With my colleague Dr Irene Morra from Cardiff University, I am working on a major international, interdisciplinary academic conference to be held at Senate House next June. ‘Britain, Canada, and the Arts: Cultural Exchange as Post-war Renewal’ will coincide with the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, and we have begun to send out the Call for Papers, which I am happy to reproduce here. Do please consider submitting an abstract if you feel you have a contribution to make to the event – or do be in touch with other thoughts about what we think is a completely fascinating, and largely unexplored, topic. read more »
Last weekend our friend Dr Billy Smart circulated by e-mail to a handful of colleagues a touching tale of a second-hand book. Billy was Research Officer for the excellent and just-completed research project The History of Forgotten Television Drama in the UK at Royal Holloway University of London. I liked the story so much that I asked if I could feature it on the blog, and Billy kindly agreed.
Dr Billy Smart writes: An unremarkable envelope comes through my door this morning, but one that sets off a chain of reflections about publishing, posterity and the value of a play as a commodity. read more »
As I fly back to the UK through multiple Sunday timezones, here are links to articles and videos that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as usual 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.
Or, a post in three chapters. I have been in Brisbane for just about a week now, and I think it’s fair to say that, despite the weather having been so-so, I’m a little bit in love with the city. Built on either side of the Brisbane river, it feels human and humane. I’m a big fan of the sweeping riverside paths that divide bikeways from pedestrians. And I’m enormously enthusiastic about the vaporetto-like council-operated CityCat water buses that speed from landing stage to landing stage. Plus, there’s free wi-fi right across downtown. I was invited here by the University of Queensland, and that’s the focus of chapter 2 below, followed by a strange – and I hope entertaining – tale of my day off yesterday in chapter 3. But first, a mention of the city’s two exceptional art galleries. read more »
Among many other excellent activities, my friend and colleague Luke McKernan, who is Lead Curator, News and Moving Image at the British Library, curates the invaluable Picturegoing website. As the site succinctly explains, ‘Picturegoing is an ongoing survey reproducing eyewitness testimony of viewing pictures, from the seventeenth century to the present day.’
Many of the entries, which are drawn from diaries, letters, memoirs and more, feature people bearing witness to watching films. But from time to time Luke unearths a fragment written by someone who has just watched television. As he has with his most recent post, ‘”Gerald Cock Presents” – Review of Television Programmes’, written by Kenneth Baily and published in The Era on 14 October 1936. Reading it, I felt much as I imagine a historian of the early modern world might feel when generously offered an unknown incunabulum. Suddenly and excitingly, a fragment of the past was illuminated for the first time. read more »
Posted from down under in Brisbane (and with little sense of what timezone I’m in – hence the change of title), today’s list of links points to articles that I have found interesting or stimulating over the past seven days. Thanks as usual 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.
• Short cuts: also, on the architecture and the future (at least as it was in 1969), this is Jonathan Meades in the latest LRB…
• Estuarial towns are an architectural utopia, says Jonathan Meades: … and in the current Spectator, Meades on Medway modernism and more; the image above is one of the Maunsell Forts at Red Sands near Whitstable; the Forts were built during World War Two as mountings for anti-aircraft guns.
If you’re even a semi-regular reader of this blog you will know that I am fascinated by early television, and especially by television before World War Two. What a delight then to discover online an open access issue of the Journal of e-Media Studies from Dartmouth College dedicated to ‘Early Television Methodologies’. As editor Doron Galili explains,
Rather than defining “early television” strictly chronologically, the issue takes a page from the book of early cinema studies and considers “early” as the period in television history that preceded the establishment, codification, and standardization of what became the dominant media practices of broadcast television.
After yesterday’s enthusiasm for The British Library at Turner Contemporary, here’s one more post from our day trip to Margate. After lunch and an ice cream we walked back along the front and turned down into Dreamland. Recently reopened, about which more below, this amusement park with a wooden roller coaster known as the Scenic Railway (currently closed for maintenance) welcomed its first visitors in 1921, with the iconic moderne front and cinema (currently shrouded in scaffolding) being completed in 1935. (There’s a useful if rather relentlessly upbeat history here.)
I came here as a kid on days out in the 1960s and in – I think – 1970 I saw my first rock concert in the Ballroom. That night the band was Deep Purple, soon to be followed by King Crimson and Emerson Lake and Palmer. But probably my strongest sense of Dreamland now comes courtesy of Lindsay Anderson’s 12-minute film O Dreamland that he shot there in 1953 but which was edited later and first shown in 1956, and from which this is a framegrab:
To Margate for the Illuminations summer outing. Our plan was a high speed train to the seaside, a touch of high culture at Turner Contemporary, a good lunch, a touch of low culture at Dreamland, and a high speed train home. The train out was delayed, we had a great time at the gallery, the fish and fine wine at Buoy and Oyster were terrific, Dreamland was dismally tacky, and the train back was delayed too. A good time was most definitely had by all six of us.
[the curators] have thought very deeply about every aspect of the circle, from its irreducible beauty to its comforting warmth and its fierce self-containment. Every one of the works here, and there are nearly 200 paintings, drawings, videos, performances pieces and sculptures, has its own fascination but suggests some new idea about circles.
Paintings glimpsed in movies are often fascinating, and invariably so when they exhibit modernist tendencies. Take a look at the painting below that is granted just two seconds or so in the British Gothic melodrama Madness of the Heart, 1949 (a detail of the poster is featured above). On the left there is what is clearly meant to be a Picasso-like young woman, and to the right is a flower that, along with the lower realm of the picture, we might imagine as refugees from a Matisse canvas of the 1920s. The centre is a good deal more indistinct, blurry even, but that’s most certainly an eye right in the middle.
In the plot of the film the painting is entirely marginal. In a seaside French town our heroine Lydia (Margaret Lockwood) has just visited the local doctor, for a reason that we don’t yet know. Her wealthy and impossibly romantic husband Paul (Paul Dupuis) is away on business and she is invited to have a drink with slacker Max (David Hutcheson), a painter and an almost entirely peripheral character. Lydia asks Max what he’s been working on, and he holds up the painting to the camera as he says, ‘It’s a view of the harbour.’ There’s a beat before he continues with a chuckle, ‘At least, I think it’s a view of the harbour.’ All of which means nothing to Lydia, since a rare and apparently incurable disease has robbed her of her sight.
I want to argue that the painting, which makes no other appearance, opens up fascinatingly complex aspects of a film that has almost no place in conventional histories of British cinema. Robert Murphy, for example, in his authoritative Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in British Cinema, 1939-1948 dismisses Madness of the Heart in a single phrase as a ‘soggy melodrama’. But as I hope to show it’s a great deal more interesting than that. read more »
