Looking up to the light

To the cinema to see a film about cinema. Is there any art form, any medium, that has been quite so sentimental about itself as cinema? There is nostalgia in the understanding of every art form or medium which has transformed through time, but cinema’s forlornness seems particular to itself. It is summed up byRead More

Picturegoers

Nine years ago I started up a website that gathered examples of eyewitness testimony from people going to see motion pictures. I called it Picturegoing, which felt catchy, and the dot com address was available. Today, I am happy to announce, the book version has been published. The book is entitled Picturegoers – because aRead More

Kane and Kong

Have you seen the pterodactyls in Citizen Kane? They are there, supposedly, in the background of the beach picnic scene towards the end of the film. As the camera tracks through the party guests, following Kane’s butler Raymond (played by Paul Stewart), just before we enter the Kanes’ tent, there in the background are silhouettesRead More

A World is Turning

Back in my time working as a cataloguer at what was then called the National Film Archive, then the National Film and Television Archive, and is now the BFI National Archive, we used to produce shotlists for some of the films in the collection. They weren’t, strictly speaking, shotlists, since we cataloguers seldom described theRead More

Farewell the trumpets

Farewell the Trumpets is the title of the final volume of the Pax Britannica trilogy on the rise and fall of the British Empire, written by the late Jan Morris. As the three books mostly cover the Victorian era, with the third opening with Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, it feels like a goodRead More