1. A major canvas by Richard Eurich

I have long been fascinated by the paintings of Richard Eurich who is conventionally pigeon-holed as a ‘war artist’. He was indeed an official war artist and this wonderful elevated view of an aerial attack is titled Night Raid on Portsmouth Docks, 1941 (artwork links in this post are to entries on Tate’s web site). Some of Eurich’s finest canvases were painted during World War Two but his work from both before 1939 and after 1945 is also well worth attention. Yet this is the first time I can remember seeing one of Eurich’s paintings displayed at Tate, and it was one of numerous pleasant surprises as I made my way round. For more on Eurich, see a rich website dedicated to the artist here.

2. Works by artists I have never heard of

So this is Bombed Women and Searchlights, 1940 by Clive Branson. Who? Exactly. Among the many familiar masterpieces (and as others have commented the new hang is significantly more dense than before) are a number of works that attract your attention and make you ask that question. From Tate’s web site I learn that Branson was influenced by the Surrealists, showed with the Artists’ International Association and died on active service in Burma in 1944. I am extremely happy to have him, since Saturday, as a new acquaintance.

3. The revelations of chronology

Jacob Epstein’s lumpen yet unutterably glorious Jacob and the Angel, 1940-41, hewn from glowing alabaster, is an old friend. But because it is now in the centre of a gallery devoted to art of the 1940s it takes on meanings that had never occurred to me before. Yes, it has all of the religious connotations detailed in Tate’s web catalogue entry, but here it also looks like a monument to the spirit of an exhausted British people being sustained for one final attempt to take the fight back to the Nazis.

4. John Read alongside Henry Moore

The new hang has two substantial spaces devoted to the work of Mr Moore. These are busy spaces, with sculptures and drawings and contextual photographs and texts vying for your attention. But by and large the works look great (do we think the grey of the walls is just a bit too much?) and I was simply thrilled to see that an extract of John Read’s 1951 BBC film Henry Moore is being shown on a loop alongside one variant of the work whose making it chronicles, Reclining Figure, 1951. On this blog and elsewhere I have long championed the importance of this documentary and its display next to one of Moore’s greatest works is an exemplary demonstration of the way in which film can illuminate a work of art. For those of us who knew John Read it also feels like some sort of recompense for the lack of respect that too often his employer and the wider culture showed towards him during his later years.

5. Seeing familiar things in new ways

I could have picked numerous examples, but the juxtaposition of L.S. Lowry’s The Old House, Grove Street, Salford, 1948 with Lucian Freud’s Girl with a Kitten of a year earlier seems particularly felicitous. Here is one of the most reviled modern British artists (at least by some, although Tate Briain’s major show this summer change that) hung next to the most revered – and the similarities are at least as revealing as the differences.

6. Henry Moore everywhere

Although there are two Henry Moore rooms, the artist’s works are also present in several other spaces, and in each place they more than justify their presence. Here is Working Model for UNESCO Reclining Figure, 1957, anchoring a 1950s gallery that is full of wondrous things…

7. Beautiful juxtapositions, part one

… and these are two of them: Barbara Hepworth’s guarea wood Corinthos, 1954-55, echoed by Robyn Denny’s rarely-seen canvas Home from Home, 1959.

8. Beautiful juxtapositions, part two

Next door, in the 1960s gallery, there is a wall on which is displayed (from left to right) Roger Hilton’s Oi Yoi Yoi, 1963, Gillian Ayres’ Break-off, 1961 and Richard Smith’s Piano, 1963. More conventional hangs would never have aligned these works but they make a defiantly handsome trio with ideas about paint and shape and colour, and about the boundaries of figuration, sparking between them.

9. Wonderful new acquisitions

This is Peter Blake’s Portrait of David Hockney in a Hollywood Spanish Interior, 1965. I see from the label that Hockney presented it to Tate in 2002 but I don’t recall having seen it before. It is a a quite exceptionally good and perhaps even great painting.

10. A photography policy that allows us all to take photos

The guard who I spoke with explained with pleasure that as long as I did not use flash it was fine to take photographs. This is simply brilliant – and exactly what I would hope for from our national collection of British art.

Now for the thing I just don’t understand.

