Welcome to Pottersville

Seventy years ago America was on the precipice of becoming a full blown police state.         Many lived in fear that they might be suspected of having ties to the communist party and be called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). If this happened, they would be asked to name other people who might be categorized as subversives. If they refused, as many did, they could expect to lose their jobs and serve some time in prison.        In 1950 Howard Fast, a novelist, was called in front of HUAC. The committee asked him to for the names of donors to an orphanage Fast had set up, an orphanage for the children of Americans who had fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Fast refused, and was sentenced to a few months in prison for contempt of Congress.       After he was released, Fast wrote Spartacus , a novel about a Thracian...

                                   For a long time now I have had a fascination with South Africa. I cannot say if it is through knowing South Africans, through taking two college courses that focused on South Africa, or just a natural interest aroused by the idiosyncratic nature of the country. The parallels between South Africa and America are well documented – as Robert Kennedy said in 1968, both can be described as a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of th...

          Two weeks ago my father rented a house in Duck, North Carolina, on the beach, and scattered family members made the trek south to spend a week together swimming, reading, cooking, watching movies, and, of course, assembling a thousand piece puzzle. My mother had bought a puzzle that contained numerous paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, which was great as it gave us all a rich experience studying his work as we tried to assemble the pieces. As we worked on this puzzle, I found myself sputtering all sorts of facts and theories about Van Gogh, and I soon realised that I seemed to know quite a bit about the man, despite having never studied him nor even reading a single book about him. Everything I know can be credited to two films – Loving Vincent (2017) and Lust for Life (1956).             I saw Loving Vincent at the Princeton Garden Theatre last year, and was absolutely mesmerized by it.   I...

           I have now recently seen Spike Lee’s new film, BlacKkKlansman, twice, and I am left with an overflow of thoughts and emotions. Not ignoring some poignant points made by Boots Riley ( Sorry to Bother You) , who convincingly argues that the real Ron Stallworth was not the hero the movie portrays, I think it is an amazing movie. It is the first film that really grapples with America in the age of Trump, despite being set in the Nixon administration. It is not a film that is designed to start a conversation exactly – maybe a riot – but it forces us to to grapple with some dark conclusions. The film begins with shots from Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation , two films that transformed the possibilities for what cinema could achieve, and two films that are remembered for their reactionary views of the American Civil War . Until this week, I had never seen DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation; I knew it for its place within the context o...

            In 1939 theatre and radio star Orson Welles was offered a generous contract by RKO pictures to bring his talents to Hollywood. This contract called for him to write, direct, produce, cast, and star in two films, and promised him complete creative control over the films’ final cut. Giving such a munificent contract to an untested director was a great risk; especially as the film he made was a hit piece on William Randolph Hearst, America’s biggest media mogul. Hearst met the completed film with fury, and he did everything in his power to prevent the film from becoming commercially successful by pulling all advertising for it and all other RKO pictures. Still, try as he might, Hearst could not bury such an achievement; Citizen Kane captured audiences, and is now widely considered the greatest film of all time.             Citizen Kane, like Birth of a Nation be...

            During the Second World War, studios across the world took up arms and fought the war through propaganda films. In America, Frank Capra left screwball comedies to make the Why We Fight documentaries, alongside directors turned propagandists John Ford and John Huston. Some films used propaganda through narrative, such as Casablanca or Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. In Germany Joseph Goebbels commissioned a series of war films showing Wehrmacht victories, and in Japan a young Akira Kurosawa began his career in cinema by directing war films commissioned by the emperor’s government. In 1944, in both Britain and in Russia, two of cinema’s greatest legends made films that didn’t show the war that they were in the midst of, but rather adapted well known histories into epics to show their struggle in a larger narrative. These allied filmmakers made films about two of their greatest monarchs – Henry V and Ivan the Terrible – to rile the...

“Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms. Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.”             So sings the comforting baritone of the Reverend Henry Powell from his horse late one night, while out scouting for children he wants to rob and murder. As he rides, a distant silhouette, we understand the children’s horror that, run as they might, he is not going to give up.             The Night of the Hunter is dependent on juxtapositions, powerful images, and this dreamlike horror fantasy environment. Robert Mitchum plays the amiably sinister Henry Powell, a preacher with the words Love and Hate tattooed across his knuckles. We are introduced to him on a clear day, as he drives away from his latest crime. He is praying aloud, asking “well now, what’s it to be Lord? Another widow?” As he tries to remember how many widows the Lord has given him he assumes...