A Queer Pioneer: Sunday Bloody Sunday on Its Fiftieth Anniversary A Conversation Between Michał Oleszczyk and Alex Ramon (Web Exclusive)

“I knew from the start that it was really a piece of chamber music, that not everyone would appreciate it. But it was a film I believed I had to do. Not wanted to. Had to do.”
(John Schlesinger, quoted in William J. Mann’s Edge of Midnight:
The Life of John Schlesinger, London: Random House, 2004)

Released on either side of the U.K.’s Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which decriminalized “homosexual acts in private between consenting adults,” two landmark British films centralizing the experiences of gay male characters celebrate significant anniversaries this year. Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) and John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) could scarcely be more different. Part of its director’s valuable run of “social problem” pictures, Victim is a taut, clenched thriller which critiques the then-current law that made gay men easy targets for blackmail. Sunday Bloody Sunday, on the other hand, is an idiosyncratic relationship drama about the triangular affair between a doctor, Daniel (Peter Finch), a job recruitment consultant, Alex (Glenda Jackson), and an artist, Bob (Murray Head), whom Daniel and Alex both love and who divides his time between them. Both pictures retain their power but it’s Schlesinger’s film that forms the focus of our conversation here, as we discuss the impact, import and legacy of Sunday Bloody Sunday fifty years after its release. Victim, while not our primary focus, provides indispensable context to our discussion.—Alex Ramon and Michał Oleszczyk  

Michał Oleszczyk: Somehow, I feel that this needs to start on a personal note. You and I are both gay male films critics, simultaneously of highly varied cultural backgrounds and of uncanny affinity of taste. I know we both love John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, which will have its fiftieth anniversary of release on July 1, 2021. To my young, pre-coming-out self, this was the most striking film in how casually and matter-of-factly it presented a gay male relationship. Can you recall when and how you first encountered this film?

Alex Ramon: Growing up and realizing my sexuality, I was attuned to discovering work focusing on gay characters, and certain early and mid-Nineties films, whether firmly mainstream like Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) or defiantly not like Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992) (the latter taped from TV and watched in secret), were important to me.

It would have been around that same period of the mid-Nineties that I first heard about Sunday Bloody Sunday, and for sure I was immediately intrigued by the idea of this queer pioneer—an early Seventies British film presenting gay and bisexual characters. However, the film wasn’t particularly accessible when I was growing up—I don’t remember it being screened on TV in the Nineties, or being readily available on video. So my first experience of the film would have been reading about it, through Pauline Kael’s review in Deeper into Movies (1973) and other criticism I was engaging with at that time. It would be the 2000s before I was actually able to see it.

Like you, I was immediately struck by the casualness and intelligence in the depiction of Daniel and Bob’s interactions, which seemed very much observed “from the inside” and therefore extremely liberating. The film felt wise, mature, and strangely calming in that way. In The Saint and the Artist, his book about Iris Murdoch’s fiction, Peter Conradi writes that “part of Murdoch’s unsung courage [is] that she deals always with homosexuality as an unremarkable, general feature of the human scene.” That’s what Schlesinger’s film does, too, and I can imagine how surprising and challenging that must have been at the time.

The presentation of Peter Finch’s Daniel as an intelligent, professional, fully human protagonist, neither laughable nor pitiable, seems a world away from the gay representations dominating British screens (and beyond) then, and encapsulated in comic stereotypes like the ever-mincing Mr. Humphries (played by John Inman) in the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? (1972–1985). Do you remember your first encounter with the film, and what were your impressions?

Oleszczyk: I first saw it on Polish television at about the same time I watched Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969). Both films were shot by Billy Williams, and I was enough of a cinematography buff at fifteen to make note of that. However, whereas Russell’s film set my teenage gay self on fire with the famous nude wrestling sequence (I wish to go on record as saying that I find Oliver Reed and Alan Bates the sexiest pairing in the history of film), the Schlesinger film took me by surprise. The on-screen kiss between Peter Finch and Murray Head was shot and presented in such a casual, unfussy way, I remember thinking to myself—yes, this is how I want to greet my partner when I grow up. It wasn’t until years later that I learned about how fraught the shooting of the scene was. Murray Head often repeats the anecdote about disturbed male crew members approaching him days after the scene was filmed, almost in sympathy to the horror he must have experienced by making out with Peter Finch [the story reappears in two separate interviews with Head featured on Criterion Collection and BFI editions of the film]. Still, in many ways, Sunday Bloody Sunday was the film that not only helped shape my notion of what a gay life may have in store for me—more profoundly, it also formed my idea of adulthood itself, as a state of constant flux, imperfect decisions, and pursuit of elusive satisfaction. You know, all those gorgeously unmade beds and messy counters, so lovingly arranged by set designer Luciana Arrighi, wonderfully suggestive of the perpetual mess our feelings inevitably pull us into.

