A little over a century ago, there was an expectation that the future was ours to map and manage. An excerpt from a review for New Socialist of Economic Science Fictions, edited by Wiliam Davies.
Mark Fisher’s latest – and tragically – final book The Weird and the Eerie explores encounters with the outside and the unknown in 20th and 21st century film, music and literature.
Notes on a five-and-a-half hour silent movie at the Edinburgh Filmhouse: a restored BFI version of Abel Gance’s 1927 epic Napoleon, telling the story of the general’s early years.
Arrival fondly imagines a universal language that, once understood, facilitates spiritual awakening, a kind of Zen enlightenment that opens the way for a new era of peace.
Nicolas Roeg’s film has many memorable scenes and images that entangle themselves in the mind, and is electrified by a charismatic lead performance by David Bowie. But the director’s habitual desire to shock through the shoehorning of several gratuitous scenes into his movie adds nothing to Tevis’ subtle tale.
The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde by Owen Hatherley explores the Soviet intelligentia’s fascination with the America of the early 20th century, a mythic land of technological wonders, vast mechanised industries, spectacular cityscapes and the startling new medium of cinema.
Seven years or so since it first appeared it seems ‘that bloody sign’ is still with us. Some time around 2009, soon after the banking crisis, a stark poster featuring the words ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ set in a Gill Sans-ish typeface, topped by the Royal crest, began to appear here and there.