Month: June 2019

1914 in Art

Giorgio de Chirico - The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

Giorgio de Chirico – The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

August Macke – Farewell

Stanisława de Karłowska – Swiss Cottage

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – Potsdamer Platz

Giacomo Balla – Mercurio transita davanti al sole

Franz Marc – Animals in a Landscape

Fernand Léger – Nature morte (Still life)

Pablo Picasso – Ma Jolie

Oskar Kokoschka – The Bride of the Wind

Albert Gleizes – Woman with animals (Madame Raymond Duchamp-Villon)

David Bomberg – The Mud Bath

Walter Sickert – Ennui

Henri Matisse – Woman on a High Stool

André Derain – Portrait of a Man with a Newspaper

Stanley Spencer – Self-portrait

August Macke – Kairouan (III) (watercolor)

Giorgio de Chirico – The Song of Love

1914 in Film

His Musical Career

 

Gertie the Dinosaur

 

Fantômas Contre Fantômas

 

Salomy Jane

 

His Prehistoric Past

 

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

 

The Magic Cloak of Oz

 

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz

 

Cabiria

 

Judith of Bethulia

 

Absinthe

 

Mabel’s Strange Predicament

 

Bathing Costumes

 

In the Land of the Head Hunters

 

Tillie’s Punctured Romance

 

Engelein

 

Mabel at the Wheel

 

The Avenging Conscience

 

Cinderella

 

The Virginian

The Christmas Truce & The Football Match

One of the most widely-known stories of the first world war is the Christmas truce. The British soldiers hear the Germans singing ‘Silent Night’, they venture out into no-man’s land, exchange gifts and have a game of football. Much of this story appears to be true, though it is important to remember that the front was long, and the truce only took place in certain sections. There is less in the record about games of football, but there is at least a little evidence for this too.

Here is an excellent video / podcast from Dr Iain Adams at the British National Archives, going into a fair amount of detail about the truce.

And here is an episode of Stuff You Missed In History Class on the truce, usual provisos about excessive advertising there.

Um, Merry Christmas everyone! It’s going to be 1920 this Christmas, so it probably couldn’t wait.

Centuries of Sound on Cambridge 105 Radio – Episode 11 (1903)

Time: 8pm BST, Saturday 22nd June 2019

Place: Cambridge 105fm

Another journey back in time with original recordings from the year 1903. This episode features sounds from as far afield as Tanganyika, Moscow, Kyoto and New York, and songs about cars, ducks, and bread and marmalade. Introduced by James Errington.

Listen to the show on 105fm in Cambridge, on DAB digital nationwide, on the Cambridge 105 website here, or on any good radio apps. Or if you missed it, the show is available to hear on demand on this very page, just here –>

 

Mark Bostridge – The Fateful Year: England 1914

The date was Bank Holiday Monday, 3 August 1914, and it was destined to be a day of final, irrevocable and fateful decision. Even as the camera shutter fell, preserving this carefree scene, the larger issues of peace and war continued to hang in the balance… Nearly thirty-six hours later, Britain would declare war on Germany. Life for many of the men and women on this river excursion would never be the same again.

Having been through a fair few of these books about years, this is the first one which has completely lived up to my expectations, but strangely enough it’s by having a narrow, selective focus that it manages to provide the wide scope it aims for. Each chapter tells a story from the time, ranging from national news to private affairs, and from the leaders of the country to its most lowly inhabitants. Woven through this is an incessant drumbeat of approaching disaster. The way Mark Bostridge weaves this  element into the fabric of the piece seems a little counter-intuitive, an odd way to capture the supposed innocence of these times, but these memories are already stained by what happened, and the examination of those stains is, after all, why we are here.

Mark Bostridge – The Fateful Year: England 1914

Martha, The Last Passenger Pigeon

On September 1st 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon in existence died. Three hundred years before, when the first settlers were arriving in North America, it was the most common bird in the continent, with up to 5 billion individuals. The story of the passenger pigeon is that of colonial destruction and contempt for the natural world writ large, and a reminder that for all the horrors taking place in Europe, mankind was already wreaking destruction of various kinds.

Here is an excellent episode of The Memory Palace on passenger pigeons

And here is a slightly less excellent video, for those who are inclined that way

37 Days

The sudden slide from the tranquil Indian summer of the Edwardian age into a state of chaos previously inconceivable is quite the tale, but telling it has always been hard. It’s not only that it’s a complicated story, it’s that much of the work in piecing together what happened was done well after the events themselves, and even when you see these pieces, none of it seems to fit. There is naturally a bias at play – we know where these foolish actions and reactions would end – but even so, believing that supposedly rational human beings in charge of powerful countries could let all this happen, it all seems somehow wrong.

It’s a great credit to the makers of 37 Days that they managed to weave all of this together into a piece of work which pulls these characters into suddenly clear focus – from Ian McDiarmid’s Edward Grey, the sanest man in the room who puts too much faith in the forces of reason, to Rainer Sellien’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, pandered to by competing officials, all keen to make him feel that their plan is his plan.

37 Days can be bought on DVD here, or you can just watch it on Dailymotion

BBC WW1 – Month of Madness

There will be a lot of coverage here of the early part of the first world war, as there are so many fantastic resources available. The BBC in particular launched into the project of making something new about these years with such a degree of creative enthusiasm that it set vastly unrealistic expectations for the rest of the four years.

This series presented by Christopher Clark goes over the feverish 37 days which took an almost entirely peaceful continent into all-out war, and it’s absolutely one of my favourites – he really gets inside the heads of all the disperate parties experiencing this historical vertigo all at one. None of them can believe that this is really going to happen until it’s too late – and frankly, I find it hard to believe too – surely they can stop this madness before it’s too late? It’s testament to the quality of the programme that even knowing how it ends, there is a genuine sense of suspense.

Part 1 – Sarajevo
Part 2 – Vienna
Part 3 – Berlin
Part 4 – The French in St Petersburg
Part 5 – London

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