Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

Links for the weekend

14.04.2013 posted by Category: Links
Links for the weekend

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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Out of the past

25.03.2013 posted by Category: Performance, Television
Out of the past

The Screen Plays season of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedies begins tonight at BFI Southbank. We open with a remarkable 1965 production of Thomas Middleton’s play from 1621 Women Beware Women, which I have written about in detail here. The screening will be followed a discussion with Dame Diana Rigg (who plays Bianca) and Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Gregory Doran. The show is sold out but if I get news of any returns I’ll announce them on the @Illuminations Twitter feed. And you can still purchase tickets for future screenings, including the wonderful 1964 Hamlet at Elsinore (above) with Christopher Plummer on the afternoon of Easter Monday. (Yes, I know the play was written around 1599-1600 and so is not strictly Jacobean.) Meanwhile, below is my Introduction to the season which argues that these great plays remain relevant and resonant today.
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Links for the weekend

10.03.2013 posted by Category: Links
Links for the weekend

Let’s start with the first trailer, released this week, for Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (a still from which is above). Might he just have pulled off something truly special? For further background on the film, which opens in the UK (I believe) on 14 June, try this Deadline Hollywood Q&A and at Co.create Steve Ramos’ feature Why you need a creative shift instead of a vacation, as explained by Joss Whedon. There are two short (and completely charming) video interviews with Whedon from the Glasgow Film Festival at Poly Gianniba’s blog. Across the jump you will find the usual cornucopia of links from the past week, with thanks to @ProfShakespeare, @Chi_Humanities, @graham_hitchin, @fashionintofilm, @rwilliams1947 and @filmdrblog.


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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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Videos for the weekend

16.02.2013 posted by Category: Links
Videos for the weekend

I know I’m coming late to this, but Girl Walk // All Day (above) is a feature-length dance film that since late 2011 has been freely available to view online in twelve chapters. And its tale of a girl, played by Anne Marsen, dancing her day through New York City is a really great watch. The director is Jacob Krupnick (there is a New York Times Q&A here) and the crowd-funded finance came from Kickstarter. There are occasional one-off showings in the real world too, such as one this past week in Glasgow. Chapter 1 is embedded here, and see also articles about the project from The Hollywood Reporter, Wired and recently by David Jenkins on the BFI blog. Across the jump, as usual on a Saturday, are nine further recommendations for online viewing.


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Links for the weekend

20.01.2013 posted by Category: Links
Links for the weekend

The great story out of Sundance is the shooting at Disneyland and Disney World of Randy Moore’s movie Escape from Tomorrow without any location permissions or copyright clearances. Believe me, as one who has tried to film at a Disney theme park, this is an astounding achievement – and Steven Zeitchik for the LA Times has the story. As Zeitchik says, Escape from Tomorrow is

a Surrealist, genre-defying black-and-white film… [and] one of the strangest and most provocative movies this reporter has seen in eight years attending the Sundance Film Festival. And it may well never be viewed by a commercial audience.

Say what? As Brooks Barnes for The New York Times asks in Disney World horror fantasy raises knotty copyright problems,  ’Is Mickey Mouse about to get very, very mad at Mr. Moore?’ See also The outlaw pleasures of Escape from Tomorrow by Scott Macaulay for Filmmaker. Here’s the briefest of tastes, albeit one which involves the eating of live octopus and a reference only to ‘a popular American tourist destination’. Then across the jump, there are links to other great features that I came across this week, with recommendation h/ts to @ebertchicago, @KeyframeDaily, @zimbalist and @LUXmovingimage.


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Nice

14.01.2013 posted by Category: About Illuminations, Digital media, Performance, Television
Nice

A number of reviews have appeared in the past few weeks of two recent projects from Illuminations: the Royal Shakespeare Company Julius Caesar on DVD (above) and The Sonnets by William Shakespeare, our collaboration with Touch Press, Faber and The Arden Shakespeare. In case you need reminding, here is the trailer for the DVD of Julius Caesar, which is available for purchase here. After you have taken a look, click across the jump to read extracts from the glowing reviews.


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Links for the holidays

22.12.2012 posted by Category: Links
Links for the holidays

Over the past couple of days there has been a lot of buzz about Snow fall – the avalanche at Tunnel Creek, written by John Branch for The New York Times. But ‘written by’ is only part of this true story of a group of trapped skiers, which across a multi-part feature is a dazzling web narrative combining text, images, video, audio, slide-shows and truly remarkable integrated graphics. This is state-of-the-art multi-media, and something you can spend hours with over the holidays. And for background on how it was put together, see Jeff Sonderman’s feature for Poynter. For further productive ways to pass the next few days, see the links across the jump (h/ts this week to, among others, @manovich, @lukemckernan, @KeyframeDaily, @holland_tom and @juliaLupton) – and then on Christmas Eve we start our Illuminations ‘top tens’ of the year.
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Links for the weekend

9.12.2012 posted by Category: Links
Links for the weekend

I am indebted to Stuart Ian Burns (@feelinglistless) and his estimable Hamlet Weblog for pointing out that – remarkably – BBC Worldwide has made available in full on YouTube seven plays from The BBC Television Shakespeare. Made between 1978 and 1985, the 37 plays in this series are often dismissed as under-cast and under-rehearsed studio-bound turkeys. A number of them, however, are far richer than that – and almost all have points of interest. I am going to write further about the plays and this initiative from Worldwide, but these are links to the productions online now (and you have to put up with four or five adverts in each stream): As You Like It, The Tempest, Hamlet (above), Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Across the jump are many more links from the past week, one about Shakespeare, some concerning television and many to do with neither (with H/Ts to @UCLAFTVArchive, @TylerGreenDC, @KeyframeDaily and @emmafgreen).
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