Last weekend I sat through six hours and thirty-seven minutes of of Les Misérables (France 1925), the longest film I’ve ever experienced at a single sitting. It was shown at the Barbican in London, two comfort breaks and a supper break along the way. Neil Brand provided the live piano score, as he had withRead More
This is the text of a talk I gave to a research event on newsreels at CIAC research centre, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal, on 9 February 2017. I’ve also published it as a PDF, with footnotes instead of hyperlinks. In the original talk I ended with eight reasons for using newsreels to study history,Read More
Next up in this occasional series on handy web resources is film databases. Everyone knows about the Internet Movie Database, which has reached such a state of majesty that it doesn’t just reflect the film industry, it helps drive it. But there are plenty of other film databases out there, some loyally documenting a nationalRead More
There’s a scene in Primary Colors (1998), one of my favourite American movies, that keeps coming back to me as I read about the current presidential race in the USA. Jack Stanton, a Southern governor in pursuit of the Democratic nomination for president, is beset by scandal. His great strength is his empathy with ordinaryRead More
Pity the New York Times‘ TV critic Mike Hales, who recently reviewed the first few episodes of Amazon’s new series Goliath. As The Drum reports, Hales complained of the series having a “needlessly complicated structure”. … presumably because the first episode leaves so much unanswered, the next jumps back in time to fill in theRead More
I’ve been adding more images to my Flickr pages reflecting the works of Charles Urban. Having started with pictures from his 1903 catalogue We put the World Before You, I’ve turned to another treasure among his catalogues, the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects (1912). Copies of this catalogue are rarer than hen’s teeth, and I’mRead More
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
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
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
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