Tag: memoirs

Late Fame

Late Fame

Director – Kent Jones – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 96m

*****

A reclusive New York postal worker who published volumes of poetry years ago becomes involved with a contemporary circle of rich young writers and creatives – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, September 4th

New York postal worker Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) lives a quiet life, with a regular, once a week night out playing pool with his mates. He regularly gets answerphone messages from his sister telling him his brother doesn’t have long left to live, and he really should come and visit before it’s too late.

Minding his own business, he’s walking through the park when he’s accosted by a young man. It emerges that Saxberger published volumes of poetry in the 1970s, and while never commercially successful, he is held in high regard by those who pay attention to such things. The young man takes a chance and invites Ed to a meeting of writers, poets and actors. Ed, flattered, says, why not?

So it is that Ed finds himself attending meetings of this artistic circle, run by Meyers (Edmund Donovan from Civil War, Alex Garland, 2024) which consists mainly of young rich kids whose parents are funding them.… Read the rest

Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Riefenstahl

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

Features Live Action Movies

Mother Night

Director – Keith Gordon – 1996 – US – Cert. 15 – 114m

*****

In this adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, a former Nazi propagandist awaits trial in Israel for war crimes – retail VHS review from Home Entertainment, 1997

From his Israeli prison cell where he must compose his memoirs while awaiting trial for his war crimes in black and white, Howard W. Campbell, Jr. (Nick Nolte in a career-defining performance) recalls in colour flashback his rise to fame in wartime Berlin as a radio propaganda writer / broadcaster for the Third Reich, surviving that regime’s madness by devoting himself to actress wife Helga (Sheryl Lee) and their self-contained Nation Of Two.

Recruited from a park as an undercover American spy by raincoat‑wearing American top brass John Goodman (a small part, but likewise impressive), Campbell has to incorporate coded messages to the Allies in his broadcasts. In 1944, Helga dies. After the War, Campbell winds up alone in a seedy New York apartment where neighbours include fellow widower Alan Arkin and Auschwitz survivor‑turned‑doctor Ayre Gross.

When admiring right wing activists arrive at Campbell’s door, the tale (based on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel) lurches even further into surrealism. Gordon’s direction is flawless throughout.… Read the rest