Ian Christie

Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese's challenging and often controversial films are a record of his personal achievement in modern cinema. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull--these titles conjure up a world and a style of filmmaking that Scorsese has made his own. The interviews that make up this book reveal a man who, like Michael Powell and Francois Truffant, has an unbridled passion for film that is evident in every frame of his work. 85 photos.

Scorsese on Scorsese

Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (Soviet Cinema)

The Film Factory

Produced in the aftermath of the Second World War, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) stars David Niven as an RAF pilot poised between life and death, his love for the American radio operator June (Kim Hunter) threatened by medical, political and ultimately celestial forces. The film is a magical, profound fantasy and a moving evocation of English history and the wartime experience, with virtuoso Technicolor special effects. In the United States it was released under the title Stairway to Heaven, referencing one of its most famous images, a moving stairway between earth and the afterlife. Ian Christie's study of the film shows how its creators drew upon many sources and traditions to create a unique form of modern masque, treating contemporary issues with witty allegory and enormous visual imagination. He stresses the teamwork of Powell and Pressburger's gifted collaborators, among them Director of Photography Jack Cardiff, production designer Alfred Junge, and costume designer Hein Heckroth, and explores the history of both British and international responses to the film. Christie argues that the film deserves to be thought of as one of the greatest achievements of British cinema, but of all cinema.

A Matter of Life and Death

Michael Powell

Emeric Pressburger

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp traces, in flashback, the intertwined lives of a dashing young officer and his German Counterpart from their first encounter, fighting a duel in Berlin in 1902, to a double defeat - the gallant British officer becomes a crusty old Blimp, and his gallant German counterpart arrives in England as a pathetic refugee from Nazi Germany. The plot is juxtaposed to that of the British officer's thrice lost love - which introduces a disturbing undercurrent of romantic pessimism into what might otherwise seem a nostalgic chronicle. This volume also contains documentary material relevant to Powell and Pressburger's struggle to get the film made in war-torn Britain.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Gavin Mensah-Coker

Disability, Social Change and Opportunities for Greater Inclusion by 2010

An Inclusive Future?

Julia Vassilieva

Over the decades since he was first hailed by critics and filmmakers around the world, Sergei Eisenstein has assumed many identities. Originally cast as a prophet of revolution and the maestro of montage, and later seen as both a victim of and apologist for Stalin's tyranny, the scale and impact of Eisenstein's legacy has continued to grow. If early research on Eisenstein focused on his directorial work – from the legendary Battleship Potemkin and October to the still-controversial Ivan the Terrible – with time scholars have discovered many other aspects of his multifarious output. In recent years, multimedia exhibitions, access to his vast archive of drawings, and publication of his previously censored theoretical writings have cast Eisenstein in a new light. Deeply engaged with some of the leading thinkers and artists of his own time, Eisenstein remains a focus for many of their successors, contested as well as revered. Over half a century since his death in 1948, an ambitious treatise that he hoped would be his major legacy, Method, has finally been published. Eisenstein's lifelong search for an underlying unity that would link archaic art with film's modernity, individuals with their historic communities, and humans as a species with the universe, may have more appeal than ever today. And among his many thwarted film projects, those set in Mexico and what were once the Soviet Central Asian republics reveal complex and still-intriguing realms of speculation. In this ground-breaking collection, sixteen international scholars explore Eisenstein's prescient engagement with aesthetics, anthropology and psychology, his roots in diverse philosophical traditions, and his gender politics. What emerges has surprising relevance to contemporary media archaeology, intermediality, cognitive science, eco-criticism and queer studies, as well as confirming Eisenstein's prestige within present-day film and audiovisual media.

The Eisenstein Universe

"This timely volume engages with one of the most important shifts in recent film studies: the turn away from text-based analysis towards the viewer. Historically, this marks a return to early interest in the effect of film on the audience by psychoanalysts and psychologists, which was overtaken by concern with the 'effects' of film, linked to calls for censorship and moral panics rather than to understanding the mental and behavioral world of the spectator. Early cinema history has revealed the diversity of film-viewing habits, while traditional 'box office' studies, which treated the audience initially as a homogeneous market, have been replaced by the study of individual consumers and their motivations. Latterly, there has been a marked turn towards more sophisticated economic and sociological analysis of attendance data. And as the film experience fragments across multiple formats, the perceptual and cognitive experience of the individual viewer (who is also an auditor) has become increasingly accessible. With contributions from Gregory Waller, John Sedgwick and Martin Barker, this work spans the spectrum of contemporary audience studies, revealing work being done on local, non-theatrical and live digital transmission audiences, and on the relative attraction of large-scale, domestic and mobile platforms."--Publisher's website.

Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception

Audiences

Jan Fairley

edited by Simon Frith

The late Jan Fairley (1949-2012) was a key figure in making world music a significant topic for popular music studies and an influential contributor to such world music magazines as fRoots and Songlines. This book celebrates her contribution to popular music scholarship by gathering her most important work together in a single place. The result is a richly informed and entertaining volume that will be of interest to all scholars in the field while also serving as an excellent introduction for students interested in popular music as a global phenomenon. Fairley’s work was focused on the problems and possibilities of cross-cultural musical influences, fantasies and flows and on the importance of performing circuits and networks. Her interest in the details of music-making and in the lives of music-makers means that this collection is also an original and illuminating study of music and politics. In drawing on Jan Fairley’s journalism, this volume also offers students a guide to various genres of world music, from Cuban son to flamenco, as well as an insight into the lives of such world music stars as Mercedes Sosa and Silvio Rodríguez. This is inspiring as well as essential reading.

The Writings of Jan Fairley

Living Politics, Making Music

Richard Taylor

Professor Richard Taylor

This is the first collection to be inspired and informed by the new films and archival material that glasnost and perestroika have revealed, and the new methodological approaches that are developing in tandem. Film critics and historians from Britain, America, France and the USSR attempt the vital task of scrutinising Soviet film, and re-examining the Cold War assumptions of traditional historiography. Whereas most books on Soviet giants have glorified the directorial giants of the `golden age' of the 1920s, Inside the Film Factory also recognises the achievements of popular cinema from the pre-Revolutionary period through to the 1930s and beyond. It also evaluates the impact of Western cinema on the early experimenters of montage, Russian science fiction's influence on film-making, and the long-suppressed history of Soviet Yiddish productions. Alongside the new perspectives and source material on the much-mythologised figures of Kuleshov and Medvedkin, the book provides the first extended accounts in English of the important but neglected careers of directors Yakov Protazanov and Boris Barnet.

New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

Inside the Film Factory

In Eisenstein Rediscovered Ian Christie and Richard Taylor present the first true East-West symposium on Eisenstein with an unparalleled diversity of views and methodologies. Two newly discovered texts by Eisenstein are here translated fro the first time, and all the contributors make extensive use of material only recently available - variant scripts, drawings, diaries and other writings - to probe behind the familiar facade. The `new' Eisenstein that emerges is in all respects a more engaging and contemporary figure than is traditionally perceived, his wit, eroticism and exlectic passions defining a distinctively modern sensibility whose rediscovey is long overdue.

Eisenstein Rediscovered

For a large proportion of the electorate, national politics misses the real issues. As a result, membership of campaigning organizations has soared whilst party numbers have declined. This work distils the principles and priorities of many of the leading voluntary groups into a strong and coherent programme of political aims and actions. The problem can be measured as a sustainability gap - between official policies and achievements and actual democratic participation, environmental restoration and the eradication of poverty. With examples and short case studies, the book translates the gap into practical and realistic recommendations for progress.

Politics in the Real World

From Here to Sustainability

Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam talks about the background and development of each of his films, including "Brazil," "Time Bandits," "Twelve Monkeys," "The Fisher King," and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

Gilliam on Gilliam

A dazzling fantasy produced in the aftermath of World War Two, A Matter of Life and Death (1946), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, starred David Niven as an RAF pilot poised between life and death. This books looks in detail at the making of the film. Ian Christie shows how the film drew on many sources and traditions to create a unique form of modern masque, treating contemporary issues with witty allegory and enormous visual imagination. He believes the film deserves to be thought of as one of cinema's greatest achievement.

Elena Loizidou

Leslie Moran

Emma Sandon

This book is an essential introduction to the complex issues and debates in the field of law and film. It explores interconnections that are usually ignored between law and film through three main themes: A Fantastic Jurisprudence explores representations of law in law Law, Aesthetics and Visual Technologies focuses on the visual aspects of law's moving image Regulation: Histories, Cultures, Practices brings together work on different dimensions and contexts of regulation, censorship, state subsidies and intellectual property to explore the complex inter-relationship between the state, industry and private regulation. Law's Moving Image is an innovative, multi-disciplinary contribution to the rapidly growing fields of study in law and film, law and visual culture, law and culture, criminology, social and cultural studies. It will be of interest to students and academics involved in these areas.

Law's Moving Image

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger formed one of the greatest creative partnerships in the history of British cinema - The Archers. Their films were often controversial - Churchill tried to suppress the release of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Later, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman startled and enchanted cinema audiences with their use of colour, form amd music. However, in the last ten years the magic, poetry and passion of their work has been acknowledged around the world and they are firmly in the pantheon of film masters. This book is a comprehensive analysis of their films and is a useful guide to their work.

The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Arrows of Desire

The multiple award-winning Doctor Zhivago (1965) is one of America's finest films of all time. Ian Christie contextualizes the film as an epic Russian love story and a Cold War classic, charts its production and reception, including the contribution of designer John Box, and discusses the unique history of the Bruce Pasternak novel it is based on.

Ian Christie

Books

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