John Wyver writes: As the headline indicates, this is the third post in a series about our new film Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain. Following an introduction and a discussion of the opening sequence, today I reflect on the documentary’s second ‘chapter’ and of the archive featured in it. As I acknowledged yesterday, since you can’t yet access the film these posts may be frustrating and/or simply like inappropriate ‘spoilers’, and if you find them so, do please return after the documentary is first broadcast on Wednesday 9 June on BBC Four.
John Wyver writes: Having yesterday introduced our new film Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain and promised a series of posts about the project, today I begin with a detailed discussion of just one section of the film and of the archive that it features. I recognise that since you can’t yet access the film itself this may be frustrating, and it may be that the post is something to return to after the documentary is first broadcast on Wednesday 9 June.
I’m also cautious about over-explaining the film and rendering too literal material that I hope retains poetic qualities. Forgive me if you feel that’s the case. All I can offer in reply is to say, stop reading. But it may just be that this and subsequent posts will both whet your appetite for the film and enhance your eventual viewing.
John Wyver writes: We’re thrilled to say that our 75-minute archive-based documentary Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain will be broadcast on Wednesday 9 June at 9pm on BBC Four. Part of the BBC’s contribution to Coventry UK City of Culture 2021, the film tells the story of the rebuilding of the Cathedral after a German bombing raid in November 1940 reduced its medieval predecessor to ruins (above). At the same time, the film sets this story in the context of post-war Britain and of the reconstruction of the city of Coventry.
I first proposed this project to the BBC in 2011 and I’ve been working on it, on and off, for the past two years with a group of invaluable collaborators, most especially consultant Helen Wheatley, Professor of Film and Television at the University of Warwick, BBC commissioning editor Mark Bell, graphic designer Ian Cross and director of photography and editor Todd MacDonald.
For me the film is a complement – a kind of prequel if you like – to our documentary Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today, shown on BBC Four in October and still on BBC iPlayer. For Coventry Cathedral we have further developed the innovative use of archival moving images, and I’m going to explore aspects of this in a series of ‘postcard’ blog posts in the coming days. In the meantime, here’s the BBC press information for the film:
John Wyver writes: the last week has been taken up with completing Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain, our 75-minute BBCFour documentary about which I will be writing here throughout the coming fortnight – so I’ve not had a lot of time for reading, but these were a (very) few of my favourite things…
• Muriel Box – the government files on the work of Britain’s pioneering female director: great research here from Josephine Botting and Sarah Castagnetti via the BFI about state interest in two films from the feature director Muriel Box: Good-Time Girl (1948, above with Bonar Colleano, Jean Kent and Hugh McDermott), which she co-wrote, and Street Corner (1953), which she co-wrote and directed.
• The disappearance of Kevin Jackson: a lovely short tribute by Matthew Sweet for Sight & Sound to the late critic and cultural polymath who died suddenly early this month.
• Dim the lights – the spell of watching films in the dark: Peter Conrad for the BFI: “In Paris in 1927 the surrealist Robert Desnos sang the praises of “les salles obscures”. Less alarmed than Gorky, more happily licentious, Desnos thought that cinemas were dormitories or perhaps opium dens, occult places where you settled down to nod off in the company of strangers, confidently expecting that the images on the screen would duplicate your dreams.”
John Wyver writes: Another broadcast deadline is just three days away, this time for the Illuminations documentary for BBC Four, Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain. You can expect lots more about this here once it is complete, but for the moment I am rather pre-occupied by it, and so this week’s links is perhaps a touch more modest than normal. Expect bumper editions in the coming weeks, but for now enjoy these articles and videos that have attracted my attention this week.
• State Funeral observes a period of mourning for Stalin: Nick Pinkerton for Sight & Sound on a film (above, and now on Mubi.com) that I’ve long been looking forward to – Sergei Loznitsa’s compilation from footage of Stalin’s funeral…
[Loznitsa’s] films offer a kind of understanding of the past, yes, but it’s precisely an understanding of what we can’t understand, even or especially through the testimony of the filmed image, for the ‘truth’ told by a camera is distorted by an infinity of variables, not least who is holding the camera, and what the person in front of it believes is expected of them.
John Wyver writes: after a week off, here is the latest list of links to articles and other elements that have caught my attention in recent days; with thanks, as always, to those in my Twitter feed who recommend a host of fascinating pieces.
• The untold story of the NFT boom: a remarkable essay by Clive Thompson for The New York Times Magazine which draws together and explains so much that has mystified me, and I’m sure many others, over the past weeks.
• The Existential Issue: Columbia Journalism Review asks ‘What is journalism?’ in an essential group of articles.
• Imperialism – a syllabus: a truly exceptional resource by Radhika Nadarajan and John Munro from Public Books in the form of an extensive reading list compiled by a historian of the United Kingdom and one of the United States that ’emphasizes approaches to empire that are anti-colonial’:
While our syllabus unfolds in a loose chronology, each week we highlight a structuring dynamic of imperialism, drawing through-lines between past and present. In addition to historical scholarship, essays, and interviews, we include literature and film, because creative forms have been crucial for making imperialism visible, critiquing its operations, and imagining a future after empire. Ultimately, this syllabus aims to foreground a history of imperialism that serves contemporary struggles.
• Uncovering the many Eric Hobsbawms: for Jacobin, Emile Chabal and Anne Perez introduce the extraordinary online Eric Hobsbawm Bibliography which ‘has over 3,000 entries, including details of every published book, journal article, book chapter, review, newspaper article and pamphlet [the historian] ever wrote, along with his unpublished work and his private papers.’
