Category Archives: Literature

The intermedial in action

3.05.2013 posted by Category: Digital media, Film, Literature, Performance, Television
The intermedial in action

Upstage there is a set with an enclosed room and other smaller spaces, including two booths like those used for sound recording. The room is dressed as a kitchen, with walls which have extensive glass panelling allowing the audience to see inside. Downstage there are elements of furniture, a table for sound effects, and video cameras, monitors and lights. This is the setting for Katie Mitchell and Leo Warner’s astonishing Fraulein Julie, originally staged at Schaubuhne Berlin and at the Barbican only until tomorrow. (I started this post on Tuesday night but it’s been a crazily busy week, so apologies for the tardiness of its appearance.) Over 80 taut minutes, the actors and creatives make and mix a live “film” after Strindberg’s play, with live sound effects and music. The appeal is both to the mind and to the heart, with an experience embedded in the late 19th century but also acutely, precisely of now. Yet for me this bold, sometimes breathtaking experiment brought to mind nothing so much as live television drama as it used to be made in the studio twenty.thirty, even fifty years ago.
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Sex and death at BFI Southbank

5.03.2013 posted by Category: Literature, Performance, Television
Sex and death at BFI Southbank

As part of the Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television research project which I am co-ordinating with Dr Amanda Wrigley at the University of Westminster, I have curated a BFI Southbank season of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedy. The season starts in three weeks’ time with a very special event: a showing of Granada TV’s 1965 adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women followed by a discussion with Dame Diana Rigg, who stars in the production, and Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Gregory Doran. Booking opens today for BFI members and at 11.30am on 12 March for everyone else: www.bfi.org.uk and 020 7928 3232.

The full programme is below.
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On reading a good book

13.02.2013 posted by Category: Digital media, Literature
On reading a good book

My blog schedule for the week has been disrupted by a slow recovery from a modest bout of ‘flu, so apologies for the absence of new posts in the past few days. Spending more time in bed than usual did allow me to catch up with some reading, including the recently published The Persephone Book of Short Stories. This is the 100th volume from Persephone, which over the past decade or more has specialised in publishing neglected twentieth-century writing, much of it by women. The Persephone story is told well in the Observer feature One shade of grey by Rachel Cooke and this is the link to their richly interesting online catalogue. I want simply to hymn this particular 450 page volume, in part for its contents but mostly – and this is particularly important in this age of the tablet – for its materiality.
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The book of ‘The Film’, part 2

5.02.2013 posted by Category: Film, Literature
The book of ‘The Film’, part 2

I posted yesterday about my discovery of the remarkable book The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems, which published in English by The Focal Press in 1948. Do take a look at that blog for an introduction to the volume, and allow me to return to it here to highlight two strands that I find of particular interest. One its its unabashed Marxist analysis of the woes of the film industry, illustrated with wonderful diagrams of monopoly capitalism in action (a detail of one is above). The other line of thought that chimes with much that I am thinking about in current productions is concerned with the distinctions between Film (which is often capitalised in the book and regarded as essentially monolithic) and Theatre (ditto).
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The book of ‘The Film’, part 1

4.02.2013 posted by Category: Film, Literature
The book of ‘The Film’, part 1

One afternoon in Canterbury recently I stumbled upon The Chaucer Bookshop, a second-hand treasure house that I realised I had last entered as a schoolboy some forty years ago. I was delighted to find that it was thriving in this age of Amazon, and I was thrilled to discover several books about film and television (the only ones I in any sense collect) that I had never come across before. Foremost among these was a handsome 1948 volume from The Falcon Press: The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems by Georg Schmidt, Werner Schmalenbach and Peter Bachlin, and with Hermann Eidenbenz (the links may need Google Translate) as its art editor. Printed on heavy, shiny paper, this is an extraordinary volume entirely deserving of the discussion of its genesis, its analysis and its truly remarkable design that I aim to develop in this post and a follow-up.
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Pride and Prejudice: 12 for 200

28.01.2013 posted by Category: Film, Literature, Television
Pride and Prejudice: 12 for 200

I thought others might do this to mark the anniversary today of the publication of Jane Austen’s great and glorious Pride and Prejudice. But as I’ve yet to see such an anthology, I thought I would make one for myself – and anyone else fascinated by how dear Jane has been adapted for the cinema, television and now the web across the years. Here, then, are 12 clips for a 200th birthday. (There were originally 10 clips in this post, but I am grateful to Stuart Ian Burns – see comment below – for pointing out my omission of Lost in Austen, which is now included below, along with the trailer for Bride and Prejudice.)

1. Pride and Prejudice, 1940

Below is the original trailer for the Hollywood adaptation with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Robert Z. Leonard directed with Aldous Huxley (!) as one of the credited scriptwriters. The film was derived from the 1936 stage version written by Helen Jerome and is set several decades later than the time of the novel. According to Wikipedia,

The film is substantially different from the novel in a number of ways; most notably, the confrontation near the end of the film between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet was radically altered, changing the former’s haughty demand that Elizabeth promise never to marry Darcy into a hoax to test the mettle and sincerity of Elizabeth’s love.


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Links for the week [updated]

1.11.2012 posted by Category: Digital media, Film, Links, Literature, Performance, Television
Links for the week [updated]

I have lost count of the number of times that I have linked to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s exemplary blog about the history and art of film. Now David Bordwell has scripted and narrated a video essay, Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, that is freely available from there, and because it’s on Vimeo it can be embedded here. Go to the associated blog post for further links.

Across the jump, more links – many of them literary, this week – that I hope you’ll find engaging.
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The Master and the masterpiece

8.10.2012 posted by Category: Literature
The Master and the masterpiece

While I enjoy – and try to make some sense of – Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone (posts coming soon), let me recommend as warmly as possible two books and two terrific critical articles. The first recommendation is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, which “the Master” published (in instalments initially) in 1880-81. It hardly needs me to affirm that this is a great, great novel. The second book is the recently published Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra. Gorra is an American academic but he writes for the rest of us in an elegant style that effortlessly combines erudition with engagement. I would say this is the best and most rewarding extended work of criticism that I have encountered in a long, long time.
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A feast of Annas

27.09.2012 posted by Category: Film, Literature, Television
A feast of Annas

I know I am coming late to this, but tonight I am off to the Clapham Picturehouse to see Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley (above). Despite the so-so reviews, I am intrigued to see how the film-set-in-a-theatre idea comes off. Tolstoy’s great novel is also probably the novel that would run Middlemarch the closest if I was allowed only a single book on a desert island (assuming I had a complete Shakespeare, of course). Which led me to muse on earlier screen manifestations of this tale of love, loss and redemption – and across the jump I have assembled seven YouTube clips of trailers and extracts, as well as the links that will take you to the two parts of a complete (legal) adaptation from Mosfilm with spectacular visuals made in the Soviet Union in 1967. For more about these and other adaptations, see this Wikipedia list. Enjoy.
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… and a third ten on Danny’s Britain

3.08.2012 posted by Category: Digital media, Film, Literature, Performance
… and a third ten on Danny’s Britain

Seven days later. A week on from Danny Boyle’s Olympics opening ceremony, and the great writing about that extraordinary vision keeps on coming. So I cannot resist offering links to a third group of ten views. Across the jump you will find political analysis, textual exploration and some fun – what more can you ask of a blog (or indeed an Olympics opening ceremony)? (Warning: contains link to toxic Richard Littlejohn.)

Previously on this:
• Ten thoughts about Danny’s Britain
• Ten more on Danny’s Britain
• Jennings and Powell, thou should’st be living at this hour: Paul Tickell’s dazzling analysis
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