08 October 2024

Wordslut:
A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language


Wordslut

Amanda Montell’s aim in Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language is to encourage and empower women “to reclaim a language that for so long has been used against us.” Wordslut, published in 2019, is not the first book to show how gender-neutral terms have been transformed into sexist insults: Jane Mills did so in Womanwords thirty years previously. And the notion of reappropriating those pejoratives is older still: Germaine Greer attempted to reclaim the c-word, for example, in the early 1970s. Mills and Greer are not cited in Wordslut (and the book has no bibliography), though Montell did interview Deborah Cameron, author of Feminism and Linguistic Theory.

Montell begins her book by calling for “a language revolution”, though her ultimate conclusion is more measured. She argues that reappropriation is a gradual process: “A word doesn’t have to lose its negative meanings completely to be considered reclaimed. The path to reclamation is almost never that smooth... As long as the positive varieties of a word steadily become more common, more mainstream, by the time the next generation starts learning the language, they will pick up those meanings first.” The book’s title is itself a reappropriation of ‘slut’, though Montell doesn’t mention Katharine Whitehorn’s pioneering self-identification with that word sixty years ago.

18 September 2024

Infiltrating Society:
The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs



Internal Security Operations Command, the political arm of the Thai military, has called for sales of a new book to be halted. The book in question is ในนามของความมั่นคงภายใน การแทรกซึมสังคมของกองทัพไทย, a Thai translation of Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs by the distinguished academic Puangthong Pawakapan. Infiltrating Society was published in English in 2021, and the Thai translation will be released on 25th September by Same Sky Books.

ISOC posted a written statement on its Facebook page on 14th September, questioning Puangthong’s academic credentials and research methods, and challenging her findings. It also requested that the book was removed from sale (“ขอเรียนว่าการนำหนังสือและบทความทางวิชาการที่มีข้อมูลในลักษณะที่เป็นเท็จ”), and threatened legal action against the author.

Thailand’s modern political history has been dominated by military rule, with thirteen successful coups. But Puangthong argues that, even during periods of civilian government, ISOC’s influence is ever present, creating a constant atmosphere of military surveillance and propaganda. She makes the crucial point that ISOC’s activities are fundamental to the military’s agenda: “Internal security affairs, rather than external threats, have long been the raison d’être of the Thai military”.

16 September 2024

God and the Devil:
The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman


God and the Devil

Peter Cowie is a leading authority on director Ingmar Bergman, and God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman, published last year, is his comprehensive account of Bergman’s entire career. Beginning in the late 1950s, Cowie was in regular contact with Bergman for more than thirty years, and in his critical biography he also quotes from letters and journals from the Bergman archive.

The book’s stark cover shows the personification of Death from Bergman’s masterpiece The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet). God and the Devil examines not just Bergman’s acclaimed filmography, but also his often overlooked theatre productions and his complicated private life. Cowie’s ultimate assessment of Bergman is as follows: “Forever obsessed with God and his demons, reckless in love, and relentless in his commitment to film and theatre.”

Cowie has written and published dozens of books on cinema, specialising in works on the pantheon of great directors, including an early monograph on Orson Welles (A Ribbon of Dreams). He wrote a lavish guide to the films of Akira Kurosawa, and his books on the making of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are indispensable. His second Godfather book was published fifteen years after the first, and he also wrote a book on another 1970s classic, Annie Hall.

11 September 2024

Truss at Ten:
How Not to Be Prime Minister



“Is it all over?”
“Yes, Prime Minister, I think it probably is.”

That exchange, between Liz Truss and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, is one of several blunt conversations documented by Anthony Seldon in Truss at Ten, which was published last month. Seldon has written profiles of every UK prime minister since John Major, and his previous book covered Boris Johnson’s aberrant premiership. Some PMs cooperate with Seldon, and others don’t; Truss and David Cameron did, while Johnson and Theresa May didn’t.

Truss at Ten features new reporting on the key moments from the shortest British government in history: the reversal of the 45p tax rate policy (“the biggest U-turn in modern prime ministerial history”), the sacking of Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, and the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as his replacement. Surprisingly, given her reckless self-confidence, Truss seemed to defer to Hunt, telling her Principal Private Secretary: “Jeremy will do the domestic side and I’ll do the foreign.”

Seldon has been headmaster of three schools, and his Truss book reads like a wayward student’s end-of-term report card. He sets out ten requirements for a successful PM, and demonstrates how Truss failed at all of them. (The book is subtitled How Not to Be Prime Minister.) Making frequent historical comparisons, Seldon argues that Truss’s period of office was uniquely damaging to the country’s economy. Ultimately, he criticises her “total failure to understand the nature of leadership and the job of being Prime Minister.”

There have been other accounts of the Truss premiership, the best of which is Out of the Blue by Harry Cole and James Healey. Ben Riley-Smith’s The Right to Rule (retitled Blue Murder in paperback) also covers Truss in office, and Truss herself wrote an unapologetic memoir, Ten Years to Save the West.

06 September 2024

The Prince:
The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau


The Prince

Journalist Stephen Maher’s first impression of Justin Trudeau was not particularly favourable: “He looked like a charismatic lightweight”. Maher’s new political biography of Trudeau portrays the Canadian Prime Minister as narcissistic and superficial, “a leader of limited ambitions, a transactional rather than a transformational leader.” Surprisingly, Trudeau agreed to be interviewed for the book earlier this year.

The biography takes its title, The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau, from a 1977 interview with Trudeau’s mother, who described him as “a prince—a very good little boy”. But the term also has other connotations, and Maher describes Trudeau’s sense of entitlement, “his princely certainty in the importance of his ideas,” his “princely capriciousness” and “princely vanity.” There is also a Machiavellian reference, and the book includes withering epigraphs from the Italian philosopher’s The Prince (Il principe).

Maher gives Trudeau due credit for a successful domestic social agenda, with “real progress for children, women, families, and the most significant effort to fight poverty in a generation.” But mindful of Canada’s election next year, he sums up Trudeau’s three terms in office with an unambiguous conclusion that echoes the PM’s current low approval rating: “After eight years of Trudeau, we are obviously in a weaker position.”

30 August 2024

บทปราศรัยคัดสรรคดี 112
(‘speeches on 112’)



A student has received a three-year prison sentence, suspended for two years, after being found guilty of lèse-majesté for attempting to distribute copies of a booklet, บทปราศรัยคัดสรรคดี 112 (‘speeches on 112’). The booklet, published by the United Front of Thammasat and Demonstration, features a collection of speeches calling for the abolition of the lèse-majesté law, which is article 112 of the Thai criminal code.

The graduate student, whose name has not been released, was accused of carrying a box containing copies of the booklet at a Naresuan University commencement ceremony on 30th December 2021. Police confiscated all copies before they could be handed out to anyone attending the event. (Copies had previously been distributed at Three Kings Monument Square in Chiang Mai, and at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.) The student was sentenced yesterday, though the booklet itself has not been banned from publication.

19 August 2024

Tectonism:
Architecture for the Twenty-First Century



In a 2009 issue of Architectural Digest (vol. 79, no. 4), Patrik Schumacher grandly announced “the enunciation of a new style: Parametricism.” His article, Parametricism: A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design, even argued that this new architectural style was the successor to the Modernist movement: “Parametricism is the great new style after modernism.”

Schumacher’s book Tectonism: Architecture for the Twenty-First Century, published last year, introduces another new ‘ism’—tectonism—which is apparently a revised version of parametricism: “tectonism is classified here as a subsidiary style within the the overarching epochal style of parametricism. Tectonism is a logical continuation and refinement of earlier stages of parametricism, such as foldism, blobism, and swarmism.”

It’s hard to take Schumacher and his self-proclaimed epochal movements seriously. He makes sweeping, grandiose claims—“Tectonism is the most advanced and most sophisticated contemporary architectural style”—that have no real foundation, and he believes that parametricism/tectonism should become a global architectural hegemony: “The plurality of styles must make way for a sweeping parametricism”.

06 August 2024

ตาดูดาว เท้าติดดิน
(‘looking at the stars, feet on the ground’) 



In 2013, Thaksin Shinawatra published a comic adaptation of his autobiography, ตาดูดาว เท้าติดดิน (‘looking at the stars, feet on the ground’). The book, published by Thaksin’s own Thaicom company, was a vanity project that reimagined his life as an inspirational rags-to-riches tale. (As Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker wrote in Thaksin, their book on the former PM, “Thaksin has mythologized his life story as a poor boy made good.”) The comic was later converted into a seven-part animated series, aimed at an even younger audience, released on YouTube in 2014.


