26th December 2013
At the end of every year each of us at Illuminations and at our sister company Illuminations Films contributes a top ten of cultural highlights of the year.
We run these through this holiday period, with today’s first contribution from Illuminations’ partner and MD Linda Zuck. As with most of these offerings, her ten is in no particular order.
1. Stoner by John Williams
A rediscovered neglected classic, an American novel about an unassuming literary scholar first published in 1965 and re-issued in 2006. It’s so beautifully written and profoundly moving and utterly compelling. A work of quiet perfection. read more »
23rd December 2013
Half a lifetime ago (for those who are counting, it is thirty-four years) I wrote a feature for Time Out about the 1979 BBC television film Schalcken the Painter (above). Leslie Megahey’s ghost story is now newly released on DVD and Blu-ray from the BFI. A glory from a period of richly imaginative arts filmmaking, the hour-plus film fully deserves this fine new release. Thirty-four years ago, when Margaret Thatcher had been in Downing Street for just six months and Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, this is what I wrote about it in the Christmas edition of London’s favourite listings magazine… read more »
20th December 2013
Neglected for the past few days, this blog needs a good deal of tlc over the coming days. On the way: a Postcard from Paris, comments on Schalcken the Painter and the Illuminations team’s top tens of the year. Here, however, is what will eventually be a bumper bunch of links to keep you engaged across these out-of-time days. First, a true treat from The British Library – the Mechanical Curator flickr collection of more than a million images identified from 19th century books, extracted and uploaded under a Creative Commons licence. Associated is the Twitter feed @MechCuratorBot which posts one of these images every hour (I’m bemused why it currently has only 142 followers). Curator Ben O’Steen (not a bot) has a blog post about the initiative, as does his BL colleague Luke McKernan. More coverage here from Generalising. The project is great in all sorts of ways, some of which will become clearer in 2014 – and is a kind of delightful Xmas present to us all. Across the jump, further links with seasonal thanks due to @Criterion, @henrymoorefdn and @KeygrameDaily. read more »
16th December 2013
The Illuminations DVD release of the 1960 BBC series An Age of Kings is now well and truly launched – and initial sales are promising. These eight Shakespeare History plays in the 5-disc box set can be bought here, as well as via the excellent Moviemail (who have been hugely supportive) and Amazon (although it’s currently much more expensive on this site). My overview of the series is here, but I want now to begin a critical exploration of the 15 episodes – a kind of virtual viewing guide. Over the holidays my aim is to transfer these posts to a dedicated web site. Episode 1 presents the first half of Richard II, playing through to the end of Act III Scene 2, with King Richard having returned from Ireland and recognising the dominance of Bolingbroke:
Discharge my followers. Let them hence away
From Richard’s night to Bolingbroke’s fair day.
Following are my initial thoughts about each scene – timings in the square brackets are minutes and seconds into each episode as presented on disc 1. read more »
12th December 2013
Nearly a week has passed since my visit to Ghent for the hugely stimulating symposium Art & Cinema: On the aesthetics, history and theory of the art documentary. I think that the last time I was in the city was for the opening of Chambres d’amis exhibition back in June 1986 when the curator Jan Hoet arranged for more than forty artists to make works in the homes of ‘friends’ of the art museum. The visitor wandered through the town with a map and during pre-arranged hours rang doorbells to be admitted to a bedroom decorated by Daniel Buren or a patio with a wall painting by Sol LeWitt. On the first Saturday of the show filmmaker Jef Cornelis choreographed a full day of live coverage for Belgian television, and I went over to observe. At the symposium I was reminded of Cornelis’s centrality to the art documentary (he made films for BRT from 1964 to 1998) and I was delighted to learn that there is a major research project underway about his work. This was among the many ‘finds’ of the day, which as a whole was one of discovery and delight. read more »
8th December 2013
