Cinema
1st September 2024
The film Orlando: My Political Biography only went into cinemas in general release here this summer, so, although it was first shown at the EIFF in August 2023, it seems to be up for discussion again. The gender issue(s) is/are, indeed, still way up on the social agenda - as Johnny Rodger puts it, 'We are all on our social stages ... all in our social cages'. Preciado's openly self-constructed cage is a particularly intricate one, and he inhabits it with his own peculiar and provocative panache.
11th March 2024
As Emma Stone picks up an Oscar for Best Actress in Yorgos Lanthimos' film of Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things, people are dancing in the streets of Glasgow! David Archibald reviews a film that coulda, shoulda, woulda...
11th May 2021
On 17th May the British Film Institute (BFI) released a 3 Disc Blu-ray box set to celebrate fifty years since the first transmission of the BBC's 'Play for Today'. David Archibald has written an accompanying essay for the two Peter McDougall plays which appear in volume 2 of the set. Archibald's piece is a retrospective on a way of life and the art it produced -in special arrangement with the BFI we bring the essay to The Drouth readers' attention.
2nd January 2021
An epistolary transliteration of a performative dialogue on the possibility of building a non-fiction cinema for the memory of women (as political subjects) – and the role of male academics in that process. Originally presented at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Catalunya by Núria Araüna Baro and David Archibald.
12th August 2020
There's been no shortage of big screen entertainment based on the Christian story - especially in the years immediately after 9/11 and the Anglo-American adventure in Iraq. What exactly is/was their appeal and what is the measure of their success? Are they just for the faithful and the fervent? David Robertson surveys the field.
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.
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.
MAKING HOME : The Fight to Save the Wyndford (ArchiFringe 23)
Kelly Rappleye