John Wyver writes: next Monday sees the start of an intriguing and, especially given the state of the world right now, a potentially significant academic initiative. Over the past fortnight every scholar worldwide has received e-mails cancelling every conference that they had been expecting to attend across the next six months or so. Except, that is, for the ‘Future States’ conference, starting 30 March and dedicated to exploring ‘Modernity and national identity in popular magazines, 1890-1945’. ‘Future States’, organised by Centre for Design History, University of Brighton, was conceived to take place entirely online, using the nearly-carbon neutral conference (NCNC) model. And that’s what the organisers are going ahead with. The topic is relatively niche (aren’t all conferences?), but if it takes your fancy, registration is free and you can sign up here.
John Wyver writes: Childishly pleased as I mostly certainly am with my headline, it’s not my only reason for starting a short series of posts about Harold Hobson (1904-1992). Specifically I intend to explore Hobson’s television criticism for the BBC’s weekly magazine The Listener between May 1947 and September 1951. I was prompted to look at these columns, one or two of which I have used before in my research, by considering The Artist’s Eye (1947-1949) series for a recent post. Like everyone else who recognises his name, I knew of Hobson (above) as a famed theatre critic. When I was a teenager his pronouncements each week for The Sunday Times carried enormous weight, and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Michael Billington rightly celebrates his achievements :
Hobson was often regarded as a wayward, mercurial critic. His lasting achievement lay in his constant championship of avant-garde writers. His most distinctive quality was his ability to discover an epiphanic experience in a single moment…
(Look out for one such epiphany below.) Billington fails to mention that Hobson regularly passed judgement on the emerging medium of television, and his contributions to The Listener are rarely, if ever, cited in media studies literature. Yet he was writing at a crucial time for the BBC’s service and, since he was already established as a theatre critic, his thoughts on the stage and the screen, and on the hybridity of television drama, are particularly interesting. It is Hobson’s writing on television plays that I want to consider more fully in future posts, whereas this offering is more of a general introduction.
John Wyver writes: Some reading – and a little viewing – that might make a tiny contribution to your edification and amusement in self-isolation; Covid-19-related pieces are complemented by a number that are blessedly free of the virus. Stay well.
In the current pandemic crisis, the BBC – now nearly 100 years old – has some precious advantages over its other media rivals. Hard won experience is perhaps the greatest of these.Simply put, it has been here before. And, with any luck, that means it stands a good chance of helping us through demanding, frightening, and extraordinary times.
With Britain heading towards a shutdown, lasting who knows how long, it will quickly become evident how difficult it is to sustain society without everyday sociality… Having spent decades overhauling the welfare state to promote a more entrepreneurial, job-seeking, active populace, driven by an often punitive conditionality, Britain has little to fall back on when the most urgent need is for everybody to stay at home.
• Feeling overwhelmed? How art can help in an emergency: adapted for the Guardian from her new book, Olivia Laing is really good – and hopeful – with nods to, among others, Dickens, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, David Wojnarowicz, Ana Mendieta, Ursula Le Guin and Derek Jarman.
John Wyver writes: researching yesterday’s post piqued my curiosity about the early BBC television arts strand The Artist’s Eye, which ran from 1947 to 1949. Although the standard histories of arts television credit Monitor, which started in 1958, as the first arts series on British television, even on just the basis of Radio Times listings, a strong case can be made for that accolade belonging to The Artist’s Eye. The monthly programmes, each lasting between 30 and 45 minutes, were produced in the studio by the remarkable Mary Adams, who during the run of the series was promoted to be head of television talks. The strand title was also used, as I outline below, for a small number of acquired film documentaries about artists. For much of the information, thanks, as always and forever, to BBC Genome.
John Wyver writes: having looked at two early films from New York’s Metropolitan Museum, here and here, and before I return to the topic of museums and media in the United States, I thought I would explore how galleries and museums in Britain started to collaborate with the BBC, initially on radio and then, as early as November 1936, on television too. I’ve already noted that I don’t think there are any films made by a museum or gallery on this side of the Atlantic before the Second World War, but both in the interwar years and just post-war there was certainly plenty of virtual gallery-going over the airwaves.
