• Love and marriage – an ultimate journey: Adrian Martin at Fandor on Vigo, Rossellini and ‘a sense that second chances for married lovers are forever possible’ – lovely piece.
• Cries and Whispers – love and death: Emma Wilson for The Criterion Collection on Bergman’s great film (above), immaculately illustrated with extracts.
• Shedding her skin: The Good Wife, currently running on More4 (with, among others, Archie Panjabi as Kalinda Sharma, above) is simply the best thing on TV – did you see last week’s show with the prison consultant? This New Yorker piece by the excellent Emily Nussbaum from last autumn goes some way to explaining its strengths: ‘the series is a model of how strict boundaries—the sort that govern sonnets—can inspire greater brilliance than absolute freedom can.’
A time there was when I would post a list of links on a Sunday morning, but over the past week I have been experimenting with a new approach by which I highlight just three things each day. Even collectively, these easier to compile than the old Sunday links, and maybe easier to consume. Regularity and consistency, however, are essential for anything like this, so let’s see if I can keep the idea going for longer than this first week. Today’s choices are:
• The Grantland Q&A – Errol Morris: Alex Pappademas interviews the documentary maker at length: ‘I’ve often said that my work is the perfect blend of the prurient and the pedantic.’
• Screening Surveillance: a substantial video essay by Steve Anderson focussing on surveillance in Hollywood movies, including 1984 (1984); this is published by the excellent online journal [in]Transition, and is discussed both its maker and by Kevin B. Lee here.
• Video Essay – Walerian Borowczyk: an introduction by Violet Lucca to the strange, sexual world of the Polish filmmaker, tied to Obscure Pleasures: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk which has just closed at Lincoln Center.
(Go here for a note about why I have started to post in this way.)
• Tom Cruise’s 10 greatest movie stunts: fascinating Vulture article in which stuntman Randy Butcher talks Bilge Ebiri through moments of the Mission Impossible series and more, including this sequence:
• Georges Perec’s lost novel: by the French’s author’s translator and biographer, David Bellos, for the New York Review of Books.
• The master writer of the city: Janet Malcolm for The New York Review of Books is simply wonderful on New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell. Above, Mitchell outside Sloppy Louie’s restaurant with Louis Morino, the subject of the writer’s 1952 New Yorker profile ‘Up in the Old Hotel’; credit: Therese Mitchell/Estate of Joseph Mitchell.
• Hakanai de Adrien M / Claire B: this is a truly remarkable dance and digital imaging work; background, an interview and additional images from Jordan Backhus at The Creators Project here.
(Go here for a note about why I have started to post in this way.)
• 100 Voices That made the BBC – Elections: a glorious archive site about the televising of elections from the BBC and the University of Sussex (kudos to David Hendy) which makes extensive use of the Corporation’s oral history interviews. (The BBC image above is the studio at Alexandra Palace during the 1950 television coverage.)
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.
