In 1964 Studio Vista published a handsome hardback celebrating the ABC TV arts series Tempo. With a profusion of plates on high quality photographic paper, plus a quirky text from critic and novelist Angus Wilson (on yellowy-beige interleaving), this was a prestige production out to demonstrate that an ITV company could compete with the BBC at the classy end of culture. The volume overall deserves more detailed consideration, but today I want to use Wilson’s ruminations to look at another of the films from Network’s recently-released double DVD set of items from Tempo (which I introduced previously here). Remarkably, The Medium Sized Cage was produced for Tempo by Royal College of Art students and broadcast with a slightly nervous introduction by Leonard Maguire on 31 March 1963. ‘Neither play nor documentary nor plain performance,’ is how Wilson correctly describes the offering, ‘peculiarly designed by the students I suppose, to illustrate the special qualities of that medium-sized cage – the television box.’ read more »
Let’s hear it for LACMA! On the Unframed blog at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Amy Heibel revealed this week that the museum is making available for pretty much unrestricted use another 18,000 or so digital images of objects from its collection (including Wrestlers by Thomas Eakins, 1899, a detail of which is above). This is a great initiative and one that should be emulated by all of our public museums over here, and for more see Amy’s post What do cats have to do with it?, which is also about LACMA’s new Collections website:
Why would a museum give away images of its art? As [director] Michael Govan often says, it’s because our mission is to care for and share those works of art with the broadest possible public. The logical, radical extension of that is to open up our treasure trove of images… So far, we have yet to hear of a situation where one of our public domain artworks has been misused or abused.
Across the jump, many more links from the past week. read more »
Film fans, happiness is coming (this to be sung to a jaunty tune with optional hand-clapping). If you’ve seen Pablo Larraín’s remarkable film No, about the rival media campaigns in the 1988 referendum in Chile, you might perhaps pick up the reference (go here for the film’s website from Sony Classics). If you haven’t, then for just the next week you can catch it online for only £4 at Curzon on Demand. This is a comparatively new pay-per-view arthouse service that I have quickly learned to love. Other ppv film offerings are available, as they say, including iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Lovefilm and Mubi.com, but none at present appear have anything close to the Curzon’s range of arthouse cinema of the moment (much of it from the Artificial Eye list). This weekend, for example, you can watch Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills and Michael H. Profession: Director, Yves Montmayer’s profile of Michael Haneke, both of which are released in cinemas this week (and as a consequence cost £10 each). From Monday, Haneke’s Amour will be available, and if – like me – you are impressed by No, two earlier linked films by Larraín are also on offer, Post Mortem(2010) and Tony Manero(2008). All three can be watched this week for a tenner. read more »
Today’s lesson (which I reflect upon across the jump) comes in the shape of a substantial quote from a Times interview by Libby Purves (£) last week with the director of the National Theatre Nick Hytner.
Talking of the BBC, I wonder what he feels about its arts coverage: does it do all it should? ‘Plainly it doesn’t. I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t change under Tony [Hall, incoming Director-General]. To the extent that a DG can involve himself in nuts and bolts, he’ll surely look at it.’ I was referring to the sidelining of the Review Show from BBC Two to BBC Four, but he brushes that aside. ‘That’s just journalism! I’m interested in performance.’
‘I don’t see why there couldn’t be a close relationship between the BBC and this vast performance network — us, the Crucible, the Royal Exchange, Opera North, Broadsides, Live Theatre, the Royal Ballet, everyone! Fifty-two weeks, more than 52 companies offering something. It’s low-hanging fruit, there for the taking. NT Live is for the big screen, but there are ways to bring terrific performances to television. Look what marvellous work Greg Doran did with Julius Caesar. The conventional wisdom is that the two worlds are separate, and that needs challenging… Look, they’ve really got to detach themselves from this Downton ratings mentality.’ read more »
The best – and best-value – show of modern painting in London right now is not the overblown and distinctly patchy Manet: Portraying Life at the Royal Academy (until 14 April; entrance fee £15). Rather, it is Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 at The Courtauld Gallery (until 26 May; entrance £6, for which you also get access to Courtauld’s many other masterpieces). You can get a sense of the show from this video with curator Dr Barnaby Wright, and as critics have notes, it’s glorious. Alastair Sooke for the Telegraph called it ‘a tight, compelling and beautifully installed exhibition’; for Brian Sewell writing for the Evening Standard, it is ‘a formidable exhibition, didactic, intense and moving’; Jonathan Jones for the Guardian describes the show as ‘scintillating’. But perhaps not quite enough has been made of just how exemplary this is as a perfectly-formed and small exhibition. read more »
We have hugely enjoyed producing four short videos and a trailer for the exhibition Barocci: Brilliance and Grace which is at London’s National Gallery until 19 May. The films about the work of the late Renaissance master Federico Barocci were co-produced with the Saint Louis Art Museum, where the exhibition was presented before Christmas. The show opened here ten days ago and has been received with rapture in the Evening Standard by Brian Sewell (‘this is a beautiful, thrilling and intelligent exhibition’) and by Richard Dorment for the Telegraph (‘a staggeringly ambitious and heartbreakingly beautiful exhibition’). Some of the videos are on YouTube (although in a slightly eccentric way; see below) and we are embedding them here; the director of photography is Ian Serfontein, editor Todd Macdonald and producer Linda Zuck. This is the trailer:
Across the jump you will find three more of the films. read more »
Listen up. Let’s talk about The Sound and the Fury, the final part of which remains on BBC iPlayer until 9 March. Let’s talk about it because it has been one of the best BBC arts and music offerings of recent times, but let’s also consider its legacy, which is interesting in part because of its limitations. A Fresh One production for the BBC, produced and directed by the excellent Ian MacMillan, the series takes its inspiration from Alex Ross’ exemplary book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. The films outline a tale of classical music over the past one hundred years and a bit, and at times ground their cultural history in the broader political events of the times. Alex Ross is a – in fact, the – key interviewee (although composer George Benjamin also has a central role) and the author takes a ‘series consultant’ credit, but somewhat oddly the series is not, or at least not explicitly, a television version of the book. Whatever. Let’s hear two cheers for its achievement. read more »
As part of the Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television research project which I am co-ordinating with Dr Amanda Wrigley at the University of Westminster, I have curated a BFI Southbank season of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedy. The season starts in three weeks’ time with a very special event: a showing of Granada TV’s 1965 adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women followed by a discussion with Dame Diana Rigg, who stars in the production, and Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Gregory Doran. Booking opens today for BFI members and at 11.30am on 12 March for everyone else: www.bfi.org.uk and 020 7928 3232.
We are delighted to present a short film that we have made for The Hepworth Wakefield about the three exhibitions of work by Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Alice Channer and Linder on view there until 12 May (above is a detail of a work by Alice Channer). It’s a terrific trio of shows, so do try to catch them. Many thanks to The Hepworth for the commission, and to director of photography Marc Rovira and editor Todd MacDonald.
