As I hope we’ll have occasion to reveal at the appropriate point, I have a particular interest at present in Uncle Vanya. So the opportunity to see two – very different – productions on the same day seemed too good to pass up. In any case how often do you get to see any play twice in twenty-four hours, to compare two casts and two interpretations? Which is the reason I took myself off to a matinee of Lindsay Posner’s new staging at the Vaudeville Theatre and then hot-footed it down the road to the Noel Coward Theatre to see the production by Russian theatre company Vakhtangov. The former, which stars Ken Stott and Anna Friel, is scheduled to run until 16 February (and there were plenty of empty seats); the latter has just two more totally sold-out shows to go.
Wednesday morning, and to kill time I’m wandering around Stratford-upon-Avon. Oxfam Books is – as ever – alluring, and I make for the modest Film and Television section. Not that my shelves at home (or indeed the floors) have any more space, but I am always hopeful of finding an early volume of Briggs or “K’s” signature in a copy of Civilisation. Today, however, slotted between Paris Hilton’s – until now, unknown to me – Confessions of an Heiress and an equally resistible volume titled Mime in Class and Theatre is, yes, a book that I wrote back in 1988, The Moving Image: An International History of Film, Television and Video. The black spine, white retro font and end-frame of Chaplin’s Modern Times jolts me with the recognition that this is perhaps the first time I’ve found myself in a second-hand bookshop. Quite how do I feel about that? read more »
After celebrating East End boy Alfred Hitchcock through the summer, the BFI is now looking to the west of London – to Ealing Studios.
As you can see from the trailer, this month and next there is a compendious (and tremendous) ‘Light and Dark’ retrospective at BFI Southbank along with a display of posters, pressbooks and the like. The noir-ish and engagingly nasty It Always Rains on Sunday, directed by Robert Hamer in 1947, is back in (a few) cinemas and a group of rarely-seen Ealing wartime shorts now features in the Mediatheque playlists. Plus, Palgrave Macmillan/BFI have published a very good new book, Ealing Revisited, edited by Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman, Keith Johnston and Melanie Williams, which is the focus of this post. And like almost all of the twenty-one authors in this collection, I also want to tip my hat to Charles Barr’s great and glorious book Ealing Studios, first published in 1977. read more »
Even though I was giving a paper at the Channel 4 and British film culture conference on Friday, the thirtieth anniversary of the switch-on rather snuck up on me. Then it was 4.20pm and I realised that it was indeed exactly thirty years since I sat down with Michael Jackson, a future channel chief exec, to watch this…
[Wipes away tiny tear.] As I lived the moment once more (a) I felt the most intense pang of nostalgia (of course), and (b) I recognised (again) that television never has and never will mean as much to me as it did in those first years of Channel 4. read more »
… till it’s gone. Today, Wednesday 31 October, is the last day of the first six months of The Space. Fortunately, this Arts Council England/BBC collaboration has been such a success that the project is continuing (see Maggie Brown’s Guardian article for details) although some of the content will, because of rights restrictions, disappear from tomorrow. Among the losses will be what for me has been the most glorious offering – documentation videos of all of the Globe to Globe Shakespeare performances by companies from around the world. Let’s hope that these, or at least a goodly selection from them, turn up on DVD or elsewhere online very soon. I have detailed my disappointments with The Space previously, and now is not the time to repeat those. Instead, I want to continue developing a post that considers some more of its offerings – and then later in the week I’ll take stock of what remains. read more »
Siobhan Davies and David Hinton’s new 50-minute film premiered at Dance Umbrella recently and was revealed as thrilling and touching and bracingly intelligent and beautiful. Now you need to know as you read this that David Hinton is a friend and that I have worked on several of his projects, including both Children of the Revolution (which won a BAFTA for Best Arts Programme) and a short film Snow, which has connections with All This Can Happen. In addition, the very first programme that Illuminations made for Channel 4, long ago and far away in 1982, was a dance film with Siobhan Davies. Plus, I’m proud to say that several Illumiantions ‘alumni’ worked on it, including editor Danny McGuire as well as Matthew Killip who contributed additional editing. All of which knowledge may or may not inflect the way you take my enthusiasm. read more »
I have been staying in The Athenaeum on the Caltech campus. A faculty club for the university, it was completed in 1930 and is a gloriously sturdy and determinedly old-fashioned institution of English descent. Jackets and ties are expected for dinner (Albert Einstein dined here in the 1930s) and there is no chance of a cup of coffee before a 7am breakfast. Yet it has been a delight, as have so many aspects of my few days here. Leave aside that my screening and Friday seminar were (let’s say) modestly attended; otherwise I have had a great time. I fell in love with the thrills of freeway driving all over again (thanks to my generous host John Brewer for the loan of a car, and for much else) and not even getting stuck in hideous rush hour traffic took the shine off this. But I understand why apparently there is not as much collaboration between USC and UCLA as there might be when it can take you 90 minutes-plus to drive from one to the other. USC was where I showed Julius Caesar, while my reason for visiting UCLA was to view early television from the estimable UCLA Film & Television Archive. read more »
Just before 12.30 the technician comes to switch on Metropolis II. Crowded around a room-size contraption that is part Heath Robinson, part Meccano mountain, is an expectant group of young children, older men and perhaps even an art lover or two. It is just as well that the operative is slight and on the short side, since once he has removed his shoes (and tucked them away out of sight) he has to squeeze into a complex lattice of roadways and railways to reach the crucial buttons. After some final checks, and with no trace of a fanfare, he activates the belts that take the cars to the top of the structure and then tip them over to race down – powered only by gravity – around curves and between buildings and then back to the belt. The spectators smile and watch transfixed. Welcome to Chris Burden’s installation at LACMA – if you’ve not seen it, I promise you’ll love the video (and don’t worry, we’ll get to the big rock above soon enough).
Andrew O’Hagan’s essay about the Savile scandal in the London Review of Books, Light entertainment, is (and I know this is much over-used adjective) indispensable. Amongst much else it is a truly remarkable portrait of the post-war BBC, but it is also a dazzling dissection of the problems of trying to understand the past through the distorting lens of the present – and it quotes great sense from Joan Bakewell:
‘You just can’t get into the culture of what it was like, transfer our sensibilities backwards from today. It would be like asking Victorian factory owners to explain why they sent children up chimneys. It’s the same with the BBC that I first entered. It had habits and values that we just can’t understand from the point of view of where we are now.’
Read this if you care even a jot about the BBC, about sexuality and sexual anxiety in the 1960s and since, and about what we all too often take for granted from ‘entertainment’.
