Earlier this year, following the infamous Barnaby Joyce affair, Malcolm Turnbull called for a rethink of the parliamentary code of conduct to ensure this ‘shocking error of judgement’ on Joyce’s part did not happen again. New ‘guidelines’ would prevent senior politicians from engaging in a sexual relationship with their staffers, even if the sex was consensual. It was an oddly draconian captain’s call which received bipartisan support, reflecting what Turnbull called the ‘changing values’ of the workplace.

Such a reaction – some might say ‘overreaction’ – is part of a larger cultural shift which can be traced back to the first stirrings of what has come to be known around the world as the #MeToo movement. Of course, consensual sex between two adults from the same workplace may seem a far cry from the alleged abuses that prompted the #MeToo movement. Nonetheless, the underlying assumption of both cases is that what we are dealing with here is not sex at all but power, what Van Badham, writing for The Guardian, called ‘a delectable indulgence not of sex, but of advantage’.

Listen to this essay read by the author.

Since I wrote about the golden age of television for ABR’s first film and television issue in 2015, the medium has evolved. Streaming has roared to prominence, with online services like Netflix disrupting television’s form and market as dramatically as cable did to broadcast television in the early 2000s. But where the stars of the cable era were dramas – great, brooding epics of American anti-heroes – the foul-mouthed stars of the streaming era are increasingly its comedies, which are delivering some of the most poignant stories on screen.

Gail Jones

Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) is the tale of a poor man (Antonio) and his son (Bruno) living in postwar Rome. Antonio, searching for his stolen bicycle, moves in restless anxiety around city locations. Scenes recall de Chirico, Antonioni, and Pavese, but at its centre are the desperate, irresistible faces of the father and son. Men with movie posters ride bicycles holding ladders; a truck driver who finds movies boring veers through cinematic rain; father and son mop their faces with the same wretched handkerchief; a near drowning; an epileptic fit; restraint; tenderness. The ending: see it and weep.

Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola in Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), 1948 (Produzioni De Sica)

Dion Kagan

The passionate cultivation of unforgettable women characters becomes a manifesto in Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999): an intimate homage to drag, performance, and female melodrama. High camp mixed with high sincerity, this is Almodóvar’s signature ensemble portrait of women on the verge, women navigating unendurable worlds. The quintessential work of queer matrocentric desire.

Marisa Paredes and Cecilia Roth in All About My Mother, 1999 (Sony Pictures Classic)

Lauren Carroll Harris

Of all the films Paul Thomas Anderson has directed, The Master (2012) is his favourite, and mine. In it, shell-shocked, alcoholic war veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) gravitates to the charismatic founder of a therapeutic cult, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Though many expected a Scientology exposé, Anderson thought about his story in relation to the idea that the best time to start a cult is after a war. Indeed, The Master exquisitely captures a world at a crossroads and a life in flux. It is alive with symbolism and alert to the psychology of obsession and dependence.

Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Master, 2012 (The Weinstein Company)

Alice Addison

An Angel at My Table (d. Jane Campion, 1990) tells the story of the writer Janet Frame from childhood to her literary success. Recalling the film, I think first of colours – the green of New Zealand and the vivid orange of Frame’s distinctive red hair. The film contains the twin pleasures of its subject’s writing and that of Laura Jones, the screenwriter, who collects a series of moments in a life – some harrowing, some hopeful, all human – and weaves them together to create something wondrous and wholly life-affirming.

Kerry Fox as Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table, 1990 (Hibiscus Films)

Anwen Crawford

Practically everyone with access to a television has seen The Wizard of Oz (d. Victor Fleming, 1939), probably when they were too young to conceive of film (or television) as anything more or less than images set in motion by an unseen power. Who put this girl and her dog and the witch and a scarecrow inside a box that I am watching in my house? No number of viewings could resolve the mystery. Last year I saw the ruby slippers at the National Museum of American History. I practically cried. Judy Garland’s feet were narrow. She flashes through my mind.

Judy Garland Ray Bolger Jack Haley Bert Lahr in The Wizard of Oz, 1939 (Warner Home Video)

Emile Sherman

There’s nothing like a Coen Brothers film, and the one I keep returning to is The Big Lebowski (1998). It’s not the story itself, which, like many of their other films, is a little hokey, although enjoyably so. It’s the worlds they create, that particular tone, that music. Above all else, it’s those characters. The genius of The Big Lebowski, and of the best of the Coen Brothers’ work, is the way the filmmakers ride that fine line, creating archetypal characters that feel at once mythic but equally human. Balancing on this line is impossibly hard. Too archetypal, and you move into caricature, and we lose connection. Too human, and you lose the epic resonance and the bounce. The Big Lebowski gets it all right.

 Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, and Steve Buscemi in The Big Lebowski, 1998 (Gramercy Pictures)

Philippa Hawker

During my first year of high school, my English teacher showed our class a print of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Less than half an hour long, it consists of black-and-white stills and a single moving image, a voiceover narration, and layers of sound and music. It is, among other things, a story of time travel, memory, obsession, and inevitability, a work about science, nature, surveillance, the human face, the everyday. I didn’t see it again for years, but I carried it within me and could recall it in an almost tactile way. It feels new every time I watch it.

Hélène Chatelain in La Jetée, 1962 (Argos Films)

Stephen Romei

It was directed by a Canadian and starred two Englishmen. It was panned by critics on its release in 1971, degraded in its VHS format, and then almost lost forever, with the original film and sound version rescued en route to the tip in 2004. Yet Wake in Fright, based on Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel, directed by Ted Kotcheff, shot in Broken Hill, and starring Gary Bond as a bonded schoolteacher and Donald Pleasance as a mad, alcoholic, menacing doctor, is the greatest Australian film yet to be made, an unflinching examination of life in the outback, where everyone is an outsider, even the two-upping, roo-shooting insiders played by Chips Rafferty and Jack Thompson. When the educated teacher says the locals are stupid, the doctor pulls him up. Their lives are a living hell, he observes. ‘You want them to sing opera as well?’

