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 »
Another post from our archives, this time from 8 March 2011, when I was about to teach a very similar class to the one that I will give at the Royal College of Art tomorrow.
I am delighted to be contributing a quartet of classes to David Crowley’sCritical Writing in Art & Design course at the Royal College of Art. Our first two sessions considered television films about Henry Moore and then Kenneth Clark and Simon Schama. Tomorrow, the third session focusses on alternatives to the dominant traditions of arts programming on British television, and one key example is the 1987 series State of the Artthat Illuminations produced for Channel 4. The series is published by us along with an interview with the series’ writer Sandy Nairne (available here as a double DVD for £39.99). It’s one of the major projects with which we’ve been involved and it remains close to the core of the company. And this despite the fact that when it was first shown it was roundly abused by almost everyone. read more »
I thought others might do this to mark the anniversary today of the publication of Jane Austen’s great and glorious Pride and Prejudice. But as I’ve yet to see such an anthology, I thought I would make one for myself – and anyone else fascinated by how dear Jane has been adapted for the cinema, television and now the web across the years. Here, then, are 12 clips for a 200th birthday. (There were originally 10 clips in this post, but I am grateful to Stuart Ian Burns – see comment below – for pointing out my omission of Lost in Austen, which is now included below, along with the trailer for Bride and Prejudice.)
1. Pride and Prejudice, 1940
Below is the original trailer for the Hollywood adaptation with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Robert Z. Leonard directed with Aldous Huxley (!) as one of the credited scriptwriters. The film was derived from the 1936 stage version written by Helen Jerome and is set several decades later than the time of the novel. According to Wikipedia,
The film is substantially different from the novel in a number of ways; most notably, the confrontation near the end of the film between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet was radically altered, changing the former’s haughty demand that Elizabeth promise never to marry Darcy into a hoax to test the mettle and sincerity of Elizabeth’s love.
I’m not going to apologise for leading again with Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow(above), the Sundance-premiered film that was shot in secret at Disney World and Disneyland. I particularly want to draw your attention to It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad Disney world, in which Tim Wu at The New Yorker writes on the ‘fair use’ issues prompted by the film (on which Disney has yet to comment) Wu is spot on when he says that the film
ultimately raises a larger question of what you might call cultural freedom, or the freedom to comment on or reimagine the great cultural icons of our time… a world where Disney gets to determine everything said about Disney World would be a poor place indeed.
Bravo, bravo. Across the jump, more links from the week to stuff about television, digital media and movies, with h/ts for recommendations to @KeyframeDaily, @Chi_Humanities and, as so often, @brainpicker. I realise it’s a slightly austere and downbeat list this week, but that feels like the way of the world at present. read more »
A selection of interesting videos that I came across during the past week and – well, that’s it really… Above is an image from the Saul Bass title sequence to Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), a film discussed by Christian Keathley in no 10. below.
1. Richard II, directed by Rupert Goold, BBC, 2012
Why not? Following the news this week that David Tennant is to play the king for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the autumn, here is a brief reminder of last year’s The Hollow Crown presentation (discussed in my blog post here) with Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt chastising Ben Whishaw’s Richard.
Basil Dearden and Michael Relph‘s 1959 British noir Sapphire is a fascinating and fractured tale of the murder of a young ‘coloured’ woman who has been passing for white. She is found murdered on Hampstead Heath and the police superintendant Robert Hazard (Nigel Patrick, exceptional) has to solve the case. The film aspires to an impeccable liberalism but it seems unable to help itself falling for racial stereotypes, especially in a frenzied musical interlude in a Shepherd’s Bush ‘dive’ called Tulip’s. Watching the film this evening (it is released on DVD by Strawberry Media), I was struck that among its many pleasures, along with terrific performances by Earl Cameron and Gordon Heath, Bernard Miles and Yvonne Mitchell, is the glorious Eastmancolor cinematography of Harry Waxman. Almost accidentally the film seems to have captured wonderfully the dingy drabness of London in the late 1950s, as I hope is demonstrated by the framegrabs that follow. read more »
PS. Just seen that for fans of this production @EffieSian has come up with the hashtag #R2DT – genius! That’s in addition to @TheRSC rather more official #RSCRichardII.
Why is the work of one of our greatest filmmakers – the director Alan Clarke – all but invisible?
This is not a new question. Nor do I have anything original by way of an answer. But the issue is much on my mind. I wrote a post for the Screen Plays blog about an extraordinary television production of a play – Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, starring David Bowie (above) – that Alan Clarke directed for the BBC in 1982. Then I read Billy Smart’s excellent piece about the same production, which only underlined my sense of how remarkable and astonishing it is. And I realised that I was angry that none of us can legally see this play aside from very occasional BFI Southbank screenings. (An off-air recording of the full production is on YouTube, but I said legally.) Similarly unavailable in this country is one of the most challenging and powerful British films ever made, Elephant (1989; released only in the USA as a R1 DVD). The astounding Contact (1984) is also denied to us. Ditto Danton’s Death(1978) and Penda’s Fen (1974) and Road (1987) and… –the list goes on and on. Whatever the reasons, this is simply and straightforwardly NOT RIGHT. read more »
In another post from the blog’s archive (previously published on 17 July 2010) I take a look at the visual arts on BBC Television between 1936 and 1939. I was reminded of this because I am teaching again at the Royal College of Art tomorrow – and our main subject is Kenneth Clark, later to be the presenter of Civilisation (1969). But Clark had a significant engagement with television long before that landmark series…
In the second volume of his autobiography The Other Half, published in 1977, Kenneth Clark recalls having taken part in 1937 in ‘the first “art” programme to appear on the new medium’ of television. ‘I was chairman of a panel in which four artists tried to guess who wrote certain lines of poetry,’ he writes, ‘and four poets guessed, from details, who painted certain pictures. The poets won. I suppose about 500 people saw it.’ I am as guilty as others in using this quote to suggest (in my book Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain) that pre-war television was pretty much a visual arts wasteland. My recent burrowing in the online Radio Times listings shows me just how wrong I was — and indeed that K was mistaken too. The programme he describes wasn’t transmitted in 1937 and it most certainly wasn’t the first television ‘art’ programme. read more »
The great story out of Sundance is the shooting at Disneyland and Disney World of Randy Moore’s movie Escape from Tomorrow without any location permissions or copyright clearances. Believe me, as one who has tried to film at a Disney theme park, this is an astounding achievement – and Steven Zeitchik for the LA Times has the story. As Zeitchik says, Escape from Tomorrow is
a Surrealist, genre-defying black-and-white film… [and] one of the strangest and most provocative movies this reporter has seen in eight years attending the Sundance Film Festival. And it may well never be viewed by a commercial audience.
