BFI Film Classics; Shoah

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is a nine hour documentary about the Holocaust. Obviously it’s a sombre experience, but I can’t think of a more effective work of art on this most horrifying of subjects.

Vice’s monograph makes explicit Lanzmann’s aesthetic/moral strategy in a very interesting way. It also takes considerably less than nine hours to get through.

London Under – Peter Ackroyd

In a perfect meeting of author and subject, London’s finest mythologiser goes underground to explore tunnels, sewers, caverns and, most fascinating of all, lost rivers. I probably knew 60 or 70 per cent of the contents here, but I’m happy to read Ackroyd riffing away.

When I next go to London, I plan to visit the Cabinet War Rooms and to locate the grill just off Farringdon Road below which you can still here the Fleet rushing below.

Morality Play – Barry Unsworth

This is one of those historical novels that almost obliges the reviewer to use the phrase “well researched”, containing as it does lots of social detail and a recognition of the entirely alien worldviews of the medieval setting. The story dramatizes a moment of transition from traditional archetypal drama to a new style of theatre that reflects real contemporary concerns. 

The fiction associates the shattering of old assumptions with the revelation of great evil, as the re-enactment of a murder exposes the flaws in the general understanding of the case. It’s a brilliant device and, if all this sounds a tad high-faluting, it’s a cracking thriller too, reminiscent in some ways of Iain Pears’ An Incident of the Fingerpost.

Kick Ass - Mark Millar and John Romita Jr

You saw the movie, right? If anything, this is even more outrageous. There is a gag about Hit Girl snorting cocaine thinking it is a scientific strength-enhancing potion, and the violence is more crunchy. I laughed a lot.

Can the forthcoming sequel possibly sustain the transgressive sense of fun?

How Plays Work – David Edgar

This is fascinating stuff, from a master craftsman. It is written primarily for practitioners but, from a theatre-goers point of view it holds lots of interest.

I must admit I was surprised by the number of references to screenplays (both TV and film). Surely the forms are made using completely different sets of tools?

Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse

I think I might have read this at school when I was about 14. Lord knows what I made of it, a grimly hilarious and touching portrayal of adolescent life in a 1950s working class town. The film version understandably makes much of Billy’s fantasy life, but it isn’t quite as significant here. 

I was surprised at the sheer quality of the writing. How about “frowning women, their black, scratched handbags crammed with half-digested grievances”.