The artist comedian, Jim Moir, presented an interesting documentary about video art and moving image from the 1960s onwards.
The programme website, is here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bpjw/kill-your-tv-jim-moirs-weird-world-of-video-art
Watch it on iplayer, or on box of broadcasts.
This is a painting by the American artist, Thomas Hart Benton. Actually, it was his last painting made for the Country Music Hall of Fame. The painting shows the origins of country music in America…
BBC4TV are showing the new Ken Burns documentary about US country music. The programme website is here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bhfw
The history of American popular music is interesting. I’ve posted before the link between music and the railway, as evidenced in the painting above.
Previously, the BBC also showed a lovely film about why Nashville developed as the home of country music.
If you are interested, have a look at Heaven’s Gate (1980) by Michael Cimino. The film is terrific throughout, and there is a brilliant Cimino dance set-piece, with roller-skates!
The BBC have shown a new documentary about the history of jazz label, Blue Note. You can see the programme website, here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b8pd
Apart from the legacy of all the great records, there is a wonderful archive of photo images and wonderful record sleeves. This material was used throughout the film.
There is quite a lot of material about Blue Note and their amazing story. The BBC have a whole page of programmes and resources, here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/SRVBqbNlgHr91p0shCyhtC/the-blue-note-collection
Blue Note recently did a collaboration with a skate shop in New York. Making some jazz inspired Vans featuring some of the Blue Note record covers. They made a nice film to go alongside the release. Here is the link to the shoes they made
http://www.dqmnewyork.com/shop/shoes/blue-note.html
And the film
The BBC have showed a documentary abut the 19C woman novelist, George Eliot, by the artist Gillian Wearing.
The programme website is here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b8nj
George Eliot was a remarkable woman in a number of different ways; as a writer, and as someone who was able to live independently, as a writer, and outside the usual confines of the matrimonial and female spheres of Victorian life. The film showed each strand of Eliot’s life fed into her life and work as a woman, and as a creative artist.
The film is typical Wearing. It uses contemporary interviews and dramatic re-enactments to tell the story.
Terrific.
The BBC showed Stanley Kubrick’s great cold-war satire, Dr Strangelove.
Kubrick’s films often seem to be about how a particular situation, expressed through a specific sociology or system, or circumstance, actually produces a kind of madness amongst the film’s protagonists.
This film looks at the madness in the bunker, as accident and system failure move the world toward a dramatic end.
BBC4TV are showing a documentary about the US urban activist, Jane Jacobs.
You can get the details, here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b090c4f8
Jacobs was one of the first people to question the modernist orthodoxy of functional segregation in modern cities, and the attendant destruction of community and neighbourhood. Jacobs was especially sensitive to the value of a busy street as crowded, safe, egalitarian and prosperous. She understood that aggregation and diversity were the two drivers of urban dynamism…
Her book, The Death and Life of American Cities (1961) became the playbook for urban activists across the US.
The film also describes the unhappy example of the Pruitt-Igoe projects development in St Louis…
There is a lot of material about Pruitt-Igoe.
The development became derelict and was eventually pulled down…nowadays, the whole thing is viewed as an indictment of modernist renewal…
The destruction of Pruitt-Igoe provides a dramatic sequence in the documentary film, Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Philip Glass wrote the soundtrack.
Elsewhere, the dereliction of Detroit is also well documented. See, for example, Requiem for Detroit (2010).
As part of the thirtieth birthday of the internet, The BBC have repeated the Steve Jobs documentary made just after he died.
You can get the details of the film, here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b018ct00/steve-jobs-billion-dollar-hippy
It was interesting to watch the Jobs film after Jane Jacobs…part of what Jobs was doing is that he understood how Jacob’s idea of animation would be crucial in supporting digital and developing Apple…
The BBC have broadcast a documentary about the life and films of Stanley Kubrick. He is generally understood as one of the great film directors of the 20C.
The film includes interviews with lots of people who worked with Kubrick, including Wendy Carlos, the electronic music pioneer.
You can visit the programme web page, here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b55c
There’s also a terrific film about the Kubrick research archive called, Kubrick’s Boxes (2005). The archive is housed at LCC, part of UAL.
The BBC have broadcast a brilliant documentary film about the fashion designer, Vivienne Westwood. You can visit the programme webpage, here
As part of a series of programmes celebrating the thirtieth birthday of the internet, Richard Clay presented a documentary about the viral power of memes…
Here is the programme webpage
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003g0q/how-to-go-viral-the-art-of-the-meme-with-richard-clay
Memes are so-called after the memetic phenomenon identified by evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976). The idea, in Dawkins, emerges from the concept of replication at the heart of Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis and extends it into the cultural arena…This seemed to propose a way of resolving the nature/nurture debate around the scope and limits of individual genetic inheritance.
The advent of the internet, and its continuous, interactive, and dynamic, digital stream had amplified the significance of the memetic potential of technological environments. Many books have been published to support this memetic extension across advertising and to advance public policy, civics etc…
It was disappointing that Richard’s programme seemed to accept, at face-value, that the meme was a product of the digital realm…in fact, the meme is exemplified by the synthesis of word and image, identified by Moholy in the 1920s, and as typo-photo. It was especially frustrating that no mention was made of the poster in this context, as the source code of memetic communication and as an expression of Walter Benjamin’s thesis about the industrialisation of cultural production.
I have spoken, this last term, about communication design in relation to the machine-ensemble of modern society and how, as that ensemble accelerates and gets bigger, it produces its own image-culture so as to keep pace with the ensemble. Contemporary meme culture seems a perfect example of this historic phenomenon.