Links for the weekend
Last weekend I was in Stratford-upon-Avon for Midsummer Night’s Dreaming and for the one before I was at a conference. So apologies for the missing Links… Today’s bumper edition aims to go some way to making good (treat the current version as a work in progress, with more to come later today). It certainly starts well with this very good 18-minute video on a topic about which I bang on here; there is also a useful online course from the makers Filmmaker IQ. As for the image above of The Donut Hole from the Tom Gardner collection at the Los Angeles Conservancy archives, see the reference across the jump to the wonderful new Modern Architecture in L.A. website. Thanks for links this week are due to David Haglund at Slate, @melissaterras, @mia_out, @emilynussbaum and @lukemckernan – and now do dive into today’s list of links.
• Scandals of Classic Hollywood – the book, the update: Anne Helen Petersen is writing a book we’re all looking forward to reading, and this is an update on its creation as well as a rich reflection on popular-academic writing about Hollywood history:
I hold a weird, tenuous place in the academy: I really like being a professor, but I also really like writing outside of the academy: I take it as an ethical obligation to take the knowledge that the government has in no small part funded and make it accessible outside of the so-called Ivory Tower. That’s not dumbing my stuff down, per se, but providing proof that the Humanities, writ large, have a place in the future of education in this country. But in order to prove that, at least right now, I understood that [for the book, rather than blog posts] I needed to talk a bit less about the Boys of My Youth.
• Curtis Harrington’s On the Edge: I met Curtis Harrington once, towards the end of his life, when I was researching a project in L.A. – he had an extraordinary career in and out of the industry, and this is from near the start of it – a poetic short from 1949, posted to YouTube by Flicker Alley to trail their DVD set of the filmmaker’s work which was released this week in the States.
• Life in love – films by Allan Dwan: oh yes, yet more about the Hollywood director, this time from Aaron Cutler at Fandor.
• A Field in England marks UK distribution first: at the BFI’s blog Samuel Wrigley writes on next Friday’s innovative release of Ben Wheatley’s film simultaneously in cinemas, on free TV, on DVD and on video-on-demand.
• How The Room became the biggest cult film of the last decade: a strange tale from Nate Jones at Vulture – ‘while there are plenty of bad movies, there are no movies that are bad in all the ways The Room is bad… As it turns out, its unending series of bizarre moments were perfect for the dawn of the Internet’s GIF and YouTube culture.’
• The Great Gatsby VFX: one of those compelling reels that show you how a movie’s amazing shots were created – this one comes courtesy of Chris Godley, visual effects supervisor on the film.
The Great Gatsby VFX from Chris Godfrey on Vimeo.
• Docutopia #53 – Jem Cohen’s ‘hallucinations of the real’: I am a big fan of filmmaker Jem Cohen and I really want to see his new drama Museum Hours, discussed here by Anthony Kaufman at the Sundance Now blog.
• Edelstein asks, how should we treat texters and talkers at movie theaters?: And it’s a great question, David, which has been rewarded at the Vulture blog with – so far – 314 comments.
• Poets at the movies – part 1 (by Rebecca Morgan Frank) and part 2 (by Tom Sleigh): two lovely pieces from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
• Gillian Anderson, The Fall and the rise of subversive genre fare: Maureen Ryan for The Huffington Post on ‘A frisky batch of quietly subversive dramas… [that] often originate abroad, quite a few of them feature complex female protagonists, and they smartly use the tropes of horror, mystery, soap operas, science fiction and thrillers to sketch diverting narratives on the cheap.’
• Cut to Black – The Sopranos and the future of TV drama: a round-table discussion in six video segments, of which the first is below; participants include RogerEbert.com editor and New York Magazine critic Matt Zoller Seitz, Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan, A.V. Club TV critic Ryan McGee, and previously.tv contributor Sarah D. Bunting – go here for links to all six parts and transcripts.
• The Dutch Courtesan: I have only just discovered this terrific University of York site dedicated to John Marston’s early modern comedy – the Department of Theatre, Film and Television recently mounted performances of the play (reviewed by Peter Kirwan at his Bardathon site), and it’s to be hoped that there will eventually be a film version here, as there is of a 2011 production of Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters.
• MOCA’s revamped architecture show a model of insularity: Christopher Knight’s L.A. Times review is quite something, mercilessly critiquing the museum, the show, its curation and its contents…
• Modern Architecture in LA: … so perhaps it’s best to make do with this wonderful new website from the Los Angeles Conservancy and Pacific Standard Time Presents; included are an introductory essay Everyday modernisms: diversity, creativity and ideas in L.A. architecture, 1940-1990 by Alan Hess, entries and images (such as the one of The Donut Hole above) of more than 300 sites and self-guided tours of modernism in the San Fernando Valley.
• The contradictions of Le Corbusier: meanwhile, on the other coast, MoMA has a major show (until 23 September) of the French master, and this is Martin Filler’s response for the New York Review of Books blog; see also Justin Davidson at Vulture.
• Looks like a Lowry – modern life in the National Photography Collection: the National Media Museum blog highlights some remarkable images of mid 20th century industrial north west England, including this one:
Caption: Two figures walk by cleared blitz site, Liverpool, 21 November 1949, White, Daily Herald Archive, National Media Museum Collection / SSPL
• Images of works of art in museum collections – the experience of open access: a downloadable version of an important report from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation which ‘describes the current approach of eleven art museums in the US and the UK to the use of images of works of art in their collections, where the underlying works are in the public domain’.
• The Humanities ‘crisis’ – are museums and higher education doing all they can?: an excellent piece about open-ness, education and museums, with practical advice, from Beth Harris and Steven Zucker at e-Literate.
• Ford Madox Ford and unfilmable modernism: at the OUP blog Ford expert max Saunders responds to the recent BBC adaptation of Parade’s End.
• When the devil danced in Hungary: I’m going to China next Saturday and this Adam Thirlwell New York Review of Books piece about László Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel Satantango persuaded me to buy the book for the holiday’s electronic library.
• The Thirty Nine Steps digital adaptation shows a bright future for interactive stories: a detailed discussion by Richard Moss at vg.archive of the recent Faber interactive adaptation.
• Cambodia’s vast lost city – world’s greatest pre-industrial site unearthed: a fascinating Guardian piece by Lara Dunston about extraordinary discoveries in the landscape around Cambodia’s Angkor Wat; for my blog posts from our memorable February 2010 filming trip to Angkor Wat and its surroundings, go here, here, here, here and here.
… and finally, I could not compile these weekend Links… without the ‘favourite’ button on Twitter (which allows me to keep the pieces that interest me from the stream that flows past) and Google Reader for RSS feeds. But Google is shutting down Reader tonight, so I have had to find an alternative – and the Digg Reader looks as if it will do the job very well. Certainly the importing of all my ‘follows’ from Reader could not have been more straightforward. Which (for me at least) makes my last link all the more interesting…
• Inside Digg’s race to build the new Google Reader: a really compelling Wired piece by Mat Honan from ten days back.
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