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 »
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there.
So begins Maxim Gorky’s famous description of watching a film in July 1896. The whole experience of being at the Silent Film Festival in Pordenone is a bit like this, but it applies perhaps most precisely to this evening’s showing of a recreation of Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre from 1900. Watching the flickering ghosts of French actresses, singers and dancers from over a century ago – and what’s more watching some of them in colour and with original synchronised sound – was truly strange. Strange and rich and wonderful and moving and, well, magnifique. The 80-minute programme, which was receiving its world premiere, was alone worth the trip to this festival (although I have other posts in process) – and in a way I still cannot quite believe what we saw – and heard. read more »
While I enjoy – and try to make some sense of – Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone (posts coming soon), let me recommend as warmly as possible two books and two terrific critical articles. The first recommendation is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, which “the Master” published (in instalments initially) in 1880-81. It hardly needs me to affirm that this is a great, great novel. The second book is the recently published Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpieceby Michael Gorra. Gorra is an American academic but he writes for the rest of us in an elegant style that effortlessly combines erudition with engagement. I would say this is the best and most rewarding extended work of criticism that I have encountered in a long, long time. read more »
Being in Pordenone (see my initial post here) inevitably means that I am thinking a lot about moving image archives – but there is more to my current focus of interest than that. This feels like a moment when the tectonic plates of the archive world are starting to shift, and while I do not have the time to explore that idea here I will most definitely be returning to it in the coming weeks. To get you thinking, can I recommend Changing channels, a blog post by Luke McKernan, and a related post, also by Luke, about new access services available at The British Library. Take a look too at Mark Brown’s recent Guardian piece about the BFI’s plans, BFI to launch online player with 10,000 films from its archives. Interesting times, my friends. Meanwhile, across the jump is the start of a list of links to other pieces that have caught my eye in recent days. read more »
