Eclectic Dialectics: William Klein's Documentary Method

This article examines the relations between documentary aesthetics and the political sensibility of William Klein. Structured around the cultural phenomena that have remained integral to his career as a photographer and filmmaker - fashion, sport, and music - it discusses his enduring attachment to notions of freedom and creativity still associated with 1960s counter-culture, and the Vietnam War. In particular, it examines how how his films disrupt conventional categories, and subvert the familiar rhetoric of mainstream documentary film, especially that associated with cinéma vérité. A erstwhile protege of Dada, Klein has always valued the expressive potential of improbable juxtapositions, of intercutting between times and places, and subverting mainstream journalistic modes and intentions. The article argues that this attitude is increasingly rare among contemporary documentary filmmakers, and yet it is the very thing that gives his work a distinctive aesthetic texture, and relevance to any history of cinema.

Becoming a national composer: critical reception to c.1925

The centrality of Vaughan Williams to British music in the first half of the twentieth century is now a commonplace in musicology, but this has not always been so. Prior to 1914 Vaughan Williams was regarded by a number of British critics as a figure of considerable potential, but of less interest than composers like Granville Bantock, Cyril Scott, and Joseph Holbrooke: a reflection, in part, of the many different strands that existed in musical modernism in pre-war Britain, as well as scepticism that Vaughan Williams's engagement with English folksong offered anything original. In this chapter, I consider this inauspicious early period of Vaughan Williams reception, when even works considered seminal today like the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis were received by some critics with bewilderment, and the changes that took place in the years after World War One after which Vaughan Williams became the leader of British musical modernism. I argue that Vaughan Williams's emergence reflects a change in attitude by British critics to modernism in general, to their approach to musical criticism, and to Vaughan Williams's musical language; in particular I note the distinction increasingly drawn by critics between folksong arrangements and a musical language derived from folksong.

‘”Like an Old Cathedral City”: Belfast Welcomes Queen Victoria, August 1849’,

Belfast, with its history of communal violence, is normally seen as lying outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century British urban development. The visit of Queen Victoria in 1849 suggests a more complex, less linear picture. What emerges is an urban identity in transition, in which aspirations to conform to an ideal of civic harmony temporarily overrode acute sectarian and political divisions, where pride in recent economic achievement sat uneasily alongside an awareness of the town’s newcomer status, and where an emerging sense of regional difference competed with a continuing assumption of Irish identity.