Screened at 2024's Glasgow Film Festival, before a retrospective opening Gala to its daughter festival Glasgow Short, Bill Douglas - My Best Friend attempts to contextualise the life and work of one of Scotland's neglected cinematic talents. He was a filmmaker's filmmaker, and the influences on and influences of Douglas' work may not be immediately visible but they are there nonetheless, an undercurrent of quality that still has an impact today.
Though he was from Edinburgh, Glasgow Short have an award named after him. He attended film school in London, and while his Trilogy is autobiographical to his childhood his final film Comrades is of England and Australia, following the fates of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
With a voiceover by Brian Cox, an opening interview with Lynne Ramsay, there's a very clear sense from the participants how much Douglas' work means to Scottish film. The subject, the title, are taken...
Though he was from Edinburgh, Glasgow Short have an award named after him. He attended film school in London, and while his Trilogy is autobiographical to his childhood his final film Comrades is of England and Australia, following the fates of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
With a voiceover by Brian Cox, an opening interview with Lynne Ramsay, there's a very clear sense from the participants how much Douglas' work means to Scottish film. The subject, the title, are taken...
- 3/23/2024
- by Andrew Robertson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
"After a period in which versions of Austen hogged our screens, the Brontës have fought back," writes Boyd Tonkin in a piece for the Independent that begins, by the way, with a brief but rousing history of Charlotte's detestation of Jane Austen. "Released today, Andrea Arnold's savagely uncompromising Wuthering Heights joins a line of adaptations of Emily's only surviving novel that began in 1920 (a lost work by Av Bramble) and went on to include renderings from directors as varied as William Wyler — with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon still the ranking Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw to many fans — and Yoshishige Yoshida, Luis Buñuel and Jacques Rivette. Earlier this year, Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska as the uncowed governess and Michael Fassbender the sulphurous Mr Rochester, offered a rather smoother ride through another much-adapted book, albeit one that shares with Arnold — and the Brontës — a rapt attention...
- 11/13/2011
- MUBI
The strike by women at the Dagenham Ford factory in 1968 that led to the Equal Pay Act is given the Calendar Girls treatment
Andrzej Wajda's superb Man of Iron (1981) was shot in the Gdansk shipyards at the very heart of Solidarity's activities, gave Lech Walesa a brief role as himself, and became part of the political process it commented on. It was a rare case of a feature film based on a major episode in the history of organised labour made close to the actual events. More typically, Mario Monicelli's The Organizer (1963) was a bracing reconstruction of a strike in late 19th-century Turin. Bo Widerberg's Adalen 31 (1969) lyrically recreated the violent strike in northern Sweden that ushered in 40 years of Social Democratic government.
There was an even greater gap in the case of Comrades (1986), Bill Douglas's epic account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Dorset labourers transported...
Andrzej Wajda's superb Man of Iron (1981) was shot in the Gdansk shipyards at the very heart of Solidarity's activities, gave Lech Walesa a brief role as himself, and became part of the political process it commented on. It was a rare case of a feature film based on a major episode in the history of organised labour made close to the actual events. More typically, Mario Monicelli's The Organizer (1963) was a bracing reconstruction of a strike in late 19th-century Turin. Bo Widerberg's Adalen 31 (1969) lyrically recreated the violent strike in northern Sweden that ushered in 40 years of Social Democratic government.
There was an even greater gap in the case of Comrades (1986), Bill Douglas's epic account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Dorset labourers transported...
- 10/2/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
I really hope there are no major changes of management at the British Film Institute. Like, ever. It's not because I have a long-standing respect for that oft-august body (although I do, I really do). And it's not that I spend a sufficient amount of time in Britain to take advantage of the many services the body offers over there (although I would, if I were spending any particular stretch of time in that place). It's pretty much because I'm thoroughly nuts about the Institute's DVD arm as it's currently constituted, and would love for it to continue doing as it does for as long as I'm around to be thoroughly nuts about it.
It's true that some of the miraculous feats of said arm are due to be reproduced, to some extent, here in the States; the Criterion Collection is coming out with Blu-ray discs of Antonioni's Red Desert and Visconti's The Leopard,...
It's true that some of the miraculous feats of said arm are due to be reproduced, to some extent, here in the States; the Criterion Collection is coming out with Blu-ray discs of Antonioni's Red Desert and Visconti's The Leopard,...
- 5/25/2010
- MUBI
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