Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today

A discussion of uses of archive television in the BBC Four documentary 'Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today'

The filmic fugue of Ken Russell’s Pop Goes the Easel

First broadcast as an episode of BBC Television’s Monitor in 1962, Ken Russell’s documentary film Pop Goes the Easel profiles four young artists: Pauline Boty, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Peter Blake. With an exuberant and richly varied approach to filming, Pop Goes the Easel is a rich and revealing document of early Pop Art in London. This article situates the film within the context of television’s engagement with the visual arts in the medium’s first 25 years. It is argued that part of its significance within the tradition of the visual arts on television is its resistance to the determinations of an explanatory voice. Also, that its achievement combines and develops approaches of photojournalism, documentary and art cinema from the mid- and late 1950s. It is further proposed that Pop Goes the Easel is especially note-worthy for its finely-balanced tensions between discourses traditionally understood as oppositional: the stasis of artworks versus the linear narrative of film; the indexical qualities of documentary versus the inventions of fiction; the mass-produced elements and images of popular culture versus the individual authorship and authority of high art; the abstracted rationality of critical discourse versus explosions of embodied sensuality; and the determinations and closure of a singular meaning versus polysemous openness

Dallas Bower: a producer for television's early years, 1936-39

Having worked in the film industry as a sound technician and then director, Dallas Bower (1907-99) was appointed in 1936 as one of two senior producers at the start of the BBC Television service. Over the next three years Bower produced as well as directed many ground-breaking live programmes, including the opening-day broadcast on 2 November 1936; the BBC Television Demonstration Film (1937, his only surviving pre-war production); a modern-dress Julius Caesar (1938), in uniforms suggestive of a Fascist disctatorship; Act II of Tristan and Isolde (1938); Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope (1939), utilising extended single camera-shots camera-shots; numerous ballets, among them Checkmate (1938); and ambitious outside broadcasts from the film studios at Denham and Pinewood. Developing the working practices of producing for the theatre, film industry and radio, Bower was a key figure in defining the role of the creative television producer at the start of the medium. Among his innovations, according to his unpublished autobiographical fragment ‘Playback’ (written 1995), was the introduction of a drawn studio plan for the four cameras employed in all live broadcasts from Alexandra Palace. Using Bower’s writings (among them his 1936 book Plan for Cinema), his BECTU History Project interview, the BBC Written Archives and contemporary industry coverage, this article reconstructs the early development of the role of staff television producer in order to consider the questions of autonomy, agency and institutional constraints at the BBC in the pre-war years

Intermedial Relationships of Radio Features with Denis Mitchell’s and Philip Donnellan’s Early Television Documentaries

Writing of the closure in early 1965 of the Radio Features Department, Asa Briggs identifies one of the reasons for the controversial decision as ‘the incursion of television, which was developing its own features.’ ‘[Laurence] Gilliam and his closest colleagues believed in the unique merits of “pure radio”. The screen seemed a barrier’ (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 5, p. 348). Rather than the screen being ‘a barrier’ for them, a number of the creators of the emerging television documentary were from the late 1950s onwards able to transfer and transform distinctive techniques of ‘pure radio’ into highly effective visual forms. Two key figures were the producers of ‘poetic’ documentaries Denis Mitchell and Philip Donnellan, who employed layered voices, imaginative deployments of music and effects, and allusive juxtapositions of sound and image, to develop an alternative (although always marginal) tradition to the supposedly objective approaches of current affairs and, later, verité filmmakers. And a dozen years after the dismemberment of the Features Department, Donnellan paid tribute to it in his glorious but little-seen film Pure Radio (BBC1, 3 November 1977). Taking important early films by Mitchell and Donnellan as case studies, this paper explores the impact of radio features on television documentaries in the 1950s and early 1960s, and assesses the extent to which the screen in its intermedial relationships with ‘pure radio’ was a barrier or, in the work of certain creators, an augmentation

Cymbeline 19

Six scenes from Shakespeare's 'Cymbeline, King of Britain', performed by MA Acting Classical students and filmed by Illuminations Media. These scenes, excerpted from MA Acting's 2019 production of the play which opened the School's Courtyard Theatre, were filmed with Illuminations as part of a research project into the language of filmed theatre. Alongside 'Cymbeline 19' we filmed 'Cymbeline 37', the same six scenes in a reconstruction of a 1937 BBC broadcast of parts of an Embassy Theatre production of the play ('Cymbeline 37' is yet to be released)

State of the Art : Ideas and Images in the 1980s

Produced in conjunction with a television series, this book begins with a definition of art as necessarily social and ideological and then addresses issues in the visual arts through the discussion of ideas, descriptions of works, and interviews with artists. Nairne examines definitions of postmodernism, artists' use of history, institutions that define art's aesthetic and economic value, ideas of creativity and work, sexuality and representation, art and politics, and the role identity and culture play in the production and reception of art. Biographical notes. Circa 200 bibl. ref