A materialist history of Hollywood, one year at a time, from 1913 to the present.
Subscribe:.rss.atom.json.md.m3u.pls
Live Last read · last published · next check
For the day of Napoléon's birth, 15 August, I'm republishing one of my favourite essays, about Abel Gance's vast project: an epic of national self-creation and a jewel of the cinematic form.
Darth Vader gives Area Manager.
Dive into the archive - it's free and full of surprises from the whole history of Hollywood.
How did divorce, the heartbreaking dissolution of a marriage, become the stuff of pop fiction and blockbuster movies?
Peak divorce. In which we meet a caricature of liberated America and learn nothing.
The strange apparatus of cinema…
You were probably in a school production of this strange and rather cruel story.
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg is a European aristocratic fable resolved in a very Hollywood way.
Indulge me while I insert Star Wars, Star Trek and Cixin Liu's Dark Forest into the 20th Century.
You wait till you see the dark enlightenment.
Thinking about how to write about Star Wars. A free preview post.
Frank Capra somehow meets Bertolt Brecht.
Now, in between the movie essays: interesting links, quotes and shorter pieces…
Exemplary movie-making and extreme moral cowardice
A city within the City of Quartz.
A winnowing of the San Francisco elite
Sometimes I make t-shirts and hoodies and mugs based on the movies I write about here.
The mystery of faith
The distant future is nasty, brutish and so much sand in your picnic.
Debt as happy ending
