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Monday links

21st June 2021

John Wyver writes: we’re a day late this week, for which apologies. Nonetheless, here’s a selection of interesting stuff from the past week or so, with my usual thanks to those who recommended items.

• Janet Malcolm, remembered by writers: a beautiful, moving series of tributes from contributors to The New Yorker to one of the greatest of contemporary prose writers who died last week (above, from a portrait by Nina Subin), and…

• Janet Malcolm: to mark her passing The New Yorker has here made all of her articles for the magazine open access for a while – you could do worse than read every one.

• Revealed – The World’s First ‘3-D’ Film Show (Part 1): a completely fascinating post from The Optilogue about Theodore Brown, stereoscopic photography specialist and cartoonist.

• The wonderful world of early colour | BFI National Archive: a glorious collection of extracts presented by head curator Robin Baker.

• Let there be projector light – 80 films that take us inside cinemas: an illuminating and enjoyable listicle from Thomas Flew for Sight & Sound.

• What you see is what you guess: a wonderful post by David Bordwell about the detective novel The Castle Island Case, published in 1937, which is a remarkable intermedial book that uses many visual elements drawn from movies.

• Return to the City: A love letter to abandoned cities in films: this is a neat 3-minute video essay by Luís Azevedo commissioned by Barbican Cinema as a lead-in for the film season Return to the City (which has lots of bustling metropolises).

• 20 years on, can cinema teach us anything about 9/11?: a good piece by Thomas Flew (his second mention this week) prompted by three documentaries at the recent Sheffield Doc/Fest; for Little White Lies.

• Real-life dramas – 10 great documentaries about theatre: a welcome viewing list from the Guardian’s Chris Wiegand – I’ve seen only one of these.

• A small Brazilian photo club that reached for the skyline: great images and a good read by Martha Schwendener responding for The New York Times to MoMA’s new show Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 (link to exhibition page with essays, installation views and more)…

• Snapshot – art in Brazil at midcentury: … and here’s an excerpt from the catalogue by Sarah Hermanson Meister.

• Imagining Landscapes – Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1976: installation shots and details of a Gagosian Grosvenor Hill exhibition (until 27 August) featuring work by a great American painter.

• Period drama – do country house exhibitions need a shake-up?: for Apollo, Oliver Cox is really interesting on museum exhibitions of treasures froim the great country houses.

• Motorway opening booklets – a hugely enjoyable thread…

• Covid and the rise of the non-place [£ but limited free access]: Ken Worpole for New Statesman.

• Human spanner [£ but limited free access]: Stuart Jeffries on Siegfried Kracauer, in the form of a LRB review of Correspondence 1933-1966: Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer and Kracauer: A Biography by Jörg Später, translated by Daniel Steuer; for the latter, see also Adrian Martin’s short review: a “superb book”.

• Catching up on the game: Luke McKernan thinks about watching cricket.

• ‘The Silicon Valley of turf’ – how the UK’s pursuit of the perfect pitch changed football: such an interesting Guardian long read, chronicling ‘the rise of elite turfcare,’ which as writer William Dalston explains, ‘is a story about money and television.’

• Why Remain lost: writing for Unherd five years on from the day of the referendum, Fintan O’Toole offers a very fine analysis:

Defining a collective identity is difficult in any country, but much more so in a multi-national kingdom with shifting and uncertain notions of its own past, of its place in the world, of the relationships between its constituent parts, of the politics of social class, and of attitudes to migration and globalisation. The great irony of Brexit is that it did in fact generate a kind of collective identity for Remainers. But it did so only in reaction to defeat. Remain lost because its only real binding agent was a sense of loss. It had to be beaten before it could discover a collective self. By definition, that was too late.

• How the Famous Five sold us a myth of Britain—and set the stage for our Brexit fantasies: although the piece is somewhat overwritten, there’s a neat analysis of Enid Blyton is this Prospect article by Ella Risbridger.

• The myths of British imperial benevolence and Palestine: this is very good from Priya Satia at Al-Jazeera, setting the recent events in Gaza in their historical context:

The British launched settler colonialism in Palestine as carelessly and recklessly as they had in Australia and New Zealand and in Kenya and Rhodesia. Israel’s violence in Gaza is not merely self-defence but part of a longer story of settler colonialism dating from the heyday of European colonialism. Contrary to British myths, settler colonialism was an aggressive process of ethnic cleansing grounded in racism.