My head’s been full of the unwelcome “Brexit” debacle in Britain – the referendum where  a slight majority of folk decided to leave the European Union – bringing total instability ot the nation on every level. For a ton of reasons I do not agree with the result, but it’s out of my hands. Maybe more on that later…

Today I suddenly realised that I have to deliver my first ever paper at a proper academic conference – something I never expected to do, ever – next week, and so I’d better get cracking and let politics be politics …

It’s a paper on cinema and painting as an exchange of cultural value, and I’m going to be talking about how this exchange works in two films – Tarantino’s  Django Unchained, and one of my absolute favourite films of all time Meek’s Cutoff by Kelly Reichardt. I’ve written about this extensively in my book, so the paper is a kind of shorter version of that.

I really love Meek’s Cutoff for many reasons but one of them is that I’m transfixed by the “humans in landscape” visual that she achieves in many of her films, and the profundity that generates. Reichart is THE first real heir to the great Michelangelo Antonioni.

The composition, colour and tonality and lighting of Meek’s Cutoff owes much – whether deliberately or not – to the works of the French realist  Jean François Millet.