6th May 2016
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 of John 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 »
5th May 2016
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 »
4th May 2016
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).
Quiet Cinematography- Floating Weeds (1959) from The Royal Ocean Film Society on Vimeo. read more »
3rd May 2016
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 »
2nd May 2016
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 »
1st May 2016
The usual weekly selection of links to things I have found interesting to read and to watch over the past seven days.
• The Kennedy films of Robert Drew & Associates – capturing the Kennedys: it’s great news that The Criterion Collection in the States have just released a DVD set of four key verité films from Drew Associates made in the early 1960s, including Primary, 1960 (above). Here, Thom Powers celebrates their achievement; at Criterion online there is also a complementary (and fascinating) photo-feature by Issa Clubb. read more »
30th April 2016
Whisper it softly but the best drama on American television – or should that be television tout court? – is about to come to an end. Depending on quite how far along you are on More4 this side of the Atlantic, there are just 7 or 8 episodes left of the seventh season of The Good Wife. They’ve just shot the final show and running major spoiler avoidance will be essential next Sunday, 8 May, when that airs in the States. Show after show, for 22 weeks a year, The Good Wife has delivered smart, sexy, compelling, provocative, involving, moving, snatched-from-the-headlines, and did-I-say-sexy, stories. read more »
29th April 2016
I purchased my first artwork in, I believe, 1972. I’m not talking here about an Athena poster, but rather a print that I could just about imagine encountering in what was then London’s only Tate Gallery. Not that I dared enter a fancy Cork Street emporium; rather this artwork came by post, ordered from a Habitat catalogue and arriving rolled up in a sturdy cardboard tube. It cost just a few pounds, although I recall that whatever the price it felt like a fortune to me. I don’t remember its name, nor even exactly what it looked like, but I am certain that the artist was Richard Smith, who died recently at the age of 84. read more »
28th April 2016
If you are thinking of coming to the ‘From Stage to Screen’ workshop in Nottingham on Saturday, the details of which I posted yesterday, then the perfect prep for this would be to watch the 2013 RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon recording of Gregory Doran’s production of Richard II with David Tennant. But of course there’s absolutely no need to have a ticket for the workshop. As part of the BBC-British Council initiative Shakespeare Lives, the recording is freely available online for the next six months – and is really something of a treat. (Am I allowed to say that, since I produced it?) read more »
27th April 2016
I’m very much looking forward to this workshop on Saturday in Nottingham. The event is free but do please register online if you would like to attend – there are just a few places left. I hope there will be plenty of time for exploring ideas together, and I’ll write up a note about the discussions early next week. The image, of course, is of David Tennant and Mariah Gale in our 2009 BBC television film of Gregory Doran’s production of Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company. read more »
