Political Cinema
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THE WIDE BLUE ROAD (Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1957, Italy)
* * * Pontecorvo’s career hinges on the very influential The Battle of Algiers which he made in the 1960s. I often thought his career was far more extensive, but he only made a handful of films. His earliest film, The Wide Blue Road, is a provocative blend of neorealism and political melodrama. In essence, Continue reading
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THE HOSPITAL (Dir. Arthur Hiller, 1971, US)
* * * I think it is George C Scott’s extended raging monologue on the broad metaphorical complexities of impotency where Arthur Hiller’s film seems to find its exact expressive pitch, carving out not only a generational angst but pointing to a broader sense of disillusionment with everyday civil institutions that would characterise much of Continue reading
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Chokh / The Eyes (Dir. Utpalendu Chakraborty, 1982, India/Bengali)
The eyes speak, harbouring and chronicling histories, emotional sentiments and even memories. Chokh, a stark political exercise in neorealist aesthetics, opens with the petrified eyes of Jadunath (Om Puri in blistering form) who looks directly at us with a totalizing gaze of defiance. Jadunath, a union leader, has been convicted of murder, and waits impatiently Continue reading
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THE BATTLE FOR BANARAS (Dir. Kamal Swaroop, 2015, India) – The Crowd
There is a spectacular political trice at the end of Swaroop’s participatory documentary. At night, on the banks of the river Ganges, which is teeming with euphoric revellers and a swathe of India’s police, Modi emerges victorious, returning to Banaras, where he had stood for election as a BJP candidate. As he makes his way Continue reading
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HIGH-RISE (Dir. Ben Wheatley, 2015, UK)
Class devours itself. And the politics of class creates an indescribable antagonism that often spills over into violence, and in the case of Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, class is explicated through the prism of satire in which modernism is a debauched, sulking creature. Intrinsic to Wheatley’s treatment of Ballard’s writing is an abandonment of logical narrative Continue reading
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