Chips Rafferty and Gary Bond in Wake In Fright, 1971 (NLT Productions/Group W Films)

Desley Deacon

The psychological western Pursued (d. Raoul Walsh, 1947) is a fascinating product of the 1940s – mystery, trauma, repressed memories, flashbacks, voiceovers – moodily shot by James Wong Howe in the brooding landscape of New Mexico. With Judith Anderson as a frontier woman whose adultery sparks a series of tragedies that haunt her family, and a young Robert Mitchum as her adopted son, it is both tough and intimate, with Mitchum and his estranged brother sweetly singing ‘Londonderry Air’, and a no-nonsense Anderson toting a shotgun to save Mitchum from a hanging.

 Teresa Wright and Robert Mitchum in Pursued, 1947 (United States Pictures/Warner Bros)

Kylie du Fresne

I’d opt for Desperately Seeking Susan (d. Susan Seidelman, 1985). There was something prescient in its energy, storytelling, and soundtrack, announcing that it knew ‘cool’ before it happened. You can see that vibe through so much of the casting: hip NYC musos John Lurie and Arto Lindsay, as well as Laurie Metcalf, John Turturro, and Giancarlo Esposito. But the script’s classic screwball elements with two strong female roles for Rosanna Arquette and Madonna seduced me at the age of twelve in that magical way that movies have. I wasn’t aware then the film was written, directed, and produced by women. More than thirty years later, this alone makes the film exceptional and such an example for the industry.

Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985 (Orion Pictures)

Felicity Chaplin

From its monumental prologue set to Wagner to the spectacle of its apocalyptic ending, Melancholia (d. Lars von Trier, 2011) extends the definition of art house cinema in the digital era. The film is great for its careful use of digital technology, sublime imagery, allegorical treatment of its subject, blend of bleakness and comedy, unsettling atmosphere, and inspired casting. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst give subtle yet audacious performances, supported by such greats as John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, and Stellan Skarsgård. Best described as an ‘art house disaster movie’, Melancholia intellectualises the ‘pleasure in annihilation’ disaster movies tap into, without the deus ex machina of the Hollywood ending.

 Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, 2011 (Zentropa Entertainments)

Brian McFarlane

‘Let’s go home, Debbie’ may not, out of context, seem like the most profound line, but, uttered by Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) as he picks up the niece years ago abducted by Indians, it pulls together so much of what makes The Searchers (1956) such a great film. Ethan’s racism has made him equivocal about rescuing her from her ‘contaminated’ years as a squaw, and it also reminds us that home – and Ethan’s lack of it – is one of the film’s underlying motifs. Home, in John Ford’s complexly stunning western, is a frail defence against a majestic but daunting landscape.

John Wayne in The Searchers, 1956 (C.V. Whitney Pictures)

James McNamara

I first saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) as a teenager, when some friends and I shuffled to the movies and went in the wrong door. Afterwards, I acted all sullen ‘yeah yeah’ cool, but inside it was like Baz had poured sherbet on my brain and cranked the music up to eleven. The kinetic modern setting, the smash and fizz and dazzle of his aesthetic, perfectly captured the rage of feeling in Shakespeare’s text, and brought R&J roaring gloriously to life for a new generation, inspiring my love of Shakespeare and a career in television. I love it so.

Claire Daines in Romeo + Juliet, 1996 (Bazmark Productions)

Jake Wilson

Fans have been debating recently whether David Lynch’s magnum opus, Twin Peaks should be considered a film (1992) or a television show (1990, 2017). Self-evidently it’s both – a single story extending over two seasons of network television, the harrowing ‘prequel’ feature, Fire Walk With Me, and the long-awaited follow-up mini-series shown on cable last year. What began as a quirky soap opera has by now evolved into a masterpiece without precedent on the big or small screen, both a bona-fide religious epic and a liberating vision of what the world might look like if we gave up demanding that things make sense.

 Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks, 1990 (Lynch/Frost Productions)

Craig Pearce

When I first stumbled across Wake In Fright on late-night television, I was young enough to be terrified by its nightmarishly familiar portrayal of Australian masculinity – and old enough to thrill to its savage brilliance. I sat mesmerised and appalled. I didn’t know much of that world, but the film’s grotesque intensity spoke truth to me that night. Most know that this great masterpiece was lost and then found and resurrected. When a few years ago I finally saw it projected on a big screen, it was still all true.

Peter Whittle, Gary Bond, Jack Thompson, and Donald Pleasence in Wake In Fright, 1971 (NLT Productions and Group W Films)

Nick Prescott

By the time David Lynch released Lost Highway in 1997, he had educated his viewers in the predilections of a deeply idiosyncratic auteur. Blue Velvet (1986) suggested to us, and Wild at Heart (1990) confirmed for us, the fact that Lynch was far more interested in the allure of mystery than in anything as mundane as a linear, traditional ‘solution’. Lost Highway represents the pinnacle of Lynch’s cinema: the film’s fever-dream intensity keeps its viewers perfectly off-balance throughout, and delivers them a work replete with the power of the most compelling and disturbing of dreams.

 Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, 1997 (Ciby 2000 and Asymmetrical Productions)

Peter Rose

As a boy of ten I happened upon Laurel and Hardy’s silent film Big Business (d. James W. Horne, 1929), a work of singular perfection in eighteen minutes. All of life seemed to be there: bluster, farce, commercialism, amour-propre, violence. When Laurel and Hardy call on James Finlayson to flog him a Christmas tree, all hell breaks loose. Tempers fray and Finlayson’s house is soon destroyed while he dementedly wrecks the tree salesmen’s car. Even an innocent piano is demolished amid this weird suburban havoc. My lifelong love of ruination was strangely seeded, plus my reverence for these two comic geniuses.

Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel, and James Finlayson in Big Business, 1929 (MGM)

Linda Martín Alcoff ends her book Rape and Resistance with the question of love, as it has been explored in the fiction of Dominican- American writer Junot Díaz. There are no easy moral binaries in Díaz’s writing, she notes. Sex lives are navigated in the midst of intergenerational trauma transferred from mothers who are rape victims to daughters and sons. As Díaz says: ‘in the novel [The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] you see the way the horror of rape closes in on them all. The whole family is in this circuit of rape. And, you know, the point the book keeps making again and again and again is that, in the Dominican Republic, which is to say, in the world that the DR built, if you are a Beli, a Lola, a Yunior – if you are anybody – rape is never going to be far.’ Rape, as a form of colonial violence, ripples out from individuals to affect families, societies, and communities. Masculinity, Díaz argues, becomes ‘a hyperactive retreat from the vulnerability that accompanies real intimacy’. For Alcoff, Díaz represents precisely the kind of thinking she has aimed for in her book – intersectional, community-oriented, and unafraid of ambiguities.

