A Life in 16 Films

Introduction - Dark Waters (2019, Todd Haynes)
Watching film in an age of Covid

The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)
Working-class cinema-going in the Midlands; children and adult film; the Western; film as an embodiment of maleness

Logan's Run (1976, Michael Anderson)
Rural England and the appeal of horror and sci-fi; rural v city; class conflict

Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979, Werner Herzog)
Grammar school in the 80s; uncinematic nature of provincial Britain; discovery of art and European film

Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Coming of age during Thatcher and punk; film and cycling; the rise of Channel 4 as a vector for film; second cold war; Solaris v Apocalypse Now

Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann)
Kibbutz Dalia, Israel; Film and internationalism; film and the Holocaust; travels in the Middle East; confirmation bias

Vagabond (1985, Agnès Varda)
Film and intellectualism at Oxford University; feminist and queer film; making film

Comrades (1986, Bill Douglas)
Film, work and radical politics; Communist and the city of Bristol; theatre and radical film-making; John Akomfrah and Julian Isaac

The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929, Arnold Fanck and GW Pabst)
Becoming a teacher; film history and education; falling in love through film

Reservoir Dogs (1992, Quentin Tarantino)
Studying with playwrights Sarah Kane and David Edgar; Reservoir Dogs and Blasted; caught between film and theatre; influence of David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino and Sarah Kane

Winter Light (1963, Ingmar Bergman)
Film, marriage and faith; Bergman and Bresson; film as ritual; becoming a theatre director; becoming a playwright

Code Unknown (2001, Michael Haneke)
Film and London; residential playwright at Hampstead Theatre; writing and multi-culturalism; Haneke's pessimism versus 'Cool Britannia'

The Wind Will Carry Us (2000, Abbas Kiarostami)
After 9/11; film and the War on Terror; film and having children; writing World music; influence of Iranian film

An Inconvenient Truth (2006, Davis Guggenheim)
Film and ecology; climate change activism and writing The Contingency Plan; adapting theatre to film

Hell or High Water (2016, David Mackenzie)
Film and precarity; parents' death; illness; end of cinema; growth of populism

Afterword - Girlhood (2019, Céline Sciamma)
Watching films with my daughter

Index