Change Your Image
domramos-3-539730
Reviews
The Mass of Men (2012)
Dole office sadism gets results
When an everyday error, something that anyone could get wrong, means that a man's dole payments are to be delayed in the face of weeks of dire poverty, the office-worker at the dole office treats the man with unwarranted bureaucratic malice. It is as if she has been ordered to do so. Indeed, a recent leak has revealed that dole offices in the UK are given targets for unsympathetic referrals:- in effect, as this film so powerfully shows, the State is setting out to be hostile to the poor to deny them their rightful benefits.
Against such a background, the main character is stunned when a series of rapid events that are so terrible and shocking unfold before his eyes, but he remains just astute enough to save his situation.
This protagonist's acting, and the film, has been praised by no less than Bernardo Bertolucci and Lord Puttnam, and anyone who enjoys a very fine short, or is interested in the reality facing many people in hardship should see this little gem.
Housing Problems (1935)
The first use of an interview in a documentary.
Sister to the famous John Grierson, Ruby Grierson revolutionized the documentary forever by the introduction of a totally new concept: the interview.
That she was uncredited on the film is a shameful, that she remains so obscured by posterity is a genuine scandal. She had real revolutionary aims: she said to the slum-dwellers she interviewed that the camera and microphone were theirs- "to tell the bastards" what they had to go through living in slum conditions.
A series of residents appear and tell for the first time on film their own account, in their own words, (unlike the scripted dialogue derived from observed reality, of her brother's documentaries) of the appalling conditions of living in the slums of East London in the 1930's and 40's.
This unique film shows she should be in the greatest Hall of Fame of all.