Links for ‘Le week-end’
After seeing Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi’s very fine film yesterday (above), with the incomparable Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, this clip – which I have featured before – picked itself – it’s from Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964). Beyond are further links of the more conventional kind, with thanks due to @andykesson, @KeyframeDaily, @Dorianlynskey, @lukemckernan, @jmittell and @SPINmagazine.
• Handicapping the Godard retrospective: especially given the above, we need to start with the notes from Richard Brody at The New Yorker on the New York Film Festival’s near-complete presentation of the master’s works – note too Brody’s wise words on why you need to be there:
There’s no substitute for the experience of seeing film prints projected big in theatres—film is tactile, and the very size of the image entails the effect of being engulfed by it.
• Patrice Chéreau, 1944-2013: we lost the great film, theatre and opera director this week – this is Trevor Johnston’s obituary for the BFI blog, but do also listen to Norman Lebrecht’s 2010 Radio 3 interview (available for only 2 days more – why? Why on earth can this – and much more – not be made available in perpetuity? There are lots of further links in Fandor’s tribute. And this is a generous extract from the opening of Chéreau’s great, great 1976 Bayreuth production of Das Rheingold; it was seeing this on BBC2 in 1979 that made me truly love Wagner.
• Lives on Film: Auto/Biographical Fiction and Documentary Film Studies: another tremendous collection of links from Film Studies for Free – I’m not sure that all of us ever sufficiently express our gratitude to Catharine Grant for all of the invaluable work she does.
• Jonathan Rosenbaum: … has this brand new home (and design) for his ever-vital film blog.
• Where did the two-shot go? Here: more of David Bordwell’s precise analysis of filmic style.
• Drowning in the digital abyss: J. Hoberman on Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity for the New York Review of Books is essential reading:
… a truly popular big-budget Hollywood movie with a rich aesthetic pay-off. Genuinely experimental, blatantly predicated on the formal possibilities of film, Gravity is a movie in a tradition that includes D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Leni Riefenstahl’sOlympia, and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, as well as its most obvious precursor, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Call it blockbuster modernism.
• A new haptical cinema: a stimulating short piece by Ryan Pierson about 3D and how we make sense of space; one of a series of ‘research provocations’ from Stereoscopic Media.
• Don Jon and the digital porn dystopia: as excellent as ever, Anne Helen Petersen at celebrity gossip, academic style.
• The new canon: Anne Helen Petersen also made a great contribution to the @Dear_Television discussion of Netflix at the blog for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
• Interview with Chris Petit: … by Hannah Gregory for The White Review – do read.
• Lost Paris – documenting the disappearance of a medieval city: a richly illustrated post from the Messy-Nessy blog as a response to the exhibition Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris (National Gallery of Art, Washington until 5 January; Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring).
• 9, rue Cadet, Paris: muyblog eats a cheese baguette during a search for Eadweard Muybridge in Paris.
• Leaving Colindale: a lovely post from Luke McKernan on the closure of the British Newspaper Library in north London.
• Collaborative plays by Shakespeare & others: an excellent Bardathon post by Peter Kirwan about early modern theatre and more that deserves rather more attention than being noted as a notable link.
• Bay watched: Nathan Heller in The New Yorker on entrepreneurial culture in San Francisco.
• The rise of the reader – journalism in the age of the open web: a really good speech with lots of lessons from the Guardian’s Kath Viner…
• Hatchet Job by Mark Kermode – review: … while this by Will Self is another strong Guardian piece about the culture we live in (which is only partly about its stated subject):
At the moment, the wholesale reconfiguration of art is only being retarded by demographics: the middle-aged possessors of Gutenberg minds remain in the majority in western societies, and so we struggle to impose our own linearity on a simultaneous medium to which it is quite alien.
• Games Reflexions: terrific interview by Regine at we make money not art with French curator Isabelle Arvers about her new exhibition (about which there is a comprehensive post in French here), plus lots of videos and additional links.
• The 29 stages of a Twitter storm: if you’ve not already seen this, Tom Phillips for BuzzFeed on the (spoof) Pricehound to-do is quite brilliant.
• Who reaps the rewards of live-tweeting in the TV attention economy?: a good piece on tweeting The Bacherolette by grad student Katie Walsh at Confessions of an Aca-fan.
• The battle to destroy Wikipedia’s biggest sockpuppet army: not sure what a sockpuppet is? Read Simon Owens at The DailyDot to find out.
• IRL or it didn’t happen: why we still dismiss the digital: thoughts that are well worth your time from Chris Baraniuk at The Machine Starts.
… and finally, my friend, I defy you to watch this wonder and not have a tear in your eye…
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