The Last Picture Show: stark black and white cinematography
"Bogdanovich's coming of age story, set in 1950s rural Texas, is an achingly accurate portrayal of small-town life and the compromises and disappointments that mark the passage from adolescence to adulthood. In contrast to his contemporaries, who experimented with style and new filmmaking techniques inspired by the French New Wave, Bogdanovich looked back to classical Hollywood, utilizing stark black and white cinematography, deep focus and a traditional narrative structure. The film is striking in its lack of nostalgia for the past, focusing instead on the desperation of a dying community and way of life, embodied by the shuttering of the lonely movie house."
(Harvard Film Archive)
"The Last Picture Show", Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. With Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd. US 1971, 35mm, b/w, 118 min.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Thomas Allen: whimsical pulp fiction cut-outs
"Playing the role of scientist, [Thomas] Allen enlists mid 20th-century books on the natural phenomenon of science(astronomy, physics, electricity, biology) and presents his research as if through the eyes of his 8-year old daughter. How would she understand and portray these theories and absolutes of science?
Allen's signature use of cutting and repurposing book illustrations has not vanished. Instead of the pulp fiction genre, Allen plays with 50's era versions of clean cut youths and domesticated moms. His unmistakable talent for creating the illusion of 3D in photography with his deft cuts and crimps, establishes a magical world in which a boy and girl play tag creating their own kind of electricity, a milkman makes a very special delivery in space, young toughs play marbles with the solar system and a mother busily sews her own version of 'string theory.'"
(Foley Gallery, 2012, New York NY)
Fig.1 Bearings, 2012. Fig.2 Eclipsed, 2012.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The mathematics of Hollywood blockbuster
HOLLYWOOD'S golden age may have ended in the 1950s, but it is only recently that Tinseltown appears to have hit upon a mathematical way to capitalise on our fickle attention spans.
"Film-makers have got better and better at constructing shots so that their lengths grab our attention," says James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He analysed 150 Hollywood movies and found that the more recent they were, the more closely their shot lengths tended to follow a mathematical pattern that also describes human attention spans.
In the 1990s, a team at the University of Texas, Austin, measured the attention spans of volunteers as they performed hundreds of consecutive trials. When they turned these measurements into a series of waves using a mathematical trick called a Fourier transform, the waves increased in magnitude as their frequency decreased.
(Ewen Callaway, 18 February 2010, New Scientist)
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Tessa SzwarnowskaSHARE
Computer History Museum: Selling the Computer Revolution
"The brochures selected here (just a fraction of the Museum's holdings in this area) show some of the more important technologies, companies, and applications in computing from 1948 to 1988. This covers the period from mechanical and relay-based computers to those based on the microprocessor - a remarkable transition that occurred over only 25 years. We hope you enjoy browsing through these historical documents."
(Computer History Museum)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Practising Theatre History as Research
"Much current scholarship in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including my own, focuses on the actual performance of plays in their own or later periods, regarding the texts that survive as, in different ways, blueprints for performance, and exploring them in the context of their performance spaces, actors and theatre-practice and of other agencies such as audiences that impact upon those texts in performance. My own research in these areas is largely conducted through practice.
But let me just sketch a brief background. In 1998, a sea-change occurred in the lives of arts (as opposed to humanities) researchers in the UK, with the creation of the Arts & Humanities Research Board (now Council) which, for the first time, funded practice-led research in the creative arts. I cannot stress too heavily the impact this had on the landscape of research in the performing arts.
That's not to say, of course, that research through practice had not been conducted before then. If I take my own department at Bristol as an example, scholars such as Glynne Wickham, Richard Southern and Neville Denny were experimenting from the early 1950s by staging medieval and early modern plays, and using their findings in their published work.
But the arrival of the AHRB not only provided funding for practice-led research in the academy, but in so doing, confirmed it as being as valid and - not to be underestimated - as respectable as research conducted through more traditional or conventional means. And - a point to which I shall return - it opened up debates not only on how such research might most profitably be conducted, but how it might be disseminated in forms other than the books or journal articles that had predominated - and be disseminated, in fact, through the practice/performance itself."
(Martin White)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
