25th March 2013
The Screen Plays season of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedies begins tonight at BFI Southbank. We open with a remarkable 1965 production of Thomas Middleton’s play from 1621 Women Beware Women, which I have written about in detail here. The screening will be followed a discussion with Dame Diana Rigg (who plays Bianca) and Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Gregory Doran. The show is sold out but if I get news of any returns I’ll announce them on the @Illuminations Twitter feed. And you can still purchase tickets for future screenings, including the wonderful 1964 Hamlet at Elsinore (above) with Christopher Plummer on the afternoon of Easter Monday. (Yes, I know the play was written around 1599-1600 and so is not strictly Jacobean.) Meanwhile, below is my Introduction to the season which argues that these great plays remain relevant and resonant today. read more »
24th March 2013
Links… is perhaps a little light this weekend, at least in this iteration. I have returned to my college for a gaudy, to which all those who started there between 1974 and 1977 are invited. Such a reunion is held only once every six or seven years, so it’s almost essential. But it is not necessarily conducive to completing a weekly column of reading and viewing recommendations. Let’s start with two great posts this week from Paleofuture, the Smithsonian’s blog that looks back to visions of the future in the past. Matt Novak wrote both The newspaper of tomorrow: 11 predictions from yesteryear (where you can find the above 1962 image of George Jetson reading his televiewer) and Postwar dreams of flying in style, and there is much to enjoy in both. Across the jump, there’s more from the past and the future, and perhaps even a little of the future, with thanks due this week to @lukemckernan, @OWC_Oxford, @Chi_Humanities, @Tate, @manovich, @emilynussbaum and @brainpicker. read more »
22nd March 2013
I have written before about NT Live – the National Theatre’s immensely successful live to cinema broadcasts – including about their showings of Hamlet, Frankenstein and Phedre, as well as general pieces here and here. By and large I am a big fan, and out of the recent screenings I loved One Man, Two Guv’nors, admired Timon and was thrilled by The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. But last night’s live showing of Alan Bennett’s People came across as a rare mis-fire, and I left the Ritzy in Brixton (my regular haunt of the Clapham Picturehouse having sold out) feeling a little short-changed (my members ticket had cost £13, full price £17.50). What I have been trying to work out since is the extent to which this was due to Alan Bennett’s squib of a play and how much of my mood was down to the penny-plain presentation from the Southbank. read more »
20th March 2013
I re-worked last week’s post as a piece for the Guardian.
You can read it here – and do please comment if you feel you would like to continue the discussion.
There are currently 19 comments, most of which are well worth reading.
19th March 2013
Early television programmes do not get anything like the attention they deserve. In part this is because very few such programmes – and I am thinking here of television before the mid-1950s – have been preserved. But even those that are still with us are little-studied and attract nowhere near the attention that is now lavished (appropriately) on early films. A case in point is the six 15-minute episodes of Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, produced in the 1955 by the BBC, with the great man as host. These were re-broadcast in 2009 by BBC Four and ‘Citizen Welles’ has kindly uploaded them to YouTube (complete with the new channel’s branding). Watching them is a bit like sitting next to the 40-year-old Orson at dinner and having this charming, dazzling man pour his anecdotes and reflections into your eager ear. What’s not to like? read more »
18th March 2013
In 1964 Studio Vista published a handsome hardback celebrating the ABC TV arts series Tempo. With a profusion of plates on high quality photographic paper, plus a quirky text from critic and novelist Angus Wilson (on yellowy-beige interleaving), this was a prestige production out to demonstrate that an ITV company could compete with the BBC at the classy end of culture. The volume overall deserves more detailed consideration, but today I want to use Wilson’s ruminations to look at another of the films from Network’s recently-released double DVD set of items from Tempo (which I introduced previously here). Remarkably, The Medium Sized Cage was produced for Tempo by Royal College of Art students and broadcast with a slightly nervous introduction by Leonard Maguire on 31 March 1963. ‘Neither play nor documentary nor plain performance,’ is how Wilson correctly describes the offering, ‘peculiarly designed by the students I suppose, to illustrate the special qualities of that medium-sized cage – the television box.’ read more »
17th March 2013
Let’s hear it for LACMA! On the Unframed blog at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Amy Heibel revealed this week that the museum is making available for pretty much unrestricted use another 18,000 or so digital images of objects from its collection (including Wrestlers by Thomas Eakins, 1899, a detail of which is above). This is a great initiative and one that should be emulated by all of our public museums over here, and for more see Amy’s post What do cats have to do with it?, which is also about LACMA’s new Collections website:
Why would a museum give away images of its art? As [director] Michael Govan often says, it’s because our mission is to care for and share those works of art with the broadest possible public. The logical, radical extension of that is to open up our treasure trove of images… So far, we have yet to hear of a situation where one of our public domain artworks has been misused or abused.
