. It’s a question I get asked regularly, and yesterday there was a query about it on a discussion list I subscribe to, which prompts this post. My understanding is this. Continue reading
Posted in Academic life, Film matters, Video
Tagged Copyright, Fair Use, Intellectual Property, Media
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Demise of Film Council
There is something very seriously rotten in the State when the Government can decide to abolish the Film Council to save £15m a year at the same time that the head of BP is said to be about to take a severance package of approaching the same amount. The disparity is all the more striking when you register that while BP is writing off more than £20 billion to pay for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Film Council has been responsible for allocating a mere £160m of Lottery funding to more than 900 films which have entertained over 200 million people and helped to generate over £700 million at the box office worldwide, or almost £5 for every £1 of Lottery money thus invested. Continue reading
Rocha on DVD
Glauber Rocha’s Antônio das Mortes is surely one of the most astonishing films to come out of Brazil in the 1960s…
See my review of the new DVD release in Sight & Sound here
Posted in Film matters, Latin America
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What a gas!
Anyone who still thinks the privatisation of utilities was a good thing needs their head examined. When I moved back to London some three years ago, I elected to take both gas and electricity from British Gas. Sometime later, must have been when new neighbours moved in upstairs, EDF came along and somehow took over my gas account without asking. At first I didn’t realise. When I did, it took a good deal of effort to get it corrected (including writing to my MP). Continue reading
Posted in Miscellany
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Academic boycott exercises Israeli TV
A current affairs programme on Israeli television is planning a report on reactions towards Israel’s policy in Gaza ‘taking place outside Israel, mainly in the UK’, and in particular, the call for an academic boycott. How I know is that I’m one of the people they’ve got in touch with to ask for my opinion. The email from the producer says ‘We’re trying to understand the intensity of this, the meaning of this, are there any concrete levels for that or [if] it’s a “silence boycott”, are there a group of academics organized acting together for this goal, or each one is protesting alone?’
This is my reply: Continue reading
Music Documentaries
Back from ‘Sights and Sounds’, a small but stimulating and enjoyable conference on music documentary in Salford. Films about music and musicians have been a major strand of documentary since the 1960s, so it’s odd, especially given the huge predominance of music in popular culture, that they’ve escaped systematic study, even among documentary scholars. This was therefore a pioneering event, and a lot of ground was covered.
It’s a subject in which I have a special interest, since this is the field that I entered at the start of the 1970s with two films I made for BBC2. Continue reading