Free Thinking

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Revisit Rashōmon Jul 22, 2021

Show notes

Who can you trust? That's the question posed in Rashōmon. In today's programme Rana Mitter's guests David Peace, Natasha Pulley, Yuna Tasaka and Jasper Sharp look at both the book and the film.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short story 'In a Grove', published in 1922, became the basis for the 1950 film from Akira Kurosawa 'Rashōmon', one of the first Japanese films to gain worldwide critical acclaim. 'The Rashōmon Effect' has become a byword for the literary technique where the same event is presented via the different and incompatible testimonies from the characters involved. David Peace's book 'Patient X' is a novelised response to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's last years and his death by suicide at the age of 35. Natasha Pulley is a novelist and Japanophile with a particular interest in Japanese literature of the 1920s, and in the unreliable narrator implied by use of the Rashōmon Effect. Jasper Sharp is a writer and curator, author of the Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema. Yuna Tasaka is one of the contributors to The Japanese Cinema Book published by Bloomsbury. David Peace's third novel in his Tokyo trilogy Tokyo Redux is out this summer. Natasha Pulley's most recent novel is a time travel story set in Napoleonic times - The Kingdoms. Her book The Watchmaker of Filigree Street became an international best seller.

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

You can find a playlist of Radio 3 programmes exploring Japanese Culture on the Free Thinking programme website from the Tale of Genji to Godzilla, jazz to the sound of rain, Rashomon to Rampo https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0657spq

Bette Davis Jul 20, 2021

Show notes

A spinster dominated by her mother in Now Voyager (1942), a strong-willed Southern belle in Jezebel (1938) which won her an Academy award for best actress, a Broadway star in All About Eve (1950): just some of the 100 film roles played Bette Davis during a career which ran from the 1930s to the late 1980s. As the British Film Institute puts on a season of films throughout August, including a re-mastered version of Now Voyager, Matthew Sweet is joined by Sarah Churchwell, Lucy Bolton and Anna Bogutskaya to talk about Bette Davis failing her first screen test because she didn't "look like an actress", her legal fight with the studios, working for the war effort and the appeal of Bette Davis eyes.

Sarah Churchwell is professorial fellow in American literature and chair of public understanding of the humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and the author of Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby, and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe.

Anna Bogutskaya is a film programmer, broadcaster, writer and creative producer. She is the co-founder of the horror film collective The Final Girls and Festival Director of Underwire Festival.

Lucy Bolton is Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch and co-editor of Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure.

Now Voyager, directed by Irving Rapper opens at the BFI and selected cinemas around the UK from August 6th 2021. The BFI is screening 20 films and staging a series of events to celebrate the work of Bette Davis as part of a major season this August.

You can find other discussions about "landmark" films and Hollywood stars in the Landmarks playlist on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44

Episode includes discussions about Marlene Dietrich, Glenda Jackson on Filming Sunday Bloody Sunday, Jacques Tati's Trafic, Jaws and Solaris.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Connecting with nature Jul 19, 2021

Show notes

Music from Orkney thunderstorms, dog walks in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park that have inspired a set of tiles, essays about the seasons from a diverse collection of writers: Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough's guests, composer Erland Cooper, writer Anita Roy, artist Alison Milner and Dr Pippa Marland, compare notes on the way they filter countryside experiences to create art, music and literature.

Anita Roy and Pippa Marland have co-edited a collection of essays titled Gifts of Gravity and Light featuring Luke Turner, Testament, Tishani Doshi, Michael Malay, Jay Griffiths and others with a foreword by Bernadine Evaristo. You can find a selection of blogs and poems pulled together in a lockdown nature writing project run by Pippa at landlinesproject.wordpress.com Anita Roy has also published a selection of her stories called Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean. Alison Milner's tiled artwork is on show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park https://ysp.org.uk/https://www.alisonmilner.com/ Erland Cooper's music inspired by Orkney and the poet George Mackay Brown will be heard on an episode of Between the Ears broadcasting on BBC Radio 3 this autumn. His music is being performed in concerts at the Edinburgh International Festival, the Cathedral Arts Quarter Festival Belfast, Stroud, Bristol and Birmingham. https://www.erlandcooper.com/

Producer: Sofie Vilcins

You can find a Green Thinking playlist of programmes exploring different aspects of nature and our approach to the environment on the Free Thinking programme website and an episode of the Verb exploring the experience of going for a walk hearing from guests including Testament and Stuart Maconie.

Alain Robbe-Grillet Jul 14, 2021

Show notes

A "cubist" story - with a plot and timeline broken up and repetitive descriptions of objects, like a painting by Picasso, is one way in which the French nouveau romain of the 1960s has been described. Alain Robbe Grillet (1922 – 2008) was one of the main figures associated with this literary movement. He was also a member of the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of French and published novels called Les Gommes (Erasers), Le Voyeur (the Voyeur), and collaborated on films with Alan Resnais which included the1961 film Last Year at Marienbad. This film was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the Golden Lion. Matthew Sweet and his guests, the author Tom McCarthy, the film historian Phuong Le and the French cultural historian Agnès Poirier discuss the screen-writing, novels and philosophy of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Tom McCarthy is the author of novels including C, Satin Island, Remainder and Men in Space and a series of art installations and manifestos put together with the philosopher Simon Critchley as the International Necronautical Society (INS).

