John Wyver writes: the regular (if this week, a little late) numerically specific number of recommendations of articles and other stuff that have engaged and amused and challenged me over the past week. For some reason there are a lot of film links this time.
The idea is to make our journalists working on climate the cool kids of the newsroom: If you work at Le Monde, and if you want to be associated with interesting projects—if you want to work with colleagues from different sections and learn to do cool stuff with social and video and podcasts—covering climate change is how you do it.
John Wyver writes: Extraordinarily, this afternoon as a little tribute to Wider Television Access, a group I co-founded in 1980, BFI Southbank is screening a 1963 episode of ITC’s series The Saint, Teresa with Roger Moore and The Avengers: A Touch of Brimstone from 1965 with, of course, Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg. I’ll be there to intro the screenings along with another co-founder, Archive TV programmer Dick Fiddy, who has organised the show as part of the BFI’s Scala: Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll cinema season.
As the BFI listing notes, WTVA was ‘a group of enthusiasts keen on providing access to vintage TV in an era before home video and nostalgia TV channels.’ Others involved included the Scala’s Steve Woolley, Chris Wicking, Tise Vahimagi, Tony Mechele, Paul Kerr and my Illuminations colleague Linda Zuck, and we organised screenings — of Danger Man, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and music shows, amongst much else, mostly borrowed from collectors or surreptiously liberated for a brief period from company vaults. We lobbied for archive television as best we could, and published an occasional magazine, Primetime (above).
John Wyver writes: something like normal service is resumed this week with a numerically specific number of recommendations of articles and other stuff that I have been engaged and amused and challenged by over the past week.
• The secret fuel that makes Ferrari such a triumph: finally, Michael Mann’s ‘sublime’ movie (above) receives the respect it so richly deserves, and from no less a critical giant than The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody [£, but limited free access]; do catch it in a cinema if you can.
[I]t’s the kind of purified, rarefied film that major filmmakers make late in their careers, in which they get to the heart of the matter plainly and present their subjects unadorned and unamplified.
John Wyver writes: Two years ago I compiled a list of stuff – books, films, journalism, television, exhibitions, online elements – that I had enjoyed, appreciated, learned from and generally been cheered by over the previous twelve months. Herewith, this year’s selection (and instead of a Sunday Dozen, which will be back next week) — and yes, I missed 2022. The order is (largely) random.
What compiling this year’s list made me realise is (a) that while I listen to a lot of music, it’s mostly via certain radio strands (on BBC Sounds), a couple of which are listed below, and that I acquire only a very few CDs (and yes, I do still listen like that); and (b) I’ve read a lot of books, but more research-related non-fiction than fiction, and only a few have made it to the list.
The image is a detail from Édouard Manet’s ‘Portrait de Zacharie Astruc’, 1866, oil on canvas, seen (and photographed, poorly) in the Musée d’Orsay’s Manet/Degas exhibition.
John Wyver writes: a tiny present in the form of a short selection of readings and listenings, some seasonal and some not, that caught my attention over the past week. The image is ‘The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel‘, 1308-1311, by the Sienese painter Duccio di Buoninsegna, tempera on poplar panel, courtesy of the truly enlightened open access policy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Happy Christmas!
• Pluralistic: 2024’s public domain is a banger: this, my friends, is how a links post should be done, from the maestro Cory Doctorow — about copyright, the public domain and sex, basically. There is also a very good edition of Free Thinking from this past week about the same subject (although mostly without the sex), with guests David Bellos, author of Who Owns This Sentence? – A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, Katie McGettigan, lecturer in C19th American literature and Hayleigh Bosher, Reader in Intellectual Property Law at Brunel University London. Pleasingly, it’s only minutes into the discussion of copyright before one of the guests comes out with the all-too-familiar mantra, ‘There are a lot of grey areas really’.
John Wyver writes: taking this one week at a time, but nonetheless I’m pleased to offer a second selection of articles, podcasts and broadcasts that engaged or informed or challenged me during the past week. There is some hard-edged politics below, but there are lighter, seasonal recommendations too. For the image above, see the penultimate entry.
• Seeing genocide: the curator, filmmaker and theoriest Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s overwhelmingly powerful essay for Boston Review about photography, history and the Israel-Hamas conflict.
• Deeper into Ozu: to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the great Japanese filmmaker’s birth, Criterion commissioned six writers each to discuss one of his lesser-known works; it’s a delightful miscellany whether you know anything about his cinema or not, and will hopefully convince you to watch more.
John Wyver writes: It’s a long time since I compiled the weekly ‘Sunday links’ – indeed it’s a long time since I wrote anything substantial here. But with the changing circumstances for the company (see News, below), I’m minded, if I can find the time and energy, to start again. So for this weekend anyway, under a new title, here is a selection, supplemented by what I hope are useful additional links, of just twelve articles, downloads, broadcasts and podcasts that in the past week I found surprising and engaging and challenging. The order is entirely random.
I aim to make a similar selection each Sunday from now on, concentrating not so much on the mainstream, but rather on the cracks and crevices of our media world. And as far as possible I’ll choose things that are freely accessible, although some may require a free sign-up. See what you think, and if you find the selection useful, do please share on social – or just tell a friend. (For details of the glorious image above, see the second item.)
