A time there was when I used to post here regularly, including on each Sunday a host of links. In recent months I have fallen out of the habit. You’ve been so busy with other things, I tell myself. You’ve been writing in so many other contexts, I use as an excuse. But I know that @Illuminations has taken much of my focus, and my recommendations tend to go there rather than here. At the same time I like the relative (with much stress) permanence of a blog, when compared with the total transience of Twitter. So I am going to try a different tack, and to post frequently – and every day if I can – just a trio of things that have engaged me or interested or infuriated me. Sometimes they will be linked, oftentimes they won’t. Make of them what you will.
Unlikely as it may seem, read of the week may be Reeves Wiedeman’s article for Popular Mechanics about how 300,000+ copies of The New York Times reach the streets every day. Below is a selection of other pieces to engage me over the past week, with the usual thanks and apologies to those I follow on Twitter and others who alerted me to some of them.
• My own life: Oliver Sachs on learning that he has terminal cancer, from The New York Times (the leadline is courtesy of David Hume):
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. read more »
Interesting things from the past week and more, with sincere thanks as well as apologies to those who pointed me towards some of them, and who I have failed to acknowledge below.
Here’s a piece I wrote for the new issue of Picturehouse Recommends about the forthcoming cinema broadcasts of the RSC’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won on, respectively 11 February and 4 March. Picturehouse Recommends can be found at Picturehouse cinemas and is mailed to members. (And I freelance as Director, Screen Productions, for the RSC and produce the cinema broadcast.)
After the forthcoming Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema showings of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won in February and March, the Royal Shakespeare Company will be one-sixth of the way through their plan to screen all 36 of the Shakespeare plays included in the famous 1623 edition known as the First Folio.
Except that not one of the two hundred-plus surviving copies of that most precious of books features a play called Love’s Labour’s Won. Mentioned in a 1598 survey of English literature and listed by a bookseller in 1603, Love’s Labour’s Won is the most famous of the many ‘lost’ plays from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. No text with this title has ever been found, but RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran is among those tantalised by the idea of a play that might be the sequel to the sparkling youthful comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost. read more »
Let us now praise MoMA. Or more specifically, a recent website from New York’s Museum of Modern Art that complements – or perhaps we should should say constitutes – an exhibition of modern photographs from the Thomas Walther collection. The interactive display is simply among the very best online presentations of historical images that I’ve encountered. At its core are 341 photographs made between 1909 and 1949 that exemplify many of the key strands of modernist image-making sometimes bundled together as the New Vision.
In the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon is a truly splendid Royal Shakespeare Company production of Thomas Dekker’s 1599 play The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Director Phillip Breen, a spirited cast led by David Troughton and the RSC’s costume department have done the text proud, and Dekker’s early ‘city comedy’ emerges as a fascinating text about class and sexual power and the ruins of war. It runs until early March and is well worth the trip; the ‘onstage trailer’ with audience vox pops below gives a small sense of the production’s pleasures. (I should admit that I work as a freelance producer and consultant for the RSC; our next RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcast is of Love’s Labour’s Lost next Wednesday, 11 February.)
Seeing the production renewed my interest in the early television presentation from Alexandra Palace which was broadcast on the evening of Sunday 11 December 1938. No recording exists, of course (the first plays we have are from 1953), no do there seem to be reviews of the television broadcast, but there are traces of other documentation, including a Radio Times billing with the photograph above. Describing the play as ‘a pleasant comedy of the gentle craft’, Radio Times details that the broadcast was based on Nancy’s Price’s production from the Playhouse Theatre.
Television drama in those early days often adapted stage productions, and The Shoemaker’s Holiday had been running at the Playhouse since the end of October. Announcing the forthcoming attraction on 17 October 1938, The Times noted that ‘a permanent Elizabethan set, with balcony and curtains, will be used, and music of the period will be played.’ The Times also informed its readers that Dekker’s play had received only one professional revival since Jacobean days, and that had been in 1926 at the Old Vic. A week later the paper of record was back-tracking a little, since it acknowledged that there had been only one modern professional production in London, since the play had also been given by the Birmingham Repertory Company in 1922 and was frequently revived by amateur groups.
