Andrew Petrie

Roberto Rossellini shot his neorealist landmark Rome, Open City while the war still raged and rubble littered the freshly liberated capital. Based on real experiences from the ten-month German occupation, the film follows ordinary Romans, some active dissenters, some just trying to get by, as the Nazis and the Italian fascist authorities mount a search for a Resistance fighter freshly arrived from outside the city. Actress Anna Magnani established her screen persona as the indomitable battler from the streets, and renowned stage comedian Aldo Fabrizi (above) turned in a performance as great as any in cinema as Don Pietro, the priest whose faith in God and his fellow man never wavers, even in the face of death.

The most paranoid of presidents, Richard Nixon must have been feeling unwell when he allowed three of his closest aides to shoot personal Super 8 footage of their time in the White House. Bob Haldeman, John Erlichman and Dwight Chapin — all of whom later went to prison for their involvement in the Watergate affair — together shot more than 200 rolls of film between 1969 and 1973, the highlights of which form the backbone of a new documentary Our Nixon, and show us a team of go-getting young Republicans you wouldn’t recognise from Oliver Stone’s murky biopic. As the director Penny Lane says: ‘There aren’t any bad guys in home movies.

‘I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble.’ Not my words, Mr Speaker, but those of demented conquistador Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s electrifying Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972). Now back in cinemas nationwide in a restored print that makes its rainforest setting a real feast for the eyes, Aguirre heralds a two-month Herzog season at the BFI Southbank. Five weeks of location shooting in Peru effectively meant the film crew endured the same hardships as the characters: heat, hunger and the unpredictable behaviour of Kinski, scarcely any less a madman than the treasure-seeking Aguirre. The director claims that Kinski only calmed down enough to finish the film after Herzog threatened to shoot the star and then himself.

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross published The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century five years ago, earning himself the Guardian First Book Award and a finalist citation for the Pulitzer Prize. Now London’s Southbank Centre is turning the book into a year of concerts, talks, film screenings, exhibitions and even a three-part BBC4 documentary series in celebration of 20th-century classical music. The festival marks the centenary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, though Ross plays down the significance of the work’s riotous première in his book: it seems Paris audiences would faire la révolte for just about anything in those days.

The trend for documentary portraits of individual cities assembled from archive footage continues with Julien Temple’s London: The Modern Babylon, out now on Bfi DVD. Temple was the obvious choice of director, as a native of the city and creator of London films Absolute Beginners and Oil City Confidential, not to mention 2010’s superb Requiem for Detroit? for the BBC. The film has been compared to Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City (about Liverpool), though London lacks those works’ deeply personal perspective and strict avoidance of cliché: this is a film that opens to the sound of  ‘London Calling’ and closes with ‘Waterloo Sunset’.

If the River of Music put you in the mood for stimulating sounds on the banks of the Thames, next week’s Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, also part of the London 2012 Festival, is well-timed. Meltdown’s later-than-usual slot should earn it a little reflected Olympic glory, though it’s hard to imagine anyone less suggestive of healthful outdoor pursuits than this year’s curator, surname-free singer and visual artist Antony (above), who looks as if he has spent his life shunning daylight in some windowless New York dive.

Folk legend Sandy Denny’s eminently coverable songs, direct of melody and opaque of lyric, have scarcely declined in popularity since the singer’s death in 1978 at the age of 31. A tribute concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2008 was such a hit that a similar event is being staged at the Barbican this month. Once again, a variety of vocalists will front a house band including members of contemporary folk stars Bellowhead and share the stage with Denny’s former Fairport Convention bandmates Jerry Donahue and Dave Swarbrick. Insecure but blessed with a versatile voice free of phony mid-Atlantic inflections, Denny’s infusion of traditional material transformed Fairport from blokey college circuit regulars into the definitive English folk-rock band.

When the late Ken Russell published his autobiography in 1989, he called it A British Picture. That title could just as easily describe The Devils, his 1971 adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, relating the true story of supposed demonic possession among Ursuline nuns in north-west France in 1634. Here is a world-class film by a British director, with British stars and crew,  sets by Derek Jarman and a score by Peter Maxwell Davies. So why is it only now getting a DVD release? Combining sexual abandon, outright blasphemy and scenes of convent life unlikely to be mistaken for The Sound of Music, The Devils fought a notorious battle with the British Board of Film Censors that has been allowed to eclipse the quality of the film.

‘I don’t like him looking daft,’ growls Alastair Campbell to the camera as Bafta-winning documentary film-maker Molly Dineen shadows Tony Blair for the 1997 party election broadcast. The warning is clear. Forty hours of footage became a mere ten minutes of spin, but it’s testament to Dineen’s rapport with the member for Sedgefield that despite its brevity the film was described by the late New Labour strategist Philip Gould as ‘probably our most effective broadcast’. Twenty-five years after her acclaimed debut Home from the Hill, Dineen’s collected works now fill three double DVDs.