PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
The last piano factory (in England)
It makes me a little sad to hear that the last piano factory in the UK, Kemble’s in Bletchley, is closing today, with a loss of 90 jobs (and the skills they comprise). I visited this factory back in the mid-1980s when I was doing research for a film I never got to make on the social history of the piano (instead, it became a chapter in my book Musica Practica).
You might suppose that this closure is yet another sign of the recession, but in fact it reflects a much longer term trend, with the recession merely the last straw. Read more
Curtocircuito
The task was not so easy. The participants in the workshop had to make a three-minute documentary in four days. The subject was Santiago de Compostela, where the workshop was held as part of Curtocircuito—ShortCircuit in Gallego—one of a number of new film festivals which have grown up in Spain, as in many other countries, in the last few years. Read more
Soundtrack thoughts
I’ve recently caught up with Charles O’Brien’s splendid, paradigm-shifting book, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound, subtitled Technology and Film Style in France and the US. Briefly, O’Brien combines thorough research into primary sources and empirical methods of analysing film style to critique the conventional idea that the coming of sound produced a homogenisation of cinema which spread abroad from Hollywood in the 1930s. In particular, this is not what happened in France, which developed a strong predilection for what was called the film parlant—the talkie which used direct recorded sound—as opposed to the film sonore—the sound film where the sound was post-synchronised, which fast became the Hollywood way.
Of course it’s not quite so simple. Read more