Jonathan Jones in the Guardian among others has commented on Tate’s decision to do away with explanatory labels next to the works of art. Gone indeed are the comforting wall panels summing up in 200 agonised-over words the connections between works of art in a room. Gone too are the too-often-simplistic pointers to an artwork’s meaning which too often came across as prescriptive and determining. Excellent.

But then this is Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, 1967, not it must be said the easiest of works to approach…

… and on the wall right beside it is this:

Say what? Is this a case of one rule for the ‘difficult’ pieces, which need a caption, and one for the rest of the art, which is graced by the absence of text? Looking around, maybe 1 in 10 works is accompanied by a similar caption, although I could find neither rhyme nor reason for which ones attracted them and which did not. And that’s what I failed to understand on Saturday. But in general Tate Britain is now as great as I can remember it in the forty-two years (since the Eduardo Paolozzi retospective in 1971) during which I have been a regular visitor.

Lead image: Sir Henry Tate, exhibited 1898, by Thomas Brock at the start of the BP Walk Through British Art at Tate Britain.

• Why can’t we take pictures in art museums?: in fact, Tate Britain now has a relaxed attitude to people snapping away in the permanent collection (hurrah!) and Carolina A. Miranda’s good piece for ARTnews fills in the background about policies in galleries across the States.

• What is neo-realism?: this is a compelling video essay from the BFI’s Sight & Sound (available only on their site, with no embedding option); @kogonada lines up Vittorio de Sica’s Terminal Station, 1954, alongside producer David O Selznick’s radical re-cut of the same material in Indiscretion of an American Wife - there is more background in Dave Kehr’s essay for The Criterion Collection’s US release of both films.

• Daves and Peckinpah: enthusiasm in a round-up post from David Hudson at Fandor for westerns by two of the greatest directors to tackle the genre.

• Jubal – awakened to goodness: The Criterion Collection has just released (in the US only) two of Delmer Daves’ best westerns, and this is an exemplary essay by Kent Jones about the director’s Jubal, and Jones is equally good in 3:10 to Yuma – curious distances.

• The adult westerns of Delmer Daves: Sean Axmaker at Videodrone similarly hymns the westerns of Delmer Daves – there is also more on Daves’ films at the Sundance blog from Nick Pinkerton; and here, for no other reason than it’s a wonderful film, is the original trailer for Daves’ 1957 3.10 to Yuma:

• Here and now and then – 1975: thanks to Parallax View for the tip about this fascinating Michael Koresky Sundance blog post about the art of the zoom in mid-’70s Altman, Kubrick and Spielberg.

• Man on fire – Tony Scott: I think you’ll enjoy Joseph Bevan’s kind-of tribute to the late director on the BFI blog; Scott’s visual flair is rightly lauded but Bevan also has this to say…

On occasion his films reach an absolute zero-level of moral redundancy that can leave the viewer feeling genuinely unwholesome…

… then again I can’t argue with this…

Justified criticism aside, you would have to be spectacularly humourless as well as disinterested in film aesthetics not to find anything to appreciate or admire in Scott’s filmography. His worst films aren’t ‘so bad they’re good’; they’re at once incredibly good and incredibly bad.

• Extending the paintbrush: a detailed consideration by Aaron Cutler for Moving Image Source of MoMA’s current season of independent documentaries from China.

• Pandora’s digital box – end times: David Bordwell asks, when exactly did film end? (And you need to read his answers.)

• Angelina Jolie controls the narrative: Anne Helen Petersen at celebrity gossip, academic style on the big story of the week.

• Gatsby, and other luxury consumers: A. O. Scott for The New York Times is terrific on commodity fetishism and the ‘sublimity of stuff’ in Gatsby, Spring Breakers and The Bling Thing.

• How to direct a TV drama: Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture with a lovely lyrical ode to the art of television.

• Faking it: Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker is essential on the style and substance of Mad Men.

• Bed Trick – a short film inspired by The Changeling: the latest Young Vic/Guardian short film collaboration is directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, stars Sinéad Matthews and develops one of the key ideas in Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean classic – it’s fascinating on several levels (as I hope to post about soon) but frustrating that I can’t embed it here.

• Berlin, days 10 to 12 – too much to say, too little time: Holger Syme at dispositio has been watching plays in Berlin, and here he posts about recent productions by Armin Petra (Anna Karenina), Robert Wilson (Peter Pan – truly) and, of particular interest to me, Katie Mitchell, whose new Night Train he explores in ways that parallel my recent discussion of Fraulein Julie.

