I fell well short this past week of my intention to post more often than every Sunday, but I shall do better next. Meanwhile, here is today’s list of links to interesting and surprising stuff from the past week.
After a really splendid week walking in Italy (thanks to Inntravel and their itinerary A Stroll Through History), it’s back to a busy week, starting with Simon Rattle on Sky Arts tonight.
Monday
Tonight at 9pm sees the premiere of our new Sky Arts programme, Simon Rattle conducts The Seasons. Just exactly a month ago at London’s Barbican Centre we recorded the great conductor with the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Chorus performing Haydn’s 1801 oratorio The Seasons. The soloists are soprano Monika Eder, baritone Florian Boesch and tenorAndrew Staples, who was a late replacement for the indisposed John Mark Ainsley. The resulting 140-minute programme, which is a co-production with the LSO, features the full work, together with introductory comments by Simon Rattle between each of the four sections. Rhodri Huw directs the screen version with his invariable flair and precision, and Lucie Conrad is our producer. read more »
Back from a week’s walking in Italy, I am happy to propose today’s links to stuff that I have found interesting and useful over the past week; I’ll contribute some additional ones later today.
• Remembering John Krish, 1923-2016: touching tributes from three BFI staffers to a singular filmmaker (above in a 2003 photograph by Peter Everard Smith) who has died, plus some great clips.
Just over a couple of years ago Illuminations worked with the Shakespearean London Theatres research project (ShaLT) to produce a clutch of performance videos and interviews about early modern theatre. One of these, which is embedded below, is concerned the playwright John Lyly, who wrote a clutch of brilliant comedies in the 1580s and early 1590s just before the first stagings of Shakespeare’s plays. Dr Andy Kesson, author ofJohn Lyly and Early Modern Authorship, is one of those interviewed in the film, and he is now leading his own research project, Before Shakespeare, about the beginnings of London’s commercial theatre between 1565 and 1595. And with timing that could be considered foolhardy or a bold statement of intent, given how it has been all-but impossible recently to ignore Will, Before Shakespeare has just launched its website and blog. read more »
Picking up the theme from Monday’s post, here’s another wonderful glimpse of early television, albeit this time in the United States. The embedded film below comes courtesy of the great and glorious Prelinger Archives which offers online some 6,000 educational and corporate films, and home movies. These are entirely free to access and to re-use, and collectively are a wonderful resource. Some sense of what is on offer and the background to the collection is in this post by Colin Marshall at Open Culture. For today, here’s the 12-minute Tomorrow Television (or it might be Television Tomorrow), made for American servicemen and women in, probably, early 1945. read more »
Andrew Saladino’s video essay about the cinematography in Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds, 1959, isn’t the most innovative or the most profound or the most theoretically rigorous analysis of this kind. But it is beautifully assembled, is genuinely informative with an engaging tone, and it highlights both verbally and visually elements of great and glorious beauty. Open your eyes… (and for more about Ozu, pictured above, and the film, see the links below).
So which magazines do you access online and which do you (still) read as print? TLS and London Review of Books still drop through my letterbox every week and fortnight respectively, and I find something pleasingly material about both. I can carry them around easily, I can clip from them easily and I can share articles as pieces of paper. So I’m not looking to change my subscription to either anytime soon. The New Yorker I get in its digital edition, in large part because the print one used to arrive days or even weeks after it was published across the Atlantic. Ditto New York Review of Books, and with this on my iPad I especially like the way I can toggle between a page view that replicates the print version and a text view that is easy to read. read more »
Among the books that I collect and cherish are early publications about television. Anything from before about 1960 qualifies as ‘early’, but volumes from the 1930s and 1940s are especially interesting. So I was particularly pleased on a visit to Whitstable on Sunday to purchase for just £4.95 a compact (and to me previously unknown) guide titled Television Behind the Scenes. The author of this 1948 introduction is John K. Newnham, a movie critic who wrote for Film Weekly and Picturegoer, and it was published by Convoy Publications, the address of which is given rather wonderfully as North Circular Road, Neasden, N.W.10. The 103-page book comprises twelve chapters from ‘So This is Television’ to a (very useful) ‘Who’s Who in Television’, with short essays devoted to ‘The Announcers’, ‘The Producers’, ‘Outside Broadcasts’ and ‘The Viewer’. And, thrillingly, there are 21 photographic illustrations, several of which I reproduce here. read more »
