Yearly Archive: 2021

13

Olson

3 Jan, 2021

Introduction to The Silents: The Classics

By

Calling the best silent films classics seems both humdrum and pretentious. Humdrum, because we tend to call any old thing classic, regardless of its quality. Pretentious, because what are most often called classics are the literary works of ancient Greece and Rome that modeled for subsequent Western literature its genres, forms, and techniques. Old movies just don’t seem analogous in quality, at least, to the epics of Homer and Virgil, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the picaresques of Apuleius and Petronius.

5

Feature

2 Jan, 2021

A Christmas Story of Anterus Smith as told to Ched Rayson, Conclusion

By

Coming out of his seclusion, Mickey  announced a monster meeting in a field outside of Chequamegon.  He did not have time to build a stage, but there was a nice little stream flowing through the field.  One side of the ground  was flat with room for hundreds of people to stand or spread out picnic blankets, and on the other side, there was a steep bank, which Mickey mounted, to make his pitch, which is why his speech has gone down in history as the “Sermon of the Mountebank.”  

16

Feature / Fleming

1 Jan, 2021

Lincoln: A Lying Duplicitous Bigot

By

This review of David Donald’s Lincoln ( New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1996)  was commissioned and published by the Spectator (London),  for which I wrote with some frequency, once upon a time before the world ceased pretending to exist.