BFI Film Classics Books
When he was fifteen, Kevin Brownlow saw two reels of the 1927 Napoleon, and it changed his life. The film was more daring, both technically and artistically, than anything he had ever seen. How could it have been forgotten? Brownlow got in touch with the film's director and tracked down members of its cast and crew. He discovered that the making of the film was as much of an epic as the film itself. In 1967, he began an attempt to restore Napoleon. The work took years, but eventually Napoleon was presented, with live orchestra, to a new generation, and, as one critic put it, it became "the measure for all other films, forever." This book tells the dramatic story of Napoleon' s incredible revival and also serves as a wonderful introduction and companion to the film.* Contains free CD of Carl Davis' original score
A medieval allegory of faith and doubt, "The Seventh Seal" contains the horrors of witch-burnings and plague, yet also features flashes of peace and joy. Each volume in the "BFI Film Classics" series contains a personal commentary on the film, a brief production history and a detailed filmography.
Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (1938) is one of the most controversial films ever made. Capitalising on the success of Triumph of the Will (1935), her propaganda film for the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl secured Hitler's approval for her grandiose plans to film the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The result was a work as notorious for its politics as celebrated for its aesthetic power. This revised edition includes new material on Riefenstahl's film-making career before Olympia and her close relationship with Hitler. Taylor Downing also discusses newly-available evidence on the background to the film's production that conclusively proves that the film was directly commissioned by Hitler and funded through Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda and not, as Riefenstahl later claimed, commissioned independently from the Nazi state by the Olympic authorities. In writing this edition, Taylor Downing has been given access to a magnificent new restoration of the original version of the film by the International Olympic Committee.
L'Atalante is the work of French director Jean Vigo. It is a study of romantic love, told in a style influenced by surrealism, but still Vigo's own. This text is part of the 'BFI Film Classics' series. Each volume in the series presents a personal commentary on the film, together with a brief production history and a detailed filmography, notes and bibliography.
It's a Gift is Norman McLeod's classic comedy of disasters, in which W.C. Fields plays a general-store proprietor who buys an orange-ranch by mail and transports his family to California. This study features a brief production history and detailed filmography.
The Big Sleep : Marlowe and Vivian practising kissing; General Sternwood shivering in a hothouse full of orchids; a screenplay, co-written by Faulkner, famously mysterious and difficult to solve. Released in 1946, Howard Hawks' adaptation of Raymond Chandler reunited Bogart and Bacall and gave them two of their most famous roles. The mercurial but ever-manipulative Hawks dredged humour and happiness out of film noir. 'Give him a story about more murders than anyone can keep up with, or explain,' David Thomson writes in his compelling study of the film, 'and somehow he made a paradise.' When it was first shown to a military audience The Big Sleep was coldly received. So, as Thomson reveals, Hawks shot extra scenes, 'fun' scenes, to replace one in which the film's murders had been explained, and in so doing left the plot unresolved. Thomson argues that, if this was accidental, it also signalled a change in the nature of Hollywood cinema: ' The Big Sleep inaugurates a post-modern, camp, satirical view of movies being about other movies that extends to the New Wave and Pulp Fiction .'
An alien entity that can take any living form invades an isolated scientific research station in the Antarctic. John Carpenter's The Thing is best known for some of the most startling visual effects--surreal, lurid, shocking perversions of the human body --ever committed to celluloid. At London's National Film Theatre in 1995, Quentin Tarantino named The Thing as one of his favorite films. Yet when it was released in 1982, it fared badly against another alien encounter movie, E.T. , and critics panned it. But The Thing has aged well, and its influence can now be detected in everything from Seven to Red Dwarf and The X Files. In her elegant and trenchant study, Anne Billson argues that The Thing has never been given its due. For Billson, it's a landmark movie that brilliantly refines the conventions of classic horror and science fiction, combining them with humor, Lewis Carroll logic, strong characterizations and prescient insight. The idea of an alien species mutating and inhabiting humans resonates all too chillingly with the mad cow disease crisis and today's new and ever more powerful genetic technology.
Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's short story and contemporary newspaper reports of bird attacks in California, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) featured Tippi Hedren in her first starring role. Camille Paglia's compelling study considers the film's aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities, and analyses its depiction of gender and family relations. A film about anxiety, sexual power and the violence of nature, it is quintessential Hitchcock. Camille Paglia's foreword to this new edition reflects upon the relationship between Hitchcock and his leading lady Hedren in the light of recent debates about male power, female agency and the #MeToo movement.
