Reservoir Management of the Oseberg Field After Four Years' Production History

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It details the movement from travelling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas, and from variety and live entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. It addresses the promotion of cinema as a socially ‘useful’ entertainment, and, distinctively, it considers the early development of cinema in small towns as well as in larger cities. Using local newspapers and other archive sources, it details the evolution and the diversity of the social experience of cinema, both for picture goers and for cinema staff. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, with a detailed production history of Rob Roy (United Films, 1911), and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of ‘local topicals’. It considers the popularity of Scotland as an imaginary location for European and American films, drawing their popularity from the international audience for writers such as Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and the ubiquity of Scottish popular song. The book concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound in Scittish cinemas. As an afterpiece, it offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from 1896 to 1927, drawing evidence from synopses and reviews in contemporary trade journals.

Download Full-text

‘What we are up against’: Lindsay Anderson and The Old Crowd

Journal of British Cinema and Television ◽

10.3366/jbctv.2014.0219 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 11 (2-3) ◽

pp. 332-350

Author(s):

Tom Sutcliffe

Keyword(s):

Critical Reception ◽

Production History

Drawing on the invaluable experience of watching Lindsay Anderson at work and on lengthy interviews with the director, this article traces the production history and critical reception of The Old Crowd, an Alan Bennett play which Anderson directed for London Weekend Television in 1979. In so doing it paints a picture of an ITV environment very different from that of today, one in which there was far more scope for formal experimentation and innovation, but it also demonstrates all too clearly the critical hostility and incomprehension which greeted directors like Anderson who were determined to take advantage of this relatively liberal climate in order to stretch the medium to its limits.

Download Full-text

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

Modernist Cultures ◽

10.3366/mod.2018.0227 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 496-517

Author(s):

Ned Hercock

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽

Discrete Series ◽

Human Experience ◽

John Ruskin ◽

Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽

Marcel Duchamp ◽

The World ◽

Production History ◽

History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Download Full-text