The BBC iplayer is showing the police thriller, Witness (1985) by Peter Weir. Brilliant, and with a beautiful barn-building scene amongst the Amish…

The BBC is showing the classic British film comedy, Lucky Jim (1957) with Ian Carmichael. You can watch it here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0078rmt/lucky-ji

The film is a charming period-piece, and very funny if you happen to work in HE. Even today.

The film is by the Boulting brothers, who rank along side Hitchcock, Ealing and Hammer, as high-points of British cinema.

We watched another JP Melville film on Mubi yesterday evening. This time it was the noir heist thriller, Bob le Flambeur from 1956. Flambeur is French slang for a compulsive high-roller.

By modern standards, the film was a little slow…that’s what the new wave did, it speeded things up.

But, I loved the scene-setting in Pigalle, with the girls, clubs and night-life. The screengrab, above, shows the metro station with the famous St Raphael drink advertisement by Charles Loupot. There were great cars and wonderful clothes too, and plenty of night neon and shopfronts. Great 1950s street typography and signage.

The climax of the film takes place at Deauville, on the Normandy coast.

Like in all film noir, the female characters are both wonderful and dangerous…

The film streaming site, Mubi, are having a JP Melville season. We watched a terrific and stylish film about the resistance in WW2 France, called Army of Shadows. I recommend.

The BBC are showing the classic prison break drama, Escape from Alcatraz (1979) by Don Siegel, and starring Clint Eastwood.

Siegel enjoyed a 40 year career in Hollywood and worked with Eastwood on a number of films, including Dirty Harry (1971). Siegel also directed the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The BBC are showing a terrific documentary about Miles Davis. You can watch it, here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ggdf

The US jazz trumpet player, Miles Davis, is universally acknowledged as a musical genius of the 20C.

My friend, Dr James Fox, is presenting as series of films on BBC4TV called, The Age of Images.
The programme website is, here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000fzm9/age-of-the-image-series-1-1-a-new-reality
This series covers exactly the ground that I have introduced in stage one (inside the image machine), and in stage two (U8) and stage three (U10).
The conceptual architecture of field, frame and optics, is even included in the structure of these programmes.
These films are a must watch.

James Fox is an art historian, so he is more interested in individual artists responding to the acceleration of modernity and the attendant fracturing of experience and image…rather than the structural relation between organisation, acceleration and image.

If you follow the links, there is an OU page about the history of lenses and optics, here
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/society-politics-law/sociology/brief-history-the-lens?in_menu=1017673
Technology and art have always been connected, from the first tools and pigments used to make prehistoric cave art, to the present-day questions that artists ask of our relationship to the world around us.

The BBC iplayer is showing the classic New Hollywood film, In the Heat of the Night (1967).

The film is a classic civil rights movie which places a small-town Southern States community against a visiting African-American detective. He doesn’t want to be there, but he’s stuck passing through, and gets caught-up in a murder investigation. Sidney Poitier stars, and there is a terrific jazzy soundtrack by Quincy Jones.

Also, there is quite a lot of train action…

See also, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

There are a number of important online resources available to you for watching films and television

Box of Broadcasts – an archive of UK broadcast TV (access through your UAL login)

BBC iplayer – BBC archive and streaming service

Mubi – films (access through your UAL login)

Ubuweb – the avant-garde online (this is an amazing resource)

monoskop – documents and books as PDFs

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.