Sunday links
Below are links to articles and other online offerings that have engaged me in the past few days. I extend my usual apologies to those who have recommended some of these, whether on Twitter or elsewhere, and which I fail to acknowledge.
• Le Giornate de cinema muto 33: the link is to the free download of the essential catalogue for the Pordenone silent film festival which began yesterday; the image above is from a featured film, When a Man Loves 1927 with John Barrymore, whose work is being showcased, and Dolores Costello.
• Forty portraits in forty years: The New York Times showcases Nicholas Nixon’s group portraits of the four Brown sisters – he has taken an image of them every year since 1975, and the article includes the latest one; Susan Minot’s accompanying text is pretty good too. Absolutely wonderful.
• Post photography – when artists go wild with cameras – in pictures: a very engaging Guardian gallery.
• Into the unknown: Calvin Tomkins profiles Chris Ofili for The New Yorker.
• Five architects, five state-of-the-art museums: Ellen Gameran for the Wall Street Journal, with some terrific images.
• Post-web technology – what comes next for museums?: by Danny Birchall and Mia Ridge for the Guardian’s Culture Professionals Network; see also Ten R&D projects that are changing arts and culture by Emma Quinn and Althina Balopoulou.
• Digitising the BBC’s archive: there is an embedding option for this interesting short film from BBC Academy, but the graphic surround is SO ugly I thought it more aesthetic simply to provide a link.
• Netflix chief Reed Hastings takes on telcos, cinemas and global expansion: a revealing interview by Christopher Williams for the Telegraph.
• Don’t look down – Russia’s urban daredevils: urbex adventures in Moscow with Maryam Omidi at The Calvert Journal (also via the Guardian, but better in the original).
• Citizen Fan – An Interview with Filmmaker Emmanuelle Wielezynski-Debats (Part One): an introduction and richly interesting interview by Henry Jenkins with the maker of an exceptional new online documentary about fan culture.
• The forgotten story of classic Hollywood’s first Asian-American star: from Buzzfeed, the always wonderfully readable Anne Helen Petersen on Anna-May Wong; AHP’s long-awaited book Scandals of Classic Hollywood was published this week – Time magazine carried a Q&A with her.
• Catastrophic Coltrane: a short New York Review of Books piece by Geoff Dyer illustrated by a performance video and a wonderful photograph.
• Diary: Mary Kay-Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, remembers the magazine’s founder, Karl Miller, who died this week.
• David Fincher – and the other way is wrong: an immaculate video essay from Tony Zhou about the work of the filmmaker of the moment.
David Fincher – And the Other Way is Wrong from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.
[…] “Wong’s acting was subtle and unmannered; her eyebrow game was on point. She had a piercing stare that made you feel as if she saw the very best and very worst things about you, and her signature blunt-cut bangs made her face seem at once exquisitely, perfectly symmetrical. Given the quilt work of exotic roles she’d played on the silent screen, audiences expected her to speak with a broken, accented, or otherwise un-American English. But her tone was refined, cool, cultured, like a slap in the face to anyone who’d assumed otherwise.” The latest excerpt from Anne Helen Petersen’s Scandals from Classic Hollywood salutes Anna May Wong and condemns the Orientalist prejudices of filmmakers and fans that had her running to Europe once she realized better parts weren’t on offer. Via John Wyver. […]