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?
Eerie, at times terrifying mix of supernatural chiller and police procedural drama. Amazing special effects and many portentous lines, given the year it was made.
Scary film interesting primarily for its exploitation of the "acousmatic voice", the voice the source of which cannot be identified, which is almost by definition terrifying.
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.