• Andy Warhol and his foundation – the questions: a coruscating analysis by Richard Dorment for the blog of The New York Review of Books.

• America in color: The New Yorker has an engaging slide-show of photos from the U S of A by Martin Parr.

• Ideas from Museumnext 2013: a really good overview of key digital issues for museums from the V&A’s Andrew Lewis.

• Explore Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in incredible depth – on your iPad: Martin Cullingford at Gramophone is impressed by the latest app from Touch Press and Deutsche Grammophon.

• Hear ye, future deep throats – this is how to leak to the press: this is the recommendation for Nicholas Weaver’s Wired article in a Tweet by @jayrosen_nyu: ‘one of the best pieces on big data I’ve read, disguised as a cheat sheet for what it really takes to leak anonymously’.

• On metadata and cartoons: far more fun than you might suspect – a post by James Baker on the Digital scholarship blog from The British Library.

• Laptop U: it’s well worth reading The New Yorker‘s Nathan Heller on MOOCs (‘massive open online courses’) and the developing revolution in academia.

• The role of blogging in the academic feedback cycle: Adam Crymble thoughtfully compares the value of a conventional conference paper with a blog post.

Header image: The Old House, Grove Street, Salford, 1948 by L.S. Lowry and Lucien Freud’s Girl with a Kitten, 1947.

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.

Apparently it took a whole weekend to get this next shot right. Shot and Directed by Paul Greenhouse, the video for To The River by James Wallace & the Naked Light is a very simple one but very well executed.

To The River from JWATNL on Vimeo.

I’m mad about ‘making of’ videos and this one is a real gem. First, you need to watch the video they’re talking about here which is Wasting My Young Years by London Grammar. Also quite a simple idea but much harder to execute. The technique used in order to pull this off shows incredible ambition and dedication. A bucket of gold stars to Owen Silverwood and Dave Bullivant (Bison) who are the brains behind it all.

LONDON GRAMMAR – Wasting My Young Years – Behind The Scenes from Academy Plus (A+) on Vimeo.

Sarah DiNardo loves masking tape. She loves it so much, she makes sculpture out of it!

Sarah DiNardo. Tape Artist. from gnarly bay productions, Inc. on Vimeo.

Making these looks like it could be quite therapeutic and that seems partly why Sarah enjoys it so much. I might give it a go myself, though I doubt I’ll make anything half as interesting as her pieces!

Mortimer Wheeler became a star (he was named British TV Personality of the Year in 1954) courtesy of the game show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (1952-59), in which experts identified objects from museum collections. Like almost all early television, this was broadcast live from a studio with three or four electronic cameras, as can be seen online from an edition shown on 28 October 1954. Wheeler is one of three panellists, while the chair is Glyn Daniel, a Cambridge don who would similarly develop a career as a television expert on the past.

Glyn Daniel is also the presenter for Buried Treasure: Stonehenge, first broadcast on 23 July 1954, in which he conducts a studio discussion with two other archaeologists. They illustrate their arguments with charmingly quaint studio models, diagrams and short, silent sequences filmed on location. This combination of techniques also suffices for another programme in the same series, Buried Treasure: Mohenjo-daro (4 June 1957) in which Wheeler, helped by substantial silent film sequences, discusses his recent excavations in the Indus Valley.

Television archaeology steps out of the studio and into the world with Hellenic Cruise, three half-hour films from the summer of 1958 in which Wheeler and some three hundred other experts and enthusiasts take a boat trip around the Aegean. (The BBC web site claims that the series is called Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise but there appears to be no mention of the first two words on the films themselves.) Travel is foregrounded throughout, as we first see Sir Mortimer enjoying a substantial dinner on board a train, following which there are numerous shots on and from the ship.

The opening titles for the films acknowledge that the journey is being made by members of ‘The Hellenic Travellers’ Club’. I am far from sure that in 2013 the BBC’s compliance rules would permit such a tie-up with a commercial enterprise. The ‘Club’ was originally an organisation established in 1906 by the educational travel agent Henry Lunn (his name survives in Lunn-Poly), but by the 1950s the name and the idea behind it had been taken over by W F Swan who had once been Lunn’s private secretary. From 1954 Swan and his son Richard ran Swan Hellenic, a company which organised cruises around the Aegean. Currency restrictions were still in place and there was a shortage of decent hotels in the Aegean, and both problems were overcome by an operation which took payment in London for sleeping places on a peripatetic boat.

