Centre for the Moving Image proposes 11-floor building with screens, learning spaces and auditorium
The organisation behind the Edinburgh film festival has submitted a planning application for a £50m film centre that would be the first of its kind in the UK.
The Centre for the Moving Image has proposed an accessible and environmentally sustainable 11-floor building that it says would be a focal point for Edinburgh’s film community.
Continue reading...Defense team pleads for minimum sentence after Weinstein was convicted of forcing oral sex on one woman and raping another
Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers have petitioned the judge who presided over his trial and rape conviction in a New York court to sentence him to the minimum of five years in prison, controversially citing the fallen producer’s “remarkable accomplishments”.
The disgraced mogul’s defense team, led by Donna Rotunno, are pleading for the very lightest possible sentence. Judge James Burke will reconvene at the New York supreme court at 9.30am on Wednesday to hand down his sentence, which could be as severe as 29 years in prison.
Continue reading...Singer says senator is the ‘Real Deal’ who offers the big changes needed to beat Trump
Neil Young has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, saying the Vermont senator is “the real deal” to win the Democratic nomination.
Writing on his personal website, the 74-year-old folk singer said that Sanders’ policies on climate change, student debt, healthcare and the minimum wage were the “big changes” required to beat Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Continue reading...As an artist and a celebrity, Warhol changed the world. But what really went on behind those shades? Ahead of Tate’s epic show, our writer unleashes his inner Andy
I am in agony. I’m sitting at home wearing a Breton top and a pair of shades, my hair freshly bleached, my belly swollen and sore. Perhaps that’s because I have just eaten five tins of Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup. Why would anyone do that? Well, I’m trying to live like Andy Warhol, the pop artist who died in the 1980s but is still a household name. And it’s not going smoothly.
Like the cafes of Paris or the skyscrapers of New York, Warhol is is so omnipresent in popular culture, the average person could probably draw a good likeness of him, despite knowing little about him. It’s the same with his work. Every framed tin of Campbell’s soup or colour-saturated portrait of Marilyn Monroe screams Warhol. And most people are familiar with his most famous quote: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Continue reading...Media companies linked to institute that also claims Leonardo da Vinci, Cervantes and Columbus were Catalan
The Catalan government had paid €3m (£2.6m) in subsidies to media companies with close links to a body that claims that Shakespeare, Cervantes and Columbus – among others – were Catalan.
The figures were revealed in a parliamentary answer given by Pere Aragonès, the Catalan vice-president, who said the money had been paid since 2012 to two media companies owned by Albert Codinas, the joint founder and current president of the New History Institute (INH) – one of which shares an address with it.
Continue reading...The veteran actor, best known for his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, as well as roles in Star Wars and Hannah and Her Sisters, has died
•Peter Bradshaw on Max von Sydow: an aristocrat of cinema who made me weep
•A life in pictures
Max von Sydow, the Swedish actor who made his name in a series of landmark films with Ingmar Bergman before progressing to international stardom, has died in France. He was 90.
Related: Max von Sydow: god of gravitas
Continue reading...A petition is calling on the site to prevent non-consensual videos being posted – and highlights the lack of industry regulation
The news that 350,000 people – and counting – have signed a petition calling on Pornhub – the world’s most popular porn site – to stop posting non-consensual videos and marketing them as “pornography” is not surprising to me.
Pornhub’s argument that “extremists” are lobbying to shut them down is ridiculous. I’m non-religious, liberal and sex positive and in no way “anti-porn”.
Continue reading...Petition highlighting failure of Pornhub to protect rape and revenge porn victims has attracted over 350,000 signatures
An online petition accusing Pornhub, the UK’s biggest open access porn site, from profiting from videos of rape and sexual abuse has reached over 350,000 signatures.
Pornhub is the world’s biggest porn site and was visited 42bn times last year. It is free to access, with no age restrictions, and raises revenue through advertising and paid-for promotions by porn producers.
