Links for the weekend

9th June 2013

After a weekend off when I was occupied with the Coronation re-run, Links… returns with a lede devoted to the late Allan Dwan. What? Who? Born in 1885 and living until 1981, Dwan was a Canadian working primarily in Hollywood after 1911 making motion pictures. He directed more than four hundred films, a goodly number of them westerns, like the glorious Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) with Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan.  (The film’s one-liner was, ‘She strips off her petticoats… and straps on her guns.) Wondrously, editors David Phelps and Gina Telaroli this week released a free downloadable e-book devoted to Dwan and his films, following on from their similar collection devoted to William Wellman. There is a host of great reading in this (including Telaroli’s extensive visual essay on Cattle Queen…) even if a good part of it is not (yet) in English (a translation is forthcoming); for background on the project see Presenting ‘Allan Dwan: a Dossier’ at Mubi.com. New York’s MoMA has also just started an Allan Dwan season (until 8 July) tied to Frederic Lombardi’s new book Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios (you can read the Preface here). At The New Yorker Richard Brody has more on all this. Meanwhile, across the jump is a selection of further links, with thanks to @filmstudiesff, @JackofKent, @manovich and @mia_out, and below is all 88 minutes of Cattle Queen of Montana.

• Rep diary – Robert Aldrich and Burt Lancaster: more westerns – Nick Pinkerton for Film Comment on the three contributions to the genre that the director and actor made together.

• Vulgar auteurism: a fascinating piece by girish shambu on ‘a particular contemporary critical approach that focuses attention on filmmakers working in a popular mode, especially in less respectable genres such as the action film or the horror film or the crime thriller’; there is a very rich debate below the line, plus Nick Pinkerton has posted a punchy response at Sundance Now.

• Sometimes a jump cut…: David Bordwell on the ‘uniquely cinematic imagination’ of director King Hu.

• What’s left to say? Four Fitzgerald scholars on Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby: I saw the movie this week, found it interesting and irritating in about equal measure, and then found this Los Angeles Review of Books collection really good.

• 3X3D, trailer (2D): a taster for the forthcoming film from Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard and Edgar Pera, but frustrating with restrictions on embedding (why make a trailer and then constrain the places in which it can be seen?).

• How lenses assist in storytelling, part one: this is a great post by Shane Hurlbut ASC for anyone deeply intrigued by – but largely ignorant about – the use of lenses in cinematography (that’s me).

• Phantom electric theatres of Leith: a lovely piece by David Cairns about the ‘buried skeletons’ of some of Edinburgh’s cinemas.

• The new evidentiary cinema: the excellent Rick Prelinger’s (@footage) recent slides and talk about moving beyond ‘story-telling’…

• Magic and metaphor: Luke McKernan writes exceptionally well on Jeremy Deller’s truly remarkable English Magic, produced as part of the artist’s Venice Biennale installation, which can be viewed at The Space and at the Guardian where Tim Adams contributes a fine piece also …

• Olympic view: …and… ‘I miss the Olympic Games, like a lost childhood’ – Luke McKernan.

• Trauma queen: Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker on Law and Order: SVU.

• The mystery of David Jacobs, the Liberace lawyer: a terrific Telegraph article by Mick Brown about ‘the leading showbusiness lawyer in Britain’ in the 1950s and ’60s.

• Hitching a ride with Larry David: a lovely Vulture piece with Paul Samuel Dolman recalling a notable lift in which he confesses never having watched either Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

• Globe on Screen – an introduction: artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Dominic Dromgoole offers a slightly breathless explanation of the reasons why they film their productions – and why they don’t broadcast them live.

• Editing A Mad World My Masters: so just how much are we looking forward to the RSC’s new production of Thomas Middleton’s comedy? Here Sean Foley and Phil Porter discuss the adaptation of the text, and below are some brief interviews the production team of ‘about the filthiest play ever written’ (which also has its own Spotify playlist).

• Opera is not dead: for New Republic G.W. Bowerstock reviews A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years by Roger Parker and Carolyn Abbate and takes issue with them by arguing that the form shows every sign of having a rewarding future.

• Wagner and the Jews: Daniel Barenboim for The New York Review of Books – ‘When one continues to uphold the Wagner taboo today in Israel, it means, in a certain respect, that we are giving Hitler the last word… This view is unworthy of Jewish listeners.’ – he also features a couple of great musical examples:

• Cool, yet warm: Zoe Heller, also for NYRB, on the new collection of articles and reviews by Janet Malcom.

• L.S. Lowry – the people’s artist comes in from the cold: the imminent Tate Britain show LS Lowry and the painting of modern life, in which the matchstick man meets the formidable curators and art historians T.J. Clark and Anne M Wagner, is going to be fascinating on all sorts of levels – and you get a first sense of the complexities and contradictions from Rachel Cooke’s extensive (and in parts, wrong-headed) essay for The Observer.

• Why Google Reader really got the axe: Christine Bonnington at Wired on the demise of the (at least by me) much-loved RSS reader.

• Museums and image reproduction fees: another despatch from the front via Art History News.

• Capturing visitors’ gazes – three eye-tracking studies in museums: a terrific paper intended ‘to share with the wider museum community the results of three different eye-tracking studies that have been conducted at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Deutsches Museum in Munich, and the Hatfield Marine Science Center Visitor Center in Newport, Oregon.’

• Read me! Glorious feature design and the future of digital journalism: Chris Baraniuk at The Machine Starts reflects on the developing digital journalism feature exemplified by Snow Fall from The New York Times and the recent Firestorm from the Guardian – and has a crack at making a comparable piece himself, Strong silent types: evil robots and their way with words.

• 10 things we learned during the making of Firestorm: the team behind the Guardian’s innovative online project Firestorm reflect on lessons from the three-month project.

• Object-based broadcasting: a really good piece by Tony Churnside for the BBC R&D blog about the potential of ‘the equivalent of responsive design for TV or Radio’.

• After the spike and after the like: essential notes from a Matt Locke talk about ’emerging patterns of digital attention’, with a gloss from Frank Rose at Deep Media.