After the BFI’s extensive tribute to Alfred Hitchcock over the summer and the immaculate restorations of his silent films, you might have thought the great director had nothing else to give. But now, and for the next two months, the first film on which Hitchcock received a screen credit, The White Shadow (1924, above), is available as an online premiere (go to the National Film Preservation Foundation here). The director was Graham Cutts, and in fact only some 42 minutes of the film have been recovered, but these make a rich and remarkable offering, on which Hitch was assistant director, screenwriter, art director and editor. For discussions of the film and its discovery in the New Zealand Film Archive together with background as to why it is online, see David Steritt’s excellent programme notes accompanying the stream (on the right of the page) and a valuable post from ferdyonfilms.
The BBC yesterday brought together all of its radio channels for a charming Damon Albarn composition to celebrate ninety years since it first went on air. Other offerings to mark the occasion include a neat online interactive timeline. I am frustrated, however, that the enthusiasm of the timeline’s creators seems to have led to a clutch of errors that while perhaps minor are nonetheless unforgiveable in a history of the corporation by the corporation. Take a look at May 1937, where the section about coverage of George VI’s coronation claims this as ‘the BBC’s first television outside broadcast’. Except that it wasn’t… read more »
I am researching early television in the 1930s and have come across a rather engaging discussion in the Letters column of The Times. This took place at a time when the very idea of ‘television’ was being formed – as indeed, as we can see, was the word itself. On 26 March 1934 Revd. G E Nicholls of Clevedon kicked things off with this thought:
May I suggest the unsuitability of the word “television” that it is half Greek and half Latin? May I suggest telorama?
(This classical allusion is often ascribed to legendary Guardian editor C P Scott, in the quote, ‘Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it.’)
Readers of The Times, and especially those with a classical education – of which there were rather more then than now – loved such a challenge… read more »
I thought it might be time to bring this blog up to date with the news from my ‘other’ project, Screen Plays. This is a three-year research initiative based at the University of Westminster and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. With my colleague Dr Amanda Wrigley, I am exploring the history of theatre plays on television and working towards a book, a collection of papers and a freely accessible online database with details of all 3,000-plus British television productions since 1930 of plays originally written for the theatre. The project is almost at its halfway point, we have just had our first conference and we continue to develop an active blog, to which today I contributed a discussion of John Arden’s play Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (above) which was produced by Granada in 1961 and is available as a Network DVD. For more on all of this, read on… read more »
The big background story of the week has to be how big data helped Obama win big. Start with Michael Scherer’s fascinating piece for Time, Inside the secret world of the data crunchers who helped Obama win. What Scherer describes is ‘a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters.’ It’s also worth comparing with the Romney campaign’s inept data work – see Inside Orca – how the Romney campaign suppressed its own vote by Joel B Pollak for Breitback. And as for the prediction stuff, How did Nate Silver predict the US election by Bob O’Hara for the Guardian is very good. The image, incidentally, is the website that the Romney campaign had ready for when their guy won.
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 »