Continue reading...Rachel Louise Snyder talks about the personal history behind her award-winning book, No Visible Bruises, which charts the shocking rise of familial violence against women in the US
In 2002, Dorothy Giunta-Cotter was shot and killed in her own home in Massachusetts by her husband and relentless abuser of 20 years, William Cotter. He then turned the gun on himself. Dorothy, 35, had fled from him with their two daughters a few days earlier because Cotter had begun to hurt their 11-year-old, but she had refused the offer of a refuge. She told the police that if her daughters were with her, Cotter would find them, and kill all three. “She attempted to avert the worst of two terrible outcomes,” wrote the American journalist Rachel Louise Snyder in an article published in the New Yorker in 2013, “the loss of her daughters’ lives along with her own.”
That article, A Raised Hand, became part of eight years of research from one of the frontlines of what the World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed “a global epidemic”. Snyder’s work is now an award-winning book, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. In the UK, the issue of domestic abuse is not “taboo”, which Snyder says the subject still is in the US. Here, while it may be a family secret, it is recognised and discussed nationally; the impact of austerity on closing refuges, slashing legal aid and axing specialist domestic abuse services, has kept the issue high on the UK agenda. It’s a crime that impacts on men too but women make up the overwhelming majority of victims. Eighty women were killed by a partner or ex in the year to March 2019, an increase of 27% on the previous year, while an incident of domestic abuse is reported every minute in England and Wales. The government estimates that the social and economic cost of domestic abuse is a staggering £66bn a year.
Continue reading...The most popular symbol of the radical left in Germany is an avowed anti-capitalist and a firm believer in collective property. He takes down neo-Nazis with the same bouncy energy as he tackles property speculators.
Books expounding his views, running at several volumes, top the German bestseller charts; posters bearing his face are currently plastered all over the country’s cities.
Continue reading...To mark International Women’s Day, ActionAid is staging a photography exhibition that celebrates female trailblazers in poor countries – from the Guatemalan hip-hop artist who uses her music to champion feminism, to the founder of Kabul’s first yoga studio. All of the images, which are on show at the Oxo Tower in London until 8 March, are taken by female photographers
Continue reading...With new museums opening in Africa, and calls for restitution increasing, old institutions are being forced to address the legacies of empire
Anthropology and archaeology were among the most important of the colonial disciplines. They derived their power from the trick of collapsing time and space. In his classic 1983 book Time and the Other, Amsterdam-based anthropologist Johannes Fabian described how this illusion operated. It was as if the further the colonial explorer travelled from the metropolis, the further back in time they went – until they found themselves, whether in Africa, Tasmania, or Tierra del Fuego, no longer in the present, but in the Stone Age.
Anthropology museums – which hold “world culture” collections – first developed in Europe, especially Germany and Britain, in the late 19th century. They were designed to realise these exoticising time-warps. In these places, the racist ideologies that sought to justify and naturalise European imperialism were institutionalised, helping create the idea of a distinction between “primitive art” and “civilisation”. Today the colonial mindset of European anthropology museums is being questioned and rethought – and we should all be paying attention.
Continue reading...Harvey Weinstein’s record of sexual attacks and harassment against women dates back to the 1970s in a “lifetime of abuse” in which he “trapped women into his exclusive control and assaulted or attempted to assault them”, according to New York prosecutors.
In a note to the New York supreme court released on Friday ahead of Weinstein’s sentencing next week, the lead prosecutor at his rape trial essentially threw the book at the fallen movie mogul. Without providing the state’s desired sentence, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon urged Judge James Burke to impose “a sentence that reflects the seriousness of [his] offenses, his total lack of remorse for the harm he has caused, and the need to deter him and others from engaging in further criminal conduct”.
Continue reading...Hachette has dropped plans to publish a memoir by Woody Allen, the Oscar-winning film director who has been accused of sexually abusing his daughter.
“We take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly,” the publishing company said in a statement.
