My blog schedule for the week has been disrupted by a slow recovery from a modest bout of ‘flu, so apologies for the absence of new posts in the past few days. Spending more time in bed than usual did allow me to catch up with some reading, including the recently published The Persephone Book of Short Stories. This is the 100th volume from Persephone, which over the past decade or more has specialised in publishing neglected twentieth-century writing, much of it by women. The Persephone story is told well in the Observer feature One shade of grey by Rachel Cooke and this is the link to their richly interesting online catalogue. I want simply to hymn this particular 450 page volume, in part for its contents but mostly – and this is particularly important in this age of the tablet – for its materiality. read more »
So let’s talk about Beyoncé. Everyone else is. Especially about her half-time Super Bowl show last Sunday (above, the video is embedded in several of the pieces linked to), which through the week prompted a slew of interesting pieces. These include The roots of Beyoncé’s Super Bowl spectacular by Ann Helen for NPR’s The Record, who writes thoughtfully of a ‘display of imperial charisma [that] comes off as a historical inevitability, and as something that benefits us all’. Also worth reading are Tom Shales’ How many Beyonci does it take to blow out a Super Bowl? for the Chicago Sun-Times, Why the Super Bowl needed Beyoncé by Mark Blankenship at NewNowNext and On Beyoncé’s face from Avidly. But make sure you don’t miss Anne Helen Petersen’s Beyoncé, feminism, ambivalence and the fascinating string of comments that this ‘sermon’ (her word) has sparked. There are more good links across the jump, with h/t thanks this week to @charleskriel, @Chi_Humanities, @erik_kwakkel and @alanclarkeGD. Meanwhile, just because I can…
The first of this week’s videos – which, by the way, is totally delightful and should be watched now – is discussed by the academic Jason Mittell in his post The Scared is Spread at his essential blog Just TV:
My perspective on this video is unique, as it was made by my student Bianca Giaever as her final project at Middlebury before graduating last week, and I was the project’s adviser… The bulk of [Bianca’s] creative background was in audio production for radio, and oral storytelling… In the fall semester, she made Holy Cow Lisa, an excellent project in her Video Production course that took an audio interview and ‘visualized’ it through creative & playful video footage. She wanted to see if she could make another project in that vein as a kind-of ‘proof of concept’ that illustrated audio stories could work as a format – the result was…
At the time of writing, The Scared is scared has attracted more than 230,000 views on Vimeo and, as Mittell details, extensive discussion and highlighting on other blogs. He continues:
I also watch it spread from the meta-perspective of a scholar of digital media, which raises numerous questions. What does it mean to traditional educational hierarchies to have a student’s work seen & enjoyed by thousands of people? Does spreadability matter when assessing and grading students’ work? Should we encourage students to seek spreadability as a goal, or just facilitate it as a potential byproduct of creative success? How do such accomplishments impact the reputation of the department and potentially benefit other students’ opportunities? And most immediately, how will this success help Bianca make a living after Middlebury?
