Kenneth Tynan

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Articles

Louise Brooks Tells All

Feb 17, 2024 | newyorker.com | Kenneth Tynan

None of this would have happened if I had not noticed, while lying late in bed on a hot Sunday morning last year in Santa Monica and flipping through the TV guide for the impending week, that one of the local public-broadcasting channels had decided to show, at 1 P.M. that very January day, a film on which my fantasies had fed ever since I first saw it, a quarter of a century before. Even for Channel 28, it was an eccentric piece of programming.
The art of the painted backdrop, from Black Narcissus to Raiders of the Lost Ark

Nov 14, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | Bruno Savill De Jong |Becca Voelcker |Mandeep Kaur-Lakhan |Kenneth Tynan

Alfred Hitchcock once said “the beauty of a matte shot is that you can become God.” Hollywood extravagance is often associated with elaborate sets and huge locations. But the humble matte painting could transport filmmakers anywhere, be it a banal city skyline or impossible alien planet.
The NHS on the box: in praise of the great British hospital soap

Nov 8, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | Mandeep Kaur-Lakhan |Kenneth Tynan |Ian Christie |Clive Nwonka

In the 75th year of the National Health Service, BFI assistant curator Mandeep Kaur-Lakhan looks at how shows from General Hospital to Casualty have helped to take the pulse of the nation. While the first NHS hospital was opened by Aneurin Bevan in Greater Manchester in 1948, it wasn’t until 1957 that audiences were first admitted on to the fictional wards of the hospital soap.
Kenneth Tynan on Greta Garbo

Nov 7, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | Kenneth Tynan |Charles Higham |Axel Madsen |Josh Slater-Williams

What when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. She is woman apprehended with all the pulsating clarity of one of Aldous Huxley’s mescalin jags. To watch her is to achieve direct, cleansed perception of something which, like a flower or a fold of silk, is raptly, unassertively and beautifully itself.
A weakness for dragons: Michael Powell and the cinema of fantasy

Nov 6, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | Ian Christie |Becca Voelcker |Mandeep Kaur-Lakhan |Kenneth Tynan

Was it the scandal of Peeping Tom’s critical reception that put an end to Michael Powell’s career as a major filmmaker? Judging by how often this is repeated, it’s widely believed as a convenient explanation for why one of Britain’s great filmmakers produced so little of substance after 1960, while his near contemporary, and former editor, David Lean was reaching the climax of his career.
Where to begin with Ken Russell

Sep 4, 2023 | bfi.org.uk | Michael Brooke |Mandeep Kaur-Lakhan |Kenneth Tynan |Ian Christie

Although a comparatively late starter when it came to film (he’d trained as a dancer and worked as a successful photographer before turning to amateur filmmaking on the cusp of his thirties), Ken Russell more than made up for lost time, and his massive, sprawling 50-year film and television output offers a daunting challenge to newcomers trying to hack a coherent path through such a florid thicket.
Tom Stoppard, Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos

Feb 6, 2023 | newyorker.com | Kenneth Tynan

In “After Magritte,” a much shorter play by the same author, we learn that a one-legged blind man with a white beard, who may in fact have been a handicapped football player with shaving cream on his face, has been seen hopping, or perhaps playing hop-scotch, along an English street, wearing striped pajamas, convict garb, or possibly a West Bromwich Albion football jersey, waving with one arm a white stick, a crutch, or a furled parasol while carrying under the other what may have been a...