Links for the weekend

6th October 2013

I like this original video essay by Michael Coresky and Casey Moore about the films of Ingmar Bergman very much; it was made for The Criterion Collection.

There are lots more Links below, with thanks this week to, among others, @KnightLAT, @jmittell, @DavidjHendy, @mattcaines, @annaegardner, @karlinmarc and @johnpaulstonard,

• The Snowden files: why the British public should be worried about GCHQ: everyone will already have recommended this to you, but John Lanchester’s Guardian essay is unquestionably the one essential read of the week.

• Freedom of information: …and this is Ken Auletta’s fine New Yorker piece about the Guardian.

• Le Giornate del Cinema Muto: the 32nd edition of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival got underway yesterday – if you can’t be there, the next best thing is reading the wonderful catalogue, available now (in both Italian and English) as a free download.

• Hale’s Tours of the World: Luke McKernan’s Picturegoing blog of accounts of seeing films through history continues to throw up gems, including this one from 1909.

• Women Film Pioneers Project: a rich new web resource about early film from Columbia University that ‘features silent-era producers, directors, co-directors, scenario writers, scenario editors, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, theatre managers to make the point that they were not just actresses.’

• Mondo Kane #2 – News! On! The! March!: David Cairns is making his way through Citizen Kane sequence by sequence, and posting blogs as he goes; this is his splendid second offering – the first can be found at Xanadu.

• Power women of the 1950s – Muriel and Betty Box: terrific Observer extract from Rachel Cooke’s forthcoming book about the sisters-in-law who made a major contribution to the post-war British film industry.

• Exprmntl – an expanded festival – programming and polemics at Exprmntl 4, Knokke-le-Zoute, 1967: a fascinating piece about the legendary gathering of the film avant-garde by Xavier Garcia Bardon for the online journal Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema.

• Why doesn’t Shawn Ryan have a show right now?: a good BuzzFeed feature by Erin La Rosa about the showrunner @ShawnRyanTV and the current state of American television.

• How USA Network is using social to redefine TV syndication: cutting edge social media simultaneous with a syndicated show in the States, from Natan Edelsburg at lostremote.

• Does live TV matter?: John Ellis at the blog for Critical Studies in Television on patterns of scheduling and social media in the UK.

• Masters of none?: at The Blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books Anne Helen Petersen muses on genre and the pilot of Masters of Sex which starts on Channel 4 this Tuesday; Jeff Maysh at the Independent has an interview with star Lizzy Caplan.

• The Dutch Courtesan excerpt – a just-released part of the screen version of John Marston’s early modern play which was staged at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York in June 2013.

• Stunning photographs of early twentieth century in New York: a gorgeous Hyperallergic post by Allison Meier about the Vandamm Studio of performing arts photography.

• Kodak No 1 Camera – early images to mark its 125th anniversary: I loved this Guardian slideshow of early everyday photographs.

• The moment a photographer became a historian: James Estrin at The New York Times lensblog on photographer Bill Eppridge who died this week – includes some extraordinary images from the ’60s.

• Painting by numbers – the state of the IMA: Matt Gonzales for Indianapolis Monthly has a long feature about the troubles at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is interesting in itself but also has resonances future-of-museum debates elsewhere.

• Emile Zola and the integrity of representation: I am a big fan of Brian Nelson’s translations of Zola, and here he contributes a short piece to the blog of Oxford University Press which publishes them.

• A different Kafka: for The New York Review of Books John Banville, no less, reviews the second and third volumes of Reiner Stach’s monumental biography of the writer:

On the evidence of the two volumes that we already have, this is one of the great literary biographies, to be set up there with, or perhaps placed on an even higher shelf than, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, George Painter’s Marcel Proust, and Leon Edel’s Henry James.

• Inside the Bodleian – building a 21st century library: a neat short film from the University of Oxford.