A week or so after that, on 5 November, the anonymous critic for The Times could only be moderately enthusiastic about the play and production:
the play, as a dramatic unity, just fails to emerge from the museum into life. Partly this is the fault of the story, which tries to poise knockabout comedy between Dick Whittington comedy and Enoch Arden pathos; partly it is no-one’s fault, only the fault of time, which has plunged so much homely verbal humour into obscurity. And yet in patches, recurring again and again, the scenes become heartily and gloriously vital.
There was praise too for the cast, including Harold Warrender and Edmund Willard, but no specific mention of director Nancy Price, a figure who had a fascinating career as an actress and occasional writer.
The Observer, on 6 November, was less enthusiastic:
the production had… good intentions and, at moments, something more… this revival gave us glimpses rather than a steady view of a play that was and still is as English and idiosyncratic as the Lord Mayor’s Show.
‘A.D.’ for The Manchester Guardian, however, was good deal more positive:
It must be that Dekker and his rich and riotous play The Shoemaker’s Holiday are things too lusty for these tenuous times. The Playhouse audience was for at least two-thirds of the way as cold as any congregation… The play’s prodigal bounty of language, its exuberance of simile and imagery, its London flavour, and its oaths that are the delight of bookmen – all these things fell on icy ears… The fault is not that of Miss Nancy Price, who has produced freshly and capably… The fault is not that of the players, who all seem to appreciate both the fun and the poetry of the Elizabethan text. The blame is wholly ours if we cannot take to this gay, witty, full-blooded and often beautiful play for the pitiable reasons that it is either too robust for us or too unfamiliar.
To which, I can only say from the perspective of 2015, hear, hear – although the hugely appreciative audience in the Swan last night seemed to have no such problems.
Welcome indeed is the appearance today on BBC Arts Online of Ken Russell’s 11-minute film profile from 1959 of the two Scottish paintersRobert MacBryde (1913-66) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-62). The film, which was Russell’s first about visual artists, was made for the BBC’s arts magazine series Monitor and originally transmitted on 25 October 1959 (for background, see Michael Brooke at BFI ScreenOnline). The documentary is not exactly unknown, but its circulation has been restricted to dedicated researchers in the past 50 years. As a consequence it is an excellent initiative to see it released like in this way (although quite why the film leader has been included I’m not sure). More… please.
Modernist but legible, expressive, energetic, such paintings were what the London art scene, mired in the romanticism of Minton and Graham Sutherland, was waiting for in the 1940s – but the last thing it wanted as abstraction, then pop, ruled a decade later. It is a pleasure to rediscover them now.
Ken Russell would be part of pop’s domination of the art scene in the 1960s, but MacBryde and Colquhoun were among the first painters he encountered when working as a gallery assistant in post-war London. His short film is a quiet and reflective tribute to them, and offers little sense of their bohemian ways and, at the time, ‘deviant’ sexuality. Beginning with a journey into ‘deep’ England, past a parish church and through the hanging fronds of trees, the camera arrives at a Tudor cottage in Suffolk which the two Roberts have apparently rented as a studio for just a pound a week.
Russell takes their paintings seriously, accompanying shots of a range of canvases, with careful moves in and out, by voice-over comments from the artists and by a Debussy arrangement of the music of Erik Satie. The artworks have their own space and place in the film, and Russell – ever the enfant terrible – clearly enjoys the quiet joke when MacBryde defaces and cuts up a page from the BBC’s magazine The Listener to help him make a painting.
Much of the film features the recorded voices of the artists, but at this early stage Russell, or Monitor’s editor Huw Wheldon, believed that a narrating voice was necessary to anchor the images, and here Scottish actor Allan McClelland does the honours. Another notable credit is that of the film editor Allan Tyrer, who would cut many of Russell’s later films including Pop Goes the Easel (1962) as well as supervise the editing of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969).
