David Spittle

As the lights come up, the sleepers begin to stir. The glare of sudden change feels brash and unwelcome, a clumsy concession that – LEAVE – BEGONE – the dream is ending, your hours of brief respite must now conclude; a few remain seated until the very final credits ascend with slow inevitability, the screen […]

Reel Recommendations: Cinema is Dreaming IV

Reel Recommendations: Cinema is Dreaming III

Cinema is a space for communal dreaming; one of the few architectural relics of myth, magic and transcendence that remain in an otherwise fracturing economics of individualism, dislocation and the vast chaos and inequality of a world too busy – with the ‘reality’ of late and later-stage Capitalism – to save itself. Cinema is not […]

Birds, Orphans and Fools  (Juraj Jakubisko, 1969 )  Made shortly after the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, Juraj Jakubisko’s magical realist fable revolves around three characters orphaned from war and living in a bombed-out church, narratively teasing out the volatility between a ramshackle utopia and a suicidal melodrama. Infused with the ludic anarchy of childhood, […]

Check out The Ghosts of England season Secret Rites (Derek Ford, 1971) In the tradition of mad Mondo movies, this oddly hilarious artefact of 70s counter-culture exists between pseudo-documentary, dramatized hoax and what might happen if Alan Partridge masterminded a TV special on satanism. Charmingly English in its quaint bohemia and featuring an invariably […]

Arguably, collage in film could be seen as a founding tenet of any editing. Considered one of the first films to use more than one shot, Robert W. Paul’s 1898 short Come Along, Do! places an exterior shot beside an interior to create the continuity of characters moving inside: the selective arrangement of different viewpoints […]

As it glides into the station, the perspective of the shot transforms the flat screen into the bustle of a platform, several puffed clouds of smoke plume and trail and plume and trail and the train races into the foreground; carriages blurring past a line of expectant travellers as the stern conductor, sporting an equally […]

  WE RECOMMEND   Gunda (dir.Viktor Kossakovsky, 2020) The most achingly beautiful monochrome film about a pig’s life that you could ever hope to see. The cinematography of this contemporary masterpiece is quietly breath-taking: chickens stalk through the towering stems of overgrown grass, cows thunder into an open field, and we follow – with a […]

Introducing Japanese Cinema: Part 1

As documentary is a ‘form’ of filmmaking that must constantly manage the ambiguity of fact and fiction and the contingency of any distinction between the two, perhaps the best documentaries should always transcend the ‘form’. Yet, if the form is itself the mobile state of questioning form surely there could be no ‘transcending’ or going-beyond […]

Guy Maddin’s ‘Me Trilogy’ The Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is one of cinema’s rare visionaries for whom the importance of narrative and bold visual experimentation do not become oppositional stances but inhabit each other, each amorously haunted by the mythologizing impulse of cinema history and personal history: a mischievous séance of self and film. Often […]

Bull (Dir. Paul Andrew Williams, 2021) Arriving in cinemas this month is the riveting, nail-biting new British thriller Bull, a tightly coiled crime drama that explodes with rage and violence, delivered with an obligingly intense performance by Neil Maskell (who plays the eponymous ‘Bull’), an actor who is no stranger to the seething communication of […]

Vampyr    After the luminous purity of his silent classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), in 1932 Dreyer embarked on a far stranger film that bridged silent cinema aesthetics and techniques into the new realm of sound and, from the formatice influence of his own Lutheran upbringing, into a more mystic poetics. Merging […]