Another of our colleague Todd MacDonald’s weekly selections of interesting and intriguing videos…
Todd MacDonald: It’s all about in-camera techniques and masking tape this week, starting with some beautiful footage of London in 1927 – IN COLOUR!
London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.
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Todd MacDonald’s choice of interesting new videos is a couple of days late this week but as he explains that’s the company’s fault, not his.
Todd MacDonald: This week I have been shooting films a lot more than watching them and as I write this, I am sitting in the cafe of The Hepworth Wakefield preparing for another. We are here to document an afternoon of performance entitled The Ultimate Form by Linder Sterling. The event promises to be an exciting collaboration of creatives including award-winning choreographer Kenneth Tindall, dancers from Northern Ballet, original composition by Stuart McCallum of The Cinematic Orchestra and costumes by fashion designer Richard Nicoll. You can watch the Illuminations trailer for The Ultimate Form here. Now, here are my selections for the week…
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So you’ve probably seen this already, even though it was only posted six days ago. Since when it has clocked up more than 3.7 million YouTube views. Yes, it’s the video illustrating part of the audio recording of the late David Foster Wallace‘s famous commencement address, ‘This is water’.
The film was created by the Los Angeles production house The Glossary, and the story behind its making is interesting too. In a Q&A with Adweek’s David Griner, the team admit that they did not clear copyright before they went ahead.
We had little to no budget for this project and we knew that the publishing house was going to be really skeptical of our little company’s request to utilize [DFW's] work. We had faith in our vision for the video and that once it was complete they would see that this was something made with the best intentions in mind. We are in no way making any money directly from this video; it was purely a passion project. While we had high hopes for this, we could have never seen all of this attention coming. Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
It’s worth reading David L Ulin’s piece for the L.A. Times as well. Below are further links to interesting stuff, with acknowledgements due this week to @jay_rosennyu, @CilentoFabrizio and @AndyKesson.
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Yesterday at BFI Southbank I saw a fine (although a touch short of immaculate) 35mm print of John Schlesinger’s 1967 Far from the Madding Crowd. Marred by inconsistency in its central performances, this is nonetheless a magnificent film in many ways, with breathtaking 70mm Panavision and Technicolor cinematography from Nic Roeg. But my pleasure was almost spoiled by the opening BFI corporate animation, which I assume to be new, with the Institute’s logo and the tagline ‘Film Forever’. Aaaaaarrrgggghhhh!
Whose ignorant and insulting idea was it to define our central body dedicated to the moving image in a way that excludes most television and all video and digital creation. Why does the BFI feel that it must take refuge in such a retro attitude? How, for example, when the BFI celebrates itself with such an alliteration, are we going to tackle the questions that Luke McKernan raises in his excellent post What is restoration? Luke makes some fundamental points about the low cultural status and lack of glamour associated with video restoration (such as that undertaken recently by the BFI on the BBC’s 1970s series Nationwide, above). But what the heck, eh, BFI? Who gives a f*** in a world of ‘Film Forever’?
Micro-rant over, below are further rewarding links from the past week or so, with thanks for Twitter recommendations to @Criterion, @AnthologyFilm, @filmstudiesff and @emilybell.
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Our colleague Todd MacDonald offers another selection of videos that caught his eye during the past week. His selection also appears on his personal blog.
Todd MacDonald: The long awaited new album from Bonobo emerged very recently along with the first promo for single ‘First Fires’ – and I love it. Great job by Young Replicant who are also responsible for the equally impressive video ‘Chained’ by The xx which is also hosted on their site via the link above.
Bonobo ‘First Fires’ from Pulse Films on Vimeo.
This is both irresistible and a touch magical: an eight-minute video courtesy of The Criterion Collection with Martin Scorsese talking about and demo-ing the recent restoration of Laurence Olivier’s 1955 Richard III (above). Shot in VistaVision and Technicolor, the film had been chopped about and was suffering significant colour deterioration, but thanks to an army of experts (and our own BFI National Archive) it can now be seen pretty much as Larry intended – and that version was released on Blu-ray and DVD by Criterion this past week. Do also read Amy Taubin’s new essay on the film …and then explore my other links from the past week, noting my thanks for recommendations to @brainpicker, @jackshebang, @KeyframeDaily and @scrnddct.
We are delighted to feature another selection of videos compiled by our colleague Todd MacDonald, which he is also presenting every week on his own blog.
Todd MacDonald: I’ve got some good’uns this week and I even had to leave a few out of the line-up for fear of overload. The five here are the best that I’ve enjoyed this week including work by Lonely Leap, Callum Cooper and Mark Bader.
First, we go to the birthplace of John Wyver, the man behind Illuminations, to Whitstable for a seaside story about the Whelkman.
The Whelkman of Whitstable Harbour from Vern Cummins on Vimeo.
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On at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art until 27 May there’s an exhibition that I really want to see. Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity is a sumptuous assembly of 80 or so figure paintings along with ‘period costumes, accessories, fashion plates, photographs, and popular prints’ which explore the relationship between fashion and art from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. But I’m pretty certain that I won’t get there before the end of next month and so I’m contenting myself with frequent virtual visits to the show – and, you know, I’m OK with that. The Met has a really good web site about the show with a room-by-room guide and great photos; there’s a catalogue of exceptional splendour and sumptuousness edited by curator Gloria Groom; and I can read detailed criticism about it like Paris: The thrill of the modern by Anka Muhlstein in the New York Review of Books. Who needs Manhattan? Below, more links to more stuff, with thanks for recommendations this week to @emilybell and @KeyframeDaily.
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Our colleague Todd MacDonald (@toddmacd), who works at Illuminations as our in-house editor, facilities manager and much more, has for the past few weeks been putting together an eclectic and enlightening selection of videos each Saturday. He has been posting the list on his own blog, and now we have asked him if we can share it. It will make a terrific complement to Links for the weekend on Sundays. Enjoy!
Todd Macdonald: This is only my sixth week of posting my videos of the week and I’m delighted that it is being hosted on the Illuminations blog for the first time. This week is probably the most mixed bag yet so I hope that readers from both my own site, and at Illuminations, find something that interests them.
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There’s one straight-up, stand-out recommendation this week, Eric Naiman’s lengthy essay for The Times Literary Supplement, When Dickens met Dostoevsky. It’s the tale of a notable literary hoax about an alleged meeting encounter between the two authors in 1862, but of course it’s also about what we fervently want to be true and why. Some of the same ideas run through The Fort Bragg murders – is Jeffery MacDonald innocent?. This is another of this week’s good long reads, in this case from Andrew Anthony in theGuardian about truth, relativism and the 1970 murders about which Joe McGinniss, Janet Malcolm and now Errol Morris have written notable books. Below, there are further links to interesting stuff, with thanks this week for recommendations from @audiovisualcy, @manovich and @poniewozick.
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