For the last few years I have been invited to give a group of classes for the Royal College of Art’s Critical Writing in Art & Design MA programme. Across four weeks a group of super-smart students help me explore some issues about the history of television and the current state of digital media, mostly as they relate to the visual arts. For the final class, course tutor David Crowley and I ask the students to contribute a short film or fragment of online media about the arts that they find distinctive or stimulating or especially engaging (or all three). Following are three pieces put forward today, plus a perennial favourite with Ice Cube.
A Brief History of John Baldessari
Tom Waits narrates this dazzling brief bio of the LA-based artist (pictured above in the film). Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the makers of Catfish whowork collectively as Supermarché, this was produced for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s inaugural Art + Film gala. read more »
John Wyver writes: Earlier today I spoke on a panel at the Archives, Access and Research conference at BFI Southbank. Co-organised by the Centre for the History of Television Culture and Production at Royal Holloway, University of London, Learning on Screen and the BFI, this proved to be a valuable and ultimately positive day of discussions. Contributing to the first panel I wanted to offer a provocation about how limited is our access to the BBC archive – and that’s the text that follows. I recognise that there have been important advances in recent years and the current state of play is perhaps not as bleak as I paint it here. So in a follow-up post I’ll outline some of those welcome changes.
I want you for a moment to imagine a library filled with the books of four nations. Published over the last seventy years, and paid for by a hypothecated tax on the people, these books contain much of the political and cultural and social life of those nations. They record fleeting appearances by hundreds of thousands of those who lived and who still live in those nations. They feature humans of every age, of every class, of every sexual orientation, of every religion and of every ethic background. Animals too, they feature lots of animals. read more »
On Monday Alice Saville wrote an article for Exeunt about streaming and filming theatre. ‘Why theatre needs to love film, not fear it’ is intended as a provocation, so perhaps unsurprisingly I found interesting and irritating in about equal measure. Similarly predictable is my wish to respond, which is what this post is intended to do. Let me start with this from near the end of the article:
Theatre’s relationship with filmed media has historically been defined by fear.
Which, with respect, is nonsense. There is an incredibly rich tradition, both in Britain and elsewhere, and across more than a century, of theatre, film, television and digital media collaborating and collectively exploring and enhancing performance, and together extending its audiences and engaging them in new ways.
The partnerships go right back to Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s King John (1899, illustrated above), which appears to have been shot to bring audiences to the eminent actor’s forthcoming stage production. This is really a topic for another piece, but I am certain that the more we know about the intimately intertwined histories of stage and screen then the richer is our understanding of the possibilities and potential now. That said, let’s consider the finer grain of Alice Saville’s argument. read more »
On Sunday afternoon Beware of Pity, an adaptation of a Stefan Zweig novel created by Complicite and Schaubühne Berlin, was live-streamed from the stage of London’s Barbican. The much-praised show sold out its theatre performances but along with around 1400 others looking in on the YouTube page, I happily watched the feed on my laptop at home. I was delighted to do so, although the experience felt somewhat reduced, at least when compared with viewing a full-blown, fully resourced live broadcast of a theatre show in a cinema.
As this perhaps suggests, I want to offer some comparative points about the Beware of Pity stream and the live broadcasts that I produce for the RSC and that NT Live similarly takes out into the world. I am going to be critical about aspects of yesterday’s stream, although I hope in a supportive way. I’m cautious about doing this, not least because I recognise the budget disparities between the approaches, but also because I don’t want simply to appear to be justifying my practice and that of the RSC. And pleasingly you can make up your own mind, since the stream recording remains online until Sunday 26 February. read more »
Sunday is a big day for live/as-live performance online, with the release of Opera North’s Ring Cycle plus a stream at 3pm from the Barbican of the Complicite and Schaubühne Berlin show at the Barbican, Beware of Pity(above). Links to those below, plus other elements in my second (roughly) fortnightly round-up of news and releases relating to theatre, dance and opera performance being broadcast to cinema, television and online. The first post, from 25 January 2017, is here.
(Incidentally, we are still plagued by glitches and gremlins across the site – which is in part why I have not been posting as regularly as I would like to. But individual posts and direct links seem fine – and we hope to be back to full functionality very soon.) read more »
The past week has been even worse for the world than the one before, but here is a list of links not totally dominated by the hideousness across the Atlantic, the hideousness at home, and the hideousness of the two together on Friday. My continuing thanks to all those who alert me to these – and my apologies for not acknowledging that individually.
• Arthouse roccoco: Close-up on two films by Catherine Breillat: Michael Pattison on two films currently playing in the UK on Mubi.com (which I am coming to like more and more): Romance, 1999, and Anatomy of Hell, 2004; article, by the way, is probably NSFW.
• Asghar Farhadi: Matthew Eng at Reverse Shot has an interview with the Iranian director currently banned from attending the Oscars ceremony for which his feature The Salesman is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film; Sean O’Neal at The A.V. Club has background on the story. There is also a fine Tony Pipolo review for Artforum; and here’s the trailer:
As my production interests and my academic concerns are both focussed, albeit not exclusively, on live events for the cinema, I am acutely aware of how rapidly the field is developing. To help myself, if no-one else, keep up to date with what is happening, every fortnight I am going to gather together a group of links about recent and forthcoming live cinema events, including reviews, previews, industry news and trailers. I also intend to keep these pages developing, so I’ll be adding additional links about the subjects below as I come across them. read more »
Although it was published just over a fortnight ago I don’t want to let pass without comment a slightly thoughtless Sunday Times article about John Berger and arts television by Waldemar Januszczak. In ‘A murky way of seeing’ (free registration required) the predictably contrarian critic took issue with the idea that Ways of Seeing (1972) made by Berger and producer-director Mike Dibb (who doesn’t rate a mention) was a significantly influential television series. Rather, Januszczak argues, it was Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which preceded Ways of Seeing by three years, and to which the later series was in some ways a riposte, that shaped much of television’s subsequent engagement with the arts, including the scribe’s own humble efforts. read more »
Let’s for a moment forget the woes of the world and look forward to some television treats coming up at BFI Southbank during February. A second season of Forgotten Dramas (the first was in 2015) features a number of fascinating titles that have mostly remained unseen since they were first broadcast. The season is curated by those exemplary scholars Lez Cooke, John Hill and Billy Smart, and it is associated with the History of Forgotten Television Drama research project based at Royal Holloway, University of London, which runs a very good blog here.
I intend to write about several of the below, but for the moment I urge you to book your tickets – apart that is for the first event which is already sold-out (although some tickets may become available later). I have included the listings information below, which ought to be enough to convince you that there are wonderful things in prospect here, including the brace of experimental pieces on Wednesday 22 and Loyalties on Sunday 26. I should also metnion that I am contributing to the Archives, Access and Research conference on Wednesday 22, about which I’ll post further details in a future post. read more »
