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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24th November 2013
Two weeks ago I composed a compendious round-up of links about Gravity which included Neil Young’s essay Satellite of love – Jonás Cuarón’s Aningaaq. In this Young writes about the short by Cuarón fils that shows the other side of the radio conversation that astronaut Ryan Stone (played by Sandra Bullock) has with a man who turns out to be the eponymous Inuit fisherman (above):
Aningaaq the short fills in the gaps of the strangers’ extended conversation – a precarious affair relying on the most tenuous of technological links – chiefly for the viewer’s benefit. In Gravity, the character Aningaaq is simply a voice crackling over the ether, with a background of howling wind, husky-dogs and occasional baby-cries; but in the film that bears his name we get to see his face, his clothes, his environment, his family (wife and child), his dogs. And we see nothing of Stone.
Thrillingly, Aningaaq has now been made available online, and I embed it here. Across the jump, there are lots more links about television, film, performance and digital media, with thanks for tips to @pabinkley, @polyg and @DavidjHendy.
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21st November 2013
The RSC has posted a 5-minute extract from Richard II Live from Stratford-upon-Avon on YouTube and elsewhere, and I am delighted to embed it here. This is part of Act IV Scene 1, the deposition scene, and it gives a strong sense of the ‘look’ of the live broadcast, although inevitably it shrinks the experience from the big screen and cannot do justice to the sound mix. Below I am just starting out on a discussion of the very particular screen language of this live presentation.
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20th November 2013
Last week, as Richard II Live from Stratford-upon-Avon unfolded, there were several moments when I thought of my English teacher at school, the late Brian Jones. Mr Jones, as he was to us in our mid-teens, was a cool poet who had even been on television. He was also, as I hope we recognised then, a gloriously inspirational teacher, and his classes contributed hugely, vitally, to my love of our language. Which, give or take a twist or two, runs right through to my work with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
I lost touch with Brian after school, even though, as I chronicled in a blog post back in August 2009, I tried to find him again when I produced a film of The Waste Land in the mid-1990s. My post was written after I’d read Paul McLoughlin’s Guardian obituary, and remarkably the comments to it (which are still archived on this site, even if the formatting is a bit awry) became a small memorial to his influence on many, many others. So now I am delighted to highlight the news that a new edition of his poetry, for so long out of print, has been published. read more »
19th November 2013
Last night saw the first round of Richard II Live from Stratford-upon-Avon Encore screenings. Which meant that I woke up to another round of wonderfully enthusiastic #RSCRichardII Twitter responses. The RSC has had a brilliant response to its request for feedback of all kinds, including the online survey here. Some of the most detailed accounts of what people thought and how the experience might be improved are on personal blogs – and these reports are invaluable to us. Below I have linked to and excerpted from nine of those that I have tracked down so far. (You can also find a full page of review and resource links here.) It can be quite hard finding blog posts like this – they tend to be a long way down in Google searches – so if there are others out there, do please let me know.
Update: in advance of the US screenings Entertainment Weekly has posted a 5-minute ‘teaser’ extract from the broadcast.
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18th November 2013
Each time I return grumpily to the topic of today’s post I feel the need to apologise to regular readers. I know that I have taken on several times before the vandalism represented by forcing 4:3 archive footage into contemporary 16:9 frames, but Saturday night’s Benjamin Britten on Camera (available on BBC iPlayer until 28 November) cries out for attention. This is an intelligent programme about the relationship between the composer and the BBC during the late 1950s and ’60s and it features a wonderful selection of gems from the Corporation’s archives. read more »
17th November 2013
With the RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcast on Wednesday, it’s been a busy and fairly intense week. One lovely and sort-of-related online offering this week is the full audio track from the RSC’s Midsummer Night’s Dreaming event with Google back in the summer, which is now available on SoundCloud. Which gives me an excuse to showcase the image above from a recent Radio 3 blog post which is a detail from a publicity image of a 1937 BBC television production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And what else can I find in scrabbling around among its online ruins? Across the jump is a selection, including some for which thanks are due to @stevenbjohnson, @matlock, @drszucker, @KeyframeDaily and @ProfShakespeare. read more »
