C4 are showing the new series (Number 4) of Fargo…this is a historic comedy-crime drama set in the early 1950s.
The original Fargo (1996) was a film by the Coen brothers…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fargo_(1996_film)
The TV series explores the potential for local eccentricity across the US mid-west. All four series are available to stream (41 episodes)
The BBC and Mubi have a number of classic films available to stream just now…
BBC
Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
Mubi
Brazil (1985)
Punishment Park (1971)
Wonderful documentary history of make-up in three parts. Especially interesting in relation to beauty, expression, projection and portraiture. The first episode looked at the 18C…all white face-paint and big hair…There were a few good tricks too; smokey cloves for eyebrows, and red crepe-paper for lips.
Amazing Opera North performance with Testament…Well worth a watch
The BBC are repeating the three part series by Andrew Graham Dixon about the Art of France. This is especially good on the classicism of the ancien regime and the revolutionary period – les grandes machines, and the pantheon etc.
It was especially interesting to see AGD visit the Paris wax work museum.
Ridley Scott has produced a terrific drama series about the 19C expedition to discover the north-west passage, across the arctic, to the pacific…the expedition ended in tragedy and a certain amount of mystery. No one is really certain of what happened.
The art-direction combines a number of themes deriving from fine-art, photography and the images and mythology of exploration.
Here’s an earlier post about the terrible beauty of the frozen wastes…
Carol Reed and Graham Greene
The Third Man (1949) is one of a number of films directed by Reed based on the work of the writer, Graham Greene. The film is acknowledged, for a variety of reasons, to be the high-point of Reed’s career, and one of the greatest films ever made. Certainly, one of the best British films of the 20C.
Greene’s story is set amongst the war-torn ruins of Vienna. Representatives of the victorious powers have partitioned the city. The resulting administrative confusion is, along with the inevitable shortage of essential supply, exploited by an underclass of gangsters and black-marketeers.
An American writer, Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, arrives in Vienna at the invitation of Harry Lime. Matins is shocked to discover that Lime is dead. His attempt to investigate the death of his friend reveals the unpleasant truth that Lime was well known as a racketeer involved in the sale of corrupted penicillin.
The film is divided into two parts. In the first, Lime’s personality is recalled as charming and compelling. At the same time, the facts of his duplicity began to be pieced together by Martins. In the second, Lime suddenly reappears. His death is revealed to have been another fraud aimed at escaping justice. Lime attempts to justify himself to his friend before fleeing through the sewers. Eventually, he is cornered and dies like a rat.
The Third Man shares a number of themes with Greene’s other work. The circumstances of war, along with the terrible revelations of brutality and genocide, came together with Greene’s Catholic belief to suggest a world where corruption and original sin are commonplace. For Greene, the struggle against the forces of evil remained largely futile. Greene’s Catholicism retained, accordingly, a particularly bleak sort of outlook.
Orson Welles and Harry Lime
It was a great coup for Reed to secure the services of Orson Welles to play Harry Lime.
Welles was an actor-director who had, famously, come to the public’s attention by staging a hyper-realistic radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. The news style staging of the play was so successful that some member of the public were reported to have got in their cars and fled to the country.
Welles built on this notoriety by making a dramatically successful first feature Citizen Kane (1941). The film was a thinly veiled dramatisation of the rise and fall of William Randolph Hearst, American newspaper proprietor.
Welles created a number of compelling grotesques throughout his career. Harry Lime was one, Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958) another.
Cuckoo Clocks (Right and Wrong in Vienna)
Perhaps the most famous scene in The Third Man is the discussion on the giant Reisenrad Ferris wheel. Lime attempts to justify himself to his friend Martins by looking down at the small dots of humanity below and asking whether, at twenty thousand dollars each, any of them would really be missed. Finally, Lime suggests that Switzerland, with its centuries of peace and cuckoo clocks, is a poor alternative to the Renaissance of the Borgias. There, suggest Lime, were combined bloodbath and genius in equal measure.
The Gutter (Down and Out in Vienna)
It is perhaps appropriate that the fugitive Lime runs into the Viennese sewers.
The subterranean caverns, reminding us of Pirenesi, become the setting for the doomed endgame where Lime is hunted down. Lime’s pursuers are implacable. Eventually, they corner him and a short gunfight comes to its inevitable conclusion.
There are several other points that need to be made in relation to this film. The Third Man was a triumph for a young lighting cameraman, Robert Krasker. Krasker devised an art direction for the film based on German Expressionist film making from the 1920s and from the Noir thrillers in America.
Krasker, filming amongst the rubble of Vienna, used powerful directional lighting to create a world of sinister shadows and weird perspectives. The result was a morally ambiguous and visually destabilising world in which Lime and his cronies were all too believable.
Finally, no mention of this film would be complete without the name of Anton Karas. The soundtrack of the film, entirely extemporised by Karas, is probably the most famous piece of film music ever.
So, The Third Man is a film where a number of exceptional talents came together and made something much bigger and more impressive than the sum of its parts.
A masterpiece and a top-ten film if ever there was one.
The Mubi streaming site is showing Agnès Varda’s lovely film about the personalities that populate her local street in Paris. The street is called, rue Daguerre. And named after one of the inventors of photography…
There are obvious echos of August Sander’s great photo documentary series and also to Irving Penn’s, Small Trades series from Paris, London and New York.
The film shows a sort of local shop retail environment that has more-or-less disappeared from the UK and London especially. The shops provide what local people need…there’s a butcher, a hairdresser, a tailor, a hardware store and a perfumier…plus a few more.
The film dates from 1976 and the street scenes show many Renault 4s…that’s always a good sign.
https://www.rennart.co.uk/renault.html
The BBC have showed a TV film from 1972 of Aretha Franklin (the Queen of Sou) giving a special gospel concert…this was filmed live using hand-held cameras and sound equipment. The film is a later edit of material originally filmed over two nights in 1972.
The film is good in two different ways. The first is that, through Aretha, it reminds everyone of the powerful roots, provided by gospel, that have nurtured a whole series of singing superstars. The second good thing about this film is that it reminds us, through the evident technical difficulties of the filming, just how difficult this kind of live documentary filming was, before the advent of digital and synchronised sound.
The film, Amazing Grace, is available here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000qzvh/amazing-grace
The name of Gilbert Scott is usually associated, in British architectural history, with the Victorian revival of Gothic style architecture…The name of George Gilbert Scott is connected to a number of important examples of Victorian gothic – St Pancras Hotel, The Albert Memorial etc…But George was just the first of three generations of Gilbert Scotts, and each made a crucial contribution to the elaboration of a Gothic style that was exciting and progressive.
Dan Cruickshank has described this family contribution in a film on BBCTV. You can watch it, here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04m3ljr
The original gothic style is mainly associated with the great tradition of cathedral builders in France and Britain through the middle ages…The Victorian revival of the style sought to re-frame the gothic in relation to the potential of modern materials and to provide for a moral example through architecture.
The original gothic was built from natural materials – stone, timber and brick. Each of these materials is limited in relation to strength-to-weight and specification. The gothic tradition, exemplified through its great cathedral structures, was the elaboration of space and light through an engineering of externalised structure…large window openings are made possible through the the dispersion of compressive forces through flying buttresses and so forth. Whatever, the result is a large structure with a big proportion of window opening and the least amount of structure possible…that’s a bit like the Pompidou Centre, Paris, with its external structure and glass walls…
The youngest Gilbert Scott, Giles, designed the GPO telephone box and Bankside power station.