A Sunday (baker’s) dozen
John Wyver writes: simply another selection of stuff that has engaged me over the past week or so.
• Carl Th. Dreyer in the silent era: a wonderful clutch of writings and films newly available from the wonderful Danish Silent Film site about the director’s early films; the link is to Casper Tybjerg’s overview of the first years of Dreyer’s career, and there his fascinating essay The Dreyer paratext, plus two newly digitised (and freely accessible) films, Leaves from Satan’s Book, 1921 and The Bride of Glomdal, 1926 – and there’s much more at the associated Dreyer website. Truly an exemplary collection of online resources.
• Sleazy post-war UK noir: a great Letterboxd list by Andrew Male of thrillers and the like made in Britain between 1946 and 1956; so many films to discover.
• Starring Ida Lupino: for Criterion’s The Current, the ever-excellent Farrah Smith Nehme on the films that Lupino made as an actor:
Lupino was one of the best, most vivid and original actresses in Hollywood, making permanent classics with directors such as Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, Michael Curtiz, and Vincent Sherman. She played “spirited, tough, offbeat” characters, as McGilligan put it. And by her own account, Lupino’s taste in roles shaped what she chose to do as a director. “I liked the strong characters,” she told McGilligan, “something that has some intestinal fortitude, some guts to it. Just a straight role drives me up the wall. Playing a nice woman who just sits there, that’s my greatest limitation.”
• Mati Diop on Dahomey and decolonial documentary: for POV, Pat Mullen interviews the director of a film essay that I found remarkable and provocative.
• ‘I think vision Is emotion’: RaMell Ross’ first Nickel Boys script was photographs: a fascinating IndieWire/Filmmaker Toolkit podcast interview with the director of Nickel Boys, perhaps the best film of 2024 (or 2025, since it opens in the UK in early January); there’s a partial transcript at the link too, and the header image here is a publicity shot.
• Seriality and slow grief: I can’t improve on the LA Review of Books tagline: ‘Lauren Eriks Cline looks back at 20 years of the TV series Lost and the lessons it holds for us today.
• Ralph Ellison’s alchemical camera: Jed Perl for NYRB [£, limited free access] reviews Ralph Ellison: Photographer, edited by Michal Raz-Russo and John F. Callahan:
Ralph Ellison’s papers in the Library of Congress include hundreds of photographs that the novelist took over many years, mostly as a serious amateur and also, for a brief period in the late 1940s, as an aspiring professional. They range from the striking black-and-white studies of street life in Harlem that he made when he was in his thirties to elegant Polaroid images of flowers and still lifes from his later years. They aren’t great photographs. But they fascinate nonetheless, as the record of a modern literary giant’s romance with a quintessentially modern visual medium.
• Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at the Tate offers a glimpse into the future past: for The Conversation, Geoff Cox reviews Tate Modern’s fascinating, wonderfully dense and surprising exhibition (until 1 June 2025); here’s a rather over-excited and brief trailer:
• At the Whitney, a stirring Ailey tribute moves dance to the edge: this Holland Cotter review for The New York Times of Edges of Ailey at the Whitney in New York is from late September, but I’m including it here as a reminder of the gallery show that I most wanted to see, but didn’t, in 2024. An innovative and dazzling tribute to the American choreographer and performer Alvin Ailey, the exhibition is, in Cotter’s words ‘an evocation of Ailey, and his dance, through the lens of African American visual art, which is a record and reflection of the Black culture that shaped him, and that he helped shape.’ See also, ‘Alvin Ailey, the man and the mind behind the unapologetic sparkle’ by Gia Kourlas. And here’s a beautiful taster of the exhibition, which is on until 5 February:
• My God, they stink!: terrific review essay for LRB [£, limited free access] by Seamus Perry about the writings of Wyndham Lewis.
• What does a translator do?: such an interesting question, and such an interesting essay for The New Yorker [£, limited free access] by Max Norman.
• Five years of Visualities: not for everyone, but there’s so much brain food in this extraordinarily rich collection about modernism, modernity and the visual, from the Print Plus open access platform of the journal Modernism/modernity.
• Letters from an American – 13 December 2024: may I urge you to subscribe to (and pay, if you are able) to historian Heather Cox Richardson’s daily substack postings? They arrive in your In box around 7am (if you are in the UK) and they provide a measured yet bitterly angry commentary on all things Tr*mp and on the history of the USA. The link takes you to an especially good edition, but every one is essential reading for these dark times.
• And finally…: Peter Maxwell Davies’ hauntingly beautiful ‘Farewell to Stromness’, played by Peter Fagerlind with images from Orkney.com. This is a piano piece I’d like at my funeral.
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