Ramon: Absolutely. The film’s attentiveness to the textures of everydayness and domesticity (that fudge and a unique technique of making instant coffee) is closely connected to its sensitivity to the ever-shifting complexities of personal life and emotional experience— something I find sadly lacking in a lot of the most acclaimed films today. What Schlesinger described as his commitment to creating “a truthful film about people’s emotions” is evident throughout, making it incredibly fresh and—dare I use the word?—“relatable,” to this day.

At the same time, though, the film emerges from some very specific contexts, which it’s worth highlighting. In his just-published book Shooting Midnight Cowboy [see review in the Summer 2021 print issue of Cineaste], which offers a lot of compelling insight into Schlesinger’s position as a gay director, Glenn Frankel notes that Midnight Cowboy comes out of the “brief but fertile interregnum between the eclipse of the old studio system and the rise of a new one, a time when original, risk-taking movies flourished, old rules were shattered and a new breed of film-makers took on adult themes and characters that had never been seen in mainstream movies before.” The same goes for Sunday Bloody Sunday, and I’m curious about how you view the interaction of these two films which Schlesinger made in sequence.  

Oleszczyk: I see Midnight Cowboy as a taboo-shattering success, which has little of the subtlety of Sunday Bloody Sunday. What’s important to understand, though, is that the latter wouldn’t have been possible without the former. It’s quite clear that if it hadn’t been for the Academy Awards and the box-office success of Midnight Cowboy—essentially a gay-tinted buddy movie exploiting the gorgeous squalor of late-1960s Times Square— Schlesinger wouldn’t have worked on Sunday with the amount of freedom that he enjoyed. We know for sure that the first inklings of the script were born during long conversations on the set of Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and there are some similarities between Sunday and Gilliatt’s novels One by One (1965) and A State of Change (1967), but it’s hard to imagine the sexual frankness of the movie without the X-rated precedent of Midnight Cowboy first clearing the field. We need to understand just how shocking Midnight Cowboy was for its time—apart from Bob Balaban’s famous midmovie blow job, the psychodelic orgy sequence was shot over many days of an actual wild party that proved so transgressive to some members of the crew that at least one of them walked out on the film, citing his religious belief as an obstacle to proceed (the story appears in Frankel’s book). On the set of Sunday, the camera operator openly asked whether the Finch–Head kiss was necessary at all (even Gilliatt opted for showing it in a suggestive silhouette shot).

Ramon: The success of Midnight Cowboy undoubtedly emboldened Schlesinger—“I can get away with anything now,” he said—and his need to do something more personal was evidently very strong. Obviously another important context for Sunday is that of the U.K.’s Sexual Offences Act of 1967, and the Gay Rights Movement, then moving into high gear post-Stonewall. We can come back to the question of the film’s politics later, but how do you feel Sunday Bloody Sunday stands up next to other gay-themed films of that pivotal period, such as Staircase (1969) that also attempts a presentation of the domestic life of a male couple, or The Boys in the Band (1970), which Schlesinger apparently hated “for its perpetuation of self-loathing stereotypes,” which he viewed as “the exception, not the rule”? 

Oleszczyk: Well, The Boys in the Band was certainly a game-changer in its 1968 theatrical incarnation—the William Friedkin film version (1970) was also important, if flawed. There’s even a cowboy-costumed hustler there, which by the time film opened was seen as a direct nod to Schlesinger’s film. I happen to like The Boys in the Band for its sheer boldness of immersing an audience in an exclusively gay world for two hours—a feat that Staircase attempted, but turned into an abrasive vaudeville of Rex Harrison and Richard Burton thrashing about in offensive posturing. Staircase and Sunday are light years apart in treating their gay characters. On the other hand, it can be argued that Schlesinger omits any real engagement with the gay culture of his day in Sunday—there are no clubs, no gay friends of Daniel, no gestures of defiance towards straight culture at all. I can imagine someone having a bad reaction to Sunday as an obsessively “straight-acting” film. How would the character of Daniel react to a flamboyant homosexual man if he met one? That’s an interesting question to ponder. 

