12-04-2025, 04:51 PM
His book is full of profound cynicism and pessimism, but his outstanding ability as a writer also allows us glimpses of a puckish sense of humour and an analytical capacity that provides keen insights into the many layers of meaning that can be found by digging under the surface of the films he talks about. The hope for a better future that must have sustained him through all the wilderness years is still apparent, and by bringing Steven's work to a wider audience we may keep it alive.
In preparing this ebook edition, beyond editing the OCR, I’ve corrected some errors of syntax and punctuation, added accents and italics where necessary, and standardised the use of apostrophes and quotation marks. I did spot one or two factual errors, and Ive corrected those after consulting IMDB. There may be others, and I'd be grateful if you could point them out if you find them. The text is entirely Steven’s, the footnotes are Edmund's.
Images
The book contains around 170 images. I’ve tried to match the presentation of these to their appearance on greek-love.com, but as is the way of e-readers, the success rate is patchy. The formatting works perfectly in the Preview screen of Sigil 1.9.2.Adobe Digital Edition can be used to view .epubs, but it’s best suited to .pdfs. In this case it doesn’t render the images at all, let alone the formatting.
However, viewing the .azw3 in Kindle for PC, gives an almost perfect rendering of the images (including captions) and their positioning. They’re even in colour. The .mobi shows images, but loses all their positioning, and the captions are treated as regular body text.
On the latest (11th gen) Kindle device, the same thing happens: the .azw3 is fine, especially if viewed in landscape, but the .mobi loses the formatting. Of course, there’s no colour.
I have little experience of other formats such as .djvu or .fb2, but if anyone particularly wants these I’ll try to accommodate.
Quote:Quite recently, a stash of over 800 lost British documentary films from the early 1900s came to light, the output of an obscure midlands partnership, Mitchell & Kenyon. This footage, now expertly restored, yields us a priceless sociological window onto the lives of working class people a full century ago, the way they actually looked and really moved. Never before in history has one generation been granted such a clear and true glimpse into the everyday world of their great-grandparents. One of the incidental things it reminds us of is that the streets of town and city in earlier times were positively teeming with young boys, because the street and workplace were then a male domain — we can still have some sense of this from contemporary news footage of the Muslim world, where segregation of the sexes remains more rigid and absolute, and child labour has not yet been marked ‘inhumane’.
In pre-World War I days, families were more prolific in output than they are now, children would have constituted sixty percent or more of the general population (as they do in many poorer countries today) and boys were everywhere to be seen. We shouldn’t feel obliged, observing these facts, to sweep into a sermon on the Oppression of Women. It is not our prerogative to pass moral judgements on the past, merely to view it with honest eyes. It is the differences in the past, not the similarities, which make it intrinsically fascinating. Women of all social classes were certainly evident in that early silent footage. What is significant, once you notice it, is the super-abundance of boys.