Adam, Author at The Open College of the Arts

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Adam

Will This Become a Cult Movie?

Posted: 14/08/15 11:44 | 1 Comments

‘Dear White People’ is a film that will flourish through word-of-mouth. If you haven’t yet seen it and it is showing locally I urge you to support the film and spread the word. Film culture needs its cult films. They don’t come around that often.

The Troubled Artist

Posted: 30/07/15 09:45 | 2 Comments

Adam reflects on the troubled artist after recently viewing Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse.

Crafting an illusion

Posted: 01/06/15 04:02 | 1 Comments

A headline in Saturday’s Guardian newspaper, “Hi-tech Hollywood Scares off its Top Monster-maker”, set me wondering. The story concerned the withdrawal from film-making by a hero of mine, Rick Baker, one of Hollywood’s most successful and gifted make-up and special effects artists. It is a sad day for film-making generally when someone as gifted as […]

Slow Film

Posted: 07/05/15 05:09 | 16 Comments

I ask only this of you. Don’t be tempted to fast forward. Settle down, switch off other appliances and remove all distractions. This season may never be repeated.

The French are back in town

Posted: 28/04/15 09:35 | 8 Comments

The Cannes Film Festival is many things; spectacle, charade, always contentious and a cultural event that bathes, as it does, on the shoes of the Mediterranean, in lively, often scandalous and always guaranteed contentious discourse. Yet, for the most part, what films the festival loves are not always ones an audience does. However, in my view, it is always worth seeing as many films that have won gongs at Cannes as one can

Now we are all broadcasters

Posted: 08/04/15 07:16 | 6 Comments

The very first commercially produced film camera, the cinematograph, designed and built by the Lumiere Brothers in Paris at the dawn of cinema in the last years of the 19th century were of such huge social and cultural significance because they became the principal means by which the very first film makers, ordinary men and […]

Being inspired

Posted: 23/03/15 02:53 | 0 Comments

Some years ago I was invited to sit on a panel at the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) then being held in Adelaide. I had been making a number of anthropological documentary series in the former USSR, the UK and Israel and was in the thick of a European project working with young film makers […]

It's all about the money

Posted: 15/03/15 05:15 | 2 Comments

So why is the business of film so important to understanding and appreciating film culture? I make no apology for returning to this subject and I will do so again when I think there is something interesting to help focus the mind on this question. Last week the BBC broadcast the final episode of a […]

Going, going, going…

Posted: 26/02/15 09:41 | 2 Comments

It’s a familiar refrain and I make no apology for quoting it, but, “Art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake,” for which we have to thank the 1975 hit by band 10CC and the penmanship of lyricists Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart comes to mind as we wave farewell to the Oscars. One only […]

Who cares about the gatekeeper?

Posted: 16/02/15 10:51 | 13 Comments

John Umney recently wrote an excellently considered and nicely penned blog about Adam Curtis’s latest film, Bitter Lake. At the end of his blog he asked a very pertinent question about why the film was not screened on TV but released only through iPlayer. Sadly, I don’t have the answer, although I do not share […]