Image: Sheffield Botanical Gardens (Andrew Key)
In relation to the Film Memories event, Mike Sperlinger speaks to writer Andrew Key about his ongoing writing project Roland Barfs Film Diary: a Substack newsletter in which Key writes about the (many) films he watches alongside what he does with the rest of his day. As Key puts it, “So much film criticism ignores the body of the critic, it ignores that someone is sitting down in a room watching a film and they’re also doing other stuff that day – they’ve eaten something, they’ve drunk something, they’re tired or they’ve got a hangover…” Begun in 2019, the film diary is now approaching half a million words in total.
Listen to the interview via the player below (or subscribe to the PRISMS podcast in your regular podcast player via the RSS feed: https://feed.podbean.com/prisms/feed.xml):
You can subscribe to and support the film diary at Andrew’s Substack: https://rolandbarfs.substack.com. And you can buy Andrew’s recent novel Ross Hall direct from the publisher grandIOTA.
Here are some other links to a few of the names and publications we mention during the conversation:
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (available to borrow online via The Internet Archive)
Alan Bennett’s diary in the London Review of Books (read/listen online)
Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (PDF via The Internet Archive)
The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (Project Gutenberg ebook)
Boyd McDonald, Cruising The Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (book)