Sunday links
I am touched and encouraged by the expressions of enthusiasm for this supposedly weekly offering, and I will now endeavour over the coming months to post it consistently. As before it is a selection of articles and more that have engaged me recently, and it is presented with the usual apologies for not including appropriate thanks to those who alerted me to some of them.
• Singular and plural – the films of Jean Grémillon: Imogen Sara Smith at Reverse Shot from New York’s Musuem of the Moving Image (which is hosting a retrospective) on the films of the neglected French master.
• Reese Witherspoon has always been wild: Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed.
• Neither lost nor found – on the trail of an elusive icon’s rarest film: a deeply impressive meditation on Jean-Luc Godard and cinephilia from at The A.V. Club.
• Scholarly striptease. Or, the unintended consequences of Film Studies For Free: a modest but telling contribution from Catherine Grant, with a complementary video essay, to this last week’s series about open access at inmediares; the exchanges in the comments are great too.
• The documentary temptation – fiction filmmakers and non-fiction forms: a stimulating read from Necsus by Adrian Martin.
• Pure phase – movies melt down: Charlie Lyne reports for Sight & Sound from CPH:DOX about further challenges to the presumed boundaries between cinema and the live event.
• The Wednesday Play, canon formation and commercial availability: spot-on argument from Dr Billy Smart at the blog for Critical Studies in Television.
• World of faces: T. J. Clark on late Rembrandt for London Review of Books.
• You can’t catch Picasso: for The New York Review of Books, Jed Perl on two great Picasso shows on view in New York.
• Barbara Hepworth and Gimpel Fils – The Rise and Fall of an Artist-Dealer Relationship: a recently published research article by Alice Correia for Tate Papers that traces in rich detail the complexities of a major artist working with a significant gallery in the 1950s and ’60s.
• Phillip King – ‘sculpture is the art of the invisible’: the artist talks with Nicholas Wroe for the Guardian ahead of a Tate Britain showing of his work.
• Does Eric Fischl really hate art fairs?: at Christie’s, Sophie Hastings speaks with the American painter and shows some great images of his recent work, which is on view at Victoria Miro until 19 December; the image above is a detail from Fischl’s The Price, 2013.
• Museums and the future history of the information age: Cory Doctorow’s keynote at the Museums and the Web conference in Florence earlier this year:
• The Ladybird Book of modern achievements: a great trilogy of posts from John Grindrod at Dirty Modern Scoundrel about images of modernism from Ladybird volumes – the link is to part 3; part 1 is here: The Ladybird Book of modernism; and part 2 here: The Ladybird Book of postwar building.
• What should we do with private schools?: David Kynaston for the Guardian marries social history and political analysis in a quiet but powerful polemic.
• Saskia Sassen’s missing chapter: a remarkable tale of Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s told by Marc Perry for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• The view from a bridge: Adam Gopnik writes beautifully for The New Yorker on the changing face of Paris.
• театр любит капитализм [a response almost as inevitable as the award winners]: Andrew Haydon on excellent form at Postcards from the Gods taking apart the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
• The value of inspiration – notes on kickstarting App Store projects: Alex Fleetwood is very good (and honest!) on his Kickstarter experience with the Tiny Games app.
• An American in Paris, 1951: I am off to Paris later this week, in part to see the new stage musical production of Gene Kelly’s classic musical. Which is as good a reason as any to embed the original trailer…
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