Ramon: It certainly is. For sure, I can’t imagine Daniel out on a Gay Lib march, and viewers who see a certain kind of activism as a prerequisite for gay cinema are indeed likely to be dissatisfied with the picture. I stand by my definition of the film as a queer pioneer due, among other things, to its casual presentation of Bob’s sexual fluidity. Yet truly there’s not much about the film that’s “queer” in the oppositional, politicized sense of the 1970s/80s US academic reappropriation of the term. Nonetheless, I agree with Mann’s contention that “Sunday Bloody Sunday becomes political by its sheer apoliticality: [Schlesinger] was not asking for tolerance; he was assuming that among people of intelligence it was already there.”

 However, beyond these American resonances, for me it’s also very important to place Sunday Bloody Sunday in a continuum of gay British cinema which, from Dearden’s Victim onward, often seemed far ahead of its U.S. counterparts. (Indeed, Schlesinger, who collaborated with Dearden when he, Schlesinger, was just starting out, had been much inspired by Victim and included a nod to it in his debut feature, A Kind of Loving [1962] in the shape of the film’s title on a cinema marquee.) There’s such a significant, diverse history of gay work in Britain from A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Leather Boys (1964) to Derek Jarman’s cinema to My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Beautiful Thing (1996), the collected work of Terence Davies, or Nigel Finch’s wonderful, sadly “lost” The Lost Language of Cranes (1991) in which Schlesinger himself appears in a small but significant role as a gay author, adoptive parent and mentor figure: his casting there constitutes a lovely, affectionate nod to a forebear.  

Beyond that, Sunday Bloody Sunday also offers a vivid time capsule to early Seventies Britain. I love the use of locations, such as Alex’s journey over Blackfriars Bridge, as we hear radio snippets about England’s economic woes and threatened strikes. Producer Joseph Janni said the goal was to capture “a weary, self-doubting England” that’s certainly no longer “swinging.” The film’s wry, arch, tart, slightly mannered dialogue also feels quintessentially British to me. As a Polish critic with a deep and extensive knowledge of British culture, what’s your response to the Seventies London that the film presents, and, more broadly, the Britishness of the film? 

Oleszczyk: I obviously have a vastly narrower frame of reference here, but I like how the film rhymes, so to speak, with other London movies of the same time—especially with Deep End (1970), made by my compatriot Jerzy Skolimowski. There’s a feeling in Schlesinger of contemplating a cultural scene in the aftermath of the atomic blast of countercultural rebellion. I love how you can see in Sunday Bloody Sunday the English upper class and bourgeoisie (represented by Alex, Daniel, and Alex’s mother) slightly recoiling from the youth-culture chaos going on in the streets. They don’t fully know how to react—Alex’s circle is “inclusive” enough to welcome a Black academic Professor Johns (the wonderful Thomas Baptiste, clearly amused by his hosts’ self-congratulatory openness), but the hidden question of the film is what will become of the children that are noisily frolicking in the background in many scenes. From teenage hooligans scratching car doors (a young Daniel Day-Lewis in their midst), to pampered kids encouraged to engage in abstract art with Bob, there is little doubt that Schlesinger sees the very young as essentially directionless; left to their own devices.

Ramon: What do you think of Kael’s review, by the way? I find it quite a curious one—she praises the film a lot yet seems at pains to emphasize how distant it is from her sensibility and temperament. She’s also a bit reluctant to let go of certain views of Schlesinger, whose work she hadn’t liked up to this point, and credits the screenplay by her New Yorker job-sharing colleague Gilliatt as key to the film’s success. This is a notion that William J. Mann’s biography of Schlesinger seeks to challenge by stressing Schlesinger’s input (after all, the film was closely based on his own affair with the actor John Steiner) and the contributions from other writers, David Sherwin and Ken Levison, that occurred when Schlesinger and Gilliatt’s relationship soured. I guess we’re getting into another case of how complicated the attribution of authorship can be. Yet, the film feels remarkably cohesive in terms of tone. 

