The world’s first regular television service started 80 years ago today, when BBC Television began daily transmissions from Alexandra Palace (above is AP’s blue plaque). To mark the date, at 9pm tonight BBC Four broadcast Television’s Opening Night: How the Box was Born, and I live-blogged the evening. For the advance information on the programme, scroll to 6.15pm, and then read up through the evening as I linked to other resources and, after 9pm, offered reactions to the programme.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently unveiled an exciting, extraordinary and exemplary archival project, ‘Exhibition history’, that is putting online for free and unrestricted access thousands and thousands of installation photographs, press releases and – most remarkable of all – hundreds of out-of-print catalogues. I have picked three initial favourites below, but it’s important to recognise just how astonishing an achievement this is – and how it makes available unparalleled access to the history of one of the world’s great cultural organisations. Perhaps Tate might take a look?
The digital archive project will include almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, most never previously available online, along with the pages of 800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, documents related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989. (The project, supported by the Leon Levy Foundation, will continue to add documents from more recent years and also plans to add archives from the museum’s film and performance departments.)
Yesterday’s Observer carried a loving profile by Kate Kellaway of the writer John Berger. Berger’s 90th birthday is this coming Saturday, and Kate Kellaway catches something of the achievement and significance of his life when she writes:
Critic, novelist, poet, dramatist, artist, commentator – and, above all, storyteller – Berger was described by Susan Sontag as peerless in his ability to make “attentiveness to the sensual world” meet “imperatives of conscience”. His book Ways of Seeing, and the 1972 BBC television series based on it, changed the way at least two generations responded to art. And his writing since then – especially about migration – has changed the way many of us see the world.
Another fortnight and another missed Sunday links last weekend. Apologies, but I hope today’s list of articles and videos that I’ve found interesting recently goes some way to making amends. As usual, many of these have been highlighted on Twitter and a few have been kindly sent to me as recommendations, but I don’t quite have the energy (nor, I suspect, you the interest) to feature each person by name. We only have today and next Sunday before the US Presidential election, although I doubt that remarkable articles like the first couple I feature here will no longer be published – in fact, probably quite the reverse.
• Final days: some jaw-dropping stuff in Gabriel Sherman’s report for New York from inside the Trump campaign.
• A closer look at debate make-up: terrific analysis by Alice Bolin for Racked of the meanings of make-up at the Presidential debates this year and before.
• Home Office rules: the London Review of Books has published Will Davies’ brilliant analysis of the state of things this side of the Atlantic – I recommended this before and can only do so, with even more urgency, again.
The Hollow Crown is the collective title of the seven films drawn from Shakespeare’s History plays from Richard II to Richard III that played on BBC Two in 2012 and earlier this year. But long before Benedict Cumberbatch gave us his Gloucester there was another version of The Hollow Crown that was first seen on the stage and was then adapted for the screen. And it was a 16mm print of the latter that I viewed on a trusty Steenbeck earlier this week. ThisHollow Crown began life as a Royal Shakespeare Company entertainment intended as a one-off performance at the Stratford Poetry Festival in the summer of 1960, although it was still doing service for the company 45 years later. Shot in 1964, the screen version will have a place in the book I’m researching about adaptations of RSC productions. But here’s a preliminary response to a film that stands up remarkably well today. read more »
I have had a hugely enjoyable morning viewing a 16mm combined optical print on a 4 plate Steenbeck flat bed. The substance of what I watched must wait for a future post, since here I want simply to celebrate the pleasure provided by the wonderful Steenbeck. A time there was when these editing tables were ubiquitous, and of course I recognise that my jouissance came with a a double shot of nostalgia. Such, however, is the age profile of those making television today, that I wager the majority of people in production now have no sense whatever of what I’m talking about. Certainly most of them will not have had the satisfactions of lacing up a print, locking sprocket holes onto the triangular teeth, hearing the nylon rollers click crisply into place, and easing the speed controller into ‘forward’ so as to prompt the hum of the spinning prism and, finally, to see a sequence of tiny still images spring into life. read more »
My weekly offering of links to articles and videos that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. The US election continues to prompt much exceptional written journalism, and I lead with several pieces related to this. Thanks, as always, to those who have pointed me towards some of them, via Twitter and in other ways, and apologies for the absence of appropriate name-checks.
• How Trump took hate groups mainstream: very fine Mother Jones journalism by Sarah Posner and David Neivert about the candidate’s connection with far-right extremists.
These photos expose the artifice and the political veneer, holding up the process and candidates to an unprecedented level of inspection, critique, and in some cases, a reciprocal dose of hostility. Here are seven photos that, if not for the unusual tone and atmosphere of this campaign, may not have been published.
To BFI Southbank for the London Film Festival’s Archive Gala screening of The Informer. Produced in 1929 during the transitional period when the industry was changing from silent film to sound, this intense tale of love, friendship and betrayal was made both with crude dialogue and – with subtly different shots – without. But as BFI curator Bryony Dixon demonstrated with extracts beforehand, the sound recording at the time was crude and the accents of a European cast uncertain. Nor, as this triumphant screening with a newly commissioned score demonstrated, does the film really require speech. A few inter-titles help the story along but The Informer is supremely and gorgeously visual – as well as being a rattling good yarn. read more »
Tonight RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcasts Gregory Doran’s production of King Lear with Antony Sher in the title role. If we can achieve something of what we got in the second camera rehearsal yesterday, then I think it will be very special – go here to find cinemas near you that are screening it.
Working on this production made me curious about the first full-length British screen version of the play, which was the live transmission by BBC Television in 1948. Sadly, we have no archive copy of this broadcast and nor do there seem to have been any reviews, but there are a few written and photographic traces, which I have started to gather here. read more »
On Wednesday this week RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcasts Gregory Doran’s production of King Lear to cinemas across Britain. As preparation for this, my work as producer has meant that I’ve watched the staging half a dozen times now – and on each occasion it seems to me richer and deeper and more moving. Antony Sher plays the king and gives, to my mind, a fiercely intelligent, subtly complex performance that I feel privileged to be seeing at close quarters. Complementing him is an exceptional cast including David Troughton, Antony Byrne, Paapa Essiedu and Natalie Simpson. And the production is strikingly visual too, with Niki Turner’s vivid, often sumptuous design and Tim Mitchell’s accomplished lighting. If you can book a ticket for Wednesday I don’t think you’ll regret it.
We’re opening the broadcast with a brief montage of photographs of distinguished actors who have played Lear at Stratford, beginning with John Gielgud in 1950. And as background to all of this I have been reading Jonathan Croall’s terrific recent book for The Arden Shakespeare, Performing King Lear: From Gielgud to Russell Beale. (I should note I’m also working on a book for Arden.) read more »
