This detailed documentary exposes the enigma behind the camera through its portrait of the woman whose work led to the recruitment of Kim Philby
The sinew and texture of history are to be found in this grippingly detailed documentary by Peter Stephan Jungk, based on his 2015 book The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart. She was Jungk’s aunt: an Austrian-born documentary photographer and socialist, domiciled in Britain during and after the second world war, whose work brilliantly recorded the lives of the urban working classes in Vienna, London and the Rhondda valley.
Edith also had a tempestuous emotional life that involved an affair with Donald Winnicott, the distinguished paediatrician – who was treating her son for autism. But most importantly, she was a spy for the Soviet Union and introduced Kim Philby to her communist handler, Arnold Deutsch, who recruited him. So she has a real claim to having changed the course of history.
The sinew and texture of history are to be found in this grippingly detailed documentary by Peter Stephan Jungk, based on his 2015 book The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart. She was Jungk’s aunt: an Austrian-born documentary photographer and socialist, domiciled in Britain during and after the second world war, whose work brilliantly recorded the lives of the urban working classes in Vienna, London and the Rhondda valley.
Edith also had a tempestuous emotional life that involved an affair with Donald Winnicott, the distinguished paediatrician – who was treating her son for autism. But most importantly, she was a spy for the Soviet Union and introduced Kim Philby to her communist handler, Arnold Deutsch, who recruited him. So she has a real claim to having changed the course of history.
- 7/27/2018
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
It may not be true that Walt Disney wanted to be cryogenically frozen, but Philip Glass's new opera about the last months of his life explores the man behind the myth. Nicholas Wroe meets its director, Phelim McDermott
It was remarkably soon after Walt Disney's death in 1966 that the urban myth emerged of his body being cryogenically frozen in the hope that one day, pending advances in medical science, he might be brought back to life. "Of course it was absolute nonsense," says Phelim McDermott, director of Philip Glass's new opera about Disney, The Perfect American, which opens at the English National Opera . "But for some reason, this was a myth that people wanted to believe. One of our singers grew up in Florida and says, when he was a kid, everyone just knew that Disney was underneath the Epcot Centre. And after a while, these myths can...
It was remarkably soon after Walt Disney's death in 1966 that the urban myth emerged of his body being cryogenically frozen in the hope that one day, pending advances in medical science, he might be brought back to life. "Of course it was absolute nonsense," says Phelim McDermott, director of Philip Glass's new opera about Disney, The Perfect American, which opens at the English National Opera . "But for some reason, this was a myth that people wanted to believe. One of our singers grew up in Florida and says, when he was a kid, everyone just knew that Disney was underneath the Epcot Centre. And after a while, these myths can...
- 5/31/2013
- by Nicholas Wroe
- The Guardian - Film News
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