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Writing history
History is what we write about our past—it’s the origin story a culture constructs for itself, from a variety of sources and through a variety of media. With Mangrove, from his Small Axe series of films, Steve McQueen is writing history, as much as he is filming historical fiction. Although Black Power struggles have been… Read more
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Blandgorgeousartsampler
It’s common for a bunch of artists to collaborate on a series, but Madi (as far as I know) has only been published as a single album, and the different contributors are deployed to produce aspects of the book’s formal structure, rather than simply taking it in turns to draw instalments or chapters. It’s the… Read more
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Shiny dance machine
It was the 1980s. We all had glossy hair, wore shoulder pads, and made music with the same three models of FM synthesiser. Style was substance and everything was shiny. African musicians were beginning to make an impact on global record sales, and France was starting to be known as the place they went to… Read more
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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
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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
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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
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