Last night, for the London opening of the Chichester Festival Theatre production of Half a Sixpence, the production’s publicists employed an up-to-the-minute medium in a manner that mimicked the early years of television. Working with Facebook Live, Half a Sixpence first of all streamed a half-hour or so of red carpet intro before curtain up. And then from late on in the performance itself, the closing minutes were shown live online, from ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop’ to the curtain calls.
Rights restrictions, I assume, account for why there’s no available recording of the second part of the stream, but you can see here Michael Underwood valiantly trying to whip up some excitement in front of the Noel Coward Theatre. All of which is pretty much exactly what the BBC television service did from the Palace Theatre nearly 80 years ago. read more »
I was going start by committing to a boycott this week of Trump and Brexit. After all, and especially after this week, what is there to say? But I have included a couple of exceptional pieces, before I get to links to other things that I’ve found interesting and stimulating over the past truly hideous few days.
• The nightmare begins: Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, a really good analysis – and do also read Joan Scott’s response in the Comments.
And then there’s this, from Saturday Night Live, with Kate McKinnon as Hillary performing the late Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. You’ll have seen it already, but watch it again – and weep.
Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer best-known for his radical work on many of the key features films of the French new wave, has died at the age of 92. Coutard shot many of the films (including the heart-breakingly beautiful Pierrot le fou, 1965, above) that meant the most to me as I was discovering cinema in the 1970s and ’80s; below I have embedded a dozen of these. The Guardian obituary by James S Williams is here. ‘Light of day: Raoul Coutard on shooting film for Jean-Luc Godard’, a 1965 text by Coutard edited Michel Cournot, has been republished as a tribute on the Sight & Sound website. And Film Comment here has a 2012 interview with the cinematographer.
‘The greatest song ever written about America… and what’s so great about it is, it gets right to the heart of what our country is supposed to be about.”
Live at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, 30 September, 1985.
In this week’s Sunday links I highlighted a recent audiovisual essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin about the cinema of Roman Polanski. Today, I want to give slightly more attention to their latest creation, the 12-minute ‘A tour through French noir’, commissioned by Sight & Sound. This is a gloriously evocative, allusive and elegant engagement with the Gallic tradition of cinematic fatalism, desperate passion and doomed love that distinguishes many of the best French films from the 1930s to the 1960s. The video essay is linked to the season French noir at BFI Southbank and Ciné Lumière, and can very profitably be watched alongside Ginette Vincendeau’s complementary Deep Focus essay for Sight & Sound, ‘How the French birthed film nor’. For more on Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s practice, see below.
Posted slightly late, here’s my latest list of links to interesting articles and videos. As usual, many of these have been highlighted on Twitter and a few have been kindly sent to me as recommendations. The list appears three days before the US Presidential election and in the midst of a peculiarly febrile time in British politics, as the first couple of links indicate.
Britain stands on the verge of a great unravelling with untold consequences for its economy, society, place in the world, and its people’s souls. The standard must be raised: fire must be returned. We need to make the case for a reimagined Britain and its membership of the EU. We say not what we are against, but what we stand for. We want our country back. And we want it now.
• Disciples of distrust: in a powerful piece for New York Review of Books Garry Wills asks what has caused the crisis of ‘the shuddering distrust of every kind of authority—a contempt for the whole political system’; his answer, encompassing both Brexit and the Donald:
What has caused this bitter disillusion? It is the burrowing and undermining infection of the Iraq war—the longest in our history, one that keeps upsetting order abroad and at home. The war’s many costs—not just in lives and money but in psychic and political damage—remain only half-visible in America, as hidden as the returning coffins that could not be photographed for years.
To round off a few days devoted to the 80th anniversary of the start of the BBC television service from Alexandra Palace, here’s how the BBC marked the 40th anniversary. This lavish programme, produced by Bruce Norman, includes archive material, interviews with many of the pioneers, a reconstruction of Baird’s ‘flying spot’ camera and modest dramatisations. It’s a fascinating document, and for my money stands up remarkably well.
Having yesterday highlighted Shakespeare on television between the wars, today’s short post spotlights a Media History seminar on Tuesday when I’m sharing the spotlight with my colleague Dr Amanda Wrigley. The event is a contribution to an interdisciplinary research seminar series at the University of London’s Institute of English Studies and Institute of Historical Research. The seminar starts at 6pm at Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU. Everyone is welcome.
My topic of the arts on television before World War Two is one that I’ve explored a little on this blog in the past, including here. And the richness of the archive material makes me hope that I can find time and resource to research it in much more depth in the future. In the meantime, below is my title and abstract for Tuesday. read more »
I was delighted last week to receive a copy of the new Shakespeare Survey volume, no 69, published by Cambridge University Press. This is an annual collection of Shakespeare scholarship edited by Peter Holland – and for this themed issue about Shakespeare and Rome, also by Emma Smith. Nestled towards the back of a hefty volume is my article ‘An Intimate and Intermedial Form: Early Television Shakespeare from the BBC, 1937-1939’..
The article is developed from a paper that I gave at a 2014 conference, organised by Kingston University and The Rose Theatre, focussed on David Garrick and Shakespeare, but I broadened it out from that discussion of a 1939 television production of Garrick’s version of The Taming of the Shrew. As a taster of the essay, I reproduce its opening below – for the rest, can I recommend you access the volume through a library or via an online subscription, as the book is priced at an unaffordable level in the way that academic publications now seem fated to be. read more »
