View across the Thames to St Paul’s from the Tate Modern in London

We just spent a week in London; hence the lack of posts for a while.

And also the lack of catching up on other’s people’s blogs – for which I apologise.

Last week, while the middle of England was a few inches deep in snow and had ground to a halt in a hail of media stories, London escaped almost all of it.

The snow did blow down an alleyway off Bishopsgate and gave me this shot, but there really wasn’t much ‘weather’ to see.

Today’s Menu

We went to the Hollywood Costume exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It’s very big exhibition and was very crowded. My heart sank when I saw the last room and realised there were at least another fifty costumes to see.

It’s not that it wasn’t interesting; but there is a limit to how much Hollywood I can absorb at one time.

But the real reason I am writing about this is to tell you about the short video interviews that were on small screens throughout the exhibition.

There were probably thirty or forty videos dotted around the exhibition.

The videos were all interviews – with directors, actors, costume designers, writers, etc. Some big names? Martin Scorsese, Robert de Niro, Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, Tippi Hedren.

In all the interviews, the interview’s voice was cut out – silence – and we heard only the answers from those being interviewed.

But the camera kept rolling throughout, including when it seemed that the interviewer must be just talking to the interviewee in the lead up to the question and answer – before the ‘green light’.

And we got to see the actors, directors, etc, sitting there – smiling, sneaking a look at their attire, being embarrassed and recovering, being vulnerable, being confident, waiting and listening, and showing interest, and showing impatience… etc.

It was mesmerising.

It was the opposite of most film making, where the editing is designed to cut out all of that ‘unintended’ stuff.