Welcome to ABR’s second film and television issue! Our first, in 2015, examined the brooding era of television drama. In our second we turn to film, celebrating the stellar movies of past decades with an exciting survey of readers, commentators, and industry professionals, while also looking at the immense changes in film today. In recent months, the #MeToo movement has deposed Hollywood moguls and sounded a powerful call for equality and the end of abuses in a male-dominated industry. Hollywood’s increasing and overdue recognition of filmmakers of colour, with awards glory and box office smashes, offers hope for a more inclusive film community. The medium is changing, as streaming blurs film with television and sparks new audiences and more diverse stories. At this pivotal moment in film history, ABR aims to start a spirited, timely conversation. From 1940s classics to today’s superhero movies, we discuss the silver screen’s achievements while examining its injustices and complexities. ABR plays a starring role in our cultural discourse. It is a privilege to guest edit the publication where I began my writing career and to reflect on film with colleagues in a great magazine of ideas. I hope the issue will inform, delight, and stimulate discussion but, most of all, share our enthusiasm for Australian and international film.

James McNamara, Guest Editor

Ronan Farrow at MWF

Ronan Farrow (photograph by Heidi Gutman/MSNBC)Ronan Farrow will be a guest at this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival (24 August–2 September). The celebrated author/lawyer/journalist will discuss ‘Power, Abuse and Facing Facts’ in an event chaired by journalist Tracey Spicer at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre on Thursday, 30 August.

Farrow, the son of filmmaker Woody Allen and actress Mia Farrow (and grandson of the Australian film director John Farrow), has been a central figure in uncovering cases of sexual misconduct among men in positions of power, particularly in Hollywood. His gutsy reporting in The New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein’s ‘systematic, predatory’ behaviour was instrumental in the wider #MeToo movement in 2017. This reportage subsequently won The New Yorker the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Farrow’s new book is titled War on Peace: The end of diplomacy and the decline of American influence (Norton).

For more information about the 2018 Melbourne Writers’ Festival visit: https://mwf.com.au/

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield (photograph by Curt Richter)Jane Hirshfield, one of America’s most outspoken and influential voices in poetry, feminism, and intellectual life, will visit Australia for the first time in July. People in Melbourne, Sydney, and Mildura will have a chance to hear the poet read from her work (she will also conduct a workshop at Writers Victoria).

Jane Hirshfield, chancellor-emerita of the Academy of American Poets, has published several collections. She will read at the University of Melbourne on 23 July (6 pm), a public event that is co-presented with the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts Monash University (register at http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/hirshfield)

The Mildura Writers’ Festival runs from 19–22 July. Guests will include David Malouf, Robyn Davidson, and James Ley.

We have much pleasure in publishing Jane Hirshfield’s poem ‘Interruption: An Assay’ in this issue.

Prizes galore

Our voracious judges are currently reading their way through almost 1,200 entries in the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which is worth a total of $12,500. As always, we will publish the three shortlisted stories in our August issue. The winner will be revealed at a special event at fortyfivedownstairs on Monday, 21 August (6 pm – see our Events page). The Jolley Prize ceremony is a free event and all are welcome, but please book via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Readings from the shortlisted stories will precede the announcement.

August is also an exciting month for the world’s most alliterative of literary prizes. Entries for the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize (worth $8,500) will open on 1 August.

Meanwhile, the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize will open on 1 September – the thirteenth time we have presented Calibre.

Sign up to our free monthly eNews newsletter, follow us on social media (Facebook and Twitter), or visit our website to get all the latest news about our prizes.

SMH Young Novelists

Congratulations to 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize winner Jennifer Down on being named an SMH Young Novelist for the second year in a row, joining previous multiple recipients Emily Maguire, James Bradley, and Sonya Hartnett. Down was chosen in 2017 for her début novel Our Magic Hour, and this year for her début short story collection, Pulse Points, which features her Jolley Prize winning story ‘Aokigahara’.

Jennifer Down at the 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize ceremony

The other 2018 SMH Young Novelists are Marija Peričić (The Lost Pages), Shaun Prescott (The Town), and Pip Smith (Half Wild).

More than a building

La Mama, one of Melbourne’s iconic theatres, has been seriously damaged in a fire. The blaze, started by an electrical fault, occurred on 19 May. No one was injured, and arson is not suspected.

‘While there is considerable damage, this has become a restoration project. We will retain as much of the historic structure of the building as possible … we loved our building on Faraday Street, but La Mama is more than a building, and despite our devastation her spirit is strong. Together with our artists, staff and community we will move with strength into the next fifty years and beyond,’ said La Mama Artistic Director and CEO Liz Jones and Company Manager and Creative Producer Caitlin Dullard in a joint statement.

La Mama Theatre after the fire (photograph by Rick Evertsz)

All productions in La Mama’s Autumn season will proceed at different venues. For more information, visit La Mama’s website or Twitter page.

John Simkin Medal 2018

Painstaking this essential labour certainly is, as anyone who has devised one can attest, so it is good to know that the craft of indexing is not entirely overlooked. The Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) is seeking nominations from publishers, booksellers, editors, librarians, and indexers for the John Simkin Medal – an award recognising an outstanding index to a book or periodical compiled in Australia or New Zealand. To learn more about the John Simkin Medal, visit the ANZSI website.

Satan Repentant by Michael Aiken

Author James Bradley will launch Michael Aiken's verse novel, Satan Repentant (UWAP, $22.99 pb, 140 pp, 9781742589770), on Saturday 16 June from 4 pm – 5.30 pm at an event at Sydney's Better Read Than Dead bookstore. A reading from Michael Aiken will be followed by informal drinks.

