Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
The Good Terrorist
Truth
(Doris Lessing) Once a vice is renounced, a delusion pricked, one looks back at it with second sight. It took the 1956 Hungarian massacre, in which Soviets deployed tanks against civilians, to budge Doris Lessing to resign from the British Communist Party. Fierce and radical, she could not resist casting some light on the leftish radicals of a new era – Thatcher’s Britain. It is to her credit that we are engaged by the story of the dreariest, most self-centred, whiniest, galactically feckless soft cell in the history of modern terrorism. Their ‘earth mother’, Alice Mellings, a thirty-something going on…
Continue Reading →Andrei Rublev
(Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) (1966) The great painter of iconography in medieval Russia is given a splendid, challenging (and long) tribute in this startling chain of magnificently filmed events, the mud and the blood and the tears, the acts of ruin and of creation making a kind of gritty surrealism over seven loosely connected episodes, the kind of picture Dostoevsky might make. Patience is repaid with interest.
Continue Reading →Reversal of Fortune
Insulin
(Dir. Barbet Schroeder) (1990) A contemplative, but playful account of a cause célèbre. Millionairess Sunny von Bülow’s vegetative state persisted from 1980 to 2008 (when she died, aged 76). The cause of this coma was alleged to be an injection of insulin by her second husband, Claus von Bülow, a classicist and former assistant to oil king J. Paul Getty. Bülow was convicted by a jury in 1982 and this film, based on the book by his appellate counsel, Alan Dershowitz,concentrates on the relationship between legal team and client during the appeal to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, seeking to…
Continue Reading →Primer
(Dir. Shane Carruth) (2004) Two commercial engineers create a time machine by accident and start bumping into their other selves. Made on a shoe-string, incomprehensible, with confusing exposition and techno-chat designed to cover gaps in plot, this film is, nevertheless, engaging and different – nice, weird playing by director Carruth and Dave Sullivan as Aaron and Abe.
Continue Reading →Winston Spencer Churchill
Peerless self-confidence
(30 Nov. 1874 to 25 Jan. 1965) The 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death prompts us to recall a person the like of which we no longer see. Whilst he was a giant even from early age, Churchill was wildly inconsistent in his politics and his professional allegiances. He failed more often than he succeeded and a case can be made that he was a far better writer (and painter) than politician or military strategist. Yet he completely embodies the heroic myth of ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’. Hard as it is to believe today, for a great deal of…
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