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Articles by Robert Hanks
Stranger Things
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Eye Magazine | Feature |
Spring 2025 Jacket required A love of reading gives Jon Gray’s book covers their edge. By Robert Hanks Anyone with an interest in modern literature probably owns a cover by Jon Gray – usually credited to ‘gray318’. Now that vinyl records have become more niche, book cover design is perhaps the most democratic form of art.
Elegantly nerdish
Cuneiform (the name means ‘wedge-shaped’) was, as far as these things can be determined, the first form of writing invented. The original pictographic script, which consisted of symbols representing a word or set of related concepts, was invented in Mesopotamia – today’s Iraq – by the Sumerians some time before 3000 BCE and was taken up afterwards by several other civilisations, including the Akkadians and the Hittites.
Your Voice: Doubt still surfaces even while remaining true to our calling
By Robert Hanks Mobile, Alabama Before he died, my father had suffered severe pain for decades despite an abundance of prayers for his healing. This and similar experiences led me to question the value of prayer. Any time I hear of mass casualties, the age-old question of “why” troubles me once again. When I have read books by accomplished Bible scholars who call into question the truthfulness of Scripture, I feel unsure about who or what to believe.
Iron curtain Vegas
In the mind’s eye, the Eastern Europe of the cold war is painted with a grey wash, enlivened by occasional splashes of beige. The reality was sometimes brighter: Poland, in particular, developed a proud national tradition of neon signage that could match Vegas for brashness and surpass it for originality and beauty. Since 2005 the London-based photographer Ilona Karwińska has been photographing and collecting these signs to create the basis of Poland’s first neon museum (neonmuzeum.org).
The Mosquito Coast review: Allie Fox in Mexico
Sign up for Sight & Sound’s Weekly Film Bulletin and more News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. Email ► The Mosquito Coast is streaming on Apple TV+. Film and TV credits, though they doubtless mean something to people in the industry, can be baffling for the outsider.
Between the Lines: a hard-nosed 90s police drama
Sign up for Sight & Sound’s Weekly Film Bulletin and more News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month.
Nick Broomfield on his favourite star-lit Greek cinema
Gardenia Open-Air Cinema, Hydra, Greece© Illustration by Lucinda Rogers Sign up for Sight & Sound’s Weekly Film Bulletin and more News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. Email ▶ My Father and Me, Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary, is available on BBC iPlayer. The Gardenia open-air cinema in Hydra opened in 1955, though I was there in ’68. It’s in this teeny lane, sandwiched between two other buildings that slightly tower over it.
Consequences for the comic artist
Nelson is, according to Rob Davis’s introduction, ‘a testament to what comics truly are’. But what, truly, are they? It is easy to think of comics and graphic novels as being more or less the same thing; but whatever the similarities in form, the two media have essentially opposed sensibilities.
At Cemetery Junction
When Vittorio De Sica was looking for funding to make the film that became Bicycle Thieves, the story goes, David O. Selznick offered to put up the money on condition that the lead would be played by Cary Grant. Film historians tend to take this as an instance of Hollywood crassness, though maybe it should be classed as one of cinema’s lost opportunities.
Paranoia in the void
The selection of Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina for the Man Booker longlist – the first time a graphic novel has appeared – has not been universally welcomed. And it does raise questions: should writers be allowed to submit prose descriptions for a portrait prize? There are few words in Drnaso’s story.
Eye Magazine | Review | Body of work
In our digital age, when every image is available and mutable, when pornography is commonplace, Andrzej Klimowski’s collaged images – with their repertoire of naked torsos, cupids, angels and devils, faces with eyes scratched out, blindfolded or devoured by blackness – may no longer take us by surprise (See ‘Theatre of dreams’ in Eye 14).
Eye Magazine | Review | Hardcore fluff
Debates about education seem these days to have been reduced almost entirely to questions of employability, while students have been reduced to employees in waiting (and, given the economic climate, waiting, and more waiting).
