Tony Palmer – Cinema of the World

Tony Palmer – Omnibus: Benjamin Britten and His Festival (1967)

admin — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 01:51:00 +0000

Tony Palmer’s classic behind the scenes look at the Aldeburgh Festival and the opening by the Queen of the new concert hall at Snape.

This was the first film made by the BBC ever to be networked in the USA, and the first of Tony Palmer’s three portraits of the great composer, the others being the Italia Prize-winning ‘A Time There Was’, and the multi-award winning ‘Nocturne’, made for the 100th anniversary of Britten’s birth.

“A superb film (which) may well achieve the status of a classic, repeated again and again over the years… the brilliant editing (was) of the highest quality, making a natural partnership of music and picture.” – Sean Day-Lewis, The Daily Telegraph

With:
BENJAMIN BRITTEN, PETER PEARS, IMOGEN HOLST, JOHN CULSHAW, COLIN GRAHAM, SVIATOSLAV RICHTER, JULIAN BREAM, MARGARET PRICE, JAMES BOWMAN, HENRY MOORE, OWEN BRANNIGAN, JAMES BLADES, BRYAN DRAKE, ROBERT TEAR, HEATHER HARPER, STEPHEN REISS, SIR WILLIAM WALTON, JOYCE GRENFELL, E.M. FORSTER, OSIAN ELLIS, THE VIENNA BOYS CHOIR, THE ENGLISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

Music featured includes:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Burning Fiery Furnace
The Building of the House
Nocturnal
Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
The Golden Vanity
A Ceremony of Carols
The Spring Symphony

Directed & Edited by TONY PALMER
Executive Producer HUMPHREY BURTON

Benjamin Britten & His Festival [Omnibus] (Tony Palmer 1967).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	52 min 37 s
Size: 	189 MiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	640x360 ~> 640x384
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	371 kb/s
BPP: 	0.054
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 128 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/0517E719B0DD737/Benjamin_Britten_&_His_Festival__Omnibus__(Tony_Palmer_1967).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Tony Palmer – Omnibus: Benjamin Britten and His Festival (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Tony Palmer – Vangelis and the Journey to Ithaka (2013)

admin — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 07:43:08 +0000

“The two-hour documentary includes interviews with Vangelis and many of his friends and colleagues, including Sean Connery, Hugh Hudson, Jessye Norman, Oliver Stone, Akiko Ebi, Julian Rachlin and many others. It also includes rare historical footage, most of which has never been seen before. Another highlight includes recent footage of Vangelis improvising new music!
Vangelis, a composer of electronic, ambient, jazz, pop/rock and orchestral music, is best known for his Academy-Award-winning (Best Original Music Score) score for the film Chariots Of Fire, and composing scores for the films Antartica, Blade Runner, 1492: Conquest Of Paradise and Alexander, as well as the use of his music in the PBS documentary Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan.Vangelis began his professional music career working with several popular Greek bands in the ’60s such as The Forminx and most notably, Aphrodite’s Child. Throughout the 1970s Vangelis composed music scores for several animal documentaries; the success of these scores brought him into the film-scoring mainstream.

In the early ’80s Vangelis teamed up with Yes vocalist/songwriter Jon Anderson. The duo recorded a series of successful and critically acclaimed albums under the name Jon & Vangelis. The 1981 Chariots Of Fire soundtrack’s single Titles reached the top of the American Billboard Hot 100 chart and was most recently used as theme music at the London 2012 Olympics.

In a career spanning over 50 years, writing and composing over 50 albums, Vangelis is regarded as one of the greatest composers of electronic music of all time. And now, the new documentary Vangelis And The Journey To Ithaka celebrates the music legend’s illustrious and fascinating career! “

Vangelis And The Journey To Ithaka (Tony Palmer 2009).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 59 min
Size: 	1.74 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 ~> 853x480
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 822 kb/s
BPP: 	0.176
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/D3A25658700B26D/Vangelis_And_The_Journey_To_Ithaka_(Tony_Palmer_2009).mkv

Language(s):English, Greek
Subtitles:English hard subs where needed

The post Tony Palmer – Vangelis and the Journey to Ithaka (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Tony Palmer – Wagner (1983)

admin — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 08:43:29 +0000

Quote:
Wagner is a giant, unwieldy beast. Eight hours devoted to the German composer, from the age of 35 to his death. Its sheer length allows the screen to play house to his politics, his person and his loves all within the frame of his music. Yet is enacts a precarious balance between the epic and the personal, between reverence and irreverence and between high art and high camp. Indeed, at its centre is not Wagner, nor Richard Burton who portrays the composer, but director Tony Palmer who grapples with the material throughout, sometimes succeeding and sometimes falling flat on his face.

