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Chiaroscuro
Heavenly Love and Earthly Love by Giovanni Baglione (1602–1603). Chiaroscuro\, Chia`ro*scu”ro\, Chiaro-oscuro\, Chi*a”ro-os*cu”ro\, n. [It., clear dark.] (a) The arrangement of light and dark parts in...
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The Watcher and Other Weird Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) has long been a favourite of mine since I first discovered his weird tales in ghost story collections, still the place you’re most likely to find his work....
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Powell’s Bluebeard
The subject of yesterday’s post, The Tales of Hoffmann, was the closest Michael Powell came to realising his concept of the “composed film”, a work which would combine performance, music, lighting and...
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René Magritte by David Wheatley
René Magritte as portrayed by Patrick McDonnell. René Magritte died in 1967, the year Eric Duvivier’s La femme 100 têtes appeared in French cinemas. Magritte is even less visible cinematically than...
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Leslie Megahey’s Bluebeard
Back in the days when the BBC’s television output challenged its audience rather than pandered to it, Leslie Megahey was a name I always looked out for. During the 1970s and 80s, Megahey was one of...
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Le Grand Macabre
Yesterday I mentioned Leslie Megahey’s Ligeti film, All Clouds Are Clocks, an hour-long documentary based around an interview with György Ligeti filmed in 1976. A unique feature of that film was that...
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Schalcken the Painter
Next week the BFI releases a box set of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas, a series of hour-long TV films broadcast during the 1970s, most of which were adaptations of stories by MR James. One...
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Michael Powell’s Bluebeard revisited
Yesterday’s post prompted me to look again for one of Michael Powell’s scarcest films, his television version of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle made for Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1963. Sure enough, it’s...
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Weekend links 172
Complete Stop (2008), an oil painting by Gregory Thielker from his Under the Unminding Sky series. • For Halloween last year I watched a very poor copy of a BBC Play For Today production, Robin...
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Schalcken the Painter revisited
Illustration by Brinsley Sheridan Le Fanu from The Watcher and Other Weird Stories (1894) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. The stranger stopped at the door of the room, and displayed his form and face...
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Schalcken’s paintings
Self Portrait by Candlelight (1695). One additional pleasure of Le Fanu’s story and Leslie Megahey’s film is the way they draw attention to the work of an artist who might otherwise have remained...
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The Tractate Middoth
The recent interest in the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas series has been a thing of mixed blessings, as is often the case when nostalgia fuels a reappraisal. On the one hand aficionados such as...
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The Complete Citizen Kane
The Orson Welles centenary approaches so the posts this week will be devoted to one of my favourite film directors. The Complete Citizen Kane was an especially generous BBC documentary—comprehensive,...
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Bluebeard’s Castle, 1981
Filmed performances of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle continue to find their way to YouTube. Clips of this film from 1981 have been around for a while but not the entire opera which I hadn’t seen until...
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