On ‘Penda’s Fen’
I’m old-fashioned enough to think that for something to count as a cult, it should be dark, subterranean and bound up with sacred mysteries. On that definition, Penda’s Fen (1974) may be the only authentic cult TV I’ve come across. My initiation came in 2015, when I saw a screening of a rather yellowed 16mm print at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
The lost art of the British public information film | Sight & Sound
Among the casualties of the “bonfire of the quangos” ignited in 2010 by the incoming Conservative government was the Central Office of Information (COI), the body that for more than 60 years had overseen government advertising and public service messages – in blunt terms, propaganda. There were, I’m sure, good financial and bureaucratic arguments for stripping away an organisational layer between government departments and the advertising agencies they employed.
Play for Today Volume 1 review
Emily Bolton and Renu Setna in A Passage to England (1975) ▶︎ Play for Today at 50 will run at BFI Southbank from 19 October through November 2020. Play for Today: Volume One is available for pre-order from BFI Shop on Blu-ray. A Drama out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today is available on BBC iPlayer. It’s hard to recapture, from our vantage point in the age of the box-set and the binge-watch, how much Play for Today mattered in Britain in the 1970s.
Stray review: a dog’s eye view of the Istanbul
▶ Stray is streaming on Dogwoof on Demand, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, Apple TV, Amazon and in virtual cinemas from 26 March. Sign up for Sight & Sound’s Weekly Film Bulletin and more News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month. Email It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to keep sentimentality entirely at bay when making a film about dogs – not that most filmmakers try – but Elizabeth Lo’s documentary comes close.
Mangrove review: Black British struggles past
▶︎ Mangrove is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Amazon Prime in the US. Speaking to Sight & Sound at the time of the release of Widows two years ago, Steve McQueen offered a refreshing challenge to the platitude that our current cultural moment is a TV golden age: “Some of this new TV is so rubbish because they try to squeeze every drop and keep it going, even when the narrative has finished,” McQueen claimed.
Increasing Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing HESI Grade Allocation Percentage in a Psychiatric Nursing Course
Due to the current nursing shortage in the United States (American Nurses Association, 2015), it is imperative that new graduates of entry-level RN programs pass the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN) as soon as possible after graduation so they can enter the workforce. Currently, many schools of nursing offer standardized testing to prepare nursing students to pass the NCLEXRN on first attempt. The Health Education Systems, Inc.
Robert Hanks: ‘It Happened Here’
Fascism in fiction has been in vogue for a while now: the television versions of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Man in the High Castle, Penguin’s republication (on the day of Trump’s inauguration) of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, people scurrying to the bookshelves to note all the pre-echoes of Steve Bannon’s politics in Philip Roth’s The Plot against America.
Sight & Sound: the September 2018 issue
“What Hollywood did to Native Americans is a disgrace: fuck John Wayne, fuck John Ford. I know they tried to make up for it with The Searchers, but too damn late.” In the September issue, BlacKkKlansman director Spike Lee talks to Kaleem Aftab about Hollywood’s history of racism, the importance of love and hate in his work, and how the violent protests of modern-day far-right thugs gave his latest film its ending.
Sight & Sound: the August 2018 issue
Sight & Sound gets bookish this month as our contributors select 100 novels on cinema. In a special summer feature, writers wax lyrical about their favourite novels and short stories about filmmaking, from Hollywood to Bollywood and beyond. In his introduction, Nick James muses on literarature’s (occassionally ambivalent) “love and fascination for what ends up on the screen”.
Rachel Malik: Nothing But Feeling
There was a moment in her interview with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight on Friday when Theresa May mentioned a woman who had escaped the Grenfell Tower fire in just a T-shirt and knickers. The woman stays with you. Very briefly, something broke through the repetitions and evasions of the official discourse being deployed by the government, Kensington and Chelsea council, and ‘interested’ corporate parties who insist that regulations were complied with and profess to welcome any investigation.
