Time to return to the modest indulgence of reviving musical obscurities from the punk and new wave era which can can be found on YouTube and not really anywhere else. Previous posts, Where’s the New Wave now? and It was easy, it was cheap – go and do it, have revived happy personal memories ofRead More
60. I remember Persia. 61. I remember David Bedford lapping other long-distance runners, a mustachioed superman. 62. I remember deciding that when older I would fly in a plane, reach out to grab a piece of a cloud, and then report back to a grateful world what it was made of. 63. I remember florins.Read More
My walking is of two kinds: one, straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural to me, and strong with me, that I think I must be theRead More
I was in Stratford, London, the other day and went for a nostalgic look at the Olympic Park. You’re not allowed into the Park, of course, and a perimeter fence ensures that you keep your distance, but if you got to the top of the John Lewis store at the Westfield shopping centre, they haveRead More
I have been engrossed by Turner Prize-winning Jeremy Deller‘s video installation English Magic. Produced as part of, and as a synthesis of, his Venice Biennale exhibition of the same name, the British artist’s work is a playful and visually profound statement on the state of the nation (particularly the English nation). The video is aRead More
I was in the town of Lund in southern Sweden last week, attending a seminar on newsreels, which I’ll write about in due course. Lund is a pleasant, quiet town of around 100,000, almost half of which are students. I had half a day in which to mooch around the town, and so it wasRead More
I started out my career in moving images back in 1986, as a cataloguer. I worked at the National Film Archive (as it then was), describing the films and television programmes that we acquired by country, title, date, creators and performers. The films were indexed according to subject – we used the Universal Decimal ClassificationRead More
31. I remember walking along a garden path towards a gate, my earliest memory. 32. I remember Peter and Jane. 33. I remember Alberto y Los Trios Paraguayos. 34. I remember that the last film to be shown at the Academy cinema in Oxford Street was Dangerous Moves, a Swiss film about chess. 35. IRead More
Today I attended What is Restoration?, a one-day conference on the subject of film and video restoration, organised by FOCAL International and hosted by the BFI Southbank. FOCAL International organises an annual set of awards for use of footage in film and television productions. The awards include two for film restorations: one for best singleRead More
This month the BFI Southbank has been running a season of Jacobean dramas on television. It’s another output of the Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television project, whose conference I wrote about last year. The project aims to document, revalue and champion the largely lost tradition of theatre plays being presented on TV. TheRead More