John Wyver writes: this week’s collection of links to interesting articles and videos, with grateful thanks to all those who alerted me via Twitter and in other ways.
The great American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank died this week. As for so many, his collection The Americans (above, ‘Restaurant – U.S. 1 leaving Columbia, South Carolina’, 1955), as a book and then as a 2009 exhibition at the Met, was revelatory for me. Here’s a selection of articles published this week:
John Wyver writes: The director and television drama executive James Cellan Jones died recently at the age of 88. He was a very fine studio director who started working with the BBC in 1963, and who later became Head of Plays, 1976-79. Among his achievements was directing episodes of the game-changing serial The Forsyte Saga in 1967. In 2005 Kaleidoscope published his entertaining memoir Forsyte and Hindsight: Screen Directing for Pleasure and Profit. An outline filmography is here, and there is a short tribute from BAFTA here. I’ll add any obits that I come across, but in this post I want to contribute a short expression of thanks for a kindness that he did for me right at the start of my professional life.
Thrilling news from our friend and colleague Keith Griffiths, who writes the following on his Facebook page:
After three years of painstaking animation and production, tonight, Wednesday 11 September, sees the world premiere of The Doll’s Breath, the new 22-minute animated film from the Brothers Quay. It will be a Special Screening at the 25th Edition of the L’ÉTRANGE Festival held at the Forum Des Images, Paris.
There will be a repeat screening on Friday and the Brothers are attending both, and conducting a Q&A afterwards. The film is inspired by Felisberto Hernández’s Las Hortensias and is the second time that the Brothers have based a film on his fantastical stories. In this one Horacio, a former window dresser, sets up complicated charades where women and life-sized dolls change places in a web of jealousy, betrayal and murder.
John Wyver writes: I’m never entirely certain if it’s interesting to post here about artworks or architecture that I’ve encountered, or about films and television I’ve watched, or books that I’ve read. Indeed, after well over a decade, on and off, writing this blog, I’m still uncertain about quite why I do it. Or what readers get from it. Meanwhile, from time to time, and far from as regularly as I would like, I carry on, as with this post about a visit today to Plas Newydd. Spectacularly sited looking out over the Menai Strat, this house is the ancestral home of the Marquess of Anglesey, and is now in the care of the National Trust. Installed here is Rex Whistler’s spectacular modern masterpiece, ‘Capriccio of a Mediterranean Seaport with British and Italian Buildings, the Mountains of Snowdonia, and a Self-portrait wielding a Broom’ (1936-37).
John Wyver writes: The summer is nearly over, the Ashes nearly lost (again), series 2 of the wonderful Succession (above, HBO/Sky Atlantic) is with us and there’s not much going on in politics. So it feels like a good moment to return to our neglected blog. Let’s also return to this weekly format for recommendations of stuff that you might find interesting to read or to watch — and then let’s see how we get on with additional posts over the coming weeks. Watch out for news of coming projects and activities.
• The 1619 Project: the essential online publishing project of the summer, from The New York Times – an interactive engagement in essays and images with slavery and its legacies. This
aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
John Wyver writes: So it’s the official publication day for Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History. My thanks to The Arden Shakespeare for taking this on, to Gregory Doran and other colleagues at the RSC for all their support, and to numerous other scholars, archivists, friends and more for assistance in making this real. I am thrilled to see my book in print.
I know that, because of the demands of academic publishing, the hardback price for the book is unaffordable. But I hope that there will be a paperback next year – and a good reception will help that process. In the meantime I would be delighted if you would consider recommending it as a library purchase.
Publication day for my book Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History looms, and so here’s another instalment in my chapter-by-chapter breakdown. The third chapter, ‘Making Movies, 1964-73’ is really an essay of two halves. The second part considers the remarkable trilogy of feature films that Peter Brook made from his productions with the RSC during the 1960s: Marat/Sade, 1967; Tell Me Lies, 1968 (the Godardian trailer for the recent French restoration of which is below); and King Lear, 1971 (based on Brook’s 1962 Stratford production with Paul Scofield).
I also explore other moving images traces of Brook’s work during this extraordinary decade, and the Guardian last week ran an edited extract about my search for film records of his ground-breaking 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By contrast, although with all sorts of links to this story, the first part of Chapter 3 relates the almost-entirely-untold relationship in the 1960s between the RSC and the Hollywood ‘mini-major’ production outfit, Filmways.
John Wyver writes: I’ve been pre-occupied with other stuff for the last few weeks, but I want now to offer two or three ‘links’ posts rounding up articles that have engaged me recently – to start with, here are pieces about the past, present and possible futures of various media, including the one we persist in calling television.
• Introducing the BBC Box: Bill Thompson and Rhianne Jones at BBC R&D offer an initial glimpse of a prototype device that pulls together your personal data into one place – and that could be deployed in a public service context; my sense of this is that it could become very important – and for background see Matthew Postgate’s ‘Looking at the BBC’s role in data-led services’, also from BBC R&D.
My book Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History is published this coming week by Bloomsbury as part of The Arden Shakespeare series. I own to being very pleased about this, and I am writing a series of posts that detail the contents chapter-by-chapter. A first post is here, and another here; more will follow in the next few days. The book’s second chapter, ‘Television Times, 1961-68’, looks primarily at the relationship of Peter Hall‘s newly renamed Royal Shakespeare Company had with BBC Television through the 1960s. The central case study is the still astonishing trilogy The Wars of the Roses, recorded in the autumn of 1964 and first broadcast at Easter 1965. Illuminations has published this series on DVD, which is available here.
John Wyver writes: Today would have been the 100th birthday of Sam Wanamaker (pictured above as Iago in Stratford in 1959), the American actor and director who conceived the idea and campaigned for many years to build the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank. In the second of a series of posts leading up to the publication on 27 June of my book Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History, I have a story – that I am pretty sure has never been told before – about an earlier project to build a replica Globe – in Stratford-upon-Avon! Had this happened, as was explored seriously in the late 1950s, the post-war history of Shakespeare in the British theatre would almost certainly have been intriguingly different.