This feels especially relevant since yesterday the BBC announced the following (which of course is exactly what underpins its legitimacy as a licence-fee funded public service broadcaster):
At a time when British culture is having to close its doors, the BBC, through iPlayer and Sounds, can give British culture an audience that can’t be there in person. We propose to run an essential arts and culture service – Culture in Quarantine – that will keep the Arts alive in people’s homes, focused most intensely across Radio 3, Radio 4, BBC Two, BBC Four, Sounds, iPlayer and our digital platforms, working closely with organisations like Arts Council England and other national funding and producing bodies. This will include guides to shuttered exhibitions…
John Wyver writes: following on from yesterday’s post I am continuing to look at the films that New York’s Metropolitan Museum (exterior above, in 1928) has put online as a contribution to The Met 150, its anniversary celebration of its opening in 1870.
Of course, like all cultural organisations The Met is facing very serious problems because of the Covid-19 crisis; read more about it in The New York Times here.
Fortunately The Met remains open online, and my focus today is the 25-minute behind-the-scenes mute study Behind the Scenes: The Working Side of the Museum (1928), which is embedded here:
John Wyver writes: Since it appears as if we’ll be spending even more of our time with our screens in the coming weeks, I thought I’d return to the blog with notes on some of the more obscure films and videos that you can find online. I’m especially interested at present in films and videos that circulated alongside the mainstream structures of film distribution and broadcasting, and perhaps especially that category of productions called ‘useful cinema’. (For more on the definition of this – and for the importance of having the term embrace electronic images and non-standard forms of television – look out for a future post.)
Today (and likely for the next couple of days) my attention is on a handful of early films made by New York’s Metropolitan Museum in the interwar years, and specifically the 1925 epic The Gorgon’s Head, which I am delighted to embed here in its full 17 minute glory.
John Wyver writes: The prospect of us all spending yet more time in front of screens away from social situations has prompted me to return to the blog and to offer a new selection of links to online offerings of different sorts that have caught my eye.
• The Digital Concert Hall now free for everyone: first up, a great initiative from the Berlin Philharmonic, which is offering 30 days free access to its virtual (and exceptional) Digital Concert Hall; the latest date for redeeming an access code for the offer is Tuesday 31 March. The website is offering over 600 orchestral concerts from the Berliner Philharmoniker in the Digital Concert Hall from more than ten years, including 15 concerts with the orchestra’s new chief conductor Kirill Petrenko.
The most instructive thing about the Berlin concert was how it dramatized what technology cannot supply: the temporary bond of purposeful community that forms under the spell of live music. The final silence was a vacuum crying to be filled.
• Met Opera to offer up ‘nightly Met Opera streams’: in a similar vein, here’s the OperaWire report about the Met’s plans to present free online encores of past performances from its Live in HD series. As the reports notes, ‘”We’d like to provide some grand opera solace to opera lovers in these extraordinarily difficult times,” said Met General Manager Peter Gelb in a press release.’ To start, on Monday 16, Bizet’s Carmen at 19.30 EST, which these days is 23.30 in the UK (I think).
John Wyver writes: How sad to wake up this morning to the news of the death of a truly great television producer and filmmaker, and also a wonderful man, Tony Garnett. Here’s the Guardian story, with a 2016 photograph above by Sarah Lee, reporting his passing at the age of 83. There’s so much to say about his significance to British television from Up the Junction (1965) to This Life (1996-97) and beyond. There’s an excellent website about his work, and fortunately Tony wrote a fascinating memoir, much of which is about the extraordinary events of his early life, The Day the Music Died.
I’ll offer some further thoughts over the next couple of days, but by way of a tiny tribute here is the delightful interview that I conducted with him some six years ago about his work as an actor in the BBC’s ground-breaking History plays cycle, An Age of Kings (1960). We’ve released the full series on DVD and it is available here.
John Wyver writes: for your consideration – a selection of recent cinema-related stuff that I have found engaging and enriching.
• Newspaper women and the movies in the USA, 1914-1925: the great scholar Richard Abel writes for the Women Film Pioneers Project about women who wrote and edited film columns in the silent period; fascinating, with some lovely page grabs – including the Virginia Dale column above from the Chicago Tribune.
