George Whitman died on Wednesday. He was 98 and the legendary proprietor of the most romantic bookshop in the world, Shakespeare and Company on the Seine in Paris. Do read James Campbell’s Guardian obituary, and also Jeanette Winterson’s short tribute. Like many another, long ago thanks to his generosity I slept a couple of nights in one of the beds among the shelves. I remember it was the best of times (to be young and in Paris was very heaven) and the worst of times (the bedbugs were truly vicious). Thanks to the invaluable Brain Pickings, I was charmed by the Spike Jonze animated short Mourir auprès de toi (co-directed with Simon Cahn and made with designer Olympia Le-Tan) that is set after hours in Shakespeare and Company (that’s a framegrab above). Across the jump, you’ll find – as usual (at least I can keep up with the weekend blogs, if not the weekday ones) – nine other recommendations for alternative viewing online.
• Excelsior! Prince of Magicians, 1901: thanks to Mubi.com, Flicker Alley and Lobster Films, here’s a beautiful print of an astounding piece of filmmaking magic from George Méliès.
• This is the BBC, 1960: I can’t tell you how I’ve been wanting to see again Richard Cawston’s 70-minute impressionistic study of the corporation – and here it is, courtesy of the estimable Alexander Palace Television Society; watch out for a future blog that discusses it in more detail.
• Opening of Eurovision Song Contest, 1971: EUScreen is a welcome new online access point for archive television from across Europe – it’s an eccentric collection of material, but there’s much to engage with, and almost at random I’ve picked the start of the first colour broadcast from RTE forty years ago.
• Lygia Pape’s Libro do Tempo: Adrian Searle for the Guardian reports from the retrospective of the Brazilian modernist at the Serpentine Gallery, and speaks in particular about her artwork The Book of Time.
• Maurizio Cattelan – All: delightful intro film from the Guggenheim in New York about how they hung the artist’s current retrospective in the spiral of the gallery.
• Power of Photojournalism, part one and part two: freely available on YouTube, this is The Annenberg Space for Photography’s richly interesting new documentary about what’s special about photojournalism today.
• How to be the photograph: OK, it’s not exactly for viewing, but these audio extracts, courtesy of the New York Review of Books, from Patti Smith’s recent performance at the Metropolitan Museum in New York are so vivid you can feel you’re seeing as well as hearing; the occasion was linked to the exhibition Stieglitz and his artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe – and apart from anything else, the concluding number, ‘Because the Night’, is just glorious.
• Inside Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: I only just caught up with Tomas Alfredson’s terrific adaptation of John Le Carré’s spy thriller – so here’s a recent New York Times video in which the director talks through the scene in which Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) steals a log book from MI6.
• Imagine – Books – The Last Chapter?: interesting for its subject – the future of the book – rather than the pedestrian filmmaking; available until Wednesday 28 December, including for download.
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