The great story out of Sundance is the shooting at Disneyland and Disney World of Randy Moore’s movie Escape from Tomorrow without any location permissions or copyright clearances. Believe me, as one who has tried to film at a Disney theme park, this is an astounding achievement – and Steven Zeitchik for the LA Times has the story. As Zeitchik says, Escape from Tomorrow is
a Surrealist, genre-defying black-and-white film… [and] one of the strangest and most provocative movies this reporter has seen in eight years attending the Sundance Film Festival. And it may well never be viewed by a commercial audience.
For this snowy Saturday, the week’s selection of freely available online videos.
Above, Act III of no. 3 below; no 4 has snowy aspects too.
1. How motion pictures became the movies
This is a great innovation from David Bordwell’s essential cinema website – a video lecture about the movies between 1908 and 1920 when, he argues, the modern form of cinema came into being. It’s an audio track complemented by slides with text summaries and countless frame enlargements – and it is richly engrossing. This link takes you to a page with background info and suggestions for further reading and viewing.
As regulars will know, I occasionally highlight earlier blog posts when they feel newly relevant. My reason today for returning to a 2008 post about the influential documentary maker John Read who died in 2011 is that I am teaching his work this morning on the Critical Writing in Art & Design course at the Royal College of Art.
The son of the influential critic Herbert Read, John Read directed British television’s first documentary film about a living artist, Henry Moore (see the framegrab above), in 1951. His subsequent thoughtful and sensitive studies of painters and sculptors in the 1950s defined the forms for film profiles of artists. Those of us who continue to make arts documentaries are all the children of John Read. read more »
So here’s my beef. I have booked a ticket for tonight at the ever-excellent Clapham Picturehouse to watch the current Royal Opera House production of La bohème. This is being shown in – as you can see from the above – the ROH’s ‘Live Cinema Season’. If you take a look at that web page, there is – I think it’s fair to say – every indication that the showing is ‘live’. That is, that the events we will be watching in Clapham will be taking place at the same time on the stage in Covent Garden.
This after all is what we have come to expect with Met Opera: Live in HD and NTLive – and certainly there is nothing on the web page to say that this is not the case. Ditto on the next page, which is where ‘Read more’ takes you to further details. Indeed, you have to download the .pdf cast sheet to discover that this performance is in fact ‘delayed live’. Which means not live at all, despite being part of a ‘Live Cinema Season’. I feel conned. read more »
A number of reviews have appeared in the past few weeks of two recent projects from Illuminations: the Royal Shakespeare Company Julius Caesar on DVD (above) and The Sonnets by William Shakespeare, our collaboration with Touch Press, Faber and The Arden Shakespeare. In case you need reminding, here is the trailer for the DVD of Julius Caesar, which is available for purchase here. After you have taken a look, click across the jump to read extracts from the glowing reviews.
There’s really only story that I can lead with this week, even if you have already seen it. Here is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie is Stephen Rodrick’s tale for The New York Times about the making of a low-budget movie by director Paul Schrader. It is a compelling read that is by turns funny, shocking and a touch tragic – and it follows in a distinguished line of ‘new journalism’ features about Hollywood that stretches back at least to Lilian Ross‘ wonderful Picture, a 1952 book about the production of The Red Badge of Courage, 1951. There are great photos too, including the one above of Paul Schrader and Lindsay Lohan by Jeff Minton for The New York Times. I can’t promise anything with greater entertainment value, but there are links to further excellent features and resources across the jump. H/ts this week to @Chi_Humanities, @ebertchicago, @annehelen, @ammonite, @jayrosen_nyu, @KeyframeDaily and Michael Jackson. read more »
Always looking for the new and different, I am extending this blog’s ‘Links for the weekend’ (see tomorrow) with a complementary post that features just videos. Which doesn’t mean that I won’t include videos in the ‘Links’ but rather that this will provide me with a focus to look out different kinds of stuff. Some of the videos will be topical (like the Quentin Tarantino interview below), while others may be quirky choices from long ago that I happened across during the week. Wherever possible, I will embed the videos here, but on occasions I will include links to sites that do not allow this. I will also aim to include things that are going to stay around, so this is not the place for time-restricted BBC iPlayer tips. As for the detail above of Paul Emsley’s new portrait of the Duchess of Cambridge, unveiled yesterday at the National Portrait Gallery, see no 10 below. read more »
Hard though it is to believe, it is nearly seventeen years since we went backstage at the Royal Opera House in the BBC fly-on-the-wall series The House. Michael Kaiser, who later became general director of Covent Garden, summed up reactions to the series: ‘The House only confirmed the general belief that the Royal Opera House was, at best, incompetent, and, at worst, completely devoted to the needs of the rich.’ Seventeen years is a long time in the media (and everywhere else), and how different was the backstage picture on offer in Royal Opera LIVE broadcast online on Monday. I live-blogged the event in a post that has proved pleasingly popular, but – not least because this felt like a game-changer in the ways cultural organisations work with the media – I want to return to it here and offer further thoughts. read more »
20:16 I’m won over – not by the switching at The Space but by the view of the performance that the ‘mix’ channel offers. (Suzy Klein, incidentally, doing a great job.) And with that, I think I’m going to sign off and enjoy the rest of the stream – the end of Die Walkure is, after all, among the most beautiful twenty or so minutes of music ever composed. Thanks to the Guardian, The Space and most of all the Royal Opera for a fascinating day – I’m going to mull on all this and post some more considered thoughts tomorrow.
20:09 In the accompanying audio, Suzy is talking with director Keith Warner, who is providing the kind of commentary that we’re accustomed to getting on DVDs. That’s worthwhile – and I’m warming to the visual mix with the cues and backstage shots. The workings of the show are being exposed in a way that I’ve never seen before. Definitely worth the effort.
One of the things you quickly learn as a producer is not to use ‘Happy Birthday to you’ in a film. Remarkably, the song remains in copyright, and as a consequence, you need to secure clearance for its use and pay a fee. In You say it’s your birthday in 2011 Paul Collins for Slate questioned whether the copyright claim really stands up – and pointed out that the original tune, ‘Good morning to all’ (above), written by Louisville kindergarten teachers Patty and Mildred Hill, has long been in the public domain. Now – and how great is this – the Free Music Archive and Creative Commons have launched a contest to replace the song with one that can be licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If you fancy having a go, you have until 13 January to submit an entry. As for the rest of my new year links, which follow across the jump, h/ts, among others, to @filmstudiesff, @KnightLAT, @mia_out, @adrianmartin25, @brainpicker, @alexismadrigal and @tiffanyjenkins. read more »
