This Bloomsday (June 16th), Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image will host a free event, “James Joyce on TV”. Book now!
About the event
Two films will be screened at the event, both made by the BBC in different broadcasting eras:
Monitor: Silence, Exile and Cunning (50mins, 1965)
Joyce in June (45mins approx, 1982, dir. Donald McWhinnie)
Monitor: Silence, Exile and Cunning, consists of Anthony Burgess’s (apparently) whiskey-fuelled reflections on Joyce’s self-imposed exile from Ireland. Burgess’s film essay is illustrated by black and white 16mm shots of Dublin, including dead seagulls in the Liffey and some of the authentic Ulysseslocations, including the Martello tower Stephen Dedalus lodges in and the dilapidated 7 Eccles Street, home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, shortly before its demolition.
This is contrasted with a 1982 biographical sketch of the young Joyce, Joycein June, which includes an inventive, and very funny, imagining of the happenings of the Ulysses characters on 17 June 1904, the day after the novel’s action. Filmed on video in studios, the image has an immediacy that speaks very much of early 1980s TV. It features a young Stephen Rea as both Joyce’s brother Stanislaus and Ulysses’s mysterious man in the mackintosh. The programme is directed by Donald McWhinnie, one of Beckett’s favoured directors for screen, radio and stage.
The screenings will be followed by a panel discussing featuring Joe Brooker, Michael Garrad and Clare Tavernor.
The event is free but booking is required – register now to avoid missing out!
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