About the film

This inaugural lecture film began as a problem. Professor Richard Scholar of Durham University had been invited to deliver his inaugural lecture — a ceremonial event marking the arrival of a new professor — but the constraints of lockdown made a conventional gathering impossible. No audience. No ceremony. No room full of colleagues. What was left was a question: could the lecture become something else entirely?

Working with Alan Fentiman over a month in 2021, Scholar turned the problem into the subject. Caprice in the Time of Covid takes the concept of caprice — irregular, playful, rule-bending creativity that wittily deviates from the straight and narrow — and enacts it in its own making. The film is part lockdown diary, part roaming conversation, part lecture, and part cinematic essay, moving through the empty streets, alleyways and riverbanks of Durham to think about what caprice means, where it comes from, and why it matters.

What the film explores

Caprice, as Scholar explains in the film, is a word that travels. It moves across languages and centuries — from Italian capriccio to French and English caprice — gathering meanings as it goes. In literature, music and painting it names a culture of irregular creativity: art that takes the straight lines of classical rules and bends them wittily out of shape. Montaigne used it to celebrate art made in the here and now. Pascal condemned it as a snare. Composers from Bach to Richard Strauss made entire works from it. The word itself is capricious — contested, mobile, hard to pin down.

The film draws these threads together through conversation and place. Scholar and Fentiman talk in a studio, on riverbanks, in alleyways and on an empty stage. The River Wear — which breaks into a meander and creates thereby the peninsula on which Durham is built — becomes a recurring image of caprice in nature itself. The film references Patrick Keiller, Molière, Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio, and the 17th-century engraver Jacques Callot, whose series of capricious etchings gave the form one of its earliest names. It is, as the full title suggests, an inaugural film-lecture in two acts.

Approach

The film is structured as a dialogue between filmmaker and subject — Scholar and Fentiman thinking through the project together as it unfolds. The lockdown diary conceit gives it shape and momentum: each day brings new constraints and new possibilities, and the film records both. Shooting in Durham during restrictions meant empty streets and deserted spaces, which the film uses rather than works around. The empty stage where Scholar delivers part of the lecture to no one becomes one of its most striking images.

The challenge was to make an inaugural lecture film that genuinely enacted its own argument. A conventional Zoom lecture would have been a betrayal of the subject. Instead the film moves between modes — conversation, observation, landscape, performance — in the same way that caprice itself moves between registers. The capricious line, as Scholar puts it in the film, is a straight line bent knowingly into a wavy line. The knowingness is all.

Full inaugural lecture

The full version — Caprice in the Time of Covid: An Inaugural Film-Lecture in Two Acts — is also available to watch below.

The capricious line is a straight line bent knowingly into a wavy line. The knowingness is all.