The week’s links 13-19/5

15th May 2012

I’m still not sure how best to create/curate a weekly collection of links that is useful to others. The process, however, is important to me as a way of gathering together pieces that I find useful or stimulating and so I am going to persevere. Adding new links during the week also seems to work well for me, so again I am going to continue with that for the next few weeks – sometimes jumping this page back to the top of the blog and alays keeping it as one of the blog’s ‘top three’ throughout the seven days. Across the jump you will find interesting stuff about experimental film, early photography, contemporary television and the history of colour in film. [Updated Friday 6.00am.]
Image: a framegrab detail from The Great Blondin, a triptych film by Phil Solomon (see David Bordwell link below).

• The angel of history – Marc Karlin: a valuable post by Ieuan Franklin for the Channel 4 and British film culture research project about the recent exhibition and retrospective screenings in Bristol dedicated to the work of the late filmmaker.

• Lord Bragg – Channel 4 failing on the arts: Guardian report on Melvyn’s punchy critique in the week in which The South Bank Show transfers to Sky Arts.

• Bridging the Divide: Janet McCabe for Critical Studies in Television on The Bridge, the latest noir television thriller from Scandinavia.

• The loves of Lena Dunham: Elaine Blair for The New York Review of Books: ‘There are many reasons to love Lena Dunham’s HBO television show Girls, and some of them have nothing to do with sex’.

• The chronocycleograph: Regine at we make money not art highlights a group of fascinating historical photos in a show at Antwerp’s Fotomuseum: ‘the technique [of the chronocycleograph] was developed by Frank Gilbreth and his wife, Lillian in the early 20th century to improve work methods. The couple employed time-lapse photography to reduce a complete work cycle to the shortest and most efficient sequence of gestures.’

• The Hays Code: The Bioscope celebrates the launch on the online MPPDA Digital Archive, which features ‘the extant records of the General Correspondence files of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., covering the period from 1922 to 1939… They describe the organization and operation of the industry’s trade association, and include extensive correspondence and other documentation relating to industry policy and public relations, distributor-exhibitor relations, censorship and self-regulation.’

• Timeline of historical film colors: another astonishing resource recently made available online courtesy of Professor Barbara Fleuckiger: ‘a database of historical film colors to document the various processes that have emerged in the course of film history. As of April 2012 this database consists of 290 entries. It is being published online as a timeline that connects historical and bibliographical information with primary resources from several hundred original papers and more than 400 scanned frames provided by archives and scholars from all over the world.’

• Skipping Rope – through Hithcock’s joins: Catherine Grant at the essential resource Film Studies for Free offers an elegant video essay about Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948) and embeds this in a page of true delights with other video essays about the master’s work.

Skipping ROPE from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

Catherine has also written in more detail about the video essay and Rope in her filmanalytical post, On Hitchcock’s Rope and Blackmail. Or, technicist dreams in videographic film studies.

And all of this is a contribution to the For love of film: film preservation blogathon, which is mounted this year to raise funds for the restoration of The White Shadow (1923).

• *NEW* Movie studios are forcing Hollywood to abandon 35mm film…: Gendi Alimurung in LA Weekly on the format wars: ‘This year, for the first time in history, celluloid ceases to be the world’s prevailing movie-projector technology.’

• Renaissance in an industrial shadow: Carol King for The New York Times on key art works from the 1970s on display in an exhibition at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-Garde in the 1970s.

• Solomonic judgements: David Bordwell on the beautiful experimental films of Phil Solomon, extracts from which and more information about can be found here.

• Radio Shakespeare – Twelfth Night: I meant to link to this before, but my tardiness means that there is more of an interesting exchange in the Comments – the initial post is a short provocation by Peter Kirwan suggesting that ‘radio productions of Shakespeare tend towards the most conservative possible reading of the play… the medium appears to me to appeal to the most ingrained, obvious readings of characters.’

• Radio drama reviews online: … also, the exchange about Twelfth Night alerted me to Lawrence Raw’s lively site that discusses radio drama, book-readings and short stories.

• Laboratory confidential: Jonathan Weiner for Columbia Journalism Review looks back at James Watson’s 1968 book The Double Helix: ‘I see so much more in [t]his story now than I did the first time around, and even more on each re-reading. And, every time, I think: This is the place to go, for a writer. Somewhere in the twining of science and story, this is where you can write about life itself.’

• How Yahoo killed Flickr and lost the internet: fascinating analysis by Mat Honan at Gizmodo.

• Touch Press, the iPad and the new golden age of multimedia: I know we are working with them on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and other iPad titles, but this is a good piece about Touch Press and their latest app, Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist.