Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage

The standard histories of collage as an artistic practice, such as Collage by Brandon Taylor, trace its origins to 1912, and the newspaper cuttings appliquéd to Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Herta Wescher’s Collage (Die Collage), the definitive work on the subject, discussed nineteenth century examples in addition to the Cubists and their successors. The recent exhibition Cut and Paste antedated the technique by 400 years, though Freya Gowrley’s groundbreaking book Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage, published this week, traces the history of collage over thousands of years.

As she writes in her introduction, Gowrley (who contributed to the Cut and Paste exhibition catalogue) “aims to provide a more expansive history of collage than has previously been produced.” The book’s publisher calls it a “global history of collage from the origins of paper to today”, and at 400 pages it lives up to that description. All previous histories of collage have focused entirely on European and American artists, though the scope of Gowrley’s book is truly international, with coverage of collage in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Again, unlike previous histories of the topic, Fragmentary Forms considers collage not only as fine art, but also examines its role in taxonomic collections, devotional objects, printed ephemera, and domestic craftmaking.

Priyanandana Rangsit v. Nattapoll Chaiching

The Civil Court has dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed in 2021 by the aristocrat Priyanandana Rangsit against the historian Nattapoll Chaiching and his publisher, Same Sky Books. Nattapoll is the author of the bestselling ขุนศึก ศักดินา และพญาอินทรี (‘feudal warlords and the eagle’). His earlier book ขอฝันใฝ่ในฝันอันเหลือเชื่อ (‘I dream an incredible dream’) also saw a revival in sales after it was among five titles seized by police from the offices of Same Sky.

On 5th March 2021, aristocrat Priyanandana Rangsit sued Nattapoll and Same Sky for defamation, seeking ฿50 million in damages. According to the lawsuit, Nattapoll’s books incorrectly assert that her grandfather, Prince Rangsit Prayurasakdi, sought an improper political influence over Phibun Songkhram’s government in the 1940s. She argued that this allegation about her long-dead ancestor tarnished her family name, and was thus defamatory to her personally.

Yesterday, the court came to the obvious conclusion that Prince Rangsit, having died in 1951, was not affected by the content of Nattapoll’s books. In the court’s judgement, Priyanandana’s legal case was therefore invalid from the beginning. This ruling is hardly surprising, though more questionable is the fact that it took almost four years for such a spurious case to be dismissed.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Taschen published The Stanley Kubrick Archives as a limited coffee-table book in 2005. Then, in 2009, came their collector’s edition of Kubrick’s Napoleon, limited to 1,000 copies: ten volumes inside one enormous book. Another collector’s edition followed in 2014: the making of Kubrick’s 2001, limited to 1,500 copies in a metal slipcase. Of course, these books were far from cheap, though last year’s collector’s edition on the making of Kubrick’s The Shining (limited to 1,000 copies) cost a prohibitive $1,500 (almost as much as the other three titles combined).

Fortunately, a year after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is now available in a more modest edition, costing around a tenth of the original price. The new edition consists of two substantial volumes in a slipcase: a book of photographs (many previously unpublished) styled to look like a scrapbook; and The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a comprehensive account of the film’s production.

The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is credited to both J.W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich, though Rinzler wrote the majority of the text. During the project’s gestation, there was some confusion around the authorship: Unkrich (a Pixar film director) initially referred to it as his book, without mentioning Rinzler’s input, and then implied that he had hired Rinzler. In fact, Rinzler had begun the manuscript independently, and the two later agreed to collaborate.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining benefits both from Rinzler’s expertise as a writer of making-of books (such as The Making of Alien), and Unkrich’s passionate interest in The Shining. (He wrote the introduction to Danel Olson’s book, also titled Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.) The original collector’s edition also included supplemental volumes such as a Saul Bass sketchbook and a reproduction of the film’s continuity script.

War

Bob Woodward’s most recent books on presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden all have one-word titles: Fear, Rage, Peril, and now War. Woodward covered the first few months of the Biden administration in Peril, and War—released earlier this month—is his account of Biden’s responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Isreal’s war with Gaza. (He previously wrote a similar book on Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Obama’s Wars.)

Woodward’s reporting is always extraordinary—his and Carl Bernstein’s investigation into the Watergate scandal ultimately led to Richard Nixon’s resignation—but War is a remarkable book. Almost every chapter features direct quotes from secure telephone calls and private meetings between Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and others.

The US intelligence services were aware of Putin’s plan to attack Ukraine, and tried several times to convince Zelensky that it would happen. Woodward reports that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told a skeptical Zelensky: “we believe there is a very high risk that the Russians will re-invade your country.” Zelensky was equally dismissive when CIA director Bill Burns reiterated: “There is going to be a significant invasion of your country”. Even a week before the war began, Zelensky remained unconvinced when Vice President Kamala Harris warned him: “You face a potentially imminent invasion.”

After the 7th October 2023 attack on Isreal by Hamas, Woodward shows how Biden and his most senior diplomats were focused on seeking assurances from Netanyahu that his retaliation would be proportionate. Netanyahu insisted that “not an ounce of anything will go into Gaza to help people,” though Blinken and Biden convinced him to reconsider. As the war dragged on, Biden sought to minimise any potential escalations, and Woodward quotes at length from a wide-ranging 4th April call between Biden and Netanyahu debating an invasion of Rafah, humanitarian aid, and the hostage crisis.

Biden’s private opinion of Netanyahu is clear from War. Woodward reports that Biden called the Israeli PM “a fucking liar,” and added for good measure: “That son of a bitch Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!” But it was the book’s reporting about former president Donald Trump that made more headlines: Woodward quotes Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, describing Trump as “a total fascist”. (Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly agreed with Milley in a recent New York Times interview.)

Woodward’s own assessment of Trump (who is suing him after the release of The Trump Tapes) is also unequivocal. He ended Rage by describing Trump as “the wrong man for the job” though he goes much further in War: “Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is unfit to lead the country. Trump was far worse than Richard Nixon, the provably criminal president... Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024.”

Chris Whipple (The Fight of His Life) and Franklin Foer (The Last Politician) have also written books on the Biden White House. Simon Shuster’s The Showman is an account of Zelensky’s presidency and the war in Ukraine.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

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.

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”.

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

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.

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.

The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau

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.”

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.

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”.

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.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

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.

“...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 life: “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.

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

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

The Movie Book (2nd edition)

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
  
• 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
  
• Jaws
  
• Picnic at Hanging Rock
  
• Taxi Driver
  
• Annie Hall
  
• Star Wars IV
  
• 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
  
• 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
  
• Scarface
  
• Blood Simple
  
• Paris, Texas
  
• Come and See
  
• Brazil
  
• Down by Law
  
• Jesus of Montreal
  
• Hearts of Darkness
  
• 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.)

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.)

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.

No Way Out —Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris

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.

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.
• 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.