Network’s new double DVD set from the 1960s ABC TV arts series Tempo is, as I posted last week, a wonderful collection of archival jewels. After last week’s introduction, I intend to post over the next few Fridays responses to individual films and tele-recordings, starting with the half-hour film A Tale of Two Talents, first broadcast on 6 February 1966. The talents on view are those of pop singer Tom Jones, a star for just a year or so when the film was shot and still playing Mecca Dancing Locarno Stevenage, and Royal Ballet principal Lynn Seymour, a dazzling young dancer who had been a favourite with critics and audiences for seven years or so. James Goddard’s film sets up an intriguing contrast of low art and high, of mass audiences and niche appeal, but initially it is far from apparent what the two figures might have in common. But as we see Tom performing and Lynn rehearsing the answer emerges comes across very clearly: sex. read more »
I have said this here before but it definitely bears repeating: over the past seven years or so a series of BFI screenings, publications and DVD releases has rewritten the history of the British documentary. This is an achievement that has, as yet, been insufficiently celebrated – and of course the task is far from complete. Much of what we’ve learned and seen anew has been to do with cinema and industrial documentaries and we still have the glories of television documentary to discover. But already we can understand more fully and engage more deeply with and simply and straighhforwardly see an enormously rich filmmaking heritage from the early 1930s to the late 1970s (and occasionally beyond). And the latest instalment of the project is this month’s initiative This Working Life: Steel which was launched on Tuesday evening at BFI Southbank. Here’s the trailer…
I posted yesterday about my discovery of the remarkable book The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems, which published in English by The Focal Press in 1948. Do take a look at that blog for an introduction to the volume, and allow me to return to it here to highlight two strands that I find of particular interest. One its its unabashed Marxist analysis of the woes of the film industry, illustrated with wonderful diagrams of monopoly capitalism in action (a detail of one is above). The other line of thought that chimes with much that I am thinking about in current productions is concerned with the distinctions between Film (which is often capitalised in the book and regarded as essentially monolithic) and Theatre (ditto). read more »
One afternoon in Canterbury recently I stumbled upon The Chaucer Bookshop, a second-hand treasure house that I realised I had last entered as a schoolboy some forty years ago. I was delighted to find that it was thriving in this age of Amazon, and I was thrilled to discover several books about film and television (the only ones I in any sense collect) that I had never come across before. Foremost among these was a handsome 1948 volume from The Falcon Press: The Film: Its Economic, Social and Artistic Problems by Georg Schmidt, Werner Schmalenbach and Peter Bachlin, and with Hermann Eidenbenz (the links may need Google Translate) as its art editor. Printed on heavy, shiny paper, this is an extraordinary volume entirely deserving of the discussion of its genesis, its analysis and its truly remarkable design that I aim to develop in this post and a follow-up. read more »
On Friday Netflix made available simultaneously all thirteen episodes of its House of Cards re-make (above). The serial, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher, has had a mixed press – Alessandra Stanley for The New York Times described it as ‘a delicious immorality play with an excellent cast, but the tempo is slow and oddly ponderous’. But it is the innovative release strategy that has attracted most attention. This has been shaped by the recognition that in the age of DVDs and DVRs our viewing habits are changing in fundamental ways. As Brian Selter writes in The New York Times, ‘People have been known to brag about finishing a whole 12-episode season of Homeland in one sitting.’ (We watched just the three shows on Friday night.) Selter is good on the changes, as is Mark Sweney for the Guardian and Tim Carmody for The Verge, who says House of Cards is ‘more like a thirteen-part movie than episodic TV’. Across the jump, more links to more interesting stuff, with recommendation h/ts to among others @nictate, @annehelen, @prodnose, @bergersmicer and @Geoff_Andrew. read more »
I have my colleague Todd Macdonald to thank for the weekend’s first clip: a timelapse panorama of the courtyard observed by Jeff (James Stewart, above) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Todd was laid up with a bug for much of the week and instead of spying on his neighbours he watched a lot of stuff online – and chronicled this on a blog post. Jeff Desom‘s remix was one of his discoveries – and it’s a revelatory reworking of the film and the studio space in which it was made. The artist also shows this as an installation. Across the jump there are nine other clips that I encountered during the week that I hope you may enjoy.
Thanks to the eclectic and extraordinarily extensive DVD releases from Network we can now see a remarkable range of ITV programmes from the past forty or so years. Who would have thought that the obscure serial Adam Smith, which was one of Trevor Griffiths’ earliest scriptwriting assignments, would one day have a life beyond its religious programming slot back in 1972? But there it is in the Network catalogue (although oddly available only until 6 February) along with The Persuaders, Sergeant Cork and many more. Network have also released DVDs of single dramas from Armchair Theatre (the link is to Volume 1, and each of the four collections deserve their own blog post) and now – thrillingly for those of us interested in the history of arts television – there is a double DVD of films from the ABC Weekend Television arts magazine series Tempo (1961-67). Today’s post is an introduction to this truly significant release, following which I intend to write some further Friday posts about individual films. read more »
