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What papers won’t tell you: “The battle of Algiers”
By Marta Musso I would like to inaugurate film reviewing on DHP with “The battles of Algiers” by Gillo Pontecorvo, perhaps the most important film on terrorism and counter insurgency ever made. It tells the story of the Algerian war by focussing on the years 1956-1957, the period of guerrilla warfare in the capital.
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Selma through a woman’s eyes
By Amy Schaffman The film Selma opened on 9 January 2015 to a barrage of criticism about its historical accuracy. Though unable to use any of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words due to copyright issues, the movie attempted to recreate the tense scene in Selma, Alabama on the eve of the passing of the…
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A Little Chaos (2014): A commitment travesty
By Anna Knutsson @annaknutsson Anna Knutsson is an MPhil student in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. She is currently researching expressions of female involvement in medicine in Renaissance Florence. Director: Alan Rickman Cast: Kate Winslet, Stanley Tucci, Alan Rickman, Jennifer Ehle, Matthias Schoenaerts, Helen McCrory. Lack of commitment is a constant complaint of…
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Mike Leigh’s Peterloo: Inequality and resistance in nineteenth-century British society
Aoife O’Leary McNeice (@aolmcn) and Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland) review Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo which came out earlier this month. Mike Leigh’s Peterloo recounts the weeks leading up to the infamous massacre of peaceful working-class protestors by the yeomanry at St Peter’s Field, Manchester on 16 August 1819. It is hard to identify a single protagonist, Leigh…
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Auschwitz and a Rose Garden: The Zone of Interest is a Brave, but Flawed Film
by Beatrice Leeming There exists an established filmic tradition that has dealt with the ethics of representation and subscribed to the pedagogical power of cinema. The Holocaust has been documented and dramatized with progressive intensity since its occurrence. The perpetrators have been satirised, the victims heroized, and the narrative memorialised in both powerful and problematic…
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