Recently I sat in a viewing theatre with half a dozen other researchers and watched a truly remarkable 1965 television documentary called Walk Down Any Street. Directed for Associated-Rediffusion by Charlie Squires, the film is a clear-eyed and sympathetic verité portrait of a working-class family in Bermondsey. There are just four extended sequences – a funeral, a 21st birthday party, a hospital birth and a christening – and each is dispassionately observed at considerable length with minimal music that is not from the world of the film and with no voice-over after an opening introduction. I had never heard of the film before, I can find nothing about it online, and I don’t believe there is any critical writing about it in any book or article (I should be delighted to be disabused of this). The film is astonishing, both as film-making and as social history, but just as astonishing is its almost total obscurity. Welcome to the terra incognita of television archives. read more »
Yesterday was Karl Marx’s birthday and today is a holiday that more or less coincides with one on 1 May that in some eighty countries celebrates International Workers’ Day. On Friday last Illuminations said farewell, after more than a decade’s service, to its Sony DSR-500WS camera, a part of which you can see above (the whole is below). Significant as this event was for us, it is perhaps not obviously connected with celebrations of socialism around the world. But let me tell you a story that brings the two together. read more »
Yesterday at BFI Southbank I saw a fine (although a touch short of immaculate) 35mm print of John Schlesinger’s 1967 Far from the Madding Crowd. Marred by inconsistency in its central performances, this is nonetheless a magnificent film in many ways, with breathtaking 70mm Panavision and Technicolor cinematography from Nic Roeg. But my pleasure was almost spoiled by the opening BFI corporate animation, which I assume to be new, with the Institute’s logo and the tagline ‘Film Forever’. Aaaaaarrrgggghhhh!
Whose ignorant and insulting idea was it to define our central body dedicated to the moving image in a way that excludes most television and all video and digital creation. Why does the BFI feel that it must take refuge in such a retro attitude? How, for example, when the BFI celebrates itself with such an alliteration, are we going to tackle the questions that Luke McKernan raises in his excellent post What is restoration? Luke makes some fundamental points about the low cultural status and lack of glamour associated with video restoration (such as that undertaken recently by the BFI on the BBC’s 1970s series Nationwide, above). But what the heck, eh, BFI? Who gives a f*** in a world of ‘Film Forever’?
Our colleague Todd MacDonald offers another selection of videos that caught his eye during the past week. His selection also appears on his personal blog.
Todd MacDonald: The long awaited new album from Bonobo emerged very recently along with the first promo for single ‘First Fires’ – and I love it. Great job by Young Replicant who are also responsible for the equally impressive video ‘Chained’ by The xx which is also hosted on their site via the link above.
Upstage there is a set with an enclosed room and other smaller spaces, including two booths like those used for sound recording. The room is dressed as a kitchen, with walls which have extensive glass panelling allowing the audience to see inside. Downstage there are elements of furniture, a table for sound effects, and video cameras, monitors and lights. This is the setting for Katie Mitchell and Leo Warner’s astonishing Fraulein Julie, originally staged at Schaubuhne Berlin and at the Barbican only until tomorrow. (I started this post on Tuesday night but it’s been a crazily busy week, so apologies for the tardiness of its appearance.) Over 80 taut minutes, the actors and creatives make and mix a live “film” after Strindberg’s play, with live sound effects and music. The appeal is both to the mind and to the heart, with an experience embedded in the late 19th century but also acutely, precisely of now. Yet for me this bold, sometimes breathtaking experiment brought to mind nothing so much as live television drama as it used to be made in the studio twenty.thirty, even fifty years ago. read more »
This is both irresistible and a touch magical: an eight-minute video courtesy of The Criterion Collection with Martin Scorsese talking about and demo-ing the recent restoration of Laurence Olivier’s 1955 Richard III(above). Shot in VistaVision and Technicolor, the film had been chopped about and was suffering significant colour deterioration, but thanks to an army of experts (and our own BFI National Archive) it can now be seen pretty much as Larry intended – and that version was released on Blu-ray and DVD by Criterion this past week. Do also read Amy Taubin’s new essay on the film …and then explore my other links from the past week, noting my thanks for recommendations to @brainpicker, @jackshebang, @KeyframeDaily and @scrnddct.
