All Slights Deserved

Marcel Ophüls' Oscar-winning documentary is a sprawling epic that seeks answers to questions both factual and philosophical. Through a composite of dozens of interviews with subjects in France, Germany and the Americas he builds a portrait of the career of Barbie, the Nazi war criminal dubbed the Butcher of Lyon, perhaps most infamous for his capture and torture of the French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. The director's diligent efforts to get to the bottom of the Moulin affair, and who may or may not have exposed him to the Nazis, make up much of the first half of the four and half hours. Even forty years after the event the wounds and recriminations continue to fester in the survivors and the testimonies suggest that the matter of collaboration is not quite as clear as one might imagine. It also touches upon Barbie's formative years and the first-hand accounts of those who suffered from his sadistic interrogation techniques. Yet perhaps more astonishing are the disc...

Leni Riefenstahl: evil Nazi film-maker or pioneering genius of pre-war cinema? Or perhaps both? Either way Riefenstahl remains probably the most influential woman film-maker ever. That's perhaps all the more remarkable because her reputation is principally due to two films, both documentaries. The first, Triumph of the Will is an account of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg; a chilling work of propaganda that showcases Hitler's hypnotic genius and the spell he was casting upon the German people. Although a certain mystique has built up around this film and its sinister subtext in truth it's not the most compelling viewing to a contemporary audience. The more innovative of Riefenstahl's techniques - such as the use of telescopic lenses and aerial photography - were assimilated by the wider film-making fraternity, but many scenes drag interminably and lack subtlety. Her second, Olympia is generally viewed more sympathetically. An epic three and a half hour accou...

In Rio de Janeiro, in June 2000, 21 year-old Sandro Rosa do Nascimento, a young man from an impoverished background, boarded a public bus and held its passengers at gunpoint. What started as an armed robbery rapidly turned into a hostage situation as the police arrived, beginning a four hour stand-off that was captured by television crews and broadcast live to the nation. The incident became a cause célèbre, highlighting issues both about the state of Brazilean policing and the plight of those less privileged in the country. Made two years after the event Padhila and Lacerda's documentary interviews many of those involved that day - including hostages and police - as well as exploring Sandro's story and the desperate circumstances that led him to attempt the robbery. For those of us not familiar with the original event it plays out like a tense drama, albeit one from which we suspect not all the principals are going to come out alive. Naturally much use is made of the televisio...

Early one crisp Saturday morning last spring I found myself standing in front of a supermarket in Candem, the former site of the once-renowned Bedford Music Hall. I was spending the day revisiting locations featured in The London Nobody Knows , an obscure 1968 documentary in which James Mason travelled around pointing out obscure Victorian landmarks in the capital. Sadly, while Candem has held on to some of its old charm better than many parts of London, there was nothing to see. The Bedford, by then semi-derelict, was torn down a couple of years after it was filmed. Its fate was typical of many of the old music halls and the working class variety shows which had all but completed their slow and lingering death by the onset of the sixties. The London Nobody Knows wasn't the only film to sentimentalise this vanishing culture. In the same year came A Little of What You Fancy , a kind of potted history of the music hall complete with re-enactments and renditions of many of the po...

The difficulty of writing about a subject close to your heart is how to adequately express the wealth of memories and emotions it invokes without parylysing the critical faculty. It's one reason that I'll probably avoid re-viewing any of my favourite films for this blog. For the main part they're bound to a particular place and time, a point in my life; indirectly they become a means of revisiting that period even though the film itself might have been made many years earlier. And for me much the same applies to comics, although it's a nebulous subject. The affair started when I was five or six years old when my mum picked up a copy of the Incredible Hulk Pocket Book - a black and white British reprint of the character's origin - at a school jumble sale. It probably wasn't the first comic I'd seen but certainly the first to grab my attention; the bold Jack Kirby visuals conjuring up a dark, strange world inhabited by a sinister brute more fearsome than ...