Satan Repentant was written as part of Australian Book Review's inaugural Laureate's Fellowship under the mentorship of David Malouf. The novel is described as 'a violent epic leaping from the cosmological to the infinitesimal, a modern day drama of revenge, resentment, and remorse, telling a new myth of what would happen if Satan tried to apologise and atone for all his crimes.'

David Malouf describes Satan Repentant as a 'tour de force. Michael Aiken, like Milton, Blake and Mary Shelley before him, has created a language, entirely free of place and time, in which to take on dramatically. and with great intelligence and wit, some of the abiding questions – moral, social, theological – at the centre of our culture.'

To register for the event, visit the Better Read Than Dead website.

Melbourne Prize for Literature

Entries are now open for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. The Prize, worth a total of $100,000, is open to residents of Victoria who have been published in any literary genre. Information and entry guidelines are available from www.melbourneprize.org

Winter Reading

Midway through this double issue (June–July), we will publish a smaller online edition with a number of new reviews. Look out for this in the last week of June. If you are signed up for our free e-bulletins, you will receive an email Alert when the mini-issue is published.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . As a young girl growing up in north-east Scotland, I didn’t know that it had been adapted from a 1961 novel of the same name by a writer known for her keen observational skills and biting wit called Muriel Spark, or that the story had first appeared, almost word for word, in the pages of The New Yorker. Indeed, I highly doubt I had heard of that august publication, let alone understood the writerly prestige of having an issue of The New Yorker devoted to one story.

But I do remember that when the indomitable schoolteacher Miss Brodie, as channelled by the equally formidable Maggie Smith, said this to her pupils, in her distinctive Edinburgh burr, I was smitten:

Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

The Marvel film Black Panther has currently earned more than US$1.3 billion dollars at the box office worldwide since its release on 13 February 2018, which places it high among the most financially successful films of all time. Such an achievement isn’t necessarily indicative of quality – the Fast and the Furious and Minions films are on the same list – but countless column inches have been devoted to Black Panther’s engaging narrative, its eye-catching aesthetic, and its complex heroes and villains. Moreover, the film was directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler, an African-American man, and features a cast almost entirely comprised of black actors. Its success has reconfigured conventional depictions of black people in large-scale blockbusters, and recast them beyond one-dimensional Hollywood thugs, sidekicks, buffoons, action film fodder, or objectified and exoticised bodies. It is also noteworthy in that its story originates from a comic book – a medium once derided as trashy and lowbrow.

History is written by the Oscar winners in our time, which makes the responsibilities of serious historical scholarship never more important. Despite its realist pretensions – it looks as real as life – film is a dreamy, poetic medium, too often prone to simplicity, conspiracy theory, sucking up to the Zeitgeist – and, above all, not letting messy facts spoil a ripping story.

Hitler won no Oscars, and he lost the war he started – a historical loser, in the end – but he was the first grandmaster of using the then-new, mesmerising art form to control the historical and political narrative. Aided by his Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels (oh for the days of honest job descriptions) his control was total, and omnipresent: twenty million Germans saw the first of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nuremberg rally films; the number only rose with those that followed. ‘Films could change the world,’ Hitler told her, and dreamt of ‘films made of the finest metal’ that would last ‘a thousand years’.

On the cover of Felicity Chaplin’s La Parisienne in Cinema: Between art and life, Audrey Hepburn, arms aloft, reigns triumphant in a strapless scarlet evening gown and organza shawl. This is a scene from Funny Face (1957), in which she plays a shy Greenwich Village bookshop employee transformed into a high-profile fashion model.

At first glance, this image might seem a surprising cover choice. Is Hepburn – a British citizen, born in Brussels, brought up in Belgium, England, and the Netherlands before becoming a Hollywood star – an emblematic Parisienne? In Chaplin’s terms, yes, without a doubt: as the author makes abundantly clear, the subject of her study is a figure with fluid, contradictory, evolving qualities. She is not defined by her origins. Some of the most representative examples of ‘la Parisienne’ she cites are, like Hepburn, from elsewhere: Ingrid Bergman, Anna Karina, Jean Seberg, and Nicole Kidman, for example. The films do not have to be set in Paris: characters carry their ‘Parisienne’ qualities with them. These works can be made by French directors; they can be the product of the Hollywood imagination; they can represent a cross-cultural combination.

With the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement reminding us all too vividly of flesh and blood Hollywood, David Bordwell’s cerebral Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s filmmakers changed movie storytelling seems to come from another planet. But Bordwell, who is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has spent a lifetime writing about ‘the genius of the system’ that is classical Hollywood, rather than the system’s individual geniuses. Generations of film students have absorbed his 1979 textbook Film Art: An introduction, now in its eleventh edition and translated into at least ten languages. His seventeen-plus books (many co-authored with his wife, Kristin Thompson), his long tenure on the editorial board of Cinema Journal, his blog, and his numerous consultancies all over the world make him one of the most influential film scholars of his generation. His planet, therefore, is mainstream American academia.

David Thomson has been an essential writer on film for around half a century, but in certain circles his reputation has long been in decline. The reasons are obvious enough. He writes too much, and sometimes carelessly; he lets his feelings run away with him; an Englishman who followed his dream to the United States, he hardly pretends that Iranian cinema, say, could possibly be as important to him as Hollywood. He has also developed a habit of launching sweeping attacks on the medium itself, which have the tang of personal bitterness, as if he regrets not dedicating his gifts to a more worthy muse.

In 1971, Australian filmmaker Joan Long wrote the script for a film about gentrification in the Sydney suburb of Paddington. At a screening in London, it was introduced by director Peter Weir. When asked who the scriptwriter was, Weir replied that she was a housewife, according to a friend of Long’s. Around this time, director Gillian Armstrong applied for a job at the ABC, only to be told that they didn’t interview women for jobs in camera, sound, or editing; she was asked to send in details of her typing speed.

Such depressing anecdotes are two of many in Mary Tomsic’s Beyond the Silver Screen, a history of women in film from 1920 to 1990. It is interesting to read the book at this historical moment. These days men are smart enough to pay lip service, at least, to ideas of equal opportunity. Yet the allegations against Harvey Weinstein suggest that a powerful man in a bathrobe operated an unofficial casting couch for decades in the United States and that almost no man working in film had the guts to call him out.

