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At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Tempest’, 31 March 2011

The Tempest 
directed by Julie Taymor.
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... movement. Caliban is an aesthetic object rather than a monster or an abused slave, and his mixed black and white make-up suggests ballet rather than the movies. And as almost always in modern versions of Shakespeare, whether on film or on stage, the comedians aren’t funny, they are just doing their best to represent what they (and their director) imagine ...

Short Cuts

Michael Dobson: Deutschland ist Hamlet, 6 August 2009

... after the Treaty of Versailles Shakespeare’s second homeland seemed once again to be sulking in black at the centre of the European stage, pining for decisive action. The Nazis believed Germany had to shake off the role of Hamlet in favour of becoming Fortinbras, freeing the national spirit from Shakespearean tragedy in the process. According to Hermann ...

Real Romans

Michael Kulikowski, 1 August 2024

The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium 
by Anthony Kaldellis.
Oxford, 1133 pp., £34.99, February, 978 0 19 754932 2
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... The title​ of Michael Moorcock’s novel Byzantium Endures, published in 1981, captures with one verb the conventional picture of a whole civilisation. Byzantium’s antiquity and grandeur are timeless and static – Yeats’s ‘monuments of unaging intellect’. The future lies elsewhere, in the rise of a West from which Byzantium is excluded ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Inside Man’, ‘V for Vendetta’ , 11 May 2006

Inside Man 
directed by Spike Lee.
March 2006
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V for Vendetta 
directed by James McTeigue.
March 2006
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... each other, except style: sly, fake-lazy, apparently frivolous in the case of Washington, a clever black guy playing other people’s idea of a not so bright black guy; and brisk, smooth and bitchy in the case of Foster, everyone’s idea of what power would look like if women had it. There is some kind of metaphor in the ...

Diary

Sean Wilsey: Going Slow, 17 July 2008

... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...

Chiantishire

Michael Hofmann: Shirley Hazzard, 6 May 2021

Collected Stories 
by Shirley Hazzard.
Virago, 356 pp., £16.99, November 2020, 978 0 349 01295 7
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... A girl falling for her cousin’s older husband is described like this: ‘An imprecise black pigtail dangled between her hunched shoulders.’ What isn’t inherent in that description? The uncertainty, the unreadiness, the defensiveness and fluster, the feeling of being trapped, of awaiting the permission to be attractive, the inevitability of a ...

On the Secret Joke at the Centre of American Identity

Michael Rogin: Ralph Ellison, 2 March 2000

Juneteenth 
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callaghan.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, December 1999, 0 241 14084 6
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... and jazz trombonist turned preacher, and Bliss, a boy of mysterious parentage raised in the black church, who has fled North, passed as white, and become Adam Sunraider, the racist New England Senator. As Callahan has put it together, the novel begins with the failed effort of Hickman and his flock to warn Sunraider that a young ...

Thom Gunn in New York

Michael Nott, 22 October 2020

... inconclusive experiments with the more extreme evidences of perversion’, and bought his first black leather jacket. ‘I’m not sure what it meant to me,’ he said of the jacket: ‘I couldn’t say. I thought I was the only pervert in the world.’ After all this, he wrote in the summer of 1956, ‘San Francisco seems a let down.’ The first dedicated ...

So sue me

Michael Wood, 12 May 1994

A Frolic of His Own 
by William Gaddis.
Viking, 529 pp., £16, June 1994, 0 670 85553 7
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... fancy and throws out a verdict reached after calm deliberation by a jury of you honest citizens black folk and white, right there in the Fourteenth Amendment in black and white, the jury that’s the bulwark and cornerstone of American justice like you don’t see in these dictator atheist countries. And it’s not just ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Nope’, 6 October 2022

... famous studies of movement. She mentions that no one took the trouble to remember the name of the black jockey riding the horse, who was her and OJ’s grandfather several times removed.OJ loves the horses and hates the fact that he has to sell them. He thinks he understands them and he may be right. But then the whole film, as its opening suggests, is about ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Only the River Flows’, 26 September 2024

... gauge throughout the film adds to this effect. The movie is in colour but it feels as if it’s in black and white, and this impression continues even as we recognise that we are (mentally or materially) in a cinema that’s still open.A good example of the other effect is the fate of a jigsaw puzzle the wife (Chloe Maayan) of the leading character (Zhu ...

Living in the Enemy’s Dream

Michael Wood, 27 November 1997

The Cattle Killing 
by John Edgar Wideman.
Picador, 212 pp., £16.99, August 1997, 0 330 32789 5
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Brothers and Keepers 
by John Edgar Wideman.
Picador, 243 pp., £6.99, August 1997, 0 330 35031 5
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... of Philadelphia Fire is the shock named in the title, the burning and bombing, on the orders of a black mayor, of a black community in a house on Osage Avenue. The event is briefly recalled in The Cattle Killing. There the shock takes several other forms as well: what we might call the invention of race by 18th-century ...

Brand New Day

Niela Orr: ‘The Wiz’ and the Prez, 18 March 2021

... electoral college, clips of ‘Everybody Rejoice (A Brand New Day)’ from The Wiz (1978), an all-Black version of The Wizard of Oz, appeared everywhere online. While the director (Sidney Lumet) and screenwriter (Joel Schumacher) were both white, the music was mostly written by the Black lyricist and composer Charlie ...

Diary

Michael Dibdin: Ulster Questions, 21 April 1988

... the same time, my mother was stopped in the street by a neighbour and asked: ‘Is your husband a black man?’ Not only were blacks as rare in Ulster as Albanians, but the neighbour in question was well-acquainted with my father’s appearance. ‘No, he’s English, actually,’ my mother replied, to which the neighbour returned: ‘Is he walking the ...

Washed White

Michael Rogin, 10 June 1993

The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America 
by Sacvan Bercovitch.
Routledge, 424 pp., £40, November 1992, 9780415900140
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Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America 
by Garry Wills.
Simon and Schuster, 315 pp., £17.99, April 1993, 0 671 76956 1
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... A statement of high ideals, Lincoln’s Gettysburg failed to stand against the white supremacy and black material deprivation that were the legacies of the war. The second civil rights revolution, that of Martin Luther King, returned to Lincoln’s principle of equality, but the re-entry of the fight for racial equality into US politics enabled the intensified ...

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