communism
Dalton Trumbo is not a household name today, but he was one of the most influential screenwriters in the old Hollywood studio system. Many of his films like Roman Holiday and Spartacus are beloved classics, but Trumbo is also a significant figure for his part in the Hollywood blacklist, a period of anti-Communist hysteria that swept through the United States in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Trumbo, like many Hollywood intellectuals, was targeted for his progressive politics in an unprecedented purge that saw many actors, directors and writers, lose their livelihoods, their freedom and even their lives.
When Vêra Chytilová sadly passed away in March of last year, cinephiles across the world mourned the loss of a truly passionate and original filmmaker. Chytilová was the dangerous iconoclast of the Czech New Wave. Both the BFI and Second Run DVD decided that the world must know of her work outside of her nihilistic masterpiece Sedmikrasky (Daisies, 1966), and as such the BFI ran a series showing many of her films at their Southbank cinema, and Second Run released two of her films, Pasti, Pasti, Pasticky (Traps, 1998) and Fruit of Paradise (1970), on their excellent DVD line.