One of my favourite podcasts at the moment is called The Rewatchables. It deconstructs movies (mainly from the 1990s and 2000s) and offers an enjoyable mix of amusement, nostalgia, and insight. It also speaks to the desire, particularly strong in the internet age, to hear what other people think about content already enjoyed. Brian McFarlane’s Making a Meal of It: Writing about film offers a somewhat similar experience in written form. The book – divided into three parts that play on its prandial title – is a collection of previously published reviews and essays by one of Australia’s pre-eminent film writers.

Love and Lament offers a bracingly revisionist and upbeat account of how the arts flourished across a broad cultural spectrum in Australia over the course of the twentieth century. Margaret Plant, an emeritus professor of the visual arts at Monash University, argues explicitly with the thesis propounded by Keith Hancock, Donald Horne, and others that Australian cultural taste was ‘conservative and backward’. In ranging widely across architecture, film, photography, music, dance, and popular culture, as well as literature and painting, she demonstrates convincingly that, as she puts it, there was ‘no dormant period’ in Australian cultural and artistic life during this time.

Plant’s book is organised conceptually in terms of decades, with ten chapters stretching from ‘Bush, Desert, Film and Federation: 1900 to 1910’ through to ‘The 1990s: Conflicts, Museums, Ceremonies and the Millennium’. The strength of such an approach is that it enables a multivalent, wide-angled portrayal of each different decade, showing how well-known figures intersected in sometimes circuitous ways with the cultural politics of their time. It also integrates a great many fascinating oddball details, as for example with her account of the theosophical radio station 2GB that operated in the 1920s, or of silent cinema director Charles Chauvel’s efforts to run a ‘Chauvel School of Scenario Writing’ in Sydney from 1933 to 1936.

What’s an accountant’s favourite book? 50 Shades of Grey. But in a world of transfer pricing and Special Purpose Entities, suddenly accounting isn’t funny anymore. A 1976 Congressional report noted that the Big Eight accounting firms controlled ‘virtually all aspects of accounting and auditing in the US’. Multinationals, presidents, prime ministers, and pro tennis players hide their vast wealth in offshore tax havens like Panama and the Bahamas. The message is clear: to keep your dosh from the tax collector’s greedy grasp, you’ll likely need a Big Four accountant.

Who are the Big Four? Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and KPMG are the great survivors of the buccaneering nineteenth-century Gilded Age of silver, wine, art, and gold. Ian D. Gow and Stuart Kells’s book traces the lineage of the original ‘Big Eight’, which became the ‘Big Five’ until Arthur Andersen’s sudden demise in 2002 in the aftermath of the Enron scandal. In 2018 the Big Four employed one million people globally, with 25,000 in Australia alone.

This is not a book with immediate appeal for the general reader, who is likely to be deterred by the denseness of its analysis. That is unfortunate, because its message deserves to be widely disseminated. It provides a useful account of economic history since the end of World War II, both internationally and in Australia, and ultimately offers a bespoke reform agenda.

The authors’ account begins with the 1977 analysis by the OECD of the stagflation then globally rampant. The inter-government organisation argued that the principal cause of this malaise was ‘the competing claims on resources exerted by different socio-economic groups’. According to Stephen Bell and Michael Keating, the main agents propelling such competing claims are workers, business, capital holders, voters, and community and state élites. Forty years later, the authors see those agents still making their competing claims, but now enormous power is in the hands of the wealthy; the result is the vast inequality highlighted by Thomas Picketty’s influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and preoccupying economists and politicians alike.

You have come to see a magic show. You arrive at the theatre, take your seat. Before the show begins, the magician steps onstage in his street clothes and explains what you are about to see; where the mirrors are hidden – every trapdoor, false bottom, and wire. When the lights go down, impossibly – even after everything you know – you don’t see the trickery, you see magic. Such is the strange conjuring that is Jesse Ball’s Census.

‘My brother Abram Ball died in 1998,’ the author begins, addressing his readers directly in a candid letter that precedes the novel. ‘He was twenty-four years old and had Down syndrome.’ Census, we are told, was born of a desire to capture his brother’s life on the page, not by recharting its course through memoir, but by evoking its nature: ‘something so tremendous and full of light’.

‘In nearly all Trevor’s stories,’ wrote V.S. Pritchett almost four decades ago, ‘we are led on at first by plain unpretending words about things done to prosaic people; then comes this explosion of conscience, the assertion of will which in some cases may lead to hallucination and madness.’ Even here, in this collection drawing together those final stories left after William Trevor’s death in 2016, the same method holds true. Take ‘The Crippled Man’, the second piece of ten. It begins with an exchange between an older Irishman and two foreign workmen in the kitchen of a crumbling smallholding in County Kildare about the possibility of their painting his house. There could be no more homespun opening than the question of price based on one coat or two while a black cat pounces on pieces of bark fallen from firewood.

Bohemia Beach is a highly anticipated novel – the first work by Justine Ettler in twenty years. In many ways, it is a continuation of her oeuvre: a fast-paced, almost madcap tale about a wildly careening woman and the violent men she is drawn to, with obsession and addiction driving much of the narrative and narration. The novel is set largely in the Czech Republic in 2002, when the country was on the cusp of change: still dealing with the legacy of communism, but also turning towards the European Union and the market forces and systems that it entails.

The novel opens on the titular beach, in a dream-state narrated by the main character, Cathy, a prodigious concert pianist, whose increasingly erratic behaviour and alcoholism have caused her life – career, marriage, sense of self – to fall apart. Cathy has been hospitalised following an accident during the Hundred Years Water floods earlier that year, the worst floods ever to hit Prague, which saw widespread evacuations and destruction across the city (and elsewhere in Europe). What follows is an account of the chaotic and confusing events that preceded Cathy’s accident, as well as her attempts to recover her physical and emotional health in its aftermath, assisted by her pop-psychology-spouting ‘life guru’, Nelly, and her kindly doctor, Edgar.

