Welcome
. . . to the homepage for Tim Cawkwell, freelance writer on film and former film-maker. I have been watching films regularly since my teenage years, and then, like so many others, engaging intensively with the cinema at university, and after that watching and re-watching films in the four decades following. By now, I’ve seen a lot – and still have more to see; I’ve had the good fortune of living through the advent of videotapes and DVDs which allow you to study films with care; I’ve had the immense consolatory experience of unravelling films over a lifetime: of knowing films which in my youth were shrouded in mist, that time and maturity have cleared away to reveal them in their true beauty: “We see through a glass darkly, then face to face.”
I am also interested in music, poetry (and literature in general), painting, sculpture, history and philosophy.
I am 60 and live in Norwich in the UK.
March 2009
A word about my emblem. The phrase 'caméra-stylo' was coined in 1948 by the French director Alexandre Astruc to describe a cinema which was'just as flexible and subtle as written language'. 30 years later I liked to use it to describe the technique I used of drawing directly on the film strip using a calligraphic pen (long ago it would have been a goose feather cut to make a quill). Now (60 years later) I like it to describe the art of writing about the cinema, and created this emblem to visualise the idea.