In Hénin-Beaumont
In the first round of the French presidential election on Sunday 23 April, Gwendoline, an 18-year-old from Hénin-Beaumont, a small northern town of 26,000 inhabitants, voted for the first time, for Marine Le Pen. Le Pen cast her own ballot in Hénin-Beaumont too. The Front National mayor, Steeve Briois, was elected in one round of voting in 2014. I met Gwendoline in a windswept railway station parking lot, on 1 May, as we were waiting for a bus to take us to Hénin-Beaumont.
The Trump Acceleration
The sheer volume and rapidity of successive Trump outrages, cascading swiftly past one another, keeps even the most attentive among us from properly paying attention to any one of them, much less to their cumulative significance.
Leonard Cohen and Me
Leonard Cohen has died. I was sorry to think that the last big world event this guru of chilled-out but vaguely sad-flavoured spiritual love had stuck around to witness was Trump’s victory.
Vancouver’s Fentanyl Crisis
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Last April, British Columbia’s chief health officer took the unusual step of declaring a public health emergency after 200 people died from (suspected) fentanyl overdose during the first three months of 2016. By August the number of deaths had risen to 488. This is a record high, a 61.6 per cent increase on the same period in 2015 (302). Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, fifty to a hundred times more potent than morphine. Paul Janssen first synthesised it in 1960.
By Anakana Schofield, David Patrikarakos Verified, David Simpson, William Skidelsky, Robert Hanks, Emily Witt Verified, Tom McCarthy
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London Review of Books
Verified
On Putting Things Off
When I hear other people talking about procrastination, I find myself getting proprietorial: surely their fleeting pauses are as nothing to mine. Procrastination is the main way I express anxiety and depression, if I can use these medicalised, dignifying terms.
On Putting Things Off
When I hear other people talking about procrastination, I find myself getting proprietorial: surely their fleeting pauses are as nothing to mine. Procrastination is the main way I express anxiety and depression, if I can use these medicalised, dignifying terms.
Fall of the wild: a brief history of dogs on film | Sight & Sound
The most impressive parts of Kornél Mundruczó’s canine-apolcalypse drama White God (Fehér isten), released this month on DVD and Blu-ray, are the sequences in which an enormous pack of dogs stampedes through the streets of Budapest, while the human populace flees in panic. The production reportedly used 274 dogs, more than any other film in history, and the statistic doesn’t seem implausible as the furry tide surges across the frame; it’s a spectacle that stays in the mind.
John Lanchester: Episode Nine: Polar Bears
At an earlier stage of this general election, I thought about proposing one of those drinking games in which people have a shot or swig every time a Conservative on the campaign trail used the word ‘plan’. I’m glad I didn’t go ahead with that. Anyone who’d taken up the suggestion would now be in a clinic. It was already bad, but the Tory manifesto takes it to another level entirely. Guess how many times the word ‘plan’ occurs’. For purposes of reference, the Labour manifesto uses it 27 times.
To have and to hold
Summer 2014 To have and to hold Robert Hanks Here Design Julia Hasting Melcher Media Chris Ware The challenges of digital publishing have galvanised a new spirit in book design and production. Is it just the decadent flourish of a disappearing format? A few years ago the death of the printed book was being foretold: the rise of the e-book would send publishing the way of the music industry.
At the Met " LRB blog
New Yorkers have been mobbing the Charles Marville exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until 4 May). ‘Paris has gotten so expensive,’ I overheard one woman saying to her friend.
Wordplay for a picture palace
Autumn 2013 Wordplay for a picture palace Robert Hanks Le Gun Mario Wagner Alexis Deacon Peter Biľak Luke Pearson Åbäke Sam Winston Na Kim Oded Ezer Johnny Kelly Jim Kay Stuart Kolakovic Némo Tral Reviews Sky Arts Ignition Memory Palace Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7<br>18 June-20 October 2013<br> Memory Palace By Hari Kunzru et al<br>Designed by Sara De Bondt Studio<br>V&A Publishing, £12.99 In classical texts on the ‘art of memory’, the student is advised to visualise...
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