Links for the weekend
Read of the week – if ‘read’ is the right word – has to be the Guardian’s remarkable round-up of the implications of the Snowden revelations in its digital presentation NSA Files: Decoded. You should also most definitely read editor Alan Rusbridger’s essay for the New York Review of Books, The Snowden leaks and the public. The above image comes from the Guardian’s online multiple media presentation, which features text, images, video and audio as well as inforgraphics and other interactive elements. The authors are Ewan Macaskill and Gabriel Dance, with producers Feilding Cage and Greg Chen. If you care about the future of serious journalism, take a look (although you almost certainly have), and click also on this week’s New York Times feature with a similar strategy, Forging an art market in China. In this fascinating and beautifully presented report David Barboza, Graham Bowley and Amanda Cox explore the problems of China’s auction houses, dealers and forgers. For other links across the jump, thanks go to @jeremy_millar_1, @lukemckernan, @RalphRivera, @KnightLAT, @annehelen and @alexismadrigal.
• Our new e-book on Christopher Nolan: David Bordwell with Kristin Thompson launch a new title, available here for the bargain price of $1.99.
• Is Ozu slow?: a rewarding piece of close reading from Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1998 (although only just posted at his new blog).
• Rethinking the retrospective – Jean-Luc Godard in New York: a very good piece by Michael Blu at Hyperallergic asking some really pertinent questions:
In a culture of ritual digitization, a retrospective like this serves as a kind of bulwark against the intractable drumbeat of technological progress in the arts.
• Studying movie magazines and fan culture! Online methodology and research! And LANTERN!: lots and lots and lots to learn from in the most recent assembly of resources from Catherine Grant at Film Studies for Free.
• Divorce court – who won the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman split?: there’s a TV series waiting to be made from this new Grantland column by Juliet Litman; here she analyses the epic battle from 12 years back.
• The rise and fall of the midnight ghost shows: this is such a great post from Paleofuture about spooky entertainments in the movie theaters of the ’30s and ’40s.
• Did the ‘War of the Worlds’ Radio Broadcast Really Cause Mass Panic?: more from Paleofuture on Orson Welles’ 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ radio hoax…
• The greatest media hoax: … which Ron Simon at the Paley Centre for Media also looks back to – and asks whether something similar could be achieved in the world of social media.
• Ambivalent about horror: Jane Hu at the Los Angeles Review of Books on the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
• Homelamb: rather cruelly, Vulture calls this totally enjoyable Sesame Street parody ‘the best episode of the third season of Homeland by far’:
• Closer than that: terrific Adam Gopnik piece fifty years after the JFK assassination, from The New Yorker.
• Why Ian Nairn, outspoken critic of postwar modernism, is as relevant as ever: Rowan Moore reflects on the life and work of the much-missed architecture writer, subject of a new collection edited by Gillian Darley and David McKie.
• The power of patience: a wonderful and wise piece from Harvard professor Jennifer L. Roberts in The Harvard Magazine ‘on creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention.’
Every external pressure, social and technological, is pushing students in the other direction, toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity—and against this other kind of opportunity. I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down. In all of my art history courses, graduate and undergraduate, every student is expected to write an intensive research paper based on a single work of art of their own choosing. And the first thing I ask them to do in the research process is to spend a painfully long time looking at that object.
• Calder’s heirs accuse trusted dealer of fraud: so closed is the art market that often it’s only legal disputes like this one that open its practices for scrutiny by the rest of us – Patricia Cohen reports for The New York Times.
• Why don’t all museums and archives want to open up like the Rijksmuseum?: Harriet Deacon at The Archival Platform:
Any public institution can think big, but to a large extent it is constrained by the national or local authorities who draw up their mandates, provide resources, and set targets for evaluation of performance. For more institutions to act like the Rijksmuseum, more Departments of Culture need to wake up and smell the tulips.
• Vivat!: a valuable response by Duncan at Margate Sands to the recent (and remarkable) production of Edward II at the National Theatre.
• Introducing the film of The Dutch Courtesan: we’ll return to this, but for moment take note of the exciting news that the Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University of York have posted on Vimeo their full-length film of John Marston’s play.
• Finally, an art form that gets the internet – opera: Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic is very good on Nico Muhly’s Two Boys as he asks the question, Can you responsibly represent the Internet at all?
• Epic opera – how to film Berlioz’s Les Troyens for the small screen: a Gramophone interview with screen director Francois Rousillon.
• The one tech buzzword every journalist should know: following on from the pieces at the head of the post, this is John Paul Titlow for Fast Company Co.Labs on how the future of storytelling may be driven by a Javascript library called D3.
• The reviewer’s song: lovely thoughtful writing from Andrew O’Hagan on Norman Mailer in London Review of Books.
• Trapped inside the novel: an honest and provocative piece about writing fiction from Tim Parks for The New York Review of Books.
• ‘I know’ by Winterfalle: a music video shot, edited and directed by our Illuminations colleague Todd MacDonald
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