‘Nothing matters very much,’ says Hilary Spinster, one of the main characters in Philip Hensher’s mammoth mêlée of a novel, ‘and most things don’t matter at all’. How true, we think to ourselves, how liberating! Is this the aphorism (borrowed from Lord Salisbury) that will finally pinpoint the Big Idea underlying the story? Given all the lives ruined by people making wrong decisions in these pages, it has been tempting to think something matters.

But no, Lord Salisbury’s bon mot pinpoints nothing. In the first place, there is no single Big Idea in The Friendly Ones. Hensher juggles many ideas from several cultures. He is a superb conjurer, but never an ideologue. In fact, Big Ideas are to be avoided in Hensher’s world. The Friendly Ones, those Pakistani murder squads that have given their name to the novel, had a very big idea indeed. In any case, Lord Salisbury’s maxim is clearly untrue, as are most of the adages both the English and Bangladeshi characters come out with in the course of their long, chatty lives.

‘Accidents happen.’ In the aftermath of a fatal car accident, one of two accidents that frame the narrative of The Bridge, these words are tossed up in the turbulent minds of a grieving relative. But accidents, unlike natural disasters – earthquakes, floods, droughts – don’t just happen. Whether it’s the collapse of the Westgate Bridge or a car crash, accidents are due to human error. Lives are cut short; others are damaged irrevocably. The survivors – family, friends, co-workers – struggle, sometimes for a lifetime, with the fallout: where to apportion blame, how to assuage the guilt, how to survive the trauma? These questions permeate The Bridge, consume the grieving characters, and undermine the whole community living in the shadow of the Westgate Bridge. The stuff of tragedy.

Revered in Germany as one of the founders of literary modernism, the equal of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) has remained something of a mystery to English readers. Some are aware of Berlin Alexanderplatz: The story of Franz Biberkopf, translated by Eugene Jolas soon after its appearance in 1929. But even this great novel of the modern metropolis seems to have been largely displaced since 1980 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brilliant but distorted film version, which presents women as passive, even willing, victims of the male violence prevalent in postwar German society – and thus saddles Döblin with Fassbinder’s own misogyny. Michael Hofmann’s new translation, more attuned than Jolas’s to the coruscating irony in Döblin’s treatment of his anti-hero, provides a welcome opportunity to re-enter the world of Berlin and to more fully experience its agony and its vitality in the year before the Great Depression tipped Germany over into totalitarianism.

Germany had borne the brunt of the catastrophic Great War. Two million soldiers died, half a million returned, disabled, embittered, attracted to fascist militias. The civilian population, mainly women, survived starvation, the turmoil of a failed socialist revolution, and imminent economic collapse. Then American capital came to the rescue in 1924, giving Germany’s first experiment in democracy a chance. By 1928 the Weimar Republic had established a welfare state: women’s rights, public health care, and the dole. The Nazi Party attracted only two and a half per cent of the vote that year. Berlin was ‘abuzz’, undergoing frenetic reconstruction, and recovery looked certain.

But Döblin, for one, was sceptical. As a former army doctor, psychiatrist, and GP in the proletarian district of Berlin, he had first-hand experience of the longevity of trauma. People do not ‘recover’ just because their prospects improve. Döblin understood how deep-seated violence, both political and sexual, is in in the human psyche, saw the lower classes experiencing both on a daily basis, and looked at the city in this light. Berlin Alexanderplatz is not about the metropolis as such, like American novels of the period, such as Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos. It is first and foremost about the traumatic violence unleashed by World War I and its long afterlife in civilian society. And as trauma can only be experienced in the minds of those who suffer it, the Berlin that Döblin shows us is primarily a city of the mind.

For all its documentary realism, stacking up slice after slice of the city’s daily life, creating a great collage of urban locales, Döblin’s Berlin is a subjective place, shaped by collective memories of war, defeat, and ignominy: an imaginary Whore of Babylon for many old soldiers, with whom they are locked in a permanent battle of biblical proportions. There are many minds in this city, of course – many memories and many struggles – and we should not expect their mental horizons to match. The pieces of the great urban collage don’t and can’t fit together, any more, for example, than the pieces in Otto Dix’s postwar Dada murals. So we hear fragments of different stories, told by different narrators; some normal, some disturbed, none ‘objective’. But to understand one mind is difficult enough, so Döblin gives us the story of a returned soldier, Franz Biberkopf – a little man, no hero – who thinks and feels like many at the bottom of Berlin society. At the heart of the story is Franz’s longing for a male friend, a ‘good comrade’, the type invoked in popular soldiers’ songs. This blind need exposes him to violence in a form beyond his comprehension: a cold and dark malice worthy of Iago, through which evil takes hold in his world.

Alfred Döblin (Wikimedia Commons)Franz, by contrast, is guileless and, we are told, means well. He is obviously no stranger to violence, but it is the everyday variety, tolerated in this milieu where men routinely rape and beat their women. He went too far once, and when we meet him he has just emerged from prison after serving four years for killing his girl, Ida, a prostitute, in a jealous rage. He seems determined to reform, but this looks dubious. In the vertiginous first hours after his release, when the nightmare city in his mind is collapsing on him, he consoles himself for his diminished manliness by shrieking patriotic songs from the victorious Franco-Prussian War and only feels ‘himself’ again when he has raped Minna, Ida’s sister, in the very room where he had killed Ida. As a psychiatrist, Döblin knew all too well where that repetition compulsion comes from, and where it leads. Nevertheless, he encourages readers to give the little man a chance.

One of Döblin’s many narrators, a street balladeer, introduces Franz in the Prologue as one of life’s hapless victims: his fatal assault on Ida was just ‘stupid stuff’; he will soon suffer three terrible blows from what ‘looks an awful lot like fate’, but he will recover and reform. We see Franz relating to a number of women: his beloved Mitzi, naïve and vulnerable; his loyal friend Eva, strong and streetwise – so we can judge for ourselves what his recovery involves. The balladeer believes in Franz, but worries about his need for a friend. There is no mention at the end of the sinister gangly figure posing as an ‘old comrade’, whose blue army greatcoat swings to the medieval tune of the ‘Reaper, Death yclept’. But others, we hear, might mislead Franz: ‘link arms and right and left go marching into war’, until ‘one stops still, the other falls down’. Unfortunately, the old spruiker doesn’t seem to know how to assess the threat; his last song sounds like a nursery rhyme: these might be toy soldiers falling down. Readers must turn elsewhere for judicious comment on Germany’s Destiny.

