17th August 2013
Another Saturday, another review of another DVD set from Network’s The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection. Following last week’s engagement with the first release, today’s post is concerned with Volume 2. Here is another quartet of lesser-known British feature films shot mostly (location filming is minimal) on the stages at Ealing between, this week, 1935 and 1942. Embedded below is Network’s trailer for the quartet – and across the jump are my thoughts about each of the four films.
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16th August 2013
For the past year and more, we have hugely enjoyed working with the academic team putting together Shakespearean London Theatres. The ShaLT project is dedicated to telling ‘the full story behind the vast theatrical scene that thrilled London for over fifty years during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I.” As the ShaLT website says,
This project aims to increase public awareness of these sites and to promote their enjoyment by producing, through a partnership between De Montfort University and the Victoria and Albert Museum, a map, a printed ShaLT Guide, interactive software, public talks, and downloadable short films that will enable the public to travel to the modern London locations of these theatres and learn about them.
The excellent website has a wealth of detail, historical analysis and images, and Illuminations has been working on the short films. The first of these films – a general introduction to the project and to the period – has just gone online, and is embedded here. More will appear over the coming days and weeks, and we will be highlighting those here too – as well as discussing further the ShaLT project and our part in it.
15th August 2013
I am delighted to have been invited to edit a special edition of the journal Shakespeare Bulletin to appear in 2015. Published by The John Hopkins University Press, the journal has as one of its editors Pascale Aebischer, who is the author of the new – and highly recommended – book, Screening Early Modern Drama: Beyond Shakespeare (borrow it from a library, the cover price is a tad steep).
Pascale and I share an interest in screen adaptations of plays by early modern authors other than Shakespeare, and the presentation of these works on television and other screen media (although not movies) is the focus of the issue that we have titled ‘Beyond Shakespeare on the small screen’. This is the call for proposals (which can also be found here) – and then across the jump I discuss the idea a little more, as well as embedding two relevant examples. One is an amazing version of the opening scene of Robert Greene’s The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; the other is Bed Trick (with Sinéad Mathews, above), a rather wonderful if also oblique example from The Young Vic and the Guardian of what I’m talking about:
The issue will consider a wide range of adaptations of early modern drama by authors other than Shakespeare produced for media forms that were not primarily conceived for cinema distribution. We are interested in critical and analytical discussions of plays from medieval literature through to the 1630s that have been adapted for broadcast television in Britain or elsewhere, for DVD distribution in either a commercial and/or an educational context, and for other forms of digital or online dissemination.
Proposals of up to 300 words for academic articles should be sent to me (email: [email protected]) by 31 March 2014. I would also be very interested to hear about any projects that you think I and colleagues might consider for discussion. read more »
13th August 2013
… a bit, well, ordinary. At least that’s how David Bowie is happening now came across in my £14.20 seat at the Cineworld Wandsworth. Tonight’s 7pm screening was billed as ‘a live nationwide cinema event’ and the ‘finale’ to the V&A exhibition that closed on Sunday. As a ‘live’ cinema event (I’m going to keep using the inverted commas), this followed in the footsteps of Pompeii Live from the British Museum (about which I posted here) in aspiring to present an exhibition on a cinema screen in real time.
As I commented then, Pompeii Live didn’t feel very, you know, live, and neither, if truth be told, did DBihn. This was despite the slightly desperate measure of cutting from the numerous prepared packages back to our uncertain presenters – exhibition curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh – leaping up onto a little stage to floor-manager-cued applause. Otherwise, I saw some compelling archive footage, admired some nice video graphics and got told again and again and again what an amazing, transformational, astoundingly original, epoch-defining genius DB is. Yet I didn’t even really feel that I actually saw the exhibition. read more »
13th August 2013
Oh to be in Edinburgh now that Hamlet‘s there. The Wooster Group‘s radical adaptation of the play has its last performance tonight as part of the official festival – it’s sold out, of course, but there is a hope that the production may come to London next year. As the company’s web site explains, this is ‘Shakespeare’s classic tragedy… re-imagined by mixing and repurposing Richard Burton’s 1964 Broadway production, directed by John Gielgud’, and a taste of its pleasures can be gleaned from this ‘flight plan’ video:
HAMLET in NY – flight plan [10.24.12] from The Wooster Group on Vimeo.
