A Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: Welcome to a selection of articles and more that have especially engaged me over the past week and more. I hope the coming week is a good one for all – Happy Holidays!
• Sleeping women: because it is content is so graphic and disturbing, I hesitated, although only for a moment, over whether to include Sophie Smith’s LRB essay focussed on Gisèle Pelicot [£, limited free access]. Concerned with both the trial and its far wider resonances, this is easily among the most powerful and essential prose that I’ve read this year.
• Malcolm Le Grice obituary: influential British artist and experimental filmmaker: a simple way to mark the passing of the exceptional avant-garde filmmaker Malcolm le Grice, whose projections and performances I documented on several occasions, who taught me much about the moving image, and who I was honoured to count as a friend. The header image is a composite of frames from Malcolm’s video Even the Cyclops Pays the Ferryman (1998), about which, for the BFI, William Fowler writes really well.
• Meet the director who reinvented the act of seeing: a really terrific interview by Salamishah Tillet for The New York Times [£, limited free access] with RaMell Ross, director of the truly exceptional Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s great novel. Go see it as soon as it opens in the new year (and, yes, I realise I enthused about it last week too).
• Casual viewing: this is such a great essay about Netflix by Will Tavlin for n+1, full of insight and surprise; here’s a taster:
In 2021 Netflix announced that it would start releasing a new original movie every week. A certain style soon began to take shape, a mind-numbing anticinema that anyone who has subscribed to Netflix in recent years knows by sight. I’ll call it the Typical Netflix Movie (TNM). From the outside, the TNM looks algorithmically constructed, as if designed to cater to each of Netflix’s two thousand “taste clusters,” the genre-like groupings Netflix uses to segment its audience, green-light programs, and recommend films and shows to subscribers.
• Watching The Diplomat after election night: for the LA Review of Books, Paul Allen Anderson skewers one of my favourite shows of the year, pointing out that ‘its timely arrival forces us to ask questions about the liberal fantasy provided by shows like this.’
• The Mirror and the Light: the series takes Hilary Mantel’s manifesto for historical fiction to heart: foir The Conversation, professor of medieval history James Clark is very good on Hilary’s ideas of history.
• The best video essays of 2024: so many links and so much creative richness in this annual round-up for Sight & Sound of 183 unique video essays nominated by 47 international voters; this is a favourite by a friend – Lily Ford’s Light Hands:
• The inside story of Josef Koudelka’s groundbreaking career: Aperture‘s ‘Must read photography features of 2024’ took me to this fascinating conversation between Lesley A. Martin and Melissa Harris about the latter’s collaboration with the great Czech photographer on his biography; illustrated as you’d expect with some wonderful images.
• In Our Time – Italo Calvino: as I’ve said before, Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 programme and its podcast form are worth the price of the licence fee alone. This is a typically good edition about a favourite author, with Guido Bonsaver, Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford; Jennifer Burns, Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick; and Beatrice Sica, Associate Professor in Italian Studies at UCL. NOTE: I’ve linked to the episode on Spotify because there, and on other podcast delivery services, you get fuller descriptions of the guests and a more detailed reading list than from the main BBC Sounds page.
• Humphrey’s world — how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain: on Facebook Tom May makes a strong case for a recommendation for this Guardian article:
Fascinating read here from Mark Blacklock about the Samuel Smith pub business and its eccentric owner Humphrey Smith – soon to retire and predictably enough pass it on dynastically to, yes, Samuel Smith. This long read article is properly investigative journalism which feels like a crucial complement to Patrick Wright’s vital history book On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. Blacklock makes the links to Orwell, and also I make the links to Martin J. Wiener’s flawed but significant thesis about ‘the industrial spirit’.
• How to disappear completely: an important essay by s.e.smith for The Verge about digital decay.
• They missed their cruise ship. That was only the beginning: a truly wild tale for New York magazine by Bridget Read [£, limited free access]; on Bluesky the author wrote that it’s ‘the true story of 9 people left behind by their cruise ship. It’s a nightmare travelogue but also a warning abt total deregulation & what happens to consumers when corporations act like gods. It’s fun & awful! (my specialty?)’.
• And finally: as a recognition of Edward Norton’s astonishing performance as Pete Seeger in the forthcoming A Complete Unknown (Timothée is terrific too), here’s the real deal with Judy Collins:
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