Why is the work of one of our greatest filmmakers – the director Alan Clarke – all but invisible?
This is not a new question. Nor do I have anything original by way of an answer. But the issue is much on my mind. I wrote a post for the Screen Plays blog about an extraordinary television production of a play – Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, starring David Bowie (above) – that Alan Clarke directed for the BBC in 1982. Then I read Billy Smart’s excellent piece about the same production, which only underlined my sense of how remarkable and astonishing it is. And I realised that I was angry that none of us can legally see this play aside from very occasional BFI Southbank screenings. (An off-air recording of the full production is on YouTube, but I said legally.) Similarly unavailable in this country is one of the most challenging and powerful British films ever made, Elephant (1989; released only in the USA as a R1 DVD). The astounding Contact (1984) is also denied to us. Ditto Danton’s Death(1978) and Penda’s Fen (1974) and Road (1987) and… –the list goes on and on. Whatever the reasons, this is simply and straightforwardly NOT RIGHT. read more »
In another post from the blog’s archive (previously published on 17 July 2010) I take a look at the visual arts on BBC Television between 1936 and 1939. I was reminded of this because I am teaching again at the Royal College of Art tomorrow – and our main subject is Kenneth Clark, later to be the presenter of Civilisation (1969). But Clark had a significant engagement with television long before that landmark series…
In the second volume of his autobiography The Other Half, published in 1977, Kenneth Clark recalls having taken part in 1937 in ‘the first “art” programme to appear on the new medium’ of television. ‘I was chairman of a panel in which four artists tried to guess who wrote certain lines of poetry,’ he writes, ‘and four poets guessed, from details, who painted certain pictures. The poets won. I suppose about 500 people saw it.’ I am as guilty as others in using this quote to suggest (in my book Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain) that pre-war television was pretty much a visual arts wasteland. My recent burrowing in the online Radio Times listings shows me just how wrong I was — and indeed that K was mistaken too. The programme he describes wasn’t transmitted in 1937 and it most certainly wasn’t the first television ‘art’ programme. read more »
The great story out of Sundance is the shooting at Disneyland and Disney World of Randy Moore’s movie Escape from Tomorrow without any location permissions or copyright clearances. Believe me, as one who has tried to film at a Disney theme park, this is an astounding achievement – and Steven Zeitchik for the LA Times has the story. As Zeitchik says, Escape from Tomorrow is
a Surrealist, genre-defying black-and-white film… [and] one of the strangest and most provocative movies this reporter has seen in eight years attending the Sundance Film Festival. And it may well never be viewed by a commercial audience.
For this snowy Saturday, the week’s selection of freely available online videos.
Above, Act III of no. 3 below; no 4 has snowy aspects too.
1. How motion pictures became the movies
This is a great innovation from David Bordwell’s essential cinema website – a video lecture about the movies between 1908 and 1920 when, he argues, the modern form of cinema came into being. It’s an audio track complemented by slides with text summaries and countless frame enlargements – and it is richly engrossing. This link takes you to a page with background info and suggestions for further reading and viewing.
As regulars will know, I occasionally highlight earlier blog posts when they feel newly relevant. My reason today for returning to a 2008 post about the influential documentary maker John Read who died in 2011 is that I am teaching his work this morning on the Critical Writing in Art & Design course at the Royal College of Art.
The son of the influential critic Herbert Read, John Read directed British television’s first documentary film about a living artist, Henry Moore (see the framegrab above), in 1951. His subsequent thoughtful and sensitive studies of painters and sculptors in the 1950s defined the forms for film profiles of artists. Those of us who continue to make arts documentaries are all the children of John Read. read more »
So here’s my beef. I have booked a ticket for tonight at the ever-excellent Clapham Picturehouse to watch the current Royal Opera House production of La bohème. This is being shown in – as you can see from the above – the ROH’s ‘Live Cinema Season’. If you take a look at that web page, there is – I think it’s fair to say – every indication that the showing is ‘live’. That is, that the events we will be watching in Clapham will be taking place at the same time on the stage in Covent Garden.
This after all is what we have come to expect with Met Opera: Live in HD and NTLive – and certainly there is nothing on the web page to say that this is not the case. Ditto on the next page, which is where ‘Read more’ takes you to further details. Indeed, you have to download the .pdf cast sheet to discover that this performance is in fact ‘delayed live’. Which means not live at all, despite being part of a ‘Live Cinema Season’. I feel conned. read more »
A number of reviews have appeared in the past few weeks of two recent projects from Illuminations: the Royal Shakespeare Company Julius Caesar on DVD (above) and The Sonnets by William Shakespeare, our collaboration with Touch Press, Faber and The Arden Shakespeare. In case you need reminding, here is the trailer for the DVD of Julius Caesar, which is available for purchase here. After you have taken a look, click across the jump to read extracts from the glowing reviews.
There’s really only story that I can lead with this week, even if you have already seen it. Here is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie is Stephen Rodrick’s tale for The New York Times about the making of a low-budget movie by director Paul Schrader. It is a compelling read that is by turns funny, shocking and a touch tragic – and it follows in a distinguished line of ‘new journalism’ features about Hollywood that stretches back at least to Lilian Ross‘ wonderful Picture, a 1952 book about the production of The Red Badge of Courage, 1951. There are great photos too, including the one above of Paul Schrader and Lindsay Lohan by Jeff Minton for The New York Times. I can’t promise anything with greater entertainment value, but there are links to further excellent features and resources across the jump. H/ts this week to @Chi_Humanities, @ebertchicago, @annehelen, @ammonite, @jayrosen_nyu, @KeyframeDaily and Michael Jackson. read more »
Always looking for the new and different, I am extending this blog’s ‘Links for the weekend’ (see tomorrow) with a complementary post that features just videos. Which doesn’t mean that I won’t include videos in the ‘Links’ but rather that this will provide me with a focus to look out different kinds of stuff. Some of the videos will be topical (like the Quentin Tarantino interview below), while others may be quirky choices from long ago that I happened across during the week. Wherever possible, I will embed the videos here, but on occasions I will include links to sites that do not allow this. I will also aim to include things that are going to stay around, so this is not the place for time-restricted BBC iPlayer tips. As for the detail above of Paul Emsley’s new portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge, unveiled yesterday at the National Portrait Gallery, see no 10 below. read more »
Hard though it is to believe, it is nearly seventeen years since we went backstage at the Royal Opera House in the BBC fly-on-the-wall series The House. Michael Kaiser, who later became general director of Covent Garden, summed up reactions to the series: ‘The House only confirmed the general belief that the Royal Opera House was, at best, incompetent, and, at worst, completely devoted to the needs of the rich.’ Seventeen years is a long time in the media (and everywhere else), and how different was the backstage picture on offer in Royal Opera LIVE broadcast online on Monday. I live-blogged the event in a post that has proved pleasingly popular, but – not least because this felt like a game-changer in the ways cultural organisations work with the media – I want to return to it here and offer further thoughts. read more »
