We have hugely enjoyed producing four short videos and a trailer for the exhibition Barocci: Brilliance and Grace which is at London’s National Gallery until 19 May. The films about the work of the late Renaissance master Federico Barocci were co-produced with the Saint Louis Art Museum, where the exhibition was presented before Christmas. The show opened here ten days ago and has been received with rapture in the Evening Standard by Brian Sewell (‘this is a beautiful, thrilling and intelligent exhibition’) and by Richard Dorment for the Telegraph (‘a staggeringly ambitious and heartbreakingly beautiful exhibition’). Some of the videos are on YouTube (although in a slightly eccentric way; see below) and we are embedding them here; the director of photography is Ian Serfontein, editor Todd Macdonald and producer Linda Zuck. This is the trailer:
Across the jump you will find three more of the films. read more »
Listen up. Let’s talk about The Sound and the Fury, the final part of which remains on BBC iPlayer until 9 March. Let’s talk about it because it has been one of the best BBC arts and music offerings of recent times, but let’s also consider its legacy, which is interesting in part because of its limitations. A Fresh One production for the BBC, produced and directed by the excellent Ian MacMillan, the series takes its inspiration from Alex Ross’ exemplary book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. The films outline a tale of classical music over the past one hundred years and a bit, and at times ground their cultural history in the broader political events of the times. Alex Ross is a – in fact, the – key interviewee (although composer George Benjamin also has a central role) and the author takes a ‘series consultant’ credit, but somewhat oddly the series is not, or at least not explicitly, a television version of the book. Whatever. Let’s hear two cheers for its achievement. read more »
As part of the Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television research project which I am co-ordinating with Dr Amanda Wrigley at the University of Westminster, I have curated a BFI Southbank season of television adaptations of Jacobean tragedy. The season starts in three weeks’ time with a very special event: a showing of Granada TV’s 1965 adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women followed by a discussion with Dame Diana Rigg, who stars in the production, and Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Gregory Doran. Booking opens today for BFI members and at 11.30am on 12 March for everyone else: www.bfi.org.uk and 020 7928 3232.
We are delighted to present a short film that we have made for The Hepworth Wakefield about the three exhibitions of work by Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Alice Channer and Linder on view there until 12 May (above is a detail of a work by Alice Channer). It’s a terrific trio of shows, so do try to catch them. Many thanks to The Hepworth for the commission, and to director of photography Marc Rovira and editor Todd MacDonald.
I think the BBC’s role in bringing to people’s attention the great things being done by arts organisations across the country and artists is phenomenally important… Do I think the BBC should take the arts seriously? Of course. But I am not there yet and I am not commenting on that stuff. The arts and culture matter to me hugely. I am not at the BBC yet, but, you know, they matter to me enormously.
I have just finished reading Stephen Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge. Or at least that’s what it feels like. In fact I have been viewing on my iPad downloads of the five-part six-hour BBC Two film. I have watched parts of it on tube and trains. I saw some in bed and some one morning with my breakfast toast. I even took the serial to the loo. And I realised I was consuming it in just the way that I would read a novel. At times I could devote ten minutes to it, or even just two minutes. On one occasion, I followed more than ninety minutes in a single session, jumping across the episode ends of of parts two and three. This has felt like a quite new experience – and a pleasing one too. My sporadic but concentrated attention seems to have suited Poliakoff’s visually sumptuous, achingly elegant, too often clunky, slow-paced but undeniably involving drama. On the tube this morning as I closed the iPad, I found myself wondering which of the author’s books I should read next. read more »
Even if I neglect the blog on other days (and apologies for that, it’s just a very busy time right now), the list of links needs to be offered each Sunday. I rarely embed audio clips here (mostly because I find doing so trickier than video) but this is a lovely long piece from Radio New Zealand with the editor of the London Review of Books, Mary Kay-Wilmers, speaking about the magazine and especially about the late Peter Campbell who was a wonderful illustrator and a great graphic designer and the loveliest of men. Peter was originally from New Zealand and his work is currently on show in an exhibition at the City Gallery in Wellington, a detail from which is reproduced above.
The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald is the most recent addition to our catalogue of Art Lives films that we distribute on DVD. Completed in 1987, this is a richly interesting documentary about the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux who died in 1994 at the age of 97. Delvaux is best-known for dreamlike tableaux featuring naked women in settings that are both fantastical and grounded in archaic Belgian townscapes. Adrian Maben’s film is a conventional biographical profile and its primary interest comes from the presence of Delvaux himself who relates his own life story. Plus there is a wealth of archive photographs together with images of Belgium at the time was shot, together with shots of many of Delvaux’s most famous images. There are some infelicities, such as incongruous music at times, and the film is very much of its moment, but it remains a valuable record of an intriguing artist. You can purchase the film here. read more »
It’s got to be Girls for the lead. The most recent episode of Lena Dunham’s HBO series, titled ‘One man’s trash’, lit up my Twitter like nothing else last week (except maybe that meteor, on which you need to read Elif Batuman in The New Yorker), and while it will be some time before we see it here, at least we can read about it. In That sex scene on last night’s Girls, Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker followed up her recent article about the series. Part – but only part – of why she liked the show so much was its tender display of sex:
… the Hannah/Josh scene was so intimate that it felt invasive: raw and odd and tender. That’s a nearly unheard-of quality in sex on cable television …
