Balsom, Erika. "The Critic Lady." Film Quarterly (June 10, 2019) ["Such positions upset a certain kind of critic, and not only because a growing concern for inclusivity might take column inches away from him. More fundamentally, the contemporary vitality of minoritarian criticism reframes his values as rather less than the only ones, the right ones, no longer to be taken for granted as valid. Every film is political, especially those that purport not to be. The same is true of film criticism. The castigation of 'identity politics' is an identity politics. The claim to appreciate a film exclusively on pure merit has always been spurious, for it disavows how thoroughly the very notions of achievement and relevance are shaped by power, generally to the detriment of those who have historically been excluded from the practices and institutions that build canons and criteria."]
Grieco, Mark. "A River Below." Film School Radio (November 3, 2017) ["A documentary as dramatic, ambiguous, and multilayered as any fiction film, A RIVER BELOW examines the efforts of two conservationists in the Amazon to bring about change by using the national media, only to discover the consequences of their actions come with a high price. A RIVER BELOW provides an eye-opening look at what happens when passion and opinion trump reason and morality. The crux of the story questions the truth in images, its manipulation to get the public’s attention and, ultimately, who pays the price for someone else’s passion for radical change."]
Jamail, Dahr, with William Rivers Pitt. "The End of Ice." Lannan Podcasts (March 13, 2019) ["Dahr Jamail is an award-winning author and journalist. In 2003 he was one of very few unembedded journalists in the early stages of the Iraq War. He has written for Le Monde Diplomatique, the Guardian, the Nation, the Huffington Post, the Sunday Herald in Scotland, and Foreign Policy in Focus, and has contributed to Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera English, the BBC, NPR, and numerous other radio and television stations around the globe. In 2008 he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, and in 2018 the Part Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College awarded him an Izzy for his “path-breaking and in-depth reporting,” work that exposed “environmental hazards and militarism.” He is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007), The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (2009), and The Mass Destruction of Iraq: The Disintegration of a Nation: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible (2014). Jamail is now a senior investigative journalist for Truthout.org. There he reports on climate disruption in the Anthropocene, digesting the most cutting-edge scientific evidence for a socially conscious and activist lay audience. His new book The End of Ice (The New Press, 2018) looks at the effects of climate disruption as he witnessed them firsthand as a young mountain guide on Denali. He writes, 'On the one hand, the experience of being on ice that is thousands of years old and often hundreds if not thousands of feet thick is humbling. The accompanying awe of this reality, coupled with the sheer beauty of these landscapes carved by and now covered with glaciers is not to be missed… [but] witnessing these dramatic impacts from anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) first-hand always feels like a gut punch to me. My climbing partners and I shook our heads at the spectacle, then carried on to the edge of the glacier in order to unrope and ascend the moraine.'"]
Levin, Sam. "Los Angeles Police Spied on Anti-Trump Protesters." The Guardian (July 19, 2019) ["Case is one of several across the US of police targeting anti-Trump and anti-fascist groups with monitoring and criminal trials."]
Considered by Whitehead to be his most important film, The Fall is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, an extremely personal statement on violence, revolution and the turbulence within late sixties America. Filmed entirely in and around New York between October 1967 and June 1968, it features Robert Kennedy, The Bread and Puppet Theater, Paul Auster (fresh-faced as a Columbia student), Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Arthur Miller, Robert Lowell, Robert Rauschenberg and The Deconstructivists. Richard Roud, co-director of the New York Film Festival wrote of the film, “…an attempt to come to grips with today, both in terms of its content as well as of its form.”
THE FALL (Peter Whitehead, 1969) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.
Tonite Let's All Make Love In London from Mark Fisher on Vimeo.
Sweeting, Adam. "Peter Whitehead Obituary." The Guardian (June 13, 2019) ["One of Britain’s most provocative film-makers whose work documented the counterculture of the 1960s."]
"If I have a boy, I'll teach him how to love. If I have a girl, I'll tell her the world is hers." - Valérie in Denis Villeneuve's 2009 film (trigger warning for this trailer, survivors of violence)
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