Tuesday, Mar 16th 2010
Fordlandia: the rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city by Greg Grandin, Metropolitan Books, New York 2009
This book uncovers the complex history of Henry Ford’s attempt to create a secure source of natural latex in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1920s and ‘30s. But it also reveals the complex and often contradictory character [...]
I’ve always found dubious the notion that certain times in the past were ‘a more innocent age’; it is bandied about a lot when referring to the more demure sexual mores of times gone, the 1950s being the prime example. Of course the ‘innocence’ of comely young ladies (and it is nearly always ladies who [...]
A surprise from Cannes, the host country got its first Palme d’Or since Maurice Pialat’s Sous le soleil de Satan in 1987. The winner was Laurent Cantet for Entre les murs (known in English as The Class) an adaptation of Parisian teacher and Cahiers du Cinéma critic François Bégaudeau’s novel of two years ago. The [...]
There’s a famous story about the technical problems encountered by Soviet director Aleksandr Dovzhenko while shooting his 1930 film Earth, an admiring account of the effect of collectivization on the Russian peasantry. Working with non-professional actors, he was shooting a scene one day that showed the arrival of a tractor on a farm on [...]
Every so often last year I would take the Metro line 9 out to its terminus in Montreuil – a suburb just east of the confines of Paris – to teach, at the town hall, one of the mayoral staff, a rather reluctant student, who needed to brush up on his English for the many [...]