The potentially tricky aspect of this for the BBC is that Swan Hellenic employed Sir Mortimer to organise lectures to passengers as they made their way around the classical sites.  Wheeler’s commercial interests, however, receive no acknowledgement in the films, even though he chats throughout the voyage with other learned lecturers, as here.

Weirdly to our eyes today, Sir Mortimer hardly ever seems to step off the boat, and almost all of the filming of places like Mount Olympus and Mycenae is done in generic travelogue mode accompanied only by our guide’s voice-over. The first film, for example, spends some eight minutes in Venice, but at no point do see Sir Mortimer or any other members of the ‘Club’ in a gondola, by a canal, or standing in front of St Mark’s. It is as if television had not yet learned that in order to validate the journey for us, and the substance of the narration, we need to see that our presenter actually visited these places and witnessed with his own eyes what he is talking about.

The producer of Hellenic Voyage was the remarkable Stephen Hearst, a man I knew a little at the end of the 1970s when, after a stint as Controller, Radio 3, he was BBC Television’s in-house defender of serious high art values. I argued with him on panels on several occasions – he had no interest whatsoever in arts television engaging with popular culture – but I also admired him greatly. As a Jew and a known agitator against the Nazis, Hearst had fled Austria in 1938, and he never lost the sense that the values of European culture could be submerged by barbarism. This is an idea that runs strongly through Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, a series in the genesis of which Hearst played a key role, although for Clark the enemies at the gate are not the Nazis but the Marxist revolutionaries of the late 1960s.

The year after Stephen Hearst took the Hellenic cruise with Sir Mortimer, the producer returned with another expert, the Scottish writer Sir Compton Mackenzie, to make The Glory that was Greece (1959). Philip Purser’s delightful 2010 obituary of Hearst for the Guardian recalls what I take to be the writer’s role (as ‘wretched critic’) in unmasking that year’s ‘fakery’ scandal:

Hearst took only a silent camera to Greece. Mackenzie worked out the enthusiastic things he would say about each fabled site without appearing in shot. Back in Ealing Studios he stood in front of a back-projection screen, a wind machine teasing his silver locks, to deliver his hymn to the scene around him. ‘The glory may have been Greece’s,’ wrote the wretched critic who revealed this, ‘but the ingenuity was Ealing’s.’

Frustratingly, The Glory that was Greece is not featured in the online archive collection, perhaps because the Corporation has little interest in reminding us that the argument about what’s ‘real’ and what’s not in BBC factual programming has deep roots. The site does, however, give us the three-part follow-up, The Grandeur that was Rome (1960). In this, Hearst is reunited with Sir Mortimer, and they have finally learned to film the presenter speaking directly to camera in some corner of a foreign field. The opening shot is of a distant panorama, from which the camera pans around to reveal our man.

The rest, you might say, is the history of history on television, and of arts programmes, and of those about science and about religion and about pretty much everything else that now falls under the rubric of ‘specialist factual’. Here is where the presenter-led travel programme began. Which is why I see this as the birthplace of Civilisation – and of The Ascent of Man (1972), The Shock of the New (1980) and so much, much more.

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…

I hope to one day live by a lake. Melbourne-based Betty Wants In just happens to have reminded me of this fact.

By The Lake, Tasmania. from Betty Wants In on Vimeo.

More and more now, short films online seem to represent exactly what the title of this next film suggests. Fragments of Time details Daniele Manoli‘s very own personal portrait of Hong Kong shot over a period of two years. What I love about this kind of filmmaking is its strength in evoking particular feelings and sense of place. There aren’t enough outlets for this kind of work to develop and thrive in, so it’s always great to come across it online and be completely taken by it.

Fragments Of Time from Daniele Manoli on Vimeo.

Daniele’s recent work includes an impressive project of short films each dedicated to a letter of the alphabet. Forget Sesame Street though, this series has much more nostalgia, music, chaos, randomness, hallucinations and vomit! You can work your way through them all here, and it really is an epic journey! One of my favourites is Q.

Q from Daniele Manoli on Vimeo.

Here’s one for the pyromaniac in me.

