Amazing performances by real-life firemen (and non-actors). How they forget the camera almost, the banter, the relation between everyone in the station. Also the way the fire services work, everyone doing their job, all cogs in a machine/cause bigger than themselves.
Finally got round to watching the Lindsay Anderson-approved "poet" of British cinema. The first, a propaganda film made as part of the Crown Film Unit is indeed a remarkably allusive, montage-influenced gem, constructing through the build up and juxtaposition of images a picture of a Britain soldiering on, and in so-doing creating a piece of propaganda that is both obvious and subtle. Helpfully, here's the whole thing:
The second, made over a period of months as the war ended was less adventurous and less interesting, but one thing it had that the previous didn't was a voice-over written by EM Forster and read by Michael Redgrave, in that way that some old British film voice-overs do where a rather stiff-upper-lipped man attempts to come across as kindly and caring toward the new baby of the title but just sounds creepy and threatening.
Absolutely stunning, incredibly moving story of a group of monks in a monastery in Algeria, trying to decide whether, in the face of a swaith of Islamic extremist violence, to leave the village where they've set up a clinic and have a real relationship with the villagers, or to stay and face whatever comes. If they stay are they martyrs, if they leave, are they cowards?
I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.