Surprisingly, ตาดูดาว เท้าติดดิน was the second comic biography of Thaksin. The first was published shortly after the 2006 coup that removed him from office. ชีวิตทักษิณ บันทึกประวัติศาสตร์ นายกของไทยคนที่ 23 ที่มีทั้งคนรัก คนชัง สุดท้ายถูกยึดอำนาจ! (‘Thaksin’s life: a historical record of how the 23rd Prime Minister of Thailand, who had both lovers and haters, finally seized power!’) is similarly hagiographic, though drawn in a more realistic style for a slightly older readership.

03 August 2024

The Notebook:
A History of Thinking on Paper


The Notebook

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper is the first general history of writing pads and their various uses. Roland Allen devotes his first few chapters to Florentine notebooks, including domestic examples such as the ricordanzi (account book), ricordi (memoir), and zibaldoni (“a personal anthology, or miscellany”, similar to later collections of quotations known as common-place books).

The book’s scope extends from the Middle Ages to the present day, and it includes concise histories of diaries, logbooks, and other types of personal journal. It also has an annotated bibliography. There are a couple of notable omissions: spiral-bound reporters’ notebooks (used for shorthand notation) and yellow legal pads.

15 July 2024

“...destabilize the socio-political situation in Russia.”



A novel about a zombie apocalypse has been banned in Russia, after Roskomnadzor—the state media regulator—accused its author of attempting to “destabilize the socio-political situation in Russia.” The book, Мышь (‘mouse’) by Ivan Philippov, is a dystopian satire in which a medical facility has been created to develop a serum allowing President Vladimir Putin to prolong his death: “Хотя бы до 120 лет Владимир Владимирович дожить бы очень хотел. И денег на опыты он не пожалеет” (‘Putin would love to reach 120 years old, and will spare no expense in funding experiments to make this possible’).

A mouse infected with the serum escapes from the secret laboratory, spreading a virus that turns Russian citizens into zombies. The novel was published last year by Freedom Letters, based outside Russia, which specialises in Russian-language literature that would be banned if it were submitted to Russian censors.

01 July 2024

The 12-Hour Film Expert:
Everything You Need to Know about Movies


The 12-Hour Film Expert

The 12-Hour Film Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Movies, by brothers Noah and James Charney, has a reductivist title, but the book itself is a reasonably detailed history of American cinema. On the other hand, foreign-language films are squeezed into a single chapter, which the writers admit—and demonstrate—“is well-nigh impossible to do”.

The book is organised into twelve chapters, each of which begins with a list of a few key films, “the most important ones to watch.” An appendix, The Movie Playlist, lists further genres and subgenres, each with twelve recommended films. At the end of the Playlist, the “rule of twelve” gives way to a list of directors from various countries outside the US, each represented by their best-known films.

There’s a general emphasis on more recent films, and there are some odd omissions: numerous genres, such as war, gangster films, period dramas, documentaries, and animation, are excluded. Stanley Kubrick’s films are conspicuously absent from any of the book’s lists.

These are the twelve chapters and their key films:

The Invention of the Movies —
  • A Trip to the Moon
  • The Great Train Robbery
The Golden Age of Silent Movies —
  • The Gold Rush
  • Sunrise
Classic Hollywood —
  • Casablanca
  • Citizen Kane
The Western —
  • Stagecoach
  • The Searchers
  • Red River
Film Noir —
  • Double Indemnity
  • Out of the Past
  • Touch of Evil
  • Chinatown
Comedy —
  • Bringing up Baby
  • Airplane!
  • When Harry Met Sally
Musicals —
  • Top Hat
  • Singin’ in the Rain
  • Moulin Rouge!
Suspense —
  • The Wages of Fear
  • The Birds
  • The Italian Job
Horror —
  • Cat People
  • Halloween
  • The Babadook
Action —
  • The Bourne Identity
  • Nobody
  • Run Lola Run
Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Superhero Films —
  • X-Men
  • Star Wars IV–VI
  • The Lord of the Rings I–III
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
International Art House —
  • Bicycle Thieves
  • Seven Samurai
  • Nostalghia

26 June 2024

The Movie Book (2nd edition)


The Movie Book

The Movie Book was first published in 2015 as a guide to the most influential films from cinema history: “The movies gathered here are those that the authors feel... to have had the most seismic impact on both cinema and the world.” The book was written by a team of authors (Louis Baxter, John Farndon, Kieran Grant, and Damon Wise), led by Danny Leigh.

