Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Funny enough to be real

    Funny enough to be real

    Black comedy crime dramas with inconclusive endings are almost a genre of their own now. The trick is to keep populating them with well thought-out characters and convincing concrete details, rather than leaning on tropes—in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Martin McDonagh nails that, making a film which is continually unexpected in multiple ways. Clearly Read more

  • An uncertain consolation

    An uncertain consolation

    Comic books are an excellent medium for non-fiction. This is not a novel insight—during the Second World War instruction manuals for US soldiers were often provided in precisely that format. Visual explication can be far easier to retain and recall, but even so, comics are primarily associated with narrative fiction. My first encounter with non-fiction Read more

  • The good, the bad, and the oblivious

    The good, the bad, and the oblivious

    Watching John Ford’s acclaimed Western The Searchers gave me occasion to note how incomplete my education in cinema is, and how hard it can be to bridge the cultural distance between the third decade of the twenty-first century and the Golden Age of Hollywood. Put simply, although I could appreciate the wonderful cinematography, the epic Read more

  • Bonfire of the hierarchies

    Bonfire of the hierarchies

    As a librarian, as a lover of history and the literature that constitutes it, as a custodian and celebrant of what might be called the collective archive of human discourse, it can be uncomfortable to hear someone shouting ‘burn the archive’, which is Siyabonga Mthembu’s opening declamation on this extraordinary, incantatory album. But there is Read more

  • Sharing

    Sharing

    Rachel Roddy’s second book is full of anecdotes and recollections, little narrative vignettes about her immediate household, the extended Sicilian family she’s married into, her English parents, the people from whom she buys food in Rome and Sicily, people she cooks with, and so on. I don’t go a bundle on memoir or ‘life writing’—I’m Read more

  • Incoherent gold

    Incoherent gold

    Gold is a recurring symbol in American cinema, a useful stand-in when directors want to establish a dialectic between self-interest and sociality. Spike Lee makes knowing and witty use of this history in Da 5 Bloods, most obviously when a Vietnamese criminal informs the protagonists that he and his crew ‘don’t need no stinking official Read more