Palmer’s best known works prior to making in Wagner in 1983 were two music related pieces from the late sixties and early seventies. The first was All My Loving, an Omnibus documentary on the then current rock ‘n’ roll scene complete with interviews from the likes of Pete Townshend and Pink Floyd. The second was a co-directed effort entitled 200 Motels, the co-director being one Frank Zappa, also the subject of this video-shot psychedelic “recreation” of life on the road. Both are idiosyncratic delights, the former a genuine classic, the latter only deserving the cult equivalent of that title. Yet whilst neither seemingly has a great connection with Wagner – certainly not thematically – it is possible to detect identical directorial impulses in all three works. Indeed, given the composer subject and general irreverence, it’s hard not to detect an element of Ken Russell in this television work (Russell likewise being the strongest factor in all of his films, no matter who the subject), though in many ways Wagner seems odder if a little less bold.

Consider the casting, for example: on the one hand we have such British greats as Burton, Laurence Oliver and John Gielgud, yet on the other there’s Ronald Pickup, Arthur Lowe and, bizarrely, Liza Goddard. It’s a pattern repeated throughout, veering wildly from one end of the spectrum to other. One scene plays as comedy, the next as drama. Another is heavily stylised (sometimes embarrassingly so), and then followed by one shot in straightest of manners. The are obvious references to Hitler and then the wonderful subtlety of the soundtrack recording courtesy of the great conductor Sir Georg Solti. Indeed, the both the film and screenplay play like a first cut and first draft respectively, complete with longuers and non sequitors and as such it’s near impossible to get a complete handle on it.

So is it any good? Of this I’m not entirely certain. The PR which accompanied this review disc proclaims various snippets of hyperbole from 1983, yet there are many who hate it. It’s a work that left me both stunned and befuddled in equal measure, but never bored. Everything about it is so variable (except for the music and Vittorio Storaro’s photography) that little truly impresses save for the brief, fleeting moments and the occasional cameo (Gabriel Byrne, here making his debut, deserves a mention). Yet for all its messiness, it is a quite remarkable cumulative achievement, whilst the flaws only make me want to go back and give it another consideration. I may grow to utterly dislike it, but then I may also absolutely love it, either way it’s a fascinating eight hours.

4.08GB | 7h 50m | 544×400 | avi

Language:English
Subtitles:English for hard-of-hearing, .sub format

The post Tony Palmer – Wagner (1983) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Tony Palmer – All My Loving (1968)

admin — Sun, 12 Aug 2018 23:21:32 +0000

Film Threat:
Tony Palmer’s landmark 1968 BBC documentary on the icons of the era’s rock orbit is finally receiving its DVD premiere. Nearly four decades after its first broadcast, “All My Loving” still resonates with the wonderful and inane excesses of that loud, vibrant world.

The focus here is primarily on British rock legends (the genre is called “pop music” throughout the film). Slices of classic performance and eccentric interviews are combined to create a trippy, psychedelic experience.

Among the sublime highights: Frank Zappa recalling a bizarre performance where he shared the stage with a U.S. Marines vocal choir, The Who in two phases of their concert odyssey (a mild early club gig and full-blown furious concert engagement), Jimi Hendrix performing “Wild Thing,” a photo shoot with the Moody Blues, and a Beatles segment with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and, of all people, George Harrison’s mother. (A DVD special feature interview with Palmer has the filmmaker noting how John Lennon influenced and assisted the film’s production – but Lennon’s absence from the interview line-up is not explained).

Among the ridiculous highlights: a semi-coherent interview with Donovan (who is shot in silhouette), Eric Burdon making a bizarre comparison between rockers coming down from an acid trip and soldiers coming back from Vietnam, and the incongruous presence of one-hit wonder Lulu (she’s the only woman featured in “All My Loving”).

Conspicuously missing from the film: the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger is seen in a quick clip), the Dave Clark Five and every major American rock leader (Hendrix and Zappa are the only Yanks here).

While some of Palmer’s editing techniques are badly dated (particularly the shock value intercutting of Holocaust newsreel footage with the rock music), “All My Loving” is nonetheless a memorable time capsule that wonderfully preserves the sounds and emotion of an increasingly distant era.

https://nitro.download/view/34D0144F8215440/All.My.Loving.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none

The post Tony Palmer – All My Loving (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.