Links for the weekend
At London’s The Photographers’ Gallery there is a compelling exhibition called Shoot! Existential Photography (until 6 January). Trouble is, the idea behind what’s not in any case a great title is a bit tricky to explain. Here’s the gallery’s set-up:
In the period following World War I, a curious attraction appeared at fairgrounds: the photographic shooting gallery. If the punter’s bullet hit the centre of the target, this triggered a camera. Instead of winning a balloon or toy, the participant would win a snapshot of him or herself in the act of shooting. Shoot! Existential Photography traces the history of this fascinating side-show – from its popular use at fairgrounds to how it fascinated many artists and intellectuals in its heyday, including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre [that’s the two of them above], Man Ray and Lee Miller.
But of course Shoot! Existential Photography is also about guns and cameras and sex and death – and it includes an intense video installation by Christian Marclay, Crossfire (2007). One of my favourite art websites, we make money not art, posted a response to the show this week with lots of images – so see that, and then take a look here for one of the show’s key works, In almost every picture #7 – you’ll be delighted and even amazed.
Below are more links that I hope hit the target, including ones lined up for me by @honorharger, @nicklebygirl, @filmdrblog and others.
• Killing Them Softly:… this Brad Pitt hitman movie opened months ago in the UK (and it’ll definitely make my “10 Best” of the year) but it is only released in the States this weekend – which accounts for a clutch of interesting pieces, including an IndieWire interview with director Andrew Dominik, a Grantland Q&A with him also, and Richard Brody’s thoughtful demolition job in The New Yorker, plus this neat online featurette…
• Tony Scott- a moving target: a fascinating and original exercise in sequential film criticism from Mubi.com.
• The rules of the game: Reid Rosefelt’s piece about life as a movie publicist in the 1980s is a lot of fun – it’s part of the excellent Columbia Journalism Review special issue on ‘The Fame Game’.
• Material properties of historical film in the digital age: a dense but important contribution by Barbara Flueckiger to an issue of the online journal Necsus taking on ‘the transformation of historical films as tangible objects by the process of digitisation’.
• The life lessons hidden in reality TV: Andrea Seigel in The New York Times is good on Survivor, The Bachelor and (what on earth is this?) Say Yes to the Dress.
• Spaces of Television: James Chapman blogs for Critical Studies in Television about British television ‘swashbuckler’ series.
• Save your kisses for me: an extraordinary – I mean, EXTRAORDINARY – blog by Adam Curtis on ‘the intertwined story of the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in the Gaza strip and the reactionary right-wing nationalist groups in Israel.’
• Caption mining at the crossover of digital humanities & media studies: Jason Mittell at Just TV applies automatic subtitling analysis to the opening scene of The Wire and offers up some suggestive ideas for the further use of the technique – his ideas reminded me of the BBC R&D work with semantic subtitle analysis and especially the Channelography project developed with Rattle.
• Art treasures of the Mughal empire: who would you most want to read on the new show Mughal India at The British Library? Yes, the Guardian was ahead of you, and asked William Dalrymple.
• Why Stephen Greenblatt is wrong – and why it matters: a remarkable essay by Jim Hinch for the Los Angeles Review of Books about Greenblatt’s hugely successful book The Swerve – ‘Unlike other non-fiction potboilers, The Swerve claimed for itself, and received, huge moral and cultural authority it simply didn’t earn.’
• The Salman Rushdie case: Zoe Heller’s takedown for The New York Review of Books of the author’s memoir, and the author too, has been stirring up the Twittersphere over the past few days.
• Can a jellyfish unlock the secret of immortality: although I used to be quite comfortable with jellyfish as I kid, now I can’t abide them – even with such fear, this extraordinary essay about ‘the immortal jellyfish’ (truly) by Nathaniel Rich for The New York Times is enthralling.
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