Even If You Have to Starve

Ian Penman: Mod v. Trad, 29 August 2013

Mod: A Very British Style 
by Richard Weight.
Bodley Head, 478 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 224 07391 2
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... British rock group Kaiser Chiefs’. The links can be tenuous, to say the least. Jean-Luc Godard gets in for A Bout de souffle. OK, but Weight makes it sound like Summer Holiday with Gitanes and avant-garde haircuts. Alain Delon gets two mentions – one for a Smiths sleeve, the other for being an early scooter adopter. (None for his ...

Promenade Dora-Bruder

Adam Shatz: Patrick Modiano, 22 September 2016

So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood 
by Patrick Modiano, translated by Euan Cameron.
MacLehose, 160 pp., £8.99, September 2016, 978 0 85705 499 9
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... into submission by LSD and hedonism. Paris’s leading artists and intellectuals praise the camp; Jean-Luc Godard offers to shoot a collaborationist film. The title of the story, ‘I Am a Young Man Alone’, expressed its author’s predicament. Two decades after the end of the war, at the height of its trente glorieuses, France had moved on, but ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper retinue: Kenneth Anger, Christopher Gibbs, Gram Parsons, Jean-Luc Godard. The Beatles grew sheepdog hair and Bakunin beards, and adopted the statutory exotic guru, but they never really had anything like the Stones’ sullen, dandified grandeur. The Stones were exquisites; the Beatles were Everyman. It’s the ...

The ashtrays worry me

Emilie Bickerton: Eric Rohmer, 19 March 2015

Eric Rohmer: Biographie 
by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe.
Stock, 605 pp., €29, January 2014, 978 2 234 07561 0
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Friponnes de porcelaine 
by Eric Rohmer.
Stock, 304 pp., €20, January 2014, 978 2 234 07631 0
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... Rohmer’s work has never been especially cool or iconic, yet more than François Truffaut’s or Jean-Luc Godard’s it divides audiences right down the middle. Those who like his films are often protective and passionate and have seen them all; those who don’t complain of boredom and pointlessness. The complaints are partly a result of the subject ...

My Mother’s Prison

Daniella Shreir: Chantal Akerman’s Predicament, 19 March 2026

Oeuvre écrite et parlée, 1968-2015 
by Chantal Akerman, edited by Cyril Béghin.
L’Arachnéen, 1584 pp., £60, April 2024, 978 2 37367 022 6
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Chantal Akerman Collection: Volume 1, 1967-78 
BFI, five discs, £54.99, February 2025Show More
Chantal Akerman Collection: Volume 2, 1982-2015 
BFI, five discs, £54.99, June 2025Show More
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... At the age​ of fifteen, Chantal Akerman sneaked into a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou. She was in the habit of skipping school with her friends and the cinema was one of their preferred hangout spots. But until that moment, Akerman had thought of it as a place for flirting and kissing, which were ‘the same thing as dancing ...