116 films were included, cross-referenced and arranged chronologically, with entries ranging from a single page to six pages per film. There was also an appendix of eighty-eight extra films, “a selection of the movies that came close to being included in the main section, but did not quite make the final cut.”

The second edition appeared in 2022, with minimal changes. It included only one additional film, Parasite (기생충), making a new total of 117 main entries. Five films were deleted from the appendix, replaced by five new entries. The deletions from the appendix are Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler), The Jazz Singer, Rosemary’s Baby, Good Bye, Lenin!, and Times and Winds (Beş Vakit); the additions are The Exorcist, Twelve Years a Slave, Black Panther, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Nomadland.

These are the 117 main entries in the second edition:
  • A Trip To The Moon
  • Intolerance
  • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
  • Battleship Potemkin
  • Sunrise
  • Metropolis
  • Steamboat Bill Jr
  • The Passion of Joan of Arc
  • The Blue Angel
  • People on Sunday
  • City Lights
  • M
  • Duck Soup
  • King Kong
  • Zero for Conduct
  • The Bride of Frankenstein
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
  • The Wizard of Oz
  • The Rules of the Game
  • Gone with the Wind
  • His Girl Friday
  • Citizen Kane
  • Casablanca
  • To Be or Not to Be
  • Ossessione
  • Laura
  • Children of Paradise
  • La belle et la bête
  • A Matter of Life and Death
  • It’s a Wonderful Life
  • Bicycle Thieves
  • Kind Hearts and Coronets
  • The Third Man
  • Rashomon
  • Sunset Boulevard
  • A Streetcar Named Desire
  • The Night of the Hunter
  • Singin’ in the Rain
  • Tokyo Story
  • The Wages of Fear
  • Godzilla
  • All That Heaven Allows
  • Rebel Without a Cause
  • Pather Panchali
  • Kiss Me Deadly
  • The Searchers
  • The Seventh Seal
  • Vertigo
  • Ashes and Diamonds
  • Some Like It Hot
  • The 400 Blows
  • La Dolce Vita
  • Breathless
  • Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
  • Last Year at Marienbad
  • La jetée
  • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
  • Black God, White Devil
  • Dr. Strangelove
  • The Sound of Music
  • The Battle of Algiers
  • The Chelsea Girls
  • Playtime
  • Bonnie and Clyde
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • The Wild Bunch
  • Easy Rider
  • Le boucher
  • The Godfather
  • Aguirre: The Wrath of God
  • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
  • Don’t Look Now
  • The Spirit of the Beehive
  • Chinatown
  • Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
  • Jaws
  • Picnic at Hanging Rock
  • Taxi Driver
  • Annie Hall
  • Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  • Alien
  • Stalker
  • Das Boot
  • Blade Runner
  • Blue Velvet
  • Wings of Desire
  • Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
  • sex, lies, and videotape
  • Do the Right Thing
  • Raise the Red Lantern
  • Pulp Fiction
  • Three Colours: Red
  • The Shawshank Redemption
  • Toy Story
  • La haine
  • Fargo
  • The Sweet Hereafter
  • Central Station
  • Festen
  • The Ring
  • Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
  • Spirited Away
  • Amelie
  • Lagaan
  • The Lord of The Rings I: The Fellowship of the Ring
  • City of God
  • Oldboy
  • The Lives of Others
  • Pan’s Labyrinth
  • Slumdog Millionaire
  • The Hurt Locker
  • Man on Wire
  • The White Ribbon
  • Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
  • Gravity
  • Boyhood
  • Parasite
These are the eighty-eight films in the appendix:
  • The Great Train Robbery
  • Nosferatu
  • Un chien andalou
  • Freaks
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • The Maltese Falcon
  • Sullivan’s Travels
  • Meshes of the Afternoon
  • Double Indemnity
  • Brief Encounter
  • Murders Among Us
  • Out of the Past
  • The Red Shoes
  • All About Eve
  • Los Olvidados
  • The Big Heat
  • La strada
  • Seven Samurai
  • Rififi
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • Touch of Evil
  • Elevator to the Gallows
  • Peeping Tom
  • Psycho
  • West Side Story
  • The Innocents
  • Jules et Jim
  • The Manchurian Candidate
  • Dry Summer
  • Jason and the Argonauts
  • Onibaba
  • I Am Cuba
  • Closely Observed Trains
  • Persona
  • The Graduate
  • Belle de jour
  • Salesman
  • Once Upon a Time in the West
  • Kes
  • Midnight Cowboy
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Harold and Maude
  • Land of Silence and Darkness
  • Walkabout
  • The Harder They Come
  • The Exorcist
  • A Woman Under the Influence
  • Sholay
  • Xala
  • Eraserhead
  • Dawn of the Dead
  • Days of Heaven
  • Apocalypse Now
  • Raging Bull
  • The Shining
  • ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
  • Scarface
  • Blood Simple
  • Paris, Texas
  • Come and See
  • Brazil
  • Down by Law
  • Jesus of Montreal
  • Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
  • Hard Boiled
  • Reservoir Dogs
  • Naked
  • Short Cuts
  • Heavenly Creatures
  • Drifting Clouds
  • Breaking the Waves
  • Taste of Cherry
  • Werckmeister Harmonies
  • Amores Perros
  • In the Mood for Love
  • Mulholland Drive
  • Tsotsi
  • Caché
  • Ten Canoes
  • There Will Be Blood
  • The Secret in Their Eyes
  • The Kid with a Bike
  • Holy Motors
  • Twelve Years a Slave
  • The Grand Budapest Hotel
  • Black Panther
  • Portrait of a Lady on Fire
  • Nomadland
(Note that Some Like It Hot is the 1959 Billy Wilder classic, Scarface is the 1983 remake, and The Maltese Falcon is the 1941 remake.)

