British cinema

  • Confessions of Britain’s Most Violent Criminal – Refn’s “Bronson”

    In the final lines of the chapter “The spectacle of the scaffold”, in his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes about a great shift in the portrayal of criminals in fiction, which took place in the 19th century: “We are far removed indeed from those accounts of the life and misdeeds of the criminal…

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  • Journey into the Unconscious: Alex Garland’s “Annihilation”

    For me, [Annihilation] was a film about the nature of self-destruction… it was about an observation I made, which is that everybody appears to be self-destructive. Some people are very obviously self-destructive because they’re addicted to heroin or alcohol… Other people are very comfortable in their own skin, and they’ve got a fantastic job and…

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  • Path to Completion in “Never Let Me Go” (2010)

      Title card: The breakthrough in medical science came in 1952. Doctors could now cure the previously incurable. By 1967, life expectancy passed 100 years. Never Let Me Go is based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro; the film describes the dystopian reality which takes place more than 50 years before the film was made.…

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  • Nick Cave Speaking the Unspeakable in the Stunning Documentary “One More Time with Feeling”

      William Faulkner once wrote: Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. These words, from the novel Light in August, have the quality of a prose poem. Their meaning eludes me, just like the understanding of this documentary eludes me. Its elusion is associated with its nature, the articulation…

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