Lyn Gardner for the Guardian was won over when the show was in Dublin last year and for the same paper Andrew Dickson more or less concurs. Dominic Cavendish in the Telegraph is, by contrast, underwhelmed: ‘altogether too much straight-faced mucking around’. But what this clearly glorious theatrical event does offer me is the chance to replay the astonishing video interview and trailer with Richard Burton (extracts of which appear above). He gave the interview and recorded the trailer when his Hamlet – on which The Wooster Group base their production – was filmed on the Broadway stage back in 1964 for release to cinemas. How prescient of NTLive and RSC Live from Stratford Upon Avon is that! As Burton rightly says, ‘This is the theatre of the future, taking shape before your eyes today.’
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the launch of ‘Theatrofilm with Electronovision’.
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12th August 2013
Time, I think, to start posting – initially on a weekly basis – about the preparations for Richard II Live from Stratford Upon Avon. This is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s live-to-cinemas broadcast of the company’s new staging with David Tennant as the king. Directed by the company’s artistic director Greg Doran, this opens in Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre on 10 October before transferring to London’s Barbican Theatre for a run between 9 December and 25 January (for which there are some tickets still available).
The live showing in more than 250 UK cinemas is on Wednesday 13 November and this will be followed by a range of encore screenings as well as by presentations in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Russia and elsewhere. We are also very excited that the broadcast will be shown for free in more than 1,000 schools in the UK in the week following the cinema showing. Details of the cinemas where screenings are already on sale are on the RSC’s Live from Stratford Upon Avon web site. The broadcast is not an Illuminations production, but I am producing it for the RSC – and I hope you will not object if I chronicle its development here each Monday from now on. read more »
11th August 2013
Continuing this weekend’s British cinema theme (see Ealing before Ealing here), my first recommendation has to be for Xan Brooks’ delightful Guardian essay and video A pilgrim’s progress: on the trail of A Canterbury Tale. Brooks uses the detective work of local historian Paul Tritton who has identified many of the locations used for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s extraordinary 1944 feature (details here, along with a page of links of various walks around Canterbury). If you want to know more there are further links at The Powell and Pressburger Pages lovingly assembled by Steve Crook. There are more film links across the jump, as well as links of other kinds, with my thanks this week to @KeyframeDaily, @OWC_Oxford and @longform. read more »
10th August 2013
Neither rhyme nor reason seems behind the choice of the four films in the first volume of the DVD series that Network have called The Ealing Studios Rarities Collection. Which is most excellent – the apparently random selection , that is, as well as the four-film DVD. Each DVD set in the series features a quartet of titles from the StudioCanal archives (yes, Virginia, a French company owns the legacy of this most British of film producers) drawn from the lesser-known and even downright obscure output of Ealing Studios. Thrillingly (at least for those of us fascinated by the by-ways of British cinema), the choices come both from the studio’s glory days (1938-59) under producer Michael Balcon and from the years before this when Basil Dean‘s Associated Talking Pictures was chief among the companies that made movies on the Ealing stages. Five DVD sets have been released, with three further ones announced, and many of the films on offer are rich and remarkable. And the unmotivated gathering on each set positively encourages sampling of titles of which you have probably never heard. read more »
4th August 2013
Catching up (far too slowly) after China, there is a mountain of great stuff to read – and to recommend. One of the richest pieces published while I was away is David Bordwell’s post Twice-told tales: Mildred Pierce which includes the video essay below. Bordwell is fascinating on the use of flash-backs in the great 1945 film noir (a detail of the poster is above), and his ideas are also illuminating in relation to recent movies including Side Effects and Now You See Me.
With thanks this week to @filmstudiesff, @zimbalist, @LondonSounds, and @filmdrblog, further recommendations include the following… read more »
31st July 2013
After China, I am slowly re-entering London life, and I am delighted to highlight the premiere showing at 9.30pm tonight, Wednesday, on Sky Arts 2 HD of our new production Samuel Beckett: Not I. The 45-minute film features a new single-shot recording of Lisa Dwan’s remarkable performance of Beckett’s astonishing monologue. Written in 1972 and famously performed by Billie Whitelaw at the Royal Court Theatre in 1973, Not I in the theatre features simply a pair of lips seemingly floating some eight feet above an otherwise entirely dark stage.
Exceptional reviews (including Lyn Gardner’s 5-star rave for the Guardian) greeted Lisa Dwan’s performance of the work earlier this year at the Court, and it is a privilege to bring this to Sky Arts and a wider audience. The performance itself is preceded by a half-hour of contextual documentary with Lisa and with interview contributions from actor Simon Callow, stage and film director Roger Michell, Beckett biographer Professor James Knowlson and the critic and artist Derval Tubridy. Making the film has been something of an adventure, but it is thrilling to have produced only the third film version of Not I.
