Links to interesting stuff that I have discovered over the past week. A day late, I fear, in part accounted for by the preparations for the RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcast of Hamlet on Wednesday.
• A visit to the nitrate picture show: Hillary Weston for The Criterion Collection reports from a ‘glorious weekend’ at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York.
So I logged on to Facebook today and this is what I found…
34th anniversary! How can that be? What I think must be the case is that we incorporated Illuminations Television Ltd 34 years ago. My then-colleague Geoff Dunlop and I bought for a few pounds a company off the shelf – which as I recall was a bankrupt double glazing provider – and changed the name and the articles of association. And suddenly we owned an independent production company. We didn’t have an office, we didn’t have any commissions, and we didn’t have much sense of what being independent producers entailed. But then nobody did back then. This was before Channel 4 had gone on air, and like lots of others we recognised an opportunity and took a punt. 34 years ago today! read more »
Shakespeare Live! From the RSC is now available as a Region 2 DVD. Here it is on display today in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-uopn-Avon. Which is where it was broadcast from on 23 April. That is all.
Links from the past week for this holiday weekend.
• Black Dog: this is terrific – frames (one of which is above) from comic book artist and filmmaker Dave McKean’s graphic-novel biography of painter Paul Nash, created as part of the first world war centenary art project 14-18 Now; courtesy of the Guardian.
• The high times and hard fall of Carl Laemmle Jr.: a Hollywood tragedy, beautifully told by Farran Smith Nehme for Film Comment, linked to this great-looking MoMA season; Laemmle was undone by the spiralling budget on the 1936 Show Boat from which this comes – Helen Morgan (Julie) with ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’… beautiful and bizarre (see Irene Dunne shimmy!), and with the racial stereotypes from the time.
Through yesterday I posted some thoughts from The Live Cinema Conference 2016 at King’s College London. At the end of the day we retired for the traditional post-discussion drinks (even if some were surprised that an event with a comparatively high ticket cost rolled out a cash bar). As we were standing around musing and moaning, we were interrupted by the appearance of a KCL alumnus who it transpired was a prominent barrister in the early 1960s. And so began a promenade drama that led us into an encore screening of NT Live’s recent broadcast of Hangmen. Additional accompaniments were to include both some further dramatic pieces and an introduction to ‘edible cinema’. I have to admit that, while I found elements of this engaging, it didn’t really deliver for me, and at the interval I mentally made my excuses and left. I was tired, in part after a slightly disappointing day that ultimately I decided was grounded in a category error. Of which more below. read more »
To King’s College London today for The Live Cinema Conference 2016. This intriguing event intends to explore the full range of live cinema today including ‘the production, delivery and attendance of outdoor screenings, drive-ins, sing-a-longs, sensory augmentations, fully immersive experiences and event-led distribution, spanning the independent to the mainstream.’ So not just the broadcasting of theatre in cinemas, which of course is my particular interest and which will be an element in the day’s focus. And then there’s a special presentation of the recent NT Live presentation of Hangmen (above) this evening for which we are promised:
a unique fusion of performance, film and food in a playful re-play of the play. For the first time, the forms and aesthetics of ‘event’ cinema, ‘live’ cinema and promenade theatre are united in a hybrid, multi-layered, immersive and sensory experience, which promises to delight, surprise and enthrall (sic) the audience.
The full programme of today’s event is here. In the spirit of the occasion – and assuming I can secure a reasonable wi-fi connection, I’m going to try live blogging with occasional posts through the day. So check back later and/or follow me on Twitter @illuminations with #LCCUK16.
Last Thursday I was at the British Library for a fascinating conference titled Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures and the BBC (the conference programme is here, along with abstracts and biographies). Organised by my University of Westminster colleagues Amanda Wrigley and Aasiya Lodhi, a number of really strong papers explored aspects of the modernist encounters between radio and literature in the mid-20th century. An especial highlight was the keynote by Todd Avery from UMass Lowell, who developed the ground-breaking arguments of his book Radio Modernism by exploring the legacy in this context of Walter Pater and aestheticism. And at the end of the day we were treated to a ‘listening’ of Louis MacNeice’s radio feature Portrait of Athens, 1951. read more »
I think I met the great graphic designer David King, who has died, just once. Yet he shaped my visual imagination and gave form to the fight that defined my first years as a writer. I think I said hello to him when he came to the Islington offices of City Limits in the autumn of 1981. City Limits was the weekly guide that the majority of the staff of Time Out set up after a bitter dispute earlier that year. We were protecting the principle that everyone on the magazine, from receptionist to editor, was paid the same salary. Strange as this may seem, it felt important to us then, and it remains important to me, even if now it seems more utopian than realisable. But it had been achieved and, in the face of opposition from Time Out‘s owner, we were determined to keep it alive. So we begged and borrowed enough money to start a rival and asked David King to design it for us. read more »
The best book that I read on holiday recently was a novel first published in 1963. My overwhelming feeling on finishing The Expendable Man was that both it and its author, Dorothy B. Hughes, deserve to be far better-known than, at least in Britain, they are. In a way, The Expendable Man is a noir novel, and certainly there’s a murder and a mystery and a manhunt. But the book is also a remarkable study of social attitudes in America, an exploration of race and of sex and of class in the early ’60s. This was the moment when John F Kennedy’s progressive administration had begun to make an impact but when ingrained prejudices were still powerful – as they remain today in many parts of the United States. Which is part of why The Expendable Man feels so contemporary. read more »
Something is happening here, with Donald Trump, and no-one really knows what it is. These are four important and truly, truly scary Stateside articles that begin to make sense of it:
The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force… It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.
