The Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: The usual weekending miscellany of articles and videos that have engaged and interested me over the past week. The header image is Robert MacBryde’s Still Life with Fish Head, 1947, usually with Manchester City Galleries but currently in the really fine exhibition at Charleston in Lewes, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders (until 12 April), which I saw this week (and which I may write about soon).
• Local colour: I learned a lot from Justin Stewart’s ReverseShot essay on Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp, 1935, the first full-length non-animated feature film made in Technicolor.
• Bardot at the Notting Hill Coronet: James Meek is very good on ‘BB’ for LRB [£; limited free access].
• The truth, Ruth: on the documentaries of Spike Lee, by Alexander Mooney, for POV.
• “There’s a kind of wet heat in there that you can feel”: Emerald Fennell on 7 films that influenced her version of Wuthering Heights: a great playlist of movies, thanks to BFI online.
• Five-Minute Films #1: The Birth Of The Goalie Of The 2001 FA Cup Final: Ian Greaves has very kindly uploaded fine quality recordings of the five short films made by Mike Leigh for BBC One in 1975 but not transmitted until 1982; this is the first, and there is a playlist link to the others.
• Slowness as antidote in Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus: an especially rich analysis for CST Online by Sarah Lahm that is complemented by another excellent CST article, Slow television, vivid crime: Steven Zaillian’s Ripley and the aesthetics of duration by Sérgio Dias Branco.
• Altair Brandon-Salmon: Electric contrasts — Kenneth Clark and vision in 1930s Britain: I was much engaged by this lecture at the Courtauld Research Forum a few weeks ago, and it’s good to have this recording online.
• Great expectations: a strong Artforum essay [£; limited free access] by Pablo Larios about the current wave of contemporary art institutions in the Gulf.
• Making a iterary future with Artificial Intelligence: a thought-provoking discussion with five writers and AI experts assembled by Dashiel Carrera for LA Review of Books.
• How TikTok is becoming Broadway’s biggest stage: a totally enjoyable New York Times feature [gift link] about fan videos of musical numbers, drawn together by Jesse Green with a host of examples.
• The Winter Olympics is a dazzling spectacle – but on the ground in Italy the mood is darker: I’m loving the BBC coverage, but this Guardian contribution by Jamie Mackay is a sobering counterpoint.
• The happiest government building in the world: brilliant comms, and in fact just brilliant; you’ll love it:
• And finally: Bad Bunny, rightly, got all the attention for the astonishing half-time performance at Super Bowl LX, but before the game there was also a gorgeous performance by Brandi Carlile of ‘America the Beautiful’, this video of which is only weirdly disrupted by the extraordinary shot of 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing somewhere in the Middle East; frustratingly the NFL won’t permit me to embed it, but do click through to watch.
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