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.
This is a little story about the joy of serendipitous discovery in the archives. I am working on a research paper about the ways in which Henry Moore and his works featured on television and in films during his lifetime. Central to the story of Moore on screen are the six films about the artist made by the great BBC filmmaker John Read, about which I have posted on several occasions including here. But for this paper I am undertaking a survey of as many of the other British films that I can find. The search took me yesterday to the always-welcoming and all-round admirable archive of the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green. On my list for viewing was Opus (1967), about which I knew precisely nothing. But what turned out to be a dazzling kaleidoscope of the arts in mid-’60s London was definitely the highlight of my day – before I later discovered it is available on a DVD set released by the BFI that was sitting at home in a (tall) pile waiting to be viewed. read more »
The RSC’s Richard II is two weeks into rehearsals and it is time for another production blog. The trailer gets completed by Dusthouse today and should be on view in cinemas and online at the end of the week. I will highlight that on the blog as soon as it is available to be shown. Dates and venues for cinema screenings in the USA and Sweden have now been announced (you can buy tickets here), with other countries to come very soon. And on Friday we released the second part of the production diary with Emma Hamilton, who plays the Queen in the production, reflecting on the first day of rehearsals. Above, is an image of Westminster Hall where the cast and crew went for a day out last Wednesday – and there are further reflections from the visit below.
