Links for the weekend
Courtesy of The Notebook at mubi.com and the Spanish film magazine Transit comes The Melville Variations, great video+text essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin about the films of the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville. Once you have enjoyed this short, sharp and so-precise montage, do also read the text here: ‘In the end, there is only ever the hat: mute, static, frozen, inhuman.’
There are further film links and much more below, with thanks due this week to @filmstudiesff, @KarlinMarc, @tiffanyjenkins, @manovich, @Obridge, @sebchan and @melissaterras.
• Innovation by accident: yet another essential piece by David Bordwell about narrative innovation in 1940s Hollywood films.
• Harry Potter treated with gravity: Kristin Thompson makes the case for filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, director of Children of Men, 2006 and the much-anticipated Gravity, as well as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004.
• A walk through Carlito’s Way: also from Adrian Martin (co-author of the Melville essay) is this tremendous analysis of the below set-piece from Brian De Palma’s 1993 movie, published in the new issue of the online film journal Lola.
Carlito’s Way Clip from LOLA JOURNAL on Vimeo.
• On the edge of slander: Stephen Greenblatt on Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, which is about to be released on DVD.
• 10 great films set in museums: I’m a bit late to this one but Samuel Wigley’s BFI blog post does exactly what it says in its title, and includes Topkapi, for which this is a terrific trailer:
• Ealing on air: a good piece from Network by Sheldon Hall about the licencing of Ealing Studios feature films to British television in the 1950s.
• Stuart Hall – mourning, migration and Miles Davis: a Prospect interview by Jonathan Derbyshire with filmmaker John Akomfrah about The Stuart Hall Project; here is the trailer:
• Edward II @ The Olivier, National Theatre: the ever-thoughtful Peter Kirwan at the Bardathon on the Marlowe production that is dividing critical opinion – ‘Not a perfect production… but stylish and provocative, and performed with gusto.’
• Why the Blackfriars in 1596?: Holger Syme worries away productively at a question about late Elizabethan theatre history.
• Backstage drama at the Met, worthy of opera: do take a look at Zachary Woolfe’s report about the Met’s Eugene Onegin as the director of which Fiona Shaw has replaced the sadly indisposed Deborah Warner.
• Writing with images: a fascinating and truly rich diary-like response by James Elkins to T.J. Clark’s rather wonderful book The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. (Clark is the co-curator of Tate Britain’s show Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (until 20 October), and tomorrow night there is a Lowry on Film event which includes John Read’s BBC film L.S. Lowry, 1957.)
• Bacon/Moore – Flesh and Bone: the Financial Times’ Jackie Wullschlager (perhaps the best regular art critic this side of the Atlantic) on the unmissable show at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum – ‘a brilliant pairing (obvious now, yet never before attempted by a museum)’.
• The rectangular canvas is dead – Richard Diebenkorn and the problems of modern painting: a fine essay by Jed Perl for New Republic.
• Sound is here – an interview with Barbara London: Charles Eppley at Rhizome talks with the curator of MoMA’s exhibition Soundings: A Contemporary Score.
• A magus of the north: for The New York Review of Books, A.S. Byatt hymns the work of Icelandic writer Sjón: ‘Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head.’
• From Mars: never heard of Bustle.com? Don’t let that put you off Lizzie Widdicombe’s piece for The New Yorker about the economics on online publishing.
• Crawling the UK web domain: Peter Webster at The British Library marks the completion of the first trawl for an archive of what we might regard as the British web – just the 31TB of compressed data (which actually doesn’t seem that much).
• Download the Let’s Get Real 2 report: this is important – a free .pdf of Culture 24’s new report on understanding and measuring digital engagement.
… and finally, this by Sally Kohn for New York magazine is very sweet,
• Watching a Brooklyn sunset with the blissfully wed Patrick Stewart
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