Pandaemonium is the Palace of All the Devils. Its building began c.1660. It will never be finished – it has to be transformed into Jerusalem. The building of Pandaemonium is the real history of Britain for the last three hundred years. Frank Cottrell Boyce, the writer behind ‘Isles of Wonder’, the extraordinary and widely acclaimedRead More
Rather by accident, I saw the feature film Mr Bean’s Holiday yesterday. Catching the opening credits while channel-hopping, I imagined that I’d stay with it for a few minutes and ended up, well, almost captivated. It’s a well-constructed comedy about Mr Bean’s haphazardous trip through France in the company of a lost child. It adroitlyRead More
This week I attended Screening the Future 2011: New Strategies and Challenges in Audiovisual Archiving, held in Hilversum, the Netherlands. The event was organised by PrestoPrime and PrestoCentre, interlinked projects funded by the European Union as part of a decade-long programme looking at how film and broadcast archives should plan for the future by sharingRead More
On the night of 16 December 1910 a group of Latvian revolutionaries attempted to rob a jeweller’s shop at 119 Houndsditch in the City of London. Their aim was to obtain funds to support revolutionary activity in Russia (and to support themselves), but their efforts to break in were overheard and nine policemen were calledRead More
The relief to be out of the sun, To have come north once more To my islands of dark ore Where winter is so long Only a little light Gets through, and that perfect. I think this is my favourite film poem. It’s not immediately obvious that it is about film; for that you needRead More
It is perhaps the most iconic of all photographic images. Eadweard Muybridge‘s running man (he made several photographic sequences of a man running, but I’m thinking of the one illustrated here) conjures up the very idea of photography. It has captured the instant, has brought a moment out of its specific time into all time.Read More
Here’s number 4 in an occasional series that reviews unfamiliar or neglected books on film. Today’s choice is Leslie Halliwell’s Halliwell’s Film Guide (London: Granada, 1977, 2nd ed. 1979, 3rd ed. 1981, 4th ed. 1983, 5th ed. 1985, 6th ed. 1987, 7th. ed. 1989). At first sight, Halliwell’s Film Guide may not seem a suitableRead More
Memory is an entirely personal thing. What we call our memories are constructions of the brain which alter according to time and circumstance. They are not objective, and they do not correlate exactly with reality, as any court of law can demonstrate. One person’s memories will never be precisely the memories of another person. NotionsRead More
This is an extraordinary image. It’s a Japanese postcard dating from 1908 (the postage stamp says Meijii 41, which is 1908). However the image that it shows dates from November 1899. It shows on the right the greatest of all kabuki actors, Ichikawa Danjuro IX (1838-1903), and on the left Onoe Kikugoro V (1844-1903), secondRead More
Sight & Sound has published a poll of the most useful and/or inspirational film books ever written. Not the best books ever, but those which have proven of the greatest value or which are most important to the fifty or so critics invited to take part. I was one of those invited to contribute, thoughRead More