BFI Film Classics
13 total works
Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Envy, Wrath. A serial killer on a warped mission who turns his victims' "sins" into the means of their murder. "Seven" (1995) is one of the most acclaimed American films of the 1990s. Starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Kevin Spacey, "Seven" is the darkest of films. In it performance, cinematography, sound, and plot combine to create a harrowing account of a world beset by an all-encompassing, irremediable wickedness. Richard Dyer explores in turn the questions of sin, story, structure, seriality, sound, sight and salvation, analyzing how "Seven" both epitomizes and modifies the serial killer genre that is such a feature of recent cinema.
Renoir's famous and controversial comedy of manners has a troubled history. Victor Perkins presents here a sensitive socio-historical study of Renoir's revised edition of the film, released 20 years after its premiere; shaped by the profundity and originality of its form.
John Ford's masterpiece "The Searchers "(1956) was rated fifth greatest film of all time in "Sight and Sound'"s most recent poll of critics. Its influence on many of America's most distinguished contemporary filmmakers - among them Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, and John Milius - is enormous. Edward Buscombe provides a detailed commentary on all aspects of the film, and makes full use of material in the John Ford archive in Indiana, including Ford's own memos and the original script, which differs in vital respects from the film he made.
The starting point for Dusan Makavejev's controversial and explicit "WR - Mysteries of the Organism" (1971), is Wilhelm Reich, the Marxist psychoanalyst who preached sexual enlightenment as a gateway to a better society. Reich is a "intellectual maverick" and "sexual pioneer", and theorist of "Orgone energy" and "world revolution". Loosely inspired by Reich's "The Function of the Orgasm" WR stages an encounter between psychotherapy and Marxism, sexual permissiveness and socialism. Juxtaposing hippie America and cold war Yugoslavia, it is a film of ideas and sensations which speaks to the contemporary world. It was banned in Yugoslavia, under pressure from Moscow, as politically offensive. This book explores the film and how its spectators interact with it.
A window is thrown open and sudden light illuminates the face of Orson Welles. Harry Lime's return from the dead in "The Third Man" (1949), Carol Reed's unique thriller set in occupied Vienna, is one of the most famous scenes in all cinema. But there is more besides: the zither score, the tilted shots, the cuckoo-clock speech, the desperate manhunt in the city sewers. A British-American co-production overseen by Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, "The Third Man" was written by Graham Greene, photographed by Robert Krasker and featured, along with Welles, Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli and Trevor Howard. All of the did superb work under Reed's subtle direction. After "The Third Man", Carol Reed was hailed as one of the world's great directors. This title sets out to understand what kind of artist Reed was and whether he deserved such accolades. Rob White explores how the film came to be made and seeks to explain its fascination.
Night Mail (1936) is one of the best-loved and best-known films in the canon of British documentary cinema. Bringing together the creative talents of Harry Watt, Basil Wright, W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, the film gave John Grierson's documentary school its first popular success. Its collectivist politics and its peculiarly modest brand of modernism is as redolent of the inter-war age as Agatha Christie, Penguin Books or The Shell Guides. But it was also a corporate promo, part of a publicity campaign initiated by Clement Attlee to stave off Post Office part-privatisation and to improve the morale of postal workers.
Scott Anthony's study provides a lively appreciation of this vivid, witty and often just plain eccentric masterpiece. In doing so he uncovers the remarkable stories of civic-minded idealism, creative intrigue and political trickery that underpin this classic documentary.
Shedding new light on an old favourite, this is an enjoyable account of how the film got made, combined with a careful scene-by-scene analysis, a wealth of illustrations and the most complete credits yet assembled.
Richard Taylor asks to what extent the film can lay claim to "authentic" history. He then examines "October"'s relationship to the politics of the period and explains the theory and its application, as well as placing "October" in the wider context of Eisenstein's career.
This text analyzes the director Pedro Almodovar's insights into gender, sexuality and subjectivity in his film "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown". It draws on a range of psychoanalytic and critical concepts, and sees the film as an account of the often tyrannical spell of sexual desire.
In this work, Edward Buscombe explores the ways in which 'Unforgiven', sticking surprisingly close to the original script by David Webb Peoples, moves between the requirements of the traditional Western, with its generic conventions of revenge and male bravado, and more modern sensitivities.
This work suggests that Humphrey Jennings' re-enacted documentary about the London Blitz, "Fires Were Started" is an understated propaganda masterpiece whose documentary value, despite the reconstructions required by film technology in the 1940s, remains undimmed. The author provides a full account of exactly how Jennings recaptured the reality of the Blitz for his cumbersome camera through a process of meticulous research and extraordinary sensitivity.
Starring James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, "Performance" was made by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg in 1968, but not released until 1970. When the studio backers saw the director's cut, they were so shocked by its sexual explicitness and formal radicalism that attempts were made to destroy the negative. Having conducted extensive interviews with surviving participants, Colin MacCabe presents in this book the definitive history of the making of "Performance", as well as a new interpretation of its consummate artistry.
The Big Heat first appeared in 1953, towards the end of the film noir cycle that had begun in the early '40s. It was greeted in the United States and Britain as a successful but modest product of the Hollywood system, "slickly written and directed" in the words of one critic. Only the extreme violence, as in the infamous scalding coffee scene, was singled out for special mention. Yet by the time the film was reissued in Britain in 1988 it had achieved undisputed classic status. How had this transformation come about? Colin McArthur takes "The Big Heat "as a case study in film criticism. He examines the film's changing critical fortunes under the influence of the so called auteur theory, and shows how other intellectual currents led to a reassessment of Lang's work in the 1970s. McArthur provides his own perceptive analysis of the film in the light of these revolutions in film criticism.