Vision On

Art rocks -- and a summer break

I'm taking a break for 10 days on a family holiday, then back with (I hope) exciting news about the RSC Hamlet.

In the meantime, take a look at these astonishing pictures (courtesy of the Guardian and English Heritage) of prehistoric rock art at various locations in Britain. Jonathan Jones writes about them here -- and EH with other partners have launched a fascinating website about them.

Also Wallflower Press, publishers of my book Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts In Britain, have put their new website on line today. They're offering a discount of 15% on all purchases.

Stage and screen

I saw the press night performance of Katie Mitchell's new collaborative experiment at the Cottesloe, ...some trace of her. It's really interesting, and a bold engagement with the media of the stage and film, but ultimately as theatrical event it's more than a touch disappointing.

A small company prepares and films live scenes that loosely relate the story from Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Each set-up is prepared, lit and shot on stage below a screen on which the images are presented, live, but in monochrome. Sometimes the actors themselves speak in the scenes, sometimes their words, presumably their thoughts, are read by another member of the cast. The preparations, the lighting, the sound (including effects) and everthing else are done as elaborately choreographed movements, often with several "shots' live at a single moment, with cross-cutting and occasionally multiple projected images.

It's incredibly clever and you sit there admiringly. The ways in which certain shots and effects are created with minimal means is often amusing -- and just occasionally there are moments of beauty in the images. The visual style mixes the aesthetic of expressionist silent cinema with early live television: lots of close-ups, long shots, action within the frame rather than between images.

What I missed was a sense of engagement with the story, with the characters, with any trace of emotion. I found the story really confusing (I hadn't prepared and didn't know it in advance) and I remained cut off from what was going on, sometimes marvelling at the invention but ultimately distanced from it all.

Later: Interestingly, Michael Billington saw the same performance and came to pretty much the same conclusions.

He that plays the prince

For reasons that I hope will soon become apparent, I am currently fascinated by Hamlet and the RSC production with David Tennant. The Guardian carries exclusive production photos and also a fascinating discussion by Michael Billington about the best Hamlets of his time. In his top ten he includes Jonathan Pryce at the Royal Court in 1980, a performance which lives with me still. (The photo is Ellie Kurttz's, courtesy of the RSC.)

Blogger reviews are just beginning to appear, in advance of next Tuesday's press night. Actor Matthew Swan posts here: "What Doran has very successfully achieved is a great Hamlet with a focus on the very human responses each character has to one another and the events that shape the play."

The blog Defying Definition exudes enthusiasm: "I was stunned by it all, gobsmacked, wanting to rewind it and watch it again."

Jan Ford, who describes herself as "an ageing female" is a little more measured: " But, at the end of the play, I felt I'd witnessed a production of some moment and this view seemed to be shared by the audience generally, judging by the acclamation."

Churches nos. 253-260

Friday afternoon I drove up to Stratford-upon-Avon for a preview performance of the RSC's Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. That's another story (and one I'll write at some point). I stayed overnight nearby (a fine manor house converted into an OK, and relatively cheap, Best Western) and after breakfast was away from the hotel just before 9am for a day of church-going on my way back to London.

It was a beautiful sunny morning and there was a wonderful range of churches to choose from -- I eventually visited 8 new ones, plus one I'd been to before and one that was closed, but where I could peer through the window. So that equalled my best day in my collecting of those in Simon Jenkins' book England's Thousand Best Churches. I thought I was going to make 9 but 8 is a good tally, and it's a good focus for an entry that tries to capture something of why I like this activity so much. Which by way of an outline of the day, with some photos, is what I'm attempting here.

Same question

I keep asking myself, Why am I writing this blog?

Part of the answer, weirdly, is coming from the renewed focus it's given me for the Illuminations website -- and for the News and Blog pages there. As the latter indicates, we're moving towards shifting the whole site towards being built around a blog, and that seems to be a really strong focus for the future of the company. This more personal space perhaps has a place alongside that.

I've been interesting by reflections from Charlotte Higgins and (in interview) Alex Ross on their blogging, and on the ways they see the relationship developing between professional critics and blogs.

Tate (Britain) is great

I'm a big fan of Tate Britain. I can be a little ambivalent about other parts of Tate's empire, but what I still (and probably always will) think of as the Tate Gallery is, more or less, a wonder. A time there was when it didn't open until 2pm and, still at school, I would come up from my family's home in Maidstone on the bus and wait in the early afternoon crowd outside. A little later I'd go to the Sunday morning openings restricted just for the Friends, when the galleries were largely, gloriously empty.

Now it's unthinkable that the place wouldn't be fully open on Sunday mornings from 10am -- and that's where I've spent the past couple of hours. And among the paintings I saw was The Green Earth 1979-80 by Victor Pasmore, of whom and which more below.

Why is the place so special? Here's what I particularly enjoyed this morning...

The two cultures

One strand of my reading this week has been taken up with Tim Boon's new book Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television. Wallflower Press has published this in the same series as my Vision On; there's also a tie-in exhibition at the Science Museum, plus this New Scientist video of very early science films, with an interview from Tim.

There's much that's really interesting in the book, but one of the things that particularly fascinated me was his exploration of the relationship between scientists and the BBC in the 1950s.

Could it be, could it be?

Sky Arts, for which we've just completed Art of Faith, is very savvy about securing press attention. And one of its smartest strategies is the Friday night "Hijack" slot. A personality chooses a run of programmes for the evening from the channel's catalogue. Marry this idea with a figure in whom the press is interested and it's a smart way of securing free column inches.

Announced today is the programmer for Friday August 22: Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, still somewhat of a mystery to those in the arts and broadcasting. So today the Guardian Culture blog and the Times ran pieces about what might be divined from his selection. And nestled in his quartet of announced choices is a half-hour documentary about Antony Gormley, an artist who according to Burnham achieves "the remarkable trick of being both utterly accessible and deeply mysterious at the same time".

Now could this be, could this possibly be, our film from theEYE series with Gormley? The Times describes the programme as an "interview" with the artist, which is a pretty fair description of our documentary, although it also features a really good and rather beautifully filmed selection of his works. And this EYE is under licence to Sky Arts. If it is, I have to say I'm rather childishly pleased with the idea -- and tomorrow I'll try to confirm whether this is the case. The picture incidentally is of one of Gormley's accessible-but-mysterious figures snapped at Roche Court earlier in the summer.

Update: Sky Arts have confirmed that Andy Burnham's choice is indeed our EYE film. Neat that, isn't it?

Watching the Qur'an on television

Last night I watched two hours of television straight through -- and it was just a single programme. Well, alright, I did make one phone call and I got up to get a drink at least twice. But devoting this amount of time to an off-air showing one film, and a documentary at that, is much rarer today than it once was.

Technology (from the VCR to the iPlayer) has combined with social change (too many other media demands) to reinforce forms of television directed primarily to the short attention span. So in both fact and fiction we have faster editing, busier shots with constant movement and frenetic graphics, plus ever-stronger verbal sign-posting. All of which --  one could argue (I would) -- drains meaning and the potential of complexity from individual images and their juxtapositions. And all of which is familiar, perhaps overly so. But it can take something that resists these pressures to expose their workings -- and that's certainly what Antony Thomas' film The Qur'an did on Channel 4 last night.

All you need is love

Congratulations to my friend Ian Macmillan (on the right) who entered into his Civil Partnership with Andy Hitchman today. It was a lovely, touching ceremony.

 

 

 

Ian made the film The Scholte Affair with me for the Tx. series, but this is the opening from his truly exceptional Channel 4 series with Matt Collings, This is Modern Art.