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 »
1st December 2013
Along with occasional grumpiness about the BBC’s treatment of its archive, let’s also celebrate how more and more of the Corporation’s history is being made available in all kinds of ways. Newly released online, for example, and intended to be there in perpetuity, is the 1946 radio broadcast written and produced by Louis MacNeice, The Dark Tower. This is a legendary Quest drama which was, as the BBC web site says, ‘suggested by Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came‘. (The painting above is Thomas Moran’s 1859 visualisation of the Browning.) With music by Benjamin Britten The Dark Tower is an innovative, complex, disturbing and astonishing work which 67 years after its first broadcast more than deserves 73 minutes of your time. It has been made available as part of the Modern Classical Music archive collection which features other wonders as well. And for additional links (with thanks this week to @rachelcoldicutt, @annehelen, @AdrianMartin25 and @ProfShakespeare), click across the jump. read more »
30th November 2013
Yesterday’s post introduced an exhibition organised by The Arts Council for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The show featured 54 paintings, together with a number of sculptures, requested from many of the prominent artists of the day. Each of the paintings, which it was stipulated had to be ‘large’ (that is, at least 45 x 60 inches), is illustrated (excepting only Francis Bacon’s contribution) in black and white in a slim catalogue, which otherwise has only a single page Foreword by Philip James of The Arts Council.
The collection was an intended snapshot of the visual arts at the key moment of post-war reconstruction, assembled as James wrote,’in the hope of handing down to posterity from our present age something tangible and of permanent value.’ So how has posterity so far treated this initiative? What has happened to each of the works and where can they be found now? That’s what I aim to find out over the coming months. read more »
26th November 2013
To The British Library for a splendid talk by Dr Luke McKernan (the text of which is now available here) about the life and films of Charles Urban, gloriously accompanied on the keyboards by Mr Neil Brand. Earlier this year Luke published Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925, and this lecture was a celebration of the book and of its subject. Urban was a major figure in early cinema, one of the key figures in the development of factual filmmaking, and perhaps most remarkably a great innovator in colour cinematography.
Rather than attempt to précis Urban’s career, let me point you in the direction – with the warmest possible recommendation – of Luke’s compendious website about his hero, Charles Urban, Motion Picture Pioneer. Along with much else, you will find an extensive biography, numerous documents and images, and a selection of embedded films, four of which I reproduce here for your entertainment and edification (others can be found on Luke’s website here). The first is an early ‘phantom ride’ film, the second a test shoot for Urban’s Kinemacolor process, the third one of his most celebrated films (shot by naturalist filmmakerPercy Smith), and the fourth a personal pleasure, given that I was born and brought up in Whitstable.
View from an Engine Front – Barnstaple (1898)
Tartans of the Scottish Clans (1906)
The Acrobatic Fly (1910), a re-issue of the 1908 title The Balancing Bluebottle
Oyster Fishing at Whitstable, England (c.1909)
Image: The logo of the Charles Urban Trading Company shows the Roman messenger god Mercury apparently travelling with the assistance of a train wheel (or possibly a reel of film), carrying a banner bearing Urban’s much-repeated slogan, ‘We Put the World Before You’. From Charles Urban: image gallery.
25th November 2013
Last week the first shrink-wrapped copies of Illuminations’ DVD release of An Age of Kings arrived at our offices. The event marked the culmination of at least two years’ work by my colleague Louise Machin and I, along with our designer Loic Leveque, and the essential support of Todd MacDonald and Tom Allen. It also represents, given the advance paid to BBC Worldwide as well as the design, sub-titling and duplication costs, a significant investment by the company. So go here to buy your copy for the bargain price of £34.99.
We very much hope that An Age of Kings will be the beginning of a major new project to release great television adaptations of classic theatre plays, which we are conceiving in conjunction with the AHRC-funded University of Westminster research project Screen Plays. Before I explain why I believe An Age of Kings is so significant, and how we plan to promote and support the release, here is a taster:
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