You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The British Film Institute (BFI) is one of the UK's oldest and most important government-supported cultural institutions. From a modest start in the 1930s it grew rapidly after the war to encompass every kind of film-related activity from production to archiving to exhibition to education. At the beginning of the twenty-first century its turnover was approaching £30m and it had become a central point of reference for anyone whose interest in film stretched beyond what's on at the local multiplex. There was nothing straightforward about this rise to prominence. It was achieved in the face of government indifference, active obstruction from the film trade, internecine warfare within the organisation and fierce contestation on the part of the BFI's own core public. Based on intensive original research in the BFI's own voluminous archives and elsewhere, this book examines the interplay of external and internal forces that led to the BFI's unique development as a multi-faceted public body.
A history of film preservation and restoration, telling the story from the earliest days of the cinema to the modern days of digital restorations. The cinema was invented in the Victorian era, but for the first four decades of its existence almost no effort was made to preserve the millions of feet of celluloid which rolled through the cameras and projectors of the world. As a result, thousands of movies were lost forever. In the 1930s, the first concerted attempts at film preservation were begun by pioneering individuals such as Iris Barry at New York's Museum of Modern Art; Ernest Lindgren at the British Film Institute, and the indomitable Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque française, a man who performed heroics in occupied France to save the world's cinematic heritage from destruction by the Nazis. The 1980s video boom encouraged the studios finally to instigate asset protection programmes and in the digital age new methods of producing, exhibiting and restoring motion pictures emerged.
The Sounds of Silent Films is a unique collection of investigatory and theoretical essays that, for the first time, unite up-to-date research on the complex historical performance practices of silent film accompaniment with in-depth analyses of relevant case studies.
Works of art were created in the England of the 50s and 60s which are of extraordniary topicality today. This applies particularly to the Independent Group which included artists, photographers as well as architects. Its members strove to achieve an authenticity close to the grass roots of life, to discover the essence of the everyday, to arouse a sensitivity to life in the raw as against a touched-up version of reality, to bring out both its hardships and its charm. The book is about architecture and art and photography. It seeks rather to show the unmediated impact and direct appeal of a refractory aesthetics.
This book presents a radical reappraisal of one of the most persistent and misunderstood aspects of British cinema: social realism. Through means of close textual analysis, David Forrest advances the case that social realism has provided British national culture with a consistent and distinctive art cinema, arguing that a theoretical re-assessment of the mode can enable it to be located within the context of broader traditions of global cinema. The book begins with the documentary movement and British wartime cinema, before moving to the British new wave and social problem cycle; the films of Ken Loach; the films of Mike Leigh; realism in the 1980s, specifically the work of Stephen Frears and Alan Clarke; before concluding with a discussion of contemporary realist cinema, specifically the work of Shane Meadows, Andrea Arnold and other recent exponents of the mode. These case studies give a thorough platform to explore the most prominent and diverse examples of realist practice in Britain over the last 80 years. The construction and critical analysis of this ‘social realist canon’ creates the conditions to reassess and look anew at this most British of cinematic traditions.
Any archivists who have held a piece of fi lm in their hands, wondering how to go about identifying it, recognize the true value of fi lm preservationist Harold Brown's work. In 1967 Brown delivered a pioneering lecture on the identification of early films at the annual Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in East Berlin. Years of working with Britain's National Film Archive collections, and the close examination of thousands of nitrate prints of the silent period, made Brown a leading authority on early fi lm identification, and an unsurpassed model of methodological consciousness in the archival field. In 1990, FIAF published Brown's Physical Characteristics of ...
A groundbreaking and extensively researched account of the 1960s London art scene In the 1960s, London became a vibrant hub of artistic production. Postwar reconstruction, jet air travel, television arts programs, new color supplements, a generation of young artists, dealers, and curators, the influx of international film companies, the projection of “creative Britain” as a national brand—all nurtured and promoted the emergence of London as “a new capital of art.” Extensively illustrated and researched, this book offers an unprecedented, rich account of the social field that constituted the lively London scene of the 1960s. In clear, fluent prose, Tickner presents an innovative sequence of critical case studies, each of which explores a particular institution or event in the cultural life of London between 1962 and 1968. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of an exuberant decade in the history of British art.
Today's successful plays and playwrights achieve their prominence not simply because of their intrinsic merit but because of the work of mediators, who influence the whole trajectory of a playwright's or a theatre company's career. Critics and academic writers are primarily considered the makers of reputations, but funding organizations and various media agents as well as artistic directors, producers, and directors also pursue separate agendas in shaping the reputations of theatrical works. In The Making of Theatrical Reputations Yael Zarhy-Levo demonstrates the processes through which these mediatory practices by key authority figures situate theatrical companies and playwrights within cul...
Inventing Film Studies offers original and provocative insights into the institutional and intellectual foundations of cinema studies. Many scholars have linked the origins of the discipline to late-1960s developments in the academy such as structuralist theory and student protest. Yet this collection reveals the broader material and institutional forces—both inside and outside of the university—that have long shaped the field. Beginning with the first investigations of cinema in the early twentieth century, this volume provides detailed examinations of the varied social, political, and intellectual milieus in which knowledge of cinema has been generated. The contributors explain how mul...