Fire drawing from Glithero on Vimeo.

If you still haven’t been up to the top of the tallest building in the European Union then this next video should give you an idea about what you’re missing!

A View from the Shard from The Film Artist on Vimeo.

Although it’s not quite the same, it might make you think there’s now no need to go up it at all!

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.

• William Witney, B-movie action king: R Emmet Sweeney at Moving Image Source on the low-budget movie director admired by Quentin Tarantino and others.

• The polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky – the mystery of everyday life: still images by the great director highlighted by Michelle Aldredge on gwarlingo.

• Jack and the bean-counters: Kristin Thompson is very good on fandom, failure and a movie called Jack and the Giant Slayer (sic).

• Test Centre launches The Museum of Loneliness: The Literateur’s Scott Morris files a fine report on the latest project – an LP! – from filmmaker Chris Petit, with a little help from writer Iain Sinclair.

• Wheatley’s latest to have same-day platform release: this is really interesting from Chris Patmore at MovieScope on plans for Ben Wheatley’s forthcoming A Field in England to be ‘the first-ever film to be released in UK nationwide cinemas, on free TV, on DVD and on Video-on-Demand on the same day’ (which is 5 July).

• Daily – ‘Chinese Realities / Documentary Visions’: a useful introduction from David Hudson at Fandor to MoMA’s new screening series of recent documentaries from China; the MoMA website has valuable notes on each of the films.

• The 50 greatest matte paintings of all time: a year-old list from Peter Cook at Shadowlocked that I’ve only just come across – and which is packed with riches.

• Meet 500 years of British art: Tate Britain opens its radical re-hang in the coming week, and this Tate Shots video has curator Chris Stephens introducing the galleries and the ideas behind them; there’s more from Tate Britain’s director Penelope Curtis in her ‘Time is right to rethink the chronological rehang’ for The Art Newspaper.

• James Turrell shapes perceptions: Jori Finkel for the L.A. Times on the American artist and his grandiose vision for Roden Crater.

• The day that punk died again: New York’s Metropolitan Museum has opened Punk: Chaos to Couture; Sasha Frere-Jones has written all you need to know about it for The New Yorker:

The biggest sin of this current show is not that it isn’t true to punk. It’s that it doesn’t honor history, ideas, or clothing.

• Made for ‘ugh’, appropriated for ‘ooh’ : … while Roberta Smith at The New York Times is a bit more enthusiastic:

The show is the ultimate confirmation that, despite attempts to be as unpalatable as possible, punk was absorbed by the culture around it, not least by blue-chip fashion designers on the prowl for new ideas.

• Cultural hijack: Regine at we make money not art reviews a richly interesting exhibition at the Architectural Association School of Architecture which also has a good website here.

• Paint bombs: Kalefa Sanneh, also for The New Yorker, on Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber and anarchism today.

• The ecstasy of a modern romantic: Joan Acocella for The New York Review of Books on Isadora Duncan.

• James Salter – the forgotten hero of American literature: Rachel Cooke contributes to the Observer a loving profile of the literary giant – if you’ve never read the achingly gorgeous A Sport and a Pastime, do yourself a favour.

• The disappearing book: for Medium Frank Rose writes about the fascinating project These Pages Fall Like Ash that ‘that starts out as a book but then unfolds as a digital text that people read on their smartphones or tablets’ – the creators are Tom Abba and Duncan Speakman working with novelists Neil Gaiman and Nick Harkaway.

• This is what happens when publishers invest in long stories: a thought-provoking piece about possible new models for online writing by Chris Dannen for Fast Company.

• Future fiction – drama meeting digital: a tremendous collection of resources from the BBC Academy’s Future Fiction day about what’s next for drama production and distribution.

• Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: a truly remarkable digital recreation, with a number of different aspects, of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day sermon given in London in 1622.