I was in Ghent over the weekend – at an excellent symposium about arts documentaries – and as a consequence I am behind with my posting schedule. I aim to build my list of links across today and also to to post a first Belgian blog. One place to start, at least for those of us interested in television and performance, is news of NBC’s live (yes, truly live) broadcast last week (at a reported cost of ¢9 million) of the stage musical The Sound of Music (above). Who would have thought it – and who would have thought that, despite a critical and Twitter-storm mauling, it would have been a ratings smash? Despatches from Charlotte Alter at Time, Lisa de Moraes for Deadline Hollywood (‘live TV is wonderfully messy’), Jaimie Etkin for Buzzfeed, Lindsey Weber, Kyle Buchanan and Amanda Dobbins for Vulture, and also for Vulture Josef Adalian. Disappointingly, the links are all geo-locked but the stills give you a good sense of what it looked like – which, for television in 2013, is strange. I look forward to further analysis. Meanwhile, there are more links across the jumps, with thanks this week to @zimbalist, @annehelen, @audiovisualcy and @filmstudiesff. read more »
6th December 2013
A low morning sun and vapour trails in a blue, blue sky provide a spectacular backdrop as an early Eurostar pulls out of St Pancras. I’m on the way to Ghent for a symposium on Saturday about the early history of documentaries about the arts (a .pdf of the full programme is here). Needless to say, I also want to see – for the first time – the Van Eycks’ Adoration of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece in Saint Bavo Cathedral, a detail of which is above. My symposium contribution is to be about the films that the BBC producer John Read made between 1951 and 1979 with Henry Moore (about which I have often posted, including here, here, here and here). The event has been organised by Steven Jacobs, a scholar at the KASK/School of Arts in Ghent, who earlier this year edited the wonderful DVD collection Art & Cinema of Belgian arts documentaries (available here). read more »
4th December 2013
Wednesday evening at 9pm on BBC Four sees the first showing of our latest broadcast documentary, Lionel Bart: Reviewing the Situation. Written by Caroline Stafford and David Stafford (and inspired by their fine biography, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be: The Lionel Bart Story), and directed by Mick Conefrey, this is a totally delightful tale of the astonishing rise and extraordinary fall of the songwriter of Oliver! (1960) and Twang!! (1965). With a fantastic collection of rare film and television archive, and interviews from – among others – Barbara Windsor, Marty Wilde, Ray Davies, Roy Hudd, Cameron Mackintosh and the late Victor Spinetti, it’s a (can I say this?) hugely enjoyable hour of television. read more »
3rd December 2013
I have started a quest to find all of the 54 paintings and 12 sculptures included in the Festival of Britain Sixty Paintings for ’51 (see previous posts here and here). My second blog post about this discussed four paintings that were purchased by The Arts Council, which organised the show, and later donated to regional galleries. There was also a fifth, William Gear’s Autumn Landscape (1951) which I have found is in the collection of the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle which acquired it as a gift in 1952 (detail above, with the full painting across the jump). I got to it via another, closely related painting by William Gear, also called Autumn Landscape, which is in the collection of National Galleries Scotland. The description of this work gives an inkling of the story behind the one included in the exhibition:
This is one of several paintings Gear completed in the autumn of 1950. A similar but larger work also titled Autumn Landscape was painted for the Festival of Britain show Sixty Painters for ‘51 in 1951. Although awarded the Arts Council purchase prize, it was denounced by the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings, who deemed it as a ‘scheming, self-conscious, anglicised, fifty-year old repetition of the École de Paris’. read more »
2nd December 2013
I’m coming rather late to this, but I want to make a short contribution to the Napoléon discussion. Back in 1980 I was among those who thrilled at the London Film Festival screening of Kevin Brownlow’s reconstruction of Abel Gance’s 1927 film. And on Saturday, thirty-three years later to the day, I was on my feet in the Royal Festival Hall applauding composer and conductor Carl Davis and the Philharmonia Orchestra at the end of a further screening of the full five-and-a-half hours.
There is no question that watching the film with a live symphonic soundtrack is a great experience. Nor is there any doubt that Kevin Brownlow, the late David Gill, Carl Davis and others have been heroic in their reconstruction efforts, as last Friday’s Guardian article details. Since Saturday, I have read a number of thoughtful responses to the showing, including Rick Burin’s review of the screening and a post from the estimable Silent London website, as well as Luke McKernan’s discussion – and there is much in these with which I agree. But there’s one aspect of the film (and its effect) that seems rarely to be discussed explicitly, which is its politics. read more »
