I am an artist-filmmaker, writer, and Professor of Experimental Film at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, Kent, UK. I have worked at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and BBC TV. I have been making films since 1974 and teaching since 1988. I have published extensively on Artists’ Film / Experimental Cinema. I have edited and contributed chapters to numerous other books and journals, including Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ, Film Quarterly, Sequence, and others. I have completed over 70 single screen works in 16mm and video, gallery film and video installations, and multi-projector film performances. These have been screened worldwide.
David Curtis’ copiously illustrated book is a wide-ranging yet detailed introduction to the world of artists’ film, with over 400 filmmakers discussed. The survey is rooted in the historical avant-garde of the 1920s and ‘30s but covers work up to the present day. While major figures such as Steve McQueen and Bill Viola are mentioned, equal space is devoted to little-known filmmakers from France, Poland, and elsewhere.
This detailed survey presents for the first time an alternative history of the moving image, chronicling artists' ever-evolving fascination with filmmaking from the early twentieth century to now.
From early pioneers to key artists of the present, leading authority and film expert David Curtis offers a vivid account of the numerous individuals who have been inspired by the cinematic medium and felt compelled to interpret and respond to it in their own way. In doing so, he discusses artists' widely differing achievements, aspirations, theories and approaches.
Featuring over 400 international moving-image makers and drawing on examples from across the arts,…
I read modern history as an undergraduate and then trained as a primary school teacher. Unsurprisingly, our classroom topics were often historical. My interest in the experiences of people, especially children, in Europe during WWII stems from the fact that my own father grew up in Germany and had numerous tales to tell. My first book was a recount of his wartime childhood. My father gave a copy of his book to his friend and neighbor who happened to be a Polish wartime veteran with his own remarkable stories to tell and this led to three years’ intensive historical research for his book.
Although there has been a great deal of debate about the authenticity of this account, I still enjoyed reading it and comparing it with the accounts told me by my own protagonist.
It is a heroic tale of survival that conveys much of the horror and desperation experienced by so many in wartime Europe, and the displacement and loss suffered by so many, but also the hope and determination to escape and defy all the odds. The parallels with the story my own protagonist told are uncanny.
"I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves."--Slavomir Rawicz
In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk--a camp where enduring hunger, cold, untended wounds, untreated illnesses, and avoiding daily executions were everyday feats. Their march--over thousands of miles by foot--out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India is a remarkable statement about man's desire to be free.
In the 1990s, I interviewed Erna in her Boca Raton home for a newspaper article about Holocaust survivors. She had been telling her moving survival story in local middle- and high-schools. We became close friends. She died in 2000. I’ve always cherished her two memoirs, which also include After the Holocaust: The Long Road to Freedom.
Recently, her family asked me to make a documentary about her. So, I’ve revisited her books. They invite readers to embark on a journey with a Jewish-Polish teenager who goes through hell only to eventually, miraculously find her piece of heaven.
I dearly miss Erna. I’m excited to share her trials, tribulations, and triumphs in a visual format. I hope I can come close to matching the power and elegance of her writing.
Rubinstein has written a fine book recounting her experiences as a polish Jew who, with her three sisters, survived the concentration camps where her father, mother, and young brother perished. The book is simply written, yet its very simplicity heightens its emotional impact.
I’m the author of multiple middle grade and YA historical novels, including Torch, which won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature. Torch takes place in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and it is especially timely in the face of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Bear (a popular symbol of the Russian Empire) has mauled many of its neighbors in the past century, not only Czechoslovakia and Ukraine but also the Baltic countries that, like Ukraine, were incorporated into the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European countries that were part of the Soviet bloc until the fall of Communism in 1989.
While there’s no shortage of WWII books for teens, this companion to Traitor is among the few that presents the eastern front and Ukrainian and Polish resistance fighters who battled each other, the Nazis, and the Soviets.
Today’s alliance between Poland and Ukraine reflects their mutual experience of oppression at the hands of larger powers that transcends their own historic differences. The unlikely romance in The Silent Unseen serves as a microcosm of this process.
Poland, July 1944. Sixteen-year-old Maria is making her way home after years of forced labor in Nazi Germany, only to find her village destroyed and her parents killed in a war between the Polish Resistance and Ukrainian nationalists. To Maria's shock, the local Resistance unit is commanded by her older brother, Tomek-who she thought was dead. He is now a "Silent Unseen," a special-operations agent with an audacious plan to resist a new and even more dangerous enemy sweeping in from the East. When Tomek disappears, Maria is determined to find him, but the only person who might be able…
When I was growing up, our neighbours used to have weekly garden bonfires that filled our house with choking smoke. Around this time, I did a school project on air pollution that opened my eyes to the horrors of breathing toxic air. All this must have made an impact because, 40-odd years later, after taking a science degree and working for a decade as an environmental campaigner, I decided to write an eye-opening, easy-to-read book about why air pollution still kills millions of people each year—and what we can do to put that right.
Like Tim Smedley, Beth Gardiner brings a journalist's eye to the problem of air pollution and contrasts how it affects different people in different ways in the UK, India, Poland, and the USA. For some people, science is dull, mundane, and plonkingly prosaic, but Beth's eleven stories really brought the problem alive for me in a spellbinding writing style I really admire.
Nothing is as elemental, as essential to human life, as the air we breathe. Yet around the world, in rich countries and poor ones, it is quietly poisoning us.
