First post

Welcome to my new Live Journal, covering whatever topic I'm thinking about at the moment. I hope to be updating this on a regular basis, but who knows what the wind will bring?

Shooting the Past

I spent the evening rewatching a Masterpiece Theater program called "Shooting the Past", starring Lindsey Duncan and Liam Cunningham. The program was about a photograph archive being threatened with destruction by an American business firm and the staff hurrying to save the entire collection. The fictional Fallon collection had 10 million photographs covering every range of subject matter from shopfronts to prime ministers to erotica. One of the eccentric characters, played by Timothy Spall, connects the dots between a photograph of Liam Cunningham's mother and an older story, shedding light of his late grandmother and her shady past. The photographs tell the large portion of the story and the last group are gorgeous, mostly from the pre and post WWI periods.



I have to wonder how Stephen Poliakoff went about writing "Shooting". Did he find the photographs first? Or did he write the first half of the story and then research the pictures?

I also have to wonder what was cut from this version. According to other sources, the BBC aired the piece over three nights, not just two, suggesting there were more stories and more photographs unseen. Maybe Masterpiece Theater figured they slowed down the action.

We had a similar story here in DC. The Victor Kamkin bookstore was evicted from its premises for not being able to pay its rent. They're the oldest and largest Russian language bookstore in the area. They were going to dump 1 million books and send them to the incinerator until the Librarian of Congress stepped in, after a rather prominent front page article appeared in the Washington Post. After allowing the owner to clear out his best books to a new warehouse location, the library trucked off their choices to figure out which would be added to our collections. They also allowed other libraries and collections to take from the books as well. I'm glad they were able to do something. It would not have played well back in Mother Russia to show the ugly Americans burning Russian literature.