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.
That surely must have been a different experience. Something like, when something goes wrong with a news cast, and they don’t know they’re on air..
Was this exhibition why you went?
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Yes, it was. It’s not often one gets to see famous people so much under the microscope.
We went to see that exhibition, and the Wildlife Photography exhibtion, and a play – The Judas Kiss – and we went to the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, and the South Bank.
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Will it still be on in September when we are in London? If not there will be something else amazing to go to.
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Unfortunately not, it ends this weekend. There is a Beatrix Potter exhibition on that runs to September.
I have a feeling my wife, Tamara, will be very interested in seeing that. She wrote an article about Beatrix Potter a while ago, and we bought a small poster featuring some of Beatrix’s animals when we in London this time. Tamara’s article is Beatrix Potter’s Affable Animals.
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That all sounds interesting. I will check out Tamara’s story too.
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“In all the interviews, the interview’s voice was cut out – silence – and we heard only the answers from those being interviewed.”
The video interviews would have fascinated me.
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