Ribbon of Memes

It's been over a century and a quarter since the first moving picture was committed to celluloid - the "ribbon of dreams", as Orson Welles mellifluously intoned.

And so, welcome, one and all, to Ribbon of Memes, a new podcast in which Roger Bell_West and Nick Marsh supply grateful listeners hot takes about films considered masterpieces by critics or filmgoers in general.

The rules: we choose one "masterpiece" from every year from the earliest days of cinema to our dreadful modern dystopia. Do we agree these films are classics? Are we entertained? Did we even understand what the film was trying to say? The questions are endless!*

We start in 1973 (for reasons explained in the first podcast) and progress vaguely chronologically (unless we think of another film that makes an interesting comparison to the one we have just seen, or are otherwise distracted by shiny new things).

Yes, that's right, we decided that what the world really needed was two more uninformed middle-aged white guys telling the world about media largely produced by similar people. Find out whether we were right or not herein!

*Actually, no, that's most of them.

We're also on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

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Schindler's List (1993) 26 March 2022

Roger and Nick discuss Schindler's List (1993).

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Tags: drama

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 01:38pm on 03 April 2022

    Well, for me two of the scenes you found less than wonderful worked just about perfectly for me. The shower scene suckered me in completely: I was expecting them all to die and the relief was so great that I didn't object to having had my heart strings plucked, possibly because I'd been having them positively pounded by that point of the film.

    And the girl in the red dress for me was all about Schindler's reaction. It is the moment when the barrier of his comforting assumptions breaks through and he realises what he is and what he has been doing all this time. It is the sudden burst of reality through illusion, seeing clearly and not 'through a glass darkly'. I wasn't upset by the artifice of it but then perhaps I have a higher tolerance of craftsmanship in plain view.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 02:32pm on 03 April 2022

    I'll happily admit that mine is a very personal reaction; I like to be absorbed in a film, thinking of the narrative in terms of events I could actually be watching. (And at the same time a separate compartment of my mind is saying "nice framing, colour balance is a bit off, good subtle use of music, damn that's a whole speech delivered with one lift of the eyebrow".) I want the filmic technique to be subtle enough not to grab my attention and flip that other compartment into the foreground.

  3. Posted by Nick Marsh at 11:40pm on 03 April 2022

    I admit I’m with Michael here; the shower scene suckered me too and I felt nothing but immense relief when the water came.

  4. Posted by Nick Marsh at 11:40pm on 03 April 2022

    I admit I’m with Michael here; the shower scene suckered me too and I felt nothing but immense relief when the water came.

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