Holocaust
Son of SaulFriday, 29 April 2016![]() In the world of the concentration camp, clothes or the lack of them sealed your fate. What you wore marked out your role; whether it was the blue-gray Waffen SS uniform, a doctor’s grubby white coat, the striped suits given to slave-workers, or your... Read more... |
ExperimenterWednesday, 23 March 2016![]() If an authority figure ordered you to inflict pain on another person, to what extent would you comply? That is the subject of Experimenter, which focuses on Stanley Milgram's controversial obedience experiment. Unable to secure a theatrical run in... Read more... |
Fabio Mauri: Oscuramento, Hauser & WirthSaturday, 12 December 2015![]() Following his inclusion in this year’s Venice and Istanbul biennials, Italian artist Fabio Mauri has leapt into the limelight. He is from the same generation as Mario Merz; but whereas Merz and his Arte Povera colleagues have long since enjoyed an... Read more... |
Lee Miller, Imperial War MuseumTuesday, 20 October 2015![]() What a woman. Does the news that Kate Winslet is to play the polymath Lee Miller in a Hollywood biopic mean a kind of sanctified apotheosis of Miller's quite extraordinary life? The story is so dramatic it transcends any fiction. Her path was... Read more... |
Philip Guston, Timothy Taylor GallerySunday, 21 June 2015![]() Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king in Hamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his... Read more... |
Now This Is Not the End, Arcola TheatreSaturday, 06 June 2015![]() Few cities have been so central to the European imagination as Berlin in the 20th century. At the centre of imperial power, then of Weimar, next the hub of Nazi Germany, then for some 50 years a symbol of a divided Cold War world. In Rose Lewenstein... Read more... |
1945: The Savage Peace, BBC TwoMonday, 25 May 2015![]() “Enjoy the war, for the peace will be savage,” was apparently a macabre joke circulating in the German military towards the end of World War Two. Peter Molloy’s searing documentary, 1945: The Savage Peace, showed us just how prescient it would prove... Read more... |
DVD: Germany Pale MotherFriday, 22 May 2015![]() This is a great, neglected film of Nazi Germany. After being savaged by German critics for its “subjective” and “sentimental” perspective on the Third Reich at its 1980 Berlin Festival premiere, it was released with 30 minutes slashed. This is the... Read more... |
Phoenix reviewFriday, 08 May 2015![]() Although the shadows of the Holocaust and German guilt hang over Christian Petzold’s sixth outing with his formidable muse Nina Hoss, Phoenix is more concerned with the essence of female identity. It contextualises in dreadful circumstances and... Read more... |
I Wish to Die Singing, Finborough TheatreThursday, 30 April 2015![]() Agitprop is a term that seems to have dropped out of use. It has too many negative connotations; it smacks of political rant. Yet artistic director Neil McPherson, whose small and feisty Finborough Theatre at Earls Court receives no public funding... Read more... |
The Decent OneSaturday, 18 April 2015![]() Remember the Hitler diaries? Stern and the Sunday Times were so eager for them to be true they went ahead and published even after historian Hugh Trevor Roper had changed his mind about their authenticity. Such was the hunger for stories about Nazis... Read more... |
DVD: Night Will FallFriday, 06 February 2015![]() The quotation from which this film’s title is taken runs thus: “Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.” It’s drawn from the voiceover of a documentary called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey that was... Read more... |
