Sunday links
John Wyver writes: this week’s collection of links to interesting articles and videos, with grateful thanks to all those who alerted me via Twitter and in other ways.
The great American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank died this week. As for so many, his collection The Americans (above, ‘Restaurant – U.S. 1 leaving Columbia, South Carolina’, 1955), as a book and then as a 2009 exhibition at the Met, was revelatory for me. Here’s a selection of articles published this week:
- The outsider genius whose photographs laid bare America’s soul: Sean O’Hagan for the Guardian; see also O’Hagan’s terrific 2004 interview with Frank.
- Robert Frank revealed the truth of postwar America: an appreciation for The New York Times by Arthur Lubow.
- How Robert Frank’s photographs helped define America: Jelani Cobb for the New Yorker.
- Remembering Robert Frank (1924-2019): MoMA curators Sarah Meister, Josh Siegel, Roxana Marcoci, Stuart Comer and Lucy Gallun pay tribute.
- Coffins and jukeboxes: … and a 2018 New York Review of Books essay by Christopher Benfey.
• Hidden histories – the story of women film editors: Girish Shambu for Criterion on the invaluable website Edited By, Sue Friedrich’s astonishing resource from Princeton about 139 women editors.
• An accidental director and the sensual illusion of realism: I liked this exceptionally detailed review by Slarek for CineOutsider so much that I went off and purchased Indicator’s Blu-ray box set Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg at Paramount, 1930-1935.
• The Technicolor legacy, color consciousness and Hammer horror: a videographic film essay by Paul Frith, published (with an introduction and peer review comments) in the latest, invaluable edition of [In]Transition:
• The extended cut of Jesse James should be released on Criterion, says Roger Deakins: just a short Collider news piece by Adam Chitwood quoting the legendary cinematographer, but with the revelation that there exists an extended version of Andrew Dominik’s 2007 masterpiece that runs for longer than three hours!
• James Gray’s journey from the outer boroughs to outer space: a New Yorker profile by Nathan Heller of the director of the much-anticipated Ad Astra.
• Love, love this 90-second trailer for the BFI’s Musicals! season which runs from October to January:
• Film is a river: gorgeous writing from Luke McKernan on the Thames, cinema and a film essay by William Raban.
• Tim Walker: ‘There’s an extremity to my interest in beauty’: Tim Lewis for the Guardian interviews the fashion photographer, ahead of a substantial V&A exhibition, Tim Walker: Wonderful Things (until 8 March).
• I was Caroline Calloway – seven years after I met the infamous Instagram star, I’m ready to tell my side of the story: I admit that until this week I’d never heard of Caroline Calloway, but (like many others) I was captivated by this New Yorker piece by Natalie Beach.
• Less human than human – the design philosophy of Steve Jobs: Maria Bustillos for Popula on Apple, Dieter Rams and William Morris.
• Who gets Emily Dickinson?: for LA Review of Books, Seth Perlow investigates the copyrights of the great American poet, who died in 1886; this is a compelling story of ‘theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.’
• Re-covered – Margaret Drabble’s 1977 Brexit novel: for Paris Review, Lucy Scholes is very good on The Ice Age, which ‘feels like an almost prophetic depiction of my own experience of England today’.
• This conjuncture – for Stuart Hall: a profound scholarly essay by Jeremy Gilbert (as an open access .pdf) on the great cultural critic, which serves as as the editorial for an issue of New Formations.
• Emmett Till’s murder, and how America remembers its darkest moments: this is from February but it has just won a significant award, which is only one reason to highlight its remarkable tale and excitingly innovative presentation, with a complementary VR documentary; by Audra D.S. Burch, Veda Shastri and Tim Chaffee for The New York Times.
• The heir: Mckay Coppins for The Atlantic is constantly astonishing about the Trump family succession (and, yes, it really is a lot like the series); the opening sentence is pretty good too: ‘The empire begins with a brothel.’
• The demented dalek: enjoy Richard Evans for London Review of Books on Michael Gove, in the form of a review of Owen Bennett’s new biography, Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry…
• On (not) reviewing Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism and British Dissent: … but re LRB read also Priyamvada Gopal on ‘the spiking of a commissioned and filed review of my new book, Insurgent Empire (Verso, 2019) at a time when the esteemed journal is under justified fire for severe under-representation of women and non-white people in its influential pages.’
• Queer times for the straight book – Maggie Nelson and Michel Serres: more challenging but rewarding scholarship, from Christina Lupton for Post45, on time and reading and two writers who
both speak importantly to the hours reading takes, the straightness of the book as something that must be read, the before and after of book learning, and the ordering of the life in which reading must jostle for time with other kinds of political and romantic action.
Header image credit: Robert Frank from The Americans; via Pace/MacGill and the National Gallery of Art.
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