TheDrouth
19th March 2020
The introduction to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, was written in 1938 but not published until long after his death. It is an attempt to categorically reveal how, through the apparent chaos and convulsions in 19th century Parisian culture and society, great explorations and exposés of the realities of the epoch and its ramifications for later generations, are afforded us by examination of the lives and works of its inhabitants.
14th March 2020
The man with the black horseshoe moustache had been allocated one of the breakfast tables that stood in a row against the glass panels. The hotel was so quiet this morning that all of its breakfasters were able to sit, as in fact they did sit, against the glass...
5th March 2020
Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a massive 2018 box office success in China which confused the hell out of the date-night audience it was marketed towards, has finally limped its way over to a UK distracted by Parasite. Long Day’s mixes art house boredom with trashy noir tropes and 3D, single-take gimmickry, un-bottling a whole jumble of questions about how and why we watch long, ponderous movies when we could be watching something else.
2nd March 2020
Taking inspiration from James Shapiro’s Contested Will Owen Dudley Edwards takes a wry look at the absurdist snobbery and the sheer daftness of the ‘who really wrote Shakespeare?’ tradition.
27th February 2020
Until one month ago, British people were among the few lucky individuals on this planet that could count themselves to not only one, but even two citizenships. Facing a deterioration of the positive powers that are granted to UK-citizens, it begs the question of who has really benefitted from taking away these ‘bonus rights’. Would it be possible to reinstate this safety-net by connecting mobile and transitory points of resistance to connect to a new form of citizen-power? Meet the emerging Parallel State. Simon Poulter gives a recap of the day on which the ambitions of the Parallel State were drawn out and reviews the territory it was inescapably born into.
20th February 2020
In an age of surveillance capitalism is it no longer viable to put hope in the creative possibilities Walter Benjamin believed were opened to humanity through technological advances in media? –Or can a new poetics of infrastructure disrupt the sinister operations of corporate power? Ravi Sundaram surveys the will in the media.
14th February 2020
Hailed as a significant technical achievement, Owen Dudley Edwards sees the film 1917 as a great humanising agent.
6th February 2020
It’s a quarter millennium this year since the birth of THE Romantic hero, the Thunderer himself, Beethoven, who claimed to have taken ‘fate by the throat’ and would never ‘let it bend me completely to its will’. Iain Matheson picks his way through Beethoven’s will and his work.
The Future of Notre Dame in Paris by Clarisse Godard Desmarest