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"There have been no comments made here yet."

Emily Blunt and Natalie Press - My Summer of Love - great film, fine direction.

Russel Maliphant Sylvie Guillem - fantastic. He did some great stuff with directional light and shadow which was very cinematic and photographic. Id love to be able to go see his stuff.

Excellent balance - and tension, in the commentators on the programme tonight - Ekow, Kate, Adam. Made me smile!

Has Ekow Eshan has been told to interrupt less? He was uncharacteristically non-interrupting last night even though we could see him itching to get in and, on a few occasions, he tried but was talked over. Great. We could hear what everyone had to say and make sense of it all.

CULTURE OR PROPAGANDA?

"The book was first published in France in 2006 selling more than a million copies and winning both the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roma.

Jonathan Littell, a Jewish American who grew up in France and wrote the original book in French, was inspired to write the novel after seeing Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, an acclaimed documentary about the holocaust."

Meanwhile , but not covered by Newsnight. Nor .

Now, serious questions for reviewers and readers alike. What is truth? What is fiction? Who deserves prizes? What do prizes win?

Hmmm...

"Max Aue, the narrator [of 'The Kindly Ones']..is interested in the potential philosophical justifications for the mass murder of Jews and regularly consults Plato. At the same time, he is a closet homosexual who once had an incestuous affair with his sister and is a suspect for the brutal murder of his mother and stepfather."
//
"The Kindly Ones, unsurprisingly for such an ambitious novel, does have flaws. The copious scatological and sexual references may strike some readers as excessive. From the lengthy descriptions of Aue's diarrhoea to the dying slave workers in the Reich's factories who shit standing up because to stop working would mean certain death, this is a novel preoccupied with faecal matter. At one point, Max, living his own Armageddon as Germany collapses around him, sodomises himself with a tree branch."
//
"Max Aue, the SS executioner, states the truth with typically brutal clarity: "I am a man like other men, I am a man like you.""

...

Hopefully, critical readers get the drift.

When reality is articulated through a camera and on to a TV or PC monitor something different happens to how we experience reality - it becomes cropped, this has the effect of making us critical and concentrate on stuff which to us looks "correct" or "incorrect" or "imperfect" or "perfect" If your a photographer doing say formal portraiture for actors or models you quickly realise that very slight movements of the head and expression of face in our reality transpose to the difference between making what might be seen as a great shot or a dud - just a few millimeters can be the difference. Same goes for getting your point across on TV and how you look, how your dressed, it becomes amplified. There is no need to shout and be over assertive, either with ones mouth or breast(s) English costume dramas are a bit (or lot) of classy visual fluff that keep certain groups in work and business, pulls in the dosh, so someone can make a better flick down the road . I agree with some of the views but no need to give me more of a headache.

Being to aware of this reduction and concentration can make people who perform in front of the camera neurotic, some photographers and maybe directors are to blame insisting on very slight movements and causing over self awareness to get the job done. Sometimes people can just naturally "get it" they are best left alone.

Its amazing to me how many seasoned TV people just don't get this and you see people on here complaining again and again about talking and shouting over each other.

All you have to do is get a video camera and practice in private, once you "get it"
it becomes instinct.

nos 6 - Culture or Propaganda - seemed in part an answer to you.

streetphotobeing (#7) A write, my #6 is still being moderated, but is essentially supplement to my #5 where I quote a few lines from a Guardian/Observer to make the point that this book, slated as without literary merit in Germany and descibed in the ) as pornography goes from bad to worse and yet still wins 'prizes'.

We don't look critically enough anymore, do we? I think all of this stuff is disagraceful, self-interested propaganda at the expense of others, and should be exposed as such.

JadedJean please be assured your on Aunty Beebs list of serious loonytoons. If you come within 500 meters of Broadcasting House you will be apprehended by men in white coats strapped to a chair and subjected to every NN review there has ever been. Believe me my sins are worse, pokey chokey for me.

#4 this is too good to be true. Ekow told to behave? And the Authorities cracking down on Her Eugenic Majesty?? I'm so glad I'm back.

Still think we need to have a VIEWERS' poll on who WE would like to see on NN Review, such as Iain Rankin, Tom Paulin and Bonnie Greer - and less of the "cognoscenti" such as Ekow, Kwame, Germaine, Paul Morley, the Lionel woman et al.

#5. what is truth? Not what you peddle.
who deserves prizes? The Authorities, for finally realising your snake oil is poisonous.

Gordi Brown
Came to town
With his poll scores
Pointing down;
Made a speech,
Tried to preach,
Not quite got Obama's reach?

Moral schmoral ; just get the banks tightly regulated, read the Riot Act to them about lending responsibly and start to talk clearly and SINCERELY to voters about what the UK, post- bubble, will look like given the return of a Labour government after the next election in 2010.

Gordi just might have a chance then.

But if Labour lose - please , please, please for your own sakes, and ours as citizens, do not make Hectoring Harriet Leader; the consequences of Lord Snooty and his Eton Rifles ruling us for the next decade or more are too awful to imagine.

The answer lies in raki.

#11; in the wrong place!
SORRY!!

TRUTH & REALITY JUST AINT WHAT IT USED TO BE

streetphotobeing (#9) There's you know!

ON NEWSPEAK

kashibeyaz (#10) But clearly what I have posted IS true, whilst what the author of 'The Kindly Ones' peddles is not. Yet it appears to be the case that you think 'the authorities' should crack down on truth because you consider that to be 'poisonous'.

But pray tell, what precisely does it posion other than some people's naive susceptibility to propaganda?

It is quite clear that what you peddle is false, demonstrated by the spurious websites you cite; no wonder you're "jaded"; it would sap the energy of a rhino, interminably searching the world wide web for the minutest scrap of tittle tattle to reinforce your madcap "Weltanschauung".

One need only be intolerant of intolerance.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Curtains, nurse!

OR; you're right, I'm wrong.

HOWZAT!

kashibeyaz (#16) You should stick with that insight at #16. But be warned, it will wear away at your comfort zone/arrogance.

"The Weimar scene," writes Henry Pachter, who knew it well, "was rich with career people of a new type: the intellectual adventurers, those who lived by their wits without having specific skills and training. They might be entertainers, social thinkers, planners, politicians, managers in the new industries, culture tycoons, educators, consciousness raisers, prophets of new sciences or sects, liberators from sexual or other oppression, promoters–in brief, men and women whose rapid rise was achieved by relating to other people and whose real contribution was measured by the judgment of their peers."

An Amy Winehouse?

"The stories have an oneiric (dreamlike) character–they are like dreams in that they invite interpretation but seem to withhold the key. There is only a single point of view: that of the protagonist. The vocabulary is one of inference and conjecture: "apparently"; "maybe." The sentences often consist of two clauses: the first states a fact or a guess; the second qualifies, questions, or negates it. The conjunction "but" is common, and the frequent use of "even if" clauses expresses the tendency to cancel expectations and refute inferences. A lot of this writing is in the subjunctive. This is a world in which nothing ever gets truly resolved, in which any decisive, conclusive event would be incongruous, because no event or series of events could ever suffice to dissolve the enormous burden of doubt, ignorance, and apprehension that Kafka calls up from the first sentence."

Are people here ever going to wake up to what was being, and is now being (reinforced) in teh name of 'freedom' at their expense?

This is, I suggest, a strategic, and malignant, celebration of and its bed-fellow . Note which demographic groups comprises the major purchaser of literature and are the patrons of the dramatic arts.

What has been the cost of the demographic transition?