Air pollution prematurely kills seven million people every year, including more than one hundred thousand Americans. It is strongly linked to strokes, heart attacks, many kinds of cancer, dementia, and premature birth, among other ailments. In Choked, Beth Gardiner travels the world to tell the story of this modern-day plague, taking readers from the halls of power in Washington and the diesel-fogged London streets she walks with her daughter to Poland’s…
I had heard of Dr. Mengele’s experiments in genetics in WWII, but nothing
specific. I didn’t know, for example,
that he looked at twins and that he tortured children.
In this book, we follow twin girls, where
chapters go back and forth between their points of view. The author does a stunning job of helping us
see how a given situation can be interpreted differently by different
characters and how the bravura of a character might be camouflage for
tremendous fear.
Here, the children are
resilient and extraordinarily decent in the face of hideous choices. It is far too easy to underestimate
children’s understanding of morality. I
was grateful for every page of this book.
It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.
That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but…
Ellen Cassedy explores the ways that people, and countries, can engage with the difficult truths of the Holocaust in order to build a better future. She researched Lithuania’s encounter with its Jewish heritage, including the Holocaust, for ten years. Her book breaks new ground by shining a spotlight on how brave people – Jews and non-Jews – are facing the past and building mutual understanding. Cassedy is the winner of numerous awards and a frequent speaker about the Holocaust, Lithuania, and Yiddish language and literature.
Steinman reaches out across a cultural divide to seek out Poles who are pursuing the truth about the past, however painful, and recovering the history of their lost Jewish neighbors. She brings to life the ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation. Her journey changed her, and it will change you.
A lyrical literary memoir that explores the exhilarating, discomforting, and ultimately healing process of Polish-Jewish reconciliation taking place in Poland today
“I’d grown up with the phrase ‘Never forget’ imprinted on my psyche. Its corollary was more elusive. Was it possible to remember—at least to recall—a world that existed before the calamity?”
In the winter of 2000, Louise Steinman set out to attend an international Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau at the invitation of her Zen rabbi, who felt the Poles had gotten a “bum rap.” A bum rap? Her own mother could not bear to utter the word “Poland,”…
My name is Jenny Harrison and my writing career started in 1997 in South Africa with Debbie's Story, which to my astonishment, became a bestseller. Thinking this was going to be an easy route to fame and fortune, I continued writing after migrating to New Zealand. Alas, the road to a bestseller is rife with disappointment but that didn't stop me from writing a bunch of paranormal and humorous novels. Circumstances led me to writing about families caught up in World War II. I don’t write about battles or generals, I write about ordinary people who face the unimagined cost of war and survive.
This book is by Alan Furst whose research is impeccable. His storytelling can be jerky and maybe chaotic but that’s how things were in the time he writes about. His characters are drawn from the sinister underbelly of war, the men and women who work in the shadows. His writing is intense, I remember the scenes as chaotic, with no character arc or happy ending, but a mirror of the times when life was lived moment by moment.
September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal.
Who am I? Well, I'm a mother of three, a nurse, a wife, a survivor of a postpartum heart attack, and a new author. I'm living proof that life can throw some curveballs, but I'm also proof that you can bounce back stronger than ever. I'm the conductor of the chaos train, the healer with a heart of gold, and the one who holds it all together when things get crazy. I'm juggling carpool, advocacy, and dinner plans with a smile on my face and love in my heart. I'm embracing every moment of this second chance at life, living it to the fullest, and loving every minute of it.
Kelly Rimmer's book is a poignant and deeply moving exploration of self-discovery and the resilience of the human spirit. Set against the backdrop of World War II and the present day, this novel beautifully intertwines two compelling lives that ultimately converge in a powerful tale of love, loss, and redemption.
One of the most captivating aspects of the book is the author's ability to capture the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Through Alina and Alice's journeys, readers witness the transformative power of courage, love, and sacrifice in overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. This resonated with me because I could relate.
Moreover, this novel is imbued with a sense of hope and redemption. As Alina and Alice navigate their respective struggles, they discover a strength within themselves they never knew existed. Their stories serve as a testament to the indomitable nature of the human spirit and the…
If you were moved by The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris or The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe, this book is for you. A searing page-turner of hope, family secrets and a love to defy all odds from bestselling Kelly Rimmer, inspired by the author's family history.
'Fans of The Nightingale and Lilac Girls will adore The Things We Cannot Say' Pam Jenoff
'Simply amazing book, so moving I couldn't put it down. A book that will remain in my heart for many years to come *****' A reader
Marxian Economics and its relevance to a better world and socialism has been my passion since I became an adult. My expertise in this subject, such as it is, has been sharpened by the study of Marx and Engels’ great works, but also by the efforts of so many others since; some of whom are included in my five best books. But above all, it is the knowledge that in this world of nearly 8 billion people, most do not have a happy and fulfilling life but face daily toil and struggle to live (and die). Humanity has the power and technology to do better; we just need to organise our social and governmental structures to achieve it.
Rick Kuhn’s book brings to our attention the ideas of the most important Marxist economist of the 20th century, previously forgotten and ignored. A Polish Jew and Communist, Grossman revives Marx’s economic theory in a clear fashion after the misunderstandings and distortions of Marx’s epigones. Grossman’s ideas, written in the 1920s and 1930s, are still relevant 100 years later.
Rick Kuhn's Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism is the definitive study of the life and work of this renowned economist, activist, and intellectual. As a young man, Grossman joined the socialist movement and participated in Jewish workers' strikes and demonstrations, as well as in boycotts against employers and the Austro-Hungarian state. He moved to Vienna, but was driven back to Poland by the Austrian state's racist citizenship policies. A member of the illegal Polish Communist Party, Grossman was frequently arrested and jailed, finally leaving Poland for a post at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main,…