One shot particularly leaps out for me, which is a brief image of a cloaked woman walking away from the camera on a seashore. It is included to give a sense of the peasant people of Scotland who made such an impression on Colquhoun during his childhood and who he frequently depicted in his paintings. In the years after making Scottish Painters, Russell would fight Wheldon and others to be allowed to use in his films ‘recon’ or dramatised sequences of artists, eventually triumphing with the technique in Elgar (1962). But here, in however modest a manner, he is already experimenting with the idea.
It’s the first day of the second month of the year, and after far too long a break I have some new links to offer. One key event of the week, for all sorts of reasons which I hope to return to, was the release on BBC iPlayer only of Adam Curtis’ new film Bitter Lake (above). The film itself, glorying in its 2 hour 17 minutes length, is here (seemingly just for another 23 days, although why that should be the case is puzzling). But for The Spectator Pakistan correspondent for the GuardianJon Boone offers an interesting riposte describing the film as ‘a Carry On Up the Khyber view of Afghanistan’. For the Guardian itself, however, Emma Graham-Harrison writes that ‘Bitter Lake is a brilliant portrayal of the west’s arrogance in Afghanistan’. For the same media source, Sam Wollaston pretty much agrees: ‘Adam Curtis’s beautiful, gripping film unravels a story of violence, bloodshed and bitter ironies’.
• Nuremberg – Its Lesson for Today: Jan-Christopher Horak at the UCLA Film and Television Archive is fascinating on ‘the mother of all Holocaust documentaries’, made in 1948 by Stuart Schulberg for the U.S. Army.
• Visual education: from earlier in January, Luke McKernan on educational film and video.
• Video essay: Altman TV: so good on Robert Altman’s early television, from Film Comment (a transcript is here):
• American Sniper: Chris Wisniewski’s reflections for Reverse Shot made me think again about Clint Eastwood’s movie: ‘Patriotism and jingoism aren’t the same, and Eastwood’s film is too accomplished and too slippery to warrant blanket dismissal or repudiation.’
• Marshawn Lynch and the future of sports celebrity: Anne Helen Petersen, also for Buzzfeed, asks whether the running back’s refusal to speak to the press is indicative of ‘a new, negotiated mode of sports stardom’.
• I want to howl: who better to review a new biography of Eugene O’Neill than critic and biographer extraordinaire John Lahr, for London Review of Books?
I guess, like anything, theatre is a small, never-ending culture-war. A series of attacks and counter-attacks by artists against each other, all trying to explain the violence and horror, beauty and brilliance of the world to their audiences.
• Arts criticism in the digital age: … after which, further interesting reflections at The Space from Natasha Tripney, founding editor of Exeunt.
• BBC Taster – first week: a major BBC digital initiative, discussed by Adrian Woolard, Head of Connected Studio.
• How John Singer Sargent made a scene: for the Guardian Sarah Churchwell pens a very fine preview of the new National Portrait Gallery exhibition.
• Renzo Piano’s hidden masterpiece: Martin Filler for New York Review of Books on the architect’s construction in Paris for the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé.
• The pursuit of beauty: Alec Wilkinson for The New Yorker profiles mathematician Yitang Zhang.
• Latin lives: Anthony Grafton for The Nation is great on the value of the humanities: ‘I have seen the past, and it works.’
• A Few Notes on Our Food Problem:
‘Cinema Pacific and the James Blue Project are pleased to make available this streaming copy of James Blue’s pioneering essay film, which, in spite of the official restrictions prohibiting United States Information Agency films from being released in the United States, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1968. The film examines, visually and poetically, the efforts by people on three continents to improve agricultural methods and conquer world hunger.’
Reading and viewing (with some listening as well) to ease you into 2015, with the usual apologies for the lack of appropriate thanks to those who recommended some of the following.
• The Wire in HD (updated with video clips): creator David Simon writes thoughtfully, movingly about his ambivalence over the transfer of his modern masterpiece from a SD 4:3 frame to an HD 16:9 one – the examples he includes are revelatory.
• Is television dying?: Ben Lamb at Critical Studies in Television reflects on Christmas TV and what it portends for the future of the medium.
• The ten best films of… 1924: the annual treat from Kristin Thompson rounds up the great works from 90 years ago, including Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (above).
