Carol Reed (1949) The Third Man

BBC4 showed a marvellous film about the current market in contemporary art…

You can watch it here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000hqmq/the-price-of-everything

We watched a lovely selection of disco clips on the BBC, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01cqt74/disco-at-the-bbc

Marvellous. Get that mirror-ball.

BBC4TV showed a terrific family documentary about the early life of the painter Henri Matisse. You can watch it, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000hqt7/becoming-matisse

Matisse was given a box of paints when he was ill as a young man. It’s amazing how many great artists began because of a period of illness. There’s a good story there.

The main part of the film was about the discovery of light and colour in the south-of-France. Actually, Richard E Grant has made a two-parter abut this called, Painting Paradise. You can find that one online. Try Box of Broadcasts.

Unless you are shown around, the history of cinema can be a bit overwhelming. There’s a lot of films to watch and it’s not so easy, these days, to figure out how the history of cinema developed across the last 100 years.

My advice is always to begin with Alfred Hitchcock…

Hitchcock was a British film director who began his career in the 1920s, when films were silent, and continued unto the early 1970s. That’s a fifty year career, and with stages in Britain, Germany and the USA.

Hitchcock made almost a film every year throughout his career as a director. These are the important ones…

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964) and Frenzy (1972)

Because of his early experience in Germany, Hitchcock was amongst the first directors to understand the freudian significance of feeling intrinsic to the voyeurism of watching films. The rich psychological and formal content of Hitchcock films have made them a staple of film studies courses and there is an enormous industry in Hitchcock interpretation.

The famous interviews wth Francois Truffaut also revealed Hitchcock as a director with a clear sense of a reflective and critical practice, and with a great sense of style. The male and female protagonists in Hitchcock films are amongst the best-dressed in film history.

BBC Sounds 3 have broadcast the 8-hour, Sleep, by Max Richter. You put it on as you go to bed and, when-and-if you wake up in the night, there is a beautiful and slightly surprising soundscape.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06db5tv

We watched this recent French film on google stream…and I would recommend it.

It’s a sort of later-life rom-com mashed up with bits of the Truman Show and Memento. Or, maybe it explores the potential for a theatrical kind of experiential and immersive version of secret cinema…Lovely.

BBC4TV showed a terrific film about the music scene on a little island in west London. The island is called Eel Pie Island and sits in the Thames, near Richmond. You can watch the film, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gp1k

The scene started in the 1950s as a traditional jazz venue but grew to include Delta Blues from New Orleans. This music was mostly unknown back then, in the UK and especially in the USA.

A generation of British musicians – Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page amongst many others – began to combine rock-and roll, electrical amplification and blues to create a hybrid form called, rhythm and blues.

The interseting thing is that R+B could never have developed in the USA in the same way. The segregation of people and culture would never have allowed it. Nor could this hybrid have emerged anywhere but west London…the schools and colleges of the area supported just the right kind of musical curiosity…

Terrific.

If you are interested in the origins of modern popular music, look at this post from another of my blogs…It’s all about the railway between New Orleans and Chicago…

We watched a recent French rom-com, Populaire, from 2012. The story is charming; it’s a sort of screw-ball comedy set against a background of regional, national and international speed-typing championships. In the end, and happily, the girl gets the boy.

The midcentury-modern style of the film was lovely too. Sort of Jacques Demy inspired, and with a nod to Jean Cocteau too. Look at the typing hands in the picture frames on the wall, above.

In amongst all the fun was a serious film about the hopelessly limited options of provincial life in post-WW2 France; especially for most young women; whose lives would mostly be circumscribed within a five-mile radius of limited opportunity. In that context, the trajectory of leaving home, secretarial work, and independence was exciting and liberating.

This was exactly the ind of film that we needed in lock-down. I recommend.