Adam Low
A hundred years since it first appeared, Adam Low’s Arena: James Joyce’s Ulysses unlocks Joyce’s masterpiece in all its surprising, poetic, moving, verbose, sexually explicit and endlessly hilarious glory, from its earliest crossed out manuscript pages to the final iconic edition, bound in the blue of the Greek flag in honour of Homer’s The Odyssey. Notoriously difficult to read and written in a bewildering variety of styles it revolutionised the modern novel.
Performance artist Marina Abramovic invites Alan Yentob into her home, opens her archive, travels to her birthplace in Belgrade and talks about turning her life into art.
A portrait of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. Six years after his death, his family recalls the experiences that inspired his finest poems.
Gauguin’s vivid artworks sell for millions. He was an inspired and committed multi-media artist who worked with the Impressionists and had a tempestuous relationship with Vincent van Gogh. But he was also a competitive and rapacious man who left his wife to bring up five children and used his colonial privilege to travel to Polynesia, where in his 40s he took ‘wives’ between 13 and 15 years old, creating images of them and their world that promoted a fantasy paradise of an unspoilt Eden in the Pacific. Later, he challenged the colonial authorities and the Catholic Church in defence of the indigenous people, dying in the Marquesas Islands in 1903, sick, impoverished and alone.
Thirty years after his BBC film The Auden Landscape, director Adam Low returns to the poet and his work. Following surges of popularity - from featuring in Four Weddings And A Funeral to being the poet New Yorkers turned to after 9/11 - Low reveals how Auden’s poetry helps us to better understand the 21st century and the tumultuous political climate in which we now live.
From Boris Karloff to Mel Brooks - Frankenstein has fired the imagination of generations of artists who have created their own interpretation of this Gothic masterpiece. Frankenstein: A Modern Myth looks at some of these depictions, including Danny Boyle's sell-out hit at the National Theatre. The film has exclusive access to rehearsals and interviews with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller - who alternate the roles of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature - and with Danny Boyle. It also features cult film director John Waters: "I'm sympathetic to monsters, and this was the first one I came across as a child".
Documentary exploration of Dirk Bogarde's private life and long-term affair with manager, Anthony Forwood, seen through home movies and excerpts from Bogarde's memoirs.
Documentary on Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog from the BBC Arena series.
Documentary showcasing the life and works of surrealist artist Salvador Dali.