But whose voice rings true in the endlessly reverberating polyphony? Some scorn fate: Orestes may have been doomed to commit matricide and suffer the furies of conscience but, says one narrator, ‘Consider the changed situation.’ And an old wit comments: ‘I’m not a believer in fate. I live in Berlin, not Greece.’ Biblical injunctions are less easily rejected. Different narrators remind us about Abraham and Job. Obedience to God’s Law is ingrained in European collective consciousness; and belief in the value of self-sacrifice. But whenever that subject arises another grim narrator refers darkly to the little calves in the city slaughterhouses. Döblin uses wit to cut through the ideology of sacrifice, to distinguish between victims and perpetrators, while suggesting that many people, like Franz, are both. And he asks his readers to hear and heed the multifaceted irony. In this they will be greatly assisted by Michael Hofmann’s keen ear. In this new translation, the dissonant voices ring out boldly; we can tell when someone is being mimicked and wickedly sent up, enjoy the black Berlin humour, even though it is at the expense of a deeply traumatised society. For Döblin is never sentimental, or hysterical. He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of violence throbbing in this city of the mind. Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the great anti-war novels of our time.

There is a shimmering, ludic intelligence to this collection of poems, Philip Mead’s first since 1984. The word ‘comeback’ is apt, with its grace note of gladness for renewed possibilities. Opening any new work, the anticipation is acute: will I be changed by reading this, and if so, how? What might I think, feel, or recognise that I have not before?

The title and opening poem, as in many collections, are intentional signals, and set our expectations. To begin with, the country of Tanzania is absent from these poems. The common lyric frame of ‘X Light’ is at once made visible and dismantled, as in René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). In the same vein, the title of the opening poem, ‘Cumquat May’, flirts with the vernal shades of May that arise despite our hemisphere, but neither May nor citrus is anywhere in sight. ‘Come what may’ is heard instead, a pointed allusion to the temporal resignation that is the weather of this book. It is not surprising to find clouds in many of the poems, as we do in John Ashbery – neither poet shuns the lyric trope of cloud as volatility. The clouds may be a signifier of affinity with that poet. As Mead writes in ‘Cumquat May’: ‘We’re bound together by a long arc of occasions / and a future that’s semi-fictional.’

Sometimes you took the shape
of an unseen mosquito,
sometimes of illness.

For a book announcing ‘the greatest story seldom told’ – that is, the triumph of the Enlightenment and its ‘stirring, inspiring, noble’ ideals – Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress frequently hits an incongruously sour note. Since The Better Angels of our Nature: Why violence has declined (2011), Pinker has been at pains to assure us that humanity’s prospects are good and getting better. Now, he wants to explain why this is the case: in short, the values of ‘reason, science, and humanism’ articulated and propagated during the Enlightenment. Although the earlier book was rapturously received among centrist technocrats like its author, the scepticism expressed in other quarters about its thesis has clearly piqued him. The result is Enlightenment Now, a book in three parts. The middle part reprises many of the data-driven arguments of The Better Angels, while also expanding their methodology into diverse areas of human well-being. In each of these, the news is also good.

Social psychology has a few iconic experiments that have entered public consciousness. There is the shaken but obliging participant who delivers potentially lethal electric shocks to another person in Stanley Milgram’s obedience research. There are the young Californians who descend into an orgy of brutality and degradation while enacting the roles of prisoners and guards in Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Below this celebrated group of studies there is a second tier of field-defining experiments, many conducted in the mid-twentieth century in the shadow of the Holocaust and the Cold War, which aimed to lay bare the roots of compliance, conformity, and prejudice. Many embodied a liberal but anti-collectivist world view: people do not act immorally because they are intrinsically evil or spineless but because social influence is powerful, and because it is powerful it must be resisted.

Every era imagines its own future. We always get it wrong, of course; often comically, sometimes tragically. The year 2001 was emblematic of ‘the future’ for decades, thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s visionary film of the same name. Videophones! Robots! Spaceships elegantly ascending to a Strauss waltz! With the approach of the new millennium, we imagined The End of History, as Francis Fukuyama put it in his 1992 book. In the post-Cold War world, nuclear weapons would be dismantled and conflicts peacefully resolved. The ‘world wide web’ would dispel ignorance and distribute knowledge to all. Liberal democracy would spread inevitably as market forces created educated, progressive middle classes around the world.

In a 2017 essay for the Guardian, author Charlotte Wood spoke about the shame artists often feel when they discover a distinguishing characteristic in their work, something that separates them from their cohort. ‘In the beginning, and for a long time, an artist can be most embarrassed by the very thing – sometimes the only thing – that gives her work life and verve. You’re ashamed of it because you don’t see it in other people’s work.’ ABC journalist Kate Wild’s début work, an investigation into the police shooting of twenty-four-year-old Elijah Holcombe in 2009, has a touch of the artist’s shame about it. Wild is drawn to the case partly because she has much in common with the Holcombe family. Her parents and the Holcombes both hail from the same patch of country New South Wales; there is a history of mental illness in both families, to varying degrees; and Wild, like Elijah Holcombe, has battled depression. Wild’s writing comes alive when she touches on her struggles with mental illness, but it’s drip-fed to the reader like a shameful secret. ‘We hide what we think is unspeakable in silence, believing if we starve a thing of words it will disappear,’ she writes.

‘People who write books about shit are regarded with suspicion,’ declares Dutch biologist and writer Midas Dekkers. But like the dung- beetle-worshipping ancient Egyptians before him, Dekkers understands a fundamental truth: ‘The world is round and held together by shit.’

In The Story of Shit, Dekkers yanks the discreetest moments of our lives out of the bathroom and into the spotlight. He sees defecation not as a shameful bodily function, but as an integral part of being human – something enjoyable and even enriching. From toilet etiquette around the world to the uses of faeces throughout history to the science of digestion, he isn’t afraid to muck in and get his hands dirty.

