So just how excited are we? Homeland S3 starts in the States on Sunday – and a week later, on Sunday 6 October, on Channel 4. In one of my Sunday Links… columns I highlighted the recent Varieties of disturbance, John Lahr’s terrific New Yorker profile of Claire Danes. For those of you recently returned from Mars, Danes plays troubled CIA operative Carrie Mathison – and her performance is among the edgiest, most dangerous and most compelling that I think I have ever seen on the small screen. Danes has had a remarkable career, literally growing up on television and invariably taking on roles that are far from comfortable. As Lahr writes,
Over the decades, in her performances, she has explored a full spectrum of disturbance, from spousal abuse, autism, and paralysis to Carrie’s bipolar disorder and the paranoia of adolescence.
Anne Helen Petersen’s 2011 Claire Danes’ second act (on celebrity gossip, academic style) is another exceptional piece of writing about Danes. And then there is Margaret Lyons’ New York Magazine piece, also from 2011, Is Claire Danes’ Homeland character secretly Angela Chase? Re-reading the three together suggested today’s tiny trawl through the online collective memory. We start with Claire Danes’ 13-year-old headlining debut as Angela Chase in the pilot episode of the comedy of adolescent angst My So-Called Life…
Here was one we made earlier. More than fifteen years ago in fact, and now brought from the archive for an outing at BFI Southbank on NFT1’s big screen. The production was Gloriana – A Film and the occasion last night was a showing as part of the BFI’s Britten at 100 season. As I am coming increasingly to recognise, it can be disconcerting seeing a production from the past in this way, especially if – as was the case for me last night – you have not watched it during the intervening years.
As it turned out, I need not have been apprehensive. Tony Miller’s Super 16 film images looked terrific, the performances of the stars Josephine Barstow (as Elizabeth I) and Tom Randle (Essex) were as good and rich as ever, Phyllida Lloyd’s debut direction came through as imaginative and creative in all the right ways, musically – under conductor Paul Daniel – it sounded very fine, and even the stereo mix, while thin (there was no 5.1 in those days), seemed acceptable. read more »
At the end of last week, I posted about the Spaces of Television conference at the University of Reading. I greatly enjoyed the three-day event and I learned a lot from many of the presentations. One of the panel sessions was particularly rich and I want to return to Reading today to draw out some strands from that discussion. For ‘Archives and Access’ the organisers had assembled an exemplary line-up, of which more below. But it was the passionate and (almost) despairing speech by Tony Ageh, Head of Archive Development at the BBC, that made the most impact.
Tony has been working vigorously for the past five years towards the goal of granting full access, through both commercial and non-commercial channels, to everything, everything – programmes, stills, written records and more – of which the BBC has a copy. Given the centrality of the BBC to each of our lives and to national and international history since 1922, this is an aspiration of the most profound cultural importance. Yet as he said, ‘hardly any progress has been made in the past five years’. As we’ll see, this is not entirely true, but in terms of any fundamental shifts towards a world in which such access is possible he is absolutely correct.
And why?
‘Nobody cares’, Tony said. Or rather, ‘Almost nobody cares’. Or again, ‘Not enough people care anything like enough’. read more »
With apologies for its late arrival (blame this blog’s server), this is a further post about the preparations for the RSC’s Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcast of Richard II to cinemas on 13 November in the UK (and later around the world). As you’ll see below, we are mostly in the rehearsal room this week, glimpses of which are in Production Diary no. 4 with the RSC’s Head of Voice Lyn Darnley and actors Miranda Nolan and Gracy Goldman.
In other news, RSC Education has released the first education pack for the production, The director’s process. Available as a free download here, this is intended primarily for teachers, but it has lots of interest for the rest of us. Tickets have gone on sale for Richard II screenings in Russia and also in Valleta, Malta; details here. And I saw the production trailer in a cinema for the first time – at Clapham Picturehouse on Sunday afternoon – which was rather thrilling. read more »
Courtesy of The Notebook at mubi.com and the Spanish film magazine Transit comes The Melville Variations, great video+text essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin about the films of the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville. Once you have enjoyed this short, sharp and so-precise montage, do also read the text here: ‘In the end, there is only ever the hat: mute, static, frozen, inhuman.’
The modern campus of the University of Reading is a pleasant place, especially when flattered by the late afternoon sun of a mild autumn day. That’s where I have been for the last three days, taking part in an enjoyable and enlightening academic conference. Spaces of television: production, site and style [link: .pdf of conference schedule] was intended to be the culminating event of a major research project with the same title, although the organisers may now put together a further one-day conference about design for television. I found the panels, papers and discussions immensely stimulating and I was delighted to contribute one of the keynote lectures. Today’s blog picks out some of the highlights (including a Doctor Who re-enactment by Andrew Ireland, from whose PhD the header image comes) while a future post (now planned for Tuesday) will discuss in more detail a richly interesting panel about television archives. read more »
Today is the start of week four of rehearsals for the RSC’s Richard II. The cast are beginning to work with director Greg Doran on the detail of each scene, starting this morning with Act I Scene 1. In parallel, along with costume fittings and the like, they are doing individual voice work sessions with the RSC’s Head of Voice Lyn Darnley – and this morning we are filming two of these as well as elements of the main rehearsal. All of that is for the next production diary, which will be online from Friday and featured here next Monday, along with my thoughts on watching the rehearsal. Meanwhile, last Friday part 3 of the diary was released, with historian Helen Castor reflecting on Richard as a medieval king. Do take a look at that, and then below there is further news of the production and more.
Each Sunday’s Links… (go here for the most recent) takes some three or four hours to draw together. I tend to collect things that interest me during the week using Twitter and Digg and then on Sunday morning I also check round a bunch of sites that often offer something new and different. Pulling this into shape is a pleasurable task from which I also learn a lot, and it is great then to see that the posts seem to have interest and value for visitors. But it all takes time, and this weekend time is something I have not got.
Too good to wait until my Links post at the weekend:
Part I has been around a while (long enough to get more than 800,000 views);
Part II was posted in July. With thanks to @KevinTPorter.