23 June 2024

รวมผลงานคัดสรรจากเพจ
อยู่เมืองดัดจริต ชีวิตต้องป๊อป พ.ศ. 2557–2554
(‘living in a pretentious city, life must be pop’)



Prakit Kobkijwattana used to work in advertising, but now he uses commercial techniques in his art, to satirise Thailand’s militarism and materialism. Like many Thai artists, Prakit experienced a political awakening—known in Thai as ta sawang—after the 2010 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Bangkok. Prakit was profiled in the Bangkok Post in 2021: “Ever since the Ratchaprasong intersection incident in 2010, the 57-year-old has radically changed his point of view toward art and society”. Sayan Daenklom coined the term “Post-Ratchaprasong art” to describe works produced in response to the massacre, in the journal Read (อ่าน; vol. 3, no. 2).

Prakit created a Facebook page, อยู่เมืองดัดจริต ชีวิตต้องป๊อป (‘living in a pretentious city, life must be pop’), in 2011, posting memes and graphic art commenting on the Ratchaprasong massacre and the following four years of Thai politics, culminating with the 2014 coup. In 2015, these were collected in the book รวมผลงานคัดสรรจากเพจ อยู่เมืองดัดจริต ชีวิตต้องป๊อป พ.ศ. 2557–2554 (‘living in a pretentious city, life must be pop: a collection of selected works, 2014–2011’), edited by Kasada Satayahurak. (Note that the date range in the title is in reverse, to show the country’s political regression during that period.)

15 June 2024

From the Moment They Met It Was Murder:
Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir



Alain Silver and James Ursini have dominated film noir scholarship with their Film Noir Reader series and three different books titled Film Noir: an encyclopedia (co-edited with Elizabeth Ward and Robert Porfirio), a recent anthology, and a Taschen guide. They have also written The Noir Style and American Neo-Noir, among other books on the subject.

It’s fitting that the leading experts on film noir should write a book on Billy Wilder’s classic thriller Double Indemnity, which is the quintessential noir film. Their new book From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir, released this year to mark the film’s eightieth anniversary, highlights its unmatched influence on noir cinema: “We cannot overstate the influence of Double Indemnity on the film noir movement. Before 1944 there was a trickle of titles. After there was a flood.”

