Why sit on stuff when you can give it away and be useful? Well exactly, and so I’ve been uploading some of my Charles Urban images to a new folder on Flickr. As well as plundering my digital archive, I’ve been copying and pasting images from Urban’s 1903 film catalogue, We Put the World BeforeRead More
Far-flung isle
Many years ago I read an article in the Sunday Times magazine about the island of St Helena. It told of a place that to me seemed some sort of paradise. It was the one of the remotest inhabited islands on the planet, a lump of rock in the middle of the south Atlantic, andRead More
Amleto
Next month, on 23 June, I am introducing the film Amleto at the Bristol Watershed. It’s an Italian film, made in 1917, and yes it’s the story of Hamlet. Among all the celebrations of quatercentenarian William Shakespeare, and among almost every book written on Shakespeare and film, you will find no mention of this gem,Read More
Out of it
What is the connection between Balzac’s The History of the Thirteen, Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound? Answer – there isn’t one. Or rather there is, in that all three are specifically referenced by Jacques Rivette’s improvisational epic set of films, Out 1 (1971), but whose chief purpose might beRead More
Kurt’s barn
The jazz singer and art lover George Melly was fond of telling a story about when he was confronted by some thugs with broken bottles outside a Manchester club. Running not being much of an option for the rotund Melly, and fighting or negotiating still less so, he chose instead to give a recitation ofRead More
Films beget films
Watching a BBC television programme on the history of the UK and the European Union the other night (Europe: Them or Us), I noted the great amount of archive footage used and how skilfully it had been woven into the argument. I looked, as I always do on such occasions, at the credits, to seeRead More
Dickensian
What sad news that there is to be no second series of Dickensian, the superlative mashup of Charles Dickens’ characters by Tony Jordan, the Eastenders writer. Over twenty episodes the series ingeniously wove together back stories to Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Bleak House and A Christmas Carol, together with several other characters taken from Dickens’sRead More
I remember # 13
373. I remember newsreels. 374. I remember Vijay Amritraj, whose always seemed to go out at the quarter final stage of Wimbledon in the most entertaining game of the tournament. 375. I remember Pinky and Perky. 376. I remember The Raging Moon, in which the lead characters were in wheelchairs. 377. I remember Fattypuffs andRead More
Bad Hamlet
It’s all Shakespeare at the moment; inevitable, I guess. And so to the Cockpit Theatre in London, a community theatre tucked away off Lissom Grove, to see a Hamlet that we seldom see – the ‘bad quarto’ Hamlet. There are three different surviving versions of Shakespeare’s play, much to the confusion and secret joy ofRead More
Alluding to Shakespeare
The film programmers among you (real and imaginary) will have noticed that 2016 sees the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and there is an obligation to show something of the man’s works on your screens. With a heavy sigh you turn to the obvious Branaghs and Oliviers, with just maybe Forbidden Planet (perhaps the best-knownRead More