The cinematic as force: curator of the week’s contributions Angelo Restivo kicks things off with a reflection on Breaking Bad and an argument that ‘the cinematic creates intensive thresholds in the image that work directly upon the bodies, objects, and spaces in the frame, often pushing us outside the logic of the narrative’.
What’s going on? Cinematic montage and televisual narrative: in an interesting consideration of cinematic editing and “live” televisual cutting, Corey K Creekmur uses an example from Sens8 to suggest that ‘The jagged fragments of modernist cinema are now the building blocks of serial narration, and montage, once virtually a definition of avant-garde cinema, has reemerged at the center of the current intersection of pulp and “quality” television.
Worth it: Steven Shapiro analyses a music video from musician Moses Sumney and film director Allie Avital, describing it as ‘intense, immersive, and intimate; yet also implosive and claustrophobic’.
Don Draper’s mask – evoking the cinematic: ‘What makes Mad Men cinematic,’ Rashna Wadia Richards posits, ‘is that its images activate a chain of unexpected or uncanny connections with a range of films. We might say, then, that the cinematic reveals how serial television serves an archival function in relation to cinema.
Of the cinematic and the televisual: considering one moment set in Jennifer Melfi’s office in The Sopranos, Martha P. Notchimson cautions against the application of ‘cinematic’ to serial television, asking ‘do we not lose the particularity and magnitude of the television auteur’s work, exalting cinema as the good object toward which inferior televisuality must strive? ‘
Drawing on the documentary films Bauhaus and Masterworks: Bauhaus, available on DVD from Illuminations, as well as on recent articles marking 100 years since the Bauhaus was established, Tom Allen reflects on the meaning and the legacy of one of the most iconic schools of Modernism.
The Bauhaus lasted only 14 years, was in three different locations due to political pressures (Weimar, Dessau, above, and Berlin), had three different directors (Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) and was ultimately shut down by the Nazis for being an alleged Jewish-Bolshevik plot. Despite this brief but tumultuous history the Bauhaus has had a huge effect on how we think of art, design, architecture and their relation to the modern world. Indeed, the Bauhaus arguably offers the most successful example of all the schools of Modernism. Founded by German architect Walter Gropius in 1919 in Weimar, it had an ethos totally different from other art and technical schools. The Bauhaus drew on politics, theory, spirituality, and the most cutting edge of contemporary artists to try and remake the modern world.
John Wyver writes: for this collection of links I am interpreting the idea of ‘writing’ rather broadly, and so there are pointers towards pieces about writing, pieces about journalism, pieces about reading, and pieces of what I feel to be simply really good writing. As with other pull-togethers like this, which have included recent ones about photography, television and the visual arts, I’m going to add to an initial selection during today and over the next few days.
John Wyver writes: Seeing The Lost People a week or so ago piqued my interest in movies set in the middle Europe of the immediate post-war years, and in how they might have negotiated the complex politics of reconstruction and the start of the Cold War. Today’s watch was Berlin Express, a Jacques Tourneur-directed thriller (sort of) made at exactly the same moment as The Lost People, in 1948. Except that this RKO movie features extensive location shooting in the ruins of Frankfurt and Berlin, and instead of Dennis Price and Mai Zetterling boasts the rather punchier star power of Robert Ryan and Merle Oberon. The plot, frankly, is pretty nonsensical, but the film is fascinating nonetheless.
Apart from anything else, it’s made me start to think about what I’m going to call mittelnoir, a sub-category of film noir set in and concerned with Mitteleuropa, the mythical central European world that embraced Germany, Austria and more. I think we can definitely co-opt for this emergent grouping Carol Reed’s great The Third Man (1949) and also The Man Between(1953), also directed by Reed, shot in Berlin and starring James Mason. I think Billy Wilkder’s A Foreign Affair (1948) should perhaps be next on my playlist. Does any one have any other suggestions?
This Sunday, 17 March, Battersea Arts Centre are hosting a very special one-off showing of all the films made for the series Performance Live as collaborations between BAC, Arts Council England, BBC Television and a host of cultural organisations and independent producers – including Illuminations.
Two of the films on which we collaborated for the series, and which were broadcast on BBC Two last year are being shown. At 4pm there’s a showing of Winged Bull in the Elephant Case, directed by Robin Friend, Wayne MacGregor and Rhodri Huw, and created with Studio Wayne McGregor. And at 7pm Hofesh Shechter’s Clowns (above) will be screened, which Hofesh choreographed and directed, and for which he created the score.
This is a unique opportunity to see these films, and a host of other great work, on a big screen – and for free! Among the other artists and groups whose work is being showcased are Paul Mason and Young Vic, Slung Low, Tamasha, Eggs Collective, 20 Stories High and Contact, Akala, Ross Sutherland, Touretteshero, Alexander Zeldin and National Theatre, and Kate Tempest.
The films will be screened between midday (doors open at 11.30am) and 9.30pm, with a special live interlude at 5.45pm.
Our very latest production is the trailer for Anne Washburn’s play Shipwreck, directed by Rupert Goold, at the Almeida Theatre until 30 March. A tale of Trump’s America, it’s quite a ride – and the one-minute trailer aims to reflect the drama’s intensity and imaginative power. The trailer was filmed, edited and directed by Todd Macdonald.
John Wyver writes: following recent clutches of Links concerned with Photography, with Television, and with the Visual Arts, today’s offering draws together a few of the essential articles and videos about film that I have enjoyed recently. I’ll be adding to these across the day and in the coming days, as I have been updating the other posts.
John Wyver writes: To BFI Southbank on Thursday for a screening of the 1949 British film The Lost People, which proved to be almost laughably poor and entirely fascinating. There are three strands to just why I got so much from the showing. First, it was partly directed, as her first such assignment, by Muriel Box, whose later work I have recently been discovering with delight. Second, intertwinings between stage and screen are central to both the fictional world it depicts (a crumbling theatre in post-war Germany taken over as a dispersal centre for displaced persons) and to its production context (it was originally the stage play Cockpit by Bridget Boland, imaginatively staged in London in 1948). And third, it was made, and addressed to, a critical moment in the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe. As I try to suggest below, drawing on the arguments of historian Anne Deighton, these dark, dark days just three weeks before the scheduled B-day, are the direct consequence of decisions taken at that time – and which the film, however clumsily, tries to explore.