The book (dedicated to Richard Schickel, who wrote a BFI Film Classics study of the film) also covers the true-crime origins of Double Indemnity’s plot (including the famous Daily News photograph of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair), Wilder’s reluctant co-writer Raymond Chandler, and the film’s production history. Silver and Ursini provide plenty of new analysis, though they also recycle some material from the Double Indemnity entry in their film noir encyclopedia.

05 June 2024

No Way Out —
Brexit:
From the Backstop to Boris


All Out War / Fall Out / No Way Out

Tim Shipman’s weekly ‘long reads’ in The Sunday Times have, for the past decade, provided the most incisive running commentary on British politics. His first book, All Out War, was the definitive account of the Brexit referendum. Its sequel, Fall Out, covered the aftermath of the Brexit vote and the 2017 general election. His new book, No Way Out—“the third in what is now a four-part sequence of books designed to tell the full story of the most explosive period of domestic British politics since the Second World War”—is an exhaustive record of Theresa May’s ill-fated efforts to negotiate a Brexit deal.

Shipman characterises the five most recent Conservative prime ministers (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak) respectively as “a blasé public schoolboy, an indecisive introvert, a self-centred extrovert, an untrammelled ideologue, and the school swot with little feel for politics.” He interviewed three of them (May not included) for No Way Out, along with an incredible thirty-nine cabinet ministers. The book has taken six years to finish, as he explained in a Sunday Times article published on 21st April: “Every time I thought the end was in sight, Westminster erupted into a fresh round of psychodrama.”

No Way Out (subtitled Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris) shows once again that Shipman has the best sources of any current political journalist. (For a 24th March 2019 Sunday Times story, he spoke off-the-record to eleven serving cabinet ministers who all called for May to resign as PM.) The book includes a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the decisive Chequers cabinet meeting that led to Boris Johnson resigning as Foreign Secretary in 2018, and another ministerial resignation that year provides one of No Way Out’s most memorable quotes: after Phillip Lee defected to the Liberal Democrats, a “mild-mannered aide branded him ‘the Godzilla of cunts’.”

The book’s conclusion is titled Theresa May: A Study in Failure, and Shipman leaves no doubt that May’s uncommunicative leadership style led directly to the Brexit stalemate that defined her time in office. (She admits as much in The Abuse of Power: “I know in my heart of hearts that the political reality is that my premiership will always be seen in the context of Brexit and my failure to get a deal through the House of Commons.”) His next book, Out, will tell the full story of the last five tumultuous years of Conservative government.

01 June 2024

My Favourite Movies


My Favourite Movies

No, not my favourite movies. Veteran Australian film critic David Stratton’s book My Favourite Movies, published in 2021, lists his 111 favourites in chronological order.

Stratton’s “personal pantheon” is restricted to a single film per director. It’s an excellent list, with a few pleasant surprises (including The Awful Truth, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Incredible Shrinking Man).