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Breathe Jul 13, 2021

Show notes

Lisa Mullen is joined by Imani Jacqueline Brown of Forensic Architecture, whose exhibition for the Manchester International Festival explores the links between power and the air we breathe; journalist James Nestor, whose best selling book traces his search for medical answers to his sleeping and breathing problems; jazz saxophonist and MC Soweto Kinch; and New Generation Thinker Tiffany Watt Smith, who has been considering the cultural history of sighing and book The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Cloud Studies exhibits investigations by Forensic Architecture - part of Manchester International Festival, it runs at the Whitworth in Manchester 2 July-17 October and is online.

Breathe: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor is out in paperback.

The Anatomy of Melancholy has been republished by Penguin.

The Black Peril by Soweto Kinch is available now.

Soweto Kinch will perform with the London Symphony Orchestra as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival on 19 Nov 2021 at the Barbican in London.

Producer: Emma Wallace

Mining, Coal and DH Lawrence Jul 08, 2021

Show notes

Lawrence's dad was a butty - a contractor who put together a team to mine coal for an agreed price. His 1913 novel Sons and Lovers drew on this heritage. Frances Wilson's new biography focuses on the decade following, when The Rainbow had been subject to an obscenity trial, he travelled to Cornwall and Mexico and then the discovery that he had tuberculosis. In a non-Covid year, this weekend would have seen the Durham Miners' Gala take place. Poet Jake Morris-Campbell writes a postcard about the traditions of this annual gathering of banners and brass bands. Prabhakar Pachpute's family worked in the coal mines of central India for three generations. For his contribution as one of the artists taking part in Artes Mundi 9, he's drawn on this shared cultural heritage with the Welsh mining community to create an installation of paintings, banners and objects that comment on protest and collective action. Matthew Sweet presents.

Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson is out now. Artes Mundi is on show at the National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39 Dr Jake Morris-Campbell teaches at the University of Newcastle and is a visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester. He is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can find a collection of programmes from the past ten years of the scheme on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Mining, Coal and DH Lawrence Jul 08, 2021

Show notes

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Epic Iran, lost cities and Proust Jul 08, 2021

Show notes

A horoscope from 1411, a portrait of a woman blowing bubble gum and a gold griffin-headed armlet: art collector Ina Sarikhani Sandmann, historian Ali Ansari and New Generation Thinker Julia Hartley join Rana Mitter to look at Epic Iran, an exhibition exploring 5,000 years of art, design and culture at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Author Annalee Newitz discusses the rise and fall of four 'lost' cities and we have a postcard exploring the author Marcel Proust's fascination with Iran ahead of the 150th anniversary of his birth on July 10th 1871.

Epic Iran exploring 5,000 years of art, design and culture runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum until September 12th 2021. Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz is out now. It explores the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Annalee is also founder of the popular io9 science and science fiction blog.

Dr Julia Hartley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, where her project is called ‘West-Eastern Encounters: Iran in French Literature (1829-1908)’. She is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can find more discussions in a playlist on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35

Marcel Proust (10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was the author of novels including À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). A Free Thinking discussion about Proust brought together Jane Smiley, Jane Haynes and Christopher Prendergast and insights from French author Marie Darrieussecq https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lpxj2

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The English country house party Jul 06, 2021

Show notes

It’s sixty years since the house party at Cliveden where Christine Keeler encountered Minister of War, John Profumo and the Soviet Naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov. The events of that weekend, a heady mix of sex, politics and espionage have filled newspapers, books, films and TV dramas. But that weekend was just one in a long line of intrigue and scandal at Cliveden. In fiction and reality, a weekend in the country has often involved far more than a simple retreat - from the appeasement talks imagined in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day to a formal invitation from the Prime Minister to Chequers. Anne McElvoy explores the social history of the grand country house gathering and its hold on the English imagination.

Julie Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield and the author of ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain and Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain's Fascist Movement, 1923-1945

Natalie Livingstone is a journalist and historian and the author of The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue.

Kate Williams is a broadcaster, historian and Professor of Public Engagement with History at the University of Reading. She is the author of Rival Queens and her trilogy of novels about the De Witt family.

Producer: Ruth Watts

Filming Sunday Bloody Sunday Jul 01, 2021

Show notes

The Oscar winning Midnight Cowboy was followed up by this drama about an artist who has relationships with a female job consultant and a male doctor. Director John Schlesinger, writer Penelope Gilliatt, actors Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch were all nominated for Academy Awards but it performed poorly at the box office. Was the film - released on July 1st 1971, ahead of its times? Matthew Sweet re-watches it with guests including Glenda Jackson, playwright Mark Ravenhill, film historian Melanie Williams and BFI archivist Simon McCallum. They discuss the different elements of the film, including the score, which features the trio Soave sia il vento from Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, the very precise decor and evocation of late '60s London and filming inside a Jewish synagogue.

Producer: Fiona McLean

Sunday Bloody Sunday is available on Blu-ray

You can find Matthew Sweet discussing other classics of British Cinema in the Free Thinking archives including British New Wave Films of the 60s - Joely Richardson and Melanie Williams evaluate the impact and legacy of Woodfall Films, the company behind Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ysnl2 An extended interview with Mike Leigh, recorded as he released his historical drama Peterloo, but also looks back at his film from 1984 Four Days in July https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000tqw Early Cinema looks back at a pioneer of British film Robert Paul and at the work of Alice Guy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dy2b Philip Dodd explores the novel and film of David Storey's This Sporting Life with social historian Juliet Gardiner, journalist Rod Liddle, writer Anthony Clavane and the author's daughter Kate Storey https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09j0rt6 Samira Ahmed convenes a discussion about British Social Realism in Film https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pz16k

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