Oleszczyk: On the Criterion disc, the filmed interview with Mann is illustrated with a photo of a rather angry letter sent to Gilliatt by producer Janni, in which he pleads with her in no uncertain terms to stop referring to the script as her solo effort. In the letter, dated August 20, 1971 and provoked by Gilliatt’s Foreword to the book edition of the script, Janni states, “You have gone out of your way to want to create in everybody’s mind the impression that the subject and the subsequent script were entirely your creation.” Janni then gives the following origin story of the film—“The first concept of SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY [caps in original] as a triangular love story as it is now in the film, was originated by John some time before we started FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD and it was while we were in Weymouth that John first started to discuss the subject with me.” 

I don’t know how aware Kael might have been of these tensions, but my (admittedly wild) guess would be that she might have wanted to reinforce Gilliatt’s claim to authorship. Let’s not forget that 1971 was also the date of the original publication of “Raising Kane,” in which Kael famously fought for Herman Mankiewicz’s claim of authorship of Citizen Kane (1941). In her review of Sunday, Kael writes of Gilliatt and herself gracefully as “ships that pass each other in the night every six months…I salute her at this crossing,” albeit it’s very clear from reading Gilliatt’s criticism that her interests and tastes were miles apart from Kael’s own. Kael had to have some real respect for her colleague, since it’s obvious that, as critics, these two writers didn’t share tastes at all. To offer but one example, in the July 1, 1967 issue of the magazine —mere months before Kael would blaze her way into the pages with the her appreciation of Bonnie & Clyde (1967)—Gilliatt wrote a hefty essay on a MoMA festival of Czechoslovakian cinema, which didn’t interest Kael at all [I wrote extensively on Kael’s dislike of Eastern European movies in the Summer 2015 issue of Cineaste]. Gilliatt wrote enthusiastically about Yasujiro Ozu, Nikita Mikhalkov, and Jacques Tati, none of whom Kael cared for. She also wrote a second-take review of Nashville (1975), which Kael famously praised before the film even opened, offering a critique in the June 16, 1975 issue. Her film reviews for the magazine stop in 1979, though she kept contributing to its fiction pages till 1988.

Ramon: Kael and Gilliatt were certainly very different in terms of tastes and sensibility and Brian Kellow’s biography of Kael is quite keen to suggest an antipathy between them (especially on Kael’s part). On closer inspection, though, I don’t think Mann’s biography is particularly fair to either Kael or Gilliatt. For one, Mann states that Gilliatt falsely claimed in the published Sunday Bloody Sunday screenplay that she came up with the whole idea for the film while on a train journey in Switzerland. In fact, she doesn’t claim that at all: she states that she wrote the final scene of the film on that train journey. She also mentions the meeting with Janni and Schlesinger on the Madding Crowd set, notes that the initial idea was Schlesinger’s, and thanks both collaborators for “having worked through the later versions of the screenplay with me.” Perhaps some of those statements were added in the later edition in response to Janni’s complaints, but, if so, Mann should still acknowledge that.

Kael’s review is also rather more flexible in its take on the authorship question than Mann alleges, as she states, “the director appears to have blended his voice with that of the writer.” Her review certainly offers more in the way of insight than, say, Phil Harry’s Time Out piece that panned the film as “a reworking of Brief Encounter given a gloss of modernism...its creators...strive for ‘meaning’ with little regard for the simple matters of shot-by-shot consistency, let alone formal unity.” 

Harry is totally dismissive of what for me is one of the most striking, and perhaps undervalued, aspects of the film—its form and its visuals. While Williams’s cinematography lacks the flamboyance of his work on Women in Love, I think the film still feels very fresh in those terms. From its teasing opening image of male hands on male skin—during what turns out to be a medical examination—followed by that relay of frustrated phone communication, the film often keeps the viewer off balance in an exciting way. Richard Marden’s editing is also of note—for example the jarring, elliptical flashbacks to Alex’s childhood develop techniques of nonlinear storytelling that Schlesinger was experimenting with at the time. What’s your view of the film’s visual qualities?

