Check Out “The Song of the Shirt” via Auteuse Theory

I first wrote for Auteuse Theory (a blog about female film-makers) a few months ago about a DVD that cost £200 a pop. For my second article, I went all the way to London to bring back word of a forgotten gem, Sue Clayton’s The Song of the Shirt (1979). Ain’t I just the most committed film-nut ever? You can read the full article (and all the other great stuff on there) by clicking the linked extract below:

At first glance, The Song of the Shirt is hard to enjoy. The opening consists of migraine-inducing overlapping texts; squawking free-form clarinets, and jumbled quick-fire quotes. It seems initially that this attempt to deconstruct the grand narratives of liberal history, and reform the component parts into a radical critique, lacks any kind of structural coherence. However, it soon emerges that this actually a brilliant foreshadowing of the structure of the film. Eventually, out of the chaos comes a beautifully orchestrated profundity.

Check out “A Pervert’s Guide to Slavoj Žižek”

I have written another repulsive, gushing love letter to Slavoj Žižek to review his new film, which you can now read on the Norwich Film Festival blog. Check it out in full by clicking here… or on the linking sample paragraph below. 

Speaking frankly, as is his custom, Slavoj Žižek said in a 2011 Guardian interview, “most of the left hates me even though I am supposed to be one of the world’s leading communist intellectuals.” Two years on, with the DVD release of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the shape of the British left might be changing (the SWP who fiercely criticised him for his words on an old Russian proverb regarding the horrors of rape, have effectively collapsed because of their actions regarding rape accusations in their own party) but the collective disdain remains. And whilst of course, we should always be willing to have conversations with even the loftiest of figures when they take problematic lines on any subject, there is something opportunistic about the way the orthodox left have approached this in writing off Žižek and his methods entirely.