In the new year a season at BFI Southbank is showcasing the weird and wonderful history of the Scala Cinema, and as part of this programmer (and our friend) Dick Fiddy has organised an afternoon on Saturday 13 January dedicated to the memory of the screenings organised there by Wider Television Access (WTVA). The programme features two classic ITC episodes, The Saint: Teresa (1963), with Roger Moore and Lana Morris, directed by Roy Ward Baker, and The Avengers: A Touch of Brimstone (1965, above), with Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, Peter Wyngarde and Carole Cleveland, directed by James Hill.
A group of those who felt that television history at the time was ill-served, WTVA is a key part of the pre-history of Illuminations, since it was in this context that the two current partners, John Wyver and Linda Zuck, first met. The success of the WTVA screenings that we, along with colleagues and other cultists, programmed led directly to our early Channel 4 commission, Six into One: The Prisoner File, and then later to The A-Z of TV, 1,001 Nights of TV and of course the series of TV Heaven. As we aim to breathe a little life back into this blog, we will try to fill in something of this history and our memories of the Scala showings. Be seeing you!
Late last year saw the passing of legendary fashion designer, Vivianne Westwood. Westwood was best known for her eponymous fashion brand and for helping to shape the look of not only punk, but also the New Romantics of the 1980s.
Westwood grew up in Tintwistle just outside Glossop, Derbyshire in a working-class family; her mother had worked in the mills and her father was a factory worker. She attended Grammar school but in 1958, her family moved to Harrow after buying a post office business in the area. Westwood briefly went to Harrow Art School (now the University of Westminster) but left feeling intimated by the art world and worried about future career prospects. A world away from punk and the Paris runway, she became a primary school teacher and married Derek Westwood, a toolmaker at the time but re-trained to become an airline pilot. They had a son together, Ben, in 1963, but separated and divorced in 1966, whereby Westwood moved back in with her parents and began to make jewellery that she sold in Portobello Market. She would meet Malcolm McLaren soon after when she shared a flat with him and her brother, Gordon. McClaren and Westwood subsequently became a romantic couple and had a son together Joe, born in 1967.
Having finished interviewing Iain Sinclair for our new retrospective film on London Orbital and packed up the filming equipment, we chatted to him as he told us the story of a screening of London Orbital in Milton Keynes, in which only two people turned up. One of the two was a man who had booked to see a screening of another film by Iain, but despite this left before the screening started. The other was a man who had a penchant for running down the hard shoulder of motorways and had used the event as a way to evade the police. He had seen the advert for the screening of a documentary about the M25 and had taken this as a sign. This was not just a sanctuary from the police but divine intervention from the motorway Gods! I brought this up with Chris Petit in my Zoom interview with him and his reply was, “how does he find these people?”
What I loved about the anecdote is that it seems to typify the absurdity of London Orbital. While the initial gesture of London Orbital is itself absurd, who would want to walk or just drive around the M25, a road with no end and no beginning? As Iain reminded us, this was no less absurd than the decision to build the ring road in the first place, a decision that would have made sense in 1956, rather than when construction of the motorway was finally completed in 1986.
London Orbital has been a steady seller for us over the years. It’s undoubtedly the most ‘cult’ film we distribute. Like all cults, its practitioners can look foolish and absurd to outsiders. Iain explained to us how London Orbital’s legacy has been formed by its reconstruction. The man from Milton Keynes was a prophetic figure in this regard. People have taken up and walked their own journeys around the M25 and have remixed the film by adding their own music to it or re-creating the film in their own way. It was this latter trend, which Chris raised in my interview with him unprompted, that he would like to see a shot-for-shot re-make similar to Gus Van Sant’s version of Psycho.
What was so interesting listening to Iain and Chris discuss the legacy of London Orbital is the fact that it went against my thinking of what the film means in 2022. My reading was based on the ideas that London Orbital inhabits, perhaps best typified when I asked both of them if the Ballardian declaration that ‘the future is boring’, was no longer relevant given that the future is doom-laden and fills us with fear. And while both gave very interesting answers to this question, London Orbital’s legacy laid not in the ideas of the film but in its method.
The questions are: how to shoot the M25, how to edit the M25, and how to narrate the M25? With a circular road, what’s your point of entry? These were answered with a method of working, which arguably wouldn’t be possible to do today. As Chris mentions in the new interview, London Orbital was written afterward. There was no shooting schedule, with the film only taking form during the edit, while at the same time the edit informed the filming, with Chris and Iain going out and shooting more material as the film’s editor, Emma Matthews, gave it shape.
Despite the emphasis on the method of London Orbital, I still find myself returning to the ideas of the film. It’s a remark that Chris makes in my interview with him that is germane to this, “London Orbital contains the future in it.” Ballard comments in the film that the M25 marks a transitory zone and I think that the film reflects this, in that it finds itself right in the middle of the legacy of neoliberalism that we are still living with today.
It was made shortly after 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan but just before the invasion of Iraq. Its production was just a few short years before the creation of the surveillance state but just before the Internet transformed our lives and with it, the creation of new forms of surveillance. Indeed, I think about Chris’ comment in the film that new types of surveillance mark “a fundamental revolution in the level and type of voyeurism,” which will result in “the loss of privacy and individuality as previously understood,” speaks directly to us in 2022. Paradoxically then, the film can be seen as both a time capsule of a lost world and an index of our current one.
