9th December 2014
Tonight’s NT Live broadcast of DV8 Physical Theatre’s John was not exactly business as usual. Absent was a live introduction by the bubbly Emma Freud. Instead we were treated to a video message from a serious-looking Nick Hytner telling us that while the subject matter might not be to everyone’s taste (gay sex, drug use, incest, rape and more) what we were about to see was most definitely art. Then we had a voice-over statement from creator Lloyd Newson illustrated with extracts from films and performance footage of previous DV8 shows. Which reminded you, incidentally, that both BBC and Channel 4 have funded truly remarkable DV8 productions for the screen, albeit a decade and more back. But what I thought mostly was different was the distinctive approach to filming this uncompromising combination of dance, movement and verbatim theatre.
I can see what critics mean when they say that the 75-minute piece feels broken-backed, being a first half about the deprivations and degradations of John’s early life and the remainder about the everyday life of a gay sauna. But for me the two elements came together, at is were, most satisfyingly in a closing sequence of considerable power. I found John entirely compelling, and there were moments when I was open-mouthed with admiration at the performances of Hannes Langolf most especially, but also the rest of an extraordinary troupe of dancers. Lloyd Newson’s choreography is at moments astounding, and throughout there is a rare level of invention.
As for the approach of screen director Robin Lough and the camera team, I was struck by how their treatment took the show out of the theatre and into a kind of electronic virtual space. Yes, there was a shot of the Lyttleton auditorium at the top, and we returned there for the curtain calls, but for the duration of the performance we were in an abstracted screen space woven from designer Anna Fleischle’s dazzling revolve and pitch-perfect stage lighting design by Richard Godin. The sense of a physical stage seemed to drop away to leave us with bodies moving restlessly and remorselessly in spaces that changed and morphed and multiplied. I found the effect entrancing.
What the live broadcast achieved (and which the trailer below only faintly suggests) was a kind of screen choreography that dancers and directors have at times conjured up when working on film or with digital recording. Indeed that’s exactly what director David Hinton did with Newson and DV8 for the television films Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (London Weekend Television, 1990) and Strange Fish (BBC, 1992). But I am not sure I have ever seen this pure kind of screen dance created, as here, on the fly, albeit with endless planning and exceptional execution. Bravo, bravo. I did, however, have one question. With all of that naked and semi-naked male flesh on show, not to mention a fair few cocks, where on earth did they hide the radio mics?
8th December 2014
I watched some terrific television over the weekend, and not all of it on television. Much of Sunday I spent at BFI Southbank with two screening programmes of the estimable Missing Believed Wiped project. This is the name that the BFI applies to showings of television that was once thought lost but now is found, and on Sunday afternoon that was the very first and the very last episodes of the 1967 comedy series At last the 1948 Show. Bracketed by these was a charming, funny and immaculately performed interview by John Cleese, who spoke about the series – in which he starred with Graham Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman – as a precursor of Monty Python, but what was clear from these two recently rediscovered episodes was that much it was, and remains, extremely funny. Only the a handful of supposed jokes about gays and the unfortunate interstitial elements with Aimi MacDonald felt uneasy in a contemporary context. The ‘Annoying train-passenger sketch’ with Cleese and Feldman was one of the highlights:
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7th December 2014
I am touched and encouraged by the expressions of enthusiasm for this supposedly weekly offering, and I will now endeavour over the coming months to post it consistently. As before it is a selection of articles and more that have engaged me recently, and it is presented with the usual apologies for not including appropriate thanks to those who alerted me to some of them.
• Singular and plural – the films of Jean Grémillon: Imogen Sara Smith at Reverse Shot from New York’s Musuem of the Moving Image (which is hosting a retrospective) on the films of the neglected French master.
• Reese Witherspoon has always been wild: Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed.
• Neither lost nor found – on the trail of an elusive icon’s rarest film: a deeply impressive meditation on Jean-Luc Godard and cinephilia from Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at The A.V. Club.
• Scholarly striptease. Or, the unintended consequences of Film Studies For Free: a modest but telling contribution from Catherine Grant, with a complementary video essay, to this last week’s series about open access at inmediares; the exchanges in the comments are great too.
• The documentary temptation – fiction filmmakers and non-fiction forms: a stimulating read from Necsus by Adrian Martin.
• Pure phase – movies melt down: Charlie Lyne reports for Sight & Sound from CPH:DOX about further challenges to the presumed boundaries between cinema and the live event.
• The Wednesday Play, canon formation and commercial availability: spot-on argument from Dr Billy Smart at the blog for Critical Studies in Television.
• World of faces: T. J. Clark on late Rembrandt for London Review of Books.
• You can’t catch Picasso: for The New York Review of Books, Jed Perl on two great Picasso shows on view in New York.
• Barbara Hepworth and Gimpel Fils – The Rise and Fall of an Artist-Dealer Relationship: a recently published research article by Alice Correia for Tate Papers that traces in rich detail the complexities of a major artist working with a significant gallery in the 1950s and ’60s.
• Phillip King – ‘sculpture is the art of the invisible’: the artist talks with Nicholas Wroe for the Guardian ahead of a Tate Britain showing of his work.
