A quiet Monday in August is a fine day to catch up with the current issue of Electric Sheep, whose theme is "Propaganda" and features Peter Momtchiloff on Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930; image above), Eleanor McKeown on Dziga Vertov's A Sixth Part of the World (1926), Robert Barry, briefly, on the soundtrack of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Sarah Cronin on the "virtual absence of politics and/or propaganda" in current American war movies.
"Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts marks the welcome return to filmmaking of Peter Whitehead, the documentarian who captured the historic first meeting of American and English beat poets with Wholly Communion (1965) and the 1968 student rebellion at Columbia University that occurred in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King shooting with The Fall (1969)." John Berra talks with Whitehead about this new work, "a defiantly non-linear experience as voice-over, imagery and on-screen quotations serve to deconstruct cinematic time and narrative form in a disorientating manner."
More interviews: Pamela Jahn talks with Bong Joon-ho about Mother and with Sylvain Chomet about The Illusionist, Virginie Sélavy with François Ozon about The Refuge. Reviews: Paul Huckerby on Albert Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), Daniel Peake on Yoichi Sai's Kamui: The Lone Ninja (2009), Mark Stafford on Tom Six's The Human Centipede (2009) and David Cairns on Freddie Francis's Paranoiac (1963): "Since Francis the director was as sure a hand as Francis the cinematographer at creating atmosphere through lighting, composition and movement, this convoluted country house crime story is rich material."
And Strange Attractor Press will be releasing the magazine's first book, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, in November.
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