At the centre of this book is Oscar, the son of Rozanna Lilley and her husband, Neil Maclean, and Oscar’s particular way of encountering the world. Unpredictably (by most people’s standards), he is indifferent to some things, sharply affected by others. His fears – of the outdoors, of night and the watching moon, of dogs, for example – are frequently disabling for him and unnerving for other people. He also has an endearing capacity for humour and theatricality. For instance, inspired by his reading of the Mr Men series (supposedly good for helping him to understand different emotions and personalities), he responds to his mother’s reproaching him for greed at a hotel buffet. ‘He looks me up and down. “Mum, you are Miss Perfect,” he comments neutrally. “Who am I? Mr Greedy or Mr Messy?”’

Which poets have most influenced you?

You learn very different things from different poets, from formal aspects, some of them minute, to whole revelations about what a poem might be. This is always developing, and influences tend to come in waves or moments, with anthologies and magazines, subcultures and discoveries. But there are a lot of poets you keep going back to. You can learn from the astonishing ways Emily Dickinson ends a poem (End-grams?), or how Anna Akhmatova’s images are moving because they’re so commonplace: a shoe-heel, an ashtray, a train station. And influence is a free space, whatever is possible: what can you learn about strange conjunctions, like the Medieval and Dada, in Hugo Ball’s line: ‘Destruction was my Beatrice’? The closest influences are the adventures in poetics that one’s contemporaries are involved in.

I have no idea if Pitt Street Poetry is located in Pitt Street, in the centre of Sydney’s CBD, but it has certainly made itself central to poetry publishing in Australia. Its list includes such fine poets as Eileen Chong, John Foulcher, Jean Kent, and Anthony Lawrence; that reputation will be added to by these books from Geoff Page and Ron Pretty, two stalwarts of poetic activity in this country.

Which critics most impress you?

From many possibilities in Australia and elsewhere, I choose James Wood. Given enviable space in The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, Wood doesn’t waste it. His shrewd, elegant reviews show a critic at ease with diverse talents, He knows where his writers are coming from and where they’re going. Calm, scholarly, but passionate when passion is called for.

What makes a fine critic?

Enthusiasm, eloquence, a distinctive voice, openness to the unexpected, a well-stocked mind, wit, and humour: some or all of these gifts would make the ideal reviewer.

Blimey, Blamey

Dear Editor,
John Arnold’s review of The People’s Force: A history of Victoria Police by Robert Haldane (ABR, May 2018) is an admirable appraisal of the work, which covers a colourful and important contribution to the state’s history. Arnold is, however, wrong to suggest that Christine Nixon was the most high-profile Commissioner to be appointed. That accolade surely belongs to Major-General Thomas Blamey, who assumed the position in 1925, eighteen months after the Police Strike that resulted in the dismissal of 636 members of the force. Despite his badge being found in a Fitzroy brothel, despite his abrogation of laws protecting the right to protest, despite his giving false evidence to a Royal Commission that ended in his forced resignation, Blamey became Australia’s wartime military leader and our only Field Marshal (let’s not count the duke of Edinburgh). I think he tops the estimable Christine Nixon.

Kevin Summers, Bentleigh, Vic.

A new anthropology

Dear Editor,
Richard J. Martin’s review of my book ‘Against Native Title’: Conflict and creativity in outback Australia and Katie Glaskin’s Crosscurrents: Law and society in a native title claim to land and sea overlooks some vital aspects of the relationship between anthropology and native title (ABR, May 2018). Martin is a highly experienced native title anthropologist; it is understandable that he would wish to defend the institution of native title and foreground its benefits (which I take care to also acknowledge). However, in declaring his preference for Glaskin’s account, Martin fails to recognise the very different colonial histories, styles of anthropology, and genres of writing represented by these two books.

Glaskin insightfully reports on her work as an expert witness forensic anthropologist: her book emerges from research with claimants on a successful case. My work was undertaken in the midst of disorienting local identity contests, set in train by native title’s codified terms of recognition: I worked from the outside, with people who had come to distance themselves from a process that had hurt them. Martin could have summoned a more perceptive comparative reading, acknowledging the ways in which the vagaries and ahistoricity of the native title regime are enacted in the very trajectories of these two different cases.

I sought to account for a cynicism about native title in the place where I worked that was real. This is the messy, contradictory stuff of grounded politics, of minor realities that might challenge liberal attachments to notions of progress and the national good, but which the fieldworker has a responsibility to take seriously, document, and try to understand. I also describe the renewed and inventive relations some Aboriginal people have forged with Country and with ‘greenies’. Martin mistakes my portrait of a complex empirical reality for ‘utopian’ critique.

There was a time where anthropologists assumed the role of omniscient narrator, authoritatively explaining Aboriginal cultural difference to non-Aboriginal readers. But in the shadow of native title’s emphasis on Indigenous otherness, I am one of many pursuing a new kind of anthropology that grapples instead with the relationships – colonial, state, and other – that shape the Indigenous present. Further, more collaborative and responsive modes of engagement with Indigenous analysis demand new ways of writing, which open up the space for reflection, for uncertainty, and, ultimately, for ethical commitments.

Eve Vincent, Lidcombe, NSW

Loveless

Dear Editor,
Anwen Crawford gives this superb and uplifting Russian film four stars, then proceeds to misunderstand it, using words like ‘cold’ and ‘despairing’. It is true that the film’s premise, a missing child, is harrowing, and the outcome overwhelmingly tragic. Her implied judgement that the parents more or less had it coming to them, given their selfish obsession with new partners, is also understandable, but it has led her to miss the most important dimensions of the film. The ‘futile’ (her word) generosity of the group of volunteer searchers – ordinary citizens with no incentive other than their instinctive obligation to society – who spend freezing nights in frightening and sordid places trying to find an unknown boy whose own parents hardly cared about him, is, on the contrary, a miracle not only of dogged heroism, but of a sense of the collective which has profound roots in Russian spirituality. No, the boy’s life was not saved; but it is a double tragedy when a critic is blinded to a film’s rugged humanitarianism because she sees only a lack of ‘civic accountability’.

Judith Armstrong (online comment)