• Does Eric Fischl really hate art fairs?: at Christie’s, Sophie Hastings speaks with the American painter and shows some great images of his recent work, which is on view at Victoria Miro until 19 December; the image above is a detail from Fischl’s The Price, 2013.
• Museums and the future history of the information age: Cory Doctorow’s keynote at the Museums and the Web conference in Florence earlier this year:
• The Ladybird Book of modern achievements: a great trilogy of posts from John Grindrod at Dirty Modern Scoundrel about images of modernism from Ladybird volumes – the link is to part 3; part 1 is here: The Ladybird Book of modernism; and part 2 here: The Ladybird Book of postwar building.
• What should we do with private schools?: David Kynaston for the Guardian marries social history and political analysis in a quiet but powerful polemic.
• Saskia Sassen’s missing chapter: a remarkable tale of Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s told by Marc Perry for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• The view from a bridge: Adam Gopnik writes beautifully for The New Yorker on the changing face of Paris.
• театр любит капитализм [a response almost as inevitable as the award winners]: Andrew Haydon on excellent form at Postcards from the Gods taking apart the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
• The value of inspiration – notes on kickstarting App Store projects: Alex Fleetwood is very good (and honest!) on his Kickstarter experience with the Tiny Games app.
• An American in Paris, 1951: I am off to Paris later this week, in part to see the new stage musical production of Gene Kelly’s classic musical. Which is as good a reason as any to embed the original trailer…
6th December 2014
So I loved this week’s episode of The Newsroom on Sky Atlantic. It was Episode 4 of Series 3 (only two more to go) and – spoiler! – it culminates in a wedding and a more-or-less simultaneous arrest for contempt. Not a dry eye on our sofa. Then I found that Aaron Sorkin had recorded a little interview about how he developed this particular show – and here it is…
6th December 2014
All producers, I am certain, harbour films on which they would have loved to have had a credit. I should have produced The Godfather and, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life. One step back from the realms of complete fantasy (yeah, right), I retrospectively covet an involvement with The Newsroom and The Good Wife. And this week I would have loved to have produced NBC’s musical Peter Pan Live!. To have marshalled a major studio show on this scale would indeed have been ‘an awfully big adventure’. And while I have tried to persuade the panjandrums at the BBC and Sky Arts to try a comparable experiment, to date the likely cost, not to mention anticipated stress factors, have acted as constraints.
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5th December 2014
You have just one week to catch the truly remarkable Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, which closes on 14 December. In recognition of this we have posted on our YouTube channel a new extract of our 1987 Channel 4 series State of the Art. The extract, which is taken from History, the first episode of the six-part series, features Kiefer’s work set against the German landscape. The full series is available to purchase on DVD, and I wrote in detail about the its production here. Further extracts, which we have recently re-mastered before posting again on YouTube, are online featuring Antony Gormley, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat together with his friend Andy Warhol. Below I recall the making of the series and of the production’s encounter with Anselm Kiefer.
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27th November 2014
Just exactly one year ago, Illuminations, working with the Screen Plays research project, released a DVD box-set of the BBC’s 15-part series from 1960, An Age of Kings. The series is an extraordinarily ambitious live studio production of all eight of Shakespeare’s History plays, embracing the Bard’s chronicle of England from the troubled reign of Richard II to the downfall of Richard III. You can purchase the 5-disc DVD set here.
The release has been a considerable success – and we would love to follow it with further DVDs of great plays from the BBC archive, although we cannot persuade BBC Worldwide to work out an appropriate relationship for this. To celebrate our modest anniversary, and also to draw your attention to the fine new iteration of our YouTube channel (revamped by Todd Macdonald), we are going to release key scenes from the series on each Tuesday and Thursday between now and Christmas. I will also provide some further background to the series on the blog, together with links to other writings. This is the first, from Henry V and Episode 7, Signs of War, with Robert Hardy as the king.
25th November 2014
To the Clapham Picturehouse for an evening with David Hockney. First up was Randall Wright’s new film biography of the artist, Hockney, which has been co-produced by the BBC. This was followed, to make it more of a cinema event, by a 35-minute “live and exclusive” visit to Hockney’s LA studio in the company of his friend Charlie Scheips. Judged by the standards of television, this added attraction had aspects of a car-crash.
The satellite feed went down a couple of minutes in and was off for three or four minutes. Sporting a remarkable retro bow-tie, when he was back on screen Charlie couldn’t keep quiet for a second. He seemed to have little sense from moment to moment of where the encounter was going, and he was palpably as nervous as a ferret on a freeway. At one point he and David cued up an extract from the mid-1980s documentary A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China but getting out of this was messy.
The vision mixer was irritatingly restless and the Steadicam operator became increasingly desperate to find yet another irrelevant floating shot. And most frustrating of all, as Hockney talked interestingly about particular works mentioned by Charlie, there were no images to bring up so that we could see what they were talking about. Television has a way of doing these things to make them look effortless. Yet this wasn’t television, and I got the sense that while this hybrid TV/cinema form is perhaps more demanding technically than the small screen, there are aspects of it that are far more forgiving. read more »
23rd November 2014
Since we have been offline for a month and more, this is a longer (and later)-than-usual selection of articles and more that have engaged me over during that time, with the usual apologies for not including appropriate thanks to those who alerted me to some of them.
