Watch Arena (1975) Online!
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.
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Episode 1 - The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
Release Date: 2022-02-13In 1970, film-maker Luchino Visconti travelled throughout Europe looking for the perfect boy to personify absolute beauty as the character of Tadzio in his adaptation for the screen of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In Stockholm, he discovered Björn Andrésen, a shy 15-year-old teenager whom he brought to international fame overnight and, as a consequence, changed the course of the boy’s life. The remainder of Bjorn’s youth was turbulent and intense and took him from the Lido in Venice to London, to a welter of attention at the Cannes Film Festival, and to Japan. Fifty years after the premiere of Death in Venice, Björn takes us on a remarkable journey back through his life in a film composed of personal memories, cinema history, stardust and tragedy - as he makes a late attempt to reconcile with his past and finally get his life back on track.
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Episode 2 - River
Release Date: 2022-07-25River takes its audience on a journey through space and time spanning six continents, showing rivers on a scale and from perspectives never seen before.
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Episode 3 - James Joyce’s Ulysses
Release Date: 2022-09-07A hundred years after its publication, this film reveals the tawdry, shocking, poetic, uplifting and gloriously kaleidoscopic humanity of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.
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Episode 4 - TS Eliot: Into 'The Waste Land'
Release Date: 2022-10-13An exploration of TS Eliot's The Waste Land, in its centenary year, that for the first time uncovers the personal story behind Eliot's creation of his celebrated poem.
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Episode 5 - Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti in Six Chapters
Release Date: 2022-11-22A visually arresting film that documents the story of Haiti's rich past, through an annual carnival in a small southern town.