David Cronenberg's Crash (1996) brought down a storm of controversy and opprobrium when it was first screened in London. And yet it's a cool, controlled, formal film, unsensational, more analytic than titillating, a brilliant exposé of modern pathologies. It has almost none of the violence and explicit sexual content of the J.G. Ballard novel from which it is adapted. What is the relationship between Ballard himself and the character 'James Ballard' in C rash ? In this book, which includes an exclusive and revealing interview with Ballard, Sinclair explores the uncanny temporal loop which connects film and novel. If Cronenberg's 'adapted' C rash , he also absorbed it, ingested it, made it into something new. But, on the other hand, the novel controls the film, or uses the film to disguise its truly subversive intent. And, for Sinclair, there are more startling permutations still. To what extent, for example, is Crash a premonition of some of the more remarkable media events of recent times?
Kenji Mizoguchi's masterpiece Sanshô Dayû (1954) retells a classic Japanese folktale about an eleventh-century feudal official forced into exile by his political enemies. In his absence, his children fall under the corrupting influence of the malevolent bailiff Sansho. In their study of the film, film scholar Dudley Andrew and Japanese literature professor Carole Cavanaugh highlight the cultural, aesthetic and social contexts of this film which is at once rooted in folk legend and a modern artwork released in the aftermath of World War II. This edition includes a new foreword by the authors in which they consider the film's contemporary parallels in modern slavery and children torn from their families by malevolent authorities.
This is an examination of Louis Bunuel's Belle de Jour , a piece about a bourgeoise wife who lives a secret afternoon life as a prostitute. The book examines the film and its reflections on truth, fiction and fantasy, and its social insight on the tale of a woman clearing her mind of its ghosts.
"It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," film critic Pauline Kael wrote of John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, it's also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second half of the American century. As Greil Marcus reconstructs the drama, The Manchurian Candidate is a movie in which the director and actors, including Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in an Academy Award-nominated performance, were suddenly capable of anything, beyond any expectations. This edition includes a new foreword highlighting the movie's terrifying contemporary relevance in the age of Trump and Russian interference in the US Presidential election.
In 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' (1949), Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) schemes and murders his way to a dukedom. This title looks into the turbulent personalities that formed the complex style of this film to unravel the fusion of cynicism, contempt, sparkling wit and philosophical curiosity.
The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowski sisters and produced by Joel Silver, was a true end-of-the-millennium movie, a statement of the American zeitgeist, and, as the original film in a blockbusting franchise, a prognosis for the future of big-budget Hollywood film-making. Starring Keanu Reeves as Neo, a computer programmer transformed into a messianic freedom fighter, The Matrix blends science fiction with conspiracy thriller conventions and outlandish martial arts created with groundbreaking digital techniques. A box-office triumph, the film was no populist confection: its blatant allusions to highbrow contemporary philosophy added to its appeal as a mystery to be decoded. In this compelling study, Joshua Clover undertakes the task of decoding the film. Examining The Matrix 's digital effects and how they were achieved, he shows how the film represents a melding of cinema and video games (the greatest commercial threat to have faced Hollywood since the advent of television) and achieves a hybrid kind of immersive entertainment. He also unpacks the movie's references to philosophy, showing how The Matrix ultimately expresses the crisis American culture faced at the end of the 1990s.
Lynne Ramsay's bleak yet beautifully photographed debut unflinchingly portrays life on a Glasgow housing estate during the 1973 refuse collectors' strike, as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old James Gillespie (William Eadie). After James's friend falls into a canal and drowns, James becomes increasingly withdrawn. As bags of rubbish pile up and rats move in, James finds solace in his friendships with Kenny, an odd boy who loves animals, and Margaret Anne, a teenage misfit. Annette Kuhn's study of the film, the first to offer an overarching account of Ramsay's work, considers the director's background and Ratcatcher alongside her earlier films. Kuhn traces the film's production history in the context of Scottish media and literary cultures, and its cinematic influences, while acknowledging the distinctiveness of Ramsay's poetic, visionary style. Kuhn draws on interviews with Ramsay and others involved in the film's production, and combines this with a close reading of selected passages to provide an in-depth and illuminating analysis of the film's poetic style and its aesthetics, including an examination of its construction of a child's world through a highly distinctive organisation of cinematic space.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is widely regarded as one of the best films ever made. It has been celebrated for its beauty and mystery, its realistic depiction of space travel and dazzling display of visual effects, the breathtaking scope of its story, which reaches across millions of years, and the thought-provoking depth of its meditation on evolution, technology and humanity's encounters with the unknown. 2001 has been described as the most expensive avant-garde movie ever made and as a psychedelic trip, a unique expression of the spirit of the 1960s and as a timeless masterpiece. Peter Krämer's insightful study explores 2001 's complex origins, the unique shape it took and the extraordinary impact it made on contemporary audiences, drawing on new research in the Stanley Kubrick Archive to challenges many of the widely-held assumptions about the film. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.
