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
17th October 2014
To Stratford-upon-Avon Picturehouse for a live broadcast of the Royal Ballet’s Manon, choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan. Very splendid it was too, with Marianela Nuñez and Federico Bonelli as the principals, and with screen director Ross MacGibbon providing a master-class in how to translate a fiendishly complex three-act ballet to the cinema. This post is intended to highlight the work of one of MacGibbon’s distinguished predecessors as a screen interpreter of dance, Margaret Dale, but let me note here that I am also fascinated by MacMillan. Jann Parry’s richly interesting 2009 biography Different Drummer: The Life of Kenneth MacMillan vividly portrays a conflicted man and a brilliant artist. And my interest in the relay was also piqued by seeing Marianela and Federico rehearse a pas de deux during the recent World Ballet Day online. The Royal Opera House have made this clip available on their terrific YouTube channel, and I embed it here simply because it is technically astounding and achingly beautiful.
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12th October 2014
An idiosyncratic selection of articles and more that have engaged me over the past few days, with the usual apologies for not including appropriate thanks to those who alerted me to some of them.
• Le Giornate del Cinema Muto – Pordenone post no 8: mille grazie to Pamela Hutchinson at Silent London for a delightful series of posts from the silent film festival over the past week; this final one has links to the other seven.
• The Barnsley disaster and the Engine-driver poet: a fascinating fragment of early film history from Luke McKernan.
• The Goddess – the revival of the classic from Chinese cinema’s golden age: a video from BFI about a major film screening this week in the London Film Festival.
• Shedding her skin: while we wait for Series 6 of The Good Wife with Juliana Margulies (above) – which is simply the best small-screen show of the past five years – here’s a particularly good New Yorker piece on the series and its context from Emily Nussbaum (but with spoilers).
• Find your beach: Zadie Smith is very good on New York, from the New York Review of Books.
• It’s official – AIs are now re-writing history: a weird auto-combination photo story, together with reflections on its implications, from Rob Smith.
• Grindr, dick pics and contemporary art’s new invasions of privacy: interesting article by Sian Cain for Guardian.
• Killing it – lessons in after-hours creativity from pop culture writer turned Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn: pretty much what it says in the headline, from Joe Berkowitz at Fast Create.
• The Woman in the Moon (The Dolphin’s Back) @ The Rose Playhouse, Bankside: Peter Kirwan for The Bardathon on James Wallace’s strong revival of John Lyly’s play.
• Grit & grace: a very fine piece of online branded content about the demands of ballet delivered by The New York Times on behalf of Cole Haan.
• Great beauty – Eugène Green on La Sapienza: Nick James for Sight & Sound talks with the maker of a film I’m longing to see.
• A farewell to Epcot’s Norway ride – how fake experiences shaped my life: Matt Novak at Paleofuture marks the closing of Maelstrom.
• Tetris the movie: can falling bricks really make it big where other video games failed?: Jenna Ng from the University of York at The Conversation.
• How Bill Gates thinks: the Microsoft man talks with author Steven Johnson, from The Atlantic.
• J. xx Drancy 13/8/42: Michael Wood in 2000 from the archives of the London Review of Books on Nobel literature prize-winner Patrick Modiano.
• Karl Miller’s grand style – John Sutherland remembers the late, great editor and academic: from New Statesman.
• The greatest ancient picture gallery: William Dalrymple writes rather wonderfully for the New York Review of Books about the Ajanta caves.
• The top ten fairytales: Marina Warner’s choice, via Guardian – what more do you want?