The Wikipedia entry on L’Herbier is a good place to start to get to know him, as is a fine introduction by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Meet Marcel L’Herbier. Here are extracts from the Festival’s introduction to the filmmaker:

From his obsession with innovative lighting and camera work and highly stylised mise–en–scènes complete with décor and costumes designed or adapted specifically for the screen effect, L’Herbier is best known for his interest in developing a language that would be cinematic in essence (which in France was at the time described by the elusive term photogénie)…

During the silent period, L’Herbier’s ambition for the cinema was to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a cinéma totalwhich would synthesise all the arts and draw together architects, artists, set designers, couturiers and costume designers. Among the many major cultural figures he collaborated with were the artists Fernand Léger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, the composers Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger, the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, designers Alberto Cavalcanti and Claude Autant-Lara, and couturiers Paul Poiret, Lucien Lelong (L’Herbier’s cousin) and Louiseboulanger. Paired with his multi-disciplinary collaborative approach, it was L’Herbier’s desire to legitimise and ennoble cinema as the ‘seventh art’ that helped establish him as a seminal figure within Paris’s vibrant cultural milieu of the inter-war years.

Using art, fashion and design as the prisms through which to examine L’Herbier’s diverse body of work, Fashion in Film’s season highlights his lifelong interest in cinematic style and aesthetics. As the costume designer Jacques Manuel once observed, costume for L’Herbier was so often a way of  ‘feeding’ the ‘mechanical eye’ with evocative surfaces and textures, a way of testing the formal elements of cinema itself such as movement, rhythm, light and shadow.

Screenings over the weekend are as follows (and I’m frustrated that I am filming in Wakefield – of which more anon) and so will miss these first showings. But I intend to catch several of the programmes next week, and will do another post about L’Herbier’s films later.

18.30, tonight, Friday 10 May: L’Argent (1928), BFI Southbank.

14.00, Saturday 11 May: L’Epervier (1933), Ciné Lumière.

14.00, Sunday 12 May: Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1931), Ciné Lumière.

If you are unable to get to these screenings, there is a glorious Masters of Cinema DVD of L’Argent (1928) and in the States The Late Matthias Pascal is newly available on Blu-ray from Flicker Alley, reviewed here by The New York Times.

Image: filming L’Epervier (1933), courtesy of Bibliothëque du Film (BIFI), Paris; © Brigitte Berg, Les Documents Cinèmatographiques.

1. Only one employee has been discovered by us in the Illuminations’ offices in flagrante delicto.

2. We named the company after the the volume of Walter Benjamin essays in which ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ was first published in English.

3. Illuminations (Television) Ltd was officially registered in June 1982, and so we have been in business for over thirty years.

4. In what passed for a mission statement in those days we said that we aimed to make ‘distinctive programmes about contemporary culture’ — and that’s what we’ve done ever since.

5. Among our earliest productions for Channel 4 was the 1984 concert film Once in a Lifetime with David Byrne and Talking Heads. In the same year Jonathan Demme released the concert film Stop Making Sense with David Byrne and Talking Heads.

6. We claim to have produced the first British television programme to use the word ‘internet’; this was MeTV: The Future of Television; this was in an interview with Mitch Kapor.

7. We also believe that our production The Net in 1994 was the first series to feature an e-mail address in the closing credits.

8. This first use of this e-mail address was incorrect, since it failed to include the @ symbol.

9. One of our colleagues had his drink spiked in a New York hotel bar on a filming trip; he woke more than twenty-four hours later to find that his camera, traveller’s cheques and much more had been stolen.

10. We have filmed interviews with one former president of the United States (Jimmy Carter) and two former British prime ministers (Edward Heath, Tony Blair).

11. Other interviewees in our programmes have included Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Walter Cronkite, Harrison Ford, Jerry Hall, Jacques Derrida, Barry Diller, David Attenborough, Sylvia Kristal, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Dawkins, Larry Hagman, Jean Baudrillard and Bobby Charlton. At least six of these notables have since died (it was four back in 2009).

12. We produced the infamous as-live Channel 4 discussion Is Painting Dead? in which a somewhat worse for wear Tracey Emin tore off her microphone and flounced off the set.

13. Presenters who have fronted our programmes include Michael Palin, Boris Johnson, Harold Evans, Terry Gilliam, Frank Muir and Jarvis Cocker.

14. In one survey of the lowest rated primetime programmes ever, our (wonderful) film with Fiona Shaw performing T S Eliot’s The Waste Land featured in the ‘top’ ten transmissions.

15. We once produced a live Channel 4 broadcast using virtual cameras entirely from within a three-dimension online world.

16. Our series State of the Art so upset a prominent New York art dealer that she screamed down the phone that she would ensure we never f***ing made a film in the art world again; this conversation took place in 1987.

