Nazis
DVD: Germany Pale MotherFriday, 22 May 2015
This is a great, neglected film of Nazi Germany. After being savaged by German critics for its “subjective” and “sentimental” perspective on the Third Reich at its 1980 Berlin Festival premiere, it was released with 30 minutes slashed. This is the... Read more... |
Edmund de Waal: I Placed a Jar, Brighton FestivalTuesday, 19 May 2015
What strange things netsuke are. Tiny sculptures, usually made from wood or ivory and depicting anything from figures, to fruit to animals, they were first made in the 17th century as toggles to attach pockets and bags to the robes worn by Japanese... Read more... |
The Decent OneSaturday, 18 April 2015
Remember the Hitler diaries? Stern and the Sunday Times were so eager for them to be true they went ahead and published even after historian Hugh Trevor Roper had changed his mind about their authenticity. Such was the hunger for stories about Nazis... Read more... |
Oppenheimer, RSC, Vaudeville TheatreWednesday, 01 April 2015
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” J Robert Oppenheimer’s quotation from Hindu scripture is often used to signify the scientist’s rueful realisation, when it was too late, of what he had created in delivering an atomic bomb to the US... Read more... |
DVD: Roberto Rossellini - The War TrilogyTuesday, 17 March 2015
Filming in bombed locations around Italy and Germany, the immediate evocation of wartime and post-war moral zeros, ordinary Italian locals and American GIs playing themselves alongside professional actors: all these assets would be enough to make... Read more... |
Suite FrançaiseFriday, 13 March 2015
Saul Dibb dispenses with the first half of Irene Nemirovsky’s great novel Suite Française in about a minute. Grainy newsreel footage disposes of the Fall of France in 1940, then it’s on to the occupation of Bussy, the country town where Lucille (... Read more... |
DVD: Night Will FallFriday, 06 February 2015
The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was... Read more... |
Taken at Midnight, Theatre Royal HaymarketTuesday, 27 January 2015
The mother, so often a sentimental figure in art, can be as tenacious and bold as any animal when protecting her young. Mark Hayhurst's play about Irmgard Litten, mother of Hans, a lawyer who cross-examined Hitler – and won – in 1931,... Read more... |
The Eichmann Show, BBC TwoTuesday, 20 January 2015
Part of a series of programmes marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, The Eichmann Show was a 90-minute account of how the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the SS's most enthusiastic engineers of the Holocaust, became "the... Read more... |
The Last of the UnjustSaturday, 10 January 2015
It is 30 years since Shoah. In the filmography of the Holocaust Claude Lanzmann's document is the towering monolith. At nine-and-a-half hours, it consists of no archive footage at all, just interviews with witnesses unburdening themselves of... Read more... |
Imagine... The Art That Hitler Hated, BBC OneWednesday, 29 October 2014
Alan Yentob’s culture programme, Imagine, returned for its autumn season with a two-part examination of one of the most potently disturbing episodes in the history of art, let alone culture. Even before the programme’s title, masterpieces by such as... Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer, Royal AcademySunday, 05 October 2014
And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. In 2007, I was left breathless by the German artist’s new paintings at the White Cube gallery in... Read more... |
