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’.
File this post (and the next couple) under what-I-did-on-a-more-or-less-holiday. Until Sunday I am in Pasadena, north-east of downtown Los Angeles, having been invited to talk about filming Shakespeare by Professor John Brewer. A decade back we made Sense and Sensation from John’s wonderful book The Pleasures of the Imagination (about eighteenth century culture in Britain and its publics; out-of-print but likely to be available again soon), and now John is Eli and Edye Broad Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. Caltech is a private research university focussed on science and engineering but the institution also has a commitment to the humanities, and all the students have to incorporate some element of non-science study in their courses. So while I’m here I am speaking both at Caltech and at USC, but I am also taking the opportunity to view some early television from the UCLA archive (that’s Postcard 2.) and to visit some of the best museums in the States. read more »
I hardly deserve the honorific ‘fan’, but I enjoy traditional American science fiction, especially from the immediate post-war years. So I am excited to see that the exemplary Library of America series (their beautiful volumes of Henry James grace my shelves) has published American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, edited by the academic Gary K. Wolfe. There are treasures here by, among others, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson and James Blish. What’s more, the LoA blog has a thoughtful interview with editor Wolfe plus there’s a terrific complementary website (a detail from which is above), with essays, audio of related tales, and appreciations by contemporary writers such as Neil Gaiman, William Gibson and Connie Willis. Back here, as is traditional, a selection of disparate links is across the jump (with thanks for Twitter tips from, among others, @annehelen, @Chi-Humanities, @mia_out and @TheBrowser). read more »
There is a significant sense in which early and silent cinema is less finished than features and television today. The film world on show in Pordenone at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto is, for much of the time, one of fragments, of moments, of individual elements that are not controlled and constrained by the conventions of mainstream narrative. That is (part of) the reason why this cinema is so compelling, so surprising and so strange – even as it can also offer the familiar pleasures of what now rather unthinkingly call the cinema. As a recognition – and an elaboration – of this, here are notes about ten moments from the films I’ve seen this week, moments that are bold or brilliant or just plain bonkers (and sometimes more than one). Below, you’ll find links to the exemplary daily blog by Silent London that will give you a better (and more informed) sense than I can of Pordenone’s offerings this week. Remember too that you can find the full text here as a .pdf of Pordenone’s excellent 192-page catalogue, with full details of the films below. read more »