Oleszczyk: I think it’s a marvelously shot and edited piece of work—very bold in the way in which it mixes realism with subjectivity, but also in how seamlessly it blends the abstract sculpture and painting into the London landscape and mixes touches of rock and Mozart within its soundscape. Schlesinger was a highly visual director and there are some great, controlled tensions in the film that give it added resonance. The main tension stretches between the old and the new; the traditional and the innovative. On one hand, the extraordinary Bar Mitzvah sequence, which points to Daniel’s awe towards the majesty of religion (and his possible Jewish guilt over being gay), almost fetishizes the glory of tradition. The persistent close-ups of Hebrew lettering stand in direct contrast to shots showing Bob’s abstract drawings of spiraling lines, signifying a perfect, meaningless vacuum. At one point, we see a comic book on Bob’s bed. I think Schlesinger feels torn between the old culture of the Word and the new and exciting (if frighteningly transient) culture of pure visuals, embodied by Bob’s artwork. He’s also clearly fascinated by the growing rapidness of instant communication, as evidenced by the many tracking shots over telephones lines—which may have influenced the opening shots of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red (1994), but I have no evidence of this.

Ramon: That’s a great connection. I can’t help but reflect that much contemporary criticism dedicates itself to pointing out what’s “problematic” in past work. What, if anything, might be considered “problematic” for a contemporary viewer of Sunday Bloody Sunday? And what does the film, focusing on the personal lives and emotional landscapes of its characters, have to offer us in a period when many of the most acclaimed films seem dedicated to scoring certain political points, however trite or obvious?

Oleszczyk: I don’t even want to judge the film against the deranged current standard, according to which all art needs to be positive and empowering. I prefer depth of feeling over empowerment, and Sunday Bloody Sunday is nothing if not a deeply felt film. If there’s any clear bias to detect here, I would locate it in the film’s slightly “anti-youth” sentiment. Bob is clearly designed to embody the sexy, pretty vacuum that Schlesinger (forty-five at the time of the making of the film) perceived in young people of his day. Thank God, he’s not campy (for campy adulation of an equally aloof “iconic” boy, see Death in Venice, made by Luchino Visconti in the very same year—and embarrassingly dated by now). But Bob is not much of a fully fleshed-out character, either, of which Schlesinger was aware, but did precious little to alleviate. Schlesinger is clearly siding with Daniel and Alex in their dazzled contemplation of Bob’s aloofness—and almost lets them off the hook in the process, as if there were mere victims of enchantment; Titania and Oberon of 1970s London, feuding over a long-haired page boy from an exotic land of counterculture.

Ultimately, Daniel and Alex are treated as more fully human than Bob for the virtue of being adults. What they are ultimately doomed by is Schlesinger’s own fatalism about long-term relationships. Frederic Raphael said a fascinating thing in an interview on a Studio Canal Blu-ray of Far from the Madding Crowd—he identified “John’s need to sabotage the marriage” [of Gabriel and Bathsheba], achieved by the ironic last shot of the film. In fact, Schlesinger does that a lot in his films, most notably in The Day of the Locust (1975), which appropriates Nathanael West’s apocalyptic skepticism about love. Even in the trashy thriller The Believers (1987), Schlesinger adds a final occult twist to mar the union of Martin Sheen and Helen Shaver. Peter Finch’s final first-person speech in Sunday is clearly a Bergmanesque touch—-but I have a feeling Schlesinger celebrates the capitulation instead of truly bemoaning it. The film is intoxicated by the perceived inevitability of romantic failure.

Ramon: Yes, that fatalism is definitely there, and Schlesinger admitted that he was consistently drawn to exploring difficult, frustrated relationships in his work. Yet, I dislike Raphael’s remark, which, at least in the context of Far from the Madding Crowd, seems to reveal a prejudice in its implication that a gay director would inevitably want to “sabotage” a potentially “happy” hetero union. Raphael makes it personal, boasting that, having himself “been married to the same woman for 60 years,” he, unlike Schlesinger, “didn’t have a need to sabotage marriage.” That’s a snide comment that, among other things, conveniently overlooks Schlesinger’s own thirty-five-year relationship with Michael Childers (admittedly embarked upon after Madding Crowd was made), a partnership that Raphael doesn’t appear to view as being of equal value.

