Links for the weekend
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…
• The persisting vision – reading the language of cinema: a terrific Martin Scorsese essay about the wonders of film for The New York Review of Books.
• A brief history of modern architecture through movies: Zachary Edelson at Architizer with some fascinating parallels between film sets and the styles of twentieth century architecture.
• Eterna: an astonishing supercut from Hollywood trailers; for background with editor Vadzim Khudabets, see his brief interview with Time.
ETERNA from Behind The Epic on Vimeo.
• “Cinema, alone” / multiple “cinemas”: courtesy of an excellent new issue of the online journal Alphaville dedicated to ‘cinema in the interstices’, this is a rewarding lecture transcript from 2001-2002 by one of the greatest of all French writers on film and video, Raymond Bellour (as translated by Jill Murphy) ; here he explores ““that which cinema, alone, has the mission to pursue”.
• Spaces of Television researchers uncover ‘lost’ Ken Loach film: bravo to colleagues Billy Smart and Leah Panos from the University of Reading for their discovery in the National Archives as part of their research on the 1973 arts series Full House.
• Difficult women: why do we not have an Emily Nussbaum to write about British television? Here is The New Yorker‘s critic making a staunch defence of Sex in the City.
• Bad in the bones – how Walter White found his inner sociopath: an insightful piece by The New York Times‘ A.O. Scott on Breaking Bad.
• VCR’s past is guiding television’s future: David Carr for The New York Times on recent legal decisions in the States and the implications of a Supreme Court case in 1984 that ruled that time-shifting of television by viewers was ‘legitimate fair use’.
• Herding elephants – radio and the British Library: for the BUFVC’s Viewfinder Online, British Library curator Paul Wilson writes about the coming changes in radio archiving and access.
• Watching you: Luke McKernan on two-way mirrors, why we should do away with them, and the essentials of documentary: ‘Film does not get at the truth by rendering itself unseen by its victims. It obtains the truth by co-operating with them.’
• Double exposure – photography’s biggest ever show comes back to life: the resurrection – in Luxembourg – of Edward Steichen’s ground-breaking 1955 exhibition Family of Man, as reported by Giovanna Dunmall for the Guardian.
• ‘We need to have a plan B’: you need to read Mark Ravenhill’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival speech in full – on austerity, funding for the arts and more (via the Guardian).
• Inside the New Museum’s vast, beautiful and totally insane digitization project: Zach Schonfeld for The Atlantic on a project that is both an exhibition and an innovative archiving project for artists’ video.
• Interview – Serge Dorny of Opéra de Lyon: Alexandra Cochlan at theartsdesk talks with the director of the house bringing Gary Hill’s digital Fidelio to Edinburgh.
• Trial by Twitter: an essential piece by Ariel Levy for The New Yorker about Steubenville and social media.
• Death in plain sight: from the London Review of Books, Marina Warner is wonderful on the legacy of suffragette martyr Emily Davison.
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