Across the jump, many more links from the past week. read more »
15th March 2013
Film fans, happiness is coming (this to be sung to a jaunty tune with optional hand-clapping). If you’ve seen Pablo Larraín’s remarkable film No, about the rival media campaigns in the 1988 referendum in Chile, you might perhaps pick up the reference (go here for the film’s website from Sony Classics). If you haven’t, then for just the next week you can catch it online for only £4 at Curzon on Demand. This is a comparatively new pay-per-view arthouse service that I have quickly learned to love. Other ppv film offerings are available, as they say, including iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Lovefilm and Mubi.com, but none at present appear have anything close to the Curzon’s range of arthouse cinema of the moment (much of it from the Artificial Eye list). This weekend, for example, you can watch Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills and Michael H. Profession: Director, Yves Montmayer’s profile of Michael Haneke, both of which are released in cinemas this week (and as a consequence cost £10 each). From Monday, Haneke’s Amour will be available, and if – like me – you are impressed by No, two earlier linked films by Larraín are also on offer, Post Mortem (2010) and Tony Manero (2008). All three can be watched this week for a tenner. read more »
12th March 2013
Today’s lesson (which I reflect upon across the jump) comes in the shape of a substantial quote from a Times interview by Libby Purves (£) last week with the director of the National Theatre Nick Hytner.
Talking of the BBC, I wonder what he feels about its arts coverage: does it do all it should? ‘Plainly it doesn’t. I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t change under Tony [Hall, incoming Director-General]. To the extent that a DG can involve himself in nuts and bolts, he’ll surely look at it.’ I was referring to the sidelining of the Review Show from BBC Two to BBC Four, but he brushes that aside. ‘That’s just journalism! I’m interested in performance.’
‘I don’t see why there couldn’t be a close relationship between the BBC and this vast performance network — us, the Crucible, the Royal Exchange, Opera North, Broadsides, Live Theatre, the Royal Ballet, everyone! Fifty-two weeks, more than 52 companies offering something. It’s low-hanging fruit, there for the taking. NT Live is for the big screen, but there are ways to bring terrific performances to television. Look what marvellous work Greg Doran did with Julius Caesar. The conventional wisdom is that the two worlds are separate, and that needs challenging… Look, they’ve really got to detach themselves from this Downton ratings mentality.’ read more »
11th March 2013
The best – and best-value – show of modern painting in London right now is not the overblown and distinctly patchy Manet: Portraying Life at the Royal Academy (until 14 April; entrance fee £15). Rather, it is Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 at The Courtauld Gallery (until 26 May; entrance £6, for which you also get access to Courtauld’s many other masterpieces). You can get a sense of the show from this video with curator Dr Barnaby Wright, and as critics have notes, it’s glorious. Alastair Sooke for the Telegraph called it ‘a tight, compelling and beautifully installed exhibition’; for Brian Sewell writing for the Evening Standard, it is ‘a formidable exhibition, didactic, intense and moving’; Jonathan Jones for the Guardian describes the show as ‘scintillating’. But perhaps not quite enough has been made of just how exemplary this is as a perfectly-formed and small exhibition. read more »