John Wyver writes: after getting The Winter’s Tale on to BBC Four last Sunday, things have quietened down a little; I’m beginning to read and watch things again, slowly, and here are some of the things that I’ve found interesting over the past week.
• Exterminate All the Brutes tracks the march of genocide: so good to see the brilliant filmmaker Paul Tickell writing for Sight & Sound on Raoul Peck’s essential four-part series (with Fraser James, above) that has just started a run on Sky:
Exterminate All the Brutes is a masterpiece to set beside Gillo Pontecorvo’s take on the Black Jacobin Caribbean, Burn! (¡Quiemada!, 1969), a film sadly neglected in comparison to his The Battle of Algiers (1966). Peck’s series is also in the same league as Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015). That film’s grotesque hallucinatory sequences in a riverside mission school capture Conrad and “the horror, the horror” of imperialism far more effectively than Apocalypse Now (1979), whose riffs on Heart of Darkness Peck references throughout this phenomenal documentary.
John Wyver writes: the past week has been professionally full-on, but a handful of interesting articles and videos still managed to catch my attention, and I’m happy to share them here…
if you’re an artist, each time out you have a problem, a subject matter, and you need to create a style that really works. With episodic, you create a template, and then directors just follow that template. So if you’re doing The Crown, you’re doing a lot of soft focus, backlighting. They all look the same. And that’s a kind of a comfort, too, because every time you watch The Crown, you know exactly how it’s going to look. The challenge of independent film is creating something that feels new, and that is going [to be] less and less in favor.
• Abandoning the Baird system: I’m not sure when this was posted but I only found it last week – an exemplary ‘History of the BBC’ post by David Hendy about ‘how the BBC abandoned Baird’s system for the technically superior cathode-ray tube stretches across four crucial years in the early history of television’.
• Watching home movies with Mister Peepers: home movies expert Dwight Swanson writes fascinatingly for UCLA Film and Television Archive blog about an episode of the 1953 NBC sitcom Mister Peepers, which is available here:
• Dia 2.0. Facing the future: some of my most remarkable visual arts experiences have been courtesy of Dia, which is partly why I was so interested to read Randy Kennedy for The New York Times on ‘how to re-engineer Dia’s tightly-bounded ethos to keep it vital in an art world now moving steadily beyond the mostly white, mostly male, sometimes swaggering heart of its founding collection.’
Will archives be tempted by the potential upside of NFTs and tokenize digital representations of their crown jewels (or the rights to these assets)? This would worsen an already bad situation, where institutions like our Library of Congress hold physical copies of millions of films, TV programs, and recordings that can’t be touched because someone else holds the copyright. Ideally, archives and museums should own and control both the physical and digital states of its collections. That won’t happen if they have to sell or license NFTs in order to survive.
• What they wrote about the war: Robert Minto for LA Review of Books on essays begun within weeks of each other in the summer of 1914 by Thomas Mann and George Bernard Shaw.
• Dirty dollars: a very fine online presentation of a Michael Sallah investigation for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette into accused money launderers who ‘left a path of bankrupt factories, unpaid taxes, shuttered buildings and hundreds of steelworkers out of jobs’.
• Making The Winter’s Tale for screen: as for the full-on week, and indeed month, here’s a glimpse of what I’ve been working on, with a couple of brief appearances in interview:
John Wyver writes: a curtailed list today as we’re still deep in the post-production for the RSC’s The Winter’s Tale which is broadcast next Sunday, 25 April, at 7pm on BBCFour; I’ll aim to add more later. As always, these are articles and occasional videos and threads that have engaged me over the past week.
• A new India finds its voice in the films of Bimal Roy: for Criterion’s The Current, Devika Girish on one of the major directors of the golden age of Hindi cinema in the 1950s; header image: Roy’s Sujata (1959).
• What the papers say: fine, funny and fascinating research by John Hoare at [dirtyfeed] about what media studies folk might call the intertextual links for a famed Yes, Minister sketch (h/t here to Billy Smart).
• Analysis: What does a controller-less corporation look like? [£ but limited free access]: Max Goldbart for Broadcast on the BBC’s ‘radical overhaul to its commissioning structure – doing away with channel controllers and the “two-tick” system”; this is a hugely significant shift for the television service and yet this informed but short article is the only piece I’ve found on it.
• Getting the measure [£ but limited free access]: the wonderful Emma Smith for TLS on the completion of The Arden Shakespeare 3 and especially its final volume, Measure for Measure.
• Reanimating Cabaret, one frame at a time: I can’t quite make up my mind about this project by Doug Reside, curator of the Billy Rose Theater Division at the New York Public Library, who has sequenced a selection of 3,693 publicity images of Hal Prince’s original 1966 Broadway production, and other staging, so as to give them a kind of uncanny half-life – the results are defiantly odd and oddly compelling; the work is immaculately reported and presented by Jesse Green for The New York Times Magazine.
Took the kids to discover some nearby colonial countryside yesterday. We found a tale so heavy with symbolism it could have been written by George Eliot. The picture is Ayot House in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, where our story starts. @ColonialCountr1 @Slavelegacies (1/9) pic.twitter.com/tNAKpUYntI
• Gargantuanisation [£ but limited free access]: a simply terrific John Lanchester LRB essay about the global shipping trade, which made me think about a topic I’d never considered before.
• Napoleon’s canal: Luke McKernan enjoys the pleasures of a walk along the Thames and Medway canal.
