So just what seems to be the problem? We have a shiny new web site which, while far from perfect, is a big step on from what was here before. While we were working on how to structure the new site I argued strongly for keeping this blog somewhere near the centre. But now the blog is here I’m not completely certain what or how to post. There are many things I want to share and comment on, and (but?) I do that on Twitter all the time. Then there are things that I want to reflect on at length, had I but world enough and time. Even so, I seem to find time to do that in occasional essays and articles. But so far, apart from faltering steps towards re-starting Sunday links, I am neither sharing nor commenting nor reflecting here with any consistency. As a songsmith who never seemed to suffer from writer’s block once wrote, ‘Why an’ what’s the reason for?’*
• Lost in Trumplandia: the fascination remains despite the horror, the horror, so here’s a very good piece for New Republic by Patricia Lockwood, with some fine photographs by Mark Abramson.
• Julius Caesar, 1908: it’s frustrating that that BFIPlayer has entirely superseded the BFI posting films to Youtube, not least because it prevents embedding, but here is a link to a wonderful silent Vitagraph condensation of Shakespeare’s play.
• Rétrospective Raoul Ruiz: La Cinémathèque française has launched a great tribute to the late much-lamented director (until 30 May), and even if you can’t get to Paris for that, the trailer for it is a thing of beauty.
Just released on DVD and Blu-ray by BFI Publishing are two sets of dramatised biographies made by Ken Russell at the BBC in the 1960s. The Great Composers contains Elgar (1962), The Debussy Film (1965) and Delius: Song of Summer (1968), while The Great Passions features Always on Sunday (1965), about the painter Henri Rousseau, Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World (1966) and Dante’s Inferno (1967), featuring Oliver Reed (above) as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The appearance of these films, several of which have not been available on home video before, is hugely welcome, since they are both enormously enjoyable (even if I have reservations about aspects of them) and key documents of British television and pop culture in the 1960s. read more »
A time there was when very Sunday morning I contributed a list of reading and viewing that I had found interesting during the previous week. To mark this blog rising once again from decrepitude, here is a selection for today. read more »
One of the most interesting strands of moving image criticism today is the the fast-developing form of the short audio-visual essay. Made possible by the availability of films on DVD and as downloads, by desktop editing systems, by “fair use” copyright provisions as long as the result is for criticism and study, and by film scholars increasingly adept at the techniques of those they study, these essays can be rich and resonant. As is today’s example: Visconti: Art and Ambiguity, made by Pasquale Iannone, a specialist in Italian cinema, for the US-based arthouse streaming service Fandor.
One of the exhibitions in London that I am most looking forward to is the Paul Strand retrospective that has just opened at the V&A (until 3 July). Subtitled ‘Film and Photography for the 20th Century’, the show was organised in 2014 by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and features some 200 prints and other objects from the photographer’s long career working around the world. As with so many exhibitions now, a wealth of background information and related material is available online, from the V&A and from many other sources. So here is a selection of readings and viewings as a kind of Strand 101 course to prepare for a visit to South Kensington.
After far too long, as you can now see, we have finally re-launched our website. The process has involved a tricky transition from a previous developer and a previous CMS. So now we are faced with how best to use this new blog, and whether we need to transition to a new approach. I intend to offer some thoughts about that over the holiday weekend, but just a way of easing myself back into contributions – which I intend to be as regular as I can make them – here are some links to stuff that has engaged me over the past week. read more »
Tonight at 8pm Sky Arts premieres our latest contribution to the Hot Ticket strand, Elizabeth, which is a co-production with the Royal Opera House. If I can be immodest for a moment, it is a truly gorgeous dance performance with Carlos Acosta and Zenaida Yanowsky, beautifully choreographed by Will Tuckett and expertly transferred to the screen by Ross MacGibbon. Created by Will Tuckett with playwright and librettist Alasdair Middleton (who co-directed for the stage), Elizabethwas presented in the Linbury studio theatre last month, and tonight’s recording was shot during one of the scheduled performances. This taping was then enhanced with a further day’s shoot without an audience.