Continue reading...In 1983 ministers of the revolutionary Sandinista government lined up on the tarmac to welcome Pope John Paul II on his first visit to Nicaragua. Moments later, TV cameras showed the pontiff wagging a finger at the kneeling Ernesto Cardenal, priest and minister of culture, admonishing him for mixing religion and politics.
But for Cardenal, who has died aged 95, there was no distinction between the two. His beliefs as a Roman Catholic growing up in Central America in the 1940s and 50s led him to seek social justice in a country that had for many years suffered under the dynastic rule of the Somoza family. His faith also meant he could not avoid political responsibility if it was thrust upon him.
Continue reading...Why did they waste their best tracks on B-sides? Were Noel’s lyrics really that bad? It’s time to reappraise the Mancunian legends …
A stand-alone single that was reportedly removed from Don’t Believe the Truth to cut down on the number of Noel Gallagher-sung tracks, Lord Don’t Slow Me Down offered fruitful, grimy repurposing of the old guitar lick from the Yardbirds’ version of Bo Diddley’s I’m a Man – by way of David Bowie’s The Jean Genie and the Sweet’s Blockbuster.
Continue reading...Discovery of secret memos led to two-year search for 19th-century cultural treasure
Forty-five years after the Netherlands promised its return, a gold-inlaid dagger surrendered by a “rebel prince” after his failed 1830 uprising against Dutch rule in Indonesia has been handed back to Jakarta.
The kris, a dagger with a waved blade, was among a number of Prince Diponegoro’s belongings that the Netherlands’ vowed in 1975 to return, only for the priceless cultural treasure to go missing.
Continue reading...From ‘Wuhan-400’, the deadly virus invented by Dean Koontz in 1981, to the plague unleashed in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, novelists have long been fascinated by pandemics
According to an online conspiracy theory, the American author Dean Koontz predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 1981. His novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” – eerily predicting the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge. But the similarities end there: Wuhan-400 is described as having a “kill‑rate” of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the “perfect” biological weapon. An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe.
But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease, from contemporary science fiction all the way back to Homer’s Iliad. Even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance. Angry gods are better than no gods at all.
Continue reading...Director’s films ‘propaganda against the system’, judges reported to have declared – but coronoavirus outbreak casts doubt on whether he will accept summons to prison
Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian director who won the the top award at last month’s Berlin film festival, has been ordered to serve a one-year prison sentence over his movies, his lawyer has said.
Rasoulof’s sentence arose from three films that Iran’s authorities found to be “propaganda against the system”, his lawyer Nasser Zarafshan told the Associated Press. The sentence also included an order than he stop film-making for two years, the lawyer said.
Continue reading...The self-produced film by faith leader Ryuho Okawa is woefully misjudged and reveals the laughable reality behind Happy Science
Here’s a biopic about a world-changing faith leader, a man who has published 2,500 books – according to his website – including accounts of his seances with the ghosts of world leaders. (Available to buy on Amazon: Margaret Thatcher’s Miraculous Message – An Interview with the Iron Lady 19 Hours After Her Death.) If you’ve never heard him, Ryuho Okawa is the founder and CEO of Happy Science, a religious movement that claims to have 11 million followers worldwide; some call it a cult. Now Okawa has executive-produced a long and incredibly leaden drama about himself written by his daughter, Sayaka.
If you’re going to make a film about yourself called Immortal Hero, hiring an actor with knee-wobbling charisma should be your number-one priority. But lead Hisaaki Takeuchi plays a self-help author called Makoto Mioya – an obvious stand-in for Okawa – with a blank-faced and catatonic presence. When he’s rushed to hospital after a heart attack, Mioya is told he won’t make it through the night. But he miraculously cures himself with the power of his mind. It turns out that Mioya has been visited his entire life by celestial spirits (they look like flickering holograms from an 80s kids’ TV series). Now these spirits command him to fulfil his destiny as the chosen one by unifying world religions. So Mioya abandons the self-help racket and branches into the lucrative business of religion.
Continue reading...