BFI Screenonline has just updated its homepage, the main feature showcasing the British short films of silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger. I wrote pieces on The Tocher (1938), The H.P.O. (1938), Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (1953) and The Frog Prince (1954).

I also wrote about a striking Topical Budget newsreel from 1923, which poked fun at Germany’s declining economy mere weeks before hyperinflation would devastate it.

BFI Screenonline has just updated its homepage. I had little to do with the main feature (a survey of British short films), though it recycles my piece on Ken Russell’s Amelia and the Angel.

On the other hand, I was entirely responsible for one of the main supporting features, a 30th-anniversary tribute to the BBC Television Shakespeare project, for which I wrote not only the introduction but entries on 29 individual plays (I’ve watched, and still plan to write up, all 37). Despite the cycle’s wobbly reputation, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of many of the productions – I suspect much of the ire it attracted stemmed from the fact that the better-known plays (As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest) generally received the dullest productions, thus distorting the overall impression. Conversely, the less familiar plays (All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, the Henry VI cycle, Henry VIII King John and Measure For Measure) came across far more effectively, perhaps because there was less of an established theatrical tradition to respect. That said, not even Jonathans Miller and Pryce could do much with Timon of Athens, one of Shakespeare’s weakest efforts.

My other new work includes a quartet of British Transport Films – Berth 24 (1950, the unit’s debut), Journey Into History, Dodging the Column (both 1952), Geoffrey Jones’s Locomotion (1975) – and a couple of Topical Budget newsreels: Strassburg Monument (1914) and Burgomaster Max (1921).

The new Screenonline homepage was launched earlier today, with yours truly responsible for two major features.

The first is a survey of the feature film output of the BFI Production Board, with an overview and individual entries on A Private Enterprise (1974) and Anchoress (1993).

The second is a look at the career of screenwriter-producer-director Sidney Gilliat, better known as one half of the longstanding Launder and Gilliat partnership. Geoff Brown wrote the career overview, but I wrote most of the individual entries, including Rome Express (1932), Seven Sinners (1936), Millions Like Us (1943), Waterloo Road (1944), The Rake’s Progress (1945), I See A Dark Stranger (1946), Captain Boycott (1947), London Belongs To Me (1948), The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953), The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954) and The Green Man (1956).

My other new material this month is a piece on Norman McLaren’s dazzling hand-drawn animation Love on the Wing (1938).

The new Screenonline homepage for September 2008 has just been published, including a look at the GPO Film Unit, the Free Cinema movement and BFI-funded animation.

I wrote most of the last collection, including the introduction and individual entries on Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin’s Round the World in 80 Days, Joan and Peter Foldes’ A Short Vision (1955), Peter King’s Thirteen Cantos of Hell, Mel Calman’s The Arrow (1969), Abu’s No Arks (1969), Antoinette Starkiewicz’s High Fidelity (1976) and Martyn Pick’s Signature (1990) – and the collection also revives older pieces on the Quay Brothers’ Nocturna Artificialia (1979) and Street of Crocodiles (1986).

My other new Screenonline work includes pieces on the recent Timothy Spall vehicle Pierrepoint (2005), James Bond films Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), some turn-of-the-20th-century films from the Warwick Trading Company – Feeding the Tigers, Highland Reel and Metropolitan Fire Brigade Turn-Out (all 1899).