Search Results: In the News

In 1979, a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher swept into office in the United Kingdom. Invoking the Vagrancy Act of 1824, the Tories gave the police new powers to stop and search people based only on “reasonable suspicion.” Members of Britain’s black community— primarily Caribbean émigrés and their descendants from the “Windrush Generation” who were invited to England to fill job vacancies in the post-war economy—were especially affected by Thatcherism’s cruelties.

To the degree that hoboing persists in the popular imagination today, it’s mostly in a cartooned version: The unshaven crank with a colorful nickname and a bindle and a secondhand top hat with the lid popped off. What this leaves out is only an entire ethos—the American railroad system was built up by vulture capitalism at its worst; the rail-rider, making free use of this amenity while paying nothing into the system, is effectively indulging in a form of civil disobedience.

The Covered Wagon (1923) is one of the most important films in the history of the Western genre, even though it has been mostly forgotten today. It was the top grossing film of 1923, earning nearly twice as much at the box office that year as Cecil B. DeMille’s first attempt at filming The Ten Commandments (1923). It was one of the highest grossing films of the 1920s, and it was the highest grossing Western of the decade.

For this 1975 masterpiece set during the horrors of WWII, Lina Wertmüller triumphed as the first woman to be nominated as Best Director by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America. I have to start by saying this, because it was and still is, gigantic to me personally.

When I was a young woman in the early 1970s, I didn’t even know yet that I wanted to make movies. I was a waitress, a poet, and a single mom, navigating my way through lefty politics, feminism, the drug culture, and the sexual revolution the previous generation had left us to process.

For thirty years, approximately 1970-2000, when I was in my twenties and thirties and forties, always a Godard devotee, I thought of Pierrot le fou (1965) as my favorite Godard movie, perhaps my favorite movie of all time. The period of his politics-first flicks, which followed quickly upon Pierrot—La Chinoise (1967) being more or less the first— felt tedious. I respected them, but they were too preoccupied with recondite Communist political analysis to hold my interest. Now that situation has reversed. Pierrot le fou seems dated and overly romantic, while La Chinoise is fresh and absorbing, a caress in its way, a thought-provoking caress. No, it’s not a movie I could ever call my favorite in any broad category, but it is glorious to experience.