Category Archives: Film

A Bigger Splash: the only way is Hockney

31.01.2012 posted by Category: Film, People, Visual arts
A Bigger Splash: the only way is Hockney

BFI Video has this week released Jack Hazan’s 1974 feature about David Hockney and his circle, A Bigger Splash. Available as a dual format DVD and Blu-ray, this fascinating and complex film has never looked better, not least because Hazan returned to a 35mm CRI for a new digital transfer. The timing is good too, for this study of life, love and sex among the Hockney set of the early seventies offers a very different picture of our ‘national treasure’ from the persona conjured up by the current Royal Academy show. The BFI has done an exemplary job with the release, as is pin-pointed by Anthony Neild’s thoughtful discussion at The Digital Fix. Included on the discs are two other shorts about Hockney – Love’s Presentation by James Scott, made in 1966, and David Pearce’s Portrait of David Hockney, 1972 – to which I’ll return in a future post. Meanwhile, included below is an extract from my essay commissioned for the booklet accompanying the BFI release.
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Some movies in 2011

20.01.2012 posted by Category: Film
Some movies in 2011

At the end of each year our friend and colleague Michael Jackson – formerly Chief Executive of Channel 4 and now living and working in the United States – compiles a list of films he’s discovered and appreciated in the previous twelve months. He sends it to friends and kindly lets us post it here. We’re a little late with this one, but as before we have added some links and clips. 

Follow this link for the 2010 list, this one for 2009′s and this one for 2008′s.

As a kind of alternative holiday card this is my annual list of the best films that I saw for the first time this year. Mainly not new films, or awards contenders, but films from the alternative universe of repertory cinemas, TCM, dvd, and Netflix Instant. Like a parent who loves their misfit child more than their straight A offspring I know it’s possible to get carried away with enthusiasm for a new discovery, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. At any rate I hope you find a couple of titles here that you are happy to see for the first time or to re-discover. (Included are links to where most of them can be found in the UK.)
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David Hockney: a life on film

16.01.2012 posted by Category: Film, Television, Visual arts
David Hockney: a life on film

Although I have no easy way of checking, there must be hundreds of films – and quite likely thousands – that feature David Hockney. By the end of the week, with the opening of David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy of Arts, there will most likely be a fair few more (the RA’s website has one, above). Far far more than other major artist of the past century, Hockney’s life, work and ideas have been exhaustively chronicled both by television and by numerous independent filmmakers. Coming of age with the box in the corner in the early 1960s, Hockney is a master of the medium – and his persona, his willingness to perform and his relative accessibility mean that scattered across the globe is a glorious archive of audio-visual fragments. I have chosen ten to highlight below, but I want first to make the serious point about how difficult – indeed, let’s say impossible – it is to track down and view this material. Each and every appearance of the artist in print is collated in scholarly bibliographies. But if you want to find out from any central source whether there’s footage, say, of Hockney talking about Domenichino (which there is), or of Hockney buck naked taking a shower (ditto), well… good luck!
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The film of the films of the books

10.01.2012 posted by Category: Film, Performance, Television
The film of the films of the books

Headline: while The Mystery of Edwin Drood, part one of which we saw on BBC Two tonight, has much to recommend it, the television treat of the evening – and indeed most certainly of the year to date – was Arena: Dickens on Film. I’ll write more about this tomorrow, but let me record my immediate enthusiasm for a film that is imaginative, intelligent, distinctive and delightful as well as being, before all else, a film. Kudos to Arena and Film London for co-producing such a treasure, to the estimable Mick Eaton and Adrian Wootton for conceiving and achieving it, to some tremendous film research (and the confidence to allow the film extracts to have their own place and presence), and to D. W. Griffith, Alastair Sim, David Lean, W. C. Fields, Johnny Vegas, Sergei Eisenstein, John Mills, Hablot Knight Browne, Arena editor Anthony Wall (who also directs) – together with a few more – as well as the genius who was Charles Dickens.
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What larks

7.01.2012 posted by Category: Film, Television
What larks

To BFI Southbank on Friday evening for two screenings in the wonderful Dickens on Screen season. First up was The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Alberto Cavalcanti’s adaptation for Ealing released in 1947. After the briefest of breaks (no time even for a beer) I plunged into Great Expectations, directed in 1946 by David Lean. It’s a critical cliché that Great Expectations is considerably superior to Nickleby (as films) – and viewing them side by side did nothing to challenge the notion. But it was really revealing to see the former in the light of the RSC/Channel 4 version and the latter so soon after the exceptionally strong BBC series. The following handful of notes also includes a truly bizarre story about one of the scriptwriters of Great Expectations as well as a paragraph about an intriguing curiosity from 1949 that was also screened. This followed on from John Mills’ Pip thrillingly ripping down the curtains and letting in the sun to stop Estella (Valerie Hobson) becoming Miss Havisham – which of course is not at all what happens in the book.
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Ken and me

28.11.2011 posted by Category: Film, People
Ken and me

Like many others, I was sad today to learn of the death of Ken Russell. There are already tributes aplenty online, including Derek Malcolm’s Guardian obituary, a Telegraph obituary, some excellent short interviews with those who worked with him, and an artsdesk Q&A with Jasper Rees about his photography and early films. Film Studies for Free has a great page of links titled ‘Pity we aren’t madder’ (it’s from Women in Love) to academic engagements with the films. My thought here is simply to record the place that Russell had in my life. I’m sure a similar storycould be told by ten or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. But perhaps its particularity gives it an interest. In any case, it’s one very small way of saying ‘Thank you’.
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Brit docs

10.11.2011 posted by Category: Film
Brit docs

Pretty much throughout my thirty-five years of studying film history, the work of what’s known as the British documentary movement of the 1930s has been regarded as over-familiar, reactionary, largely conventional, constrained by the demands of sponsors and, well, just a bit dull. No longer. Thanks to an exceptional restoration programme led by the BFI, to the release of several essential DVD box sets (see below), and to associated scholarship, Brit docs of the 1930s are being recognised as central in a whole range of cultural and social contexts. We can also see that the output of – primarily but not exclusively – the GPO Film Unit was immensely varied, at times truly experimental and often exceptionally enjoyable. And now there’s a truly terrific book to draw together much of the debate about these films and to stimulate further thinking. Can I urge that – if you have the most slender interest in British culture - The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit, edited by Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell and published by Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, goes straight to the top of your Christmas list?
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Medieval modernism

7.11.2011 posted by Category: Film, Performance
Medieval modernism

To the Barbican last night for a screening of Carl Dreyer’s silent film classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Accompanying the film live were the London Symphony Orchestra and Synergy Vocals, but this was far from a standard new scoring for an old film (not, of course, that any such compositions are really ‘standard’). Rather, this was a concert performance of Voices of Light, a large-scale choral work composed in 1993 by Richard Einhorn. Einhorn created the composition in response to Dreyer’s images, but it very much had its own strength and presence – and in a way it was the film that was providing the accompaniment. At key moments, music and film synced together, but the music’s primacy was reinforced as the projection came to an end, when the lights on orchestra and choir came up and, for a minute or two, the band played on.
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