17. For our film Pandaemonium we wanted to record a shoot a sequence with the artist Stelarc which involved him swallowing a sculpture which would open inside his stomach. The BBC did not allow us to proceed with this.

18. Our live broadcast of the Turner Prize 1995 awards ceremony was interrupted by Channel 4 cutting to a commercial in the middle of Damien Hirst’s acceptance speech.

19. Our awards shelf includes a BAFTA for Best Arts Programme, an International Emmy for Best  Performing Arts Programme, a Peabody Award – and the Contemporary Award at the 2008 International Film Festival on Clay and Glass.

20. We have filmed sequences for our programmes on Super-8, 16mm, Super-16mm and 35mm film, on 1″ videotape, VHS, U-matic, BetaSP, Digi-beta, min-DV, DV CAM and HD CAM tapes, and on RED and Alexa digital cameras as well as an iPhone.

21. We were officially censured for producing a Channel 4 live transmission in which Madonna used the f-word just before the watershed when she announced Martin Creed as the winner of the Turner Prize 2001.

22. For Artland USA we drove a 40-foot recreational vehicle right across the States. Twice. Once from San Diego to Portland, Maine, and once from the Florida Keys to Anchorage.

23. Directors who have made films for us include Julien Temple, Deborah Warner, John Maybury, Tilda Swinton and Phyllida Lloyd. Phyllida directed the feature film of Mamma Mia!, the second-most successful British movie ever, but this was for another company.

24. One of our uploads to YouTube – a clip from State of the Art with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol — has been viewed more than 300,000 times since it was posted.

25. With Channel 4′s funding we produced (separate) programmes with the artist Gary Hill and with the filmmaker Patrick Keiller which Channel 4 have never shown.

Even – or perhaps especially – those who work in television archives would not claim that their job is glamorous or sexy. What attention their essential and invaluable labour attracts is invariably associated with the retrieval of a ‘lost’ episode of Doctor Who or, as happened in 2011, the discovery in the Library of Congress of a cache of British television plays that were missing, believed wiped. Dedicated historians like Dick Fiddy and organisations like Kaleidoscope do great work finding such treasures and securing column inches for them. This is important work.

At the same time we need to recognise, as I fear that we too rarely do, that there are thousands and thousands of ‘found’ programmes in the archives about which next-to-nothing is known. Simply because of a lack of time and resources, they are never viewed – and as a consequence they remain undocumented. This is television’s terra incognita, the shelves and shelves of films and tapes that at present are off any critical map.

Each and every one of those programmes about which we know (all-but) nothing is of interest, and each undoubtedly deserves to be seen and celebrated and discussed. Walk Down any Street is an example of a documentary that I find particularly compelling, and for which I would want to make an argument about its ‘quality’. But what seems urgent is not just a mapping to find the masterpieces.

There is no simple or standard way to address this issue. Even to achieve the density of knowledge that we have now about cinema history, the mappings will take decades, and will involve all sorts of explorers and expeditions. Academic researchers have their role in this, as of  course do the archivists and those who characterise themselves as fans. Access is a key issue, and as ever the BBC, BFI and others have initiatives to address this, although there are times when it feels as if those of us alive today may never see their conclusion.

There have been and there are, of course, many beacons beginning to light up some paths. Look, for example, at the new BBC Archive site dedicated to early programmes about archaeology. Until this came online, I believe I was one of just a handful of people who in the last three decades and more had watched The Grandeur that was Rome (1960). Now this series and other treasures are available for us all to encounter and to write about (as I intend to) – and this privilege (could we call it a right?) is on offer for free and (as far as we can expect) forever. This too is important work.

So above all we need to continue our explorations, and each viewing like the one for Walk Down any Street is a step along the way. That showing was part of the preparation for a BFI initiative in 2014-15 that will offer entry points into a central area of the television history of the 1950s and ’60s. Some of the terra then will no longer be quite so incognita, although there will without doubt be much left to explore.

At the end of the twentieth century Illuminations was an independent television production company that – like pretty much every other small to medium-sized independent – did not own the means of television production. In the 1990s cameras that could record broadcast-quality images cost something short of £50,000. Broadcasters owned these cameras, as did facility companies and a few rich directors of photography, and we hired them for several hundred pounds a day. We also hired online editing suites – which were needed to complete programmes at broadcast quality – for several hundred pounds an hour.

