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.
I think the BBC’s role in bringing to people’s attention the great things being done by arts organisations across the country and artists is phenomenally important… Do I think the BBC should take the arts seriously? Of course. But I am not there yet and I am not commenting on that stuff. The arts and culture matter to me hugely. I am not at the BBC yet, but, you know, they matter to me enormously.
I have just finished reading Stephen Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge. Or at least that’s what it feels like. In fact I have been viewing on my iPad downloads of the five-part six-hour BBC Two film. I have watched parts of it on tube and trains. I saw some in bed and some one morning with my breakfast toast. I even took the serial to the loo. And I realised I was consuming it in just the way that I would read a novel. At times I could devote ten minutes to it, or even just two minutes. On one occasion, I followed more than ninety minutes in a single session, jumping across the episode ends of of parts two and three. This has felt like a quite new experience – and a pleasing one too. My sporadic but concentrated attention seems to have suited Poliakoff’s visually sumptuous, achingly elegant, too often clunky, slow-paced but undeniably involving drama. On the tube this morning as I closed the iPad, I found myself wondering which of the author’s books I should read next. read more »
Even if I neglect the blog on other days (and apologies for that, it’s just a very busy time right now), the list of links needs to be offered each Sunday. I rarely embed audio clips here (mostly because I find doing so trickier than video) but this is a lovely long piece from Radio New Zealand with the editor of the London Review of Books, Mary Kay-Wilmers, speaking about the magazine and especially about the late Peter Campbell who was a wonderful illustrator and a great graphic designer and the loveliest of men. Peter was originally from New Zealand and his work is currently on show in an exhibition at the City Gallery in Wellington, a detail from which is reproduced above.
The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald is the most recent addition to our catalogue of Art Lives films that we distribute on DVD. Completed in 1987, this is a richly interesting documentary about the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux who died in 1994 at the age of 97. Delvaux is best-known for dreamlike tableaux featuring naked women in settings that are both fantastical and grounded in archaic Belgian townscapes. Adrian Maben’s film is a conventional biographical profile and its primary interest comes from the presence of Delvaux himself who relates his own life story. Plus there is a wealth of archive photographs together with images of Belgium at the time was shot, together with shots of many of Delvaux’s most famous images. There are some infelicities, such as incongruous music at times, and the film is very much of its moment, but it remains a valuable record of an intriguing artist. You can purchase the film here. read more »
It’s got to be Girls for the lead. The most recent episode of Lena Dunham’s HBO series, titled ‘One man’s trash’, lit up my Twitter like nothing else last week (except maybe that meteor, on which you need to read Elif Batuman in The New Yorker), and while it will be some time before we see it here, at least we can read about it. In That sex scene on last night’s Girls, Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker followed up her recent article about the series. Part – but only part – of why she liked the show so much was its tender display of sex:
… the Hannah/Josh scene was so intimate that it felt invasive: raw and odd and tender. That’s a nearly unheard-of quality in sex on cable television …
I know I’m coming late to this, but Girl Walk // All Day (above) is a feature-length dance film that since late 2011 has been freely available to view online in twelve chapters. And its tale of a girl, played by Anne Marsen, dancing her day through New York City is a really great watch. The director is Jacob Krupnick (there is a New York Times Q&A here) and the crowd-funded finance came from Kickstarter. There are occasional one-off showings in the real world too, such as one this past week in Glasgow. Chapter 1 is embedded here, and see also articles about the project from The Hollywood Reporter, Wired and recently by David Jenkins on the BFI blog. Across the jump, as usual on a Saturday, are nine further recommendations for online viewing.
My blog schedule for the week has been disrupted by a slow recovery from a modest bout of ‘flu, so apologies for the absence of new posts in the past few days. Spending more time in bed than usual did allow me to catch up with some reading, including the recently published The Persephone Book of Short Stories. This is the 100th volume from Persephone, which over the past decade or more has specialised in publishing neglected twentieth-century writing, much of it by women. The Persephone story is told well in the Observer feature One shade of grey by Rachel Cooke and this is the link to their richly interesting online catalogue. I want simply to hymn this particular 450 page volume, in part for its contents but mostly – and this is particularly important in this age of the tablet – for its materiality. read more »