William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) tells the story of three veterans returning from World War II and adjusting to civilian life in a manner unusual for classical Hollywood cinema, with melodrama leavened by authentic detail, personal memories and a fierce desire to capture its historical moment. Sarah Kozloff's illuminating study of the film traces the contribution of Wyler (himself injured while serving in the US Air Force), Robert Sherwood's screenplay, Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography, Hugo Friedhofer's award-winning score, and the ensemble cast of Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright and Harold Russell. The film's poignant message spoke to American audiences reeling from the end of the conflict and the bumpy transition to peace: producer Samuel Goldwyn received hundreds of letters from ex-servicemen about how accurately his production had captured their experiences. Despite winning nine Academy Awards, Best Years was soon engulfed in political conflict from both the right and the left. Disagreements about the film's politics foreshadowed HUAC's anti-Communist investigations and the fracturing of the Hollywood community that culminated in the collapse of the studio system. Sarah Kozloff's discussion of the film's development, production and reception history draws on archival research to shed new light on our understanding of this much-loved movie, and to bring The Best Years of Our Lives back where it belongs: in our collections, in our libraries, and in our hearts.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), filmed by Maya Deren and her then husband Alexader Hammid in their bungalow above Sunset Boulevard for a mere $274.90, is the most important film in the history of American avant-garde cinema. The artistic collaboration between Deren and Hammid finds its distorted reflection in the vision of the film's tormented female protagonist. Its focus - through a series of intricate and interlocking dream sequences - on female experience and the domestic sphere links Meshes to the Hollywood melodramas of the period, while its unsettling atmosphere of dread, death and doubles makes it a counter-cinematic cousin to film noir. The film has influenced not only the subsequent history of experimental film, but also on the work of Hollywood auteurs. It is a touchstone of women's film-making, of modern cinema and of modern art. John David Rhodes traces the film's history back into the lives of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, but in particular that of Deren. He reads the film as a culmination of Deren's abiding interest in modernism and her intense engagement in socialist politics. Rhodes argues that while the film remains a powerful point of reference for feminist film-makers and experimentalists, it is also an example of political art in the broadest terms. In his foreword to this new edition, Rhodes reflects upon the film's continuing importance for and influence upon feminist and avant-garde filmmaking.
Ever since its world premiere at the Cannes film festival in May 2005, audiences have been talking about Michael Haneke's Caché . The film's enigmatic and multi-layered narrative leaves its viewers with many more questions than answers. The plot revolves around the mystery of who is sending a series of sinister videos and drawings to Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), the presenter of a literary talkshow. As Georges becomes increasingly secretive, much to the distress of his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), a culprit fails to surface. And even at the film's end, audiences are left struggling to make sense of what has gone before. This hasn't stopped people trying. In an in-depth and illuminating account, Wheatley examines the key themes at the heart of the 'meaning' of Caché : the film as thriller; post-colonial bourgeois guilt; political accountability and lastly, reality, the media and its audiences, tracing these strands through the film by means of close readings of individual scenes and moments. Inspired by the director's claim that we might understand the film as a set of Russian dolls, each of which is complete in itself but together forms a whole in which layers of unseen depth are concealed, Wheatley avoids a single, unifying approach to understanding Caché . Instead, her detailed analysis of the film's shifting perspectives opens up the multiplicity of meanings that Caché contains, in order to understand its secrets. This edition includes a new foreword in which the author reflects upon Caché in the context of Haneke's subsequent work, and considers the film's contemporary resonances in an era of omnipresent surveillance technology and doctored 'fake news' videos.
The World at War is the most successful history series ever produced by British television. TV producer and writer Taylor Downing explores the style, ethos, television context and impact of the programme, in a study that includes interviews with the producer, Jeremy Isaacs, and original research gathered from archives.
Spirited Away , directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan's most successful film, and one of the top-grossing 'foreign language' films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse, where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train runs across the sea. Andrew Osmond's insightful study describes how Miyazaki directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema, using the film's delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging from personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the lamentable state of modern Japan. Osmond unpacks the film's visual language, which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and bewildering. He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki's prior body of work, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn world. This edition includes a new foreword by the author in which he considers the world of animated cinema post- Spirited Away , considering its influence on films ranging from del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth to Pixar's Inside Out .
Winston Churchill hated The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp , and tried to have it banned when it was released in 1943. But Martin Scorsese, a champion of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, considers it a masterpiece. It's a film about desires repressed in favour of worthless and unsatisfying ideals. And it's a film about how England dreamt of itself as a nation and how this dream disguised inadequacy and brutality in the clothes of honour. A. L. Kennedy, writing as a Scot, is fascinated by the nationalism which The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp explores. She finds human worth in the film and the pathos of stifled emotions and unfulfilled lives. 'If he is unaware of his passions, ' she writes of Clive Candy, the film's central figure, 'this is because his pains have become habitual, a part of personality, and because he was never taught a language that could speak of emotions like pain.'. This edition includes a foreword by the author exploring the film's continuing relevance in an age of Brexit, when English and British national identity are deeply contested concepts.