Welcome

 . . . to the homepage for Tim Cawkwell, freelance writer on film and former film-maker. This website is a platform for my writing on film, whether in the form of blog-type entries, essays or books.

New (January 2012): the politicobiopic is in vogue, so here's a proposal for a film on the dramatic life of Vaclav Havel.

New (December 2011): How Pythagoreanism lives on in Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte, with a link to Ozu's The End of Summer.

November 2011: Compare and contrast We need to talk about Kevin and Tree of Life.

November 2011: Soulmates? Pasolini and Rocha looks at Glauber Rocha's Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (a.k.a. Black God, White Devil) and suggests connections between it and Pasolini's Gospel according to Matthew.

October 2011: Ken Jacobs' Apparition Theatre of New York as featured at the London Festival of International Avant-garde Film in 1973.

July 2011: reflections on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

Still new (April 2011):   I have just launched a new book 'Film Past, Film Future: an enquiry into cinema and the imagination' which explores the questions 'How do films engage the imagination?' 'What can film do that theatre, literature, opera and painting can't?' and 'What are the possibilities of a Shakespeare emerging in the cinema?' For a fuller description, go to this page. It is now available on Amazon for uploading to a Kindle, or Kindle apps on iPad, iPhone, Android, or PC.

 

 

 

I have also created a gallery of film stills relevant to the text on three web pages, the first covering chapters 2 to 4 of the book [to access this, click here], the second covering chapters 5 to 7 [to access, click here], the third covering chapters 8 and 10 [to access, click here].

Apart from that, I am also interested in music, poetry (and literature in general), painting, sculpture, history, religion and philosophy.

I am 63 and live in Norwich in the UK.

Oct 2011

Note about using this site: the headings along the top are fixed, but under each one you will find the different pages listed down the left-hand side.

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 in my film-making days 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  (over 60 years on from 1948) I like it as a way of describing the art of writing about the cinema, and created this emblem to visualise the idea.