Set in 1979, the film Super 8 can be read as an allegory of the American civil rights movement. The allegory is caught up in the web of a small time psychological drama. I am concerned at the way film offers grief and anger at slavery and racism as a subset of internal psychological issues.
Author archives: pasdelasbas
being normal
For the past few months I’ve been accompanying a young man, originally from Zimbabwe, to the Borders Agency office in Vulcan House, near the river Don in Sheffield. It is an area that was redeveloped over the past ten years with a host of residential flats and offices being built with river frontage. It has …
southwold sheds
I visited Southwold, near my ex-parents-in-law last weekend. As I drove into the coastal area of northern Suffolk from the west I noticed two things: the appearance of Union Jacks in a couple of places and the presence in practically every village I passed of an independent butcher. The town itself is on the sea …
the consumer is the consumed
I was talking to a friend yesterday evening and he mentioned that Facebook was for sale, or was it being floated, not sure. Impressed buy the high valuation he had heard reported we discussed how Facebook made money. He spoke about the value of information relating to the likes and dislikes of the members of …
christ the worker
I was in Truro yesterday morning and I saw a painting. It is in the Chapel of Christ the Worker in Truro Cathedral. It really caught my attention because it was so well set in that realist art of the thirties. I love the way it remarks the Soviet realism of the period and found …
institutes
There is a great wealth of institutes in Cornwall. The countryside is densely populated compared to many areas of rural Britain, there were so many small mining communities that there are Insitutes dotted all over the place. These two are nearby. I know nothing about them as yet, I’ve seen them for years. The first …
persona (bergman, 1966)
What is it to want to watch any film? If film teaches us how to desire and fictions structure our reality what am I doing watching this slow half conversation between two women who are one?
preparing a new paddock
There is land across the road that has been contested for many years, it is poisoned from earlier periods of mining and the dumping of various wastes and is heavily contaminated in places with arsenic amongst other things. It has also become home to a vast and expanding colony of Japanese knotweed. It was owned …
300
Well what am I to make of the 300? Second time I’ve seen it and a very different watching in some ways and not in others. This time too I hear the entirely fictional and impossible speeches made by Spartans about saving ‘little Greece’, that home of ‘reason and justice’, setting out to defeat the …
The Hoe, the Barbican and Ale
It is funny what you learn, or maybe remember. On a train travelling to the south west longing for privacy I am interrupted by three revelers returning from a drinking birthday celebration at the Tom Cobley, a pub outside Exeter. One of the best pubs in the world I am told and we talk about …