Such had been our way of working since the start of the company alongside the start of Channel 4 back in 1982. We shot our first programmes on 1″ videotape and on 16mm film, always working with cameras hired on short-term contracts. We edited on Steenbeck flat-bed editing tables and on basic non-linear offline VHS systems. Then we took our film fine cuts and our offline logs to, respectively, laboratories and online facility companies for completion. And we were happy, as were the broadcasters for whom these were the approved processes of production.

Time marches on, however, as does the speed of change in production technologies, and pretty soon we were shooting with BetaSP tapes and then DVCAM and, best of all, with Digi-beta (most notably for Macbeth, 2000) as well as, rarely but gloriously, on Super 16mm film (notably for Gloriana, A Film, 1999). The images changed but not our way of financing their creation, which still depended on us securing money from broadcasters to hire expensive equipment owned by others.

Around this time we and many others started to work with the first generation of semi-pro camcorders recording to mini-DV tapes. But these did not produce images that would pass muster in the increasingly rigorous “quality review” processes adopted by broadcasters before they accepted a finished programme.

Then in what my increasingly fallible memory recalls as 2000 Sony released their DSR-500WS professional camcorder which shot full-height anamorphic 16:9 images and recorded to DVCAM tape (the link takes you to lots more techie stuff). This produced broadcast-quality widescreen images and finally, for us, the price was right. Again, as I recall it, we paid around £12,000 for the camera that you see here in all its glory (thanks for the photo, Todd).

At last, in the terms analysed so rigorously by Marx and Friedrich Engels, Illuminations owned the means of production. And this important change for us was reinforced when quite soon afterwards the first desk-top editing systems became available, initially from Avid and then in the form of the now more widely-known Final Cut Pro. For the first time, we could shoot a production with our own camera and edit it with our own desktop kit and play out a broadcast-ready master. This was – and still seems as I write this – revolutionary.

Sometime in 2000 we began to think that we might make programmes which no broadcaster had commissioned. We could commit our own resources, in the shape of this camera and our editing system, and our own time, which we were prepared to invest, and we could try to make productions. Crucially, we did not need someone else’s cash to hire kit. We might, indeed, begin to work as a true independent producer.

One morning my colleague Henry Johnson and I got into a cab with our DSR-500 and a tripod and drove down to the studio, just off Brick Lane, of the artist Mona Hatoum. We were doing this not because a broadcaster had paid us to do so, but simply because we wanted to – and because we could.

Henry and I that morning recorded a fascinating interview with Mona which we soon supplemented with images that we shot on our DSR-500 of her remarkable show at Tate Britain. I had a sense that from this material we could make a very simple half-hour film about Mona’s work that might find an audience, especially since at that time the BBC and Channel 4 had all-but given up making films with contemporary artists.

That film, made possible because we now owned the means of production, became the first of the series that we called theEYE and that eventually numbered 37 productions. theEYE: Mona Hatoum was released initially on VHS and then later on DVD, and is still available for just £13.99 from the publishing arm that we established.

We sold the film to Channel 5 (weird, that) when they began to take an interest in arts documentaries and it has been shown on specialist arts channels in the USA, Australia and elsewhere. It has been screened in schools and colleges all over the world, and in museums and galleries alongside Mona’s work.

Alongside theEYE we started to produce films in the series The Art of…, again always shooting on the DSR-500WS. Our regular DoP Ian Serfontein and I took that camera all over Britain, on not a few Easyjet flights around Europe, and even to the States. We shot many more productions for ourselves, but we also used it for our broadcast work in the early 2000s and on films for Tate and a host of other musuems, for The Open University, and for others.

Five or six years ago,and starting with Sky Arts, broadcasters wanted us to shoot and deliver on HD, and gradually the DSR-500WS was less central to what we did. HD CAM is now the standard, and last week we were discussing whether within two or three years broadcasters will expect us to deliver 4K masters.

The images of today and tomorrow are far beyond the technical capability of the DSR-500. But for a while that camera was our warhorse. It allowed us for the first time to own the means of production and it made possible the fundamental change in the way in which we worked – which in turn has allowed us to remain as a small, arts-focussed independent producer. We have much to be grateful for to that camera, and I hope that this note can act as a tiny tribute as it finally leaves us.