Description
Book SynopsisSteve Waters examines how the very idea of film has defined him as a playwright and a person in this book. Through the the lens of cinema, it provides a cultural and political snapshot of life in Britain from the 2nd part of the 20th century up to the present day. The films spanning almost a century, starting with
The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929) and moving most recently to
Dark Waters (2019)
, each chapter examines aspects of Waters''s journey from his working-class Midlands upbringing to working in professional theatre to living through the Covid epidemic, through the prism of a particular film. From
The Wizard of Oz to
Code Unknown, from sci-fi to documentary, from queer cinema to world cinema, this honest, comic book offers a view of film as a way of thinking about how we live. In doing so, it illuminates culture and politics in the UK over half a century and provides an intimate insight into drama and writing.
Trade ReviewPlaywright Steve Waters has come up with a brilliantly simple and original idea: a memoir built round the movies that have shaped his life. The result is partly autobiography, partly social history and partly a hymn of praise to the medium that made him. A jewel of a book: informative, moving, witty and compelling. -- David Edgar
Table of ContentsIntroduction –
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