Stratton’s 111 favourite movies are as follows:
  • Metropolis
  • The General
  • Wings
  • The Last Command
  • City Lights
  • Love Me Tonight
  • Trouble in Paradise
  • It’s a Gift
  • A Night at the Opera
  • The Awful Truth
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
  • The Rules of the Game
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • The Public Enemy
  • Citizen Kane
  • The Lady Eve
  • Casablance
  • Went the Day Well?
  • Meet Me in St. Louis
  • Les enfants du paradis
  • The Best Years of Our Lives
  • The Big Sleep
  • Duel in the Sun
  • Great Expectations
  • It’s a Wonderful Life
  • A Matter of Life and Death
  • The Big Clock
  • Letter from an Unknown Woman
  • Kind Hearts and Coronets
  • All About Eve
  • In a Lonely Place
  • The African Queen
  • Bend of the River
  • The Man in the White Suit
  • High Noon
  • Shane
  • Singin’ in the Rain
  • M. Hulot’s Holiday
  • I vitelloni
  • Bad Day at Black Rock
  • Les diaboliques
  • On the Waterfront
  • Seven Samurai
  • A Star Is Born
  • The Night of the Hunter
  • Attack
  • Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • The Brothers Rico
  • The Incredible Shrinking Man
  • 3:10 to Yuma
  • Twelve Angry Men
  • Wild Strawberries
  • Breathless
  • The 400 Blows
  • North by Northwest
  • The Apartment
  • Cléo from 5 to 7
  • The Day the Earth Caught Fire
  • Viridiana
  • Advise and Consent
  • A Kind of Loving
  • The Manchurian Candidate
  • Dr. Strangelove
  • The Leopard
  • Charulata
  • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
  • Andrei Rublev
  • Accident
  • The Unfaithful Wife
  • Z
  • Alice’s Restaurant
  • The Wild Bunch
  • The Conformist
  • The Last Picture Show
  • Taking Off
  • W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
  • Don’t Look Now
  • Chinatown
  • The Conversation
  • Jaws
  • Nashville
  • Picnic at Hanging Rock
  • Cría cuervos
  • Kings of the Road
  • Annie Hall
  • The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
  • Coming Home
  • Newsfront
  • Farewell My Concubine
  • Alien
  • Breaker Morant
  • Manhunter
  • High Tide
  • Where Is the Friend’s House?
  • Distant Voices, Still Lives
  • Do the Right Thing
  • Sweetie
  • Lorenzo’s Oil
  • The Age of Innocence
  • Fargo
  • Drifting Clouds
  • Love Serenade
  • Jackie Brown
  • All About My Mother
  • Lantana
  • Million Dollar Baby
  • Brokeback Mountain
  • The Host
  • Animal Kingdom
  • Samson and Delilah
  • Nebraska
  • I, Daniel Blake
  • Roma
Dateline Bangkok has covered every ‘greatest film’ list published in the last two decades. But the book that My Favourite Movies most resembles is Barry Norman’s 100 Best Films of the Century from 1993.

26 May 2024

Comics and the Origins of Manga:
A Revisionist History


Comics and the Origins of Manga

Many Western readers were first introduced to Japanese manga by Frederik L. Schodt’s seminal book Manga! Manga! in 1983. One of Schodt’s chapters was titled A Thousand Years of Manga, situating manga within the entire tradition of Japanese visual culture. This approach is also adopted by Japanese manga scholars, and by the country’s cultural institutions, as it establishes manga as both artistically significant and inherently Japanese. Similarly, recent books such as Eric P. Nash’s Manga Kamishibai and Adam L. Kern’s Manga from the Floating World link manga to earlier, largely unrelated forms of Japanese art for commercial reasons: putting manga in the title sells more copies.

In his book Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History, published in 2022, Eike Exner challenges this concept of an apparently unbroken line from ancient scrolls to modern manga, debunking the “tradition of historiography that for nearly a century has sought to establish a continuity between present-day narrative Japanese comics and centuries of domestic visual art preceding them.” Exner argues that manga represents a break from traditional Japanese art, and that it developed instead as a result of innovations adopted from American comics. He shows how early US comic strips utilised new devices such as speech bubbles, which were later employed by Japanese mangaka: “Japanese and American comics came to rely on transdiegetic content like speech balloons instead of external narration to tell stories. Such audiovisual comics first developed in the United States and from there moved to Japan.”

Specifically, he cites the Bringing Up Father comic strip, which was first serialised in Japan in 1923. This American comic was popular in Japanese translation, and the following year it inspired the Japanese strip フキダシ (‘easygoing father’) by Yutaka Asō, which shared Bringing Up Father’s use of transdiegetic devices. Schodt also identified the link between these two strips, noting that フキダシ was “a direct spin-off of Bringing up Father, but its everyday-life situations and the self-effacing character of its hero had a quality Japanese readers naturally warmed to. Initially, the American influence was obvious”. But Schodt saw this as a fad rather than a paradigm shift: “Japanese newspapers realized the power of comic strips to attract readers and began hiring Japanese artists who used American styles. Foreign comics were exotic but, in the end, alien. Japanese comics were a smash hit.”

Exner is careful to avoid accusations that manga is a mere imitation of American comic style: “It would be simplistic to say that modern comics were “invented” in America and “copied” by the Japanese.” Instead, he argues that the relationship between the two cultures is one of cross-fertilisation, as the creator of Bringing Up Father was himself inspired by Japan’s ‘floating world’ woodblock prints: “The influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints on George McManus, whose Bringing Up Father in turn became the most influential and longest-running graphic narrative in prewar Japan, exemplifies the complexity of transnational cultural influence.”

