Sunday links
John Wyver writes: with Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain out in the world and on BBC iPlayer, life is settling down (a bit) and I’m pleased once more to offer a selection of articles that he have engaged me over the past few days – and I’m going to add to a few more as the day goes on…
• International football at the 1948 Olympics: terrific BBC Genome blog post by Paul Hayes about live coverage of international football during the tournament just two years after the television service returned after the war; illustrated with the front cover of Radio Times for 25-31 July which includes the very fine illustration above.
• Gareth Southgate’s extraordinary letter says a lot about England: prompted by Gareth Southgate’s exceptional ‘Dear England’ letter, Michael Walker is very good for The Irish Times:
Southgate has the wit to understand that one generation might disconcert the other and that it is a good idea to listen to both. That was one of the points of his ‘Dear England’ address. As many said, it was the kind of mature letter you might once have expected from our politicians but no longer do.
• The ‘war on woke’: who should shape Britain’s history?: exceptional and important reporting for The Financial Times from Alex Barker and Peter Foster.
• 10 things I learned – Nightmare Alley: great notes by Jason Altman for Criterion’s The Collection about Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film noir, which has been remade by Guillermo del Toro for later this year…
• Killers in the mist – the final scene of Gun Crazy: … and while we’re with mid-period US noir, take a look at Beatrice Loayza’s reflection for Sight & Sound on the last moments of Joseph H. Lewis’ 1950 masterwork.
• The evolution of split-screen cinema: I am doing my best to finish an article about the visual language of split-screen and I just came across this remarkably dense video essay from Little White Lies, which was posted in February (and doesn’t seem to have attracted the traffic it deserves); it starts with director Mike Figgis and his Time Code (2000) experiment but broadens out to feature an extraordinary variety of extracts:
• Manfred Kirchheimer, the greatest documentary maker you’ve probably never heard of: a terrific interview by Sukhdev Sandhu for the Guardian with the 90-year-old German American filmmaker who, I have to admit, I did not know about – and am now glad I do.
• The Underground Railroad, “trauma porn” and the black gaze [£ but limited free access]: Micha Frazer-Carroll for New Statesman is very good on Barry Jenkins’ series.
• How Colin Firth inspired Bridgerton and other surprising stories from 6 top TV bosses: a richly interesting Emmy-related roundtable from Los Angeles Times with Suzan Lori-Parks (Genius: Aretha), Bruce Miller (The Handmaid’s Tale), Alena Smith (Dickinson), Chris Van Dusen (Bridgerton), Jen Statsky (Hacks) and Steve McQueen (Small Axe).
• I haven’t previously been able to include the following lovely thread…
• Did paying a ransom for a stolen Magritte painting inadvertently fund terrorism?: Joshua Hunt contributes an interesting report to Vanity Fair on ‘art-napping’.
• How a family transformed the look of European theater: I admit to having never heard of the Bibienas either (see Marcus Kirchheimer above), but this review by Joseph Cermatori for The New York Times really made me want to visit the exhibition of these Baroque theatrical designers at the Morgan Library & Museum.
• Submerged in van Gogh: would absinthe make the art grow fonder?: I bet the subs at The New York Times were pleased with that headline, and Jason Farago’s piece is easily as good, about two immersive digital Van Gogh shows, which London is also just about to experience:
Like Vincent, I too suffer for my art, and so I attended both of them…
As for the technology: although these immersives have been touted as breakthroughs in exhibition design, room-filling cinema projections go back many decades. The shows hark back in particular to multi-projector attractions at the World’s Fair in Queens in 1964 and at Expo ’67 in Montreal, which cast humanist visions of the future in all directions. What’s new today is something else: not the pictures on the walls, but the phone in your hand. Individual absorption, rather than shared wonder, is the order of the day now. From every vantage point you will fill your phone’s backlit screen with glowing imagery, and there’s more than enough space to crop out other visitors and frame only yourself.
• Video Essay: Generated Spaces | FILMADRID & MUBI: The Video Essay: an essay about the history of CGI by Eva Elcano Fuentes…
• Genre is disappearing. What comes next?: from early March, Amanda Petrusich for The New Yorker on fundamental changes in popular music…
• Genre, manifolds, and AI: … and a slightly technical but really interesting response from Ben Schmidt.
• Four moptop yobbos [£ but limited fre access]: Ian Penman on The Beatles for LRB – what more do you need to know?
• The minister of chaos [£ but limited free access]: far too sympathetic, of course, but this profile of Johnson by Tom McTague for The Atlantic is a terrific piece of writing.
• … and just in case you haven’t seen it, this, miei amici, is how you open a major football tournament in Rome:
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