Sunday links
Summer’s over and – yes – I’ve delivered the first draft manuscript of my book. (It’s about film and television adaptations of RSC stage productions.) So let’s see if I can return to my weekly list of links to things that I have found stimulating to read or watch in recent days. Thanks to all those who recommended these on Twitter and elsewhere. One note: in the period since I last posted either WordPress has changed so as not to permit the embedding of Youtube videos or I’m doing something stupid – could be either, but as you’ll see there are no videos included below.
• Venice 2018: First impressions, First Man and Big films on the big screen: two rich reports from the festival by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell.
• The fabric of freedom – Laura Huertas Millán’s ethnographic filmmaking: Matt Turner for Sight & Sound on the French-Canadian filmmaker, including La Libertad, 2017 (above).
• Ontology of the memed image: at Mubi.com, Ben Flanagan looks at how studios are increasingly using gifs in their marketing and asks, ‘How can the meme be used to rediscover the history of cinema?”
• Colour Turn no 1: first issue of a new open access scholarly journal about colour theory, including a fascinating essay by Barbara Flueckiger on early Technicolor.
• Creating a scene on stage: a terrific historical essay by Alice Sprawls for Apollo about scenic design for theatre.
• Rattling bloody facts; or, why Tamburlaine would make a rubbish boyfriend: Andy Kesson at Before Shakespeare responds with enthusiasm to Michael Boyd’s current RSC production of Marlowe’s play – and especially to the verse speaking.
• Tyler Green – Books: I’m really looking forward to the study by Tyler Green of the photographer of the American West, Carleton Watkins, which is published in late October by University of California Press; while we’re waiting, Green has started a website with a host of images from the book, and you can also read his Medium essay ‘A return to Round Top’ about why he wanted to write about Watkins.
• Monochrome: Luke McKernan returns to the debate about colourising archive images, describing The Colour of Time: A New History of the World 1850-1960 by Dan Jones and Marina Amaral as ‘vulgar, gimmicky, and the antithesis of history’.
• A knife to the heart: Susan Pedersen for the London Review of Books on two recent studies, by Diane Atkinson and Jane Robinson, about the women’s suffrage movement in Britain.
• Blighted by empire – what the British did to India: for LA Review of Books Omer Aziz reflects on Shashi Tharoor’s ‘compelling’ book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.
• The ‘witch hunters’: Tim Weiner for New York Review of Books on Tr*mp and the ‘Deep State’.
• Glenn Greenwald, the bane of their resistance: a fascinating profile for The New Yorker by Ian Parker.
• Alan Rusbridger – who broke the news?: Guardian Long Reads offer an excerpt from the paper’s former editor’s new book, Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now – an essential read; see also Ian Jack’s review.
• God is in the machine: Carl Miller for the TLS on ‘ridiculously complicated algorithms’.
• Fortnite is so much more than a game: Keith Stuart’s study at Medium is really interesting.
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