We are delighted to feature another selection of videos compiled by our colleague Todd MacDonald, which he is also presenting every week on his own blog.
Todd MacDonald: I’ve got some good’uns this week and I even had to leave a few out of the line-up for fear of overload. The five here are the best that I’ve enjoyed this week including work by Lonely Leap, Callum Cooper and Mark Bader.
First, we go to the birthplace of John Wyver, the man behind Illuminations, to Whitstable for a seaside story about the Whelkman.
We are coming to the end of the Screen Playsseason at BFI Southbank of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedy. In the final two screenings, tomorrow night (it’s sold-out but there may be tickets on the door) and on Monday, you have the chance to see two full adaptations of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play The Changeling together with substantial extracts from the other two surviving versions. Monday night’s showing is Compulsion (2009, with Parminder Nagra above), a modern updating of the play set in London’s Asian community – from which I have embedded an extract below. More details of this and the other adaptations in a moment, but I want also to use this round-up to mention that we have organised a very informal discussion group about the season from 3-5pm on Friday afternoon at BFI Southbank; if you think you might like to attend, do please e-mail me via john[at]illuminationsmedia.co.uk. Below, I am compiling through Thursday and Friday a number of links and a handful of reflections about the season so far.
Best show on TV? Easy. The Good Wife. But now that Broadchurch has finished, the second-best show (at least on a non-subscription channel) is most definitely Nashville, a series from ABC in the States that More4 screens at 10pm on Thursdays (right after TGW). It’s the story of the life and loves of a traditional country singer Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her rivalry with the younger, Pop-ier, much bitchier Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere). There are lots of other characters and plotlines too, and it’s set in the home of country music and on the road. It was created and is run by Callie Khouri, who wrote the great Thelma & Louise (1991), and it’s soap-y and sexy and super-enjoyable, in part because it has great songs. So it’s a modern musical. Glee for grown-ups. This is one of the best duets, with Rayna and Deacon Claybourne (Charles Esten), the man she walked away from years ago to marry the father of one (but not both) of her adorable daughters.
If you too like Nashville, you’ll love the two-part Nashville Roundtable, hosted by Anne Helen Petersen who writes the great celebrity gossip, academic style blog. Part one is here, and the second part has just been posted. These two pieces are a wonderful mix of fan-talk and analysis, some of it spoken in a demotic that’s as complex and as referential as critical theory. But remember that we’re maybe six episodes or so behind the States, so there are things in part two that we don’t know yet. Anyway, here’s another song from the series, maybe the musical highlight so far, with so-far-not-an-item Scarlett (Clare Bowen) and Gunnar (Sam Palladio).
On Thursday night BFI Southbank screened Roland Joffé’s 1980 BBC television adaptation of John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. This was shown as part of ‘Classics on TV: Jacobean tragedy on the small screen’, a season of television productions of early seventeenth century dramas curated by Screen Plays, the academic research project on which I am working with Dr Amanda Wrigley.
On the basis of my memories of seeing ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore on transmission more than three decades ago and of viewing more recently a poor VHS copy of – for some reason – only the first half, I wrote a Screen Plays blog post about the film. I knew this was a significant television production but I was unprepared for the impact of Thursday’s viewing. For me, as for many others in the sold-out auditorium, seeing the drama on a big screen was quite simply overwhelming. This is a major work of British film – I am not embarrassed by the word ‘masterpiece’ – that is all but unknown. And it is is crazy, crazy, crazy that it is hidden away in the archives and has hardly been seen for the past thirty-three years. read more »
