Certain Women is made up of three stories involving four women in and around Livingston, Montana. Like Reichardt’s 2010 western, Meek’s Cutoff, at first glance little happens and nothing seems resolved. Yet, also like the previous film, the understated performances and spare dialogue convey huge amounts — of heartbreak, anger, loneliness and yearning.
The Russian Revolution, when it is talked about at all, is generally dismissed as a failure with little to say to us today. Sally Campbell argues that this is far from the truth — as long as people are willing to fight oppression and exploitation there are lessons we can learn from Russia.
Having received reports of one student’s recent experience of learning about the Russian Revolution in GCSE History, it seems surprisingly little has changed in the 25 years since I studied it. Students still hear rather too much about Rasputin’s dubious influence over the Romanovs, and far too little about the role of workers and the broader masses in the events of 1917.
The centenary of the Russian Revolution provides an opportunity to re-examine important questions. Sally Campbell argues that a deeply democratic impulse was at the heart of the revolution.
According to David Remnick, author of a book called Lenin’s Tomb and editor of the New Yorker magazine, Lenin, the foremost figure in the Russian Revolution of 1917, held a “view of man as modelling clay and sought to create a new model of human nature and behaviour through social engineering”. He quotes Richard Pipes, a right wing historian and critic of the Russian Revolution, who sees it as an attempt “to subject the entire life of a country to a master plan”.
Sally Campbell and Julie Sherry spoke to fast food workers about organising in an industry that is notorious for its poor conditions, widespread zero-hours contracts and poverty pay.
What are the issues you are confronting in the fast food industry?
The world we live in is turbulent. It is also polarised. Trump’s victory is a devastating signal of this.
The job of socialists is not to despair or commentate, but to look reality in the face and analyse it as a guide to action.
Sally Campbell spoke to artist Tim Sanders and historian John Newsinger about creating a graphic representation of Russia 1917.
Two and a half years ago Tim Sanders, regular cartoonist for Socialist Worker, approached Bookmarks the socialist publisher with a proposal for a graphic history of the Russian Revolution. This month the result, 1917: Russia’s Red Year, will hit the shelves.
As we go to press, thousands of refugees are being herded out of the Calais “Jungle” camp and transported to other parts of France.
Amid harrowing scenes, we have seen people rightly resisting this forced relocation, riot police teargassing refugees, and unaccompanied children being left to wander alone — only to find that, if they weren’t yet “registered”, they were to be arrested.
The campaign by Lord Dubs to let in the unaccompanied refugee children is more crucial than ever.
New (unelected) prime minister Theresa May has had an easy time of it since June, but are the Tories' post-referendum blues really over? Sally Campbell thinks it is unlikely.
Theresa May has enjoyed a gentle stroll into her new, unelected, role as prime minister over the summer. While symbolically holidaying in neutral Switzerland, she has been able to relax as the Labour right has done its best to tear down Jeremy Corbyn.
This remarkable film, set in Amazonian Colombia in the early 20th century, achieves what so many fail to — it transports you not only to another time and place, but to a different mind-set and approach to storytelling.
It is at once dreamlike as the shaman Karamakate leads his western travellers down the river in search of a hallucinogenic plant, but also political and angry in its depiction of colonialism and the social and environmental destruction it brings.
The Tories' weakness over Europe is our side's potential strength, writes Sally Campbell
David Cameron “won’t last 30 seconds if he loses the referendum”, said Ken Clarke, one of the few sitting Tories who was in parliament for the last referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU’s forerunner in 1975. And whichever way the vote goes, he continued, the Tory party will struggle to unite afterwards.
