Object Lessons: Videotape

(Bloomsbury Books.)

“Objects have the longest memories of all. Beneath their stillness, they are alive with all the experiences they have ever witnessed.”

--Teju Cole

Object Lessons, published by Bloomsbury Books, is an illuminating series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. As Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy’s incisive biography of this impactful technology reveals, over the span of a single decade, the VHS format changed the privileged relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then mysteriously sank back into oblivion. Although what we now call streaming has assumed prominence, the legacy of the humble videotape still continues to inform modern entertainment. And I’m delighted to say that both Godeanu-Kenworthy and I appear to share a similar, if not parallel, fondness for the technology that preceded our present stream-mad dimension. Here’s my outset admission: I’ve always been a huge fan of the analog world, its haptic tone and the various shapes it took, and I still am. The author of this charming little book, which has a giant subject and theme that belies its scale, also shares in her book’s beginnings what might account for her fondness. Our first exposure to any given medium of expression is often the most effective for our successive modes of experience.

No Business Like Show Business: When Playwrights Kill

Beth Leavel and Marissa Jaret Winokur in When Playwrights Kill. (Photo: Jim Sabitus.)

When Playwrights Kill is a comedy à clef whose code can be deciphered by anyone who keeps up with theatrical gossip. In 2019 Faye Dunaway was fired from the Boston tryout of Matthew Lombardo’s one-woman show about Katharine Hepburn, Tea at Five, for physically and verbally abusive behavior backstage, and the production was terminated. Lombardo had written Tea at Five in 2002 for Kate Mulgrew, who played it off Broadway and elsewhere, but it was the draw of Dunaway’s return to the New York stage after nearly four decades that secured the play’s first Broadway contract, which was cancelled following the Dunaway debacle. (A sympathetic 2024 HBO documentary, Faye, chalks her hijinks up to bipolar disorder.) 

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Life of Katherine Mansfield

(Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press)

“Books are the mirrors of the soul. If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell the truth about other people.”

—Virginia Woolf

“I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw upon one’s familiar real life, to find the treasure in that.”

—Katherine Mansfield

I will readily admit that I was woefully late in coming to the awareness that writers such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were remarkably experimental in the manner and mode with which they assumed an ascendency among the most prominent and important members of the literary modernist canon of the 20th century. I suppose I fell under the sway of louder modernists (for lack of a better word) such as rabble-rousers like James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. But Woolf and especially Mansfield were far quieter modernists, though they shook up the stylistic status quo with equal fervour and daring aplomb. It didn’t help her status that Mansfield concentrated almost exclusively on the short story, or that she died painfully young, thirty-four, of tuberculosis in 1923, just as modernism itself was building up its full head of steam. So I’m delighted to report that Gerri Kimber’s new biography of Mansfield, called A Hidden Life, released by Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, manages to correct an abundance of gaps in our appreciation of just who she was and what she accomplished in her sad but turbulent life.

Grief and The Goshawk: H Is for Hawk and Other Recent Movies

Claire Foy in H Is for Hawk. (Photo: Roadside Pictures.)

Among the books I brought with me on a trip at the end of my semester break this year was a lovely recent memoir called Raising Hare in which the author, Claire Dalton, who has grown up with the principle that human beings should never interfere with the workings of the wild, chronicles the discovery of a leveret on her land, close to death. Despite her predilections, Dalton makes the decision to try to save the young hare’s life and then, instinctually, begins to share her home – exterior and interior – with this creature with which she’s fallen in love, redesigning it to accommodate its needs and comforts.

Imaging Irony: Without Empathy / 8 Filmmakers

(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“Censorship is the mother of all metaphor.”

Jorge Luis Borges

It’s always heartening to encounter other lovers of cinematic art who resonate with one’s own passions for moving pictures that speak in a kind of secret language that we alone can fully understand. Even if that we is a large multitude of sorts, the pleasures we share in the brilliant darkness of movie theatres still seem to situate us in a private world unfolding before our mesmerized eyes. Between the flickering screen and our witnessing selves there is a shared bond which speaks to us in a dialect constructed from images that often tell a story somewhat different from the linear narrative of the screenplay script.

Urgency and Grace: The National Ballet’s Flight Pattern and Suite en blanc

The National Ballet of Canada company in Flight Pattern. (Photo: Ted Belton.)

The National Ballet of Canada opens its 2026 winter season with a study in contrast — the searing humanism of Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern and Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc, here staged to radiant precision by former Paris Opera Ballet étoile Charles Jude. Together they form a dialogue across eras: one confronting the fractures of our contemporary world, the other reaffirming ballet’s formal beauty and historical resilience.

More from Criterion: His Girl Friday

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

The complicated saga of the funniest comedy ever written by Americans began in 1928, when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page opened on Broadway. It’s a newspaper play, an especially flavorful version of the hard-boiled comedy, a genre that flourished in the Roaring Twenties. (The other signature samples are the war play What Price Glory? from 1924 by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings; Chicago, set mostly in Cook Country Jail, from 1926; and Once in a Lifetime from 1930 by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, a burlesque of Hollywood’s rocky passage from silent movies to talkies. Chicago, of course, got new life as a Broadway musical nearly half a century after Maurine Watkins wrote the original version.) In The Front Page, the best reporter in Chicago, Hildy Johnson, quits his job – and his sly, manipulative editor, Walter Burns – to get married, move to New York and launch himself into a less disreputable career. But he never gets there because on his way out he gets embroiled in a sensational story about a convicted murderer who escapes from his jail on the eve of his hanging due to the incompetence of the sheriff, who has also colluded in the burying of his reprieve from the governor. This is prime hard-boiled comedy: the press corps may be expert fabricators, but the forces of law and order and the local government are truly corrupt. At the end Hildy realizes what we – and Walter – knew all along: that he’s a reporter to the bone. Plus Burns whips up one final trick to keep him from leaving, prompting one of the most memorable curtain lines in Broadway history.