The Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: As the world turns, every week can seem more extraordinary, and more distressing, than the last. As a tiny antidote to the hideousnesses elsewhere, here’s a selection of stuff that has engaged and enriched my life over the past week, with some politics but with much more besides.
This week’s image is William Nicholson’s The Brass Canister, 1917, from the fascinating retrospective at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (until 31 May), which I visited on Saturday. I intend to return to the show, and the wonderful Pallant, in a future post.
• The ten best films of… 1935: Hurrah! Kristin Thompson’s annual round-up at Observations on Film Art, the wonderful website created by her and her partner, the late and much missed David Bordwell; the year’s titles that she discusses include Jean Renoir’s Toni, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps and John Ford’s Steamboat Round the Bend.
• Grace: Luke McKernan on Laurel and Hardy, and most especially the ‘Commence to dancing’ sequence from Way Out West, 1920:
It is the epitome of grace… Grace is movement in a fluid manner, a charming appearance, a sense of rightness, courteousness of behaviour, and in Christian thinking a state of virtue or of being pleasing to God… Grace is an evanescent quality. It is understood more by its effects than its actions. It is charm, rightness and virtue, all somehow reflected in movement.
• Captain Blood: a pirate is born: Farran Smith Nehme for Criterion on the film that made Errol Flynn a star.
• Object of the week: Ealing’s poster for the classic police drama The Blue Lamp: Melanie Williams writes for BFI Online about James Boswell’s exceptional poster for the 1950 film (above); Boswell is such an interesting artist – why has no-one given him a major show in recent years? An idea for Pallant House, perhaps?
• On Eisenstein, Godard and Welles: Michael Almereyda & Radu Jude in conversation: a rich exchange on influence and inspiration between the two directors, from Filmmaker Magazine.
• The best action scenes of 2025: another annual treat, from Jonah Jeng at Mubi Notebook.
• Happy Feet: Evelyn Kreutzer’s short video essay is, quite simply, a delight (h/t Katie Grant):
• ‘A new form of theater’: can Ian McKellen, 52 cameras and ‘mixed reality’ reinvent a medium?: Adrian Horton for Guardian on a remarkable mixed reality stage show by Simon Stephens in New York.
• Face to face with history’s most dangerous painter: a compelling visual essay for The New York Times [gift link] by Jason Farago about Jacques-Louis David; I wrote here about my visit to the current glorious Louvre retrospective (until tomorrow only).
• The undefined gothic: a rich review essay by Beatrice Radden Keefe for The New York Review [£; limited free access], responding to the exhibition of the encounter between Gothic art and modernism that has just closed in Vienna; there’s a fine catalogue from University of Chicago Press.
• Dolly Parton – ‘Coat of Many Colours’: Happy 80th, Dolly – here she is in 1983:
• People of the aftermath: this isn’t the easiest way to read Matt Houlbook’s short essay for the RSC’s programme accompanying The Forsyte Saga, but it’s well worth persevering with.
• The mythology of conscious AI: a particularly good essay on the subject by Anil Seth, courtesy of The Noéma.
• Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos: if you haven’t yet read, heard or wtached this momentous contribution to world’s ruminations, please do so:
• Making sense of the madness: an especially good, indeed essential, edition of Chris Grey’s Brexit & Brexitism blog, in which he describes Carney’s performance as ‘a speech which may well come to be seen as being as epoch-defining as Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech in Missouri almost exactly eighty years ago’.
• The new world of trade – how 40 years of change brought globalisation without trust: … and if you have the appetite for more, this detailed analysis by David Henig is very good; written for the European Centre for International Political Economy in October.
• Promised Land – for Renee Good, Bruce Springsteen, Light of Day, 1/17/26, Count Basie Theater, NJ: this isn’t the greatest quality recording, but thanks to MarcGlenRock here’s the Boss expressing what we all feel, ‘Get the fuck out of Minneapolis’.
• The power of the (literally) written word: an elegant defence of writing by hand from Maria Konnikova at The Leap blog.
• The critic cornered: a treat of a tale about the late critic John Carey by Mathew Lyons.
• And finally…: the great guitarist Ralph Towner left us this week, and there’s a tremendous 2017 interview-essay at Fretwork Journal by Nels Cline, Focused: An appreciation of the genre-bending guitar work of Ralph Towner; among a cornucopia of exquisite recordings and videos, this version of ‘Summer’s end’ with Towner accompanied by flautist Javier Girotto is particularly fine:
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