On Sunday 23 April Barbican cinema presents a six-hour screening of a recently restored version of Henri Fescourt’s 1925 film Les Misérables from Victor Hugo’s novel. As the Barbican promises the new print has ‘all the riches of the various colour techniques employed by Fescourt in 1925 (tinting, toning, and mordanting).’ As if that weren’t enough, the legendary Neil Brand is at the piano with a full score. It’s an unmissable event, and tickets are still available. I’ll be there – and to get us all ready for it, here’s some reading prep.
• Pordenone post no 5: Pamela Hutchinson reports from a 2015 screening of the restoration at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto:
… it is a faithful, and skilful, adaptation of an uncontainable novel. I was captivated by its visual elegance but also its well crafted story, which builds almost unbearable tension despite its bountiful events, characters and subplots… Neil Brand took on the Herculean task of accompanying the whole film. He played, and played, and played, such sensitive and sumptuous music, I could barely believe it was the work of one man and one piano alone. Matching the film’s scale and singularities note for note, Brand’s score was the triumph that the film deserves.
I have been wrestling with how best to contribute regularly to this blog while I am much preoccupied with a number of productions and several more extended pieces of writing. Sunday links columns like this have been the only ones that I have managed to post recently, at least until the last couple of days. Now I am going to try a variant through the week, contributing each day one or more groups of – as it were – linked links. There will be times when I’ll feel I can write something a little more substantial, but for the present I want to try to find a rhythm that involves one or two short posts each day. And Sundays links will become perhaps be even more of a miscellany than it has been in the past. Meanwhile, enjoy Easter Sunday with these…
• Somerdale to Skarbimierz: James Meek for London Review of Books on Cadbury’s, globalisation and the disconnect between economics and culture – if you read any of my recommendations this week, make it this one even if (or rather, because) it runs to more than 13,000 words.
• Lessons from Hitler’s rise: Christopher R. Browning for New York Review of Books on Volker Ullrich’s 2013 book Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939:
To begin I would stipulate emphatically that Trump is not Hitler and the American Republic in the early twenty-first century is not Weimar. There are many stark differences between both the men and the historical conditions in which they ascended to power. Nonetheless there are sufficient areas of similarity in some regards to make the book chilling and insightful reading about not just the past but also the present.
This is simply, a very sad story about some people in Denmark. Where this production draws its metaphysical extra dimension from is from a rather dizzying feeling of this living act of theatre connecting you tangentially with 400 years of culture, and the fact of just how good it is.
Andrew Scott’s performance is extraordinary, but I have seen extraordinary Hamlet’s before; what makes this one so truly remarkable is its ensemble work, the consistency of approach and commitment and attention across the entire cast and the aesthetics of acting and design. And that doesn’t come out of the blue, it can’t happen overnight. It requires growth over time, it requires the building of a shared vocabulary and a shared set of experiences, a familiarity with other performers’ instincts and habits, boundaries and freedoms.
Long ago, back in 1971, I went one Sunday afternoon to what was then The Tate Gallery to see the exhibition of work by Eduardo Paolozzi. It was one of the very first contemporary art shows that I had ever been to – I was 16 – and I was thrilled and excited to discover that an artist could fill the central Duveen galleries with toy robots and pages torn from comics and shiny geometric blobs. That day remains a special memory, and flashes of it came back as I visited Eduardo Paolozzi at the Whitechapel Gallery this morning. The show is somewhat austere, but full of fascinating things, especially from the late ’40s and early ’50s, and is accompanied by an excellent catalogue.
• On BFIPlayer you can watch (for free) Lorenza Mazzetti’s 1956 film Together, an eccentric, poetic fiction with Paolozzi and the painter Michael Andrews wandering the streets of East London.
I have been wrestling with how best to contribute regularly to this blog while I am much preoccupied with a number of productions and several more extended pieces of writing. The Sunday links columns have been the only ones that I have managed to post in recent weeks, and now I am going to try a variant of those, spreading them through the week and contributing each day a group of – as it were – linked links. There will be times when I’ll feel I can write something a little more substantial, but for the present I want to try to find a rhythm that involves a short post each day which builds over a week to something more substantial.
As usual (or given recent experience, on occasions), a list of links to articles and videos that have engaged me over the past week. Many thanks to those who alerted me to a number of them.
• Senses of Cinema 82: terrific new issue of the online journal, including a clutch of critical ‘love letters’ to films made in 1967.
• Game Theory – Paul W.S. Anderson and the filmic board game: at Mubi.com, Chris DeFalco is immensely interesting on the links between video game spaces and movies made by the director of, among others, Event Horizon, 1997 and The Three Musketeers, 2012.
• The Rerun: film theorists and video essayists par excellence@LaughMotel and @AdrianMartin25 make their first music video, for Melbourne indie rock group undergroundLOVERS.
• Has the video essay arrived?: Peter Monaghan’s valuable overview of the audio-visual film essay, with lots of additional links, for Moving Image Archive News.
I know it’s pointless gently flagellating myself in public for failing to post more regularly. So I’ll save that for the privacy of my keyboard (as well as being both rueful and grateful for how busy I am), and offer up instead a group of links to articles and videos that have engaged me over the past fortnight or so. Many thanks to those who alerted me to a number of them.
• The Empty Screen: a compelling video essay by Mark Rappaport (below) which he introduces like this:
The screen is a neutral element in the film-going experience. Or is it? It projects dreams but is also the receptacle of our dreams. It’s the vehicle for delivering the image to an audience — but does it also watch the audience at the same time? Is it a complicitous membrane which audience members can penetrate and which interacts with the spectators, despite its seeming passivity? Maybe — to all of the above …
Since I have failed for the past two Sundays to compile a list of links to things that have interested or intrigued me recently, let us begin today’s (acknowledging the usual thanks to those who have alerted me to many of these) with a couple that take on the burning cultural question of the day. Whether the movie wins big or not tonight at the Oscars, what after all the fuss do we think of La La Land (above)?
• How La La Land is made: David Bordwell is predictably excellent on how the film ‘accords with the craft of studio musicals’…
• La La Land – singin’ in the sun:… and for further thoughts then David Bordwell gave over the ‘Observations on film art’ to three colleagues: Kelley Conway, Eric Dienstfrey and Amanda McQueen.