Apparently that “anti-youth” sentiment you rightly detect was Gilliatt’s as much as Schlesinger’s. She’s pretty tough on the character of Bob in the intro to the screenplay, comparing him unfavorably to Daniel and Alex and characterizing him as a rootless and superficial representative of his generation—“His attachments are fugitive, like his here-today pop art. No reader he, no music lover.” She writes that, in contrast, Alex and Daniel view “the go-getter present...with sad contempt.” Luckily, this harshly judgmental stance seems somewhat muted in the film, and one can easily perceive the differences between the characters as ones of temperament as much as generation.

Indeed, something I think Schlesinger is particularly sensitive to—Madding Crowd expresses it better than any other Hardy adaptation—is the idea of discrepancies in romantic feeling, the variety of people’s perceptions of love, and the vast differences in terms of what individuals expect and need from a relationship. I like the ways in which Sunday Bloody Sunday broadens out in that regard, juxtaposing the central trio with the chaotic, affectionately satirized liberal family, the noisily quarreling couple at Daniel’s party, and Alex’s mother’s perspective, articulated in the pivotal, beautifully played scene with Peggy Ashcroft. What do you make of Alex as a character, by the way, and of Jackson’s performance? The ever-critical Harry claims reductively that “she.. is given little opportunity to be anything other than a cypher by Schlesinger’s exploitative camera.” 

Oleszczyk: I love Glenda Jackson and I miss that kind of presence in movies today. Alex is perpetually on edge, and the older I get the more I can relate to her beautifully communicated feeling of barely having a grip on her life. I do think that, for Schlesinger, there was a special appeal in showing relationships that link straight women and gay men in a variety of unexpected ways. It is evident here, in Darling (1965), and in the Madonna–Rupert Everett debacle that was The Next Best Thing (1999), but also in what I see as his second masterpiece after Sunday—the wonderful TV movie An Englishman Abroad (1983), scripted by Alan Bennett. Incidentally, in that film Schlesinger showed a near-perfect gay relationship that’s only cemented by the fact that the two men don’t speak a common language (one is British, the other Russian) and bond over the pure joy of playing Gilbert & Sullivan tunes in the middle of Soviet-era Moscow. Coral Browne, playing herself, is a more serene version of Glenda Jackson in this film—she’s basking in the warmth of mature gay affection instead of resenting it.

Ramon: It’s interesting to speculate how Vanessa Redgrave, who Gilliatt and Schlesinger originally had in mind for the role, might have approached it. But Jackson and Finch bring wonderfully contrasting energies to the film, making their final, understated encounter on the street after Bob’s departure so resonant. It’s a moment of awkward, yet tender and respectful complicity between “rivals” set against the noise made by the manic menagerie of kids inside the house. Following that, Finch’s fourth-wall-busting final speech rightly drew a lot of attention, but I’m equally keen on Alex’s final moment as Jackson narrows her eyes and faces off with that toucan—a brilliantly odd and somehow liberating farewell for the character. Anyway, to bring us full circle—with its Criterion and BFI Blu-ray editions, Sunday Bloody Sunday seems a good deal more accessible now than it was when we were growing up. But is it appreciated enough? How would you characterize the status and legacy of the film, fifty years on from its release?

MO: It saddens me to see relatively few people championing the film. I love the fact it’s so readily available on those beautiful discs, but when was the last time you heard a young filmmaker point to Sunday Bloody Sunday (or to Schlesinger, for that matter), as a key influence they would like to emulate? I do hope some young filmmaker falls in love with this movie and decides they want to explore some fuzzy, sticky, unkempt feelings in their work. Sunday has a wonderful tumbled-out-of-bed feeling to it—and is there anything more human (or sexier) than that?  

Ramon: Not in my book. Perhaps there’ll be a turning of the tide. There are certainly many older viewers—I know some of them personally—who acknowledge Sunday Bloody Sunday as a life-changing piece of work. Kael suggested that it would be “a film of lasting value.” That prediction is borne out by the fact that we’re still talking about it with passion—and gratitude—today.

Michał Oleszczyk is a film scholar and story editor based in Warsaw. He teaches film at the University of Warsaw.

Alex Ramon is a British film critic based in Poland. He writes for the British Film Institute and Sight & Sound among other outlets.

Copyright © 2021 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 3