A Sunday dozen
John Wyver writes: I have been in the habit, although not recently, of posting twelve links at the weekend of articles, including audio and video, that have especially engaged me during the past week. Now that I have come back to the blog, and now that it’s December already, I am going to return to making this selection also, at least for today. I tend to avoid well-known sources, and occasionally embrace challenging academic contributions, but in general expect (comparatively) long reads on film, the visual arts, performance, digital culture and literature, plus the occasional dash of explicit politics. Oh, and the Boss.
• Crime, conspiracy and the prospect of chaos: four filmic triumphs from Louis Feuillade: Geoff Andrew’s tribute to the master of French silent film is engaging and erudite, and linked to a Blu-ray box set from Eureka that Andrew hails as ‘a marvellous chance to discover four cinematic treasures from a major filmmaker too often neglected. They are exciting, mysterious, sinister, surreal, chilling, witty, tender, sexy, funny, innocent, sophisticated, timely… and ceaselessly imaginative and entertaining.’ Indeed. Above is a shot from Tih Minh (1918), and this is the trailer…
• Special issue on early cinema history: the link is to the Index page of a ground-breaking new volume from Journal of E-media Studies dedicated to early cinema history. Here be original riches from the likes of Ian Christie, Charles Musser, Dan Streible, Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Victoria Duckett and more, alongside a group of essential resources for the study of this endlessly fascinating subject.
• Journeys and detrours: Robert Frank on the road: tied to a MoMA show of the great Robert Frank photography and films, David Schwartz for Mubi Notebook offers a rewarding take on Frank’s films.
• Introduction to media and extraction: on the extractive film: Priya Jaikumar and Lee Grieveson introduce an important group of articles for the jopurnal Media+Environment:
Accounts of how films have facilitated the transformation of our planet, its biota, minerals, and matter into resources for racial capitalism through cycles of conquest, enslavement, and the elemental separation of ‘human’ from ‘nature’ can feel like a profound indictment of film itself—a relentless and brutal disenchantment with cinema. And yet, as this stream on The Extractive Film shows, it is through the careful parsing of film’s technical apparatus, archives, institutions of sponsorship, creative affiliations, and formal registration or elision of such histories that we begin to see the scale and scandal of exploitation foundational to global modernity. When held as a witness and testimonial to the industrial reshaping of multiple worlds and communities, film becomes an unfaithful ally to the extractive industries that have deployed the medium.
• From Kaiserpanorama to virtual watch parties – redefining communal viewing experiences: at CST Online Enes Akdag introduces their doctoral research into television virtual watch parties by linking the phenomenon to the late 19th century communal viewing technology invented by German physicist August Fuhrmann.
• Test your focus – can you spend 10 minutes with one painting?: I have wanted since July to recommend this terrific New York Times interactive feature by Francesca Paris and Larry Buchanan about looking, really looking, at a painting, in this case ‘Nocturne in Blue and Silver’ by James McNeill Whistler; as the authors acknowledge,
Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her students. She asks them to go to a museum, pick one work of art, and look at only that for three full hours.
You can access Jennifer Roberts’ work sheet that she gives to students for this exercise here.
• The working-class avant-garde: a collection of terrific articles edited by Leon Betsworth, Alexandra Bickley Trott, and Nick Lee for Open Library for the Humanities ‘examining the avant-garde artists and writers who were born to the conditions of the working-class’; there are studies of aspects of the work of D.H. Lawrence, Archie Hill, Mark E. Smith, B.S. Johnson and Henry Moore, among others.
• Anarchy in the UK: Douglas McCarthy with a rigorously researched ‘analysis of the inconsistencies in UK museums’ copyright claims over digital reproductions of public domain works’:
This article draws on newly acquired Freedom of Information (FoI) data from sixteen UK cultural institutions to explore their policies and practices around copyright. It highlights the stark disparities in interpretations of copyright law, examines the impact on access and reuse, and calls for a unified, transparent approach that reflects both the law and the public mandate of these institutions. This article argues that UK cultural institutions’ inconsistent approaches to copyright hinder public access to cultural heritage and it calls for a unified, transparent framework that aligns with established legal principles.
• The murmur of engines: for LRB [£, limited free access] Christopher Clark contributes a delightful and deeply informed review of Perry Anderson’s Disrupting Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War, in which the which the work that is one of the six subjects is his own.
• The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School: Thomas Meaney for The New Yorker on Martin Mittelmeier’s new study Naples 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory, coming from from Yale in January.
• The second coming: unsurprisingly, one of the best post-election analyses is from Fintan O’Toole for New York Review of Books [£, limited free access]
• Springsteen’s road movie: another favourite piece from earlier in the autumn – Richard Williams at his Blue Note blog on Bruce’s Road Diary, directed by Thom Zimmy, and on the experience of watching Bruce across the years:
And that’s where we’re at. Deep into an eighth decade, with more future behind than ahead. The girl you took to both shows at Hammersmith Odeon in 1975 is dead. Your parents have gone, which — depending on your relationships — may be a loss that doesn’t fade. (Adele Springsteen, who was in her eighties when she sashayed across a stage in her son’s arms to “Dancing in the Dark”, died this year at 94.) Your husband or wife — or you — have health issues. Your kids are suddenly what you once were. And priorities change. But some stuff doesn’t.
• And finally... here’s Pete Seeger and the Boss, plus friends, in 2009 singing Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’ Just because.
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