For anyone who reads and loves Virginia Woolf, St. Ives is a magical place. Take a trip back in time by viewing old footage of that Cornish town.
From the BBC iPlayer comes “Cornwall: This Fishing Life,” with series 2, episode 4, focusing on St. Ives. It includes old black and white film footage of the place where Woolf and the Stephen family spent their summers until she was 12.
Nineteen seconds of color film footage of St. Ives from Claude Friese-Greene’s The Open Road (1926) a fascinating social record of inter-war Britain. The St. Ives snippet below is available on the British Film Industry‘s YouTube Channel.
And just for fun, check out the video below of a model railroad version of St. Ives, circa the 1950s, created by a former St. Ives resident. In this eight-minute video, he adds his own memories, along with details about constructing the layout. Stuart Clarke of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain shared this video and notes that we “may” be able to see Talland House at the 4-minute, 32-second mark.
It’s the 100th anniversary of the 1920 German expressionist film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and Virginia Woolf is mentioned in the headline of the story on The Conversation website that celebrates that fact.
Virginia Woolf screensaver on an old keyboard-style Kindle
Woolf, the article says, “marvelled at how the set design mirrored the emotions felt by the characters and the audience: ‘it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than words.'”
“The Cinema”
Woolf shared her thoughts in “The Cinema,” an article published in the July 3, 1926, issue of The Nation and Athenaeum. In it, she articulates her fascination with and fear of this newly evolving art form that at the time was strictly a black-and-white, silent medium that she believed was both parasitic and ripe with potential.
It is an art form that starts with the eyes, but the eyes are soon forced to engage the brain, she argues.
We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. … Further, all this happened ten years ago, we are told. We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves. – Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema”
Here is a roundup of music and movie news of interest to followers of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.
Pianist Lana Bode has just released her debut album “I and Silence: Women’s Voices inAmerican Song” with mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons. The album includes a performance of Dominick Argento’s song-cycle “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf,” which some may remember them performing at the 26th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf at The Clothworkers’ Centenary Concert Hall in Leeds in June 2016.
“Jigsaw,” a 1962 film and Jack Warner’s last, includes some locations of interest to Woolfians — from Brighton to Lewes to Rodmell, along with a 10-second scene of Fr
ank Dean’s garage with the Abergavenny Arms in the background at 1 hr., 10 min., 9 sec. The film is available on DVD.
“Inside Out South West” on BBC iplayer, 16 September 2019, has many shots of Godrevy Lighthouse in the background.
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