As Will Tuckett has explained, ‘Elizabeth’s love of dance, the arts and her quick-witted, wicked sense of humour are all evident in her own writing… I felt that dance could provide another take on how these elements and this extraordinary woman could be viewed’. Middleton’s script draws on Elizabeth’s writings and those of her contemporaries, among them Sir Walter Raleigh, François, Duc d’Anjou, and Robert Devereux. The commissioned score by Martin Yates, written for cello and baritone in a modern reimagining of a typical Tudor-period ensemble, re-creates the structures and harmonies of music by the great Elizabethan composers, including John Dowland, Thomas Tallis and Thomas Morley.
Elizabeth was created in 2013 for a gala performance at the Old Royal Naval College’s Painted Hall in Greenwich, birthplace of its illustrious subject. It is revived now in 2016 as the Royal Opera House’s first contribution to the worldwide celebrations of Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary, a tribute to the political and cultural atmosphere that gave rise to Shakespeare’s genius. Elizabeth is the final show in the Linbury Studio Theatre before it closes for extensive renovation as part of the Open Up project – again highly suitable, given the many works Tuckett has created over the Linbury’s history. And finally, last but certainly not least, this run of Elizabeth marks the final time Carlos Acosta will perform with The Royal Ballet as Principal Guest Artist, as he retires from ballet at the end of the Season.
Elizabeth is someone that Yanowsky was born to play. As anyone who has caught her grand nymph in Sylvia or splendidly psychotic pianist in The Lesson will testify, she is particularly adept at parts that demand an intelligent, imperious, even slightly scary authority. Her physical loftiness helps, too…
Acosta looks spiffing in the various waistcoats that Fullerton gives him. If he struggles to differentiate except in pretty broad brushstrokes between Elizabeth’s longtime favourite Robert Dudley, the lusty François, duc d’Anjou, and the ultimately seditious Earl of Essex, some of the blame here must also go to Tuckett. But Tuckett’s steps do allow Acosta to show off plenty of physical bravura, and his Walter Raleigh is utterly hilarious. This ridiculous, libidinous, pelvis-thrusting buccaneer affectionately channels the late Rik Mayall’s wonderful Lord Flashheart (from the Elizabethan-set second series of Blackadder), and provides welcome light relief.
As a choreographer, Will Tuckett has always been pleasingly difficult to pigeonhole. From the rambunctious surrealism of Mr Bear Squash–You-All-Flat to the sleazy glitter of The Soldier’s Tale, Tuckett almost never repeats himself. His latest piece, Elizabeth, is true to form: a polished, period tapestry of dance, music, song and text that looks like nothing else he’s made…
Middleton has assembled a fascinating collage of voices – some of them reverent, some gossipy, some antagonistic – that present the story of Elizabeth’s reign from an illuminating range of perspectives. The actors circle tightly around Yanowsky, as she reacts with intimate, humorous or fearful emotion to their different tones of voice, giving us a strikingly visceral sense of the tightrope Elizabeth walked in maintaining her crown. Elegantly performed and intelligently crafted, this is dance theatre of quiet but passionate depth.
Perhaps the best, and certainly the most exciting, television I’ve seen since the start of the year was Grease: Live! screened last week on ITV2. This FOX TV show, which had been truly live in the States the previous Sunday, was reprised here “as live”, and even as a recording it made close-to-perfect television. Frustratingly, it does not appear to be available via ITV’s catch-up service, but in the States at least there’s to be a DVD in March. Last week, too, a host of clips seemed to be legally available through Youtube, but these have now been geo-blocked, so you have to go to round-ups like this to get a sense of the show.
For the end of 2015, when this blog has been less than it should have been, and for the start of 2016, when we intend it to be more than it has been, we offer five short lists of five cultural highlights from the past year. Each of the five of us at Illuminations is contributing five things, whether movies, television series, books, exhibitions or whatever, that have meant something significant to us during the year. The final choice isLouise Machin‘s, again offered in no particular order.
Depicting the endless grind of Mumbai slum life, this is a beautifully spirited adaptation by David Hare of Katherine Boo’s award-winning book, starring Meera Syal and Shane Zaza amongst others. The Annawadi slum is situated right alongside the city’s international airport and operates as a kind of chaotic underworld where young scavengers survive by stealing, picking through and sorting the detritus from the airport and hotels nearby. Centred on a violent dispute within the slum, David Hare’s play reveals an extraordinary story, mixed with hope and despair, in particular of the resilience of the Muslim family, the Husains, in the face of disaster. The play gets away from sentimentalising slum life and focuses beautifully on the possibility of goodness in a world of desperate deprivation.
