Following is my contribution to the week of top tens, and the last of this half-dozen offerings. Again – apart from the first – this in no particular order. Many thanks to Keith, Linda, Todd, Simon and Louise for the earlier posts – and to you for reading; these blogs have proved pleasingly popular through the week. Happy New Year – and very best wishes for a stimulating and productive 2013.
1. Olympics opening ceremony
So much has been written about this spectacular – and I have no doubt that there is much more analysis to come. We linked to thirty of the best articles that appeared in the immediate aftermath (here, here and here), and each conveyed an aspect of its unique combination of poetry and politics, of history and the present, of spectacle and awe, of thought and emotion, all on the grandest scale and the biggest stage. Bravo, Dabby Boyle and all your colleagues, bravo, bravo. read more »
Our top tens of the year continue with the selection of our head of business development, Louise Machin. The final choice follows tomorrow.
Louise: In no particular order, this is my top ten list of things I enjoyed especially in 2012. Several of them are highlights drawn from a month-long road trip to California taken in August with my husband and three small boys, which was a fabulous experience for all of us.
1. Lotte Mullan, Green Note in Camden, London
My friend, Lotte sings so beautifully and it was a real pleasure to hear her play Green Note in April. The song I have selected speaks movingly about self-esteem and is from her first self-released album, Plain Jane.
Our cultural top tens for the year continue with this selection by our colleague at Illuminations Films, producer Simon Field.
Simon: This is not so much a top ten, but more a selection of memorable events and experiences over the last year from January through to December. (The image above is of No. 2 below.)
1. James Benning’s Small Roads and Heinz Emigholtz’s Parabeton – Pier Luigi Nervi and Roman Concrete
In a year when I visited fewer festivals than in previous years, two complementary highpoints from the festivals of Rotterdam and Berlin by two film-makers whose work I try to follow and which these days is most reliably caught at festivals. Benning’s is a characteristic study in landscape, of roads in the American west and south in different weathers, making subtle use of the digital which he has now embraced after years of commitment to 16mm. (For more, see Robert Koehler’s review for Variety.) Emigholtz’s film is part of his remarkable on-going series of detailed studies of major buildings by modern architects from the well-known like Adolf Loos and Louis Sullivan to the less familiar, like Bruce Goff and Rudolf Schindler. They are subtle and constrained works concentrating on the visual with sync sound, no commentary. (Neil Young reviews the film from Berlin for The Hollywood Reporter.) read more »
Boxing Day sees the continuation of our lists of 2012 top ten cultural experiences. Today’s contribution is from our colleague Todd MacDonald.
Todd: I started trying to rank these in order but it started to strike me as being a bit unnecessary. These are my top ten things in no particular order, just ten equally great things at ten different times during my 2012.
1. Bugsy Malone by Secret Cinema, The Troxy, London E1
An interactive cinema experience that involved dressing up in ’20s gear and travelling to a ‘secret’ location. In this case Fat Sam’s speakeasy was located at the Troxy in Limehouse. Outside the rear door, the queue was sceptically watched over by a policeman in period costume walking up and down the line and casually swinging his baton. The librarian gave us a book each and we all walked through an actual pivoted bookcase. We finally came out into the Grand Slam with Fat Sam himself on stage. We took our table and enjoyed Leroy Smith boxing for the first time, playing Blackjack with a corrupt dealer and Tallulah chatting up one of my mates. The film itself was then screened and we ate and drank until the finale. The answer is yes. Yes, we did have a foam pie fight and, yes, it was total carnage. read more »
After the pleasingly popular post yesterday, our end-of-year cultural top tens continue with Linda’s choice. Happy Christmas, everyone.
Linda: These are in no particular order, though my list is somewhat skewed by a three week trip to Uganda this summer to visit my daughter who was living there for six months. If I had to pick a favourite amongst the ten, it would have to be the gorillas (no. 3 below) – and above is a holiday snap. Yes, this legendary little guy (a male of approx. eight years we were told) was no more than a few feet away from me, deep in the jungle. read more »
Each year each of us at Illuminations and at our sister company Illuminations Films contributes a top ten of cultural highlights of the year (although we missed this in 2011), We are running these daily through this holiday week, with first up our colleague at Illuminations Films and producer of Berberian Sound Studio, Keith Griffiths. Keith: I didn’t get out much this year and perhaps my list reflects somewhat the life of a reclusive hobbit. My top ten is not in any particular order – except for No 1.
1. Tour de France
Each year I seem to congratulate ITV more than any other television network and so it is again this year. The daily coverage and repeats of Le Tour were brilliantly commentated and succeeded in the almost impossible – making cycling enthralling and more exciting than most Hollywood blockbusters. With a TV set up on the bookcase next to my desk I managed to view nearly every Stage, and if I missed one due to a trip to the Smoke, the High Speed Rail link got me back in time for the edited version. Fantastic sport, fantastic TV. read more »
Over the past couple of days there has been a lot of buzz about Snow fall – the avalanche at Tunnel Creek, written by John Branch for The New York Times. But ‘written by’ is only part of this true story of a group of trapped skiers, which across a multi-part feature is a dazzling web narrative combining text, images, video, audio, slide-shows and truly remarkable integrated graphics. This is state-of-the-art multi-media, and something you can spend hours with over the holidays. And for background on how it was put together, see Jeff Sonderman’s feature for Poynter. For further productive ways to pass the next few days, see the links across the jump (h/ts this week to, among others, @manovich, @lukemckernan, @KeyframeDaily, @holland_tom and @juliaLupton) – and then on Christmas Eve we start our Illuminations ‘top tens’ of the year. read more »
This seasonal post is an edited version of one that I wrote last year for the blog of the research project about theatre plays on British television, Screen Plays. I hope it is sufficiently entertaining to bear repeating here.
What follows is a tale of woe about a pantomime broadcast from a Christmas past, with the catalogue of problems that afflicted the planned presentation in early January 1947 from the Grand Theatre of ‘Croydon’s biggest pantomime’, Jack and the Beanstalk. This extraordinary litany of problems and faults is drawn from documents in the file titled WAC T14/312 ‘TV OB Grand Theatre Croydon 1946’ at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre at Caversham. Happy Christmas! read more »
I was in a kingdom of dreams today – and for the very last time. It was a relatively prosaic – but I must stress most enjoyable – meeting of the Southern Broadcasting History Group that took me once more to Shepherd’s Bush and to BBC Television Centre. I first visited this iconic, astonishing and beautiful building on 17 March 1973 – that’s almost forty years ago, gentle reader – and it has been central to my professional life ever since, and to my dream life and fantasies for even longer. The BBC has sold the freehold and by the end of this month will have decamped to the glass and glitter of Broadcasting House and to other pastures new. So I’ll never have another meeting here, nor another viewing, and I’ll never see another programme recorded in the studios. Cue therefore a memory or two – and, no, sorry, that must be just a speck of dust in my eye. read more »
My strangest (and most welcome) discovery of the week was the 1929 avant-garde film La perle (above). Thanks to The Forgotten: Never Explain a Mystery, Never Wake a Sleepwalker by David Cairns at the ever-excellent Mubi.com’s Notebook, I read about the background to this ‘alluring, at times beautiful and eerie objet d’art… [which] simmers with sex and kink’. And then I got to see it, since thrillingly the author has posted it on Vimeo, from where I embed it here. Across the jump are numerous other links from the week, although whether any of the others offer further ‘sex and kink’ only you can judge. Thanks for pointers to @Chi_Humanities, @filmstudiesff, @TheBrowser, @weinmanj, and Michael Jackson.
