Christabel Bielenberg’s historical memoir, “The Past Is Myself,” looking back on the years 1932-45, was the source for this depiction of life in Germany during Hitler’s rise.
Daughter of middle-class English-Irish parents, Christabel became a German citizen in 1934 when she married German law student Peter Bielenberg of a prominent Hamburg family. The couple raised their two sons amid Germany’s shifting political climate. In 1939, as the situation became acute, Peter joined a military organization planning to remove Hitler from power.Read More »
IMDB wrote:
“The Planets” brings visual life to the classic Horst score with images that move beyond the graphic descriptions of the planets. It evokes thoughts of the solar system as it pertains to the systems that govern our lives, our society and our humanity. Ken Russell has always been known for his ability to let the audience feel uncomfortable. His images in this film are bold, but at the same time they show the subtle sensitivity that make all of his films so unforgettable.
He explores the same genre that Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass made famous, but his work in this film stand completely on its own.Read More »
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In stark contrast to the colourful, “swinging” imagery of 1960’s London we are all too familiar with, The London Nobody Knows, displays the dying, decaying underbelly of old Victorian values, practices and architecture. We are shown proto-delboy’s hawking goods in now-dead street markets. Bizarre buskers and street performers act out their defunct acts to grey, bewildered onlookers. Old forgotten men pay 6 shillings a week for bed and breakfast in Salvation Army hostels, the memories of the war lingering in their haggard faces.Read More »
From the award-winning Director Nick Broomfield, The Leader, His Driver, and the Driver’s Wife portrays the sinister and comic sides of Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the neo-Nazi AWB Afrikaner Party in South Africa.Read More »
As with LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR, the later re-working of this play, most of the action is set within the 1956 War Office in the midst of the Cold War and just prior to and contemporaneous with the Suez Crisis. Private Robert Hawk is the newly-arrived Russian language clerk. He is the son of a Yorkshire coalminer and a graduate of grammar school and of Oxford. He is doing his two years of national service. His job at the War Office is to assist the MI3 section in the translation of intercepted Russian documents on troop movements. Hawk is caught between his own working class roots and the upper middle class values and behaviours of the officers he works with. They mock him for his background, his immaturity and his intellectualism. He is also caught between his almost adolescent romantic idealisation of women as he sees them portrayed, for example, in his visit to the theatre to see Chekhov’s The Seagull and his equally adolescent sexual drives which lead him to consort with a prostitute for sexual release. He survives all this by inventing personalities for himself so that, in a pub and surrounded by football fanatics, he asserts his status by pretending to be (and convincing the fans that he actually is) the Russian national team goalkeeper. His deception fails when an old friend, Pete, comes into the pub and inadvertently unmasks him. To impress Pete that he holds an important position at the War Office, Hawk sets out to obtain a classified document but Pete fails to arrive at the rendezvous and the document is discarded.Read More »
Jimmy Porter, a disillusioned, angry university graduate has a wife from an upper-middle class background, Alison, and runs a sweet stall. He mistreats Alison and she leaves. Jimmy will have to come to terms with his grudge against middle-class life and values…Read More »
England is torn in civil strife as the Royalists battle the Parliamentary Party for control. This conflict distracts people from rational thought and allows unscrupulous men to gain local power by exploiting village superstitions. One of these men is Matthew Hopkins, who tours the land offering his services as a persecutor of witches. Aided by his sadistic accomplice John Stearne, he travels from city to city and wrenches confessions from “witches” in order to line his pockets and gain sexual favors. When Hopkins persecutes a priest, he incurs the wrath of Richard Marshall, who is engaged to the priest’s niece. Risking treason by leaving his military duties, Marshall relentlessly pursues the evil Hopkins and his minion Stearne.Read More »
Shown as part of Channel 4’s Video Fantasies series, a selection of four innovative dramas deploying state-of-the-art visual and electronic effects. This was the only one of the four that had a futuristic basis. It was set perhaps a couple of decades ahead in a world being slowly drowned by technology, a world in which traffic jams are the norm instead of the exception, and where the people avoid getting caught in the rain for better reasons than simply not wanting to get wet. The Rachel of the title is the younger sister of an up-and-coming marketing executive who has just secured a contract with a wealthy but repulsive millionaire who is into toxic waste, which he stores in secret for large sums of money.Read More »
