Tag: artefact

The Marbles

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 16 October 2025
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Director – David Nicholas Wilkinson – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 114m
****

The Parthenon Marbles – were they stolen from Greece, and should they be sent back? – Opening Night Film (World Premiere) Central Scotland Documentary Festival in Stirling, Scotland on Thursday, October 30th; out in UK cinemas on Thursday, November 6th.

This starts with director Wilkinson, who previously made the excellent Getting Away With Murder(s) (2021), writing a letter to the Head of the British Museum asking him for an interview outlining the Museum’s position on the Parthenon Marbles. He never receives a reply.

The historical and legal background is helpfully unpacked by Alexander Herman, a historian and legal expert who has written and spoken widely on the Marbles controversy, and Mark Stephens, the UK’s foremost Art & Cultural Property lawyer.

The eponymous Marbles were Ancient Greek statues and artefacts removed from the Acropolis in Athens by Lord Elgin in the early part of the 19th Century and brought over to England to adorn his newly built stately home in Scotland. In 1816, following a Parliamentary debate on the matter, they were purchased from Elgin by the British Museum where they have resided ever since, on display to the public.… Read the rest

Tags 19th century, abroad, Acropolis, Alexander Herman, ambassador, Ancient Greece, annual protest, art, Art & Cultural Property law, artefact, Athens, Battle of Wounded Knee, BCRPM, beard, Brian Cox, British Committee for the Repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles, China, COVID, COVID lockdown, cultural artefact theft, culture, David Nicholas Wilkinson, dig, document, documentary, Dominic Selwood, draw, Elgin Marbles, Elgin’s priest, England, face masks, Firmin, fly, foreign, ghost dance shirt, Glasgow, Greece, historian, history, Italian copy, Janet Suzman, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, killing of British envoys, Lakota, law, legal basis, legal expert, loot, Lord Byron, Lord Elgin, make casts of, Mark Stephens, Miriam Margolyes, museum, Native American, no beard, numerical order, of which Greece was then a part, on display, Ottoman archives, Ottoman Empire, palace, Parliamentary debate, Parthenon Marbles, Paul McGann, place of origin, plunder, purchased by the British Museum, ransacked, reference numbers, removed, repatriation of stolen artefacts, repatriation of stolen cultural artefacts, revenge, Scotland, scrupulous, secured access, Stage Four Bowel Cancer, stately home, statue, stolen, stolen goods, terminal, The Marbles, The Marbles controversy, time, travel, UK, voice artist, Yuanmingyuan

Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Riefenstahl

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 9 May 2025
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Director – Andres Veiel – 2024 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 115m

*****

An unsettling, deep dive into the indisputable artistic talent, evasive personality and self-reconstructed memory of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl through her personal archive of some 700 boxes – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 9th

Sepia / yellow images. A woman walking by the sea. Incidental music suggesting a reaching, a striving. Out of focus images of crowds lining the streets, coming into focus to proclaim, “Heil, mein Fuhrer.” The lighting of the Olympic flame, the firing of a gun at a track event. Leni Riefenstahl, as a young woman, examining hanging strips of 35mm film at the editor’s bench. And then an extract from a talk show: would she do it differently if she could live her life again? What were her mistakes? Her close association with Hitler? She hesitates – you can almost feel her squirming, trying to find a way round the question. She starts talking about her first film as director, The Blue Light (1932), a mountaineering picture in which she did all the rock climbing stunts herself. She didn’t know of Hitler at this point, she says. “If the Fascists saw you”, she was told, “you would become their hero.”… Read the rest

Tags 1920s mountaineering films, 30 cameramen, 35mm film, 700 artefacts, actress, Africa, Albert Speer, Andres Veiel, Andrew Bird, architect, archive, art, art and politics, artefact, artistic talent, audiocassette, blue-eyed and blonde, cans of film, carte blanche, close association with Hitler, complicity, control image of self, crowds, denial, disabled people, documentary, editing table, editor’s bench, evasive, excise from image, extremist regimes, fake news, fascism, fascists, film premier, filmmaker, filmmaking career, flying through space, forcibly sterilized, Fuhrer, furious outburst, genocide, Germany, Heil, Hitler rally, Holocaust, Horst Kettner, hospital, hospitalised, human capacity for evil, image for mass consumption, innocence, Joseph Goebbels, killing Jews, Leni Riefenstahl, live life again, locked up, media, mediation process, memoirs, memory, men and women, mistakes, mountaineering films, mountaineering picture, mountains, Natu, Nazi, Nazi ideal of beauty, Nazi legislation, Nuremberg Rally, Olympia, Olympic flame, opera, parade, perfect sync, personal archive, physical perfection, portrait photograph, precision, purity, rally, Ray Müller, Reich Ministry of Propaganda, Riefenstahl, river, rock climbing stunts, rolls of film, roses, self-reconstructed, sex abusive, sexual predators, spectacle, stealing, strips of film, stunts, Sudan, talk show, teach child to swim, theft, Third Reich, track event, turning a blind eye, twentieth century, Venice Biennale, war correspondent, Willy Zielke, worked to exhaustion, Zielke

Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Series Shorts Television

Greenaway
By Numbers

How Peter Greenaway’s obsession with various numeric and other cataloguing systems has led to the creation of highly complex, multi-layered film pieces that joyfully play with audiences

If ever anyone were to make a film about the Dewey Decimal System, it would be Peter Greenaway. He is obsessed with ways and means to classify the world in which he finds himself, systems to organise and make sense of that peculiar world, people’s relationship networks with one another and their movement and actions within that world and those networks.

I first came across him on the theatrical release in Hammersmith of his three hours plus epic The Falls (1980), made in between his early, self-financed short films of the 1960s and 1970s and his first, more conventional in length feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). The Falls takes its name from entries in the section of a directory beginning with the letters F A L L e.g. Orchard Falla, Constance Ortuist Fallaburr, Melorder Fallaburr. The directory chronicles survivors of a Violent Unknown Event, VUE for short… [read more]

Full article at DMovies.org in association with Doesn’t Exist Magazine – purchase your copy now.

Tags 18th century, action, actors, age, alphabet, apartheid, architecture, artefact, artist, Bible, biographies, body part, book, boundaries, buildings, catalogue, category, children, classicist, classificatory systems. reports, colour, compendium, conception, confines, consumption, country house, Dante, David Attenborough, David Rudkin, device, directory, division, documentation, drawing, dying, editing, entries, exhibition, falling, fatality, food, footnote, garden design, grid, historian, identities, index, journey, law, letter, library, lists, maps, motivation, multimedia, narrative, natural history, numbers, obsession, open plan, order, page, painting, Patricia Morison, Peter Greenaway, photocopy, photographs, poet, political prisoners, production, pseudonymous, random, real time, rectangle, Rembrandt, rhythm, screen, seamstress, season, secret, sex, Shakespeare, South Africa, speaking, stomach, storytelling, subjects, suitcases, taboo, talking heads, text, Tom Phillips, UK, verbal, video editing, visual frame, volume, website, whimsy, wife, window, word, YouTube