Exner’s research represents a ground-breaking approach to manga studies. Rather than “portraying manga as something both older and more specifically Japanese than it really is”, he demonstrates that manga as a Japanese multipanel comic format has its roots in the 1890s, and that manga in the modern sense—with its transdiegetic speech bubbles—is exactly 100 years old. He suggests that the impact of American comics on manga has previously been downplayed as it “complicates the popular account of contemporary manga as the culmination of domestic popular art, which may explain why few have been interested in the recovery of this foreign influence.”

High Bias:
The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape


High Bias

High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, by Marc Masters, was published last year, the sixtieth anniversary of the compact cassette. The first in-depth history of the subject, the book shows “how the cassette tape emerged—as a technological development, a marketed product, a cultural icon—and how things have changed because of the cassette tape.”

Masters covers the invention of the cassette by Lou Ottens for Philips in 1963, and the introduction of the Sony Walkman personal stereo in 1979. Ottens appeared in the documentary Cassette (directed by Zack Taylor, Georg Petzold, and Seth Smoot), and Masters draws on unused extracts from that film’s interviews with Ottens. The book also looks at the recent cassette comeback, a resurgence in sales similar to the vinyl revival, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Miniaturisation led to even smaller analogue cassette formats, the tiniest being the picocassette developed by Dictaphone. Compact cassettes were the highest-selling physical music format between 1984 and 1990, though they were overtaken by CDs in 1991. Two books, The Art of Sound by Terry Burrows and Analogue by Deyan Sudjic, are devoted to cassette decks, boomboxes, and other vintage audio equipment.

18 May 2024

Tawee Ratchaneekorn:
A Retrospective Exhibition 1960–2022


Tawee Ratchaneekorn

Tawee Ratchaneekorn: A Retrospective Exhibition 1960–2022 (ทวี รัชนีกร ปรากฏการณ์แห่งอุดมการณ์) was held at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in 2022, accompanied by a lavish exhibition catalogue signed by the artist. The catalogue includes an interview with Tawee, and essays (in Thai and English) on his art and its political context.

Throughout his sixty-year artistic career, Tawee’s work has consistently drawn attention to socio-economic inequality. Walking around the exhibition, a surprising motif became apparent: many paintings, none of which were flattering portraits, featured golden crowns. Other paintings satirise self-serving Thai politicians and military generals.

Tawee Ratchaneekorn

The catalogue includes an erratum slip correcting a mistake in one of its essays: both the Thai and English versions mention the ‘14th and 16th October incidents’. As the erratum slip makes clear, this should refer to 14th October 1973 and 6th October 1976, the dates of two historical massacres. Another essay in the catalogue makes a similar error—citing the ‘16th and 19th October incidents’—though this has not been corrected.

Highlighting these errors might seem like nitpicking, but they are not mere typos. Although the two massacres are among the most notorious events in modern Thai history, they have been whitewashed to such an extent that many people cannot tell them apart. The title of Aomtip Kerdplanant’s short film 16 ตุลา (‘16th Oct.’) comments on this by conflating the two dates. Similarly, the book Prism of Photography (ปริซึมของภาพถ่าย) describes “accounts which confuse the two events, often fusing them into one”.

15 May 2024

The Politics of Nordsploitation:
History, Industry, Audiences


The Politics of Nordsploitation Let the Right One In

The Politics of Nordsploitation: History, Industry, Audiences, published in 2021, is the fourth volume in the Global Exploitation Cinemas series. Pietari Kääpä and Tommy Gustafsson coined ‘Nordsploitation’ as an umbrella term referring to the exploitation cinema of the Nordic region (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). The book offers an alternative history of Nordic cinema, focussing on marginalised and censored films: “The Politics of Nordsploitation is primarily interested in ‘forgotten’ films that are typically categorized as cheap and irrelevant by cultural authorities”.

The authors discuss the excesses of 1970s exploitation movies, and the moral panic over VHS horror films in Sweden, which predated the UK ‘video nasties’ controversy. Gustafsson even consulted a doctor to verify a notorious moment of eyeball violence in Thriller (En Grym Film) that was rumoured to utilise a real human body. (The GP “leaned towards it being fake”.) But, surprisingly, it’s the austere Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) that they cite as “in many ways the quintessential Nordic exploitation film”.