• No one wanted to talk about Bill Cosby’s alleged crimes because he made white America feel good about race: strong analysis of the story of the moment by Rebecca Traister for New Republic.
• Bebop/silence – on Hickey & Boggs: Charles Taylor for the LA Review of Books is rather brilliant on the ’70s movie starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp.
• Nightmare at the Picasso Museum: Guardian Arts has been very strong recently, and one of the treats was Jonathan Jones’ report on the reopening of the artist’s personal collection in Paris.
• Picasso – the view from Florence: more about the master, here from Ingrid D. Rowland for the New York Review of Books on a major show in Italy.
• Being discovered – an interview with Calvin Tomkins: J. C. Gabel for The Paris Review talks with Tomkins about his friendship with Gerald and Sara Murphy, the couple F. Scott Fitzgerald used as the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night.
• Will Self – are the hyper-rich ruining the new Tate Modern?: not sure I agree with Self’s entire argument for the Guardian, but it’s a fine provocation.
• Eric Fischl: ‘What America wants is artists who are doing very expensive toys’: a very good interview-based profile by Tim Adams for The Observer with the painter whose new works are on show at Victoria Miro.
• Standing naked in front of an audience – Amanda Palmer and a new way to make art: Cory Doctorow for The New Statesman.
• My Darling Clementine – the great beyond: before we went offline I hymned John Ford’s great 1946 western here, and I make no apologies for returning to it with this link to David Jenkins’ new essay for The Criterion Collection.
• What-if movies – forking paths in the drawing room: David Bordwell on (mostly) the 1934 RKO film version of J. B. Priestley’s play Dangerous Corner.
• The hard work of marriage: Zoe Heller on Gone Girl for the New York Review of Books.
• The hidden history of the zoom lens: Nick Hall tells you all you need to know in a video essay distilled from his dissertation:
The Hidden History of the Zoom Lens from Nick Hall on Vimeo.
• The veils of collaboration: a dense, lengthy but fascinating not-quite-a-journal-article about the writing of early modern plays by Holger Syme for his blog dispositio.
• It’s best not to make him angry: a terrific review for Michael Boyd’s Brooklyn staging of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamberlaine, by Ben Brantley for The New York Times.
• At the Donmar: Jacqueline Rose for London Review of Books on Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of a compiled Henry IV.
• Bertolt Brecht’s Marie-Antoinettism: for The New Republic Anthony Daniels reviews Stephen Parker’s mammoth new biography.
• The new Jacob Bronowski archive: Erica Wagner for the Financial Times goes to Cambridge with Lisa Jardine to see the papers of her father [requires registration].
• Dumb and Gummer – The Newsroom: Run: to her great surprise Libby Hill for The AV Club loves S3 E2 of Aaron Sorkin’s series (which is running on Sky Atlantic, and is illustrated above)…
• The Newsroom may be the most entertaining show on television:… and Richard Lawson for Vanity Fair agrees – ‘I come to praise The Newsroom and, sadly, to bury it.’
• The cult of Connie Britton: the Nashville star considered by Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed.
• Science has great news for people who read actual books: Rachel Grate at Arts.Mic on the e-books versus paper debate, with the strong suggestion that paper wins every time.
• The future of the culture wars is here, and it’s Gamergate: Gamergate had mostly passed me by, but this piece by Kyle Wagner at Deadspin is a good place to catch up.
• Revenue streams: John Seabrook writes for The New Yorker about Spotify.
• The creepy new wave of the internet: Sue Halpern for The York Review of Books.
• Silicon Valley and journalism – make up or break up?: an essential lecture by Emily Bell, Director at the TOW Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.
• Labelling BBC Online’s archived websites: Neil McIntosh for the BBC Internet blog.
• Labour vanishes: a deeply depressing but bracing read by Ross McKibbin for London Review of Books.
• Out of print: if it’s still online, below is Julia Marchese’s documentary about the famous Los Angeles movie theatre, and about the end of 35mm, is well worth watching; see also David Bordwell, Ode to the New Beverley, and a downbeat coda, but you need also to read the background from Julia Marchese, I will not be censored. Out Of Print from John T. Woods on Vimeo.
20th November 2014
It’s been a hugely frustrating month and more. One night, entirely unprovoked by us, our web site apparently started ‘attacking’ other sites. Our developers quite rightly felt that the only thing to do was to take a large part of the site offline. We have spent the last month sorting out what went wrong, moving across to another digital agency, Origin Media (a process which was underway in any case), and working with them to restore all of our content. Which is the stage we’re at today, and which in itself feels like a small triumph.
At the same time, we have been re-vamping our YouTube channel, and you can see where we are with that here. Our plan now is to have a regular release of new content related to our productions and our DVD releases, and I will be posting about that in the coming days. For the moment, though, we are happy simply to back benignly online
